Guilty Bystander (1950)

It seems like most of the reviews on Letterboxd and other places say that Guilty Bystander is middling or disappointing. I feel precisely the opposite about Joseph Lerner's weird little film noir. In fact, it fairly blew me away. I don't think I've seen a noir quite this seedy before. The only thing I can compare it to for nihilism is Blast of Silence and that's from 1961 not 1950. The flophouses, the warehouses, and the bars in this are frankly disgusting. Even the bannisters are covered in some kind of muck, as we learn in one of the film's first moments; in Guilty Bystander cigarettes fall lazily from characters' mouths onto floors, and no one even stubs them out. This film is set in the underbelly of underbellies. There's an extraordinary fight sequence in which our anti-hero has to wrestle a guy with one arm because he's been shot. It's bracingly realistic, almost tedious. Guilty Bystander is no studio picture.

The acting is not great, however. J. Edward Bromberg gives a kind of low-rent Peter Lorre that works fine, but Faye Emerson is quite boring (one never truly believes she might be part of a double cross), and Mary Boland should really be a lot better than she is. But Kay Medford does excellent work here, and Sam Levene and Harry Landers are great in their smaller parts. Zachary Scott... well I don't think I've decided how I feel about him yet, mostly because I hate his mustache, but I think he might be good in this.

Guilty Bystander was restored from a print—apparently no negative exists anymore—through funding from Nicolas Winding Refn. I'm so glad it was. This is B-movie gold, and I found it to be a compelling portrait of New York petty crime. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it. 

Pusher (1996)

Pusher is the kind of thing I would have thought was exciting in the mid-1990s when it came out. Less so in 2006 when it was finally released in the U.S. But now in 2020, I just can't get that interested in these small-time criminals and their dumb misogyny, racism, violence, and stupidity. Pusher is notable for being Mads Mikkelsen's debut, and of course he's great in this. But he isn't in it for long. The performances are good – Laura Drasbæk is particularly interesting. And Kim Bodnia and Slavko Labović are both super attractive. But this film was not interesting to me. Its charms, such as they are, have not weathered well. Structurally, Pusher works rather like a Safdie Brothers movie, but Refn's movie does not work well as the Safdies' movies do. Oh also, the ending is incomplete. A movie like this needs to end. This one leaves the viewer hanging, and while this can work for plenty of films, even thrillers, the generic demands of this film require an ending. Instead, Refn punts.

Two in Neon

Neon Bull (Boi Neon) is one of the most unexpected films I've seen this year. The film follows a group of characters who work for a kind of Brazilian rodeo in which the tails of the bulls are grabbed by a kind of vaquero and the bull is flipped by his own energy so that he falls. As the film continues we see this happen several times. Each time it is compelling and unsettling.

Gabriel Mascaro's film follows one of these workers, Iremar, as he works with these animals, and a girl named Cacá whose mother works with the rodeo. Iremar is actually a fashion designer or wants to be, and he designs costumes for Cacá's mother when she dances in a cabaret. Cacá mostly just hangs around. But what she really wants is a horse.

The film unfolds slowly (totally my speed), allowing for our relationships with these characters to settle. We can observe and identify, slowly noticing patterns and studying these characters. The film takes a decidedly odd turn midway through, however, when Iremar and one of his companions attempt to steal some horse semen from an (apparently) valuable animal. I won't say any more than this – do I even need to? – but Mascaro's film kept surprising me from this point on.

Abigail Pereira and Juliano Cazarré

Neon Bull is visually stunning and some of its image are downright jaw-dropping. And as the film continues it meditates on our relationships with animals, on lives lived in relationship with animals, on the ways we make money off of our manipulation of animals. This means, of course, that Neon Bull is fundamentally about the question of the human. In what ways are we different from animals? In what ways are we animals? Mascaro's film thinks through these questions via the topic of sex, and Neon Bull is therefore a very sexy film in addition to being excellent.

This film made me think very deeply, and I don't think I loved it while I was watching. I was more astounded by this movie; my reaction was rather one of simple and consistent surprise. But once Neon Bull was over, I couldn't shake it. In fact, it's been three weeks since I saw this movie and I still keep thinking about it, its images, its ideas, its carefully drawn characters and their fascinating relationships. If I didn't love this movie three weeks ago, I'm positive I do now. It's not going to be for everyone – its explicit sex sequences (one involving an animal) and slow pace will turn off quite a few viewers – but this movie is great.

* * *

And then there's The Neon Demon, the new film by Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed the awesome Drive and then followed that up with the ridiculously boring Only God Forgives.

Neon Demon takes place in an odd, haunted Los Angeles that has almost no correspondence with reality. This is a Lynchian fever-dream of a film and knows that's what it is. In fact, there is literally no way that anyone who doesn't like Lynch will like The Neon Demon. 

What this movie is is actually a campy, surreal, mostly silly horror movie with models for main characters and cannibalism as its subject matter. It even includes that staple of this B-movie genre: lesbian desire and girl-on-girl sex scenes.

Nicolas Winding Refn, however, doesn't seem to think he's directed a gimmicky, B-movie, fantasy flick. He think he's made A Clockwork Orange or Barry Lyndon or Blue Velvet. He most certainly has not. He's hidden his silly-but-possibly-clever little horror film, which should have lasted about 75 minutes, inside a bloated, pretentious, and (worst of all) boring 120-minute film. The Neon Demon is awful. 

The Neon Demon's Opening Shot

And it isn't just the world of the film that seems totally detached from reality. Even the film's central assumption – that Elle Fanning possess an extraordinary (yet completely natural) beauty that none of the other gorgeous models in the film possesses – only makes sense because the film keeps telling us it does. I couldn't tell the difference between one model and the next, and I fail to see how Refn or anyone in his film is supposed to be able to do so. The film's main argument is actually that these models are a fungible quantity, easily replaceable, and yet we are supposed to believe that one of them is not that: that she is special in some kind of magical, clearly noticeable way? And then The Neon Demon itself replaces Fanning! In act three she is no longer the central character of the film. Someone else, in fact, takes the place of this irreplaceable, unique beauty, and we find that, of course, we can do without her quite well.

Oh, Who Cares?

For my part I could have done without this film in its entirety, but it is not completely without redeeming qualities. Karl Glusman is good in a small, thankless part, and Erin Benach's costumes are pretty great. The makeup, too, is really really excellent. Keanu Reeves, it should also be noted, gives a performance that is much better than this film.

There are a few stunning images, too, especially notable is a very brief sequence in which an intruder gets into Elle Fanning's apartment.

If only Refn took himself a little less seriously. I recommend that the director of The Neon Demon and Only God Forgives watch a few John Waters films and admit his silliness to himself. Refn seems to think he's doing Lynch or Kubrick, but what he's doing is what Frank Perry used to do – making very serious films that turn out to be exercises in camp.

Lost River

I got the DVD of Ryan Gosling's debut feature Lost River in June. (I still get the DVDs because I am old and they have a better selection). I was excited about Lost River. I like Ryan Gosling: I think he makes good choices, and although I haven't always enjoyed the movies that the directors whose muse he is (Derek Cianfrance and Nicolas Winding Refn) have made with him, I always think Gosling is interesting to watch in these films, even when the films don't work for me.

In any case, I was predisposed to like Lost River. And so I started watching it in early June.

I got about ten minutes in – a ten minutes that played like a riff on a David Gordon Green movie – and then the movie changed tone starkly. The film's star Christina Hendricks was now in a bank office populated by absolutely no one until Ben Mendelsohn enters doing a kind of bizarrely menacing David Lynch kind of thing. This section of the movie is a kind of absurd exposition sequence, in which the main character is introduced to us as in a complete financial bind because of her own ignorance, and (it is immediately obvious) will now be forced to do a series of things that she doesn't want to do but that the film will enjoy watching her do.

I took the DVD out and went to sleep instead. This was already too contrived for my taste.

And then I didn't put the DVD back into my player until last night, when I convinced myself – finally – simply to finish this movie so that I could move on with my movie-watching existence.

Well, I was right when I took it out the first time in June. Lost River is derivative of lots of other filmmakers, which is, I suppose, fine as far as it goes, but Lost River also can't decide which of these guys it likes best. David Lynch is an obvious influence, with his grotesquely vicious worlds and characters who behave without motivation of any kind, but the movie also insists on numerous shots lit by a single source of brightly saturated neon light (pink, red, sometimes green) just like Refn's (awful) Ryan Gosling movie Only God Forgives.

Let me just stop right here: Avoid this thing at all costs. It is slow and ponderous and absurdly self important. And it is insanely, almost sadistically boring. Eva Mendes is a charming bright spot in this dour universe, but there isn't much else of interest and there's no one to root for in Lost River. Stay away.

Under the Skin

There are spoilers here. Although I am not sure either of us understands the movie any better than you will if you read this. In fact, it might only be of interest to those who have seen Under the Skin. If you haven't yet seen it, you must. It's this year's Upstream Color: fascinating, formally cool, visually stunning, deeply unsettling. This is unmissable.

 ~ ~ ~

Carlos: Under the Skin!
Aaron: Right??
Carlos: So I must preface that I had no intention of seeing it this weekend. But I dropped by wallet in the parking lot of the Vons my friend and I were buying snacks at before Boyhood. So we had to go back and find it and by then we missed Boyhood. But I found my wallet and a redbox. So I was completely emotionally unprepared for Under the Skin.
Aaron: Ok. Good preface.  
Carlos: But I looooved it. Stylistically it reminded me a lot of Drive.
Aaron: I think I was imagining it would be more like Sexy Beast, but, well it was just so out there.
Carlos: I think, occasionally, to its detriment. But I think that's because the soundtrack wasn't as absorbing.
Aaron: Hmmmm. I loved the score.
Carlos: Haunting. To be sure. But those long shots of Black Widow looking at her rear view mirror started to wear on me by the end of it. But that that's about it as far as my complaints.
Aaron: Ooo not me. I have no complaints.
Carlos: I figured you wouldn't. I'm still unpacking it. Because I had a lot of preconceptions about what it was supposed to be and it was none of those things. Which I loved.
Aaron: I spent most of the film thinking what is going on??
Carlos: Yes! I was completely disoriented, but in the best possible way.
Aaron: I got from the very beginning – the opening sequence of spheres – that someone was learning to speak.
Carlos: Yes.
Aaron: And then I understood that the body (ScarJo, I mean) was not from round here. But once she starts seducing men?
Carlos: Was that first body her as well? It was a different girl, yes?
Aaron: Different girl. A failed version? Or perhaps someone who – like many sex workers – has met her end at the hands of a violent male.
Carlos: Maybe. I like that you referred to her as "the body" but I think "husk" is more appropriate.
Aaron: Husk is good.
Carlos: Especially considering the "body" count of the movie. Yes, once she starts seducing men. I loved the hunting sequences. Her point of view moving from man to man. Occasionally woman to woman.

Aaron: Here's a question I'm thinking about: what do the men she seduces see while they begin to wade into the pool? Surely they aren't seeing what we are seeing.
Carlos: Oh my god, I have no idea. Those sequences had me mesmerized.
Aaron: Yeah me too! And there is where the score is really really effective, too.
Carlos: I watched it with two straight guys. And I brought up the question. They had a pretty simple answer. If ScarJo (or a physical equivalent) is undressing in front of you, you will see little else. The other guy nodded, sipped his beer, and said "tunnel vision". And to a certain extent I think they're right.
Aaron: Really? And you wouldn't see that you had begun wading into a pool of some unidentifiable liquid?
Carlos: It's a larger metaphor for something else. Look at how people are hooking up over Craigslist, Grindr, etc. And then you get those horror stories of people getting chopped up instead of hooking up.
Aaron: Oh for heaven's sake! That isn't an answer. I don't think it is a metaphor for anything. But I try to resist metaphorization. Materially: they wade into a pool of liquid. And she does not. And they don't see that. If we don't metaphorize that...

 Carlos: I mean, it's more about how we treat sex now. That for many lonely people desperate for a connection, if something like that – that they've been deprived of – is offered to them, you can lose sight of yourself and your personal safety.
Aaron: Totally. Totally. But that isn't a metaphor. That is literally what happens. That is the plot. 
Carlos: Right. But the imagery is not what happens in real life.
Aaron: Haha! That's what I'm asking about. That was what I was thinking about during those sequences.
Carlos: Oh when I say real life, I'm talking about our real life. I think it's non-explained away with alien magic, honestly.
Aaron: Yes. I think you are right.
Carlos: Alien magic or hook up culture?
Aaron: Alien magic. Well, alien technology.
Carlos: Same thing.
Aaron: It is definitely about our hook up culture in a lot of ways. But also so much about loneliness, right? So much.
Carlos: Oh my god, yes. About connection.
Aaron: The man with Neurofibromatosis really illustrates this.
Carlos: Yeah. I actually read a really great interview with him a few months ago, saying how the filming of this movie really changed his life.
Aaron: And then she -- as it turns out -- also has a body that is different.
Carlos: That, like every other scene in this movie, was heartbreaking.
Aaron: She cannot physically connect with the man she wants to love. Oh my god, yes. And what is amazing is that by that time I understood what was happening, so I wasn't spending that sequence attempting to figure anything out.
Carlos: Yeah. Before she even looked with the lamp?
Aaron: Right. Yes.

Carlos: It's interesting, too, that whatever happens under the black pool, quite literally, turns the men into chunks of meat.
Aaron: I like your meat metaphor because it is sort of like a factory. The way a factory might process chicken or beef. They are eviscerated, yes?
Carlos: Well, I'm pretty sure it's worse than that. Getting all your innards sucked out after your body goes liquid soft seems worse than being sliced up.
Aaron: Isn't that what evisceration means? I need to look up my torture terminology. Clearly.
Carlos: I guess it is. I've been using it incorrectly. Eviscerate is a big catch all murder term.
Aaron: I loved that sequence with Paul Brannigan from The Angel's Share. When he touches the other body under the liquid. The point of view changes so much. And I didn't mind at all.
Carlos: Oh yes. He was very good and that whole image was the worst.
Aaron: He's so good!

Carlos: Can we talk about the motorcycle man/men?
Aaron: I was just gonna ask about him.
Carlos: This is the biggest question I have. Who is he? Is he another Husk? Is she responsible for feeding them? Because he seems to be angry with her whenever she gets out of line.
Aaron: I thought not but perhaps so. I think there's only one.
Carlos: But there were like 4-5 bike men?
Aaron: I don't mean that I think there's only one. She only has one. The other bike men in that scene I assume have their own husks for whom they're responsible.
Carlos: I kept calling him her "cleaner."
Aaron: Yes. That makes sense. He does that.
Carlos: That's what I figured. But shit was hitting the fan, and he needed help. I feel like I need to see it again. So much work was done in the tiniest of actions.
Aaron: He is part of the same machine she is, I think.
Carlos: I do too. I think he's a husk.
Aaron: Most definitely a husk then.
Carlos: But he just has a different role.

Aaron: But perhaps one who knows more than she. Yeah you are certainly right. Husk.
Carlos: Well, think about it. Remember that scene where she looks herself over in the mirror? I didn't realize it at the time, but she was looking for cracks in her façade.
Aaron: In act three? Oh yes!
Carlos: Later, after men stopped being brought in, Cleaner did that too.
Aaron: He did??
Carlos: Yep. Very briefly. So it stands to reason that if they do not consume these men, their masks slip away.
Aaron: Oh wow. Which is what happens at the end.
Carlos: Yeah. Oh man, that was hard to watch. So beautiful and tragic. I mean, the act was not beautiful, but the way it was composed was.

Aaron: But that's not... Wait. Their only purpose in consuming these bodies cannot be to sustain their own lives, surely.
Carlos: It didn't seem to be a pleasure for her.
Aaron: No, not at all, but I'm saying that they need those bodies, or their eviscera, for a purpose other than their own personal maintenance. They are required to do this. For some other purpose.
Carlos: Are they, though? It read to me as a food-as-fuel situation.
Aaron: Well yes, I mean somebody made them. Their maintenance might be linked to this but it isn't the only purpose.
Carlos: Did someone?
Aaron: A machine fashions her body and teaches her how to speak. She has just been born when we meet her.
Carlos: She has been born, but we didn't see anything beyond a black dot becoming an eye. To me, I was reading all of this as purely survival functions. There didn't seem to be any higher purpose to it. Which goes back to the men as well, and the question of what they see.
Aaron: Only survival, huh?
Carlos: Because for them, sex with this woman, or rather connection with this woman (any woman it seems, really) is necessary for survival.
Aaron: That makes it all so much more depressing, Carlos.
Carlos: And it goes back to that hook-up-culture bit, earlier. We hurl our bodies into each other because we long to find that correct fit, whether it exists or not, with little care for our greater well being. It's that tunnel vision. I thought it was a pretty depressing movie.
Aaron: I find it hard to be depressed when I am so excited about the film itself.
Carlos: I can be both.
Aaron: I was really energized and happy during the whole film because I found the form so fascinating.
Carlos: Maybe depressing is the wrong word. Bleak. It was bleak.
Aaron: I was moved but not depressed at all. It is a very sad film. Bleak yes.
Carlos: Yes. Let's go with that.
Aaron: But it is so exquisitely made that it left no residue of its own bleakness with me.
Carlos: Maybe you're just not on Scruff enough to really feel it.
Aaron: That seems possible. Touché. Well I also have made peace with my own loneliness to a large extent.

Carlos: Let's keep talking about this sustenance vs. higher purpose. Because aside from the birth, I'm wondering what other clues might have hinted at something larger for you?
Aaron: It is the machine itself that signals that. Something gives her a purpose. Information that she is supposed to do something. Something manufactures that house, the pool, the technology that eviscerates. Even the technology that transforms the eviscera into a substance usable for food or something else. What makes the husk itself?
Carlos: Because the way I saw it, she sort of moved in reverse in terms of her sexual evolution. When we're young we're taught that you must have a connection in order for sex to mean something, and as we age we learn that sometimes you just need to get your rocks off to make it to tomorrow. But the husk's evolution was in reverse. She used the hollow sex as a means to survive but discovered that without the connection that there is no meaning in what she is doing.

Aaron: I don't think she learned anything like that. Sex was a kind of utility initially; she has sex (or rather seduces men) because it is necessary. And then there is the possibility of connection with someone else, a sexual connection, and she opts for that. She didn't see that there might be something else, something redeemable in a man. And so what she learns is a kind of humanity. She sees them as something other than murderers, rapists, etc.

Carlos: But at that point, she has stayed with the man a couple days, right?
Aaron: No. First the man with Neurofibromatosis. Him first, and then the man who tries to help.
Carlos: And she lets him go.
Aaron: Right. For me that is her learning something human. Something about care or connection or, oh I don't know, generosity.
Carlos: So that begs the question, are they sort of a hive mind? Did she call the Cleaner? If the Cleaner knew about that guy, how could he not easily find her? Because as soon as he was let go, the Cleaner knew exactly where to go to take care of it.
Aaron: He couldn't find her when she started running. Before that, he is tailing her in some way. I think.
Carlos: But that's what I'm asking. How did he find that guy in such a specific place? And then was not able to find her?

Aaron: You mean that guy's home?
Carlos: Yes.
Aaron: He must've had his ID from his clothes.
Carlos: Ahhh. Okay. Makes sense.
Aaron: I don't think they have a hive mind.
Carlos: Unless it's based on proximity. Because there were a couple times where he just showed up. But she could have called or texted off screen.

Definitely this guy.

Aaron: So I still think -- and maybe it is because it makes it less depressing -- that there is something alien and larger that uses these men's eviscera for something other than the maintenance of the Cleaner and the husk.
Carlos: Some Eldritch horror, no doubt. Swimming with tentacles and eyes.
Aaron: Or something more like what we could call technology. A computer.
Carlos: I'll stick with Yog Sothoth, thank you.

Aaron: Hahahha. What is so fascinating to me is the way the film frames these men's lives as disposable.
Carlos: I loved that.
Aaron: They are a fungible quantity but even more than that a disposable fungible quantity. It is devastating to imagine. Because they really are that and not through any machine or biopolitical power (I mean, healthcare or employment or anything). They are disposable because they are alone and lonely and have no one in their lives who loves them. So this disposable quality is affectively produced.
Carlos: You said this film wasn't depressing... But that line was about the most depressing fucking thing you could have said.
Aaron: Yes. I see what you mean.

Rewind Llewyn Davis

I've been listening to the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack since the producers started streaming it in its entirety via NPR music on November 3rd. I like folk music, though, and I am generally excited to see either Chris Thile or Justin Timberlake on any CD ever. Old songs like the ones that fill Llewyn Davis connect with me somehow, and I absolutely love the most important song in the film, "Dink's Song". In any case, I felt predisposed to liking Llewyn simply for its music – that is, in addition to loving it simply because it's a Coen Brothers movie and, well, they don't actually ever make bad movies, just films that are more or less difficult to love.

I'll wager that most people are probably going to find Llewyn Davis one of the more "difficult to love" Coen films. I know I did. I am finding the best way to describe it as a A Serious Man meets O Brother Where Art Thou? (When I said this to my friend Justin he instantly quipped: O Serious Man Where Art Thou?) But in truth, Inside Llewyn Davis is quite serious. Its main character is a difficult man who spends the entirety of the movie further messing up his own already precarious life.

The film's structure, too, is difficult. The film begins, moves along for a bit, and then it fades to white. Is what we see next a flashback? The film doesn't tell us until much later, but one gets the sense that this has all happened before, that Llewyn Davis is spinning his wheels, continually making the same mistakes and not learning from them. Llewyn stays on his friends' sofas. He imposes on them. He eats their food. He makes very little money. And although it is snowing outside, he has no winter coat, no boots, and no intention of moving south any time soon. Llewyn tries to make music – tries to earn a living making music – but he has principles, see. He doesn't want to make the kind of music other people want to make. He wants to sing folk music. He is, in fact, great at singing folk music, and the early 1960s saw a kind of renaissance of folk music.

I really liked Llewyn, even if it isn't all that likable. I know men and women like Llewyn: difficult people who simply can't ever get their lives to make a kind of sense, who never can get a foothold but keep working hard at it, doing their best but continuing to make terrible, selfish decisions. And I liked him for all that. He's sympathetic and difficult, and I wanted to take him in and clean him up. I felt a little like his friends the Gorfeins, I guess.

Mr. Isaac as Llewyn Davis ("It's Welsh.")

Back to structure for a second: the whole thing is a riff on Joyce's Ulysses. Llewyn is a kind of depressed pícaro, traveling from New York to Chicago and back again. He comes across all kinds of shady and colorful characters on his travels, and he is joined by a cat (several cats, actually). I have been frustrated with the film's bookends since I saw the picture. My sister and I wondered why the film needs to repeat itself. We both initially thought this was a kind of structural flaw in the story, an unnecessary bit of Guillermo Arriaga-style dramaturgy. But the more I think about it, the more I think it is doing important thematic and emotional work. Things really are repeating. Things really are cyclical. He really does go back to doing the same thing over and over again. He keeps fucking up. He keeps going back to his sister's house when he runs out of money. He keeps running into orange tabbies. And the songs, too, come back. These are old, old tunes, and they are given a new life in his music. If the movie repeats itself, these songs, this man's decisions, repeat themselves too.

The appearance of Bob Dylan at the film's end said one other thing to me. Renaissances like the rejuvenation of folk music as a genre in the 1960s are paved by unhappy, struggling people like Llewyn Davis. These people do the thankless work of making space for people like Bob Dylan. There is no Bob Dylan without guys like Llewyn who perform the labor of teaching audiences about what is good, giving music a kind of cultural value, rediscovering songs that other people will make famous, playing guitar on other people's famous hit records. Inside Llewyn Davis gets to the struggles of people who end up never finding fame or fortune in the industries in which they labor, but who contributed deeply, on a grassroots level, to the USAmerican music scene.

I should mention, too, that the performances in Llewyn are pretty awesome, particularly Oscar Isaac's work. I really liked Isaac in W./E. and I absolutely could not stop talking about his work in Drive, and so I am glad that this actor will be getting more work and I hope to see more excellent performances from him.

Two 2013 Films about Fatherhood

Derek Cianfrance's The Place beyond the Pines is insistently about fatherhood – even to the point of being slightly clunky. "Are you thinking about the fact that the man you killed had a son the same age as your own?" a psychiatrist asks Bradley Cooper in the film's second act. "Is that why you're having trouble looking at your own son?" I can't tell you whether or not a psychiatrist would normally ask such a pointed question to a client, but either way, on film it felt forced and slightly obvious.

Thematics aside, The Place beyond the Pines is certainly interesting for its first act. And this interest derives mostly from the fact that Ryan Gosling's character was an unpredictable and erratic figure who never did what I expected him to do. Violent, scary, and very stupid, he was also devoted to his child in an immediate (also slightly terrifying) way. Gosling rides his motorcycle and broods and smokes cigarettes and says very little. His work is not without interest, here, but I think personally I'm a little Goslinged out. Okay not really. But I am a little tired of these brooding, silent figures who have secret love or secret pain or secret shame or something but aren't talking about it. And I know he works with directors other than Derek Cianfrance and Nicolas Winding Refn, but right now those gentlemen's characters seem like the only thing Gosling can do. I know that isn't true, but I also don't think I need any more strong, silent, good-at-revving-engines performances for a while.

Overall, Pines is more a piece about mood than anything else. It is also easy to say "thematics aside" above, but in truth The Place beyond the Pines is all about thematics. It is a kind of long-form meditation on what makes a father, what debt a son has to a father, and how we are or become the fathers to all sorts of sons – even the ones we didn't know we ought to be protecting.

To my mind Pines didn't have much else going for it. It's overly long, and the third act (which ought to be the most exciting section of the film) ends up being the flattest, with characters about whom we care much less than those who have been onscreen for the first two acts. I've read folks complaining on the internet that the third act dragged. To the contrary: the third act is probably the film's most exciting section; it is simply that there's no one onscreen whom we actually like.

Special note about the incredible character-actor Ben Mendelsohn, who is really superb in a supporting role as Gosling's only friend.

Pines is told mostly from the fathers' point(s) of view. Even in the third act when we adopt the son's viewpoint, we are watching as though we were his parent, so the point of view of the father predominates throughout Pines. In Jeff Nichols' Mud, we see the viewpoint of the son only.

~

Mud was everything I needed it to be. Two boys discover an outlaw named Mud on an island somewhere in the Mississippi River and decide to help him for no apparent reason other than that he is interesting and tells good stories. (I can relate; I love a good story.)

Ellis and Neckbone (That's a great handle, kid Matthew McConaughey tells him) are teenagers who really don't know what they're doing. We follow Ellis as he tries to get a much older teenage girl to be his girlfriend, deal with his parents' breakup, and assert himself as a full-grown individual. He is scared and naive and lovable, and the actor who plays him (Tye Sheridan) is unbelievably good. Watching this boy enjoy his first kiss will definitely be a cinematic highlight of 2013 for me.

Ellis is looking for another father figure – one different from his own father, I mean – and this outlaw is dangerous and exciting and apparently willing to fight for the woman he loves. Ellis admires that. Neckbone, too, needs more of a father in his life. His own guardian is a hilarious uncle played by Michael Shannon, who just wants his nephew to hang out with him. Of course, our father figures need their own fathers, too, and still need help even when they're grown. Mud is an orphan, too.

Mud is a suspense film, though, not a meditation. And, like he does in Take Shelter, Nichols handles the suspense superbly. Mud builds and builds until I absolutely loved the characters in the film and didn't think I'd be able to bear it if harm came to any of them. And it is a tribute to Nichols' excellent filmmaking that in a film that isn't a meditation – in a film that is really just a good old-fashioned genre picture – I spent most of my time thinking about fatherhood, about what we want our fathers to be, about what we need from them, and of the fantasies we project onto them about their abilities.

Perhaps it isn't fair to compare Mud to The Place beyond the Pines – they are, after all, working on totally different things – but I saw them back to back and they are both so much about fatherhood that I will probably always think about them together.

Only God Forgives

The most interesting thing about Only God Forgives is its poster art.

The movie itself is stilted and ponderous; the sentiment is all overwrought and unearned; even the violence feels unwarranted and gratuitous. Nicolas Winding Refn (whose Drive we all liked so much two years ago) has attempted to make a film about color and light, but there isn't enough variation between the colors and lights for these elements to say anything. He is also attempting to make a Kim Ki-duk-style crime film, but Only God Forgives is only ever second- or third-rate Kim Ki-duk.

Before I say how much I hated this movie, I do want to say that Kristin Scott Thomas is excellent in this picture. I see any- and everything she is in and she is superb in all of her movies, but she absolutely tears into this role and it is totally awesome. She is a scheming, horrible human being with zero redemptive qualities, and she absolutely plays it to the hilt. It helps, too, that her character is the most fleshed out by the director. The other two main characters have so few lines that I never felt like I understood them even a little bit.

There is a lot to complain about with Only God Forgives, but for me the worst part was the terrible performance at the film's center by Vithaya Pansingarm. He walks like a toy soldier throughout the city of Bangkok, but NWR doesn't seem to mind, allowing his camera to linger as we watch Pansingarm walk around in his wooden way. This awkwardness is almost comical at times, but by mid-way through the movie I wasn't laughing any longer. I was just angry. What an extraordinary waste of time.

Bullhead

For a while, as I was watching Michaël Roskam's Bullhead, I thought that the film I was watching was a kind of artfully done melodrama – something like Götz Spielmann's Revanche, which got lots of great reviews and which I liked but didn't quite love. And for a while, Bullhead is precisely that: an artfully made melodrama.

And then something breaks in the film, or lurches. Roskam's film is able to describe – in a moment that I found totally unexpected and in clear filmic language – an event that is horrific and unspeakable. It is an event that is small, really, but which has an absolutely enormous emotional impact. This is something that will stay with me for a long time.

This event, however, doesn't really change the way that the film is attempting to function, and Bullhead stays a kind of melodrama, a film about a man's suffering and his inability to make his life work. The characters in the film's present day are all the same as the characters in the film's flashback sequences; they're just twenty years older now. It's a narrative we've seen before: young man cannot reconcile his own past; his past comes back to haunt him anyway.

Bullhead is also a crime thriller, a story about gangsters. And the flashback sequences, which happen quite early in the film, give us a backstory that makes whatever is to come  in the movie feel completely unpredictable. This is a man whose motives we do not understand, whose pain we cannot comprehend, whose actions we cannot anticipate. It makes the main character (his name is Jacky, but the police surveillance team calls him "Rundskop" / "Bullhead" in Flemish Dutch) absolutely terrifying. He's not scary in a traditional way either. He's scary rather like Ryan Gosling is in Drive – although this character is more lost, more confused, simply more stupid than Drive's protagonist.

Matthias Schoenaerts is absolutely phenomenal. I loved this character, and yet I knew he would do the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing. I never knew what he was going to do next, but I wished I could help him. This is a man who is simply caught in a trap – like so many cattle being led to slaughter. (The bulls are a central metaphor in Bullhead, but their metaphoric presence never overpowers, never feels contrived.)

And then, all of a sudden, Roskam's film is so much more than a simple or even a complex melodrama. It becomes clear in act three that everything from the film's first two acts was all about class. The people who carry the guns are the people in power, sure, but power differentials in mafia circles work in similar ways to power differentials in places like chic Belgian clubs where the owner makes you buy a dress shirt at the door or boutiques devoted entirely to luxuries like perfume.

Bullhead is a film made in Flanders, and the movie nods explicitly to the old tradition of Flemish landscape painting. Think of work like this:

Roskam shoots these kinds of landscapes (complete with bovine inhabitants) as a backdrop to his scenes with his protagonist, and each time he does this it felt to me as though he was recalling a history of the land in which his story took place. These views struck me not as nostalgic ways of looking at Flanders but rather as images of the Flanders that we think we know – tourist images from the history of European painting. The rest of the film is a battleground, filled with unimaginable violence and unexpected brutality.

I don't want to spoil Bullhead any more than I already have – and my narrative here omits the other character, le doulos, who is central to the film's story – but I want also to say that this film's ending is just superb. I needed to take a walk outside after it was over.

If you can handle the violence, I cannot recommend this film enough.

2012's Nominees: Part 7 of 10

Jane Eyre

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Michael O'Connor (The Duchess)

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell, Sally Hawkins, Su Elliot.

I can't remember this movie very well, to be honest. But I remember really liking it. The costumes are lovely, and I liked the horror-film style that Fukunaga brought to this Gothic novel. He, of course, does this at the expense of the novel's other elements, particularly its delightful comic moments. Still, it's an approach. With all of the flat approaches to older texts this year (I am thinking in particularly of Clooney's and Cronenberg's), at least Fukunaga's has a point of view. As for the costumes, they are interesting enough for the Academy's costume branch, but not enough for the full voting body. I don't think Mr. O'Connor can win; he's already won one anyway, so I won't feel too bad for him.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #23 out of 66

W.E.

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Arianne Phillips (Walk the Line)

Director: Madonna

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, James D'Arcy, Abbie Cornish, Oscar Isaac, Richard Coyle.

Here's another one I haven't seen. I have a lot of shame about this, but Madonna's movie just doesn't see fit to come to Tallahassee any time soon, and I have no choice. The costumes, however, look amazing, and though apparently no one likes W.E. as a film, I can't wait to see it. Truth be told, if I were voting, Phillips would get my vote first: there is, frankly, no reason for Sandy Powell to get another Oscar (especially when she is less than gracious about it) and Phillips's costumes are imaginative and lovely. Nevertheless, I expect Ms. Phillips will not go home with the Oscar on Sunday.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked

Anonymous

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Lisy Christl

Director: Roland Emmerich

Cast: Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Xavier Samuel, Sam Reed, Joely Richardson, Sebastian Armesto, Edward Hogg, David Thewlis, Sebastian Armesto, Rafe Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower.

This movie is terrible, and I actually don't understand why the costumes got singled out for honor except that I am sure they took quite a long time to build them all. They are not particularly interesting (they are clearly the poor man's version of Elizabeth or Shakespeare in Love), and they surely don't ask us to re-magine things we don't know about those styles. There are a few gems, but mostly I was bored. However, for a hilarious (at least we thought it was hilarious) live-blog of Anonymous, visit here.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #60 out of 66

Drive

1 Nomination

• Sound Editing

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Cary Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaac, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks.

The year's most ignored film. Now, if you recall, I wasn't as nutso over this film as everyone else, but Drive is very good, and Gosling is (as should be apparent to everyone at this point) a star. The thing is, this film is filled with excellent performances, terrifying moments, great chase sequences, and interestingly staged violence. And for this reason... I think it's going to win in the one category in which it's nominated. My theory behind this is, that as the Academy members go over their ballots, they will get to Sound Editing, see Drive at the top, and decide that they loved the film and wished they could've voted for it in other places. This happened with Black Hawk Down back in '02. I'm crossing my fingers.

Will Win: Sound Editing

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #25 out of 66

If I Had a Hammer...

Everyone, it seems, is talking about Drive, the film that was released this week from director Nicolas Winding Refn. People are loving it and hating it. I meant to see this movie on Friday, but then I went to a release party for a collection of poetry written by my friend Greg. This book, in fact. So I didn't get to the movie in time, but my roommate and our friend George both went to see Drive knowing nothing about it. They both loved it.

When I saw it on Sunday I was less enthusiastic, but I have been rather inarticulate about it so far. Anyway, I figured that I would post a conversation Greg and I had about Drive since it was his fault I missed the movie on Friday in the first place.

Me: Drive.
Greg: Did you love it?
Me: No. I liked it though.
Greg: Sad face.
Me: Hahaha. Oh. I didn't know I was supposed to love it. I loved all the violence, of course. And the scene with the hammer is amazing.
Greg: YES. I thought the elevator scene was the most beautiful moment I've seen in a theater in a while.
Me: Oh yeah. That was a great scene too. I am frustrated with slow-motion shots, though. They create a real pacing problem, I think.
Greg: Normally I would agree.
Me: I don't have a problem with the director showing his hand (slomo shots do that, I think), but I get frustrated with the importance slomo places on certain things. The kiss worked. But there is a lot of slomo in this movie.
Greg: I am in love with Ryan Gosling.
Me: Oh I am too. Why else did you like it?
Greg: The soundtrack, the slow pace, the opening sequence; it didn't give in. Albert Brooks. I believed that all of it happened. I wanna make someone swallow a bullet. Everyone was emotionally vulnerable.
Me: I liked all of these things as well. And I loved Bryan Cranston. And Oscar Isaac.
Greg: Yes.

Me: My objection is that the film wants two things at once. I think. It wants us to love Ryan Gosling. For us to think he's a hero. (The soundtrack spells it out: "...and a real hero...")
Greg: He is a hero. Every hero is flawed.
Me: Well, no, Greg. He's also deeply troubled. And frankly, a bit scary.
Greg: The world forces him to be scary.
Me: Does it really?
Greg: I think so.
Me: The shot in the elevator after the kiss is, I think, intended to make us think differently. He doesn't need to smash that guy's head in.
Greg: He would've killed both of them.
Me: Yes. I understand that. It is the excess of the violence that I think we are meant to read as troubling. I read it as troubling, at any rate.
Greg: Well yeah, but that wasn't long after he gets fucked over & those guys with the shotguns. Who wouldn't snap?
Me: I hear you. I do. But he does snap.

Greg: We create these action heroes who don't use guns because we don't want to see them kill anyone, so they have whips or tie people up or kung fu them, but the reality is they are hunting him down to kill him & the people he cares about. Part of me thinks it'd be less scary if he didn't snap & kick the guy's head in.
Me: I think you are completely correct. But I want to remain ambivalent about him.
Greg: Haha. That's fair.
Me: And the film wants me to think he is heroic. I think he does what is right. Definitely. But I don't think he is a hero per se.
Greg: By making him overly violent it's easier to dismiss his death at the end.
Me: I do not dismiss his death.
Greg: It's a way for the audience to get a pass out. You know what I mean.
Me: Yeah. Drive reminded me more than anything of Animal Kingdom from last year. The David Michôd movie. Did you see it?
Greg: I didn't catch it.
Me: Drive is slicker. And I liked Drive better. But it has this same obsession with slow-motion. And empty (if you ask me) silences.
Greg: I would've liked a little more dialogue. It seemed like a cheap screenplay, if that makes sense.
Me: It does.

Greg: I am bummed. it got great reviews but audience reviews have been bad. I don't think it'll have legs.
Me: Really?
Greg: Yeah. Cinemascore was like a C-. The trailers were very misleading.
Me: Oh! Wow! Everyone I've talked to has loved it.
Greg: Because you know educated people.
Me: I don't know any educated people.

You can read more from Gregory Sherl (about Drive and John Cusack and poetry and fucking) in a delightful interview with Roxane Gay over at HTMLgiant.