Skip to main content

Posts

Runaway Bride!

Ever since she famously screamed in terror at the appearance of her apparent husband-to-be as her first act of consciousness, the Bride of Frankenstein has been a feminine icon of the horror genre. To some degree it was inevitable -she was one of the only female movie monsters of the classic era, and none that came after quite equaled her intensity of presence and her singular look, even with very little screen-time in the movie named for her. The Bride of Frankenstein does not appear in Mary Shelley’s novel, but that hasn’t stopped the character from being linked to Shelley -in the framing device of the 1935 movie, which posits the character was always intended to be part of the story and its moral theme; and in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! , which suggests even more overtly the same. Of course in one sense it is putting words in the mouth of Shelley, in another it is casting her as an avatar for Gyllenhaal herself and a kind of quasi-feminist statement more broadly. It is very artf...
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

The Criterion Channel Presents: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)

Very little happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days  -the movie that is. And what does happen is taken very mildly -the most significant developments to its plot take place off-screen, and the characters’ emotions even around harsh themes are subdued. And yet the film has a power to it, akin to something like Jeanne Dielman  -the great icon of minimalist cinema- because it is perfectly in tune with the sensitivity of its subject, especially in Romania in the 1980s. Cristian Mungiu was not the first filmmaker to apply this kind of quiet and discreet tone to a film about abortion in a time and place where that form of medical care was illegal. Another movie it has a lot in common with is Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake  from 2004. But Mungiu’s 2007 film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year, is undoubtedly more haunting -because it speaks not only to abortion, but the broader hostilities facing vulnerable young women in that time and place. It is 1987 in a small Romanian to...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Colourful, Moral Storybook of a Film

Arco might be the most Studio Ghibli movie that Studio Ghibli never made. Certainly, it’s among the more successful attempts to imitate that peculiar magic of Ghibli in a non-Japanese culture, in both the look and the general quaint spirit of the piece. But it is also a movie that Ghibli has never made; much as it fits their mold, it does not come off as any direct derivation. And in fact, a few of its choices do genuinely stand on their own, with a degree of maturity and severity distinct even from the poetic notes of Miyazaki’s best films, up to and including the bittersweet nature of the ending. The movie is French and directed by Ugo Bienvenu, though it comes to North America with an English dub courtesy of Natalie Portman, one of its producers. The dub is fine -very much like those latter Ghibli films- but it is sad to lose the likes of Swann Arlaud and Louis Garrel to Mark Ruffalo and America Fererra. The two children however seem to retain much of their original innocence with u...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ugliness and Archetype Can Only Go So Far

Everybody knows that the Disney versions of fairy tales -in most cases the most popular versions in the general consciousness- are sanitized heavily from their original forms. Stories like Cinderella , which has been around for several centuries, were intended as morality tales not family entertainments. Taken in that context, as well as in the context of history and from an alternate perspective, the stories can actually be quite horrifying. There actually isn’t a lot that Emilie Blichfeldt invented out of whole cloth for The Ugly Stepsister . The Norwegian body horror film that essentially just tells the Cinderella story from the point-of-view of one of the stepsisters of the titular character, changing the story little but amplifying its tonal extremes and adapting them in visceral ways, is one of the more revealing illustrations of how bizarre and deranged those fairy tales could really be. It also opines to critique the moral coding of such tales as they relate to conventional sta...
Post a Comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: Love Story (1970)

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” The line that is ubiquitous with the movie Love Story  is also perhaps the most mocked line in the romance movie genre. A line that sounds sweet and poetic -and certainly in context- but is meaningfully empty and kind of just flat-out false when applied to anything beyond a very narrow scope of subjects that comprise what we might call ‘love’. Even just two years later, Peter Bogdanovich had Ryan O’Neal (who delivers the line in its second usage in this film) respond to the quote with “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” in the film What’s Up, Doc? Bogdanovich and O’Neal had no qualms making fun of it then, because the movie’s power in spite of it was already assured. Love Story  was the first monster hit of the 1970s. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1970 and one of the highest-grossing movies of all time up to that point (it is still in the top fifty adjusted for inflation). It is said to have revived the Hollywood mel...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kokuho is a Stunning, Insightful Kabuki Epic

My favourite movie to fixate (at least in some regard) on the Japanese art of kabuki theatre is Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds , about a kabuki troupe in a seaside village. Kabuki is by its nature a very broad art form, full of zealous expressions of emotion and highly melodramatic storytelling, each epitomized in its distinct style of make-up and dance. It is a compelling thing to watch, but so is by contrast the lives of its performers and their relationship to the art -as Floating Weeds  does, following a veteran performer whose career has estranged him from his son. This character was played by Nakamura Ganjiro II, a dedicated kabuki performer himself from a family famous for it. And he appears to be represented at least symbolically in the film Kokuho , likewise about the dramatic personal life of a kabuki actor, in which the trainer and consultant was Ganjiro's own grandson and namesake. Directed by Lee Sang-il and currently the highest-grossing live-action film in Japan, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eating the Rich for the Wrong Reasons: How to Make a Killing

Some movies meet their moment effectively. John Patton Ford’s How to Make a Killing  is not one of them. Maybe if the 2020s were a little more like the 1930s its subject matter on the entitled pursuit of immense wealth would be worthy escapism for a broadly economically disadvantaged audience. Maybe it would in any case and it’s just this movie that has a hard time selling it authentically. It could be the attitude of the script or of Glen Powell’s performance, but there is something a little uncomfortably arrogant to this movie that renders its supposed virtues disingenuous. This in spite of some real energy there is to it. How to Make a Killing  is a modern remake of the classic British Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets , in which an underdog distant heir to a vast fortune systematically kills off the relatives ahead of him in the line of inheritance. A key difference though is that the earlier film is notable for having all of the eccentric relatives played by a s...
Post a Comment
Read more