Leave the World Behind (2023)
Based on the book (which I have not read) by Ruuman Alam, Leave the World Behind might be one of the most disappointing movies of the year. With a stacked cast (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, and Kevin Bacon) and a fascinating premise (what if you were renting an AirBNB and the world, like, ended and the owners came back to their house) this movie adds up to a whole lotta nothing.
Roberts and Hawke play Amanda and Clay Sandford, who, with their two kids, take a vacation on Long Island. But the first night they're at the rental house, the owner, G.H. Scott (Ali), and his daughter Ruth (Myha'la) show up because there are blackouts in the city and they don't want to go to their apartment on the 14th floor of a high rise when the elevator and lights are out of commission. Or so they say.
Amanda is immediately suspicious of them, and, frankly, rude as hell. G.H. left his ID in his coat which he forgot at the opera he and Ruth were attending, but he also has a key to the liquor cabinet and knows his way around the house. It's pretty obvious that these people are who they say they are. However, they are also Black.
Here is where the movie fails. I 100% thought this would be a movie about racism amongst a small group of middle-class people during the apocalypse. But race is *barely* mentioned. And I don't see that as a point in the movie's favor. Although the word "racist" is never used, Amanda is hugely racist. She doesn't believe G.H. and Ruth when they show up, she makes weird comments about Ruth's hair, and then later she dances with G.H. to the song "Too Close" while drunk. She's basically a bingo card of awkward white lady racism: pissed off at these Black people when it suits her, but also weirdly horny for the dad. Her character is fucked up and I absolutely hated her, which I guess is a testament to Roberts' acting.
The film instead pulls the "we all just need to get along" card in the end, suggesting that things fall apart when the world ends because people just aren't nice enough to each other. It's a child's version of morality and I wanted a hard-hitting film about how people would actually treat each other in this exact scenario. What a phony, bullshit movie and a waste of an interesting premise. Would recommend skipping.
Grade: C
***
Birth (2004)
Director Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest is coming out soon and so I wanted to go back and watch some of his earlier films. He directs very strange and dreamlike movies. Birth is about Anna (Nicole Kidman), who loses her husband Sean at the beginning of the movie. Ten years later, she's celebrating her engagement to Joseph (Danny Huston) when a 10 year old boy (Cameron Bright) shows up during a family gathering and announces that he is Sean. Anna's Sean.
The boy, whose name is, in fact, Sean, knows a lot about Anna and Sean's relationship, including intimate details about their sex life that no one else would know. At first, Anna sees Sean as innocent and misinformed. Sean's dad lives in the same building as Anna's mother, so Joseph and Anna take him home and explain to the dad what's going on. Sean's dad tries to force him to say that he'll leave Anna alone, but the boy keeps reiterating that he can't and he loves her.
Anna continues to try to have an (appropriate) relationship with 10-year-old Sean in the hopes that he might snap out of it and realize that he's not the reincarnation of Anna's dead husband. But Anna starts to fall in love with this little boy. Birth was controversial for obvious reasons when it came out. However, at least in my opinion, there is absolutely nothing salacious that happens in the movie. There is a scene where Anna and 10-year-old Sean take a bath together (Kidman says that they filmed their closeups separately and were never actually in the bath together)...but really, this isn't a sexual scene at all. In fact, the entire movie is more about spiritual love than sexual love.
Birth is a beautiful and mesmerizing movie about grief. How do we move on when we're still haunted by memories of the past? Does love transcend death? It's well worth watching as long as you're not squicked out by the premise.
Grade: B+
***
Angel Heart (1987)
Angel Heart is a neo-noir thriller that takes place in the 1950s and stars Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel, a private detective, and Robert De Niro as Louis Cyphre, a mysterious rich man who hires Angel to track down a singer, Johnny Favorite, who owes Cyphre a debt.
Angel's search for Johnny Favorite takes him from Brooklyn to New Orleans, where he tracks down and interviews former associates (and lovers) of Johnny to gather information. The only problem is that the people Angel interviews wind up dead not long after. With Angel implicated in their deaths.
Angel Heart was a really fun movie and gets progressively wilder as the film goes on, reaching a nearly ridiculous (in a fun way) climax. And yet, I felt like *something* was missing and I'm not sure exactly what. I think I went in with really high expectations because the movie had been recommended to me by multiple people and it also seems exactly like the kind of movie I'd love. That said, I still recommend it because it's a lot of fun.
Grade: B
***
The Report (2019)
If you're in the mood for a "people research and uncover startling truths" movie, a la Spotlight, then this one's for you. Based on the true story of Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones' (played by a very impassioned and shout-y Adam Driver) research into the "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA engaged in during the post-9/11 "war on terror", The Report is a haunting reminder that the United States is capable of great evil (what a shock, lol).
So, I lived through all this history and kinda knew a little about what was going on, but I didn't know the extent to which the United States went out of their way to figure out a way to torture supposed terrorists for no other reason than the fact that they could get away with it. The story back then and to this day is that even though "enhanced interrogation techniques" were brutal and ethically ambiguous, they worked and they prevented deaths of innocent civilians and so it was worth it. In fact, what Jones uncovers is that techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and humiliation of prisoners didn't work at all. Waterboarding was supposed to get the truth out of someone after one use and some of these prisoners were waterboarded almost 200 times and they made up shit to stop the torture. Which is like, 100% common sense, right!?
I learned a lot from The Report and none of it really shocked me. I could go into a rant about the absolute insanity that is "American exceptionalism", but if you read my blog regularly, you already know what I think. Instead, I'll just encourage people to watch this excellent film which shows how the US government stooped to the level of the terrorists and perhaps even lower the minute it had an excuse to do so. It's also not lost on me the parallels between post-9/11 USA and post-10/7 Israel. Terrorist attacks are evil, but that doesn't justify striking back tenfold.
Grade: B+
***
A Murder at the End of the World (2023)
This show, which I described as "Agatha Christie meets Mr. Robot", started strong but fizzled out near the end. The show follows Darby Hart (Emma Corrin with a shaky American accent), a Gen-Z sleuth and hacker who writes a book about how she and a fellow true crime enthusiast, Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson), tracked down the identity of a serial killer. Darby and Bill are subsequently both invited to an exclusive retreat in Iceland by Andy Ronson (Clive Owen), a tech mogul in the style of Steve Jobs meets Elon Musk. Ronson is married to Lee Anderson (Brit Marling), a female hacker from the 90s who was doxxed and retreated into obscurity soon after.
Ostensibly, this retreat is to gather some of the sharpest minds in tech and innovative thinking to come up with solutions for climate change. However, once guests start dying one by one, Darby starts thinking there might be more sinister reasons for the retreat--especially once a snowstorm blows in, trapping everyone Andy's luxury (and high tech) hotel. Can Darby figure out who is behind these deaths before she becomes the next victim?
A Murder at the End of the World (created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij) is intriguing but muddled. I was much more into the true crime aspects than the tech aspects. It's still very entertaining and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys "locked room mysteries", but I don't think it will be a show I ever return to or think much about in the future.
Grade: B
***
Birth/Rebirth (2023)
Not to be confused with Birth, the movie I reviewed above, Birth/Rebirth is a horror film inspired by Frankenstein. Marin Ireland plays Dr. Rose Casper, a morgue pathologist who experiments with bringing dead animals back to life in her spare time. She discovers that a serum derived from fetal pigs allows her to revive a dead pig and keep it alive as long as she infuses it with fresh serum. Now, if serum from a pig fetus can revive a dead pig, what could revive a dead human...? Hmmm...
Meanwhile, single mom and maternity nurse Celie Morales (Judy Reyes) loses her six year old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister), to bacterial meningitis. When Lila's body disappears from the hospital, Celie suspects Rose and ends up breaking into Rose's apartment to find Lila--alive, but barely. Given the chance to bring her daughter literally back from the dead, Celie teams up with Rose to find a way to keep Lila alive.
Birth/Rebirth is a gross and ballsy horror film that fully embraces some taboos concerning pregnancy and children. Very little is sacred in this film and it goes places that will make you wildly uncomfortable. Recommended for those with strong stomachs.
Grade: B+
***
The Bear, season 2 (2023)
While I feel like The Bear doesn't have what it takes to be one of my *favorite* TV shows of all time (or even of 2023), it's undeniably excellent. Season 2 is even better than season 1 because it dives into the backstories of some of its characters and also shows immense character growth (particularly of Richie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach).
The standout episode, "Fishes", takes place 5 years in the past and shows what Christmas dinner was like at the Berzatto household. In a word: dysfunctional. Matriarch Donna Berzatto (an excellent Jamie Lee Curtis) is an alcoholic narcissist who effectively ruins Christmas even as she creates a beautiful meal--a feast of seven fishes, which is an Italian tradition. However, she couldn't ruin Christmas without the help of the codependent and sometimes cruel people around her. We understand why Carmy (Jeremy Allen White, he of the sad, blue puppy dog eyes) got the fuck out of Chicago and was reluctant to return in the first place.
So, "Fishes" is the best episode, but "Forks", in which Richie stages at an upscale restaurant to learn more about the business, is almost equally good. Richie is a supremely annoying character and getting to see him be vulnerable really helps the viewer empathize with him.
Overall, The Bear lives up to the hype, if you can stand its stressful and fast pace. I look forward to season 3.
Grade: A-
You're killing me with those bedroom eyes, Chef.
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