January Movies Part 2: No Other Choice, Sentimental Value, People We Meet on Vacation

As awards season heats up, I've been trying to catch up on the foreign film contenders. But I'm still keeping up with some light Netflix romance. All work but no play makes Jill a dull girl after all!

No Other Choice: Directed by celebrated Korean filmmaker, Park Chan-wook, who also adapted the screenplay with Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye from a novel by Donald Westlake, this is a glorious movie about the evils of capitalism and the lengths to which one man will go after he loses his job. Lee Byung-hun plays Man-su, a loyal employee of Solar Paper, who worked there for several years and slowly rose up the ranks to management, only to get fired once an American company buys out the firm. After more than a year of unemployment, Man-su is getting desperate, and his wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) has taken on a part-time job, is whittling away at all other non-essentials, and has finally suggested they may need to sell their house and move into an apartment. This is a bridge too far for Man-su - this was his childhood home, and after years of moving around, he bought it in the hopes that he would be able to give his children the stability he never had. Thus, he is forced to come up with a devious plan. He keeps losing jobs because there are other men who have slightly more experience in the paper industry. So the only possible solution? Eliminate the competition.

What follows is a very dark comedy about a man who is going to kill all his rivals and gain a job by any means necessary. As you can imagine, when you're not some cold-blooded trained assassin, that's a pretty difficult thing to do, and hijinks ensue. His wife and children are thoroughly perplexed as to what is going on with him, as he keeps showing up very sweaty from his purported "job interviews," and it's all very chaotic and hysterical.

This is an entertaining film, and it fully captures that sense of dread and loss that accompanies sudden unemployment when you thought your life was going so well. It certainly captures the economic mood of our times and is a wild ride. But would I necessarily give it an Oscar? Like most Korean cinema, it is sumptuously well-shot, the actors are fantastic, and all of the production design is remarkable. But at the end of the day, this is a good story, not a great one.

Sentimental Value: Director Joachim Trier is back with another Norwegian movie that he co-wrote with Eskil Vogt, starring Renate Reinsve. I hated their last movie, The Worst Person in the World, so I suppose it's an improvement to say that I merely didn't like this movie? Reinsve stars as Nora, an actress whose father is a famous director named Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard). Nora also has a sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, turning in a wonderful performance), who works as a historian and chose a "normal" life with a husband and child. Much like Jay Kelly, their father was very absent; their parents divorced when they were quite young, and they didn't see much of Gustav after that. However, now their mother has died, and Gustav shows up to the funeral with a proposal for Nora. He has written a script, he wants her to star in it, and he wants to shoot it in their childhood home.

Much like No Other Choice, there's a lot of work being done by the production designers to imbue the childhood home with a lot of...sentimental value. But when Nora turns down the role, having no desire to work with her father, he turns to an American actress, Rachel (Dakota Fanning, in a charmingly bewildered role), to take over the part instead. What follows is a lot of psychological exploration and generational trauma and daddy issues that all do get resolved in a rather neat way by the end of this film.

My biggest problem with The Worst Person in the World was that Reinsve's character had no female support system. In this film, the relationship between the sisters is a real ode to healthy sibling relationships in the face of chaotic family trauma. But overall, can I say this movie charmed me? No. It still felt a little too navel-gazing and self-serious, and I'm starting to wonder if any people of color exist in Oslo at all. Because watching Trier's movies about the travails of privileged white people is starting to wear a little thin.

People We Meet on Vacation: Speaking of privileged white people, here is a delightful little romance based on Emily Henry's bestselling 2021 novel. Film adaptations of books seem to be making the journey from page to screen in very rapid fashion these days, but given the popularity of this book, it's not surprising, and the film is also unsurprisingly charming and effervescent. 

The story follows Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth), two people who met as college students, and then, for reasons, decided to have a tradition where they go on an annual vacation with each other. They are platonic best friends, but when the movie opens, something has torn their relationship apart, and they haven't spoken to each other in a long while. So we slowly start to piece together what happened through their interactions in the present, alongside flashbacks to their past nine years' worth of trips together. It's an intriguing narrative device that worked well in the novel and works just as well on film, and with these two charismatic leads, you cannot help but be swept along for the ride. The supporting cast is also stellar, and you will be treated to many globe-trotting destinations along the way.

Is this movie high art? No. But is it filling the hole in my soul that used to be filled by light, fun romcoms that Hollywood simply doesn't release in theaters anymore? Yes. I love reading romance novels, but I do appreciate that Netflix is now bringing those novels to life on film and helping us discover great new acting talent along the way. I do wish we had more romcoms that were based on  original scripts. But I'll take whatever I can get - in this age of AI slop, needs must.