Not a good night at the movies

Well, that's $5.99 I’ll never get back. Thank god the streaming price was only $5.99. I could have seen this in a theatre and paid well over $10 not to mention gas and mileage. I’m talking about, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the most award-winning movie in history! - Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) - including scooping seven Oscars and Best Picture. This gonzo, unconventional movie is supposed to be about multiple universes where we have separate selves, with various powers and ways to work out similar scenarios, in spectacular – and vengeful (the film has lots of stomach-churning gratuitous violence) - ways. It’s a comedy and has elements of surrealism, magic realism and visually, looks like a video game, with multiple images sometimes flying at you second by second. It’s so fast paced it’s hard to keep up or figure out what’s going on. How the majority of Academy voters did is beyond me. I gave the film my best shot but clocked out at the 42 minute, 40 second mark, ruing the time I lost. For all its hyper intensive moments Everything left me unmoved and utterly bored.

Having just read one of the best novels in ages, a John Williams's 1960 classic, Butcher’s Crossing, I was eager to see if a movie had ever been made of it, since its plot and atmospherics cry out for film treatment. The book is about a buffalo hunting party in 1870s Kansas, who head to Colorado for a major kill. People who don’t like Westerns, like me, shouldn’t be put off. The writing is astounding, the characters deeply imbued, the dialogue and atmospherics so perfect it’s like Williams was there himself. Some of the elements were so realistic, such as the hunting party’s travel though a drought, I found myself gasping for thirst. And during a blinding blizzard scene I looked out the window and there was a snow squall! It’s like the book had magical powers. Sure enough, there is a film (directed by Gabe Polsky). And it premiered just last year at the Toronto International Film Festival. But I couldn’t find it anywhere online to stream nor even a trailer, just a few still shots. Nicholas Cage plays one of the characters. So, perhaps in vain, I will await a release.

While recently in Spain, I went to see the Irish film, The Quiet Girl (Colm Bairéad), nominated for best international picture at the Oscars. I saw several English-language films this winter in Spain, in original dialogue with Spanish subtitles. But this film, ostensibly in English, was anything but. Ninety-five per cent of the picture is in Gaelic! So the joke was on me. Yes, there were Spanish subtitles - and I picked out various words and phrases I understood. But, thankfully, the plot is fairly simple and dialogue limited, so the movie was easy to follow. That’s not to say this is a bad film, quite the contrary.