Companion – Movie Review

TL;DR – Companion is a film full of juxtapositions, hilarious and incredibly violent, fascinating yet also profoundly exploitative, and a fascinating romp even when it is trying to plum the depths of human depravity.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene.

Disclosure – I was invited to a press screening of this film.

Warning – This film contains scenes that may cause distress.

Iris shopping.

Companion Review

Today, we look at a film that is fundamentally ambitious with the themes and tone that it wants to set. A Dark Comedy that is also exploring the world of manipulation, power, control, and personhood. All significant themes in their own right, and the question then becomes: can you do them all justice in 90-minute runtime and a shoestring budget?  

So, to set the scene, Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) have the perfect meet/cute story: they randomly bumped into each other in a grocery store, and Josh was so awkward that he accidentally knocked over a whole table full of oranges. It could have been a moment of disaster, but they found love in that odd place. It was such a decisive moment that Iris listed it as the only time that she moved out of her benign world and into something more profound. Oh, well and that one other time, the day she killed Josh.  

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Poker Face: Season 1– TV Review

TL;DR – This was a delightful romp across America where we solved a murder each week in almost the same way, and I was captivated for the whole run.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid for the Stan service that viewed this series.

Charlie sees something off.

Poker Face Review

At times, the modern TV landscape is perpetually stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. People tend to use the word ‘old-fashioned’ in a pejorative sense as if it has nothing of value to give us. We do this while living in perpetual nostalgia cycles that are morphing into nostalgia spirals. But if there is ever an artist that lives in the overlap between those two extremes, it is Rian Johnson, and I was fascinated to see where this show would go every week.   

So to set the scene, we open in a casino as the maids try to get the rooms ready for the next occupants, or at least clean for the day, when a maid sees something horrifying on a laptop. Something that needs to be reported. So Natalie (Dascha Polanco) tells her boss (Benjamin Bratt), who tells the head of the casino, Frost (Adrien Brody). But instead of protecting her, they did the unthinkable. The only problem is that working in the Casino, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) has the impeccable talent of always knowing when someone is lying. Now we will be looking at the season as a whole, so there may be some [SPOILERS] ahead.

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