Year-End Lightning Hoedown No. 6 (Patreon)

"I just thought I'd do a little hoedown."

Poet (Darezhan Omirmayev, 2021)

A careful, patient film that has an extremely clear set of points to make, Poet couldn't have been made by anyone by Omirbayev. At the same time, the unexpected, incongruous moments that have enlivened the director's finest work -- the botched cinematheque screening in The Road; the burst of violence in Student -- are sorely missed here. (The only scene that comes close, a sudden infusion of T&A, feels desperate.) On Twitter I compared Poet with Ahed's Knee, largely because both films are crypto-autobiographies of their makers, facing down the hopelessness of making meaningful art in the screen-besotted 2020s. 

But where Lapid reacts with explosive, self-sabotaging rage, Omirbayev turns in a statement characterized by depressive self-pity. There are two timelines in Poet. The present day focuses on Didar (Yerdos Kanaev), a middle-aged poet and the youngest member of his dwindling literary circle in Almaty. He seldom speaks, and I think his hangdog mien is meant to suggest that, sensitive soul that he is, he observes. The other segments concern the 19th century Kazakh poet Makhmambet Otemisuly, a radical figure whose pointed verse condemning the sultanate got him beheaded for his trouble. When Omirbayev shows Didar traveling to a mid-sized town for a poetry reading and facing a near-empty hall, the point comes hammering down once and for all. Once upon a time, poetry was a matter of life and death. Now, it's just another form of Content, competing for attention with English-language movies, TV soaps, videogames, and YouTube. 

Previous Omirbayev films gave the impression of an artist using film to work through ideas, but Poet feels like a lecture that I'd attend out of sense of duty, but I'd probably nod off at some point.

The Last Duel (Ridley Scott, 2021)

Like so many contemporary films, The Last Duel is not as compelling as the discourse that swirled around it. Although there were the expected remarks about the film's relation to #MeToo, and the impact of screenwriter Nicole Holofcener ("a woman's perspective") relative to co-writers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, the most amusing comments came from Scott himself, furious that his stately epic flopped at the box office and blaming everyone from the studio to the pandemic to generational malaise. (To wit.) Having seen The Last Duel myself, I think the real answer (as so often the case) is a little Column A, a little Column B.

It's true that this is the sort of grandiose Hollywood moviemaking that has largely gone out of favor in the Marvel era. Anything that demands that audiences transport themselves to another time, much less pay attention to that period's significant differences from our own, is rough sledding. Young people today tend to have a much less encyclopedic understanding of culture (pop and otherwise), mostly because the algorithms that organize web content focus on each user as a collection of data points. The result is that we are all in feedback loops, with commercial services dedicated to "curating" an experience that addresses you, and you alone, as the center of the world. Gladiator was a much better movie, but it would almost certainly wither on the vine in an environment like this.

As far as the film itself, it's what I might call a "programmer," the sort of thing I might once have discovered on Cinemax while flipping around. Scott is a deeply populist filmmaker, and that kind of works against him here. The script does a fine job of subtly delineating the social and gender conditions of medieval France, so different from our own. But then someone is almost always given a line of clunky dialogue to make sure none of us missed those key points. Neither a blockbuster nor an art film, The Last Duel is stranded in no man's land. This is nowhere more evident than in its tripartite structure. During the Jean de Carrouges (Damon) section, we know something is off, but we can't tell why until the 40 minute mark, when the tale repeats from Jacques Le Gris' (Adam Driver) perspective. By that time, I'd guess a lot of causal moviegoers had already checked out. Anyhow, a great cinematic turn from Jodie Comer, and a solid conclusion -- truly a battle without honor or humanity.

Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

There sure was a lot of running in this film (see above), especially in the final half hour. I began to wonder whether Anderson dropped in a Leos Carax homage and then couldn't stop himself. I say that with the understanding that Anderson is not a particularly compulsive, fetish-driven director. If this was indeed his strategy, it was due to a logic that, in the context of Licorice Pizza, might seem unassailable. "If it's good once, it'll be even better five times!"

This is a brisk and pleasurable film, but it is indeed a work of excess. It has a provocative premise (a blossoming love affair between a 15 year old boy and a 25 year old girl) that Anderson really uses as an engine, the closest thing to narrative coherence that Licorice Pizza has. The fact that they passionately kiss at the end [SPOILER] is clearly rubbing Internet scolds the wrong way, and I get that. But all this assumes that Anderson, or Licorice Pizza, really cares about any of this, that anything of substance is at stake. In fact, the film is structured less like a conventional period film, and more like one of those 70s albums where the individual songs are all mixed to fade right into one another. Watch Licorice Pizza and try to figure out its timeline, much less its narrative trajectory. Wait, he's selling waterbeds now? How did that happen? Okay, now he's in a Hamburger Hamlet with William Holden? And now he's selling pinball machines?

It's a study in riffology, really. Anderson has produced a mood piece, and the editing, organization, and even the performances are all about the head-swimming, gleeful distraction of youth. Everything is about atmosphere, and only in one so artificially heady, so removed from the demands and mores of ordinary life (e.g., adjacency to Hollywood) could this forbidden romance flourish. (If you are feeling woke, though, you could read it this way: Gary lives such a charmed life, and is so boundlessly confident, that he represents an avatar of white male American privilege.) Some have compared this to Desplechin, and for good reason, but Pizza is a little bit different. I suspect the Frenchman jots his ideas on index cards, then gives them a good shuffle. PTA is just jammin,' and well, he hopes you like jammin' too.