Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson are both icons of American indie cinema, turning their cameras onto professional class East Coast types in the former’s naturalistic style and the latter’s mannered style. Baumbach’s written scripts for the latter on more than one occasion, so it’s not like he can’t create something that meshes with Anderson’s particular aesthetic, whereas the opposite is probably not true. This is one of many things that makes Baumbach’s latest, White Noise, so confounding. Baumbach hasn’t made a film prior to this one that seems to be in direct imitation of his colleague. The characters speak in a heightened and formal cadence, like many of Anderson’s characters, there’s extensive and colorful production design like in Anderson’s sets, and it has a much more epic sweep than Baumbach’s usual character studies. In adapting a Don DeLillo novel, Baumbach’s also adapting a script for the first time instead of creating it from scratch. He’s well out of his wheelhouse and the effect is a mess.
0 Comments
For years in the 2000’s, the women and girls of an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia were systematically drugged and raped in the night, awakening to extensive injuries and pregnancies that they couldn’t explain. The perpetrators were finally arrested and imprisoned, though the rapes never completely stopped. This horrifying story serves as the basis for Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking, described as an act of feminist imagination because its events take place in the immediate concocted aftermath of the perpetrator’s discovery. This viewer was surprised that the source material for Sarah Polley’s film of the same name was a novel and not a play, because the events of the screen adaptation are dominated by a stagey barnyard discussion about what the women will do next. This is only one of the vast gulfs between what Women Talking is and what it might have been. Polley and her accomplished cast and crew have put their talents towards a worthy project, but the execution is cold and false and drains the considerable power from this story.
When the Avatar: The Way of Water trailer was released, some niche section of the film-obsessed Internet went nuts over a few seconds of footage where Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) cinches the saddle on a sea creature he’s about to ride. The way that director James Cameron films the franchise that will consume the remainder of his working life meant that nothing in this anodyne scene is real, from the character to the creature to the water that’s creeping up and over the ropes of the saddle, which are also not real. Cameron’s miracle is that technology has advanced to the point where there’s little discernible difference between the real and the created, as this A-to-B moment of physical business might as well have happened under a real sun in real water. However, like the first Avatar, all of this advancement and visual seamlessness is happening around characters who aren’t compelling in a universe of Edenic implausibility. I don’t buy any of it. The Way of Water is still soaked through with dime-store environmental idealism, now with enough whale worship to make a cetacean fetishist drench their seat. This a deeply corny franchise, and as its world gets bigger and more impressive, opportunities for sap and earnestness grow with each new landscape.
Park Chan-wook has delivered some of the most indelible, provocative, and original cinematic scenes of the 21st century. Sitting down in front of a new Park film is an event freighted with the promise of images and sequences that only he could’ve concocted. However, with his latest, Park might be slowing things down after decades of hallway hammer fights, sliced Achilles tendons, and the implied horrors of an early 20-century perv’s basement. Decision to Leave is unequivocally in Park’s visual style, with its sensuality of the everyday and his tactile ‘universe of things’ approach to sets and production design. What it lacks is the lurid, incredulous quality he brings to the screen, or the elevated nature of so many of his plotlines. When Park is doing something reminiscent of a serialized plot that Law and Order might stretch out over the course of a season, he’s out of his wheelhouse.
Hollywood has long made movies about the odd lives of American suburbia, from Douglas Sirk to Sam Mendes. There’s lots to critique about the whole arrangement, wherein a country that supposedly prides itself on individuality plagued with homeowner’s associations. Plenty of directors have taken their crack at the claustrophic conformity of lawns and fences and 2.3 children, and Olivia Wilde is in good company with her second feature, Don’t Worry Darling. A Stepford Wives for the 2020’s, the story of Wilde’s film was taken over by behind-the-scenes gossip, but beneath all the Zapruder-style videos about whether or not Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine at Cannes is a respectable psychodrama and a creative swerve from a director coming off raunchy and riotous teen comedy Booksmart. Don’t Worry Darling isn’t topping the Far From Heavens of the world, but it does spark a desire to go back and watch Mad Men for a second helping of this time period.
The last time Rian Johnson made a sequel, the studio undid all the work he did on the story and reverted to the status quo in the next and final entry. The complete jumbling of plot in the Disney Star Wars trilogy, which had Johnson leading the pivotal and ultimately unfulfilled middle chapter, remains one of the biggest fumbles in recent big-budget filmmaking, and Johnson has learned his lesson with the creation of a new franchise, albeit one that only retains tone and a central character for this and presumably many other adventures to come. A sequel to 2019’s smash hit Knives Out, Glass Onion brings southern detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) back for another murder mystery, and though new producer Netflix bungled the release strategy, Johnson is free to do whatever he wants on the production side. The result is a sequel that improves on the original, utilizing all the quirks and tropes of the genre to tell a story about wealth and hubris that smells contemporary but will stay evergreen thanks to a neverending supply of overconfident billionaires.
Despite only being a little less than five years apart, the two Black Panther films were released in different cinematic landscapes. The original Black Panther came out as the superhero movie genre was at its peak, riding a cresting wave of critical acclaim for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It featured some of the franchise’s best world-building, its best villain, and introduced a new cast of characters who could conceivably lead their own entries. The sequel, Wakanda Forever, is without its lead after Chadwick Boseman’s tragic death mid-production, and it’s coming in the middle of a creative slump for the MCU, dogged by overproduction and the distillation of the brand thanks to a dozen Disney+ series. The money still gets made, but Wakanda Forever doesn’t linger like Black Panther did. A world that seemed endless after the original feels constrained by the sequel. It’s time for director Ryan Coogler to get out while he still can.
Every year, there’s at least one movie whose critical acclaim makes me feel like an idiot. Drive My Car was too uneventful, Zama too opaque, and for 2022, Aftersun was too cold. Charlotte Wells’ autobiographical debut bowled critics over, and audiences too judging by the prodigious sniffling in the theater, but all I could pull out of it was a strong coming of age story about a girl and her totally normal dad. I don’t buy every rug that looks nice, I’d prefer a crowd of people not sing Happy Birthday to me, and I would hate being ambushed by karaoke. Clearly, I’m brooding and mysterious and worthy of being the central enigma in a movie.
Comedian, actor, and writer Billy Eichner has been vocal about the momentous nature of his film Bros, one of the first gay romantic comedies backed by a major studio. He was equally vocal about audiences not showing up to support a film that didn’t make its modest budget back, blaming homophobic theatergoers as opposed to his film’s own deficiencies and a cinema business still struggling amidst Covid. Eichner, director Nicholas Stoller, and the cast and crew of Bros should instead take this commercial and creative failure as a sign of progress. One kind of success for the LGBT community is the ability to make mediocre art and immediately move on to the next thing. Acceptance isn’t resting on every work. Bros overestimates a lot of things about itself, like the appeal of its characters, its choice of genre, its humor, its transgressiveness, and its role in the broader culture.
After seventeen years, Todd Field finally returns to filmmaking with Tar, the objective masterpiece of 2022. Only Field’s third film, Tar comes in the footsteps of In the Bedroom and Little Children, both literary adaptations about the sins lurking beneath their ostensibly happy Americana settings. In Tar, Field’s first original screenplay, the same basic theme applies but there’s nothing normal or average about the film’s towering protagonist. Cate Blanchett gives what could be the best performance in her storied career as Lydia Tar, an elite conductor beloved by high society but haunted by all the personal and professional landmines she’s planted in her life. As those landmines begin to detonate, the rarefied air that she’s been living in becomes a toxic cloud, brought on by her own manipulations and arrogance. For 158 immaculate minutes, Field and Blanchett keep the viewer rapt and devoted to the political minutiae of classical music as one of its brightest stars comes crashing back to earth.
|
Side PiecesRandom projects from the MMC Universe. Categories
All
Archives
April 2023
|