I think the first time I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg I was distracted by the sheer virtuosity of it all. I wondered how it was pulled off at nearly every turn, and imagined the headache of tethering dialogue to melody in a way that feels natural. Musicals already require a withheld cynicism - a more intense suspension of disbelief to break through the artifice - made even harder here by Demy’s decision to never relent from song and keep it rolling uninterrupted for 90 minutes.Or does it make it easier? I’m not sure. I’m sure that I couldn’t pull off what Michel Legrand did here, and I’m also sure that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to direct a film as fluidly as Jacques does here. I can say the task itself seems daunting and at times I found that distracting the first time I saw it, like a song that seems to remind you of how hard it was to construct and play at nearly every turn, but this time around I allowed myself to luxuriate in the image and story itself and it paid off. The narrative here is a simple enough; young doomed love and the crushing weight of life itself, and the way love is often commodified and compromised in its wake. Economic and societal fidelity serve as a constant disincentive to Guy and Gen’s hopes and dreams together, raising their lovely baby boy and clinging to love even as circumstances seek to tear them apart. The story spoke to me more this time….. a lot more. Life has a way of bait and switching happiness itself, a cruel exchange if there ever was one, where one day’s happiness births the next’s anxieties. I’ve become so wary of this unspoken contract that I’ve found myself avoiding happiness altogether, striving more for a stasis that doesn’t beat me down everytime I dare feel elated. Whether I like it or not, the majority of life can feel bittersweet, especially in my older years of diminishing returns. This movie emanates that ebb and flow so beautifully, with the colors offsetting the melancholy. Bernard Evein designed the sets (pour one out of the man) and Jacqueline Moreau donned the costumes to fit every frame (pour another one). This alone, in and of itself, is such a remarkable achievement; a loving homage to the musicals of Donen and Minnelli that thankfully avoids the modern pitfalls of muted colors and tones to save face. The movie itself is one big sustained stunt, so why shouldn’t the colors fall in line with this decision? Do these colors pop to remind us that even in our lowest moments, the world is full of beauty and grace. I love that Demy doesn’t demonize anyone stuck in this mess; not Roland nor Gen’s mother, even as this vow to wait has been broken. Life goes on with or without us.
Storm and Stress Redux
Like a blog returning to its own vomit.
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
dosed and confused
Even without foreknowledge of neither Gaspar
Noe’s crave to goad nor any info involving a horny dance troupe and a very portentous
bowl of sangria, you know you’re headed towards a hellscape. The opening shot,
directly overhead, features a blood-soaked woman wriggling in anguish, snow-angel
style on a white snowy canvas as the end credits scroll up. I fell for it,
pushing pause and seeing if I somehow started it at the wrong place. From here
we watch interviews with the company, presumably audition videos peppered with
tidbits of data regarding their personalities, information that doesn’t really
add up to much though the ensuing perpetrator is hiding here in plain sight. This
smorgasbord of humanity is then shown in beautiful solidarity performing a
choreographed dance to Cerrone’s Supernature. For me to call this a highpoint
in this scalawag’s brash career might seem like a snide commendation as said
career has mostly annoyed the shit out me, but for once his talent isn’t eclipsed
by his true vocation to eternally stick in bourgeois festival leech’s crawl. In
this he has made a brand and stuck staunchly to it. I’ve said before that such
an aptitude is rigged to avoid any true criticism; react and out yourself as a delicate
sucker. Still, it’s nice to see him filming his actors with such adoration and
grace even if it’ll all end as it typically does with everyone either dead or worse.
These scenes are intercut with dialogue that implies certain characters are
here to either fight or fuck, some of the implications suggest that the sex won’t
be consensual and this seed is planted making much of what’s to come all the
more alarming. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that dialogue is Noe’s knack
and Climax is no exception. The aforementioned bowl of sangria has been spiked
with LSD, and I’m guessing based on everyone’s eventual ruin it was a substantial
amount. The effects don’t rear their ugly head until at least 45 minutes of
relative niceties have passed (including another dance sequence shot directly
above the performers). The preliminary shock leads to three of the dancers getting
fucked up by their troupe; one burn victim, one frozen man, and one pregnant
woman kicked in the stomach. This violence and the violence forthcoming seem to
stem from Noe’s puerile notions of foul human nature coaxed out by the acid. This
is where Climax started to lose me, but not completely. My problem with the
descent into hell wasn’t that it was horrid and disturbing (the sound of a
scared tripping 5 year old screaming for his mother, who locked him in a
storage room and lost the key, was sufficient nightmare fuel for me), it’s that
Noe can’t resist tethering contrived plot to what ought to be pure nonsensical anguish
and chaos. The worst and most unforgivable also takes up the most time; a
brother chasing down and attempting to rape his sister. This is the type of puerile
baby baiting that distracts from the genuinely revolting and oddly beautiful funhouse
of insanity strewn about the red soaked dancefloor. The callbacks only sidetrack
us and break the spell. Noe is working with a dream synopsis, so simple that it
doesn’t really require much. His need to spike this punch with reason is telling. Stop making
sense.
Monday, June 10, 2019
dragged across burning
It’s hard for me to believe that the inherent danger in
associating fictional actions with creative consent has become so widely
accepted in media discourse. It’s comical to read grown adults worry that
audiences won’t be able to discern things for themselves; as though we laymen
are simply sponges hoping to soak up our wavering values through Hollywood.
Even if this assertion occasionally holds water, I wonder what the alternative
would be. Should we implement another Hayes Code? Should there be a certificate
that said film either falls in line with a certain credo or perhaps we can slap
a certificate of approval when a movie is believed to present no clear and
present danger to progressive society. Maybe this sense of danger comes from a
voice inside us that might rationalize a wrongheaded point of view thus momentarily
walk in the shoes of a racist, misogynist, serial killer, or homophobe. I think
this same fear has alerted mega conglomerates to lace their otherwise empty
tentpoles with hints of “activism.” If you aren’t immediately wary of Disney
imploring you to see their latest superhero movie lest mouth breathing incels
take over the cinema forever (you only have one shot here guys, either pay to
see this movie or there will never be another _______ caped crusader, don’t
fuck it up), then you are a sucker. Either way, I think that within that sense
of danger we learn something perhaps unsavory about ourselves or maybe even
unsavory about evil and its enticement. As they say, the first step to redemption
is in recognizing the problem. S Craig Zahler doesn’t shy away from the
problem, including corrupt cops (the only kind) justifying their actions with
what, on the surface, seems like sound reasoning. These are the lies they tell
themselves to justify their unjustifiable actions. The imminent conjunction of cop
and thief in Dragged Across Concrete is predictable, but it’s the beats along
the way that make it so fresh and intricate. The decision to portray a dirty pair
of cops (one played by mad Mel to complicate matters) without the ethical markers
that shepherd and soothe the diffident, dwarfs the more substantial decision to
give equal if not deeper consideration to their counterpart (Tory Kittles who
deserves all of the awards). Zahler specializes in weaponizing desperation; a harbinger
for approaching carnage. In this department he might just be the current champion,
which predictably has landed him under the ever-watchful eye of milquetoast
handwringers for the foreseeable future. And at times he is irrefutably pitiless.
Take the scene involving a mother’s return to work, a scene that uses a mother’s
hardest day (the first without her child) as a revolting punchline to both
further complicate the complicity of Kittles’ character as well as fortify the
almost mystical heartlessness of a masked villain. Like the Sadfies’ Good Time,
another genre film to draw suspicion and contempt regarding its authorial provocation,
Dragged Across Concrete never feels banal or predictable, toppling nearly all narrative
and spoken clichés in its path. Here’s hoping that its financial woes don’t
prevent Zahler from continuing to shine a light on the worst of us.
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning spends the majority of its two plus hours
in the company of an isolated and horny South Korean youth tending to his
recently incarcerated father’s farmhouse in Paju. The young man’s name is
Jongsu and he is a writer, though we get very little insight outside of a
petition as to what his prose is all about. Early on, he reunites with a
childhood acquaintance from his hometown. Her name is Haemi and it’s
immediately evident that her version of reality might be slightly skewed. For
instance, we are told she has a cat whom Jongsu has been entrusted to feed and
water while she is in Africa for a short trip. We may or may not ever see this
cat at any point of the film, thus sharing his confusion as to the validity of
its existence. The importance of this cat’s existence plays a large role in
what lies ahead. Chang-dong’s careful and deliberate structure ensures that all
information pertinent to what will eventually unravel is slyly withheld; clues dangled
just tantalizingly enough to let our minds do most of the heavy lifting,
perhaps leading to a shared fixation with our tortured central character. This
method is nothing new and in fact there is a crucial pantomiming sequence that
recalls the finale of Antonioni’s Blow Up, another film about a fanatical man
turned greenhorn sleuth as a result of meticulously withheld evidence. In
Burning we learn that one character’s secret to persuasive performance is
simply believing in that which is simply not there. This is a movie full of instances
in which we are baited to do just that. Here Jongsu scrambles frantically to
find Haemi after a phone call seems to imply foul play. The main suspect is
Ben, a wealthy socialite whose company Jongsu is forced to suffer thanks to his
jealousy. Ben constantly seems amused by his newly acquired underprivileged
company and a later scene would imply that he’s been down this road before,
that the poor are simply diversions until they inevitably get tossed aside or
worse. Haemi’s disappearance is worthy case to crack, especially as cryptic
signs seem to lead further past the point of no return. A drawer full of female
possessions, a flippant mention of arson, a yawn, a bizarre trip to a lake, and
even a cat fuel the fires of distrust. Unrequited desire begets resentment and
confusion which in turn begets anger and delirium regarding our gumshoe’s increasingly
bewildered state. Even the miserable final scene contains a single line of
dialogue that only sends us further into uncertainty, which surely has left
most to rejoice and luxuriate in its scrupulous and never not beautifully
composed chaos. I couldn’t help but feel that the last twenty minutes piled it
on too thick, but I’m certainly on the outside looking in. Love hurts.
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
pride, death, fame, and self-preservation
Zama (2018): Don Diego de Zama is a functionary of the
Spanish empire in colonialized Paraguay, and he extremely desperate for a
transfer back to his motherland because he feels above it. He may also miss his
wife and kids, it’s possible. He’s a monster, sure, but he’s got feelings too.
He was a magistrate not born in Spain, thus bound to the new world that he
hates so much. The local governor uses his request for a transfer as a tool to
bend his well, it is clear to us that he is just yanking his chain. The
governor is a different breed of monster, I’m not sure he has feelings beyond
those that tend to his needs. Zama’s happiness or lack thereof is a result of his
pride and status, caught somewhere in between, a social purgatory that finds
him with power but no respect. Of course, all this colonial pride deserves a
villain if only to make it all worth something. He gets one. A native prisoner
speaks of a fish fighting to remain in water that seeks to reject it. The finale
basically literalizes the flopping fish losing air. Martel invites us to be
voyeurs of his follies and it’s hard not to laugh, until the cold hard
realities of death creep up and spoil the party.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018): “Uncertainty—that
is appropriate for matters of this world. Only regarding the next can we
vouchsafe certainty. I believe certainty regarding that which we can see and
touch, it is seldom justified, if ever. Down the ages from our remote past,
what certainties survive? And yet we hurry to fashion new ones, wanting their
comfort.” I stopped taking comfort in false certainty, at least I tried. It’s
not that I find it all so dismal and cruel that I’ll wind up like the
characters in this, the Coen’s six-part western anthology of death, but you
never know. Banking on certainties, those which aren’t tangible can get you in
a lot of trouble. But where is the hope in that? I don’t know, and for once I take
comfort in not knowing. If there is one bit of comfort that we can all take
from death, it’s that none of us will make it out of this life alive. Buster
Scruggs tells five tales of varying tones, complexities, cruelties, and ironies
with death a consistent presence and certainty. The first story introduces the
titular San Saba songbird who is quick to remind us that he is indeed no misanthrope
right before sending at least seven men to the reapers. It’s a fully committed
cartoon; replete with song numbers and animated angel wings. I think it’s
glorious but as some have noted, it certainly plays as a greatest-hits of every
bad inclination lobbed against the brothers as navel gazing assholes. Maybe
they are, but I don’t care. It’s customary to remind all that anthologies vary
in quality and this is no exception but while the highs are extremely high, the
lows are merely not as tall. My personal favorite seems to be the consensus.
A Star is Born (2018): A story so nice they told it
twice… twice. It’s built around the tragedy of love, addiction, and showbiz and
all the evil compromises therein. One character’s ascension is predicated upon
another’s ruin; in Bradley Cooper’s hands it’s rock martyrdom (the Pearl Jam
kind) at the altar of pop superficiality. The songs weren’t my cup of tea, especially
the rock ones, but I liked it. I’ve read a lot of bellyaching about Cooper’s
self-infatuation here and how his overemphasis on his doomed drug/booze hound
is just a conceited distraction from the titular star whom the film ought to
celebrate and luxuriate. But the movie is about the tragedy of his addiction
and thus needs to be a tragedy and what good is a tragedy if you don’t give a
fuck about the person biting the dust? And this notion that Gaga is somehow
upstaged here is ridiculous. The love story is the main attraction and while
pop culture junkies with a binary view of love will speculate as to whether or
not the stars fell into it IRL (tabloid fodder that rules the land) I would
like to float the notion that even when one is pretending to “love” another, he/she/they
might be susceptible to manifest feelings that can be redefined within the
slender strictures of what we have deemed to be love itself. This hybrid is the
main draw here and the movie benefits greatly from its complexity. I don’t know
how this happened but somehow I’m on team Cooper.
US (2019): Jordan Peele loves the word tethered and so
do I. It’s an evocative word that conjures weaving fabric or taking a thread
and embedding it within a larger whole. In horror I imagine the 80s goop gore,
a body horror travesty where a head grows out of a slimy torso, reeling in pain
and torment, ready to spoil my lunch and dreams. Here we get tunnel dwelling
clones who inexplicably mimic the motions of those above, the titular US? Peele,
after winning over most critics as well as taking home a best original
screenplay Oscar for his debut, nobly stuck with the genre that so many insist he
elevated. I think it’s important to note that he gained his notoriety writing sketch
comedy, not necessarily because he specialized in comedy but that he
specialized in short form, which might explain why this screenplay fails to
explain why or how the “tethered” are indeed tethered to their doppelganger. I’m
not the kind of viewer who needs explanations, I prefer to be left with more to
ponder but here we have just enough exposition dangled in front of us to wonder
why certain details were left out of the final product. Specifically, how and
why do these angry puppets mimic our every motion? I think the word tethered
and all the connotations that this word induces drove the narrative here, and
Peele could benefit from abridging his ideas. It’s not an uncommon notion in
modern horror to tether a film to a superimposed allegory as we live in such politically
boisterous times that declaring and identifying oneself 24/7 is a constant
pressure and perceived civic duty. When the themes drive the narrative, all must
fall in line with the message within and art winds up the victim. This, to me,
is the what irks me about this notion of horror as a genre in desperate need of
redemption. It’s a boring notion that boxes movies within their higher purpose.
US thankfully isn’t sunk by this. Though built on a short form premise, it’s stretched
out with much more grace and aptitude than its predecessor. My heart constantly
went out to Winston Duke’s dad, stuck acting out the role of protector with
little to no real-life experience to survive let alone keep your family alive. The
Hands Across America gag continues Peele’s evisceration of shallow neo-liberal self-congratulatory
lip service. Get Out succeeded in its succinctness, a great concept that maybe
lacked the aesthetic goods. Here he remedies what I would say was a lackluster
style but at the service of a convoluted story that probably would have benefited
from a golden pair of scissors. I’m not saying that horror ought to lack ideas but
that those ideas need not be the impetus and chauffeur to guide us through. And
yet, somehow this movie still works which is a testament to Peele’s hype which
is certainly now justified and we who love horror will be lucky to have him
stick around and trust the genre that he’s now supposedly king of.
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
2017
Top ten lists are stupid, but they happen and someone ought
write about the need to catalogue, rank, and canonize the things and what good
it ultimately does for the artform itself. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s
pointless. With a year faded into the ether, it’s easier to silence the hype.
Some of these were revisited recently, some caught up with. The rest were just
hazy recollections, but somehow they stuck around this long and for that I give
them big kisses.
Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch): Sometimes they come
back. They have been coming back like baby bunnies lately. Most of the time
they are just spit out and wrinkled; hitting all the same beats and rhythms
that earned them a place in some foggy version of our hallowed nostalgia heap.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, in my mind, was a ten-tape box set ever
present at various punk houses across America, usually on a shelf right about
my head as I tried to sleep on a hardwood floor in my neon lightning bolt
sleeping bag. My family wasn’t much of a T.V. show family and I very much doubt
that if they were that I would have been permitted to see it in the early
nineties. Eventually I caught up with the show, thankfully well before the hip
Netflix hype faze, therefore I had a proceeding investment in old friends like
Bob, Laura, Coop, Lucy, James, Hawk, the Log Lady, Agent Phillip Jefferies
(once David Bowie and now a giant steaming tea kettle), etc. While its nice to
catch up with the ole gang, it’s maybe nicer to spend so much time with Dougie
Jones as he acclimates to the bizarre rituals of middle-class suburban Vegas existence.
Sometimes I think we don’t realize how often we are laughing with Lynch and his
characters rather than at them. It’s rare to see something this funny and
moving shift instantly to bleak and inquisitive about these mortal coils that
we will all shuffle off someday. It swears allegiance to no set register,
happily shifting gears without a warning shot, keeping us always on our toes.
It doesn’t simply rest on the lazy laurels of fanboy service maintenance.
Episode eight is perfectly content to be a great film unto itself. It has become
customary for these unending returns to wreak of our shared communal acceptance
of mediocrity if it’s rolled up in a husk of wistful nods to something being
born and conceived before burrowing deep into our minds and hearts. This feels
like a fetus, looking up at its mom asking “what year is it?”
Goodtime (Sadfies): Connie spends most this movie racing
against the clock to release his developmentally disabled brother Nick from the
notorious clutches of Rikers detainment system. Sounds heartwarming, but it
couldn’t be further from. Connie as played by Robert Pattison, in a performance
worthy of its hype, is a wily and callous opportunist, willing to destroy
anyone standing in his path. As is often the case, one man’s journey to
betterment seals another’s pain and sorrow and the Sadfie’s don’t offer
clemency as a moral respite nor a form of consolation or contrition. Everything
from the camera’s physicality to the words that characters choose sound fresh
and mapped out with regards to who these people might really be on the streets.
At its core Good Time is a futile race to a nonexistent freedom; the upshot of
desperation. We all know that Connie won’t get away and we know that he
shouldn’t, and somehow, we are wrought to root against our better moral and
logical judgment. As for the unlucky people he uses to get what he wants; it’s sickening,
and it should be. The scenes specifically dealing with Nick are especially
precise. We have seen plenty of bombastic Hollywood elucidations of individuals
with developmental disabilities but this one rings truer to me. The final scene
was among the best that I’ve seen in any film in years.
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman):
It’s been said before, but somehow Wiseman makes the seemingly mundane vital
and captivating. Without uttering a single word and by simply beholding and
forming mounds of material, he makes the case for the importance of information
and harmony. It’s not just about the fortification of this crucial union
between public and private, it’s about development and how we spread knowledge
like a plague to quell the swelling insanity.
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson): Sometimes love
requires a push, a nudge, or kick to correct our self-serving trajectory. I
know I need to get knocked off my perch from time to time. It’s rare to be
truly surprised where a story ends up. I’ve seen enough variations on the jerk dude
falling back down to earth, but poisonous mushrooms weren’t the emancipators I
had anticipated. Given how meticulous this director tends to be, I must tip my
hat to the timing here. I was just about to write the entire thing off
(impatience and distrust on my part) when the “twist” arrives. The fact that he
was able to pull the exact same trick twice with even more efficiency the
second time around is pretty impressive.
Downsizing (Alexander Payne): Payne’s oeuvre spends a lot of
time with men entering and maneuvering sudden crossroads. He hasn’t ever
attempted something so big and bold as Downsizing, though the overall stencil
remains the same. This time we follow Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) from
overpopulated and unsustainable world that we all know from a very accustomed
vantage point to the same world but smaller (5 inches according to Wikipedia).
A large part of the initial suspense lies in Paul and his wife (Kristen Wig)
investigating and thus wrestling with the titular irreversible process. Once
it’s done and Paul is left alone, he’s left wondering what we all tend to
wonder; what’s it all about and how we can make it seem/feel meaningful? From
there we meet the best cast of eccentric (to normies like Paul) companions in
recent memory. Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier play a pair of tiny hedonists who
supply their community with the good stuff, while Hong Chau steals the show as
a Vietnamese dissident forced to downsize as political punishment, an action
that nearly cost her life and claimed the lives of everyone with her. Paul’s
overwhelming sense of insignificance is exploited for good and eventually he
sees the light in a finale that isn’t afraid of the foreseeable charges of
mawkishness. The concept itself calls for a steady visual hand, the specifics
are carefully and engagingly mapped out, and Payne doesn’t shrink away from his
overall message here despite facing a cynical throng constantly diagnosing
intention.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (Craig Zahler): Zahler’s worlds are
hellscapes that erupt into attentive and unadorned scenes of tough violence.
He’s an impenitent genre guy and I hope that he can enjoy his success without
being tantalized and diluted by the inevitable amplified budget. If I’m being
completely honest, sometimes these movies drag on too long and talk too much,
but that’s a small price to pay for this guy’s pristine renunciation of our
communal good nature. In Zahler’s stories, his protagonists beat men into mush,
men who are bound to a systematic moral decay driven by greed and lust.
Humanity is the devil.
mother! (Darren Aronofsky): It’s lame but I guess it might
be useful to note that I haven’t wholeheartedly liked a single movie by
Aronofsky. While his talent isn’t lost on me, his bold style has always felt at
odds with his normie narrative duties. I know its something well beyond my
comprehension, begging rich people to fund your movie, but his movies always
seem compromised by the time he gets to where he’s going, either that or they
just plain didn’t do it for me. This time around he finally went for it, and
its imperfections are far more interesting than any tidying up he’s done in the
past. For starters, he lures the viewer in by flashing little chards of lucid
plot right before hurdling us further and further into complete disorder. For a
better look at how I felt around the time of seeing this you can read this: https://musabran.blogspot.com/2017/09/mother.html
I’m out of steam. Look:
1.
Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)
2.
Good Time (Josh and Benny Sadfie)
3.
Downsizing (Alexander Payne)
4.
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
5.
Ex Libris (Frederick Wiseman)
6.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)
7.
mother! (Darren Aronofsky)
8.
All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak)
9.
Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)
10.
Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina)
Honorable: The Florida Project, Faces/Places, A Quiet
Passion, Get Out, The Lost City of Z,
Girls Trip, The Merowytz Stories, Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Purgatory: Spiderman: Homecoming, Lady Bird, Personal
Shopper, Okja, A Ghost Story, Wind River, Leatherface, Blade Runner, Monster
Truck, Song to Song, Stronger, Thor: Ragnorak, The Last Jedi,
No: Wonder Woman, The Big Sick, The Work, Split, A Cure for
Wellness, Logan, Beauty and the Beast, Kong: Skull Island, Raw, Baby Driver,
The Belko Experiment, Power Rangers, Life, Alien: Covenant, It Comes At Night,
Rough Night, 47 Meters Down, The Beguiled, The Bad Batch, Dunkirk, Atomic
Blond, 3 Billboards, It, I Tonya, Jeepers Creepers 3, Happy Death Day, The
Foreigner, The Snowman, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Call Me by Your Name, The
Shape of Water, Jumanji 2, The Post, Hostiles.
I didn’t/I couldn’t:
BPM, Mudbound, Loveless, The Other Side of Hope, The Square (I saw half of it),
Columbus, The Human Surge, On the Beach Alone at Night, Staying Vertical,
Wonderstruck, Kedi, The Death of Louis XIV.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Mother fucker
Suspiria (2018): It’s risky business remaking a sacred text,
especially now as we are all acutely aware of the current deficiency of
original content. To repurpose Daria Argento’s Suspiria is even more
treacherous as it’s oft regarded the wicked mother of the great giallo
tradition (I’m more of a Deep Red guy personally) regardless of what one might
ultimately think of it. To interpret this vocation as an opportunity to deepen
(Red Army Faction and Theresienstadtand transit camp), extend (50 minutes), stultify
the color palette, and sooth the unsettling Goblin soundscape is bold to put it
kindly. These are the things that seemingly made Suspiria what it was; the
attributes that sparked Luca Guadagnino to chase his critical darling, Call Me
By Your Name with a retelling of his lifelong object of horror affection. The
divided reaction was foreseeable, and the squawking rarely wafted from cries of
apostacy which sparked many telling and reactionary “I think the original is a
mess” responses. Regardless, when a director decides to inherit the namesake,
they must carry its weight like a specter. Luca’s movie shares much of Argentos
threadbare plot though it spends much of its time with formerly ancillary
characters. Suzy (Susie here) Bannon once again joins the Tanz Dance Academy
(now Markos Dance Company) to dance amongst a coven of necromancers hoping to
conjure/nurture an elder witch via female sacrifice. The aforementioned holocaust
allusion is heaped on the back of Jozef Klemperer, a psychiatrist whose missing
student belonged to said dance company. Her ramblings are prescribed as
delusions which later sparks a cheap but opportune line of dialogue about
believing women. Klemperer, whom it should be noted is one of three roles played
by Tilda Swinton here looking like Grandpa Sawyer, spends most of his time
investigating things that we have been explicitly shown, making the suspense
kind of pointless. He is haunted by the loss of his wife which he is revealed
to be complicit. She was a Jew who sought to flee the Third Reich but was
convinced to stay by her husband until it was too late. Their tragic romance is
cheaply exploited for an affixed emotional relevance, a register that
Guadagnino juggles throughout. I don’t mean to sound sensitive, but this
shoehorned addendum pissed me off. It ranks among the worst of sanctimonious
virtue baiting I’ve seen in a filmscape full of moral opportunism. The real joy
here is in the suffering, which at the very least is effectively unremitting
when it wants to be. Suzy’s story involves a pilgrimage from a grim Mennonite existence
to Berlin, illustrated via a child’s scribbling of hair on a map; a nice little
bit of foretelling. We are privy to brief glimpses of her mother’s final
moments, her crow rattle a looped sound bite during some of the most cliched
nightmare imagery imaginable. Said matriarch brought to mind the zealots of
Robert Eggers’ The VVitch; another modern horror hype vestige celebrated in
some circles as a bold feminist text though accepting this would be accepting
death and suffering well beyond the realm of what most of us consider actual
merit. The plight from rural to urban is much like the journey from piety to
paganism though rooting this freedom in witchcraft, especially the witchcraft
rooted in hierarchy and allegiance punishable by death, is not much different
from the legalist shackles of what most of us consider the Mennonite or Puritan
faith. ----- I am aware that this is the point as one of the characters
represents a new order which will usher in more a more merciful reign, which
kinda takes the piss out of everything IMO ------ Susie moves up the ranks
rather quickly, especially in the eyes of Madame Blanc (the only good Swinton
performance here) who is one of the only witches who seems apprehensive about
the impending Markos reign. Just as Germany was divided in 1977, so the coven can’t
seem to agree on where they are going, though not a single witch is above murder
or torture, especially to those who defy their power or go snooping around. One
of the snoopers is Sara (Mia Goth), a character I wish the movie was built
around, though this would mean doing away with the film’s final twist which
would be just fine by me. Sara’s narrative takes over right before the final
act (yes this movie is one of those with title card chapters) and ends cruelly
and abruptly with nothing to show for it. The finale, which is inexplicably
dominated by CG blood and a shitty slow-motion effect, attempts to shoehorn a
little Argento in for good measure. It’s wackadoo to be sure, though after
Panos Cosmatos’ sustained pandemonium in Mandy it feels like a cred-baiting
afterthought. This felt especially true as Guadagnino couldn’t help himself but
to return to real life atrocity and Thom York’s signature voice as penance. I
guess the thing that has me perplexed is how the Argento movie had any impact
on this guy? I understand that remakes come with the freedom of personal expression,
but when these freedoms only wrought a new Radiohead record and some tethered
social atrocities, I don’t think it’s worthy of the name Suspiria. I guess I’m
just part of the old guard yelling “Markos!” awaiting my head to explode.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
october
Unfriended: Dark Web (2018): I’m not so sure that we’ve
purged ourselves of the found-footage phenom, a subgenre that clings especially
tight to the horror genre and has yielded enough fruit at the box office to
stay steadily lucrative since the Paranormal franchise spun $15,000 into
$193,000,000. Before it Ruggero Deodato turned a $1,900,000 profit in 1980 and
19 years later The Blair Witch Project wrangled $247,000,000 much to the delight
of Artisan/Lion’s Gate. I’m not sure why it took seven years for producers and
studios to start flooding the market but since 2006 the already thin formula didn’t
take long to be in desperate need of a rebirth. Like it or not, Levan
Gabriadze’s Unfriended may have ushered a prospectively fleeting but fresh
rendition of an old and tired tune. I’ll admit that I wasn’t fan my first go
around. I saw it with four other people, not on the big screen and with plenty
of chatter. On the small screen it’s hard to read some of the messenger text
and easy to feel lost. The POV is limited to Blair’s laptop, bouncing around
from one tab to the next in a frantic attempt to stop an apparition from
murdering her and her friends on the anniversary of the ghost’s suicide (an act
shown via Linkdin style at the movie’s opening). At some point we begin to
realize that Blair would rather watch her friend’s die than face her own
culpability, or worse, to accept the judgment of others within the realm that
we all spend most of our waking lives in. It’s also quickly revealed that all
five of Blair’s friends are backstabbing opportunists at best. Their will to
survive only exasperates this tendency in very predictable ways. It has a nice
nasty E.C. vibe to it. The nightmare here is Blair’s fear of past iniquities
being made public, much like the embarrassing video that sparked the suicide.
Gabriadze makes good use of our communal fear of not being able to close a tab,
take down a post, or essentially delete the worst aspects of our being. It’s
quite the indictment, though these cyber-jerks aren’t far from the fish in a
barrel types you would see during the 80s slasher craze, thus it’s painless to
accept their demise. These are some heartless kids, the kind whose rottenness
thrives on anonymity. The second installment takes a different approach. First,
the threats here are very real. Second, the kids are fairly good people thus
witnessing them succumb to shit luck is ostensibly harder to watch. Director
Stephen Susco adopts and respects Gabriadze’s technique and lands a better
finale. Here the Skype heads wind up in the seemingly omniscient grasp of human
traffickers, anonymous via the titular dark web where fellow creeps bid big
bucks (or bit coins) on various reprehensible acts, mercifully (?) left to the
imagination. I’ll say this, it left me feeling very icky and slightly unsafe by
end, though the twist lightened the blow. It was too contrived to completely
buy, whereas the River itself recalled all too real horrors lurking in the most
loathsome depths of human nature. I also wasn’t invested in the love story and
the subsequent calamity born from it. I would argue that the first film did a
far better job juggling the tabs and sidebars. While that film introduced the
dissemination of vile and cowardly anonymity, this film exists in a world where
we witnessed a Twitter troll become president. The cup of shit spilleth over.
Halloween (2018): I was just listening to two men discuss
this modern iteration of Laurie Strode as a contradiction or as an ill-defined
character. Their reasoning was bullshit, a yearning for absolution. In a
nutshell, they were confused as to how a woman in Strode’s position could be
both wounded and empowered as though people who survive such things can’t be
both. They also spoke of Carpenter’s original, specifically Myers, as a
manifestation of Strode’s fear of her own sexuality, aka trying to “elevate” a
perfectly efficient horror film for their own conscience’s sake. That’s what I
get for listening to a podcast, and I should consider myself lucky considering
the fate that befalls two loathsome podcasters in David Gordon Green’s sequel,
which is the first that John Carpenter himself has consented and is thus given
the hallowed distinction of being cleared by the creator himself to ignore all
nine “sequels” and Rob Zombie’s two remakes and continue the saga of Mike and
Laurie. It is often conjectured that psychoanalysis does the masked maniac no
favors. Leaving Michael’s homicidal impulse as blurred as possible makes for a
scarier ride, so they say. Zombie ignored this advice, and some very good and
astute critic’s have argued that his second whack at Carpenter’s boogeyman is a
damn near masterpiece as a result. I’m not quite with that, though the death of
Annie Bracket (along with its aftermath, namely the wonderful Brad Dourif’s
reaction) and the nightmare intro are scenes I would gladly re-watch if there
was some way to circumvent the dialogue and a lot of the stuff in between. Green’s
film flirts with explanations but lands on nothing regarding Michael; he’s evil
and addicted to killing people. Check out the scene where he walks from house
to house with no drive other than to send random Haddonfield residents to
Charon’s boat. The 78 Halloween shows the 1951 The Thing From Another World on
a screen, and the director once commented memorably on the amount of times we
see someone open a door. At once routine and seemingly futile, that decision leads
to one of the best scares in horror movie history. I have vivid memories of
seeing it as a child and jumping out of my seat. Patience can pay off,
especially in the right hands. Halloween (78) was made before the days of cell
phones and dwindling attention spans, thus remaining relatively prevalent
despite taking its sweet time getting to the slashing. Green avoids such
aspirations and it’s probably for the best. One of my favorite bits of dialogue
(some written by Danny McBride) comes in a scene where Laurie’s granddaughter
Allyson is walking down those familiar Haddonfield streets with a pair of
friends, talking about the events that put their town on the map. The pothead
boy makes a flippant but relevant observation about the deaths or lack thereof.
In today’s headlines, 4 dead teenagers wouldn’t make a splash and thus its fair
if not callous to wonder why anyone gives a shit. Within 30 minutes Green’s
Michael has that matched, and very little is left for the imagination. I don’t
say this disparagingly. Before this exchange, Allyson dispells the rumor of
Laurie’s ancestral union to Michael, a nod to the 1981 sequel which I happen
enjoy. I remember seeing that at my uncle’s house in Connecticut. I’m still not
sure how I pulled it off. By removing all familial affiliations we are able to
wonder once again why Michael is so hellbent on killing the Strodes and that’s
as it should be. Green’s Halloween isn’t as bestowed with mobility and
physicality, it doesn’t use enclosed space anywhere near as successfully as it’s
hallowed ancestor. But as a product of its time and creator, it’s a nice alternative
to haunted nuns and purges.
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