Inching Through Life

Film: Memoir of a Snail
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

One of the issues with Best Animated Feature specifically at the Oscars is that the winner is pretty much always going to be a movie for children. There are movies that are nominated that are clearly for adults, and this is a trend I like, even if I don’t always like the movie in question. It’s how we got nominations of films like I Lost My Body, Anomalisa, and Persepolis (and it doesn’t explain why Waltz with Bashir was robbed). Memoir of a Snail was never going to win this award, but I love that it got nominated, and it certainly partially makes up for the fact that Adam Elliot was denied a nomination for Mary & Max.

Make no mistake—while the Claymation looks like it would appeal to kids, Memoir of a Snail is clearly made for an adult audience. This is not merely for a couple of minor moments of animated nudity, but because of the adult themes—religious abuse, sexual kinks, suicide, and more. This is not a movie to sit the kiddies in front of while you go about your day. The bland color palette might be the first indication of this, but then again, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie exist.

Laura Palmer

Film: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on gigantic television.

This might well be the shortest review I have written for this site other than those I do in the monthly wrap-ups. There’s an inherent problem in looking at a movie like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The problem is that there is an inherent audience for this film, and you are either a part of that audience or you aren’t. Furthermore, you already know if you are in the audience for this movie or not. Did you watch the 1990s Twin Peaks television series? If you did, congratulations—this movie is for you. Have you not watched that series? You won’t have any interest in this.

In fact, the problem is even more significant. If you’ve watched Twin Peaks, you’ve almost certainly already seen Fire Walk with Me. The only reasons you haven’t seen this if you’ve seen the show are that you just finished the first two seasons of the show (I finished them on Thursday), or you were forced to watch the show by someone else and you didn’t like it, so the movie didn’t interest you. In any event, you’ve seen this, plan to see it in the immediate future, or have absolutely no interest in seeing it.

Naruto Runners

Film: Weapons
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

We’re at the time of year where people are starting to put together their year-end movie lists, both in general and in terms of specific genres. For some people, it’s also the time of year to put together lists of movies they were disappointed in. For whatever reason, it’s become quite trendy to list Zach Creggar’s Weapons on the list of disappointments for a lot of horror movie bloggers and commentators. I have to think that while some of that is likely honest, some of it genuinely feels like rage farming. Weapons goes in an unusual direction, certainly, and it might not be what people expected, but the seeming outrage I’ve seen from a couple of streamers really feels unbalanced.

The basic story is that one day, in the town of Maybrook, PA, 17 of the 18 children in the third grade classroom of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) don’t show up for school. Only Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) shows up for class. The 17 children are missing; parents of some of the houses check on their cameras and all of them confirm that at 2:17 in the morning, their children got up, left the house, and ran out into the street, all running off in the same direction, arms wide, not unlike Naruto.

The Pink Opaque

Film: I Saw the TV Glow
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on massive television.

There are times when I watch something, and I realize I am not the target audience. I felt this significantly with a number of Blaxploitation films from the 1970s. I felt it culturally when I watched Celine and Julie Go Boating. In a lot of cases, these are movies that I liked, but I felt like there was something there that was preventing me from fully getting the sense that the filmmaker intends. That’s definitely the case with I Saw the TV Glow.

What is the deal here? This is very clearly and very obviously a movie about someone coming to term with (allegorically in the sense of the movies) with being transgender. The film is very much about living a lie and living your own personal truth regardless of the consequences and despite the risks. I certainly have felt this way in some respects, like the world that we live in is broken and that I was supposed to be something other than what I am, but at least I feel at home in my own body. Because of this, while I can appreciate and understand I Saw the TV Glow, I don’t know that I can fully understand it at its deepest level.

What's Brutal is the Length

Film: The Brutalist
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on various players.

If you are me and you start watching The Brutalist, you take a step back when you hear the name of the main character, Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). For most people, that name doesn’t mean a lot, but for me, there’s an immediate connection. Comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father Guido Sarducci, wrote a couple of books where he played a character named Lazlo Toth. This version of Lazlo Toth wrote earnest (and ridiculous) letters to companies and famous people. Seeing someone with essentially the same name in a serious movie was a bit jarring.

It took me several days to get through The Brutalist. The version on HBO is truncated only in the sense that instead of a 15-minute intermission, there’s a 1-minute intermission. It’s still more than 200 minutes with the shorter intermission, and that’s a lot to ask from an audience for any film in one sitting. I do wonder about the necessity of the length. Film critic Mark Kermode tends to reference 2001 in a case like this—in that film, Kubrick takes use from the birth of humanity to the birth of a new species in about 2 ½ hours. In The Brutalist, we take nearly 3 ½ hours to look at the story of a fictional architect.

It's a Miracle!

Film: Wake Up Dead Man
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I genuinely enjoy the regularity of the Knives Out franchise. Based on the past decade, we’ll get a new film in the franchise around the end of 2028. The latest one, called Wake Up Dead Man hits all of the points that we got from the original Knives Out. The script is dynamite, the mystery is a good one and yet completely solvable (I guessed right), and the cast is a who’s who of modern Hollywood.

This time, and for the first time in three films, the person who is being falsely accused of a murder is a man, and a priest, no less. Former boxer and new Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) has been relegated to a backwater parish in upstate New York as his first official appointment as a priest. He is in the position of assisting Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks is prickly and demanding, abusive and rude. He’s also heading a cult of personality of local parishioners, all of whom have their own foibles and dependence on Wicks.

Maybe Androids Dream of Murder

Film: Companion
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on massive television.

I can’t say that Black Mirror has ruined science fiction, but it has certainly changed the perception of it a great deal. Modern science fiction that touches on themes of the dangers of technology and near-future cyberpunk feels like a Black Mirror episode. That’s definitely the case with Companion. This is a near-future story that is absolutely about AI and promised technology and exactly how it can go wrong.

This is also a case where some of the major plot points are clearly revealed in the trailer. Josh (Jack Quaid) and his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) go for a weekend get-together with friends. Included are couple Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage), Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri), and Kat’s boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend). It’s clear that Kat is not a fan of Iris, and also that Sergey is someone who doesn’t treat her very well. Sergey hints that he has connections to some dark and unsavory people; the amount of money he clearly has backs this up.