Birdman was a pretentious-as-hell comedy about artistic pretention. I certainly didn't respect its methods, but I did its goals. The much better, funnier, and more broadly comic The Square takes aim at the chief curator of a Stockholm modern art museum, but its less about a great piss-take on modern art and pretention (although its there) than it is a comedic takedown on the type of well-off, highly educated, Tesla-driving and Pellegrino-swigging doofus that inhabits its center. The protagonist in question has a number of high/low stakes balls to juggle, and way that the seemingly discursive plot threads develop are frequently shocking or just explosively hilarious. Its a comedy of manners, a comedy of discomfort, and sometimes an honest appreciation/belittlement of out of touch who try to make some sort of statement. You know, like the sort of people who would go see/make a very dry Swedish comedy about human fallibility. You know who you are.
I really quite liked Wonderstruck, but it defies easy explanation. Its a mature and measured PG-rated melodrama, so it can't really be a kids movie (there's an unusually intense central performance for a child actor performance from Oakes Fegley, he'll be one to watch out for). Like Martin Scorsese's Hugo (of which it shares a writer, and a silent-age nostalgia) its an auteur driven family film that's really more for adults than for whatever toe headed spawn they might bring along. But that's okay, the bifurcated storyline and 1970's/1920's setting make it not only kid-alienating, but also mainstream audiences. Its grounded, but it also revels in artifice, its a sincerely emotional movie about sad young people adrift, but it plotting hinges on classical melodramatic tropes. Its a movie that's seemingly at war with its own goals, but hits the mark dead-on anyway. Todd Haynes has lots of experience with this sort of tricky, backward looking and contemporary feeling sort of thing. But yeah, its pretty dang good. It brought on the feels.
