Late Stage Films

 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)...

 Was Billy Wilder ever un -cool? No, I doubt it. But one of the surprises of the newest edition of the Sight & Sound poll is how well-represented Wilder is. He placed 3 films in the top 100 - "Sunset Blvd." (#78), "The Apartment" (#54), and "Some Like It Hot" (#38). On the surface all of this love seems excessive. Without dissing Wilder per se, citing him 3 times is a bit silly when there's a whole slew of other legends of the art form with 1 or 0 mentions (to name a specific contemporary I personally prefer, Douglas Sirk landed only 1 film in the top 100).   "The Apartment" is a film which I fully appreciate and understand the appeal of. "Some Like It Hot" is... not. And that's a bit strange, I feel, because in a lot of ways those are extremely similar movies. What Wilder does in both cases is craft a dark comedy about the relationship between sex and power - a novel, bordering on unheard of idea at the time (at least in th...

 Did you watch the Dick Tracy TCM special in which Warren Beatty interviews slash fights with "Dick Tracy", as portrayed by Warren Beatty, about whether Warren Beatty's 1990 "Dick Tracy" film is a good adaptation of the character Dick Tracy? I sure did. It was something. Not something good, or especially interesting, but it was compelling and original. The snide insult here is that I've just described most Beatty projects from the last 30 years. What fascinates me about the TCM special is that it's a perfect microcosm of Beatty's whole vibe . He is at once the most conceited man in Hollywood and more willing to make fun of himself than the average movie star. Making a slapdash TV show where Warren Beatty talks to another Warren Beatty about Warren Beatty is a move that requires a monstrous ego. This is the man who pridefully took credit for Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" being about him, after all. But if you go just a tiny bit belo...

 On paper, this should not have worked. "M3GAN" is probably a bad idea for a movie: a purposely campy take on the killer doll subgenre, edited down from an R rating to a PG-13 in post production to sell tickets to Tiktok teens. But the movie is good. I thought so, critics think so (the 94% rotten tomatoes score is positively absurd for a horror-comedy), and the audience at large agrees (the $168 mil worldwide box office haul is producer Jason Blum's biggest since the pandemic). The movie is actually funny, because it knows exactly when and how to ramp up the absurdity, and because Allison Williams plays a better woefully stupid tech genius than any of the other movies this decade about dumb tech geniuses. It even has something kind of like a sincere message, about actually parenting your kids instead of outsourcing that role to technology. As a slasher flick, it never feels inhibited by its PG-13 rating. (The MPAA censoring is only obvious when the movie makes weird cuts ...