1. The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, Joel Coen)
2. Annette (2021, Leos Carax)
3. The French Dispatch (2021, Wes Anderson)
4. Halloween Kills (2021, David Gordon Green)
5. The Suicide Squad (2021, James Gunn)
6. Rifkin’s Festival (2020, Woody Allen)
7. Last Night in Soho (2021, Edgar Wright)
8. House of Gucci (2021, Ridley Scott)
9. Red Rocket (2021, Sean Baker)
10. Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)
I’d overlooked Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose) maybe because before Scream (1996, Wes Craven) I didn’t know of any decent early 90s horror movies. Still don’t really. After Scream, the cycle of Kevin Williamson knockoffs overpopulated with hot cute teen actresses as box-office bait sucked and the genre was dead until J-horror brought it back to life in the early 00s. But in 2021 I finally watched Candyman and am shocked to say it’s surprisingly one of the most satisfying amazing horror movies I ever seen.
This claim is based on the Philip Glass score. Also right around the time I saw Candyman earlier this year I was listening to this old Emily’s Sassy Lime song, the last track from 1995’s Desperate, Scared, But Social, called “Superior Threat.” And I couldn’t really say why, but it always sounded to me like somehow it had something to do with Philip Glass. Probably doesn’t. But okay so I was just really in a Philip Glass mood.
And so yeah I’m just way into the movie, way into the score, then the shocker ending came out of nowhere and it’s the kind of twist I couldn’t believe they actually had the nerve to commit to. I mean taking this nice, good person, the hero of the plot, and then she’s lured into this trap that was set for the villain and she gets burned alive instead—and no she doesn’t end up living, she’s dead, end of movie. But this sublime moment is all set to this Philip Glass piece “It Was Always You, Helen.” There’s even like this early 90s joyous gothic rapturous celebratory quality to it like “Like A Prayer,” by Madonna or something. Like everyone’s rejoicing this horror movie actually did what a horror movie should do, really fuck someone up instead of just going for a and everyone lived happy ever after resolution.
II.
In preparation for The French Dispatch (2021, Wes Anderson), I watched Isle of Dogs (2018, Anderson) again. And I mean a lot. Rewatchability at an all-time high with this one. Just kept launching the Disney + app and constantly replaying the hell out of it. It’s not that I didn’t like it when I saw it in theaters, but I fell in love with it like a newly christened cult favorite. Okay but so the reason I’m bringing this up is something that I didn’t pick up on the first time around.
Giving Isle of Dogs a second look I noticed something I missed before, a montage where the following is summarized:
· CHAIRMAN FUJIMOTO (President of Kobayashi Pharmaceutical) – secretly introduced mega-quantities of infected fleas and contagious tic larvae into a metropolitan city center, creating an unprecedented animal disease outbreak.
· GENERAL YAMATACHI (Commander of the Megusaki Municipal Task Force) – oversaw deportation of over 750,000 caged animals to a nearly uninhabitable offshore refuse center.
· SUPERVISOR KATANA (Director of Kobayashi Robotics) – developed most promising artificial life form in the history of corporate technology, and a powerful weapon to boot.
· YAKUZA NAKAMURA (Head of Clenched-Fist Gang) – Eliminated all pro-dog opposition through the use of bribery, extortion, intimidation, and violent force.
And the montage is concluded with MAYOR KOBAYASHI revealing his plan to implement the “final stage/the permanent end to the canine saturation crisis.” Final stage just sounds so much like "Final Solution..." All this, in addition to a later scene where a lab is discovered where 250 dogs were experimented on against their will, finally hit me: this story is basically what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust, right? I mean I know it this might sound a little absurd but seriously. The reason I bring it up at all is because I thought of this as a cute lighthearted kids movie until, y’kno. The Holocaust? That’s heavy. Still it’s a cool movie and all, but ethically I had to chew on this for a while.
Paul Thomas Anderson has maybe three distinct phases of his career so far. First there’s the style of his early period, when his films were bombastic, forcefully kinetic, grand, sweeping melodramas with lots of yelling. These were Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002). These films also display an impulsive originality, with odd characters and an indulgence in the unexpected. And they’re serious dramas that remain fully immersed in comedy.
But what happens in Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love is that Jon Brion composes original scores that take prominence in the mixing of the soundtrack, and additionally are featured heavily throughout the entirety of these works. It's a pivotal moment in Anderson's development as a filmmaker. (I saw Magnolia five times in the theater when it came out and cried every time.) Then after many years came There Will Be Blood (2007).
The next phase would be marked by a refined cohesion of tone; a slower, more calculated fluidity of camera moves; and original scores by another brilliant composer who drops the H, Jonny Greenwood. These are There Will Be Blood, The Master (2012), and Inherent Vice (2014). These are Anderson’s 3 masterpieces. Two dark epics about obsessive capitalism and a pure comedy Pynchon-faithful to the finest detail adaptation. These are the 3 I can rewatch for days. Each is perfect.
Inherent Vice gets funnier every time I watch it. Eventually I realized my favorite parts involve the chemistry between the performances of Phoenix and Owen Wilson on screen together. The fog scene is amazing. DOC: “I don’t know what I just saw.” COY: “Me neither. In fact, I don’t even wanna know.”
For now, it seems like he may be in the final phase. I didn’t like Phantom Thread (2017) at first. I still don’t really, but it’s fun to watch because of Day-Lewis’ and Manville’s performances. And the Greenwood score—especially the high point of the film, the entire sequence where the socialite gets wasted in Woodcock’s dress, with the expressionist music accompanying and underscoring it.
If Phantom Thread is an anti-romance, fittingly it’s followed by the nostalgic youth romance Licorice Pizza (2021). If I tell you I didn’t like a movie does the reason why even matter? Mostly it’s because it’s a romance about two characters whom I really don’t care whether or not they even get together. Or maybe it’s because there’s not a single aspect of either of their young lives I find remotely appealing, nor does L.A. or Encino or whatever in 1970 whatever look cool, fun, or exciting.
Like Anderson’s early period, Licorice Pizza revisits his long since passed mode of rough camera work, with documentary-like whip pans, and in-camera editing, suggesting something like a return to his youthfulness technically to match the subject matter? Licorice Pizza also feels like it’s trying to be spontaneously odd, but I don’t know if it works this time. And does anyone else think it’s funny? I don’t. The biggest offence I took at unfunny is the John Michael Higgins character who speaks to his Japanese wives in a thick mocking American trying to sound Japanese accent. Not like racist offensive, like this is so painfully not funny offensive.
This movie was just such a disappointment to me. The motorcycle jump scene was excruciating. The buildup was not exciting. The jump was weak. The aftermath was a letdown. Symptomatic of the whole experience. Also what’s up with the characters running everywhere?
Trivia: Alana Haim is the star of Licorice Pizza. When I first heard of Haim I thought it was pronounced Haim like Corey Haim. I just watched Magnolia again on streaming (yes I cried 5 times again) and saw this scene I totally forgot about where as soon as the Michael Bowen character, STANLEY SPECTER’S dad, asks that Felicity Huffman character if she’s heard anything about the new Corey Haim pilot, he mispronounces it like the group HAIM.
12/25/2021 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
DCP
Out of the Blue (1980, Dennis Hopper) is a punk Sirkian melodrama with the kind of vitality that’s found in so very few films. It grips you by the shoulders and knees you in the groin. It’s the uh stuff that independent is made of—a work of art baring its anguished soul with attitude.
But more than anything, Out of the Blue gives focus to the performances of its actors. Mostly Linda Manz. What do you think of when you think of independent film? I would dare to anticipate your answer is based on an attitude. Something that defies mainstream. Out of Blue got me thinking about where independent cinema started again. This wouldn’t be the first time. For me the first independent movie is Othello (1952, Orson Welles). Many or most people say Cassavetes was the first. A commonality through Welles, Cassavetes, and Hopper is they started out as actors. And anyone can see the performances in their best work as directors is astonishing. Like Cassavetes, the authenticity in the performances of Manz and Hopper in Out of the Blue are dynamically from the gut, defy the formality of coming off as scripted or rehearsed, and exhibit a volatile mix of vulnerability and vitriol. My awestruck attention went from jawdropping to cringing to euphoria to nauseating to congratulatory for their courage.
What struck me about Out of the Blue is that as a youth picture it captures so well the restless wandering reality of what it’s like to go out looking for something like fun or excitement and the random encounters you find. From dangerous to depraved. And so much of it fueled on alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and junk food. But it paints such a vividly realistic sense of the streets. And it’s some of these scenes, the ones that don’t serve the plot, that stand out as most effective. Like the quick bit where the Linda Manz character is walking the streets in the daytime and there’s the middleaged guy with bad teeth garbling something indecipherable portable karaoke with a dwarf woman on crutches hanging out with him.
So much of its art is in the spontaneously compelling. Like the scene where Hopper’s character is hitting the bottle at the dump and running around messing with the seagulls, which moves to his daughter, the Manz character hanging out there we see, in his convertible. When he goes up to her the first thing she says is “I just bit a penny in half.”
But as far as dramatic truth goes, there’s nothing light or casual about Out of the Blue. Of course, the Neil Young lyrics it gets its title from’s full line is “…and into the black.” I took it as the alcoholic father and heroin-addict mother are in the blue: melancholy; but their daughter is in the black, nihilism. Or in other words out of the blue and into the black can mean the departure from depression to death.
Out of the Blue is the pure stuff I search for and spend the rest of the year watching the other 99%. It reinvigorated my love of cinema. It restored my faith in independent film. As a work of art it’s given me something new to engage with and begin my attempts to express what it is to me. It’s also one of the few lost films I’ve had the opportunity to see—and in this case impossible to understand how it ever went missing.
12/16/2001 Plaza Theatre
Atlanta, GA
35mm print of 4K restoration (2019) by Chloë Sevigny and Natasha Lyonne
Nightmare Alley (2021, Guillermo del Toro) is a perfect model of the application of genre and setting. Its genre is carnival noir. And its setting is the point between the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of WWII—does this give you an idea of how dark you can expect what follows to be yet?
The noir angle is more than following good guy STANTON CARLISLE (Bradley Cooper) as he turns bad. It’s the empty desperation within the lives of its characters. And, there’s a tangible, prevalent sense of the dread that all of them are on the grift; and in constant danger of being found out, betrayed, exploited, of in some form violently or mortally wounded by each other. Also, there’s this uneasiness about how the trades by which they earn their living are low, cheap, filthy—and Americans line up for more every time.
The carnival angle is built to function as a way for us the audience to see backstage, giving us access to fascinatingly detailed instructional histories of the procedures, purpose, psychology, and day to day operation of select attractions. It also evokes this contrast between the subculture of entertainers who are at once aware that they’re bottom rung and not good enough for anything else in life, and their ability to keep an inherent goodness and warmth between themselves intact. Okay but yeah, also carnivals are weird. They’re scary. Grotesque. They straddle the definitions of traveling and transient. They’re often shut down by the cops.
Nightmare Alley is also consciously and unsparingly nasty. It’s exceedingly violent. With scenes of disturbingly graphic, gnarly disfigurement, and shockingly in your face carnage, there’s little that happens offscreen and left to the imagination. But this suits the material. In fact, all of the creative choices have been done with care for the source, and considerable attention given to the audience. What a show.
12/15/2021 AMC Phipps 14
Atlanta, GA
DCP
To begin with, Last Night in Soho (2021, Edgar Wright) gives us a young woman called ELLIE (Thomasin McKenzie), whose moral anchor is her dead mum. We’ll never know exactly what happened to her mother (or anything about any of the men in their family), other than: London was a lot for her, she suffered from mental illness, and took her own life. When Ellie gets into fashion school in London, it’s her chance to earn the redemption of her mother’s ghost.
Ellie’s dorm life is a lot for her, so she moves to Soho. There she begins to have dreams of an aspiring ingenue called SANDY (Anya Taylor-Joy). At this point in the movie, there’s a subtle shift. Sandy replaces Ellie’s mother as her moral anchor. Because Sandy is what Ellie hopes to be, and everything her mother wasn’t. Sandy is assertive, confident, and strong enough to defend herself against the untoward advances of gross men.
But around the midpoint, when Ellie realizes that Sandy is preyed upon in the same way her mother was and that Soho nightlife is a monster that breaks women, we get a terrifying Steadicam montage through a corridor of women shooting up, giving a blowjob, and ODing.
The film’s second act largely serves as a me too fueled mental breakdown. It’s when Ellie decides to make it her mission to bring the man who killed Sandy to justice that her psychotic breaks with reality escalate. And what does she do first? She goes to the police. And they don’t believe her. While off the record, the guy cop thinks she’s crazy and the lady cop believes her but admits she chose not to come forward.
So not having got anywhere, Ellie attempts to ensnare the man she believes guilty. Yet it turns out she costs him his life and soon thereafter that she’s falsely accused the wrong man. Okay so, yes a new spin on horror, and yes timely with its relevance. But there’s more. Ellie went after this guy because his victim was her idealized role-model; and said role-model is revealed to have wantonly mass-murdered every guy who took advantage of her.
Have you let that sink in? Last Night in Soho ends with Ellie’s success as a fashion designer, living happily ever after (looks like everyone can forget about the guilt of that old guy who got killed). Then there’s this haunting final image of Sandy staring back at Ellie from the reflection of a mirror. What a perfect note of ambiguity. So, Sandy is still Ellie’s moral anchor maybe? Is this friendly ghost an inspirational reminder? Or is this the final scene in a horror movie where the monster’s not entirely vanquished? And that Ellie’s mental illness won’t lay dormant for long?
In closing, Last Night in Soho is superb as a fun giallo horror with the complexity found in the best of that genre. The night scenes, drenched in neon spill and the rain-beaded windows along with the slick pavement and cobblestones is gorgeous. And one of the coolest shots in a horror movie ever is when Ellie’s fixed horrified stare is reflected in the knife blade slashing in and out of frame catching it every time it comes back and forth.
10/31/2021 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
DCP
Ridley Scott’s Red Period is where his late masterpieces are to be found. Prometheus (2012, Ridley Scott), The Counselor (2013, Scott), Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, Scott), and The Martian (2015, Scott) were all shot in consecutive years with the RED camera. It’s The Counselor and Exodus: Gods and Kings that make a strong case against Scott being a purely commercial director. If anyone thought his follow up to Alien (1979, Scott) after 30 years was a cash grab, seeing The Counselor beckons us to expect more from him. With its series of scenes that each feel like 5 pages of dialogue or more between two characters, Cormac McCarthy’s crisis of cartel ethics is Scott at his most colourful and brazen. Think about the difference between Javier Bardem’s character in The Counselor compared to his performance in the other cartel film adaptation of McCarthy’s.
House of Gucci (2021, Scott) finds Ridley Scott in top form. It ranks among some of his finest work—his middle classical period: Gladiator (2000, Scott), Kingdom of Heaven (2005, Scott), and American Gangster (2007, Scott).
But House of Gucci, being a classical Hollywood movie of the highest order, is carried by the performance of its lead star: Lady Gaga. Anytime Gaga has starred in anything, I’m infatuated with her character. She’s adorable. She’s sexy. She’s a star. And in House of Gucci, from its cold-open introduction of her as PATRIZIA REGGIANI, seen on screen and heard through V.O. narration, I’m under her spell. I identify with Patrizia. No matter how despicable her actions, nor how loathsome her degradation, I always feel like she deserves to be happy and have everything she wants.
On one level, House of Gucci is a traditional love story between Patrizia and MAURIZIO GUCCI (Adam Driver). And the opulent grandeur of materialism seen through the lives of this couple makes us see their desires as they see them—as something to prize, to invest in, to live for. But on a tertiary level House of Gucci is high camp. In an exhilaratingly bizarre performance that sees Jared Leto playing something like a mentally challenged Jeffrey Tambor, his PAULO GUCCI rides a wave of oddly chosen descriptors and signature catch-word. Boff! And there’s more: Leto’s character shares most of his screen time with his father (Al Pacino). And this is full-Pacino, Heat-Pacino, we’re getting.
But commercial director isn’t exclusively pejorative. Ridley Scott’s lavish, high-gloss, high-end eye for hawking luxury is on full-display for the entire 2 and a half hours of the film’s runtime. Nothing can come close to the decadence and designer glamour of mansions and villas as done by Italians. Except New York City or the world of high fashion, which House of Gucci jets through while bumping Donna Summer, Wham!, Blondie, or New Order.
Yet how fitting it is for the narrative to follow Maurizio into exile in snowstorm Switzerland. I didn’t have high expectations for House of Gucci, but beyond anything mentioned already, its second half and build up to its climax and ending never dwindled. It gets darker as Patrizia’s perm gets worse. And for me the saddest point is seeing her stripped of her Gucci, condemned to mom jeans and that knockoff leather jacket.
In closing, could this be Ridley Scott’s first movie centered on one family? House of Gucci feels like The Godfather for the Kardashian era. And for me, as domestic melodrama has always been my favorite film genre (tied with something like noir or crime), getting to indulge in this treat from Ridley Scott deserves some praise.
12/14/2021 Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
DCP
Wes Anderson’s most recent movies are like the courtesan au chocolat from Mendl’s. Their instantly recognizable meticulously ornamental design exempts them from being sawed into.
The formalism of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson) and The French Dispatch (2021, Anderson), both visually and textually, is to be marveled at for having achieved the quality wherein the style of the work is what’s most discernably essential to its impact.
Visually, and beginning with Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, Anderson), the camera is for the most part fixed, and predominately restricted to fluid movement along the x and y axes. Along the x axis this usually means dolly shots. And along the y, booming up. But the key thing here is that the camera remain fixed, so (to a lesser extent) pans are also a part of this visual language.
In The French Dispatch, the travel-guide segment features compositions that showcase something more: movement choreography within the proscenium. Hitchcock once said something about Jaws being the moment Spielberg succeeded in “taking us out of the proscenium.” The French Dispatch delights in adhering to the proscenium in the strictest sense. This feeling of everything having been staged is intentional. The interplay between foreground, mid, and deep background, through its precision and execution can be observed when the empty static frame of the Ennui neighborhood’s drainage system is released first, in the shallow foreground, to be followed by bodies and actions decorating the subsequent space and time in the frame with deliberate exactitude. But there’s stuff that’s fun and spontaneously charming too, like the Owen Wilson character’s rides on his ten-speed. Again, strict dolly tracking shot with his bike noticeably artificial in its staging, fixed with the movement of the camera, precisely choreographed with the pratfall to punctuate the sequence. Or similarly when within the static frame he gets attacked behind an object in the midground and the empty bike moves perfectly along the x axis.
Some of the visual techniques in The French Dispatch can be traced to Anderson’s earlier works, like the cutaway aircraft or ship hull first seen in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004, Anderson). Did he get that from Tout va bien (1972, Jean-Luc Godard)? But there is a growth observable to be seen in some newer devices as well. Tableaux shots are used more. Especially in the first story with the set piece depicting the ascendance of ROSENTHALER’S work—dolly track along x axis linking events occurring at distant places within the film’s diegesis together in the same space, like the bisected train compartments sequence set to “Play with Fire” from The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Anderson). Maybe the most noticeable introduction into Anderson’s lexicon of imagery is the addition of one or more of the same character inhabiting the same physical space simultaneously. Like when Rosenthaler is painting his self-portrait, and we see his crazy-eyed self in the midground, which he in the foreground paints. But also when NESCAFFIER is cooking and there is a tripling of himself in the next compartment.
Structurally, within the stories themselves the following aspects can be considered: 1.) In the travel guide, the writer is absent from the content of the article. 2.) In the first story, the writer’s article is narrated through a lecture she gives; her focus is on abstract art; she discusses the artist and the art (and his subject). 3.) In the second story the writer’s focus is a manifesto; she discusses ideas; she breaks the rule of journalistic neutrality and ultimately becomes the author of the manifesto itself. 4.) In the third story the writer recites the article as a guest on a 60s Dick Cavett type of tv program. What is the focus of his article? It’s the writing itself. He himself becomes a part of it; Nescaffier becomes a part of it; the warden and his son’s kidnapping become a part of it. And when the publisher tells him he left out the most important part, his reply is “I couldn’t agree less.”
Long ago I thought of how Rushmore (1998, Anderson) felt like a play. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Anderson) felt like a novel. Yet now The French Dispatch not only feels like a magazine, but it’s structured as such. Its menagerie of creative individuals collectively portray the aesthetic contributions of those who enjoy stories (from publisher to patron to audience to connoisseur); and those who tell stories (from stories about art to stories about ideas to stories encompassing the nuances of specialized essays).
10/30/2021 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
DCP