Post by Dracula on Oct 30, 2021 17:59:49 GMT -5
Last Night in Soho(10/29/2021)
It has taken me a while to come around on Edgar Wright, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s taken him a while to catch up to me, or my tastes anyway. I had mixed feelings about his “Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy,” which all certainly had their moments but their more parodic elements never quite sat well with me as I’m generally kind of allergic to genre spoofs. In retrospect I quite like all of those movies but it’s probably not a coincidence that The World’s End, which is the least interested in cinematic tropes of the three, was the one that worked best for me on a first watch. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is almost certainly my least favorite of his films as it just bugs the hell out of me on all sorts of cultural levels, but again I definitely saw talent there. That movie has perhaps become divisive in the years since but at the time I very much seemed to be on the outside of public opinion about it. I did however finally come to Wright’s wavelength with his last movie Baby Driver, a movie that in a number of ways I think is actually rather under-rated. That was certainly a movie that was interested in making callbacks to pop culture, specifically music, and it was certainly in dialogue with several cinematic tropes but it didn’t feel like arrogant in how it did this and the movie generally took it self exactly as seriously as it needed to while providing some really virtuosic filmmaking in the way it combined action and song. But things are a bit different with Wright’s latest film Last Night in Soho in that the buzz I was hearing going into this one was not universally positive. It has a respectable score on RT but a lot of people who saw it on the festival circuit were disappointed and Focus Features do not seem to have a lot of confidence in it in their release marketing and haven’t built a lot of buzz. And that means the tables have fully turned because I now find myself being a Edgar Wright defender rather than detractor because I quite liked the film.
The film revolves around Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) a young woman from the English countryside with some vaguely defined psychic powers who has long had an interest in clothing design, which leads her to apply to the London College of Fashion and travels to the big city to attend. Once there though she quickly finds that she does not fit in with the other girls in the dorms and opts to move out into a room for rent at a nearby brownstone owned by a rather conservative landlord named Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg) in spite of a great deal of light pollution there from a nearby neon sign. One night while sleeping in this room Turner has a very vivid dream that she is in that Soho neighborhood some sixty years early in the midst of the swinging 60s, a time period she’s long been infatuated with through the clothing and music and general culture of the time. Not only is she in this location in these dreams but she’s a different person entirely, a charismatic aspiring singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) who really lights up ever room she sets foot in. Turner wakes up from this dream but finds that aspects of her temporal journeys linger with her and this ends up being the setting for future dreams as well, but soon these dreams turn into nightmares as it becomes clear that Sandie’s story is actually quite sad and the metaphorical start to stick with Turner even during her waking hours, seemingly driving her insane to most outside observers.
In the run up to this movie’s release I was working on a theory that, much as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End formed a thematic trilogy Wright’s other two movies (Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World) could also have been the start of their own unannounced and unnamed thematic trilogy. Unlike “Spaced” and the “Cornetto” trilogy, which were both very concerned with Generation X, these new movies were looking at Millennials (pushing into Gen Z), and specifically Millennials who were obsessively interested in pop culture from before their time: 80s video games in the case of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and 70s music in Baby Driver. So I was eager to see if Last Night in Soho would fit into this framework and prove my theory right, and in some ways it does. Like those movies this is about a younger person (Gen Z instead of millennial, but close enough) and she is indeed obsessed with the pop culture of a previous era, namely the music and fashion of the 1960s. So in that sense it fits but having said that this is actually a pretty dramatic change from those movies, both tonally and in format, to the point where calling it of a piece with them is simply not accurate. Those movies had been action movies of sorts while this rather definitively is not, it’s a horror movie of sorts though it doesn’t feel like one initially and kind of emerges as one in the psychological mold of something like Repulsion or Black Swan.
The film still has some pretty adventurous camera moves and tricks and is identifiably an Edgar Wright film but his style has matured a bit here and is perhaps the first time he is using it for a movie that operates in a more straightforward kind and less referential way than his previous movies with often came close to breaking the fourth wall at times. The early portion of the film is probably Wright at his most grounded and character based. Seeing this McKenzie character fail to really blend in with her more outgoing college peers and prefer to retreat to her own nostalgic world was pretty relatable to me as that’s not entirely unlike what my own early college experience was like. We saw a similar take on the horror of being a reserved introvert in college with Julia Ducournau’s but this one is even more down to Earth. You expect that this is setting up an arc in which the protagonist learns to open herself up to her peers and perhaps have a Midnight in Paris-like revelation that you shouldn’t romanticize past “golden ages,” and to some extent it does do that on some level but it also goes down a much darker path and begins to focus on the ways in which places like Soho can in fact be quite hostile towards single women and the violence towards women who move their with ambitions. This theme is kind of undercut but a rather giallo-like twist in the third act that kind of reframes things and I suspect that will be something of a disappointment to people who invest somewhat in this being a border statement about gender politics but I think there’s still enough there to give most viewers food for thought within a horror context.
This is a more restrained Edgar Wright than his last couple of movies but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of his usual creativity here, it’s just channeled in different ways. There are in fact some pretty interesting set-pieces here like an introduction to the way the McKenzie character experiences her “flashbacks” through a dance sequence with her and Taylor-Joy switching places in mirrors and as the movie goes on he does bring some effective scares by melding the past and present and having these ghostly figures show up to the protagonist throughout her days. This trick does become a touch repetitive towards the end of the film but overall it still works pretty well. The film also uses Wrights signature mastery of using popular music with some really well chosen needledrops and many of the film’s sets are also top notch. Stylistically this is definitely a solid horror movie and a nice evolution of Wrights style. Really there’s a whole lot to like here in general but there are just some shortcomings holding it back from its full potential and it doesn’t really stick the landing, but there’s so much to enjoy along the way that I feel this is just generally more successful than its reputation would have you believe. It’s more than worth a look.
**** out of Five
It has taken me a while to come around on Edgar Wright, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s taken him a while to catch up to me, or my tastes anyway. I had mixed feelings about his “Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy,” which all certainly had their moments but their more parodic elements never quite sat well with me as I’m generally kind of allergic to genre spoofs. In retrospect I quite like all of those movies but it’s probably not a coincidence that The World’s End, which is the least interested in cinematic tropes of the three, was the one that worked best for me on a first watch. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is almost certainly my least favorite of his films as it just bugs the hell out of me on all sorts of cultural levels, but again I definitely saw talent there. That movie has perhaps become divisive in the years since but at the time I very much seemed to be on the outside of public opinion about it. I did however finally come to Wright’s wavelength with his last movie Baby Driver, a movie that in a number of ways I think is actually rather under-rated. That was certainly a movie that was interested in making callbacks to pop culture, specifically music, and it was certainly in dialogue with several cinematic tropes but it didn’t feel like arrogant in how it did this and the movie generally took it self exactly as seriously as it needed to while providing some really virtuosic filmmaking in the way it combined action and song. But things are a bit different with Wright’s latest film Last Night in Soho in that the buzz I was hearing going into this one was not universally positive. It has a respectable score on RT but a lot of people who saw it on the festival circuit were disappointed and Focus Features do not seem to have a lot of confidence in it in their release marketing and haven’t built a lot of buzz. And that means the tables have fully turned because I now find myself being a Edgar Wright defender rather than detractor because I quite liked the film.
The film revolves around Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) a young woman from the English countryside with some vaguely defined psychic powers who has long had an interest in clothing design, which leads her to apply to the London College of Fashion and travels to the big city to attend. Once there though she quickly finds that she does not fit in with the other girls in the dorms and opts to move out into a room for rent at a nearby brownstone owned by a rather conservative landlord named Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg) in spite of a great deal of light pollution there from a nearby neon sign. One night while sleeping in this room Turner has a very vivid dream that she is in that Soho neighborhood some sixty years early in the midst of the swinging 60s, a time period she’s long been infatuated with through the clothing and music and general culture of the time. Not only is she in this location in these dreams but she’s a different person entirely, a charismatic aspiring singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) who really lights up ever room she sets foot in. Turner wakes up from this dream but finds that aspects of her temporal journeys linger with her and this ends up being the setting for future dreams as well, but soon these dreams turn into nightmares as it becomes clear that Sandie’s story is actually quite sad and the metaphorical start to stick with Turner even during her waking hours, seemingly driving her insane to most outside observers.
In the run up to this movie’s release I was working on a theory that, much as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End formed a thematic trilogy Wright’s other two movies (Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World) could also have been the start of their own unannounced and unnamed thematic trilogy. Unlike “Spaced” and the “Cornetto” trilogy, which were both very concerned with Generation X, these new movies were looking at Millennials (pushing into Gen Z), and specifically Millennials who were obsessively interested in pop culture from before their time: 80s video games in the case of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and 70s music in Baby Driver. So I was eager to see if Last Night in Soho would fit into this framework and prove my theory right, and in some ways it does. Like those movies this is about a younger person (Gen Z instead of millennial, but close enough) and she is indeed obsessed with the pop culture of a previous era, namely the music and fashion of the 1960s. So in that sense it fits but having said that this is actually a pretty dramatic change from those movies, both tonally and in format, to the point where calling it of a piece with them is simply not accurate. Those movies had been action movies of sorts while this rather definitively is not, it’s a horror movie of sorts though it doesn’t feel like one initially and kind of emerges as one in the psychological mold of something like Repulsion or Black Swan.
The film still has some pretty adventurous camera moves and tricks and is identifiably an Edgar Wright film but his style has matured a bit here and is perhaps the first time he is using it for a movie that operates in a more straightforward kind and less referential way than his previous movies with often came close to breaking the fourth wall at times. The early portion of the film is probably Wright at his most grounded and character based. Seeing this McKenzie character fail to really blend in with her more outgoing college peers and prefer to retreat to her own nostalgic world was pretty relatable to me as that’s not entirely unlike what my own early college experience was like. We saw a similar take on the horror of being a reserved introvert in college with Julia Ducournau’s but this one is even more down to Earth. You expect that this is setting up an arc in which the protagonist learns to open herself up to her peers and perhaps have a Midnight in Paris-like revelation that you shouldn’t romanticize past “golden ages,” and to some extent it does do that on some level but it also goes down a much darker path and begins to focus on the ways in which places like Soho can in fact be quite hostile towards single women and the violence towards women who move their with ambitions. This theme is kind of undercut but a rather giallo-like twist in the third act that kind of reframes things and I suspect that will be something of a disappointment to people who invest somewhat in this being a border statement about gender politics but I think there’s still enough there to give most viewers food for thought within a horror context.
This is a more restrained Edgar Wright than his last couple of movies but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of his usual creativity here, it’s just channeled in different ways. There are in fact some pretty interesting set-pieces here like an introduction to the way the McKenzie character experiences her “flashbacks” through a dance sequence with her and Taylor-Joy switching places in mirrors and as the movie goes on he does bring some effective scares by melding the past and present and having these ghostly figures show up to the protagonist throughout her days. This trick does become a touch repetitive towards the end of the film but overall it still works pretty well. The film also uses Wrights signature mastery of using popular music with some really well chosen needledrops and many of the film’s sets are also top notch. Stylistically this is definitely a solid horror movie and a nice evolution of Wrights style. Really there’s a whole lot to like here in general but there are just some shortcomings holding it back from its full potential and it doesn’t really stick the landing, but there’s so much to enjoy along the way that I feel this is just generally more successful than its reputation would have you believe. It’s more than worth a look.
**** out of Five
