This is not a particularly long or deep review, but that’s fine, you’re either like me and absolutely going to go see the Julianne Moore Goes To Discos movie, or you’re gonna “catch that one later”
Lynne Ramsay is fascinated with violence, but absolutely never, ever with glorifying it. The violence in her movie is never cool or badass, it only hurts. We spend far, far more time looking at the mental wounds violence has inflicted on the main character, physical wounds too, than actually seeing it carried out. In fact his big fight scenes are all elided, stunningly cut down into these dispersed stationary shots like you’re turning several pages of a book at a time, following along just behind him in the aftermath, or skipping ahead to spaces similarly devoid of action, just holding a bad promise. What it means is that this ultimately isn’t a film about violence after all, but a film about trauma. We don’t see any girls abused. We don’t see young Joe abused either, although the very present and troubling flashbacks make it clear his nightmare started early, and what he experienced in Iraq just continued the breakage that his father began.
Support the Girls follows the general manager and several of her servers at an independent Hooters-style establishment in Texas over about a day and a half, during which it feels like approximately everything in the world manages to happen in one chunk of real estate along the interstate. So in other words: working as a woman in the service industry. It is funny and smart and deeply lovable, with one of the best, most cathartic endings of a movie released last year, leaving me probably looking a little manic, damp mascara smudged above a tired cheek-cracking grin. This movie is fantastic, and you can stream it on Hulu right now.
TARRA’S OSCARS
The 91st Annual Academy Awards are today, and I have some notes.
Full list of what *I* would have nominated on watchlog.blog, the only place tonight where Chloé Zhao, Nicholas Hoult, and the visionary who did the production design on Dirty Computer are getting their due.
Like Baker’s The Florida Project last year, the veritas nature of this movie’s production is astounding, even before combined with the care and insight this “outsider” director had in depicting a world that was not her own (all of this just speaking to an absolutely gobsmacking amount of directorial talent). For only her second movie, Zhao, a female filmmaker raised in the bustle of Beijing, stepped onto a remote Lakota-Sioux reservation in the American West, and worked with a cast of non-professional actors to craft an intimate, poetic Western on masculinity and identity, telling the real lived story of her lead, young injured rodeo star Brady Jandreau (‘Brady Blackburn’ in the film).
This boy, this incredible boy, stepped in front of a camera for the first time in his life and turned in my second favorite male performance of the year, following only Ethan Hawke in First Reformed. He’s magic.
I know….so little…about David Bowie and his whole scene, but I know about GLAMOUR and MELODRAMA, and from someone who signed in to this loopy queer rockstar wedding as a last minute guest of Bryan Ferry, whom I’d just met at an underground throwback cabaret singing smoky torch song versions of his art pop ’70s hits, I can extrapolate what watching this must be like for the actual Bowie glitterati. Basically, wild. Wilde, also, apparently, as in Todd Haynes’ horny glam rock fantasia Oscar Wilde was seemingly sent to our planet like some sort of Gay-El to bless us with a line of shimmering pop idols.
I mean I probably only “got” about half of it, but I did love this dazzle-eyed Orson Wellsian music video of a movie, like I would.
This month’s Patreon Pick: I FINALLY WATCH VELVET GOLDMINE ✨
Review for all above, exclusive live blogging here for the people who made this happen. This was a landslide win, by the way. You know what you like.
Jonathan’s and my most recent nerd-cinema outing was to go check out Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest black & white Polish film, baby! And I really, really liked it. I liked this a lot. I liked it while watching it, I liked it walking out of the theater into the cold (thematic!), and it’s now the next day and I might like it even more. This was easily the most romantic movie I saw from 2018—sorry, A Star Is Born, sorry Beale Street, come back to me when your characters are smoking hollowly on the snowy streets of East Berlin in 1951 waiting in vain for their lover to arrive so they can clandestinely cross the border into the west, because that’s the most romantic shit I know!!
Sometimes a family is just a group of criminals sharing a paper bag of croquettes
Cannes was right: this is so good!
This was a stranger movie than I anticipated! Oddly, not sure if I loved it. That goes against brand.
I turn out to love the trailer for If Beale Street Could Talk more than the movie, and I’m so sorry about that. I spend about a third of this review just talking about Diego Luna, who utterly bowled me over by being in this for a teeny bit essentially playing his own sweet self as an early 1970s New York restaurant owner? Magical cinema! Truly Barry is a genius, no matter what I say.
This is getting confusing.
Into the Spider-Verse is bouncingly meta and self-referential without ever being less than completely in love with all this. It joshes on comic book (and specifically Spidey-verse) conceits because it just loves them so hard, an artistic approach I find very relatable. It’s funny and quippy and playing with tropes, but the story is always this really sincere depiction of a dorky Afro-Latino Brooklyn teen trying to find his place in the world. He sings along terribly to hip hop on his headphones and speaks Spanglish with his mom that’s not even translated, and it’s all just so wonderful and genuine. It’s a movie utterly oriented in this kid’s cultural context in the world, without being about that, which is a remarkable feat to pull off. Especially while it’s simultaneously a rollicking superhero action movie, a spry and clever genre comedy, and a flat-out gorgeous piece of visual art.
Real bad news for anyone else with superhero fatigue: Spidey-Verse rules
