Movies
For Ethan Hawke's ailing pastor, Toller, it's the environment. "Will God forgive us for destroying His creation?" one character asks Toller, and it becomes the seed, the germ of an idea that won't let his mind go until that question has become a primal scream that Toller slings at his own church. But it's not just the environment. Will God forgive us—American Christians—for destroying the lives of immigrants, as much God's creation as the birds and the oceans and the snowy woods? Will God forgive us for exploiting the voiceless poor in other countries just so we can have a more convenient way to check our social media feeds? Will God forgive us for driving LGBT adolescents to suicide? And assuming, as orthodoxy encourages us, that He does, isn't there something fundamentally horrific about the fact that He would, that He would preserve an institution as corrupted as the American Evangelical Church? These are the questions that grip my mind, and I'll admit the appeal of the idea of destroying the Church altogether, as Toller eventually decides to do. I vocally wished for it on November 8, 2016. But the true power of First Reformed—the best film of the year and the best faith-based film since 2016's Silence—is not just that it articulates my darkest, most despairing thoughts about American Christianity; it's that it's able to contextualize these thoughts as horror, a that's as self-harming as they are self-righteous; a cage covered in thorns, one that, when shaken, hurts others as much as myself—Toller is as much Travis Bickle (to name another Schrader protagonist) as he is Tomas Ericsson from Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman's faith-in-crisis masterpiece and clearly an influence on this film). Because institutions are people. "Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind at the same time," Toller says early in the film, and that's it: institutions can be vile and worthy of destruction, but each one of them is the accumulation of human life, every life the image of God, every one God's creation. What to do with the wisdom of holding these two contradictory truths, I don't know, and the movie itself may not know either. There may not even be an answer to that oxymoron. Is this grace? Is grace so indecent? So unjust? Grade: A
A comedy, or maybe it's a satire, or maybe this is a straight drama—such tonal confusion seems endemic to my interactions with the Romanian New Wave—involving two men's search for buried treasure and the bureaucratic hassle involved with the government regulations of treasure-seeking. It's sort of interesting in parts, but the long, naturalistic takes and subdued acting are all a tad too dry for my tastes—honestly, the tonal confusion has more to do with this movie being somnolent than anything really radical. Plus, there's this out-of-nowhere ending that feels like a punchline—the most interesting part of the movie, for sure, and I could have done with more pointed thematics like that of the ending. Grade: B-
As a documentary, it's fine—a typical talking-heads-mixed-with-archival-footage affair, but elevated by just how interesting these talking heads are in the context of the film's subject of the political life of Muhammad Ali (e.g. Louis Farrakhan). Rendered this way, it's probably a better depiction of Ali's struggles than the Michael Mann movie, actually. Grade: B
So this little girl has to come to terms with the death of her mother, and it's very cute and crushingly sad and amazingly well-acted for a movie that's approximately 90% child actors. It also made me deeply uncomfortable: did the filmmakers actually convince the 4-year-old Victoire Thivisol that her mother had died? It's easy to complain about bad child actors, but it's just as easy to forget how upsetting it is to watch a child seem convincingly grief-stricken. Grade: B
The only thing I knew about Mishima before watching this movie was how his life ended, and that lack of knowledge was probably a liability for me. So what I got was a very stylish, very striking film (those sets! that lighting!) about the political and artistic philosophy of a man whose art and philosophy I know nothing about. I dug the look and structure of the film, but I'm guessing that having read some of the dude's novels (at least the ones re-enacted in this movie) would have helped me to get into the pretty conceptual, pretty monotonous dialogue scenes. Grade: B+
What they don't tell you about Song of the South is that it's really boring in addition to being really racist—and it's worth interjecting here that the racism of Song of the South is the worst sort of movie racism, too, wherein the creators actually thought they were doing something progressive (and, to be fair, it was so unusual to have so many African-American actors cast so sympathetically in a mainstream movie in 1946 that there is a sort of argument for the movie's progressivism, in a cock-eyed, representational sense) while perpetuating condescending and racist stereotypes about African-Americans and highly rose-colored depictions of the Reconstruction-era American South. But everybody knows about this movie's racism; what everybody also needs to know about this movie is that it's not the happy-go-lucky collection of Br'er Rabbit stories it's been construed as. No, it's the stiflingly dull story of how Uncle Remus helps the world's most tedious rich white kid overcome the bullying of his white-trash neighbors and come to terms with the fact that his parents are having marital problems. The animated sections starring Br'er Rabbit take up barely 20 minutes of the movie's 90. Song of the South is an undeniable landmark; its animation is some of the most fluid and technically accomplished that Disney did in the dark age between Bambi and Cinderella, and the way the animation interacts with the live action (something the studio experimented with throughout the 1940s, not always this successfully) is stunning. Then there's James Baskett, who, as Uncle Remus, deserves to be recognized with Gone with the Wind's Hattie McDaniel (who also appears in this movie) for breathing an astonishing amount of life into the most reductive of stereotypical roles. And nobody who hates on "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" is a friend of mine. But the pieces that make this movie a landmark for Disney are hardly the majority of the movie, and the other pieces, unfortunately, run this movie right into the ground. Grade: C
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