"Accomplishments"
In theaters: There must be something in the air given how many gory comedies early 2025 has given its movie-going public. Death of a Unicorn is a weirdo creature feature/eat the rich flick where you mostly want the creatures to succeed. The movie starts with a unicorn getting hit by a car, and big pharma 1-percenters discovering its body's healing properties and goes on from there. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega are cute as a parent-child unit, and Richard E. Grant always makes a great villain, but the best comedy comes from Will Poulter and Téa Leoni. They are the best lampoons of rich a-holes and work very well together as the monstrous opposites of the hero family. But also full props to Anthony Carrigan as their hard-put-upon manservant Griff - he's very funny in this too. The one clunky piece of casting is Jessica Hynes, woefully underused in an atypical part. Why her, if you're not going to give her any comedy to play? Anyway, it's all a bit silly - purposefully - and some of the CG is a little wonky, but it's a good bit of fun at the movies.
At home: After The Babadook, Jennifer Kent offers up The Nightingale, and while it's not a horror film, it's still quite a horror show. Set in 18th-Century Tasmania, Aisling Franciosi plays an Irish convict whose family is brutally killed by her English overlords (and more, they are monstrous), so she sets off after them in the wilderness with an Aboriginal guide (Baykali Ganambarr) with whom she has a contentious (to say the least) relationship with. An anti-colonial revenge picture that spends a lot of time on survival elements, making the revenge seem impossible indeed. The woman just doesn't seem psychologically - or physically - capable of it. Over the course of the journey, she'll discover there's far more that connects her guide's reality to hers, as both are displaced people in indentured servitude to a psychotic oppressor, and together, they might find a way. Very bleak, full of heinous acts, almost unbearable. What victory is eked out doesn't erase the great evils done by Imperialists. But, as a descendant of survivors of an 18th-Century British genocide, boy is it satisfying when one of them gets it.
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes director Junta Yamaguchi offers a second loopy time loop movie with River, the twist being that everyone is aware of the 2-minute loop (at least, in and around a peaceful Kyoto retreat), so everyone kind of gets to resolve their issues in a shared Groundhog Day situation. It's extremely charming - especially our POV character played by Riko Fujitani (who was also in Beyond), the one for whom the camera is a companion in each two-minute take - and that, I think, helps sell the patently ridiculous ending. Great sense of geography. Lots of characters to care about. And the very real snowfall made me wonder how parts of this were filmed/scheduled, as well as making the middle of the film look particularly gorgeous. River is full of little twists and turns, and you just won't know where the next two minutes will take you.
At 3+ hours, you'd expect Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror to be pretty complete in its coverage of the cinematic genre (it sometimes touches on literature, but the focus is movies), and you'd be right. Abundant in its film clips, various experts and film makers discuss Folk Horror and in the process adopt a lot of movies I wouldn't have put in the category myself, but am convinced by the arguments. Once one understands the reasons for its rise in the 70s and its revival in a more recent era, the widening of the genre as often a thematic overlay that includes some science fiction and hicksploitation films makes total sense. The documentary discusses its corpus geographically - it asks WHICH folklore? - to make some important distinctions between British and American folk horror, without forgetting the rest of world cinema. Guy Maddin's contribution: Some very cool collage transitions, scoring bonus points with me. A nice deep dive. I learned a lot.
[Ecuador] Who do I complain to about there being tons of buzzards in The Swamp of the Ravens, but no ravens? This is a movie that seems to have thought Plan 9 from Outer Space might be good if only we removed the Outer Space from it, almost an early attempt at Re-Animator, but I think all the focus on the cops tracking dead bodies connects it more to Plan 9. The film is bonkers, folks, and for once, I don't mean that in a good way. There's a subplot about the mad scientist's girlfriend wanting to go back to her previous lover, a crooner who sings about robots (with a blow-up doll on stage) and blood. There's the promise of science zombies walking out of the swamp at some point that never materializes. And there's florid, poetic dialog delivered in a badly-acted English dub. Plus, you tell me which is the most in bad taste: The necrophilia scene, the use of an actual corpse/autopsy, or the probability that animals were harmed in the climax? Those buzzards really ARE dark omens. I should have heeded them.
And that's it for the Americas! Crossing over to Europe...
[Faroe Islands] On a remote island village, two girls fall in love, but one of them is the priest's daughter, so tragedy is imminent. Falling Angels presents a sweet teenage romance that could have been extended to full feature length, I think, reasonably well. At less than a half-hour, it still has well-drawn characters and an intriguing locale (expanding on this is where I would have put a lot of the extra time). Beautiful lyrical ending that ties into Scandinavian legend. It's all very pretty, but necessarily sad.
[Andorra] In what feels like a good start - or, actually, late middle - of a longer film, The Blizzard finds a way, in editing, to make a "complete" story out of its brief 11 minutes. But it still feels like it's a trick to make more out of a film clip. Looking at movies made in Andorra, it seems like the main thing on its film makers' minds is the Nazis running through its mountain pass, and I was disappointed that the initial mystery sort of looped back there.
[San Marino] Drawing over frames of Buster Keaton films, The Tail (La coda) is two minutes of fun surrealism, with characters stretching into odd shapes. It looks really, really cool.
[Malta] Of the 1973 Papillon, Roger Ebert said something has gone wrong if you want the characters to escape prison just so the movie were over, and without making any claim about that film (I certainly don't think it's top-tier Steve McQueen), I do think this applies even more to the 2017 version. And yet, Charlie Hunnam (as Papillon) is more heroic than McQueen's, and Rami Malek (the man who he protects, initially for his money, but eventually for friendship) is more sympathetic than Dustin Hoffman in the same role. It doesn't change the fact that prison movies, especially period pieces, are horror shows, and the length of one like Papillon, which has several escape attempts, years-long stays in solitary, rince-repeat, extends the suffering to unbearable extremes. As a result, the audience can disconnect, or at least, I did. At its best, it's a story of will and defiance, and a real one at that. But the best moments get a little lost in a sea of hardship. And perhaps it starts a little early in the story, and ends a little late. Not badly made, but the pacing just makes it seem interminable.
[Monaco] I have a lot of affection for Lee Van Cleef in spaghetti westerns, and Beyond the Law is a pretty interesting one. He's an outlaw who, when he meets the guileless foreigner he secretly stole from (Antonio Sabàto), is... kind of smitten. The bromance, I think, stems from his seeing something he WANTS TO BE in the young man, which puts him at odds with his own compadres (a quirky duo) and ultimately, with some truly slimy villains. There's a constant push and pull on his morals, and he doesn't even believe in his own capacity for redemption (it's perhaps interesting that he pals around with a false preacher, in this context). I think the final shootout is way too long, and lost me for those many minutes, but I was well invested until then, and it hooked me in time for the ending. Van Cleef is easily the best actor/strongest presence in the film, and it probably wouldn't work without him. But he IS in it, so it DOES.
[Moldova] Simpals Studio's Grim Reaper, Dji, is kind of the Mr. Bean of Deaths - clumsy and just not very good at his job, but also venal and somehow sympathetic (it's the eyes). It's black slapstick and rather amusing. In Death Fails (which could be the title for all his animated shorts), he has trouble with a truck driver who just won't die on schedule. Some nice bits with the heart monitor, but I found the music to be pretty obnoxious. Death Sails, made 3 years later, is definitely the better short. Better animation (in two different styles) and acting, and a brightly-lit story about waiting on a shipwrecked sailor to kick it. The character actually started life in very shallow 1-minute shorts, Santa and Death, which feels adjacent to The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the abominably-titled Gypsy and Death. I'm glad they moved on to longer and better things.
Books: The last adaptation of a televised story in the original Target range, and John Peel's last Dalek story adaptation, The Evil of the Daleks, is a proper novel. Like Power of the Daleks, it's longer than than most Targets, and feels fleshed out with thoughts, backstories, and expanded scenes. It's almost my first speed bump in the complete read-through of the Target range. I just couldn't make myself care about the 1966 mystery despite an unclear memory of that part of the lost serial. Once we get to the Victorian era, the train starts chugging along, however, with the Turkish Kemel coming out of the novelistic approach most improved. And then it's a bullet train once we're on Skaro and the Dalek Civil War. We're introduced to Victoria whose onscreen blubbering has been etched into my mind, so I couldn't NOT imagine it while reading even if Peel gives her a little more agency. No surprise, I'm more interested in David Whitaker's plots and characters than I am Terry Nation's, so it's a crying shame his stories don't exist in the canon (at least we have animated versions now). Peel turning them into prose, fitting them into later Dalek lore, but also not really changing the dialog, makes this one of the better ways to experience his stories.
Filipino comics artist Manix Abrera's 12 features (well, look at that) twelve wordless stories featuring his blobby, but expressive characters, all heading, it seems, towards a darkly comical ending. While some are merely bittersweet or ironic observations, most take a surreal turn, especially in the back half of the book, making the most of the medium's wide canvas. Nevertheless, one of my favorites is "1", an existentialist piece where a character is searching for an answer to his questions, and in finding one, only creates more questions for others. Illumination seems to be a personal process. The way Abrera uses comics language in that strip is magical, and only bettered by the "9"'s use of the thought bubble to manifest an imaginary boyfriend. The simplicity of the caricatures is misleading. This is a very complex and subtle work, even if some of the punchlines are brutally savage.
Beautiful illustration upon beautiful illustration slowly creeps us into the world of Chabouté's Tout seul (Alone), the story of a man who was born in a lighthouse and now can only imagine what the outside world might be like with the help of his trusty dictionary - even if he's lacking a lot of the context (should have splurged for an illustrated version). Slow, decontracted storytelling, taking pages and pages before we even get a spoken word - it's a real mood - but I love how Chabouté teases and reveals what's really happening, creating narrative tension in small, personal stakes. It's an ode to imagination, but also a criticism of it. Too much of a good thing might just turn out to be a prison, and the subplot with the fishermen helps bring that theme to the fore (yes, I suppose that's a nautical pun). Beautiful work that might just make you shed a tear by the end.
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