Category: Arts

REVIEW: Uncut Gems

Angela Gosselin Leave a comment

Watching Uncut Gems is like watching a car crash in slow motion. The film follows Howard, a relentless gambler played by Adam Sandler, as he races in, out, and around New York City to maintain his constant state of stress (and euphoria). As the stakes rise, we as an audience realize that this is no redemption story; it’s a realistic story.

 

The Safdie Brothers’ recent films have been experiences I am grateful for, but also experiences that I never want to have again. The film bears witness to Howard’s fatal flaw over and over, costing him his family, friends, and often dignity. Grisly imagery and unsavory settings are used to play off of Howard’s state of mind–and are portrayed in surprisingly beautiful and complex ways. I found myself in love with the visual and metaphorical concept of a shady jewelry shop, complete with fluorescent lighting and a glass double door requiring two buzzes for entry.

 

Adam Sandler, to me, has always double life when it comes to his career. Moving between thoughtful films like The Meyerowitz Stories and disquieting projects like Jack and Jill, Sandler puzzled me. Uncut Gems almost feels like the convergence of these two sides of his work–in the best way. His performance includes both his nuanced emotive skills and his somewhat slimy persona. He slides into character, donning the jewelry and slim sunglasses to become this larger-than-life yet pitiably weak figure. His work is amplified with equally impressive performances from Julia Fox, Idina Menzel, and Kevin Garnett(! An athlete in a film with Adam Sandler that has a purpose other than pulling tickets!).

 

Some stray thoughts include: 1. I loved being reminded intermittently that the film took place in 2012. The highly 2012-ish details (like an IPhone’s dated messaging design) were fun to watch. 2. I’m not sure why The Weeknd is in this other than maybe being friends with the Safdie Brothers? I suppose creating a fake celebrity would detract from stray thought #1, but it still felt off and not necessary in the same way Kevin Garnett playing himself was. 3. I won’t lie, I really could have done without watching a colonoscopy.

 

Uncut Gems is a heart attack worth having. I highly encourage both Adam Sandler fans and haters to see what is sure to be a contender this awards season.

PREVIEW: Uncut Gems

Angela Gosselin Leave a comment

Uncut Gems, the latest work by the Safdie Brothers, came out this Christmas and is sure to add a little bit of excitement to your winter break. The trailer seems to point towards a film experience involving a game of stakes and highly stylized, eye-catching visuals. Good Time, a previous work by this sibling duo, proved to be a crazy ride of a movie and surely Uncut Gems will pick up and continue the kind of frenzied energy presented in the 2017 work. Adam Sandler at his smarmiest will be sure to entertain, too.

 

Uncut Gems is now showing at the State Theater, grab a pal and enjoy the end of an amazing year for film!!!

REVIEW: Little Women

Angela Gosselin Leave a comment

Little Women was a highly enjoyable (if somewhat saccharine) film. I wasn’t previously familiar with the novel, but after seeing this I looked into the source material and previous adaptations to contextualize what I saw. Ultimately, I think Greta Gerwig did a pretty good job at grounding and animating a PG story that has been told many times in many different ways.

 

Gerwig notably changes the plot structure in this version of Little Women, using the non-chronological order to reflect interesting parallels from the sisters’ childhood and adulthood. I found this be effective in conveying themes and character development, and with that, it also reflects Gerwig’s thorough understanding of the text. The ending, in its own meta way, acknowledged the fact that Alcott never wanted to marry off Jo’s character–in the same way the author herself never married. As much as I appreciate Louis Garrel’s work, I somewhat wish Gerwig took the final step of just eliminating his character and the convenient marriage ending for Jo. At the same time, though, I still can appreciate the awareness and nods to Alcott’s intentions reflected in Jo and her discussions with her editor.

 

There were many actors and actresses I like in this film, but I was surprised to find that Florence Pugh had the best performance of them all. This is the first time I’ve seen her work (to be fully transparent, I’m just too squeamish for Ari Aster’s movies), and I found her to inhabit Amy in a very believable and watchable way. Sometimes her performance honestly contrasted the others to their detriment. Maybe this is due to her character being more traditional, but Emma Watson’s Meg seemed a lot less three dimensional compared to Florence Pugh’s Amy. Lastly, I thought Bob Odenkirk as the father of the March family was an interesting casting choice. His comedic presence precedes him for me personally, so seeing him inserted into this drama felt like an act of satire. While that took me out of the story a little bit, I think it also created this meta-textual feeling that this adored father figure as a cornerstone of the family is a joke. The older March sisters and their mother are the ones actually sustaining the family, so at the end of the day, I think that choice (if it was an intentional choice) and that new meaning was smart and added another layer to this generation’s adaptation.

 

Little Women is an enjoyable film that makes you consider the nature of adaptation when one takes a look at the many, many other versions over the past 100 years. It’s interesting to use this text as a way of diagnosing society’s changing attitudes towards women and feminism, past simply its utility as a warm story of family and love. I highly recommend seeing this film and doing a little research into this culturally significant story and its implications through time.

 

 

REVIEW: Take Your Pick: Collecting Found Photographs

JM Leave a comment

Take Your Pick: Collecting Found Photographs, currently on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, is no ordinary art exhibit. Consisting of 1,000 found photographs from the private collection of Peter J. Cohen, it challenges viewers’ own definitions of what is art and what is not.

The photographs on display are distinctly human in that they capture the ordinary moments, places, and milestones in the lives of the people shown, or the person behind the camera. Since the images have no context, I felt a bit like I was looking into the photo albums of a stranger, and it was almost like I shouldn’t be there. Who knows what the personal significance of each of the photographs were to those who captured them or kept them, and what right do I have to be looking at them on a museum wall? While some depict weddings or similarly obvious events, others capture moments whose importance is unknown to museum-goers, provoking the imagination.  Many have people in them, while others show landscapes without anyone in sight, though the presence of the photographer can be sensed on the other side of the camera. A select few have captions scrawled in the margins or even across the photograph, documenting the images’ contents. Probably most strikingly, none of the photographs in the exhibition were ever intended to hang in a museum, but visitors can vote on their favorites to join the UMMA permanent collection.

On another note, the photographs are, as the exhibition description points out, a byproduct of an era that has now passed, and I found it quite interesting to consider this while I looked at them. Fifty years from now, what will the footprints of normal lives from today look like? Most photographs only ever exist in the digital sphere, after all, and so they will not be sitting out at flea markets in dusty old boxes. In this respect, Take Your Pick has an almost history museum-like quality.

I especially enjoyed the opportunity to vote on my favorite photographs, and this opened a whole new question: how is one photograph more deserving than another? Since I had no answer to this, I selected the images that I found most interesting, or evocative, or beautiful. I’ve included a few of my favorites in this review. Perhaps the point is not to judge or appraise each image, but to simply be in the moment, surrounded by the photographs’ humanity.

It’s not too late to cast your own vote, since Take Your Pick: Collecting Found Photographs since voting continues through January 12, 2020. You could also get a snazzy “I voted at UMMA” sticker! After that, the final selections to join the museum’s permanent collection, based on the voting tally, will be on view from January 14 through February 23, 2020.

REVIEW: Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life”

Joseph Patrick Raney Leave a comment

If we are given a free will, what we are responsible for? Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a meditative narrative that journeys through such a question. The beauty of Malick’s work lies in his consistent demonstration of deep meaning  through intricate layering, stunning cinematography, and an eye for the simple and the remarkable.

 

 

The true story of Franz Jägerstätter is of an Austrian farmer who conscientiously objects to joining Hitler’s fascist regime in World War II, undergoing bitter persecution and ultimately execution for such a stance. Throughout these trials, his deep faith in God and pure love for his family continually prompt an examination of conscience that progressively solidifies his inner call to honor the sanctity of all human life.

While this story of Franz Jägerstätter is considered to be Malick’s most sequential film to date, A Hidden Life goes deeper with what I would call a non-sequential analogous portrait of Christ’s Passion from the New Testament. As the audience follows Franz through his suffering that leads to execution, we are introduced to several characters that serve as representational figures of Jesus’s Passion: a judge as an interrogative Pontius Pilate-type, a taunting soldier, and Franz’s lawyer who acts as the Last Temptation of Christ, reminiscent of the Martin Scorsese film of the same title. Franz demonstrates that if we are given a free will and are capable of choosing the good, all actions, even controversial and solitary ones, have meaning. By refusing to swear any sort of public loyalty to Hitler, he sacrifices his life and the joys of home yet to come.

 

 

It is from this, however, that this film explores the dueling natures of freedom and captivity through juxtaposing sequences of Franz’s captivity with shots of his once-sublime home life. Malick captures leisure, family life, and earnest work to be simple and good, all in a truly atmospheric fashion that serves to encapsulate true freedom to live and love well. Having fought the good fight, Franz is executed. A final, long shot of him riding his beloved motorcycle home serves to represent the eternal resting place to which he journeys on. This film possessed an organic perfection that I have not encountered in a very long time. Suspended at the closing shot of our film, and still hanging in my mind, are George Eliot’s thoughtful remarks from Middlemarch:

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

PREVIEW: Little Women

Angela Gosselin Leave a comment

Little Women is the story of a group of sisters in the mid-19th century all trying to find their place in the world. The film is directed by Greta Gerwig, whose previous work Lady Bird proved her to be a highly insightful and skilled director and writer. Lady Bird also featured actors Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet, and so to see these great creatives working together again gives me great confidence that Little Women will definitely be a film worth seeing over this winter break, even (especially?) if its trailer portrays it to be slightly sentimental.