Anora (2024): The Palm D’or winner bears elements from Sean Baker’s previous films, but in many ways it’s a more elaborate version of my beloved Tangerine (2015). We follow Ani, a sex worker whose life is upended when she meets Vania, the son of a Russian oligarch. He is as exuberant as he is immature, but the temptation of a life of luxury is too much for Ani to withstand. Things go south when Vania’s disapproving parents find out about their connection and we enter familiar Baker territory. The movie plays at a healthy pace, is quite fun most of the time, and benefits from all around excellent performances, particularly from its two leads, Mikey Madison and Mark Eidelstein. What I took away from Anora was that we cannot perceive the things around us beyond the constraints that our world view allows. This is a template that we are measured by and that we measure other people by, struggling to surpass our classist conditioning. In Anora it makes for both comedy and tragedy, the heartbreaking kind, because when all is said and done, what’s left is whatever we perceive to be our currency in life. 8
The Social Network (2010): My relationship with TSN has been a bit up and down. On release I thought it was cool, but that it paled compared to Black Swan (2010). Then I came to appreciate it a lot more on the second watch, loving its rhythm and pitch. Rewatching it today, I feel that it has lost the emotional tension at its core. No matter how much it wants us to believe it should be Mark and Erica, that has always played like an ego-driven sidetrack. Rather, the rise and betrayals made it seem like there was something tangibly important at stake. The movie ends with a title card saying Facebook “is now” worth 25 billion. For perspective, that number is currently at over 1400 billion, while everyone at the table, from Zuck, to Saverin, to the Vinkelvis, are all billionaires. It’s hard to feel for billionaires. And the real themes of what these social networks were about fail to be encapsulated in Sorkin’s soaring script. It’s still a perfectly entertaining movie, but feels strangely dated only fourteen years down the road. 8
Seth Meyers: Dad Man Walking (2024): I was never a big fan of Meyers and haven’t watched his show. Checking out this stand-up didn’t make it feel like I was erring in any significant way, but that might also be because I am not a parent. There is some fun to be had, but I never felt that the show went beyond itself or tried anything out of the ordinary. Meyers is, of course, likable and this makes the whole thing easy to digest, even if the whole thing doesn’t shine. 6
Fly Me to the Moon (2024): A competently made romcom that just doesn’t have any real conflict to justify its bloated runtime, FMttM is an otherwise agreeable story about marketing the Apollo 11 moon launch. Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum play the leads, the borderline amoral marketer and the buttoned-up American archetypes, in something that’s supposed to be funny, romantic and uplifting. I guess it has some moments of good humour, but I was never invested in the romantic innings. As for the uplifting part, there are so many other movies about the space race that have done it much better and the crumbs offered here aren’t satisfying. So all in all a distinctly middling affair. 5
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021): When I did a full-on review of the movie almost three years ago, I was looking (and longing) for the silver lining. The vibe seemed fine and it was moderately close to the games, considerably more so than the previous RE movie series. Unfortunately, upon rewatching it, it fails to stand up so well. All I could see were the things that didn’t fit, the lazy writing, the mediocre special effects, the missed opportunities. It was borderline tolerable, but the pink-thingy-glasses off, a mostly sad experience. 5
tributary stu 