In short: The Gray Man (2022)

A CIA killer (Ryan Gosling, whose popularity I’ll never get, because he doesn’t act in any sense of the word beyond acting as some sort of hole in a movie for a viewer to project whatever into and has little charisma I’d see) finds himself first on the run from his own people, and then looking to free the kidnapped sick child of his mentor (Billy Bob Thornton) while fighting off the the private sector incompetents of bad guy Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, clearly having a blast with the villain role; also at least some recognizable character traits). A pacemaker with GPS is involved, so you can imagine how the rest of the script is.

On the corporate franchise side of movie making, brother duo Anthony and Joe Russo are responsible for some of my favourite Marvel movies – I’d even go so far as to call Captain America: The Winter Soldier one of the best action movies ever made in Hollywood – but their non-superhero action thrillers for Netflix suggest that Marvel’s presumably heavier hand is exactly what they need. Without that sort of guidance, we get movies as bad as Extraction, or as aggressively tedious as this one, a movie that somehow manages to make two hours of action sequences seem long and pretty boring. At least the incessant noise keeps one awake.

It doesn’t help here that none of the action sequences are anything more than big budget competent, lacking in inventiveness, interesting staging and the spark that makes a movie explosion fun, nor that the not-Bourne super spy script all of the action is based on is mostly pretty damn terrible. At least, it has more holes than most victims of Hansen’s or Six’s shoot-outs, does character motivation so badly, it would have been better not to even bother, and wastes a mostly great cast on nothing whatsoever. Because that’s not enough, the movie is also excruciatingly long-winded, and jumps from country to country without ever making any use of the different locations. This could all have happened in a warehouse and not looked or felt any less interesting.

Three Films Make A Post: The Love Story is Never the Whole Story

Deep Water (2022): Adrian Lyne’s attempt at adapting Patricia Highsmith is most definitely the worst Highsmith adaptation I’ve seen. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but Lyne, as is the director’s wont, is all about the surface level thrills, without any of the depth and insight into broken and often horrible people you get from Highsmith and most adaptations of her work. So there are many slick looking scenes of Ana de Armas being naked and Ben Affleck repeating his performance in Gone Girl, but worse in so far as Affleck mostly goes for constipation than actual acting. There is, alas, little to see on screen that ever provides any insight into why the characters here are the way they are, the way they explain themselves to themselves when they are alone; I’d love to believe the film is supposed to be about exactly that inner emptiness, but neither film nor actors do anything to convince me.

Even less well realized is the portrayal of the social connections between these bored rich people. Most of the time, you can’t even tell in whose house these bores are partying.

Strawberry Mansion (2021): There’s quite a bit of positive buzz about this twee SF indie arthouse comedy thing directed and written by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney (who also star and act a little in here, respectively) in mid-brow critical circles (we are of course always low-brow around here). It is, admittedly, difficult to hate a film that’s so clearly made with as much blood, sweat and tears as this one is, and that has an aesthetic so genuinely its own. My problem is, said aesthetic is so unbearably, relentlessly twee (and I’m someone who loves Gondry, Wes Anderson etc), and the film’s main “they are putting ads into our dreams, maaaaan!” metaphor so simplistic and half-baked, I found myself reacting to the movie mostly with pained annoyance.

Lux Æterna (2019): This is never going to be my favourite Gaspar Noé movie. There’s a bit too much of the whiny tone particular arthouse filmmakers love to take on when speaking about the filmmaking process, not made better by couching it in irony, which ruins the middle part for me. What stays with me, however, are the early sequence of Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg talking – clearly improvising – about an actresses’ life in filmmaking country and witches, and the climax, when the whole film breaks down into its director’s beloved epilepsy inducing visual and acoustic drone and the leads have rather fantastic breakdowns, swallowed by art, the shittiness surrounding it, or the whims of their director.

Three Films Make A Post: Think fast. Drive faster.

The Man Who Saw Too Much aka El hombre que vio demasiado (2016): I find Trisha Ziff’s documentary about Mexican tabloid photographer turned elderly art scene darling Enrique Metinides, and the relationship of Mexican mainstream culture to violence, utterly fascinating. Particularly, I love the film’s willingness to leave questions open, to accept that there are no absolute keys to understanding a person and what drives them; instead of providing solutions, it introduces us to the man and his work from all sides, leaving interpretations open and diverse, suggesting a man who might be a kind of folk hero, simply a commercial artist, a parasite on other people’s suffering, or a man who has seen way too much.

The only element of the film that rubs me the wrong way are the interview snippets of people from the US art scene, who provide little insight in many words, blithely ignoring the actual suffering in Metinides photos, replacing it with their half-baked ideas about suffering.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003): This one’s the final entry into the actual Timm/Dini/Reaves universe of Batman: The Animated Series but without Timm or Dini and little of the spark of what made B:TAS so great. The animation, while technically probably better than in the post B:TAS films that came before, is curiously lifeless, the design feeling as if the animators were going through the motions of reproducing a style without thinking too hard about what it’s there for. Reaves’s script is flabby and unconvincing, full of jokes that fall flat, and aiming for the detective side of Batman without constructing a decent mystery for him to solve.

There’s a sad lack of personality to the whole affair, so once again something great ends on something of a whimper instead of a bang. But then, the animated Batman has never quite left B:TAS behind even after this part of his world was officially closed.

Overdrive (2017): This mainly French production directed by Antonio Negret quite desperately wants to be a (The) Fast & (The) Furious film from the second half of that franchise’s run. Alas, it can’t actually afford the kind of effects and stunt work it would need for this, and nobody involved seems to have much of a clue about how to go about staging the kind of action the production can actually afford. But, hey, Scott Eastwood and his perfectly horrible screen presence was in the budget, as well as poor Ana de Armas.


The script is dire, too, as if it were written by people who mistakenly believe that making formulaic movies is easy; that’s only the bad formulaic movies nobody wants to see. 

In short: Anabel (2015)

Warning: I wouldn’t know how to talk about this one without a certain degree of spoilers!

Students Cris (Ana de Armas) and Sandra (Rocío León) are looking for a roommate to share their rent with after something has happened to their former roommate Anabel. Somehow, they end up sharing with an elderly gentleman named Lucio (Enrique Villén) who comes complete with a sob story about losing his job and his home and having no real place to go anymore.

Despite being as different as two young women can be, Cris and Sandra have grown close living together. But something changes with Lucio’s arrival. At first, he’s rather like a new, polite roommate and their own private washing, cooking and cleaning service rolled into one, but something about him and the way he treats the friends slowly drives a wedge between them. More curious still: things tiny and big seem to start going wrong for them. Why, it’s as if there was witchcraft involved.

Antonio Trashorras’s Anabel is a nice example of contemporary arthouse horror (which I’m never going to call by the bizarre moniker of “post-horror” some critics have grown to insist on). It’s shot in black and white, slow, ambiguous and generally lacking in the kind of obvious thrills we know and love/hate from horror movies. In other words, it’s going to piss some viewers off with its insistence on not going into more overtly violent directions; others might be bored with it. That’s neither a failing of these viewers nor of the film, really – this is not an approach to horror that’ll fit everyone, and there’s nothing wrong with that.


However, the film’s slow and thoughtful style, with its non-linear storytelling and ambiguous dream sequences, did rather click with me. At least, I found the film’s portrayal of subtle emotional violence, and its emphasis on the fragility of human relationships fascinating and sometimes creepy. The witchcraft elements – particularly the way they might be exclusively metaphorical or not – I could take or leave, but as a study of guilt, alienation and a particular kind of loneliness, as well as a very low-key revenge flick, Anabel works rather well, thanks to a fine trio of performances and Trashorras’s sharp and cold direction.

In short: El Callejón (2011)

Blind Alley (2011)

During an insomniac night before the audition that might mean her big break as a dancer and finish her career as a cleaning lady, Rosa (Ana de Armas) ends up in her corner washing salon. There, she meet-cutes a charming if slightly strange young man called Gabriel (Diego Cadavid), and things would be all set for a bit of romance, if this were a romantic comedy that is, and not a horror film with a bit of a sense of humour. So, inevitably and rather unfortunately, all may not be as it seems with Gabriel – most men I know at least don’t spend their night washing bloody women’s clothing – and Rosa’s night just might get exciting in a rather different way than the set-up suggests.

Antonio Trashorras’s Spanish/Colombian co-production is a simple, clever, sometimes ironic and pretty stylish piece of suspense horror that – as many a good low budget film does for obvious reasons – concentrates on a handful of actors (mostly Ana de Armas and Diego Cadavid, really) and locations and a straightforward plot. There are no distractions, and no attempts at doing things it’s not actually possible for the film to achieve, yet I never had the impression the film is any poorer for it. In fact, if El Callejón is anything, even in its little moments of humorous asides, it’s a film made by someone in control of his material, and very much willing and able to turn the simple set-up into an old-fashioned (as in 80s and early 90s horror, not as in Karloff) fun little horror film without pretensions that knows “unpretentious” doesn’t have to mean dumb.

Trashorras’s direction is dynamic (there’s even some fun use of that weirdest of traditional techniques, split screen), his use of colour moody and oh-so-un-2011 (which is to say, colours exist and might even mean something!), and the film never stops for breath once it’s got going. Add to this a charming performance by Ana de Armas, and there’s nothing to stop me from calling El Callejón a fun not-so-little romp.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,colombian movies,in short,horror,antonio trashorras,ana de armas,diego cadavid