msicism posts
Posts: 1188
Files: 38
Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020)
Diverting enough, Palm Springs is little more than a concept, and a borrowed one at that. To be fair, it's a bit different from Groundhog Day, in the sense that here there's a b.s. Hawkingesque explanation for the time loop, and it isn't some sort of punishment for being an unpleasant person. This makes Palm Springs more "contemporary," I suppose, and not just because popular physics is besotted with multiverses and time anomalies. The predicament in which Nyles (Andy Samberg...
Home Improvements
His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)Thematically, haunted houses are all about history. As such, they can serve as a handy metaphor for personal as well as political scenarios, and it takes a deft hand to avoid calling on simple cliches and mistaking them for insight. His House is unusual in that it uses the idea of a haunting or a curse as a highly specific means for exploring both cultural displacement and survivors' guilt. Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are refugees from South Sudan w...
Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020)
A curiosity. If you consider Promising Young Woman in the context of the broadly commercial revenge-thriller, comparing it to something like Hard Candy, it may seem audacious. It certainly has its unexpected twists and turns, but more significantly, it seems to treat the issue of trauma with more gravity than it necessarily has to. On the other hand, looked at as a "serious" film, PYW is obviously pretty trashy, but doesn't evince the knowing irony one expects from so-called "art...
You Cannot Stop The Count
Mwah-ha-ha! ⚡️
Kajillionaire (Miranda July)
I was frankly so put off by the melancholy whimsy of Miranda July's first two features that I was kind of dreading Kajillionaire. Her first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, worked a bit too hard to turn a collection of doodles about standard-issue loneliness into a cri de coeur on the deleterious effects of the Internet and a grand statement about How We Live Now. The Future, meanwhile, was just a muddle, examining Generation X's failure to measure up to an older model of adulthood...
Mank (David Fincher)
THIS REVIEW IS EMBARGOED. SO KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, PLEASE.Much like this year's major sports championships, the 2020 Oscars will go down in the logbooks with an asterisk by the results, a historical notation of a big, unknowable What If. Despite that fact, the studios and the industry are going to try their best to normalize the awards, since there is a lot of money riding on these prestige pictures. But the complicating factor -- that the Academy has been forced to change its rules, and no...
Reasons to Be Cheerful
I'm nervous. We're all nervous.But here are some things to consider.Today's tweet thread from Politico carefully details the eight crucial states in the election, and how all of them (aside from Michigan) could really go either way. Really? This is Politico, the "center-right" insider publication that has been called out several times for being so desperate to attack Bernie Sanders that they have dipped into anti-Semitic stereotypes. These guys are "respectable" crack...
Kung-fu Master! (Agnès Varda, 1988)
An undeniably bizarre film, Kung-fu Master! seems almost designed to, well, punch and kick at the boundaries of French cinematic lyricism. From its prosaic upper-middle class Parisian trappings to the main character's return to a childhood home in the countryside (Britain in this case, rather than Provence) and right up to an eventual retreat to an isolated island paradise, Varda's film operates in the romantic mode of a Truffaut or a Téchiné, saturating her film's lovers in natura...
Red, White and Blue (Steve McQueen, 2020)
Neither as baldly declarative as Mangrove, nor as poetically open-form as Lovers Rock, Red, White and Blue splits the difference, resulting in the strongest mainstream film released thus far from Steve McQueen's five-part "Small Axe" project. While Oscar prognosticators are much more likely to zero in on the conventional courtroom drama of Mangrove, as well as that film's literal black-and-white moral stridency, RWB is a thornier work of art, and is all the richer for it.In its f...
Nasir (Arun Karthick, 2020)
SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.It has to be addressed right off the bat. Nasir is a didactic film. It is made with a very particular purpose in mind, and by the time it is over, there is absolutely no ambiguity about what that purpose is. There is a particular strain of thinking that considers didacticism, in itself, to be the opposite of art, or at least art's nemesis. This is generally a liberal humanist position, one that prizes "ambiguity" over all else, partly because this ambiguity can be...
This Ain't No Galaxy Brain
Sorry for the limited watching and writing in recent days. I have in the midst of a really hellacious headache cluster which has been slowing me down over the past week and a half. I have an appointment with a neurologist next week to see about getting some new meds, but for now it's kind of an icepick-in-the-eye-socket sort of situation, day in and day out.But! Soon, in addition to finishing off that pesky NYFF slate, I will also be getting around to some other long-simmering goodies. Like ...
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner, 2020)
Or: Paranoid Racist QAnon Wackos Say Darnedest Things: an Exposé For Make Benefit of Understone Dwellers During Trumptastic Years of 2016-2020.Cheap shots at easy targets. Pretty much a waste of time. Also, how can the whole film be premised on Kazakh girls being caged, and not once does Cohen go for a chant of "lock her up"? That's ground level stuff.
On The Rocks (Sofia Coppola, 2020)
This is an utterly trivial film, but it's also kind of weird. It's really a fairly standard midlife crisis film from a woman's point of view. We've seen a lot of these in recent years, where a wife feels left behind by her work-driven husband, losing her identity in motherhood. If we might be so bold as to postulate that many of Coppola's films are autobiographical in some oblique way, On The Rocks could even be read as a crypto-sequel to Lost in Translation, which itself was...
Servants (Ivan Ostrochovsky, 2020)
Although I hadn't remembered it until I checked my logs, I did see Ostrochovsky's debut feature, a film from 2015 called Koza. It was the story of a washed-up boxer trying to make a comeback because of financial distress, and it was shot to look like a documentary. (Most of the principals were playing thinly fictionalized versions of themselves.) I mention this only because Servants, whatever its shortcoming, represents such a radical shift in sensibility. No one would ever mistake Ostro...
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)
This review will contain spoilers.At first I found myself in a rather bothersome predicament. I was left cold by Charlie Kaufman's latest effort, and I suppose I could replace the word "cold" with the phrase "emotionally unmoved," so as to avoid the necessity of appending the phrase "no pun intended" to the sentence, which admittedly weakens the force of the judgment. But cold is indeed how I felt, and the material fact that much of the film takes place in a blizzard ...
Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020)
It's true, Malmkrog isn't for everyone. But I must admit to a certain surprise at the criticisms directed at it by the reviewers for Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. It's not that I expect Puiu's difficult film to be embraced by "the trades," per se. But that both reviews seemed to take the same tack, arguing that Malmkrog, by dint of its relative physical stasis and extreme discursiveness, is essentially "uncinematic," or simply "not cinema." This was ...
New Order (Michel Franco, 2020)
Okay, first things first. Are we sure we're not being punked?Anyway, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the cinematic career of Michel Franco is a real thing, something we're supposed to take seriously. I can't speak with a lot of authority about it, since I have only seen Chronic and this one. Yes, I avoided the brother / sister incest film, and the extreme cyber-violence one. And I guess there was another one that had to do with a mother taking her grandbaby away from ...
A White, White Day (Hlynur Pálmason, 2019)
The word on the street is true. Hlynur Pálmason's second film is a major leap forward from his already-impressive debut Winter Brothers. That film, which was largely characterized by its tonal strangeness (I called it a social-realist Farrelly brothers production), did not really suggest that Pálmason was going to evolve so quickly into a stark formalist. But almost from the outset, A White, White Day alerts its viewer that conventional characterization and emotion are going to be secondar...
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross, 2020)
Okay, guys, it's Cinephile Confession Time. This is the first film I've seen by the acclaimed duo of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross. In fact, awhile back I tried watching two of their films (45365 and Tchoupitoulas) and lost interest. But of course, the near-unanimous praise that has greeted their latest film has made it impossible to ignore. And what can I say? Sometimes critical consensus is correct. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is the ultimate "bottle episode," and the bottles don...
The Notes of Anna Azzori / A Mirror That Travels Through Time (Constanze Ruhm, 2020)
Say, have you heard about essay films? They are all the rage right now. In fact, the Currents section of the New York Film Festival featured five of them, with their combinations of fact and fiction, their meta-textual analysis of a given topic (often a matter of representation), and their insistent exploration of the impact that the past has on the present. In fact, these films are so ubiquitous right now that you might think that they reflect a certain kind of artistic / intellectual productio...
The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sangsoo, 2020)
Hong operates in a minor key here, with the compositional interest primarily hinging on all the things he doesn't do. The Woman Who Ran doesn't scramble chronology, nor does it involve awkward, blubbering confessions around a soju-saturated restaurant table. But most importantly, this film doesn't center on male-female relationships. Men do pop up now and then, and the absent husband of main character Gamhee (Kim Min-hee) does seem to hover around the film like a nagging idea that ca...
Man, "Cuties" sucks.
I was asked to write a statement for the National Society of Film Critics relating to the Netflix indictment, which I've pasted below. So I tried watching the film, and made it 30 minutes through. And although there is no reason to label this child pornography -- I mean jesus -- this is another one of those 2 Live Crew moments where we find ourselves going to bat over the 1st Amendment for what is, in truth, a turd.UPDATE: I watched the whole thing. Ugh. Talk about introducing a problem and ...
Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020)
At one point, during the final third of Dick Johnson Is Dead, the film's subject says something jarringly poignant to his daughter, the filmmaker. "I used to be your dad," he laments. "Now I'm your little brother." Dick is worried because Kirsten has to leave the country for work, and he's worried that he will get into trouble in her absence. This is one of several moments of painful lucidity we witness as Dick comes to grips with the encroachment of dementia, the sam...
Marriage Story (Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, 2020)
Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty was a dense, complicated feature film that encompassed literary concerns, gender identity, the difficulties of collective resistance, and the entire question of whether all of those things could serve as a broad ethic for life itself, or were interruptions of a "life" that lay elsewhere. It's heady stuff, and by contrast, Dunn Rovinelli's latest is a model of simplicity. A nine-minute film comprised of just four shots, Marriage Story is a non-narrat...
French Exit (Azazel Jacobs, 2020)
Did you know that Woody Allen had a new film this year? Apparently some nonsense called Rifkin's Festival, about a guy hanging out at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. It quietly world premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Who cares, right?Well, based on the harmless but unengaging French Exit, Azazel Jacobs is just one more filmmaker who is more than happy to try and insinuate himself into the power vacuum left by the Woodman's complete (North American...
Time (Garrett Bradley, 2020)
As it happens, I already related most of my thoughts about this incredibly moving film in my third NYFF report for MUBI, which was mostly supposed to focus on the films in the Currents section. But I found unexpected affinities between Time and Edström / Winter's The Works and Days, despite their obvious differences.Time is clearly meant to be an accessible, even activist work of political documentary, and the fact that it was co-produced by the New York Times serves to emphasize the extent...
Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi, 2020)
One of the most critically lauded documentary filmmakers of the moment, Gianfranco Rosi seems to define his films by geographical location rather than population or community. Granted, if you choose to limit your purview to a specific locale, you are likely to end up with a cross-section of a particular community as well. But Rosi's method is curiously dialectical. It adopts a formalist organizational principle, which in theory should produce films that avoid the traps of liberal humanism. B...
Tragic Jungle (Yulene Olaizola, 2020)
I must admit, I'm a bit confused by the fact that this rather pedestrian film is being hailed as a breakout for Olaizola. And to be honest, the more I think about it, the more I suspect that the acclaim is rooted in the fact that Tragic Jungle closely resembles so many other, better movies. A little Herzog here, a little Apichatpong there, and a healthy dash of Claire Denis and Lucrecia Martel, and what we've got is another cautionary tale of colonialism and greed, where the white man an...
