Eleven movies that beat Hollywood politricks
Enough of the Top Gun: Maverick veneration by liberal movie fans happy about the return of mindless ’80s formula movies and also by non-discriminating conservatives who finally feel included in Hollywood’s market calculations. What this means for the Midyear Reckoning is that we must acknowledge that the longing for entertainment (post-Covid, qua Biden) has never been so desperate. Unfortunately, the most popular films — Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman, and Everything Everywhere All at Once — are not good, just pathetic.
This year’s fallen movie standards match the disappointment felt everywhere — in style, messaging, and leadership. Fanboy favorite Everything Everywhere All at Once epitomized the faithlessness at the heart of comic-book culture. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant laundromat owner whose American-based working-class struggles import Hong Kong action-movie agnosticism. (What contemporary Hollywood film would dare recognize the moral struggles of native white, black, Latin, or Native Americans?) Unconcerned about the existence or nature of God, Evelyn is caught up in a materialistic world of new beliefs (her beta-male husband, lesbian daughter, and feminist IRS inspector). The film’s writing-directing team the Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, respectively Asian and Caucasian) challenge the real world by surrounding Evelyn in a circus-like multiverse — the new atheist box-office utopia. Evelyn’s journey toward self-empowerment comes down to tortured Buddhism — just as the Daniels make tortured, semi-jokey art films.
Unschooled Marvel addicts who never heard of Kafka, Buñuel, or Chuck Jones easily fall for the entropy farce. The Daniels refuse narrative convention in order to represent our culture’s gradual decline into disorder. Their millennial solipsism — Evelyn against the world, through various dimensions — celebrates autism as insight.
The film’s ultimate message: “Be Kind,” spoken by two rocks. It’s a childish palliative, unlike the recent self-critical protest songs by Van Morrison and Bob Dylan that insist on responsible personal choices. Yeoh brings adult stability to the blackout-skit chaos and cast of “stupid human” clowns. But the Daniels reduce life to “just a statistical inevitability, it’s nothing special.” The final image of Earth as a gigantic, spinning bagel is as irrelevant as everything in Top Gun: Maverick, astutely rejected by critic Gregory Solman for pretending that America proves its valor by fighting an unnamed enemy.
Against Hollywood’s politricks, here are the best films so far this year:
Ambulance — Some movies deceive us through excitement and fun, but Michael Bay uses the action genre as a poetic vision of contemporary American disunity. An exhilarating cry for e pluribus unum.
Benediction — Terence Davies was never more confessional, or impassioned, than when exploring the religious, artistic, sexual life of pacifist poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Big Bug — It shames our film culture that this brilliant lockdown farce was shown only on Netflix, denying us Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s full cinematic splendor. (We got the oppressive gloom of Matt Reeves’s The Batman instead.)
Father Stu — Mark Wahlberg brings fresh exuberance and irresistible sincerity to this biopic about family life and individual faith.
Great Freedom — Recounting the era of homosexual oppression in mid-20th-century Europe, director Sebastian Meise and chameleon actor Franz Rogowski expose the self-righteous deceptions of the Pete Buttigieg era.
How They Got Over — Black pop and gospel music prior to contemporary spiritual decline and political degradation. A brief, astounding, nostalgic history of a time when black music artists had soul.
Lost Illusions — Balzac’s social critique seen through Xavier Giannoli’s sharp perception of corrupt modern journalism, a thrilling — and necessary — parable.
Memoria — Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tilda Swinton recall lost spirituality through memory and hope. Their sci-fi climax begs viewers to look deeper than Marvel and the Daniels.
Nitram — Justin Kurzel’s account of the horrific mass murder in Australia in 1996 overturns the “gun violence” cliché through private family grief. A view of national tragedy to replace Top Gun: Maverick mindlessness.
Petite Maman — A nearly perfect modern fable about feminine kinship between a daughter, her mother, and her sexual inner life. It gets more wondrous as you watch and reflect.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché — The more this doc tells about British punk visionary Poly Styrene’s harrowing life story, the more it contrasts the ideational and artistic deficiencies of today’s superficially diverse pop music. Her music still thrills. The Daniels should hear it.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy — Three stories by Ryusuke Hamaguchi explore emotional connections that define modern Japan as the world — superior to his overrated, overlong Drive My Car.