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Peele’s effortless leap towards his future

Jordan Peele’s new cerebral dish doesn’t fit into the model of social commentary that his horror/comedy embraces in “Get Out” and “US”, yet it introduces a new intellectual and artistic milestone of his craft. In “Nope” we see Peele at his most confident state as he seamlessly steps forward to speak about art for the sake of art, cinema for and within itself, and maybe the distances that one might take to achieve their subjective sense of what anything means. “Nope” is a joyous thrilling ride that is creepy, exciting, confusing, unusual, and most definitely subversive. This picture has many refreshing elements that stem from denying the expectations built around its director’s horror/dark comedy storytelling motif. It has the feel of a next project; It's prospective and progressive, building on the experience gained from previous projects with their intents, structural designs, and the massive fandom and their views of Peele’s cinematic five years career.

Here we see an open-ended statement as there are no clear definitions to all the weirdness that is “Nope”, and you -as the inhabitants of the story- are completely blind to the purposes of the spectacles that by no means unfold. There is a miracle, a bad one, unrelentingly and purposelessly violent, and you along with the people of the story are the targets of its malice. There are hints and pieces that make a relatively cohesive understandable journey, but this strays far away from a straightforward thriller story design. The unachieved desire to understand the convoluted spirals of Peele’s mind is his magician’s trick and his surrealist’s engine of powerful storytelling. Here, there is no unifying theory, in fact, there might be tens of them, with themes that build upon each other in layers that broaden and branch. Certainly, Peele’s comedy is at the center, here with some personally perceived yet accepted condescendence to the general addiction to causality that the title of the movie so clearly mocks; I can almost hear his giggles!

Much can be said about what “Nope” portrays; It can be a story of nature’s violence and its rebellious desire to break free of man’s control. It might serve as a definitive comment against the shallow efforts to understand a spectacle. There is something religious as believing comes first before an endless hopeless effort to find a proof or an explanation. This might be a story of artists and the distances that they might travel to have their “impossible shot” and the ugly ends that explain its impossibility. This might be a picture of Peele’s own intellectual maturity and his approach to art with a mockery of how we consume what we sense and then run aimlessly behind meanings. This might be a joyous hopeful Tarantino-esque celebration of the triumphs of the American cowboy, or just a sorrowful depressed comment about the inevitability of man’s control over all nature’s wonders beyond their ferocity or mystique. This might be a celebration of wonders, or a sad submission to all the fakes and their inheritance of nature and culture. “Nope” might be all of these smashed together or might be about nothing but a thrilling escape story from the teeth of a creepy predator. The only definite matter here which fits with the comedian’s perspective is that by no means anything is really serious as there is always humor within resistance and calamity alike.

This is a confident picture from a powerful comedian/writer/philosopher/director. It is light on its feet, pushes when it needs, and halts when it should. It’s infused with love for pictures and their motion. Here there is Get Out and US and Tarantino and Lynch and Kubrick and Carpenter; This is Peele and his embraced self-secure experiences and passions. And the aftertaste is yet growing and will continue -similarly to his previous projects- to mutate and flourish, powered by Nope’s mystique, its denying title, and the tease of it all.

[mouazkhaled]

Contemporary cinema at its most cosmic yet most intimate, this is a triumph for the ages

Charlie Kaufman once wrote “Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out”. I can start with nothing better to talk about an immense new movie, the Daniels' “Everything everywhere all at once”.

This hyperreal piece of art comes to us quietly sampling something that crosses our path only every decade or so to remind us that there is still more to explore in our collective cultural consciousness and that we are yet to discover a fraction of what a truly good script can do; How images can transform a script to something better, deeper, and more effective; How a harmonious marriage of script and picture can explore emotional depths that are commonly visited yet rarely understood. “Everything everywhere all at once” is only the second movie project of its writers/directors. Their first was a subject of small talks at drunk parties and "the weirdest I have seen" conversations, the story of a desperate loner who was saved by a dead body that mainly flatulates then comes alive to ask existential questions about the meaning of life, “Swiss Army Man”. That project might have been too eccentric and much ahead of its time for the common taste, but it was a true eye-opener. Now, after 6 years since that ambitious project and the experience it distilled, comes this utterly more marvelous achievement.

“Everything everywhere all at once” is impossible to describe and synopsizing it is unjust as it is a true and rare symbiosis of script and picture, each highlighting the other, making each and the whole something more than words can explain. But perhaps to describe it best -and you must see it yourself to try and state your own- it's a surreal psychedelic journey through the eyes of a financially struggling immigrant nuclear family with their crumbling owned business and their cyclical hopeless life and what bent it of their dying hopes, missed opportunities, decaying bounds, and their valiant efforts to maybe bring some love and tradition and purpose back to it. This essence of the story is challenged by the simple concept of "what if" through a theme of a multiverse with characters sliding through the different possible versions of themselves to try and find meaning through the overwhelming nonsense of their lives.

There are many aspects that make this movie a bombastic one. The screenplay introduces a simple premise but then quickly, continuously, and relentlessly evolves into absurd levels that are unpredictable and, frankly, unprecedented throughout the whole runtime, effectively challenging your sense of what is "enough". The story is an adventure of cosmic proportions of characters and characters’ versions of themselves that then is juxtaposed with its intimate origins. And so, this gargantuan design is just an external manifestation of the emotional depths of a dialogue between a mother, a father, a daughter, a grandfather, and a tax auditor in the span of 6 hours of one day of their tiny lives. It's childish and hilarious and creepy. It is a meticulous machine that keeps discovering unimaginable dimensions to portray an intense emotional and philosophical battle between purpose and nihilism, and then purpose through nihilism. The script actively prevents itself from committing to a moral conclusion. It juggles continuously -as life is and any grasp on it- between the hopeful and the hopeless and is only bound by accepting the inevitability of chaos while rejecting the perceived destiny of loneliness.

This immense script wouldn’t have made this piece without the visuals. Here, the actual pictures do not only serve as a representation of the script but also feel that they have their own identity. The visuals are utterly and out worldly surreal, like a Salvador Dalí or a David lynch or a stargate sequence of Kubrick's Space Odyssey. They are beautifully influenced by the exciting and fun Chinese martial arts Jackie Chan movies, the action/mystery of “The Matrix”, the eerie imagery of Charlie Kaufman’s “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”, “Synecdoche New York”, and “Adaptation”, and Wong Kar-Wai’s sexy romantic spectacle “In the mood for love”.

Script and picture being their own separate entities in this movie needed a masterful editor, and here too it excels. This cinematic piece could have been easily a disorienting mess of random events and visual madness, but what the editing actually achieves is a story that is easily followed and understood with characters that are poignant, close, and intimate, creating relatability that captivates and elates. The acting is flawless, specifically on the parts of Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, who both complete and finesse. The cinema that comes from all these passionately crafted ingredients creates what can be described as a particle accelerator that elaborately assaults the senses, with passion, from every angle, generating a hilarious, creepy, and immensely emotional journey that will undoubtedly leave you to tears on many occasions, and then latch on to you with a fantastic and inspiring after taste.

The Daniels wrote and directed “Everything everywhere all at once” to make it look like a marvel blockbuster but with the spirit and the feel of an art-house independent picture, effectively thriving through the fierce competition that is threatening creativity in cinema. They -either willingly with the audacity of an artist, or instinctively through the passion of a child explorer- ditched the three-act structure of a script and then went above and beyond with a bizarre and mind-blowing cinematic exploration of the depths of meaning and love. It is contemporary yet traditional, enormous yet intimate, focused yet living up to its title; It is truly Everything first, everywhere second, then all together all at once.  This picture is an absolute triumph, a true masterpiece, one of the best movies in the last 20 years, and one of the most beautiful things I personally have ever seen. Be sure not to miss it.

[mouazkhaled]

Denis Villeneuve is a visionary filmmaker, a passionate one, with a craft that is rejuvenating the old and the cliched of cinema into refined multilayered neo-noir pictures that are deeply interesting and visually enthralling. He subverted alien invasion into a visually breathtaking study of the essence of language and the lost intimacy of honest and courageous communication with self and others in Arrival; sequeled one of the most important Sci-fi movies of all time, blade runner, one with such majesty and legacy that had made it almost untouchable; thrillers like prisoners and Incendies and sicario were with context and sub-context that easily surpass most thriller genre pictures. And now, Dune, the famous novel with its massive universe and solid mythology, previously attempted to be cinematized by David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky in projects that were either disowned or never saw daylight, underlining how almost cinematically unachievable Dune really is. This is the place where Villeneuve thrives; the shelved, the stereotypical, the cursed, and the untouchable. His passion for this project also stems from a deep nostalgic attachment with the world of Dune since childhood. He was obsessed with its world, this is abundant in this picture, and at this point of his career, unfortunately, his subjective view had betrayed him, highlighting yet again why some projects are beyond theatrical adaptation, and how an overtly personal approach can fall into the overconfident and somewhat the juvenile, producing an immature rushed unbalanced attempt to create an opera, resulting in what I think is Mr. Villeneuve’s first cinematic flop. Several factors had played into this, things that stem from the director’s approach, pacing strategies, experience with franchise movie-making, musical score and sound editing, and finally the story itself.

First and foremost, Dune is a visual spectacle. The scenery, choice of shots, the physicality of objects and lands and ships, their texture and skin, the battles and their explosions, all of which feel like a unique mixture of mythological, ultra-Sci-fi blockbuster movie-like pictures that yet are very real and touchable. Mr. Villeneuve is a pioneer; his introduction of dramatic neo-noir themes into Sci-fi stem from a firm and courageous commitment to preserving the connection with reality. His visual experience is joint with his desire to draw Dune as a majestic picture, as he views it personally and perhaps as it was written and perceived by generations, creating an undeniable visual triumph, to the point of almost a new milestone. 

However, Cinema is a medium of components that require harmony and homogeneity for it to be accessible, international, and then to be elevated beyond its crafted borders; and the sole visual portrayal of the story, despite its majesty, is simply not enough, and moreover can be counterintuitive and crushing. Dune suffered firstly from serious problems in the pacing of the story and its’s characters’ developments. This is a world that is filled with rules and ideas and elements and borders that require a natural, nuanced, and calm portrayal; this is where such a story becomes a challenging cinematic adaptation. Other franchises of huge sequenced developing stories such as JRR Tolkien’s LOTR and J.K Rowling Harry Potter were adapted in Cinema through slow episodical cinematic projects that spanned years, required a huge ensemble of on and off the screen makers, along with production companies providing strong backbones for visionary projects that would unapologetically take many millions and many years in the making. On top of all, its directors understood what makes a franchise, how to pace it, breath into it, and build its worlds slowly to their full cinematic capacity. Villeneuve lacks this experience and perhaps disdains many of the franchised strategies; this was abundantly clear, both through his work here and literally in interviews when he expressed the burden of elements and rules and that he wanted them to be out of his way in this first part to gain more freedom for the rest of the story. Naturally, with these tales, exposition is a difficult task and can be easily unnatural rushed and forced, all of which are sadly abundant in this picture. The screenwriting has its three parts acts, yet they are paced too differently, especially with its blatantly long and dragged final act, which disturbed and forced me to wish that the movie would stop now because it has just been too long!

The arrogant confidence and personal nostalgic attachment to Dune were also clearly held by one of the greatest cinematic musicians in history, Hans Zimmer, who I think, by a shared and magnified pathological approach to the project with its director, had made his worst cinematic musical work of his career. The music is constant and loud, extremely loud, with lousy and immature holiness that crushed dialogues and smothered many human interactions and what would’ve been interesting meditation moments that could have presented an important character growth and viewer-character attachment, which here, were exceptionally needed. Watching the movie in IMAX has been a true challenge to the senses and made many dialogues uninterpretable, subsequently causing a detachment from the story, as I frankly and simply wasn’t able to understand what was happening. Dune needs subtitles, even for the native speakers, and this is usually not a good sign! 

The story itself, which I never read, and I should, does feel outdated, certainly not aging well. Its pictures of the white savior/messiah, desserts, and their inhabitants with their shapes, colors, and demeanors, all are filled with cliched pictures and are almost irritatingly racist. Undeniably, there are important themes of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental ideas that are universal in time and space, and I am looking forward to furtherly exploring, however, something didn’t feel quite well here. 

This project is massive, visually breathtaking, courageous, and passionate, yet unbalanced and was betrayed by its own energy stumbling into somewhat of a messy fiasco. It’s forced to be an operatic poetic adaptation, yet failing, hence collapsing into a pretentious, long, unclear, and annoyingly loud piece of cinema. Its elements obliterated any chance to form true attachments with characters, making the experience indifferent to their challenges and losses, and frankly had prevented its star ensemble from truly shining, as the desert worms and the “awe” operatic musical pieces were just too big for any human to shine in a story that clearly has humanity at its core. Certainly, I will be watching Dune again on HBO max for its crucially needed subtitles, and to be emotionally prepared to forgive and watch Dune part two, something that despite all the aforementioned, I continue to be excited for, with what its makers deserve of trust to surpass their mishaps in this cursed project.  

Rating: 6/10

[mouazkhaled]

When an active volcano is utterly more beautiful than Seattle

Pig, directed by Michael Sarnoski, his first movie debut, along with a stunning performance by Nicolas Cage -undoubtedly one of the best performances in his career- is a remarkably powerful, deep, and multi-layered picture, that maintains the personal, embraces the simple and touches intimately. It’s a story of a brilliant man whose grasp of the world had failed throughout a progressive realization that his attachment to the proud things of his life was nothing but an artificial sick joke, and all had led him to a life of escape and solitude. His abode is nature, and his profession is truffle hunting, and his only companion, the only other soul that he bonded with and ate with and smiled with, was his truffle pig. The setting is simple and is not the most original, yet what elevates and styles and polishes it, is everything around it; The melancholy of the dimmed lighting throughout the picture, the modest dialogue, the rawness of nature, the dry unwashed blood on Cage’s bruised face, his dirty ragged hair, and all this honesty’s and innocence's contrast with the heinous, senseless, soulless, noise of the city; Its evil, and all the “civil” things that march with it. This is a sad story of a man with a dying hope in a dying world, in a desperate pursuit of a brittle reality that he created at the corners of what is left alive; And this story with all its pieces, is relatable, empathetic, universal, and is unapologetically utterly nihilistic.

The setting has a man in escape from civility. His profession as a truffle hunter is an emotional metaphor of the chase of the hidden gems in nature, rather than money or materials or the modern-day consumerism that ridiculed all values. His companion is sweet and smart and innocent, and despite the expected distance from the idea, this friendship with all its depths and tenderness, is very relatable and close to the universal human needs that we all share. His companion gets kidnapped by pitiful men to be sent to the big people of the truffle industry in the city. The movie is the journey to find the Pig, and the journey takes us to a beautiful and profound analysis of Cage’s character and several others around him. The depth of his character is magnified by a secondary character of a naive teenager that is consumed by his modern car and its stereo with its constant nagging songs and the pretentious commentary in between. The journey takes us to Cage’s past as a renowned legendary chef who trained many and left everything behind. And this journey embarks with the big man, the corporate man, the money king, the bureaucrat selfish monotonous villain who took the pig. The journey is relatable, not solely with me, but with all its characters, and the evil man was too in the hunt, as was Cage, for something that can truly feel real. 

The story is an illumination of the hopeless present and its absolute grim future, hence, finds solace only in the past, the nostalgic, and the defining old moments of our lives. For Cage, the warmth of his past was in a beautiful recorded voice of a partner; Amongst relationships of colleagues and students in the past; In the taste of a mushroom tart, a bottle of wine, and his old friend’s salted baguette. For the villain, as he is as human as Cage, yet lost and angry, his Rosebud was an old magical meal in a magical restaurant of a magical night with his deceased wife. Most of the character traits, their struggles, and their choices, were stemming from an ultimate escape from the now, and a desperate need to recreate the past, reflecting a general sense that we too have little to be truly interested in and are more and more feeling the scarcity of what can be felt as real. 

Pig is an odyssey and a love story that ends in failure and deep loss, one of a magnitude of utter depression, complete hopelessness, and the death of meaning. It ends with characters realizing -maybe for the first time in decades- that all they had, all they consumed, all they chased, all they aspired to be, were all hogwash, unreal, and little but mere senseless stupid lies in prisons that they had forgotten, and are of their own making. Pig ends embracing remorse, as a sad poem written about the ends of all things. It’s an experience that forces you to reflect and walk aimlessly, hoping for a calm breeze in search of quietness and silence. Yet the world is full of cars and screens and pretentious songs and is impossible to escape, but the deep beauty of the glimpses of realizations of the invisible bars around us and the shackles on our ankles, is perhaps the ultimate goal of existentialism, and the path to having a truly real destiny.

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Lust and greediness; the powerful flames of youth, inexperience; and the juvenile comprehension of opportunity; all are dangerous qualities that can lead to anticlimactic, truncated, and ultimately hollow choices. What followed, in this particular example, was guilt, frustration, anger, losing the sense of self; and all, in the case of Billy Beane, had terminated -or at least intended to be- with a rebellion against the past, the system norms, and the old rustic foundations. However, the rebellion was ironically fueled with the same greediness and the same juvenility. He hurled outside the box, and then attacked it, shattered its walls, with the booming sounds echoing throughout an age old establishment; He might even have had changed some part of the world. But, as the cruelty of nature is endless and the misfortunes of the flamboyant souls are the often gifts of fate, he failed again, as he was always a juvenile; and the juvenile is a juvenile; he never grew, and he went on, and never abated. As sad this is, as it is magically wonderful; as regretful as it is giving; it’s the god's good old trick of the fool who unknowingly, throughout all his failed trials to obliterate his foolishness with foolishness, changes everything along the way. The enchanting fortune is, at the end of any day, it often takes a fool to change the foundations, alas it might crush him in the process, again and again, but the world would step forward and perhaps become all the better for it.

Moneyball, acted and produced by Brad Pitt, shared with the fascinating Jonah Hill, is an intense, deep, engaging, provoking, study character of someone who is stuck at the edge of greatness, and in his trials to win the last goddamn game of his series, failing each time, had introduced an unprecedented marriage between science and sport, math and experience, statistics and human intuition. In a way, he delved deep to find a universal language; one which bides things together, and in the process subverting the very concept of money and capitalism and the constituents of sport and competition. He might have touched a piece of that language; it changed all things around him, upheld him slowly and painfully, yet steadily to the edge of utter success, then as all the aspects of his life, had again abandoned him, looked back at him, and laughed.

I do not watch baseball, I don’t even know the rules of it, and despite the fact that this picture would be a gem for the fan of the game and the landmarks of its history, its depth of perceiving character and its definitions and motivations and conundrums and endless loops, make it a highly entertaining piece that can be truly fascinating for any eye. Moneyball is a philosophical terminology, an unforgettable movie, and a form of a universal truth that metaphorically dissects the hopefulness and dispersion of life, acting as a general reminder, that regardless of the possible pessimistic truth of the injustice towards the rebel, what constitutes humanity, survival, progression, and human evolution, is the attempt itself.

[mouazkhaled]

And yet again, another Pixar masterpiece

Soul, written and directed by Pete Doctor, Kemp Powers, and Mike Jones (names to remember) is harmonious with Pixar trends in ots last century. The visual representation of philosophical existentialism; the embodiment of the psychological foundations of character into colors; The exuberance of emotions through a magical interflow of enchanting scenery and music, all of which projecting freely to the extremes of what has been or could have been achieved so far through animated pictures.

A simple way to approach this fascinating piece of art is by asking a straightforward question, who is this movie for? and the simple and most logical answer is ... everyone. Soul is a woven melody of the philosophy of purpose, meaning, life, and death; the psychology of passion, joy, fulfillment, and maturity; and it does not abide by the simpler rules of prior Pixar pictures but rather dances freely between several premises with elongating dynamic rules. Simultaneously, this picture, as most of Pixar's, embraces an identity of colorfulness and humor; light humor, one that reach all age groups. And through this universal approach, there is an extraordinary bravery in embracing seemingly darker themes of sadness, purposelessness, and death to adopt their naturality, their necessity; qualities that neither the young nor the old should be terrified of.

What strikes the most is not the philosophical depth, because the ideas are there, in books and history, even Soul itself is hilariously self-conscious about their source of ideas as they reference the names of those whom the writers of this picture are inspired with. What strikes the most is the limitless imagination of the creators who were able to materialize such philosophical meanings and use their beautiful imagery to dance between physically manifested thoughts through a cheerful, intense, and complex plot; a plot that was made with musicality in its details, “jazzing” with enthralling attention and care. Soul is a story of passion and a theatre of life; a gift of beauty, one of which sink deep and hold within memory and character; it's one of those that can truly change.

[mouazkhaled]

A brilliant little moment of a brilliant show

Despite a very prosaic ending ... this show stands as one of the best. Intelligent, emotional, fun, dancing elegantly between the thrilling action-packed fireworks; the pragmatic apathic sociopathy of the absolute intellectuality; the emotional magnitude of the brilliance on his life; and his bizarre yet intimate relationships with the few that tolerated him or had a breakthrough the walls of his humanity, all done in a modern world where the maze of technology worked in harmony to shine the detective's unique ultra-human characteristics. The show’s popularity is not a surprise, hardly anyone can escape its magic.

Several moments in Sherlock stand mesmerizing as amongst the best that you can see and hear in the wedding episode “the sign of the three” perhaps stand my favorite. This masterpiece is an hour and a half long delicate dissection of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his partner John Watson, told subjectively by Sherlock as the best man in the wedding; Sherlock the smart antisocial, yet the warm and more mature one who is delving deeper with respect of human traditions while bravely embracing his deep fascination and surprising dependence on his friend. Here there is harmony throughout many layers of Sherlock's character and it's all heavily touching, because this is not only a milestone that was never portrayed so beautifully in his character, but also works as a subtle cry for help from a man fearful of an inescapable loss of his friend as Watson moves on with his life with a new partner and a new intimate relationship. Throughout this work of art, you can see that Sherlock is fearing a goodbye yet singing it, and thru the brave new enriching human attitude, sherlock himself finds crumbs of hope as there might be a chance of a dance with someone else, there might be a chance of a new life with happiness somewhere else, there might be some joy beyond the old comfort; perhaps there is another solution to the seclusion of the intellectual and the inherited inevitable hierarchy that is an eternal curse of loneliness; there might be some hope.

We see this as Sherlock playfully shows off dancing moves to Janin, saying that he always loved to dance yet it “Never really comes up in crime work, but, you know, I live in hope of the right case”. A small childish beautiful sad dream of a boy who never played, never had friends, never truly laughed, never truly danced. And as Sherlock is completing his masterpiece of a goodbye to his friend who as he now acknowledges, saved him in "many different ways", and as he congratulates the couple on their unexpected pregnancy as the "new baby in their life", the prolonged expanded words and speeches and music finally run their course and end, leaving an awkward silence between the now four of them, as Sherlock now must step back, but now the step back is one to a void, an obscure life, yet his hope is still kindling, he looks for Janin so he can perhaps dance with her and start something new, yet he was too late, too distant, too young, and his potential new partner escapes. A sad consequence, one that can be captured for seconds through the brilliant performance of Benedict Cumberbatch, seconds of loneliness, isolation, his inescapable solitude of the smart. The truth hits hard for seconds, but Sherlock lived his all life alone, he dwelt on his loneliness, grew with it, learned from it, thrived on it, wised up with it, indeed it did leave him when he knew Watson for some years, but his loneliness is never a stranger. So, the sad detective has many concrete self-defense mechanisms to protect him from this vain of void, and as the disappointing seconds pass away quickly, he finds the path to delve deeper into this vanity, embrace it to remember the inhuman utterly pragmatic unemotional character; the power of loneliness. The realization is made, expressions change instinctively as a sudden wake from a beautiful dream, he hugs his coat and walks away, alone, as he always did, from his old life to yet his one. Its a destiny of regression, one that was drawn perfectly, unforgettably, and everlastingly relatable by the hearts and brains of Conan Doyle and the many different writers who kept growing and understanding this dynamic character; it’s a piece of art.

[mouazkhaled]

Some thoughts about one of the most important and complex pieces of Cinema created by one of its most brilliant minds, Charlie Kaufman. This piece is called “Synecdoche, New York”, made it to screens in 2008, and it has not been the most famous amongst his other works (eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, Anomalisa, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), perhaps because it stood on the edge of the forgivable of the provocative. Yet it’s level of courage in the cinematic depiction of humanity’s eternal struggle for depth and meaning is an undoubtedly a rare gem.

This picture follows the life of a theater director (Caden Cotard) and its slow disintegration out from and into itself while going through an endless quest to regain control, in a world that viciously continues to strip the sense from his mind, soul, and body. It quickly starts with a brief introduction into an insane world, one full of disasters, affecting many layers, the outside world, his small family, and his own body. Calamities are everywhere, artists dying before their time, earthquakes killing tens of thousands, political destruction of a fragile society while being eaten by the unmerciful capitalism of America. This is the outside, the surrounding, the baseline of life. This eternal unfair chaos projects itself into his smaller world, his family’s. His wife is slipping away in a self-struggle to maintain the façade of love that she had for him, feeling the shattering disappointment that she describes as an inevitability after “you get to know someone really well”. She is an aspiring artist that longs for freedom from the attachments of her world, the boundaries of modern America, the walls of her house, and the ever-known human “family” structure. They have a daughter; she is erratic and spontaneous. She also has the same bug of deconstruction of the self, as her parent’s, portrayed from the very first scenes when she got obsessively worried of having a “green Poo” which was unusual and unnatural and served as a starting point of constant doubt of her own body and how it functions, thoughts that her parent’s quickly dismissed and ignored. The last layer of this mania is Cotard’s body; it starts showing several symptoms of an unknown undiagnosed illness that seems to be deadly; its symptoms are physical and apparent on his skin and in his joints and in his nerves and his blood in a medically random and incomprehensible fashion. This chaotic manifestation of these lives is aided by fast and unusual style of editing that denies the viewer the chance to breath, constantly challenging any efforts to grasp the story and its characters. This style introduces the surreal and forces you to succumb to its sheer force of the non-logical and the insane; it’s simply saying “I won’t let you understand, as these characters are lost, as these lives are denied of meaning, you will be too”.

The family is destroyed, the mother and the daughter leave, and our poor Cotard is left alone. His body continues to fail in a very gruesome manner. Then we get deeper into a dissection of society; now the medicine trying to understand this disintegration of his body but fails miserably, both because of the dysfunctional medical system (one of apathetic approach that makes an endless loop of referrals that robes time and efforts mercilessly and towards nothing!, in a surreal criticism of modern America’s healthcare system) and the enigma of his body being a projection of the enigma of his soul.

Throughout Cotard’s moral and physical battles, he fails to seize many opportunities of true passion and love. There is a secretary that finds him physically appealing; She admires his talent in theater and finds his tormented soul soothing to hers. She is wild and alive, frequently flirting with him, seducing him into surrendering his meaningless devotion to his miserably failing marriage. He is lonely, she knows that, she understands that, and she also suffers from that and wants to save herself and him, but the idiot is weak, lacks the power for adventure, and powerless to break free from his loneliness. The years pass by in a weird chronology that shines more light on the psychotic state that drowned him, and he continues to have a passive-aggressive vain dance with his admirer around their lust for passion and true happiness, but not actually reaching any. He continuously tries to connect with his abandoning family, failing every time, and each time he would lose more of himself by their constant ignorance and rejection, which later throughout the movie appeared to have changed him into a masochistic pathologic small man, one who got addicted to the worthless and the contemptible.

Despite all his defeats, he is truly a brilliant artist, and a play of his achieves major success quickly to be rewarded with the highest grant that can be given to a theater director. He now has a tool to construct something meaningful and true in his life; he has a mean to maybe gain back some control of his life. He starts building this vague play; he keeps repeating that he wants to portray something real, defining this “real” mainly by the idea of death, his firm belief of its inevitability, but at the same time, his refusal to concede to it as he wants to live and explore the spectrum of his moral paradoxes. This play doesn’t have a plot nor any well-defined characters, no unified structure, no script, and no clear dramatic objectives. He instructs his actors (or rather preaches them) about its intended qualities, but in reality -as had he intimately shared with another admiring actress- he doesn’t really know what he is doing. He starts the project in a spontaneous fashion, instructing actors to build the real, and with the lack of context, he unknowingly starts to shed parts of himself into the play. Step by step, throughout a bizarre and terrifyingly brutal and swift passage of time, he builds his own life in a colossal warehouse that replicates the same chaotic outside world (New York is used as an example, which is a perfect smaller scale of the American society in particular and the whole world in general) and the one of his own life. He chooses actors to play his friends, his co-workers, his lover, his estranged wife (the character being a piece of paper constantly instructing him to clean her house, with random phrases of “congratulations” and empty longings, that served as bread crumbs luring him into an addiction to masochism), and finally, an actor to play his own self.

These versions of the people and the environment of his life keep emerging, getting larger and larger with increasing complexity with more actors, more construction in the set, and more stories. He failed to control his own life, so he went into a quest of replicating his own world but now from the seat of the director in an attempt to assume the “god” of his life, he is searching for control, for meaning, for the lost opportunities of his youth, and the missed love from his existence. He wants to right his mistakes and re-live the failed opportunities. His theater piece -as his own devastation- became endless. He created one duplicated layer that quickly was duplicated again and again and again into further warehouses inside warehouses; actors instructing actors; himself instructing himself to choose another self, and such insanity. But now something fascinating started to appear before his own eyes, his subjects started to break free from the sorrowful storylines of his life. The opportunities of love that he had lost in his past started to be seized by the actors playing them, the stability of his replicated families had stronger chances, even an old failed suicide attempt was successful in a dramatic and hauntingly beautiful fashion (as how one's death is always wished to be). Not only that, but the actors assuming the roles of his old lost loved ones started to have real interactions with the real people of his real life; substituting him; bypassing him, they were not only defying his orders but also furthering his moral decline. The manifesto of god was being undermined, again and again, striking him many times back again to the loss of control and to the void that he so desperately was trying to escape.

This play takes decades in the making, clearly without any comprehensible finishing end in sight. Our director kept making different titles for it as he gets older -and perhaps wiser-. As these smaller versions of life continued to evolve, they started to disintegrate by falling into war and destruction, something that can be described as an embedded doom in the humanity’s genome, their tormented souls everlastingly jumping between the need for control and the need to destroy it. Kaufman is saying that after all, these enchanting dynamics are what keeps us alive, they might be lures of desire, qualities that are old and beasty, but they are the flams of our souls; ones of which are both created and destroyed by fire. This war continues to annihilate everyone and everything, leaving the director utterly alone. His last surrender was to a voice -a manifestation of his superego- explaining to him the deeper meanings of his life, informing him that all humans are alone, he is all the characters of his life, all the characters of his plays, “everyone is everyone, everything is everything”. He continues to wander in the apocalypse until he sits with one survivor actress, one whom played the mother of a dream of his, apologizing to her for the lost opportunity of an old promised picnic with her and her grandchildren he made in an old childhood dream, admitting love for her, which serves as an epiphany for what he believed to be the most complete and the purest of titles for his play, but as he started to name it, he was quickly abducted by death.

Synecdoche New York is a very complex and enchanting piece of art, one that is very hard to dissect. It must be viewed from two distinct perspectives. One that might try to look closely to understand the story, but not to be taken too seriously because it's incomprehensible and surreal, but rather to feel (and maybe understand) how the movie deals with identity, sexuality, and desires; the story of the origin of god and the instincts behind that; the glimpse at American capitalism and its resulting destruction of the passionate and the genuine. Also, the dissection of fatherhood, motherhood, and family; the criticism of toxic masculinity that Kaufman so very much adores dealing with in all his pictures. The other perspective, and the most approachable and important, is to see the bigger picture that integrates all these small aspects and its dazzling complexities; To see the laughable mockery of our grasp on life, our infinite quests for meaning in the wrong paths that imprison us into sorrow and loneliness that furthers and furthers, while we miss the most beautiful and what is truly worthy of life; sex, passion, courage, art, love, and the intimate human touch.

Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York is an unforgettable experience that almost redefines everything, one that is very personal to me, and will forever stay in my memory as well as my heart.

[mouazkhaled]

“He could resist. His reasons aren't serious. Perhaps he makes a choice. -What choice? He chooses the memory of her. That's why he turns. He doesn't make the lover's choice, but the poet's.”

Part of an unforgettable exchange in the movie “Portrait of a lady on fire” about Orpheus’s enchanting tragedy.

Many has been said about the reasons that made Orpheus peak back at Eurydice knowing that he would lose her forever doing so. His distraught from the idea of the gods tricking him in this impossible journey, and the tormenting idea of not having her behind him and his impatience to see her. All are deep human tragedies.

Yet the movie introduced another deep melancholic layer to the story. The poet who chooses the memory of love rather than the reality of it as his fountain of lust, passion, and music. For some reason, the most beautiful of art comes so often from yearning rather than owning ... a very old and very deep quality imbedded everlastingly into our souls.

[mouazkhaled]

Technically impressive, rich with breathtaking visuals, but premature and faulted in its core. 1917 had a huge marketing campaign that mostly focused on its one-shot direction style, which is a rare achievement and only one of two movies to do it for an entire cinematic picture runtime. However, the result was challenging to my patience, and arguably underwhelming.

The error is in the formula; all the aspects of 1917 are suited for the one-shot style; these aspects can be put in two simplified categories; the time flow and the camera perspective. One-shot dictates two hours of events matching the runtime; of course, there are tricks to be played (and sometimes were played very well in 1917) to extend the time limitations, but despite all, the nature of this formula forces some shallowness in character development and therefore, their actions and reactions, which would naturally harm the quality of acting, resulting in a major loss of viewer’s interest in almost everything, including the praised direction decision. Secondly, one-shot means a constant challenge in choosing camera angles. Some of the choices made here, especially the close-ups, made me question the whole idea of this style; was I supposed to feel like I am in the movie or with the characters as a god’s eye or a third hidden character, or just to live it as a virtual reality. Personally, this doubt prevented me from achieving any of three possible goals and had resulted in some annoyance and in two particular scenes, nausea!

Granted, 1917 was interestingly learning from its own mistakes and did feel like Sam Mendes was redeeming himself after a quirky first act. As the movie progressed into the second the third act, the close-ups relatively faded away, and the awe-inspiring cinematography (nothing short is expected from the great genius that is Roger Deakins) continued to soar throughout the rest of the movie, which surprisingly could have achieved the same effect regardless of the one-shot style. The result of these new decisions was a thrilling, emotional, well-acted, and heavily riveting third act, and this is where this picture had triumphed.

All in all, 1917 is an impressive technical achievement; ambitious, bold, powered by great intentions and deserves to be praised and studied thoroughly. However, this style undeniably forces several weaknesses, inconsistencies, and illogicalities affecting acting, screenwriting, and camera angles, which sometimes question the intended value of this daring style. These flaws are relatively redeemed by mesmerizing cinematography and an exceptional third act which absolutely has some of this decade’s best cinematic shots. Definitely worth the watch on the biggest screen possible.

[mouazkhaled]

"We lay our big meaties across the chopping block ahead of someone else's... It's always for someone else... Both of us know, if we're gonna kick, there sure as hell better be a point to it So maybe we feel there was a point to all of this. Alpha to omega Whether it's on the battlefield or the beach or somewhere out there today C'mon Layin' your ass on the line for someone else, tearin' it to shreds for 'em Oh, my, that is living"

Unforgettable quote from The Walking Dead

[mouazkhaled]

A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick is yet another marvelous gem in this unforgettable year in cinematic achievements. However, this statement wouldn’t be fair for this particular movie, as its without a doubt one of the best in the 20 years of the 21st century. Malick is an extremely unique and visionary director, a deduction that can be quickly made even after watching only one of his pictures. I have seen only two, this and Tree of Life. Tree of life is also hailed by critics as one of the greatest achievements in this century, but that was not apparent to me when I watched it on my small laptop screen in 2012; So it must be mentioned that Malick’s style is meditative and poetic, something that can feel like an extremely challenging yoga class, its slow, can be “boring”, yet to some who adore it, can be their favorite training style. However, there are two specific differences that must be made regarding this particular picture. First, the story is more concise and focused. Few tangible characters in a limited life span with a particular story and very well specified impacts and messages; this (along with flawless performances and mesmerizing cinematography) made this 3 hours picture much more captivating, especially in comparison with the longest this year, the Irishman (yep, it was too long to me). Secondly, A Hidden Life is an important human story that by itself is a much-needed testament about the unsung heroes of history.

A Hidden life is an epic, its very hard to justly praise its alluring cinematography, genius editing, intimate storytelling, heavy monologues, and its impeccable performances. Much can be said and studied but will focus here (especially for personal attachments) to the story itself.

The film follows the life of an Austrian farmer that defiantly chose not to join the Nazi army during WWII. It follows the simple yet precious life that he had with his loving wife, his beautiful 3 little girls, their wheat fields, their barns and farms and cattle in the heaven-like Austrian countryside, their small warm house, and the cherished memories of their lives. Malick undeniably was intensely passionate about drawing the life that was. Yes, there were the hardships of the farmer's life, but (specifically the first act) didn’t leave anything up its sleeves in portraying the warmness and the wholesomeness of this life. The clear cut contrast between the heavenly old days and horrors of what comes after is a dangerous tool if handled by immatures, as it can easily be drawn in a tedious and pretentious sea of melodrama. But in the hands of an experienced poet such as Terrence Malick, here, this contrast is nothing short of enchanting. This creates an extreme in the emotional, which highlights the endless sacrifices and their holiness; sacrifices that the farmer had to make so he can hold onto his humanity and identity.

The second act excruciatingly draws the evading Nazi Germany into this farmer’s peaceful little village. Malick tells the stories of the physical and ideological occupation of Nazism. Soldiers wander within the village taking volunteers and ensuring their constant presence, and with that, the notions of national socialism start to make their ways into the minds of everyone surrounding the farmer. Malick goes the extra mile with his emotional realism in affirming that people didn’t show embracement of Nazi ideology, but were chained with the fear of tyranny, which enslaved them and tore out their sanities. This act throws the farmer and his family in a sea of discrimination and evil that creates utter solitude stretching his adamant decision not to join the army to the extreme. He finally yields and intends to join as a medical asset to avoid participation in the killing, but one thing stands in his path, which is the imposed pledge of allegiance to Hitler, which he considers as the ultimate abandonment of what makes him free.

The third act, the most terrifying and torturing, acts as the utter darkness of life after the farmer’s separation from his family. It follows the physical and physiological torment of imprisonment of the farmer as he was considered a “traitor” and the social isolation that surrounded the wife along with this act’s more apparent hardships of the village life. This is the longest act in the film and has particular parts that absolutely broke me personally and brought me back to memories that actually should not be forgotten. As I was protesting against the Syrian regime, I was (as millions of Syrians) imprisoned. It was less than a month, during which some but not much affected me physically. However, two particular memories came back to me while watching the third act, one of the “ceremony of greeting” to the prison (which is basically to be severely hit and humiliated by tens of soldiers along your long slow path to your cell), especially when the movie used what can be described as virtual reality scene where the viewer was made to be the one who is receiving the punches and the kicks of the ruthless prison torturer. The second memory elevated this movie for me to a new level, which is of an imprisoned defected soldier who was bleeding after his long torture session, and his screams. In Syria, thousands of soldiers had defected the regime’s army after it started shooting at demonstrators killing tens of thousands of them. These soldiers and their stories are not as documented or known as the other tragedies in my country, because the regime made it a quest to silently eliminate these cracks in its steely structure. The few known stories resemble the zenith of human bravery and goodness that can ever be imagined, and they are hidden from us. Thus, I finally understood the title of the movie, A Hidden life, not of the farmer’s from his surroundings, but from the recorded history; from us.

A certain element that threw me off for a while was the messiah complex leitmotif. The movie focused for a while on the pure Christian spirituality of the farmer and his wife, but also highlighted the inevitable doubt that can wrap the heart and shake the beliefs even of the most devoted theists in such an environment. In my opinion that was an essential part of this emotional story, but what I am hesitant in embracing is that the farmer was portrayed by others (and maybe by Malick himself) as a parallel to Jesus and the biblical story, which is undoubtedly the richest and the most emotional, and it might be justified in such a theme, but there is a certain addiction to it that I didn’t appreciate. However, this remains to be a small and easily negligible part of this magical picture.

A Hidden Life tells a story with an obvious end, but the little details are what matter because they enlighten the weight of the sacrifice on one hand, and attache it to the very meaning of humanity in the other. Malick is saying as we all should that this hidden life simply shouldn’t be hidden, it should be known and celebrated and followed, it’s a debt that must be repaid to those who endured it, and a promise that we need to keep to ourselves as a whole species. A hidden life is a true story, in particular with this farmer, and generally with millions of others throughout the human history of battles against tyranny, thus, Malick’s picture is nothing short of one of the most important pieces of art, that must be sought and experienced by everyone.

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. -George Eliot

[mouazkhaled]

I read once that to write a character in a screenplay you should prepare as much as possible about this character’s aspects starting from their childhood, their school and what it has been like, their parents and how they were raised, their neighborhood and how was life in it, their friends and old toys, their first kiss and love story, their ambitions and passions and how they came to be. These can easily fill 20 pages of details that are not represented directly into the screenplay but they shape the truthfulness of the character, the details that make them alive and dynamic.

In Marriage Story, i cant imagine nothing short of a book worth of details that humanized every little moment in this picture. Its truly dazzling the amount of work that went through this mesmerizing screenplay. Each word, statement, monologue, dialogue, decision, facial feature, had been studied extremely thoroughly resulting into a novel of dynamics. It feels very palpable and relatable up to a point of making it into a very personal level of even people who didn’t go through a separation with this level of complexity.

This articulate writing style had translated into elevating the performances into the level of true, its not acting, its simply true on every level. And to solidify this excellence, Noah Baumbach (director and writer) has passionately constructed each scene with the utmost of care; each frame is perfectly designed in angles, colors, dimensions, and production design to amplify the emotional rollercoasters of the story. And lastly, the editing style specifically the choice of when to break a scene and when to prolong it and make more focused, are just in the level of master class.

Marriage story is many things, its an important human story, a screenplay to remember and dissect and study to all those who are interested in any form of writing, and simply a movie that would easily grab your attention from its very first minute into the level of you welcoming its soul punching arc, because it is very real, something that is in somewhat of a shortage in our lives nowadays.

[mouazkhaled]

Genius script, dazzling performances, stellar direction, playing into a true American masterpiece

Knives out is written and directed by Ryan Johnson, a brilliant ingenious who had directed the clever Sci-Fi “Looper” and two of the most important pieces of TV ever made, “Ozymandias” and “Fly” of Breaking Bad. In his latest project he clearly poured his heart and soul into a brilliant script that drew a dream ensemble of cast elevating this picture into a level of an absolute masterpiece.

Its build as an Agatha Christi “who done it” theme around the demise of an old wealthy American novelist in his house on the night of his 85th birthday party that all his family had attended. His family members are kind of parasites that collectively make a highly dysfunctional family. The suicide/murder mystery plays beautifully into a familiar story arc, but is quickly challenged by a new take rarely seen in this genre by throwing pieces of the truth (or is it?) into the plot with surprisingly very easy to follow style of editing, and this elevates the tension and engagement of the viewer to a new enriching level.

Much can be said about the clever screenplay, wicked humor, beautiful production design, and the stellar performances, but what really drew me was the story within the story, and the metaphors delivered through this stylistic mystery thriller flick. Slowly you would see that each member of this family resemble something about the modern twisted capitalism of America that makes this ugly gray zone between what this country was and what it truly is. The true American is old and genuine who dies quickly in the very first minute of the picture. He is a writer, an artist, and a true gentleman who held grudges on his family after exposing their true vampire nature and thusly had an affection to the only true human in his house, his nurse, an immigrant from a country (laughably always missed by each family member). The family mostly, yet in a heavily condescending manner, show appreciation and admiration towards the nurse and consider her to be part of the family, much like the attitude of the serial killer white extremist family of Jordan Peel’s “Get Out”. The nurse herself is simple and kind who, as lots of foreigners in this country, are often alienated and reduced by aggression on one hand, and arrogant altruism on the other. Of course, the family is very quick in showing their true colors towards her when the circumstances are shifted, and also very quick in a shameless “apology” to her when things shift back, something that feels very familiar nowadays.

Each son, daughter, grandkid, son/daughter in law has a unique element of the twisted and manipulated "American dream" symphony. The movie sarcastically reduces them into cheating bourgeoises, hypocrite preachers, pathetic beggars, evil thieves, and last but not least, into a mind washed anti-immigrant Nazi teenager. They pretend to be self-made individuals, but in an obvious sarcastic way, they are mere opportunists salvaging from the roots of a true passionate artist whose talent resembles the true American idea. The script doesn’t shy away from these definitions, playing a clever game of dark-comedy by shinning the contrast between what America has been, what America is now, and what America should very much come again to be.

What makes Knives out a masterpiece is that it has them all, the idea, the script, the performance, the production design, the editing. It is a very funny movie that shifts from the light humor to the pitch dark, a clever and maximally entertaining spectrum. It engulfs its qualities into an engaging old-fashioned thriller mystery, and finally weaves a socio-political commentary that works as a unique American story affected by the latest radical changes in its recent decades. It’s an optimistic picture that sends a true necessary message of respect to the old, of criticism to the “modern”, and to what true America should strive again to be. Without a doubt one the best movies of this century.

[mouazkhaled]

Meh!

“And everything becomes chaos … I am an agent of chaos … and you know the thing about chaos? … It's fair” This is what defines the Joker, and these words were said by The Dark Knight version of Nolan, not the current one by Todd Philips. First, I am extremely disappointed with Joker movie, and actually raged out of the theater, furious because of the amount of silliness that was forced onto me. And for that there are many reasons. It would be hard to state all of them as nearly every scene had a problem or two, so this is a statement about the most obvious of them.

The Joker is a concept more than a character, he is the fury of the world against the world itself, shifted into insanity that its only purpose is to obliterate the purpose itself, and such complicated level of sociopathy is what destroys the thin line between crying and laughing or tragedy and comedy. So, the idea of making a specific origin story of a human character upon its descendance to madness is a dangerous and maybe an undoable task, so I was as weary as I was excited to see the movie, and to my disappointment, Todd Philips and the writers have failed immensely and the main reason is quite obvious, there is no antagonist. The Joker’s making is the making of absolute evil, and to tell a story through its eyes is making this evil as the protagonist, and in this specific example, the antagonist would “society” and “system”. The antagonist in Joker is bland and superficial, society is evil without depth; people who hit the Joker in the streets hit him without meaning or a cause; the “rich guys” are awful just because they are awful! There is no background what so ever to their actions, and that had robbed the script from the intensity that it needs, as its in the basic structure of any screenplay is to have conflicts that drive the story, and conflicts need well-studied characters, in plural, while in this example we have only one, therefor the movie’s conflicts are pretentious and disappointingly dull.

Moreover, the script is superficial and lazy, each word is inhuman and bizarre, it wants to rub the story in your face instead of telling it through natural spontaneity that can engage the viewer. For example, the last scenes focus on the Joker yelling out all his reasons, and he mentions the words “society” and “system” which is lazier beyond comprehension. This lazy choice of words is spread throughout every scene. Robert DeNiro’s jokes are not funny and he doesn’t feel like a successful comedian as the movie has portrayed; Thomas Wayne is bluntly condescending to the poor people of Gotham in a non-human manner; the social worker is unbelievably bland; the joker’s mother is just frozen in insanity without an actual real quality; the Joker’s co-workers are stupid and shallow; the people of Gotham carry the Joker as a prophet while rioting and burning the streets without stating any believable dissected motive. The reason behind this amount of silliness, I believe, is because Todd Phillips and the writers believed that nothing can go wrong with Joaquin Phenix, I imagine that they actually said “rest assured, we have the greatest actor in the world, no one can do a better Joker”, and sadly, maybe their version is going to be the most commercially successful, and all that would be discussed, is how the Joker dances and how the Joker laughs and “oh my god, did you see when he shot him at the end, that was AWESOME!”. So, the movie is a demonstration of Joaquin’s physic; the camera follows him laughing insanely and dancing without context for more than fifty percent of it, making Joker feel like a fashion show rather than an actual motion picture.

These are all poor qualities that had me disappointed, but what got me angry was two specific things, one is a statement made by Martin Scorsese (who was a producer of some parts of Joker) a few days ago, he stated that Marvel movies are not Cinema and they have swallowed the big actors into “well made” unhuman pictures that don’t portray what real cinema does. Sorry, Mr. Scorsese, but Thanos in the Avengers, as a protagonist in Infinity War and an antagonist in Endgame, is far more complex and believable than this superficial version of the Joker that you have participated in making, actually the weakest of Marvel pictures have more depth in the characterization of the “evil guys” than this tasteless version of society in your Joker!

The other reason for my rage, and the main one and the most dangerous one, to say the least, is the commercialization of the current public frustrations. Indeed, we live in a cold dark world, our generation is finally expressing fury against their dictators, their corrupt governments, racism, and the evil inequalities that had rotted our systems. This is expressed in the Arab Spring, in Hong Kong, France, Spain, Venezuela, Russia, Greek, and recently with feminism and environmentalism, and all these examples and many more are real and far more important and crucial than the cheap one that is sold in Joker. What is done in this movie, and if I may add the recent famous show “La Casa De Papel” is just a meaningless, ridiculous, and rather silly portrayal of public anger. Its added because now it’s seen by Fillip’s eyes as “fashion” that surely will popularize his picture in a poor, sick, and condescending attempt to create relatability with his work.

Joker is heavy in its production design, cinematography, score, and the main performance of Joaquin, and in some parts mesmerizing in an unforgettable manner, but the script is tasteless and silly in its lowest points, and despicable and insulting in its highest, making this highly anticipated picture for me a failure, and I would rather stick to Nolan’s version, the actual version of the Joker that should dazzle you to the point of terribly asking yourself if you were the one who is evil.

[mouazkhaled]

                  Per Aspera ad Astra

Fatherhood, solitude, longitude for salvation, the dream of eternity, humanity’s basic savage bestiality, and our eternal struggle to understand and be understood, all these themes are brilliantly explored by James Gray, Brad Pitt, and Tommy Lee Jones’s last project, Ad Astra. The abstract is a world advanced and capable of exploring and populating our closest neighbors, our sole moon and our red neighbor, Mars, with efforts to explore what is beyond the borders of our solar system. Thirty years prior to the protagonist’s timeline, Tommy Lee Jones who played Brad Pitt’s father, lead “the Lima project”, the most ambitious and dangerous of human expeditions, a trip towards Neptune, the farthest humanity had ever reached, in a desperate yet an optimistic mission to search, find, and connect with the inevitable extraterrestrial intelligence. The crew of Lima project and their mission have been lost in the void of space and time and all that is left of it is a monumental shadow that resembles humanity’s hardships to reach the stars. What is also left from the mission is Brad Pitt’s convoluted and deformed relationship of a father figure so enlarged and so vague, that it covered his own qualities with loneliness, darkness, and anger. These qualities had shaped him to be a great pioneer, pragmatic, effortless, yet cursed him with a concrete soul that distanced him from any meaningful or sustained human connection. With time, the failed project had turned to be a destructive source of “anti-matter” that raged and started to threat all life. The movie starts with the necessary mission of Brad Pitt to explore his father’s past and find his lost base to undo this existentially catastrophic mistake.

Ad Astra is made as a visual poem told by masterful minimalistic cinematography and poignant performances of its few actors. The movie is full of allegories that are explored through two major parts. The first, acts as a rough journey to reach the father, an odyssey that starts with a mockery of humanity’s occupation of the moon, which should have been a land that unifies all, only to turn into a small pathetic reproduction of capitalism, greed, and our same old eternal conflicts to control and acquire more resources. The moon has different and distant bases that are separated by “no man” lands that had drown by piracy and war defined as “a wild west out there”.

The journey continues to another void between existences, the path between Moon and Mars, with further wilderness and lonesomeness, portrayed by a Mayday signal sent from a Norwegian ship that the crew of Pitt’s ship responds to. This side journey ends with catastrophe when the captain dies by wild apes that killed and devoured the original Norwegian crew after breaking free from their cages inside the ship. The apes were angry and terrifying, attacking with no mercy or boundaries, something that Pitt’s character identified with as a “rage that I can understand”. We reach Mars, stepping further away from beauty and life. Mars’s base is as barren as its planet. Lifeless, red, dusty, devoid of soul, and utterly depressing. The base is controlled by a ruthless military leadership that used the protagonist to communicate with his father without informing him of the true purpose nor the real response. Piece by piece, our protagonist touches the reasons for his hatred of humanity’s lies and deceit. What follows is the shock that Pitt had sensed all his life, his father’s legacy as the greatest pioneer in human history is but of a murderer who slew the other crew members of the Lima project after they were defeated by their fright of solitude and intended to go back to earth, something that the father disdains and halts with absolute brutality. And thus ends the first long part of this odyssey.

The second part starts with a cruel action of the protagonist that affirms the fact that he is as ruthless and “mission-focused” as his father was. He attempts to control the ship heading towards Neptune and “accidentally” kills all the other crew members. He acknowledges his acts and takes responsibility for them in a failed attempt to distinguish himself from his father. His long and dreary final journey towards his father’s base starts. He achieves the absolute solitude away from any human touch, something he sought for decades. But the experience wasn’t as he had craved, the abyss was utterly dark, entirely emotionless which drove him to the brink of insanity. The eternal silence of space had forced him to see his true self, lonely and selfish; He repeated these words, “ I am alone, I am alone, I am alone” “I am so selfish, I am so selfish, I am a selfish person” again and again, things he truly were but never really understood. Solitude turned to be dangerous rather than intimate, insane and torturous rather than safe. Through this eternal void, he was going through an unimaginable agony, slowly and unknowingly stepping further towards salvation. He reaches his father’s base, enters the old forgotten dungeon of the mad man, sees the bodies that his father murdered decades ago as shrines of his achievements, and breathes the toxic air that Pitt’s legacy was.

Then starts my favorite part of the movie, “Roy?” shouts the father, Brad Pitt looks up to find him standing on a ladder above him, a perspective that resembles the father shape that he worshiped for so long. The father quickly and without an ounce of shame affirms his true self, “I never cared about you or your mother’s or any of your small ideas”. The confrontation shifts from intimidation towards pity, beautifully captured by the ascendance of the protagonist to stand face to face against his dad, and powerfully depicted by the actors’ full engagement of these tender state of minds. The son pressures his father towards abandoning the idea and the ship, the father escapes into a dark corner away from his son’s touch but eventually surrenders. Pity turns into intimacy, the son helps the father to wear the suit, and reassures him that he didn’t fail his mission in finding alien intelligence, because he had discovered the ultimate truth, “we are all that we got”. Still, the father lived in insanity for too long and had lost all his attachments to life. He craved intimacy through the void and forgot what was in front of him, so this father-son short intimacy breaks into conflict and leads to the final stage of this brilliant confrontation, which is to let go. The son manages to break from his father’s ideal, and the father finally escapes into the death that he danced aside for so long. The journey ends with the rebirth of the protagonist as he reaches home to seek the love that he had lost in the past.

Ad Astra digs deep into really big ideas, and my main criticism of the movie is that its too big for its own medium. I think what really stood short in here is the timing, as an extra hour would have transcended this piece into an unforgettable masterpiece, but imprisonment by the need of commercial success is a dream killer as it does to most projects of art. There are two different stories in Ad Astra, both would have needed more details and an even slower pace. A series would have been the ultimate triumph that sadly we did not get.

Yet, Ad Astra is magical and deep, portrayed through tender emotions and shot with breathtaking cinematography. Its heavily affected by Kubrick’s space odyssey , Ridley Scott’s blade runner, and Frances Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, by drawing several examples from the general dreary atmosphere of the journey towards meaning; the connection with artificial intelligence as “Hal” in the odyssey; the steely psychological analysis of the replicas in the Blade Runner; and the long trip towards the insane in Apocalypse Now. But the movie manages to take its own beautiful course of exploration of fatherhood and attachments to the past and through that dissects our instinct in craving connection and love, to reach the final conclusion of this picture, which is that the answers we seek, and the meaning we need, are mere inches from us, right here, within the intimate touch of our fellow beings, who are our true stars and our so beloved Astra.

[mouazkhaled]

Snape’s ultimate tragedy

Heroic, shattering, and utterly melancholic was Professor Snape’s ultimate sacrifice in the brilliant magical world of J.K. Rowling. But what is truly fascinating about this part of the story is that Snape’s sacrifice was not a choice, it was the only way he knew how to fight, making it an inevitable fate that was dictated by a lifetime of misery.

Snape loved Lily all his life only on his part. In his own head, there was always a desperation towards any form of acceptance. He spent his years attached to an invisible person; a pathological attachment that gradually shaped a persona that dwells on the emptiness; one that draws motivation and power solely from it. Snape’s rejected love became an addiction to the rejection itself. He failed any true open relationship because he defined himself by the pain of loneliness. He was raised and strengthened by his isolation from the world, thus its only natural for him to succeed as an alley in the dark. It was not a choice for him to be a foe of the dark lord while being in disguise, it was actually the only way he ever knew how to fight. Its both true and scary that there would be no imaginary scenario for him to openly emerge as a hero while he is still alive. The revelation of his truth as the most valuable alley was hand in hand with his death, because this marks both the completion of his purpose, the end of his imprisonment, and the conclusion of the sorrow that is his existence.

“Lily?! After all this time” ... “Always”. The answer to Snape’s cryptic soul lays in this unforgettable exchange with Dumbeldore. This “always” is not only a deep strong love, it was a lifelong devotion to the impossible; the sort of devotion that slowly transformed into a dark and addictive escapism into the intimacy of solitude. Snape lived alone, dreamt alone, cried alone, fought alone, and eventually died alone, marking an end to his cursed lifetime of chasing the oblivion that sadly made all what he is.