Category: Films
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Jojo Rabbit, 2019 - ★★★½
I liked this a lot more than I expected to. When I saw the trailer (I think back in December, when we saw Knives Out) I was a bit freaked out by it. What’s this, you’ve got a film about a kid in the Hitler Youth, with Hitler as a character, and they seem to be playing it for comedy? This looks well dodgy.
My kids knew it was by Taika Waititi , though, and that seemed to make it likely to be OK? I dunno, but eventually I decided to give it a chance.
And it turns out to be really good. A sweet film in many ways, though with plenty of menace and darkness, as you'd expect from where and when it's set -- which is an unnamed German town or city in the dying days of the Second World War. Waititi himself plays Hitler, who is not in fact the real one, but an imaginary friend that lets Jojo, the ten-year-old title character, talk to someone about the things he can't talk to anyone else about.
So I enjoyed it, but I can't help asking: why did he choose to make this film? Why that story, why now? It's based on a novel, Caging Skies by Christine Leunens. But Wikipedia's description of it as "the internationally bestselling Hitler Youth novel" leaves me none the wiser.
Not, of course, that there has to be a specific reason for a creator to make something. And it's far from the first comedy about Hitler or the Nazis. But there's just something about the idea of it -- not the actuality -- that leaves me a little uncomfortable, in a way that The Great Dictator or The Producers didn't.
Little Women, 2019 - ★★★★
Greta Gerwig’s dual-timeline approach makes this more interesting than a straightforward adaptation would have been.
Brazil, 1985 - ★★★★★
I first saw Terry Gillian’s weird dystopia at its premier, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1985. I feel I must have seen it again since, but watching it last week, much of it felt unfamiliar. It stands up really well, though.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, 2019 - ★★★½
Well, 42 years after seeing the first part of this story (if fourth episode, though it wasn't called that then), we finally get its end.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I don't think it quite lives up to the legacy. I've given it three and a half stars here, but it hovers, Force-suspended, between that and four. Obviously I was hoping for a five, or at least a four and a half.
There were some daft parts, some annoying parts, and many spectacular parts; but no really outstanding parts; nothing that we'll look back on as being iconic.
Interstellar, 2014 - ★★★★½
I watched this again last night, and it’s really an outstanding film. There are some places where the gravity and/or relativity choices don’t quite make sense, but mostly the science is handled very well.
The philosophical aspects are also treated well. Do you put survival of the currently-living members of humanity above the survival of the species as a whole, or not?
The least believable thing, in a film full of challenging ideas, is the fact that our hero has been a pilot for NASA, but has somehow fallen off their radar, when they actually need people like him and have a base within a day’s drive of him.
The Favourite, 2018 - ★★★
What were they doing with the justified text in the captions and even credits? Made it barely readable.
