The Hateful Eight

THE HATEFUL EIGHT   **

Quentin Tarantino

2015

IDEA:  Wyoming shortly after the Civil War. Eight disparate individuals on the way to Red Rock are cooped up in a cabin stopover during a blizzard, suspicions growing as nobody seems to be quite who they say they are. 

BLURB:  Tarantino seems to be regressing. As his films have grown more grandiose in subject matter and theme, they have also become increasingly bloated and overwrought, not to mention juvenile and cruel. For a while, The Hateful Eight appears to be building toward something better as it carefully sets up its chamber piece scenario, corralling its diverse characters and generating tension from the distrust, animosity, and guarded motives they harbor. Ennio Morricone’s dread-inducing score pounds away with their every cautious forward movement, signaling that the film belongs as much to the horror genre as it does the western, and that a collective release of malice is surely yet to come. And come it does, resulting in queasily bountiful sprays of blood and bodies piling up. It’s sooner rather than later that the narrative and its intrigues fall apart, the reveal of the story’s true course as unimaginative and ultimately predictable as the bloodlust that seems more than ever to be the main goal. Tarantino has always enjoyed setting up overripe scenes and letting them unfurl before a burst of violent mayhem, but rarely has the aftermath felt so gruesome for gruesome’s sake, brutality so punishingly acrid that any trace of humanity has been all but extinguished from his sordid game. Although he positions his viper’s nest of racism and rancor as a microcosm of volatile post-Civil War America, and by extension of an enduringly fraught sociopolitical climate, any serious indictment of violence the movie may offer is quickly erased by how much glee the director derives from the cruelty he engineers. Cloaking his three-hour schlock under the pretense of contemporarily resonant historical drama isn’t only self-aggrandizing, but highly dubious.

The Good Dinosaur

THE GOOD DINOSAUR   ***

Peter Sohn

2015

IDEA:  Dinosaurs continue to roam the earth after the asteroid intended to extinguish them passes by. In this alternate reality, a young, estranged Apatosaurus named Arlo befriends an orphaned human boy.

BLURB:  It seems entirely paradoxical, but The Good Dinosaur may very well be Pixar’s most formulaic film to date as well as its most unusual. For a studio renowned for its inventiveness and expansive imagination, it is unusual, firstly, because it feels so formulaic. Discarding a bounty of unique storytelling possibilities inherent in its intriguing premise, the studio ends up with a derivative journey-back-home narrative centered on orphans, interspecies friendship, and familiar themes of family and overcoming fear. Most unusual, though, is not the fact of this slim and uninspired narrative but what is foregrounded in its stead. The Good Dinosaur represents perhaps the first time Pixar has shifted its primary focus from story or even character and placed it on purely perceptual principles, drawing our attention to the meticulous optics of texture, light, and movement. Mountains, water, rocks, dirt, foliage, and various animal flesh are rendered with jaw-dropping, hyperreal tactility, becoming the film’s true content. They are observed with a reverence for the natural world seldom seen in mainstream Western animation. Even rarer is the film’s violent physicality, its lifelike sense of the effects of environment on bodies and its bizarre, at times comical fascination with somatic trauma. Where so much CG animation feels plastic and weightless, Pixar’s film is remarkable for how much it invests in corporeality and tangible physical expression, a gift for conveying through image that extends to the beautifully wrought central relationship. On one hand, The Good Dinosaur is a disappointingly undercooked piece of storytelling. On the other, it has freed up the technologically and artistically superior studio to indulge in its most lyrical work yet.

Cemetery of Splendor

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR   ***1/2

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2015

IDEA:  A woman volunteers to assist comatose soldiers, who are being treated in a makeshift hospital that sits atop an ancient cemetery. As she spends time with them and a young female medium who also works there, she begins to have perceptions of other times and places.

BLURB:  In Cemetery of Splendor, a woman is taught how to literally open her eyes as wide as possible so she can be sure she is awake. A similar encouragement of mindfulness is extended to the spectator, whose senses are simultaneously sharpened and soothed by the magnificent flow of images Apichatpong has assembled. Intermingling past, present, tradition, modernity, lucidity, dream, and all manner of consciousness in between, he creates a vital space in which various temporal and otherworldly realms seamlessly blend, inviting us to experience them all at once. His mastery is in letting them coexist so organically; no visual or aural signposts are necessary to convey the concurrence of all that is visible and invisible within this space. Even if it is nebulous there is always the sense that we can access its levels, which means that the obfuscation of other Apichatpong films has been stripped away in favor of a concentrated, cohesive, and emotionally direct approach to spiritual worlds. As his lead character, played by the serene Jenjira Pongpas, finds her perception enriched, so do we, through the transcendent language of film. And by positing the cinema as one of our most profound states of perception in its mesmerizing centerpiece sequence, Cemetery of Splendor rebukes political oppression by reinforcing the status of film as impregnable, a legitimate spiritual realm through which release from physical prohibitions is not only possible, but miraculously unavoidable.

Steve Jobs

STEVE JOBS   ***

Danny Boyle

2015

IDEA:  A look at Apple pioneer Steve Jobs through the prism of three of his product launches in 1984, 1988, and 1998.

BLURB:  There is an overdetermined, showboating quality to Steve Jobs that feels both excessive and befitting the story of a self-anointed deity-cum-corporate giant who hawked his product like it was the Second Coming, even when it had not an ounce of consumer utility. That is to say, the film is as frustrating for its overcooked dramaturgy as it is compelling for its depiction, and perhaps occasional embodiment of, megalomania. It is not Boyle who indulges here: the typically flashy director seems to have handed the reins over almost wholesale to Aaron Sorkin, who splurges on his patented rapid-fire dialogue with its endless shouting matches, recriminations, and metaphors. Oh, the metaphors. Sorkin’s tendency to underline theme by having characters analogize is at its most unrestrained here, resulting in contrivances and heavy-handed attempts at imposing meaning. And yet, his script revolves around an idea that cuts through some of the pomposity: that Jobs, wounded by rejection and human fallibility and gripped by a need for control, sought to create an inviolate technology that would be better than us. It’s a poignant concept Sorkin – and a scorchingly possessed Michael Fassbender – play to complicated effect. They manage to maintain an ambivalence about Jobs that makes us question why and how we vaunt individuals, and what it is about them that drives our culture into the future.

Sicario

SICARIO   **

Denis Villeneuve

2015

IDEA:  An FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to help target the head of a major Mexican drug cartel.

BLURB:  As our entry point into Sicario’s world of abject moral chaos, Emily Blunt is a dramatically convincing audience surrogate. Her visceral confoundment and revulsion at the immoral tactics being employed around her, by both her own governmental team and its gangland opposition, is potent, and is shared in every way by the spectator. This conception of real-life morass turned personal nightmare is Villeneuve’s most effective strategy: unfortunately, it is not nearly enough to compensate for his film’s narrative and ideological deficits, which run deep through a clunky, hackneyed script. Content to rehash a boilerplate formula without added nuance, the film goes through the prosaic motions of a morally ambivalent 21st century political thriller, concluding with redundancy that the supposed good guys are just as corrupt as the criminals, and violence begets violence, and nobody wins. Its indictment of US exceptionalism and the untenable suspension of ethical standards in the pursuit of a goal might hit harder if any of the characters actually felt like dimensional human beings, or if Emily Blunt, so emotionally bared, didn’t exist in the story just so that she could finally be put in her place by imperious men. Sicario may have damning words for those men and for the terror they’re so ready to breed, but instead of disempowering them it resigns itself, unimaginatively, to their bankrupt reality.

Mistress America

MISTRESS AMERICA   ***1/2

Noah Baumbach

2015

IDEA:  An introverted college freshman reluctantly meets up with her gregarious, soon-to-be stepsister, and instantly becomes enamored of her boldly enterprising lifestyle.

BLURB:  Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s latest and most jocular tag-along with floundering millenials, a vibrant snapshot of young middle-class ambition stoked and arrested by uncertain creative potential. Baumbach punches up the pacing and dialogue to veritably screwball-level speeds, but he never lets the relative weight of his themes get compromised. On the contrary, his characters’ blithe patter keeps underlining what they lack, and his zaniest, most manic scenes, including a marvelously sustained romp at a wealthy designer’s mansion, are often the ones that chip away at their delusions best. The script, co-written by Gerwig, is loaded with witty, pithy quotes that manage to sound profoundly real and archly theatrical at the same time, the latter effect self-reflexively used to play up the performative aspect of social behavior. Instead of sounding like writerly back-patting, they constellate into rich profiles of the identities constantly being cultivated and negotiated by the film’s rudderless young adults. Baumbach’s commitment to sincerely evaluating their foibles, anxieties, and misgivings through shimmering comedy that neither trivializes nor glorifies is beguiling. It’s what makes Mistress America, in many ways thematically familiar but in others a mature expansion of familiar themes, a disarmingly valuable delight.

The Neon Bible

THE NEON BIBLE   ***1/2

Terence Davies

1995

IDEA:  Teenage David reflects back on his life growing up in 1940s Georgia, when his loving showbiz aunt moved in with his brutish father and frail mother.

BLURB:  If The Neon Bible weren’t so simply spellbinding, if it wasn’t immaculately visualized in hypnotic tracking shots, sensuous textures, painterly compositions, and liquidly elliptical scene transitions, and if it didn’t so movingly evoke, let alone create in the viewer, vibrating pulses of melancholy and quiet ecstasy, it could reasonably be taken to task for being a mannered and even perfunctory exercise from a filmmaker coasting on his style. Admittedly, some camera movements, editing tricks, and sound cues seem rote, products of a default film grammar Davies has grown too complacent with and is falling back on as a crutch. His deliberate artifice, often acutely channeling the distortion of memory and the dissonance of experience, can seem strained. But rote or familiar by Terence Davies’ standards is positively radical by so many others’. A loosely defined, impressionistic embodiment of feelings of lament, confusion, transition, and displacement,The Neon Bible looks and behaves like the singular result of one very specific cinema poet continuing to reach back to the elegiac well he knows best. He may be conjuring the same bittersweet music, but boy is it affecting to hear again.

A Report on the Party and Guests

A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS   ***1/2

Jan Němec

1966

IDEA:  A group of friends having a picnic are randomly accosted by a party of men in the woods, and soon after are invited to a birthday banquet for a seemingly benevolent host.

BLURB:  It’s easy to see why Jan Němec’s A Report on the Party and Guests so aggrieved the Communist Czechoslovak government: though not as blissfully incendiary as some of his compatriots’ works, it is all the same a withering denunciation of the political system, its dry, straightforward presentation making its critique perhaps even more potent. With little more than a pack of pliable petite bourgeoisie protagonists, some officious-looking men, and a wooded area, Němec sets up a droll fable in which picnickers find themselves willfully subjugated in a succession of restrictive power structures that take the forms of games and highly regulated “celebrations.” Shorn of elaborate formal strategies or narrative detours, its allegory registers on a basic, intuitive level, and its tone, suggesting menace mostly through banality, mirrors the insidiousness of the Party it condemns, easily piercing the phony façade that holds up oppression and conformity. The setup is also broad enough that its application is practically unlimited – whether it’s communism or just human folly run amok, A Report on the Party and Guests limpidly sees how evil hides in plain sight.

Morocco

MOROCCO   ***

Josef von Sternberg

1930

IDEA:  A disenchanted cabaret performer becomes entangled in the affections of a French playboy and a lusty legionnaire.

BLURB:  Quixotic and Hollywood-seductive yet tempered by world-weariness, Morocco is one of Josef von Sternberg’s typical products in which romantic notions of all kinds fight against impulses of disillusionment and lament. As in other cases, story is superfluous and often trite, subordinated to glistening images of scenery and faces and the febrile emotions they hold. Sternberg exploits this quality first by making the most of his exotic North African locales, then by reverting, as he must, to the divinely enigmatic visage of Marlene Dietrich. Despite other thin characterizations, Sternberg can never be accused of giving Dietrich paltry roles. Even though her Amy Jolly follows a disappointingly gender-prescribed arc, from defiantly independent and no-nonsense chanteuse to grieving and desperately heartsick wife, Sternberg imbues her with varied and often contradictory facets. She is alternately coquettish, subversive, doe-eyed and intractable; reticent and apathetic yet passionate and assertive; blithely resistant to patriarchal rituals and yet, finally, recuperated by heterosexual love, if only on her own willful terms. The variegated nature of her character offsets some of the movie’s dated mechanics, and the final shot, breathtakingly conjured, reveals that Sternberg knows the price of his romance.

Mad Max: Fury Road

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD   ***

George Miller

2015

IDEA:  In a post-apocalyptic future wasteland, a despot sends a fleet of warriors to chase down and stop the renegade Imperator Furiosa and her distaff crew.

BLURB:  A hard-driving salute to action movie excess and an emphatic rebuke of the capitalistic, patriarchal systems that traditionally order such spectacle, Mad Max: Fury Road gratifies moviegoers’ adrenaline lusts while offering satisfying subversions. Its influences are wide-ranging and proudly displayed: not just the American western, which informed the original series, but more pronouncedly silent cinema, the go-for-broke stunts of Buster Keaton and the visceral collision of Soviet montage. Also in play are grindhouse and late 60s counterculture, exhibited by Miller’s delirious collection of grotesqueries and his forceful, lovingly crude takedown of establishment. The film is strongest when these influences coalesce in operatic action set pieces that are allowed to unfold across the screen unabated; when the action halts for some rather dodgy, perfunctory dialogue, Miller’s desire to make us care for characters best left as allegorical signifiers clashes with his inclination for pure, grimy visual expression. Even if it can’t entirely sustain its barreling momentum, Fury Road’s brash fusion of action physics and progressive politics provides a potent and welcome charge.

Magnificent Obsession

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION   ***

Douglas Sirk

1954

IDEA:  A reckless millionaire playboy decides to help the widow he inadvertantly blinded, and whose husband's death he unwittingly caused.

BLURB:  Douglas Sirk melodramas exist in a reality all their own, one where ripe American pop iconography becomes emulsified in the heightened emotions and comforting artifice of the movies. A negotiation in much of his work, between sincere melodramatic intent and distanced ironic commentary, finds perhaps its most ambiguous manifestation in Magnificent Obsession, Sirk’s outsize homage to harebrained Hollywood kitsch. But is it homage? To what degree is the director indulging a deeply genuine affection for melodrama, in all its lachrymose and patently silly mechanisms, and to what degree is he mocking it? Is the sheer fact of the cockamamie plot, not even Sirk’s own, supposed to implicitly tell us not to take it seriously? Other Sirk films conceal obvious social criticisms that counterpoint his delicate worlds in bitterly revealing ways. But in the absence of notable social targets – consumer-packaged pseudo-spirituality is the closest thing here to an object of ridicule – Magnificent Obsession seems kind of hollow, less a trenchant analysis than a cockeyed love letter to its own dumb, shiny surfaces. It’s melodrama wrapped in more melodrama: whether that makes the film a crafty meta-movie or just exaggerated nonsense is unclear, or maybe part of a point we can only understand in the context of Sirk.

News from Home

NEWS FROM HOME   ****

Chantal Akerman

1977

IDEA:  Images of New York City are set against the narration of a mother's letters to her daughter abroad.

BLURB:  Spectatorship, authorship, absence and presence become poignantly reified in News from Home, Chantal Akerman’s homesick city portrait turned structuralist symphony. With cultural displacement and alienation as her most immediate themes, Akerman juxtaposes yearning letters written to her from her mother with long perspectival shots of grungy mid-70s New York City, its streets and subway platforms transformed into eldritch sites of communal ritual of which we are not a part. Some locations are eerily desolate, landscapes of forbidding concrete and iron. Others are teeming with people who move languidly about their urban dwellings, natural civilian habitats taking on a decidedly alien air through the dispassionate and detached camera. But Akerman, who is pointedly filming but never seen in the flesh, and whose voice assumes her mother’s words over the disjunctive soundtrack, is also very present, her camera apparatus often noticed by the pedestrians who pass in front of it, their stares solicited by its gaze. We watch, absent from the image as she is and yet authoring its look, providing it with the necessary perception to give life to its astonishing audiovisual sensations. An ethnographic time capsule of a place long gone and a singular simulation of what it’s like to be dislocated, within yet without, News from Home welds thrilling form to haunting considerations of estrangement, and ends up transcendent.

Top 10 - 2014

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, but you needn’t look at them to know what the greatest cinematic accomplishments of 2014 were (as if the Academy would tell you, anyway). Listed below are my Top 10 films of the year, ranked in general order of preference, with runners-up and honorable mentions.

A quick note on the year before we get down to it: like any other year, 2014 had plenty to offer in the way of diverse, compelling, thought-provoking, and artistically and culturally prodigious cinema. If it seems to somewhat pale in comparison to 2013, at least for me, that’s because there were fewer films I unabashedly loved, and decidedly none I would deem masterpieces. In other words, there was no Inside Llewyn Davis. I awarded only one film all year the full four stars, although a few others came close. But in the absence of undeniable knockout punches, there was a lot to like.

TOP 10 after the jump!