Movies of the Week #42 (2019)

Joker (2019): This will not be a popular opinion, but I thought that Todd Phillips’s Joker was, for the most part, a cliched, bombastic, pretentious and tired piece of film-making that’s bleak to fault. While it is a different, more engrossing and single-focused origin story thanks to Joaquin Phoenix’s performance, I found myself rarely engaged and never excited. In the same way that ultra-violent movies are accused of being torture porn, this is its own brand of torture porn, with the sadistic world Arthur Fleck inhabits. Of course, Gotham has always been dark, but that’s why you’ve got Batman, because you need contrast. The complete lack thereof, some predictable twists, the second rate philosophy ramblings, all limited my ability to emote over what was going on. As far as I can tell, everything the movie put forth – narrative, visuals, themes – has already been done before and better. And slow-mo as the main means of atmosphere building is cheap.
The one thing it’s got going beyond Phoenix, is the sheer visceral quality of some of its scenes. And as a side-note to Phoenix’s character, I found the depiction of mental illness to be well on point regarding the effects of poverty on treatment and care options, but so extreme that it became caricatured, with the potential of further stigmatizing against those who suffer of it.
I guess that’s a long short review for a movie I didn’t like, but when you piss against the wind, you gotta expect the wind to piss back at you.That being said, yes, Joker was a disappointment and that always counts for something when rating. It’s also why I give it the same rating as Zombeavers because, hey, Zombeavers knew what it was and made no false promises. 6/10

Little Monsters (2019): If there ever was an antidote to Joker, this could very well be it. In the saturated world of zombie movies, Little Monsters provides a somewhat new, somewhat diverting and totally endearing take on the genre – a bit of Shaun of the Dead, but with children. It’s all very on the nose and one could argue it could have had more bite to it, be more irreverent, or even be funnier (can’t say McGiggles did it for me), but I just came away from it with a feeling of satisfaction and a stupid smile plastered on my face. And yes, Lupita Nyong’o is amazing, as usual. 7/10

Fatal Attraction (1987): The 80s and 90s were a great time for sex-themed movies. The naughties, innit? Like real naughties, not fifty shades of naughties – Body Double, Basic Instinct, Body Heat (see ap attern there?), all culminating and kinda ending with Eyes Wide Shut. They were also two really good decades for Michael Douglas, but in Fatal Attraction it’s Glenn Close who does most of the heavy lifting (don’t shed a tear for Douglas, he did win an Oscar that year for Wall Street). The ‘crazy female’ template has its sexist qualities, but the movie is a fun/fine ride, until the less than imaginative finale. There’s probably a nostalgia factor to it as well for viewers of a certain age, which makes it that little bit more pleasurable. 7/10

Câini (2016): A lauded Romanian No Country for Old Men (as it was labelled/self-labelled), Câini aka Dogs is a great movie to look at that’s in rather short supply of fascinating characters. Which, of course, means that it differs from NCfOM in a key way and it’s the reason for Bogdan Mirica’s movie feeling flat at times. Story in short: city dude inherits his criminally-inclined father’s estate in the countryside and gets tangled in more than he can handle. It’s not the most gripping of stories, but it’s beautifully shot and has an atmosphere akin to the Coen brothers masterpiece, which proves just about enough. 7/10

Wild Rose (2018): Half Mike Leigh, half Richard Curtis, half John Carney (hah, see what I did there?), this lass-wannabe-country-singer story felt truly endearing by the end. Featuring Chernobyl’s (and Beast’s) Jessie Buckley, it takes a bit of warming up to, because our lead, Rose-Lynn, is a morally bankrupt mother of two, with a total disregard for her responsibilities. But it’s not hard to feel for her, because she’s not the first, nor the last one to be a very young mother, whose dreams are in stark contrast with what her priorities should be. Heck, the question of how we should reconcile parenthood with a career is one of the biggest questions of our current society. With me being a bit of a country music fan (four seasons of Nashville, I must be a fan, right?), it all came together quite nicely as an exploration of our humanity, even in spite of its super-mushy ending. 8/10