I'll answer you now

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2023

#38 :  Strange Way Of Life

Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke sizzle in Almodóvar’s queer cowboy yarn, a dusty lusty tale of long-lost lovers bound by a bloody fate.

Our third film from Pedro Almodóvar and so far they've generally been style over substance, with just enough interesting elements to make them worthy of consideration - but I can't say my expectations are particularly high for this.  Particularly when I go to play it and see it's 31 minutes long - how peculiar!

Even given my low expectations and the short running time, there's really amazingly little substance here in terms of plot - you could summarise the whole film in three sentences.  Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva (Pedro Pascal) had a gay old time time down in Mexco and 25 years later, Silva rides into Jake's town - but why?  Well, I'm not going to tell you obviously, but I assure you it's not tricky to work it out.

It is well acted - I'm not sure I quite go with The Guardian's description of "sizzle" but the pair of them interact well and are beautifully shot and lit (and being a Western, there's obviously some decent scenery in it as well).  It also has a beautiful last scene which cuts through a load of the stereotypical Western macho bullshit - it's certainly worth staying to the end once you've started it.

Wikipedia tells me this is Pedro's second English language film after - you guessed it, our old favourite, The Human Voice.  The critics were mostly nice enough about it, although to me all the quotes don't really seem to relate to each other or overly to the film.

I don't have a lot to say about this because there's not much here to say much about.  It's all perfectly fine but won't really enrich your life in any way - however, I can't describe it as a waste of time because it's all over in half an hour (although it could have easily come in at fifteen minutes and you wouldn't have missed anything).  If you want it, it's available to stream on MUBI or to rent in all the usual locations but I'd struggle to recommend it.

#37 - Just not that interesting
#39 - Not good

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