Mini Reviews for November 21 - 27, 2022

Yes I was without internet for part of this week and had to watch random movies I had on my laptop—why do you ask?

Movies

Bones and All (2022)
It's a lot of things, maybe too many things: a YA romance, a road-trip movie, a cannibal movie, a Badlands / Bonnie and Clyde "one step ahead of our past catching up with us" sort of thing, an '80s nostalgia movie (if what you're nostalgic for in the '80s is heartland rock, wood paneling, and everything smelling like cigarettes), a philosophical inquiry into the most ethical way to eat people if you are biologically compelled to do so, maybe a queer metaphor, maybe an addiction metaphor. I'm not sure if the extremely bummer ending satisfyingly ties up any of these threads or modes, but like a lot of road trips, the interesting part is how you get there, and this movie is certainly a journey: parts of it deeply unsettling with unexpected moments of terror, other parts evoking a profound loneliness, others a deep well of pathos. Whether or not this completely holds together thematically, it's able to make all of these disparate threads feel like a cohesive whole through a confident stylistic hand as well as some terrific performances (the entire principal cast is great). There's a strong emotional throughline, if nothing else, and some of these scenes are going to stay with me for a while. Grade: B+

Rosaline (2022)
A worst of both worlds situation: neither the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by way of Romeo and Juliet that I was hoping for, nor the sugary-sweet rom-com-revival fun that this movie thinks it is. It has the feeling of being written by someone who hasn't touched Romeo and Juliet since they read the SparkNotes summary in 9th grade English class; Tromeo and Juliet has a better literacy of the Shakespeare play than this one does, which is theoretically fine: so what if Paris is now Rosaline's gay best friend and that famous lines are misappropriated by characters in nonsensical contexts? If you're not trying to be deconstructive, there's no point in actually caring about your film's relationship to its source material. But you gotta give us something in the source material's place, and the watery gruel that we receive is a bunch of warmed-over rom-com clichés employed with a flimsy gloss of girl-power and sarcasm, not to mention a completely empty love interest. As uninterested in Romeo and Juliet as this movie is, it seems even less interested in the elements it's added, and I'm not sure why we're supposed to care about anything going on in Rosaline's life. Kaitlyn Dever is pretty good here, at least—a performance in search of a movie that has any idea at all how to use it. Grade: C-

Joshua and the Promised Land (2004)
It's basically unwatchable, but it's also fascinating because it so clearly is a product of evangelical Christianity while also being a work of outsider art, something you can't say about a lot of more visible evangelical media, which usually comes from a fairly large industry with established tropes and modes of discourse, almost none of which this movie even bothers with. For example, it's not uncommon for evangelical media to use the post-parting-the-Red-Sea stories of Moses and Joshua to justify genocide, but there's usually some tact or rhetorical sleight of hand that makes it seem like it's not justifying genocide. Like, Focus on the Family media has definitely said genocide is okay, but you usually have to analyze it a little to understand that that's what it's doing. This movie doesn't have the guile for that kind of decorum and literally just states outright that it's okay to exterminate a people group if God tells you to, and it does so by using some of the most amateur CG animation I've ever seen as well as some of the most head-scratching decisions in character modeling (if they're supposed to be lions, where are their tails??), which is kind of an out-of-body experience. There's such an incredible purity of vision here, a vile, cancerous, eye-melting vision. I'd love to hear what Phil Vischer thinks about this. Grade: C

Song of the Miraculous Hind (Ének a csodaszarvasról) (2002)
I know so little of Hungarian history and folklore that this film's plot (a telling of ancient Hungarian "history" as seen through its mythology) quickly lost me. Basically the only parts I understood were the pieces that had widespread mythological tropes like the "cosmic hunt" that makes up one early section of the movie. So I would probably have a drastically different reaction to this movie if I were Hungarian or even just knew anything at all about Hungarian history—I dunno, I would definitely have some strong opinions about a movie that tried to dramatize the national mythology of the United States, so this seems like the kind of movie that is fraught with political implications that I have no access to. But from where I sit, it doesn't matter that I couldn't follow the plot, because the film is directed by Marcell Jankovics, which means that it has dazzling animation. It's a lot more stylistically experimental than his masterpiece, Son of the White Mare, which makes sense given this movie's episodic format, and not everything is a home-run here; in fact, there are sections with animation that is surprisingly prosaic for Jankovics. However, other pieces of animation here are incredible in ways that aren't exactly superior to White Mare but also are far more intricate and complex than anything that the other movie attempts, sequences that are overtly psychedelic or even strobe-like, playing around with kaleidoscopic color variations and unstable character forms in a way that is as mesmerizing as it is bewildering. The early sequence with the cosmic hunt is pretty great in this regard, as is the final sequence of the film when Jesus Christ appears to a medieval king. There's something about this kind of stylistic kitchen-sink that, when it works, approaches the sublime when paired with mythological storytelling that I don't understand. Again, I'm sure I would have a much different reaction if I actually did understand the mythology. Grade: B+

Rock and Rule (1983)
The kind of movie that is probably best reviewed by listing out its component parts and just basking in the miracle of the existence of something this bizarre: a nuclear war has destroyed the human race and in the human's place grow a society of animals mutated into character designs I can only describe as "edgy Goof Troop," among whom is the rock star Mok, who needs to find the magical voice that can release a demon who will help him rule the world and gain immortality. This story is told as a rock musical with a plot that doesn't make a lot of sense and with compositions and performances from Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Earth, Wind & Fire, and assorted configurations of Cheap Trick, and it's visual style has a blending of the kind of squishy character animation you might see on children's programming with a less-abrasive form of Ralph Baskshi's urban mixed-media approach for the backgrounds, plus another technique I can't quite identify for Mok's demon that reminds me of Yuri Norstein in its earthy textures. Everything in this movie has these smirking comic-book naming conventions, e.g. Mok Swagger, Carnage-y Hall, Nuke York, etc. A real stew, this movie. A complete meal. Grade: B

The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
This is an amazing story about a man's sociopathic drive to destroy his marriage on his honeymoon, and as a depiction of monstrous self-destruction, it's about as hilarious as something like that can get (which is: very). Truly one of the great evocations of masculinity at its most pathetic and loathsome. But also... also... the incredible coup that this movie pulls is that by casting Cybill Shepherd as the object of this man's desire, there's a part of me, not a significant part but a part nonetheless, that watches her in this movie and thinks, "You know, I get it." Audience-implication sometimes feels like a cheap shot, but this one totally got me. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for November 14 - 20, 2022

This week I was on the Cinematary podcast talking about the 1931 Ernst Lubitch film The Smiling Lieutenant. Here's the link if you're interested!

Movies

Barbarian (2022)
It spends a good portion of its first half pretending to be a much more serious movie than it is (the movie it pretends to be: a slow-burn thriller about two strangers accidentally booked at the same Airbnb), but after a particular point, it drops the mask so quickly that the abruptness in and of itself is hugely entertaining. It does this a couple more times, and by the end, Barbarian is thoroughly goofy, albeit of the grimy, ugly sort that characterizes the work of, say, Wes Craven. This isn't anywhere near as clever as a Craven movie, but that veneer of seriousness barely containing a mean-spirited glee at others' misfortunes definitely feels like it's in the same wheelhouse. I found this thoroughly entertaining, though by the end, as it's become clear that the film is kind of a one-trick pony in terms of how it doles out its reveals, there are diminishing returns to what it's attempting on a thematic level (some muddled ideas about gender and motherhood and morality). But it's a masterclass in executing that one trick, and I had a great time hootin' and hollerin' at the screen with my wife as we watched this. Grade: B+

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
Really, shockingly good. I don't hate Martin McDonagh, but it's been a while since he's done anything I particularly cared for, and this far surpasses the distant, pleasant memories I have of In Bruges. Moreover, this is the first McDonagh screenplay (I've never seen one of his stage plays) that doesn't feel like it's bending over backward trying to prove something with its cleverness; the screenplay here simply is clever in this understated yet confident way that bowled me over. If I'm not mistaken, there's some Irish political history metaphor going on with the plot that I am unequipped to unpack, but that's okay, because it's also just a very human story of pain and loss as two former friends drift apart. Whatever the allegory that's happening here, McDonagh does the very graceful and very difficult task of also making it not feel like an allegory, and the entire thing works just as well (perhaps better) if you assume that Colin Ferrell and Brendan Gleeson's characters are real, psychologically complex human beings instead of simply being analogs for the sides of the Irish Civil War or whatever is supposed to be going on there. Career-best work from Ferrell, too. He takes his "affable goofball with hidden complexity" thing and imbues it with a deep well of sadness and vulnerability that ends up pervading the entire film. I can imagine having a good, cathartic cry over this movie if it caught me in the right mood, and I mean that as a compliment. Grade: A-

My Father's Dragon (2022)
The first half of this movie, which is split pretty evenly between the social-realist(ish) beginning involving the struggle of a mother and her son to make it in a new city and the wildly inventive fantasy of the boy's flight from the city to a magic island, is terrific, utilizing a dream logic undergirded by a strong emotional core in a way reminiscent of the Where the Wild Things Are movie. The back half of the movie unfortunately falls apart as it fails to maintain the emotional clarity through the dream logic, and the climax hinges on an emotional epiphany that is almost completely unearned. Narratively, it's the weakest of the Cartoon Saloon features, and it's not even close. Visually, however, this is as stunning as any of the studio's other work, maintaining the rich texturedness of Wolfwalkers as well as the luminous use of color present throughout the studio's work. In the face of that, it's hard to feel grumpy about the film. Grade: B

 

Cult of Chucky (2017)
My least-favorite, I think, of the "...of Chucky" stage of this franchise, but Mancini continues to have a tight grasp of fundamental horror mechanics as well as the specific idioms that make his Chucky movies special—at this point, watching these characters and tropes return is something akin to watching a soap, and it's great fun just to see, for example, Jennifer Tilly show up again in some new, ridiculous role. Some great practical gore effects here, too. The psychiatric hospital setting isn't nearly as evocative or well-deployed as the old mansion in Curse, and the film relies just a little too much on movie-crazy-people-isms in fleshing out the secondary cast, and as a whole, the movie lacks the verve or the mad-scientist coherence that animates the best in the series. But I guess in the short span of time I've been watching the series, I've become a lifer with these movies, because I still had a good time and can't wait to hop into the TV series. A cult indeed. Grade: B

 

Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
If I wasn't already familiar with the source material, it would be unbelievable that a movie this smutty and this mean came out of the stuffy '80s costume drama world. The closest thing I can think of to this is The Favourite, which of course arrived from a much different milieu in cinema. But here's this movie, a brutally spiteful satire of 18th-century ruling class with only a few of the edges sanded off from the French novel on which it is based (I'm unfamiliar with Christopher Hampton's 1985 play that is the more direct source for this movie). This is probably the best I've ever seen Glenn Close and John Malkovich, two actors I'm not overly fond of, and the way they slowly reveal the utter despair that they cloak in the abject evil of their actions is kind of masterful. The film's pacing gets a little dicey by the end as the plot turns from being outrageous to being just bleak, and as with basically every other version of the story, I'm not sure how to feel about its treatment of sexual assault. But on the whole, this is pretty good. I want to live in the alternative universe in which all Masterpiece Theatre-ish productions are this cruel and sick. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for October 31 - November 13, 2022

Sorry I missed last week. I had such a busy few days that I neither watched anything nor did I have time for blogging even if I had watched anything. I made up for it this week, as you can see.

Movies

Wendell and Wild (2022)
Henry Selick and Jordan Peele made a movie for the freaks and the weirdos and the people who care about the prison industrial complex and the people who don't care if your movie is too overstuffed to have structural or dramatic integrity. Really terrific stop-motion animation, of course. Nice to see that Selick is still making icky-looking movies after all these years. Grade: B

If you'd like to hear me (and some friends) talk about this movie at length, you can check out Episode 428 of the Cinematary podcast.

TÁR (2022)
Enigmatic, and photographed with obvious deliberation, TÁR is likely to be one of the most "Cinema with a capital-C" movies that's going to get wide distribution this year, and there's something inherently exciting about that in a world where even my local "arthouse" Regal is blocking out several screens of Wakanda Forever. It's also deliciously perverse in its depiction of Lydia Tár, its central problematic genius, a figure who, we're assured, is more than deserving of the stratospheric accolades she has received and whose prickly personality and nastily barbed speech is so compelling to watch that we as viewers might be tempted to take her side even when allegations much more serious than the distilled assholery we've witnessed come to light. The movie has a real impish glee in its depiction of both the ways that Tár brutally humiliates those around her and also the eventual indignities that come for Tár herself (right up to the sublime cosmic joke that lands in the final scene), and in doing so, the movie becomes a seriously mean black comedy of a sort that reminds me of Phantom Thread before that movie's unexpected pivot (Cate Blanchett's wiry, feral performance here is every bit the equal of Daniel Day-Lewis's work with PTA). TÁR never really pivots, though, and even given the extent to which it's such a hugely entertaining watch (especially for the kind of art film it presents itself as), there's something maddening about the central arc of the film, too, that makes it a much more slippery watch than a lot of the self-destructive anti-hero media that the film's logline evokes. Some of the film's provocations are obvious (insert your favorite charismatic-but-morally-dubious celebrity comparison here), but there's a much more insidious provocation in the sense that the film withholds just enough information from basically every single plot development here that there's a plausible deniability to any interpretation you could have—not just interpretation in the sense of what it means but also in the sense of what actually, factually occurred. The most obvious example is how the film shows us just enough of Tár's behavior around her protégés that we know she's capable of the #MeToo-esque accusations leveled at her but not enough that we can be absolutely sure how much she's responsible for the catastrophic depths those accusations indict her in. But that "just enough to be suspicious, not enough to be sure" approach holds for everything in the film, right down to a fairly minor plot point involving an alleged attack against Tár that may in fact have merely involved Tár tripping on stairs. So much of this film's plot is related via people's personal accounts that we simply have no window into beyond their own words. It's a genuinely ballsy move to make a film about an over-enabled star accused of abusing their position and then make the fundamental building blocks of its reality this opaque and inscrutable (forming an accidental, instructive juxtaposition with the trailer for that Harvey Weinstein movie that played before my screening of TÁR), but whether or not this is constructive or merely a smokescreen for something more hollow and reactionary is something I cannot parse and gives me pause. I suppose there's something possibly profound about how the act of interpreting this movie mirrors our lived reality in the real-life versions of these "celebrity accused of bad behavior" scandals in which we're invited to make decisions about the guilt or innocence of people based entirely on personal accounts. As is the case in real life, this process in the film obscures the presumably real pain of the alleged victims, instead focusing on how such accusations might undermine the elevated position of the accused, and TÁR is so deliberate in lampshading the fact that we know absolutely nothing about the victim here that I have to imagine that this effect is intentional. To what end? I dunno. Maybe once the dust settles, I'll have a clearer idea of what's supposed to be going on here. But for now, I can't think of a film with an enigma this opaque wrapped in a character study this watchable. Grade: A-

Night of the Creeps (1986)
Pretty fun, store-brand-Joe-Dante-style movie involving some gross little leech-looking things that turn people into zombies. Some really great line readings, especially from Tom Atkins, who gets to go delightfully arch in the film's climax. There's not a lot to the movie besides these simple pleasures, though, and the more the movie gestures away from them—for instance, in the middle section that is curiously focused on college Greek life politics—the less interesting it gets. Luckily, it's mostly focused on the good stuff! Grade: B

 

 

 

Dead of Night (1977)
I put this on thinking it was the 1945 movie of the same title (I didn't realize the 1945 movie was made in 1945 or I would have recognized my mistake instantly), and by the time I realized it wasn't, the sunk cost fallacy had already gripped my brain. A near-complete dud of a TV-movie—it's an anthology film, and only the last segment works (the last one is pretty good, though—a mother raises her son from the dead, and he's a terror). But overall, a waste of time. The first movie I had time to watch in over a week, and I mess it up! Grade: C-

 

 

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
I thought there would be more songs in something the early-'30s called a "musical," but the songs here are super charming. I also wasn't prepared for just how unabashedly dirtbaggy Maurice Chevalier's character is, but that's pre-Code Hollywood for ya! A highly relatable film: I, too, would be frustrated if I was winking at Claudette Colbert but instead some stuffy monarch thought I was winking at her, so I had to pretend to be in love with her so I didn't get punished, so then we got married, but then she turned out to be a total square, which is a real turn-off, so I can't consummate the marriage until Claudette teaches her how to smoke and be all cool and sexy, and then oh boy, it's off to the races! Could happen to anyone! Grade: B+

 

I Don't Want to Be a Man (Ich möchte kein Mann sein) (1918)
An interesting, sharp comedy exploring gender fluidity. It's always amazing to see a film from 100 years ago dealing with ideas that would have been considered progressive within my own lifetime. A little bit depressing, too—liberation is not a linear or inevitable arc, I guess. Anyway, I don't know anything about anything with gender, but this movie gets one thing absolutely right about gender, which is that men's formal wear sucks. Grade: B

 

 

 

Television

How To with John Wilson, Season 2 (2021)
The second season of How To is basically more of the same, though there are some subtle differences. Conner O'Malley is now part of the writing team, and while I can't say so for certain, some of the visual gags accompanying Wilson's narration seem to have his fingerprints—whatever the case, this season is slightly more jokey, but not in any way that changes the basic experience of watching an episode. You've got the same narration, the same video-essay conceit, the same out-of-left-field moments of profundity, the same commitment to finding the most absurd extensions of each episode's central idea. Still a fun and special little piece of the modern TV tapestry. Grade: B+