I meant to review this a while ago, but the year of its twentieth anniversary seems as good a time as any. Noah Hawley’s television show is every bit the film’s equal, but there’s nothing wrong with the primordial ooze of the original.
Defying expectations amidst the deluge of knowingly hip independent thrillers dotting the late ‘90s landscape like murder victims on the path of the criminal spree of ironic, self-referential cool, Fargo is at heart a tone poem, a restful calm rather than a flurry of moments convinced of their knuckle-dusting cool and charisma. Twisting and turning would be a death knell for a wonderful mood piece like this, and more often than not, a tacit admittance of an under-confident film that filmmakers’ gild and plaster over with knee-jerk side-winds to appease audiences. Fargo, which is devious and cage-rattling because it is a recess from this sort of narrative glut, is a film of blinding deception but never one that throttles its characters through the thrombosis of a belabored story.
Often accused of flattening their characters from above with their caustic cynicism, the Coen Brothers – in the film that “made” them – are too obsessed with feeling out their characters to ever truly hate them, or even exhibit a singular, untroubled, complete feeling toward them at all. Instead, Fargo’s emotions deal in dialectics of all varieties, from the contradictions of the human condition to the tensions in the writer-director team’s own situation as expat-Minnesotans relative to the thickly-brewing Mid-Northern culture they depict in this film. Rather than impressing itself above its characters with singular determination, Fargo is uniquely sincere in its desire to engage with the chemical allure of the mystifying and multilayered dialectics that construct both the individual human soul and the milieu of a place. Continue reading
Two of the even ones. You know what that means. 
You know Star Trek. This isn’t it. 
With Cutthroat Island as the never-off-the-ground bottom leg and Waterworld as the high-flying upright obelisk standing up on 175 million, the right triangle of box office halitosis spewing out from weird genre adventures in 1995 was completed with the dismal performance of Sam Raimi’s Sharon Stone-vehicle The Quick and the Dead. Which, in this metaphor, is the gnarly hypotenuse, the connective leg between Waterworld’s hyper-production-designed, outré weirdness and Cutthroat’s illogical idiocy. 
Waterworld
Between roughly 1993 and 1998, the post-Tarantino brio that was at one point the most scorching lightning-bolt in cinema shifted to a self-immolating fire, a pox on the cinematic landscape, almost overnight. The beacon of the Weinstein-fronted American independent success story, Tarantino was a shining light on the cinematic landscape until a deluge of golden-child followers (see Boondock Saints) cast their mettle in Tarantino’s gilded name and overindulged in his post-coital cool and sometimes smug pearly whites without actually backing their versions of the tale up with the wit, elan, or the cinematic rattle and hum of Tarantino’s style. Posing had suddenly become an art form.
I meant to get to this a couple weeks ago when The BFG was failing to tear up the box office, but with the Spielberg-loving Stranger Things tearing up Netflix, now is as good a time as any. 
David Lynch’s Dune opens with a blissfully presentational monologue, a female face plastered onto the screen as she intones about spices like some intergalactic trade princess as her head glints in and out in a tease of a disappearing magic act that implicitly asks us whether we really care about anything she’s saying. It’s a dose of post-Star Wars and anti-Star Wars nonsense, a mocking of a genre by a director who had in 1977, the same year as that genre’s entrance into the mainstream, blasted a cavern out of the crevice in cinema left in the wake of Luis Buñuel’s quasi-retirement. Actually offered Return of the Jedi, Lynch accepted mega-producer and mega-trend-jumper Dino De Laurentiis’ offer to throw down with Frank Herbert’s story of space drugs and sand worms instead, and what came out of that unholy matrimony was one of the most famous misfires in cinema history. 
Woody Allen is back at bat with Cafe Society, another story of a writer and the spaces that inspire and threaten him. Obviously, we’re not at a loss for opportunities in Woody Allen’s back catalogue to examine the director in exactly this mode; the very sense of a fictive past that has tormented his characters for decades has come home to roost, with Allen’s films doomed to repeat themselves much like the work of his characters. That doesn’t mean they can’t repeat in style, but it is unlikely that they will be more stylish than the exemplary peak of Allen’s evolution as a serious artist throughout the ’70s. 
The Long Take 