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Reviews
Bodkin (2024)
If you liked 'Bodkin', try 'Obituary' (2023)
Really pretty nicely done. Compelling story arc, well-defined and inttriguing characters, and a good solid mystery to solve. Conflict, ...then resolution. What more could one ask.
If you liked 'Bodkin', try 'Obituary' (2023). Also with. Siobhán Cullen. As a darkly humorous protagonist. The humor indulged in, standing underneath the gallows, is not only a perfectly resonable defense mechanism in answer to the circumstances, it can be really, really amusing.
Honestly compels me... So far, I've only started watyching the more-or-less beginning of 'Obituary'. So not only am I unable to offer 'spoilers' even if I wanted (which I don't), but I cannot actually vouch for how well the ensemble concluded/resvoled the story. ...So far. But I am very much looking forward to going along for the ride on the way to finding out.
Kindest regards,
-owen-
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Beware if ordinary people run the island, ...because then you're *doomed* (?!)
Post: Beware if ordinary people run the island, ...because then you're *doomed* (?!)
First, allow me to readily admit that this was written, directed, and acted really proficiently. Really very well done.
...In terms of process. But in terms of content, well, therein I have to assume the post of 'loyal opposition'.
There have been a couple of entries over the years of this general plot/story-arc. More or less. Eg. _The Admirable Crichton_, _Paradise Lagoon_. And so on.
But in (as far as I know) everything previous to this latest effort, there were at least some sort of 'hand-waving-gestures' made half-heartedly in the direction of the notion that the service sector personnel were the people who actually kept all of the otherwise helpless well-heeled figureheads, ...well, alive (not to put too fine a point to it). ...Before they were all rescued, and the lions' share of the below-stairs classes a got hearty "job-well-done" for their efforts and (mostly) put back into servitude. There were some machinations around the Godfrey character himself, admittedly, but that always seemed like a sort of deus-ex-machina workaround.
In _Triangle-of-Sadness_, however, we the audience are told(, and shown, and more or less have our noses rubbed in it) that the well-to-do class are, eh-hem, less than savory, or even less than worthwhile in any way. The first thing we encounter in the movie is a(n extended) scene itemizing in lengthy, time consuming, meticulous detail all the ways that the really hip, good-looking, 'It' couple are so shallow as human beings that we will have a difficult time even caring what happens to them. Which may actually be a necessary plot device at the start of the movie (as well as being sort of amusing, ...at least for little while anyway during the beginning of dinner). That's for starters. It peaks at the point during which the ship's plumbing goes sideways, and all of the people (but especially the really expensively dressed rich people, ...that must be mentioned) wind up very graphically wallowing and flapping about, crawling around in, ...well, there's no other real way around it, ...in s**t. Lots and *lots* of s**t. For a really, *really* long time. We have to sit there sighing while the really well dressed wealthy people cavort about, gurgling on all fours in s**t, for way more time than it takes to make the point, and realizing that it stopped being ironically amusing quite a long while ago. So to speak.
And all of this leads to the denouement at the end of the film (the proverbial moral of the story, if you will) that, yes, the privileged upper-crust people may well be self-centered, heartless, and greedy, ...but they, eh-hem, get the trains to run on time. They at least get things to work.
Whereas (and here's the crux of the thing, that I'm not sure everyone necessarily picks up on), ...if the ordinary working people were to run things, heaven help us all, because we'd all just wind up murdering each other in very nasty ways, and running around the island chasing after one another (for who knows what sort of bloody and depraved reasons), like a bunch of crazed and lawless cannibals (or worse!).
So whatever we do, children, do not let the regular folks, y'know, have any effective say in how we actually do anything.
Needless to say, the actual take-home-lesson is probably somewhere inbetween those two polar extremes (eg. ...we're all just human beings, ...some good, some bad, ...and so on, et cetera, &c.).
But a movie about a bunch of people from different 'castes' stranded on an island, just sort of working things out as they go along, making some mistakes, and figuring out some successes, simply wouldn't make a particularly interesting way to spend an hour and forty minutes in a dark room with a bunch of strangers (or even alone on the sofa). And trying to make that into something genuinely clever, ...well, that really would be asking perhaps more than the raw materials could assemble, to begin with. ...Maybe not. ...Alright, maybe. ...Oh I dunno.
-owen-
Philadelphia, PA.
Amsterdam (2022)
Wonderful piece of cinema -- even tho' a few of us may be trying to put our thumbs on the scale.
There's a Wikipedia entry called "Business Plot". NPR also has an entry entitled "When The Bankers Plotted To Overthrow FDR". Rolling Stone magazine has one called "The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn't Taught in Schools".
Look it up.
A group of wealthy businessmen plotted to install a retired general, Major Gen. Smedley Butler (Gen. Gil Dillenbeck in the film), in the WhiteHouse (without any election). As a dictator. That was their answer to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Not a wild conspiracy theory, but an actual historic conspiracy. The genuine article.
Why else would half the people writing reviews find fault with this movie? Except perhaps to drive down its rating, eh.
Donbass (2018)
Don't pretend that 'nothing' happened in Eastern Ukrainia - it only hurts when I laughed
So this, ...this is what the fighting is all about. For a little while I was tempted to say that it only hurt when I laughed, but the laughter died a quiet death in a surprisingly brief period of time, ...as the rest of the body count started piling on top of itself. But the increasingly biting satire remained, throughout. This movie is helpful to keep in mind ...every ...single ...time that some right-of-center political apologist tries to make pretend that 'nothing' happened with regard to Eastern Ukrainia.