Three Films Make A Post: The heist begins at 40,000 ft.

Lift (2024): This Netflix production as directed by F. Gary Gray is rather astonishing. Astonishing in how forgettable it is. If I hadn’t made a couple of notes while watching it, I’d remember not a thing about it a week after having seen it. Going by these notes, this is a heist movie neither charming enough to be light fun, nor serious enough to ever build up any stakes one might care about.

It also contains a terribly written romance between Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and a somewhat inexplicable performance by Vincent D’Onofrio, who is certainly doing something that may or may not have anything to do with an attempt at being Udo Kier.

Otherwise, there’s nothing here to even waste another sentence on.

Lovely, Dark and Deep (2023): Screenwriter Teresa Sutherland’s feature debut is a very frustrating movie. In its beginning stages, it makes interesting and creepy use of the urban myth of the mass disappearances in US National Parks, with quite a few shots of mildly disturbing background happenings our protagonist doesn’t notice. In these early stages the film builds a wonderful mood of the weird and the outré.

Alas, its back half consists of what amounts to an endless dream sequence in which said protagonist – Georgina Campbell, wasted –works through emotional issues through the most hackneyed and obvious symbolism possible at tedious length, until the film finally ends. The Weird turns into the boringly prosaic.

Life of Belle (2024): I had heard rather nice buzz about Shawn Robinson’s POV horror (in the Paranormal Activity vein) piece. I can’t say the film does very much for me at all. While its approach to a child filming random childish crap while the borders of her world slowly break down in the background is certainly interesting, it’s also a bit tedious. That the film goes quite as heavy on the “mentally ill equals evil” part of the horror equation because it tries to be too subtle about its supernatural bits doesn’t exactly make it more likeable. Though I do have to give it props for not being afraid of eventually leading its audience into tasteful but disturbing scenes of child abuse.

Like with Lovely, Dark and Deep, there is a clear influence of creepypasta on display; like that movie, and a lot of creepypasta itself, Life of Belle has trouble getting beyond showing a handful of creepy images and calling that a movie.

In short: Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

New York in the 1950s. Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), the mentor of Tourette’s Syndrome suffering detective Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) is murdered while trying to blackmail someone with quite a bit of clout for money.

Lionel, as brilliant as he is strange, does his best to find the killer, and stumbles into a maze of complicated relations (between people and between communities), conspiracies, lies, dangerous truths and dark secrets of the past.

Edward Norton’s very free adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel has suffered quite the critical drubbing. On one hand, I do understand: visually and stylistically, Norton’s not much of a director, tending to the most conservative and often bland approach of framing any given scene with pacing to match; on the script level, he makes the decision to transfer a very highly regarded (and pretty damn brilliant) book into a historical past none of the original’s plot was actually about. Norton clearly prefers things slow and there’s a labyrinthine quality to his approach to the mystery genre that’ll get into quite a few people’s craw.

For me, this labyrinthine quality is rather one of the film’s strengths, an approach perfectly fitting to the traditional noir private detective in the Chandler tradition (and Essrog as a character fits that tradition wonderfully, too), the film’s way of portraying truth as it plays out in real life between actual people as something that’s much more complex than truth as a philosophical abstraction. I’m also very happy with the movie as a left-wing critique of elements of US culture. Because the reason for Norton’s shifting of the film’s setting back into the 50s is so he can do something like Chinatown for New York, though a Chinatown that’s not nihilist and pessimistic to its core but hopeful to a fault. But, as I’m growing older, I’ve found myself being pretty okay with films that do at least dare to dream that injustices might be made just and the people doing that deserve a happily ever after (or at least until the credits run).

Norton’s script may have its eccentricities, but I found myself drawn into the world it creates and the character that populate this world, going through those moments that don’t quite seem to make sense as anything but noir pastiche the same way you go through a Chandler plot, accepting the messiness because whodunnit really never was the point of the endeavour at all. The pacing, it turns out, isn’t actually as slow as it seems once you get into that spirit, either, rather the proper way to talk about a world and the relations of people in that world.

On the acting side, this is simple great stuff, Norton overacting with great intelligence (and a bit of vanity, to be sure), Gugu Mbatha-Raw adding another impressive outing to a career that seems to become rather full of impressive work in interesting films, Alec Baldwin doing a note perfect horrible “Great Man”, and the rest of the gang acting in style.

In short: Fast Color (2018)

Warning: I have to spoil one late plot point

The USA in a near future where a complete lack of rain has caused a huge economic downturn, though things like police and the government are apparently still rocking, more or less. Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), is travelling through the semi-apocalyptic not-quite wasteland, running from what we will soon enough learn is the evil government™, trying to suppress fits during which she unloads huge amounts of psychokinetic energy, enough to cause minor earthquakes.

Ruth is running towards home, a mother (Loraine Toussaint) she left years ago, and a daughter (Saniyya Sidney) she dropped off with her years ago. Psychic powers do run in the family, but unlike Ruth, the other women in the family can dissolve objects into their separate molecules and put them back together again (but not change them). Still, once she arrives home (or “home”) she might have more to do than just try to reconnect with her closest relations, for she just might lead the evil government™ right to the people she still loves.

Julia Hart’s Fast Color is a rather frustrating film in that there’s much to like about it, but all its great elements never quite come together well enough to form a satisfying whole instead of a patchwork of good bits.

The film’s obvious strength and emphasis is on its portrayal of three generations of black women, attempting (and often succeeding) at being honest about the flaws and virtues of all three of them, effectively portraying the way people can oversteer to avoid well-known troubles but also evoking a feeling of genuine kinship despite everything wrong between the three. The film goes about this business slowly, but methodically, with patience and an eye for the telling detail, well-served by three excellent leading ladies.

The problem is that the film doesn’t trust a bit of SF enabling a family drama to be enough, so it adds the semi-apocalypse, random superhero tropes, and that godawful nonsensical evil government™ subplot that only works when a viewer accepts that a government not wanting to have someone causing earthquakes running around inadvertently destroying motels must be evil. Of course, the film really doesn’t think about that bit at all, but rather goes for the government realizing that Ruth’s powers can probably be used to let it rain again, and therefore, instead of simply offering her a job as their designated rain maker, go the whole “hunting a young woman to do vaguely defined experiments on her”.


While the special effects for this part of the film do end up looking rather beautiful, the rest of these plot elements add very little to the film, and too often get in the way of the its actual strengths.

In short: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

In the near future, the world is on the brink of war – or really, a lot of wars everywhere – caused by an energy crisis. There is still one international attempt at solving the world’s energy troubles in form of a highly experimental particle accelerator built in Earth’s orbit. However, the crew of scientists (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl, John Ortiz, Chris O’Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Zhan Ziyi) can’t quite seem to crack the problem. Time is running out, and tensions between the crew members as well as on Earth rise. Things really start to go to crap when one of the last possible attempts with the accelerator actually seems to succeeds, only with something happening to the station that turns things decidedly weird. Not to speak of the little fact that our protagonists seem to have lost Earth.

Ironically, that isn’t even the most troubling problem our protagonists now encounter. The station seems to take on a life of its own, its walls shifting and moving and even starting to become a bit nippy. And let’s not even talk about the woman (Elizabeth Debicki) the crew finds in one of the station’s walls who says she’s a member of the team. A member nobody seems to remember, but who sometimes appears and disappears in photographs of the crew, for that matter.

After five minutes of intense hype, Julius Onah’s Netflix entry in the Cloverfield universe got a right critical drubbing from mainstream critics. Me, I found myself enjoying the film just fine, sometimes even more than that, but I can understand why not only mainstream critics but also people who actually have a clue about fantastic genre film aren’t terribly happy with the movie at hand. It is, after all, impossible to deny that Paradox does waste quite a few interesting ideas and a wonderful cast on a very standard plot with a very standard finale and on in general not terribly interesting characters. There’s much more – and much stranger things – to be done with its conceit of alternative universes and I wish the film had given more characters than just Mbatha-Raw’s reason to be emotionally involved with the alternative universe they find themselves in. Or, you know, had brought them into a universe that’s just stranger than the one we got.

On the other hand, the actors are good fun in the roles they actually have, and the plot, while not as interesting as I would have hoped for, does hit its standard beats expertly enough. I also like the way the film kinda-sorta explains how the different Cloverfield films might relate to one another in a way that leaves the door wide open for the following Cloverfields to do whatever the hell they want.


Because I’m me, I can’t end this without mentioning the utter glee I felt once the business about the arm (the film’s true hero) started. There’s something to be said about a film that dares to do something so silly (some would say goofy) and even make it important to the plot.