NewYorker Movie Facebook Club discussion on Richard Brody's Most Dangerous Films of 2018

As we approach the terminus of 2018, here's a list of films from this year that Richard Brody estimates as prompting us to be vain, ignorant, prejudiced, lazy, paranoid.... as doing the opposite of challenging us to become better, more woke, and so which cooperate in making us de facto agents of evil.

A Quiet Place: The movie’s survivalist horror-fantasy offers the argument for turning a rustic farmhouse into a virtual fortress, for the video surveillance and the emergency lighting and, above all, the stash of firearms that (along with a bit of high-tech trickery that is too good to spoil) is the ultimate game changer, the ultimate and decisive defense against home intruders.

First Man: In its explicit content, and by artful omission, “First Man” subscribes to the misbegotten political premise that America used to be greater—and that the liberating and equalizing activism of the sixties ignored, dismissed, and even undermined that greatness.

Incredibles 2: Yet what’s chilling about “Incredibles 2” isn’t its smug self-promotion; it’s the superhero essentialism—the vision of born leaders with an unimpeachable moral compass to whom all right-thinking people should swear allegiance and invest confidence—that Bird proclaims through his ever more impressive C.G.I. craft.

Star is Born: Jack’s substance-abuse issues are aptly described and presented as a disease, but his willingness and ability to cope with them is viewed as inseparable from his artistic identity and fortunes; so, for that matter, is the impaired hearing and tinnitus from which he suffers. (His unwillingness to take steps to protect his hearing is depicted as a creative decision.)

But it’s hard to shake the sense of a shift in Cooper’s version of this classic Hollywood story of a man’s star falling while a woman’s ascends, one that emphasizes the self-punishing, self-sacrificing aspects of the male side of the equation. In its depiction of the musician’s self-scourging for the public’s good, it edges into turf occupied lately by “Whiplash.”

Annihilation: Besides Lena, the women are given no inner life whatsoever, with the exception of one point of suffering each: one used to cut herself; another is a recovering drug addict; one lost a child. And these troubles render each, as one of them says, “damaged goods”—as if these troubles sufficed to spur them into a virtual suicide mission. The notion is both trivializing (of their troubles and of their mission) and also essentially offensive.

Ready Player One: The movie’s fondly remembered eighties and nineties replicates its exclusions and its rejections; it’s the version that left Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground” unreleased, that left Wendell B. Harris, Jr., and Julie Dash and Rachel Amodeo without a second feature, that smothered Elaine May under snarky reviews. The movie’s icons of nostalgia provide a grotesque carnival of the undead, a uniform spew of icons emptied of substance, history, connections.

Eighth Grade: “Eighth Grade” isn’t so much an amiable film as it is a film that yearns to be likable and strives to be liked.

Suspiria: “Suspiria” is full of disconnected, static, but attention-getting, details of vast historical import, and these adornments’ function is far more insidious than mere virtue-signalling or pride. They are bait for critical vanity, handing critics toys to play with, toys that can be defended as educational while offering little substance and less thought.

Infinity War: Thanos’s plot is explicitly, enthusiastically genocidal (of his own murderous efforts to make “trillions cease to exist,” he offers the Nazi-like assertion that “The hardest choices require the strongest wills”), and the movie resounds and rumbles throughout with a megalomaniacal energy that plays like arena-Wagner. It comes complete with hardcore light shows; absurd heroic gestures amplified by visual and sonic clamor; the neo-medievalism of weaponry forged by a dwarf master smith (Peter Dinklage), and enough varieties of Liebestods to fill the Met’s whole season.

Mission Impossible: Fallout: In his 1846 essay “The Present Age,” Søren Kierkegaard decried the widespread tendency of the time—which he summed up as an age “without passion”—to “transform daring and enthusiasm into a feat of skill.” I’m not sure that these observations apply to the modern public at large, but they certainly account in significant measure for the peculiar critical acclaim that “Mission: Impossible—Fallout,” written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, has been garnering.

"Life of the Party": For that matter, Maddie’s equanimity in the face of her parents’ split—rather, in the face of her father’s affair, departure, and financial malice—is almost robotically detached; it’s as if, when Deanna reassures Maddie that the divorce has nothing to do with her, the young woman takes that idea absurdly, placidly literally. In both films, the depiction of utterly benign adolescents and young adults seems less a matter of artistic conception than of marketing: it reassures parental viewers rather than scaring them, and it flatters younger ones rather than satirizing or scrutinizing them. (“Blockers,” with its idiosyncrasies and clever physical comedy, is the far better film.)

"Tully": Reitman casts and directs the film with a peculiar blinkering that, perhaps unintentionally, defines cinematic normalcy as white. There are three prominent characters of color in the movie, and all of them play formal and orderly obstacles for Marlo to endure, confront, or bear.

"I Feel Pretty": Renee’s newfound sense of self-love is kept, by Kohn and Silverstein, within bland and narrow limits, because the character is written not with any sense of interest or inquiry but to please and to flatter the virtual character, in the audience, who is meant to find Renee’s quest, success, and missteps edifying.

"The Rider": Nonetheless, those scenes thrust into the foreground both an emotional extreme and a dramatic point (a cautionary vision for Brady, who sees the kind of danger that might await him should he incautiously return to the rodeo ring) that rest on a character, an identity, and a life story that remain flimsy and undeveloped, because Zhao preferred to shape a familiar dramatic structure in which simple conflicts and simple resolutions take the place of mental complexities.

"Deadpool 2": It’s hard to imagine a more persuasive dramatic argument to tease the self-proclaimed arbiters of their own just cause into admiration for violent solutions—and to lift the burden of guilt and the sense of responsibility—than the notion that heroes never really die.

"Upgrade": The element of nostalgia that “Upgrade” markets is for more than its high-tech advocacy of a low-tech life; it’s even for more than its realm of male action heroes and villains. It is, above all, for a mode of movie-making that’s conspicuously modest in budget but also modest in ambition; that, rather than relying on the freedom of low-cost filmmaking to create an individualistic (and challenging) movie, creates a conspicuous entertainment that has essentially no ambition whatsoever, no personality whatsoever, and that isn’t merely intellectually undemanding but emotionally effortless. [...] Rather, it’s nostalgia for a time when the interests of mass audiences and of critics frequently converged, when critics could find many movies in the mainstream that they could take seriously—and thereby find, in the movies, confirmation of their own cultural centrality.

"Life itself": “Life Itself” is, for the most part, a work of heir-conditioning that sets up a domino-string of maudlin, sentimental ancestor-worship based on gratitude for the wealth that those ancestors piled up in a past golden age of possibilities, and which now exists only for newcomers to live long enough to tell the tale.

"Peppermint": A final fillip of cavalier connection between police and vigilante practices suggests that American heroism is defined by unlawful actions undertaken by the agents of the law, acting in their own name in unleashing violence against those whom, in their determination, deserve it. “Peppermint” is a movie of unmitigated ugliness, a reflection and intensification of the current of hate that is currently coursing through the American mainstream.

Note: "perhaps unintentionally" surfaces a number of times in his reviews this year... he clearly sees worrying signs in directors he is still hoping aren't at heart what they're depicting in film.

Juan Francisco Vinueza lol

The Invisible Counterpoint

NewYorker Movie Facebook Club discussion on Richard Brody's Most Dangerous Films of 2018

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