Ad Astra (James Gray)

September 18, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Review, Ad Astra, James Gray, Essential

“Are you ready for your psychological evaluation?” It’s the computer prompt that astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) responds to in minute detail every morning. There’s something rehearsed about the cadence in which Roy responds to the question, as if to suggest that he’s answered this question ad nauseam, prepared to reaffirm a stranger’s perception of what constitutes being well-adjusted. It’s one of those ridiculous but necessary aspects of his day-in and day-out and it’s the sort of thing that is best mitigated by embracing a palatable lie. And so Roy conceals the truth: the truth about missing his wife (Liv Tyler) and the truth about his missing father (Tommy Lee Jones), now gone for nearly three decades after what was presumed to be a failed mission to Neptune. Instead he dedicates himself to the now, his “eye on the exit,” with the hope that whatever insular, emotional hemorrhaging he encounters can be compartmentalized, stowed away and forgotten. The instinct is, painfully, an all too relatable one.

Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria)

September 13, 2019 by Daniel Nava in Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers, 2019, Review

Dorothy (Constance Wu) doesn’t have the luxury of time. Her grandmother is ill and has debts, leaving Dorothy to take up dancing jobs and menial service posts to eke out a living. But it’s 2007 and with it comes the rose-tinged nostalgia of a uniquely American past that was somehow everything and nothing. It’s baffling, yet profoundly relatable, to look at 2007 as an end of an era of sorts. For me? I was living on my own and forced to become a fully functional human being. Something similar could be said for Dorothy, especially when she meets Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). It’s at that moment that she finds some measure of self, some agency. In a world of impulse and insincerity you end up clinging onto those who seem to have it all figured out. Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers presents itself as a catalog of decline, where women are let down by the men that orbit around them. Where a system of dependence proves inadequate and how, when backed against a corner, they prove to be more resourceful than the men who stood in defeat, palms stretched out as they beg for a bailout.

The Goldfinch (John Crowley)

September 11, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Review, The Goldfinch, John Crowley

John Crowley’s The Goldfinch follows some kind of algorithm of suffering, detailing the misfortunes of Theo Decker (Ansel Elgort as Adult Theo, Oakes Fegley as Young Theo). The boy loses his mother in a bombing at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which he stows away Carel Fabritius' painting, The Goldfinch, in his backpack. What follows is a film of excess: a film scrubbed clean of its Dickensian magnitude, sanitized and glossed for a less than discerning film festival crowd. If The Goldfinch hints at the traditions of 19th century literary writing, or even implies a passing resemblance to Great American existential films like Ordinary People or Paris, Texas, it’s a superficial kinship. ‘Cause this film is nothing but glossy surfaces, paying lip service to actual despair. Even the rubble is pristine.

It Chapter Two (Andy Muschietti)

September 06, 2019 by Daniel Nava in It Chapter Two, 2019, Review, Andy Muschietti

So it’s about living with regret, how we dislodge memories and the messy mechanics and symptoms of masculinity. It’s about inhaling the past, and how home no longer feels like a destination or refuge but something backwards – a symbol of drift and decline. Or at least that’s what I wanted Andy Muschietti’s It Chapter Two to be about. This is one of those specific examples of a film that I’m willing to make unhealthy and proactive concessions for. Films about memory and how it corresponds with regret tend to howl louder for me and as a result I’m prone to overlooking many of It Two’s flaws until… I couldn’t. Thing is that much like It’s 2017 predecessor, It Two is a film with rich ideas, lofty in its themes and realized with a confidence that would suggest a command of Stephen King’s source material. But it communicates these ideas in the most banal, lowest common denominator way imaginable. I really like what It Two is about, I just hate how it goes about it.

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (Morgan Spurlock)

September 01, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2017, Review, Morgan Spurlock, Super Size Me 2

What an embarrassing title. Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! is another example of the quote unquote documentary filmmaker peddling his brand of Gen-X whining as cultural and critical complaint. I was an impressionable 16-year old when Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, Super Size Me, entered the cultural conversation and even then I found his gonzo journey of eating nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days to be juvenile. Fast-forward 15 years and Spurlock’s follow-up is impossibly more jejune and inconsequential than his predecessor, relying on a series of hackneyed formal devices that serve to lecture rote banalities. Spurlock isn’t a documentarian. Or a filmmaker. Instead he’s perpetually auditioning to be a late-night talk show host, constantly mugging for the camera, insisting upon his moral, ethical, and intellectual superiority.

American Factory (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert)

August 22, 2019 by Daniel Nava in American Factory, Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert, 2019, Review, Recommended

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s American Factory opens in Moraine, Ohio with the closure of a General Motors plant. It’s the start of the decade and we observe brief glimpses of workers in tears as the final car makes its way down the assembly line. Immediately after, set several years later, we see a Chinese couple remarking on the beauty of the Midwestern plains of Moraine, ultimately shuddering as the Ohio chill settles into their marrow. American Factory details the profoundly devastating transition in which Ohio residents see the closure of an American institution and the opening of a new factory owned by Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang.

Brittany Runs a Marathon (Paul Downs Colaizzo)

August 18, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Review, Brittany Runs a Marathon, Paul Downs Colaizzo, Noteworthy

There’s a blurry distinction between the concepts of self-improvement and self-centeredness and it often requires a seismic effort on my behalf to parse through the nonsense, to read past the banal platitudes of what I’ve come to understand to be a uniquely American problem. Writer/director Paul Downs Colaizzo’s Brittany Runs a Marathon isn’t especially provocative or probing in its examination of this, but I do think it possesses some notable virtues worth unpacking. While it may initially suggest all the rote tendencies one associates with American indies that emerge from the Sundance Film Festival, its more anomalous qualities inspire thought and consideration that I would’ve expected walking into the film.

Skin (Guy Nattiv)

July 28, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Guy Nattiv, Skin

Guy Nattiv’s Skin, a feature-length adaptation of the filmmaker’s Oscar-winning short film of the same name, is a series of blasé dramatic repartees that amount to little more than crocodile tears. The dramatic conceit involves a man’s redemption arc as he reverts from a violent white power advocate to… not that. It’s a strange feeling watching a film about white men and women who carve a swastika into the face of a black teen only for its filmmaker to humanize the carvers rather than the carved. That, my friends, requires a special kind of privilege.

A Halfway There Checklist: The Best of 2019 So Far

July 01, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019

The longer you’re there, the more estranged you feel with the real world. A psych ward, that is. Here’s an interesting fact about the one I was in: there were no clocks. The concept of time just doesn’t have the same applications. What you experience is something that saddles the line between real life and fiction, insofar that it provides a repetitive sensation – a minute-by-minute inferno of routine – that slices away at something inherently human in you. Days no longer have that clear distinctive quality that tells one apart from the other. You soon become keenly aware of your own unimpressiveness. So much so that whatever brought you there seems so minuscule, minor, and insignificant. Intended or not, it helps you recognize personal weaknesses. And the whole thing offered the valuable comfort of knowing that not all weaknesses can be overcome. We have breakdowns and that’s ok.

Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley)

June 20, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Review, Toy Story 4, Josh Cooley, Essential

Toy Story 4 is, like most films that cross my path lately, about a breakup. Set nine years before the events of the third film, we begin with a rescue mission. RC, Andy’s remote control car, is left outdoors during a torrential downpour with Woody (Tom Hanks) and the cadre of toys that inhabit Andy’s room hoping to make the save. They do, but not until they’re surprised by the realization that Andy’s sister Molly, meanwhile, is giving up her Bo Peep (Annie Potts) figurine. The toy’s placed in a cardboard box along with a potpourri of unneeded things and briefly left in the rain, as Woody breaks quota with another rescue attempt, only for Bo to accept her fate: Molly doesn’t need her anymore and she’s willing to move onto the next child. Not to be betrayed by Woody’s idealism, Bo’s capacity to move on, to embrace the unknown, and divorce herself from the vise grip of placidity and stagnation is something that Woody just can’t wrap his mind around. And it takes over a decade of disappointment and alienation for Woody to come to grips with his ever-fluid importance to both Andy and now, carrying on where we left off in Toy Story 3, Bonnie.

Toy Story 4 ends up becoming a film about the importance of a craft to one’s happiness, about the “existential agony” that comes with everything around you changing while you remain the same, and the messy mechanics of trying to force the past out of the present. As you’d imagine, it’ll mean a lot of things to different people, but most vitally, it just plain means something.