by ·Comments Off on Björk: Cornucopia (2025, Isold Uggadottir)

A ton of cool stuff here, absurd costumes and masks, a large variety of setups: scrims and screens, organics meet computer graphics – every song is the most bananas shit you’ve ever seen. Not my favorite arrangements of Bjork songs (woodwinds and beats) but I melted at “Hidden Place” a cappella with a whole school of choir kids. Icelandic film director capturing stage production by the great Lucrecia Martel.

Other arguably non-movies watched lately: Aparna Nancherla Hopeful Potato, and Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One Backflip, both excellent.

by ·Comments Off on The Northman (2022, Robert Eggers)

Opens unpromisingly despite Ethan Hawke… actors laboriously declaiming portentous dialogue in fake accents. It does start to get trippy, with more CG than expected (incl. cartoon-ass animals), and at the “years later” jump the tedious-to-thrilling ratio is 50/50. Subwoofer cinema, a sonically unpleasant movie – I should’ve played the Harriet Tubman album again. Alexander Skarsgård (Florence Pugh’s fake bf in Little Drummer Girl) swears revenge, loses his way, meets Björk, swears revenge again, kills Fjölnir’s son and refuses to say where he’s hidden the heart. Lotta people get chopped up with swords. Three good performances in this: Björk > Skarsgård > Dafoe

Willow Maclay argues there are four good performances:

Nicole Kidman also gives one of her best performances in some time as an incestual madwoman, driven berserk by the times, and dripping with salacious fury in her scene of revelation. This contrasts with her elegant work as a Queen and mother, and suggests that a proper feminine presentation can be hiding a cannibalistic fury behind doors.

Michael Sicinski:

Virtually every landscape is CGI’ed to the point of absurdity. The Northman strives for the painterly but more closely resembles those 4K test images they show on the TVs at Costco.