Movie Reviews
There is a not inconsiderable percentage of this movie that involves a very keyed-up Nicolas Cage performance that never quite coheres to the rest of the movie, so your mileage will probably vary to the usual degree that it does with keyed-up Nic Cage performances. The rest of the movie, though, is really strong. The original Lovecraft story that this is based on is notoriously inadaptable to film (how do you represent a color that humankind has never seen before?), and except for a few throwaway lines that are essentially meaningless (it's pink, Nic; the color is pink), the movie largely sidesteps that element in favor of environmental horror. The text of the movie is about an alien force, but the subtext is strongly about the people who are considered collateral damage for larger infrastructural and manufacturing projects that reminds me of none other than last year's underseen Dark Waters: depicting a rural community who experiences extreme bodily harm and mutilation at the hands of an environmental contamination—there's even some talk about factories being built in the area. The movie's aesthetic is basically a feature-length commitment to the distorted VHS footage in that Dark Waters scene with the mutilated cattle. If you can get past some of the overt goofiness of the movie's surface, there's a pretty chilling tale underneath. Grade: B+
A wonderfully inventive animated personal essay about the reflections of the writer/director/animator (Signe Baumane) on her family history and the struggles with mental illness endured by the female members of her family. It's made all the more engaging by the extremely evocative decision to make all backgrounds and non-human objects from photographs of hand-made models (sometimes static, sometimes moving in stop-motion), over which Baumane draws her loopy, sometimes surreal animated characters. I wish Baumane had more resources to make her animation more fluid—we're looking at maybe like 5 fps or something here, which is VERY choppy in a way that is a disservice to the honestly astounding designs and ideas in the animation. I'm also not completely sold on her take on medication, though given the intensely subjective, personal nature of this film, that's probably beside the point. The story told here is complex and fascinating, full of terrific little detours and ellipses, and an astonishing sense of scope for a movie that doesn't even last 90 minutes. Grade: B+
It's entirely understandable why audiences didn't embrace this movie: though I have a soft spot for the naked desperation of both lead characters, the romance frankly sucks, largely because a limp Frederic Forrest makes his pairing with the ever-radiant Teri Garr damagingly lopsided in a way that never really works, and the Tom Waits + Crystal Gayle soundtrack is cool but definitely keeps us viewers at arms-length. But holy cow, literally everything else about this movie! I've never seen a movie that tries to make every one of its shots be the greatest shot in cinema history. It's completely overwhelming. Grade: A-
For a studio picture, a surprisingly focused and vicious satire of postwar consumer culture and media, though I'll admit that a lot of the satire hit me more in an "I see what you did there" way than in a completely effective one. I'd be interested in knowing how much of the cast was in on the joke. Some of the humor here is pretty broad for my tastes, too, though there are quite a few very funny moments—my favorites being "You're the best thing since chlorophyll" (such a wonderfully specific hyperbole) and the whole bit with Catherine the Great: "Who was that communist princess?" "Catherine the Great? She was a czarina, not a communist" "I don't care what was wrong with her!" I also got a lot out of the scene where Tony Randall says "poop" a lot, though I imagine that hits differently now than in 1957 (or does it? When did poop start meaning "feces"?) Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment