🍿102: Kinds of Kindness

Free issue: An unexpected guest, three trailers and death-defying stunts 🐊

Jul 11, 2024

“Everybody want’s to be a cat!”
~ The Aristocats, 1970

Crash, bang, wallop…

There’s another guest review this week from none other than my mother-in-law-to-be, who has kindly stepped in, as I couldn’t get to the cinema after our cat got hit by a car (at least that’s what the vet thinks). Don’t worry, other than needing to be kept in a cage for a few weeks, he’s generally okay.

Now, with the pet trauma out of the way, here’s a kind reminder to Premium Subscribers to vote for this month’s SP Film Club film and the best day to meet on Zoom.

At the moment, the Coen classic The Big Lebowski is leading the polls with a potential meeting date set for Wednesday 24th July, with the exact time to be confirmed — but, with just a few votes it could all change.

SP Film Club

What’s Popping

Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy will all be reprising their roles for Shrek 5, set to be released in summer 2026. Read more.
The Devil Wears Prada is also getting an overdue sequel, with key cast and crew widely expected to return, including director David Frankel. Read more.
Jennifer Lawrence is slated to produce and star in A24’s graphic novel adaptation of ‘Why Don’t You Love Me’. Read more.
And finally, the sequel to Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga has been postponed following the first film’s disappointing performance at the box office. Read more.

Coming Soon

We Live In Time

UK: 22 January // USA: 22 January

An up-and-coming chef (Florence Pugh) and a recent divorcée (Andrew Garfield) find their lives forever changed when a chance encounter brings them together, in this decade-spanning romance.

Close To You

UK: 23 August // USA: 16 August

Sam (Elliot Page) has a chance to meet with an old friend on his way back home to a dreaded family reunion that forces him to confront long-buried memories.

Gladiator II

UK: 15 November // USA: 22 November

After his home is conquered by the tyrannical emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) who now lead Rome, Lucius (Paul Mescal) is forced to enter the Colosseum and must look to his past to find strength to return the glory of Rome to its people.

Fact of the Week

As our cat, aptly named Bandit, has been training (and failing) for his stunt career, it feels like a good week to talk about another deadly stunt that went wrong, but one that could have been much worse…

In Live and Let Die, it took crocodile wrangler and stuntman Ross Kananga (the villain in the film was named after him) six takes to complete the scene where he doubles for Sir Roger Moore when Bond flees the bad guys by running across the backs of three crocs in a swamp.

Kananga received $60,000 for the stunt, filmed at Swamp Safaris, his 350 acres of mangrove swamp on Jamaica’s north coast, where he kept a herd of over 1,000 crocodiles.

In a 1973 interview, Kananga explained; “Something like that is almost impossible to do. So, I had to do it six times before I got it right. I fell five times. The film company kept sending to London for more clothes. The crocs were chewing off everything when I hit the water, including shoes. I received 193 stitches on my leg and face.”

Despite all the stitches, we can’t help but feel more sorry for the crocodiles…

Submit Your Fact

Review: Kinds of Kindness

Star Rating:

2 (out of 5)

Where to Watch:

USA: Only in cinemas

UK: Only in cinemas

Runtime:

2hr 44m

Director:

Yorgos Lanthimos

Blurb:

Kinds of Kindness is a triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife, who was missing-at-sea, has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.

The Review:

Kinds of Kindness had its world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2024, where Jesse Plemons won the award for Best Actor award, and deservedly so. Frankly, Plemons’ superb acting skills are one of the few redeeming features of this film, and he absolutely stole the show in Alex Garland’s otherwise ‘meh’ Civil War, in a bizarrely uncredited cameo.

Back to Kinds of Kindness, an award should go to the incredibly talented team behind the official trailer for this film (if there isn’t such an award, then there should be). It’s no mean feat to get this reviewer to commit to 164 minutes of celluloid — all credit to the good folk at Curzon Westgate in Canterbury for providing me with an excellent macchiato to make this happen.

The trailer for Kinds of Kindness is a truly seductive piece of work; a fast-paced, urban-noir composition of enticing scenes, set against a throbbing backdrop beat of the 80s Eurythmics classic, ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’. I’m not ‘blaming’ the fine team behind SP, but you did provide the trailer in the last issue… just saying.

So, what might happen if Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kauffman, Peter Greenaway and David Lynch all came to dinner and ‘thought it would be fun’ to come up with a gruelling and disturbing trilogy, deeply polarising the critics? Maybe something like this.

The film is touted as a black comedy, a genre that I would normally bite the ticket office manager’s hand off to watch, but this is a depressing, misanthropic and onerous movie. Yes, it’s absurd in many ways. Yes, it throws a harsh light on the ridiculous behaviours humans are capable of — but it’s just not very ‘entertaining’.

All this being said, one really cannot fault the performances of Plemons, Emily Stone, Hong Chau and Willem Dafoe — it’s just that the film’s structure is rice-paper thin. There are so many throwaway scenes and others that are overly ponderous and relentless, that one wonders whether anything did hit the cutting room floor.2 Is Kinds of Kindness a biblical allegory? Is it a meditation on the human need for control vs. submission, or approval vs. rejection? I wanted to love this film, but found it lacking in humanity and more a smorgasbord of disparate parts, rather than a cohesive triptych of storytelling. It isn’t enough to throw some enigmatic and eccentric characters together and eschew the narrative.

I would also seriously question whether the majority of the violence in this film really needed to be directed towards all the female characters… No real spoilers here, but to summarise; a woman is given medical abortion pills against her will, a woman is coerced by a male character to cut off various parts of her body, two women are locked in overheated saunas, a woman is drugged and raped by her ex-husband, another throws herself headfirst into an empty swimming pool, and yet another meets a brutal end slamming through a car window. Note: most of this happens while the female characters just so happen to be less than fully clothed.

Balance this against one of the characters played by Dafoe wearing a pair of skimpy red underpants (cannot unsee this), and one man in a huddle of blankets who gets run over. Yep.

In brief, some elements you might be looking out for:

Licking? Yes, lots of this.

Laughing? No, thank you.

Loving? Don’t be ridiculous.

Talking dogs driving around in cars? Promised in the trailer but actually only a very small part of it (boo!).

Scroll down to see what’s in the next issue.

If you liked Kinds of Kindness…

Synecdoche, New York

2008 | UK: Apple TV+ (£0.99) // USA: Prime Video ($3.99)

If you liked this film (not judging) then try Synecdoche, New York. In it, Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lonely theatre director, struggles with his career, family and a rare disease. He plans to direct the greatest play when he convinces a few actors to live in a mock-up of New York City.

Karen also recommends Pete Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, but it isn’t available for streaming.

Next Week:

Longlegs

UK: 12 July // USA: 12 July | Watch the Trailer

Salty Popcorn

Discussion about this post