More capsule or at least capsulish reviews as we finally finish cleaning up the movies of the previous year, three months and change into the new one. Herein we discuss Resurrection, House of Dynamite, Black Bag, and The Running Man.
RESURRECTION
Resurrection is legitimately less than the sum of its parts, as sometimes happens with anthologies, and I'm not even altogether sold on most of the parts, though the opening is pretty nifty and seems like it ought to be in possession of a more interesting movie following on from it, not so much because of its framing narrative (that framing narrative—"IN A WORLD WHERE DREAMS ARE AGAINST THE LAW, ONE MAN IS A CINEPHILE"—is, I'm sorry, as off-puttingly wanky as it gets), but because it's a fascinating pastiche of silent cinema and early silent cinema at that, remarkably opting not to surrender color nor even allowing itself to be restrained by the primitive limitations of early color processes (though handschiegl and general-issue tinting are, nevertheless, 100% evoked), but still very much managing to remind you of early Technicolor despite blatantly surpassing its capabilities, and bridging the rest of the gap with aspect ratio, shot selection, what amounts to basically non-editing, set design, obviously that framerate, and some good old Meliesisms. Very cool, and I was a bit stoked to see how the advent of sound was treated as we follow Jackson Yee, playing a dreamer in various guises in various dreams, is explicitly sent on a death odyssey through history, generally, and the history of film, specifically, an art form well known for its engagement of all of the five senses.
And right away it surrenders what I anticipated would've been the whole dang arsenal of formal pastiche, with very limited gestures at this era or that era or the other era, all in a 'Scope-ratio treatment, with belligerently digital and weightless camerawork that I never found awfully useful at putting any new spins on old techniques, nor sufficiently dreamy to justify some of the more outright crazed pullquotes this thing has gotten such as suggest it's like the fucking signal from Videodrome. This would all be a relatively trifling issue if the vignettes themselves were just better, though the weird thing is I would hesitate at calling most of them fundamentally bad, and the one I wouldn't, the second, is also the one that's doing the most to go for a period cinema thing, at least in its set design and shooting style (that Vertigo shot with the typewriter sure is somethin'!), hoping to find where expressionism and noir meet but unfortunately doing so in the Blue Miasma Dimension for some reason. Anyway, hereafter it is genre pastiche, and sort of nettlesome in the way it goes about doing genre pastiche, arguably less short stories capturing "noir," "Buddhist ghost story," "caper cinema," and "millennial vampires" than it is a bunch of predigested feature-length screenplays, and somehow every single one managing to start off obliquely while simultaneously resolving its basic purpose well ahead of its ending (I find segment 2 to be the only one that is just full-tilt abstruse, but then not in a fun way; segment 3, at the Buddhist temple, the clearest "actual short story" here, ties with 5, the vampires, as the most aptly-paced, but even that's only because segment 3's Asian ghost story genre referent means it's a bit plodding deliberately), and it's ever-so-slightly tedious each time but in a manner that continually adds up, especially in how they just sort of assume a solid emotional or good genre hook without always providing one. Take segment 4, with its kinda lazily-drawn con artist mechanics, paired with its formulaic emotional arc, even if I like the funny twist that comes with its sad orphan sidekick's incredibly easily-solved riddle about what you can't get back once you lose it; form-wise, I also would presume it did not come with scratch-and-sniff cards when it played in theaters.
Segment 5 kicks some life into things by virtue of being the most gimmicky, and a substantially better version of the same gimmick that wrecked a diverting little neo-noir romance in Long Day's Journey Into Night—behold! our hotshot director Bi Gan can do big-ass long takes—and, to its credit, it's not just imparsable symbolism this time, though, ironically, collapsing into imparsable symbolism would've been more forgivable with this project. I liked the ending okay, then; and its problem, maybe, is that the segment that feels the least like a real movie seemingly has the most desire to be a real movie. (Of course, if the same proportions of it were done in the same solid sheet of red lighting that'd be a serious problem.) And at this point the movie is—albeit a little by default, simply because it's caught up with the present—thoroughly encapsulating its period signifiers, being quite Bi Gan, obviously, and in conversation with contemporaries ("Wild Goose Lake" sure occurred to me), as well as a synthesis with Wong Kar-wai, though that just loops us right back to "Bi Gan," I guess. But it's decent, albeit done less justice than I think it deserves (there's a genuinely interesting novelty re: genre lore buried in this segment, if nothing else), trapped inside the aforementioned gimmick, a gimmick that feels especially unlikeably freewheeling and "experimental" (sometimes experiments fail, you know) when 50% of it is somehow a Goddamned POV shot from a character not actually present at the start of it. And if there's a rationale for why these particular vignettes would serve as this particular cinema-lover's death dreams, it is extremely opaque to me.
I'm happy that it found its audience, I suppose, for I do appreciate that it's full-on ambitious. However, it is a stunning disappointment—stun, ning—in terms of the expectations raised by the words "original score by M83," inasmuch as this original score only occasionally even exists.
Score: 5/10
It figures I'd get to it on what might be the last day it could be possible to have any fun whatsoever with this, and the movie is undoubtedly not even as likeable as it probably thought it'd be when it was commissioned (also we now know that the American military's doctrine around interceptors is "use your entire arsenal and worry about subsequent attacks some other time even when the adversary weapon being targeted is basically a large model airplane," as opposed to this film's perception of our doctrine, "expend interceptors with the utmost frugality even when the target is an ICBM or possibly SLBM inbound for Chicago"), although under any historical circumstances Kathryn Bigelow definitely doesn't want you to be having fun, which is why it's shot like that, in this utterly heinous "verite" full of shakycam and on-the-fly reframes and focus pulls such as I thought people stopped doing back around the last time she got an Academy Award nomination and for a movie that at least wasn't a wacky thought experiment. Fail-Safe, plausibly Sidney Lumet's single most attractive film, this is not.
The movie is also operating under a bit of a burden, and once I realized why, it was a lot less distracting, but the distraction never entirely fades, basically that in order for the movie to work we are asked to pretend that the threat it's postulated—an avowedly senseless premise, involving a single nuke attack from an unknown enemy (but probably the DPRK)—is existential rather than just horrific. There's a bit of an effort to kludge together a half-plausible explanation for this, but even if it never quite gets there, by design, the real problem is that it's not even close to existential, even if "existential" is what the movie believes it needs to have in order to get to its moral interrogations and (more importantly) its examination of a procedure that's supposed to be bloodless and intellectual nevertheless crumpling under emotional pressure because it's made out of humans. So it's constantly threatening to disconnect itself from its own plot, unable to acknowledge that "blowing up Chicago" is basically just a gigantic terrorist attack that will still not have the slightest immediate impact on the U.S. strategic forces' capabilities, because what it's patterned upon and would much prefer to act like instead is your classic Cold War nuke thriller—let's say one made in 1964!—where there could be a thousand bombers and ICBMs heading our way, with any delay in response potentially resulting in annihilation without sufficient vengeance, whilst in the meantime our characters themselves all stare horribly into the face of an all-but-certain death. Yet since that's not what this movie's actually doing, the decisions are simply not as urgent as they keep insisting they are, and it constitutionally cannot recognize that deciding whether to e.g. wipe North Korea off the map will keep for, you know, at least several hours, while furthermore there's the constant sense that you'd be better at explaining this to the decisionmakers than the people in the Goddamn movie are, because the people in the movie are being forced by essentially nothing but fiat into making rash decisions such as are easily encompassed within a feature that's determined to be a more-or-less realtime affair.
And none of that keeps it from being a pretty damn airtight thriller, orbiting through its multiple viewpoints each presenting their own unique hell of indecision, inadequate information, and temperamental conflict, with a neat structural conceit that I won't spoil that, along with the basic concept "hey, guys, what if this 'atomic war' thing happened?," makes it feel like it <i>was</i> written in 1964 with only minor updates for tech, which I guess is even possible (or maybe this was the prompt screenwriter Joshua Oppenheim needed) given that the tech has wheeled itself around so that our nuke thrillers can once again bank on scenes of nail-biting tension revolving around whether an interception will or will not succeed. Well-acted in a its functional way, too, though don't get too attached to anybody in particular (for instance Rebecca Ferguson, whose expressivity, charisma, and priority give her something like best-in-show honors, though perhaps shared with never-heard-of-him dude Jonah Hauer-King, playing the nuclear football guy/OPLAN sommelier, who appropriately comes off something like a vampire), and I feel like I ought to be outraged by the sheer number of Commonwealth actors who have infiltrated the highest levels of our government, though I sure wouldn't have realized Idris Elba would sound like Bernie Sanders over a bad Zoom call, which is a slight enhancing factor.
On the other hand, and it is more of screenwriting snafu, but if my dad, the Secretary of Defense, texted me to call him because it was an "EMERGENCY," then he just sort of mumbled vaguely at me while sounding like he was about to cry—and this goes double if his wife and my mom is already dead!—I would be extremely unnerved. But golly, Kaitlyn Dever doesn't give a fuck.
Score: 7/10
I don't know, I'm not usually actually bothered by the politics or absence thereof in a spy thriller, but this one kind of did it, and I really wish screenwriter David Koepp either had something to genuinely say or at least discuss, or if he'd simply kept it to pure stock bullshit with 00s-style generic Islamism, or 90s-style generic neo-Nazis, or even more nebulous 10s-style "hackers," or whatever; it's really the ikizukuri scene that does it, because he might as well be screaming "EVIL!" like Kevin MacDonald in that Kids In the Hall sketch and the cold impartiality that's at least the main operating mode of the film melts away in a moment. (I mean, the "villainous" scheme is probably a bad idea, but...) And grouching about this goes against my instincts, because frankly I am pretty sick of the cowardly anonymity of the geopolitics in my movies, like when the Navy launched their illegal attack against what appears to have been the Targaryen nuclear program back in Top Gun: Maverick (editorial note: I wrote this before Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury and, y'know, maybe it's the only thing saving Top Gun: Maverick from becoming utterly grotesque, though I bet it'd feel that way right now anyway). But I also really don't think Poland's air defense network is equivalent to Yemen's, man, though this is like no. 58 on the list of "I don't think it works that way" for this movie. Oh well, not a dealbreaker.
But if that puts paid to anything chewily "intellectual," what we have is still a procedurally-minded spy thriller for grown-ups because nobody under 40 is likely to maintain attention, modest by design in ways that I liked to begin with (it's dry but not humorless, while director Steven Soderbergh is getting some real thrills out of just, like, walking briskly around an office), and that I began to dislike when it essentially solves its primary conflict before the third act's even properly started. The movie doesn't give you nearly enough of what it's sold on—Michael Fassbender wondering whether or not his wife Cate Blanchett is a traitor to the United Kingdom—and too much of what it isn't, with a supporting cast that, excepting stunt-cast spymaster Pierce Brosnan, tops out at "the male lead from my least-favorite season of Bridgerton,*" though I can at least give him the courtesy of knowing his name, Regé-Jean Page, because forthwith the cast list descends into "who the fuck even are you?" random-Britishness in a way that cannot possibly withstand, and given that this is Soderbergh who knows of such things, could not possibly have been perceived to withstand the screen presence wielded by Fassbender and Blanchett. Moreover, and this is an even graver sin, Blanchett is basically supporting cast. It's very intentionally made, albeit in what I understand to be Soderbergh's late style way (I've missed a few), where every house has fifty lamps in every fucking room for some reason, and they're all going at once, and somehow it's still sort of dim (I have literally one lamp on in my entire downstairs right now and I can, get this, see just fine), but it nonetheless looks like a "real movie" albeit a sort of purposefully draining one, full of foreground murk and wearying levels of blown out glare everywhere those things could possibly go. By which I mean to say it's formally quite well-done, but it's obviously not fun in the normal whiz-bang way, and it's not as fun as it feels like it ought to be in "this thriller is basically just a vehicle to heighten the stakes for this marriage" way. Fassbender's terrif, though.
Score: 6/10
*Well, not counting Queen Charlotte.
THE RUNNING MAN
It's some kind of "watchable," in the most braindead sort of way, but it sucks, and while it mostly sucks by way of omission, lead actor Glen Powell sucks pretty affirmatively. I take no pleasure in saying so, as I'm a moderate fan of the would-be movie star, but this is some astonishing miscasting: take a mostly-comedic performer, known particularly for his easy-going screen persona that comes close to being glib without being assholish, and have him play a guy who cannot be easy-going ever, and whose only character trait is being constantly enraged. Just... yeah, great job.
Score: 4/10
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