The Double

So is this a Brazil rip-off? It’s got that Terry Gilliam thing going. Kafka Lite.

This is Ayoade’s second and final movie, so I’m guessing it didn’t do well.

So it was an utter box office failure.

I wonder what the Dostoyevsky novella was like before the script writer Brazilised it.

This is bad.

Really bad. It’s like a mash up… all these things. 91 Von Trier and 84 Gilliam and 82 Scott and quotes from Hitchcock and bits from Kieślowski and sound from Lynch and possibly Tarkovsky and the mood from 71 Cronenberg… put Jesse Eisenberg in it.

So we’re getting all the directors Ayoade likes but it’s not going anywhere.

Hey, isn’t that…? I think it is.

So now we’re doing Kaurismäki?

I think one of the many problem this movie has is that the viewpoint character has absolutely no… character. We’re not even given any hint about why we should care about him? He’s supposed to work as a blank you’re supposed to identify with, I guess? But the only traits he’s given is that he’s kinda creepy? Using a telescope to creep on women I mean His True Love? So this is a movie for creeps?

But skip all that, and perhaps we’re just supposed to be interested because of all the… Kafkatuity (that’s a word) of it all. But….

Perhaps it’d work with a different actor. Jeremy Irons?

This is just brutally uninteresting.

The Double. Richard Ayoade. 2013. ⚁

Submarine

I love these titles.

This is brilliant!

It’s just how I’d imagine a movie by Richard Ayoade, if I had imagined it, which I hadn’t. But I read a couple of books of his, and I got his movie, because he seemed like a right smart un.

Darren Evans (the guy playing Chips) is absolutely amazing.

I wonder whether this is autobiographical. I can hear Ayoade’s voice in all the lines.

I’m loving the cinematography and the scenes and the actors… but I’m not loving the movie? It seems kinda choppy? And it can’t make up its mind whether it’s going for cringe or honesty?

I mean… Everything seems obviously autobiographical (I mean, bits of it), but with all the specifics filed off. So we’re left with a generic movie about a nerdy British teenager with a generic relationship with a Magic Pixie Dream Girl (with a Louise Brooks wig), and it’s all rather odd.

I really like Ayoade’s books, but he really lost the plot here. It’s so generic. It could have been made by any nerdy British director.

Submarine. Richard Ayoade. 2010. ⚂

Red Notice

Uh-oh. This is a Netflix movie — so I’m guessing the script is basically gonna be auto-generated, and there’s gonna be a surprising (but not really) combination of actors people really like?

Such CGI.

Oh my god! I laughed so much! Aloud! Is this the best movie ever made? I think it could be!

It’s a movie saying “yes, I know you’ve seen this kind of movie a million times before, but fuck that shit”.

Every scene is a wink and a nod and it’s hilarious.

This is so November 2021. It couldn’t have been made a week before or a week after.

OK, this isn’t the best movie ever. It started so well — with all the fun and all that stuff — but it’s just getting more bogged down, scene by scene. I mean, all the scenes are going for wild-cap fun, but it’s not quite there, so it all collapses.

They’re going for mad-cap silly adventure, but they’re kinda not hitting the beats? I could totally see this movie being totally hilarious with just a bit of editing? It’s not that it’s too long or anything, but the individual scenes just feel off.

What a frustrating movie. Because it’s so close to being a perfect popcorn movie, but then just fails. I just want the movie to succeed, because it’s really charming, but it just doesn’t. It just needs… something. It’s got the repartee and the plot and the charming actors — it just needs to be a bit more zippy?

Red Notice. Rawson Marshall Thurber. 2021. ⚃