Tu Me Manques (2019)

Roger Bellott's film has been on my list to see since it came out in Bolivia in 2019. It was released in 2021 in the US and it's an intriguing adaptation of his play.

Tu Me Manques is a very theatrical movie, although it is never stagey. It feels much, much better than most theatrical adaptations, and I think that's because the theatre piece from which it is adapted is already quite abstract. I loved all of the theatre parts of this movie, and when we finally get to opening night in the story, I found the parts of the play we got to see absolutely breathtaking. The opening of the show literally took my breath away. Seriously.

The main theatrical conceit in the film is that the central character in the drama – whom we find out has died in the first few minutes – is played by three different actors. We rotate between these three performers constantly, with the film always giving us a full scene but while switching between the actors playing the scene. It's an odd but pleasurable conceit, especially since the three actors are rather different physically. I liked this idea a lot.

But the plot... ugh. The plot is about a man who has lost his lover to suicide because his lover would rather commit suicide than come out to his family. Now, I am predisposed to find this topic affecting, and I might have done so if this was a film about new relationships being established, about mourning, about dealing with loss, about any of the other emotions that might attend this story. But this is a public service announcement about how Bolivians need to be more accepting of homosexuality. There is a long sequence discussing what the Bible really thinks about homosexual sex, an excruciatingly long coming out sequence that is completely unsatisfying, and numerous fights about how one partner "just doesn't understand" how the other partner's family is. In short, the film's content is just not interesting. Coming out? Family acceptance? These men are adults living in New York City. To be fair, I'm not saying these aren't issues that are dealt with by many real people. I know that they are, and I sympathize with (and have counseled) many going through these same struggles. I'm just saying I don't want to watch a movie about them. I feel like I've already learned the lessons for straight people that this film has to teach.

The theatre piece in the film, though, seems to be real, and I would like to get my hands on it and read it. It looks incredible.

You can watch Tu Me Manques (I Miss You) on HBOmax, and although it was playing without subtitles for a while, they now work perfectly.

Two in Black and White for 2021

Passing is pretty good. It has no score, though, and that causes a lot of problems for the filmmaking. Rebecca Hall's movie wants to be a kind of thriller, I think. I realized near the end of act three that we were in a kind of serious psychological study slash thriller with Tessa Thompson's Irene character as someone whose motives and ideas we aren't supposed to be able quite to figure out. And I think I would have liked a film that really tried to do this, but Passing doesn't have the music it needs to help it with this, and so what we have instead is a series of scenes that move the whole thing forward but don't ever give the film the drive it needs. Something haunting, something insistent, something a little frantic, even something vaguely horrific like the score for Pablo Larraín's Spencer would have given Passing a much better pace. If it had had this, I think Passing would have worked. As it is, it rather doesn't.

I also don't really think Tessa Thompson is a very good actress. She's beautiful, obviously, but I never feel like she lets me know what's going on with her – or maybe not much is. Contrasted with the fantastic, almost hysterical performance that Ruth Negga gives, Thompson barely even registers. Ruth Negga is brilliant in Passing. She absolutely tears into the part of Clare and lets us see absolutely everything she's going through. It's wonderful, gorgeous work.

One thing I loved about Passing was the way the film took care to illuminate the queer aspects of Nella Larson's novel. In this film, Irene has a powerful and strange attraction to Clare that even she doesn't quite understand, and I loved that Hall's film did this.

Belfast is a better movie than Passing, but in many ways it has its problems, too. Kenneth Branagh's film is about a small boy as the Troubles start in Northern Ireland and he reappraises his relationship with his father, mother, grandmother, and grandfather, who is dying. The film – like Passing – is given to us in black and white, but it has a kind of gimmick related to color. When little Buddy watches anything on stage or on screen, it's in color. (Well, not all of what they watch is in color. High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are, as they were originally, in monochrome.) 

But Belfast has another, more important, gimmick – one that is even more theatrical than switching to color photography. In this film, we only are allowed to see things that little Buddy overhears or is in the room for. So, even though the movie is really about Buddy's mother and father and their relationship, we never see anything that Buddy himself isn't present for in some sort of way. The film takes great pains to indicate this by placing Buddy in the shot during scenes that don't really concern him or otherwise including him in the scene. This makes everything in Belfast seem performed, as if everyone is doing everything they're doing for little Buddy. It's an odd little quirk in the movie, and I didn't think it totally worked. After awhile it makes everything feel just a little too heightened, as if the film won't let me watch it without seeing through Buddy's eyes. He's not exactly trustworthy after all; he's a small boy.

But the fucking acting in Belfast is incredible. Honestly, I think all four of the main actors in the movie deserve Oscar nominations. Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan are Buddy's mom and dad, and they're both just incredible. I had no idea Jamie Dornan could do this level of work. His performance is devastating. I loved him. Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds are also always good, but here their work feels special and intricate. Their performances are nuanced and beautiful and idiosyncratic even if the roles aren't very large. The film is just beautifully, beautifully acted, and it's worth seeing simply for that.

The Fixer (1968)

John Frankenheimer's The Fixer is a tough, tough film about injustice and anti-Semitism. It is also quite clearly a film about prison systems, state violence, and torture. Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde are excellent. This is a hard movie to watch, though. We spend most of our time in solitary confinement with Bates's character, and the prison is a terrible, horrible place.

It is crazy, I have to say, that this movie is almost impossible to find. It's not streaming anywhere and it's not on blu-ray. How is this Frankenheimer film so neglected?

Eternals

I quite liked Eternals. I think there are a couple reasons for that.

1. The fighting is way more interesting than punching, and the energy sources with which the eternals fight are visually very cool.

2. The monsters – especially the main monster – are very cool. They look cool and they do cool things.

3. The movie is epically long, but that didn't really annoy me until the dénouement, when we had to wrap up what happened to Sprite (who cares) and every other one of the eternals. That made for a thousand irritating little cliffhanger scenes so typical of Marvel films.

4. This movie had good jokes. Kumail Nanjani, Don Lee, Harish Patel, and Brian Tyree Henry are all very funny in this.

There is plenty of clunky exposition, of course, and there is soooo much that still is not explained in this world, but the world-building is kind of cool, and I think I like how humans are not really the center of things in many ways. Thinking about the universe the way helps us remember how small humans are. This is good.

Angelina Jolie. It was so good to see her and get to spend so much time with her. I legitimately missed her.

I. Love. Richard Madden. He can do no wrong. He's not even great in this or anything, but goddammit I love him. 

Haaz Sleiman!? This movie gave me the beautiful gay actor in a key supporting part – and he played a gay man. My heart soared every moment he was onscreen.

Look Eternals has plenty of problems. I thought it was mostly a big old unwieldy mess, but I had a good time. The fight scenes, especially, were really awesome, the visual effects were very cool, and the eternals' superpowers were interesting and used in ways that were constantly intriguing.

The Odd Couple (1968)

Neil Simon is funny, and there's kind of no way around that. I had never seen the original Odd Couple film, although I have seen the play onstage several times. I did not expect to laugh much at this old style of humor with which I have become very impatient. (I especially find Jack Lemmon's characterizations at this point in his career very annoying.) But The Odd Couple is laugh-out-loud hilarious, and it's funny primarily because Walter Matthau's facial expressions get to do most of the work. In other words, the medium allows this old story – and the jokes I know by heart – to be funny all over again because I have a different kind of access to the comedians than I would if I saw them onstage. I laughed a lot at this.

Admittedly, when it ended I was like wait, that's the end? I had forgotten that this little thing that has been selling tickets across the country for more than 60 years basically has no stakes at all. The entire thing is insanely contrived and absurd. But I must admit that it is legitimately funny.

Nina Wu (2019)

I didn't have much to say about Nina Wu (灼人秘密) after I saw it – back in late September. I watched it with my unseen movie club, and it's a film about the film industry in Taiwan (but also, really, the film industry everywhere). Midi Z's movie is a kind of psychological thriller where we don't always know what's really happening, whether or not something is a dream or not, etc. But the film's end really does bring everything all together, and it makes things quite clear.

The performances in this film are also just excellent.

The thing for me is that I didn't really enjoy watching this very much. It's a hard film to deal with, and it doesn't offer a lot of room to breathe or space for joy. (This is, I suppose, a weird thing to complain about, but I guess what I'm saying is Nina Wu felt a little too relentless. One excellent thing in the film, to my mind, is the way it uses queerness as a kind of space of freedom or possibility. I was into that.

Nina Wu was released in Taiwan in 2019 and the U.S. in 2020.

Tom of Finland #2

Sexy while also being informative, Dome Karukoski's Tom of Finland is a much, much better film than the documentary about Touko Laaksonen's life and work, Daddy and the Muscle Academy, which I watched a couple months ago. Karukoski's film makes clear just how repressive the Finnish government was against homosexual sex in the mid-century, and what is so interesting about this is that it goes a long way to explaining Tom of Finland's fascination with the gear (the drag) of the police, of the military, even of the Nazis. One thing we sort of see in the film is the writer processing the violence he's experienced and his real fear of these people by transforming them into erotic figures. It's a fascinating angle on Tom of Finland's work, and one the film really sold well.

I also had somehow missed that Laaksonen had a longtime partner, Veli “Nipa” Mäkinen, with whom he shared a home for most of his adult life. This film shares that story, too, and I fell in love with the actor who played him, Lauri Tilkanen.

Cryptozoo

Cryptozoo is a bananas animated fantasy with great animation and an insane plot involving a fucked-up zoo for cryptids that purports to keep them safe but also imprisons them. It's a deep film about serious issues of freedom and security that is delivered with a hilariously deadpan attitude and an unhinged plot. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Diamantino!

Diamantino is so hilariously absurd and campy. I had a great time. This is a spoof of Cristiano Ronaldo while also skewering far right politics and envisioning some kind of strange queer kinship. Totally delightful and very funny. Carloto Cotta is amazing in this.

Two Movies about the Royals

I really liked Spencer. The vaguely horror-film style of Pablo Larraín is not always to my taste – I found Jackie really off-putting – but Spencer is scored by Johnny Greenwood instead of Mica Levi, and though that kept things in a decidedly terrifying minor key, it wasn't the descent into madness that Jackie was.

But anyway this movie is great. It's tense and intriguing, and it documents a kind of insanity within the British Royal family (not actual insanity, just insane behaviors). In many ways, Spencer is a film about Diana that is also a film about Prince Harry today, and indeed Kristen Stewart herself, which I think makes the whole thing much richer. The way everyone pokes and prods and has something to say, the way they're watched and scrutinized. It's a terrifying, weird life – a very nice one to be sure, and I am not usually one to feel sorry for very wealthy people, but one can see how difficult it would be to be an actual human person in this insane world.

This is definitely worth a watch. And Kristen Stewart is finally going to get a Best Actress nomination, so that's cool.

And then there's David Lowery's The Green Knight, which is an adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and might, for all I can tell, actually be titled this. (The title is something of a mystery to me. It is, appropriately either Sir Gawain... ...and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or ...The Green Knight, but I'm splitting hairs, I guess.) 

Here's the thing. Why is this movie so boring? It looks fucking cool. It is designed beautifully. It has Dev Patel looking gorgeous and having lots of feelings. But it's mysterious without being intriguing. It doesn't ask you to puzzle through what's happening at all; instead it behaves as though you really already ought to know what the fuck is happening.

And maybe The Green Knight would have been interesting if I had read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight beforehand. I really ought to have. The film is a revisioning of the poem, and I guess it needs knowledge of that in order for it to mean anything.

To be fair, I was with this for a while, but then near the very end, the movie takes a turn and launches off into a quick montage of the future (without, I might add, telling us what it's doing), and during this montage I just kept thinking why am I watching this???? Who cares! Honestly, though, I was just so bored. I didn't know enough of about any of the characters to be interested in them.

Crosby Sings Jolson

There's kind of an odd moment in Jolson Sings Again, in which Al Jolson remarks that people don't really want to hear his kind of music anymore because they're listening to the kind of crooning Bing Crosby does. Now, I had never thought of Bing Crosby and Al Jolson as even occupying the same universe. I think perhaps I imagined Al Jolson as a kind of relic of vaudeville and thought of Crosby as a fifties movie crooner – this is decidedly incorrect. But this became even more obvious to me while watching Elliott Nugent's She Loves Me Not last night.

In the first place, Crosby is billed over the title and way above Miriam Hopkins already in 1934! That seems insane to me. Hopkins is a perfect star, and is delightful and hilarious in this little farce. 

Crosby, on the other hand, has not yet figured out his sound, or at least has not settled into the kind of sound he would adopt later. He is doing a little trill thing in his songs that sounds really silly. If memory serves, he left off doing this after awhile. But more to my point about Jolson, Crosby actually sounds like he's singing songs written for Jolson in this. The songs were written by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon ("Straight from the Shoulder" and "I'm Humming–I'm Whistlin'–I'm Singin'"), Arthur Schwartz & Edward Heyman ("After All, You're All I'm After"), and Ralph Rainger & Leo Robin (for their Oscar-nominated tune "Love in Bloom".) It's the Schwartz & Heyman tune that sounds especially Jolsonesque to me. Anyway, this is not a scientific examination of Jolson and Crosby, and I'm not a musicologist, but I've never heard this in Crosby's voice before, and all of a sudden in She Loves Me Not I did.

This is a cute little movie with a couple of fine songs; it's funniest when it's doing its madcap farce routines starring the brilliant Miriam Hopkins.

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

If you like Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, perhaps you feel, like me, that you also need to apologize for liking it. It's so overtly stylized, so fussy and fastidious, so carefully made, so fucking cute that it feels like liking it is saying that I like all of Anderson's mannerisms, or that I pretend to be getting all of his (obviously myriad) inside jokes and odd sense of humor.

I definitely don't get all of the little jokes in The French Dispatch, but I did think this movie was funny in several excellent places – the Owen Wilson and Tilda Swinton sections, especially, I found hilarious, and the movie begins with them, so it sets a certain tone.

The conceit is charming: the opening tells us that the movie will be a kind of visual representation of a literary magazine: some editorial comment, one travelogue, three stories, and a final section of back matter. The movie was made in Angoulême but is set in the fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, already a hilarious name. The film, however, is anything but boring. There is a story of an incarcerated painter and his prison-guard muse – starring Benicio Del Toro, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, and Adrien Brody – and one of a student protest in the 1960s, with Timothée Chalamet and Frances McDormand, and finally one with a chef (hilariously named Nescaffier), a police chief, and his kidnapped son, starring Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Park, and Mathieu Amalric. The travelogue section stars Owen Wilson as Herbsaint Sazerac (these names!) in a farcical opening passage.

The French Dispatch does not offer non-stop hilarity like The Grand Budapest Hotel. After the first two stories, this becomes a much more somber film. Both the Frances McDormand section and the Jeffrey Wright section, though they have their silly bits, to be sure, are about regret and getting old. They're about memory and forgetting and loss and frustration. I liked the Wright section especially.

This is also a film about writing. It's dedicated to the short story writers and foreign correspondents who worked for magazines like The French Dispatch, and the closing of the magazine (which is announced in the film's first few minutes) stands in for the disappearance of these kinds of publications today. The movie is dedicated to a long list of these writers, and it's obvious that Jeffrey Wright is playing a kind of version of one of them – James Baldwin. But what the Wright section really hit home for me was a kind of loneliness, the difficulty of putting things into words for others, of judging what's important and what isn't, of experiencing what you experience and then somehow channeling that into language so that other people can have a different experience. The McDormand section and the Wright section both have an underlying melancholy about being a writer, trying to stay objective or separate from the story, and needing to do the work more than you need to live your own life – a kind of slow sadness of working to tell other people's stories.

What's sort of wonderful in a Wes Anderson picture is that everyone in it is so famous, so that this question of whose story is important, who has stories that might be worth sharing, is easily answerable. It's apparent on the very surface of the film that there are rich stories within so many of them. When Larry Pine or Lois Smith or Bob Balaban or Henry Winkler... or Saoirse Ronan or Willem Dafoe or Elisabeth Moss or Christoph Waltz or Edward Norton or Cécile de France appear in tiny parts, it is very apparent that there are stories hidden in each of these characters. They only need reporting.

In any case, The French Dispatch is complex and rich, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. It is fussy and mannered and overtly (almost embarrassingly) theatrical. But it has lots to say.

The paintings are by Sandro Kopp.

No Way Out

Joseph L. Mankiewicz made No Way Out the same year (1950) that he made All About Eve. This movie (why it's called No Way Out is absolutely anyone's guess) is your standard anti-racist Hollywood fare from 1950. It's a good enough drama, with a sensational race riot in the film's center. Aside from the high drama of the riot (which is filmed very, very well, without showing even a little bit of violence), the rest of No Way Out is quite predictable stuff. The whole thing is tied together gorgeously by Sidney Poitier in one of his earliest screen appearances. (This is 5 years before Blackboard Jungle but must have been filmed just before Raisin in the Sun appeared on Broadway). Linda Darnell is great in this too, and Ruby Dee plays a small (uncredited) role! The real star here, though, is Richard Widmark, who gives a superb performance as a vile racist asshole. The performance is never sympathetic, and Widmark doesn't worry a bit about whether or not the audience will hate him. It's bold and rich work for a script that doesn't quite deserve it.