Watching, or not, as ‘Marvels’ fail

Posted on January 18, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

For the past several years as Disney pivoted toward a streaming-first business model, the company line has been that instead of movies about individual heroes leading into a bigger crossover movie, they’ll have solo TV shows, and every movie will be those crossover-scale cultural events. The Marvels is the first execution on that concept, following up on characters and settings introduced in “WandaVision,” “Ms. Marvel” and “Secret Invasion,” and I’m not watching all that shit.  

This is actually kind of a painful thing, because I want to be the movie guy. I want to be the person you come to with backstory questions, but it’s 16 hours of “content” that’s cheap even by MCU standards, and I’m not doing it. I can’t do it, I have a job and a social life, but more importantly, I won’t do it. I have a shelf full of movies to watch that aren’t “content.” Disney’s explicit aim here is not to make more art, but to waste more of my time, and I’m not going to participate.

Framing this positively, The Marvels is a new experience for me! This is the first MCU movie for which I won’t have seen all the background content. How each installment stands or fails to stand on its own has always been a major issue for the MCU, and that issue is transforming. This superseries is 15 years old now. There are devoted fans who weren’t born when Iron Man came out.

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Sofia Coppolla covers familiar ground in ‘Priscilla’

Posted on January 3, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy A24.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

A long-noted omission from the great American tradition of masturbatory, near-identical musician biopics, Elvis has now been the subject of two movies in as many years – though in both films, Elvis himself is a distant figure. First, Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s extremely Baz Luhrmann epic about his infamous manager, Col. Tom Parker, in which Elvis is star performer whose human needs clash with Parker’s shady deals, and now Priscilla, writer/director/producer Sofia Coppola’s extremely Sofia Coppola moodpiece in which he is an often-absent husband more interested in pills than his wife.

Shooting in the fall after Elvis released, Priscilla is much more a response than it is a sibling, but the more important relationship is between the people who stood to make money from these things. Elvis was finally greenlit by the couple’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, who controlled her father’s estate and sold his life rights because she was running out of money. Priscilla, on the other hand, is based on Priscilla Presley’s autobigraphy “Elvis and Me: The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N’Roll,” and she’s listed as an executive producer on the film. Coppola approached her for the rights with the explicit intent of giving Priscilla a voice after a movie Coppola felt pushed her aside, and production was announced in September 2022. Priscilla is all about perspective, not from an artistic standpoint, but existentially. This is Priscilla’s narrative, based on her words from the 1980s and made with her blessing and oversight, and having seen the film, I’m not sure what the burning need was for it.

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More of the same excellence in Fincher’s ‘The Killer’

Posted on December 11, 2023 by reelentropy
“Paris awakens unlike any other city: slowly.” Images courtesy Netflix.

9/10 Director David Fincher, backed by Netflix, has been angling for awards lately, first with flagship series “House of Cards,” then a black-and-white stab at the great American biopic with Mank, and now The Killer, another American arthouse cliché of the lonely man of mystery. It’s effectively two separate genres, the deep urban neo-noirs like Taxi Driver or globe-trotting fantasies about secret spies with their secret ways like The Killer, but both genres are aimed toward the same point – you can’t kill your way out of loneliness.

Paris, December, post-pandemic- A black-gloved killer (Michael Fassbender) misses his shot and immediately becomes his employers’ new target. He rushes home to the Dominican Republic to find his girlfriend beaten and raped, but recovering well. The killer sets off on a quest that takes him to four corners of the U.S. to take revenge on everyone responsible.

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Cannes courtroom champ ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ thrills

Posted on November 22, 2023 by reelentropy
Because the prosecution is so personal and puts so many parts of Voyter’s life under the microscope, the whole film works as a story about her processing guilt and coming to terms with the unspoken but serious flaws in her marriage, with the court apparatus only a metaphor. Images courtesy Neon.

9/10 Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall is another film that captivates by being a lot of different things at once. The evolving blend of personal and legal and of fact and fiction paint a complex portrait of human life, how it’s perceived and how it’s processed in hindsight.

Grenoble, France- writing professor Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) has fallen to his death in a suspicious manner, and his wife, novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), was the only other person in the house at the time. She falls under an aggressive, speculative murder prosecution that never has any evidence, but interrogates Voyter’s marriage and art for possible motives. This is accompanied by a media frenzy that is mostly offscreen, but hangs over the film. 

Voyter is German and Maleski was French – they met and married in London and spoke English in the home, but had moved back to Maleski’s hometown as the marriage spiraled downward. Voyter’s French isn’t strong enough for a trial or daily interactions with government officials. Additionally, because the couple’s young son, Daniel Maleski (Milo Machado-Graner), is considered a key witness and the defendant is going home with him every night, court officer Marge Berger (Jehnny Beth) is assigned to basically move in with them and make sure they’re never alone together, and they also have to explain all this to Daniel as it’s all happening. 

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‘Flower Moon,’ an unflinching portrait of guiltlessness

Posted on November 14, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

8/10 One of history’s greatest filmmakers is still going strong. Killers of the Flower Moon is everything you can expect from a Martin Scorsese picture – an emotionally driven, human look at a vital moment in history with spectacular performances, sharp editing and a pointed, direct look at the emotional truths driving the story. If it isn’t his best film, it’s certainly one of his most timely.

Fairfax, Oklahoma- Killers of the Flower Moon, based on the book by David Grann about the FBI’s first investigation, tells the story of the Osage Indian murders, which peaked from 1921-26. After being driven off their ancestral lands when Missouri and Kansas became states, the Osage Nation was one of the few tribes to buy their reservation from the government, which remains in present-day Osage County, Oklahoma, a purchase that included mineral rights. This meant that when oil was discovered on the reservation in 1906, the U.S. government’s go-to plan of just killing everyone until they left wouldn’t work. Almost 3,000 mineral “headrights” entitling the owner to a quarterly share of the Osage Mineral Estate were allotted to full-blooded Osage, each individual right worth more money than anyone could possibly spend. But crucially, until the law was amended in 1925, they could be inherited by non-Osage. De facto Fairfax crime boss “King” Bill Hale (Robert de Niro) oversaw a campaign to fuck and murder the Osage out of existence in such a way that the oil rights would flow to him, which was described as a “reign of terror” in the press at the time. At least 60 Osage were murdered or died under suspicious circumstances between 1918 and 1931, but Grann’s research indicates the death toll may reach into the hundreds.

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