Substance abuse and mental illness are both sexy and dangerous...

…if you’re hot.

Smile 2 (2024, Parker Finn) is so innovative because it demolishes the line between whether it’s all in your head or not. This is a narrative where we follow a truly fucked up character into a moral abyss that she can’t help but react to through a never ending series of violent nervous breakdowns. And it’s the most fun I’ve had in a theater this year. 
     Ichi the Killer (2001, Takashi Miike) was the first movie in the crime genre where I thought yeah why have any good guys? Why have anyone whose anywhere even close to morally reasonable? How brilliant to have a crime movie where every single character has evil motives, is in some way insane or deviant, and all desperately and mutually contributing to the destruction of Shinjuku. I tend to like crime and horror movies when the protagonist is flawed and no hero comes along to save the day. When I wanna feel good I can always watch a musical, comedy, family, melodrama, historical epic or pretty much every other genre. (Except yeah I don’t know why I brought that up because while the overall effect is comparable, in Smile 2 her team and mom might not be all that bad I don’t know. And her best friend is clearly good. I am such a sucker for Dylan Gelula—she’s by far the coolest actress around lately.)
     Smile 2 sets up this dichotomy where the savagery of the attacks are either coming from an oppressive force that’s targeting you but no one else can see, or from voices inside your own head; and the best part is, what’s the difference? That’s the motor that keeps this particular model of psychological horror running. 
     On the technical side I gotta say I think that in the prologue and the flashback reveal particularly, when the camera pans an entire 180° that’s gotta be an aesthetic allusion to the arch of a smile. And same when the frame is upside down: by spinning along the z axis 180° to flip the image it’s a similar motif. And I do apologize yes I feel smug like I’m showing off because I noticed this. Also there’s a montage where she turns on all the lights and I wanna say it’s an homage to Army of Darkness (1992, Sam Raimi) Ash building his chainsawhand with same lens, speed, length and duration of zoom, except in this case zooms out instead of in.
     I love how in Smile 2 this protag, even though she has done some really awful things and is spiraling, the narrative never gives her a way out. Nor does it necessarily say she’s wrong for what she’s done or make her atone for any of her transgressions. It just shows everything crushing her under its force. I love a cautionary moral tale with no redemption. And I love this Paramount horror franchise.
 
10/19/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA

Hey you wanna see a couple as perfect as you are?

Have you ever encountered one of those people who say, “I love A24?” I suspect if you asked them what an A24 movie is they wouldn’t know. They’d probably say they’re weird, wtf, dark, slow burn, or elevated horror, I don’t know. Ari Aster belongs in the pantheon. Robert Eggers seems to have gained a following. So I guess if we’re talking stuff like Lamb (2021, Valdimar Jóhannsson) and Men (2022, Alex Garland) maybe there’s a distinctive art horror product they’ve amassed (even if they’re outliers are numerous). 
     But I really think the success of A24 is as a luxury brand based mostly on people seeing their trailers with the elaborately ornate company card being foremost and prominently the thing that sticks with audiences. The vibe. I just feel duped because like a sucker I went to go see a movie because I was A24 hyped.

We Live in Time (2024, John Crowley) feels as insufferably bland generic as a commercial for a luxury brand while coming across like a parody of a romantic drama. It’s smug and off-putting because it depicts and is aimed at people who are morally beyond reproach. How do you sell to people who want the perfect life? Target them with portrayals of perfect people so that they can identify with, and give you their money. 
     We Live in Time is also relentlessly obnoxious because it keeps shifting its timeline for no clear reason. And it’s not like I have a problem with jumping around temporally, because Challengers (2024, Luca Guadagnino) is the best movie this year and why does it constantly keep jumping through time? Because it’s a high energy 80s tennis movie and the chronology of its narrative goes back and forth between 2 different sides with the ferocity of a tennis ball serve. 
     And I’ve never seen a movie where someone has cancer and I actually give a shit. As far as tragic goes, it’s a bit low hanging fruit innit? But in this when Florence Pugh’s character has to go through chemo her hair looks like it was buzzed with clippers on like a #3 guard, we don’t even see her scalp. That doesn’t feel very cancery. 
     When you finally find out what the dramatic climax is of this thing it will be clear that in a contrived desperate reach for you to cry over the martyrdom of the bald saint Joan winning a cooking competition it should be tearfully anguished over how beautiful and perfect her life was. Again, seek this out if you want an example of a movie whose main characters are all good, and there are no villains, or flaws in this world they inhabit. I’m sure some people enjoy that kinda thing. 
 
10/19/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA

If the Hollywood epic hadn't forgotten how important it is for it to be frivolous and fun

Megalopolis (2024, Francis Ford Coppola) is alive with the joy of the craft that Hollywood hasn’t seen since before the collapse of the studio system. It’s got the sparkling effervescent fresh sharp propulsion of escapist delights that in contrast make me yawn collapsing out of fatigue over all the Marvel, DC, LOTR, Avatar, Nolan and Villeneuve over-serious, bloated, way too long modern tentpoles (with the exception of maybe James Gunn, Taika Waititi and Barbie). And the reason it rises to the forefront of the pack here is because it knows how important it is to harness a frivolous means of entertainment with an underlying framing structure of what being an American feels like.
     If you’re asking yourself why Megalopolis depicts NYC as a new Roman Empire, you’re asking the wrong questions. The point isn’t the why, it’s accepting that in movies this kind of imaginative premise can occur. And if it feels fun, why try to intellectualize a feeling? If you’ve left the movie wondering what Meglaon is, you’re asking the wrong questions. It’s a plot device. What do we know about it? It can be used as a material to design a dress that captures what it sees. It can infuse itself to create new living tissue to replace the broken leg of a small dog or half of Cesar Catalina’s face. So, it represents something like the progress people are capable of in advancing civilization through discoveries in the arts and sciences. 
     This is a personal film. And while its themes and questions are big, its story is simple. Its setting is confined to New Rome, and specifically the site of what’s to become Cesar’s new Megalopolis. Its characters are no more than the power elites embroiled in the struggle to adapt to where this leads. And what a beautiful narrative it is. Because amidst all that’s wrong with many of its characters, like the best of the classic Hollywood era, it has an uplifting ending. Megalopolis has got an old-fashioned sense of morality.
     Because after Nush Berman is out of the way, Mayor Cicero is free to come clean about what really happened with the case of Cesar’s wife; and it no longer matters why he was so opposed to Cesar marrying his daughter. Their child, along with Megalon, along with Cesar’s utopia are all in service of the theme of a hope for the future of our civilization. Is that a little much? Great. It should be. Because that’s the kind of clear-eyed sentimental product the dream factory used to churn out. And I miss it. And on top of all that, for go for broke Coppola to throw in all of his philosophical querying truly brings this thing into the modern age of cinema. And it doesn’t matter anymore about all of the corruption, scandal, and shame; because, redemption access is easily bestowed upon Cesar, Cicero, and Crassus so we can all live happily ever after. 
     As for the art direction, I’ve always been one to prefer stylized artifice over bland naturalism/realism. With its lush gold/red/black hued palette, and ceaselessly eye-popping indulgence in everything fake, there’s a feeling of being in a world that exists as an expression of all that the creative potential of cinema is capable of achieving. 
     Last year the second I walked out of Oppenheimer, the first thing I thought was that I knew Robert Downey Jr. would win the Oscar for best supporting actor. I know it won’t happen in a million years, but this time I think Shia LaBeouf deserves it.
 
10/05/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
10/12/2024 Tara Theatre
Atlanta, GA

Visuals are the language of emotions

The only thing I find more shamelessly gratifying to indulge my sight with than a gorgeous brunette Hollywood sexpot-star actress from the 80s is static framing. 

Visually, The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat) boasts a unified graphic adherence to bold, clean, meticulously art-directed powerful images that are as forebodingly sterile as a Kubrick bathroom. Why in the first scene does ELISABETH SPARKLE go into a bathroom that’s a replica of the Overlook bathroom? Who cares?

     The Substance is a work of style. Art is style. And art works best when neither its maker nor its viewer attempt to process it through their intellect. On a superficial level, The Substance continuously kept me in awe of all its locked-off static frames, poised staging of long takes, symmetry, single-point perspective, center-framed inserts and hideously ravishing still lifes. And its setting is pretty much confined to Elisabeth Sparkle’s condo, which heightens a sense of her emotional isolation in life. I can’t get enough of that white-tiled bathroom or the dark purgatory room she builds inside it—very much expressionistic of her own psyche. And if that’s the case, her view of L.A. outside that giant window with the billboard of her is everything fake, her imagination, the uh stuff that dreams are made of. 

     But of course there are several aggressively jolting quick cut, montage chop, impressionistically Mickey Mousing cued music video style sequences interspersed throughout. I hate to make comparisons, but I’ll limit myself to this exception: there’s a lot of Jonas Åkerlund feel to all of this. And I love it. It all leads to this notion I’ve always had of movies not being real life. Like the exercise show hosted by SUE, if she’s wearing the same oufit, doing the same moves, to the same song, why film new episodes every week? When a movie can become something that doesn’t let itself be hampered by the logic of real life is when art flourishes. 

 

Thematically, what is The Substance about? I don’t know. I’m not gonna throw around any lazy worthless terms like male gaze, or standards of beauty. Those aren’t themes. They’re pseudo academic critic garbage. This movie used a language of emotions to get me to feel an empathy conveyed without changing the way I think; even better, it changed the way I feel. (And that is real life.)

     There’s nothing new about the themes in this movie. But it still utilizes them in the process of forming something fresh. And like Gremlins (1984, Joe Dante), it knows the audience loves a set of rules at the beginning, especially because they know by the end they’ll all be broken, and we’ll all be confronted with our worst fears. Because what more is a morality tale than that?

 

09/21/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14

Atlanta, GA

The Counselor plot analysis

Trying to figure out what happens to the shipment of drugs in The Counselor (2013, Ridley Scott) has become a bit of an obsession for me. The biggest questions are how early did MALKINA (Cameron Diaz) get involved in manipulating the outcome of the cargo and how exactly does it benefit her? 
     For a maguffin it seems easy enough to follow. A couple of beaners in Juárez drive the truck across the border. They park it at a septic plant, then remove a small electronic device that they give to a man in a green baseball cap who pays one of the men for it. At a roadside cafe, Green Ballcap hands the device to the GREEN HORNET (Richard Cabral), which is all observed from a distance by JAMIE (Sam Spruell) and a lipreader. In the first of several beheadings in The Counselor, Jamie lops off the Green Hornet’s head. Afterwards, Jamie has a phonecall with Malkina letting her know he got it (the device).
     Once Jamie and SECOND MAN (Richard Brake) retrieve the truck containing the drugs, they’re hijacked and murdered by cartel. So, the 625 kilos ends its journey in Chicago. And that’s pretty much it. So why ask oneself about it any further? When Malkina is on the phone with another voice (this time we never hear), she says she always knew where the truck was going. We also know that she has all of REINER’S (Javier Bardem) rooms and phones tapped and listens in on all of his conversations. 
 
So what do you think? If the cocaine has a street value of $20 million, then why would Malkina implicate the COUNSELOR (Michael Fassbender) and Reiner in a conspiracy that results in the cartel eliminating them before they can flip it? And if it’s a finder’s fee she’s collecting from the cartel, wouldn’t they be highly unlikely to trust her, especially considering the whole motif of “they don’t believe in coincidences?” I mean the easy answer points to the cartel had a homing device that led them to the truck. 
     Upon the film’s conclusion, Malkina has WESTRAY (Brad Pitt) assassinated (you guessed it, by beheading) and hacks into his bank accounts, but if this was her motive the entire time, then was the whole conspiracy/hijacking even necessary? It doesn’t seem like too big of a coincidence that Malkina had forethought stealing the drug shipment before finding out that the Counselor had RUTH (Rosie Perez) as a client, and afterwards hedged her bets then wisely walks away. (Yet Malkina's line “I’m still in” being read as her profiting from the delivery is very difficult to comprehend unless she's talking about going after Westray as an idea she came up with after the jackpot she got into.)

     And this all seems to fit in with Cormac McCarthy’s morality theme of the weak falling prey to the strong. It’s the arc of the movie: the Counselor travels to Juárez to discover for himself that death has no meaning, then live the remainder of his life without LAURA (Penélope Cruz); and the real tragedy that after her death, he has no meaning. Another thing I just noticed for the first time is as Laura's headless corpse is dumped into the landfill there's a black trash bag that tumbles after it that is roughly the size of a human head. Not only is The Counselor so fun because of its confusing plot, but also because of how foreshadowcore it is. Upon rewatch there is so much dialogue that not only predicts, but metaphysically ponders connected respective plot points. The one I get such a big kick out of is when Westray talks about “…what happens when the surety becomes the more attractive holding?” sums it all up. But when the Counselor gives his lady the engagement ring and he says he’ll love her till the day he dies, to which she replies “me first,” that’s one morbid perversely prescient joke.

Nature's Friend Part Two One Plastic Soldier

It was hot. We were in Lone Pine, fresh off a few days camping and hiking up Mt. Langley, and it was hot. We'd done a favor for some folks we met on the trail, driving them from a trailhead to their car to save them a couple days of hiking they had decided or maybe realized they weren't up for, and we'd taken ourselves out for the traditional massive meal cooked by somebody who wasn't us, competently accessorized by a beverage buffet. As we prepared to make our ways back to the Ford Focus, I craftily noted that my plan was to take the ice cubes with me, and put them in my beloved Nalgene, even then heating in the car, probably to near boiling.

"You know Nalgenes kind of suck, right?" asked Noodles. Aghast, I protested: "T-that bottle is my friend. It's been so many places with me! It's served me well, it's never let me down!"

She wasn't convinced. Anyway, that's a story about one Nalgene, one that's been up Langley, up much of Whitney, through Desolation Wilderness, and other places my lapsed indoor kid ass has dragged it. Here is another story. And here is a third:

For many years, I've had a 32-ounce Nalgene in the work fridge, so I can have a nice cold glass of fridge water any time I want. Since I like my water cold, it's not uncommon for me to fill up the bottle and throw it in the freezer, so as to get it colder faster. (Feel free to adopt this trick for your own life.) Since I am forgetful, I have long had a post-it note on my work desk, reading "You have a Nalgene in the freezer."

I recently got a new desk at work. I swept off all the things on the surface of the old one and forgot about them. I forgot, I guess, about a lot of things.

The other day, I got to work, in the mood for some fridge water. I opened the fridge, and saw no bottle. "Odd," I thought. Then I opened the freezer. "Shit," I thought.

(Look what they—well, I—did to my toy.)

This is far from the first time I'd frozen this bottle, but it will be the last. I'm fairly unhappy to lose the stickers: Tabs, The Best Show, etc. I'm annoyed that I fucked up: I used to take a lot of pride in my memory, and as that capacity degrades with age, the space freed up by less pride and less capacity is more than overflowing with new shame. In this case, shame about breaking a useful tool that I had enjoyed and employed for a long time. Farewell, blue Nalgene. The world shall look on your like again.

(Poor fuckin' guy.)

(Our sick culture insists that the greatest grief be reserved for the military, no matter how many ways there are to serve, so I must borrow these pretty sentiments for a bottle that served and served, but was never a soldier.)

Metaphysical melodrama of mass construction

I love Inside Out 2 (2024, Kelsey Mann) because it’s like Joel Silver’s wham-o meter, except instead of adrenaline action thrills every 10 minutes, it makes me cry every 10 minutes. It operates most effectively as a melodrama. And it rescues that genre from the ranks of lurid trashy fodder into a prestige picture through its metaphysical, psychological, hyperspeed narrative that never sacrifices the craft of remembering to focus on the entertainment as it weaves its narrative.
     It’s also rad as a coming of age story. And its fresh take there is RILEY going through puberty avoids her facing the romantic or lustful depictions we would normally see. And something else I enjoyed this time around is mapping the interrelation between any of the various emotions.

06/16/2024 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
DCP

Finally a movie that shows how great drugs are

Okay but to be fair, Back to Black (2024, Sam Taylor-Johnson) also shows how great having a serious drinking problem, bulimia, and being in a toxic co-dependent relationship are as well. If, like me, you were going in expecting a tragedy, you’ll get one; but it’s not one that has anything to do with the setbacks its protagonist faces.

     The morally sick feeling I got watching Back to Black comes primarily from the way it has assembled its narrative to glamorize all of the self-destructive plot points in the main character’s life without any consequences; and does so in a way as to romanticize them as a means to giving us a fairytale melodrama. While I was playing along with all of this I even imagined this careless, uneven, full of plot-holes manner of storytelling to be in the style of someone who was so messed up themselves that their impaired judgment is to blame. So, reading it that way it works. Secondary to my take on the tragedy is that whoever is responsible for approval of the rights to Amy Winehouse’s life story signed off on it. That’s what’s sad to me. All of these despicable low-lifes cashing in on this is the real tragedy.

     The flaws mostly have to do with structure. There are a couple of separate cases she says she’s pregnant and then it's never brought up again. And there’s a point where she decides to go to rehab, then we see her winning Grammys for that song with the lyrics she wouldn’t go to rehab? And I don’t want to spoil the ending but it definitely feels either forced or fake in the way she gets clean and therefore happily ever after. 

     None of this is to say I didn’t love this movie—I very much do. I had only seen Marisa Abela in that series about financial institutions set in Britain that I never at all could follow, but then the only reason I watched that show was because of Marisa Abela. She’s screen-gorgeous in the kind of Hollywood glamorous way that makes this stupid fairytale magical. When AMY is supposed to be too skinny in an unhealthy warning sign way, by today’s standards Abela looks fit with a cute tummy—not like say Haynes’s Karen Carpenter gaunt razor blade emaciated Barbies, or for that matter, the real Amy Winehouse. And I laughed out of shock when she smokes crack for the first time and the camera on her underscored with rapturous swept away with joy cue happens. (Well, she smokes some rock drug that’s amber in hue and because they don’t say, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be crack or meth.) And later as if the first time wasn’t enough, after she’s married, BLAKE gives her a gift in a black velvet jewelry case that’s the same drug, but this time illuminated from within with a light gag. So I should clarify, while the movie may not condone her drinking or eating disorder, it sure as hell seems to stylistically glorify her drug use; and maybe it’s worth mentioning that at no other time does the movie break from its verisimilitude in such an expressionistic way.

     Back to Black taps into everything a romantic work of art needs. Young, beautiful, talented, and true to herself, fairytale Amy gets her prince, her kingdom, and all that makes her happy. And she feels real emotions both highest and lowest. She turns her pain into great art and numbs it through a kind of self-destruction that makes her art better so it’s as if she doesn’t live by the rules of us mortals. And because the real Amy Winehouse’s life story is too compelling to make a bad movie out of, even though this is such a bad movie that doesn’t stop it from being a satisfyingly dark melodrama. So I both admire and enjoy its uneven quality because it crams so much exposition into its 2 hour runtime yet throughout it wisely never strays from the emotional world of all these little moments that it makes the most out of and never suffers from that biopic curse of doing what a documentary should do and forgetting that it's cinema and that's someone else's job.

04/19/2024

AMC Madison Yards 8

DCP

Sometimes I feel like Jane Schoenbrun films are more real than real life

I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun) brings out the beauty in loneliness and alienation, while remaining sensitive and acutely aware of the requisite painful fear in it all. And its style is that of its filmmaker—maybe like a cool kid who is cool because they’re not cool by popular mainstream appeal standards, yet instead prove themselves even more desirable to the rest of us. 

     The first thing you notice is the music. I was enamored with a type of music that was coming out of Olympia and Portland in the ‘90s from like K records and Kill Rock Stars, then moved to what happened to it? Did it reemerge in Brooklyn or something? Has it vanished? Schoenbrun gets it though. It was like indie lo-fi folk twee, but also encompassing anything from Riot grrrl to hardcore. And in I Saw the TV Glow it’s fundamental to the mood and emotionally stimulating catharsis Schoenbrun excels in.

     Then there’s the look. Shot on 35mm, its compositions veer towards saturated primary cool colors. And oh so dark. Visually this all evokes something like a scary nocturnal space we get lost in, yet somehow safe and secure, even comfortable, at the same time. 

     And if you recall in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021, Schoenbrun) there seemed to be this almost like ASMR hypnotic vacuum quality to the dialogue. In I Saw the TV Glow there’s a little of that, but the rest of the time the actors deliver their dialogue in that atonal way you find in all Fassbinder’s movies. 

 

So moving on from its style to its content, what is I Saw the TV Glow really all about? I think there's some significant amount of doubling going on. Like with media (the TV show is also a symbol of and interchangeable with music) some of us can use it to escape our everyday real life, but also become overwhelmed by the emotions we discover about our own realities we are confronted with through it. And when this gets depicted in parts of the narrative that may become confusing I think that’s the point. Mr. Melancholy can be different things to different people: depression, drugs, suicide, disassociative thoughts or behavior. 

     The doubling of OWEN and MADDY’s drives could be seen as respectively attachment/fear of change vs runaway impulses/desperate for freedom. Owen has a voice that sometimes sounds like the weird sound device used when someone wants to remain anonymous as they’re recorded on an audio track, which could be a doubling of the ambiguous distortion of identity as akin to something someone genderqueer might experience. In contrast to Maddy, who’s firmly embraced that she’s a lesbian but has her own struggles with assimilating and fitting in. But the beautiful thing is that they find each other.

 

All of the Pink Opaque scenes are so much fun. And this nostalgia dependency as psychological horror mechanism is the perfect vehicle for Schoenbrun to yet again break free from conventional cinematic formalism and achieve such an effectively enjoyable form of personal artistic expression. Just go with it. For me the most haunting moment I encountered was when Owen is old and he says how happy he is because he finally got a family of his own. What does that mean? What does that line mean to you? I find it sad that I find it so difficult to believe him. And the way I identify with where that desire would come from in him and his need to assert this makes me so sad. This feels like the first movie to be scary in a touching, achingly connective with ourselves and those around us way.

04/27/2024 Plaza Theater ATLFF

Atlanta, GA

DCP

That was the best screenplay I've ever seen in my whole life

So lately there’s been this idea I’ve become completely obsessed with. It’s like there are these films that do something so innovative within a genre that they communicate a truth about life that far surpasses anything else that’s ever been done in the language of cinema before them. And yet these innovations seem counterintuitive, or at the very least like they wouldn’t be the first thing the writer thought of to convey a story in the style of the given genre it emulates. 

 

In Lisa Frankenstein (2024, Zelda Williams), there are quite a few instances wherein its screenplay brings a jolt of life to the gothic teen romance genre. Foremost among these is the way its protagonist’s arc shows her not only eventually embodying everything she would seem to be in opposition to (something like a shallow, selfish, slutty mean girl), but also introducing a love interest who in turn takes up her former role: the hopeless romantic outcast loner. Yeah I know that sounds like the arc of the guy in Can’t Buy Me Love (1987, Steve Rash), except there the love interest doesn’t become everything Ronald Miller was in the trade off/reversal way we get here.

     And then there’s the way the couple first meet. One would think LISA SWALLOWS (Kathryn Newton) is in love with FRANKENSTEIN (Cole Sprouse), and when she brings him to life her dreams have come true. But Diablo Cody’s screenplay instead does the contrary: it subverts our expectations by having Lisa accidentally bring Frankenstein to life through the mixup of her wishing she could be dead and him perceiving her to have meant she wished to bring him back to life so that she could be with him. And it’s emotionally brutal. She’s not into him at all. Never was. And this inciting incident sets into place Frankenstein now having become the hopeless romantic outcast reject Lisa was. Now I’m in the story. Now that feels more true to life and even more true to the gothic romance genre. 

     The other thing is how excessively dark Lisa’s backstory is, which also happens to lead to a very vague probably not at all intentional or seen by anyone else buy me half-baked theory I have. Presented as a flashback told by her step-sister Taffy, supposedly one night when Lisa and her mom were home alone a masked intruder broke in and murdered her mom; and yet the dad seems to meet and happily fall in love with Taffy’s mom 6 months later. Obviously the tonal shift here is meant to be shockingly funny—and it is. But when I weighed up how the dad doesn’t seem to care at all when either of his wives and his daughter all die (the Fuddrucker’s line), this kinda makes me feel like maybe he’s a predator. 

     And in closing, Taffy’s end of the telephone conversation with the investigator trying to get clues about her mom’s disappearance has gotta be the funniest moment in the movie, and is some of the best gag writing around.

02/09/2024 

AMC Madison Yards 8

DCP