“They are bad people. They should suffer.”

In My Man Godfrey, the Bullock sisters, Cornelia (Gail Patrick) and Irene (Carole Lombard), are tasked with finding a “forgotten man” as part of a scavenger hunt by the rich and callous. Having helped save the world in the Great War, the forgotten man was, well, forgotten as the Great Depression swept him into unemployment and despair. Cornelia, a champion stoneheart among stonehearts, finds the titular Godfrey (William Powell) at a Hooverville but is rebuffed in her attempt to claim him for a checkmark on her list; Godfrey finds Irene’s scatterbrained charms less easy to dismiss. Verified by the scavenger hunt judge as a true forgotten man, Godfrey lacerates the assembled glitterati for…

Watched some of this today, ostensibly because the trailer for the Meg 2 is going to lead to much joshing of Mr Wheatley online, and I felt like spending time with the best thing he’s ever made. Which is also, in my opinion, one of the best things of its kind that anyone’s ever made - a folk horror no less authentic for being so modern; an allegory no less lucid for being so inchoate; a tragedy no less affecting for being so alienating. (It’s one of the most brilliantly edited films of its era, open, relentless and daring). I try not to use movies to draw lines between myself and other people, but probably the most irritated I’ve ever…

Tough not to spoil this one! It’s a pretty low key, deliberately paced, tense affair about a semi-retired hitman being reluctantly dragged into one last mission that then takes a third act hard left into cult-ish horror. That said, we see more simmering domestic toxicity between the hitman and his wife than we do outright action or thrills, and that may kind of be the point (?). Religious overtones, literal symbolism, and one fucked up ending all led to me googling the hell out of whatever I had just watched. Was running on only a select few brain cells after a bad night’s sleep so didn’t put a lot of effort into pondering the deeper meaning here, but luckily found…

“This movie is so smart because it starts off with the basis of one thing but then slowly progresses into something completely different”. Yeah go watch “From Dusk Till Dawn” or “The Worlds End” if you want a good gear shift movie because this isn’t it. 

This film is fuuuuucking booooring. Jesus Christ “you don’t get it he’s building suspense masterfully” no he’s not, the film has no fucking idea where it’s going and it’s blatantly obvious. It’s like if “In Bruges” and “Midsommar” had a baby but then that baby had sex with a piece of shit who has the personally of a plank of wood. Yeah..... that’s this movie. 

I think the most annoying thing about the movie…

Still a pretty powerful and haunting merging of anxious British kitchen sink drama about a pair of financially desperate Iraq war vets who feel betrayed by their higher ups and turn to contract killing to pay the bills/support their family, and a full-on gruesome hitman procedural turned evil folk-cult horror fable where the same thing happens to them again with a much older, ancient overlord who still has use for their penchant for cold-blooded murder.

Wheatley's accomplishment here is in how eerily and subjectively interwoven the genre-bending is. In the earlier home scenes there's this tone of inevitability and dread (and sharply loaded editing patterns) that suggest brewing hostility with no real indication why, and when the explosion of hyper-violent…