Some comments of movies I've seen recently:
Blindspotting
Seems to me this movie is for Millennials and Post-Millennials who have never seen
Mean Streets. And the movie suffers from quite a bit of tonal inconsistency because sometimes Miles’ explosive and violent anger is played for laughs and sometimes it’s meant to scare the audience. DeNiro's Johnny Boy acted out irrationally and out-of-control but you never felt he was doing so for the convenience of the plot. And there are lots of raves for that rap/monologue at the end of the movie but I didn’t buy it. If Miles is unable to change his behavior, we are supposed to believe this dirty cop will?
Destroyer
I think the way to approach this movie is to watch it like it’s
Kill Bill or one of those Park Chan Wook revenge thrillers, i.e., this movie takes place strictly in the world of celluloid, with no semblance of the real LAPD. I think for Kusama to approach this material as a gritty police procedural gives viewers the wrong expectations. My wife could not buy much of what was going onscreen but I pretty much gave up trying to accept the story as anything near realistic as soon as I saw Kidman beat up an armed bodyguard with a soapdish. One has to accept that scene as something similar to the hammer scene in
Oldboy, I think. So once I accepted the film on that level, I found it much more enjoyable. And like many Asian revenge thrillers, there is plenty of melodrama or “han” in the film, especially at the end. My wife found it all so overwrought and embarrassing but I had completely bought into it by then.
The House That Jack Built
Seems like all von Trier is interested in making are provocative films these days. The reports from Cannes of many people walking out on this film because of the disturbing/gruesome content seems to be over-exaggerated. There is much more explicit violence here than your typical von Trier film but I didn't find it nearly as violent as some films I've seen in recent years (like
Green Room or
Brawl in Cell Block 99 or
You Were Never Really Here). Maybe it's because of the stilted dialogue (someone once described the dialogue in von Trier's English language films as sounding like "badly translated Ibsen") but I never feel like von Trier's characters are real in any way. You feel like they are just von Trier's mouthpieces as he presents his dialectical arguments. This film also feels like a companion to
Nymphomaniac, mostly in the use of conversation between the protagonist and a stranger (Stellan Skarsgard in
Nymphomaniac, the late Bruno Ganz in this one) as a narrative device and for von Trier to provide context to some of the disturbing images he is presenting to the viewers. Another similarity to
Nymphomaniac is the return of Uma Thurman as another intensely frank character -- she stole all her scenes in
Nymphonmaniac but von Trier and Thurman were unable to capture lightning in a bottle a second time, unfortunately. I can't say I loved the film but I admired it and was never bored, despite the 150+ minute running time. And the film had some incredible and beautiful imagery, including this
one.
Of Fathers and Sons
A documentary that follows an al-Nusra fighter and his sons in Northern Syria during a two year span. Pretty amazing journalism as it’s clear the documentarian had gained the full trust of the family because the film shows the family in very intimate moments but it’s also one of those docs that makes one feel so hopeless. I was struck by how much these boys love their father, who is very affectionate with his sons – always tussling their hair and giving them lots of hugs and kisses. And when the father is seriously wounded, we get to see the tears shed by the boys for their father, who they see as a superhero. And yet the father believe it’s his duty to sacrifice his beloved sons for jihad.
Thoroughbreds
I’ve seen lots of comparisons with
Heathers and
Heavenly Creatures and those are appropriate. I would also add
Elephant and
Nocturama, as two more films that depict aimless slacker youths planning and doing horrific and evil things in a perfunctory manner with no signs of emotion. So there was a part of me that felt I had seen this movie before but what really sets this movie apart for me is the amazing dialogue, which must have been pretty tricky to write because one of the main characters is frank and brutally honest and can see right through human phoniness while the second character is manipulative and deceitful and narcissistic. Having the two still be able to communicate meaningfully and develop, not necessarily a friendship but a codependency, was like a highwire act, and I didn’t think it was possible but Cory Finley (the writer/director) was able to sustain it through the entire movie without betraying either character. And I thought the final line of dialogue in the movie was devastatingly brilliant.