A walk through the clouds

Sinners Really enjoyed this. Good cast, beautifully directed with good sound and music, very much captures the mood and the vibe. A historic US-set vampire film that also covers racism and wealth inequality sounds like an interesting mix and they definitely made it work.

The Thursday Murder Club I was looking forward to this, because I love the books and they got an amazing cast for the film, but with hindsight I suspect the let-down was inevitable. The cast are as good as expected, but overall the film’s just fine. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing standout. And honestly that’s the problem of trying to adapt a book like this, where the strength doesn’t come from the plot but the witty brilliance of the text that makes you laugh out loud. Some of that carries over in the dialogue, but so much of it’s in the descriptive writing and there’s no way to capture that. It’s the same problem that afflicts every Terry Pratchett adaptation – when the genius is in the written word, you can’t put that on a screen. So you end up with something mildly entertaining that you watch once and then move on.

Mickey 17 Another one that I was expecting more from based on how good Parasite was. Mickey 17 has a lot of valid things to say about capitalism and worker exploitation and US christofascist politicians, but it really does whack you over the head with them. The brilliance of Parasite was in the slow build – it starts with the tale of a poor family who tell small lies to get some money, then bigger and bigger lies, and it’s all fine until it starts causing harm to other people who don’t deserve it, and things spiral uncontrollably. Mickey 17 doesn’t build – it opens with the sledgehammer and then it really has nowhere to go. Worth a watch, definitely funny in parts, but not what I was hoping for.

Superman I heard so many people enthusing about this on tumblr that I went in with expectations that were too high. It’s fine. It’s a perfectly decent Superman film. It made the sensible decision to dispense with the origin story that everyone already knows, and the choice to have the Clark-Lois relationship already established with her in the know was a good one. But it’s hardly redefining the franchise or the superhero genre. And James Gunn has done so much good stuff, but I’m guessing the problem here was the studio putting too many limitations on him. He had to make a Superman film, so it wasn’t allowed to be a James Gunn film, and the man’s at his best when he’s allowed to push the boat all the way out. Honestly, the best reason for watching this film was to see how it ties in to season two of Peacemaker, because that was good. (More on that when I do the next TV round-up…)

The Alabama Solution And in an entirely different vein, an HBO documentary about the appalling conditions in Alabama state prisons. Filmed mostly by the prisoners themselves on smuggled in cellphones, they’re able to document what goes on and film all the things the film crew were barred from seeing when they went into the prison themselves. The conditions unfit for habitation, the brutality of the guards (backed up by testimony from a couple of ex-prison guards) – it’s not exactly shocking, because we know what goes on in those places, but seeing it is different from hearing about it. And then of course there are consequences for the prisoners who were brave enough to do it... Far from an easy watch, but it deserves to be seen.