Change Your Image
tonybertocchi
Reviews
Civil War (2024)
Disorienting and subversive, brilliant.
If you've seen the trailers, the film is not what you are led to expect. Rather than blowing up the massive divisions that exist in the American psyche today, and giving its audience a side to cheer on, it almost entirely ignores them. And to avoid spoilers, I'll say no more about that. Instead, it offers a travelogue comprising a series of images and icons that all underscore, and attest to the idea of what "America" is, and thinks it is, and purports to be - often in bewildering conflict and juxtaposition with itself. Ideas of American motherland, duty, truth, justice, due process, and family are all examined as they both are supposed in the myth of the country, and in its reality. The latter, family, is most transgressively utilized. Whereas the most predominant narrative structure that underpins almost every major American tale is the reconstruction by story's end (often from disparate parts) of a facsimile of a family, this film starts with that reconstruction. An ad hoc group of photo-journalists assembles, and creates a new "family" to try to ask "why" of the powers that be, only to have that family broken down and destroyed. That they are photographers is crucial. As they explore a country at war, their sense of image, and the stories their pictures tell begin to entirely deconstruct - in similarly deadly fashion to what Garland does with "family" - what it is they think America is. Disorienting and subversive, its final image is devastating.
Stillwater (2021)
Completely unexpected.
I watched the new Matt Damon movie the other day and was totally surprised - in a good way. I watched it because my friend is very fond of the lead. I'm somewhat indifferent. But all the same - the chance to see a flick in a cinema just after lockdown is always a good thing. The film, Stillwater, sets itself up as "daughter in danger in non-American places and dad needs to rescue her" kind of thing. You almost wonder why Liam Neeson isn't in it. And this holds true for the first two acts, almost to the point of parody. Damon as said dad seems at first to nauseatingly embody the trope. He's a recovered alcoholic, christian, gun-toting rough-neck, who cleans up after tornados in the American south. A complete cliche. His daughter is falsely imprisoned by an arrogant system that appears deaf to his ideals of justice (in this case, the French courts). Finding himself unable to get any traction with his daughter's case, he sets out on his own - further invoking a maverick trope - while enlisting the help of a beautiful, younger woman - a single mother - while charming her daughter. As totally expected.
However, at this point, the third act veers wildly off its expected course and becomes an exploration and a crucible for ideals of individualism versus the collective good, and switches from a dumb thriller to a much more contemplative work. And all this is accomplished with some very sophisticated writing. Rather than have Damon's character be clicheed and static, the film rather feeds into and then questions his and our own expectations. There's a brilliant moment here where his character is asked whether he voted for Trump. Damon's answer, and the following two lines each entirely open the film's discourses up to a huge scope of ideas and commentary on modern America. This part of the film dissolves so many of the constructs of its initial genre that it almost becomes pastoral; that is until its pyrrhic conclusion. A fabulous commentary on deeply ingrained American mis-understandings about the world, I can't imagine the film will play well in the U. S. - other than in the art-house circuit. But no matter, an intriguing ride that completely disorients the viewer.
Palmer (2021)
Quite a good watch, worth the while.
It's servicable, southern tale with a bunch of somewhat predicatable touchstones; class conflict, redemption, debts carried for past sins, etc. What's refreshing is there's also a good parable about LGBTQ inclusion and acceptance. This theme ends end extending to the larger frame of the narrative, as Palmer slowly comes to terms with himslef. Timberlake very wisely underplays his role, and comes off very well. We totally invest in his slow transition; he's quite watchable, and makes the whole thing work well. Juno Temple - as ever - is totally fascinating even as the cliche'ed character she's playing, even if she only gets bout 10 minutes creen time in the whole thing.
Altered Carbon (2018)
Pretty good but some big adolescent problems.
A good deal about this show is great. It is marvelously realised with a staggeringly big budget look. Kinneman and Purefoy - indeed all the actors are just corny enough to maintain a good solid film noire feel - and their level of indulgence in this regard is mapped along class lines: the wealthier they are, the sillier they behave. Dialogue is spartan, and reflexive. They whole thing works masterfully. But there's three places where the thing falls apart. The first is obviously the tired result of test marketing and big-budget tv-boardrooms. And it's the pointless, excessive "fight-scene-for-fight-scene's sake" every ten minutes(snore), or so it seems throughout the entire ten-episode span. You can tell the suits behind it thought that if they didn't actually keep provoking the audience with shiny bloodplay that we'd get bored and go back to our phones. None obviously had ever heard of an "arc" in storyline, and it shows. Which is insulting and make you think that there's a generation of money-guys in a office that haven't even read a sci-fi novel in their life, but are just grinding out algorithms that they learned during their MBAs on how to squeeze the most out of a modern audience. This makes for unrelenting "rising action" - with little to no time for reflexion, analysis, or comprehension - neither on our nor the character's parts. Secondly (and this is likely from the source material), there's a pretty big problem with a whole a massive subplot of snuff/misogyny/porn that really detracted from what could have been a really good, well actualised, dystopian vision. Like, try getting women to like this, or better, try getting some women to be involved in the writer's room perhaps, to start with? I know so many people that just won't watch any sci-fi anymore because the sexual politics all seem like they originated in an abused 13 year old boy's brain. Come on already. Finally, and this is just s****y writing altogether, his sister becomes such one-note personification of capitalism/greed/evil that she's an absurd cartoon, who no one can take seriously, and you just wait out the last three episodes for him to kill her already. It's sooo tedious in this regard. Just how many more ways did they think they could conjure up to make sure we know that she's the personification of malevolence. I'm surprised they didn't have her grow horns. Don't get me wrong, I loved lots about it - the Ridley Scott/Blade Runner homage in perpetually soaked and foggy streets, the ancient Roman allusions to the meths as they lived in the clouds (a motif also stolen from an old Star Trek episode), the interior world of the cyber inhabitants and their relation to the actual: its sci-fi bonafides are beyond question. The whole stack/sleeve take on identity and wealth, as a central metaphor and exploration about what is a life for were brilliant. But to fall back on such teen-boy sex snuff fantasies, and to sooooooo over-indulge them in the plot, seemed to me like the writer(s) was typing with one hand, if you know what I mean.
Aquarius (2015)
Pretty good, but with problems. Still stinks of network TV.
I really wanted to like Aquarius. What I mean is that the set-up, featuring society on the cusp of the counter culture in Los Angeles, with all its hippie utopia colliding with the darkness of Vietnam, the Watts riots, and of course the Manson family, is wonderfully colourful fodder for a contemporary miniseries/costume opera. What better material could you ask for in terms of good narrative threads, a wide variety of personalities, and great imagery? The So-Cal dream with its late sixties style, permissiveness, and lotus-land consciousness is rife with narrative potential as it meets the urban grit of your typical hard-boiled Los Angeles police department. Throw in some accomplished faces and the thing should write itself. And it succeeds to a degree. It's wonderful to look at, and well, feel. The series' construction works masterfully to affect a quiet unease amongst sun-drenched suburbs. The art direction has captured the Los Angeles of its day to a tee. You can practically smell the sweat and patchouli in the scenes of the hippie retreat of Topanga Canyon. Furthermore, there are interesting narrative arcs and sub-arcs that weave in and out of the two main characters' (David Duchovny as Sam Hodiak, the jaded, button-down detective, and Grey Damon as the undercover age-of-Aquarius narc) caseload. Items such as block-busting, the Black Panthers, and the anti-war movement all intrigue as we are reminded about just how fast a massive amount of social change was occurring at the time. A good eighty percent of this is really good, solid storytelling. Except it's also really troubled. There's that other twenty percent. And the biggest fault here is what they've given Duchovny to say. And how they told him how to say it. We know that Duchovny can make a good geekish, details-oriented detective, and against the setting of a transitioning world it's an apt, loner-ish choice. However, there's far too little of Mulder here, and unfortunately far, far too much of Californication's Hank Moody instead. It's as if he's being directed to be all his previous roles at the same time. While he comes off with intelligent observations about whatever nefarious crime he's looking into, he apparently cannot help but offer smug little one liners, in which the sense of irony is so completely before its time it's like he's in a completely different TV show. So badly do these dialogical frogs emerge, that one wonders if they let him write his own lines. But this isn't the whole of it. There are some relationships that just reek of falseness. The wealthy couple Grace and Ken, whose daughter has been adopted into the Manson clan, have conflicting and ridiculous reactions to the motivations in their lives. One asks if they themselves are on the acid their daughter takes with Charlie Manson, by accident perhaps? Furthermore, Hodiak's affair with Grace, and indeed his entire personal life, appears to have no emotional, nor rational foundation. For example, he's in recovery for the first five episodes, and then he's not – but without any really big reasons to be, or apparent consequences for not being. This is add-on screen writing at its worst and stinks of having been scribed 'by committee'. Worse than this however, is Ken's supposed evilness. Here, all the cards are pulled out. Greed, lust, duplicity, abandonment of one's child, being a lawyer, and belonging to the Republican party are all paraded and conflated as a consequence of Ken's – horror of horrors – homosexuality. Furthermore, they add onto this overloaded gay signifier the ultimate repulsion, a salacious gay romp with – you guessed it – Charlie Manson himself (played marvellously by Gethin Anthony – Game of Thrones' Renly Baratheon). This kind of demonizing of queerness is cheap, manipulative, and agonizingly tired. It's so bad in fact that it reminds one of bad network television of the era it's set in. These worn-thin tropes are one of the main reasons that the public is turning away from such twaddle, and moving towards much superior cable programming. Such programming is clearly what this show is attempting to catch up to – they've even gone so far to release the entire show at once - a la Netflicks. Yet come to think of it, looking at this as a piece of network television, one wonders if they'll ever really learn.
American Sniper (2014)
Sadly myopic and anachronistic
So I saw American Sniper yesterday, I must say I wanted to like this film. I wanted to like it because while Clint Eastwood has been a part-time, chair-addressing GOP buffoon, at other times he has been a masterful director. The film sets up its polemic pretty quickly, and extremely bluntly. You can either be a sheep (of course a blind follower, and easy victim, and likely 90% of the world's people), a wolf, (pure evil, Al Quaeda), or a sheepdog (irrationally driven to kill the wolf and protect others with no questions asked, America, Navy seals, our hero). Over the course of the next two hours we watch how adherence to the need to kill the wolf slowly affects our titular hero Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper). My jury is still out on Cooper, and this film doesn't help. I think he approached some really good work in American Hustle, acting as a bad acting undercover agent. But it's hard to take some actors seriously when they have a large catalogue of teen comedies under their belt. Maybe he just hasn't had a chance to show whatever chops he might have by being able to show at least some internal turmoil in a film. Not that there shouldn't be a chance here, as the film recounts a sniper who over the course of four tours gains the rather ignominious reputation as the killing-est sniper ever. And as we watch him progress from playground attacks to from killing animals to picking off citizens, Eastwood and the writers keep hitting us on the head with the sheepdog metaphor. And this is the blunt part. However, such on-going carnage is certain to affect a guy – even our sheepdog, and he becomes withdrawn, and displays some vague PTSD symptoms. Things get worse when he almost kills the family dog. So we get it killing might be bad for you. And this part tries to be less blunt, but instead is a bit vague. However, herein lies the whole problem with the film. Eastwood, and the script (based on Kyle's own recollections) never allow this examination to stray beyond the central metaphor. And the question that needs to be, but is never asked screams throughout the entire film – that is – if you invade a country looking for made-up WMDs after somebody else bombed your big city, are you really a sheepdog, or merely a vengeance hound? And yet while Kyle slowly is affected by his massive bloodletting, he never questions the central metaphor, his place, and by extension, America's right to be the "sheepdog". So when children try to free their country with whatever means they have, he still murders them, absolutely guilt free. He murders and murders and murders and murders – never question the central existential premise of why am I here? In other words, he's an excellent robot for the kind of thinking the military tries to instill. And the film subtly, through omission, and through its devotion to Kyle, tries to underscore this same sensibility. And it is this that is most offensive about the film, even after 12 years and hopefully some clearer-eyed reflection, it still proudly beats its chest with the right of America to pretend to be a sheepdog (and anyone that questions that will meet the fangs of that hound). But should we be surprised? You can look up film titles with the name America or American in them. Over 200 exist. No other country even come close – no such hubris could possibly manifest itself, even in other patriotism-giddy places. One cannot imagine a film titled "Scottish Sniper", "Nepali Grenadier", "Frenchman Fusilier" or "Lithuanian Artillery", unless they were a comedy. The attachment of the national adjective, for the rest of the world makes us groan at such presumptive self-importance. But in its home market that adjective still breeds reverence. The notion of American exceptionalism - the unsubstantiated idea that America is 'different' and thus 'anointed' somehow for 'special' responsibilities and 'rights' to the rest of the world's business - is still consistently driving that culture, regardless of the growing greater body of evidence that it's based on lies, myth, and hokum. Kyle spews a short diatribe about it himself very early in the film, in a recruitment office. His boast is hilarious on its face, but ultra-creepy given the conviction he puts behind it. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. It is this same navel-gazing mixed with perpetual myopia that prevents Kyle from looking at his murders rationally, and by extension prevents Eastwood from seeing the 1,000,000 or so killed looking for phantoms WMDs that contextualize his film, and from 300 million from seeing that adjective as anything other than a fantasy of entitlement.