Sorry for the week delay! At least I got to see a couple of new movies this week!
Movies
Robert Eggers's newest feature is far and away his most conventional, free from most of the archaic linguistics of The Witch and The Lighthouse and pushing to the margins the folk weirdness and scatological impulses that those previous two movies centered. Actors like Willem Dafoe and Björk carry on the mad-scientist torch of the older, less-studio-financed Eggers, and their eccentricities—both tied to the northern-European pagan mysticism that undergirds the film—are welcome. But for the most part, this is a fairly straightforward revenge saga, starring a bunch of vikings. And it absolutely rips. Pure heavy metal cinema of the highest order, as grisly, gory, and as shouty as you would hope for, performed by a cast that is top-to-bottom completely dialed in to the arch intensity that is this movie's wavelength. It perfectly threads the needle between the self-seriousness requisite in the format and the silliness inherent in taking oneself so seriously, and a lot of this is actually pretty funny while still feeling of a piece with the stone-faced brutality that animates the characters. Also, by virtue of being a movie made by someone with the preoccupations of a man like Robert Eggers, even its more conventional elements are made more interesting than might be otherwise. For example, as a revenge story, it has the expected "When you seek vengeance, you gotta dig two graves" themes, but the meticulous historical and mythological detail present here, however sidelined compared to his previous features, deepens that idea to a treatise on the ways that religion and the personal mythology of "protecting my family" are used as justifications for the cult of masculine violence involved in the endless cycle of death and vengeance. Human beings are not naturally creatures of endless bloodshed but rather creatures who are driven to killing by rationalizing violence post-hoc with elaborate narratives of honor and necessity, and there's something simultaneously moving and horrifying about the deep meaning these characters find in the brutality that the movie goes out of its way to show is functionally nihilistic. It's bleak stuff, but it also involves two characters fighting to the death naked inside of a volcano, which is awesome, so you know, in conclusion, The Northman is a movie of contrasts. Grade: A-
The agreeable things about this movie are very agreeable to me. The pseudo-improvised absurdity of the multiverses here feels like a more committed-to-the-bit version of those Rick & Morty interdimensional cable episodes, which I enjoyed quite a bit, and while I certainly understand why people find the Daniels' extremely internet-y sense of humor exhausting, I continue to find it charming and usually hilarious (one particular recurring joke, which was halfway spoiled for me but I won't spoil here, had me in stitches every time it was deployed). There's a home-spun genuineness to both the gags and the effects here that reminds me of Terry Gilliam, a filmmaker who has to be as much of an influence on EEAaO as the Wong Kar-wai and Wachowski connections everybody is already talking about, not just for the practical effects and chaotic surrealism but also for the way that the film uses its aesthetic to blow up its goofiness to a sincere treatise on the nature of reality and meaning-making within the human experience, which feels right out of Time Bandits or Brazil to me. It's not an original idea that life is absurd and only valuable in so much as we are able to find meaningful connections through kindness and empathy (again see: Gilliam, Terry), but it's a powerful one nonetheless that I found movingly rendered here. All of that said, the movie's only real liability for me is such a liability that it knocks the movie considerably out of the top-tier category that the component parts deserve, and that's the length. Friends, two hours and twenty minutes is just tooooo looooong for this movie, and not even barely too long either—I'm talking majorly too long, like 30, 40, maybe even 50 minutes too long. The climax of this movie lasts forever as it makes the same point over and over and over and over and over again, and given the heightened freneticism and naked sentimentality of the film (both of which I like quite a bit in isolation), I felt like I was being bludgeoned with the film until I just went kinda numb after a while. A movie this zippy and energetic deserves a zippy, energetic runtime, and the sad thing is that it doesn't even feel like a lot would have had to have been sacrificed to cut the film down to a more functional length, considering how repetitive pieces of the film (especially the climax) are. Part of the charm of this movie is that it gives the impression that the Daniels were given a blank check to follow any and every filmmaking whim of theirs with absolutely no intervention from any studio suits, and I would hate to spoil that feeling. But maybe someone somewhere could have given some helpful pointers about the runtime? Otherwise, a complete delight. Grade: B+
Kinda feeling weird about this one, but, like the other Anna Biller movie I've seen (The Love Witch), it's a marvel of craft, and there's really no denying that, so here's that positive rating. But it is weird that this is using a very exacting pastiche of '70s sexploitation cinema to satirize the patriarchal abuses of the sexual revolution, while at the same time being kind of sexy by virtue of being a pastiche of erotic cinema. And like, it's true that a lot of older sexploitation movies also have this queasy mix of eroticism and gross abuse, but Anna Biller has a hardline moral point of view that very few of those earlier films do, making the queasiness the central intended effect, which is fine—I mean, I hope we all feel queasy about sexual assault! But—and maybe I'm being paranoid here because I'm a fragile heterosexual man (not ruling that out)—there's also this quiet but persistent feeling that Biller's themes are meant to bleed out into a broader conception of sex, wherein heterosexual encounters within a patriarchal society aren't just incidentally abusive but unavoidably abusive by virtue of their inescapable cultural framework. I think it's worth exploring the ways in which our broader social systems override and corrupt even well-meaning ideals to the contrary (and I think Viva is very on-point for criticizing the sexual revolution for not having explored this issue thoroughly enough), so kudos for Viva having the gumption to do so. But also, the sex presented in this movie is just so irredeemably corrupt that it feels like sexual nihilism on a certain level, and I don't know what that means for sexual liberation as a whole. I dunno. The fact that I'm thinking about it this much is probably a good sign that something about these themes is resonating with me, and the film is top-to-bottom a triumph of aesthetic anyway, so maybe I'm just talking myself out of liking this movie as much as I actually do. Grade: B
An utterly bizarre, almost found-object of a movie, an already strange vision (e.g. Welles's "Irish" accent) cut to shreds by the studio with little regard for continuity of tone or coherence of plot, and all we're left with are the scraps that survived. To this end, the film has the feeling of something that's disintegrating as we're watching it, beginning with a fairly conventional noir setup, only to take weirder and weirder pivots to match what seems to be the increased studio interference, including a truly deranged courtroom sequence, until we're at the climactic (and justly iconic) hall of mirrors shootout, and the movie becomes almost entirely abstract, each shot cut to ribbons by its own reflections. Wild stuff—feels of a piece with things like Kiss Me Deadly, i.e. film noirs that feel like they leaked in from a parallel universe. Grade: A-
I really hate to hand it to the Disney monopoly, but watching the early non-Disney American animated features (of which this is only the second—and only the sixth American feature overall if you do count Disney features!) really makes it completely obvious and understandable why Disney and only Disney came to dominate the animated feature film market in this country. Walt Disney was in masterpiece mode for the entirely of the pre-WWII output, and not just regular masterpieces but things like Fantasia and Pinocchio, medium-defining moments that remain high water marks in American cinema to this day. Meanwhile, the only major competitor, Fleischer Studios, was making dull crap like this. The sad thing is that the Fleischer short films of the preceding decade are far and away superior to the Disney shorts of the same era, but for whatever reason, the transition to feature filmmaking stripped away all the bizarre and inventive instincts of those shorts and resulted in a film that's running on empty, creatively—this is a film in which someone thought it was a good idea to have its protagonist's only major character trait be that he just says "gee weeds" all the time. The animation is fluid and its characters have that irresistible Fleischer design, but the actual choreography of the animation feels perfunctory at best, all that wonderful rubberiness wasted on the stalest cartoon movements. The Disney features also lack the ingenuity of their earlier shorts, but they replace that loss with a visual grandeur and storytelling mythology that makes them absolutely stunning despite being comparatively staid; Mr. Bug Goes to Town has no ambitions of grandeur, which is fine if it were to go for broke with cartoonish mayhem like the Fleischer shorts do. But instead, it just feels like this animation spends the whole movie revving up to something a lot more kinetic and out-there that we never end up seeing. Really kind of depressing that this is something of a last gasp of one of the greats of early American animation (as I understand it, Paramount basically manufactured the dismantling of Fleischer after acquiring it in the early '40s), because this is far from the swan song that Dave and Max's legacy deserved. Grade: C-
There's something about European stop-motion films with puppets that is endlessly fascinating to me. Not fascinating enough to help me not be kinda bored with this, but the uncanniness of the animation does feel particularly well-suited to the rhythms and sensibilities of Grimm fairy tales. A lot of early animation is surprisingly intricate, but this film really has a home-spun feel to it, almost like I'm watching a streetside "Punch and Judy" booth or something of that nature, and considering the improvisatory feel of those fairy tales, this works pretty well. I just wish it were a better, more exciting story. Do "Bluebeard" next time. Grade: C
Pretty great sets/costumes, and that two-color Technicolor looks cool. I was completely on-board with this movie in the early-goings when this was about a dude who had pledged bloody revenge against the pirates who murdered his dad, but then he accomplishes this revenge in the first third of the movie and spends the rest of the time tricking the pirates into not doing pirate-y things like sinking ships? Morally, yes, this seems like a good idea, but as a viewer thirsting for pirate content, I feel somewhat let down. Turns out in the end that this guy advocating for moral nobility has been literal nobility the whole time (he's a duke, apparently), so I guess that tracks. Still, nice of him to make sure the pirates didn't rape that one lady; even this pirate-craving viewer can get behind that. Grade: B-
