2022

dir: Marie Kreutzer

2022

I cannot tell you how little I care about the lives of aristocrats, any aristocrats.

Oh wait, I just did. I am no royalist, no defender of monarchies or privilege, let me tell you for free. My feelings towards the divinely anointed and all new fangled tech billionaires or old school robber barons are best summed up by the title of and lyrics to the Motörhead song Eat the Rich, which advocates for a very elegant solution to the eternal question of “how best do we dispense with this bullshit?”

So any and all of my appreciation for any flick should never be construed as an endorsement or support for any of these stratified lies of divine right or superiority-from-birth ideas.

There are, all the same, some great character studies in literature and film arising from depicting the lives of these awful people, make no mistake. Any character study of any historic person is only as powerful as the actor that depicts them, and the writer / director bringing them to life, all the same, whether they be princes or paupers or both.

I have never given much thought to the so-called Empress Sisi (Vicky Krieps) of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (RIP Sisi and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, rest in power), and this flick is unlikely to cause me to fall down a rabbit hole of finding out everything about her. But I did enjoy watching Corsage, because it’s a very well made film with a luminous central performance by an amazing actor.

Corsage in the context of this flick is not a reference to that strange bouquet or posy of flowers that teenaged American high schoolers are given as a token earning the right to engage in some unseemly and not always entirely consensual activities after The Prom. That is something I know about only through decades of exposure to American movies and television, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists anywhere else (and no I’m not talking about school formals etc).

Corsage here is a reference to the corset that we often watch Sisi being laced into. Of course, those of us who have been watching period piece / Regency bullshit for the last however many years automatically associate corsets as a physical manifestation of the oppression of women, of their enforced subservience throughout history and across society, of the general misogyny and specific chauvinism of patriarchy. Of how it grinds women down, making them smaller, making them lesser, until they disappear completely.

(헤어질 결심: Heeojil gyeolsim)

dir: Park Chan-wook

2022

I don’t know that Park Chan-wook is the best director out of South Korea, but he’s probably one of the most famous Korean directors outside of Korea, probably along with Bong Joon-ho (after he won his Oscar for Parasite, and for mocking all those people who can’t bring themselves to watch a subtitled film because of the pesky one-inch barrier at the bottom of the screen). After shaming half of the world to death, what has he done for me lately?

Nothing, which is why it’s up to Park Chan-wook to bring the noise. Brutalising audiences as he did with his so-called “Vengeance” trilogy, but then making a whole bunch of different kinds of films, he’s pretty much shown only that he has no interest in making the same movie endlessly. So one can’t readily pigeonhole his most recent flick easily either.

It's something of a “straight” detective mystery, but it operates on a different kind of level, in that you don’t feel like you’re watching an instalment in a detective character’s drama – you’re watching a weird and brutal drama that happens to involve a detective as one of the main characters.

The other main character happens to be the suspect in one, and then a bunch, of other murders. The detective, Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), can’t seem to get over the fact that an apparent suicide is a suicide, and cannot believe that the suspect, being the victim’s wife, Song Seo-rae, isn’t guilty.

It’s not because of the evidence, because everything, up to a point, looks exactly like it should if it was a suicide, or an accident. But the only suspect doesn’t act or speak like an innocent person. If anything she’s perpetually goading him into finding holes in her story. And the guy who died was a total piece of shit who was also a sadistic abuser.

There is something about her, something in the way she exists. She doesn’t seem to particularly miss the husband, nor does she mourn his loss or his absence. Nor does she seem to be offended at being accused of anything.

dir: Kyle Edward Ball

2022

What is this movie? What even is a movie, anyway?

If a person was to watch this movie, they could honestly say “welp, I watched something, not entirely sure what it was, but I watched it.” It is generally safe to say that most people would never have seen anything like it before, and hopefully never again. Not voluntarily, I don’t think. Not without a gun pointed at your head.

Skinamarink is some kind of horror movie, but not the kind of horror movie where anything happens or your capacity for absorbing scares or gore is rewarded. The only criterion for watching this flick is patience. The only way to get through the whole flick is even more patience.

The first time I tried to watch this flick, it knocked me the fuck out within 10 minutes. The film is about 100 minutes long. It is mostly long takes of indistinct walls or ceilings, floors or toys, occasionally a tv screen. It is filmed on what looks like degraded video tape, but there is also a filter which makes it also look like degraded film stock (with fake dust and scratches), giving you the feeling that you’re watching something that is a copy of a copy of a copy, and maybe you shouldn’t be watching, or even be able to watch it at all.

There are rarely any people onscreen, and when they are, you never see them clearly. You often see feet, or legs, but they’re not usually doing much of anything. There are no creatures, or monsters, or hideous creatures like Pauline Hansons / Marjorie Taylor Greenes ever appearing on screen to terrorise anyone, least of all the children.

The children… there is a boy and a girl, I’m sure they have names but it hardly matters. These kids are in a house in the middle of the night, and their parents don’t seem to be around. There is a television playing old cartoons from so long ago that they’re out of copyright, and so it costs nothing to have them. If there is any sound or music in the flick that isn’t the kids whispering, it’s from these cartoons. There is no soundtrack or score, so all sounds and music are in the scenes themselves (diegetic sound versus non-diegetic sound).

dir: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

2022

This was surprisingly good. I say “surprisingly”, because I expect every new version of a “classic” to be “shit”.

The original book is a dark classic, the Disney flick from the 40s is a classic. There have been so many other versions made as well, most terrible. Even Steven Spielberg made a version, and called it AI, which was one of the worst of the worst.

I haven’t seen it yet, but in the same year that this came out on Netflix, Disney made another version directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Tom fucking Hanks as Geppetto.

I have not found a good review of that flick, cannot bring myself to watch it. I am tired of Hanks as Everyone’s Dad, fucking sick of it. After enduring him in the Elvis biopic, I said “never again”. Is there no one else who can play old man roles in America anymore? How are Wilfred Brimley, or Charles Durning, or Ossie Davis? All dead you say…

This, thankfully, was put together by del Toro, and co-directed by someone who actually knows how to direct stop motion animated movies. del Toro is probably Mexico’s most famous director (outside of Mexico, I guess), who has been wowing and irritating international audiences for decades with his visionary works. I love him in theory, but am often frustrated with the final result of his “masterpieces”.

There is no issue here. He obviously loves the original story, and beautifully incorporated it into actual Italian history of the first half of the last century in a really unique and affecting way, without downplaying the fantastical and emotional elements that made the original story so captivating.

Where the original story is all about essentially a naughty pseudo-kid learning to obey his elders and such, through having adventures that are meant to teach cautionary messages to kids, this story is more about fathers and sons, and how they disappoint each other. Oh and the rise of fascism. But mostly about how fathers and sons may both say terrible things to each other, but they don’t really mean them, and if they just love each other, everything will mostly be okay until someone dies.