This was lovely and brutal. A dreamy Italian fable from Cannes darling Alice Rohrwacher about how wealth is inherently abusive, with wolves. Adriano Tardiolo’s face is practically a wonder of the world. At one point I sat straight up with a gasp, and a moment later realized I literally had my hand pressed over my heart. In short, if I have to pick one 2+ hour non-English language class warfare film from 2018 (a distinct category), I’m taking this one!
You all weren’t kidding about In the Mood for Love. WHEN THE SCORE COMES IN WITH THAT SLO-MO???? BOY I DIE!!!!!!
Absolutely masterpiece level
– BEAUTY*
– PASSION**
– STYLE***
– PINING****
*gorgeous
**I tremble!
***the Most
****strange, wondrous, obliterating
This was one of those movies where Emily and I spent the entire thing exclaiming to each other, in two modes: overwhelmt™, and gasping recognition of how this influenced other filmmakers we love. Because we are sure not the only one seduced by Mr. Wong Kar-wai!
As you all probably know, I like some really boring movies. I love some slow, long-ass movies, let me tell ya. So when I say that Burning was too long and too boring for ME, I imagine that should land!
I might have still been able to handle the slowly, s l o w l y delivered plot if I hadn’t found the three characters I had to spend all this time with each so aggravating. Jeon Jong-seo conceptually, Yoo Ah-in intrinsically, and Steven Yeun sexually. Good god Steven Yeun is handsome. 2018 was the year Steven Yeun was out to get your girl, and sorry he’s gonna! He’s such a fucking DISH. Even in this where he’s eerie as hell! Steven Yeun can always get it, and that’s what we have learned from Burning.
But no I cannot recommend this movie.
I don’t normally write pans, but here is one! Sorry Burning :(
A friend of mine lent me her DVD of this ages ago when she found out I’d never seen any Pedro Almodóvar movies, and also that I’d fallen in love with Javier Cámara in The Young Pope. But other than that he had a role in this, I knew absolutely nil about this movie when I sat down to watch it. When I say she lent me a DVD, I mean just the disc, in a clear plastic case. I didn’t know anyone else in the cast, and I sure did not know the PLOT. Which turns out to be a super queer film-within-a-film mystery crime thriller, each of these elements surprising me by turn!
For those that want a little more framework than I had: Pedro Almodóvar’s La Mala Educación (‘Bad Education’) takes place in Spain in the 60s and 70s. It stars Gael García Bernal and an array of long-faced, sad-eyed men. It was saddled with an NC-17 rating that I’m certain it would not have if it were released today instead of in 2004. That said, the movie deals quite frankly with homosexuality, transsexuality, clerical abuse of young boys, drug addiction, and metafiction (cw for metafiction).
The Little Hours is actually based on a couple ribald 14th-century short stories from a Canterbury Tales-esque collection known as The Decameron, but is performed with modern dialogue and affect, which is an easy joke, but the first time Plaza and Micucci launch a cavalcade of “fuck off!”s at a gardener for looking at them I’ll admit I fully lost it. There is every opportunity for the funniness of cursing, drinking nuns to wear out, and your mileage will probably vary. But for me, tonally this movie landed most like one of those long Kids In the Hall sketches, the ones that could run to maybe 10, 12 minutes, and gradually take the bit that a boy has adopted a businessman as if he’s a stray dog or whatever to a kind of surprising emotional resonance by the end—with also one or two completely absurdist wild turns along the way.
High Life is an absurd, harrowing, erotic existential crisis in space from visionary director Claire Denis, in which Juliette Binoche plays a freaky mad scientist/sex witch conducting fertility experiments on a ship of condemned criminals headed toward a black hole and Robert Pattinson is essentially 2001: A Space Odyssey’s quiet, obliquely determined Dave if he had been a single dad to the space baby. I fucking loved it.
I also watched Good Time this weekend, as the other piece of my High Life homework. Director, actor—and Good Time is 100 percent the kind of movie you watch for an actor. With all respect to the Safdie Brothers, who have made a fine movie here, and making a movie this good is hard, but you watch Good Time because someone tells you that Robert Pattinson is really good in it. Such as me right now: it’s true! Robert Pattinson is good enough in this that after something like a decade of obscure indie work it seemed like suddenly this one role single-handedly made him credible, even exciting. It was his Clouds of Sils Maria, and suddenly we were living in a post-Twilight era where both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson had become, fantastically, indie darlings. Can you believe! What a world.
You know how there’s those movies that are considered masterpieces of cinema and you watch them and you understand why, but you understand the way you understand, like, a school assignment? I’m thinking, mm The 400 Blows, maybe. Paris, Texas.
Beau Travail was NOT like that, for me. Beau Travail’s art-mad bold ass genius just rose muscularly out of the blazing desert like so many exercising Legionnaires, sideswiping any academic posturing or “importance” to pour straight into the nerve centers of my brain. I want to make my own film ranking site with a produce-based rubric where I can rate this one CERTIFIED BANANAS, and that means I LOVED IT.
Do you know what I like? I wish I didn’t, but also I don’t care—I like that Sofia Coppola romanticizes things she’s not supposed to. Suicide, young women attracting older men, pale pink. After these two I’m finding it more and more surprising we don’t yet have a Sofia Coppola/Lana Del Rey collab, the other queen of holding dangerous eye contact with marked men in the center of all that’s the worst and best about lush, seductive femininity. You’ve never seen pastels so bold than in these women’s hands. Female characters who seem to be almost indulging themselves in exhibition, like one of the embodiments of that Margaret Atwood quote: “You are your own voyeur.”
Watch Log Catch-Up: write-ups of recent watches They Shall Not Grow Old and Cabaret, which I’m realizing now have a certain thematic resonance. Double feature! Double feature!