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A S Hamrah
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Even in these scenes, Hittman maintains the film’s tone of harsh reality. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a serious film about the difficulties young women face in getting an abortion in America, but its asperity is such that it also becomes a documentary on the indignities faced by anyone who has ever had to travel through Penn Station.
man he always gets me
There is no space outside consumerism. That is the principal lesson of a group of American horror and sci-fi films that began to emerge after George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968. This kind of movie, never quite a fully-formed subgenre, peaked in the second half of the 1980s and all but disappeared after 1990. It flourished in the margins of Hollywood production like a Day-Glo mold growing where the wall meets the ceiling, erupting into a splatter of exploding heads, limbs, and organs. It was a kind of polychrome spin-art that accompanied the growth of American retail into shopping centers, and into the television commercials that advertised their stores and products.
honestly i wanted to save the passages before and after this but i couldnt find them online lol
Where Lynch is hallucinatory, intense, and Freudian (or, in a word, hysterical), Villeneuve is dull and literal, and his scene is simply a test that allows the lead character to move up a level, like in a video game or a YA novel, which we knew he was going to do. Later in the movie, the idea that Chalamet could just speak in a certain tone of voice and other people would do exactly what he wanted them to do reminded me of Brooklyn teens ordering in restaurants.
What else could explain the outright fabrications in this movie, which include a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover, in front of a live studio audience, that washes away Lucille Ball’s 1930s membership in the Communist Party and makes everyone cheer? This right-wing appeal to Hoover and the FBI is the opposite of Clint Eastwood’s in J. Edgar (2011), where Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio carefully outlined how a police state was created in the U.S.
That Sorkin glosses the McCarthy Era like this and places himself to the right of Eastwood is surprising. But it makes sense, because no one in Hollywood is more aligned with the entertainment/tech industry/Washington politics nexus than the power-loving, success-worshipping, union-hating Sorkin. Somehow this extended to slighting Karl Freund, the German cinematographer of I Love Lucy, who invented the three-camera sitcom setup that’s still in use seventy years later. Why Sorkin chose to do that is also telling: it made Desi Arnaz look smarter, Sorkin’s goal with all his protagonists.
brutal
King Richard demonstrates, step by step, the value of sticking to your plan, even if some folks think you’re crazy. I don’t mean Richard Williams’s plan to turn his daughters Venus and Serena into tennis champs. I mean Will Smith’s plan to win an Oscar. Williams, like the actor who plays him, knew the value of finely tuning a capitalist product and introducing it into the marketplace as a brand. This is a business movie, which reaches its height not when Venus Williams (Saniyya Sidney) almost wins her second professional match and reveals her talent and grace to the world, but when the Williams family decides to hold out for a better sneaker deal. “Nine months later,” we read on screen at the end of the movie, “Venus signed a contract with Reebok for twelve million dollars.” I don’t mind being nudged to cry as the Williams sisters’ reach for the stars in Compton. But I call “out” when I am asked to weep with joy over their first professional product endorsement.
omg
Wakanda Forever is very long and needed an intermission. You know it’s a Marvel movie because it’s steeped in boredom, with every scene threatening to not end. Even when the end credits start, there are fifteen minutes left. Part of it takes place in Boston and Cambridge, on the Mass. Ave. Bridge, which was not damaged enough for my liking. Ryan Coogler brought something new to the first Black Panther movie, though now its importance has faded because these movies are never memorable. They exist to remind directors that they are wasting their lives. Remember when Sofia Coppola so wisely walked away from a Disney movie she had started? No one else does, either, but it happened. Other directors would be wise to look into it.
omg
The writer couple (Greta Lee and John Magaro) in Celine Song’s debut feature, Past Lives, are younger, less established, and blander than the one in Anatomy of a Fall. Residents of a not-great apartment in the Lower East Side, they don’t have much in the way of personality. Nora is Korean and a playwright, Arthur a white-guy novelist who has written a novel called Boner.
If Nora can be said to have a characteristic, it is her desire to win literary prizes. She has left her successful arty parents behind in South Korea “because Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature.” She also dreams of winning a Pulitzer and a Tony. This seemed dated and contrived, since Koreans do win Oscars. Pretending Nora is not a screenwriter-director like her creator, or might become one, is a deflection after Parasite’s success in 2020.
The film is more literature than cinema, elevated mumblecore for graduate writing seminars, the opposite of, for instance, Hong Sangsoo, who makes low-budget films about writers and filmmakers without worrying about prizes, and whose films don’t seem written at all. With its expensive-looking cinematography, Slowdive-sounding score, and fancy editing, Past Lives is designed to win awards, which it has. Like Nora, Celine Song made a conscious choice to leave one life behind and start another. Her film is the result of a series of other professional choices, too, and it shows.
THANK YOU
Yorgos Lanthimos is our leading auteur of half-baked ideas, but since he’s begun working with screenwriter Tony McNamara on movies starring Emma Stone, things have started to gel and get moist. Poor Things, a film of “sugar and violence,” is a bizarro Barbie, a forceful, entertaining movie without smugness, featuring a kind of outré production design all its own. Every effect is thrown in: the film is in color and black-and-white, it pushes the use of wide-angle cinematography in new directions, hybrid animals wander about, and mad scientist Willem Dafoe belches floating orb-like bubbles—all this before the film gets to Emma Stone’s Bella, a Victorian wild child chasing mysteries of the organism through an ocean liner’s casino and a Parisian brothel.
i just like the opening line cus im a hater
The film’s light-pink and dark-green palette makes it look like Lilly Pulitzer was hired to design Hook. Jon M. Chu has directed it so dutifully that no musical number can become a showstopper, which doesn’t really matter because the film’s audience already knows the songs by heart. Heart, however, is what the film lacks. It contains nothing within a Kansas mile of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow.” There is no longing here, nothing sad. Emotions in The Wizard of Oz were anchored to Dorothy’s dream of a world in which her relatives and the people in her town could be other than what they were. Wicked’s longing is to be a Harry Potter movie.
omg
Idiotic cultural appropriation is paid back to Netflix, the distributor of Emilia Pérez. Netflix sent the French Emily in Paris, the French sent back this film — the titles are practically the same. A Mexico-set musical about a transgender narco (Karla Sofía Gascón) who starts an NGO to help the families of people murdered by the cartels, the film actually stars Zoe Saldaña as Emilia’s lawyer and the facilitator of her gender-affirming surgeries. It is a thankless role, predicated on Saldaña taking seriously the idea that Gascón is, as a review in the Los Angeles Times had it, giving a “sensually charged portrayal [that] wouldn’t be out of place anchoring a classic Hollywood woman’s noir.” Sure, Tommy Wiseau could play Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, too, if you gave him the chance.
The idea that this galoot would be unrecognizable to even her children requires a special suspension of disbelief. Therefore the director, Jacques Audiard, had to include a song about it called “Papa,” in which the kid has an inkling that is soothingly dispelled by Emilia herself. If the film had anything of a fairy-tale element to it, which it does not, a scene like that might have worked. But everything in Emilia Pérez is too easy, a neoliberal cakewalk. It’s the kind of movie in which Emilia makes sure to assure us her NGO is “not a replacement for public services.” The film is a preposterous nightmare of first-world self-regard.
lolllll