Reviews from gulag: Down with the Oscars (this isn't about the Oscars)

But I will indulge myself a moment, because today I watched Robert Zemeckis's Here—the boldest Goddamn movie of the year, in its way, just a real achievement, and one that deserves a full review—but perhaps just as importantly, I also watched I Saw the TV Glow, the third feature (second anyone's heard of) from Jane Schoenbrun, the follow-up to their torturously boring and bad We're All Going To the World's Fair; and, in tandem, they very briefly restored my faith in the state of cinema, one being a fearless late-style swing from a tottering master that does some truly new shit, the other being the kind of redemption I genuinely want to see from a filmmaker who might've burned me terribly in the past, but is willing to evolve towards good, exciting work.  And this feeling was shattered, because 2024 now bears the ineradicable stain of producing Anora as America's putative Best Picture of the year, and now it's all just a bunch of morbid considerations about that whole "state of cinema" thing: the possibility that Zemeckis might never make another movie (because hardly anybody's seen Here and I do not think its reputation will grow going forward); the possibility that Shoenbrun's literal physical well-being could be jeopardized, let alone that of their career; and the certainty that Sean Baker is going to go on to keep making the worst motherfucking movies in the world for decades and decades to come.

Anyway, we'll get to I Saw the TV Glow, but I also watched Marielle Heller's Nightbitch, and now they're together, because they're both obtuse horror movies or something.  I'd say it's because they're both about nighttime, but I believe Nightbitch takes place mostly, like at a 3:1 ratio, during the day.  Oh, whatever, it's fundamentally arbitrary.

NIGHTBITCH

It's not clear whether it was Nightbitch source novelist Rachel Yoder, or its writer-director Marielle Heller, or its coterie of producers, but clearly it was decided that what women needed was their own 1994's Wolf, though I certainly can't tell you what all these women thought women must've done to deserve that.  And, somehow, the results are even less impressive: both Wolf and Nightbitch are using a story of canid transformation as a means of actually pursuing a fantasy about middle-aged rebellion and rejuvenation, and, as we weigh each film against the other, Nightbitch ought to have an advantage, because it's at least not embarrassed of being a fantasy movie like Wolf was; yet it's counter-intuitively interested in being a fantasy movie even less; and while Wolf is surely not good at "being a werewolf movie," and does not deliver on the genre pleasures which a movie about Jack Nicholson playing a werewolf has blatantly promised, at least it did have Jack Nicholson fucking a woman half his age and pissing on his corporate rival's shoes, whereas Nightbitch isn't concerned with the genre pleasures of either the werewolf movie or those of the middle-aged rebellion story.  For the long, repetitive middle half the most Amy Adams's (oh boy) unnamed mother (credited thusly, though I could've sworn she received a name) ever gets out of being a human dog, or a rebellious middle-aged woman, is... well, I guess let's just say that Heller must actually hate cats, but at least the storytelling in the corresponding sequence of Can You Ever Forgive Me? suggested she understood the concept of not hating cats.  Her movie's "nighttime" photography isn't as risibly bad as Mike Nichols's.  Let's give Heller that much.

Reviews from gulag: 2022's junk drawer, part 2

2022 was a good year for movies, for the most part—refreshingly so after two years where you can blame the poor output on the pandemic (though also another year before that, where you can't).  But, man, some of the movies people have hyped the most have been some of the least worthwhile.  Here's some more mini-ish reviews of a couple of aggravating films I didn't like, The Banshees of Inisherin and We're All Going to the World's Fair, plus a couple of pleasant little animated movies that I did, Inu-oh and The Bob's Burgers Movie.

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

"You're all feckin' boring!" cries Siobhan Suilleabhain (Kerry Condon) about two-thirds of the way through The Banshees of Inisherin, giving voice to my inchoate feelings as regards the ulcerating feud that has developed between her brother Padraic (Colin Farrell) and his friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) over the latter's decision to end their friendship of many years because the former is, as Colm has it, simply an excruciatingly dull time-sink.  And nevertheless did Martin McDonagh make a movie about them.  Siobhan isn't very interesting either, for the record.  She has Belle Trait: her personality is she's literate.  As for the movie McDonagh made, what we have is basically a stageplay that happens to have establishing shots sometimes—McDonagh, an Oscar-nominated (maybe Oscar-winning, I forget) filmmaker, is perhaps still fundamentally a playwright, for better and worse—and such establishing shots as there are here are mostly just things he likes to drop in, as editing bumpers.  The cinematic element of Banshees is mostly just wondering how a movie devised for theatrical release and with some of the most Hibernian stretches of Ireland at its disposal still looks so much like streaming content in terms of its photography and color grading (the most "theatrical" element is that it's in 'Scope ratio, which is always the right choice for any film that is mostly close-ups and two-shots).  However, if I'm being very nice I do in fact like the occasional use of windows made out of badly-made early 20th century glass to construct frames-within-frames, principally by having Farrell milling about outside a structure, frowning like a middle-aged puppy through the distorting glass whilst Gleeson, sitting in the foreground, scowls and pointedly ignores his silent entreaties.  These threaten to be funny until, as they almost inevitably do, those silent entreaties become active wheedling and Padraic turns about and enters said structure.  This is pretty much his whole character, now that I think about it, except he gets madder about it as time goes on.