"Will they kill me, do you think?"
Don't go into 'Spencer' expecting an ordinary little biopic about Princess Diana. Nope, this is a straight up psychological art house horror thriller. 'Spencer' brilliantly captures the feeling of dread in an isolated foreign space surround by strangers. The royal family themselves are freaking creepy, always watching, always judging.
I must be honest, I wasn't a big fan of Kristen Stewart's recent work, as it never wowed me, and I wasn't convinced that she's improved since Twilight. But man, she's fantastic in this movie and it's one of her best performances to date. Stewart manages to portray Princess Diana in a new light that we haven't really seen before. In my opinion, her other movies failed to show her versatility as an actor, where I fully believe this movie did her justice. I'm just glad this movie won me over.
On the other hand, Timothy Spall is excellent in this movie, and another stand out performance. If you are aware of Spall as an actor, then this isn't surprising news, but I feel it needs repeating. I found him very eerie and overbearing. He plays a man with an eagle eye; he watches everything and everyone in the royal family at Sandringham House.
The major thing that this movie made me realise is that in Diana's life it's the people that kept her mentally and emotionally grounded. Her two sons, her assistant (Sally Hawkins, who is very good in the small scenes she has), and the chef played by Sean Harris, who is someone you would not think of being important.
Sean Harris is a very underrated actor that I wished people talked about more. Harris is known for playing sinister roles, but here I thought he was really sweet and shows a softer side. He's got an interesting sounding voice as well. Jack Farthing as Prince Charles does a great job playing a slimy over-privileged **** Stella Gonet as the Queen who I found really unsettling, especially her dagger eyes.
There's one scene at the dinner table with the other royal family that is one of the most intense things ever. It was anxiety level stress that made my heart racing. All thanks to Pablo Larraín claustrophobic and unique directing. Complimented by Johnny Greenwood's atmospheric, free flowing and tense score.
While I know that certain elements of the movie are fiction, but then again, the movie begins with a title card "based on a tragic fable" and I feel like the movie is playing into the nightmarish fair tale of an iconic figure in history. Diana's life in royalty was no fairy tale, but a Brothers Grimm tale.
Overall rating: The movie has metaphors to ghost, ghost of the past, ghost of old tradition. People who follow tradition isn't too kind to rarity. Great movie.
Before I started watching this movie, I had high expectations. Reviews and friends told me to expect a real science fiction movie. I've been longing for a real sci-fi flick since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Contact" and "Sunshine". I know people nowadays are calling fiction and fantasy movies sci-fi, but I rather tend to draw a dinstinctive line and emphasize on the word "science".
That being said, the plot is simple, but at the same time realistic. The movie tells the story of humans trying to survive in an utterly inhabitable place - space. It's a movie that will remind kids (and adults alike), spoiled by the strange education they receive through contemporary media, that not everything can be achieved by wishful thinking. Humans are not made for living in space. Every step off earth is a step defying nature. Is that bad or good? That's a decision everyone has to make for himself.
The visuals are stunning. I watched it in 2D and I plan on watching it again in 3D. The spectator has the feeling to actually be there.
At least as important though is the sound. Many filmmakers make the mistake of having sound in space. Of course that's totally ridiculous. The only sound there is, is the sound that's created inside of your space-suit or space-station by the shockwaves that hit it. Throughout the movie I had the feeling they got it right. And actually it didn't make the movie "empty", but quite the opposite, more tense. It intensified the feeling of "this is not a place where I belong".
There was one scene though, I thought wasn't right. When Bullock holds on to Clooney, Clooney should already have the same trajectory as Bullock or the station or he should bounce back. I just don't get what's still pulling him. I think it is a mistake in the movie and a serious one at that.
Anyway, I can overlook that, since the rest of the movie is very good. On IMDB it has a rating of 8.2 right now. I'd give it more like a 7.8. Maybe even less. I guess the rating is a bit high, because for young viewers it is a new experience to see something realistic on the screen.
Should you watch it? Yes, definitely. Should you rewatch it? Maybe, for the CGI and if you haven't seen it in 3D. Certainly not for the story.
[9.2/10] Every season, BoJack Horseman does at least one format-bending, stylized, impressionistic episode. And almost every season it blows me away. I don’t know if this tops “Free Churro” or “Fish Out of Water”, but it at least sits comfortably with them, an allegory for the act of death, the process of letting go and reckoning with your life and its end.
There is something very Sopranos about this, not only the implied demise of our main character, but also in the dream space he occupies, one where the ghosts of his past return to haunt him. This isn’t quite “The Test Dream”, but it fits into that same liminal mode that David Chase’s show (and again, also Mad Men) would go to when they wanted to make their points in a roundabout way.
It is a frightening, beautiful, challenging episode of television. It is frightening because it treats the act of death as a horror movie, where a big pile of sentient black tar goes after you, where the bystanders melt into avian husks, where there’s nothing on the other side. It is beautiful because it conveys the act of leaving this mortal coil as one of art, where true to BoJack’s psyche, each of these deceased people in his life goes out putting on a show, plying their trade in one form or another, until the time is right.
And it’s a challenging episode because it asks us what the value of life and the value of death are. It asks whether there is “good damage” that means something or if that’s just a way to treat being happy as something selfish. It asks if valorizing sacrifice makes us less fulfilled in our lives. It asks if the best parts of our lives justify the worst parts. It asks if the choices we make in life add up to something in the finally tally of our days and nights. It asks if it’s worth it to care, if there’s any sort of reward or self-justification for putting so much effort into our projects and plans.
And it asks whether it’s all worth it, what the best way to live and the best way to die are. It doesn't answer these questions. It only presents contrasting views spoken over a dinner table, one where old wounds are reopened and the faces of death BoJack’s scene and heard and internalized play out his own internal dilemma as he waits on death’s door.
It does all of this with words and tones and images that catch the eye and pierce the heart. The way that the episode presents these debates works because each of these characters feel fully-formed and represent different perspectives. Each captures both a contrasting view of what the best life is, while also reflecting the people that BoJack has known and mourned, in one way or another, in his past. That gives their conflicting points weight, sheathed in the personas of the losses that have shaped his life.
It accomplishes its heights in the shows that each puts on. Sarah Lynn sings a haunting rendition of “Just Keep Dancing”. Her song suggests a guilt still dripping from BoJack’s soul, from bringing her into this business and teaching her that continuing to perform is the only way, until it killed her. Corduroy, not one of the more poignant deaths in the series, dies doing an acrobatic rope trick, one that befits his method of death.
BoJack’s father performs a poem, one where we understand in greater depth not only his suicide, but his wish that he could take it back, that his mid-air clarity was doomed by the choice he made seconds before. And yet, before he takes the stage, he tells BoJack that it didn’t matter, that he wished he’d cared less, and that he put up walls because he didn’t want BoJack or his wife to know how much he did care. Maybe that’s just what BoJack wants or needs to hear right now, or maybe it’s the confession of a man more complicated than BoJack quite understood until he became a xerox of a xerox of him.
BoJack’s mother performs the routine we heard about in “Free Churro” accompanied by the uncle whose death helped spin her life out of control. Her ribbon dance has a haunting quality to it, with moves that seem impossible, accompaniment that floats in the air, and a contrast between the hard part and the easy part that leaves her long alabaster prop irrevocably stained with the mark of black death.
And then there’s Kazzaz, the master of ceremonies, there to rundown BoJack’s life: what he did, what he didn’t do, who he was, and who he wasn’t. When it’s all over, the goop takes him too, killing him slowly in contrast to his compatriots, eating away parts of his body like the cancer did, until the drip-drip-drip finally ends. Each has a performance, and each leaves through that door to oblivion in a way that’s befitting.
The show captures the dream logic of all of this wonderfully. Without a wisp of transition, Sarah Lynn goes from being the little girl BoJack met on the set of his show, to the adult performer who succeeded later in life, to the drugged out starlet who died sitting next to him. The man who represents his father has Butterscotch’s voice, but Secretariat's body, nicely representing the way that BoJack conflated his real life dad with the one he imagined filling that space as he sat in front of the television screen. And Beatrice goes from being the younger, vibrant woman BoJack once knew, to the sick old woman he left in a home.
This isn’t a show that’s typically particularly well-designed or animated. There’s creative material in the visual presentation for sure, but normally the actual animation is fairly basic. But here, BoJack Horseman’s production team really challenges themselves. The flooding of the black gloop, the impossible geography of the home where BoJack meets his dead friends and family, the perspective changes as he runs through it and ends up back where he started, all have an immediacy and shifting perspective that the show doesn't always go for.
But the most haunting image is the glimpses we get of BoJack in the pool, an image that connects to the show’s intro, and hints at what’s really going on here. There is a boldness to all of this, not only killing off your main character, but doing so in a way that breaks with the formal limits of your series, that confronts him with the death he’s been a party to, and presents his brain seeing and doing what it needs to in order to make peace with that.
It ends on a note of nihilism, on the possibility that none of this mattered, that there’s nothing he could do to stop it, and that the best and only thing to do now is die. But when he does, he wants to be on the phone with Diane, he wants to know how he’s doing. BoJack is dying, but even in that, he cuts against the nihilism. If none of it matters anyway, even if it all ends anyway, he wants to die caring, caring about someone he loves, someone he wants to be happy and whose joys make him happy, whether he’ll be around to see it or not.
[7.6/10] I both love and hate how this mid-season finale is the negative image of the prior episode. While “The Face of Depression” was about BoJack moving past his sins, and the ways in which he is unexpectedly capable of helping others, “A Quick One, While He’s Away” is about how those sins are still poised to come back to haunt him, and how other people are still dealing with the lingering effects of his worst behavior.
For the latter, we reunite with Kelsey Jennings, the original Secretariat director who, as she herself notes, was the only person in any way punished by the incident in season 2 where she and BoJack and the rest of the crew broke into the Nixon library to film the big scene. Much of this season, and frankly this series, is about how women bear the brunt of the negative consequences for this kind of behavior, and I like this as an illustration of that. (It’s no coincidence that all of our point of view characters in this episode, and the people who harm has been visited upon, are women).
We haven’t seen much of Jennings since season 2. But when we check in on her life, we see how she’s reduced to doing “sponsored immersive content” far below her talent while hacks like her film school pal get to do big budget work. Hers is one of the few hopeful stories here, where she sticks to her guns and to who she is when she pitches for a big time superhero movie, and ends up winning the job. But at the same time, the episode isn’t shy about how much of a struggle it’s been for her to get out of director jail all this time.
Things are, shall we say, less hopeful for Gina, who we see for the first time in season 6. She’s the lead in her own film, but she’s still traumatized by what happened on the set of Philbert last season. It’s reached the point where she’s hypersensitive about anything even vaguely surprising happening on set, and when, in a moment of improvisation, her costar holds her by the neck as part of an innocuous dance move, she has a moment of panic, falls and hits her head, and ends up storming off the set while packaging it as the “modicum of respect” she’s owed as number one on the callsheet.
It’s a sort of pain and discomfort that is not her fault, that is the result of BoJack’s issues being inflicted on someone else, but when Kelsey is looking for an actress to star in the new film, Gina’s current director gives her the dreaded temperamental label. It’s mediated by other events, but however much BoJack has gotten better, his actions have made Gina’s life and her profession less secure for her, and indirectly keeps from getting a bigger break (or even, possibly, a smaller one).
But these are events that are unlikely to be seen or understood by BoJack, if he’s ever aware of them at all. It’s also no coincidence that none of the regular characters appear in the episode (outside of the intro). In many ways, “A Quick One While He’s Away” is about the ripple effects of BoJack’s behavior, occurring far outside of his immediate orbit, but still affecting people far beyond him and maybe even coming back to haunt him.
The least compelling of these is the big His Girl Friday parody of the investigative reporter pursuing the story of who was with Sarah Lynn on the night she died. While I can appreciate the specificity, accuracy, and joie de vivre of the spoof, it feels like a mismatch for what the show is trying to do with the Sarah Lynn story. There’s something poetic and ironic about Sarah Lynn’s death being the thing that convinced BoJack to start trying to get better, but which could, if his role in it is exposed by a reporter, be the thing that ultimately tears him down. The breadcrumbs that the reporters find are interesting, particularly when it seems to lead them to Penny and her family as well, but it feels more like a weird tease of things to come within this broadly comic shell than anything substantive in his own right.
But the best of the four stories is Hollyhock’s, where what starts as a story of BoJack’s actions having second order effects on people in his life turns into a story of his old misdeeds coming back to haunt him. I like how the show explores Hollyhock’s reluctance to drink given the most recent examples in her life of people out of control, something she knows is in her blood and that makes it hard for her to relax and enjoy something fun. Her interactions with Tawnie, her panic attack, and her gentle recovery from it are all endearing and well-observed and a little sweet.
The catch is that the person who helps her out of that panic attack at a college party is Pete, one of Penny’s high school classmates. The two commiserate over their mutual traumatic experiences involving alcohol, and it’s a convincingly quick bond between them. That turns more traumatic, though, when Pete starts telling Hollyhock about how “this guy” was the cause of this horrible experience, with the episode making a devastating cut right before the person in the world BoJack loves most and sees as the best reflection of himself learns what is, well, not even the worst thing about him, but something that could still shatter Hollyhock’s image of her big brother in her mind.
I like the way the episode sets all of this up, teasing out connections between these events at the periphery until they crystalize into a broader, more haunting whole. The show finds a natural way for Hollyhock to learn about one of BoJack’s worst sins, through a chance connection that is just intermediated enough to not feel contrived.
That’s the bitter irony of this one. The BoJack we’ve known and watched for five and a half seasons has made meaningful progress in getting better. He has accepted himself, learned to forgive himself, made it possible for him to help others and think of their needs before his. He has taken these lessons and these mistakes and used them to become someone who is worthy of the care and attention and affection so many people have shown him before he did anything to deserve it. He is trying to make a fresh start and to forgive himself for the things that, in the episode where we got into his head, led to him constantly calling himself a stupid piece of shit.
And just when he has that breakthrough, just when he becomes a person semi-worthy of his status and web of meaningful relationships, the ghosts of his past seem poised to emerge all at once to tear his life asunder. BoJack may be getting better, may be turning a corner, but the other people touched by his worst actions are not, are still hurting from the things he’s done, some never to recover. Even as the show implicitly lauds BoJack for his progress, it doesn't forget the lasting harm he’s done to others not so privileged or lucky to be able to recover from it. That afterimage of his own recovery, the uncertain future so many people, so many young women, will labor under, isn’t going away, and that’s the thought BoJack Horseman leaves us with, as our heroes are left on the sidelines, before at the beginning of the end.
