Category Archives: Past

2010s, 2018, A+, Biography, Comedy, Crime, Grade, Past, Review, review-movie, Year

Film Review: Blackkklansman- 2018

November 19, 2021 The Critic 2 Comments

Director(s)	Spike Lee
Principal Cast	John David Washington as Ron Stallworth Adam Driver as Philip “Flip” Zimmerman Laura Harrier as Patrice Topher Grace as David Duke
Release Date	2018
Language(s)	English
Running Time	135 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

Note: This review contains spoilers regarding the first 30 minutes of the film as opposed to the site’s usual benchmark of 10-20 minutes. The same effort towards sustaining the intrigue and momentum of the film, especially in its second and third acts, is maintained in this review, and all plot details revealed are just meant to be a springboard to discuss the scope of the work in better detail. Nothing discussed should undermine the “best” portions of the film or the many mysteries that keep the story engaging.

A scene from Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind plays depicting a Confederate flag floating in the foreground. This is the first start. Then a faux documentary chronicling the evils of black “savages” and the desecration of white culture begins to play; the piece is narrated by Dr.Beuragard (Alec Baldwin), a man who spouts horrifically racist drivel but finds himself unable to remember the prejudiced verbiage, often breaking out of the documentary to ask for the specific lines. This is the second start. Finally, the camera pushes in on the projector playing the aforementioned starts. The camera’s forward momentum is carried through in the next shot as it glides over a Colorado mountain range. The film cuts to pavement and text appears, explaining to the viewer that the film they’re about to see depicts a real-life scenario. The title card pops in. The protagonist of our story, Ron (John David Washington), walks into the spot where the title card resided. He looks up at a sign from the Colorado Police Department encoring minorities to apply. He stares at the sign more intensely before fixing his hair and walking towards the police station. This is the third start.

Thus, director Spike Lee’s BlacKkklansman succinctly demonstrates its raison d’être: it’s a cinematic counter-response meant to reshape cultural attitudes regarding race relations. The first start opens on a “classic” of American cinema, establishing that even the foundations of our “culture” are predicated on a logic which valorizes a time-period where black people were not treated as human beings. The second start demonstrates the way such romanticization engenders tangible movement towards racialized violence. Beuragard’s documentary intermixes news-footage with clips from D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, another film from America’s classic film canon filled with racist depictions, showcasing how fictional representations bleed into cultural discussions which affect people in tangible manners (ex: support for de-segregation). Even though Beauragard is inept as a presenter and can’t even remember his long-winded verbal absurdities, the power of his sound-bites combined with images imbued with cinematic power, give his words a persuasive power.

By taking the projector, which played white nationalist propaganda, back via the push-in of the camera, Lee is able to offer BlacKkklansman as a cinematic response to the canon; the third start comes from the same “source” as the first and second and can operate on the same playing field. Informing the viewer of the “real life” status of the narrative gives the film an authenticity that the documentary preceding it hopes to achieve, while the “traditional” presentation of the narrative gives it the same staying power as the cinematic classics it discusses. In this way, Blackkklansman is positioned as both historical and cinematic corrective, a step towards a restorative vision of the U.S.A.

The story proper follows Ron as he applies to the Colorado Police Department in an attempt to reform the system from the inside out. His interview process starts off professional enough but quickly diverges as his interviewers inform him of the prejudices at play in the department and the community, prejudices against having black officers. They double-check with Ron regarding whether or not he believes he’ll be able to keep himself in check in spite of potential racial jabs. He agrees and is subsequently hired.

Officer refers to a black prisoner as a “toad”.

Unfortunately, his agreement is tested right off the bat. It’s clear from his fellow officers’ behaviors and demeanors that he’s unwelcome at the precinct. The reason is made obvious: to be black is to be criminal. Ron learns this the hard way when he’s made to handle criminal records. Other officers come in, ask for a “toad’s” file, and then give Ron the name of a criminal to fetch from the files. In an attempt to humanize the criminals, the people underneath the caricatures, Ron tries to combat the vernacular, explaining that his files document persons and not toads. But his attempts are met only with condescension and insult. A particularly racist officer, Landers, goes so far as to lose the dog whistles and come outright with the unsaid sentiment, calling Ron “Officer Toad” after getting his requested file. But Ron cannot respond. He cannot retaliate because to do so would be to risk expulsion. So, he waits for Landers to leave and proceeds to karate chop the air. Within the confines of the police station, he must remain civil while experiencing insult abound. Yet he persists.

Eventually his dedication pays off, or so it seems. Chief Bridges (Robert John Burke) calls him in to help the branch infiltrate a potentially dangerous group: Colorado College’s Black Student Union. Why? The group is planning on hosting a national civil rights leader, Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins), who might rile the “good” black people up into violent spirits. Obviously, being the only black cop in the precinct, Ron is selected as the perfect target to infiltrate the session and report back on any expressions of violence. He’s trained by fellow Detectives Flip (Adam Driver) and Jimmy (Michael Buscemi) on proper procedure and has to perform his jive dialect for them in satisfying fashion before being allowed to leave to the conference.

Ron (John David Washington) gets ready to hear Kwame speak.

After quickly acquainting himself with the Black Student Union’s president, Patrice (Laura Harrier), Ron makes his way in for Kwame’s monologue. Kwame speaks with emphatic passion as he tells the sea of black faces about the beauty inherent in their skin and the damaging manners by which they have inculcated attitudes against themselves. As his words ring true with the audience, Lee cuts to floating black faces, freed from the shackles of their predispositions and given an avenue by which to love themselves. However, Ron finds himself unable to do the same. The words have an impact on him, but he finds himself still trapped.

It makes sense. His presence at the rally is nothing but subterfuge. His liberated black persona is artifice meant to help him blend in. He’s a black man roleplaying black experience, so the conversation on accepting blackness as a lived and true experience breaks through the cracks between the mask he’s trying to put on and his true feelings underneath. By the end of the speech, Ron is the only one left keeping his fist down. He’s caught in thought. But this moment of reflection passes as Ron’s remembers his purpose for being at the rally. He raises his fist to blend in with the background, committing to the act.

Back in Chief Bridges office, Ron, Flip, and Jimmy ascertain that Kwame poses no threat, in spite of some of his incendiary remarks, but Bridges pushes back. It’s clear that he’s giving a gravity to the situation that he wouldn’t to other situations. The reason doesn’t need to be stated.

Ron (John David Washington) flips through the newspaper…

But Lee decides to make that reason clear nonetheless. Ron is transferred to Flip and Jimmy’s division and is allowed to pursue investigations. He flips through a newspaper and finds an advert for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). After calling the number advertised and getting a response from the local chapter leader, Walter (Ryan Eggold), Ron switches to a “whiter” accent and begins to lambast minorities in an effort to gain favor. While Walter is pleased with the racist tirade that would put Dr.Beuragard’s to shame with its comparative polish and fluidity, Flip and the other detectives in the room are shocked with the ease at which Ron is able to recite such vitriol. Alas, Ron’s lack of expertise comes home to roost as he accidentally mentions his real name to Walter before agreeing to meet him in person.

Unlike the Black Student Union, the Klan offers very little camouflage room for Ron, so his investigation into their affairs requires the help of a white-passing officer to act as his double, a “white” Ron. He goes with Sergeant Trapp (Ken Garito) to get Bridge’s approval for the mission but, unsurprisingly, when it comes to investigating the Klan, Bridges is less than enthused, claiming both a lack of necessity and manpower for the job. Ron and Trapp explain that the former will communicate with the Klan on the phone and serve as the primary liaison with the organization while another officer will serve as the “white” Ron and infiltrate the organization. Bridges eventually acquiesces but not before threatening Ron’s job if anything goes wrong.

The addendum is interesting because it reveals the inherent hypocrisy underlying Bridges conflicting orders. Despite claiming that Kwame and the Student Union are a dangerous threat, he’s fine with sending Ron in with no concerns regarding the latter’s safety. However, when it comes to sending a white-passing officer into an organization which he claims is not an active threat, he voices concerns about the dangers and makes it clear to Ron that loss in this circumstance is not permitted. Either he believes that the Union isn’t as dangerous as the Klan and/or he believes that harm done to Ron isn’t as severe as damage done to a white-passing officer. Regardless of what is driving Bridges decisions, it’s clear the reason is racially motivated.

Nonetheless, with mission approval acquired, Ron chooses Flip to be his doppelgänger. Now the rookie is in charge of teaching his superior on how to act in the situation, a reversal of the duo’s introduction to one another. Thus, “Ron”, the composite of a black man’s interpretation of a white man and a white-passing man’s interpretation of that interpretation, is born and can proceed towards infiltrating the Klan. Consequently, Ron, who has formed a camaraderie with Patrice due to his black persona, is forced oscillate between two radically different worlds, one black and one white, that both cause him to feel alienated regarding himself.

It’s no wonder then that this story is the one Lee has picked for the purposes of staging an dialogue with America’s film canon. Ron’s story examines the way institutions and culture shape and cement identity in needless opposition to one another. As he gets deeper with both Patrice and the Klan, he’s forced into introspection and has to determine what being black, especially within the confines of the USA, entails in regards to his orientation towards the world. Given the introduction which establishes that black cultural identity has been forcefully interpellated by a “white” romanticization which renders them criminal and deviant, the move towards depicting a tale of black agency finding itself in the world is more urgent than ever. If media has helped establish an cultural attitude, then it can help change the same, and Lee demonstrates via Ron’s eventual journey not only how those changes could materialize but also the repercussions of continuing to leave harmful representations unchallenged.

The beauty of the film is that Lee is able to have this dialogue without sacrificing entertainment value; the plot never lags or lets up, remaining compelling from start to finish. A tense encounter with the Klan is followed by mocking conversation with the organization that reveals just how out of touch with the world they are. By swapping between Ron and Flip’s respective journeys as Ron at critical junctures, Lee is able to move from comedic to tense with ease, ensuring that no narrative thread ever overstays its welcome.

Ron (John David Washington) gets on the phone with David.

The story switches only work because Lee never phones in any of dialogue scenes involving Ron and the Klan, treating them with the same regard as the thriller set-pieces involving Flip. When Ron starts to get more intimate with the clan, his phone-calls with key members are shot at canted angles or in different split-screen configurations to keep visual interest up and to demonstrate the shifting tides of understanding between the relevant parties. The already crisp and hilarious dialogue is thus accentuated and made explicitly cinematic. And the decision is important. The conversations happening are absurd. Just think about it. They involve a black man trying to achieve a heightened level of camaraderie with KKK members who love his persona while openly calling for his death in reality. It’s morose and absurd and the presentation of the situation reflects that context.

Very few films are able to be so commercially entertaining while retaining poignant themes and Spike Lee should be commended for being able to achieve both feats in such exhilarating fashion in this picture. BlacKkklansman grips you with its intriguing, but real narrative but leaves you ruminating by the end of its run-time. It’s an meaningful addition to a myopic film canon that opens the space for discourse, allowing for the possibility of more multifaceted cultural understanding. Perhaps in a century, just like Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation, BlacKkklansman will be played as an exploration of what America can truly mean.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	BlacKkklansman is that rare film that manages to stay entertaining while retaining a poignant and relevant set of themes for viewer’s to mull around about. While the real-life story of a black police officer infiltrating the KKK sounds interesting on its own, the film manages to take the narrative and present it as a response to a predominantly white film-cannon, offering an alternative view of what being black and/or American can and should look like.
Rating	10/10
Grade	A+

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2020s, 2021, Action, Adventure, B+, Drama, Epic, Fantasy, Grade, Marvel, Past, Review, review-movie, romance, Science Fiction, Superhero, Year

Film Review: Eternals – 2021

November 10, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Chloé Zhao
Principal Cast	Gemma Chan as Sersi Richard Madden as Ikaris Salma Hayek as Ajak Lia McHugh as Sprite Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo Barry Keoghan as Druig Lauren Ridloff as Makkari Don Lee as Gilgamesh Angelina Jolie as Thena Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos
Release Date	2021
Language(s)	English
Running Time	157 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

A text crawl informs us that a Celestial, a deity like figure, named Arishem, has created 10 Eternals – Ajak(Salma Hayek), Ikaris (Richard Madden), Sersi(Gemma Chan), Sprite(Lia McHugh), Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), Druig (Barry Keoghan), Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), Gilgamesh (Don Lee), Thena (Angelina Jolie), and Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) – for the purpose of eradicating Deviants, malevolent creatures which seek to eradicate intelligent life in the universe. While the Eternals are tasked with protecting sentient beings from Deviant devastation, they are prohibited from intervening in those beings’ affairs in any other manner. Doing otherwise would be tantamount to sacrilege, a violation against the will of Arishem.

This will is interpreted by the group’s leader, Ajak, who serves as the liason between the Eternals and Arishem. An orb embedded within her body functions as both a transportation and communication mechanism with the Celestial. The device flies from her chest and opens a cosmic portal which seamlessly transports her to wherever Arishem resides, bridging space and time between the two figures. Her frame is dwarfed by the red giant which exudes power and exemplifies a scale the Marvel Universe hasn’t seen on the big screens since Dr.Strange. This bridging sequence is repeated as Arishem continues to deliver orders at key intervals throughout time.

Being the group’s intermediary with Arishem, the others come to Ajak for guidance, treating her as both a stand-in for the Celestial himself and a mother-figure. However, in spite of her guarantee that the group’s actions are in line with their given purpose, many of the Eternals begins to lose faith in what they’re doing, especially once the messages from Arishem stop coming in. With no explanations or timeline for absolution, the group finds the task of protecting the humans becoming more emotionally taxing. Because they’re forced to take care of and nurture humanity, many of the Eternals come to love their wards. Consequently, they experience great existential confusion when they’re forced to wait on the side and watch the species tear itself apart at one moment and then save it at the next.

Eventually, the toll becomes too much and Druig, an Eternal with the ability to control minds, questions Ajak on why he can use his powers to save humans from untimely demise by Deviants but can’t use his powers to stop needless infighting between groups of humans, whether it be in the form of genocides or wars. Instead of ascertaining and soothing his sense of dread and sorrow, Ajak reiterates that the will of Arishem deems non-interference for all non-Deviant related matters and is the guiding principle behind the group’s purpose for being. Clearly unsatisfied with the answer, Druig sets off which prompts Ajak to break the group apart momentarily. With all visible Deviant threats apparently gone, she tells the family of immortal, ageless beings to find a purpose to their lives, a meaning to supplant the gap induced by the disjunction between Arishem’s command and the reality they live in. It’s at this point the group splits up, going forth in their own unique ways to determine what exactly their orientation towards humanity should be.

Flash forward and the film cuts to present time. Sprite, Sersi, and the latter’s human boyfriend, Dane (Kit Harrington), find themselves under attack by a newfound Deviant. Unlike the creatures they fought in the past, this one seems particularly clever and doesn’t fall for the Eternal duo’s usual battle tactics. Thankfully, Ikaris, the strongest fighter in the group, shows up at the nick of time and chases the chimera-like monster off after finding himself unable to thwart it in combat. With a newfound threat found, Sersi and co. team up to go and gather the crew back together to fulfill their purported reason for creation.

Given it’s set-up, it’s easy to forgot that Eternals is the 26th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (M.C.U). The text crawl, on top of being the franchise’s first, makes no over mention to previous ideas or entities in the franchise, and by and large, outside of a few references to the Avengers and Thanos, the movie operates similarly, presenting itself in such a fashion that even those unfamiliar with the franchise can jump into this movie. In this way, the film’s status as a Genesis story of kinds gives it a markedly new starting point to jump off and explore from.

Unfortunately, the M.C.U doesn’t want to let Eternals forget where it came from and it’s in this disjunction the problem lies. On one hand, the story wants to be a moody, existential cosmic drama in the vein of Cloud Atlas that explores the nuance of how relationships and sense of identity permeate and inform one another over space and time. On the other hand, the story is forced to fit into the patented Marvel formula, complete with hollow, formulaic one-liners that elicit momentary laughs while adding nothing to character or narrative and action set-pieces that feel tired and uninspired. The result is a decent, yet disappointing film that has individually great moments which don’t congeal in the way one would want.

This lack of inspiration is apparent in the the film’s structure which proceeds to become increasingly mundane as its patterns bear little of the creativity that the visual design of the film otherwise implies. Sersi’s road trip to finding the other Eternals follows a tired formula where the characters drive in present day towards a member of the group, and then the story cuts to a flashback of a previous historical epoch where everyone was together. There’s no thematic or narrative throughline connecting these moments together; their presentation order could change and the emotional beats of the film wouldn’t be altered all that much.

Decisions like these are a shame, because the content of the flashbacks and the story proper have more than enough in them to elicit emotional responses from the audience. Director Chloé Zhao, if anything, brings her sense of lighting and color to the film, creating fully immersive time periods that feel lived in and distinct from another. However, the creativity seen in the sets and world-building are completely absent from the way those worlds intermingle and bleed into another. By the time the third flashback cuts in, you start to question why the film wasn’t just told chronologically to begin with. The jump to the present so early on does very little when so most of the story and the emotional heft driving it lies in the past.

On that note, when the film jumps from the past to the present the first time, it uses the image of a knife to match the cuts. An ornate dagger that Sersi gave humanity centuries ago becomes a picture of the same object on her phone. It’s apparent that she’s taken the picture to document her connection and love of humanity; it persists just as strongly as the dagger exists. Her documenting obsession is even called out by Sprite, indicating that this is typical behavior for her.

In spite of this, no such cuts are ever utilized again. Instead of utilizing Sersi’s intimate connection with humanity and her desire to “snapshot” those moments via photographs as a way of delving into her and ,by association, the Eternals’ multifaceted relationship with people, the movie mentions the detail, shows it to us once, and then never broaches the subject again. Imagine if this picture-taking was extended as a motif to connect the flashbacks through the drive. Sersi sees or thinks about a connection to the past, pulls it up on her phone, and then the movie could cut to that time and place where the connection was first made. This would help demonstrate the way emotions carry over and change over time while explaining what exactly Sersi sees and envisions in people. Such details would do little to change the larger beats of the story, but they’re the kind of touches that help elevate pieces to the next level. W treats Sersi as its de-facto protagonist while absolutely squandering her ability to frame the story given her connection to the past.

While this explicit criticism sounds pedantic, the sentiment behind it is endemic of the movie. Because moments in the film are strung to one another without a gravitas befitting the subject matter, larger thematic movements and emotional beats lose the cathartic potential their existential narrative set-ups would entail. This means, while many of the individual components of the film are up to par, especially the visual design of the world and the characters proper, they don’t add up to something spectacular.

It’s a frustrating issue because the content of the film and its visual style are elements. Even though I would have preferred a mini-series to explore the characters and their respective relationships with one another, their mannerisms and interactions with one another are clear enough to get invested in their ultimate struggles. The cast is clearly enjoying themselves, bouncing off one another in a fashion that feels close and familial, even if the story’s structure doesn’t give them the time needed to give off the ranges their characters’ deserve.

Consequently, even though the last third of the film is highly derivative of previous Marvel movies, there’s more than enough to keep one invested in the impact of what’s going on. There are enough distinctive narrative choices leading up to the final confrontation that make it interesting to think about it thematically and, surprisingly, the action is some of the most cohesive and well-thought out in the franchise, both in terms of visual clarity and in regards to the characters’ powers and respective skill-sets. Even though some of the story threads are treated a bit too on the nose, the final way even thing wraps up is more than satisfying.

If Eternals is proof of anything, it’s that more experimentation is necessary, as the final script definitely feels like Zhao was forced to make choices she would not have otherwise. Nothing else would explain the discord in the film’s identity between trying to be a meditative art-house adjacent film and a superhero blockbuster meant to please the masses. The end result definitely leans towards the latter, but enough of the former shines through to give the movie a unique identity, that tantalizes the audience with a vision of what could’ve been while delivering good enough.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Though its story beats don’t subvert expectations as expected, Eternals’ technical execution and presentation makes it well worth watching, especially for those fans looking for a bit more metaphysical heft in their superhero film. While the film definitely feels like studio executives took a few too many corrective measures, destroying the possibility for the film to truly push boundaries in a meaningful sense, director Chloé Zhao still manages to instill a humanity and photographic beauty that helps the movie stay fresh in the sea of its peers. If nothing else, the depiction of Celestials is something that any fans of the franchise should be excited about.
Rating	8.3/10
Grade	B+

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2020s, 2021, Action, Adventure, Drama, Epic, Grade, Past, Review, review-movie, S, Science Fiction, Year

Film Review: Dune – 2021

November 7, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Denis Villeneuve
Principal Cast	Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen Zendaya as Chani Javier Bardem as Stilgar Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck
Release Date	2021
Language(s)	English
Running Time	minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

A deep boisterous rumble emanates from a dark abyss; subtitled translations appear and clarify this guttural noise is a message from something somewhere: “Dreams are messages from the deep.” The text disappears and the production logos pop onto the screen. Like Dario Argento’s iconic Deep Red, director Denis Villeneuve challenges the boundaries of the non-diegetic title sequence and transforms the film from being just a piece of media to a “message from the deep.” The introduction prefaces the production elements of the film, not the other way around. Thus, from its start, Dune starts off as a dream; the story to follow is nothing more than vision from an unconscious that the audience experiences. Far from being passive observers of a story, we’re part and parcel of the experience that grants that story coherence.

Once the production logos fade away, the story picks up again with a new narrator, Chani (Zendaya), who speaks to us in a language we can understand. She explains that her people, the Fremen, the indigenous population of the desert planet Arrakis, are forced to deal with the constant plundering and sacking of their home world by outsiders who seek to harvest “spice”, a drug which serves as the most valuable commodity in the galaxy, both providing health benefits on top of being the catalyst for any and all intergalactic travel. We see Chani and her fellow Fremen position in the sands, blow up one of a spice harvesting machine, and escape from the scene of the explosion. She whispers the name “Paul,” and the vision fades away as our story’s protagonist, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), wakes up. Far from talking to presumably the audience like the previous entity, Chani seems to be speaking to Paul through his dreams. But how?

The two dreams layered on top of one another suggests either that Paul also saw the first dream as a precursor to second, or that the audience is privy to an even more encompassing vision that exceeds even Paul’s. Ambiguities in the dream qua messages in regards to their senders, receivers, and method of transmission give the film an opacity which places the audience firmly on the side of the story’s hero. Like Paul, we see visions but are unaware what they fully mean. If messages are meant to inform their recipients, then the story raises the question on what exactly dreams are meant to tell us.

Following the unconscious encounter, Paul makes his way towards the dining room to eat breakfast with his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). Immediately, she asks about his dreams. It becomes apparent these visions from Chani, or more accurately the beyond that may or may not be Chani, are recurring and important enough to prompt dialogue. He responds coolly, mentioning that he had them, before then asking his mother to pass over a cup of water. She refuses and instead tells him to use “the Voice” to force her compliance. Unable to refuse, Paul commands his mother to hand him the cup.

But his voice transforms as he utters the demand, going from soft and quiet to amplified and menacing, masculine to feminine. All other sounds fade out and his words takes center stage, booming out in such fashion that a jolt in response would be appropriate. Jessica’s eyes flitter for a moment and the impact of Paul’s words continue to ring through the room. Suddenly, her hand moves a cup of water towards Paul before her eyes come back into focus and her agency returns. No explanation is given for the power or its place, but its presence informs the audience that Paul and his family are far from normal.

As if to confirm the Atreides position, Jessica promptly informs Paul he needs to change for an Imperial Procession, as his father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is to take control of Arrakis from House Harkonnen as the Emperor’s new fief ruler. Arrakis, Chani’s home world and the place of Paul’s dreams, thus becomes his new destination as his family, the Atreides, is tasked with overseeing spice production on the planet. Dreams and reality converge as Paul goes to confront his destiny.

This is Denis Villenevue’s Dune, a multi-textured cinematic dream machine that takes the task of translating author Frank Herbert’s science-fiction magnum opus to task, successfully re-creating the metaphysical visions and grandiose politicking of the books in the most spectacular fashion. If the opening few moments serve as any indication, it’s to pay close attention as even the minute characteristics have the capacity to radically alter the context by which events are evaluated. Everything seems to be connected, like pieces in a puzzle, but the shape of the image being constructed is up to the viewer.

Details invade every single frame. For example, a story of a bull told by Leto to Paul before they depart to Arrakis seems trivial at first glance, but the head of said bull makes a constant set of appearances through the film, representing the stature of the Atreides family based on its framing in the room. Thus, a simple verbal mention transforms into a powerful visual motif that remains hidden in plain sight.

Likewise, the soundscape employs heavy use of leitmotifs. Composer Hans Zimmer creates unique musical cues in relation to all the major players- the Atreides, the Harkonnens, the Fremen, the Bene Gesserit, and so on – vying for control of Arrakis and its associated treasures and employs them to convey the constantly shifting power struggles. A scene which starts with the more soothing Atreides theme indicates who’s really in charge once the sound fades out in favor of the whispery, choral theme of the Bene Gesserit. In this sense, the score acts in lieu of traditional voiceovers, giving the film an sense of direction without out-right spelling it out.

By littering the narrative, mise en scène, and soundscape in such fashion, Dune is able to fully immerse the viewer into an ethereal, dream-like experience. Every moment has so much waiting to be interpellated in relation to everything else, that one can’t help get lost in the film’s milieu. This truly feels like the culmination of Villenevue’s career up to now. Just like his previous large-scale science-fiction masterpiece, Blade Runner 2049, Villenevue fills every frame with such visual splendor that it becomes hard to not gawk at the screen (especially in IMAX). But with Dune, he puts more faith in the audience to piece together what’s happening without as many overt hints, stringing together surreal and “conventional” in fashion more similar to his cerebral thriller Enemy. That’s not to say there’s no exposition, but said exposition pales in comparison to the amount of subtle world-building done around it, providing just enough to the viewer to help them latch onto and make sense of what else is happening. The end result is a film that grabs full hold of the viewer’s attention, leading them along a path without ever spoiling where the subsequent journey will fully lead.

If there is a problem with Dune, it’s that it ends too soon. Two and a half hours pass by as the slow, cerebral, burn of the film takes hold of the viewers mind. By the time the run-time comes to an end, one is left fully ensnared and is left wanting more, as the spice-fueled dream machine truly feels like its transported the viewer elsewhere.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Dune is the science-fiction film of a century and is an experience that demands to be seen on the big screen. Villenevue expertly combines epic scale with characters worth investing in, juggling between larger macro-political struggles with intensive internal character struggles. By the time the film ends, viewers will only be left wanting more. If possible, this is an experience that needs to be experience in a thematical setting, preferably in IMAX, because it so wonderfully demonstrates the transformative power cinema contains.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S

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2020s, 2021, F, Grade, Horror, Past, Review, review-movie, slasher, splatter, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Halloween Kills – 2021

November 5, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	David Gordon Green
Principal Cast	Jaime Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode James Jude Courtney as Michael Myers Judy Greer as Karen Andi Matichak as Allyson Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy Doyle
Release Date	2021
Language(s)	English
Running Time	105 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.

As a fan of director David Gordon Green’s 2018 namesake, revival and sequel to John Carpenter’s original 1978 masterpiece, Halloween, I was hopeful that Halloween Kills would continue its predecessor’s measured approach at delving into the psychology of the characters, namely Laurie(Jaime Lee Curtis), in relation to Michael(James Jude Courtney). While not in the same league as the original, Green’s previous film at least seems to understand that the terror of Michael stems not just from his brutality but from his inability to be understood or cognized. As an emissary and force of evil, he remains an enigma.

Unfortunately, Kills forgets this key fact and throws nuance to the wind in favor of brash and abrasive points, many of which become especially confusing when given a few moments thoughts. The film’s title sequence serves as warning for what’s to come. In contrast to Carpenter’s original film’s eerie and evocative opening sequence which sets its pace with a slow push in on a jack-o-lantern that flickers menacingly, Halloween Kill’s introduction opts for something more grandiose, pushing in on a sea of flaming jack-o-lanterns which dissipate upon contact with the camera. The former approach favors the slow build-up before the spectacle, choosing to savor the moment of impact, while the latter favors extravaganza for its own sake, trading slow and methodical for bombastic. These orientations towards terror set the stage for their respective films; Halloween is a tense, atmospheric, palpable nightmare waiting to imprint its horror onto its audiences’ mind, while Halloween Kills is a to-the-point gore-fest that seeks to assault its audience with a barrage of scenarios that fail to leave a lasting mark after their initial presentation.

While the story picks up right at the end of the previous film, it almost immediately undermines everything that happened before. As Laurie, Karen(Judy Greer), and Allyson(Andi Matichak) make it to the hospital, Michael is promptly freed from his burning prison and soon starts to slaughter everything in sight. His massacre calls the attention of the residents of Haddonfield, who, under the rallying cry of a much older and still very much traumatized Tommy Doyle(Anthony Michael Hall), the young boy Laurie babysat in Carpenter’s film, go to ensure “evil dies tonight.” Consequently, the narrative jumps between groups of civilians who try and hunt Michael through the city, unaware soon-to-be victims caught in the middle of his rampage, and Laurie along with her family recovering at the hospital.

Alas, none of these narrative threads is interesting or unique. Laurie’s story might as well have not been in the film given how little she ends up doing, and all the non-Laurie related plot-lines follow the same formula as one another: introduce character, introduce said character’s quirk in lieu of meaningful personality, kill character in brutal fashion. If the character is a mob character as opposed to just a victim caught unaware, they will mention, without fail, how dangerous Michael is to confront alone, let alone with group, before then confronting him alone. Forget predictable, try exhausting. Never at any point, does anything amount to more than casually interesting, and most of the film comes up much shorter than even that.

Rather than setting firm foundation and direction for the story and its ideas to traverse along, Green and his fellow screen-writers seem content with establishing threadbare connections to Carpenter’s ’78 film, as though mere association is enough to transfer heft from one story to another. Halloween Kills confuses reverence to the most minute details for enthralling cinematic texture, assuming that because the characters are related to the first film, that somehow the audience will care about them and invest into their respective stories. Every single character or detail, big or small, is highlighted by the film as if screaming, “See, it’s all connected!” But, by and large, the effort comes off as farce. No one outside of Laurie and her family, has any embellished reason for doing what they do, and the narrative never gives the audience a reason to root for the mob and their efforts.

Furthermore, even though the last film makes it clear that Michael’s murder spree in 1978 isn’t as serious a sequence of violence as status quo events (ex: modern shootings), Kills expects the audience to now believe that there are throngs of people around who are as upset and devastated about the spree as Laurie. This insinuation not only undermines the contextual work of the last film but also moots Laurie’s unique connection to the situation. If everyone is as obsessed about the event as her, then the last film would not have happened as it did, but Kills requires this to be true in order to ramp up to the ham-fisted themes and set-pieces that it so desperately wants to present as evidence of its artistic depth.

It’s evidence that the film wants to serve as a moral warning against succumbing to mob violence; don’t pursue uncontrolled violence lest you become a monster yourself. However, the story presents no alternative to the problems mob violence seeks to resolve, especially within its own context. When a police officer talks about how they didn’t want to shoot Michael once apprehended due to respect for shared human empathy and respect for the law, it seems obvious that, without context, the audience should be in favor of such a view. Officers killing unarmed and captured enemies should not be encouraged. But because we know Michael is a brutal murderer, a point the film gleefully reminds us of as he mutilates teenagers, couples, and the elderly galore, the message of restraint and respect for rule of law becomes much more confusing, especially when the narrative constantly demonstrates just how inept the law is at dealing with such events. If monsters are bad and the law is unable to stop them, chastising mob violence and condemning it in such a moralistic fashion muddies the discourse surrounding the issue.

The point also fails to make any resounding impact given that the film is a CELEBRATION of violence. It’s hard for the consequences of mob violence to linger in one’s mind in thought-provoking fashion when the camera treats this violence no differently than it does Michael’s carnage tour. If we’re supposed to marvel and cheer at the effective, technical execution of the latter, it becomes difficult to explain why the audience shouldn’t cheer for the former, especially when both are treated in the same manner: on-display gore for the audience to gawk at.

As a result, even though Halloween Kills share many of the same qualities as the early movies in the Friday the 13th franchise, namely disposable characters and focus on brutal set-pieces at the cost of narrative or thematic depth, it never reaches near the same levels of entertainment because it takes it forces its subject matter to be treated with a undeserved gravity that makes the overall experience uneven and tepid. Despite boasting Carpenter’s excellent score, slicker moment of gore, and a more robust production than many of the Friday films, Kills inhibits enjoyment by trying to tie the gratuitous and over-the-top violence to more severe and intricate themes.

With no one to cheer for and no hefty ideas to mull about on, it’s hard to recommend Halloween Kills to anyone but ardent fans of the franchise, good and bad, and gore hounds looking for mean-spirited slayings. The story is confused and doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious contemplation on evil or a carnage candy exhibition; consequently this identity-crisis permeates and undermines the film at critical junctures, leading little to offer. I can only hope that the follow-up, Halloween Ends, wraps things up nicely, but with how disappointing Kills ended up being, I’m not holding my breath.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Halloween Kills is a sorely lacking sequel that not only squanders all good will engendered by director David Gordon Green’s previous film Halloween but also fully drops the ball for the upcoming finale, Halloween Ends. The film wants to be both a blood-bath and a piece with heart, but it fails to do either effectively because it spends no time setting up its characters or its story beats for meaningful success. Only ardent franchise fans and lovers of gore should check this one out.
Rating	4.8/10
Grade	F

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Film Review: The Last Duel – 2021

October 18, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Ridley Scott
Principal Cast	Matt Damon as Sir Jean de Carrouges Adam Driver as Jacques Le Gris Jodie Comer as Marguerite de Carrouges Ben Affleck as Count Pierre d’Alençon
Release Date	2021
Language(s)	French
Running Time	153 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

A woman, Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer), is helped into a black dress by a procession of women for a ceremony. As she’s dressed, two men, Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) take up their own ceremonial outfits in the form of knightly armaments. Marguerite is made to stand and watch as the two men get on horseback and engage in a duel to the death with one another. Why? To right a wrong. This is a trial and justice must be rendered.

Marguerite claims that Jacques raped her while her husband, Jean, was out; thus, the duel is meant to settle testimonies. God will let the righteous side prevail. It is under this belief that the two mean ready their horses and charge at one another. Weapons clash against armor and damage is done, but before any outcome is revealed the film cuts to a black screen. Text indicates that Sir Jean de Carrouges’ “truth” will be shown.

This is but the first of three such “truths” that the film will explore, one of three perspectives chronicling the events leading to the duel at hand. The set-up immediately conjures to mind Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Rashomon, a multi-perspectival recounting of a rape that demonstrates, out of many things, the way egoic identifications and layers of subjective distance render new accountings of truth that revel in aporia. While director Ridley Scott’s film shares many traits with Rashomon, namely the use and contrast of parallel retellings of a critical event, it’s far more focused on hammering home a particular set of feminist themes. Its parallel storylines don’t vastly differ from one another such as to offer multiple views of “reality”; rather, they offer vantage points by which to assess the method by which patriarchy renders women as nothing more than pieces of property.

The first two stories follow the truth as told by Jean and Jacques in that order. While the two men are different from one another, the former more battle-ready and the latter erudite, their tales and the manner in which they present their interpretations of the narrative are strikingly similar. Both see themselves as the heroes of their stories and cast the other one as the inferior imbecile needing their assistance. Both are focused on their honor and social victory in the eyes of their king and society at large. Even though their methods to gain the favor of commonwealth differ, their orientation towards the end of being symbolically enshrined – to be enshrined as “hero”.

Most importantly, this manifests in their treatment of Marguerite and by extension women in general. Jean views his wife as nothing more than dowry and the possibility of an heir – an extension of his family name and his symbolic stature. Jacques acts as though he sees her as kindred spirit, but, in reality, he effaces Marguerite’s difference in much the same way as Jean, conferring value to her only because of her proximity to what he considers valuable about himself; in other words, she’s nothing more than an vessel meant to give way for him. Scott emphasizes how the two men’s dispositions render Marguerite’s agency in the same way in spite of their perceived justness via long, often painful sex scenes where Marguerite is rendered nothing more than pleasure object. Rape and consummation are both depicted as nothing more than moments of gratification for their male storytellers.

However, the third “truth”, Marguerite’s perspective, flips the dynamic of both the previous narratives and reveals the dirty underpinnings behind what agency looks like in society where women are no more valuable than livestock kept in the barn, where law is determined by those same men who actively break it, where justice is a consequence not of procedure but of chance. Scott indicates to the viewer that this “truth” should be used as the lens by which to evaluate the other two recounts in the text screen that precedes the perspective. While the textual interludes before Jean and Jacque’s “truths” faded evenly, the one prefacing Marguerite’s lingers on the word “truth”. Her interpretation is the final and most important word for a reason.

Like the two men, Marguerite seeks to be the hero of her own tale. However, her pleasure is not oriented towards seeking some social recognition. As the wife of a boneheaded warrior in Jean, a man who admits to being jealous, she is forced to remain within the confines of his manor. In such a space, her agency is forced to express itself in the upkeep she takes on. Her focus is not on status or doing tasks the “proper way” but on a pragmatic liveliness, and the manner she engages with the world reflects that.

This is best demonstrated in a moment repeated in all three “truths”. Jean introduces Jacques to Marguerite and has her kiss his former enemy in front of the large crowd around the group, visibly demonstrating the restoration of the friendship and socially sanctifying it. Jean’s interpretation of the scene starts with him offering the olive branch in the form of loud declaration followed by letting his wife give a peck on the cheek which he approves of. Jacque’s interpretation starts with him, instead of Jean, offering the olive branch in the form of the same loud declaration followed by receiving a peck on the cheek. He notices a smile on Marguerite’s face during and after the encounter. During both of these retellings, Marguerite is framed in the background of the frame, in between the two men, reinforcing her status as a prop in both of their worldviews.

However, the same scene from Marguerite’s view focuses squarely on her face, eschewing the faces of the men as they offer one another the olive branch. Unlike both of the men’s scenes which emphasize and focus on who actually offered the symbolic gesture, Marguerite’s scene could care less for disambiguating who really did it because to her, no matter who started the processions, she’s still a pretty bow meant to represent that gesture. She kisses because she is expected to do so by the social order and accepts the function, but she doesn’t grant it importance or legitimacy because it obfuscates her desires.

Unfortunately, what she thinks is important isn’t relevant, and the story showcases through the variations in its recounts that symbolic authority overdetermines the feminine subject so severely that even their pleasure is nothing more than a death knell of what women can be. As the wise men of the film explain, women’s sexual pleasure, in the most direct sense, is nothing more than confirmation that pregnancy has been achieved. The stipulation goes so far to imply that a woman who cannot get pregnant is responsible for that predicament because she isn’t achieving pleasure in the same way as her husband. In this way, women’s pleasure is subordinated and their desires are co-opted towards the child; she provides confirmation of her husband’s name in the world.

This is the central conflict at the heart of The Last Duel and what makes even subtle differences between the narratives damning for what they reveal about both truth and the extents people can go to transform it to fit their parameters. The primary actors juggle the nuances between multiple roles and shift between their projected heroic projections to villainous identifications made by someone else with ease. A character like Jacques goes from charming and suave to horrific without either representation tearing the other one down. Both images persist and reveal something deeper about the character and the society that surrounds him.

Speaking of the society, this is a Ridley Scott film and as such doesn’t skimp on the sets or the sense of grandeur. There are extras littering the frame in key moments and their faces reinforce the subtext constantly. Women look upset and distraught and are usually pushed further to the periphery of the frame, in the background. Men are usually jubilant or imposing and are often in the centers of the frame. While most of the film isn’t subtle about its gender analysis, viewing scenes where men and women react so viscerally distinct to the same phenomena underscores the way subjectivity is sutured. At a more basic level, the presence of hordes of people roaming around the lavish sets brings a vitality to the film as moments feel lived in.

However, there are moments where the film lags because of the scripts reluctance to embrace larger differences in the construction of its three respective narratives. There are large sequences that are repeated with subtle nuances that could be delved into but end up feeling, at least on first viewing, to be overly gratuitous. Especially given how explicit some of the themes are made by the characters, it’s an odd choice for how tame some of the narrative divergences are. As opposed to Rashomon, which relishes in provoking differences between its recounts to the point where characters morph entirely into clearly distinct points of view, The Last Duel feels like it scratches the surface of what its story allows. While the same level of variation as Rashomon isn’t necessary and would be a detriment to the stringency of The Last Duel’s themes, more experimentation with the way subjects color their actions would make repeated sequences easier to watch.

Lack of variation isn’t the only factor dulling the film’s momentum from time time. Most of the action set-pieces have a similar effect in causing narrative propulsion to stutter. These long, monotonous battle sequences fail to have the distinctive flair found in Scott’s previous action outings à la Gladiator, lacking the finesse or theatricality to leave meaningful impact. These moments also do little to demonstrate or reinforce character development, so they fall flat and feel semi-disconnected in the otherwise character rich story.

Thankfully, these bumps don’t hinder the otherwise captivating and poignant tale. By the time the final duel becomes the focal point of the film again, the stakes, both narrative and thematic, have been duly set, so there’s a vested interest in determine who wins the battle. The cost of establishing the truth and living by it is made abundantly clear.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	The Last Duel‘s triple-perspective retelling regarding the situations leading up to a rape accusation and its subsequent legal determination provide a great springboard to analyze themes about gender and its relation to authority structures subjectivity is effective even if some of those themes are presented a bit too on the nose. While the film effectively utilizes its multiple vantage points to explore the way gender and subjectivity intersect, it feels like it doesn’t go as far as it’s Rashomon style premise would allow it to venture, rendering it an a great, but lacking work.
Rating	9.2/10
Grade	A

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Film Review: Titane – 2021

October 13, 2021 The Critic 4 Comments

Director(s)	Julia Ducournau
Principal Cast	Agathe Rousselle as Alexia/Adrien Vincent Lindon as Vincent
Release Date	2021
Language(s)	French
Running Time	108 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

The camera crawls over the internal workings of a car engine, jumping from one section to another, canvassing each in sensuous manner. Country music strings can be heard intermingled with the mechanical noises of the engine proper. Eventually, the film cuts inside of the car; now the engine’s rumbles are replicated by a young girl, Alexia, who delights in her loud and boisterous emulation much to the chagrin of her father who turns up the country music louder and louder as a response.

Upset with her father’s refusal to be her plaything, Alexia starts to repeatedly kick his chair before then taking off her seatbelt to presumably cause more havoc. Her father immediately turns back to yell at her and ends up losing control. Crash. She flies and suffers a head wound. Disfiguration. At the hospital, her head is outfitted with a titanium plate. Transformation. Titane is here. Metal has become flesh. Alexia has been reborn as cyborg proper, a child of metal. Far from just emulating its hums, she now is partly composed of it.

After the procedure, Alexia ignores her father and goes out to the car. Due to her crash, one would expect some kind of traumatic response, but Alexia goes to kiss the vehicle, showering it with a kind of love that seems all the more absurd given her seeming lack of feeling to her parents. Her kinship is with the world of metal and not with the world of humanity; metal becomes more skin than skin itself – a reorientation towards flesh. Just like Raw, director Julia Ducournau is most interested in breaking down the boundaries of where flesh stops being banal and starts being something worth protecting. Instead of utilizing cannibalism as the means of navigating the contours of what renders flesh valuable, she uses Alexia’s fetishistic relationship to metal.

Jump to the future. Country strings are replaced by The Kills’ “Doing It To Death” – a sign of things to come. An older adult Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) struts confidently through an underground car facility. Cinematographer Ruben Impens captures her movements in a smooth tracking shot that never breaks, gliding through a erotic gallery of bodies moving, women dancing evocatively over the hoods of cars as customers wait and watch, before finally revealing Alexia as one of these women. Unlike Raw’s gorgeous one-shot tracking shot of a rave scene meant to demonstrate it’s main characters disorientation, Titane’s introductory one-shot highlights its protagonists wholehearted embrace of an sensual and no-bars lifestyle. Far from learning discipline from her car crash, Alexia has only become more emblazoned; it’s no coincidence that car she dances on top is painted with flames. She’s an unrestrained fire that seems hellbent on “doing it to death”.

She leaves the show but is accosted on the way to her car by a fan who gives chase to her. The situation is clearly uncomfortable; the nature of his approach is downright predatory and his actions afterwards, including a non-consensual kiss, make it clear that Alexia can’t easily get away from him. Curiously, she leans in to him and begins kissing him more passionately, seemingly rewarding his unwarranted advances with tacit approval. However, this clearly is demonstrated to be far from the case as she quickly removes a long, pointed, hairpin and quickly stabs the unsuspecting fan through his ear, killing him in brutal fashion. The point of injury is near the same point of her own titanium implant – the site of which is still fleshy and observable. In her own way, she has rendered unto her attacker a similar injury – a ritual reenacting her own trauma.

Once home, she takes a shower and attempts to wash away the events of the night. But as soon as she steps out of the shower, the walls and floors start to rumble and shake. A mirror against the wall reflecting Alexia shakes and threatens to come off. Alexia opens the door to discover the source of the noise and realizes that the rumbles are coming from her flaming car. It’s calling to her, beckoning her forward. She answers its calls and gets into the vehicle. Ducournau pushes it to 11 at this point and gives the audience a small taste of what’s to come, as it is at this point Alexia begins to have passionate sexual relations with the car, moaning and rejoicing in the vehicle as she would any other lover. The scene cuts from Alexia writhing in ecstasy within the metal cocoon to shots of the car buckling up and down, shaking all around, confirming its status as fully alive.

Consequently, the experience pushes Alexia to embrace her relationship with metal qua flesh in more radical fashion. It’s revealed that far from considering metal superior, she considers it the only flesh worth protecting. Far from being a chance murder, it turns out that the ear-impaled fan is only one of Alexia’s many victims; she’s a mass murderer of sorts and kills people as easily as people eat their meals. Human flesh isn’t sacred or relevant to her; she has no reason to love it and treats it as nothing more than a nuisance. Eventually, things catch up and she’s forced to abandon her home, her parents, and occupation. Made to carve out a new station in life, Alexia proceeds through an entanglement of metal and skin in an attempt to carve out a orientation towards the flesh, one predicated on love.

Like Raw, Titane features gory set-pieces tied to the themes of the story, impeccable and uncomfortable sound design that emphasizes squelching, and a host of perverse orientations towards the flesh. However, unlike Raw, which features a mainly straight-forward, albeit textured, story, Titane is far more ambitious in the scope of its themes and the surreal, almost dream-like way its narrative proceeds, choosing to show character interactions and reactions instead of explaining them or having anyone mention them explicitly. Ducournau is clearly in her element here and deftly weaves ideas about gender expectations against Alexia’s ongoing relationships with flesh, demonstrating that what conditions and furnishes meaning is not blood or similarity, but an ability to feel love. Form matters less than content, a notion that’s stretched to its limits as Alexia navigates the borders of both gender and humanity in an attempt to find meaning in her life.

Her journey and it’s development are made all the more obvious by the no-holds barred fashion in which Ducournau captures the macabre, often times showing the bloody in a nonchalant and apathetic fashion thereby giving brutal murder sequence s a sick comedic undertone that less squeamish viewers will enjoy. Murder stops being the focus and its purpose becomes the point of focus, as Alexia’s murderous drives change form as she considers what makes flesh normatively valuable. Agathe Rousselle makes these moments of transformation palpable, rendering a variety of expressions from tired, but otherwise unfazed to broken in and devastated. It’s no small feat that she gets the viewer to invest in and root for a serial murderer whether they think she’s going to change her lifestyle or not.

Thus, far from just being a set of gore-pieces held together by indecipherable plot threads, Titane is meticulous and precise, with even small details blowing up quietly in the background of the film as it goes on. At every point, Ducournau focuses on showing the way flesh, metal or human, engenders its own preservation via inculcating love in others, demonstrating that the connecting force between subjects/objects is not so much perceived sameness as the possibility for affection between them. Because of this, even the more outlandish plot elements make sense within the confines of the story even if the actual reasons behind them or the way they culminate aren’t completely known to the viewer. For those willing to spend the analyzing the parallels, Titane offers a gory story that not only manages to captivate from start to end but also manages to showcase the true powers of love.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Though largely silent and visual, Titane, far from having too little to say, has a wide breadth of fleshy ideas it dives into and explores. The juxtaposition of human skin and metal along with idea of gender as a socially coded role gives Ducournau room to explore what renders flesh something worth caring about and protecting. Though more squeamish viewers might be put off, those looking for a film that invites the them to think and engage with them without giving all the answers will find more than their fair share’s worth in Titane.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S

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Film Review: Insidious: Chapter 2 – 2013

October 9, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	James Wan
Principal Cast	Patrick Wilson as Josh Lambert Rose Byrne as Renai Lambert Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier Ty Simpkins as Dalton Lambert Andrew Astor as Foster Lambert
Release Date	2013
Language(s)	English
Running Time	106 minutes
Report Card	Click to go Review TLDR/Summary

Note: This review contains spoilers for: Insidious.

Director James Wan’s sequel to Insidious opens in the past. A young Elise (Lindsay Seim) makes her initial visit to Lorraine (Jocelin Donahue) and Josh (Garrett Ryan) after being called as an additional line of help by her friend and fellow-psychic, Carl (Hank Harris ), who finds himself unable to deal with old woman spirit (Tom Fitzpatrick) haunting Josh. Elise hypnotizes Dalton to make him more suggestible and asks him to reveal information on the old woman. She searches the house in order to confront the malevolent entity. As the events of the night continue, Josh gets up and starts speaking to an entity who no one else can see, psychic gifts or otherwise. Josh leads the entity to a location in the house and points to the location at which point, due to his inexplicable behavior and the nature of the spirit, Elise recommends “sealing” his astral projection gifts away.

The bright red title card drops in as a sea of violent noises come to a crescendo. However, the malevolent color is displaced by a spectral blue that comes from the reveal of the “Chapter 2” in the title. A lantern similar to the ones used in the “further” goes across the title card, letting the viewer know that unlike the first film which had to tease the metaphysical, this film is more than ready to dive into supernatural hijinks.

Drawing to a close, the title sequence ends on a red door, and the camera glides through it and the dark void it opens to towards a faraway light in the distance. Eventually, the camera gets to the light, which turns out to be a lamp lighting a room where Renai (Rose Byrne) is being interrogated by a police officer over the death of Elise (Lin Shaye), an action which is revealed to the viewer at the end of Insidious as having been committed by a recently possessed Josh. Renai recalls finding Elise’s limp body and then finding the photograph of the old woman before running into an emotionally off Josh at the scene of the crime; her doubts were set then and have only continued to fester, but without definitive proof of her husband being possessed or just off, she has to learn to work with him . She confirms to the detective that she doesn’t think her husband is responsible for Elise’s death before going back home to continue dealing with the supernatural mess still wreaking havoc in the Lambert’s lives.

Chapter 2, as such, is split between telling two tales: the first follows the way the ‘Further’ intermingles and intervenes in the Lamberts life and the second explores the background of the spirit possessing Josh. While both stories inform and effect one another, the former is markedly more original and ambitious and gives the mechanics of the Insidious franchise a put-togetherness that other supernatural outings wish they could achieve. Comparatively, the latter story is contrived, not as tight, and plays like a series of lost opportunities, often settling for horror in the moment as opposed to building to larger moments of intense panic. While the nature of what’s revealed in this second narrative thread is “shocking” at a surface level, it does nothing to develop either the film’s themes or the themes of its prequel in nearly as effective a manner as the first narrative thread.

This first story takes the building blocks established in the first movie and expands on the metaphysical makeup of its supernatural domain: the ‘Further’, a place where circuits of desire are repeated while specters engage in the same acts over and over again in loop. This time the narrative focus is less on the domain itself and more on the the effects it has on the living world. It’s not the mechanics of the ‘Further’ which are explored as much as the way the domain intervenes in the world of the living, tying seemingly disparate moments together. Consequently, the film revels in building up scenes from one vantage point and then exploring them again from the other domain; the interplay between these jumps from the “real” world to the ‘Further’ and back again gives Wan an and scriptwriter Leigh Whannell more than enough space to explore creative spectral interplays.

Unfortunately, these mechanics are barely utilized to their fullest and are leveraged in service of the second story, which, while not being incompetently constructed, lacks the nuance or creativity of the first film. While the first story feels like an extension of the Lambert’s conflicts from the first film, the second story feels largely separated. The struggles depicted in the former have a texture and feeling because there’s a sense of empathy in the helplessness and nature of what’s going on, but the tribulations in the latter feel overly theatric and break the sense of immersion generated by the former. Realism takes a seat back to spectacle, and the themes get lost in translation, as the viewer focuses on terror for terrors sake as opposed to terror in serve of a larger thematic movement. As a result, visceral moments in the film shock when presented but don’t have the same staying power as the scenes from the initial Insidious which linger in the viewer’s memory long after.

This is a shame because the first story could have served as the basis for the investigation the second story ventured on if better attention was given to the nature of Josh’s possession. As a location, the ‘Further’ gives fertile ground to explore the way trauma unfurls. Like the first film demonstrates, spirits are trapped into cycles of repetition and are made to re-enact their trauma ad-infinitum. Seemingly unable to find peace, it seems that being a trapped within the ‘Further’ is a horrific fate that any entity would seek to escape, but the furthest the film goes towards exploring that idea, a great source of motivation which could have served as the basis of the second story’s mystery, is having a character mention the idea off-hand a few times. Instead of just saying it, the film could have built on this idea visually and tied it to the Lambert’s struggle to find a locus of healing and stability. Wan and his production team do a great job at evoking ethereal and inexplicable horror, but it feels like they barely scratched the surface of demonstrating the brutality of the material they’re working with, choosing instead to go for familiar and easy-to-explain over ambitious and potentially more confusing. For example, there’s a great set piece involving a host of covered bodies but by the end of the film the scene says very little besides “evil exists”. It’s just unsettling imagery that disturbs momentarily before being cast aside.

Thankfully, lack of memorable scares does not entail lack of memorable moments and Wan and Whannell still manage to leverage the better parts of the story to great effect, satisfyingly bringing the prequel’s story to a resolute close. There are a few hiccups getting to this ending, but eventually, when Chapter 2’s two story threads come together, the narrative proper is allowed to go full throttle towards an emotionally satisfying finish line that concludes (almost) all the relevant story threads on a nice ending point. While this sequel entry isn’t as strong a stand-alone as Wan’s initial foray in to the supernatural genre, it’s certainly a good enough follow-up that fans of the original should check it out. It does what all good sequels should attempt to do: extend the interesting ideas of the first movie without re-hashing them in boring fashion. Just because the film doesn’t elevate all the interesting ideas to their potential, it does more than enough to distinguish itself from and progress its prequel.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Insidious: Chapter 2 is a film that serves up many of the same thrills of its prequel in terms of ambiance and technical construction, while bringing many plot threads to a neat and resolute end-point. While it settles for cheaper scares than its worldbuilding allows, thus squandering some of its potential, it delivers more than enough intrigue to keep fans of the original and those interested more broadly in supernatural horror and its related mechanics intrigued from start to finish. It may not nail all it’s beats, but it’s certainly a good deal more fun than many of its peers.
Rating	7.9/10
Grade	B

Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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1990s, 1999, folk, found footage, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, Year

Film Review: The Blair Witch Project – 1999

October 6, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Daniel Myrick Eduardo Sánchez
Principal Cast	Heather Donahue as Heather Michael C. Williams as Michael Joshua Leonard as Joshua
Release Date	1999
Language(s)	English
Running Time	81 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

The film opens on the title card, white letters against a black backdrop, before informing the viewer that the footage presented comes from three student filmmakers who disappeared while shooting it. In other words, this is a “true” story based on true, un-edited, footage.

As if in demonstration and confirmation of this status, a completely unfocused mess of colors permeate the screen. It becomes apparent that the camera technician is trying to get the camera to focus on its subject, Heather (Heather Donahue), who explains that she is going to film a documentary on the eponymous “Blair Witch”. Unlike other horrors that start with the “true story” introduction, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by Tobe Hooper, The Blair Witch‘s look confirms its announcement, thereby imbuing it with a grounded feeling. Consequently, Heather’s announcement transforms from quirky and cheerful to swan song; the viewer knows that her documentary will lead her to her disappearance. The cheery footage is confirmation that she, and her two cameramen, Joshua (Joshua Leonard) and Michael (Michael Williams) are no more.

This impending doom permeates the film and tinges each of the introduction to the documentary’s crew with melancholy. Heather’s unending enthusiasm feels like a cruel joke. Likewise, Michael telling his mother goodbye hits harder because it’s the last time he’s ever going to see her. As the crew sets off to Burkittsville, Maryland to get footage for their “film”, the viewer knows they’re marching off to their doom.

Upon getting to the location of where the “Blair Witch” myth started, Heather, the director of the documentary, switches cameras from the camcorder, which records in color, to the 16-MM film camera, which records in black and white. The former camera is her attempt to capture a “behind-the-scenes” and the latter camera is for the for the documentary proper. The juxtaposition of the black and white scenes to the colored scenes which came before, accentuate the realism the film goes for precisely because of the amateur nature of Heather’s filmmaking.

As she uses the 16 MM to film a set of insert shots in foreboding manner – a town sign, an angel figure, headstones in a cemetery, etc – it’s apparent she’s trying to evoke a sense of fear and immensity for the audience she thinks is going to watch her piece. Her narration is overdramatic and makes the attempt at horror on her part feel cheesy. However, it is precisely because her attempts at selling fear in such a forward fashion fail, that the terrors she experiences in the latter half of the film gain their legitimacy. Because the polish associated with a studio project is missing from these “proper” shots, they give the “improper” shots an extra genuine feeling.

An old man talks about the Blair witch on the camcorder.

Case in point, Heather and her crew interact a decent amount of townspeople for clues about the witch before deciding to go off into the forest to get footage on landmarks associated with the malevolent entity. They approach most of these people with the camcorder first, before then asking their subject questions about the witch. If the answer satisfies them, they switch to the 16MM camera and start to shoot “serious” footage. The viewer gets to see the crew canvas targets, ask them questions, hear vague series of answers which paint a dark mythos that reveals very little, and then switch cameras to film those townspeople who had something “interesting” to say.

In fact, it is precisely the film’s switching between the two cameras that gives it the terrifying texture that’s made it such an integral part of horror canon. The film invites the viewer into the film-making process and shows them a view of “reality” and then “reality via artifice” in comparison. These moments provide a point of minimal difference that cements that the found-footage comes from the real world, the world the viewer actually resides in. When on camcorder, the townsfolk talk naturally and seem like average residents. There’s nothing obviously phony about them or their presentation. However, when the film camera is used, the townsfolk adopt a persona for the camera, as though conscious that they are now “officially” going to be on film, so they have to act their best. By providing a point of contrast and a measured difference, the film convinces the audience of the “truth” of the two realities its presenting.

Obviously, this technique implies that the theatrics are only happening behind the black-and-white screen. As a result, the camcorder scenes achieve a level of “legitimacy” that gives them a staying power. For example, a baby screaming out and rushing to cover their mother’s mouth when the latter mentions the Blair Witch stories on the camcorder immediately feels like an omen, because it’s not “staged”/repeated in 16 MM. Thus, the camera gains the power of being a filter for reality. It’s a measure of control that demarcates what is reality and what is artifice.

This idea of the camera as controlling force is the driving theme behind The Blair Witch Project and explains why it’s one of the most frightening found-footage films ever. Heather is obsessed with getting more footage of the events, constantly shoving a camera in someone’s face or trying to get more coverage of terrifying events as they happen. Her compulsion to record is criticized by both Josh and Michael at various points, as they see the behavior as at odds with the group’s ability to navigate the spectral occurrences they run into. However, as she explains herself, the act of documentation is all “she has left.” The camera is the only tool she has left to frame the horrors around her into a cohesive narrative that she overcome.

This is also why the camera is constantly associated with civilization, with Heather and company constantly mentioning that their detour in the woods as having to end eventually because America is destroying its environment. Far from being a cause of concern, the characters repeat the statement in the hopes that the unconquerable vastness of the wilderness will eventually give way to the calm control provided by civilization. In this way, the camera becomes the normalizing force of the social order – a tool meant to help carve out the wild and mystical unknowns into something more agreeable. It is an extension of an American dream which envisions technology being used to cut through and remove the inexplicable from the day-to-day.

This posture towards technology stands in stark contrast to Japanese horror (J-horror) films coming out at the same time, like Ring by Hideo Nakata and Pulse by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, which focused on the anxiety inherent in technology. In Nakata and Kurosawa’s films, technology provides a conduit through which the supernatural past can make its presence felt once again in the “modern” world. In The Blair Witch Project, far from being a tool of the supernatural, the camera is never allowed to witness supernatural events happening as they happen and instead is only ever allowed to assess their consequences, suggesting that the supernatural can’t be tamed by the powers of modernity. This effect is made all the more suspenseful because of the ambiguous worldbuilding provided by the townspeople. Not a single story any member gives is wholly consistent with another, so the nature of who or what what the Blair Witch and their respective capacities is a mystery. One phenomenon hearkens back to one legend of the myth while another leans another way. With no rhyme or reason to the terror at play, the viewer is stuck, like the crew themselves, to experience the scares without knowing the stakes.

In this way, The Blair Witch Project, is a found-footage horror truly representing the sub-genre’s name. It’s a demonstration of the inability of film to mediate horror and provide enough of a gap to render it palatable and tame. Found footage, far from providing answers, only hints at the uncanny power of the abyss which gives no refuge or answers to anyone willing to seek them. By the time the film gets to the latter sections, the characters no longer find solace in their cameras because their ability to frame the situation is removed. The 16 MM and camcorder become interchangeable as the distinctions between what is reality and what is artifice becomes blurry before vanishing into a void with no answers. The behind-the-scenes footage becomes artifice and vice versa as the places to hide from the terror of the unknown disappear.

When the film approaches its end, the edits between scenes become more jarring and provide less information as to what’s happened in the “down-time”. It’s apparent that the characters are clearly filming less as they find themselves trapped and terrified in a situation they can’t comprehend, let alone control. Like the characters, the viewer gets no reprieves from the terrors, as the camera cutting off doesn’t mean respite as much as it means one awful moment is going to cut to a moment even worse in the future. The audience is strapped into a roller-coaster of nightmares that shows no signs of slowing down as the film races towards its finish.

While the directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, deserve credit for pushing such a low-budget idea to such great lengths, the reason the film is able to work at all, let alone so effectively, is because of the seeming veracity of every actor. Every member of the cast, whether it be the primary trio or the townspeople, has to put on multiple layers of performance, both presenting a “genuine” representation and an obvious façade on that representation that seemingly also stems from it. In other words, the actors have to present a fantasy off as reality and then pass another related fantasy off as artifice. Despite interviewing a plethora of characters, there’s never a point where this dichotomy fails or feels questionable. Actually, the spontaneous nature of the storytelling and dialogue feels so put together and cohesive that it reaches that magical place where it is both too unkempt to feel constructed but is also pointed enough to not come off as feeling totally left-field.

Even though the film might not be as terrifying as it was when it first came out in 1999, at the height of mainstream acceptance of the internet, its construction and “honesty” make it a compelling watch for anyone willing to invest seriously into its premise. The natural character interactions, commitment to authenticity, lack of polish, and unpredictable roller-coaster of scares of The Blair Witch Project are still rarities in the found-footage genre which it helped to popularize and make commonplace, and all serve as proof of just how special the film is.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	The Blair Witch Project is proof that a solid idea and tight execution can be scarier than any polished Hollywood production. Despite being one of the first “found-footage” horrors, The Blair Witch Project is still one of the best. It effectively combines ambiguous worldbuilding, realistic performances, and quick and efficient pacing to deliver a horror that reveals our natural proximity to the terrors hiding beneath the veneer of civilization. Those viewers willing to suspend their disbelief and give in to the film can still find some of the terror that audiences back in 1999 first got a taste of.
Rating	A+
Grade	9.6/10

Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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2010s, 2013, Drama, gothic, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, psychological, Review, review-movie, S, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Stoker – 2013

October 5, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Park Chan-wook
Principal Cast	Mia Wasikowska as India Stoker Matthew Goode as Charlie Stoker Nicole Kidman as Evelyn Stoker Dermot Mulroney as Richard Stoker
Release Date	2013
Language(s)	English
Running Time	99 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

India (Mia Wasikowska) walks across the street as the frame freezes. Her actor’s name appears across from her.

“My ears hear what other cannot. Small, faraway things people cannot normally see are visible to me. These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing. Longing to be rescued. To be completed. Just as the skirt needs the wind to billow…I’m not formed by things that are of myself alone. I wear my father’s belt tied around my mother’s blouse. And shoes which are from my uncle. This is me. Just as a flower does not choose its color…we are not responsible for what we have come to be. Only once you realize this do you become free. And to become adult, is to become free.”

These words are whispered by our protagonist, India (Mia Wasikowska) in a part opening montage and part intro credit sequence that opens on her walking away from a sports car and police car across the street to a green pasture. Her actress’s name, Mia Wasikowski appears on the screen right next to her as the frame freezes momentarily – the present fading into the past. Time flows again and she walks over the name, subsuming it. She stands over the pasture and looks over it, as the wind blows her skirt and the long grass around her. Another cast member’s name appears in the enclosing of her skirt as the frame freezes again. Once again, the present “intervenes” and the freeze stops while the name recedes into the invisible abyss it came from. This pattern continues to repeat before settling on a white flower spattered in red.

This image is unsettling because at this point in the monologue, India directly refers to how a flower doesn’t choose its colors, in the same way as people do not choose the contingent events that shape up their lives up to that moment. The camera cuts to an image of her face smiling as her whispered speech ends on her explaining that realizing this truth is to become adult, thereby becoming free. The frame freezes one last time as her smiling face dissolves to another shot of a younger her running through another field of green; the sounds of wind and rustling fabrics and grass give way to composer Clint Manwell’s fairy-tale like score which evokes feelings of wonder and propulsive change.

India (Mia Wasikowska) feels an injury on her foot.

Just like her “modern” counterpart, this younger India is also followed by the opening credits which appear in the environment around her. She pays them no mind; instead, she takes her shoes off upon noticing a callous and sits next to a gray statue who serves as a mirror image to her. Her wound bursts with clear pus after she pops it, bursting through the soundscape momentarily, before disappearing again. Without a moment wasted, India continues a search, canvassing multiple locations surrounding her expansive residence for “something.” Finally, she climbs up a tree and finds a Birthday present in a box wrapped with yellow ribbons.

Upon finding her mystery item, the film cuts to India’s birthday cake; the propulsive score fades away as the sounds of sirens and flames take charge – a sharp contrast to the scene in question. The camera pushes in on the cake and then rises above it before descending. Now covered in a glass container, the cake is unable to sustain its flames which dissipate into wisps of smoke as a phone starts to ring. A woman screams, “Richard. No!” as the glass container dissolves into the film’s title card proper, which is etched out by an invisible pen and ink.

The camera lingers on both Evelyn’s and India’s shooes. One wears heels while the other wears saddle shoes, a mark of adulthood and childhood respectively.

A preacher’s voice can be heard and it’s revealed that Richard, India’s father, has died. Thus, her 18th birthday, the threshold marking her “birth” as an adult, is marked by the loss of a parent, a figure meant to guide her on that path. Her mother, Evelyn, and her sit at the funeral, both distraught in their own ways. India is stoic and steely while her mother is visibly puffy and devastated. The camera goes to the pair’s feet momentarily; Evelyn is wearing heels while India is wearing saddle shoes. However, India notices a disturbance – a gaze taking notice of her. She turns her head to the side and notices a figure in the distance, a man staring down at her from above the hillocks she previously ran through.

India plays the piano as a spider crawls towards her.

The funeral service proper ends, but the preacher’s sermon continues playing in the soundscape of India’s mind. She tries to play piano while a spider crawls towards her feet. However, her attempts at distracting herself are interrupted by her mother, whose figure makes its presence known on the mirror above her. As Evelyn implores India to help with the event’s cooking, the latter stares her down with a kind of disdain. Even after turning to face Evelyn, as opposed to facing her mirror image, India refuses to say anything. Evelyn exasperatedly pushes her point while the aforementioned spider skirts up the grieving daughter’s leg.

India (Mia Wasikowska) sits in the kitchen to help make deviled eggs.

However, India does acquiesce to her mother’s demands and goes to the kitchen to help make deviled eggs. She overhears a pair of maids gossiping about the state of her family’s affairs. These unwanted thoughts her, so she starts to roll an egg, cracking it slowly. Outside noise fades out as the sound of the eggs breaking overwhelms the ears, until finally, Mrs. McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville), the Stoker’s head caretaker, silences the pair and goes to inquire into India’s state of mind. The two remnisce on their shared past with deviled eggs and it becomes clear that unlike, Evelyn, India sees the elderly caretaker as a surrogate-mother of sorts. Mrs. McGarrick takes out flowers which are tied with a yellow ribbon and asks India if she found her birthday present yet. India ties the color of the ribbon on the flower to the color of the ribbon on the box from her initial adventure and reveals she found a key in the box before also expressing surprise at the revelation that Mrs.McGarrick is tied to her yearly birthday presents, shoes, as opposed to her deceased father like she initially thought.

She leaves the kitchen momentarily and sees her mother talking to the stranger who gazed upon the mother-daughter duo earlier at the funeral. Her mother sees India and calls out to her, introducing the stranger as Roger’s brother, Charlie – a stranger turned into long lost uncle. The revelation deeply upsets India who immediately walks back into the kitchen. Her pale expression invites concern from Mrs.McGarrick who inquiries into what’s wrong. India responds honestly: “Yes. My father is dead”.

India (Mia Wasikowska) sleeps in her bed dejected.

As if in response to her dejection, the film cuts to a fully lethargic India. The camera tracks to the right from India’s face to a pair of shoes, like the ones she’s worn previously. This pair of shoes dissolves into another which dissolves into another and so on, each pair smaller than the one that came before it. Eventually, the dissolving shoes come to a small pair, fit for a toddler, before the camera tracks right back to India’s face. The camera steps back and reveals that India is laying in a circle of 16 pairs of shoes; each pair from the montage lies around her, in a displaced oval like shape, ranging from oldest to newest pair. Her “current” 17th pair, lies on the floor next to the bed; one pair for every birthday except for the most current birthday – the threshold to becoming an adult.

It’s not just that the 18th pair, the guide to walking the path to adulthood, is missing. India’s turmoil stems from the double mystery of who was fully responsible for her previous 17 pairs of shoes. Up to the moment of Mrs.McGarricks’ reveal, India has walked in her “father’s” footsteps. With the identity of the gift-giver stripped away, the path which has defined her so long as a subject is now that has to be re-treat, rediscovered. The words from the opening monologue ring more resounding here: “I’m not formed by things that are of myself alone “.

The montage which initially presented itself as a series of discrete images, moments bleeding into one another, turns out to be multiple sections of the same image. Far from being from different times, the shoes exist in the same “present” moment with India. However, the montage of them dissolving demonstrates the logic of how moments are just accumulations of everything that came before. Each “shoe” is an epoch that can now be re-cast; a past that can open the doors to new futures.

Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) comments that India and Richard’s hunting trophies are wastes of life but Charlie seems to appreciate the work the father-daughter duo did.

Meanwhile, Evelyn and Charlie talk about India and Richard’s close-knit relationship, one formed primarily around hunting birds. Evelyn bemoans the act as senseless violence, but Charlie shows great respect for the duo’s craft. He picks up one of their winged trophies and reveals an an egg underneath. The deviled eggs which start as one of India’s favorite treats become an egg which serves as a remainder of her relationship with her father which then dissolves into her eye itself. Eggs are treats are trophies are eyes. A series of poetic connections between the images are formed.

Eggs are white on the outside and yellow on the inside. Eggs, at least the ones shown in the film, are related to birds. In other circumstances, the eggs would break apart to allow new life to come out – the birth of something new. This is a story of a girl becoming a woman, on the threshold of adulthood, looking for a path to walk on as influences all around her permeate her crumbling shell.

India walks around the house and the whispers about her family’s affairs continue. In hushed tones, adults abound talk about her family; their words enter her mental landscape constantly. She notices Charlie talking to a seemingly distraught Mrs. McGarrick, but just as she sensed her Uncle Charlie earlier during the funeral, her uncle senses her gaze and turns to meet it. However, India immediately averts the battle of gazes and escapes. Before Charlie can catch up to her, she runs out of a side entrance of her expansive manor. The camera track India while she roams the outside of the house in the background of the frame; in the foreground, Charlie is being occupied by Evelyn.

However, this turns out to be far from the case as India, initially confident upon entering her abode from the front, is shocked when Charlie calls to her from at the top of the master staircase. Just like the first time she saw him, he reigns above her. He coyly asks her if she wants to know why she feels she’s at a disadvantage, both announcing his take on the duo’s power relation and also preferring an analysis of her own psyche; this is all done despite the fact, as India rightly retorts, that she was unaware of his existence till the day. He ignores her comment and asserts the real reason is because she’s standing below him. The subtext of the stairs is thus brought to the level of text and the viewer is made aware of both the importance of height and presence of stairs as a motif representing control.

In response to his claim, India slowly climbs up the staircase. The camera pushes in through a doorway, signifying the start of the confrontation between uncle and niece, showing India alone, rising to meet Charlie, who slowly enters the frame. She gets to the top of the stairs and stares her newly found family member down, asserting her right to stand as equal to him. She quite literally rises to the challenge.

Upon giving him a long look, she remarks that he looks remarkably like her father. Suddenly, her confused emotional state at his presence gains additional texture. Her father, the one who guided her and took her hunting, not only turns out to not be the one setting her path via the shoes she walks in but has returned, so to speak, in the form of a part hidden relation, part quasi-doppelgänger. Her confrontation with Charlie, is then, the first step she has to take to find herself.

Charlie responds to her comparison with an expression of sympathy towards her loss. A strange response which she notices and calls out, reminding her uncle that the loss is shared among them. Once again, he ignores her observation and tells her that he’s planning on staying with her and her mother for the foreseeable future. He makes it clear that he’s gotten her mother on board but tells India that he wants her approval as well because it’s “important” to him. Thus, the stage for Stoker is set and the battle for power can truly commence.

Given the title, Stoker, a viewer with context would think of Bram Stoker and his work in gothic horror. On that level, Stoker works. All the ingredients for gothic feeling are present: there’s a death encased in mystery, a hidden relative that shows up, and troubled familial relations that bubble up and sublimate in obscene fashion. However, as the first 13 minutes above demonstrate, the film operates closer to the psychoanalytic thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock: the bodies of birds appear like in Psycho, the game of gazes is played like in Vertigo, and at the most obvious level, the basic story beats of Hitchock’s film noir, Shadow of a Doubt, serve as Stoker’s jumping off point. Both stories feature an uncle named Charlie, who shares a special bond with his niece and who is covered in a veil of mystery. Likewise, both stories follow a niece as she struggles against penetrating the veil her uncle puts up. Stoker even goes so far as to replicate Shadow of a Doubt’s use of the staircase as the scene of battle between uncle and niece along with its presence as a motif.

But, unlike Hitchcock’s film which uses the relationship between the uncle and niece to reveal the duplicitous nature of the social order and the underpinnings of the idyllic American fantasy, Stoker uses the relationship to examine the way personal identity is generated and navigated. In other words, one film is aimed at a macro-level and the other at the micro-level. In this way, Stoker is able to traverse a whole different set of ideas from the vantage point of a coming-of-age horror.

Furthermore, though the story and narrative progression may be Hitchcock inspired, the editing, sensuality, and painterly mise-en-scène are all in line with director Park Chan-Wook’s style as an auteur. His stylistic flourishes here give the film it’s poetic sensibilities because he elects to show most of the story rather than tell it. On top of layering motifs in a more traditional sense, he constantly uses the nature of his edits – both sequencing and the edit itself – to suggest connections between seemingly disparate ideas. Like the egg becoming the eye, “apparent” match-cuts between objects of similar sizes and shapes along with dissolves between images are used to demonstrate the state of India’s psychic journey and how she’s processing the story as it goes along. As she makes connections, the viewer can piece together both the narrative and what it means to her own journey.

That being said, the nature of this journey is constantly up for re-interpretation. Pivotal scenes aren’t cut chronologically but are cut in the order India is making sense of them and rendering them coherent from her own vantage point. This gives seemingly obvious moments, a palpable level of uncertainty, because the nature of what the moment is supposed to demonstrate is indeterminate until the very end of that movement, but because movements fade into one another and are constantly recalled, every sequence gains a newfound freedom in how it’s used in the present to open up future possibilities. Consequently, the film feels dynamic even as moments repeat, because those moments come to mean something new.

Even if all the moving parts don’t make sense, Chan-wook’s construction of the film ensures the journey can be felt even if not fully understood. He achieves this feeling of consistency via in how he utilizes the architecture of the house to reflect the ebb and flow of power and also his attention towards maintaining a consistent color palette. While the latter has been mentioned above, the former hasn’t been given it’s due. At a basic level, the exterior of the house is white like the color of an egg’s shell. The green surrounding the house in the form of vegetation makes its way in the walls of the “public” spaces of the house, like the dining room. India is constantly in the color yellow’s proximity. Likewise, her mother is always in red’s presence. By establishing the colors early on and constantly repeating them in and out of the house, Chan-wook is able to get the audience to think about the meaning of them in the background of their minds. As a result, the colors become affectively charged which is why they can be felt even if their presence isn’t consciously noted. Chan-wook is weaving poetic patterns that operate on a level that appears like it’s just style, but is in style employed in lieu of accentuating the substance.

In light of this, it’s surprising to see that critical consensus is so harsh on the film, with many critics chastising the film for being style over substance. It’d be one thing if the film gallivanted from scene to scene for shock value; with violent masterpieces like Oldboy in Chan-wook’s filmography, it would be easy for him to just sink to spectacle. But Stoker is less focused on the spectacle than the journey itself. It’s filmed in a delicate and sensual way because unlike many of his previous excursions, Stoker is a women-led character study; that too, it’s a women led horror movie where the protagonist, far from being victimized, is allowed to find herself in the most emphatic fashion, something which would certainly not be possible if there was no substance beneath the film’s stylistic maneuverings.

This oddity is even more inexplicable given that, in many ways, Stoker feels like a dress rehearsal for The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s 2016 erotic thriller, considered by many, including myself, to be the director’s best work. Both film’s share a woman lead, explore relationships between women, and focus more on the unseen gazes of characters than any overt physical action. They both also showcase incredibly sensual moments of eroticism in unsuspecting fashion, demonstrating the way desire codes even the otherwise seemingly ordinary. Furthermore, while Stoker is an homage and twist on Shadow of a Doubt, The Handmaiden, feels like something similar in relation to Vertigo, at least from my view.

Perhaps the reason for Stoker’s undeserved treatment lies in its opacity. Though, the feeling of the film is something a viewer can take away from a viewing, the lack of direct explanation regarding some of the more overt symbols, like the spider, might put off those looking for a story that provides all the answers. However, it is precisely because the explanations are withheld, that the film opens up interpretative possibility and can evoke the feeling of poetry as opposed to pretentious philosophizing. It’s for that reason that Stoker is best reserved for those viewers who relish engaging with a film, whether that be mulling over it afterwards or playing it back it back to confirm a hint about a theory. It’s a film that rewards multiple viewings and interpretations of the events depicted. At the brisk rate of 99 minutes, Stoker would already be worth seeing for its visual splendor alone. Few films have this much fun presenting images in such confident fashion. However, given the depth Chan-wook manages to pack behind each and every movement, big or small, the film is something that any cinephile should give a watch.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Stoker is a film about whispers, glances, stolen gazes, and strategies for getting one’s way. The story uses Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt as a jumping off point to explore the psychological journey of a young woman, India, who is forced to find herself after the death of her father and the mysterious emergence of her uncle. Her journey is one that fluctuates from romance to horror to thriller back again all while remaining couched in psychoanalytic motifs and relationships that give each and every moment a host of meanings. While fans of director Park Chan-wook’s other works should definitely seek out this underrated part of his filmography, I’d recommend Stoker to any viewer who enjoys the experience of being washed over by a film and trying to piece it together afterwards. For the viewer who enjoys the journey even if the destination is unclear, Stoker offers a key to a box waiting to be unlocked.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S

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2010s, 2015, Action, Crime, Drama, Grade, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, S, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Sicario- 2015

September 30, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Denis Villeneuve
Principal Cast	Emily Blunt as Kate Josh Brolin as Matt Benicio del Toro as Alejandro Daniel Kaluuya as Reggie
Release Date	2015
Language(s)	English
Running Time	121 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

Text card explaining the genealogy of the word ‘sicario’

The film starts by defining the term ‘sicario’: it was initially used to refer to zealots defending their homeland but means ‘hitman’ in the status quo. Though both interpretations of the word signify a killer, one is oriented around protecting ideals while the other seems to confirm a nihilistic kill-or-be-killed world where no values could persist. This dichotomy between the two meanings of the word represents the battleground Sicario takes place on as it explores what the transition between the terms signifies about the world in a paradigmatic sense.

The establishing shot starts from the vantage point of the idealistic interpretation of the word: a domestic view of a neighborhood in Arizona is interrupted as a group of soldiers, defenders of the homeland, creep into frame while the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s palpable score reverberates like a droning heartbeat in the background, adding to the feeling of tension. The leader of the group, Kate (Emily Blunt), sits in a tank ready for breach before the vehicle breaks into a house, scattering dust all over the area. She gets down to investigate the residence with her squad but is suddenly caught off guard by a armed resident in the house. She evades his bullet and manages to kill him. The sound calms down. It seems like the dust has settled.

However, his bullet, despite missing her, opens another wound that proves to be even more devastating . The wall, broken in by the impact of the shot, reveals a series of bagged up corpses hiding within – a simple hostage retrieval becomes a mortifying entry into the macabre.

Kate (Emily Blunt) goes outside to vomit.

Kate immediately goes outside to vomit. Being a soldier doesn’t entail being unaffected by such senseless violence, and the brutality of the situation shakes Kate and her crew. She’s asked by personnel on how to document the situation given its severity. Kate insists that the records reveal everything; transparency is more necessary than ever.

While she tries to get an accurate count on the number of bodies in the house, a group of officers outside find a padlocked door in a shed and try and open it. The cuts and expectations established previously lead the viewer to think it’s more bodies hidden away, but the intense heartbeat track comes back signaling shifting times. Suddenly, the shed explodes.

Debris and dust scatter everywhere, obfuscating the frame, and Kate is once again lost in the fog of the situation, unable to see anything besides the carnage. The domestic area turned mausoleum has now become the site of an explosion – suburbia rendered into a site of gratuitous violence. In her efforts to preserve the rule of law, Kate finds herself soaked with so much blood that she can’t seem to scrub it all off in the shower. As she looks into a clouded reflection of herself in her bathroom mirror, it’s clear her more idealistic worldview has been delivered a tremendous blow.

Kate’s superiors speak to Matt (Josh Brolin) about her qualifications.

The next day comes. Kate and her partner on the force, Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya), wait outside of a glass-paned room as their superiors discuss the previous day’s mission. A man speaks to the group with the camera positioned to his back. His framing suggests importance and a sense of mystery. He asks about Kate and Reggie’s respective backgrounds, approving of Kate’s but rejecting Reggie upon hearing about his legal education. The group calls Kate in and introduces her to the man of the hour, Matt (Josh Brolin).

First, he asks her about her relationship and child status. He’s abrupt and straight to the point. She responds she’s both divorced and childless. He tells her he’s hunting the cartels behind the bodies and bombings. She expresses interest. Her superior, Forsing (Jeffrey Donovan) tells her that joining such a task-force requires volunteering for the position. She asks Matt if they’ll be able to hold the people who committed the acts responsible. He guarantees that they’ll be able to deal with the masterminds behind the operation itself.

She agrees with no hesitation and her journey begins. However, as she leaves the room, she notices that the charming, yet serious Matt, shrouded in mystery, is wearing flip-flops in sharp contrast to everyone else in the room wearing business professional clothing – another indication that appearances are not to be trusted. Images are always imbued with an purpose and can’t be taken at face value.

The film cuts to a neighborhood in Nogales, Mexico. A young boy wakes up his father, Silvio(Maximiliano Hernández), to ask him to play soccer. Silvio gets up, eats breakfast while getting a nice helping of side-eye from his wife, puts on his police uniform, and then proceeds to take his son out on a walk. This adjunct narrative is a sense of normalcy that gives the viewer a reprieve from the violence; however, its presence immediately generates a sense of unease. The opening’s mention of Mexico in relation to sicario qua assassin, the eruption of violence in the American residence, the focus on cartel violence, and Silvio’s status as police officer transform a seemingly benign scene and moment into one that threatens to become catastrophic.

Reggie is sent home while Kate (Emily Blunt) is allowed to proceed.

Back in the United Sates, Reggie drives Kate to her first day on Matt’s team. She’s told she’s going to El Paso with them on some preliminary task-work. However, upon getting to the gate, Reggie is denied access and the uncertainty about the situation increases. The emissary of the law is not allowed to pry his eyes upon this supposedly legal execution of justice. He’s forced to leave as Kate continues forward.

As she gets closer to the plane, another man, with his head turned around as to disguise his visage, appears at the plane’s tail. Matt comes out to greet Kate letting her know that the wayward man is Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) – another unexpected surprise. The trio get on the plane and Alejandro asks Kate if she’s ever been to Juárez; the shoe fully drops and the pretenses dissipate as Kate realizes that the mission she’s signed up for is far more expansive than she could have imagined.

While the nature of where Sicario mysteries lead is fairly by the books, the way its cinematically rendered gives it a poignancy that elevates the film into something special. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s script is propulsive and juggles multiple storylines, giving director Denis Villenevue the ability to flex his muscles and leave his mark of the genre. Instead of focusing on the mystery, Villenevue repeatedly turns the viewer’s attention to the dichotomy introduced at the film’s start by utilizing parallels in characters and groups to demonstrate the way the terms and the manner by which they’re used to categorize can rapidly shift .

There’s an implied distinction between between killing while oriented towards an ideal that stands for something greater than oneself and killing for the sake of something material, like wealth. The former position is one that’s idealistic and moves towards a vision of a “just” world. The latter is one that’s nihilistic and treats the world of winner-take-all. Or is that really the case? Are the two ideas separate or do they bleed into one another? Could one assassinate as an ideal or choose to assassinate in order to move towards an ideal? Villeneuve allows these questions to fester by taking the parallel’s Sheridan’s script sets up between the cartel and the US government, the Mexican police force and the American police force, and so on, and forces the viewer to play a horrifying game of compare and contrast.

One act of violence by one side is met by a seemingly equal atrocious act on the other. A “good” character postures and makes a comment on a “bad” character but then takes action that seems just as egregious. Villeneuve chooses to showcase the “immoral” bouts of violence in more explicit detail and withhold the brutality within the “ethical” instances of violence. He gives just enough information for the viewer to imagine how a scene would progress given both the context clues and the explicit parallels, forcing the audience to come to their own conclusions regarding the mechanics and ethics underpinning certain bouts of brutality. The subjective process of imagining the violence generates an uncomfortable proximity to the situation and forces us to deal with the contradictions in values.

This move also generates an empathetic connection with Kate who is thrust into the same world of twists, turns, and moments of depravity and forced to find stable footing in spite of it all. The first act sets up Kate as resourceful, honest, and passionate. She dodges a bullet, kills an assailant, takes control of her group, and wants to achieve justice – an ideal protagonist to root for. However, the moment she volunteers to achieve her ethical vision, she’s forced into a world where friend and foe mean very little, and the boundaries between what the “good” and “evil” are doing is suspect. Thus, an action of violence which may be immediately justified as necessary can be questioned because the viewer experiences it with Kate; she’s a moral barometer that lets us traverse the hazy backdrop the film plays against.

Sicario’s genre peers would usually feature a character like Alejandro or Matt as the lead – a burly man of mystery ready to whatever it takes to get the job done. However, the choice to have the lead be a highly capable woman with her morals intact in a sea of men and violence provides a vantage point that gives the otherwise gratuitous moments of sheer visceral terror a counterpoint that has heft. She’s not a damsel in distress, and she’s not some battle-hardened veteran looking for a fight; she’s just a competent soldier looking to do the right thing in circumstances that go against everything she’s been taught to accept. Blunt exemplifies this by constantly modulating between a soldier capable of holding her own and someone way out of their depth being racked by panic. She’s the perfect vehicle for both her character and the moral fiber of the film. By building up her competency and then slowly revealing its limits within a brutal, new environment, the film is able to push forward new ground on a story and make what would otherwise be cliché’s into uncomfortable moments to unpackage.

In fact, it’s because Kate is presented as competent in the context of what she’s signed up to do that otherwise passive scenes on her part are absolutely dread inducing. For example, as opposed to a conventional car chase scene with professionals chasing after one another, a traffic jam scene where assailants can be in any car and the protagonist is a fish out of water is much more dreadful. Because Kate is established as capable, the film is able to emphasize just how unforgiving the reality of the cartel violence and dealing with them can be; the rules of war don’t do anything in guerilla situations. Thus, her position gives impetus not only to the primary questions of the film but allow the visceral moments to have genuine stakes associated with them.

Put together with the parallel storylines and the near-perfect pacing of the narrative, Sicario certainly merits a comparison to the Coen brothers’ masterpiece, No Country For Old Men, a neo-Western following multiple characters who hunt and are being hunted by one another. Like No Country, Sicario presents a dark vision of an age without values, where the values of older days have seemingly faded away to the gusts of apathy and violence. While Sicario may not be as ambitious in terms of its narrative construction and direction, it certainly evokes a similar feeling of wandering through a foreign land where sense and reason have vacated the premises.

However, Sicario does match No Country when it comes to its visuals. Serving as director of photography on both films, Roger Deakins gives Villeneuve’s vision the room it needs to breath and fully take hold. Dust in the air, shadowy environments, and ever-present sources of reflection reveal the complexity inherent in seemingly straight-forward situations by introducing a visual opacity which accentuates the themes. Nothing is what it seems and it’s within the shadows cast by projections that the “truth” can be ascertained; there’s a space between words and the paradigms they operate within.

Consequently, this makes Sicario a must-see experience for any fan of cinema ranging from the casual fan looking for an exciting time to the cinephile looking for something heftier to sink their teeth into. While veterans of cartel thrillers might be less surprised by plot twists, the sheer culmination of skill including, but not limited to, Deakins camera work, the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s adrenaline-pumping propulsive score, Blunt’s humanistic yet confident performance, and of course, Villeneuve’s brilliant ability to put all these elements together makes this an experience no one should miss. If nothing else, the final few moments of the film exemplify how dedication to craft can elevate even a small movement into a grand gesture.

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TLDR	Sicario is the rare movie that offers a totally engrossing time from start to finish across different types of moviegoers. With its propulsive narrative, fantastic acting, bloody and well-executed set-pieces, and its dark and foreboding score, the experience stays entertaining the whole time. However, it’s use of Emily Blunt in the role of the main character gives the movie a humanity and a vantage point that transforms it into a meditation on violence and the reality of the rule of law. It’s heady without being alienating and even more engaging as a result.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S

Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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