5/12/2021 0 Comments Best Films 2019
Gerwig keeps the bones of the book for this vibrant work, but she gently rebalances the characters and the way each of the March sisters Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Beth (Eliza Scanlen), and Amy (Florence Pugh) pursues her own particular happiness.It wasnt just that there was so much to watch, it was that there was so much that it seemed like we should be watching: Amid it all, hundreds of movies flickered too quickly through theaters and platforms.Everyone wanted our attention, from Disney and Apple jumping into streaming to Netflix taking The Irishman to Broadway.Its hard to believe that just a few months ago, we were sitting in a multiplex bearing the brunt of Avengers: Endgame, the highest-grossing film of all time and the culmination of a 22-film, decade-plus arc.
Below are the films that reminded us that there are all sort of ways for a movie to become an event, from an acid-black comedy from South Korea to Greta Gerwigs take on Little Women to a Senegalese romance to the return of Quentin Tarantino. Sama is Waads baby daughter, whose existence haunts the young woman as she films her husband, Hamza (one of the few doctors remaining), in his attempts to save another and another and another bomb-mangled child. Much of the film takes place inside the hospital where Hamza will do 890 operations in 20 days, but it doesnt feel like raw footage it has been shaped to force you to bear witness. You feel it would be an act of cowardice to look away from even the most tragic sights. The film, like the character, is in constant, nausea-inducing motion, which the Safdies suggest is the existential condition in a world with no moral center of gravity. What it adds up to I dont know, but it will take you a long time to stop shaking. Directed by Craig Brewer from a script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the movie has the lets-put-on-a-show feel of Alexander and Karaszewskis Ed Wood, which also celebrates self-actualization over actual talent and dignity well lost for the sake of fame. Her connection to this vanishing world seems inversely proportional to her estrangement from humankind, and her loneliness acquires the luminousness of myth. The film is hilarious in depicting the culture clash between stubbornly individualistic Americans (slow, with fat fingers, according to Chinese executives) and disciplined, anything-for-the-company Chinese workers, but the underlying trajectory is grim. Its likely that the Chinese idea of human workers as machine parts will yield soon enough to actual machines doing all the labor. So were seeing the worst of communism (become a cog, a zombie drone) combined with the worst of free-market capitalism (youre expendable in all ways). Who are the title parasites The poor who attach themselves to the rich or the rich who suck the marrow of the poor Or is the system itself the parasite, drawing its energy from the turbulent interaction between rich and poor By rights, all this should keep you up at night. Gerwigs overflowing humanism could have swamped a story with less wit and specificity, but the screenplay (which moves back and forth between a plush past and denuded present) is packed with revelations large and small. Unusually, the film is stolen by its Amy, the petite, husky-voiced Florence Pugh. ![]() Narrated by the elderly title character, a sometime hit man, from a wheelchair in a Catholic convalescent home, the movie is steeped in regret, not so much for what was done as for what was done but not felt. Scorsese wants this to feel like an old mans movie: Taking his cue from his increasingly infirm characters, he wont let himself hide behind motion. The principled paralysis becomes him: Its his most expressive film in decades. ![]() Above all, its a fetishistic collage of 60s bric-a-brac that transcends its inspirations, building to a denouement at once euphoric and heartbreaking. Once again, Tarantino has created a unique frame in which to examine (or maybe just to live inside) the movie world that, for better or worse, shaped him. And then it wore me down like a rising sea wears down an eroding coastline.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |