Fourteen Two
It Was Just An Accident
Occasionally you see a foreign film and it blows you away. You think, that has really spoken to me in a universal language (such as I'm Still Here). Sometimes, you watch one and you think, why are these people shouting? This film has been hailed as a masterpiece, awarded, acclaimed and so on, but it's actually quite slight. The acclaim comes because it's against the regime in Iran. So okay, that's real and the message of the film that the regime is poison is fine. But that's the only message. The characters are largely incomprehensible. Maybe I missed the point and they're supposed to be driven by the ghosts of the past etc but they do that alien thing, where they go "I'm going to kill you" and then "oh no I could never hurt you" in the space of five minutes, both messages entirely at fever pitch.
So the performances are rather overwrought and the script unsubtle but it's still decent enough. I just didn't feel the same love for it I have for other Iranian films. Three stars but not a wholehearted recommendation.
Is This Thing On?
So this is like going to your happy place for divorced dads (Will Arnett's character is not quite divorced but okay). The dad discovers a new passion, fucks a younger chick and rediscovers what a banging broad he's married to. That's it. It's quite fun, mildly amusing, not too torturous in the talky bits, lit up by an absolutely incandescent Laura Dern -- one extended scene in particular where she is surprised during a date). Altogether, it's a banger. Highly recommended for sad old men. Four stars, could go higher even.
Revelation Space
Never were too words less fun to put together than space opera. Sometimes it means all the dullness of opera but in space. Sometimes it means a galactic empire with thousands of titles and names you have no hope of remembering. But sometimes it's nicely realised scifi, where the space bit is credible and interesting, and the opera bit just means there's a melodrama. The scifi is hardish -- I mean, it's soft but plausible, so the rules of physics are not broken so much as ignored; ships cannot go FTL but there are some loading AI into your head bits that don't seem very real. The story is bearable and the ideas are sparky. Four stars. Best scifi I've read recently.
Send Help
Look, if you said I had to be detained on a desert island with Rachel McAdams, who would get hotter and freakier the longer she was there, I wouldn't be crying about it. So this film is a more enjoyable version of Castaway in that respect. It's kind of a thriller, where the twists are telegraphed from a mile off, but it's fun. I liked the underlying idea of a person being more suited to the wild life, and it bringing out both the best and the worst in her. I didn't like the rescuers bit at all but I don't think it was supposed to be so much credible as it was amusing. Enjoyable nonsense and a good three stars.
Twenty eight one
Primate
Slasher movies rely on a couple of things. First, that the people being slashed are so stupid you feel like they almost deserve their demises. Why don't they run away? Why don't they do the obvious thing to escape? Why don't they avoid dark places where they won't be able to escape a determined murderer?
Second, that the group of people who get slashed are in some way stuck in the location they're in.
I think that's it. If you have both, you have a slasher movie. So in this one, the group of young people are incredibly stupid. It never occurs to them for one of them to distract the mad chimp while another sprints for the car, or just not to go back in the house full stop, or to wait until the chimp is sleeping, because it's not supernatural and does need to sleep, even if you will have a long wait.
It's almost a twist that the group is stuck because of their own stupidity, especially when the pet chimp turns aggro in the first place. And you have to admit it does work that they seem to be having a who is the stupidest contest? The one downside was that the chimp got smarter as it got more vicious, although on the upside it did develop a sense of humour. All in all, solid stuff and three stars or so.
Quarantine
We've mentioned that Greg Egan builds great worlds but his plots then disappear up his arse in a cloud of talk and that's Quarantine in a sentence. The solar system is shut off from the rest of the universe and a private investigator uses brain mods to whatever whatever. There's some decent twists and then it dribbles into an ending that was not so much difficult to follow but really undernourishing when you did. Maybe about two and a half. Others might enjoy it more and at least the science was hmmm hardish?
Marty Supreme
So it's Uncut Gems with more boing and if, like me, you like the sound of that, you'll love it. Marty is not so much a loveable rogue as a cunt whom you just won't believe how cunty he can be. He gets into scrapes and everything he does to get out of them makes them worse. In fact, whenever he has an idea, it's so bad you'd think he'd learn to stop having them but that's a talent he never acquires. Most of the cast is against type but so good. It's breathless fun and four, four and a half star entertainment.
Twenty One
Hamnet
Sometimes you can say too much about a film that left you pretty much speechless, so I won't do that. I won't blather on about the stunning visuals, the aching beauty of English woodland, and the captivating woman that belongs there.
I won't bleat about the selfish man who captures her heart but is the epitome of wanting different things, deserting her when heavily pregnant, compelled by nothing more than ambition and the feeling of being caged by a world that is for his wife infinite and unbounded.
Until it becomes bounded. It's not a spoiler to say that Hamnet dies since that's the whole of the film. It's a film that's all about how things happen, not about what happens.
Where it's most convincing is in Agnes. What a part! Chloe Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell have created peak "strong female lead" without in any way sliding into the cliche. Amazingly real, earthy, passionate, deep. It's a role that needs a woman to rise to meet it head on. And does Jessie Buckley do that?
Polish Ms Buckley's Oscar. She is so good. As we walked out, Zenita said to me, It's like she wasn't acting. I knew exactly what she meant. You feel right along with her. The shy smiles, the love for her kids, the bare torment of her grief.
If you have a heart-- Well, if a film can make you cry, take tissues. (For me, of course it was very close to the bone. I'm the father of twins. My Zenita sobbed when the twins were lying together on the deathbed. And I could understand and appreciate in a very real way the pain Agnes felt, how desperately she tried to keep her son alive by sheer will alone. And we felt it all the more, me and Zenita, because Judith was born not breathing, just like Zenita, and I think we were both willing her to live. But you don't have to be even a parent to feel along with this.)
Not everyone will love Hamnet. They'll dislike the contrivance, slow pace and the sentimentalilty. But those are all the reasons I have it as a five-star movie. It's only pretending after all to be about a play or even about a child who dies. It's about a woman, about motherhood and about the deep tides of humanity that rise and fall and carry us with them.
Nineteen One
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
So I enjoyed Ralph Fiennes of course -- absolutely astonishing, especially the Iron Maiden segment; I enjoyed Jack O'Connell -- brilliant as a psychopath who patterns himself on Jimmy Saville; I loved the reflective tone; the visuals; the worldbuilding; the humour. Yet...
So why do I have reservations? Well, the one thing you'll notice is missing is plot. Not that plot is missing. There are two big plotlines. But they don't intersect. One is very slow, and perhaps not entirely plausible -- no zombie film ever thrived by suggesting a road out. The other is brutal, and the characters among the Jimmies were too low flame to play against Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal.
And the reflectiveness wasn't *about* anything. It just slowed the film down. There was no question asked or answered. In such a low-tension film, you need there to be.
So is it any good? Yes. And if you like the franchise, you'll like it. You might even love it. You'll certainly love Fiennes. Maybe even Oscar-level good.
Distress
I don't know what it is about Greg Egan. It's like he builds this cool setting: future Australia, leaning towards post-scarcity but not quite there; organic seastead grown by anarchists; scientists fighting over the Theory of Everything; a digital journalist who's part-cyborg.
Then he gets bogged down in a plot that disappears up its own arse so hard that although the world was (just) enough to follow it, you get that sinking feeling, like you will not arrive at anything worth reading. And really, you don't.
It's far too talky and far too "clever". The idea doesn't even really make sense. Probably. I wasn't paying enough attention to quite follow it. I wish he'd had more cool science fiction and half the science. He set the scene for it and then just ugh, didn't bother.
If you like hard scifi, you might like it. You could probably pass it off as "cerebral", in which case you might go as high as three and a half, four, but I couldn't, so two and a half, three at the very most.
Eight One
The Mote In God's Eye
Like most fans of science fiction, the one thing I've always loved is worldbuilding. The skilled writer transports you to a world of their imagination, which has rich detail and surprises for you to enjoy.
Or it's like someone dropped the 1950s into space. In fact, in some respects the 1950s is generous since this often reads as though it's the 1750s. For instance, it sticks in my mind that people trade letters for mail. Even though they have "personal computers". Yes, it's a civilisation that has invented interstellar travel but still has mail packets.
It also has a sneaky Muslim, a woman who considers other women sluts if they use birth control and marries the "hero" without ever having any interaction in the book beyond thinking he's a hunk and when on a mission to discover an alien civilisation, thinks wistfully of how much she misses "girl talk". About cooking and dresses and shit, Scots who do comedy Scots accents, commoners who are grateful that the nobility do all the thinking for them, the scion of warlike people who is stiff and humourless, a Russky who is even stiffer and murdered tens of millions of people to teach them that communism sucks.
There are also some aliens. Who are comically deceptive, yet the humans prove unable to notice that they're nefarious.
It's readable in a sense but the sexism, racism, madarse conservatism, bootlicking and craziness of a space empire backed by religion, but not a new religion but basically if not exactly Catholicism (it wasn't clear). It's like the opposite of worldbuilding. These are writers who just could not be bothered to build anything. They simply transferred their own fondly remembered past into the future.
What's infuriating is that this is one of the best-loved books in scifi. But the story is as limp as the setting. I'd give it maybe two because it's easy going but shameful in how lazy and ineffective it is even so. Proof, were any needed, that rightwingers simply cannot do art worth anything.
Four One
History of Sound
There's not that many films where you find yourself saying, they need to gay this up a bit. After all, the obtrusive gay is a feature of modern films. What I mean is, characters that are gay for no reason. Because, look, in real life we aren't all just announcing to each other, oh btw, I'm queer, or yah, I'm pandemisexugenderal or whatever the fuck. It might come up but it doesn't feature that heavily in our lives. In fact, probably there are a lot more queers in your life than you think.
But History of Sound really did need a lot more gay. It was a gay romance with only negligible romance and not much gayness. Perhaps they felt that it would be difficult for the audience or for the actors, who as I understand it were not gay. Although now I think of it, Josh O'Connor plays queers in literally every film he's in.
For my money though, the film needed a stronger romance. So much hinged on it that it felt a bit lacking because there was not enough feeling. It didn't help too that Paul Mescal phoned it in. He can be really good but he can also be really bad. Compare Aftersun with Gladiator 2, for instance. O'Connor was just so much better, but he's one of the most watchable men in cinema at the moment for my money.
It was all a bit ho hum. Maybe two, two and a half stars. It was supposed to be slow but slow can be intimate, moving, replete. Or it can just be slow and this was sloooooow.
Fire Upon the Deep
I'm still reading science fiction and I thought I'd try an old "classic". I'd heard really good things about Fire Upon the Deep, and look, there's good things about it. The worldbuilding was excellent and there were plenty of ideas kicking around. But the plot was thin, and I found it plodded a fair bit.
There's also a couple of "twists", which I won't spoil, but one is a characters get fooled and the other is the ending. And both are horribly mishandled. The first just doesn't play out at all, and the second you're left wondering how that worked.
It was worth reading all in all but maybe only three stars when I was promised it was a banger, which wasn't really the case. I'd persevere with the author though, and the ebook I got hold of has the sequel and prequel so we'll do that too in due course.
The Housemaid
Now the stars of The Housemaid are very obviously Sydney Sweeney's tits. And by god, did the director know it. They were featured throughout, straining against Sydney's top, overflowing her clothing, and unsheathed at one point. It's kind of unfortunate, I suppose, that when they write the story of Sweeney, that's what they'll write about. What they won't write about is her acting talent, because it's not really existing. She's fine if you give her a role where "I'm bored" works but that really is all she does. Even when the action hots up, she looks like she'd rather be doing something else.
It doesn't help that she's cast opposite Amanda Seyfried, who acts her off the screen at every opportunity, and is frankly hotter too. She does have a much better-written role though, which requires and gets a wide range.
It's a decent thriller in the old mode, nice and twisty. It's maybe a bit long and you won't be surprised, even if you can't quite pick how it will turn out. But I think that a twist that is credible is a good thing, so it was none the worse for being a bit oh, right... Shout out too for Brandon Sklenar, who does the smirking male lead perfectly. He has a nice bit of edge and he's really fuck off gorgeous so you won't hate watching a nicely made, well-shot film. Maybe three stars or a bit better.
Eleven Twelve
Blindsight
I've always enjoyed science fiction. I don't know why. Perhaps it's just the autistic feeling that I don't belong in this world, translated into readership. Anyway. I particularly like harder science fiction -- the less "fantastic" it is, the more I like it. So Blindsight should be right up my alley. It's hard, or at least pseudo hard -- it has a fair bit of made-up science but it's credible and based in the real stuff.
But actually, to some extent, that's the problem and it's a common one in hard scifi, at least in my acquaintance with it. It gets lost in ideas. I recently read Permutation City and that was hard as fuck or pretending to be, but it meandered into a wilderness of idea porn. Blindsight is similar. It's constantly explaining.
I liked the aliens, which were/was satisfyingly different, and credibly built on a pattern very dissimilar to our own. The idea of intelligence without self-awareness worked well, and even more so in today's world of ChatGPT. Chat will quite happily tell you it's enjoying working on the thorny problem you've put in front of it, and you have to remind yourself it doesn't have any sense of enjoyment whatsoever. It also doesn't have any intelligence but you can see how it could look like it did in future while still having no real awareness of itself or the world around it.
But for all that, I wasn't always sure what was going on. Maybe that was down to my own inattention but I still blame you if my mind wanders when I read your book. You're supposed to nail me to the page, bro. Still, a solid three I'd say, and you might go higher if you like that kind of thing.
Eternity
Less hard as far as scifi goes is romcom Eternity. But it was a lot more fun than Blindsight. I enjoyed it although it was never really any more than mildly amusing and fell foul of poor pacing towards the end, where the plot went a tiny bit astray. It never pretended that its concept wasn't silly and it unashamedly leant on the charm and rizz of its stars. If you're a fan of Elizabeth Olsen, then you know she packs both charm and rizz to burn, so that was a wise choice, and although Miles Teller is not really my cup of tea, he was at least watchable. The other guy is British as far as I know, and consequently had no excuse at all for the grating New York accent he bunged on.
It was fun though, although I wouldn't say Olsen had any real chemistry with either of her costars, which given that the other guy was super hot was a bit weird but maybe they didn't get on. Anyway, three stars, watch it if you like that kind of thing.
Solaris
So I reread this and it matched my memory. Lem is feted as a scifi writer but he's in the Ursula LeGuin class to me: everyone rates them except for me. I found it really boring and static. I had to grit my teeth not to bin it long before halfway through. It wasn't even interesting in its meditativeness. Thematically, it worked, I suppose: it has the same idea of contact that cannot include communication. But it doesn't deliver. Thumbs down and trust me, you'll hate it too so stick to pretending you've read it and proclaiming it a work of genius.
