I don’t think I ever actually wrote about the original Happy Death Day, it came out in one of those periods when I hadn’t the energy for anything. Yeah, I actually have two and a half paragraphs about it sitting in the draft folder that constitutes my recycle bin. It was a fun and poppy flick. I compared it to other Groundhog Day x whatever genre movies and found it to be well placed in the pack.
Cold War opens on a sequence of two musicians travelling around Poland in a beat up van, recoding the folk music of those who had just survived the horrors of World War Two. They sit under on porches and in bars and around breakfast tables, inviting those who have recently lost so much to perform. Pass on the music of times torn from them.
So, as far as romantic heroes go, island pig farmer has gotta be roughly in the middle of the pack right? Like, it’s all the necessary parts of rugged and parochial but slightly elevated. Nobody wants to fall for the dullard with a field full of leeks. And a horse breeder would obviously be some sort of unbearable in the other direction. Nah, this is a man who can look after livestock, whose hands are probably calloused after a tough day out with the animals, but soft enough for you afterwards. Besides, shepherds are either boring or stoners and cows basically look after themselves.
I suppose we all have our gets. It don’t really matter how saccharine or whitewashy or manipulative queer historical fiction gets, I will always be onboard.
I’ll admit I’ve never been super into the whole masc side of the gay scene. It’s like, what you get if you take all the liberating aspects of queerness and infect that with the worst parts of toxic masculinity.
It’s been fun watching internet film contrarians talk about this movie. Mostly it’s reddit that comes up with all the worst takes but I’ve seen some actual respectable critics come up with some real strange criticisms. The best garbage I’ve read over and over again is that this film romanticises self harm. It’s about this girl Maddy whose immune system is so dysfunctional that to even leave her treated, airlocked, aseptic house would mean serious illness, possibly death.
I don’t have too much to say about From the Land of the Moon aside from how boring it is. Like, it’s real dull.
There’s something about wartime romance movies. Usually in this country it’s the Second World War. After some searching i found the last most recent one, the insipid 2004 joint Suite Française. A film, as they always are about the love affair between a French woman and this dashing Nazi officer. At least Ilsa, She Wolf… Continue reading Frantz: Love after the war
See, just when I was getting disillusioned a good film about straight people comes along. Maybe there is some worth in them. A Finnish film about a 1960s boxer’s training in the lead up to a world championship bout stealths its way into being the best love movie in a while. Mainly because what the… Continue reading The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki: Just lovely
If there’s one subject a British filmmaker needs to approach with caution nowadays its colonialism. I mean, sure, our history, and indeed our present, is full of shit that needs approaching with caution, but following Brexit, the subsequent rise in nationalist sentiment, and the belief among many of our elderly that a rapacious, destructive, grasping… Continue reading Viceroy’s House: A paean to colonialism
