Drama

dir: Edward Berger

2024

Who knew a movie about voting for the next pope could be such a thrilling and exciting rollercoaster ride of surprise and mystery?

Well, almost no-one, and this flick is certainly not really like that, even if the music, the editing and the camerawork tries hard to convince you that this is the most exciting thing you’ve watched since the early Bourne spy action movies.

It is a thriller if you think that it matters who is at the head of the oldest corporation / crime family in world history, being the Catholic Church. Few organisations have done more to loot and pillage the world, or to bring more harm to more people than the Catholic Church, yes, it’s well known, but I’m not going to belabour the point. I am instead going to show heroic restraint and not make endless references to all the children that were sacrificed for the pleasure of these awful men, and the grand scheme imposed to protect the perpetrators and shield the Church’s money from its many criminal actions and atrocities.

Instead, I’m just going to talk about this movie like it’s a movie, based on a book, with a beginning, a middle and a shocking end, if by “shocking” I mean something that barely raised an eyebrow for me.

The only change from the Robert Harris novel, as far as I can recall, is not the alleged shock ending, but the name and ethnicity of the main character, and the ethnicity of the mysterious Cardinal Benitez, being changed from Filipino to Mexican, which makes next to no difference for my money. But other people’s money is different from mine. More volatile. More likely to start croaking “woke!” at the drop of a pope’s hat.

Our main character / detective here is Dean Lawrence, and that’s not his first name, but his title, as the Dean of the College of Cardinals. Upon finding out about the beloved pope’s death, he hurries back to the Vatican, not only to shed tears, but to manage the election of the new pope.

(دانه‌ی انجیر معابد)
(Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma'ābed)
dir: Mohammad Rasoulof

2024

This is a lot of a movie, which means there’s going to probably be a lot of review.

Boo. Sounds like homework.

This director’s previous movie was the heartbreaking meditation on what the death penalty in Iran under its current leadership does to the living, more so than the dead. Called There is No Evil, in English at least, it argued in its title alone that there was no need to blame the Devil or any supernatural source for the evil that humans perpetrate, especially within a totalitarian regime.

That flick, made surreptitiously away from governmental scrutiny, earned its director a prison sentence and a beating. He has since been sentenced to more years in jail, like every decent Iranian director before him, so he had to escape the country on foot.

I don’t know how he made this flick. I worry for the actors in it, because this regime has killed people for far less. This film crosses a line that Iranian directors never cross: directly criticising the regime, openly advocating for those who protest against its strictures and draconian, inhuman ways, and openly showing footage that would get most Iranians jailed or worse for sharing.

None of it is allegorical any more, or spoken of in the abstract. It leant a quality to Iranian cinema that people appreciated, especially international film critics, having to slyly dance around its subject matter in order to keep the authorities happy. So everyday life and its complications would transpire with the state / morality police / Revolutionary Guards way, way in the background, in lyrical and poetic ways, for our amusement, but with this pleading note behind it all, begging us to support their aspiration towards freedom.

That was then. This is now.

This film includes footage from the protests that came after complete fucking idiot scumbags murdered a young woman for not wearing a hijab. But they were only doing their jobs. Her name was Mahsa Zhina Amini, and she was a young Kurdish – Iranian woman, and the authorities still deny that she was beaten to death (maintaining an official fiction that she might have died because of a random stroke), and yet when people protested en masse, the authorities starting killing people in the streets, beating and torturing them in cells, or officially executing them because they had the temerity to say that Mahsa was killed for not wearing a hijab.

Really, she was killed for being a woman.

(გადასვლა)

dir: Levan Akin

2024

At the moment, at this very moment, I don’t want to think about, talk about, watch or write about Americans. I am so thoroughly fucking sick of them. I don’t want to have to think about them or their appalling politics, at least for the next, I dunno, four years or so. The way they pervade everything, and force us to have to watch them, like a dog licking its anus and maintaining eye contact with us the whole while, against our will or our own priorities; it is really is quite terrible, honestly.

So instead of thinking or talking about them, let us look at the lives, the troubles, the daily lived realities of a bunch of Georgians and at least one Turkish woman. No, not appalling people from that southern state of the Americas: I mean the former Soviet republic and now currently Russian occupied / vassal state with its own wacky language and alphabet. I mean look at how cool it looks “საქართველო”.
Now that’s wacky. Solely from what I’ve seen in this movie, which I think is my first exposure to movies from this country, I’m guessing it’s a pretty impoverished place. One person’s squalor is another person’s luxury, I guess, but it’s hard to see these lives as occurring in anything other than precarious circumstances.

But that’s how it looks to me. To people from there or around there maybe these people are living the high life, I dunno. When the film starts at some coastal town, there are a bunch of adults in a shack mostly yelling at each other. The main guy is yelling at his wife, who is trying to breastfeed, his younger brother is just waking up, who he seems to routinely violently attack, and he probably also starts yelling at some random cloud floating by. Making matters worse it looks like it’s a one room shack, at best two. Constructed maybe out of cigarette packets, or other shack-like materials.

And then a woman walks past, clearly not from around there but also looking for something or someone.

dir: Annie Baker

2024

The hint, to me, was how loud the sounds of nature are, at all times, around the Janet of the film’s title and her daughter, throughout the film. No matter where they are, the sounds of insects and birds, and other creatures, permeate every scene.

There is some music in the flick, but it’s all diegetic (as in, playing within the movie, not as a soundtrack that the characters aren’t hearing).

It’s one long summer, an endless summer, in someone’s life. That someone is not the someone referred to in the title of the film, but maybe it is?

Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) calls her mother from summer camp, telling her she’s going to kill herself if she’s not picked up.

She’s about eleven years old, I think. By the time the mother comes to collect her, Lacy has changed her mind and wants to stay, but tis too late.

And thus ensues the depiction of their enmeshed, co-dependent relationship over the course of that summer. I don’t think it’s unintended, or a lot of a stretch, or too unfair to say that Lacy seems really fucking annoying.

I’m sure deep down she’s a good kid, who maybe grew up to be less of a pill. But at that age, she was a clingy pill who made her mother’s life hell, based on this flick. And maybe I’m assuming too much, but I get the feeling the character is probably an extreme, extrapolated version of herself that the writer / director remembers or imagines about herself. Maybe. In which case what she remembers, or artistically renders about her mother also has meaning for her, and hopefully us.