It seems like advertising is a good enough place as any to start. Maybe that’s because MCU movies themselves are starting to feel less like the art/entertainment that the marketing and advertising is designed to support and more like merely an extension of that marketing and advertising. On the day Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was released, May 6th, I saw an online ad for it. The text of the ad read, “The Marvel universe will never be the same.” I had already attended a press screening for the movie four days earlier, so I knew that claim was basically bullshit.
Things happen in Multiverse of Madness. There’s even a major development in the movie’s final minutes that does promise to change Dr. Stephen Strange in a fundamental way. But, as is increasingly the issue with these movies, the entirety of what comes before that moment feels like a flimsy excuse to get us there, not so that we can marvel (pun completely intended) at the development within the movie itself, but so we can be excited for what this change will mean for future installments.
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In the opening scenes of Shirley, central character and audience surrogate Rose Nemser meets the writer Shirley Jackson at a house party. Rose and her husband, Fred, will be houseguests of Jackson and her husband, literary critic and Bennington College English professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, while the newlywed Nemsers look for their own place. Fred has just accepted a job in the English department at Bennington, and Stanley is to be Fred’s mentor.
Upon their meeting at the party, Rose compliments Shirley’s recently published short story, The Lottery. She tells Shirley that reading it “made me feel thrillingly horrible.” There is no more apt description for my own emotional state while watching Shirley. It is a thrillingly horrible experience, perhaps the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Any fan of Shirley Jackson’s work should be entranced by it.
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Is there anything better than being in love when you’re seventeen? Is there anything worse than being in love when you’re seventeen? The dizzying emotional highs and lows entwined with the answers to those questions are only part of the boundless beauty contained in Call Me by Your Name. As it unspooled before me, one word in particular kept returning to me again and again. I only want to share the word with you if I can first strip out any negative connotation it has. Everything about Call Me by Your Name – its lush cinematography, its meticulous pacing, its devastating performances – is languid. Not in the sense that it’s weak or frail or feeble, which are the negative synonyms associated with the word. No, this film is relaxed, unhurried, and leisurely in building the love story that by the end is emotionally pulverizing. But this isn’t just a love story. It’s also a coming-of-age story as well as a sexual awaking story.
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Every frame of The Shape of Water seems to live and breathe with a magic that’s only possible on screen. Whether it’s the heavily saturated and precisely chosen color scheme, or the gritty, grimy feel of every location, the movie is full to bursting with visual inventiveness. It’s also very full of ideas. This is a fable about our not so distant past, and it also has something to tell us about our present.
Set in early 1960s Baltimore, Water takes place almost exclusively in two locations. One is a top-secret government laboratory, the other is the apartment of our hero, the mute Elisa Esposito. Elisa is a janitor working the night shift at the lab. The Cold Warrior scientists and military personnel working there have a new project. It’s a creature the U.S. military discovered in a river in South America. They refer to this creature, which looks like a hybrid of amphibian and human, as “the asset.”
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Arrival is one of those movies that depends almost completely on a twist surprise that comes in the last half hour or so. That makes writing about it without ruining the experience for anyone who hasn’t seen it particularly difficult. There are plenty of really great movies that are structured this way – Fight Club and The Sixth Sense are two that spring instantly to mind. There are also movies that are weakened by depending too heavily on that one surprise to hold up the entire film – The Village and The Forgotten are good examples. It’s too dismissive to write that Arrival is somewhere in between. If it is, it’s on the high side of that middle area, more intriguing than not. That engagement mostly comes from the beautiful and strange atmosphere director Denis Villeneuve creates for Arrival. His visuals are complemented exquisitely by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s dark, moody score.
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From frame one, actor Don Cheadle’s feature film directorial debut pulses with kinetic energy and excitement that doesn’t break until the last credit rolls. Miles Ahead covers a few hectic days in the life of jazz icon Miles Davis and Cheadle does triple duty co-writing, directing, and starring. There are three major pitfalls that movies in the biopic genre often find hard to avoid: 1) trying to cover so much of its subject’s life that the movie becomes unfocused; 2) creating a glowing portrait of the subject that erases any real-life hard edges; and 3) following a standard formula of rising to fame/power from humble beginnings, a tragic fall from grace, and finally redemption. Movies detailing the life of an artist or musician find it particularly hard to avoid that last one. Walk the Line and Ray come instantly to mind. Miles Ahead deftly sidesteps all three. This is the un-biopic biopic, and it’s every bit as passionate and bold as the music of the man whose story it tells.
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