I'm already tired of being cold when I wake up.
Movie Reviews
This movie is incredibly good, one of the best movies of the year, and also probably the best film depiction of gentrification that I've ever seen as well as an absolutely gutting take on the trope of returning home and finding yourself an outsider after everyone else's lives have moved on. The low-ish budget and occasional on-the-nose screenplay (this is the kind of movie that drops its title conspicuously in dialogue) make sense with this being Merawi Gerima's debut feature, but also, this is a tremendously assured debut, and for any minor quibbles I have with the screenplay, there are a dozen more moments of technical and aesthetic bravura that are honestly breathtaking—to say nothing of the clearly personal connection Gerima has to the subject matter (he's a DC native himself). This movie should have generated major buzz, and the fact that it didn't is yet another indictment of Netflix, where this film languishes; people have a lot of justified criticisms of Netflix's business model and monopolistic tendencies and occasional artistic bankruptcy, but I think one of the absolute worst things about Netflix is how completely dysfunctional it is as a distributor. Things pop in and out of the algorithmic lottery with no clear rhyme or reason, and the effect of it is that everybody with Netflix knows about the same half-dozen lowest-common-denominator titles Netflix is promoting at a given moment, but the rest of the literally thousands of catalog titles get hidden in this gigantic Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouse that's impossible to browse or search with any sort of effectiveness unless you're going in looking for a particular title you've already heard about—and Netflix almost never does the work to ensure you've heard about a title. Like, come on; this movie is basically Michael Catnip; Netflix's algorithm should have been recommending this to me HARD. Instead, I was completely ignorant of this movie's existence until tonight. I follow a lot of people on Letterboxd, critics and casual users alike, and only one of them has even logged this movie, which makes me think that most cinephiles are basically in the same boat I am. I'd probably never have watched this movie if a friend hadn't randomly told me about it after he'd just happened to stumble across a review of the film. And now it's probably going to be in my top 10 films of the year. This should have been a slam-dunk for Netflix—recommend this to the same people who watched Da 5 Bloods or Atlantics and get some good word-of-mouth promotion. This isn't even a remotely hard marketing decision for a distributor. But instead, Netflix just sends me emails about Tiger King or whatever, and this movie flies under everybody's radar. BOOOO. Go watch Residue, folks! Grade: A-
This certainly isn't for everyone; it definitely tries WAY too hard to hit the intersection between David Lynch and Adult Swim, and stretches of this are pretty tiresome in the way that someone who strains too much to be "weird" can sometimes be. But a lot of the more overtly absurd/fantastic elements of this movie struck me as deeply hilarious, too. Like, in the movie there's a TV show called Kids with Knives that comes on after Little House on the Prairie reruns, and it's just kids waving around knives, and the show is such a bad influence that it instantly turns any kid who watches it into a major delinquent—I dunno, stuff like that I'm still giggling about days later. Grade: B
I was not expecting a movie with this title to actually be a serious, melancholy exploration of a woman's struggle with mental illness. It's one of those slow-burn horror movies that's basically just a single acting performance set against a strong vibe, and I'm good with that for the most part. Grade: B+
A movie that doesn't really have a lot on its mind besides Charlie Chaplin's seething rage at the United States' mid-century red scare. And while Chaplin certainly has every justification to be mad at that, I wish there was more to this movie than that plus a few limp gags. It's not terrible; the melodrama hits better than the humor—luckily, since the drama overtakes the humor entirely by the end—but there are a few good comic bits. I like that when the kid character (Chaplin's son!) first shows up, he basically just launches directly into a bunch of anarchist talking points without much preamble, and the facelift part is funny. But overall, the movie is like a lot of Chaplin features in that it's pretty disjointed and episodic, and unlike most Chaplin films, this movie has a hard time making enough of its disparate parts work well enough to justify the haphazard structure. Grade: C+
Easily the worst Chaplin feature I've seen. The fact that Chaplin himself doesn't even appear in the movie (as a disclaimer warns the audience at the beginning) is a problem, as it leaves basically a charisma void in the middle of the movie. But a far bigger problem is the fact that the characters in this supposedly serious-minded drama are incoherent outside the most basic immediate motivations. The titular woman decides to leave the dude of her dreams at the beginning of the movie because he didn't show up at the train station on time, but why? The former dude of her dreams becomes a starving artist who pines for this woman, but why? Like, in any given scene, the characters' actions can be explained, but none of this ever adds up to complete human beings who make sense as a whole. Normally, this wouldn't matter so much in a Chaplin feature because of the way that (as I mentioned in my A King in New York) Chaplin movies tend to rely on semi-standalone setpieces rather than holistic character development, but this movie explicitly presents itself as a drama and barely includes any comic setpieces, so it's as if Chaplin took the best parts of his normal filmmaking instincts out without replacing them with anything good. There are a few good moments, and I'll never get tired of Chaplin's complete and utter disdain for rich people (the movie's epilogue, where this disdain most openly raises its head, kind of comes out of nowhere, but it's probably my favorite part of the movie). But overall, this is pretty drab. Grade: C
Music
Kelly Lee Owens doesn't sound at all like New Order, but the formula is basically the same as the legendary UK group: music that pivots with grace from art-pop to synth-pop to no-bones-about-it club bangers. Opening with an instrumental IDM cover of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes / Arpeggi" (this has apparently been the year for great covers of that song), Inner Song announces itself as a record that, like the best New Order releases, straddles the familiar and the exploratory, and those impulses continue throughout, as Owens goes from spare synth-pop ballads like "L.I.N.E." to the 6-minute electronica odyssey "Jeanette" to the smooth, soul-tinged closer "Wake-Up." It's a fantastic journey, and I've been putting this on heavy rotation in my life. Definitely going to make my list of favorite albums of the year. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment