phantomtomato

It’s been a little while since my last update! This term has been busier than I’d planned, unfortunately; I do have some books to write up, and I’m planning to prioritize them this week. But in the meantime, a shorter one-off: Saltburn

I saw this movie last week on vacation in London. It seemed appropriate, and the blurb on the cinema website was attractive:

Struggling to find his place at Oxford University, student Oliver Quick finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton, who invites him to Saltburn, his eccentric family's sprawling estate, for a summer never to be forgotten.

This was a very bad summary. I wish I’d known it was a thriller before going—I wouldn’t have gone. There are things to recommend in Saltburn! The soundtrack was fantastic. The fashion was very period-accurate (early aughts) in a way that I enjoyed. The performances were good, and certain scenes will stand out as memorable or striking. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just not what was described above, and it’s also not what the first ~third of the movie sets up the story to be.

Spoilers

So: it’s a psychological thriller about a manipulative murderer. This is fine, not my usual genre, and normally I don’t find these particularly difficult to avoid. I’m sure that if I’d watched trailers or read reviews I could have spotted this one. But! I didn’t, I trusted the theater’s promotional blurb, and then the first 45 minutes of the movie reinforced that. It builds up a quieter drama about class tension and wealth inequality. It builds up the suggestion of an explicitly gay attraction between the main character, Oliver, and his posh classmate, Felix. When the story unravels as Oliver’s manipulations play out, I mostly found myself wondering why go through that slow class-conscious build seemingly designed to appeal to… idk, the type of person who likes The Go-Between. I found the contrast in tone between the first bit and the dramatic reveals to be jarring.

I also wanted the gayness to be more central! The movie is textually queer: Oliver sexually assaults another male classmate and, separately, drinks the bathwater left over by Felix after Felix masturbates (unaware that he’s being observed). The bathwater-drinking scene is memorable! Definitely a bold choice to put in a film, and I liked it even as I cringed through watching it. But there’s some narration that starts and ends the film, in which Oliver postulates about whether he loved Felix, and the end reveals that he didn’t love Felix, he hated him—so it landed like a repudiation of gay attraction to me. Just not what I’d thought I was getting. Good job on the movie for surprising me, I suppose, even if I hadn’t wanted to be surprised.

Overall, I think it was interestingly-made and did an admirable job of achieving what it wanted to, though I personally found the opening an awkward fit with where the story went. As an indie film, it works! I’m seeing more and more press about it though and I think that I’m about to become very tired of Saltburn, so my opinion will likely be very sour from overexposure in another month.

The holidays have been good for movie-watching, not as much for anything else. Mostly hits, though.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire I meant to watch this in 2019, never did, then my partner received a rec for it that pushed us over the edge. It’s good! It’s gorgeous-looking, the lighting especially is worth watching for. I’ve never before seen natural blond hair shown in all of its various shades and states of being. I’m also such a sucker for period dress and I loved that this movie did it so beautifully, using the same outfits throughout (accurate!) but incorporating all of their layers at various points. Simply lovely to look at.

The only weak part for me was the dialogue delivery, which had a clear and intentional style, it just wasn’t really my thing. A lot of pauses and blank space, not so many conversations where the lines flowed into one another like people usually talk. On the one hand, really handy for watching a foreign-language film, because it gave plenty of time to read the subtitles. On the other, it left some scenes feeling a little empty, especially the ones set in that big open studio room with hardly any furniture.

Still, wonderful film overall, beautiful romance, I cried at the ending.

Glass Onion We’d been looking forward to this for a month, since its theatrical release, and almost drove through a blizzard to see it in a cinema. That being a bad idea, we waited until it was on streaming. It’s just so fun! The cast makes it, which is hardly a novel thing to say, but they’re each fantastic. Janelle Monae is the best.

spoilers

I don’t care whether the mystery hung together or not—I’m not a mystery person, I was very much all right with being told a convoluted and absurd story for the sake of surprise. It worked for me. Also worked for me: burning the Mona Lisa. I thought that was a fantastic ending to round out the themes of valuing objects, wealth, status, etc. over people.

The Banshees of Inisherin This was a weird one. Similar to Portrait, it’s got gorgeous shots of its location, beautiful lighting (every time they open a door in one of those old houses, it looks blindingly white outside of it, and that’s just perfect/incredible/a win for natural lighting), lovely costumes. I really liked the main brother and sister, Pádraic and Siobhán, and their relationship to each other. I am sort of constantly in fear that the Sister Character will turn out to be a terrible person for the sake of narrative drama, but no, she’s completely lovely and she and her brother truly adore one another, even when they’re disagreeing about something.

spoilers

No fucking clue what to make of Colm’s character, though. Cutting off his fingers felt like a bad joke when it was introduced as an idea, and it just got worse with each escalation. I didn’t enjoy any part of that. I lost all my sympathy for Colm and, in the final third, was simply waiting for the film to end.

Top Gun: Maverick and Top Gun To be very honest I saw most of both of these films (and I’ve seen Top Gun before) but sort of drifted in and out while my partner watched them, in that order. Maverick was exciting, sure, but pretty much just bad at any point that Tom Cruise wasn’t flying a plane. On rewatching the original I realized that what made it so much more charming was Charlie. Charlie is (a) involved in the military stuff, and thus (b) has actual weight behind her arguments with Maverick. Maverick’s love interest in the second film is a blah nothing of generic later-life romance tropes (kid gives a shovel talk!) seemingly thrown in to fit the action film formula. The first movie’s romance contributed significantly to the overall plot!! You can’t just cut out Charlie and all of her presence (she fucking lectures Maverick on workplace sexism oh my god she’s great) and replace it with paint-by-numbers romance.

Also, the only thing worse than Miles Teller is Miles Teller with a mustache. Blegh.