Reaction Shots

What to say about Anh Hung Tran's The Taste of Things ? It is idyllic, to be sure. Also, lyrical, and literary in a way that calls to mind films like A Day in the Country . It feels so sensorial, not to say sensual and there is a foundation of genuine emotional depth - an adult emotional depth in a cinematic landscape often littered with infantilization or histrionics masquerading as emotion. Dodin and Eugenie talk to each other, are demonstrably loving toward each other when silent, and all of this is communicated and shared with friends and family via their beautiful meals. Cuisine here is more than mere food cooked for consumption; it's more than merely some dining "experience", however exquisite. Each meal Eugenie and Dodin conceive and execute is a sumulacrum of existence. We neglect to our peril our place in the chain of how our embodied existence is born of nature and to nature will return.  In the meantime, if we live well and attentively, life becomes infused...

At half a century (and rest assured, I'm choking - figuratively - as I type that), it's staggering how fresh Coppola's masterwork comes across. I'm relatively certain that I haven't seen it on the big screen the nineties and I haven't watched it all the way through since the early 00s. Seeing it in a crisp restoration for its fiftieth anniversary re-release was at once familiar and revelatory.  The first revelation was something more like a corroboration of something Roger Ebert noticed on a DVD release many years ago; how much Nina Rota's score was a huge element in the narrative's execution. Usually, this would be a huge demerit from my perspective, but as Ebert pointed out (if memory serves, and I'm too lazy to go hunting), it's not as though Rota's composition was directing the audience what to feel, but that it reflected the interiority of what the characters were experiencing.  No, more often than not, the tone of the soundtrack is mour...

In Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest , the Holocaust is taking place literally over the garden walls. Auschwitz is Rudolf Höss's next door neighbor, but you wouldn't know it from the normality of routine his family goes through. His wife is happy with their lot (both their social status and the land they live on), the kids go to school, there are backyard parties, and he goes to the office each day to continue fine-tuning the extinction of Jews and other undesirables as dictated by his boss. He also ensures that quotas are met and later we find he's due to be moved in a promotion over all the camps. This is how chillingly matter-of-fact Glazer's narrative is. If you remove the context, you would have a fairly typical and maybe even boring, domestic drama. You might even have some sympathy of both Höss and his wife and the disruption that a move might bring to the family. But their obliviousness to the very real evil that they are abetting and helping spread dem...

Diablo Cody has returned with a teenage girl horror film that only somewhat echoes 2009's Jennifer's Body . Lisa Frankenstein doesn't come across quite as on the nose, and considerably lighter than her earlier opus. My suspicion is that much of that is owing to the PG rating of the current film which doesn't quite allow for unbridled body horror and more intense sex scenes. It also, more importantly, hobbles character depth and richness. That doesn't stop Lisa from being enjoyed just on her own considerable merits. The film knows very much the type of film it is and the types of films it is beholden to and the parts of those films it repurposes to its advantage.  The principle homage it so vintage Tim Burton beginning with the animated title sequence and on down through the neighborhood Lisa lives in and of course, the cemetery from which the Creature of her heart rises from the dead...and to which a couple of characters are dispatched. But/and there are nods to B...

I wasn't quite certain what to expect going into Origin , Ava DuVernay's latest. I knew it would be less of a typical narrative than an exploration of what divides us, but I wasn't prepared for the film's thesis (because I hadn't read Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: the Origin of Our Discontents , an oversight soon to be corrected). The film, however, is not a documentary based on a book, but a frequently stirring and moving interpretation of how Wilkerson came to write it and a masterful demonstration of how an idea-driven film can hold the content of those ideas and engage us with how an author comes upon those ideas layered into the day-to-day unfolding of her life. This isn't the kind of movie that can be "spoiled" in the sense of ruining a plot twist or a surprise ending; what would spoil it, i think, would be to talk too much about the film and giving people the impression that they've experienced it because the idea that ...