by
A S Hamrah
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When Rosenbaum was writing in 1995, a new world of cinephilia had to be created, and it waited to be ushered in via the internet. Today, serious film criticism operates in that world. Following the template established by Rosenbaum, it is fair-minded, open to films from all over the world made by all different kinds of people, and knowledgeable about classic cinema and the avant-garde. It seeks to rediscover forgotten films, it is supportive of micro-indies, and it strives to be polite and respectful. Trying to find the good in everything in this best of all possible subcultures, however, does little to improve an art form dominated by blockbusters and streaming television, especially when writing about those things dominates arts pages. At the same time, social media discourse around film fluctuates between too nice and too mean. The dearth of jobs in journalism, which has gotten worse year after year over the past two decades, had led to more and more film criticism being written for free on the web. Increasingly it is boiled down to tweeting, a form in which there is truly no upside but which commands the time and attention of many writers.
This post-Wonka kids’ movie about future video-game competition in dystopian cyberspace contains every pop 1980s reference imaginable, including “Blue Monday,” and stuffs them by the handful into a recycling bag like cans worth five cents each. The movie is cynical and manipulative because the ’80s it exploits means nothing to Spielberg. He uses items from that decade because he noticed that’s what kids are into, even though the movie takes place three decades from now. To Spielberg, the digitized fodder of Ready Player One is not truly classic, and can therefore be further trivialized for any reason. If money can be squeezed out of it from an undiscerning audience of nerds, so it should be and must be. Here, Spielberg has truly become Disney.
Oakland plays itself in Sorry to Bother You, unlike in Black Panther, but its message extends to the whole country. A damning portrait of things as they are in the US, this movie’s accurate and wild version of the present moment is Brechtian — alienated, sardonic, and disreputable. Boots Riley’s vision, which combines Repo Man and Idiocracy yet remains wholly his own, encompasses shit jobs, union organizing, and horrible tech billionaires who turn people into lifelong slaves and captive half humans desperate for rebellion.
To that end, First Reformed is daring and unrelenting — it searches for and pinpoints real harm. Ten people walked out of the theater where I saw it, most of them Schrader’s age. I think they left because the film’s intensity was too much in a world where they had the option of seeing Book Club at a theater down the street.
There is a slight upward trajectory in Let the Sunshine In, from the obnoxious banker (Xavier Beauvois) Binoche is dating at the beginning to a manic drunken actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) to the quieter men at the end, including Depardieu and Alex Descas as a gallery owner. The film imperceptibly slides toward maturity and becomes more profound but less eventful, as Binoche settles into calmness without giving up her quest for love. In the early scenes of the film, Denis seemed to parody the work of macho French directors or French cinema in general, with the rude banker demanding “gluten-free olives” at a bar and giving the bartender and Binoche detailed instructions about everything else. The banker also mentions “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and alienation, a parody of French socialists who sold out to finance and got so rich they had time to worry about the invisible enemy, gluten, in foodstuffs that are free of it.
“Cinema is an event seen through a keyhole,” wrote Jean Cocteau, which André Bazin points out in an essay from 1951 called “Theater and Cinema.” The Hotel Artemis Quad lobby situation was an event that gave my friend and me a keyhole view into the world of Hollywood film publicity in New York, but that was not what Cocteau had in mind. Les parents terribles was an important film to Bazin because for him it proved that filming a play did not have to be uncinematic. This was a theoretical argument in postwar France, where directors like Bresson asserted that the theater and the cinema were distinct media that should have nothing to do with each other. By directing his own play for the screen just as he had staged it, and with the same actors, Cocteau, Bazin claimed, had shown that filmed drama did not have to be stagey, even if the action was restricted to a couple of sets.
The action, however, was not memorable to me. It was too seamless. I lost interest in the perfection of the film’s technical achievement, which I never doubted for a minute would be anything but complete and astonishing. I longed for just one moment where something wasn’t perfect, to remind me that humans had made this study of improvised naval success. Mostly I remember the image of Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s face in a CPAP mask left over from whichever of Nolan’s Batman movies he was in. When soldier Harry Styles survived it all, it was as though “the enemy” had been vanquished so that the real Styles could leave the set, fly to Los Angeles, hop in a car, and drive between palm trees singing the song from Titanic on “Carpool Karaoke.”
She and the film are nice to the nuns and priests who are her teachers but who are people too, with real lives and problems of their own. One of them (Lois Smith) sees right through Lady Bird. “You clearly love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah Joan tells her, in a line I had trouble imagining a real person saying. [...]
A little girl (Dafne Keen) shoplifts Pringles and what looks like a can of Four Loko Frost from a gas-station convenience store in Logan, which takes place in the year 2029. Movies have told us our future was dystopian, but it never occurred to me that things would get so bad that Four Loko would still be around a decade from now. Wolverine, by 2029, has deteriorated, too. His claws don’t retract as quickly. Working as a limo driver in a black suit and tie, he’s slower to recover from his wounds. Hugh Jackman, who also has to play a younger re-cloned Wolverine double, plays the original Logan as a Humphrey Bogart character, world-weary and disinclined to get involved.
I’m not interested in animated feature films even though I fully understand that Miyazaki is a great artist and I have been told more than once that it is in things like WALL-E and Toy Story 3 that we will locate the zeitgeist. As a child of the terrifying Watership Down era, I am surprised anew each time a Lego Batman Movie or a Coco captures the imagination of anyone I know over 12. Once, a while ago, I was walking to a two-screen movie theater down the street from me to see a French movie called Strayed. As I got closer I noticed an unexpectedly long line of adult couples waiting to buy tickets. Wow, I thought to myself, there sure are a lot of André Téchiné fans in this neighborhood. When I got to the theater I saw that Finding Nemo was playing on the other screen.