Movie Challenge Update #3

John Wick movies are for me what the Fast and Furious franchise seems to be for other people. The unreality of them is endearing and engrossing, and the permanent violence here often comes off more as an elaborate version of our childhood "Hiyah!"s than something sinister that's going to infect our minds. Which is to say, this would be a very boring franchise to talk with Tipper Gore about and that is as high a praise as I have in my magazine for something that falls this squarely into the center of its own genre.

John Wick 4 is certainly the standout between these 2, and serves as final proof that it is a dark day indeed for violent goobers everywhere when Mr. Wick comes to town. This one clocks in at right around 3 hours, but the last 90 minutes might seriously be the best action movie ever made and I don’t intend that flippantly. The scene at the steps of the Sacre Coeur alone will probably end up on the walls of film classrooms for the last few years that college will probably exist and it’s very much worth a bicycle ride or pogostick hop to your local cinema club to watch.

This is a top 5 movie for me from the last 10 years, and if you haven't seen it yet I very strongly suggest that you catch it in theaters during its current Oscars rerun. So much about it is astonishingly good that it's not even worth describing here. Better to just see for yourself.

Somewhere towards the bottom of Lars von Trier's work rests a question about our nature: are we cracking the universal code, or are we cracking under the pressure to find one in the midst of the chaos? In Vol. 1 of Nymphomaniac, we find the Fibonacci sequence spiraling upwards unstoppably through the stories that Joe and Seligman share with one another over the course of the night. What it might mean is best left to the individual audience member, but I would suggest you not rush to place yourself in Seligman's shoes and assume that you're the one here digging for beauty in someone else's mess.

Joe's disaffected recollections have something to teach all of us about self-awareness and self-disclosure even if following her through her early years gets pretty thorny in places. I won't pretend there aren't very dark moments here, and if you think this movie isn't for you you're probably right. But this isn't a test of will power or moral endurance either. Joe's lust and the graphic literalism of the sex portrayed here offer a type of simplicity that is reminiscent of purity, which von Trier plays with to great effect. The film's scientific obsession with sex desensitizes you back into paying more attention to what's happening around it, and that's where the film shines.

Von Trier, for his many faults, is a master of pulling up the artificial lawns of modern life and the creatures here that scurry further into the dishonest and culturally acceptable dirt look unsurprisingly like us, leaving us with a possible reality that the real hell confronting modern masculinity isn't its predictable, dopey badness but its nearly-religious earnestness to continue living like a chickenshit.

Profound on every possible level, to the point that the thematic and literary layers here come off as technical compared to the subject himself. Charlie is both existentially distinct and addressable, and symbolically true and relatable as he serves as a mirror into just how deep down the rabbit hole suffering can take us if we let it. The heartbreaking realism of this dual purpose is, I think, the fundamental way in which The Whale honors its central text and establishes itself as a generational work of art. There are some moments along the way of expository acting from the surrounding cast that feel a little bit like watching someone leave their Cheeto bag on the floor of the Louvre, but that comes with the bleak Hudson upstate territory so it is what it is.

I'll start with the obvious stuff: Lydia Tár has done some very bad things, and this film has a great deal of potentially boring scenes in it. A lot of the reviews I read leading up to watching it myself seemed to think they were discovering fire in the house in the middle of the night by pointing either of those things out, so I figured I'd just get them out of the way now. It's true: it's possible that you'll be bored or upset by this movie.

I mean this unsarcastically: Ayn Randian characters wearing themselves and those around them down to the literal bone in pursuit of satisfying the infinite hunger of their own ego's printing press isn't for everyone. To push it further, much of the genius of anything is found in the minute and menial tasks that most everyone else chooses to ignore, and it's often even less fun to watch than it is to do. Jiro Dreams of Sushi was only more lovable because it was brief and less culturally on edge, which allowed us to believe that learning to make rice for 10 years might be fun and only trusting yourself to buy fish from the market was cozy. In this case, we find a similar level of pedantic bitchiness with higher social and sexual stakes. It seems realistic that much of the life of a high level conductor is turning minutiae into mountains for leverage in workplace squabbles and taking copious notes on paper with pencil, and I’m not sure that it’s Tár’s fault that the modern reward for mastery is an infinite series of meetings.

For me, the portrait of Lydia here is a synthesis of a Matryoshka doll and a Faberge egg. One unnecessarily ornate layer after another being removed until we see her skull seething back at us while the camera rarely looks away. I would have watched an 11 hour cut of this, and the backdrops set within the inner organs of orchestra centers and glammy German post-industrial apartments tasted like rich food.

But regardless of how boring you do or do not find it, I don’t think this movie can't be reduced to a simplistic gotchya take. Lydia is not the only shark in the water here, and the shove that Todd Field gives to modern online self-righteousness is deserved. Olga and some of the others in here are the next waves from the same chaotic ocean Lydia rose from, not newly-emerging pieces of moral high ground like they would like you to believe. They're not better people, they’re just better at Instagram.

But I don't think the social commentary bit is even the real meat on the bone here, or at least it wasn't for me. Tár is honest about an uncomfortable truth: the pursuit of becoming incredible at anything is lonely and terrifying. There is no amount of thinking or behaving correctly that is going to save you from that. And the value of seeing a piece like this through to the end is often the work it accomplishes in you while you're not paying attention. It might be this: you are going to need to do some things that are going to feel barbaric in order to become what you're capable of, and perhaps the lesson here is that you are better off doing them to yourself. Or perhaps it's this: if you love something, you are going to have to let it destroy a version of you, and there's no gentle way around that.