New Jessica Chastain movie, Ava, reviewed! #Ava #Netflix

Well, not only does it feature Jessica Chastain, but we’re also given John Malkovich, Colin Farrell and (drum-roll) Geena Davis (of legendary Thelma and Louise and The Long Kiss Goodnight fame). It can’t be bad, right? Surely, it can’t be. Can it? Weeell, it’s certainly a stylish (posed) assassin movie. Jessica plays the assassin-with-a-heart… except it never causes her to decide against executing her target (even though she’s never sure what they’ve actually done). So, she doesn’t have any heart at all, in fact, which reeeally gets the movie off on the wrong foot. There’s a fundamental moral paradox from the start. It’s all slightly off-kilter. Oh well, let’s ignore that, cos it’s still pretty to look at. The fight scenes are well choreographed and well filmed. We’re not really sure who we’re rooting for… but good fighting, right? But we don’t really care, actually. Which is a problem, cos we’re not sure whether to keep watching… or whether to go and watch a far superior female assassin movie like La Femme Nikita.

Sigh. It’s all quite soulless and confused. Indeed, Jessica seems confused for quite a lot of it. Oh, can I resist that demon-drink that once turned me into a family-abusing monster? Oh, looks like I can, after all. So why have it in the movie – to show internal turmoil and emotion? – cos Jessica can’t actually get any emotion going with those chiselled cheeks of hers? John M does some decent acting, threatening to upstage the planet, so gets killed by Colin. Then, Geena gives Jessica an acting class, and then mysteriously disappears from the movie, never to be seen again, with nothing explained.

And the end (if you can call it that) is anti-climactic. I think they were going for something downbeat and mundane, to make some sort of point… about not glorifying violence… about there being no winners. That and other things? Or they ran out of budget so just… stopped. It’s pish. It’s better than nothing in our covid world, sure, but only just.

Blood, the gothic and Hiddleston’s bum again – Crimson Peak

Just watched Del Toro’s movie Crimson Peak. It’s got just about every gothic motif going – and sometimes it’s not entirely clear why. It’s all sumptiously staged and filmed – to the extent that it feels a bit stagey. Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain put a lot of effort into the acting – so much, in fact, that it feels overdone and hammy. Hiddleston’s inevitable bum shot is a bit random too. A random hammy bum, Mr Hiddlebum.

But is the movie the ‘botched horror’ that some critics have described? No. Within itself, Crimson Peak is consistent and the narrative thread is coherent – an American heiress is seduced by a lordly philanderer who marries her and takes her back to his gothic mansion in Cumberland, where he inevitably begins to poison her (just as he has poisoned umpteen wives before her) while bullying her into signing over her wealth to him. It very very much reminds me of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber, just a bit less feminist. Stylistically, there’s a lot of Tim Burton going on as well. None of these things are bad things actually. And it remains camply engaging throughout – in large part because vital information is released in a drip-drip fashion and because Del Toro is a master of the techniques of ‘suspended disbelief’. All in all, then, I’d say this movie has all the ingredients of a cult classic (including Tom Hiddleston’s bum). I’d score it 8 out of 10 – the movie, that is, not Tom Hiddleston’s bum.