Ooo Joan is crazy in this one. Possessed, if you will. Some descriptions of this film describe it as a rare unglamorous performance for Crawford. Umm... no. She is unglamorous in exactly one scene. The rest of the time she looks her usual, perfectly put together self.
Crawford was nominated for an Oscar for this film (her second nomination), but I don't know. These Crawford movies sort of feel all the same to me. Glamorous woman, jealousy, men who can't help but love her or don't know how to quit her or desperately want to hurt her. They just all sort of have this pot-boiler quality to them, and she seems to me rather the same in them all. (I mean, I guess that's what it is to be a movie star, but it does feel rather repetitive.)
To be fair to Possessed, this particular movie has a frame of mental illness and schizophrenia. Crawford is picked up in a catatonic state in Los Angeles, barely able to speak. She's lost her mind. Then from there we go into flashback to find out what happened. The frame is trying to tell a story of a kind of love madness and deal with psychiatry as a profession that might do some good – in this way it's in conversation with films like Private Worlds (1935), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Spellbound (1945). This frame is rather interesting; it's the flashbacks that are all typical Crawford melodrama. Nothing new to see there.
Emma. (the punctuation is included in the title) is a film version of Jane Austen's novel Emma. Now, we had another one of these directed by Douglas McGrath in 1996 starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam and a host of other actors, and one wonders why this film was made at all since it hasn't been so long. (Then again, Greta Gerwig just remade Little Women, and the most recent adaptation of that novel was in 1994.) And, of course, there is Amy Heckerling's Clueless, which this film markedly resembles in its color scheme.
Bill Nighy, I must admit, made me laugh many times. If only he were onscreen more! There is also a constant focus on the servants in this film. They take up a lot of space, and this is both intriguing and distracting, undermining the action of the story and making it, at least momentarily, about something else. I liked this idea a lot – it reminded me a bit of the way Zhang Yimou undermines the Chinese martial arts melodrama in Curse of the Golden Flower. This film is a comedy, though, so the focus on servants is nearly always comic. And of course, one can't make Emma about the servants, because it's already a novel about class, and the heroine is a member of the upper classes whose "burden" it is to be kind and generous to those beneath her in caste.
What is, perhaps, odd about this is I found this Emma to be not very likable. She's never the generous, kind, lovable person everyone says she is in the film's third act. In fact, I felt a kind of strange disconnect in this version of Emma when everyone is surprised by the heroine's selfish, shallow behavior in act three. It's weird because the entirety of the film is devoted to her selfish, shallow behavior, and she's played by Anya Taylor-Joy as though she is always working an angle, always plotting some new device. So it's hard to believe that anything she does is innocent. Now, I honestly thought (because of the director's focus on the servants) that this was intended as a critique of Emma herself, like a new version of Emma that was much harder on the heroine. But no. Emma. expects us to love this Emma as much as ever, and we expect the men to fall in love with her and the women to forgive her and love her and want her to love them back, and we are expected to want the best for her all around. But acts one and two do not help with this, and I chafed against the third act conversion I was supposed to experience.
I loved Josh O'Connor, and Bill Nighy. Both are very funny. And O'Connor has the film's most heartfelt scene – in a carriage as he confesses his love for Emma. (In this version of Emma I think she should have married Mr. Elton.) I also thought Mia Goth was quite good, Amber Anderson too.
But... why does this film exist? The entire time I was watching it I was wondering why I wasn't watching Clueless instead.
Tai, you don't have time to change, but you could hit a few balls in those clothes.
Oh Mannequin is fine as far as it goes. It has a kind of faux feminism going for it that feels good at least. Crawford is pretty great (I think I like her in films from the '20s and '30s), but Tracy feels out of place here, like he doesn't quite know how to play this role. Much more at home in Mannequin is Alan Curtis, who plays his part magnificently, except that the character is such an absolute deadbeat that one really can't help hating him the way the film itself hates him.
Titling this film Mannequin is sort of odd, really. At one point Crawford takes a job as a mannequin, but it hasn't anything to do with the plot. It's actually a very short sequence.
I watched this and two other Crawford films at the end of this month before they got removed from the Criterion Channel. I am forever doing this, but it's actually kind of hard to find Mannequin, so I had to take the chance when it was presented to me.
Everyone looks great in The Gentlemen, and everyone's very, very rich. So why isn't this any fun?
And I love a crime film, but, well, this is no fun at all. Charlie Hunnam has a great scene or two, and Colin Farrell steals every second he's onscreen. I liked Bugzy Malone, too.
But mostly I just didn't even smile. The Gentlemen just isn't enjoyable. The entire thing is told in flashback, for reasons I don't really understand. Everyone's throwing money around, but there's just no fun.
Nabarvené Ptáče (The Painted Bird) is fairly merciless. This is one of the most starkly violent movies I've seen. It opens with a truly horrific sequence, where a young boy is being pursued as he carries a small mongoose. It's a shocking way to begin the movie, and the first five minutes are brutal as a way to set the tone for what is to come.
Animals are actually central to how The Painted Bird works, and although the film is about inhumanity and the violence people perpetrate on other people, it also places that inhumanity in the context of the violence with which we treat animals. In addition to the mongoose there is an important horse in the film, and a goat, and many birds and rats. The film's eponymous painted bird is obviously an image of the main character, and of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe, but it is also an actual bird, an animal tormented and killed by its own unfeeling, unthinking relatives. The Painted Bird is gorgeously, exquisitely shot, and its subject matter is chilling, even terrifying. This film will stay with me a long time.
The Painted Bird is about the Shoah, yes, but this is not a film about the camps – or about hiding from Nazis, as most descriptions of the movie would have one believe. Instead it's about a boy trying to find a place where he can breathe and live and flourish. All he finds instead is greed and jealousy and hatred and fury and racism and perversion. It's a vicious portrait.
This Italian poster for Portrait of Jennie is so much prettier than the U.S. poster. This movie is super weird – but then turns out to be a sort of typical romantic fantasy. It's interested in time and long life and haunting, like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir from the year before but without the humor and charm of the earlier film. Still, there's something that gets under your skin about Portrait of Jennie. And in many ways the film is this odd portrait of a sad young woman who never found what she was looking for. The more I think about it the more I like it.
WolfWalkers is another gorgeous animated film about humans and nature from the studio and director, Tomm Moore (this time with Ross Stewart) that made Song of the Sea and The Secret of Kells – they're both worth watching if you haven't seen them. WolfWalkers' lead character is a young English girl named Robyn Goodfellow. She's in Ireland with her dad, who is there to hunt wolves at the behest of a very severe Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17th century. The film is beautifully, dreamily drawn, occasionally letting us see characters partially drawn or only sketched and without color. This kind of meta approach works very well, and it adds to the obvious beauty and artistry of the film by repeatedly emphasizing that this film is hand-drawn.
You might be wondering about Robyn Goodfellow. She shares a name with the most important little puck from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but she isn't the merry prankster from English lore or Shakespeare's play, at least not initially. She's a young girl who wants to be big and strong and just like her father. She is a very, very disobedient girl, though, and when she finally does start doing what her father tells her to do in act two, I was surprised. Wolfwalkers'connections to Robin Goodfellow, the medieval English sprite, are not totally clear. He was traditionally a kind of urban imp, who – as Shakespeare tells us early in the play – causes women to spill their beer and plays pranks on villagers ("I am that merry wanderer of the night"). But Shakespeare associates him instead with an Athenian forest and with his fairy band (an entirely different mythology); in Dream he works for Oberon, the king of the fairies, and plays his pranks on villagers and lovers in the forest instead of in the town. It make sense that Moore's little girl, Robyn, who causes plenty of trouble in the village would become a friend of the forest nymphs in WolfWalkers and cause plenty of trouble for the film's villain.
The villain in this film is Oliver Cromwell. He is even referred to several times by his nickname "Old Ironsides". He aims to control the forest and pagan belief in general with his Puritanism and his violence. Cromwell stands in here for illegitimate authority and he controls the villagers with lies, threats, and theatrics. And his aim is to destroy the forest, destroy paganism, and destroy the magic of nature. None of this is about what Cromwell believes. Cromwell is here to take power and to take it through violence. Moore's choice of such a famous historical figure as his villain is clearer if you remember that Cromwell is a hated figure in Ireland, responsible for English colonization of Ireland in 1649, and that Old Ironsides was personally responsible for many of the atrocities of this colonization. Moore plays a bit fast and loose with history here, but it's easy to read the film as a story about colonialism.
This film is also about queerness, I think. Werewolves are obviously queer figures – they're different at night than they are during the day (gay), they have a "nature" they try to hide and control but cannot (gay), and they must recruit new members not through reproduction in the standard human way but through conversion – also like gay people. WolfWalkers got me in my queer feelings. I think this was most evident for me in Robyn's repeated pleas to her father to listen to her, to hear her out, to believe her when she was talking; the feeling of being queer for me was echoed, too, in Robyn's father's refusal to believe what was right in front of his own eyes. No, it cannot be that; authority tells me that must be impossible, so I will believe authority rather than what I see and what my child tells me. Is there queer love in the film? Well, you can watch it and tell me what you think.
Mostly, though, WolfWalkers is about the magic that is all around us, especially in the animals and plants with which we share the planet. It's about listening to that world and looking at what it has to show us and learning from it. WolfWalkers is also just a gorgeous marvel of hand-drawn animation. I think it's Moore's best film to date, and I hope he'll keep making these beautiful fairytale films.
I watched WolfWalkers on AppleTV+ and I do not, frankly, understand why this platform exists. There is, as far as I can tell, no other new cinematic content. I looked and looked for other 2020 movies on this channel. I don't see any at all. Instead they have dozens and dozens of movies that you can buy. What? Why pay for a subscription service that requires me to pay more for the things I want? I'm paying only for the privilege to pay more? What is this? Audible? Anyway, you can do a free one-week trial of this channel and then cancel after you've watched WolfWalkers. That's what I'd recommend. If you do know where to find the movies on AppleTV+ please let me know.
'Round Midnight is a very odd, very sweet film about an alcoholic tenor saxophonist who is befriended by a French jazz fan in Paris. This film is about their relationship and, well, also about good fucking jazz.Bertrand Tavernier's film is at its best when it's giving us music, most of this is gorgeous saxophone playing, but there are also some exquisite vocals from Lonette McKee and a great number by Sandra Reaves-Phillips. Martin Scorsese has a sizeable acting role in the film, as well.
This kind of cartoony film was in vogue for a while, I guess, but it's just not for me at all. I don't understand the fake punches and phony violence and the mugging for the camera. This kind of thing happens in Terry Gilliam movies from the period and, I guess, all sorts of other 1980s movies too – Mad Max, Brazil,and Waterworld are other examples. I find this kind of thing so annoying. Back to the Future Part II's charms were all lost on me. I don't think I even cracked a smile during this; I certainly didn't laugh at any of the film's so-called jokes.
The Wild Goose Lake (南方車站的聚會) is a stylish and brutally violent crime film with a great central performance by Hu Ge. This is mostly a genre picture, though. I liked it, but there isn't really much that is special or innovative about it.
Palm Springs is so much better than the idea would seem to promise. Andy Samberg and Cristian Milioti are delightful and fun, and they are joined by a hilarious ensemble cast, especially Dale Dickey and June Squibb. More importantly, Palm Springs is really, really funny. I laughed out loud many times, and the film's questions about the multiverse, about life's meaning, about boredom and consequences and taking risks? These are all great questions, and they're dealt with here in surprising, hilarious ways. This may even become a little profound after a while. I really liked this.
I feel like it needs to be said. Andy Samberg is so sexy. That's definitely one of the draws of Palm Springs, but it has so much to offer in addition to Andy Samberg's sexiness.
I liked Sound of Metal. It's much better than most disability narratives, and it avoids lots of the tiresome tropes of these films. But this is not a disability narrative. Even the tagline – Music was his world. Then silence revealed a new one. – is too trite. This is a character study, and the real draw here is Riz Ahmed's central performance, which is just flat out brilliant. Ahmed continues to be a sensitive, soulful performer who just excels when given the space. Ruben is a finely wrought character, and he's beautifully, realistically portrayed. Paul Raci, a jobbing actor in Los Angeles who's never quite had a role like this in a film, is also superb as Ruben's sponsor Joe.
1. What did you do in 2020 that you'd never done before?
Stayed inside all fuckin' day for weeks on end.
Taught all of my classes remotely.
Planted a lime tree.
Went hiking on the Georgia section of the Appalachian Trail.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My resolution for last year was to brunch more, and I did have some excellent brunches: a couple with my housemate, Tate; an excellent brunch with Chris and Lukas in Chicago; and a good socially distanced brunch with Caleb and Diana and Caleb's parents. I just want to say that if there had been a safe way to brunch, I would have been brunching all the time. I feel like this should just be my resolution for the third year in a row. We're gonna have a vaccine for COVID-19, and I'm gonna brunch.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes. Early this year on January 10th, Michael and Brandee Steger added their son Mozart Lee to the family.
My friends Jill and Rick DiGiuseppe's daughter Ella was born on July 23.
And Catie and Graeme Humphreys welcomed little Fitzpatrick Wilde Keith into the world on 12 November. (They're British so I wrote the date the Anglo way.)
4. Did anyone close to you die?
We were not close, but my dear friend Jaime lost her mom, whom we affectionately called MoJo, this summer.
5. What countries did you visit?
Well I was supposed to go to Belize over Spring Break, but this was at the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. Bostonians were being hit badly, and all of the people I was supposed to travel with were in Boston. We had to cancel our trip.
But, hey, I did visit an Ingles in North Georgia.
6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020? I'd like to throw a cocktail party at my house.
7. What dates from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Honestly everything runs together. Seriously. For me, and I mean this sincerely, that mostly since March every day has been pretty much like the last. Obviously, once the school year ended in May and the school year started back up in August my day-to-day life changed because I had lots of work to do, but mostly the days just feel the same, as if time is barely passing.
In fairness I should also say that two stretches of time in 2020 stick out in my mind. A former student of mine came to live with me just as the Spring term was ending, and she stayed for two months or so. She needed a place to stay, and I had a room free, so she joined me for several weeks of cocktails and movies and workouts.
The second stretch is from the beginning of November. My friends Katie and Chris called me on a fluke and invited me to go to a random cabin on a random Georgia mountain for a couple days to celebrate Chris's birthday. We had such a great time together.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? I think the things I'm most proud of is the new piece I wrote for JDTC on the use of the word "performative" in theatre and performance studies. It'll be out next year. I had a really productive and fun last eight weeks or so of summer, and I proved to myself that I can actually get my own work done if I have the space to do it.
9. What was your biggest failure? Work-life balance. I sort of joke about this, but working at home also means living at work, which is what I do. I need to spend my time working toward getting tenure – writing, publishing, editing, researching, planning new classes – and so that has just taken over my life. It's what I do most days. Weekends mean nothing to me. I wake up, and then I work on my to-do list. I have hope that this will change once I am not living under the constant threat/fear of not getting tenure, and I am sure it will change at least somewhat once we are not living with SARS-CoV-2 so unchecked.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Nope! Just plugging along.
11. What was the best thing you bought? Ok, so being home alone all the time meant sort of staring at things I live with everyday but that I don't like. Upgrades were necessary. The best one of these was that I bought a new sofa this year to replace my old one. I love it.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration? My former student Tommy, who is doing amazing activist work in New York City.
People marching in the streets in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Brad Brock, who was my department chair for most of the year. I don't think I know anyone more hard working or selfless. I am so proud to have worked for him.
States passing laws that decriminalize marijuana and other drugs.
Everyone who made the very, very hard decision to leave New York City and move back in with their parents for a while. It's so rough for so many people who can't make a living right now the way they normally would, and the decision to leave the city is not an easy one.
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? I say this every year, but Mitch McConnell and most of the Republicans in Congress should be ashamed of themselves. Most of the Democrats in Congress should be ashamed of themselves, too, but Mitch McConnell belongs to a circle of shame on an entire other level. I can think of no worse person in this country.
Obviously the Trump administration's (along with the DeSantis administration here in Florida) handling of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. In addition to plain incompetence, it has just shown such an enormous lack of care for others.
People who say "trials and tribulations". Tribulations? Really? You must truly be in trouble.
14. Where did most of your money go? Taxes.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Winter break. I have never, ever in my life, been more happy to put a semester behind me. My poor students are beat down and sick of the pandemic; I'm sick of being in my house; and theatre students want to be making theatre. Some of them are doing that, but it's been very difficult.
16. What song will always remind you of 2020?
Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP"
and
Leikeli47's "Wash & Set"
17. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? Happier. b) thinner or fatter? Thinner. c) richer or poorer? Richer.
18. What do you wish you'd done more of? Gave more hugs. Donated more money to Black & Pink. Lifted more weights. Watched more movies. Danced in my living room more. Published more.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Zoom. Even hanging out with friends on zoom is drag, honestly, even friends I love a lot. Staring into this little screen does not make me feel more connected; for me it does precisely the opposite.
I also wish I had spent less time reading about Trump, and the election in general. If I'm honest, I find the conservativism of the Democratic party almost as exhausting as the much more blatant racism and big-government politics of the Republican party. I had to cut facebook out of my life for most of the time leading up to the election. I hated that, because I really just want to see photos of my friends and their kids.
20. How will you be spending Christmas?
In Tallahassee and probably by myself. It is a weird time. It's too cold to do things outside, but maybe I'll see some local friends. Some of my friends here have COVID-19, so we're a little more on edge about transmission.
21. Did you fall in love in 2020?
Haha. No.
22. How many one-night stands?
Zero. I had a couple opportunities, but I was trying to be good about spreading SARS-CoV-2.
23. What was your favorite TV program?
Team Chelseaboy
I only watched RuPaul's Drag Race season 12, RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars season 5, Drag Race Canada, and Drag Race Holland. Last year, I thought three seasons of Drag Race was too much, but as it turns out, as long as the amount of RuPaul is limited, I'm having a great time watching these queens and their visions of genderfuckery.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? No.
25. What was the best book you read? I keep track of this on GoodReads.
Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which is an extraordinary and pleasurable achievement that I'm recommending to everyone. It's a kind of West African fantasy novel that merges the Sunjata epic with The Lord of the Rings? I don't know how to describe it, but I loved it.
John Williams' Stoner.
I haven't truly loved any of the non-fiction I've been reading lately, but I did get re-excited about reading ancient Greek comic fragments by reading S. Douglas Olson's edition of the fragments of Aristophanes, Epicharmus, Menander, and other ancient comedians.
Otherwise I read a lot of plays. Reading Yukio Mishima (on the recommendation of Jessica Del Vecchio!) has been the most rewarding.
26. What was your greatest musical discovery? Nao.
27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw? The Metropolitan Opera's production of Satyagraha. They opened the archives and there is good stuff to watch.
28. What did you want and get?
A Shoog McDaniel print.
A revised curriculum for FSU's PhD program in Theatre and Performance Research.
A new dishwasher.
29. What did you want and not get?
I am so grateful this year simply for what I have. There's a way to talk about things I didn't get this year, and I have had my share of disappointments, to be sure. But I am very, very thankful for my safety, my health, my employment, and my house. This year has been depressing, but I have benefited from enormous privilege and luck.
30. What was your favorite film of this year?
I still have many to see (a list of 54 movies at the moment), but so far it's Beanpole followed by Bacurau.
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Rough stuff. This is probably the day I remember the clearest this year. I taught class on my birthday, and then I went to an emergency faculty meeting, where the chair updated us about the way that the semester was going to move to remote instruction. I then took my friends Elliott and Tate to the airport to catch their Spring Break flights back to their partners. Chari and I went to Chuy's (RIP) for margaritas. She was leaving the next day to visit her partner for Spring Break, so we didn't have dinner. I went home and had dinner by myself and watched George Roy Hill's A Little Romance. We didn't go back to in-person classes; Tate and Elliott didn't come back; and my own Spring Break plans remained canceled. I turned 39.
32. What new recipes did you make this year?
I made a blood-orange upside down cake that was amazing.
I made dan dan noodles a million times this year. I also made Jollof rice for the first time. Oh, and I got kind of obsessed with making that Jjapaguri dish from Parasite.
33. What were your cocktail obsessions?
This year it was a slightly modified Bourbon Shake.
2 ounces of bourbon, 1 ounce of lime juice, and 3/4 ounce of honey syrup. Shake the hell out of it and strain or serve it on ice.
34. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Travel.
35. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?
Shirt and tie... and shorts.
36. What kept you sane?
Meredith and Jason.
My friend Greg hosts this movie club where we watch a movie every week that none of us has seen before. This means we watch some really out there stuff. It's delightful.
Cooking.
Texts from friends checking in on me.
The Criterion Channel.
Jacob, Jessica, Kate, Lindsay, Michelle, Miriam, Noe, and Patrick.
Doing the Crossword remotely with Yasser.
37. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Gavin Leatherwood.
39. Whom did you miss?
Jason Tate, Wahima, Justin, Elizabeth, Ashley, Danny, John, Tom, J, Dayne, Jordan, Marko, Michael, Alexios, Nate Cook, Kody, Matt Silva. My family.
40. Who was the best new person you met?
Lilian Garcia-Roig
41. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2020:
It's a lot less lonely to live with someone else. Of course, this means sacrificing a lot of time. This is an enormous trade off. As soon as my former student moved out in midsummer, I found that I had time to write again. My life has really lacked balance this year. I have not yet learned the lesson of how to balance the time I give to others and the time I keep for myself. I am working on this.
42. Share an important quotation from 2020:
"In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. [...]
We can accomodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstavle to our acting.
The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.20
The Bachelor and the Bobby-soxer is hilarious and sexy and completely delightful. I laughed out loud several times, and Myrna Loy is just brilliant. She is the most underrated actress of Hollywood's Golden Age for sure. This is effortless comedy on her part. She's a gem, and this movie is exquisitely scripted.
Something Wild is extraordinary and weird and very Jonathan Demme. Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels and Ray Liotta are all sexy as hell. And Ray Liotta gives a weirdly brilliant performance. It's just so strange and compelling and... silly? Cameos by John Waters and John Sayles round out the weirdness, but the extraordinary thing here is the direction. The entire film made me uncomfortable, but when Demme's movie leaps genres and becomes something altogether different than it promised, it moves into brilliant territory.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Hollywood musicals remind me of community theatre.You recognize everyone, and you're proud of them all for doing it, but no one can quite hit the notes.
The Prom checks all the feel-good boxes you'd expect it to check. These awful, cynical Broadway people go check out a town in Indiana that is refusing to let a young lesbian go to the prom with her girlfriend. While they're there, the awful Broadway people... become slightly better people. And the town? Well, the town is slightly less homophobic, I guess.
One of the main themes of the film, though, is that the solution to being a lesbian in Indiana (one of the show's first, beautiful, songs includes the lyrics note to self: don't be gay in Indiana) is to find people on the internet in other places using social media. Or were those people also in Indiana? I was a little confused on this point. Anyway, the way to be queer in Indiana, according to The Prom, is to get on the internet and find some other queer people. Of course, the people she finds, whether they're in Indiana or elsewhere don't actually help her solve the homophobia in her town/school. They do, however, give her emotional support and a sense of identity. Which, of course, is what this film itself is also designed to do. Now, I obviously have nothing against feeling like one belongs and feeling part of a community. But in The Prom, the solution to the work of combating homophobia and changing people's minds is to acquire a sense of self and be true to who you are.
This is not much as solutions go, but it is better than the other solution, which is executed by Andrew Rannells in a cringe-worthy number in a Westfield Plaza. What Rannells' character does is point out to the local high schoolers that they're being hypocrites when it comes to their lesbian classmate. He tells them that the Bible prohibits tattoos (this is not exactly true and a matter of debate among believers), that the Bible prohibits sex between unmarried people (no debate on this one), that the Bible prohibits divorce and remarriage, and maybe there was another thing... shellfish? I am confusing this song with a musical number on YouTube that Jack Black and a bunch of other celebrities made to do precisely this same thing before the homophobic Prop 8 amendment passed in California in 2008. That video, it is worth noting, failed to convince a majority of allegedly liberal California voters using exactly the same reasoning that works quickly on these Indiana teenagers. My own parents voted yes on Prop 8, though I had been an out gay man for seven years. Maybe they just hadn't seen "Prop 8 - the Musical"?
The idea that these young people simply need a more enlightened way of looking at things – an enlightenment that folks in New York City already possess – strikes me as really condescending. The central lyric in this song is love thy neighbor, which is a very cool and fundamentally Christian principle, but let's be honest, the problem here is who gets to count as "thy neighbor". Christianity has been very, very good at excluding people from this category whenever it needs to. I also think that telling other people they're being hypocritical is bad argumentation. The other people can always just shoot right back that you are being hypocritical about something too. And you are. You know you are. And you know who else could do a little work at loving their neighbors? All of us. So it seems to me that not only are Christians picking and choosing which parts of the Bible to enforce, so are the non-Christians who are deciding which neighbors they want to love. It's all just so smug.
Sidebar: I really liked Keegan-Michael Key in this movie. He's the funniest person in the film. And I liked all of the teenagers. They were all excellent. And I loved Mary Kay Place. More Mary Kay Place, please. I also really love the music from The Prom – especially when any of the young people are singing, and the show itself is really funny. It's scripted as a delightful, hilarious satire that hits its mark well.
The thing that feels weird about the movie version of The Prom is that everything in it feels serious. Obviously, it's not realistic; it's a glitzy (in fact, I love all the shiny costumes!), candy-coated musical. But it's all played straight. No one in it is actually an asshole; there's no bite. We never actually get to laugh at anyone. The satire is there, sure, underneath Ryan Murphy's film, but his film doesn't actually poke fun at the Broadway characters it's supposed to be mocking. Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman never really look stupid. The film actively makes fun of Andrew Rannells' character, it's true, but actually not that much. The big "Acceptance" number that takes place at a monster truck rally is originally hilarious, but the film cuts it short before Streep's character starts singing. It's as if Murphy wants to prevent us from laughing at this Broadway diva.
This all makes a little more sense when I realized that the original musical is obviously designed to make fun of people like Murphy and Rannells and their this is a really important story that people need to hear sort of nonsense – the kind of bullshit we heard everybody spout when The Boys in the Band was released on Netflix earlier this year. The Prom is supposed to be making fun of liberals and their hypocrisies. And yet here Murphy is making a completely earnest version of this satirical show. He can't conceive of the story's satire because it's aimed at him. It's weird, and I didn't like it.
But I don't know what the deal is with critics saying James Corden's performance is homophobic. I don't see it. Why is it homophobic? Because his character is a sissy? I ain't got nothin' against a sissy. His portrayal of a gay man is no more or less femme than Rannells'. Are all gay men on screen supposed to act butch and if they don't it's homophobic? Sounds like liberal hypocrisy to me.
Also I wish Meryl Streep would take a break for a while. I said it.
Mank has a lot of problems. David Fincher's new film has some nice elements to it, but the screenplay (by Fincher's dad) doesn't really build its tension the way it needs to, and so the important scenes don't land when they should. Worse yet, the Finchers have us jumping around in time in a way that doesn't allow the film to build up to anything. We'll be in the middle of an important and emotional scene and – what do you know – we're jumping forward seven years in time for five minutes... only to jump right back to where we left off? These jumps are unmotivated and unrelated to anything thematic. They just seem to be there. The whole thing is quite frustrating.
The tone of this movie is off, too. Mank takes a comical approach to most of its subject matter, but then it's filmed in black and white as if its going to be a serious noir picture instead of a jaunty comedy. Meanwhile Reznor and Ross's score bounces around as if this is Sullivan's Travels. It just doesn't work.
Quiet and contemplative like all Kelly Reichardt movies, First Cow is about friendship and risk and needing to bond in order to deal with a hostile world. I really liked it.
For some reason I had in my head that since I had just watched The Brave One from 1956 that I needed to watch The Bold and the Brave from 1956. It's a movie that was also nominated for a screenplay Oscar in 1957 (in a different category). Anyway, I'm not sure why I felt the need to watch this, but I did.
As it turns out, The Bold and the Brave is not a very interesting war movie, and its central character is a truly hateful human being whom I loathed.
But Nicole Maurey is fabulous in this movie, and she gives a really gorgeous performance. Mickey Rooney, too, has a great part and is tons of fun. These two actors are the shining lights of this rather dour and taciturn film – one that doesn't have any interesting battle sequences and isn't really about war per se. The Bold and the Brave is actually just a private melodrama between four people; it seems almost to have nothing to do with WWII.
Drylongso shares an aesthetic with other films of the 1990s, especially those of Gregg Araki and the New Queer Cinema. This story is about a young artist working in Oakland who is photographing black men because they're an endangered species, while a serial killer chases young black folks, alternating his victims between girls and boys. This is a great little movie about friendship, mourning, art-making, and community. I really liked it.
The Brave One is very sweet, and I liked it a great deal more than I probably should have. The thing is, Michel Ray, even though he's not a great actor, is nevertheless compelling, and the plot itself is moving and lovely. The whole thing really shouldn't work, but it does. I think this is due more to the superb score (by Victor Young) and excellent photography (by Jack Cardiff) than it is to the script (by Dalton Trumbo), but obviously this film is most famous for the fact that Trumbo – a blacklisted writer in 1956 – won an Oscar under a pseudonym for writing this film.
Either way I'm not sure what the "From the human heart / ...for the human heart!" tagline is about. Like, is this because it's a film about a bull? Like they thought we would all be thinking from the bovine heart for the human heart? It's weird, right? I don't get it.
Red Road is a solid psychological thriller. It's Andrea Arnold, so it's atmospheric and very well made, with intriguing lighting and photography throughout. I really loved the acting too. Kate Dickie and Tony Curran are both excellent, and a young Martin Compston is so great. The film wants - in addition to being a thriller - to be about forgiveness and letting go and other things, but I think Red Road succeeds much more on its generic terms than it does on its philosophical ones.
I watched this movie, like Coma and Water Lilies before it, because it was about to get removed from the Criterion Channel, but Andrea Arnold is an excellent filmmaker, and so watching this was a must.
Water Lilies is sweet and earnest and sexy. Adèle Haenel is kind of amazing. She's obviously great in Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu, but she's great in this film too, even though she was obviously much younger when she and Sciamma made Water Lilies.
Incidentally, Naissance des Pieuvres means 'the birth of octopuses', the implications of which strike me as much more sexual than 'water lilies'.
I watched Naissance des Pieuvres on the Criterion Channel. It was just about to get removed from the channel at the end of November, so I snuck in under the wire.
I watched Coma as part of a Criterion Channel series called 1970s Horror because... like...who knew – Michael Crichton directed a movie??? This stars Genevieve Bujold, who is compelling and beautiful and should have been the star of more films. She's so great! The movie itself is not a horror movie at all but is more like a thriller with science fiction overtones – akin to Frankhenheimer's Seconds. I quite liked it, but it's a straight genre picture except for the really great intertextual nods to Sidney Gilliat's Green for Danger. Michael Douglas and Richard Widmark are good, too, and there are lots of cool people in tiny roles, including Ed Harris, Lois Chiles, Tom Selleck, and Rip Torn.
Richly atmospheric and spooky, Erik Blomberg's film Valkoinen Peura (The White Reindeer) is beautifully shot and an extraordinary achievement (Blomberg was a cinematographer before he was a director). It takes place in the Finnish Lapland, far, far north, and it adapts a Sami folktale into a quietly troubling monster movie. I watched this with my unseen movie club, and this is a weird, little-seen gem.
I almost don't know where to start. Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances is a film about a long evening when a man says goodbye to his lover – who is moving to East Africa for work. The bulk of the film is a party, where we hang out with the man's friends and get a veritable snapshot of gay New York in 1985. Much of the film discusses HIV by not discussing HIV, but it's present in almost every frame of the film. I found Parting Glances deeply, wonderfully moving, and I really loved its quirkiness and its sadness. This would pair nicely with one of Gregg Araki's strange movies from this period. Parting Glances is much more grounded than Araki's work, but he's speaking a similar language. Kathy Kinney is magnificent in this, but the entire cast, really, is stellar.
Wow I loved Un Beau Soleil Intérieur (Let the Sun Shine In). Claire Denis's exploration of a woman looking for love and trying to find someone who isn't an idiot and can be kind and selfless and communicate with her is sensitive and sweet and sad. Juliette Binoche is luminous and brilliant. I do not believe she has ever looked more beautiful. And the other actors are great too, especially Nicolas Duvauchelle and Bruno Podalydès. This movie is just so smart.
I want to say again how old Roger Moore looks in these Bond films. He wasn't much older than 50 when he made For Your Eyes Only, but they've paired him with women much younger than he, and he just can't match them, despite his (apparent) skiing abilities, much on display in this movie. Surprisingly, this film – like Thunderball from 1965, which I recently watched – has numerous underwater sequences. The ones in John Glen's film work much better, and For Your Eyes Only is an overall much tighter film than Thunderball.
The real winner of this movie, though, is Topol, who, ten years after playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, is a fox in this movie.
Oh! There's also an extraordinary mockery of Margaret Thatcher at the film's end that is simultaneously misogynist and delightful. No woman can stay away from Bond, even Mrs Thatcher!
Marco Bellocchio's Il Traditore has a very late point of attack, but then it also goes on far longer than it ought to. It's an odd way to tell this story of the first trials to bring down Cosa Nostra in Sicily and Italy. But it's so stylishly and intriguingly made and Pierfrancesco Favino is so good that Il Traditore manages still to be emotionally affecting and interesting throughout, even if the tone frequently felt off to me.
Mysterious Object at Noon (ดอกฟ้าในมือมาร) is nonsensical in many ways, but it is never boring, and the documentary aspects of it are fascinating. I am not sure I think the filmed version of the story the people in Thailand are telling is interesting at all, though. Mysterious Object at Noon is much more interesting when we are looking at contemporary people in Thailand than when we are watching the fiction those same people are creating. Either way, this is a strange and intriguing movie, inspired in many ways by the work of Kidlat Tahimik. And I think I am only just now seeing how influential of a filmmaker he was.
Zítra Vstanu a Opařím Se Čajem (Tomorrow I'll Get Up and Scald Myself with Tea) is an absurd time-travel comedy of errors that I found completely and totally hilarious.
This movie involves a plot in which Nazis in the future have taken anti-aging pills to keep themselves young and now are going back to Germany in 1944 to take Hitler a Hydrogen bomb so he can win the war. In order to get back to 1944 they hijack a tourist time-travel vehicle that takes people back to various places in history for tours – things like going to see the dinosaurs or visiting Pompeii – but instead of going back to Waterloo they go back to Berlin in the 40s.
This comedy of errors is compounded by the fact that everyone in the film doubles and triples as times get crossed. It's positively Shakespearean (or Plautine, depending on how far back you'd like to go in your theatre history).
Tomorrow I'll Get Up and Scald Myself with Tea is totally insane and I loved it.
This documentary really is unlike anything I've ever seen. Portrait of Jason is a really difficult film in many ways, and stunning because of when it came out. But it's also frustrating. Jason Holliday, the film's subject, gets so drunk in the movie, that one isn't always sure what he's talking about or what he means, and his thoughts meander. But this portrait of a gay hustler in 1967 that played at the NYFF is an important document, either way.
Zigeunerweisen (ツィゴイネルワイゼン) was weird, weird, weird. A kind of ghost story about the Taisho period and nostalgia for a Japan untroubled by the West. Maybe? Who knows. This was very strange and overly long.
I watched it with my unseen movie club. We did have a long discussion about what it was trying to do, but I am not sure any of us really liked it very much.
Damn, Joan Crawford is a bitch in this. Queen Bee, though, isn't anything other than a bitchy melodrama set in the American South, and the director and screenwriter don't even make anything interesting out of the Southern setting. Worse yet, there are no parties at all, no big sequences with even more than six actors in a room. This is a smallish film with high drama.
I've never paid much attention to Barry Sullivan before, but I loved him in this.
The costumes, by Jean Louis, are exquisite. Crawford's outfits look incredible in every single sequence.
Olivia is a recently rediscovered (not really but sort of) lesbian melodrama from 1950s France and released in the U.S. in 1954.
It's... well the whole thing is sort of hysterical, and I found it difficult to get interested in it. I think, maybe, too, it was the fact the film never gets there. We dance and dance around desire, but nothing ever arrives. I find the kind of teasing that Miss Julie, Olivia's object of affection, wields to be tiresome.
The texts of Racine stud the film throughout, so Jacqueline Audry is clearly playing with unrealized desire as such on the thematic level (think of the unresolved, unrequited, and unconsummated loves of Bérénice and Phèdre), but I think this film was just not for me, Racine or no.
Steven Spielberg's 1941 is a broad farce about (among other things) the Zoot Suit Riots – not a funny topic. This is singularly unfunny. I laughed one single time the entire 150 minutes of this. Lots and lots of things explode in 1941, but that doesn't make this any less boring or bad. To be fair, there is a great dance sequence in act two, but this is widely understood to be Spielberg's worst film, and who am I to disagree?
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is a fucking outrage.
BSM aims most of its ire at Trumpworld. There is even an extended QAnon sequence. Just listening to QAnon conspiracists is surprising and funny in an awkward way. It's scary too, of course, when one realizes how many QAnon conspiracists there are, but this kind of odd, awkward humor is Sacha Baron Cohen's stock-in-trade.
It's also easier to laugh at all of this from the post-election position, I have to say.
And I laughed a ton. It is totally out of control, and clearly aimed at males much younger than I, but I enjoyed it immensely.
Wow. Bacurau is a violent, 1970s-style Western but with the usual social critique of Kleber Mendonça Filho. This one is on the nose a little more than usual, perhaps, but it is so satisfying as a genre picture. It's also filled with queer characters, even thought it's not about sex at all. I loved this. Can't recommend it enough. Don't miss it.
I suppose it's silly to call a James Bond film bloated. The stock-in-trade of a Bond film is its numerous exotic locations and its series of setpieces. But Thunderball feels bloated, and it has a large problem. Much of it takes place underwater, where everything moves more slowly, more quietly, and with less clarity. This is interesting for the first three or four long sequences where this happens – mostly because of the novelty of the underwater activity – but having an underwater battle at the end of the film makes the climax feel a bit off, timing wise.
Also this is a very violent Bond film. I was actually quite surprised. Many many people die and there is even quite a bit of blood. But harpoon guns just, like, keep going into people's chests and arms. I cannot believe this was rated PG. Connery is great, and is looking great, but Thunderball also has quite a few more little dumb one-liners than it needs, too.
All of the James Bond films are free on Amazon Prime right now, and Connery had just passed, so I decided to watch this one – there are only a couple I haven't seen.
Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs (郊遊) has lots to recommend it, including a particularly great performance by the always good Lee Kang-sheng. But I think Tsai overdoes things here. There is just a little too much inexplicable content. The usual themes are here - loneliness, abject poverty, hunger, houselessness, crumbling buildings. But Stray Dogs just didn't quite work for me, or perhaps I mean that I feel like I've already seen it because I've seen so much of Tsai's other work. As I say, there are some great moments, but this one felt a bit too self indulgent.
The film'stitle is, to my mind, an obvious reference to Kurosawa's 1949 Stray Dog. The definition of the stray dog in that film – a young war veteran living in squalor who turns to crime – links the stray with the way the state has abandoned the young man at the film's center. This same theme has its echoes in Tsai's film as we see Lee sing what sounds like a nationalist song from the Classical theatre (though it is probably invented for the film??). Tsai's film is a much more hopeless film than Kurosawa's, of course, and it doesn't aim for the emotional punch of Kurosawa's ending, either, though Stray Dogs does contain a cri de coeur similar to the final, deeply moving one in Stray Dog.
I've been watching a lot of Tsai Ming-liang lately. I got into him in earnest this summer after my friend Alison recommended The Hole, but then I read a couple interviews and got sort of hooked. The most recent two that I've seen – Stray Dogs and Rebels of the Neon God – were just about to leave the Criterion Channel, so I tuned in while I still had the chance.
Kim Jee-woon's The Quiet Family (조용한 가족) is a darkly comic farce. I thought this was quite funny and enjoyable. It's not scary or even very grotesque, but it is funny. Song Kang-ho is in this, too, as a young thief. Most of the actors are great, but he is definitely best in show.
