Children of the Mist aka They aka They Watch (1993): This Showtime TV movie by John Korty turns Rudyard Kipling’s delicate story “They” about the loss of a child and grief into melodramatic pap, and also features the least frightening child ghost I can remember seeing; it doesn’t help that it makes overdubbed owl noises.
Nobody involved really seems to want to bother putting effort in: Edithe Swensen’s script turns everything into a cliché, Korty mishandles melodrama and ghosts alike, and the actors mostly seemed to have checked out mentally. Vanessa Redgrave gives a non-performance quite below her usual level, and I’m not even sure what Patrick Bergin thinks he’s doing at all. He’s certainly not acting like anyone who has encountered a grieving human being before.
The Other Side of Hope aka Toivon tuolla puolen (2017): This Aki Kaurismäki movie about a Syrian refugee looking for his sister and a place to be, and a former salesman’s increasingly absurd attempts at running a restaurant does cover similar ground to Le Havre, made six years earlier. This one isn’t quite as optimistic about the kindness of the working classes anymore (shitty racist Nazi types have arrived in Kaurismäki’s world, though never unopposed), but it is also not as hopeless about it as it could be. There’s still solidarity, compassion and kindness to be found, as well as the small happinesses that keep us alive. Formally, this breaks up the heart-breaking story of the Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) with Kaurismäki-style shenanigans, which never feels like the cop-out it could be, but like the statement of a guy who doesn’t really want to put a divide between tragedy and farce. Which sometimes means that the farce helps the character from the tragedy survive (see also, curiously enough, Ladyhawke).
The Scythian aka Skif (2018): Rustam Mosafir’s sort of historical adventure movie is quite the thing. Always willing to turn everything – non-plausibility, fights and men’s friendship, betrayal, and general craziness – up to eleven, this often feels like the grandchild of cheap Italian sword and sorcery movies in its wild abandon, just made with more money, and most probably talent. There’s little scepticism towards warrior cultures and manly men doing manly stuff on display, of course, so if you can’t or won’t cope with these things, this is just going to make you angry. On the other hand, the film also has an anti-imperialist streak a mile wide, clearly coming down on the Barbarism side on the Howard Barbarian versus Civilisation scale while it’s at it.
It’s also simply a great, riveting piece of adventure filmmaking full of clever and fun set pieces, craziness and awesome manly bullshit.
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