We take for granted that any movie that can be described as a “love story” inherently involves romance between two lovers, but that definition is broadening as more perspectives are being more widely represented in film. Miss You Already is a love story, but it’s not about the love between couples, but between a couple of women who have been best friends since childhood. Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore play the women, portraying one of those long-term friendships that has its ups and downs, its hot periods and cold periods, but the type whose longevity speaks volumes. It’s a rare thing to see on screen, this type of relationship commonly described by phrases like “we can be away from each other for a long time but when we’re together, it’s like we never left.”
Films that feature a child’s perspective are often powerful when they work, and painful when they don’t. Room is an example of this device working. We see and experience the world of the movie from inside the eyes and mind of Jack, the five-year-old boy played by Jacob Tremblay; it’s a world consisting of a small single room that we quickly learn he’s never left, spending all five years of his life in this tiny space with his Ma, played by Brie Larson. What we know from the introductory scenes is that they never leave this little room, that they are brought necessary supplies by a man they call Old Nick, and that Jack and Ma have a close and loving relationship.
A good way to erase all memory of an exceptionally disappointing and poorly received film festival submission is to come back the next year with your best movie to date. Writer-director Tom McCarthy seems to have done that at this year’s edition of TIFF, following the much maligned The Cobbler with his new film, Spotlight, a superb drama covering the real life investigative work of the Boston Globe reporting team who first shined a light on the widespread sexual abuse of children and subsequent cover-up carried out by the Catholic Church in Massachusetts back in 2001, earning the paper a Pulitzer Prize.
Maybe I don’t consider my time quite as precious as other people. Or maybe my standards for what I find to be a worthwhile movie-watching experience are abnormally low. Maybe I just need to find a way to justify the amount of time I spend watching movies that are widely regarded as trash, because the possibility that I’ve wasted hours to years of my life on this stuff is terrifyingly depressing.
The final episode of this fourth season of Game of Thrones was advertised as the best finale the series has produced thus far, and now that we’ve seen it, that’s a hard claim to argue against. In finales previous to “The Children,” the episode prior has typically served as its season’s climax, with the tenth episode essentially tying up any loose ends and setting up what’s to come next year. For perhaps the first time in the series’ run, we got the best of both worlds in this finale, or at the very least, a pleasant mix of satisfying closure and anticipatory teases.
Each season of Game of Thrones has placed an enormous amount of significance on its penultimate episode, and a pattern is beginning to emerge. Seasons 1 and 3 provided the two greatest shocks in the series in their ninth episodes, while in seasons 2 and 4, the ninth episode served as an opportunity to devote the whole hour to one location, and one pivotal battle. In that second season, this was the “Blackwater,” episode, which saw Stannis’ forces soundly defeated by the Lannisters, thanks in large part to Tyrion’s procurement of wildfire. In “The Watchers on the Wall,” we’re treated to by far the most exciting thing to happen with the Night’s Watch yet, coming in the form of the battle for Castle Black.
Yet another Game of Thrones episode that’s full of characters shining in ways they’ve never shone before—Sansa, Ramsay, Grey Worm and Missandei, Tyrion and of course, Oberyn—and all I can think about, despite everything that happened, is the curious shared recollection between Jaime and Tyrion about their cousin Orson killing beetles. Let’s circle back to that in a bit, though.
There were times when this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, “Mockingbird,” felt a little thin, but once again, it delivered in its most crucial moments to leave us with another satisfying hour and two long weeks before we’re treated to more. The wait becomes even more anxious because much of this episode, before it ends on a real shocker, is setting the stage for the final three episodes of this fourth season, so the lack of a new episode next Sunday makes the epic fight between Gregor Clegane and Oberyn Martell even more hotly anticipated. Then again, anyone who glanced at the titles of the forthcoming episodes, the next of which is “The Mountain and the Viper,” may have had this matchup spoiled for them.
One thing Game of Thrones has always had a special knack for is representing a variety of different individual and (fictitious) cultural perspectives on a single occurrence. It’s in a place so few stories attempt to occupy in the first place, which is a number of vastly different places and spaces at once, that gaining divergent insights into things is somewhat inevitable. But there seems to often be a deliberate effort put into this portrayal of perspective and how one’s setting and history shapes that perspective—whether it’s something they’ve inherited or something they’ve gained, or lost, along the way—with one of the best examples being the range of interpretations of the red comet that is observed throughout Westeros and Essos.
A lot of people love Game of Thrones for its multi-layered story populated by numerous characters moving forward in action-heavy set pieces and plot-driven shockers, with episodic events like the Battle of the Blackwater and the Red Wedding satisfying this itch. I include myself among this group. A facet of the show that seems less appreciated, though, and one that I enjoy just as much as its fight scenes, comes with the quiet, understated character moments that the series has earned after three seasons of establishing who these various inhabitants of Westeros are.
