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
The COVID-19 pandemic has ruined lives, crippled economies, and paralyzed entire nations, but what has it meant for the movies? The received wisdom is that 2020 has been a lost year for cinema, and there’s a degree of truth to that; I’ve lost count of how many major studio releases have been delayed until 2021 or beyond, and many other films—which ordinarily would have had the opportunity to chase eyeballs on the big screen—were unceremoniously interred in the graveyard that is VOD. But while it’s understandable to lament the movies that this year has taken from us, it’s also important to acknowledge those that it’s given us. The dearth of blockbusters created a cinematic vacuum that was promptly and happily filled by scrappier, less conventional titles: quirky comedies, chilling horror flicks, tender romances, robust actioners. And many of these movies came from a demographic that Hollywood has long neglected: They were directed by women.
Perhaps this has nothing to do with COVID-19; maybe 2020 was already shaping up to be the Year of the Woman even before the coronavirus reached American shores. Regardless of causality, it’s oddly invigorating to survey the year’s best films and to see how many were helmed by women, and with such variety. Consider: the quiet agony of The Assistant and the boisterous fun of Birds of Prey. The contemporary sadness of Cuties and the classical enchantment of Emma. The male friendship of First Cow and the female solidarity of Never Rarely Sometimes Always. (I dissented on both The Old Guard and Shirley, but other critics would surely point to them as well.) Women have always been making good movies, but their collective voice seems to be growing louder now, telling stories of ever-greater urgency and vitality. 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
Asked to describe Claude Rains’ self-regarding police captain
in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart
replies, “He’s just like any other man, only more so.” Aside from accurately
summing up one half of cinema’s most beautiful friendship, that quip
encapsulates what might be called The Law of the Hollywood Sequel. The motion
picture industry is big business, so it’s only logical that when a movie makes
money, you make another one. And because follow-ups are typically driven more by
fan enthusiasm than by creative compulsion, you make the sequel just like the
original, only more so: more action, more jokes, more special effects, more
stars, more blood.
Last weekend saw the release of two decidedly different
sequels which, if not exactly long-awaited, are certainly far-removed from
their respective progenitors. Maleficent:
Mistress of Evil arrives five years after Robert Stromberg’s surprise
smash, which found Angelina Jolie donning pointy black horns and vivid green
contact lenses for a reimagining of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Five years is an eon by Hollywood standards, but it’s
half the interval between Zombieland:
Double Tap and its predecessor, whose comic take on the apocalypse won moviegoers’
hearts and wallets a full decade ago. These unusually long gaps might suggest
that both sequels are motivated by art rather than commerce—that their creators
returned to their universes after significant time away because they’d actually
developed exciting new stories rather than because greedy studios recognized an
opportunity to cash years-old checks. Read More
Borne on the waves of controversy and leaving a trail of
smoggy fumes in its wake, Joker is
arguably the movie of the year. Not the best
movie of the year, mind you—not even close. But while the events of this strange
and faintly maddening film take place in 1981, in the fictional realm of Gotham
City, it is plainly designed to tap into the anxieties of the present moment,
to Say Something significant, whether about art, commerce, politics, or
society. It screams to be pored over, analyzed, debated; it’s a movie that also
feels like the belabored setup for a podcast. Does it glorify incel culture, or
is it a pointed critique of toxic masculinity? Is it a scabrous attack on the
wealth gap, or an ardent defense of the established social order? Is it a
violent fantasy, or a repudiation of violence?
In theory, these are interesting questions, but Joker, which was directed by Todd
Phillips from a script he wrote with Scott Silver, has no interest in answering
them. That may in itself sound bold; after all, some of the world’s greatest
art is open to vigorous interpretation. Yet the great irony of this movie—the
gag that surely has its maker imitating its antihero, cackling in high-pitched
glee—is how meaningless it is. It feints at profundity, but it does not trouble
itself with forming actual ideas. It is less a Rorschach test than a brightly
colored finger painting. It splashes the frame with divisive topics—police
brutality, mental illness, social unrest, powerful men, victimized women—and
then passes off such haphazard daubing for the articulation of genuine themes. To
the extent Joker has a philosophy of
any interest, it is that it proclaims itself to be interesting. Read More
