2022

dir: Richard Linklater

2022

What a movie. As in, how is this even a movie?

Nah, that’s unkind. This animated movie is, as far as I can guess, a version of Richard Linklater’s idealised childhood growing up in the burbs of Houston, Texas in what I like to call the button down Plastic Fantastic era during a time when America thought it could do no wrong, and the space race was going to mean everyone would be living on Venus by 1975 and everything would soon look like the Jetsons.

It was a childhood, based on this flick, typified by being safe, bland and pleasant. The main family as presented and animated here would not have been out of place on the tv itself, perhaps as the neighbours to the Brady Bunch or as the family down the road from the witch in Bewitched or the genie from I Dream of Jeannie. Is it a case of “that’s how it actually was back then?” versus “memory and television combine to transform all experiences into stuff that looks like it came out of a sitcom”?

It’s hard to say. I mean, it would be easy for often great, sometimes not so great director Richard Linklater to say, and he probably has in several interviews, but I hardly want to taint my reviews with actual knowledge from the people that would actually know why something is how it is in a movie they’ve made.

Instead I’ll take the far lazier but much more profitable path of just imagining people’s intentions and motivations, and run with that. That way I can be 400 per cent more opinionated.

This childhood that Stanley (voiced by Milo Coy as the actual boy, but with Jack Black doing the constant narration of a grown up Stanley looking back on his tedious childhood) has, I would guess, was a childhood that many white Americans had during that era, as long as they were of a certain socioeconomic status and background. Culturally, it’s the absence of culture that exemplifies this time and place – everything from where they live to how they live is all about that place as being a tabula rasa – a blank space which was filled in with shiny and new hopes and dreams. The family live in a new development where brand new houses go up in a place outside of Houston.

Who and what was there before these brand new houses?

(Pahanhautoja)

dir: Hanna Bergholm

2022

What a Freudian field day for the whole freaking family.

I can’t remember the last time I watched a Finnish film, but I can tell you two things: it was probably by Aki Kaurismaki, the only other Finnish director I can think of, and it was nothing like this. Certainly not as colourful.

This is flat out a horror flick, there’s no getting around it, and it’s a fairly brutal one. Don’t let gentle images of girls and eggs lull you into a false sense of security. It is pretty funny in parts, but I wouldn’t call this a dark comedy or anything like that. It’s way too bright, for one thing.

There is a Mother (Sophia Keikillä), who is an Instagram-influencer monster, a Father (Jani Volanen), a daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) and a son Matias (Oiva Ollila). The son is a boring carbon copy of the father, and the mother does everything in her power to make the daughter into her clone. Everything they do, every way their house looks, has to be Instagram-worthy.

When Tinja competes in gymnastics, there’s none of that “just go out there and have fun” bullshit, or “good job” this or “you tried your best” that. There’s only “win or I will disfigure you” type tough love without the love part.

This can have an effect on a young woman’s development. When a bird flies into the house during one of these White Woman Instagram moments, and punctures Mother’s fantasy, Tinja tries to gently catch the bird, but Mother is all “I’m here for the neck snappings, nothing else”.

This unleashes forces the Mother, the Father, the whole neighbourhood simply cannot understand, but at least it will help Tinja achieve some measure of self-realisation.

Struggling as she is to live up to her Mother’s strict requirements, Tinja gets the opportunity to look after a new life in the form of an egg, from the mortally wounded bird. She protects the egg. She cradles the egg. She puts into it all her rage, shame, anger, jealousy, even as she’s doing her best to nurture it and see it grow.

What hatches is a sight, a sight to behold. I don’t think there’s any CGI involved, it looks like practical, physical effects work. It’s impressive, and kinda sickening, too.

Tinja calls this inhuman bird / child hybrid Alli, after a lullaby, and the ways of feeding it are pretty gross. Alli does need regurgitated food, like all baby birds. But she also likes to feed on blood and emotions. She especially seems to like killing neighbourhood pets and anyone else that pisses Tinja off.

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.