About to Snap: Civil War
There have been some negative reactions to director Alex Garland’s (28 Days Later, Ex Machina) provocative-titled thriller, Civil War. The backdrop is enticingly dramatic: in an unspecified near future, The United States of America is divided into warring regional factions. It’s full-out war, with violent guerilla units in the streets and heavy artillery blasting neon jets across the night skies. And yet, this film is not really about that, and I think that’s where the disappointment might lie. Yes, the civil war exists, but Garland doesn’t really dissect it. We have no idea who anybody is politically, and with developments such as Texas and California aligning, we can safely say we’re in fantasy territory. If you’re hoping for a bloodthirsty onslaught, where your side sticks it to the other, then this is not the film for you. Nothing is defined on a macro level (an intelligent choice, I think) - this is all about the personal. It’s a road trip, a buddy movie, a dissection of journalism and a tribute to the war correspondents that Garland grew up around as the son of a political cartoonist. Kirsten Dunst plays conflict-hardened war photographer Lee Smith (a nominative genuflection to real-life WWII photographer Lee Miller), and the movie tracks her odyssey from New York to Washington D.C. to track down the President (Nick Offerman). Manhattan feels like 1973 Phnom Penh at the end of the Cambodian War, with the press holed up in a hotel, drinking through the power cuts. Here we meet Smith’s colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), a charismatic, gung-ho thrill seeker, as well as veteran correspondent Sammy (Stephen McKinley-Henderson) and young upstart Jessie (Cailee Spainey). There seems to be a real trend in modern media to have a battle-scarred elder transport a vulnerable innocent along a treacherous journey (cf. The Last of Us, The Mandalorian, etc), and this movie broadly falls into that category. In their trusty press truck, the gang set out across a lawless country. We encounter local militia, rogue army units, refugee camps, death squads and isolated men fighting personal battles. There’s even a bucolic small town where it’s business as usual, the clothing boutiques open and quotidian life continuing despite the snipers on the roofs. There’s brutality (especially the jarring cameo by Jessie Plemmons), danger and a sense of chaos. It’s a very analogue war, with automatic weapons and film cameras rather than drones and digital media. Smith is Jessie’s hero, and there’s a sharp learning curve as the experienced, decorated war photographer (“You took that legendary picture of the Antifa Massacre,” Jessie gushes) educates the inexperienced snapper in the most grueling on-the-job training imaginable. It’s a visceral experience, with gorily bleeding casualties, mass graves and gunpoint negotiations all a part of everyday life. Garland has taken pains to make this a very personal film. Civil War is less about politics and is more concerned with the documentation of atrocity and how it shapes its witnesses. It values poetic truths and intimacy, and I’d argue it’s a better film for it. (PO) New balls, please: Challengers
As if being one of the tennis balls so thoroughly thwacked in this tennis-themed love triangle, I was back and forth on this movie. There was a lot to enjoy, as well as some less engaging aspects that left me firmly on the fence, or in this case, the net. The plot is fairly straightforward: two very close young friends fall in love with the same woman, a fellow tennis phenomenon, who courts (pun very much intended) both of their affections. The dynamics of this lusty triangle are tested as their careers lurch in very different directions. Starting with the positives, the three leads combine with infectious chemistry, especially when the two tennis players (Mike Faist as Art Donaldson and Josh O’Connor as Patrick Zweig) trade loving quips or, eventually, pointed barbs. Their love interest, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) motivates much of their bonding and conflicts, and Zendaya pulls off a confident, mature performance. There’s some dazzlingly innovative cinematography as we inhabit the point of view of the dueling players on court and even the tennis ball. Shots hurtle violently down the camera lens, almost threatening to burst out of the screen (and this without the need for 3D glasses). For me, though, some artistic choices landed out of bounds. Some of the more emotional scenes are hijacked by a jarring, intrusive synth soundtrack that feels out of place. I’m generally a fan of composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross moody electronica, but here it seems ill-employed. I also felt that some of the non-game edits are unnecessarily busy, and there’s a pacing issue that could have been avoided with a heavier hand on the cut. This movie does not need to be over two hours long. That said, the nonlinear structure works well as a gradual reveal of a couple of twists, and though some other reviews seem to suggest it’s confusing, the time periods are all very obviously titled. The story naturally culminates in a tense face off, and though the ending might be divisive, I think director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria) made the right call here. In turns ebullient, sexy and dramatic, Challengers is an engaging match up, thriving more on court than off. (PO) You know, it's no good: a review of Back to Black
Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary ‘Amy’ is a heart-rending look at a phenomenal singer and performer, battling both her demons and ultimately destructive professional and personal associations. Back To Black, a 2024 biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (A Million Little Pieces, Fifty Shades of Grey) is…something else. Despite the panoramic mockery of the early trailers, I went in with an open mind. Yes, lead Marisa Abela was leaning into mannerisms a little eagerly (especially with the singing), but it’s nothing that Rami Malek didn’t somehow get an Oscar for (he’s a fine actor, but Bo-Rap is far from his finest hour, IMHO). I was counting on the story and cinematography of this “impressionistic” (?) retelling of the Winehouse legend elevating things beyond fan-service karaoke. That hope lasted around five minutes. It’s…not subtle. The first piece of information that the director wants you to know is that Amy Winehouse is not like other girls: she likes old fashioned music, not modern pop like you thought! The endless musical references arrive like Miles Davis delivering a discordant trumpet solo about an inch from your ear. “Why don’t people like jazz?!” Amy yells to her dad Mitch (a hapless Eddie Marsan), apropos of nothing. We meet Amy as an unknown, but within about ten minutes she’s famous. You find yourself constantly flailing for any kind emotional depth, like a third-class Titanic passenger grasping for a floating door frame. One night she’s cobbling together songs on a guitar in her bedroom, in the next scene she’s won a struggle-free bevy of international awards. The payment of dues that was so well portrayed in the documentary is just vaulted over. Tension with her roommate mum is hinted at, I wonder what the story is th-DOESN’T MATTER DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT because we’re already half way through the next scene. It’s a disorienting, breathless race to get to her indie meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), punctuated with cloying scenes with her ex-singer grandmother (Lesly Manville), who drops names like they’re covered in vegetable oil ("I sang wiv 'em all!"). Here’s where things get even murkier, where The Estate of Amy Winehouse starts to make its unwelcome presence felt. Blake and Mitch are historically known to be predatory, exploitative, and self-furthering. Here, though, Blake is presented as a lovable, bright-eyed rogue. He may be an addict, but he has Amy’s best interests at heart. As for Mitch, you may as well have him blunder around the set with a NUMBER ONE DAD mug. (One quick tangent: Blake romances Amy by playing her 'The Leader of the Pack' by The Shangri-La's. Movie Amy has never heard this song before. One of the most famous songs of the 1960s, a decade she is supposedly obsessed with. Am I nitpicking? Maybe. But...what?!) Amy and Blake are set up as kind of a Sanitized Sid and Non-Threatening Nancy. They’re chased by a benign, Keystone Cops gaggle of paparazzi, and when Blake goes to prison (IRL he got two years for a violent physical attack) he immediately blooms into the patron saint of rehabilitation. Other than that, Amy does a couple of gigs (many major events are just ignored), she moves house and, oh, she has a caged songbird DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU? GET IT? DO YOU? The final scene is beatific, Amy in a pastoral rehab center, seemingly canonized and almost euphoric. It's awful on multiple levels. Thrashing inconsequentially in the clichéd swamp of musical biopics, Back to Black sinks into the mire. It’s a movie more concerned with washing the blood from the hands of the living, rather than celebrating a talent, or analyzing the circumstances that resulted in her tragic death. (PO)
There are many impressive elements in Dune 2, the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel.
For starters, there’s the scale of the thing. Villeneuve has vocally expressed his love of visuals over dialogue, and he pours everything into the aesthetics of his world building. Planets, industrial compounds, desert landscapes and imperial palaces are all delivered with a sense of scale and grandeur that’s reminiscent of the epic movies of David Lean. On the big screen especially, these lingering landscapes and interiors are gorgeous and intimidating. Secondly, the sound design. Every vehicle and weather system has a rich, layered acoustic presence, and it really helps with the immersive nature of the movie. The dragonfly-like ‘Ornicopters’ buzz and purr and groan as if they are organic creatures. It’s a huge universe, with lots to cover, and we won’t get into a detailed plot summary as it could take all week. Suffice to say, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is a Christ-like figure, prophesied to lead the indigenous people of Arrakis (the Freman) to freedom. A race called The Harkonnens do the violent, oppressive dirty work for the shadowy Emperor (Christopher Walken) as they seek to control the planet’s resource: Spice. There’s also the influence of Paul’s mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), part of the occult Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Dune (2023) set all of this up, and Dune 2 focuses on Paul taking up the mantle of savior. Like any good hero in their monomyth, he has to train himself in new disciplines, wrangle his magical powers and win over his disciples. We get a series of training montages where he learns to ride the huge sandworms and the special way to walk in the sand to avoid these massive predators. All of this time, the enemy plot, and we see the ascendance of the psychopathic Feyd-Rautha, played by Austin Butler. He is the Harkonnen Baron’s nephew, and we meet him at his birthday celebrations, where he slaughters gladiators in a huge arena. This is one of the best scenes, the stadium cast in monochrome thanks to their black sun, the countless hordes cheering from their seats. Suffice to say that there’s a lot of plot to cover - this is even before we get to the love interest of Chani (Zendaya) and the increasing religious fervor of warrior Stilgar (Javier Bardem). At over two and a half hours long, some of the pacing takes a hit, but if you’re happy just to let the visuals flow over you, then it’s not too arduous. You do feel that Villeneuve is fighting against exposition (tricky with just so much of it necessary) so that he can focus on the striking visual flourishes, and maybe slightly more judicious editing could keep things moving. It’s hard to be too bored with such glorious renderings, though, and the fight and action scenes jolt you back into the thick of things with stirring regularity. At this point, if you’re invested, you’re invested. If, like me, you missed the first chapter and streamed it before going to the sequel, you’ll rue not making it to the cinema in the first instance. Films like this are what big screens are for, and not many directors working today understand that as well as Villeneuve. Dune 2 is showing at AMC Theaters and at The Prytania Canal Place More recent Reviews SIGN UP FOR YOUR FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: Buff justice: Love Lies Bleeding
It’s funny being a dyed-in-the-wool Gen X-er, raised on the cinematic neon and throbbing synth bass lines of 80s thrillers. To see those elements lavishly celebrated - not as a gimmick, but as a legitimate aesthetic, is what first drew me into Love Lies Bleeding. I guess the kids might call it vaporwave meta-irony, but this movie could have been made in 1987. It feels as authentic a period piece as The Holdovers, and it wears its influences on the ragged sleeve of a sweaty, blood-stained, pastel jogging suit. I was already a fan of director Rose Glass’s 2020 breakout, low-budget horror Saint Maud, and this is also something of a genre film, though much more mixed. It’s part neo-noir thriller, part Gen Z Thelma and Louise, part fantasy pastiche. In small-town New Mexico, gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart at her best: nihilistically moody and uncompromising) has her interest piqued by new-to-town, ambitious bodybuilder Jackie (played with charismatically chaotic chutzpah by Katy O’Brian). They fall for each other fast, their romance straining to break free of the psychodramatic gravity created by two villains: Lou’s ratlike, abusive brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco) and sinister patriarch Lou Sr., evoked with full-throated, seedy relish by Ed Harris. At first, it’s all sweet nothings on hazy afternoons in bed, coupled with gently romantic steroid abuse, coupled with sex scenes that - come on, let’s be adults about this - are nothing that dozens of pulpy ‘erotic thrillers’ didn’t get away with back in the day. There’s nothing here that Mickey Rourke or Kim Basinger didn’t do to service a plot. The vicious entanglements of the town’s underbelly throw a greasy wrench into the relationship, though. Violence is an intrusion and also a necessary response, and the tentacle-like machinations of low-level organized crime insistently encompass Lou and Jackie’s worlds. Jackie’s tilt at a bodybuilding competition becomes divisive as she starts to lose her grip on reality. Lou Sr. starts to exert criminally paternal pressure, and Lou sinks into a flailing, emotional morass. She’s spinning plates with ever-increasing tension, the turmoil (reminiscent of movies like Uncut Gems) pulling her apart as she attempts to reconcile her past with her possible future. Some might recoil at the film’s employment of magical realism and honestly, it’s not something I’m generally a fan of. If you just trust the director, though, and see it as another way in which the film fights against being boxed into an easy classification; you can choose to find it daring. The graphic, visceral scenes rub against the 80s visuals to create a grubby, restless world, which slips even further into depravity as the psychological vice tightens. The performances across the board are impressively committed, and keep a compelling love story well above simple parody. (PO) Movie review: The Zone of Interest
This work of course comes with the heaviest of baggage, especially since Jonathan Glazer's Oscar win. Those issues fall beyond the scope of this review - I’m going to focus on my impressions of Zone of Interest as a work of art. The setting is mainly the household of a high-ranking German official in 1943. It is located next to the Auschwitz death camp, separated only by a high stone wall. From the first frames, the cyclical swells of the horrors beyond begin to intrude. These atrocities are unseen. We don’t need visuals. They have been enshrined in our collective consciousness from any number of history books and TV documentaries. We witness them today and every day on the news and on social media. The family goes about its everyday business. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) attends to the logistical challenges of mass incineration, while Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) runs the household, organizing maids, playing with their four children and gardening. They are an upwardly-mobile family, Rudolph’s star in the ascendance and provincial girl Hedwig becoming used to the trappings of a new, middle-class life. The party favors them. They have a swimming pool and servants and Rudolph hosts parties of officers who all toast his successes. They are a bourgeois family, living in comfort and security, concerned with material things and high standards of living. Hedwig’s mother comes to visit. The couple wrestle with the problem that a promotion (and therefore relocation) would entail. Glazer doesn’t spoon feed you anything. When Hedwig gifts her staff new dresses, it takes a second to realize where those clothes came from. Every luxury and amenity they have, from toothpaste to brandy, is drenched in blood. Even as they bask in their affluence, the screams and sinister smoke stacks and the relentless sounds of firing squads intrude. The necrotic waste from the camp begins to physically infest their living space and leisure time. The sound design alone makes The Zone of Interest worth the ticket. The drones of anguish filter in and out almost subliminally, with varying levels of intensity. Glazer employs a hidden camera-like cinematography, switching between views in real time as actors move between rooms. It results in a reality TV-like effect, drawing yet more parallels with contemporary life. Many reviews refer to the famous “banality of evil” phrase, but although many of the scenes are of regular, quotidian tasks and events, it feels anything but banal. We see all of their personal, social, and sexual missteps. The party does not care for them beyond what they can deliver in terms of corpses - the far right fetishizes individuality, but only until you’re not useful, of course. It’s a Holocaust film, but one you haven’t seen before. I believe the bold artistic choices that Glazer makes elevate The Zone of Interest beyond many of its subject-related peers. New experiences in cinema are vanishingly rare these days. This movie delivers one, however uncomfortable, and it will stay with you. (PO) The Zone of Interest is showing at The Prytania Theatre, Canal Place Inhabiting the larger-than-life persona of all-American baton-botherer Leonard Bernstein has been a long-held passion project for Bradley Cooper. Speilberg (Steven) and Scorsese (Martin) have donned producer hats to help him bring his vision to the screen with Maestro, and it’s a stylized vision at that. Dialogue comes at you from all sides with minimal editing, a conversational, naturalistic choice that has divided critics. Bold staging and imaginative photography keep the biopic moving at an allegro pace, Cooper conducting Lenny’s unstoppable career and gossip-worthy personal life with relish. The scenes focus mainly on his love affair with his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), his family and his many indiscretions. The evocative music washes over the whole messy triumph, culminating in a concert at Ely Cathedral, England that is recreated with one of the year’s greatest single shots. Well worth seeing at the cinema for the score alone. High culture and the dalliances of the upper crust are fetishized and manipulated in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. It’s a campish romp through the English class system as working class scholarship boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) lands at a Oxford University, becoming the token poor friend of posh Felix (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi). Over the course of a summer, visiting Felix's intimidatingly-regal family home, Oliver is first seemingly exploited, but then begins to work his own machinations within the family. There’s hints of Parasite and The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited, and while there are some fun twists, the plot melts into near-incoherence towards the third act. There are charismatic turns from the leads, as well as Richard E Grant and Rosamund Pike as Felix’s parents, but don’t think about the plausibility of the story too much. Believability is completely abandoned in the magical realism of Poor Things, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster). Lanthimos creates alien worlds that are just familiar enough, with skewed conventions and edgy thought experiments as reality. Poor Things is no exception, Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter emerging as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster out of the laboratory of Dr Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Her social, moral and sexual education takes place amid lab assistants and test tubes, and then under the influence of a lascivious, globetrotting playboy (Mark Ruffalo). Surreal versions of Athens, Lisbon and Paris provide the backdrop for their saucy misadventures. There’s a joyful, dreamlike weirdness to the worlds, revealed to us via hyperreal landscapes and through strange fisheye lenses, and it’s a colorful, bawdy tale of exploitation and bourgeois sensibilities. Moving through elevated, rarified worlds could be a unifying theme, such as there is one between these three movies, but stylistically, aesthetically and tonally, they’re very different interpretations of that particular journey. (PO)
Cassandro
This sporting underdog tale has all the elements that scream ‘Oscar buzz’. Based on a real person, Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal) is an openly gay wrestler in a run-down Mexican border town when we meet him. Known as El Topo (The Mole), his slight frame and effeminate nature mean that he is routinely cast as a pipsqueak, thrown around by his giant opponents. He has dreams, though, to become ‘the Liberace of Luchador’ and to do this, he must take on the persona of an “exotico”. These are wrestlers who don make-up and a feminine look, but who are traditionally doomed to be punching bags and on-stage sponges for the crowd’s homophobia. Emerging as ‘Cassandro’ (named after a camp Mexican soap opera), Armendáriz wants to flip the script and be an exotico who wins. We’ve had movies exploring the inner lives of wrestlers before - most famously Aaranofsky’s The Wrestler - and this movie shares the grit and grime of their reality. Cassandro is mainly supported by women: his hard-working single mother, and his trainer Sabrina (the excellent Roberta Colindrez), a local lucha success who spots his potential. As Cassandro starts to move up the ranks, he attracts a possibly scummy promoter and his pseudo-gangster son (Bad Bunny), as well as scorn and admiration in equal measure from the crowds. There are unavoidably cliched training and sporting montages as the process takes on momentum, but Bernal’s showy magnetism easily carries them in an engagingly joyous way. Conflict comes in the shape of his relationship with his closeted wrestler lover (Raúl Castillo), who has a family that holds his main affections, and another man - the estranged father who first introduced him to lucha libre. Bernal channels his anxieties about these relationships into hard work on his craft, and increasingly risky behavior as his lot in life improves. There’s a lot to love in the flamboyance of Bernal’s character and his determined challenges to well-established macho norms. Bernal does great work combining camp showmanship, sporting grit and extreme vulnerability, and some of the wrestling sequences are genuinely impressive. For me, though, what must have been some very testing real life stakes are kind of rushed through. Cassdandro wins over hostile crowds in an instant and seemingly cruises to a nationally-televised glamor match. There’s a shift in tone over the last 20 minutes that glosses over a lot of character development and the climax doesn’t feel quite earned in some way. There’s some touching scenes, especially between Cassandro and his mother, a tough but loving woman, wonderfully portrayed by Perla De La Rosa. Bernal, too, is warmly charismatic and real, and you’re on his side from the off. Personally, I felt that director Roger Ross Williams didn’t quite stick the knockout, but the bout as a whole is still an enjoyable ride. (PO) Cassandro is currently showing at The Broad Theater. Mali-boom Barbie
by Paul Oswell What’s the crossover point of nuclear weapons and a famous American doll? Probably the bikini, right? In 1946, Europeans experienced their first summer without war in years. The air was ripe with optimism, and in France, designer Louis Réard noticed women rolling up the edges of their bathing suits to improve their tans. He created a skimpy two-piece bathing suit using a few triangles of fabric. Across the world in the south Pacific, Bikini Atoll was being used for atomic bomb tests. The islands took their name from a local word, ‘pikinni,’ meaning ‘coconut place.’ Réard thought his invention was as ‘small and devastating’ as the atom bomb, and bikinis were born. Oppenheimer - Chris Nolan’s biopic of the eccentric physician heading up the Manhattan Project - doesn’t concern itself with fashion, although there are some gratuitously saucy clips that go way beyond flashing midriffs (more on this). At three hours long, it’s something of a test of endurance, especially given the decidedly un-cinematic plethora of scenes that are mostly just men arguing in a broom cupboard. Other scenes include men arguing at parties, men arguing in congressional hearings and men arguing on trains. Oops, they accidentally-on-purpose invented a devasting weapon, and now there’s some moral qualms about using it, and the world-ending doors that its use inevitably opens. I found that the conflicts - Oppenheimer’s personal ones as well as the larger ethical/political picture - carried the drama well enough, and given that there’s only one ‘action’ scene (the testing of the bomb), I personally didn’t feel that it dragged. There are some surprising revelations. Much of the first part of the movie is negotiating Oppie’s romantic tangles. He was quite the player, let me tell you. Apparently he was irresistible, and he didn’t even look like Cillian Murphy that much in real life. Still, it rounds out the character nicely. Otherwise we’d just be watching repeated heated discussions of theoretical physics. There are some fun cameos - Tom Conti as Albert Einstein for example - and a Salieri/Mozart-type storyline with embittered scientist Lewis Strauss (Robert Downy Jr). Florence Pugh spends much of her screen time in the nude, and I’m not too sure how it advances the plot but Nolan seems to think it important. There’s lots of Communist hunting and intellectual jousting, and of course it’s a huge topic. In some ways, we are all living in the post-credits sequence. They also make Oppenheimer say his famous line (“Now I am become Death, etc”) twice, just for kicks. But overall, it’s a commendable achievement, imho. Two hours after Oppenheimer finished, I was laughing at Ryan Gosling being a plastic doll. Barbie could not be more diametrically opposed as a movie, and I’m glad we saw them both in this order. I am Very Much Not The Demographic for Barbie, but Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach deliver a witty, self-aware script that elevates this film way above, say, The Emoji Movie or Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Given that it’s essentially two hours of product placement, it’s a biting, near-subversive commentary on gender politics, and two-thirds of the way through, America Ferrera delivers a feminist manifesto that is genuinely rousing. I can understand why Ben Shapiro pretends to hate it for money, and that in itself is pleasing to me. Margot Robbie, Kate McKinnon and America Ferrara all deliver, and Ryan Gosling’s commitment to the role of Ken is impressive. Issa Rae and Michael Cera are also absolutely loving their roles. If you want six hours of experiencing just about every emotion that you could feel watching movies, I heartily recommend the double bill. Just be careful about the order and remember the old saying: “Oppenheimer before Barbie, you’ll still want to party; Barbie before Oppenheimer, you might have a bad time-a.” REVIEW: BIOSPHERE
Two men and three fish spend years in a geodesic dome after a nuclear holocaust. If this sounds like a set up for a joke, then it kind of is. Billy (Louisiana’s own Mark Duplass) and Ray (Sterling K. Brown) are - as far as anyone can tell - the last remnants of the human race, just as Sam, Diane and Woody are the last of their piscine cousins. Hilarity ensues. Er, sort of. The why is the first reveal. Turns out Billy was a red-button-happy President (of the United States), and Ray his right hand man, his childhood friend-turned-consiglieri. Ray had built the dome just in case of the apocalypse and WHOOPSIE it was a good job he did. We join them a number of years into the situation, and they’re living like a couple of college roomies, playing video games, maxin' and relaxin' and just wholesomely bro-ing out, man. The fish reproduce and provide fresh food sustainably, and so when ‘Sam’ dies and is the main star of that night’s fish fry dinner, it’s no biggie. Only they realize just before dessert that it‘s actually Diane who went fins up, which puts a freshly-urgent spin on humanity’s present and future, such as they are. What transpires is kind of a Black Mirror-esque buddy comedy as the leads deal with immediate and existential threats. How will we eat now, and oh, a strange green light appears in the completely black sky of the nuclear winter, and is starting to grow. The lifelong dynamics of Billy and Ray start to emerge. Billy is impulsive and kind of a goof, Ray is scientific but open to the mysteries of the unknown. They have Odd Couple-type fights about personal privacy, video game hacks and their different recollections of a childhood magic show. It’s mostly fun times given the circumstances, but with the sudden ecological and evolutionary pressures, a lot changes very quickly. Directed by first timer Mel Eslyn (who co-wrote the script with Duplass), some interesting ideas are explored. Given the lack of diverse settings and microscope of the dome, though, it’s hard to misdirect, and so the developments at times feel like they’ve been foreshadowed with a slightly heavy hand. It’s not hard to keep a step ahead of the script if you’re paying attention. Duplas and Brown are charismatic, and bounce off each other charmingly. We are mostly unencumbered by hard sci-fi problems or thoughts of everyone that they ever loved having been vaporized, though if you had a two-person dome set up in advance, then presumably you’d already reconciled yourself to them not making it. I won’t spoil the main conceit though you’ll work it out early on. It does throw up some fun conversations and slapstick moments, but I left feeling like it could have worked well as a one-hour episode in an anthology rather than a 100-minute feature. Bereft of the distraction of other characters, there’s a limit to where you can go (thematically and geographically). The future of the species being in the hands of two petty men who mainly like to argue about The Super Mario Brothers isn’t without its amusing moments, though. (PO) Biosphere is playing at Prytania Canal Place |
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