The mediator between head and hands must be the Washington Review of Books.
Links:
Greg Gerke on John Ford:
All the gruff machismo, the Irish-American bullshit bru-ha-ha (though he said, “I’m a coward”) is there and is well-documented (Jimmy Stewart: “There’s always tension on a Ford set”), but why did this seeming brute and struggling alcoholic feel compelled to not only unsettle human civilization, but redefine it—on his terms? This is unconscionable but not inconceivable. There are no easy answers and none that will fully satisfy anyone. Deleuze: “What counts for Ford is that community develop certain illusions about itself,” something he nodded to directly in life: “We’ve had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren’t. But it’s good for the country to have heroes to look up to. Like Custer—a great hero. Well, he wasn’t. Not that he was a stupid man—but he did a stupid job that day.” Again and again we see the community coming to embrace the “hero,” even in The Quiet Man (1952), where the native Irish adopt the Yank as one of their own. The real answer is Ford’s—history was his real profession (he made four versions of Abe Lincoln over his films), and not surprisingly his pastime was reading history books.
In The Ringer, Kyle Wilson on Tim Burton:
In nearly all of these films, the strangest character is the one who has Burton’s sympathies, and indeed the one he’s arguing is the most normal. The regular ones—the suburban neighbors of Scissorhands (1990) who gossip over the phone and at the neighborhood barbecues, the Deetzes of Beetlejuice (1988) who host dinner parties to curry favor with potential business partners—these are the real freaks. That’s a thesis statement that’s always going to ring true to a certain outsider spirit in people, and combined with Burton’s mastery as a visual stylist, it’s no wonder his early films captured the zeitgeist. Jack Skellington and Edward Scissorhands didn’t just become Halloween costume staples because of their signature looks, but because of the melancholic longing Burton managed to instill in them—character traits that made audiences not only find them “cool,” but also worthy of their care. It can be tough to remember that distinction, to clear the decades of Burton branding away to reveal the soul of his initial works. Likewise, it feels like audiences have forgotten the time when a Tim Burton film used to just be plain old fun.
In The Baffler, John Semley on “elevated horror”:
By contrast, a great many of the postmodern and elevated horror flicks feel as if they’re knotting in on themselves. They’re hermetic in the negative sense. There is not much to do with Scream (1996), or The Cabin in the Woods (2011), or Get Out (2017), or Midsommar (2019) other than to say, “I get it.” Where many of the classic horror films felt like they were smuggling meanings into them, these new cycles pushed (or “elevated”) any buried subtext to the level of text.
Even when these movies are obsessively parsed by fans, such interpretive work almost inevitably points back to basic, clearly stated themes. I am reminded of savvy viewers pointing to a scene in Get Out where Allison Williams’ character carefully separates her multicolored Froot Loops from her glass of white milk, a detail that does little beyond confirming that, yes, this is a film is about racism and the cognitive dissonance of the liberal class. And when such ideas are not painstakingly telegraphed, italicized, and double-underlined, some handwaving about “generational cycles of violence” will typically satisfy lingering questions regarding what a given movie is up to.
In ,
on Mishima and Paul Schrader’s response to him in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985):Schrader’s film also functions as commentary on Mishima’s final act. Here Schrader is one step ahead of his subject. Mishima seemed not to consider that if he was to make of his life a work of art his final moments would be subject to criticism. What if he his final act was bad art? What if he, in his quest for glory, instead achieved humiliation? What if he, like our ballerina, tumbled off the stage ever so gracelessly? Here he stages the spectacle against the spectacular.
The simple trick of the film—black and white for reality, color for the literary—admits us onto Mishima’s own terrain. His final act is an act of art. Schrader admits this. Schrader then adopts, as is his right as filmmaker, the standpoint of the divine. He will play the part of fate.
In The New Yorker, Elena Saavedra Buckley on Todd Solondz:
In the early two-thousands, American indie films drifted away from hedged yards and time-shares and toward the twee apartments of the mumblecore milieu. Solondz, however, remained planted in the suburban realm he knew best. He also dug in his heels while others in his generation adapted to a bloated, conglomerated industry. Linklater’s romances and epic optimism found studio support; Todd Haynes got Oscar nominations and Netflix money; Sam Mendes, who directed American Beauty (1999), went on to make James Bond films. Solondz, who was briefly considered for larger studio projects, like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), has a signature Gen X frustration with his industry’s conforming drive, as well as a barbed self-consciousness over real and perceived slights. When he was told that Mendes allegedly found “Happiness” to be condescending to its characters, for example, he mocked American Beauty’s treacly plastic-bag scene in Storytelling (2001): a pretentious director played by Paul Giamatti films a straw wrapper and narrates “how fragile the balance of life is.”
In the Times, Robert Rubsam on fictional pop songs in movies:
But only one film that I can think of has been brave enough to own up to the catastrophic implications of a pop hit’s emptiness. Celeste (Natalie Portman), the singer in Brady Corbet’s 2018 Vox Lux, explodes onto the public stage after surviving a school shooting as a teenager. Yet this does not result in deep, meaningful music. Celeste’s songs (as written by Sia) are heavy on flash and light on anything else. “I don’t want people to have to think too hard,” she explains to a lover. “I just want them to feel good.” In acting the role of a national healer, Celeste must stunt herself, a bargain that Corbet presents as essentially Faustian. Her music is the waste product of a culture of violence, a civilization capable only of reproducing tragedy as trashy Europop. Her songs comfort no one, least of all herself. When Celeste returns to her hometown for a climactic concert, the effect is hardly triumphant: All that movement and spectacle does nothing to paper over the void.
In The Yale Review, Emily LaBarge on Chantal Akerman:
In the French TV interview, Akerman and Seyrig argue for feminism as a nuanced language—something we might consider to be as much visual and spatial as it is spoken and written. “It is the first time I have seen this subject treated on film, and it’s very rare to see new subjects in cinema—we always see the same ones,” Seyrig says, pointing out how many millions of femmes d’intérieurs exist in real life. “The film was based on my childhood memories,” Akerman explains, “seeing women from behind who were bent over, carrying bags.” It is about what she had observed, what she knew and recognized from life. In a nearby room at Bozar, Jeanne Dielman (1975) plays across multiple monitors: we see Jeanne sitting at her kitchen table, peeling potatoes, checking if the milk is sour, finding herself at a loose end as the day begins to unravel and she remains in her apartment, as if suspended in time and space, until that final, fateful client arrives, and she kills him. Akerman reasserted her position in a radio interview given shortly after Jeanne Dielman’s release: “I’m not a militant. I simply make films that are not colonized, that have not been filtered through the language of men. . . . I think I’m making films that are very close to how I feel and to what I am, and I don’t speak the language of men to express myself. And so, that’s my way of being in the fight.”
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Sam Weller on the collaboration of Ray Bradbury and John Huston on Moby Dick (1956):
Huston perceived in his 33-year-old screenwriter a Midwestern naivete. Bradbury had never left the United States. His formal education had ended at high school. He wasn’t a hard drinker or smoker, nor was he a womanizer, unlike the famously libidinous Huston. The seasoned director saw all this and started to play increasingly vicious practical jokes on his earnest screenwriter.
For example, he told Bradbury that—at the personal request of one of the film’s major investors, Walter Mirisch—he had to insert a love interest into Melville’s story. This was funny, but it was not true. Huston went further, embarrassing Bradbury in front of others by accusing him of not having his heart in the screenplay, just to get a rise out of the young man. He pressured Bradbury to mount a horse and participate in fox hunts. He wanted him to play cards and gamble. Huston drank whiskey at night as he read Bradbury’s daily output of pages and wanted Bradbury to imbibe with him. It was bad enough that Bradbury had to adapt a doorstop book into a two-hour film, but now his hero was preying upon his innocence.
[Before I work on the WRB I also look in the mirror and say “I . . . am Herman Melville!” —Steve]
N.B.:
Interviews:
with Francis Ford Coppola.
Coppola’s list of five books that influenced Megalopolis (2024). [One of them is Elective Affinities; I haven’t read it myself, but based on what Chris says I’m going to call it a WRB classic. —Steve]
with Brian De Palma.
with Ian McKellen.
with Chris Sanders.
A24 released a kids’ book.
On showing parts of Persona (1966) to a seven-year-old. [“No, don’t!” —Steve]
“I joke with my colleagues [that] when Mubi have a slow social media day, they just post a picture of Maggie Cheung on a motorcycle, and then it’s hearts, hearts, hearts.”
James Earl Jones died on Monday, September 9. R.I.P.
Maggie Smith died on Friday, September 27. 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:
Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, September 27)
An epic of untrammeled ambition. This makes it, like any such epic, strange. The reviews will tell you that. But the strangeness is overstated. Some of it is the result of Megalopolis being in development for forty years; forty years of Coppola piling idea after idea, fixation after fixation, into it, and when the time came to make a feature-length movie all manner of ideas left evidence of their presence at one stage or another. But is it strange for a character named Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) to deliver the “to be, or not to be” soliloquy while discussing construction plans in the city of New Rome, a barely-disguised New York City? Is it strange that he should be courted with a recitation of the opening of Sappho 16 in a love scene that owes a lot to the “You Were Meant for Me” scene in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)? Is it strange that his vision for reconstructing New Rome should come to fruition in a tripartite montage reminiscent of the triptych at the end of Gance’s Napoléon (1927), which depicts Napoleon’s victories at the start of the Italian campaign? Sure—and yet anyone who has read The Waste Land has seen this done before and should be able to explain why it is done. Coppola is pulling on everything he knows, pointing not just to itself but to its juxtapositions, having those juxtapositions speak to things not in the source material, hoping to find something new.
[If this is the last modernist movie, it owes a lot to one of the first, Metropolis (1927); its subject matter, its approach to ideas, its politics, and its final vision are inextricable from that film’s. More on this in Movies across the decades below. —Steve]
The Wild Robot (dir. Chris Sanders, September 27)
Pinocchio if Geppetto needed to become a real human being. This means that it still deals with that classic subject of kids’ movies, figuring out how to exist in the world; the difference here is that Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot for domestic service who washes up on an island full of animals, has to figure out how to mother a gosling (Kit Connor) who imprints on her. At the beginning, she frames it in terms of her intended function—completing a task assigned to her—but friendship and love are more mysterious than that. They are so mysterious that they insist another way of life is possible. Maybe the animals don’t have to spend all their time trying to kill each other.
[I basically never cry at movies, especially kids’ movies, but I came close here. Also the rough brushstrokes of the animation look wonderful; see the interview with Sanders above for more on that. —Steve]
The rest:
My Old Ass (dir. Megan Park, September 13)
A sweet little meditation on “’tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all.” If it involves Elliott (Maisy Stella) doing mushrooms on her 18th birthday and meeting her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), stranger things have happened. The first thing to be lost is childhood—in a way the model for all these losses, with the attendant dramatic reshaping of any vision of the future—and so it is here. Going to college is one symptom; the family selling the cranberry farm they’ve had for generations is another. And what in life is symptoms is in art the objective correlative. Plaza is very funny as a much older person who acts like she’s above all this; in some sense she is, but no one ever really is.
[As a New Englander I feel obligated to congratulate this film and its cinematographer, Kristen Correll, on the painterly shots of cranberry bogs throughout. (Even if it is set in Canada.) —Steve]
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (dir. Tim Burton, September 6)
Tim Burton is intent on being nothing but self-parody, but at least here he is riffing on Beetlejuice (1986), some of his best work. He doesn’t understand why it’s some of his best work—Beetlejuice is a comedy of remarriage occasionally livened up by Michael Keaton engaging in delicious antics as Beetlejuice; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice attempts to build the whole plane out of antics. They’re good antics, no doubt—Michael Keaton still has it—but without the sense that the movie is actually about something it’s just a string of unconnected comedy sketches. And they are unconnected; Burton managed to fit six or seven subplots into a 104-minute movie, and so most of them don’t really go anywhere or do anything. He could at least have had the decency to let Beetlejuice and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), now the host of a cheap supernatural TV show, end up together in the spirit of the original’s comedy of remarriage. (The living men in her life are, somehow, much worse than Beetlejuice.) But no. (Winona Ryder agrees!)
The Critic (dir. Anand Tucker, September 13)
You wonder what an acerbic elderly critic like Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellen) would have made of the decisions made in shooting this film. Probably nothing—it was the ’30s, and he was a theater critic, and this for a right-wing rag; you assume he did not regard movies as art at all. But if he did, it is hard to imagine he would have liked the random lighting decisions and store-brand Wes Anderson visuals scattered through a film that aspires to noir. The plot, perhaps, would suit him better. After being arrested for gay sex and losing his job because of it, he has an unsuccessful actress (Gemma Arterton) seduce his publisher (Mark Strong) so he can blackmail his way into getting his job back. She agrees to do so in exchange for good reviews. Meanwhile, her ex-lover (Ben Barnes), an artist who happens to be the publisher’s son-in-law, pines for her. Really, you feel for the publisher, the one normal man in a world of art freaks.
The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat, September 20)
This film hates women, and—as these things always go—it’s all the worse because it thinks it’s doing the opposite. Demi Moore is an attractive woman who looks much younger than her 61 years. She is by no means a grotesquerie, but this film makes the aging actress she plays into one. Her youth and life are drained out of her and her time in the world is stolen by a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) that she created with the help of the titular substance. Eventually she becomes—this is the word—a monster. If this reminds you of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Grey, it should; but those had ideas about their transformations and what they meant. Here, the only idea is that Hollywood treats its aging actresses poorly. This is true, but “Hollywood” didn’t make Demi Moore into a pathetic and monstrous figure. This film did.
Critical notes:
Will Sloan on changing your mind about a movie:
I think that being alienated from liberalism means feeling alienated from a lot of the rules and standards and platitudes and hierarchies one might have once accepted unthinkingly. Maybe this is linked to why I’m finding Jerry Lewis funny again: I like his refusal to conform to the rules of Good Storytelling, or to the accepted set-up/punchline rhythm of a well-told joke. Typically he’ll lead with the punchline, then drag it out into infinity, like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes. I think I like the Three Stooges more than ever for much the same reason.
In the Times, James B. Stewart and Brooks Barnes on Bob Iger’s palace intrigues at Disney:
Once in the job, Mr. Iger wondered, as did Mr. Eisner before him: If stripped of his power and multimillion-dollar compensation at Disney, would his allure diminish? For several years, the license plate holder on Mr. Iger’s silver Porsche posed the question, “Is there life after Disney?”
. . . .
Few feuds among top executives have ever reached the level of intensity and bitterness of the one between Mr. Iger and his handpicked successor. Mr. Iger has called hiring Mr. Chapek for the top job the worst mistake of his career. Still, the question lingers: How could Mr. Iger have so misjudged Mr. Chapek after working with him for nearly 30 years? “I’ve tried hard to conduct my own post-mortem, just so that we as a company don’t do it again,” Mr. Iger said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit last year, but declined to disclose any conclusions.
Movies across the decades:
Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927), Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)
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