Watched Blackkklansman (2018)...



For those who may not be familiar, it's loosely based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first Black detective in the Colorado Springs police department, who began conducting an investigation into a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s which involved him posing as a white man interested in joining, so that he even had phone conversations with David Duke, at the time the KKK's grand tooth fairy or whatever. In the movie, Spike Lee et al. took a lot of liberties with the story - and also shifted it to taking place in the early '70s for some reason. The two main stars, John David Washington as Stallworth and Adam Driver as the Jewish fellow cop who poses as Stallworth for in person meetings with Klan members (in real life, Stallworth never revealed the identities of the white cops who assisted him in his investigations) are both quite good, while Topher Grace does a bang-up job playing the smarmy David Duke.
All in all, it's a pretty good film; it's entertaining enough - although the trailer above makes it seem more comical than it is, because it's more of a serious police procedural than anything else. It is, however, simultaneously rather disturbing and, ultimately, a bit depressing (when you realize how topical so much of the story is - brought home by file footage of the events in Charlottevsville in 2017 shown at the end).

Saw Freud's Last Session, about a speculative meeting between Freud and CS Lewis a few weeks before Freud's death in 1939, just after Germany invaded Poland. Well acted all round, with Anthony Hopkins as Freud, Matthew Goode as Lewis, and especially Liz Lisa Fries as Freud's daughter Anna. Very solid film but I felt perhaps even more could have been made of the intriguing premise. Definitely worth a look for anyone interested in Freud or Lewis - BTW, the Inklings make a brief appearance, including a scene in which Tolkien convinces then-atheist Lewis to investigate Christianity more deeply.

I re-watched It Follows (2015) yesterday, and it works even when you know how it ends.



It's a clever little horror film with little blood or physical violence but a lot of tension, and with quite a good artistic direction. More of a "why am I sitting on the edge of my seat?" thing that a "GAH!!! Another jump scare!" one, and all the better for it.

The scary creature here is a supernatural entity that can take the form of anyone. As the title says it follows a given victim, and if it catches it, it gruesomely turns it into a human origami. The entity just walks, it never runs, so it's not that hard to escape... but it also never relents and cannot be killed. 

Who does it follow and eventually murders? That's the interesting concept behind this story, as it's very selective: the creature's next victim is whoever had sex with its latest target (like some kind of spectral STD). However, if someone manages to have a sexual relation before being murdered, then they're off the hook! The curse is transferred to their partner. There is however a twist: should said partner be killed before they, in turn, have sex with someone else, then the monster goes back to the previous carrier. 

This presents a double problem for the protagonists: on the one hand nobody wants to be gruesomely murdered by a demonic entity, but on the other hand most decent folks don't want to damn innocents to save their own skin. This moral conundrum gives the story an unexpected depth without distracting from its fast-paced nature.

My favourite parts are the scenes in which the entity under some nondescript form is clearly within sight, getting closer and closer at a steady pace, without anyone but us viewers noticing... not because the characters are afflicted by plot-induced stupidity (they're actually quite sensible), but because hiding in plain sight sometimes works very well. 

It's a good example of what one can do, even with a limited budget, when one has a good script. In that sense, it reminds me of Spielberg's film "Duel", where all that was needed was a car, a truck, and roads for them to drive on.

I was scrolling through the 'action & adventure' folder of HBO recently and came across 65 (2023):



I was a bit surprised to see a very recent SF flick starring Adam Driver that I knew nothing about.
It's set long before humans evolved, as the text at the start notes that highly-advanced civilizations had appeared and began exploring the stars even then. Driver's character, Mills, is a starship pilot whose wife talks him into taking another long-haul (2-year) transport job because they need the money to treat their very ill daughter. Fast forward to well over a year later, and the ship sustains severe damage after being hit by some asteroid debris while passing through a star system, and Mills has to make an emergency landing on the nearest planet: Earth, 65 million years ago. The ship which, by the way, was transporting a bunch of cryogenically frozen people, breaks into two chunks and only Mills and a little girl in one of the damaged pods survive. They have to traverse over 10 miles of the inhospitable terrain full of dinosaurs to make it to the other part of the ship where there is a functional escape pod. Meanwhile, Mills' hand-held scanner indicates that a humongous asteroid is going crash into the planet and they're traipsing around in ground zero...
Up top, I'll say that this is a watchable film with an intriguing premise, but it never goes beyond that. It's a simple and predictable survival story. Also, I was a bit disappointed that all of the dinosaurs were portrayed in the very typical movie fashion, i.e, as simple-minded savage lizards, even though we now know that many of them, esp. the smaller ones, had feathers. Also, at several points they're pursued by something with a T-rex head but with normal-sized forelegs that it would sometimes use for walking.

I love the sense of community we get from that scene, and that the Fremen don't speak English.




Holy Shai-Hulud, Batman... This looks amazing.

They're more of the same, and to me that's a good thing. I always loved Denzel Washington, and this straightforward action series is very comic-booky at heart.

I was The Zone of Interest last weekend and American Fiction today.

The Zone of Interest is a different sort of Holocaust movie, focusing on Nazi Rudolf Hoss (not to be confused with Rudolf Hess) and his family, with the atrocities only conveyed indirectly. While I can appreciate what the film was trying to do, it still had the side effect of being boring at times. It's only an hour 40 minutes, but it still feels like there's filler on a story without many events in the plot. It reminds me of the third section of Moonlight (which other rave about, but I found underwhelming). It has a very interesting ending and some inserts that look like photo negatives that I didn't understand until I read a plot summary after the fact.

One reason I was interested in seeing American Fiction was because I read the novel on which it is based, Erasure, a couple months ago. The trailers seemed so different from the book, which is very bleak. I can see why some of the changes were made, as Hollywood movies tend to do better with a lighter tone than the novel. The plot of the novel has personal and professional elements, and I think the film does well on the personal elements including show how "black stories" including things that get left out of stereotypical narratives. I do think some of the changes contradicts the message of the novel. The novel's view seems to be that some African-Americans are complicit with lots of white people in pushing and profiting from degrading narratives of black people. The film downplays that. They create a line of dialogue for Issa Rae's character that contradicts a line of dialogue from the analogous character (the name is changed) from the novel. The way it absolves the character was an annoying echo of how Sinclair Lewis's satire of religion Elmer Gantry got a coating of "actually religion is pretty good" in the adaptation that starred Burt Lancaster. While I think the change in American Fiction is a little too pat and PC, overall I thought the movie was pretty good.