WRB—Aug. 2024 Film Supplement

The Lady Scarlett

They say a moonlit deck is a Managing Editor’s business office.

Links:

• In Liberties, David Thomson on Humphrey Bogart crossing the street:

  Or maybe the director Howard Hawks thought, Well, if this fellow is going to cross the street, we need a little extra to fill the time. Get me a dash of thunder, will you? Like putting mustard on a hotdog. But then perhaps the man in the fedora queried the director: Tell me, why am I crossing this street? And Hawks could have answered, Well, we need enough visual to make room for the thunder—and I like to watch you walk.

  We are attending to The Big Sleep (1946), from the Raymond Chandler novel. This actor is Humphrey Bogart and he is playing Philip Marlowe, the private eye. Marlowe is on a case, so you’d assume that this street scene has to be significant—don’t we know that movies are loaded with all the big things about to happen? Isn’t it the rule on screen that every last thing is vital? The details are clues, and that’s how we are always the private eye. The process of a story is us finding something out, and over fifty years or so that became claustrophobic—as if every damn detail was weighing on us. The visual is so single-minded as a construct. It can’t breathe without insisting on focus and action. No one on a film set ever called out, “Inaction!” And yet there were listless streets in Los Angeles, or anywhere, where not much was happening. Certainly not enough for a movie. Think of it as life.

• In Public Books, Michael Szalay on Miyazaki’s reckoning with Japanese militarism:

  Miyazaki’s tonally complex, incipiently political relation to flight comes to a head in The Wind Rises. The 2013 film focuses on famed engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Imperial Navy fighter planes, the Zero in particular, which Miyazaki has said “represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of—they were a truly formidable presence.” He elsewhere added, “Horikoshi was the most gifted man of his time in Japan”; “He wasn’t thinking about weapons—really all he desired was to make exquisite planes.” Such statements generated critical backlash. But although the film is indeed besotted with its gorgeous war machines, Wind is deeply equivocal when seeming to idealize them.

  Wind does not entirely exonerate Jiro, who does briefly think about weapons. “Who are they going to bomb with it?” he asks a fellow engineer about his bomber. The answer: “China. Russia. Britain. The Netherlands. America.” In distress, it seems, Jiro responds, “Japan will blow up.” The engineer reassures, “We’re not arms merchants. We just want to build good aircraft.” Jiro remains silent, and it’s entirely unclear how the film wants us to feel about his moral blinker.

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Muriel Zagha reviews Full Moon in Paris (1984):

  Nevertheless, with very few exceptions, religion in Rohmer’s cinema remains submerged and is not made explicit. Though the workings of grace unfold, they are expressed under the guise of happenstance. And so, although Rohmer believes in the moral freedom to make choices, chance encounters abound in his cinema, such as at the end of The Green Ray (1986) (whose heroine reads as omens the playing cards she sometimes finds in the street) or A Tale of Winter (1992)—where a long-lost love miraculously reappears during an ordinary bus ride. Much in Full Moon in Paris appears to hinge on chance encounters, until the last scene which shows us Louise’s (Pascale Ogier) crushing downfall when she least expects it, as she walks into the trap she has set for herself. The ending provides the antidote to her delusion. It also reveals another story that has been unfolding throughout unbeknownst to Louise—and to us—though the signs were there from the beginning.

  At once a charming slice of life and an astringent crucible of morality, Full Moon in Paris holds within itself the best of Rohmer’s cinema for which another epigraph could be Schiller’s line: “Live with your century, but do not be its creature; serve your contemporaries, but give them what they need, not what they praise.”

  [The timelessness of Rohmer’s work makes it very funny whenever he sends his characters to a club, which invariably plays the worst and most era-bound pop music imaginable. —Steve]

• In Current, Dave Kehr reviews Risky Business (1983):

  Here was the repository of everything repressed in our homogeneous world: not just the cultural monuments of museums, bookstores, and first-run movie theaters, but also people of different races, classes, and ethnicities, varieties of human experience not available to the sheltered, mostly white youth of the outer ring. It was a world that could at first only be accessed with parental supervision, which automatically made it feel dangerous and very alluring. A rite of passage for every suburban teen was the first trip to the city without Mom and Dad. As intimidating as downtown could be, it also offered a glimpse of autonomy and freedom. It was, in short, a sneak preview of the pleasures of being a grown-up.

  Risky Business is structured around this metaphor, as was John Hughes’ later, and much more benign, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). But where Hughes offers a fantasy of total domination, with the city surrendering to Ferris’ (Matthew Broderick) charm and self-assurance, Brickman is characteristically much more elliptical and ambivalent. By the end of the film, Joel (Tom Cruise) will have found his place in the city, but it is a precarious, morally dubious one that requires him to sacrifice as much as he has gained.

  [As Kehr notes, this made Tom Cruise a star and not Top Gun (1986). I would say that there is a lesson here for the studios as they attempt to make anyone under the age of 40 a Movie Star, but I’m beginning to be convinced that much of the blame is also on audiences. What’s the point, if you’re running a studio, of making mid-budget movies for adults that audiences say they want if the box office receipts indicate differently? —Steve]

• In The Baffler, Moeko Fujii reviews Janet Planet (2024):

  On film, daughters often inherit ways of looking from their mothers and thus prepare themselves to be looked at. A classic scene is a daughter trying on lipstick at her mother’s vanity table mirror. But in Janet Planet, the question of orienting oneself around a partner, or around men, is not about surfaces. “I know I’m not that beautiful,” Janet (Julianne Nicholson) tells Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) one night as they lie awake. “But I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.” “Can you stop?” Lacy asks, and clarifies: “Stop trying.” To stop trying would mean to exist in a world simply of Lacy and her mother, and while that is a full life for Lacy, it is not enough for Janet. The desires of mother and daughter diverge—a necessary asymmetry, difficult in any kind of love.

• In our sister publication in the City of Angels, Torsa Ghosal reviews Monkey Man (2024):

  But Monkey Man’s extended engagement with the Rāmāyaṇa is distinctive—if perhaps not in the way Patel intends. While at first glance the presence of Hanuman-related iconography in a revenge drama featuring a South Asian lead could come across as a typical Hollywood attempt to capture a broader audience by expanding on-screen cultural representation, Patel is undertaking a more complicated task. No artwork drawing upon the Rāmāyaṇa can ignore the epic’s functions in the political sphere, and Patel’s film doesn’t pretend to be agnostic. It’s clear that Monkey Man is trying to free Hindu iconography from the death grip of the divisive Hindutva regime. But the reclamation project turns out to be a fraught one since the film recruits various myths and symbols without detaching them from the hypermasculine angst that characterizes their usage in Hindutva propaganda. Monkey Man simply locates the fictional right-wing Saffron leaders as the morally corrupt Others, criminals culpable for the death of the protagonist’s mother and, therefore, deserving targets of his rage and retribution campaign. In this way, the film actually extends the logic of reactionary violence it attempts to refute.

• Two in our sister publication across the pond: first, Michael Wood reviews The Beast (2024):

  Beneath all these antics is the sketch of a sentimental anti-bot story, a tale about being human, a defense of feeling and individuality at all costs. But the sense finally created by the film, by our living for a couple of hours with Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), is rather different, closer to speculative fiction than science fiction. The preoccupation with what may happen in the midst of what does happen seems very relevant, and if this interest is often an obstacle or deviance in ordinary life, it is also the full-time job of many writers and filmmakers. In the movie we see a lot of what James called the jungle of human life, the paths in the vegetation, the escape routes taken or missed, and we face or fail to face the knowledge that some people have no life except in this unliveable world.

Reviews of books:

• Second, David Trotter reviews a book about war on film (The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, by David Thomson, 2023):

  “In two world wars,” he observes, “the American homeland was calm; its industry thrived; its stories swelled in grandeur. But it longs to be the leader and a star in war studies. So America has had few rivals in the making of exciting war movies, or in the ingenuity and expressiveness of its military expenditure.” Thomson has always been as interested in the way films are made as he is in their appearance on the screen, and he gets down to business with some intriguing thoughts about the ways in which the process and scheduling of a film might seem to resemble the “order of battle.” Both require advance planning, a firm control of logistics, and, above all, an absolute faith in the ability of the various members of the “unit”—task force, or cast and crew—to work together to get the job done.

  [All films are about the process of filmmaking, if you think about it. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a book about the sci-fi movies of 1982 (The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, by Chris Nashawaty, July) [The Upcoming book in WRB—July 27, 2024.]:

  Such is Nashawaty’s command of superlatives that he merits a sci-fi yarn of his own. The Optimizer, perhaps. Or The Hyphenator. Thus, Star Wars (1977) is lauded as “a true once-in-a-generation pop-culture juggernaut,” while the triumph of The Wrath of Khan (1982) was to turn “a cash-grab sequel into a franchise-resuscitating classic.” Far from scorning this excitable tic, I find it both judicious and contagious; the book’s parsing of Halloween (1978) as “a babysitter-in-peril slashterpiece” is hard to quibble with, and I wonder what other paragons of the medium would profit from so crisp a paraphrase. Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972)? A crimson-tinged, don’t-hold-back Scandi cancerthon. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)? A chat-free high-stakes teen roast. Once you slip into the habit, you can’t stop.

N.B.:

• Interviews: 

  • with Nicolas Cage.

  • with Mia Goth.

  • with Viggo Mortensen. [I’m happy he’s keeping the faith that movies should be released in movie theaters. —Steve]

  • with Glen Powell. [I’m happy he’s keeping the faith that one really good romantic comedy could revive the genre. I’m less optimistic. Anyone But You (2023) (which, to be fair, isn’t better than “fine”) was lucky to be released in the doldrums of late December so it could compete against nothing in January and February. —Steve]

  • with a storm chaser about Twisters (2024).

• Keanu Reeves and China Miéville wrote a novel.

  • This isn’t the first time an actor has done so.

• An oral history of the Garden State (2004) soundtrack.

• Robert Towne died on Monday, July 1. R.I.P.

• Jon Landau died on Friday, July 5. R.I.P.

• Shelley Duvall died on Thursday, July 11. R.I.P.

  • Sheila O'Malley
    on her approach to acting:

    Shelley Duvall was brilliant in that she was able to be as unself-conscious, as raw, as HERSELF, when the camera was rolling as she was in her real life. There was no difference for her. It’s like she roller-skated into the frame from offscreen and there was no boundary between the two sides. Something happens to people—even very very good actors—when they hear “action”. You go from being a real person to an actor playing a scene. There’s a little interior “click” that happens. Shelley Duvall didn’t experience that click.

  • Keith Phipps
    on her performance in 3 Women (1977):

    Here’s one way to read Duvall’s story: She was plucked from obscurity and molded into a star by a director who saw a quality in her nobody else did, not even herself. But that’s not how Altman saw it. Altman loved actors but he frequently spoke of disliking acting, by which he meant performances that felt like performances rather than human behavior observed by his restless camera. “She was Grandma Moses,” Altman says of Duvall on a commentary track he recorded for 3 Women in 2003. “She was such an untrained, truthful person.” She was not, in other words, clay to be shaped. She was just there, waiting to be found.

• Shannen Doherty died on Saturday, July 13. 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:

Dìdi (dir. Sean Wang, July 26)

It is shockingly unpleasant to be reminded what it is like to be a 13-year-old boy. One moment here stands out for its insight into their self-centered perversity; Chris (Izaac Wang) is in the first stages of realizing that his mother (Joan Chen) is a real person, with the same desires and fears and hopes as anyone else. He uses this knowledge to scream at her exactly what he has realized will hurt her most. And yes, her life hasn’t gone how she would like—her husband works in another country and is basically never home, her dream of being a painter has never gone anywhere—but what does a 13-year-old know about disappointment?

While Chris comes around to appreciating his mother he lives the life of a 13-year-old in 2008—Myspace is still around, young people actually used Facebook, and everyone is constantly in chatrooms. Chris isn’t the kind of kid who can escape into a world he finds online, and his attempt to parlay some YouTube videos he made into filming older kids’ skateboarding tricks is a disaster from the start. The Internet isn’t an alternate life; it’s just where his life takes place when he isn’t physically with his friends. There’s a sweetness to it that in 2024 reads as naïve; but it was a different time, and the instant communication the Internet makes possible feels almost magic here. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to learn how to kiss from YouTube videos was very heaven.

Fly Me to the Moon (dir. Greg Berlanti, July 12)

[This movie does not quite meet my standard of quality for Steve’s larks—it should be at the top of The rest—but I have bumped it up to show my support for the romantic comedy. The last one before this to get a wide theatrical release came out in December. If we don’t go see them they’ll stop making them. Don’t let them take the romcom away from us. —Steve]

In a better world than this one Scarlett Johansson would have revived the screwball heroine a while back—she was born for it—instead of getting around to being the lead in a romantic comedy two decades into her acting career as an adult.

[For more on screwball commentary on what America is and needs, see Movies across the decades below.]

The rest:

The Bikeriders (dir. Jeff Nichols, June 21)

Every review mentions how desperate this is to be Goodfellas (1990), and every review is right to do so. And the movie wants the audience to know this too—why else have in the first minute a freeze-frame in the middle of violence, while a woman who sounds a bit like Lorraine Bracco as Karen Hill explains the situation? This strategy has its advantages; Goodfellas is a great movie with many things worth stealing. It also has its disadvantages; Goodfellas is a great movie, and so anything stolen from it is likely to end up as an inferior copy.

The Bikeriders never does answer the question “why should I be watching this instead of Goodfellas?” but it’s still fun. Austin Butler is tasked with looking hot and confused and is very capable of that; he is a man torn between the dictates of domesticity his girlfriend (Jodie Comer) would like him to follow and the sense of purpose he only feels on a bike and with the motorcycle club under Johnny’s (Tom Hardy) leadership. This is all very innocent at the start—Johnny’s main motivation to start the club was seeing The Wild One (1953) on TV and thinking Marlon Brando looked cool—but, as the ’60s go on and Vietnam comes home, they all discover that while the club is freedom, it’s also a trap. (This attempt at linking its plot with the state of America is, to be fair to this movie, something Goodfellas does not do.) Eventually there’s a lot of violence; things get sorted out; life goes on, but it’s never really the same. Just like Goodfellas.

Thelma (dir. Josh Margolin, June 21)

Rarely is a film so overt about using a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The spoonful of sugar is the plot; 93-year-old Thelma (June Squibb) goes on a quest to get back $10,000 scammers stole from her, in the process doing—by the standards of a 93-year-old woman—daring and exciting stunts, many of which involve a motorized scooter. She is assisted in this by her elderly friend Ben (Richard Roundtree (R.I.P.), and the five decades between Shaft (1971) and this have not made him any less cool), and the two of them get to act like Tom Cruise and the person feeding him instructions in his earpiece—they have Wi-Fi-connected hearing aids that do the job.

The medicine is everything that happens in the background while Thelma and Ben are off hunting down the scammers. Her daughter (Parker Posey, playing what could be a middle-aged version of some of her more iconic ’90s roles) is desperately trying to find her while proposing to the rest of the family that the sudden disappearance of a 93-year-old who just fell victim to a scam means she shouldn’t be living alone anymore. Thelma’s grandson (Fred Hechinger) doesn’t have much going for him in life and has thrown himself into caring for her; her disappearance on his watch makes him feel like he’s failed at absolutely everything. The assisted living facility wants to know where Ben is. Yes, it all amounts to a plea for intergenerational understanding; but most of those don’t have the panache to include an old woman crashing a motorized scooter at high speed.

Twisters (dir. Lee Isaac Chung, July 19)

The charm of Twister (1996) is its complete lack of restraint. It is a movie that dares to diegetically play “Child in Time,” the William Tell Overture, and “Oklahoma” at the same time as the chasers ride off in pursuit of a tornado. It would be wrong to call Twister a good movie, and yet it works, because whenever it finds something good (Philip Seymour Hoffman, the humiliation of Jami Gertz as intruder in this comedy of remarriage) it shamelessly returns to it over and over again.

Twisters, which is under the impression that what America missed about big studio movies from the ’90s was their stolid competence, does not do that. Glen Powell is fine. Daisy Edgar-Jones is fine. Their chemistry is fine. Everything is fine. This movie made launching fireworks into a tornado boring because, compared to Twister, it is boring. As if to rub it into viewers’ faces that it misunderstood the assignment, there is no kiss at the end. Apparently Steven Spielberg, executive producer, is responsible for this; Edgar-Jones says “it stops the film feeling too clichéd.” Pass over whether summer blockbusters should be adverse to clichés and look at what piling up the clichés can do; it gave the world Casablanca (1942). Steven Spielberg, who should know better, piled up the clichés and gave the world Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Is it more clichéd than Twisters? Yes. It’s also better.

Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 (dir. Kevin Costner, June 28)

Kevin Costner has the eye of a director of motion pictures and the mind of a man who has spent the last several years working on a television miniseries. This might be the first three hour-long installments of something; in the context of a movie, it feels like the first half hour of six different Westerns, passable on their own, prevented from going anywhere by the format, and so a slog. (It doesn’t help that the bravura of an Apache raid occurs very early on.) It also quickly becomes clear why Costner needs twelve hours for this project; he is responding to past criticism of the Western that it glosses over many people who made the West in order to focus on white men, and his response is to include every single person, place, and thing in the West he can think of. How these six first half hours will come together in later chapters is no secret—all of these people are going to Horizon, which is both the name of a town and a place you can never get to, because as you approach it it keeps moving away from you! Get it? Get it? Ain’t that America?

Kill (dir. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, July 4)

America needs a better class of action movie watchers—at least, it needs them to stop comparing any movie in which one guy kills a lot of other guys to John Wick, as if that were the only important feature of that franchise. Yes, the hero (Lakshya) goes on a rampage killing those responsible for the death of his girl (Tanya Maniktala), and the way he fights up and down a train for two hours comes up with clever ways to use the setting (even if it smacks of Bullet Train (2022), which isn’t good company). But Bhat loves not his artistry but his brutality. There is no dancing here.

Touch (dir. Baltasar Kormákur, July 12)

It’s fine for a tearjerker like this to be a bit manipulative—if you’re telling a story about an old man, Kristófer, (Egill Ólafsson; Palmi Kormakur as a young man) trying to find his first love, Miko, (Yoko Narahashi; Kōki as a young woman) decades after her father (Masahiro Motoki) took her halfway around the world to end their relationship, you’ve committed to that approach. But the real manipulation here is the false nobility applied to the Boomer zeitgeist; while on this quest Kristófer keeps ignoring phone calls from his daughter. And its love for the Boomer self-conception is nauseating. This is not a film content to use “Give Peace a Chance” diegetically; it then needs Miko to say that Kristófer reminds her of John Lennon.

Kinds of Kindness (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, June 21)

In his review of A Clockwork Orange (1971) Roger Ebert wrote “Alex (Malcolm McDowell) has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization, and not by creeping fascism—but by the producer, director, and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick.” In a similar way, the characters in this film have been made into sexually perverse abusive tyrants and sexually perverse hopeless neurotics not by anything in their souls and not by any societal phenomena but by the co-producer, director, and co-writer of this film, Yorgos Lanthimos.

Critical notes:

• W. David Marx on Rocky IV (1985) and cultural relics:

  Debates about the causes of twenty-first century cultural stasis always begin by blaming the economy and technology: monopolistic control of the media industry, the hollowing out of the middle class, rising health care costs, algorithmic feeds, the proliferation of media-making tools, etc. These are certainly legitimate factors and set the horizon for our social activity. Yet Rocky IV makes it clear that stasis also must involve how artists think about production. In 1985, Stallone made most choices as director that broke with pre-Eighties filmmaking techniques, and unfortunately for him, very few of these radical decisions became conventional in the future. He swung, and he missed. Compare that with original Rocky (1976) director John G. Avildsen who chose to do his film as a grainy, naturalistic underdog story. Both are products of their times, but the original is canonical, while part four is famous as the world’s most dated film.

  But Stallone was doing what a lot of twentieth century artists felt was their core responsibility: pursuing bold aesthetics. He operated from a vague avant-garde mindset of wanting to make something that felt au courant. A major part of cultural stasis, then, may stem from most artists refusing to embrace contemporary aesthetic choices.

Movies across the decades:

The Lady Eve (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941), Fly Me to the Moon (dir. Greg Berlanti, 2024)