Mary Poppins Returns

MARY POPPINS RETURNS   ***

Rob Marshall
2018

IDEA:  Facing the imminent repossession of their home, the Banks children, now grown with their own kids, are once again graced by the presence of their favorite magical nanny.


BLURB:  Mary Poppins Returns does everything one would expect of a Disney sequel in this era of the studio’s ravenous self-cannibalization. It hews closely to the formula of the original film, repeating its narrative beats and referencing its signature moments. It exploits the audience’s affection for that earlier property, turning nostalgia into an exchange commodity. And it indulges in the latest computer effects to offer something that, at least superficially, appears like a visual upgrade. Yet it is possible to take ideological umbrage with Disney’s current business model and still appreciate, even exult in, the prodigious craft, energy, and verve with which Mary Poppins Returns has been made. This is not, despite what the corporate imprimatur might suggest, some rote facsimile of the 1964 classic, at least in execution. It is in fact a legitimately fine example of big-screen studio spectacle, a sumptuous sensorial experience that recaptures the magic of the original more frequently than one might’ve imagined possible. From Sandy Powell’s decadent lollipop-hued costumes to Marc Shaiman’s boisterous score, it makes a case for itself as a crafts-rich entertainment that doesn’t sacrifice artistry for an easy buck. And in its self-consciously recursive nature, it also justifies its existence, insisting that in times of distress minor (breaking a ceramic bowl) or major (economic depression), we could stand to be re-minded of the pluck and intractable positivity of Mary Poppins to help us along.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING   ***

RaMell Ross

2018

IDEA:  A documentary about a small town in Hale County, Alabama, and the lives and dreams of some of its inhabitants.

BLURB:  In its modest way, Hale County This Morning, This Evening seeks to liberate cinematic images of the black American South from the cultural codes that have historically figured them. This is not to say that Ross ignores sociopolitical context or signification – after all, he is in the realm of representation – but that, in his impressionistic montage, he bypasses the institutional language of “racial” cinema to access something both more ineffable and elemental. The moments he seizes on transcend whatever symbolic value they may hold, placing us in a material regime of texture and affect where sense perceptions – of water on skin, of heavy breathing during basketball drills, of sunlight filtering through smoke – attune us to a phenomenological now irreducible to any discourse. Ross’s edits further deny a traditional narrative telos, his images driven not by chains of causal logic but by poetic concatenations: sweat falling on concrete becoming raindrops; a moon appearing over a toddler’s palm; time lapse footage linking family rooms and gymnasiums with the cosmic movement of a starry night sky. While the impulse here can occasionally feel universalizing, positing an experiential immediacy outside of social constraints, the film earns itself an aesthetic latitude in order to dismantle so many sedimented views of black America. Rather than making any lofty claims of a radical or monolithic vision, it offers its loose, improvisational form as a sample of what alternative perspectives can look like.

Vice

VICE   ***

Adam McKay

2018

IDEA:  A portrait of Dick Cheney as he made his monstrous ascent from Chief of Staff to Vice President.

BLURB:  Less a political satire than a furious, stomach-turning dissection of governmental tyranny, Vice lays bare the decades worth of destruction inflicted by the GOP upon the US and the world. Tracing the party’s noxious stranglehold back to the Nixon years when Dick Cheney entered Washington as a feckless intern, McKay illustrates how the future vice president perpetuated and came to embody an ethos of corruption, amorality, fear-mongering, and avarice that has only become more entrenched in the White House in the intervening years. For McKay, Cheney is a kind of skeleton key to unlock the heinousness of what the GOP now proudly represents, and if he doesn’t quite posit him as the sole architect of its disastrously harmful evolution, he recognizes in him the ur-form of the essential soullessness that his cronies and successors would faithfully replicate. Christian Bale, in a truly uncanny performance, oozes with the barely concealed disdain and calculated sociopathy of a man fully aware of, and indifferent to, the damage he’s causing for his own gain. His distinctly pungent portrayal, along with the film’s frequent, sudden cuts to familiarly tragic current events, infuse Vice with a rare dread that tightens over its course like a noose. Even McKay’s explicitly comic scenarios are tempered by an awful recognition of the realities they satirize, denying the audience the catharsis of untroubled laughter. Vice does not boast the most elegant, or nuanced, or disciplined filmmaking. But as a work of scathing agitprop, its confrontational bluntness and refusal of comforting concessions make for not only invigorating protest, but a necessarily rude wakeup call.