Quick takes on All of Us Strangers and other films

I’ve liked a lot of films from director Yorgos Lanthimos (links to all of his stuff here), and was intrigued by his newest, Poor Things, especially after it recently won a few awards. It follows a young woman named Bella (Emma Stone, who just won the Oscar for this role) in 19th century London. Bella is under the care of a doctor and scientist named Godwin, who has recently hired a student named Max to study Bella and record all of her deeds and doings. Bella is Godwin’s experiment, the result of taking the brain out of an unborn child and implanting it in her mother’s recently deceased body. So while Bella has the body of an adult, she is mentally no more than a child, and Godwin intends to record her progress. Finding her childlike innocence endearing, Max falls in love with Bella and proposes (once she can put more than a couple words together), but Bella is still very young mentally, and wants to see the world. When an older worldly man, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), asks Bella to run away with him, she does, and finds a sexual awakening with him. However, of course it isn’t all peaches and rainbows, and Bella will have to do some serious growing up before the end. The acting is great, and the movie has Lanthimos’s trademark weirdness, but honestly I wasn’t enamored. For a long time, Bella is all about sex; it is the driving force in her life for a big portion of the movie. Very Freudian for sure, but it got old after awhile. And while I’m sure the main point of the film was letting Bella become an individual without a man controlling her (because everyone does, from Godwin, whom she not-so-subtlety calls God, to Max, who wants to put her in a box and keep her the same forever, to even society, which wants to make her a prostitute when she runs out of options), that moral becomes muddy when Lanthimos gives the audience a cheap laugh in the final minutes of the film. This is two of his films in a row that didn’t wow me, despite them getting more national attention than any of his older stuff. I definitely liked his older, smaller films better. ★★★ 

To do a play on the famous line from Stephen King’s The Stand: this is how a franchise ends; not with a bang, but a whimper. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the finale to the DC Extended Universe, a franchise that started over a decade ago to go up against Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. There were some good moments in the franchise, but its bad movies were very bad, and DC is starting over with a reboot in 2025. Aquaman 2 picks up after the first film. Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) is king of Atlantis and rules the sea, but he is still the target of David Kane, who survived the last film. Kane finds a magic item, a trident, which houses the spirit of an ancient evil that wants to destroy everything and everyone in the world. The spirit possesses Kane, and with its power, he builds an army to fight Curry, while also using the sea’s power to increase climate change to threaten humans on land. The film throws everything at the wall to see what sticks, and I mean everything. We’ve got a Star Wars bar scene, some Land Before Time, a little buddy cop feel (Curry and his brother Orm, who was a bad guy in the first film but now has to be good for the betterment of all), and a host of other film clichés and tropes. If the action were better, it could hide some faults, but like the first film, because it mostly takes place under water, it all looks a little fake. DC, c’est la vie. ★½

Hands That Bind is a tale of two movies. The bulk of the story is fantastic. It follows a man named Andy who is living on a farm in western Canada in the early 1980s, with his wife and kids. They don’t own the land, but have been working for owner Mac for a long time. Mac is estranged from his adult kids, so Andy has dreams of taking over the farm when Mac is ready to hang it up. But one day, one of Mac’s kids shows up. Dirk is a complete jerk, bossing his wife around in public and putting Andy down any chance he can get, making sure Andy knows his place as a hired hand. With Dirk back, Mac makes it clear that he’ll be getting the farm, and since Dirk is young and can do the farm chores (despite no real desire to), they give Andy a timeline of a month or two to find a different job and move on. The problem is there is no real work to find in the area, and Andy has been reluctant to contact his own father for help over some fight decades ago. All of that story is great, with a slow-burning tension that pervades throughout, and you watch patiently hoping Dirk gets what’s coming and Andy comes out on top. However, there’s these weird subplots that don’t make any sense. Andy dreams about his wife eating bloody meat. There are dead cows found strung up in trees, cows which have been surgically sliced up. And then there’s weird noises and strange lights in the sky. Are they being visited by aliens? If so, it is never explained, and left for interpretation by the viewer. I wasn’t buying it, and would have preferred a more straight-forward story. Still, solid acting from Paul Sparks as Andy and the always-scene-stealing Bruce Dern as a neighboring farmer. ★★½

All of Us Strangers is the latest from English director Andrew Haigh. Not super familiar with his work, but I did like his film 45 Years a few years ago. This movie follows a gay man living in London, a man who is carrying around a lot of baggage. Adam has no friends and only ventures out of his high-rise apartment for work or food. One out-of-the-norm visit happens though when he gets on a train and heads out to the suburbs, where he goes to his childhood home. His parents are there, though they look awfully young to be his parents, and admonish him for not visiting for years. They seem loving though, and they have a nice evening catching up. Back in his apartment building, Adam meets Harry, and they begin a timid relationship. In a very poignant moment, Adam tells Harry that his parents died in a car wreck when he was 12; turns out when he is visiting them at home, he is really just seeing visions of them, of how they were last he saw them (thus, why they appear so young). Because Adam lost them so young, and never got to come out to them, he’s lived his life finding it very difficult to make attachments. His visions with his parents are now a way to work through those conversations that he never had a chance to have. His parents tell him the kinds of things he would have in his own subconscious, putting words to thoughts that he himself may not be aware of, all in the process of finally healing. At the same time, Adam is starting this relationship with Harry, which brings a whole new set of feelings. Harry is a lot younger, about 10-15 years, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but there’s a generational difference between them. Adam grew up in a time when he was bullied for being gay, whereas Harry came out to his parents and the world without much blowback. The ending has a bit of a surprise that I did not see coming, and not sure how I felt about it, but there are some truly heartwarming and heart wrenching moments in this movie that will move you. I think everyone who loses a loved one, especially a parent, would love to have one more day with them. ★★★½

I always try to catch the handful of sci-fi films that come of Korea, because I’ve had good luck with them in the past. Not so much for The Moon. In 2029, South Korea is trying to become the first country since the USA to put a man on the moon. NASA and an international alliance have built a lunar space station, but Korea has struck out on its own, and its program is under pressure for results. 5 years ago, a deadly disaster killed 3 of their astronauts, so there’s a lot of urgency to make this mission go off without a hitch. Unfortunately it does not. The trio gets up into space OK, but a solar flare wipes out major systems on board. The 2 most experienced astronauts do a spacewalk to repair the systems, but a sudden explosion of leaking fuel kills them, leaving just one man in the hobbled ship. And that man isn’t really an astronaut, he’s a former military soldier picked for this mission because his dad (now dead) was a pioneer in Korea’s new space program. Alone up in space, the soldier-turned-astronaut has to navigate meteor showers (three of them!) and so much contrived drama that your head will spin. I lost track of how many “countdowns” I had to endure, and the numerous “Abort! Abort!” instructions when something went wrong. Horrendous acting, completely unbelievable disaster after disaster, and some graphics straight of Babylon 5, decades ago. ½

• TV series recently watched: Percy Jackson and the Olympians (season 1), The New Batman Adventures (series), The Witcher (season 3)
• Book currently reading: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell