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.

The Hateful Eight

THE HATEFUL EIGHT   **

Quentin Tarantino

2015

IDEA:  Wyoming shortly after the Civil War. Eight disparate individuals on the way to Red Rock are cooped up in a cabin stopover during a blizzard, suspicions growing as nobody seems to be quite who they say they are. 

BLURB:  Tarantino seems to be regressing. As his films have grown more grandiose in subject matter and theme, they have also become increasingly bloated and overwrought, not to mention juvenile and cruel. For a while, The Hateful Eight appears to be building toward something better as it carefully sets up its chamber piece scenario, corralling its diverse characters and generating tension from the distrust, animosity, and guarded motives they harbor. Ennio Morricone’s dread-inducing score pounds away with their every cautious forward movement, signaling that the film belongs as much to the horror genre as it does the western, and that a collective release of malice is surely yet to come. And come it does, resulting in queasily bountiful sprays of blood and bodies piling up. It’s sooner rather than later that the narrative and its intrigues fall apart, the reveal of the story’s true course as unimaginative and ultimately predictable as the bloodlust that seems more than ever to be the main goal. Tarantino has always enjoyed setting up overripe scenes and letting them unfurl before a burst of violent mayhem, but rarely has the aftermath felt so gruesome for gruesome’s sake, brutality so punishingly acrid that any trace of humanity has been all but extinguished from his sordid game. Although he positions his viper’s nest of racism and rancor as a microcosm of volatile post-Civil War America, and by extension of an enduringly fraught sociopolitical climate, any serious indictment of violence the movie may offer is quickly erased by how much glee the director derives from the cruelty he engineers. Cloaking his three-hour schlock under the pretense of contemporarily resonant historical drama isn’t only self-aggrandizing, but highly dubious.

The Good Dinosaur

THE GOOD DINOSAUR   ***

Peter Sohn

2015

IDEA:  Dinosaurs continue to roam the earth after the asteroid intended to extinguish them passes by. In this alternate reality, a young, estranged Apatosaurus named Arlo befriends an orphaned human boy.

BLURB:  It seems entirely paradoxical, but The Good Dinosaur may very well be Pixar’s most formulaic film to date as well as its most unusual. For a studio renowned for its inventiveness and expansive imagination, it is unusual, firstly, because it feels so formulaic. Discarding a bounty of unique storytelling possibilities inherent in its intriguing premise, the studio ends up with a derivative journey-back-home narrative centered on orphans, interspecies friendship, and familiar themes of family and overcoming fear. Most unusual, though, is not the fact of this slim and uninspired narrative but what is foregrounded in its stead. The Good Dinosaur represents perhaps the first time Pixar has shifted its primary focus from story or even character and placed it on purely perceptual principles, drawing our attention to the meticulous optics of texture, light, and movement. Mountains, water, rocks, dirt, foliage, and various animal flesh are rendered with jaw-dropping, hyperreal tactility, becoming the film’s true content. They are observed with a reverence for the natural world seldom seen in mainstream Western animation. Even rarer is the film’s violent physicality, its lifelike sense of the effects of environment on bodies and its bizarre, at times comical fascination with somatic trauma. Where so much CG animation feels plastic and weightless, Pixar’s film is remarkable for how much it invests in corporeality and tangible physical expression, a gift for conveying through image that extends to the beautifully wrought central relationship. On one hand, The Good Dinosaur is a disappointingly undercooked piece of storytelling. On the other, it has freed up the technologically and artistically superior studio to indulge in its most lyrical work yet.

Cemetery of Splendor

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR   ***1/2

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2015

IDEA:  A woman volunteers to assist comatose soldiers, who are being treated in a makeshift hospital that sits atop an ancient cemetery. As she spends time with them and a young female medium who also works there, she begins to have perceptions of other times and places.

BLURB:  In Cemetery of Splendor, a woman is taught how to literally open her eyes as wide as possible so she can be sure she is awake. A similar encouragement of mindfulness is extended to the spectator, whose senses are simultaneously sharpened and soothed by the magnificent flow of images Apichatpong has assembled. Intermingling past, present, tradition, modernity, lucidity, dream, and all manner of consciousness in between, he creates a vital space in which various temporal and otherworldly realms seamlessly blend, inviting us to experience them all at once. His mastery is in letting them coexist so organically; no visual or aural signposts are necessary to convey the concurrence of all that is visible and invisible within this space. Even if it is nebulous there is always the sense that we can access its levels, which means that the obfuscation of other Apichatpong films has been stripped away in favor of a concentrated, cohesive, and emotionally direct approach to spiritual worlds. As his lead character, played by the serene Jenjira Pongpas, finds her perception enriched, so do we, through the transcendent language of film. And by positing the cinema as one of our most profound states of perception in its mesmerizing centerpiece sequence, Cemetery of Splendor rebukes political oppression by reinforcing the status of film as impregnable, a legitimate spiritual realm through which release from physical prohibitions is not only possible, but miraculously unavoidable.