As you might imagine, a semi-autobiographical movie about one of the most respected and revered filmmakers ever produced by the Hollywood system is itself paying homage to the art form that birthed it. The pivotal sequence of The Fabelmans, in which the young protagonist Sammy Fabelman – based loosely on director Steven Spielberg’s own formative years – uncovers a family secret, is straight out of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 arthouse sensation Blowup. In that film, a photographer becomes convinced that he has captured a murder with his photography.
In The Fabelmans, Sammy has captured, through his obsessive moviemaking, his mother’s infidelity. As Sammy scrutinizes each frame, each stolen touch between his mother and Bennie, the man he thinks of as an uncle, he realizes that his idyllic family life is built on a lie.
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The critical rap on most DCEU films – especially those with Zack Snyder attached, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – is that they’re too tonally dark. They’re often too visually dark, for that matter. While titles like the aforementioned Batman v Superman left me feeling beaten into submission and desperate for a way out, the new take on the Dark Knight from director Matt Reeves, The Batman, had me mesmerized, fully in thrall to the world Reeves created. His film is every bit as dark as Snyder’s, tonally as well as visually. (Cinematographer Greig Fraser, who also shot Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous 2021 adaptation of Dune, listed Gordon Willis’s muted look for The Godfather as inspiration for The Batman.)
So, why did The Batman work for me where BvS failed? Improbably, I think it’s because of proximity to reality. Snyder’s films are bleak, depressing, and oppressive. They also don’t feel particularly connected to the real world in any tangible way. It’s easy to disconnect from them because the worlds created within them feel divorced from our own. The Batman is so hypnotic – and, consequently, so disturbing – because Reeves, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Craig, has crafted a world that isn’t ours, but that feels (to my great dismay) like it will be ours in another three to five years. That feeling is what fueled most of my discomfort and sick fascination while watching The Batman.
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South Korean director Bong Joon-ho is a master at blending opposing tones (see 2016’s Snowpiercer if you doubt me). That’s exactly what he does in his newest film, Okja. Half broad, outrageous comedy and half heart-rending, stomach-turning drama, Okja is beautifully executed.
Setting the tone of a movie is a big part of the magic of cinema. So many people contribute to the production – from actors to set decorators, cinematographers to sound mixers – working together to create a living, breathing world that draws us in. The director is at the center of it all, acting as the conductor, bringing order to the chaos that could result from hundreds of people focusing solely on their own jobs. And Bong Joon-ho is an amazing conductor.
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Sometimes a movie comes along that defies any kind of deep intellectual interpretation. It simply unspools its crazy internal logic before your eyes and dares you not to get caught up in the madness you’re witnessing. Swiss Army Man is that movie. It takes the concept of magical realism and twists everything you think you know about narrative expectation into a pretzel. For ninety minutes, I could not believe what I was seeing. I was so caught up in what would happen next, the full joy of the experience didn’t hit me until it was all over. Part of that was never being able to predict where the script was going.
The guys who wrote and directed that script, Dan Kwan and Daniel Sheinert (credited jointly as “Daniels”), establish within the first ten minutes that Swiss Army Man would be crazily, stupefyingly original. When the hero rides a farting corpse like a jet ski to escape a deserted island, I knew the writers were issuing a cinematic challenge. I’ll admit, I was hesitant at first. I can enjoy potty humor as well as anyone, at least in limited doses. But when Hank (Paul Dano) investigates the dead body that washes up on the desolate beach where he's stranded, all that happens at first is the farting. I wondered if that would be the extent of the writer-directors’ imagination. Then came the aforementioned riding of the corpse like a jet ski, with Hank pulling on the dead man’s necktie like a throttle for increased speed. Challenge accepted.
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