Category: GFF strand – Gala

A reverse of fortune movie. Much as I liked seeing Sandra Oh and Anne Heche star, because I think they’re really underutilised actors, the fact that everyone in this movie’s an asshole and no one really learns anything kinda leaves me flat. I know the point is the never-ending fight between the two main characters is a metaphor for America’s warmachine, a state of perpetual conflict which continues no matter how much is lost or how many meaniful things are torn down. But it’s so little payoff for two characters who’ve gone through so much to not progress at all. Mm.

Fucking great time at the opening gala. Handsome Devil is a heart warming and uplifting film about friendship and difference.

Also free goodies and drinks

So Anomalisa is awesome. Heartbreaking movie about falling in love and falling out of love and making a connection. Funny as anything too.

Quietly dignified portrayal of a man disappearing into nothing as he’s pushed into the margins of society and homelessness. Very sparse dialogue, tight fractal shots through windows and doorways, as if the character only exists in the indifferent gazes of those around him, as he becomes an extra in the background of his own story. 

Also there was a Q&A with Richard Gere afterward, and he seems like an awfully nice chap. He hugged a lady who called him hot. Made her day.

A Hollywood paperwork drama about the CBS news report into George W. Bush’s draft-dodging and subsequent fallout. Cate Blanchett is luminous as always but the movie was awash with the kind of self-righteous smaltz that made West Wing unwatchable for me. That combined with the overdone score being played to the nines over slo-mo every five seconds, it just frayed my patience. Despite the self-engrandising style, the movie was actually really predictable, with standard scene of career woman struggling/failing to be a good wife and mother. I could just call it scene for scene until the end arrived with mundane boredom and orchestral crescendo accompaniment. Ugh.

A fucking tense and brutal movie about a dipshit band walking in on a murder in the backroom of a white supremacist redneck bar after a gig. Never have I routed against Patrick Stewart before but he plays the neo Nazi leader with beautiful, skillful malevolence in this Assault on Precinct 13-esque siege. Well worth seeing.

A coming-to-terms-with-grief/romantic friendship Hollywood movie full of bittersweet humour. Much more entertaining than that synopsis makes it sound.

If it helps, a lot of shit gets smashed with a sledgehammer in this movie.

A musical biopic focusing on Miles Davis’s nadir, after his spoiled wean attitude has driven away everyone close to him and he has insulted, humiliated, beat and degraded his wife in every way imaginable until she leaves him to his self-indulgent shitpile of fuck-up. Ewan McGregor plays the journalist who is pulled into the swirling nightmare of his life for a weekend which at times verges on comedy crime caper in this loud, colourful, firework burst of a movie. 

High-Rise is awesome! A weird, kaleidoscopic, psychedelic, nightmarish, modern fairytale. Also, THE HIDDLESTON! 

So many nude scenes, so definitely getting it on DVD for slow-mo.

I have, sadly, lost this pair of leggings.

Hail, Caesar! was an actually lovely movie, even more beautiful than it was funny (and it was well funny). Surprisingly, Channing Tatum stood out as one of the best performances of the film.