This is a joint review of the two parts of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. It’s obvious that aesthetically, the film is amazing. Visuals, character design, sound design, music: all great. I’ve had Hans Zimmer’s score running through my head for the past two years. The scene with the throat-singing shaman or whatever is burned into my brain.
On the other hand, I found the storytelling difficult to get a grasp on. In each of the two parts, I enjoyed the scene-setting of the first half of the runtime. But then, as soon as the plot started to accelerate towards the end, the pacing felt both slow and rushed at the same time. I think the story is just too complicated to fit into a movie. (Maybe, just maybe, the early 2000’s miniseries and its sequel did a better job of making the story clear, but I haven’t watched those in a long time, and I don’t trust my fond memories of it.)
At the end of the day, the feeling I’m left with the most is the desire to read the books again.
A well-constructed horror movie with effective scares. It’s especially cool how whenever the ghouls/creatures appear, only one person can see it, but everybody else in the room can see the one person’s reaction. Once this is set up, they don’t even have to show the creature anymore, and it’s still just as creepy because you’re reacting along with the others in the room.
I was less engaged with the backstory of a tragic death in the family… the movie was aiming for a high level of difficulty in terms of emotional poignancy, but it felt rote to me. Suicide as a subject matter is hard to get right; it’s a fine line between treating it with empathy and using it as an exploitative plot point. One could write a whole thesis paper about when it works and when it doesn’t, and I don’t think I have it in me to get into it in a quick review like this.
To paraphrase an old wise man… who’s the more psychopathic: the serial killer, or the fan who’s obsessed with him?
The film follows the trial of a man charged with killing multiple victims and recording the murders to post on “le dark web.” In the viewing gallery are a couple of young women who are “fans” of the killer.
I admit my attention wavered a bit during the first half, because the main character is so mysterious that there’s nothing to connect with. But I really enjoyed how the movie escalates once she starts taking action. Her motivations are still unclear, but it’s fun to try to figure her out.
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.
This was a beautifully written memoir about the experiences of a Korean woman who was adopted by white parents, and her reconnecting with her birth family as an adult. When I say that, you might think that it leads to a tidy ending—now she’s got two families!—but of course, real life is more complicated than the clichés.
A memorable chapter early in the book involves a pair of Nicole’s acquaintances, who are considering adopting a child, asking her if she “minded” being adopted when she was a kid. It’s a question that assumes that the adoptee experience is monolithic, and that as long as Nicole was happy, they could be assured that their kid would be, too. The rest of the book deconstructs that idea, and shows us the messiness that lies behind everyone’s family story.
On the surface, the plot of this movie could be an episode of CSI or Law & Order, and that’s what makes it so watchable. But it dives much deeper than the typical crime procedural, and shows how the criminal justice system rests on taking a tiny slice of people’s lives, and inventing a narrative and motive out of it. Of course, those lives, and especially the relationships in those lives, are much more complex.
There’s a memorable flashback scene featuring one of the ugliest couple fights I’ve ever seen. They’re both writers, and they resent each other for how time is spent towards their creative pursuits. On the one hand, it’s become a pet peeve of mine for stories to feature the writing profession. (Can’t writers write about something other than writing?) But on the other hand, the feeling of not having enough time to write—and especially the temptation to blame the people in your life for it—hits pretty close to home for me.
Entertaining to watch, and gives you reason to root for a group of young activists, even if their actions undoubtedly lie in a moral grey area. In the end, though, the web of their backstories feels more like a point-form enumeration through the harms of corporate-backed climate change, rather than the lives of fully realized characters.
Your mileage may vary with the retro aesthetic. Personally, I don’t love the gritty 16mm look.
As the title suggests, this book is an examination of a tragic character who’s only capable of relating to others by obeying them unquestioningly. She grew up in an oppressive family, and doesn’t seem to know how to exist as her own person.
The pastoral setting and reflective style reminded me of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Like that book, it’s a challenging read; my experience of it could be described as spending long stretches not really understanding what was going on, but then being knocked over every few pages by a deeply profound sentence or passage. Unlike Dillard’s work, though, Bernstein has the benefit of fiction, so that she can introduce surreal and dark elements, like the image of the protagonist as a baby, taking care of her older siblings before she could even speak; or the Ari Aster-esque cult-like imagery in the finale.
All in all, a bizarre and melancholy read. You really pity the protagonist’s constant negative self-talk. I think there’s more to it than that, though; this book would reward a closer reading than I was able to give it.
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.
I saw this film as part of the TIFF Secret Movie Club program. The screenings have that film festival feeling, because we’re seeing movies before wide release. Also, they’re often capped by a Q&A session with part of the filmmaking team. For the screening of The Animal Kingdom (a.k.a. Le Règne Animal), we were told before the show that there’d be a recorded interview with the sound supervisor at the end. Because of this fact, I tried to tune into the auditory experience, and indeed, it’s one of the notable technical achievements of the film.
In the story, people have started to randomly mutate into Dr. Moreau-esque animal hybrids. We follow a family whose matriarch has begun this transformation, and has disappeared into the wild, while the father and son try to get her back—both in the sense of physically locating her, and in the sense of “curing” her and making her human again. The tension mounts further when the townspeople get their pitchforks ready, and further still when the boy shows signs of mutation too.
The designs of the hybrids are cool, and brought to the screen mostly by performance and prosthetics. The aforementioned sound design comes into play in the way the creatures blend their human speaking voices with animal sounds.
Sci-fi-grounded-in-reality is probably one of my favourite things, and I enjoyed the film on its technical achievements and plotting. However, the allegorical elements felt too broad to be effective. It only points at subjects like racism, queerness, environmentalism, without really diving into any. Honestly, it covers a lot of the same thematic ground as X-Men, but without the luxury of time that a long-running series affords.
