Joker: Folie a Deux (Todd Philips, 2024)

That's entertainment

Saw Joker: Folie a Deux and-- well I liked the ending. 

Todd Philips can't direct traffic to save his life and the movie still looks like a recycle bin of older better films, among others Umbrellas of Cherbourg, One From the Heart, Pennies from Heaven, and (a Scorsese, can't not have a Scorsese) New York, New York and you can feel the droplets of sweat showering down like a morning thunderstorm from Joaquin Phoenix's brow as he strains to make a profound statement out of yet another $200 million comic book villain movie-- but I did like that ending. 

Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Megalomania

Came out of Megalopolis feeling a lot of things but what I did not feel was disappointed-- not a bad thing but not necessarily a good thing either. 

I run hot and cold on Francis Ford Coppola. Thought his first two Godfather films were classically well-written if visually conventional, too-carefully curated portraits of a corrupt  American family, thought Apocalypse Now was a vividly directed Vietnam war movie that had little to do with the actual war, thought The Conversation (easily his best early work) was a nicely done portrait of loneliness and introverted paranoia. 

I actually prefer Coppola's wilder less disciplined later works: the lowkey monochromatic Rumble Fish, the emotionally extravagant One From the Heart (my favorite), the beautifully mounted Bram Stoker's Dracula (despite Keanu Reeves as an alleged British solicitor, and a haphazardly grafted love story), and now this, his wildest most undisciplined yet, basically a retelling of the Catilinarian conspiracy transposed to modern-day New York. 

The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders, 2024)

The mild robot

Dreamworks' latest (and arguably last to be fully animated in-house) movie has at least two things going for it: 1) the flattened handmade painterly look of the Spiderverse movies and Puss n Boots: The Last Wish that's currently all the rage; and 2) the fact that it's not Pixar or Disney.

On the minus side are two: 1) It's not Pixar or Disney but sure as hell feels like a Pixar or Disney movie; 2) most everything else.

Broken Marriage (Ishmael Bernal, 1983)

Trench warfare

(Warning: the story of Ishmal Bernal's films Relasyon (The Affair, 1982) and Broken Marriage (1983) are discussed in close detail) 

Film available online (can't link to it directly though-- go look for yourself!), which is one reason why I'm reposting this. No English subtitles, alas.

You might say Ishmael Bernal's Broken Marriage (1983), his follow-up to the successful melodrama Relasyon (The Affair, 1982), isn't quite as commercially or critically successful (the film's star Vilma Santos managed to sweep all acting awards with her performance in the previous production). I suppose it's easy to see why: the earlier film looks at marriage from an unusual point of view (from the outside, or from that of the mistress); the earlier film has a relatively streamlined and somewhat titillating story (a man estranged from his wife moves in with his mistress) with a suitably dramatic finale (death by aneurysm, harrowingly shot and staged by Bernal in a single take). 

Reportedly Ms. Santos, buoyed by the many acting awards earned by Relasyon, was so eager to do well in the new production that Bernal got irritated, locked her in a bathroom, and delivered to her an ultimatum: she was not coming out till she got over her 'hysteria.'

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

The Fountain of Ew

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), about the decline of celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) and rise of her showbiz doppelganger Sue (Margaret Qualley), leans hard-- very hard-- into the idea that beauty is a daily impossible burden for women to aspire to sometimes fail to attain and if they do attain must maintain said beauty for as long as they can-- forever if possible. 

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 2024)

And I'll never have that recipe again

How to do a proper sequel? Used to be a silly question but in this age of endless remakes, reboots, recycling in one form or another it's almost become a major artistic question, if art can or has ever been considered major (was there a time in the '60s and '70s, or were we just fooling ourselves?).

The Killer (John Woo, 2024)

Kill baby kill

So the conventional line is that John Woo's remake of his 1989 classic is handsomely mounted but has nowhere near the intensity and bravura style of the original.