WRITTEN BY JOSEPH TRONICEK
In the middle of Patrick Brice’s Creep 2, Mark Duplass’s character Aaron (the name of the videographer in the first movie) arrives at a stream that he was going to use in his plan. On discovering that the creek is all dried up he flies into a temper tantrum. It’s hilarious. That’s not a word that could be used to describe the first film also directed by Patrick Brice.That film was a terrifying look at a serial killer that used it’s single-camera production to break the barrier between the audience and the danger. Creep 2 works on much of the same level, but more on a contrasting level. While the first film was a horror film where we didn’t know who was in control, the second film pulls a bold move and places all the control in the audience's hands. From the start, Mark Duplass’s character tells the main character( a smart reflection of the audience who films weird meeting for a Youtube show) that he is, in fact, a serial killer and that he has lost his passion. This provides an extensive base for building off what made the first film scary, except now it’s funny… and sort of sad. Anything that Aaron throws at the videographer, she’s willing to go along with. This creates a far different mood. Fifteen minutes into the film Mark Duplass literally bears it all, and the main character does it right back. Catharsis is derived from reducing a terrifying person to something rather pathetic. One would suggest seeing the first movie before seeing this one, and those who are expecting more of Mark Duplass acting weird might find this disappointing, but the fact is this is a film that is confident enough is its actors and it’s filmmaking that it doesn’t need those. It’s one hell of a sequel that subverts and builds on top of what the first one set out to accomplish, and that’s all you can really hope for. I’ll give Creep 2 an 8 out of 10
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WRITTEN BY STEPHEN TRONICEK At the center of George Clooney’s inflammatory, yet vapid Suburbicon is a character. His name is Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon). He lives in the titular suburb and he is in love with his wife’s twin sister. He has the mob perform a job that gets his wife killed and in doing so brings all of it down on top of him...so why does Suburbicon focus on his kid? Suburbicon shifts the focus off of the character that drives the story and onto his child watching it all happen. For the record, that’s not a bad idea. Showing the story of this incredibly nihilistic, violent ordeal through the eyes of a child, can be easily juxtaposed against the way that the suburban life represented here was presented versus what it actually was. There’s a sly commentary to filtering the events of the story through the eyes of the only character that is able to believe in the safety and innocence of the suburbs, as to represent the way that society has swept the history of such communities under the rug. The movie climaxes with a race riot started simply because at the start of the movie an African American family moved in. This story, really only serves to be representative of the unrest and wrongheaded thinking of the suburban community, and serves a greater symbolic point, posing the question: Why wouldn’t all this happen with these people being truly just despicable and violent in the first place? but again, it doesn’t actually have much to do with the main story or just isn’t blended in well. Suburbicon, with as much going on as there is, does manage to juggle all of its stories by keeping this slightly detached look at everything. After all, if we’re just watching through the eyes of an observer we don’t necessarily need to connect all of the events that are going on. We just need to voyeuristically watch what’s happening and that’s honestly all fine, but it does make one think about the film that could have been if the focus had been kept on Lodge, a shift that would have allowed for a deeper character study, rather than the empty, though not expressly terrible shell that the movie is now. It would allow for the exploration of character, rather than just the presentation of character, something that Suburbicon does too often, again mainly to the fault of its focus. Multiple times throughout the film I was left thinking, “This moment would play better if it were just part of the exploration of Lodge’s character, and while it is entertaining, there’s no richness, just a bland aftertaste.” The best way to describe Suburbicon could be, a dime store apple pie. Sure it’s sweet, all American themed and has its moments of enjoyment, but it just isn’t what it could be. That’s often how some other creative decisions in the film feel. The score by Alexandre Desplat is fine at face value, but it sets too brisk of a pace to the film and imbues it with more of an insincere layer of emotionality. There are almost too many scenes where absolute silence as far as the musical score would suit the film better and allow the audience to actually figure out what’s going on in the characters heads. The cinematography by Robert Elswit is excellent, but it also seems a bit saccharine, even for a candy-colored suburb. There is so much of a problem with the framing that the whole film seems to be brought down by it. All of the component parts are good: Damon, Julianne Moore is incredible, Oscar Isaac is better in this then he is in Star Wars and yet it still fails and that’s the defining aspect of Suburbicon. The fact that even with all the right ingredients, it is simply an empty piece of violence. And it should have been more. It should have been much, much, more. Suburbicon gets a 5 out of 10 BY JOSEPH TRONICEK There’s an edit near the end of The Snowman, where a child suddenly pops up in the window of a car in hopes to playfully scare the two adults inside. The camera pushes in quickly and there is a jolt of music. Then the child smiles. Such is the rest of the film. The main problem with The Snowman is an issue of tone, and I’m not talking about how ridiculous juxtaposing a small snowman with what could be called “David Fincher,” material. I’m talking about the little details from the set design to the cinematography to weirdly propagandist themes about traditional families. Anytime that the film comes close to having a dark or real moment there’s an oddly bright set, a weird line or someone says Micheal Fassbender’s characters name, each coming in more rapid secession as the films pacing speeds up no matter the scene or context. This means that none of the emotions seem to stick and anything slightly dramatic comes off as stupid or absurd. Cutting from an eerie telephoto shot of car winding over a bridge to an eerie shot of a house that has Norwegian disco music is hilarious. One could go on for a long time about every single instance in this film where tonal dissonance gets in the way. The third act literally eats the second act, and makes sure any of the dramatic tension that was formed, if any, means nothing. This is a boring, bland, wrongheaded film, unfortunately from a group of people that is far too good for this product. I give The Snowman a 1 out of 10. The first shot of Blade Runner 2049 mirrors one of the opening shots of the original. An eye, startling and beautiful on the big screen, appears and is soon juxtaposed with the world. The true testament to how excellent this sequel is can be found here because, just like the first, this juxtaposition is created with imagery, rather than a simple spelling out of the juxtaposition. That might seem like a simple thing, but the power in the audience’s mind of an image of a smokestack, representative of the industrial landscape, curving and molding itself to the eye of the observer, similarly captured in 2049 by the huts of the farmers on the gray land forming the circle of the eye, is undeniable. If there’s one thing that makes 2049 a true masterwork, it's the understanding of visual means of storytelling. Director Denis Villeneuve, cinematographer Roger Deakins, and executive producer Ridley Scott are all masters of the visual art but there’s an invigorating artistic richness to 2049 that is unparalleled by almost anything today. To draw the closest comparison I can think of, 2049 feels like Kubrick, and that’s not just because his “listen with your eyes” mantra fits easily over the burning passion of 2049’s philosophical soul. Villeneuve, somehow stepping his direction game up even higher, brings the perfection that Kubrick was known for as well. Most Kubrickian of all though is the film’s sense of effortlessness in the face of challenging material. There are many instances where the film is dealing with a huge subject matter relating to life and the human experience and that can be hard to effectively capture. 2049 smartly, allows imagery to stay on screen for a long time, similarly to the first one, keeping the ambiance ratcheted to 12. The score, composed by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer, is one of the best I’ve ever heard, parallelling their living, breathing score of Dunkirk. It’s a layer of world building as cold and unforgiving as the breathtaking sets of the city. And all of that is present before you get to the story, which say it with me much like the first one, is a potboiler detective plot taking place in a cyberpunk landscape, that has the real purpose of taking the audience through a metaphorical journey of self-discovery relating to what it means to be human. If that sounds like I'm placing the plot elements in the back of the film it's because one I am in order to not constitute any spoilers (though those would provide a richer analysis of the material) and two, the only moments the movie does stumble at are when the overall machinery of the plot starts to take over. 2049 weaves a superficially compelling tale but, as highlighted in the opening paragraph, it is the imagery that crafts the identity of this film. If imagery defines a film though, sometimes you start to lose aspects of individual character, and what’s interesting is that Blade Runner 2049 actually allows this to be integrated into the thematic material of the film. K (Ryan Gosling) is a replicant blade runner, a man killing his own kind, who is offered the chance to become human. Throughout the film, K isn’t really connectable to, and it is mainly because he is placed at an arm’s length from the audience. He’s a man confused by his own identity and it often shows to the audience. You’re unable to connect to him, which does end up becoming a flaw, but it is also very interesting to see how he crafts his identity. So much of the film is based on scenes and events that are intentionally vapid, showing the emptiness of the artificiality of the society that the characters occupy and that often keeps the audience away from truly identifying with the film, but also allows them to truly engage with the emotions of the world. Blade Runner 2049 is a stunning achievement of frustrating, yet spectacular science fiction filmmaking. It drowns you in its imagery, thrills you with its precision and moves you with its ability to capture ideas of what it means to be human. Villeneuve, Deakins, Scott, Gosling, Ford, and almost any of the players here have crafted a science fiction film worthy of the first Blade Runner (The Final Cut), a movie that may be out of your grasp but only because you’re gawking at the visuals. There are lines in Battle of the Sexes that are heavy-handed and should land in your stomach wrong. They’re lines of unbridled optimism, that in almost any other movie would provide a fakeness that couldn’t be reconciled with. Yet here, contrasted against the clandestine use of sexism, those lines all but shine. They twinkle like wonderful little gold strips of humanity, bright and noticeable like the film’s 35mm cinematography. They shine through the inhumanity at the center of the film. The sickening, rotting corpse of modernity sitting on the sides of the bright wealth of the character’s residences. Of course, the story can’t cover all injustices, it is simply not built to, but the film viscerally goes for broke on the ones that it does attack. For all the unbridled confidence in the antagonist’s sexism, the film returns in its unbridled, even sentimental, humanism. For all the moral quandaries that consume our characters, there is an air of human decency, an understanding that humans can change and that sometimes things don’t make sense, sometimes things are just what they are. Battle of the Sexes is a rare beast of a biopic that had me so consumed I was ready to punch almost all of the male characters in the face. One where even though I knew the ending, it stood as something to look forward to, something to get excited for, something that kept all the frustrations getting there ruthlessly compelling. Battle of the Sexes, on its face value isn’t great, but emotionally it worked me like putty in its hands and it made me happier than almost any film this year. Battle of the Sexes follows the events leading up to the tennis match between Billie Jean King (here portrayed by Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), that itself was dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes,” and if you pay attention to any of this, you know that King truly did king Riggs in the battle. Like the best biopics though, the builds itself on a skeleton of emotionality that exists outside of the actual stakes of the game. The whole film is about showing the complexities of the humans involved and the screenplay is surprisingly well put together, even if it is a bit structurally wonky. The film establishes the main thread of adversity towards sexism and then dives headfirst into situations where a level of acceptance, of human decency, are used from most of the characters. King starts an adulterous relationship, and discovers a new part of herself, something that her husband figures out early, but treats with the level of respect that it somewhat deserves. There’s something beautiful about discovering a new part of yourself, and while this critic being a straight cis white male (i.e. the type of critic this world does not need any more of) can’t really speak for the one demonstrated by the film, I do understand that the feeling of new love and passion is wonderful and is captured with an authenticity here that only the worn images of 35mm can truly capture. Stone and Andrea Riseborough harness a distilled charm in their chemistry, and playing against each other are almost irresistible. On Briggs's side, he’s dealing with a gambling addiction and a failing marriage, but what gets interesting about him is how he’s swallowed up by his own belief that the system of looking at genders of the time is more comfortable than accepting the reality that humans are what they are. Carell is a really underappreciated talent, mainly being characterized as a comedian, even following his work in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, but as Bobby Briggs, he reaches a level of nuance that can only be trumped by the former performance’s sheer chameleon effect. He’s not a total chauvinist pig as he might suggest, but he sees the allure of it and eventually steps wholeheartedly into the role. Battle of the Sexes does a lot to humanize the man but also shows the acidic wrongheadedness of what he’s so avid to accept. Much of the other ignorant characters are much that way, so comfortable in their ways that they don’t realize the real harm they are doing to their own and the others humanity. And it is with all of this that I think allows Battle of the Sexes to earn its stand up and cheer moments. There’s so much contrast to the moments of true humanity and the moments of ignorant pandering to the assumptions of society that you can’t help but take all the lines, all the wonderful, sentimental, heavy-handed, human lines and accept them as victories. You can’t help but be caught up in the movement of characters, of the beauty in their loves, and the tragedy of their faults. Writer Simon Beaufoy and directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have not crafted a perfect film, but they have managed to get me more engaged and riled up than I have been in a movie theatre in a while. Congrats, I was enraptured. I give Battle of the Sexes a 9 out of 10. |
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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. |