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The Shopaholics, Wai Ka-fai, and a Cinema of Chaotic Sincerity

Congratulations! You’ve been hired to write a script for a rom-com. Out of the blue, one day, you are approached by a studio executive, who gives you the pitch and offers to pay you for your writing, on one condition: the characters must all be named by a six-year-old. Now, this is a creative, even precocious six-year-old, and so you’re going to get real names, but unavoidably, this six-year-old is going to have a child’s flair for obviousness. In this rom-com, you have a wealthy, vaguely antagonistic supporting character. Might he end up as “Richie”? What about your male lead, a character crippled with indecision? If the six-year-old wanted to opt for even less subtlety, they might mail it in and call him “Choosey”. 

These are, of course, real decisions made by a man in his 40s with several feature films under his belt. Wai Ka-fai, like many geniuses, understands that there is an art to the humor of a six-year-old, and he applied this art to his 2006 film The Shopaholics. Known principally for his collaborations with fellow Hong Kong cinematic luminary Johnnie To, anyone familiar with Wai’s work in or out of this partnership can tell you that he’s his own man. One of the world’s boldest filmmakers, Wai’s style could garner descriptors ranging from “whimsical” to “absurdist” to “insane”.This is “insane” in the sense of truly not being able to understand how anybody could have conceived of what you’re watching, despite it being largely grounded. He’s less Lynch and closer to a Willy Wonka of sorts, where there’s a clear brilliance paired with a way of viewing the world that is very slightly alien. The To collaborations, more well-known than his solo work, see two wildly talented artists in perfect concert with one another, their impulses and interests colliding and balancing one another out to create art that is singular, always beautiful and often simultaneously ridiculous. The Shopaholics, however, displays Wai’s id disconnected from the fellow creative force of To. Like the work of the lead singer of a band who has gone solo, a David Byrne or Paul McCartney, it represents daring, unmoored work that pulls into focus the unique creative genius on display while also showing, at times, that there’s something gained from the restraint of working within a collective.

Now the film does, crucially, allow us to peek into the inner workings of Wai’s mind, undiluted by collaboration, and that is invaluable. The Shopaholics, by nature of this frenetic inclination of Wai’s, is many things: rom-com chief among them, of course, but it’s also a satire of Hong Kong consumerism. So, how does Wai, the cinematic achievement of a mad scientist set loose in a laboratory of whirring machines and nameless bubbling concoctions, reconcile these two aspects? It’s a perfectly reasonable extrapolation from his character names: he turns it into a big, overarching, existential joke. The joke being, in this case, that his romantic comedy features multiple romantic pairings, not a single one of which is really romantic.

The construction of The Shopaholics up from its character names is riddled with a fundamental unseriousness, the kind that could only wrap back around to being genuinely biting in the hands of someone truly gifted at smashing together tones and conflicting ideas without losing any of their potency. Wai, a cinematic Large Hadron Collider, is fit for this in that he is uncontent to simply combine comedy and romance; he must form his own genre by unifying the souls of the base ones rather than their forms. The trick to this is that Wai seems to understand cinema in a profound yet unknowable way; again, slightly alien. So many rom-coms are, when you get right down to it, romance movies with funny elements. For Wai, this will not do. He must achieve a synthesis wherein both the romance and comedy of his film are absolute. However, he aims to do this within a framework of insincere romantic relationships. Through heightened bombast of his romantic imagery and an overarching ethos where these relationships develop through a logic beyond our credulous understanding, Wai is able to perform this high-wire act, committing to an ultimate rom-com through mise-en-scène while executing a full-bodied satire contingent on romance, or lack thereof, as a punchline.

The narrative begins as follows: Lau Ching-wan plays Choosey Lee, a cripplingly indecisive psychiatrist who meets Fong Fong-fong, played by Cecilia Cheung, in a food court. Fong-fong is, as the title suggests, a shopaholic, cartoonishly material in a way Wai takes aim at from the very first scene. We open on Fong-fong as an infant abandoned in a department store amid a sea of luxury brands, their names called out with increasing urgency by the after-hours security guard who finds her, a tongue-in-cheek insinuation that consumerism is in her blood. Fong-fong helps Choosey out of his inability to decide what he wants for lunch, and they later meet again when he, unbeknownst to her, is the psychiatrist she visits to help her shopping addiction. From this setup, she applies for a job as his personal assistant, for which she is hired.

They fall in love because, in a Wai Ka-fai rom-com, they must. Wai’s transmutation of the genre, as mentioned, values its core over the raw form, and while that form is thoroughly disregarded by Wai’s jaunty insincerities and seeming narrative jests, he recognizes the relationship that the heart of the rom-com has with the genre’s signifiers. And so, he ports over the meet-cute. However, in his conception, there is always more at play, and in this case he clearly positions the introduction of the characters as over-the-top: the jam Fong-fong helps Choosey out of is a pathetic one, and the way she is hired as his assistant is farcical, cemented by an interview scene wherein Choosey and Fong-fong continue to switch back and forth between separate zones for an interview and a psychiatrist appointment. It’s not exactly a parody of a rom-com, because it takes the act of being a rom-com too seriously. And because of this, its fidelity to the heart of the genre in a way that Wai clearly connects with deeply, the union of these central characters happens through circumstances that, like the rest of the film, eschew real world logic in favor of movie-world logic. In Wai’s cinema, that movie-world logic does not require suspension of disbelief, it runs on it, it does not ask you to believe in things beyond your understanding, it forces you to. He is capable of using this to immense dramatic effect, as well as overpowering comedic resonance. Here, he certainly leans more towards the latter, as exemplified in frenetic scenes such as Choosey and Fong-fong’s interview/appointment. But the broad narrative strokes also rely heavily on this engine of controlled chaos to sustain a love story that stems from – and remains – an interaction of superfluous, absurd necessity rather than actual connection. 

The thinness of Choosey and Fong-fong’s relationship is a subject that merits further dwelling, although while it is the film’s primary concern, it is still only a layer in Wai’s sprawling array of character relations. The thorough derangement of this web only becomes clear once Ding Ding-dong (Ella Koon) and the aforementioned Richie Ho (Jordan Chan). Ding-dong, another example of Wai’s penchant for absurd character names, is Choosey’s ex-girlfriend, waltzing around the film with a cartoonish and almost childlike demeanor, dependent and unstable, her characterization stopping just short of having her constantly bumping into furniture. Richie is a stock Wai character, a spoiled rich adult shepherded around by an adult family member (this is a role Lau Ching-wan himself embodied in Fat Choi Spirit, a similarly delirious To-Wai collaboration from 2002), who Fong-fong finds herself gravitating towards as a romantic partner (read: financier of her shopping habit) after her relationship with Choosey begins to sink into the sand it was built on. Both male characters find themselves romantically involved with both females at various points, with the tenuous Richie/Ding-dong connection arising out of an even airier strain of plot contrivance than that between Choosey and Fong-fong. Wai is in control of this, and he revels in it, matchmaking these caricatures for seemingly no reason other than that they’re in a romantic comedy. Their existence and day-to-day actions provide the humor, and the social critique the film mounts draws a greater absurdity from their standing within a rom-com, so Wai positions them within one. In accordance with Wai’s talent for seemingly unmotivated narrative propulsion borne from a blood-level understanding of cinema as spectacle, the unfurling of the plot’s romantic elements happens simply because it is there, and that’s enough for Wai.

It’s all the more believable because, of course, it only questionably dwells in genuine romance. The Shopaholics can be viewed as a study on when a rom-com is not a rom-com. It certainly possesses all the required elements: it’s zany and funny, while centering entirely on romance. It even climaxes with a pair of weddings! Yet there’s that pesky issue of whether it actually is romantic. Said climactic weddings are a perfect place to look for an example of this: As the film pulls to a close, the characters, in predictably absurd fashion, cannot figure out who should end up marrying who. So, they consult another psychiatrist, who analyzes them to determine which pairings would work the best. She does not inform them until the day of the weddings, on which she splits them up into initial pairs before executing a seemingly endless series of switches, in which one man is instructed to go after the other woman or vice versa. It’s an elaborate set piece that features a multitude of fakeouts that give us chance after chance to examine each potential marriage, never letting us get comfortable with any of them. Wai trades on the fact that we’re unsure what pairings to root for by having the characters themselves share this uncertainty, muddying their reactions at each reversal. We lean towards hoping Choosey and Fong-fong end up together, but Wai seems to position this as a consequence of them being the main characters, nothing more. He sows doubt in this pairing by repeatedly calling to mind the unease with which their relationship operates when divorced from the material world over which they’re compatible, even as he grants us a denouement in which they end up together. The whole thing is clearly set up to reinforce the finale’s central conceit: that this entire “romantic” storyline has been brought to a pair of weddings in which the participants are customizable. Sure, we get a decadent, outwardly romantic finale in which everyone achieves clarity and marries who they like – Choosey even makes a definitive choice! – but don’t let that fool you: Wai’s still playing the rom-com game, allowing it to unravel on the surface while more happens beneath.

It is, perhaps, a little unfair to Wai to claim that his perception of romance is cynical, in line with story beats rather than genuine emotions: his mastery of cinematic form across other films shows him to be, naturally, truly in touch with romanticism. Look at Running on Karma, a film which doesn’t even actually carry a romantic element but nonetheless is animated by a belief in the beauty of human connection. When he wants to be, Wai can truly be romantic. Which gives The Shopaholics even more depth in the hollow bonds it builds between its characters. Look at the climax: there’s a moment where Choosey beats off a swarming wedding party in order to stop Fong-fong from being torn away from him. It’s certainly romantic, both in the act and in the character progression. Choosey’s journey to this from his paralysis at ordering lunch is undeniably a compelling one, in line with a true romantic comedy. It’s a testament to Wai’s ability to have his cake and eat it too that this is able to be true while the film’s resolution rings so false. He never once lets you forget the situation, the constant shakeups serving to remind the viewer of the extent to which this romantic imagery has been turned wholly transactional. By the time the film reaches this stage, the “shopaholic” conceit, around which the entire consumerist satire is based, has been largely forgotten in aesthetics, but not in the film’s overarching structure. Wai’s ensconcement of the film within romantic imagery and narrative beats leaves behind the shopping mall veneers of the film’s first sections, but the ways in which he plays up the romance angle call them to mind subconsciously. The criss-crossing love quadrangle into which the film descends enhances the initial romantic setup not through any emotional development, but through the addition of more, more people, more matches. It’s the essence of the consumerist attitude that drives all the characters, more than even the romances that ostensibly do. The accumulation of things supplants meaning, which finds parallels in the accumulation of romantic relationships and Wai’s accumulation of overwhelming cinematic detail. Love is a box to check. Since Wai is absolutely capable of being romantic when he wants to be, the pessimism with which The Shopaholics regards the actions of its characters does not indicate that he’s taking aim at love as a concept. If it weren’t the farthest possible thing from the film’s tone, I’d call what he’s doing elegiac, examining this commodification of love with disdain. Yet he never pulls back from the high-energy mode that seems to be on the wavelength of his characters, urgent with no reason to be.

This is Wai’s cinema, in essence. His latest, Detective vs. Sleuths, operates on the same frenetic combination of reverence for the detective genre and parody thereof, shot through with the same frenetic style facilitating a brute-force suspension of disbelief. The film positions its plot as openly ridiculous and contrived, undermining its central detective at every turn and keeping us in the dark as to the question of his ultimate competence. Yet it truly believes in him, believes in the story it’s telling and the genre lense it chooses to tell it. Wai simply moves so fast that he can be in two places at once.

The Shopaholics is, in a sense, an anti-rom-com, but it’s also decidedly more than that. It is so committed to being a rom-com that it must be acknowledged as such at face value, even in its gleeful destruction of the genre. A parody of a rom-com might do many similar things narratively, even aesthetically, but it would never do so with the earnestness The Shopaholics operates. It never winks to the audience, it never self-congratulates, it builds its humor from its own diegesis and not from a knowledge of outside cinematic conventions. It’s clearly aware of these, yet it blocks them out of its world, another paradox Wai simply plows through, a runaway cinematic freight train inventing his own rules as he goes and justifying them all. How does The Shopaholics get away with running on its own logic for so long? Simply put, by not giving the viewer enough time to process anything beyond a visceral reaction. More accurately, and less tangibly, however, it’s because it’s a Wai Ka-fai rom-com, and the effects that can have on someone are the ultimate suspension of disbelief cheat code. You will believe, however little you understand why, that a romantic comedy can function both with full effect and without the presence of any real romance.

Avatar, James Cameron, and the Politics of the Hollywood Blockbuster

In his 2009 film Avatar, James Cameron allegorically tackles our long history of colonialism here on Earth by shooting it up into space. The film made a trillion dollars and became a pop culture phenomenon. Some would argue it dissipated, but its colossal blue footprint remains unavoidable. What does get lost, however, is the film’s political nuance. The anti-imperialist bent is genuinely well-realized, largely by virtue of the striking nature of the imperialist imagery. The contrast between the vibrant Pandoran wilderness of Cameron’s invention and the harsh military tones of the invading earth forces provides the soul of the film, and the imagery remains what people mostly remember it for. But what that imagery represents, often ignored in discussions about the film’s vitality, is such a significant departure from what it usually does that the film earns a closer look.

Cameron, as arguably the blockbuster filmmaker, exemplifies the contradictions that can arise in these movies more than anybody. Avatar is the biggest movie of all time at the global box office, yet thematically and visually it feels like a reaction against other movies like it: movies, ironically, that Cameron could have made. The adrenaline-baked highs of True Lies, the magnetic final disaster of Titanic, the manifold explosions and setpieces of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. These are where Cameron best resides. Looking at True Lies especially, maybe the most essentially Cameron film, you can start to reach some conclusions about the overall ideology and positions of his work. It’s a colossal action extravaganza starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a CIA agent fighting to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of dangerous, standard-issue Islamic extremists. You could argue that its immense artifice is, at least in part, satirical, and you’d be right: at large, its commitment to this scale is of a piece with the unabashed, end-of-culture bombast of pre-9/11 Hollywood, using the era’s over-the-top nature against it. Taking the film at 100% face value is doing too much of a disservice to Cameron: the visual of Arnold Schwarzenegger riding a horse through a shopping mall is simultaneously too on-the-nose and absurd as an epitome of American exceptionalism to trust as genuine. But Cameron shoots it dead-on, playing up the fact that it works. To a base audience, it’s easy to get something extraordinary to sell through sheer exhilaration. Therefore, the often careless and offensive choices native to blockbuster spectacles are inherently political. Cameron’s work on True Lies lays bare the ways in which this spectacle, in the Hollywood tradition, is allied with depictions of militarism and imperialist rhetoric.

The fact that Cameron is so adept within a blockbuster methodology, demonstrated in less self-aware work like the Terminator movies, lends itself to perpetuation of whatever position is suggested by his images. Blockbuster form – that is, form fitting big-budget movies designed to thrill mass audiences – is extremely convincing in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s designed to sweep you up in it without question, and so the connotations of ideas and images contained within become politicized. Cameron knows what he’s doing. Aliens and Terminator 2 would be effective propaganda vehicles if the realities of their stories were our reality. In an example of this inherent manipulation more divorced from a political angle, the final act of Titanic sees him sell the central love story through the palpable intensity and urgency of the collapse of the ship, staged as action and framed to put us in touch with our survival instincts, heightening the atmosphere of everything that is happening. True Lies sees him recognize this quality of his work and remark on it through total maximalism: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis kissing in the shadow of a mushroom cloud is an essential blockbuster image, one that, true to this spirit, could read as both winking or genuine and be effective either way. And then he arrived at Avatar, in which he takes this concept a step further, building a genuine, political narrative against the grain of the inadvertent, carelessly regressive politics of other films of its ilk.

Avatar, in its way, occupies a similar place in James Cameron’s body of work to the one John Ford’s The Searchers occupies in his. Ford, prolific across many genres and modes but iconic as a pioneer of the western genre, encountered a recurring theme throughout his career similar to the Cameron problem outlined above: Ford, despite being a self-asserted progressive who supported FDR and opposed the blacklist, made films that undeniably present a nostalgic vision of the old west, propping up stereotypes about masculinity and Native Americans that contrast with his personal politics. You could argue that Ford was the early-20th century analogue to Cameron in both his unique gift for entertainment blended with cinematic value and his place as a master of the studio system. His place within that system meant that his artistic vision, despite its consistent presence and potency, had to share space with other concerns. Ford was working with a set of recurrent ideas and pieces. He made these his own, reshaping and redefining them, but they stem from a crowd-pleasing mindset. In The Searchers, Ford attempts a reckoning with the images and themes that defined the genre he helped define. It’s the film of a man who has struggled between the alluring forces of the western as a genre and the nebulous reality of the western as an ideology. He closes the film with a literal shot of the door shutting on John Wayne, the ultimate old west icon of his own creation, and concludes with a definitive move to leave the idealized vision of the west in the past. The film’s most fascinating aspect is in this internal tension: Ford replicates his earlier films in their gorgeous landscapes and reverent shots of Wayne, yet he strips away the nostalgia at a narrative level. The connection between images and ideas here is significant, with Ford using the picturesque old west unabashedly as a setting, virtually unchanged from his past depictions, thereby lending that deconstruction of that past more gravity.

In Avatar, Cameron embarks on his own version of this. He initially presents the military as you would in a standard action flick, with technology you’re supposed to ooh and ahh at, might that’s supposed to titillate you, and righteousness you’re supposed to root for. Sure, there are early-established pockets of menace and corruption, but those are just small, avoidable sections. Yet instead of falling into the militaristic rhythms of your average blockbuster, Cameron uses this perspective to pull back, examine whether this world is really worth trusting blindly in, and ultimately indicting it. The full-throated presentation of the military as a destructive force only works with a vivid, often sympathetic visual rendering of that military, which Cameron weaves carefully so as to be indistinguishable from the action base he’s so engaged with. He puts us in the mindset of his main character, initially disoriented by the shifts from his world to that of the Na’vi but eventually more accustomed to the latter but put-off by the former. He does this not by intensifying his harsh, gray, unforgiving portrait of the human world, but by keeping it constant. His command of this aesthetic allows him to make it feel normal, so by gradually pulling back, his interrogation of its normalcy gains a dimension. Like Ford, Cameron spent so long in this mode that his eventual full-fledged breakdown of its themes draws heavily from past sincere presentations of them, often echoing choices and motifs, changing their meaning through context.

The fact that Avatar feels like such a conscious reaction to blockbuster filmmaking lays bare the realities of the (often) unconscious undertones of these films. The fact that Cameron, one of film history’s most established blockbuster filmmakers, was the one who made it speaks volumes about him and about Avatar. His decision to make the film on a big budget with blockbuster techniques echoes Ford’s western-to-end-all-westerns, both a reclamation of the form and, at some level, a recognition that its unique ability to to attract viewers makes it a perfect vehicle for a message. The messages of the films True Lies reacts to are not as purposeful as that of Avatar, but they are there, and for undiscerning audiences principally concerned with the explosions and chases, it seeps in without a second thought. This is why True Lies works to satirize this, and why Avatar works to subvert it. You can dissect to death whether it succeeds in its mission, whether it is faultless in it. But in the mission itself, in the reworking of ideas within the familiar blockbuster framework, it shows itself at the very least to be something innovative, something self-aware, something that displays Cameron’s versatility as unique.

Crimes of the Future: David Cronenberg and the End of the Line

Just shy of 40 years ago, in February of 1983, Canadian horror filmmaker David Cronenberg received studio money to unleash Videodrome, a gruesome paranoid thriller about a sleazy TV executive who stumbles upon a channel airing, seemingly, snuff films. Smuggled into the film behind the likes of James Woods and Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry were piles of Cronenberg’s trademark gore, viscera, and fascinations with transformations of the human body. He lost that studio money. Cronenberg was, by a month, still in his 30s at the release of Videodrome. He was young, spry, full of ideas. The poor box-office reception of that film wouldn’t slow him down, as for the foreseeable future he went further into his controversial, often unappealing idiom.

Today, David Cronenberg is 79. Eight years have passed since Maps to the Stars, until recently his latest film, debuted at the Cannes film festival. In those eight years, the popular wisdom seemed to become that he had entered a state of semi-retirement. No projects were announced, no indication of movement. In the 21st century, it was starting to look like he had outgrown his trademark body horror, moving towards more contemplative and dramatic examinations of his fascinations such as A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. The violence and tone remained, the running threads about blood, transformation, what it means to be human, all survived, all existed as an unmistakably distinct marker of the man’s work. But the man himself, in step with his career-long question about how much we can change before we are no longer ourselves, had encountered a fundamental shift. And then he stopped. It felt natural, in a sense. Maybe he had said all he had to say.

In 1970, Cronenberg directed Crimes of the Future. This was even before the early period when he first clicked with the body horror that would become his MO, putting out films like Shivers and The Brood. This was Cronenberg in his infancy. Crimes ran about an hour long, and its reputation in today’s Cronenberg canon is that of an oddity, even a failure, a diehards-only affair that really isn’t all that significant but for being prehistoric. It earns this, never seeming fully assured of its themes or why its visuals are the way they are. In the film, you can see Cronenberg forming, but it is unclear what he’s working towards. Something was missing.

In early 2021, Viggo Mortensen revealed that Cronenberg had something else cooking. It was to be his first body horror movie since 1999’s eXistenZ, his triumphant return to the genre with which his name was always fated to be intertwined. He was finally filming a script he had been kicking around for decades, since he was a younger man. Only in his late 70s was he ready to bring it to the screen. When originally conceived, Cronenberg had given it the name Painkillers, but for its long-awaited entry into reality, he decided upon another title: Crimes of the Future.

This marked the beginning of the end of a series of long processes for Cronenberg: returning for his first feature film since 2014, returning to body horror for the first time since 1999, returning to the script for the first time since its abandonment in the early 2000s, and returning to that title, vividly evocative but lost on a film nobody remembers, for the first time since 1970. In the eyes of the public, it was the beginning of a cycle leading to the film’s release. But, fittingly for a film about, among other things, the agony of artistic creation, the weight of the factors that had gone into its arrival meant that the remaining cycle was merely the tip of the iceberg.

So, in the end, what’s the film we got out of all this? In short, it’s a masterpiece, a vintage example of Cronenberg’s fixations and stylistic tics. But it’s also completely befitting of what led to it. As mentioned, the new Crimes of the Future focuses on artistic creation, legitimizing the term “suffering for your art” in new ways: the main character, Saul Tenser (Mortensen), is a performance artist of great renown whose performances consist of the surgical removal of internal organs. These organs are entirely new, heretofore unheard of ones that Tenser grows spontaneously. In this process, Cronenberg zeroes in on the subject of bodily transformation that he has confronted in his art for decades, but reaches a new, self-referential question: are these transformations, in and of themselves, art? It’s a question Saul Tenser seems wary of, despite his own role in perpetuating the idea that it is. His art seems to inspire people to reach a variety of different conclusions: government agent Timlin (Kristen Stewart) defends it at one point by saying “many people respond to it”, an idea that she exemplifies perfectly. The art speaks to her in a way that consumes her, rewires her personally. For others, it sparks a political drive, emblematic of the idea that these growths are beautiful. An underground network of radicals who believe in eating plastic and embracing evolution others see as dangerous views it as perfectly designed to deliver a message. For Tenser, at least at the film’s onset, the art simply seems to be in the act of removal, and even this is unsure to him. His partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux), views this removal as both artistically resonant and functionally necessary. All of these interpretations, often confusing and overlapping, spring from an act that is, by its artists, viewed as something akin to removing tumors.

The obvious way to view Tenser, and almost certainly the correct one, is as an analogue for Cronenberg. In his decades-long career, he has prodded at visceral, ugly obsessions on screen to an incredibly wide range of reactions: disgust and admiration, derision and acclaim, designation as both a peddler of shlock and an essential artist. The forces pressing down on Tenser are so disparate that his indulgences of them are easy to take as cool ambivalence, furthering a portrait of Cronenberg himself as an artist lost in perception of his art. The political movement that seeks to recruit Tenser into their cause views his art as a rallying cry celebrating the inner beauty of the human body; Tenser points out that his art centers on the removal of that beauty, inherently uninterested in letting it exist inwardly, yet the idea stays with him. The government agent who serves as Tenser’s contact in his capacity as an informant doesn’t see the point in his performances. Neither, to some extent, does Tenser; they’re useful as a job, or as a cover for his work with the government. Yet he feels compelled to defend his art, maybe buying into his own myth, maybe truly connecting with it. As his body changes, the changes themselves start to change. Tenser understands these fundamental movements, and has made himself amenable to them, liquid. Nothing is set in stone. He doesn’t have the thread of his art.

“Surgery is the new sex” is the film’s signature Cronenberg line. It’s what “Long live the new flesh” was to Videodrome. The invocation of the “new flesh” as something like a regime serves to depict the film’s conflicting cult interests in media and mutilation as all-encompassing, casting both hope and doom over the proceedings, giving them weight. In Dead Ringers, in an exchange not nearly as famous but just as essential to an understanding of Cronenberg’s self reckoning, one character responds to a comment that something is “so cold and empty” with “You can call it empty, or you can call it clean”. In that line, Cronenberg puts forth two options as to how one could view his films, not commenting, simply presenting them: his off-putting sterility could be for shock value, or it could be in service of a point about the sterility itself. The slogans of Cronenberg’s work have meaning; they worm their way into your mind, and they stick because of their resonance. “Surgery is the new sex” was designated as such before the film’s release, from its appearance in the trailers, before meaning could be adequately ascribed to it. We consume our media beforehand. Knowledge of Cronenberg’s prior work helps for context, for instance, alignment of the two concepts in films such as Crash and eXistenZ might help you to figure out what it means. So the phrase caught on, and in its actual application in the film, it’s fitting that it did. Spoken, again, by Stewart’s Timlin, the line comes to signify a deep personal response to Tenser’s surgical art that builds yet another example of weight he finds himself carrying. It’s also a commentary on Cronenberg’s own repeated depictions of mutilation, and how he has occasionally tended to present them as erotically charged (see, again, his Crash). This, like the Dead Ringers line, seeks to interrogate how we feel about these concepts. Cronenberg has always been invested in the concepts behind what he presents more than the presentation itself, which is of course, what has caught on. In one scene, Tenser views the performance of another body-based artist, the “Ear Man”, whose body is adorned with dozens of ears. Ear Man is suitably creepy, with sewn-shut eyes and mouth, complete with his own Cronenberg-esque slogan: the chillingly spoken “It is time to stop seeing”. Yet, as Tenser comments, the ears don’t even work. He dismisses this art, which he perceives as phony, due to its lack of functionality. Like Tenser, Cronenberg distinguishes himself by his concern with deeper meaning. The slogan of “Surgery is the new sex” prompts Tenser to ask Timlin why it’s necessary for anything to be “the new sex”. She responds simply, saying “It’s time”.

Crimes of the Future is, in a sense, Cronenberg taking back his own signifiers, coming to terms with what they mean to him rather than how they play to audiences. The movement of time was necessary to reach this point, this film could not have existed earlier. After spending so long away from body horror, mutations and mutilations of the flesh, his ideas have of course evolved. The world has evolved with them. These parallel evolutions are, in a Cronenbergian sense of fluid reality, mutations themselves: in The Fly, the central transformations are rapid, and in Crimes, they have slowed down to keep pace with natural human evolution. Is the implication that they’ve been happening to all of us since before we realized it? In this re-contextualization of what his signature transformations really mean, Cronenberg suggests just one of many late-career advances in his work’s philosophy. The more significant revelation in the film, however, concerns the work itself. The body horror of Cronenberg’s films has always teetered between something he’s been frightened by and enamored with, this unresolved internal tension part of what makes him so fascinating. By the film’s end, Tenser, who has resisted the more fringe political readings of his artistry, finds himself fascinated by them. In the final moments, he makes a move to break free from the rigid, mechanical structures he has let govern his life and embraces the philosophy of the plastic-eaters. In the last shot of the film, Mortensen’s face turns to elation, to release, for the first time in the film. His performance is a tormented one, pulled apart by surrounding forces externally and by the renegade forces of his own body internally. He never rests: he plays sleep as painful, and it’s no coincidence Cronenberg uses sleep as the state where he develops his art. Yet in that final image, he is at peace. He has made a truly independent choice for the first time that we see, and that choice is to give in to what his body wants, correct from the course of removal, and learn to love his evolution.

David Cronenberg has already announced his next film, The Shrouds, which is set to reunite him with Eastern Promises standout Vincent Cassel. From the available plotline, the film looks like it will center on ideas of death and the line between the living and the dead. Auteur filmmakers such as Cronenberg often tend to make late-career works fascinated with such themes, reusing motifs and images from their prior work to reach a uniting personal statement. Crimes of the Future certainly qualifies as that. In finishing the film with Saul Tenser’s moment of catharsis, Cronenberg seems to be justifying his return by delighting in the next step of his personal evolution. If the original Crimes of the Future was the work of a fledgling artist who had not yet found himself, the latest Crimes of the Future is the work of an artist who has reached not only maturity, but a final understanding of what he has been working towards. It is the beginning of some sort of end, yes, but it is also, in true Cronenberg fashion, an evolution of its own. An evolution he is more than happy to embrace.

Takashi Ito: Documentarian

Movement. Constant, plunging, almost nauseating forward movement. As if you’re being thrust into the void. It’s not a sensation that is, by any means, pleasant. Yet in the utterly entrancing films of Takashi Ito, it’s what you’re confronted with. His short works have been described as horror and surrealism, blending disembodied images, eerie sounds, and avant-garde editing techniques to create an atmosphere of discomfort in the viewer. In films like Spacy, Ito seems to be actively trying to torture his audience, issuing a bombardment of totally nonsensical visuals of familiar objects and places, strung together in an absolute fury to create a sensory overload. But more than anything, what he’s trying to do is show us something. You can see it in all of his films, the way he shoots everyday spaces as liminal and even dangerous, the way he presents human beings as apparitions, the way he appeals to all of our senses in a way nobody would think to. There is a method to this madness.

Like all great experimental filmmakers, Ito’s images are given emotional power through their individual construction and meaning through their juxtaposition with other seemingly meaningless images. When we see a human face projected like a ghost onto a dark wall in Thunder, we’re not sure what to make of it, but we know it stirs us. This is the feeling Ito dwells in. He can create a defamiliarizing feeling within a still frame with ease: Zone feels made up almost entirely of these, invoking a sense of seeing something you’re not supposed to be seeing even though it may appear normal on the surface. Ito is a master at giving something just the right unsettling tweak to land here. But his real genius comes not in the creation of these images, but in his editing. Ito was a student of Toshio Matsumoto, the iconic experimental filmmaker behind the likes of Atman, a fifteen-minute short in which a Noh theater demon is shot from several different angles to give the impression of constant, rapid rotation. Like Ito’s work, Atman’s unique movement is used to disorient the viewer: it’s easy to see Matsumoto’s influence. Also like Ito’s work, the film is explicitly centered on movement while drawing power from an image designed to burn itself into your brain:

The central figure in Matsumoto’s Atman

This is a combination of factors that Ito has used to incredible effect in communicating his grand design. What does he want to show us? His world, a wide, wonderful, horrifying world of empty spaces, between physical objects, human rituals, emotions, spirits. His world is, of course, our world, with a few differences. The key to his work lies in whether or not you view those differences as major. Ito will show us a world stripped away of recognizable humanity and littered only with signifiers of such, and thinking rationally, it makes sense to believe the signifiers are a replacement, a break from reality. The disembodied floating head in Thunder is not a fully formed human being. But Ito doesn’t want us to think rationally. And thinking of a part with Ito’s danse macabre of unrecognizable trivialities, you can start to talk yourself into the idea that what he’s presenting is not meant to represent the space between what we perceive as reality, but the empty space cluttering up that reality itself.

In my view, Ito can best be viewed as a documentary filmmaker. His break from narrative suggests abstraction, but that doesn’t mean it suggests a fictionalization or even anything beyond a thinly-veiled allegory. Ito shoots, habitually, the real world. Spacy‘s visuals, endless looping shots of the same blue-tinted school gymnasium, are clearly intentionally alien, yet created with no foreign elements. What Ito is presenting is normal, it’s the specifics of his presentation that create confusion on that front. But this is not isolated to one film: Ghost specifically seems preoccupied with an exploration of spaces we take for granted, and Grim takes this further as an extension of that concept. Ito himself referred to his goal in these two films as “peeling only the skin from various objects in the room, floating the skins in midair and then sticking them on different objects”. He’s deconstructing reality, yet there’s something very real to be said for the fact that the medium in which he chose to work is so explicitly plain reality. In Ghost especially, the idea of innocuous images taking on the role of individually-constructed powerful ones stands out. In presenting them in the unsettling, disorienting way that he does, Ito communicates the idea that everyday life is terrifying in its mundanity, that the reason these things are scary is because of how much they are expected to be accepted without question.

It’s a joke formulation, “X Outlandish Movie is a documentary”. It sounds almost unserious, as both a commentary on the work and the real world. Yet Ito’s work, fitting all sort of qualifiers for that type of “out-there art”, undeniably courts analysis as a presentation of these things rather than a formation of them. The fact that Ito is forming images of his own doesn’t contradict the idea that he’s mainly working with the natural world. If he is to be seen as a documentary filmmaker, he certainly can’t be classified as an objective, unobtrusive, fly-on-the-wall one. He’s something closer to Orson Welles in F For Fake mode, telling a story with his own authorial stamp, style, and embellishments, but still recognizably making a documentary. To accept Ito as a documentarian, you have to allow for room in your interpretations of both Ito’s films and the documentary as a concept. But this is easily doable: the documentary is undeniably malleable, and Ito’s central method centers, however strained, real-world depictions.

Ito’s less reality-grounded works may seem to challenge this. Zone’s procession of images, comparable to Spacy in acting as both an endurance test and a conscious sensory manipulation, may not seem conducive to the view of Ito as a documentarian. Abstraction as a synecdoche within reality can only carry you so far as an actual depiction of reality. Yet in Ito’s work, the surrealism manages to ring true. Think again about Thunder’s floating head, projected on a wall, an image totally divorced from something mundane, something you could conceivably encounter. How does this fit with a conception of Ito as a presenter of reality? Simply put, the image itself is real. Its location is not. In Ghost, much of what he puts forward is assembled in the same way as our world, yet in Thunder this is not the case. But its inherent reality is the same. Ito is assembling reality as he sees it, aligning images in thematic or emotional currents, but he is not altering or changing what is real. There are no characters, there is no dialogue. What he does, in putting forward images with the only context being other such images, rejects narrative or movement towards a concrete thesis. The way he edits, these images crashing and screeching against each other, only reinforces this. Even his most abstract works, he is commenting on our world by shining a light on it through his own perspective. The viewer is left to form their own opinion on what they have seen. To me, this is quintessential documentary filmmaking.

Ito’s unique filmmaking method is relentlessly compelling, forcing its way into your subconscious and nestling there. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly why this is: of course the fact that there’s nothing quite like the films makes them stand out, but the specific manner in which they are designed to unsettle is elusive. The reason they ring so true is because they are true, and they’re designed so that this isn’t immediately obvious. But for all the lingering strangeness and intangible absurdity, the truth shines through.

Was Chuck Jones the Best Looney Tunes Director?

Scaredy Cat, Jones, 1948

In the annals of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies scholarship, the idea of auteur-driven sensibilities in the cartoons tends to peak with one name: Charles M. “Chuck” Jones. The man behind the likes of Duck Amuck and One Froggy Evening cultivated an image as an unimpeachable titan of animation, and among acolytes of the Warner Brothers shorts, as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

One Froggy Evening, Jones, 1955

Yet for all the adulation, there’s a measure of pushback to Jones’s domination over the history of the Looney Tunes that I find compelling. There’s an entire world of other directors who, many feel, get unfairly overlooked in favor of Jones: Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, all responsible for some of the most iconic shorts and moments across the Tunes golden age. While Jones’s highs are indisputably tremendous, his lows can get aggravating for not breaking out of a given formula, visually or narratively. And his collaboration with another genius in writer Michael Maltese leads some to believe he may not have even been the most important part of that pairing.

Nasty Quacks, Tashlin, 1945

So how does it make sense to look at Jones’s place among this group? It could be reasonably argued that his output is the best of all of them because of how many canonical classics he made. The same point could be argued because of the immense quality of his lesser-known work, such as Scaredy Cat and Haredevil Hare. If you were in the business of determining a top spot for these things, you could even give it to Jones on the basis of One Froggy Evening, the greatest Tunes/Melodies short (and on this point, I feel, there’s no rational argument). But you could just as easily mount cases for Clampett’s visual invention, Tashlin’s handle on comedy, or Freleng’s character work.

Baseball Bugs, Freleng, 1946

This is about Jones, but it’s also about all of those filmmakers, and their place in elevating idle entertainment to high art. I’m here to state my opinion that Jones deserves his acclaim and popular opinion, but I’m also here to make a broader point about the Looney Tunes, which is that they are high art. And perpetuating the idea that Jones is the only source of that is doing a disservice to those other names. Friz Freleng, for example, is constantly lost in the shuffle despite directing one of the most iconic shorts of all time in Baseball Bugs. Ballot Box Bunny provides yet another example of his phenomenal handle on Bugs as a character, taking the already-loaded premise of a Looney Tunes political campaign and elevating it through his ingenious characterization. Yankee Doodle Daffy shows off his ability to feel fresh with the ubiquitous Daffy-Porky relationship, intercut with Sleepy LaGoof-centric visual gags that add another layer of depth to his abilities.

Porky in Wackyland, Clampett, 1938

Jones’s Duck Amuck is (rightfully) held up as a high water mark for animation that plays with the lack of visual boundaries of the medium, but its reception again shuts out other deserving cartoons and directors. Bob Clampett built a career on relentlessly compelling visuals packed into every short. The above Porky in Wackyland is his most well-known example, but his conception of a criminal underworld in The Great Piggy Bank Robbery and a living bookstore in Book Revue show that he was reliably producing this. Yet his work on something like The Old Grey Hare is what convinces me the most that he was a total master: less reliant on visuals but still wonderfully animated, while selling the broader character-based strokes with precision.

Feed the Kitty, Jones, 1952

Jones is seen as a jack of all trades who combined elements of animation, storytelling, and character work to master what the Looney Tunes were all about, but it’s unfair to suggest that these other guys weren’t. Was Chuck Jones the best Looney Tunes director? Who cares. He may well have been, but what I’d posit, after working through some of the work of the other WB luminaries, is that it doesn’t really matter. Chuck Jones, like Friz Freleng, like Frank Tashlin, like Bob Clampett, like Tex Avery, contributed so much to animation, film, and culture as a whole that I find his work pretty unimpeachable. But it’s a crime that the films of the others are less widely seen. The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies deserve to be celebrated as the height of American cinematic invention, a true art form unto themselves, and one that manages to further film as an art itself.

The Lumière Legacy: Hong Sang-soo, Vittorio De Seta, and “Boat Leaving the Port”

In 2012, the prolific and idiosyncratic South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo submitted an unranked list of his ten favorite films of all time. Many such lists were collected and released by Sight and Sound as part of their once-a-decade greatest films of all time poll, which surveys hundreds of critics and directors. The individual selections, though, are uniformly interesting looks into the tastes and inspirations of the participating directors, and while imperfect as complete accounts, each inclusion brings with it intrigue as to why exactly it found a place among a list of ten, picked from the entire spectrum of cinematic history.

Describing Hong’s work without the accompaniment of the work itself is a fool’s errand: it’s recursive in nature, reliant on variations in style, constantly building on itself. He shoots in long takes, depicts film directors wandering around Korean locales drinking and getting into arguments, makes use of his trademark zoom. There’s not a lot to be written about the surface ins and outs of his style and fascinations that hasn’t been written already. Many have compared his filmography to an ever-expanding novel. Many have accused him of making the same movie over and over again, which is both an unfair allegation and a misunderstanding of the importance of repeated motifs and structures throughout his work. A lot of people don’t really know what to do with him. And he comes by that honestly, churning out work that doesn’t quite resemble anyone else’s. His choices are uniquely his own; as much as he can be discussed to death, both on the surface and in depth, there will always be some mystery to him. So his Sight and Sound selections, while not by any means a perfect view into his cinematic subconscious, offer some intriguing nuggets. A lot of it makes obvious sense: Rohmer’s The Green Ray is a clear touchstone, Rohmer being the go-to point of comparison when discussing Hong. Films by Ozu and Bresson suggest traces of the naturalistic observatory style he’s become known for. You can see him digging Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, less something one would guess but still recognizable in influence, if for no other reasons than its scope (89 minutes of human interaction) and its fascinations (relationships, wandering around in search of meaning). But the entry on his list that starts to baffle is a minute-long 1895 film from cinematic pioneers the Lumière brothers, Boat Leaving the Port. And here’s where it gets difficult to make justifications. If you’re unfamiliar with the Lumières, and their more iconic work such as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, you should know that these titles are accurate, and also complete plot synopses. Theirs was an infant age of the cinematic art, when innovation consisted simply of pointing a camera at any movement at all. A director including Arrival of a Train on their ballot of ten essential films may be trying to make a point about significance in cinematic history. A director including a lesser-known work, such as Boat Leaving the Port, might be playing a joke.

But they also might not. In Hong’s case, the inclusion of something like Boat Leaving the Port reads as genuine. Watching the film, you start to see it. It’s relaxing, evoking an immersive atmosphere unlike Arrival of a Train. You get the sense that it’s different from that film, that there’s something alluring to it that’s almost jarringly watchable. There’s the element of the waves that the Lumières capture that’s inherently cinematic, their undulating movement a reflexively hypnotic nuance. There’s the actual journey of the central boat: It leaves, as we were promised, but it drifts around in the frame, leaving aimlessly, on its own schedule. It’s a beautiful visual, one that feels like it could go on for much longer. Hong listing it as one of the ten greatest films ever made resonates with this quality, the ease of watching it. It also hints at a key to Hong’s style: his framing of conversations and use of largely static long takes is, on a visual level, very basic and uncomplicated. It’s cinematic language cribbed from the very inception of cinematic language, back when they didn’t have the tools to do anything else. What Hong sees in the Lumière film is the potential of that style to facilitate watching. Hong has always used his camera as a watcher rather than an active participant, even when he makes films that seem aimed at his own flaws (which is frequently). In his 2018 film Grass, the central character has no real arc but instead sits in a cafe watching the drama of a few groups of people play out. It’s maybe the quintessential Hong indulgence in people-watching, and as such something of a rosetta stone for the rest of his work. In 2005’s Tale of Cinema, the first half of the film is revealed to be a film itself, which the characters in the second half of the film have just watched. This is a constant theme with Hong, the act of watching and how film blurs lines between involvement and pure viewership. In his films, we are watching him watch, but we are also watching ourselves, a layer of twisted multiple perspectives that Hong’s work actively cultivates. So why Boat Leaving the Port, a film that resists this twisted structure? Because Hong recognizes that our relationship to the departing vessel is a complex one, made all the more so by the simplicity of the visual. Viewership in this unchanging form is passive, in a way that alters the typical viewer-subject relationship. Hong plays on this stripped-down format to emphasize the absurdities and recurrences of this new relationship, but he also trades on the quick ability to change it by adding his own elements to the visual style. Which is where the zoom comes in.

Before I go into further detail on the zoom, one of the most significant and distinguishable features of Hong’s style, I want to pivot back to the influence of Boat Leaving the Port. The other difficult-to-pin-down director the film reminds me of is Vittorio De Seta, an Italian director mostly active in the 1950s who is best known today for his anthropological documentaries. Many of these depict the life and work of coastal Italian fishermen, and his own focus on boats and the sea calls the Lumières’ work back into attention. De Seta’s short documentaries persist today as cinematic documents as well as historical ones. The imagery he was able to capture is astonishing, and the immersion he was able to create into tiny pockets of the lives of his subjects takes naturalistic observation to a more extreme level than anyone else ever has. When remarking upon the unique way that the sea is conducive to cinematic hypnosis, De Seta’s name must be mentioned. He captured it perfectly, as seen in films such as Sea Countrymen, and the way in which he did so echoes the Lumières so well yet departs from them almost entirely.

The footage De Seta captured of his fishing operations is shot so up-close and personal with the mariners that it makes you question whether or not it was staged. We are far from the passive observation of the late 19th century and thrust forcefully into the action. The effect De Seta produces is similar to that of Boat Leaving the Port, yet heightened to a degree where what we are feeling is the leaving of the port, not the watching. In both cases, the focus is on the almost indescribable feeling that the movement of the ocean evokes in us, but they split on the application of cinema to make us feel a specific aspect of that. The Lumières wanted to allow us to see something and feel our own feelings based on what they showed us, De Seta wanted to create imagery designed to provoke feelings. Both are recognizable documentary form, both are naturalistic and stick to a sheer objective presentation of events, but one takes the other’s emotional evocation and wrests emotional involvement from it.

So why is De Seta important to the point about Hong? First, to give an idea of Boat Leaving the Port as a more important touchstone in cinematic history than one might think. Second, to provide a counterpoint to the stylistic directions taken from it. And third, to give a sense of the depth Hong’s style allows. I mentioned the zoom, a seemingly jarring visual movement present in all of his films since Tale of Cinema. It breaks the static composition of his shots with a push-in, usually on his characters, that foregrounds a new emotional depth to the scene, or at least an exaggeration of the already present dynamics. This is not to say that he can’t pull investment from his regular setups and dialogue, he can, and does so with extreme frequency. But the use of the zoom gives him the ability to shift between evocation and involvement in much the same way that De Seta’s work parallels Boat Leaving the Port. What De Seta may have taken from the film, assuming he was familiar with it, is an aggressively involved film grammar that couldn’t be further from Hong’s docile presentation, yet the two seem to have reached similar conclusions about what they could make their films feel like.

The fact that this all stems from a minute-long Lumière brothers joint, itself not consciously innovating for any emotion other than the one produced by the moving image alone, suggests that at heart, the reason a director like Hong might find resonance within it is because of that shock of the new. The undeniable je ne sais quoi of Boat Leaving the Port comes from the fact that you can feel the giddiness of invention, and all in all, what’s being repurposed is that same giddiness. The fact that these images have echoed so frequently in corners of cinematic history speaks to a universal truth about film. It’s the same one that makes Hong so fascinating to look at, it’s the same one that makes De Seta’s films so stunning. In all of these things, areas off the beaten path and in their own worlds of creation, there’s an inability to fully capture their essence. And that’s an invaluable part of what makes them so great.

94th Academy Awards: The Best Picture Nominees, Ranked

For what is now the fourth year in a row, I have made the poor decision to watch every movie nominated for Best Picture before the Oscars. As this year demonstrated, this is a tradition that brings with it plenty of pain, bad movies, and despair about the recognition of these bad movies. This year’s crop is especially fascinating for the disparity between its best honorees (spectacular and miraculous that they ended up in the conversation) and its worst (atrocious, despicable paeans to the kind of movie that gets lavished with praise nowadays), and is, as always, a reminder that these awards mean absolutely nothing. Let’s get into it:

Tier 4B: A Note on a War Crime

Tier 4B contains just one movie, which manages to stand out among its awful brethren to the degree of deserving an entirely separate sub-tier.

10: Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay)

Without question the worst of the worst, once-important filmmaker Adam McKay (of righteous Anchorman and Talladega Nights acclaim) continues his long, strange journey up his own ass with this bombastic celebration of his own genius, a crowning achievement in smug incompetence disguised as moral elevation. Don’t Look Up decides that the issue with climate change is that the general populace has not been yelled at about it by private jet-flying celebrities enough, and proceeds to fashion two and a half hours of shrill, obnoxious, one-note satire around the idea that it’s doing the lord’s work on this important issue. Its built-in defense against good-faith criticisms of its utter ineptitude at actually, y’know, being a movie is the bad-faith idea that anyone taking issue with its clumsy execution must disagree with its premise (which is, in its entirety: “climate change… someone should do something about that, huh?”). So allow me to state, clearly, the following: climate change is a massive issue, maybe our second most pressing one in the world today, behind of course “what is in the water in Hollywood that possessed so many well-respected people to think any of this was okay?”. The cherry on top is that this wretched fart of a movie, which decides to coast on nothing but its moral high ground, features one of the most sickening performances I’ve ever seen in Mark Rylance’s tech billionaire character, the joke of which is clearly just “Heh heh guys, this weirdo has autism! Isn’t that soooo funny?”. I can’t wait for the show to be over so this disgusting, infuriating screed can be lost to time like it deserves.

Tier 4A: *Fart Noises*

This is the tier where the regular old run-of-the-mill crapulence gets its due. There are two movies here, very aligned in quality (or lack thereof), and which I resent the Oscars for forcing me to watch. Or maybe I resent myself for it. These are dire times.

9: Belfast (Kenneth Branagh)

Set at the onset of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Kenneth Branagh’s passion project is limp, painfully boring, and bafflingly unwilling to engage with its complex setting beyond the idea of “isn’t religion so silly?”. Mostly this is just standard coming of age fodder, painfully directed and performed, bathed in ugly digital black and white, constantly cutting to better movies only to brutally pull the rug out from under you and remind you what you’re watching. There are 40 Van Morrison songs in this and not one of them is used well. It blows, folks.

8: Coda (Sian Heder)

Similar to Don’t Look Up, the defense for this turgid crap is that it features several actual deaf people in significant roles. Also similar to Don’t Look Up, this hides the fact that this movie sucks butt, and actually has very little to say about its subject matter. Rather than meaningfully engaging with the subject of deafness at its center, Coda sets up a conflict in which the hearing main character has to hide her passion for – get this – music, because her deaf family (lol) doesn’t like music. BECAUSE THEY CAN’T HEAR IT. This is written, directed, and performed like a fake movie, which is because it is a fake movie. If this wins, which is looking like an actual possibility, it will be one of the worst winners of all time, and not enough people are making a big deal out of this. The most unremarkable movie in any way but in how spectacularly it falls on its face, almost playing like a parody of a movie that gets raves at Sundance. Being held up as a triumph of indie filmmaking and word of mouth when in reality it only has any buzz because Apple spent billions of dollars in ads to prop up its front of a streaming service. Let this thing die, please, and watch the genuinely insightful and well-made Sound of Metal instead.

Tier 3: The Ether

This tier contains 2 movies, both deeply forgettable for different reasons. One is bad with a lot going for it, and one is completely fine with absolutely nothing going for it. These are the two movies I keep forgetting I’ve seen.

7: Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro)

Here’s the one that’s bad with a lot going for it. Nightmare Alley is undeniably beautiful, featuring a compelling central turn from Bradley Cooper, and some searing visuals and ideas. It’s also monstrously overlong and weirdly hollow in the same way The Shape of Water was, but drawn out to a painful degree in a way that makes it harder to hide. Such a shame, because there’s so much here that works, but soooo much that simply doesn’t.

6: King Richard (Reinaldo Marcus Green)

A perfectly fine, by-the-numbers sports biopic that you’ve seen, give or take, five thousand times before. Will Smith is pretty good in it, but it’s not a great sign when your movie focusing on the behind-the-scenes rise of widely celebrated figures is far better when it’s focusing on said widely celebrated figures.

Tier 2: It’s Pretty Good!

Tier 2 contains one movie, which happens to be the season-long favorite to take the whole thing. I’m here to tell you the following: It’s pretty good!

5: The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

Almost frustratingly not-great, The Power of the Dog contains strong performances from its four central performers (Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, all nominated), striking cinematography, and a banner score from one of the greatest working film composers (Jonny Greenwood). It never really combines those elements to reach the full potential of the sum of its parts, but that sum is astronomical, and the fact that it falls short isn’t really an indictment. If it ends up winning, it will be a perfectly fine winner, and also (I’m pretty sure) the only Best Picture winner to contain a graphic cattle castration scene.

Tier 1B: Oh Hell Yeah

There are, by my count, four movies in this years slate that are full-on masterpieces. I have decided to split them up, not to diminish the bottom two, but to underline the quality of the top two. So here’s the start of the good stuff:

4: Dune (Denis Villeneuve)

When I went into Dune, my expectations were on the floor. I was on record as a Villeneuve skeptic who disliked his Blade Runner movie and believed him to be too ephemeral in his strengths to handle long, overarching narratives. And then I left Dune ready to watch the next two and a half hours on the spot. This movie is a miracle, a nearly perfect sci-fi spectacle that wrangles its many threads into a coherent and emotionally involving whole. A stunning sensory experience wholly deserving of the praise and attention, a barnburner made within the demands of the studio system that breathes new life into big-budget filmmaking.

3: West Side Story (Steven Spielberg)

Likewise, I had my doubts about Spielberg’s update of the original classic, a movie I adore. The first look gave a much more beige picture of the film than I would’ve liked based on the vibrancy of the original. Then he stepped up to the plate with his most vibrant and exciting film since… Juassic Park? Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Ever? This thing is just incredible. Absolutely captivating from the first frame to the last, perhaps an improvement over the original in kind of every way. The performances are stunning, in accordance with the movie’s spirit of reverence yet improvement. You forget that Spielberg has this talent in him, almost, but watching it actually play out feels like nobody else could’ve pulled it off. One of his very best films, and one of the highlights of the year.

Tier 1A: Oh HELL Yeah

This is the tier with the very best of the best, two films whose nominations I consider reasons for the continued existence of the academy. Everyone should see these movies, and their presence in this group makes it far more likely that people will.

2: Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

I’ve written at length about both this movie and how cool it is that it’s nominated. So I’ll just reiterate quickly that Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of the most exciting voices in contemporary global cinema, made a stunning masterpiece that’s totally antithetical to everything the Oscars have ever been and it worked its way to a Best Picture nod by sheer virtue of being great. And because of this, more people will find his work, and he will have greater reign to do whatever he would like in the near future. And that, to me, is the true victory of these awards. Whatever crap is in the back half of this list, it’s all worth it if things like Drive My Car can get in the conversation.

1: Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)

25 years ago, Paul Thomas Anderson made Boogie Nights, a masterpiece of American cinema that still stands as one of the foremost examples of artistic genius you can produce from this country’s recent history. This past year, Anderson made Licorice Pizza, a masterpiece that provides evidence for the continued existence of brilliant Hollywood filmmaking. In between these two movies, he made 6 films, all of which are (guess what) masterpieces. Getting blessed with new Anderson feels too good to be true, and it just so happens that Licorice Pizza is another totally singular entry in his remarkable oeuvre. Light and fun yet resonant and satisfying, this is one of the best films of the year.

And so concludes the rundown of the best picture slate from 2021. Maybe next year will be the year I decide to stop doing this to myself.

On Jon Bois, One of the 21st Century’s Most Essential Filmmakers

There’s chaos inherent in great cinema. The French New Wave saw a group of critics create one of the most enduring arthouse movements on central tenets including their love for American B-movies. New Hollywood reveled in the death of the Hays Code and wrote a new cinematic vocabulary drenched in blood, pummeling the previous boundaries of popular cinema while reaching unprecedented artistic heights. Innovations and fascinations in film are often at odds with what is expected and what has come before. So it actually is in keeping with this tradition that one of the most vital contemporary cineastes in this age of blockbusters and the box office uploads his work to the internet for free. And it’s only reasonable that his newest film has many shivering in anticipation for 3+ hours of information about Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Dave Stieb.

On Tuesday, March 1st, one of my most anticipated films of 2022 will release its first part. Up there with Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Denis’s Fire or Both Sides of the Blade or whatever it ends up being called, and Hong’s The Novelist’s Film sits Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb, a four-part documentary slated to be parceled out on YouTube in two week intervals. It’s the latest in a line of work from SBNation writer Jon Bois that has stood out as one of the most unique and noteworthy of the 2020s so far, a coup against standard distribution systems and documentary form that has turned Bois into one of the most unlikely and essential auteurs of the millennium. Bois’s last two films, 2020’s The History of the Seattle Mariners and 2021’s The History of the Atlanta Falcons, followed the same format and took a similar approach: these are gargantuan documentary series focusing on an arc in sports history often treated as an afterthought. Both have stood out as among the best films of their respective years, an outstanding feat considering the vast number of people who would laugh off the very idea of their categorization as films. I am far from the first one to make this case: the Seattle Film Critics Society named Mariners the best documentary of 2020, and the New York Times cited it as an achievement. So how does Bois weave such art out of a series of YouTube videos?

Well, the first thing you’d have to talk about would be the charts. The diegesis of Bois’s work stems from granular data, represented by graphs and figures, numerical manifestations of every aspect of his subject. He’s dealing with sports, an arena where there’s a stat for everything, and he uses these stats to lay the groundwork for his stories. Both Mariners and Falcons take place on an expansive plane that eventually fills up to display the franchise’s entire history of wins and losses, the most basic of all stats. But the brilliance of Bois’s method is his slow pull back through more and more layers until the complete picture of what he’s communicating becomes clear. We begin with the wins and losses, mounting up to create seasons, and within these seasons lie more charts and more numbers. But you also start to see figures, stories Bois begins to unfold of the people who played for these teams. And these people have stats of their own, and these stats tell their stories as blips in the colossal register of sporting history. And all the sudden you begin to see what Bois is driving at: he’s exploring the random occurrences that make up the existence of a team or league in between Super Bowls or division title races. He paints a complete picture of his subject to illuminate their surroundings, and we watch as the surroundings inevitably begin to echo earth. Take Mariners: the portrayal of a franchise that has done what feels like immeasurable losing takes great pains in measuring it out to the millimeter, unfolding the agony of the long baseball seasons in between any hope with the same scrutiny and detail as those with relevance. Detours in the Mariners’ lost 80s are taken to explore the likes of Jay Buhner in a way resembling the riotously successful 90s and the focus therein on, say, Randy Johnson. Through this collage of figures Bois builds out his thesis, his underlying examination of the way the absurdity of sports reflects the absurdity of human existence. We have our parables, our heroes and villains. Ken Griffey Jr and Alex Rodriguez are positioned by Bois in opposition. Griffey is a beloved icon who (as far as we know) never took steroids, never relented and joined the dark side (who else but the New York Yankees), and consequently never won anything of substance in his career. A-Rod, on the other hand, juiced plenty, played the bulk of his career in the Bronx, and has a ring to show for it. Bois knows that the worship of these men as gods is incongruous with their very real status as athletes, yet he presents them as folk icons because culture insists that they are folk icons. Sports are an exaggerated and idealized vision of the real world that we partake in eagerly because of their resemblance to the real world. In all of his work, ranging from these films to shorter videos to multimedia internet novels, Bois fleshes out this concept. In Falcons, the story of Michael Vick serves as the jumping off point for an examination of the criminal justice system, Super Bowl 51 represents the polarization in national politics post-2016, and extensive analysis is centered around the parallels between football and the military. All of this flows naturally from the presentation of the charts and from the niche and largely unrelated anecdotes Bois digs up (one particularly relevant example from Falcons is a newspaper clipping wherein then Falcons coach Norm Van Brocklin makes multiple disparaging references to the Sherman Antitrust Act). He sees these grand histories as intricate tapestries in which every person involved played a role, and in which every game ultimately ends up secondary.

The question of whether or not to categorize Bois as a filmmaker is an open and shut one for me. Few people working approach his level of sheer cinematic intrigue, and nobody else mines it from a place as original or unexpected. And if he’s established as a filmmaker, it naturally follows that he’s a great one, blazing his own cinematic language while producing immensely entertaining work that juggles humor and drama with ease. He has cut out a niche in the cinematic landscape that nobody else could have ever filled, and the work he produces has continued to be appointment viewing. He is overlooked as an artist almost by design: nobody would expect any part of his MO to result in masterful cinema. But in the canon of 21st-century film, few deserve more recognition.

On a more serious note, here’s a quick note on why Drive My Car’s Oscar nominations are so cool

Sometimes, I really do love being wrong. I’ve talked in the past about coming around on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on second viewing. I went into Villeneuve’s Dune having totally convinced myself I would hate it and walked out ready to watch the next two and a half hours on the spot. And this morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thoroughly trashed my prediction that Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, though a critical darling, stood no chance at a best picture nomination.

The Oscars, it bears repeating, don’t mean anything. The lack of validation for many of the year’s great films — Wes Anderson’s wonderful The French Dispatch, Hamaguchi’s other masterpiece Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Julia Ducornau’s Titane, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (which never did stand must of a chance), to name just a few with zero nominations — doesn’t change the fact that they’re great. Sometimes people will use Oscar martyrdom as a measure of greatness: can you believe that Goodfellas and Citizen Kane didn’t win Best Picture? This is an exercise in subjectivity forced on an unassuming popular consciousness as objective, and as such is completely farcical to begin with. Even when they acknowledge something like Parasite or Drive My Car, it sort of feels like they’ve chosen one representative foreign film and have done their duties as connoisseurs for the year. It’s inherently frustrating and designed to compel indifference, sparking rage for its total inability to shed its popularity.

And yet, watching Drive My Car, not only one of the best films in some time but one of the more slippery and difficult ones to grab public attention, storm its way into the Best Picture slate is a tremendous feeling. Academy voters, as many have pointed out, sit in an intangible purgatory that’s too mainstream for hardcore film buffs and too snobby for general audiences. But they’re still not a group that owes anything to a three-hour Hamaguchi effort, and they’re still a group that, for better or worse, makes public taste. To watch them champion Drive My Car provides some hope for mass moviegoing continuing to accept challenging art. To consider the implications of their choice sparks genuine optimism: undeniably, more eyeballs will now find their way to a Ryusuke Hamaguchi film than ever before. It will play in more theaters (and for longer) than anyone could have anticipated. One of our most exciting emerging filmmakers is going to have unimaginable free reign on his next project, which will in turn itself become more accessible than it would have been otherwise. The much-theorized-about popular Korean cinema boom post-Parasite didn’t exactly take off, but I guarantee more people watched Okja than had ever previously considered it, and we sure as hell had some people check out The Host and Memories of Murder off of it. Parasite itself exploded, becoming a pop culture touchstone that seemingly everyone has seen, or at least knows. And sure, part of this is due to the film’s nature as entertaining and crowd-pleasing, but it never happens if it doesn’t get the extra elevation the Academy provided it. I really do doubt that Drive My Car can run all the way to a victory in the category. And I really don’t think it’s as primed for popular acceptance as Parasite. But regardless of whether the boom will be as big, it’d be pretty much impossible not to see some spike in viewership. The film deserves it, as does its masterful architect, especially considering how brazenly it isn’t designed for it. In an age dominated by franchise films and IP-driven fare, to live in a world where an honest-to-God Hamaguchi masterclass can find stateside name recognition is a downright miracle. Say what you will about the Oscars and the state of this year’s nominees, you know that I’m going to over the coming weeks. But at the very least, I’ll be taking a moment to appreciate the sheer coolness of Drive My Car’s success.

I’ll say it again: beep beep, beep beep yeah.