Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This is the directorial debut by  the Wachowskis,  a neo-noir erotic crime thriller.   According to Wikipedia they took inspiration from Billy Wilder, which led me to think I might be in for a lesbian variation on 'Double Indemnity', but that isn't the case so I guess the Wilder influence is a broader one.    Never mind, this film is plenty entertaining as long as you don't take it too seriously. The story centres on three characters - Corky and Violet who fall madly in love with each other (played by  Gina Gershon and Jenni fer Tilly respectively), and Violet's Mafia boyfriend Caesar (J oe Pantoliano) who has no inkling as to Violet's real sexuality.  All three give terrific, slightly stylised , performances that are in keeping with the overall tone. There's a sex scene between Corky and Violet early on which is something special, maybe because  feminist writer and sex educator Susie Bright was involved as a consultant. The film was shot on ...

I read David Mitchell's source novel quite a while ago and enjoyed it immensely. The most striking thing about the novel is its structure of six interconnected and nested stories, spanning a large time span, from the nineteenth century to the distant future. Because of the structure it would seem to be one of those novels that is unfilmable. This didn't stop Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis from making this 172-minute masterpiece or folly, depending on your point of view.  They decided to move away from the Russian doll structure of the novel and instead try to tell the six stories in parallel, jumping frequently from one story to another, creating a kind of mosaic. On paper this sounds nuts, but (maybe because I had read the novel so had some familiarity with the stories) I found myself thinking after about ten minutes that this is fine, what's the problem? To emphasise the interconnectedness of the stories (or maybe to cut production costs), the six actors who play the six m...