natehoodreviews:

If you aren’t of the personal opinion that Jacques Tati’s last film was Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist (2010)—the heartbreaking animated story of an aging magician and a young woman who thinks his powers are real that was based on a previously unproduced script Tati wrote for his estranged eldest daughter—then his final feature was his made-for-Swedish-television Parade. If The Illusionist was a summation of Tati’s worldview and convictions on the human condition, then Parade acts as a similar summation of his feelings about the capacities of cinema to blur the line between audience and performer. Filmed in 1973 at the Stockholm Cirkus, it features Tati in one of his only non-Monsieur Hulot roles as the emcee of a circus performance which he periodically interrupts with some of his real-life pantomime routines. (Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, Tati uses the same visual language he used for Hulot for his emcee, filming him only in long and medium-long shots and unceremoniously introducing himself by practically barging into and out of another performing group’s scene.) From the start Tati makes the point of transforming the audience itself into a character, watching as the spectators wait in line outside the theater, goof off in the lobby, and file into their seats. They even get some of the earliest and most Tati-esque gags in the film such as a bit where a woman asks the man sitting in front of her to remove his giant motorcycle helmet. When he obliges, the helmet reveals an afro that’s even bigger. As the show continues we get the expected revue of circus acts: a magic show, tumblers, clowns, musical performances. But Tati periodically cuts to members of the audience whose antics become just as important to the texture of the film as the professional ones on the stage. Some of them are revealed to be audience plants like a nondescript man in a suit who’s revealed as an acrobat during a routine with a live donkey. But others are clearly just extras. Nevertheless they take on lives of their own, most importantly two children Tati turns his camera on at the end of the film to record their spontaneous play among the abandoned props. Tati’s message is clear: a show is never just the show itself—it’s the people in the stands and their reactions that brings things to life.

natehoodreviews:

Spike Lee’s movies refuse to exist in a vacuum. They’re always reflections and responses to the world around them, to the course of popular (read: white) cinema, to the arc of God’s justice in the face of man’s injustice. His new film Da 5 Bloods may be his most ambitious yet, a bold attempt to reconcile the contributions of black soldiers in the Vietnam War, the lingering effects of Western colonialism in the Third World, the valorization of American soldiers in Hollywood cinema, and the looming shadow of the Trump administration overhanging the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Yet ultimately, that expansiveness is one of the reasons why the film struggles to reach its full potential. For one, it lacks the laser focus that makes his longer movies fly by—though only nineteen minutes longer than his last film BlacKkKlansman (2018), Da 5 Bloods feels at least an hour longer. Much of this is due to the first act which feels oddly perfunctory for a filmmaker like Lee who takes such giddy pleasure in playing with and subverting traditional storytelling expectations. Much of its feels like he shot it on autopilot. We meet four African American Vietnam veterans who return to Vietnam in the modern day to recover the remains of their beloved squad leader “Stormin’ Norm” Holloway (Chadwick Boseman)…and the massive shipment of gold bricks pilfered from the US Army payroll they buried near him. Along they way they’re joined by David (Jonathan Majors), the son of their unofficial leader Paul (Delroy Lindo), a deeply traumatized and emotionally unstable man who, to risk minor spoilers, becomes the Humphrey Bogart to the expedition’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Things only snap to life after the first hour once they recover Norm’s remains and the treasure—we can practically feel Lee’s interest waking up as Da 5 Bloods transforms from recycled war film to deeply troubling exploration of guilt (both national and personal), grief, mental illness, male camaraderie, fatherhood, and, surprisingly, patriotism. Lee never quite gets his disparate thematic considerations to emulsify, but when the movie works it’s positively galvanic, particularly the scenes involving Lindo who might have the most captivating screen presence of any character in any Lee film since Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X. The scenes near the end where he addresses the camera like a maddened Shakespearean villain giving asides to the audience is the stuff of nightmares and Oscar clips.

natehoodreviews:

There’s something distinctly Lovecraftian about Kim Jin-won’s Warning: Do Not Play. No, there are no Old Gods, no extra-dimensional aliens, nor any faux-Darwinian racism. The Lovecraftian flavoring comes from its protagonist’s incessant, unstoppable, unappeasable curiosity. Like so many of Lovecraft’s protagonists who followed clues and bread crumbs against all common sense to uncover forbidden rites, blasphemous temples, and inconceivable monstrosities, Jin-won’s hero finds herself helpless at the hands of her own need to know what shouldn’t be known. The film follows Mi-Jung (Seo Ye-ji), a rookie film director who made waves at film festivals with a short film but now finds herself stuck with a case of artist’s block for her follow-up. After hearing a rumor about a mysterious student film from a nearby university which was hushed up after it supposedly drove people screaming from the theater, she goes in search of it. Her research eventually leads her to discover that, yes, the film is real and, what’s more, its director Jae-Hyun (Jim Seon-kyu) was clearly driven insane by the experience. But instead of taking Jae-Hyun’s desperate warning to forget the film when they meet seriously, she soldiers on to discover a secret lair in a nondescript suburb that would make Kevin Spacey’s John Doe from Se7en (1995) feel right at home. Every red flag imaginable shows up to warn Mi-Jung away: eerie red lights, a decrepit interior, wooden crosses strewn over everything. The kicker: a room sealed with a giant padlock straight out of a Looney Tune. But against all common sense (and self-preservation instincts), she breaks the lock, retrieves the only surviving copy of the haunted film, and gets herself targeted by an old-fashioned murder ghost. What can you say? Curiosity’s a killer. The rest of Warning: Do Not Play plays like a traditional ghost story made slightly more interesting by a layer of self-reflection on horror filmmaking and its capacity to exorcise and heal past trauma. Both Mi-Jun and Jae-Hyun turned to horror filmmaking for the catharsis it allowed them to achieve from their traumatic childhoods, and indeed Mi-Jun finds herself using her phone’s camera as a weapon to simultaneously shield herself from the supernatural and capture it so its existence can be proven. With more than its fair share of effective scares, the film’s a satisfyingly ambitious chiller.