1. Napoleon (2023, Ridley Scott)
2. The Zone of Interest (2023, Jonathan Glazer)
3. The Killer (2023, David Fincher)
4. Barbie (2023, Greta Gerwig)
5. Saltburn (2023, Emerald Fennell)
6. Coup de Chance (2023, Woody Allen)
7. Beau Is Afraid (2023, Ari Aster)
8. Priscilla (2023, Sofia Coppola)
9. Asteroid City (2023, Wes Anderson)
10. May December (2023, Todd Haynes)
I didn’t know anything about Emerald Fennell before Promising Young Woman (2020), and I still don’t really. But I went to see Promising Young Woman in the theater and I’m glad I did, because I’m still like fascinated by it. I’m impossible though. Like even though I’ve vehemently sworn off David O. Russell I’m now drawn back to Joy (2015) because I can’t help but be—it shouldn’t work but that makes me like it even more.
Saltburn (2023, Emerald Fennell, 1.33:1) is a toxic comedy of manners class conscious morality satire chamber piece that takes a familiar premise, then subsequently takes our notions of whom we might empathize with, what feelings we associate with doing so, what judgements we might form about them, and then mischievously plays a trick on us.
Most of the time I don’t think movies have messages. But Saltburn is excused. Whether I could articulate this message or not (I’m not gonna try because I don’t wanna spoiler), it stayed with me long after leaving the theater. My two favorite things about Saltburn are the decadence fantasy-wish fulfillment and the cast, but especially Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant.
The decadence exists both at Oxford and Saltburn manor. And it’s dark in both instances. At school we care about the kids. But at Saltburn it’s how eccentric the entire family and staff are that makes it so enjoyable. The progression of the narrative always had me uneasy wondering where exactly this whole thing was going, and that intrigue is crucial to its thriller aspect. And as far as its style, I could think of many comparisons that I could make, but why bother?
11/21/2023 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
DCP
Ridley Scott is at his best with Gladiator (2000) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005). It’s like when some say how by the 60s the collapse of the studio system was due to the bloated, big budget historical spectacle period piece costume dramas that Scott found a way to revive them in something like the sexy ultraviolent almost like where Verhoeven seemed to be headed throughout the 80s-90s way, but Scott adds his own boyish sense of adventure and morality to them. Heaven is one of my favorite movies. It’s proof for me that a Hollywood historical war and romance epic can clock a nimble 3 hours and never drag. Unlike, say, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, Martin Scorsese), which feels oppressively slow and neither the romance nor the violence are we meant to enjoy; it’s as if that movie is like a master forcing us to be held next to our own shit and suffer its stink because we made a mess on the rug.
Other than Heaven the only other Hollywood movie I can think of that’s so much fun is the Napoleonic wars set 3hr 28min War and Peace (1956, King Vidor). I can watch that movie, or even just jump in anywhere, and find that perfect blend of entertainment I'm always in the mood for. Vidor’s epic revels in its untethered freedom from adhering too closely to either Tolstoy or history. And like Gladiator and Heaven it’s fun, not to be taken too seriously, and has that boyish sense of heroism.
Napoleon (2023, Ridley Scott) has got a boyish sense of villainy. As a biopic, we get less of a sense of frivolity than either Gladiator or Heaven. But what we do get is an oil on canvas where light can be a thing of beauty.
And the battle scenes, especially the Battle of Austerlitz, command a formidable victory of epic spectacle. There’s something surgical about the staging of the battles, immaculate, precise, and horrifying. Napoleon reminds us that movies were supposed to have been made to be shown in a theater. Napoleon as a film is also less fodder for popcorn, plot and characters than it is one man’s bloody, unwieldy sense of ambition. We’re certainly in the era for those. This movie is cold, so cold—and I love it.
11/21/2023 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
DCP
You would think May December (2023, Todd Haynes) is Sirkian melodrama, right? It has persecution from society, traditional feminine domestic roles/space, and the self-reflexive construct of artifice throughout. But it’s not entirely so, because it doesn’t seek to tear your heart out in that overly effusive attack on your emotions kind of way. And that’s why Todd Haynes is so good at doing his own thing—beautiful perfect make believe little dioramas where the character is just a little deranged enough to be fun but still hold up a mirror to show us ourselves.
And because I love Todd Haynes so much, I love Julianne Moore as GRACIE. It’s through Gracie the film is able to achieve its fundamental moral ambiguity. And if you’re open to trying hard enough to not merely discount her as crazy, you could begin to appreciate the strengths that contrast her weaknesses, and how the dreams of being happy contrast her nightmare reprehensible behaviors. Yeah sure, this is in fact a triangle protagonist thing and I should care about Natalie Portman as ELIZABETH and Charles Melton as JOE, but really I only care about Gracie.
Okay I know maybe I have a problem with decoding symbolism. But I can’t resist here the temptation to just sketch out: think about Joe gently nurturing butterflies from chrysalis to monarch; Elizabeth choosing a snake, a “kind that doesn’t bite,” to play her Gracie; against Gracie prowling the forest flanked by her 2 hunting dogs, with a shotgun, stalking an array of cute furry little woodland innocents.
The genre of May December should be called something like elevated melodrama. Or, I’d like even better something like arthouse melodrama, specifically because of the way it uses a Michel Legrand cue from The Go-Between (1971, Joseph Losey) much in the way Paranoid Park (2007, Gus Van Sant) uses the Nino Rota excerpt from Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini). The way that Legrand theme is used constantly shifts the tone of or our interpretation of shots. The biggest one maybe is right when the movie starts and there’s a slow zoom on Gracie lamenting they might not have enough hot dogs and the devastating music cue tells us maybe this is more tragic to her than we know? Or maybe this movie is disconnecting us from the melodrama code to get us to think about the art? Or maybe this movie is hilarious? Whatever it is, it’s fun too.
The setting is one of the factors contributing to another great strength in May December, which is how original this material feels and allows us to forget that real life story it vaguely resembles. (I know this is irrelevant but I love Savannah and when Elizabeth interviews Gracie’s ex at that coffee shop I freaked out because in real life it’s Gallery coffee shop and I always go there as much as I can I love it.) When they mention living on an island (more symbolism in the vein of Sirk) it’s gotta be Tybee, and, uh, how can I put this, mostly people with money live there and it’s kind of uh, quaint—perfect. Also yes, the downtown Savannah stuff is gorgeous. But that night exterior where there happens to be a tour conducted in the background where we overhear snippets of anecdotal history gruesome details of a hanging told almost like it’s a fun fact is bonkers.
May December is about each of its 3 main characters, and too nuanced and balanced for it to be worth me trying to outline. I see their flaws as much as I empathize with them. They’re all too human. And it’s as much a trashy tabloid premise as it is an elegantly executed prestige woman’s picture.
10/17/2023 Landmark Midtown Art Cinema
Atlanta, GA
DCP
The Virgin Suicides (1999) 1.66:1, Lost in Translation (2003) 1.85:1, Marie Antoinette (2006) 1.85:1, Somewhere (2010) 1.85:1, The Bling Ring (2013) 1.85:1, The Beguiled (2017) 1.66:1
In Priscilla (2023, Sofia Coppola) 1.85:1, the inserts are better than the movie. But it totally works to its strength. In this film setting is everything. And Graceland is Versailles. But the inserts; period authentic jars of Noxzema, Chanel no. 5, mascara in one assorted on a bathroom counter; in another, an airplane ticket on Pan-Am; porcelain miniature figurines in another; this is the film. We even get a montage where it all culminates in this connecting notably Sofia Coppola's longtime passion for Polaroids and it clicking this is probably the time they were first introduced into the market. Coppola curates the details of the setting as would be featured in a magazine, or adorning a bedroom wall, or a scrapbook. It’s who she is. It’s her artistic identity.
And as in most of her movies, her perspective is that of a young woman embarking on something like a fairytale exploration of a world of decadence, fame, and idealized romance that upon proving illusory allow her to become empowered and glimpse the kind of wisdom wrought through hard-earned life experience. In Priscilla it’s all so gorgeously quaint. Priscilla is an object. She’s Elvis’ idealization of a teenbride who only exists to be there for him to cuddle when he’s lonely, dress up, make-up, and do her hairstyles how he wants, and keep her in a dollhouse—she’s his Barbie. And here’s where it begins to become apparent that in this dream of make-believe the princess is just any ordinary girl, which is to say she could be any ordinary girl. And in her own way, Coppola tells the story she wants and has the immensely talented aptitude to understand that it’s not her burden to tell this as a documentary.
Sofia Coppola cinematically builds Priscilla through ephemeral, poignant moments of contemplative melancholy. There’s never anything melodramatic about the way she treats the material. The hues are soft and diffuse, as is the atmos—mist instead of shadows.
Priscilla is also a film where the 60s pop songs become this kind of alchemy collage. But the original score is also this percussion-based lullaby xylophones, celesta, or something like I don’t know: bells, glass, chimes, music box pretty, delicate, and soft like everything else in the movie.
This film isn’t detached from the heart of its protagonist. Yet there does seem to be something indicative of a distance between the life she wanted (and we want for her) and the one she gets (and the version of it Coppola has made into a movie). Coppola is so confident in her perspective that the artifice of it knowingly depicts the world used to ultimately define the characters she’s created. And through this it is then a matter of familiarizing ourselves with the cold inescapable maze of what’s left out as key to these truthful renditions. And it does help that Priscilla throws in just enough details you probably aren’t familiar with or don’t see coming to make it that much more fun.
11/03/2023 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
DCP
Fincher recap: Early includes Se7en (1995), The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999) and Panic Room (2002). Zodiac (2007) is pivotal. The Social Network (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014) is mid. The Killer (2023) is late. The films I’ve left out are irrelevant.
Oh my god yes. The Killer is a return to greatness. It’s a revenge-o-matic pretty much standard assassin genre entry with an existential loner. Or think of it as an arthouse John Wick.
Its narrative takes a slightly askew take in that the conflicts its protagonist encounters are mostly, how can I say this, minor (or what I'm really trying to say is not conventional Hollywood familiar). But just when you think it starts to become predictable, it ducks you. Its tone is very quiet and takes its time. But it never drags. And its center is its protagonist's vo.
There’s more handheld camera in the first half of this than every other Fincher film combined. Its customary Fincher palette often is an array of murky yellow, cyan, and green hues. And have you ever wondered what the difference is between a subjective camera shot and an objective one? I have struggled to understand this. Like is a pov the only example of subjective and everything else is objective? Anyway. In the Paris portion of the movie, when THE KILLER listens to The Smiths the music is clearly mixed upfront when we see what he’s seeing (subjective) and intercuts with shots where we’re with him and then the music is muffled and distant (objective), a great learning tool.
The Killer sees Fincher having matured. As if it’s an entirely unrecognizable departure from the person who made Fight Club. Fassbender as The Killer dressing like a typical nondescript mannequin from an upscale mall, at various times seen eating McDonald’s, clutching a paper Starbucks cup, and ordering an Amazon order from his wireless device is the epitome of what Jack’s inner voice loathes. But he’s cool. Even him only listening to The Smiths says a lot. Who doesn’t love Morrissey, but they wouldn't exactly indicate anything other than mainstream at this point. Yet most enjoyably The Killer’s that Fincher brand of smug, efficient, and knows how to deliver black comedy one-liners. He’s what you want if you want Fincher.
I love The Killer. It’s simple although immensely rewarding. And it’s the first time I’ve seen a Fincher film that didn’t seem to be striving for the grandiose operatic heights he’s heretofore constantly aimed for.
10/27/2023 Midtown Arts Cinema
Atlanta, GA
DCP
You ask me chronologically the greatest American director goes: John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, then Martin Scorsese. With each of them you can take any decade of their 50 years or more careers and find major works (that hold up) spanning each decade. Who’ll be the next one to follow?
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, Martin Scorsese) is perfect. It’s not so much long as it’s the length it has to be for the significance of its historical impact to be felt. Its thematic undercurrent might be the love of money corrupts. And what an American theme it is.
It doesn’t take long to establish its core conflict: white man is gonna take everything from the Osage. Yet it could also be said that it’s not only the white man who is corrupted by the love of money. I can’t seem to be able to overlook the main Osage characters, the sisters MOLLIE, ANNA, and RETA, all marry white men; something that they know wouldn’t be possible if they didn’t have money. It’s hard for us to accept the logic behind the actions of most of the main characters, as I’m sure it was hard for them to make any sense of why they themselves all did what they did. And isn’t that what it means to be human?
There’s something inevitable about the fates of the characters. Like there’s some sense of there’s nothing they could have done any different even if they wanted to. The pace of the story in Killers of the Flower Moon is measured: a steady dose of unendurable traumatic misery. In many ways it’s a film with a very narrow dramatic focus.
But Jack Fisk’s production design is what’s big. The booming town is most impressive when viewed from within. The new money extravagance is depicted down to the most smallest detail—the designs of Mollie’s China for example.
And finally, yes DiCaprio as ERNEST BURKHART carries the picture as a himbo (he adequately portrays with a slouch) who breezes into a life of leisure and privilege that gets him in way over his head so gradually it’s kind of poetic. But the final jab Killers of the Flower Moon hit me with is its moral condemnation of both white man and Osage who don’t work for a living. That’s what makes it relevant beyond only serving as merely a historic artifact. It’s a corrosive critique of the American way of life.
10/19/2023 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
DCP
10/13/2023 Plaza Theatre
Atlanta, GA
Anaglyph DCP
I Am Not a Wolf, Dan Sheehan
Almost certainly the last book deal that will ever be given to somebody for having a funny Twitter / Instagram account, I Am Not a Wolf is funnier, sadder, and deeper than it needed to be, and is easily one of the best humor books I have read. It's formally playful—no spoilers!—and as far as I can tell only recycles one and a half jokes from Twitter as it takes you through the surprisingly nuanced challenges of navigating work, roommate relations, public transit, post-work drinks, dating, family, and—again, without spoilers—resisting capitalism in the human world while being a wolf, lightly disguised but so far undiscovered.
So, a relatively light touch on many, perhaps most, of the heaviest topics our day-to-days give us. ("Can you call it the big foist? I'm fucking overwhelmed!")
I keep thinking about the Principia Discordia:
Some excerpts from an interview with Malaclypse the Younger by THE GREATER METROPOLITAN YORBA LINDA HERALD-NEWS-SUN-TRIBUNE-JOURNAL-DISPATCH-POST AND SAN FRANCISCO DISCORDIAN SOCIETY CABAL BULLETIN AND INTERGALACTIC REPORT & POPE POOP.and, of course:
GREATER POOP: Are you really serious or what?
MAL-2: Sometimes I take humor seriously. Sometimes I take seriousness humorously. Either way it is irrelevant.
GP: Maybe you are just crazy.
M2: Indeed! But do not reject these teaching as false because I am crazy. The reason that I am crazy is because they are true.
GP: Is Eris true?
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2: I don't know man, I didn't do it.
A SERMON ON ETHICS AND LOVE
One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
"O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!"
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
"But nobody Wants it! Everybody hates it."
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.
And I keep thinking about the Illuminatus! trilogy's thought that "it's not true if it doesn't make you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you cry". This feels like the book's goal, and at its best, it succeeds.
Special song of accompaniment with similar power in and of and from mundanity: "Spud Infinity", Big Thief.
Down the River Unto the Sea, Walter Mosely
After the success of last month's read of this series' second book about Joe King Oliver, I tried the first book, with nearly as much enjoyment. To kick off the series, Mosely gives us a private eye who was a cop, then got sent up to Riker's for a sex crime he didn't commit, where he was brutalized both by brutes and by a prolonged stretch in solitary confinement. Ten years later, he's adrift, a bit, getting by but engaged in nothing, when he gets a couple cases dropped on him that, in time, reconnect him with his passion and evolve him into new relationships with his trauma and the law.
It felt like a prequel, rather than the beginning, but that may have been an accident of order. I liked this one, but less than the second.
Art & Fear, David Bayles, Ted Orland
I'm taking another drawing class, and this short, odd, book was recommended as an extra thing to read as part of it. Starting enormously promisingly by staking a claim to be about "ordinary art", it quickly deflates, concerning itself mainly with the issues and anxieties of professionals in and around the art economy. Where it avoids this narrow focus—the "free up time for making art by skipping committee meetings at work" passage is a conspicuous and irritating example of this focus*—it contains many helpful and even insightful reflections on the processes of making stuff, and thoughtful, heartfelt observations about the many, many self-imposed obstacles one can ... impose between oneself and those processes.
Does a lot of it read like self-help? It does. But the whole thing is maybe 120 pages long (or about three hours long, in the audio version I got from the library), so it's not particularly onerous. And while their version of "ordinary art" may not be mine**, somebody interested in making things can certainly find something in here that will be of use in that pursuit.***
* Asking oneself "Who is allowed to do this opting-out, and who shows up to have that work non-escapably assigned to them?" is something nobody involved in the anecdote that undergirds this advice seems to have asked.
** The definition they offer is something like "everything less than Mozart" which is ... not helpful. I found myself redefining the term mentally as something along the lines of "things made in a non-professional(-ized) environment
*** A comparably helpful piece of advice, taken from "Nuts and Bolts" from Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town:
When young it's normal to fear losing a good line or phrase and never finding anything comparable again. Carry a small pocket-size notebook and jot down lines and phrases as they occur. This may or may not help you write good poems, but it can help reduce your anxiety.
Know what the difference is between the religions Catholic and Baptist are? I don’t. I just know they both believe in Jesus. A ton of religions believe in Jesus though. Cinematically, Catholicism has always been my favorite religion. From Buñuel and Hitchcock to Coppola and Scorsese there’s really no question of any rival Christian based religion holding a candle to it.
But that was a long time ago. The first thing that struck me about The Exorcist: Believer (2023, David Gordon Green) is how in keeping with the expanding inclusivity of contemporary society in addition to a Catholic priest, adds Baptist, Pentecostal, and Hoodoo to the mix. I guess like the cool thing about it is it leads to a view of spirituality with a focus more on people and their faith instead of overwrought adherence to any specific religious institution. Although now that I think about it something else cool about the earlier Exorcist films is that Catholicism is kind of scary—great fit.
For fans of David Gordon Green, on display here find his expertise in casting (with the help of longtime “specialty casting” agents John Williams and Karmen Leech) authentic talent for both the homeless camp and the mental hospital. In particular, the actor playing the HOMELESS GEEZER (Eddie Craddock) is great. When he first pops up as the cops are investigating the school after the girls go missing, his dialogue goes something like “We ain’t seen nothing. We ain’t done nothing. We ain’t know nothing,” is way fun. It’s the care taken with characters in general that Green knows goes a long way in creating his cinematic worlds for the stories to exist in.
10/05/2023 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
DCP
High school is where you learn everything that really matters about how our society functions. And no one ever really changes. Sex, money, popularity, clique. And when we see these characters depicted on screen, their age always seems to betray a worldview designed by minds much older. So for audiences, if you’re young it’s a social diagram, and if you’re old it’s nostalgia.
If The Breakfast Club (1985, John Hughes) is the first modern high school comedy, then Heathers (1988, Michael Lehmann) is postmodern. High school comedies aren’t about themes, nor do they carry a message. They’re all built upon class systems. And desire. Fitting in and fucking—and both of these amount to acceptance or rejection. And it’s not so much that you look at high school comedies to be new, because the characterization of a contemporary adolescent is already inherently new. You look for them to be funny. And in the end, like the characters, accept or reject who you see yourself as in life.
Bottoms (2023, Emma Seligman) is an R rated teen comedy with this perfect mix of peculiar-cute transgressive, subversive yet ultimately saccharine indie little darling of one of those movies that become an extension of a really witty comedy duo. Whatever stupid pseudo literary labels you can throw around like postmodern, surreal, magic realism, go ahead and start there, because it’s headed in the right direction to describe the way Bottoms has fun playing around with a bunch of stuff that’s usually not stuff you’d play around with.
First, Rachel Sennott being tough has to be the funniest outbursts of how effective Bottoms proves to be as a comedy. The premise is she wants to start a fight club. And once that narrative motor starts up, her character taking on this alter-ego where she’s some criminally aggressive violent alpha bent on forming her own militia of girl fighters becomes essentially why this movie is so comedically effective. I can’t get over her first speech she gives with her broken nose and black eyes. Something key here is that her character is pretending to be this badass, in much the same way the movie kind of becomes a watered down generic Marvel style fight choreography version way of pretend depicting violence; which is fine. Here, cute cartoon ultraviolence is fun in a way that Fincher explicitly stylized gnarly graphic would otherwise be just ugly disturbing.
And continuing to describe the dark comedy aspects, there are a few supporting characters who play with a variety of deranged, homicidal, criminally insane, psychopath types, yet wholly remain sweet, fun kids for us to laugh with. In Bottoms, bringing bombs to school is funny. And I’m not being sarcastic about any of this. Why can’t this stuff be funny? Bringing a bomb to school = funny. Bringing guns to school = not funny.
If Rachel Sennott kind of represents the character who does what’s wrong, who’s like way funny and everything, then morally Ayo Edebiri represents the character who does what’s right. Ayo Edebiri’s character is funny in a different way. She’s some idealized adorkable loser who does what’s right and gets rewarded for it.
What can I close with? Ever since I saw Charli XCX at South By touring for her Vroom Vroom EP, I’ve been obsessed favorite singer with her, so her music, especially the “Party 4 U” third act stuff endears me to this whole thing. And what is it about the football players and their mindless naïve solidarity with one another makes them so Heathers funny and easy to forgive? When’s the last time the character who’s supposed to be the hot girl was actually as distractingly hot as Kaia Gerber? What’s the body count in this movie? When can I see it again?
8/22/2023 Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
Corpus Christi, TX
DCP
Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius, Nick Hornby
Found this slim volume on my library app while scrounging for something, anything to help jog me out of a non-reading rut dry spell. Interestingly, it's a short, though one wouldn't say "spare", ode to length, a paean to prodigious productivity, the massive outputs of Prince and Dickens.
It's characteristic Hornby: easy to be swayed by the facility of the prose and mildly overrate how much it has to say; about equally easy to be annoyed by the glibness and then mildly underrate how much it might have to say. I think it's a good overview of two artists I don't think about much, and probably should think about more.
There could be fewer lists—I would definitely have cut the accounting of shops named after Dickens books in London—and maybe one fewer instance of "if you listen to this or that Prince double album you'll find a song you'll really like for the first time" but those may not jump out to you if you don't read it as I did, straight through, waiting for the dealership to resolve not quite all of your car's issues.
A personal quibble I had with Hornby's wide-eyed recounting of Dickens' year where he serialized two novels simultaneously while still banging out shorter fiction and journalism—"how could anyone hold all this in mind at the same time!?"—is that it seems not too distinct from the practices of not a few classic genre writers: Philip Dick published four novels a year for 12 consecutive years while producing short stories by the pound, for example, to say nothing of early Robert Silverberg (for which see Hell's Cartographers here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/atmbxyfqiihcdps/Hells_Cartographers.pdf?dl=0).
I enjoyed the read, and it certainly got me thinking at least a bit, so what could be wrong with that?
According to last.fm, I've listened to 9 Prince songs in the past three years, probably mostly after watching and adoring Sign O' the Times (sic), a truly wonderful concert film.
Every Man a King, Walter Mosley
Tremendous fun, a very American private eye, noir-adjacent mystery story about Joe King Oliver, a Black ex-cop in New York City who lost that job on a frame-up caught up in a big batch of troubles, including his ex-wife's husband in jail and his grandmother's industrialist boyfriend asking him to look into an alt-right leader's situation.
I'm often at sea when a book's plot gets convoluted or the incidents pile up too high for me to see through, and especially as I look back a few weeks later, that seems the case here, but the heavily seasoned prose and the gravitas of the characterizations carried me through. Mosley employs a lot of epithets—an interlocutor will be "he" about as often as he'll be "the seething ex-con" or "the weighty slum-lord" or similar—and it's a device that locks you into Oliver's perspective and judgment in an interest-keeping and enjoyment-maintaining way. Great characters, stylized prose, convoluted plots, thought-provoking politics, what else would I want?
Special credit to one of the best audiobook performances I've ever heard, from Dion Graham.
Noodles recommended this one, and I'm glad she did! I still owe her a conversation about the way Oliver lists the physical attributes of everybody he meets, with particular vim reserved for the ladies.
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
A re-read, after finishing the quite-good TV adaptation. I liked this a lot better than the first time through, and I liked it well enough that time.
Unsettling to hear the word "pandemic" so many times. I've heard the "criticism"—more a "whine"—that 'theater kids won't save the world' about this book a few times, and after my revisit I'm even more convinced it's a pointless and inaccurate assessment. This isn't about theater kids saving the world, it's about theater kids finding a way to be theater kids after the end of the world, and the hows and whys of that, and I appreciate that non-grimdark, non-hyper-masculine approach to a post-apocalyptic story. Sure, some of our shared future will involve scavenged gasoline, black leather, fast cars danger fire and knives, but some will also involve foraging, first aid, listening, hugs (and knives).
Like The Glass Hotel, the first few scenes took me ages to get into and through before I acclimated and was able to pick up my pace. Odd.
Great revist, though. I'm thinking Mandel is one of our best right now.
Ordinary Love and Good Will, Jane Smiley
Read these two novellas almost straight through while camping, and found them wonderful. I feel, and I'm not sure why, a little defensive about how much I liked them—white, non-experimental, middle-class, apolitical, etc., maybe—but I'm not saying everybody should read stories like these, or write only stories like these, only that I read them, and was moved by them. "Ordinary Love" is about a woman and her adult kids, and their relationships with their dad / her ex-husband, about the way family members punish one another for failures and inadequacies even and especially when they don't know each other very well or are missing important information, and how it's usually women who end up with the short end of the stick, even when it's another woman handing that stick over. "Goodwill" (or "Good Will", it's presented inconsistently) is about a man who tries to take himself and his wife and their child out of the world to a homestead they alone inhabit, sometime in the late 1980s in Pennsylvania. It's also about the limits of control, and the many ways living, working, and being alone can work ... for a while, before the essential herd-animal nature of humanity shows up with a problem no individual or family can really fix, or even handle.
Do you even know what surrealism is? I don’t have a clue. All that comes to mind I’ve realized is Salvador Dalí. And the only thing that comes to mind when I think of Dalí is a melting clock. And of course like everyone else I grew up hearing about how Dalí, Lorca, and Buñuel met in Paris during the 20s and began the surrealist movement together.
Do you even know what surrealism is in cinema? I don’t have a clue. Is David Lynch surreal? What’s the difference between weird and surrealist? In cinema, the surrealist equivalent of a melting clock is the last movie Buñuel made in Mexico.
The Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Buñuel) is an elegant bourgeois chamber comedy. It’s pivotal in Buñuel’s career in that it concludes his savage animal infatuation brutality Mexican period and introduces the sophisticated, light, airy, mannered, masterworks of his late French films. Aren’t both periods separately and distinctively surrealist?
The premise is the genius of The Exterminating Angel and what makes it surrealist. It’s so simple. A group of wealthy dinner guests prepare to depart the home where their gathering took place and are unable to leave, but none of them can understand why not.
If you’re curious, the reveal is that LETICIA, “THE VALKYRIE” (Silvia Pinal), near the end of the film arranges everyone in their original positions they were in several days ago before this whole mess started. And if you rewatch it, you can see that 15 minutes into the movie when BLANCA says she’s tired and ready to go home, NÓBILE counteracts her wishes and says something like how can you be tired this is the most pleasant and desirable hour of the night. He violated the code of manners. And the only way to correct this unforgivable offense is to instead agree that yes it is late everyone lets go home.
Some of the Buñuel highlights are, for one, when Leticia goes in that closet with all of those fancy expensive looking vases, she’s going in there to take a shit right? And though pretty much most of the movie is how these aristocracy all fall apart, when the doctor says something about how at this point painkillers are as important as food, I mean it’s making fun of how desperate rich people are to use drugs they certainly don’t need. But this also points to in general, just how quick and how drastically they all fall apart. And another funny jab is the way the upper class's view on sexual promiscuity is backwards, as when the other ladies chastise the Valkyrie for being a virgin and perverse for holding onto that object.
I love the sheep and the black bear spontaneously ascending the grand staircase, and especially the dolly past the entire group reaction shot. Is the closet dripping blood that turns out to be the adultery couple supposed to say something like the link between sex and death? And yes the coda is insanely perfect hilarious Buñuel. A Catholic mass, and the clergy in all of their finery are suddenly unable to leave, as one suggests to the group: should we wait for the faithful to leave first? And cue a flock of sheep to run in to the church from off the street where mass hysteria and some martial law agency fires off a storm of gunfire. Now that’s Buñuel going out with a bang.
The Young One (1960, Luis Buñuel) is a little different from the Buñuel films that precede it in the sense that it handles social issues in an overt way that builds an increasingly disturbing tension, which results in giving it more of an exploitation feel. And it’s also set in America, specifically the Deep South.
The narrative begins in the first act by introducing TRAVER, a black man on the run, and EVIE, “the young one,” he meets along his attempt to escape. She’s an underaged, newly orphaned girl taken in by the game warden MILLER who grooms her to acquiesce to his advances. The second act sees Traver hunted by the racist Miller. The midpoint is the two men having a conversation, in which they learn that they both served in the US army in Italy together during WWII. But they don’t come any closer to resolving their conflict. In act three, around the point we may forget it’s a Buñuel film, the Baptist REVEREND FLEETWOOD pays a call on them and discovers that Evie is being victimized by Miller, along with additionally uncovering Miller’s unlawful plans underway to punish the now revealed to be completely innocent Traver. In the unsettling conclusion, Miller seems to begrudgingly help Traver to freedom as some bargaining tactic to cloak his long-term strategy to let the reverend take Evie, only so he can come back for her and make her his wife. This whole movie feels gross.
Up until now Buñuel’s greatest strengths have been his subtlety, his use of the language of cinema through subtext, motifs conveying an art that communicates the hidden emotional nuances and moral conflicts embodied by individuals battling with desires, and motives they have trouble identifying. But not this movie.
However, there are plenty of attempts by Buñuel wherein he still brings his best efforts at heightening the material through his own cinematic language. I’m just not sure it matters. It’s set on a fictional island like a few other Buñuel films around this time. The island is always a place of despair with Buñuel. And because it’s a game reserve it does tend to feel like a garden of Eden with all its exotic creatures. And maybe I’m reaching, but Evie (Eve?) steps on a tarantula with her heavy boots on that could allude to Eve crushing the serpent under her heel. And yeah Evie and Miller being the only two people on this island. Also, when Traver meets Evie she has an apple, but he is the one who eats it—to show how she lacks any knowledge of the truth of man’s carnal nature? Following soon after, right after she’s taken a shower, there’s this insert of her in a towel adjusting her cleavage that causes Traver to inform her she should be more careful.
It’s clear from early on that The Young One is no paradise. In this movie, even more disquieting is a scene where Miller dresses Evie up and has her put on a pair of high heels that are way too big for her. His whole thing is thinking if he takes her shopping enough she'll be cool with everything. At the break into act three, we also see a torrential rainstorm around when the reverend shows up, which may indicate some kind of condemnation. And finally, the film is bookended by Traver finding a steel animal trap that foreshadows him walking right into it near the end of the movie.
Why have all the Buñuel movies up to this point that depict such lurid, taboo, fetishized areas of man’s questionable morality in relation to his nature been so fun except this one? Is it just me? Like what about that sequence at night where a raccoon in a chicken coop preys on a live chicken, shown in all its gory detail? It starts out cute but turns into something else entirely. Yet as cynical as the movie is, and the way its ending points to the threat of Evie being pursued by Miller, the shot of her right before leaving the island, skipping in her giant high heels gives some hope. Like maybe there is the possibility that there’s enough of her innocence left that she’ll still be able to enjoy what remains of her childhood.
Barbie (2023, Greta Gerwig) is the best film of the year. It’s an astounding work of genius. I didn’t know what to expect going in. The only thing that drew me to it initially was its plastic pink pastel dreamy commitment to an entirely artifice based aesthetic, which I’d only previously encountered in The Cat in the Hat (2003, Bo Welch). (But that time it was a lavender and green palette, and didn’t offer much else beyond that.)
But it’s foremost a sympathetic and modern approach to gender politics, feminism, and finding one’s self, sense of purpose, and place in life. It’s also fun. And hilarious. Gorgeous. And works as a dazzlingly choreographed musical. Sure, its audience is little girls. Yet it speaks to youth culture in general, in fact ultimately with a Generation X sensibility.
The midpoint, where BARBIE hopelessly wallows in the defeat of her existential crisis, 7 hours of looking at the pics of all of her friends engagements on Instagram, eating a whole family sized bag of Starburst, and watching the BBC Pride and Prejudice evokes a relatable truth. And America Ferrara’s monologue in the second act is an indelible feminist tract that rallies us to see the truth about the hypocrisies, perceptions, roles, expectations, and hardships placed on women in a way that’s not preachy or accusatory but insightful and progressively empathetic.
And the ending is powerful. The whole act structure of Barbie is really well done actually. But the conclusion had me, entirely won over by its existential philosophical dialogues. When Barbie says she wants to be the thing that imagines, and not the thing that is imagined, isn’t that straight out of Schopenhauer? His refinement of the Cartesian? The subject that cognizes the object? And its resolution: she’s the idea not a person—the idea, isn’t that what Plato means by the imperishable forms that, multiplied by way of space and time, are made partially visible in countless individual perishable things? Barbie as Cinema as the thing in itself.
Oppenheimer (2023, Christopher Nolan) succeeds in telling a narratively complex story about a complex historical figure. It took me a little while, but my conclusion is that the black and white scenes are from the perspective of STRAUSS (who wants to bet Robert Downey Jr. wins an Oscar for best supporting actor?) and the color stuff is from OPPENHEIMER’S.
Seeing Barbie with its perfect trad three act structure, then going to Oppenheimer is jarring. Oppenheimer right away reminds you oh yeah no credits, no set up, no inciting incident—this movie doesn’t wait for you to catch up. Oppenheimer jumps around all over its timeline. It's a mosaic of vignettes. And it’s got a relentless energy that’s punctuated with loud explosive sound cues and wall to wall epic score accompaniment. Nolan’s movies sound like if you went to see godheadSilo live. He’s the loudest rock band of cinema. Another funny thing is if you see Barbie first, there’s an attack on the patriarchy and this running joke about how the manliest thing is to ride horses; and Oppenheimer is excessively patriarchal and yeah Oppy rides a horse in many a scene.
While the bulk of Oppenheimer feels like litigation, science, politics, and espionage, all told through a bunch of white guys talking, it’s a question of how cinematic are all of these facts? How does it all come together as a movie and does it work? I think so. It’s grand, and it’s grand because it’s about the biggest thing ever to happen in the history of mankind, and happened such a relatively short time ago. And maybe I’m too selfish self-centered for even asking this but all the talk about how the nuclear bomb is the end of the world, am I the only one thinking uhh I’m still here watching this right now so…?
I know no one wants spoilers, but worth mentioning the subjective cinematic interludes are truly inspired effective. And yeah the nuclear stuff, but also the sex stuff with Florence Pugh, especially. You know, from the point of view of Oppenheimer’s wife, I won’t say anymore.
It’s looking more like Buñuel views the world as full of systemic corruption, greed, and hate. And that no one finds happiness with their true love because either they settle for the convenient choice, or it turns out to just be another illusory sexual infatuation.
But how often he tests this theory against individuals full of hope, innocence, romance, and ideals. And in the end they come out either stripped of these virtues, and are all the stronger for it; or, they are destroyed.
Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959, Luis Buñuel) is a political allegory set on the fictional island of Ojeda, where there is no escape from. This trap is seen geographically, politically, and embodied narratively/morally through the protagonist VÁSQUEZ who seems to be stuck in more of a circular than linear path. His arc is that he trades his scruples for political leverage, but to what avail?
Along the way these other characters, INÉZ and GUAL are what really shape this film into more of a Buñuel form. Inéz and Vásquez get into this romantic affair and fall in love. She’s the widow of the former governor of Ojeda, this dude VARGAS, who gets assassinated early on. When Gual steps in as new governor, he thinks she’s easy, yet she doesn’t welcome his advances. So he’s insulted, and that’s what in turn leads to a struggle for sexual power that clearly underlines what’s going on politically.
After his rejection, there’s this great imagery done with Gual and his pet birds. He starts playing dirty and forces Inéz to strip for him in his office. And as she’s undressed, he summons a clerical orderly type of his to humiliate her, instead of having sex with her. And this whole time he fondles his bird Carlota. Obviously the birds symbolize him needing to possess a delicate object of submission. But nice touch is he asks Inéz to keep her stockings and heels on.
And there’s this other scene between Inéz and Gual where he’s going to interrogate her, and ready to go so far as to resort to torture techniques. But it takes place in his bedroom, and it’s dark, so he lights candles. There’s also that chair in there with ropes on it. He wants to break her. He wants to dominate her. As he overpowers her, she’s under him on the bed and she plays into it. Later were we to ask if it turned her on or if she was putting on an act, I’m not sure if it’s such a clear answer. Of course I think she has to be, if we look at it as potentially a reflection of her political character. Also after that night they go to a bullfight. A romantic pageant of man and animal engaged in a battle of wits where both get poked, prodded, and mauled, is there a winner?
The ending with that car racing to beat Inéz’s plane is that perfect blend of location photography and studio effects rear projection along with the fun of cinema Buñuel has mastered at this point. For all of their prowess, cunning and sexual provocations against one another, in the end where does it get them? Did Vásquez ever really love Inéz? With Buñuel, as always, isn’t it the house that always wins?
Trivia question: How many of Buñuel’s films have a Catholic priest character? Answer: all of them.
Nazarin (1959, Luis Buñuel) is an examination of how one is to live a life according to the example set forth by Christ. And what does that even mean? Give up all earthly possessions. Stop caring about money or food. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Go out and speak the gospel to those who care to listen, for starters. Let’s see what that’d be like.
No, wait, even better, let’s see what that’d be like if Buñuel applied his style of we all hate each other and brutally hurt each other to this question. The main character in Nazarin is PADRE NAZARIO. And through him, we get a cautionary tale that is both tragic and pervasively hilarious. The film turns out to be all about the weighty consequences of Nazario’s choices. First, he chooses to live a life of poverty, among the poor. So, this places him in a poor neighborhood, boarding in a hostel full of prostitutes, who spit vile insults and fight amongst themselves, everyone around them, and yes even Nazario. He doesn’t last long here.
The rest of the narrative develops this conflict wherein Nazario takes to the road in exile and two women from his old neighborhood follow him, despite his exhaustive pleas for them to allow him to be left alone. BEATRIZ is a suicidal, psychotic woman suffering from epileptic seizures that she believes are caused by her being possessed by demons, and who has sex with men because she secretly wants to use her body as a means to have them desperately need her. And ÁNDARA is a mean, ugly, violent prostitute on the run for murder, whose ignorance conflates superstitions and magic with her religious beliefs.
Yeah, so these two women are symptomatic of people who don’t have any faith of their own but like parasites infest this guy who’s trying to find his own personal path to being a good Christian. When they relentlessly demand he perform a miracle to heal Beatriz’s sick niece, Nazario in vain keeps trying to tell them that he’s not a cudandero, and only God can heal. But by dawn the little girl gets better. So now he’s a saint to them.
Near the end of the film, Beatriz’s mother confronts her with the accusation that she is in love with Nazarin as a man. Obviously the question at stake here is where is Nazario to draw the line if his obligation to Beatriz is to love her as his neighbor what does he do if she's in love with him as a man? Yet, it was Nazario who sought out the poor as his neighbors. This isn’t an easy question. And what about when Nazario intentionally avoids approaching the passengers of the stagecoach? Is that fair?
The end of Nazarin has another of these amazing allegorical Buñuel sequences. Nazarin is alone, being transported to prison by a guard in plain clothes, and they stop by this old woman with a cart selling fruit. The guard takes two apples and doesn’t even think to offer one to Nazario means the people of the world are selfish and don’t care about their fellow man.
Then the woman offers Nazarin a pineapple. And he goes into something like shock. He refuses her. Because he’s used to being a martyr. Except he finally realizes that God is providing him with that pineapple. And by refusing God’s gifts his whole life now he’s going to prison. So he accepts the pineapple, but it’s too late.
Death in the Garden (1956, Luis Buñuel) is a fun morality tale set in the jungle. The moral is something like when there’s only greed and corruption, nothing really matters and no one has a chance. The film centers on five characters whose paths become aligned, when in the second half they all find themselves in a jungle while trying to escape.
The hero though is this character called CHARK. His entrance is really cool. He’s this stranger who comes into town with a donkey and the armed soldiers raise their rifles at him, but he flips them the bird and keeps walking to a well that just happens to be surrounded by a picture perfectly staged assortment of posing beautiful women. The army arrests Chark because he robbed a bank. When they bring CHENCO, an eyewitness to finger him, Chark yells that he’s lying. So, did Chark rob the bank or not? What do you think? I like that it’s unclear. I don’t want to know the answer. Because my take on the moral at play is finally that MARIA, because she cannot hear or speak, kind of represents peasants or like the common people. And ultimately she can’t rely on her father, or the priest, or government, but only this guy who goes off his instincts; and, although he may or may not be a criminal, he’s trying to do what’s right.
This mixed up coterie is what makes up the dramatic material of Death in the Garden. The bandit and the prostitute turn out to be not all bad. And CASTIN, the kind old father, turns into a complete lunatic. Castin is the familiar Buñuel male who's infatuated with a woman. In the jungle, DJIN, the prosty whom he intended to marry, moves on and so he shoots her in cold blood—not a fantasy sequence this time. And in the climax of the film, Castin also murders FATHER LIZARDI, the Jesuit missionary; and the only reason I’m mentioning it is because there’s this shot that pushes in on the dark cavernous broken half of the fuselage of the wrecked plane as if it’s some cave he’s now hidden from us in. And the cave has this spooky feel of like how in the wild of the jungle he’s regressed to man’s primitive state. Also in the jungle, what’s up with Father Lizardi ripping pages out of his Bible? My guess is he’s using them to wipe his ass? I mean it fits with the way the story’s been heading.
There’s a bunch of cool Buñuel imagery too. Slicing the eyeball of the prison guard with that pen. The dying snake being devoured by swarming ants. And late in the film, the moment when Castin finally gives up all hope, there’s this exterior shot of traffic moving by the Arc de Triomphe that freezes to a still we see is now a photo he’s holding. Then he tears it up and throws it into the flames of a campfire.
The jungle almost feels like this place where people’s true natures are revealed and they're somehow dealt with according to some ancient law. Except then why does the priest die? And what about the fifty casualties of the plane crash? Maybe an undiscerning system where everyone isn’t given a fair trial? And grace shown to only but few?
The film pathologizes infatuation. Archibaldo defines himself as being unable to decide whether he wants to be either a criminal or a saint. And there are other references to this, like when he sees LAVINIA in the nightclub, and the shot of her is framed with flames in the foreground, he says she looks pretty like a witch at the stake or Joan of Arc—a criminal or a saint. This is the foundation of how mixed up he is because of how conflicted he is and confused about his desire for women.
The film isn’t meant to be read literally. If Buñuel is expressing through cinema a language of emotions, the urge to kill these women is code for his infatuation over these women. We don’t know what makes up his desire. There’s no inventory to categorize it. But it’s probably something like sexual desire, kink, vanilla, love, beauty, marriage, fear, loyalty, apprehension, jealousy, and paranoia, or something along those lines.
And what do we get through the emotional communication if murder is a way to express his conflicted infatuation? By planning the murders, he is willing to give up everything, risk going to prison, and he’s tortured with guilt. When he tries to tell CARLOTA about his drive to murder women (his inner feelings) he can’t. When he turns himself in to the authorities, they don’t believe him and laugh it off. Because this romantic infatuation with women only exists in his head, and he can’t put it into words in any way that anyone would understand and even if he could, they wouldn’t care.
Because as Buñuel has shown, with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion. When I first started working on this claim I meant cinematically Buñuel uses illusions to symbolize the delusions his male leads are obsessed with. And one of the best examples in Ensayo de un crimen is Lavinia and the mannequin modeled after her. It’s not difficult to see that the reason the mannequin looks so much liker her in some shots is because it’s the real actress with effects make-up on, holding very still. The mannequin is important because it shows that Archibaldo objectifies women—especially the scene where he kisses the mannequin on the mouth and then kisses the real Lavinia on the mouth. But by using the real actress as mannequin it’s also as if it’s emphasizing the illusion that for us even Lavinia is fake because cinema is itself an illusion. The camera lies 24 times per second. Think about also in the wedding photo, once Carlota is framed by the camera within the frame, ALEJANDRO shoots her. In this film true love is an illusion, a lie.
At the wedding there’s that conversation among the PRIEST, THE COLONEL, and THE INSPECTOR where they all agree the presentation is all that matters—this blatant hypocrisy. That there isn’t going to be a bride because she gets murdered, or that the bride doesn’t love the groom doesn’t matter, because what’s important for the priest is that the wedding was held in the Catholic church with its pomp like a blanket of poetry. And the other guys cry over the colors of the regiment as to prove their patriotism. The illusion of a wedding as sanctified institution. The illusion of a flag as patriotism.
Oh yeah this film is also really funny. The ending is completely absurdist and seems to mimic commercial roms. Archibaldo sees that huge grasshopper on a tree in the park and wants to squash it with his cane. But Lavinia happens to randomly show up and they leave happily ever after. Because despite all that he’s been through and how mixed up he is, of course he still wants to fall in love. The illusion can exist in the movies. The illusion can exist in real life.