If anything, Wes Anderson is very consistent. His films all share his brisk pacing, deadpan humor, diorama creativity and color, and precise attention to detail. And they’re all good.
This is even though each of his nine films is wildly different and ambitious in ways unique to each project. He’s put his quirky, fantastical stamp on coming-of-age romances, family dysfunction dramas, children’s fables and French New Wave cinema. You could make a case that any of Anderson’s films is the “Most Wes Anderson” film. I wrote as much about his previous film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which found him globe hoping, going to dark places and using his dioramas to examine legacy and loss. That’s all true even though his other films have these qualities in spades, in their own ways.
So where does that leave Isle of Dogs, his second stop-motion animated film following the wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox? It feels like Anderson at his ugliest, dabbling in washed out horizons, muted colors and grizzly characters, though you can find parallels in his past films. He’s fully embracing his Japanese influences from Akira Kurosawa and kabuki dance, though eagle-eyed viewers must’ve known he’s a fan. And it also feels like his most grim movie, with an immensely percussive score lending gravitas and stakes to an otherwise pleasant story about dogs. You know where this is going.
Isle of Dogs is exactly like all of Anderson’s films and none of them. It dazzles with animation and moods that Anderson has never dabbled in before, and yet it feels at home with his best work. Continue reading “Isle of Dogs”
I feel like one of those angry male fanboys complaining about “accuracy” and being “faithful” to source material. While Ready Player One maintains most of the plot points of Ernest Cline’s novel, it often feels like a completely different story. Masturbatory and overwritten though it may be, the book Ready Player One at least took its fandom seriously. Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation is a sugary pop culture smorgasboard. It’s empty, overstuffed and bland where it should be awe-inspiring. And instead of a virtual reality world filled with wonder, Spielberg’s latest vision of the future looks corny even for him.
Director John Krasinski does an excellent job in the opening moments of A Quiet Place establishing the unfortunate predicament of these doomed protagonists. It’s your typical end of the world scenario, the camera scours some deserted pharmacy, but no one is making a noise. The scavenging family speaks only through sign language, and when the mother picks up a bottle of pills from a shelf, she does so with the utmost care. But if that wasn’t enough, there’s a helpful New York Post with a headline that blares, “IT’S SOUND!”
“It means I just have to try a little harder to be good.” That’s Amanda in an early line in Thoroughbreds plainly explaining her mental affliction to her old friend Lily. Amanda is without feeling and emotion, though she’s not quite a “sociopath.” She blankly stares into a mirror, tilts her head and flashes a smile. She can turn on a sunny demeanor in an instant, but there’s nothing behind that façade. And yet Lily is trying just as hard to be “good.” We’re all trying.
The Russian drama Loveless, nominated for 2018’s Best Foreign Language Oscar, wouldn’t be the first to show how a deteriorating marriage destroys other lives in its wake. But Loveless isn’t just bleak, it’s bitter, with contempt for how the culture that still lingers from the Soviet Union breeds hatred and distrust across generations.
In the sci-fi “Annihilation,” director Alex Garland has built a luminous, colorful playground with infinite possibilities. He takes us into a mysterious region called “The Shimmer,” a kaleidoscopic, morphing bubble. Light and technology are all scrambled and refracted inside this ever-expanding space, and the flora and fauna inside are rife with mutations and impossibilities. It’s a place where the rules of nature don’t apply and anything can be imagined.
Ava DuVernay truly wants “A Wrinkle In Time” to be the most glorious, inspiring movie you’ve ever seen. She wants you – yes you, little black girl who has never seen herself represented on screen before – to believe in yourself so you can bring light into the world and be a force for positive change. DuVernay believes this so strongly that she’s even dressed Oprah in space age chain mail, glued-on diamonds and a glittery lip gloss that looks like it cost half of the movie’s $100 million budget so that Oprah can do what Oprah does best and make it seem like she’s speaking directly to you.
It’s a cliché to announce at the beginning of your movie “based on a true story,” but it’s almost become as much of a cliché to now be tongue-in-cheek about it. “Based on wildly contradictory interviews,” the opening to “I, Tonya” proclaims. It tells you two things about this movie: that it thinks it has a blank check to take as many liberties as it wants with Tonya Harding’s (Margot Robbie) tabloid story, and that this movie wants to have a sense of humor it maybe doesn’t deserve.
“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, do you know what that means?” A social worker in the Safdie Brothers’ “Good Time” asks that question to Nick (Benny Safdie), a dead-eyed man with a stony, gaping face and who is mentally challenged. The social worker asks a few more questions, and just as he’s making a breakthrough, with Nick even shedding a tear, his loving but unhinged brother Connie (Robert Pattinson) whisks him away.