Finally finished that Czech New Wave set.
Movies
The idea of Christopher Nolan doing a time-travel heist movie based around some characters moving forward in time and others moving backwards in time feels like a director perfectly suiting a project to his strengths: lots of puzzle-y logistical games, very little by way of emotional engagement. And by the end, there are parts of Tenet that fulfill that promise, though it's pretty rocky getting there. I guess I thought that everybody was exaggerating when they said that this movie is hard to follow, but I definitely was in the dark at least 60% of the time, especially in the first half, when the movie is basically wall-to-wall exposition and setting up the chess pieces. I've never found Christopher Nolan movies to be particularly difficult to follow, but as his style has gotten increasingly chaotic concurrent with his increasingly... idiosyncratic approach to sound design, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I lost the plot in one of his movies. So here I am. The good news is that the core of this movie, as far as I can tell, is basically magical nonsense anyway (what does it even mean to "reverse the entropy" of an object, as if entropy is some distinct force?), so if you can power through the expository sections of the movie, it kind of doesn't matter if you didn't understand half of it, because the back nine of the film is pretty much just a sequence of action setpieces based around the undeniably cool mechanic of having some parts of these scenes progress forward in time while others progress backwards. Those parts are magnificent. They also clarify (to the extent that there is one) the emotional center of the film: an unstuck-in-time friendship between the characters played by John David Washington and Robert Pattinson. I dunno, there's a lot of noise in the movie around those good parts, and it definitely would have benefited from some streamlining (2.5 hours? Really?). But also, I have at least a little respect for how obtuse Nolan is willing to be in a nominally general-audience blockbuster, while still finding a way to be conventionally entertaining (eventually). Complexity isn't a productive end unto itself, nor is "nobody is making movies like this right now," but whatever combination of those two is in this movie is working for me. Grade: B
A supremely, deliriously gruesome piece of cinema in which people inhabit other people's bodies in order to commit crimes. This being directed by Brandon "Son of David" Cronenberg, a lot of people have emphasized the horror elements of this movie, and those are certainly there: the idea that someone could invade your body and exploit it for their own profits (not like that would ever happen in 21st century capitalist America...) is very unsettling, and the movie's imagery complements that. But in some ways, the connections to Brandon's father's horror legacy has obscured that this is also a really terrific piece of cyberpunk sci-fi. David has spent a lot of his mid-to-late career adapting postmodern fiction for the screen; perhaps if Brandon has the same literary bent as his father, we'll get some cracking William Gibson adaptions. Grade: A-
Every few months it seems, I run across an animated film that looks like nothing I've ever seen before in cinema, and I wonder why I ever watch anything but animated movies. This is one of those. It has some of the most stunning animation I've ever seen, a film whose aesthetic is premised on the idea of bringing an ink wash painting to life and yet somehow transcends even that lofty goal to create a truly breathtaking array of textures from glistening ice to a rushing stream to a rippling field of grass—every individual frame a work of art in and of itself but also a work that fundamentally transforms into something wholly different in motion. It's also an unusually pure distillation of the ethos of the Brothers Grimm, whose story of the same provides the source material for this movie. The movie puts a striking feminist gloss over the story (I don't know that I've ever seen an animated movie so embodied in a female protagonist) while preserving the folk strangeness and unpredictability of experiencing an unfolding fairy tale. If you aren't here for the animation (and how could you not be???), there's certainly something here for students of fairy tales. Truly incredible stuff. Grade: A
There's something special about the way that this movie just stubbornly insists on never allowing its plot to expand beyond anything but a string of anecdotes. Literally just a movie about a bunch of people working in a car wash. I don't know what the screenplay (written by Joel Schumacher????) looks like on paper, but on the screen, this feels exactly like an ensemble cast just riffing for 90 minutes, and while I usually have a hard time with comedies that don't feel tightly scripted, I'd say it works here because 1. the cast is so incredibly winsome, and 2. more importantly, the aimless, only occasionally funny and sometimes even a little monotonous vibe of the movie really pointedly captures the mix of camaraderie, antagonism, boredom, and frustration that defines working a low-wage/hourly-wage kind of job like this one, right up to that quiet final scene where two characters break down because they're not sure they can take it anymore. The movie probably gets a little too cute at times in its efforts to include literally every social strata in this movie, but there's a generous spirit to even that cuteness that is rewarding and feels like an important antecedent to the kind of movies that Richard Linklater would go on to make about Austin. Anyway, it's a good time. Grade: B+
A bunch of horny middle-aged men come to terms with their middle-agedness as they are physically humiliated in their pursuit of a hot young woman who's come to town with the circus. I enjoy the physical humiliation parts, but overall, this feels like an unintentional experiment in making a sex comedy that is neither sexy nor funny. I've now watched four of the six movies in Criterion's Pearls of the Czech New Wave set and only enjoyed one of them fully (Daisies, for the record, because how could I not?). Beginning to think Criterion may have been overselling the movies here just a tad by calling them "pearls." Grade: C
I like Milan Kundera, so it's no surprise that a film adapting a novel of his (which I haven't read) would be my second-favorite of the Pearls of the Czech New Wave set. It's not amazing; parts of it are very slow, to a degree that I don't find entirely productive. But it had a wicked sense of irony that I really dug. I don't think I've seen a funnier riff on the futility of revenge, actually. Also, there's a grim humor in the idea that a guy who merely jokes that he is a Trotskyist would get put in a concentration camp by a communist government. Good to know that the left cannibalizing itself is nothing new, I guess. Grade: B
After watching this whole Pearls of the Czech New Wave collection, I'm sad to report that the only director I'm really excited about of the bunch is Věra Chytilová (Daisies), and that's basically reflected in this anthology film, as Chytilová's short is the only one here I found truly great. Like, it's extremely good, the kind of short where every minute is better than the previous one until it ends on this dizzying high that lands the film in the ecstatic avant-garde that defined Daisies. Evald Schorm's short, "House of Joy," is pretty good, too, and also pretty funny, which is not something I would have expected from the director of the mostly straight-laced The Return of the Prodigal Son. The rest of the shorts did nothing for me, as is the case for the lion's share of this collection as a whole, I'm afraid. Grade: B-
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