The ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise’s Reckoning
Starting with 2011’s Ghost Protocol, the Mission: Impossible films found a schtick in doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the tension of elongated, elaborate, and escalating action set-pieces. The five films since and including that one form a bell curve that almost perfectly illustrates the franchise’s journey to balance tone (left of curve) and plot (right) around said schtick.
The Final Stage of Ozu: ‘Tokyo Story’ & ‘Floating Weeds’
Only the best can evoke the cycle of life and all its intricacies and broadness through a concentrated story of a single family. Yasujirō Ozu is one of the best, and Tokyo Story (1953) is maybe the greatest example in cinema of such a story, one of a relatively small number I’d argue should be rewatched.
‘Phantom Thread’ & Misunderstanding Autism for Personality
Paul Thomas Anderson may be 21st-century cinema’s best writer of complex male characters and the intrinsic and destructive nature of egotism, and his penchant for such characters, whether you agree with the superlative, infects 2017’s Phantom Thread, about a middle-aged dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) — a brilliant, perfectionistic, demanding, ornery, stubborn man who appears to fit tidily into the aforementioned bucket. And he does, to a degree, but nowhere near as tidily as canon egocentrics Dean Trumbell, Daniel Plainview, Lancaster Dodd, or Jack Horner; unlike them, Reynolds is low-spectrum (“high-functioning”) autistic, and many of his behaviors which could be attributable to egotism are actually — and independently — autistic ones.
Three Films by Sean Baker: An Assessment
The Italian neorealism movement rose from the ruins of WWII, and its characteristic pseudo-aimlessness was a powerful metaphor for life in the time of recovery. Without war recovery, the effect is mostly lost; the movement’s been dead for 70 years and a longshot for revival, especially in American cinema.
Two by Ozu: ‘The Only Son’ & ‘There Was a Father’
To pretend to truly comprehend life in post-WWI Japan as a 21st Century white guy would be shameful, but even with a little bit of preparatory research for nominal context, The Only Son (1936) is a miraculously compassionate and quietly devastating snapshot of an era and culture for the societal majority, themes which no other Japanese filmmaker — perhaps no other global filmmaker — cased better or more touchingly than Yasujirō Ozu. His work is always entrancing for its craftsmanship and precision and for its emotional gravity and tenderness, and The Only Son is a prime example.
Two by Bresson: ‘Lancelot of the Lake’ & ‘A Gentle Woman’
Stories are never equal to reality, and legends are the furthest from it of all stories. The legend of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and their quest to find the Holy Grail (collectively referred to as the Matter of Britain) is one of history’s most appealing and enduring stories. Alas, storytellers embrace its heroism, its romance, its magic — because it’s a tale that invites an audience’s imagination and admiration.
Robert Bresson’s ‘The Devil, Probably’
Like A Gentle Woman (1969), The Devil, Probably (1977) opens on (two contradictory reports of) the main character’s suicide, then jumps backward in time. At the 4-minute mark, at a gathering of students (which through context we can infer are an analog to “68ers”), a guy says into the mic, “I proclaim destruction. Everyone can destroy. It’s easy.” Sure enough, the next shots are of polluting smokestacks and dead trees.
‘Mouchette’ & ‘The Old Man and the Sea’
Objectivity, in relation to art, cannot exist. Art is, in the most basic terms, an expression of an artist, and consequently subjective. However, the conceit of an “objective eye,” still technically a misnomer, can be illustrative of a genre of artist that supposes to present his or her subject(s) without explicit comment. Film and literature are especially conducive to this style because they traditionally describe a string of events. The artist’s method for description informs an audience as much or as little as the artist chooses. In Robert Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette, and in Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea, both men posit an “objective eye” — that is: they choose to inform the audience almost entirely of what occurs and rarely provide ancillary information such as internal thoughts or indications of consumer guidance.
‘Hereditary’ & ‘The Exorcist’
When a movie, particularly of the horror genre, truly confounds and disturbs people, superlatives often follow en masse. It’s easier to generalize such a visceral viewing event as “the scariest film since The Exorcist” or one that’s “absolutely terrifying” than it is to identify and articulate what makes it so confounding and disturbing (and indeed absolutely terrifying).