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Links:
In the local Examiner, Joe Joyce on the legacy of Pulp Fiction (1994):
In less capable hands, this reclamation of pulpy crap would be mere bad taste. A food critic once pointed out that there are complex flavors in a Quarter Pounder, which is in fact delicious. But no doubt this critic’s view and that of the average customer at the drive-thru, while identical on the surface, come from different considerations. Simply put, most Pulp Fiction-influenced post-“poptimism” movie lovers just haven’t developed the taste buds to properly savor their slop. The cinephile hero’s journey is a long and arduous process but can be summarized thusly: You like Star Wars (1977), you pretend to dislike Star Wars, you actually dislike Star Wars, and, finally, you like Star Wars again but this time from a place of refinement. The post-Tarantino generation has the low cunning to recognize this is a circle and decide to save the trip. But it’s those years in the proverbial wilderness eating locusts that give you standards. The dark spawn of Tarantino’s egalitarianism is every 40-year-old man with opinions on cartoons and every Twitter reply that wheedles you to “let people enjoy things.”
[Tarantino has, I think, allowed his taste for trash to rot out his brain. The work he made as a younger man—Jackie Brown (1997) especially, but large parts of Pulp Fiction as well—was far more mature than his more recent work, which attempts to cover up its childishness through endless commentary on pop culture. Pulp Fiction understood, despite its flaws, that pop culture is not real life. You can’t live in it. It’s sad to see Tarantino try. —Steve]
In the Times, Mark Binelli profiles Guy Maddin:
Before my trip to Winnipeg, my main exposure to the place had been through Maddin’s own films—in particular, his 2007 feature My Winnipeg, a commission for Canada’s Documentary Channel. For that project, Maddin dutifully exhumed the sort of archival city-life footage you’d find in a proper public-television documentary, but then overlaid it with baroque, deeply unreliable narration and restaged scenes from the history of the city and his own family, some true and some fanciful. Yes, he did grow up in an apartment above a beauty salon run by his mother and aunt, and as a boy would climb into the basement hair chute to peep at the ankles of the largely elderly clientele. No, a flash-freeze of the Red River in 1926 did not trap a group of runaway horses and leave their heads jutting from the ice for months. (“Winter strollers visit the heads frequently, often on romantic rambles,” Maddin claims in his narration, though the image was actually borrowed from the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte’s own heavily fictionalized memoir, Kaputt.) Yes, his father, the general manager of a local hockey team, would lend out young Guy to visiting franchises as a “stick boy.” (In a 1997 documentary, Maddin remembered lathering players’ backs in the showers and gazing in awe at the sullen and monobrowed Soviets. “The guys that I loved so much didn’t wear helmets,” he said. “They wore Brylcreem.”) But alas, no, there was never a daily local TV series called LedgeMan, in which “the same oversensitive man takes something said the wrong way, climbs out on a window ledge and threatens to jump,” only to be coaxed back to safety by his mother. Nor did Maddin’s own mother portray the mother in the nonexistent series.
In The American Conservative, Nic Rowan on Alain Delon:
To the intellectually sensitive young man, alienated as much from himself as he is from his surroundings, the attraction of this Delon is often overpowering. (I have known a few to buy raincoats matching Delon’s after first seeing his Melville films.) Here, at last, is a hero who strides through the world completely unfazed by the petty rituals of daily life; he is bound only by his byzantine moral code. These attitudes shade many of Delon’s dramatic performances as well: the sadistic boyfriend in La piscine (1969) or the amoral art dealer in Monsieur Klein (1976). It is unsurprising that his breakout role was as the first screen version of Tom Ripley, in René Clément’s Plein soleil (1960), where he simultaneously plays the charmer and the lone wolf. You could say that Alain Delon was the original “sigma male.”
[And what’s wrong with that? —Steve]
In Prospect, David Barnett on folk horror:
Folk horror also often deals with our relationship to the environment, and that is something more and more people are becoming aware of. “You see the idea of the outsider coming into the community in movies from The Wicker Man (1973) to Midsommar (2019), which is kind of a homage to it,” continues Hurley, “but I think it’s very much to do with the landscape as well.
“It’s true of all countries, but in Britain in particular there’s so much that has seeped into the landscape—hauntings and superstition, sites of battles or executions—so it’s got this very dark history, and I think folk horror digs that up, it binds that.”
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller review Anora (2024):
But Ani (Mikey Madison) does believe. She embraces the married state with the fervor of the vulgar characters in Jane Austen who marry sheerly to enter it. She doesn’t appear to be much in love with Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), but there is no mistaking that she is passionately, even desperately attached to the status of married lady. She genuflects at the trite way stations of her induction without the slightest self-consciousness—the ostentatious diamond ring; its invidious display to the girls left behind at the club; the embowered ceremony crowned with a kiss—because grounding all this activity is the stupid-making thrill of getting to say, “I’m Vanya’s wife!” Eventually she accepts the name Anora, which, Igor (Yura Borisov) tells her, means “light.” But, in its derivation from the Latin honos, it also points, beyond the kind of honor that marriage would confer in making an “honest woman” of her, to the strange but unflagging rectitude that the film is patiently getting us to recognize as her aura.
In our sister publication out West, Annie Berke reviews Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004):
Still, these types and archetypes live in all of us, move us, in ways we can’t possibly articulate. It’s not all for the ill: Eternal Sunshine is also terribly romantic, more romantic, on rewatching than I even remember. I’m older, so I’ve lived with this movie for almost as long as I lived without it, and I’d forgotten how much I remembered. Maybe it made me just a little bit profoundly, unfixably wrong, as culture is bound to do.
Putting aside his public spat with critic Mark Kermode and acknowledging the mixed critical reception of his films, Kaufman remains a critic’s filmmaker. He fixates on how taste shapes our movements through the world, how we relate to others (or fail to relate, in any healthy way). And what we like, what we don’t, how our preferences change, and how we persist in love despite ourselves . . . this might be what we’re really looking at when we write an anniversary piece. Directors and studios may cut and recut films, but, ultimately, it’s not the films that change; it’s us, and only if we’re not too mired in the movies that have made us.
In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Anna Krauthamer reviews May/December (2023):
Early in the film, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is invited to speak to a high school theater class at the school Joe (Charles Melton) and Gracie’s (Julianne Moore) children attend. When asked by a student why she picks the roles she does, Elizabeth answers that she prioritizes roles with “complexity.” Ever the serious actor, it’s “the moral gray areas” that are interesting to her. But for Elizabeth, the presence of “complexity” is always tied to mimicry, a pleasurable but surface-level way of representing that she mistakes for embodiment. To prepare herself for that task, of ostensibly embodying complexity, Elizabeth attempts to come as close as possible to wearing Gracie’s skin. In one scene, Gracie and Elizabeth stand facing a bathroom mirror, with the camera focused on their adjacent reflections. In a distorted sort of empathetic identification, Elizabeth meticulously imitates Gracie’s makeup routine as if by looking like Gracie she might truly embody her, and newly understand this person previously separate from herself. But in a twist of that logic, Gracie begins applying the makeup to Elizabeth herself, literally taking control of Elizabeth’s means toward mimesis. Why the sudden reversal—why are Elizabeth’s attempts at finding legibility rendered so crudely graceless?
- reviews The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966):
Earlier in the film, a ledger of the secret police turned into a party guest list. Now a wedding party has become a hunting group. These are the principal tonal shifts in The Party and the Guests, and form the basis of the plot, but throughout are extraneous details that psychologically disorient the audience, that set the uneasy mood: Laughing, a woman calls after her friends for a knife; a desk and chair are carried out of the woods; an authoritarian madly wags his fingers like a toddler; thugs rough up a man by tossing him in the air as though celebrating; sinister men hiding in the trees, their mouths covered with handkerchiefs, emerge and are welcomed as old friends; banqueters play musical chairs; the leader’s son muses lyrically about shooting himself in the head; a wife miraculously changes into her third outfit of the day, a hunting jacket, to join a search party for her husband; her friend questions her while he plays with a rifle, and their other friends stuff themselves with dessert and wine. Watching, it is impossible to settle on any feeling. The stakes are high and low. We doubt even our animal sense of dread. Whether or not this doubt makes us indifferent conformists is the film’s provocation.
Reviews of books:
In Bookforum, A. S. Hamrah reviews two books about Agnès Varda (A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, by Carrie Rickey, August; and Agnès Varda: Director’s Inspiration, edited by Matt Severson, 2023):
Varda herself was harsh on films. The first film she ever saw was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1938. “What is certain is that I hated Snow White,” she said as an adult, explaining that “its valorization of the heroine for cleaning the house of the dwarfs without pay” disgusted her. (“A sophisticated critique for a ten-year-old,” writes Rickey.) Demy loved The Sound of Music (1965); Varda did not. “How could you love a stupid, bullshit film like this, with that stupid babysitter who wishes to marry the father? I mean, is it interesting to see someone wash the pants of eleven children to get a man?” she asked. She thought Ingmar Bergman’s marital dramas were also suspect. As late as 2013 she told an interviewer, “It’s fine that they made Gravity, but I really couldn’t care less.” In A Hundred and One Nights (1995), one of her cinema-valorizing movies, Michel Piccoli, playing a man who is supposed to be the living embodiment of cinema, makes an anti-Bergman statement apropos of nothing, “Down with cries, long live whispers,” demonstrating where Varda’s heart lies.
[Up there with some of the greatest The Sound of Music hating:
When it was announced that Ernest Lehman would write a script based on the Broadway hit, Burt Lancaster told him: “Jesus, you must need the money.” When asked to direct, Stanley Donen refused to have anything to do with it. When Lehman sounded out Gene Kelly about directing, he led his questioner to the door of his home and said, “Go find someone else to direct this piece of shit!”
—Steve]
N.B.:
Interviews:
with Cate Blanchett.
with Jesse Eisenberg.
with Mark Eydelshteyn.
with Harrison Ford.
The amount of sex in movies is in decline.
On the Pulp Fiction poster.
Paul Morrissey died on Monday, October 28. R.I.P.
Teri Garr died on Tuesday, October 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:
Anora (dir. Sean Baker, October 18)
We learn from various nineteenth-century novels that the worst thing you can do if you’re a woman is make a bad marriage. We also learn from said novels that marriage is basically the only game in town; you have to play it because men have the money.
Anora—she goes by Ani—finds herself in a current version of this predicament. She works in Brighton Beach as a stripper. This will serve as a close-enough equivalent of a governess, especially because she finds herself responsible for Vanya, son of a Russian oligarch, who hires her to be his girlfriend for a week and then marries her in Vegas so he can get a green card. He wants to stay in America because his parents are threatening him with the possibility of having to work instead of sponge off them, which says a lot about what kind of guy he is. And when his parents intervene to get the marriage annulled he starts acting like an eight-year-old, immediately submitting to his parents and taking no responsibility for anything. Still, there aren’t really any consequences for him; women are toys, and their attempts to get the legitimacy of marriage and the money that comes with it are an inconvenience to be dealt with.
If this makes it sound as unrelenting and depressing as Tess of the d’Urbervilles it isn’t, because the middle hour is one hilarity after another. The oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov) and his wife (Darya Ekamasova) tell one of their henchmen (Karren Karagulian) to address the situation, and he sends his own henchmen (Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan), and they make a huge mess of it, tying Ani up while letting Vanya escape, so the top henchmen has to show up and take over. Ani and the henchmen going all over trying to find Vanya—all the while getting into scrapes while Ani yells in beautiful Brooklynese—is a riot. We fall in love with them—but they’re not in charge. And neither is Ani, despite her desperate attempt to hold on to the literal and metaphorical ring Vanya gave her.
[For more on the setting of Anora see Movies across the decades below.]
Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood, November 1)
Clint Eastwood has been polishing his late style for so long that it’s automatic. He knows what he’s interested in, and he knows what he isn’t, and if that means he has to rush through a bunch of shots of home life so be it. The titular juror’s (Nicholas Hoult) home life isn’t the point; the unease he feels and the decisions he makes as he realizes he might be connected to the murder at issue are. And the film looks great there; somehow Eastwood found something new and interesting in the shadows cast by Venetian blinds.
It’s an old man’s film, one with no interest in interrogating why the world is how it is—that’s unchangeable now. The jury system has flaws, but it also has advantages, and in any case it’s what we have. Eastwood cares about how it makes people act, how the potential perversity of its incentives forces people to choose between what it asks of them and what seems to be in their best interest. A younger director might have ended this film five minutes earlier, with an image indicating that a guilty conscience will follow you as long as you live. Clint Eastwood is 94, and he ends his film with a shot indicating that judgment is coming, it’s coming sooner than you think, and you won’t expect it when it comes.
The rest:
Rumours (dir. Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson, Evan Johnson, October 18)
The differences between a G7 summit and a bunch of teenagers getting lost at summer camp are, apparently, minimal. The leaders of the free world, like teens, create their own world. They frequently sneak off to have sex. They like leaving people alone in the woods to freak them out. There are a couple type A personalities who try to keep everyone else on track. They hope that somewhere in all this they’ll discover a solution to all their problems. The giant brain in the woods and the masturbating bog bodies are, though, unique to this film’s bizarre approach, which sometimes leads it to pointlessness but always makes it compelling on those terms.
If the setting should induce the heads of government to act differently, the nebulous crisis they face and their inability to respond to it lead to their regression. They cannot help themselves, since their animal instincts and fears sabotage all their attempts to engage in politics. The world is falling apart and cannot be saved; the Secretary-General of the European Commission (Alicia Vikander) like Brünnhilde burns herself alive (on top of the aforementioned giant brain) before the world ends in fire.
A Real Pain (dir. Jesse Eisenberg, November 1)
David (Jesse Eisenberg), a creature of the routine he has created between his job, wife, and kids, and Benji (Kieran Culkin), one of those charming people who has no idea what he’s doing, are two Jewish cousins from New York. They embark on one of those road trips familiar from buddy comedies and learn something about themselves, each other, and life more generally. What makes this interesting is the location: Poland, where their grandmother lived before coming to America to escape the Holocaust. They’re there on a guided tour for Jews, which takes them to both concentration camps and the cities that were once centers of Jewish life, and it speaks well of Eisenberg’s skill as a writer and director that the buddy comedy portions coexist with the Holocaust portions without either feeling inappropriate. The question at the center of the movie is the standard “what should I be doing with my life?”, but the cousins’ insistent attempts to answer it have an urgency supplied by the memory of their grandmother: “she escaped a genocide to make our life possible; are we squandering that gift?”
Conclave (dir. Edward Berger, October 25)
A passable Sorkin-style thriller about the election of a pope marred by the usual Sorkin-style problems. Only Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the dean of the College of Cardinals, appears to be an actual human being; all the other leading cardinals exist to be representative of ideological tendencies and give the occasional speech explaining said tendencies. Its commitment to creating scandals for all sides is matched by how ludicrous some of them are—simony? Committed, apparently, by wiring money directly to cardinals’ personal accounts? Really? Near the end, the leading conservative figure, who (speech explaining traditionalist tendencies aside) has shown himself to be a canny operator, has a total meltdown. Another cardinal, who has emerged out of nowhere, responds by giving a speech full of Catholic buzzwords that manages to say very little. The Sorkinesque dream of unity through clever speechifying against the bad speechifiers persists. About the final twist the less said the better, but it certainly explains much of the reaction to the film.
We Live in Time (dir. John Crowley, October 11)
A romantic comedy-drama that follows a couple over several years could do a lot with a non-linear timeline. It could, understanding that a relationship is nothing but constant recommitment, remaking the same decision over and over, line up all those moments, presenting them as all one. The unifying thread is not time but that one decision made over and over, always the same decision; why not, having recognized that most romantic films’ detailing a romance in linear time is just a little bit facile, reveal the real logic and the real organization behind them?
On the other hand, it could also have a non-linear timeline for no reason beyond “non-linear timelines are arty, and if we make our movie arty it will work better as Oscar bait, and so we should do that.” It could then double down on this approach to filmmaking by giving the heroine (Florence Pugh) cancer.
The Apprentice (dir. Ali Abbasi, October 11)
The thesis here is that Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) is an actual human being, and Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), upon coming into contact with him, becomes one of those people in the Inferno whose soul is already in hell while demons puppeteer their bodies on earth. Given this, Cohn is the more interesting figure, but the demands of the Resistance require a focus on Trump. And there’s a reason no one has ever tried to make Mephistopheles more interesting than Faust.
Here (dir. Robert Zemeckis, November 1)
Tom Hanks, Robert Zemeckis, Eric Roth, and Robin Wright, apparently not content with having perpetrated Forrest Gump (1994) against the public, return with more Boomer navel-gazing. But they’re older now and no longer believe they’re the agents of all of history. Thirty years later they’ve gone to the other extreme; the film shows the Boomers receiving a paradise made for them by the sacrifices of their fathers and the political and technological innovations of the past couple hundred years, which they then proceed to squander. They achieve nothing; they build nothing; they preserve nothing; they hand nothing on; all they have left is their memories of failure. And the film tells you this through its text but even more through its inexorable commitment to incompetence. Using AI to create an 18-year-old Tom Hanks is the dream—eternal youth, eternal life—and one completely at odds with good filmmaking. It doesn’t look real because it isn’t.
Critical notes:
I recently asked Gus van Sant, who spent the creative and marketplace capital he’d accumulated as a result of directing Good Will Hunting (1997)—which made $225 million at the box office and was nominated for nine Oscars and won two—on a color remake if Psycho (1960) that wasn’t shot for shot but was pretty close. It bombed at the box office and was considered bizarre and pointless by a lot of critics, even ones who rather enjoyed it. I recently got the chance to ask Van Sant why, of all the things he could’ve made next, he chose that. He called his Psycho (1998) “a cinematic experiment.” I asked him what the point of it was, and he said, “to see what would happen.”
More directors should be allowed to think that way. Sometimes dream projects result in films that prove to be enormously valuable over the long haul, culturally as well as financially, like maybe half of the Coen Brothers’ output. And once in a while, they hit paydirt immediately, as was the case with the original Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999) which felt so new that a lot of people watching them the first time felt as if they’d been dropped into a country where they didn’t speak the language.
The movement toward repertory, however, isn’t only because of sudden changes in taste or just a case of people wanting to get out of their homes after being trapped in them. On a grander scale, it’s a Darwinian adaptation to a grim landscape largely created by the cynicism and miscalculations of the major Hollywood studio system. Nearly every decision the studios have made since the turn of the century has inadvertently supported and strengthened the position of repertory cinema as a counterbalance in the industry.
[I can’t figure out why Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) is called a snuff film in the first paragraph, unless the definition of that phrase changed while I wasn’t looking. —Steve]
Movies across the decades:
Requiem for a Dream (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2000), Anora (dir. Sean Baker, 2024)
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