November issue - Magazine - Page 29
Glenside
News
GlensideNews@mail.com
ENTERTAINMENT
CINEMA & TV FILM REVIEWS
Continued
and leaving her shackled up in a basement for most of the
movie, subjected to a constant torrent of abuse. Her
captors are rabid conspiracy theorists Teddy (Jesse
Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who
are convinced that she is an extraterrestrial bent on the
destruction of the planet and only masquerading as the
wealthy CEO of a biotech corporation. Despite being
adapted from the 2003 South Korean movie Save The
Green Planet, Bugonia does speak to a particularly
contemporary moment in American history, as political
and social discourse rises to previously unimaginable
levels of toxicity. There are plenty of grim laughs in the
movie, but Lanthimos is deadly serious.
snarky advice while strapped to his shoulders like a
backpack. It's very, very silly, but undeniably entertaining
and the action sequences are genuinely exciting.
Nuremberg (Cert 15) is out in cinemas
With authoritarianism on the rise around the world, the
courtroom drama Nuremberg makes some sober points
about just how easy it is for people to fall in line behind
opportunistic political leaders acting in bad faith. Yet for
all the timeliness of its message, it's a lightweight movie
about a heavyweight subject, amounting to significantly
less than the sum of its parts. At its centre is a towering
performance by Russell Crowe as Herman Göring,
Pluribus (Cert 15) is streaming on Apple TV
As the producer of The X Files, Breaking Bad and Better
Call Saul, any new TV series from Vince Gilligan is going
to command attention. Thankfully, the blackly and bleakly
funny Pluribus is more than deserving (in a remarkable
show of confidence, a second series was commissioned
before a single episode had even aired). Rhea Seehorn plays
an unrepentantly misanthropic writer whose disdain for the
racy romantasy novels that she churns out is only exceeded
by her contempt for the adoring fans who have turned them
into bestsellers. Her cynical worldview doesn't improve
when an extraterrestrial virus turns all but 13 people in the
world into a collective consciousness dedicated to peace,
love and happiness. Suddenly she is literally the worst
person on the planet, especially since the seemingly
benevolent invaders are so sensitive that she can literally
wipe out millions of them by simply losing her temper.
Predator: Badlands (Cert 12A)
is out in cinemas
After the terrific Wild West adventure Prey and the
animated historical triptych Killer of Killers, writer
director Dan Trachtenburg's third instalment in his radical
Predator reboot takes yet another unexpected swerve into
action comedy. Even more surprisingly, he pulls it off. The
mismatched buddies here are Dek (Dimitrius SchusterKoloamatangi), a runty Predator determined to win his
spurs by travelling to a hostile planet and bringing back the
head of a legendarily unkillable monster, and Thia (Elle
Fanning), a Weyland Yutani Corporation android (yes, you
read that right – the same Weyland Yutani from the Alien
movies) who has lost everything below the waist in an
encounter with the aforementioned critter. If he's the brawn
in this partnership, she's the brains, constantly offering
switching from garrulousness to malevolence and
arrogance to self-pity in an eyeblink. The jailhouse scenes
between Göring and Douglas Kelley, the self-serving
psychiatrist sent to evaluate him and already formulating
the bestseller he'll write about the experience, should have
been a formidable clash of egos and psychological
manipulation, but Rami Malek's simplistic performance as
Kelley leaves Crowe spoiling for a fight that never comes.
Michael Shannon and Richard E Grant shine in small
supporting roles, but their presence feels like fascinating
sidebars to the lacklustre main story.
The Running Man (Cert 15) is out in cinemas
Director Edgar Wright promised that his new version of The
Running Man would adhere much more closely to the
grungy dystopian novel by Stephen King (writing as
Richard Bachman) than the cheesy 1987 version with
Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is true (up to a point – the
ending is a major cop-out), but the world has moved on in
four decades and amoral game shows are a nightly
occurrence on mainstream television – The Running Man is
just Hunted with real bullets – while nationwide CCTV
cameras and surveillance drones are a fact of everyday life.
There's little attempt by Wright to satirise the wider media
landscape of today beyond glimpses of a vacuous reality
show called Los Americanos that's obviously modelled on
the Kardashians. When ratings-obsessed network head Josh
Brolin is asked why he doesn't simply fake the whole
Running Man concept using AI he says they tried it but it
was rejected by viewers. But by the end of the movie so
much of the televised footage has been faked without
anyone seemingly noticing, his argument seems moot.
Page 29
