Some People Juggle Geese

In this movie, Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, whose boyfriend kicks her out because she’s unemployed, broke, and out drinking with friends all the time. She leaves NYC, moves into the empty house her family owns in her hometown, and gets a job with the grade-school classmate who runs the local bar, which means she gets to keep drinking. Here’s the thing, though: she discovers that whenever she steps into the local playground, Seoul, South Korea gets attacked by a giant monster whose movements exactly match her own.

That’s the premise.

I think they mismarketed this movie as comedy. It’s really dark, actually. Okay, fine, it’s black comedy. I thinnnk I’m glad I watched it… but I wouldn’t watch it again. Yeah, she’s under the spell of alcohol addiction, but it’s actually a lot worse than that. You can shake addiction. What you can’t do is reason with a psychopath who has some sort of hold over you. That’s scary, man.

Anyway, the movie is a clever metaphor, and there are flashbacks that ultimately “explain” (not that it’s really explicable) the origin of the monster. So if you’re not afraid to see Gloria cornered by a violent psychopath in the second half of the movie, and you like black comedy, give Colossal a try, I guess.

Rotten Tomatoes currently says 82%; IMDB says 6.2/10; Google says 53%.

The show is about John, the extremely smart but hermit-like identical twin brother of a police investigator. John makes a living inventing puzzles under the pen-name Ludwig. John must assume the identity of his brother James in order to figure out why James has disappeared. (Don’t expect Season 1 to answer that question, though!)

The episodes, as you would expect, are a mixture of fish-out-of-water comedy, displays of intellectual brilliance that address some specific police investigation that “James” becomes involved in, and delicate attempts to pursue the dark secret of the disappearance of the real James. And is there a love triangle? Maybe so…

See below for a few more thoughts (no spoilers).

Continue reading Ludwig: Season 1 (2024)

What kind of movie *is* this?

Well, it combines a wide variety of genres: I’d say it’s sci-fi, martial arts, midlife crisis, coming-of-age, multicultural, LGBT, and dramedy—also, according to Wikipedia, it has elements of absurdism, surrealism, animation, and fantasy. Some of the humor is too deliberately gross, sexual, or absurd for my taste, but perhaps that’s inevitable, given how many styles are mixed together.

Kind of like Free Guy (2021), it was a creative, entertaining, meaningful, optimistic synthesis of many things I’d seen before. There’s a TV Tropes page on it that, well, lists the tropes it uses; and it’s lonnnnng….

Maybe what the movie reminded me of most (since arguably the movie’s salient aspect is zaniness) is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005), especially the effects of the improbability drive (“Ford, I think I’m a sofa!”). Oh, and actually also Spies in Disguise (2019), which features defensive “weapons” that defuse violence instead of perpetuating it. And then there’s the idea, also found in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), that humans can’t absorb all the information in the universe without ceasing to be human.

The “themes” chunk of the Wikipedia article is worth reading. TLDR? It says the movie urges us to resist nihilism. In the end, something matters. That’s what overwhelmed Chinese immigrant Evelyn has to learn—but she’s in the middle of an IRS audit of her laundromat, a divorce, and a fight with her distant, angsty, overweight, tattooed, lesbian daughter about whether to tell grandpa she’s a lesbian. She’s mediocre at everything. How can she be expected to save the multiverse?!