In case you missed it, here's my Favorite Movies of 2022 post! I'm hoping to get the 2022 music post out in the next week, too, so stay tuned!
Movies
I was constantly pinging between scared, bored, and nostalgic here. Scared and bored are probably self-explanatory: the movie is very spooky at times, and also intentionally dull, too, and those two modes have a symbiotic relationship, for sure. I'm not sure the scares would be as effective if this wasn't incessantly switching among staticky shots of mundane stuff like Legos and ceilings, though I do agree with my friends I saw this with who felt that the movie was kind of impatient in the way it was channel-flipping between different images. The nostalgic feelings I had are weirdly specific; I've seen a lot of people talking about how this movie recalls the feeling of being a child in a dark house in the middle of the night, which is true, but also, when I was growing up my family had a VHS tape that contained most of the public-domain cartoons that are playing on the TV throughout the film, and it was bizarrely cozy to have those cartoons exhumed from deep in my early childhood memories. I'm positive that wasn't the intention of the filmmakers, but that's kind of the thing with childhood memories: the strange mix of fear and comfort, stupid sound effects and incomprehensibility. Also, gotta love that this film is in its own way a feature-length tribute to Archive.org, which the opening credits explicitly shout out. Anyway, good movie, pretty cool that something this out-there is getting a relatively big audience. Grade: B
What a bizarre failure of a movie. The screenplay by Charlie Kaufman certainly has ideas about the ways that bourgeois cultural values suppress more liberated ways of living, but embedding those ideas in a screwball farce framework in the model of Bringing Up Baby or The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is a fatal mistake because Kaufman simply does not know how to (or won't) fill his writing with the moment-by-moment jokes that usually sustain this kind of film. As a result, it's a deeply goofy movie that is only actually funny on a few occasions. It's interesting to see a Kaufman screenplay operating at this thoroughly silly tenor, but maybe the reason why his movies tend to be so much more lugubrious is that it doesn't work at all here. And if I hadn't seen Michel Gondry's name in the credits, I don't think I would have believed he directed this movie, because it's pretty much asleep at the wheel, stylistically. Incredible that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was only a few years away for both of these guys. Grade: C
Probably the best case scenario for "What if demon possession were a metaphor for the dissolution of my marriage?" It's as good as it is because of just how relentlessly committed the cast is to pushing this idea to the outer limits of what seems physically possible, screaming and writhing around for minutes on end. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of extreme metal or some other bruising kind of performance whose entire point is to see what aesthetic opportunities lie outside the realm of comfort and convention. A lot of this, I think, is meant to be subjective; when we see the couple screaming at each other in their apartment, we're supposed to be seeing what their argument feels like rather than what it actually literally is, and the same goes for any number of extreme sequences, including a notorious one in which Isabelle Adjani's character describes having a miscarriage in the Berlin metro and we cut to a surreal and deeply unsettling show of her flailing about in an empty metro station as unknown liquids spew from her body. It's wild, and I thought it was good in the sense of leaving me somewhat shell-shocked, though I can sympathize with people who find all of this off-putting. There's also a lot of stuff about espionage and the German political situation in the waning years of the Cold War that I'm not really equipped to dig into, but I enjoyed the way that they added a wacky paranoid conspiracy aspect to the movie. Sure, maybe your wife is harboring a demon in her apartment, but have you considered what that means for geopolitics? Grade: A-
I had a hard time getting on this movie's wavelength. The DVD case and first ten minutes of the movie indicated that this was about a guy who allegedly met Howard Hughes and then believed he was a beneficiary of Hughes's will, but the film quickly drops that in favor of an extremely low-key ramble through the man's humble (but somehow incredibly volatile) life. The movie moves seamlessly between very radical life changes, and there were at least a couple of times that I didn't realize what was happening until it was already passed because the movie makes so little to-do about its many, many left turns. By the time the final fifteen-ish minutes bookended the film with more Howard Hughes will drama, the shape of the movie kind of came into focus for me as a deeply sympathetic meditation on the directionlessness of being a lower-middle-class person with little agency in your life, but even then, I'm not completely sure what to make of it except that I ultimately enjoyed it. I imagine if I ever rewatch it, my feelings on it will be clearer now that I know what's going to happen. Grade: B
Extremely depressing. Giulietta Masina has an incredible capacity for radiating innocence from her face, and most of the film involves us seeing that innocence betrayed time and time again once her character is sold to an abusive circus strongman "husband." For as much as Fellini is known for exploring the ideas of unfettered exuberance and life as a carnival-like bacchanal, this movie seems like a bitter refutation of anyone trying to find philosophical contentment within that view of life, as The Fool's "pebble" speech to Masina's character which tries to generate meaning and purpose into the chaos of life is the thing that convinces her to stay with her abuser, since her life must have "meaning" despite the pain. The movie kinda takes a long time to get there, and I'm not sure it quite needs to take that long, even though this movie is fairly short in terms of Fellini films (only 1h40m), but maybe that's a me problem, as I'm finding it increasingly difficult to give my undivided attention to movies I watch at home. Also, I feel dumb for not realizing before now that Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown is a remake of this. I know some people hate Allen for this, but I kinda love how often he's drawn from the well of "I'm going to remake a movie many people consider one of the greatest of all time." I wish more people would do that, because it's usually at least interesting when it happens. Grade: B+
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