Short Takes
๐๐ง๐ต๐ฆ๐ณ ๐ ๐ข๐ฏ๐จ โข ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ข๐ต๐ฎ๐ข๐ฏ โข ๐๐ฆ๐ค๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ต๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ
After Yang: Much too Instagram Stories: The Motion Picture for my taste, though casting Colin Farrell as a cogitative tea connoisseur is aces. Also now want โOzu-visionโ as an option for FaceTime, so get on that Tim Cook.
The Batman: The film I imagine Ricky Fitts would grow up to make after the events of American Beauty. Gotham City certainly has the emo-depressive aura here of a discarded plastic bag blowing in the windโฆfor three hours that admittedly proceed at a gallop, and which are bookended by the same earnestly deployed Nirvana needle-drop (OK, doomer). Like many from the J.J. Abrams school, โAโ-For-Effort is director Matt Reevesโ aesthetic ethos. He can construct, but his and Greig Fraserโs images are never more than competently oblique. Preferable to Nolanโs chaotic, bludgeoning bombast, of course, but thatโs beyond a low bar. Pattinson gives good brooding-billionaire Chiroptera; Paul Dano stinks in that uniquely Paul Dano way (his dweeb-psycho act is now in its pushing-40 paunch phase); I might very well watch Colin Farrell as goombah Penguin when his spinoff HBOMax series hits the streams; and Zoรซ Kravitz, youโre no Michelle Pfieffer, shockerIknow. Penning this capsule right as Reeves has released a telling deleted scene featuring Irish Tye Sheridan as Hannibal Jester: โHeโs got a vision.โ โYou think his motive is political?โ โOh no no, this is very, very personal.โ From your acid-gnarled lips to geek-Godโs ears.
Deception: Many have tried, and most have failed, at successfully translating Philip Roth from page to screen. Arnaud Desplechin makes it work in his take on Rothโs 1990 novel of (maybe-real-life) infidelity by, in part, leaning into verbal artifice. The elder Roth avatar (Denis Podalydรจs) is American; his younger lover-muse (Lรฉa Seydoux) is English. Yet everyone speaks, with nary a hint of knowing irony, Desplechinโs native French. Itโs the right approach given that Rothโs dexterous prose, if adapted and enacted literally, loses much of its impact. His work (at best shameful, shameless, probing, pointed, offensive, hilarious) is ideally transposed through an authorial hall-of-mirrors, which means you need as knotty and nimble a voice as youโre getting. Desplechinโs close enough to that, and often equal to the challenge. I laughed especially hard at the smash-cut transition between post-coital discussions of foreskin (cut? uncut?) and the sociopolitical aims of the state of Israel, Rothโs unclouded profaneness being one of the crucial keys to his profundity.