Pretty good movie week, all in all.
Movies
A substantially messier movie than X, and large chunks of this simply do not work. It also runs into the same problems as X did with the character of Pearl, which is that it has a hard time landing its theoretical sympathy for Pearl while balancing the plot's need for her to be a Krazy Killer. That all said, this is some mad scientist filmmaking for sure, far and away the strangest thing that Ti West has ever attempted and about as far out of his wheelhouse as he's ever been. I don't know that it ever comes into something coherent, but the way that this film uses West's facility for pastiche to squeeze '50s melodrama, The Wizard of Oz, and silent film into an exploitation mode is a true maniac's project, and the fact that Mia Goth is 110% onboard with whatever the intent was here becomes a compelling glue to hold it all together. This wouldn't work at all without Goth, who is keyed into the specific wavelength of camp this movie requires to an astounding degree, and that the movie doesn't even consistently work with her A-tier performance should give you an indication of how uneven this movie is. But for every bit that's uneven, there's a moment that feels like a payoff that doesn't exactly redeem what doesn't work but at least makes it clear why you stuck it out with that thread—e.g. spending about half an hour wondering why in the world I was seeing all these Wizard of Oz references and then getting to the part where Goth humps a scarecrow to climax and going, "Ohhh, wow." Ti West doesn't really have any of the, uh, ex factor of someone like David Lynch, who works with a lot of the same reference points to create films that feel much more primordial, and West is just a lot more crass about it than Lynch ever is, but the uncanny juxtaposition of familiar Americana with a squirmy recognition of the extremes of human behavior feels at least in the same country as the Lynchian mode (or at least pre-Fire Walk With Me Lynch). Long story short, I had a good time with it, and in the long run it'll probably be more memorable for its wild ambition than the much more coloring-inside-the-lines X, even if X is definitely the better movie. Grade: B
Has this weird quality of being simultaneously too ambitious while also provoking a "that's it?" reaction from me. It kind of reminds me of that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark adaptation from a few years ago that was somehow trying to be simultaneously a spooky campfire story and also some sort of treatise on the presidential election of Richard Nixon, and while this isn't as baldly political, it has this ersatz Stephen King undercurrent of trying to have this movie be about these battling metaphysical forces while at the same time being just a straightforward serial killer thriller. I dunno, it only barely works at its best, and at its worst it feels like an inauthentic accumulation of signifiers, not unlike its period setting (though at least we get some good, slightly unexpected needle drops—if you're going to do a Dark Side of the Moon track, "On the Run" is basically the only remotely interesting choice at this point). I love Ethan Hawke in general, but he really feels like he's just doing unflattering serial killer kitsch here. Just kind of an empty calories movie all around, and not even yummy calories either, because this movie is bleak and unpleasant on top of being uninspired. Grade: C-
A purposefully small, warm blanket of a movie. A young girl's grandmother dies, and soon after, she discovers a friend who is magically a manifestation of her mother as a little girl, which allows her to process her loss. There are some scenes that are so emotionally precise that they made me cry, but mostly the movie involves just watching a couple of cute, convincing child actors genially play together. Very sweet, very cozy, only rips your heart out of your chest twice. Grade: B+
It's hard not to look bitterly at this as a bunch of future Reagan voters cosplaying as revolutionaries, and to that end, the documentary scans as a lot more ambivalent toward its subject than I was expecting from such a mythologized text, right down to the final Hendrix solo playing over post-festival footage of the area that looks positively bombed-out—a wildly conflicted image to end this depiction of an ostensibly celebratory event. There are a few other pointed jabs at the shaky integrity of the festival, such as the darkly ironic juxtaposition of the nominally anti-war sentiments uniting the crowd with the fact that the U.S. Army supplied medical aid to the crowd once it became clear that the festival organizers themselves were incapable of maintaining an event at this scale. On a less ideological note, I guess I was expecting the music here to be better, but it's wildly inconsistent. The famous performances, i.e. the ones I'd already seen, are justly famous, especially the film-ending run of Santana --> Sly and the Family Stone --> Janis Joplin --> Jimi Hendrix. But a good portion of the acts here are a bunch of white blues groups of the kind that were popular in the UK at the time, and that's just such a tedious little subgenre of music to me. That Ten Years After set felt like an eternity, and there were at least a few more like it. The music was one of the few things I'd always figured I gotta hand to the hippies, but boy oh boy, not here. With any concert doc, there's a certain "you just had to be there" element, especially with one as ragged and sloppy as Woodstock, so I guess I've just got to assume that these bands just sound better when you're tripping on that subpar brown acid the festival staff kept warning people about. But anyway, probably the best thing about this documentary is how close it does actually get to helping its viewers understand what being there was like, and outside of the Santana, et al, finale, the best parts are the delightful little details the roaming cameras and mics pick up, like the wholesome dude servicing the toilets or the random loudspeaker announcements about somebody's wife having a baby or whatever. It's a deeply grimy and tactile film, and the breadth and specificity of sensory experiences it manages to capture is truly impressive. Probably could have done without nearly four hours of it, though; it's too bad that the 1994 "Director's Cut" is now basically the only version you can get, because the three-hour theatrical cut sounds much more manageable (though admittedly, that one cuts out a lot of the Hendrix stuff). Grade: B
With the exception of the haunting use of light in the Otis Redding sequence, this is much less of a cinematically interesting object than Woodstock (the obvious comparison point, given that the former inspired the latter), and it has virtually none of the sensory immediacy that defines so much of the film document of the latter festival. But the music is several orders of magnitude better in this movie, which covers a multitude of inferiorities. Furthermore, nowhere in the four hours of Woodstock does Jimi Hendrix pleasure his guitar before setting it on fire, so I think I rest my case on the (admittedly only barely) superior film experience. Grade: B+
