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| The Guardian - Culture: Film | | | | Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon review – B-movie thrills in New Orleans superhero gumbo | | by Xan Brooks Sep 5, 2021 | | The new film from Ana Lily Amirpour will keep the fans happy with the tale of mind-controlling waitress on the loose the French Quarter Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour serves up heaped spoonfuls of B-movie thrills in Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, in which a supernatural teen wanders wild in New Orleans. If the film is finally more moony than masterpiece, it does more than enough to keep her fanbase onside. Amirpour’s first film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, was a vampire western; her second, The Bad Batch, a cannibal romance. On the menu this time: superhero gumbo. Grab a bowl and tuck in. Whatever you do, don’t look in the waitress’s eyes. Jeon Jong-seo stars as Mona Lisa Lee, who exerts a form of hypnotic mind control that can make her enemies slap themselves, stab themselves or put a bullet in their own knees. She’s just busted out of the “Home For Mentally Insane Adolescents” where she’s been held for ten years, and now has to make sense of the world as she goes along. Seat belts are a puzzle and money is a foreign language. In one scene we see Mona gazing in abject mystification at an image of Donald Trump on TV – and this at least suggests that the girl is learning fast. Continue reading... | | | | | Jack O'Connell: 'Eventually the wheels come off, everything explodes' | | by Eva Wiseman Sep 5, 2021 | | Actor Jack O’Connell is known for going to physical extremes to show the vulnerability of violent men. But what does masculinity really mean to him? Are you here to see man?” asks a Spanish waiter as I walk through the café garden, and points towards the table just beyond the loos where Jack O’Connell stands, his hand raised in a solemn hello. Yes I say. Yes I am. To sit in the dark and watch Jack O’Connell’s work, from the very earliest characters he played (a boy accused of rape in The Bill, Pukey the skinhead in This Is England) through to self-destructive lad Cook in teen drama Skins and the boy incarcerated with his dad in prison drama Starred Up, followed by a squaddie in Northern Ireland in the Troubles film ’71, is to watch a slow portrait of contemporary masculinity. What O’Connell does, with his eyes and voice, and careful violence, is show the vulnerability beneath his characters’ cracked shells, and I’m keen now to find out how much of them is him, and how much of him is them, and what he’s learned about masculinity. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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