The Mitchells vs. the Machines; Okja; Looper

The Mitchells vs. the Machines: A decent movie that should not have been compared, in terms of its sometimes adventurous animation style, to "Into the Spiderverse", which is one of the best animated movies in a decade. Some things hold up well next to it, but this is not really one of them. 

What struck me about this was the kind of glib treatment of the genocide of seemingly-sentient robots and the aftermath of that. The two malfunctioning robots who helped execute their species without understanding what death actually is are told they're 'part of the family now', in a less corporate sense than PAL is used to hearing that. But then where are they when the Mitchells are dropping off the main character at college? Why are they still relegatable servants? (And why does it look quite so autumnal in California--are they far north, or what? Earlier shots of the school didn't look it. I almost assumed she'd switched schools to be closer to her family.)

Okja: Bong Joon Ho was evidently cursed to forever record how fucking weird rich people are. This movie is good, but depressing and at points viscerally upsetting, with scenes of abuse and rape of a highly intelligent genetically engineered animal (and then of an active slaughterhouse taking them out en masse). The ending is ambivalent. You're going to think a bit about the different ways cultures and farming systems interact with meat, and a bit about situating your own personal consumption. 

To just say that, though, kind of diminishes the keen eye for characters and social observation at a larger scale in play, here. Very rarely have I seen characters established so crisply and interestingly in such a tight space. So many of them are fantastically defined. It's rare that a movie makes me feel like I could write fic in this world. It's at times kind of like if Wes Anderson wasn't twee and off-putting? This movie also was truly funny at points. 

I can't speak to the director's eye for Korea's particular bullshit, but where even good projects like "Miraculous Ladybug" can feel texturally off in their handling of the US, this is absolutely spot on about the particular social mores of capital in the US. I can only assume their handling of Korea's differently-shaped weirdness, which felt on-point to me as a relatively low-information viewer, is as good. The way this movie handled translation and movement between language was thoughtful, playful, multivalent--the way the movie knew that no one who works in a slaughterhouse on the east coast speaks English, and slipped into untranslated but situationally-comprehensible Spanish--so on point. At times the layered focus on character and culture, the earnest desire to speak about real shit and the range of moods employed felt kind of Dickensian. 

Looper: A solidly put-together dystopian SF piece that consistently implies Kansas City ain't shit (true, but you shouldn't saaaaay it). Very film-school Freud in its treatment of gender, Oedipal desire and cycles of violence (what the fuck is this random young, hot Chinese woman doing with Bruce Willis?), but I can't really blame it for that when it's better at the somewhat simple tasks it sets itself than a lot of films are at establishing and realising their own projects. (It reminds me that it's good to ask, 'what's the core thing this story is doing? Is it doing that well?') The film isn't terribly worried about time travel causality, but that is what it is.

Some interesting tension with the highly-telekinetic, disturbed and violent Baby Hitler figure. You are never allowed to be sure of what the 'sensible' decision is, here.