Swiss Army Man

SWISS ARMY MAN   ***

Daniels

2016

IDEA:   A man about to hang himself on a deserted island is rescued by a flatulent corpse, whose sundry abilities allow the two to survive.

BLURB:  A sophomoric jape hijacked by dramatists with a sincere interest in exploring human behavior, social conventions, and the warped face of millennial angst, Swiss Army Man is a disarming blend of the vulgar and the humane that insists such qualities are inextricably enmeshed. Kwan and Scheinert present what is a fairly straightforward allegory of the return of the repressed – a timid, despondent man is visited by the moribund embodiment of man’s primal, suppressed urges, and finds his will to live again by reanimating in him what has died – and deliver it with berserk yet unwaveringly earnest commitment via their outlandish buddy-movie conceit. Defying belief, what sounds puerile and thin on paper is robustly moving on screen, as Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe work in perfect sync with the Daniels’ vision, throwing themselves (literally) headlong into this fantasia of lurid corporeal activity while fleshing out an intimate, borderline romantic pas des deux. Central to being alive, the film asserts, is to be a body in space, and to have a mind that can operate that body in all its weird, improbable glory. Kwan and Scheinert offer up bodies, and a tactilely handcrafted world around them, in contradistinction to a culture growing increasingly dematerialized and disconnected, placing ecstatic emphasis on bodily functions and the simple affinities they afford. One wishes their film was even stranger and more transgressive than it is – for all of its colorful inventiveness, it still succumbs to aesthetic and narrative triteness, with too many montages and what amounts to a depressingly familiar ennobling of male solipsism. Still, their main character isn’t let off the hook here, and if he looks kind of psychotic by the denouement, the film mordantly argues that we would too if we all acted our real selves.

Love & Friendship

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP   ***

Whit Stillman

2016

IDEA:  Following the death of her wealthy husband, Lady Susan, "the biggest flirt in all England," arrives at her sister-in-law's manor and concocts a devious plan.

BLURB:  Love & Friendship is a union of two artists magnifying and bolstering the qualities of one another, Whit Stillman revealing the bitter bite of Jane Austen and Austen sharpening the hyper-verbal, mercilessly unsentimental snap of Stillman. The match is scarily right: Austen’s novella becomes for Stillman a dryly scathing comedy of manners with hardly a room for breath, each astringent, scrupulously tailored line of dialogue at once cutting through the folly of aristocratic social ritual and compounding its exhausting gamesmanship. Nobody plays the game better than Lady Susan, a role Kate Beckinsale relishes as she rattles off reams of primly disparaging incriminations without batting an eyelash. It’s all subterfuge all the time, and Beckinsale’s handling of her deceitful verbosity is as likely to give audiences whiplash as the characters she unashamedly deploys it against. Even at a little over 90 minutes this can grow wearying, but Stillman’s propensity for playfully curt cadences typically keeps things from becoming too overbearing. And while anything resembling compassion seems entirely absent from Lady Susan’s actions, Stillman nevertheless honors the audacity of a woman who wins with baldly mendacious words, whose scheming and haughtiness are symptoms of a rigged world of privilege she’s found a way to use against itself. It’s a character invented by Austen and realized by Stillman as another of his blithely self-deluded heroines.

Midnight Special

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL   *1/2

Jeff Nichols

2016

IDEA:  A young boy with supernatural abilities is pursued by the religious cult that considers him a savior and the government that considers him a threat. With the help of a childhood friend, the boy's father takes him on the run.

BLURB:  Midnight Special is a vexing film that has ideas it never seems interested in realizing and intentions it actively bungles. This is a movie about faith in the unknown that gives us little reason to believe; a glimpse of future transcendence that forgets to generate awe or excitement; an imagining of a reality beyond our perception that feels crushingly earthbound; most upsetting of all, an intimate domestic story of parental love, responsibility, courage, and sacrifice that has no heart. The actors in Midnight Special have apparently been instructed to deliver their lines in a tone of monotonous solemnity, awkwardly signaling emotional cues without ever investing feeling in the thin characterizations they’ve been given. Nichols’ filmmaking follows suit as the narrative plods along stolidly, failing to pick up momentum or break free from the rigid parameters which it has imposed upon itself. One could perhaps argue that Nichols is using this listlessness to illustrate the oppressiveness of his American milieu, where cultish religion and government surveillance seek to control life, threatening to tear apart the home. But if the world has gotten this bad, shouldn’t we have a sense of what is being lost in the process? Shouldn’t we sense the humanity, the suppressed beauty, the potential for grace? Nichols arrives there eventually, but the journey is ponderous, its stodgy images and lifeless performances fatally incongruous with its ethereal aims.

The Witch

THE WITCH   ***

Robert Eggers

2016

IDEA:  In 1630s New England, a Puritan family is tormented by strange phenomena after being exiled from their village to a farmstead just outside the woods.

BLURB:  The Witch is not, strictly speaking, nerve-jangling supernatural horror. Nor is it a period drama about Puritans where the occult stands as a purely metaphorical representation of ideological evil. Instead, it craftily synthesizes the two approaches to tell a story where supernatural evil arises as the logical, inevitable result of dogmatic ideology. In Eggers’ film, under perpetually sepulchral skies in a scarily nascent America, it is the religious zealotry, persecution, and unbridled paranoia of the Puritans that literally breed the witches whose existence they only suspected, fulfilling their fear by inadvertently manifesting it. The Witch is brutally effective in this depiction of self-perpetuating and self-consuming fear, running real witchcraft parallel to the inner turmoil and eventual implosion of its Puritan family unit to underscore just how insidious the latter is, its tyrannical repressiveness a horror equal to or more than that of the spirits lurking in the woods. Less successful is Eggers’ handling of tone and rhythm: he makes an audacious narrative gamble early on that pays off conceptually, but it also somewhat hobbles the film’s suspense, and he has difficulty keeping the rope tightly wound to generate the kind of steady, inexorably building dread the film calls for. Thankfully he makes up for the slack with his ghostly visuals, and certainly in the smart nuances that texture this parable of religious hysteria, one that slyly posits the life of sin so much hostility had gone into averting as both a tragic outcome and ecstatic liberation from a paralyzing culture.

Hail, Caesar!

HAIL, CAESAR!   ***1/2

Joel and Ethan Coen

2016

IDEA:  Pious Hollywood "fixer" Eddie Mannix deals with a variety of snafus - including the kidnapping of one of Capitol Studio's biggest stars - while he faces a crisis of conscience.

BLURB:  Leave it to the Coen brothers to craft a farcical satire on the Hollywood studio system that functions as a meditation on faith. In their wry and ingenious tale, it only makes sense: after all, what are the movies but grand illusions that require us to believe in them if they are to work? And what is Hollywood but a capitalist industry we’d also like to think is capable of real virtue? Indeed, the “dream factory” is the oxymoron that centers the directors’ exploration of cinema’s and life’s great contradictions. Within the back lots and stages of 1950s Hollywood they find a sprawling institutional space where pleasure is manufactured while business rules, truth exists only to be trumped by fabrications, and the rigmarole of routine and mechanical process clouds all certainty that its results will have any cultural value whatsoever. Hail, Caesar! thus maintains a characteristic Coen-level cynicism, and it mines deliciously sardonic humor from the foofaraw generated by celebrity personalities and PR politics. Somewhat surprisingly, however, is the optimism that offsets it. Though they may view Hollywood from one perspective as a crass, exploitative instrument of capitalism that controls bodies, what they ultimately find is a magical instrument of creation that provides, as our protagonist notes, entertainment and enlightenment. Or maybe they just want to believe that. Why shouldn’t they? As with any higher power, whether institutional or spiritual, a certain stubborn faith is required. Hail, Caesar! sees the Coens not only honoring the power of make believe, but validating the right to believe in it at all – maybe even, or especially when, it seems most foolish.

Top 10 - 2015

This is the latest I have made a Top 10 list since I began this blog in 2010. As I outlined in a past post, the reason is that I’ve been waiting to see significant 2015 titles that I either missed or that never came to my area, and I didn’t want to compose my list without being able to consider such notable (and obnoxiously late) releases such as Anomalisa and Son of Saul, or streamables available on Netflix and elsewhere. My plan, it turns out, proved to be only partially useful: as of this writing, the second film was only released here last week, and the first is still absent from any theater near me. I suppose it’s my fault for missing them when they were at CIFF back in October…

But something else has delayed my list, something I also made note of in my prior post. It’s that 2015 felt like kind of a bizarre movie year, the rare one in which no single film stood out as a head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest favorite. In other words, you can essentially consider all ten excellent films on my list as equal top-rankers.

One theme emerged, however: cinema. Many of the 2015 films that most spoke to me were the ones that took cinema history and theory as their driving creative forces, building experiences that exploited the material and psychological faculties of the medium. These films were conceptually audacious, aestheticaly indelible, and wonderfully exciting in their understanding, and practicing of, film's boundless formal and narrative potentials.

2015 films of note I still, regrettably, have not seen: In Jackson Heights, Queen of Earth, Anomalisa, Mustang, Joy, Chi-Raq, Arabian Nights, Victoria

TOP 10 AFTER THE JUMP!

The Revenant

THE REVENANT   **1/2

Alejandro González Iñárritu

2015

IDEA:  19th century fur-trapper Hugh Glass seeks revenge against the aggrieved expedition mate who left him for dead.

BLURB:  The Revenant is quite something as you’re watching it. Visually imposing, immersive, brimming with tactile details and visceral drama, it plunges you headfirst into a vivid 19th century American frontier. Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera keeps us unnervingly tied to every step and breath of the protagonists as they weather the merciless elements and contend with their own brutal human natures. Employing long, continuous mobile takes and low angles to place us at a ground level, practically first person perspective, Lubezki continues his run of virtuoso choreography and establishes himself as a legitimate auteur with his own completely identifiable visual language. The filmmaking craft on display is so formidable across the table, from the enveloping sound design to meticulously recreated and lived-in sets, and so engaging as a full-bodied transportation system to another time and place, one may shrug off the most suspect features of the film’s narrative and politics while soaking up the atmosphere. It becomes increasingly difficult, however, to swallow Iñárritu’s ham-fisted metaphors and frequently overblown gestures, his insistence on his film’s Importance as a reckoning with America’s violent legacy. One is apt to question why a film that acknowledges and condemns such a legacy still concerns itself with the heroic journey of a white man, who is literally guided and emboldened by the ghost of his beatific Native American girlfriend. By emphasizing his superhuman resilience, strength, and courage, Iñárritu exalts him above all else. Come the frankly groan-worthy ending, The Revenant has been a thrilling, often awe-inspiring sensory experience and a dubiously inflated tribute to its protagonist’s – and its makers’ – prowess.