Potty training sucks. Luckily, not all of the movies I watched this week do!
Movies
When I reviewed the other Cloé Zhao feature I've seen, The Rider, I wondered if that film would have been better as a pure documentary rather than the docu-fiction hybrid that we got. Nomadland basically confirms that I was right, being a movie that basically does take a documentary (a nonfiction book, actually—a book documentary, I guess) and smears a coating of narrative filmmaking over it, obscuring the most interesting material here, i.e. the stories of the actual "nomads" that get told. The Rider at least had a nonprofessional actor as the lead, which lent a kind of verisimilitude to the scripted parts. But having big-time Hollywood folks like Frances McDormand and (to a lesser extent, given he's not quite as much of a Movie Star) David Strathairn playing roles that try to make them fit in as they more or less parade through real nomadic encampments and scenes of actual abject poverty is so unbelievably distracting from whatever ostensible gritty realism that the documentary style is supposed to lend that I cannot imagine what the point of having them there is other than to indulge in poverty tourism. Being charitable and assuming that this wasn't just vanity on the part of McDormand and Zhao (who are both among the producers of this film), I'm going to just have to chalk this up to a bad miscalculation, one that, unfortunately, the movie never recovers from for me. A documentary would have preserved Zhao's impressive eye for landscapes and maybe would have also managed to find true compassion for the people it documents, since it would have no millionaire screen presences to get in the way of their lives. Maybe the movie would have even found some way to advocate for these people—something the movie as-is bizarrely sidesteps as it imbues the lives of people who have been destroyed by global capitalism and specifically the 2008 housing crisis with a rugged, apolitical romanticism. Grade: C
The writer-director of Martha Marcy May Marlene (it's taken me all ten years since that movie's release to get that title right on the first try) returns with a movie that's far less mysterious and ominous and instead is just plain bracing. Basically, a charismatic huckster tries to bluster his way into business success in the deregulation gold rush of the '80s and in the process destroys his marriage. It very much feels like an arc of a lost Mad Men character updated for the Reagan/Thatcher era, and given that Mad Men is my favorite TV show of all time, that's not a slight. It does feel a lot more obvious than MMMM, though, so I doubt it will hold my imagination like that one did. But this is still a solid watch. Grade: B+
I know this is a cult classic or whatever, but I guess I'm not part of the cult because I found this extremely tedious. It has all the pieces of an enjoyably weird movie (bizarre and dense mythology, camp, fun cast, etc.) but the execution is just so inert. My first exposure to this movie was actually years ago via the Scott Adams/Adventure International text-adventure tie-in game, and that game sucked, too, so maybe I should have heeded the warning. Grade: C-
"Vertigo + Rear Window, but make it explicitly about pornography this time!" is a premise that seems almost certainly taken from Hitchcock's own fantasies, so it's hard to fault De Palma for making a movie that so, uh, nakedly rips off Hitchcock (though it is probably the most shameless Hitch rip-off that I've seen from De Palma). That said, outside the meta games with film history/Hollywood, I'm not 100% sure this movie has much going on under all of its very potent Freudian signifiers. That's not a huge concern when it's as fast-paced and energetic as it is, but still, I kinda wish there were meat on the bones of this movie that didn't immediately turn into self-reflexive post-modern circles. Credit where it's due, though: that self-reflexivity gives us the best moment in the film, i.e. the credits sequence where we see a more or less documentary-like depiction of the filming of a nude scene—as much as Hollywood likes to make movies about Hollywood, I've never seen a scene like that one before, and it's mesmerizing. Grade: B
A neat intersection of the sensibilities of Roger Corman, Joe Dante, and John Sayles, in almost equal measures. You've got the cheapo gore and nudity from Corman; the smirking, sadistic games from Dante; the working-class protagonists and political anger from Sayles. It's not, like, the best '70s movie about killer aquatic life, of course, but it's way better than a Jaws cash-in made for like $3 has any right to be. Grade: B
Absolutely gonzo British New Wave cinema—a satire of the hegemonic postwar Western order, embodied by an insular prep school. Malcolm McDowell is lightning onscreen, and the direction feel alternatingly charmingly shaggy and hard-nosedly experimental in the way that a lot of New Wave cinema (regardless of country) tends to be. It also feels unusually perceptive of this movie to, in 1968, basically call out the white counterculture as largely being motivated by a combination of fetishization/appropriation of nonwhite revolutionaries (Che and Mao posters are prominently displayed in dorms, of course) and reactionary impulses that happened to briefly align with progressive causes. The meaning of the ending (*spoilers*: a school shooting, albeit one cloaked in allegorical touches like an actual military being there to oppose the shooters) has perhaps drifted away from the original intent of the filmmakers in the decades since, at least for this American viewer, given the prevalence of actual school shootings in this country, but I can at least still respect the vision here. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment