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Trying to cut back on podcasts, but I found movies easier to ease into than music for some reason, so I spent all day yesterday watching movies then writing how I felt about them.
THE KING OF COMEDY (3.5/5)
Pauline Kael famously hated this movie, and I get it. The silence and sterility with which this movie moves can be maddening, especially when the editing follows along and creates a specifically dispassionate feeling by jump cutting with little regard for the viewer's situational awareness. But then sometimes it works brilliantly, too - if the movie weren't so quiet, Pupkin's C-list stand-up routine would be a lot less interesting, nor would his waiting patiently in the lobby feel quite so unnerving.
De Niro was on to something here, but I think Scorcese struggled a bit to find the right frame of reference for it. He's directed funny dramas before, but this is clearly a dramatic comedy and I just don't think Scorcese gets comedy, something the last five minutes of the movie make clear for me as it's really the only time the movie specifically seeks out laugh lines and light-hearted music only to fall flat. In contrast, Masha serenading Jerry Langford or Rupert attempting to guide Jerry through the ransom call are legitimately funny moments even if they don't produce laughs.
The other struggle this movie has is an issue of perspective. We follow Rupert for most of the movie, and yet Scorcese opts to show these characters from the perspective of Jerry Langford and his staff. As a result, we never learn much about them as people, we never get any reasoning behind their obsession with this man other than that they have it. This plays better in the present than it likely did in its contemporaneous moment because we have so much additional text to draw from, whether that be Jake Gylenhaal's high-functioning compulsive obsessive Lou Bloom, or Aubrey Plaza's suicidal social media stalker Ingrid Thorburn. They (and the broader culture of fame in which we all now live) don't actually make The King of Comedy any better than it is, but it lets viewers fill in blanks in ways perhaps viewers of 1983 wouldn't have been able to do as easily.
Instead of filling in those blanks, Scorcese falls back on goofball movie nerd tropes like a Scooby Doo chase scene between Pupkin and studio security or a tense-for-no-reason street chase between Masha and Langford (seriously, what is the point?) or a house full of burning candles that our generation has rightly mined for parody rather than some kind of genuinely dramatic or romantic scenario. There's certainly plenty of Scorcese's keen eye at play here, but I found myself now and again wondering what this movie would've been like in the hands of someone like Brian De Palma or John Landis, directors who might've picked a side and gunned for it rather than attempting to linger in a chaotic neutral. The uniformly great performances make up for much of his inactivity but not all of it; ultimately, The King of Comedy is a blueprint for the better, fuller movies that would follow its lead decades later.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (4/5)
Properly unsettling, and yet another shining example of Kubrick's one of a kind ability to envision how any old bland scene like the introduction of a test subject to a group of onlookers could have life thrust into it via the camera. If a line Alex delivers during his therapy - "the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen" - wasn't lifted from the novella, Kubrick was clearly putting a bit of himself into Alex. That gets to the heart of a problem this movie is only going to have to fight harder and harder to reckon with as society marches on, however, and that's it's leery objectification of women offered without any commentary of consequence.
Ostensibly understood to be wrong because Alex is punished for his actions, the camera obsesses over women's breasts every chance it can to the point that even other characters - grown men and wardens of prisoners - are shown to be shocked by a pair of breasts as if they'd seen the Light of God. The woman in the theater has beautiful breasts, sure, but it's troublesome that that's the point of her rape scene rather than the rape or the vileness of the boys attempting it. There is a lot of this movie that isn't that, and honestly I think (a RateYourMusic user named lonely_panda, whose review of this movie really ought to have been published somewhere) got at it far better than I could ever hope to, so let me just say this:
A Clockwork Orange might be lacking in subtlety, but subtle wasn't the point here, was it? The set design is so in love with the eccentricities of mod culture it pierces through the authenticity of Mad Men and back again like a wet fever dream. Save but a handful of lines, McDowell and many other actors here perform as if on stage, belly-voiced and emphatic beyond any known reality. Someone looking for small messages might come to the conclusion that by goading the audience into sympathizing with the "cured" Alex's problems, A Clockwork Orange is arguing in favor of his right to beat and rape people if that's his true will, or that his journey through the streets and forests of his hometown after being released are meant to draw a direct parallel between Alex and Christ. If this movie does any of that, it's merely by accident in pursuit of its grander allegory of who gets to decide what's moral and what's not, with the wealthy writer (whose insane overacting is a honest pleasure while also going to show how impressive Mark Margolis' performance as Tio Salamanca really was) whispering it at all of us through the guise of a phone conversation.
Do I think this movie deserves as much unfiltered praise as it's received? No, not really. But Kubrick was a director that plainly knew what would make for engaging cinema, and uses all his gifts with sight and sound to take a movie that by all rights should've simply been the Boondock Saints of its day and elevates schlock into art through sheer talent.
THE GRADUATE (4/5)
The Graduate is so full of definitive moments that even if you've never seen the movie, chances are you'll recognize at least half of it thanks to both mimicry and homage. What you might not be able to gather about the movie from its reputation, however, is how its 105 minutes manage to sneak an art film into a rom-com, or a rom-com into an art film, whichever you'd prefer.
The first half of the movie is an equally hilarious and emotional roller coaster, as we drift along with nervous wreck Ben Braddock in his post-graduation malaise, finding solace in the effortless confidence and big dick energy of Mrs. Robinson. The second half is essentially the formula for the modern romantic comedy as we still know it today, with instantaneous love, heroes and villains, not at all creepy stalking montages and a huge set piece to round out the show.
Anyone who argues that's a problem just doesn't like having fun at the movies, but anyone who doesn't recognize the capriciousness of this film's two halves is just being willfully obtuse. Whether you're coming for the former or the latter movie, I can't imagine why anyone would come away from The Graduate feeling fully satisfied; I've usually counted myself among the ones who wish we'd kept diving into late nights at the Taft Hotel, swinging a cross at the fastest ex-husband in history be damned.
One other small gripe: I've always thought the Simon & Garfunkel stuff is really overused, and compared to all the clever things Nichols pulls off with camera angles, lenses and perspectives it's disappointing to see him rely so heavily on the dreariness of "Scarborough Fair" and the fatalism of "Sounds of Silence", particularly considering he had a theme song and it would've fit the ending quite well.
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (4.5/5)
This is just a Made for Nodima ass movie, man. The utterly incomprehensible plot is about all that knocks it down from perfection, but this is why Glengarry Glen Ross is one of my favorite movies of all time: get some great performers, get some great dialogue and let them soar together. Always an exhausting watch, always a confounding watch, but an absolutely necessary one if you're ever thinking of calling yourself any kind of real movie fan. Especially for a first time director to wrangle these performances and capture it this smartly, it's just a phenomenal production all around.
Big and loud and fussy in a way that's totally owed to its origins as a stage production, there are so many ways this could've gone off the rails, but instead it's still king of the "repressed suburban couple lets their hair down" because that hyper-real approach leads to every character coming out the other end feeling like they've lived the centuries and centuries together that they joke about, and we've just got the one little second when it all snapped and broke apart to nibble on. Revolutionary Road might make a little more sense from a plot perspective, Blue Valentine is certainly more honest, Scenes from a Marriage is far more comprehensive, but if you want to feel the psychology of a relationship at its final moments, Virginia Woolf is the poetry that'll get you there.
TOMB RAIDER 2018 (3/5)
This is kind of a throwback to the lower stakes of action movies in the 2000s, stuff like The Mummy, the original trilogy of X-Men films and the xXx series. It's not always imaginatively shot and you know every beat the movie's planning to hit before the production company titles have finished, but it has so much heart to it and one or two higher quality set pieces that by the end you're totally bought in.
Vikander proves she's an actress to be reckoned with here; Ex Machina is all I've seen her in otherwise and it can be easy to hide behind stellar material and CGI that highlights your best features to the point of surreality. Tomb Raider offers her no easy outs, asking her to run and jump and scream and shout and chase a bunch of kids through a Southeast Asian pier market but still find time to develop a relationship with her father (Dominic West also comports himself with total class) and develop a charming comedy routine with Nick Frost (okay, that part's probably not hard). She's game for all of it, and portrays Lara Croft with the sort of investment it took most of the Marvel roster until the third phase to commit so earnestly.
The two highlight sequences? A comedy of errors aboard a rotten military plane at the cliff of a waterfall that probably kicked ass in a theater environment and the token bit where the director and actors fake a video game scenario for a moment, with Lara stealthing her way through enemy camp to rescue her friends. The sound design and cleverness of the way she slinks in and through the environment is both clever on a regular film level and a nice, clean way of nodding to what made the Tomb Raider reboot special without getting too desperate about it. That's another nice thing about the movie, just about every acknowledgement that it's a video game is just a wink and a nod rather than full blown fan service or a bent over backwards and shoehorned element that's just weird out of context. The best sign yet that video game adapters might finally be learning from their comic counterparts. I really think this movie got a much harsher reception than it deserved and I wish I'd gone out to see it. Was it because too many people attach her face to a murderous android's and can't see the obvious charm she has? Because she is quite thin and that makes it somehow hard to believe she could be a video game character superhero? I go back to my comps earlier - those aren't "good" movies, but nobody took a shit on them either, we just let them be fun and take us on a dumb ride.
Would I recommend this movie? I don't know, not really I guess, but it's perfectly good empty calories when you're looking for an action flick with a pretty face. It's certainly not the disaster Assassin's Creed was. I hope they iron out the rougher edges and go on with the sequel. With Atomic Blonde, Anna, this movie, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, women are having a real moment in terms of kicking ass in theaters, but the moment still in search of its definitive film. This wasn't it, but Tomb Raider is the sort of franchise that could deliver that and Vikander's got the skill and the buy-in to take it there if the studio can give her a good enough script and big / clever enough action sequences.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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