8 stars

dir: Andrew Dominik

2022

Three hours of this. Three hours of mostly misery.

Blonde is the 2 hours and 47 minutes long fictionalised biopic based not on Marilyn Monroe’s actual life but on a book by Joyce Carol Oates. There is some crossover between the two (Marilyn’s actual life and the book), and then there’s the third filter through which Andrew Dominik wedges the story through his screenplay.

I don’t think anyone over the age of 40 or so will confuse this with actual Earth history. To younger people, who from what I hear don’t ever watch movies anyway, this might become the bible on a person they don’t know and don’t remember. But to the rest of us she’s still a well-known figure from the last century, up there with Gandhi, Hitler, Churchill, Michael Jackson and Big Bird from Sesame Street. An icon. Maybe the icon, or at least the blonde icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

To us, just to generalise massively, she was more famous as the icon than she was an actor or a person, as a reference more than for any performance. As an image, through countless famous images, of a certain idea of femininity or sexuality that had nothing to do with her as a person and everything to do with her as a product.

This flick tries to say a lot about the person, as opposed to the icon, to explain her deep sadness, to show us all the many reasons for her deep sadness, and to deliver it in a complicated, visually stunning, musically depressing, very long package that emphasises the psychological over the literal historical.

In other words, a highly stylised fictionalisation intended to reveal the “truth”.

Whatever. The film has a moody, melancholy score from usual suspects (for this director) Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and uses black and white stock, and every possible film aspect ratio that Dominik had access to, all for the purposes of replicating a ream of famous photos of her with the intention of fleshing her character out by elaborating on the world she lived in, that existed leading up to and following immediately after those iconic shots.

Sorry, I should have mentioned earlier, the main character in this flick isn’t Marilyn Monroe, it’s actually this lesser known girl called Norma Jeane Mortenson (Ana de Armas).

dir: Lena Dunham

2022

I don’t know who this exists for, or how it came to exist. It is an unusual thing.

The biggest surprise for me is that Lena Dunham directed this, and it’s actually pretty good. That’s not to minimise Dunham’s talent as a writer or a director: I think she’s quite accomplished at both. It’s just that when you think of a story set in England in the 13th century, you don’t immediately think of Brooklyn’s finest as being the best fit for the material.

Which would be (on my part) a weak and unjustifiable set of assumptions. If nothing else Dunham has made a career of working out through art (and in public) what it means to be a woman in this contemporary world, and as such I guess it’s not that strange that the coming-of-age of her young ladyship at a time when women had even less rights now than the average woman in a Southern American state is a story she has ideas about.

The surprise, if it is one, is that her ideas, feminist or otherwise, are good ones, and serve the story well.

It helps to have a solid performer in the lead role. This isn’t going to mean a lot to people who didn’t watch Game of Thrones, but anyway – that show had a lot of memorable performances from a whole bunch of people, but easily one of the greatest characters and most on point casting decisions was getting Bella Ramsey (with a name like that she already sounds like a GoT character) to play the Lady Lyanna Mormont, head of her house at only the age of 10.

The ”joke”, such as it was, was when people would speak to her, they thought they were talking to a child, but a few choice and pointed words from her would disabuse people of that notion forthwith. This absolute badass would shame men 40 years her senior that lacked even a tenth of her fierceness or her courage, and the way her character leaves this world at the Battle of Winterfell still has me in awe.

The character of Lady Catherine, or Birdy, as she prefers to be known, is not as fearsome, but is just as wilful and determined to get her way. Unfortunately for her, her character isn’t in an epic fantasy series, so she’s not in a world in which a powerful young woman can transcend the strictures of her society with a sharp sword and through sheer force of will.

She is, instead, the daughter of a minor noble, in the town of Stonebridge, and she is of marrying age, meaning she is 14.

dir: Zach Cregger

2022

You know, for a lot of this movie’s duration, I was kinda hooked. It’s a horror movie, so naturally there are some terrifying bits.

And then it all falls apart in the end. Which is okay. I can forgive that in many/most horror flicks because they’re notoriously difficult to end in a way which doesn’t either bamboozle the audience or leave it shrugging in a way that could imply the flick will be forgotten before the viewer has left the theatre.

Barbarian is tricky. You think it’s a flick about a certain kind of horror (turning up to an Airbnb you’ve booked correctly, but someone else is already staying there, which is like the most horrific thing I could possibly imagine), but then it digs two levels deeper into layers of hell you didn’t imagine were there, and will probably regret being told about.

If I could humbly suggest that this flick has maybe three distinct acts, the first act, which happens to be the one where we don’t know anything, is probably the best because it doesn’t hurry and it’s delightfully ambiguous.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) travels to Detroit, and has booked a stay at a house for the night because she has a job interview the next day. She arrives at night, struggles to get the key out of the lockbox, and then is shocked, shocked I say when the key’s not there. Calls to the help line are obviously ignored. And then she sees that someone is inside the place.

Keith (Bill Skarsgard) is in the place already, and wary as well, but tries to be gentlemanly and solicitous, and is well aware of how everything he says and does could look to someone. Tess is very tentative about coming in to sort everything out, and to figure out whether it’s genuinely a mistaken double booking, or whether something else that’s quite nefarious is going on.

The thing about Bill Skarsgard is, other than being the son of Swedish screen legend Stellan and brother to very famous other Skarsgard Alexander, is that while being a kinda handsome guy, his eyes bug out a bit, and one of them tends toward a slightly skewed direction, giving him, from certain angles, a very unsettling air.

It’s probably the key reason as to why they made him play the profoundly evil child-eating clown Pennywise in It Chapters 1 and 2. So here, in human form, it’s used to give him enough of a reason to keep the wary Tess wary, despite his polite and respectful patter.

Tess agrees that it’s probably not fair for either of them to have to find somewhere else to stay, and he helpfully points out that there’s some medical convention in town, and she’s unlikely to be able to find accommodation elsewhere. First red flag. He does everything to make her feel comfortable, and even insists that she take the bedroom, and washes the sheets and dries them. It’s just that it means, despite it being the middle of the night, she’s going to have to wait an hour and a half before she can crash out. Immense second red flag.

Then, after she uses the bathroom, he delivers an understandable but immensely awkward explanation of why he hasn’t opened a bottle of wine that sits on the table yet, so that she’d know that the bottle was sealed up to that moment and nothing’s been added to it, but that if she doesn’t want any wine he totally understands and maybe she wants a tea instead and…

dir: Jordan Peele

2022

Now, I’m just a simple, country movie commenter. I ain’t no fancy, big city film critic, with credentials or qualifications or justification for inflicting my film-related opinions on a largely unsuspecting, and, let’s be honest, entirely uninterested public.

But I knows what I likes, and I liked this here film by Jordan Peele called Nope.

Having said, or at least typed, all those words as a preface already, I’m not going to pretend that I get everything that was going on here, or all the references Peele tries to make, or how they all hang together, and whether it all makes sense as a movie. But what I will say is that whatever flick I thought I was going to watch, it turned out to be something completely different.

Nope contains multitudes of tropes within it, so many references not necessarily just to other films but to the history of the entertainment industry, that when I tell you it’s pretty much a monster movie, you’re not going to believe me. Even the title, Nope, refers to the dumb things people do across a multitude of genres that sees their characters bite the big one. In this flick, at those moments where a character is about to do something stupid, but then changes their mind because they realise how vulnerable to the monster it would make them, they just casually say “Nope”, and do something more sensible.

That’s refreshing, that is. Like a cool, refreshing drink after mowing the lawn in the hot spring sun. Why, yes, that is literally what I did – watched a movie, mowed the lawn before the rains set in, then wrote a review about that movie and about cutting the lawn with an electric lawn mower. I’m going to try to keep both parts relevant and interesting for you, the poor reader.

Of course it would work. What if you were a bunch of characters in a flick, and your main goal wasn’t just to survive, but to capture on film the existence of some kind of creature. But, and here is a tremendously big but that I cannot lie about, what if the mere presence of the creature caused all electrical equipment to stop working?

Hmm., now that’s a conundrum.

And again, what if, now stay with me, what if your family business was raising and training horses, and Hollywood no longer really wanted your horses, so your business wasn’t flourishing anymore?

You could blame a bit of racism: