Not long ago, the United States was rocked by a seismic event—one that historians will be grappling with for generations, and one that threatens to further divide an already polarized nation. I’m talking, of course, about the new Sofia Coppola movie.
OK, OK, settle down. The 2020 presidential election may be unprecedented in a variety of ways—voter turnout, disinformation campaigns, whispered implications of an outright coup—but even it couldn’t derail the movies, which keep getting made and released. We here at the Manifesto have been a bit busy of late obsessively tracking every electoral development doing important confidential work, so let’s catch up with some capsule looks at five recent streaming titles. Read More
I don’t mean to be glib. These are turbulent times in the
film trade. The ever-fluctuating artistic topography that is the movies somehow
felt even more precarious than usual in 2019, with industry-wide fault lines
cracking into seismic shifts. You’ve heard the cries of panic: about a
sequel-saturated marketplace, about a dearth of original screenplays, about
viewers watching new films—or, really, digitized reproductions—on their couch
(typically via Netflix) rather than in the theater. Sure, some formulas remain
sacred; after all, we can still count on Hollywood churning out safe products of
hagiography, particularly where musical legends are concerned. (After Bohemian Rhapsody claimed four
Oscars in 2018, this past year gave us Rocketman.) Yet there is
nevertheless an uncertainty gripping global cinema, a sense of shifting
currents and irregular tides. Even if 2020 is set to see Timothée Chalamet play
Bob Dylan, I’m compelled to note that the movies, they are a-changin’. Read More
Of course Uncut Gems
opens with an extreme close-up of a colonoscopy. After all, this nasty, edgy,
oddly exhilarating movie is the work of Josh and Benny Safdie, those sibling
purveyors of stomach-churning New York City sleaze. Their prior film, Good Time, steeped itself in grimy
brutality, featuring all manner of crimes, deaths, and maulings. Their new
picture, as its initial footage of a man’s digestive tract suggests, in no way
eases up on the throttle; it’s another portrait of a desperate man, and it’s
uncompromising in its vulgarity and intensity. Yet there’s something strange
about Uncut Gems, something shiny buried
within its crusty shell of unfiltered savagery and heedless aggression. It
is—and I can’t believe I’m writing this, given that the Safdies’ filmmaking
ethos seems to involve making the viewing experience as nauseating as
possible—fun to watch.
Whether it’s pleasant to look at is another matter. With
each new feature—before Good Time,
they made the low-budget addiction drama Heaven
Knows What, starring mostly non-professional actors—the Safdies grow
increasingly accomplished in refining their distinctive style. It is not an
aesthetic I particularly care for. The camera is wobbly, the music (again by Daniel
Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never) is invasive, and the lighting is, well, not
very light; many scenes play out in dim interiors, with unflattering
illumination that makes the actors look wan. Occasionally, they subvert their grungy
approach in productive ways, such as when a musician activates a black light at
a nightclub, suddenly brightening the screen with bolts of neon. The veteran cinematographer,
Darius Khondji, has worked with David Fincher, Bong Joon-ho, and Michael Haneke,
and he helps modulate the Safdies’ signature freneticism with a measure of
discipline. Still, for the most part, this movie looks gritty, sickly, and
ugly. Read More
A punishing movie whose bits of greatness are obscured by a
fog of auteurist pretension, The
Lighthouse is a deeply frustrating experience, a tantalizing work that
defies explanation and categorization. It defies enjoyment too; as technically
impressive and formidably confident as it may be, it isn’t much fun to watch.
But it does carry a genuine
personality, the imprint of a director who refuses to sacrifice his bizarre
vision for the sake of more quotidian values like accessibility. Or, you know,
coherence.
That director is Robert Eggers, whose first feature, the
terrific horror movie The Witch, blended creeptastic folk-story
terror with silky filmmaking craft. It also featured characters speaking in
period-specific dialect, a trick Eggers repeats here, though the setting has
been bumped up by a few centuries to the late 1800s. The screenplay, which
Eggers wrote with his brother Max, is laden with old-timey jargon—“aye” in
place of “yes”, “ye” instead of “you”, etc.—which enhances the film’s already-ornate
degree of detail. Assuming, of course, you can understand what the hell they’re
saying. Read More
The Farewell might
have been a minor movie, if it didn’t plainly house such major talents. With
its gentle tone and delicate sense of scale, it’s so intimate, it could have
verged on flimsy. But writer-director Lulu Wang, making her second feature, invests
the melancholy story with grace notes of lyricism that give it some stylistic
heft. She’s also found the perfect star in Awkwafina, the rapper and comedienne
who here makes a seamless transition to more somber material. It’s a heavy
story told with a beautifully light touch.
The movie opens with a title card that reads “based on an
actual lie”, establishing both its autobiographical bona fides—Awkwafina’s
Billi is in many ways a stand-in for Wang—and its cheeky wit. But the falsehood
at its center does more than just drive the slender plot; it becomes the foundation
on which Wang builds the film’s intriguing explorations of culture, geography,
and identity. And The Farewell,
despite its narrow scope and quiet bearing, ends up operating on multiple
levels. It’s a human melodrama that doubles as an empathetic treatise on
humanity. Read More
