Toy Story 4

TOY STORY 4   ***

Josh Cooley

2019

IDEA:  When Bonnie loses her new "toy" on a family road trip, Woody and the gang set out to rescue him from an antiques shop.

BLURB:  All the Toy Story films are underpinned by the same evergreen tangle of existential anxieties, but in Toy Story 4, the angst takes on perhaps its most febrile form yet. This is largely due to the character of Forky. A bricolage of trash that inexplicably gains sentience, Forky is an exemplary unheimlich creation, cast-out matter that has returned from that abject place called the “garbage” to remind the toys (and the audience) of our fragile, contingent selves. With his exposed component parts, he reveals the body in its fundamentally violable corporeality, even as his consciousness transcends the individual functions of those pieces. As a result, he catalyzes thought-provoking questions around identity, which extend to a host of other new characters who, in their own ways, contemplate, mourn, or attempt to resolve problems around their origins and (intended) purposes. However foolhardy it may be to seriously analyze the ontological dimensions of the films' intricately realized but admittedly inconsistent universe, Toy Story 4’s heightened attention to its own material logic is its most fascinating development, and encourages productive evaluations of taken-for-granted existential knowledge. It also keeps the mind reeling through the slick but busy action scenes, and makes the jarringly photorealistic animation seem like an apt aesthetic to convey the tactile horrors lying in wait for a toy. Toy Story 4 may not be a patch on the Trilogy, but by amping up its characters’ neuroses, it produces unusual and memorable effects new to the series.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN   ***1/2

Tsai Ming-liang

2003

IDEA:  On the final night before it closes, an old theater plays King Hu's 1967 Dragon Inn to a sparse audience.

BLURB:  The space that has historically grounded cinematic reception becomes its own object of aesthetic contemplation in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Through the camera’s extended gaze, the walls, seats, and labyrinthine back hallways of the theater – nearly everything but the screen – become animate, visible parts of the circuitry of our sensory experience. Their dual perceptual immediacy and multiply vacancy mirror the nature of film itself, displaced onto the (literal) architecture of spectatorship, a decaying cinema palace that seems aware of its own slow demise. Of course, this cinema exists on our screens, in agonizing suspension, as Tsai records and memorializes its disappearance. Sexual longings and nostalgia drift through its darkened corridors, the last remnants of the effects of this temple of desire; and always, in Tsai’s infinite temporizing, the sense of impossible consummation prevails. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn’s most breathtaking moments, including a hilariously protracted urinal visit and a late shot of the completely emptied, fully lit theater, Tsai encourages us to think about and corporeally feel time as cinema (his cinema) manipulates it, and to understand how the spaces of our spectatorship materially impact on this perception. And by slowing time to what feels like a standstill, he only intensifies our awareness of its passage; even the most static and “endless” of scenes must elapse. Goodbye, Dragon Inn may eulogize a communal moviegoing experience slipping into obsolescence, but in layering a fading reality with a dilated time, it makes loss, the past-ness endemic to all movies, into a concrete and lingering presence.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO   **1/2

Joe Talbot

2019

IDEA:  A young black man fights to reclaim his grandfather's Victorian house in a heavily gentrified San Francisco neighborhood.


BLURB:  The Last Black Man in San Francisco presents an unusual, rather gauche combination of subject matter and tone. It is a film that tackles the very real and destructive urban abuses of gentrification, environmental defilement, and the rippling effects of systemic racism, and yet it’s largely told in a heightened comic register in a universe that often tips into the patently absurd. There are moments when this outsize humor works to invigorate the film’s depiction of the titular city, imbuing it with idiosyncratic life and energy. But there are too many other times when glibness undercuts the issues being explored. This is most egregious in the scenes that attempt to satirize race relations, which hinge on facile, broadly discomfiting interactions between the black characters and the uniformly cartoonish white ones. Talbot and Fails often seem to fall back on millennial-friendly humor and fantastical scenarios as a crutch, as if they’re afraid they might slip into undue earnestness, and the result is strangely watery. Judging by their handling of the drama, however, there should have been no worry. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is at its best when it drops the silliness to focus genuinely on its two core relationships: those between Jimmie and Mont and between Jimmie and San Francisco. The former of these is so moving due to the performances of Fails and Majors, who create a lovely, tender rapport through shared disenfranchisement and off-center personalities. The latter relationship, which is the film’s elegiac ballast, is only more intimate, capturing Jimmie’s intense love for and historical rootedness in the city that has always been his home, and how that love becomes strained, if not defeated, by the city’s inability to keep loving him back. It’s in its final passage that The Last Black Man in San Francisco finds the balance between social anguish and bigheartedness that it often struggles with throughout, ending on a note that resonates because of its painful sincerity.

The Souvenir

THE SOUVENIR   ***

Joanna Hogg

2019

IDEA:  A film school student from a wealthy family falls in love with an older man in 1980s London.

BLURB:  The Souvenir is a film-souvenir, at least for filmmaker Joanna Hogg. As it transpires in its protracted attention to the minutiae of its mise-en-scène, one gets the sense that these starkly presented images are the material of Hogg’s memories. The layout of Julie’s flat, with its paneled wall-size mirror, diminutively attached kitchen, and window overlooking a row of London rooftops, has such sensory specificity and lived-in-ness it comes to read as the real-world referent it is almost certainly designed to represent. This is not to say the film produces a documentary consciousness, but that its detailed reconstruction attunes us to Julie’s, and by extension Joanna’s, remembered experience of a time and place. It also attunes us to the emotional textures and reflections of a woman negotiating work, a rare perspective in movies. The Souvenir is most affecting when it focuses on Julie’s film school education, which we recognize as the genesis of Hogg’s own cinematic journey, and the inspiration for this picture. It’s less compelling, unfortunately, during its primary narrative focus, the toxic relationship between Julie and Anthony. However formative the impetus for this relationship might have been for Hogg, its depiction on screen is vexing, giving us an inadequate feeling for what magnetizes this young woman to this condescending fop. Their amour mal is tediously drawn out by the film’s frequently leaden airlessness. Yet it is hard to deny what this all likely means to its maker, as memoir, as release, as chronicle of an ongoing self-creation. Even if we remain outside of it, The Souvenir at least suggests what it feels like on the inside.

Waiting for Happiness

WAITING FOR HAPPINESS   ***1/2

Abderrahmane Sissako

2002

IDEA:  A variety of lives converge in a small Mauritanian port town.

BLURB:  The title of Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2002 film isn’t necessary to describe the endless state of expectancy its characters inhabit. In fact, it barely begins to convey the depth of their liminal circumstances, the various longings, disappointments, pleasures, and mundane rituals that fill their vacant hours like floating tumbleweeds. Their condition is less “waiting” or biding time than learning how to exist, in whatever way they can, in geographical and cultural suspension. Theirs are lives literally situated at a point of transit, in a place where globalized modernity passes through but doesn’t stay. Sissako, who creates delicate, plaintive rhythms out of the villagers’ quotidian routines with a camera that rarely moves, powerfully elicits a sense of their desultory idleness, the feeling of stagnation experienced by those who’ve been left in the margins of industrial progress. But for all its melancholy, and talk of mortality, Waiting for Happiness is infrequently depressing. Around and between its characters’ lamentations are scenes of startling vibrancy, moments in which bold colors, music, and the spirit of community work to communicate a vigor and even a contentedness that are beyond reproach. Modernity is not what these villagers need; in fact, as Sissako shows us, it’s modernity that has paradoxically caused their isolation. In the film’s lovely, final shift in perspective to its intrepid youngest character, Waiting for Happiness hands the torch (the light bulb?) to the next generation, physically stranded from its ancestors but carrying their wisdom over the threshold.

The Image You Missed

THE IMAGE YOU MISSED   ***1/2

Donal Foreman and Arthur MacCaig

2018

IDEA:  Filmmaker Donal Foreman reflects on both his estranged father and his Irish heritage through archival footage his father shot of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

BLURB:  A film “between” Donal Foreman and Arthur MacCaig, The Image You Missed is a dialogically dual-authored memoir and a dynamic record of national memories negotiated across generations. In montage by turns contemplative and propulsive, Foreman absorbs, interprets, and recontextualizes his father’s documentary footage alongside his own, simultaneously bridging their distinct personal and politico-historical experiences and exposing the irreconcilable gulfs in between. The film demonstrates, lucidly, the intersection of individual and collective identity with practices of image-making and consuming, but it would perhaps be more accurate to say it exemplifies these things as being always already entwined. By recognizing his father’s archive as not merely evidence of a cultural past he never experienced but as a necessarily provisional and ongoing site for historical writing, Foreman realizes Gregory Paschalidis’ maxim that “photographs do not represent history, they represent in history… are part of the way we make sense of and give form to history.” Much of The Image You Missed can be understood in this way, as a testament to how images frame and generate historically and culturally situated knowledge about ourselves. The vastly different Irelands that separate Foreman and his father’s lives – not to mention all the other temporal distances keeping them apart – may speak to inevitable epochal changes and epistemological gaps, but in dialoguing with his father’s past in the present, Foreman is able to create the sense of fissures symbolically overcome. One comes away from The Image You Missed with the feeling of the image’s partiality, certainly, but also with an intensified awareness of its exorbitance, of its power to create meaningful new connections.