Mare of Easttown

 HBO's police procedural Mare of Easttown illustrates both what prime-time cable does best and, also, how shows of this sort fall short.  The series embodies what is good and bad about current scripted television.  From its opening shots, a montage of decaying urban landscapes, the program establishes a kind of disheveled authenticity.  Set in southeastern Pennsylvania, in the suburbs around Philadelphia, Mare shows us a hard-bitten, but cohesively clannish, lower middle class milieu.  The houses are cluttered and unkempt.  Bits of stray wilderness lie at the fringes of the neighborhoods and there are desolate half-abandoned commercial districts interspersed in these suburbs.  Everyone seems chronically underemployed and the teenage girls are all young mothers or prostituting themselves for cash.  There's a lot of drug addiction and, by default, it seems, all the characters swill down gallomns of Rolling Rock beer.  Some of the streets are nearly vertical and, it seems, that, perhaps, there was some kind of hard rock mining in these forlorn-looking boroughs.  (There's some confusion in the film as to where the action is really supposed to be set -- Easttown, in reality, isn't a mining city like Allentown or Bethlehem where some of the scenes seem to have been shot; and it's certainly not like the vertical Appalachian landscape in the poor, decaying suburbs of Pittsburgh, where other sequences seem to take place.)  In effect, the filmmakers have created an imaginary landscape that embodies the American rust-belt with its ragged forests, polluted rivers, and decaying, mostly derelict industries.  The characters, particularly the titular Mare, a middle-aged female detective, all seem exhausted and at the end of their tether.  Domestic life is shown as crowded, squalid, and contentious.  The character are all related in one way or another and everyone supposedly knows everyone else's business.  Kate Winslett is effective and compelling as the show's heroine and, like the landscape where she lives, she is bitter and angry.  People waste their lives in this world -- entropy is too powerful and everything is falling apart.  One has the sense that the community has somehow irredeemably lost its center.  We don't often see this sort of environment in police procedurals -- these picture are generally set in big city urban centers or the ghetto or sometimes in the picturesque country.  Easttown is the weird, disorderly combination of rural and urban that, in fact, correlates to much of the country, particularly in the East Coast or places like Ohio.  The acting is hyper-realistic and every scene is staged for maximum gritty reality.  The performers impeccably imitate the sort of non-glamorous and inglorious folk that, of course, they are not and do their job without condescending to the poor bastards that they are playing.  Everything in the show looks just right.  

But, by the end of the first episode, it's also eminently clear that there's nothing new here in terms of plot and narrative.  In fact, the show trots out every shopworn cliche in the police procedural genre.  Mare, although obsessed with solving the mystery of disappearing teenage girls, is falling apart herself.  (How many shows of this kind feature a protagonist who is collapsing into some sort of profound dysfunction -- either alcoholism or promiscuity or just corrosive, paralyzing cynicism?)  When Mare goes to a bar within the show's first hour, we know that she will let herself be picked-up by stranger and have joyless sex with him. (In this case, Mare ends up in bed with self-absorbed writer, also a depressed and depressing fellow who has written one novel "popular with the ladies" but otherwise been afflicted with a monumental and protracted case of writer's block.)  Mare is given an earnest, wide-eyed and naive partner whom she must school in her weary brand of disenchantment -- there is the perennial clash between the idealism of youth and the discouraged disenchantment of middle age.   Mare's son has committed suicide and she is locked in a custody battle with her son's girlfriend, a junkie who is the mother of her grandchild.  Mare has a divorced husband, who looks like a schoolteacher which is exactly what he is.  He is earnest, well-meaning, and ineffectual.  There is a tough African-American chief of police who, of course, takes Mare off the case that is consuming her life.  And, of course, Mare responds by bucking her boss' authority and continuing to investigate the mystery notwithstanding official orders.  Mare's daughter is a cheerful, pretty lipstick-lesbian who has a cheerful, pretty and life-affirming girlfriend.  The plot is as exhausted as the characters -- it's a standard yarn about someone, possibly a serial killer, who is making teenage girls in the neighborhood vanish.  When a Catholic priest appears, we're pretty sure that he's a sexual predator -- which turns out to be, more or less, true.  There are two approaches to the detective narrative:  in one, an investigator working on a case that seems narrowly defined and, even, readily solved, stumbles onto a vast, sinister conspiracy -- Raymond Chandler's novels invoke this convention as do many movies, notably Chinatown and The Big Sleep.  In this kind of plot, everything starts out as disconnected and episodic, but gradually a pattern emerges that connects the events that we see.  The other approach to this kind of material is the way old TV detective shows were structured -- a new adventure every episode with no attempt made to connect the different plots.  (This how Dragnet or the CSI franchise police procedurals work.)  In Mare, the story starts with the heroine assigned the investigation of a murder in which a teenage girl, an unwed mother with a malevolent ex-boyfriend (and his even more malevolent current girlfriend) is found naked and dead in a ravine full of big rocks.  Another teenage girl vanished in mysterious circumstances a year earlier and the plot is full of  hints suggesting that the murder and the disappearance are somehow related.  Everyone is under a pall of suspicion, including Mare's ex-husband, the dead girl's ex, and the local priest (who lives with Mare's uncle, also a priest).  Mystery novels and movies always involve a lot of cheating and misdirection on the part of the auteur and we discover at the end of the fourth episode that the murder and the vanished girl (presumed dead) are not related -- despite all the clues planted to this effect.  This feels a bit like fraud perpetrated on the audience.  In fact, the movie, after adhering closely to the suspects in its large interrelated and clannish cast, imports a mad, bad guy from out of nowhere.  Mare and her partner get into a lethal shootout with this bad guy from nowhere and it appears that the mystery of the vanishing girls is solved, albeit in an unsatisfying way.  (There are various holes in the plot -- for instance, everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing. But, if this is case, how come no one figures out that the teenage girls are hooking on-line for pocket money?)  Notwithstanding the "false end" concluding episode five, two episodes remain (and I haven't yet seen them) and, so, it appears to me that these shows will be used to ultimately solve the mystery involving the girl murdered in the rip-rapped river bed and, also, settle the soap opera aspects of the story -- that is, will Mare preserve her custody rights to her grandchild? How will things turn out with the lesbian love affair?  What about the novelist?  Will Mare's relationship with him continue?  These seem to me to be the strands in the first season of this show that need to be resolved.

There's nothing innovative or, even, particularly interesting in th show's conventional plot rife with banal and predictable staples in this genre.  However, the program is worth following for Kate Winslett's performance as Mare -- she's not afraid to make the character downright unpleasant and, even, unethical, although her dogged tenaciousness makes us admire the heroine even against our better instincts.  Mare is a variant on a uniquely American kind of failure -- she is famous in Easttown for a shot she made in a championship basketball game.  But this sort of fame is more than a little pathetic and fleeting.  (Her character is similar to the protagonist in Irwin Shaw's memorable short story "The Eighty Yard Run" published in Esquire in 1941, once a staple of college literature classes, but, now, alas most forgotten -- you should look it on-line and read it.) The minor characters are all pitch-perfect denizens of the dreary landscape in which they are confined.  And Jean Smart, who plays Mare's tough but loving (of course) mother is marvelous.  Normally, this actress is given thankless rolls as neglected middle-aged women afflicted with a strong vein of hysteria.  Here Smart gets to shine as a resolute survivor, a feisty old woman who won't back down and, yet, who counsels others to keep the peace -- she's far and away the best thing in the show and its worth watching just on account of her performance.      

The Grandmaster

 Apparently, 78% of the critics who reviewed Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster praised the film.  This is an example of why review-aggregating sites like Rotten Tomatoes are useless.  The Grandmaster is an execrable film, bad in some astonishing ways.  And I say this as someone who admires Wong Kar Wai and think that several of his earlier films -- particularly Chung King Express and Happy Together -- are very fine movies.  The Grandmaster is so bad that it seems to be some kind of perverse parody of a martial arts film.  It is so bad that it casts an unflattering retrospective light on the director's earlier movies.  How could someone so gifted make something this idiotic?  Were his earlier films also a bit silly?

In effect, the movie is a prequel to another well-known picture and a sort of origin film.  However, I won't name that picture yet and will withold the identity of the superhero whose origin the movie shows us.  The Grandmaster begins with the assertion that in Mainland Chinese martial arts schools are divided between the south and the north, the border being the Yangtze River.  A handsome middle-aged fellow with the improbable name of Ip Man practices southern Kung Fu from his hometown of Fushan.  Some interlopers from the North with allegedly different styles of fighting -- it looks all the same to an uninitiate (lots of skidding with the feet and karate chops) -- challenge Ip Man.  In true super-hero fashion, he beats everyone up, sometimes hacking down dozens of assailants at a time.  The greatest fighter in the north is someone called Gong Yutien.  Ip Man has some kind of aphorism-spouting battle with this guy -- the two men exchange fortune cookie slogans.  Apparently, the verbal combat results in a draw.  (Who knows? the subject has something to do with cookies itself and the fight concludes with a giant close-up of the proverbial cookie crumbling.)  Gong Yutien's comely daughter, Gong Er ("Gonger"?) comes south to Fushan and challenges Ip Man to a fight.  They exchange kicks and karate chops for a few minutes.  Here the film faces a challenge -- for plot purposes, Ip Man has to lose the bout, although he is incapable of being beaten.  Since Kung Fu requires exactitude in placing one's kicks and chops, and since previous fights have featured dozens of shots of unfortunate attackers hurled through windows, smashing down doors and crashing through furniture, the condition placed on this combat is that neither of the duelists will damage anything on the film-set.  (All of this fighting takes place in a dimly lit, gilded space without any precise geometry -- it's just a black void with some intense highlights.  This is supposed to be the Golden Pavilion, a brothel frequented by belligerent Kung Fu Masters who are always brawling here; the place is a little like the assassin's hotel in John Wick where various murderers are constantly slaughtering one another.)  For some reason, Ip Man and Gong Er fight on a stairway surrounding a central atrium.  About half of the combat is aerial and, when Ip Man reaches out to save Gong Er from a bad fall, he slips over the edge of the balustrade and the force of his impact pulls a screw out of a floor-board.  And, so, he is deemed to be the loser of the duel.  The fight is staged like a witless version of a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dance, featuring lots of cheek to cheek waltzing between flurries of amplified kicks and karate chops.  Of course, Ip Man and Gong Er fall in love, notwithstanding the fact that they are trying to maim one another.  (And notwithstanding that Ip Man is married and, apparently, has several children.)  Gong Er departs for the North.  The Japanese invade the South and eight years of privation ensues.  (We expect Ip Man to join the resistance to fight the Japanese, but, apparently, his bellicose ambitions don't extend to fighting for a cause or, indeed, anything useful.)  After the War, the film now shifts into romantic mode and, of course, Ip Man's wife has to be eliminated (his kids apparently died of starvation).  Ip Man goes to Hong Kong to teach his special brand of Kung Fu -- it's call Chun Wang. The wife remains in Fushan is now out of the movie.  Ip Man's venture in Hong Kong  involves a number of fights in which the hero has to best rival teachers -- no problem and easily accomplished.  Meanwhile, Gong Er's father has been killed and the villainous Ma San now rules the North -- he was a Japanese collaborator.  There's a spectacular scene on a glacier (it's always snowing in the North) as Gong Er carries her father's ashes -- where?  We don't know -- she's just marching across the ice with color-coded army of thugs behind her.  Gong Er has acquired a factotum who runs around with a literal monkey on his back a bit like a parrot on a pirate's shoulder.  Later, Gong Er fights Ma San at a train station where the world's longest train is rushing by the platform, perilously close to the combatants.  Gong Er uses her father's trademark move called "Old Monkey Hangs up the Badge" and manages to shove Ma San into the speeding train.  This kills him, although not before he can deliver a sort of soliloquy as he lies dying in the snow.  Gong Er goes to Hong Kong where she practices medicine.  There Ip Man looks her up and they sort of renew their romance.  By this point, the movie has become deliriously romantic and, even, uses  the ravishing "Deborah's theme" from Ennio Morricone's Once Upon a Time in America to underscore the doomed love affair.  Gong Er has become an opium addict due to self-medicating her pain resulting from the lethal fight with Ma San.  (This is the only fight resulting in a death -- the rest of the mayhem is all weirdly bloodless.)  She dies without passing on to the world her father's version of Kung Fu, called the "64 Hands."  She has made a vow to the Buddha that if divine providence grants her the right to kill Ma San, she will never marry, have children, or teach martial arts.  Ip Man continues teaching Kung Fu in Hong Kong.  He has a very young student who shows promise.  This student turns out to be Bruce Lee, the film's big reveal at its end.  The viewer has to rub his eyes in astonishment.  This huge epic spanning twenty five years or more is really just a vehicle to introduce to the world a minor-league movie star most famous for something called Fists of Fury.  (And mocked as a poseur in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). It's as if a film surveyed the Civil Rights movement for thirty years and ended with the declaration that this saga made possible the career of Kevin Hart or Redd Fox (Hart is too famous -- Redd Fox is better.)  The reader might think that I have labored to make the film seem ridiculous -- in fact, the actual picture is far sillier than this summary suggests.  

Wong Kar Wei is incapable of making a film that is visually uninteresting although he almost succeeds with the tedious fighting sequences and gloomy interiors in The Grandmaster.  The picture is stylized -- it's aesthetic seems to be derived from Chinese lacquer-work.  Except for the scenes on the CGI glacier, everything appears to happen indoors in a jet black void.  The ebony enamel coats everything with a sleek shining surface in which faces or objects are highlighted and glow as if suffused with shining amber.  Since the interior spaces are ill-defined to the point of being completely illegible, the fighting makes no sense -- there's no topography for the characters to traverse.  In fact, the combat scenes are dull to the point that I fell asleep during several of the protracted fights -- you can't tell what's happening and the action is fragmented into tiny, meaningless snippets of blow and counter-blow.  I assume someone carefully choreographed the battles but this doesn't translate into anything exciting because the footage is so fragmented and cubist.  The dialogue is completely idiotic -- for instance, when we see Gong Er as a child watching her father fight in another snowy studio landscape, she says in a voice-over:  "The music most familiar to me was the sound of bones breaking" -- this is her explanation of why she never became an opera star notwithstanding having a beautiful voice.  There's nothing like acting in the film-- we just get enormous Sergio Leone-style close-ups of completely immobile and impassive faces.  The shots are beautiful but inexpressive.  The movie was apparently cut by 15 minutes by Harvey Weinstein's group that distributed the picture in the United States.  The narrative elides most interesting or tragic events -- for instance, the destruction of Ip Man's family during the War -- and titles are used to bridge gaps where some sort of meaningful narrative should be.   At the end of the film, we are supposed to lament that Gong Er never passed on her father's trademark 64 Hands-style of fighting (with its signature reverse whammy move called "Old Monkey Hangs up the Badge).  Try as I might I couldn't work up any emotional response to that cultural loss -- and, in any event, there are innumerable other fighting styles with similarly exotic names that have survived.  Indeed, at the end of the film, in a jocular aside that is completely inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the film, Ip Man looks right at the audience and smirks:  "What's your style?" 

The Disciple

 It is sometimes averred that children are influenced to avenge the frustrations and failures suffered by their parents.  This influence is subtle and unintended, but effective nonetheless.  My father, for instance, wanted to become a writer.  However, he had to support a wife and a growing family and, so, he went to work in the Defense Industry and, indeed, remained in that employment until his mid-fifties.  Then, he revived his interests in creative writing, submitted a few stories for publication, but didn't succeed in that endeavor.  As if in recompense for my father's thwarted efforts to become a professional writer, I have spent my life writing, thousands of pages by this time, and millions of words.  Because of my father's inability to get his writing published, I haven't really tried to offer my work to the general public -- I just assume that I will never succeed in this endeavor.  Nonetheless, in some obscure way, I feel like I am redressing a wrong suffered by my father.  A similar dynamic is on view in Chaitanya Tamhane's The  Disciple, an austere masterpiece hidden in the darker recesses of Netflix.  In The Disciple, a man spends half his life pursing the ignis fatuus of success in the performance of Indian (Hindustani) classical music.  In this pursuit, the man, Shared Narulkar, aims to succeed where his father failed and, indeed, blighted his own life and that of his family with his obsession.  A conventional film, either made in Holly- or Bollywood, would show us the hero making good where his father failed.  The Disciple is more disheartening -- instead of achieving success, Narulkar simply replicates his father's failure in his own life.  His striving, it seems, is for naught.  The dynamic of fathers and sons is particularly pointed in the insular world of Indian classical music because the art is taught by discipleship -- aspirants to performance of this kind of music study with masters or gurus to whom they are indentured in all respects.  The disciple, for instance, is required to massage his master's legs and back -- we see Narulkar lovingly performing this service in the film.  But, not all father's are worthy of respect, and the film poses the question of whether Narulkar's guru (the young man calls him Guruji, apparently an honorific) is actually concerned about his pupil's well-being and success in his vocation or is merely exploiting him.  

The Disciple begins with a long shot of an Indian classical music ensemble performing.  A man in his late middle age is singing while younger people seated at this side play the tabla drums, a harmonium, and create droning tones on large instruments that look like emaciated, out-size string basses.  The ensemble is performing to a crowd of about 40 people seated uncomfortably on metal folding chairs in what looks like an assembly room at provincial high school.  Fans are running overhead and the room seems hot.  The camera slowly dollies toward the ensemble focusing not on Guruji who is singing, but on Shared who is seated at his side playing one of the big stringed instruments and gazing with undisguised love at his Master.  The film is constructed with classic symmetry -- the first hour is set in 2006 when Shared is 24; the second half of the film takes place 14 years later with Shared approaching forty.  There is a short coda to the film showing Shared married with a little girl -- he now seems to be about 45.  In the first hour, Shared performs with Guruji and is shown practicing with the Master.  He enters a competition and we expect that he will win a prize -- but, in fact, he doesn't even finish among the top three contestants. The film is punctuated with sequences shot in dreamy slow-motion in which Shared drives his motorcycle through the deserted and grim-looking streets of Mumbai, listening on earbuds to a lecture delivered years earlier by a renowned female singer named Maai.  Maai was a purist and never authorized any recordings of her performance -- because no recordings exist, there is nothing to criticize and the community specializing in North Indian Alawar music reveres her like the Hindu goddess of music, Shawasthi.  Maai's words are mystical:  she says that even "ten-thousand lifetimes would  be insufficient to learn how to successfully perform Raag as the musical form is called.  (I think this is the Indian word for what we call Ragas in the West.)  The performer of this music sings for her Guru and God.  All performances necessarily fall short of perfection and, therefore, fail -- "but one must learn to fail with sincerity."   The performer who seeks to do justice to his or her art must expect to tread "a path of hunger and loneliness."  Ironically, Maai's lecture was delivered to music enthusiasts in Belgium; she was so austere in perfecting her art that she never even allowed herself to be photographed.  Shared works transferring hundreds of hours of classical Raag on reel to reel tape to CDs.  With a friend, he sells these CDs at classical music festivals.  He and his partner are such purists that they are not willing to listen to the concerts where they sell merch -- shows that have catchy titles like Diwali Dawn.  "It would make your ears bleed" to hear this denatured Raag music, Shared's friend says.  The first hour of the film is interspersed with flashbacks that show Shared with his father -- we see the older man practicing this music with his son keeping him indoors when other children play outside.  Later, Shared travels halfway across Indian to a concert performed at dawn on a glorious-looking mountain plateau -- apparently, Raag's are composed for various parts of the day and, with his father, he is seeing a master perform a "morning Raag".  (The little boy has memorized the Raag forms that associated with the various times of the day.)  Shared lives with his aunt who gently suggests that he should consider getting a real job.  Guruji's health is declining -- we see  him with a doctor; Shared, of course, is expected to pay for the old man's medications and treatment.  The old man performs at a house party in a wealthy man's music room saying that he doesn't understand the introduction made by the hostess with respect to his performance -- "I understood only a little of the English," he says, adding with false modesty, "I will try to give a decent performance of a few songs."  Shared's sex life consists of masturbating to computer porn.  There is a remarkable transition:  we see the beautiful outdoor stage where Shared with his father hear the morning concert, the high ranges of the Himalaya resplendent in the distance.  But, then, the film cuts to Shared vomiting.  He has stage-fright.  At a concert, he performs in tribute to his guru and people politely applaud his efforts.

The film's second hour begins 14 years later.  (None of this signaled in any way -- we have to figure out the time-line from the dialogue; indeed, the film is so austere in its  technique that it doesn't put the flashbacks in any sort of pictorial quotation marks although, nonetheless, we pretty quickly understand that certain sequences are set in the past.)  Shared is at photo-shoot to promote himself for performances at festivals.  He has an agent who is pretty skeptical about his career.  In this part of the film, Shared is harassed by his mother (whom we never see -- he talks to her by phone) to marry and have children.  His mother doesn't want him to "waste his life like his father."  Guruji, who seemed on his last legs fourteen years earlier, is still alive, complaining of unremitting pain and still being supported, at least in part, by Shared, who continues to  buy his medicine and massage his legs.  Shared is now employed as a music teacher and has become the guru to about 14 students.  When one of them asks his master's permission to perform with a classical-pop fusion band, Shared is cruelly dismissive -- the boy can perform in that manner if he likes  but he will be expelled from the class.  In modern India this doesn't go over very well.  The boy's mother stalks off, muttering that she will report Shared to the school principal.  Shared observes a girl singer navigating auditions for a show like American Idol -- the young woman ultimately becomes famous, performing Raag to pop-rock accompaniment complete with stage-fog and slinky half-naked dancers.  Guruji tries to perform at a house-party in the wealthy man's music room, but is too sick to complete the show.  After the concert, Shared and a friend meet a fat critic who is famous for having disrespected the Mumbai classical music community.  The critic is scathing and there may be an element of North-South Indian bias implicit in the discussion -- the critic seems to come from the North where this form of music was perfected and dislikes the performance style in the South, Mumbai where the film is mostly set.  The critic says that Maai was a pious fraud -- she was a racist who denounced the Muslim influence on her music as "poisoning it" and spitefully ruined her own daughter's career.  Despite her mystical declarations, she was a wicked woman.  When the critic insults Guruji, Shared throws a glass of beer at him.  In what seems to be a dream, Shared hears Maai saying that "technique can be taught but not the truth."  And "the truth is sometimes ugly."  Shared performs for Guruji who tells him that  he has not succeeded and doubts whether he even understands the music.  Later, Shared donates the tapes on which Maai is speaking to a library -- but the librarians have almost no interest in the donation and don't know anything about the once-famous singer.  Guruji seems to die while complaining about the fact that his patrons scarcely pay him anything -- he gets some "dry snacks" and taxi-fare.  (Just when we think Guruji is dead, he revives -- he's one of those noxious old people who lives on indefinitely as a burden to all around him.)  At a concert, Shared becomes disgusted with his performance and storms off-stage.  There's a short epilogue, as it were, in which Shared is now married and has a child.  He's marketing his recordings of vintage Raag on a USB thumb-drive -- 300 performances per drive.  In the last scene, Shared sits on a train.  A young man comes onto the train and sings, accompanying himself with a stringed instrument .  Like the rest of the travelers, Shared seems embarrassed by the street musician and gazes stonily off into the distance.

The film is exquisitely filmed in very long sequence shots.  Each scene consists of only one or, perhaps, two shots.  For instance, when Shared takes his guru to the doctor, there is a shot of long duration showing the old man, almost like a cadaver, on an examination table.  A second shot shows the guru and his disciple conferring with the doctor at his desk.  More than half the movie consists of concert or performance scenes, usually shot with very slow imperceptible dollying motions in or out of the shot.  The scenes with the motorcycle moving along the midnight streets of Mumbai are visually striking.  Some of the sequence shots are deliberately inexpressive -- for instance, in the scene where Shared walks off-stage in despair, the concert is filmed from a long shot and we can't see the expression on the hero's face nor can we gauge how the audience is reacting to his performance (we see them from the back).   The only close-ups in the movie appear in scenes taken off TV shows.   The masturbation shots show the hero pleasuring himself in front of a screen on which no images appear -- we hear a woman moaning but can't see her.  (The director seems to not want to provide us with any prurient imagery).  In its ascetic style the film resembles movies by Pedro Costas or Straub and Huillet's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach with its long performance sequences.  Some of the long takes involving performances also seem to channel Tsai Ming Liang and his movies like Goodbye Dragon Inn.  I can't judge the quality of the music in the film, but, it is riveting to see these performances.  (The music is something like Jazz in which the performer improvises using microtones and complex rhythms, apparently constructing the work from variations around a single note.  The form is very exacting and failure is apparently expected.)  Looming in the background is Satjayit Ray''s The Music Room, a film about a old Indian aristocrat who impoverishes himself by putting on lavish performances of Indian classical music in a specially designed chamber in his house.  (Ravi Shankar devised the score for that film.)  As The Disciple proceeds, we see that the audiences become smaller and smaller.  In the last concert scene, when Shared storms off-stage, the show takes place in what looks like a middle school cafeteria -- there are many empty seats in the audience.  The film raises more questions than it answers.  There are various musical communities that are so elitist and purist that they end up withering away -- no one can pass the litmus test for purity:  I think a similar film could be made about the ever-shrinking number of devotees to art-song and Lieder or the closed world of Delta Blues purists.  There is much about this film that is mysterious, but I think the picture is very, very good.     

(On the evidence of The Disciple, Chaitanya Tamhane may well become one of the world's great directors.  His first feature, Court, earned high praise.  The Disciple, the director's second film, was shot by the Polish cameraman, Michel Sobocinski and was produced by the great Mexican film maker Alfonso Cuaron.  Netflix has been criticized for, essentially, dropping the film without any advance publicity.  However, The Disciple won a number of awards at film festivals and, so, there are plenty of reviews that will direct to you to the film.)  

Things Heard and Seen

 Things Heard and Seen (Netflix 2021) is an okay ghost movie:  it delivers a few scary moments in its first hour and has an inventive, if predictable, script.   The movie demonstrates that the cable TV production companies have, by and large, run out of material.   The demand for new movies is insatiable and, so, companies like Netflix are forced to recycle variations on older better movies, faintly disguised by superficial elements that might seem new and different to someone who hasn't seen many motion pictures.  These surface elements create the impression that we are consuming something fresh and innovative, but, in fact, the narrative situations are generic and predictable.  The situation is something akin to the waning days of Hollywood Westerns when horse operas were set in Australia or the pampas of Argentina -- the fundamental plot is the same, but the scenery looks a little different and you have kangaroos instead of coyotes.but otherwise not much changes.  Hollywood, during its studio days, was a factory for turning-out hundreds of variations on well-established themes and marketing each of them as new and surprising.  There's nothing wrong with this paradigm if it is managed skillfully and Things Heard and Seen has good acting, a wicked undercurrent of satire, and excellent photography.  But the film is really just a mash-up of Kubrick's The Shining and Ari Auster's Inheritance, two much better movies that render the entire enterprise a little bit gratuitous.  Nonetheless, Things Heard and Seen is sufficiently entertaining, retains your attention, and has some amusing ideas and, so, it's worth watching if there's nothing better on TV.  Furthermore, my recognition that the picture is derivative is nothing that would surprise it's creators -- in fact, some scenes replicate sequences in the pictures that are obvious influences on the film.  The film makers (Robert Pulcineli and Shari Springer Berman) are, in effect, winking at you the whole time.

It's impossible to write about this sort of movie without revealing plot points that are supposed to be a surprise.  Therefore, proceed with caution.

The premise of the film is derived from The Shining.  A young married couple with a four-year old daughter move to a haunted house in upstate New York.  The husband and wife are troubled and their picture-perfect marriage is not what it seems.  Pretty soon, the ghosts in the house pick sides.  The husband is manipulated by an evil, domineering ghost who murdered his family -- this is the plot of The Shining.  The wife gets cozy with a friendly female ghost who was murdered by the evil husband.  As in the film Inheritance, the film demonstrates that ancestral evil is genetic in the sense that it gets passed down through the generations.  Marital discord resulting in murder has happened several times in the haunted  house -- during the late 19th century, during the 1960's apparently, and, at the time of the film's present established as 1980.  (It's inexplicable to me why the film is set in 1980 -- usually when a movie picks a time period before cell-phones and computers, the film maker is trying to avoid plot problems created by our era in which all information is instantly available.  In Things Heard and Seen, the characters have to research things in libraries and local historical societies and can't call for help when they are menaced.  But I didn't really detect much about 1980 that is integral to the film and had to keep reminding myself that the events in the movie are occurring 40 years ago.)

The film's first hour is its best -- after that, it devolves into predictable murder and madness.  And the film has one twist that is genuinely surprising, at least, until the viewer works out the dynamics of the plot.  The young husband, who is handsome and appealing, turns out to be a monstrous homicidal narcissist -- this is something we don't quite grasp during the film's first forty minutes or so when we are willing to give the roguishly attractive hero the benefit of the doubt.  But by the end of the movie he has become a slavering maniac along the lines of Jack Torrance in The Shining.  It turns out that the husband, George Claire (played by James Norton with a Kennedy'esque wave of hair over his brows) has faked a doctoral dissertation on the theme of the influence of Emmanuel Swedenborg on the American painter, George Innes.  He finds a college in a remote place in upstate New York where the 18th century mystic, Swedenborg, has not been entirely forgotten and, in fact, where his disciples still  hold seances  in his name.  Hired to teach art at this college, Claire begins seducing his students and has an affair with one of the (much younger) local girls.  Meanwhile, his wife, Catherine, an art restorer, is having problems with the ghosts in the house and suffers from isolation caring for the couple's nondescript (generic) four-year old.  She makes friends with an adjunct professor of weaving at the college and learns the horrific history of the farmhouse where she is living -- several murders spanning four or five generations.  The ghosts manifest in all sorts of ways and, at first, we think they're persecuting Catherine, although later it becomes clear that the lady ghost (or ghosts) in the house is, in fact, a protective spirit, a sort of guardian angel as Swedenborg would characterize the relationship.,  The ghost reveals George's lies.  Every time, he says something untrue, the spirit goes poltergeist and pitch crockery  against the wall acting as a kind of spectral lie detector.  When George takes his students on field trip to the Metropolitan Museum to view Hudson Valley School paintings, he runs into his former doctoral advisor who smells a rat.  The advisor tells George's boss, the kindly dean, Floyd DeBeers (F. Murray Abraham) that his new art professor is a fraud.  So George murders Floyd before he can fire him.  He also causes a serious accident, running the Professor of Weaving (who has become his wife's friend) off the road and almost killing her.  George is now taking counsel with the evil ghosts and they tell him to take an axe and... well, you can figure out the rest.  

The film has some eccentric, if interesting, trappings.  There are discussions of Swedenborg's theories about the after-life and some appealing imagery relating to the Hudson Valley School.  However, some of this material isn't really accurate and I would suspect that Swedenborg is spinning in his grave at the characterizations of this thought in the film.  George Innes is not really a Hudson Valley school painting -- he comes a generation later and is a sort of transcendentalist artist, very much an "odd man out" for most of his life.  Thomas Cole's three paintings "The Journey of Life" are not in the Metropolitan Museum but in the old New-York Museum.  On various occasions, the film's photography imitates either Thomas Cole or Innes with sometimes remarkable results.  The ending is unsatisfying if picturesque -- the villain simply sails his boat into a Cole painting and vanishes in an apocalypse of light and mist.  Amanda Seyfried plays Catherine, the wife, who has an eating disorder -- she's bulimic and the wicked George poisons her by putting drugs in her energy shake.  (Were there energy protein shakes in 1980? I don't think so.)  With her protruding eyes and scrawny physique, Seyfried looks almost identical to Sissy Spacek in The Shining.  (The director's make no effort to conceal the influence of Kubrick's film -- two tracking shots early in the movie channel the famous opening of The Shining in which Jack Torrance drives up the mountain pass to the Overlook Hotel.  As in The Shining, the child is the first to sense the presence of the ghosts in the haunted house and the little girl is about the same age as Danny in Kubrick's movie.)  There is some satire about academic standards -- the heroine's friend is an adjunct professor of "weaving".  Again, I'm not sure that colleges in 1980 were as free and liberal as they were to become later and the film's "me-too" style feminism is an artifact of a much later era.  Anxious to check all buttons, the film also decries homophobia as it existed forty years ago -- like the talented Mr. Ripley, the sociopathic George has stolen the identity of a gay better man, his uncle I think, who perished (possibly murdered by George) in a boating accident.  F. Murray Abraham came to fame playing an old man -- he was Salieri in Amadeus (1984)-- and he's still playing old men, here the Dean at Saginaw college.  Oddly, the actor gets younger with each year.  Here his character is a youthful 65 -- in fact, the actor is 81.  

  

The Lost Patrol

 John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934) is a grim, disturbing little picture that seems caught between two genres.  The film's title is literally accurate:  a group of 12 British soldiers reconnoitering a vast tract of sand dunes gets lost and the men are killed by unseen Arab snipers described in an opening title as "ghosts."  The premise is worked-out with brutal logic down to the last man.  The narrative is uncompromising and, indeed, single-minded and there's no fat on these bones -- the picture clocks in at 74 minutes.  Ford, and his scenarists, seem conflicted about the point of these proceedings:  is this supposed to be chummy adventure movie, set in an exotic locate along the lines of the later Gunga Din or are we watching a dead-end anti-war movie on the order of Journey's End? Elements of both types of picture uneasily coexist in The Lost Patrol:  there's plenty a gruff horseplay and the soundtrack features jaunty military marches incongruent with the desolate vision that the film presents of sunstruck men, harassed by an implacable and unseen enemy, slowly going mad with fear.  Victor McLaglen as the Sergeant and commanding officer is surprisingly restrained.  There are some comical enlisted men, lifers in the military, who playfully josh with one another but end up with their eyes gouged out and the lips peeled from their faces.  Boris Karloff is on hand to supply horror elements to the film:  he plays a religious fanatic who claims that the sea of sand is really the Garden of Eden (the film is set in 1917 in Mesopotamia) and who simpers in his trademark fashion:  his preternaturally deep and resonant voice is a weird match with the insane whimpering and pleading words that he speaks.  There's a poet who speaks in blank verse (quite effectively in fact) and a naive young man from the upper class who has joined the army because he admires the works of Kipling  -- needless to say, he doesn't survive for long.

The plot is non-existent -- the movie simply sets up a situation and lets it play out inexorably.  The men's horses are dying of thirst and the Sergeant doesn't know where they are in the wasteland of wind-sculpted sand-dunes.  After a man is shot off his horse and buried in the white, shifting sands, a horse collapses from the heat and has to be shot.  (We see the soldier tenderly rubbing water from his canteen on the dying animal's nose.)  In extremis, the patrol finds an oasis with water and a crumbling mosque.  There they are besieged by the unseen Arabs who snipe at them and drive off their horses.  The desperation of the situation is evidenced by a classic "reversal of fortune" scene:  one of the men, climbs a palm tree with great effort, surveys the landscape and notes that he see something -- in the next second, a sniper shoots him out of the tree ("right through the head," a wondering soldier says.)  The two comic enlisted men are sent to find the river.  They return with their faces cut off tied to horses -- and, in fact, get shot down by friendly fire.  A plane circles the besieged mosque and, then, lands.  But when the pilot steps out of his biplane, the hidden snipers gun him down.  Sarge rips the machine gun off the plane and, later, uses it to massacre the seven or eight Arabs who are besieging them -- they make the mistake of showing themselves only be slaughtered according to the film's implacable logic.  By this time, Karloff has gone mad and carrying a big wooden cross marches across the dunes like some sort crusader -- he's killed right away.  Sarge is the last survivor.  After he machine-guns the Arabs, the camera pans to the side and we see a column of cavalry coming to the rescue, riding over the mountainous dunes.  Sarge looks at the graveyard where he has buried his men under sabers that catch the sun and gleam in the shadow of the mosque.  He has a haunted look.  But the film ends with a merry military march tune playing on the soundtrack:  is this supposed to ironic? Or are we take the musical cue seriously as a sort of  happy ending?

The acting is first-rate and Karloff, of course, is particularly effective as the religious maniac.  There is a poetic speech by a soldier who recalls the native maidens of Java -- of course, in a movie like this, when someone delivers himself of a poetic soliloquy a bullet to the head is not long in arriving to dispatch the poor fellow.  Curiously, the picture resembles some of Walter Hill's more desolate films, particularly the doomed patrol of National Guardsmen in Southern Comfort or the men besieged in the abandoned steel mill by a vicious, mostly invisible, mob of criminals in Trespass.  Hill's movies have more sociology in them, however, and more psychology and, of course, they're longer.  This movie is a distilled blast of deadly heat and rage.  As they used to say in capsule movie reviews in Parents magazine, a periodical that I pored-over for its ratings, the movie is "excellent of its kind."  It is, of course, what it is.  

The Place without Limits (El Lugar sin Limites)

 In the opening shot of Arturo Ripstein's startling The Place without Limits, a massive bright red truck inches down a rough country road.  As the truck crawls through a tiny Mexican village, El Oliva, a man in bed with an attractive young woman is aroused.  He frets that Pancho is coming in the truck to harm him.  The man says something about a red dress that is still ripped from the last time the brutish fellow visited El Oliva.  The young woman calls the man "Daddy".  Like the force of irresistable destiny, the red truck creeps down the vacant streets of the hamlet, moving between derelict-looking plaster and brick walls. 

El Olivo has seen better days.  The town is the personal property of its cacique, Don Alejo.  The old man has bought up the town and, apparently, intends to resell it to the highest bidder.  The only hold-out in the village is the brothel where the fearful man and the young woman live, together with a half-dozen fat and homely whores.  There's a new inmate in the brothel, Cloti, who looks gaunt and fearful -- "she's a a sad whore," the man gripping the red dress says, "and that's bad luck."  Don Alejo has cut off the power to the town in the hope that the brothel owner, the young woman in bed with Daddy -- she's called "Jap" -- will sell the place.  The truck parks outside of the town's single gas station and the handsome, macho, Pancho eats breakfast with his brother-in-law, Octavo ("Tavo").  Tavo tells Pancho that he should buy a house for Emito, Pancho's wife -- Tavo doesn't like the fact that his home, where Emito is living, is overrun by Pancho's kids.  Meanwhile, Manuela, the man with the red dress, is traipsing around town looking for red thread to mend the flamboyant evening gown.  Manuela is homosexual and a transvestite -- everyone refers to the man as "her" or "she"; at least, the pronouns are right.  Manuela has had some previous encounter with Pancho in which the dress was ripped and there's an implication that s/he may have seduced the tough guy and earned a beating thereby.  Jap, who is indeed Manuela's daughter, says that her father is always vanishing for a few days and, then, straggling back to the brothel all beat up.  

Ripstein's film is exceedingly verbose .  The complicated and sordid situation requires vast amounts of explanation and, even, that isn't enough to motivate the peculiar events in the plot -- about half of the film is comprised of a flashback (confusing at first because it's not signaled in any way) that is, devised to provide additional context for the story.  Ripstein is adapting a novel by the great Chilean novelist, Jose Donoso, who also collaborated on the script and the film is designed as a series of inexplicable provocations that are gradually made plausible by the backstory.  The picture is certainly ambitious and the acting is first-rate and, gradually, indeed, the viewer comes to accept as possible some of the more outre elements of the plot.  Clearly, Fassbinder's more outrageous films are an influence on Ripstein and, indeed, the lurid color scheme ornamenting the hellish melodrama seems derived from the German director (and the American films of Douglas Sirk).  Other elements in the picture seem exported from Tennessee Williams and, in fact, the picture, about half of which is confined to the brothel, has a distinct theatrical aspect -- the lumbering red truck is a particularly effective, if obvious, symbol, a literary device, as it were, of the kind that we might find in one of Williams' plays. (The truck represents the overwhelming and destructive force of sexual passion.)   The picture has too much expository dialogue but it builds to an alarming climax that has some of the impact of a classical tragedy.  The theatrical elements of the story are signaled at the outset by a lengthy quote from Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus proclaiming that anywhere occupied by a damned person is Hell, the "place without limits."

From the flashback, we learn that Jap, Jr. is the daughter of Jap, Sr..  The luscious Jap senior operated the brothel in the good old days when the village was alive with people.  On the day of Don Alejo's election to congress, the pols throw a big party for the cacique.  Recruited for the shindig are several Hollywood-quality whores and wildly romantic Manuela who specializes in transvestite Flamenco dancing.  During the party, everyone gets drunk and Jap Sr. is challenged to seduce the flamingly gay Manuela -- Don Alejo wants to watch them have intercourse.  Jap Sr., who is so sexy that she would make a stone sweat, agrees to the wager on the condition that if she succeeds Don Alejo will deed over to her the whorehouse that she is operating for him (she is also Don Alejo's mistress). Of course, Jap Sr. proves irresistable and Don Alejo loses the bet and has to give his girlfriend title to the whorehouse.  (The bet occurs only after Manuela has inflamed all of the partygoers by a Flamenco number and, then, dived half naked into the local river, a lagoon filled with nasty-looking duckweed.,)  Now, 25 years later, Don Alejo is weak and elderly.  He goes about with two vicious dogs and a chubby thug with a shotgun to threaten people.  Jap Jr. is running the brothel -- her mother has apparently died although this isn't clear.  Pancho is the son of Don Alejo's best peon and the old man has sent the lad to college so that he can become a doctor or lawyer.  But Pancho is wild and undisciplined and he fails at everything to the horror of his mentor and protector Don Alejo.  (I wonder if Pancho isn't, in fact, Don Alejo's illegitimate son.)  Alejo has loaned Pancho money for the truck but the young man spends his income on whores and booze and has missed several payments.  When Alejo berates Pancho after his return to town, the young man weeps.  His tears are observed by Jap Jr. with horrific consequences later in the film.  

Pancho's brother-in-law, Tavo, pays off the loan on the truck.  (I didn't understand why he does this -- it appears that the two men are planning to go into a partnership using the truck.)  Pancho and Tavo go to the brothel and get drunk to celebrate. Manuela flees to the chicken coop while his daughter dances with Pancho.  (She has previously grabbed Pancho by the genitals at the town's railroad station and, so, there's obviously some strong mutual attraction.)  Pancho decides to humiliate Jap Jr. and, probably, intends to rape and beat her up.  (He wants her to weep since she has seen him crying.)  Manuela observing that things in the whorehouse are going from bad to worse, makes a dramatic appearances in her newly mended red dress.  He demands that a wildly romantic song, "The Legend of the Kiss", be played and whirls around Pancho.  Pancho loses control and passionately kisses Manuela.  But, then, ashamed of his homosexual impulses, he decides to murder Manuela.  He and Tavo hop in the red truck and pursue Manueala who is fleeing madly through the ruinous town.  They trap the transvestite in a dead end and beat him to death.  Don Alejo has observed this, doesn't intervene, but says that he will take action to destroy Pancho.  Jap Jr. sits alone in the brothel -- she says that Manuela will turn up in a few days "all beat up" but otherwise okay. "Then, the power will come back on," she says.

The film is brilliantly shot and crafted.  It is weakened mostly by Donoso's loquacious screenplay which has many pointless subplots.  Ripstein is a sort of anthropologist, exploring, it seems, the nether reaches of Mexican machismo.  The film's point is that the fey, girlish Manuela proves to be truly, if disastrously, heroic -- in order to save his daughter, he distracts Pancho, seduces him, and, then, pays the inevitable price when the young man feels compelled to vindicate his embattled masculinity.  The scenes in which Manuela seduces Pancho and, then, flees the looming red truck in a nightmarishly protracted chase have a raw power that is enhanced by Ripstein filming these scenes in very protracted sequence shots.    The picture won just about every award possible in Mexico (numerous Cesars) and has been internationally acclaimed.  Why don't we know more about Ripstein (and Mexican film in generally?)  Curiously, the picture is dedicated to the director's mother and father.  

   

The Mitchells v. The Machines

I'm not a good judge of animated films.  For some reason, I find them, alienating and the enormous energy required to produce a movie of this sort sometimes seems to me to be wasted effort.  I suppose that at heart I follow Andre Bazin's theory that film is, in essence, photographic -- that is, objective and representational, each shot portraying some sort of truth that God has impressed into reality.  Animated pictures aren't photographic -- in fact, post-Pixel studios films aren't even drawn; they are manufactured from computer data points.  They stray so far from pure (or mere) representation that my imagination, I fear, can't follow them,  Therefore, I can be (faintly) impressed with a tour-de-force of animation like Sony's Imageworks The Mitchells v. the Machines, but am not really moved by the picture.  Others, I think, may disagree and, in fact, find the film both emotionally compelling and beautiful.

The narrative in The Mitchells is an uneasy mixture of zany, hyper-violent science fiction (a robot apocalypse) combined with a mawkish family drama that is like an ultra sentimental pastiche of themes that we find in Ozu films.  A teenage girl Katie Mitchell makes films on her phone, posting them to her You Tube channel.  The film that she makes feature the family dog, a weird-looking barrel-shaped beast named Monch.  (Apparently, the images she uses in her films are heavily manipulated with filters and swaths of color decoration -- but this is hard to judge because the movie in which her movies are embedded has the same qualities:  the images swarm with little emblems and patches of animate color..)  There is a very slight implication that the girl may be lesbian, although the movie is "family friendly" and, therefore, this hint is very subtle.  The girl's family consists of her mother, apparently an elementary school teacher (she rewards people with star decals) and father, a handy, gruff do-it-yourselfer who is not exactly Luddite, but clearly computer illiterate.  (The mother is voiced by Maya Rudolph and Rick, the father, speaks through Danny McBride).  Katie has a younger brother who is obsessed to a pathological degree with dinosaurs.  Katie's films impress a college in California and she is admitted to that school's filmmaking program.  On the night before Katie departs from Michigan for California, she gets into a quarrel with her father and he, inadvertently, smashes her laptop computer.  To make it up to her, Rick decides to drive Katie cross-country to California and the four family members embark with Katie sulking in the backseat of the Mitchell's orange 1993 stick-shift stationwagon.  Unbeknownst to the family, a callow super-billionaire tech mogul premieres a new kind of cell-phone, the so-called new PAL model.  The mogul's old phone is jealous of the attention bestowed upon the new model and, when she is swept aside as obsolescent junk, the scorned phone instigates a robot rebellion.  (The new model phone is a limber, wise-ass white humanoid robot.)  Robot armies descend from the skies with an aim toward exterminating mankind.  We don't see any humans killed -- this is 'family friendly' entertainment after all but what happens is fairly disturbing.  People are encased in turquoise hexagons and assembled in giant glowing beehive combs that seem to be many thousands of feet high -- the plan is to shoot the humans in their hexagon cells into outer space where they will be killed.  The robots attack the Mitchell family when they are stopped to inspect a dinosaur-themed cafe and everyone around them is imprisoned in the luminous hexagons.  After some combat between the family and the robots, two of the mechanical men are damaged and join the side of the Mitchells.  (These robots are played by Beck Bennett of SNL and Fred Armisen).  The robots reveal that there is a "kill code" that will shut off the Queen Robot, the aggrieved cell-phone's earlier PAL model.  The "kill code' can be uploaded into the router from a store at the Mall of the Globe in eastern Colorado.  After avoiding a number of traps and obstacles, the Mitchell family reaches the Mall where there is big battle with "Furbies" -- that is, furry little gremlins that are modeled on the critters in Joe Dante's iconic movie Gremlins.  (The army of bloodthirsty Furbies is joined by toasters and other appliances that have become lethal due to their computer chips.)  The mission almost succeeds but, then, power is cut off at the Mall ending the "kill code" upload in process before it is completed.  The Mitchells, then, drive to Silicon Valley where there is a final spectacular combat scene, something on the order of the fight scenes in live-action films like The Avengers and the Transformer  movies made by Michael Bay.  The "kill code" is finally uploaded and the robots all perish.  Humanity is saved.  Katie matriculates into film school and, maybe, even acquires a girlfriend -- the feud with her father is resolved into maudlin sentimentality:  the family that massacres robots together stays together.

The movie certainly looks spectacular and is filled with all sorts of exceedingly inventive mayhem.  Sequences are orchestrated in luminous colors invented by the computer that don't have any exact correlates in reality -- as in the Spiderverse movie made by the same studios, I would be challenged to put a name to the various colors that we see spinning across the screen.  The final battle scenes in Silicon Valley invoke a mishmash of earlier movies:  Katie drives a sort of rocket-powered sledge with Monch strapped to its front like the hapless hostages in the Mad Max movies.  The mother becomes a samurai avenger, hacking robots to bits with a sword, after the manner of Uma Thurman as the Bride in the Kill Bill films.  The father, who doesn't know how to use computers, has to enter the code via You-Tube -- thus, we get a reprise of any number of movies with people desperately entering data into a machine in order to save the world.  The entire premise harkens back to the robot revolt in 2001 although the more immediate precursor in Bay's Roboapocalypse.   Some of the final battle sequences take place in the cool and abstract geometric voids shown in Tron, jets of bluish and turquoise data spewing across the screen.  The style of animation involves apparently rounded, even sculptural figures with stylized limbs and big heads with outsized googly eyes.  These figures, representing the protagonists, move through flattened, non-naturalistic spaces (generally -- the closing scenes at the autumnal campus are more realistic in tone) -- embroidered with all sorts of wiggly emblems and emoticons:  little rainbows, happy faces, swaths of vibrating color.  The effect is one of the somewhat grotesque protagonist figures which seem to have three-dimensions moving about in orbs and radiating beams of flat icon-style decoration.  Most shots contain a visually complex mixture of fully rounded figures interacting with halos of subordinate emblems and symbolic graphemes.  The style is one of clashing or opposing round versus flat imagery. There is a lot of mild comedy and some sardonic satire as well -- the Mitchell's have as their nemesis the Posey family, irritatingly perfect people who are continuously posting Instagrams of their wonderful meals and yoga sessions.   The movie is overlong for my tastes, and, after the manner of big budget extravaganzas, features not one but two climaxes (the fight in the Mall and the battle in Silicon Valley). There's too much in the movie for it be wholly coherent -- Rick, the father, is represented as a sort of back-to-nature survivalist who laments a log cabin that he built with his own hands and, then, had to abandon when he had a family (at least, I think this is what is implied.)  There's a nascent romance between the semi-autistic Aaron and the Posey family's daughter.  The movie makes fun of its rather inexact draftsmanship by positing that the dog may also be read as a hog -- when the robots try to figure out whether they seeing a dog or a hog, their metal craniums literally explode.  The film's geography is bizarre.  Someone apparently thinks there are mountains in lower peninsula Michigan (the Porcupine Mountains are in the Upper Peninsula).  There's nothing but wheat in Eastern Colorado where the Mall of the Globe is supposed to be located.  You can't drive from eastern Colorado to Silicon Valley in a single night -- at least I don't think so.  But, again, I'm falling into a trap of judging the movie by canons that are inapposite to it.  The sentiment in the scenes with father and daughter doesn't judge merge on the maudlin -- it skates through that category into being both mawkish and cringe-inducing.  

The film's credits seem to last for fifteen minutes attesting to the enormous complexity of creating a picture like this.  One credit shows us that about 21 babies were born to technical crew (computer graphics specialists I assume) during the making of the film which bears a 2020 copyright.  To me, all this effort verges on the pointless, but I'm pretty sure that the film will be an international blockbuster hit.  The Netflix dubbing credits also go on interminably -- the film has been dubbed into Finnish, Danish, Greek, Vietnamese, various languages with Cyrillic-looking alphabets, as well a dozen Asian tongues that I couldn't identify from the exotic characters on the screen.