Election week arthouse binge part 3: American Honey

Posted on November 10, 2016 by reelentropy

Images courtesy A24.

American Honey is a vibrant mashup of a coming-of-age road movie and a smut film, blending shock value with a unique emotional experience.

The film follows Star (Sasha Lane), a late teenager in a bad situation. She happens across a traveling magazine sales pyramid scheme in a K Mart parking lot and becomes enamored with Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who invites her to join them. Star ditches her boyfriend’s children with their mother and runs off to join the circus. American Honey is the meandering, three-hour long story of her adventures traveling across the rural Midwest.

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Election week arthouse binge part 2: Denial

Posted on November 8, 2016 by reelentropy

The eye contact games are subtly one of the stronger parts of Denial. Images courtesy Bleeker Street.

Man, Oscarbate movies really suck. If you know what you’re looking for, they feel way too much like an advertisement for something you couldn’t buy even if you wanted to. They’re just, they’re not fun to watch.

Denial is based on the autobiographical History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier by Deborah Lipstadt. It follows Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) through said lawsuit, brought in 1996 by Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall) and finally brought to court in 2000. Irving accused Lipstadt of libel for calling him a liar in her 1993 book about the history of Holocaust denial, and he filed in the U.K. where the burden of proof in libel lawsuits falls on the defendant, not the accuser. Lipstadt must prove that Irving intentionally ignored the facts of the Nazi genocide or otherwise settle out of court and give legal validity to the claims that it never happened.

Everything about Denial is built around the goal of getting its lead actor an Oscar, and everything wrong with it flows through the problems with its main character.

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Beta Decay: witnessing in Black and Chrome

Posted on November 8, 2016 by reelentropy

 

Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

The cultural phenomenon just got even shinier and even more chrome.

In the year and a half since Mad Max: Fury Road’s release, writer/director/series mastermind George Miller has been talking about black and white and score-only versions of the film that he claims are even better than the theatrical release. He said they’d be on the initial home media release, but they were cut. This makes sense — immediately releasing a special edition leaves money on the table because no one will by the standard one. Cinephiles rejoiced when the Black and Chrome edition was announced for this holiday season, but what was kept relatively quiet was that this version would return to theaters last weekend.

There’s never been a movie that benefits more from the big screen than Fury Road, and there may never have been a movie that benefits more from a black and white conversion.

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Election week arthouse binge part 1: Desierto

Posted on November 7, 2016 by reelentropy

This is what most of the movie consists of. Image courtesy STX Entertainment.

Weeks ahead of potentially electing a bewigged narcissist whose central campaign promise is building a wall on the southern border, Alfonso Cuarón’s son, Jonás, makes his American writer/directorial debut — a film about a Mauser-toting psychopath who will kill anyone trying to cross the southern border.

Desierto follows Moises (Gael García Bernal) — there are just some minor, barely noticable religious themes at play here — one of about a dozen Mexicans packed into a truck crossing into the U.S. The truck’s engine fails, and they are forced to trek the rest of the way across the badlands. There, Sam (Jeffery Dean Morgan) discovers their tracks. He stalks and exterminates them.

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‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is OK, I guess

Posted on November 6, 2016 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Summit Entertainment.

Whenever I watch a World War II movie, I spend the entire time asking myself whether or not I should be watching Band of Brothers instead. Hacksaw Ridge is a movie split in two, and has two answers — “yes, definitely” and “No. Well, yeah, probably.”

Hacksaw Ridge tells the story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), who became the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honor after dragging 75 wounded men to safety* while under artillery fire during the Battle of Okinawa. The first half is tough to get through, covering Doss’ insistence on joining the military and the boring courtroom drama that ensued, him meeting his boring wife, Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), a primer on his boring upbringing and all the boring abuse that he took during basic training. The back half, covering his heroics on the ridge, is pretty kick-ass.

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