Film Round-Up: Mean Girls, The Zone of Interest and Bob Marley: One Love
MOVIES AND MOVIES AND MOVIES
Mean Girls
Homeschooled Cady joins an American high school, and soon becomes part of the plastics, the most powerful clique in the school. This is a weird cycle, you start as movie, which is very loosely inspired by a book, then become a Broadway musical before going back to being a film. A film musical that was not advertised as a musical in any of the trailers. Explain that one. Anyway, this is perfectly decent. It won’t ever match the cultural impact that the original made, and still makes to this day, but it has enough catchy songs, has a strong enough plot and a star making performance from Renee Rapp as Regina George. It does have some irritants though. There are large gaps without songs, there’s an overuse of TikTok and other social media camera angles and the meta humour is a crutch. Still, it’s a perfectly decent musical.
The Zone of Interest
Rudolf Hoss lives with his family by his work, managing the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. This is a very different film. There’s no narrative really, the only time it approaches one is when Hoss is moved to another camp. It’s basically an art piece, something that feels more fitted to a gallery than a cinema. The idea is that you have this very quaint, sometimes disturbingly charming provincial life, just by the walls of one of the greatest evils humanity has ever created. You see none of the horror, there’s no masses of Jewish people being marched to a torturous death on screen. But you see it in the background, from the smoke of the chimneys to the sound of the trains arriving. I find this a really tricky movie to review, because it’s not a traditional movie. I usually discuss plot, pacing, characterisation. This film largely eschews that, and as someone who wants a strong narrative, it could be tough to get through at times. It is very powerful, and the idea behind it works very well to show the horror of the concentration camps in a very different way to what we’ve seen before. Just be aware that this is not a typical sort of film, as if you go in expecting a traditionally told story, you will not get what you expected.
Bob Marley: One Love
Bob Marley creates his Exodus album as his country Jamaica are on the edge of civil war. This film starts off with some intensity. Jamaica is about to go to war with itself, the country is on a knife edge, and then there is an attempt on Bob Marley’s life. It’s a film that seems like it wants to motor on, and the film looks like it might become a classic. Then, Marley leaves Jamaica and the film loses everything it had going. Marley making an album, even if it is as influential as Exodus, is far less interesting than a fraught political situation in Jamaica, and the film only comes back to it to try and add some guilt to the lead character. Despite having some very good performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch, this is a film that is condemned to biopic purgatory for some how missing anything that might have made for an engaging narrative.