A Ghost Story could be described the same way that most people would describe an encounter with a ghost (did I say crazy people, I meant crazy people). It’s cold and soothing at first, numbing to the world around you. But then the existential terror of the moment slowly sinks in and everything suddenly goes white. All existence expands in front of you, the cosmos both collapse and unfold...David Lowery is all about taking ludicrous premises and inserting an ache into them that can’t help but soon blow your mind. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints was a typical man on the run story, but with the ache, it became a movie about love and what happens when new love arises in the ashes of the old. Pete’s Dragon was a kids movie that started out with a traumatizing but beautiful moment of intelligence, a slice of pure gold on film, and A Ghost Story, which I’m not going to tell you anything about, especially the story, is another mind blowing ache. Another film that unfolds like nothing you can imagine and crushes you with your own existential thoughts. Your own existential terrors. A Ghost Story is an aching experience, one that you can’t forget, won’t forget, shouldn’t forget, and wouldn’t forget. It’s the type of adrenaline shot to the arm that...it makes you feel like living. What Lowery is playing around with this time is time, and he’s a lot better with it than Christopher Nolan, because rather than trying to take time apart like a watch (as entertaining as that actually is) Lowery embraces the messy nature of time. The ever expanding, ever compressing, meaninglessness in all of it. The feeling that comes from being around long enough that time doesn’t exist, that time holds no bounds. The figments, the importance, everything that it means to be human. There’s no other way around it. Lowery lets time become a diegetic player in scenes, allowing scenes to drag on incredibly long, something that some directors wouldn’t have the ability to nuance to the point of addicting perfection. A scene with Rooney Mara (WHO HOLY SHIT, between Song to Song and this, is having a year of performances so nuanced that it damn near fractures your ability to perceive the idea of an actress) goes on forever, and yet with each aching, pulse pounding moment breaks the audience into the mind space of watching the nuance and the horror that the time presents us with. This isn’t just good filmmaking, this is an uncanny ability to transcend who we are and how we think of our place in this world and David Lowery burning the whole thing to the ground into a symphonic hodge podge of glory. And if that all sounds crazy, if that all sounds like gibberish in the face of something that should logically be broken down, ok...fine. It’s all gibberish. It’s all too arty. It’s all too much...but you’re missing out. There’s no way past that. You’re missing out on one of the best experiences of the year. A film that can’t help but make you think of yourself, your time in this world, your entire being and those around you differently, and there’s nothing better than when a movie gives you that. A Ghost Story made my day. It made my week. It made my year. A Ghost Story is a stone cold shot to the heart, that I implore you not to miss.
0 Comments
Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is something of a minor miracle (if you can, in fact, call a $100 million tentpole minor). It’s a blistering film that leans hard into realist tendencies but has the gall to use them to formalist aims. You see, Dunkirk is structured in a formalist manner, being told in three different spans of time, sometimes on different days, and sometimes intersecting at moments of nail biting intensity. It’s a whip smart structure, allowing writer/director Nolan to take us through the horrors of the Dunkirk Evacuation by way of setting up traditionally heroic moments and then taking the piss out of those heroic moments. The Dunkirk evacuation was a military disaster, in which the French and British Allied Armies were trapped on the beach of Dunkirk, France, the enemy armies closing in on them. The only way to get off the beach was to evacuate, and soon citizens on their own boats and came to help evacuate, in constant danger from the bombs and gunfire of the German air force. Nolan’s goal with Dunkirk was creating, “virtual reality, without the glasses” and he just about does that, but he does so with the intelligence to structure his film in a way that always reinforces the emotional palette he’s going for, which is to put it lightly, a disarming (sometimes detrimentally) amount of intensity. Dunkirk crushes you consistently and frustrates with ease. Whenever the movie doesn’t show Nolan’s stroke of perfectionism, the film feels startlingly human, flawed, but that is genuinely ok. Dunkirk, is Nolan’s first film paramountly about frustration, about taking the piss out of his own realistic heroism, about the small things and actions that lead to disaster. If there’s one feeling that Dunkirk imbues best, it’s the feeling of the sinking in Titanic, and that’s not just because a lot of the horrifying action takes place on sinking ships. It’s mainly because Nolan’s goal of deconstructing the nobility at the center of the disaster works so well. Where as A Night to Remember created a noble sense of the events of the Titanic, and history itself creates a nobility in the evacuation of Dunkirk (which was most certainly noble), there’s a crazed sense in the dressing down of the evacuation at the center of Dunkirk that mirrors the crazed final hour of James Cameron’s opus. Nolan’s three story structure: one taking place at the beach over the span of a week, the other taking place on the sea within the span of a day and the last taking place in the air over the course of an hour, sets up heroic moments throughout the entire film, which are only deconstructed by a later storyline. A plane landing in the water, obviously representing a moment of relief for our characters is soon revealed to be another terrifying problem for the man inside, a moment of silent mourning near the beginning of the film soon reveals itself to just be another survival tactic, and soon one of the most triumphant victories of the film’s ending turns out to be the calling card of a terrible fate. This does mean that some of the earlier heroic victories of the film seem to be underplayed, mainly because they are about to be subverted in order to create the chaos that the film wallows in, but that’s the point. There’s not supposed to be a satisfying part to this until the ending, where Nolan damn near grandstands the power of a political hero of the time, in his ability to unite the people and give the audience a sense that in all the chaos, there is still hope. The actors here have a perfect amount of physicality. Most of the characters are young men, almost nameless, experiencing the horrors of the evacuations. The biggest stars of the piece, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles, and Tom Hardy, are all overshadowed by the plot and the movements, almost to the point that they seem like little figures in the shape of history, rather than actual players, which of course is something Nolan often does, but because again, that’s the point, it works, even if it does sometimes overshadow the always incredible work from all of those actors. Dunkirk is one of the best war movies of all time (though technically, it finds itself more as a deconstruction), and there’s almost nothing else to say, that I haven’t. Nolan is a great filmmaker and he’s made a film for the ages, much like his others and Dunkirk should not be missed. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets cares as much about its plot as Luc Besson cares about film critics and that is to say not very much at all, but despite that being the case, what it does decide to focus on makes it feel constantly new in this era of safe superhero blockbusters. At the center of the film are intergalactic special agents Valerian and Laureline, who while being generic stock characters tend to drum up quite a chemistry. That’s most likely because they are played by Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne, who while in a vacuum may seem like wooden character actors, suddenly seem to gain charisma acting against each other. They seem so tailored to each other’s skill sets that both their efforts almost cutely start to grow on you. They seem perfect for each other which creates an energy the film needs, mainly because their relationship is what the film bothers to focus on. This is the focus so much so that most of the beats in the film are motivated by one of the pair getting in trouble and the other one saving them from whatever situation they have found themselves in as the plot revolves around them, only really doing anything at the beginning and the ending of the movie. This, to some, may be indicative of a flimsy story structure, but the film overcomes this and becomes more interesting than most blockbusters by becoming a much more intimate “day in the life” situation for two space cops. This does mean that if your focus is in the wrong place throughout the movie, i.e. on the plot, you might get less out of the proceedings. Again, Valerian doesn’t really care what you think about its plot, it just wants to show you some cool shit. Yes, there are blockbusters these days where the same could be said (TRANSFORMERS) where that can’t be used as an excuse, but Valerian is proficiently directed and consistently entertaining and creative, where a most of those are mind numbing and terrible. There is no problem with a big summer action movie just running along like it doesn’t mean anything, just having a bit of fun, as long as it is good, and since we’re dealing with Luc Besson, yep, it’s good. When the plot does decide to roll around at the beginning of Act 3, you start to notice what Besson is trying to say, which is a variety of allegories all of which hit incredibly hard. The third act is also of surprisingly small scale. The plot really only revolves around a few people, one who has orchestrated a small bug in the system causing there to be a problem. It is a bit underwhelming, but we’ve already seen such a beautiful, luscious world that it’s hard to hold those elements, most of which the movie doesn’t seem so concerned with, against the film. The rest is just too fun, cute, and insanely well directed, that ultimately the whole package adds up into an entertaining summer blockbuster. Valerian, despite any type of flaw built into the material, works mostly attributed to the great director, and the cast that is ready to make that material extremely entertaining. It’s a monumental work of brisk soap opera filmmaking, that shows you worlds beyond your imagination and gets by on a spectacular amount of charm, even if it’s a bit lacking in the plot department. I give Valerian an 8 out of 10. Having seen all three recent Apes movies in a row (I went and saw the Triple Feature), I’m struck with a feeling of disappointment. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is still as strong as it always has been, Dawn holds up even stronger, building upon the skeleton that Rise created. In the shadow of these two excellent science fiction films, War for the Planet of the Apes is, unfortunately, kind of a disappointment, even if on its own it tends to hold up very well. It’s like the Return of the Jedi of the series, not a bad movie per say, just a lot sillier, especially considering the ending that was promised to the audience by the previous entry in the series. War for the Planet of the Apes picks up five years after Dawn, with the Apes, led by Caesar (Andy Serkis, motion captured), being attacked by the humans and the humans getting more and more violent and desperate. This eventually leads a to disaster, that leads Caesar to a prison camp for apes up in the mountains where he will have to match wits with the ruthless Colonel, played by Woody Harrelson. An important thing going into War for the Planet of the Apes is to set your expectations correctly. While the ending of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes suggested all out war, War doesn’t really do that. It’s instead, a much more character driven piece, less about the actual events of the war and more about the ways that characters bounce off of each other. The problem with the expectation is that’s not really what Dawn set up for us. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ending juxtaposed with the plot twist of the original Planet of the Apes provided the audience with a chance to be engaged in the material by using their imagination to build on what would happen next. How would the world be nuked? What pathos could be found in the way that history would sweep up these characters and lead them to the end?...but that’s not really what War for the Planet of the Apes is going for. It instead, prods the audience with metaphors, and symbolism, suggesting but never showing. The film climaxes in a spectacular final battle, that suggests that humanity would be stupid enough to actually go ahead and blow themselves up due to their incredibly stupid militaristic pride, but it never shows us the payoff. The film instead seems based around Caesar’s own fall from the moral high ground and his return to it, which seems fitting seeing how the series often focussed more on individual emotions, but it also seems to rob the audience of the true tragedy of the story. Dawn felt like it was building to the crushing, deeply interesting end of humanity as we know it. War takes us there in some interesting ways but doesn’t really provide us with any of the emotions that we’d expect coming out of Dawn. It instead focusses on things like comic relief characters, which while great looking (seriously the CG is crazy), don’t seem to do much other than to complicate the Jesus martyrdom narrative that Caesar is going through. This all being said, the more character focused tone does allow the film to take some life through going all in on the whole perceived “they are animals” metaphor you get with the Apes, becoming a scathing and political film about the moral and political ignorance of people in our country. The level of nonacceptance on display from the humans in the film finds itself becoming comedic at times, which in one way or another could be considered tragic. War, also looks better than most blockbusters. The apes were mastered by the time they showed up in 2011, but here they look better than ever. This is a much more artistic action movie compared to the similar work in the genre and Matt Reeves action chops are flexed in beautiful ways...if only they were servicing something that didn’t seem so betraying of what we were promised. War for the Planet of the Apes is a genuinely good movie I’ll probably have to watch more than once to truly appreciate. Again, as a first reaction contextualized by the previous two films, I find that there is some disappointment to be found, but all of the parts are just about perfect, with the acting, the effects, and the writing finding themselves at the top of the blockbuster craft. War of the Planet of the Apes gets an 8 out of 10. The Little Hours is marketed as an extremely raunchy, blasphemous piece of work, lacking of any morality and ready to attack with exaggerated, obnoxious, raunchiness. This is, surprisingly, quite untrue. The Little Hours is raunchy, but it’s not that raunchy, with most of the inappropriate content playing quite honestly, rather than the exaggerated sense that the film’s trailers provide us with. Any semblance of sexual or drug fueled content that the film presents us with tends to have a purpose, exploring the deep sadness that comes with a world of great repression meeting a world of true humanity. The Little Hours explore the actions of a few nuns at a convent in the 14th century. Of course, because these nuns are played by Allison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Kate Micucci, and Molly Shannon, to mention a few, these are not your ordinary nuns. These are seasoned comedians playing nuns that burst into violent rages and scream f-bombs consistently. Soon, a young man named Masseto (Dave Franco), who is being chased after by some men with the intent to kill him, shows up to hide out at the nun’s convent. These nuns being no ordinary nuns, suddenly are spurred on to start living their lives, ready to indulge in what it means to be human. And that’s what most of the explicit content measures itself up to. When the nuns explode, it’s because they are repressed, their actions fueled by the confused sexuality and freedom in life that they desperately want. Most of the humor isn’t based in said explicitness even, but more in the subtle touches that the seasoned comedic powers in this film, tend to hit right on the mark every single time. The cast is rounded out by John C. Reilly as the convent’s priest and Nick Offerman as a hilarious nobleman, who both tend to transcend the mere one joke characters that they are in the script to become something noble in their own right. There’s something sobering about all the content in The Little Hours and the way that the actors attack it that feels beautiful, rather than cloying. These are reasonable people, thrust into unreasonable situations by their own morals and their own wants and needs, and the film transcends the raunchy humor at its core by using it to explore this situation. The Little Hours is one of the biggest surprises of the year so far. At the ending, I left feeling truly humbled at the humanity that I had just witnessed. Impressed by the class, and skill that the characters desperate emotions were captured with. The Little Hours acts like a wonderful balm to the sins of humanity and I think it’ll be a nice surprise to those who give it a shot. |
Archive
December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |