For a director who lives, or at least dreams, in dollhouses and dioramas, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs fittingly, and not unproblematically, begs, and then totally decries, comparisons to Yasujiro Ozu for its cinematic fantasyland version of mid-century Japan. That plaintive master of the cinema – arguably the master of the cinema – exposed post-War tensions in Japanese life with potent undertows of generational compromise and interpersonal balance all illuminated by and exposed through his famously diorama-like aesthetic. But although Anderson’s film is also set in a facsimile of mid-century Japan and retains Anderson’s typically diorama-laden milieu as well, it is in many ways Ozu’s diametrical opposition. While Ozu cast a plaintive and empathetic eye on external society, Isle of Dogs is resolutely a vision of the internal. Or, at least, it is a resolutely internal gaze on a mindscape known as Andersonville. For better or worse, it is as personal as Ozu’s film, but it is far more hermetically the work of, and a work for, one artist. Continue reading
Review: Isle of Dogs
Leave a reply
Retreading but also, crucially, retexturing Taxi Driver, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here casts both a severe shroud and a diaphanous aura. Silent and somehow graceful, it suggests a world that could float away with every moment, ever-closer to crumbling with each second that passes on the screen. Yet, while it’s constantly dissolving and possibly evaporating, it’s also a heaving, brutish beast of a picture A huge, unapologetic mass of cinema. A giant hulking fucking thing of a film. Most importantly, while scores of films trade in corporeal violence and fewer still in existential disturbance, Ramsay’s picture is the rare film that feels truly, inescapably dangerous. Not because it depicts violence, mind you, or documents any external tragedies – although it undeniably does both – but because it casts us adrift in the askew, hostile, truly broken-down headspace of a phantom man with Ramsay’s diabolically refined, ruthlessly sawtooth craft as our collective Charon. It’s a psychic, predatory tremor of a film. 
The addictively Ill-tempered I, Tonya imagines itself as a wildly speculative critique of the biopic formula. That said, while it focuses on Tonya Harding and is at its best when focused on her, she is not primarily in the film’s crosshairs. It might be more accurately said that the film weaponizes the media frenzy around Tonya Harding as a way to yolk Billy Wilder’s scabrous journalist-carcass scavenger Ace in the Hole with, well, Billy Wilder’s equally scabrous showbiz-psycho-circus Sunset Boulevard. Yolk to effects that, of course, aren’t nearly as monumentally well-crafted or psychologically inquisitive as either of those films. Not to mention effects that are much, much more scattershot. But, to a point, that’s acceptable for Craig Gillespie’s rabble-rouser, which analyzes a scattershot world. Steven Rogers’ script and Gillespie’s direction are punchy and slovenly in equal measure, and there’s a formal combustibility brewing throughout that both mirrors Harding’s cathartically unpracticed, spontaneous rage and animates wider questions about the chaotic instability of memory, journalism, and subjectivity.
There is no deer in Yorgos Lanthimos’ film, certainly as cryptic and roughly as zoological as his previous work The Lobster, but there are obvious shadows of the multi-millennia old tale about King Agamemnon, Artemis, and other figures from which the film draws its title. The specifics of that tale don’t necessarily bear on this film outside of imbuing it with a generally moralistic view of eventual comeuppance, a sense of balance in the world rooted in often-painful eye-for-an-eye moral righteousness. But the millennia-old connections are our earliest rumor of another key feature of this film, perhaps its defining paradox: despite its relentlessly modernistic awareness of dissociated subjectivity and uncertain truth, a whiff of extreme classicism suffuses this picture, as it so obviously infuses Lanthimos’ obvious aspirational dreams, his affectations to be part of the canon of Greek Drama with capital letters. Despite his mobilization of hyper-modern techniques and assumptions about the level of punishment his characters can take on-screen, this is a director who clearly doesn’t belong in the 21st century. 
On the surface, Annihilation, Alex Garland’s adaptation of the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, is the rare blockbuster that seems to be hurtling inward, exposing the furthest reaches of its mind, the darkest corners of its imagination. Every twist and turn desperately in search of composure and truth reveals something much more than added clarity: an erosion of certainty. For Annihilation, the dream would be an endless self-refraction, uncovering new selves and fragmenting the vision until no possibility of a definitive, monolithic, totalizing statement, let alone a “pure” vision, remains. This form of “failure”, although I shouldn’t have to say it, would be no flaw; it’s the mark of any masterpiece of perfect imperfection, a sense of heterogeneity and a will to collide contradictory registers which cannot cohere into a prefabricated whole.
I read somewhere on the internet that it would have been a shame if Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread “won” Best Picture, especially when measured up against other, quote, “quirkier” and “stranger” offerings like the eventually triumphant Shape of Water. A two-character drama set in the secluded lairs of the British bourgeoisie, the aesthetic proclivities and nominally-classical texture of Phantom Thread apparently encase it in the stifling halls of traditionalist, conservative cinema in this framework. This equation, of course, pits the film against its corollary, but also its diametrical opposite, or its positive mirror-image, in Shape of Water, a fellow warped mid-century love affair between unlikely companions. But the assumption that Shape is forward-thinking and Phantom Thread backward-moving is not only a cruel fate for the latter film, considering the beguiling ways in which Paul Thomas Anderson’s work plunges into the artifice and performance of desire and gender and discloses truth within. The comparison, not to mention Shape’s eventual win, also illuminates a much more significant problem with the status of debates around “progressive” and “regressive” cinema and their, in this case, imbrication upon a certain construction of, or false opposition between, a binary of “strange” and “traditional”. 
The acme of Paul Thomas Anderson’s self-conscious plundering of the American cinematic canon, There Will Be Blood is so freighted with importance and fraught with visions of its own mythical, apocalyptic dimensionality that it would crumble under the sheer girth of its own doom-laden edifice were it not so classically skillful and crafty. Plunging right into the heart of not only Upton Sinclair’s short story “Oil” but centuries of canonical American masterworks, There Will Be Blood jumps headfirst over Anderson’s scruffy Altman fetish and sets its sights on the mac daddy of American filmmaking: Citizen Kane. It’s truly a cinematic Icarus, attempting to rope together a century of prior national cinema, cut through the fat, and encroach on – and then tyrannize and desecrate – the American sublime. It’s a foolish and foolhardy quest that Anderson’s film is destined to fail at, but bless it for trying. 
With two images of social collapse under his belt, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson wisely made the decision not to repeat himself with his first 21st century film. Magnolia was akin to dropping a bunch of loose human animals in a preserve just to experiment, even if Anderson never lost his personal compassion, never diminished his characters to mere subjects of analysis. Magnolia was also a monolith, a messianic and almost apocalyptic vision of life at the end of the 20th century that (fairly successfully) interpreted depth as only a question of breadth. Understanding its subject was equated with conquering any and all subjects, consuming monoliths with a hubristic and unerring pull to complicate through augmentation, amplification, and magnification. Which, glorious though that film was, also sacrificed a certain intimacy, out-sizing the boldness of its landscape and its “visionary” status at the expense of its ability to register untold personal truths, to intimate the unvoiced longings and desires at the core of its tale but sometimes drowned out by the grandness of the camera, the monumentality of the sound, the exorbitance of the design. 
After a decade or so building up his reputation as the heir to the throne of Kubrick, Scorsese, or Altman (depending on one’s critical proclivities, or the specific scene one is viewing), writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s edifice has since lightly toppled, or at least begun teetering. He has thus far spent the 2010s in a mild critical comedown. But, perhaps having attained the mount, he’s also fallen a dizzying, wholly edifying route, pirouetting with grace and exploratory abandon by virtue of his will to test his own mettle rather than rest on recapitulating past glories, often one’s borrowed rather than conjured on his own. Only in the 2010s has Anderson finally cultivated his own genuinely contradictory style, and folded in the parallel and perpendicular tendencies of his forebears, say jittery Scorseseian nerviness, soft and humanistic Altmanesque woundedness, and calculating Kubrickian brutality, in intoxicatingly heterodox ways.
The Long Take 