Struggles of Family Survival
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) when they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.
“You see, you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson & the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song's name)
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): Damn! This has been a hell of week for responding to all the news as I try to cram it into what’s supposed to be brief opening remarks, yet here goes: I intended to begin with a mini-tribute to one of my favorite musicians, the now-departed David Crosby, but he’ll have to wait for a Musical Metaphor down below due to other, more tragic deaths in 3 recent mass shootings (no clear definition but at least 2-4 killed or injured) here in California, one in the south in Monterey Park, 2 in the north at Half Moon Bay (about a 2-hr. drive from where I live; a beach town that reminds me of aspects of Galveston and Austin, TX, places where I spent my formative years) and Oakland, right across from my longtime-employer, Mills College, 19 dead at this point, many others injured, adding to the 40 (!) of these violent incidents just since January 1, 2023 across the U.S.A. (a total of at least 69 dead so far) Will we ever find a way to bring this needless slaughter under control? It’s hard to be hopeful, given the growing butchery of these needless acts.
In a less-depressing-direction—and cinematically-related—this year's Oscar nominees were just announced, but I won’t get into my annual commentary on favorites/probable winners until I’ve had a chance to catch up on some of the major options that haven’t come yet to streaming. However, until then, if you’d like to compare the Oscar noms to those from the major filmmaking guilds here’s a suggestion for you. Go to this site (then scroll down a bit) to get a slightly-more-concise-listing of the Oscar contenders, copy the URL, put it another web browser for reference, then come back here for links to some of the top guilds for comparisons (where you’ll find a lot of overlap, due to members of these various guilds also being members of similar groups within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). So, for Best Picture you can compare the nominees from the Producers Guild of America (oddly enough, they don’t put this info on their own home link) and the equivalent Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture from the Screen Actors Guild where you’ll also find SAG’s equivalent nominations for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress. Moving along, you can compare additional nominations from the Directors Guild of America, Writers Guild of America, as well as American Society of Cinematographers.
The biggest news for me, though (along with the frustration of my Internet going out last night, delaying this posting for hours), is that my wonderful wife, Nina, and I decided to defy COVID-paranoia and actually go to a theater (fully vaccinated, boosted, masked) to see Avatar: The Way of Water as it’s ideally intended to be experienced in 3-D on a big screen (going to an afternoon matinee after it’s been out for 6 weeks worked fine as only about a half-dozen others joined us in an auditorium built for several hundred; senior prices weren’t all that great, though, at $18 apiece). While it didn’t need to be so long and could benefit from more of the spiritual aspects of the original, it’s quite impressive, now competing for Best Picture from the PGA and the Academy, along with other Oscar noms for Production Design, Sound, and Visual Effects (I’ll be stunned if it doesn’t get that last one). I wanted to add one more review too, so I checked my list of earlier releases now on streaming, saw the best critical support's for Aftersun about a Scottish man and his young daughter trying to connect better on a short vacation, found it very touching with Paul Mescal getting an Oscar nod for Best Lead Actor. Also, here are links for the schedule of the cable network, Turner Classic Movies, which gives you a wide selection of older films with no commercial interruptions and the JustWatch site which offers you a wide selection of options for streaming rental or purchase. If you'd just want to see what reigned at the domestic (U.S.-Canada) box-office last weekend, go here.
Here’s the trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge it; activate
that same button or use the “esc” keyboard key to return to normal size.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: (You don’t have to know the first Avatar [Cameron, 2009] to fully appreciate this sequel, but it probably helps; streams on Disney+, rents for $3.99 at Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Vudu, etc. [I just did so recently, found it to still be visually amazing even in just “plain” HD with no 3-D enhancement], but I’ll offer a quick summary in an attempt to help out.) 15 years ago (2154 in terms of Avatar’s plot) a group of Earth’s scientists—in a desperate attempt to save our dying planet by extracting a rare-but-near-magical-substance, unobtainium, on the moon Pandora (of the planet Polyphemus) in the distant Alpha Centauri star system—developed biological avatars of the moon’s inhabitants, the very tall Na’vi, so that humans could lie in a sort-of-suspended animation-state while their consciousness is sent into the avatars in an attempt to interact with the locals to negotiate removal of the unobtainium from sacred Na’vi gathering places, with sincere attempts made by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the latter in avatar form slowly taken into the Omaticaya clan where he develops a romance with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), daughter of the chief. The human intrusion into Pandora is led by the Resources Development Administration (RDA) with Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) determined to get what he wants, no matter the damage to the moon or its inhabitants. Long story short (yes, Spoilers, but you need to know this stuff to help understand the current sequel), war breaks out; Grace is killed; as is Quaritch, him by skilled archer Neytiri who helps Jake's soul (I suppose) be permanently transferred into his avatar by the Tree of Souls, while most all of the humans are sent back to Earth.
As we move on to Pandora’s present in this new story, Jake’s now head of the forest clan, he and Neytiri have 5 kids: their teenage sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), little daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), adopted teenage daughter Kiri (Weaver)—somehow born from Grace’s inert avatar; no news yet on who the father might be, but there are 3 more sequels to come—adopted young human teen Spider (Jack Champion), son of Col. Quaritch, born after his death. In the shortest sequence of the movie, the RDA return to Pandora, blast away some territory to build a substantial headquarters, then we meet a small group of Na’vi avatars implanted with the memories of Quaritch and other dead soldiers from the earlier battle; they may ultimately be there for the unobtainium, but all this hybrid-version of Quaritch and his big-blue-squad care about is killing Jake.
As this RDA group moves into the forest they come across Jake’s kids, capture them, but most are freed by Jake and Neytiri except Spider who Quaritch’s avatar understands is nominally his son, though there’s no biological connection; nevertheless, the kid’s willing to teach his quasi-Dad more about Na’vi language and customs. Knowing the RDA’s after him, Jake insists (despite family resistance) to move his group to the seashore, home of the Metkayina clan where chief Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) welcomes them, though his wife Ronal (Kate Winslet) isn’t so hospitable. Boys from the clans fight, Lo’ak is then tricked into being left in deep water where he meets/befriends Payakan, a whale-like Tulkun, a species considered part of their family by the Metkayina clan, although this one’s a misunderstood outcast, adding to Jake’s problems with his new protectors. Kiri willingly goes into the ocean, though, links to an underwater Spirit Tree, has a connection with the spirit of her mother, but suffers an epileptic seizure. Then all hell breaks lose when Quaritch tracks Jake to his new home, commanders a whaling vessel that hunts Tulkuns to extract from them a valuable hormone that’s used as a human anti-aging serum. Quaritch invades the coastal village, gets no help in his quest for Jake so decides to hunt Tulkuns to draw out Jake and the water-located Na’vi. Payakan becomes the object of the hunt after bonding with Lo’ak, revealing how he’s an outcast because he rejected the pacifistic ways of his species to attack those whalers who killed his mother.
⇒In the following, always-escalating melee, Quaritch again captures some of the Na'vi children: Lo’ak, Tuk, and, this time, Tsireya (Bailey Bass), daughter of Tonowari. Just as Jake’s about to surrender to secure release of the kids, Payakan attacks the whaler boat. Jake’s older son Neteyam rescues Lo’ak, Spider, and Tsireya; however, he’s fatally shot by Quaritch. Jake faces Quaritch who’s using Kiri as a hostage; Neytiri counters, holding a knife to Spider, forcing the madman Col. to back off. As crises continue to evolve, it seems Jake on his own, Neytiri with Tuk are all trapped in the huge, sinking vessel until Lo’ak rescue Jake, Kiri saves Neytiri and Tuk. We think Jake had choked Quaritch to death, yet he’s still alive so Spider drags him to the surface, then rejects going back to the RDA base with him. Jake offers to continue on into hiding, rejected by Tonowari who welcomes the family into his clan, although Jake does vow to take the fight to the RDA humans.⇐
So What? The first question one might ask, if he/she hasn’t seen this movie yet, is “Does it have to be so long?” The first response from one (me) who's seen it is “No, it doesn’t.” I realize Cameron’s trying to match the embracing spirituality aspects—and the dignity of the Na’vi people in harmony with the natural environment they share with dozens of species of plants and animals—of the original along with those dramatic action scenes where seemingly everything that moves on land or in the air on Pandora comes to the aid of the Na’vi in defeating grossly-militaristic-humans, but for me the new long middle section of Jake’s family learning the ways of the ocean-connected-Metkayinas just goes on way too long, although in retrospect it’s a calming interlude before the climatic battle of the third section, so maybe these placid, beautiful scenes under water help calm our bodies before the constantly-intensifying-action of the third act where no option of hand-to-hand or group-to-group conflict (enhanced by the attack of the angriest whale since Moby Dick) seems to have been modified or rejected. Into that third hour the battles are intense, as the body count rises.
Overall, there’s a sense that whatever idea anyone came up with in the preproduction process was not only considered but likely made it into the final version, where a lot of hissing at each other by the Na’vi clans reminded me a bit too much of how my 2 cats interacted with each other when the younger one was first introduced to the older one, kind of cute at first, a bit tiresome when often repeated (fortunately, the cats have now moved beyond that behavior, unlike many of the Na'vi). Overlength-indulgence aside, the visuals here are astounding—a lengthy, expensive process of shooting motion-capture-footage of the actors in specially-designed-suits and dots on their faces to allow the army of Computer Generated Imagery artists to impose the final versions of all these Na’vi characters (which is how Weaver’s able to portray her own 14-year-old-daughter) as well as add the forest and ocean environments—Cameron says that no water we see in this final product was photographed; it’s all CGI—along with exotic animals and birds, and everything else you can’t set up for green-screen-enhancement photography in a studio setting; you can watch this video (8:39) if you'd like exploring the flow of CGI enhancement/improvement in these movies, 2009 to the present.
Even the actors’ scenes underwater are mostly shot in motion-capture, so they all had to learn to hold their breaths for several minutes while submerged—although by the ending climatic scenes I believed the Mektayinas could survive for lengthy periods due to their being raised and trained in this environment, but it seems a bit unlikely the Omatikaya family could have learned such endurance within the short time they relocated to the ocean before having to survive its constant challenges (yes, I know, this is all fiction, but we need to buy into its seemingly-demanding-laws of physics to fully accept what we’re being shown). Still, marvelous creativity has gone into the depiction of the underwater environments, the bonding of Lo’ak and Payakan, and the frantic battles at the end (where, again, no possibility of a violent encounter or a heart-stopping-scene [including the likely-to-drown-scenes of some main characters, bringing us back to similar situations in Titanic {Cameron, 1997}] seemed to land on the editing room floor [or deleted file, I guess, as this kind of CGI-driven movie is no longer edited by cutting strips of celluloid]). I understand the combination of rewritten scripts, the need to further develop necessary technology to render these scenes and shoot effective motion-capture-shots under water, then the pandemic, then the acquisition of Avatar’s previous properties as Disney bought the cinematic holdings of 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios) prevented us from getting this sequel for over a decade, but it’s here now, making a huge financial impact (if not so much with the CCAL; more on both comments just below), and will continue to keep this franchise alive long after decadent humans have (presumably) been driven away from Pandora.
Bottom Line Final Comments: When ... Water debuted in its general release back on December 16, 2022, Cameron said it would need to gross $2 billion to break even, given its huge production costs ($350-460 million estimate) plus accompanying distribution/marketing expenses. Well, that’s happened as the domestic haul (still climbing; Nina and I made our contributions) is now about $600 million, the global take currently $2.03 billion, making it #6 on the All-Time worldwide chart, with solid possibilities of going higher to join Cameron’s other top-successes of Titanic at #3 with $2.2 billion and the original Avatar at #1 with $2.9 billion. When considering running time, ticket price, COVID awareness for theaters, etc. regarding this Avatar sequel you might be willing to wait a not-yet-announced-time for streaming on Disney+, despite mildly-supportive CCAL encouragement to brave those other possible restrictions and just see it now, especially in its most-commanding-technological form, as the Rotten Tomatoes critics give it 77% positive reviews, the folks at Metacritic counter with one of their usual reserved responses in a 67% average score (connections to these critics’ accumulation sites will be found far below in Related Links, as in all ourTwo Guys postings).
I’ll let Leonard Maltin give you a reason to not wait for smaller-screen-streaming: “It’s easy to poke holes in James Cameron’s films because of awkward dialogue or glib characterizations or his propensity for staging climaxes to his climaxes. But […] Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie filled with wonder, which has become a rare commodity in the age of CGI. But CGI is just a tool, beholden to the storyteller who can harness its powers. James Cameron is many things: a visualist, a futurist, an innovator. Most of all, he knows how to engage an audience through his gift as a storyteller.” To be fair, though, Variety’s Owen Gleiberman speaks for those who aren’t so enthusiastic: “But though the faces of the Na’vi and the MetKayina are expressive, and the actors make their presence felt, there is almost zero dimensionality to the characters. The dimensionality is all in the images. […] I’m sorry, but as I watched ‘The Way of Water’ the only part of me that was moved was my eyeballs.” So, it’s up to you whether you want to immerse yourself in this spectacular display of cinematic wonder (as Gleiberman says, in the stunning visuals) or whether the extensive combat finale with its ending-after-ending structure (not unlike Titanic) would just wear you down after the second hour or so (you could take a restroom break at that point if needed, though; you wouldn’t miss much of substance as Tuk gets tied to a railing again by the bad guys [even she’s angrily-stunned about it]).
While you ponder buying a ticket, let me end with my usual tactic of a Musical Metaphor to speak (well, sing) to what’s gone before, which in this case finally brings me back to David Crosby, a tremendously-talented-man whose drug addictions fatally harmed his body and his close friendships with famous bandmates over the years, until he recently expired (you can learn a lot about him in the documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name [A.J. Eaton, 2019; review in our July 25, 2019 posting]; $3.99 rental on several platforms).* For me, one of his best songs is “The Lee Shore” (first heard on the live 1971 CSNY Four Way Street album, then enhanced for the 1991 CSN Carry On compilation) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CUp-5iq8ns, celebrating his love of sailing, losing yourself to the world of water, just like an island-dweller explains in the movie: “The Way of Water connects all things. Before your birth … and after your death.” In a similar fashion, “The Lee Shore” celebrates “Shells lie scattered in the sand / Winking up like shining eyes, at me / From the sea […] There’s nothing more to see / Than a hundred thousand islands / Flung like some jewels upon the sea.” There’s a lot of violence in … The Way of Water, yet there’s also the underlying message of the natives of Pandora living in peaceful harmony with nature, on land, through the air, or under the sea, if only the vengeful “Sky People” of Earth would allow this tranquility to continue. We’ll see where Cameron takes us in these sequels, in a future that may outlive our present reality.
*I was fortunate to see him perform 6 times: Once at Universal Studios Hollywood amphitheater with Graham Nash (plus a walk-on from Roger McGuinn), twice with the full Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young group, 3 times as CSN. On one occasion I wandered backstage after the concert to see where else the shows would go so I could let friends in Texas know (although when 1 of them drove from Dallas to Austin she got there to find the show cancelled); as I was leaving Crosby zoomed past me on a motorcycle riding out into the warm CA summer night. If you’re not that familiar with his tunes, here’s an opinion of 15 essential songs (I don't agree with the omission of "The Lee Shore").
SHORT TAKES (spoilers also appear here)
Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) rated R 102 min.
This is, as we’ll see by the end, a thoughtful meditation by a daughter about a vacation she shared with her Scottish father in Turkey a couple of decades ago (seems to have not seen him since, given his divorce from her mother) when they both tried to keep upbeat about this relatively-rare-time of being together, even though both of them had worries they couldn’t fully hide.
Here’s the trailer:
Before reading further, please refer to the plot spoilers warning detailed far above.
Set in the late 1990s, this is a simple-yet-very-touching-story about Scottish Calum (Paul Mescal), approaching year 31, who goes on a short vacation to a Turkish resort with his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (Frankie Corio), whom he doesn’t see much as he’s divorced, the kid living with Mum. Father and daughter clearly love each other despite a distance between them based on not really knowing all that much about each other as she’s approaching adolescence, he’s on the cusp of early-middle-age. Further, while he maintains an upbeat façade, inwardly he’s depressed, self-critical, short of proper finances, non-optimistic about his future (he tells someone he doubts he’ll make it to 40). While at the resort he tries to indulge her with a cluster of seaside-activities including sunbathing, pool swimming, pool tables, underwater photography, and scuba diving, with Sophie in the latter activity managing to lose an expensive mask which she feels upset about even as Dad tries to convince her it was no big deal. Later, in a local market he finds a rug he likes but balks at the price, then surprises Sophie later by going back to the merchant without her, buying the rug, bringing it back to their hotel room. There’s not really a lot of plot otherwise (one phone call to Mum, with both of our tourists trying to make the best of their journey to an unknown land), but one highlight is when Calum and Sophie are at a nightclub where the music easily pulls him up to dance (one activity that counteracts his negativity), although it takes some cajoling from him to get her to join in, with them appropriately dancing to the Queen-David Bowie song, "Under Pressure"* (from Queen’s 1982 Hot Space album), with the visuals periodically shifting into a mode that pops up frequently in this film, the dancers lit briefly by strobe lights intercut with darkness. ⇒As this story ends, Sophie boards a plane back to Scotland, Colum walks down an empty hallway (in a crowded airport?) back to the hotel, with implications they never see each other again through a final scene of 31-year-old-Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back on video footage they both shot with her cell phone (neither of them would ever be up for a cinematographer award), seemingly wistful concerning her lost Dad.⇐
*Here’s the official video, focused on various human pressures, illustrated with stock footage of grim situations and shots from classic, discomforting films such as Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) and Nosferatu (F.W. Marnau, 1922). This song gets to the heart of the unspoken, unexplored pressures on our main characters, the images presenting them in an unflattering manner.
Director-screenwriter Wells, in the interview about this film found farther below in the Related Links section of this posting, says this story evolved over years as a semi-autobiographical reminiscence about her own father; further, she notes how at screenings she’s often observed audience members emotionally-shaken by this story, probably in thoughts about their own fathers (I’m not immune from that, thinking back on my own Dad who showed solid love for me, accepted changes in my life that weren’t all that consistent with his own beliefs, yet even though I came along when he was 34 and I knew him until his death at 92 we weren’t really that close beyond a mostly superficial level, so I understand how Sophie here feels she’s only come to know her father from a distance as she’s become an adult, now more able to understand the traumas he was experiencing). Aftersun’s the complete opposite of … The Way of Water in terms of the quiet flow of the former compared to the intense action of the latter, although they do resonate in terms of the importance of (at least attempting to) preserve family, especially under less-than-ideal-circumstances. Aftersun opened domestically on October 21, 2022, can still be found in a few theaters after taking in $1.05 million in upper North America, $3 million globally, but you’ll more easily find it via streaming for a $5.99 rental on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, etc. The CCAL actively joins me in encouraging you to see it, with RT positive reviews at 96%, the MC average score at an astonishing 95% (almost unheard of for them). While “Under Pressure” (noted above) speaks to the tamped-down-tensions of father and child, what I’d rather use for a Musical Metaphor here is Judy Collins’ “My Father” (on her 1968 album Who Knows Where the Time Goes) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R04d-XAA_EQ, with its melancholy lyrics such as “The colors of my father’s dreams / Faded with a sound […] I sail my memories of home / Like boats across the Seine / And watch the Paris sun / set in my father’s eyes again” in that it echoes Sophie’s nostalgic memories of her troubled Dad (even though he was never a coal miner who talked of moving to Paris [neither was Collins’ Dad who was actually a blind musician]), gets to the heart of what the film truly wants to explore, not so much what didn’t connect 20 years ago for Sophie but instead what she remembers about her complicated parent, how she better understands his situation from her emerged-adult-perspective so many years later into her life.
That’s all for my critical commentary this week (which usually reminds me of some parting lyrics from Pink Floyd’s "Time": “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say,” or maybe R.E.M. knows me even better [from "Losing My Religion"]: “Oh no, I’ve said too much / I haven’t said enough”), but whether you agree with any of that stuff or not I’ll offer you one more opportunity to be in unity with an attitude that would benefit all of us, James Taylor’s "Shower the People" (on his 1976 In the Pocket album), because we should “Shower the people you love with love / Show them the way that you feel / Things are gonna be much better/ If you only will.” We’re now sailing through divisive times; it could be a smoother ride if we’d only help each other a bit more.
Other Cinema-Related Stuff: (1) 24 films rejected for the 2023 Oscars (I haven’t seen 14 of them anyway); (2) Oscar snubs and surprises; (3) Where to stream/rent/purchase many of the 2023 Oscar nominees; (4) Another streaming guide for Oscar nominees, this one with some "Anatomy of a Scene" links; (5) 2023 Oscar nominations diversity report: much better for Asians, not so for Blacks; and (6) All 19 Oscar Best Picture nominees directed by women.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll down to the bottom of this Summary page to see some additional info about you wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list). Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage. If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page. We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us!
*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.
AND … at least until the Oscars for 2022’s releases have been awarded on Sunday, March 12, 2023 we’re also going to include reminders in each posting of very informative links where you can get updated tallies of which films have been nominated for and/or received various awards and which ones made various individual critic’s Top 10 lists. You may find the diversity among the various awards competitions and the various critics hard to reconcile at times—not to mention the often-significant-gap between critics’ choices and competitive-award-winners (which pales when they’re compared to the even-more-noticeable-gap between specific award winners and big box-office-grosses you might want to monitor here)—but as that less-than-enthusiastic-patron-of-the-arts, Plato, noted in The Symposium (385-380 BC)—roughly translated, depending on how accurate you wish the actual quote to be—“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” so your choices for success are as valid as any of these others, especially if you offer some rationale for your decisions (unlike any awards voters who blindly fill out ballots, sometimes—damn it!—for films they have never seen).
To save you a little time scrolling through the “various awards” list above, here are the 2023 Golden Globe nominees and winners (if you even care about them after all of their recent controversies) and the Oscar nominees for 2022 films.
Here’s more information about Avatar: The Way of Water:
https://www.20thcenturystudios.com/avatar-the-way-of-water
and https://www.avatar.com/movies/avatar-the-way-of-water
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_qm280q2e0 (12:38 discussion of
making the movie and its special effects [ads interrupt at 4:45, 8:57])
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/avatar_the_way_of_water
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/avatar-the-way-of-water
Here’s more information about Aftersun:
https://a24films.com/films/aftersun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pprHZwk773c (8:08 interview with actors Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio and director/screenwriter Charlotte Wells [ad interrupts at 6:08]) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0-81tmEJg (3:32 conversation between Mescal and Wells)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/aftersun
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/aftersun
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