POMO

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is made up of a mysterious mosaic of hallucinations that may or may not be connected to the simple story of “a man’s wife disappearing from a locked apartment”. The film’s rapidly cut dream-like madness with unjustified erotic and gore scenes might catch your attention in the beginning, but they cannot hold it throughout the whole movie. The scenes that develop the plot’s mystery would make for a stylish ten-minute short film.

From the technical point of view, Razorback is extremely outdated. The filmmaking methods of expressing anxiety and fear through camerawork and editing, at the time creative, cool and impressive, are now the ridiculous and distracting stuff of dated B-movies. And that is the difference between visionary filmmakers who can still make genre movies work (Spielberg) and temporary hitmakers who stayed stuck in one genre season (Mulcahy). Imagine Jaws having such music and camera tricks… Razorback’s surrealistic set decorations and atmosphere, however, appealed to me even today. A slightly more perverse Edgar Allan Poe(tics).

A more adult version of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, The Beach Bum is a casual bohemian fuck-off to social conventions and Miami glamor, set in a stoner’s euphoria, without the need for genre-specific plots or realistic basics. Though the humour is occasionally so infantile that it’s no longer funny, and there is less ambition for artistic reflection than we are used to with Korine, there is a non-stop good mood and some definitely iconic details, so I predict that, just like good wine, this movie might get better with age. For me, the most iconic scene is the stoned cruise from Key West to Miami on a shoddy, funnily branded motorboat!

I love this show for several reasons: 1) I like the hotel business, customer service, real estate and interior design and its functionality; 2) apart from interesting real estate rentals, the series presents the most attractive Australian tourist spots, where these properties are located, which also determines their local architectonic character and leisure facilities; 3) the selection of the couples renting these properties is clever and, thanks to their different personalities, the testing of the individual houses through cohabitation leads to intriguing clashes of opinions; 4) hotel interior design expert Juliet Ashworth, who finishes the show with her assessments, is great thanks to her vast knowledge of the field as well as her professional self-presentation. Instant Hotel is an incredibly likable reality-TV show with a beautiful opening theme song, witty sociological insights and huge added information value for real estate geeks. It’s the Friends of real estate, which I had the good fortune of seeing just before my month-long trip through Australia.

Holiday is notable for having zero characterisation and unjustified and unexplained plot events, while the actors and technical side are so clumsy that they border on amateurish, making you ponder whether it’s on purpose (given that it’s shown at festivals) with the intention of brutally and “realistically” showing the normal workings of a bizarrely composed group of spineless individuals on vacation. One star for being self-serving, but the only memorable thing in the film is the ejaculatory porn scene; the second star is for the puzzled interest I felt while waiting to see what the movie would come up with next.

Mankind, nature, eternity. Visually and in terms of screenplay, At Eternity’s Gate is a sensual, wellthought of portrait of an artist experiencing rays of light from the depth of darkness. Schnabel skilfully and clearly expresses the main character’s mental states, whether related to anxiety or poetic dreaming, using the interplay of all basic means of filmmaking at his disposal. An artist who lives only for painting and satisfactorily answers those existential questions, that might interest you in the context of the mysterious historical personality named Van Gogh. All shades of his moods and thought processes are stated or implied in a mosaic with the mature thematic complexity befitting an experienced director. And Willem Dafoe, who showed great dedication and deep understanding of the difficult personality of the main character. Here, even the biggest European stars were content to work for food. At Eternity’s Gate is small film classic.

Destroyer is a hundred minutes of watching an unlikable character(s) in extremely unlikable LA locations (without the atmosphere or mystery of Nightcrawler), and at the end the movie tries to explain the character’s wrecked state, give her a human dimension and surprise us with one formal plot detail, which doesn’t really salvage the boring viewing experience.

A more courageous and mature filmmaker might have got more out of such interesting source material than a generally nice movie about the familial relations between a suffering son, an understanding mother and a bigoted father.

This movie enables you to experience a nine-month rowing journey from California to Australia (!) with a group of girls. Two hours of sleep or rest, two hours of rowing, rinse and repeat for nine months. It is an admirable feat both physically and especially mentally. They don’t experience lifethreatening storms and no sharks attack them while they are swimming, but the mental burden that they must bear (and confess to the cameras) lend sufficient drive to the documentary, which is a psychologically intriguing study of a decimated person in an unusual situation. Admirable!

Captain Marvel is a nice chill-out movie without the great drama of The Avengers, which it doesn’t really need. The only character whose emotions are explored in depth is the protagonist; everyone else is either there to provide comic relief or a villain with a surprising plan. The setting in Los Angeles (and the surrounding desert) in the 1990s enables a lot of cool jokes and establishes the overall lighthearted mood of the movie (Samuel is immortal!). This was what I liked best about Captain Marvel. Plus Brie Larson. The movie benefits from casting her and not a sexpot like Amber Heard. Larson is more approachable, natural and cute.