Sunday, June 29, 2025

Pecker


PECKER   ***1/2

John Waters
1998
























IDEA:  After an amateur teen photographer becomes a sensation in the art world for his vérité pictures of his neighborhood, his real life and his community fall apart. 




BLURB:  A blasé outsider artist from suburban Baltimore has his work co-opted by the art-world establishment and assimilated into the elite culture of the urban intelligentsia. It’s hard not to read Pecker as John Waters’s self-reflexive, ironic commentary on his own complicated relationship with the commercial mainstream. Like a more intentional version of the titular Pecker, he was transformed by tastemakers from an unapologetically transgressive enfant terrible to a branded auteur sanctioned by Hollywood and the critical canon. In ways sincere and hilariously irreverent, Pecker uses the art/commerce opposition to satirize the way the capitalist image economy commodifies and fetishizes people's lives, makes a spectacle of consumption, and creates an artificial binary between “high” and “low” culture. The film’s giddy magic comes from how Waters collapses that division completely, with Pecker’s amateurish, impromptu photographs — often depicting scenes of social indecency — being hailed by the establishment as masterpieces of working-class authenticity. What’s trash and what’s art? Who gets to decide, and at what cost? The film, and Waters through it, argues that art can be found anywhere and in any thing, from laundromats and Virgin Mary shrines to go-go bars and thrift shops. And while the stuff that’s dirty, transgressive, and abject is often neutralized or expunged to be packaged for the mass market, sometimes, as the case happens to be in both the narrative and form of Pecker, they poke through with just enough queerness and uncontainable excess to resist capture.

Thursday, June 19, 2025

The Phoenician Scheme


THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME   ***1/2

Wes Anderson
2025

























IDEA:  Hunted and sabotaged by his adversaries, a wealthy business tycoon embarks on a quest with his appointed heir - his only daughter - to convince his associates to fund his newest and biggest project. 



BLURB:  The title sequence of The Phoenician Scheme — a long-take, slow-motion overhead shot of a monochromatic and sparsely furnished bathroom — heralds a simpler Wes Anderson than we’ve become accustomed to over the last decade-plus. The ensuing film has few of his most extravagant (and irritating) formal indulgences: no meta framing device or laborious stories within stories, no chaotic profusions of onscreen text, no constant shifting between aspect ratios and time periods, and not as many elaborate camera movements or overstuffed images. There’s still a sprawling cast of characters, but the narrative is focalized around just two (maybe three) of them, harkening back to the more intimate emotional worlds of Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel. At its core, The Phoenician Scheme is the story of an amoral megalomaniac finding spiritual redemption by reconnecting with his estranged daughter. This is old ground for Anderson, and arguably exhausted by this point, but the situational detail, humor, and pathos he brings to the characterizations of Zsa-Zsa Korda and Liesl are so finely realized it feels like a cleansing distillation rather than a retread. Benicio del Toro cuts a magnetic figure as a worldly, grandiose scoundrel, and Mia Threapleton is a mordant delight as the vexed novitiate daughter who grudgingly comes along on her father’s mission. Biblical allusions, transcultural mischief, and cinematic intertexts abound (hello, A Matter of Life and Death!), but the film moves with a streamlined linearity that never loses sight of the relationship at its center. The Phoenician Scheme wraps that affecting parent-child rapprochement in a witty fairytale adventure that also has something to say about the abuse of power in a global capitalist world (shades of a certain U.S. president-turned-felon are unmissable). Maybe a person like Korda being humbled is a fantasy in real life, but in Anderson’s malleable and merciful alternate universe, it’s blessedly achievable.