Having not completed a Midnight Screening in a while, I decided to quadruple up this week with four films from Joe Dante, typically considered a modern master of B-movie gusto. I’ve chosen his less excavated films as a way to stave off the obvious choices.
The ‘Burbs
After a short sabbatical in the realm of more overtly childlike whimsy with Innerspace, Joe Dante returned to his day job brokering a peace between manic comedy and subfuscous horror with 1989’s The ‘Burbs. Primarily remembered today as an early starring role for Tom Hanks, Dante’s film – his final unqualified success at the box office – is also the final film in his run of relatively straight-faced pop cinema. Come the turn of the ‘90s, Dante would pay more overt homage to the channel-surfing impudence of his youth with post-modern cinematic swindlers that would, artistic bravado aside, often leave audiences bamboozled as to how to approach Dante’s films. While Dante’s later films would dive into the non-narrative, youthful indiscretion clearly closer to his heart, the commercial success of The ‘Burbs was probably a factor of its relative stability and cohesion. Continue reading
Much like his later A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly is a bitter respite from the filmic hierarchy in that it refuses to afford us what might be called an omniscient, privileged position. Instead of knowing everything beforehand, it adopts a perspective that slides between characters and perspectives to construct a multiplicity of experiences or opinions that elide the notion of an essential truth. The most obvious characteristic of this lack of omniscience is the film’s disinterest in imparting a cohesive depiction of the world of the characters, instead choosing to construct a minefield of contradictory, contested opinions. This is, first and foremost, a proclamation against the tendentious norms of cinema where a film’s moral mapping is supposed to conspire to slam that film’s presumptive argument home in the final stretches; in comparison, About Elly always, fascinatingly and rebelliously, feels like it is slipping away from us. If most films are lit toward a primary beam of crystal-clear truth, About Elly refracts the light through the crystal and constructs a variegated, prismatic rainbow of varied perspectives and possibilities. 
Edited for Clarity
Compared to “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for The Nice Guys”, “Ocean’s Eleven for Money Monster” isn’t as clean a comparison. But I really like Soderbergh’s collaboration with George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and mindless excess, and clearly Clooney and Roberts enjoyed themselves too; Money Monster reteams them and brings a different kind of capital along for the ride.
This one just writes itself. Writer-director Shane Black is back with another buddy comedy, so let us look at his last one, a return to form after nearly two decades of wallowing in nihilism, misogyny, and eventually, oblivion.
Both unhurried and nimble, Richard Linklater’s beguiling concoction of breathless immaturity and stunted, off-hand maturity worships an altar of “just one more midnight hang-sesh doing nothing in particular”, an event that is elevated in import within Everybody Wants Some!! precisely because of how acquainted with the passing nature of youth the film seems to be. The film’s aimless, untamed, rowdy structure of bedlam-before-linearity cheerfully replicates the constant blood rush of avoiding your future that embodies the daily lexicon of the Southeast Texas State University baseball squad of 1980. But they aren’t the event-instigating, virile, social-agent protagonists of the tale so much as the byproducts of social tumult and the circumstantial nature of chance. Accused of a sort of masculine bro-ish bravado in some circles, and not inaccurately I might add, Linklater’s film is also notable for how painfully it recognizes how deeply unspecial its main characters are. 
Ilya Naishuller’s celebration and extension of, as well as slight rebellion against, pinball-scripted action cinema storytelling charitably accentuates, and lambasts, the genre it calls home by curdling it down to its most primordial essences devoid of meaningful context or narrative: dude, gun, fire, pandemonium, nonsense, more gun. Smitten with its playfully trivial nature and keen on its own exclusively, even exclusionary, surface-level ambitions, Naishuller’s first-person camera is a little like a Looney Tunes version of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s recent achievements behind the camera, even if it isn’t nearly as full-throated or as perceptive in its utilization of the faux-long-take lexicon as anything Lubezki might have in the works. Hardcore Henry certainly deserves credit for perspiration, occasionally for exhilaration, and once or twice for genuine innovation. 
With four major-ish video game adaptations arriving in the cinema this year (something of a resurgence after the trend died off a half-decade ago), let us recollect our memories of two films from 2010, the inflection point of the video game adaptation as it was just entering its death throes the first time. We will eschew actual video game adaptations (they’re pretty worthless, relatively speaking) for two films that attempt to peruse the abstract idea of the video game as a jumping-off point instead.
The Long Take 