Nope

NOPE   ***1/2

Jordan Peele

2022

IDEA:  On their family's Hollywood horse ranch, a pair of siblings begin experiencing a series of increasingly threatening supernatural phenomena. 

BLURB:  Among the myriad indelible images in Nope is a desert blanketed with multicolored tube men. Used to signal the proximity of a UFO, the flailing inflatable figures constitute a vibrant display amid a parched landscape, their unblinking eyes beckoning our gaze. Vision and spectacle are at the heart of Peele’s film, a thrilling, supremely clever genre mashup that interrogates our scopic regime in relation to mass media: what we look at, how we look at it, and who gets to look and be seen. The tube men emerge as just one manifestation of the commercial spectacle that echoes throughout Nope in bold and surprising ways. Peele is particularly concerned with how violence and tragedy become transformed and commodified for mass consumption, seen most vividly through the arc of Steven Yeun’s traumatized former child actor. It’s in his backstory that the exploitation of animals in show business comes luridly to the fore, and in which Peele orchestrates some of his most formidable filmmaking, using image and sound to withhold and reveal information with the command of a suspense master. Like the writer-director’s first two features, Nope also reflects on the institutional subjugation of black people in America; here, Peele grounds that theme in the history of cinema and the racist legacy of Hollywood, positioning his film as a riposte to an industry that has erased, abused, and sensationalized minority identities. In the tradition of idiosyncratic Hollywood iconoclasts such as John Carpenter, Peele embeds his pointed social commentary in the conventional pleasures of genre, offering a clinic in how the cerebral and the amusing need not be mutually exclusive. Nope certainly belongs to the cinema of attractions, but in analogy to the way its UFO becomes dazed by colorful excesses, it also uses spectacle against itself. A novel thing in contemporary mainstream film, it asks us to question the moral, psychological, and social costs of the media we make and consume, and to ponder when the titular word might be the appropriate response to that media’s voracious pull.

Arizona Dream

ARIZONA DREAM   ***

Emir Kusturica

1993

IDEA:  After coming to Arizona on the behest of his Cadillac dealer uncle, a New York fish-counter falls in love with an eccentric woman who dreams of building her own flying machine.

BLURB:  Arizona Dream presents a porous universe in which reality, dream, and cinema produce and reciprocate each other in an irresolvable feedback loop. In this möbius strip of a cosmos, you can see a man mime the crop-duster scene from North by Northwest at a talent show before finding himself stalked by a real aircraft in an impromptu reproduction of the same scene. It’s a place where Chekhov’s gun is invoked and, of course, used. Where the combination of Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Vincent Gallo, Lili Taylor, sea turtles, Cadillacs, and Sirkian domestic psychodrama improbably exists. If this all makes Arizona Dream sound preciously self-reflexive or just downright arbitrary, that wouldn’t be inaccurate. Kusturica’s raucous direction fosters a tonal stew that vacillates between astringent, often slapstick black comedy and existential drama. The filmmaker has negotiated this balance better in other films; here, the manic tenor tends to cross the line into the ungainly and strident, clouding a narrative that often seems divorced from any kind of perceivable calculus. That being said, illogic also appears to be somewhat of the point. Arizona Dream deserves recognition for being a rare (semi)-mainstream film committed to the philosophy and aesthetics of surrealism. Similar to works by Buñuel or Jodorowsky, it creates a deliquescent, uncanny dream logic of free-floating symbols that speak in some indirect way to our deepest fears and desires. Kusturica and screenwriter David Atkins throw up signifiers both opaque and obvious (all the allusions to flight), inviting us to intuit connections more than interpret meaning. And if one can’t see the connection between Faye Dunaway ebulliently piloting a Wright brothers-style flyer and Jerry Lewis speaking Inukitut, well, some things just may never make sense.

Play

PLAY   **

Ruben Östlund

2011

IDEA:  A group of black immigrant kids in Sweden carry out an elaborate scheme in which they gain the trust of middle-class white kids to rob them of their cellphones and other belongings.

BLURB:  The children are definitely watching us, but who’s watching them? That’s a question posed heavy-handedly and pleonastically by Play, a self-serious Euro-arthouse provocation masquerading as profound sociological study. The film comes unashamedly from the Michael Haneke playbook of clinically-observed cruelty, its gaze trained coldly on the complacency and moral apathy of capitalist bourgeois society. Like his pitiless Austrian idol, Östlund favors long, often static master-shots that echo the impassive indifference of his characters to the violence and inequity occurring around them. Sometimes, the camera’s creeping pans and zooms suggest the automatism of mass surveillance, signifying a state apparatus void of human compassion. In Östlund’s dourly cynical formulation, we become aligned with that acedia and inaction; moreover, we’re asked to confront our racial and class biases as we witness lower-class black immigrant children systematically deceive and rob middle-class white kids. But what, exactly, does this seemingly tendentious narrative want us to understand? That immigrants can be criminals, and that liberal piety conceals this truth? Östlund’s aim is dubious at best; it doesn’t help that his characters feel more like pawns in an experiment than actual people, inhabiting a world that operates according to its imperious creator’s disingenuously manipulative rules. Formally impressive though it is, Play is a smug, overlong slog, displaying precious little of the dramatic tautness or biting dark comedy Östlund would master just three years later.

Love on the Run

LOVE ON THE RUN   ***1/2

François Truffaut

1979

IDEA:  While awaiting his divorce from Christine, Antoine Doinel has struck up a relationship with record shop employee Sabine. Escaping his troubles with both women, he runs into his former flame Colette at a railway station.

BLURB:  After all his aimless peregrinations and relationship woes, Antoine Doinel at last finds some measure of surcease in Love on the Run, the disarming final chapter of Truffaut’s 20-year saga about the imprudent, perpetually stifled young man. Per the title, however, he’s still chasing romantic satiety for most of the film. Proceeding from a hallucinatory opening sequence that blurs the distinction between passionate intimacy and hostility, Truffaut interweaves Doinel’s latest flight from responsibility with a spate of flashbacks to his tribulations from the preceding installments in the series. The uneasy sense that this is all a glorified, redundant clip show eventually recedes as the flashbacks accrue a psychic, spectral power, the traces of the past resurfacing for Doinel in what amounts to a delayed reckoning. Our protagonist isn’t the only one reflecting on the effects of his actions, as Love on the Run devotes just as much time to the subjectivities of the women who have crossed his desiring path. In the most surprising and welcome development of the whole Doinel series, it is Colette, heretofore the most narratively diminutive of Doinel’s love interests, who emerges as something of the film’s stealth hero. Often shot in adoring closeup, actress Marie-France Pisier imbues the character with equal parts moxie and melancholy, giving her a fully-fleshed life apart from the man to whom she is otherwise inextricably tied. Her happy ending is just as cathartic as Doinel’s, who, no longer on the run, is nevertheless gifted with Truffaut’s most ecstatically kinetic gesture, answering the concluding freeze frame of The 400 Blows with a radiantly romantic whip-panning sendoff.

The Harvey Girls

THE HARVEY GIRLS   ***1/2

George Sidney

1946

IDEA:  En route to Arizona to marry a man she's never met, a young woman falls in with a group of waitresses working for the famed Harvey House hospitality chain.

BLURB:  Despite its low profile in the canon of MGM musicals, The Harvey Girls is among the heartiest and most satisfying of the films created for the studio by the Arthur Freed unit. On a cinematographic level alone, Sidney’s tuneful Western is several cuts above the standard 1940s crop. From the rousing, geography-trotting company performance of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” to the sinuous craning shots that ascend a balcony or zigzag across a ballroom floor, The Harvey Girls feels like a genuine work of film art, its musical strengths supported and elevated by its considerable formal panache. It helps, too, that the film features a dynamite ensemble cast working as both a fluid, evenly showcased collective and as an elegantly delineated community of idiosyncratic individuals, each with their time to shine. Within its milieu, The Harvey Girls ennobles its titular waitresses and, in its way, the showgirls with whom they compete for business, offering a generous celebration of the historical importance of women in the service industry. It might be a bit of a stretch to identify in this anything more than the germs of a proto-feminist ideology, but the attention to politics is itself a welcome dimension, making a grand Hollywood entertainment that has so many other plates spinning effortlessly - Comedy! Romance! Action! Melodrama! - all the richer.

House of Bamboo

HOUSE OF BAMBOO   ***

Samuel Fuller

1955

IDEA:  After an American military officer in Japan is killed during a raid on an army vehicle, an ex-GI arrives in Tokyo looking for the culprits.

BLURB:  Throughout House of Bamboo, Samuel Fuller juxtaposes stodgy, stolid Americans - ex-GIs involved in a Tokyo crime syndicate - against the vibrant color and social ritual of a Japan reemerging from the rubble of World War II. In DP Joseph MacDonald’s dazzling, masterfully composed CinemaScope frames, the men’s gray coats and fedoras cut sharp, incongruous lines across a milieu abounding with kabuki performances, fan dances, and women in bright kimonos. It’s an expression of blustery men trudging through a place where they don’t belong, which is to say, a metonymy of American occupation and cultural imperialism in postwar Japan. As a Hollywood film, House of Bamboo is unavoidably bound up in this very process, and Fuller is able to have his cake and eat it too by having his hero be an ex-GI just like the antagonists over whom he triumphs, reinscribing virtue as the prevailing American character. Still, the film’s Western gaze is complicated and tempered by its genuinely lovely images of Japan and its people, which are far less exoticized than one would expect from a Hollywood film of the era. Rather, they veridically index the peculiar, inchoate meetings of tradition and modernity transforming the Japanese culture and landscape, for better or worse. The forceful melding of East and West comes to a head in a Hitchcockian finale high atop a revolving amusement park ride, on which American tyranny is a recurring view.

For Me and My Gal

FOR ME AND MY GAL   **1/2

Busby Berkeley

1942

IDEA:  Vaudeville stars Jo and Harry fall for each other during the onset of World War I, but when Harry receives his draft notice their personal and professional partnership is put in jeopardy.

BLURB:  Even by the standards of the more middling Golden Age Hollywood musicals, which are surely more abundant than the exceptional ones, For Me and My Gal doesn’t inspire much excitement. Berkeley’s trademark large-scale dance choreography is nowhere to be found, while Gene Kelly, in his screen debut, is afforded scarce opportunity to show off the virtuosic footwork for which he would soon become renowned. If one adjusts their attitude toward the film, understanding it as more of a romantic melodrama with some music than a musical with some romance, For Me and My Gal delivers a degree of satisfaction, albeit on still fairly routine terms. Berkeley puts his troubled lovers, played by Kelly and Judy Garland in their first of three film pairings, through a familiar, sentimental romance-torn-by-war scenario. The war threatens not only their love and courtship, but, in the fashion of a backstage musical, their work as performers. How will anyone survive without show business? They won’t and can’t, the film suggests, as the need for uplift in hard times is manifested as a patriotic demand for mass entertainment. Hilariously, For Me and My Gal substitutes World War I for the (then) ongoing World War II, flouting all the obvious geopolitical differences for the direct purpose of morale-boosting propaganda. Against the clunky, the silly, and the trite, Kelly and Garland remind us of the simple power of convincing onscreen chemistry.