I read the Washington Review of Books once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.
Links:
In Air Mail, Alex Belth on editing Annie Hall (1977):
Unsettled on an ending, Allen held a few screenings for small audiences to assess their reaction (a practice he did not continue). Back in the cutting room, Morse recalls, Rosenblum suggested the tone mirror the old Groucho Marx joke that started the movie (“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”). After swapping ideas back and forth, Rosenblum brought up a memory montage he’d cut in 1969’s Goodbye, Columbus, in which a scene of Richard Benjamin, dejected at the end of his friend’s wedding, flashes back to a highlight reel of scenes with Ali MacGraw. “That seemed to resonate with Woody,” says Morse.
She pulled clips from 15 or 20 key sequences—cooking with lobsters on Long Island; meeting in the lobby of the gym after playing tennis; kissing at dusk with the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in the background—and the memory montage was cut minutes later, with only Allen’s final voice-over remaining.
Allen recorded the final monologue, an old joke about a man whose brother thinks he’s a chicken, at Magno Sound, at 49th Street and Seventh Avenue. “He didn’t tip his hand to any of us as to what he had in mind,” says Morse. “He simply stepped into the isolation booth where he watched the final scene of the film unspool and delivered the perfect ending. No rehearsal. One take.”
[Annie Hall was one of the subjects of Movies across the decades in WRB—June 2023 Film Supplement. Marshall Brickman’s suggestion that the story of Annie Hall is that of Annie Hall’s coming of age is bizarre to me—if anything, it’s the story of Alvy Singer finally growing up. There’s a reason it starts with his childhood and not hers. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Éric Rohmer:
Rohmer realized that the usual length of a film (90 minutes to two hours) did not suffice to enable narratives with the scope of a novel, an epic poem or a spectacular theatrical pageant. Instead, he aimed to create work on the scale of a short story, a lyric poem or a one-act play. When you describe the plots of his films, they sound intricately trivial, like eighteenth-century-style comedies of manners, or nineteenth-century boulevard farces, replete with slamming doors, scheming lechers and paranoid, hysterical cuckolds. Yet they all unfold at a gentle pace; Rohmer tells his stories in a manner that gives them a natural, almost documentary feel, so that you often cannot tell what has been scripted and what was merely improvised by the actors, or captured by chance on camera. Instead of action, there is a great deal of talk.
[Rohmer was one of the subjects of Movies across the decades in WRB—May 2023 Film Supplement. Personally, I prefer to believe that France is just like that. —Steve]
In Current, Hillary Weston interviews Peyton Reed:
Weston: I’d love to know more about your relationship with romantic comedy and if this is a genre you’ve always been drawn to as a filmmaker and a viewer. It doesn’t always get the respect it deserves, despite having had such a deep cultural impact.
Reed: I’ve always been a fan of romantic comedies, but they’ve frequently gone in and out of favor. I’m a huge Frank Capra fan, and a movie like It Happened One Night (1934) swept the Oscars and still really holds up and gives you everything you want out of a romantic comedy. It’s genuinely romantic, which is not something you can say about every movie of its kind, and it’s so clearly of its time. I find that romantic comedies are the best genre of movie to give you a window into attitudes of the era in which they were made.
Down with Love (2003) is a love letter to the sex comedy. It was written by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, and their script was so particular about every reference and visual detail. They’re also both creatures of New York, and you could just feel that on the page. There was such passion in the writing, and I knew exactly what they were after. I bonded with them over our love for this subset of the romantic comedy, and I wanted to figure out what this kind of movie meant to modern audiences in 2003.
[Imagine how much better things would be if everyone writing thinkpieces about the state of relationships between men and women were instead writing scripts for romantic comedies. Imagine if Hollywood made some of them too. Maybe we’re too far gone. —Steve]
Reviews:
In 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews Earthlight (1970):
Pierre (Patrick Jouané) declares himself “the man from nowhere,” at home neither in France nor Tunisia, most at ease when he knows he’s leaving one location for another. While his lack of attachment to place may leave him perpetually adrift, it also affords him a kind of freedom, untethered from sentimentality. He will never be doomed to fetishize the past, unlike his father, unlike Mme. Larivière (Edwige Feuillère), unlike a bearded habitué of that seedy Pigalle boîte who utters, “The district’s changing, it’s not like before. What fun we had.” While not beholden to memory, Pierre knows he’s not impervious to time. He hears clocks chiming everywhere, and, while crossing a bridge over the Seine, is moved to tears when he listens to a woman singing about all the quotidian actions that make up a day. This doleful yet beguiling film ends with a title card that reads simply “To be continued,” perhaps the most optimistic way of saying “Laughing, crying—time goes by anyway.”
In The Nation, J. Hoberman reviews Hard Truths (2024):
Having made a large-scale costume drama, albeit one focused on the English working class, Leigh has returned to the character-driven social realism of his earlier films. Not that Hard Truths is a comfortable film or a small one: However intimate, Leigh’s post-Peterloo (2018) movie has its own epic qualities. His use of careful wide-screen framing imbues this latest account of a dysfunctional family with a measure of tragic gravitas, although it is essentially the story of one cosmically unhappy person, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), introduced more or less as she goes about her day.
If dinner with Pansy is a nonstop enraged monologue, a morning in her company is a mad adventure wherein she gratuitously insults the saleswoman (and two customers) in a furniture showroom, gets involved in a slanging insult fest in the parking lot, and causes an instant commotion on a supermarket checkout line.
Initially funny in an outrageous, Marx Brothers sort of way, Pansy’s behavior is less so with regard to the medical professionals whose help she so obviously needs. Pansy rudely disrupts a physical exam—referring to the young doctor as “a mouse with glasses squeaking at me”—and terminates a trip to the dentist, screaming that she is being subjected to “torture” and that the treatment is “unacceptable.”
Reviews of books:
In The American Scholar, Noah Isenberg reviews a book about Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation, by Kenneth Turan, February):
Their individual reputations in the motion picture business, where the two officially joined forces at MGM for its auspicious launch in 1924, were appropriately distinct. Mayer “was a very impetuous man—given to sudden infatuations, temper outbursts, emotional moments,” remarked producer David Lewis—Mayer’s favorite diet, according to Hermann Mankiewicz, was “his fellow man.” By contrast, owing to his youthful demeanor, Thalberg was frequently mistaken—even by his own future wife, MGM star Norma Shearer—as an office boy. Vogue columnist Allene Talmey described the “boy producer” as “nervous, skinny, mostly dark eyes and no body.” A certain father-son dynamic took hold, replete with oedipal battles and internal clashes. “I can’t make stars as fast as L. B. can fire them,” Thalberg once rued. When, in a textbook case of Hollywood nepotism, Mayer snubbed Thalberg by allowing his son-in-law David O. Selznick to run his own unit, the press tagged the event “The Son-in-Law Also Rises.”
In The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs reviews a book about Terrence Malick (Terrence Malick and the Examined Life, by Martin Woessner, 2024):
All that said, I will now risk my own use of Heidegger. One of that thinker’s most famous concepts is Geworfenheit (“thrownness”), the disorienting experience of being cast into a world and having to navigate it as best one can. Woessner invokes this notion, especially in relation to The New World (2005), which makes perfect sense, since to be among the first Europeans to visit the North American continent, or the first Native American to visit London, is to be “thrown” with a vengeance. Yet all Malick’s films seek to portray—not to describe but to portray—this condition, which combines wonderment, bewilderment, and alienation. A teenage girl on a road trip with her boyfriend, who has just murdered her father; a group of young men dumped from a transport ship onto a wild Pacific island occupied by Japanese soldiers; a Hollywood screenwriter whose life suddenly becomes incomprehensible to him; a farmer whose refusal to vow fealty to Adolf Hitler lands him in prison—these and many others are thrown, and by being thrown, are tested. How, the world asks them, will you respond to the challenge I offer you?
[Days of Heaven (1978) goes even further and makes the world a secularized God; Bill (Richard Gere, never better) is forced to flee his home after killing a man (like Moses) and in exile attempts to pass his girlfriend off as his sister (like Abraham). —Steve]
N.B.:
[I learned from this review of the new Malaparte biography (an Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 22, 2025) that he built the villa that belongs to Prokosch in Contempt (1963). I don’t know what to do with this information, but I figured I’d pass it along. —Steve]
A profile of Parker Posey.
An interview with George Miller.
An interview with Martin Scorsese.
The number of trailers and ads theaters play before the movie has attracted the attention of a Connecticut state senator.
Souleymane Cissé died on Wednesday, February 19. R.I.P.
Michelle Trachtenberg died on Wednesday, February 26. R.I.P.
Gene Hackman was found dead on Wednesday, February 26. R.I.P.
Someone called for the actors. He got up to get ready for the shot. I sat alone for a moment, trying to figure how to take that. He had not felt the need to explain it or even acknowledge how good or bad he thought the movie was, or its impact on me. He just got up, as if it was no big deal; a conversation that might or might not continue. I sat there wrestling with this knowledge, that what had been one of the most formative performances in my young life, a performance that had moved me so much, had been some sort of a blip to him, a job to pay the bills.
We got on the marks and we did the scene. My character opened up to him about having a difficult year, and he put his hand on my neck, and he looked at me, his eyes inches from mine, with a deep honesty and empathy, the powerful kind of look I had seen him give onscreen many times, and he said, “I know you have.” I believed him.
In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw:
In the end, I keep coming back to his performance in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), one that builds on his reputation for potent, unimpressed no-bullshit men but doesn’t simply satirize or send up his former career. His tatty, double-breasted chalk-stripe suit, his cigarette in the holder, his glasses, his indomitable grin, even his slightly too long hair are all absolutely perfect—as is the moment when he finally has to swallow his pride and take a job at the Lindbergh Palace hotel, and wear the cheap-looking but strangely well-tailored uniform and cap. His line readings are perfection, especially when he talks to his bewildered grandchildren about their mother, his daughter-in-law, who has died in a plane crash: “Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”
In Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz:
That triptych of roles in politically adjacent genre movies—No Way Out (1987), The Birdcage (1996), and Absolute Power (1997)—is also a vivid illustration of what we might call the Gene Hackman Principle of Transformative Acting: The best special makeup is talent. He’s visually the same guy in all three movies, down to the suits and ties, but if you watch them in a row without knowing the plots going in, you could never guess what Hackman’s character was going to do based on what you’d seen last time. Each new assignment was a chance to revisit the familiar and make it feel brand new. The patriarch Royal Tenenbaum summed up that brand of creative chaos in the “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” montage, where he resolves to show his sheltered grandsons how not to play it safe, dropping g’s by the handful: “I’m not talkin’ about dance lessons! I’m talkin’ about puttin’ a brick through the other guy’s windshield. I’m talking about takin’ it out and choppin’ it up!”
In The Bulwark,
:Hackman slid easily back and forth between hero and villain; his whole career was painted in shades of gray. And while Hackman could undoubtedly ham it up—he remains the definitive live-action Lex Luthor for a reason—he imbued his characters with a sly subtlety that could leave audiences unsure where to fall. That mode practically defines the roles he took on in the last decade or so of his career, starting with Unforgiven (1992). Given that the film stars Clint Eastwood, it’s easy to forget that he, technically, is the outlaw in that picture. Hackman’s Little Bill is the face of law and order, though not justice. He’s just a semi-retired lawman trying to maintain order in a frontier town; if some whores get cut up, that’s worth a few horses to their employer, not burning down the whole town in vengeance. Again, there’s that sly, knowing smile, one he spent decades perfecting: He deploys it before defanging English Bob (Richard Harris) because he knows he has the goods and Bob, who spends Independence Day yammering about the glory of royalty, doesn’t.
In The Ringer, Brian Phillips:
Hackman, by contrast, drew you in by holding back. Even when he was playing a loudmouth or a bully, he always held something in reserve, and because he was so naturally gifted, this felt like an act of generosity rather than stinginess. He didn’t have to overpower you or cow you into submission, the way Cruise or Jack Nicholson or even Humphrey Bogart might. He had a trick of making room: for you, for the story, for the world outside. There was something almost restful about watching him, because he never approached a movie like it was a battle he needed to win. It sounds strange to say that his fundamental quality as an actor was courtesy, but there was something essentially courteous about the way he watched and listened and modulated himself. Movies breathed more freely, always, when he was in them.
Critical notes:
- on movie run times:
To the extent that tentpoles were getting (varying quality notwithstanding) long for long’s sake in the early 2020s, variables have changed. When studios expected or implicitly wanted viewers to watch The Batman (2022) on HBO Max, letting Matt Reeves’ Caped Crusader melodrama run as long as The Godfather (1972) A) could be sold as an art > commerce win and B) was less of an issue with folks pausing or breaking it into three “episodes” at home. With the industry (re)learning that cash-in-hand theatrical revenue > non-transactional SVOD viewership, I’d expect to see even tentpole runtimes closer to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) (126 minutes) than Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) (160 minutes). Another factor, namely that those AMC and Regal pre-show reels (trailers, commercials and those uh . . . absolutely critical promos for the very theater chain you’ve already chosen) run so damn long (25-30 minutes) that even a two-hour movie in theaters (with before/after transportation) can become a three-hour-plus commitment.
Movies across the decades:
The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Washington Review of Books to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.