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Movies
When I first saw this movie back in like 2015 or so (I think this was post-Oscar win, so I wasn't really involved in that whole debate, though for my money, it remains one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic Best Picture wins in recent memory), I was mostly caught up in the style and acting, both of which remain electric and intoxicating. This time, though, I had enough distance to pay attention a little more to the ideas, and what struck me is how totally slippery this movie is in the realm of theme. A lot of this has to do with tone—the percussive score, constantly moving camera, and gonzo acting all conspire really effectively to give the movie its relentless forward momentum, but none of them do much to tip the movie's hand regarding, for example, with just how much ironic distance we're supposed to regard Michael Keaton's character, who is either a sympathetic artist beset by his past, social expectations, and his own doubts or a self-aggrandizing, self-destructive man who mistakes pain for authenticity and old-fashioned literary signifiers for artistry. It's not like it can't be both, I suppose, but the movie risks mealy-mouthedness without more clearly defining its intent regarding the balance of these two things, and your interpretation of the final scene, which at first seems extremely dark but then, by virtue of Emma Stone's facial pantomime, becomes somewhat uplifting, but maybe only ironically so? I dunno, from where I stand, it's either saying A) that the 21st century media landscape surrounding artistic prestige links the attention economy and self-destructive behavior/performance art with artistic merit in a way that is toxic and dangerous, or B) that this very landscape creates a crucible by which the True Artists are found. It makes a qualitative difference to me which of those two the film wants me to land at, but at every turn, Birdman becomes intangible and ambivalent when I try to pin it down to that end. Like I said, slippery. A marvel of its kind, but slippery. Grade: B
I know my position is not exactly uncontested that Hereditary is a movie in which its sprawling, disparate narrative and aesthetic parts click into a satisfying and nuanced thesis, but at least from where I'm sitting, Midsommar, writer-director Ari Aster's follow-up, is far and away that earlier film's less-tidy cousin. It is a complete mess, in fact. The human element is almost entirely fumbled, with the traumatic family deaths (a huge mistep in execution to begin with) and the central relational toxicity between Florence Pugh's character and her boyfriend (which loses most of its psychological specificity once the film arrives in Sweden) only paying off in the most frustratingly generalized ways through the metaphorical connections to the Swedish pagan festival that makes up the majority of the film's 147-minute runtime (!?). So that doesn't really work. But taken as an accumulation of aesthetic choices, Midsommar is an absolute monster of a film. It threads this really fine needle that links horror and (delightfully, unexpectedly) comedy in a way that I don't think I've ever seen done before, and, coupled with Pugh's terrific performance, the sun-drenched cinematography, and grotesque folk horror, this tone makes a perfectly ghastly waking nightmare of an experience. Comparisons to The Wicker Man have already proliferated, but while it's nowhere near that movie's equal (for starters, The Wicker Man at least hangs together thematically), what Midsommar accomplishes on a sensory level feels a lot more ineffable and otherworldly, which I dig considerably. Grade: B+
An absolutely ridiculous movie in which Matthew McConaughey stumbles through a parade of bongs and beautiful women in the Florida Keys on his way toward writing a novel and achieving a stoner enlightenment. It's kind of bewildering at first, and writer/director Harmony Korine, as in Spring Breakers (this film's depressing cousin), never really figures out how to indulge in this without also indulging in some leery camerawork re: women. However, if you can get on the movie's wavelength (I was able to once Martin Lawrence showed up), it's very funny, maybe even one of the funnier movies of the year. It's interesting that "auteurs" like Korine so rarely go this full-bore into comedy; I'd be interested in more directors following suit. Grade: B
Unless you fell asleep during WWI day in your high school history class, They Shall Not Grow Old isn't going to be super informative for you—the audio recordings used voiceover (entirely veteran interviews, with no other narration) have been available to the public for decades. And the folks behind the movie's marketing seem to have been smart enough to recognize this, since the entire push behind the movie's trailers and posters has focused on the pretty pristine restoration, colorization, and audio synchronization used to transform the archival footage that comprises the entirety of the film's visuals. A lot of people seem to have gotten bent out of shape over what they view as unnecessarily technical exhibition here, and I might feel the same if the footage used were in any way exclusive to this movie—it's not, and Peter Jackson himself, in the lengthy making-of featurette, basically says he was interested in using the same stock footage everyone sees of WWI and helping people see it with new eyes. That old footage is still out there, so it's not as if Peter Jackson is airbrushing history a la George Lucas's Star Wars special editions. Besides, when this kind of restoration/colorization technology exists so readily, it seems as much of an aesthetic statement to leave footage b&w as it is to colorize it, at least when we're dealing with journalistic footage—to use a historical text is inherently to interpret it, etc. Anyway, it's pretty striking to see the colors and hear the sounds for this era of history, and at least for me, it did help me see stuff in a somewhat new light. Grade: B
Some truly spectacular special effects are wasted in a movie that has absolutely no idea how to script or direct. On paper, this is some really cool cosmic horror; in execution, it's rickety on a basic technical level, which makes it super difficult to figure out what I'm supposed to get from this. I mean, we have giant spider legs coming out of people's eyeballs, and forgive me for barking up the wrong tree if I want that to mean something. Grade: C
There's a lot going on in Joshua Oppenheimer's follow-up to The Act of Killing, but what struck me most is just how familiar the responses are when the film's anonymous protagonist approaches the men who were responsible for his brother's death in the 1965 Indonesian communist purge/mass murder: "Why are you talking politics right now?" "What's the point in bringing up the past?" To be clear, these aren't responses to academic queries like, "Is communism better than capitalism?" or "Is Indonesia a better place under the current state?" No, he's straight-up asking these men, "Why did you kill my brother?", and they're acting like he's bringing up a provocative Slate article at dinner. Which really throws into relief the fact that "politics" isn't just the abstract dance of concepts and tribal affiliations that we like to pretend it is in polite society—it's a tooth-and-nail struggle in which people's lives are literally at stake, and to deflect it as something more benign than that is to be complicit in that death toll. It's easy to look at the death mongers gleefully re-enacting their kills here and feel superior, but I think history has shown time and time again that whether or not we've actually killed someone with our bare hands, when someone comes knocking whom we've hurt, directly or indirectly, we deflect. I mean, just ask yourself honestly: what was your gut response to the line, "The Americans taught me to hate the communists?" Grade: A
