WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
“It’s one of those nice, gentle, French movies about incest”
New orleans looks a bit like a set itself.very neat stylish buildings in orderly rows that open right into the streetApparently it was filmed in New Orleans, so I guess I was wrong and it's just something to do with the way they shot the exteriors.
And check out Craner's helpful guide to him on this very forum.Oliver Stone is my favourite director. Check out Salvador if you get a chance.
That word "unreserved" is incredibly annoying, I am not sure that I have ever seen a film or read a book or eaten at a restaurant or done anything whatsoever about which I had absolutely no reservations whatsoever. So every single post in this thread begins with "I can't say that I am recommending this unreservedly but... " who the fuck started this thread?U Turn directed by Oliver Stone starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez. I wasn't sure which thread to put this in as it's not an unreserved rec. But if you're like me and like Sean Penn as an actor especially when he was younger it's a decent neo-noirish flick.
wtf rich this has got to be the stinkiest sack of shit i've ever watched in my whole lifeDisclaimer, not unreservedly yadda yadda yadda
Yesterday a film came on telly just as I was about to crash, but it was good enough to suck me in and force me to stay up until 6am or whatever. The film is called Safer At Home and is the most direct response to lives during the pandemic I've seen yet. It's set ten minutes into the future when the nth and most deadly variant yet of the C19 virus has caused millions of deaths in the US, and increasingly strict curfew rules mean that the country is all but living under martial law (yes yes, even more so than now).
Anyway, that's the premise... the film starts with four hipster households "meeting" via Zoom or similar to celebrate the birthday of one of their number which ought, if circumstances were different, to be taking place in Vegas. As is they make do with each others' virtual company and a party pack one of them has mailed out, containing a main ingredient of super strong "molly".
From there it develops in the same way as any film in the genre I'm gonna catchily christen "oh no the stripper's dead but we can't call the police cos we've all taken drugs, so let's just hide the body and never speak of this again, I'm sure nothing else will go wrong".
Actually that genre has two sub-genres, sometimes it's deadly serious and sometimes it's more like The Hangover or that one with Scarlett Johansson where it's played for laughs. This one is very much in the former camp.
And that's the one problem in this film. The dialogue is great, the actors are all extremely believable as irritating twenty-somethings (a role that probably didn't necessitate a chameleon like change for any of them) and, as the drugs are too strong, arguments develop and so on it's all very well observed and convincingly portrayed. But it does then turn on one major event which didn't really make sense to me, especially their reaction to it. Which is a shame cos apart from that it's extremely effective - the party, the arguments and then the tense game of cat and mouse with curfew cops that ensues, the non-participating people cleverly caught in the action by the ongoing screen connections.
At first I thought that they had taken an already extant plot and put it on Zoom to pretend it was written now. But actually the Zoom thing is very effective in that they can all see what is going on but are horrifyingly unable to influence it. Also, when one of them is out after curfew and chased by police it's quite scary cos you see how badly it's all been ravaged and at the same time you grasp that the curfew is more serious and that the cops have extra powers... but you're not sure what.
Anyway, I enjoyed it quite a lot. A few minor tweaks and it could have been a real low-budget classic.