Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) (d. Shuji Tereyama) It’s a young man’s film, screaming at the top of his lungs, from a provincial point of view, reacting to the changes in Japanese society, with a focus on the materialism and its entailing hypocrisies. The climax is an arresting tearing away of …
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After school special
Typhoon Club (1985) (d. Shomai Shinji) It’s an atypical coming of age flick. Apparently none of the teenage protagonists learn from what are supposedly life-changing experiences. It’s a relief to see such unsentimentally in the genre even if the teens sentimentally promise to meet up after the tumultuous night stuck in the high school. The …
Hipster life
Annihilation (d. Alex Garland) Less of a sci-fi flick than a hipster movie about multiculturalism–of all things! Garland parlays his problematic representation of the passive Asian woman as a sex robot from his well-reviewed Ex Machina (2015), where most reviewers ignore or seem to be unaware of this problematic stereotype, into a wider explication on …
Matsumoto parade
Went to the Matsumoto Toshio screenings. Saw two feature lengths and four shorts. Funeral Parade (1969) is by far his best work. Shura (1971), while good, is just good. His period films are not quite convincing. War at the Age of Sixteen (1974) suffers from indecisiveness. Is it a commercial film or an art flick? …
The help
Roma (d. Alfonso Cuaron) Raiding the vocabulary of Italian neorealism, Cuaron’s love letter to 70s Mexico City is delightful to behold visually but equally easy to shrug off as a melodrama. As a melodrama about the indigenous maid, the film falls flat because we don’t really get to see her, fully. She is a plaything …
Threadbare
Phantom Thread (d. P.T. Anderson) Lovely filmmaking. So much assurance, skill, and restraint. However, isn’t the story rather silly? Poisonous mushrooms. A timeline that seems outside of history or thoroughly concentrated and crystallized in that magnificent house. Even the past isn’t haunting enough: she just stands there. Another male monster, faded and fading, along a …
American vegan pie
Booksmart (d. Olivia Wilde) A female-centric spin on the teen movie, and specifically, the last day(s) of high school sub-genre. It’s actually quite sweet as it chucks the usual misogyny one finds in these films out the car window where boy loses virginity at girl’s expense in the backseat. Here, it’s girl-on-girl action and Wilde …
Don’t be a humanities major in Japan
After the Storm (d. Hirokazu Kore-eda) I want a clearer stance from the film whether it’s one’s personality or one’s time that shapes their material and psychological destinies. And if it has to do with the material conditions of a time period, I want the criticism to be sharper. Is our handsome protagonist a ne’er-do-well …
Say yes to the dress
Captain Marvel (d. Biden & Fleck) She’s the most powerful woman, according to her black woman friend. She’s like white feminism, powerful but not clear about the past, the history of feminism itself and the role WOCs and queers of color who also took part in feminist activism and critique. There’s a nice twist when …
Pretty guilty
Tabu (d. Miguel Gomes) Nicely done. Had I seen this years ago, I would have liked it more. Times have changed. Pure aesthetics especially in works under the banner of avant-garde and experimental are no longer enough. At what point is actual politics evaded in the parade of pure images? Tabu is a well-crafted movie …
Orpheus in Hell: Unlicensed Film Reviews 