I Am Cuba

I AM CUBA   ***1/2

Mikhail Kalatozov

1964

IDEA:  Four long vignettes illustrate a picture of pre-Revolutionary Cuba.

BLURB:  I Am Cuba is a curious object; a maximalist piece of pro-Castro Soviet propaganda made in partnership between the USSR and Cuba and roundly rejected by the publics of both upon its release, the film is simultaneously preposterous and exhilarating. Preposterous because its sociopolitical rhetoric - crude and unsubtle in a kind of Grand Guignol way – rarely feels grounded in the actual lived experiences of the Cuban people for whom it breathlessly advocates. As a predominantly Soviet production, the film rests on the often touristic and exoticizing gaze of Kalatozov. In particular, he shows little interest in the country’s darker-skinned inhabitants, who mostly appear as signifiers of poverty or sensational Otherness. The characters that emerge as protagonists – a farmer, a student revolutionary, a rural family man –  are generic archetypes that could easily be transposed from any of the 1920s Soviet films from which I Am Cuba derives its spirit, although Kalatozov’s narrative and visual privileging of these figures pointedly departs from the emphasis on a non-individuated collective in something like Eisenstein’s Strike. While the social messaging is at once watery and ham-handed, I Am Cuba nevertheless endures for a reason: it’s a truly astonishing feat of formal ingenuity and immersive sensory spectacle. The film is a swollen sizzle reel of kinetic cinematographic technique, from its raucously expressionistic camera movements to, most famously, the elaborate sequence shots that crane, dive, and soar through space with acrobatic agility. Unshackled from the strictures of habitual human subjectivity, Sergey Urusevsky’s camera acts as its own enchanted, free-floating consciousness. It may not assert the identity of Cuba itself, as the title implies, but it does declare itself as pure cinema. 

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD   ***

Richard Linklater

2022

IDEA:  A young boy in Houston, Texas circa 1968-69 dreams of himself being recruited by NASA to fly to the moon.

BLURB:  For much of its runtime, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood tends to play like your garden-variety Baby Boomer nostalgia trip. Linklater wastes precious little time getting to (and through) the requisite hits of late-60s American culture, with major sociopolitical events and pop-cultural artifacts alike condensed into rapid-cut montages. Attended by the ubiquitous narration of Jack Black as the adult version of our prepubescent protagonist, these parts of the film evoke the digestible, somewhat didactic historical summarizing of The Wonder Years, including that show’s distinctly white, middle-class perspective. And yet, without completely dispelling the sense of banality, Linklater makes Apollo 10 ½ into a uniquely affecting, often startlingly tactile memory piece, overflowing with a reverence for the physical details and sensations of a time and place long gone. While his cultural reference points are contemporaneous television shows, movies, songs, and sites - all conjured with the awestruck thrill of rediscovery - other elements resurrect more timeless childhood pleasures, such as the infantile contentedness of being carried to bed after falling asleep in the backseat of the car. As in Linklater’s Boyhood, these moments accumulate into a bittersweet portrait of youth as a fleeting dream, an idealized mirage that never quite existed the way it does in memory. The rotoscoped animation enhances the quality of vague unreality, real life literally embellished in retrospect. Linklater may view the past with a certain measure of melancholy, but he doesn’t fall prey to reactionary eulogizing. His emphasis on the promise of the once-thriving American space program reveals his thesis: that the seemingly lost excitement of the past is merely dormant, waiting to be reignited in new forms.

Slacker

SLACKER   ***1/2

Richard Linklater

1991

IDEA:  In Austin, Texas near the UT campus, a succession of variously eccentric individuals discuss politics, philosophy, history, popular culture, relationships, and much more.

BLURB:  The characters of Slacker are trapped in discourse. Just as the camera roves digressively from place to place, failing to sustain narrative momentum, the assortment of bored, garrulous misfits who populate those places amble through conversations and speeches before hitting rhetorical dead-ends. A large portion of them simply pontificate to the nearest set of ears, hardly expecting a response; their thoughts and ideas, although often expressed with enthusiasm and eloquence, are discharged into space with nowhere in particular to go. For Linklater, this is the burden of a certain breed of intellect, the putatively indolent but really over-qualified and restless who struggle to find productive outlets for their passions and knowledges within the labor economies of late capitalism. The young adults of Slacker seem to have internalized the deflated countercultural dreams of their Boomer parents; the Boomers, too, run on the fumes of hoary government conspiracies and unrealized revolutions, uniting Linklater’s various layabouts in a trans-generational, ideologically Leftist condition of disillusionment and anomie. At the same time, Slacker palpably marks a series of inflection points for its specific era, at once capturing a fading way of bohemian living in Austin, Texas; embodying, by example, the efflorescing American independent film scene; and auguring the forthcoming explosion of the Internet, seen most presciently in the film’s proto-hyperlink-cinema structure. For all of Slacker’s foreboding - and for all the past and present historical traumas that lurk around its margins - Linklater ends the film on an invigorating note of optimism in the form of a kinetic 8mm film shot by a group of amateur media-makers. As the camera is tossed over a cliff, the image dissolving into an abstract whirl of light and color, the discursive inertia of Slacker is supplanted by an ecstatic release into an unwritten future of possibility.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE   ***1/2

Daniels

2022

IDEA:  Disillusioned with her life and family, a Chinese-American woman begins experiencing a multitude of alternate-universe versions of herself while she fights to stop an omnipotent figure from destroying everything.

BLURB:  Truth in advertising: at its most anarchic, which is most of the time, Everything Everywhere All at Once truly does approximate something like an experience of spatiotemporal simultaneity, its brain-frying pileup of signs and sensory stimuli like a hypertrophic version of our digital-era information overload. Seemingly intent to make their debut film, Swiss Army Man, look like a modest chamber piece by comparison, Daniels have produced an unrelenting cataract of bonkers invention that tests and confounds our credulity - did that really happen? - with systematic precision. One would not typically associate a word such as “precise” with a film of such flagrant excess, but then Daniels are not exactly artists who like to observe boundaries. Everything Everywhere All at Once floods the spectator with a riot of destabilizing juxtapositions; an unclassifiable crazy quilt of tones and stylistic idioms, it’s Hong Kong martial arts film, absurdist farce, gamified sci-fi fantasy, Freudian psychodrama, existentialist horror, and family soap opera, all at once. That this wantonly chaotic film should ultimately coalesce into, of all things, a Zen exhortation for mindfulness and equanimity, is an improbable development of which the deeply irreverent filmmakers seem to relish the irony. On the other hand, maybe it’s not so ironic. Everything Everywhere All at Once weaponizes its surplus almost as a warning; its howling cornucopia of mayhem is fun, but it’s also exhausting, unsettling, too much. As such, the film - in keeping with its copious anal imagery - is like the waste before the flush, the abjection that must be expelled to shore up the ego. This process is mirrored in Evelyn’s journey toward self-unity, and given disarming poignancy by Michelle Yeoh, the human center to the madness. In their audacious, sui generis way, Daniels argue that maybe a certain kind of madness is just what a path toward enlightenment could use.

Miracle in Milan

MIRACLE IN MILAN   ***

Vittorio De Sica

1951

IDEA:  Influenced by the resilient spirit of his late adoptive mother, an orphan in postwar Italy rallies a colony of displaced people against the greedy businessmen trying to seize their land.

BLURB:  If fantasy entails, on a primal level, the imagining of desired circumstances unsupportable by reality - as well as an attendant willful disavowal of their impossible realization - then Miracle in Milan is fantasy of the highest order. Taking cues from Chaplin, magical realism, and Hollywood escapism, De Sica and Zavattini craft their film as a fable of brazen wish fulfillment constantly teetering on the edge of collapse. In the first, less overtly quixotic half of its bifurcated structure, the film offers up images that cannily braid optimism and despair, as in the sight of vagrants huddled together under a lone ray of sunshine. While the predominant mode of jocular, even lavish tragicomedy departs quite sharply from the neorealism for which De Sica is best known, he and Zavattini remain attuned to the social realities of postwar Italy, particularly the ways in which the economic “miracle” and its proliferating structures of capitalism militated against the underclasses. The rollicking, at times cartoonish blitheness of much of Miracle in Milan is ultimately inseparable from the gravity of the material poverties with which it concerns itself. As the film charges through its second act, an escalating parade of whimsical interventions and outlandish escapes, the hyperbolic fantasy has the pointed effect of underscoring the direness of the conditions that prompted it. By the time the film’s dispossessed community is blowing away police grenade smoke with its collective breath - and certainly by the flight-by-broomstick denouement - one is struck by an ambivalent mixture of elevation and melancholy, a vacillating attitude toward a world that often warrants our most stubborn illusions.

Turning Red

TURNING RED   **1/2

Domee Shi

2022

IDEA:  The life of a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl is thrown into chaos when she begins transforming into a giant red panda during moments of anxiety or excitement.

BLURB:  Turning Red is both a sensitive, culturally specific modern fable of a girl’s coming-of-age and a frenzied reiteration of formula. Perhaps it’s too much to expect the current Disney-subsumed Pixar to match its past peaks of creative invention, but there’s no reason Turning Red had to be quite so beholden to narrative tropes or a tone and pace as relentlessly hyperactive as a migraine-inducing sugar rush. The problem is not with the central metaphor, which, despite its timeworn reliance on human-to-animal transformation, is effective in tying the film’s Chinese mythology to broader experiences of anxiety and difference. Turning Red is most valuable for its candid portrayal of female pubescence, for how it takes an empathically lucid, edifying Inside Out-like approach to making legible the psychic life of its young protagonist. Yet unlike that Pixar touchstone, Shi’s film is infrequently imaginative in either its conception or execution; one would be hard-pressed to find in its perfunctory visual design an idea as elegantly potent as Inside Out’s crumbling personality islands, for instance. The film is also burdened by a murky gender politics, its conceit of a hereditary, exclusively female condition of unruly emotion - figured as monstrous-feminine animality - falling dangerously close to retrograde essentialism. There is no doubt Turning Red comes from a deeply personal, idiosyncratic place, and there is similarly little doubt about how meaningful it will be to audiences young and old and across gender and ethnic lines. But for such potentially groundbreaking subject matter - at least in the context of mainstream American family filmmaking - the results are more banal than inspiring.

Top 10 - 2021

 

What a pleasure it was to have cinema back! Following the COVID-induced moviegoing privations of 2020, it was immensely satisfying (and more than a little overwhelming) to be inundated by the rich cinematic surplus of 2021. While theatrical exhibition as an aesthetic experience continues to feel somewhat endangered - a reality dispiritingly reflected in the box-office successes of factory-assembled IPs at the expense of all else - this past year proved that quality filmmaking is as alive as ever, and that we shouldn't take for granted the ability to sit in the dark with strangers gazing up at a silver screen. 

Many of the great movies of 2021 were big in a way that seemed to propitiously answer our frustrated thirst for the big-screen experience. Musicals made a huge comeback, from the exuberant In the Heights in the summer to the dazzling old-fashioned spectacle of Spielberg's West Side Story to close out the year. The only way to truly take in the maximalist Dune: Part One - and to feel its churning, bombinating soundscape in your bones - was to go to the theater. There were also a remarkable number of high-profile black-and-white features (Passing, The Tragedy of Macbeth, C'mon C'mon, and Belfast among them) that helped distill the pure, fundamentally photographic pleasure of images sculpted from light. Meanwhile, a sublime opus from one of contemporary cinema's most indispensable artists literally demanded to be seen on the big screen - its director and distributor have no intention of ever releasing it for home viewing. No wonder it's also the clear best film of 2021 (no credit if you can guess what it is)!

Note: there are still some major titles I've been unable to see, namely Flee, The Worst Person in the World, Mass, and Parallel Mothers.

On to my Top 10 after the jump...