by
A S Hamrah
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Wakanda Forever is very long and needed an intermission. You know it’s a Marvel movie because it’s steeped in boredom, with every scene threatening to not end. Even when the end credits start, there are fifteen minutes left. Part of it takes place in Boston and Cambridge, on the Mass. Ave. Bridge, which was not damaged enough for my liking. Ryan Coogler brought something new to the first Black Panther movie, though now its importance has faded because these movies are never memorable. They exist to remind directors that they are wasting their lives. Remember when Sofia Coppola so wisely walked away from a Disney movie she had started? No one else does, either, but it happened. Other directors would be wise to look into it.
omg
The writer couple (Greta Lee and John Magaro) in Celine Song’s debut feature, Past Lives, are younger, less established, and blander than the one in Anatomy of a Fall. Residents of a not-great apartment in the Lower East Side, they don’t have much in the way of personality. Nora is Korean and a playwright, Arthur a white-guy novelist who has written a novel called Boner.
If Nora can be said to have a characteristic, it is her desire to win literary prizes. She has left her successful arty parents behind in South Korea “because Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature.” She also dreams of winning a Pulitzer and a Tony. This seemed dated and contrived, since Koreans do win Oscars. Pretending Nora is not a screenwriter-director like her creator, or might become one, is a deflection after Parasite’s success in 2020.
The film is more literature than cinema, elevated mumblecore for graduate writing seminars, the opposite of, for instance, Hong Sangsoo, who makes low-budget films about writers and filmmakers without worrying about prizes, and whose films don’t seem written at all. With its expensive-looking cinematography, Slowdive-sounding score, and fancy editing, Past Lives is designed to win awards, which it has. Like Nora, Celine Song made a conscious choice to leave one life behind and start another. Her film is the result of a series of other professional choices, too, and it shows.
THANK YOU
Yorgos Lanthimos is our leading auteur of half-baked ideas, but since he’s begun working with screenwriter Tony McNamara on movies starring Emma Stone, things have started to gel and get moist. Poor Things, a film of “sugar and violence,” is a bizarro Barbie, a forceful, entertaining movie without smugness, featuring a kind of outré production design all its own. Every effect is thrown in: the film is in color and black-and-white, it pushes the use of wide-angle cinematography in new directions, hybrid animals wander about, and mad scientist Willem Dafoe belches floating orb-like bubbles—all this before the film gets to Emma Stone’s Bella, a Victorian wild child chasing mysteries of the organism through an ocean liner’s casino and a Parisian brothel.
i just like the opening line cus im a hater
The film’s light-pink and dark-green palette makes it look like Lilly Pulitzer was hired to design Hook. Jon M. Chu has directed it so dutifully that no musical number can become a showstopper, which doesn’t really matter because the film’s audience already knows the songs by heart. Heart, however, is what the film lacks. It contains nothing within a Kansas mile of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow.” There is no longing here, nothing sad. Emotions in The Wizard of Oz were anchored to Dorothy’s dream of a world in which her relatives and the people in her town could be other than what they were. Wicked’s longing is to be a Harry Potter movie.
omg
Idiotic cultural appropriation is paid back to Netflix, the distributor of Emilia Pérez. Netflix sent the French Emily in Paris, the French sent back this film — the titles are practically the same. A Mexico-set musical about a transgender narco (Karla Sofía Gascón) who starts an NGO to help the families of people murdered by the cartels, the film actually stars Zoe Saldaña as Emilia’s lawyer and the facilitator of her gender-affirming surgeries. It is a thankless role, predicated on Saldaña taking seriously the idea that Gascón is, as a review in the Los Angeles Times had it, giving a “sensually charged portrayal [that] wouldn’t be out of place anchoring a classic Hollywood woman’s noir.” Sure, Tommy Wiseau could play Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, too, if you gave him the chance.
The idea that this galoot would be unrecognizable to even her children requires a special suspension of disbelief. Therefore the director, Jacques Audiard, had to include a song about it called “Papa,” in which the kid has an inkling that is soothingly dispelled by Emilia herself. If the film had anything of a fairy-tale element to it, which it does not, a scene like that might have worked. But everything in Emilia Pérez is too easy, a neoliberal cakewalk. It’s the kind of movie in which Emilia makes sure to assure us her NGO is “not a replacement for public services.” The film is a preposterous nightmare of first-world self-regard.
lolllll
The small, transparent network logo that used to appear in the corner of TV screens was called a “bug,” or “the bug,” and it was invented by ABC Sports during this armed standoff, we learn here. That was the highlight of the movie for me. I’d always wondered about that. In the end, September 5 is a tribute to Nielsen ratings. Nine hundred million people watched this tragedy unfold on live TV. Now that TV news has become unprofitable for the entertainment conglomerates that own it, and the Olympics are viewed piecemeal across many platforms, the film can be seen as nostalgic longing for a time when terrorism got everybody to watch the same thing at the same time. That is not what movies are for.
lmao
It’s important to remember that even as Hollywood was ignoring Lynch, much of the mainstream, middlebrow critical establishment in the US was also disparaging his work. It wasn’t just that it was too weird. It elicited really hateful reactions from Siskel & Ebert, among others. At the New Yorker, one of the film critics instantly dismissed Twin Peaks: The Return as soon as the first episode ended, tweeting that Lynch had been superseded by Wes Anderson, and their TV critic simply refused to watch it, while at the same time insisting it was TV, not cinema. Even the highest-browed American, Fredric Jameson, who died four months before Lynch, saw in his work some kind of threat, writing against him in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by calling his work “evil.” Just last summer, Phillip Lopate’s latest collection of his film criticism, My Affair with Art House Cinema, came out, and included a piece on the inadequacy of Mulholland Drive in which this dean of American film critics described Lynch as “prone to jejune self-indulgence, capricious phantasmagoria, and vulgarity.”
Such big, dismissive words! As for me, my mind was blown open by Blue Velvet when I saw it college-aged in first run in 1986 at the Nickelodeon Cinema in Boston with my then-girlfriend. We could not speak when we left the theater, so rattled were we by this terrifying new thing that had come into the world (the same summer and fall as Down by Law, She’s Gotta Have It, Big Trouble in Little China, and Something Wild). This filmic world of smashed TVs, diners, wood paneling, the ominous hum of electricity, and rose-pink wall-to-wall carpeting was not, as some viewers may now think, an alien place. It was the actual America of that time, put on screen by David Lynch in a way no one had ever seen before.
:)
In a typical case of tone-deafness, studio publicity described the ending of In a Lonely Place when it came out as a “stunning surprise climax.” Only in Hollywood could somebody’s innocence be touted as shock. But if what they meant was that the climax was emotionally devastating, and that emotional devastation was unexpected in a studio film, they had a point. Inner conflict structures every scene in this film. By its end, everything, even the way Humphrey Bogart puts down a telephone receiver to make two black holes in the frame, adds to its heartache.
“Can’t you relax for a second?” Gloria Grahame’s Laurel asks Bogart’s Dixon Steele. He can’t. Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter, exists in the tension between creative work and real life. His fear of being misunderstood and punished for being right plagues him, makes him lash out, and poisons his relationships. We see it happen in wrenching closeups of Laurel’s face as she looks at him. In the film’s last scene, Ray keeps subtly emptying the frame until Dix and Laurel break up and disappear, he through an arch that leads to the street, she behind a door she closes.
It’s not just the end, but the film’s whole last half hour that wrecks you. Ray couples anger to tenderness. Dix beats up a guy, then deliver’s the film’s (maybe any film’s) most romantic lines. He describes a “good love scene” to the woman he loves even as she realizes she has to leave him.
<3
If, as Godard said, “the definition of the human condition should be in the mise en scène itself,” then Zontar, which plays like an industrial documentary on Dallas living rooms and shopping centers, puts it there in negative. A dead-watch-battery miasma pervades the film, a three in the afternoon of the soul.
heh
I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.