I have yet to find a film with a lacklustre performance by Glenda Jackson; my working theory is that there isn’t one. Even in light entertainment films like House Calls or Hopscotch she is just fully there and delivers.
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Alison Bechdel’s opinion on the Bechdel Test:
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Even her appearance on The Muppet Show was top notch. She hijacks the show and turns it into a pirate ship.
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Watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 just now. The mid-credits scene ruined it for me.
The whole movie we flash back to Rocket and his animal friends getting tortured and killed in what are meant to be heart wrenching scenes. So in the climax after the Guardians rescue the children Rocket goes back to free all the animals too. Hurrah!
But in the end scene the new Guardians team led by Rocket gets ready to “protect these settlers” by… slaughtering a bunch of wild animals.
It could have been robots or mercenaries or something instead. It’s like they went out of their way to undo the message of the prior two and a half fucking hours of movie and I’m bitter
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I noticed that, too. I wondered what we were supposed to take away in the end. Are only human-like consciousness and communication worth protecting and preserving?
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I disagreed with the decontextualised pull quote. I mean it was literally a joke in her long running series it’s true. But it was also funny because it was true.
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And I watched the Little Mermaid in the cinema. It was okay, but a lot lot lot better than the earlier Disney version. The animation was fantastic, the music was also better (though similar, changed lyrics) and the star was luminous.
I always enjoy Melissa McCarthy chewing up the scenery too.
And sorry for off topic but talking of Alison Bechdel I just went to the Fun Home Musical with kiddo and we loved it. A friend working on it tells me it’s a great experience as the audiences are ecstatic and it seems to be a real positive experience.
Back on to films and I saw this recently:
It’s not a great film and not one of de Sofa’s best but it is really interesting. What would it’s a wonderful life be like if instead of a bourgeois drunk driver banker being shown how he was really great by Ángels it’s a homeless innocent of dubious origins in a squatters camp straight after he ages out of the orphanage? The woman who finds him in a cabbage patch gives him the means to do magic which he uses to help stop the police evicting the homeless people from the camp they have made as good as they can to live with dignity. The angels are against that kind of thing rather than for it.
I enjoyed:
Which shares with Céline Sciamma’s under rated Petite Maman a child who visits the past before they were born. This is much more a kind of folk horror than tender childhood drama. It’s been a great couple of years for films focused on children and if you’ve been enjoying them as much as me this one kind of fits in.
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Most people did, and will continue to, overlook the movie Robot Jox based on premise alone, but a single credit in the opening reveals a movie at war with itself. Joe Haldeman, the author most well known for The Forever War and its subsequent series, wrote the screenplay. You can tell. There are bits where you know the movie wants to get weird, but then it doesn’t. (Genetically modified humans, a world in which illiteracy is so common there’s money in being “a reader,” Russia has become the Confederation and America has become The Market, etc. None of this gets explored.)
Turns out Haldeman and Stuart Gordon disagreed on whether or not the film should be for adults but appeal to children or for children but appeal to adults. Something that they did agree on was that it should appeal to both audiences, especially as they were attempting to cash in on the toy robot craze. The film came out a little late for that, so it failed in that respect as well as for being a watered down version of what it should have been.
Strangely, it’s not a bad movie overall. It’s essentially about a war hero who wants out because war is trauma but gets back out there to fight a man who is obviously his true and worst self when fighting. I kind of want someone else to take a crack at this story and do it right.
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“life-size rocks and mountains were brought onto the set”
For me, the considerable ingenuity that must have went into moving mountains is completely spoiled by the crass oversight of neglecting to bring in any boulders as well.
Quite another thing yet are the theological implications which are, to paraphrase Linus van Pelt, staggering.
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A MOVIE ABOUT GEF THE TALKING MONGOOSE!!!
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(He wrote the novel The Sympathizer. Which Hollywood is currently making a movie version of. He posts about spending time on set, so I hope his input is bwing listened to. It’s a great novel!)
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Crap. I just found out that LaKeith Stanfield is in the new Haunted Mansion movie, so I guess I have to see it?
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