Author: nolipstick1

Film: “The Triangle of Sadness” 2022, Directed by Ruben Östlund

The winner of the Best Film Award of 2022 of the European Film Academy is quite disappointing.

Its best part is the starting scene where we see an audition of male fashion models and the instructions they are being given on how to relax the “triangle of sadness” on their faces or slightly open their mouths in order to “look more available” or how to train the “Balenciaga look” vs the “H&M look.” And the viewer is misled to believe that this will be a scathing and fresh satire of the fashion industry. Instead, the film goes on to become an annoyingly predictable and transparent parable of class conflict, the class of the super-rich or consumerist society. There are some good previous examples in European cinema that did this quite successfully – La Grande Bouffe and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, for example. Ostlund’s creation is a tired imitation of these as well as Bong Joon Ho’s recent film Parasite. The core part of the film is set on a luxury cruise yacht with some of the cliche characters being a Russian oligarch, a weapon manufacturer, a fashion model turned influencer and an IT start-up owner. These representatives of the class of the rich are of course quite obnoxious and we see them eating and drinking and then, you guessed it, throwing up, etc. The poor, again in a quite cliched manner, are represented by the service and crew of the yacht, the “lower deck”, who are servile to the extreme and motivated by money in their submissiveness, while the captain is a drunk and a Marxist. I would rather put the latter in quotation marks because his “Marxism” is “for dummies.” In the third part of the film, after the ship wrecks and all find themselves on an island, the poor take over as they have access to the food supply, and turn out to be quite disgusting as well. The overarching “idea” of the film seems to be that the rich are very very bad and the poor are justified to be bad. And this “idea” is shoved at the audience in a boring and very simplistic manner over the course of two very long hours.

It is quite a pity that this talented director who grabbed the critics’ attention with an original and fresh film like Force Majeure winds up with a stale didactic bore that unfortunately appeals to film juries as it “checks all the boxes.”

TV: The Gilded Age. Created by Julian Fellowes, 2022, HBO

Julian Fellows tried to pull a Jane Austen or an Edith Wharton – unsuccessfully. He did not even emulate his own previous win, “Downton Abbey”…

A mix of bachelors and bachelorettes does not necessarily make a good TV series recipe. It is a recipe anyway, but for a show that can be watched while crocheting (that is for people who crochet). This much Julian Fellowes has achieved. I found it more entertaining to count how many times the characters use variations of the phrase “I am going upstairs to change”, “I need to change”, “Aren’t you going to change”, etc, etc. instead of following some of the supposedly feisty dialogue of the female characters.

In general, all the characters wear their convictions or beliefs on subjects like money (new and old), equality, race, love, etc. on their sleeves – like badges. So, the dialogue can be replaced by just characters flashing their badges at each other – “hey, I am a prejudiced old snob”, “hey I am an early bird feminist”, and so on. Not a very engaging action to watch. All this is interspersed with historical curiosities about the Doylestown rail or the Statue of Liberty. Wouldn’t you rather watch a proper historical documentary? The other recipe that worked before for Julian Fellowes – “upstairs-downstairs”, masters and servants, is so trite and inorganic to the plot that you could just hit the FF button without missing any of the action, whatever that could be.

In other words, Baron Fellowes is slipping us a fake.

Film: Don’t Look Up. 2021. Directed by Adam McKay

This film, supposedly a satire of America, is like a film made in the Soviet Union in the 50s. It employs the devices of anti-Americanism of a now-defunct socialist aesthetics.

Its problem is not that it compares the inevitable catastrophe of a meteorite about to hit the earth to the problem of climate change (a problem of immense complexity) as one serious critic of the film pointed out. Its real problem is that it portrays the “villains” of the US government as complete idiots and then claims that this is a satire. You can’t make the object of your satire a complete idiot in an attempt to prove that they are an idiot. It reminds me of the manipulative aesthetics of anti-semitic German films before the Second World War.

And what a pity that some great actors obliged.

Satire is a very difficult genre!

Film: The Lost Daughter, 2021, Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

Maggie Gyllenhaal has created a great European-style film in the best traditions of European cinema. This is a very refreshing achievement given that the current European cinema has started to resemble one very long and predictable Romanian film.

The film pulls you in slowly into its psychological web of relationships and nuances. In Gyllenhaal Elena Ferrante has found an excellent match for her literary style. This is a film without a “message” (and in my world that is a big plus) – it is subtle and questioning.

No need to say that Olivia Colman is great as the main character. The whole cast is superb but if I am to rank the performances, I would put Dakota Johnson and Peter Sarsgaard as my second favorites. Jessey Buckley as the young Leda is good but the two actresses are so different it is hard to believe the “evolution” of the young woman into the old one. They are like two different persons and may by that was a saught effect.

If you have seen the film, you already know it is about motherhood and womanhood. But it is also about class. There are two distinct groups of characters in the film – the primitives and the intellectuals. The primitives (the Greek Americans) are aggressive, patriarchal, threatening – their latent violence is suggested constantly. Motherhood is about “nature” and “submissiveness” in this milieu. The intellectuals are subtle, torn by conflicting desires, selfish, autonomous. Everything is hard in their world – including motherhood and love. And the children are a class of their own – they parade their “natural” unmitigated by education and culture inherent cruelty, aggression, and love. They are innocently cruel and constantly and aggressively demanding love and attention. Seemingly, the cliche of the joy and bliss of motherhood is completely shattered here. But is it? Leda’s parable looks pretty ironic at the end. She is portrayed as suffering for having missed something. She seems to have been punished for having left her children- the sense of regret prevails eventually. Leda’s sexual freedom and intellectual accomplishments – were they worth it? The answer is in Peter Sarsgaard character – this caricature of an intellectual, the unabashed academic narcissist who uses flattery to get sex! Was he worth it? Or the pseudo-intellectual puns passing for literary scholarship at today’s humanities conferences? What could be the price of feeling “accomplished” in this kind of field? Maybe melancholy – the kind of melancholy that can be crushing.

Gyllanhaal has achieved a level of complexity that can make Ana Karenina’s story look didactic.

Film: The Revenant

What a shame! At the BAFTA awards director Inarritu had the nerve to define the film as a “tender story” about a father-son love. Whom are you trying to fool Mr. Inarritu? The film lost so much money while in the making so that now the producers are ensuring some big awards for the film so that they can force-feed it to audiences throughout the world and try to recover some of this money. The award system is so rigged! Now we will have to watch the same circus at the Oscars…George Miller is ten-times better director than Inarritu and he does not even get nominated. What about “Trumbo” – no nomination for film at all, just for Cranston? The Revenant is such a boring film – no characters, no dialogue, simplistic and violent… Poor DeCaprio – he is being awarded for enduring hardships while shooting the film – because there is no real role worth mentioning there…The visuals are of course “inspired” or rather “copied” from the great Tarkovsky, Urusevsky, etc. Boycott this film, don’t bail it out.

Film: Trumbo, 2015, Directed by Jay Roach

Film about the black-lists in Hollywood and the story of the Hollywood ten whose ordeal started in 1947 and ended in the 60s. A must see! Great performance by Bryan Cranston! All the actors were actually very good except for Helen Mirren who thought she was playing in a comedy. Some very good moments in the script by John McNamara when he succeeds in avoiding melodrama and depicts with complexity the characters’ motivations — not necessarily heroic. Talent wins and the line between integrity and cowardice is fragile but clear. There are no heroes in times like these – but how does the atmosphere of fear become dominant, what are the mechanisms that bring about “times like these”?

Film: While We'are Young, Directed by Noah Baumbach (2014)

Another good movie by Noah Baumbach! It’s all about “the old” vs “the young” in art. In Baumbach’s story – it’s film making.
The young can pitch you anything and you will love them for that. You are old and uncertain and self-doubting and you can’t complete things. The young make things with ease. They record stuff and pass it on as “documentaries”…They are shameless, cool, and master the game of appearing authentic. They steal from anybody and everybody and make it their own. They can justify their lack of artistic integrity with irresistible charm. The young can use “fuck you” playfully but — fuck you “young” – for real…It’s all going to pass…Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame while it lasts.

Highly enjoyable – if you are in the “industry” or if you are “old”!

Film: Ex Machina, Directed by Alex Garland

Went to see the film because it was generating some buzz. It started out as a limited release and then it was suddenly showing in a lot more theaters. 

I watched it with patience that it did not deserve. As the film progressed, my patience started to transform into curiosity as to how this is going to work out and finally it turned into disappointment. First of all – a lot of ideas were thrown out and never developed (from semantics to automated neuropschylogical testing). A lot of name-dropping occurred as well — from Wittgenstein to Jackson Pollock — without actually deriving any meaning from that. Name-dropping was a fancy backdrop and did not create a CONTEXT for the action. Some of the issues discussed were so tired and tiresome: e.g. global loss of privacy , the internet as Big Brother, behavioral patterns as source of the new enslavement of the individual by the big technology corporations. The display of the ‘enslaved’, ‘closeted’ robots (all women), interchangeable, and disposable – was the lowest point of the film. This part belonged to “dungeon” movies aesthetics, if there is such a genre.
Isn’t it sad that the underlying message of the film eventually turned out to be that the robot “becomes” human when it learns to lie, back-stab, and be manipulative? This is the test for humanness? Please…If the movie sends a cynical message that does not mean that it is very intelligent or intellectual… The final shot was quite ridiculous – the robot’s (now human) dream to stand on a cross-section and observe what happens IS accomplished!? I thought the director would at least send her to manage The Big Software Corporation …

Oscar Isaac is unrecognizable in the role of Nathan and as good as ever. Hope he gets the role he deserves in the future.