Youth of the Beast

YOUTH OF THE BEAST   ***

Seijun Suzuki

1963

IDEA:  A former cop, recently released from prison for embezzlement, infiltrates two rival yakuza groups to destroy them and find the killer of his former police partner.

BLURB:  Combining aesthetic surface pleasures with a guiding postmodernist ethos of pastiche and self-reflexivity, Seijun Suzuki’s films are vibrant blasts of pop-art madness. While not quite as spectacular as some of his later work, Youth of the Beast is entirely cohesive with the director’s inventive, gonzo genre experiments. The tropes are familiar - an antihero with a shady past, gang rivalries, unreliable women, subterfuge and double-crossings - but the thrill is in how Suzuki abstracts these elements so they function in excess of their narrative meanings, transforming them into signifiers of their own pulpy sensationalism. Temporal and spatial continuity are less important than the jazz-like rhythms established by movement, composition, and color; teeming with visual information on multiple planes, Suzuki’s widescreen frames host a riot of activity that at once conveys a modernizing Tokyo and a newly adventurous kind of cinema. Despite the deliberate, very noir-ish convolutions of Youth of the Beast’s plot, Suzuki directs with such confidence, flair, and freewheeling energy that rarely does even the most questionable idea or story development feel like it could be any other way. Joe Shishido dispatching yakuza while hanging by his feet from a rope attached to the scrawniest chandelier ever? It makes sense in Suzuki’s elastic world, where cartoonish men are parodic icons of machismo, and violence is a spectacle both of cinematic excitement and sheer human inanity. 

SubUrbia

SUBURBIA   ***

Richard Linklater

1996

IDEA:  In the fictional suburb of Burnfield, USA, a desultory group of recent high school graduates hangs around behind a convenience store. Tensions rise when they're met by an old acquaintance who's become a musician in Los Angeles.

BLURB:  The characters in Richard Linklater’s Slacker may have been aimless, but they were propelled, productively or not, by intellectual and creative energies. The circuitous, vignette structure of the film - a roundelay in which one set of characters passes the narrative “baton” to another - generated continuous movement, even if it was just across the street or into a club. By contrast, many of the small cast of characters in SubUrbia are well and truly stuck in place, both physically and mentally. Paralyzed by post-high school ennui and disillusionment, they fritter away their time drinking and fulminating behind a convenience store whose Pakistani owner they regularly harass. They do not possess the educational backgrounds of the Slacker kids, nor are they steeped in the fertile culture and social scene of Austin, Texas, and so their idleness and cynicism curdle into cruelty, both self-inflicted and interpersonal. SubUrbia is certainly among the bleakest films made by Linklater (that the material wasn’t created by him is telling), a portrait of young white middle-class inertia that mostly forgoes witticisms for laments, delivered into the void of an empty parking lot in the middle of the night. The execution is stagey, owing to the film’s theatrical origins, but Linklater generates tense and often surprising rhythms among his actors, all of whom play the foibles of their characters without appeasing facile audience sympathies. Sure, theirs are “First World” problems, in contemporary parlance, but they know that: for the most miserable among them, such knowledge can’t erase the discrepancy between their relative material comfort and just how purposeless they feel. 

Barbie

BARBIE   ***1/2

Greta Gerwig

2023

IDEA:  When Barbie is overcome with irrepressible thoughts of her mortality, she ventures into the real world to find the solution to her malaise.

BLURB:  From its very existence to its narrative and themes, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie prompts us to consider the relationships between art and commerce, people and the objects they make and use in a consumer-capitalist mass culture. The nebulous boundary between the film’s Barbieland and the “Real World” suggests the protean interchange we have with the culture we create, a conversation in which ideology flows both ways. Gerwig and Baumbach ask us, with a balance of irreverence and earnestness: how does a branded product like Barbie become more than a commodity? Who gets to decide what she represents, and in what context? Gerwig’s film answers that by positing a Barbie that promotes the authenticity and diversity she has historically been decried for disavowing. The director at once fashions a feature-length Mattel commercial that rehabilitates the doll’s image in the name of feminism – i.e., Barbie has always been about empowering the aspirations of girls – and indicates the ways in which the toy has conditioned girls with a sexist, idealized concept of womanhood, which, going back to the commercial aspect, can be transcended through the evolution of the brand to reflect changing societal attitudes. So yes, Gerwig plays nice with Mattel, but her film is also genuinely artful and clever, a showcase for incredible craft and inspired ideas and performances, for auteurist idiosyncrasy within the parameters of big-budget studio mandates. Moreover, it’s a poignant coming-of-age story that feels of a piece with Gerwig’s Lady Bird and Little Women, films that candidly grapple with the anxieties and desires of young women negotiating their growing independence. Like Toy Story, Gerwig’s Barbie proves that our childhood toys can be among the most acute conduits for existential exploration.