Wes Anderson. French dispatch.

  After a relatively flabby -- for him-- but grandly rewarded by the Hollywood, "Grand Budapest Hotel", Wes Anderson rehabilitated himself by his latest "French dispatch". His stellar status has grown so much that major stars such as Adrien Brody, Elizabeth Moss, Saorise Ronan, Willem Dafoe and Leah Seydoux agree to play cameos in his movies, some being dressed in totally unrecognizable attire, without one thereof or in quite subdued roles. 

The critics who consider this movie disorganized simply cannot handle cinematic art divorced of a specific "moral" message, usually feminist, racial, anti-Russian or some other kind. It shares the same name-dropping routine as the "Mank". Namely, the person other than a graduate student in American journalism has to do a prominent search in Wikipedia -- inconvenient in a dark movie theater -- to get any idea of his allusions. 

Why Brody's character, whose prototype was strangely identified with David Duveen by the cineasts -- despite his lack of promotion of the modernist art -- is being made up and dressed like Jean Cocteau, who indeed was a tireless promoter? Is "French dispatch" a code word for "New Yorker" -- again the majority of the cineasts' suggestion -- or "Paris Review", which is the minority opinion? Was this ambivalence random or contrived by Anderson? Why the 1968 revolutionary leader is called Zeffirelli and what connection that has with the opera? Because he could not be called Feltrinelli or Cohn-Bendit? His is a very American movie despite being set up and filmed in France -- and obviously the member of New York cultural elite can explain all the minute details by Anderson -- but it is good all the same. 

Encanto.

Formulaic plot; but an inventive combination of realistic and psychedelic uses of color and light. Also a very creative implementation of movements and sequencing of plans from far-offs to close-ups. Altogether wonderful. 

The House of Gucci

      

           Unlike "The Last Duel" where the same director could have added a depth of character at the expense of historic accuracy, the House of Gucci shows the family struggles of the rich and famous with a hefty dose of psychological realism. And Lady Gaga can act. The only unworked line was Adam Driver's character turning from a "boy next door" into a sybarite capitalist shark under the influence of his overbearing wife only to reveal his lack of business acumen in ceding control of his company to the Bahrein investors. 

The Spine of the Night.

A rotoscope movie, extremely inventive in details and successfully merging Western comic and anime styles but totally senseless.  

Dune.

I never understood what was wrong with critics-maligned "Dune" by David Lynch and why this new version is so exalted by them. Probably, during the times that passed, the tastes degraded. It is an elaborate computer-generated cosplay with Timothee Chalamet as Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Fergusson as Rebecca Ferguson and Zendaya as Zendaya with the cameos by Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa. Only a relatively unknown Oscar Isaac can be mistaken for the Duke Leto Atreides I. They perform a rather primitive fable of the Cold War built by Herbert on the foundations of "Lawrence of Arabia". Namely, bad, oppressive colonizers (Turks/Russians) of desert planet Arrakis (Iraq, but at the time the whole Middle East was engulfed in the struggles by Nasser's clones) producing most of the world's Melange (Oil) are replaced by good, enlightened colonizers (Brits/Americans). Even the name of the Emperor Padishah Haddam (Saddam) is an instance of life imitating art. At the time Saddam Hussein was already prominent in the junta ruling Iraq but was not recognized as the top dog, the big cheese, par excellence. This does not mean that Herbert was a bad writer--after all Gulliver's Travels were a satire crammed with long-forgotten barbs and allusions on contemporary British politics and society--but Swift remained immortal. 

Ridley Scott. The Last Duel.

The action is good, period details are excellent but the movie characters are underdeveloped. There is no ambivalence in them. Ridley Scott freely borrowed cinematic stuff from Alaine Resnais--repeated shots of the same scene to enhance realism, and used the template of the "Return of Martin Guerre".  

I am sure that his characters were such in real life: J. de Carrouge was a dependable but tempestuous and semi-literate boor, his wife--a wronged woman, LeGris--a social climber devoid of any scruples and Count d'Alencon--a scheming Renaissance prince straight from Machiavelli--enlightened but ruthless and immoral. But this does not make a movie interesting. I would wish a conscious retreat from the historical chronicles--that LeGris was really madly in love, that Marguerite was torn between her true feelings and conjugal duty, and that the Last Duel was essentially a glorified suicide of LeGris to save the honor of his beloved, even at the cost of his own soul--not a trivial consideration for the Middle Ages.   

Noah Baumbach. Marriage Story.

Noah Baumbach never veers from his well-beaten track of the family chronicles of upper-middle class New York families, probably inspired by his own adolescence, for now he firmly graduated into the Hollywood upper class. But in this particular genre he achieved perfection. After the flailing "Frances, Ha", he completely rehabilitated himself with the coherent and powerful storyline and the impeccable performances of Driver, Johansson and Dern. Despite the fact that the narrative dissolves into a soapy-syrupy ending  (the creatives who cannot get UCLA professorship on a dime are obviously outside Noah's mental scope) just like infirm but daring "Sideways", Baumbach retains his cinematic verve to the end. Ninekaikos, Ebraious! 

Drunk Bus.

A fresh premise--that a poor student driving campus bus at nights and losing his virginity--can be interesting.  Movie is well made but it exposes a strange slant. Why all the guys on a campus of a second-rate university look realistic--unkempt, over- or underweight slobs with lots of issues--but all the college girls are stereotypical Hollywood casting material and sex-hungry sluts at that? Director's prospective must be seriously skewed. 

David Fincher. Mank.

David Fincher proved that he can create masterpieces ("A Curious Case of Benjamin Button") but also that he has problems with the pace of his movies. All substantial dialogues happen in the last 13 minutes of his movie, and the rest, in which he intended to imitate Orson Welles' style is incomprehensible. I spent 3/4 of the length of the movie by hysterically googling the characters and trying to understand why they are there in the shot. My experience was not helped by the fact that the actors playing Joseph Louis Mayer and Irving Thalberg looked almost identical. Was Fincher implying that Irving Thalberg was the son figure for L. B. Mayer before his own son could take the reins? If yes, the hint can be understood only by Welles' buffs. As I already mentioned, a director must not be in love with his characters, otherwise they take over him. 

Les Notres.

Impeccably directed and acted movie--at some point I became afraid of the teenage girl having to act a role with some shots borderline to a child pornography--but, unlike much more nuanced Bad Tales, it is sociologically and psychologically unsatisfying. Of course, I wished for a happy ending, if only for the vindication of Emilie Bierre's and Marianne Farley's indomitable heroines, but suicide would also be explainable. 

Whether provincial Quebec is in such a medieval state of consciousness that the null hypothesis in the case of a pregnant 13-year old girl, refusing to disclose who impregnated her, would not be that she was raped and that the rapist is threatening her or her family and not being investigated by police? Why loving and caring mother inexplicably refuses to go to the police and/or district attorney's office and leaves the whole case in care of a bumbling social worker doubling as a local DJ? That a local mayor, the rapist, is so powerful that he can assure silence of an entire town is perfectly believable--in the US leaders of religious sects sometimes control and intimidate the entire counties--but that mother is barely interested in uncovering the whole story and easily subscribes to the cockamamy suggestion that the mayor's adopted son is a culprit?  That the mayor's childless wife does not notice his interest in underage girls and that mother of a victim and her best friend never communicate on that issue throughout all the rapturous event? If the director Jeanne Leblanc wanted to demonstrate that even well-intentioned people easily fall to the simplest and most convincing (or the least traumatic) version of events, she achieved that purpose. But that purpose is outside of cinematic story she so masterfully displayed.  

Bad Tales (Favolacce)

American film buffs who criticize the movie as "disorganized" and "illogical" simply don't understand cinematic art. It is superbly organized to imitate the boredom of low-to-middle class suburbia populated by the Italian red necks as the murderous swamp. Its immutable logic leads to attempts at murder and, finally, collective suicide. 

The ensemble--mostly consisting of kids--plays superbly. Not a single mediocre acting job, and Ileana d'Ambri in a role of mildly retarded soup kitcheness, and Elio Germano in a role of a red neck factory supervisor--stupid, brutish--but loving and caring husband and father are shining. Ileana d'Ambri even may in future substitute Anna Magnani as a neorealist heroine for the XXI century. 

This is also stumbling American critical multiverse--the absence of obvious heroes and villains--just the people with their big anxieties and small victories. 

The Italian cinema is back after a long hiatus following murder of Pasolini, slow journey of Michelangelo Antonioni into the night, and the death of Fellini! 

Enfant Terrible.

The Oscar Roehler movie depicts R. W. Fassbinder practically as a cult leader, abusing, psychologically, physically and sexually his group of devotees. I watched it expecting the story of his trouble with anti-Semitic theater performance, which was completely glossed over by Roehler: "Cologne Jewish community protesting, after which the show was canceled" appears as an afterthought during a drink. Also, his heterosexual side was made completely sterile at the expense of his numerous (and abusive) homosexual affairs. But suave Andy Warhol appearing in MOMA episode with Fassbinder destroyed the lives of everybody he touched. Violently rude Fassbinder elevated most of his collaborators into the stars of the German cinema and theater. 

Roy Andersson. On Endlessness.

 

An apocalyptic view (with "I saw" refrain) of sterile prison landscape of modern Sweden and, sometimes, 1945 Germany, in a color scheme of a postmodernist office space--pink-beige and 50 shades of grey. Somebody's absurdist idea of hell as an endless boredom. 

Mare. HBO.

            The fact that, judging by her interviews, a ridiculously self-centered, upper middle class British airhead can produce and credibly play a strong, troubled woman from rural Pennsylvania is remarkable by itself. Unlike other modern fare, e.g. "Nevers", the plot is well constructed and logical. 🥀🥀🥀

Lodz

 Somber part-documentary elegy of the pre-war and post-war Jewish life in Lodz. 

Lapsis by Noah Hutton.

Lapsis is a fine movie; as far as indie fair is concerned and Noah Hutton made his mark as a promising director. But I am not sure why critics called it a "satire". There is zero use of "humor, exaggeration, ridicule or scorn", which defines satire in vocabularies. I would characterize its genre as a techno-punk thriller. 

Some Kind of Heaven

I rented this movie tempted by mordant Darren Aronofsky as a producer. What I got instead was a soapy opera about well-heeled (mostly) retirees living in a artificial paradise created by the State of Florida on the backs of mostly illegal immigrants who build these properties, water and manicure their lawns and take out trash. They are unseen.