WRB—Apr. 2024 Film Supplement
“Say, what is it, anyway?”
“I hear it’s a kind of Managing Editor.”
“Gee, ain’t we got enough of them in New York?”
Links:
In The New Yorker, Richard Brody on the challenges of doing biography in film (and his list of the best):
Most directors, like most people, have interesting observations about their daily lives, their communities, their fields of endeavor—and plenty of directors have, as artists, the practical skill to convey such observations. Part of the long-standing collective lament for the demise of the mid-budget dramatic movie—essentially, realistic movies featuring movie stars—is that it’s a form that even middling directors, writers, and actors have always done well. But bio-pics are different, because they are about extraordinary people, and fewer directors, writers, and actors are able to successfully imagine their way into this level of extraordinariness. The genre poses challenges of scope and psychology akin to the stringent visual challenges posed by musicals. Unlike with melodramas or comedies, it takes greatness to advance the art of bio-pics.
In Unherd, Tom Shone on last year’s “genocide cinema”—Oppenheimer (2023), Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), The Zone of Interest (2023):
That is the unnerving thrust of all three films, but Glazer’s in particular. By the end of The Zone of Interest, the Höss’s garden wall is more than just a wall. It symbolizes the bureaucratic structures that allowed the Nazis to see themselves as merely “getting on with the job”; or the gas chambers themselves, which Himmler intended to shield German soldiers from the damaging psychological effects of point-blank executions; or the “compartmentalization” that allowed Oppenheimer to divorce the “technical success” of Trinity from its ghastly human effects. Is it any wonder Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest feel more like horror movies than war movies? The absence of victims from both films is not some act of artistic negligence or authorial oversight, but a deliberate absence that haunts both dramas, ionically charging what we do see: technocrats haunted by their own eerie success, numbed by a sense of mission, dogged by miasmic guilt.
[As long as we’re talking about these I’m going to keep suggesting Pacifiction (2023), which deals with similar material and is better than these three. —Steve]
In the Times,
on the sound design of Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest:To the Höss family, the sound is background noise, and they no longer hear it, the way you stop hearing planes if you grow up near an airport. But a key scene later on suggests that’s not quite the whole story. It’s winter, and the Höss boys are playing in the yard alone. The older brother tricks his younger brother into entering the greenhouse, then locks him in and sits down, smiling, as the boy yells to be let out. The older one starts hissing. He’s playacting the part of a guard, having locked his brother in a gas chamber, and he knows exactly the sound it makes. His parents may have numbed their own ability to feel their humanity, but he has absorbed the massacre in a soul-stunting way.
In
, on Mary Pickford:Pickford is an actor of volume. Whereas a silent actor of any talent level must be trained in movements and gestures of exaggeration, there is nothing exaggerated about Pickford. It is all about her size, her weight. Like a peacock flushing its luxurious feathers outward, gaining the superficial mass of a lion, Pickford manages to switch, rather elegantly, from the coquette, a shrinking creature in layers of white satin, to the tramp, a bigger, rowdier character, a different weight class on the screen. She is less comparable to a Chaplin as she is to an iguana. Certain strains of marine iguanas are able to change their length, their size, sometimes even their mass, in order to compensate for a lack of available food, or to ward off predators. We can say Pickford has that same ability—to change her filmic mass, contort and shift her persona into odd new shapes, even change her age—in order to better suit her character or world view. She is an irresistible body, puny enough to fit through any thin opening, large enough to fool any villain. Unlike the meticulous Chaplin, she is haphazard and raw, an object that only moves forward, with seemingly limitless potential energy.
In Commonweal, Griffin Oleynick interviews Tim Parks about Pasolini:
Pasolini arrived in the capital as an outcast, thinking that all avenues of a conventional career in culture were closed to him. He’d been canceled, as we’d say now. He had never been to Rome, and it proved immensely stimulating. There, Pasolini discovered the gritty suburbs, where he was forced to live since he had no money. He also discovered the Roman dialect—aggressive, violent, full of earthy humor. And he fell in love with all the young, working-class boys and their chaotic energy, and with the idea that there could be a life outside the bourgeoisie. That formative moment is absolutely crucial for understanding Pasolini: his enemy is the piccola borghesia, small-minded middle-class people whom he attacked—in the press, in his films—for the rest of his life.
Two in The Guardian: First, Beatrice Loayza on “feminist film”:
It has reached the point where the term feels cheap. Choose a film, do a bit of rhetorical flexing, some squinting and voilà: a feminist icon! On the one hand, this speaks to the normalization of a term once considered radical and niche—we are all feminists, or should be. On the other hand, the label of “feminist” is beginning to feel more like a subcategory on Netflix—an algorithmic signpost—than a meaningful description of art. And as a subgenre it’s so broad as to be useless—covering biopics about women’s suffragists, raunchy feminist comedies, and final-girl horror screamfests. I don’t go around looking for feminist messaging in the many films I watch, and if I find it, it’s not automatically a positive thing.
Reviews:
Second,
reviews Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004):One of the reasons why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, now 20 years old, ranks among the best love stories of the twenty-first century is that it makes the unique argument that failure is an essential, precious part of romantic experience. It’s only human to want that pain to go away, but the film suggests that literally making it so would be a wish on a monkey’s paw, offering some short-term relief, perhaps, but with unanticipated long-term consequences. People usually have many more failed relationships before one that succeeds, after all, and the accumulation of experience and memory not only means something, but that meaning isn’t static. Bitter moments can turn bittersweet.
In 4Columns, Michelle Orange reviews La Chimera (March 29):
Less interested in telling a story than casting a spell, La Chimera wears its influences (Pasolini, Fellini, the Taviani brothers) loudly and with pride, not unlike the men who in an early sequence don dresses and rouge to preen and buss their way through the town’s Epiphany parade. Not quite an ensemble piece, the film suffers for its divided focus between the amorphous plight of its central character and the unruly collective he leads. La Chimera finds its own register in scenes where that collective operates as more than background players—notably an evening beach party that leads to the gang’s most lucrative discovery yet. Charm and danger swirl as an oldster belts a few lines at the mic and Italia (Carol Duarte) dances in a sequined halter dress. The men imitate and then surround her, grabbing at her skirt. On the sidelines, Fabiana (Ramona Fiorini), the sole woman in the group, gives Arthur (Josh O’Connor) a look as old as the scene they are watching unfold. Do something, it says. Get her out of there. And, as if called from his private reveries for just a moment, he does.
In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri reviews Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (March 15):
Of course, that’s why it works. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), about forbidden homoerotic longing in a Japanese POW camp, is filled with scenes of terrible cruelty, but beneath so much of the violence lies unfulfilled desire, and Sakamoto’s music opens new emotional doors that the onscreen story merely approaches. As played in Oshima’s film, the central theme is loud, brash, and alien. When played on a solo piano, however—which is how Sakamoto performed it in later years, and how he performs it in Opus—you sense its velvet tenderness, its otherworldly optimism. Reduced to its essence, it’s a love song.
Reviews of books:
In The New York Sun, Carl Rollyson reviews a biography of Garbo (Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo, by Lois W. Banner, 2023):
For Ms. Banner, Garbo’s signature role is Queen Christina, a character admired as a feminist heroine whom Garbo resembled in many respects, though the royal personage had a hook nose and was nowhere near the beauty Garbo personified. Not only did both women exhibit an intense interest in art, literature, and religion, the queen of Sweden and the queen of Hollywood each renounced a powerful position—Christina abdicated at 28 and Garbo relinquished movie stardom before she was 40.
Garbo was severely disappointed that Hollywood did not value her performance in Queen Christina (1933) and did not offer her similar roles, which she did not seek out, concluding (wrongly, Ms. Banner argues) that the film was a failure. Louis B. Mayer doctored the books to make it appear as though Queen Christina lost money. To Ms. Banner, the film is a triumph that makes Garbo’s retreat from adventurous roles all the more regrettable.
N.B.:
Vulture’s Second Annual Stunt Awards.
Christopher Walken learns about the connection between Dune and the music video for “Weapon of Choice” (both of which feature Christopher Walken).
The hunt for Christopher Nolan’s short film Larceny (1996).
An analysis of characters in movies saying the title of the movie.
“Ask A Music Critic: Will Timothée Chalamet Be Good At Playing Bob Dylan?” [Not as good as Cate Blanchett. —Steve]
The collectors of DVDs, preservers of humanity’s audiovisual heritage.
The challenges of digital preservation.
Martin Scorsese’s VHS collection is at the University of Colorado.
An appreciation of the Landmark at Bethesda Row.
M. Emmet Walsh died on Tuesday, March 19. R.I.P.
In theaters:
[Since every WRB Film Supplement is someone’s first: the movies are listed in approximate order of how good I think they are. Steve’s larks are the ones I recommend you see. —Steve]
Steve’s larks:
[None, to my dismay, although in the right mood I might bump the top film from The rest. —Steve]
The rest:
Love Lies Bleeding (dir. Rose Glass, March 15)
Very American is the situation Lou (Kristen Stewart) finds herself in—working a miserable job in a crummy little New Mexico town, waiting for something to happen. Very American, too, is that “something” being a stranger with the possibility of being bad news—in this case Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder passing through on her way to Vegas. This is how film noir works. The real novelty here is not the lesbianism but the steroids Lou gives Jackie, which transform her (literally, through surreal body horror shots of her muscles growing) from a normal-seeing person into someone capable of exceptional violence, exceptional self-loathing, exceptional self-sabotage. Jackie, ’roided out, hardly even tries to clean any of this up; that falls on other people, Lou included. Isn’t that America? Isn’t that love?
Problemista (dir. Julio Torres, March 1)
In the best scene—say “Kafkaesque” if you like—Alejandro (Julio Torres), aspiring toy designer, finds the process of getting a visa to stay in the United States reflected in a dream where he is trapped in an infinite staircase of rooms, climbing through ceiling panels only to make no progress. Nothing else is up to that standard as images or ideas (the immigration narrative fades into a more general “young person trying to make it in New York without money” story), but Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth, the demanding and out there art-world lady Alejandro finds himself working for, forces the film to be about something. It is not about its confused ideas about artists and their work; it is about Elizabeth’s furious desire to be respected and honored.
Snack Shack (dir. Adam Rehmeier, March 15)
Through long exposure and practice, the suspension of disbelief for most audiences permits people in their mid-20s to play high schoolers in the movies. It does not permit people the age of college students to play middle schoolers—they end up seeming not like middle schoolers but exceptionally immature college students. [I wanted to hate these characters and kept having to remind myself that they were, in fact, thirteen and therefore deserving of slightly more indulgence. —Steve] That said, it’s summer in Nebraska in 1991. There are two guys who are best friends, one wild (Gabriel LaBelle) and one staid (Conor Sherry). There is a girl (Mika Abdalla). There are schemes. Near the end everything gets real heavy. You know the drill. And yet it has charm in abundance, and still has some charm even with the issue of suspension of disbelief.
One Life (dir. James Hawes, March 15)
An elderly Nicholas Winton (Anthony Hopkins), a socialist stockbroker (wonderful combination, allows him to get paid for reading the Financial Times, which he would otherwise read for free) starts going through all his old papers and things. He finds his records from when he as a younger man (Johnny Flynn) helped organize the transport by train of 669 children from Prague to London, mostly Jewish, before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. It’s fine hagiography, and Winton deserves it; but the real strength is Anthony Hopkins portraying a man near the end of his life who knows he did something important and noble, but who is haunted by the thought of the additional children he could have saved if he had only worked more, pushed harder, done things differently. It is impossible to imagine that such a feeling ever completely went away for a man like Winton, but as the film ends the afterlife of his records helps him find a kind of peace.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (dir. Adam Wingard, March 29)
The big monsters fight. That’s all you can ask for. Like the rest of the series it feels like it was put together by someone who deeply considered Heidegger’s Der Spiegel interview and The Question Concerning Technology (especially “only a god can save us” and his gloss of the opening of Hölderlin’s “Patmos”) before being repeatedly hit over the head. This adds another level of interest for those who cannot be entertained solely by big monsters fighting. It is also revealed in this installment that, in the beginning, all things were in harmony. Then, an ape decided to rebel against this established order and, with the aid of other apes he convinced to join him, waged war against it. The rebel apes were finally defeated by Godzilla, who banished them to a desolate and fiery waste. For more information about these events, consult Paradise Lost.
[For more on Kong see Movies across the decades below. —Steve]
Immaculate (dir. Michael Mohan, March 22)
An American nun (Sydney Sweeney) goes to an Italian convent and gets more than she bargained for. Most of this comes from the lurid imagination of a twenty-first-century secularist, but its suggestion that Americans are too naïve to understand the dark maneuvering subtleties of Europe comes from Henry James, and its belief that the Italian language is itself a source of evil comes from the lurid imagination of a nineteenth-century Protestant.
Knox Goes Away (dir. Michael Keaton, March 15)
One of the better recent old guy action movies. Better than Liam Neeson’s recent work (about one example of which more lower down); worse than The Equalizer 3 (2023) because Denzel Washington is in that one. Surely Michael Keaton has better things to be doing than acting in this kind of thing; surely he is a more interesting person than his competent and uninteresting direction would suggest. Al Pacino steals every scene he is in, except when his leopard-print clothing steals them from him.
The American Society of Magical Negroes (dir. Kobi Libii, March 15)
The most provocative thing about it is the title. The funniest, which the film wisely returns to over and over, is its sending up of the general white attitude that black people are the repositories and guardians of an ineffable “cool,” which they bestow on white people they deem worthy. But this is hardly new—when jazz was invented in New Orleans a white man no doubt appeared instantly to take a racialized interest in the music—and it adds little to that conversation. Also there is a romance, which would be honey on the cup if the cup had anything bitter in it.
In the Land of Saints and Sinners (dir. Robert Lorenz, March 29)
Probably the best of Liam Neeson’s recent work, if only because Marlowe (2023) and Retribution (2023) were basically unwatchable and this one has Kerry Condon, who is always watchable, in it. It makes sense that in a film where all the actors are Irish (some from the Republic of Ireland, some from Northern Ireland) the IRA are not the heroes; it is darkly funny that, in order to prevent a certain kind of American from getting confused, the incident that sets off the film’s action is one of the IRA members abusing a child.
Kung Fu Panda 4 (dir. Mike Mitchell, March 8)
[What do you want me to say about “Kung Fu Panda 4” here? Awkwafina is fine. This exhausts my positivity. —Steve]
YOLO (dir. Jia Ling, March 8)
A Chinese ripoff of Rocky (1976) that adds a subplot about weight loss. They might have the moves down, but they don’t have the magic. They also don’t have the music, so they have to use “Gonna Fly Now.” On the other hand, a boxing movie that isn’t part of an existing franchise can make $400 million at the Chinese box office, so who really should be laughing?
Cabrini (dir. Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, March 8)
In this film a prostitute (Romana Maggiora Vergano) expresses to Mother Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) her fear that her sins are so great that she can never be clean. Cabrini, who historically was a religious sister but here acts like some combination of a modern non-denominational Evangelical and a modern “lean in” type, responds not by referencing any of the several applicable passages from the Gospels but by saying that the prostitute is a strong woman.
Arthur the King (dir. Simon Cellan Jones, March 15)
[To any studio executives reading this fine newsletter: Are you worried that the only way to get audiences suffering from superhero fatigue to enjoy your product is the long and arduous work of making movies that are good? Fear not! If the reaction of the audience I saw this with is any indication, your salvation lies in making movies that are as terrible as ever, as long as they exploit Americans’ shameless sentimentality about dogs! Rejoice! Your troubles are at an end! —Steve]
Critical notes:
Corey Atad on the unreality of CGI:
It’s ultimately a philosophical question, and one which reveals a truth that might be uncomfortable for VFX artists like Ussing, whose role in the filmmaking process has become increasingly central. As he points out, on blockbuster movies, the VFX department is often the largest single department by orders of magnitude. Many in the VFX community complain that crappy CGI—often the result of studios like Marvel failing to plan productions effectively, putting too much pressure and not giving close to enough time in post-production—has led to a negative impression among the public regarding the use of digital effects. If only the public knew about all the invisible CGI they’ve simply never noticed, maybe then they would appreciate the sizable contribution of VFX artists. But what if it’s not just the bad CGI? Perhaps the good CGI—the invisible CGI—is part of the problem, too. Perhaps audiences are reacting to the feeling that we’ve lost something amid cinema’s digital revolution, even when we can’t properly articulate what that is. Perhaps that’s the “why.”
Movies across the decades:
King Kong (dir. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)
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