Blind Vaysha (2016)/4.1 Miles (2016)

  Here's a couple more shorts.  

First up is Blind Vaysha, an eight and a half minute long animated film based on a short story of a girl whose left eye can only see the past and whose right eye can only see the future.  She can never experience happiness because she has no present.  

I found it overly moralizing and not nearly as clever or provocative as it thought it was being.  Would rather read the folklore, honestly.

  4.1 Miles is a documentary short produced by The New York Times.  It follows a Greek Coast Guard captain who rescues Afghani refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in overcrowded crafts not designed for the journey.  

I want you to open another tab on your browser and pull up a map.  Find Afghanistan.  Now find Greece.  Consider the level of desperation you have to have to consider crossing that amount of distance with absolutely nothing but a backpack.    

There was a different doc short called Lifeboat from 2018 that covered the exact same thing, except they were a German non-profit.  It was a whole-ass humanitarian crisis and I have no idea if it is still happening because there have been like 20 other whole-ass humanitarian crises since then.  I'm so tired, y'all.

Both films are available on YouTube.

Pear Cider and Cigarettes (2017)

  Finally getting around to some of the Oscar nominated shorts from 2017.  Still working through my burnout.  

A narrator (Robert Valley) recounts the story of traveling from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to China in order to get his childhood friend to stop drinking long enough to have a black-market liver from a death-row prisoner transplanted.  

This is not a fun or happy story.  The animation is slick, anime-inspired, and completed entirely in Adobe Photoshop.  It is an adult animation, so there's some nudity but nothing super egregious.  It's about half an hour long and available on YouTube or Vimeo.  I'd never watch it again but it was very pretty to look at.

Barbarian (2022)

  For my birthday week, I got to pick the selections for Movie Club and I picked The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Barbarian.  Didn't have a theme in mind, but they worked pretty well together anyway.  Content warning:  sexual assault (off-screen), violence, some gore

Tess (Georgina Campbell) booked an AirB&B in Detroit for her job interview, but when she arrives, she finds that it has been double-booked and a strange man (Bill Skarsgaard) is inside.  A tense night is made worse by strange occurrences in the house, leading to the discovery of a hidden door in the basement.

I laughed so hard during this movie.  I don't want to spoil anything for you but this was one of the most delightful movies I've seen this year.  Wildly entertaining.  It has a triptych-style story with tonally jarring edits at the breaks that could have felt like being bludgeoned but if you just go with it, I promise it's worth the whiplash.  Cannot wait to inflict this on everyone I know.  

It's currently streaming on Netflix but they are taking it off at the end of the month (31 Aug) so hurry or you'll miss your chance.

Thunderbolts (2025)

  It's my birthday weekend!  And I have spent it going on ghost tours, wearing incredible outfits, watching aerial silk performers, and having a great time with all kinds of friends, near and far.  I also watched some movies.

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) has been just existing since her sister Natasha died.  She's been doing freelance "cleanup" work for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) but feels like she's drifting without purpose.  She takes one final job, catch a thief at a top-secret research facility, and then she plans to quit.  But the job is a trap to tie up all of Valentina's loose end covert operatives that she's been running like her own private death squad:  John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the disgraced Captain America replacement, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who can barely stay on this plane of existence without technological help, and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), the tragic Red Room experiment.  While arguing over how to escape, they also discover Bob (Lewis Pullman), who has apparently been stuck in the facility for however long.  Turns out Valentina had a plan for a new post-Avengers world by creating her own superhero, Sentry, and Bob was the only test subject that survived.  Barely limping away from the trap, the misfit antiheroes are "rescued" by Alexei, the Red Guardian (David Harbour), and then almost immediately captured by freshman congressman and permanently tired dude Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan).  Bucky has been trying to get Valentina removed from her position but the wheels of justice are moving a little slowly.  And his resources consist of a team of fuck-ups and war criminals and an inside source with a wavering conscience.  But hey, everybody's got problems.  Especially when Valentina's control over Bob isn't as strong as she thought.

Marvel has been on a decline in popularity but this was a solid entry and I'm a little sad it's not getting the levels of praise it would have in a pre-Endgame world.  I get it.  It's hard to build a replacement team after your all-stars but --Oh holy shit, have I just discovered why sports people are they way they are??  Oh no.  I...have to go re-evaluate some things in my life...

Currently, it's only available for rent, but it's dropping on Disney+ Aug 27.

Divines (2016)

  This is a super cute female friendship movie right up until the Trauma.  Content warning:  sexual assault, violence

Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) are best friends in the Paris projects.  They idolize Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), a hardcore girlboss drug dealer, for her flashy lifestyle and badass demeanor.  Dounia especially sees Rebecca as a stand-in maternal figure and becomes ever more desperate for her approval.  

I have straight up not been having a good time this month so the whole time I was watching this, I kept anticipating something bad happening to one or both girls but I didn't guess the specific thing which still sucker punched me.  I'm not going to do spoilers but FYI, not a happy ending.  It definitely lessened my enjoyment of the film, which sucks because the three actresses were phenomenal.  Kalvanda was menacing and charismatic and Lukumuena's face was so expressive.  I hope both have incredible careers ahead.  But this was Amamra's movie and she took every scene.  A tiny powerhouse.  

So if you're in the mood for a depressing, feel-bad character drama, Divines is streaming on Netflix.

Fargo (1996)

  I didn't post last week because I had a couple of deaths in the family.  I can't believe I've never posted a review of Fargo but it got picked for Movie Club so I re-watched it.

Car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) has a problem:  he has committed fraud and needs almost half a million dollars or he'll get caught.  He knows his father-in-law (Harve Presnell) has the money, so he comes up with a scheme to hire two criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd), and hold her for ransom.  Things do not go to plan and as the body count rises across multiple jurisdictions, police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins pulling apart the various strands leading back to Jerry.

This was pretty much an instant classic when it came out and it continues to be held in high regard.  I have had my ups-and-downs with the Coens but I can't deny that Fargo is a great movie.  It's got the alchemy of a great cast, great writing, and great direction.  Sometimes you can have all three and still not work out, but when you do, it really is movie magic.  There are still some things I would change (because I'm an asshole) but not enough to even talk about.  If you've never seen it, you definitely should.  Also, the TV show is very good as well.  It's streaming on Kanopy with a library card or Tubi and Roku for free with ads.

Superman (2025)

  I wasn't going to see this but my friend got tickets and I'm glad she did.  This was much better than I thought it would be.

Three years after revealing his existence to the world, Superman (David Corenswet) has engaged in his first globo-political controversy.  He intervened in the annexation of poor, underdeveloped Jarhanpur by its overpowered neighbor, Borovia, going so far as to threaten the Boravian president (Zlatko Buric) with bodily harm.  Superman knows Borovia has nefarious intentions, but doesn't know that they are being bankrolled by billionaire whiny man-baby Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).  Luthor has poured uncounted amounts of money into this scheme, which involves tearing small holes in the fabric of reality because fuck everyone on the planet if it means he can kill Superman.  

Thank God it's not another origin story.  Also, it is in very bright colors!  Like it was filmed in daytime and everything!  

It is recognizably a James Gunn film.  Your mileage may vary on that depending on how burned out you are after the sheer volume of work Gunn has produced within the superhero genre on film and TV, for Marvel and DC.  I enjoy the banter, snappy action scenes, deep-cut soundtracks, and style of humor.  For me, the standout performance was Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific.  His line delivery was so perfect.  Also, Rachel Brosnahan made a great Lois Lane.  She was smart, determined, and reminiscent of Margot Kidder's performance without the neurotic edge.  The whole movie felt like a throwback to Richard Donner's Superman down to using the iconic original score (complimentary).  It's currently playing in theaters.

Kpop Demon Hunters (2025)

  This movie is so fun.  Even if you're not into K-Pop.  

Huntr/x are pop stars by day and demon slayers by night, the latest in a long line of singers that maintain a magical web keeping the Demon King, Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun), from stealing the souls of mortals.  But Gwi-Ma has a plan to destroy the girls before the web becomes permanent.  He sends Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop), a human turned demon, to form a rival boy-band to steal all of Huntr\x's fans.  Lead singer Rumi (Arden Cho) is pissed but believes there's still some good in Jinu, especially after he refrains from revealing her own terrible secret.  

I found the animation a little off-putting.  There's just something about it that doesn't gel for me.  But the whole movie is so freakin' cute, I stopped caring about a third of the way in.  It is fizzy bubblegum for your brain.  Utterly charming.  And the soundtrack is phenomenal.  I'm not a big K-Pop person (I like BLACKPINK and that's about it) but I immediately bought this one.  So good.  It is streaming on Netflix.