Showing posts with label Luca Guadagnino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luca Guadagnino. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Mother, may I?
SUSPIRIA
Stuffed, maybe overstuffed, with ideas and symbols and bids at meaning, the most important thing is that Suspiria does terrible things to you, but you realize you really like it.
2018
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Written by David Kajganich
With Dakota Johnson (Susie Bannion), Elena Fokina (Olga), Mia Goth (Sara), Chloe Grace Moretz (Patricia), Jessica Harper (Anke), Tilda Swinton (Madame Blance, Dr. Klemperer, et al), and Malgorzata Bela (Mrs. Bannion)
Spoiler alert: mild—well, severe for Suspiria '77, but come on now
Sunday, April 22, 2018
Reviews from gulag: That is not dead which can eternal lie
Admittedly, the past few months have been a little spotty: between work and personal obligations, and an unfortunately-mania-free depressive episode that feels like it's gone on for about four straight months, I've let Kinemalogue lapse into a weekly (bordering on biweekly) update schedule. In the process, I missed the chance to talk about a bunch of stuff from last year back when it was still relevant. Hence, it's mostly in the spirit of spring cleaning that I dump this first batch of short reviews for a bunch of movies that you probably only vaguely remember by now, and which I found so terribly interesting I didn't even bother writing about them at the time. Am I selling it? Anyway, today's reviews are for Marjorie Prime and Call Me By Your Name.
The idea of a sci-fi play, by itself, already strikes me as somehow incongruous, even though there's clearly nothing but the silliest possible prejudice underlying this reaction—the genre of science fiction that deals with the offloading of human labor (physical or otherwise) onto artificially intelligent servants (fully-sapient or otherwise) began with a play, after all, namely Karel Capek's R.U.R., which—amongst other things—exported the very word "robot" into the English language. Prime nobly extends that lineage one more time, finding a new task for our silicon friends to perform, and a stranger one: Prime posits the existence of an artificially-intelligent adaptive program, designed to keep the elderly company and help them retain their grip on their memories as they head, inexorably, toward the void.
Such a program, called a "Prime" (which seems ass-backwards, but I can accept this fictional branding of the software as an intentional irony) has been deployed to assist Marjorie (Lois Smith) as she fights her losing fight with Alzheimer's. To this end, Marjorie and Marjorie's helpful, almost over-supportive son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) have set up the thing's holographic interface to resemble and sound exactly like Marjorie's dead husband Walter (Jon Hamm) as he was, around four decades earlier. Marjorie's daughter and Jon's wife, Tess, is distressed by the whole situation, and (perhaps inevitably) can only look upon the automaton with the face of her late father with suspicion and a little bit of disgust; but she acquiesces anyway, because there is little else that even seems like it could help. This "Walter Prime" tells Marjorie stories, all day, every day, intended to remind her of her past; but what's obvious from the very start is that Walter Prime can only know what he's been told by the living, and, indeed, the first conversation we find ourselves privy to between Marjorie and Walter is the key to unlocking what Marjorie Prime is actually interested in, when Walter spins the yarn about their very first date together, and Marjorie says it would be better if they'd gone to see a repertory showing of Casablanca. (At this point, I forget exactly what it was they actually saw, so let's say it was, oh, Billy Madison.)
It is something of a miracle that Marjorie Prime manages to escape the heavy gravity of the basic Black Mirror premise which it resembles, and (more to the point) even the Black Mirror episodes which it specifically resembles. (Take your pick, because it specifically resembles two of 'em, namely "White Christmas," which is also about Jon Hamm's ghost in a machine, or "Be Right Back," which is the one where Domnhall Gleeson plays a robot designed to replace a departed loved one, and who is therefore given license to act with even more awkwardly-miscalibrated emotion than he usually does. Anyhow, they even use a pullquote on the poster that mentions Black Mirror, and ewww, that is some straight-up pandering, bandwagoning shit right there. But damned if it isn't fair.)
But for starters, then, it's a miracle that Marjorie Prime itself never feels too much like a TV show—or like a filmed stageplay—despite an easy majority of the film taking place in a single location, and the vast majority of it taking place indoors (with the entirety of the action in any of its locations amounting to people talking to and often just at each other, or even effectively talking to themselves). The very worst thing you can say about its aesthetic is that it sometimes trips over itself to be more dynamic, with tracking shots around the house that don't really justify themselves beyond proving the thesis, "this is an actual house and not a set." But even these moments are relatively rare, and not especially distracting; the general impression is that of a very staid chamber drama, but an immaculately precise one.
As this is somewhat the case for many Black Mirror episodes, as well, the miracle that truly distinguishes Marjorie Prime (besides, I guess, the fact that it justifies its runtime, something only about half of Black Mirror's episodes actually do) occurs because Marjorie Prime is not pantswettingly terrified of the technology it imagines. In fact, it doesn't even really care about the technology that much. Instead, it finds it an interesting tool, and a starting-point for what it really wants to be, which is an examination of human families (which are rarely fully functional in the movies, and this is no exception) and, even more ambitiously, human memory itself. It's a faculty that's awfully fallible in the first place—as the screenplay dutifully explains, what we remember is not any event itself, but the last time we remembered it, a copy of a copy at best—and one that's much more ephemeral than we'd like to admit.
In the process, it makes for a terribly upsetting depiction of a family dealing with Alzheimer's, essentially by default—you likely already noticed that the cast list is almost unfairly stacked in the movie's favor. Smith (reprising her role from the stage, and, at 87, legitimately old as fuck) obviously steals the show. But the show does not end with her, and Robbins and Davis each get at least one hunk of red meat of their own to chew on here. Hamm, on the other hand, might not; but Hamm, in giving a semblance of life (though no more) to the first and most often-seen of the several not-all-that-intelligent artificial intelligences we meet, is also possibly giving Marjorie Prime its single most technically adept and interesting performance, managing the very subtle, philosopher-bait distinction between "computer you can talk to" and "person" with outright uncanny ease. At this point, I'm on the edge of spoiling things; so let's just say that, in its final coda, it fully embraces its sci-fi conceit at last, in a way that is at once whimsical, darkly hilarious, and (I think) at least as insightful in regards to the humans that it's always been about as it is to the dumb ol' AIs it wasn't.
Score: 8/10
Such a program, called a "Prime" (which seems ass-backwards, but I can accept this fictional branding of the software as an intentional irony) has been deployed to assist Marjorie (Lois Smith) as she fights her losing fight with Alzheimer's. To this end, Marjorie and Marjorie's helpful, almost over-supportive son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) have set up the thing's holographic interface to resemble and sound exactly like Marjorie's dead husband Walter (Jon Hamm) as he was, around four decades earlier. Marjorie's daughter and Jon's wife, Tess, is distressed by the whole situation, and (perhaps inevitably) can only look upon the automaton with the face of her late father with suspicion and a little bit of disgust; but she acquiesces anyway, because there is little else that even seems like it could help. This "Walter Prime" tells Marjorie stories, all day, every day, intended to remind her of her past; but what's obvious from the very start is that Walter Prime can only know what he's been told by the living, and, indeed, the first conversation we find ourselves privy to between Marjorie and Walter is the key to unlocking what Marjorie Prime is actually interested in, when Walter spins the yarn about their very first date together, and Marjorie says it would be better if they'd gone to see a repertory showing of Casablanca. (At this point, I forget exactly what it was they actually saw, so let's say it was, oh, Billy Madison.)
It is something of a miracle that Marjorie Prime manages to escape the heavy gravity of the basic Black Mirror premise which it resembles, and (more to the point) even the Black Mirror episodes which it specifically resembles. (Take your pick, because it specifically resembles two of 'em, namely "White Christmas," which is also about Jon Hamm's ghost in a machine, or "Be Right Back," which is the one where Domnhall Gleeson plays a robot designed to replace a departed loved one, and who is therefore given license to act with even more awkwardly-miscalibrated emotion than he usually does. Anyhow, they even use a pullquote on the poster that mentions Black Mirror, and ewww, that is some straight-up pandering, bandwagoning shit right there. But damned if it isn't fair.)
But for starters, then, it's a miracle that Marjorie Prime itself never feels too much like a TV show—or like a filmed stageplay—despite an easy majority of the film taking place in a single location, and the vast majority of it taking place indoors (with the entirety of the action in any of its locations amounting to people talking to and often just at each other, or even effectively talking to themselves). The very worst thing you can say about its aesthetic is that it sometimes trips over itself to be more dynamic, with tracking shots around the house that don't really justify themselves beyond proving the thesis, "this is an actual house and not a set." But even these moments are relatively rare, and not especially distracting; the general impression is that of a very staid chamber drama, but an immaculately precise one.
As this is somewhat the case for many Black Mirror episodes, as well, the miracle that truly distinguishes Marjorie Prime (besides, I guess, the fact that it justifies its runtime, something only about half of Black Mirror's episodes actually do) occurs because Marjorie Prime is not pantswettingly terrified of the technology it imagines. In fact, it doesn't even really care about the technology that much. Instead, it finds it an interesting tool, and a starting-point for what it really wants to be, which is an examination of human families (which are rarely fully functional in the movies, and this is no exception) and, even more ambitiously, human memory itself. It's a faculty that's awfully fallible in the first place—as the screenplay dutifully explains, what we remember is not any event itself, but the last time we remembered it, a copy of a copy at best—and one that's much more ephemeral than we'd like to admit.
In the process, it makes for a terribly upsetting depiction of a family dealing with Alzheimer's, essentially by default—you likely already noticed that the cast list is almost unfairly stacked in the movie's favor. Smith (reprising her role from the stage, and, at 87, legitimately old as fuck) obviously steals the show. But the show does not end with her, and Robbins and Davis each get at least one hunk of red meat of their own to chew on here. Hamm, on the other hand, might not; but Hamm, in giving a semblance of life (though no more) to the first and most often-seen of the several not-all-that-intelligent artificial intelligences we meet, is also possibly giving Marjorie Prime its single most technically adept and interesting performance, managing the very subtle, philosopher-bait distinction between "computer you can talk to" and "person" with outright uncanny ease. At this point, I'm on the edge of spoiling things; so let's just say that, in its final coda, it fully embraces its sci-fi conceit at last, in a way that is at once whimsical, darkly hilarious, and (I think) at least as insightful in regards to the humans that it's always been about as it is to the dumb ol' AIs it wasn't.
Score: 8/10
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