 Nothing's ever what you'd expect. I have said many times over my many videos that I don't expect to be successful on this platform and even that I don't want to be successful as arbitrarily measured by being able to dedicate my life to it. The dream of being a YouTuber instead of just a guy with a day job in a YouTube channel. I've said it so many times that no doubt some believe the Lady Dolph protests too much and maybe they are right but if so it is not them I'm trying to convince it's me. I need that to be true because if I do dream of success actually then the reality of its lack is much darker and harder. Every so often this mask of disconnection I wear for myself does slip each time I fuck something up or even if something fucked up happens that I can't control but oh well now it's all ruined it's just kind of spiral. Less than two weeks ago I went through a period where I thought maybe I should just stop doing YouTube and if you're a part of the week Airview Discord you know that I didn't even have a plan to do a review right now. I almost gave up on the last video after it had been shot and this one was going to be a channel update called I Don't Know What I'm Doing and would have just been me figuratively and maybe literally crying on my couch about my current mental state. And maybe that will come at some point because it's still kind of true but between that initial feeling and now came cinema. You know sometimes you just see something that hits you in the moment that you need it. It encapsulates all of that emotion and makes you feel like you're not alone and if you're lucky it comes from one of your favorite directors. Hello by the way and welcome to the week Airview. You can call me frustrated about the uniformity of men's fashion and today I am talking about Edgar Wright's latest film Last Night in Soho. This was one of those films like Julia Ducarno's Teton that I went into completely blind. I knew that Edgar Wright had directed it, that it was a horror movie and that the always captivating Anya Taylor Joy played a prominent role. The only real insight I got into it was two days before when my friend Garth having just come out of a showing texted me, I loved that Edgar Wright of all people made an incredibly sober minded movie about how nostalgia sucks. And that certainly piqued my interest because though it would be unfair to say that Wright's career has been spent catering to nostalgia, it's certainly what fueled his rise. Look I love Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World but all of them are so obsessed with the past and making you think about the past and how fun it is to see the past but again somebody smarter or at least more dedicated than me should make a two hour video essay about the link between parody and nostalgia. Kind of surprised that one doesn't already exist. And I know that their stories often try to feint towards the idea that you'd need to grow up but when it comes time to commit to that idea, they don't. It's not until the world's end where Wright seems to finally be grappling with the genuine damage that can result from someone's inability to get past their glory days. Well I have some issue with its structure, I think the Cornetto Trilogy's final installment is also the most meaningful with top tier performances from everyone and far more complex character dynamics than I think in any of his other films period. And while some of that is a function of a more personal story, it also feels like after the box office failure of Scott Pilgrim which is as indebted to in-jokes and references as anything that has ever existed but is better than most of them combined. So take that Steven Spielberg. He decided to take a new tack. It doesn't surprise me that he first pitched the plot for Last Night in Soho as the world's end was gearing up for production but this can go so much further because it's not connected to anything. The world's end feels different from the other entries in that spiritual trilogy but it's still in the spirit. There are beats it's gotta hit. Baby Driver stood on the shoulders of Heist and Car Chase Giants but is less indebted to its references. I think while some unfortunate casting choices meant it almost immediately became awkward to watch, the film is important for how it pushed Wright's integration of licensed music into the fabric of his work to new heights. So it feels natural that he followed it with a decade spanning music documentary and that said decade spanning music documentary would be followed by the decades jumping Last Night in Soho. The film which I saw in New York's Times Square so I could sadly never say a movie I saw Last Night in Soho follows Eloise, a rural girl who wants desperately to be a fashion designer and travels to London to attend the London College of Fashion or as the weirdos across the pond call uni. In the US, colleges are higher learning institutions that typically offer bachelor's degrees and maybe master's degrees as well. Universities offer PhDs as well as a heavier focus on research. Actual British law professor and patron Phil Bates, seen here wearing the dope merch designs created by number one week air review Superfan Willow, told me that UK colleges do not inherently have degree granting capabilities but can be given them through partnership or other affiliation with a university. London College of Fashion, for example, is a constituent of the University of the Arts London. Wow, learning. But because she is the protagonist of a horror movie, there's another layer. She sees dead people or at least one dead person. Her mother appears to her at times in the mirror. Something that her grandmother with whom she lives is aware has happened but the extent of which has been hidden from her. And for a while there's a very real question about whether any of what we're seeing is real at all or if Eloise is merely suffering from a mental illness. And while it's eventually clear that the events we are seeing indeed happened and Eloise literally has a sixth sense, it's very easy to read the entire thing as a metaphor for coping with mental illness and or trauma. Eloise's mother died by suicide and her grandmother explicitly mentions that things can get too much and that it's okay if she needs to come home and get away from the big city, a place that can be genuinely cruel and uncaring even if you aren't a teenage girl dealing with lascivious old men and spoiled brat roommates who want to tear you down as a way to build themselves up. As I've mentioned before, I not only live in New York City but on the island of Manhattan itself. I work on the border of Midtown and Hell's Kitchen. On my typical daily commute, I see at least hundreds of different people and probably over a thousand. The primary colors I see are gray concrete, red brick, and black glass. Not much green, not much blue. It's stressful. And if you've got mental health issues that intensity isn't likely to help them, it hasn't really helped mine except maybe helped me to ignore them. Smile here. Whoops, that was a note to self, not a thing I was supposed to say. My bad. That was a lie, but one of the interesting things about me scripting these videos over days or sometimes weeks is that my writing in general and jokes in particular differ dramatically in tone depending on my mood. And if you're paying close attention, you can maybe sometimes tell how I was doing at any given punchline, although I do tend to cut out the bleakest bits in editing. And Eloise doesn't have a good time in the modern big city. She's an old soul, I guess, someone who likes older fashion and older music and she pines for the days when those weren't old at all. She wishes she was in Soho in the 1960s and because she's the protagonist of a horror movie, her wish is fulfilled sort of, but in mostly a bad way. On the first night at her new room away from the dorms, which she rents from an old spinster type because her unique roommate was making her miserable, Eloise pulls out one of them old records. Syllablex, you're my world, turns it up nice and loud and gets under the covers. But when she does, she finds that the underneath stretches on seemingly forever. And of course, she follows it until she reaches a door that lets out into, you guessed it, Soho in the 1960s, vibrant and lively and a place where you could see Sean Connery as Bond on the big screen except when that was just a regular thing and not a fun throwback. But something strange happens when we find a mirror. It is not Thomas and Mackenzie looking back, but Anya Taylor Joy. It turns out that last night in Soho isn't a time traveling movie. Eloise did not physically go anywhere, rather her spirit or something unwittingly latched onto Sandy. And she gets to see this bygone era play out from her perspective. At first, it's glamorous. Sandy is a young woman with a dream to sing. She wants all eyes to be on her, but not in a creepy way, you know, the next cell of black. She knows that she's a star who just needs to show everyone how brightly she can shine. And Eloise is so excited. Who wouldn't be? If you've got to be hitched to someone, it may as well be a gorgeous gal who's going places and her fashion is to die for. Back in the present, Eloise blondes her hair and shifts her style. The clothes she can buy, she does. Those she can't become class assignments that she will make. Gosh, damn it. Everything seems to be going great until it isn't because Sandy, it turns out, is not the star of a heartwarming underdog story or even a horror movie, but a showgirl's type drama about a young up-and-comer who is exploited in every sense of the word by the men around her. And Eloise got VIP tickets to an immersive experience that she's forced into every time she goes to sleep. The rules surrounding how exactly Eloise is experiencing Sandy's story are a little muddy, though obviously we first see her as Sandy's reflection and that's the common representation. Eloise appears on the other side of a conveniently placed mirror. This more than implies that the story is playing out through Sandy's eyes, but there are other times where Eloise is a bystander in the room, like an out-of-body experience with someone else's body. A lesser critic would say that this is a plot hole or some stupid bullshit, but I follow the Film Crit Hulk School of Things. If I don't think about it while it's happening, it doesn't really matter now does it? And like, there's no apparent narrative reason for the shifting perspective, but there is absolutely a storytelling reason for it. The movie is better for giving variety to how Eloise experiences the past because it creates variety for us as the viewers. Sometimes all we need is the occasional look in a passing reflection to understand her feelings. While totally different in their usage and purpose, it is interesting that two different horror movies this year used mismatching reflections to tell their stories. I liked the Candyman reboot quote in general, but I loved the way that the killer appeared only in mirrors. Seeing things happen seemingly by magic in the real world with the full scene and perpetrator only being reflected is just cool as hell. But other times it's important that we see the whole thing play out, as in Sandy's audition in first public performance. These are crucial to Eloise's development, and so it's crucial that we see how she experiences them. Once the stakes are clearer, her constant presence would become more of a distraction because like, we don't always need to see Eloise to know how she feels about what's going on because we're feeling it too. What's happening to Sandy is horrifying. We want it to stop, but just like Eloise is trapped behind the mirror, we are stuck on the other side of the screen. Neither of us can do anything to change the past. All we can do is see it through. This parallels the lack of agency that Sandy feels each time she tries to get away from this life she's pulled right back. She can't escape it and doesn't know how to fight it. Eloise can't very well do something from the future that Sandy could not do in her present, and as the nights drag on, the experience of Sandy's life becomes more and more horrific. As the men blend together, they literally blend together. Each face seemingly a composite of numerous others. It is a truly unsettling effect, and because we have established that Eloise can see dead people, eventually they start to haunt her waking life as well, pushing her already fragile state of mind ever closer to breaking. Because in the collapse of Sandy's dream, Eloise sees her own. Eloise escaped the cruelty of modern London to this mythic time of decades past because that's when things were good, right? Of course not. The good old days were never that, and suddenly, Eloise's new style and ideas inspired by this girl, she idolized and became reminders of how wrong she was. Yes, her roommate's awful, but showbiz. Jesus fucking Christ. Which is why I'm very glad that Edgar Wright for the first time in his career chose a woman to co-write this screenplay. Christie Wilson-Carrons, who co-wrote 1917 and will apparently be working with Taiko Waititi on his upcoming Star Wars project, came into last night in Soho with a vital perspective. Sure, Wright could have ignored his own limitations and made a movie that was still a stylistic triumph, but missed the emotional core. Wilson-Carrons helps to bring it. At first, the evil men around the girls feels cartoonish, but the longer you sit with them, the more you realize nah, there really are people like this out there. I've no doubt that she has seen people like Sandy pulled into the meat grinder, people she desperately wanted to help but felt trapped and unable to. That's a bleak thought, but at the same time this is very much an Edgar Wright movie, visually sumptuous, impeccably engineered, and very funny, despite the brutality on display. And that is hardly a surprise. The world's end is a tale of alcoholism and how it destroys lives and relationships, but it is also shockingly optimistic about humanity. Last night in Soho can be heartbreaking and infuriating, but it's ultimately about women who refuse to be held down, who take their power back in radically different ways. Dreams don't always work out, they probably don't more than they do, but just because your life doesn't become the thing you wanted it to, doesn't mean you don't have value or that you can't have an impact. And that's good to remember. 8.9 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, thank you particularly to my patrons, Tom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Liam Knipe, Willow, I Am The Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Jacob Alexander, and the folks who'd rather be read than set. If you liked this video, that's great. If not, oh well. If you want to see more, please subscribe. I hope to see you in the next one.