I must admit, when Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was first announced, my heart sank. Do we really need yet another film version of such an iconic story? Like many I’m getting a bit tired of the recycled tat we get in cinemas these days and would rather see a truly original story. Surely AI hasn’t grasped us yet to the point where we can’t come up with new ideas?
Despite being in his eighties, David Cronenberg doesn’t appear to have settled down yet to make family-friendly films. His last film, Crimes of the Future (2022) caused the entire audience to leave my local cinema until I was the only person left in the theatre. I therefore wasn’t expecting an easy ride when embarking on The Shouds, his new venture, knowing it revolves around technology which allows people to watch their loved ones’ bodies decay in their grave. A nice and cheerful film to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon, right?
Wes Anderson’s latest has dropped, and we all know what that means: endless discussions as to whether he’s become a parody of himself, is choosing style over substance, etc, etc, etc.
For people spending their valuable time arguing these points, I have one piece of advice: you don’t need to watch his films. You certainly don’t need to like them. It’s okay. You can go and watch something else.
A 3,5 hour-long film about a Holocaust-surviving architect may not sound like the best way to spend your Saturday evening. Yet The Brutalist captured my imagination in a big way and, almost a week after I saw it, still haunts my memories.
If there’s one horror trope that’s been used to the point of exhaustion, it’s the vampire. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could come up with an original vampire story after Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys and, god forbid, Twilight.
Robert Eggers therefore seems to have taken the sensible route of not trying to come up with an original story. As any vampire-afficionado will know, Nosferatu is a reworking of a story that first existed as a silent film, and then as a remake in the 1970s. Even though I wasn’t expecting anything new, I still went to see the film as soon as it came out.
So many film adaptations of Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula have appeared over the years, surely there’s no original angle left? Renfield, which focuses on the famous vampire’s assistant rather than the big man himself, makes a brave effort to prove critics wrong.
“It’s a film about shoes,” said Mark Kermode in his review of Air. I can’t see how this could possibly be bad thing (after all, Tetris is getting it’s own TV series too). And yes, on a basic level Air is about shoes, more specifically the development of Nike’s Air Jordan range. But it’s also a very American story about how an underdog company (Nike) managed to sign one of the greatest athletes to ever walk the earth (Michael Jordan). And they all lived happily ever after.
Here’s a pitch for you. How about we go and see a stop-motion animation film about a shell called Marcel who lives in an AirBnB with his grandma and enlists a struggling documentary film maker called Dean to help him find his family. You’d think I was demented, right? I admit, the synopsis of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On doesn’t sound like much. But the reality of this little film is so, so different. I’m glad I managed to catch it in my local cinema this week and have been thinking about it ever since.
Yes, David Cronenberg’s world is disgusting and morally bankrupt. But what makes it truly disturbing is the realization that, perhaps, its crimes are less futuristic than we’d like to admit.
Not everyone will like this film. Dialogues are often slow and almost Shakespearean, there’s a sense of mystery and unease that prevents comfortable enjoyment. But then these aspects was also present in The Lighthouse, so it’s probably characteristic of Eggers’s style of film making, and it suits the film’s grave narrative universe.
cococatani 