The Other List for 2021: The Overlooked, the Overrated, the Disasters, the Sleepers
It’s pretty self explanatory. Listed below are features for 2021 that I think while not perfect, should have gotten more attention. Or less attention. Or instances where I was pleasantly surprised. Or where I stared mouth agape at a catastrophe.
Overrated: I could not fully get behind.......
Dune
Denis Villeneuve, US
We may just have to accept that contemporary Hollywood, with its need to filter any allegory or commentary through action and dialogue, is unprepared to approach the near-insurmountable assignment of transmitting the complexity of Frank Herbert’s novel and its laundry list of themes and parables to screen. This is understandable to a degree since Dune is kind of about everything - mythology, diplomacy, mysticism, militarism, economics, resistance, colonialism, religion, capitalism, feudalism, nature, maturity...
But to spend any time exploring any of these themes in any detail would be to spend too much time on them, because Villeneuve’s effort is so interested in storytelling and excitement that no indulgence of anything else can be allowed for. The committee-based, paint-by-numbers approach to large-scale studio moviemaking can really wreak havoc on this kind of material, which winds up eluding both mystery and dramatic tension.
I agree with what Richard Brody wrote about this version in The New Yorker. I disagree with his measurement of it against what he considers to be the superiority of David Lynch’s 1984 version of Dune, which I think is awful for different reasons. Less talked about is the three-part miniseries that was done for The Sci-Fi Channel in 2000, which, for its unhurried approach, may be the best one by default.
I can admire the effort to make things coherent and entertaining, even if those efforts are based on multiplex-friendly notions of entertainment and cohesion. Also, I acknowledge that excessive fidelity to the novel would have killed this project. But there should be a sense of wonder in thought-provoking or “hard” science-fiction. But there’s very little to wonder about in a production with this kind of literalist interpretation, where the actors are subdued within parts that render them emotionally inaccessible (fitting with contemporary film acting trends), the sets are maddeningly austere, the tone inspires virtually no curiosity about this world and the whole endeavor is coherent and unambiguous to the point of tedium.
Titane
Julia Ducournau, France
So sacred is the interrogation and subversion of norms and stereotypes with respect to sexuality and gender identity, we’re supposed to look past the misanthropy and viciousness of Ducournau’s vision on route to the destination. When asked about the foregrounding of the view of gender as a construct in her film, she told Sight & Sound in its winter issue, “I wanted the audience to believe in the journey that Alexia/Adrian goes through without projecting anything. Because for me all that matters in the end is that there is love...” Parsing this statement with the relentless, cringe-inducing first third of the movie makes it come off like a lot of hooey.
It’s a violence Agathe Rousselle’s androgynous, murderous protagonist has no reservations about. It’s implied that she’s killed before and far from being non-judgemental, I don’t believe Ducournau has the meditative detachment from the ugliness of this violence she seems to think she does. At times, it feels as if she’s reveling in it, intentionally ramping things up as if to shock us into submission. She acknowledges in that same interview that the EMT ladder boss played by Vincent Lindon is the only character to whom we can relate. His fragile and toxic masculinity is in crisis as he’s unable to grieve the loss of his son, and there’s a tender core later in the film that reveals itself in the bond he forms with “Adrian.”
But if we’re to be on the side of the director (and I was) in laying out a deconstruction of those traditional norms, we’re made to relate to the wrong character. And wading through the nihilism on the way to that tenderness (which is actually heartfelt and deep) is a major ordeal. I like Ducournau’s spiky boldness up to a point: The use of imagery depicting nonhuman or nontraditional forms of penetration (sexual or otherwise) is interesting, as is her critique of the stigma attached to reproduction and pregnancy. There’s also a fair bit of dark but goofy humor that worked for me. But, to a greater degree than her feature debut Raw - which had similar smugness about it - too much of Titane is so formally aggressive, this aspect overpowers what it has to say, which is a lot.
For one thing, I wish the movie were less indebted to Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). In Shinya Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk smorgasbord, the mechanical dehumanization and metallic metamorphosis the characters come to embrace is without the odious sense of righteousness that sometimes surfaces here (director Pedro Almodovar has been dramatizing fluid identities in his characterizations for decades without this kind of grandstanding). I suppose I could get behind the prospect of a new type of human steeled up for a new age if the notion wasn’t so perversly connected with a particular echelon of feminism that sees empowerment and truimph in simply imitating all the worst behavioral traits of men. Namely, brutality.
Don’t Look Up
Adam McKay, US
I cannot recommend highly enough Neil Gabler’s book, Life, The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality for contextualizing Hollywood’s participation in the dumbing down of the public that McKay’s film thinks it’s unearthing
A big production with an A-list cast that includes both highly esteemed Oscar winners and hot young stars and pop figures is simply unequipped to produce satire that can truly sting its targets and the audience, especially when that audience consists of a big portion of the target. If you’re nodding thankfully in agreement at every step of a movie like this, all the while thinking, “yeah, that’s how I feel too,” then it's not doing its job. I have nothing against any of these people, nor do I doubt their good intentions or the possibility that they all genuinely believed they were involved in a project whose worthwhile stances aligned with their own (as they did mine). It’s just that the simple nature of their aggregate presence in a project like this deadens and weakens it. No examination of media vacuousness and hollow institutions and their effects on the sheepish masses can be addressed by a big studio movie of this kind. Contemporary Hollywood is not the prophet. It’s part of the problem.
Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, political campaigns and government projects (including wars) have more and more closely come to resemble the culture of Hollywood movies and are sold to the public as such. And subsequently, major movies and TV shows are marketed as if they were significant cultural events, with immense capacity for informing our political landscape. It’s how we wound up with a fraudulent rapist criminal for a President: he was a reality TV sensation. Judging by the naivete and shock of the scientists at the three-ring circus they find themselves in as they try to inform the public, Don’t Look Up acts as if The Great Mass Delusion is a recent development.
In fact, the sense-numbing entertainment factor has played a major role in the escapist slant of mass media culture for decades. Reagan was the first president to see politics not as a means of addressing problems, but as a way of distracting the public from them. He’d come from Hollywood and understood its capacity for capturing and aligning public imagination using simplified, feel-good rhetoric. His and all future presidencies, Republican or Democrat, would be designed for the express purpose of making people feel better the way they seemed to feel better watching movies and television.
Under what credentials does this particular pot get to call this specific kettle black?
With nearly forty years to slicken up its act, major movie studios are as responsible as the news media and social media for stoking mass incredulity. The falsehoods they feed us about the world and about ourselves are things our brains have been subtly picking up our whole lives. That’s why Don’t Look Up is so digestible and disposable - and such a good time. The satires that will truly shake us - they won’t be so familiar. They won’t go down this easy. They’ll likely bomb upon their initial release. They’ll instead sneak up on us, making cases about the sickness of our society, about the anomie created by our wealth and privilege that we weren’t aware of.
Misjudgments: I was wrong to underestimate......
Zola
Janicza Bravo, US
A good object lesson for making the case that social media can lead to empowerment and insight - a hard sell for someone like me. But the movie does a nice job of translating the frank, pithy delivery of A’zaih King’s legendary Twitter thread into black comedy, chronicling a road trip with her new stripper partner that became a surreal, hair-raising ordeal. I loved the standoff in the hotel room between gunmen imitating what they’ve seen in movies. In the midst of this lunacy, it's a nice touch that Zola learns what she is and isn’t willing to do with her own body under the bizarre conditions of what could only be called the stupidest hostage situation of all time. And the way she teaches a perverse form of self-respect and entrepreneurship (albeit tragically contextualized) to the soon-to-be-ex-friend who could be called her pupil (“Pussy Costs Thousands!”).
The use of the tweet ringtones signifying a line of dialogue that would later be used in Zola’s Twitter feed, as well as a few other stylistic choices wore out their welcome for me. But on the whole, I was pleasantly surprised at how well this seemingly inconsequential folk anecdote could be turned into something that addressed a number of reservations I have about the times we’re living in. Zola’s “kidnapping” means being subject to the whims of the grotesquely stupid and venal culture of her captors and the threat of violence looming as a reprisal for not sharing their idiotic tastes and values begins to closely resemble some aspects of life under the Trump presidency.
West Side Story
Steven Spielberg, US
“Fuck, it’s actually good,” I thought to myself, sitting in the theater. Spielberg’s ability to explore the potential for drama, action and suspense within a given space turns out to be a great skill to have for making a musical. What he does with a back alley scaffolding and fire escape or a game played for possession of Riff’s gun on a rotted out bridge, in addition to working as foreshadowing, are good examples of this. The tussle for the gun is a new bit of business added to this version, as is giving the song “Somewhere,” to Rita Moreno, who was written a meaningful role here that respectfully honors her longevity and her crucial contribution to Robert Wise’s and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 original adaptation.
There was a lot of visible room for improvement in that production: white actors cast as Puerto Ricans, the distracting false feel of sound stages substituted for city streets, Richard Beymer’s dull rendering of Tony. All of these issues have been addressed to some degree. The Lincoln Center of this version has seen its older buildings demolished and waiting for an upgrade that would push its irrelevant street gangs further into redundancy. Incorporating the transitioning community and more of its inhabitants into the musical numbers places the story in a more poignant light, highlighting the pointlessness of turf wars and ethnic street gangs that have had their day.
With tribal entrenchments and gang violence still very much with us in 2021, Spielberg's version feels more relevant than most cynically packaged, same-thing-only-different remakes. It feels like the right time for this to have been made. Many of the same strengths and weaknesses linger from the original film (and the two stage productions I’ve seen). The Puerto Rican Sharks are still more interesting than the Anglo/Italian Jets (though by a narrower margin). With a time signature that required a new way of staging dance sequences, “America,” is still the best number in the production. The concept of dueling street gangs snapping fingers as they creep forward may still be a corny way of realizing the play’s Shakespearean origins but the new orchestrations of Leonard Bernstein’s score and delivery of Steven Sondheim’s lyrics give the whole thing life and spirit.
No subtitles are provided for the substantial amount of Spanish dialogue spoken in the movie, which is as it should be. I certainly didn’t feel excluded in any way from appreciating those scenes, which wouldn’t have mattered anyway considering how much else non-white movie audiences are made to feel excluded from. All in all, Spielberg actually seems to understand and care about the material, which adds up to something that felt justified in its existence.
Side-point: can we all agree at this point that the “Hey, Officer Krupke,” number works as a perfect sendup of the standard liberal excuses for street crime? How could one know all those things about their behavior and still do it? Could this account for an episode from a more recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (which has been chipping away at the fake liberalism of the coastal white upper class for years) where Larry David is singing the song in his car?
No Time To Die
Cary Joji Fukunaga, UK
There’ll be a longer, more in-depth examination of Daniel Craig’s tenure as 007 from The Flickering Knight in the coming weeks.
For now, I’d call the partial running storyline to which the emotional continuity of this iteration of James Bond is attached a success. Even across some of the five-feature series’ weaker entries, it weirdly demonstrates a plus side to living an era that privileges emotional well-being and contentment, which is no easy task. It dies this by illustrating the problem those values would pose for a killing machine, hopelessly tied to the material world, who just wanted some semblance of a normal life. Superhero movies and other action franchises have often explored this theme - the impossibility of a double life. But the idea of a Bond, entering his sixth decade on screen, as just another guy who resents his job for wrecking his life, a job he sees as futile and corrupted by a world he and the old dogs at MI6 can barely keep up with, is a tantalizing notion.
This relatively grounded attempt at the emotional reality of the character mirrors and compliments the grounding of the action in some semblance of physical reality, thanks to smart choreography and old-fashioned solid stunt work. If the emotional stakes seem higher than normal during an SUV chase through a Norwegian forest, it’s because of who the people being protected by Bond are. It’s not just some high-kicking amazon at Bond’s side who’ll be gone by the next entry. In deciding that who this character is matters, because who people are matters, the filmmakers can chart a development across the series where the action and suspense have more weight and more potential to thrill or move us in the same way that sex is always hottest when you’re interested in the person you have it with.
Underexposed: More people should have seen....
Nina Wu
Midi Z, Taiwan
Ads and articles describing this as a Chinese Mulholland Drive fall short. First off, it’s a Taiwanese production, which makes it more than a little nervy for criticizing Chinese authoritarianism as it does. Secondly, I would argue it’s a little closer to Satoshi Kon’s 1997 anime masterpiece Perfect Blue. But Nina Wu goes as far as including the depiction of the paternal, authoritarian State as just another shadowy menace using show business as a cover for propaganda and the subjugation and violation of women. The censorious, domineering nature of the Chinese government’s meddling in the arts via the whitewashing of its own history is depicted as a process that goes hand in hand with the patriarchal purpose and practice of the movie business.
The titular heroine is put through an emotional and physical battering ram that continues after she’s gotten the lead role in a high-profile historical drama. I was reminded of many of the complaints lodged at filmmakers like David O. Russell and Lars Von Trier in their pushing of actors (female actors, that is) to their emotional limits - to which Nina Wu is a direct and necessary protest. There were other moments when I couldn’t help thinking of The Stunt Man for the dizzying examination of cinematic trickery. Here, it serves a pointed political purpose. The anger at these two correlative forms of exploitation is bracingly articulated. I’ve got to hand it to director Midi Z and her star Ke-Xi Wu. This is a brave piece of work to have gotten away with.
Benedetta
Paul Verhoven, France
In rides Paul Verhoven to use an accounting of the real-life exploits of a 17th century lesbian nun who became revered as a holy vessel by the villagers in her province as the backdrop for a stunning grudge match between sex, religion and politics. Quite simply, Verhoven (Basic Instinct, Elle) is a genius when it comes to depicting society’s unease with female defiance and female power gained by any means necessary while kidding generic movie tropes. His ability to deconstruct commonly held assumptions about exploitation and trash art with a kind of sardonic sarcasm that undercuts the ugly nature of the material must make him difficult to summarize and package - a thorn in the side of press-agents, distributors, ratings boards, and trade promoters posing as critics. I took the small crowds protesting in front of the arthouse theater where I saw Benedetta as a good omen (pun intended). Like the movie or hate it, at least it would be something worth thinking and talking about.
Like much of Verhoven’s work, Benedetta is easy to misunderstand. The illicit sexual relationship between Benedetta (Virginie Efira) and Bartolomea (Daphne Petakia) within their Tuscan convent baits us, masking the larger issues that Verhoven explores, namely the way the same ignorance and superstition that characterize religious power can be used against it as means of gaining status by the powerless through the marketing of shared delusions. And what would appear to be a very well-groomed and clean rendering of the period feels like a kind of mockery of the grimy self-seriousness of most evocations of the era to be found on screen.
Coupled with her performance last year in the psychological drama, Madeline Collins, Efira is someone to watch. Her Benedetta truly believes she’s a vessel for God’s will, something the movie has fun keeping us guessing about. Verhoven has even more fun working in jabs at the cinematizing of Jesus as he’s imagined by Benedetta to look and act like one of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed commandos of Starship Troopers. Above all, Verhoven’s work demonstrates that character, not plot, are what grab our interest. It’s in guessing at their motivations, wading through their complex pathologies that we can come up with answers. Why does Benedetta imagine a crucified Jesus with a vagina? Because she’s never seen a penis and has no idea what they look like, of course.
Disasters: The immense disappointments of....
Antebellum
Gerard Bush, Christopher Renz
Infuriating for the gyrations and machinations and gymnastics this goes through to pull off a sub-Shyamalan twist so underhanded, banal and low class, I wanted to chuck something at the screen. There’s no sense of interior character to either the slaves or the slave-masters. The stylized brutality on display is empty and dull of head. There’s no insight into racism or the main characters. The confederate villains are all but rendered in pantomime. A twirl of the mustache is all the characterization they require. These are manipulative movie tactics so old, slavery was probably still legal when they were invented. Any smart viewer could venture a better guess about what’s going on in this story than what they give us. The actors are wasted or painfully stereotyped. And how is the movie’s premise supposed to actually work?
It doesn’t matter. Intriguing questions would require thoughtful answers which would hamper everything leading up to the equally empty and gratuitous finale. It’s amazing to depict this kind of torture and assualt visited on black bodies while somehow completely missing any chance for insight into the nature of white supremacy. Motives, nuance and humanity are out of the reach of a project like this. It may comfort those actively striving against racism to imagine White America in this All-Against-Us way. But what to do once the despair of the movie is over and one steps back out into a world where systemic racism is more complicated and elusive than this cynical, trashy baiting of the Get Out audience could ever imagine?
The Card Counter
Paul Schrader U.S.
This image has its roots in Robert Bresson’s magisterial Pickpocket (1966), but I can’t shake the feeling director Paul Schrader thinks he’s merely updating a similar composition used in his American Gigolo (1980).
Oscar Isaac does virtually no card counting in a movie that also teaches us almost nothing about poker, presumably because writer-director Paul Schrader is more interested in his bemoaning his protagonist’s tortured soul. This would be fine if it wasn't just one more of Schrader’s theatricalized, middle-aged male crises handed down from earlier projects, updated and reprised so many times that it’s become familiar and dull.
At this point, I fully believe Schrader must think he’s remixing images and themes from his own previous work rather than repackaging those of Robert Bresson. Anyone familiar with the details of Bresson’s intricate, radical filmmaking know that they don’t work and can’t work in a Hollywood production without bastardizing everything Bresson was about. For Schrader to simply drag Bressonian devices in his own cinema (like the keeping of a diary narrated offscreen by the hero that hints at the spiritual crisis of alienation and anguish amidst everyday trivialities) as if they were of the same ilk is patently ludicrous.
I would appreciate his efforts to deglamorize the trope of the Cool Gambler Movie and its shopworn jazzy effects if the results weren’t so stilted and flat. Poker championships may indeed be this pedestrian and unspectacular and the plainspoken dialogue - right down to the insipid drink orders - aims for realism. But it’s all so distant and spacey, despite Issac’s and Tiffany Haddish’s best efforts. With 2017’s First Reformed still fresh in mind - for me, Schrader’s best film - it’s as if the director, who I respect as film historian, had at last fallen out of love with fascism and warmed up to humanity, gotten jilted, and then retreated back to his comfort zone.
Old
M. Night Shyamalan, US
Maybe the premise isn’t that bad. But the script so clumsily and stupidly tries to explore its possibilities, I can’t imagine a proper response to it that would involve taking it seriously. It’s a script that seems to plot in advance for the actors to be stranded with blinkered motivations and trite dialogue the way they’re stranded on that beach. I’ve seen school plays where the actors were blocked and coached better than in this film. Just the simple act of people speaking to each other about what’s going on, which should be interesting enough considering how extreme the circumstances of the situation are, is difficult to watch.
Isn’t it amazing how they had a conversation with their kids about the importance of respecting the passing of time right before falling into the exact situation that would test that notion? Wasn’t it ironic how the corporation behind the whole thing thought they were doing something good for humanity the whole time? Didn’t you think it was a clever wink to the audience for the director to cast himself as a metaphor for the engine of cinematic manipulation? I wish I could tell you what Hollywood knows about M. Night Shyamalan that we don’t. But I have no idea. All I can say is one day, studios will stop giving him budgets to squander for them. There is so much talent waiting in the wings to take his place. People who don’t just have ideas, but smart, sane ways to dramatize them.
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