by
A S Hamrah
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
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
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