The latest film releases include Death of a Unicorn, Grand Tour, An Unfinished Film, and The Ballad of Wallis Island. Weighing in are Alonso Duralde and Dave White, film critics and co-hosts of the movie podcast Linoleum Knife.
Death of a Unicorn
Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father and daughter who accidentally hit a unicorn with their car, and the blood that splashes on them clears their skin and enhances their vision. And so, they try domesticating the mythical animals and make money off of their healing powers. Then the animals strike back.
Duralde: “We think of unicorns as being the fluffy, adorable Lisa Frank creations, but these are deadly creatures, and so as a monster movie, Death of a Unicorn works pretty well; as a satire of corporations and the horribleness of very rich people. … This movie delivers its satirical points with all of the subtlety of a unicorn horn going right into the back of your head.”
White: “The unicorns are a retaliatory force. They are not to be trifled with. But as a primer for class warfare, it seems aimed at a young audience in search of genre filmmaking that will satisfy the gut desire for gnarly mayhem, while giving them a political allegory that they can process later.”
Grand Tour
Set at the height of the British empire during the 20th century, Edward gets cold feet about his pending marriage and runs away, so his fiancé Molly is on the chase through Thailand, the Philippines, and China. Portuguese director Miguel Gomes won Best Director at Cannes last year for this movie.
White: “The title itself … comes from this historical tradition of young money people traveling through Europe for education sake, but also as a marker of class distinction. Later, the idea would expand through the grand tour of Asian countries, which is where we find ourselves here. This part of the movie is shot in black and white, and it fully embodies the European … vision of the Asian continent that you would find in … The Letter … starring Bette Davis, in which a very distorted Western understanding of Singapore is in full flower. And that stylistic choice for the narrative portion of this film is intentional, because it is frequently cut through with contemporary color documentary footage that came from Gomez and his crew, that they shot before shooting the black-and-white fictional story on sound stages. The contrast then is both kaleidoscopic and visually mesmerizing, because now you have fact and fiction mirroring each other in ways that contrast the colonial past and the post-colonial present. Keeping your footing throughout this as a viewer … could be a challenge, but I think it's also worth it.”
Duralde: “This is one of those movies where all the British characters speak Portuguese. But [Miguel Gomes] is making a very cogent point about Europe's colonization of Asia, the way that they treated it for a long time as a bauble, and that Asia is carrying on quite well without them now.”
An Unfinished Film
Based on director Lou Ye’s experience, a production crew is shooting a movie in Wuhan, China, in January 2020, right at the start of COVID lockdowns.
White: “What begins as the story of a film within a film becomes the story of people trying to survive, and stay sane, and keep going during the first wave of COVID. Now, the footage you see is a mix of actors playing characters, and crew members playing themselves. It's a mix of fiction and nonfiction, and quite often it is intentionally ambiguous. And the finished version that we see here consists of phone video, Zoom calls … and clips from Lou Ye’s earlier films.
There have been a few documentary features about official governmental responses to COVID, both in the U.S. and China, and a handful of COVID-based narratives like the rom-com 7 Days from 2021. But what this film suggests, from both its formal ambiguity and its very title, is that we aren't quite done yet with any of it. … Anyone with an interest in how the film industry has responded to this horrible recent history should see it.”
Duralde: “I'm thrilled that this film exists because for me, it's been an ongoing thing where this was a trauma that happened to the world, and at least in the United States, we barely acknowledge it. People have managed to politicize this. So we're at the five-year anniversary of when this country started shutting down. Where are the retrospectives? Where are the articles? Think about five years after 9/11 and how much news coverage that got. … Nobody is talking about this mass trauma that we all endured. I think we're all still walking wounded after it. … There's not a monument to the people that we lost. There's not a monument to the anxiety that we developed from staying home.
… So I want more movies like this. But I want people to see this movie because I think it's so important that we not just remember what happened, but acknowledge that it happened, and acknowledge what it did to all of us. Because we're not having that conversation, and we really need to.”
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden are musicians who venture to a remote town in Wales to play a show for an audience of one. Both were estranged for years, before a superfan (played by Tim Key) unites them.
Duralde: “Tim Key stars as a guy who is a wealthy eccentric, and he has brought together his favorite musical duo, McGwyer and Mortimer, played by … Tom Basden and Carrie Mulligan, to this island to perform. McGwyer does not know that Mortimer is coming because the two of them have not spoken in years. They were romantically together, as well as a musical duo, and they both went off in separate directions. And so there's a lot of awkwardness there. There's a lot of awkwardness in realizing that they're playing for an audience of one. They're stuck on a tiny island with one little store that carries rice pudding, but not rice, which is a problem when your phone has fallen into the ocean. … This movie is about two steps away from being a horror movie.
… Instead, of course, everyone learns things and grows. … The movie, it's very sentimental. It taps into this idea of: What if I could get my favorite band together, who no longer speaks to each other? And not only could I fix them, but they could fix me, and see how cool I am. There's a lot of wish fulfillment going on here.”
White: “It's cute and sweet. It gives you exactly the warmth that you want, a lot of scenery to luxuriate in, enough deeper emotion to make you feel like you've seen something somewhat profound. It expertly glosses over the bizarrely manipulative behavior on the part of Tim Key's character in a way that will make any reasonable person feel gross. But I will give it this: It does explore his grief as a motivating factor in a far more restrained way than I expected it to do, and occasionally I found myself moved by that.”