Movies
Objectively not nearly as out there as the other Josephine Decker movie I've seen (Madeline's Madeline), but if you grade on a curve that considers that this is ostensibly a Shirley Jackson biopic, then they're just about equals. A very mean, squalid little movie, wherein Elizabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg play an awful, venomous couple who ruin people's lives with bitter pleasure, and these people just happen to be Shirley Jackson and her husband. It's really uncomfortable while (impressively) remaining really entertaining, too. Grade: B+
Soderbergh levels of herculean auteurist involvement from writer/director/producer(!)/editor(!!)/star(!!!) Isabel Sandoval. I do wish it pushed just a little past the lo-fi indie aesthetic, but the narrative itself is very affecting and distinctly lived-in and well-observed. I guess that's what happens when you let trans women and immigrants tell their own stories. Grade: B
Really interesting choreography and stage setup that I wish I could have seen live. I miss live music. That said, Spike Lee's direction makes the most of having this be rewarding as a film in a way that would have been inaccessible to a normal concert-goer—the overhead shots of the stage are fantastic, for example. Also, I got a lot of joy out of the Spike Lee dolly shot happening for the mobile light fixture instead of an actor. Grade: B
Full disclosure: I watched this movie 100% because of Carly Rae Jespsen's involvement in it. I'm too proud to admit that this was a mistake, but I probably could have saved myself some time by just pulling up "Cut to the Feeling" on YouTube for the 100th time instead. Grade: D+
I was pretty skeptical about Twixt when I saw it a few years ago, but holy cow is Youth Without Youth tempting me to become one of the late-career-Francis-Ford-Coppola-enthusiast people. Exceptionally strong weird fiction vibes on this one, told extravagantly and opaquely—delightfully indulgent of its pulpy "dude wants to discover the first human language" plot while also being cosmic and inscrutable. The whole movie just kind of keeps folding in on itself until it becomes something impossibly large for the space that contains it. Feels of a piece with Jonathan Glazer's Birth, I think. Grade: A
A great little parable about how systems built on competition breed suffering: in this case, among among the concubines in a palace. I dig the ambient, slow-cinema textures, and some of the editing is very good, but above all, this is a stunning visual experience, even with my having to view it on the notoriously awful Razor Digital Entertainment DVD with the bad transfer and worse subtitles (the word "groovy" makes an appearance in dialogue set in early 20th century China, which I admit is kind of charming). Grade: B+
1974, huh? Wild to see a proto-slasher that's so close to the actual fully-formed slashers from a few years later. Only this one is much better than most. In fact, I'm sure I'll immediately regret saying this, but right now I'm feeling like this movie is as good as the original Halloween; both share that feeling of an urban legend come to life, and while Halloween has better music (duh), I think Black Christmas is eerier—the ending especially is one of the more skin-crawling ellipses I've seen in a horror movie. On a separate note entirely, it's a shame that more slashers don't take place at Christmas, because the juxtaposition of caroling and killing yields some majorly good results. It's also a movie about abortion, and, after my post on Never Rarely Sometimes Always, I feel the need to comment that this is like no other abortion movie I've seen. Overall, this is just a really fascinating, complex movie that's a blast all the way through. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment