Review

Companion

Chill Movies, Review

Wow, Companion is much better than I expected! Good film. A dark comedy take on what the world would look like if tech like in Ex Machina were to be commercialized.

Best line:

“I am not robo-shaming you!”

Spoilers below.

Such a clever, clever film. There’s a cute part in the beginning. If you go in cold you don’t know the protag, Iris, is a machine. Of course, she does not know either. When the two main characters are exiting their self-driving car, she says “thank you” to the car and won’t let them get out of the vehicle until her human partner does the same thing. This implies that she somehow intuits that she shares more with the car than she consciously knows. Great little detail.

Second favorite line that one of the robots says of his implanted, artificial memories in a more serious moment: “I mean, it may have never happened but my memory of it’s real.”

The movie is actually a better and more incisive critique of “nice guys” and the incel phenomenon than any feminist has managed to come up with. Sophie Thatcher as Iris is perfect, too. Without her, the film would’ve been not nearly as good. The scene where she realizes she’s artificial is particularly affecting.

Recommended.

Moore Less

Chill Books, Review

I read Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods recently.

This won’t be a complete review, but will try to offer enough of an appraisal to know if you, dear reader, would like to devote your time to this fairly long book.

My main thought is that I wish it had been better. The work starts off so well and had so much potential, which is why I kept reading it. The characters are interesting, the beginning is a banger, and the mystery is compelling. But it begins to suffer as it spends more and more time with viewpoint characters who offer little to the story. Too much of the action happens off the page — it’s like Moore has no idea what to do with anything more than people talking, so God of the Woods has no substantive propulsive action scenes at all even when they are core components of her own story. Nearly everything important occurs outside of the reader’s observation. While this can work — see No Country For Old Men for an example — you have to be Cormac McCarthy or the Coen Brothers to pull something like that off.

And Moore is neither of those things.

As the book becomes increasingly meandering and the characters do little to advance the story, I began to hope the ending would be the banger that the first 30-40 pages were. No such luck. The denouement is unbelievable, unsatisfying and borderline insulting to the reader.

There was a good novel in there somewhere. A decent editor probably could’ve located it for Moore, who clearly has some writing talent. But like many of the characters in the story, that editor was nowhere to be found.

I don’t have a Goodreads account, but if I did I’d rate The God of the Woods 2 out of 5 stars. However, I’d rate the first 100 pages a 4.5/5 and the last 100 a 1/5. By the by, Yun’s review is better than mine and more thorough — and is essentially what I think, but she is more charitable to the book than I am.

Bergh

Chill Movies, Review

I watched the Soderbergh film Presence in the theater earlier today.

It was a good film, but it will be polarizing. If you do not like Soderbergh’s quieter, more introspective works, you probably also will not like this one as it is indeed very Soderberghian.

The performances make the film. The plot is thin, but then that is intentional. The viewpoint is the point in a sense. It is not a horror film, really, but an examination of pointless misogynistic evil and how it reverberates through time.

It also had one of the most uncomfortable scenes I’ve experienced in a movie in a long while. I know this will sound bad, but there’s a part that you’re thinking will be “only” sexual assault — then it moves to something else altogether and you wish it’d go back to the other thing.

Callina Liang both grounds and elevates the film with unexpected depth. The rest of the cast is really good as well.

Recommended.

One of These Mornings

Chill Movies, Review

We watched My Summer of Love earlier. Like most movies about girls/women, it’s underrated on IMDB. It’s a beautifully-shot study of the summer love affair of two girls-verging-on-women in the Midlands of the UK. The first one we meet is a lower-class, rough-around-the-edges dreamer who yearns for a better time in her life, often without quite being able to express it.

The other girl is from a posh family and seems to be sincerely looking for companionship and the solidity of a real connection after a recent tragedy has left her grieving.

But this is a deeper and more compelling work than the surface would indicate, and quite a bit darker. I’ll not say more to avoid spoilers as it’s best watching unaware. With great performances by both Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, the film never goes for the easy cliché, either in its shots or its narrative, and never is less than true to its characters and their motivations; the film moves how they would move.

Recommended.

Span

Chill Movies, Review

Both Cailee Spaeny and Kirsten Dunst were very good in Civil War, but the movie itself was meh. It didn’t know what it wanted to say or to be; it committed to nothing. There is a lot of noise and Sturm und Drang but it just has no thesis. At the same time, it’s not observant nor perspicacious enough to be a slice of life (or of death) film, either.

It just was not a good film despite the combat portions being pretty well-done. I wish it had been attempting to say something, anything, to have some history or future or meaning. Not every movie needs that, of course. But this one did.

Not recommended, unless you’re a particular fan of Cailee or Kirsten or both.

Mass

Chill Review, TV Shows

Midnight Mass is pretty good but quite slow, even for me. And I am definitely one who enjoys plodding, methodical movies and TV shows. Also, I don’t care about religious themes very much and the show is perfused with those.

It’s still worth watching, though. And I do like that Mike Flanagan (the director) tends to use the same cast, so you get to experience their range and talent across various shows he makes. Overall, the work feels like a stage play on screen. I enjoyed this but will not be to many people’s taste admittedly.

Recommended, with caveats.

Cinematic Omens

Chill Movies, Review

The First Omen was not that good. Kind of meandering and predictable. However, the cinematography was nice.

(That’s a shot of Margaret and her roommate getting ready to hit the town. Our girl Maggie1 is trepidatious about going out in a dress she feels is too revealing, while her roommate applies some peer pressure for her to woman up.)

In addition to just having a great name, Nell Tiger Free is very good in the film, as are Bill Nighy and Ralph Ineson. But you spend most of your time with Nell so she is the reason to watch if you like good acting. Otherwise, skip.

  1. No one actually calls her this in the film.

Escapade

Chill Books, Review

I quickly read L.D. Smithson’s The Escape Room. It’s not worth the minimal time. It’s as light as a feather and has no content to match its convictions. It never commits to anything. It’s ostensibly about a group of eight people forced to compete to the death in reality TV show while giving us a look at the relationship of an older, kind of overbearing sister to her younger, more easygoing sibling. However, the work never explores any of this satisfactorily and it neither examines the problems with the pigeonholing of the younger sister as “scatty” nor the horror of being essentially forced into almost-gladiatorial combat with seven other people.

It’s not clever, it’s not interesting and it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it horror? Is it family drama? Is it just plain drama? It’s never observant enough of human behavior or extreme enough to warrant any reaction. Both the book and all the characters in it are so milquetoast that you want to call the novel and all the people in it “Obama.” The book feels like it was written by a committee who had seen Fincher’s Se7en with all the good parts edited out combined with a binge of Golden Girls and Sex in the City.

The prose — well, let’s not talk about that.

I rarely encounter a bad book that I read all the way through, but this one I did. I wanted to see what happened when the two sisters finally had their big confrontation that the book should’ve been building to. And you know what happened? Not a damn thing. I guess I fooled myself because even that encounter was an anticlimactic waste of time.

Do not recommend.