past week:
Inherent Vice - 4/5 After realizing PTA films often fade in quality over time for me, I've been pleased to find this to improve the more I think about it. Certainly what I enjoy most owes to PynchonI understand the dialogue is 90+% lifted word-for-word, and that plus the carefully crafted message on runaway capitalism co-opting counterculture and how the most vital but least celebrated heroes are those who find ways to divorce themselves from economic systems entirely were what I enjoyed most. PTA's contribution is shocking in its lack of showiness for a guy revered for virtuoso tracking shots. A lot of the time he stays out of the way, scenes will just be two shots slowly pushing in and in. still it does take deftness to know exactly when to stand off to the side and when to get in the middle and emphasize the foggy stoner perspective with a visual gag or dream-logic edit. Anderson's funniest. Maybe its best effect has been sending me on a Can kick, replaying Future Days and Soundtracks and catching up on Unlimited Edition
Happy Christmas - 3/5 Just like Drinking Buddies Swanberg really has a grasp on average normal relationships and dialogue. While that film was aimless, mostly interested in hanging out and drinking, it did all hang on ideas of dishonesty in romance. Happy Christmas lacks that, no axel on which this turns. Cast is charming enough to make that just fine, Kendrick and Lynskey and Dunham writing erotic fiction and shooting the shit is well worth putting on a screen. Also felt Swanberg's visuals in here, so limited to interiors, were efficient in focusing everything towards that hangout spirit.
Why Don't You Play In Hell? - 4/5 A Sono movie, so the question isn't really whether it's tonally scattershot and self-obsessedly eccentric but if it is those things in a pleasing way. turns out (mostly unlike Tokyo Tribe) it is. First two acts are funny, convoluted farce that doesn't seem to be going much of anywhere. Then the finale arrives to give every disparate character and condition a task and unite them towards a celebration of the psychotic, suicidal act that is making a movie. Making a movie is going to fucking kill you, but who caresit's worth it. Lost in all the violence and hyperactivity it's helpful to keep the exact translation of the title in mind, which our introduction speaker clued us in on: If you're already in hell, why not play?
Stranger by the Lake - 3/5 I didn't find the thriller elements of this to work very well, despite the evident formal rigor. It's best as a steamy romance drama, examining the different desires humans have and how pursuing any one of them isn't unnatural but pursuing just one is sociopathic.
A Brief History of Time - 4/5 Rosenbaum: "alternation between Morris's usual talking-head approach for the biography and Hawking's computer-generated voice and various kinds of illustrations to recount most of the theory creates a dialectic that the film profits from stylistically." Pretty much exactly thatthe talking heads plus the shapes, the handwriting, the academic type, the blinking screen and artificial voice. Combined and sprinkled with humorous asides it avoids slipping into genius-overcomes-odds pablum, instead acting as a depiction both of Hawking as a savant and of the academic community overall as a bunch of peculiar dreamers.
The Triplets of Belleville - ≤2.5/5 Mostly found the grossness of this movie, well, gross. not oddly beautiful or anything. Caricatures, some of them super racist, trying for Tati and landing on something like fucked up Farrelly Bros. excellent music