.png)
This month I saw what was the best 2024 movie I've seen this year (watch for the penguin); the movie I saw for the first time I think will stick with me longest is a weird Russian thing that poisoned everyone who worked on it.
So good times!
.
 |
| HOME Hulu |
Like the other film from this director I've seen, this film is bananas with excellent practical effects and madness throughout. This one I guess makes less sense? It's like 70s Ultraman but also an anthology films as various characters (including a cooking fish) tell awful stories to one another.
It's not easy to express what this movie is about or for, but it is about something and it is for something. And someone.
I was covering my eyes and laughing out loud at various points. It's just so wonderfully weird.
 |
| HOME YouTube |
Incredible, amazing movie. Absolutely earned its three-hour runtime and gave me everything I hoped for from my first Tarkovsky. Every scene deserves its own review and every scene is asking me to read its own criticism. I'm not sure how to say anything with those demands upon me.
It ranks with the great, slow, lengthfests I've loved in the past, like The Tree of Life and A Hidden Life and, to go nonMalick, Amour, but it's nothing like them. I can't imagine watching this again—not for years at least—but it does make me excited to watch more Tarkovsky.
I suspect it's a bit of autofiction as well. The Writer—especially as he turns and speaks directly to the audience—seems like a standin for the author. But the Professor and the Stalker also are likely aspects of him.
But the Stalker's wife also speaks to the camera. And it is his child that can bring color outside the Zone.
The film is filled with echos. It's difficult to determine what are the rules of this world and what is merely what people imagine the rules to be. It's weirdly similar to 80s fantasy films like The Neverending Story as much as it is like The Tree of Life. Unlike Malick's films, there is a less certain view of beauty in the world. A less certain hope. Even though it explicitly calls for hope.
Part of what's happening is that this film is made near the end of the USSR—it only has a decade left as this film arrives. While some of the settings are clearly fantastic, others seem likely to just be Soviet Russia unadorned. Photograph what is really there.
I'm amazed the film was allowed to exist.
But tyrants have never been good at reading allegory—let alone something so slippery as metaphor.
Send three bald men, each fifteen years older than the last, out of the real world (or perhaps into it), and what do you get? A dog. Some grass. Waterfalls. A tunnel. Mounds of sand. A ringing telephone.
It seems like nonsense, but they say he is a genius—our genius—so send it to Cannes.
 |
| ELSEWHERE Prime Video |
Um. It had the key bits I hoped for. But the movie as a whole, especially at the end, just started betraying my every expectation.
What, exactly, happened, exactly?
Anyway, if you know, let me know.
 |
| THEATER Landmark Piedmont Theatre |
Absolutely loved this movie. Glad we were able to sneak in a viewing before it gets walked behind the walls of the Netflix zoo. I'm not sure it'll happen since I have about thirty hours of driving, two birthdays, and a major holiday ahead of me over the next week, but I hope to write a longer essay about how much joy this movie brought me. With that in mind, here are some notes to trigger my own memories:
Gromit out TomCruising Tom Cruise on the bridge
Yes, Gromit deserves his praise as perhaps the greatest silent actor of the last fifty years, but don't sleep on Feathers McGraw—a stonier face than Buster
another way the film beats Mission:Impossible is in its take on AI; it does go soft at the end, but it's honestly more believable terrifying than most of the other stuff we've been fed
smart and clever nods at current issues like cop stuff and border anxiety
great to see old characters back (townsfolk, the farmer)
glad we rewatched "The Wrong Trousers" the night before
family members who complain about the animation being too smooth, the liquids too good
no one dutchangles like Aardman dutchangles
the gnomes are genuinely scary (although never to the point the 7yrold hid her face); I would say this more genuinely plays with horror than Were-Rabbit did
finally a chance for Wallace to get a genuinely heroic moment (inventing the rebooter)
really: Feathers is AMAZING (don't miss prison workouts and pet seal)
and it never ceases to be delightfully silly
probably my favorite movie of 2024?
 |
| ELSEWHERE Prime Video |
Sure, the side characters are mostly lazily written caricatures, but this is the sort of movie where that doesn't really matter all the much. Did you laugh a dozen times? Did the heartwarming climax work? Does Judy Greer hold it all together? Yes, yes, and yes?
Okay. Well then.
The movie works.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
 |
| ELSEWHERE our dvd |
Given the use we've gotten out of this, this has to be the greatest white-elephant gift of all time.
 |
| ELSEWHERE Disney+ |
First, Michael Caine is extraordinary in this film. I really need to go watch his early work when he was young and sexy and dengerous because he must have been riveting.
Second, shame on me for spending thirty years saying this movie is bad. In retrospect, I suspect I was just still mourning Jim Henson and was angry others who knew him better and surely loved him more were moving on with their lives. I suppose that's understandable. But I suppose I also ought to finally give Muppet Treasure Island a chance. I mean—who doesn't love Tim Curry?
 |
| HOME library dvd |
Not top-tier Shaun but an enoyable time all the same.
 |
| HOME our dvd |
The boys keep failing to educate their sister the way I educated them so tonight we all watched the Marx Brothers together. The oldest chose this film (I suspect its the love of tutti-frutti ice cream) and of course the youngest laughed as much as anyone.
Someday I want to write an essay about the radical egalitarianism of this film in a racist world. The film knows the world's racist. And it chooses to smile anyway. But the credits? Still racist. And this is one of the Brothers' MGM films where they had less control.
I don't know what film historians and Marx Bros. experts have to say about it, but I don't know any other way to read it.
Anyway. Someday I'll write it.
 |
| HOME Prime Video |
Here we are at the end of the year and I have a couple hours alone and I ask myself: what movie am I most sad about missing in theaters this year? It's a tough call, but I decided the one that, conveniently, also runs under 90 minutes. Thanks, Tricia and Ethan!
The story did a lot of things I didn't anticipate (spoilers ahead) and they pretty much all worked out. For instance, I didn't expect the love story and, as the story commenced, I didn't want one. And it started out awkwardly, sure, but it worked. And ended up being the backbone of the story. So I liked that.
And I liked the Coenesque violence and I appreciated the absurdities and wit and literariness one comes to expect.
I'd sure like to know what happened to Curlie, though.
 |
| HOME Disney+ |
It's a feelgood bit of "copoganda" (and I love it) that simultaneously basically accepts a certain amount of corruption. No way Judy Hops is ever taking down the shrewlords.
It's been so long, so this is more like a 1.5th viewing rather than a 2nd, but I think I probably did like it more second viewing, as predicted.
And that's it. Sure, it's New Year's Eve and we may watch another movie, but it's 11.08pm and it'll be finished next year if that happens. So that's donezies on 2024, folks! Happy New Year!
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
No comments:
Post a Comment