Three Films Make A Post: A Disgrace to Criminals Everywhere.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): After more than two decades, I’m still not sure if I exactly like Guy Ritchie’s debut movie, but then, I’ve been known to have problems with movies whose main characters are all arseholes and idiots, particularly when  the film they are in appears to loathe them (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). What has endeared the film to me from the perspective of today is how insanely it is of its time: starting with the piss-coloured non-colour scheme, the showy editing, the post-Pulp Fiction ideas about coolness, and certainly not stopping with its very specific kind of digressive storytelling. As a time capsule, this is about as pure as it gets, and when the inevitable late 90s revival is coming around, this will be one of the aesthetic core texts.

Infinity Pool (2023): I was a great admirer of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, but this sometimes body horrific critique of the late-capitalistic mindset which is here exemplified in extreme hedonistic exploitative tourism doesn’t work too well for me. Often, it appears to be rather too in love with exactly the things it wants to criticize, but my main problem really is how little I found myself caring about anything and anyone in it going through their surrealisted-up version of rich people problems: Alexander Skarsgård’s doing his by now usual “weak man” shtick without ever finding a note from which to empathize with the guy, and Mia Goth’s ultra femme fatale is certainly riveting to watch but also empty of any nuance or humanity. The only actual identifiable human being, Cleopatra Coleman’s Em, is shelved relatively early, and from then on out, the movie is all about rich people being surrealistically horrible. The rather more interesting elements of the film concerning Philip K. Dick-style identity problems never really go anywhere interesting, so I found myself a bit bored by a very well shot film that uses the most obvious metaphorical systems in the most obvious manner.

Re/Member (2022): What would we be without time loop movies? Because you can time loop anything, Eiichiro Hasumi’s example of the form unites some typical YA business with ghosts and the fascination of Japanese pop culture with weird rules. Which does at least lead to a bit of originality, for there are very few movies about a group of teens bonding while time-looping through the experience of searching for the body parts of a dismembered little girl while being hunted by a monster.

The character work is very much like you’d expect in a Japanese teen movie, and Hasumi does tend to lay it on a little too thick in melodramatic sequences, but on the other hand, there’s also a sense of playfulness and fun on display when it comes to changing up the ways in which a group of teenagers might be ripped to pieces, farting around with game rules, or making third act twists entertaining.