Recent Viewing: Multiple

[rocky41_7]

I've watched several movies since my last post, but it's 3weeks4dreamwidth  so I feel like I should post something! I'll put these under a cut so as not to clutter your reading page.

 

In other news, my laptop keyboard has decided to deprive me of E,C, and D a couple weeks before finals, so I am typing from the atrocious $20 external keyboard I grabbed from the school store while I try to solve the other issue.

Below the cut, short reviews for Atonement, Bad Genius, Heart Shot, Promising Young Woman, Apollo 10 1/2, Sankofa, The Fall, and Flee.
 

Atonement (4/7)
This has Kiera Knightly in it so we're starting from a good place, but for some reason I just did not emotionally engage with this film. I couldn't connect to Cecilia and Robbie's romance in the beginning, which is critical to caring about the rest of the film. I was a lot more interested in the relationship and fallout between Cecilia and her sister Briony, but their relationship gets comparatively little screentime. Visually it was a lovely film and if you enjoy WWII-era stories as a matter of course, you'll probably want to check this one out. Watching it through to the end was worth it though because this is definitely one of those movies where the ending ties it all together. I may watch again to see if my feelings on it change.

Bad Genius (4/10)
I remember this one for the luxury of firing up a movie mid-day over spring break. This is a Thai film on Netflix and it makes a heist film out of high schoolers trying to cheat their way through an elite school. Protag Lynn is from a middle-class background, being raised by her single father, and she earned her way into the school, but quickly learns she can rake in the cash helping her wealthy, hapless classmates pass their exams. The film does an excellent job fostering the tension and while at 2 hours it may seem long, I couldn't think of anything I would cut to trim it down. I think it also does a great job of showing how Lynn talks herself into justifying what she's doing, and how her frustration with a system that feels stacked against her builds with the casual way her wealthy classmates treat their privilege. Yes it's a heist movie, but Bad Genius also has things to say about society, both in Thailand and abroad.

Heart Shot (4/11)
This is a short (20 minutes) film and objectively it is not good. But it does feature a WLW couple as the core protagonists and a butch gal with an unknown dark past haunting her. I enjoyed this purely for the genderbent take on "You shouldn't be with me it's dangerous I'm no good for you" angst trope. A fun watch.

Apollo 10 1/2 (4/12)
This is a rotoscope animated film about a young boy growing up in Houston in the Sixties. There isn't much plot; it's mostly a collection of his recollections of his childhood mixed in with his daydream about being tapped by NASA to get sent into space. But the animation is beautifully done and it's a very sweetly nostalgic film about childhood. I recommended this on principle to my mom, who was a Sixties kid, and she loved it so much she's recommending it to all her siblings. This is a great film for when you're tired because it's nice to watch and it doesn't ask much of you. I really enjoyed this one.

Promising Young Woman (4/12)
*Sexual Assault TW*
Oof. This film is brutal no matter what your ultimate take on it. Minor spoiler: it focuses on the aftermath of a college student's public rape and her (implied) subsequent suicide, through the lens of her lifelong best friend. The film really tries to address the injustice of the situation. The victim, Nina, we never see on screen, but her ghost haunts protagonist Cassandra so intensely that Nina's own mother tells Cassandra she needs to let go and move on, while the rapist is a successful, well-liked man on his way to getting married, with seemingly no lasting consequences for what he did. The number of times characters confronted by Cassandra try to brush off their involvement by saying "We were just kids!" drives home how a bunch of adults are still trying to justify themselves. This is definitely not a film for everyone. There are people who have expressed how cathartic it was to see a movie address sexual assault this way. There are others who feel it was not sensitive enough and took advantage of grisly subject matter for the sake of entertainment. I tend to lean towards the former, but there was a glaring weakness in it for me: no one in the entire film--not even Cassandra, who aggressively confronts her former classmates and spends much of the film trying to avenge Nina--uses the words "rape," "assault," or "sexual assault." For a film that tries to so directly confront the consequences of this violation, it seems somewhat baffling that the crime is never called what it is. Nina's fate is only referred to in oblique or roundabout terms, which seems like an oddly cowardly move for an otherwise bold movie.
*End TW*

Sankofa (4/14)
This is a Ghanian movie, recently remastered from the 90s and available on Netflix. It centers around a young African-American model who is cursed and sent back through time to the era of slavery in America. Another film with very heavy subject matter, but it seems (to me and my limited perspective) to be handled very respectfully. The movie opens with a singer's lament for the "lost Africans" of that time, and the lives of the slaves on the plantation that serves as the setting for much of the film are rich and complex. The movie emphasizes their diversity--in opinion, in where they're from, in how they handle their circumstances--and how they keep fighting for themselves. This, of course, is going to be a no-go for some people based purely on how intense the subject is (mind the potential triggers if you do watch it), but it is a well-done film from an African perspective.

The Fall (4/16)
This was just a rewatch but I love this film so much I'm including it anyway. Lark had never seen it, so I broke down and bought an overpriced DVD (this movie is worth owning, but it apparently had an extremely limited release, so getting ahold of it is difficult) to stream. Visually it's one of the most striking films I've seen. Costuming, sets, cinematography...absolutely stunning. It stars Lee Pace as Roy, an injured stunt man in the hospital in a time vaguely implied to be the 20s or 30s. He befriends a young girl there for a broken arm by telling her fantastic stories about a grand adventure. Both the central actors do an excellent job and their friendship is so sweet.

Flee (4/22)
This is a newly-relevant film centering around the story of a gay Afghan man who fled Kabul as a child with his family back in the 90s when the Taliban first came to power. Now he lives in Denmark and is recounting his story for the first time in full, to an old friend. It mixes a loose animation style with real footage of Afghanistan at the time and it really shows how easily people get lost in the cracks when they're forced to flee their homes. It also touches how on even at 36, Amin is still affected by what happened, it still influences his thought patterns and throws up barriers in his personal life. Given where Afghanistan is now, it feels particularly timely.