THE BRUTALIST

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cheers!

 

A PRISON OF ONE'S OWN DEVISING

Brady Corbet Paints Himself Into a Corner

By Cole Smithey

 

Director/co-writer Brady Corbet has made an overwrought, unlit, postwar [fictional] epic with an unreliable protagonist that is as frustrating as any movie you will ever see.

An utter lack of pacing variety, dangling sub-plot threads, and a tacked-on ending make this four-hour audience investment hardly worth the effort.

Fictional Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) celebrates his liberation from a Nazi concentration camp by escaping to America, the land of a colder more hidden version of Nazi ideology.

László's Philadelphia-based furniture store-owning cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) proves to be an ersatz Nazi collaborator who, since moving to the States, has married a shiksa and switched to Catholicism. In no time at all cousin László wears out his welcome with considerable help from Attila's racist wife. Welcome to America sucker.

A gratuitous subplot involving a black coal worker (Isaach de Bankolé) and his son, gives way to László being hired by Guy Pearce's little Hitler Harrison Lee Van Buren, a narcissistic millionaire intent on subjugating László as his own personal Jewish architect slave. Van Buren has a real hard-on for his self-imposed prisoner László.

Under Van Buren's thumb (cough), László designs a gargantuan monolithic "institute" (church) that looks every bit the prison of claustrophobic holocaust nightmares.

László Tóth is no Frank Lloyd Wright.

Is László taking a piss at his blue-eyed capitalist warder by designing the ugliest fucking prison-like structure you've ever seen? Perhaps.

The claustrophobic building's focal point involves an upside-down crucifix that sunlight shines through.

Weird.

The sexually impotent, heroin-addicted László fulfills his updated concentration camp existence when he forwards his payment for Van Buren's project toward its completion to his own specifications.

Victim-hood is its own reward.

László's wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters the movie a half-hour too late, and even then does little to relieve the fictional narrative's doom and gloom trajectory.

"The Brutalist" doesn't know what it wants to say. Is it anti-Zionist? anti-Capitalist? anti-socialist? anti-Bauhaus? No idea.

I do know that "The Brutalist" is an exploitation movie in love with its own misery.

No amount of editing or color-correcting can save this film from itself.

Save the back-slapping for Sean Baker's "Anora."

Rated R. 215 mins.

ZERO STARS

THE BIKERIDERS

Welcome!

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.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

Writer/director Jeff Nichols based this wildly entertaining fact-based movie on photographer Danny Lyon's book, which celebrated the Illinois' Outlaws Motorcycle Club.

Through a fictionalized narrative, "The Bikeriders" makes profound commentary on subjects regarding toxic masculinity, cult mentality, and the role of women amid man's animalistic urges.

Nichols's beautifully formal approach is stunning to look at, and to digest on intellectual and emotional levels.

The Viet Nam War is a constant presence lurking in the film's subtext.

Inspired by a television airing of Marlon Brando's "The Wild One" (1953), truck driver family-man Johnny (Tom Hardy) starts his own motorcycle club, the Vandals.

Johnny goes so far as to adopt Brando's voice and speech patterns. Johnny's whole communal club is based on artifice.

What could go wrong with such a phony foundation for positive social interaction to occur? Add to that a repressed homosexual underpinning, and you've got problems.

In the words of Iggy Pop, "a heavy price for a heavy pose."

Iggy's "Stooges" era song "Down on the Street" makes narrative impact during one of the film's most harrowing sequences.

Real life is hardly as romantic as Hollywood would have you believe.

Johnny bites off more than he can chew as his Vandals Motorcycle Club grows rapidly with multiple chapters around the Midwest.

A hotbed of cult violence breeds like wildfire. Stupid is as stupid does.

Tom Hardy's Johnny hopes to pass his presidential club status on to Benny (Austin Butler), a young hothead adored by Jodie Comer's working class Kathy Bauer character.

It doesn't take much extrapolation to see the connection between motorcycle gangs and pseudo political cults such as the MAGA movement. Racism and sexism are baked into the mindsets of societal outcasts intent of instilling fear in all those they come across.

Primary to Jeff Nichols's brilliant five-act film is the female perspective of its protagonist Kathy.

Jodie Comer gives an Oscar-worthy performance that defies all expectatio

Ms. Comer's mastery of acting craft is astounding — next level stuff. Comer's Midwest exquisite Midwest accent and range of expressive physicalizations are a delight to witness. Wow!

All young aspiring actors should study Jody Comer's superb work.

Tom Hardy and Austin Butler have their hands full keeping up with Jodie Comer.

"The Bikeriders" is an actor's actors movie by far and away.

Rated R. 114 mins.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE — CANNES 2000

Welcome!  

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

Where Secrets Are Kept

Wong Kar Wai Tells All

By Cole Smithey

"That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore."

Wong Kar Wai's masterpiece of romantic longing, emotional expression, unrequited love, and unresolved jealousy, is a cinematic poem that stretches across time and Asian social barriers.

The film's indisputable beauty radiates with a burning glow that emanates from its charismatic lead actors, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. 

Set in Hong Kong, circa 1962, shared experience of wounded romantic repression plays out between neighbors whose spouses are sharing an affair.

The Korean War rages distant to our would-be lovers. Love is always an escape from loneliness.

A mutual decision to play out an imagined version of their spouse's affair, gives way to a simmering erotic tension barely masked by gesture, habit, and style.

Formality, dignity, and respect are unwritten rules of the couple's sexless romantic game of curiosity.

Every atmosphere is furtive.

Secrets are kept.

Erotically tinged gemstone colors explode in carefully crafted set designs and wardrobe elements that bleed off smoke from the burning chemistry between Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.

Hollywood should be jealous, very jealous.

By this standard, Hollywood knows nothing of nuance.

The early '60s political and economic atmosphere of Hong Kong informs the way that Wong Kar Wai's iconic couple interact.

Public appearances are kept up.

Erotic sparks can ignite from a spoonful of mustard shared at a restaurant table.

Lust is secondary, but just barely.

The intimate negotiation that transpires between our star-crossed lovers takes place in an aura of negative space where things such as wallpaper designs and dress patterns set boundaries of sexual restraint.

There is a BDSM undertow to the couple's interactions. Theirs is a private code told in silences, and muted responses that no lie detector could catch.

Although the film's ending feels rushed, it speaks to the audience as a cauterizing effort at mirroring the disjointed fragmentation of quickly passing time and far lost promise.

Memories are lasting, especially when the romantic stakes are so deep.

The film's impeccable soundtrack places the characters in an era of Big Band music whose standards fueled a utopic atmosphere of charm, class, and romantic connection.

You'll be humming Nat King Cole's version of "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas" for days, and nights after seeing this film.

"In The Mood For Love" was an instant classic when it premiered at Cannes in 2000. It remains Wong Kar Wai's finest cinematic achievement.

In the words of Lou Reed, "you're over the hill, right now."

Relax, the romantic pressure is over.

Memories are all that's left in a lover's memory box.

Tear up the letters; they don't prove anything.

Keep your secrets.

Rated PG. 98 mins.