chaos-rampant
Joined Dec 2007
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chaos-rampant's rating
What could have been a long read in the Times is turned with the power of dark rainy footage, aerial and drive through shots of Ohio, into a detective story.
In proper noir fashion it starts with a dead body that speaks - through a book he just wrote - to us about events that brought him there.
We get to listen to actual FBI wiretaps as the would-be conspirators unfold their pay-to-play scheme, which turns out to be neither small-money nor hare-brained.
And we have just only zoomed in on a corner of Ohio state politics, and have even accidentally stumbled onto the plot through wiretaps set up for a different reason.
America has had these and much worse the last 10-15 years with paid influence on an unprecedented scale and, not least around elections, taking place in open view. It's made for an unstable world, indiffferent or openly hostile to the weak and disenfranchised, cruel to people and home, but those who manipulate for personal gain can finally attain those very well known cures to unhappiness; maybe a good house, a fancy car, or to pluck an example from here, a newly renovated kitchen.
This is only the first episode, and I see they turn to electoral financing in the second, so there will be more to say.
In proper noir fashion it starts with a dead body that speaks - through a book he just wrote - to us about events that brought him there.
We get to listen to actual FBI wiretaps as the would-be conspirators unfold their pay-to-play scheme, which turns out to be neither small-money nor hare-brained.
And we have just only zoomed in on a corner of Ohio state politics, and have even accidentally stumbled onto the plot through wiretaps set up for a different reason.
America has had these and much worse the last 10-15 years with paid influence on an unprecedented scale and, not least around elections, taking place in open view. It's made for an unstable world, indiffferent or openly hostile to the weak and disenfranchised, cruel to people and home, but those who manipulate for personal gain can finally attain those very well known cures to unhappiness; maybe a good house, a fancy car, or to pluck an example from here, a newly renovated kitchen.
This is only the first episode, and I see they turn to electoral financing in the second, so there will be more to say.
On one hand here is the honest depiction, decrepit council estates somewhere in Kent, with spray-painted walls housing broken homes, drugs, teenage pregnancy. We're meant to see a ghetto of always precariously perched lives teetering on the edge, and yet somehow within it, community and togetherness.
As I read, this is a world the filmmaker knows all too well, herself a child of the estates. I'm sure we could not ask for a better guide.
And on the other hand there's the journey of being transformed by the experience. How you might be, if allowing yourself to be softened by insight.
Her blueprint is, a child of 12 who is resentful of her broken home, given to us as her dad deciding to marry and she hates it (himself barely 30, a teenage dad and product of that same world).
So, she meets an older boy in a field one day, a seemingly magical creature who dances and frollicks for her, and is later seen perched on roofs. Also a being of this same world who has returned to find out who he is. There's some effort to ambiguously perch him between real and imagined, but not that interesting.
And so she goes with him through it all, to find out about ambiguously broken homes, where people just managed as best they could in dire circumstances, and that frees some part of her that in the end allows reconciliation in the father's wedding.
Insight here is tied to watching, framing in context - you'll see her as observer in key scenes, Bird's talk with his faher outside, the assault on the abusive boyfriend.
There's a mirrored teen pregnancy, a half-brother who would have repeated the cycle - but the girl never shows up, perhaps for the better.
As I read, this is a world the filmmaker knows all too well, herself a child of the estates. I'm sure we could not ask for a better guide.
And on the other hand there's the journey of being transformed by the experience. How you might be, if allowing yourself to be softened by insight.
Her blueprint is, a child of 12 who is resentful of her broken home, given to us as her dad deciding to marry and she hates it (himself barely 30, a teenage dad and product of that same world).
So, she meets an older boy in a field one day, a seemingly magical creature who dances and frollicks for her, and is later seen perched on roofs. Also a being of this same world who has returned to find out who he is. There's some effort to ambiguously perch him between real and imagined, but not that interesting.
And so she goes with him through it all, to find out about ambiguously broken homes, where people just managed as best they could in dire circumstances, and that frees some part of her that in the end allows reconciliation in the father's wedding.
Insight here is tied to watching, framing in context - you'll see her as observer in key scenes, Bird's talk with his faher outside, the assault on the abusive boyfriend.
There's a mirrored teen pregnancy, a half-brother who would have repeated the cycle - but the girl never shows up, perhaps for the better.
In an ideal world, one that values visual imagination, spontaneity of expression, tracking close to youthful life, this would have won at the Oscars this year over the incidentally also youth- and New York-centric Anora.
In an ideal world, it would be playing in every screen now; twenty-somethings who have no clue who Jonas Mekas, Malick or Akerman are (the filmmaker does) but are deeply visual creatures would be rapt to receive this depiction of them, non-Netflix.
It's very much a studied work. The diaristic stream of consciousness is after Jonas Mekas, the poetic swirl of bodies after Malick. Chantal Akerman once made a marvelous little film called News from Home, in the form of visual letters from New York, which this one recalls in its tone of intimate, uncertain confession. I would bet the filmmaker knows them all too well from film school, which is where she came up from. There is an air of precocious emulation of favorites.
But this is a first work, and as old masters leave us, I eagerly expect new voices to aspire to take up the mantle. What is this bizarre, ephemeral firework of being here in this moment? Knowing myself in the light of all the other things.
She falls for a boy, twentysomethings in post-pandemic Brooklyn, who is whisked away from her (incidentally to Ukraine as the war starts) but leaves behind in his place a son.
Friends, acquaintances come together for a brief winter and spring, then disperse again, maybe for now. How was it different for you? What does it amount to? Coney Island in the 1910s, sparkling lights, the same today as not. Coyotes maybe will roam. A dreamlike dance that reunites her with her mother. Kids playing in the hallway, the building slated for demolition soon.
Thi is fine work for a first time. Anxious, messy, tenderly reaching youth is and will always be one of our pre-eminent modes of discovering wild music in the stars.
In an ideal world, it would be playing in every screen now; twenty-somethings who have no clue who Jonas Mekas, Malick or Akerman are (the filmmaker does) but are deeply visual creatures would be rapt to receive this depiction of them, non-Netflix.
It's very much a studied work. The diaristic stream of consciousness is after Jonas Mekas, the poetic swirl of bodies after Malick. Chantal Akerman once made a marvelous little film called News from Home, in the form of visual letters from New York, which this one recalls in its tone of intimate, uncertain confession. I would bet the filmmaker knows them all too well from film school, which is where she came up from. There is an air of precocious emulation of favorites.
But this is a first work, and as old masters leave us, I eagerly expect new voices to aspire to take up the mantle. What is this bizarre, ephemeral firework of being here in this moment? Knowing myself in the light of all the other things.
She falls for a boy, twentysomethings in post-pandemic Brooklyn, who is whisked away from her (incidentally to Ukraine as the war starts) but leaves behind in his place a son.
Friends, acquaintances come together for a brief winter and spring, then disperse again, maybe for now. How was it different for you? What does it amount to? Coney Island in the 1910s, sparkling lights, the same today as not. Coyotes maybe will roam. A dreamlike dance that reunites her with her mother. Kids playing in the hallway, the building slated for demolition soon.
Thi is fine work for a first time. Anxious, messy, tenderly reaching youth is and will always be one of our pre-eminent modes of discovering wild music in the stars.