High Hopes

1988 comedic drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A working-class socialist and his wife deal with an obnoxious sister and even more obnoxious brother-in-law, a senile mother, and the mother's snooty neighbors. Oh, and an extraterrestrial.

With Naked being one of my favorite movies ever, it's strange how I never bothered watching Mike Leigh's other movies. This one, kind of about how much of a boner kill Thatcher is, is English enough that I'm likely missing context. And it took me a while to adjust to Leigh's rhythm here, but once I did, I really enjoyed spending time with these characters. They're broad, especially those neighbors who make the neighbors in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation look like people who might actually exist, but they all effectively add textures of meaning to this nearly plotless slice of life.

As Chekov said (and I'm paraphrasing), "If the director puts a cactus in the first act of a movie, then in the second act, it should be fired." I'm not sure it was, maybe not even metaphorically.

Why is Karl Marx buried in England anyway?

I really liked the plucky music in this (Andrew Dickson, who seems to work exclusively with Leigh), but it was a little much at times.