KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese (based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann)
Spoilers: N/A
Showing posts with label holocausts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holocausts. Show all posts
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
American Gothic Week: The discovery of witches
WITCHFINDER GENERAL
aka The Conqueror Worm aka Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General
1968
Directed by Michael Reeves
Written by Tom Baker and Michael Reeves
Spoilers: moderate
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Is this the end of the world, the death of the light?
A HIDDEN LIFE
Don't call it a comeback, but even so, A Hidden Life really is the best Terry since The Tree of Life, and it might be even better than that.
2019
Written and directed by Terrence Malick
Spoiler alert: inapplicable
Monday, December 16, 2019
The bad first date hall of fame
QUEEN & SLIM
An imagistic journey to, well, a certain kind of freedom, I guess. Queen & Slim is gut-wrenching and bittersweet, current and sadly timeless alike.
2019
Directed by Melina Matsoukas
Written by Lena Waithe and James Frey
Spoiler alert: moderate
Sunday, January 7, 2018
And here's to Nagasaki, always a bridesmaid, never a bride
IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD
A microscopic take on the defining tragedy of modern Japan, In This Corner of the World combines great beauty with great horror; but it turns out, in the end, that its chiefest concern all along was just telling a story about life. Sounds lame, I know, but it was pretty great.
2016 Japan/2017 USA
Directed by Sunao Katabuchi
Written by Chie Uratani and Sunao Katabutchi (based on the comic by Fumiyo Kono)
With Rena Nounen (Suzu Urano), Yoshimasa Hasoya (Shusaku Hojo), Keiko Kuromura (Minori Omi), Harumi Kuromura (Natsuki Inaba), San Hojo (Mayumi Shintani), Entaro Hojo (Shigeru Ushiyama), and Tetsu Mizuhara (Daisuke Ono)
Spoiler alert: mild; spoilers are severe for a famous anime made in 1988, however
Spoiler alert: mild; spoilers are severe for a famous anime made in 1988, however
Saturday, February 4, 2017
As previously established, that was when I was carrying you
SILENCE
Shall we call it "magisterial"? That's as good a word as any for a movie that's this rich and rigorous and (not to put to fine a point on it) honestly great—and yet is also long, and slow, and coolly intellectual, occasionally to a fault.
2016
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese (based on the novel by Shusaku Endo)
With Andrew Garfield (Sebastiao Rodrigues), Adam Driver (Francisco Garupe), Yosuke Kubozuka (Kichijiro), Tadanobu Asano (The Interpreter), Issey Ogata (Inoue Masashige), and Liam Neeson (Cristovao Ferraira)
Spoiler alert: moderate
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Reviews from gulag: Tom and the Holograms
2016 keeps rolling along, despite our best efforts! Here's three more for the pyre: The Birth of a Nation, De Palma, and A Hologram For the King.
In the early 19th century, Nat Turner (Nate Parker) is born on a slave plantation in Virginia. He grows up, and comes to seize ahold of a grandiose, annihilating vision of racial justice: the eradication of the slaveholding class of the American South. With a band of followers, he pursues his dream to its foregone conclusion, namely his own execution, but in the process he manages to shock the system he despised, and his name and his fame (or, perhaps, his infamy) live on.
Probably the single best thing about The Birth of a Nation—and I've got to warn you, this is pretty unfortunate—is still just its title. That title is the cleverest fucking thing, but when it's also the cleverest thing Nate Parker ever gets up to here, it really must register as an estimable pity that it didn't get to be the title for a much better movie—one that, you know, actually managed to earn the subversive force of it.
Instead, Nation turns out to be Nate Parker's one man show: a somewhat aimless, even somewhat artless exercise in building in his own brand. Perhaps needless to say, that doesn't really do the material much justice, social or otherwise. It is certainly insufficient to overcome one's feeling that Parker himself is a very bad person, and this goes double when something like one-third of Parker's movie is devoted to a slavery-was-an-American-rape-camp narrative, giving Nation the same extraordinarily bitter flavor of a picture like (for example) Polanski's Repulsion—wherein your response is unavoidably conditioned by your extrinsic knowledge that the man bringing you this tale is, himself, far too deeply compromised to have the moral right to tell it. (Shucks. And after I promised myself I wouldn't mention any of that business, too.)
Instead, Nation turns out to be Nate Parker's one man show: a somewhat aimless, even somewhat artless exercise in building in his own brand. Perhaps needless to say, that doesn't really do the material much justice, social or otherwise. It is certainly insufficient to overcome one's feeling that Parker himself is a very bad person, and this goes double when something like one-third of Parker's movie is devoted to a slavery-was-an-American-rape-camp narrative, giving Nation the same extraordinarily bitter flavor of a picture like (for example) Polanski's Repulsion—wherein your response is unavoidably conditioned by your extrinsic knowledge that the man bringing you this tale is, himself, far too deeply compromised to have the moral right to tell it. (Shucks. And after I promised myself I wouldn't mention any of that business, too.)
The fundamental problem with Nation isn't just that it was helmed by Nate Parker, the Bad Man, however. For one thing, there are more people involved in a movie than just its director, even if there are somewhat fewer in this case than there usually would be, once you take Parker's position as Nation's writer-director-producer-star-and-scenarist into account.
But even then, let's be crystal clear: the fact that Parker is the star of his own movie is definitely a problem, and not for any external reason on this count, either. Rather, it's because whatever acting prowess the man might possess—I rather enjoyed his supporting turn in Beyond the Lights—it has very obviously not been honed to the level it needs to be at for this particular role. Thus does Parker provide his presumably-complicated hero, a man decried by many as an actual madperson, with roughly one single note per any given scene throughout the picture; and, because Parker evidently lacks much in the way of imagination, that note is almost permanently set to "theatrically angry at the world," except in the scenes where that note is "noble martyr"; and, of course, there is a smattering other scenes, wherein there aren't any notes to speak of at all. Finally, there is always a certain lack of the heavenly fire you'd hope for, even in the notes Parker gets right.
So, seriously, I can't even tell anymore: should I be annoyed that the best performance in Nation comes either from noted white boy Armie Hammer, as Turner's master who thinks himself kind, or from Roger Guenveur Smith, as the Turner plantation's senior house negro who thinks himself wise? You know, as opposed to the deeply, deeply backgrounded ensemble of abused and desperate field slaves, not to mention the film's protagonist?
The point is, whatever cosmetic indications of hubris that Nation no doubt displays—e.g., the filmmaker's name showing up in the credits roughly eighty times, and that's before you even get to the smaller print—the most glaring overreach of all is when he decided that Nate Parker was the man destined to portray Nat Turner. (And this was clearly meant to be. I mean, gosh, they share the same Christian name and everything.)
So, seriously, I can't even tell anymore: should I be annoyed that the best performance in Nation comes either from noted white boy Armie Hammer, as Turner's master who thinks himself kind, or from Roger Guenveur Smith, as the Turner plantation's senior house negro who thinks himself wise? You know, as opposed to the deeply, deeply backgrounded ensemble of abused and desperate field slaves, not to mention the film's protagonist?
The point is, whatever cosmetic indications of hubris that Nation no doubt displays—e.g., the filmmaker's name showing up in the credits roughly eighty times, and that's before you even get to the smaller print—the most glaring overreach of all is when he decided that Nate Parker was the man destined to portray Nat Turner. (And this was clearly meant to be. I mean, gosh, they share the same Christian name and everything.)
But, as I was saying: the fundamental problem with Nation isn't Parker, the Bad Man, it's Parker, the Mediocre Director. He has no solid idea what his film ought to be, and it inevitably becomes something of a slurry (probably not intentionally), sometimes a very gripping slurry based on the content alone. However, it just as often invites comparisons that it cannot easily survive: very unfortunately, Nation spends almost all of its two hour runtime laboring in the shadow of its immediate predecessor in bondage, McQueen's grim, methodical portrait of a human being being broken, 12 Years a Slave; and then, once Turner's rebellion has (finally) arrived, it leaves McQueen's shadow only to cross over into the penumbra of the other big slavery movie of recent years—namely, Tarantino's unhinged, borderline-pornographic historical revenge fantasy, Django Unchained.
Well, in the end, Nation splits the difference between those two extraordinarily different movies, and that's just no place for any film to be, unless "resolutely middle-of-the-road" was, in fact, always Parker's goal. Indeed, Nation escapes a serious competition with Tarantino's picture solely because it appears to have no opinion to share about the Nat Turner Rebellion in the first place, except that a rebellion of some sort was justified, which is not necessarily something anyone needs a movie to tell them.
Therefore it cannot simply be a joyous explosion of rage, leavened with tragedy thanks to our foreknowledge that Turner's rebellion shall not succeed; nor can it be a troubled examination of the wisdom and morality of what Turner actually did (namely, annihilate families, including children—though, interestingly, not always!). In fact, once Nation arrives at the Rebellion itself, it starts to come perilously close to refusing to function on the level of basic storytelling, presenting the events of Turner's 48-hour war as a rushed-through montage that keeps getting more and more elliptical as it goes on—and never to much of any cognizable purpose, either. It is a baffling choice; and, ultimately, the story of the Rebellion shatters entirely in the editing room. It is something of a surprise, given that the rest of the film has been nothing much more than a sturdy progression of things-that-happened; it is not much of a surprise, however, that in very short order Parker's quotidian direction reasserts itself, and Turner gets his Braveheart finale.
The result, sadly, is a film that is possibly already a little too long for the mere thing that it winds up being—a competent but never compelling biography (and not a terribly accurate one, if I'm not mistaken)—and which is also vastly too short for what that written-in-blood title advertises it as—namely, an epic historical fiction that actually has something subversive and edgy to say about race, either then or now.
So why does Nation not grapple more forcefully with its questions of tactics and morality? Indeed, why does it do so precious little with what it does have? Is it because it is, effectively, Oscarsploitation, assuming itself to be important because of its subject matter, rather than on its merits? Possibly so. Another explanation presents itself, however. That's because it's Parker's very first feature length film as a director—and first-time directors don't typically cut their teeth on politically-charged prestige films about difficult characters for a good reason. Parker acquits himself well enough behind the camera—he certainly has a halfway-decent eye for the tableau, if not for how to place them within a sequence to make them truly land—but he has no idea what to focus on. Thus we get furtive glimpses of Turner's visions, when the full Ken Russell Freakout might have sold us on Turner's unerring certainty that he was on a bona fide mission from God. We get all the ugly interstitial scenes of slavery we could want, in order to give us all the old time holocaustal catharsis we could need, but Parker tends to shy away from letting his film truly absorb the violence inherent in his scenario. And we get the vague sensation that Parker is setting up Turner as the man who fired the first shots in the great war of liberation to come, yet, somewhat curiously—given the climate of 2016—there is not a whole lot of suggestion that this was a struggle that concluded without the fullest possible satisfaction.
Even so, the most redemptively cinematic moment in Nation's whole two hour span is its very final image: a match-dissolve from a black child to a black man, wearing the Union blue thirty years down the line. It is the littlest bit trite—though it is perhaps somewhat less trite, when you know precisely who is growing up to be whom. Either way, it does have a legitimate power to it—the kind of power the rest of the movie doesn't actually seem that interested in wielding.
But even then, if that's where this is all heading—"isn't it nice that the Civil War happened?" (and, yes, it was!)—then what we have is just about the safest movie about Nat Turner a man could possibly make. And, sure, a pretty decent one, at that.
So, if I have regrettably done very little but complain about the thing, it's only because the substantial good that Nation offers is just not very interesting to talk about. That's because—let's say it again—it's so fucking safe: from the way it redacts its chosen subject matter, to the way Parker services his vision of a bloody rebellion, even to the way that it characterizes Turner's breaking point. It is scarcely good enough to be safe, I'm afraid, and in its essential tidiness, you almost wish it were a grasping, stupid, ambitious mess, instead of being safe and just okay. Given its cool reception, I wouldn't be surprised if Parker himself wishes that, too.
Score: 6/10
Therefore it cannot simply be a joyous explosion of rage, leavened with tragedy thanks to our foreknowledge that Turner's rebellion shall not succeed; nor can it be a troubled examination of the wisdom and morality of what Turner actually did (namely, annihilate families, including children—though, interestingly, not always!). In fact, once Nation arrives at the Rebellion itself, it starts to come perilously close to refusing to function on the level of basic storytelling, presenting the events of Turner's 48-hour war as a rushed-through montage that keeps getting more and more elliptical as it goes on—and never to much of any cognizable purpose, either. It is a baffling choice; and, ultimately, the story of the Rebellion shatters entirely in the editing room. It is something of a surprise, given that the rest of the film has been nothing much more than a sturdy progression of things-that-happened; it is not much of a surprise, however, that in very short order Parker's quotidian direction reasserts itself, and Turner gets his Braveheart finale.
The result, sadly, is a film that is possibly already a little too long for the mere thing that it winds up being—a competent but never compelling biography (and not a terribly accurate one, if I'm not mistaken)—and which is also vastly too short for what that written-in-blood title advertises it as—namely, an epic historical fiction that actually has something subversive and edgy to say about race, either then or now.
So why does Nation not grapple more forcefully with its questions of tactics and morality? Indeed, why does it do so precious little with what it does have? Is it because it is, effectively, Oscarsploitation, assuming itself to be important because of its subject matter, rather than on its merits? Possibly so. Another explanation presents itself, however. That's because it's Parker's very first feature length film as a director—and first-time directors don't typically cut their teeth on politically-charged prestige films about difficult characters for a good reason. Parker acquits himself well enough behind the camera—he certainly has a halfway-decent eye for the tableau, if not for how to place them within a sequence to make them truly land—but he has no idea what to focus on. Thus we get furtive glimpses of Turner's visions, when the full Ken Russell Freakout might have sold us on Turner's unerring certainty that he was on a bona fide mission from God. We get all the ugly interstitial scenes of slavery we could want, in order to give us all the old time holocaustal catharsis we could need, but Parker tends to shy away from letting his film truly absorb the violence inherent in his scenario. And we get the vague sensation that Parker is setting up Turner as the man who fired the first shots in the great war of liberation to come, yet, somewhat curiously—given the climate of 2016—there is not a whole lot of suggestion that this was a struggle that concluded without the fullest possible satisfaction.
Even so, the most redemptively cinematic moment in Nation's whole two hour span is its very final image: a match-dissolve from a black child to a black man, wearing the Union blue thirty years down the line. It is the littlest bit trite—though it is perhaps somewhat less trite, when you know precisely who is growing up to be whom. Either way, it does have a legitimate power to it—the kind of power the rest of the movie doesn't actually seem that interested in wielding.
But even then, if that's where this is all heading—"isn't it nice that the Civil War happened?" (and, yes, it was!)—then what we have is just about the safest movie about Nat Turner a man could possibly make. And, sure, a pretty decent one, at that.
So, if I have regrettably done very little but complain about the thing, it's only because the substantial good that Nation offers is just not very interesting to talk about. That's because—let's say it again—it's so fucking safe: from the way it redacts its chosen subject matter, to the way Parker services his vision of a bloody rebellion, even to the way that it characterizes Turner's breaking point. It is scarcely good enough to be safe, I'm afraid, and in its essential tidiness, you almost wish it were a grasping, stupid, ambitious mess, instead of being safe and just okay. Given its cool reception, I wouldn't be surprised if Parker himself wishes that, too.
Score: 6/10
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Steven Spielberg, part XXIV: D-Day Plus 26,051
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
I said to myself, "Self, let's not focus on the opening 21 minute battle sequence, because everyone else has already done that." So, go ahead and just guess what the first thousand words are about.
1998
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Robert Rodat
With Tom Hanks (Capt. Miller), Tom Sizemore (Sgt. Horvath), Edward Burns (Pvt. Reiben), Barry Pepper (Pvt. Jackson), Adam Goldberg (Pvt. Mellish), Vin Diesel (Pvt. Caparzo), Giovanni Ribisi (T/4 Medic Wade), Jeremy Davies (Cpl. Upham), Dennis Farina (Lt. Col. Anderson), Paul Giamatti (Sgt. Hill), Ted Danson (Capt. Hamill), Jeorg Stadler ("Steamboat Willie"), Nathan Fillion (Pvt. James F. Ryan of Minnesota), and Matt Damon (Pvt. James F. Ryan of Iowa)
Spoiler alert: high
Friday, April 15, 2016
Steven Spielberg, part XXIII: This... is how far I've come
AMISTAD
Our director takes on slavery, and it's far better than you likely remember.
1997
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by David Franzoni
With Djimon Hounsou (Cinque), Matthew McConaughey (Roger Sherman Baldwin), Morgan Freeman (Theodore Joadson), Stellan Skarsgaard (Lewis Tappan), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Ens. James Covey), Anthony Hopkins (Sen. John Quincy Adams), Razaaq Adati (Yamba), Peter Firth (Capt. Fitzgerald), Jeremy Northam (Judge Coglin), Pete Postlethwaite (U.S. District Attorney William S. Holabird), Anna Paquin (Queen Isabella II of Spain), and Nigel Hawthorne (Pres. Martin Van Buren)
Spoiler alert: N/A
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Steven Spielberg, part XXI: I could have done more
SCHINDLER'S LIST
The Serious Spielberg's magnum opus comes also in the form of one of his most profound and powerful emotion machines, in what can only be called one of the greatest historical dramas ever made.
1993
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Steven Zaillian (based on the novel Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally)
With Liam Neeson (Oskar Schindler), Ben Kingsley (Itzhak Stern), Caroline Goodall (Emilie Schindler), Embeth Davidtz (Helen Hirsch), and Ralph Fiennes (SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Amon Goeth)
Spoiler alert: N/A
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
The reason for the season
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
Did the militant atheist enjoy spending the afternoon of his last day off watching a right-wing Christian fundamentalist film about humanity's inherent worthlessness in the absence of God? The answer may surprise you! Especially if you don't look at the tags!
2004
Directed by Mel Gibson
Written by Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson (based on the books by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John)
With Jim Caviezel (Yeshua), Maya Morgenstern (Maryam), Luca Lionello (Yehudah), Hristo Shopov (Pontius Pilate), Francesco De Vito (Shimon), Christo Jivkov (Yochanan), and Monica Belluci (Magdalen)
Spoiler alert: N/A
Saturday, November 23, 2013
I wish John Brown had nuclear weapons
12 YEARS A SLAVE
The feel bad movie of the year! It's entirely possible, even probable, that I appear to have stolen that, though I did make it up; but that's because it is the most obvious damned thing you could say about this great movie. And it may not be true.
2013
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by John Ridley (based on the book by Solomon Northrup)
With Chiwetel Ejiofor (Solomon Northrup), Michael Fassbender (Edwin Epps), Lupita Nyong'o (Patsey), Benedict Cumberbatch (Ford), and Brad Pitt (the Magical Caucasian)
Spoiler alert: N/A
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