Late Stage Films

 A film guaranteed to be remembered more for its baffling Oscars push than for anything that happens on the screen itself, "To Leslie" is perfectly fine. I basically buy the hype on Andrea Riseborough's performance. She finds nuance in her performance - she tends to be quieter than you expect from a toxic mess rural woman, and Riseborough makes sure to always play her as unaware of how toxic she is. Her best scene is the one of aggressive flirting. The man is not interested in the slightest, and is only barely willing to humor her. Leslie is incapable of taking a hint, and keeps pushing harder.   I wish the rest of the actors here were more willing to take the same approach. Basically every actor except Riseborough and Marc Maron (softly strong, but the romance plot he gets is unnecessary) has severe Sundance Disease, in which every negative emotion is played at an 11. It makes the whole ordeal feel rather performative. The easy claim for this little film with a big...

 The "John Wick" series has always felt... impressive, but not really for me? The stories of these films manage to hit just the right combination of thin and convoluted to keep me at an arm's length. In one sense, a thin story shouldn't be an issue. Fair enough! If the action scenes are really that good (they are), then the movies don't need "plots" or "characters", they only need connective tissue between action scenes. That formula works perfectly well for plenty of great action movies, smart and dumb alike. The thing about stories that take this approach is that they tend to be short and actually simple. The "John Wick" series, on the other hand, has evolved into the type of bloated worldbuilding most at home in spy movies. I don't really know who this stuff is supposed to appeal to besides Reddit - the run times have aggressively jumped up and up (the first film ran under 2 hours, this latest entry clocks in over 2:40), and th...

 Gregg Araki is a pivotal figure in the "Queer Wave" movement, which makes him a key player in the 90s independent film wave as a whole. To a younger person, someone young enough that I could not have possibly watched an Araki film in a theater before, it sure seems that he's never gotten the respect of a major filmmaker. Part of that is due to his edgy content, okay, sure. But what part of that lack of love is due to distribution? One of the topics that fascinates me in the history of film is this idea of functionally "lost" media that's only a few decades old and was reasonably notable when it did come out. "The Doom Generation" premiered at the Sundance festival less than 30 years ago, was nominated for multiple Indie Spirit awards, and then vanished off the face of the earth, its distributor bankrupt and its content as un-mainstream as one can imagine. You cannot stream "The Doom Generation", nor can you buy or rent it from Apple or A...

 Surely Damien Chazelle can be called one of the best filmmakers of the 2010s, I don't think that's a controversial claim. His newest film, "Babylon", is kind of awful and was a monstrous flop for the studio, but it's awful in a very auteur-chic sort of way. Every issue the film has (and it has plenty!) is the result of doing too much, of committing to a bad idea, which in its own way is much better than watching a bad film that has no ideas.  The main hold-up I have here is that Chazelle never quite figures out the balance between "making movies is fun" and "making movies will destroy you". From the outset, nothing about the film feels fun. We are introduced to the world of silent-era Hollywood with a massive cocaine party, where people die and/or get shat on by elephants. The film is happy to show you bodily fluids of all sorts, but none of this feels appealing. I often found myself thinking of two very well known cocaine movies: Scorsese...

 It's easy to say with 20/20 hindsight that the original "Scream" film predicted the state of horror in the 2020s. Our two extremes now are the intellectual exercises popularized by A24 and the aggressively ironic horror-comedies produced mostly by Blumhouse. "Scream" saw these sides as complements to each other. Why can't you use knowledge of the horror genre seeped in irony to make some sort of intellectual point about the horror genre? The most recent reboot did not totally nail that balance for me. The script felt a bit too invested in meta-commentary to the point where none of the characters felt interesting or meaningful. "Scream 5" feigns having something to say about horror reboots (or legacy-quels, or whatever word you want to use here), but the main thing it satirizes is the reddit nerds who lost their minds when Rian Johnson subverted expectations with his Star Wars flick. It wasn't for me. Worst of all, none of the set pieces after ...

"The Last Temptation of Christ" feels like a true historical epic despite apparently being made in a rushed and cheap manner. Peter Gabriel's music is a fantastic blend of Middle Eastern and prog rock instrumentals, and the photography is gorgeous. It also has a lot of thoughtful big ideas. Portraying Jesus as having some negative thoughts and feelings is I guess edgy and challenging, but it's not the most interesting thing in the world to me. A lot of the traits he gets here (fear of the future, regret for not helping more people, a weird emotional detachment from the people he does help) are pretty common to the protagonists of writer Paul Schrader. It's good stuff, but purely as a character study I suppose that "First Reformed" is a "better" script. The themes, though. The themes on display here really get at the core of what Christianity is, and they had me thinking about the film for days after I saw it. Here are some of those thoughts. 1)...