"Thanksgiving" - Review

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, people gather for the Black Friday Sale at the RightMart superstore. Jessica (Nell Verlaque) whose father Thomas (Rock Hoffman) owns the store, meets up with her friends when Evan (Tomaso Sanelli) needs a new charger. However, after being let into the store early, tensions rise and end in tragedy... A year later, Jessica and her friends have tried to move on from the tragedy (for the most part...) when they find themselves tagged in a photograph by somebody calling himself "John Carver". And he wants revenge on the people who caused and participating in the events of that day. Who is this mysterious murderer? Is it new, out of town Deputy Bret LaBelle (Jeff Teravainan), Jessica's ex boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), former store manager Mitch (Ty Olsson) or somebody else? Jessica and her friends, and Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) will found out this Thanksgiving...

Eli Roth is a film maker I have struggled with over the years. On the one hand: he loves horror movies, has a soft spot for the same bloody B-movies and exploitation pictures I relish, and just seems like a swell, fun time, as he tries to bring back the stuff he loved (who else would have a Takashi Miike cameo in one of his movies?). On the other hand, his movies have mostly sucked: I hated "Hostel" and "Hostel 2", and "Green Inferno" was let down by his obnoxious, weird writing despite being a kind of fun cannibal movie, and his best work has honestly been "The House with a Clock in its Walls". "Knock Knock" is funny, however unintentionally.
So it was refreshing to have a movie of his I unironically love with few caveats.
A bloody, brutal, funny, fun throwback to the slashers of old, with a little more of a nudge and a wink to its source material and a few good pieces of character work, red herring laying and some excellent kills to make it more than just something which could have stayed a short trailer. His eccentricities are still there, but have been reigned in somewhat: he introduces a character named "Detective Chu" (Russell Yuen), and has a brief little vulgar swear off between him and Deputy LaBelle, the teenagers have that usual Eli Roth flair in the dialogue and have learned words like "cringe" now - but he now realises which ones are terrible and we wish to have killed off, so makes us wait for them and actually follows through with them; and quirky side characters show up, but here are part of the plot, actually amusing and serve a purpose (particular praise to Joe Delfin as McCarty), no more Deputy Winstons here... And he just seems to have a tighter hold on things now. The movie is funny when it needs to be funny, and has a sense of exuberance to proceedings. Honestly, he even seems to have gotten a handle on tone and juggling it now: the opening is in many ways genuinely quite horrible and upsetting, and some of the kills after this are honestly a welcome relief. The killer doesn't take cheap shots by doing things like murdering a character's cat, but instead feeds the cat (thank Christ) and pets it (good!). The cast are mostly unknowns, and good fun, and a sequence involving heads is excellent fun. The gore is practical, thankfully, and it's a fun time all around, especially since I saw this in a crowded cinema with a great audience. The movie really pushes a particular red herring, and wants you think of one particular character as the killer, almost to detriment of others, despite it being very clearly another... And it even outright lies to you about it! But the movie is still fun, and a great time.
Oh, and the main girl looks a lot like Maria Bakalova.

"The Marvels" - Review

After destroying the evil AI which ran the planet of Hala, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) now operates as a space lesbian protector. Her grilfriend's daughter Monica (Teyonah Parris) works as an astronaut for an organisation called S.W.O.R.D, under Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) in space, and they haven't been talking in a long time. Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) is an aspiring superhero living in Jersey City, who absolutely adores Carol Danvers.
When space magic from Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) leads to shenanigans, all 3 of these women find themselves swapping places whenever they attempt to use their powers at the same time.

The central concept and rapport between the trio of Marvels is wonderful. They have lovely chemistry and Iman Vellani is one hell of a find: I wish everybody enjoyed everything in life as much as Iman Vellani enjoys playing Kamala Khan. It is a shame that the "Swapping Places" is not the whole film, and is resolved too quickly. The film soars when it is veteran space lesbian, overly keen and adorable fan girl, and unfortunately bland scientist going on adventures and figuring things out. Yeah, Rambeau gets given the emotional core of the film with her relationship to her "Aunt" Danvers (who is fun here, as a spacefaring lesbian with a lot of things on her plate, who usually spaces out and forgets how humans are, due to her frequent interactions with aliens) after her mother's death and how it separated them and the betrayal she felt. But it falls rather flat despite good efforts from the actors due to a half-baked nature of its ideas and plot: Rambeau (a key supporting character from the last film) has been killed off screen (and don't tell me "it's in one of the shows" because this is a film, fuck off), and whilst we can have Khan's powers just be there and have her be a superhero with no context (she's great, I cannot stress this enough), that's fine for her character: this is a core emotional beat and throughline of the film which is effectively an afterthought. This leaves us with the main plot, forgettable despite having the talented Zawe Ashton as the villain, which boils down to "bad hammer lady wants magic thing and is going to 3 different places, Earth is the last one". Fortunately the set pieces (a fight between the trio and some aliens where they swap places between space, Suburbia, and the moon; a musical segment on a water planet with a beard husband and a species who speak entirely in song, again Vellani is too precious for all things; and a sequence set to "Memory" by Streisand) and the chemistry of the leads propel it higher and further than is would go otherwise, and it is a fun, goofy, if underwritten follow up to Captain Marvel.
The pre-credits finale with Vellani is nice.
Mid credits scene is absolute dogshit, however, continuing the trend of movies self-cannibalising. Can this "Multiverse" nonsense piss off already?

"Dream Scenario" - Review

Professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is an ordinary man, with an ordinary life, with a beautiful home and a beautiful wife. Then he starts appearing in everybody's dreams, and he thinks to himself: how did I get here?

Marketed as a wacky comedy, hoping to get by on the meme potential of Nicolas Cage being in dreams. Instead, the film is actually a dark fable about a man's life being ruined, in a spiralling downfall, complete with satirical swipes at media, memes and celebrity in the modern age. It takes the concept, stretches it, bounces it and toys with it as far as it will go. It has a droll, Scandinavian sense of humour (including a scene where Dylan Gelula tells him about a particularly vivid sex dream), even as it follows a man forced out of his home and community and breaking down. There is a fantastic dystopian sequence featuring Nicholas Braun, nobody let Silicon Valley watch it. Cage injects the film with a lot of pathos without being cartoony, keeping his crown as the greatest actor alive. Cute use of The Talking Heads too. Nice to have cameos from Amber Midthunder, Lily Gao and Dylan Baker.

"Cat Person" - Review

Margot (Emilia Jones) works at a cinema, and bumps into a semi-regular customer named Robert (Nicholas Braun), and after some initial awkwardness, gives him her number. Her more cynical friend Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan) has doubts, but they start dating, and going through the awkward trials and tribulations of modern dating.

Jones (who played Alice in "Utopia"... huh) is excellent, playing Margot as unsure and awkward and trying her best to navigate this relationship, with little dream sequences and conversations with herself. There are lots of relatable parts to her, and little moments and touches which throw you into her headspace, including a rather well-done sex scene.
But for me personally, it was the performance of Braun which really stood out: he filled it with little touches like his angry shaking off of a hand at his shuolder when opening a door, his awkward pauses or silences during conversations, his somewhat uncomfortable initial conversations with Margot at the start. He managed to be full of red flags without being overtly, comically sinister, and the whole film became a death by a thousand cuts: he's not abusive or violent, he's just a bit weird and mismatched, but the movie has you thinking that Margot is maybe taking this a bit too far (up until a rather unforgivable point). The makers make EXCELLENT use of the fact that Braun is 6 foot fucking 7. But even after the inevtiable break up, and the crossing of the line from Robert, the film takes pains to have it be relatively realistic in its depictions of break ups and behaviours: was Margot being too naive or was her desperate thrust for politeness and manners going too far? It's a murky, grey, uncomfortable film about the awkwardness of romance.
However.
Tonally, it stumbles in a few places as it doesn't know what it wants to be: is it a wacky dark comedy (where the characters huddle around Margot and shuffle out of the restaurant comically) with quick-talking sassy friend Taylor dishing out sick burns and running away with the entire movie (as Viswanathan is wont to do!) and imagined sequences of wackier murders; or is it a dark thriller with a stalker and a woman's descent into paranoia and danger? The tonal shifts can be jarring. One moment we are watching a toe-curling attempt to appease her step father, the next there is a sequence of her up all night, wondering if she realy did see Robert waiting outside...
It yo yos between these things, and whilst Viswanathan is incredibly funny, it threatens to derail proceedings.
The finale will be controversial, but I rather like it: there's some great payoff to previous moments and recontextualising of her previous assumptions and fears, and some actually rather valid points raised by Robert about all of the behaviour up until this point. It risks "both sidesing" the issue, but I think it balances it relatively well, though after "Bottoms" I am not sure I can accuse any finale of being "out there".