The Films of 2021

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
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DarkImbecile
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The Films of 2021

#1 Post by DarkImbecile » Fri Jan 01, 2021 1:00 am

Image

Swo suggested I just repost the 2020 version in full, but looking the newly announced 2021 releases over made me (naively?) hopeful that I'll actually see one or two of these in a theater, so maybe it'll do the same for you!

As always, this is the thread in which you can post your reactions to any film released this year that doesn't already have a thread created for it; if enough posts are made on the same film, a separate group of posters will meet several weeks later and decide if that film will be awarded its own thread (barring recounts or court challenges), at which point a thread will be permitted to exist about a month after that. Please limit yourself to one film per post — even if that means a few consecutive posts after a day-long trip to the multiplex (hahahahahasob) — as the mods have hard enough jobs already without having to try to split your 1,000-word treatise on the Venom sequel and Chris Rock's Saw movie into two different threads.

If all goes even marginally better than it did last year, in addition to all the unreleased films from last year's list, we might get:
  • Brady Corbet following up Vox Lux with a period drama set in the world of mid-20th-century architecture
  • Riley Stearns following up The Art of Self-Defense with a sci-fi cloning feature
  • Olivia Wilde following up Booksmart with a period domestic drama starring Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, and Chris Pine
  • Julia Ducournau following up Raw with a horror mystery about a missing child reappearing a decade later
  • Daniels following up Swiss Army Man with "a sci-fi adventure comedy about a 55-year-old Chinese woman trying to finish her taxes" starring Michelle Yeoh
  • Martin Scorsese's documentary on the classic sketch show SCTV
  • George Miller's "epic fantasy romance" starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba
  • Jean-Pierre Jeunet's android uprising comedy
  • Park Chan-wook's detective drama featuring Lust, Caution's Tang Wei
  • Bruno Dumont's latest incisive observation on societal hypocrisy starring Lea Seydoux
  • Melanie Laurent's period drama about an escapee from a mental hospital
  • James Gray's period drama about 1980s New York, with Oscar Isaac, Cate Blanchett, Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, and Donald Sutherland
  • Steven Soderbergh's return to the crime thriller with Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Jon Hamm, Matt Damon, and Julia Fox
  • Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks
  • Jeremy Saulnier's latest violent thriller with John Boyega
  • Robert Eggers' viking epic with Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang, and Bjork
  • Shaka King's depiction of the assassination of Fred Hampton, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya
  • Ridley Scott's true-crime drama about the Gucci family starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Adam Driver
  • Ana Lily Amirpour's supernatural thriller starring Kate Hudson
  • Jacque Audiard's latest feature, a collaboration with co-writer Céline Sciamma and Portrait of a Lady on Fire star Noémie Merlant
  • Claire Denis' latest collaboration with Juliette Binoche set in the world of French radio
  • Adam McKay's star-studded environmental satire, featuring [deep breath] Leonardo Dicaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett, Jonah Hill, Ariana Grande, and others
  • Christopher McQuarrie's latest entry in the Tom Cruise-starring action series about the importance of following public health protocols
  • David O. Russell's latest drama(?) with Margot Robbie, Christian Bale, and John David Washington
  • Maggie Gyllenhaal's feature directing debut, a dark psychological drama about motherhood
  • Edgar Wright's supposedly dark time travel thriller, with Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy
  • Jane Campion's western drama with Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jesse Plemons
  • Robin Wright's feature directing debut about a grief-stricken woman making a life-changing journey in the West, starring herself
  • Channing Tatum's feature directing debut about a grief-stricken man making a life-changing journey in the West, starring himself
  • Nicolas Cage playing himself when cast in a fictional Tarantino movie as an informant for the CIA
All this in addition to the many, many projects from the likes of ::kogonada, Tomas Alfredsson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Leos Carax, Scott Cooper, Gia Coppola, Andrew Dominik, Jonathan Glazer, Mia Hansen-Løve, Todd Haynes, Michel Haznavicius, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Adrian Lyne, Terrence Malick, Tom McCarthy, Mike Mills, Kornél Mundruczó, Sally Potter, Paul Schrader, Paul Verhoeven, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Chloe Zhao we were already anticipating from last year! Everyone is encouraged to offer their thoughts on any 2020 release that provokes a reaction, whether it's a hidden art house gem or a big budget studio disaster — you never know when you'll be the one to start a vigorous conversation on the merits of 2021's version of Hillbilly Elegy.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#2 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Jan 01, 2021 3:18 am

Got all excited that my dream of Tom Hanks playing Elvis had finally come true, 2021 off to a rough start

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Finch
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Re: The Films of 2021

#3 Post by Finch » Fri Jan 01, 2021 5:22 am

Jane Campion is directing a western? Yes, please.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#4 Post by senseabove » Sat Jan 02, 2021 11:17 am

LWLies’ rundown of 100 films to look forward to in 2021: Part 1 and Part 2

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captveg
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Re: The Films of 2021

#5 Post by captveg » Tue Jan 12, 2021 5:49 pm

Netflix pushing their 2021 schedule with this new trailer. Gotta admit, there's more in there than I expected drawing my interest.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#6 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jan 12, 2021 5:57 pm

Oof, I had the opposite experience watching that. I mean, I'm somewhat interested in O2, Kate, and Don't Look Up just based on casting, but aside from Malcolm and Marie this looks like the worst Netflix slate in years

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Never Cursed
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Re: The Films of 2021

#7 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Jan 12, 2021 7:03 pm

Yeah, most of those films look quite bad, and further I don't know if I like how Netflix is releasing them in much the same way that Lifetime releases movies

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captveg
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Re: The Films of 2021

#8 Post by captveg » Tue Jan 12, 2021 7:17 pm

On average I've seen 2 or 3 Netflix films a year for the last couple years. There's around 5 in that trailer that have at least a little interest from me, so that's the level of "more" I have, for full context.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#9 Post by Persona » Sat Jan 16, 2021 11:24 am

The Netflix thing is about as ho-hum a sizzle reel as possible, but I will admit that the refreshingly wordless clip of DON'T LOOK UP enticed me for an Adam McKay ensemble-palooza more than I was prepared for.

That said, the reel also didn't do much of anything to highlight the stronger faction of their releases this year. I don't think they are gonna have much in the way of awards bait or those sort of crown jewels they had in these past few years from Cuaron and Scorsese and Kaufman, but I am really looking forward to the Showalter, Dosunmu, and Campion and I think the B-movie genre fare seems a little more intriguing than their usual with KATE, NIGHT TEETH, FEAR STREET, etc.

But yeah, the stuff front and center in the clip is a yawn besides the McKay.

Reading about the Campion has me very stoked for it. A lot is gonna hinge on Cumberbatch's performance, which I think could easily go either way between making the movie or breaking it and I really have no clue if the Batch can pull it off. One fortuitous thing was Paul Dano dropping out and being replaced by Jesse Plemons, which I think is a huge upgrade for the role. On the downgrade Elisabeth Moss was replaced by Kirsten Dunst, though Dunst is certainly capable of doing a great job.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#10 Post by Brian C » Sat Jan 16, 2021 2:50 pm

News of the World (Paul Greengrass)

Change-of-pace film for Greengrass about an old man on a long, slow journey that feels like it's trying to emulate David Lynch's The Straight Story in some respects, but it lacks that movie's elegance and charm. This is a role that Hanks could play in his sleep - it's pretty much the archetypical Hanks role - and the film hits every narrative and thematic beat exactly how anyone would expect. It's a movie astonishingly short of surprises, but in case you need a cheat sheet to what the movie's trying to say:

War --> bad
Racism --> bad
Child rapists --> bad
Child labor --> not great but these are simple folk
Violence --> oh we're ever so weary of all the violence in the world, unless it's heroic, then it's kinda neat
The US treatment of American Indians --> bad, of course, but also because of the film's premise, hoo boy do we ever not want to open that can of worms
Wastefully killing bison --> sad
Rickety old wagons --> use with caution
Reading --> good

I guess I would think a lot more highly of the film had the filmmakers been a little more willing to get their hands dirty. What if the Hanks and Greengrass hadn't been so insistent on the main character being such a Decent Man? There are a lot of unavoidable echoes of The Searchers here, but that movie faced attitudes that were contemporary to the setting in a way that Greengrass mostly sidesteps, which seems overly convenient to me. There's not much indication that people in 1870s Texas might have looked askance at a little girl that only speaks Kiowa, even if they do stare a bit when she eats with her hands. And then the movie wraps things up in a way that feels frustratingly - even insultingly - easy.

I guess what I'm saying is that the movie never defines the stakes very forcefully and never feels all that interested in the characters. Instead it feels annoyingly like allegory, a will-they-make-it-or-won't-they narrative that dutifully stops now and again to impart a lesson but never stops to care about how things will play out even if they do make it and how these people will be affected. There's just no way to think that the toll of the events leading up to and portrayed in the film won't have a long-term traumatic impact on everyone involved, and there's no simply no interest, either. Instead we get a movie that is piously "relevant" but with massive blind spots in its moral vision, and ignoring moral complexity in a movie with obvious intentions to impart a moral message just seems kinda pointless.

Finally, a pet peeve - when did actual landscape photography in film go out of style? This movie is a complete mess of ugly CGI outdoor photography. Is it really that hard and that expensive to do some location scouting and get some 2nd-unit aerial shots of the landscape?

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Re: The Films of 2021

#11 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:17 pm

Godzilla vs. Kong looks genuinely fun.

I was a big fan of 2014's Godzilla, which was far better than it had any right to be. Kong: Skull Island was dumb fun. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, on the other hand, was a pretty boring trainwreck.

I have hope that this one will be good time.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#12 Post by knives » Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:21 pm

Admittedly I’m biased in favor of Kaiju, but I thought the sequel was fun and did a good job utilizing the essence of some of the nuttier originals.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#13 Post by Big Ben » Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:46 pm

I'm pleased that the movie is not advertising itself as anything other than exactly what it is. I have a sneaking suspicion that King Kong and Godzilla will not be the only Kaiju in the film however. \:D/

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Re: The Films of 2021

#14 Post by Persona » Mon Jan 25, 2021 10:00 pm

THE WHITE TIGER (Bahrani)

The incessant voice-over narration undermines this movie so badly. I picture the exact same movie without the V.O. and it registers as something sorta great in my mind. The narration cages the picture and the viewer together into such a narrow space of engagement and interpretation. It erases any potential for subtext or ambiguity. Why do good filmmakers still do stuff like this in 2021?

Still, on the film's other merits (it's never less than interesting and involving and pretty well-made), I have to give it a frustrated thumbs up.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#15 Post by yoshimori » Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:07 pm

Saint Maud looks fun. Certainly likely to be worlds better than the utterly cliche new Ben Wheatley horror, In the Earth, that premiered at Sundance this week. What an unexpected disappointment that festival has been. The Sono-Cage thing, Prisoners of the Ghostland, has none (zero) of the poetry and psycho-sexual intensity that makes Sono's version of Grand Guignol work. It's like a Mad Max movie written by Tarantino fanboys and directed by Miike's dull-witted nephew. The Wong Kar-Wai produced Thai film, One for the Road, is super-slick and utterly vacuous. A paint-by-numbers plot -- a young man dying of cancer enlists his former best friend to go on a road trip to help him reconcile with his former girlfriend -- sketched out by someone who can only count to two. Several other shows ooze the traditional Sundance sap. The best I've seen so far, Debbie Lum's doc on SF's majority Asian-American Lowell High School, Try Harder, accessed the details of the lives of the school's cream-of-the-crop student body, their parents, and teachers, but its diffuse response to the drama that it sets up -- implying that the prestigious high school's failure to get more than one kid into each of Harvard and Stanford is a veiled racism -- ignores, among other things, top colleges' reluctance to reward those who've already had the best educational opportunities. The impossibly narrow goals the school and (some of) the parents set and then ludicrously expect the kids to achieve are a real shame ... because most of the kids, none of whom is prepared for barrage of rejections he or she inevitably receives from the "dream" schools, seem like genuine treasures.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#16 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:31 pm

Not sure exactly where to put this, but Under the Grapefruit Tree: The CC Sabathia Story is apparently on HBO now, and from everything I've heard it's a really terrific depiction of addiction and recovery. This article by fellow addict-in-recovery Ryan Hockensmith is quite powerful, and he uses his personal experience in very raw and honest way to debunk myths and reinforce the hard truths of the process related to addiction. Highly recommend people read it.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#17 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Thu Feb 04, 2021 11:17 pm

My daughter somehow got ahold of the Roku remote and accidentally purchased Greenland, the new Gerard Butler disaster movie. I was about to return it (just like I did when she accidentally bought Avengers: Infinity War a few years ago), when I thought: Eh, why not keep it. I like disaster schlock.

To my surprise after tonight's viewing, it is not that schlocky and not actually terrible. It's more focused on the protagonists' race against the clock, and against other people, than it is on comet-collision money shots. This makes for an effectively intense viewing.

That said, it's certainly not great. The dialogue is ham-fisted and bad, and the movie seems uninterested in exploring any interesting questions inherent in its set-up...
SpoilerShow
...the set-up being that the U.S. government has selected just a special few people, our main characters among them, to survive the apocalypse.
That doesn't lead to any cogent commentary or ethical questions; it's little more than a surface-level gimmick meant to provoke the expected drama.

But it doesn't suck. It's not Geostorm, is all I'm saying.

Still, probably shoulda gotten the refund.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#18 Post by tenia » Fri Feb 05, 2021 5:30 am

I watched Greenland a few weeks ago with my GF, and we both found it quite mediocre overall. It's indeed a very shallow and superficially written movie, that also feels particularly out of its time, ressuscitating the old "asteroid disaster" movie to jumpstart the movie's catastrophes while we're in a world that have plenty of already existing starting points for disaster movies. It's a weird thing to ressurect right now, as if a global pandemic or climate change weren't relatable points to use instead of sheer fantasy. I guess it's simply because it's more practical cinematographically, allowing for very specific events.

Then, it's indeed centered on the characters but it's quickly a bit easy to understand we're still in a typical "action" movie where they're pretty much invincible, and that it's a 2hrs movie that doesn't explore much of its setup and developments, it all goes quickly and superficially from a scene to the next with its brain turned off.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#19 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Feb 05, 2021 6:11 pm

TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Thu Feb 04, 2021 11:17 pm
My daughter somehow got ahold of the Roku remote and accidentally purchased Greenland, the new Gerard Butler disaster movie.
A likely story! :P

I am shying away from Greenland (what was that quote from Slacker's card game: "withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy") mostly because having a lead actor who seems very tied to right wing movies and evangelical Christian themes (as in Machine Gun Preacher) helm an end of days disaster movie without comment (and even receive unqualified praise from mainstream outlets such as Mark Kermode) seems concerning. I mean I know there are not that many films out there currently and as much as I love disaster stories (I'm reading my way through The Day of the Triffids at the moment which also features a flawed main character who has to leave half of the people he meets to their inevitable dire fates) that does not mean that we all have to uncautiously dive straight into Gerard Butler's burly arms for comfort.

So I'll probably just re-watch War of the Worlds, Deep Impact and 2012 again if I want to achieve the same effect.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#20 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Fri Feb 05, 2021 8:29 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Fri Feb 05, 2021 6:11 pm
TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Thu Feb 04, 2021 11:17 pm
My daughter somehow got ahold of the Roku remote and accidentally purchased Greenland, the new Gerard Butler disaster movie.
A likely story! :P
Scout's Honor, I tell you!
colinr0380 wrote:
Fri Feb 05, 2021 6:11 pm
I am shying away from Greenland (what was that quote from Slacker's card game: "withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy") mostly because having a lead actor who seems very tied to right wing movies and evangelical Christian themes (as in Machine Gun Preacher) helm an end of days disaster movie without comment (and even receive unqualified praise from mainstream outlets such as Mark Kermode) seems concerning. I mean I know there are not that many films out there currently and as much as I love disaster stories (I'm reading my way through The Day of the Triffids at the moment which also features a flawed main character who has to leave half of the people he meets to their inevitable dire fates) that does not mean that we all have to uncautiously dive straight into Gerard Butler's burly arms for comfort.

So I'll probably just re-watch War of the Worlds, Deep Impact and 2012 again if I want to achieve the same effect.
Though the movie has no overt politics, there is an undeniably a ring-wing vibe to the whole thing. It fetishizes the military and pick-up trucks, and there are a few uncritical references to the Good Lord.

But I'm mostly struck by the movie's elision of any exploration of privilege:
SpoilerShow
Our basically white* and obviously wealthy protagonist couple is selected by the government to be among the few deemed worthy to survive. This is supposedly because, we hear later, Butler's job as an architect would be important in the post-apocalypse. This plays as a tacit defense of classism; there is no invitation to think critically about a system that deems nice, white, rich families worthy of survival.

This is made much weirder by the fact that the family is helped, numerous times, by families and people of color (people, I should point out, who were not selected and thus presumably die shortly after their acts of kindness). A black military woman tries to help lady-protagonist, a black guy helps Butler out in a scuffle, a black man rescues lady-protagonist during a pharmacy shoot-out, and a hispanic family gives lady-protagonist a ride when she gets separated from her son.

This is a movie where we are expected to root for our wealthy white heroes who are helped along the way by doomed POC. And these POC are in the movie not as fully realized characters but as mere devices to be used by the privileged protagonists. There is no sense that the movie understands the optics of this or is interested in our thinking critically about it in any way.

I do not know what to make of all that. It's just weird.

*(the actress who plays lady-protagonist is a Brazilian-American of Italian descent)

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Re: The Films of 2021

#21 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat Feb 06, 2021 12:17 am

colin -- in regards to recent disaster shows, did you check out Japan Sinks 2020 on Netfllix -- not my favorite Yuasa, but I found it worth watching overall. It has a few tangential tie-ins to the old live-action film, but is otherwise an independent story in the same setting as the original film.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#22 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Feb 06, 2021 1:49 am

I'm afraid I'm not on Netflix so was not aware of it, though it looks interesting (as does Devilman Crybaby, his previous Netflix show) and I think Yuasa's work is always very experimental and daring.

I keep hoping that some label will start releasing some of the older Japanese disaster movies such as Kinji Fukasaku's 1980 Virus. At the moment I'm only really familiar with the comic take on disaster films with The World Sinks Except Japan (put out by Synapse Films on DVD in the US a while back as part of their Minoru Kawasaki collection), and the Japanese take on disaster through video games such as Tokyo Jungle or the Disaster Report series.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#23 Post by knives » Mon Feb 08, 2021 8:04 pm

Drat, I had this big write up of Mike Cahill’s Bliss as a Bukowski-esque refutation of Voltaire that got eaten up. The film will probably get the reputation as this year’s Serenity and on the surface it does earn that, but the cumulative effect of Cahill’s optimism on a highly depressive world makes as satisfactory an argument against happily ever after as Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

The issue for the film is that the first half before it plays its hand is unsatisfactory at fulfilling what feels like its potential as the scenes of Wilson as a schizophrenic burden for his daughter are great whereas the science fiction antics with Hayek lack pleasure. The damned nature of being removed from the mundane is the point though and I hope others will see that.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#24 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Feb 14, 2021 3:07 pm

Judas And The Black Messiah is a somber, but at turns terrifying look at a part of American history that is most worth examining. And it is a trifecta of tour de force performances, by Daniel Kaluuya, Lakeith Stanfield and by director Shaka King. It lacks the bloat and ponderous negatives even the best bio-pics suffer from, and gets down to brass tacks almost immediately. A stunning achievement of cinema, in both it's thematic clarity and overwhelming prescience to things we see today.

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Re: The Films of 2021

#25 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Feb 19, 2021 10:26 pm

I Care a Lot is a far less successful version of Promising Young Woman’s style of dark comedy. I'll go so far to say it's a lesson in how not to make a satire. Its diatribe isn’t well-directed and its character isn’t examined with the same weight of complexity or ethical interest. The film's self-awareness is winking repetitively from the word “go,” and doesn’t let you forget it, playing into the clichés of oversimplified dichotomies, point-blank diagnostics of human beings as units of money, and stressing confidently careless corruption as the universally-spoken dominant language of human services. It’s all a bit irritating, not only because it’s ridiculous and untrue but because this film, unlike Fennell’s, doesn’t even make a small effort to portray its satirical thesis as layered, ignoring infinite opportunities to make intelligent leaps. But that would of course take risks, an artistic willingness this film treats as an allergy.

There’s an interesting idea somewhere in here. The filmmakers use elder abuse, specifically an immoral and common form of harm that’s become more popularly discussed in the zeitgeist lately, and frame the collection of dying people’s assets for the younger as a reflection of the apathetic seizure of the American Dream as a Hobbesian right. This is further reinforced by the societal celebration of the individualist, where superficial appearances in status and where one stands in the social pecking order translates to respect and malleability across compromised systemic barriers. In theory I appreciated the concept of a gay feminist practice joining 'the game' unapolegetically as a double-edged knife - to suppose that all counterculture demographics need to subscribe to the dominant systems to thrive, or at least think that they do, or that those with progressive qualifiers are not excluded from the allure of heartless economic dogma.

The problem is that there’s no audacity in execution, leaving any commentary trite and superfluous, while the connective tissue of the revealing narrative doesn’t add up either (underground immoral economic systems challenging legal immoral economic systems, but to what avail? Is it really supposed to cause audience cheer when Pike demands the criminals play by her rules?) and we don’t care about anybody or any idea, because none of them have been established or fleshed out in any interesting way. A moment like Pike correcting a man calling bullshit on her enterprise with a “she” -to unveil his problematic assumption that a doctor must be male- reallyyyy exposes the patriarchal default to assign masculine terms for positions of power. How clever! Some might challenge me for even comparing this film to Fennell’s, but I actually think it’s trying to tow a similar line and such a move comes with risks (even if this is averse to taking them) that when you fail, you fail hard. I don’t want to say it’s because the film was made by a man, since J Blakeson’s awful direction and script problems would likely exist regardless, but anybody even mildly woke in today’s climate could have written something better and with more nuance.

I’d be lying if I said that I was never amused, but that semi-interest is resigned to a “heist” at the halfway mark, when taken as a half-assed crime mystery of raised stakes set to a careless tempo. For a while the film essentially plays like a thinned Blood Simple, where dark comic absurdities stem from the conflict of a bunch of people blind to the whole composite, only instead of that excellent mood piece this is diluted to the bone of substance. I think I have less patience for a film like this because it wants to be, and think it is, so much more. If you want a smart movie about women contesting with broken systems through a broken method, just watch Promising Young Woman instead.

As a final cap to this rant, I do want to say a few words about Rosamund Pike. I can’t tell if she’s been unfortunately typecast to her Die Another Day ice queen following Gone Girl, where she plays a character far more complex and interesting than she appears to be on the surface; or if she actually has difficulty stretching her range and Fincher simply brought out the best in her/played to her strengths/cut a hundred takes of a scene and put the optimal edits together to formulate his own performance from disconnected movements. Either way, she’s not very good here but her character isn’t much to work with, to be fair.

This is an antihero who isn’t developed enough to detest satirically or to align with in conflicted attraction. At a certain point in the last act, we’re asked to sympathize with her as a victim of her society, as a woman, as a resilient symbol of human autonomy- but it’s a misjudged characterization at a misjudged time (about an hour and a half too late in the narrative) to attempt to draw shades. If a certain event had played out differently in her apt., she’d be a responsible culprit-by-proxy and lose any and all shreds of credit given to her, but the film has mercy and this fateful insert actually wishes for us to blame everyone but Pike. Her behavior at the convenience store after a certain setpiece is that of a "tough woman" who we’re told, in every ounce of film language, “should” appeal to her audience based on self-actualized independence from social norms. But this isn’t Ema where the titular character’s singular identity causes us to respect and understand her morals as holistic breaking down the binary codes we live by to show us new spiritual light. Pike plays by these rules (she literally declares the same "eat or be eaten" cynical bifurcation of action used in countless movies), she is the cause of her own and everyone’s pain, and fails to earn any care the film has for her- which, turns out, is actually a lot more than she deserves.

Oh and give me a break on every part of that ending
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not only the stupid logical team-up that dissolves all the weight placed on emotion, which drove the action of the entire narrative!- you can't have your cake and eat it too on this one, J)- but that final scene is all kinds of wrong, plagiarizing Layer Cake of all movies! Okay, karma catches up to her, but... it turns out she was right about Macon Blair's erratic behavior being dangerous. How does this work- justice as unjust, or a lack of justice justified and then invalidated before our eyes. Because he's a man, as expressed after he spits at her outside the courthouse? What the actual fuck is this trying to convey- and a "complex" pessimistic 'everyone sucks' anti-message doesn't work because it's not in step with the pretty conventional cinematic cues we've been fed.
I don't even know what to think or feel about this film's purpose, but I do know that I hated it.

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