pretty things 5

I watched some movies

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME [Wes Anderson]

There are a lot of component traits that cement Wes as one of the best working American filmmakers alive but there's one in particular that makes him my favorite. Beneath the totally iconic (and at this point, underrated) visual language lies a surprisingly humanist vein: with growing fervor over the course of his career, Anderson seems to be saying that we are all destined to feel the exact same things and hurt in the exact same ways, even when they can’t be expressed in words. In fact, watch more than a couple Anderson movies and it becomes really clear that he's circling an emotional bleakness that has become so black-hole-dense that we must enter a cosmic and then religious scope to even discuss it. Most of the time this is really heavy shit. To Anderson’s immense credit, this is why no other filmmaker should ever be allowed to touch Roald Dahl.

I’m not saying that the familial dysfunction in ROYAL TENENBAUMS or DARJEELING LIMITED (my 2 favorite Wes flicks historically) isn’t contrived, it obviously is, but I do think the more elaborate side of his filmography (BUDAPEST, notably) isn’t as compatible with this humanism. Spectacle generally is not the friend of empathy (hello Darren!) and as a viewer I perceive a really thin line between Anderson using his dollhouse visuals to make his sorrow comprehensible versus to hide it behind a mask. I was similarly disappointed by PHOENICIAN for most of its runtime but there's a moment in the closing act of nearly every Wes movie where the edges of the screen seem to close in on my vision and I almost can't believe what I'm watching — in ASTEROID CITY (the new entrant to the Wes Rushmore) that scene is the Margot Robbie scene, and I felt the same way in this one when Liesl and Korda begin the work of fixing what was broken, too. What I’m saying is that even when I feel like Wes has gotten a little too deep in his bag, he can always be trusted to stick the landing. The funniest and saddest filmmaker working, what would I do without him?

MATERIALISTS [Celine Song]

To start with the good - this affirms that Song really does possess a strong, close-to-the-ground visual sense for intimacy, the sort of instinctive intangible that can be missing from some other prestige A24 fare like WE LIVE IN TIME. There are a few moments here where, if the characters were saying things other than the actual lines they have, I would have been super moved.

Unfortunately pretty much everything else is weak here, the unfortunate sort of follow-up feature that both in profile and substance makes PAST LIVES seem more questionable, too. I honestly still love that flick but I think with an objective lens can also definitely ask myself how much its slow, silent deliberateness works better as a venue for my own projection. Truly brutal one-two to then follow that up by shooting a movie that willfully seeks to be a twist on generic rom-com fare, with a (good but) one-note lead actress and two (quite good) romantic opposites who are absolutely hamming it up every time they're on screen, leaving zero room for (mis)interpretation of its emotional dynamics. Ultimately MATERIALISTS is bad politics and bad writing, relying on archetypes (Rich Guy Poor Guy Cold-Hearted Modern Woman) in a way that puts even PAST LIVES to shame. Capital T tough watch.

NICKEL BOYS [RaMell Ross]

When I ask myself what makes me like a movie usually the answer is something along the lines of "it made me want to cry" and when I love a movie it's usually "it made me want to cry and I have no idea why." There are a few scenes in the final sequences of this movie that are heartbreaking for obvious reasons, but then there are others that execute flashbacks or disassociations from reality in ways that so closely mirror the spirit of the actual first-person experience I was left a little shaken up. I was super reminded of my first watch of AFTERSUN, another movie that treated the experience of memory with such reverence and accuracy it made me rethink the way I experience and then recall my own life. Of course, in NICKEL BOYS, these are moments that are also built atop the stunning formal achievements that the movie also somehow manages to undertake. Really singular stuff, comfortably the best new release movie of the last few years for me.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN [James Mangold]

This is a pretty interesting watch in the abstract because this movie gives you literally zero live sense of where it’s headed or its narrative stakes, so all you can rely on to orient yourself are context clues — it's almost deductive. (Yes yes, I know Bob Dylan is struggling to not do what people tell him to do, but this acknowledgment of the universal human condition does not count as a plot.) For example sometimes the music gets spookier (this means things are not good) or we jump-cut to a corporate environment (this means people want money) or Timmy's eyes get even more dead than usual (this means that Bob Dylan is being told to do something he really really doesn't want to do again which happens often). Ultimately this movie is just a sequence of events where Timothee Chalamet is playing Bob Dylan, and while this is broadly inoffensive and even has its moments (both big Newport folk festival scenes, the first Jesse Moffete scene), it's not easy to get through either.

WEAPONS [Zach Cregger]

Best thing this does is let the imagery speak for itself and let u as the viewer make your own read (if you believe Cregger when he says this movie isn’t meant to reference school shootings I have some business propositions for you)...second best thing is have Benny Wong Naruto run down a suburban road I almost peed myself laughing

8 1/2 [Federico Fellini]

Thought the politics of this movie were pretty funny: Guido basically just outsources at different times his conscience, his creative ambition, his fear, and even part of his identity (Luisa does his strut better than he does) to the women around him to ultimately catastrophic results. I think the ending is legible as self-criticism, the director falling into the role of the director again because that's all he can do, and I get why this is the most common read — but imo bro gets let off light, we just watched 2.5 hours of Guido being a charmer, nothing this self-indulgent could ever not be generous. What I’m saying is that this is the 60s version of fuckboy self awareness, and while I’m sensitive to putting too much of a 21st century gender theorist spin on this, I think Fellini is firm about suggesting Guido's romantic indecision is not a distraction from but an explicit sublimation of his creative indecision. There is no separation.

I didn't fall into the movie as much as I wanted to but visually it's spectacular basically the whole way with some transcendent dream sequences — hope to find this one grow on me.

PERFECT DAYS [Wim Wenders]

Not sure why this movie has to be set in Japan besides the toilets and to evoke Ozu etc. but to me the whole point of that sub-genre is that life contains unimaginable broadness even in its narrowest slices, and I don't get any of that feeling here. This movie looks beautiful and sounds beautiful and feels beautiful for most of its runtime but despite some Emotional Turmoil I feel like the pure asceticism that this movie broadly seems to affirm is really just projection. You telling me Wim Wenders doesn't actually speak Japanese?

GREASE [Randal Kleiser]

Would be generous to call this a movie honestly as it is more like a collection of ideas. Those ideas include high school (even though everyone here looks between 27 and 42), that a woman should subsume herself entirely to the image of the man whose love she desires (morally bereft), and “what if John Travolta was a greaser” (literally one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on a screen). Even if this is not a movie, it’s definitely a classic.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO [Gus Van Sant]

This movie seems to suggest that some dwell within a mode of existence that is totally incapable of accessing the fundamental natural beauty around it except through a form of play-acting and affectation. This is like the thesis statement for Keanu Reeves’s whole life so it’s a really good thing he was alive to play this role. By the end of this movie we have been divorced from middle America, divorced from romantic vistas, divorced briefly even from the English language. The creative move of sublimating this existential detachment into Shakespeare is super clever even if it’s kind of a tough watch.

L’ARGENT [Robert Bresson]

So cool — I tried to watch this 3 or 4 years ago and 10 minutes in got bored so I watched something dumb instead, and this time I was riveted. Everyone in this movie walks like they are suspended by marionette wires attached at the shoulders, even those who aren't in the crosshairs. This affectation suggests that just existing in our world requires everyone to bear existential weight (guilt, resolve, feigned ignorance). Obviously, as this movie suggests, we are all jointly complicit, and the inevitable endpoint is bleak. I watched this one day after the goat David Lynch's passing and I was so glad I picked a movie that is this lucid in its suggestion that the mundane and the impossibly dark are one and the same. Lynch would have made me laugh, though.