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Showing posts from July, 2025

Oh, Hi Molly!

There are a few moments, including right at the start, where Oh, Hi!  suggests it’ll be taking a very dark or harrowing turn -if not into full-on horror than into something akin to  Fatal Attraction  or Misery , just with a more modern lens. It would be the conventional way to approach this kind of story -and that is not on its face a bad thing - Companio n from earlier this year isn’t too far from it. But I respect the direction filmmaker Sophie Brooks and producer/star Molly Gordon took instead, even if it made for some complications and problematic plot developments. Essentially, it is the trope of the mad woman scorned taken with some sympathy - Fatal Attraction  if it were on Glenn Close’s side and far more judgemental of Michael Douglas. And especially in the context of a story less about thrills and tension than genuine relationship drama that is a curious idea. And Brooks and Gordon are a great team to facilitate that. Though Gordon isn’t credited on the scr...

Back to the Feature: Anna Christie (1930)

Garbo Talks! In 1930, that was all the promotion you needed. Greta Garbo had only been in Hollywood for five years by that point but stardom came swiftly in the silent movie era, and especially for such a mysterious evocative personality like her. She’d made such a name for herself and her distinctive melodramatic acting style, and being a European export (the first in a line of great Swedish actresses of the silver screen), it was natural that with the dawn of the talkies there was immense curiosity over how she would make the transition, especially given she had no English when she first came to America. How would she fare in this new medium, and what would she sound like? To meet this anticipation, MGM, and Irving Thalberg specifically, very shrewdly chose for her a new film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna Christie , which already had garnered a reputation for the intensity of its titular role. It had been filmed already in 1923, but a sound version ...

Fourth Time's the Charm

The Fantastic Four have had a rough time in the movies. Though an incredibly significant superhero unit in the comics -debuting in 1961 as the “First Family” of the Marvel brand, efforts to translate them to film have been as rocky as The Thing. Roger Corman made an attempt in the early 1990s, aborted before it could be released. Fox then produced a pair of mildly successful through critically maligned films in the mid-2000s. And finally in a meagre effort to hang onto the brand, Fox produced a reboot in 2015 that was a disaster on every level. Then Marvel Studios managed to wrest back control, and almost forty films into their cinematic universe have now given it their own shot -at a time when they not only need it to be good for its own sake but for the studio’s pervasive credibility going forward, which has taken a hit in recent years due to a variety of factors. The Fantastic Four: First Steps  couldn’t possibly be everything it needs to be for Marvel right now -and indeed what...

The Beguiling Tangibility of ‘80s Fantasy Cinema

For most of cinema history, the fantasy genre has been marginalized, often existing only in children’s films and the animated works of Walt Disney. The Wizard of Oz  was a groundbreaker, but it didn’t open the doors one would think. Because as in literature, fantasy was deemed an unserious genre -even a gargantuan figure like Tolkien was rarely uttered in the same breath as revered geniuses like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. Even among the populists of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, or Truman Capote, no fantasy writer would be found -certainly not one who wrote of wholly fictional worlds and races, active magic and mystical battles. For the film industry the genre might have been deemed far too niche and far too expensive to produce to be worth the stigma. In Hollywood certainly, but also in most other national film industries, fantasy never managed to get a foothold really -until 2001 when The Lord of  the Rings trilogy broke...

Ideological Dishonesty Dulls the Social Commentary of Eddington

Five years out from the start of the pandemic we are still struggling to reckon with it in art. Exactly how deeply it changed us individually and as a society writ large we still need time to grasp. We know it was a turning point of the modern era, but what that really means still eludes us. Ari Aster identifies it as such, and in his neo-western film Eddington  endeavours to assign specific cultural weight to it. He makes it a nexus point of the fraught politics and divisiveness of our times. As can be imagined, his attempt to illustrate that theme through dark satire is rather clumsy to say the least. It is not entirely unexpected, given both the tense subject matter we all have opinions on, and Aster’s own tendencies. He is not a filmmaker with a light touch, and as he strays from the horror genre he got his start in, it only becomes more apparent in the plunges he is willing to take. Beau is Afraid  was proof positive of that, as eccentric and unapologetic a movie as they ...

Everything is Not So Great

Passion for theatre is a beautiful thing and you love to see it -even on a small scale in community or youth theatre where the acting isn’t particularly good, there’s still a charm in the enthusiasm and the spirit for the work. Not long ago I experienced this with an amateur teen production of Guys and Dolls . But a love for theatre cannot be forceful, and unfortunately that is exactly how it comes across in Everything’s Going to be Great , a movie about how theatrical passion can both ruin people’s lives and give them meaning -struggling to reconcile those contradictory points. Directed by Jon S. Baird from a script by I, Tonya ’s Steven Rogers, it centres on a quirky Kansas family in the 1980s running a small local theatre company. Patriarch Buddy (Bryan Cranston) has long-nurtured dreams of working in Broadway, and his younger son Lester (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) shares his passion and aspirations, while mother Macy (Allison Janney) -a former beauty queen and devout Christian in con...