Young mother Jennifer Lawrence is behaving oddly. It’s implied that she’s a threat to others when we watch her cat-stalk though the grasses with a knife in hand, or when she borrow/steals Sissy Spacek’s gun to shoot their injured dog. She keeps smashing herself through glass things, or raking the walls till her fingers bleed, or trying to ladybird herself out a moving car, finally walks into a previously unseen (except in the opening titles) forest fire, a Petzold move but without any aftermath, so we can wonder whether it’s a metaphorical fire. Lot of odd-looking day-for-night shots. Ramsay be like: protagonist crazy, so movie crazy – I’m used to her being hit-or-miss, but this one is more almost-hit. Robert Pattinson very good as her befuddled husband. I would not be surprised if LaKeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte didn’t know what the movie is about or why they appeared in it. Thoughts from Josh Lewis, Lena Frances, Adam Nayman, Katie Kadue.
Tag: Robert Pattinson
Mickey 17 (2025, Bong Joon-ho)
Pattison is an idiot, fleeing into space pursued by loansharks after he and Steven Yeun lost a fortune on their macaroon business. Turns out he signed up to be an expendable, now he’s always being sent on deadly missions then getting resurrected in the 3D printer. Movie starts in the middle, when 17 has fallen in a hole surrounded by beasties who rescue him instead of eating him like everyone assumed, while they go ahead and print up 18. Now his girlfriend Naomi Ackie (a friendly interloper in Education) enjoys having two Mickeys while rat spy Kai (Jane from The Empire, a specialist in awkward uneven scifi movies) wants to turn them in.
Bong remains the least subtle dude around, as the ship is led by Trumpian Hulk Ruffalo and Toni Collette, shithead politicians who aim to create “a pure white planet full of superior people.” 17’s narration is funny at least, but it’s no Starship Troopers.
The Boy and the Heron (2023, Hayao Miyazaki)
Inspired weirdness.
MVP Willem Dafoe as a doomed pelican.
Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan)
My notes include things like “Ives leads red team splinter group to recover algorithm,” which didn’t even make sense at the time, so I’m skipping the attempted plot summary of this cinematic Sator square. Branagh is an arms dealer helping execute attacks from the future, smuggling in reverse-kinetic objects and backwards-moving people. His abused wife is Debicki, the helpless woman only concerned for her child’s safety while the real men do all the work. Those men are serious spy-dude Washington and his chill buddy Pattinson. Bits of exposition via Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Martin Donovan! I took some advice and just watched the hell out of this (with subtitles) without insisting that it make any sense – though I guessed early on that anyone half-glimpsed in the first half of the movie would turn out to be our reversed heroes in the second half – and had a good time. It never stops talking utter nonsense for 150 minutes, and none of the action scenes were as impressive as expected. Michael Sicinski on Patreon: “But then again, I’ve never seen a building un-blow-up on the top, only to re-blow-up on the bottom. That was cool.”
The Lighthouse (2019, Robert Eggers)
Watching The Shallows, I was delighted that Blake Lively and the movie allow their injured seagull to survive to the end, but now I realize this avian assistance was the key to Blake’s survival, because Rob Pattinson’s luck turns bad when he cruelly murders an injured gull, and after a descent into pain and horror and madness, he ends up gull food. Let these sister films be warnings to any who would wish harm to our seagull friends.
Eggers sounds like a delightful interview subject:
My understanding is that they were rescue birds that were injured and rehabilitated, and after that rehabilitation couldn’t really survive back in the wild again. So giving them things to do makes them happy. So they were very eager to learn how to fly on a windowsill, peck a windowpane three times, and jump off, and then get a little food reward. Actually the seagulls were incredibly easy to work with, unlike a certain black goat that, I mean, I have no fond memories of working with.
Set in 1890ish Maine, Rob Pattinson is on the run under another man’s name, spilling his beans to crusty old Willem Dafoe, as the two of them tend a lighthouse for a season. Unclear how much time passes, or what is real vs. hallucinated, but it’s all very beautifully shot, and if this Eggers makes another dark film about witches or lighthouses I will go see it.
Good Time (2017, Safdies)
I didn’t enjoy Heaven Knows What, but this Safdie follow-up is splashed across the covers of all three film magazines I subscribe to, so I went out all by myself (does nobody else in this town read the magazines?) to sit too close to the screen and watch a movie where everything is shot too close-up. Felt like maybe a bad idea, and I’m not always a fan of electro music scores, and I was already aware of certain accusations against the movie, but against all odds, it’s… extremely good. The nervous energy from the close camerawork and pulsing electro plus all the lurid colors and frantic performances add up to a… not a good time exactly, but a hell of a ride.
The only time the title is spoken in the movie is by Nick’s psychiatrist. The doctor is a white-haired nemesis to Connie, conspiring to restrict his brother’s freedom, appearing early in the movie’s trailer as Connie talks about “the program [Nick] is forced to attend and how he shouldn’t be there.” We see Nick going to prison in the trailer, getting beaten as his brother races against time to rescue him, then as images of violence flicker across the screen faster and faster the psychiatrist reappears: “This place where we are now can be a lot of fun if you let it. You’re gonna have a good time,” then the title sears across the screen. It feels like this wicked psychiatrist is taking advantage of helpless Nick, the title a bitterly ironic reference to the bad time Nick is gonna have in his evil institution. In the movie itself, it took me a couple scenes to shake this idea, since the psychiatrist seems harmless and Nick is the one getting his brother into trouble then trying to get him back out, in a rapidly escalating series of near-successes. Connie is (argh) a con-man, an expert manipulator, and we follow him as our would-be protagonist, the movie barely giving us time to contemplate the havoc he’s leaving behind him, until the deep-breath relief of the ending. In fact, the title is supposed to be a reference to getting reduced prison sentence for good behavior (Connie and Nick are both fresh out of prison) and the end of the film shows the psychiatrist actually helping Nick after his villain brother is sent away.
The first thing we see after Connie “rescues” his brother from the institute is a bank robbery, wearing dark-skin masks and getting hilariously foiled by a dye pack. In the ensuing chase, Nick smashes through a window and gets busted, and Connie fails to bail him out with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s cancelled credit card. Connie then breaks the wrong guy out of the hospital – a plot twist I saw coming but dismissed as too ludicrous-obvious – then teams up with him (Ray: Buddy Duress, Holmes’s buddy in Heaven Knows What) to make quick cash for bail money. Ray was busted at an amusement park, and stashed a sprite bottle full of pure liquid LSD and possibly some money, so they trick underage Crystal into giving them a ride there, fuck with the security guard, and everyone gets arrested except Connie and Ray, who escape with the LSD-soda to the guard’s apartment, where Ray calls his dealer and finally things go wrong.
J. Safdie on the controvery:
I don’t think Connie is a racist. I think that he just knows how society functions. He knows that society is racist.
Connie makes choices instantly, and one gets the impression that it’s an instinctual ability that has helped him at times but will only prove his downfall on this particular night … Pattinson perfectly conveys the nervous energy of being essentially hunted by your own bad decisions without ever feeling like he’s chewing scenery.