Tag: Jason Schwartzman

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Features Live Action Movies

Queer

Director – Luca Guadagnino – 2024 – Italy, US – Cert. 18 – 135m

*****

A journey through the gay fleshpots of Mexico City leading, through illness, to a deeper jungle wherein can be found a drug that will enhance telepathy – challenging William Burroughs adaptation with Daniel Craig & Lesley Manville is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 13th

Bookended with a prologue and an episode, this is a narrative split into three separate sections or chapters. In the first, set in Mexico City, fortysomething Bill Lee (Daniel Craig) spends his days and nights drinking in bars like Ship Ahoy frequented by (mostly younger male) US ex-pats. He talks with friends such as Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman), he watches newcomers, he attempts, sometimes successfully, to pick some up. He is taken with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), and the pair embark on an intense physical relationship. Lee persuades Eugene to accompany him to South America, with no stipulation other than Eugene “be nice” to him a couple of times a week.

In the second, on the trip Bill goes down with a nasty case of the chills. In the third, following his eventual recovery, he asks around about a drug called Yaga he understands can facilitate telepathy, the pair trekking deep into the jungle to find biologist Dr.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Asteroid City

Director – Wes Anderson – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 104m

***

A stage play frames a tale of various characters in a 1950s US desert town, built on the site of an asteroid impact, which becomes the centre of a cover-up after an alien appears – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 23rd

Iconoclast Anderson’s latest is being sold as one thing by its trailer, when it’s actually something else. And watching the film, that something else completely threw me. What we are being sold via the standard letterboxed movie framed image is, a 1950s family trapped in the town of Asteroid City, USA when their car irreparably breaks down, then the entire (not very large) population including visitors imprisoned there following an incident with an extra-terrestrial spaceship and an alien. The overall tone is of whimsy, but maybe there’s something unsettling and disturbing about it too.

Anderson’s movies have never been about photorealism as much as artifice, which is part of their undeniable charm. Perhaps that’s even more true of Asteroid City than most. The costumes, the production design, have gone for a very particular, stylized look. This is fifties American desert romanticised into pastel-shaded eye candy, and if all that were required of going to a movie were to sit down in your seat and soak up the scenery, then provided you’re not the type to insist on photo-representational accuracy, this would be a winner hands down.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Spider-Man
Across
The Spider-Verse

Directors – Joachim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 140m

*****

Assorted Spider-Men and -Women interact across many multiverse worlds as an elite Spider force attempts to prevent their interactions causing disaster – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 2nd

The first part of a two-part sequel to Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018) with the conclusion Spider-Man Beyond The Spider-Verse due for release next year. So be warned: Across ends mid-story with a To Be Continued… legend plastered across the screen.

Having played around with the multiverse concept in Into, Across ramps it up to overload, introducing new worlds with titles that appear on screen before you’ve worked out where you are, making you want to hit pause and stop and take it in. You can’t do that in a public cinema, where the image and sound is sharper than it is in the home but you have no personalised remote control, and that’s a defining characteristic of the theatrical cinema medium.

You can of course go back and see a movie again and again for successive viewings, and I imagine that will be happening a lot with Across during its theatrical run because its visuals are consistently amazing, but once it’s available on a home platform where you can freeze it, go back, look at bits of scenes again, this movie will take on a whole new life as the viewers interact with it at their own pace.… Read the rest