Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde’s second feature as director, after Booksmart, which we loved, is an irredeemable mess of a psychological thriller. We pick through its carcass in an attempt to figure out which bit of it we liked the least.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
Marvel’s triumphant return to our cinemas is… a film that fills in a plot hole nobody cared about for a character who not only should have had a standalone film long before now but who has since been killed off. To say that Black Widow feels like a kick in the teeth is an understatement, but still, the MCU is back with us and we see what it has to offer.
And what it presents us with is something much more earthbound than the spacefaring antics in which Marvel has increasingly indulged: a good old-fashioned Russian spy story, and a family reunion of sorts, Natasha Romanoff driven to reconnect with the other undercover Russian agents who formed her surrogate family as a child. We ask whether the theme of family is done justice here, especially David Harbour’s – the father’s – part in its expression. And, among others, we ask questions of the action filmmaking, the lack of humour in heroes, Romanoff’s conceptualisation, how the women are filmed, and whether it’s necessary to eschew edginess in order to pursue a progressive politics.
Black Widow is a film we enjoyed, though on reflection, picking out the reasons why is harder than picking at its flaws – but it certainly hasn’t dampened our willingness to continue following Marvel’s movies.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
José has been brushing up, recently rewatching the 1933, 1959 and 1994 adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. Mike has neither seen any adaptations nor read the book, coming to the story entirely fresh. And so we get to grips with Greta Gerwig’s wonderful, open-hearted, energetic version of Little Women.
José finds much to contrast between the versions, picking up in particular on the unusual dimensionality given to the male supporting characters here, whose roles have previously been thankless. Timothée Chalamet and Chris Cooper particularly impress, the former capturing Laurie’s playful, generous spirit; the latter touchingly evoking Mr. Laurence’s grief. Less successful is Meryl Streep’s Aunt March, who slightly too mechanically reaches for the laughs for which she’s designed.
The girls, though, are a triumph of energetic wildness, ambitions and realism. The scenes they share in their childhood home are well observed, wisely mixing all-American sentimentality you might expect with a disarming sororal combativeness you might not. If there’s a bum note amongst them it’s Emma Watson as Meg, who Mike argues never truly embodies the roles she plays, but Saoirse Ronan is miraculously transparent as Jo, and Florence Pugh gives Jo a burning, vital sense of frustration and fury at always being second best to her sisters. Their relationships make the film the success it is, and, Mike suggests, even when the film begins to wrap their stories up in some fairly convenient ways, so fond are we of them that it’s hard not to be swept along.
Greta Gerwig has achieved magical things with Little Women, and you miss it at your peril.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
A young girl from a tight-knit family in Norwich gets a shot at her dream, joining the WWE, the glamorous home of professional wrestling. Parental pride, sibling rivalry, and a lot of hard work ensues, as do great performances generating a lot of laughs. We’re not that keen on some of the clichés – very little happens that you wouldn’t expect, and some of the scenes take a long time to get there – but we like the male-female rivalry, the way Vince Vaughn and Nick Frost light up the screen, and of course, the fact that a big promotional corporate movie for Americans starts off in a tiny living room in Norwich.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
I went to see Lady Macbeth for Cosmo Jarvis – I became a fan through his Gay Pirate song — who is very handsome in it but not good, rather like the film. Great material though – based on Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Russian novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, rendered even more interesting by adding a racial dimension to the casting. I know it’s been highly praised as an examination of patriarchy. The lady in question is bought in marriage, along with a piece of land, and treated like a piece of property. Then slowly, she revolts, she takes on a half-cast lover, a groom working on the estate – begins to murder for him, and in the end is capable of anything. She starts off as a piece of property who’s humanity is in every way denied or diminished; is brought to life by passion only to be once more de-humanised by the murder necessary to keep the passion going. Her desire frees her only to re-enslave her in a different form. There are a lot of black actors in the cast, and it’s clear that the casting is meant to make one think of people as property, of slavery, to somehow add this to discussions of class and gender. But the film doesn’t do what films are supposed to do which is create a pattern around this, try to make sense of them somehow in order to convey feeling and meaning. Perhaps a better way of saying this is one knows what the film is trying to get at, but the film is not quite getting to it in a way that is decipherable, intellectually or emotionally — at least to me. There’s a lot of silence, and a lot of murders take place out of sight or out of camera range. It’s a dispassionate film. I wanted to feel something at the beatings or the murders and the sex rather than just knowing about them, having them blandly half-shown. I was trying to figure out why the camera was wherever it was at any given point and the only reason I could come up with was that they were short of money – thus all the tableau-y medium long shots and lack of variety in camera set-ups. I also thought the moment – and this is just one of many examples — where the master asks the black servant to get on her knees and crawl ‘like the animal she is’ — I thought that might have been a magnificent moment on stage but the film just opened up all kinds of possibilities as to what a more imaginative director could have done with that moment onscreen that merely demonstrated the gap between what the film is and what it could have been. I don’t think this director, William Oldroyd, whose first film this is, knows much about directing movies. On the other hand Ari Wegner has done a beautiful job of cinematography, it’s all lush haze, densely forested exteriors in half-light outside, clearly coloured, almost varnished emptiness inside. It looks beautiful. And there is, I don’t know if it’s a performance exactly, but the magnificent surly presence of Florence Pugh, which brings an anger and resistance to the character and renders the film dramatic, adding the only excitement this lifeless film seems capable of.
I found the experience of watching Lady Macbeth dull. Yet images, those very tableaus I didn’t at first like — the lady dressing, and dressing and dressing again; being constricted by form, habit, propriety only to be removed of her clothes to await her master’s pleasure — and the contained anger in Lady Macbeth’s surly face: all of this has lingered in my mind almost a week after seeing the film.
José Arroyo