note: This is a great fuckin movie and this review has spoilers, so if you’re planning on seeing it anyway, I suggest doing that first and coming back.
I’m not fully up on the films of director Luca Guadagnino. He’s done several I haven’t seen, including A BIGGER SPLASH, which I know some people love. I did see CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, which I didn’t officially review but did write a little about in a 2018 Oscar preview. I concluded that, “My main feeling about CALL ME BY YOUR NAME was that it was pretty good but just not for me. But I did continue thinking about different aspects of it for days afterward, making me think I liked it more than I realized at first.”
Since that was my only impression of Guadagnino it seemed kind of crazy that he was the one to finally do a remake of SUSPIRIA! Or as I called it in my review, “SUSPIRI… uh…”
Actually I liked that one, and will watch it again, though I didn’t understand what it was trying to say about German politics of the ‘70s. As I wrote in my review, “It is possible that this Italian director and American writer have something very important to say about the post-WWII generational shift that was happening in Germany when they were 6 and 8 years old, respectively, and that it adds greatly to the story of these dancing witches. If so it’s way over my head, so for me it dilutes what could be a far more intense experience if the horrific parts weren’t so spread out.”
With those mixed feelings in mind, I’m thrilled to say that Guadagnino’s new one BONES AND ALL is the first one I’ve seen by him that I unreservedly loved. This is another horror one that will get some of the more finicky genre purists in their feelings about it being pretentious or whatever, but I think it’s a real fuckin knockout. It’s a cannibal road movie romance. You’re gonna love it. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT is not the wacky SHARKNADO type bullshit that the title may bring to mind, but instead an odd, humble little character piece about aging, regret, loneliness and sacrifice. Its greatest strength is that it stars Sam Elliott (or as I call him, The Man Who Mentored Dalton and then Fought The Hulk). He plays Calvin Barr, who many decades ago gave up the love of his life (Caitlin FitzGerald, Rectify) for an important WWII tracking, infiltration and assassination mission that he could never tell anyone about, and in his old age has failed to either feel good about what he did or find another purpose for his life. Its second greatest strength is that it attempts the daredevil feat of telling us that outlandish alternate history tale, following it with his being recruited to save the world by finding and killing a sasquatch, and not treating any of it as something to laugh at.
ROOM is a movie that would be better to know nothing about. I knew a little more than I should’ve, and that wasn’t too bad. But if you were planning on seeing it anyway, read this later.
