Self-effacing art of a high order, letting characters be people and their lives be their own.
Yes, it’s about reaching the end of the line and about atomization, which is entirely clear from the outset, but it’s beauty is to let the ideas unfold patiently and with humor and understanding.
Can there ever have been a baseball story where teams have mattered less?
It's 2054, and the only good to be found in the coming thirty years' advances in technology is how they provide the resources for Bong Joon Ho to tell a scathingly funny story about planetary émigrés from Earth that rests largely on the sad, simple shoulders of Mickey (a marvel of a multifaceted performance by Robert Pattinson).
Maybe the great director loves some of his material a bit more than is necessary, in particular the long assignments he gives to Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo, but, that apart, his comic pacing is superb.
In the new director-blessed restoration from Janus, this multi-hour poetic/epic feast of visual storytelling refracts war, vast landscapes, horsemanship, survival, betrayal, religious crosscurrents and conflicts, Eisenstein closeups, and destabilizing switches in film format that keep it clear this is intense, interpretive art as well as a reenactment of 13th-century Central Asia.
You can get away with this once in a generation: make a big movie about a group of real artists that redefines "about."
As W. H. Auden wrote after the death of Yeats: "He became his admirers." Alex Ross Perry is valiantly trying in "Pavements" to direct Pavement out of this inevitability while they still live and can make music in a movie that also acknowledges the tyranny of fractured memories and the marketplace for biographical media.
It's fascinating. Perry…
