Managed to watch two pretty new movies while the child was home from college for the holidays.  

The Menu 




Number Three Son had actually seen this in the theater and wanted to re-watch it, which is something he almost never wants to do.  I knew almost nothing about it going in.  Just an excellent film.  A very dark comedy, tinging on horror, but far more psychological horror.  A group of people are gathered at a very exclusive island restaurant run by a revered chef played by Ralph Fiennes.  The clear outsider of the dinner guests is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who is absolutely luminous, the date of a sad little foodie.  The film just brilliantly skewers the commoditization and the simultaneous deification of art, that drains the joy from the art as both a consumer and a creator.  One almost hesitates to analyze it because you don't want to risk becoming one of those people.  I really loved it. 


Glass Onion 



The sequel to Knives Out is maybe not quite as good, but I'll watch Daniel Craig play Benoit Blanc as long as he wants to do so.  I didn't really set out to watch two films that skewer the pretension and the vapidity of the very rich, but here we are.  Rian Johnson never hides the ball and sets it right out there for you to see.  And I'll say that I pretty well had it pegged from the beginning, except for one hoary old twist that should have been annoying but wasn't because it was in a movie that knew it was winking and nudging.  The supporting cast was generally good, but Craig was clearly in command, though Janelle Monáe was outstanding as Andi.  Super fun, but still thought provoking.  

Same here.

"Benoit Blanc" is however a great name, if I say so myself.

This looks interesting.....



I wonder if it will have a talking dog?

Agreed!

That’s why I don’t want to analyze it. If I was a film critic, perhaps following a synopsis, I would be tempted to simply type, “The film is what it is. Enjoy.”

I do agree that it skewers the commoditisation and deification of art. 

I found it utterly absorbing throughout, and I feel that a second viewing will be satisfying despite the fact that a second viewing of any film can always be less enjoyable due to knowing the ending.

I’m glad this came onto my radar (via your post, Slam_Bradley). I subscribe to Disney+ but can’t say I saw this advertised anywhere. 

I think we're alone now (2018)



Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... what a hard film to judge. I loved it for something like 75 minutes, and it collapsed in the last ten.

Many decades ago, a film that would come to be be known as The Doomsday Machine ran out of money before production ended, and the almost-finished movie languished on someone's shelf until the property was bought by another company and given a tacked-on ending, with different actors and an abrupt shift in plot. While this is not what happened here, it almost felt like it -much to my dismay.

The cast is pretty impressive : Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, Paul Giamatti and Charlotte Gainsbourg. They all do a great job of making you believe in their characters. The post-apocalyptic setting is haunting and poetic, in a melancholy way; I love long sequences of deserted towns. No destruction porn either; just a quiet world with dead leaves blown by the wind, with no a voice to be heard. The writing is also top-notch for most of the film. No, scratch that; the writing is very good even when the plot eventually derails. I really enjoyed the sparse dialog.

We viewers are not told just what happened to the world; just that fairly recently, nearly everyone dropped dead for no apparent reason in the blink of an eye. A universal gas attack (as in The Earth Dies Screaming) could have been a good explanation, but we're left completely in the dark, and thankfully so. Dinklage's character, finding himself the sole survivor that he knows of, quickly adapts to his new reality and makes a life for himself in the public library he used to work for. Apparently obeying his knack for keeping things in order, he keeps himself busy by cleaning all the houses in his neighbourhood (burying corpses, emptying fridges and garbage cans, leaving everything clean). He also collects family photos in each house, and saves them in folders corresponding to each address, as so many quiet memorials to the people who lived there. It is his way to fight against the chaos that threatens the world around him.

He seems stoically content in his new life, enjoying the peace and quiet, even, when a young woman shows up and suffers from a low-speed car crash. After tending to her concussion, and after some initial distrust, he eventually agrees to let her stay and to show her the ropes -how to clean houses, how to grow food, how to dispose of bodies. She, in turn, helps him reconnect to a humanity he had distanced himself from in his isolation.

So far s good, and the slow-paced and soft-spoken exploration of this new world and the two protagonists' relationship makes for interesting viewing; especially since it all feels very believable. I was especially touched by the main character's motivation; he's right, even though cleaning the houses of dead people has little practical use: by maintaining a certain order in his environment, by fighting entropy, he gives his life a goal that helps keep despair at bay.

Also appreciated: even when the young lady joins him, they don't go the romantic Adam and Eve way; they just start working together, for the nonce nothing more than adults sharing a common goal. Hints of a possible romance (unavoidable, one would say) take their sweet time to manifest themselves and feel completely natural when they do.

Then comes a final act plot twist that had potential initially, but that is followed by a nonsensical revelation that basically killed the movie for me.

The twist is that our two protagonists are not, as we believed, among the very few (or the sole) survivors of humanity; the girl actually escaped from a town in California where thousands of people have already gathered and live a life of leisure. Added to that, said town apparently counts super-scientists that devised a way to erase all "negative" emotions from people's brains, The result is a community of happy quasi-zombies, one which the girl didn't want to live in anymore when she fled.

Had the film, from the start, been about the distinction between the respective advantages of (a) making lemonade out of the lemons that life gives us and (b) making people forget that lemons are sour altogether, my appreciation would have been different... but here we deal with something like 75 minutes of how to make lemonade, and then an abrupt change in pace to go save a girl from mind-controlling reality negationists.

I simply couldn't buy it. All the verisimilitude of the movie flew out the window at that point, especially since I have no idea how a bunch of surviving scientists would invest any time in a way to change people's emotions when there is so much to do to salvage what can be saved from civilization's remains. That is, if emotion-controlling technology existed at all to begin with! I think the movie would have been much better had it ended a little sooner, even with no answer to the several questions asked. Heck, even after we learn that there are survivors elsewhere; we could have left our hero wondering whether he should rejoin the group or stay alone in his library, seeing as he's done pretty good on his own.

Anyway... At least I loved most of it.

It's a sub-genre I love as well. One thing I like about it is that it requires little to no special effects; any empty neighbourhood or building can serve as a background. Accordingly, that means that anyone with a decent story to tell can afford to do it, and the emphasis is then on the writing rather than on exploding cities. For every big budget post-apocalyptic movie, there'll usually be two with a small budget but a good script.