Wow, it took fifteen years but we finally get another episode of Jackie Chan Adventures. The gratuitous swearing and unnecessary penis were a strange addition though. Sucker of souls war directed by Owen Sullivan from a script by Philip Gellat. This review will contain spoilers.
The next week is looking pretty sparse as far as films go so I’ll be throwing up reviews of the new animated Netflix anthology series from producers David Fincher and Tim Miller Love, Death & Robots. The shorts themselves are only like 10-15 minutes in length so it’s probably best you watch before reading, I’ll try my best but will usually end up being pretty loose with spoilers. Enjoy.
I think I underrated Florence Pugh when I caught Lady Macbeth back a few years ago. I think because its complicated relationship with race stood out to me so much that I kinda overlooked her central performance. There’s still tics of it that I can remember to this day, same with her bit part in that Liam Neeson train movie The Commuter. She’s gonna be in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women later this year and I cannot wait. She’s a great actor, I think she’s incredibly winning in this and once again I’m not gonna be able to talk about her much because the movie’s got a heck of a lot of other stuff going on. Her rise should be meteoric.
This movie got delayed a lot. After the first one the whole series did. When the second instalment of the franchise as part two of a trilogy it was supposed to be releasing in 2013, we saw it in 2014. This one was supposed to drop in 2016. It’s a shame really, if it had come out then it might actually have felt relevant.
Vice ends on a scene where we flash back to a focus group earlier seen determining that ‘climate change’ were a less credible threat than ‘global warming’. In it a liberal and a conservative start getting into an argument over the film’s credibility as a factual document. Off to the side, a young woman already painted as vapid, turns to the person next to her and comments that she can’t wait to see the the next Fast and Furious joint.
Mary Queen of Scots wants to be a big feminist picture. A brutal excoriation of the wrongs done to women, powerful before their time, brought down by men who cannot counteance their position. In truth I have little idea how historical a work it is, writer Beau Willimon (of House of Cards, among others) adapted the work from an acclaimed biography — but one senses that his tastes are a little too contemporary for the material.
Mortal Engines was like the YA book series with the best politics. Maybe it was tied with A Series of Unfortunate Events, but those books didn’t go too hard with praxis. These were books that were fervently anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist, written from a clearly defined Anarcho-Communist perspective. Sure, the conceit of autonomous, mobile city states is maybe a big hurdle to overcome — but to reflect a societal condition as fucked as late-capitalism takes some doing.
