Climax

Like a nightmarish, inverted Busby Berkeley musical where we get the jubilant spectacle first and then hell and chaos unravel until all we are left with is sex, death, fear, and pain.  Is the opening dance just a sublimated rehearsal for the finale?  Is the plummet into madness the real performance at work?  Noé would probably argue as much.  If his entire oeuvre is a paean to entropy then Climax might as well be his magnum opus.  Its central thesis (and perhaps Noe’s overarching directorial thesis) seems to be that people are vile, and they deserve to suffer.  There may be some Lord of the Flies-esque meta-commentary at play here about how quickly a methodically codified society can descend into chaos, but I think Noé sees it the other way around.  In his Hobbsian worldview, society is a behemoth, carnal and sadistic, that has been flimsily decorated to appear civil.  Once the superego veneer is unsheathed, true chaotic desire reigns.  The dance is the artifice, the chaos the authentic.

But what a lumbering, puerile way to pull back the curtain.  Noé is up to his typical antics here – pseudo-philosophical title cards, disjointed credits, nauseating, roller coaster camera pirouettes – and it all feels as tedious as its ever been.  Like a lot of his work, this is essentially a 90-minute gimmick.  Characters, like the little boy, and character development, like the pregnancy reveal, are merely used as shock props to enhance its comic gruesomeness.  You’d almost expect a puppy to stumble upon the proceedings and lap up the sangria just so it too can join in on the torture.  Bleh.  Granted, the opening dance number is a blast and is astoundingly orchestrated.  And there are some truly bravura tracking shots in which we initially begin to take inventory of the degradation, but the incessant retracing of lines feels strained, not revelatory.  By the end, it all feels like a tacky haunted house carnival tour.  What will we find around this corner?  Who cares.  The warehouse explicitly assumes the guise of hell by the end– blood red lights gleaming, nondescript shrieks and groans, contorted bodies writhing like souls in the river Styx – but it feels cheap because it is so obviously designed to provoke your paranoid discomfiture.  Hailed by some as Noé at his most dynamic, this is him at his most incorrigible. 

2018 Capsules Part 1

Happy as Lazzaro

Like Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Idiot, Rorwacher wonders what an unknowing Christ figure would look like in modern times.  If you removed Christ’s proselytizing and self-confidence in his divinity, plopped him into the 20/21th centuries and instead rendered him an infinitely humble man so void of self that he essentially lived as a prop to uphold the wellbeing of others and absorb their suffering, how would he be treated by our post-industrial world?  The answer for Rorwacher, as for Dostoevsky in the 19th century before her, is simple: like a fool.

At the end of Silence, F. Rodriguez is told to “trample, trample!,” for Christ, he is further informed, was born of his world to be trampled by mankind and alleviate their suffering.  For the inhabitants of Rorwacher’s world, Lazzaro serves a similar function.  We don’t know Lazzaro’s level of self-awareness (his often  unperturbed, dutiful face belying any emotional or intellectual catharsis).  We do know that he is trampled upon by all - the wealthy landowners, his supposed “brother” the Marquis, and each of the sharecroppers he lives among - and that his indefatigable willingness to help and be of use is perennially exploited.  Lazarro would selflessly do anything for anyone and not only turn the other cheek, but offer his entire body up for abuse rather than strike out from a place of self-interest.  We learn other things about Lazzaro, which amplify his ties to Christ in the later half of the film, and which I will not reveal because so much of the joy of this film is how its majesty unfolds like the rippling enchantment of sprinkled fairy dust over your downy eyes.  But, don’t misunderstand, this is not a saccharine fable.  Their are passages in this film of astonishing beauty and euphoria (it is shot on 16mm rounding film stock - and bless it for it), but it is an angry film about how the poor are treated by the retrograde exploits of capitalistic industrial society and the nefarious, urban indifference of late capitalistic culture.  In many ways, it’s as angry and as despairingly tormented as First Reformed.  Yet, it’s also subtly and painfully humorous at points.  It ultimately may have hit me harder than any film I saw last year.  Right now - it’s my favorite by a mile.

Halloween

Its best qualities are its offhand goofiness and willingness to expose its histrionics to impromptu ridicule, a testament no doubt to Green and McBride’s years of honing their comedic style.  The diner scene finale of Pineapple Express comes to mind as a classic example of their brand of self-aware, digressive meta-commentary as a means to chuckle at the preposterous theatricality of action cinema contrivance.  There are sundry moments in Halloween when characters make similar near-fourth-wall-breaks, with most of these au fait observations coming from its ribald community of astute, loquacious teens and preteens.  The ease with which these kids are given effervescence, especially in quick one-off scenes, is the film’s primary source of flippant, albeit minor, joy.  

Its worst qualities, however, are its hypocritical reverence for mythologizing and its egregious lack of tension.  There’s a sense of Green and McBride wanting to reign in the convoluted mythology surrounding Michael and to wipe the post-’78 Halloween renditions from our cultural memory; they, for instance, outright dismiss the Laurie-Michael sibling connection foisted on Halloween II and subsequent sequels.  And there is the commentary from one of the doomed teens about how Michael’s initial babysitter murder spree isn’t all that impressive considering the age of routine mass shootings we’ve all consented to tolerate.  But, alas, and to no earnest fault of their own, Green and McBride are not immune to the influence of 30+ years of Michael Myers cultural iconography.  And this is probably where their having-our-cake-and-eating-it demythologizing project feebly fails.  In attempting to demythologize and dehistoricize Michael, they end up idolizing him.  There are too many scenes with people talking robustly about Michael, as if he were some plebeian villain in need of more mystifying, grandiose bastions.  In the original Halloween, we didn’t need many scenes of Loomis’ boogeyman aggrandizement.  Like an effective campfire story, there’s just enough of it to unnerve our imagination into a there-is-something-behind-you discomfiture.  Instead, in Carpenter's adept hands, we are left with the omnipresence of Michael.  We don’t need to be repeatedly told from multiple characters how evil, how immortal, how elusive as a shadow Michael is - we know these characteristics to be true because we see them; and we feel Michael as such.  The simplicity of Halloween I and II (which I love) are that we are in a contained world, an almost labyrinth of horror, where Michael floats around as effortlessly as an autumn wind.  There’s a sense that Green and McBride want to recreate this sinister and elusive ubiquity, but we are often abruptly shuffled between too many scenes and bifurcated narratives to feel any tremulous immersion.  There’s a labyrinth all right, but we’re not the ones trapped in it with the residents of Haddonfield like a gaggle of helpless wanderers - Green and McBride are.

Blockers

Cena’s commitment to the role of the sensitive, willfully naive helicopter dad (fastened with dorky, belt-clipped cell phone) sells the movie.  And the film works its best self-reflective magic as a commentary on how adulthood commitments and misplaced panoptic energy fractures genuine connection and spontaneity between parent-kid & parent-parent relationships.  There’s a warped Hawksian posse formation between the parents to face their common problem of female virginal sacrifice - one that is clearly assembled for all the wrong reasons.  Even though their means are ethically dubious and motives are farcically fear-induced, you do get the sense that this is the most fun these parents have had in a long while.  And the film is at its most naturally perceptive when it reveals the various ways these adult "friends" have truly failed each other as comrades and supporters - juxtaposing their blind judgment of Hunter’s failed marriage with their children’s rapturous acceptance of Sam’s lesbianism.  I can see Blockers getting the requisite liberal adulations for striking all the right woke points about gender double-standards (which I, of course, agree with and know are important reminders for a society that still shields male date rape behind an impenetrable shroud of boys-will-be-boys discourse).  But for me, these were the film’s weakest moments.  They are just too knowingly imposed and underlined with a good-ol’ fashioned wink and nudge to the audience about their own importance to be anything other than insufferably obligatory (where’s Keenan Ivory Wayans' mailman when you need him?).  Blockers has way more to say than it probably has any right to, but it is more successful when it speaks through the narrative than when it turns and points directly at you.

The Killing of a Sacred Two Hours

I hated every second of The Killing of a Sacred Deer.  I felt little outrage, hardly a modicum of disgust, and no sense of being rattled by this Greek pseudo-punk provocateur.  I’m not offended by Lanthimos’ repellent style, just bored by it.  And I use the word “repellent” to describe his style not as a pejorative judgement but as a description of the effect he’s clearly trying to achieve.  From wide-angle lenses, off-kilter framing, ill-timed close-ups, creeping zooms, deviant behavior, eccentric dialogue, and frigid, emotionless acting, he uses every alienating trick he can to repeal his bourgeoise audience.  While I’d hardly bemoan the general use of alienation as a technique for unsettling viewers (in the right hands it’s a powerful filmmaking tool), I do have two foremost issues with its deployment in Sacred Deer.  

For one, its intention is laughably otiose.  Lanthimos’ audience is the cultured bourgeoise whose conventional tastes he’s so eager to offend, yet whom he relies on not only to finance his work but to build a namesake as a “provocateur.”  I’m sure he fancies himself persona non grata, the kind of derelict hidden from formal occasions, but really he’s mingling at the soiree telling off-color jokes to a blushing audience whom are all too quick to invite him back to the next one.  The Lobster was insufferably idiotic mainly because it extolled itself for satirizing an issue that is nonexistent.  It’s the most comfortable form of satire where nothing is ultimately mocked.  Sacred Deer, similarly, becomes insufferable, not because it’s offensive, but because its so comfortably inoffensive.  Like in Gramsci’s model of hegemony, its the type of resistance that has already been built into and accounted for by the status quo.

For another, it’s a stylistic diversion from its own hollowness.  I’m not sure if Lanthimos is even capable of telling a story, creating characters, or using his camera to penetrate into the heart of either.  We are alienated from the beginning so much so that we are never given a chance to be drawn in; therefore, nothing that develops feels revelatory or elicits an effect other than indifference.  Watch the camera-work: nothing builds, everything slogs through an endless drone or retreats to a sterile distance; close-ups do little to punctuate or turn a scene on its ear.  If Lanthimos is daring us to break the chilly distance and care, its an egregious bluff because we don’t or worse can’t.  If he doesn’t even want us to care, then the entire film could be shorted to the single scene of Nicole Kidman’s character jacking off the anesthesiologist.  It’s essentially all he’s doing.  Either way, he loses and so do we.

I’d certainly throw Lanthimos in the same group of bourgeois enfants terrible as von Trier, Haneke, and Ostlünd.  Where youthful me was once captivated by von Trier and Haneke’s puckish antics, older me has since become profoundly bored by them.  Lanthimos, like Haneke and von Trier, has talent, and I give him credit for the consistency of his filmmaking.  He’s commitment to the formalism of alienation is unwavering and precise.  Perhaps years ago I would have celebrated him as a firebrand.  Now, I just pity his toothlessness.

2015

2015

1. Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)
2. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)
3. Heaven Knows What (Safdie Brothers)
4. Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg)
5. Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont)
6. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
7. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
8. Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
9. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)
10. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson)

Honorable Mention:  Inside Out (Pete Docter), Carol (Todd Haynes), Sicario (Denis Villeneuve), The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu), When Marnie Was There (Hiromasa Yonebayashi), The Hallow (Corin Hardy)

No thx:  The Revenant, Spotlight, Room, The Assassin, Goodnight Mommy, Straight Outta Compton, Crimson Peak, Pitch Perfect 2, Love and Mercy, Beasts of No Nation, Ex Machina, The Gift, Spy

I don't have much to say about these films or this year other than I wish I had been writing about them as I saw them.  Hard to Be a God is the crown jewel for me.  It'll be very high up on my best films of the decade list.  It's about as ideally singular a film (and film watching experience) that I could dream of in this modern age of stagnant, rote filmmaking.  It reminds me a lot of Marketa Lazarova, a film that too few have seen but has steadily grown to be one of my all time essentials.  Both films elicit genuine awe from me.  They almost feel impossible, and I don't mean that hyperbolically.  I watch them each and honestly wonder, "how the fuck does this exist?"  It is as if relics excavated from ancient times were magically given motion or as if uncanny images were being transmitted from an alien world.  I respect more than love something like The Forbidden Room for having a distinctive vision that plays unlike most anything else around.  But you can see the brushstrokes and the artist tirelessly at work in something like The Forbidden Room; in Hard to be a God, you are swallowed by the majesty of the canvas.

2016

2016

1. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

2. The Wailing (Na Hong-jin)

3. Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman)

4. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)

5. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)

6. Silence (Martin Scoresese)

7. O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)

8. The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit)

9. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)

10. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Love)

Honorable Mention: The Witch (Robert Eggers), The Handmaiden (Park Chan-Wok), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve), Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford), Gimme Danger (Jim Jarmusch), Hail, Caesar! (Coen Bros)

No thx:  Moonlight, Manchester By the Sea, The Lobster, Blair Witch, The Girl on the Train

Also, here's a half-formed idea I started writing about The Wailing back in the summer:

One of my favorite aspects of Macbeth, and one that never fails to unsettle me, is that it appears to posit a universe that is inherently malevolent.  At the end of the play, we are provided an illusion of moral order, as the diabolical Macbeth is finally disposed of by the good Christians Malcolm and MacDuff.  But behind this denouement of seemingly divine justice, there reigns the unchecked authority of the Witches, left to spin their nasty webs and pluck at the fates whichever cruel way they choose.  The Witches, the real villains of the play, get no moral comeuppance, no divine punishment for their machinations.  In the end, the universe of Macbeth is neither ultimately benevolent or innately indifferent but actively evil; the witches reign supreme within it.  I felt a similar way at the end of The Wailing, and without giving spoilers, those who've seen it hopefully know precisely the feeling I mean here.

mother!

I guess I’ll preface this by admitting that I’m not really a fan of mother!’s underlying biblical allegory.  I caught the gist of what ulterior mythos Aronofsky was creating for our couple and their riotous guests early on and every turn of the screw after felt maladroit.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I literally rolled my eyes at the scene where Jennifer Lawrence’s mother (i.e. mother earth, mother Mary, the eternal feminine) is asked to forgive wretched humanity by Javier Bardem’s heavenly father for killing her baby Jesus.  It felt forced/obvious.  A labyrinthian film with copious figurative threads to pull from suddenly became one bulbous rope dangling coyly before us to grab and climb so that we could be transported to its higher plane of redoubtable revelations.  This isn’t to say that I don’t agree with Aronofsky’s critique of religious fervor and environmental destruction or that I don’t share is ire.  I’m right there with him and I admire his take on our profoundly fucked up world.  However, I do feel that this grandiose allegorical relation is the one slipshod conceit in an otherwise flawlessly told phantasmagoria. 

I like mother! more as a hallucinatory physical manifestation of a relationship’s decay.  As someone who has recently lost a home I worked tirelessly to cultivate into a sanctuary for me and my loved ones, I am painfully aware of how it feels to have that home adulterated by an intruder and have your things torn away like refuse only to be rebuilt in someone else’s image after you are gone.  And as someone who has recently lost someone I loved to the point of pure blind devotion, I know the feeling of dawning horror as you realize you gave yourself entirely to a false, weary idol.  The nightmarish parade of marauders and Bardem’s indifference to Lawrence’s suffering felt all too real to me as a physical representation of a relationship’s toxic denouement.  I felt that way as my world collapsed around me and I live every day with the scars.  The unseen terror and claustrophobia Aronofsky builds in these scenes as hell unfolds around Lawrence is the best work of his career.  It’s as tightly controlled and ferociously realized as any recent filmmaking I’ve seen.

I also like how mother! critiques our dreams of autonomy and our naive pastoral fantasies.  I think most of us, consciously or not, try to turn whatever space we inhabit into an eden we can share idyllically with our loved ones, just like Lawrence’s mother.  We lock our doors to prevent intrusion, we shut our blinds to shield us from onlookers, and furnish our surroundings with things we have imbued with meaning and emotion.  Naively, we dream our home and relationship are autonomous phenomena, excluded securely as if enshrined from the terrors or degradation that may befall them.  In many ways, this is all part of a larger pastoral fantasy we yearn for, a desire we have to return to prelapsarian grace or some illusory wholeness.  But how quickly our dreams can become nightmares when we realize our idea of haven is just myth we’ve convinced ourselves is real, perhaps something we read about long ago but never actually possessed.  The horror of our true vulnerability to a fractured world probably looks something like mother!

All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down

Let's see how long we can have a go at this for...I'm gonna give it my all to keep up.  What better way to kick off the new blog than with two brutal Australian horror/thrillers from this year.

Hounds of Love (Young, 2017): There's undeniable talent here, but couldn't help but feel like a slog to get through.  I'm more than a little weary of suburban underbelly exposes like this; the idyllic community facade belying a deplorable evil behind the picket fence isn't an incisive observation at this point.  I'd say it's fairly clear to most people that evil can harbor anywhere; the true crime craze has probably killed any remnant of shock value the culture has for middle-class decay.   I did enjoy a few scenes: Vicki's decision to get into the couple's car - peppered with enough subtle detail to make the predatory pickup plausible - and a scene involving some mail where Vicki realizes her plan of escape my have fallen just short; its anxiety and heartbreak is palpable.  Also, surprisingly, I did appreciate the ending, not only because of the inclusion of Joy Division, but for actually granting us a cathartic moment without the need for a rote revenge fantasy coda.  Still, a majority of the film is devoid of mystery or insight, and once the kidnapping occurs, we are not discovering a narrative anymore but are merely left waiting to be dragged through the rape, torture, and cruelty we know will come.

Killing Ground (Power, 2017):  I found this one to be far superior to Hounds of Love, although I'd readily conceded that the latter has better formal craftsmanship.  Killing Ground isn't perfect - it makes some unnecessary missteps late on - and it's easily more brutal and violent than Hounds of Love, but it's never tasteless or gratuitous.  A particularly harsh scene, for instance, is mostly held at a removed wide shot after the worst of the abuse has occurred, leaving us to reflect on the horror without hauling us through its every grimy detail (a majority of the film's supposed brutality is left to the imagination like this).  The disjointed time contrivance is also a nice touch, as it effortlessly builds dread, mystery, and a sense of discovery - qualities I enjoy in horror movies and found lacking in Hounds of Love.  But what I liked best about Killing Ground is that it left me chewing on some of its meatier (or veggier in my case) questions.  At the heart of the film is a moral and ethical imperative towards the well-being of a child, and how each of the characters choose to react to this imperative will come to define them.  I don't think it's fair to say the film bullies its characters or emasculates them for cowardice.  But I do think it challenges them to make a moral choice under extreme duress and to face its consequences.  Who will survive and what will be left of his or her soul?