One and a half weeks until school lets out.
Movies
This feels akin to Tom Hooper's Les Misérables in the sense that it is mostly notable as a pileup of idiosyncratic/questionable decisions—and given that I'm at least theoretically (if not in practice) in favor of big-budget musicals built from idiosyncratic/questionable decisions, I had a reasonably good time with Cyrano. In this case, an incomplete list of the notable choices includes: 1) making the juxtaposition of an incredibly elaborate period setting with an anachronistic, self-aware comedic sensibility about the pomposity of the period, 2) relatedly, playing up to grotesque degrees the elaborate fashion of 17th-century France, but only for some characters, 3) giving most of the musical sequences an abstract, impressionistic style more like music videos than traditional choreographed numbers, 4) having all the music written by The National and having half of the actors attempt to sing at Matt Berninger's baritone register, 5) casting a lead, Peter Dinklage, who, despite his best efforts, has no real discernible facility with musical theatre, and this seems to be part of the point of the movie (or at least a part of his character, vis-à-vis Cyrano's awkward physical presence that he must hide behind his writing), 6) having Peter Dinklage do some Hamilton-style raps in the verses of his introductory number just for fun. It's very, very goofy, but it also has moments when it undeniably cooks, especially during some of the songs when Joe Wright and his main guy Seamus McGarvey get grooving with their typically florid camerawork. There are also a lot of places where this pretty much falls flat on its face, but imo, that's the appeal of this kind of mad-scientist musical: the high-wire act of how far these questionable choices can get the film before it falls. It's the kind of movie that's so sincere and heart-on-its-sleeve that it invites mockery but also makes you feel bad for making fun of it because it's having such a good time being itself. Of the two financial flops that tried to bring back big-money musicals in 2021, West Side Story is the obvious winner, but I like the idea of this being the weirdo kid brother to Spielberg's honor-roll, class-president ethos. Grade: B-
Just kinda okay as a Gregg Araki film—mostly pretty paint-by-numbers in terms of the kind of plot beats and themes he seems fond of including in his 21st-century films. But I remain consistently floored by this dude's ability to conjure incredible film music, whether that's curating a soundtrack or (in the case of this one) commissioning an absolute flex of a score. Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd??? Amazing. Grade: B-
I thought this was actually terrible for the first half, where the main bit seems to be that Warren Beatty is a hairdresser.......but Not Gay! This comes together a lot better once you get to the election-night scenes and all of Beatty's character's cavalier behaviors blow up in his face, but it's too little, too late for me. The Richard Nixon stuff all feels painfully on-the-nose, and watching it makes me think I've been given a window into how our kids and grandkids are going to feel as they run across all the 2016-2020 #Resistance anti-Trump media. I'm sorry, children and grandchildren. I'm all-for boomer self-critiques, and I get that on some level this is about how the dream of the '60s counterculture was cut off because privileged white folks lacked (or abandoned) the class/race consciousness to understand or care about the revolutionary core under the hedonist surface pleasures of liberation, a point I'm in theory interested in. So maybe it's one of those "you just had to be there" sort of things. But this didn't really connect with me. Grade: C
At the periphery of this portrait of a Benedictine monastery, you can see small glimpses of the bureaucratic mechanisms that Wiseman is usually so fascinated by, and of course any organized human community is going to have some feature of that. But what sets Essene apart from the other early Wiseman documentaries is the degree to which the liturgies and structures of a religious commune like this allow the people Wiseman records to be far more open-hearted and sincere than folks out in mainstream society are usually allowed to be. Like all Wiseman subjects, these monks stare into the dehumanizing, alien maw of modernity and feel afraid and lonely, but unlike Wiseman's normal subjects, who because of the constraints and obligations of their lives are often only obliquely referencing that fear and loneliness, the monks here are constantly talking about these things to each other and, stripped of the formalities of a industrialized, disenchanted life, are allowed and even encouraged by their faith to openly seek human connection and understanding, which is kind of incredible to see in the context of Wiseman's broader filmography because it makes you realize that that kind of connection and intimacy with fellow human beings is exactly what's at the heart of so many of the eccentrics, pencil-pushers, and vagrants that Wiseman throws up onscreen. By simply showing the routines of people who have devoted their entire lives to embracing ancient rituals as they slough off our modern, bureaucratized ones, Essene becomes a striking and often transcendent depiction of meaning-making in its rawest form. I know my own religious beliefs make me especially susceptible to this subject matter, so maybe I'm just projecting, but this was, for me, unexpectedly a kind of primordial Wiseman film, as if all the other ones are in answer to the questions raised in this one. Grade: B+
Good Mother's Day watch—a mom trying her best to shield her son from the consequences of her past of poverty and desperation (unsuccessfully, of course, because this is Italian Neorealism). This would probably have more of an impact on me if I cared at all about the concept of Rome as a city, for which this movie's titular mother is very obviously an analogy, but the tragedy of the movie's arc has a baseline gravitas that is unavoidable, and Anna Magnani as the protagonist is electric onscreen. It's funny to me that fascists showed up to protest this movie's premiere, considering how gentle it is compared to what I understand about Pasolini's later work, but I guess opposing anything but sycophantic adoration and positivity toward your homeland is one of fascism's big deals. Grade: B
Television
In the end, it's fitting that the final season of Nathan For You is obsessed with authenticity and identity, a theme that has been not only a constant undercurrent of the show but also is an inevitable casualty of the fame-adjacent, growth-minded business "sense" that has permeated the show as well as capitalism as a whole. This season, Nathan seems much more willing to mislead and even openly lie and defraud to enact his absurd schemes, whether that be convincing people (falsely) that Michael Richards left an abnormally large tip at a diner, leading every Maria Garcia in the greater Los Angeles area to believe that a psychic has had a vision about them, or orchestrating a bizarre confluence of events just to tell a funny anecdote on Jimmy Kimmel Live! To pursue a profit is to make all but the most crass of us inauthentic, but nobody can let on that they understand that or the whole illusion of the purity of the entrepreneurial spirit would crash, so we're all just participating in this elaborate charade to imbue business with a meaning beyond pure financial motive. This all comes to a head in the feature-length finale "Finding Frances," which turns these very tensions about authenticity and success inward onto the show itself, and it's honestly brilliant, one of the best TV episodes of all time, not to mention one of the greatest series finales ever. I've seen people compare it to the work of Abbas Kiarostami, and as hyperbolic as that sounds, it's right on the money. I'm going to miss this wild, wonderful show. Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment