To say The Menu is a dark comedy is understating the issue. This is BLACK comedy, as dark as it gets. Voldemort doesn’t hold a candle to Ralph Fiennes’ Julian Slowik. Imagine crossing The Bear with Eating Raoul, and you might get a vague idea of what this film is up to.
Ani (diminutive of Anora, the titular character, played by Mikey Madison) works in a strip club, pole dancing and taking customers to back rooms for a friendly lap dance. She sometimes does a bit of escort service on the side. She is pretty, and young enough to not have become resigned to her lot in life. She makes good money, enough to live in New York City.
Because she speaks some Russian, management assigns her to “Vanya,” (Mark Eydelshteyn). Vanya is what Steve Martin might characterize as “a wild and crazy guy” – perpetually high, living life as one long party. They have a pleasantly blurry good time together, and when he next pops into the club, he asks for her by name.
Putin caught a lot of critical attention right from the get-go, simply because it’s the first film made to use AI to make the actor performing the role of the main subject exactly resemble said subject. Vladimir “Vova” Putin was a sensible choice since his mien is somewhat unco and frigid, a living example of uncanny valley. Given his power and viciousness, perhaps a risky chance, too. Patryk Vega might want to avoid buildings more than two storeys high.
Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a fading sex bomb whose career grinds to a halt on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. She is cruelly fired by her producer, Harvey (played to brutal, sleazy, sexist perfection by Dennis Quaid). Later that day she crashes her car, and while not seriously injured, gets checked up at the ER. A nurse, learning of her circumstances, tells her there is a drug to be had that restores youth and beauty. He hands her a card with a number.
The first thing to know about The Electric State is that the whole thing is daft as tits on a tank. It has the same blend of deadly seriousness and utter lunacy that one finds in, say, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
I like stories with moral ambiguity, but in the case of Wicked it just seemed to have moral confusion. It begins with Glinda informing the Munchkins that the Wicked Witch is dead, to mass jubilation. It’s a glimpse into the future of the vain, vacuous, vacant Galinda who is smirking at the death of her friend and taking credit for it.
If Inside Out was a great portrayal of the hidden mind of a child, Inside Out 2 surpasses it with the far more intricate and complex machinations of the mind of a female adolescent. It’s easy for an adult to dismiss the concerns of childhood as shallow and even trivial, but the tsunami of emotion and confusion that comes with early teenage years is something even adults shy away from.
In most movies, the main character’s developing lycanthropy is pretty much front and center, and the rest of the character’s life is incidental, if not entirely subsumed. You know, like Jack in Werewolves of London. (Still my favorite werewolf movie).
In Nightbitch, the lycanthropy is more or less incidental to the other things going on in the character’s life.
With the two part Watchmen movie, there would seem to be little to upset Moore. The dialogue, line for line, transitioned wholly intact from graphic novel to animation, right down to Rorschach’s use of “Herm.” It faithfully recreated every scene from the graphic novel. Dave Gibbons, who drew every panel of the original, oversaw the animation art from start to finish. The only element missing was Moore’s often-brilliant use of segues from one scene to another. And I’m not sure that could translate well.
I didn’t do a lot of reviews this past year. Fifty three in all. It was an election year and I write mostly about politics, and I have a backlog going into 2025. Also, if I think something is rubbish, I’m very unlikely to review it. And there was a fair old bit of rubbish that came out last year.