Posts Tagged: film

Learn from the films you love

To become a better film watcher, go beyond collecting favorites. Ask yourself why some of your favorite movies are the way they are. Favorites are idiosyncratic, personal, and influenced by forces beyond what’s on the screen. The more you understand your tastes, the better you’ll be able to find movies to watch in the future. And just as life can influence how we appreciate film, looking back on what we enjoyed can help us reflect on our lives.

This is an opinion borne out in my personal best of 2023. Four out of my top five pointedly reject the traditional “Hollywood narrative” approach to genre.

Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic western that explores systematic racism and unbridled capitalism without redemption, hero, or savior. The Zone of Interest is a Holocaust movie that engages with its horrors sonically but not visually. It “humanizes” the banal desires of its Nazi protagonists, which makes their actions all the more chilling. Past Lives is a romance that rejects an easy love triangle for a more mature vision where one can lose a soul mate and still live a fulfilling life. Anatomy of a Fall is a courtroom drama that avoids dramatic swings, explosive climaxes, and tidy resolutions.

Continue reading…

Killers of the Flower Moon‘s unforgettable ending

Of the many films I’ve seen this year, nothing has shaken me the way Killers of the Flower Moon has. Director Martin Scorsese subverts film archetypes and genre conventions to deliver a bleak, indelible story on evil and capitalism rooted in America’s past.

(Spoilers ahead for Killers, which you should watch.)

Most of Killers centers on WWI vet Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), and other white settlers as they scheme against the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma. The Indigenous tribe became wealthy from oil rights. Hale and his crew lie, steal, and murder Osage to secure their wealth.

Most of the screen time is from the white characters’ perspective, which I found occasionally frustrating. With his gullibility and unquestioning criminal mindset, DiCaprio as Burkhart is a less compelling character to watch than the supporting players around him. Lily Gladstone, who plays Ernest’s wife, Mollie, delivers a quietly devastating, pitch-perfect performance but disappears from large stretches of the film. One could point to Scorsese’s long history with gangster crime stories and playing into his comfort zone.

Continue reading…

Niche Consumption Theory challenges the mainstream

Every mainstream entertainment hit – from Marvel to Call of Duty, to prestige TV – is at more risk of a rapid decline in popularity than ever. Fueled by the internet and on-demand media, alternative options are compelling and diversified. So when the audience sees a weak spot in their entertainment library, many bail to new possibilities, even across different forms of media, and don’t look back. Let’s call it Niche Consumption Theory (NCT).

NCT is an underrated contributor to The Marvels bombing. While many factors sunk the box office, from middling reviews to superhero fatigue, it’s exacerbated by having so many great leisure substitutes to swap in. TikTok, PS5, mobile gaming, Netflix reality TV, VR, and other alternatives can look very appealing against a mid-tier MCU film. They won’t match the spectacle of a $300 million movie, but they don’t have to.

Continue reading…

Mississippi Grind and film’s rocky future

The 2015 comedy-drama Mississippi Grind – the movie’s release alongside the build up and aftermath of its principal cast and crew – tells you everything you need to know about the dire state of today’s big budget movies. Grind is an underseen road trip, buddy comedy, and character study of two struggling gamblers played by Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn.

Everything about Reynolds, Mendelsohn, and the film’s directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, before their intersection on Grind chart a familiar path for budding Hollywood talent.

Reynolds had a traditional leading man trajectory. He started his career in Canadian soap operas before decamping to Hollywood and landing supporting parts in a few studio comedies. Success led him into other genres (Blade Trinity) and a few breakthrough leading roles in bigger budget fare like Green Lantern and the rom-com The Proposal. By 2010, he was rich, famous, and a movie star. Around this time, he mixed in some more eclectic work with small indie directors, including Atom Egoyan (The Captive) and Persopolis director Marjane Satrapi (The Voices).

Continue reading…

Making the most out of your TIFF experience

I learned a lot at TIFF 23, ending the festival with a more informed strategy for approaching future years. The sheer time on the ground helped; it was my first year as a volunteer and my first as a more devoted attendee, bumping up from three screenings in 2022 to eighteen this year.

You may be reading this and have never been to any film festival, but you’re considering watching a movie or two at TIFF 24. Or you’ve been doing this for many years and will happily pre-pay for thirty-plus films, sight unseen. Regardless of experience or interest, I have advice to make the most of your time at the festival.

Continue reading…

Just film strike, dire future

I support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes; the financial inequity between studio executives, working actors, and writers is untenable. But an extended industry-wide pause could be disastrous to theaters and small independent movies. The strike slowdown will also accelerate a general decline of film (at least beyond the biggest blockbusters) as mainstream entertainment.

Let’s start with some cold economics: any remaining 2023 movie with major stars is at risk for a delay into next year. Studios see a marketing campaign without major talent as too high a burden. Stars working the red carpet and holding press junkets generate vast social media shares and journalist coverage. And for minor releases, one prominent actor can be the defining reason for a film to get noticed.

We’re seeing some of these delays already play out. Sony pushed two major 2023 releases – Kraven the Hunter and a Ghostbusters sequel – into 2024. Warner may pivot the blockbuster Dune 2 into next year as well. A24 bumped back the Tilda Swinton starring Problemista from August to an indeterminate date. As the strike extends, expect related announcements to only accelerate.

Continue reading…

Past Lives and the power of small scale drama

The new drama Past Lives centers on three ordinary people taking realistic actions, leading to messy outcomes. There are no clean Hollywood endings, heroes, or villains. Characters don’t die. Nobody is saving the world. Writer-director Celine Song challenges audience expectations of Hollywood escapism and genre conventions and, in the process, makes a riveting movie.

Reflecting on the forty-plus films I’ve seen this calendar year, three of my favorites – 2020’s The Nest, 2022’s Saint Omer, and Past Lives – share the same small scale and grounded feel.

Each film has different aims and subject matter. The Nest follows a rich family moving to 80s England for business opportunities. Saint Omer is a French courtroom procedural covering a woman accused of infanticide. Past Lives centers on two childhood friends who split apart, later in life reunited.

Continue reading…

Tár’s bold opening act

Tár is one of my favorite movies from 2022, thanks to a herculean performance by Cate Blanchett alongside Todd Field’s bold direction. For Field, this is only his third feature as director and his first in sixteen years. With such sporadic output and little connective tissue to his past work, I find his contributions to Tár fascinating to dissect. The film is Kubrickian in its clinical detail, subtle yet purposeful, messy and enigmatic, with an open provocation for the audience to get on board with the film’s unique wavelength or head for the exits.

Nowhere is that challenge clearer than in Tár’s opening thirty or so minutes. Like the fictitious composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Blanchett), the opener is bold and uncompromising in a way that feels tailor made to rankle some audiences. On an otherwise sparsely attended weeknight screening, I saw several moviegoers visibly impatient, sighing and shifting audibly in their seats.

Before I dive into that opening, it’s essential to set the larger context: Tár is a nearly three hour movie for which most is a patient “slice of life” character study. We learn about Tár (Blanchett) as she works through her musical projects and interacts with her wife and colleagues. Except for a guest lecture at Juilliard where Tár criticizes a student, onscreen conflict is mostly muted for the opening half or so of the film.

Continue reading…

The Netflix earnings slump

After a decade of rapid growth, Netflix took a tumble over the past quarter, for the first time losing more subscribers than it signed up. Wall Street’s reaction has been swift, with the market slashing Netflix’s valuation to less than half of its value from a few weeks prior.

Many schadenfreude-fueled takes revel in watching the king of streaming take a hit, but Netflix’s downturn won’t improve film watching habits or shake up streaming’s ascendance. The availability and discoverability challenges on streaming – clunky user interfaces, ruthless algorithms – won’t improve. Mega budget streaming sites will survive. What will change are the type of shows and movies that streaming sites buy, produce, and green light going forward.

Continue reading…

Why movies are getting longer

Mainstream movies have crept up in length. A few years ago, feature-length films regularly ran a tight 90 or 100 minutes; today, that brevity feels increasingly rare. Almost half of the movies I watched that came out in 2021 ran for 130 minutes or longer, many from genres that historically tend to be shorter: action (F9, No Time to Die, The Matrix Resurrections, The Suicide Squad), biopics (King Richard), coming of age comedy romances (Licorice Pizza, Red Rocket), and neo-noir (Nightmare Alley). I suspect inflated runtimes trend beyond my tastes.

Superhero movies are a significant influence. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics have produced the biggest movies around for almost a decade, seen worldwide with record profits, and generate endless discourse everywhere from film journals to Twitter. They also tend to run long. Most MCU movies have a runtime over two hours, with installments from the popular Spiderman and Avengers series regularly exceeding two and a half hours.

Continue reading…