Mini Reviews for August 23 - 29, 2021

 In case you missed it, here's the Gravity's Rainbow/Dark Souls post I was teasing last week.

Movies

Feed (1992)
A documentary consisting entirely of B-roll and unaired footage of the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primaries. I imagine that this sort of puncturing of political decorum and media norms was a lot more of a revelation in 1992 when political candidates didn't have phone cameras trained on them at every moment and an internet hungry to devour any morsel of video about even moderately famous people, but it's still pretty fun to watch now. Watching Ross Perot tell dirty jokes is something, as is the utterly cringe-inducing scene involving Hillary Clinton urging a homeless man to register to vote, and him responding by asking for a dollar. There's also a surprising amount of footage of George H.W. Bush just staring out into space. I dunno, there's not a lot to this movie, but I got a chuckle out of it. Grade: B

The Driller Killer (1979)
This feels like a graduate student made a slasher movie, not in terms of the professionalism (or lack thereof) but more because everything just feels so freighted with academic symbolism and weight. Normally that wouldn't be a bad thing for me, but it kind of feels like this has more of a thematic eye than a cinematic one, and it's just cumbersome most of the time. The plotting is totally frazzled, though, which does make it kind of interesting—it ping-pongs between Taxi Driver-esque disaffected-urban-male storytelling and just straight-up smut in a way that was unpredictable, and there's a certain entertainment value in that unpredictability. This is my first Abel Ferrara movie—not sure what else to expect from the guy. Presumably more than this. Grade: B-

PlayTime (1967)
Probably the least-funny Tati movie so far in my watch through his features—he was never a laugh riot, and at this point in his career, he's more just doing whimsical choreography than actual humor. That said, this has the only gag in his filmography that's gotten a full, out-loud laugh from me (the Roman column trash can), and also, who cares how funny a movie is when it's this visual splendid? Seriously, I don't think there's a movie in the rest of cinema history that looks like this movie does, with Tati's deep focus revealing detail after detail in his mind-bogglingly large, dizzyingly absurd sets—architectural modernism as both playground and nightmare. I couldn't pull my eyes away from the screen. Just a mesmerizing, totally realized creation. Grade: A-

Trafic (1971)
As an avid hater of the automobile, I was really looking forward to seeing M. Hulot bumble through some absurdly elaborate car environments. So it is with a heavy heart that I must report that I was bored to tears. It has the lack of conventional gags of PlayTime with very little of the visual grandeur that elevated that film. There are a couple of good bits—the nose-picking montage, the car with seemingly endlessly unfolding compartments—but the rest of this movie is just shapeless mush, and I can barely remember most of it already even though I finished it just like half an hour ago. I'm really disappointed—I felt like I was getting into a pretty good groove with Tati, and then there's this. I don't get it at all. Not everything can be PlayTime, but is it too much to ask that everything else be Monsieur Hulot's Holiday? (Apparently) Grade: C

Parade (1974)
I can see what this movie is going for: something like a cross between a TV variety hour (or hour and a half) and a circus that casts Tati himself as ringmaster/MC, calling to mind his mime/vaudevillian past while also moving into the future with TV and video. And there are some good moments: some of the physical acrobatics/stunts are very impressive, and it's incredibly sweet that the movie (and Tati's feature-film career) ends with two children playing on the emptying set, given Tati's sense of play throughout his filmography. But other parts of this just drag, and other parts highlight how much of this sort of live-performance/circus really just has to be experienced in-person for it to have its full effect, because it's pretty flat onscreen. It's kinda the same deal for the video cinematography—sometimes it looks very cool, but other times (most of the time) it looks like trash in the way that a lot of video cinematography from '70s TV looks. Anyway, a movie that's more fun to think about than it is to actually watch, but thematically, it's a fitting final feature. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for August 16 - 22, 2021

 Still working on that Gravity's Rainbow post. Hopefully will publish it this week.

Movies

Annette (2021)
This movie commits to being what it is, which is an admirable show of gumption considering that what it is is an operatic musical involving, among other things, Adam Driver singing over and over "We love each other so much" as he goes down on Marion Cotillard and Marion Cotillard giving birth to a puppet. More seriously, it's about the artifice of storytelling and the fraught role of audiences on art, and on that metric, it's at least interesting to consider the brazen artistry it took to will this movie into being. Though that said, I'm unclear how seriously I'm supposed to be taking this movie at all—there's an obvious insincerity at some parts, where the film goes out of its way not just to call attention to the artifice but also to mock it, and other parts of the movie are obviously expecting us to engage with its characters in good faith, and others still fall into a weird limbo of intent, where it's unclear if the film is taking the piss—it's a really disorienting tension to live in, and I'm not sure the movie navigates that tension successfully. Such a deeply, deeply strange movie on so many levels. Grade: B-

Shiva Baby (2020)
I've seen a lot of people talk about how unpleasantly stressful this movie is, and maybe I'm just sadistic, but I thought this was great fun. A woman goes to a shiva out of family obligation and finds that in attendance are people from different and competing ecosystems of her life, such that she has to hustle big time to make sure that these different people don't talk to each other too much and discover the lies she's felt compelled to tell about herself in order to cope with the indignities and anxieties of adult life in the 2020s. Like, sure, this is unpleasantly stressful for the protagonist, but for me, the viewer, it's really satisfying to see all these tightly interlocking dramatic pieces slide in and out of each other across what is essentially a feature-length tragicomic setpiece. Frantically energetic in a way that I completely dig. Grade: B+

Escape Room (2019)
It's pretty dumb, especially on a screenplay level (the lurch toward a conspiracy plot in the final fifteen minutes is numbingly stupid). But "you're in an escape room designed to kill you" is a really fun premise that the movie delivers on when it isn't trying to make a coherent story, which is about 60% of the time. I basically had the same issues with Saw, quite a bit of whose DNA is in this movie—when will filmmakers stop using plot to ruin cool movies about people trapped in a room solving sadistic puzzles? Grade: C+

 

 

Mon Oncle (1958)
Like Chaplin's Modern Times, only French and about the suburbs and less interested in radical politics. Tbh, the aesthetic and mechanical shortcomings of the suburbs are hardly the most interesting reasons to critique the suburbs for me, so Tati's occasional position on how Monsieur Hulot is so much cooler than his suburban cousins lands flat for me (though I do like the repeated comedy of errors that comes from those cousins' inability to adjust their social norms to even the smallest bit of chaos). Still, I get the idea that whatever social commentary gets included in these movies is just kind of incidental to his main focus on using physical gags to push at the limits of the film's environments. And there are a lot of good gags here. The suburban McMansion (or whatever the French version of that is) is obviously a whole lot more obviously artificially structured than the sea-side town in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, which allows for even tighter physical comedy as these characters pratfall through these sets, and the light surrealism of things like the house having windows for eyes is good, clean fun. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for August 2 - 8, 2021

School starts for real tomorrow. Boo.

Movies

Fear Street: 1978 (2021)
On a moment-by-moment basis, this is a better, more competent movie than the first Fear Street movie, but not by much, and it also doesn't have the bread slicer, so overall these shake out about the same for me. Also, it's incredibly irritating to me how many needle drops there are and how short each one lasts. Did they not have access to anything but the 30-second iTunes Store previews of the songs? Grade: C

 

 

 

May (2002)
Kind of unique among horror movies in the way that this is so single-mindedly a character piece and not all that interested in conventional horror theatrics. It's pretty good as a character piece, depicting a very specific kind of lonely person that Angela Bettis's performance lends a ton of humanity to the character. When the horror elements do kick in, there's something a little otherizing about them, and the movie struggles to find a consistent balance between the empathy generated by the character's desperation for human contact and the grotesquery of where her desperation eventually leads. I guess if this were just purely a character drama it would be unbearably bleak, whereas the horror trappings at least give a constructiveness to the bleakness. But the character beats are so strong and do such a good job of getting me to care about May that I do wonder what that other hypothetical movie would be like. As it is, this is still pretty good, despite being compromised a tad. Grade: B

The Mission (1986)
Man, what was it about '80s prestige pictures and being stupefyingly boring? I realized almost instantly that I was confusing this movie with The Apostle when I decided to put it on, but I'm no quitter, so I soldiered on. The good: Ennio Morricone's score is incredible, the locations are exquisite, and the movie questions colonialism. The bad: it barely questions colonialism, mostly just criticizing the brutality of the proto-capitalist extraction by secular powers while giving the Catholic missions a pass on principle of their supposed good intentions (I mean, there's a little critique of the missions, but we're mostly focusing on the Good Missionaries here, which seems to be missing the forest for the trees). I mean, basically everything except the score and locations is a non-starter here, either blandly competent (most of the acting, tbh—sorry, baby Liam Neeson!) or actively irritating (most notably, the fact that this is trying to tell the story in support of the Guaraní without having a single Guaraní character of note). It's hard to wrap my mind around this winning the Palm d'Or at Cannes—maybe the attendees fell asleep and Morricone's score gave them such good dreams that they thought this was a masterpiece instead of a truly middling piece of dull sanctimony. The history trying to be told here is incredibly important, though, so hopefully one day we'll actually get a good movie about it. Grade: C

Jour de fête (1949)
Has little of the complexity and absurdity I was led to expect of a Tati film, and for the first hour, I found this low-key and gentle to a fault. It's not bad, but I was seriously struggling to find anything to hold my interest. The final 20-30 minutes where the mailman is jetting around on his bike trying to deliver fast "like the Americans do" are pretty great, though—much more (maybe intentionally so) like a Keaton movie and therefore something I was much more plugged into. But I would have been happy to have just watched that part as a short instead of having to wade through a whole feature to get to it. Not the best entry point into Tati's filmography, it turns out. Grade: C

If you're interested in hearing my gripes more fully fleshed out and contrasted against the much more thoughtful analyses of two long-time Tati fans, then this week's episode of the Cinematary podcast is for you, because that's what happens on it. Here's the link to listen.

Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot) (1953)
I was able to tune into this movie's wavelength much better than Tati's debut, Jour de fête. It's basically working in the same wheelhouse: Tati's bumbling, slightly out-of-touch protagonist pratfalling his way though a minutely detailed provincial community. But everything is just so much sharper and more elaborate here. Gone are the empty spaces of movie just kind of idly observing the community—in this movie, even the more observational, slower parts of the movie are layered upon each other in a way that allows them to interact with each other, either physically or just visually, and the result is a movie in which, unlike Jour de fête, there is always something happening, always something to look at, and its layering effect allows gags to pile up to much more complicated and delightful setpieces, e.g. the boat sequence or the car chase sequence, both of which find Tati's Hulot wrestling with vehicles that just won't work how they are supposed to (I've been told a thematic throughline in Tati's career). Anyway, I'm feeling much better about watching the rest of Tati's movies than I was after Jour de fête. Hopefully will get to the rest soon. Grade: B+

Television

Lodge 49, Season 1 (2018)
A sprawling, occasionally very funny, occasionally very bizarre, sometimes very moving series about a quasi-mystical social club (The Order of the Lynx) and a nebulous conspiracy behind it. The show it reminds me most of is the early stages of Lost where it was impossible to tell exactly what kind of show you were watching because of the way the series was completely comfortable throwing unexpected, incongruous elements together. One minute in Lodge 49, the show is a serious character piece about processes grief and death; the next, characters are having ecstatic visions; the next, there's a gross-out gag involving a tapeworm. The constant throughline is the shows obsession with debt: all our characters are saddled with crippling debt of some kind here, and broadly, the entire season (and, I'm assuming, the whole series) is about just how nefarious and exploitative modern financial institutions are and how difficult it is to untangle the web of connections that enslave us in debt in order to keep the status quo intact. It's openly influenced by the work of Thomas Pynchon (the title is a Crying of Lot 49 reference), so you've got a lot of that kind of thing going with the conspiracy angle and also with the way the show ricochets back and forth between high-brow and low-brow, esoteric and open-hearted, serious realism and wild genre tangents. Maybe unlike Pynchon (depending on your relationship to his work), this remains super approachable and always grounded at least in some sort of emotional stakes to pull us through the weird stuff, an effect achieved largely thanks to the excellent cast and especially the three main leads: Wyatt Russell and Sonya Cassidy as respectively wide-eyed and cynical siblings and Brent Jennings as an aging plumbing salesman. I'm sure this series isn't going to work for everyone, but it worked tremendously for me, and I'm truly stoked to dive into the second (and sadly final) season. Grade: A