You Were Never Really Here

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE   ***

Lynne Ramsay

2017

IDEA:  A psychologically scarred army veteran and ex-FBI officer acts as a hired gun to save girls from sex trafficking.

BLURB:  Lynne Ramsay possesses a distinctively oblique, poetic film grammar that is thrilling both for its exquisite, unorthodox formalism and for the affects it produces. Her images, often impressionistic close-ups untethered to establishing shots or contextualizing juxtapositions, combine with densely layered soundscapes to create unpredictable and visceral sensations that obtain before the intervention of narrative. This is a syntax informed by the associative logic of memory and dreams, a fragmentary flow of sensory information that antecedes signification or else acts to repeatedly puncture it. In You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay exploits the disruptive and shocking potentials of this language to express the trauma of the Real that perpetually irrupts into her protagonist’s tenuous existence. Even when Joe, played as an ungainly, battered beast of a man by Joaquin Phoenix, is not engaged in his murderous routine, the violence and death that mark his past surface as destabilizing reminders of the trauma he’s desperately trying to exorcise. Ramsay signals their threat in jarring cuts and discordant acoustic arrangements: normally innocuous images and sounds come to induce as much unease as the frequent splashes of ruby blood when collocated through the director’s disorienting audiovisual rhythms, generating a cold-sweat state of anticipation compounded by the vicious thrum of Jonny Greenwood’s score. You Were Never Really Here’s highly aestheticized representation of PTSD, among other thorny subjects, runs the risk of fetishizing or abstracting, but Ramsay is a shrewd filmmaker who knows how to avoid crass spectacle. Even when her technique feels indulgent, its evocative results speak for themselves.  

Ready Player One

READY PLAYER ONE   ***

Steven Spielberg

2018

IDEA:  In a squalid and overpopulated 2045, an enormous free-roaming virtual reality system called OASIS allows people to escape the drudgery of their lives. When the world learns of a hidden game the program's late creator designed into the system - one that would grant the winner ownership of OASIS - a young gamer sets out to beat it.

BLURB:  Ready Player One is in many ways the apogee of Steven Spielberg’s genre cinema, a nostalgia-baked fantasia of popular culture that giddily presents itself as a monument to commercial spectacle. Exercising his characteristic filmmaking vigor, here intensified by the possibilities of an infinitely malleable virtual environment, the director has taken material that can be only descriptive on the page and made it into the very embodiment of the all-consuming mass culture with which it is obsessed. Through its seamless synthetic form, Ready Player One potently extrapolates how this mass culture might continue to manifest in the digital era: as not merely a ceaseless stream of branded content, but as a full-bodied sensory integration with the media apparatus, a lived simulacral state where representation has swallowed reality. In figuring such a reality, a literally virtual one within the film’s diegesis, Spielberg, Kaminski, and an army of effects artists have crafted a virtuosic orchestration of movement within a space whose dematerialized status allows for the liberation of the physical camera gaze. One can feel Spielberg, the eternally wide-eyed wiz kid, exulting in this unbounded mode of image-making – everything from his exhilaratingly kinetic action sequences to the uncanny blending of iconic pop culture scenes and characters buzz with the enthusiasm of a creator given free reign in a limitless sandbox. And if Ready Player One’s trite storytelling and retrograde politics fail to match the scope of its aesthetic vision, they do little to mitigate the film as an exemplar of the media culture that produced it.

A New Home

WELCOME TO THE NEW SITE!

Hey film fans and Cinematic Review readers! Welcome to my new blog, Passion for Perceiving. You might be wondering what prompted this site change - the simple answer is that the web host I have been using since 2010 has become untenable for me. I've intended to make this leap for many years now, but kept holding back as the thought of having to transfer years of content left this less-than-tech-savvy cinephile rather apprehensive. But then I pressed something I probably shouldn't have and my site's formatting went all kablooey. Apparently this is the newfangled result of Webs.com's upgraded builder mechanism, which is shinier but hardly more usable than the old one! Left with a blog whose screwy header I cannot fix (take a look for yourself) and told by the anonymous corporate overseers (customer service) that I could not return to the former "glory" of the antiquated Webs server, I resolved to embark on this epic journey of blog reinvention.

I'm far from having mastered Blogger at this point (in fact I kind of hate it right now), and I obviously have loads of content needing to be imported, so you - and I! - must be patient. But rest assured that everything you loved about Cinematic Review will be available here too, in due time.

Cinematic spectatorship is driven by our passion for perceiving - the pleasure derived not only from looking but from being immersed in the operations and affects of the full human sensorium. The prosaic critical denotation of Cinematic Review has thus metamorphosed into the richer, fuller, more evocative...

PASSION FOR PERCEIVING. 

Isle of Dogs

ISLE OF DOGS   ***

Wes Anderson

2018

IDEA:  In the future, the Japanese city of Megasaki has banished all dogs to Trash Island. Defying the censorious government, a boy travels to the island to find his lost pet.


BLURB:  An aesthetic marvel and an exercise in cultural fetishism, Isle of Dogs vividly demonstrates Wes Anderson’s breathtaking artistry as well as his incorrigible ethnocentrism. That the film’s ornately designed, elaborately choreographed visuality is largely constructed from signifiers of Japanese culture makes the two qualities difficult to separate. Is this art of the Western colonizing gaze, or reverent pastiche that tacitly acknowledges the vexed identity of a hybrid, globalized world? Anderson’s brand of hermetically-sealed whimsy muddies the conclusion. Despite its echoing of Japan’s feudal and military pasts and its depiction of autocracy, Isle of Dogs severs itself from the historical world enough that it mostly registers as pure cinematic invention, a fastidious pop-art medley of multiple visual idioms that are reconfigured into something that exceeds national specificity. But if the film makes a case for itself aesthetically – and it must be said that Anderson’s baroque decoupage of split-screens, text, scrolling dollies, and practically cubist organization of space constitutes his most astonishing formal achievement yet – it is less forgivable in areas relating to representational politics. Most egregious is the linguistic divide that neatly cleaves characters into English-speaking audience surrogates and Japanese-speaking Others. It is within this scheme that a white American becomes the film’s driving agent of change. Superficial or not, Isle of Dogs is best appreciated as a dazzling display of modernist aesthetic precision, a surface value befitting a film where culture-as-ornamentation takes precedence.