Since my top 10 is a little soft, I'm trying to fill in some last minute viewings.




Adam Driver is a solid decade too-young to play the middle-age father in the book, so they added some make-up to make him look more like an age-appropriate Steve Coogan or something.  Director Noah Baumbach has a knack for films where the characters have a kind of artificial facade way of speaking their lines, since most of his characters tend to be intelligent neurotics, and this carries over here as well.  It gives the opening half-hour an odd tone that may be off-putting to viewers unfamiliar with him or the source novel.  The artifice is not very engaging, and the characters don't seem initially believable.  The book is famously "unfilmable", partly because the substance that makes it believable is in the frequent digressions and inner monologue.  Without that, we're only left with the characters' fake-sounding dialogue as if they're satisfying their artificial existence, neurotically fearing that eventually the facade will crack, and this inevitably helps as the film plays out.  One thing that the film manages to innovate from the book is that its setting, the then-contemporary 1980s, is used to create a pleasantly fake nostalgic shell, because author DeLillo was incapable of knowing then that the 1980s would eventually become a halcyon ideal for future generations.  So the film's 80-isms, subtley incorporated usually through background TV screens, seem less like a gimmick and more in service of the overall neurotic compulsion to idealize their rather banal suburban and affluent guise of security.

It seems like a gimmick, as well, to have this film made in the aftermath of the pandemic, considering the book's prophetic take on the fragility of society's stability in the face of an unknown and spontaneous crisis.  Much of it comes off as surprisingly relevant even after 30 years.  Obviously the fear of death, and the many decrepit symptoms of age which accompany it, is pretty universal.  The absence of faith in a consumerist society, and the ridiculous substitute for faith that consumerism provides, is hanging on tightly as a prescient concern.

8/10





Unfortunately, the parody of musical bio-pics, Walk Hard, has failed to dissuade Hollywood and American audiences from getting suckered, year after year, with yet more cliche driven bullshit regarding famous talented goofballs and idiots.  Unfortunately, we need another film to catch up on the latest ego-driven bullshit cliches, from James Brown to Freddie Mercury to Elton John to Aretha Franklin to Whitney Houston.  It never ends.  This fine, fantastic motion picture tries to end it all with another round of scathing cliche-sanitation.  But we all know that we'll need another one in a another decade or so because people are simply too stupid to understand poor narrative nutrition and diabetic catharisis.  They may even laugh at this film and pretend that it isn't at their expense.

Appropriately, the Weird Al biopic is a parody of biopics in the most absurd proportion imaginable.  Not quite as over-the-top as Walk Hard, it still hits all of the cliched notes, with slightly different, sillier lyrics.  Little wonder that Weird Al would request that he be played by Harry Potter, but only with glam muscles that pop.  Weird Al's music has always had the quality of being stupid in the way that only smart people can conceive stupidity.  And even if the third act does introduce something approximating sincere sentiment, it's quickly shot down like John Lennon on a cold New York sidewalk.  The way music docs were meant to be shot down. 

8.5/10
 

You watched Forced Entry and every Planet of the Apes movie?
What a masochist.
 

I suppose after watching Water Power, I have no excuse for not having seen Pink Flamingos. Now I just need a copy to magically materialize in my hands (or the Criterion Channel).

I held off watching it for a while for obvious reasons, but the appeal of a Taxi Driver style premise combined with its bizarre popularity on Letterboxd (compared to the average vintage porno) and my interest in Shaun Costello’s career was too great to resist. I figured I would be sufficiently numbed by Force Entry to get through it without too much pain. It actually is mostly a much easier watch than the other movie… except when those scenes happen, at which point you should reach for a barf bag, ALT+TAB to another window or just look away.

Last edited by Rock (1/04/2023 2:51 pm)

I should clarify that the apes and rapes were not in the same movie.

(Feces. The reason is feces.)

R0g3r M00r3 R00lz

A disappointment.  Things are not looking good when the central metaphor of the film is already a well-worn cliche (the joke that cruise ships are floating toilets), but that shouldn't excuse its lazy climax of simply making the cliche literal.  And when we're literally wallowing in the shit of the rich, do we really need Woody Harrelson's pedantic polemic on top of that, as if maybe someone somewhere was still having trouble understanding the point?  The film's biggest liability is its obviousness, as satire or social comment, resting on the thematic innovations of 80-year-old films like L'Atalante and Rules of the Game, flirting (and failing) with Altman-esque ensemble dynamics, basic and ultimately trivial politics (Russian capitalist vs. American communist), and boofed with a presumption of self-importance that some viewers will mistake for sophistication.  Besides the gastrointestinal graphics (already shown in the trailer), the film adds nothing truly innovative to the canon of classic class satires that have come before it.  Even discounting older work from Bunuel or Godard as possibly outdated (are they?) for our modern social predicaments, there's absolutely nothing that this film offers that wasn't already executed with more style, humor, excitement and creativity in 2019's Parasite.  The comparison actually proves embarrassing.

The film isn't entirely a wash.  There are some genuinely funny bits, some crafty camerawork.  There's Charlbi Dean.  The centerpiece dinner scene is delightfully garish, and the film's best contribution is providing some of the more believable vomiting, long a difficult gag to depict.  But there's also a completely useless 20-minute prologue, caricatures rather than characters, and an ending which happens to be objectively and indefensibly bullshit, no point or punchline, just an exhaustion of imagination.

6/10




Now here's a class satire that actually stings, mostly because it never pretends to be a satire.  It's more of a psychological horror film that unravels class pretension.  Cate Blanchett is a brave actress, who bears the kind of cold facade that some viewers may see initially as the exact kind of controlled and artificial histrionics that prestigious Oscar-winning actors are ridiculed for performing, but in this case, as the film inevitably reveals, this false affect is the character.  Lydia Tar is a highly manicured persona, a manipulative megalomaniac, who is facing a creeping crisis of cracks in this facade, her repressed anxiety manifesting as bizarre dreams, hallucinatory whispers and fraught suspicions of being found out for the person she may actually be.  The illusions and lies of a high-functioning control-freak can lead to contrivance and cruelty, and a chilling desperation to maintain that control in the face of consequence.

Unlike Triangle, this film isn't afraid to confront its complications, there are no coherent distinctions between personal and political.  Lydia Tar is not an unsympathetic sociopath, despite occasionally engaging in toxic control and defenses.  There's also a parallel cruelty directed at her, the resentments and snobbery of class-climbers.  Manipulation becomes a currency of class insecurity.  Some critics are confused about these complications, but anyone who feels that this film is an indictment of #metoo or cancel culture has completely missed the point of the film, and may actually be exposing themselves as those who are indicted by it.

9/10
 

There are so many films from this year that I have yet to see.  A brief list is already intimidating:

Aftersun
After Yang
Holy Spider
No Bears
Great Freedom
Please Baby Please
Benediction
Eternal Daughter
EO
Stars At Noon
Nope
Master Gardener
Saint Omer
Decision to Leave
Hunt
Coma
Enys Men
Showing Up
Pacification
.......

I'm exhausted just writing this.
 

Rock wrote:

I’ve been bad about seeing new releases on the whole, but I should make a point to see Tar eventually.

I don't want to appear to be pushing too hard or anything, as we all have our schedules and queues to deal with.

But!  This is one of those movies where I'm chomping at the bit to discuss in more detail, but the obvious problem is that the film is a minefield of spoiler territory.  This is a major reason why the film is so tantalizing, is in the discovery of the little mysteries and details it offers.  I can only hope that, given the film's density and its emerging prominence in the award-season discussion, more people will be compelled to seek out the film in order to be a part of the discussion.

I watched the film a second time, which required a lot of recontextualizing information from the film's first half under the light of its later revelations which, on first watch, these details seemed so mundane that they didn't even register as being worth keeping in mind.  The film is also filled with cultural references that are sometimes quite oblique (there's an obscure book called Challenge which is shown, and it's a real book which has subject matter extremely relevant but only if you're familiar with the book or only after looking the book up afterward will it make any sense.)  The film opens with "Cura Mente", a vocal in the style of the Amazonian tribe Shipibo-Conibo, who are briefly mentioned during a flush of expository details about Tar's academic research work.  The connection is never explicated, and can only be made (by a layman) after learning and putting these details in place, and, again, this connection carries significant symbolic importance to her character.  The film was designed to be engaged with in such a way, not merely watched.

I did see where there's a Tar thread on movieforums, but it suffers from the typical intellectual stagnance of that site.  Only Minio's or Little Ash's contributions have amounted to much.  Obviously a sociopath like Agrippina would see Tar as some kind of heroic triumph and initially ignore its horror elements.  And again with this goddamn Gideon58, calling the film "pretentious" (unable to see pretention as an essential character element), complaining about the length, and saying really dumb stuff like "for a movie about music and musicians, the film barely had any music score, except for what was produced by the orchestra".  I swear I'm going to start ripping hair from my head if I read very much more from this idiot.

But Little Ash provided an excellent analysis, absolutely riddled with spoilers, of the film's mysteries, which I don't fully buy in all of the particulars, but no one is demanding that there is any singular truth here:

But what does it all mean? What really happens? Is it all a dream? I admit that I don’t know, nor do I think Todd Field wants us to “know.” Tár isn’t a puzzle box, where the answer clicks into place at the end and we understand, at last, who Keyser Söze was. Think of this film, instead, as a journey through a haunted forest, like the ones the Grimms wrote about—like the one where Lydia hears that scream. We wend our way down ever-darker paths, becoming less and less certain what is real and what is not. By presenting the reality of Tár as increasingly subjective, Field is demanding that we question everything we see on that big screen, and receive the film as a mix of plot and psychology, incident and nightmare—all coming back around to the life, the dreams, and the fears of the incomparable Lydia Tár.

And finally I'll point one thing from that article which is the closest to being considered as a true spoiler - a hint at the nature of the film we're watching - and a detail that I admit completely eluded me on the initial watch.  Although I don't think this is such a fatal spoiler as to ruin the film - it may even add to its enticement - it may prejudice to some extent how one enters into it.  Therefore, I'll utilize Rampop's Spoiler Thread for further detail.