Tag: Amazon

Interview With The Vampire (2022)

Where to find it: Buy on Amazon, now on iPlayer
Length: Seven 50-minute episodes
Synopsis: Camp, gory gothic fun à la True Blood
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: writing, acting
What I don’t like about it: source material, season 2 a step down but still fun

Review:
Aging New Journalist Daniel Molloy travels to Dubai to re-do an interview with immortal vampire Louis De Pointe Du Lac, who tells the story of his afterlife through flashbacks. It’s a remarkably clever adaptation and is paced reasonably well.

Unfortunately it’s still Anne Rice – accursed grandmother of a million Twilights – and her flowery prose and unsettling obsession with young flesh make it to screen largely unscathed. Adds some good stuff around Louis being Black and a pimp in 1910s Storyville but criminally under-utilises its “birthplace of jazz” setting.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, gore, sex, sexual assault, racism, domestic abuse

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

Where to find it: Rent or buy on Amazon
Length: two and a half hours
Synopsis: A luxury megayacht is the setting for an angry metaphor
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: clever, funny, great images
What I don’t like about it: slow in parts, very gross in parts, long (though not overlong)

Review:
Ruben Östlund’s (The Square) English-language debut is inconsistent and disjointed but full of brilliant satire and further showcases his gift for visual symbolism and metaphor, while pacier than his previous European work. It opens with a modelling audition and smoothly dunks on many fashion targets before focusing on Carl, whose career has hit the skids, and girlfriend Yaya, who is doing just fine as a model/influencer and “finds it unsexy to talk about money”. They argue over dinner (providing Östlund’s signature intellectual cringe comedy) but soon reconcile and ship off for a luxury cruise on a megayacht.

Onboard, the crew is split between obsequious customer-facing staff hoping for a big tip and blue-collar boatmen hoping they don’t get noticed. Everything is luxurious and artificial and it seems to please the passengers, including Carl and Yaya – whose follower count has got them here as a freebie -, a post-Soviet oligarch, elderly English weapons manufacturers and a Swedish game developer who bears a striking resemblance to Minecraft’s notorious founder. On top of furnishing the absurd requests of their passengers, the crew are also dealing with an absentee captain, Woody Harrelson, whose alcoholism and devout Marxism bring about an encounter with the oligarch which was the funniest scene in the movie for me.

The highlight is the act two finale, when the boat is wracked by stormy seas and everyone tries to keep things ‘business as usual’ in a potent metaphor for climate change under capitalism. Unfortunately, this coincides with a highly graphic bout with seasickness and food poisoning – both brought about by poor priorities on the part of those who run the ship, further enhancing the metaphor. The final hour of the movie drags as the ship is destroyed and the survivors cope with a new social order but it ends well (an early line points out that the start and the end are the most important parts of a cruise as well as a movie, I found that cute).

Content notes (may contain spoilers): nudity, sex (coercion), vomit, defecation, corpse

Harley Quinn (2019)

Where to find it: Amazon
Length: Thirty seven 25-minute episodes
Synopsis: Superhero shitposting, starring everyone’s favourite Halloween costume
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: DC Comics gags, gets better as it goes, voices
What I don’t like about it: adolescent animation ultra-violence and coarse jokes, stinks of male feminism

Review:
In this cartoon, Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco) decides she’s been fucked over by the Joker for the last time and strikes out on her own, personally and professionally. She forms her own crime squad consisting of best friend Poison Ivy (Lake Bell), King Shark (Ron Funches), grandiose thesp Clayface (Alan Tudyk at full ham) and misogynist Doctor Psycho (Tony Hale), largely replaced in later seasons by talking plant Frank (J.B. Smoove). It’s an impressive cast and they do fun work, especially when the material works as it largely does when they’re dunking on Jordan Peterson guys or some of DC Comics’ sillier Silver Age villains.

Unfortunately, much of the material doesn’t work, such as whenever romance, plot or anything other than jokes are included. It contains many gratuitous bloodsoaked action sequences and many of the jokes, especially in early seasons, betray a core problem: Warner wanted a show primarily about the friendship between Harley and Ivy and they handed it to three people named Dean, Justin and Patrick. The show gets a lot of mileage out of Quinn’s coarseness when it’s really only funny to teenage boys and those who share their mindset.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence and blood, sexual references and swear words, lots of death

A Field in England (2013)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 90 minutes
Synopsis: Odd, unpleasant allegory on the English Civil War
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: writing is genius, acting brilliant, editing great
What I don’t like about it: it’s really not much fun and very weird

Review:
An eccentric, grim puzzle about three filthy, desperate deserters from the English Civil War who are led on a dark journey to find treasure in the titular field. They eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and are pressed into service for a guy they pulled out of the ground. Kinda genius, especially Amy Jump’s screenplay with period language and observations on class and religion. If you do take it on, expect lots of pretension – it’s in black & white and makes extensive use of tableau vivant – and prepare to be confused.

The characters represent paganism (Jacob), “slave mentality” Christianity (Friend), the clergy and intelligentsia (Whitehead), the middle class (Cutler) and the ice-chewing sociopaths out for a quick buck (O’Neill) and they’re haunted by visions of an ‘ill planet’ as they dig ever deeper at the behest of their new masters. It’s a great allegory but if you’ve no stomach for weirdness, realism and history there won’t be much here to enjoy.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): (pretty much) strobe lighting, violence, defecation, genitals

But I’m a Cheerleader (2000)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 86 minutes
Synopsis: Lesbian romcom
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: cute, funny, fluffy
What I don’t like about it: limited appeal due to camp nature

Review:
Director Jamie Babbitt presents a loving pastiche of the films of John Waters, while being far more enjoyable than anything he ever made. Natasha Lyonne plays Megan, an all-American teenage cheerleader. Everyone in town knows that Megan is gay, except for one person: Megan. Despite her protests that it is unnecessary (see title), her parents send her on a religious intervention at a compound in the middle of nowhere where she can learn appropriately rigid gender roles, unintentionally locking her away with a bunch of queer kids who strip away her last pretense of heterosexuality. Always a fun watch.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): conversion therapy, religion, sex

The Last Supper (1995)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 90 minutes
Synopsis: Liberals decide to kill conservatives
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: clever themes, good ending, biblical imagery
What I don’t like about it: mostly a talky play and not a great one

Review:
A group of friends gather for a regular dinner party, they discuss liberal political topics and quaff expensive wine. They take in a stranded traveller who does not share their views and in fact turns out to be very racist. This escalates into a confrontation in which one of the group kills him. After clearing away the mess, they find they have quite the taste for killing awful conservatives and even flatter themselves that doing so may “prevent the next Hitler” and so they arrange to do it again, this time intentionally inviting people whose opinions they dislike and poisoning them. They do it again and again, with increasingly less stringent vetting, before an ending ties the themes up nicely and makes a solid, somewhat-unexpected statement in doing so. Not a great film overall but well worth watching for the execution (pardon the pun) of its ideas.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, racism and hateful dialogue

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon (sometimes on iPlayer)
Length: 110 minutes
Synopsis: Surreal social comedy about ‘hustle culture’ and labour relations
Recommendation rating: 5/5

What I like about it: radical, hilarious, cool
What I don’t like about it: gets weird

Review:
The Coup frontman and avowed communist Boots Riley makes his directorial debut with this parable of modern life. LaKeith Stanfield plays Oakland telemarketer Cash Green (*smirk*) who finds a secret that improves his job performance and splits his loyalties away from his less-successful friends, who are organising a union. Things come to a head when he ingratiates himself with his Silicon Valley CEO and sees life from his perspective. It’s absurd from early on and gets so surreal at the end that it’s all people tend to remember of the film if they don’t get it, but it’s genius.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, body horror

Le Diner de Cons (1998)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 80 minutes
Synopsis: French farce
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: wordplay, farce, not too long
What I don’t like about it: requires significant attention

Review:
Rich snobs hold a regular dinner party where they compete to bring the biggest “idiot”. One of them meets his match in his latest mark and his life unravels in the style of a farcical play. A fun mix of comedy-of-manners and comedy-of-errors.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): ableism in dialogue, less in plot

Michael Collins (1996)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: little over 2 hours
Synopsis: Biopic on the IRA’s top general from the Easter Rising to the Civil War
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: history, tactics, guerrila warfare
What I don’t like about it: Julia Roberts is awful, Alan Rickman not a lot better

Review:
Liam Neeson plays the title role of the reluctant but dutiful soldier. Features great history such as his surgical co-ordinated assassination of British Army officers and the British Army’s massacre of civillians which followed, as well as de Valera’s prison break and the start of the Irish Civil War.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence

Shiva Baby (2020)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 95 minutes
Synopsis: Impressive psychological dramedy about young adulthood
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: fascinating, often funny, great direction
What I don’t like about it: can be unpleasant, slow to build

Review:
A young Jewish woman caters a shiva with three unwelcome guests – her sugar daddy, her successful ex and a crying baby. Debuting writer-director Emma Seligman is a genius and the baby is used to incredible effect, their crying punctuating heavy moments for the lead character, and my favourite directing touch in this is how the baby isn’t shown and it becomes noticeable that the main character is avoiding looking at them, until she does and we get a radiant two-second insert of the little darling before she has a complete meltdown. Amazingly well-made.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): a baby screams most of the way through the movie, sex work, eating disorder