Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Wrestling The Bear
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
2022 Catch-up: Men, Deep Water, Resurrection, Dr. Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, NOPE
Resurrection
has two stellar performances (Rebecca Hall continuing to be one of
my favorite working actors and Tim Roth unnecessarily proving he needs to
be in...everything) but it's hideous to look at and, I guess fittingly, we watch a woman have a meltdown for almost two hours. It's a pornographically miserable slog. The ending has been compared to Malignant, described as "insane" and "bonkers" but those claims are egregious lies. The ending is actually a cheap, predictable copout chasing the stale sensibilities of 2010s
horror, which makes the whole experience ultimately one-note. It's agonizing
watching her PTSD consume her and that's...all there is. I doubt this character would be as
interesting if Rebecca Hall didn't have the reins - I had similar issues
with MEN (which, these two movies share a lot of topical topography,
though MEN is much more visually and hilariously bold). There's some provocative shit here, just not enough of it. C/C-
WandaVision
is the MCU's best piece of work; it's nuanced, challenging, moving,
cathartic, creative, and uncharacteristically weird. Multiverse Of
Madness is the numbskull sequel that turns the colors pale. Wanda
is no longer an antiheroine who sparks debate and adoration in equal
measure, here they swing the pendulum to straight-up capital-V Villain. The
MCU has, rightfully, earned a reputation for its weak villains and, with her oil-soaked face amidst
her dreadful red eyes (and sometimes Raimi has her looking
like a sleep paralysis demon) and her perpetual body count, Wanda is a formidable baddie in spite of her thin and redundant characterization. Raimi makes sure that every death is fucking memorable, too, with
some dazzlingly ghoulish [PG-13] violence. Wanda rips
through everyone like an unholy combo of Carrie White and Jason
Voorhees. Seeing her massacre every notable cameo right after
their manufactured cheer moments was worth the price of admission. Raimi brings the kind of style and personality
(dissolves, match-cuts, POV shots, swirls of color and shadow, camp,
gags) that this studio has stamped out for its entire filmography. The script is too dumb
and too bland for Raimi but he and Danny Elfman make the best of a bad situation. I'm indifferent to literally every other aspect of this fucking movie. C
I've seen NOPE 4 times; it's the movie of the summer and one of the best of this fresh decade. I have no hesitation in declaring it a new classic. It's across-the-board impressive; Peele is a real-deal bonafide filmmaking talent who's ambitious, values originality, and balances tones like a dab-hand juggler. This movie is so fucking enchanting, tense, scary, funny, and thematically dense. The cgi is seamless and reminds me of the pure movie magic of Spielberg's heyday with some of the most gargantuan visuals I've experienced in the theater; I don't wanna leave the AMC when it's over. I could keep going but it would either be an obsessive ADHD nightmare rabbit-hole or a repetitive collection of synonyms for "good movie, me love it forever." I'll spare you. A+
The Music, Just the Music: Dennis the Menace
So much to talk about — too much — when it comes to Dennis the Menace (said nobody ever). I could talk about the iconic casting, the flawless comic timing, the razor sharp editing, the polychromatic cinematography, the picturesque compositions, the dynamic camerwork, the Demme-esque close-ups and inserts, the fact that it’s the best movie Nick Castle was ever involved with, but I wanna focus on the music — just the music — which may very well be the movie’s one towering strength above all others.
In general, I don’t often dwell on all-time favorite performances, cinematography, editing, etc. Partly because I can’t, in good faith, abstract those things from their intended contexts and compare them to one another. And it’s also partly because, frankly, I just don’t find it to be an interesting intellectual exercise. But I think about favorite scores quite often — more often than almost anything else in movies. This is due, obviously, to the fact that movie music takes on a life of its own outside the film in question, and it’s also because, well, music is arguably the most cinematic thing about cinema. If you ask Brett Easton Ellis he’ll say that cinema is defined by cinematography and story structure; if you ask(ed) Kubrick, he’d say it’s defined by editing. Me? I say movies are defined by music, which is such a nonsensical and paradoxical statement that it must be true.
Favorite Film Scores is a topic I’ve revisited over and over again throughout my life, usually unconsciously. Before I ever made a single “Favorite Movies” list, I was already in the habit of instinctively crafting “Favorite Movie Music” lists. At various points in my life, my favorite film score was Terminator 2, or The Thin Blue Line, or The Conversation. Recently, it’s Dennis the Menace.
I said I’d steer clear of talking about directing, editing, etc, but the reality is that this movie demands a comprehensive, holistic assessment when singling out any one element; like all great cinema, everything in the film has a life of its own, yet can’t be abstracted from anything else. In other words, the movie is a dance, not unlike Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love, except that it’s better (yeah I said it). It moves at such a rhythmic pace that it might as well have a time signature, comparable to Scorsese’s output at the time, as well as a lot of other lesser movies. The overall aesthetic of the film is a (literally) surreal timewarp, a seamless blend of modernity and old Hollywood affectations, situating it as the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed nephew to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. And that’s where Jerry Goldsmith comes in...
What Goldsmith did here, as far as I’m concerned, is at least as good as anything John Williams has ever produced, if not better. Compositionally, it falls somewhere between Midnight Cowboy and the Imperial March, and is just as instantaneously recognizable: the mischievous-yet-innocent harmonica paired with the playfully sinister horns, anxious strings, and plucky woodwinds. I can’t imagine a more timeless evocation of a breezy summer day in white suburbia. In particular, the theme for Switchblade Sam is a tightrope balancing act of villainous and funny. Whimsy this potent could’ve single-handedly saved Little Rascals from itself or made me into a Macaulay Culkin fan. Instead, Mason Gamble will forever be my Kevin McCallister.