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Non-Review Review: Last Night in Soho

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Darren

Last Night in Soho is a fascinating snapshot of the siren lure of nostalgia, and how it is so often filtered through a presumptive male gaze.

Last Night in Soho follows a young student named Eloise who moves to London for the first time to follow her dream of becoming a fashion designer. After some tensions with her roommate, Eloise moves out of her apartment into a small bedsit, with warnings that past tenants have had some strange experiences in the flat – disappearing in the dead of night, as if fleeing from something that shares the space. Eloise has always been sensitive to otherworldly presences, and it is no surprise when she seems to connect with the memories imprinted in her new bedroom.

Who nose?

Night after night, Eloise is seduced by memories of a young woman named Sandy, who came to London to pursue her own ambitions of becoming a singer. Sandy met a handsome talent agent named Jack, who promises that he can make all of her dreams come true. As Eloise sinks deeper into this nostalgic fantasies of the swinging sixties, she notices that the lines are begin blur – between her waking moments and her sleeping thoughts, between herself and the girl who visits her at night, between dreams and nightmares.

At its core, Last Night in Soho is a meditation on the idea that it is not always so easy to escape the past.

Bad romance.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: anya taylor-joy, edgar wright, film, giallo, last night in soho, London, male gaze, matt smith, Movie, nightmare, non-review, nostalgia, review, sixties, slasher, thomasin mckenzie, violence | 2 Comments »

177. Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady On Fire) – This Just In/World Tour 2020 (#226)

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Aoife Barry, Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair and Charlene Lydon, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.

This time, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu.

Marianne is a portrait artist who is summoned to a remote island and assigned a strange task. The Contessa would task Marianne with preparing a portrait of her daughter Héloïse, which might be sent to a waiting suitor in Milan. There is just one complication; Héloïse has refused to sit for any portrait painter, and so Marianne must paint the young woman without her knowledge. However, as Marianne studies her subject more intensely, she finds herself more and more drawn to this isolated and lonely soul.

At time of recording, it was ranked 226th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: aoife barry, céline sciamma, charlene lydon, imdb, lesbians, male gaze, podcast, portrait of a lady on fire, queer cinema, Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair, The 250, This Just In, titanic, world tour | Leave a comment »

46. Ah-ga-ssi (The Handmaiden) – This Just In (#247)

Posted on September 30, 2017 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Grace Duffy and Graham Day, This Just In is a subset of The 250 podcast, looking at notable new arrivals on the list of the 250 best movies of all-time, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.

This time, Park Chan-Wook’s Ah-ga-ssi.

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Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: erotica, feminism, film, male gaze, Park Chan-wook, psychic geography, South Korea, the handmaiden, violence | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Darren

There is something subversive lurking at the heart of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.

The film’s single best gag comes very early in the film, putting a wry twist on audience expectations. The movie’s opening credits feature the eponymous characters at a number of family occasions; birthday parties, weddings. Like any pair of overgrown manchildren, Mike and Dave imagine themselves to the be the life of the party. And, for the length of the opening credits, the audience is invited to see them in that manner. Their dance moves look impressive. Their costumes are fabulous. They brought their own fireworks. These guys, they know how to party.

More like “Wedding Crushers”, am I right?

In another comedy about arrested masculine development, that would be the end of it. The credits would establish the pair as the life and soul of any social gathering and maybe need to learn to balance that with some maturity. It is to the credit of Mike and Dave Need Weeding Dates that the film returns to that montage quite quickly. Insisting that the boys behave themselves at their sisters’ wedding, the duo object and insist that they are the party. “We thought you might say that,” remarks their father, reaching for the home media system.

The film then proceeds to demonstrate what happened directly after the impressive shots from the opening credits. There is devastation. There is catastrophe. There are broken bodies. Dave protests that this is not at all representative, and demands that their father edit back in the “epic tracking shots” that showcase how cool they are. It is the movie’s strongest moment, a skilful subversion of a comedy standard that suggests Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates might have a much better sense of irony than its two lead characters.

Mike and Dave need to have a long conversation about the direction their life has taken.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: adolescent, comedy, male gaze, men, mike and dave, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, non-review review, review | 6 Comments »

Millennium – Nostalgia (Review)

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Darren

This July, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the sixth season of The X-Files and the third (and final) season of Millennium.

Nostalgia is the last “serial killer of the week” story produced by Millennium.

Sure, there is a serial killer in Via Dolorosa and Goodbye to All That, but the last two episodes of Millennium are much more interested in the show’s mythology than in a nuts-and-bolts “Frank catches a serial killer” story. Appropriately enough, given its title, Nostalgia feels like a throwback to a simpler version of Millennium. In a way, it does more to capture the mood and feel of the first season of the show than anything like Matryoshka or Seven and One. It helps that Nostalgia is a great episode, judged by it own merits.

Frank sees all. All.

It makes sense that Nostalgia should come from Michael R. Perry. With his debut script for The Mikado in the second season, Perry had demonstrated quite a knack for traditional Millennium storytelling. The Mikado was arguably something of a throwback itself, the most old-school “serial killer of the week” story in the show’s delightfully off-kilter second season. If the show wanted to do one last “serial killer of the week” story, there was no writer better suited to crafting it than Michael R. Perry.

In a way, Nostalgia feels like belated vindication for the “back to basics” aesthetic running through the third season – proof that perhaps it might be possible for the show to recapture some of the stronger aspects of the first season even this late in the game. Nostalgia is a much better version of the stories that Closure and Through a Glass Darkly had tried to resurrect earlier in the year. It might be enough to entirely redeem the season’s stubborn fixation on a past fading into history, but it does demonstrate that there were interesting stories to be told using that technique.