Sexy Beast

SEXY BEAST   ***1/2

Jonathan Glazer

2001

IDEA:  Retired gangster Gal is living an idyllic domestic life in southern Spain when an old associate comes to rope him into a bank heist.

BLURB:  Ben Kingsley’s lunatic gangster Don Logan drops into Sexy Beast like the most unwelcome houseguest ever, and despite the resistance of his hosts, he never really leaves. He’s a classic disruptor, an existential rupture signifying a return of the repressed. In the gangster genre, this comes in the form of a past acquaintance beckoning the protagonist back to a life of crime, and this is certainly the case in Sexy Beast. But Don Logan is not your typical gangster; in Glazer’s narrative formulation and Kingsley’s splanchnic performance, he’s more like the inextinguishable monster from a horror movie. And like a horror movie, Sexy Beast is about boundaries erected, transgressed, and put tenuously back up again. Glazer conceives of a number of imaginative metaphors for this border-crossing, perhaps none more so than the climactic break-in of a bank vault from an adjoining bathhouse, in which the violent drilling of the pool wall and the subsequent eruption of water is intercut with the bloody pummeling of Don Logan, seemingly unwilling to die - or stay dead. Gal’s laborious attempted suppression of Logan is coextensive with the generalized air of sexual repression and paranoia that, at the expense of the underwritten female characters, points up a frustrated masculinity that so often underlies gangster films. Although familiar in that way, Sexy Beast is crafted with such exciting, idiosyncratic audiovisual flair and caustic humor that it doesn’t quite feel like any other crime film out there.

Orion and the Dark

ORION AND THE DARK   **1/2

Sean Charmatz

2024

IDEA:  Fearful 11-year-old Orion is met one night by the Dark, who attempts to prove that there's no reason to be scared of him by taking the boy on a journey around the world.

BLURB:  You could certainly do a lot worse than Orion in the Dark in the current oversaturated, undernourishing landscape of mainstream children’s media. The film has a welcome maturity and depth owed to the screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, whose existentialist sensibilities and propensity for meta-narrative structural trickery are points of inspiration amid the more routine kids’-film tropes. Orion is most effective when it zeroes in on its protagonist’s anxieties, a grab bag of irrational fears that should strike a chord for anyone (child or adult) prone to catastrophic thinking. Using sketchbook doodles and a panicked internal monologue, Kaufman, Charmatz, the animators, and lead actor Jacob Tremblay handle this material with both powerful sincerity and a necessary sense of detached jokiness. This is all before Orion even introduces its other main character, the personified Dark. While the anthropomorphic figure of fear (and his ragtag team of nocturnal associates) are the raison d’être of the film, their entrance inaugurates muddy, overwrought plotting that labors under the weight of its High Concept. It doesn’t help that the character and environment design are mostly unappealing, lacking the detail and pictorial grandeur to match the scope of the film’s themes. Orion is still sweet and moving, and offers valuable lessons for children, but it also feels more than faintly like a budget Pixar knockoff just happy to say it’s better than Trolls: World Tour.

Top 10 - 2023

 

This list is already late to arrive, so I'm not going to spend much time writing an introduction. I'll just say that 2023 was a good year for film, as every year is when you see enough, and that there was plenty to savor even when looking beyond the "big" titles that, more often than not, I had significant qualms about (looking at you, Oppenheimer, Poor Things, and Killers of the Flower Moon)! As ever, American independents and international cinema kept the quality high - which isn't to say I didn't find room for one particular (pink) blockbuster. 

After the jump, I proudly present my top ten films of 2023...