Babylon

BABYLON   ***1/2

Damien Chazelle

2022

IDEA:  A veteran actor, a Mexican immigrant, a fledgling starlet, and a black jazz trumpeter navigate the choppy waters of Hollywood's transition from silent film to sound.

BLURB:  Movies about Hollywood may be a dime a dozen, but there are few if any as devilishly committed to eviscerating its glamour and mystique as Babylon. Chazelle’s rollicking, scabrous opus presents the early days of Tinseltown as a farcically debauched Wild West fueled by all manner of turpitude, abuse, and obscene excess. To make it here, he posits, is to leave morality at the door, to submit to a system of exploitation and debasement in the name of mass entertainment. Even then, longevity and success are hardly guaranteed. As a contemporaneous classic asked: what price Hollywood? Kicking things off with a Bel Air bacchanal before transitioning to the hilariously protracted pandemonium of a desert film shoot, Chazelle constructs much of Babylon as a series of self-contained set pieces that astringently undercut the romance associated with Old Hollywood. The director revels in pointedly sardonic juxtapositions. A bromide about making it to the land of dreams is followed by most of the principal characters waking up in shabby tenement buildings and boarding houses; an inquiry about the need for sound in movies is answered by a loud bowel movement; the shooting of a single take of a cheap early talkie, constantly bungled, is punctuated by streams of profanity before culminating in a negligent homicide. Like all of Chazelle’s films so far, Babylon is a portrait of mad endeavoring, in which the endeavor in question seems increasingly unable to justify the human toll of achieving it. Also like his other films, and in some ways to an even greater degree, it’s an exhilarating showcase of sheer outsize filmmaking mastery and gusto, marked by Linus Sandgren’s elaborate tracking shots, Tom Cross’s rhythmic editing, and Justin Hurwitz’s thumping jazz score. With its monster length, Babylon can feel pleonastic in its messaging and effects, and Chazelle’s handling of the character arcs within his multi-stranded narrative falls well short of the Altman- or PTA-level complexity to which he sometimes seems to strive. But this is thrilling, audacious stuff, a Hollywood philippic/valentine for which the dream factory is perhaps more accurately seen, at least for those inside, as one of nightmares.

Avatar: The Way of Water

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER   ***

James Cameron

2022

IDEA:  After starting a family on Pandora and enjoying years of peace, Jake and Neytiri once again find themselves threatened by colonizing human forces. To escape, they join a seafaring clan that teaches them how to exist in the water.

BLURB:  Whatever their shortcomings, James Cameron’s Avatar films are sui generis in the history of cinema; they’re exorbitantly budgeted, technologically groundbreaking auteurist epics whose primary pleasures, despite the storytelling intentions of their maker, have little to do with narrative concerns. Cinema has been a vehicle for spectacle since its inception, and blockbusters have long privileged the form as one of attractions above all, but Avatar feels somehow different. Perhaps it’s the fact that Cameron, with all the resources at his disposal, has mobilized the true vanguard of moving-image technology in the service of a story and characters that are almost perversely disproportionate in quality and interest. That’s not to say that the story or characters don’t elicit our involvement and emotional identification; the narrative may be trite, but Cameron is enough of a savvy storyteller to make it sing dramatically. Yet one might find themselves (literally) looking past those conventions, entranced by how palpable the blubber of that alien whale appears in 3D, or how it really feels like it’s raining in the theater. The telepresence conjured by Cameron’s use of the technology is so consistently potent that Avatar almost aches to be experienced outside of traditional narrative viewing habits. As in the first film, whose novelty of discovery the new one inevitably lacks, The Way of Water is best when it engages in pure sensory play, particularly in the scenes of marine exploration. These moments are wondrous and enveloping, so hyperreal at times they would mimic lucid dreaming if not for the visible boundaries of the screen. While this sequel offers several elements that spice up the formula of the first - not least among them the Sully children and the reef tribe, who add new layers to the themes of transhumanism and cultural belonging - The Way of Water works mostly because it furnishes a perceptual experience that doesn’t currently have any cinematic analogue.

Athena

ATHENA   **1/2

Romain Gavras

2022

IDEA:  In the fictional Parisian banlieue of Athena, three adult brothers of Algerian descent become variously involved in a violent uprising against the establishment after their little brother is killed by the police.

IDEA:  Everything about Athena - from its title to its archetypal story of fraternal conflict to its operatic visual and musical overtures - suggests aspirations toward myth, particularly Greek tragedy. Gavras certainly signals his epic intentions in the grandiose formal construction. The film is nothing if not cinematographically dazzling, composed of a series of stupefying, physics-defying sequence shots that have the camera gliding through windows, in and out of a speeding van, and at one point straight into a blaze, fireworks of both the figurative and literal kind exploding all around. It’s the kind of virtuosic camerawork and pyrotechnic spectacle designed to flabbergast, which means it also captures the preponderance of your attention at any given moment. Gavras seems more interested in these kinetic maneuvers than in his characters, who are given only a few defining traits, or in the film’s sociopolitical dimensions, which he engages with mostly as a narrative pretext for the thrilling action set pieces. The latter point is especially troubling, making it difficult to view Athena as much more than another ethically dubious commercial entertainment built from real-life strife and suffering. Gavras has evidently inherited his father’s sense of political urgency and skill for depicting on-the-ground social unrest, but an equivalent human sensitivity, at least here, is less abundant.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO   ***

Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

2022

IDEA:  An update of the classic tale set in Fascist Italy.

BLURB:  It’s easy to understand why Guillermo del Toro has such an affinity for Pinocchio, a story of a Frankenstein’s monster who proves to be more human than many of the actual humans around him, and whose desire to be more than a literal and metaphorical puppet makes him a figure of recalcitrance. By transposing the tale to Fascist Italy, this reimagining introduces an authority that especially warrants resisting. The update also shifts the focus of the material’s inherent darkness to more urgently political modern-day evils, adding new connotations to its theme of real and symbolic father-son dyads. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio bristles with the various paternalisms and violences of patriarchs, whether they be, at the most extreme, the peremptory apparatus of fascism, or at the least, the well-meaning but short-sighted attitude of a bereft father trying to ply his wayward wooden creation into the mold of his lost son. Del Toro and his animators generate poignant and at times visceral visual expressions of the clash of barbarity and kinship, from the quasi-body horror of Pinocchio’s conception to the sandy, twilit purgatory and near-death scrapes that reflect Sebastian J. Cricket’s maxim that “love hurts.” The film is relatively sprightly considering the historical context, with musical numbers and a gently comic tone seemingly aimed at keeping the youngest viewers engaged. If del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson don’t totally pull off the balance - the songs feel mostly like an afterthought, and the comedy is lukewarm - this Pinocchio still bewitches in its macabre, intricate handcrafted world and moves in its lucid emotional stakes.

Mystery Train

MYSTERY TRAIN   ****

Jim Jarmusch

1989

IDEA:  A flophouse in a dilapidated area of downtown Memphis becomes a way station for a pair of Japanese tourists, a recently widowed Italian woman, and a British transplant and his two acquaintances.

BLURB:  Jim Jarmusch is ineluctably drawn to coincidence and congruence, rhyme and repetition, similarity and resemblance; those phenomena that, if not exactly indicative of some grand cosmic design, provide fortifying patterns in the chaos of life. Such connections make up the drolly mesmeric form of Mystery Train, one of Jarmusch’s most explicitly and meticulously structuralist works. Everything in the film is somehow both idiosyncratic and commonplace, possessed of its own spirit yet ineffably bound to someone or something else. Memphis doesn’t look so different from a depopulated Yokohama; Will Robinson exists here just as he did on television’s Lost in Space; even Elvis Presley, that singular icon of 20th-century America, resembles the Buddha and the Statue of Liberty from certain angles! And just how many hundreds of impersonators does he have? For Jarmusch, the King is a synecdoche for the country, a mythic chimera of achievement and an ad-mass sign of grandeur concealing deep racial divisions and cultural contradictions. He is the elusive American wholeness the characters of Mystery Train are either chasing or being haunted by, the imago animating and rending the film’s woozy nocturnal Memphis, shot by Robby Müller like a living diorama of Edward Hopper paintings. What Jarmusch’s ingeniously adjacent narratives, transnational cast of outsiders, and myriad formal echoes reveal is a culture that, however distinctive it may seem, cannot be located in any unitary place or idea. As in so much of the writer-director’s work, Mystery Train hilariously and elegiacally embraces the cross-contamination, polyphony, and nomadic nebulousness of America both as it is and, unavoidably, as it’s imagined.