This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel managing to edit the Washington Review of Books. I’m Phil Connors, so long.
Links:
In Arc, Allan Appel on religion in horror:
At this moment in [Heretic (2024)], something notable happens: Grant’s voice drops an octave, and the creepy soundtrack-locks grinding, water dripping, sudden shifting house noises-all that ceases for the first time, in a genre film dependent on sound for its effects. The movie is saying, right here, Pay attention. Also gone for an instant is the manipulating, honeyed tone in Grant’s voice, as he says, in a tone that actually reveals his humanity for the first time, “Yes, to choose is horrible.”
Call me an aficionado of cinematic theological horror, of a kind in which the writer and director take enough time to limn religious positions, so that spiritual certainties can become unsettled. Such films don’t make it easy for you; they respect and elevate both faith and doubt and also suggest, strongly, that unless you can find a way to embrace a bit of each, you're headed for the basement. And except for Heretic, I can’t think of another film, certainly not in the horror genre, that has all these pleasures. So bring on the Latter-day Saint horror movies (and the Jewish, Muslim, Baptist, and Shaker). Somebody has to rescue horror from the Catholics.
[We linked to a review of Heretic in WRB—Dec. 2024 Film Supplement. As someone who grew up about half an hour from Sabbathday Lake I can confirm that it would be a good location for a horror movie. —Steve]
In The Point, Barry Schwabsky on the connection between Pasolini’s fiction and films:
It was with cinema more than fiction that Pasolini would discover a completely satisfactory poetry of presence. The dreamlike intensity of a cinematic image was, he believed, “profoundly poetic; a tree photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. Because who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself.” Already in reviewing Ragazzi di vita (1955), Fortini had perceived “a Cinerama”—that is, an ultra-widescreen film projection—“meant to convey an illusion of physicality, of truthfulness.” It’s remarkable that, at a time when linguistics, semiotics and structuralism were claiming to demystify language, Pasolini sought a way to use sign and system to reveal the transcendent. And it’s noteworthy, as well, that he take as his example of the cinematic image something as static as a tree; it’s a reminder that his cinema is one of icons more than of actions.
[We linked to a review of a translation of one of Pasolini’s novels in WRB—Oct. 21, 2023.]
Reviews:
In The Nation, Sam Adler-Bell reviews A Complete Unknown (2024):
Perhaps the movie is less like a Disney ride and more like that other lucrative Disney amusement: the superhero movie. One need not catch every reference to follow the film; but for fans of the Dylan Extended Universe, there are Easter eggs galore! When Bob buys an Acme whistle on the street several scenes before recording “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan nerds are supposed to relish the moment—there it is! The whistle! Just like on the record!—as if we’re watching Thor brandish his hammer or Captain America his shield. (This is perhaps no coincidence, given that Mangold has directed several X-Men films.)
Opinions may differ, but I don’t enjoy being infantilized in this way. “Fan service” is a sickening, adolescent ordeal. If a film aspires to be art, it cannot possibly succeed through flattery—i.e., by showing us stuff we already know. “That’s the problem with a lot of things these days,” Dylan grouses in The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022). “Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs.” The old man is right. And the same can be said for movies.
[A Complete Unknown prefers to engage with Dylan on the fan service level; it will show you the whistle in “Highway 61 Revisited,” but it will not show you “My Back Pages” as a pre-electric sign that Dylan would not be what they wanted him to be. That would have required more thought. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Andrew Katzenstein reviews Hard Truths (2024):
It’s to his credit that Hard Truths ends without a resolution. Rather than leave, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) kicks Curtley (David Webber) out of their bedroom, dumping his clothes in the hallway and making him sleep on the couch. The next day he returns home from work after suffering a possibly career-ending back injury. We don’t see whether Pansy goes downstairs to help him or whether she stays shut up in her room. Reconciliation seems impossible at this point, but so does the prospect of Pansy striking out on her own. In the cemetery she tells Chantelle (Michele Austin) that she wants her life to be different but also that she’s “so tired. . . . I just want to lie down and close my eyes.” There may be no escape for Pansy, just the pleasure of raging against her lot from time to time.
In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Grand Theft Hamlet (2025):
To an extent, Grand Theft Hamlet is picking up where Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) left off. The sight of DJPhil whipping out a shotgun, rather than a foil, reminded me instantly of the gonzo scene at a gas station in Luhrmann’s film, when the anachronism of Benvolio’s line “Put up your swords” is swept aside by a closeup of the maker’s mark on a handgun—“Sword 9mm Series S.” But Crane and Grylls, I suspect, are onto something more than the buzz of a smart historical update. Consider the moral environment of G.T.A., where cruelty is funny and where malignity, more often than not, springs from the daftest and the most fleeting of motives and leaves no lasting trace. Might that actually be near as we’re likely to get to the mood of the mob, in theatres and other pits of revelry, in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England? We may be baffled by a public that rejoiced in the baiting of bears. But what would Shakespeare’s contemporaries make of us as we sit in front of a little window, in the warmth of our own homes, and watch puppetlike people blast one another in the head?
[“Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from William Shakespeare’s perspective, would look even worse?” —Steve]
In Angelus, Joseph Joyce reviews Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (2024):
Part of their hesitation lies in wondering if they’re the butt of the joke. Between interviews with the musicians are talking head segments with critics and cultural commentators, who are all well-meaning Los Feliz types who have long lost track of the line between irony and sincerity. I am on the brink of my 30s but still cower in fear when high-schoolers laugh in my vicinity; I suspect the same dynamic is at play. When a man in a Ninja Turtles T-shirt insists you’re cool, you can’t help but speculate what curve he’s grading on.
Somewhere in the goofy name and ironic appreciation and fake mustaches, their actual artistry is lost in the shuffle. The documentary does them justice there, demonstrating their chops and how much hard work it takes to create soft rock, how much effort goes into sounding easygoing.
[“Kulee Baba / Coming your way / Every Sunday / Live from nowhere” —Steve]
N.B.:
An interview with Lucy Liu.
David Lynch died on Wednesday, January 15. R.I.P. [You could read the Times obituary linked there, but why not read instead the Bob’s Big Boy obituary:
The innovative American filmmaker is known for his visually-arresting aesthetics and non-linear storytelling. David Lynch’s films tend to either enthuse, or conversely, confuse. “You’re a madman. I love you!” said Mel Brooks. “What’s happening?” said most of the American public.
One thing everyone can agree upon is David Lynch would lunch late at 2:30pm while enjoying coffee and chocolate milkshakes at Bob’s Big Boy Burbank. The resulting buzz from the sugar and caffeine would lead to many of his ideas, which were jotted down on Bob’s Big Boy napkins.
I think Lynch would like it more. —Steve]
Erik Baker in The Nation:
Lynch’s work is unsettling precisely because it gives us the world we inhabit in ways that help us recognize it as the nightmare it so often is. The world he presents us is uncanny in the sense Freud exposited: unheimlich, un-homely. Lynch’s affection for The Wizard of Oz (1939) is well known and his art too tells us that there’s no place like home. But it is art for people who don’t realize they are in Oz, people who wrongly believe they are home when they have never really been there.
Richard Brody in The New Yorker:
Lynch, more than any filmmaker of his time, faced down carefully argued lies and reckoned with the burden of alienated identities. Many films are called revelatory and visionary, but Lynch’s films seem made to exemplify these terms. He sees what’s kept invisible and reveals what’s kept scrupulously hidden, and his visions shatter veneers of respectability to depict, in fantasy form, unbearable realities.
Manohla Dargis in the Times:
By contrast, I saw and still see these images—even the cruelest, most debased and outwardly offensive ones—as raw and unflinchingly honest. Many filmmakers try to disguise their less socially acceptable prejudices, their impolite fears, dislikes and worse, but Lynch always seemed unafraid or maybe uninterested or just unaware about what others thought of his uglier visions.
Matt Feeney in UnHerd:
At some point while watching a Lynch work, I’m typically struck with the marvelous fact that he wrote all this down. For us in the audience, simply intuiting his uncanny linkages feels vaguely miraculous: “I don’t know how, and yet I do know how.” We couldn’t reproduce this stuff in conscious terms if we tried, much less scheme it out in the first place. And yet Lynch made whole screenplays of it.
Joseph Joyce in Angelus:
Lynch also believed in such trifles like family and friendship, which is why he spent most of his films trying to destroy them. To Lynch, these things above all else held power, and threats to them were the only story that mattered. They were the bulwark against the forces of evil, and if they were broken (or, God forbid, infiltrated) then nothing stood in the path of destruction. A character in his Twin Peaks once said his greatest fear was that Love was not enough, a thought that haunts the rest of his work.
Beatrice Loayza in 4Columns:
This has less to do with his particular narrative obsessions (women in trouble, cops and hit men and mobsters caught in Manichean struggles) than his insistence that we connect to works of art by purely intuitive forces—thus his famously terse and blank-faced interviews when asked to talk about his films. For Lynch, the most powerful images throw us back into the shock, wonder, and confusion of our greenest years, when everything in the world seemed to be happening for the first time.
Kyle MacLachlan in the Times:
It’s why David was not just a filmmaker: He was a painter, a musician, a sculptor and a visual artist—languageless mediums.
When you are outside language, you are in the realm of feeling, the unconscious, waves. That was David’s world. Because there’s room for other people—as the listeners, the audience, the other end of the line—to bring some of themselves.
Adam Nayman in The Ringer:
With Lynch, it wasn’t just about seeing his movies, but living with them for days, and weeks, and years as they sat on your shoulder, making their way slowly up the back of your neck, through your ear and into your mind’s eye. The scenes don’t go away, even the ones you sometimes wish would. You can’t get rid of a Lynch movie, but it’s never quite yours, either.
Max Nelson in Sidecar (the NLR blog):
Somehow a local, small-town atrocity has ended up throwing a great deal more out of order, rendering it all “not the way it is supposed to be.” If there is a utopian sensibility running through Lynch’s films, it is here—in this boyish, inchoate, but touchingly stubborn intuition that a single woman’s suffering can tear the fabric of the world.
Derek Robertson in the Washington Examiner:
It would also be insufficient given his name itself became synonymous with his own particular brand of weirdness: “Lynchian,” since at least the early 1990s, has served as shorthand for art that highlights the perversion and weirdness underpinning American life. That weirdness, more often than not, was an aesthetic wrapper for the Capra-esque moral rectitude expressed in his work, which was strengthened, not undermined, by how viscerally he depicted nightmarish violence, anguish and disorientation.
- in The Bulwark:
Even in a film set in the real world, something new, mysterious, and probably disturbing, on levels both obvious and hidden, was just around the corner, or just down that path, or just next door.
Armond White in National Review:
Later, with the nightmare surrealism of Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch would expose the soul-destroying nature of Hollywood. And his finest work, the 1990 television soap opera Twin Peaks, could also be considered a sensitive, comedic Rorschach test, given its all-American grotesqueries—the definition of his artistic expression.
Muriel Zagha in Engelsberg Ideas:
Mel Brooks memorably described David Lynch as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”: the archetypal American nice guy, but from another planet. In Lynch’s universe both Bedford Falls and Pottersville, Oz and Kansas exist alongside one another, always capable of bleeding into each other. From this originate Lynch’s films-as-waking-dreams and his Heaven-and-Hell vision of America.
Critical notes:
In Prospect, Imogen West-Knights on subtitling and dubbing:
I suspect that dubbing will eventually win out over subtitles, because a lot of people, myself included, increasingly like to multitask. In these cases the shows I was watching were somewhat hard to follow (or, in Dark’s case, very hard to follow—it introduced an alternate universe on top of the time travel in season three), so when I was watching them, I was really, 100 percent watching them. I was not looking at my phone or cooking or having a conversation. But sometimes I do like to be doing these things, when I’m watching something more familiar or more easily understood. Is this a shame? That we pay less attention to the things we watch? Yes, I think so. But it is the way things are now.
[Maybe we should all just pack up and go home. —Steve]
Movies across the decades:
Groundhog Day (dir. Harold Ramis, 1993)
[In lieu of adding to the appreciations of David Lynch above, I figured I should look at another film about a very strange American life under an unassuming facade. —Steve]
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