I’ve decided to post shorter reviews of various films I’m seeing for the first time via courses I’m enrolled in.
Equinox Flower
Yasujiro Ozu’s world is one of parsimoniously placed symmetries and laconic, ever-subtler shifts in human composition that form telltale signs of theme and character. Unlike most esteemed directors, he doesn’t rest on prodigal imagery or inflammatory dialogue, nor does he inundate us with restive tangents and dalliances with the absurd. His films are stingy with their carefully focused formalism, and as such are prone to claims that they are left wanting or overly enervated by their placid demeanor. Yet within Ozu’s ostensibly metronomic minimalism lies a gregarious, human vision of the world as a teetering, lightly fluctuating balancing act where the most hurtful of human tragedies is found in the most unadorned of images. In a world constructed out of pairings and balances, the disruptive elegance of a lone human face without a matching motion or figure is as tragic as the end of the world. Continue reading
Elaine May’s career-ending 1987 blockbuster social tract Ishtar, a lopsided work of equal parts monomaniacal egomania and bracingly scabrous anti-masculine comic commentary, has spent the better part of a decade being partially rescued by youthful, revisionist film critics. Now, that film’s partial reappraisal is arguably unearned; its phenomenally sardonic first half is mostly undone by an untethered, obsessively messy back portion that sees May woefully incapable of handling the ridiculously inflated budget of the production. It feels like wishful thinking to lump it in with the equally voluminous anti-American critique of Western iconography that is Michael Cimino’s much more deserving masterpiece Heaven’s Gate. But if reappraising Ishtar is a necessary casualty to resurrecting Elaine May’s bracing back-catalogue, then so be it. She remains responsible for a number of the lost masterpieces of American cinema, a cadre of the best films released in arguably the most impressive decade for the nation’s cinema. 
With the release of The Witch imminent, let us look back at another famous horror film to rely on witches, however indirectly, to go bump in the night.
With the imminent release of The Witch upon us, let us look back at another famous movie with a villainous witch.
A weekend into its release, the mostly loose-limbed Deadpool is certifiably an accidental but genuine pop-culture zeitgeist-defining event rather than the belated cult classic it would have been at any other time in history. One can only predict the ripples of the film’s success, but some cause for celebration erupts. So many superhero movies – Christopher Nolan’s elephantiasis-prone Batman films not least among them – are content to cart around the depressive husks of their beings, especially over the past decade of glum, operatic, tortured superheroism. In this light, Deadpool represents a more manic, cheerier alternative to the doldrums of the self-imposed superhero funeral we’ve been undergoing since the genre supposedly “matured”. But it also suggests a more classical spirit: that being a superhero might, dare one say it, be fun. 
Fitting for a film about conviction and the inclement weather that tests it, Hail, Caesar! ought to wash away any and all false prophets proclaiming visions of the Coen Brothers’ malfeasance and sociopathic hatred for mankind. Cynicism is their tool, and their films are prone to a particular brand of withering sociopolitical critique, but the two writer-directors are, and have been, expert stegenographers for the better part of three decades now. Hiding in plain sight in almost all of their films is a stress-tested but never broken love of both the sweeping grandeur of cinema and the gnomic bits of dogmatic human persistence undercutting the seemingly abusive, surrealist death and destruction sometimes at play in this universe of ours. There’s is a scabrous, sometimes maladjusted brand of humanism, but the Coens are humanists nonetheless. 
After the laconically witty, good-natured “wait, how much money are they giving me?” spurt of Big Trouble in Little China, John Carpenter decided his steadily encroaching ascent into mainstream fluff required a course correct. His 1987 feature, Prince of Darkness, reflects a homecoming of sorts, a rejection of the more-is-more pomp and circumstance of the 1980s for the merciless fringe-dwelling independent malevolence of Carpenter’s upbringing in the 1970s and his time being reared on the works of Val Lewton, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray. Antithetical to good cheer, the fluctuating energy levels of Prince of Darkness occupy a secluded spectrum from poison-cloud malevolence to throat-grabbing holocaust of horror. If Big Trouble was escapism, Prince of Darkness feels like it cannot be escaped. 
It would not be incorrect to treat Yasujiro Ozu’s works as a mere question of how geography intersects with modernity, but it would be incomplete. Surely, his mid-century, middle-class films about Japanese men and women both enlivened by and enveloped within the social structures around them do unearth great truths about the specific nature of life in post-war Japan and, particularly, about generational divides. His Late Spring, a story about a woman, Noriko (played by Setsuko Hara) in the late spring of her life and her father, Shukichi (played by Chisu Ryu), no doubt treats on the same issues. With the daughter aging beyond the father’s interest, he, a widower himself, feigns a fake marriage plan to convince his daughter that there will be no room for her in his house. Naturally, the hope is that she will find a marriage partner herself, and questions of gender oppression and the iron grip of social expectancy marinate throughout Late Spring, coursing through the veins of the diorama-like closed-spaces that Ozu relies on to ensnare his characters in the vise of social geometry. 
Robert Altman’s great mode as a director was the comedy of desperation, or in some cases the more elemental buddy film of loneliness, both genres served well by his democratic, crowded, fragmented spaces defining loneliness not as a form of isolation opposed to collectivism but as an isolation within community. For the Altman welterweights who think of the director’s ’70s as MASH, Nashville, and a murderer’s row of films of lesser import withering on the vine in between those two powerhouse works of communal chaos, California Split’s nominally more centered, two-character pas de deux seems more straightforward and less robust. In comparison to the wide swaths of partial Americana glimpsed in the roving camera of those, his more famous films, one might obfuscate and avoid California Split by nominating it as “lesser Altman”.
The Long Take 