ALSO SHOWING
Icarealot (15) ✪✪✪✪
Rosamund Pike channels her inner Gone Girl in I Care a Lot, an American-set, none-more-black comedy thriller about a courtappointed professional guardian for the infirm who exploits her position to mercilessly rip off her elderly wards. Pike plays Marla Grayson, a self-styled “lioness” all too willing to game the system and do whatever it takes to get ahead with no regard for the collateral damage she might leave in her wake. With a professional manner that’s as unflappable as her bob-cut is severe, Marla has the family court judge wrapped around her finger, the local care home in her pocket and a doctor all-too-ready to supply her with a steady stream of marks in return for kickbacks and stock options.
That Marla is utterly reprehensible is the point, and it’s a testament to Pike’s performance that she doesn’t try to make her in any way sympathetic. Indeed, her repellent nature is supposed to make us cheer when it turns out her latest cashcow client, Jennifer (Dianne Wiest), has some pretty nasty associates of her own who don’t take kindly to her suddenly being made a ward of the state. But that’s also what’s great about British writer/director J Blakeson’s fiendishly inventive script, which has some roots in reality, but is mostly content to operate in the heightened realm of something like To Die For, Gus Van Sant’s brilliant mid-1990s comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a woman with a similarly ruthless mission to become a success. As the stakes start escalating and a true nemesis emerges in the form of Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, Blakeson’s film forces us to question why we find one type of murderous movie monster acceptable and not another. Yet what’s also fascinating about this is the way the film’s twists encourage us to swap our allegiances for characters who are all rotten to the core. Indeed, right up until the final scene it plays like an entertaining, appropriately
demented send-up of the cutthroat, bend-the-rules, use-money-as-aweapon, do-whatever-you-want gangster mentality of corporate America. Unfortunately, Blakeson proceeds to dull the film's impact with a seen-it-all-before finale lifted wholesale from a British gangster movie that I won’t name here because it would constitute too much of a spoiler for what is otherwise a supremely entertaining film. Despite this lapse, I Care a Lot is a gleefully mordant romp, with a savagely funny performance from Pike at its centre. Amazon Prime
Zappa (15) ✪✪✪✪
Bill & Ted star-turned-documentarymaker Alex Winter’s latest film Zappa is an engrossing deep-dive into the music and life of Frank Zappa, the maverick rock star, experimental composer and unlikely political figurehead who died from pancreatic cancer in 1993 and whose career here feels like the only rational response to the creeping conservatism he was witnessing all around him.
Kicking off with his final gig playing to thousands of culture-starved rock fans in the newly liberated Czechoslovakia in 1989, the sixyears-in-the-making film rewinds to give us a kind of cradle-to-the-grave portrait of Zappa that functions both as a useful primer and as a more expressionistic immersion into the mindset of an artist driven by a singular desire to get what he heard in his head out into the world in a format that satisfied him.
The latter was his personal definition of success, and while he had a certain amount of commercial success too, he was a compulsive workaholic who generated an incredible amount of material that forced him to become an inveterate archiver of his own life and music. As a result, Winter has been able to draw from a vast treasure trove of never-before-seen material in order to submerge us in Zappa’s life.
Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.
I’m still alive, and if you’re reading this then that means you’re still alive, too. That’s something. My name is Haley Cooper Crowe and I’m in lockdown in a remote location I can’t tell you about because, if I do, then you and any people you come in contact with could endanger me and the ones I love, plus some of the ones I less than love.
When this shit began I was fifteen years, seven months, two weeks and one day old, but in the first year of lockdown we lost touch with the outside. Then we lost a day, then a week, then all sense of time, so I don’t actually know exactly how old I am now.
Here is a Survival Tip: When you see a wheezer (that’s what we call a contaminated person), try not to get in a panic and don’t forget to breathe. Holding your breath can make you pass out or hallucinate, and these are not useful things to do when you are carrying a loaded crossbow, which may even be pointing upwards towards your own actual face.
Move your weapon into a safe position and get your fingers the hell away from the trigger, then count your breaths and focus. You’ll have to decide on whether you are actually going to shoot to maim or shoot to kill, and to assess the consequences if you shoot and miss. Like I’m trying to decide now.
Shoot or not? I am shit at choices and only slightly better at hitting targets. Choose, Haley, for the first time in your stupid life.
Dad’s voice is in my head, saying, ‘Contamination and starvation drive good people to do evil things. You’ve got to get stronger, Haley. If I die first, you’ll have to protect the others.’
Wait. Rewind.
This happened about three or four months into lockdown and you have zero clue what any of this is about or how we even got here. Right?
Start again, Haley.
Like, on the day it began.
The day Dad abducted us. The day he called Day One.