Sicario

SICARIO   **

Denis Villeneuve

2015

IDEA:  An FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to help target the head of a major Mexican drug cartel.

BLURB:  As our entry point into Sicario’s world of abject moral chaos, Emily Blunt is a dramatically convincing audience surrogate. Her visceral confoundment and revulsion at the immoral tactics being employed around her, by both her own governmental team and its gangland opposition, is potent, and is shared in every way by the spectator. This conception of real-life morass turned personal nightmare is Villeneuve’s most effective strategy: unfortunately, it is not nearly enough to compensate for his film’s narrative and ideological deficits, which run deep through a clunky, hackneyed script. Content to rehash a boilerplate formula without added nuance, the film goes through the prosaic motions of a morally ambivalent 21st century political thriller, concluding with redundancy that the supposed good guys are just as corrupt as the criminals, and violence begets violence, and nobody wins. Its indictment of US exceptionalism and the untenable suspension of ethical standards in the pursuit of a goal might hit harder if any of the characters actually felt like dimensional human beings, or if Emily Blunt, so emotionally bared, didn’t exist in the story just so that she could finally be put in her place by imperious men. Sicario may have damning words for those men and for the terror they’re so ready to breed, but instead of disempowering them it resigns itself, unimaginatively, to their bankrupt reality.

Mistress America

MISTRESS AMERICA   ***1/2

Noah Baumbach

2015

IDEA:  An introverted college freshman reluctantly meets up with her gregarious, soon-to-be stepsister, and instantly becomes enamored of her boldly enterprising lifestyle.

BLURB:  Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s latest and most jocular tag-along with floundering millenials, a vibrant snapshot of young middle-class ambition stoked and arrested by uncertain creative potential. Baumbach punches up the pacing and dialogue to veritably screwball-level speeds, but he never lets the relative weight of his themes get compromised. On the contrary, his characters’ blithe patter keeps underlining what they lack, and his zaniest, most manic scenes, including a marvelously sustained romp at a wealthy designer’s mansion, are often the ones that chip away at their delusions best. The script, co-written by Gerwig, is loaded with witty, pithy quotes that manage to sound profoundly real and archly theatrical at the same time, the latter effect self-reflexively used to play up the performative aspect of social behavior. Instead of sounding like writerly back-patting, they constellate into rich profiles of the identities constantly being cultivated and negotiated by the film’s rudderless young adults. Baumbach’s commitment to sincerely evaluating their foibles, anxieties, and misgivings through shimmering comedy that neither trivializes nor glorifies is beguiling. It’s what makes Mistress America, in many ways thematically familiar but in others a mature expansion of familiar themes, a disarmingly valuable delight.

The Neon Bible

THE NEON BIBLE   ***1/2

Terence Davies

1995

IDEA:  Teenage David reflects back on his life growing up in 1940s Georgia, when his loving showbiz aunt moved in with his brutish father and frail mother.

BLURB:  If The Neon Bible weren’t so simply spellbinding, if it wasn’t immaculately visualized in hypnotic tracking shots, sensuous textures, painterly compositions, and liquidly elliptical scene transitions, and if it didn’t so movingly evoke, let alone create in the viewer, vibrating pulses of melancholy and quiet ecstasy, it could reasonably be taken to task for being a mannered and even perfunctory exercise from a filmmaker coasting on his style. Admittedly, some camera movements, editing tricks, and sound cues seem rote, products of a default film grammar Davies has grown too complacent with and is falling back on as a crutch. His deliberate artifice, often acutely channeling the distortion of memory and the dissonance of experience, can seem strained. But rote or familiar by Terence Davies’ standards is positively radical by so many others’. A loosely defined, impressionistic embodiment of feelings of lament, confusion, transition, and displacement,The Neon Bible looks and behaves like the singular result of one very specific cinema poet continuing to reach back to the elegiac well he knows best. He may be conjuring the same bittersweet music, but boy is it affecting to hear again.

A Report on the Party and Guests

A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS   ***1/2

Jan Němec

1966

IDEA:  A group of friends having a picnic are randomly accosted by a party of men in the woods, and soon after are invited to a birthday banquet for a seemingly benevolent host.

BLURB:  It’s easy to see why Jan Němec’s A Report on the Party and Guests so aggrieved the Communist Czechoslovak government: though not as blissfully incendiary as some of his compatriots’ works, it is all the same a withering denunciation of the political system, its dry, straightforward presentation making its critique perhaps even more potent. With little more than a pack of pliable petite bourgeoisie protagonists, some officious-looking men, and a wooded area, Němec sets up a droll fable in which picnickers find themselves willfully subjugated in a succession of restrictive power structures that take the forms of games and highly regulated “celebrations.” Shorn of elaborate formal strategies or narrative detours, its allegory registers on a basic, intuitive level, and its tone, suggesting menace mostly through banality, mirrors the insidiousness of the Party it condemns, easily piercing the phony façade that holds up oppression and conformity. The setup is also broad enough that its application is practically unlimited – whether it’s communism or just human folly run amok, A Report on the Party and Guests limpidly sees how evil hides in plain sight.

Morocco

MOROCCO   ***

Josef von Sternberg

1930

IDEA:  A disenchanted cabaret performer becomes entangled in the affections of a French playboy and a lusty legionnaire.

BLURB:  Quixotic and Hollywood-seductive yet tempered by world-weariness, Morocco is one of Josef von Sternberg’s typical products in which romantic notions of all kinds fight against impulses of disillusionment and lament. As in other cases, story is superfluous and often trite, subordinated to glistening images of scenery and faces and the febrile emotions they hold. Sternberg exploits this quality first by making the most of his exotic North African locales, then by reverting, as he must, to the divinely enigmatic visage of Marlene Dietrich. Despite other thin characterizations, Sternberg can never be accused of giving Dietrich paltry roles. Even though her Amy Jolly follows a disappointingly gender-prescribed arc, from defiantly independent and no-nonsense chanteuse to grieving and desperately heartsick wife, Sternberg imbues her with varied and often contradictory facets. She is alternately coquettish, subversive, doe-eyed and intractable; reticent and apathetic yet passionate and assertive; blithely resistant to patriarchal rituals and yet, finally, recuperated by heterosexual love, if only on her own willful terms. The variegated nature of her character offsets some of the movie’s dated mechanics, and the final shot, breathtakingly conjured, reveals that Sternberg knows the price of his romance.

Mad Max: Fury Road

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD   ***

George Miller

2015

IDEA:  In a post-apocalyptic future wasteland, a despot sends a fleet of warriors to chase down and stop the renegade Imperator Furiosa and her distaff crew.

BLURB:  A hard-driving salute to action movie excess and an emphatic rebuke of the capitalistic, patriarchal systems that traditionally order such spectacle, Mad Max: Fury Road gratifies moviegoers’ adrenaline lusts while offering satisfying subversions. Its influences are wide-ranging and proudly displayed: not just the American western, which informed the original series, but more pronouncedly silent cinema, the go-for-broke stunts of Buster Keaton and the visceral collision of Soviet montage. Also in play are grindhouse and late 60s counterculture, exhibited by Miller’s delirious collection of grotesqueries and his forceful, lovingly crude takedown of establishment. The film is strongest when these influences coalesce in operatic action set pieces that are allowed to unfold across the screen unabated; when the action halts for some rather dodgy, perfunctory dialogue, Miller’s desire to make us care for characters best left as allegorical signifiers clashes with his inclination for pure, grimy visual expression. Even if it can’t entirely sustain its barreling momentum, Fury Road’s brash fusion of action physics and progressive politics provides a potent and welcome charge.

Magnificent Obsession

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION   ***

Douglas Sirk

1954

IDEA:  A reckless millionaire playboy decides to help the widow he inadvertantly blinded, and whose husband's death he unwittingly caused.

BLURB:  Douglas Sirk melodramas exist in a reality all their own, one where ripe American pop iconography becomes emulsified in the heightened emotions and comforting artifice of the movies. A negotiation in much of his work, between sincere melodramatic intent and distanced ironic commentary, finds perhaps its most ambiguous manifestation in Magnificent Obsession, Sirk’s outsize homage to harebrained Hollywood kitsch. But is it homage? To what degree is the director indulging a deeply genuine affection for melodrama, in all its lachrymose and patently silly mechanisms, and to what degree is he mocking it? Is the sheer fact of the cockamamie plot, not even Sirk’s own, supposed to implicitly tell us not to take it seriously? Other Sirk films conceal obvious social criticisms that counterpoint his delicate worlds in bitterly revealing ways. But in the absence of notable social targets – consumer-packaged pseudo-spirituality is the closest thing here to an object of ridicule – Magnificent Obsession seems kind of hollow, less a trenchant analysis than a cockeyed love letter to its own dumb, shiny surfaces. It’s melodrama wrapped in more melodrama: whether that makes the film a crafty meta-movie or just exaggerated nonsense is unclear, or maybe part of a point we can only understand in the context of Sirk.