11/26/2023 0 Comments Time up review![]() The main relationship at the heart of Armageddon Time is between two preadolescent boys: Paul, who lives comfortably with his family in a detached house in Queens, and his African American classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb), whose parents are no longer in the picture. What, if anything, do the adventures of a gifted but wayward wannabe artist have to do with a society’s encroaching rightward tilt? Does Gray earnestly conflating the ethical struggles of his youthful surrogate with the state of the nation suggest humility, hubris, or something even more outrageously overwrought? Or, thorniest of all, considering Armageddon Time’s tragic themes of racial profiling and institutional favoritism and its maker’s status as a brand-name auteur free to tackle whatever material he wants on big studio budgets: What is the best way for a winner to write his own history? ![]() The key question of Gray’s semi-roman à clef, the latest of the director’s real-life Queens Boulevard equivalents, is not whether it’s accomplished, but whether it fills out such a grandiose conceit. The trick of beefing up a coming-of-age story by setting it against some kind of familiar historical hinge point is an old one (one recent example: Licorice Pizza’s gas shortage subplot). ![]() And when you’re a teenager, everything feels like it’s the end of the world as you know it. But the anxiety around his campaign is still palpable. For high schooler Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), the then-governor of California is just another politician for his liberal Jewish parents to scoff at around the television Chicken Littles clucking that the sky is falling. The film takes place in the fall of 1980, in the glory days of the Clash and on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election: the dawning of Morning in America, sunny skies with a warning of potential mushroom clouds. The cruel elusiveness of justice-legal, poetic, or otherwise-is the subject of James Gray’s new drama, Armageddon Time, which returns the filmmaker to the cloistered, personal mode of his early work after forays into big-budget dream project territory (2019’s explicitly Kubrickian Ad Astra, which was inevitably subject to studio meddling). “Remember to kick it over,” he sings, his appetite for destruction justified by the track’s weary, wary refrain: “A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight.” In it, Joe Strummer doubles down on the apocalyptic anxieties of “London Calling,” with its intimations of “nuclear era” and a metropolis tumbling into the Thames, and advocates for guerilla class warfare. As the B-side to “London Calling,” the Clash’s 1979 cover of Jamaican singer Willie Williams’s “Armagideon Time” is a crucial footnote to pop history: a righteous, opportunistic fusion of punk snarl and reggae rhythm aimed squarely between the eyes of the powers that be.
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