The latest film releases include Mickey 17, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Night of the Zoopocalypse, and The Rule of Jenny Pen. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for The Los Angeles Times.
Mickey 17
In this sci-fi thriller from Oscar-winning Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho (Parasite), Robert Pattinson plays a space mission volunteer who repeatedly dies and is resurrected.
Seibold: “He does live in this future where he can just get reprinted. … All the people around him treat him like his life has no value. They send him on these dangerous missions. He falls down a crevasse at the beginning of the movie, and a friend says, ‘I'm just gonna leave you there. We'll print out another one, no problem.’ … The sheer Sisyphusian existence he's living is hilarious, and Director Bong Joon-Ho really taps into that futility that he's encountering.
It also takes place in this weird alternate future where he's on a ship occupied entirely by this weird right-wing cult, who follow this Mark Ruffalo character who's a combination of Donald Trump and a televangelist. And he's talking about finding a new land where his people can be safe from persecution, when really he is this eugenicist and this shallow guy. And his wife, who's played by Toni Collette, is obsessed with sauces and foods. And they're really these shallow, bourgeois idiots. And his drama happens when — what happens when he does find that his life has value, or he actually does find something that he wants to fight for, but only after struggling through a lot of his own futility and his own idiocy.
… Robert Pattinson is an incredibly interesting actor, and the choices he makes in this movie to make his character this dejected Brooklynite is really interesting. Bong Joon-Ho tends to get a little carried away at the end of a lot of his movies, he tends to throw in a lot of extra twists. … And you want him to stop and explore some of these new things instead of just throwing them all into the climax. So it does get a little snarled by the end.”
Nicholson: “It almost feels like Bong's greatest hits bolted together crudely. There's a lot of Okta in here as well, a lot of Snowpiercer, some monster mechanics like The Host. … He's like, ‘I won the Oscar. Now let me reintroduce myself to people who are just catching up with me.’ Bong heads might be like, ‘You've done better work.’ But I think all these pieces on their own are fun enough to make it worthwhile entertainment, even though … [it] goes off the rails and even loses its own interest in the character of Mickey himself.
… This is based on a book that came out a few years ago called Mickey7, so 10 fewer Pattinsons. Tragedy everywhere, and that guy was more a cynical, grumpy hero. And I love the idea of making him just doofy and the slowest person to realize how much his character is being manipulated.”
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
At a funeral in Zambia, grievers face questions about how to remember and pay respect to the deceased uncle who abused the women in the family. Director Rungano Nyoni is Zambian and British, and her previous work commented on womanhood and social conservatism.
Nicholson: “This movie really starts with just a wow shot, you have this girl, her name is Shula. She's played by the actress Susan Chardy. She's driving home from some sort of party in this really cool costume. It's like rhinestone helmet, inflatable jumpsuit, very Missy Elliot. And she finds her uncle's corpse in the road, and she just pulls over, and she seems a little bit relatively unmoved by this sight of this dead body, as does her cousin who shows up to help her wait for the cops. And her cousin is just this party girl who's really drunk, really funny. And you realize that this is going to be a very modern, zingy look at women in Zambia, specifically women like Shula, who have an education, a job, where she's trying to move past her family's traditions in the local way that things are done.
And of course, where this film goes is that it sinks in more and more. How overwhelming the family traditions here are. When the older generation shows up, there's lots of wailing, lots of demands of what people are supposed to do, lots of people crying on their knees, because that's how it's done. And this actress barely talks, and you just see this resistance in her eyes about celebrating this uncle that they call a pervert. This movie is actually really fun, and just building to the huge, screaming climax that's incredibly gripping.”
Seibold: “[The director] made a film in 2017 called I Am Not a Witch. And both that film and this one are very much about how the local customs are … designed to repress women, how they are meant to keep women down and keep men in power. And she is very careful to make all of the men in her films look like complete buffoons or monsters. … The final scene … has a comedic undertone, but it's also incredibly harrowing, watching these men assert their power, and watching these women have to shrink back and sit idly by while they defend … a known abuser. There's also something very dream-like about her movies, that people float through these … liminal spaces, where you feel like you're half dreaming. … There's a lot of humor, and there's a lot of humanity, but there's this weird subconscious quality that makes them that much more intriguing.”
Night of the Zoopocalypse
In this animated children’s horror flick, animals have to escape a zoo before a zombie virus infects them.
Seibold: “The main character is this very lanky timberwolf character played by Gabbi Kosmidis. And one of the rabbits at the zoo eats a meteorite that lands there, becomes this zombie with glowing eyes. And they also become, when they become zombies, really strangely gelatinous, and the animation changes in this really fascinating way. He ends up teaming up with a mountain lion, played by David Harbour. There's also a proboscis monkey played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who's the one who wants to sell everybody out to the zombies. … What I admire about this movie is the character design is really wild and out there. Eyes are bigger, actual physique of the animals is elongated and strange-looking compared to … designs you might see in a Disney or a DreamWorks film. And also, the zombies are legitimately scary. … All of this is really visually creative in a way that you don't see in a lot of mainstream animation. This is made from a smaller, independent studio, and they did something really fascinating.”
The Rule of Jenny Pen
This horror movie features a couple of senior citizens languishing in a nursing home, starring John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush.
Nicholson: “The basic idea here is that Geoffrey Rush has had a stroke, and now he's been put in this home, and he is a miserable person even before this. He's this very unpleasant, judgmental, former judge who finds being in this home completely demeaning. And then he realizes that this home is under the thumb of this manipulator who's been there for a really long time, played by John Lithgow, who terrorizes all of the residents with this doll that he wears on his hand like a puppet named Jenny Pen. He's this geriatric version of the Joker. … This movie becomes about how people who are willing to break the rules can get away with basically everything, because nobody, including any of the nurses, is equipped to recognize the scale of what's going on with John Lithgow just controlling the power structure of this entire retirement home.
… The doll itself is silly, I could do without the Jenny Pen part of it all together, even though a lot of vile things happen with this doll, and from there, the movie drags a little bit. But these two leads, Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow, they're just great. … You want to close your eyes a lot at what they get up to. And I really like how the director, James Ashcroft, and his editing team, they really handle how this Rush character, who's not in good health, physically or mentally, is slipping in and out of consciousness the whole time. And you do get this really just gripping awareness and terror of what is it like to realize that you're not present in your own body.”
Seibold: “The big part of this movie is the Geoffrey Rush character trying to voice his grievances to the nursing staff, and nobody believing him. The idea that these people who live in nursing homes are not listened to, that getting older strips you of your ability to gain any kind of respect or even the ear of the people around you. … There's very little levity or modulation. There aren't any twists. It just saunters very aggressively down more and more violent paths. But you're in it because Geoffrey Rush is unbearably tortured and … struggling with his own body. And there are fewer greater delights than watching John Lithgow just go full villain. … From what I understand, he is a wholly decent human being, but he plays heavy so well.”