Incredibles 2

INCREDIBLES 2   **

Brad Bird

2018

IDEA:  After a disastrous fight with the Underminer, the Incredibles are approached by a billionaire telecommunications scion who tries to rehabilitate their public image.

BLURB:  The most disappointing thing about Incredibles 2 is how content it seems with its consumerist mediocrity. Unlike the best films in the Pixar canon, which are distinguished by singular artistry and storytelling ingenuity, Brad Bird’s sequel looks and operates like a disposable, run-of-the-mill continuation of a popular commercial property. Although continuation might not be the right word: rather than progress the story of the Parr family or the world of “supers” in any meaningful way, Bird more or less rehashes the plot points, themes, and narrative beats of the original film, adding more flash and hectic activity without bothering to develop fully formed ideas behind it all. The inversion of gender roles is merely a feint at social commentary that only underscores how retrograde this edition feels. While Helen is busy going through the motions of the only strand of the story that really matters, the rest of the family is demoted to a stale subplot that stages clichéd, sexist domestic scenes of male ineptitude and female hysteria. Meanwhile, in a move that reeks of Disney influence, an inordinate amount of attention is devoted to the antics of the baby. His erratic, protean mischief is admittedly humorous, but how many times must we watch him combust or fly through walls before we’ve got the idea? Incredibles 2 seems to think simply showcasing and amplifying the foibles of these beloved characters is enough for another round, but the novelty is gone. While the film is breezy and fitfully inspired, it is hard to escape the sense that, after 14 years, the studio ought to have come up with something better than this.

Cold Water

COLD WATER   ***1/2

Olivier Assayas

1994

IDEA:  Two disaffected teenage lovers seek escape from their stifling home lives.

BLURB:  Coming after arid scenes of parental harangue and institutional-social malaise, the centerpiece sequence of Cold Water, a euphoric party-into-the-night scored to Janis Joplin, CCR, and Bob Dylan, arrives like an earthquake. It is a jolt to the film’s and spectator’s systems, a seismic affective shift that erupts the restless adolescent energy that had previously been conspicuously subdued. Assayas’s camera, channeling this unshackling, weaves through the exultant teenage revelers in breathlessly unbroken takes, making the scene as much about joyous release as one of exorbitant, distended time. Yet even as it marks a pronounced tonal departure, Assayas is careful not to make the party into a wish-fulfillment fantasy. As it transpires in its indulgent duration, the pleasurable feeling of jouissance becomes gradually subsumed by a sense of inertia and futility. Parents come searching for their daughter, briefly but unsuccessfully restoring narrative progress; the jukebox of songs furnishing the sensory experience begins to sound rote; the systematic destruction of the squalid building housing the party, and the blazing bonfire, seem more like signifiers of a danse macabre than a celebratory escape. And after the haze of disenchantment sets in the next morning, as it must, Assayas launches his final and most austere stretch, in which freedom and futurity itself dissolve into vaguer and vaguer ideas. Cold Water is a powerful bottling of teenage discontent and that desperate urge to find somewhere – anywhere – that might be more accommodating.

They Live

THEY LIVE   ***1/2

John Carpenter

1988

IDEA:  When a vagabond puts on a pair of sunglasses he finds at an abandoned church, he is awakened to the truth that the moneyed classes are extra-terrestrials brainwashing the masses through media.

BLURB:  What, exactly, is the nature of They Live’s relationship with consumer culture? The film’s vision of a society ruled by an alien power elite that manipulates and enslaves the working class through mass media is certainly an unmistakable ideological critique. Indeed, Carpenter’s realization of this quintessential Marxist dogma is so blatant as to be brilliant, so vividly, bluntly imagined that we wince and laugh not because he is revealing some buried truth, but because he is embossing the obvious to the point of absurdity. They Live mostly operates within this hyperbolic mode of satire, mocking, specifically, the inane and exaggerated machismo of 80s action films, sending up their sensationalized violence and jingoistic politics in sequences of anarchic, self-consciously silly excess. These scenes, which can be at once horrific and hilarious, exhibit a dissonance that makes They Live especially rich: they are the source of the film’s giddy thrills but also its troubling contradictions, images of our familiarized commercial pleasure that bite back. Yet, true to its postmodernist penchant for irony and pastiche, it is difficult to disentangle Carpenter’s film from the objects of its contempt. To what degree is the director merely reproducing the mind-numbing spectacle of the culture he’s indicting? Should a film targeting systemic social oppression be this fun, this digestible? They Live prompts us to question if any product of capitalism can be truly subversive. Its sardonic indulgence in the language of mass-mediated culture might even belie a piercing cynicism: that because the system in which we and the film are embedded cannot be vanquished, humor and amused recognition are maybe our last real defenses.

First Reformed

FIRST REFORMED   ***1/2

Paul Schrader

2018

IDEA:  A reverend begins to question his faith in the world after he meets a radical environmental activist.

BLURB:  A searingly intimate witnessing of one man’s anguished prayer and crucible; a jeremiad wrestling with a sermon; a rumination in perpetual twilight solitude; First Reformed creates an experience of ascetic contemplation in which questions of faith, responsibility, and morality are put on ruthless trial. Shot in the constricted Academy ratio in mostly muted wintry tones and with an emphasis on minimalist, geometric space, Schrader’s film is marked by a severe perceptual austerity that effectively underscores the stark anxieties and obsessive thought patterns such questions foster. For Ethan Hawke’s tortured Rev. Toller, the questioning itself, the spiritual inquiry and guidance that form his very bedrock, becomes an act of increasingly destructive self-flagellation exacerbated by the series of undeniable existential threats he is forced to confront. What is the role of religion in a contemporary world corrupted by commerce and ideological extremism? How can one respect God and his creations and accept man’s systematic despoliation of the planet? How does one maintain hope in the face of such pervasive darkness? Through multiple, soul-searching discourses, Schrader sets up a tonally complex dialectic that bristles with intermingled outrage, skepticism, ambivalence, and intellectual frisson. The film is grim, but not nihilistic; despairing but also, in its breathtaking denouement, inspired by the possibilities of salvation and renewal. As a state-of-the-world lament, First Reformed can occasionally feel reactionary, especially when it comes to its monocular first-person male perspective. But Schrader is too smart to localize the problem, and too humane to welcome the apocalypse. His film is a nuanced, agonized tract that still manages to arrive at something resembling catharsis.

You Were Never Really Here

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE   ***

Lynne Ramsay

2017

IDEA:  A psychologically scarred army veteran and ex-FBI officer acts as a hired gun to save girls from sex trafficking.

BLURB:  Lynne Ramsay possesses a distinctively oblique, poetic film grammar that is thrilling both for its exquisite, unorthodox formalism and for the affects it produces. Her images, often impressionistic close-ups untethered to establishing shots or contextualizing juxtapositions, combine with densely layered soundscapes to create unpredictable and visceral sensations that obtain before the intervention of narrative. This is a syntax informed by the associative logic of memory and dreams, a fragmentary flow of sensory information that antecedes signification or else acts to repeatedly puncture it. In You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay exploits the disruptive and shocking potentials of this language to express the trauma of the Real that perpetually irrupts into her protagonist’s tenuous existence. Even when Joe, played as an ungainly, battered beast of a man by Joaquin Phoenix, is not engaged in his murderous routine, the violence and death that mark his past surface as destabilizing reminders of the trauma he’s desperately trying to exorcise. Ramsay signals their threat in jarring cuts and discordant acoustic arrangements: normally innocuous images and sounds come to induce as much unease as the frequent splashes of ruby blood when collocated through the director’s disorienting audiovisual rhythms, generating a cold-sweat state of anticipation compounded by the vicious thrum of Jonny Greenwood’s score. You Were Never Really Here’s highly aestheticized representation of PTSD, among other thorny subjects, runs the risk of fetishizing or abstracting, but Ramsay is a shrewd filmmaker who knows how to avoid crass spectacle. Even when her technique feels indulgent, its evocative results speak for themselves.  

Ready Player One

READY PLAYER ONE   ***

Steven Spielberg

2018

IDEA:  In a squalid and overpopulated 2045, an enormous free-roaming virtual reality system called OASIS allows people to escape the drudgery of their lives. When the world learns of a hidden game the program's late creator designed into the system - one that would grant the winner ownership of OASIS - a young gamer sets out to beat it.

BLURB:  Ready Player One is in many ways the apogee of Steven Spielberg’s genre cinema, a nostalgia-baked fantasia of popular culture that giddily presents itself as a monument to commercial spectacle. Exercising his characteristic filmmaking vigor, here intensified by the possibilities of an infinitely malleable virtual environment, the director has taken material that can be only descriptive on the page and made it into the very embodiment of the all-consuming mass culture with which it is obsessed. Through its seamless synthetic form, Ready Player One potently extrapolates how this mass culture might continue to manifest in the digital era: as not merely a ceaseless stream of branded content, but as a full-bodied sensory integration with the media apparatus, a lived simulacral state where representation has swallowed reality. In figuring such a reality, a literally virtual one within the film’s diegesis, Spielberg, Kaminski, and an army of effects artists have crafted a virtuosic orchestration of movement within a space whose dematerialized status allows for the liberation of the physical camera gaze. One can feel Spielberg, the eternally wide-eyed wiz kid, exulting in this unbounded mode of image-making – everything from his exhilaratingly kinetic action sequences to the uncanny blending of iconic pop culture scenes and characters buzz with the enthusiasm of a creator given free reign in a limitless sandbox. And if Ready Player One’s trite storytelling and retrograde politics fail to match the scope of its aesthetic vision, they do little to mitigate the film as an exemplar of the media culture that produced it.

A New Home

WELCOME TO THE NEW SITE!

Hey film fans and Cinematic Review readers! Welcome to my new blog, Passion for Perceiving. You might be wondering what prompted this site change - the simple answer is that the web host I have been using since 2010 has become untenable for me. I've intended to make this leap for many years now, but kept holding back as the thought of having to transfer years of content left this less-than-tech-savvy cinephile rather apprehensive. But then I pressed something I probably shouldn't have and my site's formatting went all kablooey. Apparently this is the newfangled result of Webs.com's upgraded builder mechanism, which is shinier but hardly more usable than the old one! Left with a blog whose screwy header I cannot fix (take a look for yourself) and told by the anonymous corporate overseers (customer service) that I could not return to the former "glory" of the antiquated Webs server, I resolved to embark on this epic journey of blog reinvention.

I'm far from having mastered Blogger at this point (in fact I kind of hate it right now), and I obviously have loads of content needing to be imported, so you - and I! - must be patient. But rest assured that everything you loved about Cinematic Review will be available here too, in due time.

Cinematic spectatorship is driven by our passion for perceiving - the pleasure derived not only from looking but from being immersed in the operations and affects of the full human sensorium. The prosaic critical denotation of Cinematic Review has thus metamorphosed into the richer, fuller, more evocative...

PASSION FOR PERCEIVING.