Yes I was without internet for part of this week and had to watch random movies I had on my laptop—why do you ask?
Movies
It's a lot of things, maybe too many things: a YA romance, a road-trip movie, a cannibal movie, a Badlands / Bonnie and Clyde "one step ahead of our past catching up with us" sort of thing, an '80s nostalgia movie (if what you're nostalgic for in the '80s is heartland rock, wood paneling, and everything smelling like cigarettes), a philosophical inquiry into the most ethical way to eat people if you are biologically compelled to do so, maybe a queer metaphor, maybe an addiction metaphor. I'm not sure if the extremely bummer ending satisfyingly ties up any of these threads or modes, but like a lot of road trips, the interesting part is how you get there, and this movie is certainly a journey: parts of it deeply unsettling with unexpected moments of terror, other parts evoking a profound loneliness, others a deep well of pathos. Whether or not this completely holds together thematically, it's able to make all of these disparate threads feel like a cohesive whole through a confident stylistic hand as well as some terrific performances (the entire principal cast is great). There's a strong emotional throughline, if nothing else, and some of these scenes are going to stay with me for a while. Grade: B+
A worst of both worlds situation: neither the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by way of Romeo and Juliet that I was hoping for, nor the sugary-sweet rom-com-revival fun that this movie thinks it is. It has the feeling of being written by someone who hasn't touched Romeo and Juliet since they read the SparkNotes summary in 9th grade English class; Tromeo and Juliet has a better literacy of the Shakespeare play than this one does, which is theoretically fine: so what if Paris is now Rosaline's gay best friend and that famous lines are misappropriated by characters in nonsensical contexts? If you're not trying to be deconstructive, there's no point in actually caring about your film's relationship to its source material. But you gotta give us something in the source material's place, and the watery gruel that we receive is a bunch of warmed-over rom-com clichés employed with a flimsy gloss of girl-power and sarcasm, not to mention a completely empty love interest. As uninterested in Romeo and Juliet as this movie is, it seems even less interested in the elements it's added, and I'm not sure why we're supposed to care about anything going on in Rosaline's life. Kaitlyn Dever is pretty good here, at least—a performance in search of a movie that has any idea at all how to use it. Grade: C-
It's basically unwatchable, but it's also fascinating because it so clearly is a product of evangelical Christianity while also being a work of outsider art, something you can't say about a lot of more visible evangelical media, which usually comes from a fairly large industry with established tropes and modes of discourse, almost none of which this movie even bothers with. For example, it's not uncommon for evangelical media to use the post-parting-the-Red-Sea stories of Moses and Joshua to justify genocide, but there's usually some tact or rhetorical sleight of hand that makes it seem like it's not justifying genocide. Like, Focus on the Family media has definitely said genocide is okay, but you usually have to analyze it a little to understand that that's what it's doing. This movie doesn't have the guile for that kind of decorum and literally just states outright that it's okay to exterminate a people group if God tells you to, and it does so by using some of the most amateur CG animation I've ever seen as well as some of the most head-scratching decisions in character modeling (if they're supposed to be lions, where are their tails??), which is kind of an out-of-body experience. There's such an incredible purity of vision here, a vile, cancerous, eye-melting vision. I'd love to hear what Phil Vischer thinks about this. Grade: C
I know so little of Hungarian history and folklore that this film's plot (a telling of ancient Hungarian "history" as seen through its mythology) quickly lost me. Basically the only parts I understood were the pieces that had widespread mythological tropes like the "cosmic hunt" that makes up one early section of the movie. So I would probably have a drastically different reaction to this movie if I were Hungarian or even just knew anything at all about Hungarian history—I dunno, I would definitely have some strong opinions about a movie that tried to dramatize the national mythology of the United States, so this seems like the kind of movie that is fraught with political implications that I have no access to. But from where I sit, it doesn't matter that I couldn't follow the plot, because the film is directed by Marcell Jankovics, which means that it has dazzling animation. It's a lot more stylistically experimental than his masterpiece, Son of the White Mare, which makes sense given this movie's episodic format, and not everything is a home-run here; in fact, there are sections with animation that is surprisingly prosaic for Jankovics. However, other pieces of animation here are incredible in ways that aren't exactly superior to White Mare but also are far more intricate and complex than anything that the other movie attempts, sequences that are overtly psychedelic or even strobe-like, playing around with kaleidoscopic color variations and unstable character forms in a way that is as mesmerizing as it is bewildering. The early sequence with the cosmic hunt is pretty great in this regard, as is the final sequence of the film when Jesus Christ appears to a medieval king. There's something about this kind of stylistic kitchen-sink that, when it works, approaches the sublime when paired with mythological storytelling that I don't understand. Again, I'm sure I would have a much different reaction if I actually did understand the mythology. Grade: B+
The kind of movie that is probably best reviewed by listing out its component parts and just basking in the miracle of the existence of something this bizarre: a nuclear war has destroyed the human race and in the human's place grow a society of animals mutated into character designs I can only describe as "edgy Goof Troop," among whom is the rock star Mok, who needs to find the magical voice that can release a demon who will help him rule the world and gain immortality. This story is told as a rock musical with a plot that doesn't make a lot of sense and with compositions and performances from Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Earth, Wind & Fire, and assorted configurations of Cheap Trick, and it's visual style has a blending of the kind of squishy character animation you might see on children's programming with a less-abrasive form of Ralph Baskshi's urban mixed-media approach for the backgrounds, plus another technique I can't quite identify for Mok's demon that reminds me of Yuri Norstein in its earthy textures. Everything in this movie has these smirking comic-book naming conventions, e.g. Mok Swagger, Carnage-y Hall, Nuke York, etc. A real stew, this movie. A complete meal. Grade: B
This is an amazing story about a man's sociopathic drive to destroy his marriage on his honeymoon, and as a depiction of monstrous self-destruction, it's about as hilarious as something like that can get (which is: very). Truly one of the great evocations of masculinity at its most pathetic and loathsome. But also... also... the incredible coup that this movie pulls is that by casting Cybill Shepherd as the object of this man's desire, there's a part of me, not a significant part but a part nonetheless, that watches her in this movie and thinks, "You know, I get it." Audience-implication sometimes feels like a cheap shot, but this one totally got me. Grade: A
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