Kitahito

It is painful to see Clint Eastwood humiliate himself on screen. His acting wasn't as bad as in The Mule, where he kept having that confused and stunned look that Joe Biden used to have he was in front of the cameras, but at least in that film he had a historically justified reason why a 90-year-old skeleton should be creaking and crackling all over the screen, but here he doesn't even have that. Instead, he's the biggest macho man inthe west women fall for, he heals animals with a flick of his hand, turning a street urchin into a saint in an afternoon, breaks in wild horses, repairs cars, beats up gangsters 60 years younger, and spits out shallow life wisdom like someone spits out the shells of a sunflower. You can joke about it like most of the kind-hearted reviewers here did, but beyond a certain point it's just too pathetic to bear.

No self-awareness whatsoever, and it's very painful to watch...

There are moments in one's life when one is so profoundly disappointed, because reality proves that we are on a cursed, terrible, doomed timeline, when there is simply nothing else to do but stare in front of you, stripped of all illusions, and ask, not of yourself, but of the universe in general: why?

I was very, very skeptical of this film, because I knew that with about 3 exceptions (Dancer in the Dark, Fiddler on the Roof, Hair), all of the musicals were burnable garbage that invalidated their own dramatic quality with their silly, infantile, matinee-flavoured singing, but I didn't expect it to so deliberately and systematically destroy everything that made the 2019 Joker film great.

Why was this necessary?

I must say at the outset that I wanted to like this film, because symbolic, metaphorical, low-budget, chamber-drama-like works are very close to my heart. Unfortunately, Niclas Larsson (who is responsible for such great works as... well, yeah) hasn't the faintest idea how to direct a film or write a script, because the end result is so fake, incoherent, wannabe-deep, boring and so frustratingly roundabout that anything the film was trying to say (not that there haven't been a million films made about grief work and letting go...) is completely meaningless because it just babbles, stammers, and then urinates under itself.

I have no idea how Larsson was able to blackmail these stars into appearing in this botched film experiment, perhaps kidnapping their child or poisoning them with the venom of a rare species of South American snake for which only he has an antidote. In any case, it is certain that "Mother, Couch" will not ennoble anyone's CV. But one thing must be acknowledged: it's a perfect film for snobs, who are ready to project everything and its opposite into the infertile, barren nothingness at any time, if it makes them feel that they are more than the average cinema-goer, despite their mediocre intellect and awful taste.