Category Archives: Reviews

Fast movie reviews

Mistress America

An intriguing movie covering a coming-of-age sort of thing in New York City. Tracy (Lola Kirke) is an aspiring would-be writer having trouble fitting in at Barnard, so on her mother’s advice she contacts her soon to be step-sister Brooke (Greta Girwig). The movie doesn’t have the sort of predictability you would come to expect, the characters are likable, their relationships and dialogues interesting. Brooke wants to open up a restaurant which is also a hipster paradise, a place where you can hang around and talk, and of course order food, be able to trade etc. She goes a long way but needs some capital to get things started. She’s a smart and independent woman, but still realistically clueless, as we all are when we’re in our thirties. She goes to her ex to get him to invest in the new business, Tracy accompanies her because she really believes in Brooke and is sort of in love with her. There is no one to drive her but Tracy’s ex-crush and his new girlfriend. A mishmash of characters that somehow work together nicely.

The whole movie in the end is sort of depressing, but hey, that’s life. Greta Girwig is a really beautiful and talented actress, I’ll have to keep an eye out for this one. Definitely recommended.

Passengers

Yes, there’s a female character in the movie too.
An aesthetically pleasing sci-fi flick with a minimal cast and beautiful scenery. The starship Avalon is travelling at 0.5c towards a distant colony. The entire crew and its 5000 passengers are in deep stasis of some kind since the voyage to Homestead II takes about 120 years. Our protagonist Jim’s (Chris Pratt) stasis pod starts a reanimation sequence due to a very specific and unlikely event. The passengers are suppose to be reanimated some 4 months before arriving to the distant colony, but Jim is awaken some 88 years before the voyage ends.

There’s a lot of details in the movie, it’s a part of a new trend where the sci-fi film is realistic as possible. No FTL, no wormholing, no fancy SF shit, a ship like this is maybe possible within 10 generations, maybe. Jim sends a message back to home, but since they’re 30 years out already, it’d take approximately 17 years for the message to reach Earth and then it would have to catch up to the Avalon when they reply, so the earliest reply is in 55 years. Great, a lifetime spent in the bowels of a ship, but it’s not all so grim, he has an android bartender named Arthur (Michael Sheen) to keep him company, and has plenty of food. The movie has a weird melancholy attached to it, how everyone has a different reason for choosing such a strange life as by the time you reach the other world all your family and friends will have died. It’s the ultimate fresh start. Not going to spoil the movie further, surprisingly recommendable for a mainstream movie.

Kiss of the Damned

Now this movie is a particularly interesting take on the vampire genre by a director called Xen Cassavetes. An exquisitely fresh combination of erotic scenes, common vampire themes along with a narrative to explain and explore how an underground vampire society could co-exist with humans. Humans are still preyed upon for food, but is generally not done as the vampires are afraid their cover would be blown. The vampires drink animal blood and substitutes, live in lavish and remote houses where maids reside during the day to keep an eye out for their employers while they sleep and of course do housework. The maid in the movie has a rare genetic blood disorder which makes her completely unattractive to the vampires and that makes her very sought after.

The story begins where Paolo (the always lovable Milo Ventimigla) meets Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume), a hot vampire. They of course, fall in love and very soon proceed to have hot human-vampire sex. She’s shy at first because she has to reveal her true form and insists Paolo chains her to her bed so she can’t hurt him. She turns and the shackles are barely able to hold her sexy demonic form on the bed. This is a major turn on for Paolo who promptly unchains her and they have sex. Oh, she technically kills him in the process but it’s all right since he’s now a vampire. His senses are heightened, can’t stand the daylight and is always battling the urge to suck a human dry.

They’re a match made in heaven, all they have to do is fuck all night and be philosophical since Djuna has a very wealthy and influential vampire upper society friend who lets them use her fabulous house somewhere in the country. They got no jobs, no bills, very convenient for a love story. Their seemingly peaceful (un)life is disrupted when Djuna’s disturbed and of course hot vampire sister arrives, Mimi (Roxane Mesquida). The sisters are pretty ancient, hundreds of years or so and are always fighting. Mimi seems to resent the fact that Djuna turned a human as they swore they’d never do something like that. Mimi is a disruptive element to anyone that has anything to do with her and causes chaos for everyone. Her story line has a great ending, not gonna spoil that one for you.

In essence, a totally unheard of movie which I personally kind of liked. Definitely recommended if you don’t only favor movies with an ensemble cast or a strong and popular lead. Decent exploration of the vampire theme, actually pretty decent acting in a way, and a surprising amount of eroticism in it.

The Lobster – a science fiction movie or not?

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, […]

Not sure what genre The Lobster belongs to, I’d say dystopian present, and no SF to be found. The movie is a wonderful blend of surreal exterior and interior shots, great camera work and angles, and an intrusive musical score that conveys the uneasy atmosphere throughout the movie.

The non spoiler synopsis:

Colin Farrell is David with a silly mustache, a man that is sent off to a hotel that is dedicated for pairing people up. If they fail to do so within the first 45 days, they are turned into an animal of their choosing. The only way to leave the hotel is either fall in love with someone, or simply by running away. Extending your stay in human form without falling in love is only possible by hunting down the people that have run away from the hotel and brought back to be turned into an animal.

Spoilers ahoy — The story

The story starts with David entering the hotel and having his expectations explained by a woman with a very creepy bureaucratic voice. He is accompanied by a dog that he reveals is his brother that “didn’t make it”, at the very same hotel. The movie continues to show the day to day lives of the hotel guests. Society expects them to fall in love with a person, doesn’t matter which gender. They need to prove their love is real, lest they suffer the consequences. The hotel staff is very strict and rigid. It is in societies’ best interest to pair people off, and the hotel is there for that purpose only. Masturbation is strictly prohibited on the hotel grounds. The female staff is arousing the male guests at regular intervals by grinding their crotch to achieve erection and then leaving them with a nasty case of blue balls and no masturbation as an option.

This is what I call cruel and unusual punishment
This is what I call cruel and unusual punishment

David sees a chance of pairing off with a woman that is notorious at the premises, as having the most days lined up, over 150 of them, as you get a day extension for each person you bring back to the hotel. The woman is completely heartless, stripped away of any emotions, but still even she has some interest in pairing and leaving the hotel. Some couples are given children to help them bond, and David in one instance adapts to the psychopath and becomes completely heartless, like kicking the little girl in the leg front of their guardians, because her new father has a limp so they’re more alike.

He completely changes for this person, but is still rattled when she outright kills his brother, the dog. She comes into the room and says she killed him by kicking him over and over and that he might still be alive. The frame then shows her leg which is dripping blood from kicking the poor dog incessantly. David simply shrugs it off and saying that it doesn’t matter. He goes to brush his teeth and sees the dog – his brother, lying in a pool of blood and with an open wound on the abdomen. David starts brushing his teeth, but breaks down in tears. The woman catches him weeping and is dragging him to the hotel manager, because he was lying, he DOES have feelings for something or someone, and they aren’t a match.

David eventually flees the hotel, and joins the loners, the people that choose to be alone and don’t want to be with someone. They also have very strict rules and punishments for those that become involved, for example is someone is caught kissing, they slice open the lips of both people and force them to kiss. At this point the movie sort of loses its momentum. There are a couple of scenes from the city, where everyone is openly and annoyingly together. People are stopped for random checks of their marriage certificates to prove they’re not alone and are checked for mud to make sure they’re not runaway loners around the city.

Why not an SF movie?

Everyone says that the movie is sci-fi, because of the dystopian future and the animal transformations. At no point in the movie is the transformation shown or adequately explained. Rumors are flying around the hotel of how it is done, but no one knows for sure. The movie is satire and criticism of our society, how little we sometimes ask questions. All the characters in the movie don’t really see that the hotel staff is abusive and their whole exploit is completely insane. I think the transformations are some sort of metaphor, the people are probably killed. The movie goes as far as to never really prove that the animals were human, and that their essence is somehow captured within the animal. One of the characters says that his mother was left by his father and that she was transformed into a wolf and sent off to a zoo. He went to the zoo as often as possible and gave raw meat to the wolves, as that is what wolves normally eat. He fell into the wolf pit one day and all of the wolves, save for two, came attacking him because and he claimed that one of the two wolves was his mother, he had no idea which. The animals obviously do not have any human left in them, or they’re completely unable to show it and if so, one has to wonder were they ever human at all, or are all the people from the hotel and the picked up loners are simply murdered and this wild story is being fed to them – again a metaphor of the modern world and our lulled existence within it.

Should you see it?

Yes, you should. The movie, despite the several shortcomings is visually great, has solid dialogue and narration. The movie in the end doesn’t explain how and why is society like this. I thought that it might be aliens or something but the movie really leaves it to your imagination. The Lobster isn’t mainstream and is probably unwatchable for a lot of people. I usually rate movies by how much I think about them in the days after watching them, this one has stuck for a while. Bad movies are forgotten as soon as they’re watched, good ones stick a while.