The best plan without removing your pants is almost always to go to the movies
It started in 2022, which will have an easy time to be better than 2021 (we already said this last year). For a long time, the only value that I find in New Year’s Eve is the same that I see in the Golden Globes. If those justly vilified awards are called the prelude to the Oscars, I see all the New Year’s paraphernalia as the prelude to the best party of the year, Three Kings Day.
If you are reading this with some grapes still without eating and listening to the New Year’s Concert (both if you have good taste), and thinking about what to do on the afternoon of the first page of the calendar, I remind you that the best plan without taking off your pants it is almost always going to the movies. Today you have it easy because they have released ‘The King`s Man: The first mission’. Combining elegant violence with British humor, this bizarre saga of a quirky spy agency delves into its origins dating back to World War I.
Stylish, house-brand actors like Ralph Fiennes play their part. The plot, usually somewhat crazy, here explodes with sympathy for the twists and turns of the story. Neck cutters, gushing blood, and bullets everywhere adorn this first Friday of the new year and will help us pass the hangover, indigestion or boredom, to the taste of the consumer.
I’ve got a friend who’s been looking for depressing books lately, and he’s not referring to poorly written novels by the latest famous TV host, but rather to works that leave you ill and want a meteor to hit the Earth and clean up this dump. I will advise you to watch ‘The Card Counter’. Make no mistake, it is good but unsettling.
That is achieved by its director, a veteran guy who has always seemed as interesting as he was shady, Paul Schrader. Make the story of a kind of ‘Rain Man’ who plays poker in a cerebral way who teams up with a boy to carry out revenge, instead of being an ‘Oceans’, is more like a ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986) . For that he has the complicity of the main actor of the function, a content Oscar Isaac, who plays the professional player, who sees how his calculated life that fits in an Excel to save himself from a devastating past, becomes Instagram.
I suppose that having passed the equator of Christmas you will already be a little fed up with your family. But if not, here is a French comedy that will provide you with ammunition, ‘Vuelta a casa de mi hija’, which is the ingenious title (the national distributors are leaving) of the second part of ‘Vuelta a casa de mi mother’.
I am not going to give you a euro for guessing the argument, because I think it is quite clear. If in that one the matriarch suffered the presence of her heir, in this one revenge is charged by a mother loaded with all the topics (true all) of a mother, to make her daughter suffer and disturb her world. The humor is based above all on the actors, especially the veteran Josiane Balasko, who is here to take it home.
Miguel Ángel Muñoz has always wanted to be an actor, in fact he has filmed a few films, but he still has not succeeded. Now he becomes director and scriptwriter of ‘100 days with the father’. What’s this? Well, this average actor turns out to be an extraordinary person, he spent confinement with the lady who raised him since he was a child, so as not to leave her alone. His videos became popular on social networks during those tough weeks, because they transmitted vitality and joy (which we lacked).
Now that has been dramatized mixed with real images already seen. The experiment can be seen, although it looks too obviously for the feeling. But she is saved by the natural grace of her father, a 95-year-old Carmina Barrios who disarms preconceptions and surprises even the most disbelieving. You have the feeling of a Christmas advertisement for Coca-Cola.
The most remarkable thing of the year: that we have returned to the cinema; the billion gross of ‘Spiderman: No Way Home’; that the ticket sales figures do not yet match the pre-pandemics; Almodóvar’s biggest box office failure in twenty years with ‘Parallel Mothers’; premiere jams on Fridays; Santiago Segura’s new family success with ‘A todo tren: destino Asturias’ and that of ‘Dune’.
May we have a 2022, and a week, of cinema.
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