After my previous films post, I continued watching the Musketeers films; with three viewings of each part, I understand almost all the plot now. I could probably write a long list of their flaws, or aspects that annoy me, and I just don’t care about any of them, I love those films so much. I’m now sceptical of any structural reason I give for disliking a film. I either like it or I don’t.
The Movie Teller (2023): 7.5/10
This was the opener to the Spanish Film Festival, and there was a pleasingly high ratio of trailers to ads for August Eyewear, made with the precision of German lens technology, prior to the film starting.
We’re in a saltpetre mining town in 1960’s Chile, where Dad works Monday to Saturday and takes the family to the movies on Sunday. He gets himself injured in a blast; unable to work and not qualifying for a pension from the mining company, money gets tight and the long, long saga of this family begins.
The film’s title comes from what is nominally the central part of the plot: with only enough money for one ticket a week, one child watches a film and recounts it at home to the family; the daughter is talented at this and ends up providing for the family by selling tickets to her movie tellings. But that feels like maybe a third of the film, in which a lot happens – the mother abandons them, and there’s murder, Pinochet. It keeps going on and on.
But eh, I liked it well enough, and it is quite distinctive in my memory.
La Syndicaliste (2022): 8/10
In 2011, Areva was a French majority-state-owned business covering all aspects of the nuclear energy chain, from uranium mining and enrichment through to nuclear power plants. Its then CEO was Anne Lauvergeon, who earlier in her career had been an aide to Socialist president François Mitterrand. Late in Sarkozy’s presidency, Lauvergeon was replaced as CEO by Luc Oursel. Oursel was party to secret negotiations involving Areva and Électricité de France for a joint venture with a Chinese company.
Maureen Kearney, union representative for Areva’s 50,000 workers, was given this information by a whistleblower from EDF. Fearing the loss of members’ jobs if construction and technology was transferred to China, she started lobbying deputies in the Assemblée nationale, trying to make the proposed deal public and get it blocked. Presumably as intimidation, she was attacked and raped, an Areva logo cut into her stomach.
La Syndicaliste, which has the English title The Sitting Duck for some reason, tells Kearney’s story, which is as much about her experience as a woman in the French justice system as it is about boardroom plots at Areva. In real life, she speaks French with an Irish accent; in the film she’s played by Isabelle Huppert, meaning that I was on the subtitles most of the time.
I can see why the cinema was almost empty for this, and it helps to have some knowledge of the French context. But I liked it, in a “had to concentrate and engage my brain” kind of way.
I don’t understand all the various corporate restructurings, but the uranium mining parts of Areva later got spun out into Orano, a company I sometimes have dealings with at work.
Top Gun (1986): 9/10
Hahahahaha, the opening chords of Danger Zone kicking in is an all-time great moment. I watched a lot of this with a big dumb grin on my face. The fighter jets are cool, and the soundtrack is incredible, even if Take My Breath Away gets played maybe two or three times more than would be optimal.
Cultural osmosis had taught me that Top Gun was about navy fighter pilots, but I didn’t know the meaning of the title, which is explained in introductory text: ‘Top Gun’ is a nickname for a US Navy program training fighter pilots in dogfighting. Fun fact from Wikipedia: “Quoting Top Gun while at the school incurs an immediate $5 fine, as it is seen as conflicting with the institute's atmosphere of professionalism.”
Is the action in the film realistic? Can an F-14 cover 110 miles in 30 seconds? It doesn’t matter, there’s no time for arithmetic.
Unfun fact from Wikipedia: a stunt pilot hired to hired to put a Tomcat into a flat spin couldn’t get out of the spin, and died in the crash. A grim parallel to the film’s emotional extremes.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022): 7.5/10
A lot of the sequel feels like a sad, aged copy of the original. The intro is more or less identical, and I actually moved my mouse to see the title, making sure that I’d clicked on the right film. They play football on the beach instead of volleyball; they sing Great Balls of Fire; maybe if you hadn’t watched the first film for a couple of decades, these would have been good nostalgia hits, but I’d watched it 24 hours earlier and my reaction was just, “I saw this yesterday.” And they’re not cool anymore – Tom Cruise is old now, and I don’t want to watch a movie to see people sending text messages.
Anyway the sequel does have its own story. A rogue state is building a uranium enrichment plant in a heavily-fortified valley, and they bring back Mav to train a group of elite fighter pilots on how to destroy it: a Death Star run except two fighters will have to hit the exhaust port only a few metres in diameter.
Anyway Mav’s a better pilot than the cocky young kids, and you know he’ll lead that mission. The action gets a little over the top, but they lean into it, all good fun. Here are two videos from former fighter pilots analysing parts of the film.
The Promised Land (2023): 8/10
It’s 18th century Denmark, and no-one has managed to turn the Jutland heath into farmland. Mads Mikkelsen, the Bastarden of the Danish title, wants to be the first, and gets permission from the Danish King to try. He’s just spent 25 years in the German army, and he has a secret idea that is one of my favourite plot reveals among all the films I’ve watched about agriculture.
Mads isn’t the most likeable character, but he’s better than a local sadistic tyrant who claims the land for himself, and it gets very murder-y. Enjoyable.
Un silence (2023): 8.5/10
Spoilers, I guess? I don’t like the narrative device of hiding information from the viewer that the characters we’re following know about, a film equivalent of a curiosity-gap headline. Based on a true story from Belgium, Daniel Auteuil plays a lawyer representing the families of murdered victims of a pedophile, but the lawyer himself is addicted to child porn and abused his nephew several decades earlier. The nephew now wants to press charges, and the lawyer’s wife (Emmanuelle Devos) is trying to talk him out of it. We gather from early on that the son will attempt to murder the lawyer.
Once the plot becomes clear, it’s a gripping watch, albeit with unpleasant subject matter. Other reviewers seem to have disliked watching minutes-long sequences of Devos driving a car, but it worked for me.
Kalki 2898 AD (2024): 6/10
I saw that this film had a 600-crore budget, thought “That seems pretty big for an Indian film”, and indeed it’s in the top one. It’s a three-hour post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi action epic which borrows from Hindu mythology, though my knowledge of that subject is essentially zero.
The plot is a lot; I don’t think it would spoil the film to read all the spoilers in the Wikipedia article. There’s a lot of dumb fight scenes, some pauses for dumb jokes (is this what they do in Marvel movies? I’ve heard about quips being a thing there), a funny droid, and an awesome theme song that hits great every time:
Not really my thing – it’s quite similar to Fury Road – but the cinema was doing a promotion of $8 tickets last weekend, and it’s decent value at that price.
I assume that the actors were dubbing themselves, even though I was watching the Telugu original. They often speak with a deep booming sound, and once or twice, when I finished a subtitle early, I noticed that the lip synching was lost.
Kinds of Kindness (2024): 8.5/10
I was well prepared for the new Yorgos Lanthimos film to be weird, and it was, though I wouldn’t say it was weirder than Poor Things. The same set of actors play different characters in three unrelated stories, shown one after the other. I’m not sure what adjective to use to describe the stories – Wikipedia suggests ‘absurdist’; my brain goes to ‘surreal’. They are not in the normal world, anyway.
Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, and Emma Stone play the main characters, their prominence varying from story to story. I liked Plemons’ performance in the second story the best, a man paranoid that his wife, who has returned home after being rescued at sea, has been swapped for someone else.
Often amusing, occasionally gross, I was entertained. Emma Stone driving like a maniac in the third story was a good recurring gag. Good colours.