I have a long list of movies I have yet to see this month, but I've still managed to watch a lot of other random ones. Eclectic mix of reviews incoming...
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl: Written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, this is a Zambian movie about a woman named Shula (Susan Chardy) who discovers the dead body of her uncle lying on the road when she's driving home from a party one night. She seems strangely unfazed by this and goes through the motions of calling up her family and the police, navigating all the bureaucracy of getting this matter sorted out. What follows are the various funeral arrangements, involving Shula's mother and many aunties, aka the sisters of this dead man. Everyone is insisting that Shula grieve and show more emotion, but she seems to just be going through the motions, alongside her cousins, Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), who seems to be perpetually drunk, and Bupe (Esther Singini), who is suicidal.
If you haven't pieced it together yet, the nieces are not mourning dead Uncle Fred because of...reasons. And yet this movie is a very dark comedy, an insight into the patriarchy, and the many ways in which older generations of women will still try to protect men, while the younger generation are trying to break a vicious cycle. It's a very vibey film, but I had never seen any movie set in Zambia before, so it was extremely engaging, along with its many parallels to my experiences with Indian funereal customs...and the patriarchy, of course. Give it a shot if you want to immerse yourself in something completely unique and strange, but obviously, trigger warnings abound.
The Phoenician Scheme: Written and directed by Wes Anderson, this movie is exactly what you would expect (or at least, it's what I expected). I find it increasingly hard to talk about Anderson's films because they just all seem to blend together into one big twee art project featuring a lot of famous actors delivering nonsensical dialogue or running around like they're in a Benny Hill sketch.
In this one, Benicio del Toro stars as Zsa-Zsa Korda, a rich man in 1950 who decides to name his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who is a nun, as his sole heir. Together, they must travel the world and meet various investors to help fund Korda's morally dubious Phoenician scheme. And of course, along the way, maybe this estranged pair will build a proper familial bond. It's all very weird, it's a string of silly vignettes, and I didn't much care for it. But I must stress, I am entirely too jaded to properly review Anderson's movies anymore - my husband thought this movie was wonderful and a return to form. So, if you're a fan, perhaps this movie will perfectly scratch an itch for you. But if you're too tired of "auteurs" like I am, give it a miss.
The Penguin Lessons: Written by Jeff Pope, based on the memoir by Tom Michell, and directed by Peter Cattaneo, this movie stars Steve Coogan as Michell, an English teacher who decided to teach at a boy's boarding school in Argentina in 1976 when they were in the midst of a coup d'etat. During a holiday in Uruguay, he rescues a penguin who was caught up in an oil slick on the beach, and then proceeds to smuggle it back to Argentina. What follows is a heartwarming story about how a grumpy old Englishman learns to become more empathetic as he is forced to engage with this penguin. And also learns to maybe stop being politically neutral while the Argentinians around him are being abducted and tortured by their government?
The tone of this film is all over the place, but it's certainly charming enough to stream over an afternoon, particularly if you're into cute penguins. But there's something decidedly colonial about the proceedings, with a classic "white people are shocked to learn how the rest of the world operates" aesthetic. Coogan delivers a good performance, and the movie is certainly intriguing since it is based on a true story, but beyond that, it lacks any real substance.
Mountainhead: Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong (aka creator of
Succession and
Peep Show - talk about range!), this is a bleak movie about four tech billionaires (well one of them only has millions), who convene in a snowy mansion in Utah to talk about how they might take over the world. Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, and Jason Schwartzman star as four Silicon Valley dudes modelled after the likes of Thiel, Musk, and Zuckerberg, who are of course convinced of their own inherent genius, and blithely ignore all the chaos their technologies have wreaked upon the world. At the moment they're meeting, the world is particularly rife with misinformation and anarchy, all spurred on by the fake videos and messages being circulated on a social media platform one of them owns, and what follows is a hodgepodge of tech speak and insanity.
This is probably a good movie for those of you who are massively online. But depending on your politics, you will love this movie for very different reasons. As you can imagine, I did NOT enjoy this movie, as it depicts the very reasons why I am not massively online and do not care for tech bros. It's the darkest of comedies, and practically a horror film. It does a brilliant job of capturing that painful Silicon Valley tech speak and how these men want to optimize their lives and think that they are the only ones who know how to run the world. It's the epitome of Move Fast and Break Things, and after you watch this movie, you'll certainly feel like your brain got broken!
