Us

Watch as director Jordan Peele dances around the ties and trademarks of a threadbare genre and then renders these tropes irrelevant with splenetic bites of satire and an audaciously intellectual pulse. He continually penetrates the horror genre with an irreverently political edict. Beautifully controlled, the macabre quality of the film lives in the slow pace of the film, the eerie sounds, the heavy political undertone and the unusual acts that are buried within the false safety of the many mundane ones. It feels oddly pedestrian, heavy in awkward symbolism as Peele struggles to strings together each concept, playing with and challenging its expectant audience. He wraps each frame in an echoing hypnotic rhythm, skeletons of Eminem's Five On It, manipulated, cut and thrown into various points of the film. 

While Peele's debut Get Out rests more heavily on a singular concept, in Us, Peele ventures further, affording greater depth, thought and consequence to his depiction of enduring systematic racism. This is his answer to "post-racial" America, a satirical, absurdist piece that seeks to incorporate his understanding of mythology, human nature and postmodern culture. 

The innumerable plot holes frustrate and antagonise the audience, but Peele relinquishes clarity and grace for the beauty bought by the vague and loosely defined, indulging in the space for interpretation created by the non-specificity of his frames. Rich in playful detail, in political commentary and perfectly measured, Us buys fully into antiquated satire, a piece of cinema drenched in symbolism, relying heavily on the horror of motifs. The film is affected by a chilling score woven with afro-beats and symphonic nuances. Disquieting moments are disturbed by sudden, unnatural movements, quick and constant plot twists to create a continuing guess game. 

Moonlight

Moonlight concludes at a cathartic moment: the camera closes in on Chiron comforted in loneliness by a lost love before cutting away to the visual of a smooth black head turning back to pierce the fourth wall, a dewey orb of darkness set against the moonlit seascape. The film's power is captured precisely in its conclusion as it provides no payoff, only the real succession and consequence of choices and mistakes made in a lifetime, plagued by an unyielding realism. This sentiment is echoed in its technical style. Moonlight takes the form of a series of moving moments that linger too long, a closeup that never relents, invading the audience with the harshness and helpless of every character's condition. It is a piece of cinema confirming substance to lie within the style, living in the music and the imagery, in the beauty of suggestion, nuance and interpretation. The dizzying concoction of grief, violence and torment, a carefully selected orchestra of events that culminate to an emotional climax where the film descends into a fever dream. Judgment blurs and characters act on whim and instinct and desire and the story is pushed into its next chapter. 

There is a quality of the unremarkable in Moonlight's intrinsic story. A young boy is neglected by his crackhead mother, bullied as a teenager, finds solace in lust and intimacy and as an adult is empty, lost and lonely. But herein lies the distinctive power of Moonlight: its essential character of humanness. There is push to develop its characters beyond their short name: the crackhead mother and hard drug dealer are not incapable but merely constrained in their ability to give Chiron the love and care he needs. The specificity and smallness of its story prove no bar to its reach and relevance. It is a piece of cinema delicate and profound in its soulful resolution.

Paterson

Paterson finds the tiny fragments of poetry which trickle through routine and rest in the crevices of ordinary life, swimming in the details of a particular place or person, hiding in patterns, in serendipity, and the largeness which affects the smallness of an individual. The feature evokes a stirring, patient kind of understated, suggesting there to be beauty found in rearranging the prosaic humdrum of mediocrity into pretty words, a sweet verse. The words written by Paterson (Adam Driver) are done so without a definable purpose. Paterson relishes in the pleasure of deconstructing his day to day with clunky metaphors and strangely profound prose. Every day is miles driven in a local bus blocks around a small town, strokes of a pen forming an ongoing love sonnet, and the patient words exchanged between a pensive man and his idiosyncratic, somewhat facetious lover.  

Paterson's poetry is far from exceptional, it is pure and unadulterated, tranquil, free from pretense or any forged grandeur but more often than not it lacks the elegance and sophistication of published work. This is verse quite plainly coming from an ostensibly content man who desires nothing more than what he already has, a fascinating concept given the dull, uneventful and routine nature of his existence. He rises early, but not before first cherishing a few moments in bed with the sleeping silhouette of his beautiful wife, eats alone, scribbles a few meditative lines at his driver seat before being interrupted to start work. Throughout his day, he finds time to set ink to his small book of poetry, he listens in to the snippets life he can steal from the conversations of his passengers and the fragments of community and drama he encounters at the dive bar he frequents. 

Visual & Sound Diary: Paris, Texas

To romanticise loneliness is a guilty pleasure, a sweet and shameful joy. Paris, Texas, a slow-burning mediation on the luxuries of isolation and escape, is a film of retrospective melancholy, flooded with a ripe air of mystery, implicit devastation and so exquisitely focused on detail, motion and silence. Wim Wenders is not the kind of filmmaker to stitch on superfluous super 8 camera footage simply to instill some forged sense of nostalgia. He uses every mechanism and technical nuance of cinema to capture the missing and unattended parts of a story told so often. The beauty lies in the strangely traditional nature of its background story for Paris, Texas illustrates the many moments long after a crisis and its spectacular events has occurred. Redemption feels almost irrelevant and in this, the characters are at ease in speaking openly and honestly. Told through a passage of visuals, the picture consists almost purely of a collection of single frames featuring single subjects on assorted landscapes. It implores the audience to reach for inferences and make our own conclusions. As the film is principally devoid of event, it settles for the ghost of drama and the romantic affliction which the biased retelling accompanies.

As Travis Henderson wanders out of the desert and into civilisation, pieces of a functional past life fall into his lap: a son, a lover, a family, a holiday, a mysterious conflict unknown or  suppressed from memory. To say more would unjustly draw the potency away from the story. If you can sit and watch and wait for the layers of the story to peel back and reveal the drama at its core, you will no doubt we awarded with a ghostly piece of poetry. Dutch Director of Photography, Robby Müller, complements the stark and eerie melodies of a score filled with the sharp bottleneck guitar strings with illusory imagery of the wide expanse of the baron landscape. He plays with light, particularly the iconic neons of the archetypal hot American desert dream. The film carries with it the painful kind of profound that resonates with the viewer, impeaches on whatever personal woes we carry, evoking, without falsehood or exploitation, intimate memory and sentiment.

P.S. Girlhood

 

The final entry to Celine Sciamma adolescence trilogy, Girlhood, has been dubbed the female reciporcal to Richard Linklater's Boyhood. The two films however, could not be more different. Unlike Boyhood, Sciamma's film is not about lushy nostalgia or some insight realised on retrospection, although audiences will undeniably be plagued by both. Girlhood is more concerned with impulse, growth and identity, as overworked as the theme may be. The film reminds how terrifying and volatile and harsh the world seems when you're young and how a hard-shell identity can be your anchor to safety. Predictably plotless, Girlhood finds incredible meaning in small moments, in slow growth, in defiant changes and in personal insurrection. Where Boyhood is a primarily talking feature, with growth demonstrated through speech and wordy self-expression, conversation (charm), Girlhood is a film wrapped up in visuals, in demonstrative actions, moments and events. It isn't indulgent in wordy conundrums like the narcissistic, self-involved poetry of any Fault in Our Stars. What few dialogues to take place in Girlhood are clunky, raw and authentic, recognising that teenagers don't speak like poets or English teachers in love with the sound of their own voices. They suffer from the struggles of self-expression. Inarticulate as they are, redemption is found in the eloquence of their movements - these are creatures of light, freedom and impulse.  

Girlhood dabbles in many issues: crime, sex, domestic violence and gender conflicts but exploits none, so that each significant part comes together only to form a derelict youth with mistakes and empty decisions. Girlhood's centerpiece comes in the form of Marieme, a marvel of a character who refuses to become a victim of her home life. She finds freedom in decisions she knows are ridden with consequences, finding the idea that any human being would deliberately sabotage their own welfare to be an exhilarating and liberating experience. Sciamma's work in capturing adolescence in its full, unapologetic form is patient as it is poignant, spirited and allusive.

85/100

88th Academy Awards: My Predictions and Picks (Ranked)

Cinema is the most commercialised form of art that exists. Nearly the entire film industry is based on the box office, on pitching screenplays and ideas to studios, revitalising and forming franchises, on marketing to an audience. What started as an art form with little to no money in it has become a field of investment and greed. There is no other way to explain why twelve Nicholas Sparks movies have been made, each slightly more terrible than the last and why Michael Bay has 21 directing credits to his name. This is an industry which almost tossed out Marlon Brando for being "unbankable". So you can see why a great film released in 2016 is something of a miracle. Most of these films come about in one of two ways. Firstly, there are directors such as David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino and Woody Allen whose work exists in the tiny sliver of the middle section of the Venn diagram: they produce films of merit with loyal and large followings. Everyone loves Pulp Fiction, Fight Club and Midnight in Paris. The only other way is via film festivals, where hopeful filmmakers fund the entire production on their own dime (or by generous benefactors), then distributors see potential and purchase the rights to it (e.g. Like Crazy, Winter's Bone, Whiplash). All of the nominated films fall into one of these categories. Each year out of the thousands of films which are released, there will be about ten great ones and the prestigious award incentive, the Academy Awards, are usually the closest to distinguishing these.

Below are both my predictions and my personal choices.

P.S. Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, an analogical symphony of artful, vibrant graphics, drilled into a smart and consistent rhythm with the aid of a tight, marching score and crisp, rich dialogue, riddled with epiphanies, clarity, insight and quirks, is a film still inferior to its screen associate The Social Network. It thrives on the same intellectual backbone, owing largely to Aaron Sorkin's love of the slippery, spoken word, and similar to the beauty of David Fincher's discipline, Danny Boyle was careful to harness in any murmur of pretentiousness so that its lettered fashion can be enjoyed guiltless. The hundred-mile-an-hour dialogue and villainy of its protagonist are all delicious attributes of Sorkin's portrayal of two tech giants, Jobs and Zuckerberg. Michael Fassbender affords a more refined representation of a different man than Jesse Eisenberg, with a truly formative performance but Eisenberg's character is better written, just as egotistical and ingenious but more complex, exposed and iconic in its egomania.

The structure of Steve Jobs is really a thing to admire, a mighty spectacle, the entire film neatly arranged  into 3 parts, with all its irresistible catharsis spilling out before product launches, seminal points in the actual life of the actual Steve Jobs. There is an undeniable charm to its unhinged messiness but it falters as it comes together a film with excellent parts which do not necessarily work together. And this is where The Social Network surpasses. For where Fincher's film is a seamless tech package and an all-in masterpiece, at times Boyle's love for visual innovation and Sorkin's rapid-fire dialogue only distract and detract. At these moments, the film lingers dangerously close to one that can only be enjoyed purely as a extravaganza from a safe distance where insight can never be grasped. These films are not twins, they are brothers, and like Facebook installs perfectly in app form to every Apple device, the films work together, illustrating events in the world of modern technology in a similarly gratifying, uniformly excellent, enterprising manner. 

82/100

The Revenant

The Revenant is a film bathed in brutality, featuring a primal kind of beauty shot through gritty, unforgiving lenses, indulgent in its unrelenting violence. The sweeping grandeur of the picture is formed on the momentum of its visceral imagery, immeasurable precision and nuance lie within every stroke and shot. This is cinema that has your heart sitting in your throat, your fingers clutching your seat as every sight and sound assaults your senses, creating the calamitous and joyous product of a hearty Western thriller, a trying survival tale and a vengeance story all in one. It settles as a film that no less demands your focus and unquestionably deserves it, affirming its value with the raging melancholy, anger, hate, fear, urgency, and pain that is built so unceremoniously into every second of the film. The sprawling story, a cosmic creature which swells and intensifies, is enriched by an array of disturbed sub-plots as the audience is pulled deeper and deeper into the deliciously unhinged experience of breathing alongside a revenant, maddened and driven to every act by grief. 

Hugh Glass (Leonardo Di Caprio), his half-native son and his only surviving companions, after escaping a savage surprise attack on their fur trapping bivouac by Arikara Native Americans, begin their journey back to their outpost. While trekking to safety, out of the reaches of the bloodthirsty tribe, Glass is brutally mauled by a female grizzly bear and left in a near fatal condition. A series of events, betrayals, deceptions and murders leads to his hunting team abandoning him. Recovery and pursuit take order, an aching desire for vengeance is not superseded by a need to survive, but acts as its complete motivation.

A Guide to Melbourne Cinemas

It may come as no surprise that my favourite places to be are cinemas. My city, Melbourne, is a kind creature to my habits (or rather manic obsessions), the various cinemas allowing me to rub shoulders with other cinephiles, or rather listen into their beautiful conversations and having me wonder why most movie buffs in Melbourne are middle-aged, wine-sipping, beard-stroking civil engineers who have friends "in the industry" and a bookshelf of screenplays in working progress. In the years since I've graduated high school I have come to appreciate Melbourne and its cultural audacity. Melbourne, like San Francisco and Toronto, is a melting pot society, made up, of, as I like to call it, klepto-culture, like the Quentin Tarantino's of cities, borrowing endlessly from well-established cultures. As far as cinemas go, there are hundreds in Melbourne and if I haven't been to it, then I know of it.

P.S. Sicario

Sicario is an assiduous, pulsating work of art, a graphic feature of inspired technical verve, tense and satisfying with rounded performances, charged dialogue and unusual utility of its lead character. With his latest feature, director Denis Villeneuve breaks into the main frame of action cinema - his previous efforts, Enemy, Prisoner and Incendies - terrific works easily overlooked by main audiences, a precursor to his most accomplished film of yet. Sicario, meaning "hitman" in Mexico, illustrates FBI agent Kate Macy's (Emily Blunt) rude awakening to the CIA's unorthodox methods of operation in utilising one drug lord to take down another.  The feature is brilliantly reminiscent of the the precision of A Most Violent Year and the technical nuance of the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, with scene-stealing villain played by Benicio Del Toro, comparable to No Country's own Anton Schigurh. Although ebullient and masterly in its execution however, Sicario cannot be deemed faultless, ambiguity is intended in this feature but it almost oversimplifies its content and threatens to undermines its integrity.  The element of originality fades in and out, at times forsaken in place of entertainment. Ultimately, the feature identifies as a traditionally structure cartel movie with well-established genre traits presented in a superb tech package: components of aerial camera work perfectly complemented with a heavy, ominous score. Villeneuve creates in Sicario a film enigmatic, brash and beautifully unrelenting, far from inspired but prolific nonetheless.

78/100