Movies
Suspiria (2018)
It's ostensibly an homage to Dario Argento's 1977 batshit opus. But in practice, what 2018's Suspiria feels like is less a brightly colored cult horror film than one of those epic post-war European movies about modernism and fragmentation and fascism and complicity and the nature of God and evil and stuff—if not a full-on Tarkovsky-style art film, it's at least of the school of early Bertolucci or a slightly less onanistic Fellini. So I guess your enjoyment of the movie kind of hinges on how you feel about that whole class of filmmakers—I dig them, and I mostly can get behind Suspiria, though it lacks the moments of brutal clarity that typically brings those filmmakers into such sharp focus. Your enjoyment of this film is also definitely dependent on how much you can get behind the sprawl of it all. It's a spacious 2.5 hours, which offends my sensibilities of preferring 90-minute features, but it's also this curious case of its bloated runtime not feeling quite long enough to contain what this movie wants to accomplish. There's a lot of movie here, from the fairly delicious ridiculousness of some of its choices (Tilda Swinton plays not one, not two, but THREE roles, praise heaven) to the totemic weight of its themes, which cover not just fascism and, ya know, the whole sweep of Western history but also gender and art and a bunch of other things—to say nothing of the complicated mythology of its literal plot of an ancient witch coven and the competing power dynamics therein. I've got a complaining tone here, but I do want to stress that a great deal of this is quite compelling or at least intriguing, and there's a perverse streak of dark humor throughout. And what better time to revisit the pernicious persistence of fascism than right now? The movie evokes that idea with a compelling collision of horror and elegy (a juxtaposition perfectly suited to Thom Yorke's score) in a way that feels profound on those occasions when the film allows its cluttered brush to thin out enough to see the landscape behind it all. This is most apparent in the movie's final twenty minutes or so, which luckily are hands-down the film's best. None of this fixes how the movie is entirely Too Much, but it at least makes it consistently commanding of attention, if not consistently breathtaking. Grade: B
Fort Maria (2018)
I complain a lot on here about improvisation and the hacks that directors often use to try to evoke an improvised vibe: riffing dialogue in 21st century American comedies, handheld camera in European arthouse, etc. So enter Fort Maria, a movie advertising itself as entirely improvised based off a small treatment—red flags, my friends, red flags. But co-directors S. Cagney Gentry and Thomas Southerland and their four principal actors (whom the directors call "co-creators," which is absolutely fair, given the heavy-lifting the actors had to do in creating their characters without a script) know what they are doing, and the end result is a perfect exhibit for the best-case scenario for controlled chaos of cinematic improvisation. The characters feel lived-in, the plot feels both organic and driven, and the dialogue is generous and discursive in a way that's similar to the naturalistic verbosity of Richard Linklater films. The film's story—a parallel study of identity and social connection, explored through the experience of a woman who is suffering from acute agoraphobia and her adopted daughter who has left to meet her birth family—is small but never insignificant, and the whole thing just crackles with life, animated by this great b&w cinematography. This movie's making the rounds (I saw it via Knoxville's Public Cinema group [welcome back! hope we get more of these again soon!], so keep your eyes peeled for it. Grade: B+
I Think We're Alone Now (2018)
Solid acting on Dinklage and Fanning's parts, and nice cinematography on Morano's part. But pretty tedious otherwise. "The last man on earth is wrong about being the last man on earth" is a decent (if familiar) premise, and the idea that the plot unfolds based on discovering the extent to which he is wrong is interesting. But the movie does next to nothing with that except unfurl its plot, at first slowly and then like really, really, shockingly rapidly, and neither mode (slow nor whiplash-inducing fast) serves these characters much, who are just the barest of "gruff man gettin' stuff done, maybe recovering from trauma" and "sarcastic but effervescent lady disrupts gruff man's routine, may also be recovering from trauma" archetypes that populate far too many post-apocalyptic media. There's this weird veneer of "cool" that's slapped over the movie, too, where Dinklage rocks out to Rush and stuff, and I want to like that, but it doesn't really add a lot to the movie and gets dropped after the opening act and the closing credits. Anyway, I can't remember how this got on my Netflix DVD queue, but I kind of wish I'd gotten Halloween II like I thought I was instead. Grade: C-
Last Shift (2014)
A rookie cop has to stay the night in a haunted police station. There are some decent scares, usually the more patient ones (a long conversation that reveals a "Purloined Letter"-style horror-in-plain-sight at the end), but in general, this movie favors skittering, jumpy horror that I quickly grew tired of. Last Shift sort of wants to be this cross between Repulsion and Assault on Precinct 13, but it's up to neither movie's pedigree and instead falls back on some pretty uninteresting horror cliches. Grade: C
The Devils (1971)
This movie is notorious for its sacrilegious imagery and gross-out effects, and it delivers those in spades. I can now say I've seen a nun humping a crucifix, so cross that one off my bucket list, I guess. It's worth noting that this isn't just perversity for perversity's sake (though the film does seem gleeful in its almost masochistic journey toward church censorship)—there's a trenchant and passionate critique of the abuses of the Catholic Church motivating all of this, first in its depiction of the way that the power structures of the Church allows church leaders to sexually exploit their flock (uh...), and later in the film, how even when the higher-ups in the Church become aware of the sexual deviancy of their leadership, they are too concerned with the purging of metaphysical evils to address the clear and present moral crisis facilitated by their practices regarding priests and nuns (UH...). I'm not Catholic, so I can't speak to the nuances of this critique, but as your friendly neighborhood Protestant looking in from a distance, these seem like critiques that the Catholic Church is only just now coming to grips with (and honestly a lot of Protestant churches, too, if they are addressing them at all—not denying that). Still, I think the movie gets a little tedious when its back half pivots to become basically The Crucible, and its moral core is undercut a tad by the sheer tonal problem (that The Crucible also runs into) of making it hard not to sympathize with a dude unjustly accused by the Church's kangaroo court, even when the movie has previously gone out of its way to show this man an abusive, corrupt man not really deserving of sympathy. And I'm still not sure what I think of some of the enthusiasm for deviancy—there's a biting, punk-rock energy to it that's cool, but with that comes a juvenile button-pushing that feels less vital. Grade: B
Detour (1945)
As a piece of craft, Detour is pretty sloppy (understandably, given the shoestring budget and lighting-quick shooting schedule, but still), and the fact that the film's preservation looks like it's seen the butt-end of the public domain doesn't really help. Yet the movie's pitch-black heart is pure noir in the best way possible. The sheer bitterness with which Tom Neal's character/narrator spouts off the typical noir nihilisms about a perversely random universe elevates its philosophy far above the pack. It's not like noir in general is famous for its good cheer, but Detour is an exceptionally sour and nasty movie even for its genre, and the contempt for each of its characters that the film has is an acid bath. It helps that the movie's mean little story is a white-hot 68 minutes, making this feel something like an extended episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, complete with the punchy plotting and bleak smirk of dark comedy. And like that show, Detour manages to be both bracingly cynical and also a lot of fun. Grade: B
Music
Spiritualized - And Nothing Hurt (2018)
Spiritualized latest and reportedly last album finds Jason Pierce (aka J. Spaceman) in a better place than he's been in decades—which is great for him and a nice way for the band to bow out. Throughout their run, Spiritualized music has flowered from destructive tensions: between gospel and noise rock, between classic rock's hedonism and alt-rock's self-flagellation, between sobriety and intoxication, between heaven and hell. But with And Nothing Hurt, the music feels more at ease than anything the band has ever put out. That isn't to say that the music is conflict-free, and you still get plenty of spaced-out noise-rock jams ("The Morning After") and euphoric pop swells ("Here It Comes (The Road) Let's Go"). Musically, it's a slightly more adventurous fare than the band's previous effort, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (though nothing quite matches the neo-Brit-Pop death swagger of that album's "Sweet Jane"), but lyrically, Pierce has found peace. It's certainly a happier ending than we had any reason to expect after Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space. Grade: B+
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