Romance

dir: David Frayne

2025

You would think a movie titled Eternity would perhaps lean towards some kind of profound ideas about the human condition, about our lives and deaths and what they mean in the big cosmic picture, if anything. Or maybe you wouldn’t, because your expectations are reasonably low when it comes to expectations about movies produced for mass audiences.

I have to compliment the people who put together the trailer for this flick, because it is a singularly painful trailer that I would think would actively warn people against watching the flick. Nevertheless, I watched the flick anyway, despite the aggressive damage to my eyes and soul, because I’m just a trooper that way.

As trite and mawkish as these flicks can be about an afterlife, and a metaphysical architecture to the universe that actually looks after our immortal souls when we die, there are some great shows and movies that have tackled the concept. There’s the great Defending Your Life by Albert Brooks, What Dreams May Come, the many versions of Heaven Can Wait, and in terms of tv series there’s the hilarious and philosophically dense The Good Place, which I feel is like the main inspiration behind this flick, only further dumbed down for the masses, somehow.

There would have to be something supremely disappointing about regaining consciousness after dying and finding yourself trapped in a place that looks like a 1960s modernist Best Western hotel hosting the shittiest conference centre you’ve ever beheld. There’s countless other souls in the same boat as you, as these weird people with clipboards and matching air hostess-like uniforms shepherd you towards deciding upon an ‘eternity’ for all eternity, before you’ve even figured out what the hell is going on.

Were you Good, were you Bad: It doesn’t matter. All that matters is making an ill-informed decision, and sticking with it f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

To confuse things a bit more, these Eternities are called “worlds”, so you get to decide between Beach World, Mountain World, Food World, Satanist’s World, Gay World (no straights!), Smoker’s World (“Because cigarettes can’t kill you twice!!”), Studio 54 World which has all the cocaine, and, my personal favourite Man-Free World #443 (#444 will be opening soon!) obviously popular with women who put up with a little bit too much mansplaining and being told to smile over the course of their lives.

dir: Jay Roach

2025

I really wonder what Americans think British people are. Watching a film like this makes you think Americans think Brits are like these polite but profane aliens who don’t really physically exist in the same world as them, but they have those delightful accents, so what’s not to like?

Olivia Colman and Benedict Timothy Carlton “Cumbersomely Named” Cumberbatch are probably great actors who have been great in all sorts of things. They are, shall we say, less than great here. They are game, they’re trying, you can tell they’re trying, but this script, the stuff these Americans make them do in order to amuse other Americans…ugh. It’s ugly.

It’s ugly and unpleasant, and pretends constantly that it’s not, and they play terrible people, so I question how anyone thought this was going to work. I mean, I have no doubt people saw this flick, as in, might have even bought tickets and such, popcorn, the works, maybe on a date night out. Why didn’t they release it around Valentine’s Day, I’m sure some marketing genius is lamenting?

But, fucking hell. I know that the story is based on a book, and I know they made an earlier movie from it starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and I remember watching that movie, back in the day, when I was still a kid. A young, impressionable kid. I can’t lie I hated that fucking film too, but at least that had some good actors in it. Good American actors, that is.

The novelty was that these two people had starred in these moderately successful romantic action flicks, Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, in which Danny De Vito was also along for the ride, and then the thought was to have a flick where Turner and Douglas play a couple whose divorce gets messy and murderous. Ha ha, so funny, and De Vito can direct and play the third wheel!

I think what I really hate about these kinds of flicks, ones that pretend to be about the breakdown of a relationship or a marriage, is just how inherently dishonest they are. There’s nothing even vaguely hilarious about intimate partner violence, domestic violence, people trying to kill each other. It happens every day. Every week in Australia a woman is murdered by her partner or her former partner. That’s not to ignore the countless thousands of people who endure physical and emotional abuse, threats to murder, threats to suicide, every awful permutation possible, each and every day. Not exclusively women at the hands of men, but the vast majority being women on the receiving end.

(کیک محبوب من,
Keyk-e mahbub-e man)

dirs. Maryam Moghaddam & Behtash Sanaeeha

2024

I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I’m not even sure what my favourite cake would be, but I don’t think you’ll be surprised if I lead with the fact that this flick is probably, despite its title, not about cake or cakes in general.

It’s about contemporary life in Tehran under the regime, and how depressing it is, independent of how life for a widow or widower can be sad or lonely without enough to keep you occupied in between cakes. And it’s not just the matter of community expectations, or conservative cultural morays, or of the actual literal Morality Police who patrol the streets and kill women for allowing their hair to be visible.

Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) remembers the city before the revolution. She remembers how people partied, and danced, and sang. But that was so long ago. She also remembers when her husband was alive, which was also a long time ago, thirty years to be precise. Her children have grown up, and fled this totalitarian nightmare, and she is alone. Alone, bored, lonely, craving human contact and perhaps human touch. She has trouble sleeping so naturally stays up late into the night watching trashy romantic dramas, and then sleeps in until noon, most days.

She still has some friends (alive). All women, obviously, since friendship or contact with a non-relative male would probably get you arrested at the very least. And they are all widows too, who get together and nostalgise in between complaining about their physical ailments.

Being 70, her freedom is a little bit physically limited, but the bigger limitations are ever present, and invisible, except when characters choose to make themselves emblematic, and then those limitations become more literal. She hears conflict, when having visited a park, of a girl being harassed by the Morality Police, who are trying to drag her into a van because she’s not wearing her hijab properly. She fearlessly pushes back at one of the MoPos, telling him how dare he pick on innocent women for no good reason, and doesn’t he have a mother himself, how would she feel if she saw him brutalising women?

His retort is “ah, you must be one of these women that provokes the Morality Police and then get someone else to film it on their phones, and then post it to social media”, which must be a very standard response, and you’d have to think the perfect retort would be “We didn’t make you dumb goons kill Mahsa Jina Amini, you clods did that all on your lonesome”, and all that followed in the Woman Life Freedom protests that ensued.

It makes me, unfortunately, think of the old phrase “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, a process which started just after the revolution, and doesn’t seem like it’s ever likely to end under this despotic regime.

And it’s funny (it’s not funny at all) that now these directors, and the actors, are in danger of being jailed or worse for making this flick, accused of all sorts of nonsense by the regime, and of being tools of outside influence, in the pay of American masters etc.

It’s as if they constantly re-forget that no-one hates and seeks to destroy the Iranian people more so than the Iranian regime.

dir: Luca Guadagnino

2024

Well. That was… something.

I’m not entirely sure what. I feel like I’ve been tricked by a film again, but I can’t accuse it of a bait-and-switch, because the bait was “hot young tennis players in steamy love triangle”, which was never that appealing, and the “switch”, given the ending, is “absolutely nothing.”

My one point of interest in watching this is that Luca Guadagnino is making interesting films, sometimes with Tilda Swinton, sometimes, like this one, without. I think there’s an aspect of the film that REALLY interested or energised him greatly, which is the relationship between Patrick and Art (Josh O’Connor who is trying to be in everything currently, and Mike Faist), there’s an aspect that somewhat interests him, being the motivations and machinations of le femme athlétique Tashi (Zendaya).

And then there’s… I dunno, a lot of hollow nonsense to fill out the already lengthy running time. This is definitely one of those films that feels longer than what the clock tells you. Though having said that, I wasn’t really bored, but I wasn’t really enraptured either.

This flick tells a story about three people in a non-linear way, having something happen in the “present”, then thirteen years in the past, and then it jumps all over the place with the lynchpin being what’s happening at a low grade tournament in New Rochelle, New York, proudly sponsored by Phil’s Tyre Town. It will then jump randomly weeks before, hours before, days before, a decade again, and you think it’s building towards explanation or meaning, but you realise the revelations of the past don’t really amount to much.

I mean, there’s info we want to know, somewhat. Like, we might be curious as to how and why Tashi went from a world-class player to a coach living through her husband’s success, when she was so driven and fixated on success. We wonder why Patrick is pretty much homeless, despite that charming smile and those sticky-outy ears of his.