Horrors movies have the advantage of usually being short and easy to watch but I find myself liking them less and less. This one has decent reviews and once again stars Nicolas Cage who seemingly will appear in any schlocky project these days. It’s decently put together and has strong vibes but that’s all it has. Not only is it a mishmash of the usual tropes: scary clown-like figure, Satanic cults, dolls and so on, it makes no attempt whatsoever at verisimilitude. The frustrating thing is that at times it’s reminiscent of David Fincher’s style but in the end it’s not a serious film at all.
A few years back, I was extremely impressed by Capernaum, the only Lebanese film I’ve seen so far. Well, this earlier was both the debut of its director Nadine Labaki and she also stars in it. Once again I love the authenticity of its Beirut setting and the matter-of-factly way that it tells the stories of five women there, leaving aside the country’s post-war tensions and instability. Unfortunately this is a lighter film that goes for breadth rather than depth and relies too much on maudlin music. I admire what it’s going for and enjoyed it but it’s nowhere as good as Capernaum.
I noticed when this popped up on Netflix but didn’t think it was worth paying attention to. Then I read a wonderful essay about how it’s really a masterclass in management as Lionel Richie and Quincey Jones wrangled the biggest pop stars of the 1980s to work on a single world-changing song. Watching it, this really is the case and is full of amusing little anecdotes about these stars interacting with one another. If you’re a child of the ’80s like I am and have fond memories of We are the World, you owe it to yourself to watch this.
This film is said to be representative of the new kind of feminism in China, championing women who are strong enough to take charge and live their own lives as they please. With its rapid fire dialogue and dominant woman characters, it reminds me of the American screwball comedies of the early 20th-century but adapted for China and with both partners of the duo being women. I found it modern, smart and very funny. Unfortunately I’m not hip with Chinese culture and the language often moves too quickly for me to follow, so much of its cleverness is lost on me but I do so admire this film.
A Icelandic-Japanese film feels like an odd combination to me but it must have been natural for Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson. This film was adapted from a novel by Ólafur and he in turn is an Icelandic businessman who helped create the original PlayStation while serving as the CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. So this film spans both cultures across a gulf of some fifty years. It’s a heartfelt romance with an ending that is perhaps a little too perfect but it’s executed with so much finesse that I found myself being very much a fan.
At over three hours long and with so many award nominations, this is a true epic, even the swelling music it opens with proclaims it as such. Given its premise, I’d expected it to be similar to a biography of an artist even if the character is fictional. Yet the film resolutely refuses to stay in that box, spends as much developing other characters as the protagonist and is barely about architecture at all. In the end, all is explained and I have to admire the director Brady Corbet’s unique artistic vision. But it feels like a bit of a bait and switch to me and so I’m not a big fan of this film.
I’m not sure how or why a renowned director Hirokazu Kore-eda has the time to also make television shows but this is highly acclaimed and readily available on Netflix so I’m all for it. It’s a remake of a 1979 series and so is set in that year. The moment I read its premise about four sisters discovering that their elderly father is cheating on their mother with a mistress, I thought that Kore-eda is doing his usual theme of pointing out the failure of parental figures again. But it’s more than that as over the leisurely course of seven episodes, he is able to intricately map out the relationships between the sisters and their families.
