By: Henry J. Fromage –
Has the quarantine addled my brain to the point that I’m scraping the bottom of the movie barrel and watching Netflix reality dating shows? Yes… yes it has.
155. Fantasy Island
This one is somewhat hard to grade. On one hand, it’s a cheaply produced modernization of a 70s TV show maybe less than a quarter of our population remembers in any significant capacity. On the other hand, it plays off of what I can only assume was the premise of that TV show, an island where all your fantasies literally come true (on a TV and/or Blumhouse budget), to just do whatever the fuck it wants. The result is a not good movie with a not good plot that nonetheless keeps you surprised and, dare I say it, engaged throughout. Kind of a blast. Four Beers.
156. Love is Blind
Yes, this is a Netflix reality show, but it’s one that couples an intriguing social experiment-y premise (people agree to marry each other with nothing but deep conversations between them- literally sight unseen) with interesting people and the heightened emotion that’s unavoidable with such stakes. It leaves normal reality show manipulation at the door and just lets things play out as described, which yields genuine surprise and pathos. Three Beers.
157. Too Hot to Handle
On the flip side, this Netflix reality show is utter garbage. The premise is that a bunch of young attractive playboys/girls get to share/win some unspecified portion of 100,000 dollars if they can refrain from sex for 30 days. Besides the fact that this would be the easiest challenge in the world for the vast majority of the world’s population, to add insult to celibacy, the show has 3 or 4 New Age-y self-help workshops, after which the contestants have poorly scripted “breakthroughs”. This wasn’t cheap titillation at all, you see. It was a story of personal growth all along. Plus all the boning they didn’t do, which after taxes netted them like 2,500 bucks apiece. Six Pack.
158. The Quarry
This drama stars Shea Whigham as a drifter who kills a preacher in a fit of panic and assumes his identity, and Michael Shannon plays the local sheriff who knows something has upset the natural in his small Texas town. As they and a cast of characters that includes the local drug dealer and his young brother encircle each other, building to a test of the power of forgiveness that could have been much more powerful than it ultimately lands. Still, well worth the quality, gritty acting alone. Three Beers.
159. Swallow
Haley Bennett stars as a housewife whose rich family is clearly uninterested in allowing her to be anything else. She responds to this, and some childhood trauma that is eventually unveiled, by “doing something unexpected”. And indeed it is, as she goes from swallowing a marble whole to many even less salutary things. While there’s undoubtedly an element of body horror here, it’s far from the point of the enterprise, which blossoms into something different than what I was expecting, and well worth the journey. Two Beers.
160. Stray Dolls
In some ways this is another crime story set in the American economic margins that will remind you of several others. There is a specificity, though, in director Sonejuhi Sinha and star Geetanjali Thapa’s Indian perspective on the travails of a young immigrant working at a seedy motel who falls into criminal activity with her live-wire coworker played by Olivia DeJonge, as well as some nice understated touches in how Sinha gets to the same place many of these stories go. Worth your time. Three Beers.
161. The Other Lamb
This harrowing cult film starts Raffey Cassidy as a young “daughter” of The Shepherd (a creepy Michiel Huisman), who tends his flock that consists solely of other “daughters” and “wives”, with the distinction disturbingly blurring. Cassidy’s Selah (the second recent film with a character by that name, strangely enough) goes from being a true believer in everything she’s been raised with to having the wool fall from her eyes to the The Shepherd’s cruelties and manipulations. Malgorzata Szumowksa crafts a savage, electrifying new entry to the cult genre. Two Beers.
