Movies
The weakest of this series that I've seen so far, which is too bad because Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives hands-down the best performance of anyone in all three movies. This movie isn't without its charms, and there is at least one deliriously complicated chain-reaction death involving a nail gun (also one hilariously uncomplicated one involving weights). But for the first time in this series, at least one of the killings feels more bullying than impish (the tanning bed), and the stuff with the photographs giving clues for deaths doesn't really do much for me. And the ending is pretty dumb—disappointing, considering that the endings of the previous two movies were pretty good. Grade: B-
This is a pretty damning character portrait of a white woman refusing to divest from her complicity within the oppressive system that a (unnamed) de-colonizing African country is rapidly purging. I really like what Isabelle Huppert does with that character, the lean vulnerability overlapping with a keen sense of survival overlaid with a general self-blindness, and as a piece of storytelling, I was pretty caught up. As a cinematic object, though, I don't know if there's much going on, which is unusual for a Claire Denis feature. Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems pretty staid outside of some pretty landscape photography. Grade: B
I've heard a lot discussion about how this movie is groundbreaking in its depiction of urban violence and anti-heroism, but nobody told me just how desperately sad this movie is. Most of The Public Enemy consists of the central character getting swept into the urban underworld by powerful crime leaders who promise him the moon only to use him as an ultimately expendable pawn in their conflicts with other bosses. He's deeply miserable and makes everyone around him whom he doesn't alienate miserable, too; all the while, his family waits expectantly for a redemption that never comes. It's bleak, heartbreaking stuff and not at all the callous, salacious B-picture I was expecting. Grade: B+
Just devastatingly beautiful from top to bottom in the way that only late-'20s silent features (esp. German Expressionist late-'20s silent features) could be: genuinely sophisticated, jaw-dropping use of double exposure, evocatively operatic costume design, stunning elaborate sets. Murnau is really not holding back one bit in this movie, and it's a glorious expression of maximalism in the service of one of the most maximalist stories stories in the Western canon. The first forty-five minutes of this movie, involving angels and demons and a raging plague and Faust as an old alchemist are heavy metal to the extreme, and it's great; the final half hour or so is similarly intense, though more with the urgency of a fairy tale or fable. I wish I had kinder things to say about the middle, though, which drops a lot of interesting thematic threads (an exploration of utilitarianism, hedonism, etc.) to do a kind of dull mix of romantic melodrama—Faust is in love with Gretchen, but he's got secrets, man!—and romantic comedy—the devil tries to seduce Gretchen's mother! Any longform version of Faust is going to have to deal with the fact that the structure of the story means interrupting all the epic metaphysical stuff at the beginning and end for a small-scale romance in the middle, which is part of the whole thing that's beautiful about this story, that war for a man's soul takes place simultaneously in biblical and microscopically personal proportions and has such human consequences. Unfortunately, this movie never finds a way to make that juxtaposition work, and there's a good portion of this movie's middle that drags. But the rest! It rocks! Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment