TIFF
MOVIE REVIEW
Violet (2021)
This movie could only have been made in United States, and not just because it’s about what happens when fear is your primary emotion. There’s a sequence of Violet (Olivia Munn) at a party for work – she is a film producer in Los Angeles – mingling with various peers in the large backyard of someone’s lovely home. By the pool there’s an open, catered bar. She orders a dirty martini, which takes a little while to prepare, but when it comes she allows herself only two tiny sips before giving it to a passing waiter. But of course, when she leaves she must pick up her car from the valet parking and drive herself home. No wonder she is fearful and anxious; the lack of external help for something as simple as getting home from a party means true relaxation is an impossible dream. If we needed a metaphor for the emotional state the country has worked itself into, this movie would be a good place to start.
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Hulu
MOVIE REVIEW
False Positive (2021)
“False Positive” is not body horror in the conventional sense, as the terrors visited on our protagonist, Lucy (Ilana Glazer), are from clinical procedures performed by fertility specialist Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan) with a hospital gown obscuring her view. Much like “Here Before,” “False Positive” casts its protagonist as an unreliable narrator suffering mental breakdown, only to reveal its own plot twist as she’s gaslit the whole time.
Continue reading “Giving Pregnant Pause” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Your Highness (2011)
Frank Connor/Universal Studios
It’s hard to fathom precisely how the makers of “Your Highness” may have pitched the film to the studio executives: Think “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with excessive vulgarity and gore? Picture a live-action “Shrek” sans the lovable green ogre? Envision newly minted Oscar Swan queen-Mother Leia transforming herself into Fiona the Warrior Princess? Consider an Oscar co-host-daytime soap star-Yale professor dabbling in a film that revolves around a severed penis instead of a severed arm? And how about it all in a vehicle starring the next Seth Rogen–Zach Galifianakis?
Who in his or her right mind would green-light a movie with such a premise?
Continue reading “The Monty Half-Empty” »