Girl meets guy. Girl falls in love with guy. Girl is Mia, a struggling actress played by a very-much-not-struggling actress Emma Stone. Guy is Sebastian, a poetically long-suffering jazz musician played by Ryan Gosling. Guy is also writer-director Damien Chazelle, who mostly just loves himself.
La La Land is a technicolor fantasia, a vacation spot, and buff-and-shines for a veritable armada of Bonafide Classic stylistic touchstones, all in service of Damien Chazelle somewhat cynically showing us that he has goods to play with the older, more wizened hands in the poker game. The film’s mind is a wandering, stylistically promiscuous consciousness that temporarily houses itself in a jambalaya of classical musical film influences. Or, in other words, a film that is very much keen to prove that it is an old soul dusting itself off with fancy new tricks. And tricks it certainly boasts in abundance. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren browses through every canted angle, camera-pirouette, and fluorescent color he can find in the film library, having been given seeming free-reign to concoct a cotton-candy parallel universe. Continue reading
Now that we’re firmly entrenched in the perennial-Star Wars churn of the Disney machine, director Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story bears testament to the only true artistic value of Disney’s exercise: a chance to gouge Disney’s money to spread out not vertically – along one path – but horizontally, foraging through deepest, darkest corporate storytelling for shards of tonal variance and new moods that need not commingle with the main through-line. Every film need not follow the line of best fit, which allows for a franchise to stagger and ping-pong between tones wildly rather than chart a forward path that would surely become a funeral procession, at least artistically speaking. As a first blow though, Edwards latches onto the asphyxiated, battered, worn-out world of the original film to germinate Rogue One into a supernova of bruised beauty wracked with undertows of ambivalence about its own obvious oncoming, fated conclusion. Ironically, it is by returning to the franchise’s roots – and pulling them up to expose the dirt-encrusted thorns – that Rogue One keeps the franchise from ossifying into arrested development. 
Much hullabaloo has been made about season five of Samurai Jack’s serialized nature. And why not? Serialization is the mantra of our time, the de rigueur shorthand for maturity in the televised world and the essence of respectability for a culture almost hermetically obsessed with the lexicon of long-form storytelling. The prestige TV glut of the past twenty years has almost uniformly been filtered through the quasi-hegemonic logic of the linear story, of spreading out storylines in the name of events causing events causing more events. More time means more conflict, more space to accrue information, more room to define everything and leave nothing ambiguous or uncertain. It conjures a wider cavern to fill in causes, effects, consequences, obstructions, and solutions. It feeds into a cultural desire to trace increasingly complex, labyrinthine plots and prove ourselves as viewers by untangling the thorns of a narrative. 
Freud and Superman and Fellini and sleaze-house dens all make walk-on appearances just in the introductory passages of Brian de Palma’s Hi, Mom!, a quasi-satire, or at least a loosening up of, the malevolent Hitchcockian Rear Window. A bizarre-world antecedent to Taxi Driver, this is a film with Robert De Niro obsessively subjecting New York to his viewfinder until he is himself victim to and participant in an artistic nightmare. Relentlessly aware of its own spectatorship and shot-through with neurotic ambivalences, the film always has film on the brain, and the muscles, and the loins. But De Palma refuses to rest on this tried-and-true meta-textual laurel, instead wandering off – skipping, even tumbling – in untold and untested directions. Call him a Hitch parasite all you want, but Hi, Mom! commandeers Hitch for its own sinful purposes. 
Hectoring becomes a professional endeavor, or professional filmmaking becomes a form of hectoring the audience in John Huston’s whacked-out Beat the Devil, entirely denounced when it was first released and somehow bent and mutated even further sixty four years later. Temptation begs that I reclaim the film by arguing that it was “misconstrued’ upon release, but I’m not entirely certain it exists to be construed. That might only breed domestication, curbing the film’s vigorous unruliness. With a regular goon squad of odd cartoon shapes masquerading as people waiting around in a squalid sea-port town, the whole film seems to exist to breathe in the salt water. The most exciting moment is entirely about an aging, wheezy Bogart and a pair of portly fellows schlepping after a runaway car, teasingly dramatic music massaging out the irony of their failure to exert more than a modicum of effort. It’s awkward, heinous, mismatched, and oddly brilliant in its idiom. 
Recast as a fair-weather Hollywood rebel with Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys – breaking the rules only just enough to accrue a superficial glaze of strangeness – Chris Marker’s La Jetee is the real deal. It’s as aesthetically radical as any film this side of, well, Hiroshima, Mon Amour three years earlier, at least, but La Jetee was released in the most aesthetically radical period of cinema ever, so “as (blank) as any film since (blank)” has the misfortune of not really working here. Marker’s short-film is an elegy for the cohesive illusion of time as a passive process, as an unalienable fact to be perceived identically by all and regurgitated out by scores of films more or less in unison. Most films grant themselves safe passage to erase time, to treat time as a background specter to be shocked into corporeality when a film needs to increase its own stakes via a ticking clock bomb or parallel editing that expands time to increase suspense. Films escape time, essentially, and they ask us to escape with them; they whisk us away, projecting a parallel universe where the events of the world are liberated from death, from age, from vulnerability to the physical realm, to the material reality that conditions their own existence. 
Contrary to its reputation as a one-sided morass of sobriety, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is prismatic in its consciousness, a fitful and lithe creature that can crawl on its belly like a dark acolyte of existential Swedish woe one minute and cartwheel to celestial fields of comic (and cosmic) foolishness the next. Although accruing the dredged-in reputation of a stilted monolith afforded to only the most holier-than-thou, protected-by-the-Vatican masterpieces, Bergman’s film is a Janus-headed creature that matches its bristling dread and ability to turn terror into torpor with a spontaneous brio and elastic mood permissive to sparks that constantly disturb any tonal equilibrium. The film’s detractors conveniently fail to notice its many appetites, such as how it leverages it doleful imagery for its more amusing undercurrents, or how it teases out symbols that are as cheekily self-reflexive as they are morbidly pious. And, although Bergman’s representation of Death has been parodied too many times to count, none of them match Bergman’s Death and his statuesque, unwavering anti-charisma for sly suggestion. The film’s detractors are more-so trapped in a state of arrested development than the film. 
Blake Edwards does Jacques Tati in this natural evolution (or devolution, if you prefer) of the unwinding chaos of The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark. Toying with the perception of physical space and middle-century domesticity, The Party begins with a simple premise – an Indian actor adrift and misconstrued in a bourgeois Hollywood party – and stokes into a case for pandemonium as an ultimate liberation. If his fellow Brit Richard Lester was uniquely keyed into the beats of Beat and the menace of Mod, Edwards’ film seems to find a mantra for life in visual bedlam. Charting a path from lone Indian infection in a white person’s world to full-bore mansion pandemic, Edwards not only massages an ethnic minority’s failure to assimilate into virtue but ignites it to demolish the implicit codes, customs, rituals, and aesthetics of the Western bourgeoisie. 
Meant to review this in memoriam for Bill Paxton earlier this year, but with Powers Boothe passing as well, I had no choice but to get around to it. Both are great in this underrated horror film from arguably the worst period for the genre in film history.
The path of least resistance for Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism is to demarcate its boundaries to the realm of a frank and unadorned depiction of sex in all its musty and fleshy glory. This is itself highly valuable, especially as a respite from, and a riposte to, decades of puritanical and repressive arms of society and cinema that have abstracted the body beyond itself symbolically to make it more than itself and, in doing so, less than itself, unable to acknowledge the fact that the body’s tangibility cannot be contained by a symbol.
The Long Take 