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A S Hamrah
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After Kiarostami's death, Mohsen Makhmalbaf—his fellow member of what is sometimes called the Iranian New Wave, who in Close-up plays himself, the filmmaker whom Sabzian was arrested for impersonating—summed up his colleague’s life and career for the BBC: “He could show you how friendship could take you out of loneliness.” The title of the 1987 film that begins the director’s Koker Trilogy asks the main Kiarostamian question: Where Is the Friend’s House? The following two films in the trilogy, And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), take place in the aftermath of the devastating 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake. Those films put Kiarostami on the road to Taste of Cherry, in which he examines the precariousness of life without the backdrop of natural disaster. In Taste of Cherry, the calamity is private and subjective. We are never told what it is. Perhaps it is life itself.
Asia Kate Dillon, a nonbinary actor with a neatly shorn head, would have made a better foe for Wick, but Dillon is instead constricted to Helmut Newton–esque slinking and posing in tight black pencil skirts. Ian McShane’s Winston, a traitorous hotelier, sleepwalks through his role like he’s playing the Most Interesting Man in the World in the Dos Equis beer ads. As incessant gunfire in the lobby and corridors destroys his hotel, McShane responds with ever faker nonchalant bullshit acting, mirroring the overelaboration of everything else in the film. The John Wick franchise has an official weapons supplier, but the film’s target audience isn’t gun nuts. This is a movie for corporate travel agents upset that it costs so much to stay in hotels.
lol
Here, the film’s 180 really kicks in. We are supposed to feel pity for Cao, a man who is getting millions in tax subsidies from the state of Ohio. Then American Factory wrenches us again, like in Modern Times, with a supertitle at the end that informs us that by 2030, 375 million people around the world will have lost their jobs to automation, unions or not. Why this ideological muddle? Because this is cinema verité in the service of power, not people, made to win awards. A success story in the film, about an unemployed forklift operator named Jill who has to live in her sister’s basement until she gets a job at Fuyao and moves into a tiny apartment by herself, turns sour when she’s fired for bringing up safety violations. As for the Chinese workers in Dayton, they only look happy when their new American friends are teaching them to shoot pistols and shotguns in their backyards, where they can pose for photos holding firearms and wearing cool suits.
scathing
In Milton of Vivos, a fairly young man who’d led a life of hardship and abuse detailed his upbringing on the streets with a single mother. His bunker was one of a series of many others in South Dakota that look like mini-airplane hangars in a field. Milton’s belongings were scattered about in big piles, giving the windowless undivided space the feel of a hoarder house yet to be filled, as if Milton had moved from his car into a warehouse and now had plenty of room for storage. A bed was in there, somewhere. Milton had decided to get away from everyone else. Now he lived like a homeless person, but in a military shelter where he’d scraped up enough money for a 99-year sublease. Offering subleases does not speak of a firm belief in the apocalypse on the part of his landlord, the Vivos Group. Milton’s bunker could house two dozen other people. He did not seem like a prepper so much as a lost soul.
lolll
The Platform is a dystopic horror film from Spain that I watched dubbed but also with the English subtitles on because of the sirens outside. It is a disgusting, cruel film that seems written by a smart eighth-grader. A pallet of Michelin-star restaurant food descends through hundreds of floors of a prison, one floor at a time, in this reactionary microcosm of class relations. Prisoners fight over scraps with no concern for those below them. Director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia is so nihilistic he will undoubtedly make the leap to Hollywood, especially since his cynical banquet leaves room for religiosity as the last course. Spoiler alert: the dog dies.
i gasped
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