December 2022: A 3.5/5 Fest

Damning with faint praise.

 

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022): 3.5/5

“Well, maybe I’m not a happy lad, so.” Best ensemble acting of the year, and just go ahead and give the supporting nod to Barry Keoghan. A literate and “written“ script (a la Mamet). Priest: “Do you think God cares about miniature donkeys?” Colm: “I fear he doesn’t, and I fear that’s where it’s all gone wrong.” And later: “If punching a policeman is a sin, we may as well just pack up and go.” Ultimately, I think it’s about how artists are depressed narcissist.

 

The Fablemans (Steven Spielberg, 2022): 3.5/5

Tony Kushner can really write, and I found it conventionally entertaining: funny and full of emotion. But damn the direction and tone are so broad and cartoonish. For a movie that seems to be based on real life, everyone comes off as a “character” instead of a human. Look at poor Michelle Williams’ bowl cut for Christsake!

 

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022): 3.5/5

For the first hour, I was sorely disappointed in the visuals—for me, the high frame-rate stuff was absolutely disastrous. The underwater second act works much better, and the third act is a solid hour of cascading action sequences, masterful and overstuffed. The movie is finally redundant to the original, not bringing much new to the table in terms of image, tone and strategy. I was surprised to realize that Avatar (and this one) is actually a war movie—a fact had eluded me until now. I always remember the beauty and calm, but this one really ratchets up the sadism, complete with torture and whale-massacre, somehow making me like the original a little less. 

 

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund, 2022): 3.5/5

Östlund’s broadest and most traditionally entertaining. But I missed the squirmy discomfort that comes from the feeling that the movie is taking aim at me and people like me. In this case, the film is at the expense of “the other” (extremely rich folks and influencers, the easiest possible target).

 

White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022): 3.5/5

Only about half of it works but that half is pretty good. Funny and permeated with DeLillo-recognizable observations and tone—satiric and somehow flat & torrential at the same time. Like Amsterdam, the third act threatens to burn all the (tentatively granted) goodwill earned thus far. 

 

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, 2022): 3.5/5

Lots of hot sex—always very welcome. I understand it diverges from the book, which I haven’t read. 

 

Athena (Romain Gavras, 2022): 3.5/5

If you watch, say Intolerance, you soon get the idea that cinema is about movement—about men and women (or groups) running from left to right and right to left. Here is a movie that harnesses that basic power in a riot situation, with multiple long-ass tracking shots involving huge crowds, fireworks and movement from room to room, situation, mood to mood. Loads of help from CGI I’m guessing. If not, a massive accomplishment. Either way, engrossing and ambitious. This is the action-packed movie I think I want while watching, say, Aftersun. But while watching this one, I missed the cogency and thoughtfulness of most adult movies. Shrug emoji.  

 

Hit the Road (Panah Panahi, 2022): 3/5

Moves gradually toward the cosmic, but doesn’t quite achieve the outer atmosphere.

 

Kimi (Steven Soderbergh, 2022): 2/5

A calculated nexus of hot button issues from techno-paranoia, to COVID-induced isolation sliding into agoraphobia, to MeToo-style believe-her virtual-signaling. Zooey Kravitz is not even close to being good. Written by David Koepe, an extremely successful screenwriter who has never once written a good movie—look it up!

 

Atlanta, seasons 3 & 4 (Donald Glover, etc., 2022): 4/5

Super-creative and ever-evolving. I never once got the feeling that they were just doing the easiest thing. Always going for it. There seem to be a lot of complaints about the scatter-shot and anthology-ish third season, but I loved never knowing what to expect next.

 

 

Sight and Sound Rewatch Party

I had previously seen all but two movies on the new list(s), so I knocked those out first. Overall, none of the movie’s ratings moved more than a half star one way or the other—rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. 

 

Daughters of the Dust. #60 (Julie Dash, 1991): 1.5/5

Amateurish and of little value beyond the anthropological. 

 

Histoire(s) du Cinéma, 266 mins, #84 (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1998): 3/5

In strategy and effect, this feels like all of Godard’s later, essayistic works. This one (besides being quite a bit longer) just uses images from cinema instead of cruise ships or a 3D dog on a shore. As in all these works, he proclaims stuff (using voice over or text on screen), some of which is pretty interesting and some of which doesn’t make much sense to me. For example, we get this nice image: “For nearly 50 years in the dark, moviegoers burned imagination to heat up reality. Now reality is seeking revenge.” But then later, this: “Only the hand that erases can write.” (?)

 

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, rw, #1 (Chantal Akerman, 1975): 3.5/5

I just don’t understand this character. What more does she want? She has a nice apartment, nice wallpaper, nice yellow tile, a nice tub and sink, a nice son with an interest in literature, nice dishrags and stiff green dish-scrubber, nice hallways and light switches, a nice hair style, nice potatoes and meatloaf, a nice blue smock and a really nice seagreen housecoat to wear over her sweater because it’s cold. I know this movie is supposed to be boring—and it is, it is. But I couldn’t help also thinking that it’s more interesting even on a basic pitch level than, say, Endgame which such a nil. Let me add that Matthias Müller’s Home Stories is also great, and only six minutes long.

 

Close Up, rw, #17 (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990): 5/5

Setting aside the casually brilliant formal choices, the film’s protagonist powerfully expresses his own humanity, suffering, and love for art. And it’s perhaps this directness and eloquence that raises the movie to greatness.

 

Daisies, rw, #28 (Věra Chytilová, 1966): 3.5/5

Like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, these two women step outside not just the mores of their time but the outside the frame itself. Full of crazy bits, of which the scissors thing is probably my favorite. 

 

Mirror, rw, #31 (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975): 3.5/5

Remains opaque for me. Much of it is obviously about his childhood on some level and his mother in particular—but why we are shown certain things, I have no idea. Contains a handful of breathtaking cinematic images—the shot of a single wave of wind moving towards us across a great field of grass is an all-timer.

 

Bicycle Thieves, rw, #41 (Vittorio De Sica, 1948): 4/5

Marxist not only in its critique of capitalism but in its reverence for work and all it provides. Lack of work can’t be soothed by family, friendship, religion, food, music, sport or the law. 

 

The Battle of Algiers, rw, #45 (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966): 4/5

Extremely contemporary concerns, including colonialism, terrorism, and being an Arab who wants something that Europeans don’t want them to want. Still amazing to discover a movie where our protagonists are Muslim people who murder innocent Europeans (although not pointlessly). The filmmaking is shockingly realistic-feeling and on a huge scale. Stanley Kubrick: “All films are, in a sense, false documentaries.”

 

Ordet, rw, #48 (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955): 5/5

Its power is obviously borrowed/used by Silent Light and Breaking the Waves but also by Tarantino in Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time, where faith (in the power of cinema) can change the past and raise the dead. The square compositions, glowing white light, and slow and hypnotic line-readings and movements are not only beautiful but entrance the viewer in a way that surely was not lost on (late) Kubrick. 

 

Sans Soliel, rw, #59 (Chris Marker, 1983): 5/5

It has no strong thesis, but instead presents a steady flow of engaging and worthwhile images, observations and reveries.  

 

L’Argent, rw, #72 on directors’ list (Robert Bresson, 1983): 4/5

An obsessive interest in hands and feet emphasizes the mechanistic (as opposed to the rational, much less the “soul”ful) nature of existence, calling into question the existence of free will. Using this strategy, the film answers some ultimate questions in a blissfully simple and crystal-clear way: “I expect nothing.” Which is exactly what the next nihilistic five minutes delivers. Still, it’s not our man who commits the terrifying final acts, it’s those hands and feet.

 

Sansho the Bailiff, rw, #75 (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954): 3/5

A simple story of cruelty and misfortune. 

 

Pierrot le Fou, rw, #84 (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965): 3.5/5

Jean-Luc, pitching fastballs—scattershot, funny and casually creative. “It’s a good thing I don’t like spinach, because if I did, I’d eat it, and I can’t stand the stuff.” And: their combined list of what they “like and want:” “Flowers, animals, the blue of the sky, the sound of music, ambition, hope, the way things move, accidents.”

 

Yi-Yi, rw, #90 (Edward Yang, 2000): 4.5/5

Nashville but in Taipei. A huge family, with 8-10 separate emotional arcs, full of drama and artfully handled. The city itself is also a character (cliché be damned), seeping in through windows and reflections, playing upon the characters’ face, and most of all in the signature long shots (in the sense of the camera remaining far back from the characters, ensuring that they are framed and engulfed by their environment.)

 

The Color of Pomegranates, rw, #93 on directors’ list (Sergei Parajanov, 1969): 3/5

Idiosyncratic, beautiful and mysterious—if not meaningful. Symbolic weight imbues each image with great gravity. Is it cultural appropriation if I project this movie on a wall at my next party? (Just kidding, I don’t throw parties). 

 

Throne of Blood, rw, #93 on directors’ list (Akira Kurosawa, 1957): 4/5

Intimate, intense, dreamy, primal and large-scale. A cast of (perhaps) 400, plus 400 horses and 400 fog machines, yet also very interior/psychological—since, for all that we ARE shown, there is still so much that we are not. The killing of the Lordship, the primal sin, is conducted off screen, and the Lady Macbeth character barely moves a muscle, serving as the demonic, paranoid and tempting inner voice of ambition.