Dear friend,

sometimes (actually: quite often) streaming services don’t seem to offer too much choice and you spend half an hour to find something that looks vaguely watchable, until you realise you don’t have enough time to watch a full-length film. So you end up falling back on short films…

  • Bernice Bobs Her Hair is adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This mainly served to make me miss Shelley Duvall, and to make me sad about her leaving the show business (except for the 2023 film The Forest Hills, in which she has a small role, and that I haven’t seen)
  • The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story, released on YouTube, sees Miles Morales facing the anxieties of a teen superhero life

…or series:

  • I am half-way through 3 Body Problem which I find, up to now, intriguing but not really enthralling. Funny to see so many actors that Benioff and Weiss brought from Game of Thrones (Conleth Hill as Pope Gregory XIII? Yes please!) , and lots of Chinese dialogue, which is nice if you have decided to learn that language (but that’s another story and shall be told another time)

Easter weeks meant a couple of days off, which meant multiple visits to the cineplex:

  • Immaculate is a nice little horror that made me appreciate more Sydney Sweeney, both because she directly produced it, and because she’s basically the only American actress in a film that’s set in Italy, filmed in Italy and employed a lot of Italian actors and professionals (though the other main character is played by the Spanish Àlvaro Morte, the mastermind in La Casa De Papel); non-spoiler reviews mention the final shot, which is definitely worth mentioning, and a lot of jump scares, which didn’t feel many more than your average modern horror
  • Dream Scenario has finally arrived in this part of Europe, and it was quite a disappointment: the intriguing initial idea doesn’t translate to much more than a very basic take on the so-called cancel culture, and, being generous, an analysis of self-loathing. But it all felt very superficial and unjustified
  • Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire in my unpopular opinion, is much better than its force awakens-y predecessor, but it trusts the new generation of Ghostbusters so little that most of them have nothing to do (and when they do something, it’s not helping the plot), and prefers adding yet more characters (James Acaster and Kumail Nanjiani above all) to remind everybody that this franchise used to be a comedy horror

Still I got to watch a couple of films in streaming:

  • Beetlejuice - even though it’s actually styled Beetle Juice in the title cards - was a necessary rewatch before the sequel arrives; oh how much we miss original Tim Burton!
  • M.F.A. - Promising Young Woman before Promising Young Woman, this is not perfect but harder to watch, more serious, and generally speaking better than the Emerald Fennell film
  • Death of a Vlogger - a film that got a lot of praise from horror fans, which leaves me puzzled because it’s a really uninspired, unimaginative, not scary streamed-footage mockumentary. I understand the low budget, but this is neither Host (which is a later film) nor Lake Mungo.