Neptune Frost – Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman
Miners leave their servitude in the mines, inspired by fellow miner Metaluna, and set up a small commune in Burundi. There they are met by an intersex person from another realm, Neptune, who has the ability to influence the internet. They launch a worldwide resistance campaign to break the chains the First World uses to bind the Third World. A romantic, science fiction musical about community and struggle, made on an extremely low budget in Burundi, but bursting with ideas, clever design, and hope. The fact that Neptune is intersex is a small part of the plot but any conflict around it is presented as a bill of goods the West has sold the world; in the film it is simply an element of reality.
Criterion
Lux Aeterna – Gaspar Noe
In Gaspar Noe’s short film, hell is a movie set and everyone suffers there. The ones who suffer most are the actors. Everything goes wrong on the set of an unnamed film about witchcraft, and hence the burning of witches. As with most of Noe’s films, you either buy into his excesses (strobe effects, split screens, the general fatalistic perspective) or you abandon it in disgust within the first five minutes. I can put up with him, since he only makes a film every few years and there is a certain glee in the art of filmmaking present in his films. This film does serve as an antidote to the way filmmaking usually presents itself.
Amazon
Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence – Elsa Dorlin
French Philosopher Dorlin traces both the developing ideas and the various manifestations of self defense across centuries here, moving from Hobbes and Locke to the Warsaw ghetto and the Suffragette movement, and more. She concentrates on bodies; what oppression does to bodies, how bodies respond, and the necessity of response. She explores groups that spring up to protect themselves and their community members, from queer neighborhood patrols to the Black Panthers, and the strategies and ethics of their engagement. Underlying much of the discussion is the conflict over which bodies a society decides are worth defending and which are not, and how that conflict plays out. Deeply researched and clearly written, it raises a lot of questions. We may not like the answers.
Banshees of Inisherin – Martin McDonagh
If this film is supposed to be a metaphor for the conflicts in Northern Ireland, then it’s terrible, but still better than the inexecrable Three Billboards… . Or, it’s a film about friendship, as some have said. For me it’s about escape and the willingness to do anything to escape who and where you are, even a little bit. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson handle to ambiguity of, if not friendship then, a deep familiarity with a nuance that seems almost fragile but is actually bone deep. The death, the dismemberment, religious symbolism, and the worst of the human condition, are larded on to give the conflict a grim weight it can hardly bear. By the end, I was thinking more of Waiting for Godot with Padraic and Colm as Didi and Gogo dancing a variation of an old existential Irish tune.
HBO Max
Eyes of the Rigel – Roy Jacobsen
The third part of Jacobsen’s Barroy trilogy finds Ingrid Barroy going in search of the Russian soldier who fathered her child and becomes, partly, an exploration of how a war changes people, makes them wary, and ready to forget or re-write the past. Ingrid is a taciturn character, hardly revealing her emotions except obliquely, nested within Jacobsen’s prose. That’s what I’ve loved about her throughout the series; she does things because they need to be done and doesn’t see why that should cause confusion or require an exploration. The prose is terse and deceptively simple with an occasional revelation brought about in three or four words. I’m sad this series is coming to an end. I’ll miss Ingrid.
Indigo Field – Marjorie Hudson
A novel which, in both quiet and apparent ways, underlines the threads of history—secret to some—carried by women in their memory, in their bodies, and in their relationship to the land. Faulkner’s oft repeated maxim, ‘the past isn’t even the past yet,’ runs like a clear stream throughout this book, where each character is slowly coming to understand and articulate their history, often surprised by what they find. (I grew up in the South and I find this clinging to history suspect, believing it probably traces itself back to the loss of the Civil War, and our desire to imagine in a golden age, torn from us by the Invading North. There’s none of that here, but the Southern novel seems to live in the deep glow of nostalgia masquerading as history; that’s its lineage. That’s my personal beef.) Hudson’s book features well-drawn characters moving in a small part of the world that surges beneath them with history and secrets.
pubs 2/23
Downstream to Kinshasa – Dieudo Hamadi
Reviewers usually call films like this ‘inspiring’ and ‘a testament to human resilience’ but that’s just to forestall the feelings of rage and helplessness engendered by the situation. Nearly 20 years after atrocities were committed in their small town in the Congo, the citizens are still calling on their government for restitution; this film follows a group as they make the arduous journey to Kinshasa to voice their demands to government officials who have no interest in listening to them. Unsentimental, unsparing, unresolved.
Metrograph
Anecdotes – Heinrich von Kleist
Humorous stories, ghost stories, tall tales written to fill leftover space in the newspaper Kleist worked for. They have a certain droll charm while maintaining an elite distance-always the stupid farm boy, etc. Supposedly, Kafka loved them.
Glass Onion – Rian Johnson
Johnson is riffing here on the all-star exotic murder mystery films of the 70’s and he gets a lot of the surface elements right. The beautiful people, the exotic sets, the bloodless kills, but there is no mystery here for the audience to solve and nearly every clue is delivered by coincidentally overhearing a conversation, an incredibly lazy and implausible way to build a mystery. Easy potshots at celebrities abound and the facile class warfare elements are just dumb. Still, as in the 70’s films, the costumes are great, the sets are cool, beautiful people abound. Daniel Craig is having fun, and Janelle Monae is impossible to look away from, and maybe that’s enough for two hours.
Netflix
I Am the Light of this World – Michael Parker
Reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Parker’s novel follows Earl, a seventeen-year-old in backwoods Texas, an American Innocent, and his fall from an uneasy—possibly imaginary—grace. This is a vibe novel, where the juice and the substance are in the prose itself, in the texture and musicality of the world he sees and, almost invariably, fails to understand. Bad things happen and Earl spends 40 years in prison, years undocumented in the book. Yet, when he emerges, his voice is generally unchanged, and those years are only seen in the occasional short aside. Earl embodies a kind of dogged persistence here, and a hazy belief in the goodness of people regardless of how often he is mistreated, and perhaps this is a commentary on a particular kind of American mindset that never works out well in the end.
You Won’t Be Alone – Goran Stolevski
Set in 19th Century Macedonia, this film follows a shapeshifter from body to body and village to village and, while occasionally gory and horrific it can be remarkably joyous in a kind of this-is-what-it-means-to-be-human kind of way. Beautifully shot and chockful of contradictory feeling, brutality and tenderness, it’s a wonder.
Car Wash – Michael Schulz
A casual, ensemble workplace comedy that has most of its fun sending up the white characters as caricatures, and poking fun at its Black preacher Daddy Rich. Not without its moments of drama, this is primarily an entertaining hang out movie stuffed with young BIPOC actors, many of whom would go on to be moderately famous.
Criterion
Seduced by Story – The Use and Abuse of Narrative – Peter Brooks
Brooks’ book contemplates not the predominance of ‘story’ in our culture—airlines have a ‘story’, perfumes have a ‘story’—but what narrative actually is, and how it functions. He mentions the current dominance of the story form as opposed to other kinds of information (in the broadest sense) exchange, but he doesn’t really explore them. What I find most compelling here is his argument for the novel as a ‘field of play’ which both author and reader enter; an idea which, in his telling, is far less gooey and new-agey than it sounds.
On Writing and Failure – Stephen Marche
Let’s be clear here: Marche isn’t writing about failure as a necessary step on the road to success; he’s not writing from a ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’ perspective. He’s not selling failure as anything but abject and unpromising. He’s arguing that failure is a constant, it doesn’t necessarily teach us anything, it doesn’t miraculously shape us in positive ways. Failure has to be accepted. From the arid plains of the print industry to our own attempts to make a living, failure is ubiquitous. His advice: If you can NOT write, don’t. If you must write, come to terms with the fact. Bright prose, great stories about writers, salient points all around, Marche just wants you to know what you’re getting into.
The Big Brunch – Dan Levy
A cooking competition even more supportive and touchy-feely than GBBS, this show spends a lot of time on who the chefs are and how they are working in their communities. There’s nothing cutthroat here, which seems downright un-American. Now and then, the chefs help each other out with their dishes, and the judges seem genuinely reluctant to send people home. Part of each contestant’s pitch, and part of the judging is based on how each will use their money. And, there’s a chef from Asheville.
HBO Max
Outfitumentary – K8 Hardy
Feminist artist K8 Hardy films her daily outfits with a ‘shitty camcorder’ over 10 years, from 2001 to 2011, usually in shots lasting no more than 10 seconds. Sometimes she’s dressed to go out, sometimes she’s hanging around her apartment or studio. Strangely fascinating for the ways in which her fashion—and her body—change over the course of a decade, and also for the incidental glimpses we get of her life: the music she’s playing, the furniture, the pets, the work in her studio. A meditation on how we present ourselves to the world and how it changes over time.
Metrograph
Winter in Sokcho – Elisa Shua Dusapin
A spare, tightly focused novel of inner transience—the way emotions drift and build, changing shape, contradicting themselves, within us. Told in gestures, phrases, and incomplete actions, it’s as stunning for what isn’t on the page as for what remains. Beautiful to read, with images carved in ice that remain long after the book is closed, this story of two people, aching, unsure of themselves and each other, is a gentle kind of heartbreaker. Have you ever had a conversation with a friend that seems to go in circles? It never quite alights or comes to resolution—as if something hasn’t quiet been spoken. Then an hour later, or the next day, you realize all at once what was being articulated in the conversation but never said. This book is like that.
The Noel Diary – Charles Shyer
Insanely popular and immensely rich fiction writers have a hard time in the movies. From their 6000 square foot Manhattan lofts or their glass and granite ranch houses in upstate New York, they suffer from past traumas most other people have endured as well, just not as scenically or with as much brood. There are all kinds of themes in this Christmas romance, but no princes. Parental mental illness, childhood death, abandonment, and adoption all get a glancing mention in the screenplay, but none of that is as important as eventually getting our anguished, insanely rich author together with his soulmate. The two leads are much better than the material deserves, making the film imminently watchable.
Netflix
Aborted Attempt #3
A Thief in the Night/A Distant Thunder/Image of the Beast/The Prodigal Planet
I was an impressionable child in the 60s, growing up in NC, and while my family was not religious, I was surrounded by other families, and my friends, who regularly talked about The Rapture. (If you don’t know, look it up.) Promulgated in my neck of the woods by Chick Tracts and fire and brimstone ministers, the rapture is embedded in my psyche like a form of intergenerational trauma. From 1972 to 1983, Mark IV Productions released a series of Christian films distributed in 16mm, not only to drive-ins, but to churches, where they were shown in basements and fellowship halls. The four above detail the sad plight of the folks left behind when the chosen are taken into heaven. The production values and the acting here is 70’s porn level, but the director and cinematographer show some skill in framing and keeping the whole thing moving. Mark IV’s innovation was to construct films, loosely and badly, like horror films, to bring the full terror of the post-rapture tribulation to the screen, in as much as you can do that on a miniscule budget. There are action sequences, there’s a helicopter, there’s an unconvincing explosion. There’s the worst fake mustache I’ve ever seen. And lots of folks wondering around wishing they’d accepted Jesus Christ when they’d had the chance. The interpretation of Revelations here, and around me growing up, is nonsensical, but it is embedded deeply in everything the far right does. I felt a responsibility to you, my reader, to finish all four films, so I could report responsibly on the tetralogy but, sadly, I could not. The sermonizing becomes wearying while the horrible things happening in the world are reduced to stock footage of forest fires and closeups of radios as they blare the bad news. I was willing to sacrifice myself for you, dear readers, but, like Peter, my faith faltered, and I denied the last film and a half.
Freevee
Is That Black Enough for You? – Elvis Mitchell
Film critic Elvis Mitchell takes a look at the explosion of Black independent film in the late 60s and the 70s, films often called ‘blaxploitation.’ He begins by celebrating the first Black filmmakers and talking about black stereotypes in the films of the first 60 years of cinema then can’t contain his excitement as a wide spectrum of black actors come to the screen in a broad range of films from inner city drive-in fare to Lady Sings the Blues. There’s a lot of joy in this film—the joy of suddenly seeing yourself on screen as beautiful, powerful, and confident. Is that Black Enough for You shows signs of being truncated, as if it were originally supposed to be longer, in parts, but there is still enough here to celebrate and Mitchell’s writing is insightful and both reverent and irreverent at will.
The Great Silence (1968) – Sergio Corbucci
The Shootist (1976) – Don Seigel
Both ends of the Western spectrum from two films eight years apart. Corbucci’s, shot in constant snow and cold, is deeply cynical about the nobility of the West and—as a director of his time—deeply suspicious of capitalism as a civilizing factor. Nothing ends well in this film but it is often beautiful to look at, working out some of the Italian-Western techniques Sergio Leone will hone to a razor’s edge in a couple of years. Seigel’s film is elegiac to a fault, less for the Western as a genre than for John Wayne himself, dying of cancer, but still the most noble guy around. The cast includes James Stewart, Lauren Bacall and a host of older actors which means the film skews toward being an elegy for a certain era of filmmaking in the end. Here, in contrast to Corbucci, trade and capitalism have civilized the West almost to the point of boredom.
The Swimmer – Lynne Ramsay
Soft Fiction – Chick Strand
(Criterion)
Short films from women filmmakers. Ramsey’s is a dreamlike evocation in black and white of a swimmer traversing the countryside. And, while he seems to be swimming past or through some interesting tableaux, the film is really about water, how it moves around a body and closes as that body passes. Chick Strand’s 1979 film gives five women the space to talk about their lives, from addiction to sensuality, from abuse to joy. It’s a remarkable document of a certain time and cultural place as well.
The Black Guy Dies First – Robin R. Means Coleman & Mark H. Harris
A loose, list-laden book on black characters in American horror films, this book is mostly composed of short TV Guide style synopses of films, interspersed with short essays on trends in black horror from the early 20th Century on. The subject deserves a better investigation than this book can provide, but as a compendium of black actors and tropes in horror, it gets its job done.
On Not Knowing – Emily Ogden
A series of essays which follows the many branching paths of what we don’t know and what that could mean. Writing, raising children, falling in love, staying in love—we don’t know how to do these things, though we like to believe that, armed with the best data, professional advice, and the newest celebrity endorsement—we can construct a matrix of information that at least resembles knowing. Yet, if we’re honest, we’re making it up as we go along. Ogden beautifully teases out not knowing, not to resolve it, but to deepen it and to arrive obliquely, at the few things we might know.
This is America: An Anthology – Johnny Gandelsman
At the height of the pandemic, violinist Johnny Gandelsman commissioned work from 25 composers on the theme: This is America. The composers are from a number of ethnic backgrounds and each provides a stunningly original work which not only showcases the violinist’s skill, but brings into relief the multitude that comprise a true America. From the far end of the avant-garde to more traditional Americana, this three-disc set is a kind of internal travelogue, allowing us to visit a range of sounds and textures and—more than that—a broad spectrum of voices, sometimes celebratory, sometimes brooding or angry, which make up this country of ours.
Yonder – Jabari Asim
In an unnamed part of America, most are designated either the Stolen or the Thieves; the Stolen work the plantations and tend the houses of the Thieves. The Stolen dream of escape, but their world is so small, constricted by what the Thieves tell them and what little arrives as legend, that escape seems a dream. What this novel captures brilliantly is the impossibility of imagining change without the words and images to make it real, and the ways in which hardship and fear narrow our ability to see and imagine. A fictional Slave narrative with hope, hard-earned, Yonder is a quietly insightful novel.
Novel 11, Book 18 – Dag Solstad
The urge, at some or many points in our lives, to change our situation drastically may be ubiquitous. It’s an existential urge; a thing that reaches deep into our being, one part desperation, one part hope. Bjorn Hansen is a respected middle aged town treasurer. He’s left his long-time partner and he’s feeling adrift. He tried community theater, without much excitement. A renewed relationship with his adult son, doesn’t pan out the way he’d like. So, he hatches a striking plan to drastically change his life. Solstad’s book is funny, perceptive, and remarkably forgiving.
Against the Wall – Jenn Budd
Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States – Reece Jones
A view of the US Border Patrol from two perspectives. Budd is a former agent coming to terms with both the things she witnessed on the job and the acts she participated in. Her book is a personal reckoning set within an abusive bureaucratic system. Jones is a political geographer and his book both tracks the history of the Border Patrol as well as the shifting social and political landscapes which have transformed it. Both books caution us that the Border Patrol, which doesn’t operate under the same 4th Amendment protections as any other police force in the country, could be poised to makes its own rules in the future.
The Asphalt Jungle – John Huston
(Criterion)
Directed in cinema-verite style by John Huston, the film follows a group of low-lifes pulling off a diamond store heist and being double-crossed. There are layers of corruption here and the low-lifes are at the bottom, lorded over by bookies, lawyers who are criminals and crooked cops. (Which demands a one-bad-apple monologue from the police commissioner.) The criminals are tough, the lawyers are slippery, the cops take no prisoners. Crime doesn’t pay, but it’s so interesting to watch.
Where the Wild Ladies Are – Aoko Matsuda
A series of ghost stories, though none of the ghost are very frightening. Many are helpful, some annoying. Based on Japanese folktales, Matsuda updates, re-arranges, or re-invents with each story. The stories are also a sly commentary on how the tales present an afterlife we almost never consider whole cloth. Are ghosts just randomly wandering the earth alone, or are they organized into a shadow bureaucracy? Do they like their jobs or are they slogging through their non-corporeal existence? Funny and tender.
Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) – Hans-Jurgen Syberberg
A 7 ½ hour film in Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre tradition, filmed entirely on a soundstage utilizing back projection and various other theater techniques. There’s a link to the trailer so you can get a sense of how it looks. Syberberg wants to examine the rise of Hitler in the context of world politics and the lasting effect of Nazism in Germany. The text includes lots of first-person accounts, but this is not your History Channel oblique celebration of Hitler’s rise, rather a mournful and exhausting document of the minutiae of responsibility and its aftereffects. The weight of the previous seven hours makes the attempt at uplift, or at least a flicker of light, at the end a bit suspect.
House of Bamboo (1955) – Sam Fuller
Not the lurid melodrama tinged with hysteria that I know and love from Sam Fuller. Interesting for its post-War Japan setting. However, Robert Stack’s voice never sounds as if it’s originating from his body. That’s a little distracting.
(Criterion)
Sleepaway Camp (1983) – Robert Hiltzik
A Friday the 13th clone gone gleefully wrong. Rife with gay male subtext and a gender-based shock ending, this movie is weird in fun ways which, by the way, does not make it good, but does make it watchable. Features the largest pot on a stove in movie history.
Re-Animator – Stuart Gordon
Stuart Gordon is a man who understands that something can be funny and horrific at the same time. He has a great script here and actors who commit completely. This is what low budget horror can be.
Bad Day at Black Rock – John Sturges
The screen is filled with lines: the flat, horizontal grid of the western landscape, the square frames of the buildings, the doorways, the jail. Each person in the film is trapped within this mesh. It’s a tense film set over 24 hours—a mysterious stranger arrives in a dead-end town, asking questions no one wants to answer. The conflicts are almost completely underplayed, conducted in civil language, no voices raised. Sturges keeps the camera at a distance; I don’t think there’s a single close-up in this film. He wants us watching from within the room. We are one of the players, observing from their vantage point and we can’t escape either.
Criterion
I Have Some Questions for You – Rebecca Makkai
Bodie Kane returns to the fancy boarding school of her youth twenty-five years later to teach a class and is drawn back into the closed case of a classmate’s murder in her senior year. Makkai takes on contending with the world of our youth in light of the #MeToo movement and the cultural shifts in gender relations of the last two decades, as well as the strictures of class as seen through the eyes of a teenager. A sort-of murder mystery, but more an examination of shifting attitudes and how we begin to reconcile our current self with the selves of our past. There’s also a sly commentary here on how we gather and process information in the age of Google and Reddit and attempt to sort conspiracy theories from obscure fact. A little too easily tied together for me, but I think that’s required of popular novels; still a propulsive and thought-provoking read. (pubs 2/23)
Aborted Attempts #2
Who’s Minding the Store – Frank Tashlin
I’ve been reading Serge Daney’s The Cinema House and the World, a collection of his writings on film from Cahiers du Cinema from 1962-1981, and I came across a review of the 1963 Jerry Lewis film, Who’s Minding the Store, which contains the much talked about French elevation of Jerry Lewis to the pantheon of great filmmakers. Maybe I’ll write about that curiousity later. But the point here is that I felt compelled to watch the film, as I hadn’t seen a Jerry Lewis film in, probably, 50 years. He was never someone I enjoyed, even as a kid. I couldn’t make it through. Though Frank Tashlin’s cartoonish direction is often fun, I cannot bear Lewis himself. Unlike the Marx Brothers, for instance, there is no glee in Lewis as a chaos agent, though there is bit in the film itself. For me, he is another comedian who is so desperate for a laugh that his very desperation precludes being entertained. Instead, watching him becomes a grueling exercise in humiliation. Is that what people enjoyed about his films? Watching a man humiliate himself for a laugh?
The Hidden – Jack Sholder
A slug-like alien inhabits the bodies of strangers, using them to drive fast cars, listen to heavy metal, and kill people. Not to worry, good alien and FBI agent Kyle McLachlan is on the case. Fun 80s action with a clever script. (Criterion)
Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (2021) – Kevin Kopacka
Part 70s euro-horror, part acid trip, this film is more concerned with image than narrative. Not really frightening, but eerie and, at times, delicious to watch. (Amazon)
Empty Words – Mario Levrero
The character that is Levrero decides to practice his penmanship as a way of strengthening his moral character. If he can make his actual writing more ordered and beautiful, then why shouldn’t that change spill over into his actual living? Empty Words is a funny and insightful book, which doesn’t take itself or its narrator too seriously, about the games we play with ourselves, in our own minds. Levrero is a master of the mundane, and of making the mundane not only readable, but entertaining. A great introduction to his work.
Reservation Dogs, Season 2 – Sterlin Harjo & Taika Waititi
The series follows four Native American kids, just out of high school, in the aftermath of the death of their friend. Season 2 opens up the story and spends time with some of the adults around them, as the four become estranged from each other, both by grief and loss, and by attrition. The strength of this series is in the writing for the kids and their performances, and also in the ambient texture of their lives and environment. The show understands both grief and joy. Grief, not only in immediate circumstances, but in a family and generational sense. Joy, as a manifestation of friendship and community. The show can be reverent toward Native American traditions, but also knows how to poke fun at them, as well. In Reservation Dogs, not only do we see stories rarely seen in American media, but faces and bodies as well that don’t usually show up onscreen. (Hulu)
Four Short Films – Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Mieville
De L’Origine Du XXIe Siecle/The Old Place/Liberte et Patrie/Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo
These short documentaries, like so much of Godard’s later work, feel like being inside a mind as it thinks—in images, films of the past, thoughts, and quotes from authors and books. Not exactly free association, but a mind searching for patterns and linkages. The other day I saw footage of a single, isolated neuron reaching out in thin, spasming tentacles in different directions, attempting to make contact with another, attempting to join a network. I thought of this image again as I watched these films, because they have that impulse to connect, not necessarily with an audience, but with other thoughts, other images. Now and then, they connect for the viewer as well and the sensation is something like a warm, electric charge. I wonder if that’s how the neuron feels when it finally links.
Goodnight Mommy – Matt Sobel
Nonsensical version of what I assume to be a much better Austrian film. It has to be better, otherwise what would encourage someone to make this collection of garbage. Amazon
Fascination – Jean Rollin
Badly staged softcore lesbian ‘vampire’ movie with very little vampiring, but one beautiful shot at the very beginning that the film can, in no way, live up to. Criterion
The Cinema House and the World – Sergei Daney, translated by Christine Pichini
Sergei Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, the influential French cinema journal from 1964 to the late seventies and this is the first translation of his work in English I’m aware of. Cahiers, and Daney, approached film steeped in the fresh post-modernist tradition of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, and greatly inspired by the political unrest of the late 60s and early 70s. These two influences combine to produce a complex, and occasionally incomprehensible, approach to film criticism but one which, nevertheless, provides a number of interesting perspectives.
Arguably, the most interesting aspect to someone reading now is the deep and fierce conviction that film matters as an art and that conversation about film can be vital and rewarding. What films say, what they don’t say, what they say without knowing it, what they refuse to address and how; these are the touchstones of this criticism. Daney critiques film in this way because the art matters deeply to him and he’s trying to figure out how and why he watches. The viewing and analysis is intensely political for him; political in both the broadest sense, as a signpost to meaning, and the narrow sense, as a contact point to the real world.
One stance inherent in Daney’s view is a resistance to fascist cinema. Fascist is a strong word here, but it’s indicative of the time and approach. These are not films that openly endorse fascism, rather they are films which allow only one response, films in which we the audience know how we’re supposed to feel at every turn. Think of many of Spielberg’s films where John William’s music telegraphs every emotion. Think of superhero films, or James Bond, where the good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated.
A basic tenet of fascism is to narrow the discourse to such an extent that there are only two possible responses: you are for us or against us; a range of feeling or thought is denied in the service of a simple duality. A fascist film takes something from us—our complexity, our uncertainty. Our humanity.
In this light, it’s understandable that the rise—the saturation—of superhero films in the last twenty-five years coincides with the rise of fascism in the United States. One impulse expresses, and feeds, the other.
Art matters. If we choose to ignore that it matters by reducing the conversation about it to gossip and box-office figures, if we refuse to look at what the language of film reinforces around us every day, it doesn’t defuse that unconsidered language, it allows the language to strengthen and overtake any discourse. This is something the writers for Cahiers knew, and something we have willfully forgotten.
Alone – Season 6
I am not immune to trawling the channels for something to watch at odd hours of the night and I fell upon this show and found myself slowly drawn in. It’s reality TV, where 10 vetted survivalists are dropped, alone, into a wild area with limited equipment and a couple of cameras and must survive for as long as they can. The last one standing wins, but none of the participants know how the others are doing, or how long they must go on. There is no yelling, no ginned-up drama. Each person talks to the camera because it is their only lifeline to the outside world. They build shelter, find food, try to stay warm and dry. It’s fascinating, for the most part, because we see how over time the effects of isolation begin to wear on each person in small ways. Simply finding activities to fill the time becomes a major concern. (Netflix)
A General Theory of Oblivion – Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Trans by Daniel Hahn
A Portuguese writer writes about the Angola Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 2002. How do you survive a revolution? Ludo walls herself in her apartment with her dog Phantom. Others in the book fight on one side or the other and each survives in their own way. The tone here is remarkably light, even as horrible things happen. Each character is locked with the necessity of survival; each does what they need to. Agualusa gives us a compelling character in Ludo, who reads until she must burn books for heat, who grows vegetable in her rooftop garden and looks out on a city square now and then though she can’t tell what’s going on. A beautiful book on the communities we form, and which sustain us, in times of crisis.
Halloween Shorts
Cabin Fever (2002) – Eli Roth
A tight, nasty piece of work which resonates uncomfortably in the midst of a pandemic. Five horny teenagers are exposed to a flesh-eating disease on a camping trip in the wilds of Stokes County. Well scripted, efficiently directed, and very bloody, it’s a horror movie without a monster or a killer.
(Amazon)
Slumber Party Massacre – Amy Holden Jones
Slumber Party boasts a script by Rita Mae Brown which was originally written as a parody of the slasher genre but filmed straight. Sly humor leaks through now and then in the tale of a man who kills with a giant drill for no apparent reason. The women do prevail in this film, which is something. If drilling is your thing, this is the film for you.
(Criterion)
Bunker – Jenny Perlin
Projektr
A documentary on men (it’s always men) who build or live in bunkers, hoping to survive some unnamed apocalypse. Ranging from a dark buried cubicle to a $3 million dollar condo in an abandoned silo, the film nominally explores why men are compelled to do such a thing. Rarely delving into politics or ideology, the film doesn’t satisfy as it as it never elicits interesting responses from the people interviewed, content to let them say as little as they wish. We do get a nice advertising and real estate tour of the missile condo, though. You can find that information here, if you’re in the market: https://survivalcondo.com/
Projektr
Bjork – Fossora
Listening to Bjork is imagining an alien descends to earth, becomes fascinated with our musical instruments, and uses them to create their own music. At first the brain may rebel: is this music at all? But it is. It’s Bjork. The overriding feel of every Bjork album save Vulnicura is one of joy and celebration; this joy, however, is not blind. It doesn’t turn away from pain or the dark. Fossora is partially inspired by the death of her mothers. There is grief here, but it is an accepting grief. Featuring a bass clarinet sextet, string and choral arrangements, and dance beats by gamelan-infused Indonesian DJs, it reads as an affirmation and redefining of self after hard years away. Then, of course, there is Bjork’s voice, which rages and bounds, screeches and coos. OK, it’s not for everyone. But, you will hear sounds you’ve never heard before.
Porn Work- Heather Berg
“Every porn scene is a record of people at work.” Berg takes a Marxist labor approach to her exploration of the porn scene, talking with numerous actors and some directors, both about the work of porn and the business of it. Her conversations are more often with people who have worked in the industry for a while and have made a name for themselves, people who reject the idea that the sex industry is any more or less exploitative than any other. The book details the minutiae of film sex work, from testing and costuming, to how much each is paid for specific acts. As the porn market has leveled out, the maw of online porn constantly fed by amateur and homemade films, established stars move to other platforms, using their film work as advertising for other businesses they have more control of. It’s a fascinating look at a business that is rarely written about as a business. While the voices in the book reject their business as exploitative, Berg is generally talking with established stars, not those attempting to rise in the industry, who might have different experience and a different viewpoint. However, with the revelations of the past years of abuse and exploitation in every field, from acting to gymnastics, would the porn industry be that different?
Harper – Jack Smight
Hud – Martin Ritt
Watching Harper, a 1966 sort of remake of The Big Sleep confirms one thing—the most important subject of the film: the film world belongs to Paul Newman. There’s an old adage: it’s a cat’s world, we just live in it. The same can be said for Newman as an actor. Every film is his world, the other actors just live in it. He has a preternatural ability to draw the eye to himself and keep it there, though he is never overacting or chewing the scenery. He does it with a physical grace, much like a cat, and the ease with which he embodies his character. He seems to have been born a movie star—of course he wasn’t—and he makes everything appear effortless. You may come for the LA mystery, but you’ll stay simply to watch Newman enter a room.
Criterion
All Fires the Fire – Julio Cortazar, trans. by Suzanne Jill Levin
In the course of a short story, Cortazar creates a world in which reality is malleable and constantly changing because the people who make up that reality are always in flux. In his stories, these realities meld and mesh like different cloud forms passing over or through one another. There’s a gentle acceptance in this perspective; the awareness that we each muddle through on our own perceptions, sometimes catching a glimpse of what another sees. These worlds often intermingle with grace, but sometimes crash into a sharp edge which bursts their thin skin. More often than not, even after a jarring collision, there’s a tacit agreement to reconstruct normalcy and that’s what makes the stories beautiful and mysterious.
Tape – Richard Linklater
A single set three-hander stage play becomes a film shot (cleverly, by Maryse Alberti) is a single shitty motel room. The three actors (Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard) along with director Richard Linklater, can never quite convince us why each person remains in the room through the torrents of abuse and recriminations, nor can Leonard and Hawke quite convince us they really were friends. It’s the kind of non-stop pyrotechnic play that actors love, but it can only be appreciated, not believed. These kinds of plays make me ask the question: Has it ever happened, even once in human history, that a group gets together 10 years after high school graduation and bares their souls to each other in a hours-long psychodrama that ends in catharsis. It seems unlikely. (Criterion)
Tommasso – Abel Ferrara
Knowing what I know about Ferrara’s life, I assume this film is deeply autobiographical, which makes it all the more affecting as it is uncompromising in its portrayal of Tommasso, a now-sober film director who still can’t get beyond his own rage and narcissism, even though he does yoga, meditates, and talks the AA talk. Willem Dafoe shows us his charm when it suits the characters needs, and his self-deception. “People like us,” one character states flatly, referring to ex-addicts, “we don’t fall in love, we take hostages.” This film shows what that hostage-taking is like, from the vantage point of the kidnapper. Dafoe is fantastic.
Metrograph
Out of Sight – Elmore Leonard
Breezy and fun. My first Leonard. Full of interesting characters, it bops along at a great clip. I couldn’t buy the central relationship, but I guess I’m just not that kind of romantic. It didn’t stop me from enjoying it.
Aborted Attempts #1
Eden and After – Alain Robbe-Grillet
There was a time, in the early ‘80s, when I would have been thrilled to see a film by Alain Robbe-Grillet. I’d never seen one and critics wrote about them now and then. When they did, whether they liked them or not, they always sounded interesting. I read one or two of his books then and I liked the idea of the novelist/director (Duras, Handke). So, I was intrigued when Metrograph featured five films by him this month. I couldn’t make it through a single one. I tried 5 times to finish Eden and After, a psychodrama of disaffected youth, set in a café where the customers seem to be trapped within a Mondrian. The actors have the blank looks of a very serious film, the action involves lots of clinical nudity and tempera-paint blood, and the entire enterprise is like a Monty Python sketch sending up Antonioni. There’s a pervasive misogyny to the entire enterprise, which I found in the other film I tried to watch, Successive Slidings of Pleasure—yeah, that’s the title. Even in 20 minute increments over the course of days, I couldn’t finish.
(Metrograph)
Godard is dead, long live cinema.
For Godard, the word ‘cinema’ was aspirational—not a golden age, or the present—but something that could be. Cinema exploded in short bursts within films; it could happen unexpectedly, like a revelation available to anyone. It was act of surprise itself. Cinema was a language we were only beginning to understand, and we were learning it together, frame by frame. It was a way of thinking, of speaking; a way to disappear in the darkness and emerge changed. Godard spent his life in that childlike aspirational state, taking cinema apart and putting it back together in new ways.
In one interview, after Godard’s 70’s Maoist period, he explained that Maoism seemed the answer for a time. “Then they started making films, and the films were bad, and I knew something was wrong.” It would be easy to take this as a sarcastic statement, but it isn’t. It’s a central tenet of Godard’s understanding of the world. A movement that can’t make a good film is not a movement worth following.
Cinema broke Godard’s heart—as all great loves break our hearts—but his passion, though it turned cranky and misanthropic in conversation, remained buoyant and searching on screen. As Billy Wilder might say, ‘Godard is big. It’s the pictures that got small.’
Drive Angry – Patrick Lussier
This is what a whacked-out Nic Cage movie is supposed to be. John Milton-get it?-escapes from Hell to save his infant granddaughter from a satanic cult, the Accountant (William Fichtner) hard on his trail. A fun script directed with trashy verve by Patrick Lussier; this is what B-movies of the 21st century should be. Cage brings his world weary, hangdog persistence to role and the entire film is just the right kind of ridiculous
(Hulu)
Small Things like These – Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan writes luscious prose that manages not to distance the reader from its subject by virtue of its lusciousness; instead, it subtly lures us inside a world and offers us a chance to look around. This story of gathering circumstances birthing a moral imperative is deceptively dense with detail, and haunting, with a central character who doesn’t give away much as he moves toward a epiphany that has nothing to do with religion. It’s a short, powerful book about the moment of deciding not to turn away from need, something so easy to turn away from.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – Tom Gormican
A concept—Nicolas Cage, playing himself, as a send-up of some of his roles—manages to be relatively boring and only occasionally funny in execution. This film is nowhere near as deranged as it needs to be. It has too much plot, too many clashing tones, almost no visual reference to the films they are mimicking, and a mawkish Nic-Cage-learns-what-really-matters-is-his-family thread. Cage himself is tamped down, playing himself as a desperate loser who becomes a spy (yeah, that’s another subplot.) It’s really just a movie that can’t commit (neither can Cage!) to what it wants to be and ends up being nothing much at all.
(Apple TV)
Chasing Homer – Laszlo Krasznahorkai
No one captures a kind of manic existential angst like Krasznahorkai: paranoid and fatalistic, shot through with enough beauty and ragged hope to make survival necessary, and powered by a wicked sense of humor, his writing breathlessly moves through a labyrinth of internal struggles, each holding tenuously to an identity, a precarious place in the world, and if all of this seems too much, he writes in single sentences which go on for pages, much like this meager attempt, that create a world constantly closing in on itself, lightened or accentuated here by the addition of paintings made specially for the book by Max Neumann and a score (accessible through QR codes) keyed to each chapter by Szilveszter Milkos, and if all of this still seems too much, a bit over the top you might say, it is, of course, however this the first book I’ve read in months where I found myself wanting to read aloud time and again and that is some sort of recommendation in itself, apart from the fun of sharing someone’s paranoia yet retaining the ability to step out of it at any time and some might say that’s what reading is all about and I would tend to agree—though not just with paranoia but with beauty as well.
In the Mood for Love – Wong Kar-Wai
In the Mood for Love is a vibe film, the kind you want to live in for a few days just to take in the colors and textures. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung plays people whose spouses are having an affair with each other, whose spouse’s transgressions may be the only thing preventing them from transgressing themselves. They do everything but transgress. It’s a film of longing and sensual pleasure, the ripe pause before consummation. It aches with the sound of rain, the swirl of cigarette smoke, and swathes of red pouring across the screen. The actors are models of restraint and as much as we want them to throw caution to the wind, their yearning is so glorious we don’t want to miss a moment of it. (Criterion)
Calling for a Blanket Dance – Oscar Hokeah
Hokeah uses multiple voices and perspectives to tell the story of an extended Native-American family in marginalized towns in Oklahoma over a number of years, centering on the maturation of Ever Geimausaddle. The struggle for survival is the undercurrent flowing beneath the events in this book—not only economic survival, difficult enough with few jobs and few prospects, but the effects of the wear of economic survival: rage and despair. Family, extended family, and tribe are the only things to cling to in this world and the book is a muted celebration of how people come together to support each other, because each other is all they have.
The Set-Up – Robert Wise
Sailor Gray (Robert Ryan) is a washed-up boxer nearing the end of his career yet still clinging to the possibility of moving up the card to a title bout. His long-suffering girlfriend doesn’t understand, of course, and wants him to quit before he gets really hurt. Meanwhile, his manager has sold him out to take a dive for the local gangster without telling him, counting on his inability to last four rounds with the kid he’s fighting. Something gets into Sailor, though—a desperation and a rage as if all the choices he’s made, and those made for him, boil over—and he doesn’t go down, even when the manager clues him to the fix. He knocks the kid out. By then, his manager and his trainer have left town and the gangster and his boys are searching for him. Ryan plays Sailor as someone trapped within the one thing he knows how to do, unable to do it well enough to matter. The gangster ambush him, beats him up, shatters his hand with a brick. He’s bloody and beaten when the girlfriend finds him. “I won,” he says, looking up at her. “They busted my hand,” he tells her, “I’ll never fight again.” The relief that plays across his face, the release he had needed, maybe for years, is understood by anyone who’s ever loved a thing and, simultaneously, felt it as a curse.
Case Studies – Graeme Macrae Burnet
Hot on the heels of Olivia Laing’s Everyone, about Wilhelm Reich and the decadent Berlin days of psychotherapy, I read this book, set in the late 60’s and early 70’s, when people like Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing are challenging the very idea of mental illness. This slippery novel, purporting to be fact, alternates between a history of Collins Braithwaite, an ‘untherapist,’ and the sister of one of his patients who committed suicide. Full of period detail—I imagine it filmed like Antonioni’s Blow-Up—it’s a variegated investigation of identity, how beliefs about our own hold us together and tear us apart. It takes as a fundamental idea, a la Braithwaite, that we have no unified self but flit endllessly between selves like a moth in a field of candles. Burnet has captured the prurient pull of ‘case studies’—reading about the neuroses of others from a distance, and the charisma of a doctor who believes nothing is ever off the table.
Double Indemnity – Billy Wilder
This is classic noir, full of snappy dialogue by Raymond Chandler, odious people in the grip of lust and money, plot twists, double crosses, and Barbara Stanwyck in full slink. There’s a lot to enjoy here, but Edward G. Robinson is my fave, machine-gunning dialogue and attitude, taking no prisoners. There’s always a bit of sadism to James M. Cain’s stories; he seems to enjoy watching his characters singe and burn under his magnifying glass, and his puritanical view of sex—or simply the existence of women—can become a bit too much, but Wilder keeps the twists and turns coming and the banter flowing. These movies are fun just to listen to, for the rhythm of the speech.
(Criterion)
Bridesmaids – Paul Feig
My problem with this kind of comedy is that the protagonist is so neurotic, so fucked up as a human, and so unable to relate to any other human, that I cannot find their charm or believe anyone else would be able to. It’s a suspension of disbelief I can’t manage, whether it’s Woody Allen (back in the day, before…) or Kristen Wiig. There are funny sequences here and funny moments, mostly provided by Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph, both of whom can be funny and act at the same time. Kristen Wiig, however, has a certain kind of comedic deadness in her eyes that seems to belie any true character. It was there in most of the film performances of Jim Carrey and Robin Williams—the willingness to do anything for a laugh but reveal themselves. (Hulu)
Everybody: A Book about Freedom – Olivia Laing
Starting with Wilhelm Reich’s early theories of sexuality, and the role social, cultural, and economic pressures weigh on the individual psyche, Laing moves through a hundred years of conversations on freedom and its risks. Drawing on artists, musicians, psychotherapists and others, she questions what freedom is and what it may cost us. A beautifully structured book that moves at ease from Kate Bush to Philip Guston with many offramps in between, Laing doesn’t come to any grand conclusions, yet covers a lot of ground and gives the reader a lot to consider, especially in her insistence, with Reich, that the body is the seat of any freedom we afford ourselves.
Diary of a Teenage Girl – Marielle Heller
What this film gets right is the queasiness of budding, teenage sexuality, its thrill and ambivalence, its risk and regret. Minnie (Bel Powley) always has agency, even when involved in dubious escapades and with dubious men. The impression is that she knows what she’s doing (even though she doesn’t, and she knows she doesn’t yet part of her courage lies in that knowing). She makes mistakes and almost makes worse ones. Alexander Skarsgård plays the skeevy older love interest with just the right amount of cluelessness and tenderness—he might have exploited Minnie if she had been exploitable.
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations – Edouard Louis
At 29, Louis has written four novels, each documenting an aspect of his life growing up gay and poor in a provincial French village. Each balancing seething rage at the society around him with tenderness for the people ground down by poverty and indifference. This book focuses on the dreams of his mother, locked in two consecutive abusive marriages, yoked to young children, desperate for an escape that never seems possible. He can be brutal in his assessment of her and, two sentences later warm and loving. Nor, in any of his books, does he spare himself, revealing himself as petty, egotistical, ready to escape his parents, as we all are at that age. Well, everyone I knew anyway. There’s not a lot of navel-gazing here. It’s a clear-eyed portrait of a woman trapped by circumstance who never gives up the dream of escape.
Prey – Dan Trachtenberg
Learning a lesson from the first film and resisting the urge to make a sequel that’s bigger (More Predators!) and louder (More Explosions!), Trachtenberg makes a film that part survival story, part horror film with a coming-of-age thread. It’s lean while still managing subtext, well-acted, and thrilling. I wish I’d known about the Comanche language version available before my initial watch. Someday soon, I’ll watch that version.
A Postcard from the Delta – Michael Gaspeny
Reading this novel, I kept circling back to an Anais Nin quote I’ve carried around for a long time: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Johnny Spinks is tight in the bud—a high school football star dating the chief cheerleader, son of the moneyed patriarch of the town. His life wraps around him like a warm coat, his future already set. Yet, something is drawing him away from this stable future and it starts with the blues he listens to constantly, to the confusion of everyone. Anyone who’s grown up in a small town understands the yearning for a larger world, and the blues opens a doorway of escape for Johnny. It teaches him about the world, not just in lyrics about cheating women and no-good men, but in its guttural rhythms and jagged guitar. Postcard is about the few times in life when we find ourselves between—between one self and another, and the restless agony of realizing that the things you love, in this case football and music, haven’t let you down, but they’ve changed shape before your eyes, becoming something else. This is an evocative novel of place, where the place is the no man’s land between who you are and who you want to be.
(Publishes in November)
Inferno (1953) – Roy Ward Baker
Leave Her to Heaven – John M. Stahl
What a treat, noir films in color. Both films shot mostly in daylight, making use of shadows cast by branches and rocks, both with a dark heart. In Inferno, cheating lovers leave the jilted husband in the desert after he accidentally breaks his leg. In Leave Her to Heaven, a man’s new wife really wants him all to herself. Cool twists in each. The evil wife stalking the crippled brother on a glassy lake in a slow boat, while dressed in white is a stunning sequence. The structure of Inferno means we spend the first part of the movie with the would-be killers, never knowing if the husband is already dead. All noir leans on a Calvinist paying-for-your-sins underpinning and these are no different, but the fun is always in the evil. (Criterion)
The Devil Takes You Home: A Barrio Noir – Gabino Iglesias
Iglesias writes close to the ground, among people barely hanging on at the edge of what used to be the American Dream. This is a true noir, mixed with the supernatural and horror elements—not for the faint of heart. After the death of Mario’s young daughter and separation from his wife, he takes on a dangerous job that will either end in his death or The Big Score. He enters circles of hell he couldn’t have imagined, some involving cartels and ruthless bosses, some involving strange creatures and rituals, all revolving around money and blood. Iglesias keeps the focus narrow and the pace tight, yet we can still see the shadow worlds that are very real around him. Now and then, the dialogue lapses into Spanish and I couldn’t understand everything being said; this only added to the verisimilitude of the book—hanging out with a bilingual friend who doesn’t always translate every exchange for you. Face-paced, bloody, violent with characters you may recognize from your own life. Don’t read this book before bed.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – Sophie Hyde
Two actors struggle valiantly against a script. I don’t think there’s a single recognizable human moment in this film. All contrivance, all the time, but with the noblest of intentions, which possibly makes it worse. As if it could be made worse. (Hulu)
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned – Walter Mosley
Mosley excels with character and dialogue, creating his own battered world with every phrase. This book of short stories is no different. Its protagonist, Socrates Fortlow, released from prison after 27 years, pieces his life together slowly, story by story, dealing with his barely suppressed rage and his ever-present guilt. That’s where the beauty of these stories lies. The plots, however, were a little too didactic for me, most built around a particular ‘Black problem’ Socrates somehow finds a way to address in his own small way. Still, Mosley is always a thrill to read, with his cogent descriptions of settings and his bristling, taut dialogue.
My Brilliant Friend, Season 3 – Daniele Luchetti
Elena Ferrante writes about the visible and invisible structures that combine in society to subjugate women, but her style is so rooted in complex characters and everyday life it’s possible a reader might consciously miss the underlying themes. This four -part miniseries produced in Italy (the final season is due next year) admirably duplicates her subtlety in following the entangled lives of two girls growing up after World War 2. Spanning decades and multiple actors in the lead roles, it’s an exploration of the ambivalent bonds of friendship, as well as a short course on women awakening to their creative and political power in the latter half of the 20th century. If that makes it sound pedantic, it absolutely is not. Every gesture in the 24 episodes (so far) of this series is rooted in the characters of Lila and Lenu. There have been, of course, many films made by women, and films which fracture the standard male gaze of cinema, but I’ve never seen a film so precise and consistent in focusing on women, their experiences, and their developing awareness of the world. There are male characters, of course, and they are rarely caricatures, but they are never the focus of the story, regardless of how they may influence it. The friendship between Lila and Lenu, as they grow up—becoming new people now and again—is often bitter, ambivalent, and hostile but it’s held together by a mutual desire: to escape the stifling life of their gender, their class, and their parents. This they understand about each other; it’s a blood pact they hold between them ,and living in the world opens that wound again and again. The absence of the male gaze in the filmmaking itself across 24 episodes gives My Brilliant Friend a particular look, a particular way of telling a story, and curiously, a different relationship to cause and effect: it’s a story that moves forward, not in terms of emotional climaxes, but decisions, often impetuous, often deeply conflicted. People do things they don’t understand, change their minds, trap themselves and escape their own traps. Beautifully photographed, rich in period detail, with nuanced, complex performances by the leads, My Brilliant Friend rivals the best in longform storytelling. (HBO)
The Lost Weekend – Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder could always be counted on for an acidly cynical view of the world and this film, about a man who goes on a four-day bender, really lights up when Ray Milland gets to play the cat-like concentration and deviousness involved in scraping up enough money to buy another bottle. It skirts the Reefer Madness line toward hysteria around alcohol because Wilder is actually interested in how addiction works. I just wish his natural pessimism had carried the film over the finish line, the line managed many years later by Leaving Las Vegas. Here, however, we have another endless variation of The Love of a Good Woman, the bad faith belief that if only the addict were loved enough, accepted enough, supported enough, they could climb their way out of addiction. Of course, this is always the role of the woman: to suffer, cajole, and beg. To clean the house and wash the clothes and clean up the vomit. To sacrifice themselves, in their boundless love, to their partner for eternity, because that, supposedly is the definition of love. It’s clearer to say: this is the definition of love men want women to believe, while not holding themselves to the same standard. Maybe we could stop sacrificing women on the altar of manhood. Just maybe. (Criterion)
Babymother – Julian Henriques
Considered the first Black British musical, Babymother is set in a Jamaican enclave of London in the late nineties. The story is a trope—young single mom dreams of being a reggae singer but must do it her own way—but the period detail, the music, and the general vibe of the film, while familiar, is infectious. In the end, music brings everyone together and makes them famous, in true musical fashion. I was taken with how everyone walks in this film. They strut, they stride, they amble. Watching each character move had a kind of music to it, but it’s unclear whether this was a conscious choice of happenstance, Watch it for the clothes, if nothing else. (Criterion)
On Browsing – Jason Guriel
Guriel writes a celebration of wandering aimlessly and not knowing what you’re looking for. Of exploration and discovery, and of the generative qualities of restriction, when our choices are limited instead of infinite. Drawing on his youthful algorithm-free experiences in the bookstores and record stores of his youth, Guriel reminds us of the beauty of not knowing what we want, then finding it as if by accident. Browsing, of course, is not an accidental enterprise, but an art, developed patiently, quietly, with a certain sense of heightened elation and a casual persistence and this small book is a celebration of that art
Pubs 11/15
The Bear – Season 1
Many believe a type of compulsory service should be required of young people—a gap year of civil service before they begin college and their adult life. I think every human should be required to work 50 hours a week in a service job for a year. Preferably, food service. The Bear is a great descriptor of why this would change our society at a fundamental level, and a clear reason why many would never want the experience. A little over-plotted, a little over-written, the series nonetheless captures the drive, the panic, the occasional joy as well as a rancid camaraderie that develops in and around a commercial kitchen. Anyone who has ever done it recognizes themselves and others here. If you’ve never worked in food service, watch the show and can’t quite swallow the highs and the lows. Believe me, real life is worse, and better.
The Books of Jacob – Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
In 18th Century Poland, Jacob Frank shows up in a village as a Jewish prophet who eventually proclaims himself a Messiah, urging his followers to abandon their Jewish faith and traditions because ‘the new world is already here.’ Tokarczuk creates a truly kaleidoscopic mosaic of characters—most real people based on historical record, some fictional—and Yente, an old woman who can’t quite die, lodged between death and life. From her vantage point, she sees all. This is the story of the cult which spread around Frank, the political machinations to keep the cult together and safe as they move from place to place. It’s the story of the life of Jews in Poland, the constant persecution by the Church and the populace, the pogroms and exile. It’s the story of how religion becomes political and how the religious use politics for their own ends. And, it’s the story of believers who want desperately to find hope and promise in their world, and how all believers are eventually betrayed by those they believe in. Panoramic, steeped in period detail and eccentric questions about God and creation, The Books of Jacob is about people who want to be more than they are, and those who simply pretend they already are.
Made in Hong Kong (1997) – Fruit Chan
SubUrbia set in Hong Kong, only in the massive housing projects of the lower class. Fruit Chan allows his actors to wander, laconically considering the suicide of a girl they don’t know while reckoning with a constricted future. Made in Hong Kong has the meander necessary for a film about young adults of a certain age, occasional dramatic moments interspersed with random moments of joy cut short by the pressures of a demanding world. Instead of teens endlessly talking about their ennui and sense of hopelessness, this film embodies it with engaging performances and well-observed characters.
(Metrograph)
Foster – Claire Keegan
If you grow up in a home less than safe and loving, you imagine all homes are the same, and to enter an environment of love and care is off-putting at first, then terrifying, then magical—an entire new world opens up and you find yourself opening as well to accommodate these new features. Clare Keegan’s short novel (really a long short story) captures this opening in vibrant, musical prose ripe with warmth. It’s packed with detail a child captures but doesn’t understand as well as an elation that comes when, for a moment, you can take an easy breath. A delicate balancing act resonant with contradictory emotions. All the best emotions are contradictory.
pubs 11/1
Stranger Things – Season Four
The bane of longform television is that everything just takes longer to happen with more talking in between; this 13 hour season might have been fun and engaging at 8 hours, but at 13, it’s simply strung out and repetitive. Which doesn’t mean things don’t happen; there are always nine things going on at once, as well as endless exposition in the name of ‘world-building.’ But when your world must be built through exposition, it never really takes on any life. The Duffer Brothers DO actually care about the kids of Hawkins and that is when the series shines, when they can be kids, interacting with each other. That’s when the gears actually catch. This is what made the series so compelling from the start. Everything else is plot mechanics designed to keep things happening at a frenetic pace that takes forever to arrive anywhere. Now and then, you can still see glimmers of the original intent.
subUrbia – Richard Linklater
Eric Bogosian meets Richard Linklater and neither come out the better for it. This is what happens when playwrights write about ‘the young people’; fake anarchy and ginned-up ennui. The actors can’t find much of any subtext to play, though they try. Their characters are written as ideas, not people. So, they stumble through monologues about Meaning and Loss (in capital letters), all of them tortured in ways the Boston born playwright imagines Texas kids must be tortured. It’s also unnecessarily ugly to look at. For teen anarchy with more fun, see Repo Man. (Criterion)
Croatian War Nocturnal – Spomenka Štimec, translated by Sebastian Schulman
A timely book for Americans, as states work to restrict travel across their borders for women. This book is about how walls and borders can appear almost overnight, cutting us off from friends and loved ones as civil war begins. Translated from Esperanto, the language and its ideals form a subtext to the clear descriptions of hiding in basements during shelling, friends called up for a war they don’t believe in, news of family relayed by rumor during the war between Serbia and Croatia.
When We Cease to Understand the World – Benjamin Labatut
Labatut fictionally recreates the inspiration, obsession, and years of work of the men who essentially invented quantum physics in the early Twentieth Century. Along the way, he lucidly explains what these theories are and what they meant in the world of physics. These are tales of obsessed men who devote everything to their work and after a hundred pages or so, the romance of suffering which undergirds the book began to grate on me. Why is it noble, or important to us, that great creators suffer for their work and why do we maintain romantic notions around this suffering? The romance of suffering overlaps the Tortured Genius trope which allows, actually encourages, horrible behavior by predominantly male artists of all types. It’s a messianic idea that only serves the horrible person in question. Of course, great art requires sacrifice (if only in time), but that sacrifice is a decision made by the artist themselves and the actual romance is in the choice.
Hair – Milos Forman
I’m not sentimental about the 60s—I was too young and in North Carolina for all of it—so I ‘m not sentimental about the Broadway play Hair. I saw Milos Forman’s film when I was 20 and this opening sequence, in which John Savage’s Oklahoma born character encounters Central Park for the first time was exhilarating and surprising. There are many beautiful elements in the sequence but what thrilled me at the time was the choreography by Twyla Tharp. It seems to rise from the ground into the bodies, sometimes moving as one, then separate like drops of oil and re-combine. I’d never seen dance in a natural setting before, dance that used the landscape, dance this joyous and controlled. I’d only seen dance on 70s tv, either she-bop or Swan Lake. Somehow, in this one sequence, I could understand what dance was for and why it mattered, and it was the revelation of a new language. Throughout the film the dance arises from natural movement, sometimes intricate, sometimes simply a gesture or two, always in a location setting. The combination of those two things (three, actually; the ‘hippie’ costume design works with this as well) made me feel I was watching normal people burst from their narrow lives for an instant. Filmed on location almost exclusively in Central Park, Forman’s film is about the exuberance of youth as it approaches the age of responsibility. In this period, Forman was making films about America (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, The People vs. Larry Flynt) better than those by Americans. In the initial moments of the film, I was Claude (John Savage) coming into the park for the first time and it was a phenomenal place to be. Perhaps the deepest responses to art are a sense of wonder and gratitude. At that moment, I felt both.
Detour – Edward G. Ulmer
Grim, low-budget noir with a second and early third act that is truly operatic. It’s difficult to think of a femme fatale in this period more abrasive than Ann Savage in this film. Just over an hour long, Detour ratchets up the drama to a near hysterical pace and the one size fits all sets add to the fever dream feel of the film. (Criterion)
Linea Negra – Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Barrera’s last book, On Lighthouses, was all about stillness and isolation; this book is about chaos: the chaos of pregnancy, of healthcare, and of Mexico City enduring a series of earthquakes. What links both is the comfort and support Barrera finds in art; of writers writing about pregnancy and photographs of women, pregnant and with their children. There is anxiety here, and hope, the presence of family; there’s her attempt to keep writing. (Write everything down, so you don’t forget, her husband tells her. And she does.)
Red Rocket – Sean Baker
Sean Baker continues to make movies about people in America we never see on film: struggling to get by on disability, when a trip to the donut shop is a treat. Smoking crack occasionally because the doctor has cut back on your pain medication, doing the occasional internet porn to make extra money. He doesn’t glamorize them or make them ugly; he simply presents them as they are. Enter Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), desperate shyster by nature, porn actor by trade; he’s a man constantly looking for an angle to get what he wants. He’s not even charming as much as he is persistent, endlessly persistent. The trick of the film is to have us watch Mikey manipulate everyone around him, yet still manage to keep him both watchable and somehow, oddly likeable, even though we know he’s lying about everything. Haven’t we all had at least one friend we knew lied about everything; still we found them endlessly fascinating.
Querelle of Roberval – Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler
Kevin Lambert is angry about the provincial culture of the rural Canadian towns where he grew up gay and hungry for something, anything other than what surrounds him. In this book Querelle is a kind of queer savior, bringing echoes of Montreal to the small logging town as well as an excessive horniness which blankets the town in a fog of transgression. When a strike is called at the lumber mill where he works, Querelle is on the striker’s side and, as the strike continues and the conflict grows more violent, he pushes for more radical action, not out of an ethical stance, but from the need to see something, anything happen. Lambert prose is taut and sometimes brutal; then, when we least expect it, it blooms into a raw tenderness, suffused with a grace we know can’t last. Releases 8/2
Repo Man – Alex Cox
A scuzzy, sort of anti-movie in the right mood, otherwise it might be tedious in its loose approach to everything about filmmaking. Yet, that’s the charm of it. Harry Dean Stanton as the perennially exhausted repo man of the title is great. He sci-fi plot is suitably ridiculous and the special effects are intentionally silly. It’s a movie that looks like it was fun to make and that fun spills over to the viewer. There’s no movie anarchy like 1980’s movie anarchy.
Tomboy – Celine Sciamma
Ten-year-old Laure wants to be a boy. There’s nothing sexual or political about it; she simply wants to dress like a boy and play like a boy, so when her family moves to a new neighborhood, in an unplanned moment, she introduces herself to other kids as Mikael. She has no trouble being accepted as Mikael. Sciamma’s film follows Laure/Mikael in an almost documentary style with as little commentary as possible and what we see, in the film’s best moments, is a child slipping into a comfortable skin and coming to feel at home with themselves. A great ensemble of young children and a vulnerable performance by Zoe Heran. (Criterion Channel)
Streaming Now – Laurie Stone
My friend Marlon is the one to call when you’re moving. He’s a master at packing a truck. We always buy a truck too small, but he stands before it thoughtfully adjusting a box, choosing another, considering the space remaining. He creates a beautiful order from our chaos. It’s wonderful to see—his concentration and his artistry.
Laurie Stone knows how to pack a sentence. She makes it appear effortless. And because she can pack a sentence, she can pack a paragraph. She gets more in a small space than nearly any writer I know. These sentences aren’t heavy and laborious; they’re light, vibrant, and the lightness allows her to drift incisively from one thought to another. (She’s not really drifting, it just seems that way at first.) As a reader I follow her, because of her delicate craft and because her connections are so fascinating—the ways she fits one thing into another like a puzzle I didn’t think could be solved.
I met Laurie for the first time in a coffee shop in Manhattan that was more a plant store with coffee. We sat at a small, wobbly table amidst large green fronds and the sound of tiny waterfalls. We could have been characters in a von Sternberg film. We talked about publishing a book together and we came to know each other instantly in that weird, indescribable way people do when they simply find they like each other.
Every Laurie Stone book feels like a conversation with the reader, every book re-enacts our first meeting. The intimacy she creates makes the reader comfortable enough to share their own thoughts with themselves. Perhaps, they’ll even confess things they didn’t know to themselves.
The writing is about observation—deep sustained observation—and the desire to see relationships between observations. This is the way we construct our own worlds and reading Laurie Stone is being a witness to her own construction. It’s about feeling and thought. Best of all, it’s about randomness and desire, surprise and confrontation.
I share a thrill when Laurie’s eyes flash in expectation or anger because her sentences—deceptively clear and elegant—place me in the moment with her. It’s fun sharing moments of discovery with Laurie. Fun as a kind of voltage that awakens then blooms in the body. Fun as a kind of orgasm of awareness.
Writing should be about love, and we all share our love in our own way. For Marlon, packing the truck, as prosaic as it was, became his sharing. His appreciation for his friends. For Laurie, it’s the sentence.
Mortu Nega – Flora Gomes
Pure political cinema from Guinea-Bissau focusing on the end of the war for independence. All the characters are symbols, most of the acting is wooden and awkwardly staged, yet the film has a sense of place, if place can be an ill-defined realm between two things, war and independence. The people here are removed from the capital, from any seat of power; they learn everything about the war they are fighting on the radio. There is little war-romance here, only slogging through one field after another, then returning home after ten years of fighting. There’s also little propaganda. Everyone is just trying to get by. (Metrograph)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
I’m partial to anything that depicts a decision as the abandonment of the life before, of throwing oneself into the void of chance, because that’s what real decisions do; they change our lives in a fundamental way. So, even though it all works out in the end (spoiler alert) I appreciated Jane’s decision, the speed with which she executed it, and the consequences she bore because of it. This is a book about how few decisions were available to women, about actually making the few decisions you could. And, dealing with strange men with inexplicable ideas. Really strange men.
Imposter – Bart Layton
Brilliantly structured film about an unbelievable story, told (sort of) by the participants; a little bit like a Texas noir told by the characters of Blood Simple. This film was visually and aurally referenced in Titane, a film I wrote about earlier. It’s great. Still, I seem hyper-aware these days of how documentaries are constructed and the creative decisions behind making a documentary a good movie which of itself, doesn’t necessarily serve the truth of the subject. I wonder about the scenes left out, the people not talked to, why this shot was juxtaposed with that shot. The answer to this question is almost always that it makes a better film, which generally leaves me feeling a little queasy. (IMDB)
Guitar Studies I, II, III – Zimoun
There’s a scene in Todd Hayne’s film on The Velvet Underground where John Cage, a protégé of Cornelius Cardew, talks about listening to the motor of his refrigerator cycle up and down and wanting to get THAT sound. You’re either the kind of listener who completely understands this or one who says, That’s not music. Zimoun’s work is not music, by that definition. A Swiss artist who builds rattling, crumpling, or burbling mechanical work that moves, is interested in sound and the layering and repetition of it. There are minimalist tenets here, married to Eno’s search for self-generating music systems. The word ‘environment’ is overused in music—usually denoting a lazy, droney ambience, but Zimoun’s audio work fits the bill. Repeating washes that reveal subtle differences, hums that slowly become something else. It’s sound as oracle. You bring yourself to it and discover something. (Spotify)
Glengarry Glen Ross – James Foley
Ed Harris is the real revelation here, balancing sheer terror, rage, and the sniveling schemes of a cornered rat; his desperation is palpable in every scene and he’s just the kind of guy who might pick up a gun because his shame at not being man enough has turned to black rage. It’s a men‘s show here. “We’re men, John!”, Pacino bellows, “Men!” Maybe he’s reassuring himself, but he’s also setting a measure. Everyone here is silently measuring their cock against the other guy’s while screaming at them. I don’t think Mamet sees this as satire; he seems to believe this is what real men are. A perfectly cast film that Foley directs well. Mamet, in the end, sides with the winners because the losers, well, they were always losers. (Kanopy)
The Round-Up (1966) – Miklos Jansco
Jansco explores the incessant intimidation of an oppressive state and its strategies for pitting the citizenry against each other for its own ends. He somehow creates tension from the most mundane exchanges because each exchange is weighted with intrigue and danger. Words can get you killed. I’m most fascinated by his ability to compress and expand time within the same shot. People wait and events happen around them and we know they are waiting for weeks and months though the shot itself is unbroken. (Metrograph)
Resurrection (1980) – Daniel Petrie
Ellen Burstyn delivers a quiet, powerful performance in this film about a woman who discovers she has healing powers. Hokey in a lot of ‘80’s ways, it’s held together by a pretty smart script and the smart direction of a number of great character actors. This film made a strong impression on me when I saw it way back then, and I wanted to watch it again to see why. I think it’s because it isn’t interested in answers or religion, dramatizing a kind of empathy between people as a vibrant force. Burstyn embodies this nonjudgmental empathy (which I think all great actors must possess) and makes it real. I think the film informed my burgeoning creative ambition then; helping to define creativity as empathy with myself and with others. It was still years before my bullshit cynical worldview began to crumble, but I think this film was a beginning. Thanks, Ellen. (Criterion Channel)
My Best Stories – Alice Munro
Alice Munro writes intricate, character driven that pack a good punch. Often about Canadian women leading quiet lives, they document an often chilly inner terrain where much is not said, and what is said means more than it appears Though dense with detail, we often infer these characters as much as feel them since much about them is a secret even to themselves.
Everything Everywhere All at Once – Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
Finally, a film that can master multiverse timelines, understands spatial coherence in fight scenes, is well-lit, audible, and doesn’t insult the intelligence. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s fun and some days that’s all that matters.
On Lighthouses – Jazmina Barrera
A book about lighthouses, loneliness, and the community of books. We read as Barrera’s casual fascination with lighthouses blooms into a consideration of solitude and the ways in which that solitude is eased by friends, by strangers, and by books. This book is like a pleasant conversation on a seaside porch in late afternoon with someone you’ve just met but now want to know better. I learned a lot about lighthouses, and more about Barrera, which seems just right to me.
Paradais – Fernanda Melchor
In this slim novel about a young gardener at a high class gated community in Mexico, Melchor captures the spiraling, claustrophobic impotence of the poor and the ways in which the impossibility of escape, unless you work for them (the drug cartels) eats away at any selfhood you might have. The large blocks of text and endless sentences great a sense of inevitability happening around, and independent of, the families with their manicured lawns driving by in their white SUVs. Paradais conveys the rage and misogyny as it builds, but only rarely suggests the deep male insecurity and terror that lies beneath it.
Titane – Julia Ducournau
Unlike Robert Eggers in The Northman, director Ducournau knows how to ride a concept for all its worth, creating a fully realized environment that never falters. Simply put, Alexia has sex with a car one night and becomes pregnant. From this simple premise, Titane builds a layered, sometimes off-putting, story of damaged people whose bodies betray them, or are the instrument of their betrayal, at every turn, and who must find ways to adapt. There are numerous ways to interpret this film and it doesn’t force us into a single meaning: it’s the best kind of art. Instead, it creates a word in which there are overlapping relationships and images, leaving us to sort it out. You never know where it’s going to go but, once it arrives it seems there was no other destination possible. (Hulu)
Memoria – Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The world of Weerasethakul’s films is a vibrant, mysterious, and inexplicable place which always feels it accepts human presence a bit grudgingly, as if spirits, sound, and light are more vital and important. Here a strange bang awakens a woman (Tilda Swinton), a bang she continues to hear erratically, and searches to understand while visiting her sister in Colombia. The intricate sound design creates a web that holds us as the narrative slips around her. Some movies are like a good sauna; afterward I feel cleansed of junk imagery and repetitive technique. This is one of them.
Tram 83 – Fiston Mwanza Mujilla, Translated by Roland Glasser
The frantic impulse to survive in a country swamped with late-stage capitalist opportunists is told with a frantic lyric intensity. Like a singer-poet on speed, Mujilla drops us into a world in which everyone is desperate for money and escape, and daily life repeats the same few choices over and over. I loved reading parts of this book aloud for the driving jazz rhythms of the prose and the dark survivalist humor. Grim and claustrophobic, it captures the charged desperation of not knowing where your next meal is coming from.
The Northman – Robert Eggers
The Northman opens with promise, grounded in Norse mythology and a dangerous survivalist machismo that damages everything in its path. Brutal, with alternately horrifying and beautiful imagery, it begins to lose its way as accents falter and the desire for a romantic subplot creep in. It settles for a revenge story you can’t think about for too long, as the titular Viking learns about love, yet can’t escape his fate. I understand the desire to make this kind of movie if you can stay grounded in the worldview of the story, something essentially striking and alien; but I understand it less when it becomes just another revenge fantasy.
Providence – Alain Resnais
We perceive ourselves, especially when self-justifying or revelling in our selflessness, theatrically. We are the lead actor on the stage of our own minds, delivering our dispensations to the supporting cast. Theatricality is the beginning of self-awareness. It enters our dreams, it infiltrates our memory, it informs how we see ourselves. I remember reading a review of Providence many years ago (before I ever saw it) where the critic decried its staginess and theatricality, missing the point so completely of what Resnais has always done in his films. He’s after an inner landscape, and it’s nearly always a landscape that is self-aware; that is, watching itself. Here, John Gielgud plays a dying writer devising elaborate scenes of betrayal for his children. Dirk Bogarde is at his eviscerating, withering best.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies – Deesha Philyaw
Loaded with secrets, confessions, and secret confessions, many of these stories remind me of listening to my parents and grandparents talk dirt about the neighbors when they thought the children weren’t listening. Very Southern, very rural, the casual nature of the stories doesn’t disguise the craft behind them. Stories about strong black women who don’t always know what’s right, don’t always do the right thing; who only express their doubts to each other.
Top of the Heap (1972) – Christopher St. John
Notable for the complete unlikability of its protagonist, a black DC cop who dreams of being an astronaut, a political figure, or anything other than what he is, this Black Cinema entry from the 70’s is deeply cynical—not only about white America, but Black America as well. Written, directed, produced, and starring St. John, it does have that beautiful sheen of a personal vision B-movie, which sets it apart from general exploitation fare.
The Batman – Matt Reeves
At this point, productions like this, and all the Marvel product, are more ritual than film—like getting a tattoo to mark an occasion or eating in the same restaurant every year on an anniversary. We’re not supposed to enjoy them—we’re compelled to do them because we’ve done them before. What once might have been pleasurable is now simply repeated over and over because it’s wormed its way into the pattern of our lives. It’s the zombies returning to the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead. So, there’s nothing new to see here. Actually, there’s barely anything to see at all since no one in Gotham City has a goddamned lamp, not even Billionaire Bruce Wayne. No overhead lighting, either. All of the citizens navigate like moles, by smell and touch. You do get a lot of black clad masked people fighting each other in the dark. It’s a great relief when Riddler Paul Dano finally shows up because he must have had a rider in his contract insisting on light in his scenes. On a positive note, it’s great to see Jeffrey Wright in a new franchise, since they killed him off in the last Bond.
The Card Counter – Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader’s films often follow guilt or sin-ridden men in their attempts to ease their souls and pay for their past transgressions. Sometimes they’re overtly religious, sometimes they’re free of an overarching morality which must be confronted. This film is the latter, a straightforward story of a man with more guilt than he can bear who thinks he’s found a way to, if not expiate it, at least do a little good in the world and save someone else. Saving, if it’s even possible, is not as easy as acquiring the guilt. Oscar Isaac plays Bill Tell with the hollow-eyed stare and restrained physicality of a man locked within himself who, like a newly sober addict, fears what might happen if even the slightest wrong step is taken.
The Secret Talker – Geling Yan
What starts out as an intriguing exploration of secrecy and desire soon becomes an implausible soap opera with all the tropes of the sociopathic stalker who is supposed to simply be helplessly in love. A woman receives emails from a man she never sees who is watching her intently, describing her to herself. Eventually they begin to share their secrets, exchange by exchange, and she grows more and more dissatisfied with her husband, more obsessed with her secret talker. While the early passages deftly describe the thrill of having the attention of an anonymous admirer, the book suffers as the secrets grow more complex and the answer more obvious.
You Will Love What You Have Killed – Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler
Finding a perfect balance of rage and black humor, Lambert’s book is a teenage revenge fantasy steeped in longing and loss. In a small, provincial town in Canada, children and teenagers die gruesome deaths then return to school as if nothing has happened. Not a horror story, but a surreal yet relatable tale of growing up ostracized and out of place in your neighborhood, your school, your city. Claustrophobic, dark, and grimly funny.
Run Toward the Danger – Sarah Polley
A series of essays on the body, how it affects our emotions and thoughts and vice versa, grounded in the very real experience of a woman who became a child actor at 4, and moved out on her own at 14. In a personable style she writes about being treated as an object: a child manipulated by those around her, a sexual object at an early age, an object of frustration when dealing with a brain injury. However, this is not a trauma memoir and, even better, it’s not a book about ‘resilience.’ It’s a book about slowly, and sometimes painfully, working out who you are. Sometimes, your body is your friend, telling you secrets you might never uncover; sometimes it’s the impassible obstacle in your way. Casually intimate and insightful.
Altered States – Ken Russell
Written by Paddy Chayefsky as a meditation on meaning but directed at a blistering pace by Ken Russell in such a way that most of that is thankfully lost, Altered States is a true late seventies film with drug-induced hallucinations in the Russell mold tied to a search for God, arriving in the end at love. Love is the answer to everything. What makes the film remarkable is William Hurt in his first film role. He’s a searcher-scientist who appears to already have one foot in some mystical realm; he wants to be fucked by God. Hurt’s performance is so earnest and innocent, so confused by the motivations of others, we can see why he’s charming to those around him and why they half-heartedly believe and follow him.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – Radu Jude
Pure political cinema. Low comedy, cultural critique, and extended rhetoric. A teacher’s private sex tape finds its way to the internet and her school calls an emergency meeting. Her walk to the school gives Jude space to satirize and comment on modern culture, and when she does arrive, we find the discussion is no different in Romania than Texas. Not exactly biting satire, but often fun, sometimes wry, and exciting as a shameless throwback to the earnest political filmmaking of the ‘60s.
Being the Ricardos – Aaron Sorkin
10 Scenes in Search of a Character. Sorkin knows how to write big speeches and dramatic scenes but fails to understand there must be a strong character for those scenes to work. For him, the speeches are the character. We’re expected to love and admire Lucy and Desi because we already know who they are. We get a meet-cute scene, but no real sense of them as people, except what Kidman and Bardem can muster between the cracks of an airless script, whipping quickly on to the next Big Scene. Sorkin hires great actors to play his stock tropes and they almost camouflage the Big Writing which deals with Big Issues at the expense of everything else. Give me Bad Luck Banging any day, which pushes its own politics to the point of satire.
Go, Went, Gone – Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky
In this perfectly calibrated novel, Erpenbeck explores the German refugee crisis through the eyes of Richard, a retired Philosophy professor who gradually begins to see, and be drawn into, a world which has always been invisible to him—not because it was distant, but because he never managed to look. It’s a novel about individual awareness and how it can slowly inch outward from a stagnant and frozen place, and how that can sometimes happen without our meaning for it to.
Worst Person in the World – Joachim Trier
Hopefully, at least once in our adult life, someone tell us we are beautiful, we are smart, we are amazing and worthwhile, and we believe them completely. They aren’t trying to seduce us, or inspire us; they are simply stating what they know as a fact. And we aren’t expecting it, so we don’t have a response ready and the statement slips into us before we know it, and it changes us. This movie has that scene, and it elevates the entire film. Trier knows to let it play quietly, in extended shots; he trusts his actors while, at the same time, meticulously laying the groundwork for the scene. We may go through life believing we are the worst person in the world because our choices sometimes hurt others; then one who we have hurt lets us know it was worth it.
I Wished – Dennis Cooper
An obsessive, nearly deranged, burn-it-to-the-ground love affair is a high manic episode; you may never feel so alive or so loved. The crash, however, is brutal, often destroying everything in its wake. Love is the meteor tearing through the sky, burning hot in the atmosphere; Dennis Cooper writes about the cold, dead stone of the crater formed when the meteor strikes the earth. Sad in an all-encompassing way—when loss and sadness has entered the bedrock of your being—this book circles round and round that loss in beautiful, oblique prose that recognizes the damage of the burning, but can’t turn away from its beauty.
White Shadow – Roy Jacobsen, translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
The second novel in Jacobsen’s Barrøy Trilogy finds Ingrid living out WWII alone on her desolate island in Norway, the hard, barely survivable conditions presented in The Unseen, almost unchanged. Yet, the war has a way of changing things, even in secluded locations, and Ingrid’s life soon become complicated. Jacobsen has the eerie ability to portray deep feeling and thought through prosaic action alone so that, while the book has almost no apparent interiority, we come to know Ingrid, her loves, her decisions, her feelings, through the flow of the novel. Ingrid is one of my favorite women in contemporary literature.
Blue Prints – Bobby Previte and Musicians
Sheer joy. Previte gathers accomplished musicians and whips through a two-hour improvisation based on his written work, chosen in the moment. Standing in the middle of the circle, he chooses the music as a foundation, then allows the musicians to improvise, creating a wall of noise, or surprisingly tender moments of quiet. The overall effect is of watching the act of creation take place in the moment in a kind of joyous group exaltation, each artist intensely aware of the others, each ready to swirl into the unknown.
Why Patti Smith Matters – Caryn Rose
It’s difficult to write about a musician who’s written nakedly and extensively about themselves and bring anything new to the party. It’s also hard to understand why we need Why Patti Smith Matters, given Smith is everywhere, even the New York Times Bestseller list and Law & Order. Caryn Rose gives it a shot in this somewhat reverent cultural overview of Smith’s career which lacks what I can only call desire—a quality present in most of Smith’s work. A sinewy, snarling, guttural wave that rises from the pelvis; Smith’s answer to Elvis and the rock and roll she grew up loving. To say there’s no sex here—sex as a physical, creative force—is to say something of Patti is missing.
Shaft’s Big Score – Gordon Parks
Richard Roundtree looks good in a turtleneck. That’s the main takeaway here. Gordon Parks returns for the sequel, which works best when it concentrates on Shaft and his friends and less well when it gets to the action. There are a number on nonsensical action sequences, and a lot of running. Still, it’s the 70s, so you get an effete Italian gangster going up against snarling black drug dealers. After this, I started Shaft Goes to Africa, but the entire production team there is now white, for a story about slavery in Africa. No thanks.
Spencer – Pablo Larraín
Kristen Stewart plays a brittle internal state while everyone around her is a façade that rarely cracks. They pass their time within the facades of sumptuous dining rooms, labyrinthine halls, and corps of servants to anticipate every eventuality. This is a portrait of family as artifice and one woman’s attempt to come up for air. The film takes place over a weekend, so we don’t see what brought Diana and Charles together. We know, of course, how it will end. The script is a little too on the nose, but Larraín keeps the camera on Stewart as she dodges, hides, and suffers through Christmas with the royal family. He creates an airless atmosphere; something like living in a wax museum.
Atlantis – Valentyn Vasyanovych on Projektr
Made in 2019, this film is set in the Ukraine in 2025, ‘after the war.’ Much of the land has been poisoned by the conflict in some way or another and many jobs have to do with finding landmines or digging up the unnamed bodies of those lost. It’s a cold, damp film, full of mud, rain, and recent tragedy. There are beautiful sequences here. Vasaynovych keeps his camera at a remove, never intruding, and the actors play everything close, revealing little. The subtle use of color and sound create a brittle, yet enduring world—a shell-shocked world of people slowly putting their lives back together piece by piece.
Why Marianne Faithfull Matters – Tanya Pearson
Part memoir, part appreciation (though definitely not a hagiography), part cultural criticism, Pearson’s book uses the many deaths and lives of Faithfull’s career to consider the way women in rock music have had to fight for a place at the table, not only because of the systematic male domination, but because aging and change is not something we culturally appreciate in women artists. She talks about what Faithfull meant to her growing up and as she’s aged, while bringing sharp insight to the music and iconography itself. Loud, messy, opinionated, then surprisingly tender: even if you’ve never heard Marianne Faithfull, you’ll believe she matters.
My Brilliant Friend, Season 2 – Saverio Costanzo; Alice Rohrwacher; Daniele Luchetti
Enduring friendship is fraught with misunderstanding, resentment, envy, and an undefinable bond forged early, or immediately, and constantly tested. We can attempt to put words to these feelings, but it always chafes like a rationalization—thoughts formed after the fact. We see something in the other person, and they see something in us; a deep recognition that is almost chemical. We can point to things that draw Lila and Lenu together at an early age: their love of reading and education, their aspirations to somehow escape their history, but these answers are too easy; it’s enough to say that they have each other, and they change each other’s lives.
This Italian series, from the novels by Elena Ferrante, is concerned only with its female characters, their struggles and successes within the brutal world of men in which they live. The men are not caricatures, but the show itself doesn’t care about them, and this turning away from the intrigues of men makes it a revelation of female relationships and the ways in which their world is shaped against them.
In Season 1, Lila and Lenu are children growing up in 1950’s Naples. In Season 2, Lenu is away at school and Lila is married, each struggling against the subtle and overt restrictions on women. They rebel in their own ways. They lose touch, hurt each other, find each other again. They infuriate each other, yet they have this golden thread of memory and history that holds them together, even at their most disaffected.
Beautifully shot with deep, insightful, maddening performances, every decision in this production—casting, editing, story compression—is made in the service of the tensions and confidences of its female characters and that makes the series feel like it’s something we’ve never seen before.
S-Town Podcast – Brian Reed
Brian Reed dives into small-town life in rural Alabama through the eccentric eyes of John B. McLemore, an antiquarian clock restorer and all around, interesting, infuriating and obsessive guy. Rumor, mythology, and suspicion form the basis of a narrative shot through with strange attachments and affections. Sometimes hilarious, often queasily invasive and ultimately deeply sad, S-Town chronicles a life of often noisy desperation in an environment where desperation is almost a currency. That’s one way to talk about the podcast. The other is to ask about journalistic integrity and the boundaries of it. Who brings a tape recorder to a funeral? Why are those who don’t want to talk on the record automatically suspect. McLemore was not a ‘public figure,’ he was simply a guy awkwardly living his life. In the end, S-Town is dangerously close to exploitation.
The Luminous Novel – Mario Levrero, translated by Annie McDermott
Levrero is awarded a Guggenheim to complete a book he is convinced is impossible to write, something he calls The Luminous Novel, about those moments in our lives that remain, that reach out of the mundane to grab us. Instead of writing, he searches for the perfect chair, the perfect pen. He has computer problems, creates computer problems, spends a lot of time solving them. Most of the book is an intermittent diary of procrastination, neuroses, and everyday life that becomes surprisingly intimate and compelling. Definitely a book writers will appreciate, but also a celebration of the prosaic, studded like a simple bracelet with the occasional astonishing jewel all of us can relate to.
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold – Charles Bail
Tamara Dobson trades jibes and kicks ass wearing extravagant outfits and heels. Tempera colored blood, great 70’s exploitation music, and Hong Kong locations. Henchmen are dispatched by the hundreds. The heroes and villain here are all women, and Dobson’s pre-Grace Jones make-up is a wonder. Pity the men who cross their paths.
Composition as Explanation – David Lang/Eighth Blackbird/Anne Bogart/Gertrude Stein
David Lang wants to explode the idea that classical musicians are simply conduits for hallowed sounds, so he created this piece for Eighth Blackbird which requires the musicians to move, act, and recite the intricate text of Gertrude Stein. Lang’s music weaves in and around Stein’s own repetitions and musicality alternating lyric intensity and percussive force. Anne Bogart’s direction brings a precise and mysterious meaning to each gesture and the ensemble is astonishing as musician and actors. Composition as Explanation is a cloudburst of music and words, bringing definition to both the time of the composition and the thrilling time in the composition. Live at Duke Performances
The Memory Librarian – Janelle Monae, and others
Multi-genre artist Janelle Monae expands her Dirty Computer universe with five SF short stories, each co-written with a different woman of color. Co-authors include Eve Ewing, Yohanca Delgado, and Danny Lore. The themes of the universe cohere around the working out of identity in action, in memory, and in vision. The New Dawn authoritarian state is a monolithic force exiting to quash or remove memory. Central to identity in the world of the stories is sexuality and love—romantic, familial, and platonic. The beauty of the stories lies not only in the explorations of memory and self, but in the easy way fluid sexual orientation is presented as a given. Coming 4/19
Nightmare Alley – Guillermo del Toro
A proto-film noir without the lust or a sense of revenge. In making the film pretty and stocking it with an ensemble of actors better than the material, del Toro has created an homage more coffee table book than film. It seems that the very things which drew him to the material have been leached away. Bradley Cooper can’t manage the hunger in a character that noir demands, so there is no desperation and drive to his schemes. Cate Blanchett might as well be Jessica Rabbit. Often beautiful to look at, Nightmare Alley doesn’t have the necessary dark heart; it has no heart at all.
The Employees – Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitkin
Sometime in the future, humans and humanoids live together on the Six Thousand Ship on their way to we’re-not-sure-where. The Employees is a workplace novel, compiled from interviews with both humans and humanoids. You imagine it something like a job interview, one person facing a committee. All speak in a subdued workplace jargon, even when the tensions begin to mount between the two species. Far from home, how do you maintain your humanity? If you’re not human, how do you interact with those who see you as machines? Funny, sad, and like nothing you’ve read before (as if it dropped from the 22nd Century), The Employees imagines being locked into your workplace forever.
Starlet – Sean Baker
I love a film with little surprises; instead of grand dramatic gestures, give me the tiny moments. This film has a lot of them. Sean Baker makes films about people who are always on the edge of the frame in other movies. They make bad decisions, have terrible friends. And when they do try to be kind, they often mess it up, yet they struggle along, nonetheless. Great performances from the two leads who don’t ask you to love them. This is a primary thing Baker extracts from his actors—they surrender the desire to be loved, or hated, or even understood.
Futura – Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, Alice Rohrwacher
When three Italian filmmakers decided to talk with ‘those who are becoming’—Italian youths just finishing school—about their ideas of the future, they had no idea the pandemic was about to begin. The result is an observation in real time of how Covid has changed us all, but more specifically, young people. Many of the concerns are familiar to anyone who was ever a teenager. (I’m convinced some never were.) There’s a renewed urgency here and an underlying desperation most struggle valiantly to keep at bay. It’s also a film in which I never felt the subjects were completely candid, either because they weren’t sure how to answer abstract questions or were uncomfortable sharing their thoughts with adults. I wondered what conversations they had when the cameras vanished.
Gravel Heart – Abdulrazak Gurnah
Colonialism distorts the lives of a family over generations, in obvious ways at first when the oppressions and revolutions are fresh, but later as they move farther from the source, the causes of mistrust and alienation become more difficult to trace. Salim struggles with responsibility and hope as well as his own detachment when he goes to school in London. Far from his native Zanzibar, the central mystery of his family’s life churns in his body. A novel about generational pain and the struggle to come to terms with its deep and often invisible repercussions.
No Time to Die – Cary Joji Fukunaga
Q: Why do children in films never actually behave as young children would? A: Because they are props, not humans. That’s my biggest beef here, the introduction of a child to ‘raise the stakes.’ None of the last Bond films have made any sense story-wise and this one continues down that shambling, murky path. Lazily directed action sequences, bad special effects (simple things, like green screen), dim lighting which I suppose is meant to be elegiac. On the upside, Craig is allowed to act in a few scenes and pulls it off; everyone else just seems grim and blank. Except Ben Whishaw, who I’d watch in anything; obviously, since I watched this.
The Image Book – Jean-Luc Godard
If you take them as intellectual exercises, Godard’s late films can be a bit of a slog, but as audio-visual mirage, they take on their own life. We’re inside the head of a person who thinks in film—not in the way the rest of us do, with constant snatches of things popping into our heads now and then—but as a deep observer, a historian, and someone still enraptured. There’s a sadness to The Image Book, a lament for the violence of the 20th and 21st Centuries and our continued desire to kill each other in ever larger ways, but it’s fractured by beauty and, from a different perspective, by the mind that could put this film together. Can you still be an enfant-terrible when you’re 92?
Tangerine – Sean Baker
Shot on the streets of LA with iPhones, Tangerine follows Sin-dee (just released from jail) and Alexandra, two trans women sex workers and best friends, through a single day. Using almost exclusively non-actors, Baker creates a low-rent world just holding itself together through sex, anger, and just enough money to get by. Baker’s films highlight the American Unseen (the economically, culturally, and politically marginalized) in ways that defy the cinematic history of ennoblement and redemption. He doesn’t create or bestow humanity to his subjects (as if he could), he shows them as they are, as human. Loud, messy, and affecting.
Kate Plays Christine – Robert Greene
What begins as a seemingly straightforward documentary about an actress preparing to play Christine Chubbuck, the Florida newscaster who committed suicide on camera in 1974, morphs into an examination of the nature of watching, and the damning toll exacted upon women performing in society as women. This is a film that slowly gets under the skin, as Kate (Kate Lyn Shiel), who may or may not be playing herself, learns more, and less, about Chubbuck’s life. It’s impossible to know what in this film, other than the most essential facts, is ‘real’ leading to the question of what we, as viewers, imagine as real in the first place. Nowhere near as heady as I make it sound; instead closely observed, cunningly structured, and a fascinating look at performers preparing for and coming to identify with a role. @Projectr
E-Force – Minister Faust
The essential obstacle with self-published authors in for the long game is that they don’t have an outside editorial hand involved in their work, both in tightening and shaping stories, and in choosing what to and what not to put into print. This collection of short stories has some real gems, taut pieces of idea-driven science fiction, interspersed with less developed pieces and stories that aren’t really stories at all, but excuses to talk about other books. Minister Faust has made a name for himself in the world of self-published SF and many of these stories show why. The language here is what often shines. It’s not the language of usual sci-fi, more earthy, slang-driven, and sly, giving each story its own syntax.
Electra, My Love (1974) – Milos Jansco
Startling long takes filled with motion, music, dance, and horses; the film plays as if it were one take transpiring on an open field and around a couple of stark buildings. Jansco tell the story of Electra by compressing and lengthening time within the same shot, creates an oppressive state simply through the constant galloping of horses and cracking of whips, and underlines the capriciousness of the state, any state. Full of symbolism that I assume is rooted in Hungarian history—I don’t understand it, but it’s beautiful, nonetheless. Often, I forget what film can be. Movies like this remind me in an exhilarating way.
Chilean Poet – Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell
An exploration of surrogate fatherhood, the indefinable contradiction of relationships, and the sublime and ridiculous nature of a life devoted to poetry, be it reading or writing. As an author, Zambra is a gentle, wry, and compassionate observer who is most interested in the mundane exchanges of everyday life and how some of those exchanges change us. The characters in this novel are steeped in literature; it is both their inspiration and their protection against the larger world. There is a beautiful and human melancholy in Zambra’s work that never turns sour, and a deep love that can never quite find a way to express itself.
Licorice Pizza – Paul Thomas Anderson
Love is always fraught, and a little psychotic, with a touch of implausibility in P.T. Anderson movies, but isn’t love itself completely implausible? Set in the San Fernando Valley in the summer of 1973, this film is an episodic, yet engaging story of two people who don’t know what or who they want to be yet and it perfectly captures that sense of aspiring to adult hood but not quite knowing how to achieve it. This enterprise is made even more precarious because there aren’t any adults around one would want to emulate. Funny, sometimes uneasy and chaotic, it’s a film about who you are when a little confidence is all you can muster. Beautifully framed and shot.
The Trees – Percival Everett
An African American Revenge Fantasy with supernatural elements. Black ninjas kill the people responsible for the Emmett Till lynching which begins a nationwide uprising of ghostly black mobs seeking out others whose families were responsible for lynchings. The book is essentially divided between a black world and a white world and much that occurs in the black world is compelling, but the sections in the white world play with the broad humor and cultural condescension of the worst Hee Haw episodes. There is a precedent here; the whites are generally minstrel show caricatures, which is its own kind of revenge, but the book doesn’t justify the juxtaposition.
Landscapers – Will Sharpe & Ed Sinclair
Lovers create the world they share, for better or worse. For Susan and Christopher Edwards, their shared world rests in film and when things get tense, they can retreat to that version of their relationship; the film slides easily between these two worlds. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before—Dennis Potter did it in 1978 with Pennies from Heaven—yet many moments are beautiful and affecting. I was particularly struck by the post-shootout scene in the forest, a sly hint that the couple never wished to harm anyone. What we haven’t see before are the stunning performances of Olivia Colman and David Thewlis, attempting to hold their world together as it slowly dissolves around them.