Reviewing the 18 Movies I Watched in January, 2023
I started a movie-watching mega-thread on Twitter to compel me to watch more, and it worked out pretty well.
My short impressions of these films were shared in this Twitter mega-thread—but since a Tweet isn’t long enough to communicate how I felt about a movie in much depth, I‘m expanding on those reviews for my audience here.
The idea for a movie-watching mega-thread was inspired by some of the people whom I follow that have kept doing the same as a yearly tradition. I usually miss the window for starting something like this; but since Bird and I happened to be staying at a hotel next to a movie theater at the start of the year (which we didn’t end up visiting), and I was reminded of the thread concept by the start of Asher’s, I conspired to see all three of the major films which were available at the time in theater (this didn’t happen).
Puss In Boots (2011)
I’d heard that the sequel was supposed to be good (we’ll get to that), and Bird wouldn’t take me to see it unless I did the pre-requisite viewing of the first one. Structurally sound, cute and fun—mostly this movie was memorable and surprising for its up-close examination of the toxic relationship between Puss In Boots and his childhood friend who turned him into a criminal, Humpty Dumpty. The presentation of Humpty’s character was almost distractingly nuanced, with Zach Galifinakis oddly turning in a serious vocal performance that plays well off of Antonio Banderas’ clueless cartoon cat with a sexily silly voice.
The film’s dedication to playing action-movie tropes with an almost-straight face, before (in hilariously-creative ways) reminding us that the main characters are talking cats to highlight peaks in action, charmed me right away. It’s not all-the-way farcical parody—but it’s—y’know—a cartoon; closer to the vein of Bugs Bunny shorts, wherein the intentions of the characters and their expectations based on tropes are pure, but are constantly subverted by the fact that they exist inside an illogical universe.
Besides that Puss In Boots’ backstory is surprisingly well-done (young Puss is so goddamn adorable), the romantic subplot is also pleasantly decent. Kitty Softpaws (a femme-fatale not-accidentally in the vein of Catwoman) is always batting away the childish, pretentious side of Puss, in search of the prideful cat-of-action that she knows could be sweeping her off of her feet, if he could just stay focused. The cats have more chemistry than you’d expect from CGI talking cats in a Shrek spin-off movie; and on that note—I think the sincerity of this film and the solid construction of its script have let it age a lot more gracefully than the extremely of-their-time Shrek films.
Score: 31/40 - RECOMMENDED!
Andrew Santino: Cheeseburger (2023)
Never having heard of this stand-up, I watched this just because it was the first thing of interest to me to be released in 2023. It’s mildly funny; it ends on a closing statement about aiming to be as enjoyable as a casual cheeseburger. While I’m okay with that as a goal, I also have plenty of experiences with exceptional cheeseburgers; and so I feel especially unimpressed with the idea that I should compare this to, at best, a mid-tier fast food burger.
Santino tends to vaguely insult both sides of a political issue before driving toward a non-partisan or ‘fuck everyone’ punchline. Some of these pop hard—usually because the long buildup has more payoff than it seems like it’s leading toward.
There’s a bit in here about how the stuff that Santino is saying and doing would not be acceptable in almost any other context; and at one point he even pretends to jizz on an audience member. At a metaphorical level, I think it’s the most potent moment in the special; it really does feel, emotionally, like Santino is jacking off in front of us—telling us he’s doing it, and we’re letting it happen—maybe even laughing—just because he’s doing it thru enough abstraction, and in a context in which we accept it.
This left me with the unshakable feeling that the whole special was implicitly trying to explain the Louis CK masturbation scandal that sent him into underground comedy; and even to see to what extent it could be replicated in broad daylight without causing any problems for anyone. Fascinating as this became to me on a thought-level, it still left me with the unshakable feeling like I’d just watched this dude jack off on stage—and I wasn’t really sure I ‘enjoyed’ it like that.
Score: 23/40
The Menu (2022)
The Menu wouldn’t work without Ralph Fiennes in the villain role and Anya Taylor-Joy as the main character—they would’ve carried the film entirely on their eyebrows together if they didn’t have delightful support all around them (my favorite is mega-intense Christina Bucato, who shows up just to glare at the people she knows she’s about to kill for a while, seething with contempt as they plead). Highly recommended, but hard to describe without spoilers, so here they come.
Basically, this is a bottle movie about a night at a very special restaurant when the artistic chef has decided it’s time to kill everyone involved in making him miserable over the last thirty-odd years (including himself and his enabling staff). It’s an excellently-seething black comedy which makes the case for why an artist would lose their mind and finally snap on the people who’ve made their life possible—and in some sense trapped them inside the cage of their own ambition. What makes all of the people in this system so awful is just the fact that they’ve put so much reverence on Chef Slowik—which is why the hero we follow thru the situation is Margot (a high-end call-girl brought along as a last-minute stand-in for a date), who survives simply because she doesn’t respect the chef any more or less than herself as a human being.
I think the movie is a little uneven; the pacing is weird, and once you know what’s really going on, the story’s attempts to twist and turn don’t really lead anywhere. It’s fun to learn why each of the characters has to die, and to listen to all the darkly comic banter; but without much depth being given to those characters, the whole thing ends up feeling a little bit farcical—like a South Park episode, but without ever quite going that far. It’s almost shocking how not-shocking the movie actually tries to be—which maybe is because it’s actually tinged with some hopefulness that the soul of the artist can still be observed even after it’s become so twisted and bleak that its arc of destruction is uncorrectable.
Score: 34/40 - RECOMMENDED!
Smoky Mountain Park Rangers (2021)
Not much to say about this short National Geographic documentary. I visited Smoky Mountains National Park for only one night, in late-2021, and it was a very pretty place, although busy. (It’s the most-visited National Park in the US. The town just outside of it is sort of like a micro-Vegas in the worst way.) This doc is mostly focused on showing off the bears which frequent the park, and also showing how the rangers use blowtorches to clear the underbrush from the forests before fire season. For some reason, California doesn’t do this, which apparently contributes to their prevalent wildfires—so maybe this doc can help them to learn how it’s done in the East.
Score: 17/40
King Crimson at 50 (2022)
This was unexpectedly interesting—not necessarily surprising, but edifying nonetheless; a lens into the mindset which produced some of the darkest, most maddening, influential yet completely inimitable rock music of all time. I have been a fan of King Crimson since I was a teenager, discovering them because so many of my favorite bands (The Mars Volta & Tool in particular) cited them as a major influence. The band has always represented class despite its brazen experimentation that few other bands come close to capturing; sort of like if Steely Dan had been deeply tormented instead of just slyly angst-ridden. Robert Fripp comes off like an even bigger hardass than any other obnoxiously-particular prog rock star, especially because he’s so zeroed-in on the instrumentality, and nailing every specific note of what’s written while still squeezing total improvisation of the highest caliber out of each of his band members. (Imagine Whiplash, if the guy in charge was like that towards guys much closer to his own age.)
It’s not out to glorify the band’s history, or to herald Fripp’s genius, so much as to portray the crushing effect of the band’s existence on the people who’ve been picked up to play along with it for little stretches of its existence. In fifty years, Fripp has burned away countless other musicians (who are thankfully mostly alive and ready to tell their stories in this film), ending up with an interesting collection of old cooks, who are all obviously in search of something similar to what Fripp seems to want—which is to work with people he can count on to put on the most-perfect show possible every single time, with ambitions of doing it even better the next one—nevermind that they are in their seventies now. Fripp is usually upset when approached by the documentarian because of how the conversations break his concentration on practice.
In The Menu, there’s a bit wherein one of the chef’s pupils commits suicide as a sort of art piece, commenting on his inability to ever achieve nearly the level of perfection that his leader has approached. In this documentary, past band members describe the constant unease and pressure of being in the band as ‘hell;’ and the most lovably-cynical, funniest, kindest-hearted member of the current band literally dies before the documentary is over. The singer has a look about him like existence has been constant terror, and if he didn’t have this gig he would simply slip out of existence at a moment’s notice.
In the film’s most chilling scene, Fripp is regaling a story about his childhood, when he suddenly stops—freezes completely in stone for nearly two whole minutes as tears roll down his cheeks—and then finally returns to speaking as if nothing had just happened. It was kind of like when the leading melody finally comes back after the long dissociative freestyle section of a King Crimson song.
Score: 29/40
Is That Black Enough For You?!? (2022)
I learned how little that I know about the history of black Americans in cinema, and was recommended no shortage of awesome-looking films up through the 1978 by this documentary. Not even having seen any of their films, I became a fan of some of the very-old actors interviewed in this documentary who’ve lost none of their charisma. Plenty of my generation’s most prominent black stars offer their impressions of the films talked about as well, and the documentarian exercises as thorough a knowledge of the history of black film as one could imagine a person having. It’s kind of like watching a very long, very good YouTube video, and so is maybe more of a pause-and-play experience than a conventional “documentary film” (it’s trying to be more thorough and historical than just entertaining).
Score: 27/40
Stewart Lee: Tornado (2022)
Stewart Lee’s humor isn’t exactly “made for me,” but I appreciate it, and I think he’s gotten a lot more entertaining and less aggressive than he used to be. His appeal has always been to intelligent people who are sick of how slow everyone else is, but in a way aimed to sort of bully whichever part of the audience isn’t laughing. Now that he’s got legendary status, he’s probably quite comfortable that whoever’s shown up is in on the joke—and grateful what he’s been allowed to accomplish and awarded at long last. I find that kind of heart-warming, and so I enjoyed this special; it’s a fun time.
Score: 28/40
Kate Berlant: Cinnamon In the Wind (2022)
Something felt oddly familiar to me about Kate Berlant right away, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before watching this. It takes a few minutes to sink into her bit—to figure out what’s a joke, what’s a genuine reaction in the moment, and what’s practiced, before it starts to become apparent how complex and intricately-constructed the character she’s playing really is. There’s this weird tidal energy to the thing, where it’s posed as though Kate’s actually having a conversation with the audience, except that she’s just deciding their reactions for them based on her projections, and then reacting as though something was actually expressed—and is weirdly convincing that she means it.
She demonstrates how people extremely self-absorbed and insecure people communicate. Your actual reaction is irrelevant compared to their expectation of how one would react to them based on how they feel about their own actions. What makes it so funny is that you can always understand what she’s reading into, even though nothing is actually being expressed by the audience except for laughter (and sometimes she’s playing off of that). The fact that she’s in a room full of mirrors helps to ground the experience, as you can visualize the way in which she is just talking to herself; sort of switching between being herself and the reflection of herself—between action and reaction. Anyways, it’s a good bit.
Score: 31/40 - RECOMMENDED!
Sebastian Maniscalco: Is It Me? (2022)
I only know about this dude as-of my dad putting on another one of his specials when I was visiting for New Years. It’s mostly “things was like this then, and now they’re worse in this way,” type comedy—kind-of inherently conservative. He plays to that audience in semi-subtle ways, with a couple of jokes I would honestly describe as what you’d conventionally call “dog-whistles,” to include people with more-extreme reservations about present liberalism than he wants to openly joke about.
Nevertheless, I don’t think the politics are so abrasive that the comedy can’t be enjoyed at the core. Not all of his jokes land for me, but I find the extremely well-practiced and particular character Maniscalco performs entertaining and interesting to think about. He’s kind-of doing a stereotypical Italian gangster stereotype, except that the lifestyle he’s acting that way about is that of a hyper-normal suburbanite; and the joke is basically trying to be the most-normal guy possible, but in the most stereotypically suave and cool way. It really pops when he pulls out some kind of heinously bizarre expression (see above) to contrast the baseline he’s been setting for most of the experience (and how much fun he looks like he’s having doing it). It’s intensely physical winking and nudging humor that sometimes works really well; and copying his vocal inflection is a ton of fun.
Score: 25/40
Bo Burnham: The Inside Outtakes (2022)
I wrote about Inside right here on this blog back when it came out in 2021. I didn’t think about it too much in 2022 until the songs started becoming massive hits on tiktok, and the extended soundtrack was released on Spotify. Bird absolutely loves the Bezos song, Microwave Popcorn, Problematic, and the Content song especially (obviously we both think all the songs are great); and so I felt ready to appoach the Outtakes film. It’s really kind of a behind-the-scenes and extras feature, too—and doesn’t have the strong, dreamlike pacing of the full film, but does have a lot of really cool experimental editing and unique gags as compared to any other featurette of its like.
Score: 24/40
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Bird and I mostly-rewatched this the other day after having seen it in theaters, and I thought it was even better the second time through, with a better sense of what all of the disparate elements are culminating to than I had the first. I do still think the first film is a better first-time view, because it has a harder-hitting emotional core between the backstory of Puss and the strong relationship he has with the villain of that film. In the sequel, his relationship with Kitty Softpaws is more important (and knowing how much so also enhances the early film)—but for a lot of the time, that relationship also treads the same ground that it already had in the first.
I think the little dog is a cute support character with a satisfying arc in the effect he has on the cats, and for reflecting a moral and idealistic center for the film as a whole. The villains are very well-done, although the repetitive dialog of Goldie and the bears at times strains on being humorous. I think they tried to cram a lot of development for these characters into a movie they have to share with two other villains—although those other two are far more straightforward. The strictly sociopathic Big Jack Horner emerges as memorably threatening thru his total disregard for life, which leads to a LOT more death than is normal for a film ostensibly aimed at children. (Then again, the entire theme of the movie, and its third villain literally, is Death.)
Considering how steeped in Mexican iconography Puss In Boots is (especially the first film), the theme of death (around which Mexico famously has a whole holiday based) is a great way to incorporate those cultural themes in more of an overarching way, while telling a fairy-heavy tale that’s clearly meant to stir up some hype for a conceptual Shrek 5. (The fairy humor in this works as well as the cat humor did in the last one.)
This film is both less cute, and also less emotionally hard-hitting than the first, but it’s a lot better of a blockbuster action-thrill-ride than the first movie, and I think will hold up a lot longer into the future. Even with the simplified characters, the animation of the first film has started to look dated in a way that the stylized second film probably won’t for a lot longer a time. It’s extremely cool to see Dreamworks taking visual cues not just from Into the Spider-Verse, but even clearly from places like Studio Trigger, the production of Arcane, and especially Attack On Titan. (The opening scene may as well have been an animation homage.)
Score: 32/40 - RECOMMENDED!
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
It’s alarming how persistently racist this film is; the tone feels lurid in this layered way. We are meant to think that a lot of the culturally-alien people in the film are gross and awful, but instead it feels like the filmmakers have a gross and awful impression of the world outside of things they understand. What still makes the film watchable is that it’s not only race contributing to the nightmarish, whirlwind action of this manic fever dream of a film. Every scene is basically designed to escalate into a fever pitch of visual insanity, all perfectly timed and edited to crescendo into some of the most epic and memorable cinematic imagery possible. The film looks fucking amazing, in a way that feels painful when you see what some of that glorious technique was dedicated to depicting. There are moments in this movie when I was straight-up confused about how characters reacted to things that, to me, are pretty normal as a worldly person of the twenty-first century. (And this movie isn’t THAT old.)
Ke Huy Quan is an adorable child actor in this film, playing Indie’s plucky little sidekick—and knowing that he would eventually play the dad from Everything Everywhere All At Once made this film a lot easier to watch—especially because you can so easily see the through-line of his performance style from then to now. I really hope that Steven Spielberg didn’t molest him or any of the other many, many child actors in this film—especially after that weird-ass shot where shirtless Indie gets his crotch in his face and then pets it fondly. Yeah, this film is uncomfortable in a whole lot of ways—but I think that’s largely intentional, too. I was annoyed how the girl is presented as completely braindead from the beginning; but I thought the sexual tension scene between her and Indie was hilarious, and the scene where she gets covered completely in bugs horrifyingly effective exactly because she was such a caricature. Suffice it to say, maybe this is supposed to be an awful, lurid, racist, sexist, pedophilic, psychotic nightmare. That shit tends to stick with you.
Score: 29/40
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)
Speaking of lurid fever nightmares, I am still completely in awe of the existence of this film—especially because I haven’t seen the first film, and so have no idea how the presence of any of the human characters was originally justified. It’s painful how forced they are into this movie, but it’s also kind of the best part, because the whole thing is so deliberately, mind-breakingly awkward and weird that it kinda-sorta clicks and almost-kinda works—at least some of the time. Around the end of the second act, there’s a bit where Sonic comes flying through a portal ring riding an avalanche on snowboard as it crashes onto a beachfront wedding, whereupon the “comedy” subplot is taking place; and then said subplot resolves in the form of an almost totally other movie inside of this movie following an action-heavy bridal revenge plot. This happens inside of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Tails also uses shadow-clone jutsu to win a dance-off against a bar full of angry Siberians.
I hated the weird-ass voice Idris Alba was doing for Knuckles, but the lady who played Tails was absolutely spot-on and precious. Jim Carries the emotionality of the film entirely, because he’s the only one who can give a convincing performance entirely on his own. Every other actor has a pleading helplessness in their eyes, as they try to guess as where the CGi Sonic is going to be later on while talking to no one and nothing. Carrey is clearly seeing some semblance of what’s supposed to happen in his mind’s eye and acting against his own expectation. His usual hyper-active bit, filtered through a genius mad scientist character, leaves as strong an impression as ever, and is by-far the most entertaining and cohesive character in the film. Sonic himself is almost totally incomprehensible; apparently he’s a child? It’s hard to really grasp what the fuck this character is without the groundwork of the first film—although I think enhancing the wheezing feeling of what the fuck evoked by this experience was only a good thing for me.
Score: 25/40
The Outfit (2022)
Bird put this on to watch by himself, and I missed the first twenty or thirty minutes of character setup before getting drawn in by an incredibly tense scene, wherein one gangster is threatening the main character (a cutter), into stitching up his just-shot companion—the son of the gang boss in their town, to whom the cutter expresses some sense of loyalty. I found myself drawn into the film’s unique visual tone and pacing, which uses digital effects to enhance superb lighting and pop the actors off of the backgrounds in a manner not just resembling theater (the film is written and performed like a stage-play), but even kind-of resembling comic book panels—what with the level of focus on every line detailing the faces of its actors (especially important when your lead is the ancient, legendary stage actor Mark Rylance (of whom I’d never heard nor seen at all until this movie—nor had I any of the other actors; which also helped me to accept the characters whole-cloth).
I find this film especially comparable to jazz composition, as it sort of flows from scene to scene between rising and falling tension, but without ever quite “changing songs,” so to speak. The last hour is basically one long scene, which just moves through different phases. You could almost say that it’s a huge Mexican standoff, with a lot of similarities to Tarantino’s Hateful Eight in particular (given the period characters and bottle setting), but with an air more so of class and dignity than… well, class and indignity. It’s also a movie about craftsmanship, with a lot of metaphorical meta-speak about the nature of storytelling as a craft (that tends to come from author-written films). This one is the directorial debut of novelist and screenwriter (of The Imitation Game), Graham Moore, and I hope it’s not his last feature film, as I enjoyed this one a lot—especially when it made its winks and nods to writers, actors, fans of jazz, and voidgazers et. al.
Score: 36/40 - RECOMMENDED!
Fredrick Douglass: In Five Speeches (2022)
I knew almost nothing about Douglass before watching this (and there is clearly vastly more to know) but I appreciated the angle this film took and balanced portrait it painted of him as a person while telling his life story—with breaks at times for some of the greatest black actors relevant currently to perform segments of his key speeches, and also to offer their feelings about them.
I was most-fascinated to realize how similarly the experience of Fredrick Douglass is presented here to how modern rappers often present their own journeys in pop media (although frustratingly, often with less of the righteous indignation that Fredrick displayed). Granted, Douglass literally escaped from slavery, having been born to it; and even though he’d say things about how his experience was in one of the less-severe slave states (to insist to his audience that things are even worse than how awful he makes them sound by describing his own experiences), obviously there was more for him to overcome in achieving what he did than what almost anyone in the modern world could ever claim.
Nevertheless, Douglass did become famous, influential, and a member of high society by exploiting his own story as a slave—and ultimately rode that to a higher-class life than what would’ve been enjoyable by even most white people of his time. An experience extremely tinged with the PTSD of something worse than what was likely in the pasts of those white people, yes—but still, a life that he himself had to admit had made him a total outlier to the entire way of life of the average American. He just couldn’t relate to basically anyone, because he really was the first person to have a life experience anything like what he did.
If you want to hear what it sounds like when someone in the most-modern version of Douglass’ position achieves many of the same things, and then has the space to self-reflect on it, listen to Kendrick Lamar. Black Boy Fly will show you exactly what it looks like to see a person like this come into existence and hope that you can be that person some day; and Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers will show you what’s on the other end of becoming exactly that guy.
Score: 26/40
Jurassic Punk (2022)
This one starts out as a fun history lesson, and eventually becomes kind of a sad biopic telling the story of a guy who once was unfathomably influential and ahead of his time in the realm of 3D special effects for film, and then got bucked out of the industry for being an out-of-control and unworkable element the moment he wasn’t strictly necessary anymore.
The movie does a good job of sticking up for the guy, in the sense that it proves how earth-shaking it was for the industry to be faced with what his little team in an ILM basement were proved 3D effects were capable of; but it’s also obvious that those brilliant people were being “put up with” in spite of their desire to break as many rules and do as much outlandish shit as possible because they were irreplaceable as talent. When the difficulty of dealing with them outweighed the necessity of having them, they were quickly excised—and this was made easy by their lack of business-politics acumen, which had been taken advantage of all through their careers by people higher up on the totem pole.
That’s all very cool and interesting to learn about, but it gets harder to sympathize with Steve Williams when we see how alcoholism and an inability to control himself and integrate into society has lead him out of money, away from his family, and out of any sense of direction in life. The film ends after he’s been thru rehab and is in the process of getting his life on-track, although it’s uncomfortable how close we are still to having seen him in a really negative state of being. I don’t know this dude, and this film feels like it wants me to have a parasocial sympathy for him that I’m not really emotionally prepared to have with this dude just because he gave me the T-Rex. I hope him all the best, but I don’t really think this part of his life needed to be anyone’s business unless he was going back into film.
Score: 22/40
Elvis (2022)
I think Baz Luhrmann has a certain love for the cheesiness and gratuity of older times that I don’t necessarily share; but I do appreciate his attempts to sort-of update and modernize those things through an ADHD lens to make it feel as over-the-top and ecstatic as it must have to the people experiencing that imagery at the time. Funnily, the footage of the real Elvis at the end of the film reveals that Austin Butler doesn’t look very much like him at all—but I don’t think that was the point. He looks more like a Gerard Way type—an emo dreamboat in makeup and pink clothes shaking his crotch for young girls and singing edgy shit about being literally evil.
There is a strong focus on the “blackness” of Elvis’ music—and I think the standpoint is maybe a little more straightforwardly sympathetic than I would’ve preferred. What the movie wants you to appreciate is that Elvis lived in a black neighborhood and was directly exposed to black music from a young age, and therefore stole it because it was the music that he loved, and the black artists just weren’t going to get signed to the major labels that he could be based on being white. What the film could’ve criticized more effectively is how Elvis never effectively uplifted black musicians or made an effort to change the industry standards; though it does pretty well examine the reasons that Elvis wasn’t prone to that kind of heavy involvement in the industry, and stayed as more of a branded face and voice for twenty-five odd years until his untimely death of rock-and-roll lifestyle.
Mostly the film fixates on the guy who managed Elvis his whole career, played in a fucking weird-ass accented Tom Hanks role—which might be the first character I’ve seen him play who is as creepy as that guy seems to me like he must be in real life. I hated the character, which is what the film wanted—but it doesn’t do a good job of settling on whether the guy had any sincerity (as he claims to in his Salieri-esque narration of the film from his own deathbed or something), or was actually just a greedy cunt who ruined Elvis. Frankly, once Elvis gets into the hard drugs, it’s hard to imagine anyone would’ve had a great means of steering him back on-course—and if anything he comes off as a really lazy dude who just wanted to perform and do fuck-nothing else.
It has a song by Eminem for the ending theme, because he famously called himself “the worst thing since Elvis Presley, to do black music so selfishly and use it to get (myself) wealthy,” which is probably the best reason that people like me know his name at all. There is a bunch of modern music in this movie which is used to compare the emotional impact that music of the time would’ve had to the music which we’d play in the same situations now; clever as a film technique, but a bit loaded historically. (Not that this cheese factory edited like a fever dream is really going for accuracy.) Eminem starts listing the ways he’s like Elvis in his verse, and only gets out like a few bars before he reverts to talking about himself, unrelatedly. I don’t think he actually knows fuck about Elvis—but maybe he will when he sees the movie.
Score: 26/40
Dune (2021)
I think I read a bit less of the first Dune book than what is covered by this film when I was staying with ghostlightning in 2011. I remember this section as nearly a solid brick of exposition, interrupted occasionally by the main character proving some kind of special ability—and the film isn’t too different from that. Given that this is an audio-visual medium, it’s almost necessary to conduct all of the exposition either by showing or telling us things—whereas the original book was just dense with narration explaining concepts in an abstract sense without describing dramatic “scenes” as often.
Dune is a weirdly-structured story without the context of knowing where it plans to go. It starts by explaining all these huge, macro-scale concepts, before boiling most of that away until the main character is on his hero’s journey at the end of the first act (which is only where this movie ends). The reason it starts out so cosmically macro is that the story intends to make it back to that scale again; but in the time it takes to establish everything about the setting before that story actually gets moving, it’s pretty difficult to cling to anything emotionally or to really care about any of the characters.
In genre tradition, the first act ends with an epic eruption of violence and the deaths of basically everyone in the main character’s life; but it takes a lot longer to get to that point than it does in just about any other hero’s journey I can think of, thanks to all the legwork done in setting up the world.
When reading what I did of Dune, I remember finding a lot of the details interesting in and of themselves, but was constantly wondering “what is all of this building to? What’s the point of this?” I think the film also takes a little while to get to that—but it sews the seeds well in what dialog and details it choses to incorporate from the original story; basically, trimming it down to the stuff that most prominently reflects the thematic core, but without throwing away too much of the imaginative stuff.
Denis Villeneuve has a weird filmmaking voice. His movies always look very grounded, combining gritty worldliness and robust actors with sleek, hyper-modern sci-fi aesthetics to create something believable to current film sensibilities. He always works with heady scripts and complicated, adult themes, too; and yet, there is an oddly dreamlike quality to the structure and editing of his films (Arrival most especially), and this kind-of dissociation which isn’t as cold and precise as Christopher Nolan, but also a bit dry and understated even by comparison. There are striking and exciting images in Dune, but they are few and far between—and a lot of the stark settings and simplistic color grading is just a little bit boring.
Dune is kind of a stuffy read, so I understand why it might’ve been interpreted this way, and why this aesthetic will resonate with people looking for that kind of serious, politically dramatic sci-fi in the present decade; but I also think that the insane premise of what’s actually happening in the story could’ve lent itself to way more unique and imaginative visuals (as would’ve been Jodorowski’s approach, and was also David Lynch’s.) I think if this film was actually as water-tight in its craft and inventive in its cinematography as a Nolan film, then I would like it as much—but instead, it feels just a little cheaper and shabbier than the average blockbuster.
Maybe all the budget went to all those A-list actors. I know some people were distracted by all the recognizable faces; but frankly, I’m not sure how most audiences (including myself) would’ve gotten through the sleepy first half of this movie if they weren’t constantly remembering where they’ve seen all of these people before, while the film bombards them with fantasy words that are only going to become meaningful as the story plays out. I knew at least that I should REALLY care about the girl in Timothy Chalamet’s visions when she was played by Zendaya. That, in its own way, is effective storytelling—and by the end of the film, I think it got there—although ending at the end of the first act left it feeling as incomplete as reading only as much of the book has felt for the last twelve years.
Score: 28/40
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