BEFORE: Day 300? Where the heck did most of 2024 go? Oh, right, movies. Movies and TV and work and comic books and rinse and repeat. Also North Carolina and Atlantic City and day-trips to Long Island and New York Comic-Con and maybe a beer festival or two. But I've got 66 days to wrap this Movie Year up and somehow simultaneously that's not enough time and also way too much time. 19 movies in 66 days sounds like a cake-walk, but the really hard part is holding back for 47 of those days. I've got to clear the weeds out of the backyard, that should kill a weekend, and we're going to North Carolina again for a whole week, that will help. I can log in some. comic books and I've made a list of streaming TV series to catch up on, so it's going to be OK. But first let me focus on these last 6 horror movies, get through this weekend's film festival and celebrate our wedding anniversary, then maybe I can make a plan.
Mia Goth carries over one more time from "Pearl". I did find a way to work "MaXXXine" in but I'm holding back there, too, in favor of clearing other films from my DVR. I think my chances of circling back to it next October are pretty good.
THE PLOT: James and Em Foster are enjoying an all-inclusive beach vacation on the island of La Tolqa, when a fatal accident exposes the resort's perverse subculture of hedonistic tourism, reckless violence and surreal horrors.
AFTER: Don't worry, I'm keeping track of all the super-weird movies I've watched this year, and in my year-end wrap-up I'll try to figure out which one was the weirdest, and it's not going to be easy. A movie about a woman who finds a genie in a bottle sure seemed a bit weird at the time, but then along comes a movie where a girl can see all the imaginary friends whose humans grew up and forgot about them, and that certainly seems weirder. Then there was a weird movie about sending convicted murderers into space to see what interstellar travel does to them, but then along comes a movie about an astronaut who talks to a giant spider-shaped alien, and then there's a new definition of how weird a movie can be. In much the same way, I watched "They Cloned Tyrone" a few months ago, and sure, that was weird, but it just can't quite compare to tonight's film on a similar subject.
To be fair, "infinity Pool" is more like "Triangle of Sadness" meets "Midsommer" meets "They Cloned Tyrone", but then again, it's all of those things but also it's trying to be its own thing, so I shouldn't just compare one movie to the next.
This film shows a bunch of well-off Americans and Brits on vacation at a resort, but the resort is in a poorer, backwards country of sorts - the resort is on a fenced compound and the guests are told to not leave the resort for their own protection. So naturally some of the guests want to go out and have some fun, just a picnic on the beach and maybe a few drinks, and breaking the rules always makes things a bit more fun, right? Well, on the way back the struggling writer who was driving hit a local man with the car and killed him, naturally the first instinct of the two couples is to cover things up, hope against hope that nobody figures out how the man died or whose car ran him down. Yeah, good luck with that.
The writer, James Foster, is charged with murder, and on this island the punishment is death, in fact the son of the killed man has the legal right to execute the man who killed his father. But fear not, the local police have a solution, all they have do is clone the man, for a large fee of course, and the boy can execute the clone, thus killing a copy of the murderer, and the author can still live - only he is forced to watch the execution of his double, perhaps this way he will learn his lesson. Umm, sure, that works for everybody I guess, except for the clone. But then the man meets a number of tourists who have all been through this process before, and all these rich people just basically view it as a way the locals raise money for their island. Well, they did invent and perfect (?) cloning, so maybe they deserve it?
One tourist, however, raises the fear that the original version of him was executed, and that he might BE the clone, one with all the memories of the original, plus the vision of watching himself die, but sure, what could possibly be bad about all that? I remember in the movie "Multiplicity" that the cloning process wasn't perfect, each clone was like a photocopy that's never going to be as sharp as the original, and if you copy the copy, well, forget it, things are bound to get foggy or cloudy or ill-defined.
Also, you'd think that these rich tourists would learn something from watching their own executions, and you would be completely wrong there. Instead their take-away is that they can do pretty much whatever they want on this island, commit crimes like burglary, rape, you name it, and always the solution will be to create another clone and just stand and watch as the clone is executed for their sins. So pretty much they don't ever learn anything, except that their money can keep getting them out of trouble, as long as their bank account can cover the cloning costs. So I wonder if this is just some giant metaphor for how the rich people are treated differently by the legal system because they can pay for the best lawyers, or something to that effect. There's another point to be made about what the lack of punishment would then do to those rich people who can afford to pay fines or make bail or bribe someone to always get out of trouble, over time they could essentially become psychopaths.
There's more to the story, like it gets even weirder, but that's really all you need to know to get into it. The film was a festival success at Sundance and the Berlin International Film Festival, but was then a box office failure. You can watch it on Hulu and judge for yourself.
I can't believe this movie was made AFTER Mia Goth's breakthrough roles in "X" and "Pearl" because that would mean that she's older in this than she was then, and she looks younger somehow. Well, she looks like she's both 15 and 35 here, it's a bit tough to say which. (A little research tells me she was 28 when this was filmed, and it was filmed the same year as "Pearl", which I guess is possible?)
Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "13"), Cleopatra Coleman (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver"), Jalil Lespert, Amanda Brugel (last seen in "The Calling"), John Ralston (ditto), Jeff Ricketts (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Caroline Boulton (last seen in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Dunja Sepcic, Adam Boncz, Zijad Gracic (last heard in "Cars 2"), Amar Bukvic, Alan Katic, Anita Major, Roderick Hill (last seen in "Colette"), Katalin Lábán, Kamilla Fátyol (last seen in "The Martian"), Lena Juka Stambuk, Kristóf Kovács, Romina Tonkovic, Gergely Trócsányi, Hajnalka Zsigar, Gáza Kovács, Oszkár Bócsik
RATING: 5 out of 10 buffalo sausages
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