Update early 2019: The original Alien is such an incredible exercise in negative space and sonic absence, an unwelcoming dispatch from an all-too-fathomable future, a transmission from the dark side of the 1970s that pushes the haunted house film to its constitutive limits. Scott’s attempts to expand the mythology here misfire on all counts, only diffusing the purity with a kind of thematic dilettantism – a little Bible here, some Greek mythology there – as though the screenwriters were afraid that anything other than reconsidering the entire Western canon would be a failure of ambition. That original film remains a stark howl of cinematic minimalism, a fugitive, monstrous insurgent into the increasingly grand and self-important cinematic landscape of the late ’70s, but this new one just replicates the grand, Gothic tendentiousness of every other blockbuster film in the 2010s, all sound and fury signifying ego.
Original Review
Alien3 was its gloomy adolescent faze. Alien: Resurrection was it mid-life crisis where it put on a clown costume and rode around on a fluorescent motorcycle to prove its hipness. The AVP films are the lost years. And Prometheus was a kind of rebirth, a newfound, new-agey euphoria where intelligence and pseudo-intelligence intermixed to the point of abject indecipherability. But what does that make Covenant for the Alien franchise?
A film that is usually unsure of itself, above all, one which tries to repeat and reconcile the entire franchise in the course of one film. One that struggles to decipher some point of solubility for many films and as many essentially irreconcilable viewpoints about cinema and the world. In this series of films whose entries have uniquely little tonally or atmospherically to say to one another, Covenant is also a return to the good old days, a regression, and a stasis of sorts, an attempt to retain and harden the philosophical musings of Prometheus while finding salvation through a return to the franchise’s younger days of cold-blooded, efficient brutality. To fossilize what intelligence the at-least self-consciously oblique Prometheus had for fear of it slipping away and to efface that intelligence by cutting through the fat with a lean, mean monster film, a marriage of pulp and phenomenology that just does not mix. As if afraid to acknowledge that less can be more, director Ridley Scott demands to be taken seriously as an auteur, which for him, means thematizing and seeking solace in headiness with a capital-H even when it is to the detriment of the overall production. As a down-and-dirty horror film, Covenant is retreading old ground, sure, but doing so with gusto and panache. As a rambling monologue (or dialogue, I suppose) about the nature of creation, creator, and created, it’s just another patch on the quilt proving that these pseudo-pretentious sci-fi action films have nothing new to say about their robot fetish. Continue reading
Released as Netflix’s first blockbuster – a fact that bears some weight for scholars of the industry of cinema but less for the connoisseurs of films themselves – Okja is significantly more enticing as the new film from South Korean cinemagician Bong Joon-ho, marking his second Korean-American co-language film after 2014’s Snowpiercer. A leftist parable – although less brazenly radical than Snowpiercer – this lightly Miyazaki-esque eco-critique of American capitalistic practices is extremely broad, but like Snowpiercer, it treats its populist-front, excessive sense of caricature as a boon to its political ambitions rather than a restriction on them. Both of these films lack anything resembling the delectably sinuous pitch-black brio of Joon-ho’s two best films, Mother and Memories of Murder, but they do not erase his expert knack for Warner Bros-esque absurdism, nor do they stamp out the truest quality of all his films: the intoxicating commotion of conflicting energies. 
Baby Driver makes a palpable and committed bid to attain the action sublime. It is a work of testosterone-auteurism that falls short of the sheer aesthetic bravado and emancipatory charge of Mad Max: Fury Road but at least matches The Raid in the top tier of ‘10s action cinema. Its style spreads like a pandemic, sidewinding into the realm of avant-pop music video, turbo-charged but with flickers of whimsy where restive full-throttle motion is contraposed by plateaus of stillness and silence that reveal writer-director-mad-scientist Edgar Wright as a true summoner of the cinema. He conjures the long-dead spirits of style-as-substance ‘70s car thrillers that matched pedal-to-the-medal with moments of melancholy and pensive reflection about the nature of a life lived watching your rear-view-mirror, hurtling at a hundred miles an hour but never truly moving forward. 
A toxic swirl of competing and conflicting energies and moods, The Bad Batch relishes both a freakish, convulsing elan and a border-town’s sense of dispossessed, out-of-the-way melancholy. It definitely carries a streak of hot-tempered punk aggression and rambunctiousness. But the energy is tempered with the ethereal disposition of punk’s younger, more reptilian late-‘80s-alt cousin, Alt-Goth, which was the prevailing ethos of Amirpour’s first film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and which carries its own attitude of vaguely stoned, quasi-psychedelic, chilled-down depression. The Bad Batch has a feminist spirit – more riot grrl than Gloria Steinem – but also a lean, mean musculature, parts of which Sam Fuller or Anthony Mann might have directed. It defies reasonable meaning at almost all turns, but its dyspeptic drone is palpable and feels thematically united in its exploration of the pushed around, both the people and the films of the furthest corners of the world where rules are guidelines and communities are tenuous and volatile. It is flawed, deeply so, and, at times, its poetic brand of outsider melancholy can become less of a mood proper and more of an affectation or, at worst, a fixation Amirpour just can’t quit. But the film’s iconoclastic zest is undeniable. 
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is most appealing because it busts through the shackles of hopelessly milquetoast race-themed Oscarbait persistent to this day, and not only the old standbys like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?. Get Out also ousts and decentralizes more modern fare like Hidden Figures for their contentedness to coast on shuffling black historical figures into the relatively unchanged narrative structure gifted to white historical figures for decades: down-and-outs persist, struggle, and triumph. By thrusting African-Americans into this all-too-American success narrative thrumming with national mythologies of potency and virile capability, Hollywood only allows this agency-narrative to continue unabated as the dominant acceptable lexicon for black characters in film. If you are black and not a scathingly regressive stereotype in a film, essentially, you better be a success story, operationalized to validate America’s go-to narrative of assimilating all races into its fetishization of “opportunity” as an opiate keeping discussions of real equality at bay. 
Park Chan-wook’s endlessly, even mercilessly fastidious and picky aesthetic sensibilities – ornate and obsessive in equal measure – have never served him better than in The Handmaiden. His formalist techniques, often constricting and repressive of the emotional juices of his films, are wonderful mimetics for a screenplay which very much attends to questions of constriction and choking alienation. Set almost entirely in a Japanese-controlled mansion occupied by Koreans, not to mention in a male-dominated culture tenated by women, The Handmaiden’s mise-en-scene and blocking compound the pristine ritualistic motions of the characters who cannot break-out of their socially-structured, performative identities without incessant observation and admonishment.
The opening of James Mangold’s Logan bears the film’s fangs right from the get-go, brandishing the titular character’s unruly temperament in an early fight edited in schizophrenic shambles. The scene is treated not as a cleanly delineated pleasure-soaked fight-performance for our amusement but as a brutal, animalistic seizure of uncontrolled violence. Rather than a slow, mysterious secretion of innumerable details building to narrative proportions, Logan quite literally lets itself rip.
I’m at a loss. I cannot quite decide what Kong: Skull Island’s central problem is. Sometimes, director Jordan Vogt Roberts’ film rudderlessly vacillates form obvious highs (the apocalyptically-shot pre-credits screen and a killer credits bit) to infernal lows (an impossibly idiotic, on-the-nose opening line from John Goodman – spoken almost directly to the camera – about American politics never being “this bad again”). Here, the film is an inconstant success story sabotaging its structural integrity with foolhardy bull-in-a-china-shop shifts in quality, a work of half-crazed energy and personal auteurist flourishes with no earthly idea how to stitch its numerous harebrained personal madnesses together into an unidentified film-like object. Other times, however, Skull Island has the reheated quality of a monotone hum that settles not for a tilt-a-whirl shuttling between greatness and failure and more like incessant competence, seldom better or worse than acceptable and essentially unwilling to risk its adequacy to achieve greatness at the risk of failure. 
This review written on the occasion of the release of All Eyez on Me and Juice’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
The late ‘70s. Boston. Michael Smiley and Cillian Murphy play two IRA gunrunners looking to buy. Sharlto Copley dons the mustache of someone with an eye to sell, backed by his crew of course. And Brie Larson and Armie Hammer are just along as the middle-persons to smooth things over. Director Ben Wheatley has other plans.
