Movies
The fact that this movie pays any attention to cinematography and shot composition is practically a revolution unto itself within the context of the modern Hollywood comedy. It is also solidly under two hours and mostly devoid of improvised riffing, and with all this combined, it's handily sidestepped my go-to critiques of most mainstream comedy cinema. Truth be told, Game Night isn't hilarious (though it's a decent step in that direction, even as the jokes kind of peter out in favor of plotting toward the middle section onward), and its charms lie mostly in its expert deployment of its impressive cast—it's the best use of Jason Bateman in a decade, Rachel McAdams is as charming as ever, and Jesse Plemons completely steals the show. I feel like I'm damning with faint praise here, but believe me: I enjoyed this, and I welcome more comedies that take their cinematic craft at least this seriously. Are you listening, Judd Apatow? Please? Grade: B+
There are two modes this movie works in: one about the mechanics and group dynamics of an ACT UP chapter in Paris in the '90s, the other a much more personal rendering of the experience of loving someone who is HIV-positive. Because I dig explorations of activism and the group tensions therein surrounding pragmatism vs. idealism vs. interpersonal connections, I connected much more strongly with the first mode I described, but I can imagine someone just as easily feeling that the intimacy of the second personalizes that activism in ways the first fails to do. Regardless, though, it's all very moving and strikingly presented and worth your time. I do get the feeling that the two modes are bumping up against one another rather than truly complementing each other, and this dulls the movie somewhat. But it's a minor problem overall, and one that only keeps the movie from being Great instead of Good. Grade: B+
Force Majeure has one very interesting question on its mind—what is your gut reaction to a crisis: self-preservation or the protection of your loved ones—that unfortunately The Loneliest Planet already eviscerated with much more elegance. Still, it's not like we can't live in a world with more than one film wrestling with the same thematic landscape, and it's an undeniably compelling theme that Force Majeure scrutinizes with a great deal of wry humor and a good eye for critiquing the posturings of masculinity. I do wish there was a bit more on this film's mind, though, because, unlike The Loneliest Planet, Force Majeure exposes its conceit in the very early goings of the film and basically just repeatedly poses it with little variation for the following two hours, right up to its thematically muddled ending. Grade: B-
Jean-Luc Godard chose to have this film's English subtitles not be proper subtitles but as these fractured, conceptual phrases (e.g. "war is war," "hello geometry," you get the picture). I guess these are supposed to clue us English-speaking swine in to the larger thematic concerns of the movie while still preserving the feeling of us being present in a context outside of our own language, but who knows—writing I've seen about this movie discusses aspects of the movie that I totally didn't register at all (one of the characters is apparently running for public office?), so maybe Godard is just trolling us even more heavily than my academic rationalization of the subtitles indicates. What that means is that all I'm left with are those broad ideas—as always, Godard loves his leftist ideology, so hellooooo low-hanging imagery about the excesses of capitalism—and the pure texture of the movie, which, to be fair, is often quite playful and fun in that cockeyed way that avant-garde cinema can be; for example, my favorite of the cryptic subtitles reads, meme-ily, "What if reality but in books," which elicited a hearty chuckle, and other sections use the language of film to funny, incongruous effect: a long, static close-up of a llama scored with tense, serious music (and later, Gregorian chant). Honestly, the movie's first movement (set on a Carnival Cruise) and the third/final (consisting mostly of a collage of repurposed existing footage, both from Godard films and film history) are also frequently visually sumptuous in the ways it uses filmic imperfections and datamoshing to create these almost painterly images. But good merciful heavens, the middle section of Film Socialisme, set in a gas station, is interminable and inscrutable and above all crushingly boring, especially in absence of my being able to understand the French dialogue outside of those subtitled abstractions, and it just kills the movie for me. I guess part of this is my fault for not learning French like a *real* smart person, but also: screw you, Godard. Even given the eventual pleasures of the final segment, the movie never really succeeds in coaxing me back into the house after throwing me into non-French-speaker jail for so long. Grade: C
I mean, it's basically rich people being miserable and doing drugs and hating themselves, but... imagine that being intermittently compelling. Also imagine Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming writing and directing the best film versions of themselves, because it's here, too. Grade: B
This movie looks amazing, both as the classically composed b&w cinematography of urban, non-famous Paris that makes up the film's first half and as the hazed-out, digital-video-as-first-gen-Technicolor footage that encompasses the film's second half. On the other hand, I'm left extremely cold by the actual text of the film, which involves a bunch of academics considering their pasts as radicals and the ethics of complicity in capitalist systems—not ideas that I'm opposed to a movie exploring by any means, but certainly ones that I wish this particular film engaged with a bit more vigor. I'm sure this says a lot about the difference between what Godard and I want out of this movie, but I wish this felt more of an impassioned dialogue than a cool, ruminative stroke of the chin. Grade: C
In which Jean-Luc Godard condenses centuries of human history and class conflict into a metaphorical road trip into hell—it's hilarious and outrageous and sobering and completely out-there. Weekend is not a subtle movie, but it makes a virtue of unsubtlety ("The end... of cinema" one title card declares) that feels weaponized in a frequently compelling and complicated way, even if I'm just a tad wary of the actual philosophical POV. Godard is leaning into a particularly nihilistic strain of Maoism here, one that, scrubbed of leftism's utopian impulses, posits that Western society is doomed to spiral into tribal chaos whether it's in the hands of exploitative bourgeoisie or violent radicals, which, if this movie is meant to be a political statement, I find to be understandable but ultimately a dead-end of an idea. But maybe I'm just not radical enough, ha. Either way, it's an exhilarating, endlessly inventive movie that, among other things, is the most direct antecedent to last year's mother!—if mother! is the Bible for heretics, then Weekend is (to put the chronology a bit backwards) mother! for Marxists. I liked mother! a whole lot and I'm not a heretic (I don't think?), so it's only natural I'm into this, even though I'm not a Marxist. Grade: A-
There are definitely things about this movie that work very well—it's stylish, the editing is, of course, great, and Nana is a reasonably engaging character (performed excellently by Anna Karina). I also liked the imposition of The Passion of Joan of Arc over the narrative—Godard loves his Hollywood films, sure, but this is probably the most successful cinematic reference in the movie. That said, Vivre sa vie is fragmented to a degree that I'm not sure it completely justifies—I mean, I know that this is a gigantic part of the movie's conceit, and I'm not against modernist fragmentation. But a lot of this fragmentation feels like an end to itself rather than serving some larger scheme, and as it is, the movie seems very much like the guy who made Breathless grasping at more formal and philosophical profundity, awkwardly caught between more traditional narrative concerns and high-minded philosophical, modernist ones. Grade: B-
Music
In case you needed any more assurance that the future of indie rock is female (thank goodness), here's U.S. Girls with a strong, left-of-the-dial collection of pop/rock. In a Poem Unlimited is perfectly balanced between its zanier elements (the sax in "Rage of Plastics," the weird hoarse vocals on "Why Do I Lose My Voice When I Have Something to Say," the song "Time" in general) and its strongly melodic songwriting, resulting in an album that feels unhinged enough to be interesting while it maintains a pop immediacy. Grade: B+
Screw you, Godard! Haha.
ReplyDeleteThere's no better way to inspire this sentiment than to watch four of his movies in two days.
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