The Witch

THE WITCH   ***

Robert Eggers

2016

IDEA:  In 1630s New England, a Puritan family is tormented by strange phenomena after being exiled from their village to a farmstead just outside the woods.

BLURB:  The Witch is not, strictly speaking, nerve-jangling supernatural horror. Nor is it a period drama about Puritans where the occult stands as a purely metaphorical representation of ideological evil. Instead, it craftily synthesizes the two approaches to tell a story where supernatural evil arises as the logical, inevitable result of dogmatic ideology. In Eggers’ film, under perpetually sepulchral skies in a scarily nascent America, it is the religious zealotry, persecution, and unbridled paranoia of the Puritans that literally breed the witches whose existence they only suspected, fulfilling their fear by inadvertently manifesting it. The Witch is brutally effective in this depiction of self-perpetuating and self-consuming fear, running real witchcraft parallel to the inner turmoil and eventual implosion of its Puritan family unit to underscore just how insidious the latter is, its tyrannical repressiveness a horror equal to or more than that of the spirits lurking in the woods. Less successful is Eggers’ handling of tone and rhythm: he makes an audacious narrative gamble early on that pays off conceptually, but it also somewhat hobbles the film’s suspense, and he has difficulty keeping the rope tightly wound to generate the kind of steady, inexorably building dread the film calls for. Thankfully he makes up for the slack with his ghostly visuals, and certainly in the smart nuances that texture this parable of religious hysteria, one that slyly posits the life of sin so much hostility had gone into averting as both a tragic outcome and ecstatic liberation from a paralyzing culture.

Hail, Caesar!

HAIL, CAESAR!   ***1/2

Joel and Ethan Coen

2016

IDEA:  Pious Hollywood "fixer" Eddie Mannix deals with a variety of snafus - including the kidnapping of one of Capitol Studio's biggest stars - while he faces a crisis of conscience.

BLURB:  Leave it to the Coen brothers to craft a farcical satire on the Hollywood studio system that functions as a meditation on faith. In their wry and ingenious tale, it only makes sense: after all, what are the movies but grand illusions that require us to believe in them if they are to work? And what is Hollywood but a capitalist industry we’d also like to think is capable of real virtue? Indeed, the “dream factory” is the oxymoron that centers the directors’ exploration of cinema’s and life’s great contradictions. Within the back lots and stages of 1950s Hollywood they find a sprawling institutional space where pleasure is manufactured while business rules, truth exists only to be trumped by fabrications, and the rigmarole of routine and mechanical process clouds all certainty that its results will have any cultural value whatsoever. Hail, Caesar! thus maintains a characteristic Coen-level cynicism, and it mines deliciously sardonic humor from the foofaraw generated by celebrity personalities and PR politics. Somewhat surprisingly, however, is the optimism that offsets it. Though they may view Hollywood from one perspective as a crass, exploitative instrument of capitalism that controls bodies, what they ultimately find is a magical instrument of creation that provides, as our protagonist notes, entertainment and enlightenment. Or maybe they just want to believe that. Why shouldn’t they? As with any higher power, whether institutional or spiritual, a certain stubborn faith is required. Hail, Caesar! sees the Coens not only honoring the power of make believe, but validating the right to believe in it at all – maybe even, or especially when, it seems most foolish.

Top 10 - 2015

This is the latest I have made a Top 10 list since I began this blog in 2010. As I outlined in a past post, the reason is that I’ve been waiting to see significant 2015 titles that I either missed or that never came to my area, and I didn’t want to compose my list without being able to consider such notable (and obnoxiously late) releases such as Anomalisa and Son of Saul, or streamables available on Netflix and elsewhere. My plan, it turns out, proved to be only partially useful: as of this writing, the second film was only released here last week, and the first is still absent from any theater near me. I suppose it’s my fault for missing them when they were at CIFF back in October…

But something else has delayed my list, something I also made note of in my prior post. It’s that 2015 felt like kind of a bizarre movie year, the rare one in which no single film stood out as a head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest favorite. In other words, you can essentially consider all ten excellent films on my list as equal top-rankers.

One theme emerged, however: cinema. Many of the 2015 films that most spoke to me were the ones that took cinema history and theory as their driving creative forces, building experiences that exploited the material and psychological faculties of the medium. These films were conceptually audacious, aestheticaly indelible, and wonderfully exciting in their understanding, and practicing of, film's boundless formal and narrative potentials.

2015 films of note I still, regrettably, have not seen: In Jackson Heights, Queen of Earth, Anomalisa, Mustang, Joy, Chi-Raq, Arabian Nights, Victoria

TOP 10 AFTER THE JUMP!