Marigold

Get this guy a shrink.

Weird, wicked and irradiated, i.e. the more Ghoul, the more fun. I considered the ridiculous Westworld to be collective cognitive dissonance and thus I didn’t expect much from Fallout. But hey, it not only doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s also pleasantly illuminating. The funny blend of creepy western, futuretro slapstick and narrative sci-fi has a cheerfully fitting tone grounded in the main aesthetic pillars of the games and creating its own origin story. Yeah, the first half is significantly better and the last three episodes, which suddenly start to form epic arcs, are a bit prone to throwing out clichés. But nothing fatal. The Ghoul and Norm are great characters, Lucy has potential and Maximus isn’t annoying. I’m very satisfied and I look forward to the next trek through the wasteland.

A violent nightmare that I dreamed for some unknown reason. Kind of like Children of Men from Wish. Garland somewhat mechanically adorns his shady road movie with random images of a broken America. A number of them are impressive, with powerful visuals and staging (mainly the scene with Jesse Plemons). The film manages to induce anxiety to the point of nausea from a cruel world that is not so far from The Walking Dead in its absence of morality and prevalence of brutality. But…the whole thing seems terribly gratuitous; for all of the questions that the film wants to raise, Garland’s work just shrugs its shoulders and wagers on another spectacular composition. The characters are flat and the ethics and psychology of the war reporters come across as very superficial research. There is little in the way of Nietzschean gazing into the abyss in this film, which paradoxically comes across as terribly thesis-based and illustrative, but it isn’t at all clear what its thesis is or what it actually illustrates. An impressive exercise in unclearly straddling the line between a skilfully made spectacle and a not so skilfully rendered metaphor of a divided country. It’s actually a reiteration of my problem with Garland, a maker of spectacular movies that are dull at their core.

Whoever expects an action spectacle and wicked thrashing will inevitably be disappointed, though I can’t remember the last time I saw a film that radiates such pure and palpable anger, or even rage. Dev Patel has filmed a somewhat fragile story about brutal revenge that, based on the myth of the monkey king, shakes a fist at contemporary India and its social chasms and injustices. Monkey Man is refreshing in that it doesn’t build up a macho avenger, but a character who has to harmonise his masculine and feminine sides in order to become the (monkey’s) fist of justice. The film nicely mythologises and works with the antithesis of the image of India as a land of light, fragrances and colours that we know from the dreadful Slumdog Millionaire. Patel goes all-in on both aspects. Intense acting, imaginative directing – the way the film inventively changes style and tells the same story twice reliably held my attention. In addition to that, I was emotionally touched by the motif of motherhood and the ensuing fragility of the modern-day Hanuman. The result? A film that economises on the action, but it doesn’t seem lacking. Like its protagonist, it works hard for its moments. Monkey Man knocked me out.

The creators of 3 Body Problem have the tremendous good fortune that the source material is packed with good ideas and piercing thoughts that hold up even in the banalising series version.  However, that’s still no reason to rejoice. Gone are the broad and engaging paradoxes/theories/disputations that were so faithfully preserved in the Chinese version. A few illustrations remain and they added some phrases that are supposed to sound cool but don’t actually say anything. The change of setting from China leads to a slightly strange lack of realism. Whereas authoritarian control of society is understandable under a communist regime, in the Western context the character of a cynical dandy who orders everyone around like an aging James Bond necessarily has a B-movie air about it. And there are more B-movie elements here. Rather than an adaptation of penetrating hard sci-fi, the whole thing comes across as a second-rate show about first contact with a few original ideas, which the series is unable to organically incorporate in any way. The variations on the book’s characters are also very problematic; particularly the catchphrase-spouting nerd played by John Bradley, who is reminiscent of Simon Pegg from Wish, and the horribly overacting Eiza González in the role of a sensitive prophetess of applied physics are extremely annoying. Benedict Wong as a Chinese detective from Manchester at least has a fine delivery, though even his character looks around for trash a bit too obviously. 3 Body Problem generally has the same problem that a number of Netflix projects have. There is a lot of utilitarian consideration for appealing to the broadest range subscribers while to some degree forgetting that in a good adaption, changes reinforce the dramatic/psychological impression of the whole and should fit together both conceptually and logically. In this respect, 3 Body Problem is reminiscent of a series based on muddled excerpts from the work of a slow student who has seen too many disaster movies.

It’s a running joke, but it’s appropriate. Another film that looks like it was made by the hacked Twitter account of a famous filmmaker. I expected some dry and stiff directing, and I got a truly large portion of it. From the first scene, Ethan absolutely misses the mark. Drive-Away Dolls is dumb, devoid of timing, with no point. The verbal ping pong between the annoying characters has none of the rhythm or nuance to which we are accustomed from the Coen brothers; rather, the unlikable characters juggle stiff phrases and dialects. The trademarks are here (coincidences, statues, a hallucinogenic intermezzo), but they’re so haphazardly put together, in a weak story no less, that this screwball comedy seems like a lesbian version of Dumb and Dumber, but without the humour. Furthermore, the whole thing is dated. A queer comedy in which the female protagonists are rather like male teenagers in their fondness for vulvas and penetration, Thelma and Louise castrating the patriarchy with tragic clumsiness and literalness. I feel that my favourite brothers have never stooped to this level and I strongly hope that they never will. Better to have five more Shakespeares from Joel, please!

Smartass n**** Vince and his ‘hood reflected from a typically intelligent angle. Unfortunately, one of the most modest and cleverest rappers on the scene is not as gifted a comedian as he is a musician and this socially critical showcase somewhat lets him down in its overweening ambition. When it veers into mild surrealism in the second half, it’s good, unpredictable and entertaining...but Vince is not the next Jordan Peele.

The Iron Claw tries terribly hard to give the impression that the holds it employs and the punches that it throws are real. Thanks to the motif of wrestling as painful theatre that is only a spectacle but still manages to fully absorb and scar both viewers and the participants alike, it even inventively plays with the meta-illusion of wounds, which the film inflicts on the viewer. In order for this illusion to be perfect, however, Durkin would have to as skilled a screenwriter as he is a director. But he’s not. Family relationships dissolve in his hands, the individual storylines are half-baked, characters somewhat randomly disappear and the grand words and literal symbolic scenes do not create the illusion of completeness. Efron put on a lot of muscle, but his acting is squishy and flat. He can’t hold the film together with his turnip head of a cursed good guy who is stronger than he thinks. The concentration of tragedy due to unsatisfying ellipses may ultimately arouse more cynicism than participation, and this whole sweaty routine about fragile masculinity finally pins itself to the mat with its silly ending.

Yes, Spaceman is slow, deliberate and meditative in the manner of art film, but it is also flat, full of therapeutic and visual clichés, Paul Dano’s sleepy recitations and the marginal acting of Adam Sandler, whose sadness and bags under his eyes I don’t believe for a moment. I can say the same about the directing of Johan Renck, who this time seems more like Stakka Bo pretending to be an artsy filmmaker. The film wants to be a melancholic meditation on closeness and distance, on abandonment, a modern-day Odysseus in space. However, it much more gives the impression of being the longest and most annoying commercial for a fictional Czech telephone company that you can rely on. My irritation with this film grew with every other scene in which I sensed the potential for a melancholic psychological sci-fi flick. And what did I get instead? A dull bit of would-be art that doesn’t work. In space, everyone hears your banality.

A pungently toxic romance between a village Lady Macbeth and the submissive guy next door, who in terms of type is a reference to the social realism that I miss here. Despite being monsters, these two characters have a surprising number of layers and if one approaches them from a cynical distance, Mr. and Mrs. Stodola is actually, and primarily, a story about the turbulent marriage of a dominant woman and a man who devotedly loves her, but cannot handle her. Yes, we find ourselves treading on the ethically thin ice of romanticising unacceptable characters, but there is nothing cheap in this empathy, because it is derived from a good character study and precise directing. Furthermore, the dramaturgical switch to procedural description of the murders in the last third of the film works superbly as a contrast to the “romantic storyline”. Lucie Žáčková’s performance is one of the best seen here since the revolution and the effective chemistry between her and the peculiarly soft Jan Hájek is the driving force of the film as a whole. Mr. and Mr. Stodola is the Czech answer to Dahmer and, in my opinion, the best domestic film in a long time.