We Write Things

levity not brevity

Film Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

by // Leave a Comment

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny / Disney
Image Credit: Disney

In his fifth outing, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the legendary adventurer has lost a step, not cinematically, but literally, as he grapples with aging and a sense of falling out of sync with the modern world. He’s alone, on the brink of retirement and the cultural excitement of the late 60s and the moon landing is totally lost on him. In many senses of the word, he is a man out of time.

As it turns out, this is welcome news for the franchise. As Indy finds himself drawn back into a globetrotting quest for a long forgotten relic by his estranged goddaughter, James Mangold takes advantage of the opportunity to subvert what we expect of an Indiana Jones adventure. Not so much that the film feels out of place in the larger canon of the series, but it a way that reinforces Indy’s humanity. He’s not immortal nor invulnerable, and much as he did with Logan, Mangold captures the nuances of that last hurrah quite gracefully.

After a sequence relating Indy’s first encounter with the Dial of Destiny, and the film’s big bad, Mads Mikkelsen, during the last gasp of World War II, the film zips ahead to the summer of love where a 70-year-old Indy is settling nicely into his “get off my lawn” era. But add a dash of intrigue from his ambitious goddaughter, Helena, played with Golden Age gumption by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and an encounter with his old Nazi enemy and Indy is right back in the proverbial mix.

What follows is a clever and sweeping adventure that’s mostly fun and more successful than not. Some twists might leave fans scratching their heads, while others will sure illicit a few cheers. A far cry better than past missteps, if not quite as triumphant as The Last Crusade, The Dial of Destiny is an Indiana Jones film that understands how to flip the script without abandoning that which has always worked well in the series: namely, fighting Nazis.

As summer popcorn movies go, The Dial of Destiny is neither exemplary nor regrettable. It’s fun, light-hearted and a fine farewell to one of cinema’s favorite history buffs.

Film Review: Past Lives

by // Leave a Comment

Past Lives / A24
Photo Credit: A24

Celine Song’s feature debut, Past Lives, is a melodic meditation on who we are and what we mean to each other under disparate conditions. Part examination of two people trying to find themselves in far flung lands, part tender romance, Past Lives is a wonder of a film. It’s also one that is difficult to review, for fear of selling it short.

For this reviewer, at least, it’s a natural evolution of Before Sunrise, but instead of a meet cute road movie about two strangers making a connection as they pass through a city they’ll never call home, it is a sweeping story about identity, immigration and love — about people trying to reconcile who they are and where they belong in this world. Nora (Greta Lee), after all, is not a traveler temporarily away from home, she’s living a full life in New York, married to Arthur (John Magaro), a sweet Jewish man she met at a writer’s retreat, and staging a play. So when we open on her, in a bar, sitting between her husband and her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), translating their conversation, it begs the question who are they to each other. The film spends the rest of its runtime attempting to capture the far-from-simple answer to that question.

Past Lives could have been saccharine and easily forgotten, but thanks to a trio of sensational performances at its center, it is nuanced, lyrical and unforgettable. A story that soars on aching dialogue and meaningful glances, it’s like a salve for the soul. The composition is as lovely as the story itself, with sun-dappled shots of happy memories and searching shots of vast cityscapes, nearly every shot reflects the emotion of the characters. And what emotion it is — the heft of this story is palpable. The full range of crying cues is on display: impermanent happiness, wish fulfillment, love lost and found. This film will wreck you, even as it fills you up. See it. Not because this review does it justice, but because it doesn’t, and there is so much more to discover.

Film Review: Scream VI

by // Leave a Comment

Photo by Photo Credit: Philippe Bossé/Philippe Bossé – © 2022 Paramount Pictures. 

More than two decades on and half a dozen films later, Wes Craven’s iconic franchise continues the tradition of advancing the genre, even as it meditates on its own influence and jabs at the tropes it helped create. The unknown new Ghostface tells us in the trailer, “there’s never been one like me.” While it sounds like the boast of any lunatic inclined to don the mask, it actually transpires to be the logline for the whole of Scream VI. No Scream installment can ever be as earthshaking as the first, but the most recent is the most surprising since the original.

Out of Woodsboro and sans Sydney, Scream VI was always going to be new territory, but in execution it proves to be at once more intimate and ambitious than previous entries. The trademark witty dialogue and meta humor remain, but the promise of a different kind of Ghostface puts a new spin on familiar dynamics.

Scream VI Trailer | Paramount Pictures

With fewer iconic legacy characters around which new to navigate, the Carpenter sisters are much more fully realized, likewise bringing a new logic to the fore. Sydney’s stoic heroism was always an anchor to the big personalities elsewhere in the world. Conversely, the Carpenters don’t operate on final girl logic, and that too brings a different flavor to the proceedings.

But more than a bagful of new tricks, Scream VI has a new tone. There is a dark sense of immediacy and invasion brought on by the inability for our heroes to hide, even in a city of millions. It is a living breathing paranoia, that manifests, finally in a sense of angst and outrage. It’s gritty in a way the series never has been. As raw and intense as the brutality often has been, the fallout tends to happen after the screen fades to black. But this Scream operates in trauma and is the sharper for it.

Come for Kirby. And stay for Kirby — duh. But stick after the fact on how the series, in its sixth outing, found a way to tap into something entirely fresh and perfectly at home in its mythology.

__________

Scream VI
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Writer: James Vanderbilt, Guy Busick, Kevin Williamson (based on characters created by)
Runtime: 2h 3m
Rating: R
Release Date: March 10, 2023