Monster (2023): 8/10
A Japanese film showing the same story told from three perspectives, one after the other. Apparently some sort of classroom bullying, first as seen by the mother, then by the teacher, and finally resolving in a direction full of spoilers.
I think it all holds together! It’d be an interesting re-watch.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011): 6.5/10
This is silly and entertaining, the balance a little too much on the silly for my liking. There was another Apes movie soon to be released when I watched this, and I was wondering if it was worth seeing; Scott Mendelson had been telling me that these films were very popular. I’ll pass.
I’d watched the original Planet of the Apes long ago, and remember liking it a ordinary amount. Rise is a sci-fi-ish rebooted prequel. The plot constraints – apes must end up speaking English and taking over the world – ensure that the science is pretty stupid, and I couldn’t bring myself to engage with the film on its intended level.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015): 5/10
This is what heaps of people call the greatest action film of all time? It’s boring! All action sequences, nothing to make me care about why the characters were doing all these stunts. This was another film that I watched because of an upcoming release, and I’ll be skipping Furiosa as well.
I haven’t seen the original Mad Max films, but it would surprise me if they provided enough meaning to make me feel anything about Fury Road. Do the people who watched this just like big trucks?
The post-apocalyptic dystopian setting is interesting enough, I just wish an engaging story had been written for it.
The Favourite (2018): 8.5/10
I’d seen tweets saying that Emma Stone was going to be in two more films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Having enjoyed Poor Things, I thought I’d go back to the origin of this sprawling Lanthimos-Stone cinematic universe, preparing myself for something extremely weird.
But in fact The Favourite is quite straightforward. It’s the olden days; England is at war with France; Olivia Colman is Queen Anne; Rachel Weisz is a historical figure I hadn’t heard of who uses her position close to the Queen to wield political power; Emma Stone is another historical figure I hadn’t heard of who becomes Weisz’s rival with ambitions of personal gain.
It’s often amusing, and – I don’t know how filmmaking works, but it does the thing where it makes me intrigued and glued to the screen even when not much has happened. Maybe it falls away a little towards the end.
The whole thing feels very well crafted. One scene involved an alarming couple of seconds in breach of good firearm safety practices; it quickly passed without incident or comment, and I was tickled by the misdirection.
Fisheye lenses and ducks are elements also seen in Poor Things.
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (2023): 9.5/10
The Three Musketeers: Milady (2023): 9/10
For better or worse – better, judging by all the reviews that are less positive than mine – I was completely unfamiliar with the story. For a few years after undergrad, I read a decent amount of 19th century French literature, but I was going for more high-brow fare than Dumas’s adventure stories. It wouldn’t shock me to learn that I was exposed to the Musketeers in some form during childhood, but my only remaining memories are the “All for one” cry and the names, a pronunciation of “dar-tag-nuhn” pre-dating my high school French. Today my French is good enough to often reconstruct what I’ve heard after reading the English subtitles.
Anyway I didn’t always know who the characters were or why they were trying to kill one another. The action, portrayed with realism, is often fanciful; characters seemingly die but survive with no explanation. The plot sometimes jumps around disjointedly. I loved every minute of it. Terrifically entertaining, a wildly fun journey, a lot of horse riding and sword fighting. The music would tell me when it was dramatic even if I didn’t know what was happening.
The two parts are of roughly equal quality; I only mark the second part, which is full of edge-of-your-seat action and drama, down a touch because I was expecting something more feelgood.
Mildly interesting:
Despite me usually relying on the subtitles, the snippets of dialogue that are most prominent in my memory are in French.
I watched Part I in an almost empty theatre. Part II was an early preview screening1 and it was reasonably full. Were there really more jokes in the second movie, or was it just that I heard laughter more?
Louis Garrel reminded me more of René Descartes than Louis XIII.
One of the trailers was for The Count of Monte Cristo, which must be close to the theoretical maximum of how well-targeted a movie advertisement can be.
I dug up my Livre de Poche edition of the book from out of the box I was storing it in. Seven hundred pages of French is a little daunting, and I don’t know if I’ll give it a serious go, but I’ll watch the films again for sure.
As opposed to the multiple screenings at the French Film Festival earlier this year, which I skipped. The official release date for Australia is 6 June. I don’t understand movie distributions.