In honor of another Wachowski bullet ready to be thrown away and left out in the cold by an undiscerning society, Jupiter Ascending, here is a review of their previous film, a work that draws out their strengths and weaknesses for creating passionate, alive, messy, confused, singular cinema like few others.
Let no one say the Wachowskis aren’t unique, and neither is their friend Tom Tykwer. When they succeed, they succeed in a way that no other film these days even dreams of. And when they fail, they fail gloriously and unapologetically, not for laziness or lack of trying but for the sort of self-aggrandizing messiness the likes of which we haven’t seen since the New Wave auteurs were drowning in their own sweaty ambition thirty five years ago. Usually, they achieve the extra fascinating feat of accomplishing both such success and failure within the same film, to the point where they don’t so much swing wildly between the two as construct an edifice wherein the distinction between success and failure is no longer meaningful or even useful.
Case in point, Cloud Atlas, a film for which good and bad hold no meaning, a stew where achievement and failure are mixed together so that they are inextricable and one-in-the-same. Cloud Atlas is surely a unique concoction, but saying anything else takes us into uncomfortable, un-confident territory where every statement is merely a half-guess loaded with so many qualifiers it often serves no purpose in and of itself. Continue reading
Edited June 2016
First aired in 1999, the “SpongeBob” animated television show is defined primarily by an aesthetic of chill, off-the-cuff, non-confrontational madness. It is a show left uncontrolled with its own id in a room, forced to confront its own nonsense and live with it and have the most glorious time of its existence simply being itself. It is a wonderful slice of animation as character definition, radical in subtle ways and existential and playful without ever seeming over-worked or tired. Above all, it never really seems to try. It simply exists in its own state, not so much working to function a certain way as laying itself down and exploring whatever comes out of its mind at that moment. It seems gloriously uncontainable, but never too hungry to lash out or rush around for the sake of energy in every direction it can. It’s a show of quiet confusion, aloof froth, and lazy charm. It is something that does not seem to have been produced or created, but found and observed. It is free of exposition, free of explanation. It is pure, un-worked, and unworkable. It seems effortless. 
Ahem. “Faced with the overwhelming stubborn mule that is the American girth of racism and backward stagnancy, Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) uneasily fuses together a coalition of the willing (and unwilling) toward showing America the full extent of its wrongs and doing whatever he can to pursue a greater right”. With a story like that, one would be forgiven for assuming all the hype around Selma boils down to a work of reigned-in Oscarbait, safe and streamlined and ready and willing to fall in love with its own saccharine self. It would seem this crowd-pleasing lull is the de facto state of the corporate biopic, flying high on easy, over-written drama and hagiography, indifferently filmed, edited, composed, and photographed, and resting almost entirely on the laurels of the main actor/ actress in the lead role.
Predestination is so close to being just another in a long line of too on-the-nose puzzle box movies. So much of what it does is ape the sort of sub-Christopher Nolan modern-era “betcha can’t guess where this is going to go?” holier-than-thou smug superiority that sacrifices visual nuance and crafty characterization for placing viewers in an icy cold puzzle box that was hired instead of a story. It’s so close to not working that its kind of a miracle it does work at all. It’s even more of a miracle that so much of why it works is in the acting, my much-chagrined “don’t care” department and perennial vote for “most overrated thing about the whole cloth of cinema”. Besides story, of course.
The Boy Next Door is a film alive with the sense of discovery that “yes, a film can be this bad in 2015”, and it is astoundingly welcome for this reason. Directed Rob Cohen, who still exists apparently, and starring Jennifer Lopez, who also sometimes remembers that she is an actual person, The Boy Next Door is a riot, plain and simple, and it seems to have absolutely no sense that it is. Just the idea alone works wonders: a high school English teacher (Jennifer Lopez) who has an affair with local resident supposed-nice-guy, takes-care-of-his-paraplegic-uncle, male-model, good-with-his-hands-if-you-know-what-I-mean Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman). All is well and good, until he turns out to be a particularly abusive male-privilege hound who obsesses over her and is willing to kill to get what he wants.
A critic should be honest about their biases. Considering this, a preface: Beyond the Black Rainbow is conventionally described, at least insofar as a film this atypical can be conventionally described, as a modern recollection of the grainy, quizzical, hard science fiction storytelling so popular in 1970s US culture, doused with a thin membrane of stilted, personality-heavy American animation forever struggling to find out what it meant to aim for an audience of both children and adults. Considering this, it would have been almost impossible for me to dislike the film going on. As it turns out, I do not dislike it. Take from that what you will.
House of Flying Daggers
The first thing to note about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the most important: it is very proud of what it is, and makes no attempt to hide it. Lee’s film is a melodrama, unambiguously and unashamedly, and Lee directs with painterly flourish to match. He showcases the splendor and dignity of the work with magnificence and a sense of illustrious eminence, positioning it as part classical Hollywood epic (Lee is after all a highly Americanized director) and part Chinese mythmaking fable. Nothing about Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is played at the level of naturalism, and all of it enhances the opulence of a production which wears its honest drama on its sleeves. 
The Long Take 