I’ve surprised myself by really sticking at Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. I think we’re within hours of me being done with it, but I’ve seen every level, and if I was really determined to mop everthing up I’m sure I could do quite a bit of it. It’s rare that a game clicks with me, and I’m glad this one has.
Still really want to get Shadow of the Tomb Raider though. It’s at best a B-rated series, but it’s fun.
I’m not a horror film aficionado, which is strange, because I should be. Hereditary is one that I watched last year, that I enjoyed when it was metaphorical, and fell out with when it became dully literal.
However, Ari Aster’s follow-up Midsommar is right up my street. Pagan worship and Florence Pugh in her breakout year is a fantastic combination. It didn’t feel the need to explain things in the reductionist way Hereditary did, and the look of the film is extroadinary. I wouldn’t go along with the chat around release that it isn’t really a horror film – it totally is – but one which takes the modern metarphorical approach to a level near poetry, which is where it should be. I would like to have written more intelligently about it, but it kind of knocked me sideways in a delicious way.
Also, my housemate came home at precisely the wrong moment, which was entertaining.
Laura Dern is also having a fantastic year. She was masterly in Little Women, and a standout in Marriage Story. She obviously featured heavily in my Lynch phase last year, and I was remembering her perfomance in Inland Empire while I was failing to get to sleep last night. The film is…
The thing about Inland Empire is that it’s three hours long, has a plot and momentum but doesn’t satisfy your narrative hunger, and is shot on mid-2000s near-consumer camcorders, so is a less than beautiful viewing experience. And yet I want to watch it again, just to marvel at the multiple perfomances Dern pulls off in that movie.
I could happily spend the next year just watching Laura Dern movies. What a magnificent actor.
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