Sorry for missing last week! Things got busy!
Movies
Pretty dumb by the end, and specifically the action climax (set to Hall & Oates) is no good whatsoever. But before that, it's a mostly fun little sci-fi thriller in the vein of Ex Machina, i.e. "futuristic tests in an enclosed environment with a charismatic mad-scientist type." Chris Hemsworth (the mad scientist-type) is extremely entertaining, actually—of all the Marvel people who primarily exist as Marvel people (as opposed to, say, Scarlett Johansson, who has a robust career elsewhere), Hemsworth has always struck me as the most movie-star-ish, and performances like this make it clear how much of a shame it is that his career has not really made space for him to be characters who aren't Thor. Grade: B-
I am not qualified in the slightest to comment on the politics of this movie, which are complicated, but hey, I had a good time with Top Gun: Maverick, whose politics are not complicated at all (they're bad!), so who am I to say anything? Anyway, as a piece of action movie craft, this completely rules. For a full 100 minutes, you get a non-stop, rip-roaring, fist-pumping onslaught of some of the most banana-pants wild action choreography I've ever seen, even within the already fairly banana-pants-wild world of Asian action cinema. Everything's just flying across the screen, usually in slow-motion, in these incredible comic-book-ish tableaux. The film slows down a little in the subsequent hour-plus, but only a little. I was a little disappointed how the Komaram Bheem character kind of fades into the background as we're given a somewhat awkwardly structured info-dump about Alluri Sitarama Raju's backstory, but only a little. For the most part, this just rocks and rolls like no other three-hour movie I've seen. Also, some British colonizers get killed in some really nasty ways, and whatever the politics of the rest of the film, I gotta give this movie props for that. Also also, as awesome as the action sequences are, the best scene of the movie is the amazing dance-off early in the film. The British not just being literally killed in battle but also figuratively killed on the dance floor. Fantastic. Grade: A-
Terence Davies movies always have this floating, ethereal quality that makes them more dreamlike than narrative, but this is the first of his that I've seen that decouples narrative almost entirely and instead leans into the free-associative possibilities of Davies' style to depict a just-barely-prepubescent childhood in postwar Liverpool. This is, more than any film I can think of outside of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, a film that understands how our human minds process the passage of time less as a story and more as a collection of images, sounds, and emotions that capture the atmosphere of given periods of our lives without necessarily tying those in to a rigorous timeline of "when" and "how." Just absolutely stunning filmmaking on display here, too, which is pretty much a given with any Davies film but especially so here, where it far eclipses that of any of his other movies I've seen. Kinda wild how most of the rest of his later films are so much more heavily narratively driven, given that it kinda feels like he unlocked his secret weapon with the dream style here. Grade: A
I wish I liked this more than I do. I mean, I do like it, but I was gearing up for another slow-cinema opus in the vein of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and instead, it's just a low-key drama about some young adults having ennui and doing crimes, which is good but kind of a letdown. I should probably rewatch with my expectations appropriately recalibrated, but even so, I can't imagine preferring this to, for example, the movies where Wong Kar-wai does something similar. That said, the vibes are pretty immaculate for what this is. Grade: B
An animated movie that looks like the cover of Don Cherry's Organic Music Society put into motion, which is fitting because the music in this movie sounds a lot like the kind of music Don Cherry and the rest of that whole spiritual jazz wave in the 1970s were making. Which of course means that the music absolutely owns. The animation is also very, very cool, completely ambivalent to hiding the drawing streaks and strokes that a lot of more traditional animation tries to smooth away, and the result is something that is constantly shimmering with organic motion. The basic, hippie-ish "why can't we all get along?" text of the film (the whole movie basically consists of aliens looking down on earth and wondering why there is so much conflict and violence when human beings share so much in common) is pretty shallow in that new-age-y way that sometimes comes out of well-meaning social-justice sentiments without a lot of concrete basis in material specifics, but it's at least a broadly nice sentiment. I'm mostly just here for the very cool music and animation, though. Grade: B
The kind of movie that spends its first 90-ish minutes building up this really sweet, warm male camaraderie just so it can show the system (imperialist, patriarchal, judicial—take your pick) crush it in its final 15 minutes. A real bummer of a movie, but my kind of bummer movie. Also, maybe my favorite Jack Nicholson performance? The real star here is Randy Quaid, though, who is adorable beyond measure. Grade: A-
I've had this on my watchlist for years entirely on the basis of its being referenced in a St. Vincent song ("Chloe in the Afternoon," i.e. its original title in America). So when I popped this in and the opening title card informs me it's the last in a series, I was like, "Uh oh." Luckily, it seems like the entries in Éric Rohmer's "Six Morality Tales" are fairly standalone, and if there was any of this that I was supposed to connect to previous entries, it went completely over my head as I blissfully enjoyed this pretty straightforward little fable about a man being tempted into infidelity. I know this already has an English remake (starring Chris Rock??), but tbh, Eyes Wide Shut already feels like it's picking up the baton and taking it to the finish line. Grade: B
A movie about a very relatable situation in which you have sublet your apartment to a guy who is trying to set you up with the guy he sublet his sublet to, just so he can destroy a political opponent. 100% a delight. Also, surprisingly steamy for a studio movie of its era. Grade: A
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