Decade favourites here.
2019: Traumas past and present (and future)
FILMS
01. A Hidden Life (Malick)
02. The Irishman (Scorsese)
03. Lost Course (Li)
04. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Gu)
05. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma)
06. High Life (Denis)
07. Ad Astra (Gray)
08. Mary Magdalene (Davis)
09. MS Slavic 7 (Bohdanowicz/Campbell)
10. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Tailfeathers/Hepburn)
11. Atlantics (Diop)
12. Jojo Rabbit (Waititi)
13. The Lodge (Franz/Fiala)
14. Midsommar (Aster)
15. Oh Mercy! (Desplechin)
16. 1917 (Mendes)
17. One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Kunuk)
18. Once upon a Time in Hollywood (Tarantino)
19. Uncut Gems (Safdie/Safdie)
20. Young Ahmed (Dardenne/Dardenne)
21. The Lighthouse (Eggers)
22. Parasite (Bong)
23. Toy Story 4 (Cooley)
24. Little Women (Gerwig)
25. US (Peele)
26. Koko-di Koko-da (Nyholm)
27. The Twentieth Century (Rankin)
28. High-Flying Bird (Soderbergh)
29. The Farewell (Wang)
30. The Two Popes (Meirelles)
PERFORMANCES
01. Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes
02. Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, Mary Magdalene
03. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, The Lighthouse
04. Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro, The Irishman
05. Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Margot Robbie, Once upon a Time in Hollywood
06. Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems
07. Juliette Binoche, High Life
08. Lupita Nyong'o, US
09. Riley Keough, The Lodge
10. Deragh Campbell, Anne at 13,000 Feet
11. Florence Pugh, Little Women
12. Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
13. Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell
14. Roschdy Zem, Sarah Forestier, and Léa Seydoux, Oh Mercy!
15. The entire cast of Parasite
ALBUMS
01. FKA twigs, Magdalene
02. Billie Eilish, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
03. Ariana Grande, Thank U, Next
04. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated
05. Mount Eerie and Julie Doiron, Lost Wisdom pt. 2
06. Taylor Swift, Lover
07. Solange, When I Get Home
08. Kanye West, Jesus Is King
09. Lizzo, Cuz I Love You
10. Sleater-Kinney, The Center Won't Hold
FILMS
01. A Hidden Life (Malick)
02. The Irishman (Scorsese)
03. Lost Course (Li)
04. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Gu)
05. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma)
06. High Life (Denis)
07. Ad Astra (Gray)
08. Mary Magdalene (Davis)
09. MS Slavic 7 (Bohdanowicz/Campbell)
10. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Tailfeathers/Hepburn)
11. Atlantics (Diop)
12. Jojo Rabbit (Waititi)
13. The Lodge (Franz/Fiala)
14. Midsommar (Aster)
15. Oh Mercy! (Desplechin)
16. 1917 (Mendes)
17. One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Kunuk)
18. Once upon a Time in Hollywood (Tarantino)
19. Uncut Gems (Safdie/Safdie)
20. Young Ahmed (Dardenne/Dardenne)
21. The Lighthouse (Eggers)
22. Parasite (Bong)
23. Toy Story 4 (Cooley)
24. Little Women (Gerwig)
25. US (Peele)
26. Koko-di Koko-da (Nyholm)
27. The Twentieth Century (Rankin)
28. High-Flying Bird (Soderbergh)
29. The Farewell (Wang)
30. The Two Popes (Meirelles)
PERFORMANCES
01. Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes
02. Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, Mary Magdalene
03. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, The Lighthouse
04. Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro, The Irishman
05. Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Margot Robbie, Once upon a Time in Hollywood
06. Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems
07. Juliette Binoche, High Life
08. Lupita Nyong'o, US
09. Riley Keough, The Lodge
10. Deragh Campbell, Anne at 13,000 Feet
11. Florence Pugh, Little Women
12. Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
13. Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell
14. Roschdy Zem, Sarah Forestier, and Léa Seydoux, Oh Mercy!
15. The entire cast of Parasite
ALBUMS
01. FKA twigs, Magdalene
02. Billie Eilish, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
03. Ariana Grande, Thank U, Next
04. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated
05. Mount Eerie and Julie Doiron, Lost Wisdom pt. 2
06. Taylor Swift, Lover
07. Solange, When I Get Home
08. Kanye West, Jesus Is King
09. Lizzo, Cuz I Love You
10. Sleater-Kinney, The Center Won't Hold
In Storms of Steel
Sam Mendes's 1917 may very well be the most intensely realistic war movie ever made, a hypnotic hybrid of immersive VR and the grim matter-of-fact-ness of Ernst Jünger's war prose, or else like the famous opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan extended to two full hours and transported from the beaches of WWII Normandy to the rat-infested trenches and no man's land of the First World War. It's appropriately exhausting, in the expected, rigorous war-epic way but also uncommonly demanding on the viewer's eyes; the sustained illusion of a single, largely mobile shot, masterfully executed by Roger Deakins, provides little opportunity to blink or relax. Few movies more palpably express the feeling that there could be fatal danger anywhere and everywhere. As in Jünger's memoir, staying alive is a matter of constant luck and split-second decision-making.
With its genuinely nightmarish atmosphere and pervasive sense of dread and terror, 1917 is also (more so than most war films) a great horror movie, though, like many great horror movies, it relies too heavily on its musical score to build tension and foreshadow. In this otherwise ultra-realistic film, such artifice feels especially superfluous, undermining the immediacy of the action. It is also, just occasionally, too sentimental, attempting to win the audience's sympathy through calculated bits of character exposition –– another common horror-movie misstep. Yet, the best sequences in Mendes's film –– particularly one set amidst the hellish ruins of a burnt-out French town –– feel like something new and urgently powerful, summoning up the visceral lived experience of a war that almost no one still living can personally remember.
Sam Mendes's 1917 may very well be the most intensely realistic war movie ever made, a hypnotic hybrid of immersive VR and the grim matter-of-fact-ness of Ernst Jünger's war prose, or else like the famous opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan extended to two full hours and transported from the beaches of WWII Normandy to the rat-infested trenches and no man's land of the First World War. It's appropriately exhausting, in the expected, rigorous war-epic way but also uncommonly demanding on the viewer's eyes; the sustained illusion of a single, largely mobile shot, masterfully executed by Roger Deakins, provides little opportunity to blink or relax. Few movies more palpably express the feeling that there could be fatal danger anywhere and everywhere. As in Jünger's memoir, staying alive is a matter of constant luck and split-second decision-making.
With its genuinely nightmarish atmosphere and pervasive sense of dread and terror, 1917 is also (more so than most war films) a great horror movie, though, like many great horror movies, it relies too heavily on its musical score to build tension and foreshadow. In this otherwise ultra-realistic film, such artifice feels especially superfluous, undermining the immediacy of the action. It is also, just occasionally, too sentimental, attempting to win the audience's sympathy through calculated bits of character exposition –– another common horror-movie misstep. Yet, the best sequences in Mendes's film –– particularly one set amidst the hellish ruins of a burnt-out French town –– feel like something new and urgently powerful, summoning up the visceral lived experience of a war that almost no one still living can personally remember.
Kicks Inside
Add to the examples of Mary Magdalene's enduring, modern pop-cultural clout the best album of 2019. Every time I listen to it (must be 50x-plus at this point), I hear new, strange and interesting things. I also, by turns, hear flashes of Björk, Kate Bush, Polly Jean Harvey, Tori Amos, Tricky, and EMA; Teresa, in cluing me into how fucking great this record is, suggested Kanye and Portishead, which I can sometimes hear, too. And yet, taken as a cohesive whole, played front to back (as it really should be, to an extent that few albums these days necessitate), it's finally, thrillingly sui generis––somehow huge and dramatic and, at the same time, hyperintimate, moving and tender and weird and wonderful. A gift that keeps on giving. She does it like Mary Magdalene.
Add to the examples of Mary Magdalene's enduring, modern pop-cultural clout the best album of 2019. Every time I listen to it (must be 50x-plus at this point), I hear new, strange and interesting things. I also, by turns, hear flashes of Björk, Kate Bush, Polly Jean Harvey, Tori Amos, Tricky, and EMA; Teresa, in cluing me into how fucking great this record is, suggested Kanye and Portishead, which I can sometimes hear, too. And yet, taken as a cohesive whole, played front to back (as it really should be, to an extent that few albums these days necessitate), it's finally, thrillingly sui generis––somehow huge and dramatic and, at the same time, hyperintimate, moving and tender and weird and wonderful. A gift that keeps on giving. She does it like Mary Magdalene.
Last Rites
I hope Martin Scorsese lives to be 120 and makes two dozen more movies, like an American Manoel de Oliveira, confounding critics who keep approaching each new film as a de facto swansong. But if, by sad chance, Silence and The Irishman turn out to be his last two narrative features, they would arguably stand as the most stunning, and apt, one-two punch to conclude any great oeuvre. The former is, in my view, his best film; the latter is very close. Both are overwhelmingly powerful products of a true master working not only in the autumn of his career but at the peak of his talents. Silence feels like a summation of the aching, ambivalent spirituality that pervades so much of Scorsese's filmography, building and improving upon earlier works like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun. The Irishman is a meditation on the criminal culture surveyed in GoodFellas and Casino, and more broadly on the changing sociopolitical landscape of twentieth-century America.
But if GoodFellas was Stagecoach, The Irishman is Scorsese's The Searchers, or maybe Cheyenne Autumn. (Movie analogies seem like a particularly appropriate way of assessing the work of this most intensely cinephillic of filmmakers.) It's about the end of things: careers, lives, a century, a culture. Like Silence, it's a film of serious and uncomfortable questioning, of wondering whether any of it was worth it –– worth the effort, the journey, the sacrifices, the sin. These are not simply "greatest hits" films, although they do summarize much of what Scorsese does best; they are retractationes, mature reconsiderations of a life's work. More than any film since Scorsese's first masterpiece, Mean Streets, The Irishman merges together nearly all of his major themes and concerns. To be sure, he made some movies before Mean Streets and hopefully he'll make many more after The Irishman (he just turned 77; perhaps he should run for president?), but these may still be rightly read as the bookends of a singular, vital corpus.
I hope Martin Scorsese lives to be 120 and makes two dozen more movies, like an American Manoel de Oliveira, confounding critics who keep approaching each new film as a de facto swansong. But if, by sad chance, Silence and The Irishman turn out to be his last two narrative features, they would arguably stand as the most stunning, and apt, one-two punch to conclude any great oeuvre. The former is, in my view, his best film; the latter is very close. Both are overwhelmingly powerful products of a true master working not only in the autumn of his career but at the peak of his talents. Silence feels like a summation of the aching, ambivalent spirituality that pervades so much of Scorsese's filmography, building and improving upon earlier works like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun. The Irishman is a meditation on the criminal culture surveyed in GoodFellas and Casino, and more broadly on the changing sociopolitical landscape of twentieth-century America.
But if GoodFellas was Stagecoach, The Irishman is Scorsese's The Searchers, or maybe Cheyenne Autumn. (Movie analogies seem like a particularly appropriate way of assessing the work of this most intensely cinephillic of filmmakers.) It's about the end of things: careers, lives, a century, a culture. Like Silence, it's a film of serious and uncomfortable questioning, of wondering whether any of it was worth it –– worth the effort, the journey, the sacrifices, the sin. These are not simply "greatest hits" films, although they do summarize much of what Scorsese does best; they are retractationes, mature reconsiderations of a life's work. More than any film since Scorsese's first masterpiece, Mean Streets, The Irishman merges together nearly all of his major themes and concerns. To be sure, he made some movies before Mean Streets and hopefully he'll make many more after The Irishman (he just turned 77; perhaps he should run for president?), but these may still be rightly read as the bookends of a singular, vital corpus.
Fuck school shooters.
Fuck guns.
Fuck gun manufacturers, who literally profit from death and the sociopathic urge to kill other living beings.
Fuck the idiotic, anachronistic 2nd Amendment.
Fuck the piece-of-shit, cowardly politicians who hide behind it as an excuse to never change anything.
Fuck the cartoonishly evil NRA.
Fuck the cartoonishly evil, cult-of-personality GOP.
Fuck the excuse that people need guns because they like to murder animals for fun.
Fuck guns.
Fuck gun manufacturers, who literally profit from death and the sociopathic urge to kill other living beings.
Fuck the idiotic, anachronistic 2nd Amendment.
Fuck the piece-of-shit, cowardly politicians who hide behind it as an excuse to never change anything.
Fuck the cartoonishly evil NRA.
Fuck the cartoonishly evil, cult-of-personality GOP.
Fuck the excuse that people need guns because they like to murder animals for fun.
Hidden Lives
Jojo Rabbit is so much better than I expected it to be. I mostly went to see it because it looked more or less kid-friendly and didn't involve superheroes or low-quality digital animation. The premise, though, sounded like it could make for a Life Is Beautiful–level disaster of appallingly misplaced comedy. It's not that. The comedy actually works, not only as a way of highlighting the deep absurdity of the Third Reich and its ideology, but also as one way of explaining how its methods of mass brainwashing functioned, particularly for an impressionable, naive kid whose personal conception of the Führer bore only a vague, superficial resemblance to reality. This is a genuinely great coming-of-age movie and, at the same time, a fairy tale about how sudden familiarity with the vilified Other is (sometimes) all it takes to break the spell of cultural indoctrination––a universal parable that speaks powerfully to present circumstances. Although Taika Waititi conceived of this project almost a decade ago, presumably without the aid of a crystal ball, it's especially resonant right now, with far-right, semi-fascist, and white supremacist forces having crept squarely into the mainstream of Western politics.
As a truly incisive satire, Jojo Rabbit isn't nearly as effective as, say, The Death of Stalin, mainly because it's too warm and humane. Some critics have derided the film's ultimate "conventionality," implying that it's a kind of dirty secret concealed (though not well enough) by Waititi's more radical, anarchic flourishes. But I think there's something to be said for this straightforward, poignant storytelling, even if takes some of the edge off the satire. The last scene is as classically lovely, and touching, as anything in recent cinema, even calling to mind Chaplin–––specifically, the final moments of City Lights, not The Great Dictator. Above all, Waititi's movie is a modest ode to those who summon up the courage to resist evil, those who, as the film's characters put it, did "what they could." This is not a particularly original theme, but it's a perennially important one, which it shares with the year's best film, Malick's A Hidden Life. Both are unapologetically sentimental histories; and both, under layers of artistic license and distinctively aestheticized representation, are essentially built from the stuff of "conventional" storytelling. They would make for a bizarre, yet potentially fruitful, double bill.
Jojo Rabbit is so much better than I expected it to be. I mostly went to see it because it looked more or less kid-friendly and didn't involve superheroes or low-quality digital animation. The premise, though, sounded like it could make for a Life Is Beautiful–level disaster of appallingly misplaced comedy. It's not that. The comedy actually works, not only as a way of highlighting the deep absurdity of the Third Reich and its ideology, but also as one way of explaining how its methods of mass brainwashing functioned, particularly for an impressionable, naive kid whose personal conception of the Führer bore only a vague, superficial resemblance to reality. This is a genuinely great coming-of-age movie and, at the same time, a fairy tale about how sudden familiarity with the vilified Other is (sometimes) all it takes to break the spell of cultural indoctrination––a universal parable that speaks powerfully to present circumstances. Although Taika Waititi conceived of this project almost a decade ago, presumably without the aid of a crystal ball, it's especially resonant right now, with far-right, semi-fascist, and white supremacist forces having crept squarely into the mainstream of Western politics.
As a truly incisive satire, Jojo Rabbit isn't nearly as effective as, say, The Death of Stalin, mainly because it's too warm and humane. Some critics have derided the film's ultimate "conventionality," implying that it's a kind of dirty secret concealed (though not well enough) by Waititi's more radical, anarchic flourishes. But I think there's something to be said for this straightforward, poignant storytelling, even if takes some of the edge off the satire. The last scene is as classically lovely, and touching, as anything in recent cinema, even calling to mind Chaplin–––specifically, the final moments of City Lights, not The Great Dictator. Above all, Waititi's movie is a modest ode to those who summon up the courage to resist evil, those who, as the film's characters put it, did "what they could." This is not a particularly original theme, but it's a perennially important one, which it shares with the year's best film, Malick's A Hidden Life. Both are unapologetically sentimental histories; and both, under layers of artistic license and distinctively aestheticized representation, are essentially built from the stuff of "conventional" storytelling. They would make for a bizarre, yet potentially fruitful, double bill.
But tonight you presume too much
(Not my video, but I was there.)
Terrific show on the whole, though not necessarily the greatest setlist.
Highlights:
1. "Jack the Ripper" (one of his very best songs, stunningly performed)
2. "Why Don't You Find Out for Yourself"
3. "Is It Really So Strange?"
4. "Suedehead"
5. "Seasick, yet Still Docked"
6. "Everyday Is Like Sunday"
7. "I Wish You Lonely"
8. The fact that he didn't talk politics at all (a great relief!)
9. His story about how, when he retires from music, he wants to move to Ropongi Hills, Tokyo; the only trouble with this is that I'd really like to hear His Tokyo Record!
Gripes:
1. Too little Smiths (just the 1 song! by comparison, Marr played 6 at his show here last year)
2. Too little Vauxhall and I, or, as he referred to it last night, "Vancouver and I" (still by far his best post-Smiths album; at least "Why Don't You Find Out for Yourself" sounded really great)
3. Too much California Son (just meh af)
4. "World Peace Is None of Your Business" (Is Not a Good Song, and Also Suggests Some of His Worst Tendencies/Ideas)
(Not my video, but I was there.)
Terrific show on the whole, though not necessarily the greatest setlist.
Highlights:
1. "Jack the Ripper" (one of his very best songs, stunningly performed)
2. "Why Don't You Find Out for Yourself"
3. "Is It Really So Strange?"
4. "Suedehead"
5. "Seasick, yet Still Docked"
6. "Everyday Is Like Sunday"
7. "I Wish You Lonely"
8. The fact that he didn't talk politics at all (a great relief!)
9. His story about how, when he retires from music, he wants to move to Ropongi Hills, Tokyo; the only trouble with this is that I'd really like to hear His Tokyo Record!
Gripes:
1. Too little Smiths (just the 1 song! by comparison, Marr played 6 at his show here last year)
2. Too little Vauxhall and I, or, as he referred to it last night, "Vancouver and I" (still by far his best post-Smiths album; at least "Why Don't You Find Out for Yourself" sounded really great)
3. Too much California Son (just meh af)
4. "World Peace Is None of Your Business" (Is Not a Good Song, and Also Suggests Some of His Worst Tendencies/Ideas)
VIFF: Best of the Fest
(It was an exceptionally good year, so I've cheated a little here.)
FILMS
01. A Hidden Life (Malick)
02. Lost Course (Li)
03. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Gu)
04. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma)
05. MS Slavic 7 (Bohdanowicz/Campbell)
06. The Lodge (Franz/Fiala)
07. Oh Mercy! (Desplechin)
08. One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Kunuk)
09. Young Ahmed (Dardenne/Dardenne)
10. The Lighthouse (Eggers), Parasite (Bong), and The Twentieth Century (Rankin) [tie]
PERFORMANCES
01. Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes
02. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, The Lighthouse
03. Riley Keough, The Lodge
04. Deragh Campbell, Anne at 13,000 Feet
05. Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
06. Roschdy Zem, Sarah Forestier, and Léa Seydoux, Oh Mercy!
07. The entire cast of Parasite
08. Valerie Pachner, A Hidden Life
09. Anthony Wong, Still Human
10. Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Joan of Arc
(It was an exceptionally good year, so I've cheated a little here.)
FILMS
01. A Hidden Life (Malick)
02. Lost Course (Li)
03. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Gu)
04. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma)
05. MS Slavic 7 (Bohdanowicz/Campbell)
06. The Lodge (Franz/Fiala)
07. Oh Mercy! (Desplechin)
08. One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Kunuk)
09. Young Ahmed (Dardenne/Dardenne)
10. The Lighthouse (Eggers), Parasite (Bong), and The Twentieth Century (Rankin) [tie]
PERFORMANCES
01. Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes
02. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, The Lighthouse
03. Riley Keough, The Lodge
04. Deragh Campbell, Anne at 13,000 Feet
05. Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
06. Roschdy Zem, Sarah Forestier, and Léa Seydoux, Oh Mercy!
07. The entire cast of Parasite
08. Valerie Pachner, A Hidden Life
09. Anthony Wong, Still Human
10. Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Joan of Arc
VIFF, pt. 4: One More
The Lodge In (another) strong year for interesting horror movies, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's English-language follow-up to Goodnight Mommy –- exploring much the same thematic territory –- is the best of the bunch. I'm usually not especially careful when it comes to "spoilers," but in this case, the less revealed in advance of seeing it, the better (don't watch the trailer!). Suffice it to say that Franz and Fiala's film is unrelentingly tense and unnerving, pervaded by a thick atmosphere of dread. Few horror movies in recent memory use sound (or near-silence) so effectively: the soundtrack is mostly dominated by the sound of wind sweeping over snow; when this ominous calm is suddenly interrupted –– by a church organ, or the sound of ice cracking, or a gunshot –– it provides a serious jolt. Yet, such shocks aside, this is, for the most part, not a jump-scare sort of horror movie, but one that digs deeper under the surface, gradually winding through its characters' (and audience's) psyches to disorienting and genuinely disturbing effect. Comparisons to Hereditary are inevitable –– the fractured family themes, the prominent, creepy use of dolls, etc. –– but The Lodge is more subtle and slow-building than Ari Aster's film; and the performance at its core, Riley Keough's eerily understated turn, is in some ways the opposite of the volcanic intensity of Toni Collette's. Both films, in any case, rank as instant classics of their genre, "prestige" or not.
The Lodge In (another) strong year for interesting horror movies, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's English-language follow-up to Goodnight Mommy –- exploring much the same thematic territory –- is the best of the bunch. I'm usually not especially careful when it comes to "spoilers," but in this case, the less revealed in advance of seeing it, the better (don't watch the trailer!). Suffice it to say that Franz and Fiala's film is unrelentingly tense and unnerving, pervaded by a thick atmosphere of dread. Few horror movies in recent memory use sound (or near-silence) so effectively: the soundtrack is mostly dominated by the sound of wind sweeping over snow; when this ominous calm is suddenly interrupted –– by a church organ, or the sound of ice cracking, or a gunshot –– it provides a serious jolt. Yet, such shocks aside, this is, for the most part, not a jump-scare sort of horror movie, but one that digs deeper under the surface, gradually winding through its characters' (and audience's) psyches to disorienting and genuinely disturbing effect. Comparisons to Hereditary are inevitable –– the fractured family themes, the prominent, creepy use of dolls, etc. –– but The Lodge is more subtle and slow-building than Ari Aster's film; and the performance at its core, Riley Keough's eerily understated turn, is in some ways the opposite of the volcanic intensity of Toni Collette's. Both films, in any case, rank as instant classics of their genre, "prestige" or not.
VIFF, pt. 3: Duos habet!
The Two Popes When Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins are on screen together, this is a great movie. It really feels like we're watching the actual Popes Francis and Benedict XVI interacting, feeling each other out, quarrelling over issues of Church leadership and doctrine, learning to appreciate the other's virtues, despite their considerable differences in style, worldview, and ecclesiology (the papal names they've selected are deeply telling in this regard). These are two of the most fully realized portrayals of real, famous people –– familiar to us, but always at a remove –– that I can recall. When the leads are not sharing the screen, Fernando Meirelles's film is a very mixed bag: The opening act, from the death of John Paul II to Benedict mulling over his decision to abdicate, feels rushed, like a Cliff Notes summary of recent history; as a snapshot of intra-Vatican politics and factionalism, this is far less convincing than, say, The Young Pope (notwithstanding Paolo Sorrentino's series being a work of fiction). The lengthy flashbacks, providing exposition for the complicated pre-papal career of Francis (then Jorge Mario Bergoglio), are awkwardly inserted and shot (inexplicably, some are in black and white, while others are in colour). They tend to play like cheaply produced dramatic re-enactments in a true-crime show, the quality of which contrast sharply with the incredible performances of Pryce and Hopkins. While the past events depicted do help us better understand Francis and his reluctance to accept the papal crown, they could've been more effectively incorporated simply through more conversation between Pryce and Hopkins. Perhaps most problematically, one is never quite sure if The Two Popes is intended as a critique of the papal office and/or of the Church generally, or as a sort of love letter to these powerful institutions. The magnetic charisma of the leads, "humanizing" not just the well-loved Francis but also the more opaque Benedict, suggests the latter, even as Meirelles works in repeated references to the Church's chronic failure to address its legacy (and on-going crisis) of mass child abuse and its long history of tacitly supporting (or at least neglecting to oppose) murderous and oppressive regimes.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire Céline Sciamma's follow-up to the terrific Girlhood also centres on two people who get to know one another under highly particular and unusual circumstances (although that's probably where its similarities with The Two Popes end). Set in eighteenth-century France, Sciamma's drama is historically specific with regard to the extent of the constraints placed on female agency and its excellent, if austere, period detail, but it also has a timeless, fairy-tale-like atmosphere that feels indebted to Jane Campion (especially The Piano, less so Campion's adaptation of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady) and to Perrault's tales. Some synopses of Sciamma's film place it in the 1770s, while others see it taking place "at the end of the eighteenth century." I'm assuming that the main story is set just before the events leading up to the French Revolution, yet, unless there was some explicit date marker that I failed to spot, this is not at all certain. Such ambiguity –– keeping such a world-historical event totally outside the narrative frame –– speaks to the laser-focused intimacy and thoroughly feminine orientation of Sciamma's film. More than a usual "period drama," it feels like a dream of the past, a subversive romantic fantasy doomed to muted tragedy by its time and place. Its power sneaks up on you, building to a final shot that is among the most indelibe in recent memory.
Oh Mercy! Arnaud Desplechin's latest is an abrupt change of direction in the course of his career, almost completely eschewing the layers of artifice and meta conceits so characteristic of his oeuvre. Instead, Oh Mercy!, adapted from police transcripts and a TV investigative documentary about Desplechin's rough, northern French hometown of Roubaix (the film's much-superior French title is Roubaix, une lumière), is a realistic police procedural and gritty mosaic of contemporary life in this city. It's tightly scripted and superbly acted, with stand-out performances by Roschdy Zem, Sarah Forestier, and Léa Seydoux. One can imagine this translating well, and pretty easily, to the stage, particularly a remarkable long scene near the end that is all about performance, staging, and direction. Yet, at the same time, Oh Mercy! is still quite distinctly cinematic. Desplechin captures the urban environs of Roubaix with both affection and uneasiness--there is beauty, but also real danger, here––lending the film a strong touch of noir style, evident too in its rumantive, pessimistic voice-over narration. In the post-screening Q&A, Desplechin cited Hitchcock (The Wrong Man) and Bresson (Diary of a Country Priest) as influences for this project. When a member of the audience asked whether he conducted interviews with the real Roubaisians represented in the film, he answered firmly in the negative. Instead, for "research," he re-read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in multiple translations.
One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk Zacharias Kunuk's best film since Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner re-creates the 1961 encounter of the titular Inuit community leader with a Canadian government officer on Baffin Island. The white officer tries to convince Piugattuk to move his family from their ancestral home to a government settlement, and to send his children to school there. In return, he'll receive a wooden house, heated by a stove, a monthly family allowance payment, and access to desired commodities like tea, sugar, and tobacco. A local guide imperfectly translates the communication between Piugattuk and other Inuits and this government representative––a tense meeting that takes up the majority of Kunuk's film. What these scenes illustrate is the process of forced assimilation at work, in medias res. It only hints at the coercion and cultural destruction involved in this process, while suggesting that a profound lack of understanding was also partly to blame for it: first, at the level of language, though more generally of mutually incomprehensible mentalities and ideas about "home," identity, money, and productivity/utility. The flawed translation between English and Inuktitut feels wholly authentic, showing in vivid detail how such a meeting might well have played out. It also serves as a kind of microcosm for the ultimate failure in real communication that occurred between Inuit and other indigenous peoples across North America and the representatives of colonial governments. Yet, as in all of Kunuk's films, the situation is necessarily specific to Nunavut, the beautiful and severe Arctic landscape, and the Inuit culture. This film, after all, is set in 1961, by which time nearly every other corner of the continent had long since been enveloped by the "governmentality" of the Canadian or American state. Language gap notwithstanding, Noah Piugattuk clearly expresses his anxiety about the Canadian officer's proposal/command, though he refuses to directly state his choice. Despite his indecision, Kunuk frames this fateful encounter as a truly decisive moment in the modern history of the Inuit people and the (culturally and spatially) distant state imposing its will on them.
The Twentieth Century Matthew Rankin's bizarro biopic of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King is a weird, sporadically hilarious delight, like a cross between fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin (especially his Saddest Music in the World) and rightful cult classic Cabin Boy. To be sure, King was almost certainly Canada's strangest PM. For instance: "Not only did King speak with his dead mother, but he communicated with the ghosts of such famous figures as the former prime minister Sir Wilfred Laurier, and even Leonardo da Vinci. He used a crystal ball, now found at Laurier House." And: "King saw magical images in his tea leaves, and even more oddly, in his morning cup of shaving cream. On January 20, 1948, he visualized in his morning lather symbols of the Cold War, a polar bear and an eagle...Then a dog appeared, perhaps symbolizing Canada, which helped push the bear off the eagle." Even so, Rankin pushes his story into still odder, more aggressively surreal territory, skewering not just King and his era of staunchly elitist Canadian politics, but clichéd ideas about Canada, its history and traditions that survive up to the present, often generally accepted and unquestioned. The film gets a little tedious as it nears the home stretch, but on the whole, it's a lot of fun; I'll certainly never look at a Canadian $50 bill the same way again!
Edo Avant Garde As in Leonardo: The Works, the main pleasure in Linda Hoaglund’s documentary is "the works" themselves, in this case Japanese folding screens produced between the early seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries, filmed in awesome, gracefully mobile HD by cinematographer Kasamatsu Norimichi. These extraordinary works, decidedly more unfamiliar to most Western audiences than Leonardo's masterpieces, are fascinating to look at (the more closely and patiently the better); and, as the films shows, they take up space and invite visual engagement in a way that is quite different from typical Western oil paintings. It's an important point, too, that something is inevitably lost from this experience by viewing these screens displayed behind glass in a museum or gallery. Hoaglund aims to place them back in their proper contexts, both by showing folding screens arranged in traditional rooms that could've been occupied by (sitting) Edo-era aristocrats or monks and by providing some useful historical information about the wider world of Edo Japan, particularly the shift in patronage to a wealthy merchant class, facilitated by Japan's rapid urbanization, and the combined influences of Buddhism and Shintoism on the art of this period. However, Hoaglund's primary argument--that in their non-naturalistic, "3D" perspective; lack of a clear centre or vanishing point; use of materials like goldleaf to form background space; and focus on animals, plants, and other elements of the natural world without direct reference to human beings, these folding screens were "avant-garde" art, conceptually and stylistically ahead of European painting in this period--is, ironically, too narrowly West-centric, tied to a flimsy History of Art master-narrative that few art historians today would accept and to an overly rigid East/West binary. Hoaglund compares the Edo screens to European art between the Italian Renaissance and the French Impressionists, noting that Van Gogh was heavily influenced by Japanese styles. But what if we broadened the scope to compare these works to Islamic or Persian art (flowing floral schemes and patterns), Byzantine art (particularly the use of goldleaf backgrounds), or even medieval European art (similarly de-centered works like tapestries, which invite a comparable type of nonlinear engagement), rather than only to Old Master paintings? In so doing, we might find that, while the art of Edo Japan was no doubt unique and spectacular, it was rather 400 years of European painting (ca. 1400–1800) that stand as the true outlier in the longer, global history of visual art.
The Two Popes When Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins are on screen together, this is a great movie. It really feels like we're watching the actual Popes Francis and Benedict XVI interacting, feeling each other out, quarrelling over issues of Church leadership and doctrine, learning to appreciate the other's virtues, despite their considerable differences in style, worldview, and ecclesiology (the papal names they've selected are deeply telling in this regard). These are two of the most fully realized portrayals of real, famous people –– familiar to us, but always at a remove –– that I can recall. When the leads are not sharing the screen, Fernando Meirelles's film is a very mixed bag: The opening act, from the death of John Paul II to Benedict mulling over his decision to abdicate, feels rushed, like a Cliff Notes summary of recent history; as a snapshot of intra-Vatican politics and factionalism, this is far less convincing than, say, The Young Pope (notwithstanding Paolo Sorrentino's series being a work of fiction). The lengthy flashbacks, providing exposition for the complicated pre-papal career of Francis (then Jorge Mario Bergoglio), are awkwardly inserted and shot (inexplicably, some are in black and white, while others are in colour). They tend to play like cheaply produced dramatic re-enactments in a true-crime show, the quality of which contrast sharply with the incredible performances of Pryce and Hopkins. While the past events depicted do help us better understand Francis and his reluctance to accept the papal crown, they could've been more effectively incorporated simply through more conversation between Pryce and Hopkins. Perhaps most problematically, one is never quite sure if The Two Popes is intended as a critique of the papal office and/or of the Church generally, or as a sort of love letter to these powerful institutions. The magnetic charisma of the leads, "humanizing" not just the well-loved Francis but also the more opaque Benedict, suggests the latter, even as Meirelles works in repeated references to the Church's chronic failure to address its legacy (and on-going crisis) of mass child abuse and its long history of tacitly supporting (or at least neglecting to oppose) murderous and oppressive regimes.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire Céline Sciamma's follow-up to the terrific Girlhood also centres on two people who get to know one another under highly particular and unusual circumstances (although that's probably where its similarities with The Two Popes end). Set in eighteenth-century France, Sciamma's drama is historically specific with regard to the extent of the constraints placed on female agency and its excellent, if austere, period detail, but it also has a timeless, fairy-tale-like atmosphere that feels indebted to Jane Campion (especially The Piano, less so Campion's adaptation of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady) and to Perrault's tales. Some synopses of Sciamma's film place it in the 1770s, while others see it taking place "at the end of the eighteenth century." I'm assuming that the main story is set just before the events leading up to the French Revolution, yet, unless there was some explicit date marker that I failed to spot, this is not at all certain. Such ambiguity –– keeping such a world-historical event totally outside the narrative frame –– speaks to the laser-focused intimacy and thoroughly feminine orientation of Sciamma's film. More than a usual "period drama," it feels like a dream of the past, a subversive romantic fantasy doomed to muted tragedy by its time and place. Its power sneaks up on you, building to a final shot that is among the most indelibe in recent memory.
Oh Mercy! Arnaud Desplechin's latest is an abrupt change of direction in the course of his career, almost completely eschewing the layers of artifice and meta conceits so characteristic of his oeuvre. Instead, Oh Mercy!, adapted from police transcripts and a TV investigative documentary about Desplechin's rough, northern French hometown of Roubaix (the film's much-superior French title is Roubaix, une lumière), is a realistic police procedural and gritty mosaic of contemporary life in this city. It's tightly scripted and superbly acted, with stand-out performances by Roschdy Zem, Sarah Forestier, and Léa Seydoux. One can imagine this translating well, and pretty easily, to the stage, particularly a remarkable long scene near the end that is all about performance, staging, and direction. Yet, at the same time, Oh Mercy! is still quite distinctly cinematic. Desplechin captures the urban environs of Roubaix with both affection and uneasiness--there is beauty, but also real danger, here––lending the film a strong touch of noir style, evident too in its rumantive, pessimistic voice-over narration. In the post-screening Q&A, Desplechin cited Hitchcock (The Wrong Man) and Bresson (Diary of a Country Priest) as influences for this project. When a member of the audience asked whether he conducted interviews with the real Roubaisians represented in the film, he answered firmly in the negative. Instead, for "research," he re-read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in multiple translations.
One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk Zacharias Kunuk's best film since Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner re-creates the 1961 encounter of the titular Inuit community leader with a Canadian government officer on Baffin Island. The white officer tries to convince Piugattuk to move his family from their ancestral home to a government settlement, and to send his children to school there. In return, he'll receive a wooden house, heated by a stove, a monthly family allowance payment, and access to desired commodities like tea, sugar, and tobacco. A local guide imperfectly translates the communication between Piugattuk and other Inuits and this government representative––a tense meeting that takes up the majority of Kunuk's film. What these scenes illustrate is the process of forced assimilation at work, in medias res. It only hints at the coercion and cultural destruction involved in this process, while suggesting that a profound lack of understanding was also partly to blame for it: first, at the level of language, though more generally of mutually incomprehensible mentalities and ideas about "home," identity, money, and productivity/utility. The flawed translation between English and Inuktitut feels wholly authentic, showing in vivid detail how such a meeting might well have played out. It also serves as a kind of microcosm for the ultimate failure in real communication that occurred between Inuit and other indigenous peoples across North America and the representatives of colonial governments. Yet, as in all of Kunuk's films, the situation is necessarily specific to Nunavut, the beautiful and severe Arctic landscape, and the Inuit culture. This film, after all, is set in 1961, by which time nearly every other corner of the continent had long since been enveloped by the "governmentality" of the Canadian or American state. Language gap notwithstanding, Noah Piugattuk clearly expresses his anxiety about the Canadian officer's proposal/command, though he refuses to directly state his choice. Despite his indecision, Kunuk frames this fateful encounter as a truly decisive moment in the modern history of the Inuit people and the (culturally and spatially) distant state imposing its will on them.
The Twentieth Century Matthew Rankin's bizarro biopic of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King is a weird, sporadically hilarious delight, like a cross between fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin (especially his Saddest Music in the World) and rightful cult classic Cabin Boy. To be sure, King was almost certainly Canada's strangest PM. For instance: "Not only did King speak with his dead mother, but he communicated with the ghosts of such famous figures as the former prime minister Sir Wilfred Laurier, and even Leonardo da Vinci. He used a crystal ball, now found at Laurier House." And: "King saw magical images in his tea leaves, and even more oddly, in his morning cup of shaving cream. On January 20, 1948, he visualized in his morning lather symbols of the Cold War, a polar bear and an eagle...Then a dog appeared, perhaps symbolizing Canada, which helped push the bear off the eagle." Even so, Rankin pushes his story into still odder, more aggressively surreal territory, skewering not just King and his era of staunchly elitist Canadian politics, but clichéd ideas about Canada, its history and traditions that survive up to the present, often generally accepted and unquestioned. The film gets a little tedious as it nears the home stretch, but on the whole, it's a lot of fun; I'll certainly never look at a Canadian $50 bill the same way again!
Edo Avant Garde As in Leonardo: The Works, the main pleasure in Linda Hoaglund’s documentary is "the works" themselves, in this case Japanese folding screens produced between the early seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries, filmed in awesome, gracefully mobile HD by cinematographer Kasamatsu Norimichi. These extraordinary works, decidedly more unfamiliar to most Western audiences than Leonardo's masterpieces, are fascinating to look at (the more closely and patiently the better); and, as the films shows, they take up space and invite visual engagement in a way that is quite different from typical Western oil paintings. It's an important point, too, that something is inevitably lost from this experience by viewing these screens displayed behind glass in a museum or gallery. Hoaglund aims to place them back in their proper contexts, both by showing folding screens arranged in traditional rooms that could've been occupied by (sitting) Edo-era aristocrats or monks and by providing some useful historical information about the wider world of Edo Japan, particularly the shift in patronage to a wealthy merchant class, facilitated by Japan's rapid urbanization, and the combined influences of Buddhism and Shintoism on the art of this period. However, Hoaglund's primary argument--that in their non-naturalistic, "3D" perspective; lack of a clear centre or vanishing point; use of materials like goldleaf to form background space; and focus on animals, plants, and other elements of the natural world without direct reference to human beings, these folding screens were "avant-garde" art, conceptually and stylistically ahead of European painting in this period--is, ironically, too narrowly West-centric, tied to a flimsy History of Art master-narrative that few art historians today would accept and to an overly rigid East/West binary. Hoaglund compares the Edo screens to European art between the Italian Renaissance and the French Impressionists, noting that Van Gogh was heavily influenced by Japanese styles. But what if we broadened the scope to compare these works to Islamic or Persian art (flowing floral schemes and patterns), Byzantine art (particularly the use of goldleaf backgrounds), or even medieval European art (similarly de-centered works like tapestries, which invite a comparable type of nonlinear engagement), rather than only to Old Master paintings? In so doing, we might find that, while the art of Edo Japan was no doubt unique and spectacular, it was rather 400 years of European painting (ca. 1400–1800) that stand as the true outlier in the longer, global history of visual art.
VIFF, pt. 2: Making Connections
Parasite The first half of Bong Joon-ho's Palm d'Or winner, about a lower-class Seoul family of four who one by one con their way into jobs working for a wealthy family, is the funniest hour of any movie in recent memory. The performances are pitch-perfect across the board, and nearly every joke lands with maximum impact. Most of them sting, too; like last year's Korean Cannes hit, Lee Chang-dong's Burning, Parasite is an incisive social commentary centering squarely on class tensions and resentments in contemporary South Korea. More generally, there are also shades of Jordan Peele's Us, though Bong's poor family isn't composed of literal doppelgängers. Roughly midway through, Bong's film shifts gears, toward horror and tragedy––it's still quite funny, but more darkly so––yet without ultimately, fully succeeding as either. It is certainly suspenseful and occasionally disturbingly violent, though never truly scary. And its tragic final act feels too coolly calculated. Like Peele's Us, but very much unlike Lee's superior Burning, it explains much more than is needed. All things considered, this is a pretty terrific movie, probably one of Bong's (and the year's) best. Still, I suspect that, while it may remain just as funny, it won't otherwise reward repeat viewings the way a more ambiguous, less airtight version of Parasite might have.
Joan of Arc To be sure, the story of Joan of Arc has been one of the most frequently presented over the history of cinema, going back (at least) to Georges Méliès' 1900 short. Representations of Joan, her brief life, her trial, and her death have yielded some of the best films ever made (Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc), some merely fine, conventional biopics, and some bizarre misfires. Bruno Dumont's Joan of Arc (a follow-up to his 2017 Jeanette, which I didn't see) is firmly in the third category, closely rivalling Luc Besson's The Messenger as the weirdest filmic treatment of the Joan story. Where Besson's movie was a full-on action/war spectacle, starring Milla Jovovich in proto-Resident Evil take-no-prisoners mode, Dumont's includes no such action whatsoever (battles are merely hinted at, including in one long sequence wherein a horse dances, a touch that, for better or worse, felt straight out of Monty Python!) and features a 12-year-old actress as his Joan (probably 19 at the time of her death), radically reversing the usual problem of overly adult screen Joans. There are also songs, by the septuagenarian French singer Christophe, sporadically inserted into the narrative, and standing in, by turns, for the voice of God (or an archangel) speaking to Joan, Joan's prayer to God, and the questioning from one of her clerical inquisitors (Christophe himself, making a sudden cameo as a monk, lip-syncing one of his songs). The results are decidedly alienating––no doubt deliberately so, on Dumont's part. At the screening that I attended, there were at least a dozen walkouts, maybe more. I opted to stick it out, mainly because the less willfully idiosyncratic scenes of dialogue, particularly during the preparation for Joan's trial and the trial itself, are quite strong, thoughtful and well-performed (especially the young Lise Leplat Prudhomme, who is impressive despite being miscast as Joan). As provocations go, this one's a very mixed bag, but it's not without its peculiar charms.
Leonardo: The Works Speaking of venturing into well-trod territory, Phil Grabsky's latest fine-art documentary tackles perhaps the biggest name of all in the Western art canon. To his credit, Grabsky's film is acutely aware of how Leonardo, through pop-cultural osmosis, has come to stand in for Art with a capital 'A.' By taking the time to examine all of Leonardo's surviving paintings, together with some sketches and other paintings that he may have collaborated on (all beautifully filmed in pristine HD), Leonardo: The Works is able to carefully situate Leonardo and cogently demonstrate the nature of his legendary genius. Drawing on the expertise of scholars and curators, Grabsky's film also goes some way toward illuminating the specific cultural context of the Italian Renaissance, its competitive hotspots of Florence, Milan, and Rome, and its influence in neighbouring France. Of course, a 100-minute film is not the best source for this complex history, nor to learn about Leonardo's works themselves, topics to which specialists have devoted entire careers and countless books. But it's a perfectly fine starting point. For those who are already well-acquainted with Leonardo's paintings and their contexts, it's just a wonderful way to spend an hour and forty minutes.
Anne at 13,000 Feet Canadian director Kazik Radwanski's film, about a young woman struggling with (something like) manic depression while balancing strained personal and work relationships, is above all a showcase for actress Deragh Campbell. As the titular character, a daycare supervisor who has developed a fondness for skydiving (hence the "at 13,000 feet"), Campbell is revelatory, moving convincingly between uncomfortable laughter and sudden tears and awkwardly crossing others' boundaries while fortifying her own. Campbell's Anne is neither an opaque blank slate nor a showy caricature of mental illness, but something much more interesting and nuanced--namely, a dynamic person, constantly in flux, and "growing," though not simply in the usual, dramatic sense of linear personal progress.
MS Slavic 7 Deragh Campbell also stars in this film, which she co-directed with Sofia Bohdanowich. It's a sequel of sorts to Bohdanowicz's remarkable Never Eat Alone, and, like that film, it fruitfully blurs the normal lines distinguishing "documentary" from "fiction." The film's premise is based in fact: a young woman, serving as the literary executor to her great-grandmother's estate, discovers that some fascinating letters written by her great-grandmother, an accomplished Polish poet, to another important poet, have recently been donated to Harvard's Houghton library. This story is drawn from Bohdanowicz's family history, and, yet as a character in the film, "Audrey," she is played by Campbell. The narrative built around Audrey's research process and critical engagement with the letters is also fictionalized, although woven into it are, for instance, scenes shot at an actual anniversary party in suburban Toronto, at which Campbell's Audrey mingles with Bohdanowicz's extended family members as a kind of alternate version of her co-director. From this brief description, however, MS Slavic 7 probably sounds more aggressively "experimental" than it actually comes across in practice. Truth and invention are engaged with here in a way that feels mostly seamless and subtle. The film's formal playfulness is directly connected to its narrative and to its major themes, relating in particular to the relationship between content and form, the document-as-text and the document-as-material-object, with some passing gestures toward the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Hayden White, and the like. MS Slavic 7 (appropriately, the title comes from a library special collections shelfmark) does a better job than any movie of which I'm aware at really capturing the excitement and pleasure of archival research––and it gets so many of the little details right: no pens in the reading room!
DANNY Another work deeply concerned with family history and memory, "by" Aaron Zeghers and Lewis Bennet. The scare-quotes are not meant as a slight to Zeghers and Bennet. In DANNY's closing credits, they cite themselves as editors, while "images and sound" are by Danny Ryder, Zeghers' deceased uncle. The 50-minute film is constructed out of home videos that Ryder shot in 1993, after being diagnosed with leukaemia. These video clips consist of Ryder, alone, speaking directly to his camera (he notes that photography and video technology are among his main interests, along with boating), usually in his Vancouver apartment or on its balcony. He reflects on his illness and mortality--alternately expressing hope, pessimism, and fear--but also on his frustrations in romance and sexuality, the difficult experiences of his childhood, his ambivalent relationship to his parents, and his worries about how others perceive him. This is extremely personal, indeed confessional, stuff, and at times it is discomfiting viewing. When Ryder, for instance, admits that he was once a "peeping Tom," the viewer of his (or Zeghers and Bennet's?) film can't help but feel a kind of queasy guilt, and pause to wonder whether they're also engaging in a type of voyeurism by watching DANNY. It's completely impossible to qualitatively assess a work like this one, but it is, in any case, genuinely moving and unforgettable, which speaks to both the skillful editorial efforts of Zeghers and Bennet in bringing this footage to light and the frank humanity of Ryder's self-portraiture. Whether he would've wished for his private videos to be presented this way, and screened at a film festival, is another, more problematic matter...
Still Human At one point during Chan Oliver Siu Kuen's film, I turned my wife, both of us teary-eyed, and whispered, "This is, like, Friday Night Lights-level sweet." And so it is! Following the symbiotic relationship of a Filipina nursemaid with dreams of being a professional photographer and her outwardly misanthropic but secretly tenderhearted employer, a lonely, paraplegic Hong Kong divorcé, Still Human is the kind of movie where you can see every dramatic plot development coming well beforehand, yet it still makes you cry when it gets there. It's not a great film, by any stretch: its treacly musical score is over-used and overly manipulative, most of the supporting characters are just faint sketches in service of the plot, there are some odd, unnecessary uses of slow-motion, and, most glaringly, for a film dealing with foreign domestic servants in Hong Kong, there could've been some acknowledgment of the many serious abuses suffered by such workers. Yet, these issues notwithstanding, it's a lovely, well-acted comic melodrama about being kind, decent, and compassionate to other people. And it's impossibly sweet.
Parasite The first half of Bong Joon-ho's Palm d'Or winner, about a lower-class Seoul family of four who one by one con their way into jobs working for a wealthy family, is the funniest hour of any movie in recent memory. The performances are pitch-perfect across the board, and nearly every joke lands with maximum impact. Most of them sting, too; like last year's Korean Cannes hit, Lee Chang-dong's Burning, Parasite is an incisive social commentary centering squarely on class tensions and resentments in contemporary South Korea. More generally, there are also shades of Jordan Peele's Us, though Bong's poor family isn't composed of literal doppelgängers. Roughly midway through, Bong's film shifts gears, toward horror and tragedy––it's still quite funny, but more darkly so––yet without ultimately, fully succeeding as either. It is certainly suspenseful and occasionally disturbingly violent, though never truly scary. And its tragic final act feels too coolly calculated. Like Peele's Us, but very much unlike Lee's superior Burning, it explains much more than is needed. All things considered, this is a pretty terrific movie, probably one of Bong's (and the year's) best. Still, I suspect that, while it may remain just as funny, it won't otherwise reward repeat viewings the way a more ambiguous, less airtight version of Parasite might have.
Joan of Arc To be sure, the story of Joan of Arc has been one of the most frequently presented over the history of cinema, going back (at least) to Georges Méliès' 1900 short. Representations of Joan, her brief life, her trial, and her death have yielded some of the best films ever made (Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc), some merely fine, conventional biopics, and some bizarre misfires. Bruno Dumont's Joan of Arc (a follow-up to his 2017 Jeanette, which I didn't see) is firmly in the third category, closely rivalling Luc Besson's The Messenger as the weirdest filmic treatment of the Joan story. Where Besson's movie was a full-on action/war spectacle, starring Milla Jovovich in proto-Resident Evil take-no-prisoners mode, Dumont's includes no such action whatsoever (battles are merely hinted at, including in one long sequence wherein a horse dances, a touch that, for better or worse, felt straight out of Monty Python!) and features a 12-year-old actress as his Joan (probably 19 at the time of her death), radically reversing the usual problem of overly adult screen Joans. There are also songs, by the septuagenarian French singer Christophe, sporadically inserted into the narrative, and standing in, by turns, for the voice of God (or an archangel) speaking to Joan, Joan's prayer to God, and the questioning from one of her clerical inquisitors (Christophe himself, making a sudden cameo as a monk, lip-syncing one of his songs). The results are decidedly alienating––no doubt deliberately so, on Dumont's part. At the screening that I attended, there were at least a dozen walkouts, maybe more. I opted to stick it out, mainly because the less willfully idiosyncratic scenes of dialogue, particularly during the preparation for Joan's trial and the trial itself, are quite strong, thoughtful and well-performed (especially the young Lise Leplat Prudhomme, who is impressive despite being miscast as Joan). As provocations go, this one's a very mixed bag, but it's not without its peculiar charms.
Leonardo: The Works Speaking of venturing into well-trod territory, Phil Grabsky's latest fine-art documentary tackles perhaps the biggest name of all in the Western art canon. To his credit, Grabsky's film is acutely aware of how Leonardo, through pop-cultural osmosis, has come to stand in for Art with a capital 'A.' By taking the time to examine all of Leonardo's surviving paintings, together with some sketches and other paintings that he may have collaborated on (all beautifully filmed in pristine HD), Leonardo: The Works is able to carefully situate Leonardo and cogently demonstrate the nature of his legendary genius. Drawing on the expertise of scholars and curators, Grabsky's film also goes some way toward illuminating the specific cultural context of the Italian Renaissance, its competitive hotspots of Florence, Milan, and Rome, and its influence in neighbouring France. Of course, a 100-minute film is not the best source for this complex history, nor to learn about Leonardo's works themselves, topics to which specialists have devoted entire careers and countless books. But it's a perfectly fine starting point. For those who are already well-acquainted with Leonardo's paintings and their contexts, it's just a wonderful way to spend an hour and forty minutes.
Anne at 13,000 Feet Canadian director Kazik Radwanski's film, about a young woman struggling with (something like) manic depression while balancing strained personal and work relationships, is above all a showcase for actress Deragh Campbell. As the titular character, a daycare supervisor who has developed a fondness for skydiving (hence the "at 13,000 feet"), Campbell is revelatory, moving convincingly between uncomfortable laughter and sudden tears and awkwardly crossing others' boundaries while fortifying her own. Campbell's Anne is neither an opaque blank slate nor a showy caricature of mental illness, but something much more interesting and nuanced--namely, a dynamic person, constantly in flux, and "growing," though not simply in the usual, dramatic sense of linear personal progress.
MS Slavic 7 Deragh Campbell also stars in this film, which she co-directed with Sofia Bohdanowich. It's a sequel of sorts to Bohdanowicz's remarkable Never Eat Alone, and, like that film, it fruitfully blurs the normal lines distinguishing "documentary" from "fiction." The film's premise is based in fact: a young woman, serving as the literary executor to her great-grandmother's estate, discovers that some fascinating letters written by her great-grandmother, an accomplished Polish poet, to another important poet, have recently been donated to Harvard's Houghton library. This story is drawn from Bohdanowicz's family history, and, yet as a character in the film, "Audrey," she is played by Campbell. The narrative built around Audrey's research process and critical engagement with the letters is also fictionalized, although woven into it are, for instance, scenes shot at an actual anniversary party in suburban Toronto, at which Campbell's Audrey mingles with Bohdanowicz's extended family members as a kind of alternate version of her co-director. From this brief description, however, MS Slavic 7 probably sounds more aggressively "experimental" than it actually comes across in practice. Truth and invention are engaged with here in a way that feels mostly seamless and subtle. The film's formal playfulness is directly connected to its narrative and to its major themes, relating in particular to the relationship between content and form, the document-as-text and the document-as-material-object, with some passing gestures toward the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Hayden White, and the like. MS Slavic 7 (appropriately, the title comes from a library special collections shelfmark) does a better job than any movie of which I'm aware at really capturing the excitement and pleasure of archival research––and it gets so many of the little details right: no pens in the reading room!
DANNY Another work deeply concerned with family history and memory, "by" Aaron Zeghers and Lewis Bennet. The scare-quotes are not meant as a slight to Zeghers and Bennet. In DANNY's closing credits, they cite themselves as editors, while "images and sound" are by Danny Ryder, Zeghers' deceased uncle. The 50-minute film is constructed out of home videos that Ryder shot in 1993, after being diagnosed with leukaemia. These video clips consist of Ryder, alone, speaking directly to his camera (he notes that photography and video technology are among his main interests, along with boating), usually in his Vancouver apartment or on its balcony. He reflects on his illness and mortality--alternately expressing hope, pessimism, and fear--but also on his frustrations in romance and sexuality, the difficult experiences of his childhood, his ambivalent relationship to his parents, and his worries about how others perceive him. This is extremely personal, indeed confessional, stuff, and at times it is discomfiting viewing. When Ryder, for instance, admits that he was once a "peeping Tom," the viewer of his (or Zeghers and Bennet's?) film can't help but feel a kind of queasy guilt, and pause to wonder whether they're also engaging in a type of voyeurism by watching DANNY. It's completely impossible to qualitatively assess a work like this one, but it is, in any case, genuinely moving and unforgettable, which speaks to both the skillful editorial efforts of Zeghers and Bennet in bringing this footage to light and the frank humanity of Ryder's self-portraiture. Whether he would've wished for his private videos to be presented this way, and screened at a film festival, is another, more problematic matter...
Still Human At one point during Chan Oliver Siu Kuen's film, I turned my wife, both of us teary-eyed, and whispered, "This is, like, Friday Night Lights-level sweet." And so it is! Following the symbiotic relationship of a Filipina nursemaid with dreams of being a professional photographer and her outwardly misanthropic but secretly tenderhearted employer, a lonely, paraplegic Hong Kong divorcé, Still Human is the kind of movie where you can see every dramatic plot development coming well beforehand, yet it still makes you cry when it gets there. It's not a great film, by any stretch: its treacly musical score is over-used and overly manipulative, most of the supporting characters are just faint sketches in service of the plot, there are some odd, unnecessary uses of slow-motion, and, most glaringly, for a film dealing with foreign domestic servants in Hong Kong, there could've been some acknowledgment of the many serious abuses suffered by such workers. Yet, these issues notwithstanding, it's a lovely, well-acted comic melodrama about being kind, decent, and compassionate to other people. And it's impossibly sweet.
VIFF, pt. 1: Dangerous Times
A Hidden Life Terrence Malick's latest masterpiece is, like all of his films, sublimely, singularly beautiful, but this might be his first film that can rightly be called "timely." His recent forays into contemporary culture, whether great (To the Wonder), muddled (Song to Song), or both at once (Knight of Cups), tell us almost nothing of particular interest about the present world. His apparent distaste for, and/or tenuous understanding of, things current (viewed, at times, like artifacts of an alien society) awkwardly undercut his focus on the poetic, the timeless, the essential. In his return to the past––specifically to the perilous period of the Second World War, which he last explored two decades ago, in the war's Pacific theatre––Malick recovers something from the story of the Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter that, through its timelessness and universality, resonates powerfully in the dangerous, murky conditions of the present.
Malick evidently found Scorsese's Silence seriously challenging. A Hidden Life considers a similar kind of spiritual crisis, though (perhaps, surprisingly) in an ostensibly less theologically complex manner. Matters of good and evil and of free will and compulsion (problems at the very heart of his oeuvre) are no less thoughtfully explored by Malick, but there are fewer nagging shades of grey here than in Silence. Instead, across its generous three-hour runtime, A Hidden Life immerses its audience in this kind of spiritual crisis as wholly as it immerses us in the Edenic beauty of Jägerstätter's Alpine village. Its simplicity is deceptive: if resisting and rejecting what we sense is truly wrong is something that is easy and obvious, the film asks, then why do we not all fully and unambiguously do so all the time? What evils do we just tacitly accept? Is being able to resolutely say "No" a matter of conscience, or courage, or the mysteries of divine grace? Jägerstätter has in fact been beatified by the Catholic Church, and A Hidden Life might be accurately termed a modern hagiography. Yet, as presented by Malick, Jägerstätter is a saint whose example speaks poignantly and directly to the insidious forces of nationalism, authoritarianism, and populism gaining ground again today.
Lost Course Another three-hour, genuinely monumental work, no less urgent than Malick's, although in many respects very different from it. Hong Kong filmmaker Jill Li's extraordinary documentary charts, for around five years' time, the hopeful rise and terrible fall of something like grassroots democracy in the small Guangdong province village of Wukan, where the expropriation of communally held lands ignited a forceful opposition to government corruption. In its intimacy and scope, I was reminded in particular of Xu Xin's Karamay (still one of the very best films I've seen over my dozen years attending VIFF). Li's film is not as artful, and its style is more frenetic and fly-on-the-wall where Xu's was above all acutely mournful, but, as a fiercely polemical extended snap-shot of Chinese society and politics, it's just as vital and affecting. If Lost Course's conclusions are inevitably pessimistic, one might find some glimmer of hope outside the frame, in the streets of Li's native Hong Kong.
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains Set in Fuyang, a suburban district of Hangzhou straddling the idyllic Fuchun River, currently being transformed by large-scale redevelopment projects and soaring real-estate prices, Gu Xiaogang's film attentively follows the lives of four adult brothers, their elderly mother, their wives, and children over the course of about a year. The film takes its title from Huang Gongwang's Song Dynasty-era scroll painting of the river landscape. This famous work is explicitly mentioned as the university thesis topic of one of the film's characters, who has returned to his hometown to work as a schoolteacher; he can still detect the ancient beauty and distant civilization memorialized in Hong Gongwang's painting amidst the rapidly changing twenty-first-century Fuyang. Gu, for his part, draws inspiration from the form and substance of this painting for his film's distinctive visual style, characterized by a kind of loose and open formalism. Comparisons to Edward Yang, or to the warmer Jia Zhangke of Ash Is Purest White, are entirely merited. Such comparisons speak to the level of assuredness and quiet mastery of Gu's film--almost unbelievably, a debut feature! The film concludes with the note "End of Part 1," suggesting more to follow in this engrossing family story. By its completion, I suspect Gu may well be regarded as one of the next major Chinese filmmakers.
The Lighthouse Robert Eggers' follow-up to The Witch isn't quite as flat-out frightening as his superlative debut, but it's every bit as meticulously constructed and evocative of a time and place that look, sound, and feel thoroughly strange. Despite the (potentially distracting) presence of two prominent movie stars, one quickly feels locked into the claustrophobic milieu of a remote, eerie New England lighthouse in the late nineteenth century. This transporting effect can be attributed both to Eggers' great attention to visual and aural detail and to the precision and intensity of Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson's performances, method scenery-chewing in the best, most entertaining sense. In its second half, The Lighthouse jumps off the rails (to the extent that it was ever on them?), deliberately mimicking its characters' descent into madness. The result is surreal and jarring; this is a "horror movie," broadly defined, in the same way that, say, Eraserhead is a horror movie. Like Lynch's classic, Eggers' new film, also shot in stark black-and-white, is plumbing the depths of some deeply weird waters (nautical pun intended). Not all of it comes together in the end--nor do I think it's supposed to come together cleanly or coherently, in contrast to the hyper-exacting quality of Eggers' mise-en-scène--making for a movie that is not conventionally satisfying, but all the more haunting for its rough edges and loose threads.
Young Ahmed The Dardenne brothers' most provocative film to date, a character study centering on a Muslim teenager in Belgium, driven through radicalization to attempt a violent crime. If Young Ahmed, on some conceptual or thematic level, is meant to measure the uneasy pulse of Western Europe right now, its greatest strength is its specificity. This is not, in execution, a general sociological portrait of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, but of one troubled boy, who may appear demographically archetypal, yet who, in the course of his actions and reactions, emerges as a vivid, difficult subject. Thankfully, the Dardennes refuse (as ever) to play psychologists, instead allowing their protagonist to gradually come into focus through his choices and their consequences--first as a "product of his environment," but ultimately as an idiosyncratic individual, uncomfortable in his world and in his own skin. Not unlike several earlier Dardenne bros. works, this is a certain, rigorously realist type of coming-of-age film––the adjective jeune is in the title for good reason––territory the Dardennes understand better than they do ideology or religion.
Preface to a History As a longtime Vancouverite, it's a real pleasure just to see this extremely photogenic, if chameleonic, city playing itself, well-shot and up on the big screen. This remarkable short film by Devan Scott and Will Ross gives us that, as it follows one guy's long, scenic walk from Commercial Drive to English Bay after missing the last Skytrain of the night. The nocturnal rhythms of the city (so sleepy and still outside the downtown core) are perfectly captured here, and they provide the film its sliver of narrative. But these meandering rhythms are strikingly juxtaposed against Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich, a sobering history of Nazism's origins in German culture, playing (as an audiobook) through the walker's headphones and over the film's soundtrack for nearly the whole route––interrupted only briefly by a phonecall with his girlfriend. I'm not sure what particular symbolic connection we should infer between what we're hearing and what we're seeing. In a post-screening Q&A, the filmmakers suggested something about the imminent danger of "global warming," but, I must admit, this idea did not occur to me at all as I watched their film. Instead, without overextending, what Preface to a History evokes so well is something quite common in life, but rarely hinted at in movies: the "ordinary affect," without conscious cognitive dissonance, of experiencing totally different phenomena at the same time, like The Coming of the Third Reich colouring an unhurried, late-night stroll around Vancouver.
A Hidden Life Terrence Malick's latest masterpiece is, like all of his films, sublimely, singularly beautiful, but this might be his first film that can rightly be called "timely." His recent forays into contemporary culture, whether great (To the Wonder), muddled (Song to Song), or both at once (Knight of Cups), tell us almost nothing of particular interest about the present world. His apparent distaste for, and/or tenuous understanding of, things current (viewed, at times, like artifacts of an alien society) awkwardly undercut his focus on the poetic, the timeless, the essential. In his return to the past––specifically to the perilous period of the Second World War, which he last explored two decades ago, in the war's Pacific theatre––Malick recovers something from the story of the Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter that, through its timelessness and universality, resonates powerfully in the dangerous, murky conditions of the present.
Malick evidently found Scorsese's Silence seriously challenging. A Hidden Life considers a similar kind of spiritual crisis, though (perhaps, surprisingly) in an ostensibly less theologically complex manner. Matters of good and evil and of free will and compulsion (problems at the very heart of his oeuvre) are no less thoughtfully explored by Malick, but there are fewer nagging shades of grey here than in Silence. Instead, across its generous three-hour runtime, A Hidden Life immerses its audience in this kind of spiritual crisis as wholly as it immerses us in the Edenic beauty of Jägerstätter's Alpine village. Its simplicity is deceptive: if resisting and rejecting what we sense is truly wrong is something that is easy and obvious, the film asks, then why do we not all fully and unambiguously do so all the time? What evils do we just tacitly accept? Is being able to resolutely say "No" a matter of conscience, or courage, or the mysteries of divine grace? Jägerstätter has in fact been beatified by the Catholic Church, and A Hidden Life might be accurately termed a modern hagiography. Yet, as presented by Malick, Jägerstätter is a saint whose example speaks poignantly and directly to the insidious forces of nationalism, authoritarianism, and populism gaining ground again today.
Lost Course Another three-hour, genuinely monumental work, no less urgent than Malick's, although in many respects very different from it. Hong Kong filmmaker Jill Li's extraordinary documentary charts, for around five years' time, the hopeful rise and terrible fall of something like grassroots democracy in the small Guangdong province village of Wukan, where the expropriation of communally held lands ignited a forceful opposition to government corruption. In its intimacy and scope, I was reminded in particular of Xu Xin's Karamay (still one of the very best films I've seen over my dozen years attending VIFF). Li's film is not as artful, and its style is more frenetic and fly-on-the-wall where Xu's was above all acutely mournful, but, as a fiercely polemical extended snap-shot of Chinese society and politics, it's just as vital and affecting. If Lost Course's conclusions are inevitably pessimistic, one might find some glimmer of hope outside the frame, in the streets of Li's native Hong Kong.
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains Set in Fuyang, a suburban district of Hangzhou straddling the idyllic Fuchun River, currently being transformed by large-scale redevelopment projects and soaring real-estate prices, Gu Xiaogang's film attentively follows the lives of four adult brothers, their elderly mother, their wives, and children over the course of about a year. The film takes its title from Huang Gongwang's Song Dynasty-era scroll painting of the river landscape. This famous work is explicitly mentioned as the university thesis topic of one of the film's characters, who has returned to his hometown to work as a schoolteacher; he can still detect the ancient beauty and distant civilization memorialized in Hong Gongwang's painting amidst the rapidly changing twenty-first-century Fuyang. Gu, for his part, draws inspiration from the form and substance of this painting for his film's distinctive visual style, characterized by a kind of loose and open formalism. Comparisons to Edward Yang, or to the warmer Jia Zhangke of Ash Is Purest White, are entirely merited. Such comparisons speak to the level of assuredness and quiet mastery of Gu's film--almost unbelievably, a debut feature! The film concludes with the note "End of Part 1," suggesting more to follow in this engrossing family story. By its completion, I suspect Gu may well be regarded as one of the next major Chinese filmmakers.
The Lighthouse Robert Eggers' follow-up to The Witch isn't quite as flat-out frightening as his superlative debut, but it's every bit as meticulously constructed and evocative of a time and place that look, sound, and feel thoroughly strange. Despite the (potentially distracting) presence of two prominent movie stars, one quickly feels locked into the claustrophobic milieu of a remote, eerie New England lighthouse in the late nineteenth century. This transporting effect can be attributed both to Eggers' great attention to visual and aural detail and to the precision and intensity of Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson's performances, method scenery-chewing in the best, most entertaining sense. In its second half, The Lighthouse jumps off the rails (to the extent that it was ever on them?), deliberately mimicking its characters' descent into madness. The result is surreal and jarring; this is a "horror movie," broadly defined, in the same way that, say, Eraserhead is a horror movie. Like Lynch's classic, Eggers' new film, also shot in stark black-and-white, is plumbing the depths of some deeply weird waters (nautical pun intended). Not all of it comes together in the end--nor do I think it's supposed to come together cleanly or coherently, in contrast to the hyper-exacting quality of Eggers' mise-en-scène--making for a movie that is not conventionally satisfying, but all the more haunting for its rough edges and loose threads.
Young Ahmed The Dardenne brothers' most provocative film to date, a character study centering on a Muslim teenager in Belgium, driven through radicalization to attempt a violent crime. If Young Ahmed, on some conceptual or thematic level, is meant to measure the uneasy pulse of Western Europe right now, its greatest strength is its specificity. This is not, in execution, a general sociological portrait of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, but of one troubled boy, who may appear demographically archetypal, yet who, in the course of his actions and reactions, emerges as a vivid, difficult subject. Thankfully, the Dardennes refuse (as ever) to play psychologists, instead allowing their protagonist to gradually come into focus through his choices and their consequences--first as a "product of his environment," but ultimately as an idiosyncratic individual, uncomfortable in his world and in his own skin. Not unlike several earlier Dardenne bros. works, this is a certain, rigorously realist type of coming-of-age film––the adjective jeune is in the title for good reason––territory the Dardennes understand better than they do ideology or religion.
Preface to a History As a longtime Vancouverite, it's a real pleasure just to see this extremely photogenic, if chameleonic, city playing itself, well-shot and up on the big screen. This remarkable short film by Devan Scott and Will Ross gives us that, as it follows one guy's long, scenic walk from Commercial Drive to English Bay after missing the last Skytrain of the night. The nocturnal rhythms of the city (so sleepy and still outside the downtown core) are perfectly captured here, and they provide the film its sliver of narrative. But these meandering rhythms are strikingly juxtaposed against Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich, a sobering history of Nazism's origins in German culture, playing (as an audiobook) through the walker's headphones and over the film's soundtrack for nearly the whole route––interrupted only briefly by a phonecall with his girlfriend. I'm not sure what particular symbolic connection we should infer between what we're hearing and what we're seeing. In a post-screening Q&A, the filmmakers suggested something about the imminent danger of "global warming," but, I must admit, this idea did not occur to me at all as I watched their film. Instead, without overextending, what Preface to a History evokes so well is something quite common in life, but rarely hinted at in movies: the "ordinary affect," without conscious cognitive dissonance, of experiencing totally different phenomena at the same time, like The Coming of the Third Reich colouring an unhurried, late-night stroll around Vancouver.
And I press you to the pages of my heart
It may just be that I spend way too much time closely reading Augustine––but this lyric sounds rather strikingly like something straight out of the Confessions. Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that, like Blood Orange, Carly Rae Jepsen is consciously invoking Augustine. But what a strangely wonderful metaphor in a pop song that also seems to explicitly reference the True Blood theme!
In any case, Dedicated further confirms her place in the upper-most echelon of pure-pop consistency, with Robyn her only real peer, and Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift hovering, for now, just below that. The latter's Lover is nearly as resplendent, but its finest moments (including the title track and the quietly wrenching Dixie Chicks duet) sound closer to the country ballads with which she originally made her name than anything she's put out in years. She's still a singer-songwriter at heart, whose pop turn was a product more of will than nature; in another, plausible timeline, her career trajectory might have resembled, say, Lucinda Williams's or Tori Amos's. CRJ is through-and-through a crafter and performer of pure, sublime pop, like Robyn, like Kylie Minogue, like golden-age Madonna. Just occasionally, though, a note of (writerly) profundity slips in there, e.g, "And I press you to the pages of my heart."
It may just be that I spend way too much time closely reading Augustine––but this lyric sounds rather strikingly like something straight out of the Confessions. Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that, like Blood Orange, Carly Rae Jepsen is consciously invoking Augustine. But what a strangely wonderful metaphor in a pop song that also seems to explicitly reference the True Blood theme!
In any case, Dedicated further confirms her place in the upper-most echelon of pure-pop consistency, with Robyn her only real peer, and Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift hovering, for now, just below that. The latter's Lover is nearly as resplendent, but its finest moments (including the title track and the quietly wrenching Dixie Chicks duet) sound closer to the country ballads with which she originally made her name than anything she's put out in years. She's still a singer-songwriter at heart, whose pop turn was a product more of will than nature; in another, plausible timeline, her career trajectory might have resembled, say, Lucinda Williams's or Tori Amos's. CRJ is through-and-through a crafter and performer of pure, sublime pop, like Robyn, like Kylie Minogue, like golden-age Madonna. Just occasionally, though, a note of (writerly) profundity slips in there, e.g, "And I press you to the pages of my heart."
2019, so far
Top five (or six) favourites, thus far this year:
Films
01. High Life (Denis)
02. Mary Magdalene (Davis)
03. Once upon a Time in Hollywood (Tarantino)
04. Toy Story 4 (Cooley)
05. Midsommar (Aster) / US (Peele) [tie, for now]
Albums
01. Ariana Grande, Thank U, Next
02. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated
03. Taylor Swift, Lover
04. Sleater-Kinney, The Center Won't Hold
05. Solange, When I Get Home
Top five (or six) favourites, thus far this year:
Films
01. High Life (Denis)
02. Mary Magdalene (Davis)
03. Once upon a Time in Hollywood (Tarantino)
04. Toy Story 4 (Cooley)
05. Midsommar (Aster) / US (Peele) [tie, for now]
Albums
01. Ariana Grande, Thank U, Next
02. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated
03. Taylor Swift, Lover
04. Sleater-Kinney, The Center Won't Hold
05. Solange, When I Get Home
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