Movie reviews

ACH SPIJ KOCHANIE (LULLABY KILLER)

Watchable. As for a crime story, it lacks suspense. A characteristic but unpleasant music piece gets repeated several times throughout the film. It attempts to play with the genre both with a visual motif and with the person's identity: the murderer touches his hat the way detectives do in cinema noir, then you hear him addressed as "judge", then you are told he's just on a Misdemeanour Court. Far too little to make it interesting.

THOR AT IMAX 3D

Watchable. Way too loud. I had to cover my ears several times. Besides the fantastic 80s-inspired music sounded a lot better in Dolby Atmos. For the visuals even Imax seemed to small at first. But at least it lets you see details like Thor's nose squashed against a window pane or the Sakaar ruler's painted nails. The story's not that thrilling the second time round. Nevertheless some jokes still amused me, e.g. when Thor suggests Doctor Strange could have sent him an email: "Do you have a computer?" "No, what for?" Chris's brother Luke Hemsworth is a stand-in for the actor playing Thor in the performance in one of the early scenes hence the semblance. I wonder if the Asgard refugees will reach Earth in the next movie or if that huge object from the mid-credit is going to be the basis of the plot.

MOTHER!

Watchable. At face value a class B horror, it's a metaphor of modern world tensions.  The isolated house looks like a separate country where two factions fight. On the one hand we have a man whose only job is it to write and even when he doesn't, he still won't do housework because, as he puts it, "writing is what I do". She does everything around the house and gives all her love to the man, which is never enough for him. He "can't even fuck" her properly but demands a baby. A female guest insists they should have children and her own sons turn out to be criminals. There's another power struggle once the baby's born as the baby is all the woman has but the man claims it's his. At the same time, when the house gets inundated with visitors, whom he appreciates and she doesn't, they behave not like guests but like refugees: when in a small number, they disobey house rules, hit on the woman against her will, sneer at the mention of it being "her house", the landlords have to clean up their mess, one con pretends to be a doctor, they commit a crime inside their house, mourn the death of one of their sons who got killed by the other in a fight, the husband reiterates "they've got nowhere to stay"; when en masse, they tell her to dress appropriately, pillage, demolish, grope her, say their prayers in one of their rooms, blow up, then the police lash out at her. With its poor execution, the movie gains in value in hindsight.