2022 Movie Reviews

[Jondalar]

Originally Posted by TrueFaith77

10.Texas Chainsaw Massacre (9) (David Blue Garcia); grade: B


Like Brady Corbet’s art-film masterwork Vox Lux, Garcia’s B-movie TCM retcon launches its broad socio-political analysis from the trauma of school-shooting survivor’s guilt and the psychological specificity of sisters. The social tensions go beyond fake binary political paradigms. Garcia winds them so tightly that when the scary-and-funny slasher gore commences it feels like relief. In other words, Garcia confronts his characters with the moral dilemma they try to escape. Garcia complicates the “final girl” trope with ambivalent politically-loaded imagery of a phallic assault rifle and chainsaw. Those unable to comprehend such complexity and contradiction—humanity!—are doomed sheeple to the slaughterhouse.

I'm a horror junky. I'm going to watch this one.

[Jondalar]

3. Death on the Nile, grade C- = The movie is beautifully shot, but poorly directed. There are some great scenes of the nile river and Egypt but the movie is choppy and doesn't really flow. Also, they changed the story and added a bunch of politically correct elements that make the movie far fetched. It just didn't quite work and the ending is not shocking at all. It was a big disappointment.

[TrueFaith77]

11.The Batman (Matt Reeves); grade: F

#TheBatman bastardizes Chinatown in the incoherent style of 80s Euro-trash ad men Scott, Figgis, Lyne. Essentially, it peddles Fascism. Note: GOAT Batfleck always struck in the face of imminent danger—but Battinson just disregards the Constitution to bootlicking applause. Best moment: Batman and Selina’s motorcycle wheels hum in harmony—actors offscreen, it’s their sexiest interaction. The film ruins it with Selina’s cri de gurre about white male privilege that I think was supposed to be funny/ironic (as she unknowingly delivers it to Bruce Wayne), but the audience lapped it up with the grave seriousness encouraged by hack Matt Reeves. The music score’s sentimental use of “Ave Maria” (the name of Catwoman’s mother) just continues the culture’s ruinous misunderstanding of the profound “Martha” revelation in Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman.

[TrueFaith77]

12.The Invisible Thread (Marco Simon Puccioni); grade: B

“Our marriage is a farce!” declares Paolo (the great Filippo Timi!) as his 20th anniversary celebration with husband Simone (Francesco Scianna) descends hilariously-then-heartbreakingly into a domestic catastrophe caused by infidelity. At the center of this Italian farce is Paulo and Simone’s son Leonne (Francesco Gheghi), whose autobiographical activist school film project further complicates matters as it depends on Pablo and Simone’s upstanding representation of the gay-marriage cause. Hence, Puccioni always yo-yo’s between feeling and hilarity, the individual and the social, the private and the public. As questions about his family stability and the legal implications of his DNA paternity swirl, Paulo explores his compassion and his sexuality with gorgeous fraternal twins Elisa (Alessia Giuliani) and Dario (Matteo Oscar Giuggioli). He and Elisa flirt by brandishing hipster pop t-shirts; Dario kisses Paulo on a cliff. As with Timi’s hilarious embodiment of a middle-aged bourgeois gay man (on the brink of hysteria), these are the kinds of universal experiences that Europeans get right—including the identity of Paulo’s father. Essentially progressive, Puccioni’s farce resolves itself not through familial reconciliation but through the imagery of nature-and-nurture as an invisible thread of love through the generations that results in one unique person. The dignity afforded to which all politics must be based.

[TrueFaith77]

13.Scream (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin; Tyler Gillett); grade: F

Now, the meta conceit of the Scream series turns the characters into mere consumers. The film’s consumerist conflict establishes a false binary between toxic fandom (the killers) and consumer acquiescence (the victims). The film’s first victim prefers “elevated horror” junk like The Babadook and—God help us—Hereditary. (With taste that awful, she has it coming.) Meanwhile, the filmmakers’ lack of series progenitor Wes Craven’s craft and emotional intensity (what the characters call “stakes”) lowers audience standards. They ineptly stage the killings. Suspense and scares rely entirely on loud music and whip pans. The filmmakers reduce the significance of adventurous actress Neve Campbell (Investigating Sex, The Company, When Will I Be Loved). It’s ideological murder.

[TrueFaith77]

14.Don’t Look Down (Jacques Martineau, Olivier Ducastel): grade: B+

Covidpocalypse colors Martineau-Ducastel’s Don’t Look Down, by filmmakers known for the Demy-inspired gay-lib, AIDS-era existential romanticism of masterpieces Paris 05:59: Theo & Hugo, My Life on Ice, and Adventures of Felix. Instead, this film’s isolation setting features 5 victims in a high-rise apartment who persecute an off-screen menace. Instead of sexual freedom, Martineau-Ducastel explore the spiritual toll of exploitative sexual-romantic relationships. As the characters take turns confronting their mutual tormentor, they divulge their sexual fantasies (domination/submission) and their real humiliations (public manipulations). Recalling similar ventures by Bunuel, Fassbinder, Ozon, the activist French filmmaking duo explore power dynamics in bourgeois norms—an insight into how gay shame and female subjugation manifest in supposedly liberated relationships. Even spatially constrained, Martineau-Ducastel always prove cinematic. The charged off-screen space, the camera exploring others’ reactions to monologues, blocks of neon color, and dance/musical interludes express moral perspectives and individual feeling. The film reaches its visual-emotional peak when a character longs for purity while a cloudy sunrise reflects on the image of the 5 characters in search of revenge, control, and healing. Martineau-Ducastel silhouette them in the morning light of compassion.

[TrueFaith77]

15.Guermantes (Christophe Honore): grade: B-

“Boo! Self-indulgent bull****!” screamed a man at a Lincoln Center screening of the new Honore film. I think the film’s unorthodox perspective on COVID got under the New Yorker’s skin. Honore, playing himself, refuses to make his art a “slave” to COVID. Yet Honore feeds the trolls with a seemingly unfocused narrative—the improvised fictional bts of a real-life theatrical production of Proust at the Comedie Francaise. The most interesting rehearsal is a gay interpretation of Cyrano de Bergerac, which synchs with the best improvised scenes (Honore’s one night stand with a student actor, two older gay men arguing about a young lover). The taste of Dominique Blanc’s presence (big eyes, mischievous smile) in the troupe acts as a Proustian madeleine, an emotional and cultural slipstream recalling the late Patrice Chereau’s Queen Margot and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. This last inspired Honore’s own AIDS-era catharsis in Sorry, Angel. With Guermantes, Honore explores the personal and political impulses behind the artists that covidpocalypse challenges to find meaning and achieve catharsis.