Licorice Pizza

LICORICE PIZZA   ***1/2

Paul Thomas Anderson

2021

IDEA:  A teen actor and a disaffected 20-something woman navigate film industry eccentrics, business endeavors, and politics in the San Fernando Valley of 1973.

BLURB:  The Hollywood of Licorice Pizza is infectious; its showbiz attitudes seep into the daily lives of those within its proximity, informing the behaviors of everyone from minor child actors to zealous agents and restaurateurs. Not unlike the poison mushrooms of Anderson’s prior film, the motion picture industry here is a perverting, ego-altering toxin, equally fragrant and rancid, capable of twisting relationships and their underlying structures of desire into exceedingly strange geometries. It’s also an age-warping force that turns a 15-year-old boy into a cocksure entrepreneur and wannabe Lothario, and a young, directionless woman into, alternately, his guardian, starry-eyed friend, employee, and vampish boss. In this rich, mutating exchange of performance and power, Licorice Pizza is more allied with Anderson’s recent films than its bright, breezy, lackadaisical SoCal surface might have one believe. The writer-director threads through his would-be nostalgia piece a pas de deux of manipulation and oneupmanship as juicy as the one in The Master, and fleshes out a 1970s LA as suffused with the air of cultural danger as Inherent Vie. Yet departing from those films’ violently tortured couplings, Licorice Pizza’s greatest coup - one bolstered by the sensational performances of Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman - is in how it transforms its putatively unnatural quasi-romance into a perfect collision of complementing personalities, a beacon of mutual personal maturation in an environment seemingly conducive to anything but that. Toggling deftly between the sunny and the antic, Anderson furnishes a quixotic yet realistically turbulent roadmap for Alana and Gary to find their ways through the maze of hoary Hollywood leches, pervasive consumerism, and sociopolitical turmoil that constitutes their surreal world; maybe in this context, he suggests, the two really can feel just right together.

West Side Story

WEST SIDE STORY   ***

Steven Spielberg

2021

IDEA:  In the midst of a rivalry between white and Puerto Rican gangs in 1957 New York City, a forbidden romance blossoms between star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria.

BLURB:  Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story introduces itself like a war film. In place of the chicly modernist aerial city views of the 1961 adaptation, the camera glides close to the rubble-strewn earth, surveying the ruins of a neighborhood that’s become a battleground in more ways than one. Of course, West Side Story has always been something of a war story, but this version underlines and expands on that idiom by grounding its drama more viscerally in the forces of systemic depredation and ethnic tribalism. Through the grimy decay of Stockhausen and DeAngelo’s sets, the overexposed gleam of Kaminski’s lensing, and the sweaty rough-and-tumble physicality of its actors, this West Side Story conjures a verisimilitude of dread within its artifice that is striking. At the same time, Spielberg and Kushner balance this new realism with grandly classical Old Hollywood spectacle and a fundamental impulse to remain loyal to the original text – its pleasures as well as many of its deficiencies. While it’s hard to watch the film without having some lingering skepticism about the point of its existence, it’s also impossible to fault the sheer brio and technical prowess of Spielberg’s production on a moment-to-moment basis. The outsize emotions of the material are ideally matched to the director’s own lushly melodramatic sensibilities, and he even manages to find some savvy ways to add new dimensions to canonical sequences. No creative decision lands more poignantly than the change made to the voice of“Somewhere,” which becomes here a punctum to the fiction, a metatextual threnody connecting past and present with sobering clarity.

C'mon C'mon

C'MON C'MON   ***1/2

Mike Mills

2021

IDEA:  When nine-year-old Jesse's mother leaves town to care for her ill estranged husband, he's left under the watch of his radio journalist uncle, who takes him around the country on a project interviewing kids.

BLURB:  Mike Mills makes films of such genuine warmth, lightness, and empathy for people that they end up inadvertently exposing just how lacking these qualities are in so many movies from major American filmmakers. On the other hand, perhaps it’s not inadvertent at all; in C’mon C’mon especially, the writer-director seems to wear his heart on his sleeve with something like defiance, unashamedly courting potential calls of sentimentalism without ever succumbing to the mawkish devices or platitudes that would validate those accusations. In other words, he demonstrates how a film can be non-naively about positive relationships, open communication, and hopefulness without sacrificing dramatic interest or complexity. He makes it cool to be kind. One of the things that feels so quietly radical is his depiction of American masculinity. Through the blissfully tender rapport between Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman (an uncommonly centralized uncle-nephew relationship), Miller extols a male sensitivity and emotional candidness too seldom witnessed in popular Western media. This generosity radiates all throughout C’mon C’mon, pulling in every face - from the professionals to the myriad kid non-actors - into an expansive, egalitarian dialogue on childhood, parenthood, and the spaces connecting them. Mills also incorporates a number of other texts within his own, fostering a heteroglossic tapestry where every voice matters, and echoes; his black-and-white images further flatten hierarchies between the many places he depicts. C’mon C’mon is ultimately a gentle entreaty to listen and to learn. It has an air of pedagogy, even homily, but it’s not didactic; it’s more like a heuristic for a world we have the capacity and tools to make better, if we’re willing.

tick, tick... BOOM!

TICK, TICK... BOOM!   ***1/2

Lin-Manuel Miranda

2021

IDEA:  Playwright Jonathan Larson struggles to get his new production off the ground in the months leading up to his dreaded 30th birthday.

BLURB:  Among the many things tick, tick… BOOM! gets acutely right about the foibles of the creative process is how narrowed one’s consciousness can become when devoted to a project. Art can be a laborious, crazy-making idée fixe as much as a pleasure, and for Andrew Garfield’s Jonathan Larson, it’s an obsession that often clouds out the rest of the world, right when he needs it the most. Lin-Manual Miranda’s film also potently understands, and beautifully embodies, the transformations that take place in the channeling of life into art, not just within the artist and the “original” work, but through the myriad of others who come into contact with that work, from those who give it new life, like Miranda, to audiences whose engagement advances its legacy. This tick, tick… BOOM! is a marvel of an adaptation because it recognizes all art, in some way, as fundamentally adapted, as the translation of lifeworld intentions and contingencies that continue to evolve long beyond their conceptions, fanning out infinitely from a subjective point of origin. There are numerous other things the film is perceptive and agile about, from its depiction of the eternal conflict between artistic integrity and capitalism to how it refuses to soften, demonize, or excuse the navel-gazing proclivities of its subject. Importantly, Miranda’s tick, tick… BOOM! is also just a blast, a spry, inventive, and full-hearted testament to the crucibles of time and creation, powered by the gigawatt charisma and grace of Andrew Garfield’s career-best performance.

The Power of the Dog

THE POWER OF THE DOG   ***

Jane Campion

2021

IDEA:  While waging a war of attrition against his new sister-in-law, an irascible Montana rancher is pulled into the orbit of her enigmatic teen son.

BLURB:  The Power of the Dog is a queer kind of Western, in all senses of the word. Structurally, it morphs from the appearance of a sweeping frontier drama to the cloistered, febrile textures of a Gothic romance. Standing in for 1920s Montana, the desolate, alien-looking New Zealand landscape never lets us settle into a terrain that feels particularly isomorphic with the American plains. Guns rarely appear, and outward displays of violence are scarce or elided. Campion’s violence is predominantly psychological, festering beneath the surface on a constant simmer. Most of the film’s incident transpires in pained, loaded glances and gestures, in the codes of patriarchy and cowboy masculinity being tacitly challenged, inverted, or otherwise nervously negotiated. The Power of the Dog is queer, of course, because it deals with queer characters, most intriguingly Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Peter, whose gawky string-bean frame and effete manner alone make him a full-bodied iconographic shock to the milieu of gruff machismo in which he's cultivating his identity. The Oedipal drama that unfolds between him, his mother, and the literally castrating father figure-cum-lover Phil forms the late-breaking crux of the somewhat shaky narrative, giving the film its most tantalizingly subversive thematic currents. What nags about The Power of the Dog, a curious problem considering the director, is that it often feels too reserved to truly bring its psychosexual tensions alive; one longs for some spikes of libidinal energy in the languorous mood, for a more viscous, lurid visual eroticism to convince us of the characters’ transgressive desires. It’s all guarded under those circumspect gazes, nudging the film softly rather than emphatically toward the queerness that becomes its unexpected victor.

Top 10 - 2020

No, you're not going crazy: we're just over a month away from 2022 and I'm only now getting around to posting my top ten list for 2020. The reasons for this rather extreme tardiness mostly have to do with the fact that 2020 was a strange and tumultuous year; its many intersecting disruptions hardly need to be recapitulated. That perhaps the biggest personal impact the pandemic had on my life was how it threw my moviegoing out of whack reveals that I don't really have much to complain about. Still, with theaters shut down and so many films locked behind the paywalls of the seemingly hundreds of streaming services in existence, it was a weird and unsettling time to be a cinephile. I saw fewer new movies than in any other year of my adult life, and was playing catch-up long into 2021. Some notable titles, such as American Utopia and Wolfwalkers, I still have not been able to see. 

After all the real-world turbulence and my own temporizing, I decided to just make the damn list already (I am a completist, after all; I couldn't let a lacuna in my archives perpetuate the idea that 2020 was just one big void in time). Even more than usual, this feels like a provisional ranking, culled as it is from a relatively small pool of films to which I really responded. Notably, it includes more documentaries than I've ever had on any previous top ten, with non-fiction films taking up exactly 50% of the list. Chalk it up to a year in which facing ugly realities proved to be unavoidable.

My top ten, comprised of stills and a few words, is after the jump...

Spencer

SPENCER   ***

Pablo Larraín

2021

IDEA:  During her visit to Sandringham Estate on Christmas weekend in 1991, Lady Diana find herself uneasily navigating tensions with her cheating husband and his family.

BLURB:  As conceived by Steven Knight and Pablo Larraín, Spencer is something of a ghost story; it presents an ossified, fog-shrouded Sandringham Estate symbolically haunted by the memory of one of the modern Crown’s most publicized victims. Here, the People’s Princess is not radiant celebrity, but a despondent girl trembling in designer clothes and slumped on the bathroom floor retching over a toilet, a body and mind visibly depleted by the soul-sucking institution of the royal family and its stringently fusty codes of conduct. Kristen Stewart takes on the often jarring nature of this unromantic depiction by situating her performance somewhere in the gap between reality and the collective imagination; never fully disappearing into the role through typical biopic mimesis, she instead stretches and unsettles the iconicity of Diana to the point where we question how much about her we really know, or have ever been able to. The approach doesn’t so much illuminate her legacy as compound its mystique - this is a self-described “fable” after all. If Spencer is questionable, then, in its strategy of knowingly retrospective (and revisionist) portraiture, it’s more straightforwardly effective as a harrowing, expressionistic account of the psychological state of someone being slowly suffocated by social expectation and public scrutiny. The strings and organs of Jonny Greenwood’s score constrict around Claire Mathon’s gorgeously fragile images like the pearls around Diana’s neck; there’s room to roam but nowhere to escape the vice-like grip of demanding eyes. Crucially, Spencer lets its heroine, and us, come up for air in the denouement, giving Diana a valediction transcending her tragic fate.

Dune: Part One

DUNE: PART ONE   ***1/2

Denis Villeneuve

2021

IDEA:  Thousands of years in the future, war is waged over the desert planet Arrakis. Caught up in the conflict is the heir to a galactic noble house that's attempting to ally itself with the planet's native people.

BLURB:  The most arresting thing about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One is its formidable sense of physical magnitude. Understanding that a work of epic fiction calls for an enormous canvas, the director and his superior crafts team have realized a vision with a focus toward the sublime. For 150 minutes, they treat us to an opulent parade of images that play on the parallactic juxtaposition of scales, resulting in breathtaking views of elephantine contrasts: tiny figures dwarfed by brutalist architecture; soldiers coalescing into sprawling phalanxes; massive machinery devoured (literally) by even more supersized sandworms. Villeneuve and crew orchestrate a number of sweeping action set pieces that recall a largely lost form of epic big-budget filmmaking, creating and maintaining scale through an elegant, always legible rendering of spatial relationships. Has sand been so palpable since The English Patient, so multivalent in its materiality and meaning since Woman in the Dunes? The sound design follows suit, its dense, sonorous mix constituting an aural landscape as prodigiously enveloping as the visual one. It’s so easy to fall under the thrall of Dune’s sheer formal heft that one could miss, or at least not mind, its relative tonal monotony and lack of robust characterization, the fact that its huge cast of talented actors are mostly called upon to perform in a register of uniform stolidity. Somehow, this doesn’t make the film less thrilling, and hopefully these elements will acquire more dimension in Part Two. On the level of large-scale science-fiction action-adventure spectacle – and spectacle that also grapples seriously with imperialism, multiculturalism, and spirituality – Part One more than delivers. At its best, it sends chills through the skin that would shake the sands of Arrakis.

The French Dispatch

THE FRENCH DISPATCH   **1/2

Wes Anderson

2021

IDEA:  A presentation of three stories from the fictional magazine the French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, on the occasion of its editor's passing.

BLURB:  Representing Wes Anderson at his most indulgently ostentations and overwrought, The French Dispatch hyperbolizes his style toward near-rococo abstraction. It dazzles and galls often at the same time, and does everything to reaffirm common criticisms of the director’s films as the preciously insular, politically dubious fetish objects of an obsessive aesthete. As in his recent output, Anderson again crafts an alternate-historical world only tenuously connected to reality, in which the chaotic forces of society are held in tension with his meticulously controlled, impregnable dollhouse universe. Bill Murray’s newspaper editor is thus something of a surrogate for the Andersonian superego, attempting to rein in and manicure the uncontainable excesses of reality. In The French Dispatch, these excesses are sublimated into one of the director’s most florid mise-en-scènes, a smorgasbord of ornate graphic layouts, tableaux vivant, breakaway sets, wandering subtitles, animation, and precision-timed sequence shots that overwhelms with its semiotic surplus. It’s awe-inspiring, but also fairly oppressive-feeling, especially in its tendency to smother the human component of a film bursting with famous faces. Also obscured by the foofaraw is history itself, most egregiously in the second story’s frustratingly glib gloss on the May 68 student protest movements. More than usual, even, Anderson seems unconcerned with the real world here, an odd attitude considering his intended homage to the colorful, firebrand, and sometimes unsavory personalities of journalists and artists who have made lasting marks on Western culture. The French Dispatch may in fact honor them, but in the end, it comes across more as a self-regarding kickshaw than an open love letter.

The Last Duel

THE LAST DUEL   ***

Ridley Scott

2021

IDEA:  In late-14th century France, a knight challenges his squire to a trial-by-combat duel after his wife accuses the squire of rape.

BLURB:  Despite its robust length and grand historical backdrop, The Last Duel is not the sweeping epic one might expect. The bombastic spectacle of Scott’s Gladiator is scarcely seen here; more in line with a chamber drama, the film’s action is largely confined to dusty, candlelit rooms and two-to-three-person exchanges over matters of feudal politics, chivalry, and medieval jurisprudence. With little in the way of visual frisson - Scott and Wolski shoot in bland closeups and perpetually gloomy shades of slate - The Last Duel generates its intrigue by immersing us in the minutia of archaic 14th-century French legal and economic systems and their accompanying civil discourse. At stake here is the autonomy of women within these spheres. The script by Damon, Affleck, and Holofcener underscores just how draconian laws surrounding women’s rights have historically been, with its first two chapters anatomizing the entrenched patriarchal structures that bear their inane, bloody fruit in the final third. The Last Duel is heavy-handed in its commentary; even when it’s giving us the supposedly self-glorifying perspectives of the two men, the writing, directing, and acting make it impossible to view them as anything other than what they really are: petulant and entitled, loyal only to their own egos and status ambitions. While the film may seem obvious in its rhetoric or even superfluous as a polemic on systemic sexism, it’s justifiably keen to remind us that, 600-plus years after the events it depicts, women are still being oppressed by legislation for which the adjective “medieval” remains sadly apt.

Memoria

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

MEMORIA   ****

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2021

IDEA:  A British woman in Bogotá, Colombia tries to find the source of a strange booming sound only she seems to hear.

BLURB:  Sound is such a naturalized part of daily life that we don’t often think about how unique a material phenomenon it is. It can seep across boundaries and pass through physical objects; index distance, location, mass, and time; form into melodies encoded with meanings and affects; reverberate within the body as a haptic experience. Apichatpong has always foregrounded the auditory in his films, but in Memoria it becomes his driving force and organizing principle, the phenomenological vehicle by which he unlocks other perceptual states. The sound Tilda Swinton’s Jessica keeps hearing may be purely subjective, but technology and the cinema, as Apichatpong self-reflexively demonstrates, are able to reproduce and transmit it for others to share. Simply and ingeniously, Memoria equates this communicable power with memory, specifically national memory, which it understands as embedded in the landscape and transferred through material things. In a familiar dichotomy, Apichatpong’s narrative transitions from a modern urban environment to a lush rural one, where the shedding of the city’s sensory stimuli allows for an opening of consciousness to history, myth, and dream. Here, Memoria offers its most distended shots, its most transcendent marriages of image and sound, revealing the world in all its porousness as a sponge of intercorporeal sensations and resonances. While Apichatpong doesn’t quite address the connotations of having Jessica, a white European woman, serve as his conduit for Colombia’s colonial trauma, race seems to be fairly beside the point for the director. Like sounds and their affects, so much of Memoria bypasses language and dissolves barriers, sublimely attuning us to the unaccountable phenomenological networks that flow all around and within us, beneath the visible surface of things. For Apichatpong, accessing these networks is but a matter of gentle perceptual modulation, whether through sound, music, food, drugs, conversation, meditation - or film.

The Tsugua Diaries

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

THE TSUGUA DIARIES   ***

Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro

2021

IDEA:  A film crew attempts to make a movie during COVID lockdown.

BLURB:  According to David Bordwell, art films constitute “a cinema of psychological effects in search of their causes.” Such an inverse of traditional narrative logic would seem to be literalized by The Tsugua Diaries, which presents itself in reverse chronological order. However, rather than use this structure to draw the spectator into a riddle of fractured cause and effect - an expected route for such a cerebral conceptual project - co-directors Gomes and Fazendeiro seem to have something simpler but no less evocative in mind: an undermining of our perception of time as necessarily linear and teleological. As such, the film neither begins at a recognizable denouement nor ends at the causal source of its “psychological effects”; instead of tracing its events and its characters’ relationships back to some putative origin along a cleanly sloping timeline, it charts a bumpy path of ups and downs, forward and backward movements side-by-side. In addition to being an apt depiction of the creative process, which The Tsugua Diaries is most explicitly about, this ebbing and flowing also mirrors the course of the COVID pandemic, the film’s impetus and structuring reality. Just as the pandemic interrupted the flow of daily life, so too does it intrude on and mold the course of The Tsugua Diaries, its contingencies and restrictions paradoxically fostering a sense of artistic freedom. Gomes and Fazendeiro take advantage of their improvised, cozily commune-like filmmaking retinue to create a small, nifty portrait of collective creativity, where the end product is less the point than a shared experience among friends.

Hit the Road

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival. 

HIT THE ROAD   ***

Panah Panahi

2021

IDEA:  A family of four embarks on a road trip to deliver the eldest child to a mysterious checkpoint in the Iranian countryside.

BLURB:  Sharing with his father Jafar Panahi and his late compatriot Abbas Kiarostami a fondness for the cinematic road trip, Panah Panahi places the action of his debut film within and around a traveling car. The ultimate terminus of the vehicle and the family within is unclear; instead of immediately outlining this crucial detail, Panahi spends time fleshing out the familial dynamics of the passengers, whose forced close proximity results in frequently humorous annoyances and squabbles. In a short time, we become familiar with the strong-willed mother; the gruff patriarch, who’s nursing a broken leg and a deeper spiritual malaise; the elder son, who sits sullenly at the wheel; the infirm pooch, Jessy; and the obstreperous kid brother, an ebullient counterweight to what becomes an increasingly solemn journey. With great sensitivity, Panahi gradually shades the family’s interactions with melancholy and pain, tears bursting the dam of willful good cheer. Hit the Road never fully reveals the purpose of the road trip, but it gives us enough information to know that it’s one motivated by sacrifice and a need to escape repressive conditions, and that it will inevitably involve a grudging farewell to a beloved son. That long goodbye, filmed in extreme wide shot, is one of many striking images in Hit the Road that both contextualizes the open spaces of Iran and suggests a relative paucity of attendant social mobility within them. In the face of hardship and heartbreak, however, Panahi never loses his thread of levity and resilience, whether manifested in an imagined, 2001: A Space Odyssey-referencing flight among the stars or a lip-synching karaoke session in the middle of nowhere.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN   ***1/2

Radu Jude

2021

IDEA:  A primary school teacher faces the wrath of society when a sex tape she filmed with her husband inadvertently winds up on the Internet.

BLURB:  Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is perhaps as close as 21st-century world cinema has come to the transgressive audacity and excoriating political satire of Eastern European art films of the 60s and 70s. It’s a film designed to slice right through the equivocating bullshit, a vivisection of a mass culture warped and degraded by the shared toxins of capitalism, nationalism, racism, anti-intellectualism, moral fundamentalism, misogyny, and social media, a COVID-era Idiocracy if Idiocracy had teeth and aesthetic daring. While Jude’s utter contempt for the current cultural and political climate (and Romania’s in particular) is astringently apparent, Bad Luck Banging… is more than a one-note polemical instrument. Following the vérité observations of the film’s first third, a promenade through the crass maze of commodity signs swallowing modern Bucharest, Jude launches his best and most rhetorically ambitious formal exercise. Suspending narrative with liberating abandon, he enumerates a glossary of terms, many of which he trenchantly relates to shameful chapters in Romanian and European history. Baldly - although with tongue in cheek - addressing injustices past and present, it’s a sardonic, sobering kick-in-the-pants of a school lesson, the kind that so panics the benighted conservative parents in the film’s culminating, screaming outrage circus of a PTA conference. Tellingly, this dictionary portion ends on the word “Zen,” which it defines as an attitude of regarding life as both a tragedy and a comedy. This underlies the general philosophy of Bad Luck Banging…, a barbed time capsule that invigoratingly reflects and refracts what is horrifying, vulgar, and mind-bogglingly ludicrous about the state of the world circa 2020.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY   ***

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2021

IDEA:  A triptych of episodes focusing on the impact of free will, coincidence, and social mores on the lives of different women.

BLURB:  Social interchange is a mercurial and adventitious things in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a structurally sneaky comedy of manners, errors, and fateful encounters. Each of its three chapters - stark, sometimes time-hopping chamber plays that suggest life distilled to miniatures - revolves around the strange alchemy of chance and desire, alighting on minor inflection points that have the potential to birth new possibilities, whether fortuitous or otherwise. Often recalling Hong Sang-soo’s tricksy relationship games, Hamaguchi frequently films dialogue between characters in long, static two-shots, his camera like an X-ray picking up conversational tensions, mood shifts, and granular mutations in real-time. And like another master auteur, Abbas Kiarostami, he slyly manipulates character dynamics to create a series of enigmatic displacements that consistently reshape the nature of the relationships we’re witnessing. Sunny demeanors conceal romantic frustration and cunning; malicious intent dissolves into a reciprocal voicing of desire; old friends become strangers, and vice-versa. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy evolves too, growing funnier and richer as the addition of its chapters generates new semiotic connections. What is intriguing if for a while a bit airless comes to a satisfying payoff in the final third, when Hamaguchi turns the game on us, combining prior textual knowledge, accumulated expectations, and deceptive new signifiers to upend our perception of the characters in tandem with their own confounded perceptions of each other. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy steadily compiles such revelatory discoveries, and, to borrow from one of its chapter headings, leaves the door wide open for more.