WRB—June 2024 Film Supplement
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Links:
Two in The New Yorker:
Burkhard Bilger interviews George Miller:
Bilger: Do you think the pace of film editing will continue to accelerate?
Miller: I don’t think that this will naturally lead to faster and faster films. But you should be aware, as you are making the film, that the audience is capable of understanding things that it couldn’t in the past. I remember a quote: “Individually an audience might be comprised of idiots, collectively they are never wrong.” I really think that’s true. People come to cinema loaded to the gills with all this learning of a relatively new language. They watch movies and pick up the rhythm of them. They are visually literate. They are narratively, dramatically literate, but not necessarily in a way they can articulate. And, collectively, it is quite astonishing.
Very early on, I made a point of rewatching films in the cinema when there were lots of people. One film that had a lot of influence on Mad Max was What’s Up, Doc? (1972). Every Saturday night in Melbourne, I would go and watch the film, because I just loved the audience’s laughter, and knowing exactly where that laughter is. Then I went to Hong Kong, in a packed cinema with standing room in the aisles, and the laughing was consistent with Melbourne. There is a collective response of audiences that is constantly playing in the back of your mind. You just have to trust it.
Katy Waldman on the idea of love animating The Idea of You (2024):
If a romantic comedy is a machine that converts shame into self-affirmation, what kind of shame does The Idea of You want to expiate? The obvious answer is the shame of being an older woman and a mom. The film seems to engage and then relieve the shame of middle-aged maternity by crafting an insanely aspirational middle-aged mother for viewers to glom on to. But Solène’s (Anne Hathaway) mom-ness remains so gestural and impressionistic for most of the movie that this answer feels unsatisfying. Showalter conveys an idea of motherhood but not the realized and embodied thing. A truer statement—and the characteristic that distinguishes The Idea of You as a rom-com—is that the film, with its Wattpad and Archive of Our Own lineage, wishes to expiate the shame of being a fan.
[A common kind of bad rom-com writing makes the leads blanks with the idea that this makes it easier for an audience to identify with them—to be fans of them, and root for them. —Steve]
In Air Mail, Blanca Schofield with an oral history of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Simon Callow:
When I was sent the script and told they wanted me to play Gareth, I said: “I bet I’m the funeral. I’m bound to die in this.” And so indeed I was. I die in most things. The appetite of the British public for my death is limitless.
It’s a fascinating idea to follow a group of people who go to weddings a lot and never manage to get hitched themselves. But the thing that is brilliantly daring is the funeral. It’s Shakespearean. In the sense that Gareth believes in cakes and ales, he is like Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. He wages war on every kind of puritanism and narrowness of spirit. Also, a minute or so before he dies, he says, “I was adored once,” quoting Belch’s friend Andrew Aguecheek. As I look back over my career, Gareth is one of the parts that I’ve really nailed.
[Basically every character in Four Weddings and a Funeral has a Shakespearean tinge except for the leads. —Steve]
In RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz on Palpatine as a great screen villain:
Palpatine’s (Ian McDiarmid) psychological seduction of Anakin (Hayden Christensen) is one of the great ironic tragedies in science fiction. Anakin is born into slavery and escapes it through induction into the Jedi order, only to end up in permanent servitude to a far more diabolical and powerful master. The cocky, gifted teenager has such a huge ego that he can’t handle having to remain an apprentice until the Jedi tell him he's ready to become a knight. In his peevish immaturity, he opens himself to corruption by a man who plays him like a ragtime piano and is sentenced to a permanent apprenticeship. You’d have to visit the Twilight Zone to find a more ironically perfect fate.
Reviews:
In Fast Company, A. S. Hamrah reviews Unfrosted (2024):
The nostalgia factor is an optical illusion. It’s not atomic destruction we are nostalgic for, nor addicting children to face-smearing goo, finger-coating dust, or Gameboys. It is massive success through licensing and franchising we love and want in on. The bourgeois-to-billionaire class that Jerry Seinfeld is part of doesn’t even go to movies anymore, as he pointed out. To understand why these movies are made we must study the executives who greenlit them, because public taste is no longer reflected in the mass production of culture at this level. How did we get the masses to eat Pop-Tarts? Now there’s a story. And in the case of Unfrosted, one that is not lying about being futzed with, rewritten, fudged, and made up.
In his recent book Foreverism (2023), University of Georgia nostalgia scholar Grafton Tanner writes that movie studios have a different view of the past. The real strategy there, Tanner theorizes, is “to keep the past present so we aren’t nostalgic for it anymore.” “Nostalgia,” he writes, “is experienced when one fondly aches for the past. Foreverism, on the other hand, will implore you to revive the past and save it from ever dying again,” in order to maintain the current system of production in a way that disallows actual longing for anything better.
Two reviews of films directed by Francis Ford Coppola:
In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri reviews Megalopolis (2024):
There is nothing in Megalopolis that feels like something out of a “normal” movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular. The characters speak in archaic phrases and words, mixing shards of Shakespeare, Ovid, and at one point straight-up Latin. Some characters speak in rhyme, others just in high-minded prose that feels like maybe it should be in verse. At one point, Adam Driver does the entire “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. Why? I’m not exactly sure. But it sure sounds good.
Katie Kadue: “hamlet also does the entire ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy from hamlet for no reason but it also sounds good”
In 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews Coppola’s updated and restored version of One from the Heart (1982, 2024):
In pleasing contrast with this optical razzle-dazzle is the demotic speech of the characters, particularly the central pair. The unadorned dialogue of Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) tethers this fantasia to firmer ground; their acrimonious exchanges accurately reflect the wobbly language of heat-of-the moment insults (“You used to have a pretty good build. . . . Now you’re startin’ to look like . . . an egg!” Frannie taunts her boyfriend). Forrest and Garr had each worked with Coppola before—they both have secondary parts in The Conversation (1974), and he also appears in Apocalypse Now (1979)—but One from the Heart provides the added pleasure of seeing her as a lead, a rarity. (Tootsie, which also opened in ’82, features Garr in an emblematic supporting role as Sandy, who, much like the woman playing her, is a character actress who never quite gets the recognition she’s due.) Garr, who began her film career as a dancer in Elvis Presley vehicles, further buoys Coppola’s delectable movie with her vivacity—whether Frannie is tangoing with Ray (Raul Julia), admiring her own physique in a mirror, or delivering my favorite line: “I wanna live . . . I wanna go out with a bunch of guys. I want erotic things to happen.”
In our sister publication across the pond, Michael Wood reviews La chimera (2024):
Arthur (Josh O’Connor) loses himself at this point. He isn’t in prison and he isn’t free. Time passes and he wanders from place to place, looking scruffier and scruffier. At last he comes back to the little town and finds that Italia (Carol Duarte) and some other women have set up a commune in a disused railway station—they are adopting the liberation implied by a myth that Etruscan women ruled, and Etruscan men did as they were told. Arthur is invited to stay and almost does. At least he is composed now, and cleaned up, and this would be a good place to end the movie, as Rohrwacher obviously knows. But she is not going to do that. One more tomb awaits Arthur, and you need to see the movie to learn what happens there. Actually, even when you’ve seen it you won’t be quite sure, because several fascinating interpretations of the events are possible. Judge ye. What would Orpheus do in this situation?
In The Point,
reviews The Zone of Interest (2023):Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) justifies her demand with an impassioned speech about their ideals. She is a true believer—she and Rudolf (Christian Friedel) met on a farm, both enthusiasts of a Nazi back-to-the-land movement—and makes an appeal to the beliefs she and Rudolf share. They would have to drag me out of here, she tells him. “This is our home,” she says. “Everything the Führer said about how to live is how we do. Go East. Lebensraum. This is our Lebensraum.” This isn’t just a domestic squabble; Glazer is making a serious and profound argument about the way fascist ideology suffuses domestic life, so that Lebensraum becomes not just a national program but an individual ideal. He is also, not incidentally, casually dismissing, as he does throughout the film, what has been a kind of ludicrous debate about how much Hedwig knew about her husband’s activities. In the memoir Rudolf wrote in prison, he claimed Hedwig never knew about the gas chambers, a claim some historians have apparently taken seriously. The film tacitly reveals how absurd an idea it is.
[Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which, as Steven D. Greydanus once pointed out, was not originally titled “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” is more subtle than it’s given credit for here. (Inglourious Basterds (2009), a movie more or less about Raiders, also misses this, but that says more about Tarantino and the flaws of his projects of historical revisionism.) —Steve]
In the Times,
reviews MoviePass, MovieCrash (2024):That story is, in a sense, a tale as old as time. MoviePass in fact existed all the way back in 2011, co-founded by Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt. The story they tell in the documentary is one of spotting a need in the market—a threat to theatrical exhibition of films posed, in part, by the slow growth of streaming services—and of figuring out a sustainable way to fill it. The answer was MoviePass, which cost more at the time (I believe I paid $49.99 per month in 2013, which was still a bargain) and seemed poised for success.
But as Spikes and Watt explain it, MoviePass is another story of Black entrepreneurs who, along with other underrepresented demographics, struggle to find investment capital and investor confidence in the market, creating something groundbreaking and then losing it to overconfident white men. There’s no doubt that, under Lowe and Farnsworth, a promising service was run directly into the ground. The frustration that Spikes and Watt felt as they were pushed out of the company is palpable. And when Lowe opines on camera that Spikes “wasn’t being a productive member of the team” when he voiced his concerns, you can feel that frustration, too.
N.B.:
Part of the estate that inspired The Philadelphia Story (1940) is for sale.
The best names in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). [I like to think of the pseudo-Latin of many of the names in the Mad Max world as the equivalent of Anglo-Saxon coins with incorrect Latin, or just random letters from the Latin alphabet, on it; after the collapse of civilization, why not try to claim some of the prestige and power of the Roman Empire for yourself? —Steve]
The world of tiny independent theaters in the UK.
The story of a ten-year-old who spent a week unsupervised at a movie theater in 1947.
Ted Sarandos’ son believes that “on your phone” is an appropriate way to watch Lawrence of Arabia (1962). You, however, can see Lawrence on the big screen this August. [I saw Lawrence at the AFI in Silver Spring last month, it was unforgettable. —Chris]
Roger Corman died on Thursday, May 9. R.I.P.
- on two very different films he directed in the early 1960s: “The Intruder (1962) could have established Roger Corman as an artist. Instead, films like X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963) proved he’d been one all along.”
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:
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller, May 24)
Roger Ebert opened his obituary for Audrey Hepburn with “She was, a critic once wrote, the last of the silent stars—because her eyes almost made it unnecessary for her to speak.” Anya Taylor-Joy is not Hepburn—no one is—but here, in a film where she has hardly any dialogue, her eyes have some of the same power.
[For more on Furiosa and how it fits in with George Miller’s recent work, see Movies across the decades below.]
The rest:
Wildcat (dir. Ethan Hawke, May 3)
There is Flannery O’Connor, the author (played here by Maya Hawke, who also plays the female leads in adaptations of some of O’Connor’s short stories interspersed throughout), and then there is Flannery O’Connor, symbol of a certain kind of literary Catholic’s insecurity about the general lack of Catholic contributions to English literature. To Wildcat’s credit as both a film and as an interpretation of O’Connor’s work, it is not particularly concerned with the latter—could a reader unaware of her life conclude with certainty from her stories that their author was a Catholic and not part of a Calvinist denomination? Even the inclusion of her line about the Eucharist—“if it’s a symbol, to hell with it,” delivered here as a retort to Elizabeth Hardwick (Willa Fitzgerald)—is more of a defense of religious faith in general in the context the film gives it.
O’Connor’s life is not, on its surface, particularly cinematic. The choice to film a number of her stories and thread them through feels like a necessary device to get the running time up to a normal feature length. It also indicates an awareness that, while O’Connor suffering from lupus is worthy of comment, it is her stories that create an interest in the life of this one woman suffering from lupus. (The two minutes where Robert Lowell (Philip Ettinger) and Hardwick are on screen together have more typical biopic incident in its glimpse of their lives than the rest of the film combined.) Instead, it is content to sit with O’Connor as she works out how writing her stories, stories that most people in her life think are strange, can be a form of devotion to God. If this is not incisive—let alone revelatory—it is honest.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wes Ball, May 10)
Several reviewers have pointed out that the central question underlying this film—Caesar has been gone for a few hundred years; what did he teach, and how should the apes apply it to the present day, when the ruling authorities claim him?—echoes certain questions Christians faced under Constantine and his successors. What those reviewers have neglected to say about this reimagining is that it comes from the lurid mind of someone who believes that imperial goons were hunting down all those fourth-century Baptists. Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), an ape warlord, suggests that Caesar’s teachings endorse subjection to him. On the other side is Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan member of a religious order just barely holding on. As if to underline that he represents the Baptists, he preserves books from before the collapse of human civilization—Proximus Caesar has no use for such things, depending on a tradition he is inventing as he goes along.
Indulging in these theological reflections distracts from such unpleasantries as the plot, which takes two and a half hours to get to the starting point of a more interesting plot. This more interesting plot will, no doubt, feature in the next installment of this series.
Poolman (dir. Chris Pine, May 10)
Chris Pine (who also co-wrote the film and stars as the titular poolman) is a big fan of Chinatown (1973) and The Big Lebowski (1998). This means he has good taste. Here, he has tried to build a whole movie around that love by pulling one very lightly adapted scene after another from them. There is no freshness to this. Roman Polanski and the Coen brothers are much better directors than Pine. His mashing these two movies together drains the Lebowski material of its hangout vibes and the Chinatown material of its menace, and his performance as the poolman is an Halloween costume imitation of Jeff Bridges as the Dude. The homage reaches its nadir when the poolman and his buddies decide to seek inspiration for their quest to investigate LA malfeasance and corruption by watching Chinatown. (Since he owns it on VHS, and has clearly watched it many times, he must know the ending—what does he make of it? For that matter, what does Pine?) Later, one of his buddies uses the trick of putting a watch under a car tire so it will break when the car drives away and show when the car left. She describes this as “like Chinatown.” Some free advice: if you are describing something you are doing as “like Chinatown,” stop doing it.
Robot Dreams (dir. Pablo Berger, May 31)
The story of a dog—in this world animals are stand-ins for people—who befriends and then loses a robot in 1980s New York City (the film reminds viewers of the time period by showing the Twin Towers at least a dozen times) is not without a surface charm that evaporates upon consideration of the scenario. Dog (this is his name; at least, it’s what he puts on some paperwork) comes into the robot by seeing an ad on late-night TV suggesting that lonely people can buy robots to address that problem. This is not how you make friends; it may be how you acquire a mail-order bride. The time period and the robot’s sexlessness can only do so much to point away from the facts: Dog is the sort of person who would today dream about an AI girlfriend. What does he do when he loses the robot? He mourns for a while, and he tries to find the robot, and when he fails—he goes out and buys a new robot. There is pathos here—it comes from the robot seeming more human.
Babes (dir. Pamela Adlon, May 17)
There is a kind of comedy so determined to make its points about society that it forgets to do any jokes. Babes, at least, remembers to include the jokes. Most of them are about bodily functions, though. Being animated by the comedic stylings of a nine-year-old fits poorly with a story about a single woman (Ilana Glazer) who gets pregnant from a one-night stand and decides to keep the baby, relying on her best friend (Michelle Buteau), who is married with kids, throughout her pregnancy. It moves through all the obligatory points—the different expectations placed on friends and family, the assumptions made about a pregnant woman when the father is not in the picture, the actual physical experience of pregnancy—but it merely nods at the existence of these points in lieu of saying anything. Only the most patronizing kind of film would expect its audiences to be satisfied with the appearances of what they recognize and expect to see; a movie of this kind should be better than that.
Back to Black (dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson, May 17)
Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela, given the impossible task of sounding like Winehouse while singing and doing a decent job with it) died at 27; unlike such figures as Hendrix and Morrison, who produced lasting music more or less right up to their deaths, the last essential piece of music she made is her “Valerie” cover with Mark Ronson, released right after she turned 24. An exploration of why this happened would make a good movie.
But Back to Black is not an exploration of why it happened. Its main idea is that Winehouse was, more or less, just like that, and its one move beyond that—suggesting that her inability to get pregnant sent her spiraling down—still has to be traced to the unexplained drug and alcohol abuse. This is the explanation you would use if you wanted to paint the living members of Winehouse’s family in the best possible light, as you would expect in a film her estate signed off on. It smacks of Colonel Parker’s alleged statement about what he would do after the death of Elvis: “I’ll keep on managing him!”
Critical notes:
In ,
on trailers:Assigned seating fundamentally altered how all this works. With assigned seating, you didn’t need to get there early, which devalued the pre-show advertisements. Knowing that your seats were yours no matter what, you didn’t even have to get there in time to see the trailers—and with the expansion of the number of trailers and the mixing of ads for cars and insurance into the trailers, it’s no wonder people started showing up 15 or 20 minutes after the listed showtime. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been at an AMC and seen people straggle in just before or just after a movie started.
This severed a vital link in the information and excitement chain that theaters need to thrive. As great as YouTube may be for generating views of trailers, there’s nothing quite like watching a mini-movie play out ahead of something you’re already at a theater and excited to see. And there’s something to be said for having a captive audience; a trailer on YouTube is just one more window in the floating morass of entertainment options. A trailer in a theater dominates your attention.
Movies across the decades:
Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller, 2015), Three Thousand Years of Longing (dir. George Miller, 2022), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller, 2024)
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