…are due for an official, institutional rehab?
In his admiring 8.23 review of David Kittredge‘s Boorman and the Devil, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman calls this about-to-open documentary as the latest example of “Movie Disaster Rehabilitation Culture, which is now an industry among hipster cinephiles.”
And so “the arid and didactic Heaven’s Gate has been elevated to the status of masterpiece. Eyes Wide Shut, which should have been about pedophilia (not aging swingers in masks), is now top–drawer Kubrick. And Exorcist II: The Heretic is described in Kittrdge’s doc as a wacked but misunderstood grand folly.
“I passionately disagree with all three of those reassessments,” Gleiberman writes, “and I think they’re all rooted in a certain impulse toward viewing movies in a postmodern way — as endlessly malleable texts rather than as stories that require an emotional logic and coherence that none of those films have. Wait long enough and even the worst movie, if it possesses the proper shoot-the-works ambition, can be ‘reframed.’”
HE hereby nominates Simon West and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Con Air as one of the most deserving contenders for this hallowed status. It was the first Bruckheimer action flick to fully embrace a surreal, meta-ironic, half-comedic approach to the JB formuila. In this sense Con Air was a true genre groundbreaker, and yet, incredibly, it’s currently saddled with a 59% Rotten Tomatoes rating as well as a 52% rating on Metacritic. WTF?
Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty (2012). ZDT doesn’t need an agggregate critical rating upgrade (the RT and Metacritic ratings are in the low to mid 90s). It does, however, need a full and unqualified apology from the woke scumbags who did everything they could to take it down over allegedly endorsing torture….ridiculous!
At some point down the road Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme will need a fresh reassessment minus the Timothee Chalamet-needs-to-be-punished narrative that so many award-season handicappers succumbed to. We don’t need to rehash the whole thing except to say that at the end of the day Marty Supreme — a great manic-high, pogo-stick, hoppity-hop farce — was sorta kinda given the bum’s rush. In a sane, non-woke world it would’ve taken the Best Picture Oscar instead of PTA’s One Battle After Another.
No, I don’t think Damien Chazelle’s Babylon deserves a rehab treatment. Stylistic audacity isn’t enough. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. Leave it there.