8 stars

(Straume)

dir: Gints Zilbalodis

2024

When was the last time you watched an animated movie from Latvia? When was the last time you watched anything from Latvia? I watch films from anywhere, but I don’t think I’ve watched anything from Latvia, ever.

Then I wondered if maybe Latvia was a made up place, since it sounds awfully similar to Latveria, the made up country from which comic book villain Doctor Doom comes from, and is the king of. But no, it’s real, snuggled up as it is between Lithuania and Estonia, all three of which are former Soviet republics.

You know, one of those places Putin has, like Doctor Doom, vowed to re-conquer, just like Ukraine.

No. Latvia is a real place, and this is a real film, albeit an animated one, albeit an animated film from Latvia that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film a couple of weeks ago.

It probably helps that there were no subtitles. The movie is entirely dialogue free, which makes sense when I tell you that there are no humans in this flick. There are lots of animals, but they are of the lazy, non-talkative kind. They’re not voiced by celebrities, and they don’t have catchphrases, more’s the pity.

dir: Robert Eggers

2024

I… am scared of this film.

I’ve always found the Nosferatu version of the vampire story far scarier and far more off-putting than the sexy – sparkly – romantic versions. And, yeah, like most people of a certain age, I watched the original playing at a repertory cinema like the Astor or the old Valhalla, back in the day, and once with a live orchestra or band playing either the score or their own score for it. Might have been the Blue Grassy Knoll, if I recall.

It’s just the kind of thing we did back in the 1990s – early 2000s, if you were a film lover / film wanker.

I still find the image of Max Schreck as Count Orlok walking around in his stilted manner as the essence of cinematic horror. Fast hot vampires zipping around faster than the eye can see like The Flash I guess is scary conceptually, because it means you can’t outrun them, but there’s something viscerally horribly about some dread creature slowing coming towards you, as you cower in terror, knowing that you can’t get away.

That’s not to ignore the sexual aspect of these stories, but the Nosferatu version has the creature being a mostly dead being that brings with it pestilence and plague. There’s no threat / promise of eternal life – eternal sexiness, like with Anne Rice’s vampires: there’s just putrescent death wanting to consume everything that is alive.

And, yes, belabouring the point further (of not talking about the present film, and talking around all other sorts of nonsense), there is the Werner Herzog remake Nosferatu the Vampyre from the 1970s, which also had an actual monster playing the vampire, being Klaus Kinski, and I’ve seen that version too, and laughed a fair bit through it, though I think that was unintentional on Herzog’s part. That flick is not as well respected, though it deserves some credit, since you will I hope never see that many live rats in one place again as long as you live, and it uses some of Wagner’s Ring cycle music in superb ways as the plague sweeps across the city.

Last pre-digression – there’s also the superb film Shadow of the Vampire from 2000 that conspires to be a ‘making-of’ of the making of the original Nosferatu, but the sting in the tail is that the director, F.W. Murnau, played with the insanity that we used to admire in John Malkovich, actually found a monster to play Orlok onscreen, and happily lets him eat away at cast and crew in order to get the perfect shots he needs to make the classic that would be still be known a hundred years hence. Nothing says “Hollywood will chew you up and spit you out” more than a movie where none (except the studio executives) are safe.

dir: Anna Kendrick

2023

This is, admittedly, not the kind of flick that I usually like watching, and, lo and behold, I did not enjoy watching this flick. ‘True crime’ is not a genre I’m that interested in that much anymore, whether it’s in films or podcasts. Especially stuff about serial killers. Man, am I burned out on serial killers…

But there had to be something important for me to watch this and break my prohibition on reviewing stuff from America since their last election showed how truly unworthy of our continued attention they were, and how irredeemable there are as a people. Luckily for me this flick does my job for me: it argues that misogyny in general, and The Patriarchy as experienced in its sparkling American form allows serials killers to go on doing their despicable thing because so many men there don’t really see women as being human. And as such, when they get murdered by a complete stranger, eh, whatcha gonna do? It happens. Like shark attacks or lightning strikes, it just happens.

Though this is based on a true story, about a serial killer who killed heaps of women in the 1970s in the States, and about the fact that the jerk was so arrogant and self-assured that he once went on a show called The Dating Game, it’s really about something more complex, and more depressing. in the hands of the director Anna Kendrick, who also stars as Sheryl, the woman who wasn’t killed by this jerk, she has repurposed the story to magnify her point, arguing that the overall cultural mentality that allows such a monster to evade capture for so long isn’t that different from how Hollywood, or show business, treats women generally. The killer kills women who won’t be missed, at least in his estimation. Hollywood, casting agents, producers etc treat women like they’re livestock, grading their physical qualities in front of them, like they’re meat, and therefore utterly consumable and disposable, and so who will even miss them when they’re gone?

Sheryl has been struggling to get roles because she’s not blonde and not whatever flavour of feminine the casting agents want in the late 1970s. She has to listen to two ugly jerks as they talk about her body like there are parts of it they wish they could sell and others that they could replace. To her face. Right in front of her. Also, the eternal pressure to do nudity, which they insist on not because it’s required, whatever that means, in a specific scene, but just to make Sheryl feel worse about herself.

She has a neighbour who’s also an aspiring actor, and he respects none of her boundaries and, since he’s played by stand up Pete Holmes, we know he is a friendly and manipulative jerk. Where other brutish men bully and threaten women into having sex with them, others mope and guilt them, using women’s inherent politeness against them. There is a scene so gutting where Sheryl, so concerned with having deflated that jerk’s ego, essentially continues drinking with him and ends up sleeping with him despite not wanting to at all. At all.

dir: Jesse Eisenberg

2024

Oh the irony… I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on Jesse Eisenberg, that the title can have multiple meanings, and in fact clearly signposts, so people can’t blame him, how painful parts of this movie are.

And it’s not because it’s about a bunch of people who go on a tour through Poland that looks at the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis at the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin.

And they even do it voluntarily.

No, it’s about how two characters played by two jittery lunatics can be agitating and aggressively irritating just in very different ways. It’s a real showcase for the talents of two of the jitteriest jerks in this business we call show.

I mean Eisenberg has been playing minute variations on that theme for his whole career, but now Kieran Culkin, fairly famous for playing an absolute jerk failson in Succession as one of Logan Roy’s pathetic offspring, now gets to play a different type of jerk whose main difference is he has no money.

But he does run off at the mouth, with no filter or seeming knowledge of what he’s going to say next, constantly and continuously.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) depart from New York flying to Poland in order to go on a tour in honour of their grandma who survived the Holocaust. Benji is already at the airport. David is on his way to the airport, and feels compelled to leave Benji between 10 and 20 voicemail messages, despite the fact that it is two hours before their flight leaves, and we know that Benji is already there, and not listening to any of them.

To say that I was already so agitated by David’s agitation would be a classic example of my charming capacity for understatement. I was so anxious already within the first few minutes that I just wanted to start walking away from the screen, perhaps walking into the sea, never to return.

But, come on, I’m made of sterner stuff than that, surely. A lot of people put a lot of work in to make this flick, and regardless of my feelings, it deserves my attention and my time.

In theory.

So though my anxiety was at an all time high, or at least as high as the last time I watched something either with Eisenberg / Zuckerberg in it, or the last time I watched Succession, which usually used to leave me a nervous wreck anyway, I strapped myself in anyway to watch this flick about two cousins who used to be close but these days not so much.