Catching up on Park Chan-wook.




Following hallmarks of a neo-noir - somewhat hapless detective taken with a mysterious potential femme fatale, as the plot frequently flirts with temptation and moral compromise - the film's appeal is in subverting much of these tropes throughout, keeping the audience on their toes as to what is actually going on, and ultimately offering something more emotional and philosophical (if not a little melodramatic).  Holding everything firmly in suspense is Park Chan-wook's superb framing, dreamlike editing, hypnotically seductive filmmaking, as well as the excellent leads, Tang Wei and Park Hae-il.

8.5/10




Park Chan-wook's satirical aesthetic isn't nearly as evocative as his more seductive aesthetic, but when his dark comedy is so chaotic and incoherent in contingency as this, it becomes as irresistibly electric.  A class-critique in the mold of Parasite, but whereas that film was fueled by the tension between the affluent elite and the working class, No Other Choice is focused directly on the middle class, and finding no less tension there as this management-level protagonist finds himself equally squeezed and exploited, driven to moral extremes and very poor judgment, all just to maintain his stable sense of social and comfortable stasis in a corporately enforced rat race.  What normal people have to sacrifice so that the wealthy can continue to grow.  It can't be helped.

8/10

I think I loved Decision to Leave, especially after an ex of mine explained the motivations of the female characters actions at the end of the movie to me.

The Secret Agent has become this year's international award-season darling, and quite deservingly so.  "A time of great mischief", set in 1977 during Brazil's (US aided) military dictatorship, the rife corruption is deftly depicted right from its first scene, where a dead man outside a gas station is drawing dogs with its stench while the police ignore the corpse because they're too busy soliciting bribes from random passerbys.  Over the film's 160 minute runtime, there's never a lack of such striking images, a combination of local Carnival flavor, rich cinematography which emulates its '70s era (hopefully we're near the end of the 'desaturation' era - a plague on the past 20 years of cinema), and a long deep bench of equally colorful characters.  There isn't a weak supporting role here, but just a sampling of excellent faces includes Tania Maria, Carloe Francisco, Roberio Diogenes, Roney Villela, Kaoni Venancio.  And Udo Kier in his final role.  Lead actor Walter Moura has already won about a dozen acting awards - including at Cannes, NY Film Critics and the Golden Globe - as the man with a mysterious past seeking underground refuge in his hometown of Recife, while the writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho (also a Cannes winner) deserves praise for balancing between the occasionally brutal and bizarre but never being less than believable.  (Even the fake news story about the "hairy leg" rampage turns out to be true - a concocted cover-up of the police's anti-gay crackdowns.)

Although I wouldn't consider this as substantial criticism, I do have a curiosity over the film's title and its marketing as a "political thriller".  There's definitely a lot of politics, and plenty of thrills, involved, but not so much cat-and-mouse intrigue as a document of suffocating corruption.  But when the document happens to be as thoroughly satisfying as this film is, this is a minor quibble at best.

9/10

Speaking of the Brazilian city of Recife, Kleber Mendonca Filho had previously made a documentary dedicated to the city - also his hometown - called Pictures of Ghosts, which focuses on its reputation for movie houses, including the one which features centrally in Secret Agent (Jaws and The Omen provide significant backdrop in the film), and reflecting Filho's own youth attending these houses and developing his own love of cinema which is so evident in Secret Agent (only his third full-length narrative film).




Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind, which is also set in the '70s and emulates that New Hollywood era of filmmaking, presents an art heist conceit but comes out more like a comedy of incompetence.  In the latter sense, the film is darkly funny, but the fact is that the scheme's unraveling is fairly predictable.  I assume that was Reichardt's intent, because her focus is not on the heist, per se, but on how incredibly short-sighted - down right dumb, if you ask me - this ironically fashioned "mastermind" turns out to be at just about every twist and turn.  Again, as a dark comedy about watching this guy shrivel through such an obviously unwinnable situation is quite amusing, and Reichardt's steady pace and handsome period detail help tremendously, but ultimately this character (played by Josh O'Connor) simply doesn't invite much sympathy or anything else worth investing in him, and the joke of this "individualist" who so weakly flaunts what he considers the norms of the system, or whatever he or Reichardt think he's doing, starts to sour long before his final pathetic scene of trying to rationalize it.  The jazz score gets a bit redundant by that point as well.  There's an awful lot in the film to like, however (it is very funny actually), but nothing very enlightening, if that was what Reichardt was going for.

8/10

Charming true-life tale of an old man addicted to the joys of robbing banks, shot by David Lowery in an equally charming period style, not quite 'New Hollywood' '70s but more like that decade-cusp into the early '80s, somewhere between Straight Time and Melvin and Howard.  Plenty of New Hollywood faces though, with Robert Redford front and center as the jolly robber in what would be his final leading role.  Also Sissy Spacek and Keith Carradine, and just-missed-New Hollywood vets Danny Gover and Tom Waits as Redford's faithful accomplices, forming the dubbed 'Over the Hill Gang' by a press amused by these incorrigible codgers.  Casey Affleck, Lowery's faithful avatar who is one of the more capable actors at believably invoking a '70s style, is the police detective on their trail.

For the most part, the film's old-fashioned (some may say 'corny') charm is enough to carry it through.  There are some obvious quibbles if you think too much about it - maybe put out an APB for an old guy with a huge hearing aid sticking out of his ear?  Were US police departments in the early '80s so inept as to allow eight bank robberies before some cop started investigating (because that cop just happened to be in one of the banks at the time)?  And as warm, in style and nostalgia, as Redford is as the central criminal, he seems cast more for what he represents than as a suitable fit for the character.  His charm precedes him.  He's so assuredly a movie star.  And that hair.  That Robert Redford hair.  What old man in 1981 could maintain that perfect feathering?  Even a scene with Redford in a hospital bed shows not a single strand out of place.  Wouldn't it have been something if he had finally allowed himself to go natural gray?  (The real Forrest Tucker, ftr, was balding.)  I'm tempted to play backseat director and suggest that someone like Seymour Cassel (only a year older than Redford) could have been a better choice, capable of both a ribald glint of eye and a steady underlying cunning, the kind of criminal who exposes neither menace nor desperation.  But, alas, the film probably only got made because Redford lent his name to it, chosen as a swan song project as much as All Is Lost.

Who am I kidding?  This is about as fine a late-career Redford vehicle as we could hope for, and his chemistry with Spacek represents recent screen highs for both of them.

8/10




It's great to see Sam Raimi having fun again, after nearly 20 years in franchise hell, with a nasty little film about a shipwreck between two people who absolutely hate each, allowing Raimi to revel in several over-the-top acts of gruesome indulgence.  It's at its best when we don't really have to care about either of them (he's an asshole; she's kinda crazy).  But this is also one of those films which attempts one of those twist endings which kind of ruins everything before it.  Spoilers aside, I'll just say that sociopathy shouldn't really be considered the acceptable remedy for misogyny.  Kind of like fixing a plumbing problem by burning the house down?  I know this isn't a film I'm supposed to be taking that seriously....but seriously?

7/10




It's a well-worn cliche that films about comedians are never really that funny, as classically epitomized by fare like Punchline, Funny People, The Comedian.  But that really shouldn't be an excuse to not even try, right?  This film, about a middle-aged man facing divorce who decides to take up stand-up comedy, is so ruthlessly unfunny, both in its pathetic domestic scenes as well as in the actual specimens of legitimate stand-up sets it shows, that it makes one wonder why such a well-meaning schlub like Will Arnett - who co-wrote the screenplay but seems to have some intuitive sense of good humor - didn't get director (and co-writer, who has less evidence of any intuitive sense of humor) Bradley Cooper to write some checks for a punch-up or two.  The film tries to use some actual stand-up comedians, and maybe it's telling that the most accomplished comedian shown here, Dave Attell, is cut away from as soon as he steps on stage.  This film could have used even Attell's sock-drawer material.  Instead we don't hear him tell a single joke.  We hear a lot of less funny comedians telling jokes though.

There was exactly one guffaw that I had in this film, and that guffaw had less to do with the joke than it was a reaction to how ridiculous it would be to believe that it was supposedly said in earnest by a grown man, no matter how stoned he's supposed to be.  It has Arnett and Cooper looking at a wall poster of Arnett's wife Laura Dern:

BC: "You can't tell it's her."
WA: "It was taken from behind."
BC: "Well, just turn it around."

Setting aside the failure of its comedy material, and taken strictly on grounds as a film of domestic drama and existential angst, well, the film is still a pretty mediocre effort at best.  Again, more pathetic than pathos.  And contrived.  At least Dern does her best with it, even if she has the indignity of having to play scenes with Peyton Manning.  Again, not funny scenes, serious scenes....with Peyton Manning.  Was everyone depressed when making this tepid puddle of middle-age self-pity?

5/10
 

Rock wrote:

I saw The Old Man and The Gun during TIFF in a theatre full of old ladies who seemed to be swooning all the way through. I imagine they wouldn’t have swooned if Redford were bald.

Not bald, just, you know, hair that looks like a man in their mid-60s (Redford was actually 80 making the film).  Redford has had that same hair since the 1960s.  Same feathered sides, same part.  I swear to god I think in his will he demanded to have it stuffed after he died.  Or maybe before!  Could it be a wig at this point, like some time in the '90s he just had it glazed in place?  

Rock wrote:

I took Send Help’s ending as Raimi suggesting that you need to be a sociopath to climb the corporate ladder. I don’t take it as an endorsement the way I’ve seen others on LB have done.

I want to double down a bit on this a bit, because I don't think this film is as nuanced as, say, Wolf of Wall Street, or other films where a stray interpretation may be more plausible.  I like the sentiment though, because it is that corporate allegory which has made the reality show Survivor so abhorrent to me since its beginning, with "office people" openly, sometimes bragging, modeling their co-worker relationships on the exploitative "alliances" of the ultimately self-serving game.

*some slight spoilers*

But that last scene though definitely gives off the kind of 'brat girl power' vibes where I can see it pretty easily taken that way by those inclined to that messaging.  Just looking at the front page of the film's Rotten Tomatoes page, a review from Sara Michelle Fetters allows that the film is "mean-spirited nastiness" and that it is "far from the darkly comic feminist manifesto its trailers may lead some to believe", but then still she describes Linda's (McAdams) actions as "just-deserts" and "justified hell to pay", and plainly saying that the rich. spoiled and entitled, misogynistic and cruel, CEO happens to "deserve all of the pain, suffering, and unavoidable damnation that’s about to come their way".  Even if we take the definition of "justice" in that atavistic sense of "eye for an eye", it can pretty easily be argued that his corporeal punishment exceeds his own crimes as a petty and pompous asshole.  Again, her sociopathy is being defined here as "justice" for his misogyny and elitism.  And even if we can write him off, because he is such an asshole, this doesn't even begin to excuse her acts against the innocent bystanders like the totally blameless boat captain and the couriers, or the wife, whom we're never really given any information regarding her own feelings or morality.

This review is just one example, from a cursory glance. but I'm betting others will come up.  And while bad takes are plentiful online, I do think the film tries to have it both ways by nodding towards those who would celebrate Linda's "liberation" (ignoring her other issues) while leaving enough bread crumbs for a "corporate critique" defense.  If it is indeed the latter though, then I still have to fault the script for not realizing the potential of this intention because, by the ending, that message has been muddled moot.  (Meet the girl boss, same as the boy boss.) 

It's funny that Fetters credited the screenwriters as being the same team who wrote the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot, as if that's something to be proud of.  Looking it up, this is their first script since they rebooted Baywatch a decade ago.  Yup, I'm calling it.  The film's flaw is just a very poor script.  The positives are that it represents mid-grade Raimi (not nearly as fun as Drag Me To Hell) and serves as a decent primer for some impressive drone-cam cinematography.