The Village Detective – Bill Morrison/David Lang
Morrison has made the use of damaged film an art form, often pairing film with music by contemporary composers such as Johann Johannson and Michael Gordon. Here he works with David Lang, composing a score for accordion, to create a film that’s part documentary—the film work of acclaimed Russian actor Mikhail Zharov—and part ghost film—four reels of the 1969 Derevensky Detektiv trawled from the bottom of the Atlantic by a fishing net in 2016. Derevensky Detektiv is about the village detective (Zharov) solving the case of a stolen accordion. Not my favorite Morrison. Still, an interesting meditation on the idea that what survives of us are stories, and those stories change, whether we like it or not, as the years go by.
Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys – Aaron Tucker
A postmodern take on the masculinity we inherit and the masculinity we’re left to awkwardly work out ourselves. In Part 1, a couple discuss Howard Hawk’s The Searchers, one of John Wayne’s most iconic roles. In Part 2, our antihero must act, or attempt to, or believe he is acting, in the face of a real catastrophe. It doesn’t go well. Less a meditation on what masculinity might be than on what it isn’t.
The Big Sleep – Howard Hawks
Labyrinthine to the point of being nonsensical, The Big Sleep floats on star power (Bogart and Bacall) and our thrill at the general seediness both of Los Angeles and the very rich. Bogart is the quintessential gumshoe who uses his wits instead of fists or a gun. In the end, all that really matters is that Bogart and Bacall get together in the end, despite a web of intrigue that only gets more thorny the more we know.
Triangle of Sadness – Ruben Ostlund
A study of power, and conversations about power, and how conversations about power are not about conversation but about, well, power. Ostlund plays with the audience sympathies like a pro, shifting our allegiances subtly and often as the film progresses. The shiny surface of the film has to do with money and class, but the more subtle aspects shift nearly scene to scene. Funny, and also perceptive and knowing.
Shanghai Express – Josef von Sternberg
It’s easy to see why Marlene Dietrich became a sensation. She’s the only actor in this film playing a character with more than two thoughts in their head. The script doesn’t give anyone more than two thoughts, but Dietrich doesn’t care. It’s a beautiful thing to watch actors (and directors) learning to act for the camera, instead of simply repeating their stage tricks, and it’s striking to see how it changes a film. Dietrich is in a completely different film here, populated by people smarter than those around her. Her performance is sensual, sardonic, and knowing. Von Stroheim layers the frame with multiple textures, both light and dark, and he knows how to give Dietrich glorious close ups. Anna May Wong is great. Nothing else in the film matters but Dietrich, von Stroheim and Wong are enough.
Watertown (1970) – Frank Sinatra
Low-key obsessed with this album—a concept album made in 1970 which is like a tastefully lurid Douglas Sirk melodrama for the ears. There are no radio-ready hits here, but a collection of songs narrated by a middle-aged man in a dead end town whose wife has left him with their two sons for the big city. This album rivals Lou Reed’s Berlin as the saddest collection of pop music ever made; and it’s uniquely fascinating not only that it was made, but that it was made by Sinatra. From the break-up (“There is no string ensemble/ and she doesn’t even cry.”) to his slow realization that she’s never coming back home (“I forget that I’m not over you…for a while.”), it’s so completely outside Sinatra’s brand that it’s startling. Resigned and broken, it’s the music of quiet desperation.
Where All Light Tends to Go – David Joy
An Appalachian noir about people who have, or believe they have, no means of escape; the sense of captivity pervades a book that is never sentimental, yet captures a flickering hope too far away to be grasped yet close enough to make despair more pronounced. Joy writes about the land and the natural world with awe, and without romanticism, as a fully realized, ambivalent character in the story. His people are real and damaged in a world where violence is often the only answer.
The Killers – Robert Siodmak
Siodmak packs each frame with life in this noir classic based on a Hemingway story. The dialogue crackles—gives you a sense of what kind of films influenced the Coen brothers. The revelation for me here is the nuanced and sensitive performance of Burt Lancaster as the boxer led astray by the dame. I grew up seeing him in tough guy westerns of the 60’s and 70’s, so it was a joy to watch him juggle multiple emotions at a time. Edmond O’Brien is the insurance agent who cracks the case. What was up with so many insurance agent gumshoes in the 30’s and 40’s. Was that actually a thing? Guy shows up at your door, shows you his employee card, “I’m from Acme Mutual. I’d like to ask you a few questions.” Weird.
The Eternal Daughter – Joanna Hogg
Moody slog with Tilda Swinton playing dual roles as a mother and daughter. The film can’t maintain a consistent tone so instead of a simmering sense of dread and the nagging belief that something is wrong, I just impatiently waited for the reveal. It wasn’t worth the wait. Tilda Swinton is great.
Human Sacrifices – Maria Fernanda Ampuero, translated by Frances Riddle
Cockfight – Maria Fernanda Ampuero, translated by Frances Riddle
These taut, dark short stories move on the logic of Grimm’s tale though they rarely dip into anything approaching magic realism. Ampuero writes like a tougher, less privileged Clarice Lispector about women in Ecuadorian patriarchal culture and the inherent danger—physical, psychological, cultural—that is omnipresent. This is not a chronicle of oppression but of survival and, unexpected joy. These are stories of defending and feeding the self and they hold a skewed vision that feels perfectly real. Sometimes the danger is all around you, but sometimes it’s yours—the threat you hold inside and gently nurture.
Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead
Is it possible for a book to be too readable for its subject matter? Whitehead knows how to write, and this story—of a boy’s school which tortures and kills its students, is based in fact. It’s horrifying and compelling, but I wondered toward the end if it was too propulsive and, in that way allowed me the reader to slide easily past the deep horror of the story. The counter argument for this is that the horrors were so ingrained in the culture that they are taken as almost commonplace, but that isn’t true for our protagonist. There’s a line here somewhere—too much unremitting horror and we shut down. This book full of well-realized characters and well-researched detail. It’s well paced and readable. And it brought up the question: Is it possible to write too well for the subject matter?
The Glass Key (1942) – Stuart Heisler
Brian Donlevy is great as the swell guy mob boss, but Alan Ladd couldn’t convince me he was a smart guy and a schemer. His smirk is empty and his eyes are too. The real deal here is Veronica Lake, a pallid, jellied form held in the exoskeleton of her clothes who somehow manages to be both alien and alluring, the very picture of an aquatic siren luring men to their grateful deaths.
Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Larry Cohen
Though not as batfuck delirious as Cohen’s God Told Me To, this is still a stellar cheapie B-movie. Terrible special effects, Richard Roundtree AND David Carradine showing up for paychecks, great 80s NYC guerilla location photography and Michael Moriarty doing something…I don’t know. I feel like Cohen must have been shouting off camera “Act!…Act more!…No, even more!”, and act Moriarty does, all over the place, in every nook and cranny he can. One of the most puzzling performances I’ve seen. Somehow unhinged, yet still not very interesting.
The Menu – Mark Mylod
A satire of people with too much money and too much time on their hands made by people with too much money and time on their hands.
American Movie – Chris Smith & Sarah Price
Anyone who’s ever attempted anything creative cringes watching Mark Borchardt talk a good game about the indie film he’s going to make, cajoling his friends to help, then never seeming to finish. Very funny and deeply sad—a balance nearly impossible to achieve—American Movie is very much about America, about the struggles of someone with no connections and no money attempting to break into a sacred space where they don’t belong. It’s about ambition without resources, about selling as an end in itself, about never slowing down for long enough to see that your dream may never materialize. The filmmakers never condescend to their subjects and that’s what makes the film human.
How to Read Now – Elaine Castillo
A fierce argument for reading within historical context and not separating the artist from the art. Castillo sees ‘reading’ broadly, to include art, film, the world, and argues that to read Austen within the colonial and societal milieu in which it was written, can only deepen an appreciation of the work. She’s smart enough to write not only about the things which infuriate her—the desire for comfort within the white gaze—but the things which bring her joy as well.
What Happened Was… – Tom Noonan
Beautifully modulated two-hander about a first date, with all the shifting power dynamics, glimmers of hope, moments of connection and moments of terror portrayed in a low-key, nearly casual way that makes it impossible to turn away from. When people say They don’t make indie films like they used to, this is a prime example of what they mean. Stellar performances by Noonan and Karen Sillas that ache with both the desire and the terror of connecting.
Criterion
Tar – Todd Field
Todd Field films seem to have all the right pieces, but they always leave me cold. They feel shot in a vacuum, a place the real world never infringes, like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where the aliens have constructed a perfect neighborhood and transported people there in their sleep. This is a film about the haunting quality of guilt and there’s a lot of online chatter about what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. My problem is, I don’t care—nothing in the film moves me. A lot of hard lines and brutalist architecture, a lot of sterile interiors and suppressed emotion. What surprises me most is that the film shows startling little understanding of music. Cate Blanchett is superb.