WRB—Mar. 2024 Film Supplement

Chalamet of Arabia

I must not be a Managing Editor. Being a Managing Editor is the mind-killer. Being a Managing Editor is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Links:

• In The New Atlantis, Rachel Altman on aging in Barbie (2023):

  As she absorbs more, though, Barbie (Margot Robbie) also discovers the blessings of life. For the first time, she bears witness to childhood, motherhood, and the weightiness of adult relationships. In one of the most touching scenes of the film, Barbie sits at a bus stop and notices the transcendent beauty of an old woman (Ann Roth). “You’re so beautiful,” Barbie tells her. “I know it,” the woman replies. In Barbieland, everyone is young, and youth, to be sure, is one kind of beauty. But this woman’s peaceful contentment with the wrinkles earned from a life well lived is another. Barbie realizes that there’s something scarier than cellulite: never moving forward in life’s stages.

• In RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz reappreciates the Star Wars prequels:

  I’m also fascinated by how the prequels mirror the first three movies so exactly in terms of major events that if you watch the six-film cycle in order and treat it as a complete statement, it starts to look like a meditation on free will versus predestination. Among other repeated events, there’s a forced landing on Tatooine, the death of a mentor at the hands of a Sith, a chase through an asteroid belt, and, in the second installment, a sudden twist that changes your relationship to the hero, followed by a cliffhanger. The droids show up again, becoming immortal tin-can Shakespearean jester-witnesses to the Skywalker saga, and putting a self-aware storytelling frame around Lucas' narrative embellishments and recontextualizations. C-3PO isn’t aware that a lot of things have happened to him before because his memory gets erased, but his buddy R2-D2 apparently knows but never says anything, and keeps revealing new powers (including the ability to fly!) that would have come in handy in other films had he felt like using them.

• In The New Yorker,

  becca rothfeld
  on sexual desire and body horror in the films of David Cronenberg:

  The flesh! It just makes you crazy! It just disassembles you and puts you back together in a different form! Brundlefly (Jeff Goldblum) is disfigured and ultimately destroyed, yet I suspect that many of us would rather turn into something other, even something awful, than stay siloed in the solitary and workaday self. “The disease . . . wants to turn me into something else—that’s not too terrible, is it?” Brundle, already halfway to Brundlefly, muses with characteristically Cronenbergian flair. “Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.”

  [Finally a serious treatment of the classic locus philosophicus, “Would you still love me if I were a worm?” —Chris]

• In The Baffler, Robert Rubsam on cooking on screen in The Taste of Things (2024) and elsewhere:

  As a third-act tragedy reveals, this fantasy is also an elegy. The characters reference huge new hotels, presided over by master chefs, and are invited to a gut-bustingly incoherent meal by an indulgent prince, gesturing toward the degradation and commercialization of their passion. The art of the gourmand is centered on the menu, which strives for balance between the flavors, delivers dishes in the proper order, and respects the point-counterpoint of sweet and savory. It’s an elite view, but it rests on a foundation of deep knowledge and dignified labor, and respects both the chef’s palate and the cook’s intuitions. A mass society prizes volume, speed, and interchangeability: cheap meals delivered with the efficiency of an assembly line. In Siegfried Kracauer’s phrase, it obeys “the ideal of the machine.” Dodin’s (Benoît Magimel) estate will soon become an anachronism, if it has not already.

  [One of the pitfalls of being known for cooking quite a lot is that people assume I am interested in cooking-themed things. I am not! I cannot explain this. I do want to go see The Taste of Things, though. —Chris]

• In our sister publication in New Amsterdam, Dennis Zhou on the history of Taiwan as seen by Edward Yang:

  In Taipei—a city that has been transformed from indigenous settlement to Qing outpost, Japanese model colony, provisional capital, and finally hypermodern global metropolis—the effects of history show themselves readily yet also hide beneath the surface. Yang’s characters often sit in the backs of taxis or drive themselves around the city, where they might occasionally pass Chiang’s gleaming visage or a remnant of the city’s Qing-era walls, razed by the Japanese to make way for Haussmann-derived boulevards. So many of Taipei’s buildings look alike because they were built in a hurry, between the 1970s and 1990s, when the Nationalists tacitly abandoned their plan to retake the mainland and made Taiwan their permanent home, culminating in the demolition of the shantytowns and soldiers’ villages set up as impromptu residences and their replacement with high-rises. The city has stood ever since as both a repository for nostalgia and a monument to forgetting.

• In 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza on Luis Buñuel’s career in Mexico:

  The greatest portraits of cuckoldry present the masculine fear of betrayal as an absurd kind of pathology—and no film, in my mind, achieves this as magnificently as 1953’s Él (This Strange Passion). Francisco (Arturo de Córdova) is consumed by the kind of amour fou that knows no laws, has no barriers; possessing his beautiful wife, Gloria (Delia Garcés), is his only happiness, a sick, destructive pleasure that succeeds only in deranging him further. Beyond Francisco’s bizarre antics, the melodrama achieves a deep shade of black humor for the patriarchal social conditions it lays bare: as with Eduardo’s kid sister in Abismos de pasíon (1954), no one seems to take Gloria’s cries for help all that seriously. This nonchalance has little to do with not believing women (strapping machos are perhaps too willing to defend the honor of the so-called weaker sex, so much so that their “heroics” come off as performative and/or infantilizing, as seen in The Brute, from 1953, and The Young One, from 1960). Gloria is believed, all right, but her friends and family members shrug it off all the same: that’s marriage, and you’re stuck in it for life.

  [I’ve spent a lot of time trying to track down a copy of Buñuel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I have a long list of complaints with every adaptation I’ve seen—they all do something I would describe as either “flinching” or “drawing on the popular conception of Wuthering Heights and not the text”—and I suspect Buñuel’s might not. If you know where I can find it, please let me know. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw reviews Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024):

  As he takes us through the great Powell/Pressburger films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Scorsese also plays clips of his own films, including Raging Bull (1980) and The Age of Innocence (1993), showing how he had been influenced by these predecessors. How remarkable that a movie director who came of age in the era of gritty violent realism—precisely that movement which supplanted the romantic idealism of Powell and Pressburger—was to give them a second lease of life.

  [The Red Shoes was the subject of Steve’s first Movies across the decades feature in last February’s Film Supplement. —Chris]

• In

  The Hobbyhorse
  ,
  Daniel Fraser
  reviews May December (2023):

  As such, May December stages the search for meaning as the correlate of the production of imitation: they are the same thing. The “truth” Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) looks for is not truth in some historical sense but a truth that will enable her to create a convincing performance. The narrative impulse (to make legible human time) and its reduction to an object of consumption cannot be delineated. What we experience as a result is the uncanny nature of a commercial genre’s efforts to inscribe such events within a narrow horizon of moral pathos and superficial libidinal economies.

• In The Nation, A. S. Hamrah reviews About Dry Grasses (2024):

  Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), we come to understand, exists in the ultimate condition of the Ceylan protagonist: He longs to be in Istanbul instead of living on the edge of nowhere, and his pining for the city is coupled with an unwillingness to commit to or even recognize anything that might help him get there. 

  But as we watch About Dry Grasses, we realize that the film’s running time also opens it up in many other ways. In fact, its length allows Ceylan to keep changing the stakes. As Samet continues doing the wrong thing, Ceylan deepens the film’s politics, subtly placing his story in the context of suicide bombings and Kurdish resistance, a world in which Samet’s complaints about his lot in life are trivial and petty. 

Reviews of books [Hey now, let’s stay in our lanes. —Chris]:

• In The Baffler, K. F. Watanabe reviews the first English translation of the original Godzilla novellas (Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, by Shigeru Kayama, 1955, translated by Jeffrey Angels, 2023):

  After his Godzilla novellas were published, Kayama decided to bow out. In a published essay translated as “Godzilla Confessions,” he expresses some misgivings about the direction of the franchise, realizing it was moving away from his original intentions. Angles summarizes Kayama’s dilemma as the author presciently described it: “What had started as a symbol representing his fear of atomic weapons had morphed into a character with a ‘manga-like’ appeal that the viewing audience loved.” In Kayama’s thinking, contributing to Godzilla’s continued existence represented tacit approval of the hydrogen bomb. Still, he had to admit, he too started to feel affectionately toward his creation.

N.B.:

• A restoration of the 7-hour cut of Napoléon (1927) screened at the Apollo Theatre during its initial release will premiere in Paris this July. [I’ve seen the Kevin Brownlow restoration from 2004 (about which, see the Dec. 2023 Film Supplement), which lasts five and a half hours; awe-inspiring. Considering a trip to Paris in the style of Frances Ha (2012) to see this. —Steve] [If you can find flights cheap enough we can look at the WRB budget for this. —Chris]

• The costume designer for Dune: Part Two (2024) breaks down her inspirations.

• “22 Things I Did With the ‘Dune 2’ Popcorn Bucket”

  • Other weird movie merch.

• “I Saw ‘Dune 2’ at 3:15 a.m.: Inside the Nearly Sold-Out, All-Night Screening in 70mm IMAX”

• Denis Villeneuve: “When I'm thinking about the Fremen, I'm thinking about French Canadians.” [In Quebec, we need to cultivate hydropower. —Steve]

• An interview with Will Gluck, director of Anyone But You (2023), about its success.

• All the food in The Taste of Things was real.

• Juliette Binoche: “I think we should all make films with every single boyfriend we’ve separated from.” [Very WRB-coded. —Steve] [No comment. —Chris]

• Sneaking around to see Woody Allen’s latest. [I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to see it. —Chris]

• A story of getting banned from a theater when a smuggled-in three-liter bottle of off-brand Mountain Dew exploded.

• Universal released some PVOD revenue numbers.

• In praise of the 4K Blu-ray. [I’m all in. I want it on the shelf. I hope 4K discs become more common and cheaper, it seemed like for a while we were at the end of the entire medium. —Chris]

• David Bordwell, film scholar, died on Thursday, February 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:

The Taste of Things (dir. Tran Anh Hung, February 9)

[The best new release I’ve seen since TÁR (2022). —Steve]

Tradition is love. The experience of a tradition is indivisible from love for those from whom it was learned, with whom it is shared, and to whom it is passed on. Dodin (Benoît Magimel), the so-called “Napoleon of gastronomy,” and his cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) have been engaged in their work together—he helps out in the kitchen—for decades. She is his lover but always refuses his proposals of marriage; she wants love as they experience it while working together on food, with him devising new dishes and her making them come to life. There, she is his equal; if anything, she is his superior. And their friends, fellow gourmands, with whom Dodin eats all recognize it. They want her to eat with them, but she declines and Dodin recognizes his inability to order her. And Dodin’s scheme to propose marriage in a way that she’ll accept requires him to inhabit the whole of the culinary tradition, even the portions of it she has always occupied.

Near the end of the film, Dodin says to Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), the young woman he is training as his protégé, that she is too young to appreciate bone marrow, but she must remember the taste for when she can. The tradition Dodin and Eugénie have devoted their lives to is enriched by their contributions, and enriched further by their willingness to share those contributions with those around them and the next generation, even if they will not see the full impact of their work. Dodin says of a soup at one point that it must all have one flavor, and yet each part of it must remain distinct. He might as well be describing tradition, which would go on without him and Eugénie but benefits from their work. And to Dodin’s friends and Pauline they themselves are at the center of the rich heritage they pass on.

Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve, March 1)

Those who enjoyed the first installment will enjoy this. It feels epic because it looks epic and shames the rest of big-budget Hollywood in so doing. The first ride Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) takes on a sandworm is breathtaking.

[The feelings of the native people towards their savior from outside, and how Lawrence of Arabia (1962) handles that subject, are the topic of this month’s Movies across the decades below. —Steve]

The rest:

The Monk and the Gun (dir. Pawo Choyning Dorji, February 9)

One of the great delights of cinema from outside the United States is the appearance of an American who has no understanding of manners, nuance, or the place where he is. [Chris and I discussed one of the greatest in this category—Jeremy Prokosch in Contempt (1963)—in the Jan. 2024 Film Supplement. —Steve] This particular American, an arms dealer (Harry Einhorn) who has come to Bhutan to buy a rare Civil War-era rifle, is unable to understand what a lama wants with the gun in question and why one of his monks (Tandin Wangchuk) refuses to sell it. The Bhutanese villagers he’s dealing with understand him slightly better; after all, they’ve seen a James Bond film. And the villagers are grappling with Bhutan’s democratic transition so that their country can be like the United States. In the end, it all gets sorted out and everyone’s happy. Except for the American.

Io Capitano (dir. Matteo Garrone, February 23)

There are three separate ideas that piece together this film. The first is flat depiction of migration from West Africa through the Sahara and the Mediterranean to Europe. It does not shy away from its brutality—there are robberies, there are deaths in the desert, there is torture—but the other pieces take the edges off. The second is a coming-of-age narrative about Seydou (Seydou Sarr, with such subtlety that you’d never guess this was his debut), who undertakes the journey with his cousin (Moustapha Fall) and (obviously) grows up a lot during it. The last, which appears only in Seydou’s dreams and hallucinations, is textbook magical realism. It should, perhaps, have been the whole film, since the material is suited for it; as it is, it’s one more way the film can’t decide whether and how it wants to soften its presentation for an audience.

Land of Bad (dir. William Eubank, February 16)

The current stage of Russell Crowe’s career, where he appears to select roles based on how much scenery-chewing they let him do, continues to be a lot of fun. This time, he’s a hot-tempered drone operator. Many other things happen in this film, which is inconvenient, since they take the focus off Russell Crowe, hot-tempered drone operator.

Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders, February 7)

Pure Boomer dreaming. Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) is how Boomers perceive themselves; he lives a simple life, he does his job as a cleaner of Tokyo’s public toilets, he has his routine of music and books and attention to nature. There is a tender melancholy to it. The portions where young people he meets hear the likes of Patti Smith and Lou Reed for the first time on Hirayama’s cassette tapes are the equivalent of that YouTube genre “teens react to old people stuff with awe and wonder” and give away the game.

Ordinary Angels (dir. Jon Gunn, February 23)

You would not expect a faith-based film to be the most stereotypical “Movie for Adults”—nothing too out there, nothing foreign, nothing flashy, just a solid drama—on this list, but it is. One benefit of making a Movie for Adults is being able to get Hilary Swank to star in it. Her role, too, is for adults; she plays a hairdresser who, in an attempt to make up for the harm her alcoholism has caused, throws herself into helping a family hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt due to one daughter’s liver disease. Swank is one of the great actresses of the last couple decades; the charisma on display in one scene where she dances on a bar is not something most can match, and that charisma carries what would otherwise be an unmemorable drama.

Drive-Away Dolls (dir. Ethan Coen, February 23)

If this and The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) prove anything, they prove that Joel was responsible for the existential bleakness and Ethan was responsible for the jokes within their collaborations; they also prove that Joel has most of the talent. This might as well be a lame imitation of better Coen films by a young filmmaker. Ethan Coen, apparently, believes that bad PowerPoint transitions are art and that influences should be honored by direct reference. Astounding. Here, the references, many of which are to his past work, only pose the question “why are Fargo (1996) and Burn After Reading (2008) and A Serious Man (2009) so much better than this?” (It’s set in 1999, a choice which ends up being one more way it feels like better Coen films.) And the film’s attitude towards its central lesbian couple (Margaret Qualley, doing some terrible accent work, and Geraldine Viswanathan) and lesbianism in general is leering and gross, aimed at titillation and little else.

Lisa Frankenstein (dir. Zelda Williams, February 9)

Like Drive-Away Dolls it’s a period piece, but for the ’80s. Like Drive-Away Dolls it is deeply and obviously indebted to several better films, most importantly Heathers (1988). Like Drive-Away Dolls it is incredibly confused about what it wants to say. Like Drive-Away Dolls it relies on jokes to hold it together. The jokes in Drive-Away Dolls are better, though.

Joshua: Imai Pol Kaakha (dir. Gautham Vasudev Menon, March 1)

Tamil cinema keeps the comedy of remarriage alive here with a premise—a hitman (Varun) gets out of the game when he starts a relationship with a prosecutor (Raahei), but she rejects him when she learns about his job; later he becomes a bodyguard assigned to protect her—more interesting than it appears on screen. The film ends with the woman shooting and killing her father. What that means is left as an exercise for the reader.

Kiss the Future (dir. Nenad Cicin-Sain, February 23)

Somewhere in here is a good documentary about the music scene in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. That documentary is buried under Bono’s preening self-regard. At one point he says that U2 stopped using satellite footage from Sarajevo during their shows because people started saying that it was cheap and exploitative. He has learned nothing.

Bob Marley: One Love (dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green, February 14)

Another case of “family-approved” meaning “uninteresting.” In its attempt to get away from music biopic cliches it becomes an aimless hangout movie that goes nowhere. While it hangs out with Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and his friends making Exodus (1977) several more interesting things about Marley’s life—Rastafari, the political situation in Jamaica, his womanizing, his role in the development of Jamaican music—are merely gestured at.

Critical notes:

• Thomas Doherty on the rise and fall of Paramount Pictures:

  Lubitsch’s eponymous touch was already his auteurist billing when he came from Germany to Hollywood in 1922—brought over by Pickford, to supervise her persona shift as a Spanish street singer in Rosita (1923)—but he imprinted his “saucy but not salacious brand of screen satire” at Paramount. In Lubitsch’s hands, the potentially censor-enraging Design for Living (1932)—about a ménage á trois—could be utterly disarming with a practical solution for an age-old problem: A girl like Miriam Hopkins shouldn’t really be forced to choose between Gary Cooper and Fredric March, should she? Such was Paramount’s reputation for “smart and sophisticated” screen fare that studio publicity had to pull back for fear of scaring away the rubes. “Don’t misunderstand the word ‘smart,’” the pressbook for Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) assured exhibitors. The film was “not over the heads of the mob—and not a picture for the intelligentsia only.”

• Sam Kriss
  on fascism and cinema:

  This is why filmmakers, honest ones at least, get nervous around fascism: what they do is not that different from what the dictator does. Turning images into meanings and meanings into images; conjuring unities. There’s something dangerous about the visual, the power of sight. Domination is always implied. Usually, the seeing eye that roves the world is sovereign over what it surveys; in Renaissance art, God is a disembodied eye, floating by itself in the corner of the scene. But park thousands of eyes in front of some spectacular image, and all that power vanishes. Now the eye is just an intermediary, hooked up to your camera. Great masses of people look at the world exclusively through your little mechanical hole.

Movies across the decades:

Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, 1962), Dune (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2021), Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2024)