Ian Thomas Malone

Movie Reviews Archive

Thursday

30

March 2023

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COMMENTS

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a hell of a lot of fun

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There’s a certain irony in modern blockbuster filmmaking. Movie runtimes are longer than ever, but so many films spend so much time planning for future installments that they often fail to live in the present. Studios rob you of having fun today off the promise of maybe having some more fun with the franchise tomorrow. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has plenty of obvious franchise potential, but thankfully the film’s primary concern lies with actually being an entertaining movie.

Based on the iconic role-playing game of the same name, Dungeons & Dragons has a fairly straightforward premise. Edgin David (Chris Pine) is a lute-playing thief who is trying to acquire a resurrection tablet to bring back his dead wife. Edgin’s team successfully retrieves the tablet, though he and his best friend Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) are captured in the process at the hands of Sofina (Daisy Head), a Red Wizard of They, leaving his friend Forge (Hugh Grant) to raise his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman). Upon escaping prison, Edgin and Holga try to resume their mission, aided by their sorcerer friend Simon (Justice Smith), and newcomer Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifting druid.

The plot is very easy to follow regardless of whether you have played D&D before or can’t even remember anyone’s name. Directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley offer longtime fans plenty of lore to chew on while making sure newcomers aren’t lost in the weeds. The worldbuilding is brisk and simple, a refreshing dynamic for the fantasy genre.

Honor Among Thieves has some of the best practical sets in recent memory, a delightful playground for the eager cast to work their magic. Pine and company are clearly having a blast. The heist crew’s easy chemistry makes the entire cinematic experience worthwhile, even at times when the pacing lags and the plotting feels a little too predictable. There’s plenty of variety in the cinematography, which blends CGI with shots filmed in actual locations, a literal breath of fresh air for those of us who are beyond sick of endless green screens.

The script has a firm grasp on the role of humor in the narrative. The action heist comedy rarely takes itself too seriously, often poking fun at the role of magic within the broader worldbuilding, but it also doesn’t let the jokes detract from the stakes at hand. There are a few moments of genuine sincerity that remind you of a time when blockbusting filmmaking tried to convey actual emotion.

The narrative does run into some small issues in the third act that was a little too unfocused, a 134-minute runtime that overstays its welcome. Edgin has too many core relationship dynamics at play that come at the cost of the supporting cast, particularly Smith and Lillis. Regé-Jean Page comes close to stealing the show as the hyper-literal paladin Xenk, but the film doesn’t really have a ton of space for his character, likely setting up future appearances. Pine is fantastic with the entire cast, but the film lives a bit too much on the table with the underutilized Grant.

Like the franchise’s twenty-sided dice, it’s easy to see dozens of directions this narrative could have taken. Honor Among Thieves feels determined to capture that sense of surprise and spontaneity alongside carefully crafted storytelling. Very little feels particularly original, a further testament to competence and charm in an age where blockbuster filmmaking feels like it’s flying on autopilot. You may not be blown away watching Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s a great experience to enjoy on the big screen. Sometimes, fun is more than enough.

Friday

24

March 2023

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COMMENTS

John Wick: Chapter 4 is a breathtaking, exhausting cinematic experience

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The existential question of why we still go to movie theatres loses some its subjectivity in the streaming age. There are explicit gravitational forces that bring us back to the majesty of the big screen, with all its splendor, even when we could watch the same material weeks later from the comforts of our own homes. We go to the theater to be excited, to see things we’ve never seen before, to recapture that sense of awe and wonder that first marveled our young eyes as children.

The John Wick series built a franchise out of a bankable actor, a dead dog, and some of the most beautiful fight choreography to ever grace the big screen. John Wick is ballet for the Grand Theft Auto generation, the genre superseding any preconceived notions of its limitations to metamorphize into something bigger. John Wick is, unironically, art.

John Wick: Chapter 4 takes place six months after the events of Chapter 3 – Parabellum, a massive time jump considering the first three covered a span of about ten days. Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still seeking revenge on the High Table, who are in turn still sending hundreds of assassins to kill him. It’s still not very easy to be John’s friend, a reality that Winston (Ian McShane), Charon (Lance Reddick), and newcomer Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) are forced to confront when the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård) arrives to clean up the High Table’s mess. The Marquis enlists the help of blind elite assassin Caine (Donnie Yen) to take Wick out once and for all.

Chapter 4 is not a narratively ambitious film. The overstuffed runtime is buoyed by exceptional fight sequences, as well the relief that the franchise seems to understand its own limitations. Director Chad Stahelski doesn’t exactly top any of Parabellum’s superb action choreography, introducing a few cool tricks into the mix along the way, but he also doesn’t drag the movie much further into the weeds of High Table exposition either. This is the first film in the franchise that doesn’t try to exponentially expand the criminal underworld. Despite carrying a 169-minute runtime, a full half-hour longer than its predecessor, Chapter 4 feels more restrained in its delivery.

Yen’s choreography goes a long way toward differentiating Chapter 4 from Parabellum, delivering most of the film’s memorable fight scenes. Reeve’s stunt work is exceptional as always, though his performance is a little stiff at times. Maybe understandably, John Wick looks tired, a sentiment many in the audience will undoubtedly share by the time the credits roll.

Chapter 4 is a ton of fun to watch on the big screen. It’s also the first film in the franchise that doesn’t top the one that came before. Parabellum has better acting, writing, and fight choreography, a far more immersive experience delivered with a shorter runtime. What works most about Chapter 4 is the sense that it doesn’t try to be bigger.

The fact that Chapter 4 isn’t as good isn’t particularly a letdown, but a sign of maturity for the filmmakers. The franchise carries the weight of its absurd body count, eager to take a step back and process everything that’s happened up to this point. We’re not used to that kind of restraint from major franchises. At a time when superhero movies bloat themselves with additional characters and explosions with each installment, John Wick looks relaxed, and confident in its own course. No one would be fooled into believing there won’t be sequels and spinoffs until the end of time, but blockbusting filmmaking could learn a lot from the way John Wick approaches the craft.

Tuesday

21

March 2023

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COMMENTS

Shazam! Fury of the Gods tries to do too many things at once, an empty disaster

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Superhero sequels often have an unhealthy need to pad out their rosters with far too many characters. The “connected universe” approach deployed by DC and Marvel can give these cinematic experiences the feel of open-ended television, or their own comic book source material. It bears noting that film does not possess the same amount of narrative space as TV or comics. The entirety of a superhero’s cinematic canon can possess a shorter runtime than a single television season, peanuts compared to the ninety years that someone like Billy Batson has spent in the pages of a comic book.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods squeezes six main superheroes and three villains into a runtime of barely over two hours. Further exacerbating the dynamic is the fact that five of the six superheroes are played by two different people, their child and adult counterparts, with the eldest member of the “Shazamily,” Mary (Grace Caroline Currey) now played by the same actress in both forms. Billy Batson (Zachary Levi and Asher Angel) is no longer so much the star of his own movie than a traffic cop trying to keep his family, and the various pieces of his movie, together.

The plot is pretty straightforward, though delivered in an exceedingly incoherent fashion. Two daughters of the Titan (god) Atlas, Hespera (Helen Mirren), and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) want the staff from the first movie to take over the world. Why? The movie doesn’t really have time to explain the motives for either character, besides the general sense that they are not very nice.

The film barely has time to explore any members of the Shazamily either. Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer and Adam Brody) functions essentially as the lead kid, still being bullied in school in a sequence that feels quite wrong for the year 2023. He befriends a new girl, Anne (Rachel Zegler), a figure anyone in the audience would know to be important in a narrative that already has way too many characters. The rest of the family, Batson included, are mostly stuck in their plotlines from the first film. The one notable exception is a member of the family who is gay, seemingly just because it would likely be the only thing anyone would remember about this character.

Fury of the Gods feels oddly empty for a film with far too many characters, coasting solely off any remaining goodwill earned by its predecessor. This narrative tries to pretend it has a heart to cover up the overabundant sense of nothing at its core. There isn’t any time to do anything besides go through the motions, at times reminding the audience of the charm this story once had, when it possessed the space to actually explore its own characters.

The film does find time to poke fun at the peculiar nature of its heroes’ identities, repeatedly referring to Freddy as “Captain Everypower.” There’s a reason the Shazamily sounds so awkward to say. Billy, Mary, and Freddy all spent many decades wearing variations of the “Captain Marvel,” moniker, while the younger three are much newer characters. Shazam’s powers and his name were involved in two of the most famous lawsuits in comic book history, creating a sense of confusion for both casual fans and comic book diehards alike. The trouble is, DC itself hasn’t really understood what to do with the Marvel family either, decidedly B-tier heroes who lend themselves well to charm, but not necessarily convolution.

Mirren and Liu are completely wasted playing generic villains. The film’s humor doesn’t land well within a narrative that never seems to understand what’s going on, even with its paint-by-numbers delivery. Anyone can follow along with this generic mess. The broader question is, why would anyone want to?

It’s easy to see how this formula might have worked as a season of television, with plenty of time and space to explore all the themes director David F. Sandberg tossed out there. This narrative has no business being a movie. The lackluster special effects don’t exactly look all that cinematic either.

Shazam used to be a highlight of the DCEU’s splintered roster. Fury of the Gods squanders all that goodwill. The first Shazam! was a relatable treat, a self-contained story that could be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of whether you’ve ever picked up a comic book. Fury of the Gods tried to do so many things at one time that it actually achieved nothing at all.

Wednesday

1

March 2023

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COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 17

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There is no precedent in television history for The Book of Boba Fett’s decision to hand over two of its seven episodes almost completely to The Mandalorian, let alone in a way that completely undid the latter’s superb second season finale. There are undoubtedly millions of Mandalorian fans who did not make it to the fifth episode of Fett’s unremarkable season and have no idea how or why Mando and Grogu were reunited. Season three’s opener “The Apostate” at times didn’t seem particularly concerned with that reality, exacerbated by the more than two-year wait since we’ve had an actual episode of The Mandalorian.

The show has hardly missed a beat after moving on from its initial two-year arc, quickly establishing the stakes for Mando’s re-entry into his people’s good graces. The sequence featuring the giant crocodile was among the best uses of StageCraft after a stretch of extremely lackluster special effects in The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania among others. The Mandalorian continued its streak of superb effects alongside some beautiful practical sets, including a gorgeously revamped Nevarro that looks a teensy bit like Batuu from Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

The scene with Greef Karga was a little clunky, offering a bit of necessary exposition while Grogu engaged in some of his most memorable antics, using the force to spin Greef’s chair and eat his desk candy. Mando is right to note that the situation with Grogu is complicated, but the episode passed on an opportunity to explore this dynamic between the two, even with Greef serving as the closest thing Mando might have to a confidant on the show.

The decision to rebuild IG-11 makes some narrative sense, Mando wanting a capable droid to explore the perils of Mandalore. The comic relief centered around IG-11 going rogue fell a little flat, indicative of the show’s broader relationship with its extended cast. The season two finale featured a full room of allies on Mando’s side when Luke Skywalker appeared. Now, Mando seems weirdly short on allies, though Cara Dune’s absence was deftly explained after the actress self-canceled off the show with her Majorie Taylor Greene-type antics. Nevarro feels weirdly small, Greef looking like he runs the show alone in a town with the resources to make an IG-11 statue in the square but no suitable alternative droids to help Mando’s mission besides a broken potentially homicidal bounty hunter turned nurse.

Letting Shard live was inexplicably reckless, a move that bit Mando in the ass almost immediately, albeit in service to a stellar space sequence. It’s clear Shard, and maybe Moff Gideon, will be thorns in Mando’s side down the road. Mando’s refurbished N-1 starfighter is one of the best throwbacks to the prequel trilogy that new Star Wars has given us, a beautiful substitute for the Razor Crest.

The show found itself a bit caught in the weeds with the return of Bo-Katan, who has fallen from grace among her people after failing to acquire the Darksaber in Mando’s possession. The show handled the exposition with some grace, but this episode was the first time that The Clone Wars and Rebels felt truly important to the plot rather than merely enhancing the experience. The overarching plot is understandably becoming more complex that the self-explanatory arc of the first two seasons. It’ll be interesting to see how much season three relies on established Star Wars lore moving forward.

“The Apostate” was solid television that never felt like it needed to make a big splash to compensate for the long hiatus. As a show, The Mandalorian has often produced its best work with fairly self-contained storytelling, but the demands of Mando’s mission will undoubtedly introduce a greater sense of serialization into the mix. The episode didn’t do a great job bridging the gap from Fett’s “Mando 2.5” dynamic, but it certainly served as a strong premiere in setting up the rest of the season.

Monday

27

February 2023

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Babylon is a beautiful self-indulgent disaster

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The 89th Academy Awards ceremony presented the film industry with a watershed moment that it’s only starting to fully grasp in the years since. The mistaken announcement of La La Land as the Best Picture winner over Moonlight came with plenty of understandable shock given the high-profile flub, but also plenty of understated bewilderment at the idea that a small budget film about gay people of color could triumph over an elaborate production centered on Hollywood’s favorite subject: itself. Though La La Land director Damien Chazelle took home an Oscar for Best Director for his efforts, the notion of his work falling just short of the top industry prize courses through the veins of his recent release Babylon, a film that tries way too hard to be the definitive statement on Hollywood grandeur.

Babylon follows a few different narratives that are somewhat intertwined with each other. Manny Torres (Diego Calva) works a lavish party at a studio executive’s house in 1926 Los Angeles, quickly folding an infatuation for rising star Nelle LaRoy (Margot Robbie) into his broader longing to be part of the mechanics of show business. Aging silent film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) gives Manny his first break as an assistant. With the advent of sound quickly upending the entire industry, Manny, Nelle and Jack all confront their brave new world with varying degrees of competence and grace.

Few films open with such a declaration of their own epic stature quite like Babylon. Chazelle’s worldbuilding is absolutely delightful, with lived-in sets that capture the exquisite grandeur of the era. Keenly aware that a runtime of over three hours can’t be sustained on frantic party energy, Chazelle manages to synchronize his characters’ career fatigue with the own exhaustion his narrative evokes from the audience. Babylon is the kind of work that needs to be survived before it can be enjoyed.

A body fed nothing but sugar will eventually long for nutrition. Babylon resists the idea that its audience needs nourishment, but the high starts to wear off halfway through when it becomes abundantly clear that Chazelle has absolutely nothing unique to say about Hollywood. The absolutely gorgeous cinematography constantly dazzles, Chazelle putting forth an admirable effort to cover up his empty narrative that putters through its final ninety minutes following a predictable path.

Though Babylon is nominally an ensemble piece, Calva’s Manny carries most of the film’s emotional weight, a not-so-subtle surrogate for Chazelle himself. Robbie and Pitt are a lot of fun, if not at times a bit distracting given their leading roles in the eerily similar Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Despite its meandering nature, supporting characters Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a talented jazz trumpeter, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a lesbian cabaret singer, are given almost nothing to do besides expose the racism of the era. Adepo delivers the film’s most emotionally gut-wrenching sequence when forced to confront showbusiness’s tendency to appease bigotry rather than condemn it. The power of the scene is unfortunately undercut by Chazelle’s relative apathy toward Palmer as a three-dimensional character despite having ample opportunity to explore his character.

Babylon is an easy film to hate. Chazelle’s work is sloppy, arrogant, and self-indulgent bordering on masturbatory, but also irritatingly beautiful and hard to get out of one’s head. The ending deserves all the eye-rolls in the world, a clownish sequence that could only be executed by a director who lacked anyone around him capable of reigning his antics in. Nothing in this mess feels terribly original, yet somehow, inexplicably, it’s the kind of movie you walk out of longing for the next opportunity to watch it all again.

Chazelle delivers on the themes he superficially explored in La La Land, blowing his earlier work out of the water. There are still plenty of signs of an immature artist behind the wheel, especially in a series of scenes featuring Tobey Maguire. It feels so outlandish to say that there’s nothing else like Babylon out there, a narrative full of obvious cliches that borrows heavily from so many other better films, but the pieces of this messy epic clunkily come together to produce something magical. You may hate Babylon, but it’s impossible to forget Babylon. Chazelle may not have topped any of the classics he was riffing off of, but managed to produce an epic worthy of the name.

 

Friday

17

February 2023

0

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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is Marvel’s greatest embarrassment

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The criticism of Marvel movies possessing a paint-by-numbers feel has existed for almost as long as the MCU itself. The idea that each superhero’s journey serves as little more than an Instagram filter over the exact same formula isn’t entirely unfair, but the MCU has generally managed to make up for its lack of originality with an abundance of charm. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a depressing case study of what happens to the whole enterprise when the same song and dance starts to lose its muster.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is one of the few surviving Avengers who actually seems to be enjoying life after the events of Endgame. Parlaying his fame into a successful memoir, Scott seems to have finally left his past behind, though his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton, the third actress to portray the character) worries that he may have lost sight of the needs of the world around him. Whether Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), now successful CEO of the Pym Foundation, agrees is largely unclear, since most people involved with making the film seem to have forgotten that the Wasp shares equal billing with Ant-Man, generally implying a sense of lead-character status.

The film’s plot quickly is set in motion after Cassie and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who the former now refers to as “grandpa” with absolutely zero explanation, craft a device that can communicate with the Quantum Realm, where Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) was famously trapped for thirty years. The idea that Scott too was trapped there after the events of the last Ant-Man film or that the space served as the main catalyst driving the events of Endgame is not deemed relevant to the plot. Naturally, a portal to the QR is a terrible idea, and the five find themselves sucked into a vortex, split up into two very convenient groups. Scott and Cassie get some space to work on their father/daughter bond, while Hope and her parents wander around looking for something that might resemble an interesting storyline.

Director Peyton Reed never seems terribly interested in exploring his characters as people. Unfortunately, Quantumania can’t really explore the Quantum Realm either, not with the severely limited scope of its special effects department. Marvel’s laziest cinematography reduces the Quantum Realm to a monotonous green screen that looks to be about the size of an elementary school gymnasium, forcing all the actors to stand in place for almost the experience. Seasoned cinematographer William Pope recycles the same zoomed-in shot of the characters’ upper torsos again and again, presumably to clip coupons for the visual effects department. The color palette is bland and dreary, like a child cross-contaminated their Easter egg dyes, a tedious depressing eyesore.

The performances are almost as lifeless as the CGI. Rudd, Douglas, Lilly, and newcomer Bill Murray all looked bored out of their minds, the latter as if he required a sedative to get through his scenes. If Murray agreed to shoot more than one take for any of his scenes, it certainly doesn’t come across in the final product. The jokes fall flat, with Rudd constantly betraying his complete awareness of what a disaster he’s starring in. Pfeiffer and Newton try their best to make the most of their character’s expanded roles, though their attempts to convey awe and wonder for the Quantum Realm fall flat in the incoherent narrative that moves swiftly through its 124-minute runtime, quite short by MCU standards.

Quantumania suffers under some predictable hurdles that befall most third entries. The film already has too many characters within the Ant-Man family, on top of carrying the weight of a certain iconic villain in Marvel lore. Jonathan Majors makes his proper MCU debut as Kang the Conqueror after playing an alternate-timeline variant in Loki. Kang is supposed to be the MCU’s next Thanos-level threat, already announced as the villain of the next Avengers film set for release in 2025.

Majors is always a joy to watch, but Quantumania is simply not a good outlet for his talents. Kang’s introduction is quite rushed, a reality of the film’s scattershot interests. Majors brings some depth to the lifeless experience, but his performance often serves to highlight the film’s abundant limitations. The plot grows exceedingly incoherent in the film’s third act, a narrative completely out of steam by the time Kang gets to do anything interesting. The film would have been much better off allowing secondary villain M.O.D.O.K., another iconic figure in Marvel lore, to slot in as the main antagonist, sparing Majors for a narrative that could bring some dignity to Kang as a character. It’s unclear how Marvel expects anyone to want more of Kang after this clownish endeavor.

Quantumania represents an embarrassing low point for the MCU, a soulless cash-grab that debases the very idea of cinema itself. A just world would never allow the superhero genre to recover from such an artistically bankrupt abomination. This movie just doesn’t fail to give its audience a reason to care for its narrative, it makes you wonder why you ever cared in the first place.

Monday

13

February 2023

0

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Tàr is a beautifully crafted, vapid commentary on cancel culture

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Society has long struggled with discourse surrounding the unwieldy leviathan known as cancel culture. The term has become somewhat of a Rorschach test, its definition molded to whatever situation best suits the intentions of the party that invoked its usage. The film Tàr gender swaps the traditional mechanics of the #MeToo movement, centering a manically narcissistic female conductor at the heart of its tale of power and treachery.

Lydia Tàr (Cate Blanchett) is seated at the top of her insulated world. The first female composer of the Berlin Philharmonic, Tàr juggles an upcoming live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the release of her memoir, alongside the tedious nature of orchestral politics and heavy travel schedules on private jets between spacious apartments in some of the most beautiful cities of the world. Armed with a hands-on assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) to schedule her every move, Tàr structures her entire existence on the endless validation of her own brilliance.

A former student’s suicide throws Tàr’s empire into chaos, the genius lesbian maestro’s taste for younger women a poorly kept secret across her realm. Tàr disrupts the mechanics of the orchestra by elevating a young cellist Olga (Sophie Kauer) who she’s had her eye on even as her wife and concertmaster Sharon (Nina Hoss) looks on in disapproval. The presence of her former mentor Andris Davis (Julian Glover) serves as a stark reminder of how one can go from the top of the mountain to an afterthought lost in the annals of time.

Director Todd Field presents his 158-minute narrative as if it was unfolding in real time over the course of a few days. There’s a marvelous lived-in feeling to the worldbuilding that produces ample natural tension across the slow burn. Much as cancel culture feels like the boogeyman, Field manages to bring the inner workings of #MeToo to life, a highly impressive feat of filmmaking.

The true beauty of Tár stems from the sheer vitality of Cate Blanchett to the whole production. It’s not unfair to say that the entire immaculately crafted film would fall apart without her, a towering presence that commands the whole experience. Field deserves plenty of eye-rolls for using a lesbian as his stand-in for cancel culture commentary that would feel clownish if it had a male lead, but there’s no denying that his synchronicity with Blanchett results in a breathtaking experience.

Much of Tàr’s through-line depends on a pivotal scene between Tár and one of her students in a class she was guest-teaching at Julliard. The BIPOC Gen Z student expresses apathy for the work of Bach as a white male cisgender composer, goading Tár into a fiery rebuke of cancel culture fitting for the primetime programming on Fox News. Field crafts an easy lay-up in his lazily constructed strawman bound to resonate with an audience that probably can’t name many transgender women composers of color, let alone a handful with portfolios of work comparable to the impact and legacy of one Johann Sebastian Bach.

Field does himself and his work a great intellectual disservice by reducing the Bach question to a matter of his gender identity and problematic personal life. At the heart of every academic and artistic institution on this planet lies a canon that defines their very orbit. Modern efforts to diversify the canon harness the raw power of its reality as a living, breathing entity that does not need to forever remain an exclusive club of the only people who were allowed a seat at its table, namely cisgender white men.

An average audience may understandably find it absurd that a student at an institution like Juilliard would not be familiar with Bach. You’d be hard-pressed to go into many classrooms full of Ph.D. students in English Literature who had read more than a handful of Shakespeare’s plays or Dryden’s verse, who could tell their Schopenhauer from their Hegel and certainly could name any Faulkner beyond the few that pop up as Jeopardy! questions. Anyone with half a brain can sound like a pretentious ass while gatekeeping the canon, but the sad truth is that our nation would rather highlight fluff like the assault on cisgender heterosexual white men than debate whether those same anointed few should forever center the conversation within their respected fields.

Another question that Tàr unfortunately tries to sidestep completely is the nature of the impermeability of genius. Many abusers have clung to their perceived Godlike aura to justify further bad behavior. History has shown us time and time again that the success of artistic movements or cultural institutions rarely hinges on the fortunes of singular individuals. The sun still rose the day after Harvey Weinstein’s cancellation just as it would on any other morning. Those in power would sleep better at night if you weren’t aware of that innate truth. Field is not unaware of this dynamic either, but he focuses his attention elsewhere far too often to produce any interesting conclusions on the subject.

Tàr ends up as an unfortunate mix bag, another film about cancel culture that doesn’t really take a stand on its subject material. Field’s pseudo-intellectual script betrays a spectacular exposition on power’s corrosive rot on the genius of the soul, though Blanchett remains perpetually able to pick up the pieces of his shoddy reactionary mess. The end result produces a beautiful film, albeit one that falls just shy of greatness.

Friday

10

February 2023

0

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Titanic Remains One of Cinema’s Crowning Spectacles

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Few pieces of popular culture capture the zeitgeist of the 1990s quite like Titanic. From its elaborate practical sets to its sappy dialogue to the unparalleled cultural phenomenon it was able to inspire, James Cameron’s epic represents the apex of twentieth-century filmmaking while paying homage to a tragedy our collective consciousness refuses to let go of. Twenty-five years later, Titanic still stands as a truly singular moment in cinema, a feat both of physical endurance for those who struggle to sit in a theatre for three hours and the emotional intelligence required to embrace the film’s ultimate mandate and cry amongst a room full of strangers there to experience the exact same tug on their heartstrings.

The magic of the theatre requires a buy-in from the audience beyond the mere suspension of disbelief required to follow along with a narrative parsed down to exist within the restricted confines of the medium. As a film, Titanic serves two distinct masters: the historical and the interpersonal. We the audience know that the boat sinks amidst several preventable tragedies, capitalism playing the role of God in choosing which victims to spare. Any human being with half a soul could acknowledge that this senseless carnage is in fact, sad.

Cameron’s exceedingly sappy love story across the barriers of class and culture forces the audience not only to reckon with the tragedy but to invest emotionally in the depths of its sorrow. Titanic is not a documentary, but a narrative that required a force of dramatic tension that could counterbalance the weight of its inevitable climax. You need over-the-top characters to match the irony of the fate of the unsinkable ship.

Jack and Rose’s love story is bound to resonate with anyone who’s ever enjoyed the fleeting perfection of a one-night stand. Leonardo DiCaprio brings a kind of manic energy to Jack that’s designed to change a person like Rose’s life, even if everyone involved knew that their kind of love isn’t built to sustain the morning after. Both Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart manage to capture the essence of that swooning heart that got a taste of life’s purest essence, if only for a moment. Some love is only meant to last forever in memory.

Titanic is supposed to be silly, armed with a cartoonish steel baron (Billy Zane) and his equally outlandishly over-the-top valet (David Warner) to manifest the role of narrative villain in places where the iceberg’s dramatic range was far more limited. Kathy Bates grounds the silliness as the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, champion of the proletariat from her perch in first class, a fairy godmother to supply Jack with the confidence he needs to seize the means of production. Brown serves as a kind of Greek chorus through the absurdity of it all. Rose’s mother Ruth (Frances Fisher) is the living embodiment of the cruelty of man, willing to sacrifice her daughter’s happiness to keep her head above the working class.

The big screen has hardly been better-utilized than in service to Titanic’s third act. The special effects hold up marvelously all these years later, but Cameron’s mastery of practical effects has always been his bread and butter. At a time when many studios are looking to cut corners, the sight of tens of thousands of gallons of water ravaging an exquisite set never grows stale with repeat viewing. Rarely does a major blockbuster feel as grand as its budget suggests.

Cameron’s greatest strength is his unrelenting drive to amass a spectacle fitting of his source material. Titanic is a testament to a time when film tried to step outside the confines of the screen and change the very world around its walls. It’s easy to poke fun at the over-the-top nature of this epic, but the water settles around the endless debates of whether Jack could’ve fit on the door (yes) or if old Rose should have given her granddaughter the priceless jewel (also yes), one truth remains self-evident. There’s never been a cinematic experience quite like Titanic.

Wednesday

18

January 2023

0

COMMENTS

Occasionally weighed down by its genre trappings, Corsage is buoyed by an exceptional lead performance

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The female body has been viewed throughout history as a finite commodity with an explicit expiration date. The aristocracy essentially provided its women with one clear mandate, an entire existence defined by one’s ability to pump out a few babies to carry the line to another generation. A lifetime in a gilded cage boiled down to a handful of nine-month stretches.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) nears her fortieth birthday in the middle of the nineteenth century. A curious mind with nothing to entertain itself beyond the tightening of her corset, Elisabeth spends her days idly while the rest of her world moves on. Her husband Emperor Franz Joseph I (Florian Teichtmeister) loses interest right around the moment her body no longer proved up to the task of producing further offspring. Her young daughter Sophie (Lilly Marie Tschörtner) is too caught up in her studies to care about the frivolities of youth, the same joys Elisabeth desperately tries to cling to in the absence of anything else to titillate her mind.

Director Marie Kreutzer leans heavily on her lead actress to carry her sleepy period piece. Krieps wields her greatest power through her mastery of subtle emotions, an empress longing to break free yet keenly aware of the ever-present, though slightly fading, gaze of the palace. Much as one might be loathed to pity a woman who reached the apex of the aristocracy, Krieps manages to elicit plenty of natural sympathy for Elisabeth, a once-powerful comet forced to watch the dimming of its own star power.

Though Kreutzer occasionally deploys modern music out of place with the historical setting, increasingly common with period pieces, Corsage utilizes great restraint with its approach to sound. There are many scenes where the silence is utterly deafening, heightening the sheer loneliness that some of the most powerful people in the world must have felt within the enviable walls of these great palaces. The 112-minute runtime is a slow burn that could have used some trimming around the edges, but you can also see where Kreutzer tried to wield the monotony to her narrative’s advantage.

Corsage wears some of its flaws on its sleeves. The desire for the film to be more than simply competent operates on the same wavelength as Elisabeth’s longing for a breath of life beyond the walls of her existence. You never really shake the idea that this immaculately crafted, well-acted film could have risen above its fairly predictable genre trappings. Krieps’ performance alone begs for nothing but the best, an area where the script certainly fell a bit short.

There is great value in Kreutzer’s subtle commentary on the female body after it has served its purpose in a man’s world. In an age where diet culture and the notion of the girlboss have received their necessary backlash, Corsage offers a damning indictment of the grind. Your body is not a temple for someone else’s legacy. The soul cannot sustain itself as a supporting character in your spouse’s story. A restless spirit cannot learn to love its cage. Only when we accept that truth can we ever hope to make the most of the time we have on this rock, time serving not as a benchmark, but as an unwieldy bastion of the patriarchy to flip one’s middle finger at.

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Avatar: The Way of Water eclipses its predecessor in its breathtaking splendor, albeit with a similarly lackluster narrative

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Somewhere along the way in the years since 2009 came along a theory that no one cared about Avatar, a thesis that any individual could prove for themselves through their own apathy. Putting aside the massively expensive Pandora-themed addition to Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park, the idea of staying power for a film that sat atop the all-time box office leaderboard never made a ton of sense. Is Titanic similarly irrelevant because fewer people dress up as Jack and Rose at Halloween than the minions from Despicable Me?

Avatar’s perceived lack of cultural capital can be explained in a few ways. The film failed to immediately establish a connected universe at precisely the same moment that big franchises began to entirely consume the box office, an association that feels fairer to make given that James Cameron already pulled off that feat decades earlier with The Terminator. The 3-D technology that the film dazzled its audiences with failed to maintain a firm stronghold in theatres. Cameron’s technical wizardry could also only go so far as to cover up Avatar’s generic plot that played like a hybrid of FernGully: The Last Rainforest and Dances with Wolves.

What people may have underestimated with regard to the delay between Avatar: The Way of Water and its predecessor is the way that the box office landscape would move away from mandating the kind of technical prowess that made Avatar such a hit in the first place. CGI has undoubtedly become cheaper to produce, but that quality has not always translated onto the final product, with countless superhero narratives settling for bland, gray color palettes projected onto green screens in soundstages that are so tiny the actors can barely even walk around. Awe and wonder was always Avatar’s greatest asset. Modern blockbusters rarely aim for that high of a bar.

The Way of Water does not have a particularly interesting story. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have their happy life among the Omaticaya disrupted when the RDA returns to Pandora ten years later. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) has had his conscience cloned into an avatar, along with various other commandos who were in the first film. Jake self-exiles his family to the water-based Metkayina clan when Quaritch captures the human Spider (Jake Champion), his sort-of-son who was adopted by Jake and Neytiri after the events of Avatar. The forest-based Na’vi struggles to adapt to their new ocean surroundings, a sense of belonging remaining elusive until they can truly learn the ways of water.

Cameron often seems conflicted with the idea that his fun on Pandora might need to function as something resembling a narrative you would find in a movie, a notion that might be a problem if not for the film’s breathtaking beauty. The cinematography continuously feels like footage that would be happier in a Planet Earth-style documentary, where David Attenborough’s voice could quickly remove the need for any pesky characters and those things called storylines. Pandora is such an immersive experience itself that you

The Way of Water largely operates as an ensemble piece, with Saldaña and, to a much lesser extent, Worthington ceding most of the spotlight to the next generation. Their four children, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, playing a much different role than Dr. Grace Augstine in the original film), and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) form the emotional core of the narrative in a quite satisfactory manner, even if few in the audience will remember any of their names. Cameron manages to carve out complete storylines for practically every character, though Saldaña feels like an odd afterthought. The Metkayina play second fiddle to Cameron’s preoccupation with worldbuilding.

The gargantuan 192-minute runtime largely flies by, Cameron rarely losing his pulse on the pacing until halfway through the third act. There is some unnecessary exposition here and there, the price of admission to see the work of a vision-obsessed man incapable of editing himself. The notorious control freak Cameron can’t be told what to do, but you almost can’t really blame him when he constantly delivers some of the best visuals ever to play in a movie theatre. Cameron’s intense devotion to Pandora seamlessly translates onto the screen, making it easy to forgive the superfluous nature of his storytelling. This man never stops trying to prove he’s the greatest technical filmmaker currently making movies, often making a quite compelling case.

The climax of The Way of Water often feels like a composite of Titanic, The Abyss, and The Terminator, carrying on a bit too long to merely coast on its gravitas. There is a natural sense of audience fatigue after three hours of continuously jaw-dropping visuals, only for a finale to drag its feet toward a predictable conclusion, the only element of the film that’s not a major improvement on its predecessor. Cameron does succeed in making his film truly embody the meaning of the word epic, a movie to be survived on top of being enjoyed.

Skeptics who deem Avatar irrelevant will find plenty to scoff at in The Way of Water. The thirteen-year wait produced one of the most beautiful movies of all time, a feat of tremendous ingenuity, especially regarding underwater motion capture technology. There is a genuine thrill to watching such spectacular imagery on the screen, dazzling cinematography that reminds us all of this medium’s tremendous power when operating on all cylinders. The underwhelming narrative can’t detract too much from the joy of watching Cameron play with his craft. If only more blockbusters could aim for the stars in such a determined fashion.