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LOVE FOR SALE:
SEAN BAKER'S CINEMA OF SATISFACTION
Sean Baker has stepped firmly into the role of America's most sophisticated, articulate, and socially meaningful filmmaker.
Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach, and Mike Leigh should be falling over themselves, praising Sean Baker for his filmmaking gifts.
Not the least of which is Mr. Baker's seamless ability to slip intimately between American regions (Florida, Texas, New York City) to create thoroughly researched, locality specific, stories that ring like a bell with authenticity and humor.
Sex-work in America is the topic that Sean Baker continues to mine in all of his films.
Mikey Madison takes no prisoners in her fearless performance as Anora. Russian/American "Ani" works at a Brighton Beach strip club where she meets Vanya (Mark Eidelshtein), the over-privileged son to Russian oligarch, Nikolai Zakharov (Aleksey Serebryakov).
Shit hits the fan when Vanya's filthy rich folks find out that their son and a stripper are a thing.
Darya Ekamasova is hilarious as Galina Zakharov, a woman with way too much money and power.
The film's remarkable ensemble cast feeds on the material to achieve incredible set-piece action sequences that explode like indoor fireworks.
"Anora," is yet another film (behind "Starlet," "Tangerine," "The Florida Project," and "Red Rocket") that Mr. Baker wrote, cast, directed, and edited, is yet another quantum leap in modernday cinematic storytelling.
This is a movie that gets into your bones.
It is inspiring that Sean Baker is able to write screenplays with such precise novelistic detail about people interacting in overlooked aspects of day-to-day life in America.
Mr. Baker's dialogue is modernday Shakespearean.
Just stunning.
You want Neo-Modern-Realist Cinema, well here it is. Serious adult filmmaking doesn't get any better than this. All NYU film students should be studying Mr. Baker's films.
You can easily tell in its first 15 minutes why "Anora" won the coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes.
"Anora" is a winner, and an instant classic of American Independent Cinema.
Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.
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A wrench and a cat walk into a bar.
Ouch!
Preachy, insipid, wrongheaded, mean-spirited, and fossil fuel-driven, "Barbie" is by far the worst movie (or more accurately, commercial) I have ever witnessed.
"Barbie" is to feminism as a wrench is to a cat.
This plastic character has no charm, no grace, no sense of romance or inner beauty of mind.
To be clear, "Barbie" is not a movie; it is a rip off.
Evidently, it would have taken John Waters or Trey Parker and Matt Stone to properly trash the capitalist monolith of Mattel with a transgressive movie based on a sex doll turned pop toy icon.
And yes, Mattel (the toy company) produced this overlong commercial.
Could anything be more obvious?
And, yes that's right, the creator of Barbie based this popular landfill ingredient on a sex doll.
They probably should have left the sex doll parts intact, at least then it could have been used for sex education.
Too late now.
Corporate cult pap. Unrelenting dystopia.
Vomiting all of the time.
You've heard of "cult of personality," well this is cult of image, used to dumb down society in the service of profit. Forget about life imitating art, here life follows toys.
Gross. Really, really gross, and sour.
Toxic.
"Brave New World" indeed.
Aldous Huxley was right all along.
Here is narcissism, infinity squared.
Let's put it this way, "Barbie" is the exact opposite of "The Wizard of Oz" in every square centimeter of quality, metaphor, and nuance.
"Barbie Land" is a gated community inhabited by lesbian Barbies and gay Kens.
How do we know this?
When Ken asks Barbie if he can stay over one night for reasons he can't explain, Barbie says, "no."
Barbie is a Breadcrumber.
"Every night is girls' night" at the Barbie house of endless fun. This is not to say that sexytime doesn't happen between consenting plastic girl/women with no vajayjays. Feet are the operative sex organ here.
In response, Ken usurps that long revered animal of teenage girl fetish obsession, the horse, as his personal connection to all things manly.
Choke.
Barbie's red or blue pill moment. She chooses the one she has to buy on Amazon.
Oh the ugliness of its sickly sweet set designs. This commercial looks like Mattel spent $1000 to make it. And yet, they still spent way too much.
At least Mattel got their money's worth out of their herd of actors. Here is a perfect example of why Alfred Hitchcock called actors, "cattle." Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie, and the rest, are nothing more than mindless props.
Meanwhile, Barbie (Margot Robbie) has thoughts of...wait for it...death.
The death of capitalism, or the death of Mattel's profitable practice of polluting the globe with plastic?
Not so much.
No, we would have needed John Waters, or maybe even Todd Haynes, for such grounded satire.
Nevermind that David Lynch already gave us the movie that addresses female stardom lust, namely "Mulholland Drive."
This is more, battle-of-the-sexes Barbie. Equality, as a benchmark human value, is never mentioned. Take that, Simone de Beauvoir.
Valley Girl baby. Like, "literally."
"It's like barf me out. Gag me with a spoon," as Frank and Moon Zappa put it.
Anytime you hear someone utter the word "literally," I suggest you exit the room immediately.
"Barbie" is nothing more than a (nearly) two-hour commercial, designed to send hordes of potential customers to Amazon to purchase an endless array of plastic toys. And you thought only Marvel could play in that crap-infested sandbox.
Extermination of rational thought is this commercial's goal. For nearly two-hours, it achieves its mission.
Co-screenwriters Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig stumble over themselves with face-plants of dialogue and monologues that wallow in stupifaction.
"I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don't even know."
What is this "us" bullshit?
The crux of all nature's beauty springs from the female form. This commercial doesn't know what beauty — female or otherwise — looks or sounds like.
Immaturity and idiocy go hand in hand. In Barbie Land there is no such thing as individuality.
A trip to the OBGYN substitutes for a sexual encounter.
Where is John Waters when you need him?
"Barbie" is a chunky diarrhea stain on humanity.
Notice how you feel sick to your stomach just from looking at images from this worthless commercial.
Peter Bogdanovich was a skilled and informed master filmmaker and screenwriter. Check out "The Last Picture Show," and compare it to this filmic (sic) turd called "Barbie."
What a fecking embarrassment and insult "Barbie" is to society, and to Cinema.
Greta Gerwig is a hack screenwriter, and a remedial filmmaker at best.
You wanna see post-modern feminism in cinematic action, check out "I Am Curious, Yellow and Blue," and tell me how that beautiful piece of cinéma vérité art compares with Gerwig's commercial garbage.
I could go on but why should I. — Note the absence of a question mark.
I will say that anyone calling themself a "film critic" has no business giving "Barbie" a passing grade; if they do, they should turn in their credentials and quit because they haven't the first clue about Cinema, film, or movies — to pretend otherwise is just wrong.
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Born of Bernardo Bertolucci's fantasies about carrying on a purely sexual affair with a complete stranger, Marlon Brando's Paul and Maria Schneider's Jeanne meet regularly in an empty Parisian apartment for unbridled sexual trysts. Paul insists that neither one reveal their names or express any elements of their lives outside their insular world.
Theirs is a relationship built purely on carnal intention and experimentation. The stark atmosphere that Bertolucci creates allows for sensual realism to thrive.
Jeanne doesn't know that Paul is coping with his wife's recent suicide. Paul knows nothing of Jeanne's obsessive filmmaker boyfriend Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who is on the brink of proposing to Jeanne.
Written with assistance from Franco Arcalli and Anges Varda, Bertolucci plays liberally with dualities to address deep-seeded emotions that can only be expressed indirectly. Even the filmmaker’s noir-influenced image system plays with angles.
For the first time, Paul drinks with Tom, his wife's neighbor and former lover, who wears the same robe as Paul. The over-enthusiastic Tom represents an outwardly preoccupied inversion of Paul, who tests Jeanne's temperamental boundaries in similar but altered ways.
After revealing his identity and troubled situation, Paul tells Jeanne, "When something's finished, it begins again." He breaks the carefully guarded code the lovers have adhered to up until now. Paul's sudden turn from cynic to optimist (late in the story) must be punished. His refusal to adhere to his own rules is unacceptable. Not everything is permitted.
For all of the critical and public controversy about “Last Tango” being a pornographic film at the time of its release, the movie is a painstakingly theatrical mood piece that relies heavily on judiciously coded musical cues from Gato Barbieri's repeated motifs.
Significant is Philippe Turlure's bold art direction that draws on the work of the artist Francis Bacon. Two of Bacon's paintings introduce the film during its opening credit sequence. They influence the look of the movie’s saturated color scheme for the interior of the apartment where much of the story takes place. A two-foot high rust colored waterline surrounds the interior walls as if to suggest that the apartment had been submerged in a mixture of blood and water for an extended period during its storied past. The ravages of wars fought have left their mark here.
“Last Tango in Paris” is a masterwork of post-modern existential angst that attempts to reconcile a depth of social existence through its sexually liberated characters.
Rated NC-17. 129 mins.
Mike broke out Wavy Tropics Guava Pale Ale from Kills Boro Brewing for our discussion of Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS even if we had planned to do Lars von Trier's MANDERLAY for this, our 99th episode. Check out my silent shout-out to THE STRYPES if you go to ColeSmithey.com. Bon appetite!
