Sexy Beast

SEXY BEAST   ***1/2

Jonathan Glazer

2001

IDEA:  Retired gangster Gal is living an idyllic domestic life in southern Spain when an old associate comes to rope him into a bank heist.

BLURB:  Ben Kingsley’s lunatic gangster Don Logan drops into Sexy Beast like the most unwelcome houseguest ever, and despite the resistance of his hosts, he never really leaves. He’s a classic disruptor, an existential rupture signifying a return of the repressed. In the gangster genre, this comes in the form of a past acquaintance beckoning the protagonist back to a life of crime, and this is certainly the case in Sexy Beast. But Don Logan is not your typical gangster; in Glazer’s narrative formulation and Kingsley’s splanchnic performance, he’s more like the inextinguishable monster from a horror movie. And like a horror movie, Sexy Beast is about boundaries erected, transgressed, and put tenuously back up again. Glazer conceives of a number of imaginative metaphors for this border-crossing, perhaps none more so than the climactic break-in of a bank vault from an adjoining bathhouse, in which the violent drilling of the pool wall and the subsequent eruption of water is intercut with the bloody pummeling of Don Logan, seemingly unwilling to die - or stay dead. Gal’s laborious attempted suppression of Logan is coextensive with the generalized air of sexual repression and paranoia that, at the expense of the underwritten female characters, points up a frustrated masculinity that so often underlies gangster films. Although familiar in that way, Sexy Beast is crafted with such exciting, idiosyncratic audiovisual flair and caustic humor that it doesn’t quite feel like any other crime film out there.

Orion and the Dark

ORION AND THE DARK   **1/2

Sean Charmatz

2024

IDEA:  Fearful 11-year-old Orion is met one night by the Dark, who attempts to prove that there's no reason to be scared of him by taking the boy on a journey around the world.

BLURB:  You could certainly do a lot worse than Orion in the Dark in the current oversaturated, undernourishing landscape of mainstream children’s media. The film has a welcome maturity and depth owed to the screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, whose existentialist sensibilities and propensity for meta-narrative structural trickery are points of inspiration amid the more routine kids’-film tropes. Orion is most effective when it zeroes in on its protagonist’s anxieties, a grab bag of irrational fears that should strike a chord for anyone (child or adult) prone to catastrophic thinking. Using sketchbook doodles and a panicked internal monologue, Kaufman, Charmatz, the animators, and lead actor Jacob Tremblay handle this material with both powerful sincerity and a necessary sense of detached jokiness. This is all before Orion even introduces its other main character, the personified Dark. While the anthropomorphic figure of fear (and his ragtag team of nocturnal associates) are the raison d’être of the film, their entrance inaugurates muddy, overwrought plotting that labors under the weight of its High Concept. It doesn’t help that the character and environment design are mostly unappealing, lacking the detail and pictorial grandeur to match the scope of the film’s themes. Orion is still sweet and moving, and offers valuable lessons for children, but it also feels more than faintly like a budget Pixar knockoff just happy to say it’s better than Trolls: World Tour.

Top 10 - 2023

 

This list is already late to arrive, so I'm not going to spend much time writing an introduction. I'll just say that 2023 was a good year for film, as every year is when you see enough, and that there was plenty to savor even when looking beyond the "big" titles that, more often than not, I had significant qualms about (looking at you, Oppenheimer, Poor Things, and Killers of the Flower Moon)! As ever, American independents and international cinema kept the quality high - which isn't to say I didn't find room for one particular (pink) blockbuster. 

After the jump, I proudly present my top ten films of 2023...

The Killer

THE KILLER   ***1/2

David Fincher

2023

IDEA:  Following a botched hit, a contract killer attempts to clean up his mess by targeting the higher-ups who are out for him.

BLURB:  At first, Michael Fassbender’s titular Killer might seem like a disciplined and honorable - even cool - ascetic-type master warrior, in the vein of Jef Costello in Le Samouraï or the Lone Man in The Limits of Control. But within minutes of listening to his continuously running internal monologue, one easily grasps that this guy is really a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing douchebag. He has more in common with such past Fincher protagonists as Fight Club’s Narrator or The Social Network’s Mark Zuckerberg, deeply insecure white men who take laborious pains to convince themselves of their worth in an increasingly estranging, atomized techno-capitalist culture. The Killer is particularly and mordantly attuned to how this figure manifests today, when the propagation of militant far-right ideology on social media platforms has deluded a contingent of cisgender white men into thinking they’re the ones actually being attacked, and the answer is to take up arms and “fuck your feelings.” This resonates with the Killer’s mantra to “forbid empathy,” as “empathy is weakness” and “weakness is vulnerability.” As he drones on about his noble precepts and work ethic - things he then consistently undermines in his actions - The Killer reveals itself as a sharp, blackly funny satire of a kind of digital-age self-absorbed derangement, abetted by a dehumanizing global capitalist order that reduces human interaction to the logic of commerce. DP Erik Messerschmidt renders this world in inky cobalt-black cut by queasy chartreuse and orange, panes of glass and the eerie glow of electronic locks. Despite the darkness, there could be absolution yet for the Killer, a fan of the Smiths who might just have to admit to himself that his IDGAF attitude is barely suppressing the fact that he does give a fuck.

Fallen Leaves

FALLEN LEAVES   ***

Aki Kaurismäki

2023

IDEA:  Two blue-collar laborers find a budding connection with each other amid the doldrums of their lives.

BLURB:  Cut from the same cloth as Bresson, Jarmusch, and Roy Andersson, Aki Kaurismäki operates in a mode of deadpan, laconic anti-naturalism that generates its own all-encompassing affective universe. It’s a drab, mostly unforgiving world through which the characters lumber like zombies, numbed to the routines of modern wage labor and well-ensconced in the warm, dark arms of disillusionment. Kaurismäki makes you feel the weight of the world on Ansa and Holappa, setting their lethargic movements in shadowy, noir-ish interiors and on frigid gray streets that seem equally suffocating. Yet Fallen Leaves never lapses into miserabilism. Kaurismäki’s characters may be down-on-their-luck working drudges living in spartan quarters with a single set of dinnerware, but they also have brute stoicism, which Kaurismäki and his actors carefully and unsentimentally wield in the form of droll impassivity. Ansa and Holappa also have empathy, a buried light that Fallen Leaves gently teases out from its pallid Helsinki cityscape. Their bumpy but eventually redemptive courtship has the sweet simplicity of a silent movie, particularly a Chaplin, who is not-incidentally named in the film’s pithy punchline. Popular culture frames Ansa and Holappa’s romance throughout, from classic movie posters to the diegetic songs that seem to perfectly narrate their emotions. They simultaneously serve as escapes and grounding mechanisms, ways of finding oneself in - and back to - a world that often feels so distant.

May December

MAY DECEMBER   ***1/2

Todd Haynes

2023

IDEA:  Over two decades after a woman began a scandal-provoking relationship with a 13-year-old boy, to whom she's now married with children, an actress comes to town to visit her in preparation to play her in a movie.

BLURB:  Mirrors appear frequently throughout May December, but they’re not exactly visible during their most significant occurrences. Echoing the haunting final shot of his 1995 film Safe, Haynes turns the screen itself into the mirror as his actresses peer out at us from the other side. Lacking the ego-defining configuration of mirror/subject in the same image, our perception is subtly destabilized: are we seeing the real thing or the reflection? It’s a question entirely emblematic of May December, an impeccably slippery psychological drama that’s continuously interrogating ambiguous relationships between truth and fiction, authenticity and performance, what people say and do and what they believe. The particular quotient of any of these things is never clarified in Samy Burch’s script nor through the masterfully layered performances of Moore and Portman, who create a shifting dynamic of power that leaves us wondering who’s really playing whom. With its scandalous subject matter, coiled eroticism, and juicy games of predation and subterfuge, May December is always on the verge of breaking out into Grand Guignol luridness, but Haynes denies the impulse. Pointedly resisting the exploitative sensationalism under his microscope, the director films in muted, washed-out taupes and grays while cleverly avoiding sordid recreations of the primal incident. The soft, glassy flatness of the images and the crashing score may suggest a true crime television serial, but Haynes isn’t interested in uncovering a crime or explaining psychology. As in the vacuous suburban domesticity of Safe, the shivery strength of May December is how it agonizingly chips away at seemingly stable social roles, narratives, and identities that are revealed to be anything but.

Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros

MENUS-PLAISIRS - LES TROISGROS   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

2023

IDEA:  A look inside the Michelin three-starred Troisgros restaurant in Ouches, France and its culinary legacy.

BLURB:  Between the haute cuisine of Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros and Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things, 2023 is quite the year for the French foodie film. Of course, being a Frederick Wiseman movie, Menus-Plaisirs has a scope quite a bit wider than the domestic ambit of Tran’s 19th-century lover-gourmets. In his signature fashion, the filmmaker studies a panoply of aspects of his central subject, the Troisgros restaurant, from its meal preparations and clientele to the local farms and cheesemakers that supply its ingredients. The magic of a Wiseman documentary, in addition to the hypnotic rhythms they generate from quotidian activities, is in the serendipitous accrual of detail and meaning across typically extended durations, so that what happens in one scene retroactively attains new significance during later ones. Here, an in-depth description of how sulfites are used to inhibit oxidization in wine forms a dialogue with discussions about various other human interventions in food cultivation, from agriculture to cheese ripening, eventually adding up to a broader existential picture of ecological balance, contingency, and the flux of trends. Like all of the institutions he studies, Wiseman finds a microcosm of society - if not life itself - in the bureaucracies, systems of labor, creative processes, and social rituals of Troisgros. He also finds a mirror of his own practice, with the aesthetic and culinary exactitude of the chefs echoing his patient and studiously watchful style. Movingly, Wiseman seems to invite especial parallels with the gregarious, august Michel Troisgros, who passionately carries on a decades-long tradition as time takes its inexorable course, and who extols the power of learning through nothing so simple as our attention and observation.