Perfect Pauses: Men

To get myself off the schneid -- that's a losing streak in sports, but it applies here when I'm in a bit of a rut in terms of ideas -- I decided to do a Perfect Pauses post, since it'd had been a while since I'd done one.

Of course, you can't do a Perfect Pause post unless you have, you know, a perfect pause. Fortunately, a pause during Men last night qualified.

In this case it's not anything that really speaks to the themes of the film, though I certainly don't think Alex Garland would have chosen a grapefruit for Jessie Buckley to cut through unless he found there to be something vaguely symbolic about it -- you know, cutting something open to reveal its pink insides. That's the way Garland's mind works I'm sure.

No, it's that the pause is perfect because the cut has already started to occur but the half that is not pinned down by Buckley's fingers has only just started to fall toward the cutting board underneath it. (A lot of my Perfect Pauses are action captured midway through its completion, in a moment you'd only have a split section to grab, like this post about Luca's title character in the final millisecond before he gets hit by a glass of water.)

Since I have you I might as well tell you what I thought of Men.

Well, for about a half of a movie I thought it was going to be a masterpiece. That scene with the echoes in the tunnel is so eerily beautiful that I think I could have watched it for about 45 minutes. But, the idea wears thin pretty quickly and ultimately doesn't bear very clear thematic fruit. There are some potentially provocative ideas in this movie but they are not executed with much coherence.

Loved all the stuff related to the husband who might have committed suicide or might have died of an accident, though. Garland is really good with such flashback scenes, one of the strengths of the far more successful Annihilation.