Where the Crawdads Sing.

 

     The movie is too brainy for a melodrama and not sufficiently gripping for a crime thriller. A fashion to invite English actresses to play girls from a deep South resulted in a perfect English of a "marsh girl" obtained through a few language lessons from her suitor. And the heroine dresses as a contemporary Hollywood starlet for an audition. This is vaguely explained as her receiving Church donations from the public in the not-so-wealthy Southern town collected by a supportive wife of a black store owner -- supposedly from a segregated congregation. Swamp house of an unemployed alcoholic looks inside like an illustration to the "House and  Country". It would be more interesting, if the authors abscond the ending of the book and make a heroine's Army brother or the shopkeeper's wife as a murderer. 

The Duke. Roger Michell.

    

       The Duke continues English tradition of the taped theatrical plays with the elements of a movie. Jim Broadbent is wonderful but the understated performance of Helen Mirren with hardly a hundred words throughout the whole movie supports her position as a Queen of an English cinema. 

Neruda.

      

         Neruda is a national poet of Chile. I thought Chileans were antipodes of Argentineans: stern, ordered, Germanic-influenced Catholics. Instead the movie demonstrates the underside of Santiago's 1940s urban life as a typical Latino stereotype: hard drinking and heavily womanizing men, including Senator Neruda. Married Neruda escapes his hiding to visit a brothel and hires three girls who swill champagne with him. His half-imaginary, half-real nemesis, police inspector Pelluchonneau is himself a son of a whore by the legendary Minister of the Interior. Neruda's life is saved in the end not by his Communist friends whom he alternately admires and mistreats -- like his much suffering wife -- but by millionaire Araucanian landowner out of spite to the state. Because it is a movie made by a Latin American directors, the leftists are shown sympathetically. 

Everything everywhere all at once.

 

 A very good movie, but lavishly overwrought. In fact, this is the most accurate depiction of the midlife crisis I have seen in a long time. Why the director needed a dozen imitations of Hong Kong kung fu movies if half of those would be enough to convey the idea? The lapses into alternative memories also happen too often as well as the scenes with flabby elongated fingers. The movie is needlessly long and the whole period between wonderful pot-smoking Jamie Lee Curtis and the final shot of Michelle Yeoh at the tax office could be excised with the sharpening of the message and the running time. 

Fantastic Beasts. The Secrets of Dumbledore.

    

        Poor franchise of J. R. Rowling did not deserve this fate. The third movie of the series was cinematically better than the second, but... The whole meaning of the story has disappeared because of disappearance of Johnny Depp and now-you-see-it-now-you-don't homosexuality of Dumbledore. 

    There was a motivation difference between chief antagonists Voldemort and Grindelwald, which the producers erased between the second and the third series, not unlikely to Benioff who forgot the character differences between King Jeoffrey and Ramsey Bolton so by the end they acquired virtually identical personalities (Game of Thrones). Voldemort's agenda had obvious parallels with Nazism: striving for a society of the elect based on racial hierarchy and headed by a leader of questionable racial purity. Grindelwald of the first two series had a completely different motivation, even if it was not sufficiently enunciated, based on the revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century. Namely, the old world ("muggles") let the world into a catastrophe of the Great War and promises even worse disasters in the future (it did). It persecuted sorcerers and witches. Now it is the time for a new world, safer for everyone and led by the magi for the benefit of all. The strength of the premise and its connection with the previous "Harry Potter" franchise was in the message that the desire to make people happy by force can be as destructive as the desire to oppress everyone by force. 

Outfit.

 

Soviet-era comedienne Ranevskaya (see the footnote) was so popular that people came to some mediocre play only to watch her cameo and then left. Artistic director told her that this was ruining the performance. On that, she retorted: "If this is needed for the theatrical art, I can play worse".   

Not so much a movie as a filmed theatrical performance. The plot is very well wrought. Chekhov's remark that if in the beginning of the play, one hangs a gun on the wall, in the end it must fire is well followed with the scissors. But not so the blood dripping from the chest with the fresh corpse. Mark Rylance is towering over the other actors so much that they serve only as a background. There are a few smudges in the movie: even the best tailor ("cutter") cannot do seams as good as a sewing machine, etc. 

Don't Look Up and Moonfall

    

Hollywood studios and their Motion Pictures Code Committees (currently renamed as the "Committees for disparaging the Russikies") designed an expensive vehicle to get rid of inconvenient movies. Namely, if a cinematic work by strange filmmakers contradicts the Party Line, they create another, castrated blockbuster version of the former and throw a publicity campaign behind it. This already happened with the shows The Brink, cancelled by HBO after only one season, and Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot. 

So, instead of formulaic but star-studded and pungent - Kate Blanchett, Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Timothee Chalamet,  Leonardo Di Caprio, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry and incomparable Mark Rylance, Hollywood fielded and promoted another blockbuster. Moonfall is well-wrought, masterful, but absolutely senseless thriller with only John Bradley from that GoT star factory in an exculpating role. And all this effort to stop a predictable but powerful parable on the danger of overpowering influence of social media and tabloid thinking, "deep fakes" and politicians in bed with mediatech corporations caring only about their campaigns. Neither cinematically uneven but beautiful "Hero" with Dustin Hoffmann and Geena Davis, nor the majestic "Doctor Strangelove" could appear in a current climate of conformism and docility. 

P.S. This continues my tradition of pairing movie reviews: [Ex-Machina vs Her], [Inherent Vice of Map to the Stars] and [Strange Magic of Paddington].