A “love story” without chemistry set in a fairly bleak future world where public surgery to remove spontaneously growing extraneous organs is the hot ticket. This resembles a George Saunders short story or a Remedios Varo painting on steroids. Director David Cronenberg is the master of the “body horror” genre. One has to wonder why, other than a bizarre personal obsession, this exists.
A provocative documentary about whaling in the Faroe Islands–specifically, an annual (or more) slaughter of pilot whales unfortunately called a “grind.” While the killing is stomach-turning and Sea Shepherd activists politely present the arguments against, the local islanders, and the filmmakers, ask why is this different from slaughterhouse killing of the other animals we eat.
No surprises and nothing original, but in managing to tie up multiple stories with happy endings for everybody–and I mean everybody–Julian Fellowes brought a few tears to my eyes and gave us a pleasant afternoon in the movie house. Everything was a bit pat and no scene lasted more than its allotted 60 seconds; it was also helpful, maybe essential, to have the back stories of all the characters firmly in mind. But the residents of Grantham Hall have been good company for many years, and they didn’t let us down.
This one required a suspension of disbelief that I couldn’t quite muster. Or maybe it didn’t. Or maybe I missed something when the slow pace put me briefly to sleep. Two look-alike 8-year-old girls meet in the woods and I kept waiting–mercifully for only 1:18–for a plot to emerge. Three points for sincerity.
It felt like an art museum, the Watteau gallery in particular, with soldiers parading and lovers dallying. By adapting a classic play, the movie suspended disbelief and even made the songs feel integral to the plot, which they were. Peter Dinklage, of course, is not a traditional Cyrano, but again, we weren’t looking for realism once we fell under director Joe Wright’s spell. This also allowed us to cast aside contemporary feminism and appreciate the dutifully shallow Roxanne. It’s a matter of taste, but we found Cyrano sweet, especially when viewed on a theater big screen.
Fortunately, the “worst person in the world” is not Renate Reinsve, who is the most approachably beautiful movie heroine of the year, including Penelope Cruz and Caitriona Balfe. But more than her Julie, this is a film about relationships: how they start, how they develop, and how they end. Director Joachim Trier tells the story in 14 discrete chapters, most, but not all, about Julie’s search for self-understanding while touching, sneakily, on serious subjects like art and death. It’s all very European, even Proustian.
A thrillingly different Eastern European film, this one from Romania with lots of blah shots of Bucharest and other social commentary. In Part 1 we meet the teacher, whose porn selfie with her husband has gotten loose on the Internet, as she wanders the streets, like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Part 2 I didn’t get, archival footage illustrating random words and phrases, very Romanian. Part 3 is the best Covid film I’ve seen, as masked and socially distanced parents debate the teacher’s job status, with polarization, misinformation, facts and prejudices in one wild cacophony. Seemingly filmed on an iPhone, the movie kept me wonderfully off-balance all the way.
A sweet, rather predictable tale of a cynical and lazy city teacher who is assigned to “the most remote school in the world” and discovers teaching, and himself. It was lovely to see the ghos and the landscapes of Bhutan, and it brought back memories of my year in Libya with the Peace Corps; but it is hard to see this standing in the company of the other Oscar foreign film nominees.
Eight thousand years from now, with all the technological advances, they still fight like the Norman Conquest, or maybe the siege of Troy? Absurdity piles on absurdity, so much that we might as well be watching a comic book. If the .0001 per cent of the population that hasn’t been reduced to drone ant level were at least interesting, we might go along for the ride, but Timothee Chalamet appears to have been beamed in from another millenium and missed all his acting classes. The worst thing about sitting through this movie is finding out at the end that we have only seen Part 1.
An unabashedly over-the-top depiction of the Gucci family saga, with megawatt performances by Lady Gaga, Jared Leto, Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons–the whole family except Adam Driver, a hole in the middle, who acted mainly by changing his hairstyle. There’s no point in quibbling over the plot, because it was a true story. If you could overlook all the cigarette smoke, you could revel in the fantastic set designs and fashions and enjoy the ride, as the actors seemed to be doing.
[Interestingly, a credit at the end said that no consideration had been paid for the use of tobacco products. Someone knew I had become suspicious!]
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