In honor of the release of Colour out of Space, the new Richard Stanley-Nicolas Cage-HP Lovecraft film (what a wonderfully demonic cinematic Cerberus that is!), I decided to look back at Stanley’s last film, a full 23 years ago. Let us hope that his new attempt at channeling the deranged spirit of century-old pulp literature and tearing open and excavating the most demented corners of the cinematic void don’t render him victim of that void, unable to find his way back, for nearly a quarter-century, like they did last time.
A travesty of Welles as well as Coppola, The Island of Dr. Moreau is as sure an example as any of that old maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. It’s also one of the most beguilingly meta-textual would-be blockbusters ever released, one whose off-screen production ended up not only mimicking its textual themes but folding in several layers of mediating texts and prior films just to stir together enough post-modern cinematic madness to satiate audiences. It feels less like a unique product than a ghoulish aftershock, a horrible, mangled echo, of its seventeen-years forebear, Apocalypse Now.
Now, normally, production turmoil can distract from an analysis of what actually makes it on screen as much as it can enhance that analysis. But The Island of Dr. Moreau is a special enigma, the dream of a cinematic wunderkind so feverishly and immediately collapsing on-screen that it begs comparison not only to its most obvious cinematic predecessor (Apocalypse Now) but to another cinematic directorial hanging by another Welles, one more deranged than HG: Orson Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons. (And not only because Marlon Brando is on hand for Moreau, reminding us that only one actor can go toe to toe with Orson Welles for sheer insular late-period delirium). Continue reading
The first cinematic adaptation of the writing of James Baldwin, perhaps unexpectedly and perhaps perplexingly but undeniably fittingly in light of the writers’ artistic omnivorousness, takes its most obvious cues not from Baldwin’s profession but from the profession of its main male character. If Beale Street Could Talk follows a young African-American couple Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne), nineteen, and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), twenty-two and working as a sculptor’s apprentice who conjures visions of tragically stilled beauty that the film, if not modeling itself after, at least siphons energy from.
Gotti asks me to put my money where my mouth is. A favorite complaint of mine when reviewing movies is to critique actors turned directors for neglecting the film of their films. That they render mere theater pieces that happened to have been filmed in lieu of genuine works of cinema. Watching actor-turned-director Kevin Connolly’s bastardization of the life of John Gotti, I realize that I’ve sinned. Most actors turned directors at least display a basic competence with the camera. They merely fail to embellish their narratives in any particularly cinematic way, dismissing the possibility that the camera might be to used to achieve anything beyond or besides perfunctory realism. They treat their camera as a window or a simple observer rather than a canvas and, in doing so, their cameras’ perspective often fails to expose its perspectival nature, feigning naturalism.
Luca Guadagnino’s deliberately polarizing 2018 Suspiria shows its utmost respect for the original 1977 Suspiria by Dario Argento by making an absolute travesty of it: rethinking it, stripping it for parts, inverting its essence while honoring its spirit. And then defiling even that. The original Suspiria was a thoroughly abstract mindscape, with horror as an associative framework for arranging sound, sight, and sense to tap into otherwise untouchable enigmas about “humanity” conceived broadly. Nominally, this new Suspiria is totally at odd angles to Argento’s film, as thoroughly opposed as, say, Stephen King’s psychological vision of The Shining was from Kubrick’s baroque weave of sensory experiences that only superficially correspond to questions about the main character’s sanity.
When the central couple galvanizing Cold War’s spatial and temporal slippages first meet, their bodies are already both shrouded by and formed out of the desecrated husks of history; the weight of the world sacrifices their individuality, but the film also suggests that there is no such thing as pure individuality outside of the weave of the social, of history and of History. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is part of a mid-century Soviet government-sponsored research team looking to “preserve” the iconic cultural traditions of various ethnicities and nations now roped into the Soviet Empire, part of the Soviet Union’s project of multi-national socialism. Lula (Joanna Kulig) auditions for a role in a performance of Polish “traditional” music, already privy to the fact that her identity has been casted and essentialized as a “folk” person, construing her as bearing testament to the “essence” of the Polish “people,” not a sovereign person but an icon of a preserved past. Initially, the Communist government both draws from these identities and thoroughly flattens them, evaporating any sense of political acumen in the folk lyrics, locking them into the vise grip of a depoliticized time and casting the singers not as poets of modernity (capable of resisting as agents) so much as immobile totems to the past.
When Lucrecia Martel’s Zama begins, its protagonist, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), is performing his own sovereignty on a beach. Decked out in colonial garb and jutting one leg outward toward the sea, he seems to be posturing to no one in particular, as if beckoning to some unseen God to witness his sculpting himself into a predefined role as an icon of mid-level colonial bureaucracy. Radiating a vision of masculine competence to himself and only himself, de Zama’s supreme selfhood ultimately discloses his supreme loneliness and pitifulness. He then enacts a self-authored fiction of ownership of and mastery over the island by spying on a group of native women bathing naked, assuming that he has the right (and ability) to look. With the mischievous, wicked temperament of a colonial slapstick, writer-director Martel’s film then immediately punctures his vision of self: they spot him and shoo him, nearly beating him up in the process.
Impish and pious in equal measure, James Wan’s Aquaman is almost violently at a crossroads with itself. It both worships at the altar of the comic book and recklessly exposes the form’s essentially frivolous nature, giddily treating the comic book as holy writ while implicitly dismissing any desires to lard the form up with self-conscious airs. Somewhat astoundingly, it resurrects the mid-century pulp spirit of B-cinema and the comic book form, almost more Heavy Metal than DC, a spirit that both cherished and, at least sometimes, derived genuine pleasure out of that paradoxical overlap of silly and serious. The best of these comic books are somehow both eternally reverent to the value of unquestioned, thoroughly and inhumanly “good” mythological super-persons and essentially amused by this worshipful fascination. They seem almost curious about how loopily self-indulgent it is to get lost in such nonsense. Aquaman is quite conspicuously nonsense, and its melding of the ridiculous and the sublime never treats that nonsense as anything less than completely sincere. 
The Long Take 