A Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books is a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one.
Links:
In The Ringer, Adam Nayman on the ambiguities of Richard Linklater:
There are other examples where Linklater slyly has it both ways, including arguably his most beloved titles. Dazed and Confused (1993) vibrates with nostalgia for the halcyon, hard-rocking days of the early ’70s, but it’s also shadowed by sensations of anxiety around the vicious hazing rituals enacted on incoming freshmen by a campus-ruling class of knuckleheaded seniors (still Ben Affleck’s single best performance). And, depending on how you look at it, the hyper-articulate, semi-improvised, wall-to-wall conversations between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy that define the Before films—a trilogy set at nine-year intervals in the lives of its tempestuous lovers—either speak to the eloquence of its intellectually curious characters or confirm their inability, across the decades, to truly communicate. (“I feel like you’re breathing helium and I’m breathing oxygen.”)
The saying goes that it’s darkest before the dawn, and, compared to its two predecessors, Before Midnight (2013) is a caustic, claustrophobic viewing experience; where the courtship rituals of Sunrise (1995) and Sunset (2004) evoked the style of Éric Rohmer, the finale’s knock-down, drag-out arguments contain bellowing echoes of John Cassavetes. The film’s emotional violence is so bruisingly acute, in fact, that its provisionally happy ending feels imposed—a fact of which Linklater is keenly aware. For a movie set in Greece to close with a reference to a deus ex machina—with Hawke’s despondent, unfaithful Jesse throwing a Hail Mary in the form of a thought experiment about time travel and a letter from the future—indicates a filmmaker who understands the relationship (and difference) between fantasy and reality.
Three touching on Chinatown (1974):
In The Guardian,
on its screenplay:The scenes between Cross (John Huston) and Jake (Jack Nicholson) alone are a dazzling battle of wills, because all of the confidence and swagger that Nicholson projects so naturally withers in Huston’s presence. During their meetings, Cross keeps mispronouncing Jake’s last name—he calls him “Mr. Gitts”—which is probably a deliberate strategy to make Jake seem unimportant, but could, in fact, reflect a genuine unimportance to him. “You’ve got a nasty reputation, Mr. Gitts,” says Cross. “I like that.” But their similar reputations do not make them the same: Jake is a good enough detective to discover every last one of Cross’ dark secrets, but there’s nothing he can do about it. That’s how real power works.
In The Dispatch, Hannah Long on its idea of the divine:
And Cross certainly sees himself as a creator. In his final monologue, he goes off on a tangent about tidal pools. His partner, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), had been “fascinated” with them. “You know what he used to say?” Cross reminisces. “‘That’s where life begins.’” The irony is that Cross drowned Mulwray in one such pool—an artificial one. On the surface, the tirade is a speech about water rights, but the deeper meaning goes back to the second line of the Bible: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Even the font of life is a place of death.
The small-minded Gittes, of course, doesn’t follow, and can only assume there’s a fiscal motive.
In The Lamp, Stanley Fish on film noir in general:
Fatalistic is too weak a word to describe the world noir characters inhabit. Fatalism tells us that what must be will be; there is nothing we can do to evade or alter our fate. Noirism tells not only that we can’t evade it, but that its shape will be unpredictable; life’s purpose is to trick us into thinking that we understand even a small part of it and then to take an unexpected turn, dashing all our hopes; you thought you knew what you were doing but you didn’t. Rose Balestrero (Vera Miles), the wife of the world-tossed hero (Henry Fonda) of Alfred Hitchcock’s docudrama The Wrong Man (1956), puts it perfectly: “Every time we get up, something knocks us right down again.” That something is not a visible and opposable entity like a big corporation or a political conspiracy or a corrupt municipality (although there is some of that in This Gun For Hire (1942), Hell or High Water (2016), and Chinatown); rather it is a universe indifferent to the hopes and ambitions of its inhabitants who have dreams, some of them modest, some of them venal, that will always be undone by circumstances they could not predict and cannot control.
[Chinatown is not really about a visible entity that can be opposed, and its universe is hardly indifferent; it is a film about spiritual wickedness in high places, whose visible manifestations barely hint at the malevolence beneath. I think Long is incorrect to describe the world of Chinatown as pagan; a pagan version of this story exists, and it is called Oedipus Rex, one complete with incest bringing a curse to the land and the detective investigating the situation having too high an opinion of himself and discovering something he didn’t want to know. Fate may destroy Oedipus, but it makes no sense to describe it as evil, or actively intending misery. Noah Cross, though, has a mind, and a soul, and he knows what he is doing and what he has chosen. Even Long’s phrase “the font of life is a place of death” echoes nothing so much as one of Milton’s descriptions of Hell:
A Universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Then Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d,
Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire.
(Note that Milton specifies that the place is worse than anything the pagans have imagined.) And Fish, I am sure, appreciates the resonances Cross declaring that he wants to control “the future, Mr. Gitts! The future!” has with Milton’s Satan expressing similar intentions near the start of Paradise Lost:
Since through experience of this great event
In Arms not worse, in foresight much advanc’t,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal Warr
Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in th’ excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav’n.
“In foresight much advanc’t”—the past and present are what they are, but the future belongs to those who are, as Cross says, “capable of anything,” capable of first conceiving of and then carrying out “eternal Warr” against God. —Steve]
- interviews Carrie Courogen about her new biography of Elaine May (Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, June):
At the end of the day, it’s gonna be Tootsie (1982), which, coincidentally, is also a movie I became obsessed with in my early teens. I remember I had the Syd Fields screenwriting book and read all the fuss he made about how it’s maybe the most perfectly constructed comedy of all time, and was like “yes, yes, yes!” But, again, in spite of how it was probably one of my top ten favorite films for more than half my life, I didn’t know she had a hand in it until like the past five years. Even if it’s maybe not her most signature The Elaine May Work, I think it might be her best. When Mike Nichols called it her greatest save, he wasn’t being hyperbolic. I get so giddy when I talk about this, it’s so geeky, but my favorite part of this entire journey was learning more about that and, especially, finally getting to read her handwritten notes and amendments to the script. I was practically peeing my pants having it in front of me, I was so over the moon excited. And it didn’t disappoint—she really did totally reshape it, and added in most of the best jokes, and she had such astonishingly precise notes and edits. It has touches of her signature voice that when I watch it now, maybe because I’m just so intensely familiar with her, that I can watch and say—even without re-consulting the script—“Oh, that’s Elaine” after a line or two, but it’s more astonishing to me how removed she is from it, too. That movie is rightfully held up as one of the greatest comedies of all time, and even if it isn’t screaming “THIS IS AN ELAINE MAY SCRIPT,” that’s because of her.
In Decider, Glenn Kenny on Kevin Costner’s history with the Western:
The box-office failure of Wyatt Earp (1994) did not deter Costner from continuing to think big. The archetypal Western hero, that is, let’s put it, the Lone Man Who Only Wants To Enter His Home Justified but either 1) can’t find a home or 2) can’t get to his home for all the bad guys in his way, was revived in his filmography twice shortly after Wyatt Earp, albeit with genre variations. First came 1995’s Waterworld, an idiosyncratic futuristic after-the-flood extravaganza that was kind of laughed out of theaters, at least in part for an opening scene showing how Costner’s character recycles his urine into drinking water. It’s actually a pretty good movie in its gonzo way. Then came 1997’s The Postman, a metaphor-heavy post-apocalypse tale (set in 2013—looks like our reality dodged a bullet!) in which Costner’s title character seeks to restore order to a devastated and lawless U.S. by, you know, delivering . . . not just the mail but a call to arms to a downhearted populace. Costner directed this one and had final cut, yet declined to cut the picture’s nearly three hour running time. His performance and his directorial depictions of his character were, many critics complained, almost insane in grandiose self-regard.
Reviews:
In the Verso blog, Jake Romm reviews The Zone of Interest (2023):
This is the apotheosis of the photographic way of seeing: complete alienation. Your own vision subordinated to the eye of the camera, everything form within the frame. To photograph is to freeze time—that is, to photograph is to make dead. It is, in a sense, a corollary to instrumental reason, the reduction of thought to the calculation of inputs and ends, the very reasoning which Adorno and Horkheimer saw operative in the camps, the heart of the dialectic of enlightenment. Why then the injunction against aestheticization? It does the victims a disservice, a dishonor even, to see others pantomime their suffering, which is horrible beyond empathy. But the very form of the cinema-eye, only slightly different from the photo-eye, is itself a recapitulation of this alienation. We cannot feel our way into the suffering, even if we see it, but we can feel our way into this lack of feeling.
Reviews of books:
In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Robert Baskin reviews two compilations of material from Robert Bresson (Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943–1983, edited by Mylène Bresson, translated by Anna Moschovakis, 2023; Notes on the Cinematograph, translated by Jonathan Griffin, 2016):
At one point in Notes on the Cinematograph, Bresson asks, “is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?” The first time I read the book, I understood Bresson as a sort of nightingale, forever dealing with the same themes in films with the same style. The filmography itself tells a different story. While Bresson worked towards his principles, he was only human, and his career does follow a familiar artistic path of experimentation, refraction, technical development, and the accompanying variation in quality. Whatever the flaws in Bresson on Bresson as an aesthetic manifesto à la Notes, it is a wonderful testament to Bresson as a working artist. In Notes, he can seem unapproachable, uncompromising in his fidelity to his maxims and principles. In the interviews collected in Bresson on Bresson, however, you get a sense of him thinking and questioning himself. Earlier I quoted some of his thoughts on sound in film from Notes. An interviewer in 1968 pressed Bresson on these ideas, pointing out the higher incidence of music at the beginning of his career. The filmmaker responds, “I made mistakes with the use of music in my early films.” I realized the book’s true value when I began thinking about it more as a reference, reading the relevant interviews after watching his films for this piece.
In The Yale Review, Annie Berke reviews a book about Siskel and Ebert (Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, by Matt Singer, 2023):
As television personalities, Siskel and Ebert’s lexicon could never be as cool and literary as prose designed to be read, but, as Singer explains, these men saw their jobs a little differently from hipper critics like Andrew Sarris and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. For Siskel, to be a film critic was to be a journalist reporting on a fire—“only the fire,” Siskel explained, “is my reaction to the movie. And I jump off into that approach.” For Ebert, a critic was a teacher. “What we’re trying to do,” he would say, “is share everything we found out about the movies with people who are interested in that.” They provided an accessible, surprisingly rigorous film education to those watching.
I’m sure it was great fun to hang with Pauline Kael on Central Park West and let her pour poison in your ear. But At the Movies with Siskel and Ebert was a party that anyone could attend.
[An experience that helped form me both as moviegoer and as writer was (since they’re all online) reading a million Ebert reviews about anything and everything. I still instinctually check to see if he wrote anything about movies I watch released while he was working. —Steve]
N.B.:
An interview with Glen Powell and Richard Linklater.
An interview with Russell Crowe.
Lionsgate will distribute Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024).
Some controversy in Australia over the amount of tax rebates given to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), which is probably in the nine figures.
“Netflix to Open Massive Entertainment, Dining and Shopping Complexes in Two Cities in 2025”
The origin of that line about the cuckoo clock from The Third Man (1949).
An oral history of the “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt from Napoleon Dynamite (2004).
Anouk Aimée died on Tuesday, June 18. R.I.P.
Donald Sutherland died on Thursday, June 20. R.I.P.
Bud S. Smith died on Sunday, June 23. 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.
I have been out of town for most of the last half of June, hence the limited list here; there will be some catching up in the next Film Supplement. —Steve]
Steve’s larks:
Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater, May 24)
The danger of getting everything you want is the getting everything you want.
[For more on Hit Man as a sunny version of one of the bleakest films noir ever made, see Movies across the decades below.]
The rest:
The Dead Don’t Hurt (dir. Viggo Mortensen, May 31)
Aragorn (who also stars) should make all the Westerns he likes if he can keep making them like this. That said, the non-linear nature of this one makes it feel less like a Western and more like a series of nostalgic memories of Westerns, going “remember this scene? remember that one?” one after the other. This is all very cozy, as are the generic Western locations where the scenes take place. But underneath this are questions about what a man (Mortensen) owes his common-law wife (Vicky Krieps) (she refuses to marry him), what these two immigrants—her from French Canada, him from Denmark—owe the United States of America, and the painful fact that his decision to fight for the Union in the Civil War means leaving her, strong as she is, alone in the world of a Western, a world of unchecked male desire and male violence.
Tuesday (dir. Daina Oniunas-Pusić, June 7)
A barely-functional relationship between parent and child, the appearance of Death personified—you think of Bergman. Then you realize something it had never occurred to you to consider: part of the genius of The Seventh Seal (1957) is that Bergman did not make Death a talking parrot (voiced by Arinzé Kene) and then give him a lot of annoying things to say.
One of the underlying beliefs animating the commentary in this newsletter is that the true test of a great actor is not in making good material great but in making atrocious material salvageable. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is great.
Inside Out 2 (dir. Kelsey Mann, June 14)
It is possible to forgive a children’s movie for having a simplistic message, although the substance here—Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) sense of self goes from “I’m a good person.” to “I’m not good enough!” to an understanding that she has both good and bad traits—is an attempt to dramatize, what, the correct self-understanding of being a human being in the world? And one which, if you don’t have on this basic level before you’re thirteen years old, I doubt you ever will. (Much better to dramatize, as artists have done since forever, an actual fall from innocence and not what this movie comes up with in its search for something similar but devoid of the moral element.) This stupidity pretending to be cleverness also underpins most of the jokes—the “stream of consciousness” is a literal stream, the “sar-chasm” is a literal chasm, and none of it actually indicates anything about emotion.
Speaking of emotion, the film introduces new emotions to the ones present in Inside Out (2015): Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It proposes that these new emotions arrive with puberty, which anyone who has ever met a prepubescent child could tell you is not the case. [The idea that Envy arrives with puberty is especially silly, motivated as it is by a misguided belief in the inherent goodness and sweetness of small children. I could refute it with Augustine:
Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? for in Thy sight none is pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth. Who remindeth me? doth not each little infant, in whom I see what of myself I remember not? . . . Or was it then good, even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent, that persons free, and its own elders, yea, the very authors of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wiser than it, obeyed not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt, because commands were not obeyed, which had been obeyed to its hurt? The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother. Who knows not this?
But I could also refute it with experience. I recently saw friends of mine who have a daughter at the age where she knows about three words—and one of them is “mine.” —Steve]
Critical notes:
Mike Fleming Jr. interviews Tom Rothman, Sony Motion Pictures Group chairman:
I’m a believer in contrast, and I said this one year at CinemaCon; I think stars are more valuable than ever, but streaming doesn’t make stars. Only movies make stars. Stars are super valuable, in the right role. Dawn Steel taught me this 30 years ago and it’s as true then as now. A little less true during the studio system, but the minute that broke down, the operative rule became that talent follows material. So if you want a star, you’ve got to have great material. And the great material will get you a great filmmaker and that will get you a star. The stars that the audience want, they have their pick. So at a good studio, we’re not sellers at that point in the process, we’re buyers. We have to convince the best talent in the world to do it. The two co-equal things, is the quality of the material and the quality of the director. Believe me, the quality of the paycheck is way down the pecking order to the real talent in the world, who know how good is the material and how good is the filmmaker.
In pretty much every other way, though, this is not the ideal outcome for Hit Man—or for movie theaters, where I feel like this movie would have done well, assuming it wasn’t simultaneously playing at home for the low price of a monthly Netflix subscription. Powell co-wrote Hit Man with Linklater, and he clearly designed it as a showcase for all his talents. As Gary, Powell is charming, funny, handsome yet likable, and very willing to look silly or vulnerable. In another era, this would have cemented Powell as a major movie star after his recent roles in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Anyone But You (2023).
But in that other era, Hit Man would have played in theaters, where the sheer size of the film image lends the people on the big screen a mythic, larger-than-life quality. At home . . . everyone seems smaller, less special, less spectacular—even someone as hunky as Glen Powell. I’m starting to wonder if that’s one reason why, as so many have noted and complained lately, we seem to be witnessing the death of traditional movie stardom. On television, stars don’t shine nearly as brightly.
At its peak in the late 1940s, moviegoing represented an astonishing 1.3% of all personal consumption expenditures in the United States, or $1.30 of every $100 spent . . . By 2019, this share had fallen from $1 in every $100 to 9¢ (a 95% total decline that contrasts with the roughly 82% drop in attendance). . . .
Even among ticketed spectator amusements—live entertainment (which is mostly concerts but also includes performance theater, ice shows, etc.) and live sports—moviegoing has lost share. In the 1920s to 1950s, motion pictures were $80 or more over every $100 spent on a spectator amusement in the United States. Today, it’s less than $15.
[I don’t think I had ever put together that from the 1930s to the 1950s the average American went to the movies 20 to 30 times a year. The argument in here that, if anything, ticket prices should increase surprised me at first but might have something going for it (especially because, contrary to popular misconception, ticket prices have been stable for decades adjusted for inflation). —Steve]
Movies across the decades:
Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944), Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater, 2024)
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