Three Films Make A Post: Hope Burns Brightest in The Cold

Black Crab aka Svart krabba (2022): Some time in the near future, when Sweden is struck by a civil war between groups the film doesn’t bother to define for us, a group of soldiers is tasked to ice-skate over the ocean behind enemy lines to transport some canisters that’ll win the war for their losing side. The movie directed by Adam Berg is going for the whole universal/archetypal thing, apparently, so giving the audience the space to decide if they actually want these characters to achieve their goal is not in the cards; or any actual, concrete politics. Also not in the cards is anything amounting to characterisation for anyone but Noomi Rapace’s character. She gets a lot of superfluous flashbacks to early civil war life with her daughter that do very little for the movie yet take up quite a lot of time.

The film is a war movie made by people who somehow managed to miss how films in this genre understood how to speak about something universal by focussing on the specific, and decide that vague handwaving is the way to go instead. We do get as many war movie clichés as we never wanted, all of which I’ve seen realized in so many better films.

Windfall (2022): I liked director/co-writer Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love from a couple of years quite a bit as a very clever contemporary and adult movie-length Twilight Zone episode. This thing with Jason Segel, Lily Collins and Jesse Plemons is rather less successful, playing out like an attempt to make a somewhat contemporized version of a Coen Brothers film in the Fargo mode crossed with a TV show bottle episode. Just one that can’t seem to get up the imagination to give any of its three characters any amount of depth – after the first couple of scenes, you really know all you need to know about everyone, and nothing of interest will be revealed about their personalities. Also missing are a sense of timing – the ninety minutes drag as if they were three hours – and really much of a point.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982): Fortunately, this P.D. James adaptation by the usually rather more experimental than he is here Christopher Petit rides in to save this post – or rather its writer – from complete frustration. The seldom seen on screen Pippa Guard plays secretary turned private detective Cordelia Gray with quite a bit of presence, generally finding something interesting to add to any standard detective movie scene. And there are a lot of them in a film as chock-full of detective movie tropes as this one is. Petit and his fine cast use most of these tropes for good, making a pretty meandering film whose sense of meandering isn’t a weakness but very much the point of the whole endeavour, because it provides ample opportunity to think about class, gender and obsession.

Three Films Make A Post: A horrifying descent into the twisted killing spree of a psychopath.

Witchouse 3: Demon Fire (2001): Ironically, J.R. Bookwalter’s likeable little horror movie - produced for Charles Band’s Full Moon when the money was obviously starting to run really low (though at least there aren’t any puppets around) - looks cheaper than most of the director’s self-financed films. It’s not terribly exciting business about the dangers of doing magic rituals while drunk (until the underdeveloped PLOT TWIST CHANGES EVERYTHING, of course), but Bookwalter makes the best out of no money and presents some minor chills, mostly spending his time on Debbie Rochon, Tanya Dempsey and Tina Krause (as well as Brinke Stevens as the evil witch Lilith) having fun, flipping out (particularly Rochon has two and a half highly entertaining scenes of losing her shit), and saying things like “You look like you fell down a flight of abusive boyfriends” while mostly keeping their clothes on. It’s entertaining enough for what it is, and tries hard not to bore its audience.

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997): Where the first Speed was a dumb but inventive and fun action movie, this sequel is more than just a bit of a slog. Despite the promise of the title, the film is at least thirty minutes too long, full of boring subplots blandly presented, non-characters nobody gives a crap about and a general air of a script not so much written as spat out by some sort of script robot. Returning director Jan de Bont seems to have lost all his mojo for presenting exciting action. Never a man for prodding actors along, he can’t even get an entertaining performance out of Willem Dafoe (or any of the other actors, for that matter), so that the whole thing doesn’t just have the air of a bad sequel but of a film nobody involved actually wanted to have much to do with apart from cashing their pay checks.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008): On paper Nicholas Stoller’s comedy (written by lead Jason Segel) should be a mess of a movie, seeing as it mixes genuinely sweet romantic comedy, awkwardness humour (a comedy style that still leaves me puzzled), “raunchy” comedy, Hollywood self-irony, and full frontal nudity by Segel. In practice, all these things for once feel as if they belong together here. That’s thanks to a script by Segel that is generally much cleverer than it needs to be, and often more insightful into the way actual human beings work than it pretends to be. A cast (Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Russell Brand in the main) that can switch comedy and acting styles at a moment’s notice does help there, too.
Plus, there’s a puppet comedy Dracula musical involved.