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Cinema Briefing
Movie reviews by
Ian Flanagan
Ian Flanagan
 2 ½ (out of 4)
Without getting too white about it, I’ll simply say The Color Purple as musical (and directed by an African-American) doesn’t have much on a Jewish guy working out the same affair. I don’t know whether author Alice Walker signed off on the turnaround of her Pulitzer Prize winning 1982 novel, but she’s most definitely cool with this new one, which takes the tale’s persistent anguish and attempts to fashion some kind of holiday escape from the extroversion of the story-to-song translation. Personally, despite finding the well-cut trailers absurdly moving, the troubling sum of this film, while forcefully acted and home to some fantastic theater talent, is underwhelming in pathos — I’m sorry but if your adapted musical can’t even top the singular performance (the wonderful juke joint sequence) of the original movie, then why bother? When 2023’s Color Purple feels hymn-like or dreamlike, there’s a real, rapturous pulse beneath the direction of Blitz Bazawule in his second outing — but for the regular drama, or even just numbers requiring no dancing, no extravagance, this movie has jack shit on Steven Spielberg’s sense of gravity, composition and fitting the epic, despondent aspects of the novel to appropriately grand cinematic sweep. For sure, Colman Domingo is so good as Mister and looking uncannily similar to a young Danny Glover that he manages to top the 1985 turn. Corey Hawkins continues an auspicious career as a perfect Harpo and Taraji P. Henson is also pretty much the perfect choice for Shug Avery. Still in spite of very commendable work from Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks living and breathing Celie and Sophia respectively (they both, unsurprisingly, are the Broadway carryovers), there’s just so much emotional heavy lifting originally achieved through Whoopi Goldberg’s demeanor and Oprah Winfrey’s vigor. When you get to that dinner revelation and the long lost letters in Spielberg’s take, it feels so dearly earned, and here it’s “oh, already?” — turns out for as much as Steven was accused of softening the edges of Walker’s certainly more mature source material, this Color is pure plush with little tassels on the end, and so it turns out without illustrating the story’s pain properly, the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t so bright, and the tears don’t flow so easily, or at all. You can’t cheat your way around this particular narrative’s deliberate oscillation between agony and exultation. Cutting out that Christmas visit is strange — what, too dark for the same day you ask your loyal audience to show up? It's especially weird considering the tales allows for making white people look even worse than you are but seriously, why does this feel just shy of “why don’t we turn 12 Years a Slave into a musical?” I’m curious, but mostly doubtful about whether the NAACP will have any words about this particular Color Purple — I guess the racist white lady, the one omitted here, wasn’t enough to offset the fact that there’s nothing inherently sinister about showing black on black violence onscreen, especially when its inextricably ingrained in the story. And considering all the “positive” characters like Harpo and Buster and Shug’s husband, most of the “reinforcement of negative stereotypes” boils down to the literal villain: an evil step-dad plus the dad of the evil step-dad — what gives, or gave, almost 40 years ago? Spielberg’s Purple is not faultless but something wholly heartrending. Honestly, how is our juke joint moment here just lifeless outside of the big show? Maybe you shouldn’t be burying character and nuance when you could be fleshing out the novel’s illustration of the indispensable issues facing black women and the prejudices they encounter — I figured the bluesy song-and-dance could only extrapolate and empower the dramatic blueprint rather than hamper and reduce the narrative even further. Worst of all, not only is Barrino no match for Goldberg’s acts of uncontrollable meekness (Whoopi has an awkward cameo as midwife to her own former character’s birth), the soft-spoken Celie isn’t even revealed to us through narration, as would make sense given the epistolary nature of the story and the significance of the fractured correspondence between Netty and the Lord above — the songs should truly make sense her host of hardships, yet Celie is one of this adaptation's least considered characters. Then there’s the stage-to-screen stuff, apparently 13 songs were cut — killing our darlings are we? And this selection was the best? Of course there are the two original songs pining for an Oscar (indistinguishable to me, doesn’t really matter) but SORRY, Barbie’s got that wrapped up tight. This so-called Bold New Take is certainly new, but it’s dearly lacking sonic resonance, strong sentiment or any kind of spectacle, silly as that sounds — given how naturally Bazawule made something phantasmal from scratch in The Burial of Kojo, it's a shame his essential, spiritual immediacy has been shrunken and scattered. There’s one set most of the movie, so where’s another 90 million dollars of Warner Brothers' money going? It’s so funny that the studio was asking for some real names like Beyoncé and Rihanna to join the cast as the budget grew, and the best they got was H.E.R., no disrespect — no amount of celebrity power could replicate the 1985 version’s cathartic breadth and bitter grace.  3 (out of 4)
It’s rare that I review a debut unless it’s from some overzealous Hollywood actor or proven writer — having seen nothing Mr. Cord Jefferson has charged (namely The Good Place and Watchmen, sorry my TV interests practically don’t exist), nonetheless the winner of the People’s Choice Award at TIFF is no small thing in any year, and this time it bested The Holdovers and The Boy and the Heron. Should be damn good right? Regardless of festival fanaticism, American Fiction would’ve had me curious from its tempestuous high concept alone: an African American professor and novelist dumbing his efforts down to meet the pandering place where authorship, audiences and pompous middlemen publishers all compromise some intellectual equilibrium — if somehow Cord had come away with a less scrupulously conceived screenplay and screen-display (based on Percival Everett’s even more impressively culturally reflective 2001 novel Erasure, though I’m not reading modern stuff if anything either, sorry my narrow mind measures movies mainly), he could have possibly been accused of the same shady solicitousness the film goes to great lengths to satirize in order to stir up conversation. It may be the approachable version of both Spike Lee's brilliantly brazen, incisive, hysterical minstrel-disassemble Bamboozled as well as Ava DuVernay's anti-cinematic lecture come to life Origin. While this hit the People’s Choice Award requisites for the mixture of mischievous, politically provocative positing and feel-good, pathos-padded mainstream-primed fare, this kind of complete left-and-right-brain package doesn’t ask you to make personal or political compromises in order to enjoy, gradually outpaces your expectations just as you think you have the story’s angles all figured out. This meta-comedy-drama could have stripped a layer of self-awareness and maybe been better for it, but there’s no room to complain when American Fiction candidly invests in potentially trite but practically touching family dynamics with recognizable, relatable, flesh and blood figures within and without the family unit. Exceptionally vivid dialogue and an oscillation between bitter bite and quiet contemplation are met by every performer, particularly Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae and of course Jeffrey Wright, who after so long on the outskirts of many features finally feels at home in the spotlight. Sure, in classic left-wing demoralizing fashion, the white characters are drawn broad, senseless and stupendously out of touch — if its targets of clever dissection didn’t also include hypocrite liberals just like the last great satire of its kind Get Out, there would be a chink in Cord’s impenetrable armor. AS A WHITE MAN, I could laugh at all the jokes because I’M sooooo progressive, not mind-poisoned like closet racists or open ones. But even the cutesiest meta elements are well-realized, from his own Phucking Pafology come to life born from a fed-up imagination to a denouement seemingly inspired from Clue’s pick-your-own-ending freedom. There’s little cinematic craft outside of letting a fantastic, multifaceted screenplay sing for a very full less than two hours, and that’s more than alright with me. “It’s not supposed to be subtle” or whatever 'Monk' about his fake "urban" book, and the film itself has built-in excuses for its more mass-appealed race-baiting — the so-called skewering of Hollywood brown-nosing is more prevalent than its commentary on modern literature, and moreover the cultural frustrations expressed here are raw, real, and just the movie we need right now hehehahahoho. But seriously, this isn’t like Black Panther where the praise from white audiences is a foregone conclusion, a prerequisite out of fear of criticism reversed back — American Fiction is actually punchy and pure enough for universal cinema regardless of the specificity of its dissonant zeitgeist. The film pretends to be cuddly as a cactus, but it’s got a soft, chewy center outside of a provocative, pointed shell. Say what you will about its many-folded stances on the direction and authenticity of black art, this screenplay was the definition of tact, particularly in its standout conversational climax. American Fiction is a cunning movie that also feels like it could be something more, still the preference for emotional clarity and a familial reality (as opposed to occasionally plucking for lower hanging fruit of cheap racial shots) and speckled, tactile commentary make for a killer cine-cocktail.  2 ½ (out of 4)
Apologies aquapals but I don’t see how propping up Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires as some indispensable influence somehow makes your sloppy sequel redeemable, as if citing more creditable camp were a get-out-of-criticism-free card — when you’re promised that the follow-up to 2018’s Aquaman will be “even goofier,” you just get me too excited for something as uniquely dumb and casual as The Lost Kingdom. Not that I wouldn’t take James Wan’s horror-informed, Snyder-ascending sense of kinetic, shiny cinematic turbulence over just about any of the other more forgettable, flash in the pan, undercooked and under-thought DCEU fare that has led to this shameful, pathetic whimper of a finale, if you can even call it that. So yes, the second Aquaman is probably a hair or so better than Shazam: Fury of the Gods (remove a mugging Zack Levi and the skittles and there’s an OK movie), The Flash (something was clicking in the double trouble Ezra show, and similar buddy comedy crap happens here), and definitely superior to Blue Beetle, Black Adam, Wonder Woman 1984, even Birds of Prey and yes, most assuredly Zack Snyder’s untenable Cut of Justice League. Wan did just about as good a job as James Gunn (now the new messiah/Feige of whatever clean slate casts off with Superman’s latest legacy in 2025) did for The Suicide Squad, which was almost worthy of its own Deadpool-ripped Reddit-reeking irony and of course a marginal improvement over 2016's original abortion. I really don’t want to even comment on the artistic merit of BvS, I’ve tried to see why the cult is so fervent by way of the extended version but Snyderbros are their own special breed of stubborn, funny enough the frankensteined Joss Whedon version of Justice is somehow more approachable detritus. Man of Steel is arguably not bad in sum even if it gets bad, leaving only Wonder Woman, Shazam! and, of course, the highest grossing DCEU film with over with over 1 billy, 2018’s Aquaman, as the only installments in a 16-part series I could, with a straight face, say were pretty good, and even these finer cuts have their chewy bits. But personally the undersea undertaking is most forgivable… I never expected anything show-stopping, momentous or in any way climactic — it’s crazy just how standalone the EU entries became, as the original Aquaman was already rather untethered and still made references to Justice League. MCU’s one-offs literally require some moment of context within the brand, some stupid reference to the shared universe, and I used to think ignoring this in-film-shilling made DC stronger, and specifically the separated installments like Joker spoke to this potentiality — The Batman would be another more mature, quality exception if it weren’t the longest, lamest mystery movie ever to wear the mask of a detective caped crusader movie. After all these years of enjoying DC as the foil, the wild card, the crazy cousin to Marvel’s mightier cultural powers, I've finally witnessed the scope of Warner Brother’s failure, and not just because The Lost Kingdom punctuates a decade of filmmaking with Patrick Wilson snacking on a roach burger. Unfortunately, the incessant inanities save this one from total oblivion, as does some action showmanship, sincerely employed fantasy elements (like giant man-eating grasshoppers or an assistant cephalopod named Topo) as well as Wilson in probably his sixth collaboration with Wan — in addition to inciting the Saw franchise with Leigh Whannell and executive producing many sequels, he created the first two installments of both the Insidious and Conjuring series. There’s some overlap and regular enough acclaim for his horror movies that at least halfway earns the cult, Conjuring with its acting and period elements, and Insidious with a balance of the usual ghost-hunting with domestic disturbances and ethereal astral planes, so all I can say is the man knew how to either actually improve upon a sequel as with The Conjuring 2’s mastery of expectations or how to make the most of the inevitable with a less fondly remembered and yet different enough Insidious: Chapter 2. Point is whether you have him belting Elvis tunes to comfort scared kids, or antithetically playing subject to some Jack Torrence-level episode of supernatural takeover, Wilson is clearly the guy holding together Wan’s sequels, and The Lost Kingdom makes three for three. Wilson excels as straight man and fish out of water (“fucking surface-dwellers…”) whereas Jason Mamoa is too crass and quippy here as opposed to how roguish and intimidating he could be in the last, and it all evens out to some decent Abbott and Costello buffoonery between. The first act of this film is so rough at recapping events, establishing new threats and moving from very broad pee-in-the-face comedy to some sort of thematic mixer of tepid commentary on fatherhood and brotherhood (yuck!) to the whole Day After Tomorrow angle (wherein they’re scuba diving in minus 50 degree water) not so subliminally screaming some eco-exhale while functioning no less grotesquely as a dullard’s disaster movie on top of it all. The Lost Kingdom only made me smile during the Wilson-Mamoa team-up, and the rest of the movie’s madness is measured by greenhouse gases, cursed tridents and blood oaths rather rapidly coasting by in a colorful, damp fever dream. Unlike, say J-Law basically mercy killing herself in Dark Phoenix just to get out, Amber Heard, despite whatever heavily publicized off-camera complications, was not too absent from this movie and actually tried her best whatever that amounts to, and Nicole Kidman certainly shows up too. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II was trying hard last time, and while I wish a villain elevated to primary bad guy from a previously secondary role (a rarity, can you name anything closer than Spider-Man 3?) made for a better role, he was serviceable even if mystical brainwashing doesn’t trump proper character motivations. This movie misses a touch of Willem Dafoe complete with tight hair bun but elsewhere a bolstered role for Randall Park thankfully doesn’t obviously pigeonhole him for comic relief as thoroughly as Ant-Man and the Wasp does. Speaking of Marvel, the plot of Lost Kingdom pretty much copy-pastes huge portions of Thor: The Dark World, it’s own decade-removed, mixed-reviewed sequel perfect for memory-holing. I have a soft spot still, carried over from my much fuller, more genuine appreciation for the first Aquaman — when this movie chases down the follies of cheesy, eager adventure movies that made 2018 float on, there’s enough corny, crumby fun (almost forgot that subsurface speakeasy with Martin Short) to call The Lost Kingdom a half-decent holiday flick, if you can stand the whiplash of an event feature that clearly went through the ringer in audience testing, only to be generally derided all the same.  2 ½ (out of 4)
Oh geez Bradley I hope they can forgive you for this one! Listen, I don’t care for Cooper’s rock star regress in his own A Star Is Born, the man's acting has never really done it for me outside of Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza, The Place Beyond the Pines, Rocket Raccoon and maybe the David O. Russell collaborations, oh wait that’s not a bad profile, never mind. But for a movie about Leonard Bernstein, this might as well have been called CAREY MULLIGAN: The Movie, because you remove her, and there’s no calculated Oscar contender/pretender to speak of. “You don’t even know how much you need me, do you?” Carey utter as Felicia Montealegre… Cooper has admitted an awareness to just get out of his co-star’s way, be it Lady Gaga or now Mulligan who singlehandedly holds this film together and, my word, she’s not even turning in her best work (Promising Young Woman? Wildlife? The Great Gatsby? An Education? Take your pick). She’s a heaven-sent miracle worker — "What have we got, cancer melodrama? No sweat." Regardless of reading across from Mulligan, Bradley had an uphill battle. Despite the assistance of controversially exaggerated prosthetic excellence (it wouldn’t be called antisemitic if that schnozz was a little more accurate), Cooper’s efforts add up to more than shy of a buck given a subject so many-splendored in his cultural significance. Cooper strives and struggles to marry his considerable abilities with a figure with whom he already bears a likeness but the mumbling, nasally 40s-diction is more distracting than protruding sniffers, bigger ears, bushier brows and a pronounced chin. Watching someone imitate an icon is one thing but self-direction to top it off is another level of butt-scratching high-risk low-reward tomfoolery that I can’t get behind — there’s this crazy secondhand self-awareness, this heightened hellishness to it all. I’ll be damned if I can name one single other self-directed biographical movie, unless Citizen Kane's allusions to William Randolph Hearst count. His ego feels fairly removed, more than I believe haters think (there's less self-consciousness than A Star Is Born), but man, when Cooper’s doing his sweatiest, most vein-throbbing baton-waving, he’s losing just about everybody divorced from some orchestra nerd pointing out a missed beat — you practiced years for these few minutes and this is it? As Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman (for Marathon Man), “My dear boy why don’t you just try acting?” But let’s just consider the facts, see if I have any questions: everyone hates this movie, especially those who haven’t seen it — for film twitter or zoomers this is Oscar bait in its purist distilled form, a vacuum for all things true concerning people let alone movies. With backing by both Spielberg AND Scorsese plus Netflix distribution, this is a real enough movie, one Steven even cued up for Bradley after an early screening of A Star Is Born (all told at least a decent update on the ’76 version, the trash one with Streisand and and Kristofferson). As much as I want to go to bat for Bradley, it’s hard to act as if Maestro is actually a home run or some misunderstood movie — we’re dealing with very textbook filmcraft. At its best it’s really evoking the desired style — the blockier B&W is a fairly brilliant simulation of the past, and even in modern color the distinguished makeup work still hold things up, not to mention the way the film mostly, wisely incorporates the prolific composer’s many compositions into the fray. It’s only cloying or deadening when they need to throw his influence right in your face, like that terrible not-quite-dream-scenario-homage to On the Town. The film has subtler ways to make note of Bernstein’s musical breadth without stooping to silly, showy theatrics contradicting the more insular, tasteful, patient moments in earlier life (aside from a few contemporary, far too fluid match cuts that could never pan out back in the day). Largely Cooper manages to extract some intimacy from a grandiose, drug ’n’ desire fueled life, so much so I can applaud the movie for getting deep into his pivotal, strained marriage considering all the extra-marital and extra-sexual affairs. But like, say, Mank, this is a film with fine dialogue, fairly faultless direction and by all accounts winning, well-worn acting that nonetheless feels like it needs to explore everything BUT the inner soul, like respectively what screenwriting or the composition process means in cinematic terms, what it feels like when “summer sings in you.” Cooper ain’t no Fincher for that matter. Not only can I accept more of this historical timeline ping-ponging — both Oppenheimer and Maestro use of color and lack thereof for future or past — but Nolan’s latest film was actually meant to “provoke questions” (as Maestro’s opening quotation from Bernstein indicates you were after) whereas Maestro is basically there to answer them, if well-dressed wiki-summary simplicity and bio bullet points is good for you. I’ve had it with the “new, unconventional” biopic ending up just as more of the same — for as much as Andrew Dominik’s Blonde leaves plenty to be desired (and is barely a biopic), that strange, sullen, schizophrenic style would’ve suited Maestro’s ode to a noteworthy jack of all trades. Cooper wants to be both reverent and critical but Maestro isn’t much of either — it gets very close to covering the “grand inner life“ that Bernstein had but the script can’t stop recounting his deeds and bringing up that crucial fill-in conducting job when he was 25. Still the screenplay is a palatable, pretentious portrait of the artist as a sorta gay man and at least the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue makes it more genuine for me, shedding stagey pomp and circumstance for more believable back and forth. My contrarian ass desperately would like to rally behind an unfairly maligned movie relatively full of graces, good performances and handsome technical attributes but Jesus, all the careful consideration in the world can’t remedy a life-snapshot that is inevitably forced, a little full of itself and somehow soundly un-cinematic. Once time takes Mulligan out of frame, there’s nothing left but that REM reference and continuing to watch Bernstein fuck around with his students. WHAT A LEGEND!  3 (out of 4)
WHO saw this one coming?? Seriously I want to know! How rare it is when a movie that not only sounded like a bad idea in conception alone but also looked fairly revolting from the previews somehow overcomes just about every limitation and apprehension. It's hard to believe Warner Brothers' Willy Wonka origin story is a children's musical light-years lovelier than Disney’s centennial piece Wish (maybe their worst Theatrical Animated Feature, like, ever) and a better squeeze of intellectual property than what anyone would’ve imagined the more soulful franchising, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which lamentably does a good deal less to honor its celebrated progenitor. This severely this kicked the crap out of Tim Burton’s edgier yet more ‘faithful’ redo of Willy from 2005, the only comparison is swapping daddy issues for sweeter Momma’s boy weak spots. Sure Christopher Lee can do plenty with nothing but Sally Hawkins elevated Paddington (not to mention anything else she’s touched) and serves as a nice secret weapon here. I'm shocked how darn cute Wonka was, how delightful, if somewhat forgettable, the tunes (SCRUB scrub), how delicately fanciful Timothée Chalamet’s turn is, and most unfathomable of all: that miraculously Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa (just after a villainous turn in Paddington 2) didn’t Achilles heel the whole project, especially after painfully punctuating each trailer. But there you have it — I initially couldn't help but feel some certainty that director Paul King, relatively early into his career, was coerced by fat Hollywood checks to sell out, not unlike what Disney’s forced many MCU stooges to do — but no, the critical kindness (not to mention the fat box office haul) was actually earned because the man in charge is a great tactician of valuable children’s entertainment, finding himself ascending nearer to a correspondingly cinematic place akin to Roald Dahl as one of the key voices of youngster lit. Paddington is wonderful, 2 almost nearly as excessively charming, I don’t need to cite the sequel’s recent reign as the best-reviewed movie on Rotten Tomatoes to recall. Even his modest debut Bunny and the Bull makes something out of nothing through a rambunctious road trip format, showing his knack for the artifice of DIY VFX quite early. Since Bunny, King's immediate capacity for more "grown-up" humor has been filtered through a PG lens (siphoning none of the cleverness thank God) much like Lord and Miller bouncing between fashioning the hard-R hilarity of the Jump Street movies and the fetching, funny, tot-targeted flicks Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie. All the precise whimsy, dynamic enough musical numbers free with insistent melodies and amusing lyrics, even the little self-aware nods felt like reasonable evidence of a kid's movie that quickly, skillfully becomes an all-ages affair with equal measure in store for any lifespan. Wonka’s defiant, unfazed innocence, met with Timothée’s own winning efforts and face fit for all forms of cheek-pulling, sells the surface of holiday family fare that speaks directly to the light fantasy elements of the original film, that 1970s fluke still FAR and above this movie’s blindsiding quality. It’s not the emo, quasi-English garbage of Burton’s sights despite the London setting (though the odd steampunk magician mechanics have their place) nor does King feel the need to overload on nostalgic plucks and pokes at your memory. Other than Oompa Loompa refrains and “Pure Imagination” with inspired new verses, every song is original and pleasing, advancing story, comedy and fun, rarely reading as false, forced, too soon or too late. Other than some incredibly fine print, laundry stew, consumer-grade levitation and the occasional symphonic motif of an older musical theme — none of which it bothersome mind you — Wonka is like a vacation, “a holiday in your head” next to Disney's despicable, disgraceful pandering toward rabid Star Wars and Marvel devotees. Young Calah Lane as Noodle is winsome indeed as the major player next to Timmy, each of our trio of villains (Mathew Baynton, Matt Lucas and Paterson Joseph) is more deliciously diabolical than the next, hell the whole supporting cast, including Keegan-Michael Key’s police chief, Olivia Colman's even more evil Mrs. Scrubitt and her many prisoners, is nestled firmly in the enchantment. King even makes room for a regular, the titular Bunny from Bunny and the Bull Simon Farnaby — the hyper-sexual funny man is yet again a security guard like the Paddington movies, and he’s the face, or rather the silhouette, of one of this movie’s best gags. Sure there’s the occasional dud in the joke department but mostly Wonka’s confections courtesy of King are an unqualified treat, with visual effects only slightly overused but largely appropriately practical. The movie's darkness is mild as far as the delightfully knowing, mature-for-kids sense of the original goes (I could've done with even more underground chocolate mafia moments), and thankfully this Willy is not some stunted weirdo à la Johnny Depp’s shameful iteration, but a kid for life in the most exuberant, mischievous sense — the slight distinctions matter here, like worrying about undoing the mystery of the character to begin with, though the impish character retains a beaming ambiguity, more than the backstory bullshitting of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Shaping a dreamer rather than some creep with an affect does this movie wonders. If it’s reminding me of fellow Brit Joe Cornish’s exceptional young people’s feature films (Attack the Block, The Kid Who Would Be King) and evoking the spirit of Chocolat, that also doesn’t hurt. New kids classic? Maybe not. Biggest surprise of the year? I think so. What I’ve really learned other than sharing good things with friends is MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE THING ITSELF is this — don’t judge a movie on its trailer or theoretical desperation. For Dahl media, I couldn't dream of this rubbing up next to Nicholas Roeg’s heartily homespun, brutally British The Witches, Henry Selick’s stop-motion staple James and the Giant Peach, Danny Devito’s marvelous, masterful Matilda and Wes Anderson’s slightly too Andersonian Fantastic Mr. Fox (not to mention his now Oscar-winning adaptation of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar). If this recent Roald revival is worth anything, it's that this truly titillating, disaster-deviating prequel sits comfortably above less chancy modern adaptations (that should've sucked), particularly Robert Zemeckis’ inoffensive, CG-slathered Witches and the better-than-expected Matilda the Musical, a fine Broadway companion piece to the ‘95 gold standard. Then, after all that unspoiled goodwill, I wouldn’t mind SEQUELS to fucking WONKA? See, the imagination isn’t exactly 100% pure but it sure it scrumdiddly-oh scratch that.  3 ½ (out of 4)
It only took me until now to realize Todd Haynes hasn’t whiffed once or ever really come close, which ain’t easy for as many substantial risks in feeling and narrative the man is willing to take on the average project. Maybe Carol was secured by the wave of LGBTQ arthouse features of yesterdecade, but even that film, a splendid adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, is just a morsel of his tidy, intimate works of rascally transgression. His whole career is a wicked ride — Poison’s surqueerlism, Safe’s hypnotic hypochondriac disassembly (and first of many fruitful collaborations with Julianne Moore), the Bowie/Wilde/glam-rock zeitgeist kaleidoscope of Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven’s masterful modern Sirk-spin, I’m Not There’s profusely poetic rewrite on the rules of musical biopics (good luck with A Complete Unknown James Mangold), then after awhile Carol’s return to elegant, sumptuous melodrama was his last masterwork. More recently his ode to museums and silent films in the dual-deaf-child-odyssey Wonderstruck, the uncharacteristic legal thriller Dark Waters and the all too frontLOADED Velvet Underground documentary (the harshest way to say I wish the counter-counterculture essay was twice as long) seem to have found Haynes still prone to variety but with less to do with his place as one of Queer Cinema’s giants alongside Gus Van Sant. So yeah, when you lay it all out there, this quiet king’s latest film May December isn’t all that strange even for all its bizarre, cringe-inducing taboo-probing. Like many Haynes features it’s a dazzling dance of intimacy and showmanship, artifice and reality, though May December specifically proves to be gently haunting, imperceptibly, oddly moving and cruelly funny. It’s unclassifiably one-of-a-kind, not unlike a good deal of his filmography, particularly Poison and Goldmine, which simply couldn’t have been made by anyone else. There’s nothing hetero-divergent going on here, and while from afar this looks like a fresh finagling of the revivified melodramatics seen in Heaven and Carol, it’s really some giddily grotesque, almost subtly black-comic psychological thriller within an art-is-life-life-is-art satirical Hollywood exploitation piece exuding, for all its serenity, some seriously evil cosmic energy. But, like Sofia just did with Priscilla, the grooming is spelled out only from a removed distance, each film bathed in a trance-like haze, an unknowable kind of dark wish-fulfillment and moral trepidation. The grainy, soft-focused, beautifully blocked, warm and welcoming aura is obviously atoned with the stark-raving batshit-bonkers subject matter and the score’s Hitchcockian, almost ironically overzealous score, all the more eerie for how well it imitates the almost aggrandized, symphonic stylizing of long-past film orchestration. The cornucopia of cinematic meaning, extrapolated moment by moment, is unfathomable given the story’s sum — it seems like some disturbing exploitation/WTF cinema like Saltburn from afar, but even as May December sidesteps stupid, topical rich-rebuking, this movie has infinitely more to mull over inside the rigorously edited, gloriously acted fable on the ethics of teacher-student boundaries and real-life movie adaptations. Which brings me to my mildly sparring leads — my GOD, the fucking character dynamics move like lightning bolts, minute by minute you’re discovering things, shifting the sublime thematic detailing, your alignment of what the movie is and what you’re even watching adjusting scene after wonderfully executed scene. Moore is in her mode offering perhaps the best of at least five collaborations with Haynes — historically plenty of directors have had their reliable performing counterpart as creative pillar to lean on — John Waters and Divine, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich — and Moore is Hayne’s mercurial, matriarchal muse. In May December she’s just so hearth-like and homey in spite of the disarming lisp and, after everything, makes you feel this woman could break down someone also calculatedly polite as Natalie Portman’s quietly vainglorious starlet playing doting detective. Despite Portman’s better, more recent turns like Black Swan and Annihilation, she’ll be more remembered for earlier days like Leon the Professional and the Star Wars prequels… maybe that’s better than peaking with Closer when she’s showing her ass, or Garden State showing her innermost insufferable hipster, or V for Vendetta showing her bald head, all part of her ascension to bouncing between Terrence Malick and the MCU — this is one of her moments, a defining career culmination. So much of the movie’s sometimes spiked satire stems from Portman’s character nestling into a psyche she isn’t prepared for and all the simple, inherent insensitivity of her presence within a dynamic as delicate as a family founded on a grown woman and a teenage boy and the mindfuck of sending their set of offspring through graduation. Not to de-emphasize a diamond in the diamond rough, Charles Melton may not have the illustrious resume but he is still the remarkable highlight, offering an all too human performance in a sea of vanity and posturing. Despite the victory laps for his illustrious co-stars in an already exceptionally stupefying film, Melton gives the most vulnerable, incredible performance of a man backed up with short-circuited development and long-term denial. This movie could make you think of anything, like the searing absorption of the other à la Persona or even topics of shirt-tugging discomfort and testy social edginess via Licorice Pizza (STILL the genders reversed is TOO DAMN EDGY) or just the strands of distanced investigative dismay within Spotlight or Day for Night's dismantling of Hollywood's carefully curated reality and twenty other movies not too far off on the cinematic maps and charts. Yet it was so singular, and for such an original movie steeped in seamlessly woven, film-history film selections May December had flavors I could not have expected. Though the threat of adultery looms there’s not one part of this story I could’ve predicted and yet never does the film betray its noblest aims, particularly equalizing empathy even for our most despicable characters, be it the naive or the vain. Notes on a Scandal wishes it were this incisive or challenging, this warped, twisted melodrama — despite May December's beautiful, nearly unclassifiable ambiguity it remains a completely unsympathetic, unsentimental rendition of the same story (the case of Mary Kay Letourneau look it up!) told in hindsight through an enigmatic, erotically charged psychological minefield, every little bit bearing sharp, reflexive, existentialist truths, subconscious insanity and really invigorating showmanship. |
Forthcoming:
Thoughts on Snow White Black Bag Mickey 17 Captain America: Brave New World Flight Risk The Brutalist Nosferatu A Complete Unknown Sonic the Hedgehog 3 The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Wicked Gladiator II Emilia Pérez Here Anora Megalopolis The Substance Longlegs Hit Man Dune Part Two Poor Things ... Follow me on Twitter @ newwavebiscuit To keep it brief...
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October 2024
Kino
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