Contemporary Movies

I just wanted to mention a few contemporary movies I have seen recently, since some readers have suggested I only write about movies from the classic era, which is somewhat true because I usually post about films I like, for one reason or another. The three movies I write about today look as though D.W. Griffith never lived, by which I mean not only are they derivative but they are murky and make no narrative sense, even on their own terms or Antonioni's:  "all movies should have a beginning a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order."

James Gray's Ad Astra is a poor man's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Brad Pitt goes off to Neptune to find his renegade father and bring him home but his father, for rather unclear reasons, ends up drifting off into space after years of an unsuccessful attempt to find life beyond earth.  This is a one man show, as is all too common in contemporary films, with a wooden performance by Pitt and a lot of space-traveling hardware.

Hirokazu Koreeda's Shoplifters is something of a Japanese version of South Korean director Bon Joon Ho's Parasite, this time about a family of lower class criminals who seem to be only marginally related and kidnap a very young girl to help them with their shoplifting, which they apparently need to do in order to have enough to eat. Eventually they get caught and go their separate ways.  The film takes mostly in a tiny cramped room where the "family" lives, with one of the children reading and sleeping in a closet, and in various shops where they refine their shoplifting skills. Most of the time it is difficult to be clear about what is happening; though there are subtitles this may be at least partly due to the language barrier.

Andrew Patterson's Vast of Night takes place in New Mexico in the fifties and is a too subtle version of films of that period, such as Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953), though Patterson's film doesn't actually show any aliens, just suggests them by sound.  Much of the film takes place in a small radio station where the unusual sounds are heard by DJ Jake Horowitz who starts investigating with his younger colleague Sierra McCormick and a tape recorder.  In spite of its virtuoso tracking shots this would have made a pretty good radio show, rather like Wyllis Cooper's Quiet, Please, which ran from 1947-49, with most of its episodes available on the internet.