Justice League arrives in theaters with the stench of self-seriousness, not to mention the load of legitimizing a frail, failing franchise, on its back. While its predecessor, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, remains a perennial fanboy punching bag 18 months after its release, the light of the much-adored Wonder Woman, for me at least, grows more dim by the day in both its faux-feminist politics and its glum, dirge-like aesthetics. Now, I’m no Marvel partisan. Even the frissons in those films, from Dr. Strange’s psychotropic visual shenanigans to the feisty caper escapades of Ant-Man to the comic filigrees of James Gunn’s Guardians dyad, only nominally search for an escape hatch from their franchise’s homogeneity. In actuality, they mostly stress-test the walls of their franchise by providing merely minor disturbances that the Marvel Universe can still accommodate. The ebullience of their alternative imaginations of a “Marvel Movie” is routinely limited by the dawning awareness of the unactualized possibilities they imagine for films actually unmediated by the Marvel Machine. A go-for-broke James Gunn space comedy, a true-blue hallucinogen, a real-deal frothy ‘60s comic caper flick. Marvel films gesture toward these alternative paths, but they cushion their weirdness by shoring up the house that contains them. They’re the cinematic equivalent of receiving a flu shot: small doses of bodily insurrection in service of making Disney’s profits all the healthier in the long-run. Continue reading
Review: Justice League
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The big story with Coco is the film’s endearing expression of Mexican cultural forms. But the even bigger story, to my mind, should be how disturbingly assimilable these norms are to the way Pixar always tells stories. Someone, of course, will make the case that it’s “positive” that society can tell normative stories which happen to be inhabited with Mexican cultural forms that do not really challenge mainstream styles, that Mexican culture can be “normal”. But if Coco is a case of integration rather than mere assimilation, it also relegates Mexican culture as a passenger. The culture gilds this particular film nicely, but what does it say that it’s a “major” achievement for a film studio to make the same film they’ve been making for years, only now with Mexican culture along for the ride? I’m tempted to write off this kind of film as a nice moral achievement or “good on social issues” without actually being all that much of a film. Except I’m not entirely sure this is a moral achievement. 
Embedded within but highly subversive to the American Western, Kelly Reichardt’s wilderness of small-scale conversations and un-obtrusive insight suggests that there is no physical space as trying to master as that of the internal. She singularly offers another vision of a feminist Western that is actually unmoored from the decorum of romanticism or the bindings of mythopoetic malehood. In place of high-stakes conflicts and brooding, unfettered soul-searching, she lyrically produces a handful of uncanny, narratively-unkempt stanzas on lost dreams, stagnant desires, and interpersonal dilemmas that are far more truly disjunctive to masculinity than women with guns because only the former actually erode masculine storytelling structures at their very bones rather than simply placing women within them unabated. Rather than physical conflicts belying and then bearing quandaries of the mind and soul, as most superior Westerns do, Reichardt more purely distills the latter, dispensing with guns, ammo, and posturing entirely. Wringing herculean drama out of the seemingly diaphanous, Reichardt’s exploration of a polluted but hopeful world draws a supple mood of traumatic disquiet, a more minor-key crisis for a series of women in modern day Montana than the kind of consternation most Westerns are willing to deal with. 
A calamity of inspiration and ingenuity, along with banality and over-indulgence, Gore Verbinski’s chilly, Euro-malevolent A Cure for Wellness is the tonal opposite of the brash, giddy Americana of his previous feature, The Lone Ranger, but they are undoubtedly kindred spirits. Three years after having written it, I remain wracked by my review of that earlier film, lost as it was in its own incredulous eccentricities and tonal spasms that destabilized it to its very core. But I now suspect that I and other reviewers were as misguided as the film was, and I now appreciate The Lone Ranger – at great cost in cognitive-dissonance to myself – as not only an undeniably peculiar blockbuster but a boisterously, almost radically singular one. Not a film as compulsive, fanatical, and personally tormented as, say, Speed Racer, to name the reigning misunderstood blockbuster of the past decade, but the rare tentpole that stands up in the name of individual vision even in the face of individual blunder. A Cure for Wellness similarly missteps all over the place, but it is also a riposte to corporate homogeneity, the caliber of visionary medium-budgeted film that used to populate the multiplexes off and on but is now nearly extinct. Situationally, then, A Cure for Wellness often feels like a sudden discovery, a giddy “they spent how much money on this?” curio that suggests Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean good faith will never run out. 
Early on, James Franco’s ostensible-lark The Disaster Artist seems oddly generous, even generative, with its themes, as though willing to interrogate questions ranging from auteurism, to film-set camaraderie (or lack thereof), to intentionality, to interpersonal relationships and the cost of friendship. In other words, director-actor James Franco’s film adaptation of Greg Sestero’s tell-all book about the making of the cult anti-classic The Room has ideas both for and about Tommy Wiseau, director and star of The Room and all-around human enigma, here played by Franco as well. Which means that it escapes, at least for a duration, the obvious narrow corridor of an in-joke about a film that is, itself, a joke. The early-goings flare with at least mild possibility. They glint with shards of not only genuine cinematic joie de vivre but dueling absurdist tragedies. One tragedy, Sestero’s, is a modern day James Dean story of a rebel with a cause, and the other is of a man who at least believes himself to have a cause. 
Stan-up comedian Kumail Nanjiani plays a somewhat fictionalized version of his real self in the breakout romantic comedy of 2017, The Big Sick, a film with the disheveled, low-key vibe of a personal anecdote, a story you tell to your friends about how you and your partner met. How they, in this case Nanjiani and his wife Emily Gordon (fictionalized and played by Zoe Kazan here), come across one another at Kumail’s stand-up show in Chicago. When? Sometime after the Pakistani-American Kumail has feigned interest in and given up on numerous potential planned-marriage partners from his parents Azmat (Anupam Kher) and Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff). And sometime before Emily contracts a life-threatening disease that inadvertently forces Kumail in the hospital, after their break-up no less, to sign her into a medically-induced coma. 
The lion’s share of films about racism tend to denature race’s own construction, neutralizing its existence in time and space as a material-but-conceptual reality that is institutional and structural in nature. They miss that racism is assembled, modeled, fashioned, and implemented rather than simply felt or present as an assumption. But even films aware that race is constructed often neutralize its instability by fleeing from its paradoxes: that race is arbitrary yet all-encompassing, fragile yet galvanized, collapse-able and implacable in one. These films empty race out of its peculiar qualities, favoring one of two constructions that overlook the dialectical rather than dichotomized nature of race as material and ideological in one. In the first construction, they may consider race as a simple accident that recuses the film from having to critique democracy wholesale. They consider the material presence of racism not as a symptom of a democratic syndrome that begets race but as an addendum, alternate, or holdover that democratic theory has not successfully stamped out, not for want of trying. Racism becomes a rogue insurgent in democracy and America rather than a foundational element. Alternately, films may define race as a more immanent problem for America, but only as husk of abstraction, a foundational accident in American democratic theory but one which plays out purely at a theoretical rather than material level. Thereby, these films do not have to expose and express the way race is reified in practice. They dare only to understand democracy as a concept, not as a material and temporal process. 
Notionally a point of departure for playwright-turned-writer-director Martin McDonagh after the just-dandy In Bruges and the eccentric but flippant Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri not only turns McDonagh’s wandering eye to America – either Middle American or the South, depending upon your placement of the pointedly liminal Missouri – but to a deepening of themes, a reckoning with untouched subjects and untapped potentials. The story of an implacable mother, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), who erects three incendiary billboards chastising the local police for their failure to solve the rape-murder of her daughter, Three Billboards is, as we say, going for it. At the same time, I’m not entirely sure the film does go for it, which is where its problems commence.
The high-brow-baiting artistry of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle may seem like atonement for the defiantly low-brow American films he unchained on America between 1987 and 1997. But beneath its harsh austerity lies a film as extraordinarily carnal, deliciously primitive, and totally untamed as anything he’s yet directed, a work that shreds pulpy shards of equivocal, morally-grey human desire in every direction. Make no mistake: those wandering into the domain of emotionally-clipped art-cinema must discover that even the highest-raised brow is not enough to protect you from the Verhoeven-touch. Returning after a decade out of commission, the director utilizes art-cinema’s pretensions and impudently explode them, propelling the niceties of French cinema away in a centrifugal mass of uncertainty. A morally flammable film, Elle catches fire because of rather than in spite of its chilly, seemingly-antiseptic demeanor. 
Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman isn’t as multifaceted a multi-character story as A Separation and it cannot match About Elly as an eloquent study of how personal identity is as much a construction by other people as an effusion of your own will. But although, thriller credentials aside, it is a mild retread of Farhadi’s two masterpieces, it is still extraordinarily thoughtful cinema on its own terms, as bold as it is quietly assiduous. As with all of Farhadi’s films, an extremely precise narrative of minutiae manifests multitudes of even more incisive observations on Iranian society more broadly. And while the first 90 minutes are merely solid Farhadi, the apex of the drama – maybe the acme of Farhadi’s career – is a three-character mini-play where audience sympathy, empathy, and desire become malleable clay for a director for whom each moment is a glint of new suspicion or a twitchy shiver of dramatic reorganization. Farhadi has compassion for all his characters, but he treats interpersonal quandary as an abyss of revelation in a drama we must navigate rather than merely watch. His film is a diamond, not because it glistens but because every visual frame or character lens destabilizes the drama and emanates a new image of existence. Or a new point of view, shining with the blinding, brilliant light of its own remarkable negotiation of personal perception, of seeing things anew such that old modes of thought are now futile, permanently disabled, the refuge of the mentally-obliging. The Salesman is a wonderfully pliant creation. It’s also somewhat unevenly sculpted, but we’ll get there as well. 
The Long Take 