Short review of "Marriage Story", 2019, Noah Baumbach

Baumbach's "Annie Hall" is a mix between a Woody Allen 1980s film and a Pixar tearjerker mixed with sprinkles of Spielberg's suburbia.  He is being pulled apart between his wokeness, arguably a West Coast sentiment, and his position as a leading voice of New York's moneyed hipsters, or as we used to call it, "the intelligentsia".  It is fairly difficult to make a Hollywood robotic star like Johansson likable at all, and he tries, but the movie sits firmly with his alter ego, Adam Driver, both of which play characters whose names is not worth remembering. It is well filmed, and contains a fair share of sardonic humor, but it is not a masterpiece. Whatever internal war between elites Baumbach is fighting in his head, we the people are left outside of it.  Woody's hypochondriacs often were natural working or middle class New Yorkers.  Driver's character, instead, is supposed to be a transplant that made it but just feels like another bourgeois that got lucky and landed a young starlet in disarray.  I guess that being born into cultured royalty makes difficult to connect with normal folk.  Whatever grievances exists between these people, they're far from the zeitgeist that both "Parasite" or "Joker", to give recent examples, are tapping.  Baumbach is still living in a privileged bubble on which his characters can live anachronic phenomena like the process of real romance, professional growth and success and hurtful divorce. The eighties and nineties are long gone by now. We are just trying to survive.

Capsule review: "Parasite", 2019, Joon-ho Bong and "Joker", 2019", Todd Phillips.

Two movies that tap the zeitgeist.  The superior Korean film, maybe the movie of the year, is a dark comedy about social class differences, disdain and self-respect.  The American one is about crazy losers versus normal winners, a notable conceptual distinction.  None of them explain why there are those differences to begin with and why society is a pressure cooker.  They just stop with the possible consequences for an upper class that doesn't care enough about its underlyings.  This is the bane of the reactor, the path to reactionary movements and fascism.

Despite this lack of connection between class consciousness and the motives behind its existence,  Joon-ho Bong manages to execute a tight and brutal comedy with matter-of-fact mirror images of wealth and squalor. Actions are justified. There are no minutes lost in "Parasite".

"Joker" is another matter.  It lives in 1970s movies, especifically Scorsese's, and often just looks to shook the viewer.  The music is overbearing, similar to Nolan productions; the unnecesary slow motion scream "evocative student film", and the rest is a copy of the "Unbreakable" aesthetic, a far better film. Still, Phoenix is excellent on it, and it is the riskier production we can expect from a decadent Hollywood industry.

If you need to chose one, go for "Parasite" straight away.  If you can do both, then "Joker is an interesting curiosity that will be heralded by the always hungry fans of anything, living in the desertic landscape of American big screen entertainment.

Capsule Reviews of: "Level 16" (2018), "Scarecrow" (1973), "Alita: Battle Angel" (2019), "Weird City" (2019), "Kingdom" (2019), "Russian Doll" (2019)

"Level 16" (2018), Danishka Esterhazy.

"The Island" but done right. The recently celebrated Lanthimos, which specializes in this kind of cold authoritarian dystopias (even when dressed in period clothes), lacks what this movie has in spades: human connection. The classroom from "The Girl With All the Gifts" is mixed with a "Stanford Experiment" prison in this timely metaphor about capitalism and consumerism, dressed as a simple tale of a school taken out from the society of "A Handmaid´s Tale". It was disliked by many amateur reviewers on IMDb, and I can´t understand why. It is nicely shot and suspenseful enough.

IMDb link

"Scarecrow" (1973), Jerry Schatzberg.

An episodic character study and road movie with a young Al Pacino and Gene Hackman at the sublime heights of their game. The two drifters travel through the low-class parts of 1970s American society, with plans to become respectable and productive citizens. Excellent photography and exuberant public displays of character between the era of the white picket fence and the fall of the national dream. Trashy life seemed a lot less violent than contemporary social anomie. Was America freer back then, more open to alternative ways of being?

IMDb  link

"Alita: Battle Angel" (2019), Robert Rodriguez (& James Cameron influence).

A waste of talent. Impressive technological feat obscured by erratic pacing due to highly compressed narrative and a superficial teen romantic plot. Threads are not given time to breathe, and main plot points are covered in scant minutes just to get to a cliffhanger ending. You can make things slower and add significance to the proceedings, or you can cut all the relationships and use cues and visual shortcuts to reach the (a) final point in one film. What you can´t do is mix both approaches and stay in the middle: emotion is not deserved and denouement is sacrificed in the Altar of the Sequel God. Such a shame.

IMDb link

"Weird City", Jordan Peele, 2019.

Social Justice Warrior interpretation of "Black Mirror" in farce mode. Of the six episodes, only the last one is somewhat imaginative. The rest are a series of comedy vignettes augmented to twenty something minutes each. The first episode suggests to find happiness disregarding biological imperatives; the second and fourth make fun of "male losers" (nowadays called incels, toxic, and other names); the third one posits that given the option between helping your family and society or following your own selfish motives, individualism wins. Also for some reason a man is thrown under the bus, again. It will be lauded in the mainstream media, but I found it to be cynic, obvious, infantile and a waste of my time.

IMDb  link

"Kingdom" (2019), Seong-hun Kim, Netflix.

"Game of Thrones" meets "Train to Busan". What else can you ask for? The first season of this big-budget extravaganza is only six episodes long, of which the first and half of the second episodes set the pieces in motion for what it is to come. And when the monster mayhem finally arrives, it is in a stunning and relentless violent way that American series can only dream of. Beautifully shot, with the usual social commentary regarding classes, albeit simplistic for intellectual tastes. Director Seong-hun Kim is also known for the Korean blockbuster "The Tunnel". Winter is coming, have a happy binging.

IMDb  link

"Russian Doll" (2019), Leslye Headland, Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler.

Derranged "Groundhog Day" tale grounded by astounding foul-mouthed post-hipster Natasha Lyonne. Eight short episodes (a long movie really) for an engaging fantasy that fires in all cylinders once it reaches the end of the third one. It is the first great binge of the year. Shades of the book "Replay", good urban setting, intelligent comedy, and emotional denouement.

IMDb  link