Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding
Showing posts with label 2015. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2015. Show all posts

28 January 2024

Le Meraviglie (2014)


The Wonders 
is marvelous. Rohrwacher’s portrait of a family working the land in traditional ways but getting squeezed by regulations and the modern world makes parallels between lost Etruscan antiquity and ghost stories. This is a beautifully balanced film with some gorgeous performances at its center.

02 May 2021

Turbo Kid (2015)


Turbo Kid
is for the SXSW crowd. This is a kind of nostalgic dystopian film in the vein of Mad Max. Actually, this film loves Mad Max. I would say that Turbo Kid's main selling point is that it does its gross-out blood effects in the old-school way. No CGI. All geysers of blood and dismembered corpses spouting viscera at the camera. I didn't hate it or anything, but it's really gross, and its particular brand of nostalgia just isn't aimed at me.

15 February 2021

Advantageous (2015)

Advantageous has a smart little idea. A woman who has been deemed too old to do her job can replace her body entirely, but it means jeopardizing her relationship with her child. It's a poignant, message-heavy story. Jennifer Phang, however, places this narrative within an entire dystopian world of child sexual exploitation, terrorist attacks, abusive fathers, artificial intelligence, houselessness, surveillance, and memory loss. There is also an additional context of the betrayal of a best friend, a cheating husband, a daughter who refuses to speak with her father, and a religious mother who is also estranged from her daughter. 

To put it another way, the container is too big for the story. 

And what results is boring. 

There are so many nascent ideas in the film, and so little is happening in the narrative itself, that the viewer begins following these other ideas in order to make the film have meaning. But literally all of these ideas are red herrings in Advantageous, and the movie turns out to be what you thought it was about all along. 

Furthermore, it hasn't a thing to do with the poster – which makes this film look like a science fiction thriller – and, in fact, it doesn't need to take place within its dystopian universe at all. All of that is just a distraction from this film's lessons for you. 

Maybe this worked as a short film.

If you want to catch Advantageous you can find it on Netflix. But I wouldn't recommend that.

06 November 2020

Cupcakes (2013)


Cupcakes
(בננות) is a sweet, earnest, quirky, and queer romantic comedy about a group of friends who join a EuroVision-like contest in Israel. Cupcakes is pretty stupid, but it's hard not to like this. In Hebrew, incidentally, the title translates to bananas, although the film and the poster (as you can see) still feature cupcakes heavily.

03 December 2016

The Riot Club

Distasteful. This is supposed to be a portrait of masculinity run amok, corruption, and the absolute contempt of the wealthy for those classed lower than themselves. It is certainly that. What the film doesn't do is actually tell us anything we do not already know. Worse yet, either director Lone Scherfig expects us to enjoy all of this pathetic masculinity or it wishes us to love hating it. This is entertainment? I just hated it.

23 November 2016

Gett: the Trial of Viviane Amsalem

Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's movie Gett: the Trial of Viviane Amsalem (גט - המשפט של ויויאן אמסלם) is mesmerizing, challenging, difficult, and finally pretty damning. I liked it very, very much, and Ronit Elkabetz is fantastic in the lead role.

08 October 2016

Queen of Earth

Alex Ross Perry has made a strangely calibrated film that intends for its genre to be unclear. Is it a mystery? Is it a horror film? What in the hell is going to happen? The reason, I think, the film resists genre is that once we know what genre we're watching, we'll sort of know what to expect. And Perry doesn't want us to know what to expect. This works.

Queen of Earth itself is a critique of white bourgeois entitlement, I guess. But it is also a portrait of sheer madness. Or perhaps it is just that because I value politeness so much, I found the two main characters – and especially Elisabeth Moss's Catherine – absolutely insane. These women are totally unhinged. Who behaves like this??

Also, I love the poster. What a batshit crazy way to sell a movie! You can also see from even the poster that Perry is attempting to avoid the expectations that go along with particular genres. That typeface! That sketch! What am I even looking at??


I can't say that I enjoyed Queen of Earth, but I found all of this thoroughly respectable.

22 September 2016

Difret

This movie out of Ethiopia – from director Zeresenay Mehari – was well intentioned but clunky. If this movie were about the kind of great work that this center for women lawyers could do, it would be much much better, but the film is more about justice in the abstract, and discusses an issue (the rape and forced marriage of a teenage girl) on which most of us can agree. And in that case, it doesn't feel like much of a movie.

04 September 2016

Labyrinth of Lies

Giulio Ricciarelli's Im Labyrinth des Schweigens is a totally conventional procedural version of the first trial of the SS at Auschwitz.

Labyrinth of Lies certainly isn't boring, I'll give it that, mostly because I sort of couldn't believe that this protagonist was doing what he was doing. (A character refers to him as "greenhorn" through most of the film, and this fits for most of the film.) Still, this is a film in which a character discovers what happened at Auschwitz. It feels as though it is rather an impossible task to find interest in someone figuring all of this out. The film takes places in the early 1960s, so I get how this historically could have happened, I am just not quite sure that there is any way to make all of this detective work actually interesting in 2016, or what the import of all of this procedural work is in the present day. 

The acting is good, and Alexander Fehling is great in the main role, but there is not really much here in the way either of moviemaking or insight.

16 January 2016

2015 in Review

LOVED
~ ~
1. Son of Saul
2. White God
3. Youth
4. Mustang
5. Straight outta Compton
6. Spotlight
7. Beasts of No Nation
8. 45 Years
9. The Revenant
10. The Tribe
11. Anomalisa
12. Mediterranea

REALLY LIKED
~ ~
13. Timbuktu
14. Saint Laurent
15. Creed
16. The Big Short
17. Dope
18. Clouds of Sils Maria
19. The Second Mother
20. Boy & the World
21. Girlhood
22. Tangerines (Mandariinid)
23. The Wonders 24. Z for Zachariah
25. Steve Jobs
Brooklyn
Gett: the Trial of Viviane Amsalem
Mistress America
Far from Men
'71

LIKED
~ ~
Jauja
Ex Machina
Goodnight Mommy
Grandma
The Hateful Eight
Star Wars: Episode VII - the Force Awakens
The Danish Girl
Room
Kumiko the Treasure Hunter
Carol

While We're Young
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Cinderella
The Voices
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Appropriate Behavior
Cupcakes
Theeb (Wolf)


LIKED MORE THAN I DISLIKED
~ ~
Sand Dollars
Phoenix

The End of the Tour
Inside Out

Spectre
The Martian
Insurgent
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Love & Mercy
Jurassic World

When Marnie Was There
Suffragette
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared 

The Assassin (刺客聶隱娘)
The Cut
Queen of Earth
We Are Your Friends
Labyrinth of Lies 
Shaun the Sheep Movie
The Good Dinosaur
Bone Tomahawk
Difret
The Walk


BARELY LIKED MORE THAN I DISLIKED
~ ~
Sicario
Mad Max: Fury Road
Southpaw
Spring
Turbo Kid
Advantageous
Black Sea

The 10 Year Plan

DISLIKED
~ ~
Bridge of Spies
The Scorch Trials
Tangerine
The Riot Club

Trumbo
Joy


HATED
~ ~
Lost River
Everest

COMPLETE AND TOTAL WASTE OF TIME
~ ~
Fifty Shades of Grey
The Boy Next Door