It's a magical world

I really enjoyed this movie, and I recommend it to fans of Mission: Impossible, action movies, and practical filmmaking. But I'm also convinced it's lying to me. 

( The International Monetary Fund?! )

Memoria (2021). Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 

I went to see this weird movie last weekend; it will never be released on streaming or home release, but will simply keep circling the globe in theaters as it can. It stars Tilda Swinton as a British expat (?) in Colombia who starts hearing a weird noise, and starts taking steps to figure out what it is. 

I can already tell that words are going to fail to convey the experience of watching this movie. Thankfully the noise isn't too creepy--I am very much a horror wimp, but after the first time you hear it, you start expecting it. Basically nothing is ever fully explained, from the setting to the denouement; it took a while to work out from context that the setting even is Colombia. (Swinton's character speaks in mediocre Spanish for much of the film, but she gets the South American accent correct.) At some point I realized that some of the film's disjointedness may in fact be pointing to the fact that she's remembering the future--or the past. Weird things and weird coincidences happen; is it the weirdness of life or something else? Because the film is about hearing, we're primed to listen closely to everything in a way that I don't always consciously do while watching films, and we're rewarded with a striking performance from a live pickup band, as well as a few other extended auditory delights, in a way that most movies would never do.

I haven't been to Colombia, but I've been to Argentina and Peru, and the way the director, who is Thai, shoots the hulking postmodern edifices of Bogota and Medellin really brought Lima in particular back to me, and it makes for a beautiful contrast with the scenes at the end of the film, which takes place in a town in the jungle. 

( Rot13 text here so I don't forget what I thought about the ending )

Anyway, this movie was a really interesting experience, as a movie, and I think if you go in with an open mind you'll appreciate it. If you have the chance to see Memoria in your city, I'd recommend it; I wouldn't mind seeing it again.

No two ways about it: I hated this movie. And I struggle to find a way to describe it that isn't "evil." 

I loved Kimi no na wa and I have really liked all of Shinkai Makoto's previous films. ( Shinkai Makoto embraces climate fatalism )

I rewatched All the President's Men (1976, dir. Alan J. Pakula) last night for probably the first time since I first saw it in 1998 or thereabouts, when I was in seventh grade. I immediately went out and read the book, which tells you a lot about the kind of kid I was. Come to think of it, it may well have been 1997, the year of the impeachment. In any case, I haven't watched the movie in this millennium, and doing it now is eerie.

Twenty years on, what's striking to me about the movie is just how little of the Watergate scandal it depicts--it spans the year and change in which Mark Felt, Bob Woodward's "garage freak," guided Woodward and Bernstein's investigation, which mostly consisted of wearing down shoe leather trying to find sources who would go on the record (they wouldn't) and, failing that, finding ways to corroborate what people would tell them anonymously about what they knew. It ends just after they print (correctly, but without all their supporting evidence properly verified) that H.R. Haldeman was the fifth man controlling the CREP slush fund which bankrolled all the dirty work that Nixon wanted done. We learn what happened to all the major players in the scandal via typewriter at the end; most of the higher-ups are only voices on the phone in the movie, and Nixon himself appears only in file footage playing on the television at strategic points. It works, though. 

We're living in Stupid Watergate now, of course; the broad lineaments of what went down have been known for more than a year at this point, and (crucially) it only remains for the facts to be established in courts of law and (hopefully) for the perpetrators to face justice, but whereas Woodward and Bernstein can barely grasp the ramifications of what they're reporting, even when their investigation has identified the White House Chief of Staff as being guilty of criminal conspiracy, there's only parlor game questions left about what our sitting president does and doesn't know. In a weird way I found myself envying them. 

Given the recent revelations about Dustin Hoffman's harassment of women on set, his turn as Bernstein is even more awkward to watch than it was before--there are more than a few scenes where he, with his more free-wheeling reporting style, is trying to pressure female witnesses into telling him what they know and/or go on the record about it, and it's impossible now to watch those scenes and not wonder how much the women were really acting acutely uncomfortable, as opposed to just being acutely uncomfortable. I found myself thinking of Spotlight, predictably, because it's the other great newspaper movie and because it shares many of the same concerns, and one which pays homage to this one but also plays off the expectations that this one generates. Towards the end, I also realized that a key scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is also a direct tip of the hat to one of the final scenes in this movie, which makes what Winter Soldier tries and fails to do even clearer. Spotlight is about complicity; All the President's Men is about conspiracy, and how much work it takes to pull at the few loose threads the conspirators left dangling. Both, ultimately, reinforce that there's no substitute in journalism for persistence.

Atomic Blonde (2017), dir. David Leitch
I fully support Charlize Theron's decision to transform into an action star as her mid-career reinvention. Set in Berlin during the literal last days before the fall of the Wall, Theron plays a British spy tasked with flying in to recover "the list" (spy movies need to stop using this MacGuffin, and someday they will, but not today) of covert agents and figure out which agent in Berlin has betrayed their country. Smart money is on James McAvoy, playing the MI6 Berlin station chief in full-on dirty mode, but much more charmingly than in Filth. I was in Berlin last October, which leant a vertiginous quality to the whole affair; much of the movie is quite accurate about getting between the two cities, etc, and it feels like Berlin still does, a little, even now. Everyone is excellent and the fight scenes, eschewing the Bond films' PG-13 rating for a well-earned R, are realistic and tense. The soundtrack is great too, though if anything, it was edging slightly close to being too on the nose at times; this was saved mostly by the many German covers of 80s standards. There is also canon queerness, for an even better bonus, and I am definitely going to watch it again. Has anyone read the graphic novel it's based on?

The Dark Tower (2017), dir. Nikolaj Arcel
My brother and I went to see this because Idris Elba and…it's not good. I don't think it was quite as bad as it was made out to be, but it's certainly the case that less than 12 hours after I walked out of the theater the only thing that stuck with me was Matthew McConnaughey saying "magics" with absolutely zero conviction. The posters were more epic than the actual film, alas. I still maintain that they should have made Jake a girl (heresy, I know), but the film had bigger problems. Stephen King apparently signed off on it, though, which suggests an inherent problem in his standards for adaptations of his books.

Only Yesterday (1991), dir. Takahata Isao
I caught this in the second-run theater in Oakland that has beer, and I was so glad I did. It's one of only two Ghibli movies I hadn't seen (we don't talk about Gedo Senki), and it was so, so good and so Ghibli. 27-year-old Taeko takes a vacation from her office job to work on a farm in Yamagata, and maybe change her life. This release, for the 25th anniversary, was one of the ones that Disney decided to spend money on, so Taeko was voiced by Daisy Ridley, who was very, very good, and the film is still a delight, even as Japan in 1991 seems like a very bizarre and distant country from the perspective of 2016: all the sleeper trains are gone, all the train displays in Tokyo are digital, the plight of farming communities is in some ways better and in some ways worse. But Taeko's experiences and her thoughts on them, and the fact that they're presented as worthy of note and consideration, are timeless.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), dir. Miyazaki Hayao
One of my favorite Ghiblis, and the only one I could get tickets to in the Saturday matinee film series downtown. I still love this movie, and what it says about art and craft and work and life and finding yourself by getting outside your comfort zone, and the possibility of flight. Ah, Kiki. ♥

I stopped writing up all the movies I'd seen for a while, with the result that I cannot remember all the movies I've seen this year. I have ticket stubs for Creed (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Love and Friendship (2016), and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) on my desk. Two of those movies are perfect and amazing; the other two are not. Oh, and I also saw X-Men: Apocalypse (2016).

Zootopia, dir. Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush
Disney has been making better Pixar movies than Pixar for about the past five years, and while this one isn't quite as amazing as Wreck-It Ralph or Big Hero 6, it more than gets the job done. It's also a Disney movie that addresses race in a not incredibly lead-footed way, although the usual problem with animation and comic specieism is not something the movie gets around: namely, once you think deeply about any aspect of the allegory, it all falls apart in spectacular fashion. (For just one example, white people here are represented as prey species…who are also the victims of the predator species, i.e. black people. Neat trick! Nor is the answer to police prejudice and violence that black people, I mean, predators, join the police force.) But the story is solid, and the chemistry between the two leads is off the charts, and the fact that the protagonist has to confront prejudice not just in other characters but also in herself is a great touch. Great animation, and great integration of Shakira and her music into the movie as well, rather than just a gratuitous add-on.

Finding Dory, dir. Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane
It's been a while since Pixar has made a movie as solid as this one; it's at least as good as Brave (2012), and I suspect will come to be evaluated in similar terms. The studio continues to ignore the truth about fish biology, which is probably good; also note that the movie taking place only a year after Finding Nemo means they can ignore the issue of coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. In many ways, Pixar here is playing to its strengths--the action arises organically from the characters themselves, and there is at least one zany breakout character (in this case, Hank the octopus; last time it was Dory herself) who steals the show, ably supported by a memorable secondary cast, notably Idris Elba and his pinniped companion. I could have done with more of the sea turtles, ngl, but the ongoing Sigourney Weaver joke was pretty great, as was the evocation of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Dory herself--only the second female protagonist of a Pixar movie after Merida--is great, as is the movie's gentle insistence that her being neuroatypical is not a problem, just the reason that she makes her way through the world by slightly different means. The animation isn't as good as it could be--the animation in the short "Piper," which is Pixar's best in years, is off the charts in terms of photorealism--and I hope that was to match Finding Nemo, which after all is 12 years old at this point. Still, I'm looking forward to what they do next.

Thinking about it, there's a lot of ways in which these are actually the same movie, not least of which that I highly recommend both of them.

Spotlight (dir. Tom McCarthy) covers approximately six months from the summer of 2001 to 6 January 2002, when The Boston Globe's Spotlight investigative team published the first of its more than 600 stories on the Roman Catholic Church's systematic cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests. The Globe is Boston's paper, and Boston is full of Catholics, just as the Spotlight team is full of lapsed Catholics of various stripes (Sasha Pfeiffer, played by Rachel McAdams, seems to have gone the "silently de facto agnostic/atheist" route; Mark Ruffalo is the flamboyantly angry disillusioned one; Brian Darcy James' character goes to his wife's Presbyterian church; Michael Keaton, playing the Spotlight editor, rubs elbows with half the city's Catholic movers and shakers but is, I'd bet, a Christmas-and-Easter-only kind of guy); it takes the arrival of the paper's new editor, an unmarried Jew from Miami who doesn't like baseball and who is masterfully underplayed by Liev Schreiber, to point the paper and the team towards investigating an ongoing criminal conspiracy that turns out to have been taking place under everyone's noses. "Everyone knew something was going on but us," Keaton says to McAdams in the middle of the movie, but even that turns out not to be true; the eventual revelation of who was responsible for killing an investigation into the tip-offs the Globe was given about the story in 1993 at the end of the film completely undercuts the easy narrative about good guys and bad guys that we as viewers want to slot the film into (and which the film doesn't try to prevent us from faking ourselves into), and is what make the film totally different from All the President's Men (1976) even as this is clearly the best newspaper movie since All the President's Men. Spotlight shines its strongest light on how institutions operate, how complicity is ginned up and sustained between people and those institutions--but also how people can shed that complicity and choose not just to speak up, but to listen to people who already are speaking up. One of the subplots involves the prickly relationship between Ruffalo and Stanley Tucci, playing the Armenian lawyer (another outsider) representing 84 abuse victims and counting; Ruffalo wins no bullshit points with Tucci's character by stating flat-out what everybody knows but doesn't talk about, namely that the Globe is the only game in town when it comes to local media with any appreciable power; Tucci's character gets his own back later by tipping Ruffalo off to de facto public records fraud that demonstrates clearly the Church's power, and how it operates. An ongoing plot thread that provides a lot of the overt drama is the need to take every action possible to keep the paper's competitors from scooping the story; that's just the way it is, because it's also a business.The Spotlight team are also bound by their own confidentiality policies, and that makes the ongoing stress of the revelations they uncover even harder to deal with; they can't talk about what they're finding with anyone, not even about why D'Arcy James' character hangs up a sign on his fridge telling his kids not to go near a certain house in their neighborhood that he knows but can't say is a "treatment center" for pedophile priests, or when McAdams' character can't tell her grandmother why she can't bear to go with her to church anymore. By the end of the movie I was severely regretting my own family's decision to have the parish priest say a few words at my mother's memorial service at the funeral home in 2009; even that degree of complicity, when we knew what we knew, feels too much now. It really is an excellent film.

The Big Short (dir. Adam McKay) is an exhilarating, hilarious, depressing movie about the crew of outsiders, renegades, and paranoiacs who--through a combination of brilliance, luck, due diligence, and gumption--managed to figure out that the world economy was primed to collapse and who, by virtue of that knowledge, engineered the creation and purchase of a series of financial instruments that made them all fantastically rich when the music stopped and the bottom fell out of the U.S. housing market in 2008. On paper this movie shouldn't work, but it totally does--the script is fantastic, the performances are stellar, the story is too unbelievable to be anything but true, and McKay's willingness to break the fourth wall whenever necessary is somehow an essential element. Christian Bale, playing an M.D. turned hedge fund manager with a glass eye who listens to death metal and gets the big Wall Street banks first to invent credit default swaps and then to sell him bundles of them, once again is a master-class in physical acting; I want to see the film again just so I can work out how exactly he managed to make himself be so goddamn awkward all. the. time. Ryan Gosling is magnetic as the narrator, scumbag i-banker Jared Vannett, who plays a Virgil, or perhaps Mephistopheles, to the Morgan Stanley-owned hedge fund crew led by Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a certified cynic and crank who becomes the vessel for the audience's sympathy largely by default--"saints don't live on Park Avenue," his wife tells him at one point, and there sure as fuck aren't any saints in this movie, a point driven home by the reaction of the two callow outside small-time fund managers mentored by ex-banker and paranoiac Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), who works his connections to make his two young neighbors players and then very rich men for reasons of his own but draws the line at their celebratory dance after they short the AA-prime CDOs, because when those instruments fail real, ordinary people are going to lose their homes, jobs, retirement funds, pensions, savings. They did. We did. The movie doesn't forget them; and the tonal shift from the first half (high comedy) to the second (high tragedy) works not so much because of what's going on inside the movie as what's going on outside it; McKay's breaking the fourth wall to explain various points of finance, or to confirm or deny the veracity of parts of the movie's narrative, as well as the visual rehashing of a lot of pop culture from the years in question, helps broker the transition. The real fraud and outrage kicks in around the 2/3 mark, when our anti-heroes all converge on an investment forum in Las Vegas and realize just how fucked the system and the global economy really are, with the active complacency or outright collaboration of the S.E.C. and the ratings agencies paving the way straight to hell. Only Vannett believed in the full extent of the damage before they went to Vegas; the movie's most telling moment is his comment to the Baum team after the ratings agencies have refused to downgrade the CDOs despite the fact that subprime mortgage failures are steadily accelerating: "And you pass yourselves off as cynical people. Yet you still have some underlying faith in the system." The system should have meant that this crew of weirdos weren't alone on the other side of these bets--but the brakes had well and truly come off whatever internal or external regulatory mechanisms that previously existed in the banking world well before this (the movie in fact starts in the 1970s with the invention of mortgage-backed securities. har har. har). So yeah, Vannett is right; I do definitely judge him, but all the big players were behaving so egregiously that it's nonetheless very satisfying to see someone make them bleed and make money off this meltdown--even if again the small players of Wall Street, the Lehman and Bear Stearns employees, were the ones who ultimately suffered the most out of it. The worst part is, the end of the movie leaves no real doubt that by now the system is primed for the exact same thing to eventually happen again--and maybe sooner rather than later.

I wanted to see James Bond be stylish and kill people, and this movie…well, okay. The best thing was the casting, the worst thing was the Sam Smith title sequence (sorry not sorry, Sam Smith), and in between was everything else.

( James Bond will return )

Also, on a cross cultural moviegoing experience note, there was a 10-minute intermission an hour and twenty minutes into the movie. Apparently this is normal in Belgium? Okay then. And yes, no matinee pricing.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015)
I fucking loved this movie. I've seen it twice in eight days, is how much I love this movie. (For those keeping score, the only movies I've seen twice in theaters this year are MI:RN and MM:FR.) I've always had a weakness for the Mission Impossible films, but they've gotten a lot better since they were revived with Ghost Protocol, and right from the very beginning, this movie is fun. It's telling a serious story, but there's plenty of banter and humor, much of it done in a dry way that is perceptible but not showy--the Japanese audiences I've seen it with have laughed at most of the right points, which is actually a really impressive achievement in my Japanese movie-going experience. The script moves along briskly, but there are plenty of character moments, mostly through the cast's excellent use of facial expressions. They are all great.

I read longwhitecoats' excellent review of the movie before I saw it, and I don't really have anything to add to the conclusion that FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC. I was struck both times I saw it, though, of how consciously the movie is playing against the recent Craig Bond movies, most obviously Skyfall but also more than a little against Quantum of Solace as well--the sequence at the performance of Tosca in QoS is matched and opposed by the sequence at Turandot in this movie, and the visual trope at the end of MIRN is an echo of and a rejoinder to the deployment of that trope, at a different place in the narrative, in Skyfall. I also couldn't help but read the running bit about Faust's shoes as a response to Jurassic World, just as longwhitecoats read the thing with the motorcycles (no spoilers) as a response to MMFR. Those last two are speculative due to movie timing, but I'm quite sure that the Bond parallels, and the callouts to the first MI movie, which Alec Baldwin references explicitly in his first scene, were deliberate and conscious. (Speaking of music, I'd have to rewatch MIGP to confirm this, but the score in this movie also seemed a bit brassier than normal, a la the Bond movies.) The action is also shot in a much more comprehensible way that the micro-cutting of Quantum of Solace and the later Bourne movies, which was nice, and there are some really nice car and motorcycle chase shots. And it's so fun. It's GREAT.

The Losers (2010)
I was sitting in my room in Kyoto and realized I didn't have my copy of Ghost Protocol with me, but I did have this movie, so I watched it and I was thoroughly charmed. This is also a fun action movie, and as somebody else on the internet said, it was actually a better A-Team remake than the A-Team remake, and it's a shame that it didn't reach a wider audience. The characters in here are also great, and the action is also done in a very believable way--hits have real consequences, as do things like being shot in both legs--and it's just really fun all around.The casting is also remarkably inclusive (far more so than MIRN, it must be said), and recessional's old post on the movie lays out what makes it work so well. In the end both movies are about trust and teamwork, and that is something that I really enjoy.