Summing Up 2022

1. What did you do in 2022 that you'd never done before?
I hooded my first PhD advisee. I took over for a colleague who left FSU, but it was a pleasure to be able to help my student in the ways I did. I love ceremonies like this. We don't have them enough. I don't know. This year, I did a lot of what I did last year. But I will say I feel infinitely more confident this year, as if I mostly feel like I know what I'm doing. I went to Detroit for the first time (and I really liked it).

Me and Mike Post Hooding

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn't actually make any! I knew what I needed to do this year, and I actually accomplished all of it, which feels amazing. My GoodReads goal for this year was 125 books. I'm at 120 as of today. We will see if I can manage the other five before the end of the day on the 31st! Either way, I'm feeling pretty good about what I was able to manage. 

My resolution for 2023 will be to work less for the university. I need to become less of a workaholic and focus more on having fun and doing things that are not related to my place of employment. Teaching sometimes feels like a 24/7 job and I need to start making that less so.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My cousin Angela gave birth to a little girl, although we aren't very close. I was, however, able to visit Daniel Sack and Alex Ripp's new daughter, Thalia Maeve, this summer.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Not this year, thankfully.

5. What countries did you visit?
The Bahamas, but only in a manner of speaking. I went on the most obnoxious cruise to Grand Bahama in order to see my friend Jude perform on the cruise-ship version of Escape to Margaritaville. Jude was brilliant in the show. The cruise was very strange and sort of awful, though I was with my great friends Matt, Walt, Jeanne, and Katie. So that part of it was very fun.

6. What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?
Honestly, I'm not sure! More vacation time, I think. I need to spend more time reading and just generally doing nothing. I'm in a place right now where I work pretty much every day. This does not leave a lot of time for cooking (which I love to do), working out (which I need to do), or visiting cool natural spots in North Florida (of which there are many).

7. What dates from 2022 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
This was a very intense summer. I had strict deadlines related to finishing my book Love Is Love Is Love, and I stuck to them almost perfectly. The manuscript was due to the publisher on June 30, and I was six days late because of exactly six campus visits for new faculty members I helped to hire in my School this summer. But I love writing, and the time between the end of school in May and the deadline was really fun if pressure-filled in its own way.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I'm very proud to have finished writing, editing, rewriting, and making the index for Love Is Love Is Love. The book comes out in the first couple of months of 2023, and I'll be excited to see it in print. The last couple of passes of the book were horrible: the copyediting process for these things is completely fucked and the copyeditor introduced hundreds of errors into my manuscript by way of "fixing" things. Still, I'm hoping it all turns out nicely. I think that's the biggest achievement. I should also say that my article "Infelicities" was given an honorable mention as the Outstanding Article in a Journal at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference this summer. That feels amazing, and I am so glad that people are finding this piece useful and provocative for their own thinking. Below is a video of me speaking about the article with Michelle Liu Carriger.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I did not work out as much as I could have or should have. I did not get up to Philadelphia to see my friends Matt and Jill this summer. And I'm underpaid, which makes a lot of things more difficult for me. The failure I feel the most keenly, though, is the stack of unread books my friends have written that is sitting on my coffee table. I did get to read a few of my friends' books this year, but the ones I haven't read really make me sad. Maybe I'll be able to finish one of them before the end of the year.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
No. And somehow I have also managed not to catch Covid still. I don't know how that's possible.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
I am obsessed with my Dyson vacuum, which I bought this summer. This is an absurd thing to be obsessed with, and yet here we are. I also love the new chairs I bought for my dining table. I need a new computer. Maybe I'll get one next year.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My friend Chari, who directed a very well reviewed production of Rent this year at Short North. My friend Meredith, who is somehow doing three jobs at once in the College of Fine Arts. My many students who have graduated and moved off into the world to do good things!

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Ron DeSantis. Honestly, Republican politicians everywhere. (I don't feel quite the same about Republican voters.) These politicians are just so awful. Why do they wish to create a fascist hellscape? Is it just because they hate freedom? What's so fascinating about Republican lawmakers and politicians – at least in Florida – is that they claim to be in favor of freedom, while incarcerating more people and taking more freedoms away from young people, women, teachers, voters, former prisoners, and people of color. It is insane to me that people who say they love freedom don't wish for others to be free. What's truly terrible about DeSantis, though, I think, is that they've rigged the system so blatantly, so terribly in Florida that even our votes matter less. They've gerrymandered everything so horribly because they know they're in the minority, and they don't actually care. Rather than trust the people to make decisions affecting ourselves, they have rigged things so that we can't. They literally are dismantling the basic functions of democracy. It's appalling and depressing to me.

14. This question used to be "Where did most of your money go?" but once I turned 35 the answer was always taxes. So I'm modifying this question to be: Which charitable organizations did you give to?
Wikimedia Foundation

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
The Rings of Power

Helping Lauren Abel finish her master's thesis

Every time I hung out with Michael Cleary

The American Society for Theatre Research conference

Finally seeing Dayne Catalano after three years

Some amazing retirements in my department

16. What song will always remind you of 2022?
Carly Rae Jepsen's "Beach House"

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?
Reading, watching movies, hiking

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Evaluating students, stalling before meeting guys

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I'm in Los Angeles. I'll be at my sister's house. This year's dinner theme is Ghosts of Xmases Past, and none of the foods go together. I'm making a leek and potato gratin, a peanut coconut soup, and baba ganoush. 

21. Did you fall in love in 2022?
I didn't. Sigh.

22. How many one-night stands?
I didn't count this year. But it was a) more than usual and b) not as many as there should have been.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
The Rings of Power. I had a great time, and I literally stop people before they say anything negative about it to me. I'm completely not interested in anyone's negative assessments of that show. 

I also loved season 7 of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars despite my total and complete disagreement about the eventual winner. The only other shows I watched in 2022 were RuPaul's Drag Race season 14 (ok), RuPaul's Drag Race UK season 3 (fine), RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under season 2 (almost unwatchable), RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under season 1 (actually unwatchable), Drag Race Holland season 2 (fun), and Drag Race España season 1 (very good). I still didn't watch all the drag race franchises that are out there. I'm trying to catch up, but tv is not really for me.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
I think I hate fewer people, actually.

25. What was the best book you read?
I keep track of this on GoodReads. Come join me over there! Cookbooks I loved this year were Eric Kim's Korean American and Rick Martínez's Mi Cocina. The best fantasy book I read was Marlon James's Moon Witch Spider King. It's an awesome sequel/companion to Black Leopard Red Wolf. I can't wait for the next instalment. But the best novel I read was Andrea Lawlor's Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, which I think everyone – and I mean everyone – should read. 

All the writing I did this year meant that I didn't read very much nonfiction, unfortunately. But I did start a little reading club (Early Modern Madness, we're calling it) with my friend Michelle where we read an early modern play that we haven't read before or have mostly forgotten. We started with witch plays and read Thomas Middleton's The Witch, followed by John Marston's Sophonisba and Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches. These plays are all astounding, and since then we've read some really strange gems from the period, including Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, John Webster's The White Devil, John Marston's The Malcontent, Tirso de Molina's La Venganza de Tamar, Marston's The Insatiate Countess, and Middleton's Second Maiden's Tragedy. This has been really fun, and I'm very grateful for Michelle's prompting in this direction. 

As for nonfiction, I'm currently obsessed with Sea People: the Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson. 

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Dave Malloy's Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812

27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw?
I can't believe I'm about to say this, but José Zayas's Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Center. It really stunned me.

28. What did you want and get?
A raise. A book contract.

Actually last year, for question 34, I said that I wanted "some retirements in my department. A few of those (six?) would improve my life exponentially." It seemed impossible, honestly, but I got that after all.

Better restaurants in Tallahassee. We actually have quite a few now, and I am grateful.

29. What did you want and not get?
To go on a date with my bartender non-boyfriend Tyler. (Also go on a date is mostly a euphemism.)

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
So far it's Jerzy Skolimowski's Io.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I had dinner with Chari and Tenley and Meredith and Jason at a farm-to-table place I like in Tallahassee. I turned 41.

A Lucien Gaudin I made recently

32. What new recipes did you make this year?
Many new things! The highlight, I think, was the Cajun turkey breast I made for Thanksgiving courtesy of Donald Link's book Real Cajun. I made my own boudin (i.e. boudin blanc) at home, and then I rolled it in a turkey breast to make a roulade before cooking it in the oven. It was incredible. The other thing I made that was amazing was Claire Saffitz's fruitcake. It's just so good.

33. What were your cocktail obsessions?
My drinks of choice lately have been an Old Barrel (2 oz. rye, 1/2 oz. Amontillado sherry, 1/2 oz. Benedictine, 3 dashes Angostura) and a Lucien Gaudin (2 oz. gin, 1 oz. dry vermouth, 1 oz. Campari, 1 oz. Cointreau or Beauchant).

34. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Gosh, I don't know. This has been a very good year. 

35. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022?
Boots are the new dress shoes. I wear boots when I teach about 50% of the time now.

36. What kept you sane?
The Criterion Channel. My friends at Bar 1903. I honestly love having a local bar where I know everyone. (Whenever you see me make a bunch of cookies, just know that I bring a whole bunch of those to the staff at 1903 because they're awesome.)

37. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Haaz Sleiman

38. What political issue stirred you the most?
Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. This is further evidence, I think, of the fact that Republican lawmakers and jurists have completely stopped caring about what actual people in the United States think. It's tough for me to blame the Supreme Court for this completely because, in fact, the current makeup of the Supreme Court is the fault of political maneuvering and outright fraud on the part of Senator Mitch McConnell. It is also the fault of the legislature that we don't already have federal protections for female bodily autonomy in this country. The laws that specifically affected me in this country are the fascist policies that Ron DeSantis is promulgating in Florida related to education, queer, people, and the teaching of history, but the work of the Supreme Court this year when they overturned Roe is really and truly insane.

39. Whom did you miss?
Dayne and Jordan. Justin and Elizabeth and Ashley and Danny and Wahima. Katie and Viktor and Yasser and Jonathan. Patrick and Jessica and Michelle.

40. Who was the best new person you met?
Ryan Travis. Clara Nizard.

41. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2022:
Every moment does not have to count, despite what the bad WordArt in AirBnbs wants to tell you. I was asked to give a speech at our School of Theatre commencement ceremony this December, and I made it a point to tell the students that not every moment needs to be filled with meaning. What I said to them was "It seems to me that once we leave college and have good jobs or are out there hustling or even are just like hanging out in our parents’ basements, we oftentimes look back on the time we spent in college as if it were wasted time. The time we’ve spent learning and practicing comes to feel like so much a part of who we are that we forget we actually spent it usefully and fully. I don’t think it’s important that you make sure that every moment counts. I think that’s too much work, actually, and kind of impossible. But I do think it’s important that you remember that even the moments that feel like they are throwaways, that feel like they’re not important at all, are actually the vibrant stuff of being. The silliness of gathering together in a space like this, the hilarity of cheering for a dragon carrying sour cream during a theatre-night performance: these things actually matter a lot. They’re the very material of life, of friendship, of presence." (The dragon carrying sour cream was from an excellent production the School of Theatre did of the children's show Dragons Love Tacos.)

42. Share an important quotation from 2022:

This is a mantra that I heard from Eric Kim that I have started repeating to myself: Don't yuck other people's yums. If someone tells me they like something but I don't like that thing, my job is to shut the fuck up. There's no reason to ruin or even slightly taint anyone else's enjoyment of something.

Eo (2022)

I have really flipped for Jerzy Skolimowsksi's Eo. This is a film about a donkey who works in a circus and an odyssey that takes the donkey from the Polish circus through a range of experiences. It's deeply moving, and I fell in love with it. Eo is quite obviously based on or a retelling of Robert Bresson's wonderful Au Hasard Balthazar, but Skolimowski's film is designed as a kind of portrait of modern humanity that feels deeply unnerving and sometimes confusing if frequently beautiful. Eo contains these amazing interludes – occasionally lit red – in which we watch the world upside down or backwards, or we watch a robot dog hunt something. Skolimowski is insisting that we look at the world differently, that we don't settle into complacent ideas about the world's beauty or the purity of animals or clichés like this. He is using film to ask us to see differently, to unsettle our typical ways of watching and thinking. 

Eo is a film about our relationships with animals, the complete unimportance of our very high melodramas from their perspective, and our total disregard for animal welfare. It's fascinating and beautiful and totally compelling, and Skolimowski's writing is impeccable.

One note on the title. I really don't understand why the distributors changed the title to EO instead of the original Io, and I absolutely do not understand the commitment to capitalizing it – I am equally baffled by people who keep writing TÁR, too. These are names. The donkey is called Io (pronounced eee-oh because we're in Poland), and the Todd Field film is named after its main character, Lydia Tár. The caps make no sense. This isn't CODA. Part of Eo/Io takes place in Italy, as well, where Io, of course, means I – the implication being that the donkey is all of us... 

But more importantly Io is a classical reference that I would expect many people to get. Jupiter's moon Io is even named after the mythical figure! Io was a mortal woman, beloved by Zeus, who was transformed into a cow. To my mind, the resonance here is unmistakable. Skolimowski is asking us to look at this donkey from a different perspective, and indeed asking us to look from the donkey's perspective, but one of the points here is that a donkey is not so different from a human, and yet we treat donkeys as if they are. Is Io a cow or a young woman? And do we treat her as if she's a cow once we know she was once human?

Terence Davies' Benediction

I always want to love a Terence Davies movie. And they almost always have amazing ideas behind them, as if they're going to be headed in a beautiful direction. Somehow, I am always disappointed. I hate this because he's my friend Anthony's favorite director, and I always feel like I'm betraying him by being bored by Terence Davies.

It's his style. It's just not for me. Davies films all of his indoor scenes as if they're theatre. This is by design, at least I think it's by design (???). They're scenes that are supposed to feel haunted, not quite real, as if they're taking place in a character's memory, or perhaps Davies' own memory. But I just don't understand. Often when we are blessed with a scene that's set outdoors this goes away completely and one feels as if one is in the real world all of a sudden – there are one or two scenes like that in Benediction. But mostly I just felt as if I'd stumbled in on a scene in an acting studio.

The unfortunate thing is that the idea behind Benediction is so powerful and superb. It's also an attempted portrait at decadent gay life between the wars in the UK, a period not very well documented on screen. And yet, Davies has chosen in his protagonist – the poet Siegfried Sassoon – a kind of stick in the mud, someone who dislikes his contemporaries and can't seem to understand or live with the gay people in his life. 

And then he gets married...

It's a choice I find difficult to understand or forgive. This is bad morality on my part, of course, and I don't really feel superior to a gay man who decides to get married, but I also stop being interested in him the moment he does. He feels lost to me forever, gone from someone I could possibly identify with, someone with some hope for the future, to someone who has chosen to capitulate to a society that wants to crush him. This is, as I say, a bad moral position to take, and I don't approve of my feelings. I'm just being frank about them.

Anyway, the point isn't my questionable moral stance toward Davies' film, it's that I just found Benediction so oddly disjointed and distant. Even when Siegfried is supposedly in love or happy we seem to be granted only a stilted portrait of that, as if he never was really happy, and we are to be given no access to the fantasy that he might have been.

Davies has spliced footage and photographs from the Great War into this film, and almost all of that works very, very well. The film is at its best when it's about WWI. But mostly, actually, the film isn't about WWI. Instead it's a sort of exercise in frustration, a stumbling portrait of midcentury homosexuality, and one that seems to blame the midcentury homosexual himself for the unhappiness he inflicts upon himself and his family rather than the homophobic society that gave him that misery to begin with.

Jack Lowden is very good in this, and I rather loved Calam Lynch and Tom Blyth, as well.

The House on Telegraph Hill

Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill is an excellent film noir. It's filled with surprises and it manages to be sexy and scary and suspenseful. It is, in many ways, a kind of riff on Rebecca and Gaslight, but it has new things to say and new ways to say them! Valentina Cortesa is great, and Richard Basehart is magnetic and attractive and rather disarming. The whole thing is actually quite disarming. Robert Wise's films noirs from this period are excellent. And this one is made richer and much more interesting by its link to survivors from the genocide of European Jews. This is, in other words, a post-Expressionist noir that's in many ways about both its German aesthetic roots and its U.S. American criminal subject matter. I loved this.

Crimes of the Future

I really don't understand why David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future is as boring as it is. There's really no excuse for it. It has a good cast and a cool premise. Crimes of the Future even has a good score (by Howard Shore)! But this movie is filmed like it's half asleep. It's filled with oddly stilted scenes and oddly tame imagery. It's as if the whole thing is merely on the surface of its idea and it never gets to the heart of things.

Tár (2022)

Tár kind of blew me away. This movie jumps right into the story it's telling with almost zero exposition. And its characters are throwing around terms related to conducting and Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar and the Berliner Philharmoniker without bothering to explain any of it to us. We have to learn the power structures in this movie while we watch, and we have no one to help us understand them. This is entirely appropriate, to my mind, but it creates identification problems – who are we here to love and like and whose side are we on, after all? I know that many of my friends experienced a great deal of distance from this movie, despite how beautifully made it is and how intriguing the story.

What we wind up watching with Tár is a Harvey Weinstein story – although I don't even need to watch the upcoming She Said to know this is very different from that narrative. Still, it is that to a certain extent. It's also not. For me, Tár follows precisely the structure of an Athenian tragedy, and it carried with it all of the aspects that attend one of those ancient plays. In other words, we are waiting for violence throughout the narrative. We know we are leading up to violence – this is how an Athenian tragedy is structured: we move toward atrocity, and we all know it is coming. This creates an enormous amount of tension in Todd Field's movie, and I watched Tár mostly in terror at what was coming. (Enjoying every moment.) It's worth noting that this film, like a Greek tragedy, is deeply haunted, as if there are ghosts around every turn, others watching, mysterious forms coming to get the characters and make them pay for the things they know they've done. I loved that about Tár.

The other thing to say about this ancient Athenian structure is a question of character. No one learns things in Athenian tragedy. That isn't the point of them. They're not teaching tools: they're ideological propaganda for the Athenian city-state. But often a character in a tragedy will do something that he or she feels he can get away with. To do something as if no one will punish you, to dare others to punish you just to see them cower, the ancient Athenians called this hybris. Lydia Tár, this film's central character, acts as if she can simply get away with anything she chooses to do. It's terrifying because for the whole film it feels as if we know retribution's coming but she doesn't see it. 

I want to say one more thing about Tár and character and identification. I know folks who have objected to the way this movie treated its central figure, punishing her, destroying her. And it is a dubious move to translate a sexual exploitation narrative into a story about a lesbian instead of telling this story about a man. (It's always made me very mad that Arthur Miller's The Crucible transferred the hysteria of the House un-American Activities Commission to the little girls in his play. It was grown men, in fact, who were hysterical fascists. And he made a play about little girls being hysterical fascists. Let's place the blame where it belongs.) Anyway, this film punishes her and brings her low. This was a problem for a few of my friends. It wasn't a problem for me, and I realized the reason while I listened to them speak about the movie. We had watched it very differently. They weren't identifying with Tár's main character while they watched. The distance and difficulty of the film meant that they did not see themselves in the main character. While I watched Tár I identified with her completely. This film made me think about my own hybris, the decisions I make out of ego and the things I believe I can get away with doing because of privilege. This is why, I in fact, loved the film. It's a difficult piece, and she's a difficult character to love, but I identified with her very fiercely, and I didn't feel self-satisfied by her punishment at the film's end; I felt unsettled and accused. For me this is what makes the film so great.

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile

Honestly I laughed so much at Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. I laughed so much I was basically bullying this film. It starts off sort of charming, I guess, but it moves into hilariously absurd territory. It's so stupid it starts to be sort of marvelous, actually. Constance Wu's plays a basically unhinged sort of character who never strikes a single believable note. Javier Bardem does much much better, but he's not asked to be earnest in the same way that Wu is. The whole thing is insane. I watched it because I imagine that one of the Pasek & Paul songs in this (sorta) musical would be nominated for an Oscar. But after having seen it, I'm honestly sort of skeptical. Maybe the song that played over the credits...

10 (1979)

This isn't important at all, but I saw Blake Edwards' 10 a couple days ago, and I just don't understand. I think the reason I don't get it is that about a year and a half ago, I saw and disliked Edwards' 1986 film That's Life! and I was surprised to find that this is basically a very similar plot. 10 is about a very, very rich Hollywood songwriter, played by a hilarious Dudley Moore, who is going through male menopause – which is exactly what is happening to Jack Lemmon's character in That's Life! Indeed, both men in both films are both in romantic relationships with (Edwards' wife) Julie Andrews. Andrews is great in the 1986 film; she's totally miscast in the '79 film. 

Anyway, 10 is much funnier than its later, 1986 iteration (I think this is because Lemmon takes his role way too seriously, while Moore plays everything for laughs), but it's largely the same movie. 

The highlight for me was that Dudley Moore's best friend in this is a gay man who is about the same age as him. They talk frankly about him being gay, and it's rather delightful. He's only a gay best friend character, but he has some great moments, and I believe Dudley Moore even drops the word "faggotry"!

The L-Shaped Room (1962)

I was very pleasantly surprised by The L-Shaped Room, which is an early-60s kitchen sink drama set in a cheap boarding house. It has an intriguing, beautiful cast of characters that are played beautifully (including – and this was very surprising – an older lesbian actress who is wonderful). Leslie Caron is excellent, but really the whole thing is very good!

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

What a delightful swashbuckling adventure! Ronald Colman is good in this, and it's a well plotted, beautifully designed, pleasurable romp no matter how you swing your sword – especially for 1937 – but the real takeaway here was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He's incredible! Insouciant, wild, unpredictable: he's a movie star through and through. He makes this part into a character any star would want to play. It's really masterful. I have never paid too much attention to the younger Fairbanks (the Academy never did either), but I will now. Mary Astor is also fabulous in this.

In Harm's Way (1965)

In Harm's Way (1965) is an epic WWII melodrama with an incredible cast (John Wayne, Patricia Neal, Kirk Douglas, Brandon De Wilde, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Carroll O'Connor, Franchot Tone, and more), and the melodramatic aspects of this actually make it quite enjoyable. It's clearly based on a kind of sexy, potboiler novel, and Otto Preminger has done a somewhat good job of keeping it sexy... although the romantic side plots often seem extraneous to the military drama that feels more in keeping with a John Wayne film. In truth, John Wayne, while still very very handsome, doesn't fit well in this kind of romantic drama. His performance feels forced, as if his persona just can't let him be part of a "woman's novel" like In Harm's Way (it was, in fact, written by James Bassett, but it has a lot of feelings).

Twilight of Honor (1963)

Twilight of Honor is a 1963 murder-trial movie that is very obviously derivative of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder from 1959. This one stars Richard Chamberlain (who is almost painfully handsome) and a wonderfully old and bright Claude Rains in one of his final film roles.

This movie is billed as one for adult audiences, and indeed it discusses some rather scandalous material, but that's not enough, really, to make Twilight of Honor interesting. It makes too many odd blunders. In the first place, the title refers to the murder victim, who was an honorable man but dies "without honor", or so the film would have us believe. In the second place, this movie is not at all interested in the murderer at the narrative's center. It's so strange: Nick Adams plays this character, and he garnered an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal, but the movie just doesn't pay much attention to him. He is definitely the film's most interesting character, but the filmmakers don't seem to think so. Instead, he is a figure we are supposed to pity and mostly forget as we turn our attention to Richard Chamberlain and his erstwhile romance with Claude Rains's daughter at the film's end.

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

I really objected to The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), and one reason is that it's unnecessarily long, but I also think it's because I didn't like so many of the film's characters. Ian Bannen, who somehow was nominated for supporting actor for this, has no big scenes and is not a central character in the movie. I have no idea why he was singled out by the Academy. The other actors and characters are super interesting, honestly, but the film isn't really interested in them. It only has eyes for its lead, and that's a problem.

The central figure in The Flight of the Phoenix is an old man from the old school played by James Stewart. Stewart is a dinosaur. He believes that the way he's always done things is the only way to do things. He tries to bully everyone around him into doing things his way, and when that doesn't work, he tries to reason with them. At almost every turn in the film, however, Stewart's character is flat-out wrong. I think the odd part of The Flight of the Phoenix is that the movie's perspective on this man isn't critical. He is the film's protagonist, and the film isn't really interested in a critique of this awful character so much as it is in heroizing him. In other words, I think this film thinks that he's somehow a good guy despite how awful and wrong he is. The film's central conflict – between an engineer who has figured out how to build a plane to help them escape and the captain, who just doesn't like that he's German and bossy and that he came up with the idea first – is the best example of this, of course, but there's another one that will give a good idea of how I feel about this captain.

A bossy military officer played by Peter Finch keeps coming up with harebrained ideas for ways to get out of the desert. His first idea is that he wants to walk 100 miles. He asks who wants to come with him, but he volunteers his sergeant to come with him, even though his sergeant doesn't think walking 100 miles in the desert is a good idea. So the sergeant "twists his ankle" and has to be left behind. The captain judges the hell out of this guy for reasons I found unfathomable. Then in act three of the film, the officer (who has come back after nearly dying) decides to try to talk to some travelers who are nearby but who everyone thinks will probably kill him. He again orders his sergeant to come, even though this is certain death. His sergeant refuses. After they find the officer dead, the sergeant asks, "He's dead, isn't he?", and James Stewart's character punches the sergeant in the face. The film lets the violence end the scene without any criticality, as if somehow this sergeant who totally did the right thing was somehow in the wrong or at fault. I was yelling at my screen by this time. Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole? But I guess the real question is: who the fuck does The Flight of the Phoenix think this guy is? He's not a hero to me, despite the movie's approach.

Two-Minute Warning (1976)

Two-Minute Warning kinda sucks. First and foremost this is a disaster film, in the vein of The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and less well-known gems such as Earthquake and The Hindenburg. In other words, this film has a million characters, and its first act introduces them all while we ready ourselves for the impending disaster, which must arrive with finality and force in act three. 

This movie is about a psychopathic shooter who decides to murder a bunch of people at a football game at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. One of the virtues with disaster films is that they are good at character. But in this movie only a few of the characters are interesting, unfortunately, and so I was more interested in the psycho shooter than almost anyone else.

Perhaps the strangest part of Two-Minute Warning is Charlton Heston's performance. Heston, who only 8 years earlier had been a sex symbol, is, in this film, an out-of-shape policeman who is actively bad at his job. In fact, Heston plays a character whose ego gets at least a dozen people killed. What's even weirder is that the film doesn't really his bad decisions as responsible. (It is, of course, the shooter's fault that people died and not the policeman's fault, but his ego sure makes the whole thing run more smoothly for the psychopath.)

Anyway, this just isn't interesting. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands are both good. I liked David Janssen too (I usually do), and Beau Bridges. But – here's an example of how this filmmaker just sort of lost the plot – Joe Kapp is completely wasted in this. He's in the first act, in which he is introduced as one of the characters in the disaster movie. He's the quarterback of one of the football teams. But once he's on the field, the film literally never, not once goes back to him. So he's introduced for no reason at all, and this also means that Two-Minute Warning has zero characters who are actually playing the game. It's kind of a huge mess.

Year of the Dragon (1985)

This was intensely racist. It was also bloated and way too long. And its main character was a hateful, misogynist prick. John Lone is sort of wonderful in Year of the Dragon, though. Definitely a star. I think the thing that I just can't understand about this film is the way Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Hong Kong, and China are all conflated by this movie. There's a great, redeemable Chinese character who gets to tell Mickey Rourke's character off – cool. But then he of course comes around to seeing things from Rourke's point of view. No thanks. This was rough going.

Aferim!

Wow wow wow wow. Radu Jude is just so good. First off, this film was made in the crispest, most breathtakingly beautiful black and white. And it's funny... for a long time! It moves through its first act with a sort of silliness and easy farce that is quite delightful. And then the racism of 19th century Romania emerges, slowly, along with, of course, the abject poverty of the people who are at the center of Aferim!, people who live in stark contrast to the wealthy Turkish merchants and boyars, who treat the poor like dirt. But then the film just takes a turn: the main character sells a young Romani boy despite his desperate pleas. And then things get worse. The film maintains its buoyant tone, but Aferim! moves almost inexorably toward something truly atrocious, and when it gets to where it is headed, it's stunning, insane, and merciless.

I was familiar with Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and incisive, whip smart analysis of contemporary Romanian prejudices, corruption, racism, and misogyny. And Aferim! is obviously of a piece with work like that – its critique analyzes contemporary misogyny by finding its underlying bases. But Aferim! really took my breath away. It's just does not shy away from the consequences of slavery and racial capitalism. This is a hard movie. And it's excellent.

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's infamous follow-up to The Deer Hunter, got a bad rap, y'all. This movie is difficult, for sure, and the long first act in New England doesn't really make much sense until the second and third acts, but this film has some really great stuff in it. I especially loved the performances of Kris Kristofferson and Jeff Bridges (he's superb in this). And, of course, Isabelle Huppert is wonderful. I really enjoyed this movie, and I found myself deeply moved during the sequence when they read the names of all of the immigrant men on the kill list. This is a pretty extraordinary portrait of racism and capitalism and the way they worked together in this particular period in U.S. American history, and it's a masterfully made movie. I watched this on DVD - from the Criterion release - in its Cimino-approved three-and-a-half-hour version.

Captain Newman, M.D. (1963)

Captain Newman, M.D. is about a military psychiatric hospital during WWII. It's a 1960s movie, unlike most of the WWII content I've been consuming that was made during the war, so this one has a lot of space to be sentimental. And Captain Newman, M.D. is mostly that. It's also mostly a comedy...? The film, in fact, opens with a herd of sheep running all around the base. The sheep have no purpose at all within the plot except that they create farcical situations when they escape and they make everyone run around catching them. In a totally absurd sequence late in the movie, sheep are in ambulances, sheep are in taxis, sheep are in pickup trucks. It looks like something from Wallace and Grommit. 

Anyway, the comedy doesn't work in this movie, or rather, I guess it could work if so much of the movie wasn't invested in talking about the psychological effects of the war, but it's the psychological drama stuff that is actually good. The film stars Gregory Peck, Angie Dickinson, and Tony Curtis, but the great roles are given to the patients: Eddie Albert as a psychotic general, Bobby Darin as a depressed and angry plane-crash survivor, and Robert Duvall as a near-catatonic ghost of a man. Bobby Darin, especially, is amazing. His scenes, which are about uncovering what he experienced in a plane crash with an officer he admired, give us no flashbacks at all. Instead, Darin narrates it for us. It's heartbreaking, and he's wonderful. I was skeptical of this movie's comedic tone, and this whole sequence still brought me to tears. All of the Bobby Darin stuff is excellent. The movie might be worth watching just for him.

You can watch Captain Newman, M.D. on YouTube.

Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

Ceux Qui M'aiment Prendront le Train is a complex melodrama from Patrice Chéreau that's filled with queer characters. This is one of those gay films from the 1990s that I always intended to watch but for some reason never got around to. It's most notable, I think, for heartthrob Vincent Perez's role as a trans woman, and this role does turn out to be surprising and wonderful. But Those Who Love Me is more interesting for the other characters, I think. They're complex and beautiful and fascinating, especially the ones played by Pascal Greggory and Bruno Todeschini. In any case, this is a very confident ensemble picture from Patrice Chéreau (it also stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Charles Berling, Roschdy Zem, and Dominique Blanc), and I liked it very much.

I watched this on DVD, but I think it's streaming on VUDU at least.

Swanee River: the Story of Stephen C. Foster (1939)

Oh my god. This is a biopic of the composer Stephen Foster, who wrote "Oh, Susanna!", "Swanee River", "Camptown Races" and a bunch of other songs. It stars Don Ameche, who is great! Andrea Leeds is not given anything to do except love Stephen Foster. Swanee River also stars... Al Jolson as EP Christy (of Christy's Minstrels fame). This makes the film truly unhinged as a historical object. There is an insane amount of blackface in this movie, and Swanee River seems to think it is laudable that Foster took music from the enslaved Black folks he knew and made good money off of it. This is sort of a crazy movie. And its ending is completely bananas.

Swanee River covers over the likely fact that Stephen Foster killed himself. It also invents a very strange alcoholism plot that feels completely fake onscreen, even if the man actually was a hard drinker. E.P. Christy, as it turns out, also committed suicide two years before Foster did. But Swanee River would have us believe that Christy (in blackface, of course) rushed from the theatre to Foster's bedside and then back to the performance, where he performed Foster's latest tune, "Old Folks at Home", to a crowd who sang along (they apparently memorize the lyrics spontaneously). Then the film – while Jolson and the crown are still singing – cuts to images from the American South, including a man picking cotton, a plantation mansion, and an old Black woman sitting outside a cottage. This is how the movie ends. It's unhinged.

Anyway you can watch this technicolor non-masterpiece on YouTube if you so desire.

The Salt Mines (1990)

Whoa. The Salt Mines is a powerful documentary (and only 45 minutes) about transvestite crack users in New York City in the late 1980s. This is a really important film, especially for the way the subjects describe the Mariel boat lift, life on the streets in New York City, their understandings of their sexualities (and genders), crack use, religion, and their own disposability because of capitalism. Their living conditions are horrific – the salt mines are a storage facility for salt used on the roads when it snows – but these women are fascinating.

Paisan (1946)

Roberto Rossellini's Paisa' is six vignettes about US Americans in Italy as everybody (including Italian resistance fighters) continues to fight the Germans. Rossellini's camera scours the ruins of the peninsula, and Paisa' is a legitimately heartbreaking film. I don't know why it took me this long to see this movie – perhaps it was the total bleakness of Rossellini's previous film, Rome, Open City – but I'm glad I finally saw it. I completely loved this.

(I'm not really sure what year to classify this under. IMDb says it was released in the US in March of 1948, but I know it was nominated for a Story & Screenplay Oscar during the 1949 season. I'm gonna do '49 just because the whole point of these years is to keep track of awards seasons. 

And another thing: the original title, seemingly everywhere, is rendered as Paisà. But it's Paisa' on the title card of the film, and that's what it is on the poster, too. I'm not sure I understand the confusion here.)

1948 Oscar Excursion

I realized a couple of weeks ago that most of the films I had yet to see for Academy Award season 1948 had appeared on YouTube within the last year. Most of these movies are from 20th Century Fox, so perhaps that – and copyright expiration – has something to do with it. I haven't looked into it, so that's just an assumption, but there they were!

By chance I had just seen The Three Musketeers, and then Charles Walters' Easter Parade and Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair appeared on the Criterion Channel. I somehow also managed to watch When My Baby Smiles at Me. It felt like a sign, so I made it a point to see the rest of these 1948 movies. I had, of course, seen the big winners that year a long time ago: those were Hamlet, Johnny Belinda, The Red Shoes, The Snake Pit, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but there was a good chunk still yet to see.

Most of these movies are musicals, actually, which made viewing all that much more silly. Casbah, directed by John Berry, was a musical version of the Pepe le Moko story, in which a well-known and attractive criminal can't leave a particular district in Morocco or he'll be arrested. In this version, Pepe sings. This is pretty silly, but the central song is good, and the film's star, Tony Martin (who I don't think I'd seen before), is pretty great. Pepe le Moko is a melodrama anyway, so making it into a musical doesn't change much. Peter Lorre also stars, and he's delightful and weird as always. 

Yet another musical was Ernst Lubitsch's That Lady in Ermine, a movie that was finished by Otto Preminger. It stars Betty Grable (whose popularity baffles me), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (dreamy), and Cesar Romero (who somehow always plays second banana to the leading man even though he's leading-man handsome). That Lady in Ermine is, frankly, an insane film. It's a musical, of course, and it's one of the weirdest musicals I've seen. It's irrepressibly silly and definitely charming, but it's really wacky. In it, all of the paintings in some castle in Hungary or wherever we are come to life. They're the ancestors of this queen (Grable) and they sing and protect the castle from an invading soldier from next door (Bohemia? Czechia? I've forgotten). The That in the title is really weird, too. I don't think anyone refers to her with this phrase the whole movie. Anyway, this one I don't recommend. 

The Emperor Waltz, a second film directed by Billy Wilder this year, is a musical starring Bing Crosby (who plays an American salesman) and Joan Fontaine (who plays a non-singing noblewoman in Austria). Well, weirdly, their dogs also fall in love. This is another very silly musical. It didn't quite work for me, though. Bing croons through the movie, and that's fine and all, but because Joan Fontaine (who I otherwise love) doesn't sing, things feel out of balance. The central couple doesn't feel right for each other, even if the dogs do.

Norman Z. McLeod's The Paleface is a Bob Hope–Jane Russell comedy set in the wild west. It's very stupid. I laughed occasionally, but Jane Russell... kinda sucks? Like, she's supposed to be funny, but she's really not a comedienne (I think I've only seen her in this, so maybe I'm wrong). Also, much of this film's humor hinges on Indians, killing Indians, making fun of Indians, and basic colonial activities. It was really hard to enjoy any of it. Worse still, the song for which this film was nominated and won is the least good of the five nominated songs. It's called "Buttons and Bows" and Hope sings it while accompanying himself on a ukulele. It's so weird that this won.

Robert Z. Leonard's B.F.'s Daughter is a war-melodrama that's really just all about masculinity and money. The basic plot is that a young idealist marries a very, very rich woman, who just basically pays for things. He makes good and starts making his own money, but he begins to resent her wealth, and she doesn't understand why. The basic politics of the film are that class warfare is a terrible idea because rich men can be very good men, too. Wealthy capitalists can also risk their lives to save their country (the U.S., of course), and it's important to be nice and polite, even when the people you're talking to are raising rents and making their money off of the backs of the destitute and exploiting the labor of the working class. So, actually, I hated this movie, despite the fact that it stars Barbar Stanwyck and Van Heflin. 1948 was the first year to have a Costume Design category, and Stanwyck's gowns in this are incredible, so maybe it was worth it for that.

On the vaguely liberal front, Henry Koster's The Luck of the Irish is about a political sellout who, like, learns to come back to his roots and not be a political sellout because of the magic of a – get ready for this – hard-drinking leprechaun played by Cecil Kellaway (who was nominated for best supporting actor). The politics here are not specific at all, so we actually don't know what the main character (Tyrone Power, lovable as always) has sold out about or to what values he returns. Either way, the whole thing is fun and silly, and I enjoyed myself, even though I must confess that half the time I had no fucking idea what that Irish-accented leprechaun was saying.

Charles Vidor's The Loves of Carmen is the Carmen story, starring the gorgeous, fabulous, can't-say-enough-good-things-about-her Rita Hayworth and the oh-so-handsome Glenn Ford. This was what it always is... a tale of jealousy and love where everyone is doomed. The unfortunate part about The Loves of Carmen is that it rather looks as though it was made on the cheap. There aren't enough big, splashy scenes of cities or raids or anything like that, despite the plot rather needing them. We spend too much time in caves hiding out. The Loves of Carmen is, of course, a musical, though all the songs are diegetic. Carmen is a singing and dancing performer, and it's Rita Hayworth, so all of that stuff is wonderful.

But now for some much more interesting/better films:

Deep Waters, directed by Henry King, is a drama about a troubled orphan boy played by Dean Stockwell! This is a movie about lobstermen in Maine or somewhere up in the northeast, and the lobstermen are Dana Andrews and Cesar Romero. The men befriend this boy and let him work as an apprentice, but the government – in the person of the woman who Dana Andrews loves – is afraid of the water, and thinks this is bad for the young boy. So the government disallows this and then he gets in trouble. The whole thing is a little family drama, but it feels innovative and interesting, and the relationship between Dean Stockwell and Dana Andrews and Cesar Romero is fascinatingly sketched. This film also stars an always-wonderful Anne Revere, as a no-nonsense foster mother with a heart of gold. I really enjoyed this and recommend it.

Another fascinating 1948 film is documentarian Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story. This is a film set in Cajun country Louisiana, and it's ostensibly about oil drilling there, but it is really about this Cajun boy. We follow him and his pet raccoon around as he confronts and explores this giant piece of machinery that is disrupting his home and life. He fights a gator, he fishes, etc. Much of Louisiana Story has the paternalist gaze that's so easy to see in Flaherty's Nanook of the North, in which we sort of laugh at how charming and child-like this "foreigner" is. But I think this is the tradeoff with Flaherty's movies. His gaze is paternalistic and superior, but what he captures is really special. This movie is free on Amazon Prime, although the print is pretty rough. There were several films from this period that starred small boys in pseudo-documentaries that were actually fiction films – I'm thinking of 1952's Navajo and 1949's The Quiet One. I found all three of these movies worth watching.

I'm saving the best for last: Walter Lang's Sitting Pretty is a domestic comedy set in the suburbs. In it, a harried housewife with three kids is desperately in need of a housekeeper and accidentally hires... a man! He's played by Clifton Webb and his name is Mr. Belvedere, and he's incredible. In any case, Mr. Belvedere turns out to be a great housekeeper. And everyone loves him. I won't spoil any more of this movie, because you should absolutely watch it, and it's on YouTube. It's a delight from start to finish and very, very funny. Clifton Webb was nominated for Best Actor for this movie, too! And here's the real rub: it's very obvious, from the very beginning, that Mr. Belvedere is a gay man. This is not so much coded as it is completely and totally clear. Sitting Pretty would actually make no sense if Mr. Belvedere wasn't gay. There is, for example, an entire silly plot where the man of the house, Robert Young, is totally skeptical of the idea of Mr. Belvedere staying at home in the house with his wife while he travels for a couple of days. The women in the film are in hysterics laughing about this. As if Mr. Belvedere is a sexual threat. It's hilarious! He has to be gay for the entirety of the comedy to work. This film is wonderful, and you should see it.

When My Baby Smiles at Me

If I am honest, I don't really get Betty Grable. She and Dan Dailey made Mother Wore Tights (zzz) and then they made When My Baby Smiles at Me a couple years later, and it's the old burlesque-dancer-loves-burlesque-comic routine, and, y'all, it's old. I get annoyed because this old song and dance is literally a diegetic musical in which we are enjoying old burlesque numbers and laughing at old burlesque jokes (well, supposed to be laughing, anyway), and yet we're also supposed to understand that we should look down on burlesque as a form. These musicals traffic in nostalgia for burlesque, and ask us to enjoy it, while simultaneously insulting it (and insulting our intelligence). 

When My Baby is even worse than this because most of it is unhappy. Dan Dailey is a terrible alcoholic in this one, and Grable sends him off to Broadway to become a star but he has no support system in New York so he drinks himself into a stupor and, star though he is, gets too wasted to keep his job.

But When My Baby's high point is an extraordinary confrontation between Dailey and Grable and a bunch of their friends in which Dailey is absolutely fucking plastered and totally losing his mind about Grable marrying another dude. He's incredible in this sequence, and it's shocking and devastating and really awesome.

Of course, it all ends how you'd expect it to, but When My Baby sure does go to some dark places that I was not expecting.

The 1948 Musketeers

George Sidney's 1948 adaptation of The Three Musketeers is the best one I've seen. It packs the novel's whole plot (including the second half, I mean) into it's 125-minute running time while still managing to pack in lots of farcical comedy with the four musketeers. This does, of course, mean that Queen Anne (Angela Lansbury) doesn't appear in the movie very much, but it means instead that Milady de Winter (Lana Turner) becomes the real focus. And what a focus!! I think Lana Turner looks more gorgeous than anyone I've ever seen in this movie. She appears in the most expensive outfits with her hair covered in jewels. She looks absolutely exquisite. Gene Kelly is way too old to be playing D'Artagnan, but who cares, honestly. His particular style of dance makes his fight scenes even more delightful. Anyway, this is the one. It makes full use of its gorgeous Technicolor photography, has great performances (including a brilliant Van Heflin and a charming Frank Morgan), and a breathtaking Lana Turner.

Tommy: the Movie

Honestly, I don't get it. This is very Ken Russell, and I like Ken Russell usually, but this annoyed me. You know... I think I'd feel differently if I liked the voices in this, but the only song that really worked for me were the Elton John number and the Tina Turner number. I like all of these actors, but I didn't like any of their voices in Tommy.

The Paradine Case (1947)

I wanted Hitchcock's The Paradine Case to be an intriguing curiosity and, well, I guess it is that; it's just not very interesting. There was lots of behind-the-scenes drama with this film. Hitchcock and David O. Selznick did not get along, and Hitchcock didn't want to cast Gregory Peck or Louis Jordan or Valli. (Incidentally, only Louis Jordan really works for the movie; Peck is definitely miscast.) But the trouble is that this screenplay just isn't that good. What should be an intriguing and tense mystery film with high stakes in the present becomes a kind of melodrama about the main lawyer and his wife and their relationship. It's not even interesting, although that gets most of the screen time.

The other very strange thing about the film is its runtime, which, once upon a time was 3 hours, was apparently cut down to 2 hours and 20 minutes, and then later 2 hours and 5 minutes and finally 1 hour and 55 minutes. Now, I'm not saying the whole thing wouldn't have been better at a longer runtime, because I seriously have a lot of doubts, but, well, maybe I am. I trust Hitchcock more than I trust Selznick, but with Peck in the lead...? I think the reason I would like to watch a longer cut (which, apparently, will now be impossible because the negatives have been destroyed) is that Ethel Barrymore got the film's lone Oscar nomination in 1948 for a supporting performance that lasts all of about 3 minutes in the current cut. Apparently much of this performance has been cut (and, I would imagine, much of Charles Laughton's work as well), and it definitely feels as though it's missing from this trimmed version.

Pete Kelly's Blues (1955)

Pete Kelly's Blues is a gangster movie musical where all the songs are diegetic and most of them are great – including numbers by Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. But this movie is awfully directed, and honestly I am still not really sure I understand what the film's conflict was or how it resolved. Edmond O'Brien plays a gangster and the most wooden Jack Webb (who also directed) plays the cornet-player Pete Kelly. O'Brien is taking most of the band's money, ok... I get that. But I think somehow this is supposed to be Kelly's fault. In any case everyone seems to resent him.

In any case, whatever this was it didn't work.

The Black Rose (1950)

I am not quite sure why I was so disinterested in Henry Hathaway's The Black Rose. Perhaps it is Cécile Aubry as the protagonist's love interest... she's twenty-one or so, but she looks much younger because she's very short, and so the love between her and Tyrone Power never really registers as believable. She isn't a bad actress per se, acquitting herself well in a scene where she declares her love for him, but I just never bought his attraction for her. She just looks like a little kid.

I think, too, The Black Rose suffers from not having any narratives about the sea. I am used to seeing Tyrone Power on a ship, and this adventure narrative covers an overland trip through medieval Persia to China. This has its appeal, and there are some cool scenes, but Power feels kinda trapped.

In any case, despite being a very expensive and beautifully designed epic, this is just not that great. It's narratively wonky – it should have been more like two and a half hours instead of just two – missing big chunks of important travel and information. And its nationalist politics feel really on the nose: Power plays a Saxon who hates the Normans even though it's 200 years after the Conquest. What he needs to learn is that he loves his nation, and that's more important than who runs it... or something like that? The lesson is unity: we love this land where we were born, and so Saxon and Norman can work together for its glory. (I.E. Put aside all of your complaints about what a bad job I'm doing running this country, and stop complaining about all of the injustices you've suffered under my illegitimate colonial reign, and think of the land.)

I am skeptical.

Action in the North Atlantic (1943)

Yet another contemporary WWII movie, Action in the North Atlantic boast some cool sea fights. This follows a big tanker taking supplies from the U.S. to the Soviets while being chased by a fleet of submarines. It stars Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey, with a very important supporting part played by the instantly recognizable Dane Clark. It's criminal that he didn't become a huge star. I really don't know how that happened. He's wonderful.

In any case, one very strange thing Action in the North Atlantic does is have the Germans in their submarine speak only German. The film does not subtitle their speech, so we actually spend a lot of time in this film listening to German without any translation. It's a very strange move for a 1943 film.

Happening

For me, L'Événement (Happening), Audrey Diwan's new film about a young woman in France in the early 1960s trying to get an abortion, feels a bit like a retread. I liked it a lot, honestly, and it's quite a thriller, actually – I was on the edge of my seat for much of it – but I guess I feel like I've seen it before. In 2020 there was Eliza Hittman's excellent US American film Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which was much more of a terrifyingly tragic drama than Happening. But this movie reminded me most of Cristian Mungiu's truly wonderful 4 Luni, 3 Săptămâni şi 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) from 2007, which works a lot like Happening.

In any case, Happening works very, very well, and it was a good watch even if it didn't feel completely original. It also feels very important in the U.S., where rampantly misogynist state governments – and a truly backward federal government – are once again attempting to force women to give birth by passing anti-abortion legislation.