Movies
I was leaning sort of positive on this movie for the first half, and it's not so much that the second half flubs it as it is that the second half just throws into relief that the movie is merely a lot of wind. In isolation, most of this movie's scenes are very good, both from Drew Goddard's confident direction (with camerawork that far surpasses his otherwise superior debut, Cabin in the Woods) and from a taught screenwriting perspective. The acting, too, is solid, though maybe not something I'm quite as enthusiastic about (Jeff Bridges in particular seems to be coasting on our familiarity with previous performances). But this weird thing happens where somehow, two hours and twenty minutes of good scenes add up to a not-good movie. It strikes me that this movie was probably conceived around moments and conversational setpieces without much of an idea of how this would all work together as a whole, which explains, for example, why Jon Hamm's loquacious, foregrounded performance in the film's opening half hour has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the film, or how cool moments like an extended flashback to what appears to be a cult commune have little bearing on what comes either before or since. So when it comes to playing the long game of actually making a feature that develops these moments into not just immediate pleasures but also functional pieces of a larger, meaningful whole, the film just kind of flounders. It's not hard to see how Goddard envisioned this working—this past-its-prime hotel setting serving as a purgatorial backdrop for these characters to attempt to remake themselves as they cloak themselves in anonymity that the film gradually pokes holes in until they are all psychologically naked, and to have this dovetail with a late-'60s American West over which Richard Nixon reigns would have made this a synecdoche for the nation as a whole at itself teetered between the radicalism of its immediate past and the comforting amnesia of a "law and order" future. But as it is, the movie gestures at these ideas amid its lumpily paced, fractured narrative. I suppose there's a way to watch the film that instead just luxuriates in the movie as a collection of cool moments rather than worrying about the whole, and I'm happy for people who can do that. But for me, the movie's liberal paraphrasing of Tarantino (specifically Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight) just calls attention to how Goddard, talented as he is, just doesn't have the gift of gab that Tarantino does to make even these individual moments work as well as they're intended to. So all I'm left with is a movie that's always on the way but never quite there, which is its own sort of El Royale purgatory, I guess. Grade: C+
A fairly sensitive and nuanced film is nearly bludgeoned to death by some extremely on-the-nose music cues (e.g. "I wanna live," Neil Young sings in "Heart of Gold" at the precise moment when the movie cuts to Timothée Chalamet's character starting on the path toward sobriety). Still, this is probably the best I've seen Carell in a purely dramatic role, and the father-son dynamic is well-done. The movie doesn't add a whole lot to "drug addict cinema" that wasn't already placed there by Drugstore Cowboy and the like, and honestly, the film is a kind of miserable slog, too, though in my own very limited experience with dealing with people recovering from addiction, that's probably the correct emotional tenor to strike. There's also this weird moment when Amy Ryan (criminally underused, per usual) and Andre Royo show up in the same scene for this out-of-nowhere The Wire reunion, which is as strange as it is endearing to see Ryan and Royo onscreen. Grade: B
Considerably funnier than I remember This Is Not a Film being (the only other Panahi film I've seen), but the overall bent is still in the same seething ire at Iranian censorship. More so than that earlier movie, though, this movie coasts on the sheer affability of its cast, making it basically Carpool Karaoke for cinephiles. I could spend all day watching Panahi's niece talk about film. Grade: B
Is this movie a biography of the eccentric photographer Vivian Maier? Is it an investigative piece about the posthumous discovery of Vivian Maier as an artist? This movie doesn't know, and it splits the difference between the two in a way that's pretty unsatisfying. Each half gestures at threads that are pretty fascinating (she apparently would fake her identity at times? Like, come on, how is the whole documentary not about that?), but the movie always has too much to do to spend enough time weaving those threads. Plus, the film's co-director and discoverer of Maier's work, John Maloof, spends entirely too much time in front of the camera, and honestly, he almost singlehandedly tanks the more interesting parts here. Grade: C+
Basically the SparkNotes of the whole WMDs/Valerie Plame horror story from the buildup to the Iraq War. I suppose you could do worse than this movie, and it's handsomely acted, if a bit perfunctorily directed. As a movie, its just fine and doesn't really make any active missteps. But there's something disappointing about a movie whose real-life subject matter is so incendiary turn out to be so middle-of-the-road. I suspect its timing is at least partially to blame: solidly entrenched in the hopes of the early Obama era, it's too late to really catch any of the fiery righteous anger of criticizing the actions of a sitting president's administration and too early to have any of the smoldering cynicism in the toxicity of the executive branch heralded by the Trump era. Despite the fact that this situation was hardly resolved at the time of its filming, there's simply no urgency here—a perfect distillation of the vaguely lulled inattentiveness of political media of the early 2010s. Shout out to the 2018 "director's cut" that leaves the movie essentially untouched except for the addition of a title card at the end implicating Trump in this whole mess, too. Grade: C+
An early and influential entry in the 2010s wave of home-invasion thrillers. It's pretty much exactly the type of thing that Michael Haneke's criticizing in Funny Games, but be that as it may, it's an effective piece of film craft, if not extraordinarily so. The bare-bones, almost elemental plotting and characterization of the killers is strongly reminiscent of the original Halloween, and while The Strangers isn't nearly so lyrical in its imagery as the John Carpenter classic, the blunt force of the film's unadorned brutality is affecting in a way that a lot of these movies aren't. It's still a home-invasion thriller, which means that it's unnecessarily fear-mongering and sadistic. But if you're going to be fear-mongering and sadistic, might as well have some class about it, right? Grade: B
Having aired it on television first, Spike Lee's approach to this documentary about 1963 Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church bombing is, on its surface, more or less conventional: talking heads interspersed with archival footage, told cleanly and linearly. But as the film progresses, things start to stand out. The camera sits just a bit closer to its subjects' faces than usual; each talking head shot lingers for just a little longer than expected; the talking heads start minorly but conspicuously disagreeing with one another. 4 Little Girls is a remarkably intimate documentary, both on a formal level and then on a narrative one, depicting the fervor surrounding the Civil Rights Movement not as some moment captured in time's amber but as a searingly personal, fractured reality that continues to have bearing over not just the national present but the present of individual people who live and breathe and die by the truths and tragedies that occurred and continue to occur. When it shows the famous statue of the police and the dog lunging at the boy in Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park, Lee adds the sounds of a vicious growling animal—a touch that might seem cheesy if it weren't so readily apparent that this dog and that police have become a perpetual present. Oppression is flesh and blood, not b&w celluloid. It's this immediacy of oppression that is the implied rebuttal to the handful of white people who appear in the film to describe how much of a family environment Birmingham was to grow up in and how water hoses and dogs aren't so bad compared to what other white people did to African Americans. The dissonance between the suit-and-tie white testimony and the raw-nerve black talking heads gives the film a richness uncommon in this type of documentary, no richer than when George Wallace himself appears in some magnificent and excruciating present-day footage to offer a defense of sorts for his infamous segregationist attitudes—a defense that essentially amounts to "I have black friends" (complete with a torturous moment when he drags his silent "black friend" in front of the camera). Such defenses, along with the persistently implied one of how racism is just a feature of the past, not the enlightened present, are consistently shown to be at best opportunist fact-fudging and at worst nonsense that perpetuates racism even further, and it feels in conversation with Spike's narrative features, which, from the contemporary-footage ending of Malcolm X all the way to the Charlottesville violence that concludes BlacKkKlansman, all share a relentless drive toward this idea that the past is the present. Incredible stuff. It's a near masterpiece and a model of just what exactly to do with the quote-unquote conventional documentary format. Grade: A
This movie occupies a lot of the same space as Clerks did for me when I finally got around to seeing it, in that it's a particularly vibrant and frequently entertaining depiction of a hyper-specific period, setting, and way of life that ultimately loses its charm because of how disdainfully it treats every character who is not its two male protagonists. In this case, there's this warm rendering of a mid-'90s south-central L.A. neighborhood and the easy-going, twentysomethings male camaraderie that is absolutely infectious, and Ice Cube and Chris Tucker have a nice screen chemistry as stoner buds—no slight compliment from me, who normally has an allergic reaction to Tucker. But this is mixed in with some ugly misogyny and body-shaming that the movie validates pretty heinously, so I dunno, I can't get too excited about it. There is certainly some good stuff here, though. Grade: B-
1941 is wildly unhinged in a way that feels very atypical for Spielberg: an epic, free-wheelingly absurd farce that feels one part Catch-22 and two parts Jerry Lewis (the good Jerry Lewis). However, I don't know that this is actually much different (though of course a few degrees more intense) than what Spielberg would do a couple years later with Raiders of the Lost Ark; in the same way that Indiana Jones is (contrary to his stamp on pop culture) basically a deconstruction of the square-jawed pulp hero, recasting the archetype instead as an inconsequential and (literally) impotent loser, 1941 is basically a piss-take on the domestic picket fences and rah-rah nationalism of America's collective memory of WWII—a move that strikes me as considerably ballsy, given the weight of the conflict as a "just war," and it speaks to just how kooky and countercultural young Spielberg actually was before he became everyone's favorite whitebread liberal uncle in the '80s. There's a real youthful energy to the whole affair that's as adorable as it is outrageous: a tank plows through a paint warehouse for seemingly no other reason except that Spielberg was just giddy to see what it would look like, and that goes for nearly a dozen notable filmmaking decisions here, the most significant of those being the mid-film jitterbug dance sequence, both a highlight of the movie and of Spielberg's filmography in general (and the closest we've ever gotten to the man making a proper musical—just gimme that West Side Story, Steve!!). The movie isn't without its pitfalls, and to be fair, they are notable; the plotting often relies on somewhat sexist and (to a lesser degree) racist turns, though in a film as rambunctuous as this one is, I suppose you could cast them as just part of the movie's relentless irreverence for the "respectability" of the past, though I'm skeptical. And that's to say nothing of how entirely too long the whole film is—and how uneven it can be. But on the whole, this is way better than its reputation as an early Spielberg failure. Grade: B
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