Cruella (2021)

My first reaction when I heard about "Cruella", was not a reaction. It was an "ignore" for yet another recycled production stemming from the more and more present lack of imagination at Hollywood. And to give an argument for that, at a quick count, in 2019 - the last pre-pandemic year, the top box-office stats show a score of 26-to-7 (if I didn't miss something) for sequels/reboots/spin-offs/etc vs fresh stuff = featuring a new subject. So, the idea to squeeze out a villain origin story from the "101 Dalmatians" didn't catch my attention. Especially since I don't really like prequels. So, how did I end up watching this: 1) I was looking for something more recent, and I actually found a couple titles, but 2) at 2 AM before going to sleep, knowing that probably it won't work in one view, Id didn't want to fragment watching something else. So, I told myself, ok, let's see how Disney managed to get something that was received better than the previous attempts for a live-action version of the classic animation. Obviously, as in many situations where my expectations were rock bottom, the final impression is way higher, but I'll try to be objective.

I must say that my first surprise after watching this was the complexity of the story - not that it is very complex, but I was expecting.. nothing. I didn't read "101 Dalmatians" the book, but I can assume that it doesn't get too deep into Cruella's origins, so in that case, we can give a plus to the writing. I also don't want to get too deep into the story, but in brief we're starting with the childhood of the character, who from start manifests a split personality between Estella and Cruella, something like a light version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. It doesn't take long, and the girl loses her mother in tragic conditions, ending up as member of a pickpocket gang with Horace & Jasper, who we know from the animated version. Years pass, and by some fortunate series of events Estella manages to make a career shift from thief to her dreamjob: a designer hired by the most select fashion brand in London, owned by The Baroness - the negative character in the movie. And from here we have a bit of a soap opera, and as in any soap if we tell who, how and when met the path with somebody else, we'll spoil too much.

What the movie tries, especially in its first part is to humanize a character who we know it's a bad one from the classic story. And it's not just Cruella, it does it even more with Horace & Jasper. That's something that for me seemed a bit too forced. Especially since, in its second part, it doesn't go that far in the opposite direction, up to where you would expect seeing how Estella is turned into Cruella. In the end it's a Disney movie in 2021 - let's get real, seeing dalmatians as fur coats nowadays, a bit too sensitive. In any case, the movie rolls as a light comedy from start to its end, which probably helps in all this character development, in the sense that you can't take it very serious neither when Cruella is Estella, nor when Estella is Cruella. In general, I like such an approach, because when the light storyline gets broken for inserting the drama, that has an impact that's much more clear and strong (I can only think at "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" now as an example). We have something pretty similar here, at the climactic point of the soap part, about two thirds in the movie, which gives the whole thing some force, but it's still too little. You would expect to hit you harder with something at the end, but, well... it's a Disney movie.

Leaving the story aside, I don't know... it seemed to me that the rest of the departments that got involved in the movie had pretty much the same expectations as I did from the subject, and gave everything to counterbalance it. Let's not spend much on the acting, where Emma Stone confirms me again that she's probably currently the best actress in the Hollywood generation born in the '80s. For the technical side, pretty much everything from production design to VFX has a shot to whatever awards will be given next year, although typically the movies targeting that get a release during the fall-winter season. I'm reserving a bit more space to mention the soundtrack. I don't remember another situation where I've heard such a good mixing between arrangements of known songs and an original score. Actually.. I don't remember any other case like that. At Tarantino for instance, where we find quite often the first approach, I don't know for instance if in "Kill Bill" was any piece of original score. Well, here we have both - again, I don't know who should get more credit for that - the composer, Nicholas Britell, or the sound mixing department, but the result is probably enough as a reason to clearly recommend you to watch this movie.

To conclude, I'm probably not the only one who sees "Cruella" as a sort of "Joker" made by Disney. That's my final impression. Which probably loses something from the drama, but also even more probable is more appropriate for a period when the reality around is dark enough, so you won't feel the need to see that so poignant also in a movie :)

Rating: 4 out of 5

Till Death (2021)

It's been a while since I'm counting the length when selecting a movie for watching. It's probably not the best criteria, but it's practical when the allocated time for this starts after 1 AM. "Till Death" is a short movie, otherwise I probably wouldn't have watched it. It would've been a loss. Not that we're talking about a masterpiece, but it was surprisingly original.

What we have here is a more peculiar revenge story, which rapidly turns into a survival movie. Moving 10 years back, we find Emma (Megan Fox) as victim of a violent robbery attempt, ending up marrying the young attorney who's sending the attacker behind bars. Years pass, and he's advancing his career to owning a successful law firm, but their relation gets cold. The movie actually starts when Emma's ending an extramarital affair, just before her marriage anniversary. Her husband organizes a "gift" for this occasion in the form of a romantic evening in a vacation house by a lake, but that's just a prequel for what follows. He decides to put a bullet to his head the following morning, after handcuffing himself to his wife. Well, I already said something you don't get from the trailer :) Something else we don't see there is how elaborate is the sick payback plan. Light spoiler - eventually we find that the deceased probably experienced some "remorse" after sending his wife's attacker to jail and decides to end his life only after the guy's release, leaving him some diamonds as compensation. The clause for getting into possession of these, however, is not that simple.

All the context and whatever else the trailer provides might seem a bit unrealistic, but the the movie slowly delivers small parts that add sense, turning the action in a tensed race for survival. That's actually the catchy factor here - the action is unpredictable enough, although you might not expect that. Emma must deal with the isolated house during a cold winter, carrying a dead heavy husband, who's brain was passed before the bullet by all kinds of thoughts on how to make the "separation" from his wife harder to accomplish. And I can say that either Megan Fox fits perfectly to the role, or she took some acting lessons since last time I saw her in a movie ( I know I'm mean :-) ). Not the last thing: although we clearly have a macabre element, and despite what the trailer might suggest, the violence level in the movie is probably at a third of the average "The Walking Dead" episode. So, to conclude, I think the movie is quite underrated. It's not so easy these days to find a complex enough story, starting from a complicated idea - how to survive a post-mortem revenge - within a thriller that respects its genre = more tension, less VFX.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

A Quiet Place Part II (2020)

The first thing to say after watching "A Quiet Place Part II" is that you need the first "A Quiet Place" to understand everything. You're offered some sort of a prequel intro, which is probably the minimum required to get the context: a totaly unfriendly alien invasion of some creatures relying exclusively on their hearing to decimate the human race. However, I don't think this minimum helps much somebody who would prefer skipping the first movie. I obviously didn't have time to re-watch it, but fortunately I still remembered enough of it to make sense of some references. And also to say that I think I like the sequel better.

The movie is quite short, especially if we're also cutting the intro I was mentioning. Basically, it follows where we were left with the four surviving Abbott's - a mother with three children (including a newborn), and presents us their path after abandoning the former shelter. We first get a scene where we're reminded the essential of the last movie = the hearing device of the older daughter is the ultimate weapon (and pretty much the only one) against the monsters, after which we're stopping at an abandoned factory where we meet Emmett, apparently a former neighbour from before the apocalypse. Then, the group splits. The girl runs away towards an island where she thinks there might be survivors being followed by Emmett sent to get her back, while the rest tries to resist somewhere in a basement providing some level of acoustic insulation. I think it's best to stop here with the details, otherwise there won't be much left to discover from the story.

The narrative is as it seems - very simple. What's to appreciate in the movie is how this narrative is "dressed". In brief, the production level is very good, both at technical level, and as well as the directing and the acting. I'll just detail more on the editing. We have two brief parts where the tension is on a growing path, one sometime at two thirds of the movie, and one at the ending. I won't spoil more besides that in both we have a critical development in each of the two locations - on the path to the island, respectively at the abandoned factory. For me it seems very hard to make a paralel cut such that you'll get a simultaneous development towards the climax - in each of the two places, without one of the sequences to "lose" in front of the other. I think I've seen attempts like that, which didn't end well - that's why I don't remember one in particular. Well, here it works - twice, with the "advantage" let's say that the second time, the climactic point is a common one ending the movie, but that makes it even better. Besides this, to finally give some light spoiler :), I can say that the ending leaves again plenty of room for a "Part III", but now we don't have so much to remember, so you don't need to wait for it ;)

Rating: 4 out of 5

The Invisible (2007)

I don't remember exactly when I've seen "The Invisible" for the first time, but it probably was more than 13 years ago, before writing my first blog entry. At that moment I liked it a lot. My memory is not so good though to write based on that impression, but I've refound it on TV recently, by chance. What I can say after my 2nd watch is that either my standards went up a lot, or it's harder for me to get impressed by drama, but even so I still find a movie a bit underrated.

What we have here is a mix-up between a teen romance and a thriller, with drama accents that you can feel (spoiler) in not the most happy ending ever. Nick Powell is a fresh high-school graduate, coming from a wealthy family, aspiring towards a career as a writer, and willing to escape from his mother's close watch to continue his studies in London. At the same school, Annie Newton has the complete opposite profile: poor disfunctional family, a bunch of unorthodox activities in order to make some money: from loan sharking to stealing cars and others, and a future that most likely looks to lead behind bars. The paths of the two intersect after Annie is denounced by her boyfriend pissed of being cut off from the spoils of a jewelery robbery, but somehow Nick ends up as the one suspected of informing the police. So, Annie decides to pay the "bill" helped by her partners in crime, and Nick ends up in a coma, thrown at the bottom of a sewer and becoming "the invisible". Precisely, he's trapped somewhere between life and death, giving him the opportunity to walk among the living and to observe what he left behind, until he becomes aware that he's still alive. After that we're getting in a race to save his life, where, predictable enough, the role of who brought him to this state shifts completely.

The movie is a remake of a Swedish production, which I didn't see and it might be better. Here, the target is clearly set somewhere similar to "Twilight", released during the same years. Probably this age range contributed also to why I liked it better when I've seen it first, despite being already older than this target. Indeed, I can't deny now that are many parts where the story is at least hardly believable. Besides that, the approach for the SciFi part is very... "economic" let's call it, in the sense that pretty much all Nick's interactions with the environment in his "ectoplasmic" state are presented as effectively taking place, with a sort of flashback succession where nothing really happened. Given the potential confusion degree of the approach, I'd say that the movie is very well edited. Still, you can't deny that some VFX might have been more.. natural in this context. Probably all these lead to the low rating it has on pretty much all the movie sites it's indexed on. However, the movie has something in how it's put together so that if you can ignore the above, it builds up an emotional load that grows on you until the end. It's either that, or the fact that when I've watched it for the first time I had an instant crush for Margarita Levieva who has the leading part of Annie :), or it just has a nostalgia effect for years with less stress, but for me it's still something like a...

Rating: 4 out of 5