It'd been awhile since I actually sat down to watch anything - what little time I've had has mostly been spent in sppaaaaaaaace. But once the weekend came along, it was time to remedy this.
First, I'd had repeated recommendations to see You Were Never Really Here, and damn but I see why. I won't spoil anything, but will say it is truly superb, and deserves to be considered in the same category as Taxi Driver. It somehow manages to feel like a slow burn going at breakneck speed, and I'm not entirely sure how they pulled it off. But they did. Seriously one of the best movies I've seen in awhile.
Another one that was recently recommend (indirectly, as it showed up on the AVClub's top of the year so far list) is The Endless. The premise is two brothers get a message from the UFO cult they were a part of as kids (and which they'd left/escaped from about a decade before). The younger one has much fonder memories of the place, and convinced the older one to go back for a visit. It turns out they were right to leave. It sounds much more generic than it turns out to be, and it goes to some interesting places with it. It's more horror than drama, but there's a little bit of that too. It's one of the better done "normal people dealing with abnormal things" flicks I've seen in awhile, and it's definitely able to hide what's going on much longer than I expected. Occasionally can be heavy-handed with symbolism, but still good overall.
Anyone else got anything they saw recently that'd be worth checking out?
I Don't Feel at Home In This World Anymore is an amusing, well-acted portrait of a woman finally driven to the edge of American society. Watching from Germany, it really seemed like a film about small-town America, disguised as an over-the-top thriller. Melanie Lynskey is particularly impressive in the title role, and Elijah Wood does what Elijah Wood does. At the end of the day, though, the film falls a little flat; its observations about American life and the nature of revenge don't lead anywhere, and the ending comes off a little hollow for my taste. Nevertheless worth the barely 90 minutes it asks.
Aquí no ha pasado nada (English title: Much Ado About Nothing, although the translation is very rough, and any Shakespearean implications fully irrelevant) shares much in common with Don't Feel at Home, with the caveat that it's a portrait of modern Chilean society (or at least a certain segment of it), masquerading as a crime drama. Like Don't Feel at Home, it remains mostly suspenseful and interesting, but loses significant steam in its last scenes; in this case, the director chooses to display a court case through witness testimonies, half-spoken, half-text-on-screen-- but the displayed text isn't the text being spoken, and it's all important to the plot. A nightmare with subtitles. And looking back, the film honestly isn't critical enough. It comes across as a bare reenactment of the real-life Chilean scandal it's based on (link in Spanish), displaying but not condemning its injustice. Entertaining, but not much staying power.
Now to the films I really liked:
Neruda is a very strange little film. It's an investigation into the life of Pablo Neruda, but also into the nature of film, of story itself-- without spoiling too much, it eventually ventures into a kind of experimentalism that I hadn't seen in film before. Ultimately not entirely successful, but in any case incredibly interesting. And Gael García Bernal is always great.
Temporada de Caza (Hunting Season) is the beautifully-shot and understated story of a father and estranged son reconnecting in the "wilds of Patagonia," as Netflix puts it. There's not really much I can say here-- the film is well-acted, well-shot, and has a convincing if sparse storyline. Nahuel's intensely emotional reaction to killing his first buck had me reconsidering eating meat. Definitely recommended.
In a similar vein, Absolute Giganten (Absolute Giants), recommended to me by my former roommate, belongs to a group of late-90s German films mostly distinguished by their quietness and slow pace. It takes a relatively played-out trope, the last night of partying before leaving forever, and tones it down to extract the beauty-- although it also has its I've watched it 3 times in the past few months, in part because it feels like a film about me.
Oh, and it's also home to the best foosball scene of all time, beloved in the German foosball community for its accuracy and badassery.