But 1995 was not merely a year for corporate excess and nihilism crawling out from the woodworks; it was also a year of magic and wonder, and a childlike work of supreme, effervescent joy the likes of which cinema had long forgotten…
Most reviews of Babe focus almost exclusively on some aspect of cinema related to maturity, championing Chris Noonan and George Miller’s 1995 childhood fable for its maturity relative to other movies “for children”. They posit, essentially, that it works for “adults” as well. A fine point, but it also misses quite a bit more than it hits. For Babe is a lovely film for adults, yes, but that could not be the case if it were not so wholly committed to being a children’s film to begin with. What is more germane, I think, is that is a rare breed of children’s film, a work which takes children as its subject rather than its object, and sees the world from the perspective of a child without seeking to reveal some layer of ironic detachment or self-serious maturity to comment on and critique this child’s mind. It is, instead, wholly dedicated to the emotional dream-logic of children, and for precisely this reason, it exists at a right angle to just about everything you can find in the film world this side of 1939. Continue reading
Yet 1995 was not simply a year of corporate indulgence; it was also a period where the rampant nihilist streak inherent to much of the cinema of the late ’90s and the 2000s and still running wild today came to fruition in the eyes of one music video director…
Goldeneye
Paul Verhoeven doesn’t know the meaning of the word nuance, and Robocop provides at least the opening arguments for why the world is a better place for it. Brash and brutal in its own quintessentially ’80s way, Robocop also chomps at the bit to lose itself to the royal flush of political satire that stamps out the dark heart of ’80s consumerist ultra-violence and the evils of capitalism with gusto and flair. Under its sleek, brawny hood lies a personality-surfeit aimed squarely at other ’80s action films. But the film never lowers itself to the tiredness of irony, instead opting for a sort of loving critique of action cinema that plays with its inadequacies and idiocies by exaggerating them and acknowledging that an anti-action film would be a hypocrisy most foul. When Truffaut claimed that any war film that wanted to hate war was dishonest because a war film innately positioned war as a form of excitement, the same could be said to apply to action cinema. Thus, while Robocop gets entangled in its conglomerate mass of neo-fascism and broad-sword crypto-leftism, it’s always glad to exist, always happy to be a film we’re watching, and never per-se anti-action … even if its political message chastising media violence considered along with the fact of its own hyper-violence may not be the most easily reconcilable tension in the film world.
David Cronenberg has spent the past fifteen or so years milling around with Hollywood credibility and narrowly avoiding losing himself to the ether. He’s too fundamentally personal and fascinating a filmmaker to ever make an out and out boring film, but he sometimes seems like he’s trying. Maps to the Stars probably ought to be more of the same (the anti-Hollywood Hollywood tale is not exactly fertile ground anymore), but Cronenberg has selected Maps to the Stars for letting his hair down. Rather than a burst of Old Hollywood prestige with all the i’s dotted and the t’s dashed in squared-off fashion, he’s given us a burst of New Hollywood trash, a conglomerate of messy fluff and corrosive melancholy that flops around when it should push and throttles forward when it should relax. It’s not sensible, nor is it entirely reasonable. It’s the sort of film you’d expect from a New Hollywood affiliate losing themselves to their personal inhibitions at the expense of rhyme or reason, or an unformed young gun with ambition and passion to spare (neither of whom are Cronenberg). Either way, it’s not the work of a classically refined filmmaker. In fact, it’s much better. 
As a film reviewer, one gets used to films with pleasing content undone by a sense of form that just fails to measure up, but the opposite is much rarer and perhaps more depressing occasion: a genuinely decent film were it not so misguided. And misguided Kingsman: The Secret Service certainly is. Honestly, its quite difficult to make heads or tails of, but the problems, I suspect are shockingly similar to director Matthew Vaughn’s previous film Kick-Ass, although worse here for this film’s greater ambitions. Kick-Ass sought to critique the superhero individualist myth, or at least it purported to do so, but mostly ended up falling head over heels with what it sought to subvert (no wonder Vaughn was soon after hired to direct the relatively straightforward X-Men: First Class on the grounds that he had directed a superhero film and a ’60s style crime film and not placed at the back end of the pile for destroying the superhero myth from the ground-up). Truffaut once said that one cannot make an anti-war film because depicting war on film is an innately exciting act that cannot critique itself. A bold point, but not an incorrect one, and not one that only applies to war films.
This being the second of two new reviews of 1926 films for the National Cinemas month on German Cinema (replacing a much longer essay I had planned to finish the month off with, but since it has been many months since September now I decided to formally use that essay for another purpose and not align it with the National Cinemas project, which I can now put to rest). 
This being the first of two new reviews of 1926 films for the National Cinemas month on German Cinema (replacing a much longer essay I had planned to finish the month off with, but since it has been many months since September now I decided to formally use that essay for another purpose and not align it with the National Cinemas project, which I can now put to rest). 
The Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending is not a particularly good film, which is itself not as much of a problem as we might think. I deeply wish it was a better bad movie, however, and this is a problem.
The Long Take 