It goes without saying that Widows is more of a crackerjack offering than we’re used to from director Steve McQueen, who typically specializes in the soul-rotting malaise of a cold-blooded world and/or the existential disfigurement of an abandoned person barely surviving in it. But Widows still bears McQueen’s ruthlessly stark, almost psychotically perfect formalist streak. There’s a little more wiggle-room in the style – more drive, more chaos, more flippancy, more immediacy, maybe even more of a desire to please – but it’s still a Steve McQueen film. Which means, although its gears run faster and it’s more soul-shredding than soul-rotting, it’s still all cold muscle, coiled nerves, and ready-to-pounce fury.

My mixed metaphors above – mechanical to organic, automotive to leonine – sound off, but the film validates them – and, more importantly, itself – within a minute of its run-time, an old-fashioned “here is some cinema for you” gesture that sets the film absolutely running. I don’t want to spoil it, but it involves an immediate, mesmerizing, and rather brutal cut from sexual animalism to full-throttle pedal-to-the-medal instability that comes out of nowhere and carries us forward for more than two hours.

It also indicates, perhaps a little overtly, that the film really wants to let us know that it means business, that it is first and foremost out to Cinema us with a very capital C.   Widows is positively overstuffed with masterful gestures of that sort, both big and small, perhaps to the point of self-congratulation. Within half an hour, there’s a spellbinding circular tracking shot and, as if to top itself yet again, an astonishing several-minute tracking shot as a car hastily skedaddles from a working-class, African-American community into a predominantly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood, the film quietly but pointedly underlining via its formalism the inescapable (but, in America, typically very easily forgotten) fact that such stark wealth disparity can be visualized within a roughly two-minute tracking shot without cutting.  Widows is almost definitively the most sharply crafted Hollywood film of 2018, but it is also no less definitively aware of that fact, and that realization is not always to its benefit. Continue reading →

Forgive the fact that this anniversary was last fall; I wrote this then, but didn’t publish it here until now

The most famous band in the world naming an album after themselves sounds like a mark of certainty, even hubris. They don’t need another name, no album title to serve as postscript, subtitle, or anteroom for the main attraction. They’re The Beatles, dammit. And this post-summer-of-love album is The Beatles, 30 whole songs of them. The title’s self-conscious striving toward monumentality aims for essence, for the answer, for an obelisk-like encryption-key to decode what makes The Beatles themselves. And it may actually achieve this monumentality, but not because the album offers any conclusions or solutions. Rather than statement, The Beatles’ totemic title is more of a mimic for the famous album cover: negative visual space, a cover and a title so basic and obvious that, rather than explaining the band in the plainest of terms, they offer a blank canvas upon which every audience member can ponder their opinion of the band.

And those pondering, of course, include all four members of the band themselves, all of whom at times seem to use the colloquially-titled White Album as a way to disentangle themselves from what they by all accounts felt to be a noxious interpersonal communion, to ponder if anything of The Beatles was really worth saving. Naturally, they only end up tangling themselves further. More than on any other Beatles album, The White Album is the one where their individual voices seem to bleed and contort, separating out into specific quadrants (such that some songs are only by McCartney, only by Lennon, only by Harrison, etc) while paradoxically blurring to the point where it is exceedingly difficult to actually put one’s finger on what constitutes a “Lennon song” or a “McCartney song” anymore in the first place. The band turn their identities into a centrifuge of discreet sounds and sensations which, pointedly, never collect themselves into any cohesive, singular, or easily-mappable perspective. Which is to say: The White Album, to cop a cliché, exceeds the sum of its parts, but specifically because it fails to do so, because it is an accumulation of song-styles which cannot be summed-up or summarized into a larger “vision”.  The act of making the album pulled the band apart, and, aurally speaking, the album’s sound doubles that breakage. The results are gloriously dysfunctional. Continue reading →

Green Book is almost refreshingly tone-deaf in its mid-century liberalism. Which, apparently, is still late 2010s liberalism, if writers Peter Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie, and Nick Vallelonga (son of the protagonist) have anything to say about it. And, if for no other reason than to remind us that this variant of faux-egalitarian genteel liberal cinema undetained by questions of power and politics still exists this deep into the 21^st century, I suppose I have to thank Green Book for taking my breath away. With Moonlight, Sorry to Bother You, and Us, I’d hoped we’d moved on. But here I am about to claim anything especially positive about late ‘10s American cinema on the subject of race, and Green Book has kindly arrived to keep me on my guard. Would that the film had any interest in exploring what its African-American deuteragonist has to do to keep himself on guard.

Instead of what it does do, which is – to the surprise of no one – subsume Shirley’s personal and physical crises to the role of a reflective mirror for a white protagonist. The two characters I write of are classical pianist Dr. Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali), about to depart for a two-month concert trip through the Jim Crow South in roughly November and December of 1962, and Italian-American (the film is very interested in us knowing that he is Italian-American) working-stiff Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), hired to serve as Dr. Shirley’s chauffer and all-purpose bodyguard. The conceit of the narrative, then, rests on our awareness that a black man in the South in the ‘60s will, as Tony informs us, cause “trouble”. But that trouble is more important for us, meaning white America, than for Shirley, at least in the film’s mind. The film’s perspective is almost exclusively hewn to Tony’s, the script exhibiting a clear favoritism for his moral awakening compared with Shirley’s plight, let alone the collective suffering of African-Americans in the South (or North), all of whom are meaningful in the film only as background.

As – to be honest – is Tony. While I’ve already made the obvious point – that Shirley only exists in this film to validate Tony’s crisis of conscience – the truth is that Green Book has an almost exclusively functionalist relationship to all of its characters (but especially Shirley).  It treats them each as a collection of qualities and features that never come into play except in moments where the plot finds them instrumental or where they can be expressly thematized. Thus, Dr. Shirley’s homosexuality is “useful” for the film in one scene, and briefly in a second, and evaporated from the film’s conscious at all other times. And to any dubious claims that this serves some sort of “humanist” purpose – to ask us not to over-emphasize any identitarian features in order to treat Donald as a “person” first and foremost (rather than a black person, a gay person, etc) – the film submits not one ounce of stray human energy to suggest that it actually ever cares about these characters as people in the first place. No internal desires or personal uncertainties seep out of the tight confines of film narrative. There’s no room for any personal excess – for the characters to exhibit traits or features which the film doesn’t know what to do with, which it can’t immediately schematize and instrumentalize toward a kind of dialectic synthesis designed to harmonize the two main characters into a friendship. (The film does, admittedly, make the somewhat bold decision to give Tony a character trait that I don’t know what to do with, namely that he is the type of person who enjoys folding an entire pizza in half and eating it at once). Continue reading →

Although penned by a phalanx of writers and starring Liam Neeson, the cinematically-savvy corners of the internet have been very quick to label The Commuter the work of director Jaume Collet-Sera. Perhaps grasping at straws in the wake of the death of the “action director” of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the internet has also deemed fit that Collet-Sera really is the dormant action-auteur we’ve all been silently waiting for over the past twenty or so years. And, if that wasn’t enough, he’s apparently a wrong-man thriller director whose pairings with Neeson rekindle the spirit of, if not existing on the same plane as, the famous thrillers of Hitchcock and Cary Grant! You know, the one’s where Hitchcock was playfully manipulating his audience and characters, rather than teasing us about the moral implications of how he was playfully manipulating his audiences and characters. Those films called for Jimmy Stewart in the lead.

Aided and abetted by Paul Cameron’s expressive, quasi-expressionistic camera and depleted, leached-out color palate, The Commuter makes a great first impression as a lynchpin for that argument: a post-recession locked-room potboiler with its finger on the pulse of the late ‘10s miasma just as surely as Hitch’s own explorations of mid-century middle-class voyeurism had post-war suburban spectatorship, and the desire to live vicariously through others’ lives when our own are thrown into disarray, on the mind. Continue reading →

After the sturdy filmmaking economy of Hotel Artemis, it’s rather depressing to witness the belabored post-modernism and needlessly hip temporal machinations of Bad Times at the El Royale, not the worst kind of cinematic “cunning,” but close to it. Finally returning after directing Cabin in the Woods – and his mostly indifferent, mildly pleasurable screenplay for The Martian – Drew Goddard’s Bad Times is a vital compendium of many of the worst tendencies of mainstream “intellectual” storytelling. Goddard’s screenplay traverses an astonishingly circuitous route toward a largely banal resolution, superficially name-checking a variety of late ‘60s thematic signifiers – racism, classism, post-hippie fallout, cultish masculinity, the miasma of the oncoming ‘70s, a zeitgeist-y inability to trust in leaders – tepidly and arbitrarily. It expends all of its energy quite overtly ticking boxes on the path toward a moral parable that, at best, has little to do with any of the above, and at worst, actively avoids them to get from point A to point B, pulling themes out of a hat and getting bitten by the rabbit when the carrot at the end of the stick turns out to be a phony. Continue reading →

The directorial debut of Iron Man 3 co-writer Drew Pearce, Hotel Artemis displays all of the style of that earlier film’s director Shane Black, and none of his sometimes cloying cleverness. Hotel Artemis is a blessedly simple, brutally elegant creature, a cinematic bottle-episode in the life of The Nurse (Jodie Foster), an elderly woman who’s clearly seen far too much in her life to exhibit anything more than pragmatic indifference about anything that comes her way. A temperature which is true of the film’s titular location, and, by way of approximation, the film itself. Written and directed by Pearce with a sense of suggestion and screenwriting economy unheard of for a summer genre film in the era of 2 ½ blockbusters, this is an abnormally – dare I say heroically? – straightforward production.

And a defiantly un-visionary one, exclusively dedicated to workaday problems and everyday struggles in the lives of criminals in Los Angeles, only ever-so-slightly refracted by a “15 minutes into the future” aesthetic that is much more thoughtfully quotidian and less obnoxiously conceptual than Black Mirror.  Hotel Artemis introduces us to two career criminals, brothers played by Sterling K. Brown and Brian Tyree Henry, the latter of whom is shot, prompting both to go to the titular Hotel, a kind of no-questions-asked medical bay for criminals who have memberships. Run by Foster’s Nurse and her towering assistant Everest, played by Dave Bautista as a tragic-comic fanatic who worships the hotel’s rules with a devotional fervor, the Hotel admits the brothers, but they are far from the only visitors that night Continue reading →

The protagonists of the 2018 version of the oft-adapted A Star is Born may be the rugged, ragged country singer Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) and the younger rising pop star Ally (Lady Gaga). But the film’s voice undeniably belongs to another character, Jackson’s older half-brother, played with a typically phenomenal mixture of world-weary cynicism and weathered wit by Sam Elliot. Essentially the film’s viewpoint, Elliot’s character rebukes criticisms about its remake status by explicitly and perhaps charitably thematizing the value of playing within formulas and dusting off older routines in an early line of dialogue. As if the film is commenting on itself, this traveling soul seems to know, more than his younger brother who still believes in a more singular notion of originality, that there are limits to self-fashioning, and that all selves are cobbled together piecemeal out of influences far and wide. Elliot’s itinerant would-be cowboy reiterates what prior American wanderers Whitman and Emerson understood as the tragic possibility of realizing that you live in a world where all you can truly do is quote creatively.

Elliot’s character thus not only provides Cooper his voice but gifts his movie its thesis, not to mention its point of view. And, of course, its mildly self-congratulatory excuse as well, the film’s way of avoiding the challenge of more overt experimentation while committing to the belief that all experimentation is itself a similar form of play within existing structures. Of course, the film is correct in suggesting that creativity really is just skillful reconsideration of forebears. But that doesn’t necessarily let the film off the hook for, well, not doing much in the way of genuine reconsideration.

Elliot’s voice is the film’s in a second sense as well: Cooper’s protagonist sounds like Sam Elliot looks, and the gravelly hoarseness of both performances is also part of its relative fascination, as well as its thematic commentary. Another line of dialogue seems to acknowledge that Cooper’s character chose to model his voice off of Elliot to achieve some simulacrum of “authenticity,” suggesting that Maine’s swaggering machismo is a performance, a kind of costume meant to articulate an American creed. The film suggests that no one is really born a rambling man; through a combination of social circumstance and personal will, they become one, even at the expense of other, perhaps more humane and generous, versions of self. Continue reading →

Perhaps the most consistently banalized of all prestige genres, the “Oscarbait biopic” has recently emerged as an idiom for self-complicating narrative cinema. But the Oscarbait biopic can take many forms. For name-conscious auteurs seeking to problematize the individualist Oscarbait formula, with its focus on personal growth and salvation at the expense of wider social or material realities, this kind of film typically allows filmmakers to produce popularly legible dramas while paying attention (and often, frankly, lip service) to social issues. For other, often more artistically inspired filmmakers who frequently nonetheless run the risk of drowning in their personal myopic, biopics tend to center characters who are facsimiles for the creators of the films themselves. It was impossible to miss director Damien Chazelle in the main character of the decidedly agitated Whiplash or in either of the protagonists of La La Land. Neither film had any itch to explore a world outside the nearly hermetic glory of personal creation, each suggesting a kind of laudable final artistic transcendence that, in the first case, might mean the loss of a character’s soul, and in the second, the loss of a companion.

First Man’s Neil Armstrong, in contrast, is essayed as a kind of blank canvas and evacuated man by Ryan Gosling. He also, I suspect, really isn’t meant to be Neil Armstrong. I’m not sure how much Chazelle sees of himself in Armstrong, but it doesn’t really matter. Although this new film misses some opportunities, and its central character’s steadfast determination and essential dismissal of anything resembling a personal life may be read as further proxies for Chazelle, it is testament to First Man – indeed, it may be why the film is meaningful at all – that it is the first of this director’s films where the protagonist isn’t a myopic recreation of personal psychology so much as a Rosetta Stone for a culture, a time-period, and an ethos. And, at times beautifully, for the film’s own self-conscious limits in exploring that time-period.  Continue reading →