We all loved Gravity didn’t we? We all loved 127 Hours? (Though I think we might have forgotten that one.) Like a lot of these damn things, Helping Hand steals the most surface-y elements of the two without actually taking into consideration why. I needn’t explain the plot, if you have literally any idea at all about those two films, you’d be able to write it yourself.
Today sees the second instalment on our series reviewing the shorts of Love, Death & Robots. I’ve decided to put the writing and directorial credits up top as it’s probably best to keep an eye throughout the run. Three Robots is directed by Victor Maldonado & Alfredo Torres from a script by Philip Gelatt.
Literally one of the first scenes in On the Basis of Sex is a love scene — as though the film wants to remind you that the octogenerian Supreme Court judge fucks. It’s got an odd structure: spending ten minutes profiling her time at Harvard Law School, ten hunting for jobs in New York, and the rest on the tax law case she takes on while a professor — her first as a future women’s rights attorney.
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.
Clint Eastwood always looks like he’s wearing shoes two sizes two small nowadays. In The Mule he casts himself as a ninety year old failed horticulturalist who — out of a misplaced sense of pride — instead of turning to the family he abandoned years before, starts running drugs in order to make a living. His perpetual irascibility serves him well, he seems like a man that it just ain’t worth the time to fuck with.
About halfway through my screening of Stan and Ollie, someone sitting behind me said — in reference to the antics of the leads’ respective wives — ‘These bloody women.’ A strange reaction to have, I thought, given that they’re the best part of the film. I mean, the tale of Laurel and Hardy’s farewell tour of the UK is mostly pleasant enough, but lacks definition without a meaningful external lens through which to view them. Up until that point you’re just watching two talented actors do a perfectly serviceable impression of two others.
Just imagine being Rachel McAdams for a second.
