Onward

ONWARD   **1/2

Dan Scanlon

2020

IDEA:  In a fantastical world where the use of magic has fallen into abeyance, a sullen teenage elf is given an incredible gift for his birthday: a staff that has the ability to bring back his dead father for a day.

BLURB:  Onward is a heavily formula-driven movie, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In its fantasy quest narrative, the film makes clear its debts to the pop-cultural legacy of the Hero’s Journey, with particular homage paid to Spielbergian domestic/adventure drama. Family conflict and loss serve as relatable, resonant metaphors for social change, as Ian and Barley’s quest to resurrect their deceased father parallels the desire to restore magic – and its attendant “primitive” wholeness – to a world that has become fractured by modern capitalism. Scanlon and the other writers have some fun with this idea, especially in the case of the corporatized Manticore, but there’s the nagging feeling Onward doesn’t go far enough in exploring its possibilities. Instead, it prioritizes the emotional arcs of its fraternal protagonists, who, for all the charm Tom Holland and Chris Pratt imbue them with, remain largely static in their roles as fledgling hero and goading, cocky mentor, respectively. The film fills their scenes with banal platitudes about being brave and believing in yourself, which it then strangely conflates with blithely reckless, transgressive behavior (turns out, you can do a whole bunch of stupid and deadly stuff if you have magic to save you). And yet, Onward is sweet, beautifully animated, and builds to a poignant conclusion. Its imagination is spottier than it should be, but the core of fraternal love that drives it is intimately conveyed and, in some ways, magical enough. 

Jane B. par Agnès V.

JANE B. PAR AGNES V.   ***

Agnès Varda

1988

IDEA: An innovative biopic of actress and singer Jane Birkin.

BLURB:  Cinema is not only a mirror of the reality in front of a camera, but of the subjectivity of the person behind it. This notion, so central to Varda’s documentary and docu-fictional works, expands in Jane B. par Agnès V. to explicitly include multiple subjects. Here, that’s the triangulated relationship between filmmaker, camera, and filmed subject, in which all parts of the equation are equalized. Varda rejects hierarchical relations: while Birkin is the ostensible object and “muse” of this biopic, she is not positioned to be captured and controlled by the omnipotent Auteur. Instead, Varda establishes a generous, reciprocal interchange with the British-French actress and singer, in which the women are reflected in and by each other, and form a synthesis that transcends codified roles. The result is a most unusual biopic, a dual portrait of two women framed in creative chiasmus, as people who come to their identities through the art they produce. Varda’s preoccupations – time, artistic representation, class, gender, mortality – all emerge through her freewheeling, sometimes desultory-to-a-fault vignettes, but attain another dimension in how they intersect with Birkin’s slippery persona. Jane B. par Agnès V. is an embodiment of the vitality and necessity of this and other collaborations, and most affectingly, a love letter exchanged between creative confidantes.

Best of the Decade - 2010s

I know. It's April. Kind of late for a 2010s decade retrospective. Or is it? 

The truth is, even the best critic hasn't seen everything from the past ten years. It's not possible. I've done my best to catch up with notable titles I've missed in preparation for this list, which is one reason it's so tardy. But there's still much to see, and I imagine that will remain the case for a very long time. Let's appreciate such cinematic surplus, even when it can be overwhelming!

It was a great decade for film, even with the dismaying reality of a handful of IPs almost totally devouring mainstream American cinema, leaving the state of Hollywood as dismally, creatively bankrupt as it's ever been. But the independent scene thrived, national cinemas blossomed and continued to go strong around the globe, and a Korean film won Best Picture right at the end of it all. Not bad, huh?

Because ten isn't enough, I've elected to make a Top 25 (roughly ranked, outside of the top two or three - especially the top, because it is the decade's definitive work of cinema). 

The closest runners-up: Toy Story 3 (2010), Melancholia (2011), A Separation (2011), The Master (2012), Amour (2012), Lincoln (2012), Nebraska (2013), Her (2013), All is Lost (2013), Gravity (2013), National Gallery (2014), Spotlight (2015), The Lobster (2015), The Forbidden Room (2015), Jackie (2016), Toni Erdmann (2016), A Ghost Story (2017), Good Time (2017), Phantom Thread (2017), Faces Places (2017)

The list, told in images, after the jump!

The Green Fog

THE GREEN FOG   ***1/2

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson

2017

IDEA:  A pastiche reimagining of Vertigo, comprised entirely of clips from other San Francisco-set movies.

BLURB:  One of Maddin’s fleetest and most purely joyful creations, The Green Fog finds the director turning to the found footage format to plunder the collective cinematic imagination. Instead of his usual phantasmagorias, Maddin (alongside wavelength-sharing collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) constitute this febrile realm out of pop-cultural representations of San Francisco, one of the most eternal US cities in visual art. Through a feverish assemblage of interlaced Hollywood classicism and kitsch, the filmmakers condense and loosely recreate the narrative arc of Vertigo, from rooftop police chase to final thudding plummet. But the specifics of Hitchcock’s opus – which would color the proceedings even had it been ignored completely, such is its permeating trace – are not as important here as the themes and motifs that underpin it: obsession, repression, fetishism, voyeurism, grammatical recursions, understood by both Hitchcock and Maddin as equally primal to the psyche as to the cinema. As such, The Green Fog is a film made of films that ineluctably speak about film, in an ad infinitum discourse. Its extensive, humorous use of nested clips reinforces this structure, suggesting an endless feedback loop, a hall of mirrors without a beginning or end. Where is the reality and where is the dream? Is there even a way to tell them apart? And is it possible anymore to watch a pensive, implacable Chuck Norris with anything but smirking reverence?

The Naked Kiss

THE NAKED KISS   ***

Samuel Fuller

1964

IDEA:  After running away from her pimp, a prostitute ends up in a seemingly idyllic suburb and becomes a nurse at a children's orthopedic hospital.

BLURB:  True to Samuel Fuller’s caustic, impertinent ways, The Naked Kiss is a subversive twisting of film noir codes. The dissipated postwar milieu is still here, but its moral rot is totally disguised by the patina of everytown Americana. Into this artificial suburb, Fuller drops Kelly, a former prostitute first seen beating and fleeing her pimp in the film’s jolting opening scene. In another, more familiar context, Kelly would be the de facto femme fatale, setting poisonous sexual traps. In The Naked Kiss, Fuller introduces her as an agent of insubordination and danger, only to then reveal her true, almost comically opposed position as a virtuous reformer. As the layers of Grantville get peeled back, and its golden boy philanthropist is revealed to be a child predator, Kelly’s taboo-ness, her socially vilified out-of-place-ness, is recast as something nearly holy: a whore and a mother, a bitch-slapping demimonde and a steward for justice. She’s the foil to the feckless male characters, as any femme fatale must be, but she confounds our expectations by being totally righteous in her crusade. And when she makes her ambiguous exit, she wanders off like a distaff Ethan Edwards, a result of failed assimilation that suggests the values of a hooker are above most of the stuff that passes in an allegedly civil society.

The Last of England

THE LAST OF ENGLAND   ***1/2

Derek Jarman

1987

IDEA:  A dystopian collage of England colored by Thatcher's reign.

BLURB:  “Made in England,” the credits say, not with gratitude but with an implicit forlornness and contempt. For Jarman’s apocalyptic opus is a cri de cœur for a nation descended into political tyranny, a caterwauling lament in restless montage. Jarman’s images flicker and convulse in symphony with a baroque soundscape, creating a dyspeptic tapestry of military violence, working class poverty, and societal collapse. The skies are always the same shade of hellish, irradiated red-pink as the fires that blaze across the film’s largely decimated landscape; the overall dystopian vision bursts with iconography of World War II, the Troubles, and the AIDS crisis, yet remains vague enough that it seems practically timeless – a sobering reminder that such sociopolitical havoc never dates. As expressed formally in The Last of England, it only accelerates, as the film transitions from its relatively becalmed, poetry-narrated beginning to frenetic, wordless thickets of audiovisual chaos. This may be Jarman’s most aggravated, guttural, and resigned work, but like all his greatest films, it’s perked up by a countervailing defiance pushing back at the walls of oppression. Whether it’s a dizzying bacchanalian dance, gay canoodling atop the Union Jack, or Tilda Swinton rage-shredding her way out of her wedding dress, The Last of England speaks with a form of invigorating creative resistance that burns bright in the face of seeming hopelessness.

What Love Looks Like

Meet-cutes, dating apps, disappointment, and second chances: this is the material of Alex Magaña’s What Love Looks Like, a sweet and sunny romantic ensemble comedy about Millennials negotiating love in the City of Angels. Five relationships take their course over an economical but pleasantly ambling runtime, allowing us to observe the vagaries of youthful courtship in the 21^st century. There is plenty of melancholy – one character is struggling to let himself love again following the loss of his wife, while another finds herself repeatedly let down by her doltish boyfriend whose eyes are permanently glued to his phone – but Magaña mostly focuses on men and women finding their way toward each other, rather than on romantic dissolution, signaling through his largely lighthearted tone an intent to deliver on the proverbial fairy-tale ending.

Things aren’t entirely rosy in the beginning. Nicole (Kate Durocher) is flummoxed by her beau Owen (Josh Gilmer), the aforementioned screen-obsessed boyfriend. Fed up with his inattentiveness, she begins a cautious affair with cocky rideshare driver Jace (Trevor Sean). Elsewhere, Calvin (Connor Wilkins) and Summer (Jamie Shelnitz) are separately mourning their fortunes after their Tinder date goes sour. Their respective roommates coincidentally turn them onto the same blind dating app, through which, in a yet more incredible coincidence, they end up anonymously matched. It’s unclear whether this happens because the app is massively unpopular, because their friends conspired to set them up through it, or because only a handful of people are living in LA. Or… destiny? In any case, the emphasis on social media nicely captures the reality of dating in the digital era, especially among young adults.

The other storylines range from the emotionally heavy to the sprightly, sometimes juggling both. Sadness permeates the situation of Sam (Nathan Kohnen), who’s still reeling from his wife’s death when the chipper Evie (Ashley Rose McKenna) invites herself to a sandwich-based lunch with him every day in the park. (A welcome, whimsical touch is the way this same park functions as a meeting place for all five couples, at various points). Sam’s wife appears to him occasionally as a ghostly apparition, urging him to let her go so he can rediscover love and happiness. The conceit is elevated by Kohnen, who makes Sam’s sullenness feel authentically weighty. The back-and-forth between him and Evie helps to leaven the mood, as does the dynamic between Theodore (Jack Menzies, fully committed to his character’s chronic awkwardness when it comes to female contact) and Bailey (Ana Ming Bostwick-Singer), the exceedingly good-natured recipient of his fumbling overtures. Their scenes together are charming without feeling strained, and lead to my favorite moment in the film, a date-night screening of an absurdist reimagining of Casablanca. Rounding things out are the slick Finn (Kyle Meck) and the British exchange student Penelope (Taylor Alexa Frank). Although Penelope initially resists Finn’s entreaties, the two eventually hit it off, culminating in a hasty trans-Atlantic flight with hearts on the line.

Again, it comes as little surprise that the characters of What Love Looks Like mostly get what they want, and there is certainly satisfaction in that. We’re not here to get exaggerated conflicts or violent uncoupling, but rather the ordinary uncertainties and triumphs of young relationships, which, however momentous they may seem in the moment, really are just relationships among many probable ones yet to come. I wish Magaña had made room for at least one that wasn’t heterosexual or monogamous (and it would have been nice to have seen one of the Black couples glimpsed during the film’s opening montage show up as a main pairing), but what is here is a heartfelt reminder that we’re all seeking affection in one way or another, and that sometimes it’s great to bask in the idea that we’ll end up finding it.