Three Contemporary Films

I am occasionally asked why I don't write about more contemporary films and my simple response is twofold:  one:  contemporary films are widely reviewed already (each film I will mention here has hundreds of reviews, which one can easily find on IMDB or MRQE) and two:  most contemporary films look as though D.W. Griffith never lived; I prefer to write about movies that (mostly) I like.

Boon Jon-Hoo's Parasite, Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse and Quentin Taratino's Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are different in superficial ways but actually quite similar in construction: an original attempt to deal with class issues that, in all three cases, ends with nihilistic violence.  This a pattern from all three directors, though in the case of Eggers it is only his second film.  Boon Jon-Hoo's film takes place in the present day, the other two attempt a detailed re-creation of the past, the 1960's in Tarantino's film and the vague 19th century in Eggers case.  It's difficult to determine whether this approach is meretricious or actually a personal vision of the director, the writer and the cinematographer.  Eggers is trying to be deliberately anachronistic with his black-and-white and aspect ratio of 1.33:1, while Tarantino is obviously more interested in re-creating the looks and sounds of the late 60's than he is in anything else, his "characters" being little more than symbolically two-dimensional.

I do give credit to Eggers for influencing my returning to read more Melville --who is obviously a considerable influence on The Lighthouse -- as well as Poe, whose unfinished story was the germ of Eggers idea for the film, as Poe wrote "It never would have done to let Ormdoff accompany me.  I never should have made any way with my book as long as he was within reach of me, with his intolerable gossip -- not to mention that everlasting meerschaum."