Authors: Angelo Muredda Archives - Page 6 of 13

Hot Docs ’14: Actress

May 2, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

***½/****
directed by Robert Greene

by Angelo Muredda "It wasn't just the character," Brandy Burre muses in voiceover as she watches herself in the kitchen in an artfully-framed dishwashing scene during the opening moments of Robert Greene's Actress: "It's me. I tend to break things." That's an appropriately wily introduction to a documentary that adroitly blends domestic melodrama, biography, and sociological study. "Brandy Burre is Actress," the surprisingly ostentatious (for nonfiction) title card announces, and so it goes: Burre stars as herself, a Master's-holding former supporting player from "The Wire" who took a break from acting after the birth of her first child, and who now seeks to get back in the game at a moment when her long-term relationship appears to be breaking apart like the dishware.

Transcendence (2014)

April 17, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

by Angelo Muredda If his name wasn't already plastered over the ads for the nerd bona fides the studio hopes it will signal, you'd still know that Transcendence was the work of Wally Pfister from an inimitably-portentous opening shot featuring the long, steady fall of a raindrop: as meaningless a totem as Inception's ever-spinning (or is it wobbling?) top. Having lensed all but one of Christopher Nolan's joyless epics, including that "Twilight Zone" episode told with Miltonic gravitas, Pfister has at last graduated to making his own Nolan film about serious men making serious moral choices in the name of serious ideas–here, sending the first human consciousness up into the cloud to fuse with an artificially-intelligent program, the better to meddle in the affairs of mortals. The Pfister-Nolan collaboration was a fruitful one, the equivalent of a hammer repeatedly meeting its companion gong, but watching the alternately soapy and chilly Transcendence, one can't help but feel the cinematographer-turned-director would have been better served by a more conspicuous departure, a project that better indulged his more melodramatic instincts.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 9, 20142013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy

click any image to enlarge

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extra B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Angelo Muredda And so arrives Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (hereafter Hobbit 2), landing at its appointed hour a year after its predecessor's mixed debut like a job application received after the position has already been quietly filled. While middle entries in trilogies are always awkward stepchildren, Hobbit 2 is a very special problem case: It consists of roughly the midsection of J.R.R. Tolkien's fleet fantasy book for children, cracked open and fattened with multi-coloured Post-it notes until the spine can bear no more. Here at last, then, we have the week-old meat of the only Hobbit adaptation Jackson could deliver, having spent a decade steering comically overextended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a 3-hour version of King Kong, and a wrongheaded interpretation of The Lovely Bones as a Nintendo-ready CG light show.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 23, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD

click any image to enlarge

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Angelo Muredda "For us, to live any other way was nuts," Ray Liotta's schnook turned gangster Henry Hill explains early on in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. With that, spoken over a montage of permed Italian men in tailored suits gorging themselves at an upscale restaurant, Hill at once launched a wave of lesser, faux-conflicted pictures about the swanky perks and ethical compromises of organized crime, and raised the fundamental moral question of Scorsese's latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. An unashamedly indulgent, ribald, and formally troubled biopic of Jordan Belfort, this unofficial Goodfellas follow-up likewise revolves around the kind of work that makes living like a pig in shit possible. His kinship to Hill aside, Belfort has had an unusually clear-sailing trajectory to garner the interest of a filmmaker who tends to be drawn to Catholic tales of excess followed by redemptive suffering. Belfort is still a born stockbroker and swindler, despite his working-class origins and federal inquiries and stints in rehab; the fact that he debuted on Wall Street the day of the crash and remains in demand as a guru well after the financial crisis of 2008 seems to give Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter pause, as well the astonishing survival rate of cockroaches should. What better way to make a film about such a man, Scorsese and Winter appear to have concluded, than to structure his story as a Roman orgy?

Nymph()maniac (2013)

March 21, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

Nymph()maniac: Vol. I
Nymph()maniac: Vol. II
***½/****
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Angelo Muredda Partway through the second volume of Lars von Trier's surprisingly nimble Nymph()maniac, wounded storyteller Joe (three-time Trier MVP Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her rapt listener Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) about the time she went to a support group for her sex addiction. When the group's straight-edge policy proved more than she could bear, Joe bowed out, but not before quipping that her fellow sufferers are nothing but "society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick." At last, one thinks, von Trier has found his ideal authorial surrogate in Gainsbourg, whose weird Brechtian delivery is halfway between earnest declaration and stiff high-school rendition of The Crucible. Von Trier has been a professional troll, masking his underlying seriousness with outré gestures, since long before he started sporting T-shirts emblazoned with "PERSONA NON GRATA," in tribute to Cannes' goofy decision to brand him uncouth for joking that his Wagner fixation owed to a latent penchant for Nazism. (All joshing aside, it obviously stung him.) But he's never shown himself to be as sophisticated at joking through tears (or crying through nasty punchlines) as he is in Nymph()maniac. Clocking in at over four hours in two rich parts, at least in the edited version debuting this weekend at Toronto's Lightbox, it's a landmark of seriocomic storytelling that is simultaneously a satire of biographical tall-tales, a depressive's bildungsroman, and an alternately tender and lacerating self-portrait, defending all the Joes and Larses of the world for their obscenity without sparing them the lash.

The Monuments Men (2014)

February 6, 20142014, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, War

*½/****
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov, based on the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter
directed by George Clooney

by Angelo Muredda There have been far worse prestige films than George Clooney's delayed Oscar season also-ran The Monuments Men, but there's rarely been a more misguided one. Hinging on a conceit that even the filmmaker appears to realize is weak sauce and based on a true story that's probably worth its weight in magazine articles that really make you think, the film follows the exploits of a team of ragtag art dealers and curators turned Allied troops, sent into Europe in the closing days of WWII to save the Western world's finest paintings, sculptures, and, yes, monuments, before Hitler could destroy them. It's perhaps a mild credit to Clooney the humanitarian that the overwhelming gaucheness of the premise–that European art is the thing most worth preserving amidst a war that saw the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews–rates not just a mention but a guilty structural response, too, in the form of a framing story that sees Clooney the actor, as team leader Stokes, lecturing his overseers on the ambiguous value of the mission. It's also to his shame as a screenwriter (alongside usual partner Grant Heslov) that the response is so ill-considered–the same canned "Art is all of us" spiel politicians who couldn't give a damn about art give in the promotional material for government-funded cultural events.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

Stranger by the Lake (2013)

January 17, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

L’inconnu du lac
***½/****
starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d’Assumçao, Jérôme Chappatte
written and directed by Alain Guiraudie

by Angelo Muredda Late in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, a detective sent to investigate the murder of a young man at a nude male beach designated as a gay cruising spot breaks from his procedural script to unload his exasperation on a potential suspect. “You guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes,” the investigator (Jérôme Chappatte) points out when it seems that no one can provide him with so much as the first names of their recent conquests, much less recall the moment the handsome guy with the ballcap vanished without a trace, save for his abandoned beach towel. His assessment cuts two ways in a film that, before veering into the territory of gothic sex thrillers with uncommon ease, takes a wry anthropological approach to good sex and bad love in a space designed to indulge both in their most rarefied forms. On the one hand, the detective is an anticipatory mouthpiece for the conservative critics who would rain down on the movie he’s in, eager perhaps to brand this tribe he’s wandered into as perverse, borderline sociopathic death-seekers with no regard for their fellow neighbours. Yet his curiosity and suspension of judgment might also mark him as Guiraudie’s ideal audience: a serene observer held in thrall to the strange lengths people will go to satisfy their desires.

FFC’s Best of ’13

January 1, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw Searching for themes in 2013, you come upon the obvious ones first: the frustrations of the forty-five percenters; the growing income gap; and the death of the middle-class, encapsulated in brat-taculars like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers and prestige pics like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, David O. Russell’s American Hustle, and, um, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. You see this preoccupation with the economy in Nebraska‘s quest for a million-dollar Clearinghouse payday, and in Frances Halladay’s desire for a place to sleep and a career that can subsidize it (see also: To the Wonder and Byzantium). It’s there in the identity theft of Identity Theft and the motivations of the prefab family from We’re the Millers, paid off with picket fences in an ending with echoes of My Blue Heaven and Goodfellas. Consider All is Lost, an allegory for pensioners who’ve lost everything to the wolves of Wall Street, adrift on a limitless span, taking on water but plucky, damnit. Too plucky, in the case of Redford’s Everyman hero–who, frankly, would’ve better served his allegory had he drowned with salvation in sight.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

December 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

American Hustle (2013)

December 19, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda "The world is extremely grey," a con artist intones in American Hustle, which for all its ineffectual stabs at ambivalence is a curiously prescriptive heist movie, the kind that constantly updates its ledger about who deserves what in the end, in case someone should go unrewarded. It's hard to say when David O. Russell–a formerly prickly sort so effectively housebroken in recent years that he's now on the fast track to Academy Award nominations four through five–became so square as to depend on this sort of moral calculus for his dramatic fulfillment: Its equally big-picture pronouncements aside, I ♥ Huckabees seems an odd way station between the redemptive U2-scored montage that closes Three Kings and the brotherly hug of The Fighter, as well as a far more pugilistic film than the one about boxing. Whatever the genesis of his newfound softness (which Russell has insisted is the mark of his maturity as an artist), it's never been as out of synch with either his manic sensibility or his aesthetic of distended, freewheeling set-pieces and outsized actorly emoting as it is here.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

December 12, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Angelo Muredda And so arrives Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (hereafter Hobbit 2), landing at its appointed hour a year after its predecessor’s mixed debut like a job application received after the position has already been quietly filled. While middle entries in trilogies are always awkward stepchildren, Hobbit 2 is a very special problem case: It consists of roughly the midsection of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fleet fantasy book for children, cracked open and fattened with multi-coloured Post-it notes until the spine can bear no more. Here at last, then, we have the week-old meat of the only Hobbit adaptation Jackson could deliver, having spent a decade steering comically overextended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a 3-hour version of King Kong, and a wrongheaded interpretation of The Lovely Bones as a Nintendo-ready CG light show.

Frances Ha (2013) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

December 5, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Charlotte D’Amboise, Adam Driver
screenplay by Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There’s a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her “galumphing radiance.”) You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender’s miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song’s abrupt stop, from Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant’s Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film’s ambling structure: a lovely, headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.

Nature Calls: FFC Interviews Denis Côté|Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013)

November 22, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Not long into Denis Côté's equal parts unnerving and affecting Curling, we get a taste of what might charitably be called the social life of its cloistered central characters, stolid dad Jean-François (Emmanuel Bilodeau) and his taciturn daughter Julyvonne (Philomene Bilodeau): When Julyvonne does her chores, her father grants her a rare glimpse of the world beyond their home in the chilly Quebec countryside, courtesy of the living-room stereo. Father and daughter quietly tap their fingers and rock their knees to songs like Tiffany's improbably upbeat “I Think We're Alone Now”–pop hits from a bygone era that, for all the unschooled Julyvonne knows, could be the present. The irony of that reveal, which is perhaps unsurprising to anyone familiar with Côté's filmography, is that Jean-François and Julyvonne have their own, perfectly private lives outside this sheltered world, him through his work as a repairman whose job necessitates roaming into hotels and bowling alleys, her through a number of clandestine trips to the forest that put her in touch with a tiger and its possible prey.

Short Term 12 (2013)

November 14, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Brie Larson, John Gallagher Jr., Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek
written and directed by Destin Cretton

by Angelo Muredda Of all the specious arguments thrown around during awards season, the most enervating may be the contention, popular among early champions of films that are near-universally acclaimed on the festival circuit, that the first negative reactions to said films are simply backlash. Backlash, the logic goes, is a latecomer's insincere negative reaction to a title he or she did not have the opportunity to praise when it was still hip to do so–lateness presumably being the only reason a person might have problems with a critical darling. Let it be said, then, that while I could not shake my own feelings of belatedness while recently watching Destin Cretton's routine Short Term 12, which came out of festivals as diverse as SXSW and Locarno relatively unscathed, my response owes less to my unseasonable viewing conditions than to the film's own curious belatedness, its tendency to rehash old-fashioned 1950s moralism about family-planning and Dangerous Minds-derivative solemnity about underprivileged teens in a faux-authentic new package.

A Touch of Sin (2013)

October 18, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Drama, Revenge, Theatrical

***/****
starring Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn't flow so much as it
spurts in A Touch
of Sin, Jia Zhangke's invigorated if uneven
return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized
documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming,
however, it's the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest–the
leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City
into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia
anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master
filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg's Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that
dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn't condescend to the populist
trappings of the material. Jia isn't slumming so much as tapping into the
righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights
and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of
a nation state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia's violence comes fast
and leaves a mess, then, it's a testament to his willingness to get his hands
dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.

Bastards (2013)

October 11, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis’s stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man’s body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L’Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we’re simply not allowed to know until we’ve arrived through the movie’s own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis’s eleven features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

The Hangover Part III (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

October 6, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Road Movie

click
any image to enlarge

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring
Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay
by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed
by Todd Phillips

by
Angelo Muredda When Project X
spilled forth from its amniotic
septic tank last spring, I
read it as a prime example of a
producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That
found-footage
chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a
monument to
producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover
series, where the same Dionysian impulses and
deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or
disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a
difference a
year makes. If Project
X was a brand
consolidator and The
Hangover Part II
was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing
Phillips's
demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley
Cooper's
Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part
III is an actors'
contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment,
Cooper has
become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been
savaged
for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The
Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen.
Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot,"
along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes
about Mr.
Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly
neutered, if
inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for
being.

Watermark (2013)

September 27, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky

by Angelo Muredda Although it’s the first of her films to be co-directed (by Manufactured Landscapes subject and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky), Watermark is less a departure for Jennifer Baichwal than it is the apotheosis of her style. Since 1988’s Let it Come Down, Baichwal has been the most formally adventurous documentarian of the artistic process, not just profiling the work of makers as disparate as Paul Bowles and Shelby Lee Adams, but attempting to recreate their singular visions as well. In her previous film, Payback, that meant converting Margaret Atwood’s lecture series of the same name into an evocative position paper about debt in all its global permutations, from blood feuds to legal restitution. In Manufactured Landscapes, it consisted of finding a way to translate Burtynsky’s large-scale images of factories and pock-marked terrains into cinematic tableaux, with collaborator Nick de Pencier’s cinematography of Burtynsky’s stomping grounds effectively adding a sense of duration and movement to the print-bound stasis of the originals. Watermark might be the most radical variation on this approach, an abstract consideration of the interaction between water and human-made structures, carried out largely through wordless aerial photography of streams bisecting grotesque landscapes rather than the usual talking-head exposition.

TIFF ’13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

September 18, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things, elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge double-bill of Bastards and Prisoners, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line, commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards Alex Ross Perry’s self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono’s by turns delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming for one of the mobster’s jailed wives.