The Grouchy Editor » Category » Books, Movies, TV & Web

16Jan

Madhouse at the End of the Earth

Posted in Books, Books, Movies, TV & Web | Leave a comment

by Julian Sancton

Madhouse depicts an amazing, grueling adventure of which I had never heard. Why is that? I suspect that, if ever someone decides to make a movie of this harrowing ordeal, only then will it stick to the public imagination.

In short, what happened was this: In 1897, the converted whaler Belgica set sail from Belgium to Antarctica, hoping to conduct scientific research and make history by penetrating deep into the southern continent. Early in 1898, the ship became wedged in pack-ice. There it sat, crew aboard, for nearly a year.

Sancton relies heavily on officer diaries to describe the frigid nightmare that followed, in particular the words of Frederick Cook, the colorful American who served as ship’s doctor, and the strange Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who would later become a world-famous explorer.

02Jan

Reviews in Short: January 2022

Posted in Books, Movies, TV & Web, Reviews in Short | Leave a comment

Two

A man and a woman, strangers to each other, awaken naked in a bed and discover they have been surgically sewn together at the abdomen. Who would do this to them, and why?

From its synopsis, I expected Spain’s Two to be cheap exploitation, inspired by the cult success of The Human Centipede. But I was mistaken; the movie is neither cheap nor exploitative. Rather than Centipede, the movie it most resembles is Brian De Palma’s Sisters, steeped in psychological horror. At a brisk 71 minutes, the film nevertheless leaves a lasting impression. Release: 2021 Grade: A-

For those of you intrigued by Two for its more prurient elements — such as naked actress Marina Gatell, 42 — check out 2009’s Little Ashes, below. From her full-frontal shots in Two to her fairly graphic backside exposure in Little Ashes, Gatell clearly places a lot of trust in her directors.

Above, Gatell braves cold weather in Two

Above and below, Gatell braves the camera’s lens in Little Ashes

**

Photocopier

Such a difficult movie to review. Technically, it’s top-notch. The acting is uniformly excellent, and the direction is flawless, at times even inspired. And yet — to this American — the film’s premise is patently absurd. Or is it?

Shenina Cinnamon plays an Indonesian girl (“Sur”) who, after attending a celebratory party with a group of artists, wakes up the following day and learns that someone took “selfies” of her during the night and posted the embarrassing pictures online.

The movie then becomes a mystery/thriller, with Sur enlisting the aid of anyone she can to find out who did this to her. Her quest makes for compelling drama.

And yet … the selfies are not nudes, nor are they particularly salacious — to my Western eyes. Apparently, in Indonesia relatively tame images are enough to ruin careers and irreparably harm reputations.

One more quibble: I thought the ending was overly artsy and pretentious. At least to my Western eyes. Release: 2021 Grade: B+

*

Unlike starlets from the West, whose social media posts might make Hugh Hefner blush, Indonesian actress Shenina Cinnamon’s posts are indicative of a conservative (repressive?) culture. The pictures above and below are about as provocative as you will find on Cinnamon’s Instagram page.

12Dec

Endless Night

Posted in Books, Books, Movies, TV & Web | Leave a comment

by Agatha Christie

Darn the luck! I think I might have spoiled the “big twist” in Endless Night for myself by (stupidly) reading an article about the novel in which the writer likened it to one of Agatha Christie’s most famous books, which includes an ingenious surprise that is justly canonized in the annals of detective fiction. “Unreliable narrator,” anyone? Because I read that article before sitting down with Endless Night, I will never know how fooled I might have been by Christie’s clever narration.

And darn your luck. Because you are reading this post, I might have just spoiled the twist for you, as well.

Some of Christie’s best novels have nothing to do with Hercule Poirot, nothing to do with Miss Marple. Like And Then There Were None and Crooked House, Endless Night is a standalone that represents Christie at the top of her game.

(A plot synopsis here? Nah … I’ve already said too much.)

03Dec

Reviews in Short: December 2021

Posted in Books, Movies, TV & Web, Reviews in Short | Leave a comment

Promising Young Woman

The main reason to watch Promising Young Woman is Carey Mulligan, who shines as a damaged woman who goes to the dark side to avenge a friend’s gang rape and subsequent suicide. It’s a good film, but not a great one, I think because it tries too hard to juggle a serious topic with a desire to entertain. The muddled result is thought-provoking drama — but not too thought-provoking. Because, you know, that might be a downer. Release: 2020 Grade: B+

**

Nobody

With Nobody, Bob Odenkirk joins Liam Neeson and Keanu Reeves in the trendy late-career transition to that most unlikely of genres: the middle-aged man as action hero. Odenkirk plays a seemingly harmless everyman who, following a home-invasion that threatens his wife and kids, returns to his not-so-harmless roots.

What sinks the movie is its discordant tone. It begins like a Falling Down for a new generation, with Odenkirk in Michael Douglas’s role as the American white man who finds himself on the downswing of societal change. But once the big secret is revealed, Nobody goes from “take this serious” drama to a procession of violent, cartoonish set pieces — “hey, we’re just having fun here!”

Although a sequel is clearly on the minds of everyone involved with Nobody, I can only hope that Odenkirk finds something more suited to his talents. Something like Better Call Saul, maybe? Release: 2021 Grade: B

**

Insomnia

I liked the 2002 American remake of this movie, which starred Al Pacino as a cop with a checkered past who hunts a killer while battling his own demons — and a relentless midnight sun. I also enjoyed the original, with Stellan Skarsgard as the troubled cop, although the locale in the first film is northern Norway, not Alaska.

I guess a viewer’s preference might depend on which performance most intrigues: Skarsgard’s cold-as-ice inspector, or Pacino’s more emotional cop on the edge. I’ll give the nod to Norway’s version, if only because it came first. Release: 1997 Grade: B+

02Dec

Godzilla vs. Kong

Posted in Books, Movies, TV & Web, Movies | Leave a comment

So I suffered through Godzilla vs. Kong so that you don’t have to. And yes, I do expect some kind of reward.

I did this because, foolishly, I believed reviewers who claimed that, unlike so many big-budget monster movies, this one dispenses with any pretense toward character development or logic and gets straight to the good stuff.

Also, despite initial reservations, I enjoyed a few monster flicks like this in recent years, including Peter Jackson’s King Kong and 2014’s Godzilla.

Silly me.

As I endured the first 40 minutes or so of Godzilla vs. Kong, familiar patterns emerged:

Big-name actors were hired to remind us that yes, previously respected stars will spout cliched dialogue and go “ooh!” and go “aah!” any number of times — if the paycheck is big enough.
Characters include: a cute child; teenage nerds; women who are stronger/smarter than the men; arrogant men who must be humbled; society’s “weak” members who turn out to be heroes.
Characters who, although we don’t really care for them, we must care for them because, if they are kids they are orphans or, if they are adults their spouse/child has died.

Left to right: cute kid, nerds

OK, so the movie does deliver on its special effects. But no, it wasn’t worth sitting through all the dull exposition and pseudo-science talk meant to appeal to teenage science buffs. In the case of Godzilla vs. Kong, this talk includes mumbo jumbo about reverse gravity and journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth ecosystems — who knew there was sunshine, waterfalls, and floating asteroids way down there?

I’d go into the movie’s plot, but life is too short. I lost interest early on. Besides, the plot is just one long, ridiculous set-up to get to the special effects.

Eiza Gonzalez

There was a silver lining in the movie. My reward for sitting through it, I suppose. I had never heard of Mexican actress Eiza Gonzalez, who plays a bitchy cybernetics executive (uh-huh), so I Googled her. Turns out she has a stripper scene in the TV show From Dusk till Dawn: The Series. Here it is:

Apparently, Eiza also has a sex tape — unless it’s not really her in the grainy, blurry video. If you want to make the determination for yourself, here is a link.

Perhaps I was a bit harsh in this review. The final battle in Tokyo was fun. My advice is to fast-forward to the last 30 minutes of the film and enjoy. You won’t have missed anything important.

Director: Adam Wingard Cast: Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, Demian Bichir, Brian Tyree Henry, Eiza Gonzalez Release: 2021 Grade: C-

14Nov

American Dirt

Posted in Books, Books, Movies, TV & Web | Leave a comment

by Jeanine Cummins

American Dirt is nothing if not controversial, what with its white, European-American author telling the tale of a middle-class Mexican woman whose life is upended — to put it mildly — and who chooses to make a harrowing journey from Acapulco to Arizona with her eight-year-old son in tow. Illegally.

The book’s critics say Cummins took pains to make the story palatable for American readers, and that her heroine, Lydia, is an unrepresentative, atypical immigrant. The critics might be right. What the hell do I know?

The novel was a bestseller last year. But all hell broke loose upon its publication.

The uproar over Dirt brings to mind James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which came under fire for being hyped as a memoir when, in fact, it was fiction. Fact-based or fabricated, Frey had written a remarkable book. Pieces was a marketing failure, not a writing failure.

I can only comment on what I read in American Dirt, and as a work of fiction, it’s a superb thriller.

As for the novel’s politics, yes, it is very one-sided, very pro-immigrant and pro-immigration. There is even one none-too-subtle jab at Trump. But immigration is a huge story, with many subplots.

Someone else could write an equally moving, largely anti-immigration story, I’m sure. A story about an illegal immigrant, a career criminal who wreaks havoc on a small American border town, for example.

American Dirt simply isn’t that story.

04Nov

Reviews in Short: November 2021

Posted in Books, Movies, TV & Web, Reviews in Short | Leave a comment

Searching

I was wary of Searching because it’s a gimmick movie. Like Unfriended and films of that ilk, the entire story is told from the perspective of a screen — computer screen, cell-phone screen, security footage, you name it. I’m not a fan of the screencast genre because, among other annoyances, I find myself triggered to “interact.” I feel like I should be clicking on buttons or highlighting text. Too much work.

But like the much-maligned found-footage genre, if the screenplay is clever and the direction is skilled, screencast movies can work. Searching succeeds because the gimmick never becomes outlandish, and the script contains several surprises and one nice twist.

Oh yeah, the plot: A widower undergoes every parent’s nightmare when his teenage daughter goes missing. Then he undergoes every technophobe’s nightmare: enduring all those screens to retrace her steps. Release: 2018 Grade: B+

24Oct

The Coddling of the American Mind

Posted in Books, Books, Movies, TV & Web | Leave a comment

by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Here’s the thing about current-affairs books — they tend to have a short shelf life. What was eye-opening in 2018 can feel ho-hum today. If you happen to be a news junkie, like me, reading The Coddling of the American Mind in 2021 feels like revisiting old news, even though the book is just a few years old.

And yet that’s a compliment to the authors. So much of what they describe in Coddling — concepts that seemed fresh in 2018 — is now omnipresent on media news outlets. That’s a testament to their powers of persuasion.

What Lukianoff and Haidt describe (in case you haven’t guessed from the title) is the concept of “safetyism” and its harmful effects on society in general, and schools in particular. Safetyism, they claim, is introduced by over-protective parents, continued by college administrators, and then spread throughout the greater society. Hence, the “snowflake.” Hence, social problems galore.

But you probably already knew that. You, like me, should have read this book in 2018.

18Oct

Reviews in Short: October 2021

Posted in Movies, Reviews in Short | Leave a comment

The Trip

I’m not normally a fan of gross-out humor, which is too often witless and juvenile. And I’m not attracted to gore, which I find a bore. So why am I recommending Norway’s The Trip, which is loaded with gross-outs and gore? Because when done right it can be funny, and The Trip is a black comedy that made me LOL — an event so rare for me that when it does happen, I simply must praise the film.

Noomi Rapace and Aksel Hennie play a married couple who are ostensibly taking a relaxing holiday trip to their lakeside cabin. But peace and prosperity are not in their cards. The plot starts out like The War of the Roses, but then … shit happens. Literally. To say more would be a spoiler, so I’ll shut up now. Release: 2021 Grade: B+

17Oct

The Demise of Gratuitous Nudity

Posted in Guilty Pleasures, Movies | Leave a comment

I just finished watching There’s Someone Inside Your House on Netflix. In some ways, the movie was comforting. It’s nice to know that 40 years after I was first exposed to this kind of junk, young people are still transfixed by slasher movies in which other young people get slashed.

On the other hand, watching the flick was dispiriting. Since the 1970s, movies like this nearly always featured nubile young starlets getting naked. This was done, presumably, to cater to the lust of males in the audience — not to mention the leering producers and crew on set.

No such luck in There’s Someone Inside Your House. The movie certainly has nubile young starlets, including final girl/star Sydney Park (pictured above). But no one shows skin. (As a consolation for horny males, Park does treat us to tits and ass in her Instagram posts. See below.)

But I miss the gratuitous skin in teen slasher flicks — or, for that matter, in sex comedies. Everyone involved back then seemed to understand that bare-naked actresses were not essential to the plot, but they got naked anyway. And if this was degrading to the actress, well, she wasn’t held at gunpoint. She got paid. Like starlet Karen Wood in this shamelessly gratuitous — some would say humiliating — scene from 1985’s Screwballs II (originally titled Loose Screws):

Karen Wood

“I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.”

Not just bare-breasted, but groped as well.

In addition to the cluster of actors, there would also be an off-camera crew taking in the action.

The end of the gratuitous nude scene in mainstream movies — what caused this cultural calamity? Was it overzealous feminists? Harvey Weinstein? An Internet where the most disgusting and dehumanizing pornography is just one click away, and a cultural desire to compensate for that by sanitizing mainstream fare? All of the above?

Depending on how despondent we become thinking about the demise of the gratuitous nude scene, we might or might not make this an ongoing category at The Grouchy Editor. We have nostalgia for movies and starlets who knew that what they were doing was naughty — but did it anyway.

Karen makes a dash for the exit.

Sydney shows us the back door.