This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
In 2014 I saw Interstellar in theaters with a group of friends. When I walked out, I called it my favorite movie. Here I am, ten years later, doing the exact same thing. How far I’ve come!
I remember that when I first saw it, I literally laughed at Dr. Brand’s monologue about love. I was 16 and jaded and thought…how unserious to be going on about love when the fate of humanity is at stake! But by the time…
Feels so clearly like QT is in total control of what he’s doing here. There is none of the youthful exuberance of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction—which I love but do feel more like works by someone with something to prove and excited to show off what he can do. This is a movie by someone at the top of their game (really, many someones atop their respective games) looking back over the arc of a changing career approaching its…
I never really think of Tarantino as a humanist filmmaker given how mean-spirited and gleefully violent some of his work is, but the end of Pulp Fiction sits with me every time. Jules’s reinterpretation of Ezekiel 25:17 puts it all in context. Various narratives of redemption and personal change weave together. Human connection pops up in a morass of absurdity and violence. It’s not too late to change your stripes, and if you don’t then you’ll get blasted to hell coming…
Shyamalan’s characteristic blend of Hitchcockian suspense and sympathetic family melodrama really works for me. I felt it here: gasping and jumping and getting a little teary-eyed. It helps that every shot is framed to evoke just the right feeling—David in the train at the beginning through the seats, Elijah’s feet shuffling down the stairs, lots of mirrors and reflections. I was really gripped. I dig Shyamalan in this mode, a lot.
Sort of remarkable - there is something deeply humanistic about the whole project here. Cinderella x Uncut Gems is an apt description. But neither of those are quite as naturalistic or lived-in. They are a fantasy and a nightmare. This is both but somehow all of it still feels real. Each interaction feels in some sense authentic (I get that term is fraught but I do not wanna say 'naturalistic' or 'lived in' or 'realistic' again, so...). This is how…
Emma Stone does a great job inhabiting someone figuring out how to live in a body—most basically just figuring out how to move around and what to eat, but also discovering the more, er, carnal aspects of embodiment. I think that’s part of why I prefer the first two segments—in B&W and in Lisbon—to the rest of the movie. The movie is at its funniest then, with Bella very slowly learning how to live. Dafoe’s presence in those earlier parts doesn’t hurt either. I enjoyed it throughout, but it lost some of its luster for me by the end.
