Top Ten lists are among the ten worst things. They’re facile and reductive, they’re lazy journalism, and still for some odd reason they’re so tempting that I tend to check them out, only to come away annoyed, both with the list and with myself for having been lured in.
So without much further ado and completely unaware of the contradiction, here’s a Top Ten list for you to look at!
… and we change with the times.
What’s that you say, though? Didn’t we change just recently? You may very well say that, but let’s face it, sometimes it takes a change to get the grey matter going, and then, over the next couple of months, it comes up with a new, better change.
Why is it better, you say? Because it involves coffee.
On the outside, Julia Ducournau’s Raw seems like an endurance test. There are reports of audience members fainting and vomiting, interrupted screenings and official complaints. And all of these people have seen the R-rated version, not the original, unreleased NC-17 version. During the show I was in, a guy left twice, his girlfriend stayed on, but all three of us fidgeted and squirmed more than once. Yes, Raw is hard to watch, but once you think you can cope with the blood and guts, you will find one of the best-told horror flicks in a long time. Like Lady Macbeth last week, Raw is a feature debut in a double sense: Julia Ducournau directed her own feature-length screenplay, and Garance Marillier, who plays the main role of Justine, is a newcomer. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Continue reading
Reader, we are not in Jane Austen country anymore. Any Austen adaptation must end in a marriage, whereas Lady Macbeth starts with one, not a happy affair, and it gets worse from here on out. The source of this story is, of course, that famous Scottish play, and then there is Nikolai Leskov’s novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District from 1865, which is said to be loosely based on a real crime. William Oldroyd’s movie, from a screenplay by Alice Birch, could have approached the character of Lady Macbeth from one of those angles. Instead, the movie shows us a young bride called Katherine who initially does not object to be married to a wealthy nobleman who resides in a bleak, solitary country estate. The troubles start during their wedding night: the husband is a gruff alcoholic and under his father’s thumb. He orders her to undress and face the wall, and then he puts out the light and goes to sleep. She discovers that he is impotent and wants to keep her indoors. The mood of the movie has more in common with Wuthering Heights than any Merchant-Ivory movie. Continue reading
Today, legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau died at the age of 89.
Change is coming. In fact, change has already come. You may have noticed the dearth of ads on the site – unless you’re one of the naughty boys and girls who use Adblock, that is. If you look up at your browser’s address bar, you might notice a change of URL as well. It’s been time to retire the Goofy Beast – we’re now called eaglesonpogosticks.com, which I’m sure we’ll regret soon as the God of Search Engine Optimisation banishes us to the nether regions of the web.
That’s not all, though: thanks to the new and shiny WordPress plan we’re on now, we have so much storage space, we don’t really know what to do with it. I’m sure we’ll come up with an idea, though. Any day now something’ll pop into our brains. Any… day… If we still haven’t come up with anything cool, snazzy and oh-so-early 21st century by autumn, you can tell us off.
So, with no further ado, welcome to eaglesonpogosticks.com and farewell to goofybeast.wordpress.com. We’ve had a lot of good time and we’ll miss you.
The Leftovers was already an odd beast in its first season. Here’s a series about a world where, on October 14 three years ago, 2% of the world’s population just vanished. Poof. You may have been sitting at breakfast with your family, you may have been getting in the car where you’ve just put your infant after shopping for groceries, you may have been in the middle of having a tryst with someone not your wife – and from one moment to the next, they’re gone. Your highschool sweetheart that you occasionally see at the store? Gone. The old man who touched you when you were a kid? Gone. What’s this? The Rapture?
There is a wounded stranger in the music room of Mrs Farnsworth’s seminary, a Union soldier from Ireland, a deserter with a leg wound, a man, not exactly young, but handsome. What to do? He is a Yankee, they are all from the South, so shall they hand him over to the Confederate troops nearby, or should they do the Christian thing and dress his wounds first? Mrs Farnsworth herself, the head teacher Mrs Morrow and the five pupils all feel an undercurrent of fear because that deserter might bring the War to their school, a war they watch every evening through a telescope from the upper balcony of their mansion, and they see the black plumes of smoke just beyond the treeline. Sometimes the boom of cannon-fire can be heard. That’s the situation at the beginning of Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled. It’s a must-see, because who tells stories about groups of girls or women better than Coppola? The movie is set in Virginia in 1864, but it resembles Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) in more ways than one. Continue reading
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
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
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 