LOOKS LIKE: those videos of mercury thiocyanate undergoing thermal decomposition
SOUNDS LIKE: a warehouse party hosted by a circular saw
SMELLS LIKE: rust
TASTES LIKE: licking the third rail
FEELS LIKE: being trapped inside a haunted pinball machine
"This is the most tormented man I have ever known."
Anthony John, an overweening star actor inclined toward histrionics, lives out a violent ab's wish fulfillment fantasy in A Double Life. Done up in blackface to play Othello in a long Broadway run, he gradually dissolves his own identity into his character's through a series of dissociative trances in which he attempts to murder the women in his life. These are his ex-wife, Brita, a fellow actor who reluctantly teams…
The Monkey's zany cartoon violence is undermined by a tedious insistence on how darkly funny it all is, even as its jokes fall flat, its gestures toward nihilism are thwarted by sentimentality, and its weirdly inert direction deflates what little tension it manages to build despite itself.
More than anything, I think this suffers for not knowing how seriously to take its own premise. Messy, and not in a good way.
Girls love a sick child or a healthy animal. / A man who's both itches them like an incubus
Marilyn Hacker, "She Bitches About Boys"
It does get better in the second half, but I found Agent of Happiness a surprisingly mean-spirited documentary in its depiction of its subjects, especially in the first half. The audience is more or less encouraged to point and laugh at the provincial Bhutanese villagers who self-report their happiness in of the quantity of rice or donkeys they own. There are doleful cow reaction shots. The very first subject interviewed by our titular agent Amber is an 84-year-old man…
All the more disappointing because I really, really wanted to love it. And it did have glimmers of greatness. My problem is mostly with Margaret Qualley: that kind of fast-talking sexy livewire charisma bomb role demands an actor who can 100% nail it, and she doesn't. And it's not just her accent, which wavers in and out of Foghorn Leghorn territory. Even that could be forgiven if she were a better actor. Ultimately I just don't buy her and Geraldine…
