johnpmoseley Reviews

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024– )

Scenes from a marriage - with shoot-outs

[8/10 · 7 April 2024]

I nearly didn't watch this because I assumed it'd just be a mediocre knock-off of a mediocre movie and that Donald Glover was only in it for the money. Oh me of little faith. Is Glover ever doing anything just for the money at this point? Not this. Part-written by him, it's got the same near surreal quality as Atlanta, the same willingness to make wild shifts in tone, pace and genre convention and the same brilliant eye and ear for idiosyncratic characters.

This last is a particular joy, with standout appearances from Parker Posey and John Turturro each doing some of their best work, though the lesser-known Wagner Moura is at least equally good.

The story's implicitly fantastical universe involving a mysterious private spy agency with bottomless resources is reminiscent of John Wick, but there the joke, if there even was one, wore tissue-thin as the writers felt forced to create ever more complicated lore to make sense of it all. Here the workings are kept neatly and mysteriously in the background, at least for now in the first season, leaving us free to absorb ourselves in character and story - of which there is far more than in John Wick.

You can imagine it all beginning with Glover and writing partner Francesca Sloane, who also worked on Atlanta, watching the original Mr. And Mrs. Smith and saying, 'This could have been so great if...' It's the same thematic game: a couple's involvement in spying used as a metaphor for relationship trust issues. But where the movie played it for superficial laughs, this uses its indie dramedy sensibility to go deep, taking lengthy breaks from the shoot-em-ups to depict some of the most painfully relatable bickering I've ever seen in fiction, the couple getting hung up on seeming trivia, always struggling to work out who they are, who the other is and whether they can make the two align.

Eat your heart out Bergman, Updike, Ibsen, Woody Allen etc. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Not saying this is hands-down better than those illustrious predecessors (Ibsen definitely still pips it), just that I can't think when I've seen this particular kind of wrangling done better.

Bottoms (2023)

Bottoms kills

[8/10 · 20 February 2024]

Rarely has the phrase 'this thing is a riot' been more apt. The story's reckless abandon is carried through, or at least does a great job of pretending to be, in the writing, part of the fun of which is the way it casually tramples plausibility. The effect is cathartic, the message more transgressively unmentionable even than anything in John Waters, Russ Meyers or Paul Morrissey, and almost the opposite of Heathers, despite the many similarities. I feel the need to be a little coy about it myself, so I'll just cite Freud's 'Civilisation and its Discontents' as a good explainer and leave it at that. Hey, that's a little text you should all read anyway. And you should all see this brilliant, stupid movie as well.

Flux Gourmet (2022)

Like hot dogs in caramel and vinegar sauce served up as molecular gastronomy

[2/10 · 17 February 2024]

This movie is simultaneously trying way too hard and acting as if it doesn't have to care if that makes it bad because it's arthouse. As a lover of arthouse, I hate that.

It feels like the kind of stuff people write and then stare at 'wondering if it works' but really wondering why it doesn't and whether 'other people will see something in it' but really whether they can get away with it. And then if they're foolish and/or desperate enough to actually make the movie and people say, no, it doesn't work, they might say, 'It's just really hard.' And it is, but that's no excuse.

I feel bad for the filmmaker, embarrassed and sad for him, but also I want to say to him, if you really want to be an artist, especially a wild one, have a little guts: admit you don't know what you're doing and go on the adventure of learning some lessons. There are good ones to be had. It's fun to do them and it makes the writing more fun to do too, and it usually makes it better, and that can even mean better like real arthouse movies, things that are funnier and more interesting than the mainstream. But even a lot of the mainstream is better than this, so stop trying to run before you can walk. Please.

The Eternal Daughter (2022)

Story about the difficulty of writing a story is bad story

[4/10 · 15 February 2024]

A filmmaker takes her mother to an old country house that her mother spent time at as a child and that is now a hotel. The filmmaker's aim is to write a script about her mother. During their time at the house, she struggles with this writing and we, of course, watch the film that the film's real filmmaker Joanna Hogg ended up writing. Its numerous treacherous flaws have been abundantly detailed here by other reviews, but I'll add that the basic conceit was done first and so much better in Dead Man's Shoes. Unless you can improve on that, it's really best to find another. The use of it here looks like desperation.

Has Hogg attained a stature now so elevated that none of the people around her will tell her when she writes a dud? It's the only way I can explain how this made it to the screen. A spot of Stephen Poliakoff syndrome. It really saddens me after her initial promise - I mainly mean Archipelago - but this is just so totally unfit for purpose that it makes it look as if she got lucky before and now fully doesn't know what she's doing.

In this would-be nightmarish story partly about struggling to write a script, she could almost be admitting to the problem. Well, there's no shame in that, it's hard, but Christ, don't just torture yourself. Maybe find a decent screenwriting course? There are at least one or two good ones that won't just turn you into a formulaic commercial writer. Hogg has more than enough of a way with character and dialogue to make it worth it that she learn how to construct suitable narrative frameworks with which to show it off.

Maestro (2023)

Yeah? You really didn't like it? Huh. I loved it.

[8/10 · 12 February 2024]

I dunno. Funny how these things go. I'd irrationally decided I didn't like Bradly Cooper as a guy and was perfectly happy to find that his first film as director was a mess and then to hear that everyone thought this was bad too.

Then, probably only about five minutes in, I had to admit to myself that I was into it. The often overlapping realist dialogue everyone's complaining about seemed really exceptionally good to me. You do have to pay close attention and maybe even rewind occasionally, but it's just so beautifully accurate to the period and place and full of interesting ideas and imagery.

Then I thought that and the equally well-done period cinematography might be all there was and it would have no story and nothing to say, despite the Walt Whitmanesque musings, starting with the epigraph, on people being contradictory to the point of containing different personas.

Nope, it's got a real point that not only goes beyond 'I contain multitudes' but interestingly argues with the idea. Because as much as it might seem convenient to Leonard and his wife Felicia to adopt whatever identities their situations seem to require, there are some truths about themselves, it turns out, they cannot shirk: he's really more into men than women, she's really given up her own talents and dreams to play wife in the marriage to this guy who can't even love her properly, and it all does hurt her like hell, to the point where, by middle age, Bernstein relates to a friend, she is completely beaten by life and in despair - and he's just barely hanging onto hope and meaning himself.

The actual opening quote, from Bernstein, is about how there are no truths in art, only a heightening of our awareness of questions and contradictions. To be a little dialectical, that is a truth of a kind, but then, also, there seems to be a clearer one here. Because this is a story with a moral: don't make a bad bargain of your life; don't commit to something that cannot work and that forces you forever after to collapse your feelings into a black hole. The remaining dissonance lies in understanding that the moral is not moralistic: anyone can find themselves on this kind of enchanted ground, especially, in this instance, in an age that forced gay people into the closet.

That last part, by the way, is so deeply embedded in the background that this feels far from being an issues movie. In fact, I've seen it said that the story is too hard on Bernstein and doesn't significantly acknowledge the struggles he would have faced due to his sexuality. This is rot, I'm pretty sure, though I also don't feel quite qualified to argue the point, or maybe am too tired. About that and about the more contentious point, then, I don't mind ending, as the film seems to advocate, in uncertainty.

Saltburn (2023)

As pretty and structurally unsound as a crumbling country pile

[3/10 · 23 November 2023]

Oliver, a seemingly working-class Oxford student, falls in with a group of upper-class kids, one of whom invites him to his huge old stately home (Saltburn) and may be an object of obsession for him. Oliver is thus, or roughly thus, led into elaborate lies and worse. My uncertainties here are because the plot is never really clear.

It's probably not a deliberate irony that the film often appears to want to be The Talented Mr. Ripley, possibly the greatest story ever about wanting to be someone else. Unfortunately, it also apes, by turns, Brideshead Revisited, The Servant and The Little Stranger. These impulses are not compatible and all said precursors are vastly superior.

The script's one real strength lies in the area where writer-director Emerald Fennel was, presumably, able to write what she knows not from other people's art but her own experience: an upper-class British person herself, her depictions of upper-class British people are mercilessly perfect, ably abetted by very funny performances from Richard E. Grant and, especially, Rosamund Pike.

But that accounts for about five minutes in an otherwise quite astonishingly amateurish mess. Oliver is either the sad sexual obsessive of Ripley or the single-mindedly sociopathic revanchist class warrior of The Servant. The two do not go together; the only real guiding principle seems to be whatever transgressive, would-be shocking image Fennel wants to show us. Furthermore, in class warrior guise, Oliver is supposed to be carrying out an elaborate, precisely calibrated, 5D chess stratagem that in reality depends on absurdly impossible luck and the fog-brained gullibility of everyone else concerned.

This review is a rewrite. Fennel should, at best, have done more of those herself. Her film's grainy, grimy, fashion-shoot prettiness, which seduced me a little at first - hence the rewrite - has soured over time like perfume used to cover up the smell of putrefying corpses. It's bad enough that Fennel has written characters stupid enough to be duped by such transparent ruses. It's wqrse that she seems to expect this of her viewers too - and perhaps even a little worse yet that some of them, on the evidence of these reviews, have fallen in line.

One Fine Morning (2022)

all this boring beauty

[4/10 · 29 October 2023]

I got so bored watching this that I made up a little song as I did: 'I know you got nothing to say / But you waste my time with it anyway.'

Really, I don't mean to single this movie out, it's more what I feel about 90% of the arthouse fare I encounter these days, especially on Mubi.

This one's very pretty, not just in terms of its actors but their clothes and homes - like a lot of French films, which increasingly look as if they're parodying themselves with these impeccable, magazine-spread stylings.

It even has the raggedly worn out cliché of a philosophy professor as a prominent character. We see lots of his books, but naturally no actual philosophical discussions are had, unless you count the film's general, implicitly panicky message that life is short and we should grab love while we can. Not good or serious philosophy at all in my view, in practice leading not to this film's too easy happy ending but to a lot of frustration with love turning out not to be the great cure-all of such sentimental myth.

At least the best romances let us believe and bask in the myth for a short while by inducing us to fall in love with the protagonists, but what are we to do with the blandly dimensionless, insipidly nice people we see here? My song went on: 'It's not enough to look at your pretty face / Telling me stories that don't go any place.'

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)

Best thing I've seen for ages

[10/10 · 25 October 2023]

I watched this on a friend's Mubi account - the day before it was leaving the streaming service. So glad I caught it. Unlike most Mubi fare, this is a film with so much to say and so much to narratively engage the viewer. It's little short of miraculous that it does it with such limited and economic means, the stories unfolding in simple shots and long dialogues that perfectly pay out the key information to lead us to delicious ironies, fascinating interactions and the deepest of feeling. Not only that, but it does it three times in three separate stories, proving beyond doubt that the neglected art of the short film, done right, can be as or more powerful than the feature.

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

Uneven

[6/10 · 13 September 2023]

This arguably changes genres part-way through, with an accompanying massive drop in quality.

For most of it, the best of it, it's absurdist - bizarre, but just about within the realms of possibility - a brilliant chain of cause and effect relentlessly leading to crazier and more hellish outcomes. At this point I felt I'd be very happy to watch it again.

Then it literally gets lost in the woods and turns oneiric and overblown, its set-pieces more and more elaborate as they have less and less to say. Where the absurdism was like Charlie Kaufman at his best, after the woods it became, for a while, like Kaufman at his 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' surreal/symbolist worst. Then, in a fourth and final section, it got sort of cod-Freudian and even more boring.

It is objectively a problem, I think, that Beau entirely works out how his mother traumatised and lied to him - a perfectly adequate resolution, if not achieved with the greatest of storytelling rigour - and then the torment simply continues, via a series of twists that seem over-complicated and pretty random. Like

SPOILER

Beau realises he doesn't have a heart murmur that will kill him if he ever beds a woman, so he goes for it and doesn't die, but....the woman does. What does that mean? Nothing. It's another nightmare twist, but unlike all those that preceded it, it's not earned, hasn't been set up.

Something at this point had already played itself out - already stretching the audience's patience just a tad - and then it just goes on, as if Aster was desperately improvising, had missed his stopping point and was now stuck wandering the weeds looking for another. Baffling and irritating that he did that. There had to be a better way.

Sick of Myself (2022)

Vanity makes you ugly

[8/10 · 24 August 2023]

How nice to see an arthouse movie that has something to say and says it so well. We don't get enough of that these days. Vanity makes you ugly, that's what this is saying, appropriately gruesomely.

I loved this funny, troubling, ruthlessly focused, pitiless little screed against vanity and will be recommending it to everyone. I started it late at night thinking I'd just watch a few minutes and it kept me up way past my bedtime. Next day I wanted to watch the start again and still found it hard to pull away. It's magnetic and weaves a spell, at least on me.

I apologise - comparisons are odious - but I can't help thinking how much better it is than the recent Worst Person in the World, also Norwegian-made and set in Oslo. Best thing about that was its title and even that would have worked better for this.

The Hippopotamus (2017)

Not as good as it seems to think it is

[5/10 · 26 June 2023]

I haven't read the book, which may possibly handle this better, but what we get here is a story where the protagonist seems a transparent stand-in for the author and is only there to 100% validate that author's views and teach everyone else a lesson. Never mind that said protagonist is severely alcoholic: he has nothing to learn about this or confront in himself and no need to change, it's all just part of his supposedly lovable, dogged, earthy truth-teller persona.

In a story where the whole point is for everyone else to face up to a comforting lie that structures their lives, this is some decidedly weak sauce. NB I am not religious and I'm perfectly comfortable with the basic message against mysticism, just not this narcissistically hypocritical mode of delivery. Nor am I much keen on the way the dumb, blunt-instrument didacticism is dressed up in such a baroquely show-offy stream of over-written dialogue, especially voiceover. Even the intricately 'clever' plotting doesn't make up for this. It's all like excessive decorative detail tacked onto a badly designed house.

The French Dispatch (2021)

A required field is missing

[2/10 · 2 April 2023]

As has been repeatedly said, this thing has no heart. It might seem a reasonable assumption that its dandyish author lacks one too, but I don't know. To me the more plausible explanation, really for his entire career, is that he must be labouring under some utterly monstrous trauma, something so unspeakable that, to stave off a total character dissolving breakdown, he's forced over and over back to this numbing comforter of arch references, rigid symmetries, meaningless stories and fake jokes - in short, a total protective void of feeling.

Well, it was never a good thing, but it has really reached a rock bottom apotheosis of empty tedium here. Maybe Anderson even displays some awareness of that by calling the town where this latest offering's set Ennui. You should go with that feeling, Wes, that this is all drearily pointless, give in to the breakdown. Even if it means tears, snot, bile, vomit and a full messy rending of the cushions, I promise you, it'll also be your life's first real access to beauty. As things stand, to use a line that could have appeared in this movie, for all intents and purposes, Wes Anderson n'existe pas.

It Follows (2014)

You're next. You really are.

[7/10 · 26 March 2023]

Before he made Under the Silver Lake, writer-director David Robert Mitchell gave us this and its predecessor, The Myth of the American Sleepover, two movies about teenagers living in Detroit suburbs. Detroit, its downtown famously now in a state of near total necrotic decline, has lately been described as a potential or actual donut or ring city, a place with no centre or a dead centre, the life and economic activity occurring only in the periphery. This matters thematically here because the run-down dead centre is a forbidden place - the characters talk about how when they were younger their parents told them not to go beyond the Eight Mile road, the boarder before the dereliction of the middle - and now, twice, they have to go into it to chase down the horror that is pursuing them. Each time, they leave the leafy middle-class security of the 'burbs to enter a realistically frightening landscape of burnt-out, abandoned houses and other buildings, some of them with the crumbling grandeur of haunted mansions and mausoleums. The metaphorical implication might be: the cause of this decay is not staying put; it's coming for you too. The city's heart of darkness or America's is not going to be be easily contained.

Until the End of the World (1991)

I don't think I can go on to the end of the world

[3/10 · 2 February 2023]

I'm about a quarter into the long version. It is very silly and visually very dated, more so in fact than any of Wenders' prior work. Stylistically, the only thing I liked was the futuristic cars - if only automotive design had really gone this way. Otherwise, it is full of its era's bloated spectacle, meaningless novelty and brazen phoniness. Neon lighting is everywhere, along with a lot of clothes and architecture in gratuitously wild geometries, both seeming somehow defined by outsized shoulder pads. A very '80s vision of the future, then, even if it was made just after the '80s.

Apparently Wenders, the sage of '70s minimalism, had, at this point, fatally allowed himself to be seduced by the pop video maximalism of the cinema du look. But perhaps the particular tendency on show here can be better described as 'arthouse naive'. This is where directors think that because they're doing highbrow, they can cast aside the difficult filmcraft demands of visual and verbal synthesis and just zany up the imagery and lace it with a lot of self-regarding, stylised dialogue. Wenders, working previously with novelist Peter Handke, had already fallen into this overwrought dialogue trap in his worst screenwriting - Wrong Move and parts of Wings of Desire - but he seems not to have learned anything from it by the time he came to this collaboration with novelist Peter Carey. Schade.

And is Wenders or anyone else involved really concerned about the end of the world? The problem does not seem pressing, nor do any others, and it all thus feels decadently postmodern, the characters floating around in a universe where so little's really at issue that all that's left to them is to play at being characters in a film: crudely exaggerated plastic caricatures of mystery men, tragic heroines, star-crossed lovers etc. They are enabled in this show-offy vacuity by a wildly messy plot founded on an implausibly convenient windfall of endless cash, only adding to the feeling of this being a now totally unrelatable relic from an era of undeserved wealth and empty extravagance.

Not so much a film for the end of the world, then, as what some once called the end of history.

White Noise (I) (2022)

A screenborn toxic event

[2/10 · 15 January 2023]

I read a lot of bad reviews here before watching this and still felt sure from the trailer that I'd like it. Nope. If anything, it's worse than the reviews convey: a zany, garish cartoon vision of the '80s that's really nothing like the '80s, with a script that reads like a very bad philosopher or sociologist shoehorning chunks of his thinking into awkward dialogue, and a story that does nothing to carry all that meaning and anyway feels less a story than a series of disconnected, unfunny skits.

It's all just so shockingly, tediously try-hard bad - everything: dialogue, performances, sets, camera work - all wildly overdone, a sort of perpetual, manic assault that's hopelessly out of keeping with the cool drollery de Lillo seemed to be aiming for in his book.

So much talent involved and no one piped up before it was too late to say, 'We're making a stinker'? How does this happen? OK, Driver, given his deep commitment to Carax's Annette, seems worryingly like he might be into this kind of blow-hard, faux-comical pretension. And de Lillo has written similarly embarrassing would-be clever dialogue for Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. But Baumbach and Gerwig? They usually judge things well. And Baumbach was actually the screenwriter here and, from what I can recall, de Lillo's novel, while nowhere near as funny as it wants to be, is in no way the series of florid, stagey lunges at profundity Baumbach has turned it into.

So, I don't know, it's a mystery, but one surely of interest only to film and writing students as an example of what absolutely not to do.

Decision to Leave (2022)

Kind of a mess

[4/10 · 7 January 2023]

An insomniac detective with an ice maiden wife falls for a woman who can offer him all the warmth, understanding and touchingly human imperfection missing from his marriage. Unfortunately, she's also a murderer.

It's a pretty good metaphor for anxiety about opening up to feeling, but maybe not all that new: very similar vacillation between attraction and suspicion occurs constantly in Hitchcock, a clear model for this, and compared to every crisply executed instance in the master's work, this gets into awful, convoluted and tedious plot tangles. The central relationship here - a perfectionist cop who prides himself on never fluffing a case vs a repeat offending killer who always ends up having strong justification and a hard luck story to win you over - does offer some interesting new angles on the trope, but the endless business of her complicatedly explaining away her apparent guilt becomes absurd and is, anyway, much hampered by a lack of storytelling economy.

There's also a ton of tricksy jumping around in space and occasionally time, which is jarring and confusing and doesn't seem to me to mean much.

Tang Wei as the sympathetically homicidal female lead is pretty great, though.

A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

Great start, but you might as well give up after about ten minutes

[3/10 · 28 December 2022]

Amazing flair and humour in the opening shots. Be sure to read all the headlines on the newspaper page reporting the car accident, they're funny.

After that, as if the start was a dream or a brilliant improvisation Greenaway never found a way to follow through on, it goes pretty dead. It keeps looking good, but it really isn't about anything, though it seems to sort of arrogantly imagine it is.

Since I have a character count to fill, here's the thought I had about Greenaway the other day: we're routinely told that film is a visual medium, and what that's usually meant to mean is you get the imagery to do most of the storytelling and keep the dialogue spare. Greenaway, for all his intellectual sophistication, is often doing a kind of naive version of this visual medium thing: lavish imagery that's basically just spectacle and still needs a ton of verbiage to tell the story. I say 'naive,' but when it works, as in Drowning..., The Cook..., the Baby of Macon and even the complicatedly wordy Nightwatching, he's breaking a rule and pulling it off. Not here though, maybe because the extensive blah blah doesn't actually have much to say.

Drowning by Numbers (1988)

The best Wes Anderson movie by far

[10/10 · 25 December 2022]

In the game of "Guess the Director" the players look at images from Drowning by Numbers and various Wes Anderson movies and try to guess whether the director is Peter Greenaway or Wes Anderson. After three wrong guesses, you are held under water until you drown.

The shtick is exactly the same: lots of colour, maximalist sets full of appealing retro knick-knacks and artefacts, archly symmetrical shots, deadpan comic dialogue, games and other pursuits taken to the point of high eccentric elaboration. Almost every frame here could be from Anderson. In fact I don't like his stuff at all, but it's striking how this film makes the style wonderful by means of a good, engaging, meaningful script that, unlike Anderson, isn't just playing for cheap laughs and archly detached pomo dandyism, and is fully prepared to acknowledge the dark side. Anderson fans should seek it out to see how it's done. It renders at least half of his career irrelevant. And Greenaway invented it all years before Anderson even got started, then simply moved on.

A brilliant work, which, like so much of Greenaway, is about the brutal business of figuring out who's going to fatally take the fall - except this one's really funny.

Good Posture (2019)

Not that good

[4/10 · 10 December 2022]

Script has an early draft feel about it, with a lot being done for effect without really making sense.

At best, it's one of those regular negative exemplar warnings for would-be Baumbachs and Gerwigs, and fetishists of '70s Woody Allen. Turns out that a gentrified boho setting, attractive but dysfunctional intellectuals, a quirky folk soundtrack and a ukulele aren't going to be enough to make your movie. One might further venture that if touchingly realist character studies are your ideal, you might have spent a lot more time trying to understand the characters you decided to depict and a hell of a lot more making their interactions feel unique, plausible, motivated and meaningful.

Oldboy (2003)

Old bull

[5/10 · 19 November 2022]

Here's a sequence for everybody's consideration: part-way through, the protagonist gets the idea that the woman he's been staying with is betraying him. He ties her up and smacks her around and suddenly - somehow - realises that his main antagonist must be in one of the other flats in the building. He runs out and - again, somehow - finds the other flat right away and there confronts the antagonist to try to find why he kept him imprisoned for fifteen years. The antagonist opens his own shirt to show him a pacemaker operation scar and a remote control device he says he paid a surgeon a ton of money for so he could switch off his pacemaker at any time and die and he'll do that if, uh, the protagonist tries to...uh...kill him?... Because, OK, yeah, no, the protagonist really wants to know what happened to him and he won't find out if...OK, yeah, it's that the protagonist can't torture the antagonist to find out because then the antagonist will die and he'll find out nothing... OK, yeah, kind of makes sense, but then the antagonist lets the protagonist know that the woman he left tied up in her flat did not betray him and is now in danger - because he, um, left the door open, which, how did the antagonist know that when he's been in the other flat the whole time? But anyway, that's all he really had to say to get the protagonist to leave and not torture him, so why didn't he just do that...? Oh, OK, only so way later in the movie the antagonist, now apparently suicidal, can toss the remote control at the protagonist who'll try to use it to kill the antagonist only to discover all it really does is play a tape of the protagonist having sex with the woman he loves - a tape that didn't exist when the device was first shown, by the way - whom he now knows to be his daughter, after which the antagonist kills himself anyway. Oh lordy.

This is really incredibly bad storytelling. It happens all the time in movies and TV, but that's no excuse. People in reviews here keep criticising reviews like this one for pointing out the numerous plot holes - I've barely scraped the surface - and convoluted explanations by saying, 'But it's surrealism.'

Yeah, it's not, but anyway good surrealism, almost the whole point of good surrealism, is that it never explains itself, much less goes into agonising expository tangles like this. Imagine if most of Exterminating Angel was taken up with figuring out that some evil genius had kept everyone stuck at the dinner party by means of mass hypnosis and that he or she had done this to take revenge on them for attending another dinner party when they were all at school where one of the guests had let slip something compromising about the antagonist and then this info had sort of mushroomed in the retelling becoming a different rumour that then caused someone close to the antagonist to believe something untrue that caused them to have a purely psychosomatic medical condition that then caused them to kill themselves. That would be silly and annoying, not surreal. And that's almost exactly what this movie is like.

The tall order for good storytelling in this vein: either payoff on the dazzling intrigue cleanly and satisfyingly or make it something we're happy to see left unexplained. Both of those things are hard to do. What's not that hard is to present a bunch of spellbinding images and then awkwardly justify them by bolting together a complicated plot with whatever bits of string, wire and scotch tape you find lying around - especially when loads of this literal garbage is delivered in chunks of unconvincing dialogue.

That said, some of the free fun stuff near the start here is pretty great: the protagonist drunk in a police station, the rooftop bit with the suicidal guy with the dog, the deliberately ludicrous hallway fight scene. So a few stars for all that, but, oh dear, I basically hate it. What were you thinking, Cannes Film Festival, you dupes?

Benedetta (2021)

Is it about Donald Trump?

[7/10 · 16 November 2022]

I mean, if you had to have Trump played by a woman, Virginie Efira, who stars as Benedetta, would be a good choice visually. And her character's a lying narcissist putting herself forward as God's anointed (as per evangelicals' weird kink for Trump), whipping up the mob against the establishment, and retaining her populist appeal even when clear proof of her deceit and sexual impropriety emerges.

Just saying. Verhoeven's obviously a subversive old jokester, and he seems here to me to be hiding this subtext in fairly plain sight.

Simply as a story, the film offers strong characters sucked into a buffeting storm of conflict throwing out many twists. Really nice to see that done well in an era so beset by weak scripts.

The Abbess of the convent, ably portrayed by Charlotte Rampling, is especially interesting and suffers especially excruciating choices and hurts. Louise Chevillotte as her daughter is also great.

The movie could have given us all that without the soft porn, and I could've done without that too, but...oh well. Maybe it's sort of there for a reason. Not sure.

The Souvenir: Part II (2021)

Strong material in search of a form

[6/10 · 9 November 2022]

Is Hogg here a minimalist struggling to reconcile an attraction to maximalism, a realist who can't let go of the oneiric, or maybe just a brilliant creator of vignettes desperately trying to figure out how to tell a long-form story?

Mostly I think it's the last of these. She's never done better than in Archipelago, where the vignettes had free reign to comically and sadly portray the maddening trivia of an upper-class family life, offset against the son's largely hopeless pursuit of meaning and purpose in developing-world philanthropy. The intelligence of the film was in realising just how rich all this barely perceptible stuff could be.

Cut a few years later to The Souvenir Part I and we find Hogg taking on a highly perceptible Big Subject, the death of her heroin addict boyfriend, in what proved, not necessarily paradoxically, to be an altogether duller and more conventional film. I don't mean to be unfeeling about what must have been a traumatic event, but the film is a case study in how the transfer of such real-life devastation into compelling story material is no simple thing - and by no means a guarantor of artistic quality on its own.

Part II, with its Cocteau-like, high-artifice student film within the film and flipping of film sets with real settings attempts, sort of, to tackle or at least acknowledge the trickiness of the endeavour. Actually, for me the thing is at its strongest on Hogg's home turf of sometimes sad, sometimes subtly comic realist set-pieces: the protagonist's visit to her dead boyfriend's parents and a particularly good little sequence on her mother learning ceramics. All this is early in the film and it's all I personally could ask for: shots as spare and beautifully composed as Vermeer or Piero, perfectly observed human interaction and deep feeling breaking through the quotidian and the politesse. This is where not just Hogg, but her actors get to shine, particularly Tilda Swinton, doing some of her very best work. Elsewhere, Richard Ayoade, likewise stands out, a bad director, ironically, in real life here portraying an aggressively intelligent and confident one in what's probably also his strongest acting anywhere. Accolades are due to both performers, but it's also a testament to Hogg's craft as both writer and director that she can get such gold from them and others here.

This kind of work is delicate and requires patience and when Hogg elsewhere tries to cut loose with dream imagery and film sets merging with reality, it looks like a loss of patience, understandable but a wrongturning. I may be missing something, but it just doesn't seem to me she has much to say at these points, despite the appearance of major statements being made.

Towards the end, her young director self gives an interview in which she candidly admits, in fact, that she still hasn't much to say. I think the point is supposed to be that she's in denial about the horror she's been through with her boyfriend - and the fact that it might constitute strong story material. But maybe what Hogg's really inadvertently acknowledging is that she has no conversion technique, no way of taking this compelling raw material and creating a metaphor or otherwise giving it a shape that can communicate it to an audience. That, ultimately, is what I think we've been watching: her struggling to find that way of connecting, from life to art and back again, and ultimately, I regret to say, failing.

Under the Silver Lake (2018)

Aagggh. I so want to like this more

[8/10 · 3 November 2022]

OK, actually, I must like it quite a lot since I've just watched it three nights in a row. So I'm upping my rating from 6 to 8 and rewriting my review, but keeping my original title as a marker of what a grower this film can be. Try to keep an open-mind, o easily bored fussbudget pawns of late capitalism.

Straight out of the gate there was always, for me at least, so much to love: brilliant atmosphere and camerawork, a perfect old-style Hollywood score, and laconic, economical dialogue humorously conveying the dissociated bewilderment that is the movie's worldview. Andrew Garfield likably portrays an amoral, hungover/stoned slacker drifting through LA, alienated from any sense of purpose he might ever have had, but throwing himself into an increasingly strange search for the woman who's disappeared from his apartment complex. For quite a while all this was quite enough to have me writing enthusiastic nine or ten-star reviews in my head.

The bummer that initially dropped me down to six stars was the failure to pay off. The film builds a sense of the Hollywood entertainment-industrial complex as a terrible trap of seductive meaninglessness, one that uses us up, ruins lives, even kills. I was with this all the way until act III's explanation of what's behind it all. I won't give it away, but contra certain defences of the film - the lack of resolution is the point, naive of us to expect clear answers etc. - it absolutely is an answer and it's daft, reductive, nonsensical and in no way shocking enough to underpin the sublime horror of reality or meet the expectations the film has instilled.

Damp squib endings have flat-out ruined so many other bewitching mysteries - 'Lost', lesser works by Jacques Rivette and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the Swedish noir 'The White Cat' - that it's a huge surprise to me to find that this gaping flaw is not what stays with me here and is far from fatal. I think it's that, unlike those other stories, this one's not dependent on its ending for its sense of purpose. Regardless of where it's going, it does a remarkable job along the way of building a picture of Hollywood's evil - particularly its dependency on grossly exploiting women - and the druglike way it lures us in, implicates us and strings us along.

As other reviewers have noted, it really will likely take several viewings to get it. In my view, it's well worth the time required - especially since so little else on offer at the moment is. Maligned as it's been, I feel confident in predicting that like Eyes Wide Shut before it, with which it has many parallels, this thing's eventually going to be recognised as a solid, stone-cold classic. Plus it's made me positively re-evaluate REM and is way better than Inherent Vice. Plus I'm not sure there's ever been a better realisation of Godard's idea that cinema is death 24 frames a second.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–2023)

Twinkling mischievously is no substitute for being actually funny

[2/10 · 17 October 2022]

Think about this show in the abstract and it could have been so great: conventional, straightlaced, socially hidebound Upper West Side newlywed's life falls apart causing her to come down to the Village and out of her shell and become the cool, revolutionary, taboo-busting and brilliantly funny female Lenny Bruce.

That transformation, better executed, would have been a giddying thrill to watch. As actually is, it perpetually carries an air of the pathetic that has only increased with each season.

The trouble is partly that Mrs. Maisel starts off already more than halfway to her freedom, compulsively playing the comic at her own wedding, donning black turtle necks for trips to the Village and outdoing her husband, while she still has him, in his faltering attempts to launch a stand-up career. She doesn't seem repressed or oppressed enough for her flowering, when it comes, to feel really liberating.

Then again, especially considering the importance of Bruce to the story (he's a significant character in it), the whole show feels repressed, its characters twee and implausible, its humour trivial, safe, silly and devoid of subversion. It's a cartoon insult really, both to Bruce's memory and to the then embryonic feminist struggle the show might so easily have celebrated.

Plus, as many many others have noted here, Mrs Maisel's flowering isn't all that funny. It seems founded virtually not at all on hard work and interest in the craft of comedy and reliant instead on some daffy positive self-affirmation type notion that just thinking you're funny makes it so. This is incredibly irritating. I can see quite well that the character thinks she's funny; I wish she would completely ditch the 'Aren't I amusing?' face that tells me this in favour of some actual jokes.

Somehow, despite it all, something, some fascination with what might have been maybe, or some defeatist despair about finding anything better to do, carried me through to the end of S4. But I hated 4 especially so much and myself for wasting time on it that I cannot go back. There are better things to do. For the sake of our own liberation, we have to believe that.

Blonde (2022)

Oddly dashed off and unclear considering how long it is

[6/10 · 10 October 2022]

I don't mind it being as dark as it is, but this movie is a good indicator of how difficult it is to do dark without looking like you're just showing off your strong stomach. So much of it feels like it was made with the idea of 'Oh boy, this'll be a tough but cleansing ordeal for the audience,' and it isn't really, it's just kind of dreary and grose, but also a bit baffling.

So little feels well motivated. We're supposed, clearly, to get that Norma/Marilyn is driven somehow by the traumas of her father abandoning her and her mother going crazy. However, it's not all that clear what the causal or thematic link is between those things and her turning into her bombshell persona and feeling alienated in it, or being used sexually by a studio exec, or repeatedly ending pregnancies early, to name the most prominent griefs and wounds.

Much of this is very garbled, as when she opts to abort her first pregnancy because she's afraid her mother's madness is heritable, then changes her mind but, in a way that is not in the least plausible in its depiction, can't get out of it anyway, then watches 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' - which she'd originally turned down due to the pregnancy - and chides herself for killing her child just to make this (wait, so, not because of her mother's madness?). To be charitable, perhaps the way it goes is, once she tells the studio about the pregnancy and asks for help with the termination, they force her to go ahead so they can make the movie. But, as I say, actual execution is so dashed off, sketchy, unconvincing and confusing that almost none of it hits home. There's a terrible feeling of the screenwriter's attitude being, 'Oh, this'll do, won't it?' and maybe, 'After all, real life is messy, right?'

Screenwriter was also director and I can't help feeling he'd have done well to spend more time ironing out his script problems than working with the digital crew to ape the look of old photos - and the latter's only done well half the time.

No. I mean, yeah, messy, sure it is, life, but why turn this material into a story - and even take liberties in the service of the fiction - if you're going to leave us entirely clueless about how or why, for instance, this person got into an exploitative relationship with an apparently totally charmless and selfish JFK. Norma speculates blandly as she goes down on him that somehow 'Marilyn' drove her to this, but it's all done with such lazy haste that there's none of the sense of awful compulsion, either from the possessing persona or from the president's power, that would induce the pity and horror we seem to be being asked to feel here. Really, at this late point in the movie, we have almost no sense of the Marilyn persona as some controlling spirit or anything else really, so Norma's VO thought is barely meaningful.

All that's missing here is what's present in the one really strong scene, in which Arthur Miller and Norma fall for each other. At last, some real clarity and connective tissue. We totally get from this what breaks down Miller's prejudice and allows him to see the brilliant best of Norma, and the writing at this one moment is superb, full of awful tension that then movingly breaks as the lovers-to-be bond. Was other material like this cut to prevent the run-time from being even longer? Then they should have left it in and made it a series, because I'm pretty damn sure a lot of the people complaining about the length wouldn't be if they were actually emotionally engaged.