Pay no attention to that Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books behind the curtain!
Links:
In Lit Hub, an excerpt from Tim Robey’s book about Hollywood flops (Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops, November) about Babe: Pig in the City (1998):
“That’ll do, pig” from Farmer Hoggett was the first film’s motto, but when it’s trotted out at the end here, with Babe safely back at the farm, it plainly doesn’t work. Our pig’s various acts of kindness, such as saving the bull terrier and goldfish from near-certain death, have gone without human notice at any stage. If Babe’s (1995) a round hole, with its human-porcine teamwork, Pig in the City is far too square a peg to get away with the pretense that it’s about the same things. It’s about other things instead—mainly, the heroism of lending a hand when there’s no one watching.
None of these considerations caused it to flop, though. Beyond the poorly planned release and too-late flurries of studio panic—over legitimate issues that ought to have been addressed far sooner—it conveys so little desire to mollify its intended audience that they blatantly smelled a rat. Particularly in the US, newspaper reports raising eyebrows at lofty ambitions (“Felliniesque,” “much darker in tone”) rarely fail to put off wary consumers, who paid more attention to the bad press hounding the film than the decent clutch of impassioned reviews. It fared better abroad—but not nearly well enough to erase the taint of a serious failure.
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Beatrice Loayza on Catherine Breillat:
Marie (Caroline Ducey), in Romance (1999), seems to speak for many of Breillat’s heroines when, at the end of the film’s rape scene, she cries out: “I’m not ashamed, asshole!”
That line can be read as defiant. But rewatching the film after reading Ducey’s testimony, it feels closer to contrived—an exquisite abstraction designed to fulfill Breillat’s dream of a world in which women aren’t torn down by the sexual impulses of pitiful men. In reality, there are reasons to feel ambivalent about sex that have nothing to do with internalized misogyny. Some traumas can’t be overcome simply by asserting strength; willing oneself to say they “meant nothing” could also cause them to fester. Breillat’s films themselves indicate that such feelings might be throbbing under the icy surfaces of her characters’ self-control. In this sense she is one of our last true Hitchcockians, perversely fascinated by the fragility of personal autonomy even as she insists on the need to shore it up.
In The American Conservative, Nic on John Simon:
And he believed realism would ultimately save film. “There is one quality that more than any other could help revitalize the cinema: believableness,” he wrote as he looked around disapprovingly at the blockbusters in 1990. “Characters in films must re-establish contact with social, economic, and political realities even where film style is non- or anti-realistic.”
When Simon found a movie that achieved “believableness,” he would gush about it just as much as Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael would go on about their own hobby-horses. One such film, oddly, was Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which Simon praised because, unlike Allen’s earlier efforts, it was a serious affair which dared to present a world that Simon seemed to believe was true: “There is no justice, no rhyme or reason in the universe, no God.” The review is the best essay ever written on Allen, made all the better by the enmity between director and critic.
In The New Yorker, Richard Brody on Virginia Tracy, who briefly reviewed movies in 1918 and 1919:
She expressed frustration with movies that did little but tell a story clearly and efficiently, however skillfully and professionally, and she considered such films to involve unwonted borrowings from theatre, by way of “the economy and unity of the play form.” To wit: “We can’t help scenting a danger in this complete competency of stagecraft, so compact, so firm, so balanced, moving so evenly and yet suspensively toward a climax which has not a loose thread, every incident constructive and yet naturally stressed.” Though she considered Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) a summit of the art, she criticized his direction of True Heart Susie (1919): “We were too conscious of him standing a little between us and the picture and pointing out, a trifle too emphatically, its funniness, its pathos, its simplicity, as though a hand were occasionally laid upon the continuity and we became aware of a voice saying: ‘Just a minute! Hold that till they notice how true this is and how lovely is its homeliness.’” In particular, she reproached his direction of Lillian Gish’s performance: “Everything you insist upon an actress’s doing may be admirable and yet the mere insistence may give her an air of being stage-managed to death.”
Reviews:
In The Ringer, Adam Nayman reviews Gladiator (2000):
Getting the script right is the crucial point here. Scott’s poetic eye is real, but so is his dependence on sturdy dramaturgy. When he doesn’t have good material, his obsessive perfectionism curdles into indulgence; he can seem less like an auteur than a sort of spendthrift journeyman. Meanwhile, the idea of Sir Ridley as some sort of uncompromising auteur is, at best, double-edged and increasingly dubious given his own views on the matter. “There isn’t a ‘them and us’ as far as I’m concerned,” Scott told Interview in 2001. “I have enormous respect for the studios—they’re paying me to have a jolly good time making my vision of what we’ve agreed on. All creative minds have to deal with the people who are paying the bills.”
On one level, Scott is simply being honest about the tension between art and commerce endemic to mainstream moviemaking. On another, he’s admitting that, for all its visionary qualities, his work ultimately and willingly serves the bottom line. The contradiction of an iconoclast who is also a company man is fascinating, especially in light of the themes of rebellion and nonconformity that punctuate Scott’s films, which often focus on conflicts between individuals and institutions.
- reviews Gladiator II (2024):
Then it’s the fighting, which is, after all, why we bought tickets to see this movie. First-off the gladiators battle a troop of bizarre mansized hairless baboons, all of whom can open their hideously-befanged jaws reeaallly wide. What species these simians are is not disclosed to us, but they struck me as in many ways more promising gladiators than the humans they fought. Really, the movie should have given them armour, shields and swords and had them take on the might of Rome, voiced, perhaps, by Robbie Williams. Gladi-ape-r. At any rate Mescal beats the lead baboon by biting it on its wrist, which seems a bit lame. Then it’s off to the actual Colosseum to fight humans, first in the dusty arena, then on boats, the arena being flooded to provide a suitably watery medium, and sharks bussed-in from Jaws (1975) (“you’re going to need a navis maior” etc.), then in the dusty arena again. One of the fights involves an adversary mounted upon an enormous, blood-thirsty Rhinoceros, genus Rappus Rhinoceros HippusHopaPotamus. Hanno defeats the beast by standing in its way as it charges straight at him, throwing dust in the air to confuse it, and jumping aside so that the rhino smashes into the wall and breaks his nasus, which is a rather Looney Tunes maneuver, frankly. He might as well have painted a false tunnel arch on the Colosseum walls and have the rhino run at that. Wilius Coyotus et Cursor Viae.
In ,
reviews Anora (2024):There’s a surface reading of this film that the Russian family is merely monstrous. And, sure, they are: Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) treats Ani (Mikey Madison) like a plaything, casually breaking her hopes and dreams like a Ninja Turtle action figure that has reached the end of its usefulness. But the fact remains that Ani herself is a gold-digger. She may have feelings for Ivan, but what she really has feelings for is a way out of her squalor, a way into a better life. She is, in her own way, childish and childlike: when Toros (Karren Karagulian) describes her as an escort, she goes into a screaming rage. She thinks their (hasty, inebriated) marriage is inviolable and she is owed some fantastic sum to dissolve it because that’s how she believes the game is played. But again, this is a child’s understanding of the rules. She doesn’t even understand which league she’s playing in, a fact that Ivan’s mother makes very clear once they meet.
Again, none of this means we can’t sympathize with Ani. But she can be both sympathetic and fundamentally mistaken. Sympathizing with her does not require ignoring that her own choices in life are what brought her to this moment.
In Angelus, Joseph Joyce reviews Heretic (2024):
Hugh Grant, for his part, has spent most of the last 30 years stammering and charming his way into American hearts and increasingly larger houses. Now in the back nine of his career, he has decided to weaponize and thus destroy that goodwill. His last several roles have flipped the rock on the persona to reveal the dirty old man beneath, which such mannerisms usually disguise. After all those weddings he’s finally getting to the funeral, and it’s more fun than he’s had in years.
Grant is the best part of the film, a charming rake even when the story inevitably plunges into bloody Hell. As it turns out, Reed isn’t interested in conversation as much as an . . . experiment, where he will decide once and for all if his own theory on religion passes muster.
In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, Grant acted out iconic horror-movie lines as if they were romantic-comedy dialogue, adding a delighted grin to “Hello, Clarice” and cooing “The power of Christ compels you” as if it were a pickup line. But his performance in Heretic suggests there’s less daylight between the genres than one might assume. Like a bumbling rom-com lead, a horror-movie baddie often uses the appearance of vulnerability to get his prey to lower their guard.
- reviews Hundreds of Beavers (2024):
Filmed in splattery black-and-white, with no dialogue besides grunts, screams, and “ . . . huh??” sounds, peppered with visuals like intertitles and iris lens effects, Hundreds of Beavers is a throwback to silent film era comedies. There’s one moment stolen from a Mack Sennett Keystone Cops short as well as a “riff” on Buster Keaton’s famous falling-house stunt. These are homages, but without the overly respectful tone you often see in homages. Paying respect to a former time is different from inhabiting the former time to such a degree it doesn’t seem “former” at all. The “former” time required skill in pantomime, slapstick, timing . . . tricks of the trade used by performers in the teens and 20s of the twentieth century, tools gained through years in vaudeville, and which were inheritances from commedia dell’arte, a legacy throughline. This is a lost tradition. People don’t “come up” that way anymore.
But the cast of Hundreds of Beavers seem as though they did come up this way. It’s a reminder that the old bits are the best bits because they have withstood the test of time. Some schtick comes out of a tradition 500, 600 years old. This shit worked across cultures and across millennia, in some cases. Slipping on a banana peel is a classic for a reason (it shows up here, as well, in a funny comment on the initial idea. Things go so poorly for our hero he can’t even do the ol’ slip-on-a-banana-peel correctly).
N.B.:
Netflix and Lifetime Christmas movies are sexy now. [They should make one about a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. —Steve]
A history of movie posters.
Should you sit until the credits have finished rolling?
More on historical accuracy in Gladiator II.
Jim Abrahams died on Tuesday, November 26. R.I.P.
Marshall Brickman died on Friday, November 29. 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, alas. Go watch Hundreds of Beavers, which is back in select theaters this week. —Steve]
The rest:
Heretic (dir. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, November 8)
Hugh Grant’s tour of villainy has brought him to weaponizing his charm in the service of Reddit atheism. And the charm helps him trap two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) in his house so that he can get to the real point of Reddit atheism: haranguing young women about why they’re wrong. (And if that necessitates playing psychological games to demonstrate superior intellect, so much the better.) As a film of ideas it doesn’t really have any—anyone who has spent some time online in the past two decades knows all the moves in a debate like this, and there’s no imagination to add any more. It doesn’t even have the courage of the ideas forced upon it by the concept; by the end Sister Paxton (East) is suggesting that prayer probably doesn’t work, but it’s still nice to think about other people. But the vicious treatment of the Hugh Grant persona is incisive; as Orson Welles said about Woody Allen in words that also apply to Mr. Stuttery Blinky:
Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation.
And Heretic lets the narcissism curdle. To quote Hugh Grant singing Radiohead at one point in the film: “I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo.”
Small Things Like These (dir. Tim Mielants, November 8)
Basically a silent film, both because lower-middle-class Ireland in the ’80s was a place of few words to begin with and because all the characters are types. There’s the everyman in a complicated situation (Cillian Murphy), his wife who’s worried about their position (Eileen Walsh), all the kids they have, the abusive mother superior (Emily Watson), the young woman being mistreated (Zara Devlin), a desperately poor boy who appears on occasion, and so on. The plot incorporates these pieces about as you’d expect. But it’s Murphy’s movie—really, it’s Murphy’s face’s movie; his gift as an actor is an ability to make the operations of thinking visible on his face, and here he plays a man who has to seriously think about who he is and what’s important to him for the first time.
Gladiator II (dir. Ridley Scott, November 22)
A very long and drawn-out commercial for Gladiator, never more than when it puts archival footage of Russell Crowe on screen and so holds Paul Mescal to a standard he cannot meet. That all the self-righteous cant about “the dream of Rome” appears in a film directed by the director of the acid and myth-deflating Napoleon (2023) and written by the writer of that same film indicates that neither Ridley Scott nor David Scarpa has any actual ideas beyond “it’s good when movies are cool and cool things happen in them.” And that’s true—but all the cool is brought by Denzel Washington, who knows that sword-and-sandal is about hamming it up as much as possible, and Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who follow his lead as demented co-emperors to Washington’s power behind the throne.
Wicked (dir. Jon M. Chu, November 22)
Ariana Grande tries to redeem two hours and 45 minutes of inexplicable back-lighting, dance numbers with no understanding of what parts of the dancers need to be in frame, and an overwhelming desire to explain every little bit of lore.
[For more on how the animating spirit of this movie fails to understand why The Wizard of Oz (1939) is successful, see Movies across the decades below. —Steve]
Red One (dir. Jake Kasdan, November 15)
The Puritans liked to declare days of fasting and humiliation on December 25 to prove a point. It would be good to have one specifically for everyone involved with this.
Critical notes:
There are probably more good movie critics than there have ever been, just as there are more good movies being released than there have ever been. The problem is finding them. The film scene itself has altered irretrievably since the days of print media when a film opened, was reviewed, provoked a discussion, and we were all on the same page, so to speak. Even if there still existed a kind of central clearinghouse of major newspapers and magazines, cinema itself has proliferated beyond the scope of such gatekeepers.
At one end of the spectrum, there are the superhero films that can fend for themselves, and at the other, the explosion of streaming titles—that endless disgorging of “product” less dependent on the authority of critics than on the buzz of the internet populace. Who can begrudge such a cornucopia, which of course includes many gems? But somewhere in between, you find (if you’re lucky) the lesser-known talents and lower-profile films. It is these films—the esoterica made by directors who are rarely household names, along with the more familiar art-house cinema of veteran auteurs, that desperately need the mediation of critics.
Movies across the decades:
The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), Wicked (dir. Jon M. Chu, November 22)
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