After landing on my Best of 2020 list with the chilling and rather emblematic The Assistant, I was definitely curious to see what writer/director/editor Kitty Green would come up with next. And sticking to her roots as a documentarian, she pulled inspiration from the doco Hotel Coolgardie to tell the story of two American backpackers who find themselves in the middle of woop woop, working at a bar until they can make enough to continue their trip. Well, if they make it that far, that is.
In response to the myriad of fan theories about the secret meanings behind the Beatles’ music (backmasking, “Paul is dead”, that kind of shit), John Lennon wrote the song Glass Onion, which would be included on the group’s self-titled White Album. It’s basically a troll set to music, referencing other Beatles songs to give fuel to the people who think that they intentionally put in all these cryptic messages in their art... when in reality, it meant pretty much fuck-all. Many layers, but all of them see-through right down to the core: a glass onion.
After absolutely crushing it last year with Spontaneous, a film I truly hope will go down as one of the most poignant statements on the Millennial generation (my generation), writer Brian Duffield seems to have found his calling in creating coming-of-age stories in truly bizarre situations. With Love And Monsters, that takes the form of Joel, a young-adult survivor of the apocalypse (basically, in stopping a meteor, we wound up mutating all of our animal life into the things that killed off most of the human population) who sets out across the wilderness to reunite with his love Aimee. It is every bit as effective as Spontaneous, and might even go a few steps further.
