Review: Fruitvale Station

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On January 1, 2009, a young African-American male named Oscar Grant was fatally shot by a police officer named Johannes Mersehle at the Fruitvale Train Station near San Francisco. He was not armed. At the same time, his story is one of many, too many. But individualism sells, and thus, for a Western audience, Oscar’s story will appeal more than something broader and more explicitly political. This is a right shame, itself predicated on the violence of individualism that denies the communal stories behind Grant’s tragedy, ironic considering this film’s assumed challenge to Western racism. But all of this aside, Fruitvale Station exists in this format, and in this format, Grant’s story is America’s, or minority America’s. And Ryan Coogler is here to share. Continue reading →

Double Feature: A Serious Man and True Grit

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A Serious Man

A deceptively sedate but perpetually off-kilter movie, A Serious Man really has a lot going on under its sleeves, even if the characters seem more interested in re-fastening the cuff-links to keep everything from spilling out. It’s one of the two-headed director’s patented caustic satires of the very mundane oppression of everyday suburban America, only this time without as much salt and vinegar. Yes, A Serious Man is a combative, anxious film, and it takes a perturbed delight in unearthing the daily existential crises of a society that seems to run on wheels to the untrained eye, but it’s also a curiously warm film. Perhaps the Coens had a little bit of humanist fun left in them after 2008’s 60’s caper comedy re-reading Burn After Reading, and they decided to infuse just a smidgen of it into a decidedly brainier, more intellectual stew. Or maybe they just had Jewish guilt on the mind, and needed a little Jewish humor to save their tired souls. Either way, they produced some filmic dynamite, a work as rabidly intellectual as it is lightly feeling and genially flighty. It captures humanity looking the other way and takes a true delight in watching and letting the popcorn fly. Continue reading →

Getting these Reviews Out there, but this Time, they’re all Best Picture Winners Apparently!

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The Artist

And here, at least (at last), is a film that is proud enough of its superficial intentions to elevate them to the status of filmic playground, to respect them and put as much gasping talent into them at all angles as humanly possible. If The King’s Speech was confused, The Artist knows exactly what it is: a good ol’ fashioned time at the movies. And it’s happy to be one for its mercilessly peppy running length.
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Movies and Music and Magic and … Metal Mockumentaries: This is Spinal Tap

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Edited

This is Spinal Tap is so inescapably rife with over-the-top zaniness and gleeful, knowing stupidity. But for all its exuberance, what’s most astounding about this concoction of sugar and spice is how easy-going, relaxed, and even lethargic it is. The tone of the film conveys a sort of laid-back afternoon, with sly, subversively restrained performances complementing characters rather than stealing them and running away with them. This is not one of the many throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks-films becoming popular around the time of this film’s release; it’s a comedy with a difference. The batting average for jokes is remarkable, with each one seemingly assembled with care and craft. It is a thoroughly composed, careful, willful, and even delicate motion picture, and it is one of the sharpest comedies ever released.
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National Cinemas: Gojira (1954)

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Update late 2018:

With all the claims about the 2014 American update inaugurating the “post-human” blockbuster, I was reminded on a re-watch of the original how salient Ishiro Honda’s crisis-ridden cinematic creature is. Charged with atomic energy, Honda conjures not only a hundred-foot paleolithic behemoth but a reckoning with a past come to haunt us, a vision of pre-modernity wreaking havoc with our pretensions toward teleological progress into the future. In its vastly more noirish, pugnacious way, Gojira plays like the B-side to the prior year’s Tokyo Story, Yasujiro Ozu’s take on the crisis of modernity and the dialectics of the private-public divide. Although punchier and not as meditative, Gojira, perhaps no less than Ozu’s film itself, is fully aware of its own paradoxes, and, especially in its final anti-cathartic gesture – science immolating itself to correct its own mistakes – fully aware of the paradoxes which construct modernity itself.

Original review:

Watching the original 1954 Japanese version of Gojira (or Godzilla, its American title) brings haunting, caustic visual poetry to the collective suffering of a post-war nation still reeling from World War II and the H-Bomb Drop. The film is an exposed wound, a lesion on a collective consciousness. It has the big man, of course, in the titular character, but it has much more: humans fending for their lives, running around in total chaos not only from an attack but the impression of an attack leftover from a previous life. Godzilla bestows its titular figure with a looming presence – he towers over the film even when he’s not on screen that often, going beyond the physical object and into the doom lying down on the hearts and souls of Japan. He is an idea more than a physical presence. The film is draped in a malaise of human inactivity on the eve of assured destruction, and a realization, after all, that there is little to be done against a force so impenetrably inhuman. And yet so penetratingly human he is. Continue reading →

Review: Her

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Update late 2019: Looking back on some old Joaquin Phoenix films with Joker raising such a ruckus, and I’m torn on Her after a six-year gap in viewing. The film certainly feels less monumental than it did six years ago, but that’s also a show of strength: quietly but demonstrably, critically but not-cynically, the film exhibits curiosity about relationships, identity, and the world, and its lack of capital-case textures and showboating maneuvers suggest the subtlety of its craft more than Importance ever could. That said, I’m less certain that Her’s curlicued production design affectations, while kept in check from garish Burtonesque grotesqueness or Wes Anderson-esque excess by Hoyte von Hoytema’s phenomenally diffuse, naturalistic cinematography, are actually the auto-critical gestures the film so clearly thinks them to be. The film’s look is still pointed, and still effective, but at times, it encroaches on the very mannered twee-ness that the style otherwise so thoughtfully diagnoses about modernity, so much so that the film seems cloistered and soul-bearing at once. Is it thoughtfully contradictory for the film to lean so clearly into its very object of critique, as though swirling around in its own critical gaze, or is it simply too-cute by half?

Original (Edited) Review:

After Where the Wild Things Are, I’d been waiting intently to see what writer-director Spike Jonze would do next. Create a fascinatingly mundane view of society and the individuals that populate it? Produce a gorgeous feast for the eyes that exists at odds with the dynamic, dreary visuality of most films today? Wring great, pointedly hollow performances of out some very talented actors, even one who doesn’t appear on camera? Create one of the finest, most honest romances of the new century, albeit between a human and an AI, without resorting to either cloying melodrama or judgmental pandering? Include not one but two very fiercely well manicured mustaches? Well he did it all and then some. Continue reading →

Midnight Screening: I Walked with a Zombie

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I Walked with a Zombie was the second film Val Lewton produced once given complete control of RKO’s horror unit, and it was released only a year after Cat People, his most famed horror film. Given this, one might expect a retread, but I Walked with a Zombie is certainly not the film anyone then or now would be expecting. A tension seethes in the air and grasps all, but the film doesn’t demand in the way a work like Cat People is so tersely constructed to fight for our attention. Absent are the soul-deep colors of Cat People which lighted up the screen with black energy. And in place of the rampant diluted German Expressionism of American horror throughout the ’30s and ’40s, all caught up in harsh and angular nightmares, we have something that more closely approximates a hazy dream, a curious cross between an English period drama and a work of French impressionism that centers mournful, elegiac long takes and has room enough for lost secrets deviously begging to get out . It is, above all, wholly distant from anything resembling horror logic, and it is all the more fascinating for it.
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National Cinemas: Seven Samurai

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Akira Kurosawa came to Seven Samurai at a flux, but the ripples of his magnificent cultural clash are still felt today. Birthed on a long line of films seeking a sort of safety in cultural traditionalism, he’d by 1950 established a certain formal rigidity in his films to befit this traditionalism that he extended into the stratosphere and elevated to high art. But Seven Samurai was him flexing his muscles, and his attitude toward the world, in a bid to implicitly challenge the culture he’d grown with, even as he naturally upheld that culture all the same. In its own way, Seven Samurai saw him growing, bending, and testing the limits of the Japanese samurai film. It also saw him feeling the ensuing pain and cognitive dissonance of his actions, not unlike Western films like The Searchers and High Noon for American cinema around this time. But while those films saw America grappling with its fundamental lie, that of individual freedom and fluid class boundaries, Seven Samurai saw Kurosawa tackle the mid-century Japanese focus on static class boundaries by adding a dose of new-found fluidity and freedom to his formally composed camerawork, and to his strong, silent characters. Like those films, Seven Samurai is caught in its own dissonance, radicalizing even as it remains resolutely traditional to the point of fable– but here it’s a fable of a nation coming to terms with itself.

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American New Wave: Annie Hall

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Annie Hall is many things: a thoughtful, perceptive dissection of romance, a frothy, light romantic comedy, and a devastating depiction of the inevitability of loss in love. It is also, more than anything, not the film Woody Allen was on the path to making in 1977. While he was a noted comedy writer-director by this time, and one who had made several strong features, his films were defined by their frothy-caustic anarchy and generally zany Marx Brothers riffs, movies structured less like narrative than improvisational comedy. This last part continues in Allen’s then most mature feature, Annie Hall, but while it boasts a number of laugh aloud moments, its humor is underscored by a fundamental nervousness that puts it at odds with Allen’s previous works.

Personified in Allen’s Alvy Singer, the kind of figure who would soon become an Allen stereotype but who here feels youthful with worry, this film was Allen’s first to tread the line between the caustic and the deeply warm-hearted, the incorrigible and the unquestionably brittle. This isn’t a depressing picture per-se – it’s far too energetic and lively – but it does deal with ends as much as beginnings, innately creating a sort of finality that breeds some sense of loss absent in any of Allen’s previously more abstract, even obtuse, sketch-like works. Annie Hall is also, in addition to all these things, and perhaps because of Allen’s skill at combining them into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, pure cinematic dynamite, a film so in love with and so angry at the world it cannot help but provide us with new ways of looking at it. Continue reading →