My 2024 Watchlist Obsession!

That always horrified me, the thought of a raccoon in my house.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

There's something so aesthetically satisfying in seeing (and hearing) a whole box of kibble poured onto a hard floor surface. I'm sure your cats would agree with me there.

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It starts, innocently enough, as a dream. A dream to cultivate flowers, which is a good idea from Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) - even his old uncle César (Yves Montand) admits as much when he discovers how much florists will pay. But it would be best to grow them on a neighboring property which has the advantage of a spring that César and Ugolin know about. Their neighbour doesn't want to sell them the land, and in the heat of the moment their neighbour ends up dead - but even this terrible but fortuitous turn of events doesn't bring Ugolin's dream any closer to fruition. Jean Cadoret (Gérard Depardieu) inherits the land, and even though he's a city man (and a hunchback) he has dreams of his own for the place. In the meantime, César and Ugolin have staunched the spring with concrete and a plug - and this will lead to Ugolin, who seemingly befriends Jean, having to wrestle with his conscience. As Jean battles the harsh climate and topography he drives himself closer and closer to an early grave in his desperation to make his farming dream a reality, and he doesn't know that he's actually in competition with his faux-friend's own dream. The more Jean suffers, the more Ugolin looks the other way, as greed holds sway and it becomes obvious that the real cause of Jean and his family's hardship is this rat-faced, filthy, two-faced man who has extended a false hand of friendship, and his awful uncle, who urges him on in denying Jean the help he needs, in what seems the worst kind of theft imaginable.

You get to a certain stage in Jean de Florette where I think most of us will think, "Okay, by this stage I would have told Jean the truth, uncle be damned." For some good folks, that is an almost immediate reaction. To others it's when Jean starts really hurting, and his farm starts to die. But I doubt many of us can watch this entire film and think they could be as duplicitous, greedy and immoral as Ugolin and especially César. You can see that Ugolin at least wrestles with the dilemma in his mind, and I really loved Daniel Auteuil in this movie - if I were Jean, I would have totally thought this guy was my friend, and that he was looking out for my best interests. Claude Berri is economical but direct and powerful in how he shows Jean's status in the village as a city person and hunchback - how he's hated, and distrusted by those who don't know him, despite being a kind of loving guy. But all of that makes Ugolin's betrayal even worse - because Jean and his family are depending on him being true to them. Gérard Depardieu gives us a Jean that becomes blind to the dangers around him in his quest for success in this venture - in any other film, he'd kind of be the villain in that he loses track of what's important (his wife and daughter) by risking his own life, and his finances, by constantly gambling in a "double-or-nothing" kind of sense. He'll risk more and more (without knowing that he has the winning hand so nearby.) Depardieu is fantastic, and takes us to the edges of madness, while at the same time embodying the much more pure (and at first confident and right) person in this story.

This really was a superior and extraordinarily excellent French drama, anchored by a third great performance - that of legend Yves Montand as the cynically awful César Soubeyran. Played out on some of the most visually pleasing, hilly areas in Province (close to Marseille), it's easy to agree with Jean when he arrives and keeps noting the beauty of the surrounding landscape. It's not the kind of flat terrain we'd normally associate with farming activities, and I almost gasped when Ugolin came home from military service and had to climb such a steep, mountainous incline just to take his luggage to his living quarters (a dirty, run-down, cluttered shack.) We're put in no doubt throughout the movie - this life is a tough life, and it will simply kill the uninitiated, unwise or unprepared. Surprisingly, the film doesn't suffer at all from being the first half of a 'two-part' story, and stands alone as a self-contained, fulfilling movie. It's excellent in all departments, and I was drawn in and fully engaged by Jean's dream, and the battle he wages against the elements while being hamstrung by an unknown that he doesn't know is an unknown. His betrayal eats away at him like an undiagnosed cancer. It was so compelling, and such a great way to showcase the best and worst in all of us. As a period film it has a certain 'timeless' quality to it, and I simply can't wait to finish the story...

Glad to catch this one - it won 4 BAFTA Awards from 10 nominations, and 1 César Award from 8 nominations, along with being nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Jean de Florette

I have still never watched this because it seems very squirmy which is a feeling I do not care for one bit.

It's more weird than squirmy. For me, the relationship between the women and the various men who work for them was the most awkward part, mostly because I was like "The vibes here are off, but I genuinely can't tell who is taking advantage of whom."

Jean de Florette would make it pretty high on my list of favorite first time watches this year. It's one of the few films I can think of which finds beauty and darkness in the natural world, yet gets you to appreciate both at the same time.

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Also, Grey Gardens is great, bu I should revisit it soon to refresh my memory. Everything I've seen so far from the Maysles brothers is pretty great.

You might find that it's not quite as much like that as you'd immediately guess at face value - I think the Maysles bros were conscious of not making this a complete squirm-fest, and were quite kind in how this was presented. That's not to say it's completely squirm-free, of course.

When summed up, Manon of the Spring makes for a very satisfying whole when coupled with Jean de Florette - all of the counterbalance that was needed organically sprouts from Marcel Pagnol's story (he originally wrote and directed the 1952 version, before writing a novel based on it.) Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart) is now a goatherder, still living in the same countryside where César (Yves Montand) and Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) have set up their carnation-growing business. She's in her late teens, and becomes the target of an obsessive, overpowering love from Ugolin, while at the same time falling for the much more handsome, intelligent and age-appropriate Bernard Olivier (Hippolyte Girardot), who is a schoolteacher. She also resorts to drastic measures in her fight against the locals when she overhears townspeople talk about how everyone there knew there was a spring on her father's property, but they all kept silent. The pain she feels is revisited on them all, but in the meantime Ugolin suffers even more - his unhealthy, hysteric desire and fanatical devotion leads to one particular scene that had me squirming, and shouting, and almost beyond belief at what I was seeing. The final denouement felt perfect, with Greek tragedy levels of heartbreak and revelation mixed with a fitting closure to all that had come before.

Getting to this stage of Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring, I'm much more loathe to bring up too much more concerning the story. There was a certain inevitability to the first part, but here anything can happen - and all paths are open for us to see many possibilities eventuating. If Manon seeks revenge, will it consume her along with those she tries to get even with? If Ugolin is rejected, how will he react? What consequences will there be? Manon seems so vulnerable and alone out there - and by that, I'm not saying that she's not capable, or brave - she's both - but simply that she's such a lone figure. Her mother is off galivanting around Europe, making a career for herself in theater, leaving her with no family or even any friends (bar Bernard) to fight beside her. César, for his part, simply wants the Soubeyran name not to die out - and has high hopes for his comically hopeless, filthy, creepy and extremely unattractive nephew. I felt so much tension just because of the fact that I knew nothing would be beyond him. He could sink to any low imaginable. A trump card - and real power over the town - sits deep within a remote series of caves, down within the ancient rock the water that feeds the spring flows over. It all comes together in a way that's pleasing in a dramatic way, and the surrounds of Provence once again play their part as an awesome and majestic backdrop to what happens.

Once all is said and done, Claude Berri and his cadre of actors manage to have their audience feeling sympathy for everyone and opens up the scope of this to make it a tale about generations. Think of it as karma, writ large on the rocky, sun-drenched hills, sand and desperation of those living off the land in the villages dotted around Provence - where the men leave on military service and come back with dreams ahead of them, or sometimes dreams shattered and lost. The dreams of César - for his family and his nephew - were enough for him to see morality as nothing more than a hindrance, but by the time we've seen this second film we understand all of the characters and can see why everyone was the way they were. The "if only" of everything tugs away like an ache, but at the same time there's such a satisfying feeling of having come full circle. It's a great story, told in such a wonderful way by these two films. I've really enjoyed engrossing myself in them, and figure that the same goes for many others. If you haven't seen either, or even if you've seen the first but not the second yet - you ought to catch both. Although the first stands alone just fine, the two films are the ying and yang that makes such a greater whole picture.

Glad to catch this one - Emmanuelle Béart won a César Award for playing Manon and this (coupled with Jean de Florette) was named the Best Foreign Language Film of 1986 by the National Board of Review.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Manon of the Spring

Expectations and first impressions can do funny things to your film-viewing experiences. With movies on my watchlist, I feel I've already done the work concerning reading reviews and making sure it's something I really, really want to see. So when it comes to eventually watching them, so much time has passed - I remember nothing, but don't feel the need to catch up on what they're about. I like being surprised. With Mommy, I didn't have much to go on except for the picture on the film's poster - which to me looks like some kind of abuse/hostage situation, with possible sexual assault added to the mix. (The situation in the film is extraordinary in how different it was to what I pictured.) Then comes a title card before the movie starts, with some information for us concerning a fictional new law introduced to the Canada of the near-future - S-14, which allows for parents to have their children committed to institutions if their behaviour becomes uncontrollable. You can imagine the trepidation with which we meet this film's tearaway teenage protagonist then, Steve Després (Antoine Olivier Pilon), who is being expelled from an institution for starting a fire which severely burned a fellow-inmate. After spending 10 to 15 minutes of film-time with Steve, my impression of him could be summed up easily with what was going through my mind - "This kid is Caligula." He's wild, prone to sudden and inexplicable violence, rude, sexually inappropriate, abusive, manipulative and completely unpredictable. Now I was afraid for every other character in this film...

The first character we do meet in Mommy is Steve's mother, Diane (Anne Dorval), or as we know her, "Die". Die is pretty confrontational herself, and quick to go on the attack in situations involving the exchange of differing views. She swears, smokes and doesn't shy away from telling Steve exactly what she thinks of him, despite loving her son with equal fervor. The pair together are a force of nature to flee from, and the first time they have a physical confrontation with each other it's ghastly and terrifying. In need of medical treatment, but with Die reluctant to take her hurt son to a hospital, Steve's mother begs her neighbour, Kyla (Suzanne Clément), for help. Kyla is a high school teacher on sabbatical, and as a relationship builds between her and Die, she's enlisted as a home-schooling teacher for her son. What follows involves these three characters principally, and goes into what I'd categorize as spoiler territory, but I wasn't only surprised by what happened, I was surprised by how amazing this movie is. It's the kind of movie that can perceptively change your views about people in general - it's a surprise masterpiece by a filmmaker who deserves to be the talk of the film world. Why did I not even hear about this film when it came out? Probably because I was relying on the likes of mainstream publications instead of word of mouth.

There's a reason for everything in Mommy, from it's unusual 1:1 aspect ratio to the fear I spent most of the film gripped in, and of course I have wild praise for Pilon, Dorval and Clément - three French-Canadian bundles of thespian talent who power this movie right into your solar plexus, where it stays long after the end credits are finished. This isn't some tawdry thriller like I at first expected - this is a very humanistic, emotionally-charged, sometimes (often) scary and delightfully written and directed exploration of something that's important for all of us to learn - at least in an emotional sense. There aren't any easy answers for us, or for Die, Kyla and Steve, but to feel some of the fear, pain, love, joy and disappointment in such stark, yet cinematically expert fashion (get a load of this film's soundtrack, and smooth cinematography) takes us to places that prove cinema's worth. I'm surprised myself by how I feel about Mommy's characters, who could at times be labeled "irredeemable", and certainly cross lines in shocking manners. Maybe I arrived at the point I did by fearing the worst, or judging by initial appearances, but regardless - it's the extraordinary highs and lows that unfold over Mommy's 138 minutes that create a concoction both complex and full of the kind of layered personality that touches on the real. I loved it.

Glad to catch this one - it competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2014, and ended up winning the Jury Prize. It also won a César for Best Foreign Film, along with dozens of other accolades.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Mommy

It's a very strong film that takes seriously the question of what to do with young people who have serious mental/emotional problems, but who are right on the edge of being someone who could function out in society, yet who also seem obviously on a trajectory to harm others. I like that you see in Die echoes of the behaviors that her son cannot control.

The only other Dolan film I've seen is Tom at the Farm, which isn't as good as Mommy but is definitely worth a look. I started watching The Death and Life of John F Donovan and it just did not sustain my attention at all. I feel like at one point I heard good buzz about Laurence Anyways, but I have yet to check it out.

I often feel a little bit of trepidation when it comes to watching war films made during or shortly after the Second World War - they're usually jingoistic, unrealistic and light on food for thought. Decision Before Dawn though, bucks all of these trends and not only heralds a German character as the hero of the piece, but takes us for a stunningly real-feeling tour of Nazi Germany's inner sanctum in late 1944, where unbridled destruction, paranoia and fear reign over a struggling population. There's a real sense of scale, as the film was shot in the cities of Würzburg, Nürnberg, and Mannheim, which were still the site of ruins and wreckage - and the assistance of the U.S. Military along with the German people living in these places made for really dynamic and believable imagery. Amongst the carnage walks Corporal Karl Maurer (Oskar Werner), known as "Happy" to his American military intelligence handlers. It's Happy's job to find out the position of the 11th Panzer Division once reinserted behind enemy lines - a great act of bravery when you consider what the Nazis would do to him if his status as a "traitor" is revealed. Another point of view might be that the Nazis themselves are traitors to Germany considering what they have done - but nevertheless, it's not easy to be fighting a war against your own former comrades.

Decision Before Dawn feels a little sluggish and slow in the build up to the mission portion of the film, with narrative strands (such as a French love interest for Happy - Monique, played by Dominique Blanchar) that end up going nowhere when all is said and done. We never return to headquarters and only briefly pick up on the characters we meet in this portion of the film, with the American commanding this venture, Lieutenant Dick Rennick (Richard Basehart), and the "is he telling the truth, or is he a double agent?" other German recruit, Sergeant Rudolf Barth (Hans Christian Blech) - otherwise known as "Tiger", not appearing again until close to the end of the film. The really strong portion of the movie - Happy's mission into Germany and the various situations he gets himself into - is basically a one-man-show, and Werner is an undeniably strong and compelling presence in the movie. His basic humanity comes across in the way he plays his part alone, but of course there are many instances where we see him stick his neck out for strangers - such as a man sentenced to death for desertion. I really admired the film for taking the course of realism, and having Happy not push his luck and be suicidally heroic. I can imagine so many poorly written war films making Happy that kind of person - but he's a realist, and understands futility. This film was all about realism.

It's mind-blowing finding a film released a mere six years after the war's end that's as meticulously balanced as Decision Before Dawn is, with the good and bad acknowledged with a documentary-like lack of bias. It's a kind of salute (and reminder) to/of all of the people who died defeating Nazism without their names ever being known - in other words, those people who were spies and waging a much less visible conflict than those on the front lines. I think it might have struck people as completely novel that there were Germans who ended up being heroes for the Allied cause during the Second World War, as they were reinserted into Germany and acted as sources of information or sabotage. This film is cognizant enough to not ignore potential arguments against it as well - so that when German P.O.W.s are being interrogated, there's many a piece of dialogue along the lines of "Oh, so now Germany is losing you're willing to work for us, but when you guys were winning you were a total Nazi!" Each German captured has to speak for himself, and explain their own personal circumstances regarding why they were fighting. For most, it was either that or death - and consequences were often visited upon the families of these people as well. For the most part this was really good - if the first 45 minutes or so had of been tighter and more focused, it would have been great.

Glad to catch this one - this was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award in 1952, surprisingly (for a Best Picture nom) only garnering one other nomination - for Editing. It was also nominated for a Best Cinematography Golden Globe.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Decision Before Dawn

Mindwalk is a reminder to me that it's all about timing. If I'd watched this when I'd been most idealistic, and least worldly and knowledgeable - say, 1997, then I'd have been endlessly haranguing everyone, insisting they watch this. I would have been excited about it. I'm sure that, for some, it's an eye-opener, and can set people on a path to discovery and enlightenment. For me, it's nothing new, and doesn't tell me much that I don't already know. The entire film consists of a philosophical discussion three people have - one a presidential candidate, Jack Edwards (Sam Waterston), the other a scientist, Sonia Hoffman (Liv Ullmann), and the last a poet, Thomas Harriman (John Heard) - giving us three different points of view once Sonia introduces the other two to a necessary paradigm shift needed from humanity as a whole if we're to confront the problems facing the modern world. It starts with science, and how our view of reality has been altered by scientific discovery from a Newtonian/Cartesian mechanistic view - thinking of life itself and reality as clockwork in nature - to a systems approach where cause and effect aren't so rigidly defined. She discusses the insane discoveries made concerning the structure of matter itself, where the stuff everything is made of behaves in fantastical, bizarre and counterintuitive ways. The claim is that humanity is still hung up on an expectation that the universe can be understood in a mechanical kind of way. Politics, especially, is lagging behind.

Once our mindset has been completely altered, the problems of the world get a thorough talking through - and who of us hasn't spent an evening with friends trying to solve all the world's problems or bemoaned the unnecessary suffering when it comes to starving children, greed, environmental damage, third world debt and the money wasted on a stupendously powerful military that lacks the sufficient threat to justify it's existence. Brazil owes money, and the only way it can keep it's economy from collapsing is to destroy it's treasured rainforests at the rate of 10,000 acres a day. A third world child dies at the rate of one every two seconds, chiefly because of foreign debt. The United States has a carrier force that could easily defeat the rest of the world combined, even if the rest of the world doubled their carrier might. America could halve it's military might, and still defend themselves from any conceivable threat that could be reasonably imagined at this stage in world history. In 2023 the U.S. spent $1 trillion making it stronger. In the meantime, social and economic problems are so great that American society is teetering on the brink, and the nation's leaders careen from one crisis to the next. The two sides of that equation don't make sense. Nobody has the power or influence to change this, because money buys you political influence and enough media control and power to convince voters that any change would spell disaster for them. When is the paradigm shift going to kick in? It seems like there has been one - only not the one the writers of this film were counting on.

Now and then, Thomas butts in with a little poetry, and Jack says just enough to prove that he's absolutely clueless - but he seems very impressed with Sonia's ideas and musings. Sonia became disillusioned when she found out her work on lasers was being utilized by "the military", and the subject of Oppenheimer comes up more than once. How responsible is science for the harm that has come from it's successes? This is why she's wandering around Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy - listless and in a funk. She explains that you can understand a tree by examining it's roots, leaves, photosynthesis and organic growth - but that's not enough. You have to include the way it provides a habitat for animals and insects, and how it's process of photosynthesis is part of a symbiotic relationship with life by way of the exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Nothing can be defined (or should be) by removing it from the way it relates to the world around it, and this goes for the way we define anything. Humans have had a habit of ignoring the holistic when it comes to the way we view the world around us. If Sonia, Jack and Thomas saw the world we lived in today, they'd probably be pretty disappointed with some aspects, but since everything they said in this film felt like old news - stuff I already knew - then perhaps we have advanced in our thinking. In any case, apart from some lovely views of Mont Saint-Michel, I didn't find enough here to excite me much, and gained little insight from Mindwalk - but that's not to say it would be like that for everyone. It depends on where you're at in life's journey.

Glad to catch this one - it's writers, Floyd Byars and Fritjof Capra, received a nomination for Best Screenplay at the 7th Independent Spirit Awards..




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Mindwalk

I don't want to pretend that I understand exactly how Bait works the way it does. On the one hand, it's not as esoteric and freeform as Mark Jenkin's follow-up feature Enys Men - but on the other hand, it's far from your regular, everyday fare. Visually, it seems that monochrome wasn't nearly enough for Jenkin, and as such the viewport we see the narrative unfold through is grainy and distorted enough to make us think we're either dreaming or watching a lost movie from the late 19th Century. He reinforces the style he wants further by decoupling the dubbing and sound looping, along with adding a dozen frames here and there that are out of place with the rest of the film, or else freezing the action altogether. What this all feels like to me is like I'm not seeing what I'm seeing directly, through my own eyes, but through the mind of somebody else. If there were a machine that could read minds and give us a visual representation of what's going on, this is what I imagine the effect might be. Because this seemed so esoteric at first, I really wasn't sure how clear the narrative might be - but this film presents us with a situation that becomes clearer as the film advances, and it's more a situation it's main character finds himself in rather than any kind of odyssey. It's one common to modern man - of displacement from one's traditional place in the world and the resentment bred from losing your heritage and economic security.

Martin Ward (Edward Rowe) is a fisherman in a seaside Cornish village without a boat, who catches a few mere fish each day with his nets while his brother, who has ended up with their father's fishing vessel, uses it to ferry tourists about. In the meantime his family home has been bought by the Leigh family - Sandra (Mary Woodvine) and Tim (Simon Shepherd) who often clash with Martin over local issues, giving him a sense that these newcomers to the area have taken over and are edging his family out of their traditional place. You can extrapolate Martin's story far and wide these days - and you feel the very special kind of hurt it must feel that the Leighs are in the meantime occupying and redecorating what was once the Ward's place of safety, security and heritage. Pretty much everything we see in this film touches on change, and the thoughtless actions of interlopers who have no appreciation for convention or history. Every action that directly affects Martin causes him to strike out in anger, ratcheting up the temperature another degree and bringing everyone closer to some kind of tragic outcome. People used to invade their neighbours with swords, arrows and fighting - but now it's done with weaponised money when economic uncertainty weakens places ripe for the plucking.

As is usual for me, it took me a little while to get fully onboard with Bait - at first my impression was, "well, this is going to be a headache to watch and decipher." Somehow though, the hazy style of the movie made my emotional reaction to what I saw more keen and clearly felt. It was as if everything had an enhanced realism to it, and perhaps that's because I really felt that I was peering in at someone's mind instead of looking through a window and seeing everything from my own perspective. I drifted in and out just a little, and I don't know if this was because of my general mood or else because it was the kind of film which allowed one to take a step back without losing your place or having an effect on your immersion. It's a very moody film, and works at you emotionally without being an intellectual exercise, but at the same time there's a cornucopia of experimental movie-making techniques that Jenkin plays with for one to analyse. It's very specific to this filmmaker's vision, and his connection with this particular corner of the world, so there's nothing particularly pretentious or overwhelming about it's design - just refreshing originality that in many respects makes this one I'll recall every time this artist's name comes up.

Glad to catch this one - Bait won a BAFTA for Outstanding debut from a British writer, director or producer and was nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year at the 2020 awards. It also won a British Independent Film Award.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Bait

Hmmmm. I didn't love Enys Men, which at times felt like it was trying to be oblique in a way that felt forced instead of natural. Haven't seen Bait.

Would you say you liked them equally, or did you like one more than the other?

They're both pretty extreme exercises in deliberate distortion, so if you didn't like Enys Men I'd beware, but whilst I didn't particularly feel any kind of connection with that latest film of his I was able to relate a lot more and actually feel a lot for the characters (and about what was going on) in Bait - which might make all the difference.

I hated it.

We meet lead singer of Something She, Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), already in complete freefall at the start of Her Smell. Backstage at a concert, she partakes in bizarre cult-like pseudo-religious ceremonies, throws attractive offers of band-saving concert tours back in people's faces, puts her infant daughter in danger through her reckless actions and generally acts like a frenzied psychopath as her two fellow Something She members - bassist Marielle Hell (Agyness Deyn) and drummer Ali van der Wolff (Gayle Rankin) watch on in horror - the realization that their superstardom is under threat of crashing down in the very near future written on their faces. The heady mix of drugs and fame are something most of us would struggle with I'd expect - but some people more than others. Her Smell gives us a very intimate look at what it's like backstage and in the recording studio when the close sisterhood of a talented rock group begins to disintegrate, as their much vaunted Goddess lead singer becomes a loose cannon, secure in her own mind that it's everyone else around her at fault for the sliding fortunes of Something She. I really enjoyed this because of how real the "behind the curtain" peek at how the music industry functions feels, and how everyone who depends on the fortunes of one person on the rocks become like passengers in a crashing plane - powerless to do anything about it, but simply grimace as the ground rushes up to meet them.

Super secret shameful admission here - I often imagine myself a famous rock star and lead singer of a stupendously successful band. After high school my close-knit group of artistically minded friends and I formed "Sneezeweed", of which I was lead singer. We fought all the time, but I often wonder if we were really as bad as I thought we were. Probably. But that band is always the basis of my fantasies - my imagining of us being super talented and a revelation in music, going on to release albums considered the greatest of all time. Seeing behind the scenes of such stardom in Her Smell fed into my curiosity of what it would have been like, and in some cases reminded me of what it was like to jam, argue and hang out in a studio full of musical instruments and recording equipment. This film has a much firmer focus on Becky though, and her destructive, traumatized, manic mindset - set up via a troubled childhood, and set alight via fame, drug abuse, influence, pressure, adulation and success. She's a walking catastrophe, and tragic in that she was a star for a reason - she had talent, and was part of a group who combined to make great music. What would it take to make her appreciate that she's the cause of her own problems? Will she ever appreciate just how many people she's hurting, and how they depend on her? Can she be saved? She's in self-immolation mode despite the fact she's surrounded by people who love her, and pine for the version of her that was lost once she careened out of control.

I really enjoyed Her Smell - Elisabeth Moss absolutely shines in this film and it was criminal that she never received an Oscar nomination for her role. Come on. There are a whole bevy of young actresses showcased, and I was ever so pleased to see Eric Stoltz as a firm presence as Something She's manager, Howard Goodman. How he suffers in this - his finances directly tied to Becky, whereupon he loses big time as Something She's fortunes sink. Musically, it's always tough having your film be about an ultra-famous band or singer and yet when they perform they're pretty average, and we have to basically pretend that they're delivering one of their timeless, chart-topping hits. The singing - actually from Moss - is okay, but we still need to suspend disbelief. What I loved about this though, were all the behind the scenes moments of drama that mixed with the pros and cons of being superstar performers - the behaviour that would be completely unacceptable in any other workplace is the norm here, with the most inebriated person in the room actually in charge and the decider of everyone's fortunes. Working through the corridors, dressing rooms, toilets, mirrors, drug-laden tables and chairs made me think briefly of racing through a submarine in Das Boot - tight spaces where the only implosion will be that of a rock star - all the glamour, sparkle and shine turned to horror via fame and it's chemical attendees. This isn't how I imagine my own superstardom, but the ugly truth will always trump fantasy, and make for compelling watching.

Glad to catch this one - Elizabeth Moss was nominated for many awards, winning an International Online Cinema Award. Her Smell would win a "Most Underrated Film" award at the Internet Film Critic Society gongs.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Her Smell

Ugh, fan of Moss, but I hated this movie.

This is a fantastic personal tidbit.