Look Both Ways is a rather good Australian movie about cancer, loneliness, uncontrollable thoughts, mortality, coping, smoking, children, purpose and family. Maybe it’s about more than that too, but it’s a good start. I’m eager to give the benefit of the doubt to any movie that tries to deal with dying, esp. when it’s both the person dying and the people left behind. I really admired The Barbarian Invasions for that reason. This doesn’t get nearly as deep and full of itself as that one; it just wouldn’t be Australian as if it did.
One characer is diagnosed with testicular cancer straight off, and another imagines scenes of her own demise around every corner. Do they meet and fall in love? Well, yeah. Nothing earth-shattering there, but the characters are believeable and try to do the right things, difficult as that may be. It’s too sappy and there’s a tendency to break into montage with some Damien Rice-esque Australian singer-songwriter strumming a tune far too often. But I give a lot of respect to the writer-director here anyway, Sarah Watt, who is primarily an animator. This is her first live-action film.
Dominion however, hoo boy. It’s a mess; not the lost psychological thriller about lost faith that some thought it might be, jettisoned for more gore and the feather-light brushstrokes of subtlety for which Renny Harlin is known (Ha.) There’s not any good acting, a terrible script by Caleb Carr and someone else, and poor Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd stumbling about, growing fatter scene after scene. The SFX were cobbled together without a budget of course, as was the music, so I don’t hold any of that against it. I’m frankly eager to revisit Exoricst III now, which I think might hold out quite well. At least Jason Miller has a giant pair of scissors of something like that, if I remember the trailer correctly.
PS – I’ve give up on Izzard’s the Riches after 3/4 of a second episode. I find myself actually wanting to watch Reign Over Me and the Shooter, which makes me think I’ve lost my mind, or maybe had a stroke.
No, wanting to see the Shooter is just normal hormonal activity. I’m planning on it this weekend, after my hormone treatment. I also really liked the first Izzard episode; pity the writing doesn’t hold up.
Yeah, Dominion needed more than a few CGI wolves to give it some oomph. Who knew the devil could be so damn boring? I saw Exorcist III (of course I saw it), but years ago, and remember little… except that it wasn’t bad at all, ‘though not as much lurid fun as the first.
I gave up on the Izzard show during the first episode when Minnie Driver labored mightily toward an Emmy during her character’s “no-I-must-not-take-more-heroin” willpower montage. There’s much to enjoy, mainly the two leads playing off one another, but….
And speaking of Andy Richter, I really like Andy Barker. Like much of Conan’s show, it’s determinedly weightlessly pointlessly silly, in an almost mannerist fashion. (It is a fairly rigorous reconstruction of those ‘seventies mysteries. Why? Beats me. And I love it.) So it’ll be canceled shortly.
I haven’t watched much of late, but I’m a few episodes into a delightfully strange yet adult anime tv show called “Paranoia Agent,” by Satochi Kon. Its design and look are excellent, and its approach to narrative is opaque; each episode centers on a character, and the connections between characters and through-line plot are hard to come by, beyond a mysterious teen skating around beating people with a baseball bat. I’ll post it properly when I finish up, but I liked it so much I snapped up a couple of his movies from the library (Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers), which means I’ll probably post something on his oeuvre, which I pronounce oover.
Oh, and I really dug The Host, and I almost had something smart to say about the title’s resonance as a metaphor for parasitism and symbiosis, in relation to Korean/American politics and/or the nuclear family, but I forgot and then weeks went by and I realized that I am not that smart, after all, so I’ll save it ’til Jeff posts how he didn’t like the movie, and then I can indignantly respond with a defense.