This Japanese comedy takes place in a spa/hotel in a small town, and follows the staff and guests as they get stuck in a mysterious time loop. A twist on the Groundhog Day formula, with a couple of key differences:
the loop is only 2 minutes long, rather than the whole day, so we can see every iteration in its entirety, in real-time
all of 10 or so characters are experiencing the same thing, which introduces an aspect of project management, as they assign tasks to each other and scramble to complete them within the 2 minutes
The first act is a lot of fun as the characters figure out what’s going on. Seeing how each person reacts is pretty funny… for example, one of the guests is a writer under pressure from his publishers, and he decides to use the time loop as a chance to rest, because it means that his deadlines will never come.
The movie surprised and impressed me with how it used its structure to illuminate emotional truths for some characters. For example, a young couple challenge themselves to escape from the others, by running away as far as they can. At first, it felt silly to me, since they know that they’ll always end up back where they started. But then I realized that the futility of the game was the point, and that it was a way for them to connect with each other, like a series of rapid-fire “dates.”
Along the way, the major characters wonder whether they caused the loop by wishing for time to stop. Everyone has a reason for fearing the future, and the natural response to this fear is wanting to just keep things as they are. The movie has a real “Monkey’s Paw” kind of message: there’s a fine line between staying in our comfort zones, and becoming stuck in a rut. We need time to move forward, even with all the scary uncertainty that progress brings.
Another entry in the TIFF Secret Movie Club series, this film was an enjoyable rom-com about a gay Indian man who brings a boyfriend to meet his traditional parents for the first time. We hit most of the beats of the rom-com formula: the meet-cute, the big fight and temporary break-up, the grand gesture to get back together (although I felt that this scene was missing an actual apology and acknowledgement of wrongdoing), and of course, the happy ending.
Interestingly, there’s no coming out scene: the main character’s family knows that he’s gay from the get-go. But they’ve never seen him be with someone, and the difference between being accepting in theory, and being comfortable in practice, is one of the main themes of the movie.
I had a lot of laughs watching this and it was a good time. After the film, the lead actor and the director held a Q&A session over Zoom. It turns out that they’re a couple in real life, and they were able to express how personal the film was for them, which really enriched the experience for me.
Godzilla, Alien: Romulus, American Fiction, Oddity, Furiosa, Blink Twice
Over the Christmas holiday season, I had more spare time than usual and got a chance to catch up with some recent movies, as well as revisiting some older ones.
A quirky, silly film about a woman who reincarnates and lives several lifetimes, each one taking place in a different century, starting in the 1600’s. In every life, she becomes obsessed with incarnations of the same man, and keeps trying to connect with him. He never seems to return her affections, though.
The production value is extremely low-budget, but it works. The various historical time periods are portrayed via costumes and set dressing, but the locations themselves are often just an empty room with hanging curtains in the background. It’s going for the impression of a time period, rather than a realistic portrayal, which I respect as a stylistic and pragmatic choice.
Ultimately, I had a hard time connecting to the story. I think the film is satisfied with cracking silly jokes, like dubbing the protagonist’s boneheaded husband with dog sounds because his previous incarnation was her pet. I did have a couple of good laughs, but there wasn’t much substance overall.
Eventually, the protagonist is reincarnated in the 80’s, and the object of her desire happens to be a famous pop star. I thought that the film had the opportunity to take a turn and comment on the nature of what we call “parasocial relationships” nowadays. But the movie sticks to its frivolous tone, and leads to a kind of empty conclusion.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been watching this show for over 20 years. I used to buy the DVDs of the early seasons and watched them repeatedly. For me, the show reached its peak in 2009, the seventh season, which served as a reunion of the Seinfeld cast. Subsequent seasons have felt more forced and contrived, but I’ve been wondering whether the show actually changed, or if it was me who changed. Did it used to be more funny to see Larry David and his co-stars yelling at each other constantly, before social media made it so that the whole world was yelling at each other constantly? Have I just become softer as I age, unable to stomach the sometimes stressful nature of cringe comedy? Did I simply outgrow Larry’s misanthropic mindset, because I learned to love?
In any case, I wish to thank Larry for years—nay, decades—of entertainment, and wish him a happy retirement.
I enjoyed the premise and the humour of this Nicolas Cage vehicle. (Am I childish because the biggest laugh for me came from a well-timed fart joke?) Cage plays a boring professor who starts to appear in many people’s dreams, even if he doesn’t know them. The first act setup is at its best when it’s showing the contents of those dreams—whether they be surreal or nightmarish, it’s always funny when Cage wanders in looking bemused and out of place.
The film loses me as it escalates into the second half. It tries to introduce social commentary about the temptations of fame, but its message wasn’t particularly enlightening. It’s too easy to mock college kids for being snowflakes who want to cancel everything. Whether you agree with it or not, it’s a stale stereotype.
I’ve mentioned before my pet peeve about stories that feature writers. I think I should qualify that a little by saying that if the story isn’t about writing, then the characters don’t need to be writers. You Hurt My Feelings gets an exemption because it’s all about the anxieties and insecurities that afflict artistic people.
I barely consider myself to be a writer, but I could relate to the protagonist, who accidentally eavesdrops on her husband telling his friend that he didn’t like her latest book. I can imagine taking this revelation as hard as she does, if my entire identity was founded on my creative work. Luckily, I have other skills around which to build my sense of self-worth.
The humour in the film leans more towards the cringe comedy style, which I know doesn’t work for everyone. At the end of our viewing, my wife said, “I thought it was supposed to be funny,” apparently not noticing that I had been laughing through the whole thing.
I had heard about the buzz after this film premiered at Sundance. Mostly, the coverage focussed on how many people walked out of the screening, and made it seem like the film had nothing to offer besides a lot of gross-out bodily-function humour. It all added up to me being a bit wary going into the screening.
I’m happy to report that I was pleasantly surprised. I guess I was expecting an aimless, plotless slog where nothing happens, but instead, what I got was a compelling story with distinctive characters and a good mix of comedy and tragedy. If I have one criticism, it’s that the performances were not sufficiently animal-like. I kept mentally comparing them to Andy Serkis in the Planet of the Apes trilogy, which is admittedly a high bar.
The tone of this show vacillates between quiet moments of culinary creativity, and brutally stressful shouting matches. I much prefer the former, but I recognize the necessity of the latter. All of the characters in the show are living in the shadow of tragedy, and the process of healing that pain is not always a smooth ride.
Come for the cooking scenes that make you want to try new recipes in the kitchen; stay for the honest depictions of trauma and mental illness.
I did like the show, but I will mostly be critical here because it’s already received its fair share of praise. I enjoyed it mostly for the comedy. “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs” is an all-time great line.
Where it’s lacking for me is specificity about the actual business. What is it like to run a TV station? How do they manage the logistics of a cruise ship? What kinds of numbers need to be crunched during a merger? We get glimpses of these things, but I guess my expectation for a workspace drama is: I want to see the work. I’m thinking of a show like Mad Men, where you can really tell the difference between a successful ad and a failed one. More recently, The Bear spends a lot of time on showing the characters through their abilities in the kitchen.
In Succession, it all feels kind of vague and hand-wavey, with the details obscured by (admittedly clever) one-liners. To be fair, the focus is on how the characters angle for power, but the show would have been more enjoyable for me had the actual ins and outs of the business been more clear.
About Me
Hi! Albert here. Canadian. Chinese.
Writing software since 2001. “Blogging” since 2004. Reading since forever.
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