Movies
About what you'd expect from the title, with the added wrinkle of being slightly socially conscious by having a half-baked metaphor based on the "beaver=vagina" thing, which... *sigh*. I was hoping for a doofy, so-bad-it's-good kind of thing (and that's clearly what the movie is going for). But there's just something about its vaguely conscious pretensions and how thoroughly the movie reveals that it doesn't understand its own subtext (there's an extended scene whose point is literally that a character is making a big deal about another character being topless, and this seems less about body image/modesty culture commentary and more about "hey look, titties"—why yes, the movie is written and directed by a bunch of dudes, why do you ask?) that's deeply irritating, and ultimately, I found it all to be craven and lazy rather than fun. No abundance of hilariously bad beaver puppetry and over-the-top gore can remedy it. Grade: C-
After loving Mudbound, I thought I'd go back to Dee Rees's 2011 breakthrough. The cinematography is very nice in that hazy, neon, handheld way that's been American indie's bread and butter for the past decade or so (though perhaps that decade of neon-bathed digital has softened the impact of this movie's look), and the story, while drawing on a familiar trope (the coming out story), succeeds by transporting tropes into an environment I've never seen them play out in, urban African-American culture. Some of this feels a little too on-the-nose, and it feels like the movie is spread just a tad bit thin by focusing on as many characters as it does, a feeling Mudbound miraculously avoided. But in general, it's a well-observed and engaging piece of cinema that fits in nicely with the sensitive, naturalist (as opposed to twee) indies of recent years. Grade: B
It's basically the opposite of a screwball comedy, wherein instead of talking around sex in humorous ways, these guys just dive head-first into it by frankly talking about orgasms and oral sex and stuff [*Pete Rose sliding into home image*], only with that same glibness that makes screwball feel so fleet. The movie is attuned to and making fun of social nuances/manners in a way that feels at home with its 18th-century source material, and it's also dealing in this almost-parodic teen melodrama mode that fits in well with the late-'90s spate of teen movies and TV, the combination of the two making for some interesting moods in the film. So I like all that. But at the same time, I also don't think the movie really works as a whole, and I'm going to call it a failure of both directing and acting. Sarah Michelle Gellar is really the only one in this cast who understand the viciously tongue-in-cheek, arch tone that this material necessitates, and she gets all the best moments, too; the rest of the cast seems to have wandered in from something like Dawson's Creek and are various shades of listless and tone-deaf (though I guess Selma Blair deserves something for her strange, grating performance). And this is all staged in really contradictory and dull ways by the director, who I'm not going to say has misunderstood the material so much as he seems to lack the craft necessary to make the material pop; this is some shockingly generic filmmaking for a story that involves a wager staked on lowkey incest, and ten points from Gryffindor for those terrible music cues ("Bittersweet Symphony," what are you doing?). There's also the whole late-'90s sexual ethic that seems to buy into the myth that someone can be harassed (and basically raped, to be honest) into enjoying sex, which like... yikes. There's enough smart/high-camp stuff going on here that it didn't really ruin my time with it, but I don't blame anyone for checking out because of that. Either way, it's a complicated, compromised movie that easily could have been way better. But also, it's not like we've gotten a better version of this specific type of movie since, though I welcome modern filmmakers to try. Grade: B-
The two things that make My Neighbors the Yamadas so distinctive within Studio Ghibli's catalog—the sketchy, hyper-cartoonish aesthetic and the almost entirely vignette-based structure of its plot—also make it something of a drag at times. There are times when the art style works extremely well, especially when it blends the line between objective and subjective reality (a character flies into the air, the world itself melts away into a fantasy), and there are just as many times when the plot's vignettes create these heartbreaking little ellipses and slice-of-life pinpricks. But almost as often, the movie is directionless and inconsequential, and I strongly felt the 100-minute runtime. It's an interesting experiment that I'm glad exists, but I probably won't be returning to this any time soon. Grade: B-
Surprising absolutely nobody, one of the most popular and enduring movies of all time is great. Fritz Lang's vision of the future by way of the Weimar Republic is awe-inspiring and transporting and exactly the sort of thing I watch movies for. I can nitpick: the movie never quite bests its jaw-dropping opening hour (honestly, the 2.5-hour length of the "Complete" cut I watched was about fifteen minutes north of ideal), and I guess I wanted the movie to be just a tad more agitprop-ish and a tad less "we need a messiah to make the capitalists and the labor get along"—viva the robot revolution, is what I'm saying, or maybe that's just the Janelle Monáe fan inside me. But fixating on these bits would be unrepresentative of just how successful this movie was at achieving in me the greatest ambition of all popcorn cinema: I was enthralled. Grade: A
Yay, Metropolis!
ReplyDeleteIt's so goooooooood.
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