Kids, get out your popcorn, and let me tell you a story about the space Viking, Thor Odinson. This isn’t Thor as seen in Kenneth Branagh’s terminally boring 2011 outing, which made the mythical god and his world as dour and operatic as possible. No, this is Taika Waititi’s Thor, which we got a snootful of in Waititi’s previous outing with the character, Thor: Ragnarok. As in that film – which influenced the general comedic direction the character has taken in the non-standalone MCU movies in which he appears – Thor, in Waititi’s hands, is here for a good time. But, it’s important to note, he’s not here only for a good time.
Right below the surface of all the sight gags and screaming goats in Thor: Love and Thunder – I laughed out loud more than once at those giant screaming goats – is effective and heartfelt pathos that gives the picture its emotional anchor. That’s Waititi’s stock-in-trade. As can be seen as far back as 2010’s Boy, through 2014’s What We Do in the Shadows, to 2019’s Jojo Rabbit and his work in the MCU, Waititi uses all the goofy humor to disguise more serious themes. His technique is as fresh and entertaining here in Love and Thunder as it’s ever been.
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It’s serendipitous that I came across the film Passing when I did. I happened to screen it as I’m almost half way through a staggering book about race – and so much more – in America by Isabel Wilkerson titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I’ve been making my way through Caste for about two months now. I’m a notoriously slow reader, and I’ve found myself only able to read so much of this particular book in one sitting. Wilkerson includes gut-wrenching, disturbing examples of the rigid hierarchical system in place in America to keep Black people at the bottom of society, known as a caste system.
The serendipity comes in one text informing and unlocking nuance in the other. It’s easier to recognize, because of what I’ve read in Caste, that everything you see and hear in Passing is a result of white supremacy. The very idea that some members of the subordinated – read: Black – group could gain the privileges and respect of the dominant – read: white – group because their skin is light enough to pass for a white person speaks to the ugly and destructively nonsensical idea of white supremacy and using skin color as a way to asses human worth.
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Hip-hop artist, music producer, teacher, and political activist and agitator Boots Riley has new talents to add to his resume: screenwriter and director. His electric film debut, Sorry to Bother You, announces a fresh and singular new voice in American cinema. The movie uses biting, politically charged satire to comment on a myriad of social justice concerns. Riley skewers issues like race, class, labor rights, toxic capitalism, and selling out with an outlandish and exhilarating premise that gets stranger with every passing minute. I can sum the movie up with one word: bonkers. The last time I used that word to describe a film I wrote about was over three years ago. The inventive science fiction (for lack of a better term) feel and unique sense of humor Riley employs in Sorry to Bother You makes it the first bonkers movie event since Mad Max: Fury Road.
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With his new film Annihilation, director Alex Garland is attempting bold, exhilarating science fiction that is on par with a master of the genre, the late Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The science fiction films that Tarkovsky made used fantastic settings and circumstances to explore the human condition. His film Solaris is a meditation on grief and acceptance that takes place on a fictional planet with mysterious powers. Stalker involves characters who wish to travel to “The Zone,” a place that contains a room that can fulfill a person’s innermost desires. Annihilation also uses a cosmic, head-trip scenario to examine human fears, mostly our collective fear of being wiped out of existence. Garland is masterful at creating a mood of existential dread and using a sci-fi backdrop to employ glorious, overwhelming imagery, but his movie never really gets below the surface of its premise.
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