Dear friend,

here is another round of Greek weirdness and final destinations.

Attenberg, written and directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, 2010 - ⭐⭐⭐½ (up from ⭐⭐⭐)

Moving on (in a way) from last week’s Yorgos Lanthimos centrality to the second best-known director of the Greek Weird Wave (and Dogtooth producer), I rewatched her most famous work.
I said ‘in a way’, because Lanthimos is in this film, as an actor. And I must say the film works better when you are prepared for the idea that you’ll watch one of your favourite directors getting really really intimate with the lead actress (pre-Alps Ariane Labed). Although it’s not clear to me if they were already together before this film, or they ended getting married because of this film.
Anyway, the plot revolves around a young woman (Labed) looking for a human connection with someone other than her terminally ill father (Vangelis Mourikis) or her best friend (Kinetta’s Evangelia Randou). The most striking scenes from the film depict a series of funny walks by the two friends, discussing about dreams and human life, inspired by David Attenborough’s (or Attenberg) documentaries.

Final Destination 2, directed by David R. Ellis, written by Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber and Jeffrey Reddick, US, 2003 - ⭐⭐⭐ (down from ⭐⭐⭐½)

Also moving backwards in the Final Destination series, mostly to check that what I wrote last week was correct, I watched again the second episode. The logs scene remains the highlight of the movie, the rest felt intermittently quite silly, like the read-don’t-tell exposition about the fate of Devon Sawa’s character from the first film, and our heroes shouting about pigeons to the poor boy that will end up offed by glass panes, just not in the satisfying Omen way.
On the plus side, I liked the narrative linking of the characters to the previous films’ events: it’s something that, for a change, makes sense, and reverberates down to Bloodlines.

Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, written by Drew Goddard, based on Andy Weir’s novel, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐

In this week’s edition of Paolo’s Grumpy Corner: guys, what did you see in this film?
There are jokes, ok, but nothing that happened moved me in the slightest. I didn’t feel any tension at any moment. And to think this is supposed to be about the end of humanity.
Maybe I’ve been affected by Sandra Hüller’s detached demeanour - glad to see her in a Hollywood film, maybe next time she won’t be cast as the über-cold German woman?
This is not a bad film, not at all, but I was incredibly bored; to keep myself entertained, after noticing that Rocky is essentially the mineral version of Shang-Chi’s Morris, I tried to imagine how funnier this film would be with the furry creature and Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery as the lead couple.

The Capsule, directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, co-written with Aleksandra Waliszewska, Greece, 2012 - ⭐⭐⭐

I normally don’t include short films in these reviews, but this one is more than thirty minutes long, it fits with the Greek theme of these weeks, and with another film that I will mention next week, so let’s make it count. It’s a very arthouse film that could visually be compared to a perfume advert or one of Tarsem Singh early films.
The director of Attenberg assembled a cast of seven women, including her two leads from that film, her co-screenwriter (Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska) and Clémence Poésy, to paint the story of the guests of a mysterious Greek mansion, welcomed and then ‘shaped’ by their host (Labed), until they are ready to go back into the world.
It includes animations and various effects, spontaneous dancing, and A Horse with No Name.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, written and directed by BenDavid Grabinski, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐

A film that went straight to Disney+, and that’s fine because honestly… it’s an okay comedy, featuring a repentant gangster (Vince Vaughn) who travels back in time to try and save the man (James Marsden) that is having a relationship with his wife (Eiza González).
It has some fun moments, a double Vaughn, some fun cameos, fifteen minutes too many, and it’s forgotten the moment it ends. And still, I prefer it to Project Hail Mary. Maybe it’s because everything stops when González is on screen.
Other people are more enthusiastic than me about it, but that can be applied to almost every film in any of my posts.