I have been on a couple of long flights recently and, as we all know, flights mean films, so here are some brief and helpful film reviews for you. To be especially useful, I will start with the best and work down to the worst.
Girls Will Be Girls is an Indian English language film set in a prestigious boarding school (hence the use of English). Our heroine is a sensible girl in her final year, just made Head Girl, who starts a relationship with a new boy. The original angle of the film is that the girl rather looks down on her mother (who is temporarily living nearby in order to be near her on her final year) while looking up to her father (who is mostly absent, making money) but her boyfriend charms her mother, making for an interesting family dynamic to add to the (more usual) "first love" story. It's not a classic or must-see film, but it's pretty good. As with many of my choices, part of the interest is seeing incidental glimpses of life in a foreign land, but that's a smaller part of the appeal of this film than some of the others below because of the cultural similarities between this milieu and our own.
Next, two films not too far behind Girls Will Be Girls in quality, namely Wicked and Tales of Taipei. You will already know all about Wicked, so I needn't say much except that the overall design of the film is confident and stylish, and Ariana Grande gives a surprisingly good performance - spot on for the role, in my view. Tales is a very different film. It's a collection of short films by different directors, some very loosely connected to others but not so as to make a whole, all about aspects of life in Taipei at around the time of COVID. I didn't think that all of the individual "tales" were first class, but some were affecting, or funny, and all were interesting.
After that, in a weird coincidence, two films featuring east Asian children with a stammer. My Sunshine is a Japanese film about a boy (with a stammer) who sees a girl figure skating and decides to take up the sport himself. It's one of those beautifully-shot, long-lingering-scenes kind of films ('Un Certain Regard' at Cannes, of course), with a soundtrack mostly consisting of Clair de Lune. It's pleasant but not enough happens to justify the length - and that's despite the fact that it is not a long film. Blossoms Under Somewhere is also very well shot, but strikingly different in tone: our stammering teenager this time is a girl at an elite Hong Kong girls' day school who (not to put too fine a point on it) sells her used knickers to men. (Elite Indian boarding school - English language. Elite Hong Kong day school - mostly Cantonese, but some English. Now you know.) Are her customers not that nice? Is the wrong-side-of-the-tracks delivery boy with a propensity for opening other people's mail going to turn out to be nicer than her customers? Does this line of work cause tensions with her best friend? I'm sure you can pretty much guess the answers to these questions, but, like My Sunshine, it's well done. I just don't think that either the plot or the subject matter quite justify the attention paid by the filmmakers.
Next, two films that could and should have been frantic screwball comedies but didn't have the confidence: Anora and Mickey 17. Anora is just what you'd expect from all you have read about it, but no twists, little to redeem the characters and lots of swearing in Russian and English. It's fine (good performances, on the whole), but I think it should have been played simply for laughs and it would have worked much better that way. The trailer for Mickey 17 makes it seem slightly funnier than it is, but otherwise tells you all about it. The film works as medium quality sci fi, but it should have had some twists (or just more plot) if that were the aim; on the other hand, it is not really funny enough to justify the jokey trailer. Again, making it more screwballish could have worked. Just one example: the space mission is led by a religious nut/politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Toni Collette). They are mostly played cartoonishly, with her concerned about blood stains on the Persian rug and him concerned about appearing to his advantage in video footage, but then his uxoriousness turns out to be entirely sincere and, at a couple of dramatic moments, he displays personal, physical courage and great presence of mind. Is he a caricature to laugh at or a serious antagonist to respect? Who knows? As with many of the fertile themes of the premise, it was just not thought through. I see that some reviews refer to Bong Joon Ho's changes of tone, as in Parasite, but I think that's special pleading: Parasite did multiple genres very well, but this is neither fish nor fowl.
Finally, a long way behind all the others, Rumours. This film was so bad in the first quarter hour that I gave up. Maybe it gets better but I doubt it. And that's despite a cast including Charles Dance and Cate Blanchett - but then Dance plays the US President, but doesn't bother with any accent, and Blanchett plays the German Chancellor by doing a kind of silly impression of Angela Merkel.
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