Three Films Make A Post: If you have to scream, cover your mouth

Sick (2022): I’ve seen this sometimes pretty brutal home invasion movie directed by John Hyams described as some kind of comeback for writer Kevin Williamson – who co-wrote with Katelyn Crabb – but I can only see it as a much weaker follow-up to Hyams’s brilliant Alone that’s failing mostly because of Williamson’s and Crabb’s limp script. As a director, Hyams is still fantastic at directing classical suspense and thriller scenes, but where Alone’s deceptively straightforward script earthed these scenes in great character writing and tense plotting, the film at hand falters at creating characters whose destiny you’d actually be interested in and can only understand suspense scenes as set-pieces instead of intricate parts of a greater whole. That the killer’s motivation come right out of the wet dreams of an anti-vaxxer forum doesn’t make things any better either.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2022): To continue grumping about movies, this Evil Children affair by Roxanne Benjamin is just not a terribly interesting film for most of its running time. Benjamin is clearly a competent filmmaker, but not one so good – or simply so experienced, this being her second feature – she can work around the fact the child actors she has to depend on can’t consistently hit the notes of required creepiness, which is pretty much the death knell in a film about kids acting creepy. The script can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to do something clever with shifting the usual role of the “woman who realized early on there’s bad shit going on, but nobody believes her because she’s mentally ill” on a man, or somehow talk about female scepticism of becoming a mother, tries both at once, and manages to do neither in a satisfying way.

It’s not a terrible movie, just one that’s perfectly forgettable.

Baghead (2008): As I have repeated ad nauseam in the past, I am not an admirer of the mumblecore canon as a whole (mostly not even in particular), with an aesthetic that never convinced me this is more than film school grad wank of the highest degree. Having said that, I do have a small place in my heart for this horror/hapless indie filmmaker comedy by the Duplass brothers. Mostly because this, like their other films, doesn’t feel trapped in its aesthetics like too much mumblecore does for me, but actually uses them intelligently. Even the – most probably in large parts improvised – dialogue comes to sensible points and shapes emotional beats instead of simply stumbling around, amounting to nothing.

Quite a bit of this is obviously thanks to the cast – Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller – as well as what I assume is judicious editing, but there’s also a pleasantly non-wanky sense of self-irony, as well as an abundance of heart (the genuine kind sometimes found on sleeves) on display that makes the film impossible to dislike for me.

Three Films Make A Post: A sensational characterisation you wouldn't believe possible

The Darjeeling Limited (2007): I don’t usually write a lot about Wes Anderson’s films, because while I love most of them quite a bit, I don’t have much to say about them beyond noting my appreciation for his general aesthetic (and the guy’s films are nothing if not expressions of a single and very personal aesthetic), his curious ability to make films full of ironic distance that still seem to respect and portray human emotion in a stylized yet truthful manner. Why, he even gets me to watch a film about characters for whose little rich boy problems I’d have little patience otherwise like this one, and enjoy it.

Greenberg (2010): I’m somewhat more particular when it comes to the films of Noah Baumbach. About half of them I think are brilliant or borderline brilliant, the other half (say the confusingly beloved Mistress America or While We’re Young) I can’t stand at all.

One of the borderline brilliant ones is this one about the perils of being a supposed grown-up when you are perhaps not suited to it at all, embodied in a pretty fantastic performance by Ben Stiller (who is a properly good actor when he is acting instead of being Ben Stiller). The film also concerns itself with the perils of being a young woman who has had much of her confidence and self-esteem sucked out by life as a young, poor woman in late capitalist America as even more fantastically embodied by Greta Gerwig. As an actress, Gerwig has an incredible way of projecting telling degrees of awkwardness only comparable to the way Vincent Price could chew scenery to just the exact correct degree. Baumbach keeps some ironic distance here too, but where Anderson’s view is a bit more clinical, I believe Baumbach wants his characters to change and improve and be happy (to the degree being happy is possible for them) more often than not. As a viewer, I approve of this.

Stegman Is Dead (2017): Keeping with the comedy, though on a less critically acclaimed and less accomplished level, David Hyde’s film concerns a bunch of slightly eccentric criminals, killers etc, performing their merry dance of stupidity and mild violence while descending on the house of a porn producer (porn jokes are actually one of the film’s strengths) and other houses looking for a McGuffin in form of a video. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes going over the same couple of ideas over and over again, sometimes threatening to do something really interesting and crazy but never quite getting there.


It’s a generally likeable little film, though, not terribly cynical, not terribly involving, but certainly worth a friendly nod.

In short: Lady Bird (2017)

Unlike I, Tonya the other film concerned with class that was nominated for all the large film prices last year, and about which I can only speak through clenched teeth, Greta Gerwig’s coming of age story about a young woman (Saoirse Ronan, as genuinely fantastic as she always is) growing up in Sacramento actually understands things about class. Specifically about how being part of a family of the lowest rung of the middle-class (only a catastrophe away from becoming the working poor) can feel, not just about how large parts of one’s future are determined by the class and place into which one is born but how that knowledge grinds one down, one way or the other. The film’s not exactly about that, though, or rather, the class element is just a piece of a film that talks about how it feels to be a somewhat strange young woman in a place nobody will confuse with the centre of the world, about the complications of the love of family and home, growing up, sexual awakening, and half a dozen other things.

In a highly impressive balancing act, Gerwig manages to let riotously funny scenes follow moments of great sadness, moments of the absurd those of great veracity, as well as the other way round, without that ever feeling like grating shifts in tone but as logical consequences of the characters and the town the film takes place in. The film often feels light as a feather; it comes about these moments of lightness not by ignoring depths and the abyss but by facing them, un-dramatically and dramatically.


Honestly, I didn’t think Gerwig had a film I’d find quite this moving (my heart and brain in many directions) in her, for quite a bit of her other work as a writer I’ve seen (Frances Ha and its circling of comparable themes being an obvious exception) tends to keep a wall of irony between her and her characters, distancing the audience from too much emotional involvement with them as well. In Lady Bird, the writer/director still uses irony and distance, but now it’s the distance of someone taking a step or two back to be able to watch more closely and understand more precisely.