The GardenDespatches from The Satyrs’ Forest

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Stuff i watched recently, December ’24

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GoodFellas (1990)

The first time i’ve actually enjoyed a Scorsese flick.1 I love how it uses music to illustrate the main character’s psychological decline. (8/10)

Evil Dead 2 (1987) (again) and Army of Darkness (1992)

Watched as a double feature for the Hallowe’en season — Evil Dead 2 is as funny as ever, and all you need to know about Army of Darkness is that it’s a film where a stop-motion skeleton explodes, and if that doesn’t sell you, it’s not for you. (I did find myself wishing i’d watched the theatrical cut, rather than the director’s cut — the studio-mandated happy ending has so many iconic bits i didn’t realise i was missing!) (7/10)

Synecdoche, New York (2008) (again)

In honour of Megalopolis2, Tyneside Cinema were doing a season of films with dizzying ambitions and variable results, from Southland Tales to Synecdoche. I jumped at the chance to finally see my favourite film on the big screen — and, yep, still a certified 11/10 masterpiece.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

I have a “hear me out”. (7½/10)

Poltergeist (1982)

Steven Spielberg did not technically direct this, but come on now, we all know this is as spiritually Spielberg as it gets. Some fun stuff, especially the motley crew of paranormal investigators, but it’s weighed down by the jarring tonal mish-mash and a glued-on fourth act where they seem to have suddenly realised they forgot a “0” in their special effects budget. (5½/10)

The Fisher King (1991)

I knew absolutely nowt about this going in, so when Robin Williams showed up, it took some time for me to mentally adjust to the combination of his zaniness, Jeff Bridges’ shock-jock sleaze, and the trademark layer of Gilliam grime coating it all. All of it comes together beautifully in a surprisingly good-hearted fantasy tale of big-city redemption. (8/10)

Juror №2 (2024)

I had bought the tickets and everything for Clint Eastwood’s final film — but it was the day after the U.S. election, and fifteen minutes in, i thought, cripes, do i really want to be sitting through a drama about the dysfunction of the American legal system right now? (N/A/10)

AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001)

There’s nothing i love more than a big, ambitious, messy film, and this hits all three. You can see the joins between the Kubrickian rigour and Spielbergian spectacle, but i don’t care. Viva the mess.

Haley Joel Osment is incredible in this. You can totally see why Kubrick thought no child actor could ever pull off the script.

All the tech has this glorious early-noughties Orion’s Arm-style shimmer and sheen to it, and let me tell you, i live for that shit. (9/10)

Summer of Sam (1999)

I kind of forgot i even watched this? (3/10)

🎵️ Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want to Turn into You (2023)

Favourite tracks: “Welcome to My Island” (especially the George Daniel remix), “Blood and Butter”, “Billions”. (7/10)

Se7en (1995)

It’s good. I have little more to say on the matter, except that the title is pronounced /sə.ˈsɛ.və.nən/. (8/10)

The Lighthouse (2019)

This is some kind of primordial film, one that you’d find washed up at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and six months later, radiocarbon dating would show it to be older than civilisation itself. (Very glad i had subtitles — those old-timey wickie accents don’t mess about.)

Also, Robert Pattinson is really, really hot in this. No man has ever been this Fucked Up. (10/10)

Wicked (2024)

I didn’t know Hollywood still had it in it to pull out all the stops for a big, colourful show-stopping musical like this. Ariana Grande stole the show, but the goat stole my heart. (9/10)

Annihilation: In defence of the Shimmer

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Two mutated deer, their antlers clad in vibrant flowers, stand in a beautiful verdant forest, looking quizzically at the camera

Alex Garland’s Annihilation is nominally a horror film.1 Team of scientists goes into an evil forest, gets picked off one by one with cool body horror effects, blonde final girl makes it out and is irreversibly traumatised, movie ends, many such cases.2 But i’ve never seen it that way.

Might i just be a contrarian? Certainly, the biosphere our characters enter is cruel, but i think it’s a useful exercise to consider the situation from its perspective. The government is on their Gods-know-how-manyth expedition into the Shimmer at this point, and up until now, it’s all been military men. Cripes, if i were a sentient self-regulating ecosystem and all these feds started probing around my internals because they want to kill me, i’d develop an immune response too.

The world beyond the Shimmer is beautiful beyond description. It is a place where the sky glistens in iridescent3 waves, where every sort of plant grows from every sort of bush and beast, and where death is just one step in a beautiful cycle of life and rebirth.4 It blurs the line between not just the species but kingdoms of life — flora, fauna, and funga all mingling and merging together equally under one roof. Barring the terrifying human–bear hybrids, that’s a world i’d like to live in.

Plus, it seems willing to learn. In the ending “fight” (cue the noise), allegorical for the obvious as the visuals may be, the alien throws not a single punch. It’s learning by doing, mimicking every move Lena makes, enough to turn into a rudimentary facsimile of her — and even after its destruction, the ending glimmer in her and her husband’s eyes makes clear a part of the Shimmer’s essence is here to say. I say that’s for the better.

P.S. Here’s some stuff i’ve been listening to recently (sorted from “bleep bloop” to “strum strum”):

Stuff i watched recently, October ’24

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Posters for the undermentioned films

Big Fish (2003)

Tim Burton, you bastard, you’ve done it again. Hit a remarkable 0.7 Titanics on the cry-o-meter and made me want to call my papa. (8/10)

Alien: Romulus (2024)

I reviewed this one in full back in August, so go check that out if you want more detail. A stylish sequel (sevenquel?) that makes the world of Alien more believable than ever and introduces some great new talent. (7/10)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Seeing Christopher Lloyd in this was like seeing Jeff Goldblum in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like, hey, you’re not meant to be famous yet!

It’s one of those films that’s been talked about so much that i have very little new to add, but i will say that i wasn’t expecting this to be as funny as it was.1 (7/10)

Sexy Beast (2000)

Ugh. Once the plot gets moving two thirds of the way through it’s pretty good, but that first hour is æsthetically revolting in the most perplexing way. The Spanish countryside has never looked so grimy and clammy. I hate all of these people. (3½/10)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

I didn’t know Steven Spielberg had the capacity to be so… cryptic? I love how the film builds up the mystery of what’s going on, with an ending that leaves you wondering in both senses of the word. Contact’s better, yeah, but Contact wouldn’t exist without Close Encounters as a base to work off. (9/10)

Silent Running (1972)

Douglas Trumbull, 2001’s special-effects man, gets into directing with this sickeningly seventies environmentalist sci-fi fable. There’s a lot to like here, but i can’t help the feeling that this would have worked a lot better if you’d cut it up into five twenty-minute TV episodes and had Tom Baker show up midway through. (5/10)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Went to the cinema for this, for… some reason? Tim Burton is back, baby, having finally freed himself from Disney’s offputting computer-generated tendrils, and while Beetlejuice²: Beetlejuice Harder is ultimately inessential, it’s a fun legasequel that’s better than anyone was reasonably expecting, keeping up the same manic energy as the original. Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, and Winona Ryder haven’t missed a step since 1988. Willem Dafoe is great too, though like most of the new cast, his character doesn’t have much to do in the story, which struggles to commit to any of its three plot threads.

Also, the lead girl falls in love with a socially awkward zoomer who listens to Sigur Rós, which means there’s still a chance for me. So that’s… that’s good. That’s reassuring. (6/10)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Once you’ve seen one Woody Allen film, you’ve seen them all, and boy did i wish i was seeing Annie Hall instead. (5/10)

Casablanca (1942)

Come on. It’s Casablanca. What do you want me to say? Every five minutes there’s a line that made me point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio. “We’ll always have Paris.” (10/10)

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Unnerving to see Dev Patel before his ongoing “sexiest man alive” era, but you can never go wrong with Danny Boyle, whose kinetic, saturated style elevates a simple feel-good rags-to-riches story. (6/10)

The Substance (2024)

I cannot fucking believe i roped my mum into coming to the cinema with me.2 Greatest decision of my life. Her fucking face!

The Substance is the goopiest [sic] movie i’ve ever seen, and that’s ignoring all the body horror. Demi Moore digs through wet rubbish to pick up a sticky USB drive and splatters eggs everywhere. Dennis Quaid eats a bowl of shrimp that makes the world’s most viscerally disgusting noise. Margaret Qualley’s teeth fall out.3

My one complaint is i wish it had gone further. Everyone on the internet thinks it went too far. No. They are fools. That blood-sprayed audience should have started melting into The Thing, and we all know that deep inside our hearts. (9½/10)

Videodrome (1983)

Long live the new flesh! A film starring a Betamaxussy and a man who exists exclusively through semi-sentient VHS tapes. So many ideas, so little time (the Cronenberg special). Watching this is like trying to remember a nightmare you just woke up from.

I’m filing this in the same folder as Rear Window, a film with a surprising amount to say about an internet that it couldn’t have reasonably foreseen. What are we if not, like Brian O’Blivion4, ghosts of all our past transmissions? Is the online avatar not the new flesh? Existenz tackles the internet more head-on, but suffers from the fact that David Cronenberg doesn’t know what a video game is. Videodrome is unburdened by the future facts, and so can say whatever it wants. (10/10)

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

A double feature with Videodrome. Sure. Why not. Let’s go.

This tickled the Gremlins 2 area of my brain in delightful Looney Tunes-esque fashion. What a silly little flick. (9½/10)

The A-Team (2010)

Stepdad’s pick for movie night. My review: “Stepdad’s pick for movie night”. (3/10)

Megalopolis (2024)

Francis Ford Coppola’s final fart is why Hollywood can’t have nice things, an incomprehensible schmaltzy mess about how Adam Driver is a Very Special Boy who is always right. I don’t know where the money went — everything looks like Spy Kids. What an embarrassing way to go out. (2/10)

Francis Ford Coppola shoots for the moon and misses with Megalopolis, his long-gestating passion project that shows why studio interference isn’t always the worst thing. Sometimes you need someone in the room to say “no”. Every creative decision made here is baffling: Adam Driver’s character can stop time, and this never comes up. Our main character can stop time, and this does not play a role in the film’s story! His political rival leaks a video of him having sex with an underage pop star, and within about five minutes, it turns out it was fake and she was 23 anyway, so that plotline’s resolved and never comes back up. Every conflict is like this. I don’t know what’s going on. (4/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable defies your puny human notions of “good” or “bad” in an ambitious sci-fi drama that’s like if Hillary Clinton wrote a Neil Breen film.5 You can neatly split the cast into “knew what kind of movie they were in” and “didn’t”. Shia LeBeouf knew — he chews the scenery with every line as if the sets were made of cotton candy. Aubrey Plaza knew, because there’s no way not to know what kind of movie you’re in when your character is called “Wow Platinum” and makes Mr LeBeouf give her head. Adam Driver probably knew? He can get pretty hammy, but he’s kind of trying to keep a straight face. Nathalie Emmanuel didn’t know — she’s the female lead, but her performance is so wooden i was genuinely shocked to find out she wasn’t a nepotism hire. Giancarlo Esposito is insulated enough from the properly weird stuff that i don’t think he knew. (6/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable is so sincere i can’t help but love it. It’s a man who built his fame on films about the criminal underworld and the hell of war going: “I refuse to let this be my legacy”. Megalopolis is about a man with a vision for a better future and the power to make it happen. (His vision for a better future mostly involves those moving walkways they have at airports. I never said it was perfect.) And, yeah, it’s a little undercooked. Yeah, it’s as subtle as a brick.6 But it’s the film the man wanted to make, and it’s a film that proudly stands against the cynical doom and gloom that has infested popular culture since the nineties. I can’t help but respect that. (8/10)

“Whaddaya think of this boner i got?” —Jon Voight, 2024 (10/10)

Alien: Romulus is awesome

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A young white woman fires a gun in a retrofuturistic space station, a young black man cowering behind her
Super props to the trailer people, honestly — if it wasn’t for seeing that chilling first trailer in cinemas, i’d never have even considered watching the seventh film in a franchise i didn’t particularly care for.

I watched Fede Álvarez’s turn at the Alien franchise’s helm with, i sense, the ideal amount of knowledge. Online reviews are split — and the more Alien films the reviewer’s seen, the less they like it. Me? I’d sat down for the first and second, once, a while ago, and that was it. No slogging through assembly cuts or failed comebacks or stealth prequels or anything of the sort. Where they saw the gasping regurgitations of a dying and overexerted setting, i saw a darn good film.

The opening credits start rolling and we’re immediately in the future. Yesterday’s future. Everything’s clicks and clacks and yellowing walls, just as James Cameron left it when he turned off the lights. What they’ve done is turn what could be an embarrassing anachronism — haha, look at what those quaint twentieth-century fools thought today would look like — into a believable path that, with a nudge and a push, technology might have otherwise taken. Certainly, the bulky CRTs and Vectrex video games aren’t better than the technology of even ten years ago IRL… but they’re cheaper, exactly the sort of thing a fledgling colony would use to save money, and one gets the sense that the predilection for tactile tools and fuzzy screens is the result of æsthetics cycling back to where they were a hundred years ago, not everyone collectively forgetting how to make a liquid-crystal display.

Two sci-fi pet peeves of mine are nicely resolved, too. In the role of the astronomer-aggravating “““asteroid field””” we instead have the ring of an icy planet; the ship’s artificial gravity system is no mere cost-saving cop-out, but a structual Jenga block in the film’s action scenes, which mine the flip between 0 and 1 g for all it’s worth. Objectively speaking, Alien: Romulus just wouldn’t work on a hard sci-fi rotating spaceship, which is a rare thing!

Seven films into a franchise, it would be easy to bog oneself down in continuity and lock out any viewers who haven’t melted into their couch for a twelve-hour marathon. (This is the predicament which Marvel films have found themselves in as of late.) Equally, it would be easy to go too far in the quest to “breathe new life”™ into the world and leave us wondering why they put the Alien name on it at all. Romulus finds a sensible middle path. Its connection with the Alien brand is chiefly a matter of economy. We know, for example, that xenomorphs are bad, that they have acid blood, and that they get you boypreggers. We know Weyland-Yutani is an unscrupulous corporation in the business of space colonisation that wants to use xenomorph DNA for its own gain. We know that androids are made of milk for some reason. And so Mr Álvarez needn’t waste any time explaining that to us. Equally, nobody ever says the name “Ellen Ripley”. There’s no mention of the ancient progenitors of mankind or whatever those prequel films were about. Our story is set in the world of Alien, not the wiki.* (Please ignore that Asterisk of Doom. I’m sure it’s fine.)

*The Asterisk of Doom, or, the dead CG elephant in the room

This was an exceedingly minor thing to my overall enjoyment and i didn’t want to give it more space than it deserved, so i’m shunting it down here where noöne will see it. So. That, uh… that Ian Holm deepfake, huh?

There has always been spirited debate over the ethical quandaries of reviving old actors with effects, even before the current wave of machine learning — Crispin Glover sued Universal for flipping his character upside down in Back to the Future: Part II, remember! I actually don’t mind it, particularly when the character themself, like Ian Holm’s Ash/Rook, is meant to be artificial. (And as before, the same way we already know xenomorphs are bad news, we already know Mr Holm’s face won’t belong to someone with our crew’s best interests at heart.)

My annoyance is strictly technical. To understand the problem, let’s flash back fourteen years to Tron: Legacy, the first blockbuster to bring back an old face with the power of the computer:

© Disney, 2010. I’m using this clip for the purpose of criticism, as is my right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Bastids.

Here Joseph Kosinski’s legasequel flashes back to the original film’s time period, so faces the task of bringing back Jeff Bridges as he looked in 1982. It starts with just his voice. Perfect: faces and bodies change drastically in one’s life, but at worst, a voice will get a little huskier.

Then, as we pan into his son’s room, we see him first from the back, then a side profile, in the dark. Again, perfect. Hiding shoddy CGI in the dark has been a go-to in the filmmaker’s bag of tricks since Spielberg did it in Jurassic Park. This is going great. We have a believable fake Jeff Bridges. We’re hitting our audience right in the nostalgia zone, which, as we all know, is the most profitable zone of the body. And then… oh. Ohhh no. Ohhh no no no.

Mr Bridges’s doppelganger turns around directly into the bright light and opens his mouth. Every weakness in early-tens computer graphics comes out at once. The plastic skin. The dead eyes. The mouth that never moves the same way as the rest of the face. This is not Jeff Bridges. This is a changeling who has stolen his name and skydived into the uncanny valley. The illusion is shattered, because the filmmakers couldn’t help themselves from giving the game away.

I bring this example up because Alien: Romulus has the exact opposite problem. The crew, exploring a dank, dark ship, finds Rook face down on the messy ground, having barely survived a close encounter of the third kind. They plug him in, and… a heretofore unknown bright light turns to shine directly onto his face, on which not a jot of blood or waste is to be found. (It’s harder to deepfake someone if there’s muck in the facial area, you understand.) This is everything you’re not meant to do, and though technology has advanced tremendously in the fourteen years since Rubbery Bridges Syndrome, a cluster of neurons in the back of your head knows that something is deeply wrong. There is no light in his eyes. I kept looking at his eyebrows, wondering if the problem was there, but no. Every bit of his face looks perfect — but all put together in motion… one shudders at the sight.

But the further the film goes on, the smarter it gets. After our scavengers leave the lab where they found him, they interact with him chiefly through fuzzy CRT screens, smoothing out the imperfections. Unable to move, assorted gunk and alien goo piles up on his increasingly ravaged face, and when we do properly cut back to him, he’s shot in a side profile with chiaroscuro alarm lights. I kept thinking: why the fuck are you only doing this now‽ You don’t put the bad effects first, for Gods’ sakes!

Anyway, the rubbery robot face didn’t actually bother me that much — we’ve come to the point where we’re closer to the top of the uncanny valley than the bottom. I just needed some time to explain.

Particularly i’d like to single out the cast, none of whom i had heard of before barring a passing recollection of the name Cailee Spaeny, but all of whom do great jobs. Mr Álvarez has aged down the cast from the series’ usual monster fodder, not burnt-out truckers but wide-eyed twentysomething pirates looking to steal some cryo pods to blast off after a better life. (Outside the lead two they’re pretty thin, but hey, it’s a monster movie.) Our lead is the orphaned Rain Carradine, a serviceable Sigourneyalike played by Ms Spaeny, who reluctantly goes with the scavengers after she finds out she’s been assigned another six years on a black-skied mining colony… and because they require the services of her android guardian Andy (heh), the only one who can interface with the systems on the derelict space station they have their eyes on. David Jonsson, who plays Andy, would deserve an “and introducing” had he not been in Rye Lane just last year, but this alone already proves he’s going on to do even greater things. He’s given the task, without spoilers, of playing what amounts to two different (but similar!) characters in the same body, and shows off his naturalistic chops in every little micro-movement.

A certain scene with his character early on will be etched in my brain forever. It’s the big reveal of the Alien™, facehuggers jumping out from every corner in a room flooded by molten ice and red lights… and he stands there, rebooting, the same pose he was two minutes ago, his arms wide, as if nothing happens. Two seconds later, he takes total command of the situation, going from timid to Terminator in five seconds flat. If anything from this film is passed into the annals of pop culture (other than the Asterisk) it’ll either be that scene or the insane body-horror third act that i daren’t even mention for fear of ruining the experience. (Annihilation would be proud.)

I’ll be straight with you: it’s not as good as Alien. It’s not as good as Aliens. But nothing ever will be. Don’t go in with sky-high expectations — go in for a rollicking sci-fi-action-horror, xenomorph or no xenomorph, and you’ll have a great time.

Stuff i watched recently, August ’24

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A montage of the undermentioned works
  • First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin — Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens — but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isn’t necessarily the scariest thing. 6/10.
  • Took a trip to the cinema to see Longlegs (2024), starring the greatest living actor himself, Nic Cage. I say “starring”; he’s not in it so much, as it’s more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plot’s a bit thin, falling apart with a whimper in the third act, but the style and execution more than makes up for it. There are so many looming shots of doors and windows just at the edge of frame, snippets of interspersed terror, ominous rumbling soundscapes… pretty good! 7/10.
  • Green Room (2015) is a solid little low-budget thriller where a punk band get trapped in a nazi bar. Not much to say other than 6/10.
  • Watched Schindler’s List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (“I could have got more…”) I would like to apologise for calling John Williams a hack. I was not familiar with your game, sir. 10/10, but it feels wrong to give it a numbered score in the first place.
  • In Bruges (2008)! The online hype for this is ravenous and i’m not quite sure it lives up, but i was suitably entertained. Colin Farrell has very kind eyes. 6½/10.
  • The Olympics were as uplifting as always. A Discord friend of mine put it best: “The Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human race”. For a few glorious weeks, it doesn’t matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesn’t matter that there are wars raging across the old world. All that matters is that the most fit people on the planet have come to show what the human body can really do when pushed to its limits.
  • After years of putting it off, i finally got around to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), all 3½ hours of it. It’s hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, it’s on track for an easy 9.
  • I’ve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and “The Chimes of Midnight” might be among the best things to come out of Doctor Who. Very dark. Very weird. It builds up this offputting atmosphere perfectly, Paul McGann and India Fisher making you wish they’d gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.

Stuff i watched recently, Junely edition

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A montage of the undermentioned films

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Hyped up to me as one of the best horror films in history, i’m convinced it’s actually an incredible comedy. There is so much Gremlins energy oozing out of this whole film; every scene, you can just imagine George Romero sitting back and going “…can i, like, put that in a movie?” and then putting that in a movie. A zombie gets pied in the face. 8/10.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road is not the greatest film ever made, but it feels like the greatest film ever made while you’re watching it. I’ve never seen a film edited like this: a two-hour-long sugar rush where every shot is overcranked till it breaks and nothing ever stops moving. 9/10, with one point added solely because of the guy in the post-apocalyptic convoy whose job it is to play the guitar.

La La Land (2016)

It’s fine. Ryan Gosling’s great as always, but something about this failed to grab me in the way it clearly has so many other people. 5/10.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Stepdad’s pick, in honour of Donald Sutherland’s death. Great stuff, with a fascinating eerie soundscape, creepily good practical effects, and, hang on, is that Jeff Goldblum? 7/10.

Doctor Who: “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”/“Empire of Death” (2024)

Well, that sure was a Russell T. Davies Doctor Who finale, wasn’t it? Part one’s always great, and then, as always, he can’t write an ending for the life of him.

Now the season’s over, it’s clear that it needed more room to breathe. Eight episodes of forty minutes just isn’t enough for a show to do both monster-of-the-week and a longer arc; with two episodes taken up by the finale, two Doctor-lite episodes, and one where she’s unconscious for half of it, we’ve barely gotten to know the relationship between Ruby and the Doctor, which is a shame, because what we do get is brilliant! They play off each other so well, and i wish we could have seen more of them together.

The Bikeriders (2024)

Seen on a whim. A nice little drama about a motorbike club, starring Elvis and Jodie Comer, who’s doing a… fascinating… Midwestern-type accent. 6/10.

Roadgames (1980)

“It’s like Rear Window, but on a lorry.” This scrappy Australian flick delivers just what it says on the tin, with an early turn by Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitchhiker who gets picked up in the second half. 6/10.

🎵️ Brat (2024)

I’m out of touch with music these days, but listening to Charli XCX’s pulse-pounding new hyperpop record, i can’t help but think this is what pop music must sound like in the next universe over. I was sleep-deprived after staying up for election night and that definitely helped the vibe… 8/10.

Stuff i watched recently, Maypril edition

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A montage of the undermentioned films

  • Tombstone (1993). I have this pathological aversion to westerns, so i wasn’t expecting much — but once i turned off the part of me that was waiting for Richard Pryor to show up i realised that this the “’em” in “they just don’t make ’em like they used ta”: just a solid, well-made flick, regardless of my thoughts on the genre! I cried manly man tears at the end. 7/10.

  • The Thirteenth Floor, everyone’s fourth favourite film about a simulated world from 1999. I found it surprisingly interesting whenever it didn’t remind me too much of The Matrix, and a bit pathetic whenever it did. (Don’t try to do action, simulated world movie from 1999. You’ll never measure up.) 6/10.

    As a bonus, since nobody cares about this movie, you can just watch it on Youtube if you want.

  • Little Shop of Horors (1986). My pick for family movie night. Utterly charming from leaf to toe — the best example since Gremlins 2 of a film where you can see the craft that went into making every frame. Incredible effects, wonderful music, magnetic comedic performances from the whole cast… 10/10!

  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the impromptu double feature to the above. My brain has been completely frazzled by watching this. I went from loving it to hating it to complete bafflement to examining it like a scientist would a new species of frog. This film may very well have invented homosexuality. Defies numerical rating/10.

  • Late Night with the Devil (2023). Always nice to see David Dastmalchian, even if it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before — 6/10.

  • The Fall Guy (2024). Ryan Gosling’s a brilliant comedic actor, but him and some great setpieces struggle to save this film from a shoddy script and baffling editing choices. The jokes aren’t funny, the dialogue scenes linger for far too long, half the stuff from the trailer is gone from the movie… the whole thing desperately needs a trimming down to a tight ninety minutes. 4/10.

  • Eurovision 2024. Bullet-pointed, as per tradition:
    • I went in totally blind this year, having missed the semi-finals while building a new PC. Oops!
    • Sweden appear to have trapped the Backstreet Boys in the Matrix.
    • There is no country named the Netherlands and never has been. Doesn’t exist. Not real. We begin bombing in five minutes.
    • Big fan of Spain’s bizarre campy cougar energy, even if the audience and juries weren’t!
    • Estonia are frankly embarrassing.
    • Completely maxed out my scorecard for Ireland, who have sent in Xanthe-bait of the highest order. Yes… hahaha… yes!!!
    • Greece’s song is the most annoying thing since Crazy Frog and it baffles me how highly it scored.
    • I think the UK is just cursed at this point. We send a legitimate star with the world’s gayest performance (admittedly more in the “getting sucked off in a dingy bathroom” way than the “campy drag queen” way) and not a single point from the audience?
    • God bless Finland. I usually hate it when acts try deliberately to be funny but i died laughing at a pantsless man in a censored Windows 95 T-shirt emerging from an egg while pyrotechnics go off.
    • Switzerland have taken Sam Ryder’s mantle as this year’s designated golden retriever… a great performance from someone who’s clearly happy beyond words to be there. A deserving winner if there ever was one.
    • Croatia’s catchy pirate dance is great but i cannot forgive that abominable stage name. I don’t care how many records you sell; there is no excuse to call yourself Baby Lasagna. Go back to the drawing board. Now.

  • T2 Trainspotting (2017). Mama’s pick for family movie night. I wasn’t so hot on the idea going in… and then it was, to my surprise, pretty great! It uses the idea of the legacy sequel to its advantage — it’s a film about nostalgia, the good and bad of it all. It really does feel like you’re catching up with these characters twenty years later, all wondering where their lives have gone. Some beautiful shots, too — a film from 2017 that bothered hiring a gaffer?? What a concept! 8/10.

  • 127 Hours (2010), continuing the Danny Boyle theme. Probably the best film a film about a guy whose hand is stuck next to a rock could ever be, it convinced me of the occasional merit of a good biopic over a documentary — this would not and could not work if you only had access to the original crummy camera footage and talking-head interviews. Also perhaps the only movie in history to contain an inflatable Scooby-Doo jumpscare. I was going to give it an 8, but then they played Sigur RĂłs in the triumphant ending scene, so sod it, it’s a 9/10.

  • Chris Chibnall is dead and Doctor Who is alive! I thought Ncuti Gatwa was playing the role too young at first, but the season proper has me totally convinced. His Doctor, the first Doctor to Fuck™, has this infectious energy and zest for life that’s totally new to the character, and a great rapoport with his companion — even when the new series is bad, it’s unhinged in a fun way, rather than the forgettable doldrums of the Chibnall era.

Stuff i watched recently, i forgor edition

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A montage of the undermentioned works

  • Aniara (2018). I actually watched this one back in February, but forgot to mention it at the time — a Swedish hard(ish) sci-fi tragedy, where a colony ship on its way to Mars gets knocked off course with no fuel left to turn back. This is unrelentingly bleak, sometimes to the point where my brain would shut off and stopped caring, but there’s a lot to like.

    I love the idea of the Mima as a character/narrative device/whatever: a living AI that uses people’s memories to bring them back visions of Earth as it was, then gets depressed because too many people are using it and flooding it with memories of the apocalypse. Giving the holodeck a soul? Genius.

    Unfortunately it doesn’t so much end as it just fizzles out — i guess you could make a case that that’s on purpose, since that’s how these situations go in the real world, but i found the whole dénouement deeply unsatisfying excepting the veeeery final shots (if you know, you know). 6/10.

  • Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Caught this one at the Tyneside, where it happened to be the next film on at the time i got in. This spoke to me not just because of the powerhouse performances from Sandra HĂźller, a dog named Messi (how did they get him to do that?), and the fifteen-year-old(!!!) Milo Machado-Graner, who i wish nothing but the best in his future, but because it matches up with events in my life to a frankly concerning autobiographical extent. This would never, ever be in my wheelhouse were it not for random chance, but i teared up thrice over. 10/10, and i’m annoyed i couldn’t make it my best of last year.

    Ten seconds after watching… Wait, people online think she killed the husband? Are they fucking stupid? What? It’s obviously an accident. Did we watch the same film? Did the cut they saw not have all those carefully-inserted moments where people almost fall off of ledges or get hit by cars to hammer home that accidents can, in fact, just happen? What?? I — am i just projecting my own experiences here and not wanting to believe that my mum would kill someone? And then if they don’t think she killed the husband, they’re like, oh, well the husband deserved it, he was so awful in that argument, and like, no!!! The mum in the film near enough turns to the camera and says “the worst moments in someone’s life are unfairly cherry-picked as evidence for a trail and do not represent them as a whole”; again, did we watch the same bloody film? Are people stupid? Am i stupid? Is Justine Triet stupid? Am i dying?

  • Reservoir Dogs (1992). Mama’s pick for family movie night. Every time i watch a Tarantino film i really get the sense that he’s jacking off to how clever he is writing the script and this is that tendency at its worst. I get why it caught on, i really do, but this is absolutely insufferable from start to finish any time someone who’s not a cop is on screen. I do not care about your thoughts on Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”, Quentin! 3ž/10.

  • Monkey Man (2024). I have been hyped as shit for this ever since the first trailer came out. You can tell this is Sexiest Man Alive Dev Patel’s first time in the director’s chair (looooots of shaky-cam close-ups), but it’s damn stylish, and he shows a lot of promise. I can also see why Netflix did not want to touch this with a barge pole given that the plot is essentially “Dev Patel kills the BJP”. (It has some, ah, terroristic overtones that would be a little concerning if it were even 10% less shlocky.)

    That aside, i really enjoyed the film, and thought it got better as it went along — early on, i wasn’t super clear on the character motivations at play, but then the most me-bait thing since The Northman happens: Mr Patel’s character has a near-death-experience flashback and wakes up having been rescued by a hijra priest at a secret temple to Ardha­nari­shvara, a half-male, half-female incarnation of Shiva. Into! my! fucking! veins! 6½/10.

  • De dolende god (2018), as seen previously on The Garden. This is pretty much designed to appeal to me specifically, and yeah, it’s really good. It’s sweet, heartfelt, absolutely gorgeous, and of course, extremely European. It’s the odd one out in this list, being a comic book rather than a film — a medium i don’t have much experience with, so it’s hard to give it a numerical rating in the absence of comparisons… but let’s say 8/10.

Stuff i watched recently, Marchuary edition

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Letterboxd screenshot of a list of “movies about spice worlds”, with the two adaptations of “Dune” and “Spice World”
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation, season three. How did i let myself not get around to this earlier‽ This is soft sci-fi running at peak performance — a crew of hyper-competent and endearing1 people on a starship, sometimes just going on wacky space adventures, other times using science fiction as a lens through which to view our own world. 10/10. My three favourite episodes so far:
    1. “Tin Man”. Our character actor of the week, Harry Groener, plays a member of a mildly telepathic species who has a small problem: he has Space Autism, thus can’t turn said telepathy off. Man, does this episode get it. Every little thing about him is painfully relatable, the ending reduced me to tears, and i would like seven seasons of a buddy cop spinoff show starring him and Data right now, please and thank you.
    2. “The Survivors”. The third episode in the season, this is the one that made me sit up and go: God damn, that’s good television. Our character of the week, John Anderson, is the man of the house for an elderly couple who are the only ones left after the decimation of their planet. I can’t reveal anything more than that, but he sells it like noöne else could.
    3. “Deja Q”. This one’s just funny.
  • The Revenant (2015). Stepdad’s pick for family movie night. When the credits rolled, i thought it one of the best films i’d ever seen… but a few weeks on, i’m not so sure. The cinematography is epic, and Tom Hardy’s brilliant, no doubt, but i really feel more could have been mined from the premise. Leonardo DiCaprio’s half-Pawnee son in particular is the heart of the film, and the key role through which to interpret the conflict between the three warring groups, but he gets unceremoniously killed off halfway through, for no other reason than to bolster Mr Hardy’s villain cred and, i am left to infer, because the writers had no idea what to do with his character for the rest of the story. Mr DiCaprio himself goes completely overboard and could really take Lawrence Olivier’s advice to heart: “My dear boy, have you tried just acting?” 6½/10.
  • True Stories (1986). My pick for family movie night. This sweet and mild-mannered musical comedy is David Byrne’s only director credit, and that’s a damned shame. Most places call it a satire, and i can’t help but think they’re projecting. This is a genuine ode to small-town American life, whatever its pros and whatever its cons, and next time i’m sick, i know exactly what i’ll be putting on. 8/10.2
  • The Wicker Man (1973). Figured i’d watch a whimsical musical from the seventies in preparation for the next one on the list. Great vibes, great music, great ending, great showing from the legendary Christopher Lee3, but good heavens, is our main character ever an unsympathetic, bigoted prick. He’s stumbled on a conspiracy to murder, and he just won’t let go of the fact that he saw some NEKKID WIMMEN prancing around a henge! 7/10.
  • Wonka (2024). Mama’s pick for family movie night. This is a bad idea for a movie and they should not have made it. That’s fine, though: lots of good films make poor ideas on paper. This isn’t one of them. TimothĂŠe Chalamet is terrible! You never once buy him as anything other than TimothĂŠe Chalamet in a hat. He’s far too much of a goody two-shoes — not a droplet of the sinister nature of Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp’s4 WonkĂŚ is anywhere to be found. 3/10.
  • An American Werewolf in London (1981). Stepdad’s pick for family movie night. A bit of a throwaway, but there’s some good stuff in here, especially the titular American Werewolf (Who Went Hiking In The North But For Some Reason Is Taken To A Hospital) In London’s zombified friend. 6/10.
  • I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020). Shades of Tenet and Asteroid City here: it’s not Charlie Kaufman at his best, but it is Charlie Kaufman at his most, and he may have finally metatexted too close to the sun. Some really interesting stuff spread out over a turgidly paced first and second acts and a completely nonsensical third. I presume Jesse Plemons’s directions were just “pretend to be Philip Seymour Hoffman”. 5/10.
  • Dune Reloaded / Dune 2: Dune Harder / D2NE (2024). Seen in Imax. A titanic achievement that improves upon the often unfeeling first in every way. I take back everything i said about Wonka — Mr Chalamet is magnetic in a way that cements him as the zoomer generation’s first true movie star. Every gushing ten-star review you’ve heard is true. See it now on the biggest screen you can, with bass that shakes the leather in your seat, because you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t. 9/10, with that final point conditional on the inevitable third part hitting the mark.

Stuff i watched recently

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A still from “Poor Things”
Poor Things (2023)
  • Some Like It Hot (1959). My pick for family movie night. I’ve been accused of being a bit of a “miserabilist” (i’m sorry, but Synecdoche, New York bangs, and i have no regrets on making them watch it), so i thought i’d kick the year off with something a bit funny, a bit light-hearted, and a bit gay, and cor, was this an absolute classic! A comedy from the fifties about two men cross-dressing to infiltrate a women’s jazz band should be positively radioactive, but this misses all the potential pipelines of “well, you know, back in the day…” sewage and instead hits a gold-mine of timeless commentary on gender relations. I’m on Team Daphne — he’s so much more confident in being a woman than Josephine and does not deserve that terrible toad man. (And, having seen both this and Rear Window, i can finally weigh in: Grace Kelly is a thousand times prettier than Marilyn Monroe. Sorry.) An instant 10/10.
  • “NoĂśne knows who created skull trumpet (until now)”. Had to click this as soon as it appeared on my feed. There’s really something beautiful about the amateurism of the early web, how a woman with no formal training in graphic design or anything of the sort could make all these wonderful, whimsical images, and have one of them persist into the present day. Rest in peace, Cathy Jarboe, you beautiful diamond, you. 6½/10.
  • The Master (2012). Mama’s pick for family movie night. Philip Seymour Hoffman is incredible in this as an L. Ron Hubbard–style cult leader, to the extent that you often find yourself agreeing with him — i totally get why people join these sort of things now. Joaquin Phoenix, on the other hand… man, i hate to say it, but i might be falling off the Phoenix train? He’s always doing that same snivelling Joker thing, even when it’s totally inappropriate like in Napoleon, and it’s getting kind of old. Joaquin Phoenix Play A Character With Social Skills Challenge (Impossible). Paul Thomas Anderson directs the shit out of this. 6/10.
  • The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Rewatched with mama.1 Loved it even more than the first time, especially Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character. Just a terribly good-natured film that only sits in obscurity because of its obsequious title. It’s a shame Tim Robbins disappeared after this — i looked up his filmography and he seems to have been in bomb after bomb (Green Lantern, Mission to Mars…). 9/10.
  • Poor Things (2023, but didn’t come out until 2024 here). Watched at the Tyneside. I’d been eagerly awaiting this since i saw the bonkers trailer back in September, and it didn’t disappoint. There was a moment 15% of the way through where i thought i might walk out, but good lord, did it ever win me back over! Bella Scissorhands goes on a steampunk adventure across Europe filled with childlike whimsy, discovers herself, has lots of sex, and winds up Mark Ruffalo. Everyone is absolutely brilliant in this — special commendation to Willem Dafoe as a Scottish mad scientist. Already the strong front-runner for my favourite of the year. 9/10.

The 2023 Satyrs’ Forest Horny Awards™

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I would like to kick off the second annual Satyrs’ Forest Horny Awards™ with an epigraph from myself, at the end of 2021, predicting what lay ahead. I wrote, and i quote:

Avatar 2 will bomb and possibly kill James Cameron’s career. Really: who on earth is actually excited by the idea of an Avatar sequel? Someone? Anyone?

Hahahaha oops!!!

The Laurel Wreath Award for Annual Achievement in Film

And the award goes to… Avatar 2: The Way of Water!
It came out in December and i watched it in January of 2023 — i’m counting it.

Look. Look. I’m not happy about this either. But he got me. That fucking James Cameron boomed me. I’ve never even seen the first one!

Everything about Avatar: The Way of Water puts our decade-long glut of superhero movies to shame. The visuals, thirteen years in the making, are indistinguishable from reality. (You will believe the sexy blue cat people are real, and you will rewatch it three times in Imax and still never figure out how they composited the scrawny human kid in.) Every tiny anthropological detail envelops you in the world of Pandora, meticulously constructed by the new god-king of worldbuilding. But most of all, it’s sincere. There are no tiresome quips of ”well, that just happened”. The characters never make fun of how silly this all is. It just lets itself be itself.

Some might shunt the film’s story and characters to the back seat, and in many ways, that’s fair: nobody goes to see an Avatar movie to find out if Jake and Neytiri get a divorce. But that’s just the James Cameron style, man! He paints with a broad brush, and because of that, his stories connect with everyone from Chicago to Chittagong. Noöne ever complained about Titanic just being Romeo and Juliet on a boat, after all.

So, much as it might bug the poser in me to heap praise upon the fourth-biggest film in history, congratulations to the best film of the year: the one with the smurfs.

The Zoetrope Award for Classic Cinema

And the award goes to… Synecdoche, New York!

I have too many thoughts about Synecdoche, New York and i’ve never been able to organise them all into anything coherent, so i’ve set a timer for fifteen minutes and i’ll just stop when i stop. This is going to be a mess.

So, first of all, this film is only two hours long. I say “only” because it feels like four when you’re watching it. This takes place over, god, what, thirty or forty years? And you feel time slipping away just as Caden does.

Oh, uh, Caden Cotard is our main character, a hypochondriac playwright with ambitions of dizzying scale, played masterfully by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman. I’m not sure he’s meant to be a real person; rather, just as his fictional play (the size of the actual city of New York) balloons to its own world with its own Caden and its own play, he is just the creation of the unseen Ellen1, one world up, somewhere in between him and Charlie Kaufman.

There’s a moment halfway through that might be the best single second in a movie ever. Caden goes to Berlin to find his long-lost daughter Olive working as a prostitute — and as he enters the brothel, the door creaks behind him… sounding just like a baby’s cry.

I put off watching this movie forever because i knew it was bloody depressing, and indeed, i spent the last half barely containing a film of salt water behind my eyes. Two main candidates for best scene (spoilers!) — Sammy (the stalker who Caden hires to play himself)’s heart breaking, and the very end, where everything fades to grey.

Jon Brion’s score is incredible, by the way.

That shot, when Caden finds out his dad died, and Sammy’s shadow looms behind the curtains like the Grim Reaper? Brilliant.

The one piece of the puzzle i still can’t figure out is what’s up with Maria. She’s this corrupting influence on everyone Caden loves, but bears the name of the Virgin Mary — which makes it difficult to slot her in, as i tried, as the Devil to Ellen’s God. Hm.

It’s funny how Caden never really gets any sicker, but the world around him does. (There’s some gender identity stuff in there too, but honestly it all seems like the type of thing that could be attributed to other stuff to me. I don’t think Caden’s literally trans, he just happens to be the self-insert of a woman.)

That’s my fifteen minutes up. Synecdoche, New York! Greatest movie ever made.

The Pebbledash Dildo Award for Cinematic Disappointment

And the award goes to… The Congress!
Again, not a 2023 film, but i actually quite liked every 2023 film i watched, and i was annoyed enough by this one to put it on here instead.

It all started so innocently. It was a family movie night, and me and my mam were in the mood for something uplifting. I’d asked on Reddit for movies with the same manic exuberance as The Fifth Element or Elvis, where some strange new colourful thing is thrown at the screen a mile a minute and the viewer is ripped along for the ride.

Mad Max: Fury Road? Seen it. Mandy? Not in the mood for horror. But The Congress? Now that sounded interesting. The reviews were coy, but all praised the psychedelic, mind-bending world crafted by director Ari Folman.

Count us in, i suppose. And so began my journey into hell.

To get the “coveted” Pebbledash Dildo, you don’t just have to be bad. It is, after all, an award for disappointment. You must have a kernel of a great idea within you, one that is so simple to make something good out of, and fuck it all up anyway. That kernel can be found in a single brilliant scene, a diamond within this pile of filmic zirconia.

A live-action Robin Wright stands in the centre of a sphere of cameras blaring at her

The premise of The Congress is more relevant now than ever, in this age of digital doubles, deepfakes, and AI actors. Robin Wright plays herself, who reluctantly decides to scan herself into digital form, so the studio can use her likeness forevermore without her having to break a sweat. As she stands among the blaring lights of the scanner, her agent recounts to her the story of how they first met, bringing tears to her eyes. It’s a genuinely touching moment, and a springboard off of which so many ideas could dive, a trunk from which so many stories might branch.

Then it all goes to pot, and thirty years later, everyone is permanently on drugs, and so the film switches to oh god what the fuck is that get it off get it off get it off my fucking screen

So Robin Wright, now in a world of terrifying Newgrounds Betty Boop clones, attends the titular congress, where the CEO of the subtly named Miramount does a Hitler rally for his new drug. Then she meets generic Prince Charming man, the very person who scanned her in to the system — an interesting idea that they do absolutely nothing with — and they have ugly cartoon sex, she gets locked in a freezer for 300 years, and she goes in a balloon to find her terminally ill son… or… something?

I have never seen a film fumble the ball this badly, and be such an assault on the senses to boot. You won, Ari. Enjoy the money; i hope it makes you happy. Dear lord, what a sad little life, Ari. You’ve ruined my night completely.

Miscellaneous awards

  • The Golden Lyre Award for Excellence in New Music: Edinburgh-based Young Fathers’ euphoric senior album Heavy Heavy stole the show this year.
  • The Broken Link Award for Best Use of Hypertext: The best “miscellaneous thing” i saw online was Atlas Altera, an absolutely ludicrous worldbuilding project dedicated to the surgical maximalisation of global diversity.
  • The Fred Figglehorn Memorial Award for Online Video: Spanning the end of 2022 to the start of 2023, Geowizard’s “How not to travel America” series brightened up my day every time a new one appeared on my feed. People are just nice!
  • The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award for Good News, Everyone!: This one may be a wee bit controversial, but i have to go with the rollout of a new generation of obesity drugs (most famously semaglutide) — which not only finally work to combat obesity, but seem to dull all sorts of other harmful impulses too. One step closer to true freedom of form?

Movie review: Goncharov 2 (Gonchathon day 37)

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The internet was lit ablaze last year with the rediscovery of Martin Scorcese’s obscure masterpiece Goncharov, and it’s easy to see why. Accessible yet complex, of its time and yet progressive, it was ripe for a critical reëvaluation.

What people don’t often hear about is its sequel — one that Marvel’s biggest fanboy didn’t even know existed. The rights having fallen into the lap of the bloated corpse of Cannon Entertainment, they dumped it straight to video in 1989, leaving it to be forgotten.… until now!!!

Goncharov 2: The Quest for Gonch (sold in the USSR as The Quest For God) is the biggest piece of shit since the fat one i laid in the McDonald’s deep fryer last weekend.1 The Gonch himself is no longer played by Robert DeNiro — clearly too good for this shit — but an up and coming Danny DeVito, wearing an unconvincing latex mask which sits somewhere in between Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky and that one I Think You Could Leave skit.

Personally, I think this was one of Devito’s better roles. Casting Devito to replace Deniro was an odd choice, but that’s what happens when the Farrelly Brothers direct a mafia film.

Yes, this was the Farrelly Brother’s first picture. They tried taking a more serious film for their first work, but it falls flat on its face in many places. I found the scene where the Gonch huffs thirteen cans of glue to be quite amusing for all the wrong reasons. Devito put his heart—

I neither know nor care who you are but please stop defending The Quest for Gonch™. The Goncharov Cinematic Universe does not need this sort of slander, and neither does this blog!

Listen, there is TONS of potential for the Goncharov Cinematic Universe to expand from this film. It’s not the best film, sure it’s… well… 

…..

…well, it is definetly2 a film.

Well if you’re going to get technical, it’s not a film! It’s a video! I’d say it was shot on a potato, but that’s an insult to potatoes — when you compare it to the beautiful composition of Gonch 1™’s ending clock shot, this was shot on a yam.

Ok, sure, the picture quality wasn’t the best, but I’d blame that on the film’s rushed development. It was first approved by Scorceses in the late 1980s as a fallback in case he was killed by a conservative lynch mob during the production of The Last Temptation of Christ as a fallback.

You have no understanding of the complex lore behind /The Quest for Go(nch|d)/, you absolute fucking nitwit. You fool. You Fucking Nimrod.

The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, and Concharov II was released in 1989—

Martin Scorcese had no involvement in this. This was that fucker Matteo Bunchofnumbers’ idea. You know how i know that? Because if Martin Scorsese knew about the existence of Goncharov 2: The Quest for Gonch, he’d have not only killed himself, but figured out how to kill himself twice.

You’re half-right; he had no involvement in the film, but he did approve its creation solely to profit off of any VHS sales. I know this because a friend’s cousin’s nephew’s sister-in-law’s boss’ son’s great uncle knew a guy who worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and did an interview with Scorsese not long before the film’s release.

I guess killing yourself twice just results in you coming back to life. Look — regardless of Marty McFly or whatever his name is’ affiliation with it, can we focus on the end product? I mean, that scene where Kremlinova trips over her high heels in that blue dress, and then when it cuts to the next shot, it’s orange! Orange! Don’t you try and fucking pretend it’s some deep symbolism that predicted the rise of every movie poster in the 2000s, it’s just the director having a fucking washing sponge6 for a brain!

Actually, I thought it was one of the more insightful scenes of the film. The dress colors symbolize the slow and gradual fall of Russian society from great pride in an idealistic world to the growing realization that said utopian dreams will never fruition, and the subsequent moral collapse 127.192.34.27 therein.

They could’ve used a better dress for the scene, though. 73 West Boulevard, Ocala, Florida8

So then Goncharov gets aids. You know — given how tenderly G1 / Gonch Wick Chapter 1 handled its gay love scenes, there’s a real opportunity there! But since this is being directed by Thomas Ouiseau (no relation? I think?), he “catches aids from a government cactus”, starts coughing up blood, and immediately says “i have the aids” and dies. Yes! I’m writing over you! Fuck you!

My least favorite part of the film would be the scene where Goncharov punches an Albanian consort woman. It was not necessary to the plot at all, and just felt like a dated excuse to throw in a bar fight scene. Oh my god, are you seriously writing over me? Wha- how is this even possible?

Fine, you know what, here.

You’ve heard of Marsyas and Applo before, right?

You’re in Comic Sans now.

hhhNOOOOO

when the goncharov is the the gonch goncharov

You know what, hang on, this is my blog. I don’t have to put up with this crap. I can just tell you to leave. Or whatever.

That feels rude, actually, now i think of it.

I was never invited, so telling me to leave simply doesn’t work in the first place. Algorian logic. Pretty deep stuff interdimensional. Don’t think a normie like you would understand.

Look, can we just agree on a rating out of 10 and then go? The people need to know if G2ÂŽ is worth the purchase!

…

0.85/10.

I think you’re being too nice with that 0.85. I mean, what is this? IGN?

Thrembo/10. Too many overly long sex scenes.

That’s not even a real number. Not since the incident.

Anyway — i give Goncharov 2: The Quest for God (God never shows up, incidentally, unless you count the Kandinsky painting in the beach scene) an (eiπ+1)/10.

I revise my earlier rating. Rational numbers are better for ratings.

I give the film a -b±√(b²-4ac) 2a/10. Has the potential for greatly expanding the Goncharov universe, but its attempts at being both a psychological thriller and a slapstick humor film wrapped into a mafia film are simply too confusing for most viewers.

Thankfully, the first Goncharov11 film on VHS was also the last. And it’s stayed that way ever since. (We don’t talk about the Blockbuster trilogy.12) Good night.

Movie review: Vanilla Sky

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Title of movie: Vanilla Sky

Year of release: 2001

Starring: Tom Cruise

Director: “Cameron Crowe” (possibly Tom Cruise in a latex mask)

Plot: Rich prick gets in a car accident, has some nasty dreams, and then Mr Exposition shows up in the great glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the last 10 minutes to explain everything

Director’s taste in music: Same as mine; you can tell because this film has like fifteen pointless needle dropsa

Does it contain a Tom Cruise Triathlon™?b No, although he does do a Tom Cruise Run™ at least once

Does it at least have good ideas? It has the germs of things that might be called ideas, but none that haven’t been done better before

Overall review:

WHEN YOU BUY ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND ON ON WISH DOT COM

My first love

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A shuttle and a destroyed spacecraft framed in shadow against an ice-white planet

When i was eleven, my dad told me to come downstairs. (I was on holiday at the time, you see, on my semiannual Divorce Custody TripÂŽ back to the fatherland, where i could gorge myself on as many sweets and spit out as many cuss words as i wanted.) He had something to show me on his home cinema setup.

Normally it would be some documentary about watchmaking or nuclear waste storage or any number of things that took his fleeting fancy. Neither of us were much for fiction, and my young self especially wasn’t much of a cinephile. I don’t think my taste in movies had updated much since i watched Finding Nemo on a loop at age three.

Two and a half hours later, there i was, on his lily-white fake-leather sofa, my jaw agape, needing a lie down to take it all in. That was the day i met my first favourite film: Interstellar.

Dust storm

Christopher Nolan has a reputation for mind-bending bombast, but his directing is actually quite plain when you get down to it. His palette of colours would be more at home in a hardware store than an art department.a He has little time for the fancy camera trickery so beloved by his fellow mass-market auteurs like Spielberg and Zemeckis. He shoots his pictures as they are, not as a painter might like them to be.

It works to his detriment as often as in his favour. The Dark Knight trilogy’s dedication to surgically removing every ounce of colour and whimsy from its inherently campy source sucks it dry of life and fun. (Whenever Heath Ledger isn’t on screen, all the other characters should be asking, “where’s the Joker?”) But in the intervening years, it seems that Mr Nolan figured out how to use his un-style to his advantage.

On Earth, he shoots everything like, well, a Christopher Nolan film — a look that perfectly suits such a drab, dying world of omnipresent dust storms and weltering crops. When the plot shoots past the stratosphere and into the stars, he anchors his fantastic alien worlds and black holes of tantalising beauty against that same pedestrian style; devoid of his peers’ tricks and flourishes, you get the sense that if his gargantuan star-eaters and tome-tiled tesseracts were real, this is exactly what they would look like.

Matthew McConaughey crying

Much has been made of Interstellar’s Achilles’ heel: lurve. I'd like to offer a lukewarm defence. Many take Anne Hathaway’s speech about love as a force “transcending dimensions of time and space” as exposition, seeing her character, Amelia Brand, as a simple mouthpiece for the Messrs Nolan’s hamfisted platitudes. I would call this a severely mistaken interpretation.

Dr Brand’s lines come at the lowest point in her life. She has spent years — decades, from Earth’s view — floating alone in space; now, the crew have to decide how to use their one remaining shot to save all mankind. She isn’t making any profound statements or logical arguments. She is desperately trying to explain to the two men beside her why she thinks, right or wrong, that they should take the risk and visit her former lover’s last known location rather than the closer world the other two prefer. It’s clunky and melodramatic, but that’s the point: she’s grasping at straws, willing to do anything to see her love again. Her speech gives balance against her comrades’ assumption that cold, hard logic is all that matters, throwing gut feeling and emotion out the airlock.

When Cooper falls into that black hole and finds himself wall to wall with a myriad versions of his daughter, it isn’t some literal fundamental force of “love” that brings him there. It is his acceptance of Dr Brand’s romanticism over Mann’s enlightenment. Cold calculations have brought him nought but ruin, forcing him to watch his daughter grow up in front of his eyes and nearly killing both him and the whole human race; so, he lays down his mask, dives into what science tells him is certain doom, and lets the man who wept at those 20 years of messages take control.

I’m not sure that it all comes together in the end. Matthew McConaughey is a fine performer, but the role of Cooper deserves someone who can give it the gravitas (heh) and sensitivity his trauma deserves — not just screaming “Murph!!!” over and over. Mr Nolan’s script is utilitarian as ever; misunderstood as it may be, Dr Brand’s tangent fits into the rest of the film about as well as a cat fits into a baseball glove.

That slack-jawed night on the sofa would begin a new tradition. Every time i shuttle back and forth between England and Holland, i queue up Hans Zimmer’s score on my earbuds, and try to time it juuuuust right, such that the second the jet takes off, “Mountains” comes to its peak or “No Time for Caution”’s organs begin to blare. There’s a lot of flicks i like better these days — Interstellar would probably barely scrape the top ten — but there’ll always be a warm place in my heart for my first love.

A cool wormhole