Black Coal, Thin Ice, Diao Yinan’s third feature film, employs a bifurcated narrative about multi-furcated corpses to expose a world that has been furcated so many times that pieces of the whole are rendered enigmas, no more recognizable as distinct entities than so many lumps of emotionless coal. Sure, the individual chunks exist – like the individual humans – but the oppressive weight of the leviathan conglomerate of empty humanity inundates all individuality. People in Black Coal, Thin Ice tread on thin ice, but their fate is even more precarious because the girth of the world hangs over them, cracking the ice with every strained step. The post-industrial haze of northern China suffused the air long ago, and the gravid lethargy of billowing smoke laying its fate down on every person is omnipresent in the film. Humans don’t stride with confidence and purpose. They crawl through a somnambulant world that displays little interest in slapping anyone awake. Continue reading →

Michael Dougherty deserves all the money he can bamboozle from Hollywood. Thus, Krampus, regardless of quality, is only fair. Only his second feature film release, it enters the world long after his first film Trick ‘r Treat was unceremoniously denied an impending theatrical release and was banished to the no man’s land of straight-to-DVD horror.

One has to give it up to Universal for giving him a second shot, and going out on a limb. Holiday horror is not exactly verboten in cinema land; a quick perusal through the darker regions of the cinema landscape reveals a questionable lineage of would-be Santa slay rides dating back to the 1970s. Still, one can understand the iciness of the idea; no film in the interim has managed to recapture a fraction of the lump-of-coal energy of the original Christmas horror film, Black Christmas from 1974. Krampus is the highest profile such release in quite a while, and it does its share to restore some of the good (bad?) name to a never-really-venerable sub-genre. So, as I said, Dougherty (who co-wrote X-Men 2 with Bryan Singer and will return for next year’s Apocalypse) deserves his passion projects. But that doesn’t mean a little Hollywood money can’t get to your head. Continue reading →

Edited for Clarity

At a worldly 68 years of age, Hou Hsiao-Hsien shows signs of slowing down, but not of stopping. Like the titular character of his new film The Assassin, he bides his time, calibrating every movement with painterly precision and critical sangfroid. And when he pounces, the consequences are mighty and unwavering. His latest kill, The Assassin, is the result of Hou’s eight-year sabbatical from releasing films, or eight years of planning for this one. The result is a singularly transfixing ballet of action and inaction, friction and restfulness, where the most trenchant fallout is found in the pregnant pauses of stillness and the glints of a sword glimpsed almost as if in the film’s peripheral vision. The Assassin is a work of almost spiritually free-floating, cloud-encircling ravishment, much like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, where emotional effervescence and transcendence overpowers detached intellectual consideration. Continue reading →

Update early 2019: Personally disappointing though it is that The Martian obviously disavows anything remotely akin to Alien’s abyssal,  forsaken futurist abjection and working-class loneliness, I can spot Ridley Scott his choice to eschew desolation and abandonment for zeal and enthusiasm. The real issue is that the film’s chosen alternative to Alien – an escapist fantasia about the whole world coming together to resurrect a thought-dead Matt Damon – just isn’t anywhere close to the usually dour Ridley Scott’s forte, whose animating impulses hew much closer to meditating on the neglected rather than trying to reassimilate them into society. While Ridley Scott’s sudden focus on the digital communities which develop within the loneliness of space is an interesting inversion of his typical emphasis on the isolation of everyday life, the results have no real texture to speak of, Scott’s more mechanical style cutting against the pop and pizzaz of Drew Goddard’s more mischievous (and somewhat tiresomely ironic) screenplay. Makes an obvious case that ersatz pop is not Scott’s wheelhouse in the slightest. I’d probably lower the score to a 6 at this point.

Original Review:

After nearly four decades of frantic, omnipresent terror, cosmic frailty, and industrial malice, it seems that director Ridley Scott has finally found happiness. Or perhaps he has simply given up trying. For a director whose films – not his best ones, nor his worst, but all of his films – have always been defined by an almost Lovecraftian stigma against the niceties of joy, Scott using the ripe old age of 77 to find solidarity with lighthearted entertainment is a surprise to say the least. After marauding against the dying of the light – or marauding toward it, more likely – for so long, his poetic fatalism – once bracing and disarming in his youth – has grown interminably stale over the past decade and a half. The self-serious likes of Robin Hood, Exodus, and even Gladiator all entomb themselves in a crisp outer-coating of operatic pretension that makes the hypothetical “fun” at their core go down like acid. Shockingly, or perhaps expectedly, Scott’s new foray into the dark heart of science fiction, the genre that made him famous, is … not quite so dark after all. It is the closest Scott has come to throwing his hands up, giving in, and letting a little light in. Continue reading →

Allow me to indulge myself in the most obvious comparison I can humanly muster for analyzing Steve Jobs: it is a little like Apple, the company ushered into the modern age by the titular behemoth of this film, who, with said ushering, may have ushered in that modern age with it. Which is to say, Steve Jobs is sleek in its interface, pinpoint in its clarity and ease-of-use, slightly idiosyncratic in its egotistical imperfections, vaguely refreshing and unique, and when you chew away the eccentricity and the fat, not all that different from anything else on the market. With its highly literate, theatrical three-act structure that eschews the conventional “life story” approach for a just slightly less conventional “process-oriented, real-time discover-the-man-as-he-works” parade of sequences, Steve Jobs promises something different, maybe something revolutionary. Like Apple, or any number of other vacantly, circumstantially liberal corporations like it – Google, the Democrats – its superficial differences only serve to mask its pat, corporate nature. Continue reading →

With Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, a pummeling potboiler dressed to the nines in contradiction and complication, it is tempting to pull the same old same old, the routine, now a ritual, that has been carted out for every “drug war” motion picture since Steven Soderbergh’s genre-defining Traffic. It is tempting to layer criticism under a diaphanous ruse of beautifully skulking ambiguity, to throw down the time-tested gauntlet of “characters not in black-and-white, but in gray”. It is tempting to go the epistemological route and employ critique about how Sicario sees the crippling no man’s land that is the War on Drugs, that is spans the gamut from down-in-the-trenches to up-in-the-boardroom. To claim that it “sees all sides” and “plays no favorites”.

None of that is really true. Sicario doesn’t have any food for thought about the War on Drugs, and plainly, I am not sure it thinks it does, which is, depending on your point of view, its guiding light or its crutch. Villeneuve’s previous film, 2013’s Prisoners, was a similarly-minded exploitation film with art-house aspirations, a work that ought to have wielded the name of an Argento or a Carpenter but instead felt itself a Godard. It was, essentially, a Halloween trick, drawing audiences in with promises of slick thrills (which it offered) but pretending, at every step of the way, to turn its back on the cadaverous, waning graveyard filmmaking it knew in its heart. It was a work of schlock, of trash, masquerading as a “serious” film with something to say about revenge. It was a gaslighting effort, essentially, or a way to tell the audience over and over again that they were watching a hardened think piece, when in reality they were watching a dime-store novel on the screen. Continue reading →