It all kind of falls apart in the last half hour, but I’m still a total sucker for Parker’s unfussy style.
Also, maybe watching this in 2025 wasn’t the best move? Can’t help but feel like maybe we’re not as far from this as we think.
Flow
I’ve seen a lot of people complain that Flow felt like an extended video game cutscene. And it’s true that the film is in conversation with videogames. Specifically the work of Fumito Ueda, whose sparse, barren worlds hint at but don’t explain their history which allows you to project your own emotions and interpretations onto the story.
If you’re going to copy anyone, copy the master, right? Flow does all this along with the added difficulty of telling a complex story through the believable gestures and motions of a range of animals. This is every bit as magical as the hype would have you believe. A remarkable achievement.
Mozilla deletes its 'Does Firefox sell your personal data?' FAQ entry »
One of the most disappointing git diffs I’ve ever seen.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
I thought maybe I’d enjoy Martin McDonagh’s schtick a bit more when he wasn’t wrapping it in some diddley-eye patronising Irish bullshit. I guess not!
Sam Rockwell was terrific, though.
Grand Theft Hamlet
Now it’s very possible that I was just in a bad place watching this, because I’m seeing a lot of very high scores for this film and I just can’t relate.
I mean, intellectually I understand that it’s a significant achievement to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online and I understand intellectually that the juxtaposition is supposed to be hilarious. But something about this film rubbed me the wrong way. What I saw was a pair of charmless craic vacuums with no understanding of the medium latching onto a cheap gimmick that would have worked better as a series of TikTok clips instead of a full movie where everything feels contrived and inauthentic (the soliloquys were delivered more believably than a lot of the supposedly natural dialogue, like the “oh what do we have here?” finding the theatre at the beginning).
It also doesn’t help that the film is stuck between a rock and hard place ‐ viewers need a certain level of fluency with the game to be able to understand what’s going on, especially considering how disjointedly the whole thing has been put together. But on the other hand, too much fluency and you realise how much of the game’s bonkers anarchy has been left on the table, and how anaemic and dull the end result is.
God bless Parteb, the agent of chaos in the whole thing ‐ the true spirit of GTA:O ‐ and the only thing that made me laugh in the whole movie.
Even more disappointingly, there’s another story here: two out-of-work actors during lockdown, struggling to find work, struggling mentally and emotionally. They finally find a project to keep them occupied, to keep them connected with other people and get them some industry recognition. A better film would have spent some time interrogating this but for the most part it’s completely ignored in Grand Theft Hamlet.
A hugely missed opportunity. Disappointing.
My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani »
Gina Trapani has put together a beautiful web-first memoir/memento mori. So simple, so clever.
Master and Commander
Master and Commander is up there with Mad Max: Fury Road for sheer dad-level “how the FUCK did they even make this??”
The Martian
You solve one problem, and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
Somewhere during Covid, this became my ultimate comfort film. A colossal epic and Ridley Scott makes it look easy.
