Incredibles 2

INCREDIBLES 2   **

Brad Bird

2018

IDEA:  After a disastrous fight with the Underminer, the Incredibles are approached by a billionaire telecommunications scion who tries to rehabilitate their public image.

BLURB:  The most disappointing thing about Incredibles 2 is how content it seems with its consumerist mediocrity. Unlike the best films in the Pixar canon, which are distinguished by singular artistry and storytelling ingenuity, Brad Bird’s sequel looks and operates like a disposable, run-of-the-mill continuation of a popular commercial property. Although continuation might not be the right word: rather than progress the story of the Parr family or the world of “supers” in any meaningful way, Bird more or less rehashes the plot points, themes, and narrative beats of the original film, adding more flash and hectic activity without bothering to develop fully formed ideas behind it all. The inversion of gender roles is merely a feint at social commentary that only underscores how retrograde this edition feels. While Helen is busy going through the motions of the only strand of the story that really matters, the rest of the family is demoted to a stale subplot that stages clichéd, sexist domestic scenes of male ineptitude and female hysteria. Meanwhile, in a move that reeks of Disney influence, an inordinate amount of attention is devoted to the antics of the baby. His erratic, protean mischief is admittedly humorous, but how many times must we watch him combust or fly through walls before we’ve got the idea? Incredibles 2 seems to think simply showcasing and amplifying the foibles of these beloved characters is enough for another round, but the novelty is gone. While the film is breezy and fitfully inspired, it is hard to escape the sense that, after 14 years, the studio ought to have come up with something better than this.

Cold Water

COLD WATER   ***1/2

Olivier Assayas

1994

IDEA:  Two disaffected teenage lovers seek escape from their stifling home lives.

BLURB:  Coming after arid scenes of parental harangue and institutional-social malaise, the centerpiece sequence of Cold Water, a euphoric party-into-the-night scored to Janis Joplin, CCR, and Bob Dylan, arrives like an earthquake. It is a jolt to the film’s and spectator’s systems, a seismic affective shift that erupts the restless adolescent energy that had previously been conspicuously subdued. Assayas’s camera, channeling this unshackling, weaves through the exultant teenage revelers in breathlessly unbroken takes, making the scene as much about joyous release as one of exorbitant, distended time. Yet even as it marks a pronounced tonal departure, Assayas is careful not to make the party into a wish-fulfillment fantasy. As it transpires in its indulgent duration, the pleasurable feeling of jouissance becomes gradually subsumed by a sense of inertia and futility. Parents come searching for their daughter, briefly but unsuccessfully restoring narrative progress; the jukebox of songs furnishing the sensory experience begins to sound rote; the systematic destruction of the squalid building housing the party, and the blazing bonfire, seem more like signifiers of a danse macabre than a celebratory escape. And after the haze of disenchantment sets in the next morning, as it must, Assayas launches his final and most austere stretch, in which freedom and futurity itself dissolve into vaguer and vaguer ideas. Cold Water is a powerful bottling of teenage discontent and that desperate urge to find somewhere – anywhere – that might be more accommodating.

They Live

THEY LIVE   ***1/2

John Carpenter

1988

IDEA:  When a vagabond puts on a pair of sunglasses he finds at an abandoned church, he is awakened to the truth that the moneyed classes are extra-terrestrials brainwashing the masses through media.

BLURB:  What, exactly, is the nature of They Live’s relationship with consumer culture? The film’s vision of a society ruled by an alien power elite that manipulates and enslaves the working class through mass media is certainly an unmistakable ideological critique. Indeed, Carpenter’s realization of this quintessential Marxist dogma is so blatant as to be brilliant, so vividly, bluntly imagined that we wince and laugh not because he is revealing some buried truth, but because he is embossing the obvious to the point of absurdity. They Live mostly operates within this hyperbolic mode of satire, mocking, specifically, the inane and exaggerated machismo of 80s action films, sending up their sensationalized violence and jingoistic politics in sequences of anarchic, self-consciously silly excess. These scenes, which can be at once horrific and hilarious, exhibit a dissonance that makes They Live especially rich: they are the source of the film’s giddy thrills but also its troubling contradictions, images of our familiarized commercial pleasure that bite back. Yet, true to its postmodernist penchant for irony and pastiche, it is difficult to disentangle Carpenter’s film from the objects of its contempt. To what degree is the director merely reproducing the mind-numbing spectacle of the culture he’s indicting? Should a film targeting systemic social oppression be this fun, this digestible? They Live prompts us to question if any product of capitalism can be truly subversive. Its sardonic indulgence in the language of mass-mediated culture might even belie a piercing cynicism: that because the system in which we and the film are embedded cannot be vanquished, humor and amused recognition are maybe our last real defenses.