Just the tonic I needed this week. Every now and again cinema just really delivers. Josh O’Connor is sublime here, as is his linen suit. Quietly and yet unrelentingly romantic, it is elliptically punctuated with oneiric imagery that foregrounds the turmoil within Arthur’s psyche. One to rewatch and reinterpret through the years.
5th or 6th watch – first time in cinema.
One of my first cinema loves, and I fell in love anew seeing it on the big screen with an audience of God’s own prototypes – too weird to live and too rare to die. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see this film and then walk across the street to my favourite bar, which takes its name from this story: Bat Country. A flash in the pan of its ingredients, it’s another film that I can’t imagine ever not loving.
Tremendous cinematic fun while you’re watching (in IMAX, anyway). More enjoyable still if you don’t pause to wonder why the white guy is always teaching the black guy in these stories, or why F1’s “first female technical director” (in quotes because they say it four times) only gets over the line when that same male sprinkles his magic knowledge on her. ALL THAT ASIDE, this proves my theory that you can paint by numbers so long as you aren’t boring.
It’s well documented that “beautiful and charismatic people being beautiful and charismatic on the coast of France” is one of my favourite film genres, and this slots into that genre nicely. With a title that translates to “hello sadness” you’d be forgiven for expecting the same sadness that was relentlessly foreshadowed in the 1958 Jean Seberg adaptation, but we don’t really say hello to the sadness here so much as we recognise it as it passes by. Contextually and tonally, this is best.
3rd watch. A favourite.
I’d need a few pages to list everything I love, but here’s a start:
A foundational concept of phenomenology is “returning to the things themselves” and engaging with them as they are, not as we subjectively perceive them to be. A lazy form of film criticism describes a movie as being flawed because it’s not the movie the critic wanted to be viewing. I was unironically hyped for this movie because I wanted to see some android carnage. It’s here, but l wanted more.
Am I at fault? Probably.
At least my 5th viewing; first in cinema.
A film about which it is impossible for me to be objective, so entangled are my initial impressions of it with those heady moments of falling in love with The Girl, my persistent social anxiety, and my troubled relationship with my family. As I age and mature, I experience it in ineffable swells of emotion.
“Here we go,” indeed.
It’s a quirk of some Australian horror that it tries to both scare you and also entice you to visit the Gold Coast. But at the end of the day, one can’t forget that everything here wants to kill you, including Jai Courtney (who is the most consistently fun part of this movie). Alternatingly tense and cheesy (a compliment). Hassie Harrison is the Final Girl dreams are made of.
Somehow both too much and too little. Breathlessly (and repeatedly) tries to inject meaning into things you will never care about even as it ignores things you’d desperately like to know more about. The stunts were great, as always, and I do enjoy Ethan Hunt vs The Entity as a parable for Tom Cruise (practical filmmaker) vs AI [in moviemaking] but even that high-minded interpretation is “too much” for a movie that should, above all, be something this rarely manages to be: fun.
Second watch.
This one wisely backseats the mystery killer element — far from a source of horror, the existence of a killer is mostly regarded by the characters as an inconvenience — and instead leans into its multiverse conceit to give us more of what we liked the first time, albeit in a novel flavour. If we must have time loops and multiverse shit, make it this.