Sebastian review – journalist turned sex-worker aims to turn side-hustle into art

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Ruaridh Mollica is very good as Max, a freelance writer with a secret app life in prostitution, but Mikko Mäkelä’s film is not clear enough about his motivations Sex work as a window into human nature is a longstanding theme in cinema, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who mines his side-hustle escort work for material, is also a writer. But this uneasy, self-regarding sophomore effort by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never fully distancing itself from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly makes contact with flesh-and-blood human truths. By day, Max is a freelance hotshot for London’s trendy Wall magazine; he has just bagged himself a sweet assignment to interview Bret Easton Ellis. By night he is “Sebastian”, a hot commodity on an app called DreamyGuys. Typically servicing the older gentleman, he turns his experiences...
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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is in trouble – but is it too big to fail?

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It’s on to its third reshoot and has lost two Batmans but is Jason Momoa’s protector of the deep destined for a watery grave? Warning: contains The Flash spoilers

Back in the 00s, the idea of making an Aquaman movie was deemed so ridiculous that the Hollywood bro comedy Entourage spent much of its second and third seasons taking the mickey out of the idea. In the end, Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) only agrees to star in the superhero epic because box office king James Cameron signs on to direct it.

This, of course, was long before the advent of the Marvel and DC superhero universes, which have since gone on to dominate multiplexes and prove that people really will turn out in their droves to see (for the most part) preposterously entertaining films about spandex-sporting titans as conceptually silly as Shazam!, Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon. During the peak of the comic book movie era, which on recent evidence appears to be long gone, it seemed as if almost any character from the pages of DC and Marvel could be spun off into their own big screen adventure. If Vin Diesel can be convinced to play a talking tree whose only utterance is “I Am Groot”, you know the creatives behind this are fully aware they are riding a gravy train to the land of psychedelic potentiality.

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