Chris Knipp
11-08-2021, 10:31 AM
THE ETERNALS (Chloé Zhao 2021)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/Zh.jpg
How did Chloé Zhao get to this?
Let's start here: the piquant title from NATIONAL REVIEW for its ETERNALS review:
Eternals Shows How to Go from Auteur to Hack in One Movie Subtitle" "Despite its Oscar-winning director, Eternals is a bottom-of-the barrel Marvel superhero saga."
This piece by Kyle Smith on NATIONAL REVIEW, Armond White's current platform, is more conventional than him but a satisfyingly abusive condemnation of what looks like a terrible example of the tired Marvel Comics superhero genre. One can see Kyle has learned a thing or two from Armond:
Chloé Zhao, the first Oscar winner for Best Director to direct a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, promised to bring to the blockbuster realm the character-based portraiture and documentary-tinged realism she exhibited in The Rider and Nomadland. Yet, surprise! Eternals is one of the dumbest, cheesiest, most trite, and least human of the 26 MCU movies, a creative misfire on the order of the first two Thor movies or Avengers: Age of Ultron. Zhao has graduated from delicate artisanal indies to overprocessed, soul-challenged, assembly-line Hollywood junk in record time.
-NATIONAL REVIEW. For the whole pice go HERE (https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/movie-review-eternals-shows-how-to-go-from-auteur-to-hack-in-one-movie/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=third).
I don't look forward to seeing a two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster flop, but having seen Zhao's admired debut THE RIDER (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36271#post36271) at its premiere in the NYFF, then witnessed the adulation heaped on her sophomore effort NOMADLAND (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4862-New-York-Film-Festival-2020&p=39051#post39051), which I found fault with but got her the Best Picture Oscar, I want to figure out in specific detail really just how you do "go from auteur to hack in one movie."
Her debut feature was actually the 2015 SONGS MY BROTHERS TAUGHT ME (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3566788/reference), a plot-light tale about a troubled Native American family (which I have not yet seen).
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/Zh.jpg
How did Chloé Zhao get to this?
Let's start here: the piquant title from NATIONAL REVIEW for its ETERNALS review:
Eternals Shows How to Go from Auteur to Hack in One Movie Subtitle" "Despite its Oscar-winning director, Eternals is a bottom-of-the barrel Marvel superhero saga."
This piece by Kyle Smith on NATIONAL REVIEW, Armond White's current platform, is more conventional than him but a satisfyingly abusive condemnation of what looks like a terrible example of the tired Marvel Comics superhero genre. One can see Kyle has learned a thing or two from Armond:
Chloé Zhao, the first Oscar winner for Best Director to direct a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, promised to bring to the blockbuster realm the character-based portraiture and documentary-tinged realism she exhibited in The Rider and Nomadland. Yet, surprise! Eternals is one of the dumbest, cheesiest, most trite, and least human of the 26 MCU movies, a creative misfire on the order of the first two Thor movies or Avengers: Age of Ultron. Zhao has graduated from delicate artisanal indies to overprocessed, soul-challenged, assembly-line Hollywood junk in record time.
-NATIONAL REVIEW. For the whole pice go HERE (https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/movie-review-eternals-shows-how-to-go-from-auteur-to-hack-in-one-movie/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=third).
I don't look forward to seeing a two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster flop, but having seen Zhao's admired debut THE RIDER (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36271#post36271) at its premiere in the NYFF, then witnessed the adulation heaped on her sophomore effort NOMADLAND (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4862-New-York-Film-Festival-2020&p=39051#post39051), which I found fault with but got her the Best Picture Oscar, I want to figure out in specific detail really just how you do "go from auteur to hack in one movie."
Her debut feature was actually the 2015 SONGS MY BROTHERS TAUGHT ME (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3566788/reference), a plot-light tale about a troubled Native American family (which I have not yet seen).