The first episode of The Acolyte is another drop in the already saturated Star Wars universe.
The show is set centuries before the Empire, when the Republic is prosperous and the Jedi are at height of their power, but some train to use the force in secret. One of these ‘acolytes’ risks being discovered to seek revenge. Thus begins this new story set in an even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
It’s a good start. Revenge on whom and for what? Those are the questions that kept me watching through the opening scene even though the scene takes place in yet another space cantina but without a band. The acolyte (Amandla Stenberg) walks into the bar wrapped and encased in dark robes and armour. Even her short hair has the effect of a hood shrouding her face. There, she kills a Jedi master.
Director and writer Leslye Headland then cuts to a Trade Federation ship (the Trade Federation again?) and one of its crew: a woman named Osha (also Amandla Stenberg) who has the assassin’s face but not her manner. Osha lives on the ship and works doing the repair work only droids are legally allowed to do. She says a chipper good morning to her hand-held droid and her work buddy and jokes back at her (literally) frog-faced boss.
Stenberg’s range is incredible. She can be both a cold and spectral assassin like Asajj Ventress and a spunky Scotty like Rose Tico, and Leslye makes good use of her talents by giving her this dual role that may be real or an illusion, not unlike Kim Novak’s in Vertigo. When Osha was arrested for the Jedi’s murder, I didn’t know if she was an innocent victim of circumstance or the assassin just taking another step in some elaborate plan. Either way, I kept watching her to wait and see her reveal which one she really was.
Yet Osha’s arrest, by her former friend to boot, last five minutes. Gone is the old Star Wars that gave each obstacle its due and gave each shield generator, small but vulnerable exhaust port, and pod race the screen time to turn into a formidable enough boulder to make it awesome when the heroes leap over it.
Leslye devotes more time to exposition than to obstacles. Her Jedi are a battalion of talking heads. Those who arrest Osha ask her a series of questions that they already know the answers to and Osha’s former master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) is told that the Jedi’s political enemies would use Osha’s crime against the Order and thus their justice against her must be swift. Why does Sol need to be told this? Because, apparently, the Council wants his support in this matter, but why would they need it? What power does Sol have to stop them? He could be one of those rebellious Jedi who are the type to save Osha from what sounds like a politically expedient kangaroo court. He did train her despite her age. That’s another piece of exposition. I wish Leslye had thrown it out and told the story that sits in this material begging to be told, like a neglected seedling sitting in the garden crying out for the water it needs to germinate. She could have started her series with a Jedi master going against the orders of the Council to save his former student.
But even if Leslye did tell that story, there’s still the problem that Sol would still be a copy of Qui-Gon Jinn. He’d be a rebellious Jedi with samurai-long hair and it’s unrealistic to expect Jun-jae to be as good as Liam Neeson. There is an evasiveness to Leslye’s writing. She starts the story great but seems to retreat into the safe mediocrity of exposition and unfulfilled potential due to fear that she cannot add anything to Star Wars that’s already there.
The Acolyte holds an intriguing mystery that is overwhelmed by poor plotting and unfortunate echoes of George Lucas’s original Star Wars films that only reminded me of how stale the franchise has become in its current hands.
Scarface is a gangster movie at war with itself. Quality and incompetence battle within the film and tear it asunder and leave a bloodied and blasted wreck, not unlike the corpse-carpeted halls of its protagonist Tony Montana’s mansion after the film’s climax.
Tony (Al Pacino) starts the film as an illegal alien in Miami and shoots his way to the throne of the palm-tree state’s crack trade. The film was directed by Brain De Palma who directed Carrie, Carlito’s Way, and Mission: Impossible, but it’s written by Oliver Stone who wrote Wall Street and Platoon.
The film’s failure lies solely at Stone’s feet.
I’ve never seen a screenwriter start dramatic conflicts only to toss them away with such indifference as Stone does. Tony wants his wife’s boss Elvira (Michelle Pfeifer) but the minute he gets her he says he doesn’t want her. He’s staring at her in a glaring long take in the scene when they first meet. The shot’s manic with Tony’s desire. A few scenes later, Tony’s sitting at a restaurant table with Elvira and his right-hand man Manny and he’s telling Manny how “her womb is so polluted” that he can’t have a kid with her. Pfeifer watches on with a cold and stunned sphinx face until she cracks and throws her drink in Tony’s face. “How dare you,” she says. A fury’s screech shoots out from the sphinx’s mouth. There are a dozen scenes in between those two points in the story that could show Tony claw closer and closer towards his trophy wife and then feel his hands go cold at her touch but Stone was either too lazy or incompetent to write them.
Just as he was too lazy or incompetent to flesh out the conflict between Tony and his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Tony doesn’t want her dating guys but she starts dating Manny but you don’t know it until you find out at the same time as Tony that they’ve gotten married.
Stone’s action leaps but it never rises. The film is haunted by the ghosts of the Shakespeare-level drama the movie could have had but that Stone, like a quack obstetrician, leaves to suffocate and die in the womb. He flicks his story’s dramatic potential into the gutter like a tramp does with their cigarette buds and leaves Pacino, Pfeifer, Mastrantonio, the rest of the cast and crew and De Palma to pick up after him.
De Palma is a Christ-like figure in this movie: a doomed miracle worker. He tries to turn Stone’s stale bread of a script into cinematic wine and he does a good job. When Tony and his friend Angel are captured by a Columbian drug dealer when a deal goes wrong, the dealer strings them up in his bathroom, goes back into the bedroom, opens a suitcase, there’s a chainsaw in the suitcase, the drug dealer picks up the chainsaw and carries it back to the bathroom. De Palma moves from wider to closer shots with each step. He ends with a close up of Angel’s eyes ripped open with terror and blood just starts to splatter on his forehead, but De Palma then pulls away to slowly pan out the window onto the street where Manny is waiting in the car outside chatting up passing women. De Palma left me to imagine Angel’s brains being sliced open while Manny chatted up bikini-clad blondes. He brings the same flawlessly engineered sadism that he did to his best films.
But, poor architecture can’t be disguised by even the best interior decorators. Stone’s lousy script is the cross upon which De Palma and the other great artists in Scarface are all crucified.
From Hilde With Love is a romantic drama film standing in front of a history biopic. This new German film is set in Nazi Germany and is about the young communists who rebelled against Hitler and who were dubbed the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo, but there’s hardly a swastika or hammer and sickle in sight. That’s the film’s beauty.
The film’s heroine is German actress Liv Lisa Fries of Freud’s Last Session and Babylon Berlin and she plays communist resistance fighter Hilde Coppi. She goes camping with her commie buddies, they call each other “comrade” but only once, and they praise one of their ranks for reading Lenin in the original but never sing the “Internationale.” They’re all later arrested and the lady warden who presides over Hilde’s prison term doesn’t have glowing gold or silver swastika badges on her lapel or a flat black one glaring amidst a blood red armband around her arm.
This isn’t a history film like Darkest Hour or Golda where the spy’s message or the Battle of Stalingrad are big plot points. The film’s not about communists vs Nazis but a conflict that’s far older: love vs despair.
The film starts when Hilde’s arrested and starts her imprisonment when she’s heavily pregnant. The director Andreas Dresen makes you watch and endure every humiliating and horrifying moment with Hilde by trapping you with her in long takes. He doesn’t trap you in anything as predictable as a torture scene with a sinister-looking Gestapo man. He makes you watch Hilde strip down bare so the warden can search her before she enters the prison. The warden is thorough. She even searches Hilde’s rear to make sure Hilde hasn’t hidden anything between her butt cheeks. Dresen also makes you watch every push Hilde makes to force her baby out of her when she gives birth in the prison hospital. He shows this in close ups too. Hilde’s face fills the frame as she screams.
But Dresen does not just make you suffer with Hilde. He also shares her joy with you. There’s two narratives in this film that run alongside each other and that Dresen jumps between. One shows Hilde’s imprisonment but the other shows the days and weeks and years leading up to her imprisonment in which she finds her friends, lover, and husband in the Red Orchestra. When they go camping together, she climbs on the back of a motorcycle with her husband. He takes her for a ride around the campsite. They circle around and around the campsite like they’re on a fun park ride. They spin in a 360-degree pan around their friends who sit in the centre of the camp site. Their friends are wrapped in the soft amber sunlight coming through the trees and bouncing off the river nearby and they’re drinking, singing, and laughing. This is just one of Hilde’s happy memories that she and Dresen keep returning to even as the day when she’s executed marches closer. These happy memories take up as much time in the film as her time in the shadow of the guillotine that’s waiting for her. Her love is the opposite force pushing against her terror.
By the end of the film, you will know if Hilde’s love is equal to or even greater than that terror.
The Thomas Crown Affair was made in 1968, and it starred two of the 60s’ most stylish screen stars (Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway) as a millionaire who pulls off the perfect heist and the insurance investigator who’s hired to get back the loot he’s lifted but falls for him.
A film with a plot like that doesn’t sound like it can go wrong but Roger Ebert was right when he called The Thomas Crown Affair “possibly the most under-plotted [and] under-written…film of the year.”
What bang the film has is only in the beginning. The shots split into multiple screens to show the robbers Thomas Crown (McQueen) has enlisted to rob a Boston bank en route to the heist. One’s landing at an airport in an airplane, another’s travelling by train, and one’s driving a station wagon down the street but they’re all accompanied by the same heavy and regular beat from Michel Legrand’s soundtrack. I was thrilled to see what these disparate souls had in common that could link them together through such a grave tune. “Where’s the showdown they’re all attending?” I wondered and who was going to shoot whom?
There is shooting in the robbery. That’s all the fireworks in the film over and done with in the first half an hour. McQueen spends the rest of the film taking Dunaway on expensive dates, cooking her lobster dinners in the coals of a fire on the beach, and playing chess with her but getting distracted by her pink lips and her bare arms. It’s extravagant and it seems to distract Dunaway’s insurance investigator Vicki Anderson from gathering one grain of evidence to prove Crown masterminded the robbery. The cop working with her complains to her that he’s running “a sex orgy for a couple freaks on government funds.” I sympathise.
The Thomas Crown Affair is a cat and mouse game played in high society but one where neither the cat or the mouse advances or retreats a single step for close to an hour and a half. Instead, they drink champagne in a sauna. It’s a glitzy but dull heist film.
Challengers isn’t a ‘romance’ or ‘romantic sports drama.’ The critics and the online plot synopses have got it wrong. Challengers is what its writer Justin Kuritzkes says it is: an erotic tennis thriller. It’s Freud dressed for the US Open with Brigitte Bardot as his date.
The film at times looks like the US Open inside a tube. The tennis mostly takes place in static wide shots without any music. They’re silent, still, and austere.
This chastity isn’t confined to Luca Guadagnino’s direction but also extends to Kurizkes’s script. There’s only one scene you could call a ‘sex scene’ and I would not tag it as such. The point of the scene isn’t for Tashi (Zendaya) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) to have sex but for Tashi to talk to Patrick about tennis, for Patrick to refuse to talk about tennis, and to strike the crack that will break them up and send Tashi to marry Patrick’s best friend Art (Mike Faist) years later. Tashi thinks the most important part of her is that she’s a tennis player but Patrick thinks the most important part of her is that he can fuck her (his words not mine).
Sex is what all the protagonists of Challengers want. Patrick wants to do it with Tashi. Art wants to do it with Tashi but it’s because he worships her like she’s an Artemis of the court. Tashi wants to do it with both of them but of course that’s not an option. The conflict of the film is who will have sex with whom even if you never see any actual sex.
That is why Challengers burns like a cattle brand in the hands of a dominatrix. There’s nothing less erotic in film than a sex scene but sex talked about, thought about, and suggested by where the characters stand and sit, what they wear, and what they eat is the most tantalising drug. When Tashi first meets Art and Patrick at a night-time party on Long Island, the trio go and sit on the beach. Tashi sits by the water’s edge in her dark, ocean-blue dress that leaves her shoulders and her arms bare. The boys sit a little further back from her in beach chairs and smoke and watch her like they’re still spectators watching her play tennis. Guadagnino pans a close up from the boys’ point of view up Tashi’s body. She’s leaning on her arms and looking out over the sea with her hair blowing in the sea breeze like a siren and she’s turned her face away from the boys. The boys’ posture as they sit in their chairs is identical right down to how they’re holding their cigarettes. There’s no sex on the surface of this scene but it’s there. There’s the boys’ twin desire for Tashi in that slow, ravishing pan and point of view shot. The physical distance between her and them on the beach is the same distance they both want to cross from their beach chairs to her bed. Art and Patrick’s common position sitting watching Tashi is their friendship that their desire for her will rent asunder like an Ancient Greek sailing ship split in two by a collision with a rock on which a siren sits and from which she has mesmerised the ship’s crew into a libidinous trance. Guadagnino does all this without having any of the trio remove any of their clothes. He knows that showing is for masturbation but not for drama.
With sex scenes, Challengers would be just another MA15+ romance movie. Without them, it’s the apple from the tree of forbidden fruit sitting on a red velvet cushion in a polished glass display case.
I watched Carrie because I’d heard that Brian De Palma was Hitchcock’s heir. If De Palma ever had a claim to that title, it’s Carrie.
I was terrified that Norman Bates would move into my nightmares after I saw Psycho. I laid down in bed that night and I expected that when I closed my eyes I would see him leaping down the cellar stairs in his mother’s grey dress, a wig atop his head, a thick and long knife raised in his hand, and his eyes ripped open and never blinking when he looked at me across the cellar as he sprang towards me.
No film character had ever scared the crap out of me like Norman…until I met Carrie White. I dreaded going to bed and finding her standing there in the dark with her body splattered in blood and glowing red. Her eyes are flung open as wide and unblinking as Norman’s. They’re so manically focused they don’t look like a girl’s eyes or even a human being’s but a gargoyle’s. Her mouth is so straight it looks like it’s been sown shut. This creature standing before me doesn’t look like she can speak or be spoken to. She’s a fury in a ruined prom dress.
This wasn’t just due to Sissy Spacek’s acting. Much of it was De Palma. He scared me so well because he followed Hitchcock’s greatest lesson: there’s no terror in the bang only in the anticipation of it. De Palma crouches under the prom stage with Nancy Allen’s Chris who lies in wait ready to douse Carrie in pig’s blood as Carrie’s crowned prom queen and unintentionally causes this telekinetic girl to have a mental breakdown. He looks from Carrie walking up onto the stage to Chris waiting beneath the stage, from Carrie smiling on stage to Chris’s hand itching around the rope that will release the bucket of blood, from Carrie kissing her date to Chris licking her lips as she savours the taste of her coming vengeance not knowing that the most terrible revenge to come will be Carrie’s. This cutting back and forth is just what Hitchcock used in Psycho’s shower scene and like in Psycho it turns a quick moment into an eternity of waiting for the ground to explode out from under you. De Palma shows the train that’s coming, so that you can lie there tied to the track and scream through your gag as you watch it hurtle closer and closer towards you and you imagine how your guts will burst under its iron wheels and spread all over the rails.
The prudish and the puritanical would call this sadism but what do they think a great horror film is? It is the art of gore and De Palma is a Da Vinci of that art. Carrie is his Mona Lisa.
“Why am I here?” CS Lewis asks Sigmund Freud. Freud has invited Lewis to his London home in 1939 to find out why an intelligent man like Lewis believes in the God whom Freud calls a delusional lie.
It’s a promising social engagement yet halfway through Freud’s Last Session I wanted to ask its director and co-writer Matthew Brown the same question that Lewis asks Freud: Why am I here?
It’s just to hear Freud and Lewis talk apparently.
They talk very well.
Freud tells Lewis a truly dreadful joke about two Jews in a bath house and Lewis informs the shrink that his jokes are “as funny as a hanging.” Their dialogue is not just humour. Lewis tells Freud that the suffering in the world is the fault of man and not God. Freud then brandishes before Lewis a photo of his favourite daughter Sophie who died of Spanish flu and asks Lewis if man was responsible for that. Freud winces in pain from the oral cancer eating away at his jaw and says that he wished that the cancer had infected his brain instead so that he could hallucinate Lewis’s so-called benevolent God and exact his revenge on the deity.
Hopkins plays Freud and as always he can swerve and leap from slow, septuagenarian dignity to manic anger and sorrow. His acting agility is only made more delicious by its contrast with his age. Hopkins’ age is becoming more and more visible every time I see him on screen. His hair is getting whiter and his cheeks are becoming more and more hollow, but he can still grin and chuckle like the Cheshire Cat or Hannibal Lecter. His acting style is one of the most dramatic out there now because of his age and how his abundant energy defies his aged vessel.
Hopkins is well-balanced by the scholastic serenity of Matthew Goode’s Lewis. In this role, Goode proves what I’ve suspected: that he deserves more than the supporting roles that have kept him out of the spotlight. He dispatches lines like the one about Freud’s jokes with the erudite yet humble glamour of an English gentleman tilting his cards to reveal a winning hand. Goode could be the next David Niven if he got the right role.
Yet as well as Hopkins and Goode deliver the entertaining dialogue written by Brown and his co-writer Mark St. Germain, they cannot overcome the problem that the film is just talk. Nothing happens but talk and talk and talk. Freud and Lewis sit in Freud’s house all day going round and round on the subject of God and recycle arguments as old as St Augustine and not once does whoever is right actually obtain any tangible significance. Unlike in Ben-Hur or The Count of Monte-Cristo (2002) where the hero’s faith in God is what sustains them or dooms them in their quests, no one ever lives or dies in Freud’s Last Session if Lewis is right or if Freud is right. Their discussion remains ensconced in the drawing room.
I could only sit in Brown’s drawing room with Goode’s Lewis and Hopkins’ Freud for so long before I wanted to leave the cinema for the real world to write more of my novel, go fishing, or roast a pork shoulder, just to make something happen. Even delightful conversation wears thin without the heat of action.
Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi film is so much like the immaculate and obsidian monolith that reappears again and again and again across the film’s few thousand millennia without ever actually doing anything. It’s magnificently sculpted but inert.
Kubrick is a maestro of images. He uses his camera as Michelangelo used his hammer and chisel. Kubrick’s shots are slowly panning extreme wide shots of floating space craft and spinning orbiting space stations turning into alignment above the blue marble that is Earth, and when Kubrick boards the space craft and he showed me the inside of its cabins, the craft’s futuristic innards are shot in Polykleitos-level perfect symmetry. I don’t think there was once one shot where one side of the shot sat in bad proportion to the other.
2001 is a gallery of cinematic sculptures, but like sculptures it stands there still and silent. There are long stretches without dialogue. The characters do speak but it’s not to say “We’ll always have Paris” or “Frankly my dear, I don’t give damn.” They speak to tell their daughters to be good girls, give bureaucratic meetings, and discuss technical malfunctions and all with the flawless yet monotone demeanour of androids. Kubrick’s universe is vast but it’s populated by men and women as monotone and perfunctory as the film’s famous AI HAL. When I watched his film I felt both the awe but also the emptiness I imagine I’d feel if I stared out a spacecraft window at the void of space for over two hours.
2001: A Space Odyssey is cinema’s Great Pyramid of Giza. It is monolithic in the best ways and the worst.
Martin Bourboulon continues the adventure he began in The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan with the second part in his adaption of Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel: The Three Musketeers: Milady.
Like the first film and Dumas’ book, Milady is a shower of fireworks across the sky. It’s a trail of sparkling explosions stretching from Paris to London. Half the sparkle comes from the story adapted for screen by Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patelliere. The other half of the sparkle comes from how Bourboulon paints the story, and I say paint in the truest meaning of the word. Bourboulon is the French Spielberg. In his films, the images become as exciting as the script.
The script is a cocktail of Dumas’ original plot and Delaporte and La Patelliere’s own inventions. One such original jewel they insert into Dumas’ old crown of a story is Athos’s brother. He’s not in the novel but he is in the film, and he’s one of the Protestant separatists Athos and the other Musketeers fight against as soldiers of the King of France. Athos’s brother is captured and tied to a cross on the seashore and Athos goes to cut him down, but this will make Athos a traitor to the kingdom he has spent his whole life defending. D’Artagnan and Aramis race on horseback across the beach to help him and the reflections of their horses run alongside them in the mirror of the water lying on the beach.
This is only one scene in a 115-minute film and they all burn with the same Romanticism of plot and image. Bourboulon’s The Three Musketeers is the most beautiful adventure since Spielberg made Indiana Jones.
This comedy adventure film directed and written by John Huston with Truman Capote is luxuriously elating, like floating over the Swiss alps in a hot air balloon while giggling tipsy from champagne.
It opens in a Mediterranean port city where “four brilliant criminals” are led in handcuffs through the streets to the clink. A marching band accompanies them and the band’s jolly marching tune turns the crooks’ obvious failure into a parade.
The film then flashes back to tell you how these crooks messed it up.
Therein lies the film’s tickling dramatic tension. In every scene I was wondering “How will these crooks bugger up?”
The man who described them as brilliant criminals is Humphrey Bogart playing Billy Dannreuther. He was a rich man but now he’s a poor man, and he’s gone into business with these crooks so he can be rich again. Accompanying him is his gorgeous wife Maria played by Gina Lollobrigida who Bogart said made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.
This glamorous gang suffers one hilarious accident after another. Their ship’s captain gets drunk, they push their car off a cliff, and they’re captured by an Arab general who’s also got a fan-crush on Rita Hayworth. Bogart, of course, promises to introduce him to her if he lets them go.
He and his co-conspirators are trapped in a carnivalesque purgatory but they laugh off the slings and arrows of comedic fortune with witty one-liners. “What have you got to worry about?” Billy asks the gang’s leader with nonchalant when their ship breaks down halfway across the Mediterranean. “We’re only adrift in the middle of the ocean with a drunken captain and an engine liable to explode at any minute.”
Billy treats this high misadventure like a splendid holiday. Sitting back and watching the film on my laptop,[1] I felt like that’s exactly what it was.
[1] The film’s in the public domain. You can watch the original black and white here but I suggest watching the coloured version on Amazon Prime.
I cherish Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers but I’ve never seen an adaption of his novel that I loved as much as the original text…until now.
In The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan, director Martin Bourboulon has kept the daring and Romantic adventures that made me read Dumas’s novel every night and through so many recess and lunch breaks. The young swordsman D’Artagnan still meets the Three Musketeers Athos, Aramis, and Porthos after provoking all three to challenge him to a duel on the same day of the very morning he first arrives in Paris, and D’Artagnan spends the better part of Act II racing against time and the gorgeous yet deadly Milady de Winter to recover the French Queen’s diamond necklace from her lover the Duke of Buckingham.
The only difference is that Milady de Winter is no longer a rosy-cheeked, Lana-Turner-blonde with a beauty mark and the Musketeers are for once not as waxed as Hercule Poirot’s moustache. Milady is a raven-haired assassin, enwrapped in a black dress and hat, and who can fire a gun and smoke a pipe. She’s a ravishing angel of death and more like Rita Hayworth’s dark and silky femme fatales in Gilda and The Lady From Shanghai than Turner in the 1948 Three Musketeers. In that adaption, musical star Gene Kelly lead the musketeers and the musketeers wore tights and capes so flashy only campy, comic book superheroes would wear them. In D’Artagnan, Bourboulon’s musketeers dress in earthy brown leather and have Hemingwayesque dark beards, moustaches, and chest hair bursting from their faces and open shirts. They aren’t costumed beautiful boys like Gene Kelly. They’re rugged action heroes in the make of John Wayne.
Bourboulon gives them all the screen time action heroes deserve. Almost all the sword fights are shown in long takes and Bourboulon pans the camera around to follow D’Artagnan as he dodges enemy’s blades and musket fire and steals their horses, and Bourboulon hardly ever interrupts the action with a cut. I think one fight scene was one single take. It wasn’t wearing. I was thrilled to watch the camera parry, dodge, and run in tandem with the musketeers, as much as I’ve been thrilled to watch Daniel Craig as James Bond, Clint Eastwood in the Dollars films, and Downey Jr as Iron Man.
This is where the 1948 adaption and other adaptions have failed for me. They’ve turned a Three Musketeers movie into a trussed-up costume drama but I loved The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan because Bourboulon embraced what made me love Dumas’ novel: the action and the adventure. This was lost under the feminine regalia of the previous adaptions I’ve seen. Bourboulon bares it as proudly as the Musketeers bear their chest hair.
Quintin Tarantino’s WWII thriller is bloody good fun until it stops being fun. Then, it’s just bloody. The Inglorious Basterds of the film’s title are a rag-tag squad of Jewish-American soldiers who go behind enemy lines in France to bash, maim, and dismember as many Nazis as they can find. Their leader Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) tells the Basterds when they sign up that they all owe him “one hundred Nazi scalps.” The Basterds aren’t the only scalp-collectors here. Tarantino wrote and directed this film and in both roles he’s a sadist. He loves torturing his characters and his audience. The Basterds ask a captured Nazi for information and threaten to beat out his brains with a baseball bat if he doesn’t tell them, and Tarantino prolongs the takes and makes the moment go on and on in which the Nazi, refusing to cooperate, watches his bat-wielding executioner walk closer and closer until, finally, his brains are mashed to a pulp on the ground. Similar threats of colourful slaughter supply the conflict for almost all the film’s scenes. More than one ends in a bullet barrage that kills characters that I thought were going to survive long enough to become significant protagonists. This is Tarantino’s skill here. He is not just willing to put his characters in cartoonishly insane danger and create a thrilling plot for each individual scene but he also subjects his audience to massacre after shocking massacre. This shock is why I kept watching the film. I wanted to see the next explosion. There’s a sadistic joy in watching Tarantino bathe in his characters’ blood. This joy however can’t last. The shock it gluts on has its limits. It wears off and by the climax I’d seen so much blood and guts that I was unable to enjoy anymore. Like all films fuelled exclusively by shock, Inglorious Basterds for me began with a bang and ended with a whimper, even if the tears were the tears of Nazis being shot to pieces by machine gun fire.
“Bye honey, I’m off to work at the extermination camp.” That’s Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest: the day-to-day life of living next door to history’s worst crime.
This contrast is the film’s only point. There’s little plot. The only conflict is that Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss is being transferred and his wife Hedwig doesn’t want to leave the home they’ve built next to the camp for their four children.
The Hoss family have a house with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a swimming pool, and a wide and bountiful garden. The camp is sealed off from their home (or vice versa?) by a tall concrete wall topped with barbed wire that Glazer never looks over. Whenever you see the camp, it’s just the bald, brick building heads, the tower tips, and the chimneys that peak over the top of the wall.
Glazer sustains without plot and with just this contrast between the visible domestic bliss the Hoss family enjoy and the unseen horror they’re taking part in. Glazer did not make this film to show you Oscar Schindler saving Jews, the Inglorious Basterds killing Nazis, or Gregory Peck blowing up the guns on Navarone. He made it to show you the trail of white smoke from an arriving train’s funnel rising into the sky above the Hoss’s garden greenhouse that isn’t even noticed as the family hold a garden party for Hedwig’s mother. What is the train carrying? Jews! Yet it’s reduced to background noise as the family frolics. This is the film’s point: the black co-habitancy of happiness with mass murder.
Even a film that runs on such chilling contrasts can become wearing. In some moments, I did half-wish that Glazer had kept the plot of the Martin Amis novel from which he got the title and idea for the film: an Auschwitz commandant has an affair with the commandant’s wife. Some sex and intrigue would have been welcome amidst Glazer’s repetitive, long, and static shots of Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss and their children and their house guests walking from the kitchen to the dining room, mounting the stairs from the entrance hallway up to the bedrooms upstairs, and walking out the front door into the garden.
But this cold and bureaucratic attention to detail is the key to the Hoss family’s life. Glazer’s detached regularity in The Zone of Interest is the lifeless clockwork by which they live at peace with being complicit in the greatest mass murder ever devised.
Which is the better film: Elvis or Priscilla? Is it Baz Luhrmann’s glitzed-out saga of the King’s rise and fall or Sofia Coppola’s murkier coverage of the romance between Elvis and his child bride Priscilla?
This is not just a question for film critics. Comparing Luhrmann and Coppola’s films can answer the question anyone concerned with art’s purpose must find an answer to, however tenuous that answer might be. The films approach the same subject from opposite angles. They’re both portraits of Elvis and Priscilla Presley but by two different artists with polar-opposite aesthetic philosophies. The answer to which portrait is better is the answer to whose aesthetics are better. This is then an answer to the question “What should a film do?” and that’s the answer to what art should do.
***
Luhrmann’s Elvis is a “fairy-tale.” I read a review that chastised it as such. The critic complained that Luhrmann cut the seedier slices from Elvis’s and Priscilla’s relationship out of the film.
Luhrmann did omit details that Coppola included in Priscilla. I saw Elvis twice and I never saw Elvis’s affairs with his Hollywood co-stars. Luhrmann’s Elvis didn’t pick Priscilla’s hair, makeup, and clothes for her and keep her stored away at Graceland like a prized porcelain doll in a cabinet. Luhrmann also dodged the fact that Elvis was 24 and Priscilla was 14 when they started dating in Germany.
Luhrmann edited out the infidelity, domestic domination, and paedophilia in Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship, but he kept their love.
The scene where Elvis and Priscilla first kiss is possibly the most beautiful scene in Luhrmann’s whole film. It’s brief. It could have been a love scene approaching if not meeting Bogart and Bacall’s first meeting in To Have and Have Not and the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet if it had lasted longer and Luhrmann had built up towards it more.
Elvis and Priscilla are talking alone in Elvis’s room in Germany. Luhrmann shows them in mid shots surrounded by furniture and mountains of Elvis’s fan mail.
Elvis closes the door to shut out the noise from his comrades and their dates partying downstairs.
He returns to Priscilla.
They sit on the floor and lean against his bed. The mid shots now give way to close ups of Elvis’s and Priscilla’s faces. They sit looking at each other and he tells her he’s never met anyone like her and she says “I hope not.” The close ups make their faces swell to take up the whole frame like blooming flowers.
They slowly tilt their heads forwards to kiss. Every muscle in their faces and necks quake with trepidation. Kacey Musgraves sings “I can’t help falling in love with you” as they do but she draws out every syllable in the lyrics and the melody is slow and heavy like steps towards an altar. It should be. This is Elvis and Priscilla’s marriage. It may not be the literal ceremony but it’s the moment when their love wraps around them and binds them together for the rest of their lives. Luhrmann does show their actual wedding ceremony but he shows it as one flash in a montage. The ceremony passes like a postcard hastily whipped out, looked at, and thrown back into a cardboard box. Luhrmann knows it’s just a formality and that this scene is the real moment of symbiotic romantic bonding. He mates music, camera, and acting perfectly to show it as such.
Luhrmann also makes this pure romantic scene possible by not including the wildly inappropriate age gap between the two lovers. He doesn’t permit the paedophilia to dirty the romance.
Coppola does. She includes dialogue where Elvis asks Priscilla what grade she’s in. She tells him and he says she’s “just a baby.” He then asks her to come up to his room.
The dialogue wasn’t the only way Coppola made the age gap palpable. When she shows Elvis and Priscilla standing together, she positions Elvis’s face in the top left-hand corner of the frame and Priscilla’s head far below in the bottom right-hand corner. She accents the age gap and makes it physically obvious. I could never forget this age gap when Elvis and Priscilla were alone in his room. There’s no rape or sexual assault or even sex. All that happens is one consensual kiss, but no matter how innocent it was, the age gap was always there polluting the scene like the bad smell from milk left out to go bad overnight. Coppola’s version of Elvis and Priscilla’s is less innocent than Luhrmann’s.
***
Why does Luhrmann make his portrait of Elvis and Priscilla innocent enough to come from a fairy tale and Coppola make hers as messy as it was in real-life?
Luhrmann is a Romantic. Coppola is not.
A Romantic artist like Luhrmann doesn’t recreate reality. He stylises it. He selects those aspects of reality he regards as most important and leaves the rest, as Ayn Rand explained in The Romantic Manifesto. As Hitchcock advised, he makes his art like life but with the boring parts cut out. Luhrmann leaves behind everything in Elvis and Priscilla’s life together that doesn’t belong in a love story to make the screen glitter like the polished chrome hood on Elvis’s first Cadillac. His film does not document Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship. It glorifies it.
Coppola by contrast is thoroughly un-Romantic and an unsentimental and reliable chronicler. She shows both the bright smiling face of the moon and its dark behind. Coppola’s determination to catch all reality’s clashing colours extends down even to her lighting. In Priscilla, pure white light is always streaming through the windows into the Presleys’ home but shadows are also always there lurking in the corners and around the furniture. Light and dark are entangled and both highlight and cancel each other out as they do in real life. The film’s mixed and clashing complexion is the two-faced nature of the reality Coppola wants to faithfully reproduce.
Whose aesthetics is better?
Fairy tales like Luhrmann’s aren’t accurate depictions of reality. They don’t show the whole truth. At most they show half of it. For every star in Elvis and Priscilla’s story that Luhrmann lifts up onto the screen in Elvis there’s a personal train wreck he neglects to show. There’s always the dark side of the moon behind its smiling face. Luhrmann’s Romanticism breeds selective fantasy rather than holistic reality.
It distorts reality but “reality should be distorted” as Camille Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae, or rather reality should be edited. At least it should be in art.
Can you name anyone who is pure? Can you find a person wholly innocent, a life of 100% heroism, or a single individual without one blot of cruelty or cowardice on their record? Of course you can’t. Washington owned slaves, Churchill wanted to keep India under the British Empire’s boot, and Gandhi slept nude with female followers to test his chastity. These men were still heroes but they were not wholly heroes. They weren’t perfect. No one is.
This is not misanthropy. It’s honesty. I’m not damning everyone who ever lived on Earth for not being an angel. I’m not calling for the house to be burnt down because not all the pictures are straight and some of the doors creak. I’m just acknowledging that the house does fall below what would be ideal.
Art can show that ideal because it does not have to accurately represent reality. No other field is granted this freedom and nor should it be. Journalism, history, and politics, to name just a few fields, should never be given the license to romanticise that art is granted. To romanticise in these field would be to distort fact into fictions that more often than not are used to advance political agendas. Napoleon’s glorification in art, Stalin’s editing of historical documents, and the 1619 Project are just some examples. These are examples of Romanticism stepping beyond art to fashion the myths that Hannah Arendt recognised are the bedrock of totalitarianism.
In these fields Romanticism is a dangerous delusion but in art it’s a liberating one. You can close To Kill A Mockingbird and go to bed thinking “I want to be like Atticus Finch.” You can leave the cinema after a screening of Wonka and think that like Timothy Chalamet’s young Willy Wonka you want to run rings around the dastardly villains of this world and build a thriving business that puts a smile on every man, woman, and child’s face. You can sit before the Mona Lisa and see the grace and dignity you wish illuminated your smile, posture, and gaze.
Romanticism in art allows us to see the perfect individuals we want to be, who we rarely see in the mirror or in the faces in the street or on the nightly news or even in the faces of our nearest and dearest, and who without whom we would have nothing to aim for even if our efforts to reach the ideal fall short. Without the ideal to aspire to we could never achieve the good. Romanticism is our necessary delusion.
Once, when I closed my eyes and pictured a desert world with two moons inside a cinema screen’s frame, the world I saw was Tatooine. Now, the world is Arakkis.
On that desert world at the start of Dune: Part Two, Paul Atreides (Timothy Chalamet) is where director Denis Villeneuve left him at the end of Dune: Part One. “Your father didn’t believe in revenge,” Paul’s mother tells him as they shelter with the planet’s natives called the Fremen. “Yeah, well I do,” Paul says. His words are like a breath carrying a vow blown through the eyes of a skull. Chalamet would make a great Hamlet. His voice in that moment is that of a young man still seeing his father, family, and dearest friends massacred by the Harkonnen with his Emperor’s consent. It’s calcified with pain but hard and ready for vengeance like a dagger. Like Hamlet, Moses, and Ben-Hur, Paul is a prince cut away from everything he ever knew and loved and he’s on a quest to make those responsible pay.
Paul seeks to unite with the Fremen to get his revenge but they see him as an outsider. He falls in love with the Fremen woman Chani (Zendaya) but, to raise the Fremen army he needs to take Arakkis from the Harkonnen and force the Emperor to come to terms, Paul may have to become what she hates most: the messiah his mother says he is destined to become but that Chani thinks is the hero of a false prophecy told to enslave her people. “If you want to control people, promise them a Messiah,” she spits through gritted teeth at Paul. “Then they’ll wait for centuries.” Like Paul, Chani is hard as the blade with which she fights to liberate her people and her world. Yet the man she loves may become her people’s greatest oppressor.
These are scripture-sized stakes to be decided here an on this world that looks so much like the deserts out of which came Moses, the Bible, and Islam.
On Arakkis, there are no slug crime bosses, pod races, or space port cantinas with bands playing repetitive yet catchy tunes. Here, the harsh sun blackens fighters crossing blades to duelling silhouettes. Its sunlight bends around Paul and Chani’s faces as they kiss for the first time sitting atop a sand dune, like starlight bending around a planet. The shouts of the first wave charging across the dune into Paul’s holy war is as loud as the pulsating blam blam blam blasted from the cannons they charge against and Hans Zimmer’s chant-like yet booming electronic score. All the thunder and drums join hands to form a sonorous tidal wave that pushes through the film in tandem with the story like the air rushing out of a church organ’s pipes to fill the vaulted ceiling of a church.
Dune: Part Two is the best sci-fi I’ve seen since Star Wars but Villeneuve’s tune is different to George Lucas’s. Lucas assembled a gallant and swashbuckling pop saga. Villeneuve has created cinematic jihad. Dune: Part Two will have you praying before the screen by the time the credits roll.
You can watch The Big Sleep and see just a good detective story, but if you do, you’re missing out on the full course director Howard Hawks offers you in this classic film noir.
Hawks joins PI Phillip Marlowe on Marlowe’s latest case: an infirm millionaire is being blackmailed with his youngest daughter’s sins. Humphrey Bogart plays this gumshoe who calls himself “just a guy who gets paid to do other people’s laundry.”
Except taking out this smelly laundry is only half the film. The other half is Marlowe falling in love with his client’s oldest daughter Vivian. Vivian is played by Lauren Bacall and Bacall is made for this part. She’s got Athena’s marble face and her unique voice that’s a sexy lioness’s growl. That’s the perfect recipe for a lady tough enough for the tough guy to fall hard for her and hard enough that when he’s found out she’s also being blackmailed he wants to find out who’s got their hook in her and to yank that hook out of her.
As Marlowe investigates, Hawks made me see the story as Marlowe does. I knew where the scenes took place because Hawks showed the street signs and the named mailboxes that Marlowe looked at to figure out where he was as he tailed his client’s blackmailer. When Marlowe breaks into the blackmailer’s house, I saw Marlowe’s client’s daughter inside and sitting in a compromising position through Marlowe’s eyes. Point of view shots abound in this film and they’re all from Marlowe’s point of view. They’re just one way Hawks made me travel through the film as Marlowe did without even noticing it when I first saw the film.
The Big Sleep is one of those films that I enjoyed more the second time. I could comfortably put my feet up and be absorbed into the story the first time I watched it but on the second time I sat up, looked closer, and found just how Hawks’ filmmaking had absorbed me so easily. I found the great art that lay beneath and supported the competent storytelling.
Chinatown did almost nothing new. I loved it for that.
That’s after I finally watched the film. Roman Polanski’s neo-Noir thriller was a classic I took a long time to watch. I read The Movie Book and its authors made Chinatown sound like an innovation miracle for breaking every Noir genre convention. I love Noir. Watching a film labelled Noir but that didn’t taste like Noir stunk like snake oil to me. It put me off watching Chinatown for five years.
Those five years passed and I decided to see if Chinatown was what those authors had sold it as. I borrowed a copy, watched it in my New Year’s holiday, and I found that they got even more wrong than Jake Gittes.
Gittes is the film’s hero. He’s played by Jack Nicholson with a devil’s charm.
Gittes makes a lot of cockups. He’s hired by a lady who says she’s Mrs Mulwray to expose her husband’s affair but the real Mrs Mulwray then slaps him with a lawsuit when he does. That’s not even the worst case of mistaken identity in this film. There are others and one’s far worse. It and many of the others are on Gittes, but he’s still the film’s keystone despite his bungling.
Nicholson isn’t playing a new role when he plays Gittes. Gittes is not the first incarnation of the private detective who becomes a hero after stumbling into a maze littered with flick knives, guns, and a few dead bodies. Nicholson is wearing a suit first worn by Humphrey Bogart. Bogart played the lone but Stoic gumshoes penned by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. These films are the foundational texts of Film Noir. Bogart made the Noir detective in those films.
Nicholson is playing Bogart’s tune, but he’s playing it on a different instrument.
Nicholson wears the Noir detective’s suit different to Bogart. He’s more a goblin than a Stoic. A sly cackle is always dancing on his tongue and it can flip into a viper’s hiss with the snap of his fingers. There’s a sharpness to him but it’s the sharpness of a jackal. A jackal is a handsome dog but it can also bite your hand off. James Cagney had this same blend of charm and menace but he played jitter-bug gangsters. Gittes isn’t a gangster. He’s mercantile, yes. “I’m not in business to be liked but I am in business,” he tells the real Mrs Mulwray when she asks why he persists in investigating her imposter. But, he keeps investigating even after a thug slits his nose open, after any promise of a pay check skips town, and he beds with a woman who might be a murderer. Gittes keeps going just like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falconand Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Nicholson is playing the hero Bogart first did. He’s the shamus who takes the beautiful lady’s job for the pay but sticks around after he’s gotten in over his head to save her from being drowned. He’s a sentimentalist inside a cynic. That’s what Bogart’s character in Casablanca was called. You could say that about almost all Bogart’s roles and about his Noir PIs more than any of them. You can say it about Nicholson as Gittes in Chinatowntoo.
Chinatown doesn’t subvert the Noir genre. It’s a faithful addition to it. Gittes is a direct descendant of Spade and Marlowe, Nicholson is fighting Bogart’s fight, and Chinatown is a spiritual triplet to The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. It’s not snake oil. Chinatown is 100% Noir.
We needed My Name is Alfred Hitchcock. Film and literature proper needed it and their makers, connoisseurs, and consumers desperately needed it.
Mark Cousin’s unusual documentary about Alfred Hitchcock was released in late 2023. It doesn’t just resurrect the Master of Suspense through Alistair McGowan’s perfect mimicry of Hitchcock’s deep and impish voice as he narrates the film. The film is a reminder wrapped in the Master’s own voice and accompanied by a gallery of his greatest work that his work sprung from what today is shunned like an artistic leprosy: escapism.
Only cultural appropriation is as unpopular as escapism in film and literature today. You can see it in the scorn thrown at the makers and the fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The superhero blockbuster film franchise is as escapist as you can get. It’s a cocktail of fantasy, science fiction, and adventure stories where spies, wizards, and gods, battle super soldiers, androids, and aliens wearing flashy threads that no real person would dare wear in public. They’ve also been derided by many caryatids of art and culture. Cultural and artistic pillars as diverse as Stephen Fry, Alan Moore, and Martin Scorsese have called superhero films infantilised rubbish.
“Life is complicated, and no one wants to believe it’s complicated,” Fry said when interviewed by Dave Rubin in 2016. “I suppose you might call it the infantilism of our culture.” To stem this infantilisation, the British actor, author, and public intellectual implored Rubin’s viewers “above all, when you go to the cinema don’t go and see superheroes hitting each other. That’s for children!”
Moore was more apocalyptic. “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batmanmovies,” Moore said. “Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” (Let’s set aside the fact that many socialists commit the exact same cognitive sin). Scorsese, like Moore, also talked as if he were a guerrilla fighter on a campaign in his latest criticism of the superhero film genre. Scorsese dismissed the genre as “not cinema” but “theme park” rides in 2019 and he’s now warned of the “danger” it poses to culture and that filmmakers at “the grassroot level” must “fight back stronger” to “save cinema.”
Fry and Moore cast the escapism that fuels superhero films’ popularity as a retreat from reality, and Scorsese frames it as an abandonment of great art. Escapism in their view is for cowards and philistines. It’s like sin or disease. It’s something malign that just poisons anyone and everything it touches.
Yet Cousins shows in his documentary that escapism was the reason Hitchcock made his films. Cousin divides his documentary into five chapters, and the first chapter is titled “Escape.”
In that chapter Cousins compares a scene from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps set in a mock-up of the Scottish Highlands to the location as it exists in real life. The real location is a typically sombre patch of Scottish countryside but in The 39 Steps Hitchcock transmutes it into a Gothic wasteland. The hero and heroine walk slowly through the fog in the night like they’re lost. The fog is thick. Its ghostly haze obliterates the countryside around them and leaves only the stone bridge they’re crossing and a tree clearly visible. The tree is dead. It stands in the corner on the other side of the bridge as the hero and heroine cross. Its skeletal and black figure hangs over them like a waiting gallows. This is what Hitchcock wanted to do and did do in his films. He didn’t want his films to show reality but something more exciting. He wanted them to be “holidays from your life” as McGowan says in Hitchcock’s voice in Cousin’s documentary.
An interviewer for The New Yorker in 1938 on the eve of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes being released described Hitchcock as a man who “works with the mind of an intelligent child who gets angry when his adventure story bogs down midway with talk of love, duty, and other abstractions.” Hitchcock was a “child.” He made the films an adventurous little boy or girl would if their parents gave them a movie studio for Christmas: films about spies dashing across the globe from the Washington Monument to the Royal Albert Hall, detectives chasing women possessed (allegedly) by ghosts, and murderers who live next door. They’re all fantasies, as Hitchcock said in an interview. “They’re not slices of life. They’re all larger than life.”
Hitchcock is the greatest filmmaker who ever stepped behind a camera. He turned film’s shot sizes and angles, film’ dimensions themselves, into means of communication. I don’t think any of the upstanding cultural and artistic citizens I’ve quoted would disagree with my assessment of Hitchcock. Scorsese has praised Hitchcock for years. He wrote a whole article on what Hitchcock’s Vertigo meant to him and called the film “essential” to him. Yet his art came from his escapism. His success that so many like Scorsese praise came from the childish flight from reality they diagnose as a type of Peter Pan Syndrome. He was a great artist because he was an escapist.
He’s not the only one. Some of today’s greatest artists are escapists.
Steven Spielberg is as childish as Hitchcock and his films are escapist like Hitchcock’s. They’re about Indiana Jones trekking through dense emerald jungles alive with the caws of Amazonian bird life on his quest for lost treasures like the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Lance of Longinus. Like Hitchcock, Spielberg is looking for an adventure in his films.
Donna Tartt is Spielberg’s prosaic twin. Her writing isn’t populated by adorable aliens or killer sharks but they’re filled with prose that glitters and sparkles like a marble cherub iced in frost standing and smiling under a winter morning sun. “It is here,” she writes in The Secret History, “that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life.” Tartt is not a reporter. She does not just list details as you would items on a shopping list. She embellishes. She polishes, encrusts, and bejewels the objects, actions, and people in her work. The worlds she and Spielberg create are, like Hitchcock’s, more beautiful and more thrilling than the real world.
Escapism is more ancient than Tartt, Spielberg, or Hitchcock. Shakespeare isn’t realistic. Most of his plays aren’t set in his native Elizabethan England. They’re set in Denmark, Verona, and ancient Greece and Rome. His characters don’t speak like real people. A real, aggrieved Jew would likely say “I’m just like you, you Christian sons of bitches!” But this isn’t what Shylock says in The Merchant of Venice. He instead says “If you prick us do, we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” It’s not realistic dialogue but it’s so much more interesting to read and listen to. When Aeschylus wrote The Oresteia in ancient Greece, he did not call Clytaemnestra an evil woman but “that detestable hellhound who pricks her ears and fawns and her tongue draws out her glittering words of welcome.” It’s no more realistic than Shakespeare but like Shakespeare it’s thrilling to hear.
Hitchcock, Spielberg, Tartt, Shakespeare, and Aeschylus are all like the Darling children flying away with Peter Pan from reality off to the magical isle of Neverland where they can watch mermaids swim and battle pirates. Their art takes them and their audience to somewhere more beautiful and exciting than reality. They’re all escapists.
This flight from reality to the grand and glorious world of fantasy despised by the adults in charge of what’s called good art and bad art, and what’s called art and trash, has delivered some of our greatest artists and art. “Fantasy matters doesn’t it?” McGowan asks in Hitchcock’s voice in Cousins’ documentary. Yes, it does, and I’m glad Cousins has reminded us.
How could a film filled with Blues, violence, and incest be so boring?
It’s got the wrong heroine.
Like Alice Walker’s novel and Spielberg’s 1985 adaption, Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple follows Celie Harris from girl to womanhood as a “black” woman in early 20th century Dixie.
IMDb says the story’s about “A woman [who] faces many hardships in her life, but [who] ultimately finds extraordinary strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” I usually avoid any literature with a plot synopsis like that as a rule. Such big words often conceal a lack of drama. They’re how literary critics dress up vacuous trash like Waiting For Godot as great literature.
My rule is vindicated by The Color Purple. It’s not vacuous trash but despite the characters jumping up to dash, stomp, and twist about to the litany of sing and dance numbers, which flash and pulsate with rhythms reminiscent of Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, Celie makes it a chore to watch.
Celie can’t be called a heroine. Nor can she even be called a protagonist. She doesn’t do enough. Her father rapes her, impregnates her, and rips her newborns from her arms and gives them away to her neighbours, and her husband steals the letters from her beloved sister Nettie, beats her when she’s late with his dinner, or when she just refuses to give his children a bath. Celie’s life is Hell. Yet she does nothing about it. She sees her husband take and hide her letters but never searches his house for them or tries to catch the mail man before him. It’s Blues singer Shug Avery who finds Nellie’s letters for her and who rescues her from her husband. The film’s over two hours of watching Celie being kicked and picked up by other people like a discarded kitten.
The Color Purple is the grandest display of passive suffering since the Book of Job.
A slow thriller sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t.
Hitchcock said suspense lies not in the bang but in waiting for the bang. The best thriller-makers know how to stretch that waiting period out like a victim’s spine on a torture rack. The shower scene in Psycho is thrilling because Janet Leigh’s killer steps ever so slowly up to the ghostly shower curtain with their long knife held tightly in their hand, and the climax of Carrie, when Carrie White ascends up the stairs onto the prom stage where the bucket of pig’s blood awaits her, is more thrilling in slow motion than it would be if Brian De Palma showed it in real time and got it over with quickly. Hitchcock, De Palma, and their fellow masters of suspense are sadists. Their audiences are willing victims. You and I enjoy being tortured by them over hours and hours.
You’d also enjoy Justin Triet’s torture methods in Anatomy of a Fall which she directed and co-wrote. I did.
This film is the French lady’s admission ticket to the illustrious club where Hitchcock and De Palma are members. Triet deserves the title of a Master of Suspense.
She trapped me in the story of Daniel Maleski whose mother Sandra is charged with murdering his father, and she kept me there for as long as possible. Her two chief instruments of torture are: point of view shots and long takes.
Triet’s point of view shots shut me inside Daniel and Sandra’s ordeal. I wasn’t watching their legal and personal trials from a comfortable gazing distance like in a John Ford or Steven Spielberg adventure film. I saw their father and husband’s body prodded and turned over through the eyes of the ME and I was watching Daniel testify from where the judge was sitting. Triet put me there with Daniel, Sandra, and their supporting cast.
And she used a lot of long takes to keep me there for as long as they had to be there. Triet made me sit through the whole duration of the film’s most harrowing moments like the characters had to without the relief of time breaks or shot cuts. Like Sandra I had to sit through the interrogations by her lawyer, the prosecution using her own novels as proof of her guilt, and the night when Daniel asks her to leave their house. Sandra and Daniel’s lives become purgatory and Triet made me endure each moment of their burning with them in real time. Triet made the moment waiting for the bang as long for me as it was for Sandra, Daniel, and the rest of the cast who had to live through every second of it. Their waiting time became my waiting time.
It’s her fine torture of her audience that puts Triet in the same class as Hitchcock and De Palma. It also makes Anatomy of a Fall a great thriller equal to Psycho and Carrie. Hitchcock would take his hat off to Triet and De Palma should do the same. So should David Fincher, Fritz Land, and Christopher Nolan. Every Master of Suspense living and dead should rise and applaud to greet their newest member Justine Triet.
You can also read this review at Into the Screen. It’s an online film criticism magazine dedicated to creating a language of cinema.
Priscilla isn’t just a hatchet job on Elvis Presley.
That was a nice surprise for me. I watched the film’s trailer and I just saw a gloom-addled rebuttal to Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Some critics glared at Luhrmann for making Elvis’s life into a fairy-tale and in the same glum tone I heard a friend criticise Luhrmann for washing the muck from Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s relationship. Luhrmann dodged the fact that their relationship began as paedophilia. Elvis was 24 and Priscilla was 14 when they started dating in Germany. That would have been heavy and flight-killing baggage to tie around Luhrmann’s Icarian portrait of Elvis.
Sofia Coppola has made her film out of that baggage but not the baggage alone. Coppola has taken the light and the shadow in Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship and sat them down together in the same room.
She shows Priscilla and Elvis sitting side by side on a red couch surrounded by the golden lights cast by the Christmas tree behind them during their last Christmas together in Germany. Elvis gives Priscilla a parting gift before he returns to the US and Priscilla begs him to never forget her. It’s a starlit lovers’ farewell at the most wonderful time of the year. But Coppola also keeps their questionable age gap as easy to ignore as a corpse lying across the living room floor. Line after line of dialogue reminded me of that age gap. Priscilla is constantly called a “baby” and a “little girl.” Coppola even makes her look like a little girl. Coppola constantly shows Priscilla in mid shots and wide shots that dwarf her against the huge empty living rooms and hallways surrounding. This cinematographic belittling continues even when Priscilla turns from a 14-year-old girl into a grown woman. I couldn’t forget that the first time she met Elvis he was an adult man who asked a teenager to come up to his bedroom. That fact was always there infecting the shots themselves.
Coppola never let me forget both sides of Priscilla and Elvis’s story. If you want an image to summarise Priscilla, Google M.C. Esther’s Circle Limit IV. In that artwork angels and demons occupy the same space. You can see one and the other and both all at the same time. It’s darkness and light as roommates.
Hildy Johnson thought she was through with the newspaper business. Her boss and ex-husband Walter Burns thought different.
Howard Hawks’ classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday is the story of Burns’s con-man’s crusade to win Hildy back as both his wife and his ace reporter while they work to break the story of Earl Williams who’s a man on death row for popping a cop and whose repeal could knock the city’s mayor out of office.
Burns would commit anything short of murder to get this story. By the time the end credits roll he’s lied to Hildy, her fiancé, her mother-in-law-to-be, the mayor, the sheriff, and even the governor, and he’s aided an escaped felon, arranged a kidnapping, and framed an innocent man thrice. And the film happens over just one day!
“I am fond of you,” Hildy tells him, “I often wish you weren’t such a stinker.”
Hildy’s not just talking about Burns. She’s talking about the whole newspaper game. “I’m going to live like a human being not like you chumps,” she tells her fellow reporters whose sensational stories about Williams’s so-called girlfriend drive the weeping lady to dive out a window. They’re all stinkers. Theirs is a stinker’s business.
But it’s so fun. Its anthem is two sounds: “WIZZ” and “WHAM.” And it’s got one speed: breakneck.
“Now get this you double-crossing chimpanzee,” Hildy tells Burns over the phone. “I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up and if I ever lay my two eyes on you again I’m gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkey skull of yours until it rings like a Chinese gong!” Hildy pulls out the best lines but her fellow journos flick their own words off their tongues just as fast and sharp. “I swear on my mother’s grave,” Burns promises Hildy. Your mother’s alive she smacks back at him. Without a beat he says: “My grandmother’s grave. Don’t be technical.”
The newspaper game is stinky but it’s still a game where the players whip out new punchlines and comebacks out of their sleeves between breaths. I was always waiting to see what new flick knife, knuckle-duster, or balloon animal they’d twist the English language into and I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long.
Frank Miller wrote for Turner Classic Movies: “Where the average rate of human speech is 100-150 words per minute, the dialogue in His Girl Friday has been timed at 240 words per minute.” Howard Hawks sought to break the record for fastest dialogue when he directed His Girl Friday and to do it he used multiple over-head mics that were switched on and off as needs be. It worked. The dialogue came at me like camels racing to get off the hot sand. I jumped on and I loved the ride.
So did Hildy. She’s swept away by the WHIZZ and WHAM of the newspaper game she’s sworn she’s quitting. It just takes one more story to send her darting between phone calls as the news of Williams’s escape comes in and she’s smiling like an exited little girl when she reports to Burns that Williams escaped with a gun the sheriff gave him. “Ain’t it perfect?,” she grins brimming with glee. “If the Sheriff had unrolled a red carpet and loaned Williams an umbrella, it couldn’t have been more ideal.” She’s let the story’s thrill carry her away from her plans to “live like a human being” who cares about truth, justice, and the American way and not about how hot a news story is. The WHIZZ and WHAM outruns any sobs about right and wrong.
His Girl Friday crackled with such energy that like Hildy Johnson I couldn’t help but love Walter Burns and be seduced by his world where everything stampedes at a 100 km an hour to get each thrilling and possibly fact-lite story to the presses in time for the morning edition. “Oh Walter,” to take Hildy’s own words, “you’re wonderful in a loathsome sort of way.”
Bret Easton Ellis wrote a grand article on the film’s production and how the film’s director Michael Cimino:
“had become an artist whose fanatical attention to detail led to an entire street being built to his precise specifications, and then being torn down because it just didn’t look right.”
I’m not surprised that the film cost four times its budget.
Heaven’s Gate made 3 million against a 44 million budget and the New York Times called it “something quite rare in movies these days: an unqualified disaster.”
That’s not fair.
Heaven’s Gate is a failed epic but an epic all the same.
Its opening shot puts it in the same bed as Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, and Lawrence of Arabia. A slow pane down from the top of the spire atop Harvard University’s towered gate lowers the camera down onto the street below along which a young man runs to reach the college’s hall in time for his graduation. Cimino sweeps his God-like eye over the immense and sprawling stage upon which he will set his story in motion. It’s a common but effective technique in epics. Cimino uses it just as effectively as Victor Fleming, William Wyler, and David Lean.
That young man is Jim Averill (played by Kris Kristofferson) and after graduation he goes west and becomes a marshal to the town of Sweetwater in Wyoming. Jim fights to save the local Eastern European immigrants from cattle barons who send an army of mercenaries to massacre them. It’s class war in the Wild West.
Yet Jim, Sweetwater’s people, and Cimino forget this for long stretches of the film. There are scenes where characters get in and out of bed, gaze longingly into each other’s eyes, skate, go to cock fights, and show each other what happens when you grab a man’s tongue, but compared to the time devoted to this frolicking the characters and Cimino spend very little time dealing with the gunmen about to roll into Sweetwater armed with rifles and a death list with 125 names. This threat and the story it creates should be their focus but it’s swamped by all these scenes that are just pretty pictures. They’re the reason the film drags itself out to almost 4 hours-long. Cimino could have made a thrilling western akin to Stagecoach, El Dorado, and A Fistful of Dollars if he’d stuck to the bare spine of the story. Instead he weighed it down with all this fat.
Heaven’s Gate deserved to flop but it doesn’t deserve to never be seen again. That opening scene at Harvard is just one of many that take in the full horizon of the landscape upon which Cimino ran amok. Helost the story in the scenery but the scenery is still worth seeing.
Ferrari is out front. All 2024’s films will need to catch up and they’ll be competing against a film with a divine drive.
I saw Ferrari and I felt like I was inside an engine. The film rumbles and roars. An ever-present power courses within it, like the power you can feel vibrating through the body of a car that’s stationary but turned on and that turns the metal egg of the car into a lightning bolt when you kick up the throttle.
Stephen Romei from The Australian wrote that Ferrari has “less violence [and] less action” than its director Michael Mann’s other films. There’s plenty of violence and plenty of action. It’s just not gun fights or explosions.
It’s 1957. Enzo Ferrari must win the Mille Miglia to save his racing car factory from going broke and he must keep his mistress and their son secret from his wife Laura who owns half his business.
This plot is the film’s sturdy driveshaft but it’s not the film’s sole propulsion.
In one shot during the race, Mann weaves and turns the camera in tune with Ferrari’s race car and the panning holds the car in the shot’s centre and shows the countryside, the mountains, and the emerald pillars of trees, passing around the car as it speeds across the Earth. The speed envelopes the shot as it does the driver. I felt the world passing by in a blur of earth, wood, and asphalt around this motor-hearted chariot.
Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin’s dialogue is just as glorious. Ferrari demands that there is a “cruel emptiness” in his driver’s stomachs that leaves them with only a “lust to win.” Is there a posthumous award for Best Screenplay? Martin should win it if there is.
Mann and Martin electrify, accelerate, and glorify every wheel and gear of Ferrari.
When I saw Ferrari, a boy sitting with his family in the seats behind me covered his eyes when the cars crashed. The boy’s father told him when he could look again. But you can’t have the speed, the splendour, and the poetry without the carnage. Energy tears machines and people apart and it revs them up. It’s why Enzo calls his work a “deadly passion” and it’s why I found Ferrari so thrilling. Energy promises glory or ruin. Its fire can speed you across the Earth as Enzo’s priest says but it can also incinerate your bones.
Ferrari’s energy promised me something magnificent around every bend. I wanted to see Enzo Ferrari race around those bends to see what lay beyond: ruin or glory?
The plague turned movie screens dark for the last few years and this year Hollywood went on strike but old and new heroes still came to light the silver fire inside cinema screens.
First, I’ll acknowledge the bomb in the room. No film critic can write about this year in film without writing about Oppenheimer. I didn’t think Christopher Nolan could do better than his heist in a dream, in a dream, in a dream that he pulled off in Inception in 2010, and after his semi-botched, time-inverting spy thriller Tenet in 2020 I was concerned Nolan was taking the first steps of a declining artist. Then, this year I walked out of Oppenheimer dazed, almost blinded, like I’d watched a star being born. Nolan can still outdo even himself. His filmography keeps rising like a crescendo that doesn’t seem to have a peak.
Nolan wasn’t the only established name to return to cinema this year. David Fincher’s The Killer was the best pure cinema I’ve seen since Hitchcock. Wes Anderson Asteroid City was zany like only Wes Anderson could get away with.
Established brands returned too. Across the Spider-Verse went higher and deeper than its predecessor and Branagh took Poirot into a mystery and shots more warped than anything the sleuth’s stepped into in Branagh’s previous two Poirot films. I’m glad these two films won’t be the last in these franchises. Decent mythologies are needed now that the Age of the Superhero Film is over. They will come from people like the makers of these films: those who don’t just string a Beginning, Middle, and End together but who make the movement from A to Z itself the blossoming and withering of a flower. These filmmakers make the telling the of story itself a beautiful art, like the gliding figure of a ballet dancer. They are the ones who will forge the stories that ignite the child within you hungry for new dreams and nightmares. The makers of mythologies are not society or studios but the storytellers.
Such storytellers emerged from outside Hollywood this year: Guy Nattiv (director of Golda) and Alejandro Gomez Monteverde (director of Sound of Freedom). Watch these men. The cinema’s next great stories will be made by them, alongside Nolan, Fincher, Anderson, Branagh, and others like them.
We were fortunate for this year in cinema. It was a reminder that we have such men making films. We were reminded that there are heroes.
Here are what those heroes gave us: 2023’s Best Films.
The young chocolate entrepreneur Willy Wonka, played by Timothee Chalamet, works to build his business from the street-level up and beat the machinations of the Chocolate Cartel who are hell-bent on squashing this new competitor.
Chalamet is a young Gene Wilder’s Wonka not Johnny Depp’s. Chalamet is handsomely pale like Depp but the Oompa-Loompa he meets has soft green hair not black and waxy hair like the Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Chalamet’s costume is also more Dickensian than Gothic. Wonka is light not dark.
Hollywood’s been making prequels, sequels, and reboots like a pair of over-sexed rabbits. Much of the spawn are worthless, like The Matrix: Resurrections. Wonka is one of the exceptions, like Mary Poppins Returns and Paddington 2.
It has a well-wrought plot. Wonka has a dream and villains that want to kill it. Watching Wonka fight for his dream was so much fun. He flips every obstacle before him upside down, like a magician who grabs a tabletop, flips it over, and before your eyes the bare table holds a triple-decker chocolate, strawberry, and caramel cake. Telling you too much would be like tearing open your presents before Christmas morning, but to give you just a taste of Wonka’s thrilling feats: when he’s out of milk, he breaks into the zoo, and milks a giraffe. I felt like a kid again through the whole film.
Inside the plot, Chalamet is dazzling as Wonka. If you’ve ever wondered what James Dean would look like in a live-action Disney musical (think Mary Poppins) directed by Gene Kelly then look no further. Chalemet smiles and pure joy lights up his pale face. His lean figure has brought critics’ scorn but here it dashes and twirls through cobblestone streets and across glass rooftops, like a ballet dancer’s, draped in his magenta coat and a chocolate-brown top hat. Chalamet is today’s Apollo. He’s the most perfect beautiful youth since Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic. This handsome young man goes back to being a child in Wonka. Apollo returns to Eden. Removed from the adult world, he runs rampant. He’s a living, kaleidoscopic lamp that shines every colour of the rainbow into the world around him.
A song Neil Hannon wrote for Wonka gives words to what I found in the film: “Here is the child that you left behind…Here is the wonder we used to feel, back when the magic was real.” Wonka is a voyage back to a childhood of fantasy, magic, and adventure.
How does such a dull film become one of the Sixties’ biggest box office hits and most ‘iconic’ films?
That’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Arthur Penn’s 1967 gangster film cost just $2.5 million and it made $70 million. Roger Ebert called it “a milestone in the history of American movies” and “a work of truth and brilliance,” and on Rotten Tomatoes it’s called “A paradigm-shifting classic of American cinema.”
Yet it almost put me to sleep. The film larks about with Bonnies and Clyde from one robbery and shootout to another. Like them it meanders across the whole central rump of the USA without any thought except to rob the next bank to buy the groceries for tomorrow’s lunch. Unlike the best crime films, The Maltese Falcon, Shadow of a Doubt, and Carlito’s Way, there’s no MacGuffin everyone’s after, serial killer to unmask, or soul to save. There’s no plot that arches towards a climax. It’s a series of Bonnie and Clyde’s episodic escapades.
So why did cinemagoers in the Sixties slurp it up?
Because it was “contemporary in feeling” as Pauline Kael called it, but not in the way she meant. Bonnie and Clyde felt right for the Sixties’ hippie litter. Abbie Hoffman laid out the hippies’ moral code in his book “Fuck the System” the very same year Bonnie and Clyde was released. The book’s a manual on how to get free food, free petrol, free books, free everything. Just some of Hoffman’s sage advice for living includes:
FREE GAS — If you have a car and need some gas late at night you can get a gallon and then some by emptying the hoses from the pumps into your tank. There is always a fair amount of surplus gas left when the pumps are shut off.
FREE COLLEGE — If you want to go to college free send away for the schedule of courses at the college of your choice. Pick your courses and walk into the designated classrooms. In some smaller classes this might be a problem but in large classes, of which there are hundreds in New York, there is no problem. If you need books for the course, write to the publisher telling him you are a lecturer at some school and are considering using the book in your course.
FREE BREAD AND ROLLS — Rapaports on Second Avenue between 5th and 6th Streets will give you all the free bread and rolls you can carry. You have to get there by 7:00 A.M. in order to get the stuff. It’s a day old, but still very good. If you want them absolutely fresh, put them in an oven to which you have added a pan of water (to avoid drying them out), and warm them for a few minutes. Most bakeries will give you day old stuff if you give them a half way decent sob story.
Freeloading was the popular ethic of the Sixties and Bonnie and Clyde put this ethic on screen. The gung-totting duo can’t even pay for their own groceries or bus fare. Every meal they eat is bought with stolen money and every mile they travel is in a nicked car. They live off others just as Hoffman advocated. Bonnie and Clyde showed the hippies their morality in practice. It also helped that Bonnie and Clyde were played by the glamorous Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, and that Penn spent more time with his camera trained on them than the nameless and dead bank clerks and coppers they leave in their wake. Bonnie and Clyde are made into movie stars but their victims are redshirts. These thieves and murderers are made beautiful and their crimes are glossed over. When they looked up at Bonnie and Clyde on the screen, the hippies could see their parasitic ethics came alive but clean and beautiful.
Bonnie and Clyde rocked the Sixties because it washed the blood off those freeloaders’ hands, put them up on a stage, and made them rock stars to be cheered by the hippies who wanted to live like them by getting everything for nothing, but without all the killing.
Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic isn’t just as comprehensive as Orson Welles’s drama of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane. Like Welles, Cooper has crossed over from acting to directing with stunning results.
Cooper’s made a great argument for keeping black and white films around. Black and white films haven’t yet gone extinct. Christopher Nolan used black and white in Oppenheimer and Kenneth Branagh used it in Belfast, but they both used it to distinguish past from present and one narrative timeline from another. They used it for plot. Cooper uses it to make twilight New York streetlamps look like white stars held up atop silver torches against night’s black curtain that’s pulled along suburban New York streets. He uses black and white for looks and the looks are glittering. Not since Raging Bull has there been a film that shows just how beautiful black and white can be.
But Cooper does more than just paint the film in pretty black and white makeup. He watches Bernstein and his estranged wife Felicia argue but he watches from a distance. When they argue Cooper’s camera is always far away and frames them in a wide shot. The immense camera distance shows the chasm between husband and wife, and it makes the audience stand and sit in the position of one of their numerous party guests, interviewers, and onlooking fans who watch them from afar trying to peer into their private lives beneath their public ones. The camera distance measures the emotional distance and mirrors the biopic’s inherent voyeurism. Cooper knows how to make the image itself tell the story. He has one of the necessary skills of a great director.
He may join Welles, Elia Kazan, and Branagh in the ranks of actors who’ve made great films on the other side of the camera. You’ll have to wait and see. I will.
Napoleon Bonaparte is the clay that historical epics like Lawrence of Arabia, Gone With The Wind, and Ben-Hur are carved from. Scott’s Napoleon is mush.
He chose the wrong Napoleon. Watching Joaquin Phoenix play Napoleon was like reading Kafka. He proclaims himself Emperor, recites love letters to his Empress Josephine, and tells off a subordinate, all in the same tone. His performance doesn’t rise and fall with the action. It’s more than ten floors below the level set by Helen Mirren in Golda. In Golda Mirren sharpened her voice into a ruthless war-time commander’s, but she also made it crumble under Golda’s despair when when listened to her troops being massacred. She had the range to make her performance dramatic like the story. Phoenix doesn’t have that ability. His Napoleon is so stiff he’s impotent. His personae doesn’t project drama. He’s fit to play Gregor Samsa but not Napoleon.
Scott’s poor choices don’t stop at casting Phoenix. He should have got a better script from his screenwriter David Scarpa.
Scott and Scarpa crush Napoleon’s life to make it fit inside the film. Napoleon’s coronation doesn’t last any longer than the scene before when he’s told he should take the throne. Napoleon also watches Marie Antoinette guillotined in the time it takes him to lower his crown onto his head. His coronation should be his story’s Act I climax, but it’s dethroned and squeezed into the procession of snapshots from Napoleon’s life that Scott holds up. This is all Scott hands to his audience in Napoleon: snapshots. He doesn’t deliver scenes that foreshadow the next scene and push the action to go faster and rise and fly and hurtle through the air towards a climax. Napoleon’s Russian campaign isn’t planned, argued over, or speculated about. It just happens. Scott just cuts to Napoleon riding on horseback into Russia’s frozen wasteland and misses all the suspense he could have juiced from that moment. He and Scarpa could have made so much dramatic tension by making the audience anticipate the campaign that would be the beginning of Napoleon’s end. But they didn’t. They made the film’s story flat like Phoenix’s performance.
I went to see Napoleon rightly expecting a portrait to rival Jacques-Louis David’s and Delaroche’s. I was disappointed. Scott didn’t give me a portrait. He just gave me a string of dull vignettes.
To Hell with how ‘relevant’ Golda may be now that Israel is at war again. I won’t compare October 7 to 73’s Yom Kippur War or Golda Meir to Benjamin Netanyahu. A good critic doesn’t grab their reviews from the headlines.
Many great films have been made about war-time leaders: Darkest Hour,Lawrence of Arabia, and Patton. But Golda is greater than them all.
This movie made me feel what it’s like to be the one who makes the choices between victory and defeat.
Director Guy Nattiv stays with Golda (Helen Mirren) in Tel-Aviv for almost the entire film. He flies out onto the battlefield only once and very briefly. But he made me feel that, even if Golda was sitting in an office without bullet holes in the walls or shocks from shell blasts breaking through her windows, she was still at war.
She fills the shots. Golda gives orders to her commanders, frantically washes her face after her troops are slaughtered, and records every man killed under her leadership in her notebook, and Nattiv frames all these acts in close ups and extreme close ups. Her face and what she says and what she does become the centre of the film’s universe.
Ash trays, typewriter keys, and the phone to Kissinger are also brought alarmingly close to the camera. Nattiv also lifts and sharpens the volume of the typewriter’s tap-tap-tap when Golda’s assistant types cabinet meeting minutes and the hum of the spotlight heating up to glare at Golda before she makes a televised speech. Small objects and actions like these swell to the size of tanks and the volume of gunfire when they’re fed through Nattiv’s transmuting camera.
The urgency and intensity of war is there in Nattiv’s shots. Nattiv made me feel what it was like to be the woman who could save or doom her nation through one choice. He made me know what it was to be Golda.
There’s a great story in Caravaggio’s Shadow: a papal inquisitor investigates the simultaneously brilliant and debauched life of the famous painter Caravaggio to decide if Caravaggio should be pardoned for murder. But the historical drama’s director Michele Placido doesn’t tell it.
Placido throws a visual flare over his material. Caravaggio’s paintings are the greatest recipients and beneficiaries of Placido’s glorifying gaze. Placido follows the inquisitor and makes the inquisitor’s eyes the camera’s and yours as the inquisitor looks up at Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus hanging over a church altar, but also when he looks down at Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia which lays hidden in the dark corner of a secret catacomb. Placido makes you look up at the mighty steed that fills the first painting and that towers over the altar like a statue on a pedestal. He makes you look down at the angel in Amor Vincit Omnia as it grins childishly up through the shadows cast by the candlelight that are licking its face, like it’s not an angel but a demon staring up at you from the bottom of Hell. Placido’s gaze shows Caravaggio’s work in both heavenly and demonic light. It turns them into icons of the two sides of Caravaggio’s life that the inquisitor must reconcile.
But Placido can’t get away with just style. He needs a better plot for this film. The Pope orders the inquisitor to investigate Caravaggio’s life and work so the Pope can decide if he should pardon Caravaggio for murder. Caravaggio paints whores and tramps as virgins and saints. He transubstantiates what the inquisitor calls filth into what he regards as holy. The inquisitor is being asked to gaze into Caravaggio’s soul through his art and what he sees could shake his faith and what he does with what he sees could condemn Caravaggio to death. It could, but it doesn’t. Louis Garrel gives the inquisitor a puritanical mask of cruel indifference that never slips even once to reveal any crisis of faith as he gazes into Caravaggio’s art. And despite what the film’s promotional literature tells you he doesn’t hold Caravaggio’s life in his hands. Caravaggio isn’t on death row and the inquisitor is not deciding if Caravaggio is to be executed. He’s compiling a report to recommend to the Pope that Caravaggio’s pardon application should be granted or denied and Caravaggio has sent the application from Naples where he lives safely outside Rome’s jurisdiction. An application for pardon is far less sexy as a guiding conflict than a death sentence. Caravaggio’s head is not on the chopping block and the inquisitor’s investigation will not decide if the axe falls or not. This lack of immediate peril sucks the suspense from the plot’s veins.
Placido isn’t Caravaggio. He can’t transfigure the leaden plot into gold just with his camera as Caravaggio used his paints and his brush to turn the wretched of the Earth into the populace of Heaven.
Have you ever heard of EVP? Electronic voice phenomenon?
It’s when the dead speak to you through a machine, like a radio or TV. Your household, radio-wave sensitive appliances become electronic Ouija boards.
My Name is Alfred Hitchcock is a similar phenomenon but the board is the movie screen, the medium is English documentary-maker Mark Cousins, and the spirit on the other end is the greatest filmmaker who ever lived.
I knew that the film wasn’t written and narrated by Alfred Hitchcock but the longer and longer I sat there in the cinema watching the screen the more and more my grip on that knowledge slipped loose.
It wasn’t just because Alistair McGowan perfectly mimics Hitchcock’s voice. Without looking at their titles, listen to this video, and then listen to this one. Can you tell the two Hitchcock’s apart? Which is the real Hitchcock and which is McGowan?
Cousins looks at Hitchcock. He really looks at Hitchcock. His gaze is as relentless and penetrating as Hitchcock’s that the director turned on his characters. Cousins unmasks the planning, the precision, the deliberate cinematic calculations behind shots in Hitchcock’s most famous films (Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window) and more ancient gems from Hitchcock’s earlier days before films could speak (Blackmail, The Lodger, and Murder!). Cousins’ exploration of Hitchcock’s work is all-encompassing and deeply permeating. In between these glimpses and winks at Hitchcock’s filmography are shots like the one standing behind the opening and closing credits: a single fish bobbing against a black screen, its nimble body surrounded by a swirling dress of glowing pearl flesh. Cousins stares at it like it’s held in a glass bowl. It’s caught in his gaze as Hitchcock’s characters and actors were caught under his, and as Hitchcock is now caught in Cousin’s. Hitchcock’s gaze is reflected back at him. This film about him looks like a film by him.
But this still is not what made me believe most deeply that Hitchcock was speaking to me from beyond the grave.
This film showed me Hitchcock’s films as I’d never seen them before. It gave me knowledge about those films I love and have studied by that man I revere and have studied that I didn’t know existed but I now see were right in front of me whenever I watched and re-watched Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, or any other Hitchcock film. I learnt that Hitchcock’s heroes and heroines are always trying to escape. They’re not just trying to escape prison like Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man. Cary Grant was trying to escape the crop duster in North By Northwest. Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window was trying to escape his suffocating, domestic four walls through voyeuristic adventures into his neighbours’ lives. Janet Leigh in Psycho was trying to escape the society that did not approve of her unmarried love. The suspense in Hitchcock’s films comes from the protagonists fleeing their own “private traps” as Norman Bates called them. It’s a detail so fundamental to Hitchcock’s films that you’d be forgiven for thinking only Hitchcock himself could tell it to you.
It wasn’t Hitchcock that told it to me, but My Name is Alfred Hitchcock may be the closest I’ll ever come to speaking to the Master of Suspense.
Unlike the protagonist of his latest film, in The Killer David Fincher doesn’t make mistakes.
And his protagonist, an anonymous professional assassin (I’ll call him the Killer), only makes one mistake, and that mistake brings punishment from his boss and colleagues down on those he loves and he travels swiftly and undetected under numerous names from Santo Domingo to New York to Chicago to get revenge.
The Killer was my first Fincher film. I wasn’t just impressed. I was glad. I’m a Hitchcockian, and I’ve searched and searched for another filmmaker whose style equals Hitchcock’s. I found one in Brian De Palma. I’ve found another in Fincher.
Like Hitchcock in all his films and De Palma in his best, Fincher’s style in The Killer is subliminal. He works on a subconscious level. He communicates information and produces emotion through the breadth and depth of his camera’s gaze.
The size and order of the shots itself are what Fincher uses to create suspense. The cut and shot size are his rifle and scope.
The Killer is preparing a hit in the opening scene, and Fincher cuts back and forth between the Killer, his fingers coiled tightly around his rifle trigger and looking through his scope at his target in the hotel across the street, and point of view shots of the target in the Killer’s sight ascending to his rooftop hotel room, undressing and lounging in his silk dressing robe, oblivious to the target trained over him. The cutting back and forth between these shots may seem simple and innocuous, but add them together and they equal: this man is going to kill this other man. I took the next logical step and asked “When will the shot be fired?” and “Will it hit its mark?” and I was standing on that thrilling tightrope when I’m waiting to see which way the story will fall.
Fincher begins his scenes looking wide and gradually looks closer and closer as the action unfolds and the suspense mounts and the climax approaches and the tension, finally, is released. He’s mastered the imagistic climb towards a visual orgasm that Hitchcock perfected. The Killer begins a scene watching his next victim (Tilda Swinton) enter a gourmet waterfront restaurant in a wide shot. He sits down across the table from her and Fincher moves in to a mid shot of them at the table and close ups of them both as Swinton silkily spins line after line trying to delay the inevitable and the Killer sits there coldly and almost completely mute. The scene ends with Fincher right up in Swinton’s face in a close up as the Killer’s bullet crashes into her forehead and shatters, splatters, and scatters the bones and blood and leaves a black dot in Swinton’s powdered white brow. I knew the closer Fincher looked at his characters the closer I was to the moment of the kill, and I was back on that tightrope.
Fincher is a lot like the Killer. I mean that in the best possible way. Both work with a technical perfectionism that can pass unseen but is never ineffective. You may not notice what Fincher is doing even as he’s wrapping his leather-gloved fingers around your brain.
History is both a muse and a menace in Martin Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese’s fascination with the murders of the oil-rich Osage tribe in early 1900s Oklahoma inspires some of the film’s most impressive cinematic flourishes but bogs down its story.
History walks hand in hand with the story.
Scorsese shows the story passing into history as it happens before your eyes. He frequently intercuts his shots with recreations of historical photos. Characters stand and pose for a photograph in the full colour shot, the photographer tells them to hold still, there’s a flash of light, and a photo of the moment, in early 20th century rusty brown, springs onto the screen. Even as he’s showing the story play out Scorsese is showing his audience the documents that one day will be all that remains of the story.
The story finally recedes into history in the film’s epilogue. The epilogue is a true-crime radio show’s latest episode about the Osage Murders. The story is no longer living people being directly enacted by actors and actresses before your eyes. It’s become the stuff written about and read about, made into broadcasts and books. The story recedes even further into history when Scorsese steps up to the microphone and narrates the last words of the broadcast and the film. Scorsese’s metafictional insertion of himself into his film reminded me that I was watching a film by Martin Scorsese. His closing narration is the story’s final step into history. It turns it from a living saga into a matter of record for broadcasters, writers, and now Scorsese to make art from.
Scorsese’s historical perspective enriches the films’ style but undoes its screenplay. The film’s screenplay was co-written by Scorsese and Eric Roth and it’s over three hours long, but it didn’t have to be. Scorsese said the story’s heart is Lily Gladstone’s character Mollie Burkhart. He’s right. Burkhart is Osage but her husband Ernst is in a plot to murder her and her sisters for their share of the Osage’s oil. That is a great dramatic recipe, but Scorsese doesn’t stick to it. He wonders off to the murders of other Osage who are unrelated to Burkhart and whose deaths don’t increase Ernst’s prospective inheritance. His detours elongate the film’s runtime and dilute the suspense by shifting the focus from the story’s most thrilling dramatic avenue. Scorsese should have stayed focused on making a thriller and not a history lesson.
Scorsese is creative as a director but as a screenwriter he is like an enthusiastic history student with a poorly disciplined pen running about vomiting words all over his essay trying to cram all he can into a word count that can’t hold it all.
My hometown Adelaide is bloated, swollen, and overrun with festivals both long-established and concocted but in this festive frenzy there’s one new face that deserves attention.
The inaugural Adelaide Independent Film Festival was held at the Capri Cinema on Saturday October 14.
The Capri sits in my local neighbourhood of Goodwood like a solitary Buddha in an East Asian jungle tended to by a small band of devoted monks. This heritage-listed 1940s cinema is staffed by volunteers, and I’ve faced them across the counter as a customer and stood and served by them on the other side of the counter as a volunteer myself. The cinema’s cream shell, crowned with an emerald neon star, houses a foyer and two-storey cinema, candy bar and loos, girded and encrusted with sleek skins of scarlet carpet and light tan varnish, all with art deco curves. It’s a survivor of an era when cinemas were temples.
It was a perfect venue for a new film festival, a new time of worship for the cult of living images that is film, to enter the world.
I was fortunate enough to meet two filmmakers whose work won awards in the festival in the Capri’s foyer.
Michael Cusack is a cheery old man whose animated short film The Better Angels won Best Australian Short Animated Film. It’s a stop-motion tale of beauty amidst desolation. A young soldier flees from a war zone into an shelled home, and in this place of refuge he finds an abandoned cello and the music he plays on it brings a dress mannequin’s shadow to life to dance to his music.
Fraser Cameron’s The Drivers won Best Australian Live Action Short Film and, it’s a collection of conversation snippets with Melbourne taxi drivers but it’s not a piece of kitchen-sink realism. Cameron asks the drivers if they’ve ever been in love or if they’re happy, and one taxi driver tells Cameron he thinks each of us is our own God who we believe in and worship.
I discussed this idea with Nasim Nasr during the meet and greet at the local pub, the Goody, after the festival. Nasr’s short film Impulse won the Best Micro Film Prize. It’s a moving work of photographic art. Two shots of the same bare-chested man with thick and long black hair fade across one another, as the man dances and twirls a black chador in one shot and a white in another. It’s a dance of contrasts. My conversation with Nasr evolved into how, as artists, our work is our God.
She, Cameron, Cusack, and others whose work in images is their God have found a new place to worship. At the Adelaide Independent Film Festival the cult of the image in which I am just one devotee has sprung another tributary totem head.
A robot burning on a funeral pyre is a potent image…except a metal robot can’t burn. The Creator is much like this image as it tells the story of a soldier searching for his wife in a world where humans are at war with AI.
The film is more interesting than it sounds. Its director and co-writer Gareth Edwards hasn’t just re-worked the tired plot of humans battling AI that’s turned, Frankenstein-like, on its creators. Only half of humanity in The Creator is at war with AI. The other half work alongside them as colleagues, fight and die beside them as comrades, and live with them as friends, family, and lovers. The Creator approaches AI in a different way. It’s not just humans versus robots. Those who don’t recognise AI’s personhood must fight those who do.
Edward’s has inseminated this action film plot with a romance. Despite Edwards’ panning wide shots over East Asian rice fields tended by robot farmers wearing bamboo hats and Hans Zimmer’s characteristically epic score, The Creator is a love story. Its conflict is a man trying to reunite with the woman he loves who has every reason to hate him. John David Washington plays the AI-fighting soldier Joshua who searches for his wife Mya (Gemma Chan) who was raised by and lives amongst AI.
Washington and Chan establish this conflict in the opening scene. Both were suffocated in their previous bland roles in Amsterdam and Eternals but in this scene they deliver Edwards’ and co-writer Chris Weitz’s succinct dialogue with awesome conviction and pain. “They’re my family,” Mya tells Josh when she discovers he’s come to kill her AI family. “They’re not real,” Josh says and his voice is steady in its conviction but he’s reaching his hand out towards Mya slowly like he’s afraid she’ll run away from him. “This love is real,” he implores her. “This child is real,” Washington shouts and points at Mya’s swollen belly. “This isn’t real,” Chan says, and her mouth and her eyes are pulled apart. They crack and tear, and her face bleeds tears but remains luminous but only to remind you of the happiness that once radiated it and that’s been destroyed. It’s like watching a joyous face painted with gold crumble. You can see the chasm that is broken between them and the love that drives Joshua to try and cross it.
But Washington and Chan are better actors than Edwards is a writer. The Creator has sparks but they don’t all catch and ignite into a beautiful fire like Edwards’ last film Rogue One. That film was the best of the recent Star Wars offshoots but it was written by Tony Gilroy not Edwards.
Edwards doesn’t grasp his subject-matter.
I was looking forward to a reckoning with the enigma of AI personhood but I was disappointed. Edwards splits plot and theme, action and thought, and the two do not meet again as they did in the opening scene. Josh does change his views towards AI but this change is ultimately unnecessary for him to be reunited with Mya. Josh’s friend has an AI girlfriend, a temple hosts carvings of robots alongside human figures, and dead AI are carried on stretchers, prayed for, and mourned like humans, but all this remains background that never shifts the plot’s current, like a cross that lies on the bedside table but that’s never used in prayer. They just reminded me of the question Edwards asked in the opening scene and his inability or refusal to attempt to answer it.
This artistic ineptitude or cowardice makes the story lose even its action film flavour. Edwards’ refusal to engage with his subject-matter drains The Creator of drama as it also drains the film of philosophical substance. He rushes through the story’s most dramatic moments. Scenes when Josh is told he must kill Mya, when the architect of AI is discovered, and when it’s revealed a miracle child must die to end the war, are introduced and done with inside a few sentences and seconds. Edwards picks up these moments of the heaviest drama and quickly drops them like a stone he’s unable to carry.
Like Icarus, Edwards has chosen a noble goal but one that he’s unfit for.
There’s a first-time for everything. Even a boring Wes Anderson film.
Or rather four short boring Wes Anderson films. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is streaming on Netflix alongside The Ratcatcher, The Swan, and Poison. They can all be watched in one sitting, are adapted from Roald Dahl’s stories, and mark a low in Anderson’s career I’ve never seen him reach and I hope I will never see him sink to again.
They look like Wes Anderson films. Anderson paints Roald Dahl’s hut with as many colours as the Grand Budapest Hotel. Dahl (Ralph Fiennes), wrapped in a light chocolate brown sweater over a cherry red shirt, his face glowing a jovial orange, his baby blue eyes small pools inside his face, sits in his mustard yellow armchair. It’s so visually rich it’s Van Goghian. All the colour I expect from Anderson was there.
But these shorts don’t act like Wes Anderson films. The characters are lifeless dummies not living cartoons. Gustave H, Mr Fox, and Herbsaint Sazerac talk, walk, and ride bicycles and sleds with the zany agility of Looney Tunes after a round of drinks at the pub, but Henry Sugar, the Ratcatcher, and Peter Watson just stand and stare at the audience and narrate Dahl’s stories, I suspect, word for word. Even the dialogue tags are included in the dialogue. Anderson recites more than he creates. He has enslaved his style to his source material and left these films with his face but none of his brains.
The result is that these are not Wes Anderson films based on Roald Dahl’s stories but Roald Dahl’s stories turned into films by Wes Anderson.
Childhood collides and intermixes with war in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun.
The film is a coming-of-age story and a war story. It’s adapted by playwright Tom Stoppard from novelist JG Ballard’s same-titled novel. It stars the 12-year-old Christian Bale as the privileged English schoolboy Jim Graham who’s separated from his parents when the Japanese occupy Shanghai in 1941. Jim is Oliver Twist thrown into a Hemingway story. He’s separated from his parents after letting go of his mother’s hand to retrieve his toy plane that he dropped in the street and he screams as she’s carried away by the panicked crowd fleeing the Japanese. He navigates WWII until it ends in the bright white light of Hiroshima that he says was “like God taking a photograph.” His story is the perfect clash between childhood’s prelapsarian garden and the adults’ kingdom built on bones and grouted with blood.
Jim is the child in the story but he isn’t the only child in the film.
Spielberg is the child behind the camera. He looks up at Jim when Jim salutes three Japanese fighter pilots and their craft sits behind him. His head reaches the top of the frame and bright sparks fill the air behind him as the plane is repaired. This close up’s low camera angle turns this child into a giant. Spielberg also looks down at Jim when Jim lies in bed looking up at the model plane hanging from his bedroom ceiling. A single spot of silver light crosses his dark bedroom and hits his face and makes his eyes sparkle amidst the dark. From this high angle, Jim looks like he’s gazing up into the heavens. Spielberg’s cinematic gaze is always aimed up at a plane cutting across the sky or down at a bustling street from atop a skyscraper. His is the eye that always searches for the exciting everywhere it turns. It’s a child’s gaze.
Bale is the child in front of the camera behind the child in the story. Empire of the Sun was Bale’s first role. I sat down in the cinema and looked up at the screen expecting to see an embryotic version of the Bale I loved as Batman. Instead, I saw the Christian Bale I knew in miniature. The long diamond face with hollow cheeks and that could drop its chin to open its lips into a wide and wonderous O, crack its mouth into a weeping chasm, or spring its cheeks up into a Peter-Panish jubilance was there. Bale’s talent for becoming a canvas on which he actualises the most dramatic potentialities of character apparently hasn’t waned after almost fifty years. It’s as if he’s stepped from Jim into Batman without the bleaching of the soul labelled ‘growing up’. He has kept the child’s flame against the assaulting grey of adulthood.
This flame ignites and illuminates Empire of Sun. It is a story of war but it’s told with the Romanticism of youth that seeks the exciting behind all the universe’s curtains.
The director of this year’s Asteroid City is the same director of 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. That earlier film is painted with the same idiosyncratic brushstrokes.
There’s the borderline-absurd comedy. “This criminal…[is] a ruthless adventurer and a con artist who preys on mentally feeble sick old ladies,” Dimitri (Adrien Brody) bellows at Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes), “and he probably fucks them too!” Gustave replies: “I go to bed with all my friends.” No real person would calmly accept this accusation of sexual perversity when his accuser sounds ready to cut his throat for it, but they wouldn’t be as funny. The clash between Dmitri’s brutish insult and Gustave’s casual admittance is hilarious. It’s unrealistic but I laugh every time I watch it.
There’s also the blatantly anti-realistic aesthetic that allows Anderson to get away with this absurdity. His settings are so saturated in colour and so intricate in detail that they look like models meticulously and obviously assembled. The Grand Budapest is the pinnacle of this anti-realistic glamour. Its walls are sugary pink and vanilla white. It’s carpeted in scarlet rugs, supported by polished tan marble pillars, and does not have a single un-panelled door. The Grand Budapest is as ornate as a pampered child’s birthday cake. Anderson’s aesthetic signals to his audience that The Grand Budapest Hotel isn’t meant to be real but a fiction contrived for fun.
Wes Anderson hasn’t changed. Maybe he never will. I’m glad for it.
Kenneth Branagh has created a new kind of whodunnit with his third Poirot film.
The value of the whodunnit has until now been its plot. The film’s mystery, a medium is murdered in a Venetian palazzo, is exciting but Branagh’s direction eclipses it.
He looks down on the medium from an extreme high camera angle and looks up at the palazzo’s faded tan walls from extreme low camera angles. It’s like there are restless spirits watching the scene from their graves beneath the earth and from inside the walls. Branagh also cants the camera. He tilts the shots far onto their sides. Something is eschewed in these images. Branagh tells this story of a haunting with a haunted cinematic gaze.
This gaze goes mad as the film and the haunting creep and rush along. Branagh pans the camera to follow Poirot as the sleuth races through the palazzo after a child only he can see. The camera pans round and round in every way as Poirot searches manically and even slides up onto the roof and turns Poirot on his head.
A Haunting in Venice should be watched not just to find out whodunnit but to see how-Branagh-does-it.
Only Wes Anderson could get away with a film where an alien arrives on Earth and almost nothing happens.
Almost nothing. “Nothing happens” would be inaccurate and unfair. Asteroid City is written and directed by Anderson and he’s put more plot into this film than his last film The French Dispatch. That film was just a collection of absurd sketches that dramatised articles in the last issue of the titular New Yorkeresque magazine. Asteroid City is about a recently widowed war photographer who searches for the right time to tell his children that their mother is dead when they’re staying in the titular New Mexico desert town. But even though he and his children witness an emerald UFO descend from the starry night sky, by the time they leave Asteroid City little has changed. Anderson pans around the town just as he did in the opening scene showing its diner, garage, and motel just as they were in the opening scene and the same train that passed through the town in the opening scene passes through it again as the credits roll. Asteroid City has a plot but it’s such a slim plot that to call it Chekhovian would make it sound more rotund than it is.
But it has Anderson’s distinctive colour. Anderson’s mise en scene is still a visual buffet. The pure baby blue sky over Asteroid City contrasts delightfully with the desert’s hot and dusty red, the town’s cream motel cabins and the characters’ skin colours that are so saturated that they all glow like they’ve got quality tans. None of them would look out of place working at the French Dispatch or staying at the Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson surprised me as much in Asteroid City as he did in those two films. Jeffrey Wright’s General Gibson receives a telegram from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, opens it, reads it quickly and tells his staff: “He’s furious.” You’d expect the President to say more than this and that’s what makes it a funny joke. Anderson remains adept at subverting expectations and he kept me interested despite the film’s near plotlessness. He has maintained his talented slights of hand and glowing palette.
I’m glad Asteroid City is a Wes Anderson film. The film wouldn’t be much fun if it wasn’t.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a gruelling adventure into the dark jungles of men’s souls. It stands alongside Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as an epic parable about our demons.
The classic Hollywood film was written and directed by John Huston and starred Huston’s drinking buddy Humphrey Bogart, Huston’s father Walter, and the comparatively obscure Tim Holt.
The three actors play three broke Americans who go prospecting for gold in the Mexican wilderness to find a fortune to fill their empty pockets: Bogart’s gruff Fred C. Dobbs, Huston the wizened old prospector Howard, and Holt’s softer Bob Curtin. The trio meets in a flop house that Dobbs says is “filled with rats, scorpions and cockroaches and the cots are only fifty centavos a night” and then they set off across the dusty and barren Mexican wilderness to claim their fortune that’s their ticket out of poverty. Huston shows the mountains they scale in wide shots and lets the high key natural lighting flood the camera. The searing white light blasts the rocky and sandy expanse and turns it into a burning white mirror as the prospectors trek on and on across it.
But the drive of the film isn’t if they’ll find their gold but what their gold will do to them. “I know what gold does to men’s souls,” Howard tells Dobbs and warns of how gold destroys the brotherhood between partners in prospecting. “When the piles of gold grown that’s when the trouble starts,” Howard says. He says it with a cheery and dry resignation to what he’s decided are immutable and irresistible laws of human nature. He places a prophecy above the trio’s heads before they set out, like an Ancient Greek Chorus. “Do you believe what that old man…said,” Dobbs asks Curtin, “about gold changing a man’s soul so that he ain’t the same kind of a guy as he was before finding it?” Curtin says: “Guess it all depends on the man.”
Huston cracks open this question through sending these men out into the wilderness on a treasure hunt that becomes a spiritual quest into the heart of each of them.
This true crime thriller creaks under the weight of history.
Boston Strangler is written and directed by Matt Ruskin and starring Kira Knightley as relentless investigative reporter Loreta McLaughlin who investigates the Boston Strangler. The serial killer murdered at least 11 women in Boston in the early 60s.
Hitchcock said that there’s no terror in the bang only in the anticipation of it and Ruskin never forgets this essential axiom of suspense. A man in the opening scene turns off his radio before walking over to his wall and pressing his ear against the plaster to investigate the thump on the other side. Ruskin creates the space to anticipate if the man will discover the murder-in-progress on the other side of the wall. He creates it by inserting the precious seconds, when the man turns off the radio, when the man takes those first frightened steps, before panning through the wall to the crime scene. Ruskin inserts the same time for anticipation in the climactic scene when Loretta meets the man she suspects is the Boston Strangler. She looks at him, across the wide-shot of the coldly lit and empty room, sitting waiting for her at a grey table. Then she walks over and sits down to face him. Ruskin permits audiences to anticipate the bang from the opening to the climax.
But Ruskin’s material gets the better of him. The Boston Strangler still remains a phantom. The historical mystery Ruskin has chosen is an unsolved one and this leaves Ruskin’s film without a resolution. Ruskin valiantly tries to invent one. Loretta presents a final theory about the killer’s true identity to her editor but there’s no new evidence or eureka moment from which it can emerge. It’s like Ruskin has quickly jotted down an improvised answer on notepaper, scrunched it into a ball, and tossed it to Knightley. Ruskin fails to give the Boston Strangler Story the satisfying ending it never had.
Character is the source of story, wrote Lajos Egri. (That’s Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing in a nutshell). Ford vs Ferrari proves Egri was right.
The 2019 sports drama film was directed by James Mangold, written by the Butterworth Brothers and Jason Keller, and starred Christian Bale and Matt Damon, and I’ve never seen a film with such promise fail so completely due to poor characterisation.
So much could have been made of this film. I’m saying that even though I’ve never been interested in race cars and the film’s about Ford Motors’ quest to defeat Ferrari in the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. “There’s a point,” race car builder Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) says, “where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless, just disappears…That’s where you meet it. It asks you a question. The only question that matters. Who are you?” Shelby’s monologue that opens the film turns the race car into a hurtling crucible in which everything but the driver’s true character is burnt away. Race car driving becomes akin to slaying the dragon, dynamiting Cortland, and blowing up the Death Star. It’s transmuted into a great trial out of which heroes may emerge.
Yet this dramatic potential is scuttled by the film’s poor characterisation. Henry Ford II hires Shelby to make him the car to beat Ferrari but sabotages Shelby’s efforts to give him the victory he wants. He fires Shelby’s fearless driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), then lets Shelby re-hire Miles, and then almost fires Miles again but Shelby intervenes. Ford is leading a crusade while ramming his own sword up his bottom. Miles and Ford’s underling Leo also act contrary to their character. Half the major characters want the treasure but walk in the opposite direction to the big red X.
Contradictory characters will always ruin any story. They only give the audience reason to distrust that the characters will create a plausible and exciting story by acting to reach their goal. Disengagement with the story and boredom will then follow.
This is how the dramatic potential of race car driving was squandered in Ford vs Ferrari: through letting inconsistent characters into the story.
Lots of thrillers have a mystery. Fritz Lang’s 1953 crime thriller The Big Heat, starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, and Lee Marvin, has two.
The film begins with a mysterious suicide, and something more. Lang opens with a closeup of a gun laying on a desk and pans back as a man raises the gun and then BANG. Lang’s skilful camera angles never reveal the man’s face and establish the first mystery: Who is this unfortunate soul? But then, his wife, after finding the body and the letter next to it, draws the blinds and calls a Mr Lagana. Who’s Mr Lagana? A cut to his bedroom shows Lagana’s a man who sleeps in silk pyjamas, has a tough-looking man, perfect bodyguard material, wake him up to answer the important call, and hand him his cigarettes, light them for him, and then pass him an ash tray. Lagana promises to meet with the widow and tells her to phone the police, and then he calls Vince Stone. Who’s Vince Stone? He’s playing cards with politicians in the dead of night and orders his girlfriend out of the room and to close the door behind her when he takes the phone call. Surrounding the mystery of the suicide is the mystery of what plot these characters are weaving.
The suicide on its own wouldn’t be enough to generate the momentum that pushes the film’s plot. The hero, detective Dave Bannion played by Glenn Ford, would just be investigating a corpse. Why a man commits suicide is a mystery but the man’s no longer walking around, planning as Lagana and Stone are, or plotting to kill anyone as Lagana and Stone later plot to murder Bannion. There’s no immediate need for the mystery to be solved. But there is an immediate need for the mystery of what characters are plotting to be solved because then the hero knows if those plots endanger him or someone or something else both he and the audience should value. There’s action that can come to bear on the plot, not just a corpse.
The double mystery in The Big Heat adds action and with it thrills to the story.
The seventh Mission: Impossible has action but too many actors.
Director and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen have achieved the feat of bringing me to the edge of my seat while spinning my head like a runaway spinning top at the same time.
Tom Cruise, playing Ethan Hunt, and Hayley Atwell evade the CIA and battle arms dealers aboard a runaway Orient Express headed for a dynamited bridge. Rebecca Ferguson duels Esai Morales in a sword vs knife fight on a bridge over a Venice canal. Luther Stickell, played by Ving Rhames, guides Benji Dunn, played by Simon Pegg, in disarming a nuclear bomb in the baggage department of Abu Dhabi International Airport. McQuarrie and Jendresen throw the right gadgets in the heroes’ and villains’ hands when these characters are standing on the right bridge or running down the right alley to make riveting action scenes.
If only McQuarrie and Jendresen had been as efficient with why these characters are doing all this in the first place. Ethan’s mission to find the key needed to destroy a rogue, sentient AI is clear. But so many other parties are after the key, Atwell’s character Grace, the CIA, MI6, the Russians, a glamorous arms dealer played by Vanessa Kirby, the silver-haired Gabriel played by Morales, and an unfortunately anonymous buyer, who all in turn propose, form, and break alliances with each other that the plot becomes excruciatingly labyrinthine. There are too many characters with too complex motives.
The film’s thrilling action scenes are single rooms amidst a condominium honey-combed with mazes.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is about Robert J. Oppenheimer’s bomb, and like its subject it’s hard to believe a film such as this could be sired by one man.
No facet of the art of filmmaking passes unutilised. Nolan has used anything and everything to create his epic of the American Prometheus. Nolan uses images both real and surreal. Oppenheimer gives a triumphant speech after his A-bomb is dropped, and steps off the podium and walks down past the cheering crowd, and steps in a charred corpse. His foot leaves a hole in the brittle and black, human-shaped husk. It’s something that should be in a nightmare. But Oppenheimer also can’t hear the cheers of his adoring throng. Nolan has edited out the sound of their cheers. Sound and image are both marshalled to show Oppenheimer’s horror at what he has done that has broken him apart from reality and cast him into a waking nightmare. Nolan even uses the colour of the shots. Different colours distinguish the two storylines of the film. The story of Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, is shown in colour. The story of Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downing Jr, the bureaucrat who chained the American Prometheus to his rock of torment, his shown in black and white.
Oppenheimer will be watched again and again and audiences will be awe-struck before it for generations to come. And generations of film scholars will obsessively dissect it to create a complete catalogue of each isotope of genius artistry Nolan has infused it with. Their task may take them as many eons as it took for humanity to build the atomic bomb. Maybe, even longer.
The establishing shot is the first shot of a scene and it’s usually a long shot that gives more prominence to the setting than the characters and establishes where and when the scene is happening.
It can seem redundant but it can pull a viewer into the screen before the action of the scene gets started.
Alfred Hitchcock begins the climax of North by Northwest with an establishing shot of Roger Thornhill, the film’s hero played by Cary Grant, speeding along a mountain road in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. The screenwriter, film director, and playwright David Mamet has said in his Masterclass that shots such as these are redundant because the audience can tell where and when the story is happening by watching the action unfold. Mamet’s not wrong. An audience could work out that Thornhill is at the villain’s house to rescue the heroine without that establishing shot of Mount Rushmore that the villain’s house overlooks.
But, Hitchcock didn’t include that establishing shot to tell you where Thornhill is and is doing. He included it to tell you that Thornhill is going to go to the villain’s house to rescue the heroine. Its purpose is to tell you what’s going to happen before it happens and allow you to anticipate what will happen. This is the establishing shot’s value.
Establishing shots shouldn’t be included to communicate information which the audience can get for themselves, but to create suspense. Suspense, unlike contextual information, can’t be got by the audience themselves. The filmmaker must provide it, and an establishing shot is one way.
Indiana Jones goes out with more than just a bang.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is set in 1969 and the world has left Jones behind. He’s no longer at the centre of the camera frame in close ups as he’s battling Nazis. He’s pushed to the side of a mid shot as he rides the New York subway to work surrounded by people excited about Neil Armstrong visiting the city, reduced to just another commuter. His days of adventure have “come and gone.”
But director James Mangold, and screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp, give him one last, exciting adventure. They give him the quest to retrieve the Antikythera (the Dial of Destiny of the title) from his goddaughter, before a former Nazi scientists does, to clear his name of murder. This conflict is the spark that ignites a string of quintessentially Indiana Jones action scenes, where Jones goes from fleeing from henchmen on foot to stealing a policeman’s horse and riding it down into the subway while a goon chases him on a motorcycle. The goal, and the rise in action it makes possible, keep the plot at the high bar of excitement set by Steven Spielberg in the previous Indiana Jonesfilms.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny shows Indiana Jones from a new angle as he embarks on his last adventure that’s as thrilling as all those he’s had before.
I loved seeing Michael Keaton return as Batman in his glittering leather suit and his bat cave, with its vaulting stone walls, and his batwing, accompanied by Danny Elfman’s 1989 score, and he’s still able to give me goosebumps by just saying “I’m Batman,” in his gritty yet sharp voice.
But that’s just nostalgia.
Barry Allen’s desire to go back in time to save his mother has the potential “to destroy everything,” as Bruce Wayne tells him, but they spend just five minutes discussing this immense danger that’s the primary obstacle to Barry’s quest that drives the film, and Bruce is leaning on his car in the street and Barry is sitting on his front door step, and there’s not so much as a raised voice let alone apocalyptic prophecies of what damage Barry could wreak. The immensity of the obstacle doesn’t show to create as much suspense as it could.
Sasha Calle is a magnificent new talent playing Supergirl. Although Superwoman would be more accurate. There’s nothing girlish about her. She stares and speaks with a glittering coldness and walks like a goddess who’s descended to Earth, striding with a straight back, firm shoulders, and strong yet agile movements, across both a dining room and a battlefield. She talks and walks like a woman who could fly up into the sky at any moment to smash an incoming meteorite to gravel with her bare hands. She is a woman of steel.
But Calle must make do with precious little screen time. She’s forced to cram her entire origin story into a less than five minute monologue, and all the motivational force and the pain within her story (Why did she swear to protect her cousin? How is apparently failing in that mission affecting her? Why won’t she help Barry? Why does she then change her mind?) are left as drops when Calle could turn them into oceans. If she was given a script that let her flex her dramatic muscles that are left lifting dumbbells when they could be ripping mountains up by the roots and tossing them across oceans.
The Flash doesn’t let its ingredients simmer and breathe and release their full flavours, and comes out, like every meal cooked too fast, as a lump of only material, neither totally inert or totally potent, that has only partially realised its potential.
You can also read this review on Substack. Remember Into the Screen will be moving exclusively to Substack on August.
When it came to cinemas in 1976, Pauline Kael wrote that “No other film [had] ever dramatized urban indifference [as] powerfully” as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Both Sight & Sound and Empire have put this alleged psychological thriller on their lists of greatest films twice. It’s preserved in the US National Film Registry. Taxi Driver is the most famous film about nothing at all.
NYC Taxi driver Travis Bickle, the film’s protagonist played by Robert De Niro, is a monument to inaction. This city is filthy and someone needs to clean it up, he tells the politician he picks up for a fare one night. I’m paraphrasing and making Travis sound much more articulate than he really is. In the film, his indignation against the state of the world comes in gutted prose. This is how he expresses himself in his diary in a later scene: “Listen you fuckers, you screwheads, here is a man who would not take it anymore, a man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, here is someone who stood up.” Travis speaks in shopping lists of slang, cliched and trite abuse.
I can understand why filth would be stinking up Travis’s mind. Scorsese filmed Taxi Driver on site in New York City during a sanitation strike. Rubbish lies spilt and piled up on every street corner. Travis meets a prostitute named Iris and finds out she’s only 12 years old. One night, he picks up a passenger, drives the passenger to an apartment, and the passenger tells Travis how he’s going to go up to that apartment, confront his unfaithful wife and her lover and stick a gun up his wife’s pussy. Travis meets a new shade of rot on every street corner when he takes his cab out to work every night. Critics including Kael got it right when they called the New York of Taxi Driver Hell.
Yet for all Travis’s internal raging against this Hell he traverses every night, he does absolutely nothing about it. You’ll read in the film’s plot synopsis that he plans to assassinate a political candidate. That’s just a side plot. He spends most of the film watching people. Sometimes he’ll talk to them but he does it very badly. “I felt that when I walked in that there was something between us,” he tells a pretty political staffer he tries to woo. Travis’s tongue is cardboard and all his crusading thoughts stay bottled up inside his head.
I’m not surprised. One day a rain will come and wash the scum off the streets, Travis tells himself but he has no reason to become the rain. The “scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth” haven’t done anything to him. He’s not Batman or Dave Bannion in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat or Paul Kersey in Michael Winner’s Death Wish and noone he loves has been murdered, raped or even robbed by the people he spits on in his mind. The rot is festering around him but never on him. He’s a wannabee vigilante with nothing to take revenge for.
So of course he spends almost the entire film spinning around and around like his cab’s wheels. In the climax where he (for some unarticulated reason) shoots a pimp, I wanted to cheer. “Finally,” I thought. “Something’s finally happened.”
You can also read this review on Substack. Remember Into the Screen will be moving exclusively to Substack on August.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy is the ride of your afterlife.
Wife and Husband Babes and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) live alone and in bliss in their house on a hill in a quiet New England country town…until they die in a car crash. They come back as ghosts but are trapped in their house with its new and insufferable owners the Deetzs. Babes and Adam try to scare the Deetzs away but fail and they summon an exorcist for humans called Beetlejuice. Then things really get weird.
Ghosts who can’t haunt. A ghost exorcising humans. The living haunting the dead rather than vice versa. Screenwriters Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren turn, flip and twist every angle and expectation of a ghost story and make the film one loop the loop after another for the living and the dead.
I don’t know which of the two parties is funnier. The Maitlands’ predicament isn’t that big of a pickle. The Deetzs aren’t that bad. They’re actually very entertaining. Delia Deetz begins to borderline demolish the Maitlands’ house to ‘redecorate’ it the minute the Deetzs move in. She tells her husband Charles “If I can’t gut out this house and make it my own I will go insane and take you with me.” I believed her. Her voice has a shrill squeak like a bat swarm cooped up in an attic banging on the walls to get out. Charles seeks solace from the city bustle in watching the birds hop across the countryside’s skies even as Delia guts the house and their daughter Lydia tells him “You may be able to relax in a haunted house but I can’t.” Lydia walks around half the time with a black veil over her face. “As soon as we get settled, we’ll build you a dark room in the basement,” her dad promises her. “My whole life is a dark room,” she says. She’s drowning in goth and to the point that she’s so miserable its funny. Lydia’s so strange that she’s the only one who can see the Maitlands. They find this out after trying to scare her parents off. Babes and Adam pull their faces, eyes and heads off but it’s not very effective since Delia and Charles can’t see them. They seek help from the bureaucracy that runs the afterlife. They meet a man with a shrunken head, another man killed by being run over flat by a truck who is now hung up on strings in the afterlife’s office and giant sandworms with an extra head inside their mouths. One insanity after another and the Maitlands are still trapped with the Deetzs.
So they call on Beetljuice who’s the most outrageous wild card in the whole deck living or dead. Michael Keaton plays him with a crackling electricity. He shoots off in every direction you can think of, turning, twisting and bending his legs and arms this way and that, pulling rats out of his pocket, and his words popping from his mouth yet gushing with sleaze, all the while plastered over in his undead makeup of a chalk face, black eyes and green hair. He’s a zombified Charlie Chaplin. I wish the Maitlands had called him sooner. It takes them the better part of the film’s first half but Keaton makes it worth the wait when he appears.
Like Wes Anderson, Burton makes cartoons for adults. Beeteljuice is the finest example. It’s bursting to the seems with cartoonish energy but gallows humour that only adults get. For instance, how when you die you’re doomed to spend eternity as civil servants. The Maitlands find this out when the civil servant they meet in the afterlife’s waiting room shows them her slit wrists. Burton’s humour is macabre. His fun is fiendish. The Maitland’s fatal car crash is caused by a cute dog. In Burton’s world, the Ferris wheel is just a step away from the guillotine. He works at a cosmic intersection where the imagination of childhood meets the blackness of the adult world, much like the Maitlands’ house which becomes a meeting place for the living and the dead.
You can also read this review on Substack. Please remember: Into the Screen will be moving exclusively to Substack in August.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The screw-ball comedy lives again in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Fly Me to the Moon has the magic mix of glamour, gags and gravitas that I haven’t seen except in classics from the 30s and 40s like Ninotchka, His Girl Friday and Mr SmithGoes to Washington.
The film orbits around two people. Madison Avenue ad lady Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johannson) moves to Cocoa Beach (right next to the Kennedy Space Center) when she is hired by US agent Moe (Woody Harrelson) to sell the Apollo 11 moon mission to the public and Congress. Both the politicians and the people are asking why they’re spending so much money on a program where there’s routinely fires and explosions. The program’s launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) does not like having his astronauts pose for Omega ads, telling paranoid congressmen that Moscow will build a death ray on the moon if they get there first, or Kelly hiring younger and more handsome actors to play his staff and himself to give interviews to drum up public interest in the program. They’re a great pair. Kelly is the sharp-witted Mad Lady whose profitable fibs sometimes cross the line into downright deception and Cole is the honourable but stiff boy scout who’s inability to even season the truth can be self-defeating but also work as well as Kelly’s spin jobs. A senator thinks the Apollo program’s money should go to repair his flood-hit state. That’s a bit selfish, Cole says. Cole makes up for it by winning over another more evangelical senator by sharing his own belief in the relationship between God and space. “Sometimes you can win people over by being yourself,” he tells Kelly. They’re the hunky and good-hearted klutz and the gorgeous yet suave businesswoman. He’s Jimmy Stewart with Brad Pitt’s pecks. She’s got the lips of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Cary Grant.
Yet Kelly is also one of the film’s greatest flaws. The film felt like several films squished into one. Kelly must sell the Apollo mission to the public, Kelly and Cole have to convince US senators to vote to fund the Apollo mission, and Kelly has to hide from Cole that she’s organising a fake moon landing to replace the real one. Each one of those could be a film on its own and Kelly moves the plot from one to the other with her savvy circumnavigation of every obstacle so quickly and easily that the film feels like a revolving door of perfunctory meetings she just breezes through. When she’s facing being arrested, all she has to do is smile and flaunt her hair and the cops escort her back to NASA HQ. Almost everything is just too easy for her unlike the classic screwball comedy stars played by Grant, Rosalind Russell and Garbo.
Garbo’s director in Ninotchka Ernst Lubitsch would have insisted on a better script but if the great screwball director had lived to see the moon landing and the conspiracy theories that followed, this is the film he likely would have made. It’s silly, stylish and sincere.
It’s been a long time since a film made me cry. The last one was Lion in 2016 and the moment I cried was when the young Indian boy Saroo screams for his mother as a train carries him away from his family for 25 years. The moment I cried in Chapter 1 of Kevin Costner’s Western epic Horizon was when Apache burn a settlement and slaughter its people at twilight and a boy named Russell (Etienne Kellici) jumps on a horse and flees the massacre. He rides on and on through the dark blue night with Apache ridding after him. Russell’s horse’s hooves thump and thump like locomotive pistons against the earth in tune to his breaths.
How old is Russell? He can’t be older than ten.
Horizon Chapter 1 is not just about Russel. It’s made up of many stories not just his. His neighbours the ‘Ladies Kittredge’ (mother and daughter Frances and Lizzie played by Sienna Miller and Georgia MacPhail) survive the massacre by hiding in an airtight cellar under their home, forcing a rifle up through the dirt and breathing through the rifle’s barrel until they are rescued by the US army. Costner rides into a Wyoming mining town as saddle-man Hayes Ellison. There he saves a prostitute named Marigold (Abbey Lee) and the baby she’s nannying from fur-clad gunmen.
The film is a mosaic of individual narrative tiles like these spread across the American Frontier. Costner travels from the rocky and pine-studded mountains of Wyoming and Montana to wagon trains stretched across flat and arid dessert on the Santa Fe Trail and few of his characters’ stories intersect. The film is spread far, perhaps too far, perhaps to the point of thinning, but unlike in Michael Cimino’s disastrous, lethargic, long slug of a Western epic Heaven’s Gate, something actually happens in Horizon. Russell joins a band of scalp hunters, the Kittredge’s are adopted by the cavalry unit that saves them, and Hayes and Marigold flee with Marigold’s charge to save him from the men hunting him.
Costner has done for the Western much what Jean-Pierre Melville did for the resistance thriller in Army of Shadows. His American pioneers live like Melville’s French resistance fighters. They fight their own battles without one spilling over into another and are connected only in that their battles are part of the same war. For Melville’s fighters it was to liberate France from the Nazis. For Costner’s pioneers, it’s to push onwards and build a life on the other side of the horizon.
I will stop publishing my work on this blog in a month but I will continue to publish work every week as I have done but on Into the Screen on Substack.
I have been publishing both on WordPress and Substack for over a year now. I did this to test the pros and cons of each platform compared to the other and to see if one was better than the other. I’ve decided Substack is better than WordPress. It’s easier to manage and it’s far easier to monetise my content and thus reach my goal of turning this publication into an income source.
This blog will still remain online as an archive but I won’t publish any new work here from August 8.
Thank you all for your support and I am offering you all a complimentary subscription to my Substack publication. This will give you free access to the publication’s content that’s only for paying subscribers. I will process them within the next month. This will involve me adding your email addresses under your subscriptions here to the subscriber lists on the Substack site. If any of you want to opt out, please tell me by commenting on this post.
“What did you see?” Ron asks Thomas in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up.
“Nothing,” Thomas says.
I watched Blow-Up.
What did I see?
Nothing.
Michelangelo Antonioni wrote and directed this film. It was called a masterpiece. Martin Scorsese advises all young filmmakers to see it. Brian De Palma used it as the basis for his film Blow Out and Francis Ford Coppola did the same with The Conversation.
But it’s an aimless wander through a wasteland.
I’d read that the film’s about the photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) who photographs a murder by accident. I watched Thomas drive around London, skip about a park taking pictures, and buy a propeller from a junk shop presumably for a photo shoot that never happens. I watched the film on DVD. The film went on and on and no murder came along. I kept looking at the DVD player to see how much time had passed. I wondered when I’d get to see the murder.
This is something I’ve only experienced in Taxi Driver: a plot and a protagonist so purposeless that I was begging for something violent, bloody and horrific to happen just so I could see something happen. I amused myself afterwards by imagining what Hitchcock would think of this film. I imagined him sitting in the cinema quietly until the lights go up and then asking me “Now does the film start?”
Blow-Up is misrepresented as a Hitchcockian thriller. The Criterion Collection describes it as “a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park.” It sounds like a psychological thriller about a heroic common man who stumbles into a murder, but the murder doesn’t even happen in the first half of the film and Antonioni, unlike Hitchcock, couldn’t give a stuff about Thomas or any of his other characters. He constantly looks at them from a distance down hallways and across rooms and landscapes. When he shows Thomas taking photos in the park he does it from such a distance and in shots filled with so much empty space that Thomas is reduced to just a speck on the green. He’s not a hero. He’s an ant crawling across a blank page.
Blow-Out is a barren heath despite the mirage of a plot and of merit that’s been draped over it.
Ridley Scott doesn’t plot his films. He paints them. Story for him is often secondary to imagery and philosophy. Blade Runner is the film that has kept audiences going to see his films for four decades and it is the purest example of Scott’s baroque style where the workmanship is more in the ornamentation than the architecture.
Its plot is in fact flat and cliched. Let two generations of film scholars hang me for saying that but it’s true. An ex-cop (Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard) is roped into hunting down a band of fugitives by his ex-boss, finds the fugitives, kills them, and along the way falls in love with an icy and gorgeous dame (Sean Young’s Rachael). I dare you to find a plot that’s more obviously Noir. The only difference is this Noir is set in a futuristic LA where the sun doesn’t ever shine, cars fly past skyscraper-high chimneys that exhale flames, and cops like Deckard called Blade Runners hunt down artificial humans called replicants when the replicants step out of line.
There is nothing wrong with using familiar storylines as clear, brightly lit entrances to films. That’s the advantage of established genre conventions. Christopher Nolan did it with the heist film in Inception, but Blade Runner does not take the sharp turns and sudden drops that Inception does. It’s a straight line until the very end. In the beginning, the replicants are on the run looking for their creator and Deckard is hunting them. In the middle, the replicants are on the run looking for their creator and Deckard is hunting them. The conflict stays at the same temperature until the last few scenes. That’s when Scott turns the gas nob right up.
In the last half an hour of the film, the replicants’ leader Roy murders his maker by crushing the scientist’s eyes and head with his bare hands as they’re seated on the scientist’s white-linen bed amidst flaming candles in gold candelabras that are spread throughout the scientist’s bedchamber. Roy then returns to his hideout where Deckard is waiting for him and chases Deckard through the crumbling building as rain from the storm outside seeps and floods through the walls. It’s like the building is dissolving into tears. Tears that will be lost in the rain, like Roy’s memories as his famous last words go.
Roy is an artificial human with memories. Does that make him real? Does it even matter? I tore Blade Runner apart in my high school English class to find its portents and conundrums of artificial vs ‘real’ people. There’s plenty there. Deckard asks his boss what if the test they’ve got to tell if someone’s a replicant doesn’t work and Rachael asks him “Have you ever taken [the test] yourself?” Without the test, where is the line between the real person and the fake one? Can you even be sure you’re real until you’ve taken the test? If you can’t be, doesn’t that mean you’re real?
These questions might be churning inside Deckard’s skull. It would explain why he quit being a Blade Runner, his disgust when Bryan dismisses the replicants as “skin jobs,” and why he buys a full bottle of spirits after killing one of the replicants. Has he just killed a machine or a real person? Deckard might be asking himself this question but he’s only asking himself and it doesn’t stop him from hunting down the rest of the replicants. The question spends the whole film floating in between the lines.
Perhaps the subtlety should be praised. Scott’s lavish visual style certainly should be but the film’s one-note plot deserves the loss of a few stars.
Next month, it will be 55 years since Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Maybe by the time that moment has turned 65 a filmmaker will have made a film about it that realises its potential.
Damien Chazelle’s 2019 First Man opens in 1961 and Neil Armstrong is test-piloting an X-15 spaceplane. He’s breaking through the atmosphere, the close ups are as tight as the plane’s cockpit, and the camera shakes, rattles and trembles in tune with the craft and, like Neil, Chazelle looks from instrument to instrument in close ups so close it looks like a shot from Neil’s point of view as his brain is overrun with adrenaline.
This is how Chazelle shows all Neil’s flights in which he tests the craft that pave the way to the Apollo 11 mission to the moon: claustrophobic close ups and hand-held camera shots that put me in the craft with Neil Armstrong when it feels like it will fly apart and fling him out into space as a frozen corpse. Never before did I imagine how terrifying it must have been to be the first man to go to the moon.
If only First Man also made me understand what made the first man keep going. Wittgenstein said that whatever we cannot say we must let pass over in silence. That seems to be Armstrong’s motto in this film. A reporter asks him how he felt about being chosen to lead the Apollo mission and he answers: “I was pleased.” The reporter asks him how it compares to winning a car and he answers: “I was pleased.” Neil also spends a lot of time sitting or looking up at the moon or walking home and Chazelle just lets silence fill the scene. Chazelle is skilled when it comes to the terror in the moment of human engineering colliding with the force of physics but when it comes to answering the why that moves Neil into space he just stares at his protagonist as mute as a kid who know he’s looking at a great man but can’t say why.
I admire Chazelle’s boldness. He doesn’t let either his age or that of his career stop him from tackling big pictures that most filmmakers only take on when they’ve got lots of films under their belt. Oppenheimer was Christopher Nolan’s eleventh film but First Man was only Chazelle’s third yet Neil Armstrong is just as much a giant to get in focus on camera as Dr Oppenheimer. Chazelle followed First Man with Babylon. In that film set in 1920s Hollywood, Chazelle plunged into the oceanic territory of the very history, glory, and purpose of film itself. Chazelle was only 37 when he made Babylon. Other filmmakers have not gone into the ring with such beefy material until much later in their careers. John Ford and John Huston didn’t make The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance and The Treasure of Sierre Madre respectively until their 60s. Despite what Pauline Kael thought, filmmaking is not only a young man’s game. It’s not only an old man’s game either. Chazelle shows that.
But Chazelle’s boldness ultimately isn’t enough. Boldness lets you grab the material but you need skill to make the material work. Fortune may favour the bold but skill often waits for experience. Chazelle has the technical but not the character skills to tell the story of the first man on the moon.
Into the Screen 