Booksmart

Booksmart is a great movie that's unfortunately been lumped in with Judd Apatow's output. I saw it described as "a female version of  Superbad" or something similar in a lot of places. And now here as well, I guess. It put me off watching it for the longest time.
 And I get it; Superbad was successful, and it's not too bad a comedy, probably because Apatow didn't write or direct it. But it's still a completely unfair comparison to Booksmart; Olivia Wilde's movie is much better crafted, and written. While it's still kind of a shaggy dog story, it doesn't have that formless, mostly filler feel that most Apatow or post-Apatow comedies have.
 If nothing else, it's got an eye for good shots and interesting scenery. I mean, look at this interior shot of a cab:

And it is fucking hilarious. A lot of the time; The joke hit ratio is so good here. Unless any part of the phrase 'inclusive, female-led, queer-friendly teen sex comedy' puts you off, this is as close to an universally-likeable movie as I can think of. 

 It's not a plot-heavy film. BFFs Amy and Molly have spent their four years in high-school in voluntary abstinence from any form of partying or fun to concentrate on their grades. On graduation eve, Molly discovers that some of her classmates have made it to good universities, despite being less than model students. So off she goes on a misguided quest to live it up before graduation, and drags Amy along with her.
 A few vignettes follow on their quest to make it to the graduation party; a near-empty yacht party, a murder mystery dinner, and other misadventures - your typical 'one crazy night' story, but one where each of the scenes sheds some light on one secondary character or the other and reinforces a gentle 'maybe don't judge?' messaging.

 The acting is grand, with the two central characters (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein) giving great, very empathetic performances -they have a great comedic chemistry going on- and a ton of memorable characters in the periphery. Billie Louder as an omnipresent weirdo goofball one-percenter is a highlight.
 And yeah, lessons will be learnt, maybe its characters will grow up a little; Another trick from Superbad and Apatow's book, but here it doesn't come out of the blue or sound preachy; it's baked into the movie's premise, and developed from scene to scene. The movie comes by its plot points honestly. It earns any formulaic beats by carefully building up to them, keeping its characters coherent, and being damn funny every step of the way.

Q - The Winged Serpent

 You could always count on Larry Cohen to have an interesting take on a story. Take this movie - a straightforward tale of a flying monster snatching people from New York Skyscrapers. And the Aztec Priest ritually killing people to... summon it? control it? And the policemen trying to catch either one of them. And the petty criminal goofball trying to find his way throughout a few messes. See what I mean?

 Cohen's scripts are normally a little smarter, a little weirder than they would ever need to be. There's also usually a satiric edge and a whole lot of his personality showing through. I saw this movie and a bunch of other Cohen films when I was a kid and I've always had a soft spot for them, even though I thought they were a bit cheesy. Screw that. They're awesome, and this one might be my favorite.

 In any case: there's a monster haunting the New York skyline, taking and killing victims from high rises. You don't get a clear view of it for a while - just point of view shots (there's a lot of great aerial photography in this movie): a flash of beak, a quick shot of a giant chicken leg snatching someone, some great (very fake-looking) scenes where the beast's animated shadow falls on buildings or a bridge. The monster duly makes a full appearance for the climax, and it's a beaut - a winged, beaked, claymation brontosaur, making diving runs at the Chrysler tower while a ton of policemen fire from within (with tracer fire, no less!). It's all great.

 Until that point the film goes mostly monsterless. It spends some time on the police investigation - David Carradine as a detective going around and figuring out that the monster is actually the ancient god Quetzalcoatl, and that a separate series of grisly murders might somehow be related. And that'd be enough for a normal movie to chew on, but here most of the runtime actually follows a petty criminal (Michael Moriarty) around until he accidentally stumbles onto the monster movie plot.

 Moriarty is the heart and soul of the film, a fully fleshed-out oddball for an oddity of a movie. He's constantly surprising, and his actions seem to hijack the script for a while. He starts out agreeing to be the wheelman for a jewelry store robbery, botches a piano playing audition because he scats while he plays, then botches the robbery when he loses the loot while trying to escape on foot. He's an ex-junkie with loose morals and a huge chip on his shoulder, and the script doesn't shy away from making him a scumbag ('At least you're not hitting me any more,' his girlfriend says at one point.)

 His douchebaggery comes to the forefront when he realizes he can leverage some knowledge to blackmail the whole city. You see, while he was running away from the scene of the crime, he stumbled upon the Winged Serpent's nest high up on the crown of the Chrysler Building. So when he's arrested for the robbery, he realizes he can use that information as a get out of jail card, and maybe extort some money on the side.

 Moriarty's character making his demands to a room full of incredulous city officials makes for a great scene (Richard Roundtree, who plays one of the detectives, is taken out of the room before he can bash his face in.) It's also nothing like that you'd ever expect from a movie like this coming in, which is the beauty of the Larry Cohen filmography. Anyhow, once there's an agreement then the movie is free to go into full carnage mode, with the previously mentioned attack on the flying monster.

 It's not a perfect movie, but it's imperfect by design. It has a nervous, restless energy that I find irresistible. It's a bit rough, overstuffed and the pace is irregular as hell, but the jokes - all of them delivered deadpan - are so good. I especially like when a cop on a stakeout poses as a mime/juggler, with makeup, a hat for donations and everything; when they need to run and get into a car to chase a subject, he pointedly grabs the hat. "How much did you make?" - the other cop asks - "Not much... the bird must be bad for business."

 But that's just one in so many memorable exchanges. Moriarty has tons of them, and so does Carradine. So many counts of cool weirdness; As with so many of the better B-movie out there, the filler here is as good as the mayhem.

Thor 4

 Thor IV, or, to use its proper name MCU Phase 4 episode 6: Marvel's Thor 4 (the 4 is silent): Love and Thunder, is the direct sequel to the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. It directly includes elements of Guardians of the Galaxy, Immortals*, and of course the previous Thors.

 Other than that, it's pretty stand-alone!

 I talk shit about it, but honestly, at this point whoever is going to watch this would have already watched at least some of the marvel stuff - it's a weird place to be, but them's the breaks, right? The movie itself does a good job of giving you a very short (and pretty funny) catch up of what went on outside the main Thor series- it sort of, kind of handwaves it away, which is exactly the right take. Coming in having watched only the previous Thor movies wouldn't be the best viewing experience, but... well, the Marvel business model isn't going away any time soon. It leans the most on the first Thor movie, and otherwise does its own thing, which is great. It's got an arc and a semblance of themes, and it all revolves around Thor. Which is a long-winded way to say that it's not a repeat of this year's Dr Strange.

I never do get to mention these two, which is a horrible injustice. Awesome, and mythologically correct.

 So after the events of the awful, terrible, shitty, not very good 'Thanos does dumb shit' crapfests, Thor's recovered from his haha, depression is funny fatsuit episode, but feels a bit adrift. He's hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy (don't worry, they're only guesting for the prologue) serving as a sort of tactical nuke they can point at stuff they want to die. Basically, he's trying to think of himself as more of a weapon than anything else. Then he gets a warning from an old acquaintance that there's a dude going around the universe killing gods (said dude is played by Christian Bale, and his backstory is the first thing we see in the movie).
 Thor bids farewell to the Guardians (in a particularly unfunny scene that was featured prominently in the trailers) and goes his own way. Soon he's reunited with co-protagonist and old flame Jane Foster.

 If I have to be honest I find that Jane (played by the great Natalie Portman) is the only memorable, engaging  female character in the MCU (sorry Gamora and blue sister): socially awkward, enthusiastic and very funny. In the time since she and Thor went their own ways, she contracted cancer and found it could be held back by wielding Thor's old hammer, Mjolnir, in the process gaining his lightning powers. Together with Valkyrie and Korg (from Thor 3) they set out to stop the god killer's plan to break the universe. The usual.

 I like the Thor movies because out of all the MCU they're the ones that are the most allowed to exist as pure comedies. They're goofy larks- the first one was a fish out of water comedy, and the third is filled to the brim with silly sight gags and jokes, to the point where nothing was taken seriously. Oh, and they tried to make the second one more serious and it was kind of crap... but still had some great jokes.
 This one is a direct descendant from Ragnarok, and it's much more willing to be ridiculous. It's a shame, then, that it's not quite as funny - I really didn't find a lot of  the jokes as hilarious as the film clearly did.

 The plot is ok. It's a very basic story made complicated by MCU cruft and a lot of digressions, and a lot of its heft comes from a soap-opera-ish interweaving characters that have been established throughout the series. Very comic book. In this specific case it works because the principals are ridiculously likeable and most of the events reflect on or relate to Thor's existential crisis. Also, the jokes actually slow down in the last act, letting the story breathe a little.

 The visuals vary a lot. The first few battles are your standard CGI fest, and is vey much in the typical uninteresting MCU house style. But there's a couple of visual flourishes on later scenes that are pretty cool, and by the end they've fabricated an excuse to go (mostly) black and white for some real excellence in the biff! blam! pow! scenes. It's like there's at least one FX team that Marvel farms out its action scenes to that fail to get the memo to make the action as forgettable as possible.
 All the fights against the God Killer are good, as well - he's just a cool visual villain, all rags and shadows. Not actually a good villain, unfortunately, he's too simple and gets too little screen time for that. They waste his big monologue in a pretty bad scene, but he at least gets a cool sendoff.

 Finally, given how many feces I've thrown at the Russo brothers, it'd be remiss of me not to mention that it's got a world-changing wish plot point that's just as dumb as the whole Thanos thing. If anyone had said 'wait, maybe we can workshop it a little?' before making it... well, the movie would be ruined, but it's really glaring that no one involved acts as any half-intelligent person would. At least in this case those involved are dimwits or in a pretty bad place psychologically, all acting against a (perceived) time limit. Unlike with The Eternity Stones, this is not a years/centuries-in-the-making plan and it's got extenuating circumstances. I'll allow it.

 Is the movie any good? At this point, I honestly kind of don't know anymore. It's a mess, made harder to judge because how damn weird these things have become compared to more traditional movies. I enjoyed it, but it's probably safe to say it's only really good for an MCU film, and just OK- fun, but uneven, clunky and kind of overlong film in and of itself. It's cute as all hell, it's got a lot of warmth for its characters, and a bit more thought behind its themes than you'd expect from this sort of thing - in other words, director Taika Waititi's sensibilities have filtered through, which is not always a given. And it's got some stunning visuals, which at this point was also not something I was expecting going in.
 I'm just not fully in its target audience of people who buy into the broader Marvel thing and are onboard with their comic-book plot structures and conventions, and less so in this case because this one is even more aimed at kids than usual. Which is a weird thing to say about a movie that starts with a little girl dying of dehydration in her father's arms, and has more (many more) than one mention of orgies.

* I was kidding that you need to watch Immortals for this. No one does. Some of the big guys from that get a cameo, nothing else; but you know Disney's going to shoehorn them somewhere at some point.

Censor

 There's been a few exploitation and '70s style extreme gore throwbacks over the years, but Censor is the first genre movie I've watched that centers around and is ultimately about the UK's Video Nasty panic. It was a political and media circus pitched by the usual bunch of reprobates (it rhymes with gories) and their usual cheerleaders in the media that basically laid blame for all of society's ills on a list of fringe extreme horror films. It's an attack on society, won't you think of the children, etc etc.

 The way I understand it is that in the dawn of the VHS/Beta era films that were refused a classification on cinemas, or never sought it out, could go straight to home video without any oversight; there they could be prosecuted for obscenity, but many productions chanced it anyways. A big moral panic was launched in the mid-eighties that caused a regulation board to be established, but lists of forbidden nasties were maintained (some of the films were released later with cuts) and held a grip on public imagination for a long time. I mean, I knew about them, and the associated illicit tape trade, and I was living in another country at the time. Of course, we used the lists as a guide of stuff to watch, but hey.
 It's a really interesting subject, and a text-book example of political and media scare mongering, including the focus on the children.

 As a foreigner, Censor's timeframe is a bit hard to work out; there's a news item about the miner's strike, which would date this to 1985 at the latest, I think? But that's the year the censor board would have been established, and their operation seems pretty well established in the film. There's a (fictional?) plot point involving Demented, which would place this after 1987, when it was (re)released with cuts; So... dunno, and in the end it doesn't really matter; it seems to be a pretty loose take. Its writer/director was born in 1982, for fuck's sake.

 I'm going to avoid going into specific plot points, but it's hard to keep talking about this without inadvertently spoiling anything. So be warned.

 The protagonist and titular Censor, Enid, works for the BBFC - the agency in charge of evaluating films, giving them an age rating, and suggesting cuts (though this is blurred in the film - it seems to imply they make the cuts themselves). She's a mousy sort, tightly buttoned down, which... yeah, this is not a subtle movie. Enid's a true believer, someone who thinks what she does is making a difference, and also the type of person who would be worn down by what I might jokingly call a dream job (jokingly; there's a pretty harrowing scene where she and a co-worker have to watch a long rape scene; focus is kept on their reaction.)

 The situation at work is stressful, and on a personal level a chat with her parents introduces a childhood trauma: her sister went missing under mysterious circumstances under her watch, and Enid, who remembers nothing of the incident, is still looking for closure. So when a nasties director specifically asks for her to evaluate his new horror movie, and the movie seems to echo the few memories she has of her sister's disappearance, things take a dark turn.

 It's an effective and tense story, and a fun ride while it lasts*. I have some issues with it, but the execution is good to hold it up even if the destination is a bit underwhelming.

 The budget is pretty low, but well spent with convincing period locations and good actors. And they have some great material to work with - the dialog is sharp, well observed, and fun.

 As for the gore, there's some pretty satisfying bloodletting for a psychological thriller - more Dario Argento than Tom Savini, although there's a neat little reference to Evil Dead 2. The use of the VHS video format and old horror movie conventions (as filtered through a more modern lens, much like Mandy) is fun, as well.

 It's all highly allegorical, so if that sort of thing bothers you you can safely stay away. The message is pretty well woven into its plot, but I did ultimately find the lack of subtlety and surprises disappointing as it built into a crescendo at the end that slightly soured me on the film. But not enough to not recommend it.

 

*: eighty-three minutes - one minute shorter than Beavis and Butthead do the Universe!

Beavis and Butthead do the Universe

 Beavis and Butthead, for eighty-something minutes. It's exactly what you'd expect: two very dumb, very horny teens laughing at dick jokes for most of the runtime, plus a fish out of water plot that plucks them from the 90s and deposits them in this year of our lord 2022, plus some straight men and women baffled by their antics. So you get very basic innuendo and jokes about smartphones.

 The movie is kind of one-note and extremely dumb... by design. If you've never had the pleasure of Messieurs Beavis and Butthead's company, well, the trailer is more than enough to give you an idea whether you'll like it. There are some tiny bits that aim a little higher (including a surprisingly sweet ending) but most of the time it's perfectly happy to affectionately wallow in the protagonists' mindset. As it should.

 So I don't think there's a lot I can meaningfully say about it... I thought it dragged a little, but it's a lot of fun.

 Heheheh, I said butt.

Odd Thomas

 Dean Koontz is an weird novelist. I've read a couple of his books and enjoyed them, thought they were a bit cheesy, and proceeded to forget almost everything about them; I know I've read Watchers, for example, but the few things I remember from it are from the movie, not the book. I mostly remember his stuff struck me as being a bit less horror, more fantasy adventure.

 I haven't read any of the Odd Thomas books, but going from its 2013 adaptation... yeah, doesn't look like I need to change my mind.

 As directed by Stephen Sommers (he of Deep Rising and the first couple of Mummy Movies), Odd Thomas is a horror comedy about a guy with psychic powers (Anton Yelchin) who gets pulled into a race against time to prevent some horrific events. It's pretty similar to The Frighteners (but less successful with its horror) or John Dies at the End (but less successful as a comedy and a lot less weird.) It's fine. It's fun. Perfectly enjoyable, with some cool ideas, a handful of good scenes, and at least one clever twist.

 Odd (that's actually his name) lives in the small town of Pico Mundo, CA, where he works as a fry cook with a sideline as a supernatural investigator - we first see him finding a serial killer with help from the ghost of one of the victims, and then chase him down and bring him to justice (turns out, he's done this enough that he's gotten pretty good at fighting.)

 One thing that's interesting for this sort of story is that the guy is pretty universally beloved. There's a couple of throwaway lines intended to make him seem a bit of an outsider, but pretty much all the characters in the movie either adore him or are assholes. This goes double for the police chief (Willem Dafoe!) who not only trusts Odd implicitly and is endlessly patient with his phone calls even while he's trying to get it on with his wife, but is also willing to do a spot of cover up so Odd's psychic abilities remain a secret.

 Odd doesn't just see dead people. He also senses spirits no one else can see, which kicks the plot into gear when he starts seeing bodachs swarm into his neighborhood - they kind of look like ghostly, goopy, bug-like mashups of humanoid skeletal things that skitter all over the place - at one point one of them splits into several others; it's a cool creature design! The bodachs of Scottish folklore were kid snatchers, but seeing one of them was supposed to be an omen of doom, so it tracks with their use here. As Odd explains, they can sense when something bad will happen, and come to feed on it. So their being there in such numbers can only mean bad things.

 A cool touch is that he can't let the bodachs know that he can see them. There are a few good scenes of Yelchin pretending not to see stuff that his character can see but he (the actor) can't. A wrinkle on the usual reacting to green screen playbook.

 The rest of the movie is Odd trying to work out what apocalyptic event will happen to get the bodachs all riled up. It all leads to a potentially horrifying event with many real-world parallels in the US, but it's defanged to be consistent with the rest of the movie. It's a shame, because I would have kind of loved to see this sort of movie deal with that type of more mundane horror a bit more honestly, but it really wouldn't fit Odd Thomas's relentlessly upbeat tone.

 About that tone- unfortunately, it can get a bit grating. The protagonist keeps a constant narration going, and when he's quiet, the on-screen characters feel the need to fill the silence, or else a cheesy blues riff rushes in to fill the void. It's almost manically breezy, and the script isn't always up to the task; Lots of forced quips and character moments that don't quite land successfully; the poor girlfriend character gets saddled with a lot of them. Shit gets quirky fast.

 Sommers is pretty good here, fortunately, especially when he takes a deep breath and reins in his instincts a little. Most of the scenes with the bodachs are at least a little creepy and well done, and the action beats are well handled (the fight against an angry poltergeist is a highlight.)

 He does overreach his budget often, resulting in some spectacularly dodgy CGI, but at this stage that seems to be one of his directorial trademarks even when he does have the money. When the imagery is supposed to be unreal, it works pretty well. I'm kind of angry this guy was kind of relegated to the sidelines of Hollywood, while Roland Emmerich can still get semi-big budget films greenlighted.

Men

 Men is Alex Garland's new surrealist/psychodrama horror thingamajig. Shouldn't need to say that if you're in the 'keep politics out of my movies!' crowd, you probably want to sit this one out. It's also a proud example of what some horror fans complainingly refer to as 'elevated horror;' If a film being produced by A24 rings warning bells to you, you might also want to stay the hell away.

 Harper is a Londoner fleeing the city for the countryside after an initially unexplained domestic incident with her husband. She's rented a country house for a couple of weeks, and as she starts trying to relax, she's accosted in different ways by a bunch of different Men. All of them wearing Rory Kinnear's slightly altered face as if this were a '90s Eddie Murphy movie.

 Each Men has his own flavor of what kids today would call toxic masculinity, depending to which institution/role they map to. Harper's landlord -a country bumpkin who hilariously channels the same stereotype Alan Partridge plays off of, and is described as a 'very specific type'- treats her like a delicate flower and has no respect for boundaries, the policeman is quietly, judgementally dismissive, the priest feels entitled to her body because he's tempted by her, a kid to her time, etcetera.
 But worst of all is the naked weirdo who first stalks her while she walks in the woods, and then follows her home. He keeps mutating throughout the movie, and is explicitly tied to the green man, a pagan symbol of natural cycles; more grist to build your interpretation(s) out of.

 It doesn't make a lot of sense to dive any more into the plot of the film because that's not really what's important here. There's a progression/escalation of incidents and a complex chain of symbolism and imagery that end up building a consistent picture of how emotional abuse can affect victims even after the abuse itself is safely in the past, but no clear-cut explanation of anything will be forthcoming.

 The film doesn't skimp on the horror front, including some... it doesn't really qualify as body horror, I think, because it happens to the 'monsters' and not anyone you're meant to identify with. But it's definitely body-horror adjacent and it's a gruesome delight to watch. I'd be very surprised if anything tops Men's final sequence this year for intensity and sheer batshit insanity.

 In fact, there are a lot of indelible, very bold images here - some of them audacious enough to the point of being laughable. From a technical standpoint the movie is a marvel, with some truly beautiful cinematography and an expert ratcheting up of tension and a pervading sense of dread. 

 So It works as a horror movie even as it never builds up to a 'proper' resolution. Still, there are a lot of elements that weave together satisfyingly to form a... well, not any sort of traditional narrative, but more of a web of meaning that you can pick ideas out of. Can't say I didn't get frustrated with it at points but I did enjoy it, and the more I think about it the more glad I am I watched it.

The Princess

 I have a couple of friends who are, shall we say, not best pleased about more or less current pop culture developments (to varying degrees). You probably know the type: the ones that complain because all films these days are virtual feminist manifestos, trying to turn our children into transexuals, or part of whatever liberal agenda they want to rail against. People who use woke* as an insult.

 I'm not saying that they don't have any grounds to stand on, obviously. Things have undoubtedly changed; Stuff that just wasn't shown before is being shown now, and some long-running tendencies are being corrected, somewhat. Sometimes gracefully, sometimes not. And yes, some times it's being done for what seem like mercenary reasons. But that's just the way it goes. Are you really complaining about people bringing ideology into their art? The nerve! Art is obviously best when it doesn't try to say anything! Also, the irony of bringing ideology into their criticism will probably forever elude them.

 Anyhow here comes The Princess, strutting into the fight like a #girlboss, proudly and very bluntly wearing its progressive feminist creds on its sleeve. So what happens when it's a bit shite just because, well, it's a bit shite? For reasons that far outstrip its ideological takes? Oh man, it's a Widows/Black Panther situation all over agains, isn't it?

 I like the premise: Once Upon A Time, there was a The Princess (Joey King) who didn't want to marry a conceited, chauvinistic, evil prince from a neighboring realm (Dominic Cooper) in an arranged marriage. Arranged marriages, right? Scourge of our times, cause celebre among progressives. We're against it, you know.
 Anyhow. Because she spurned him, the prince invaded her castle and is holding her family hostage.

 Now, unbeknownst to her father (Ed Stoppard), who is a staunch traditionalist, The Princess is a badass fighter who's been training in martial arts since she was a wee The Princess.
 So The Princess needs to go out and fight a whole army in her own castle, The Raid Style, to set things right.

 And yes- from the beginning the whole feminist angle is a bit of a problem, because it's never subtle or in the background. All men underestimate women, They all leer and objectify them. They all suffer for it. It gets old pretty quick, and it caused several eye rolls not because I have a problem with the concept, but because it's so on-the-nose. But as usual this 'wokeness' - or rather, its cack-handed integration into the movie - is a minor issue at best. There are several, much more pressing problems...

 ...the main one being The Princess.

 She's just not either an engaging character or any sort of credible physical menace, and despite clearly having had loads of training and a lot of enthusiasm, I just didn't find her a convincing martial arts fighter. This is specially clear once she's paired with her mentor, played by the great Veronica Ngo, who effortlessly outclasses her in each and every one of the aforementioned categories but perversely remains little more than a sidekick.
 Dominic West is reliable as always, happy to chew on scenery as the asshole prince. Olga Kurylenko plays the main heavy and adds a lot to the movie- another actor who seems like she could have The Princess for breakfast.

  The script is another big problem. It's smugly self-congratulatory on how feminist it is whilst not saying anything interesting on the subject, sure. But it's also not afraid to engage in some fat-shaming humor, or code all the evil brutes working for the evil king as working-class people. It makes sure to show that the good, besieged king has a multi-cultural, inclusive kingdom (the evil prince specifically calls him out on it!). But... all the royals are white; the foreign people are advisers, servants, part of the entourage. Oh, and monarchy does work, it's just a few bad apples that give it a bad name. 
 Do  I actually care about any of these 'lapses' in the 'progressive agenda'? Nah, not really -they kind of go hand in hand with the faery tale setting, after all- but they do drive home just how half-baked this movie is.
 It's just a piss-poor script that doesn't otherwise distinguish itself at any point with any clever moments or interesting twists, and doesn't really have anything interesting to say about feminism or anything else; a b-movie action script with feminist-targeted marketing and no real ideas of its own.

 And the continuity is unconvincing, too. The size and level of threats accosting The Princess keep varying; wasn't there a dozen soldiers chasing her from the top of the tower? Where'd they all go? Oh, look, a single guy came down but now there's a lot of soldiers coming from downstairs. Very sloppy.

 The action should be what carries the film, but it's merely OK; pretty tame by eastern action movie standards, and many newer western ones. Some of the choreographies are elaborate, and a couple of fights are fun, but not having a good martial artist actor drags most of them down. There's a whole lot of posing, a whole lot of skipped frames to make things seem more brutal and exciting, and quite a few fairly boring, filler-like fight scenes.
 It's bloody, too, but with curiously little impact, and next to no gore. Very unremarkable in a post-Game of Thrones world. Weird that they'd make that stylistic choice but leave it so neutered.

 This is something that's completely forgivable in a B-movie, but the special effects do need a separate mention, because they are flat-out terrible. The distant landscapes composited onto the background look like they were rendered on last-gen consoles, and the less said about the couple of fire effects the better. But far better movies have stumbled with this sort of thing, I guess.

 So yeah. I didn't hate it, but it was pretty much a waste of time - a mediocre B-movie without weirdness or laughs; At least it moves quickly and despite some bloat, it's gone without causing much offense. Unless you're offended by all the (pretty superficial) feminism, of course.
 
 Director Le-Van Kiet and deuteragonist Veronica Ngo had previously teamed up for slow-burn martial arts movie Furie, which is available on Netflix here in the UK and really fucking good; given the choice, just go watch that instead. There's nothing to see here.

*To be fair, I do think woke is a fugly neologism.

Aniara

now we have fathomed what our space-ship is

--a tiny bubble in a glass of God.

 Aniara is a Swedish science fiction film based on a 1956 epic poem by Harry Martinson. I hadn't heard of it before watching this movie, and honestly, I found it a bit of a slog to get through. That said, I don't tend to get on too well with most poetry; but don't take my word for it, though - it won a Nobel prize, and SF luminaries such as Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson and Vernor Vinge were apparently fans.

 In any case, I'm glad they adapted it into a film. It's a bleakly existentialist (is there any other type of existentialist?) nightmare that enjoys nothing more than punching you in the emotional nuts repeatedly. I imagine the Swedes find it delightful.

 So, what is it about?

 Aniara is a Swedish- oh, wait, I've said that already. Ahem. Aniara is a spaceship - a floating city that ferries humans between a dying earth and colonies in Mars. It's more than a little bit like a giant cruise liner; its passengers can expect amenities, shopping malls, a large auditorium, pools and a MIMA room, among other things.

 What's MIMA? I'm glad you asked! It's a sort of holodeck analogue room where passengers can 'hook up' and revisit places from their memories as vivid illusions. It's important for the movie in several ways, and I'll get back to it later.

 Anyhow. The mission to mars soon goes wrong when the ship is forced to change course after an accident with some space debris. Aniara, and all the souls aboard, are left hurtling out of the solar system into the void with no hope of going back or of being rescued.

 People turn to MIMA at first, then when that breaks, to other, more bizarre ways to pass the time. This Includes cultish orgies, by the way, that are more graphical and less sexy than you'd hope because, well, Sweden.

 The film follows the ship's Mimarobe -the MIMA operator- (Emelie Garbers) from an at-first unimportant role (people prefer going shopping than using MIMA, to transitioning to other roles once she's out of a job. She has a front row in a few important events aboard the ship, falls in love and has a child, you know, tries to lead a good life and present a brave face in front of heartbreak and ultimately a futile existence. Hmmm.

 While she may be the point of view character, the real heart of the movie is the Astronomer (Anneli Martini). She is introduced earnestly saying she doesn't care that everyone on earth is dying: "I've never been very impressed by people," she quips. The bubble quote at the start of this post is hers as well, trying to explain just how insignificant the Aniara is to the universe.

 The Astronomer is the one that constantly finds fault with the lies other people try to find hope with, the one who is brutally realistic about their fate. No prizes awarded for guessing where that will get her, and no prizes awarded for guessing whether she's right.

 While the budget is obviously not very large, the designs are pretty good (loved the space elevator with advertisements along the bottom!), and the actors are uniformly excellent. 

 The science part of the genre equation itself is suspect - the technologies involved are extremely handwavy, entropy doesn't seem to be as active as you'd expect given the time periods involved, and the ship does go through a weird shiny pink cloud at one point; very Star Trek. But the sci-fi ethos is very much present and accounted for; this is ruthless, unflinching speculation, without the concessions you might expect from something meant as entertainment. It's a bit ponderous, but there are enough events to keep the forward momentum going. And maybe a little pitch-black humor to leaven things up a little, if you squint, up until the bold gallows humor of the final chapter's title card.

 Turns out, the film isn't very impressed by people, either.