2. Nutcrackers (2024, David Gordon Green)
3. Gladiator II (2024, Ridley Scott)
4. Juror #2 (2024, Clint Eastwood)
5. I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun)
6. Lisa Frankenstein (2024, Zelda Williams)
7. Anora (2024, Sean Baker)
8. Blitz (2024, Steve McQueen)
9. Challengers (2024, Luca Guadagnino)
10. The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat)
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Exodous: Gods and Kings (2014)
Napoleon (2023)
I’m a fanatic obsessed with every movie Ridley Scott has done since The Counselor (2013), a period which includes his (to me) highly acclaimed RED camera quad. So if you choose to read what follows, disclaimer: I’m stubbornly unqualifiable when it comes to my bias in favor of being a Ridley Scott apologist. I know Gladiator (2024, Ridley Scott) sucks (in some ways). But I will rave about it as a masterpiece nonetheless. (And I’m intentionally dropping the II because the new Gladiator is a cash grab for a younger generation of ticket buyers that you know has no qualms replacing its predecessor in the arena in cold blood.) The best form of revenge is to be nothing like the one who inflicted you is talking about this movie.
Like Michael Bay, a Ridley Scott movie is fodder to be torn apart yet maintains a unique visual/pacing that’s impossible to mistake for anyone else. David Scarpa’s script is late Scott—the equivalent of thrash metal, all muscle all the time. Paul Mescal is less of a star presence as we might have taken Russell Crowe for, and that’s all for the better. Gladiator starts off with a coastal invasion and then delivers a steady adrenaline drip of gladiatorial blood matches up until the house lights come on. So detracting critical reviews are all the more welcome; Gladiator enjoys taking a beating more than Scorsese’s LaMotta.
The characters in Gladiator are shallow, and cynically underdrawn because here, it’s more efficient and what the crowds really want. Women don’t belong here. Mescal’s wife is expendable in the opening scene—who could miss the feeling as soon as she appears she’s going to be slaughtered? Same with Connie Nielsen: she’s ruthlessly employed as a concession to the studio as a callback to the source who’s sacrificially executed in front of the large crowd (both diegetic and non). Pedro Pascal’s a pussy, which makes him the antagonist. The plural protagonist in Gladiator is actually Mescal and Denzel, who despite their ideologies, earn hero status by mowing down bodies for entertainment and prey on the subjugation to power of the masses. The gates of hell are open night and day.
Gladiator indicts the audience’s tastes and politics more harshly than Joker: Folie á Deux and just about as accurately as Idiocracy. Ridley Scott has posited the twins’ status of aristocracy as code for all the few hundred million dollar budgeted movies being made nowadays: young, spoiled, fickle, entertainment-addicted, amoral, falsely appointed polarizing tastemakers. One can easily imagine how many hits Barbarian Bites Dog Monkey would get on youtiktaktube. Their Rome rotting is why ours is, tentpoles and review aggregators. But what fun right?
Denzel should have been the victor. He had the political acumen Mescal didn’t. That would have been real life. But to gain their hearts and minds ($$), we all know the studio has to instead deliver a vengeful climax. And I still can’t stop laughing when I think of the final shot. When Mescal asks his father what to do and we get that music cue and the gag me with a stick schmaltzy hand through the wheat field it’s the biggest fuck you to the audience no effort to the point of hilarious that makes me so happy about how unabashedly cynical this thing is. I can’t wait to see this again.
11/18/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
As courtroom drama, the genre blends well with its plot. The prosecuting attorney says something to the jurors early on like, “nobody wants to be here. That’s what makes you such ideal candidates.” Being stuck in the theater for 2 hours is very conducive to taking an active interest in this jury room. I’d forgotten what a joy it is to watch a movie that is so familiar you aren’t doing the exhaustive work in something like a say, Oppenheimer. But that isn’t to say the plot isn’t well executed, because it feeds you just enough to grow increasingly intrigued.
The dialogue in Juror #2 is mischievously adorned with so many double meanings you have to acknowledge it as pointing to the duality of justice. And yeah, sometimes it’s heavy handed, like when the defense attorney is in a 50/50 pointing right at Juror #2 talking about finding the guilty man who did this. But I love it. It’s my ham this Thanksgiving.
The theme of Juror #2 is morally complex. And it's constantly embodied by its characters; mainly the 2 couples. You’re indicted as being complicit when you ask yourself what you think of character moral dilemmas like “when you let her walk away alone in the rain at night is that how you treat someone you love?” I see 2 sides, and I don’t know. The midpoint for me is when Zoey Deutch hears “Old Quarry Rd.” That’s the point of no return. And like, what about all the awesome overt symbolism names like the accused SYTHE (as in grim reaper), prosecutor FAITH (as in believe in her to do what’s right), and JUSTIN (not quite justice but close enough).
In closing, you’re with Justin because Nicholas Hoult has to be as nice and as good as he looks. And you see him struggle to do what he knows in his heart is right. And you want him and Zoey Deutch to be happy; until he makes his decision; and you realize it was never possible. When the credits roll it hits you that most people decide what justice is in their own minds, and the chills up your spine are because in reality the life or death verdicts are in the outcome of a bunch of random ordinary people who on any given day will probably succumb to their own prejudices.
11/18/2024 AMC Parkway Pointe 15
Atlanta, GA
The theme of Nutcrackers manifests itself as a symbiotic redemption plot. This is foreshadowed with the line of dialogue JUSTICE (Homer Janson) first recriminates UNCLE MIKE (Ben Stiller) with by the denunciation “You’re incapable of loving anyone.” So, if Mike’s arc is to realize his bigshot real estate values aren’t what are most valuable in life, then Justice’s is something like gaining the courage and self-esteem to get out of his own way with first love MIA (Maren Heisler), and overcoming his insecurities about performing ballet related to what the other kids will think of him and losing his mother.
I would argue this is Green’s most personal film to date. And his most tearjerker. Nutcrackers, thematically, is also something of a trojan horse in the scrappy orphan genre. Because like say, Addie Pray, the orphan typically is emotionally out of reach and violently defensive because of the justification that too many adults have relinquished or avoided custody of them; if nobody wants me then I don’t want nobody. But the KICKLIGHTER BOYS had amazing parents. Parents who wouldn’t send them to school because that’s where “they teach you how to be like everyone else.” And the clincher in Nutcrackers is that at the end (because of Mike) the boys and all of us are shown that if you had parents who loved you, then even after they’re gone, their love will always stay with you. And it’s the catharsis of that magical profound depiction of love that sets this movie apart. And it doesn’t hurt that in return the boys show Mike how it's okay to not try so hard to be (materialistic?) what he thinks would make him successful in the eyes of everyone else.
In most movies, the second act is the longest and most integral to engaging the audience with its plot; but Nutcrackers’ second act is the shortest. The first act is like Uncle Buck or Home Alone in the way there’s this big two-story house full of kids (and in this case farm animals) where if you’re a kid, you wish you could live. And I never want to leave this house. If Act I is Uncle Mike superficially trying to be a good uncle and figure out how find these kids a home, then Act II is going about it. But it’s here where at the Wilmington Estate we also get to meet Mia. When Justice and Mia are together you feel exactly what it was like to fall in love for the first time. The warmly lit singles of them up at the top of the staircase are tender, romantic, pure innocent melt your shell of cynicism holiday hearth.
It’s great how you just get a hint of ROSE (Edi Patterson) at Wilmington’s because you know it's imminent she’s gonna sleigh. You remember how dark Green can be though when Rose makes that yogurt threat. Anyways, so yeah, Act III is the ballet performance and yes, that’s what you wanna wait for. That’s why the pacing of this movie never wavers. Worth mentioning all I’ll say is the biggest pathos Mike moment for me is that simple utterance of the web page “that I made.” Oh man I’m gonna cry again.
Visually, the defining motif for me is the 4 boys running through a field together. And there’s this amazing scene early on where the boys have this bonfire at night to scatter their parents’ ashes, and there’s this in-camera phaser effect where the glowing flames seem to stretch vertically. It says something words can’t. And there’s a pan over to um I think Arlo frame right close on him and we share in something you wouldn't have thought possible for a movie to be able to.
During and after my viewing of Nutcrackers there are so many jokes I been trying to quote. Instead of an exhaustive inventory of them, I’ll limit it to some of JUNIOR’S (Uly) creative imagination’s best crop. What does he say at the Nativity? “…and that was the first time the baby Jesus knew what ice cream tasted like. And Creamy’s only present was a tombstone.” That’s my kind of comedy. And when Mike is reading Junior’s composition book, the line about a bunch of people went to a party at Ronald Reagan’s house and Junior says “why not?” with such truly enthusiastic wonder it’s infectious; that timing is art. The set-up and non-sequitur payoff is all over Nutcrackers, and what Green is a master at getting through improvisation.
It’s like when Rose is mentioning how if Mike were to ever want to visit the boys and she could provide lodging accommodations, “I have a foldout couch… in my bedroom.” Maybe I shouldn’t say it’s so much a non-sequitur punchline as much as it’s a sophisticatedly clever unexpected one. (And the pullout couch zinger kinda goes back to an Eastbound and Down joke that uses a deceptively innocent into more overt type pick-up line to similar effect.)
In closing, Nutcrackers shows us how to wreak havoc if it’s fun. And reminds us how to love. Justice loves to dance. Junior loves to write. To love to be able to be yourself, pursue your creative passion, and find people that mean something to you prove to be what we leave celebrating after the film’s over. So, it’s only incidentally a holiday movie (shh don’t tell anyone). It’s not life-affirming, it’s the poetry of look at all life can be, and has been the whole time right in front of us.
11/16/2024 The Murphy Theatre
Wilmington, OH
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
