Movie City Indie Archive for July, 2019
Friday Movies: ONCE UPON A TIME …, Fassbinder Trilogy on Blu; Why FLORIDA PROJECT on 35mm?
Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio star in ONCE UPON TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.
ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD. Quentin Tarantino’s melancholy pop-rocket picaresque Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is the truest of true “hang-out” movies: key characters spend the greater part of their screen time getting from one place to another, wandering blissfully, even wantonly to an incessant song score, across a delirious period landscape, a wholly realized world. It’s also a Western, a war movie, and a snow globe, shaken now and again, of Tarantino’s fascination with the filmmaking process.
A swarming cast crosses the fates of three characters over three days in another time: Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio, hilarious and tragic, too), a stammering falling star with a drinking problem; his stunt double-turned-body man/dogsbody, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt embodying epic sangfroid), who has a knack for abrupt violence—“More than a brother but less than a wife” and Rick’s neighbor, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie, archetypal yet human, so human), a young actress who competes with the inexorable Southern California sunshine [Read More.]
THE BRD TRILOGY on Blu. A single, singular, boldly prolific filmmaker was an unstoppable force at the turn of the eighties, much as Godard had been in the early sixties when he turned out tasty, provocative film essays a couple times per annum. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the most prolific of the 1970s German New Wave directors, went out with his bad-boy image intact when he died thirty-seven years ago (at the age of thirty-seven), slumped over a flatbed editing machine after yet another long day of dogged work, plentiful cigarettes, bountiful beer, intermittent barbiturates, a taste of Jack Daniel’s and more than a tincture of cocaine. At the center of Fassbinder’s output were twenty-eight stage plays and forty-three or so films, including the magnificent parable of postwar German life, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and the epic fifteen-and-a-half-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz. [Read More.]
THE FLORIDA PROJECT. Sean Baker’s effortlessly headlong dive into a child’s imagination is a tender thunderclap, brisk, observant, funny, and built upon the writer-director’s customary attention to issues of class, and more specifically, the underclass. (It remains my choice for the best American feature film of 2017.) The Chicago Film Society hosts a premiere of a 35mm print of the movie, with Baker on hand. “Florida Project” was shot on film, but distributed in the standard DCP format. [Read More.]
2 Comments »Friday Movies: MIDSOMMAR, THE JUNIPER TREE, THE CURE, COOKED
Midsommar. Oh, shit: shit happens. Or “Holy shit, right?” as a doofus American laughs in writer-director Ari Aster’s second feast of grief, the anthropo-horror Midsommar, it’s not good grief, it’s grievous goodness: pain is protracted, agony prolonged, and so much of it is a manifestation of what is simmering inside its troubled central couple. Then the unforeseen pagan mysteries revealed under the midnight sun blow it up to nightmare scale. It’s also blackly funny, down to the brutal and extravagant final shot: a perverse post-Falconetti close-up that is both magisterial and hilarious. A character arrives, is anointed: avaricious beauty and brute malice make a final floral gesture. Aster’s detail-drenched, languorous, even ponderous follow-up to Hereditary is multitudes. [Read more.]
The Juniper Tree.The weight of the Icelandic landscape startles and captivates as it embraces and punishes its female characters; Björk, twenty-one, is sound and vision, grounded and ethereal at the very beginning, as she is to this day. [Read more.]
The Cure–Anniversary 1978-2018 Live In Hyde Park London. If a band’s gonna go through four decades of shamanistic repetition, these are dandy, candy incantations. [Read more.]
Cooked: Survival by Zip Code. Revising the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds of Chicagoans, mostly poor, mostly black. Urgent questions, asked crisply and well.[Read more.]
