In the Bible, the city of Babylon is referred to as a dwelling place of demons—a haunted, sinful metropolis that is ultimately befallen by evil, disaster, and ruin. That Damien Chazelle has selected it as the title of his new movie, a rampaging epic set in the dawn of Hollywood, is one of the filmmaker’s subtler touches.
I mean this less as criticism than observation—maybe even admiration. The maximalism with which Chazelle has constructed Babylon, a simultaneously nostalgic and seditious homage to cinema’s golden age, is unmistakably a product of courage, even if it is also a signifier of poor taste and bad sense. His heedlessness—the way he has envisioned 1920s Tinseltown as a gluttonous underworld of sex, drugs, and generalized depravity—carries with it a monumental ambition, one that demands the skill of a truly great director. That Chazelle mostly pulls it off is a testament to his talent; that he fails in stretches makes his vanity no less interesting. Read More
James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie full of miracles—floating mountains, underwater trees, resurrected warriors, talking whales—but perhaps the most miraculous thing about it is that it exists at all. With more than a decade spent in mysterious development, its hypothetical completion and release became something of an industry joke—the cinematic equivalent of hell freezing over. Yet defying the odds has long been Cameron’s forte; remember, Titanic was a colossal boondoggle until it became the biggest movie in the world, and the original Avatar was initially anticipated to be a misbegotten foray into motion-capture extravagance before it dethroned Titanic and attained box-office supremacy. (Until Star Wars: The Force Awakens came along, financial analysts resorted to qualifying new hits as setting records among movies “not directed by James Cameron.”) Now, 13 years later, the self-proclaimed king of the world has finally emerged from the oceanic depths with a sequel, and it’s both exactly what you expected and more than you could’ve imagined: repetitive, eye-popping, clunky, spectacular. Strictly speaking, The Way of Water may not be better than Avatar—which, to be clear, is fantastic—but there is certainly more of it.
In a sense, Cameron’s triumph here is limited, even as it’s also boundless. His reputation as a cinematic pioneer remains intact—he once again channels his instinctual pop savvy and his extraordinary grasp of technology to conjure images, environments, and sequences that have never before been glimpsed on screen—yet his innovation is still exclusively (if exquisitely) visual. From a storytelling standpoint, he prefers to mine familiar terrain. If Avatar was derivative of a dozen prior adventure epics (it’s Dances with Wolves! it’s Pocahontas! it’s FernGully!), The Way of Water is derivative of Avatar. Once again, the native Na’vi—those twelve-foot blue-skinned forest-dwellers who are indigenous to the bountiful planet of Pandora—find themselves under attack by marauding human invaders. There are minor tweaks—instead of installing a mining operation, the colonizers now seek to permanently inhabit Pandora in light of Earth’s impending ecological demise; rather than extracting the precious mineral “unobtanium,” venal poachers now hunt down giant sea beasts to secure a priceless enzyme that prevents people from aging—but the movie’s central conflict remains largely uncomplicated: The Na’vi and the humans are still at war, and the good guys—led by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the former Marine who defected after he fell in love with the beautiful and fearsome Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña)—are the ones in blue. Read More
The moment that best encapsulates the tone of Violent Night, the smirking and sadistic new action comedy directed by Tommy Wirkola, occurs when a seven-year-old named Trudy (Leah Brady) has an earnest conversation over walkie-talkie with Santa Claus—not a mall employee impersonating Santa Claus, mind you, but the real mythological deal, complete with white beard, reindeer sleigh, and craving for homemade cookies. Strategizing about how to overpower the gang of psychopaths who have taken her and her family hostage, Trudy suggests a plan: “Shove coal right up their assholes!” Santa winces. “We don’t want you ending up on the naughty list,” he cautions, and so Trudy modifies her scheme: “Shove it up their anuses!”
Santa’s approving smile in response to Trudy’s revision would seem to carry some bizarre ethical implications—vigilantism is commendable, vulgarity is deplorable—but let’s ignore that. As a matter of humor, the joke here is that cherubic children saying dirty words is inherently funny. This isn’t necessarily wrong—comedy is often found at the intersection of the holy and the profane—but it speaks to the obnoxious complacency with which Wirkola and his writers, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, have approached their material. Forget about smart dialogue or inventive choreography; the real fun, this movie insists, lies in scatology and brutality. Read More
The real mystery of Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s breezy and punchy sequel to Knives Out, is how Netflix so badly bungled its distribution. After bidding the GDP of a small country to secure its production rights, the streaming giant broke with its own foolish tradition and granted the movie a semi-wide theatrical release… for seven measly days. It made a healthy chunk of change during that span (over $13 million despite a general lack of marketing), but if you missed it, you’ll need to wait for its small-screen premiere later this month. This is frustrating, not least because Glass Onion is exactly the type of picture whose experience is vastly improved in a crowded theater—not because of its crisp visuals or its gleaming sets, but because of the murmurs of pleasure it inspires from its audience. That ineffable kinship—the ripples of laughter, the squirms of tension, the collective hum of anticipation and enjoyment—is unique to theaters. Netflix’s half-measure—offering a modest release but severely restricting its scope (not to mention its opportunities to make money)—is a puzzle so bizarre, even Benoit Blanc couldn’t solve it.
Blanc is back in Glass Onion, again played by Daniel Craig with a winning combination of Southern-fried decency and innate perspicacity. His return is the lone nominal carryover from Knives Out, though Johnson also retains the broader architectural blueprint of the whodunit. As a result, there is a bit less suspense this time around, and a bit more familiarity. You know the formula: A dead body will turn up, a cluster of suspicious malcontents will be implicated and suspected, and in the end Blanc will pierce the elaborately constructed veil and elucidate the plot’s relentless machinations. The build-up will be artificially loaded with crucial clues and red herrings, while the climax will be breathlessly satisfying and also beside the point. Read More
Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is undoubtedly a valentine, but who is the target of its affection? Is it an ode to the movies—a celebration of the populist art form’s beauty and magic? Is it a self-congratulatory testament to Spielberg’s own genius, given that it chronicles a lightly fictionalized version of his childhood? Or is it meant as a gift to you, the audience—the appreciative populace that regularly crowds into auditoriums to stare upward at a silver screen? Early in the film, a young boy makes his first visit to the theater in 1952 in what proves to be a transformative experience; surrounded by hundreds of strangers, he gapes in awe, making the same wide-eyed face that he will spend the rest of his life earnestly recreating.
Watching The Fabelmans in a half-empty 53-seat multiplex, I felt a twinge of irony at that image; the notion of throngs of ticket-buyers piling into giant caverns to watch movies would seem to be less a halcyon vision than a distant memory. (Unless you’re talking about superhero flicks; across the hall, in its third week of release, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was gobbling up $64 million, more than 20 times The Fabelmans’ gross.) But one of the lessons of this sweet, enchanting movie is that cinema can retain its power in settings that are intimate as well as expansive, and that art can be a vehicle for personal expression in addition to a commercial product. It may find Spielberg operating in a gentler register than typical, but that sensitivity hasn’t dulled his instincts as an entertainer or hampered his gifts as a storyteller. Read More
