Do they have yoyos in Sierra Leone?

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Movies of 2020...

#34 : The Good Girls (Las Niñas Bien)


Ilse Salas is outstanding in an 1980s-set study of Mexico’s financial meltdown, playing a rich, status-obsessed woman whose privileged life starts to collapse

I couldn't find this at first, but finally managed to track it down.  I can't say I'm overly looking forward to it, but I'm intrigued to watch it because it got some terrible reviews on IMDB!  So here goes...

And it starts at a party which obviously has lots of rich people at it.  But - oh no!  There's a big (and I mean big!) black moth on the wall - apparently it's bad luck to remove them.  Could that be an omen, by any chance?!?  

And well, would you believe it - it is!  Basically, the whole film is one woman's life having a meltdown - but seeing as how the whole country is having a meltdown, it's not all that surprising.  And basically, that's it - I guess you could consider it a bit of a psychological horror, but really it's just a drama telling a story that could happen to anyone when they refuse to accept reality.  Until about 15 minutes from the end, when it all gets a bit unhinged and I had no real idea what was going on.  And then it ends abruptly on a very odd note indeed giving you no idea what was going to happen next.

Ilse Salas is fine in the lead role, but I certainly wouldn't describe her as outstanding.  The rest of the cast are also fine, but it's not like any of the roles appear to be too much of a stretch.  It's filmed well enough and the period nature is done well enough (probably more impressively so if you lived in Mexico in the 80s) but not amazingly so - basically some vintage clothes, cars and tennis rackets and you're done.

And that's pretty much the theme throughout the film - it's all fine but (to me, at least) there's just nothing there to elevate it beyond that.  Except for maybe the odd bits, but I didn't understand what was going on there, so they just seemed odd.  It's all very meh, I'm afraid and I can't imagine why anyone would bother watching it.

At time of writing, the film isn't available anywhere on the usual streaming services - but I struggle to imagine that's going to be much of an issue for anyone.

#35 - An odd film, and no mistake
#33 - A stylish load of old nonsense

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more