Let’s not pretend that there’s a vast wealth of movies about the trans experience, but for the viewer who stays plugged into the world of independent cinema and has access to the theaters that program them, there are more and more examples every year. In the first 9 months of 2024, there’s been Crossing, Monkey Man, National Anthem, and The People’s Joker, with Emilia Perez soon to come. These films have been some of the best of the year, and the hope is that there are more and more onscreen ways into trans lives that use the medium as more than just a visual memoir, which feels like the most boring outcome. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is one of the best possible outcomes, as it is plainly about the writer/director’s own feelings as a trans woman, but can also be read as an allegory for the kind of teenage alienation that fails to dissipate with age. Its personal specificity is so precise that it does the classic thing and taps into the universal.
0 Comments
Luca Guadagnino hops genres from erotic thrillers (A Bigger Splash) to coming of age (Call Me By Your Name) to horror (Suspiria, Bones and All), but he always brings a lusty romance that enchants his characters and takes over their higher brain functions til all that’s left is animalistic passion. He does the same for the sports genre in Challengers, another dense and sensual critical hit from the Italian director. With his magnetic trio of stars, Guadagnino crafts a game of musical chairs between a character who demands control, a character happy to give it up, and a character who scoffs at the idea of control in the first place. Using tennis as a backdrop, Challengers is a riotous feat of filmmaking from one of cinema’s most exciting filmmakers.
One of the most irritating critiques of Oppenheimer was its omission of the Japanese victims of the atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan chooses to omit any images of their suffering beyond on off-screen newsreel. It’s easy to imagine the worse version of the film that does include those images, just as it’s easy to conjure up the opposite critiques. How dare a white Englishman appropriate Japanese misery for use in his blockbuster? The best people to deal with the aftermath of the atomic bombings of the Japanese are the Japanese themselves, a truism that’s been enacted over and over again in countless movies made by Japanese directors, up to and including Godzilla, one of Japan’s most enduring 20th century cultural exports. Godzilla Minus One continues in this long tradition as the latest version of the lumbering nuke-metaphor became an international hit and a critical darling. Director Takashi Yamazaki expertly balances big-screen kaiju thrills while exploring and purging the strain of suicidal nationalism that infected Japan during World War II.
In Jonathan Glaser’s The Zone of Interest, a father and son, depicted as earnest and industrious factory owners who take pride in their work, make a big sale to a major prospective client. The actors portraying them do an excellent job of feeling excited but downplaying it, as though the characters are too decent to be good at hiding their emotions well. This scene could be the climax of an underdog story, where the elderly father’s dream of building something that will guarantee his legacy and the success of his descendants is finally achieved. Instead, it’s one horrifying entry of many, as the company is selling incinerators to Nazi death camps, each efficiently designed to function around the clock. Glazer’s film focuses on the client, Commandant Rudolf Hess (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller), and their five children who live in a homestead directly abutting the walls of Auschwitz. Like the factory owners, they’re carrying out their own stories while hundreds of thousands are being snuffed out a few hundred meters away. Glazer uses all his considerable cinematic talents to observe and contextualize this family, never letting them forget how it is they’ve come to live the good life and watching as they shrug.
Two of cinema’s greatest directors sensed the end in 2023. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese continued his reorientation to the violent men that have characterized much of his career, portraying them as brutes with none of the charisma of his earlier work while casting himself in the role of a radio show narrator humiliated by the dismissive way that film’s tale of rancid monstrosity is being passed along to the audience. He proceeded to give poignant interviews about his looming death, lamenting that there’ll only be a few more chances to do this thing that he loves so much. That kind of ruefulness isn’t in Killers of the Flower Moon, but it’s all over The Boy and the Heron, the latest and likely final masterpiece from Hayao Miyazaki, another all-timer director who’s long questioned the impact and value of his own work. It’s a valedictory film that recapitulates the themes of Miyazaki’s legendary career while openly contemplating the world he brought his work into and the world he’ll leave behind. One Miyazaki movie was always going to be the final one. If The Boy and the Heron is that one, what an incredible note to go out on.
|
AuthorsJUST SOME IDIOTS GIVING SURPRISINGLY AVERAGE MOVIE REVIEWS. Categories
All
Archives
April 2023
Click to set custom HTML
|