The Church has been given an explicit promise of immortality. The Washington Review of Books, as a newsletter, has not.
Links:
In the Times, Wesley Morris on being a young critic in 1999:
Before 1999, “meta” was not a concept I had really grasped. Suddenly, every third movie seemed to be in some way about itself, filmmaking or the movie business. John Malkovich as a personal theme-park ride landed in meta’s hipster strike zone. The Voice introduced its annual film poll in 1999, which Being John Malkovich topped. (It was also near the top of whatever list I made that year.) But The Blair Witch Project was meta’s commercial and cultural gateway.
The first time I watched it was beside Ebert. The movie ended, and I sat there chilled, shocked that its three filmmaker protagonists were never found. He saw my open mouth and hunted for the appropriate paternal warmth to break the news: “That’s because they’re not real.” Until then, I remember watching a particular kind of tragedy: middle-class white kids lost in America looking for ghosts they couldn’t understand.
In Fusion, Oliver Traldi on Whit Stillman:
Defenses of the bourgeoisie, of text over subtext, of disco, detachable collars, and timeworn clichés, seem the key to the director’s own views, a sort of talky traditionalism.
The response is understandable. Stillman’s characters often express conservative social and aesthetic sentiments that rarely appear in movies. And the expression is often memorable—usually funny and occasionally poetic. But I think the real theme of Stillman’s films is the insufficiency of all this theorizing, particularly the way our theories fall apart when they come up against the realities of the situations in which we find, pursue, and maintain love. It’s not just that our theorizing fails to get us to the truth. Truth is sometimes an inappropriate social goal. On the other hand, polite fictions and prosocial manipulations often elicit the actual truth of our emotions and characters in a way that intellectual inquiry is not strong enough to accomplish.
[A long time ago Chris, Nic, and I had a frankly rather bizarre sort of discussion about Stillman as a “conservative director” in which we compared him, mostly unfavorably, to Éric Rohmer. I still don’t know what “conservative director” means (I’m not saying “right-wing” on purpose). Leo McCarey? That’s just Catholicism. Rohmer? Also Catholicism. —Steve]
In UnHerd, Lee Siegel on The Hustler (1960) and division in American life:
If Rossen had indeed wanted to write a communist or, indeed, a Christian parable, he could have ended his movie right there. In a society whose cardinal acknowledgment is that everyone is broken—lame, or with shattered thumbs—everyone is protected from everyone else. Quod erat demonstrandum.
But that would be liturgy, not fiction. It would not be honest. Bert (George C. Scott) comes back into Eddie’s (Paul Newman) life and performs his own hustle. He offers to put up the money Eddie needs to make a comeback. Though in conventional Hollywood terms, Bert is a villain, it is hard to deny that he is on the side of the living. “So I got talent,” Eddie says to him at one point. “So what beat me?” Bert replies: “Character . . . Everybody’s got talent.” But what, the movie now asks, is the American definition of “character”?
In Liberties, Robert Rubsam on Janet Planet (2024) and shooting on location:
These scenes are pocked with what Roland Barthes called “puncta,” the details which reach out from a photograph and “prick” the viewer with unexpected feeling. Looking over his collection of photographs, Barthes feels himself drawn, “lightning-like,” to surprising details: strapped pumps, a boy’s jagged teeth, the crossed arms of a posing sailor. These details transform the act of looking, imbuing it with an expansive quality that allows him to feel things about these people he has met only as images, as if they were as close as his own beloved mother. His own emotional response attests to the photograph’s indisputable past; because if it had not happened, there would be nothing for him to respond to. Yet the picture itself is also a document of what is already over: of a kind of death. “Every photograph,” he writes, “is a certificate of presence,” “a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch.” Yet these details touch us, because they are really there.
In Notebook, Soham Gadre on Bombay Noir:
Aar Paar (1955), featuring Dutt himself in the lead role—one of two he played in major noir films, the other being in Pramod Chakravorty’s 12 O’Clock (1958)—repeats many of the tropes of Baazi (1951), like the shadowy boss figure and the centralization of the taxi as the location of many of the film’s main plot points, but this time, it also features a heist, drugs, and several shootout scenes. It was uncommon, even shocking, for Indian films to feature brash acts of violence at the time, and their inclusion was one of the signature ways in which Bombay Noir brought the influence of Hollywood into Indian cinema. But even within Bombay Noir, violence and sexuality was toned down to levels even more restrained than what Hollywood dealt in under the Hays Code. The genre’s narratives also resisted the pessimistic and cynical nature of much foreign noir cinema. Bombay Noir adopted Hollywood’s aesthetics and portrayals of vice, but kept the Bollywood cinema’s romantic optimism.
Reviews:
In National Review, Ross Douthat reviews Trap (2024):
Hartnett is very good in those scenes, in which his secret self is fully exposed, and very good in the scenes where he’s playing dadliness straight up. He’s weaker in the scenes where he’s supposed to be a charismatic and convincing liar, talking his way out of trouble: His face becomes hyper-performative, all leaping eyebrows and too-wide grins, not a convincing façade but an obviously suspicious mask. And it’s there that the illusion of dadness is truly broken, because the true dad is nothing if not fundamentally, even embarrassingly sincere.
Reviews of books:
In The New Republic, Jane Hu reviews Stanley Cavell’s study of the comedy of remarriage (Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, 1981):
I often find myself most moved by the final chapter on The Awful Truth (1937), not just because the film is the clearest example of a remarriage comedy but also because it is so clearly Cavell’s favorite film of the book. After a breathless recap of its convoluted plot, Cavell lands on the titular phrase “the awful truth,” which Dunne uses to describe the compromising situation Grant finds her in with her music teacher. Cavell’s reading of The Awful Truth—in which the scandals of love are at once mundane and monumental—also strikes me as the best philosophical take on what it means to be, and stay, married. The awful truth of marriage is that we love and marry who we love and marry not because of grand gestures or irrevocable betrayals, but through ongoing acts of faith and daily trials of talk.
[Chris and I read this book earlier this year and had a bunch of notes about it in which we both lived up to caricature. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Andrew Katzenstein reviews three books about the screwball comedy (Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals, by Grégoire Halbout, translated by Aliza Krefetz, 2022; Becoming Nick and Nora: The Thin Man and the Films of William Powell and Myrna Loy, by Rob Kozlowski, 2023; and Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, by Stuart Klawans, 2023):
But Halbout goes further, constructing an elaborate account of what screwball romances have to say about marriage and society between the Great Depression and World War II. He argues that in early-twentieth-century America, the normalization of divorce (whose “existence and legitimacy are never disputed” in films despite the Code’s restrictions) and the growing emphasis on sexual fulfillment gave female characters the power to set the terms of their marriages and win greater freedom for themselves. Moreover, “the world built by men had been discredited” by the cataclysm of the Depression, and women had to help repair the damage, leading to “a reshuffling of classic male and female roles.” (The PCA had something to do with this shift, too, as Molly Haskell explained in her 1974 study From Reverence to Rape: “The proscriptions of the Production Code that were catastrophic to sexually defined, negligee-wearing glamour goddesses were liberating for active or professional women.”)
N.B.:
Interviews:
with Vince Vaughn.
with Winona Ryder.
An excerpt from Al Pacino’s upcoming memoir (Sonny Boy, October 15).
On finally seeing Jerry Lewis’ unreleased Holocaust film.
Girls who wear glasses in 1940s Hollywood.
Mary Blair’s concept art for Disney.
The experience of Criterion24/7.
A recent trailer for Megalopolis (2024) used a bunch of fake quotes from critics.
Gena Rowlands died on Wednesday, August 14. R.I.P.
In Cassavetes’ films, Rowlands was able to give of herself comprehensively, to be herself and to allow the wildest extremes of feeling to overwhelm her on camera. This isn’t solely because of the couple’s personal bond. It’s also because Cassavetes, behind the camera, is giving of himself completely, too, in his responsiveness to the people he’s filming and the situations that they create. She and he seem almost to be meeting at the surface of the image, yielding a sense of shared risk, shared vulnerability, and equality.
- on Opening Night (1977):
Opening Night is filled with reflections both literal and figurative. We see Myrtle’s (Rowlands) face in dressing room mirrors, in the younger self she imagines to be haunting her, and in the plot of The Second Woman, with its parallels to Myrtle’s own life. There’s another layer, too. Myrtle, like Rowlands, is an actress who’s crossed over into middle age. She’s aware of what that means in her profession and the doors that have closed behind her as, undoubtedly, Rowlands was as well. Rowlands seems to understand Myrtle better than Myrtle understands herself, but that doesn’t stop her from disappearing into the role.
Alain Delon died on Sunday, August 18. R.I.P.
- on his beauty:
Beauty beckons but it also discourages. His was not an inviting kind of beauty. He was aware of what he looked like, and his awareness was certainly in operation in his performances, but he was not self-conscious about it. He was beyond that. Somehow. It’s mysterious.
If the actor Alain Delon had not existed, it would have been necessary to create him. His death at the age of 88 brings not just a life to a close, but an era in both French cinema and public life that has no corresponding figures in it today, for good or ill. Delon was praised posthumously by none other than President Macron as “more than a star: a French monument.” This is accurate, suggesting that Macron is a surprisingly perceptive judge of cinematic achievement. American cinema had the likes of Henry Fonda and John Wayne, the square-jawed epitome of righteousness and courage; France had Delon, a strikingly good-looking lounge lizard, who was capable of everything from astonishing thespian prowess to equally astonishingly awful off-screen behavior.
[More about Delon in Movies across the decades below.]
- on his beauty:
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:
Sing Sing (dir. Greg Kwedar, July 12)
Describing a movie like this is an exercise in triteness. A group of prisoners at Sing Sing belong to a theater group; it gives them meaning and they learn something from it. Despite appearances, this movie actually has ideas. Divine G (Colman Domingo), imprisoned for a crime committed by someone else, writes plays himself and serves as an unofficial leader of the theater group; it gives him something to do, but he also sees his involvement as a service he takes on for the others. He proposes that another prisoner, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (played by himself, as are most of the prisoners) join the group after watching him act-but-not-really while intimidating a fellow prisoner in the yard. Or maybe he is acting. As the parole board suggests to Divine G, maybe he’s acting all the time, even now. It’s hard to draw that line—acting shapes a life.
Divine Eye, being new to the group, suggests they escape, mentally, by performing a comedy. It turns out that everyone has some specific idea they want in a play, so they end up with a play containing ancient Egypt, the Old West, pirates, gladiators, the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, and much else besides. This is the description of both an epochal work of high modernism and a story told by a five-year-old. The play itself is more the latter, but it has the spirit of the former; as silly as it is, the theater group puts together a play that gives them all a voice at once, both kaleidoscopic and unified.
Skincare (dir. Austin Peters, August 16)
In Los Angeles no one has a face. They have facialists instead. One of these facialists, Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks), finds that she has a competitor (Luis Gerardo Méndez) in her plaza and within two weeks gets arrested because someone killed him. Getting from here to there is a matter of a bunch of stereotypical Los Angeles people—in addition to the hilariously image-obsessed facialists, the film presents its viewers with a criminal turned life coach (Lewis Pullman) and the co-host of a talk show whose main interest is sexually harassing women (Nathan Fillion)—sitting in their cars and driving around, since it’s Los Angeles. This is also based on real events, since it’s Los Angeles.
This takes place in 2014; the internet is beginning to curdle. Goldman thinks that her competitor Angel is behind a campaign of online harassment, which is both based on nothing and nonetheless able to severely harm her reputation even though everyone can see it’s based on nothing. Goldman also manages to blackmail the talk show host with a video of him offering exposure for sex, where the implicit threat is that it too would make its way to the internet. These people want to live on the internet; faces sag and wrinkle, but pixels are forever.
The rest:
Between the Temples (dir. Nathan Silver, August 23)
Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) is a cantor at his synagogue. He has one immediate problem; he can’t sing. Behind this are additional difficulties. His wife recently died; he is living back at home with his moms (Dolly de Leon, Caroline Aaron) who repeatedly get on his case to find a new girl; the rabbi (Robert Smigel) is making him empty the shofar that he putts golf balls into for practice in between telling Ben to date his daughter (Madeline Weinstein). Is it any wonder that his music teacher from when he was young (Carol Kane) shows up to his bat mitzvah class and looks like a reprieve from all this? Is there a more classic situation than to court a significantly older woman out of some inchoate desire for a change only to really fall in love? (In the Schwartzman-verse Ben Gottlieb is not too far from a possible future for Max Fischer.)
It’s a specific movie. [I kept thinking of A Serious Man (2009), although I will admit that these are the only two movies I have seen that spend a significant portion of their run time in the offices of rabbis. —Steve] And it doesn’t apologize for it; all its jokes about being Jewish show a deep affection for the experience, and if the audience doesn’t understand why it’s funny then so be it. They can laugh at the jokes about upstate New York; that’s interfaith dialogue.
Trap (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, August 2)
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room, and Cooper (Josh Hartnett) does not fret at being trapped in a concert for a teen idol (Saleka Night Shyamalan) with his daughter (Ariel Donoghue). The same amoral genius that makes him an effective serial killer makes watching him work his way out of the dragnet around the concert, bit by bit, outwitting one layer of security after another, thrilling. And Shyamalan, forced by the plot to stay entirely within the concert venue, doesn’t fret either.
Then he gets out and the discipline disappears. Hartnett gets goofy; Saleka demonstrates that she was only cast because she’s M. Night’s nephew; we get a mess of psychological explanation about Cooper’s relationship with his mother. There’s a point to those narrow rooms.
Reagan (dir. Sean McNamara, August 30)
It runs through the highlights and lowlights of the life of Ronald Reagan (Dennis Quaid, who takes a while but eventually does become Reagan) in a basically competent (if congratulatory) manner before letting him ride off into the distance, the Western hero who did his job in this town (the United States of America) before setting off in search of something new. The story is told by an ex-KGB agent (Jon Voight, bad Russian accent) explaining why the Soviet Union fell to a much younger communist; fascinatingly, the communists are doing great man history—the old guy seems to sincerely believe they could have won the Cold War if not for Reagan—while most of Reagan’s explanations of events and their factors come down to material analysis. (Yes, there’s a lot about the human desire for freedom; he also yells at his advisors about the stimulatory effect of tax cuts and connects the Saudis’ geopolitical interests, low oil prices, and the Soviet budget.)
At one point in this movie, a preacher, in the company of Reagan and Pat Boone, prophesizes (this is the word the movie uses) that Reagan will one day become President of the United States. Reagan doesn’t really know what to make of it, but his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) persuades him that he should listen to the prophecy and run. This story was better when it was called Macbeth.
Blink Twice (dir. Zoë Kravitz, August 23)
Here is a question: is it a good idea to get on a plane with a bunch of people you don’t know, travel to the private island of a billionaire tech guy (Channing Tatum) who just got #MeToo’d but says he’s sorry, hand over your phone when you arrive, and then do a bunch of drugs?
If you answered “no,” you are smarter than the two women at the center of this movie (Naomi Ackie, Alia Shawkat). Congratulations.
While on the conceptual level this owes a lot to Get Out (2017) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022), moment by moment it confuses depicting the lives of the rich with having anything interesting to say about them, just like any number of recent movies about the unimaginably wealthy. (This looks better than all of them, though; Kravitz and the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, deserve a lot of credit.) Whatever bite this might have had in addressing abusive men is dispelled by the very premise—the movie wants the dark side to be surprising, but it isn’t. It’s obvious. Look at the question at the top of this review again. There’s nowhere to go from there.
It Ends with Us (dir. Justin Baldoni, August 9)
Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) proposes that reading romance novels serves two functions in the lives of women; first, it allows them to escape their lives (since the interpretative strategy they all use is “imagine myself as the heroine”), and second, the narratives provided by the romances allow the women to feel cared for and nurtured, since the men in their lives do not make them feel this way. Give the movie this; it knows what it’s doing. If you want to say something about domestic violence for such an audience, well, the heroine will have to suffer domestic violence. And, since these things require happy endings, there will be another man for the heroine to turn to. So what if he’s a blank? He might be a romantic interest, but he’s really a substitute for the heroine’s ineffective mother. He’s a small child’s understanding of a mother—just there to kiss the boo-boos and make them go away, and hardly a person outside of that function. Even domestic violence can be dissolved into this wish-fulfillment and leave no trace.
Borderlands (dir. Eli Roth, August 9)
Cate Blanchett was marking up Mahler scores in preparation for TÁR (2022) while on set for this. This is like Eliot working at the bank, if the bank were a Mad Max ripoff where every shot looks cheap and fake and every line of dialogue is either tedious exposition or obnoxious “well that just happened”-style attempts at humor. Blanchett’s commitment to this extended even to attempting to walk like a video game character throughout; it did not extend to her voiceover narration.
Critical notes:
The
on antitrust:Really, the question is, “Why do executives believe that industry consolidation is good?” And I can provide a few explanations, some of which are charitable and some of which aren’t.
Big Tech is a colossus. Looking at it from the perspective of traditional entertainment leaders, the massive tech behemoths (Google, Apple and Amazon) are spending billions, likely losing billions (though I can’t prove it), and using their massive platforms to steer customers to their new streaming platforms. In that world, consolidation seems like the only response.
Consolidation begets consolidation. If all your rivals are buying up competitors, at some point, if you don’t consolidate as well, you’ll get left behind. But this just exacerbates the problems of market power; it never solves them.
Less charitably, business leaders want market power. I could write a lot more on this—and I may!—but market power is really useful for a business leader. If you have market power, you can pay suppliers less and charge customers more, meaning better profits. That makes your life easy. Don’t get “suppliers” wrong in this sense, either: I’m talking about talent! And below-the-line workers. Those are the folks who “supply” Hollywood with their raw goods.
Movies across the decades:
The Leopard (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1963)
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