Evidently the Managing Editor’s an educated man. Now I really hate him.
Links:
In Air Mail,
on Joan Didion’s movie reviews:While not undiscerning, Didion had quite populist taste, and the more I read, the more often I disagreed. She declared that Billy Wilder, the director of Some Like It Hot (1959), had “only the most haphazard feeling for comedy”; that Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1963) was almost so bad as to “not be worth mentioning”; that Sidney Lumet’s films were “dutifully rendered and almost totally unfelt.” She wrote at length about how irritating it was to watch a movie in which an actor played against type, how frustrating crime movies were when they became “cast studies of deranged individuals in a sane society” rather than old-school gangster films.
Like most movie critics, I disagree with critics—even the ones I think are great—all the time. So Didion’s film reviews intrigued me because they revealed a mindset about movies that you can trace through her later writing, heavily influenced by being brought up in the golden age of the big studios. To her (and to Dunne), movies were predominantly entertainment turned out by large-scale teams designed to tug at your emotions, rather than the gritty, artist-driven form that would come to dominate the New Hollywood.
[Billy Wilder couldn’t catch a break from the auteurists—or their adversaries in that debate, apparently. —Steve]
In The Nation, T. M. Brown on the decline of the paranoid thriller:
“If the Sixties and early Seventies were, at least in part, periods of disillusionment, the late Seventies and Eighties brought a process of re-illusionment,” the film critic J. Hoberman wrote in Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (2019).
Hoberman’s book braids together the political, cultural, and cinematic threads of the 1970s and ’80s, using Reagan’s rise from B-list actor to governor of California to president of the United States as a guiding timeline. For Hoberman, movies like Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) represent not just a difference in artistic vision, but also a rift in philosophies that set the tone for national cinema. “Two kinds of filmmaking passed each other. . . . Nashville was intellectual and exclusive, Jaws visceral and populist; Nashville looked back to the 1960s, Jaws ahead to the 1980s,” Hoberman wrote. Jammed in the middle of these two divergent paths were films that tried to put a nation’s anxiety on the big screen. But that movement was short-lived, and the conspiratorial cinema from Pakula, Pollack, and Coppola was eventually metabolized by an industry and a country willing to forget the bad times.
- on Éric Rohmer:
The moral of the story is not that it’s okay to fudge the truth a bit with your spouse in order to keep the peace. What interests Rohmer is the insincerity of Jean-Louis, a sneakily unsavory character who professes to be a hidebound moralist and then regularly updates his moral calculus whenever it behooves him to. This might be lost on viewers who reflexively want to equate Jean-Louis’s Catholicism with de facto moral uprightness, but others might be watching through their fingers. Identification with a Rohmerian protagonist is always a dangerous business. He/She’s just like me fr fr quickly turns into, oh God, am I really like that? What makes Rohmer’s movies work as well as they do is their gentleness toward human foibles (even the predatory behavior of the adults in Claire’s Knee (1970), who if anything he probably goes a little too easy on). The value in watching (and rewatching) Rohmer isn’t to get tidy lessons in right and wrong, nor even to learn how the world works necessarily, but to risk a bit of self-knowledge by seeing recognizable virtues and vices reflected back at you by an artist who approaches the human condition with endless curiosity rather than contempt.
[Rohmer was one of the subjects of Movies across the decades in WRB—May 2023 Film Supplement. He doesn’t express any open contempt for awful men in Claire’s Knee, but in La collectionneuse (1967) he really lets them have it. —Steve]
Alan Jacobs on sex and Cat People (1942):
One last point, on a related matter. In the Lewton horror films of the Forties, there are several characters like Irena [in Cat People] (Simone Simon): let’s call this type the Unsuitable Wife, the woman who blocks the male lead from marrying the Normal Woman he loves and is obviously meant for. Oliver (Kent Smith) can’t marry sexy Alice (Jane Randolph) as long as sexless Irena is in the way. (The locus classicus for this theme is obviously Jane Eyre.)
A different version of the same problem appears in I Walked with a Zombie (1943): poor Paul (Tom Conway) is clearly attracted to his wife’s nurse, but how to get rid of the wife? She’s a zombie, after all. Can’t have sex, or even companionship, with a zombie, and murdering her would be complicated—as well as immoral, of course. Jessica is not a zombie in the George Romero sense, but nevertheless is locked away in her own wing of a compound, sort of like Ed at the end of Shaun Of The Dead (2005) but not as much fun.
[I Walked with a Zombie shares with Jane Eyre the association of the Unsuitable Wife with the Caribbean. (I wonder if Jean Rhys had seen it.) —Steve]
- on what David Lynch taught him about art:
One of the things Lynch did for me, with his particularly distinctive and aggressive style, was to permanently cure me of any lingering notions that TV and film are sort of illustrated audiobooks, showing us in a basically neutral way what happens in the script. Lynch, because he is a genius stylist but also a very aggressive stylist, forces even an inexperienced viewer to realize that the way events are filmed is everything: camera placement, composition, blocking, color, lighting, sound, music, can tell us as much or more about the import of a scene or the relationships between characters and events as the dialogue or plot. Imagine that in the record player scene above, when Maddie (Sheryl Lee) moves to the couch, the camera follows her and frames the actors in a cozy three-shot, or follows a shot–reverse shot pattern. That would be a completely appropriate technique for a certain kind of scene, but it would not remotely be the same scene, affectively or narratively, even if every word of the script was the same. The reasons why these moments work as they do are mysterious, but the effect is direct and undeniable. As David Foster Wallace wrote in the aforementioned essay: “[Blue Velvet’s (1986)] obvious ‘themes’ . . . were for us less revelatory than the way the movie's surrealism and dream-logic felt: they felt true, real.”
[While reading this I suddenly realized that the work of art that did the most to reveal to me how art works and how to think about it is “To His Coy Mistress.” (Specifically, a dramatic reading of it by my English teacher senior year of high school.) I then realized that this explains at least two-thirds of what is wrong with me. —Steve]
Reviews:
In Liberties, Robert Rubsam reviews Nickel Boys (2024):
Nickel Boys proceeds at the speed of his attention, a gaze which can be shy, curious, defensive, creative. Through him we see playgrounds, card games, kitchens, classrooms, a Malickian montage of private life lived against the backdrop of history and nature. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) notices especially those small details which a more typical narrative would excise as insignificant—a puddle, a flipbook, a girl’s loose shoelace—and then, with the dawning consciousness of an artist, spins them into moments of imagined synchronicity: the music made by a skipping record, two women stepping in unison across a shop floor. These moments run alongside and intertwine with the brutalities of Jim Crow, but are not reliant upon them, and Elwood’s political awakening is neither distinct from nor wholly determined by the ambit of his vision. Segregated Tallahassee is both beautiful and violent, with neither zeroing out the other.
In the Times,
reviews Eephus (2025):In fact, Eephus never foregrounds any particular plot point. The screenplay, written by Lund, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, exists outside sports movie tropes altogether, though it’s most certainly a baseball movie. It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.
That makes it sound very serious, which Eephus is not. The arc is simplicity itself: The teams gather to play the game, which goes much longer than they’d expected and then, at the end, they go home. In between, the men fret, spit, argue, josh around and occasionally hit the ball. They lament the end of their ball-playing era, but whenever someone brings up just playing on the field two towns over, they loudly and flatly refuse: That field’s no good and the town is lousy, too. (Their language is slightly stronger than what I can print here.)
[The best movie I’ve seen in a theater so far this year, although I too am a New Englander with obscure and inarticulable resentments against places two towns over from where I grew up, and it was good to see my people represented. —Steve]
Reviews of books:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Geoffrey O’Brien reviews a book about Hollywood in the 1950s (Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television, by Foster Hirsch, 2023):
Even the most heroic or brilliant faced hopeless odds and irresistible cravings. The sight of John Wayne leaning on his saddle in The Searchers (1956), powerless to save his family from massacre, conveyed a pain beyond resolution. In Forbidden Planet (1956), Walter Pidgeon, as the marooned space explorer Dr. Morbius, could only murmur disconsolately “My poor Krell . . . ” upon grasping that the ancient superintelligent inhabitants of Altair-IV were annihilated by their unleashed unconscious urges—“Monsters from the Id!”—and sensing that his own repressions were putting his daughter in mortal danger. (In this outer space recasting of The Tempest, Prospero was Caliban.)
Women fell apart too, but under different kinds of pressure. Age, to begin with: Bette Davis spent most of All About Eve (1950) preoccupied with her age (she was forty-two at the time), while Gloria Swanson (at fifty) retreated into delusion rather than face her decrepitude in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Stars of the Thirties and Forties were cast in deglamorized vehicles—Loretta Young as a housewife endangered by her psychotic husband in Cause for Alarm! (1951), Esther Williams as a sexually harassed schoolteacher in The Unguarded Moment (1956), Merle Oberon as the driver responsible for a hit-and-run accident in The Price of Fear (1956)—roles calling chiefly for various stages of panic. Their male counterparts (John Wayne, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable) maintained an undiminished status.
[Prospero was always Caliban (and, to be fair to him, Ariel)—“this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Thames, Alex Harvey reviews a collection about Powell and Pressburger (The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, edited by Claire Smith and Nathalie Morris, 2023):
The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death (1946) anticipates The Red Shoes (1948), with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet about a girl who is punished for surrendering to the lure of the Red Shoes is mirrored by a realist narrative, the story of an ambitious young dancer, Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), whose identity merges with the role she creates for the impresario Boris Lermontov, played to perfection by [Anton] Walbrook. Fantasy and realism permeate each other: Grishcha, Lermontov’s choreographer, becomes the mischievous Shoemaker; Vicky’s arrival at the wind-blown steps of Lermontov’s deserted villa is echoed by her fairy-tale entrance in the ballet. Powell in particular enjoyed collaborating with artists from different disciplines, and the dancers and choreographers in The Red Shoes—Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine and Robert Helpmann—play versions of themselves. Pressburger based the character of Lermontov on Diaghilev, but it also has elements of the imperious Korda, as well as both himself and Powell. “I live cinema,” Powell told the French director Bertrand Tavernier. “I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from this time on, my memories almost coincide with the history of the cinema . . . I am cinema. I grew up with and through the cinema.”
[The Red Shoes was the subject of Movies across the decades in the inaugural Film Supplement.]
N.B.:
Polaroids from the New Hollywood.
Jason Statham’s jobs in movies.
Soil in film.
Some ideas to revive the movie theater:
From selling pot along with popcorn to offering cellphone-friendly screenings, cinema owners could soon overhaul the way their customers watch films. These changes, many of them once considered sacrilegious, may give the box office a much-needed boost.
[No. Absolutely not. —Steve]
Val Kilmer died on Tuesday, April 1. R.I.P.
In The Ringer, Rob Harvilla:
Val Kilmer as the most smoldering bank robber in world history in 1995’s Heat, smolderingly firing that machine gun like he was born with it, though for me it’s the far quieter moment when Robert De Niro calmly explains the whole tough-guy premise of the movie to him—Don’t let yourself get attached to anything that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner, et cetera—and Val’s soft, smoldering reply is “For me the sun rises and sets with her.” Everyone in my packed theater leaned forward to hear him better.
In The Bulwark, Sonny Bunch:
The cast of Heat is no less impressive, though more succinctly summed up: Pacino vs. De Niro. And yes, both De Niro and Pacino deliver master class–caliber performances. But again, in this movie about alpha men and their relationship both to excellence at crime and incompetence at home, Kilmer is the bleeding heart of the film. He’s the one criminal who is able actually to fulfill Neil McCauley’s (De Niro) axiom: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Few moments in film are as heartbreaking as when Kilmer’s Chris clocks his wife giving him the “run” signal and his face shifts from loving relief to the cold realization he’ll never see them again. As much as everyone loves the physicality Kilmer demonstrates in the Hollywood shootout scene—and as great as that is—it’s this moment of face-work that demonstrated why he was one of the best.
Movies across the decades:
Tombstone (dir. George P. Cosmatos, 1993)
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