Tag: Books

Week in Review: February 19th – 25th, 2018

Max Mayo1 Comment

Spielberg – HBO documentary that is too long and too vapid. Its best on his early work and the commentary by Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, and de Palma during that period is entertaining. There’s a good documentary waiting to be made on that group. The main insight I gleamed is how little prep he likes to have on set, preferring to put himself into positions of uncertainty.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – This is epic. There will be more on Marquez in the coming weeks. He has an incredible ability to tell you what is going to happen and then completely usurp your expectations of how you get there by growing a character or a relationship in an unexpected direction. The complete Buendía family tree at the beginning of the book is an apt metaphor for Marquez’s approach. Ultimately quite pessimistic.

Black Panther – As refreshing and exciting as it is to see this pan-African created Marvel film, it is still at the end of the day a Marvel film. I’d rank it near the top of the pile.

National Symphony Orchestra: Brahms’ First Symphony

My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman – Normally my cynicism would devour a show so hagiographic about its guests; but, there is a certain boldness in a talk show blatantly choosing such an approach with a highly curated guest list. As if to say, “These guests actually deserve attention. Now let me tell you why.” The first episode with President Barack Obama succeeded, properly placing him in context of the civil rights struggle. This month’s George Clooney episode doesn’t nearly reach the same heights, though I was surprised to learn about Clooney’s humanitarian exploits and his breadth of knowledge in general.

Annihilation

The Joel McHale Show – (with Joel McHale). Fans of The Soup rejoice, its back on Netflix. Once McHale builds up steam, usually around midway through an episode, a certain delirium sets in with the studio audience that is contagious to the home viewer.

Illumination – Polish film from 1973 directed by Krzysztof Zanussi. It follows a young Polish man from the moment he’s admitted to college for Physics to the age of 30 when he is married, has a child and has just completed a PhD. Zanussi utilizes an unusually high shot count (~every 5 seconds) with each conveying slivers of the immense intellectual and emotional development that goes on during this time period. The film is ostensibly about the horrors of having to make these long-term decisions at such a young age in a rigid Communist satellite bureaucracy; but in todays Western context I find this is a relevent concern. More on Zanussi in the coming weeks.

Bob le flambeur

Annihilation

Max Mayo1 Comment

I wanted to like this movie going in. This is a $40 million hard science-fiction film!  And like the best science fiction filmmaking, Annihilation is atmospheric, visually driven and intellectually dense. This is very much down my alley. I wish Hollywood would greenlight a dozen of these each year.

Having read the novel by Jeff Vandermeer, I was intrigued throughout by a lot of choices director Alex Garland made when adapting the story. He abandoned all narrative devices that are language based – hypnotism, found journals, organic writing on the walls – and instead attempted to reroute as much information through the visuals. Nevertheless, the script is full of unnecessary exposition, but I was willing to look past this due to the fantastic cast. Portman and Isaac are the standouts, but the whole team of women have their moments. Getting Black Panther and this film back-to-back is proof of how rejuvenating minority led casts can be. Unfortunately, these positives were not enough to push this movie over the top for me.

In theory, the end offers much to discuss. But in the aftermath of Annihilation, what I find most interesting about director Alex Garland and his first two directing projects (this and 2015’s Ex Machina) is how much the central organism at the heart of these two films have in common. Ava and The Shimmer are mimics/replicants of human nature; Ava being a coded AI, trying to win her freedom as an intelligent life form; The Shimmer as an alien life form, ambiguously attempting to recode/replicate Earth’s biology. Both organisms are more or less successful and yet, there is no question for the viewer that they are not the same as humans. Compare this to Garland. He’s a director who is boldly trying to make the next science fiction classic. It’s coded into the DNA of his films with their plethora of synthesized references and images. From film history alone, he’s compositing Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Cronenberg, Carpenter and Scott. He studiously replicated it all and yet, just like Ava and The Shimmer, there is something completely inauthentic about the entire enterprise.