Damsel (2018)

Touches You

To me, this movie is perfection.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Blistering performances.

Are film schools and institutes like Sundance and AFI giving young filmmakers some sort of mandatory class on "revisionist westerns?" I get the feeling that every grant-supported filmmaker is in some sort of race to make the world's most boring "lyrical reimagining of the west." The Ballad of Lefty Brown seemed like the nadir for this genre, but Damsel just said "hold my beer."This may be the world's first Twitter Western. It seems to have been made for the limited purpose of being praised on blogs and in Facebook by milquetoast NPR liberals: the kind who can't tell the difference between Naomi Klein and Gina Haspel. The movie is polite enough, at least, to essentially tell you exactly what to say in your laudatory blog post or tweet; the subtext is essentially the text.Damsel squanders beautiful photography, an evocative score, and a dream cast on hours of tedium, terrible attempts at absurdist comedy with sub-Mad-Magazine daffiness ("You are convicted of skullduggery, skullthuggery, and skullbuggery"), and cringe-inducing audience pandering. (Does it count as a spoiler if I tell you that all white men are rapists and racists?)Before the big twist a third of the way in, the movie is tiring but bearable (like Meek's Cutoff but with bad jokes and great music). The twist adds five minutes of surprises and interest - and then the next hour or so is essentially the filmmakers running out the clock, hoping to drag this pile to feature length.When your movie makes The Little Hours and Your Highness look like Bicycle Thieves and Rashomon, you're not on your way into the canon.

What a piece of crap. I've seen movies that were worse, but few that I deeply wanted to leave early more or that pissed me off as much. It has *some* merit (beautifully shot, a couple amusing moments). But ultimately: millennial garbage par excellence. These two brothers wrote and directed it, and they clearly think they are the Coen brothers with a hint of Wes Anderson for whimsy. What's more, they stole their take on male hope-projection onto a beautiful women from a much better film: There's Something About Mary.In attempting to subvert masculine cowboy tropes, they made a hack film of a different sort: one that is accepted because it panders to popular opinion among people who go to the renovated art house movie theater in the part of town they gentrified with their trust fund bucks. It isn't that the opinion is wrong or uninteresting in and of itself, it's just relayed in this film in such a hack, lazy, glib, boring way by people certain they're more clever than they are.It would have taken an amazing female lead to overcome the middle-school quality writing and all-too woke directing; their naturalistic take on zany Wes Anderson-movie dialogue was excruciating in certain scenes and I could have easily believed a teenager wrote it. But what was committed to film was one of the worst performances I've ever seen by an actor. To believe this woman was capable of starring in this or any picture is a strong indication you're as irrationally obsessed with her as the film's characters.The result of all of this is a movie only certain people could enjoy: privileged white young women who can't get enough of having their shallow politics pandered to and the men who subconsciously know they must share the same opinions if they want a social life, so they self-righteously and vociferously do: in other words, woke drama queens who will their victimhood while boasting their empowerment and their male allies (tm)/hangers on. Great movies don't pander. They make people find unlikely surrogates. True subversion requires excellence and subtlety this film doesn't come close to touching as it bashes its hack message into the faces of too many grateful to be bludgeoned with their own ideas. It doesn't even require pretentious art house claptrap to attempt to subvert. Blockbusters like The Hunger Games--a film where the damsel is literally a cute, cake-baking boy who is saved by the ass-kicking heroine--do much more to change expectations and advance gender relations. That's in no small part because that movie is well crafted. It's a good movie to a broad audience (no pun intended). Damsel preaches sloppily to its own choir of loathsome millennial hipsters. I'd be just as pissed off watching a Kurt Cameron loves Jesus movie that pandered to evangelicals, and I'd be pissed for for the same exact reason. However, what's really troubling is the thought that this is the future of media post #MeToo. Indeed, that's scarier than Hereditary.

Quirky comes to mind. out of the ordinary. unusual. fun. this is not a film for young people, but for movie goers old enough to enjoy good film making. the plot doesn't matter, but it's a frontier woman dealing with circumstances as they present themselves. the directors have a hard time wrapping things up, but that's all right. and it's always a pleasure to see Robert forster. he never quite "made" it. who knows why!

There are very few farces made these days, so people aren't very used to the exaggerated and non-realistic elements of this genre. It's the same reason some of the Coen Brother movies don't connect with mainstream audiences. This time it's the Zellner Brothers, and they double down on the unusual genre elements by making it a farcical western. But if you're down for some off-beat cinema, what the Zellner's do here is pretty fantastic.As farces do, the story here takes some pretty drastic bait and switch turns as it sets up Pattinson's character as the traditional western hero - yet still gives you signs that all is not right with this guy. Indeed, he's a very bad man. And things get very tragic and slightly disturbing when he meets his love - the damsel who is not in distress until he shows up.I'll refrain from further spoilers, but I feel like people react to farces like the directors or writers don't know what they're doing. They do. And this one is a good one in that it packs more than one tragic punch by the end. The characters in this movie long to be part of something they can't and being part of. And it being the ruthless wild west, even if they get a moment's peace, it can be quickly taken away by violent men.I think this one might have legs as a bit of a cult movie, hopefully. It's not for everyone but that's all right. Looking forward to what else these original and imaginative filmmakers will come up with.