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
Who wants movie characters to live forever? Plenty of people, apparently, given how many films are made about the undead or the undying. This makes some sense: Reality has yet to discover the fountain of youth, so art has stepped in to fill the gap, allowing us to grapple with the dream (or the nightmare) of life everlasting. But it also presents a unique challenge for storytellers. No picture can fully encapsulate a person’s entire life (not even Boyhood), yet we still expect a certain degree of finality when the credits start to roll. How can movies deliver that necessary closure when their characters’ lives are open-ended?
Last month, two very different films wrestled with this quandary, in decidedly different ways. In The Old Guard, Charlize Theron plays the leader of a band of immortal mercenaries struggling to find meaning in a life of perpetual assassination. And in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti star as wedding guests locked in an infinite time loop, doomed to relive the same sunny Southern California day over and over. Both movies attempt to interrogate their characters’ predicaments, but only one does so with any real freshness. The Old Guard may be a sturdy and accomplished piece of action filmmaking, but it never truly distinguishes itself from the pictures it’s imitating. Palm Springs, on the other hand, improbably manages to evade the giant shadow cast by Groundhog Day, transforming into a romantic comedy that tickles your brain as well as your funny bone. Read More
No movie is literally realistic. People’s actual lives are not filmed by professional camera crews, nor are their conversations scripted. Even adherents of Dogme 95 accept a certain degree of manipulation when they watch movies; it’s the implicit contract between the artist and the viewer. Still, if any genre challenges the assumptions inherent in this contract, it’s the musical. Our preconditioned brains may not immediately perceive that most cinematic dialogue is far more polished than everyday speech, but we damn sure notice when characters suddenly break into song.
It’s this theatricality, I assume, which animates the canard that musicals are unrealistic. Of course they’re unrealistic… and so is every other movie you’ve ever seen. The best musicals—my own list would include A Star Is Born (1954), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Aladdin, and, yes, La La Land—lean into their heightened stature, using song and dance to emphasize their characters’ emotions; in the process, they turn artifice into art. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to consider the two most recent musicals to arrive in American theaters on streaming networks, and how they relate to the genre at large. Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, the new vehicle for Will Ferrell’s outlandish shenanigans, and Disney’s Hamilton, the not-so-new phenomenon that you surely don’t need me to describe, are decidedly different movies—not just in terms of tone, but in how they depict music being performed on screen. Read More
Pronouns work overtime in The Assistant. Characters are constantly discussing the whims and
whereabouts of their imperious boss, but they never refer to him by name. “He’s
in a meeting.” “I don’t have him right now.” “He wants you on the flight to
LA.” They may as well be talking about God. You might know him better as Harvey
Weinstein.
But let’s not get too cute. The genius of this sobering movie,
which was written and directed by Kitty Green, is that despite its painstaking detail,
it isn’t about any particular person. It is instead a searing indictment of an
entire ecosystem, a culture of domination, silence, and complicity. Rather than
narrow its scope to the exploits and exploitations of a specific individual, The Assistant seeks to shine a harsh
light on a prejudiced and predatory industry. The paradox of the film—the
contradiction that Green deploys so thrillingly and, at times, frustratingly—is
that, while its ambitions are undeniably dramatic, it unfolds with an absolute
minimum of actual drama. Read More
Two years ago, after 13 nominations without a victory, Roger
Deakins—one of the greatest cinematographers who’s ever lived—won his first
Oscar, for his magnificent work on Blade Runner 2049. I mention this
not because I care about the Academy Awards (I don’t… except
when I do), but because 1917, Sam
Mendes’ bold and brawny and periodically breathtaking new film, seems to have
been engineered specifically to secure Deakins an Oscar. Its technical premise—it
purports to capture its grueling events in a single take—is not wholly novel; a
recent example includes Birdman (which won Emmanuel Lubezki
the second of his three straight trophies), while the conceit stretches back to
Hitchcock and beyond. But in marrying the single-shot concept (or gimmick,
depending on your disposition) to the epic gravity of the war picture, 1917 practically screams to be
recognized for its grandeur. Some movies envelop you with the invisible pull of
their craft; this one pulverizes you with the sheer force of its technique.
The single-take maneuver, though undeniably impressive, is
not without its hazards. The risk of wielding the camera with such fluid
dynamism is that it will distract viewers. It’s a danger of distancing; the more
conscious you are of the stylistic prowess on display, the farther away from
the screen you tend to feel, which in turn prevents you from melting into the
immaculately constructed environments. But while my brain never quite stopped
registering the presence of Deakins’ camera in 1917, that subconscious awareness did little to sabotage my
appreciation of his work. There’s an elegance to his lensing, a grace that
somehow magnetizes you, forcing you to grapple with the lovely brutality of his
images. That distinctly cinematic paradox—the tension between horror and
wonder, between ghastliness and gorgeousness, between death and life—is what
animates 1917, and what makes it such
a fascinating sit. Like most war movies, it traffics heavily in blood, viscera,
terror, and despair. And it depicts this ugliness with what can only be called
beauty. Read More
