Following fifteen years in hibernation, Todd Field came back with Tár, a Cate Blanchett-starring juggernaut posed to either sweep at the Oscars or at least to make enough commotion to remind the public at large what cinema can be about. Among other things.
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As the joke goes, people who are really excited about technology, AI, and who surround themselves with smart gadgets most likely do not work in tech, or at least if they do work in tech, they do not have anything to do with cyber-security. On the other hand, people who do work in tech and who are aware of how these convenient technologies can enable others to negatively impact their lives don’t install Ring doorbells and smart fridges, and they elect not to bug their own houses with Alexa-enabled technologies. They may decide to have a printer, but they might choose to keep a weapon nearby in case it makes a suspicious noise.
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Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun opens with a piece of homemade footage of a young girl interviewing her father. She distracts him from whatever it is he is doing by prodding him about his age, because from the point of view of an eleven-year-old, being in your thirties is effectively equivalent to being a biologically functional fossil. The two have good fun, exchange laughs and then the picture freezes, which is where we realize we have not been watching the home video footage per se, but rather we have been looking at a screen where someone else is playing said footage. And we might just make out this person’s reflection in the TV screen.
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Meet Otto. Otto is a boomer. He’s about to retire from a job he has held for his entire adult life because, following a merger, his old ways did not fit with the future direction of the company. Otto leads a scheduled life. He is a stickler for rules and regulations. Every morning he makes sure cars parked on his residential street have correct parking permits displayed in correct locations. Otto makes sure the gate to his street remains closed because it is not a through-street. Otto always double-checks if recycling is properly sorted and corrects when people dump cans into the paper bin.
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Has Rian Johnson finally found his groove? Having spent the last decade-and-a-half bending genres (Brick, Looper), creatively reinventing cinematic staples at his own peril (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) and refreshing the rather stale and calcified template of a whodunnit mystery (Knives Out), he has finally decided he’d like to dabble in this sandbox for a few more minutes. In fact, this might be where he finds permanent cultural accommodation – if only by way of squatter’s rights – as on top of a deal to produce, write and direct two Knives Out sequels, he has been busy producing and overseeing a Columbo-style TV show Poker Face which is about to be released for public consumption any second now. And if his most recent addition to what is now considered a Knives Out brand is anything t go by, staying within the confines of the whodunnit subgenre was the right choice to make.
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At this point my memory may be conveniently failing me, but I don’t think I ever promised anyone that in the event of Avatar 2 being finally released theatrically, I would ‘do a Herzog’ and eat my own shoe. And even if I did, I am officially pleading amnesia because I don’t think I own a pair of shoes I’d be comfortable enough to cook and consume. There’s not enough thyme in the world to make this experience even remotely acceptable.
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It’s quite frankly impossible to deny that Ruben Östlund’s directorial output – sparse as it may be in quantity – has been consistently delivering both in terms of visceral enjoyment and intellectual engagement engendered by the subject matter the filmmaker has dabbled in. In fact, from Involuntary to The Square, Östlund successfully crafted a string of politically charged satires awash with allegories and teeming with extratextual frustrations consciously imposed upon unsuspecting viewers in order to unsettle and force them to think critically about aspects of their existence they’d rather left alone in the dark.
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Horror as a genre is constantly evolving, perhaps more so than others. Or at the very least, the way it keeps reshaping itself remains quite interesting in that it is both an entity that tirelessly seeks to reinvent itself and one that seeks to retain a firm connection to its roots. Moreover, horror attracts a specific pedigree of filmmakers, many of whom are driven predominantly by a desire to have fun making movie magic happen.
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Wow. Just wow. My expectations were low for this movie but still… It somehow feels like an utter disappointment even with full awareness of the fact that Halloween Ends was bound to be a problematic spectacle.
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One data point is just what it is – a data point. Two data points are the minimum requirement to form a line. And for some reason it seems that quite a lot of critics and casual moviegoers alike decided that two data points are sufficient to form a trend, which is a big no-no for anyone even vaguely aware of how statistics operates as a science. So, in a way, Jordan Peele’s Nope has inadvertently fallen prey to the general public’s lack of awareness that extrapolating from small data sets is at best loaded with uncertainty and most likely completely useless. Because this movie is pretty damn solid, to say the least.
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Flasz On Film 