Still working on that Gravity's Rainbow post. Hopefully will publish it this week.
Movies
This movie commits to being what it is, which is an admirable show of gumption considering that what it is is an operatic musical involving, among other things, Adam Driver singing over and over "We love each other so much" as he goes down on Marion Cotillard and Marion Cotillard giving birth to a puppet. More seriously, it's about the artifice of storytelling and the fraught role of audiences on art, and on that metric, it's at least interesting to consider the brazen artistry it took to will this movie into being. Though that said, I'm unclear how seriously I'm supposed to be taking this movie at all—there's an obvious insincerity at some parts, where the film goes out of its way not just to call attention to the artifice but also to mock it, and other parts of the movie are obviously expecting us to engage with its characters in good faith, and others still fall into a weird limbo of intent, where it's unclear if the film is taking the piss—it's a really disorienting tension to live in, and I'm not sure the movie navigates that tension successfully. Such a deeply, deeply strange movie on so many levels. Grade: B-
I've seen a lot of people talk about how unpleasantly stressful this movie is, and maybe I'm just sadistic, but I thought this was great fun. A woman goes to a shiva out of family obligation and finds that in attendance are people from different and competing ecosystems of her life, such that she has to hustle big time to make sure that these different people don't talk to each other too much and discover the lies she's felt compelled to tell about herself in order to cope with the indignities and anxieties of adult life in the 2020s. Like, sure, this is unpleasantly stressful for the protagonist, but for me, the viewer, it's really satisfying to see all these tightly interlocking dramatic pieces slide in and out of each other across what is essentially a feature-length tragicomic setpiece. Frantically energetic in a way that I completely dig. Grade: B+
It's pretty dumb, especially on a screenplay level (the lurch toward a conspiracy plot in the final fifteen minutes is numbingly stupid). But "you're in an escape room designed to kill you" is a really fun premise that the movie delivers on when it isn't trying to make a coherent story, which is about 60% of the time. I basically had the same issues with Saw, quite a bit of whose DNA is in this movie—when will filmmakers stop using plot to ruin cool movies about people trapped in a room solving sadistic puzzles? Grade: C+
Like Chaplin's Modern Times, only French and about the suburbs and less interested in radical politics. Tbh, the aesthetic and mechanical shortcomings of the suburbs are hardly the most interesting reasons to critique the suburbs for me, so Tati's occasional position on how Monsieur Hulot is so much cooler than his suburban cousins lands flat for me (though I do like the repeated comedy of errors that comes from those cousins' inability to adjust their social norms to even the smallest bit of chaos). Still, I get the idea that whatever social commentary gets included in these movies is just kind of incidental to his main focus on using physical gags to push at the limits of the film's environments. And there are a lot of good gags here. The suburban McMansion (or whatever the French version of that is) is obviously a whole lot more obviously artificially structured than the sea-side town in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, which allows for even tighter physical comedy as these characters pratfall through these sets, and the light surrealism of things like the house having windows for eyes is good, clean fun. Grade: B+
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