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.