Three Films Make A Post: Don't rush, die slow.

Slotherhouse (2023): Only a hopeless optimist would go into a movie about a slasher sloth (sloth slasher?) hoping for much of that elusive quality normal people describe with the word “good”, but Matthew Goodhue’s film still manages to disappoint the hardened cynic. Sure, you’ll expect the lame, would-be self-referential humour, the “irony” (where irony is defined as not giving enough of a shit about your film to come up with decent jokes), the harmless kills.

What you might not expect is that about half of the film’s running time is spent not on a slasher sloth but on the race for the role of sorority house president, and the bad moral influence this race has on the good girl trying to beat the generic bitch character; or how much that part of the movie feels like a modern Lifetime movie in all the worst ways.

The trailer’s pretty fun, though.

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023): Also pretty underwhelming is Adam Sigal’s movie about one of my favourite bits of Forteana, the mysterious talking mongoose its friends call Gef (the voice of Neil Gaiman, for some reason). Despite a pretty fine cast (Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd and so on), there’s just very little here, mostly because the filmmakers can’t seem to be able to decide what exactly they’re trying to do here. Is this a broad comedy? A comedy about a man being confronted with his failings and only half-way learning anything? One of those insufferable movies about The Power of Belief™? The film never seems to be willing or able to decide, and so never quite arrives at anything you might want to call a point. Plus, the real Nandor Fodor was much more interesting than the one the movie concocts. And Harry Price was, not to put too fine a point on it, a damn liar.

Bones and All (2022): Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance, on the other hand, wants to be more than one film at the same time and has not problems at all coping with that. So this is a doomed teen romance, a sometimes surprisingly nasty cannibal film, a serious movie about falling in love badly and with the right wrong person, a road movie, and one of its directors slick pseudo-artsy endeavours like Call Me By Your Name, just with a lot more blood. But then, after his fantastic Suspiria project, I’ve grown to expect surprising shifts in Guadagnino’s body of work from the mid-brow towards the interesting.

Somehow, all of these different approaches to the material at hand feel as if they belonged to each other in Guadagnino’s hands, characters and tone subtly gliding from one to the next, resulting in a film that shouldn’t work at all, but does so wonderfully.

In short: Dune: Part One (2021)

As regular readers will know, I’m not as big of a fan Canadian director Denis Villeneuve as most of the critical caste seem to be. Instead of the intelligent and deep filmmaker others see, apart from the Blade Runner film I’ve mostly encountered movies I found pompous, painfully slow and self-serious, and lacking a spark of humanity, exclusively populated by characters who never smile or laugh and really love staring off into the distance dramatically. And please don’t ask me about what Arrival did to its source novella.

However, this time around, I’ve come to praise Villeneuve and not to make fun of him. Ironically, you can still use most of the points of criticism above against Dune: the characters certainly seem to be lacking in any sense of humour whatsoever, the film moves slowly, and Villeneuve takes things so very seriously indeed it could border on the ridiculous. It’s just that all of this works in the context of Dune in a way it very much didn’t in something like Sicario or Arrival. For once, the heightened tone is actually perfect for the source novel’s still peculiar and wonderful mixture of very old and very new (at least at its time) ideas and themes, something that aims for the mythical while at the same time trying to show how myth is a constructed thing.

Villeneuve is certainly better when it comes to constructing myth than criticising here, but then, pulling things down to Earth was really the job of the second novel and need not concern us with this film (or its sequel).

The film is most certainly a masterpiece of visual worldbuilding, creating the mood and feeling of its far future made out of things taken from many different pasts through fantastic production design, an often pleasantly peculiar Hans Zimmer score, and camera and editing rhythms that take their time to create the heft of reality.

Really, the only thing I’d wish I could change about this Villeneuve movie is the casting of Thimothée Chalamet as Paul; his range seems to lie exclusively between mopey, super mopey, and extra special mopey, which could become a bit of a problem in the second film when the kid’s supposed to be charismatic.

But then, nothing’s perfect.