It was another dry month for movies I’m afraid. I spent a lot of hours watching TV shows and Froggy Flips on YouTube again.
Till Death (2021) isn’t the story of a check-out operator’s untimely demise but instead tells the story of Emma (Megan Fox), who after a rather forced romantic evening with her narcissistic husband in a secluded lake house, wakes up to find he’s shot himself and is handcuffed to her. She was having an affair and it turns out he knew about it. Then some bad guys (including Callan Mulvey who you’d recognise from a few DC and Marvel movies) turn up and it’s a story of cat and mouse in which Emma strives to protect her full face of makeup at all costs. Also she doesn’t see the obvious solution to the corpse issue when she’s in the garage next to the car, you know, the one with the really heavy doors, and instead spends a good third of the 1hr 30m film still handcuffed to the body.
The film, currently on Netflix, has a rather early-90s tone to it like a brighter version of the Cape Fear remake but without any of the bad guys really having an ounce of real menace or swagger like De Niro. The special effects are rather good given that the lake house, and the snow and ice is all fake. Spoilers hehe! Reminded me rather too much of Gerald’s Game to be honest, but without the spookiness. It’s nice to see Fox still getting work and adding to her blood-soaked canon.
The Guilty (2021) is another 1hr 30m film from last year that’s on Netflix and boy is it a COVID lockdown film. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a cop who is, doing some kind of penance while he awaits a court hearing, working at an emergency call dispatch centre. He gets a call. He leaves the room, but only to go into another room, all the action happens on the end of his phone and if you liked Phone Booth then you might like this too.
It’s a good film given the circumstances but a film stands or falls on its ending and all you have to do is insert one ill-considered line into the dialogue and it ruins the whole thing. To my mind this film was like that. I won’t spoil the surprise. You’ll know it when you hear it, if you haven’t already fallen asleep by then.
The Bubble (2022) is a longer film but it needn’t have been. Also on Netflix it is a comedy about a bunch of actors working on a sequel to a film inside a COVID lockdown bubble. The cast is great and Pedro Pascal and Karen Gillan show once again that they’re very good at doing comedy.
There’s some tongue in cheek mockery of the film industry and actors in general with the usual lightweight subplots to buoy up a bit of a messy main plot. I say plot, it’s more of a hot mess to be honest. If I was generous I’d say it was character driven.
The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent (2022) is currently available on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and is without a doubt the best film of this meagre helping. It starts with the title, a play on Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and goes from there. Pedro Pascal is in this one too and is even funnier here thanks to a superior script. But obviously the star of the show is Nicholas Cage who does not fail to deliver in this meta comedy about the Hollywood actor being paid a million bucks to be a guest at a rich guy’s birthday party.
The film goes into action overdrive in the third act but not before the two main characters have started working on a film script of their own and dropped some acid. The subplot about Cage needing to spend more time with his daughter (Lily Mo Sheen) and estranged wife (Sharon Horgan) is woven in really well and while the film follows a predictable buddy movie arc it does so with style and panache and whole lot of Nick fucking Cage. In fact his alter-ego from Wild At Heart pops up like his very own Tyler Durden from time to time to give him bad advice, and there’s tonnes of movie references throughout. It’s just great.
couchmagpie 