Resurrection

Film: The Bride!
Format: Streaming video from HBO on Fire!

There are a couple of things I say pretty regularly here to the point where I’m not sure if I should keep saying them. One of them is that I genuinely want to like every movie that I watch, even when I suspect it’s not going to be good. With The Bride!, with or without the punctuation, there was added incentive to like the film. Any time a movie gets negative reactions because of the theme, the cast, or the director (see the recent controversy around The Odyssey), I go into it predisposed with the opinion that the attacks on it are probably nonsense. The Bride! got a lot of negative reactions, not a few of which regarded Maggie Gyllenhaal at the helm.

The reality, at least as I see it, is that this is a movie that isn’t sure what it wanted to be. It’s clearly a romance and there are clearly horror elements in it. Is it a feminist manifesto? A fever dream? A story of possession? An undead remake of Bonnie and Clyde? The problem is that it’s kind of all of these things, and because of that, it’s also kind of none of them.

Our Mother of Perpetual Sorrow

Film: The Lost Daughter
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I haven’t been putting up a lot of reviews lately, and I always have intention to change that. Life, work, all the rest get in the way. Here it is October and I still have nearly half a dozen Oscar films to finish up, which means getting through at least one more this month if I want to get done by the end of the year. So I picked The Lost Daughter for no reason other than it was one of the longer movies I had left, and I knew I was going to watch it eventually anyway. I went into this cold, knowing only that it earned Olivia Colman another Oscar nom. I like Colman, but it’s hard not to see her right now as one of the Oscar flavors-of-the-month.

The Lost Daughter is a slow movie, one that is contemplative, but not in a direction that is comfortable or easy. Leda Caruso (Colman) is on vacation in Greece. She is a noted translator and successful university professor. She has a run-in with a vacationing family, but then ends up redeeming herself when their young daughter goes missing at the beach. Leda finds the girl, but also steals the girl’s beloved doll for reasons that are initially unknown.