by
A S Hamrah
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A children’s movie about how great science is, The Martian has a pragmatic message for budding astronauts: you solve one problem, then another, and see if you survive. The film’s obsession with years-long plans imparts a Soviet feel to the space program depicted, but its sunny optimism keeps the movie all-American. Not once do we believe The Martian will end with a shot of Matt Damon’s skeleton half-buried in sand. Maybe the film is so bright because the days are thirty-nine minutes longer on Mars than on Earth, the same thirty-nine minutes that should have been cut from this Friday-less Robinson Crusoe. Kristen Wiig, however, is on hand to show that girls aren’t into The Lord of the Rings.
laughed out loud at this
A fairy tale of lean-in capitalism about a Cinderella without a prince, David O. Russell’s Joy recasts the crazy family of a Capra comedy with stellar toxicity. Joy’s (Jennifer Lawrence’s) undermining relatives are the selfish American clan par excellence, claiming to know everything about Joy’s business while sabotaging her future. Robert De Niro and Isabella Rossellini, playing evil-universe versions of themselves as Joy’s father and stepmother, delight in their performances as fickle scoffers.
Joy is a natural inventor prone to epiphanies about household products — the film could be called A Beautiful Mop. Her ingenuity and tenacity save her from a life of drudgery, though by the end her victory seems hollow. The film, busy with fake TV soap operas and flashbacks, doesn’t imagine another life for her, except maybe settling down with a cable-TV executive (Bradley Cooper) who lectures her and is wrong half the time. The mitigating factors in her struggle are that she can turn a profit, employ her friends, and help younger women manufacture improved lint brushes. Set in the early 1990s, Joy suggests these were the consolations working-class Gen Xers could hope for.
i vaguely remember watching this on a plane
[...] In film and television, his distinctive oeuvre has obsessed cinephiles, fans of the outré, and film academics, giving rise to the adjective Lynchian, a word, as Lim points out, that many have tried to define but that the culture at large has decided means “weird.” Lim boils the Lynchian down to “abysmal terror, piercing beauty, convulsive sorrow.” Lynch’s movies, he writes, “give form to the submerged traumas and desires of our age.”
Romero cast an African American in the lead, and he shifted the horror genre’s dynamic, aligning it with black-and-white anti-war documentaries like Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig, also released in 1968, and distinguishing it from the lurid color horror movies Roger Corman and Hammer Films had been turning out up till then. Those films made certain concessions to the film industry; Night of the Living Dead did not. This was an American horror movie, so it needed no English accents or familiar character actors. It was grim and unflinching, showing average citizens, played by average people, eating the arms and intestines of their fellow townspeople. Romero drove home this central point — that a zombie-infested America differed from the status quo only in degree, not in kind — by ending his film with realistic-looking fake news photos depicting his characters’ banal atrocities.
Bickerton quotes Jean-Louis Comolli, an editor at the magazine during its most radical phase in the ’60s and ’70s. Film criticism and filmmaking, he wrote, must make “a political choice to stop seeing the audience as an inert, amorphous mass open to all sorts of manipulation by advertising,” and instead must “bank on the existence of an audience that is lucid” and “ultimately as creative as the filmmaker.” Bickerton argues that Cahiers switched tactics as the film industry changed during the Reagan–Star Wars era, dumbing down in order to please a new kind of consumer and to drive flagging sales.
Only Serge Daney, the magazine’s most vital film critic since the days of Bazin and Truffaut, held fast, admitting that while “the times themselves [had] grown more feeble, in terms of thought,” film critics still had to discover and explain “what was cinema’s ‘specificity,’ given the proliferation of images through advertising and television. . . . And how should the critic conceive of his or her role within this transformed landscape of images?”
It makes sense that Black Swan came out around Christmas because Black Swan is like a fruitcake. It is a cake, but not any kind of cake you’d like to eat; it’s heavy; and you find out too late it’s filled with gooey red clumps made out of God knows what. With dialogue like silent movie intertitles, its sunless expressionism is not so much reminiscent of The Red Shoes and Carrie as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It recasts ballet as a masculinized competition between broken dolls and maniacs that takes place inside a Freudian fairy tale, making it a film for today — incoherent and unsatisfying, it leaves you battered and confused.
THANK YOU i also hated this
The next thing that had to go was the endless plot description that pads most film reviews. In the 21st century, film plots are known before the movies arrive in theaters. There are few points a critic has to make that need much plot description, but critic-journalists still put everything on the record like they are preserving it for a future in which we have no way to know what happened in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Seeing Godard’s Masculine Feminine at Wesleyan effected some change in me, on a cellular level. Contrary to its not being “the total film we carried inside ourselves, that film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live,” as Jean-Pierre Léaud explains in some narration Godard, I later learned, cribbed from Georges Perec’s novel Things, my high school friends and I, watching it twenty years after it was made with older college students and the few cinephiles there were in central Connecticut, really did feel like we had discovered a secret key to life. Everything about it had an immediate and visceral effect. The sound cuts, with their audible jumps within scenes, did something to my brain that changed me. Léaud’s subsequent narration in the film about his job as a pollster probably had more to do with my actual subsequent professional life than I would like to admit: “Do vacuum cleaners sell? Do you like cheese in tubes? Do you know there’s a war in Iraq on?”
What is now being celebrated, we’re told, is the system’s newfound commitment to greater inclusiveness. But there is a sharp distinction to be made between celebrating the appearance of new talent in filmmaking and celebrating the continued box office success of the blockbuster form itself. For moviegoers it is not always so easy to tell the difference, but every film executive understands it.
Criticism’s function is separate from that. “All that is required of the embattled critic as a test of his courage is that he never lose faith in his own judgment,” the film critic Andrew Sarris wrote in 1970. That kind of critical courage has waned in the age of the blockbuster. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s retirement from the Chicago Reader in 2008 left a vacuum in critical conscience that was filled by a strange, renewed interest in the opinions of the top critics at major media outlets, even as their opinions became more wishy-washy and noncommittal. No critic wants to get owned by Samuel L. Jackson on Twitter, like one did when the Avengers movie before last came out. It’s easier and safer for critics to embrace the style of feeble criticism that has emerged alongside the blockbusters they would prefer to avoid. For all the anger at critics, film criticism is very gentle these days.
And yet each week brings with it a new frustration with film critics. After Ocean’s 8 was met by reviewers with suggestions that it was less than perfect, Sandra Bullock, the film’s star and one of its producers, stated that this mild disapproval resulted from a lack of diversity among critics. American film criticism is not as diverse as it should be, but a different critical establishment would not have made Ocean’s 8 a good movie. And what did some grousing about it matter to the film’s box office? As of this writing, Ocean’s 8 has already quintupled its budget in ticket sales. What Bullock wanted was more deference from a profession already noted for its servility to movie stars.