Tag: movie

REVIEW: A. M. I.

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

I knew this movie was going to be sort of bad before I watched it; Netflix doesn’t put brand-new horror movies on their site unless they’re fairly sub-par. However, for whatever reason, I’m a bad movie junkie: I love anything campy or a little trite and easy to consume. Movies that make you analyze them have a definite place and value, but I’m doing enough schoolwork already.

So objectively, this is not a good movie. The acting was flat, the main character was cast way outside the actress’s age, the fairytale structure that A.M.I. followed to tell Cassie to kill everyone was completely out of place. It’s a step above a soap opera only in that the background music and sound quality are all right. Overall, the thing would have fit better on the Lifetime channel, where it belongs.

But the concept is still interesting; that’s why it caught my eye in the first place. Besides all of the actual cinematic qualities of this movie, the reality that technology is filling every inch of space in our lives is a startling truth, and it’s happening so fast we don’t have the time to reckon with it. Classes on Zoom, delivery of anything via an app, conveniently equipment-free workouts on YouTube, and virtual meetings have made leaving the house a necessity of the distant past. I feel like my body can’t handle sitting in temperatures below 72 anymore; I venture into the outdoors like a Floridian explorer going out into the Antarctic wilderness. I might snag a lungful of fresh air when I go for a jog long after the sun has gone down, but I come crawling back to the comfort of my computer in no time at all. Of course, all of this is amplified by the virus, but it is just a tilt upwards in a long trend with no endpoint. 

For a moment, I’d like you to imagine this movie was done by the producers of Black Mirror, and casted with actors like Daniel Kaluuya and Bryce Dallas Howard instead of a side character from iZombie. All technology-based horror has the potential of becoming gimmicky, and definitely dating itself in a few short years (the first movie in the Unfriended series, which came out in 2014, now looks like a relic of yesteryear with its old Skype interface). Simplicity is everything. It allows imagination to fill in the rest, just hinting at the depth of something gone wrong. If under different direction, and with a different cast, this movie could have made Cassie slower to blindly accept that her dead mother’s personality was captured in a cell phone she found. Her friends could have been a little less one-dimensional; I would have liked less overt direction in whom I should root for. Adding in some good nature or innocence to her victims would make their murders more chilling. Cassie could have periods of lost consciousness, showing us only hazily the work of her disintegrating mind. The audience should be just as bewildered by the events as she is, confusing justice and tragedy. I wanted flashes of the murders, just the creeping edges and muffled violence. Instead I got one or two camera angles of uninspired stabbing. 

I’m sure there will be many more movies like this one in the coming years. Maybe they won’t try to go beyond what they need to in terms of overtness, and will start straying farther from tired story structures. Here’s to hoping.

REVIEW: The Half of It.

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The Half of It opens with Plato’s Symposium as Ellie recounts Aristophanes’ creation myth. It begins as a film of poetic quotes about love, of loneliness and endlessly searching for another half, built on the foundations of archetypes and classic storylines like this. This movie is another succession of Cyrano de Bergerac, another story about high school, another experience about the desperate longing of unrequited desire.But within these frames, the characters give nuance to adolescence in Squahamish. Ellie, Paul, and Aster – enveloped inside their own private worlds that rotate around the different constants of their lives – feel the pains of growing up in different ways. They experience the loneliness of being misunderstood or unseen, of wishing for a greater life that’s both intensely moving and frightening to them.

Ellie is created with particularly fine lines, strokes that paint a complex person. She’s characterized by her experience as being “other,” as an Asian-American immigrant in a predominantly white town, an atheist in a church community, a girl who is in love with another girl. These subjects are explored carefully, and there is no right answer to anything. Most of the moments where Ellie grows are quiet and simple, without the cinematic flair of teenage romcoms.

The film uses its created environment well, the town framing most of their interactions, as we see Ellie and Paul again and again in the same places, each layer of the story adding another dimension to Squahamish. Despite the repetition, the cinematography is quite beautiful at times; there’s the scene where Aster and Ellie swim in the groves, talking about intangibly vast things as they float in the water, light and trees all around them.

The second half of the movie veers into more complex character interactions. While the setup of the first half builds steady momentum, the denouement still has to tie together issues that are only brought up in the latter half. The ending has mixed pacing as a result of this, with some plot points that are resolved in a timeframe that feels natural, while others come on more suddenly.

Towards the end, there’s a tonal switch too, where the film ultimately decides it’s not about “getting the girl,” and while romance is important in The Half of It, the movie becomes more about the seduction of a happier life, the romancing of the start of their adulthood. Their unrequited desires move beyond an individual and towards the world and their futures.

The Half of It encapsulates the longing for another half, whether it’s a person, or a dream, or a life. Despite the fine details added to the characters and their surroundings, the film catches the universal feeling of the uncertainty in those seconds before you reach out and make your move into the world you’d envisioned for yourself.

Check out The Half of It on Netflix today.

PREVIEW: Nosferatu

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

I hope everyone is enjoying the Halloween season (though truly every season is Halloween) by immersing yourselves in as much spooky media as possible. Decorations, candy corn, and research into ancient gruesome myths are all important parts of a healthy Halloween diet, but we must not forget to honor the great movies that never fail to get us into the spirit.

While the genre of horror has become something wildly artful and haunting over the decades, we must look to the classics that provided inspiration for the present. That is why I will be attending the 7:30 pm showing of Nosferatu at the Michigan Theater on Wednesday, October 16. The night will feature live accompaniment by our resident organist Andrew Rogers! The 1922 silent film follows the life of one of the original vampires ever to be depicted on screen, modeled after Bram Stroker’s Dracula of a few decades prior.

Until then, I will be busy learning how to apply a bald cap, because (of course) I will be showing up in full costume. I invite you to come sit with me (I’ll be quite visible), and encourage you to wear your own frightful fashion.

Tickets can be found at michigantheater.org.

Image result for nosferatu

 

REVIEW: The Goldfinch

Fareah Fysudeen Leave a comment

I fell in love with The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt this summer. I’ve said this many times after reading her first and cult favorite novel, The Secret History: that I am convinced Donna Tartt is the best novelist of our time, if not only my favorite. The intricacy of her genius is mind-blowing. The Goldfinch has every Fareah-esque theme a book could possibly have: large, sprawling, ambitious plots, a character we see grow and mature and break, glittering prose, an attention to the everyday, philosophical underpinnings, an incredible (!) best friend figure, unrequited love (not essential, but definitely a perk). I love The Goldfinch so much. I’ve reread some of the passages religiously. 

The story follows Theo, a bright and thoughtful young boy who loses his mother to an attack in an art museum in New York City. In his fervor, he takes a painting with him: Fabritius’ The Goldfinch. We follow him throughout his life, the secret possession of this painting threading its way through every milestone. The story is about a lot of things: love for objects, for art, for people; a search for meaning and value, and sometimes the crushing absence of meaning and value. It is a stirring and riveting story.

The narrative of the book is inexplicably tied with words, with prose, with life given form by language. It’s essentially part of the logic of the story, the central thrumming aesthetic question. Without the craft of language, the narrative seems lacking. I used to be a book purist– someone who believed that books were always better than their movie counterparts. I don’t believe this anymore, because I think that movies and books are two essentially different modes of storytelling, and so a movie adaption must be judged differently than the book. This being said, however, my heart still flinches at the injustice inflicted upon many a good book by horrific and painfully bad movie adaptations. The fact that The Goldfinch relied on language as an essential part of the structure of the narrative and in the history of Hollywood movies with bestsellers, I was incredibly weary of the film adaption. This, I believed, was one of the kinds of stories that movies could not capture. 

I went to the film with my friend who had not read the book. It was a nearly three-hour movie, dense and rich with images and motivations, trying too hard to encapsulate the plot of intricately woven nearly thousand-page novel. It is almost adorably endearing to me that any filmmaker would even attempt to grapple with the magnitude of this novel. It’s uncontainable! I wonder how Donna Tartt does it herself! Three hours is not enough! The psychologies of the characters are too complex, the relationship too deep, the philosophical underpinnings too expansive to capture in the form of film. Perhaps it is unfair of me to say this, and perhaps I am being unfair to the form itself, but they were much too ambitious. I think the film would have worked much better if they had focused on a particular aspect of Theo’s life and developed that carefully rather than trying to explain his relationship with Pippa, and Boris, and Hobie, and Mrs. Barbour, and Kitsey, and drugs, and artwork, and depression, etc etc. Choose one! You don’t have enough time!

Thus, in my opinion, the movie feels like a dilution of plot points, racing to the end. I cannot imagine the movie being successful as a standalone; without the book, it withers. Moreover, the images feel artificial to me, too constructed, and obviously symbolic– all in the varnish of a blockbuster-type style with oversaturated gray skies and all-brown and gray tones. I’m not entirely sure how to explain this, probably because I don’t have the proper film vocabulary, but it felt to me like the images were trying too hard to mean something. I would have liked it to all be scaled back, broken down into the elements of its true nature; not glamorized and made larger-than-life. I felt like I was watching a fantasy, like Harry Potter– and this was, intuitively, the wrong feeling for the story. 

My friend, who had not read the book, loved the movie very much, so perhaps this review is irrevocably restrained by my opinion. However, I did love that the movie reminded me more of my love for the book; when I got home, I sat down on the floor of my apartment with our dim lights while my roommates slept and re-read my favorite passages. If it could do that– spark joy and love, and remind me of what I loved– I am still grateful.

PREVIEW: Tigers Are Not Afraid

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

With Halloween well upon us, we have descended into scary movie season. While horror isn’t for everyone, there’s something about the graying skies and the melancholy cold that brings out at least a little bit of enjoyable frightfulness in us all.

For lovers and haters of horror alike, Tigers Are Not Afraid is a must-see movie. In it, a ghost haunting is shown from the perspective of a 10-year-old child. Part fantasy fairytale and part creepy supernaturalism, Issa Lopez’s film will amaze everyone in the audience.

There are several showtimes available at the Michigan Theater in the coming days:

Wednesday, October 9: 5:00, 7:30, 9:55 PM

Thursday, October 10: 7:30, 9:55 PM

Monday, October 14: 12 AM

Hope to see you there! Wear something spooky…

REVIEW: Downton Abbey

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

It is a difficult thing to leave behind one’s biases to write, especially when they are capable of making one want to projectile vomit on the movie screen for the joy of not having to watch it for another minute.

I try to keep an open mind, as most people do, especially when any form of art is involved. To truly absorb the work is to leave behind–or at least closely reflect upon–immediate assumptions and misgivings. So when my dear old friend Henry (who eats, sleeps, and breathes Downton Abbey–he’s seen the entire series at least three times over) asked if I wanted to see this movie with him, I said yes. Though I hadn’t seen the show, I had watched and enjoyed The Great British Bake Off with him, and that was probably the same thing. My love of art and my friendship with him, I had thought, would survive through anything, even the driest British drama.

But golly gee did I underestimate how throat-closingly sawdust-like this movie would be, even despite the gallons of tea the Crawley family guzzled over the course of the film. 

Never before have I encountered a story in which so much happens but I feel so little: royalty stay at the house! A family secret is revealed! Two actresses from Harry Potter were there! Yet there was little emotion. The humor was, I’m told, the subtle kind. So subtle, I guess, that it passed me right by. There are few breaks in formal tone, even when there are lines meant to be sarcastic or snide. Absolutely everyone has a stick up their a**. 

And I understand that this is a cultural difference between England and the United States, as well as the result of the time period the movie is set in, but these factors do not account for all the ways this movie was work to consume.

It seemed that there were only two or three scenes, with a dozen or two slightly different variations of each. Every two seconds a group of somber-faced Brits are in a circle sipping tea and talking about Troubles In The Family, or Troubles With The Royal Servants. In a word, this movie was…mild. A few more words I could use include: repressed. Unexciting. Bland. 

Meanwhile, Henry is leaning forward in his seat, barely blinking so as to assure he experiences the entire film. 

But given my loyalty to promoting artists, I did find some positive qualities worth mentioning.

Save for a few symbolically stormy weather scenes, the whole movie had a glow to it that should give the lighting crew much pride. Somehow they put a little life into the drabness of British landscapes and faces. 

The costumes were extravagant, glamorously gilded and suited for the characters’ level of sophistication. Costume designer Anna Robbins is a master in designing elaborate, multifaceted vintage styles. Working as the head of costuming for both the movie and tv show, she is tasked with adding the only flavor that exists in Downton Abbey. Despite the daunting nature of period wear, high-class styles, and several thousands of costume changes (how I wish for the sake of their budget that this was hyperbole), Robbins never falters. She thrives under the pressure of making countless extravagant patterns and layers, incorporating a great variety of fabrics and tones. 

                                                    

 

I hold that Downton Abbey is a somehow worse version of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Perhaps ‘worse’ is not the word, but rather ‘inverse.’ Rather than sensationalizing miniscule disagreements with scripted shouting matches played under suspenseful scores as KUWTK does, DA makes actual, often life-changing events seem unimportant by the sheer lack of excitement the characters seem to feel. Although visually appealing in some aspects, this movie was tiresome. Unless you are already a diehard Downtoner or otherwise enjoy movies that make you feel nothing, I would suggest passing on this one.