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Diqiu zuihou de yewan (2018)
All we have is now
A playful artistic experiment that uses amorous love to connect you to the labyrinthine mystery of identity and memory.
Influenced by the great Andrei Tarkovsky and Alain Renais, it overtly pays homage to Last Year at Marienbad, Stalker, and Sacrifice, by examining time as a sort of spell or artifact of awareness. Hopefully you come away with a deeper awareness, if not Satori, that now is the eternal residence of the heart, in the way that it is commonly said that we will love forever.
As well as nodding to exceptional influences, there's also musing on the writer/director's obvious love of the movies as a past time and on the pleasures of art that enliven a bleak world. It also indulges its creators' curiosity about craft and expresses a mix of admiration and envy of Godardian (Western European) cool. It's finely made, with a reverent attention to the moment and its details. Even the tiniest gestures such as lighting a cigarette, or turning out the lights in a pool hall are given intimate attention.
Unobservant viewers may experience boredom as they mistakenly think they are looking at the ordinary or merely the unfamiliar, but it's all extraordinary. Visually there not a wasted second in the movie.
The pacing may also be a challenge. Audiences looking to be wowed by Spielbergian strong plot and visual gimmicks will not be impressed.
The contents of a complete story are provided out of narrative order, so you sort of have to be able to remember what you haven't seen yet. You can do this by relaxing desire for causality and letting the story unfold as if it is doing your remembering for you. In this sense it is musical. If it works for you, you'll want to rewatch the way that you want to keep revisiting music, and by rewatching its patterns will unfurl.
Those with experience watching art movies enough to be patient observers, especially those who have explored self-reflection about the recesses of their own memories and love attachments may become engrossed by a sense of floating in a strange medium. It's a verisimilitude of a three act structure that unfolds using recursion. It's more profound than clever and shows uncanny sensitivity to the spark of awareness. This style is low-key and antithetical to Charlie Kaufmam movies flamboyant paradoxes and tautologies.
Although it's recursive, it's not quite cyclical. There's no cause and effect, even as one thing leads to another. It's like once you fall in love it's impossible to recall how you felt before, or like how dreams don't get anywhere even as they're always going somewhere.
Viewers who enjoy the slow consideration of light and movement in Terrence Malick pictures (Emanuel Lubezski) or Nicholas Winding Refn's TV series Too Old to Die Young, will find an analogous visual style here. The use of color moody and subtle. The camera is always at large with careful movement in every scene. This is a movie that invokes psychic and spiritual transit.
While it's highly enjoyable and intensely mystical, and it offers a tantalizing ascent for those craving a mount for upon which the mind's eye might perch and survey existence, it is not quite a Siddhartha of cinema. It walks the edge of craft that could be revelatory, but it's missing a spiritual reach for its impressive grasp. It's forcibly provincial in spite of its adventurous outlook. I couldn't quite avoid a tingling sensation of xenophobia. It's very Chinese, like Wong Kar-Wai movies. For me, this adds to its mystique. But cinema is such a ruthlessly Occidental medium: I wish this could transcend the west, or just escape it, but instead it fully embraces the western cinematic idiom.
But why am I complaining? This is a fine movie that grows with further consideration. If it's creators keep working we might look forward to a future exceptional- or possibly genius- work of art.
If you can get to see it in 3D, it's is an impressive effect, well suited to the teleplay and well used. But if you don't get a the chance, it's not a show-stopper. The missed experience is merely uncanny not momentous.
Conte d'été (1996)
Raisin d'etre
Annoyingly French bourgeois nattering with strong psychological imperatives, as described here by another reviewer. But like life, amazing regards can attend the banal.
I think Rohmer shares an sense of cinema with Tarkovsky in sense of sculpting in time and Malick with his philisophical obsessions. Through wonderful economies of production, a careful camera, fortuitous locales, revealing dialog, honest actors, and acute editing, the movie becomes a fully-formed linguistic expression. In the way that we know the world through thought yet words are empty arrangements of glyphs, this era of Rohmer movies, in which he dotes on youth and l'mour, lets me review my own youth with the pleasure of desire that comes from watching lovely people, and the distance of wisdom in observation of the sexual dances which propel the human comedy through across the generations, paradoxically the most obvious and intimate modes of our existence, yet largely unbeknownst to us.
Rohmer uses the camera as both a microscope and a telescope, but never puts his subjects under glass, nor relegates them to pure puppetry. His actors accept the camera as a third party intruding upon their couples, with the hesitation appropriate of including an other who is a friend or lover they won't quite ever know, but is right there with them. This creates a fantastic metonymy of the camera to the inner eye of my self-awareness that leaves me feeling like I shared the holiday with this people.
And the lingering mood is peaceful, meditative, and fosters openness and psychic contact with the Self in the sense of the sage Sri Ramana Maharshi.
This is analog cinema which eschews gimmicks to just look at a world, yet is always delightfully contrived for its points about persona and the wandering heart.
Too bad the dude Gaspard is such a bore, with French narcissistic personality disorder. Many times in the dialog I wished he would shut up about himself. Early on his manner of relating to Margot would seem more thoughtful if he just punched her in the face. But what's perennially true and wonderful is her willingness to love him on his own terms. The balance of the sexes is revealed as this constellation of young women orbit and this malleable young man like moons to let their gravity run the tides of his heart.
Rohmer is careful to not let these dynamics become tainted with selfish regrets, by keeping the portrayal fixed in its holiday moment of time, which works on me like my own memories of love, that I was changed by forces I could not comprehend, and later came to relish the reflection in both delight and horror.
Through Rohmer's lens, I don't get the feeling I could go back and do it again better with hindsight, but only awareness of life's stages. A reflection that attends me through a bit of sweet-bitter grief.
God help you watching these movies if all you notice are self-absorbed French dorks, perseverating in a meaningless world of trite artifacts, as children who are the distant consequence of Napoleon.
Firepower (1979)
One of the Greatest Movies Ever Made for 2020
Some movies take time to come to full fruition.
Astounding cast, great photography, ridiculous set pieces, ludicrous awesome dialog, prime '70s fashion, gimmicks galore, made for TV soundtrack. And just so happens to br one of the many but oblique primary references for Austin Powers series. There's no sense in revealing the myriad idioms that make this a gem; see it for yourself and just be aware that even if you get none of it, its rich with references to an America that all too recently was just as this portrays, plus a whole lot more. CLASSIC great fun.
Tenet (2020)
See Cibo Matto Video to Understand
This is a feature-length version of Michel Gondry's video for Cibo Matto's song Sugar Water. Find it on the youtubez.
If you don't get the plot of this movie, just watch the aforementioned video and replace love with Plutonium. Add big-budget Hollywood vfx and a lot of egomaniacal fussing about how rich dudes have to die in a cruel world just like everyone else, and there you have it.
Gondry didn't need a special room to make his point, because when the gimmick is presented with split-screen in 4 minutes, you can just see the crossover for what it is and enjoy the symmetry.
This movie is super portentous (and pretentious) and maybe even a bold comment about how high-zoot oligarchs are putting everyone's nuts in a vice with uber tech and fake news... Ok, props Nolando!
The action really serves no point in this movie because in a movie, backwards is still forwards, so the cleverness rests in something you are told, not shown. Your will struggle with trying to reconcile the visualization with what you are told. This sensation may feel deep. But it also leads to the paradox of an action movie that only makes sense when it is explained by its characters. Helpful to watch with subtitles due to bad sound and JDW slurring his speech. Once you get the clever gimmick you may become aware that the effects upon which this movie depends are not really playful like a good magic act, but sort of forced and tedious. As important as the idea of time slips are to Nolando, it seems he just writes about them as a sort of wish fulfillment that he could reverse his own career and be a family man.
This story is dramatically very lopsided and emotionally vacant, like Dunkirk, due to AWOL Jon Nolan -- who is the smarter brother -- and Chris' reliance on set pieces which at best are absurd and have nothing at stake.
In spite of these criticisms, I enjoyed being beaten over the head by this production more than I expected I would.
This is not anywhere close a masterpiece. Masturbxxxn, maybe.
I suggest watch Prestige again, because although it's distressed and mean, as all Nolan movies are, it has something like a beating creative heart, unlike this didactic amusement park ride for Nolan-bots.
-- Update --
Reversed rating; it won me over with its gimmicks.
Knight of Cups (2015)
A View Into the Anthropocene
The nature of the view (sight), of awareness, and the inimitable hazard of speech to experience of satisfaction in life, are manifestly cerebral concerns in Knight of Cups. The opening sequences of man, desert, car, memory (home movies), advertising fetish, and the Aurora Borealis as seen from the ISS, with John Gielgud and Charles Laughton reciting the Pilgrim's Progress to Ralph Von Williams set a threshold for the character of Rick to discover that the farther than man's wealth progresses, the more hopelessly distracted he becomes by the effects of his own artifice, and how desperately he requires a nature to make possible his hedonistic excess, and to redeem him of it. This is a survey of the pleasures and the plight of rich men, who have fallen into extravagance far ahead of any experience which can prepare them for their privilege. Malick fashions this excess into a beautiful allegory for human life as a universal surplus. Whether Malick is aware, I'm not sure, but he says no matter what your lot in life you face an abundance is which your suffering is also your pleasure, with an emphasis on thr freedom wealth brings to indulge in the sensation of life's abundance and the tragic dread than attends life's pain and brevity, all roiling in a "material" world which we can now see, with the aid of the camera, appears in the verisimilitude of a dream. It's a magnificent and damning portrait of a once promusing future turned into a haunted present, and a cry to an impossible God to rectify the human condition while pointing towards a horrific future that will continue to emerge even as God never answers our call. We fear death and rejoice in the hedonistic moment with no one, nothing, to answer our prayers,not even ourselves. This angst becomes a beautiful agony in Lubeski's warlock's hands as time and again a divine serendipity plays out before the camera; I have never seen such good fortune in shots, it's as if fate demanded this movie be created against ever odd, and the editing and sound design create a tone poem that conveys a magnificence of an era that I treasure, and believe will be celebrated one hundred years from now, whether we encounter a utopia of convenience or stare back longingly from an ash heap of human destruction.
The Godfather Part III (1990)
Happy it got made
Big successes are than it offers another installment in a great story, given the benefit of being carried by sublimeness of the previous 2, and it's well shot.
But the reason this movie is despised is also plain in many traits.
The biggest fail is pandering to recollections of the previous movies, and a soap-operatic tone. Nothing is at stake with Andy Garcia and Sophia Coppola as superficially attractive young tourists of the previous installments who never actually embody their roles as a new generation. I can imagine S. Coppola having sex on the couch with Garcia while watching the original on on Cable TV and bragging about it to her BFF.
No one in this installment has any gravitas and much time is wasted on drawn-out idiomatic patter that begs you to recall the previous 2, but never amplifying any portion of the previous story.
It's worse than lamentable that this movie offers beat-for-beat repetitions of gestures from the previous movies, with only minor adjustments to syncopation.
In its backwards-looking, It's like "Tenet" of Godfather, with the Vatican playing an eerily similar part to Ken Branaugh's evil, dead-ender uber-oligarch.
My initial reaction was disgust as Pacino seems to be literally diabetic in his responses to having to bring Michael back to life. He is sort put in a casket to start, climbs out, and slowly shuffles as more than a zombie through the paces of a criminal mastermind with a wheezy ambivalence towards redemption. The characters of his kids are oddly, yet believably, passive and bored, with S. Coppola coming across as a daddy's girl way too believably, and the character of his estranged son serving no point but to rhapsodically eulogize the first movie--The kids are meta-textual constructs here. In the son's case, operated at the level of the NYC stage actors seen by young Vito in GFII, so that Mike can reprise the portentous walk-out of Don Fannuci. Except this time it's lame and boring because it signifies nothing but Pacino's Michael's unease at having to listen the character of his fake son give a guitar recital of the series' theme music.
In Terrence Makick's Knght of Cups, Rick voice-overs how he aged and forgot the man he thought he wanted to be, and now looks back on dissatisfaction with realization he made life miserable for himself and for everyone around him. In this GF, we see a cinematic embodiment of regret that's not tragic because painful outcomes of previous choices, but tragic in how senility obviates any memory about why those choices were ever made--both in the character of Michael and in Coppola's direction! GFI and GFII were brilliant vital renderings. GFIII is an aging uncle still living his heyday in his dreams but mostly just nattering about it to his kids. When Vincent (Andy Garcia) helps Michael from the casino attack, did that situation really happen? Or did Vincent (Andy Garcia) just shine Michael on, as he assisted with the changing of a Depends Adult Undergarment?
Andy Garcia (Vincent)... I guess I get his appeal in the sense of celebrity fetish, which I imagine is analogous to why I like Cara Delevingne in Luc Besson's Valerian--mutant sex appeal. GFIII is a production similar to Besson's Valerian in the way the directors have inadvertently introduced empty space into derivative works which they prefer to see as cleverly overflowing with personal idioms, when in fact they create a void by merely rehashing pet gestures from previous successes. As John Huston retorts in Peter Bogdonovich's completion of Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind: "It's alright if we steal from each other, but what we must never do is steal from ourselves!"
I've never liked Keaton as Kay, she just seemed wrong and unbelievable, with her modest strength as an actor being a bit of wit about the absurdity of so much pretending--this made her a great sidekick to Woody Allen in movies like Sleeper and Love & Death. In GFI and GFII her Kay serves a tediously plausible but empty counterpoint of some other American reality beyond the tyranny of the family, but she never get as far as intruding, she's merely imposed as a plot device: In GFII, Michael has to be up against something personal in his state-side marriage and Keaton puts on the helmet with the blast-shield and dodges like Luke Skywalker harnessing the force to avoid Mike Vader's raving. In this movie, Kay is such an outlier that she's only a bit more than an empty signifier, helping Mike go through an awkward reconciliation with himself. it's impossible to imagine they ever had anything for each other. And looking back at the other movies its obvious they didn't, we just overlooked it because of all the other characters.
In the broadest sense, my complaints about this movie are sort of a claim about its authenticity: Real families, inc my own, are actually like this across the generations... Something once vital about an era ends up getting lost through no fault of anyone in the lineage. It's just that situations age out.
So, although this is movie is only a pale extension of the other two, I still enjoyed seeing it, and I'm glad it got made. More life ain't bad.
Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Running time not 155, it's 141
//We got gypped! Announced runtime is 155mins and actual runtime is 141mins. I have been Star War fan for life and never felt so betrayed and taken advantage of... Where are the missing 14mins? I blame Rian Johnson for steeling a reel from this beautiful film out of resentment of GoT fans. It must be a terrible movie which they cut their losses? Why is no one complaining about this travesty?!//
I decided to take this a little more srsly than at first, per this edit, tho based on the majority of reviews posted here (I've looked at about 1000) the above reads better.
Announced runtime of 155mins, has been widely reported in all advance press through release date, and in theater listings.
Theater listing the day the show I attended 12/20 claimed 155 with (TBC) in parens, which may stand for to be confirmed, but it's still on theater page, Mcmenamin's Bagdad.
Going into show a number of reviews I saw through aggregator Metacritic made passing references to length as being longish, 2 1/2 hrs, which jived with theater listing. So coming out I was perplexed by time not adding up: Show started at 2:31, quick Bagdad curtain / host intro for 2 mins, about 12 mins of prevues, then leaving theater while credits roll at 4:46. I came out of theater looking at time and thought Did we miss something? Actual runtime was more like 120 mins. Were there 10mins of credits? Probably.
Searching for "rise of skywalker 155 minutes" On 11/26 Forbes says Runtime changed to 141.
Ok. But what version of this movie did advance screeners, aka "press", see?
Did Edelstein, Travers, AOScott, Roeper, et al, review a 155 min version? Probably not.
Speaking of retcon, review sites are just changing the runtime detail without editorial comment. Maybe it's considered a minor factoid, not worth mentioning? Keeping in mind with today's press it's all pay for play, NDAs, etc.
So what version did you see? Would 14 more minutes help or hurt your reviews of this product?
Is this story of mismatched times a bunch of hooey about nothing? Yes! Just like this movie.
Is my 10-star rating for realz? Who knows? It could change at any moment...
Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (2019)
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019)
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019)
"Does anybody want fried sauerkraut?!"
This movie says more about American's adaptation to the memory of WWII in one line than Jojo Rabbit does in its entire running time.
Yes, Tarantino is back in form, and this is pure enjoyment. I saw this movie five times, and enjoyed it more the 5th than the 1st. Somehow 3 hrs float by in a colossally perfect waste of time. It's like a great double feature in one sitting.
Why does this nonsense work so very well when so much other stuff out these days is just nonsense? Because QT has never, ever had any pretensions to anything except his influences. He makes movies about what he loves in movies and TV. You can join if you like, or tell him to go to hell. But he knows how to have fun. His eye is excellent, he's perfectly adept, he gets great stuff out of A-list actors, he gets others on-board to join the fun, he's got great dramatic chops, and right next door to his lot trailer maybe he has a heart of gold.
Fair warning: If you don't love movies for their own sake, you may be tempted to disregard this movie. Anyone who thinks there is some sort of defect or error or problem with identify or politics or historical emphasis has no idea what's going on here. Go home, take Taika Waititi's lead and read Rilke.
The sheer orchestration of this construct is a sight to behold that rewards you for paying attention and gives you plenty to pay attention to. Light, sound, action, performances, all delivered in a fine concert.
Leo is a joy to behold and Pitt is right there with him every step of the way. If this is art imitating life imitating art, bring it on. Any many others surround and support them to wonderful comedic and dramatic effect.
It's also a minor museum of cultural artifacts. And It may be looked back upon as a proper artifact itself.
Props to QT for being a fun-loving adventurer and tour-guide in the midst of the plight of a cinematic creative class who at this juncture of the medium must mostly follow the money and gaze at their own navels.
I saw freshly minted 35mm and 70mm prints at different showings at PDX Hollywood theater, which happens to have QT as a benefactor for its 70 setup. While film is nostalgic, and these prints were the best quality I've ever seen, my eye found digi rules today. The most enjoyable presentation of the 5 showings I took in was on a big colorful contrasty screen in an acoustically perfect auditorium of 82nd Ave Century Theater with recliner seats. (Notwithstanding a minor but ongoing problem that venue has with a fruit-fly infestation.)
Gisaengchung (2019)
Parasite (2019)
Parasite (2019)
OUCH!
Pls make this director stop.
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
This is a movie that seems controversial, because it takes a chance with an overt invocation of Nazi Germany in a sympathetic setting. On fact, this movie has nothing to do with Nazis, Hitler or history, other than because of that history, various signs and symbols are part of our world heritage.
It takes about 1/2 the movie to discover that it is going to take no chances beyond juxtaposing Leni Riefenstahl newsreel footage with the Beatles singing in German. It dispenses with this bold gambit in the opening few minutes, taking the idea nowhere. But forgive yourself for thinking it might try to develop the idea.
Yes, this movie milks caricatures related to Nazis. No it's not a big deal. It's a cartoon, true to the Thor: Ragnarok pedigree of its creator.
Taika Waititi just wants to make a movie about adolescent love and the fear everyone rightly has about being included or excluded in a society that makes no sense, maybe largely because a society steeped in American movies and television makes no sense.
A goofy marionette doll made up to be Hitler is the imaginary friend of Jojo, a 10 year old German Boy Scout, at the edge of puberty. Think Harvey the Wonder Rabbit. A cute caricature of Anne Frank becomes his girlfriend.
If you are not old enough to be averse to the exploitation of the Third Reich for comedic-tragic purposes--The Producers (1967), anyone--you will be charmed by a well-photographed and carefully designed set piece, most likely created by Wes Anderson's production team in their off-time when he's doing animated features.
Nothing happens except that two kids fall in love under the auspices of personal tragedy. The dynamics of this go unexplored. I think Waititi means well, though his insights don't range any farther than open admonishments to keep a stiff upper lip and get on with life in spite of its emotional vicissitudes. And with a perky cheerful vibe.
Does the world need an upbeat lozenge about the Holocaust? After seeing the re-release of Mr. Klein (1976) I didn't reject this wacky sojourn. It's well acted. Its talent is given little to do but they make the best of it. The relationships portrayed are simplistic and one-dimensional, but not tacky. It is full of oddly good cheer, somehow obliterating the sense of how dark, morbid and grey the human experience often can be. We all know what's gonna happen: Allied Americans are gonna kick some Nazi ass and parade around with the Red, White and Blue, then Trump is gonna be re-elected. Freedum: "Learn it, love it, live it" as some golf nerd played by Chevy Chase once told his caddy. "da-da-da-da-da..." (Putt) "De-de-de-de-de...." (Putt). That's as far as this goes; sinking close putts with one hand on the iron.
And I didn't really wish for anything else to happen. The kid, his mom, and Anne Frank are all super appealing people, Sam Rockwell is a crank with a heart-of-gold, and Hitler is a goofball, designed to be annoying.
I don't see any comparison of this with Life if Beautiful (1997). I like this better. But the Begnini movie had an odd irony, noted by cultural critic S. Zizek, that while we are supposed to be moved by Begnini's efforts to protect the spirit of the boy, convincing him that everything happening in the concentration camp is part of an elaborate rouse, the boy in fact knows that he's being duped but plays along to protect the feelings of his caretaker, just as children pretend to believe in Santa Clause to humor their parents and get presents. But this uncanny quality doesn't exist within the Begnini movie itself. It had to be observed from without. There's probably no such irony possible with Jojo Rabbit.
This is the boundary of the uncanny which Jojo Rabbit somehow steadfastly avoids, amounting to nothing more than an emotional device to remind us love hurts. "It's like Ghost meets the Mabchurian Candidate, but it's got a heart... that's in the right spot." You'll learn little except a couple of R. M. Rilke quotes.
Anybody who has ever been discriminated against--which is pretty much everybody who went to high-school--will identify with the vilification of the unwanted other. Why this has to be couched in the horror of WWII Germany, I have no idea, except that's all close to being forgotten because everyone who was there has passed. Yes, the legacy lives on. But what does this movie have to do with it?
Try looking up "billy wilder death mills" on Youtube to become connected to a bit of what the era of the Allied victory actually looked like. Then forget about Jojo Rabbit as having any bearing on history.
BTW--Jojo Rabbit gets his name in a manner directly lifted from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Watch that movie and consider how the memory-hole of Hollywood plies the collective mind.
Enjoyable fare that's more empty than it seems, but is so darn heartfelt you may not mind. It was OK with me.
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Once again we have a movie about nothing but another movie. And in what's become a stereotypical formula of banal, derivative, demographically pandering action nonsense. A shameless milking of a franchise, level and degree of plot and characterization here are so repetitious and pitiful it defies reason.
The script is almost untouched by thought. But in a way scarier than pure ignorance: this product eschews thought altogether and we have to wonder if the infotainment industry is the AI the characters are fighting against. This movie utterly disdains knowledge of every and any kind. As if someone or something is doing extra work to make dumb, it's a production of an execrable psychic pablum that's computed to sell to some lowest common denominator. Like TV news, you become dumber from watching this stuff.
There are five scant minutes of enjoyment to be had here in company of old Linda Hamilton meeting Arnold (Carl) at his woodland home, where he passes time hanging drapes, scanning for time waves, sending cryptic terminator arrival coordinate texts to Hamilton's bag of Lay's chips (yes, potato chips) and endlessly rehearsing a game-nite Corona beer commercial. The humor of the Deadpool director peeks through in this interlude--cleverness akin to the first 20 minutes of Deadpool, during the setup, before it flips into claptrap.
Here the enjoyment comes from the situation that T101 Carl, once freed of his directive to destroy John Connor, has an epistemic realization: he needs a reason to live! So he becomes a step father to a boy like John. Arnold plays it stern but surprisingly light on his feet, and it feels fun. Too bad these five minutes are just a desperately needed rest-stop in this otherwise relentless vehicular incursion of the neocortex.
Save for this precious five minutes, TDF blows every other chance, no matter how small, to have fun with the series, and to reflect on the nature of experience, aging, and wisdom.
It seems as if this decade of movies there is inspiration and writing talent behind the scenes somewhere, trying to get work done, but it keeps getting sidelined by producers at the controls of a script analysis computer. Like Terry Gilliam's Brazil is a formal description of the movie industry.
I feel for Linda Hamilton as she clearly cares about her character. She's fully present, this script doesn't allow her to manifest past a relic.
The two leads in this movie are props to make it pliable for viewers born far after the original movies. As the main story arc tracks these two, what we have pure demographic pandering. Great news, World! A latina chica can be the leader of a revolution against against the crazy militaristic machine of capitalism--er, no The Man--just like back in day any red-blooded American boy could grow up to be El Presidente of the USA.
Not!
Entrée the sheer contrivance of the screenplay: the hero becomes the hero because she's the hero. And eat your vegetables! So "Dani" becomes the leader of the "human resistance" (whatever this term means, esp as A.I. Carl is pretty much now at the top of the human game by virtue of platonic fidelity to his wife, willingness to change diapers and "being a good listener") because as a sort of pretty Ché Guevara, Dani saves and befriends a cutely androgynous /girl/boy/girl being harassed by stereotypical redneck... Oh, never mind... And this girl becomes--though forces and logic that will forever remain unknown to viewers--physically augmented into a sort of robot, who then is sent back in time to protect our nascent leader-to-be, so the ordeal between them can lead to leader-to-be's leadership. Whew. And yikes! This stunning plot cycle requires an impetus, supplied directly in the form of a T E R m i n A t O R who can be both TXXX and T1000 at once. He has no personality at all. He's just an inverted mcguffin supplying needed pressure to push nascent leader to become Dear Leader... Waagghhh! Yes they really wrote it this way.
As an aside, now that I think about it, hero-is-hero-because-hero is a teleology for this age in that it eradicates causality in the creation of meaning and substitutes a catch phrase: "You can do it!" This feels both true to life and slyly artistic.
As another aside, I've seen no other movie that wanted so much to be over at the outset. Old Cameron was obliged to produce one damn more movie and he just gritted his teeth and went 'OK people let's get this over with!...'
In T1, the recursive plot cycle is done artfully with a clever deployment of the Grandfather Paradox around a love interest for the protagonists, which audiences generally had no reason to see coming, and which was delightfully foreshadowed by the setup with Sarah's roommate's on-the-make BF. Yet even if you do see it coming, It unfolds with several layers of reveals and character awakenings. In T1 we're both shown and told a bizarre course of events. This is enjoyable, and makes for a cool movie because our rooting for Sarah is impelled by feelings of excitement and mystery for a young women energized by a strange fate to a heroically new yet traditional expression of love.
So TDF tries to be a beat-for-beat rehash of T1, the same way Star Wars EpVII was a beat-for-beat rehash, except TDF leaves out 3/4 of the beats. And it resorts to boringly telling us what's going on. But what's to reveal? You already know. TDF is a silly cartoon.
Interestingly, the ascension of Dani requires the eradication of Mid90s John Connor at the outset. And Dani has a protector in Grace, leaving Hamilton nothing much to do but pine for some antiquated ideal of a post-feminist womb.
Also interesting is that men don't quite exist in this movie, in an inverted case of the Bechdel observation.
Arnold playing the T101 surprised me as the one human-being in this tale. And he plays it like an ex-Governor of California!
This movie's action is a slugfest of visual noise without tension, purpose, or physics. Time loops in scripts, even as insipid as this script is, are fun as they play with the nature of memory and anticipation. But ignoring physical law is ruinous to action, making it ludicrous and painful to watch. These dayz all the action is simulated, just some fever dream in a warehouse of CG operators; an engineered hallucination.
The most vibrant scene in this movie is lifted verbatim from T2JD and stuck underneath the opening credits. Recall the video recording of anguished, grunting Sarah Connor played on the raster-scan TV of the mean prison psychiatrist: "Anybody not wearing 2,000,000 sunblock is gonna have really a bad day!"
It's also pretty cringey out of context and comes off as lost in time and place. The threat of nuclear annihilation--which is still a very real and present danger--seems to have long since been occluded from the popular mind, replaced by dread of the slow-motion anthropogenic climate bomb that's been going off continuously for the last 250 years. So why should the specter of nuclear war frighten us now when it's so made-for-TV?
I was not unhappy to see latent weak polemics about how horrifying and militaristic US border policing has become. Seems America also has long since shoved the Berlin Wall and Apartheid down the memory hole.
There's a quip about the lunacy of gun-fetish survivalists which felt forced, but at least it's in there.
These gestures are the evidence of a Cameron touch. Though they're phoned in; hackneyed and trivial ideological subtexts with no bearing on any course of the events.
There's also a quirky moment at Arnold's crib where when he (Carl) remarks that Sarah's arrival may expose his true identity to his "wife" who along with his "son", exist as nothing more than props. Holding a lime-capped Corona, a boozy (we're told but not shown) Sarah and Carl openly discuss how Carl's wife hasn't noticed he weighs 400 lbs, pointedly suggesting that Sarah has sexual ideations about T101, whom she still hates and wants to destroy. This sort of odd humanity is scarce but welcome in a movie about killer robots and lack of industrial ethics.
Don't let me get too twisted on this last point. The real hazard of technology is not that robots will reign supreme over people, it's that people are turning into robots. And this movie is close to the edge, because it trivializes everything it touches and uses applied psychology to sell itself under auspices of an insipid platitude of self determination. Watch and become free!
This "product" is DOA, and Arnold will tell you so himself during the course of events. Genisys is almost profound and engaging by comparison, omg.
Cameron must be suffering from same industry institutional decay as George Lucas to let his name be connected to this. The rot is in the industry head.
However, if the contents of this movie is merely its subtexts, and there are various, ranging from hazards of surveillance and militarism, ideals for more open families, and more civilized medicine, then these are a few tiny reasons to not give up hope. These subtexts are James Cameron's indelible marks upon the product and signs there are still human beings employed in production.
The Lighthouse (2019)
The Lighthouse (2019)
The Lighthouse (2019)
If movie-makers can only write what they know, and increasingly all they know is other movies, then this art form is eating itself.
And this is what is to be found in The Lighthouse: a shaggy dog story about the pitfalls of making a movie when you don't know a lot about it, or about anything else. The lighthouse itself is the movie projector, and it caused two actors go drunkenly mad in awe and obsession with the light it shines around them.
The whole thing is deliberately affected to create a sense of foreboding. Like you are looking through some portal at an aged and foreign world, that is timeless and placeless but for being in a dream. The picture is cropped, confined, opaquely grey, cold and moody. You struggle to see half of it. It's un-cinematic in the same way that a zombie is un-dead. The camera is just a keyhole, but the leaden views is punctuated by some lovely filmic textures.
Sound / noise are used to great effect to expand the frame into bombastic, threatening and eerie dimensions. But as this non-story drags on, what worked to establish setting and tone gives way to the sensation of tedious loops.
Everything in this movie is a nod to some prior art; nothing is original; repetitions.
The director has remarked about folklore and impressionism, but avoids comment about his intentions and influences. As an artist he doesn't need to explain his work. His modest repertoire can't afford the status of auteur, and this work is more ritualistic and gimmicky than expressive, so his regards seem evasive. I mention this because the movie superficially appears to have the heft to justify deep thoughts about creative drives and intentions, and questions about the world on the other side of the camera. I found it too harsh, elliptical and boring to be entertaining. So what is being proffered? It's oddly close to a superhero movie, except its colorless and has an immense horn honking all the way through it.
Dafoe and Pattinson have a blast chewing each other up. They manage to create some laughs in what is otherwise a literal shtshow between bunk mates trapped in an actors studio located on some ethereal mound of coastal rock. They resort to fart jokes and oddly dull slapstick to create enough pressure in a scene to justify a cut. But in all but a few transitions, its a cut to nowhere.
There are some brightly monstrous images which are exceptional, and linger in my mind. Too bad there's nothing binding them together into a story. The additional work required to convey 3 acts would have been minimal, so it seems to have been deliberately avoided.
It's like storytelling is dead and movies are now collectively dreaming.
The Nolan Bros were on to something with Inception.
If the intent of this device-and device is all this is because it eschews essential cinematic architecture-is to artistically convey the madness of modern movie production, then success!
Will you enjoy this ride? I didn't. And I didn't learn much of anything about anything from watching it. In fact it may make you dumber. But this is an industry-wide problem in this cinematic era.
Happily I got a 15 minute nap in the middle. I'm sure I missed nothing. I would've walked if not for my company. For enduring it I was rewarded with a couple of remarkably strange sights at end which in no way justify remaining, but I got to see nonetheless.
This might make a good late nite date movie if you are completely infatuated. You might remember it as a weird or quasi-mystical emotional or psychic aberration to the pleasures of new love.
As to awards, I like the idea of a class of audience that's not enjoying this sort of thing but but they laugh nervously and stick around out of respect for all the hard work that went into it, and because they paid for the ticket. Thankfully there was no clapping at end.
Gemini Man (2019)
Gemini Man (2019)
This is daytime TV of sci-fi action cinema. Chinese business influence is evident in total lack of any cultural dimension of the product beyond the simple boy-girl agent buddy story and a clone's daddy issues. There are no ideas, no plot, no intrigue. Of course critics hated it; it defies criticism; too dumb.
So why are audiences split with the critics?
Audiences who are not aware of the use of their own eyes, and who from a young age have been conditioned by advertising and FPS vid games will grok the visual language of the action, the impossible camera, and base emotional gambits, and may not miss a story. This is a product to be Seen. Every cinematic concern outside of visual immersion is a distant second; not only second, but everything else goes totally unconsidered.
The use of CGI and HFR 3D makes its entire world into an uncanny valley. Like 60s Viewmaster travel discs. The color grading is midday BRIGHT even at night, in sense of worst excesses of HDR. There is no mood of the light. "It's like looking through a window!" At something totally fake.
Good news is that the 3D looks deep, and there is some visual flair such as underwater, and for the motorcycle chase ghost ride. While 3D is used for certain effects, the people doing the photography clearly do not yet comprehend power of the medium and second guess it by using 2D gimmicks such as depth-of-field / rack-focus to push your eye in the frame, and heavy-handed closeups. This is a movie that has been visually compressed to sell in 3D and standard, IMAX, TV, laptop, airplane and phone.
This experiment in the future of storytelling-which is to skip storytelling for simulation-hits two beats. First, it's got something that seems a lot like action, if you can overlook none of the stunts you see, no matter how literal anything looks, actually happened anywhere but on a computer screen. And second, it's got a bit of buddy chemistry between Smith and the Scott Pilgrim chick.
OTOH Will Smith youngified back into the Fresh Prince shedding big cyborg tears at the hostility and betrayal of his adoptive, manipulative, clone-war-managing white-supremacist dad may pluck at your heart strings, but it left me cold as ice.
The one gambit the story has to generate excitement is that the two Smiths think so much alike they outsmart themselves. But for some reason this goes totally unexplored. Generally the circumstances of this movie are so arbitrary and outlandish it totally fails to develop any sense of place or time. Every element of this movie is pure device. Think Bay's Transformers.
There are a couple of lame stabs at sex appeal where Smith tried to flirt with his sidekick but this only serves to establish the relationship is platonic. Will there be sexiness between her and Fresh Prince? He has her take her clothes off in an encounter so pointless and tame it doesn't even rise to level of T&A. Fresh Prince is operating at the level of a 10 y.o. so nothing is gonna develop there. Scott Pilgrim's GF could've been written into a mother figure for Junior and it would've fit this plot.
As to locales, settings: High marks for reprising Rambo First Blood small-town hardware store set for showdown.
Movies seem to be a dying medium.
Hatsukoi (2019)
First Love (2019)
First Love (2019)
Humanity.
In this age of movies where storytelling has been almost forgotten and teleplays are collections of gambits emitted by computer programs designed to cause sufficient audience arousal to induce further ticket consumption, First Love is a simple pleasure in its capacity to tell a humane and genuine love story couched in conventions of a Japanese mob thriller.
It works on the theme of the basic mysteries of our lives: birthright, inheritance, desire, health, career and fate in the throes of an absurdly hostile civilized world. Imbued with Miike's signature violence, in the routine milieu of a warring underworld, his gangs are stand-ins for the monstrous hostility of anonymous industrial civilization.
Miike operates the controls of the genre with a reverie of hope that young love can transcend humanity's glaring morass of urban blight through nothing more that the essence of self creation. By positing the Platoic aspects of our nature-that there is the True, Good and Beautiful-he creates a metaphysical picture, even as it hews to genre conventions of pulp to provide the audience a mere carnival ride.
This is Saturday matinee enjoyment at the movie theater.
It employs comedy deftly to stay light on its feet, like the protagonist, a young athlete, a boxer, who fights for no other reason than he thinks "it's all he can do." This could also be Miike's regard for is own late career: making movies he does what fate has set forth for him.
This strain of the inevitable feels of a kind to a movie from Miike's early-career, Rainy Dogs (1997) which cooly observed a specific situation in a society which produces children that nobody wants, as their parents are so preoccupied with their life predicament in industrial churn, they live as nothing much more than beasts in urban cages.
In such environs, crime is a necessarily human activity which grows naturally within the social gradient of a political economy founded in exploitation and rapacious growth with as too many reside within the vast slum machinery of cities.
This theme is taken up in Todd Phillip's Joker (2019) which is grotesque apolemical critique of late capitalism that offers its audience pure pathos with no pleasures. Luckily for First Love audiences, Miike wisely sees a bigger world with rays of hope.
Miike's monsters are most certainly Us in some cataclysmic sense of human growth and civilization, where he shows us as societally unhinged but individually harboring the courage to channel divine powers that can improve the tragic dimensions of the commons, even as Miike seems to confide his doubt that we can ever manage anything more than endure life.
Miike lives down on the ground with the riff-raff, not up in some Disney techno tower of wealthy producers and psychic eugenicists.
I'm glad for the Asian auteurs who are still interested in the experience of living, still think there is something to learn in ordinary life. As compared to the ubermensch fetish and alarming fakery of Hollywood.
In this movie and his Rainy Dogs, Miike nods to his enjoyment of the American Western genre, the outlaw hero, vigilante justice, and even back to the Greek theme of Antigone: that justice is an individual pursuit rooted in the contrarian when she fights for the rights and honor of the oppressed. In Miike's world, love and pride power the conflict and justice demands a sacrifice, which becomes a gift of the dead to the living as an eternal cycle, in the sense of Buddhism.
There are no saviors, but there is something like nobility. Miike presents a preference for honor, and his humor is jest rather than gags.
Along the way there are moments of plain fun. And to make a satisfying capsule of the movie, it ends where it begins.
The movie is not long but it's biggest glitch is pacing, where action builds in a furious expansion that could have ended with a satisfying pop, but instead the balloon of tension is allowed to just deflate. It's not unsatisfying but dissipates the movies verve. It also helps the movie seem a tad more magnificent than it's short runtime should permit, and it wraps on a cheesy blockbuster note appropriate to a popcorn flick and whets your appetite for a sequel that should never occur.
In summary, this fare is slight, but very refreshing compared to the bombastic mayhem that occupies so much screen space in this decade-the garish terpsichore of Marvel or the sordid auteur nihilism of Lars van Trier, even as Miike indulges such traits in himself. There's a bit of hope here.
Praise for simple enjoyments.
Color Out of Space (2019)
Color Out of Space (2019)
Color Out of Space (2019)
Saw this with Richard Stanley in attendance at PDX Hollywood Theater and H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
I went in cold, not knowing much about Lovecraft, and knowing nothing at all about the story. I had heard that Stanley was of some renown for getting sacked from production of Island of Dr. Moreau, with Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer and others, and that he invoked voodoo upon the production out of mischief.
If you read the wikipedia entry, Lovecraft's story itself sounds pretty good.
Too bad the movie scrambles it up into a tedious admixture of contemporary fear of mixed ethnic mating, cheezball humor, and Cage's now-overworked histrionic raving.
It appears Stanley has compressed Lovecraft's epochal tale into a slice-of-life couple of days in the lives of some non-descript city folk turned sheep farmers. Lovecraft's rural homestead is cast as a pastoral bourgeoise retreat with a fine wine cellar, color tv and poor internet service, which is ruining Cage's wife's work as an finance / investment analyst. Her complaints about the internet gets dropped so many times in the script you expect Wall St's bull to appear as a monster, but it's ultimately an inconsequential detail.
The tale is pegged to the emotional straights of a pretty goth-occult (Wiccan? Someone behind me in theater grunted nerdly recognition and approval at some distinctive category of her magick that fandom sees as determinant, but like the mom's profession is another inconsequential plot detail) white teenage girl who-while inexplicably casting spells near a lake on her family's property-encounters a handsome black "hydrologist" (surveyor). This is also inconsequential to the plot. Why is this man there? In Lovecraft's story he's an observer who helps the reader make sense of the odd effects that occur upon the landscape as a result of the "meteor" impact.
In this adaptation, could this man be imbued with a wizardly understanding of the sexual contours of nubile girls? If only... Because as you will see, the entire movie is built around her purely passive, innocent sexual attraction to him somehow splitting the world asunder, rendering the homestead, and destroying them all. That's pretty much it. IOW the contents of the story is nothing more than the slightest potential of a mixed ethnic young love affair destroying the world. The meteor is just a supernatural mcguffin.
Meanwhile a bunch of silly stuff occurs. Sadly for the viewer nothing else really happens.
The psychic dimensions of the meteor intrusion go totally unexplored, with the events of the plot, alternately disjointed and spuriously interconnected by weak dialog serving no purpose other than to get from one scene to the next, which in the long run serves no point at all.
It's a remarkable visual experience, I suppose. But it feels designed for the psychic aptitudes of 12-going-on-40 year olds Cthuhlu nerds-who btw must have very sophisticated visual pattern matching capacities because all manner of intense camerawork and vfx are deployed to try to hold audience interest in a plot that's going down a dark road at the 45-mph maximum speed of Cage's 80s vintage Volvo station wagon.
In place of drama, exploration and suspense, you'll see psychedelic vfx ala Annihilation, body horror ala Mandy and a procession of jump scares bookended by old Nick Cage's pro forma crazy-ase hamming.
A solid hour of churning monster mayhem and a iridescent light show leave the hydrologist as the last man standing. He looks across a blighted ruin of a landscape turned to ashes by a teenage girl's amorous histrionics, and wonders aloud about the effects of color on the world. I am not making this up.
I doubt the director is a bigot, but watching this movie in a sea of Portland Cthulhu hipsters and considering Lovecraft's misanthropy and deep strain of white supremacy / xenophobia, I noticed how much these monsters are simply sprouts of unexamined libido rooted in the acrid soil of America's origins with the rapacious empires of Europe, Puritanical new world flight, the North American genocide, and the lingering scars of the Civil War. Portland is a very white and rejunevile city, and this "culture" is fit for an episode of Portlandia. Never mind that the movie was made in Portugal.
At Q/A after show, Stanley said if you kill a dog you've got a B movie. Well you can get B movie many other ways and dropping Tommy Chong's weed-addled old visage into the mix for no reason is another.
Yet the audience seemed to love it and gave a standing ovation. Maybe more out of appreciation for Stanley's appearance at the festival than because they loved the movie?
And it's not a good movie. There's some memorable imagery, and some cinematic craft in keeping with this technical age of the movies, but nothing to go on about. The whole effort felt forced.
Nobody at the Q/A gave a flying F about the medium as an avenue of cultural exploration re Lovecraft's latent racial politics.
I find the mysterianism of the Necronomicon and the rest of this sort of pop occultism tedious, notwithstanding its purely anthropological features.
To his credit, Stanley remarked that his teleplay was informed by his great personal fondness for Lovecraft's work and his awareness of "Lovecraft's misanthropy and racism." That comment spared him from a pointed question I wanted to ask about the absurdly trivial "racial" dimension of the plot re mixed ethic love.
The festival presentation met the basic parameters of fun but was a typical PDX circle of banal hipster fetish and minor celebrity with the movie less a main feature of the event and more a prop for the fetish.
Stanley seems an intelligent and interesting guy and he's worth looking into, esp per the documentary on his de-railed adaptation of the Island of Dr. Moreau and some documentaries which will be difficult if not impossible to find.
I hope he keeps making movies so that he can someday redeem the promise hinted at by this competent if not compelling production.