A Good Summer Film, Finally! Weekly Reel, July 24
From theatrical releases to streaming oldies, Jordan Peele and Marcel the Shell to Akira Kurosawa and Where the Crawdads Sing, a guide of what to watch this week
News of the Week: I’ve decided to keep this weekly post, which received more words of support than usual, so thanks for that. I hope that by providing a weekly list of both theatrical releases and streaming classics, I can finally respond to all those asking for film recommendations. I’ll aim for Sundays but will try Saturdays in the future to test that out. Thanks again for the support and don’t forget to share!
Watch Now (pick of the week)
Jordan Peele’s third feature, Nope, probed theaters this week and took us on a gallop through terrifying rodeos. (Okay, I’ll stop.) Although some parts of the film felt under-explored and unresolved, Nope is a thoroughly enjoyable watch because of its playfulness with the genre, making it feel more like a sci-fi-horror-thriller flick from the seventies than the modern social horror Peele quickly dominated. The music is big, evocative of a previous film scoring era, which was composed by Peele regular Michael Abels, but the cinematography is bigger and easily the hero of the film. Hoyte van Hoytema, the Swiss born Dutch-Swedesman who studied in Poland, is known for innovating the use of Imax film cameras, whether attaching them to WW2 fighter jets for Dunkirk or doing away with the camera operator and carry the fifty pound camera on his own shoulder for Interstellar. Michael Wincott’s character in the film doesn’t sound too far off from Hoytema’s dedicated style of Imax-film photography.
In terms of Peele’s use of overt allusions to race in America, Nope tones down those gestures in favor of a more nuanced story of humanity’s relationship to nature and the unforgiving predations of hierarchy, which is always obscured behind an unmovable cloud of pie-in-the-sky, blissful ignorance. The comments on race are present—the Haywood’s being Hollywood’s historic black-owned horse wranglers, an in-your-face Thomas Jefferson nickel, etc.—but it holds back on making the kind of explicit message on representation that the Peele of five years ago would have done. It also explores an interesting thread of trauma and embracing, or LARPing, one’s biggest fear through a removed layer of media depiction. The actors are all great, but no facial expression can surpass that of Daniel Kaluuya’s eyes, which is worth the price of admission. Universal Pictures released Nope on July 22, which is playing in theaters—but please make the effort in seeing it on a real Imax screen, it’s worth the drive!
Save for Later
Also in theaters is the impressively made Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, the latest A24 quirkfest that is good but not great. The strengths and weaknesses of the film all stem from being a stop-motion mockumentary: the filmmaker staying at an Airbnb films the daily routines of an anthropomorphized shell trying to find its family. It has its genuine moments of fun but feels like the kind of indie-mumblecore from yesterdecade; it should have been released in 2010, when the first Marcel short film came out and performed well at short film festivals. The story behind Marcel’s backstory is actually more interesting than the film: Jenny Slate, the annoying sister on Parks and Recreation who made a theatrical appearance earlier this year in Everything Everywhere All at Once, voices Marcel, a character that she and Dean Fleischer-Camp, director and main actor of Marcel, made up while on vacation, seeing that the Airbnb had little shells on display, to which Slate decided to give a strange voice. After making the first short, the pair got married in 2012, made more Marcel shorts and co-wrote books, then divorced in 2016 and deciding a few years later to make the feature film. Marcel will certainly have a dedicated fanbase for its humor and use of stop-motion, but the plot drags on and the resolution was underwhelming. A24 released Marcel in theaters on June 24.
What to say about Akira Kurosawa that has yet to be said? He’s the Japanese director known for Seven Samurai and Rashomon—as well as Hidden Fortress, which was plot fodder for Star Wars—and other samurai-era films from the fifties and sixties. Therefore, when he made a film set in present-day, he had something important to say. Ikiru, for instance, is a powerful story about finding meaning in life even when you’re dying of cancer and stuck working in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. This week I watched High and Low, a tense hostage negotiation police procedural that effortlessly elevates 142 minutes of one’s life. Toshirō Mifune, Kurosawa’s stalwart actor, plays a businessman who just bet his mortgage on buying enough of his shoe company to keep it from being turned into a fast-fashion factory. But that same night, his chauffeur’s son is accidentally kidnapped—he was going for Mifune’s son—and held for ransom, which the businessman acquiescently ends up paying. Doing so cost him his position within the company and the repossession of his house, but the public remained on his side and through the goodwill of the people didn’t lose his dignity. Meanwhile, the police use all their resources to locate the child and kidnapper, no matter how meticulous the leads are. While a chunk of Kurosawa’s films aren’t easily accessible to those unaware of him, High and Low, which is available to stream on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel, is a solid introduction to his filmmaking. Be honest, you were going to watch something true crime, law and order related anyway.
In trying to catch up on my 2022 Criterion challenge, which the James Bond marathon completely ground to a halt, I watched a gang of classic films from prominent filmmakers and genre staples that, while each deserving their own short review, I would like to mention nonetheless.
For those wanting interesting films by classic auteurs, then watch The Big City by Satyajit Ray and/or The Flower of St. Francis by Roberto Rossellini (I’ve reviewed a couple of his films in previous Weekly Reels). The Big City tells the still-relevant story about a house-wife that gets a job in Calcutta in 1963 but becomes alienated by her conservative family. The Flowers of St. Francis follows a group of real Italian monks playing Francis of Assisi and his traveling padres. Not much happens, but it’s unique in its use of peppered vignettes of holy life.
For those wanting interesting films in classic genres, Ashes and Diamonds is a great anti-war Polish film by Andrzej Wajda, which takes place on the final day of WW2 and follows a Home Army, anti-communist soldier tasked with assassinating a Polish politician. Ending the section, I’d like to mention Salesman, one of the early documentaries to use small, handheld ARRI film cameras. The film is a simple slice-of-life study following door-to-door Bible salesman, which for ninety-one minutes lets you peep in and out of an early version of reality TV.
For the Daring (something to shock and challenge you artistically)
Lars von Trier doesn’t hold the same shock-and-awe value he held a decade ago. Co-creator of Dogma 95 along with Thomas Vinterberg (my favorite Danish filmmaker), the Danes eschewed the reliance on filmmaking through special effects and technology and placed the power of pure storytelling back into the director and writer. Although criticized nowadays as a dated, young-man’s rebellious system, it provided von Trier and Vinterberg the type of film education to boost their status into world-class filmmakers, the first since Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose first film was released in 1919. While Vinterberg drifted towards more conventional filmmaking forms in the 2000s, von Trier stuck to highly stylized art films that, for instance, highlighted the artificiality of filmmaking. But what made von Trier the enemy to many in the film community was his Depression Trilogy. Based on his real-life issues with depression, von Trier started with Antichrist, which I watched this week after already having seen the two sequels: Melancholia and Nymphomaniac.
Antichrist can best be described as an anti-erotic, anti-thriller. There’s only three characters: He (Willem Dafoe, one of the great plug-in-anywhere types of actors), She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, protagonist of all three of von Trier’s Depression films), and Nic, their toddler son who falls out of their apartment and dies while they’re having sex. This sends She into a debilitating state of anxiety while He takes it on the chin with his detached, Psychologist attitude. They go to a cabin in the woods to help her escape life, but their Eden turns into the most diametrically-opposed binary of all human history: man v. nature. The bad-faith reviewers, which has only gotten worse as cultural commentators moved further away from sexual nuances, butchered this analogy into a straightforward man v. woman tale. Then juiced it down to a “man bad, woman good” pulp that does neither the story nor von Trier any good. The film is shocking in the end, no doubt, but so is man’s position in the natural world, from which most of us remain safe. Von Trier aligns himself on the daemonic axis of Spenser surpassing Chaucer, Romanticism counter-reacting to the Enlightenment (even the Decadent counterreaction within Romanticism), Sade and Blake surpassing Rousseau, Coleridge over Wordsworth, and of Wilde’s instincts (but not form). Nature (She), expressed historically in Western female forms as the Great Mother, gives life (Nic) but can also take it away (He). And try as He might, She will always be the more destructive force. Anyway, save this film for a nice date night, preferably your first film together if you’re really trying to get to know one another. It’s available to stream on Kanopy, for free, or on DirecTV, Curia, and the Criterion Channel, for subscribers.
Pass
This wouldn’t be a proper Weekly Reel without a tepid theatrical release. Where the Crawdads Sing, released last week in theaters, started bad when I entered the theater to watch it. I sat in between clumps of retirement home pensioners making unironic, volume uncontrollable remarks during the trailers, each with their own bag full of Ziploc goodies. I thought the coming-of-age murder mystery would have a non-geriatric audience, what I didn’t realize was that the film is the adaptation of a debut boomer-bait novel written by a conservationist-zoologist. And that’s exactly where the film fails, it reads like the fantasy of a debut boomer-bait novel from a conservationist-zoologist: marsh girl is at peace with nature and the outsider of the city-folk, she gets rid of the predatory male, she marries the sensitive marsh boy, race relations are apparently all good in the South of the fifties and sixties. The marsh girl, played by Fresh’s Daisy Edgar-Jones (who, being the British daughter of the Sky entertainment director, is terribly miscast as a dirt-poor Southerner), has an abandoned mother complex and grows up with an abusive father. Her siblings all ran away. She grows up alone after her father leaves sometime (I must’ve blinked and missed it) the film. But she’s totally normal, clean, even gifted intellectually and creatively, with the wherewithal to fend off predators and establish herself as the owner of multiple hundreds of acres of marshland. The story follows a legal dispute of marsh girl v. the state, which she of course wins. Her entire existence is validated, uninteresting, and tidied up like the third act of a Law & Order episode. Like I said, the kind of conservationist-boomer fantasy that sold twelve million copies of the book. The film has an astonishing sixty-two point discrepancy on Rotten Tomatoes between the critics and general audience. It seems the viewers that like it like it because it adheres to the novel. I can also adhere to the instructions on the mac & cheese box but that doesn’t make me Gordon focking Ramsay.
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