WINTER WILDS PETITE SUMMER LIN MOVIE
But Michael Sarnoski’s mournful, tender movie is so much richer and more interesting than a revenge saga. Nicolas Cage plays the wild man so often in movies that it’s easy to take the choice for granted and to assume, when he’s cast as a bedraggled hermit who trudges out of the Oregon wilderness on a mission to retrieved his kidnapped truffle pig, that you’ll be in store for a lot of yelling and outsize violence. For all Dune’s psychic space witches, the messiah-breeding eugenics programs, and incomprehensible alien motivations, it’s the reminders that this onscreen universe is meant to be a descendant of our own that turn out to be the most disconcerting aspects of all.
But what makes Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s strange, strange sci-fi saga so hard to shake is its strategic touches of the familiar - the bagpipe that makes an appearance during an arrival ceremony the titles left over from European nobility that adorn the heads of the rival factions the bullfighting that an Atreides ancestor apparently kept up as a hobby. Hundreds of millions of dollars are regularly spent on would-be extravaganzas that look like warmed-over ass, so Dune earns a spot on the strength of its spectacle alone - the chilly grandeur of its far-future universe, with its massive sandworms rising nightmarishly out of the sands and its spaceships hovering in the sky with eerie steadiness. In Tamhane’s film, this realization isn’t a defeat but a hard-earned liberation, a way for Sharad to come back to the thing he loves from another angle rather than lose his passion for it entirely. The Disciple is about the realization, common in real life and rarely dramatized onscreen, that you are not going to achieve your dream, or at least not in the form those dreams took when you were younger and less familiar with the world. It takes half a lifetime, in fact, during which we get to know Sharad like a friend, watching him struggle in an impossible industry and try to square ideas of authenticity and transcendence with being able to have things - like a life, a home, and an existence that isn’t defined by poverty and petty grievances the way his beloved guru’s can be. And a wide-eyed man watches Tiffany Haddish crawl out from under a prison bus in an orange jumpsuit, then informs her, “You better take off - you better run.” It’s not gotcha comedy, it’s comedy in which the whole world is a co-conspirator.Īrtistic purity is a prison in Chaitanya Tamhane’s wonderfully textured portrait of an aspiring Indian classical musician, but it takes Sharad Nerulkar (Aditya Modak) a long time to understand that. A nurse attempts to treat André when he spews explosive vomit all over a bar. A golfer tries, with surprising patience, to talk André and Howery through extricating their dicks from a Chinese finger trap. But the true delight comes from how the first impulse of so many of its unwitting cast members is to help when met with whatever scene of inspired chaos the film’s creators have dreamed up. Not that Bad Trip is all that cringeworthy - there’s a sweetness to it that’s anchored by the friendship between Eric André’s lovelorn human cartoon and the long-suffering straight man played by Lil Rel Howery, a movie relationship planted in a real-world setting. Consider the following lists snapshots of moviegoing in the year in-person cinema truly returned, almost too late and with a vengeance:Įric André and Kitao Sakurai’s howlingly good hidden-camera movie temporarily cured me of the secondhand embarrassment that prevents me from enjoying cringe comedies. Red Rocket, Titane, The Last Duel, and Spencer - great films that have garnered recognition from one awards-bestowing body or another - could easily have made someone’s final cut. List-making is always capricious, but the decision to include a particular movie on this year’s Top 10s felt subsequently more personally haphazard. This is true any year, but it was especially true at the end of 2021, which Vulture’s Alison Willmore describes simply as “ overwhelming.” Not just because the sheer amount of movies released seemed dramatic after months hibernating at home but also because so many of those movies arrived late - held back by pandemic forces, of course - and stuffed into the fall season. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos Courtesy of the StudiosĪsk a film critic to list their Top 10 best movies of the year, and they will give you a Top 20 list with runners-up and several annotations.