We all have comfort movies, things we like to pop on whenever we’re feeling down and just need to escape for one to two hours. Annihilation is mine. This may seem like a weird choice at first—and to a certain extent it is—but I stand by it. Annihilation is a 2018 film directed by Alex Garland based on a novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, from his Southern Reach trilogy. Continue reading “Retrospective: ‘Annihilation’ is an Underrated Horror Gem That Got Lost in the Streaming Shuffle”
Noah Hawley’s Lucy In The Sky was not exactly anticipated by the population at large. With a 23% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this review, it seems destined to fall into obscurity almost as soon as it has been released. Which is, in this moviegoer’s opinion, a crying shame.
Lucy In The Sky’s titular Lucy Cola is an astronaut in some undefined, vaguely present-day era who comes back from a mission to space only to find herself changed. Not in a horror movie sense, by some alien contagion, but in a philosophical sense. How do you go back to your daily routine once you have seen all of humanity from above? How do you return to your old perspective now that you know what is out there? As Lucy struggles to return to herself and qualify for the next spaceflight, she begins to unravel, and a series of dire choices leads her farther from the heavens than ever.
As anyone who has ever seen one episode of Legion will know, Noah Hawley has a unique, directorial eye. The editing of this movie was crazy, but, more importantly, engaging. Its most abrasive quality is its constantly shifting aspect ratio. While this didn’t bother me, I can easily see how it could start to get on others’ nerves. On a less visual note, I thoroughly enjoyed Natalie Portman’s portrayal of a woman in love with the beauty of the world, desperate to maintain control of her life and herself while also achieving her goals.
However, with visuals and a story this crazy, this movie should have had a watertight narrative. Unfortunately, it just felt jumbled at points, with metaphors and motivations mixing together and losing clarity as the film reached its climax. Additionally, the script isn’t always easy to take seriously, and characters sometimes make choices that seem to be wholly unmotivated.
At its core, Lucy In The Sky is a film about boundaries, and the cost of transcending those boundaries. As the film’s aspect ratios bend, distort, and break, we wonder how much of the picture we’ve been missing, and we too begin to miss the transcendent moments of visual freedom from the film’s opening spaceflight. And, not to give away the ending, we learn that we don’t have to go all the way to outer space to find beauty. We can find beauty everywhere we look.
Lucy In The Sky is the kind of movie that doesn’t come out every day. It’s bold. It takes risks. Some of those risks pay off, and some don’t, but it certainly gives every choice its all. And shouldn’t that be rewarded? Shouldn’t we celebrate creativity, even when it’s not pitch perfect?
Lucy In The Sky is not for everyone. It is certainly not an easy movie to enjoy. However, I would encourage you to not let this film drift into the abyss. It’s certainly worth seeing on the big screen. Maybe you’ll leave the film like I did, with your perspective just a little bit different.
3/5 STARS
The glitz and glamour of the life of a poster is one observed through television screens, newsstand tabloids, and online social media. The commodification and exploitation of stars and their personal lives that is carried out daily by these outlets are the targets of Brady Corbet’s sophomore film, Vox Lux. In today’s climate, it’s easy to see these targets are ripe for deconstruction. Going to the home page of TMZ, E! Online, or another chewing gum site will tell you all you need to know about why a film like this came into being and how its themes resonate today. The grotesque and easily criticizable profiteering of tragedy through the personal life of a pop star is center stage in this four-part drama, but unfortunately, the result is a little befuddled and not deep enough to get at the root of what Vox Lux wants to critique.
After surviving a school shooting when she was thirteen years old, Celeste (played by Natalie Portman as the older iteration and Raffey Cassidy as the younger) is thrust into stardom after writing a successful single in the wake of the tragedy. From there, she navigates the tumultuous world of fame and fortune with her manager (Jude Law), and the drawbacks that accompany it. Plagued by scandals and her own personal demons, Celeste grapples with a world that seeks to exploit her suffering.
Right off the bat, the performances from Portman and Law are stellar. Portman is a whole other persona in this film as she adopts the fragile and demanding characteristics of a superstar drowning in her own world. Everything from her mannerisms to her accent is remarkably executed and dare I say transformative. Law is equally impressive as an exacting manager who gives off an edge of sleaze, providing a great counterpoint to Celeste, especially in the first two acts of the film. These two commendable performances headline the film but are underserved in a movie that doesn’t dive deep enough into their characters, particularly Celeste’s.
The most glaring issue with Vox Lux is how inconsistent it is. When a film is consistent, you tend not to notice because the film is actively disciplining itself to create uniformity, but Vox Lux opts instead to throw in assorted techniques, styles, and choices because it can and not because it should. Kicking it off, the pop music in the film goes on for too long, often resulting in lengthy screen time for Sia’s original songs for the film, rather than meaningful depictions of thematic relevance. The end, in particular, is pretty egregious in how devoid of meaning it is. It’s really kind of just there as the big finale and makes no strong statement about who Celeste is or as a coup de grâce moment. Then, there are the moments where Corbet throws in dashes of art house sensibilities, but not really committing to it, resulting in this weird style that is neither purposeful or aesthetically coherent. We get blurred, drug-infused moments that are sped up, credits that roll backward, a clearly defined act structure a la Moonlight, pretentious but witty narration by Willem Dafoe (which I’d argue creates more defining character moments than the action on screen), odd deviations in style, and so on. It’s like creative inspiration strikes for certain scenes, but there is no commitment to carry through and make it consistent.
Inside all of this is the film’s take on stardom and controversy. The film sets its thematic target on how we treat stars, the events surrounding them, who they are, and how we capitalize on tragedy. Celeste is only flung into stardom because she survived a school shooting. The propulsion she receives from that tragic event parallels the gains the media receives from exploiting travesties in her life. No good deed goes unpunished, and no bad deed goes unnoticed in this world, and I think this is a fascinating notion to dissect. How we treat stars or how we treat disasters and who seeks to gain from it are fascinating concepts, but in the end, it feels as if the film is afraid to really send it to the top, to pursue the deeper causal factors, and to explore the issue for how complex and controversial it really is.
The film builds on the promise of addressing this issue, but by Act III we start to realize how problematic its narrow approach is. Celeste is the focus here because others are gaining from her suffering, but no one else gets dragged into the mud to a problematic degree. The media is one of the players in the profiteering of tragedy, but they’re not given the time of day in the film. Celeste’s sister Eleanor and manager stand to gain from the spoils of her travesty, but they too are kept at arm’s length, always promising deeper development to their initial conflict, but never going anywhere. The whole thing just feels under-baked, and to know that everything was teed up, but never driven home is what is so dissatisfying about the film. The whole finale of the film is Natalie Portman dancing around on stage lip-synching to Sia in a final moment of celebratory release, and it’s all so devoid of preceding conflict and culmination. There was so much more left to accomplish which is the most disappointing thing I can say about something that had so much promise.
At the end of Vox Lux, we get this weird amalgamation of ideas, themes, and styles that don’t congeal into the popstar-drama one had hoped. Everything was right there in front of us, it just couldn’t come together.
Score: 2.75/5