7 stars

dir: Rose Glass

2024

It’s..a lot.

This director’s previous film, Saint Maud was a whole hell of a lot as well, but that was a queasy, intimate, horrific character study about a very troubled young woman (brilliantly played by Morfydd Clark who went from that to playing a ‘young’ Galadriel in The Rings of Power). This is…what this is.

It’s set in the 1980s? It has the trappings, the energy, the aggression of flicks that I can’t even think of, but it’s filtered through a sensibility that is completely unlike whatever flicks we might think of from the era?

I am phrasing all of my statements as questions, because I’m unsure of a lot except for my reactions to the flick. I understand my more visceral reactions to the flick, but I’m not entirely across my intellectual reactions to much of what ensues, or many of the themes that crop up.

And there are some elements, like a bonkers scene of Ed Harris eating a giant beetle, that I have no idea what to do with, at all.

This isn’t a cool crime caper, though it has the trappings of such. This isn’t a Tarantino-esque flick with witty dialogue, obscure facts no-one asked for and eruptions of apocalyptic violence. But this is also an overtly sexual, queer forward flick that disdains the often quoted “male gaze” to replace it with something special, but somehow no less vicious.

This is not a flick intended for mass audiences, maybe, but it’s also swinging for the fences in a wild manner that seems like it could be trying to cover almost everything possible and every genre imaginable.

If there was something cinema / the ‘culture’ was obsessed with in the 80s, it was aerobic fitness, with the accompanying gear, and musclebound hulks like Arnie and Stallone ruling the cinematic roost. This flick imposes the same conceptual aesthetic, but it’s in the service of its two main characters / heroines / villains?

dir: John Ridley

2024

There was already a film a few years ago called Shirley.

That was about a different Shirley. In that flick, an absolute queen called Elizabeth Moss played legendary miserable author Shirley Jackson, in a complicated biopic with manipulative twists and turns.

This Shirley is played by an absolute queen of the movie screen, being Regina King, playing a pretty interesting woman who strove for political power, called Shirley Chisholm, in a simplistic biopic with no twists and a couple of turns.

It’s a very strong performance, and yet it’s a flick that suffers from a collective desire to avoid some level of embarrassment.

Here’s what I mean: A few years ago, there was a mini-series called Mrs America. It starred Cate Blanchett as I guess the main character, being the both venomous and poisonous Phyllis Schlafly, which focussed on her opposition to the Equal Rights Act that they tried to pass in the States in the 70s. In the series there’s a whole rogues gallery of great actresses playing a collection of famous feminists like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Uzo Aduba played Shirley Chisholm.

I’d heard of most of the women that were represented in the show, and was glad to learn about impressive people I didn’t know anything about. But when there was an episode devoted to Shirley, and the fact she tried to run as the Democratic candidate for President in the 1970s, I was like “how the fuck did I not know about this? Seems like someone should have mentioned it in the vast raft of American material I’ve consumed over the last 40 years or so.”

Maybe I had heard or read about it, and maybe I didn’t take any notice. That’s shameful, isn’t it? The first African-American woman to win a seat in Congress in the 1960s, and who wanted to run for President against Nixon in 1972? Apart from the fact that she should have won (I’m not saying she could have, I’m just saying if we lived in the just universe that the religious claim to believe in, it would have happened), how is that not a story better known?

dirs: Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams

2023

I love that the Adams family exists. I’m not talking about the other one, with two Ds in their name, those ones who are creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and ooky.

I mean the real life family of John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu, who make movies together, on the virtual smell of a digital oily rag ie. with no money.

I don’t know how they fund their movies, I don’t know how they paid to rent a Model T Ford or to pay crew, extras etc in anything other than hugs and sandwiches. And I kinda wish someone would hand them a ridiculous budget so they could blow it all on trips to the Riviera and inflatable furniture (is that what rich people buy?)

But I can’t see that big budgets would compel them in inventive and creative ways to create the kinds of flicks they make. I saw and loved Hellbender from a couple of years ago, and while I didn’t get into this flick quite as much, it still has a similar anarchic energy of a movie that doesn’t follow a well-trodden path.

That being said, I couldn’t help but be reminded of probably the only Rob Zombie flick I’ve ever liked, being The Devil’s Rejects. That’s to my shame, not the Adams’.

Set during the Great Depression, Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) travel around with carnie folk and pretty much just murder people. Maggie I think does most of the murdering, Eve takes photos, and Seven looks away because he can’t stand the sight of blood, having seen way too much during the Great War to ever be a normal person again.

And that’s pretty much it. Visually the flick has a whole bunch of scenes of startling quality and composition, just because they’re so different from shots you see in any other flick, perhaps deliberately. Compared to their earlier flick this is much gorier, much more macabre. But there’s also a fairly menacing element to it, and I put it down to both the awkward phrasing of much of the dialogue, deliberately striving to make it sound like words that could have dropped from the mouths of John Steinbeck’s characters, and the almost otherworldly, almost Amish sensibility of working in such a wood paneled period setting.

dir: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

2024

Maybe this flick doesn’t need to exist, but I super duper enjoyed it anyway.

Anyone who has watched Stranger Things on Netflix has already seen hundreds of hours of Millie Bobby Brown playing a kickass character who suffers a whole hell of a lot. This flick Damsel has her playing a character who doesn’t have superpowers, but does suffer a whole hell of a lot before she maybe triumphs, or dies in shame.

Either way it requires you to be on board right from the start. And it’s a pretty slow start, let me tell you.

When the movie starts, it’s set in a fantasy / medieval land possibly called Generica which could just as easily be the beginning of Frozen or Brave or any other kind of place where women have long cumbersome dresses and braided hair, and the men are either chubby old guys with long hair and beards, or young ponces. It’s all doublets and curtsying and thees and thous with weirdly dodgy British accents. Even in fantasy realms people have to sound like posh plumy jerks at all times. Even Angela Bassett.

Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is a princess from an impoverished realm. She is essentially sold by her father into marriage, to somewhere on an island. Long build up, lots of mystery and ambiguity, and then the other shoe drops (when she is thrown into a pit).

The island kingdom tricks other realms into sending their daughters, they marry the women in a sham marriage, somehow share their blood with them, and then throw them in a pit in order to satisfy the beast that lives below.

It’s a common story, as in, it’s familiar to anyone who’s ever heard or read any stories, ever. The theme of sacrificing people to monsters, gods, volcanoes etc is as old as humanity, I think, considering the place it holds in almost all old cultures’ mythologies. The theme of sacrificing young women for the “good” of society, well, it’s the very definition of patriarchy: women viewed as commodity, and valued in ways that takes none of their personhood or autonomy into account.

And arranged marriages? Well, it’s all about sacrifice, isn’t it?