3 weeks 4 DreamwidthJust three, as I stream shows more than movies. I enjoyed all of these.
Flow - on Netflix. Flow is an amazing animated film about a group of animals (some past pets, some wild - a black cat, a golden retriever, a lemur, a capybara, and a white heron-like bird - surviving a great flood in a post-human world where the ruins of human civilisation are still around, but there are no humans at all, no bodies, nothing. The animals are just that, animals. No speech, but they snarl and purr and chitter as you'd expect. They also behave characteristically for their species. It's largely unsentimental but it
is a fantasy thus unrealistic (e.g. the animals learn to use human leavings, like simple boats), and as the film progresses they develop relationships, and in the end, become unlikely friends.
Good things:
- it's visually stunning - great animation, beautifully imagined, intense colours. Both the land-based and underwater scenes are depicted in marvelous detail.
- the animals are mostly very likeable, certainly the core group we follow. They all have clear personalities and individual strengths, and communicate well nonverbally.
- the story of their adventures is gripping, and carries you along - in the flow, as the movie's name suggests.
Problems:
- their adventures are quite risky, especially for the little black cat, the POV character.
Spoilery content warnings linked to this:
I was at least a little bit anxious throughout the movie (and often very worried), especially for the little cat who has a lot of hair-raising close shaves. Things that bothered me were the overt dangers, but also the cat barely eats at all across what must have been several days or longer. And it never drinks. We don't know if the flood is salt water or fresh but a freshwater flood creating a seemingly limitless ocean seemed unlikely. I had to repeatedly tell myself it was a fantasy to handle that aspect, which worked against being immersed. If there'd been no eating it might have been less real and thus easier, but the other animals found some food however the little cat and the dog, hardly any. Plus there are tall white birds whose species initially seems predatory, but then one of the birds helps the cat, and as a result is assaulted violently by the flock leader and ousted. The bird kind of ascends, goes up into the light, later in the story, but that seemed a voluntary spiritual choice. All the rest of the animals survive and are together at the end, but there's a giant whale-thing which scares the companions earlier on, and is left stranded on land when the waters recede. In a post-credits scene we see it alive and leaping in the waves, but it's unclear if that's a future scene or just a callback to when it was alive.Overall verdict: Beautiful, magical, and worth seeing, but only if you can cope with watching engaging animals facing a lot of risks, and the somewhat uncomfortable mix of fantasy and reality in the movie. I recommend reading the spoilers if you're not sure if you'd handle animals in danger, as the huge plus of the movie is its amazing visuals, and I can't spoil those for you.
Anora - on Apple. A beautiful 23 year old New York sex worker with Russian heritage meets a spoiled, chaotic, but often sweet Russian oligarch's 21 year old son and after partying hard together for a week they impulsively marry in Vegas. Then his family's minders, and his parents, find out and the shit hits the fan. This film is the antidote to Pretty Woman. Once the marriage is discovered the boy's panicked minders desperately try to force Anora (Ani) to agree to an annullment, and the boy, Ivan, runs off and goes on a bender. There's a lot of chaos and struggling, and a frantic tour of Manhattan looking for Ivan. The ending is realistic - not happy, but not grimdark. Ani is poignant in her youth and the denial she clings to as her fantasy marriage disintegrates. She's also a feisty fighter and the minders all get somewhat injured! In the end she forms a grudging friendship with one of them, with whom she has far more in common than the feckless Ivan.
Content warnings: a great deal of explicit sex work (lap dancing and paid sex) in the initial third of the film, and loads of drug and alcohol use. There's mild to moderate violence but not too bad, and Ani gives as good as she gets. And there's a lot of furious screaming at one point.
The Accountant - on Prime, or rent it on Apple. Not new, from 2016, but until it was mentioned by
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smilebackwards (as the sequel's coming soon) I hadn't heard of it. I very much enjoyed it as I'm a big Ben Affleck fan. It's far from realistic, very much a tropey thriller, but it had several aspects I
really like (apart from Affleck). His character's neurodivergent but a genius with numbers and pattern recognition, and he and his brother were trained by their right wing father (via horribly abusive methods) to be highly competent in martial arts and weaponry. So his autism is mostly tightly locked inside a semi-normal mask, except when he can relax a bit and self-soothe. He's an accountant on the dark side, and inevitably, the dark comes for him so we get a lot of competency porn. I found it gripping, and complex enough in its various threads not to be too formulaic.
Content warnings: lots of violence and killings.
Lots. Explicit depiction of the father's intolerance of his neurodivergence (because father didn't believe in gentler interventions and socialisation and insisted on training him to survive, abusively). But it gets us the competency porn, damn it. Well, it's fiction.
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