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.
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