BIRTH: Lover Boy

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writers: Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
Runtime: 100 mins.
2004

Birth begins with an intrusion: a voice speaking over the opening production title cards. "Okay, let me say this. Let me say this. If I lost my wife, and the next day a little bird landed on my window sill, looked me right in the eye, and in plain English said, 'Sean, it's me, Anna, I'm back.' What can I say? I guess I'd believe her. Or I'd want to. I'd be stuck with a bird. But other than that, no, I'm a man of science, I just don't believe in that mumbo jumbo. Now that's going to have to be the last question, I need to go running before I head home." From there, a lengthy tracking shot of a man jogging down a snowy path, the camera lurking behind and above him like unseen doom. This is underscored by some absolutely gorgeous strings and woodwinds, the first hint of Alexandre Desplat's stunning compositional work throughout the film.

The man runs until his heart gives way and he quietly collapses beneath an underpass. We cut to a newborn baby, emerging from a pool of water.

The opening five minutes of Birth hand us the blueprint we need to watch the rest. Already the film is teasing out Hegelian dialectics; everything contains its antithesis, and the processes of growth and life are fueled by the irresolute contradictions that tear at us. The man of science finds comfort in mysticism. The healthy act of running brings deadly heart attack. There is laughter at a funeral. Death contains birth.

Adam's Rib: The Tokenization of Women in the Age of Identity Politics

This essay was requested by Carson Rebel. His prompt concerned the new wave of woman empowerment in film--when it is done well and when it is done awkwardly. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

The early days of Hollywood were filled with women in crucial creative roles. In the intervening century, women were muscled out as Hollywood became an aggressively masculine force of cultural production. The twenty-first century has seen a slow shifting in the tides. With the culture of identity politics in full swing, large studios are exploring the profit motives of better representation. The disparity is still large, but mainstream and blockbuster movies are seeing more and more women take center stage. Unfortunately, that shift comes with three significant caveats.

1. The women taking center stage are overwhelmingly able-bodied cis white women.
2. Most women written for mainstream films are either wholly generic, or stuck in a cycle of performative masculinity.
3. This wave of diverse representation onscreen seldom extends to the writers, directors, or producers who are shaping the narratives offscreen.

So it is that most of our contemporary examples of 'strong female characters' onscreen are cynically designed. This piece will explore a range of failures and successes, and expose the shallowness of liberal identity politics that avoid substantial structural commentary.

DEATH NOTE: A Light Adaptation

Director: Adam Wingard
Writers: Charley Parlapanides, Vlas Parlapanides, Jeremy Slater
Cast: Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley, Shea Whigham, Willem Dafoe
Runtime: 101 mins.
2017

A quick word about adaptation. Translating a work of art to a new medium isn't just about copying what came before. It must be an entirely new work. Adaptations don't derive their value from how close they come to replicating the original, but from how they function on their own merits. No art can perfectly replicate what worked in a different medium and time.

There are questions that all artists ought to answer as they create, but these questions become especially pressing with adaptation. Why does your work need to exist? What makes it relevant now? What about this medium enhances your ability to tell the story?

Adam Wingard's Death Note cares dick all about these questions. You'd be hard pressed to find a compelling original idea in this mess. I guess there are slightly futuristic guns?

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS - The Bliss of Evil

Director: Werner Herzog
Writer: William M. Finkelstein
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Xzibit
Runtime: 122 mins.
2009

I cannot stop thinking about this clip from an interview with director Werner Herzog, so I'll replicate it here in full:

Nicolas Cage would not sign his contract unless I was directing the film and I would not sign my contract unless he was the leading character in the film, so there was an immediate basis. We never had had any contact before, but we watched each other's work in a way, and I think we complemented each other very well. Nicolas knew I would get the very best out of him. I always get the very best out of actors ... He said to me on the second day of shooting, 'Werner, you know I hate to ask you this because I know you cannot stand debating the character development of your figures onscreen, you cannot stand these endless debates about motivation.' Yes, it's true, I cannot stand it. He said to me, 'But one quick question, maybe you'll have some sort of a quick answer. Why is the Bad Lieutenant bad? Is it the drugs? Is it Hurricane Katrina? Is it the corruption of the police force? Is it his messed up family life?' And i said to him, 'Don't enumerate anything more, let's stop it right here. Nicolas, there's such a thing like the bliss of evil. Go for it.'

This brief anecdote perfectly encapsulates the respective essences of Herzog, Cage, and the film itself. Certainly Bad Lieutenant is preoccupied with the matter of evil, but what makes the movie dance is its pursuit of bliss. A film that observes a man careening towards physical and spiritual self-destruction, in a devastated city long abandoned by a racist government, featuring act after act after act of wanton cruelty... well, a film like that ought to be a tough watch. Yet somehow, Bad Lieutenant is the most bleakly funny movie I have seen in quite a long time.

Top Ten 2019

Other Top Ten Lists

I wasn't overly enamored with the movies of 2019, but every year has its cinematic rewards. Although 2020 is throwing that claim into uncertainty. Already dozens of high profile movies have been pulled from the release schedule, with who knows how many more to come. Many new films will drop on streaming services, but even so it's difficult to imagine a full and satisfying list of 2020 favorites eight months from now.

All the more reason to celebrate the treasures of 2019. My hope as always is to expose you to works of art that hadn't crossed your radar, or that fell by the wayside. This is the opportune moment for artistic exploration; we may have a freeze on new releases in all this craziness, but luckily we have a whole 100+ years of film to catch up on.

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST: I Am the Silence That You Cannot Understand

March is Women's History Month, where we highlight voices that can get lost in the shuffle--sometimes deliberately. Such is the case with this film, one of the great indie successes of all time, whose creator was subsequently suppressed out of the filmmaking arena.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Julie Dash

Writer: Julie Dash

Cast: Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbarao

Runtime: 112 mins.

1991

"I was the only one who came off of that stage not having another motion-picture movie."

The speaker of this quote is Julie Dash, the stage is Sundance, and the film featured there is Daughters of the Dust, the first film directed by a black woman to be theatrically distributed in the United States. The film saw widespread critical acclaim, yet Dash was shut out of Hollywood, relegated to decades of TV movies, music videos, and books reflecting on Daughters. It is next to impossible for a black woman to make and distribute a film. The barrier is racial and gendered (maybe we'll consider a woman, and maybe we'll consider a black man, but a black woman?? not a chance). That obstacle is only now being slowly eroded by the likes of Ava DuVernay and Dee Rees, thanks in large part due to the pioneering work of Julie Dash. But for Dash herself the barricade was made even more insurmountable by the content of her work.

Daughters of the Dust is the story of the Gullah, a community of African Americans residing in the low country Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Living isolated from the mainland has allowed the Gullah to survive without their African heritage being entirely eradicated. The film is set in 1902 as a contingent of the Gullah prepare to leave their home to travel North in search of more modern opportunity.

Most of what we have come to expect from a movie is radically upended by Daughters. As Roger Ebert put it in his review, the film plays like a tone-poem. It is not beholden to plot, or character, or chronology, but to mood, texture, and rhythm. I struggled to follow Daughters for the first half hour. This is not a deficiency, but an education. Dash is teaching you how to engage with her world culturally, aurally, verbally, rhythmically, temporally.

CAPTAIN MARVEL: A Woman's Touch

March is Women's History Month, so round these parts we round up films directed by women. This one's a big one, Marvel's first woman behind the camera since Patty Jenkins was ousted from the production of Thor: The Dark World.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck
Writers: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, Meg LeFauve
Cast: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, Annette Bening, Lashana Lynch
Runtime: 123 mins.
2019

A pattern begins to emerge among all of the heroes Marvel has introduced in Phase 3, which ends next month with Avengers: Endgame. These newcomers' stories lack compelling, fully manifest character arcs. In other words, the movies are hardly about anything at all. The MCU's Doctor Strange is Tony Stark with tech swapped out for magic; he is punished for his hubris by losing functionality in his hands, but then zips through magic training effortlessly, with only lip service paid to transcending his arrogance. Meanwhile, the MCU's Spider-Man is Tony Stark with oldness swapped out for youngness; Peter steadfastly refuses to learn any lessons, then is rewarded for his unchanging behavior. The only exception seems to have been Black Panther, who managed to have a focused and pointed arc even before his solo film, back in Captain America: Civil War.

Which brings us to Captain Marvel, the worst offender yet. There is a narrative online that the men writing negative reviews don't understand the message, and that the movie is not for them. In some cases this is certainly true. Others may love the message, but resent the execution. There are quite a few women writing negative Captain Marvel reviews that you could check out, like this succinct piece by Louisa Moore.

Captain Marvel purports to be about a woman throwing off the shackles of what men have told her to be, but in practice the message doesn't evolve past lip service. "You should do what you feel!" the movie suggests, "Especially if you got superpowers in an explosion!" Such a worthy message tossed off with such little thought feels more like condescension than progress. It doesn't help that director/writers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have absolutely no idea how to dramatize any of this. We never see the growth. Yes, Jude Law tells her to control her emotions, but then she blasts him anyway. Yes, a man tells her to smile more, but then she steals his motorcycle. These are fist-pumping feminist moments, but they jump the shark of Carol's arc. What lesson has she learned if her behavior is the same throughout? (And who is she supposed to have learned this lesson from, anyway? Nick Fury, a man who has no compunction against exploiting individuals for their violent potential? Or her supposed mentor Dr. Wendy Lawson, whose only advice is, "We need to blow up this speedy engine."?)

THE NATIVITY STORY: Dad Almighty

March is Women's History Month, so round these parts we round up films directed by women. This week is a movie about two and a half dads.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Writer: Mike Rich
Cast: Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub, Ciarán Hinds
Runtime: 101 mins.
2006

Imagine my surprise when Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story establishes itself as a shabby Lord of the Rings knockoff within the first few seconds. It's the haunting rendition of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" that does it, though you can find telltale signs of mimicry anywhere from the tone of self-important grandeur, to the impressive production values, to the shared distributor: New Line Cinema. In theory, the idea seems to have been an update of the painfully familiar religious fable of the Savior's birth for a new generation. In practice it is pompous and dull. There's a reason Tolkien expressed his beliefs via a heavy lens of mythology. These stories simply aren't as interesting if you literalize them. The folks who critiqued The Lord of the Rings films for being mostly walking ought to take a gander at this slog.

The film endeavors to be a heap of rubbish in the least spectacular way possible. The cinematography is approximately competent, save some inexplicable camera movements, but it is awash in the most unappealing "Biblical" browns and grays so as to siphon away any pleasure that could be derived from the well-financed set, props, and costumes. The script is far worse, with dialogue careful to traffic only in vagaries, so as to avoid accidentally making a statement about something. This is a screenplay (penned by Mike Rich, veteran of Hollywood Oscarbait) in which the phrase PREPARE YOUR TAXES is meant to fill us with a sense of ominous dread. Even more dire is the plot. The A-plot is stuck in a perpetual first act, while the B- and C-plots (King Herod's machinations; the Three Wise Men) are so inconsequential I couldn't even tell you which is the B- and which is the C-. The villain Herod wanders around the sets tossing offhand threats at a hypothetical Savior, while the wise men ride their camels and wonder aloud whether the Savior will really be waiting for them when they arrive. At least they play with some fun science wizard gizmos at the beginning.

A Sexist Cinematic Universe

Gamergate seems as good a place to start as any. For those not familiar, Gamergate was a 2014 crisis in the video game community that saw multiple campaigns of targeted harassment against prominent women in the industry. Nominally, the issue at hand was "ethics in game journalism," but this was nothing more than a wispy smokescreen covering over a nasty sentiment: We men don't want women and SJWs* infiltrating our boys' club and critiquing the [ro]bust objectification rampant in the medium. If this is sounding familiar, that's because Gamergate was a sort of a coming out party for the alt-right and neo-nazi movements plaguing our political landscape now. The implications of Gamergate were ignored or dismissed as something dumb happening on the internet. A huge mistake.

*Social Justice Warrior, an apparently disparaging term popularized by this very movement

As the alt-right movement grew in power, if not yet in prominence, the Red[dit] Horde set its sights on the movies. Ghostbusters (2016) has been the most striking example of uproarious backlash to totally innocuous diversity initiatives. This represented a sea change in fan entitlement, crossing a line from tweeting angrily at artists to decisive and violent collective action. Infantile fans resented the womanwashing of their original heroes. In response they waged online crusades against the reputation of the film, trying their best to drag the box office take down (proving, I suppose, that feminism isn't profitable). A particularly insidious group launched an abuse campaign against one of the film's cast members, Leslie Jones, until she was forced off of social media. Why Leslie Jones specifically? Sexism and racism make good bedfellows. Jones hasn't made a high profile movie since, though she lends her voice to this year's The Angry Birds Movie 2.

There have been plenty more bumps and grinds along the way, and here we are in 2019 well worse for the wear. Yet we get bleaker still.

Top Ten 2018

Other Top Ten Lists

I abandoned Post-Credit Coda last year. Our driest year yet featured only seven reviews. These hobbies can take a backseat for life reasons from time to time, but we make time for what's important. Thing is, I wasn't sure how important this was to me. Film criticism typically comes from a place of knowing; in my other work (and life in general) I've been dwelling a lot on the power and honesty of coming from a place of not-knowing.

Still and all, it would be a shame to miss out on sharing my favorite films of the year with you. Just because I haven't been writing about movies doesn't mean I haven't been seeing them! Maybe I can introduce you to a new favorite. Before we get there, we're going to have some fun with the clunkers, and before we get there, here are some films I missed that may have factored in:

Madeline's Madeline, Night is Short, Walk on Girl, One Cut of the Dead, Aquaman, You Were Never Really Here, Blindspotting, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, Creed II, Anna and the Apocalypse, Venom, Burning, Shirkers, Paddington 2, The World Is Yours, First Man, Cold War