Triangle (2009)

The perfect loop. Well, maybe it's not really perfect, but if there would be a movie not leaving any question mark when it comes to alternate realities/time travel, it would probably be too much for this medium :)... To be fair, if for "Looper" I had around half an hour in a late evening train after to put together all the small details and answering how can all fit together to try convincing myself that "man, that might actually work...", since then I've grown older and I don't think I'm still patient enough to do that :). The irony is that "Triangle" was released earlier than "Looper", and here we are again - no pun intended ;) ... after all there were also others in the same niche ("Predestination", "Coherence").

After this intro, which probably doesn't say anything (besides that I'm probably obsessed with time travel), I should probably start talking about the movie, right? "Triangle" begins like that kind of horror where you're tempted on betting who dies first. We have three couples (well, more or less), which in a sunny day decide to sail on a yacht bearing the same name as the movie. The sun doesn't stay up for too long, we're getting a quick storm (good opportunity to win the bet we've been talking about), and we're left with 5 people stranded on the capsized yacht. Lucky them, it doesn't take long and a large cruise ship shows up at the horizon. Surprise, surprise, there doesn't seem to be anybody on board. Where the key phrase is... "doesn't seem". Second surprise - spoiler, but I can't write this entry without it - is that we find out that one of the five who just got on the cruise vessel was already aboard. And now we have two questions: 1. What the...? 2. Why only one?

Let's start with the simple one, question 2 is answered somehow by the "horror" trait that the movie seems to advertise in the first half an hour. Which proves to be a pretty false impression in the end. Maybe with an exception - if in "Shining" a huge empty hotel looked scary to you, just wait and see how an empty cruise vessel feels. But there won't be any ghost or any kind of spirit with distorted face, to just come up from behind the corner. What's happening on the deserted ship goes so much towards psychological thriller that I wouldn't really categorize it as horror at all....

Question 1 has an answer that in brief could be summarized to a repetitive temporal loop. In detail, there's much more to uncover, and maybe even more left to be explained. Maybe it doesn't look too different from other approaches on the subject, as the ones mentioned above, or the classic: "Groundhog Day". But... what if the loop doesn't close before it begins again? Well, here comes the triangle part. Or why the movie has the name of a boat that has something like 10 minutes of screen time. Meeting you from the past I think we've seen before, but getting also to meet a third copy it's a bit more rare. Now, comes the question, why only a triangle, and not going like this infinitely? Well... because as I said in the beginning: it's a perfect loop ;) How is that closed? Well, that's to be seen in the movie.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Cosmopolis (2012)

A bad week can only end with a bad movie... I had some second thoughts before watching "Cosmopolis" - that's why it was for so long on my "to watch" list, but considering that David Cronenberg is different, I said to give it a chance. Not deserved. A CEO gets into his limo and wants to reach the other side of town for a haircut. All the movie is a salad of monologues within dialogue, mostly taking place in the car, which want to have some hidden meaning, but either don't or everything's so cryptic that's pointless. Top that with bad acting, bad camera, bad directing, the only part that has a better contrast with the rest being the sound. It doesn't worth writing more about this, not even to spend my time looking for a trailer. If you like Cronenberg, go back to "eXistenZ". Avoid this...

Rating: 1 out of 5

A Simple Favor (2018)

"Loneliness probably kills more people than cancer" says a line from a "A Simple Favor". Probably the only trying to sound like "this was deep..." if you look at it after the movie and think how far it goes on what you just seen, and that's why it probably sticks to you. Besides that, this was fun!

Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) is a single mom living in the New York suburbs out of the life insurance of her late husband, dead in a car crash, and who spends her days with a cooking vlog and many parenting activities. Emily (Blake Lively) is the wife of a former success writer, lacking now any new novel ideas, which lets her as main provider for the family working as the PR head for an important fashion house. Therefore, her preference for drowning her daily existence in a Martini glass instead spending more time with her child, for whom she's unsuccessfully looking for a nanny. Lucky her... both kids go to the same school, and in a rainy day, Emily meets Stephanie. Starting with an invitation for a drink and some chit-chat, despite the apparently major difference between the two, we're getting to more often encounters + sharing secrets + Stephanie's offer to take care once in a while of her new best friend's kid. That's the "simple favor" = Emily must leave to Miami for a few days, her husband is in England to his sick mom, so help is needed. All nice and well... until when Emily does not respond anymore, and Stephanie's temporary nanny job seems to take a more permanent turn. The urgency brings the husband back home... police, searching, mystery.

Spoiler alert: Let me move a bit beyond the trailer this time and just say that the disappearance has an expected finale. We have a body. Emily is found dead, drowned this time in a lake, no Martini, but with some injected heroin. The mystery stays alive though. The apparent cause of death is an accident or a suicide. So apparent that we're not even said clearly which of those is considered, and it's obvious that we have more. Or to put it straight, who did it? :) And now the story starts ;) ...

There's some stuff on the plus side that I can't let unchecked. 1. The script and the story - maybe's the reason that we have a novel behind the movie, maybe not, but this was, by far, the best I've seen of this year (not that I've seen many). Let's say that a solid chunk of the mystery is solved somewhere at two thirds of the movie, giving you the feeling that... damn, that's it.... what's left to see? Well, there's more. Maybe not with such a strong twist, but trust me, there's still some story left to tell. 2. The soundtrack - exceptional; same style as Tarantino, Guy Ritchie or the last John Wick of combining the "dedicated score" with songs. As in the trailer we have a selection of French tunes, older or newer, which match perfectly the tone of the movie (I don't know if that connects somehow to "do you want to Diabolique me?" :) another line in the movie said by Stephanie to the just widowed husband, referencing directly the French film). 3. The acting - I must admit a reason that brought me to the cinema being the presence in the cast of both Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. Objectively speaking, if the first maybe overacted just a bit, I think Blake Lively has here her best role of what I've seen by now ("The Age of Adaline" not included). Maybe the character also helps a bit, being more... complex, let's say, than how it seems initially.

I've read somewhere that "A Simple Favor" can be seen as a more light-hearted version of "Gone Girl", or something like that. It's a pretty good description, although besides the mysterious disappearance + some other common elements about the respective character (no more spoilers), the story evolves quite differently. The cat and mouse game there is a bit different here - first we start with three participants: the wife, the friend/nanny/whatever... and the husband. Second, we have indeed a comic nuance, which often moves towards sarcasm, and which has an excellent effect of keeping the general feeling more towards a relaxed zone a la "Midsomer Murders" meets "Wild Things", compared to Fincher's specific tension from "Gone Girl" where I still remember a shock build-up sequence. You also get here a "stronger" scene at some point but it's not even close to as disturbing the other was. So, overall, again, it was fun! :) + you might learn how to make a real Martini ;)

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Killjoys

No time for new movies this week... So I decided for a quick review of a series which afaik reached season 4, me stopping at 3 for now. Probably the best description that I can give starts from my answer on "why did I start watching Killjoys?" ...

I wanted a light SciFi, but with a decent story depth - let's say somewhere nearby SG Atlantis. The epic story (because that's where we're finally getting) starts with a trio of bounty hunters, in a galaxy far far away, employed by a sort of entity dealing mainly with catching wanted fugitives (dead or alive) - the RAC = Reclamation Apprehension Coalition. Two brothers and a girl, Dutch, the team leader. In the first episodes we have a couple of separate missions - "stand-alone" stories. But it doesn't take much and we're getting to a full-fledged conspiracy threatening "the Quad" = the planet with three inhabitable moons (well, more like two of them), or to be precise the population inhabiting these. Without many spoilers, we have an alien race, a green one :), which seems to have as final purpose the universe domination. The details are much more complex, and this makes quite a story ;)

In the first episodes "Killjoys" seems a bit low-budget and the acting has some room for improvement. What you can't deny is the story depth. I'd risk saying it's the most dense in any SciFi series that I've seen before. So dense that you get a repetitive feeling that the episode reached a conclusion and ends at 30-35 minutes of its length (although felt longer) - but surprise, you still have 5-10 more adding something usually new. I think the first three seasons could have been easily doubled adding some lengths to each episode - and honestly is admirable that the producers didn't do it. Some other particularity about the story are the strong connections between the narration segments. In other series from some point onward the writers invent plenty of stuff that doesn't have much in common with what happened before, just to have a new base to keep it going. I could not believe when I discovered at the end of the third season new connections with the first episodes (e.g., why a strange cult of monks have as basic ritual safe-inflicting scars - you have no chance imagining in episode 2-3 how valid/logic is the explanation you'll get only in the 3rd season).

Let's be objective though, and see the bad side too. First, I've heard the forth season is not as good, can't tell yet... Second, we have a soap-opera piece too with tangled family relationships and related surprises (but how many series don't). There are also some attempts a la Game of Thrones of killing some characters who you wouldn't expect departing the cast, but even if they do, their disappearance is maybe not as shocking as wanted, especially when some find their way back :). Finally, I have to admit that a reason that made me continue with "Killjoys" after episode 1-2 was that I felt a certain resemblance to "Farscape", or more exactly between Aeryn Sun there and Dutch here + I liked the leading actress. Unfortunately, Hannah John-Kamen isn't really Claudia Black, and as some other part of the cast too, there are moments when she's not credible enough for her part. In any case, you still have the story ;) ...

Rating: 4 out of 5 (up to the 3rd season)

A Quiet Place (2018)

It's been a while since I've seen a horror with a relatively original subject. Well, considering that I've grown older and I don't have the same preference for scary movies as 10 years ago, that might explain it. In any case, "A Quiet Place" manages to bring something new, although in essence is not more than another monster horror. We have a context set after the invasion of some ugly creatures, with no sight, but with a damn good hearing, and more important with plenty of teeth and appetite for humans. So, to live, you should keep quiet. In this context we have a family of 4, former and soon to be again 5, who try to survive somewhere in the States, where nobody seems to be left living. It's a situation movie, in which we wait to see from one scene to the other, who and how escapes, so it doesn't make sense to spoil more. Although the idea is cool and unexplored as far as I know, probably that's why I can't help noticing that's a bit far fetched in some places. The rest, acting ok, editing ok, sound ok. The story could've been worked out a bit better, but well... they probably wanted (plenty of) room for a sequel ;)

Rating: 3.5 out of 5