Anarchist_Rationale

Mike Mills wrote and directed this wonderful film about a teenage boy’s tutelage in life by the women around him. I found it to be very low-key but powerfully moving, about human connection and communication of values in a changing world that sometimes seems alien and hostile in its modernity. It made me laugh out loud several times as well as shed a tear or two. California, 1979, is the setting for a rooming house run by Dorothea Fields (Annette Benning) who, as a single mother, is concerned about her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) being a well-rounded person. She enlists the help of two other, younger women, punky lodger Abby (Greta Gerwig) and neighborhood girl Julie (Elle Fanning), to help teach him good values and how to be a man, from a woman’s perspective. There is a lot of discussion about feelings and trying to comprehend a social landscape that is fraught with miscommunication, and every character is multidimensional and complex. The tone of the film is very quiet and...

Margot Robbie produced and stars in this very entertaining if slightly uneven biopic about the figure skating scandal of 1994 between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. I found it to be a funny, poignant and rather timely look at just how far stupidity and bad decisions can go when left unchecked. It’s not great, but it is very good. I thought the early-90’s period white trash setting was well rendered, complete with bad fashions and bad hairstyles. It’s a story about losers who achieve more than they can really handle and how flailing their attempts at control can be. At first you kind of like these lovable underdogs but they very quickly show their ugly sides and so you have this interesting balance of sympathy and schadenfreude as events unfold. It’s also about abusive relationships, from toxic family and romantic entanglements to the intrusive media fueled by the insatiable appetite of the public for falling stars in the emerging 24-hour news cycle landscape. I think Margot...

I recently re-read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and it made me think about adaptations and how important it may or may not be to remain faithful to the source material. Along with V for Vendetta , the two comic book works written by Moore have been adapted into feature films which are poles apart on this issue. For myself, I think it a moot point because I mostly prefer innovation to re-creation. Watchmen and V for Vendetta are great examples of different approaches to adaptation. In the case of the former, slavish devotion to re-creating the source material is the course and, while satisfying the urge to see the characters faithfully brought to life may be nice, the film as a whole feels curiously flat. I do think it’s the best adaptation they could have made, but of something that probably doesn’t translate well into film because it was so specifically designed for and about the subject matter of super-hero comic books. I happen to like the 2009 film adaptation, but...

Season four of Black Mirror is out now and I just watched all six episodes on Netflix. I’ve been a fan of the show since I discovered it and it’s still going strong, in my opinion. I love it for its intelligence, its authenticity and its unpredictability – you really don’t know how each episode will end until the final scene. If you like smart storytelling with a dark edge, you’d have a hard time finding better than Black Mirror . It’s an anthology series like The Twilight Zone wherein each episode is completely isolated from any others so that you don’t need to watch them in order or even watch them all. That appeals to my short attention span. It’s got a variety of styles suitable to whatever the story of the episode is, but the general theme is science-fiction and the examination of where our technology might lead us. It’s also incredibly dark, but I like that because when the show has the odd happy ending it feels a lot more earned and special than a typical show where i...

For me, the most interesting movies of 2017 were fairly subversive critiques which still somehow hold out a sliver of hope against the darkness of our current world. I am an optimist, but I am also a realist. I think these five movies reflect that very well, in spite of their fantastical qualities. 1. mother! Darren Aronofsky has crafted the most shocking movie I’ve seen in years. It’s weird, heavily symbolic and deeply allegorical, a stark rebuke of civilization and mankind’s seeming inability to avoid repeating bad behavior. I found it to be absolutely compelling viewing, fascinating, oppressive, brutal, and dark as pitch. This is the movie that hit my buttons the strongest this year. 2. Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villeneuve clearly loves the original Blade Runner and has directed a beautiful sequel that outdoes its predecessor. I love the first movie, so watching the sequel was a suspenseful experience, waiting for the filmmakers to fuck up. They didn’t. In my opinion, they...