Breaking the Waves (1996)

  It took me almost two weeks to get through this movie and I hated every second of that time.  I had added it to my queue because it's one of those Serious Art Films that people like to reference.  Also, I've never watched anything by Lars Von Trier and people (critics, mostly, I don't know any actual people who have ever mentioned his name) talk about him like he's some Danish genius.

Bess (Emily Watson) is a young woman from a very religious and conservative village in the remote part of Scotland.  Somehow, she meets and decides to marry Jan (Stellan Skarsgaard), an oil rig worker.  Bess is extremely co-dependent and clingy when Jan has to return to the rig and makes an impulse prayer to God --who talks back to her in her own voice-- that Jan come back early.  Jan is subsequently severely injured in an accident which leads Bess to believe that she is responsible.  Delirious and depressed from a serious head wound, Jan tells her to move on and find someone else to be with.  Bess interprets this to mean that if she fucks other dudes, Jan will be happy and be completely cured of his injuries.

All of the pullquotes on the poster and the description paragraph talk about the "transcendent power of faith" and love and paint this glowing, ethereal portrait.  They are full of shit.  This is about the exploitation of women's bodies and their pain.

The cinematography is hazy and jaundiced, which I can only assume is a deliberate choice.  It's a two and a half hour cuckold fantasy and it draaaaaaaaags.  Do you remember the gross yellow Nick Stahl serial killer from Sin City?  Imagine that but as a movie, and you'll be pretty close.  Also, this movie brings my total count of Skarsgaard Penises Seen up to 2, which I could have lived without.

Are there any redeeming qualities?  Well, Emily Watson is phenomenal.  This was her debut film and she pours herself into the role.  The title cards are pretty, like shifting Impressionist paintings, and the accompanying song cues are good.  That's it.  That's all I liked.

Yeah, but is it Art?  Of course it is.  I personally hated it, but in ways that I could write an entire dissertation and have debates about the intersection of patriarchy and religion, the exploitation of vulnerable women, sexual violence, and mental illness.  The kind of stuff you would take in an undergrad class.  I would just never recommend it for casual watching.

It's streaming on the Criterion channel currently.

Black Sheep (2018)

This was another film I had been putting off because of the tagline.  It's only 26 minutes so I finally toughed it out but I'm really grateful it's over and currently has no plans to be made into a full-length feature.

Cornelius (Kai Francis Lewis) is London-born of Nigerian descent.  After a boy of the same background and age is murdered in a very high-profile incident, Cornelius' family moves to Essex to get away from the dangers of the city.  Unfortunately, Essex is even more violently racist and Cornelius finds himself utterly surrounded by people who hate him on sight.  Rather than risk constant bodily harm and psychological torment, he begins a path of assimilation, lightening his skin and buying colored contacts in an effort to be accepted by the white supremacists.

It's a jarring portrait of the lengths of cognitive dissonance humans will go to survive.  Unfortunately, I'm guessing it's also a daily process for many, many people of color in Caucasian-dominated spaces.  In that sense, the film doesn't really have anything new to say, nor does it show how Cornelius managed to escape that life, or his struggles to regain his sense of identity.  It is a moving, personal account, interspersed with dramatic recreations to underscore the narration.

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

   I have put off writing this post for literal days.  It has been so hard to really distill my thoughts about this movie, which is odd considering it's a fairly straightforward documentary.

Jiro is 85-years-old and still goes to work at his small sushi restaurant in the subway.  His three-star Michelin rated small sushi restaurant with a month-long waiting list that starts at ~$300/person in the subway.  He maintains the absolute strictest standards in ingredients and preparation from vendors and apprentices alike and embodies the ethos of constant striving towards perfection and mastery of a craft. 

Okay, sounds great.  But what was most interesting to me is the stuff the movie tried not to really touch on.  Like that Jiro was put out of his home by his abusive father at age 7 and told to fend for himself.  Like that he casually mentions how he "allowed" his sons to finish high school before forcing them to apprentice under him.  His oldest son, now in his 50s, dismisses earlier dreams he had of being literally anything but a sushi chef and is now quietly resigned to almost certainly never fully gaining control of the restaurant. 

This is a look into what remains a deeply patriarchal culture and for a quasi-millenial American, it was more of a shock than I was truly comfortable with.  That absolutely has more to do with my own cultural lens and inherent biases but it made it really difficult to focus on the positives (so much dedication! true artist!) of the documentary.  What I was looking forward to was a nice, feel-good documentary about a dude who has devoted his entire life to making raw fish taste fucking delicious.  What I got was "this man exerts iron control over every facet of his life and the lives of those around him with no regard for their hopes or dreams." 

Also I got really sad watching people eat octopi because they are sentient and display complex problem-solving and abstract reasoning so it feels a little more like murder than eating tuna.

It's currently streaming on Netflix and I think also on Hulu.

Chinatown (1974)

  Chinatown is one of those movies you watch one time because it's a classic and you need to see it to be a well-rounded cinephile and then you never watch again because it's soul-crushing, blackly cynical, and directed by a rapist.

Unless you need to show it to someone else to further their cinematic education.  Guess which one is more fun.

Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is an L.A. private investigator hired to catch a milquetoast water engineer (Darrell Zwerling) cheating on his wife.  Except the woman who hired him turns out to not be his wife and the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is not pleased that Gittes has basically run a smear campaign against her husband.  Especially when the dude ends up dead in a reservoir and the cops are leaning towards suicide.  Gittes is not pleased at being used so he and the widow Mulwray team up to determine who would want her husband dead and what's going on with the water rights of Los Angeles county.

This is a true noir for all it's filmed in sunny streets and well-lit country clubs.  It's thematically dark, extremely depressing, and there's no justice to be found.  It's a damn near perfect movie and it fucking kills me to say that because Roman Polanski is a cockroach of a person and I hate praising him.  Worse still, the concept that powerful men will always be self-serving assholes no matter how much money they have and how much destruction they cause has only gotten more timely and relevant.

This movie will fuck you up.  That is a guarantee.  Unless you are a sociopath, in which case it's more like a how-to.  It is streaming on Tubi with like 10 ad breaks or you can rent it on Amazon for $3.99.

A Night at The Garden (2017)

  This is only about seven minutes long but it is a powerful seven minutes.

In 1939, almost 20,000 people attended a "Pro American Rally" at Madison Square Gardens in New York City.  Inside, people recited the Pledge of Allegiance while wearing swastikas and performing the Nazi salute.  A protester rushed the stage while an anti-Semitic speech was being made and was attacked and beaten by attendees before the cops could break it up.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The entire film is on Vimeo and it is absolutely worth watching.

Youth in Revolt (2009)

  This movie is the worst.  I honestly don't know how anyone would find this funny.

Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) is a bored sixteen-year-old desperate to lose his virginity.  He meets Sheeny (Portia Doubleday), an equally bored sixteen-year-old girl desperate to get away from her religious fanatic parents.  Nick is willing to do anything to woo Sheeny, including inventing an alter ego named François, committing millions of dollars in arson, stealing at least three cars, manipulating one of Sheeny's classmates to drug her everyday so she'll fail out of her prestigious French academy, and alienating everyone around him.

To get laid.

And it's supposed to be funny and not an extended episode of Criminal Minds.  What in the ever-loving fuck?

*Produced by Bill and Harvey Weinstein*

Oh, suddenly it makes so much more sense.

Avoid.

Sisters (1972)

  A three-peat of DePalma!  Here we see him returning once more to the absolutely bananas horror of women's bodies.  This is a much better double feature with Carrie or you could slap it up next to Dead Ringers for a Doublemint Evil Twins kind of night.

Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) witnesses her new neighbor, Canadian model/actress Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder) murder a lover (Lisle Wilson) and rightfully calls the police.  Unfortunately, Grace had just published an article calling the police out as being racist fucks so they are not super-inclined to believe her.  By the time she convinces them to search Danielle's apartment, the body has already been hidden and Grace looks like an asshole.  She still insists that a crime has been committed, however, and hires a private investigator (Charles Durning) to search Danielle's apartment.  That's how she discovers that Danielle had a conjoined twin named Dominique that was constantly referred to as "the disturbed one" while they were institutionalized before separation.  Now Grace has to find enough evidence that Danielle and her creepy-ass ex-husband Emil (William Finley) are guilty before all traces are destroyed.

So this movie stands up as still being extraordinarily creepy and disturbing but not for the reasons the movie thinks.  Let's break it down!  **SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT FORWARD**

What the movie thinks is scary:  ZOMG, you guys, crazy bitch alert!  Danielle seems really pretty and innocent right up until she stabs you in the dick for no reason!

What is actually scary:  Emil stalks Danielle from minute one, drugs, gaslights, hypnotizes, and involuntarily commits Grace into an asylum he run to force her to "become" Dominique so Danielle can break through the trauma of separating from her twin.  That is fucked up and legitimately horrifying.

What the movie thinks is scary:  the cops can't/won't help you, especially if you are a woman or a minority.  Everyone else will enable your rapist/kidnapper in his lies because he is a dude and you are "emotional."

What is actually scary:  ...Okay, the movie is pretty spot-on with that one.

We'll call that a draw.

Obviously, the major theme of this movie is voyeurism and it makes sure you know that there are layers upon layers of people watching people through windows, through cameras, through binoculars, through literal eyes.  It makes the audience accomplices to the crimes, passively complicit in these acts of extreme violence.  For that alone, this would qualify as a horror movie but it also manages to be super stylish and campy as fuck.  If you've only ever seen Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, you really should check this out.  It's streaming on the Criterion Channel because it is Art.

Stand Up Guys (2012)

  I flat out hated this movie.  It's a poorly written, lazy, reductive insult to anyone who manages to sit through it and wastes a spectacular cast.  Unforgivable.

Val (Oscar winner Al Pacino) is out of prison after 28 years and wants to go out an celebrate with his best friend, Doc (Oscar winner Christopher Walken).  What he doesn't know is that Doc has been told to kill Val by morning as vengeance for killing mobster Claphands' (Emmy nominee Mark Margolis) only son.  So after hitting up the local bordello, breaking into a pharmacy to steal Viagra, a subsequent trip to the ER, and a random encounter with a nurse (Golden Globe winner Julianna Margulies) who happens to be the daughter of one of their old comrades, Val and Doc decide to steal a car belonging to rival gangsters, and liberate their friend Hirsch (Oscar winner Alan Arkin) from the retirement home. 

Does this sound like a rambling, nonsensical review?  That's because the movie also has no sense of purpose.  It tries to play like a greatest hits reel for these septuagenarian mobsters but ends up meandering sadly all over the place.  The action is tepid, the dialogue is weak, and the entire concept is mired in irrelevancy.  Why would anyone watch Pacino and Walken stumble around whining about their hypertension and deflated boners when movies like The Godfather and Suicide Kings exist?  Surely neither one of them needs money this badly.

The Untouchables (1987)

  The Brian DePalma streak continues.  The Untouchables is out of vogue nowadays but it's hard to overestimate how popular it was when it came out.  I still hear people quote it occasionally but the most recent time I've seen it mentioned was in Billy Drago's obituary.

Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is a Treasury agent tasked with enforcing Prohibition in Chicago, home to well-known gangster Al Capone (Robert DeNiro).  Frustrated by the corruption in the police force, Ness puts together a small group of men quickly dubbed the "Untouchables" to take the fight directly to Capone.

The tide of public opinion has kind of turned on Eliot Ness.  This movie makes him out to be a paragon of virtue, standing up to corruption and injustice, but falls flat in its hagiography while never once examining the ridiculousness of Prohibition that created a space for men like Capone to flourish.  Sean Connery is of course the shining jewel here as the tough-beat cop-with-a-heart-of-gold Malone and Andy Garcia packs a surprising punch despite only being in about half of the film.  Patricia Clarkson has the distinction of being the only real female character in the whole movie, radiating a beatific saintliness befitting the wife of Ness the paladin.  As a double feature with Carrie, DePalma's Madonna-Whore complex is in full display.

The Untouchables hasn't held up as well as DePalma's true gangster classics like Scarface or Carlito's Way but it is still very watchable (and not just for the all-Armani costuming).

Carrie (1976)

  So I reviewed the (fairly) recent remake but I've never actually reviewed the original, even though I've seen it three or four times.  It is a horror classic but as the remake proved, less for the story and more for De Palma's signature style in execution.

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is bullied both at school and at home.  A classmate (Amy Irving) feels guilty about the bullying and tells her boyfriend (William Katt) to take Carrie to the prom as his date.  Meanwhile, the resident Mean Girl (Nancy Allen) has a plan to get revenge on Carrie for existing by rigging the Prom King & Queen votes in order to dump a bucket of pig's blood on Carrie.  Carrie unleashes a hitherto unpublicized telekinetic ability to wreak havoc on the school that has wronged her.

This is some premium quality sleaze with full nudity (in slo-mo!) almost before the opening credits finish.  It's so male gaze-y you could forget you were watching a horror film and not Skinemax until Carrie burns down her school.  But that actually works in its favor, lending a heightened hysteria to the whole affair while rendering it as dated as the clothing styles.

Carrie is a weird artifact in the world today.  It's supposedly anti-bullying but even when people are being nice to her, Carrie has no real autonomy.  She's very much the protagonist and an object of pity so her casual mass murder is cheered, even though the majority of those people in the gym are completely innocent.  It's easy to dismiss Carrie as fantasy, though, because the murder weapon is telekinesis.  If she had physically used the fire hose to attack people and manually caused the fire that killed them, would she be as sympathetic?  Or would that be too real, like We Need to Talk About Kevin, a film that is not listed as horror but most emphatically is.

Negative Space (2017)

  I found this short randomly scrolling through FirstShowing.net so shout out to them.  This is from last year's Academy Awards and was the last unwatched one in the Animated Short category so I can finally tick that off as completed.

A man (Albert Birnley) reflects on his childhood and bonding with his dad through packing suitcases for his dad's many business trips.

It's done with claymation (or CGI masquerading as claymation) and has that stop-motion feel to it.  Which is good because the actual story is pretty bleak and delivered in a monotone voiceover that does nothing to alleviate the tone.  It's currently available on YouTube from the channel Short of the Week if you have a spare five minutes.

A Most Violent Year (2014)

  As much as I hated Arbitrage, it would make a fascinating double feature with A Most Violent Year.

Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) runs a heating oil business in New York City in 1981.  He is on the cusp of acquiring a huge investment but must contend with jealous and vindictive business rivals, an ongoing fraud investigation, and near constant hijacking of his trucks by enterprising thieves.  Through all these trials, Abel struggles to maintain his principles and a clean reputation, even when those around him urge violence and illegality as shortcuts to success.

It's a good contrast with Richard Gere's character in Arbitrage in that Abel Morales is the only good man trying to resist corruption while Gere's Robert Miller taints everything he touches.  You could see them as opposing forces or as a before/after on the dangers of power.  Up to you but I think it's kind of a neat idea.

Otherwise, there's not much else I liked about the film.  It's very much a character drama (boo, hiss) with an A-list cast.  Jessica Chastain is cold and brittle, David Oyelowo is calculating, and Albert Brooks is a weasel.  I found it difficult to care about the central mystery of who was stealing from Abel's trucks and some of the character interactions made no sense to me, but this is not remotely the kind of movie I would pick out to watch on my own (Thanks, Golden Globes!).

It's streaming on Netflix currently if that sounds like a good time to you.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

I've been trying to watch Arrow and I finally made it through season five.  Then I hit a wall so I took a break to re-watch Ant-Man and the Wasp.  I still think this is one of the best entries in the MCU because it never tries to overreach and make Ant-Man more than he is.  He is a friendly, neighborhood insect-oriented superhero and that's exactly how he should stay.  Originally posted 7/22/18.    I know several people who are just Marvel-ed out.  It's understandable.  There are currently fifteen more projects either in development or in talks on top of the twenty already released.  Not counting the TV shows on Netflix, ABC, Freeform or other streaming platforms.  We are inundated with superhero content.

Personally, I love it.  I have been down for every Marvel movie and have tried (and mostly failed) to stay current with all the shows.  This is my life now.  As long as Marvel keeps cranking out quality content, I will be there to watch it.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has been on house arrest for the two years following Captain America:  Civil War.  He no longer has any connection to Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) or Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily) and is mostly just trying to bide his time and contribute to his new business venture with his buddy, Luis (Michael Pena).  Then, a strange dream about the quantum realm prompts him to reach out to Hank and Hope.  They arrange an elaborate kidnapping in order to get him out of the house, and inform him that they have built a quantum tunneler that they believe will allow them to access the quantum realm safely and locate Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Hope's lost mother.  The only problem is that the part they need to finalize the device is being held by an unscrupulous businessman (Walton Goggins).  Oh, and there's a former S.H.I.E.L.D. operative named Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) who is being slowly destroyed by quantum energy and thinks the only way to save herself is to drain Janet Van Dyne dry.

This is the perfect antidote to Infinity War's depressing ending.  (Until the mid-credits sequence, which was UNNECESSARY and CRUEL.)  If you just needed a little pick-me-up, Ant-Man is your guy.

On a slightly related note, I'm thinking that I'm going to do a Marvel rewatch starting the first weekend in August and going until it's done.  I've been toying with this idea for a while now but the timing has never been really right.  Graduating college took more out of me than I had initially realized and I'm only just now starting to feel up to resuming my normal load of movies and TV.  I appreciate all of you faceless Internet dwellers for giving me a shot and sticking by me through these lean content months.

Marguerite (2019)

  Vimeo has been killing it with the shorts lately.  If I didn't already have four streaming services with another two planned, I'd probably throw some money at it.

A woman in hospice (Béatrice Picard) forms a sweet bond with her caretaker (Sandrine Bisson) over a what-might-have-been relationship from her youth.

Honestly, this made me tear up a little.  It's very short, only about 15 minutes, but it packs a lot of compassion into that run time.  For once, it's nice to see a short that isn't horribly cynical or just dead depressing.

Arbitrage (2012)

  I fucking hated this movie.  I was mad the entire time I watched it.

Billionaire Rober Miller (Richard Gere) falls asleep while driving and wrecks, killing his mediocre artist girlfriend (Laetitia Casta).  Instead of calling the cops, he reaches out to Jimmy (Nate Parker), the son of his former driver, for help.  The cops circle Miller but can't touch him due to his wealth so they try to pin everything on Jimmy.  Why didn't Miller go to the cops?  1) All the white dude privilege and 2) he is trying to sell his company before anyone figures out he's been cooking the books for 20 years.

Can you see why I didn't like it?

At every turn, Miller is given a chance to come clean with little to no repercussions and instead doubles down on his illegal shit.  If there was ever a movie to inspire you to eat the rich, this is it.