The reviews I read on Letterboxd was a bunch of ho-hum, didn't we do this in Berberian.

Well, there are fair comparisons to be made between the two movies but....how many movies have gone into this kind of territory. And that is putting aside all of the differences between these movies.

Talk To Me, meanwhile, seemed designed to be exactly as ho-hum as fucking 90 percent of the middling, half-assed horrors of seen in the modern age. It's not exactly terrible, it's just irrelevant. And yet its redundancy was rarely even mentioned in those who approved of it.

Now a lot of this is going to get down to who saw it, and Talk to Me was marketed to general audiences, and was made for them, so of course they lapped it up. But the general indifference I was seing towards Censor genuinely surprised me, considering how much better than the average it was. Or, rather, how good it actually is. And who cares if, maybe, theoretically, Berberian was a jumping off point for it. It's still unique in it's own rights.

You guys seen Eddington yet?

On the surface, this looks like a pretty conventional and mainstream release for A24, largely pushed in the "rom-com" category ("It's girl shit, right?", as Dakota Johnson's Lucy wryly puts it), and maybe the marketing worked, as it has been a quiet success, and aimed at both the young couples and forlorn romantics who make up the rom-com target demo.  That's the math anyway.

What works about Celine Song's second feature (after the Oscar-nominated Past Lives) is her sharp, mature screenwriting, which manages the tightrope feat between sentiment and cliche without ever falling over into being cloying or saccharine.  The strength of the performances of the leads may also be attributable to Celine Song as a director of actors, but Dakota Johnson deserves special praise in a role which may define her career.  She gives a terrific performance here, ably inhabiting the grace of some classic French actress and maybe being an even finer kisser.

The film's main theme isn't particularly deep, the title materalistic preoccupation on sexual relationships in terms of "market value", "business deals", "the math", where Lucy's matchmaker dating service is akin to an investment firm.  All of this is laid out fairly quickly right at the top, and outside of this skewering of the superficialites of the dating-world expectations and entitlements, where "tangible assets" take priority over emotional chemistry, the film isn't really trying that much to be a comedy once it focuses on Lucy herself and her own materialist gambit.

These themes all seem very simplistic on paper, but it's telling how some reviews remain confused by the basics.  I note from Jacobin's Kristen Ghodsee, who calls the film "liberal feminist propaganda", and claims "the film validates the general theory....that sexuality is a commodity, with mating practices shaped by the background economic system".  This is, in fact, the opposite of what the film validates.  It is, in fact, the very theory of reducing "intangible assets" into tangible transactions which this film is critiquing.  But Ghodsee continues that "the implicit message seems clear: In a free market economy, women either need to marry for money or earn enough of their own money so they can afford to marry for love".  Not exactly!  The more explicit message is clearer that if you are conflating the values of money and love, especially in cost-benefit terms, then you are doing it wrong, and probably a bad person.  Lucy says this almost verbatim.  Now of course, Ghodsee has her own agenda (and Marxists tend to be among the most materialistic of ideologues), she probably wasn't paying too much attention to the film because she was thinking about how she can sell that book of hers.  But if some of the other reviews are correct, that this film has something more topical to observe about our contemporary culture of sexual transaction, as opposed to back in the days of dowries, it might be the sad comment that we seem to have forgotten something as simple as what this film is saying.

8/10






The title refers to a business which provides babies who do not age for mothers who never want to stop cuddling, and it also refers to the fact that most of the characters here are terminally infantile and pretty determined to stay that way.  This low-budget indie managed to get support from faithful pros like Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally, who produce as well as perform, and the good graces of fellow travelers Stephen Root and Kevin Corrigan to do their respective low-key magic.  There's also Martin Starr (whose monotone drawl is showing its limitations) and Kieran Culkin (who is convincingly sleazy) and followed by a trio of young actresses (Noel Wells, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Zoe Graham) who have the uphill challenge of trying to act like they could be the least bit attracted to a weasel like Culkin.

The script by Onur Tukel is plenty clever, absurd and playful.  Director Bob Byington however relies on a few too many indie-comedy cliches - the unnecessary B&W (which he does very little with), ample awkward pauses - taken straight from Jarmusch 101 from 40 years ago.  Inevitably, because of its undeniable charm, and its breezy 80 minute runtime, it's easy to recommend.

7.5/10





Vanity project from Chris Pine, looking to do his own rendition of Lebowski (although less Jeff Bridges and more Jack Black) in a retread LA stoner-noir (no explicit pot use, but suffice to say it's plenty weed-coded).  Apparently calling in whatever favors he had lying around from his friends and family, I do hope that all of his acting buddies who so generously lent their time and effort to this project had a hell of a good time making it.  Apart from getting to see that beaming Ray Wise grin again in well over a decade, I did not.

4/10
 

Rock wrote:

I’ll need to get to Materialists at some point. Reactions have been all over the place. No way it’ll be boring.

I wouldn't expect it to be too controversial.  That's why it's controversial, I guess.

More in terms of genre, the appropriate comparison might be Working Girl, more smart and sophisticated take on class and sexual relations with possible Oscar potential.  (And, no, I'm not saying that just 'cause Melanie Griffith is Dakota's mother, because that honestly hadn't occured to me when I first thought of the comparison.)