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One of the most disappointing git diffs I’ve ever seen.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
I thought maybe I’d enjoy Martin McDonagh’s schtick a bit more when he wasn’t wrapping it in some diddley-eye patronising Irish bullshit. I guess not!
Sam Rockwell was terrific, though.
Grand Theft Hamlet
Now it’s very possible that I was just in a bad place watching this, because I’m seeing a lot of very high scores for this film and I just can’t relate.
I mean, intellectually I understand that it’s a significant achievement to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online and I understand intellectually that the juxtaposition is supposed to be hilarious. But something about this film rubbed me the wrong way. What I saw was a pair of charmless craic vacuums with no understanding of the medium latching onto a cheap gimmick that would have worked better as a series of TikTok clips instead of a full movie where everything feels contrived and inauthentic (the soliloquys were delivered more believably than a lot of the supposedly natural dialogue, like the “oh what do we have here?” finding the theatre at the beginning).
It also doesn’t help that the film is stuck between a rock and hard place ‐ viewers need a certain level of fluency with the game to be able to understand what’s going on, especially considering how disjointedly the whole thing has been put together. But on the other hand, too much fluency and you realise how much of the game’s bonkers anarchy has been left on the table, and how anaemic and dull the end result is.
God bless Parteb, the agent of chaos in the whole thing ‐ the true spirit of GTA:O ‐ and the only thing that made me laugh in the whole movie.
Even more disappointingly, there’s another story here: two out-of-work actors during lockdown, struggling to find work, struggling mentally and emotionally. They finally find a project to keep them occupied, to keep them connected with other people and get them some industry recognition. A better film would have spent some time interrogating this but for the most part it’s completely ignored in Grand Theft Hamlet.
A hugely missed opportunity. Disappointing.
My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani »
Gina Trapani has put together a beautiful web-first memoir/memento mori. So simple, so clever.
Museum of All Things »
One step closer to the vision of the internet we were promised in the 90s.
Master and Commander
Master and Commander is up there with Mad Max: Fury Road for sheer dad-level “how the FUCK did they even make this??”
The Martian
You solve one problem, and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
Somewhere during Covid, this became my ultimate comfort film. A colossal epic and Ridley Scott makes it look easy.
Companion
Dopey, dirtbag Ex Machina but make it fun. Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher are perfect ‐ Quaid playing against his usual loveable goofball type and Thatcher is right up there with Samara Weaving for “actors I love to see going feral”.
Way better than it should have been.
Something Wild
Ray Liotta is rightly the star of the show here. His introduction halfway through the film shifts the story into another gear entirely. He’s electric, absolutely magnetic and steals every scene he’s in. But at what cost? In the first half of the film, Lulu/Audrey (the 80s Manic Pixie Dream Girl) is a whirlwind of life and vitality and an absolute smokeshow, one of the sexiest characters in cinema.
But in the second half of the film, she’s relegated to being a helpless, screaming damsel as two men fight for her. I guess there’s some indication that this is partly Ray Liotta’s grip on her and she’s regressing but the story doesn’t really bear this out fully, so I’m back-filling an explanation. The film did her dirty.
Cabel Sasser, Panic - XOXO Festival (2024)
I must have sent this privately to at least a dozen people but I realise I’ve never actually posted this on my own website. So I’ll say the same thing I did in all of those private messages: please, if you haven’t seen it already, take 19 minutes out of your day to watch this. I guarantee your day will be improved by this talk. I mean, yes it’s a story about a silly piece of McDonalds art but it’s also about value and legacy and wanting to be seen, and every time I watch it, it leaves me absolutely sobbing.