Movies
The thing is, it's kind of hard to discuss this movie without talking about the movie's final third, and that movie's final third is best experienced cold. Whether or not that ending works is another conversation altogether, and I'm of two minds right now, and neither is entirely enthusiastic. Neither is entirely negative, either. I will say this: throughout its runtime, Mountains May Depart shows an sharp eye for imagery and genre-blending (it handily vacillates between light comedy, domestic melodrama, and sweeping saga) that makes it a thoroughly interesting experience. What's even better is that it's one of those rare movies that, regardless of the technical success of its "interesting" elements, is consistently engaging on an emotional level. And that covers a multitude of possible structural sins. Grade: B+
Nausicaä is, without a doubt, one of the most visually stunning of Hayao Miyazaki's career, which is no small feat. It's also full of some of the most inventive creature and character designs in animation history, period—the opening minutes are absolutely jaw-dropping in their warped, mystical grandeur. It also runs into the same problem that I've always had with Princess Mononoke (a movie that shares no small portion of Nausicaä's DNA), which is that for all its epic scope, it's kind of cold. I enjoy watching these characters, but I don't care a thing about them, and I'm not convinced the movie does either. Ultimately, that's not a huge problem--it's much more focused on imagery and action, and on that rubric, it's a resounding success. Grade: A-
The point is good: irony and sarcasm are ultimately empty ways of interpreting the world if it's the only way you look at things. The problem is that the point is made clearly in the first five minutes and reinforced ad nauseum over the next 90 minutes of generally bland indie-aesthetic cinematography and mumbling dialogue. It's tedious to the extreme. Grade: C-
Another Tarkovsky, another masterpiece. At this point, I'm prepared to call the man the greatest visualist in cinematic history: it takes about thirty minutes for the truly arresting images to come in this movie (it's no coincidence that those first minutes are the least interesting of the whole film), but once they come, they are constant and gorgeous. I was riveted, and I'm convinced that you could take any frame and mount it as gorgeous photography. Get me a poster of the final shot, STAT. It's not all just eye candy, though. Thematically, this movie's a little more straightforward than earlier, more cryptic Tarkovsky like The Mirror, but it's no worse for that. Like Stalker before it, Nostalghia is a film about religion's role in how we think about the past and present, and it's super compelling. So, gold stars all around. Grade: A
The original Cloverfield showed the traditional monster-movie scenario from the perspective of basically mere extras—those who just run and scream the whole time, a bleak portrait of how little agency most non-Schwartzenegger people have in a disaster. Enter 10 Cloverfield Lane, one of the tightest, smartest sci-fi thrillers of the 2010s, and you have a similar conceit of telling a micro story in the context of what turns out to be a much larger one. 10 starts at the smallest possible point, focusing on tiny objects on a dresser, and meticulously pulls back its lens over the next 100 minutes until the ending gives our protagonist her first moment of true agency: the choice to be either a movie extra or a movie hero. Like the rest of the film, it's simultaneously horrifying and thrilling. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment