Zombies in themselves aren’t that interesting, are they? If they don’t want to eat your flesh and slurp your brains, they just stand around rotting and smelling badly. Some of them walk slowly, others are able to run towards you. There are some who learn a thing or two, like climbing a ladder after you, or bashing a glass door in with a heavy rock or their own head. That’s about it. The key, then, to rather long-running series like The Walking Dead, or to movies like 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later is that those stories are all about the living, who are the survivors in some post-apocalytpic world with scant food and shelter and safety, where they are the endangered species, and mostly vastly outnumbered by zombies. Yes, sometimes the zombies get the living, but it’s also the living who seem to be very good at killing each other off when pushed into a corner like that. Humans have become a minority. It’s a metaphor that every audience member immediately understands. Continue reading
Author: Mege
An Amazon in her Prime
Wonder Woman gets Wonder Woman right. Princess Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Queen Hippolyta and mighty Zeus, speaks her mind and does what she damn well pleases. In this movie, she wants to end World War I singlehandedly. She talks freely about slavery and freedom and the duty to fight for the weak. And boy, can she kick ass. Sometimes she is serious about fighting because there are civilians who need saving, but there are a few moments where she seems to enjoy combat, and she has a little glint in her eyes, just like Errol Flynn did before another bout of swashbuckling. It’s just that Wonder Woman deserves a better movie than this one. Continue reading
Genocide by Xenomorph? Discuss.
Alien: Covenant is a notch better than Prometheus, maybe two, but it still leaves much to be desired. The main problem, for me anyway, lies not within the film, but outside it. My main complaint is this: I am no longer afraid of the Xenomorph and its many manifestations. Oh sure, I am going to lose my shit for a moment at a jump scare (they are named that way for a reason), but even facehuggers and new-born chestbursters don’t do it for me anymore. I might suffer from what Mr Thirith calls Alien fatigue. Continue reading
This is a test – but for whom?
Cristian Mungiu’s Bacalaureat (2016) (or Graduation, as it is called in English-speaking countries) is firmly rooted in realism, but manages to turn some of its characters paranoid. Somewhere around the movie’s middle mark, I turned slightly paranoid, too. It’s entirely possible that this paranoia might be intentional, and that it might refer to the fact that this is a Romanian production, with its subtle hints to the Ceausescu regime which had the whole country in its grip until 1989, but it doesn’t have to be. We could also just witness a system that works with favoritism and secret handshakes, but the thing is: the favoritism in the movie, while not legitimate, does not increase the elite’s power, but helps single individuals overcome their problems. It’s a film about morals without wagging its finger at you. Continue reading
Here comes the Train again
Why does Mark Renton return to Edinburgh 20 years later? I don’t know which reasons Irvine Welsh’s novels give, but Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting lets us take our pick. I like that ambiguity – it keeps you guessing about the characters and about the story. Renton says he is here because his wife is going to divorce him. Could be, but we never see her. There is also the money he wants to give back to Sick Boy out of guilt. Sick Boy, still very blond, now runs his dead auntie’s run-down Leith pub and calls himself Simon. I have another theory: Renton simply remembers the best of times and the worst of times he had with Simon, Spud, Diane and maybe even Begbie, as depicted in the original Trainspotting (1996). Everything else since then wasn’t half as intense as those times 20 years ago, even if it almost killed him. Continue reading
One more last stand
Old man Logan is weary and drunk and asleep in his car. He runs a one-car limousine service in New Mexico near the border, and some thugs are trying to steal his tyres. He gets out and shields his car with his body, using his precious faculties of self-healing for something as trivial as a limo. His suit is rumpled and dirty. He is one of the last mutants, and he lives in an abandoned factory in the desert and cares for a demented Professor Xavier who hides in a collapsed water tower nearby. Professor X is on heavy medication that makes him go woozy, but if he doesn’t take his pills, his brain, a weapon of mass destruction, will hurtle out of control eventually, and everyone around him gets paralyzed and can’t breathe. The professor is 90 years old. Logan is something like 220 years old. His wounds don’t heal as fast as they used to, and his scars don’t heal at all anymore. One of his blades doesn’t come out all the way, and he actually has to pull it out to the hilt with his other hand so that he can’t help but to cut himself in the process. Can you believe that? He suspects that the adamantium is slowly poisoning his body. Time is not on their side. Continue reading
The Sound of Silence
Silence is almost not a Scorsese movie. His camera watches from the middle distance; it doesn’t cut away, but keeps watching, standing still, but far from unmoved. There are no extra-long scenes, no musical cues, no freeze frames, no siren call for a life of crime. Every movement has its reason. This is a mostly quiet film. Nature sounds can be heard – the waves, the wind, footsteps, fire burning. There is some voiceover narration, and there are dialogues, all of them necessary, but silence is the point. The louder the movie gets, the more disquieting things are going on. Silence is not entertaining in any superficial way, but it’s definitely intriguing. Continue reading
Every dog has its movie
White God is a good movie, but it’s unnerving to get glimpses of an even better movie in there. All the ingredients for a better story are there, but somehow it gets lost on the way, and then still finds some sort of ending all the same, like a dog on its long way home. This might explain why there was once so much talk about it, and then it never even made it to the cinemas, at least not near here. And please note: dogs will seriously be harmed in this movie. Humans, too. Continue reading
Personal Ghostbusting
Since I give every movie one chance, sometimes two, let’s call this one an experiment, because me watching Personal Shopper could go either way – I might like it, or I might not. Personal Shopper seems to lend itself particularly well to this experiment because it got booed first and later received rave reviews in Cannes – not a lot of middle ground. I admit I found Clouds of Sils Maria sometimes quite intriguing, sometimes weird and incoherent, and sometimes it dragged along for me. On the whole, Sils Maria was probably not as smart as it thought it was. So here we have the same director, Olivier Assayas, and one of its two stars, Kristen Stewart, in the main role. I know some people have huge problems with her, but I am not one of them. I liked her in The Yellow Handkerchief as well as in Welcome to the Rileys. Continue reading
The old woman and the Sea
There is an apartment house on the beachfront of Recife, Brazil. It’s from a time when houses still had names, and this one is called the Aquarius. Throughout the years, towering hotels have been built around it; tenants move out until there is only Clara left. Developers turn up, friendly but smarmy, but Clara does not want to sell. For Clara, home is a place. That is why the movie is called by the name of the house, Aquarius. It’s impossible to separate the woman and the house, but the developers don’t realize that yet. We all have something outside ourselves that defines us. With Clara, it’s the place she lives in. In Clara’s living room, there is a wooden chest of drawers on which Auntie Lucia, a family legend, once made love to her lover and future husband. That is not a source of ridicule, but a way to fondly remember the past. Continue reading
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 