msicism posts
Posts: 1188
Files: 38
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
Couldn't finish it; made it just over an hour in.In a discussion on Twitter, a number of folks whose opinions I really respect (Sean Burns, Steve Carlson, Nictate) have suggested that the essential secret of Eggers' film it its inherent humor or "silliness." Several people have even compared The Lighthouse to Guy Maddin, which I understand up to a point. While there are moments of obviously deliberate comedy (e.g., Willem Dafoe's crusty Mr. Wake seeming genuinely hurt that Ro...
Frankie (Ira Sachs, 2019)
Whether by design or simply lackluster writing and directing, Ira Sachs' latest film demonstrates how people can respond to dramatic life changes in ways that are not particularly interesting. Perhaps this is because trauma sends us back into our default modes of behavior, which tend toward the selfish and reactionary. In any case, Frankie is a film about a woman facing the end of her life, attempting to gather her loved ones around her for a semi-official goodbye vacation, and also taking t...
Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach, 2019)
What exactly are Ken Loach's films for? I don't pose this question as a dismissal, because I actually admire them quite a bit, even if they usually don't come together as well as I'd like. But I am genuinely wondering what he and usual screenwriter Paul Laverty see as their primary mission. Are they trying to entertain? Educate? Do both simultaneously? Provide a model for a uniquely working-class form of popular culture? It's difficult to say.I think about the great 19th cent...
In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018)
I feel a bit like Jason Bateman in that scene from Arrested Development when he opens the bag in the fridge labelled "DEAD DOVE - DO NOT EAT." I don't know what I expected. It's a haunted-dress movie, and as advertised, the dress kills various wearers, including a hapless milquetoast (Leo Bill) forced by his mates to put it on during his own stag party. (Some friends!) I guess I didn't necessarily expect that the dress in question would, you know, crawl around on its own voli...
Well All Right, Okay, You Win!
So yes, I got the message! Thanks for voting.I will be viewing (in order), In Fabric, Us, The Lighthouse, and time permitting, Midsommar.It may take me a minute, though. Classes begin tomorrow, I have to get cracking on the dissertation, and I am currently binge-watching the films of obscure Swiss documentarian Peter Liechti, for an assignment. So please bear with me.
Closing the Book on 2019
Of course I will still be catching up on 2019 films being released in 2020, and undistributed films that I have not yet gotten around to yet, and that sort of stuff. But I am pretty much finishing up with 2019 commercial releases. One only has so much time.But I wanted to check in with you guys, to see if there were any outstanding (or merely decent, har har) films from the previous year that you'd like to see me dally with, or that you think might just be worth my time. I always value your ...
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
It's really just a sort of lesbian Merchant-Ivory effort, and that's fine.
Paddling Their Own Canoes
Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)I have to give Gerwig credit. I would not necessarily have thought that another rendition of Louisa May Alcott's populist classic was worth bothering with as a creative endeavor. I came to the film with a great deal of skepticism. Why tackle a project like this, apart from the obvious industry cred that comes with mounting a period drama with a baked-in nostalgia factor? And while I am still not entirely convinced that, from a cultural standpoint, Little Wome...
A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019)
Terrence Malick has always been a more spiritual filmmaker than a political one, but changing times bring out unexpected facets in those we think we know well. A Hidden Life is essentially about the power of Christian faith and the refusal of a true believer to capitulate to a dominant evil simply for expediency's sake. It's hardly a stretch to call this Malick's "Trump film," but I'm sure some of the filmmaker's admirers would consider that a reductive way of looking...
End-of-the-Year Ketchup
I had to watch a lot of films in a short amount of time, and not all of them stuck in my memory in any profound way. Some of them don't really merit a full review, and need to just be dealt with. My apologies for this rather mercenary TCB mode.Diane (Kent Jones, 2018)This is a very promising debut film, but let's face it: it is being overvalued in the critical community because of who made it. Too often it resembles a sophisticate's view of what "ordinary people" are like, wi...
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019)
Quite possibly the film least amenable to watching on a screener, particularly during the year-end crunch, Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela nevertheless made a significant impact. I will need to give it another viewing, particularly when it plays in Houston next year. But I wanted to at least jot down some tentative thoughts before everything evaporated.First of all, I cannot be absolutely certain without a rewatch of Costa's earlier films -- Ossos has all but faded from my memory -- but it...
Plasticity of Forms
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn, 2019)Premised on the aftermath of an unexpected meeting on a Vancouver street, The Body Remembers is organized so as to look like a single unbroken take, offering the viewer a hypothetical span of real time. Unlike films such as Birdman, Children of Men, or even Russian Ark, The Body Remembers manages to employ this technique with an impressive subtlety. It takes awhile to even notice the lack of cuts, ...
Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, 2019)
The story of Joan of Arc is a standard of the repertoire, the French cinema equivalent of Beethoven's Ninth. It has been performed so many times by so many different people that everyone knows it by heart. So the fundamental purpose of going through this story is for a director to put his or her unique stamp on the material, while also paying homage to the various versions that have come before. In the most basic sense, making a Joan of Arc film is a self-conscious engagement with the histor...
Strict Machines
For year-end consideration, a couple of films that are built to do a particular job, and do it quite well. They are not especially resonant, in part because their subtext is installed right into the film's hardware. There is not a great deal of speculation as to what these films "mean," since they are extremely forward, not to say aggressive, in letting the viewer know precisely what they mean. In order to extract surplus meaning from these films, one would need to work very hard to ...
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019)
A relentlessly "interesting" film, Bacurau is a bit of a disappointment nevertheless. Mendonça's previous film, Aquarius, is one of my top films of the decade, so admittedly that would be a tough act to follow. And to the man's credit, he did not exactly attempt to follow that triumph so much as veer off in an entirely new direction. Bacurau is a Western of sorts, although it doesn't always seem like it. It is clearly a film that is concerned with genre, though, particularly...
Twitter: the ban is permanent.
I am not sure what would be worse: thinking that no human actually reviewed my appeal, and that this is just a computer spitting out boilerplate; or the idea that someone(s) in the corporation thinks it's important to protect Nazis from me.I am particularly insulted by the insinuation that the @msicism account's "primary purpose...was to incite harm to others." What a horrible thing to say. It borders on defamation, really.Anyway, that's that. I will slink into relative isola...
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe, 2019)
Do I need to hand in my Cinephile Card? I found Fire Will Come to be the single most pointless film I have seen all year. Oliver Laxe and cinematographer Mauro Herce (himself a noteworthy director) produce simply stunning images of the Galician landscape, including misty hillsides and pink / purple skies that resemble Turner canvases. Perhaps if Laxe had simply made an abstract film, in the manner of Lois Patiño, things would have turned out better.But instead, Fire Will Come is a narrative fil...
Two from Cannes: Mezzo-Mezzo
It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman, 2019)In this corner, a film I didn't like quite as much as I expected to. Looking back, I believe that I have been less and less engaged in Elia Suleiman's overall project ever since 2002's Divine Intervention, which I consider to be his high-water mark. In that film, Suleiman's deadpan humor was marbled with streaks of genuine rage at the plight of the Palestinian people, so much so that the conclusion entailed a sort of terrorist superbabe who ...
Thank you, and blessed be.
As Christmas and Hannukah approach, I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your support. Not just monetarily, either. 2019 has been a weird year, with its fair share of stressors. I have occasionally let this Patreon project fall by the wayside, largely because of the strain of my "real job" at the University. (Taking on seven classes seemed like a great idea at the time, and it certainly helped out with a lot of unexpected domestic expenses, but it just about killed me.)...
I Heard You, The Irishman, Paint Houses (Martin Scorsese, 2019)
An irreproachable effort, really. I found the film engaging, if not captivating, from start to finish, even if quite a lot of it -- particularly the rise of Frank Sheenan (Robert DeNiro) through the ranks of the Bufalino crime family -- was familiar territory. More than anything, The Irishman strikes me as wiser, more world-weary revision of Goodfellas, making for a classic "late film" in an oeuvre replete with masterworks. Using the aged Sheenan as the narrative anchor, Scorsese moves a...
Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)
A few months ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Leo Goldsmith and Gregory Zinman for Filmmaker Magazine. They were brought on by James Gray as consultants for Ad Astra, and their task was to expose the director to as much experimental film and video as possible, particularly those works that might help him develop a new visual vocabulary for outer space, as well as the future-based civilization that existed within it -- an airport on the moon, for example, or mining facilities on Mars. How ...
Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas, 2019)
"Isn't this kind of a black Thelma & Louise?" my wife Jen asked as we were about halfway through Queen & Slim, and I couldn't really refute the idea. Like that overrated "feminist" outlaw film, Queen & Slim could capture the Zeitgeist by trading on one of the most vital social issues facing America today: police violence against African-Americans. But the film doesn't have a great deal to say about that particular issue, at least not once it hits the road for its reve...
My Twitter Has Been Suspended, Maybe Permanently.
According to the email I received, my account was suspended for hate speech. Yeah. Sure. Makes sense.UPDATE: I am still waiting for a reply to my appeal. The official notice I received from Twitter was that I used hate speech against @TheSquid187, based on his/her membership of a suspect class. It seems anti-Semites are a religious affiliation?But I also read through the Terms of Service, and it seems that "wishing harm on someone" is grounds for suspension. Things like "I hope you g...
Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019)
In certain respects, Dark Waters occupies the place in Todd Haynes' filmography that something like Milk occupies in Gus Van Sant's. That's to say, this is not on par with a no-personality cash grab like Good Will Hunting. Rather, it's an instance of an artist making a conscious decision to adapt his primary artistic concerns to a more popular / populist format. Of course those ideas change in the translation. This isn't [SAFE] or Poison, much less Superstar. But there are ob...
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)
I have to say, I'm pleased to have missed out on The Discourse on this one. It was partly accidental, because I simply didn't have time to see it. But it was a choice as well. Folks scramble to opine about Tarantino's films, and yet I can't think of a filmmaker working today who gives less of a shit what critical discourse makes of his work. He continually displays a contempt for all but the most superficial analyses, playing this proprietary grumpiness off as a boyish nonchalanc...
Little Joe (Jessica Hausner, 2019)
From its Cannes debut right up to its current U.S. commercial release, Jessica Hausner's English-language debut Little Joe has been leaving many critics ice cold. And it seems that part of the problem is that this general lack of affect, the film's unwillingness to adopt a moral or even a straightforward allegorical stance and just deliver on it, is part of the problem. Hausner's direction is nothing if not controlled, relying on slow pans, composition in depth, and the slowest of zo...
Footprints: a Christmas Message
One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene, I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was only one. This bothered me because I noticed that during the hardest periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow, or defeat, I could only see one set of footprints.So I said to the Lord,"You promised me, Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk...
Daddy Issues
Trouble (Mariah Garnett, 2019)The feature debut from experimental filmmaker Mariah Garnett falls squarely within a burgeoning new tradition in cinematic autoethnography, and in that respect one ought not to marvel at its concept so much as consider how well it is executed and for what relative purpose. Operating within a Venn diagram circle that includes such works as Elisabeth Subrin's Shulie, Clio Barnard's The Arbor, Jane Gillooly's Suitcase of Love and Shame, and Jennifer Fox'...
Waves (Trey Edward Shults, 2019)
It's only fitting, I suppose, that I am stuck illustrating my review with the "official" stills that A24 is willing to place into circulation. (I tried taking screenshots from the DVD screener, and they were grayed out, "protected" from my Fair Use.) Waves is a critic-proof film in an almost palpable sense. As I ruefully remarked on Twitter, taking it to task is a grim undertaking not unlike correcting a particularly wrongheaded student paper, and in fact I'm taking a bre...
I am that man.
A man goes to the movies. A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man.-Robert WarshowOne sees this quotation a lot in this field, mostly as a kind of half-apologia, half-embrasure of subjectivity in film criticism. I think we all implicitly understand that if we become "that man (or woman)" too profoundly, we risk making judgments so idiosyncratic that they are essentially diary entries, having much more to say about our state of mind than about the object under consideration....
