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Baby Reindeer (2024)
The Comedy and Horror of real life in 4 hours.
Comedian Richard Gadd tells his story of how he was stalked by a relentless woman. Someone who intrigues him, someone who stirs up things in his heart he cannot fully explain to himself. His story makes you laugh at its absurdity, stare in horror, feel warm and fuzzy.
Here is a story that without a shadow of a doubt is the most realistic thing I have ever seen. Since it is based on a true story, the main character Donny feels like a real person, because he is. And yet it is the furtherst thing from a biopic or a documentary as you can ever come. The actress playing Martha Jessica Gunning, portrays her character in such an amazing way, the irrational behaviors we can all recognize in ourselves, the conflict in her, the way she deals with her traumatic past, all laid out beautifully over 4 hours of runtime. Donnys obsession with being liked and popular, the thing we all feel to a certain extent, it all resonates through you.
Stories can either try to portray something other-worldy, something we do not recognize, in order to keep us interested, or they can dwelve to the darkest most contradictory parts of the human heart and explore until we as viewers can do nothing else but feel empathic love for it.
William Faulkner once said "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself", and Richard Gadd have done this, once again, in one of the best ways I have ever seen. You cannot stop watching. You cannot stop feeling sorry for Martha. You cannot stop being hilariously scared of Marha. You cannot stop feeling sorry for Donny. You cannot stop feeling frustrated with Donny. The conflict that makes life interesting is encapsulated in this serie , and it punches you right in the heart with a gauntlet of ice and fire.
You feel it all!
Would recommend this serie to anyone who wants a story with complex characters, who wants to laugh, cry, rage and smile.
3 Body Problem: Countdown (2024)
A binary star system of an episode...
So... Having read the novel, the part in China is amazing, really manages to capture the feel in my opinion, watching the first scene in 1966 I was glued, really good acting from everyone!
That's the first giant star in our binary system.
However, the second, present-day part feels like a mediocre run-of-the-mill Hollywood flick, unlikable and simple characters, the common girl-boss tropes, which belongs more in a university activist sorority than a multimillion dollar production.
This is the white-dwarf orbiting the giant...
Sometimes it felt like two completely different TV-shows, one a serious, thrilling and intriguing one, the second, another "Oo something spooky happening, but did you see that one dumb guy, lol slay"-story.
Note that almost none of these present-day characters are in the novel, yes each are based on book characters, but, how much though... Basically, when the writers, David Benioff and D. B Weiss, follow the story of the writer it's very good, when they get to write on their own the quality plummets as fast as a neutrino going through earth... Now where have we encountered this situation before...
And let's just get this over with. They took Liu Cixin's novel and wanted to adapt it for the screen, and doing so changed character genders. That's fair, can always be interesting to give your own take on things, as long as you do it with a respect to the source material. Is that what D&D does though? Well, not yet... This is just episode 1, so we'll see how it goes. But as of now, just cut, pasting the gender of a bunch of characters and similarly cut & pasting the standard Hollywood girl-boss dialogue is not worthy of praise in any way. If you can't write women in STEM without making them into the standard unlikable Hollywood feminist protagonist, what does that say about your view of women?
Anyway, they setup the main storyline and introduce one or two very interesting characters (mainly Ye Wenjie, portrayed amazingly by Zine Tseng), which will be interesting to see how they adapt Cixin's work in later episodes, the rest though, recycled tropes and common grabs. Not that interesting.
I still give the episode a 6/10 since the parts in China are well done and the main idea presented well.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
This is an amazing movie!
So. Frank Herbert told a story of religious fervor and how it warps the minds of people. Dennis Villeneuve wanted to capture it and did so very well.
With this film Villeneuve creates a grand tapestry of cultural expression which we have never seen before. The different planets have their very distinct feel to them, in both sight and sound and one never feels like it's too much or too weird, it's just the right amount. Villeneuve managed to capture and create his own totality of the world of Dune. Some could say he leaves certain parts of the book out which they miss, but just as with Peter Jacksons trilogy, this movie eminates a passion from both director, cinematographer, composer, vfx artists, sound designers, it's clear they wanted to tell Frank Herberts story, and they certainly did!
Hollywood is in a crisis, why? Just because people have stopped going to the movie theatres? Well, as we see with this movie which has already broken many box office records, people haven't necessarily stopped going to the cinema, they just don't wanna waste money on bad movies. So the Hollywood crisis is, sure, partly due to technological change, but also to a severe lack of good stories to tell. And funnily enough, the lack of stories to tell in 2024 has a parallel to the story of Dune 2, mainly in that the prophet of Paul Atreides is precisly the story the Fremen need to reach beyond the dunes and out into the galaxy, we need a similar story to reach beyond ourselves today too. But as Dennis Villeneuve and Frank Herbert so brilliantly shows us, it can very easily go bad.
I tell you though. When watching this film, you cannot help yourself, you are just dragged along whether you want to or not. Chalamet, Bardem, Ferguson, Zendaya, Skarsgård, Butler they all do their parts so well. I would say Zendaya has a tendency to be in the permanent "I carelessly dissaprove"-role, but even she manages to break out of it for this movie.
The thing that impressed me the most is the authenticity of the different cultural expressions as I mentioned before, the Harkonnen aestethics, the choice of having a black and white sun, the Fremen funeral rite, the accuracy of shamanic rituals, the costumes, it all feels like a window into a different reality more than a movie.
I have blabbed on, what could have been said in just a few words, so here it goes in case I wasn't clear: This is an amazing movie!