Contains spoilers for pretty much every plot point

There is a lot here that reminds me of Donna Tartt’s interests. Young rich people (and their rich parents), who are either artists or vaguely “work for the Foreign Office,” codependency, hard drugs, classical music, social mores, True Art vs. Fake Art, terrorism as back-drop, miserable conversations in restaurants, OD’ing in an art gallery bathroom, overcoats—all rendered through a film grainy gauze of memory and emotions. But based on the universally poor reception of John Crowley’s The Goldfinch versus yes a mixed general response to The Souvenir, but one where I’ve seen it land in top ten lists of at least six film critics off the top of my head, Joanna Hogg seems to have more successfully conveyed these themes as worthwhile subjects, or at least more artistically likable.

Perhaps it helps that in Hogg’s The Souvenir we are actually in London, instead of Tartt’s merely spiritually anglophilic settings. What I suspect has even more of an impact though is that Hogg has been perfectly clear that this story is indeed about herself, the main character a young film student with even her same initials. It actually took us a little while to figure out when this takes place because they’re all posh or artsy people so you can’t reliably go off their clothes and decor, but eventually we determined it was the 1980s, when Hogg was also in film school. Later I read that the flat was a replica of the one she lived in at the time, and the city views outside the windows are 35mm projections of photographs she took of London during that period. I love that, are you kidding!

I’m going to finally watch Archipelago and see if this holds, but I suspect that a big part of why I love Joanna Hogg is that half of the things she does blindside me, and the other half are exactly what I would have done, and both are a thrill. Probably my best immediate read of what Joanna Hogg was writing was quite early on, after we’d seen the track marks on Anthony’s arm, and I said to Emily, “Oh no, he’s going to get some disease and pass it to her,” and then later—! I was also certain Anthony was dead in the scene where Julie and her mom decide to go to bed before he has come home. It had become unfortunately clear Julie was never going to leave her bad first love on her own, so if we don’t want them together at the end (and we don’t, because only by spreading her wings without him can she can become A Full Artist), he was going to have to take this on himself and just leave this whole mortal coil. No taking him back now! Also: more trauma 4 for the Art.

Tilda Swinton, by the way, is so good in this. Her Hermes scarf, her lipstick. When she’s standing there without any of those things on and the belt on her dress is lopsided, and if you hadn’t already heard the telephone ringing while Julie’s note on the door flapped in the wind, you’d know just from her appearance what has happened. And how all she says in answer to Julie’s look is simply: “The worst.” Incredible.

I love this movie because of stuff like that. I love a stylish English mood picture where no one ever raises their voice and yet everything they say is outrageous, until it’s just me that’s screaming, quietly into my hands. I love stunt casting, here with Tilda playing the mother of her own daughter, the also very good Honor Swinton Byrne, with something of that Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha thing, all bright-eyed, shuffle-footed artistic earnestness and bad young-hearted decisions. I loved those big shelves around the window in that apartment. I loved Anthony’s floor length coat he wears indoors like a robe, with all the gold buttons running down—“Buttons” I called the coat, affectionately. Anthony himself though, the worst! A deliciously insufferable performance from this odd man beamed in from 1957.

None of the casting prepared me though for sudden Richard Ayoade. His familiar face strangely disorienting without his glasses, his Artíste dickery, his hilarious delivery of “…tesselate”—a gem in this necklace. Also very into that mystifying scene where Julie in her pale pink silk pajamas follows a trail of paper arrows on the floor of their flat to the window, and as she peers out of it the block is rocked by an IRA bomb. That Anthony listens to booming dark stressful classical music and opera, and Julie and her mom listen to charmingly elegant frayed old Glenn Miller tracks. How there are two separate scenes where baby director Julie walks back onto set from where she was taking a phone call out in the hall, and then some PA boy has to trot over to close the door behind her. And then in the very last scene when that huge sliding door of the soundstage rolls open for her (pity that PA), and we see the landscape beyond it, and it’s the landscape that’s been serving as a backdrop to the poetry interludes(!)

I did not personally like any of the characters in this movie, but that doesn’t matter: I liked watching them. They were aggravating, but they lived, and we don’t always live well in our lives. This movie is long, it meanders, but that creates plenty enough time and space to have moments where you feel your feelings shift. It is one of those slices of life that does feel like living, with the same gradual sea changes and sick undertows and murky things under the surface that may only glancingly break the water.

Mostly though it is two slow hours of lovely static shots of buttoned up British people you are yelling at to just break uppp. I had a delightful time.

★★★★★

I feel like I’m supposed to start my thoughts on Greta Gerwig’s Little Women by assuring you that I read the book twice as a kid, which will then bolster the credibility of my opinion, whether positive or negative. But in fact, I am pretty neutral on Louisa May Alcott. Little Women was probably the first Adult Book I read when I was in elementary school, something big and old with many chapters, and I reread it a few years later to see if I got more of it as a 12-year-old than I did as an 8-year-old. I did! But overall, it didn’t make that much of an impression on me. Instead, little me was obsessed with like, Jack London. For our 5th-grade burlap embroidery project, I replicated the cover of our school library’s copy of White Fang. 

Are there any similarities between White Fang and Little Women (2019), you may be asking yourself, in growing confusion? There is for me! Snow. Snow figures heavily in my estimation of a work’s quality. There is such good snow in Little Women! It is not winter the whole time, but it feels like winter the whole time. It’s cozy, it’s so freaking cozy. Everyone is always wearing these cheerful woolen socks and nice fabrics and amazing jackets, and there is warm lighting and bustling, that particular cozy wintertime kind of familiar, familial movement. I found it so nice to just look at and listen to this movie, to the music of the girls’ voices weaving with Alexandre Desplat’s score. Not that the actual styles necessarily resemble each other, but the aesthetics of this movie activated the same pleasure centers in my brain that are delighted by Wes Anderson movies. Both are heightened appearances—here, the costume & production design clearly began in the 1860s, but veered off to land in this faintly fantasy realm, shaped by a modern sensibility of Character and Prettiness. I was entirely down with it. I liked how you could always tell the March sisters in a crowd by their anachronistic loose hair, how it marked them visually as different, a little out-of-time. I adored Jo wearing what looked like men’s shirts under her waistcoats, and Laurie more soft, feminine blouses under his. I loved that perfect attic.

Is this movie possibly too lovely and nice? I mean it depends on what kind of experience you want out of a film, I’d say. But as the adage goes, easy reading is damn hard writing. Making a movie this charming is just as difficult a feat as making a movie that’s stressful. They both require a strong and well-expressed directorial vision, and performances in sync with it. Speaking of which, Gerwig has a nearly perfect cast of lovables here. Timothée Chalamet as this innately dissolute & floppy sentimental rich boy is just top quality use of Chalamet. Saoirse Ronan and Laura Dern are, as ever, masterclasses, and good mother-daughter casting to boot. But the most inspired casting in this movie has got to be pairing Meryl Streep with Florence Pugh. Florence Pugh in this…I’ve loved her since Lady Macbeth, and my god, the woman’s got screen presence. Her Amy is hilarious, human, infuriating and winning. She doesn’t fully eclipse her costars, but she shines very bright.

Now, politically, this movie has gotten positioned in the cultural discourse as the only chance for female stories to be taken seriously in 2019’s film crop. And that’s a shame just on the face of it, that each year we just get the one basket for all our eggs, and also because I feel this particular movie was too light & lovely to quite bear that weight. Of course it is feminist, by definition: it is concerned with depicting women as full human beings, quite literally in the script at several moments. It’s just not the style of cinematic feminism that makes me feel excited about the directions women-led filmmaking might go in, the way this year’s Hustlers or The Farewell did, or even Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird two years ago. It’s nice, watching a period piece that states simply, by its existence and dialogue, that women are interesting—listen I had a wonderful time watching Colette—and I think more of these in the world is a good thing, far better than none of them. I just think Little Women is suffering from undue expectations that were forced on it by the nature of the film (& criticism) industry right now. Not everything has to be that deep or revolutionary, and it can do a disservice to good works to try to package them that way.

Anyway, the book changes! [Those who don’t want to know anything that’s different yet, look away now!] Apparently young me only registered that Friedrich Bhaer was European and somewhat older than the rest of the characters, and as Louis Garrel is French and looks older than Timothée Chalamet (I mean who doesn’t), I had not seen his casting as a shift. Turns out, Friedrich was decidedly not an attractive figure in the novel, and Garrel is, and listen, I take no issue with it. Because, and this is getting to another meaningful change, if you’re going to do an elegant choose-your-own-interpretive-adventure kind of ending (which I think is the kindest choice for an adaptation of beloved book), then you might as well let the ending where Jo still marries the professor be an ending where the professor is a certified dish. Or alternatively, Jo gets to be genderqueer ace representation, which also rules.

★★★

Spoilers immediately!

When that heavy abruptly shot Howie in the head the whole theater gasped, and I felt this huge wash of relief. “Was that actually the happy ending?” one of my friends asked as we walked away from the theater, and “oh it absolutely was,” I responded. Howie dies at probably the highest he’s ever felt, abuzz with victory and possibility—and before he can proceed to fuck this up too, as he has fucked up everything this whole movie and seemingly his whole life. It’s actually the nicest thing the movie can do for him, and the nicest thing it can do for us, who can finally, finally breathe, now that Howie will at last be quiet for one goddamn blessed minute. Is that dark? Sure. So is Uncut Gems.

Mostly it is cacophonous. When I imagine the script I picture it criss-crossed with text like those old 19th-century letters where they were trying to save paper, all the lines just running over each other and at cross purposes. I’d say the characters’ volume keeps going up and up as they fight for verbal dominance, but honestly I think Adam Sandler just yells ceaselessly for the entire runtime. Perhaps not in a few of his scenes with Idina Menzel, probably because he knows he’ll never win that way with her.

Incidentally, Great Actor Adam Sandler is back, but Idina Menzel is TERRIFIC in this. She is distinct and sharp and so, so funny. I’m a little obsessed with it actually, how this movie let both of its female leads be, it could be argued, the funniest characters in this black comedy. It would have been so easy, traditional, for Menzel and Julia Fox to simply be the combative no-fun wife and the emotional bimbo mistress, each a different kind of albatross that the male lead is supposed to shake off. But Howie’s soon-to-be-ex wife Dinah is a highlight every time she’s on screen, and Julia (yes same name) is actually the only one who gets character development and an arc. In a welcome surprise, Julia absolutely OWNS the driving final act, starting with her hilariously crying along with Howie and showing him her new tattoo, up until she’s slipping off that very tan rich man and into a limo, with her two big bags of cash. I hope to god that her and Dinah just split the money—Howie’s survivors.

So Uncut Gems actually treated its mistreated women pretty well, treated them as real characters, which I appreciate. It was also entirely unafraid to dive into issues of race and economics, which I appreciated too. And they hired basketball star Kevin Garnett to play a fictionalized version of himself, for a far larger role than a simple cameo. He was a full-on supporting character, and he nailed it! He was out there really acting, and doing a totally good job! Watching someone love something is one of the best ways to make us love that character—if you can pull it off, and that’s the if. But Kevin Garnett’s weird love for that hunk of opal was palpable, and now I love him.

Anyway, this is a movie that is deliberately exhausting and unpleasant and chaotic and harsh, but as mentioned, with a happy ending. That the happy ending is the main character getting shot in his jewelry store feels rather peak Safdies, but here we are (New York City).

★★★

Peterloo is very like one of those particularly good lectures that people who aren’t even in your history class make a point of dropping in to hear. It is composed almost exclusively of long speeches, bracketed by more Socratic style conversations. Mike Leigh lays out this world of 1819 England carefully, in thorough detail, mostly through words, with the occasional visual aid—a set composed like a painting—displayed behind. You know how the class will end: it ends with the Peterloo Massacre, when law enforcement officers on horseback ran into a crowd of peaceful working class protesters at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, swords drawn. As you near that end, because you’re nearing that end, you find yourself gripped. A sword is poised over the entire lecture hall, as Professor Leigh gets closer, and closer. And when he gets there, with a shock, he suddenly switches mediums. It’s still film, in the movie, but the scene of the massacre lands like a lecturer pausing, and beginning to play an old song, unaccompanied and powerful. No more talk, just a kind of harrowing music, in the screaming of people and horses.

There were two moments where I said something aloud while watching Peterloo. One was about halfway through, when I announced “Break time!” This movie is two and a half hours long, and it feels it. But if you stream it (on Amazon Prime in the U.S., who bought this class warfare movie for distribution, bizarrely), there is a scene where three men on fiddles play a little tune by a stream, overheard by two women who are walking through the grass and stop to listen appreciatively. This little interlude occurs about an hour and fifteen in, and is the perfect signal for you to take a breather.

The second time I said something was to announce in quiet, mountingly desperate surprise: “I feel like I’m going to go out of my mind.” This was in the latter half, as the protest drew near. The first half of Peterloo is slow and boring, in the ways people who do not enjoy the early Star Trek series find those shows slow and boring, wondering how long these moving but yes somewhat broad characters are going to be standing around discussing matters of justice within a faintly alien social system. The content does not change in the second half, not until the final fifteen minutes, but the tension and doom began to build hot in my blood.

Peterloo can seem like a very staid sort of movie, a straight costume piece about a particular period of history, rigorously un-romanticized. But my god this movie can get you really worked up. At one point, watching these early 19th-century English working people speak so urgently about not being represented in their country’s government, I was suddenly swept anew with frustration over my own country’s gerrymandering, the electoral college, the fucking senate system, and I got so mad for a second I couldn’t see straight. It’s been 200 years since 1819! 200 years and we STILL don’t have a true representational democracy! We are still held in the grip of greedy landowners, who really believe they’re doing their employees a favor by paying them with the money they’ve produced through their labor! And we still have militarized police violently putting down those who try to do anything about it. Fuck.

Peterloo brings a new meaning to the term slow burn. ‘Slowly incendiary’, maybe. This is great filmmaking. This is that history lecture you don’t want to miss.

★★★★

I got word Saturday night from the good people of Twitter that in a move seemingly without precedent in film history, Universal would be sending out an updated “patch” to all the theaters showing Cats, with corrections to the digital effects that had only been quote-unquote finished (not finished) just a day before the movie premiered. Hurry, Twitter urged. My little sister and I promptly bought tickets for a matinee of unpatched Cats at our hometown mall the next day.

There is a picture going around of a shot of Judi Dench with her very human hand, complete with wedding ring, upon her furry breast. We saw that. We saw…oh, the things we saw. But I need to impress upon you that ALL the hands are primarily human, deliberately, as just one of the endless, hallucinatory string of unworldly choices made by this movie. For the nearly two hours I was watching this, I felt like my brain had returned to an infant state, overcome with fear and confusion and, yes, a kind of delight, at beholding so many new and terrible things. Things that my eyes had no frame of reference for. Surreal, exuberant, unnerving things. Sensual things. Images that arrest you in a mix of horror and fascination, something approaching, perhaps, the true meaning of the sublime. I think I emerged with a new wrinkle on my forehead from a sustained frown of bewildered awe. I am grateful I didn’t get a crick in my neck from how often my sister and I swiveled to stare at each other, our hands weakly—forgive me—pawing at each other’s sleeve, looking for ballast in this sea of frolicking, singing human-cat hybrids in which we were adrift, after the little family at the front—our only fellow audience members—at last fled about two-thirds through, leaving us all alone together upon the shores of this brave new world.

Cats is a shockingly shoddily made $95 million fantasia of the most challenging images and concepts you will be presented with in a mainstream movie this year. The editing is appallingly paced, the acting amateur, the jokes leadenly unfunny, the sets a tacky play-land of mystifying proportions, the cinematography not optimized for choreography and the talented dancers so CGI’ed to pieces that it just looks fake anyway. Even the sound mix of this, a musical, is no good! A unifying philosophy for the project, any unifying philosophy, is disturbingly absent. It nags at you. There is no rhyme or reason to which behaviors will be conveyed as cat-like and which human-like, which body parts, which vocalizations. The scale of the cats in relation to the props swells between terrier and hamster. Some cats wear clothes, some do not, and the clothes are their size except for the buttons, which are for some reason massive. Several of the cats wear fur over their fur and if you cannot wrap your head around that, hang on for when I tell you that at one point Rebel Wilson unzips her furred skin to reveal a second, identical furred skin underneath, and that skin is wearing clothes. That same scene includes singing mice with the faces of children.

It is like a fever dream, like an absurdist joke set to Andrew Lloyd Webber. There is a scene where we come up on Sir Ian McKellen lapping milk out of a bowl and all my nerves tried to leave my body. Actually Ian McKellen is turning in far and away the best performance in this, as he is cat-like in a way no one else is even attempting, and would make my fur stand on end if I had it. Honestly, I think I wish they had more. Idris Elba’s sleek brown seal body is haunting. Actors with delicately furred faces and long whiskers over their pink human mouths nuzzle the tawny ruff below the largely unaltered face of Dame Judi Dench, uncanny as a sphinx. Jennifer Hudson’s soft pointed ears flatten back in meek worry as the other cats hiss at her, and actually you know what this effect was pretty good.

Cats is a crime. But it is a crime of passion. This marvelous, monstrous mess is utterly sincere from nose to tail. And listen, listen—I can understand why one could have felt enough Jellicle love in their weird theatre kid heart to make this. I can! Because it’s a day later, and I’m still singing half of these loopy songs. Not so much the first few, but when Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat appeared in his little suspenders and started tap dancing, my sister and I both sat up and brightly muttered “oh, hell yeah.” ‘Magical Mr. Mistoffelees’? A bop! And absolute vocal powerhouse Jennifer Hudson belts ‘Memories’ right into your face, out of her own weeping, bewhiskered cat-face.

Anyway, this is a misbegotten nightmare and the most incredible cinematic event of the year.

★ / ★★★★★

Half the fun of a whodunnit is finding out who done it, so please god, if you have not seen this movie and want to (you do!!), do not read this!

The other half of the fun is watching the actors have fun. Is a rollicking murder mystery the most fun you can have as an actor? I look at Clue, I look at this, I think: maybe so. There are a number of movies I might describe as feeling like a play, and usually what I mean is not what I mean here: Knives Out feels like a movie performed by a company. An ensemble that all got together for a few weeks in a big house to make a feature. Which is essentially how this actually went, because Rian Johnson is by all accounts a delight that everyone wants to work with, and he saw he had a window and said, be there? And they said, WITH BELLS ON.

I love that this is nearly a movie without a lead character, but that there actually is and it’s Marta. Ana de Armas is essentially playing the straight-man role and that can be pretty thankless sometimes, but not in her hands! She is so cute, she is so funny, she is so nauseous. The girl spends a whole sequence bopping around the grounds of the Thrombey mansion wearing this long color-block knit scarf and her weird winter capris over socks & sneakers looking for all the world like a mash-up of several different Doctors Who. I love her. I love Marta so much that my two (2) quibbles with this movie are things I think were a disservice to her: 1) I did not need her to soothe Meg and tell her it was okay that she sold her out, and 2) I really wish we’d learned what country her family had actually immigrated from. You can keep the ongoing joke at the Thrombeys’ expense that they keep naming different places, and just give Marta a little hero moment in the latter part where she sets the record straight. But that said, that final shot of her with a blanket around her shoulders like a cozy cloak, standing on the balcony above them and almost understatedly raising the ‘My House My Rules’ mug to her lips, was Perfect Beautiful Triumphant. As warming as whatever was in that mug!! I laughed and my laugh was a CHEER.

Meanwhile: Everyone else. God they are having such a good time. Daniel Craig’s performance, as Glenn Weldon put it, is the honey-baked ham at the center of this movie, and it is delicious. Benoit Blanc. Benoit Blanc. But you know what? I didn’t think he was the funniest one. Because this movie contains Toni Collette, nailing every. fucking. line reading. I think our theater laughed at the end of 90% of her deliveries. A masterpiece. Lakeith Stanfield wearing a very nice coat and deploying his giant eyes in background reaction comedy was another highlight.

As was, good god, Christopher Evans, who was practically sparkling with glee in every one of his scenes. I mean he got arguably the most fun part:
– swan in halfway through, as obnoxious as an actual swan
– not give a fuck
– get to play that EXHILARATING thing where suddenly the unrepentant asshole is, oh of course, the only one renegade enough that you would consider aligning with him when he shows up in a pinch and offers you a ride
– aaannnd double-cross our heroine and prove to be the villain the whole dang time

Well except for the fact that Marta did in fact kill Harlan (a lovely turn from Christopher Plummer, like he knows another way to be), albeit only in the most inadvertent and be-tricked way possible, and holy–[kicks a chair over]–FUCK did I love that they showed us what happened so early! Turning the whole Christie mystery structure on its head! THIS SCRIPT IS KILLER.

Because really, Knives Out so fun, it’s so fun, but it’s also functional. I don’t know if that’s the word I mean. It is a classic genre piece but it is very fresh, it comes from right now. It’s a party pastiche with points to make. The whodunnit gone timely, where the knives may be false but the social commentary is plenty sharp enough to make up for it. The jokes, oh the jokes…top tier and aimed straight for those there. Twisty and romping yet with a gimlet eye, this is one of the cinematic gifts of the year.

★★★★

Everyone’s gonna tell you this is a sweet movie but I’m not, I’m here to tell you that A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood is kind of outrageous, actually. It opens with Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers, walking into a perfect recreation of his program’s set, quality fuzzy like an old TV picture, and after he does the bit with the cardigan and the sneakers, he starts showing you this “picture board” with photos hidden behind doors, and then he opens one of them and it’s this insane close-cropped image of Matthew Rhys with a cut on the bridge of his nose and a black eye, looking dead into the camera with a face of bitter misery, and Tom Rogers goes “This is my friend Lloyd.” And at that moment my soul briefly transcended my body to turn around and look at me and ask, “Is this movie gonna be…weird?” It is, and in retrospect I don’t know why I expected otherwise!

But yes, let’s talk about Mr. Rogers’ friend Lloyd first, because he is the main character and he is, yes, outrageous. Lloyd is an impossibility: the only person in the world who has no good will toward Fred Rogers, living in the only alley in New York City, with the only journalism job that would pay for him to travel from NYC to Pittsburgh I think three separate times to write a 400-word piece of copy. In real life, the Esquire profile that inspired this movie was written by a man named Tom, but as they needed to make him outrageous, all the names have been changed, and, appropriately, they picked one for him that sounds like a mournful trumpet slide. Lloyd has (outrageously) a 10/10 compassionate beautiful public interest attorney wife named Andrea, and an adorable brand new baby, and this movie is basically an hour forty-five of Mr. Rogers trying to make Lloyd worth their time. Mr. Rogers took one look at this cynical sadsack and went, ‘I have to rehabilitate this man’. Lloyd is so mad and so sad and just, god, Lloyd, nobody’s got time for this—except Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers moves at a different pace from the entire world. Mr. Rogers has got all the time he needs. Mr. Rogers will care about Lloyd when I do not.

Because it’s important to remember that Mr. Rogers was also kind of outrageous! He was a strange person! He was an endless fount of empathy and grace, and a total weirdo. Marielle Heller has figured that out, and essentially made the kind of movie Fred Rogers was. She has deliberately framed the film as if it’s an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, full of kindness and miniatures and slowly delivered dialogue and nearly too much sweetness, but with this certain oddball angle you never get too far away from before suddenly Fred is talking to you in a falsetto through his tiger puppet, or Lloyd has been shrunk down small enough to fit on the battlements of King Friday’s castle and given giant floppy bunny ears, in my personal high-water mark of this movie. The whole of which I spent, like I would watching the show, wishing it were just….a bit more outrageous.

★★★

First half spoiler-free, second half watch out

Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite is a maniacal ride powered by a finely honed engine. It’s a perfectly constructed trap door–-Incredible, you think, as you fall through the beautiful floor after a smooth click. It is a masterful black comedy about class and capitalism and resentment and cruelty and wishes and architecture. It is so much about architecture. GOD I LOVE A HOUSE MOVIE.

Is there something about Korean cinema that lends itself to house movies? The Handmaiden was as well. Parasite bears not a small amount of similarities to The Handmaiden in fact. They both involve twists and turns and wealth and secrets, secrets in the dark rooms of that big stunning house. The Handmaiden is a love story though, and Parasite is…probably a thriller.

Or maybe we can come up with a new genre: the grift movie. Distinct from a heist movie, the grift movie, this year’s Hustlers being another one, backs the pleasure derived from the elegance of the fraud with a sharp wash of financial anxiety. Heists are targeted assassinations—grifts are class warfare. Heists are “jobs” that you complete—grifts are Destiny’s moving car with no breaks. The characters in both Hustlers and Parasite realize they must have had a chance to take an off-ramp at some point, but they missed it, and now their only options are to dive out the door, or just try to ride this all the way to the top without crashing.

I don’t know why I keep trying to compare Parasite to other movies when it’s so much its own thing. Though maybe that’s what happens when a movie’s light shines really strong: it falls on so many others. I thought that about In the Mood for Love as well, and I thought of In the Mood for Love when I thought of the scenes in Parasite rendered in gorgeous slow motion set to Jung Jaeil’s classical score, and all that rain pouring down. It is a very beautiful movie. And riotous fun, and utterly chilling.

Okay, let’s get into it. Look away now if you’ve not seen it and are the sort of person who doesn’t want to know the plot before you go into something.

I thought this movie’s twist was going to be supernatural. I definitely thought something alien and strange was going to be up with that weird looking rock, and that maybe the parasite of the title would turn out to be literal. In fact, what turned out to be very literal was anyone who described this as an “upstairs/downstairs” movie. The rich family with a secret in their house is SUCH A CLASSIC, the horror genre beat drop that feels like missing the last step. For this is definitely horror at times! God I keep remembering the flashback scene of the little boy eating cake in the dark kitchen, seeing the Ghost coming up the stairs to the basement, his eyes glowing over his hungry cheekbones.

But the fact that the Parks don’t know the secret in their house isn’t the way this usually goes. In this way Parasite is not The Handmaiden, or Get Out, or Sorry To Bother You—the Parks aren’t hiding the kind of sadism only money can afford, and afford to keep hidden. In many ways, the Parks are nice, as the Kims talk about as they drink their liquor and eat their food, and they are certainly gullible. But they are also selfish and classist and unthinking, in how the life they want to lead demands the labor of others who will, structurally, never be able to have this for themselves. 

What is truly going to stick with me, beyond the face coming up the stairs or the buckets of water being thrown in slow motion or really anything Park So-dam does on screen, is Ki-woo’s dream he describes to his father at the end. That the only solution he sees, is to become the Parks himself. That he will be rich, that he will buy the Big House, because only then will he get his father back. Not blood money: money for blood. The idea that the very bodies of our families get trapped in the architecture of late capitalism, and only through becoming capitalists ourselves can we free them. 

“This is so metaphorical!” Ki-woo happily exclaims at multiple points, and every time I felt giddily frightened, what the hell will a movie like this do next. Parasite is bold and brutal and every seat in our theater was taken, because 2019 has found its film.

★★★★★

I’ve finally joined the Jojo Wars, which have been waging since TIFF. I don’t know if you can use ‘waging’ like that, but ‘raging’ seems too much—few seem actually mad [well, see update note below], there’s just a lot of differing critical opinion on whether or not the movie works. The fact that the reaction has been both negative and positive would seem to be proof that it does in fact work, just for some people and not for others, but here we are.

I think it’s very rare that anyone writes an objective review that actually has value to other people. Most reviews are utterly subjective and that’s fine. Subjective reviews can have value, either in that you feel the same way and someone has put it into words for you and you feel that you understand the work more deeply now, or you don’t feel the same way and you get to have that strange but useful experience where you’re forced to confront that fact that we can all watch the same movie and yet come out having watched entirely different ones. I don’t pretend that this review will not likely be one or the other of those for you!

But I’ve been doing some meta-analysis in my own reading, to try to find anything actually objective that’s of use. One of the features of the Jojo Rabbit discourse I’ve found is that interestingly, no one on either side seems particularly eager to die on this hill with their hot takes, which might be the most telling thing about this movie. Amazingly, after what I think we all assumed from the subject matter, there’s just seems to be something inherently mild about Jojo Rabbit. Joker it is not. I have a feeling that it might be this year’s The Shape of Water—the latest from a widely loved director, an instant crowd-pleasing awards front-runner with both fans and detractors in the critical community, that will sail through awards season buoyed on what will be dismissed by those who deem it “just not that good” as its Mainstream Appeal, despite being straight-up a heist romance about a lady who bangs a fishman, or a tragicomedy in which a Māori-Jewish man plays Hitler. Honestly the mainstream can really be more wild than we give it credit for sometimes.

[Edit: Having now lived three months into the future, can report that I was wrong and the Jojo dissenters in fact became quite hateful toward it as we got deeper into awards season, the descriptions of the movie I was seeing eventually becoming as disingenuous and occasionally as outright incorrect as the way people who had only seen that fight clip from Marriage Story were describing it (which makes me suspect that many of those hating on Jojo Rabbit on Twitter also hadn’t actually seen the movie themselves), and I wrote but ultimately deleted maybe three different essays on outrage-mongering, because man that hill just looked more awful than ever!]

Something that critics do seem to agree on is that Taika Waititi’s “anti-hate satire” is not actually strictly satire—despite admitting they understand why in 2019 a studio would be compelled to market their Nazi movie with a phrase that broadcasts the intent behind it. But while they don’t think this is it, no one can seem to agree on what satire actually is, giving me flashbacks to when this year’s Met Gala was themed on “camp.” Similarly, the only thing I now feel any clarity on regarding the definition of satire is that I do not care whether or not something fits it. Just like with the outfits, all I care about is: Do I like to to look at. Does it make me feel a thing, anything. In Jojo Rabbit’s case: Yes.

What did I like about this movie? A number of things, including some things that others specifically did not, because THAT’S ART, BABY. Let’s start with what some might think is my stupidest opinion: I liked the mishmash of inaccurate German accents. I did! I liked that each actor had their own goofy spin that befit their character & performance—Scarlett Johansson’s worldly Rosie with her mysterious loyalties sounding more generically quote “European” than the others, at times even kinda French, while Sam Rockwell’s dissolute officer had a heavy inflection of those old 1940s British actors playing majors, and Rebel Wilson going the furthest of anyone into just pure hacky Comedy German befitting her role as a broad caricature.

I liked this element because it underlines that this movie takes place in a fantasy Third Reich, which is the second artistic choice I appreciated. And not one without precedent in film. As everyone points out, the Hitler Youth camp looks very much like Nazi Moonrise Kingdom, and the whole movie carries on that similarly sunny, good-looking color scheme and use of slow motion and perfectly turned-out quaint costumes and interiors. Taika Waititi has garnered comparisons to Wes Anderson I think his whole career, definitely since Boy, and even absconded with Anderson’s frequent composer Mark Mothersbaugh for Thor: Ragnarok after Mothersbaugh loved the Anderson-y arpeggios Waititi had used in Hunt for the Wilderpeople. But while aesthetically Jojo Rabbit looks most like Moonrise Kingdom, and similarly features children as the leads, I’m really surprised I haven’t yet seen anyone discuss its similarities with Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which an overt Nazi Army analogue sweeps through a fictional European country with lavender-hued but still bleak, brutal violence. The Grand Budapest Hotel in fact took the same route as Charlie Chaplin’s own Hitler comedy The Great Dictator did, even using made-up names for countries that we are absolutely supposed to recognize for their real-life counterparts. But while Jojo Rabbit does not distance itself quite that far, to me the surreal visuals—including, of course, a brown man as Hitler—this Germany read just as much as a fantasy world version of a place where very real horrors took place as Anderson’s Zubrowka.

Which is another thing I liked: I think fantasizing (by which I do not mean romanticizing) real historical traumas can be an affective and productive artistic enterprise. Genre films, your horrors and supernatural tales and high fantasies and sci-fi and the like, have always been viewed as useful ways to allow filmmakers and audiences to process things from our real lives. Honestly it’s just rather an extrapolation of what storytelling IS on a base level, but the ones that are in some way fantastical really emphasis what can be gained in the transfer. In Jojo Rabbit, the only version of Adolf Hitler we see is Waititi’s unhinged imaginary friend version, and he can lambast and deride this figure to his heart’s content. By making it comedic, by making it strange, the creative team isn’t restricted under the weight of trying to render awful things faithfully. They can come at the trauma differently. And this approach absolutely will not work for some, definitely this is not the way everyone wants to engage with the atrocity of the Holocaust and World War II. But there are also some people that will get something out of this version that they don’t get out of Schindler’s List or Life Is Beautiful, or even The Great Dictator.

I watched The Great Dictator the day before I watched Jojo Rabbit. I’ll confess liked this one a bit better, with the exception of Chaplin’s Hynkel dancing with that globe balloon, which is utterly sublime. Both are billed as Nazi comedies, or satires if you’re feeling frisky, I guess, but after seeing them I’ve been calling them both tragicomedies, because they’re also really sad. The showing of Jojo I went to was at the kind of big old independent theater where someone comes out and does a little pre-show announcement, and I was slightly surprised when he mentioned the movie was “heartbreaking, so be ready for that!” And then I cried multiple times. These tonal shifts from comedy to tragedy are another thing that certainly doesn’t work for everyone, but once again, this did work for me. I often find suffering more moving when it’s in works with a sense of humor than ones that are purely Serious Dramas, because being able at times to just laugh at the great painful cosmic absurdity of life is what gets me through it. Black humor has a strong tradition in marginalized groups for a reason, I think. It can be strengthening. Life is full of such sorrow and evil, but as Rosie tells Jojo, we should always be dancing more, because that part is good. It can be brave and powerful, to dance in the face of death.

★★★

The Lighthouse is like this box, this nearly square screen in salt-dried black & whites, into which Sea Dafoe and Sea Pattinson have been plunked, wearing nautical sweaters and gloomy gremlin glee. And gradually, as the wind and waves pick up, the box starts getting rattled and tossed around, the two of them scrambling and colliding bodily into each other, slipping in a brackish muck of kerosene and seawater and piss and semen, yelling in kelpy, semi-incomprehensible Melville. All the while, a foghorn keeps an eldritch time, a deep bellow like an exhalation from Hell, and a dizzying phantasmagorical Art Deco egg of thick glass-plated light slowly swings and sings overhead, as the timbers of the box begin to buckle and crack under the onslaught, the mad sea rushing and foaming in at the corners like a briny vignette, waiting to crash through and leave everything a tangled broken mess on the rocks.

It’s a rigorously deranged ride of barmy barnacled madness and we are blessed. By an absent fearful Christian God, or more likely Poseidon, invoked at one point by miniature craggy king Willem Dafoe in a maniacal, minutes-long ocean swell of a curse in which he apparently foregoes the need to breathe. When at last the booming torrent breaks, all Robert Pattinson can do is look up at him from his sprawl on the uneven floor with his haunted cliff-ghast eyes, and offer that alright, maybe not all of Thomas’s cooking is that bad. And our packed Monday night audience absolutely lost our shit.

Is it for anything besides this, this fever break of laughter before the barometer just starts rising again? Does it need to be? As the internet has asked, must a movie be good—is it not enough to sit in the dark and see an actor, unhinged? Do you question the SEA for ROILING?

In this case I think there is actually plenty of flotsam and jetsam tossed in this, but I don’t need all these references and elements (meteorological or otherwise) to be combed out. I don’t need to solve anything, be like oh it’s Freudian, oh it’s the myth of Prometheus—it’s enough that there are phalluses and light and at times those coalesce and almost drip into Robert Pattinson’s graven cheekbone. I really like reading Robert Eggers talk about making his movie, his fascinating reverse-hydra approach to production decision-making where he establishes something he must have, and then that one decision auto-decides a constellation of other decisions that he’ll insist serve this one. It would all sound rather draconian and unfun if the initial choice wasn’t whimsically something like, and I quote: “The reason why it became this period in The Lighthouse is because I wanted to have a foghorn, and I wanted to have a Fresnel lens.” You go, buddy. I respect this Quaint Nerd priority matrix.

This is what I mean by rigorously deranged. It means that Pattinson is wearing the exact right style of wickie overalls when he’s getting menaced out of his damn mind by a one-eyed seagull or fucking unearthly screamed at by an alarmingly anatomically correct Victorian mermaid or drunkenly hanging on Willem Dafoe as he slurrily slow-dances him around their cramped kitchen singing a song of which I caught not a word. But if there’s a message here, it might be on that last: go easy on the grog when you’re trapped on a rock, lest you go mad north-nor’easter, and don’t make it back to land.

★★★★★