The Films of 2019

[Persona]

Well, obviously it is a hybrid of the contemporary (FKA's music, pole dancing) with mythology (Icarus, etc.)

On a purely visceral level I found it remarkably effective. Very derivative of Huang's own stuff with Bjork, sure, but applied to the vulnerable aspects of FKA Twigs' music in a striking way.

They synergy of the visuals with the moment where Twigs falls from "heaven" really hit me hard, especially in conjunction with that climactic moment with the titular lyric "All wrapped in cellophane / the feelings that we had." That struck a deep chord with me personally, so maybe that's why I was so affected.

But I found the falling images with that emphatic reprise of the first verse to be very moving.

All told I loved the mythological components, the images themselves, and how they were edited together with the music.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Stockholm

While most of the top actors of Ethan Hawke's generation grow super-rich by playing super-heros, he soldiers on playing quirky characters in low budget independents that no one goes to see, one other patron at my showing on an early matinee weekday when four auditoriums showing Avengers, including the huge Imax, were sold out.

Hawke's performance here is the reverse of his under-played First Reformed pastor, he entertainingly over-plays his hippy dippy gangster, a terrorist with a soft heart, all to a Bob Dylan song track. Noomi Rapace doesn't have much to work with as the chief hostage, she struggles to get past a stunned blank look, so the chemistry that must develop between her and Hawke is only intermittently convincing.

Christopher Heyerdahl as the beleaguered chief of police has no hostage taking blueprint to consult, it's 1973, and he messes up at every turn, but I enjoyed his channelling of Max von Sydow's English accent, and his confusion as to why the hostages aren't helping him out.

Writer/director Robert Budreau never quite gets the tone right, he appears to be reaching for absurdity, but the many subsequent tragic hostage incidents make that a difficult task. He doesn't quite legitimize the Syndrome either, but the locked in the bank vault scenes do have a bizarre intensity in which one can believe that relationships might be turned upside down.

[Mr Sheldrake]

The White Crow

An unusual biopic (Nureyev) in the sense that it adhere's closely to the details of its subject, little fiction as far as I can tell. This approach risks dullness but David Hare's scrambled timeline kept my interest. Ralph Fiennes directs so the performances are precise and subtle, his as Nureyev's primary instructor rendered entirely in Russian.

Manohla Dargis called Adele Exarchopoulos' performance "exasperatingly limp" as Claire, the heiress who saves Nureyev. I liked her personification of 60's French cool, the chain-smoking, her perfect hairdo, her strength at crisis time.

Oleg Ivenko resembles Nureyev and he effectively portrays a selfish devotion to his art, and art in general, and to overcoming his peasant heritage in a high cultured world. What disappointed were the ballet sequences, they seemed like inserts rather than an emotional culmination of the struggle to individuality in a conformist society.

The defection is staged with much suspense despite knowing the outcome, probably because it was not planned. Imagine saying "Andre Malraux" to drowsy policemen, rousing them into action.

[ford]

Just caught up with David Mackenzie’s Netflix movie Outlaw King. Completely baffled this didn’t get rave reviews. Strikes the right tone between period appropriate feudal chilliness and classic romantic storytelling. Absolutely beautiful looking in a way the trailers never captured.

Once again the film critic consensus—as deranged and solipsistic as the rest of the American media complex of 2019-–has failed cinephiles with their collective shrug at this film. I’m guessing that once they heard it got re-edited after the premiere, they smelled blood in the water.

[Persona]

I mean, I didn't like Outlaw King very much, but okay.

I just found it tedious. It needed to take more chances with its style or approach to narrative or it needed to be grander and more epic in sweep. It was a weird middle-ground for me and I didn't much care for the characterizations or performances. Pugh was pretty good, that's about it.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Tolkien

Unlike the current Nureyev biopic, this is hagiography, Tolkien's formative years sentimentally dramatised, the loyal friend, the long-suffering suitor rewarded at last for his constancy. Fortunately, Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins develop a real chemistry portraying two penniless orphans with artistic aspirations.

The fellowship of the four members in the T.C.B.S., their tea drinking club, is also effectively explored. There is poignancy to these scenes, a group of young males with varied and enthusiastic hopes and dreams blissfully unaware of the slaughterhouse that will soon engulf them, much of their generation lost, including half of the fellowship. A battlefield phantasmagoria lays it on a bit thick, as Tolkien in the throes of trench fever, searches for his friend, but it's always useful to be reminded of the horrors of war.

There's also two amusing scenes with Derek Jacobi as Tolkien's tutor, his presence welcome to any movie.

.

[Persona]

Not a huge Yimou fan but I see his latest, SHADOW, has gotten pretty strong reviews and am thinking about checking it out at the theater tomorrow.

Anyone have an opinion to offer on it?

[DarkImbecile]

See here

[Persona]

thanks, I should have thought to look under his filmmaker thread.

[BenoitRouilly]

Le Jeune Ahmed / The Young Ahmed (Dardenne)

Ahmed is a young 13 year old Belgian boy whose passion for video games just converted to something else entirely : religion. He leaves childhood for serious adult matter. This brutal change has ran havoc among his closest family. His mosque’s Imam stuffs his head with ideas of purity in Quran verses and impurity in misbelievers. Those who don’t believe deep enough. From the vantage point of his short life, he begins to judge his family members. His mother drinks wine. His sister dresses too sexy. His teacher plans to teach Arab through pop songs which is sacrilegious.

The film begins with a handshake that did not happen. To a true muslim, it is impur to touch a woman. Ahmed, young teen who feels like a man already, cannot behave like the child he was yesterday. Even his classmates are impur because they shake the teacher’s hand.
After his ablutions, Ahmed refuses to kiss goodnight his mother because he must go pray rightaway. Nobody recognises the new face of Ahmed. This is the birth of a fanatic in his familiar milieu.

Above him hovers the shadow of a dead, not one of his absent father, but the one of his cousin, martyr of the war in Syria. To him a hero. A hero whom photograph he hides in his school books and underneath his prayer carpet. Ahmed is inhabited by a zombie who guides his footsteps toward religious radicalisation where purity is only attenable in combat death. His Imam tells him in private that Jihad time is not now. But Ahmed takes it upon himself to punish one infidel who he dims deserving the death sentence, and ends up in a juvenile detention center…

Like the young « orphan » in Le Gamin au vélo (2011), Ahmed is against all attentions given by educators. How do you save from himself a religious fanatic seduced by a mortiferous ideology ? A purity ideal peerless on Earth.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne : « The film is not a trial. The film is not an accusation. Our bet in the beguinning was : how could we bring back to life the young Ahmed ? This is a film of peace. Life always comes out on top against totalitarianism. »
The film doesn’t blame muslim religion, but the extremists who mislead. Even in « prison », Ahmed is able to attend all his prayers all day-round. His educators only try to live up his condition, with collective, agricultural and scholar activities.

The mise en scène, awarded in Cannes, is remarkable. With small means, the brothers Dardennes recreate the usual life of a young muslim, closest as can be to his least gestures, at the time of his radicalisation. The camera follows Ahmed day to day in close up, quasi-claustrophic, revealing to the spectator only his viewpoint. The naivety of his youth, the purity of his faith, but also the excess of his radicalisation, the hatred of the others, the obstinacy of his blind revenge.

Except for twice when adults spell out in front of him, what he must understand, the film leaves us to learn by observation of his behaviour, trivial often, but Machiavellian at times. We are priviledged as spectators to follow Ahmed when he lies to society in order to hide his intentions, but as well when he’s on his own and carries out his criminal machinations. All this with the candour and clumsiness of a young adolescent driven by a fixed idea. A terrible idea for a child.

[Finch]

Indiewire picks the best 35 film posters so far and the Beach Bum poster is so hilariously tacky that it does kind of deserve to be in there.

[Mr Sheldrake]

American Woman

An odd movie in many ways including being written and directed by men, Ridley Scott the producer, son Jake the director. The screenplay is muddled in its depiction of Debra a mother whose teenage child goes missing, played by Sienna Miller at full-throttle, bulldozing her grief stricken path with abrasive behavior, screaming at everyone, even her loving family. She tells a huge lie about the teenage father of her grandson that in his mind destroys his life. Debra later tells him without overt remorse "sorry, I was in a bad place."

We're nevertheless meant to root for Debra, she's predictably sentimentalized at crucial moments, and she does love and care for her off-spring. The movie becomes less situated in the ubiquitous child disappearance sub-genre, it's more about the minefield of toxic men that women must navigate in the heart of Trump-landia. Fathers who abandon their children, kidnappers/rapists, men who trade financial security for control and abuse, pretty boy seducers who can never be trusted. Debra runs the gamut.

By contrast her sister (fine understated performance by Christina Hendricks) is happily married and well-adjusted. Debra tempts her with an erotic fantasy of Tom Selleck! (never clear what decade we're in) wouldn't she like some of that excitement, she hesitates, and then after looking at her big lug of a husband, dependable and loyal and boring, ensconced on the couch watching football, tells her she"ll happily stick with what she's got. It felt like a genuine moment.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Late Night

Billed as a comedy, and the first act does have some funny jokes. Then Kaling/Molly turns the focus of the movie over to Thompson's character, Katherine, and some turgid melodrama ensues, the laughter dwindles. Molly (without any experience in the business) instinctively knows how to turn around the dwindling ratings of Katherine's decades-old talk show. Her job is to be the (non)white savior, schooling a skeptical Katherine into wokeness and to embrace the cultural imperatives of the moment.

The advice is golden ratings-wise. No more boring Doris Kearns Goodwin type guests, she implores! The many cliches are amiable enough to endure, Kaling and Thompson do have chemistry, and it leads to a righteous paradise of diversity. Its cardinal sin is wasting John Lithgow in a nothing role.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Anna

An espionage plot that contains some nifty twists and turns. I pondered whether one might be able to transpose it to a serious '60s spy-vs-spy movie, le Carre-wise. One would have to jettison the beautiful female groomed to be an indestructible assassin but there might still be enough good material left. le Carre did something similar in Little Drummer Girl.

We see Anna's grisly recruitment but are spared her training. She emerges a full-fledged killer and in her initial assignment she has been coached well enough to dispatch her target and about 30 bodyguards (it's all in the trailer) in a crowded restaurant, Anna a female John Wick who like John kills for her freedom. It's ludicrous action but well-staged.

My interest in a more realistic approach derives from the casting of the three supporting players- Cillian Murphy, Luke Evans and especially Helen Mirren, a trio whose talents are far superior to the material.

Mirren knows she's in a one-dimensional comic book world so she plays it to the hilt. Her performance reminded me of someone, maybe Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein, that's not quite it, but it gives an idea. At any rate it's a lot of fun even while sensing a more believable character is dying to be born, that is if there were any audience left for serious movies.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Shaft

There's no one better than Samuel L. Jackson (Shaft 2) in delivering profane dialogue, he catches the beats like a stand-up, often hilariously. This performance is all jokes except when he's killing or torturing but those are treated jokingly as well. He's retro (and offensive) in his attitudes to women, and to men, like his long estranged son (Shaft 3), who buy into this new-fangled effete concept of treating women with respect.

When he hears his son has a female friend his immediate response is "are you tapping that ass?" He advises him that women want real men not pussies. And the movie endorses his view. Theirs has been a platonic (romance possible) relationship of equals but when Junior, timid with guns, suddenly springs into action during a restaurant shootout, and reveals himself as an indestructible killing machine, her eyes sparkle with rapturous desire.

Richard Roundtree (Shaft 1) joins the finale and he's also efficient with the comic schtick and the killing. He's playing Jackson's dad but in real life he's only 6 years older. Jackson was de-aged throughout Captain Marvel and I began to wonder if he wasn't de-aged here as well, he looks about 45-50 instead of 70.

The movie has bombed at the box office, rightly so, but then lately just about everything outside of animation and super-heroes is bombing. I saw this with three other people and several times already this year I have been the entire audience, in a densely populated area.

[Mr Sheldrake]

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson's novel offers a challenge for adaptation given that Merricat is one of literature's most effective unreliable narrators, her haunting, child-like voice propelling a fast-paced, claustrophobic, paranoid fairy tale. Imdb lists a May release but nowhere in my area. The movie certainly doesn't fit into any of the usual slots at the multiplex but I found it an intelligent attempt if not altogether successful.

The production chooses a surprisingly enhanced use of color, eye popping, one might have expected a b/w Edward Gorey-wise look suitable to the novel's gothic roots. Older sister Charlotte is rendered as the symbol of a 1950's print advertisement, the happy homemaker, content in her duties, not a care in the world (she has many!). Alexandra Daddario's voluptuousness as Charlotte is nicely contrasted with the scrawny Merricat of Taissa Farmiga and her furtive, darting eyes.

Jackson's famous agoraphobia is well dramatized, the townspeople are evil indeed, several shots seem inspired by Lang's Fury. Crispin Glover as dotty Uncle Julian brings an intensity to his role as the one who keeps the family tragedy in constant view. Sebastian Stan is also good as the interloper, a cousin who comes a calling, luring Charlotte with his sexual power, horrifying Merricat who grasps his ulterior motives.

The main misstep is expanding Jackson's study of sociopathy with intimations more understandable for our moment, which may give pause to those familiar with the novel.

[Never Cursed]

This year's winner of Cannes' top documentary prize For Sama is one of the most disquieting and unsettling docs I have ever seen, a relentlessly downbeat and unconventionally filmed look inside the Battle of Aleppo. With the exception of a few professionally done drone establishing shots, the entire movie is shot on consumer video cameras by co-director Waad Al-Kateab, an economics student turned journalist who chose to stay, along with her doctor husband Hamza, inside the rebel-held districts of Aleppo while it was besieged by Syrian and Russian forces. She films several years' worth of her life in Aleppo, as conditions become more hellish and it becomes clear that the regime is indiscriminately killing civilians, with a focus on the hospitals that Hamza works at and Al-Kateab's motherhood. The titular Sama is Al-Kateab's daughter, born in the middle of the siege, to whom the film is addressed and narrated to, and who appears as an infant throughout.

The result of all this is a compelling juxtaposition of intimate moments between an ever-shrinking group of principal subjects set alongside sequences of death and destruction that look like they were ripped out of Cloverfield. The film is transparently political and manipulative (it's clear that its overall narrative was figured out long after the shooting stopped), but those sentiments are all-too-understandable when your finished product features something around five scenes of dead children being mourned in hospital by their immediate relatives. Lots of incredibly difficult sequences in this movie, but one in particular stood out for me and made the entire theater, including me, audibly uncomfortable:

Graphic description insideShow

A critically injured, nine-months-pregnant woman is brought to the hospital after a shelling attack and is given an emergency c-section. The doctors get the baby out, but he has no pulse. We then see, almost without any edits at all, the doctors performing CPR on the baby for several minutes before finally the baby coughs, then cries; both mother and child survive. This is filmed in the same in-your-face way as the rest of the movie, with the majority of the action taking place not one foot away from the camera lens.

Unforgettable stuff, and there are many, many other scenes like it. Recommended to anyone interested in the Syrian Revolution and with the stomach for things like those in the spoilerbox.

[Lemmy Caution]

One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang / Jialing Zhang) – A great, but hardly surprising, subject for a documentary – the dark underside of China’s “one child” policy – but this is possibly the most irritating and self-aggrandizing way to approach it. Nanfu Wang makes it all about her, her family history (although she wasn’t from a single child family and they weren’t subject to the abuses documented in the film), and her new status as a mother (which apparently gives her a special insight into human rights abuses). It’s frustrating that such a strong subject has now been spoiled for better filmmakers. Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam’s Leftover Women is a much better film on an obliquely related topic.

I read an article on One Child Nation that had a trailer attached. Maybe it was on NPR(?)
It was hard to tell if the director putting her family front and center would work or be a giant mistake.

When the one-child policy was initiated, China's huge population was seen as a burden for a very poor country (mouths to feed) and not yet a strength (large, cheap workforce and potential consumer giant) for a developing economy. The gov't in the late 70's and early 80's also still had almost total control over people's lives, controlling their work, their work unit and their housing. In such context, enforcing family planning by strictly controlling family size wasn't that much of a stretch. Though not surprisingly much more difficult to achieve. The One Child policy was implemented unevenly and at times harshly. Abuses occurred, primarily in rural areas, especially during the hard-core communist days before Market-Leninism took over.

As economic freedoms were implemented strongly in the 90's (after sputtering starts in the 1980's), the one-child policy was gradually relaxed especially in the new millennia. But change comes at different rates, China is a huge country, and in pockets the communist authorities carried on as though it were the the Maoist Era (or at lest the late 70's).

As far as ruining a rich theme, there's still plenty of room for someone to look at both sides of the One Child policy. China's pulled a few hundred million people out of absolute poverty in the past 25+ years. Would that have just been offset by a few hundred million additional babies without such a policy? What would it mean to China and the world if China was heading towards 2B, instead of stabilizing around 1.3 to 1.4 Billion? Even in the documentary the director notes most Chinese believe the one-child policy was necessary and has been so ingrained that even after it was rescinded many parents just want one child, as that's become the norm (and the cost of raising a child has risen greatly).

It'd be interesting to see a doc that analyzed both the good and bad aspects of such a monumental policy. Yes, there were high-levels of abortions involving female babies. [The gov't in the late 90's banned medical personnel -- all gov't employees -- from telling parents the sex of a fetus. And permitted many families whose first child was female to have a second child a few years later -- which is how the director's family was treated]. But the flipside was that the massive emphasis on family planning and birth control gave women significant freedom and more control over their bodies and future. While many families who only had a daughter put all their resources into that one child, and there has been a degree of opportunity in education and jobs and freedom for females that is rare and possibly unprecedented in the developing world.

Interestingly, now that the one child policy has been abolished, some companies are becoming more reluctant to hire women, worried that they might have two or three children, missing time from work for maternity leave and prioritizing family over career. During the one child phase, a single maternity leave could be planned for, and many white collar firms saw females as better employees than young men, as the women tended to have better English skills, changed jobs less, and were generally more content and loyal employees.

The One Child Policy was a massive experiment in social planning and had plenty of ramifications and consequences. An objective documentary could examine and catalog those changes.

[zedz]

I want to see your movie!

One Child Nation has no such sense of nuance and is more like a 60 Minutes exposé framed awkwardly as a "personal journey."

[Mr Sausage]

Idol (Lee Su-jin)

A rising anti-nuclear politican returns home to find bloody water covering the floor, his wife desperately scouring their car with a rag, and a body shrouded in a blood-soaked plastic sheet propped against the car. His son has hit a mentally ill man and in his panic brought the body home. The politician returns the body to the side of the road and has his son turn himself in for a lighter sentence, but the dead man’s father, who had dedicated his life to caring for his disabled son, is devastated, bitter, and wants answers. The movie starts off seeming like it’ll be about complex situations involving character and morality ala High and Low, but prefers to focus on well placed narrative complications. Where it triumphs is pitching most of its twists well below outlandish or unbelievable. There is a tendency in thrillers to want to surprise the audience so badly that the twists end up being absurd and unlikely. Here, the twists and complications are in keeping with everything we’ve seen. I’m not sure the characters are always consistently portrayed, but the twists come largely from mundane but damaging details. In that, in often being unexpected, and in finding the right tone for its emotional scenes, the movie is solid and worth watching. Be prepared for the opening line, tho’. It’s a shocker and left the audience laughing in uneasiness and disbelief. The film earns the sentiment, but it comes out of nowhere.

[Mr Sausage]

Bliss (Joe Begos)

As aggressive and abrasive a film as I’ve seen in years, all energy and momentum, its characters empty and unpleasant. The cinematic equivalent of listening to a Carcass album: jangling and bewildering and mortifying, but also astonishing. The movie's tone is orgiastic and electric. It delights in overloading the viewer. A descent into the grimy pits of addiction and ecstasy. Trash cinema made with verve and skill. I left the theatre feeling slightly drunk. I loved it, but I imagine most will hate it. It's about vampires, art, addiction, drugs, capitalism, partying, sex, etc, etc.

[Mr Sausage]

Blood On Her Name (Matthew Pope)

A minimalist thriller set in the Ozarks. The movie opens on a single mom, sitting in the auto repair shop she owns, wondering what to do with the body of the man she’s just killed. We don’t know why she killed him or how she came to be in this situation, but you just know her choices from here on out will unravel her life. A movie about violence, poverty, and despair, as expected, but never quite as sweat-soaked and desperate as it ought to be. It’s just a bit too gentle.

[Mr Sausage]

Jade’s Asylum (Alexandre Carrière)

The most interesting thing about this movie, where a group of friends and potential business partners on a South American retreat are stalked by jungle monsters sprouting fungus and dripping sap, is a discontinuous editing style in which scenes recur and expand, gaining new information, perspective, and context in a dream-like pastiche. The film intercuts these ever-expanding fragments with shots of our heroine, a woman struggling with trauma and perhaps mental illness, who has just settled into a bath at the film’s beginning and stares hauntedly out of the water. The implication of the editing scheme is that the events of the first half, if not playing out entirely in her head, are at least somehow under her influence or a part of her understanding. But eventually I had to admit the technique was pointless, that the monsters were real and autonomous, and that the heroine is no more connected to the events than anyone else. This is not a plot reveal or a realization the film builds towards or sets up, either. There just comes a point where you give up expecting the film to make something of its editing scheme.

Given the film barely runs 80 minutes, including a long mix of bloopers and extra scenes that interrupt or play over the credits, I suspect the editing style of the first half is there to help pad out a thin script by reusing footage as much as possible. In the context of student films, I’d say its makers have a strong future in the business. But this is an independant film made by professionals, so it’s just amateur. Even the story is insufficiently motivated, and ends with a thematic conclusion that’s unearned. After the screening, the director mentioned the film was in many ways an excuse to stay in the beautiful shooting location. It shows.

[Mr Sausage]

Mystery of the Night (Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr)

Adapts a play based on Filipino folklore: a woman, impregnated by a high-ranking clergyman in Spanish occupied Philippines, is taken by the governor into the forest and left there to die. Found by three spirit women, guardians of the forest, the baby will grow up and eventually meet and fall in love with the govenor’s son, now grown and on a ritual quest for manhood. All is fated to end badly—both the plot, and your experience watching it. The film is slow, stiff, and very boring. It lacks the energy and carnality this kind of story is built for. What is this but a story of propulsive emotions that cannot be escaped? It’s dreary even to look at: tho’ shot in the jungle, the digital photography is flat and overlit, and all the colour desaturated. The richness of the jungle is absent, unaccountably. Even more unaccountably, the film is shot on location in the jungle and yet often staged and photographed as a play, with a central set, brightly lit from overhead, where the action takes place while the surrounding scenery remains in various degrees of darkness. Basic filmic sense is absent as well: most shots are held too long, with little sense for when to cut in. The slow, deliberate pace is not rewarded with the pleasures of style and atmosphere, nor complexity of theme, character, and story. The film drags on with no sense of appropriate pace. So slow is its narrative that what I thought to be the main plot was actually the prologue, which inexplicably occupies nearly half the run time. The film lifts a bit at the climax, but mostly I was glad to know it was nearly done.

[mfunk9786]

Netflix has announced that all of its films releasing this fall will get some kind of theatrical release:

The Laundromat
Theatrical: 9/27
Netflix: 10/18

Dolemite Is My Name
Theatrical: 10/4
Netflix: 10/25

The King
Theatrical: 10/11
Netflix: 11/1

The Irishman
Theatrical: 11/1
Netflix: 11/27

Earthquake Bird
Theatrical: 11/1
Netflix: 11/15

Marriage Story
Theatrical: 11/6
Netflix: 12/6

Klaus
Theatrical: 11/8
Netflix: 11/15

I Lost My Body
Theatrical: 11/15
Netflix: 11/29

Atlantics
Theatrical: 11/15
Netflix: 11/29

The Two Popes
Theatrical: 11/27
Netflix: 12/20