TOP TEN RICHARD BRODY INSULTS OF 2019
Nothing brings me greater joy than reading the unhinged, audacious, exaggerative and brutally snarky film criticisms of Richard Brody. I’d love to propose that not only is he unintentionally one of the greatest living humor writers, but also that no one on the planet loves hating movies more than this man who watches them for a living. His reviews feel like an exemplary Cutco sale-every style of insult carved using a different knife, jabbed with precision at filmmakers across the world. I love this industry bully as much as I often disagree with him, and it’s my dream to have work torn apart by Richard Brody.
I wasted a ton of time entertaining myself by combing through all his reviews published in The New Yorker during 2019, excising my favorite insults and compiling a list of my top ten, here.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text below belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the loser who compiled this list, but sometimes she agrees with them.
10. A HIDDEN LIFE
Yet in “A Hidden Life” Malick’s merely illustrative and forcedly expressive approach to his subject — complete with studio Nazis from Central Casting (who bark in German, while Franz and Fani speak to each other in English), shots of natural splendor that are numbingly nonspecific and pictorial, and performances that leave no room for ambiguity, contemplation, or mere presence — culminates in a sequence of heavily intended exaltation, a death scene of such leaden bombast and overwrought vagueness as to turn its sacred simplicity into a self-parody.
9. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
Tarantino is delivering what he considers to be a cinematic gift horse, a popular film with real artistic ambitions — and his movie’s very theme is the fruitless, counterproductive, and even misguided energy that would be wasted looking in the horse’s mouth.
8. BOOKSMART
Its perspective is as Manichaean as one might expect to find in a doctrinaire religious or political film: the little world of “Booksmart” is divided into people with decent motives (almost everyone) and sociopaths (one person). It’s a teen drama that, I suspect, hardly any teens will want to see, or, if they do see it, will hardly care about, because it doesn’t at all resemble the high-school snark tank.
7. LONG SHOT
Actually, though, it’s a zombie film. There isn’t an undead character in it, but the movie itself is brought back from the cinematic graveyard, dry with the dust of long-interred ideas, moods, and tones. It’s decked out in up-to-date attitudes, pop-culture references, and political pieties and deceptions. But it’s an attempted and failed resuscitation — or, rather, a lifeless simulation — of the old-fashioned romantic comedy, and its narrative nostalgia is inseparable from its forward-seeming, backward-looking political fantasies.
6. JOHN WICKE: CHAPTER 3 — PARABELLUM
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum” is almost all action, and its extended fight scenes range from numbing to repellent to interesting. “Interesting” isn’t a compliment; it is what happens when filmmakers reduce drama to a technical problem that viewers are invited to observe being solved.
Nonetheless, the movie — which features a screenplay that could have been written by Western Union and hardly enough fight-free scenes to fill a trailer — has a remarkable overarching conceit.
5. APOLLO 11
It’s a special sort of achievement to take a collection of footage of the Apollo 11 mission, much of it previously unseen and much of it in the 70-mm. format, and render it dull. That, unfortunately, is what the director and editor Todd Douglas Miller has done in the documentary film “Apollo 11,” which relies almost entirely on archival materials — other film and video footage, plus contemporaneous news reports….With extraordinary material, a merely ordinary approach is worse than a bore; it’s a betrayal.
4. MIDSOMMAR
There’s a political tinge to those details, which presents an illusion of substance and a veneer of social conscience. In “Hereditary,” it’s a literal perpetuation of patriarchy; in “Midsommar,” it’s the fecklessness of a shitty boyfriend. But, in both movies, the imagery that gives them their emotional impact takes precedence over any dramatic considerations. In “Hereditary,” the less-ambitious film, the results are merely ludicrous; in the grander and more visionary “Midsommar,” they’re regressive, the product of a filmmaker who’s so busy looking at his images that he doesn’t see what he’s doing.
The exposition, setting up the premise for the trip, is both lugubriously long and trivializingly brief. The entire drama depends upon the relationship between Dani and Christian, but, in lieu of developing it, Aster drops details onscreen like index cards.
By the time the group gets to Sweden, the movie, only a few minutes old, is virtually over: it’s built on such a void of insight and experience, such a void of character and relationships, that even the first level of the house of narrative cards can’t stand.
3. JOJO RABBIT
This tweet: https://twitter.com/tnyfrontrow/status/1187218032923418627
“Jojo Rabbit,” with its combination of extreme goofball humor (including a campily over-the-top caricature of Hitler, played by Waititi himself) and grim and earnest portrayal of the terrors of Germany’s genocidal tyranny, plays more like a comedic fantasy composed for The Onion as a reductio ad absurdum of the blinkered follies to which Hollywood and its potentates are susceptible.
Today, making fun of Hitler and his minions is both easy and pointless, because he poses no threat; Waititi is kicking a dead bull.
Waititi displays a sort of wan humanism in which Jojo’s fanatical Nazism seems excusable, or at least understandable, because it responds to his own personal psychological issues. No less than “Joker,” “Jojo Rabbit” is another contrivance on the theme of “hurt people hurt people.”
TIED FOR FIRST:
1. STAR WARS: THE RISE OF THE SKYWALKER
There are no such surprises, let alone audacities, in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” yet I confess that it’s nonetheless engaging to see how the movie’s ponderous banalities reveal the essence of the cycle’s four-decade slog.
Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney, in 2012; now whatever’s left of his world view has been mined and refined into narrow and simplistic norms. The dyad of Disney (with its sanitized and sanctimonious simplicities) and Abrams (with his scrawnily derivative sensibility, an echo of an echo) has become a Death Star.
The hermetic logic of the plot is as impeccable as it is ridiculous. It’s a drama crafted with robotic insularity for the consumption of viewers being rendered robotic at each moment of the soullessly uniform spectacle.
The bulk of “The Rise of Skywalker” involves characters in closeup expelling greeting-card-like slogans with vehemence and dour conviction, punctuated by lumpishly unchoreographed biff-bash-and-blam fight scenes. Abrams doesn’t offer any original, significant, or memorable images, not a glimmer of action that’s staged with a sense even of mere physical connection, let alone balletic grace or athletic splendor.
The movie’s few infinitesimal touches of what might be called character — such as Rey substituting compassion for violence when she heals a deadly serpent — tick off a few ready-made socio-boxes.
There is a lot of hope, but, above all, it’s a movie that pushes the cycle’s own baseline idea, of family and return, to newly neurotic extremes. It’s a movie of grownups desperately tangled up in mommy and daddy issues a long time ago, before psychologists, artists, and even personality were invented.
1. JOKER
Long before “Joker” pays homage to two of the classic New York films of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy,” it relies on the fictitious setting of Gotham City and the pretext of a comic-book story to evoke real-life crimes — and it alludes to them from a perspective so narrow and destructive as to resemble not intention but obliviousness. The result is a movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.
“Joker” is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering. What it seems to be saying is utterly incoherent, beyond the suggestion that Arthur, who is mentally ill, becomes violent after being assaulted by a group of people of color
Yet, for all the historical references in “Joker,” it’s a blatant and brazen distortion of the most substantial historical elements at which it winks. “Joker” is the comic-book “Green Book,” twisting history for the sake of a yarn.
The thematic incoherence of “Joker” is inseparable from its aesthetic emptiness. Phoenix, alternately brooding and exulting, dancing extravagantly in his underwear or in a resplendent costume or seething with rage, cringing with horror, or camping it up with an affected accent, isn’t so much unhinged as unmotivated and, to all appearances, undirected. What he delivers is less a performance than a display of his bag of actorly tricks
“Joker” is a wannabe movie that also wants to be all things to all viewers, that imitates the notion of adding substance while only subtracting it. “Joker” is a viewing experience of a rare, numbing emptiness.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
HIGH LIFE
“High Life” is as scripty as a Hollywood drama, as rigidly determined as a television series, in which the images merely illustrate the details that are planted there to offer ready explanations or easy narrative rhymes. Monte’s memories recur throughout, but without a free play of memory; his mind neither wanders nor explores nor slips — it corresponds, as if his unconscious were a writers’ room that winks with portentous irony.
ROCKETMAN
The new movie has a brief sex scene of little eroticism, which might as well have been a title card saying “They had sex.” Watching a scene in which Elton flaunts his sexual success to his mother (“I’ve fucked everything that moves!”) viewers are likely to wonder, Where? When?, because nothing in the film indicates that Elton has in fact done so.
SERENITY
For much of the film, the clichés are so blatant, the general tone of tropical mystery and menace so brazenly cribbed, that the movie would make sense only as a high-level goof, a collection of clichés assembled as a meta-movie.
ALITA BATTLE ANGEL
But the movie’s well-imagined world-building and backstory turn out soon enough to be something other than ends in themselves: they mainly set up a double-stranded plot that blends a cookie-cutter skein of superheroic battles with a romance of a faux-naïve cheesiness that bears “Titanic” fingerprints. The character of Hugo is written and directed with an aw-shucksiness that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Mickey Rooney musical, and his romance with Alita has a simple and absolute purity that’s as sentimentally drubbing as it is devoid of substance.
AVENGERS ENDGAME
But these moments get lost in the movie’s stiflingly rigid yet bloated three-hour span. The Russos have peculiarly little sense of visual pleasure, little sense of beauty, little sense of metaphor, little aptitude for texture or composition; their spectacular conceit is purely one of scale, which is why their finest moments are quiet and dramatic ones.
The movie’s lack of imaginative freedom reduces personal identity to pictorial identity; the grandiose and maudlin melodrama to which the movie rises feels as manipulative as did the dénouement of “Infinity War.”
THE 2019 OSCARS
“This year’s Oscars were the “Jurassic Park” edition: Hollywood’s dinosaurs have come back full force from their welcome obsolescence and laid waste to their own playground.”
BIRD BOX
The melodramatic tone, and the increasingly menacing set of dangers that Malorie and the children face in their rustic flight — set throughout with looming closeups in which characters register and express a fear that the images don’t themselves convey — make for a earnest sound-film variant on what could have been a masterstroke of silent-film comedy.
CAPTAIN MARVEL
But “Captain Marvel” offers a shallow vision of ethnic comity that even a Republican would have trouble arguing with. Nothing is known of Maria’s character beside her military service alongside Carol. Their mutual regard is based in the solidarity of warriors; it’s a professional recognition, not a personal one. In “Captain Marvel,” the forward-looking liberalism has a conservative core; it’s devised to extend the brand’s reach without alienating its base.
It’s one more reminder that the problem with superhero movies has nothing to do with the genre or its source material. The problem is with the corporate anticulture that controls these productions — and the fandom-targeted demagogy that they’re made to fulfill — which responsible casting can’t overcome alone.
SPLIT
“A demotic structuralist, Shyamalan conceives of superheroes in terms of their powers, their points of vulnerability, and their motives. He gestures toward their subjective points of view without ever dramatizing their inner lives — because he isn’t so much a visionary filmmaker as he is a very skillful plotter who also has a suave, at times distinctive, but dully literal style.”
MARY MAGDELINE
Though afflicted with the stodginess and staginess that characterized Biblical dramas of the nineteen-fifties, “Mary Magdalene” entirely lacks their sense of spectacle. Neither a character with psychological depth nor a prophet with a holy vision, Davis’s Mary Magdalene is reduced to a good soul and an empathetic helper whose most significant achievement is avoiding imposing her own ideas on Jesus’s mission, avoiding impeding him from pursuing his chosen path, and avoiding saving him from the consequences of his actions.
THE KITCHEN
For all the movie’s dangerous conflict and physical violence, and despite the dramatic reconstruction of New York period settings and styles, the movie plays like a feature-length table read.
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK
But Øvredal’s sense of horror is neither notably stark nor significantly ornamental; it’s nearly textureless, as if it had been squeezed from a tube.
SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME
Beside the superheroic overlay, the movie’s depth of characterization and imaginative amplitude of social relations (as well as its placing of American characters in European settings) could have been borrowed straight from the Disney playbook of decades past — in particular, from “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” which got more fun out of its European settings and reflected the authentic modesty of its goofy and self-deprecatingly adolescent humor.
