Viewing entries tagged
Willem Dafoe
Based on a 1992 novel by surrealist Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, Lanthimos infuses his wacked-out aesthetic into this modern, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by way of Hal Ashby’s Being There. Sitting through Poor Things is an incendiary, hypnotic experience. The film’s subject matter is about nothing less than the human compulsion for self-improvement.
The first time I saw Asteroid City, it was a disaster. I couldn’t connect with a single character. Each one felt like a collection of quirks hiding the fact that there was nothing below the surface. The story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure was too clever by half. After that first screening, I was ready to write off Wes Anderson’s latest effort as demonstrating a peak example of the idiosyncratic director’s style, but with none of those touching, emotionally charged moments from his previous works.
On the morning I was supposed to hammer my thoughts about the movie into a proper review, I decided to be lazy. A poor night of sleep and the siren song of the comfortable bed in the quiet early morning hours convinced me to bank more shuteye. It was the best decision I could have possibly made.
As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity in names between Prince Amleth, the hero of The Northman, and a certain other famous prince in world literature, namely Hamlet. As the story began to unfold in the new film from director Robert Eggers, who brought us the deeply researched and meticulously crafted films The Witch and The Lighthouse, I saw other similarities. There is a king who is betrayed and slain by his own brother. The young prince, his mother taken as a spoil of victory by the new king, vows revenge on his treacherous uncle.
I thought that Eggers and his cowriter, the Icelandic poet, novelist, and lyricist who goes by Sjón, might have taken inspiration from the Bard for their tale of Nordic kings and Viking berserkers. Turns out – as I’m sure more than a few of you already knew – that I had it backwards. It was Shakespeare who took inspiration from young Amleth for his own Prince of Denmark. As I should have suspected after seeing his first two films, Eggers took inspiration for his movie from and adapted the 13th century version of the Nordic legend of Amleth as memorialized by Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum.
With Nightmare Alley, virtuoso director Guillermo del Toro has added neo-noir, alongside gothic horror, fantasy, and science fiction, to the growing list of genres he’s proven mastery over. His fidelity to the gritty, nihilistic films noir, made popular after WWII and featuring broken protagonists who play fast and loose with society’s mores – and often get brutally punished for it – almost doesn’t need the “neo” qualifier. Nightmare Alley is the closest rendering of an actual film noir made in the 21st century thus far. At the same time, Del Toro puts his distinctive stamp on the film, blending in flourishes of straight horror and devastating morality tale.
The late-career renaissance that Paul Schrader started with his 2018 film First Reformed continues with his new picture, The Card Counter. The two movies have quite a bit in common; they work well as companion pieces. Both feature sparse storytelling techniques. While First Reformed is a purer example of slow cinema, The Card Counter certainly fits the transcendental filmmaking mold.
Schrader has a decades-long career obsession with examining psychologically broken protagonists seeking redemption and absolution. Both First Reformed and The Card Counter tackle systemic failures of society as a way into their main characters’ psyches. In First Reformed, it was climate change. In The Card Counter, it’s the United States government and military’s unconscionable orchestration of torture in the so-called “war on terror” of the Bush years.
It started with a Fresnel lens. If you’re wondering what that is, then we have something in common; so did I when I first read the term. For his second feature effort, The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers knew he wanted the 19th century technology – developed specifically to make lighthouses visible by ships from farther away than was previously possible – as the centerpiece of his film. Just like with his directorial debut, the hypnotic 2015 film The Witch, Eggers was obsessed, and achieved, the most meticulous period accuracy for The Lighthouse. It seems blasphemous to use the word masterpiece so early in his career, but with his painstaking attention to detail, his eye for striking cinematic imagery, and his exploration of the human psyche, that’s just what Eggers has produced with both The Witch and now with The Lighthouse.
Set in the late 1890s and making use of sources like Herman Melville’s writings and actual lighthouse-keepers’ journals for its idiosyncratic dialog, Eggers hasn’t just re-created the time period with The Lighthouse. He’s brought it back from the dead.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is turning 15 this year. On a whim, I picked it up at the library recently along with The Darjeeling Limited. Life Aquatic was a re-watch and Darjeeling was one of Wes Anderson’s films that I was finally getting around to seeing for the first time. Click the link for something new I’m trying; it’s a feature I’m calling Revisited, where I’m going on the record with a movie I’ve seen before but never written about.
The critical consensus to the newest adaptation of Agatha Christie’s whodunit is that it’s style over substance. That seems a little odd, considering the source material for Murder on the Orient Express is one of the most well regarded murder mysteries of all time, by arguably the greatest mystery writer of all time. There is, to be sure, plenty of style. The film’s director, Kenneth Branagh – who also portrays the story’s world-famous detective, Hercule Poirot – went out of his way to stage a lavish production. The movie, which takes place on the eponymous first-class passenger train, revels in its aristocratic decadence.
At the same time, the substance of Orient Express – Poirot’s sifting of clues to find a killer among the passengers – is engaging, especially for someone unfamiliar with the story, as I was.
Sean Baker’s new film, The Florida Project, is a video essay on empathy. It’s a moving, funny, and heartbreaking depiction of the poverty many Americans struggle with while living in the richest country on earth. It shows the resilience of children to make the best of any situation. It also feels incredibly authentic.
The movie shows us one summer in the lives of guests at The Magic Castle extended-stay hotel. In particular, we see the world through the eyes of Moonee, a precocious 6-year-old girl, and her friends. Moonee and her unemployed mom, Halley, are unfailingly referred to as guests by hotel management because calling them what they really are, residents, would give them legal rights the hotel’s owners can’t afford, and the Florida government won’t allow.
