Racking my brain, go Gone & calling Dr. Freud

It occurred to me this week that a rich source of blog posts has been eliminated from my life. That’s the demise of website-based rental service zip.ca. You see, I quite often watched a couple of zip DVDs (I know, old technology) each week. These of course were from the best of the art house and auteur catalogues. This obviously has left a vacuum. There is Netflix of course which I subscribe to. But as mentioned in previous posts poor Netflix doesn’t have quite the depth. So my movie choices are limited. In future I’ll have to put nose to the grindstone and try to eke out whatever I can from this rather mainstream site. Last night, for example, I found Steve Coogan (picture above left) in Alan Partridge (Declan Lowney, 2014), which has garnered hugely positive reviews and rates 88 per cent on RT. Yes I’m a fan of Steve Coogan – and caught him this summer in the sequel “Trip” series The Trip to Italy (Michael Winterbottom, 2014). In Partridge he’s pretty good in his normal rapid fire wit as a zany “d jockey” at a provincial radio station undergoing a new corporate format change. Having worked in radio I can vouch for the outsize personalities that walk broadcasting’s not-always-so-hallowed halls. But that’s about it. The movie descends into tedium – a mini jump-the-shark – when one of the jocks (Colm Meaney), having lost his job, takes the staff hostage. The movie drones on and even Partridge’s hilarity can’t save it. But I did learn a good substitute for F-word. 

Gone Girl (David Fincher), which has been among top box office draws this month taking in more than $110 million, is a movie I have no interest in seeing. That’s because I, well, hated the book by Gillian Flynn, also the movie’s screenwriter. Prosaic, predictable, manipulative and somewhat over the top, the book was also a smash – that's depressing - selling some six million copies before it went paperback last spring.

Does Xavier Dolan have a mother complex? The esteemed wunderkind of Quebec cinema’s latest is Mommy, another critically acclaimed hit. His first film in 2009 was called I Killed My Mother. Wikipedia described the 2009 film as, ”an exposé on the complexity of the mother and son bond.” And a Guardian writer described the latest as "a boisterous oedipal comedy." Calling Doctor Freud.