Movies seen in April '24
May. 2nd, 2024 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessCivil War is not quite the movie you might think it is from the promotional material. Yes, it’s set during a modern-day civil war in the US, but it’s more about what it is to be a war reporter. Granted, that war is in their own country (the country with so very many guns.) Structurally, it’s about a newly formed work family on a road trip (to Washington D.C.), with legendary photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), her colleague reporter Joel and old-timer Sam mentoring newbie photojournalist Jessie. Only when they stop for gas, they encounter grisly scenes. The opening scenes give you a good sense of the intensity of the violence in unusual settings for the rest of the movie.
Writer-director Garland isn’t quite borrowing from real life: a US President has stayed in power for a third term, but a US President showing dangerous disdain for press is nothing new, and the treatment of press in the war in Gaza is being discussed right now. I suspect this film might hit even harder if you’re American (as ‘Resistance’ did for me.) I kept having questions such as how Jessie got her press accreditation and who was she working for and how did the Western Front have such an army. Dunst is very good as a battle-hardened, traumatised professional, in contrast, it’s her character’s male colleague who is more expressive, more of an adrenaline junkie (he’s played by Wagner Moura who was the other Mr Smith in Mr & Mrs Smith.) And it’s surely a plus that the central mentor/protégé relationship is between two women. It’s intense and thought provoking. (Having seen some of Alex Garland being interviewed to promote the film, how much does he LOATHE that part of the job!?)
Back To Black is a biopic about Amy Winehouse, so I think how fannish you were about Winehouse (I like some of her songs a lot) and whether you’ve seen the documentary ‘Amy’ (I haven’t) will colour your take on this. Marisa Abela is brilliant in the lead role, with great chemistry with Jack O’Connell, and Lesley Manville is reliably good. The songs on the soundtrack, mainly Winehouse’s, but also jazz standards and a few other well-picked songs, are also wonderful. But the rest of it is…fine? The script is a bit too on the nose, some of the dialogue lacks the sharpness of Winehouse’s songwriting, and, okay, it’s meant to be her POV, her POV of her troubled relationship, but it too often seems to buy into the lies she was telling herself about how she was coping.
Abela sells the vulnerability as well as the sass, and it recreates Winehouse’s London. The scenes with the paparazzi basically hounding Amy are suitably gruesome, and it honours her talent, but despite it being about a woman who wasn’t the musical one in a very flawed relationship, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla had more to say.
Writer-director Garland isn’t quite borrowing from real life: a US President has stayed in power for a third term, but a US President showing dangerous disdain for press is nothing new, and the treatment of press in the war in Gaza is being discussed right now. I suspect this film might hit even harder if you’re American (as ‘Resistance’ did for me.) I kept having questions such as how Jessie got her press accreditation and who was she working for and how did the Western Front have such an army. Dunst is very good as a battle-hardened, traumatised professional, in contrast, it’s her character’s male colleague who is more expressive, more of an adrenaline junkie (he’s played by Wagner Moura who was the other Mr Smith in Mr & Mrs Smith.) And it’s surely a plus that the central mentor/protégé relationship is between two women. It’s intense and thought provoking. (Having seen some of Alex Garland being interviewed to promote the film, how much does he LOATHE that part of the job!?)
Back To Black is a biopic about Amy Winehouse, so I think how fannish you were about Winehouse (I like some of her songs a lot) and whether you’ve seen the documentary ‘Amy’ (I haven’t) will colour your take on this. Marisa Abela is brilliant in the lead role, with great chemistry with Jack O’Connell, and Lesley Manville is reliably good. The songs on the soundtrack, mainly Winehouse’s, but also jazz standards and a few other well-picked songs, are also wonderful. But the rest of it is…fine? The script is a bit too on the nose, some of the dialogue lacks the sharpness of Winehouse’s songwriting, and, okay, it’s meant to be her POV, her POV of her troubled relationship, but it too often seems to buy into the lies she was telling herself about how she was coping.
Abela sells the vulnerability as well as the sass, and it recreates Winehouse’s London. The scenes with the paparazzi basically hounding Amy are suitably gruesome, and it honours her talent, but despite it being about a woman who wasn’t the musical one in a very flawed relationship, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla had more to say.
