by ·Comments Off on Bugonia (2025, Yorgos Lanthimos)

So soon after Train Dreams, here’s another new movie people are attacking for botching its adaptation of an original work (in this case the Korean movie Save The Green Planet!) but which I watched in blissful ignorance of the original work and greatly enjoyed. Theoretically not a fun movie, as a conspiracy obsessive and his dim relative kidnap and torment a businesswoman into confessing that she’s a space alien, but I cackled more than once, then floated away happily after she escapes to her ship and kills all the humans.

Stone and Plemons and his cousin Aidan Delbis are the whole show, though Stavros Halkias shows up as a perv cop just long enough to get murdered by bees. Not until after the kidnapping and head-shaving does Jesse let us know that he thinks she’s an alien. More of his craziness is gradually unveiled (he’s a loner whose mom told him about mind control, he tells Stone “everybody denies it at first” revealing she’s not his first victim, she runs the major company where he works a menial job) and he seems to be making up space alien stuff as he goes along, so all his stories being true was the only decent twist the movie could have. I guess he and the cousin didn’t have to have their heads blown off after Jesse is tricked into murdering his comatose mom, and Stone escaping from an ambulance and running back to the crime scene seemed like padding, but the payoff is worth it.

Jesse flashes his tascam, pretty sweet:

Not all life! Just the humans:

by ·Comments Off on Kinds of Kindness (2024, Yorgos Lanthimos)

1. Plemons is married to Hong, living according to strict instructions from Dafoe, until they have a disagreement and Plemons is cut loose, extremely pathetic on his own. Qualley is part of the organization, also under Dafoe, and Stone appears to be the new Plemons, until Jesse figures out how to get back in his employer’s good graces. The music is all doom-piano or moaning choir. Goes nicely with Yorgos’s project of deconstructing human behavior.

2. Plemons is a cop, Athie his partner, his wife Emma has been missing and arrives home acting strange, so he tells people that she’s not his real wife, then finds ways to prove it (cw: finger trauma). Good commitment to casting quirky people all down the line in these.

3. Plemons and Stone in another Dafoe cult, this time one whose members only use water from a tank that Hong has cried in. Qualley is twins, Alwyn a rapist husband, and in an episode three exclusive, Hunter Schafer of Cuckoo is an attempted resurrectionist.

by ·Comments Off on Poor Things (2023, Yorgos Lanthimos)

It’s not shocking that I, a habitual enjoyer of Yorgos movies, greatly enjoyed the one where Emma Stone plays a grown woman with a baby brain raised by a chopped-and-sutured Willem Dafoe then taken into the world by a ham-comic Mark Ruffalo. Doesn’t quite track as an On The Count of Three reunion – Jerrod Carmichael is an intellectual friend of Hanna Schygulla – in different scenes/country from Chris Abbott: Emma’s former husband, “The General,” who they lobotomize so everyone can live together happily.

The critics are mostly angry over the fisheye lens. Also: “the movie’s provocations are all at the level of its ghastly aesthetic, which feels like a prank on the viewer” per Brendanowicz, it’s “infantilizing and visually one-note” per Josephine, and I dunno what Ali and Jon‘s issues are. Movie funny, movie good. Some people get it.

by ·Comments Off on The Favourite (2018, Yorgos Lanthimos)

Yorgos has been refining his bold visual style from Alps to Lobster to Sacred Deer, but it’s hard to notice while you’re busy making sense of his oddball characters and dialogue. So now something amazing has happened, and he’s applied those bold visuals (now featuring more fisheye lens than I’ve ever seen in a movie theater) to someone else’s script, a period comedy about women in high court behaving badly. The result wipes the floor with last year’s The Death of Stalin. And YL’s actors have always been splendid, but it’s been hard to tell since they fall into an uncanny valley of almost-not-quite human behavior, so now that they’re playing recognizable humans with killer comic insult dialogue, they’re all getting award nominations.

Queen Olivia Colman’s best friend Rachel Weisz handles all the complex policy issues while the queen hides away in her rabbit room, and this is fine until Rachel’s cousin Emma Stone shows up and starts insinuating herself. These are all based on real people according to the wiki, though it doesn’t mention whether the real Queen had 17 pet rabbits representing all her miscarried children. Nicholas “Beast/Nux” Hoult plays a parliament member who tries to get Emma to spy for him, and maybe if I see him in a few more movies I’ll start to recognize him, but probably not. Premiered at Venice with Roma, Buster Scruggs, Suspiria and Vox Lux, and sold out Phipps on a Sunday matinee, which I thought was impressive until I realized Phipps got those gigantic lounge seats and now only 24 people can fit in their tiny theaters.

by ·Comments Off on La La Land (2016, Damien Chazelle)

I wasn’t thinking of anything when I rewatched Mulholland Dr. the same week we saw La La Land, another movie with great songs in which a girl follows her dreams to Hollywood. Emma Stone’s Mia eventually becomes the star that Betty only dreams of being, after a casting agent sees her one-woman show. Her man Ryan Gosling sets aside his own dreams of running a jazz club to tour with his friend John Legend’s band Jazzhammer. Everyone acts like this is a tragic move on Ryan’s part, but he was broke, so how was he gonna afford his own club without building up cash from those lucrative Jazzhammer tours? Either way, Emma thinks he’s selling out his dreams, and their jobs mean they have to spend months apart, and there’s a fight, and suddenly it’s five years later and Emma and her husband duck into Ryan’s successful new club for a bittersweet Umbrellas of Cherbourg-style ending (noticed a suspicious Parapluies shop on the studio backlot, too), but not before indulging in a (shared?) musical fantasy of how their relationship might have worked out.

Nice to see a strong musical with dancing and singing and Rebel Without a Cause references on the big scope-letterboxed cinema screen. Katy thinks all couples should always end up together at the end of movies, but otherwise she liked it.

J. Rosenbaum:

If the movie’s opening and closing production numbers are by far the most impressive and powerful, this is because they’re both responses to realities perceived as unbearable — which becomes all the more unbearable in the latter case by being disguised as a phony happy ending … La La Land is far more about the death of cinema and the death of jazz than it is about their rebirth or survival. It’s about boarded-up movie houses, antiquated analog recordings, and artistic aspirations that can only be fulfilled (as well as fueled) by fantasy.