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.

One of My Favorite Films of 2017

A Ghost Story is one of my favorite movies of the year. Right now I have it at #2. It's a beautiful film.

A Ghost Story is a haunting, mysterious fable about longevity, about what lives on after us, about letting go. It also manages to be whimsical in lots of ways, and to rethink what we even mean by a ghost. The image of the ghost with the sheet over its head and holes for eyes is a very old one – a child's image of a ghost, or perhaps a Hayao Miyazaki image of a ghost. This is childish or whimsical; it's even sort of silly. But it turns serious quite quickly, even haunting, and there is an extraordinary payoff to its sheet-over-the-head aesthetic.

David Lowery's film is a kind of fusion of Kelly Reichardt, Tsai Ming-Liang, Terrence Malick, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and it was just my cup of tea. The thing is, it doesn't feel derivative. It feels totally original and fascinating, and once you think you've figured it out, it goes further, into uncharted, strange territory.

(One warning. This is not a long movie at all, but it is a slow, contemplative film. If you don't like Reichardt, or Tsai or Weerasethakul, you will be annoyed by this movie's pace.)

The film's third act is my favorite section of the film. These parts of the film are about time and waiting and being. At one point we seem to project thousands of years into the future and then jump back another thousand and start again. A Ghost Story wonders what it means to live on, to live with, what it means to be in the first place. This meditation is about how people (or things?) haunt us – it is a ghost story, after all – but it is itself haunting, as we might think about how we are going to live on or what came before us or, indeed, what we are in the first place.

I loved this movie.