Europeans make so many films about the Holocaust that watching yet another one isn’t particularly interesting to me. Jonathan Glazer’s newest one however takes a completely different tack by not showing a single Jewish victim at all. Instead it focuses on the home life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss whose family has established a mundane and pleasant existence just outside the camp’s walls. There is effectively no plot as it merely shows their everyday routines. Glazer claims that he aimed to demystify the perpetrators of the Holocaust to show that they are not evil in the mythological sense. Yet they most certainly are evil at least in the ordinary sense for being able to enjoy life under such horrendous circumstances.
Given its subject matter, it’s particularly poignant to watch this now as Donald Trump has just won the election to once again become the president of the United States. This short film effectively consists of just one extended scene in which FBI agents arrive at the home of Reality Winner, a US Air Force veteran and translator for the NSA, and interrogate her. All dialogue is taken from the recording made by the FBI itself, with portions redacted as per the transcript. It’s remarkable how much tension director Tina Satter was able to inject into the material and it works especially well if you have no idea who Reality Winner is before watching this.
I briefly considered the recent Steven Spielberg remake but it received only middling reviews and I realized I’d never seen the original anyway. I wasn’t too enthusiastic either about watching yet another iteration of Rome and Juliet but I should do it anyway as a kind of completionist achievement. Unfortunately I found it to be fairly underwhelming. It’s a dance-centric rather than a music-centric and almost all of its songs are forgettable. The two sides, the Sharks and the Jets, are very much not equal as the Puerto Rican Sharks have a far more compelling story to tell. I think I prefer pretty much any of the other versions of the familiar story to this.
There’s no indication of it in the film itself, but this was based on the real-life murder of an infant by her mother in France and director Alice Diop attended the trial just as the main character here does. As a courtroom drama, it’s very talky with long scenes of the characters delivering their statements. It’s also a case in which all of the facts seem immediately clear, plain as day. Yet the lesson Diop teaches here is that there is still the matter of perspective as each person presents the facts in a way that benefits themselves as we struggle to understand the incomprehensible horror of why a mother would kill her own child.
My wife felt like a change from the usual television shows that we watch and wanted to try a cooking show. The latest season of this long-running, award-winning show popped up on Netflix, with each season focusing on a different cuisine, so I thought we’d check it out. Each episode is indeed filled with exquisite visuals of perfectly crafted dishes but the focus is really on the biographies of noteworthy chefs rather than the food itself. It’s okay but not really what we were looking for so we’re glad it’s only four episodes.
It’s pretty impressive how director Yorgos Lanthimos has transitioned from making weird, almost incomprehensible art films to mainstream success. With recognition comes a bigger budget to play with and so Poor Things is set in a gorgeous, steampunk version of Victorian England. It’s in service of a story that resembles the familiar one of Frankenstein’s monster, except with a female lead and the creation is allowed to grow and mature to full adulthood. I found this film a tad long and I think the overemphasis on sex is to the detriment of the other ways the character can grow. Still, it’s a beautiful film and a clever twist on a familiar story.
Netflix hits it out of the park again with an animated series that replicates the flowing beauty of Japanese anime but is a Western production through and through. It has a bit of a slow start with a somewhat clichéd premise but I was hooked once once I saw the amazing fight choreography. Even better is that it is unabashedly an animated show for adults. It was deaths and amputations galore, full frontal nude shots, sex scenes, the works. I loved the story as well but of course it runs off of Western moral values and not Asian sensibilities. About the only complaint I have is that it ramps the stakes up so high that it’s a little ridiculous how only Mizu, the protagonist, is the only one who can get anything done.
