Tag: Woman Of The Hour

2024 In Film: Day Seven (The Good)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

Immaculate
Ups: Good chemistry between performances.
Great score.
Downs: Wastes potential.
Sweeney isn’t quite a strong enough performer for large sections.
Best Performer: Benedetta Porcaroli. Sweeney is great in the final section, but she’s too weak in the opening two-thirds to really be effective.
Best Moment: The entire final third.
Worst Moment: Sister Gwens’ death, happens off-screen and we should have seen it.
Opening: A nun tries to escape through a locked gate but instead gets her leg broken and is buried alive. Standard horror movie opening but it does let you into the fact that the nuns are evil, which is obvious anyway, but at least TRY to have a mystery.
Closing: She gives birth to the antichrist, bites through her own umbilical cord, and then kills the baby with a giant rock. Shocking, disturbing, and so well made.
Best Line: “If this is not the will of God, why does God not stop us?”. I used a similar line the time I got urinating in the font, just before I was struck by lightning.
Original review here

Jackpot
Ups: Satirical brilliance.
Some brilliant lines.
Pretty damn good soundtrack.
Downs: Issues with the plot are so big you can drive a bus through them.
Tonally inconsistent.
Best Performer: John Cena
Best Moment: The wax museum. So fun.
Worst Moment: The villain reveals, only because it’s so obvious that you’re surprised the characters didn’t see it coming.
Opening: A text narration explaining the premise. Bleak but comedic. Then Sean William Scott running down a street being chased by a mob
Closing: She survives, they become rich, and massive pricks. There are some outtakes too, which are pretty fun to see.
Best Line: “The California Grand Lottery © started during the Great Depression of 2026. The New Government was desperate for money and so was the public. It was simple. Kill the winner before sundown and legally take their jackpot. The only rule? No guns. No Bullets Some people call it dystopian. But those people are no fun. LOS ANGELES 2030” Sets the tone perfectly.
Original review here

Poor Things
Ups: Breathtaking visuals.
Unique.
Good ensemble cast.
Downs: Some of the music is physically painful to hear.
Repeats itself a lot.
Might be too weird for some.
The idea that so many men are sexually attracted to someone with the brain and capabilities of a baby is………strange.
Best Performer: Emma Stone
Best Moment: Harry showing Bella cruelty. It’s heartbreaking.
Worst Moment: Duncan finds Bella’s hidden money, mainly because if he didn’t find it then the story would advance in the exact same way.
Opening: A suicide. It’s always a weird way to open a film, but it’s good. It lets you know the visuals straight away.
Closing: The weird family dynamic characters all live together, with the evil ex-husband now having the brain of a goat. I genuinely assumed they were just going to put the dying Dafoe brain in his body, kind of surprised they didn’t.
Best Line: “I’m going to punch that baby”
Original Review here

The Beast
Ups: Hypnotic.
If you stick with it, it makes sense.
Definitely a relief that a film called “The Beast”, based on a piece of work from 1903, and released in 2024, isn’t subtly racist.
Downs: The directing style will be divisive.
The narrative could be clearer at parts.
The central concept doesn’t kick in for 20 minutes
It does the “imagine spot” trick too often.
Best Performer: George MacKay. He is such a good actor. His incel speech is brilliant
Best Moment: The introduction to the 2014 world where Louis is an incel dickbag.
Worst Moment: The earthquake is pretty weak
Opening: Gabrielle is acting in a room comprised entirely of green screen, being ordered around by a director.It then kind of dissolves into he title. Weird, doesn’t really intrigue you and force you to continue watching, but doesmake you wonder “how weird is this going to be?” Especially since it then goes into what looks like an 18th century party of nobility.
Closing: The classic “invasion of the body snatchers” ending. But then it does something very cool, instead of end credits, it has a QR code. The downside is that in a few years they will likely forget to keep up the domain rights, that WILL lead to either porn or a virus.
Best Line: “Tell me why, at parties, we seek the people with whom we live and whom we see every day?”
Original review here

The First Omen
Ups: Some great scares.
Good performances.
Unsettling body horror.
Decent twists.
Downs: Too reverential of the original.
Best Performer: Nell Tiger Free
Best Moment: The childbirth scene about halfway through. Very unsettling.
Worst Moment: The ending, drags.
Opening: Two Fathers (of the religious variety) discuss an evil occult plot. One of whom then dies brutally and with a pie-sized chunk missing from his skull. The death is horrific and scary, but it’s also only done like that as a reference to the original.
Closing: The demon child has been delivered to the correct person. Which we knew. He’s been called Damien. This just confirms it is the same child as the original, which we would have guessed.
Best Line: “What’s not real?” the line itself isn’t great, but its use is my favourite jump-scare of modern times.
Original review here

The Substance
Ups: Creepy.
Some great body horror
Amazing performances.
As subtle as a brick, a brick to the face, a brick to the face with the words “older women have value too and we need to stop placing so much of a woman worth on how men perceive her beauty” written on it, which would be a pretty fucking big brick.
Downs: REALLY loses focus and steam in the final third.
The world feels too protagonist-centered. There’s no indication that the world of this film exists outside of these characters. Every person in this universe exists solely to serve the narrative, there’s no attempt to make it feel lived in. If it sorted this out, it would be at least 2 blogs up, but it REALLY hurts it and kind of dampens the message.
“Look how disgusting the way we treat women is” followed by lots of close-ups of tits and buttcheeks. I get that that’s the point, but still.
Best Performer: Demi Moore
Best Moment: The first transformation.
Worst Moment: It repeats a dream sequence. Not really necessary.
Opening: A walk of fame star being constructed then neglected. The “look at how the world ignores this star until it cracks under pressure” double meaning isn’t exactly subtle. But it looks gorgeous.
Closing: Elisabeth’s face crawls out onto her own star then dissolves into nothingness before wiped away by a floor scrubber. Like I said, not subtle.
Best Line: Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can’t escape from yourself
Original review here

Thelma
Ups: Very sweet.
Funny.
Pretty darn good chemistry between the two leads.
Teaches you basic cyber security.
I found it very funny how when she called her old friends she went through a list of various deaths and then “moved to Cleveland?”
Downs: The use of focus on the surroundings may be distracting to some.
Richard Roundtree has since passed and this was his final film.
Doesn’t quite run with the concept as much as it could.
Best Performer: June Squibb. Obviously.
Best Moment: The villain reveal.
Worst Moment: The phone call with the ex doesn’t seem as important as it could
Opening: Thelma being shown how to operate her e-mails by her grandson. Then the two sit around. Very sweet interactions between the two. Did kind of make me miss my nan though so boo for that.
Closing: She succeeds. That’s the real ending, but then it continues. But I don’t mind. Because whilst the story is over, the themes continue, and the post-story interactions are so sweet and wonderful that it’s heartwarming. She then twats a cockroach with a newspaper.
Best Line: “If I fall over I’m toast, that’s why I don’t fall”
Original review here

Woman Of The Hour
Ups: Creepy.
Never pretends to be anything that it isn’t.
Kendrick is a pretty damn good director.
Made with passion.
Downs: Somewhat weak narrative
Muddled story.
Doesn’t make the most of the premise.
Best Performer: Anna Kendrick
Best Moment: When she asks her own questions.
Worst Moment: Valentine’s day car ride with one of his victims. Just feels a bit superfluous and kills momentum.
Opening: A guy takes photos of a woman in an isolated exterior. You can tell he’s creepy because he has long hair. Some beautiful establishing shots though. Yup, he kills her, and it’s REALLY well shot.
Closing: The truth is fucking infuriating. He was released on bail where he then killed more people.
Best Line: “Did you feel seen?” “I felt looked at”
Original review here

Woman Of The Hour (2023) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: It’s 1970 and Sheryl Bradshaw is so desperate for TV time that her agent books her on The Dating Game, unaware that one of the male contestants is harbouring a dark and disturbing secret: he’s from Texas. Oh, and he kills people. That’s bad too.

Woman Of The Hour (or WOTH, pronounced to rhyme with cough) is like a six-dicked Calydonian boar, a strange beast you can’t turn away from. It’s helped by a truly fascinating story. This actually happened. In 1978, serial killer Rodney Alcala made an appearance on The Dating Game, and he did win, which has to be a real kick in the teeth of the guys who were rejected. Everything else about the story is fiction. The entire story of the woman who went out with him? Fake. The woman in the audience who reports the killer and is ignored? Fake. The host of the show is a complete dick? Fake (for this one specific person). A producer making creepy comments about Anna Kendrick whilst pointing at her breasts? Fa-oh wait, that’s real, happened to her when she was 19, which sadly meant she was too young to drink, so she couldn’t go to a bar, buy a bottle of drink then use the bottle to slit the throat of that producer.

I’m okay with that kind of approach to historical accuracy. This is mainly because it never pretends to be anything other than what it is; it is a fictional narrative that occurs during a real historical story. If it was presented with a subtitle like “The true story” then I’d object. The reality isn’t important, the story and the setting is. The setting is significant. This was a time when, according to the letter of the law, women were mostly equals (sometimes), but the reality was very different. Men still felt comfortable being sexually aggressive with female strangers, who would then be told to “take it as a compliment” or “stop complaining” when they mentioned it. It’s very different from now, I’ve spoken to many men on the subject and they all agree women are treated equally now. The time is just as much a character as the serial killer (now there’s a sentence I’ve never said before).

The other essential half of the jigsaw of WOTH is Anna Kendrick. This is her directorial debut and it’s pretty damn impressive. She does have a tendency towards being overly arty and “oooo look at this” as opposed to using the camera to tell a story. There are no moments which are “bad”, nothing which makes you think “Ooof, I wouldn’t have done that”, and more experienced directors have done that (A Quiet Place: Day One, for example, featured one of my least favourite shots of the year from a coherence standpoint, and that was from a guy with experience). I hope Kendrick continues to direct, and I’m curious as to what her next move would be. I’m hoping she continues to do stories she has a passion and personal interest in (she donated her fee from this movie to charity, because she’s lovely and a badass). She’s about 2 movies away from making an INCREDIBLE feminist AF drama which I will absolutely LOVE.

Her performance is good too. The moment where she calls everyone out on their misogyny is glorious to watch. I’ve seen some reviews state she was the wrong choice, and that she feels too modern for a 1970s character. To those people I say, you’re wrong. I won’t debate this, I won’t explain this, but you are wrong.

The weakest part, for me, is the narrative. The fact he was on a tv show (you know, the whole selling point of the film) doesn’t matter. It’s not his appearance on TV that leads to his downfall, his downfall wasn’t until the next year. So really, the main crux of the film is entirely inconsequential. It’s still a good watch, but I do wish that more things mattered, that the timeline was more coherent, and that the side characters were memorable. So much focus went on the “serial killer on a dating show”, that it feels that not enough effort was put on anything else in the narrative, so it feels incredibly underbaked.

That being said, there is one BRILLIANT scene that’s not set on the show. The date. Specifically, the aftermath when she’s creeped out by him in the car park. It’s CHILLING, and makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on edge. It’s also (I imagine), a scene in which pretty much every woman alive has a “yeah that happened to me too. When? Well the first time was when I was 12, then the next time it was-” series of anecdotes which are similar.

In summary, an easy film to be impressed by. An easy film to be moved by. But also a film in which you can’t help but feel there’s something better from the creators in the future.