by Oscar O’Sullivan

God almighty but doesn’t college take it out of you?

Monday – The Royal Tenenbaums

An all-time favourite of mine – Wes Anderson can do no wrong. Gene Hackman is so utterly compelling as Royal, maybe the greatest difficult dad in cinema history, a corrupt hustler who thinks it’s appropriate to shoot your son with a B.B. gun and tell your adopted daughter that you don’t consider yourself her real dad. Each Tenenbaum is living their own self-sustaining story that brushes up against and collides with all the others, trapped within the crumbling framework of their own family just as they inhabit the dingy, crumbling New York setting. It’s far from a sappy tale of redemption and hardly even interested in forgiveness. This is Wes’ meditation on on the bizarre beast that is family – the one you choose and the one you don’t. The people that make you who you are, for better and worse, their influence inescapable whether or not you accept it. The best you can hope for is that everyone makes it to the funeral. 10/10.

Tuesday – Trap

Shyamalan’s latest is a style experiment that hinges on a simple but high-concept premise – a serial killer trapped in a concert will do anything to escape unnoticed, but must also account for the presence of his teenage daughter. The bulk of the film delivers on that idea expertly, but doesn’t quite rise above it, with events proceeding predictably and with with few genuine surprises to justify the De Palma-esque trappings of the cinematography and editing. Josh Hartnett’s central performance carries this section home, stunningly magnetic as he combines radiant charisma with ruthless cunning to bluff and batter his way out of the situation. Where the film really picks up is the third act, bursting from it’s cocoon and becoming a genuine nail-biter with all bets off. The mechanical direction of the story from here is difficult to parse but the effect is undeniable and it doesn’t rely on a single major twist to tie things up, instead layering on a series of escalating surprises to keep the atmosphere electric all the way to the final shot. A rewatch could swing this score either way, but for now it’s a strong 8/10.

Wednesday – Alien 3

A film that would have probably been better received if not for the baggage of being an entry in a larger franchise, Alien 3 is more than happy to discard and subvert the trappings of it’s predecessors to create something properly nasty and provocative. Trapped on a cultish prison colony with no access to weapons, the single Xenomorph is once again a serious threat after Aliens made them into fodder to be blown away en-masse. David Fincher made his debut as a director with this film, his style already apparent in its raw state – he revels in filth and grime but maintains a steady formal hand, luxuriating in stillness and silence, holding extreme close-ups of objects and movements – even hacked to pieces in a studio edit the craft of the film draws you in and holds you down. If this is the bad version then the Assembly Cut could turn out to be a masterpiece. 9/10.

Thursday – Inglourious Basterds

Another all-time favourite, Tarantino’s self-described masterpiece set a high bar he’s yet to surpass (though OUATIH came close). It’s the perfect Tarantino film, the Platonic ideal of everything he does best – spine-chilling suspense giving way to brutal violence, verbose characters holding endlessly quotable conversations, a massive formal debt to Italian Westerns, iconic needle-drops, a strong central heroine and a pile of overlapping plot-lines that intersect in just the right way. This may be Tarantino’s most politically layered film thanks to the wartime setting, with a new angle to discover on each viewing – the ethics of “heroic” violence, the way Hollywood portrays historical evil, art as a tool of revolution or propaganda, just to highlight a few. Above all of that, it’s just plain fun, Tarantino at his most playful and dynamic – love him or hate him, the man knows how to make a movie. 10/10.

Friday – Alien: Ressurection

Pleasantly surprised by this – a dumb fun action romp that takes the lore and iconography of the Alien franchise in some fascinating directions. Bears very little resemblance tonally to what came before, but the time jump of a couple hundred years allows me to wave off how different it feels. The writing is kind of abominable – characters speak in one-liners and insults, which can get really old and undermine serious moments – but the overall story and cast of characters turns out to be fairly compelling. They’re a bunch of dumbass caricatures but they’re fun to watch in a guilty pleasure sort of way, and the brutality of some of the deaths even makes it moving when it needs to be. Sigourney Weaver grounds the whole affair with a fascinating turn as Ripley’s clone, almost animalistic and endearingly blunt, wholly justifying this tortured method of bringing her back after the previous film closed the book on Ripley’s story. An off-putting first act and some questionable visual choices hold this back from rising above dumb fun, but it’s about as fun as something this dumb can be. 6/10.

Saturday – It Ends With Us

Perhaps the first film ever that would have been improved by the presence of Ryan Reynolds – at least he would presumably have chemistry with Blake Lively. This is a bafflingly stupid film, a story of harrowing domestic abuse presented as an aspirational fashion-show montage. Lily Bloom’s victimhood is treated as a dark secret that the film wants to slowly unfold for you like the petals of a flower, but it’s so overbearingly obvious from the word go that the glimpses we get of violence almost become a comedy – the Mr Bean of wife-beaters burning his hand on a hot tray and accidentally elbowing Lily in the face results in her catatonic on the ground as if a bomb has just gone off in the apartment, making her willingness to brush past it and defend him feel absurd, especially compared to the screaming fit of rage it inspires in her teenage boyfriend. The intention is clearly a conversation on how women enable their abusers, but the absurdity of the plot and the lightness and flash of the presentation deflates any thematic motivation. Like a parody of a rom-com played entirely straight, it’s watchable if nothing else. 3/10.