Occupied City (2023)

Film Director Steve McQueen and his wife Author Bianca Stigter, in their city of Amsterdam

First Screening. Kanopy. Over three nights in my study. I am still recovering from a physical illness when I watched this and it probably wasn’t the right timing, but I found this mesmerizing all the same. Occupied City is a documentary by the British Master, Steve McQueen, and as a student of The Second World War and the Shoah, I could not turn away. I had heard this hit Cannes and Venice and caused quite a stir, but I had not the opportunity to see it until now. It is unavailable on physical media (a crime against artist lovers everywhere) and was lucky enough to catch it on Kanopy.

When I went to Berlin last year to see my son for two weeks, I prepped the trip by reading Alexandra Ritchie’s monumental and award winning Faust’s Metropolis, a history of Berlin. Just across from his apartment on Krautstrasse (yes, that is indeed a real street name) the Berlin Wall used to wind up on the north side of the Spree River, and just a block north of that was Jannowitzbrucke, a bridge across the Spree from his neighborhood (Mitte) to the environs of the government district. I did not bother to tell my son that this part of the Spree is narrow, and in April, May, and June of 1945 it was clogged with bodies and the river flooded the neighborhood. I didn’t bother telling him this because it is a matter of course that every street corner in Berlin has a story. A past. A dead body, be it a Jew arrested, a party official’s apartment, or a side street in the garden where, say, Karl Leibnicht was murdered in 1919. You cannot cross the street in Berlin, in Prague, in Paris, indeed in most large towns in Europe without walking through history, and so it is with Amsterdam.

The Netherlands was, for centuries, safe under British protection and had gone long stints without much chaos. But the Nazi occupation changed all this, and as McQueen effectively demonstrates, in the Dutch capital, crime is everywhere. This is evidently based Bianca Stigter’s ‘Atlas of an Occupied City’ which chronicles the forgotten crimes of the Third Reich in Amsterdam. It is not available in English.  I’ve read some very disappointing reviews that point to the monotony of the exercise. Ostensibly, what McQueen is done is to log over a hundred specific incidents in Amsterdam’s tumultuous history of occupation, set up cameras there, and shoot what goes on there in contemporary society (post pandemic, which we’ll get to later). This opens with a description about how one home owner hid Jews in the basement while the modern homeowner, related to the previous owners we do not know, retrieves grocers from the former hiding place. It would be like using the Secret Annex in Otto Frank’s office to store records or an archive of magazines. From here the places multiply. Street corners. Town plazas. Houses. Train stations. Cinemas. The crimes of the occupation are delivered in a flat monotone by Melanie Hyams, McQueen’s collaborator (no pun intended) who is aided by her Dutch fluency. Sometimes, like Shoah, these scenes are staged. While Hyams recites what happened to a jewish family that was arrested in the middle of the night and deported to Auschwitz where they were all murdered, McQueen focuses on city workers installing Stolpersteine. A practice originated in Germany in the early 90’s, ’Stumbling Stones’ mark places of the Shoah all over Europe. While strolling through Charlottenburg one day, I noticed one not too far from Richard Wagner Platz that recorded a family of three who deported in 1944 to make Berlin “Judenrein” for the Fuhrer’s birthday. Obviously a lot of planning went into McQueen being there with his cameras at a specific time. Other moments are simply on a calendar. While watching a construction crew assemble a music stage in Amsterdam’s town square, Hyams recalls how the Germans, house in the Town Hall during the occupation, erected a music stage so they could attend classical concerts in the open - no Jewish conductors of course. This modern day music festival seems not to know what happened there before them, but then again most of us don’t wherever we go. Or we could take it for granted that they know something happened there, much like my son understood whenever he left his apartment. Not all of these are so on-the-nose. One scene, describing where a high ranking Nazi officer lived, shows an older woman watching the pandemic news. More than likely, she lived through the war. But another shot simply describes the Westerbok station as it was used to deport Jews, the modern station as the live shot. Mixed in with the profound is the ordinary. Everyday average Nederlanders, Jews or not, were hounded and oppressed throughout the occupation. In the Leidesplien, one Dutchman describes having been beaten to an inch of his life. When he choose to passively oppose the occupation, he spent the rest of the war in a prison cell.

In 2006, D to the K to the Motherfucking A to the Third Power sent me on a business trip to Africa. My layover was in Amsterdam, on Easter Sunday. My layover was 8 hours, and I left Schipol to see what I could see starting at six AM. I was lucky to catch a train into central station, which was deserted. As I walked through Vondelpark, I did not have Hyam’s commentary to tell me that German officers of the occupation confiscated all the houses rounding the park, evicting their tenets for the duration. I had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe Amsterdam, where I had no clue the Resistance took revenge on collaborators after liberation by shaving the heads of dozens of people, marking them if for a short time as traitors.  In countless squares that I passed through on my route that day, Dutch men and women were left rotting in the sun for days as a warning to the residents who could smell the decaying corpses. They were shot by the OrPo, or Orderpolizei not for crimes which they had committed, but in reprisals for the Resistance assassinating a number of Germans.

Sometimes these moments in the film are too much to process without tears. Watching a young boy of about three or four standing simply in the grass in a small park next to a river, Hyams recalls a mass execution on that spot by the Siecherheitdeinst, or SD (Security Service) in retaliation for Resistance activities there. Hyams tell us the SiPo and SD were housed in a girls school that is now a high school. The basement where Dutch citizens were tortured and beaten to death is just under a classroom where minors now learn math and (I hope) history.

Due to the timing of the shooting schedule, I was constantly trying to figure out if McQueen was trying to say something subtextual. While watching the Dutch police clear out of Covid protest, Hyams keeps on task, talking about occupation crimes. Was McQueen trying to draw a line between the lockdown and the occupation? Wasn’t that absurd? Like many cities, the curfew in Amsterdam was the first curfew since occupation ended. I was never able to adequately resolve this issue and I have not researched McQuee’s answer to it. Later, in an apartment where the head of the Zenstralle head lived, an old lady lives now, riding on a bike, watching Ukrainians come into Nederland on TV. They are fleeing the invading Fascist threat in their own country and the Dutch so far have used open arms. During a climate march while recounting the National Socialist Dutch Worker’s Party rallies, McQueen shows us a silent bullhorn, a Covid protestor wearing a Guy Fawkes Mask, and some black musicians having what looks like an insanely good time doling out beats as a drum quartet. Marching in Holland is different these days, way different. Though tens of thousands of black Dutch men volunteered for the Nederland Army recruited for the Allied War effort, they were never allowed to liberate their own country. A man holds up a sign during the protest that says “Climate Justice” which reads rather eery. Who does he plan on ‘punishing’ for the state of the world climate, he does not say. Another sign, seemingly aimed at Dutch authorities, has the severely underwhelming Sam Wilson message of “try harder.”

The finale of the film, in which a Jewish kid learns how to Daven in his synagogue in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah, Hyam’s narration stops. Out of the hundred thousand plus Jews in Amsterdam before the war, only about five thousand returned. Most did not survive. The occupation of the Netherlands was especially brutal for Western Europe, though one would not compare it to Warsaw or Ky’yv. In Hungary for example, hundreds of jews were tied back to back, and one shot in the head, the other left to struggle while they were both pushed off the bridge into the Danube. 90% of all the Jews in Hungary were murdered in Auschwitz in six weeks. But this is not a pain contest. This is only a document. A document of fear and perhaps a warning. Perhaps, if we join that little boy in the synagogue, it ends in a message of hope.

Head (1968)

“What you have seen you must believe if you can… if you can…”

Second Screening. Criterion DVD. My bedroom. Allow me to utter my sheer shock and surprise at my own rating, for which I take full responsibility. For those who wish not to travel down the lane of wishful nostalgia, stop now. For I remember when I saw the old Monkees reruns on Nick at Nite, and then saw Val Kilmer wear a Monkees T-Shirt in Real Genius (1985) and knowing I was the only person under the age of forty who understood the power and glory of the Pre-Fab Four. Much to my consternation, I did not like Head (1968) when I saw it on the Encore channel in the early 90's, but that was most likely because of the permanent crop, non-sensical whimsy skit structure (pre-Groundlings, pre-Monty, etc.) and the horrible monaural. But when the soundtrack came out in 1994 and I bought it as a Monkees completionism, I have to say I did not remember and was enraptured by Purpoise Song and as the CD turned, Circle Sky blew me away. How was it possible this song came out the same year as Helter Skelter and no one noticed it? It remains one of my favorites to this day. But still, I avoided Head (the CD had a faux chrome cover so when you stared into it, it was vaguely a mirror = so you could see your own... head. These guys...

So when Criterion, of all platforms, put out this failure of a film, I didn't even give it a chance. I finally wasted my money on the package BBS story because I wanted to give Jack Nicolson and Bob Rafealson a chance (besides Head, they failed with me). By this time I had already seen the forty year anniversary Monkee Doc and the made for TV film that documented the struggle the group had in trying to be taken seriously. It all seemed cruel. Mickey Dolenz once defended the band from the criticism that they didn't play on their own songs by saying "The Beatles didn't even play on their own songs..." which was only true if you counted the orchestra in Sgt. Pepper or the violins in Eleanor Rigby - but he had a point. By the time Pet Sounds came out, The Beach Boys were incapable of creating what Brian Wilson wanted not just in the studio, but on tour as well. The Wrecking Crew, that melodious model of music, did that for them. And for Phil Spector. And for a thousand other bands and artists, including Neil Diamond.

For the Monkees were actors, not musicians, was the greatest crime they were charged with. In fact, they were actors who were musicians on the side (excepting Nesmith, who had an unnoticed career before the Monkees as Michael Blessing). Generally speaking, Peter York was better on piano than bass, but Davy Jones couldn't learn bass so he had to learn on piano. He was also better at drums, but Mickey didn't have a musical instrument other than his voice, so he had to learn drums FAST. With the help of ABC, they became stars for exactly two years while they struggled episode by episode to push their own agenda into the show and into their music. Basically forced to lie about performing on albums, they were refused rights to even play the songs written for them, never mind WRITING new songs for the band. FUCK THAT said ABC and Capitol. When Dolenz finally got permission to direct an episode, it was their last. When Don Kirshner finally agreed to release a Monkees-own written single...and did so in a limited release overseas... he was fired, and The Monkees went on their own way.

But without a show, no one followed them but one of their directors, Bob Rafelson, who always found charm, meaning, and an undercurrent of the counterculture which the hippies always deemed 'fake' and 'plastic' in the Monkees. Jack Nicolson, ten years into Hollywood, helped pen the irreverent 85 minute comedy, alternating in between subversive skits and traditional set pieces, pushing the Monkee narrative from corporate manufactured pop group (read the Stock-Aiken-Waterman creation of the 60's) to the band that definitely had something to day. About Vietnam. About America. About themselves.

The Monkees weren't going away with out a fight.

That's why Head (1968) opens with Mickey committing suicide (and closes with the band following him. And that's why the acid trip opening shouts acid trip lyrics while Mickey is being pulled into a fantasy re-creation of what leads to his suicide ("the porpoise is laughing, goodbye, goodbye..."). This is followed by a mind numbing criss cross from one bad idea to one that blows you away. Nesmith shouting Circle Sky to ten thousand people while York and Co. try to keep up cannot be re-created. It's why there is a live version on the disc. It's why Nesmith put it on his solo album. It's why the Monkees re-created it as the opening track to Justus (2020). Did they need the Wrecking Crew? Not necessarily, but it helped. No one saw Head (1968). No one bought the soundtrack. No one bought their next "contractually obligated" album. But now there ere six special editions of their LPs and six greatest hits compilations. Even Daddy's Song, Davy Jones' hysterical treat which I would skip every time on my CD, is on one of them. Once I saw what Jones did with his feet and Tony Basil, in Rafelson's unbelievable black and white set piece cutting back and fourth with tempo, I was sold. I've been listening to it all week.

Mickey has always been, more or less, the front man of the group, though he is perpetually like Don Henley, Gil Moore, and Phil Collins, in the rear. Nesmith's southern accent (he once twanged a reactionary pro-Vietnam song as Blessing) was less welcome though he garnered sympathy and hits with his earnest voice in hits like "What Am I Doing (Hanging Round)?" Davy was the 'Paul' of the group in that he was the lady-killer, as nervous as he was. Daydream Believer remains their Greatest Hit of all time. The solid Peter Tork, beloved by millions, poured his heart and soul, like they all did, into trying to become that thing they thought the audience wanted. Nesmith was the older brother. Tork always there. Davy smiling. But Mickey was the bold in-your-face provoker shouting subversive lyrics like Pleasant Valley Sunday and Last Train to Clarksville.

This subversiveness is in Head (1968) when Mickey stops a Western film shoot and walks through the paper backdrop. Peter is subversive in the diner when he forces the real "film crew" to show themselves when he refuses to 'act' anymore. Davy is subversive when he convinces the band to break out of the vacuum cleaner, literally a vacant places that "sucks." And Mickey, by choosing suicide rather than conform to the image the corporations have of him, and want to sell of him to his fans, is the most subversive of all. He is so subversive, the band follows him to his death. Head (1968) winds up as tails of the Monkees.

Nothing is more subversive than the funny, cute, pop band using the execution Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer responsible for the murder of various South Vietnamese officials, by Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, a Captain of the South Vietnamese army, as a pretext for telling the audience, even before the front credits, that the Monkees are fucking serious. Loan's execution was caught on film, both still and moving, and it lead the news in TV and print media. It became the image of the Tea Offensive of January 1968. It became the proof that America was on the wrong side of the war. Never mind that Lem had murdered people in cold blood, was a member of a recognized terrorist organization, and as per the rules of war deserved to be shot as an assassin and saboteur upon arrest. General Loan was castigated the rest of his life for rendering Lem's victims justice. This is lost in Head (1968). Loan's real story, or Lem's, is less important that what is important to the countercultural heroes that Nicholson and Rafelson want the Monkees to be. They Monkees are not fucking around anymore. They're going to be in charge of their own music. Their own image. Their own future.

And America wasn't ready for them.

Irreverent. Self-Aware.

Lee (2024)

First a fashion model, then an artist, then a professional photographer and war correspondent, Lee Miller defied the order that surrounded her. Though she is probably most famous for directing David Scherman’s famous photo of her nude in Eva Braun’s bathtub, I prefer this no nonsense profile he took of her somewhere in Allied occupied Europe. With her custom visor, she looks like a knight, determined to win in any fight. I first came across her photographs in graduate school. Her plutonic partner Scherman, an American Jew, was rumored to have taken a shit in Hitler’s toilet - an oft visited place for G.I.’s in occupied Munich. With Gitta Sereny, Hannah Arendt, and Sophie Scholl, Miller defined the way we look at the War.

First Screening. AMC. Tightwad Tuesday. There were about ten people in the theatre so I hope this does well. As we get further and further away from the War, it terrifies me that there will be a loss of memory about that event and what it means for our collective human history. My son is studying in Germany right now, and this weekend took a train to Prague. And on his way, he passed through Dresden, which had a train yard so massively important to the Third Reich that the British Air Force wiped the entire city and it's 120,000 inhabitants off the face of the earth. I'm sure there are people that live in downtown Hiroshima that are not too sure what happened there. This is my fear.

And then I hear on the We Have Ways Podcast that in the month of September, the 80th Anniversary of Market Garden, 100,000 people went to The Netherlands to celebrate and Allied defeat. Think about that. A defeat. Market Garden was like the Alamo of the Second World War, and more than 90% of the people who were there weren't alive during the war. But they went. And they celebrated the ATTEMPT to push the Nazis out of a country they had no right to be in. Last June, a quarter million people went to Normandy to celebrate D-Day. And now, there's Lee, which is a lot of film to think about. And films like Lee give me hope that we're not ready to forget yet. We're still trying to process all the pain and trauma of that horrible F word and everything it did to us. And everything it's doing now (the first day of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, a targeted missile descendant of a War era V-2 landed on top of the monument that memorialized the massacre of 60,000 Jews at Babi Yar- just to name one example).

Lee is a spectacular film for its continuity (an inheritance of Spielberg's war-era saturation techniques) and for its original story. I was in grad school when a teacher of mine passed around original magazines of the war, including LOOK, TIME, and one of them was VOGUE, which we all laughed at until we opened it and saw Lee Miller's photograph of a room stacked full of corpses. Breathtaking. It induced one of us to tears. This is 65 plus years later. We've seen the footage. We know what happened, and still her photographs were punching through. I heard this film was coming out about six months ago, and a couple of weeks ago, Lee's son was on a podcast talking about his mom and how he reconstructed her life after she died in 1977. Rough stuff. Finding out your mom was a supermodel in the 1920's had to be something to adjust to. Finding out your mom asked G.I.'s to open train doors so she could photography carloads full of dead undesirables is something else. And I'm not talking about death camps. I'm just talking about one of thousands of concentration camps where people were just outright starved to death. It's hard enough for me to think if my Grandfather was too slow, the bullet might not have gone through his ankle and instead have gone through his thigh and severed his femoral. He could have bled out, changing my father's life in not having a father of his own. My standard of living, my personality shaped by knowing my grandfather, forever changed. That's what Antony Penrose, Lee's son, thinks about every time he thinks of his mom.

And as that as a background, I have to say this film is a great extrapolation of those experiences and Lee's fight to do everything she wanted to do. Her fight to define herself instead of other defining that for her. Winslet had several moments in the film that others might see as dramatic or over the top, but I thought was shockingly good. She's always been amazing, despite most of her projects not particularly interesting to me. Her portrayal of taking pictures at Buchanwald's crematoria with Andy Samberg was a stunning display. The director NEVER showed you what she was looking at. You didn't have to see it. You had only Winslet's face to convey to you what she was seeing. And it was horrible.

Samberg's portrayal as David Scherman, Lee's plutonic and unofficial partner during the war, was an amazing break from what I've seen him in the past (and I'm one of those people that think Palm Springs is AMAZING). On one level it seems uneventful. Samberg is a Jew playing a Jew. But Samberg's understated professionalism, when gauged right alongside Lee's, shows you how professional Lee was. This gender equating is subtle story arch material and not a bat over your head message material. There was no message here. There was only Lee. My only criticism being that in 1944 Lee was 37 years old and still looking like the model she was in 1930. Ms. Winslet is 50 and this age discrepancy is the same issue Kevin Spacey had in Beyond the Sea when he played Bobby Darin 15 years older Darin when he died. There were also time period inconsistencies that I won't go into because frankly they are childish compared to the important story of Lee's life. In a universe of no Lee films, I'll take a flawed one, and I'm sure no one would be disappointed in having a pro like Winslet play them.

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

My mind is human. My body is manufactured. I'm the first of my kind, but... I won't be the last. We cling to memories as if they define us. But what we do defines us. My ghost survived to remind the next of us... that humanity is our virtue.

Third Screening. Vudu (which I guess now is Fandango). I've never understood the hate for this film, though I understand some of the objections to the vision of the screenplay. I think most of the criticisms of this film are much like the criticism of The Great Wall. They are from most people who have not seen the film and do not understand the context of the character. For example, both main characters are westerners injected into a foreign environment. Major is not Japanese. You could make a valid argument that the character was definitely Japanese in the first film and thus should have been Japanese in the reboot. You then would be tasking the production company with finding a Japanese actor fluent in English that had the same world market profile that Johansson does. Good luck with this. You could also make an argument that Major's costume design and particularly her hair and eyebrows look altered to fit an Asian. Of course, if you grew up in Asia maybe you would just dress like and do your hair like those around you. This type of cultural assimilation is practiced everywhere, and is pretty much demanded by the dominate white culture in America.

The visual aesthetic is in keeping with the Manga, and certain shots are lifted directly in homage to the original. Though the film is longer, it is not too long, and the plot, though different, moves in the same direction of the first film. This parallel happens to the audience's benefit. The aesthetic lifts a lot from Blade Runner and even the Total Rekall remake. I would think as we move closer to the danger and pitfalls of AI, that this film would become more popular, but it is looking like the reverse. At least the ratings are becoming more balanced instead of the hatefest that usually occurs - but then again the Letterbxd community tends to be more thoughtful and balanced.

There is something else, subtextually, going on in this film that I can only guess at. Japanese laws being what they are, Manga in cartoon and film is used as an expression to get out that which you cannot normally see. Hardcore pornography is banned in Japan, and lurid images are laughably scrubbed, digitized, and blurred to 'hide' what is going on. What this has led to is an attitude of 'well as long as we don't see-it see it, then it's okay. Thus, Major in the anime might as well be nude. Her artificial shell looking not like a human, not like a robot, but a sexualized imitation of male desire. This aesthetic is not alone to the anime, it is the preferred style due to the fetish-ization of the market audience. Anime has been greatly criticized for this, but usually by the same people who castigate studios for leaving out Michael Douglas eating out Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct - ergo, there is some hypocrisy going on.

The best aspect of this film is how Rupert Sanders and Johansson have chosen to lean into this aesthetic instead of run from it. Johansson has, by the release of this film, one of the most known physical figures in the history of cinema. If I had to compare it to anyone I would say how people oogled Marilyn Monroe in the 50's, or Sophia Loren (maybe Bridget Bardoe) in the 60's. You could write an article on how this is right or wrong or whatever but the fact is this is a connection the audience forms with the actors. In the 90's, waif was queen and the 'body style' that people came to react to was more in line with Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. Jovovich's body became famous in '98 due to her role in the Fifth Element and consequently had no problems showing her body in subsequent films (though if you want her in total eroticism see her in Kuffs with Christian Slater where she is never nude). My point being here is Johansson' figure especially since The Avengers in 2012 in which her character Black Widow is covered in tight leather, is finger printed into the minds of a mostly male audience and she is familiar here. Thus, when Major takes off her cloak in the opening fight, much like in the anime, there people choking on their Adam's apple. Rather than run from the nude figure, the camera exposes much of it without revealing, like in the Japanese tradition, crude and some would say totally unnecessary vulgarity such as nipples or pubic hair (I should be clear here that I don't think it's vulgar or crude, rather the MPAA and a lot of audience members would). Johansson embraces this non-nude persona, much like the anime. it is this frankness, this boldness, I would say bravery with her figure, that gives her character agency and command, and propels the narrative, however flawed, forward. Her image gives you investment, and since we have been giving investment to beautiful women in film since Clara Bow, we shouldn't be ashamed about it, or be crude about it. The Seven Year Itch is a horrible fucking movie. Why did I sit through it? Well, I think you should give it a chance and perhaps you'll figure that out for yourself.

There is also another level to this subtext. Johansson unfortunately has been the subject of many embarrassing leaks over the years and she has stated in court filings how embarrassed she has been and in one statement described being 'humiliated' at such treatment. So when Major appears nude, then chooses to disappear at her own timing, Johansson is choosing when to show you her body, and choosing when not to. She is commanding an agency that has been stolen from her in the past, and I cannot help but applaud her for it. There were always be those images of her in the vast cesspool that is the internet, and I would be lying if I said I was unfamiliar with them, but I cannot help but admire how she has taken the narrative about her body back,

There are plenty of other practical reasons to appreciate this film. Who has ever complained of a role inhabited by Juliet Binoche? Certainly not me. Takeshi Kitano is a physical manifestation of Aramaki, the head of domestic intelligence. Chin Han, one of the most talented living Asian actors, fills a needed background. One one hand I feel conflicted about him playing second fiddle to Johansson. On the other she needs a circle of competent support for the story to move forward. No one gives more strength to this bulwark than the Danish actor Pilou Asbaek, who gives Batou a living breathing presence just as important as Major. Batou is so important to Shell's story, that he is actually the protagonist in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, If Asbaek fails in his duty as Major's only link to the human world, the film falls apart.

Perhaps this is overpraise, but I enjoy this film. I keep coming back to it. I feel that it is compelling, and is ahead of it's time as we become increasingly wary of Alexa, Siri, and Chat apps. I think it speaks volumes about the trappings of these types of technologies, and contemporary attitudes regarding the controversial displays or at least modern ideas of nudity.

Run Lola Run (1999)

“How do you know you love me?

There is an enormous amount of thought that must go into a review of what is on the face of it a very simple film. We begin with the title, which was changed from the German (Lola Rennt) meaning ‘Lola Runs’ which was changed to something that was more fluid and attention grabbing for an English-speaking audience. The year of release is even wrong, as it premiered in Germany in 1998 but did not find distribution in North America until 1999. Yet despite this fact, the film is constantly tagged with ‘1999’ ranking it in that year that has since been lauded as one of the best years in cinema history. This year (2024), it has been re-released after the original 35mm negative was scanned to 4K. It has been consistently advertised as “the 25th Anniversary” of the film. This should not put us off, instead the confusion surrounding the film’s name and release date is right in line with the film itself.  

I rented Run Lola Run from the Hollywood Video near my house as the cover was gravitating. This would have been in the fall of 1999 or the spring of 2000 (we do not have ‘winters’ in East Texas). I was so blown away by what I saw that when I noticed it on a rack in Best Buy, I purchased it for about $20. I know I’ve watched it twice on cassette, at least fifteen times on DVD, and once on streaming when I lived in Canada. I saw it last Friday night 35mm at AMC and that is probably the 20th or so time I’ve seen the film (it could be more, I’m being conservative). I was eager to see this in the cinema for the first time because I was wondering since I had not seen it in over ten years what it looked like on the big screen and why I and others found it so fascinating. There are a ton of things going on.  

Tom Tykwer’s film is littered with an enormous amount of well executed, well thought out moments that are repeated in a series of slightly different scenarios. There is the standard ‘repeat’ plot that in the last thirty or so years has been identified as being “like Groundhog Day (1990),” That film, in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman in Pennsylvania, details the exploits of that character repeating an entire day on end. In this way, Groundhog Day is similar to Edge of Tomorrow (2015), the Tom Cruise vehicle in which a soldier must learn as much as he can to survive as long as he can against an alien invader to break the daily repeat pattern. However, Run Lola Run does not repeat the day, rather only twenty minutes. In this way, the film is much more like Monday, an episode of The X-Files in which Special Agent Fox Mulder, fresh from body switching in the previous episode, slowly finds he is repeating a day and must do something radical to get it to stop. In that episode, 15 minutes repeats three times– perfect for a 47-minute episode. The 20 minutes in Run Lola Run is preceded by a pre-credit sequence, the opening credits, and the opening exposition. The ending has only a minute or two of resolution.  

The pre-credit sequence is used to get the audience used to the quick paced time framing of the film. The clock starts like a metronome, then stops, giving us a hint at what will happen twice in the film. The guard from the bank appears so we will recognize him in the middle and in the ambulance at the end. He sets the rules of the movie: “the game is 90 minutes, all the other rules are known,” and this sets our expectation. We see their characters and we will interact with later. The line up mug shots in which we cycle through the cast is smart as it introduces us to whom we will see fleetingly in our story but also alerts us that everyone we see (and I do mean everyone) is a criminal of one kind or another. Yes, even her mother. Yes, even Meyer. We hear techno (some would suggest ‘Progressive House’ genre music such as Paul Oakenfold) which deliberately sets the pace via the beat. This is not dissimilar to Tarkovsky’s slow, agonizing shot in Mirror (1972), in which five whole minutes of film pass before you notice the camera has panned in and the lead actor stirs in his sleep. Like the opening of Mirror gets you used to the slow, three hour drag you are about to endure, so the opening of Run Lola Run gets you ready for an 87-minute thrill ride. While Tarkovsky rarely cuts, Tykwer cuts more than his contemporaries of his time (the golden age of quick cut editing is generally thought to be the 2000s and 2010s in which The Lord of the Rings heavily influenced editing). This fast pacing is in parallel with Lola and Manni’s fast talking, shouting, and throughout the film, her running.  

This pacing, and all the elements that go with it (the polaroid-type fast forwards of passers-by, the obstacles that either increase or decrease her run time [the dog in the stairwell, Meyer’s car, the Nuns, etc.], the interruption – or not – of her father’s conversation with his mistress all are very interesting elements to explore. Lola’s physical route across Berlin across intersections, under elevated S-Bahn bridges, and through buildings, is fun to note through the film, but hardly scratches at the metaphysical hammer drops in the film. I’ve always enjoyed the film, and it certainly is a favorite of mine, but until I saw it in 35 on the big screen, it seemingly always eluded me, and I never knew why. This time, I finally saw it.  

I noticed two huge, powerful things on the big screen. One should have been obvious from the start, and the other, well, not so much but if I used my brain maybe I could have figured it out. The first one is Franka Potente’s unbelievable performance of Lola. When I first saw this on my 13” Mitsubishi, it was hard to see anything, especially in letterbox. The next format was on DVD on my 35” TV. That was decent. But there is no contemplating her performance until you see it on 35mm. Potente’s performance is dynamic, at times devastating, and completely enthralling. The post-coital scenes in which she and Manni (wonderfully performed by Moritz Bliebtrieu) which divide the ‘runs’ in a red tint, show a slower, more endearing Lola, someone who knows she loves her partner, and as we find, she is touched when he manages as a male to express back this feeling. Potente (born in 1974) is the stand in for her Generation, the dreaded X. In a re-united Germany, she conveys the fear of getting it wrong, the reality of having nothing, and the desperation to save a given situation. Potente does more than just cry at the right moment. She expresses thinly veiled rage at the bank guard (the famous shot of her looking over her shoulder before darting off), wonder at the impossible (winning in the casino), and the terror at having to do what she knows is the wrong thing (shooting a guard). If this were not enough, there is a physicality to the performance masked by the green pants, Doc Martins, constantly exposed bra, and the bright shock of red hair surrounded in a sea of dark grey Berlin. Potente exudes a certain sexiness that pulls you in not because she looks like a Milanese model, but because she does not. She doesn’t run with a midriff, though you can see a tattoo around the top of her belly button and though she is topless in the red tinted scenes, you get no more of her than in any other shot and the mystique of that is what pulls you in. Potente staring into the camera (almost, almost breaking the fourth wall) uses her sexuality to penetrate a viewer’s consciousness so they care about the character instead of being ambivalent. Her physical nature, her emotive skills, and her ability to convey desperation in times of crises is why this film, filled with her face in turmoil, is such a beaming success. Potente makes you love Lola so that you care for her. Because if you don’t care for her, the film is sunk. This is top tier acting.  

The second, more pointed element, that I missed was in the casino at the end of a long crane shot that leaves Lola at the cash out booth as we travel up to the clock. You cannot but help see, in 35mm, a painting of a woman on the wall of the casino under the clock with her back turned. The back of her head prominently displays a hair bun, a swirl that for film aficionados will be an unmistakable reference to the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo. There is no other conclusion than to think that Tykwer, who wrote the screenplay, had any other intention than a parallel. This could not have been an homage. Given the plot of Vertigo, this would be impossible. Scotty, a private detective, is hired by Madelein’s husband to shadow his wife because she has been acting strange. Over the course of his duty, he becomes entranced and obsessed with his charge, to the point of neglecting his job. As a result, he is not there to stop her when she commits suicide. Guilt ridden, in a deep depressive state, and somewhat manic, Scotty’s mind becomes unhinged when he sees a woman on the street that looks EXACTLY like his suicide obsession. Given a second chance, he decides to heavily woo the girl as to, in a sense, do things over. He does not want to waste this opportunity because he is so in love. Unfortunately, Stewart does not understand that the suicide was staged, that in fact the real Madelein is dead, murdered by her husband so that he could have the fake Madelein Scotty has been obsessing over. When Scotty realizes this, he confronts the fake and in high drama, she accidentally kills herself.  

What is Run Lola Run except the intentional willing to avoid such circumstances? This is more than willpower. This is having the will to supernaturally change things for the better (the scream in the casino is a physical manifestation of this). Having concluded a deal for his mob boss Ronnie, Manni takes the payoff money to meet Lola at a rendezvous, but she is not there (timing has meant her moped was stolen). Hiking to a subway, he fleas when he sees cops and accidentally leaves the money on the train next to a bum. He has to hand over the money to Ronnie in 20 minutes and calls Lola in a panic. His backup plan is to steal the money from a Bolle Supermarket unless Lola can come up with the cash – 100,000 Deutsch Marks – in 20 minutes. Lola runs her ass off to her father to get the money, who tosses her out after saying he’s leaving her mother and unceremoniously admits he is not her real father. Frantic and depressed, Lola is thus late running to Manni whom she interrupts while he is robbing the Bolle. In the escape, she is shot and Manni watches her die, absolutely distraught.  

Star crossed lovers have been around since before Romeo and Juliet. What punches through here is Lola looking into the camera and deciding, willing, this to not be the way things end. Breaking the Fourth Wall, but not looking to us the audience but rather to time, the cosmos, or a supreme being, she says “Stopp.” In German, this sounds like “Schtop.” (Do everything you can to avoid the English dub of Lola Rennt. It is beyond a doubt the worst English overdub I have ever heard in my life.) Dissolving into the red tint, we see Lola and Manni discussing why Manni feels like he is in love with Lola. It is this love that is the central core of the film, and the tag line of the movie: “Fast Cash, Crazy Fate, and True Love.” I don’t remember how confused I was when the phone came down... but I got enough of the point. Because her love for Manni was true, Lola had intentionally willed herself another 20 minutes. In an attempt to avoid a horrible fate, Lola picks up when the phone drops (a Kubrickian-like moment from 2001 as it is crosscut with the stolen bag of cash from Bolle) and runs to prevent the catastrophe that has just occurred.  

Having cut some time down, Lola confronts her father, who pushes her over the edge. Lola steals the bank guards' gun, heists the bank, and takes the 100K to Manni, who then is distracted by Lola and is thus run over by an ambulance (who we later learn is carrying the bank guard who just had a heart attack). Lola, much calmer this time, has some inherited memories from the previous run. She does not remember the incident with her father (so that is replayed) but she does remember the safety on the gun. (This is also replayed in the X-Files episode Monday when Mulder realizes the bomber is strapped with C4 even though he has no memory of the bomber or the previous ‘Monday.’) In the second red tint break, again with no music, Manni professes his love for Lola, and the intentional willing occurs again. The phone drops, and Lola runs to her father.  

Because another banker, Mr. Meyer, has crashed into Ronnie (Manni’s mob boss) twice in the two previous runs, Lola’s father is there when she gets there. But because Lola does not distract Meyer on the street (thus causing the two accidents), Meyer outpaces Lola to the bank and picks up her father for lunch. Lola thus misses her father by seconds and frantically runs after him until she is exhausted. When she opens her eyes, she sees she is outside a casino. Having bet on black 20 (20 being the same number of minutes she has), Lola wins 127,000 Marks which she takes to Manni.  

Manni, meanwhile, has tracked down the bum (whom Lola has passed twice and Manni once), gotten the cash back (minus a hundred marks or so, which he can replace easily) and made the handoff to Ronnie. When Lola shows up with the cash, Manni no longer needs it, and the two live (we guess) happily ever after.  

Past the spiral we see in the Vertigo re-creation, we see an animation as Lola runs down the stairs re-create the spiral. The film itself is also a spiral, watching Lola go round and round until she makes the right decision. Remember, the film tells us at the beginning that everyone in the film is a criminal of one sort or another. The bike thief. The baby kidnapper. Ronnie. Manni. Her father is refuses to help his family emotionally, her mother incapable of being loyal either. The security guard may be innocent, but the way he teases Lola and looks at her, he gives off the impression of a misogynistic pig. By the third run, only Lola has not committed a crime. She has avoided her fate. She has intentionally willed it to happen. The Vertigo spiral finally stops.  If only Scotty had the same will power. And this is why Run Lola Run is special.  

Civil War (2024)

“Oh, so you’re a cinephile? Well, what kind of cinephile are you? What, you don’t know?” 

First Screening. Regal Cinemas. More controversial than the film is perhaps the controversy about the controversy. There seems to be several splits that are genuinely surprising, starting from the trailer to the aftereffects of the screening. At several points people are asking themselves ‘what the fuck is that about?’ And when you analyze the arguments, you can see how Garland has specifically constructed something for a purpose, and either you understand that purpose, or you don’t. And upon that understanding, you can either get pissed off about it, or you don’t. There is the outlier of ‘I understand what is going on, I just don’t like it’ which is perfectly reasonable as I just used that argument on my Poor Things review. I get it. I liked Civil War, but I understand people’s contention, even if I think some of them are being shallow.  

 We should, perhaps, start with the trailer, which had everyone in America asking themselves in what universe would California be teaming up with Texas ON ANYTHING much less a war against an oppressive federal government. A more discerning, informed citizen, preferably from Texas, could look at the point spread the last Governor’s election in which Beto O’Rourke came within ten points of ousting Greg Abbott, or the same “liberal” coming within five points or replacing Ted Cruz, and you could say... well, ti’s not that farfetched to think that Texas could be a Blue State. In fact, Colin Allred, who is running as the Democrat to replace Ted Cruz this November, has just tripled Beto’s fundraising, and has doubled Cruz’s last effort. I think it is also worth mentioning that Allred is again just five points away from Cruz. Five points does not sound like a lot, unless you consider that it is TEXAS, where Republicans like Rick Perry have been clearing ten to fifteen points, and in many cases running against four other people and still dealing a double-digit blow. Texas is more in danger of turning Blue than California is turning Red. That being the reality, we must retreat to the world of the film, which operates on a different basis.  

 The trailer, and thus the film, is operating on two different levels. The first is the overt, apolitical level, and the second is the subtextual level, and Garland is brilliant to do this. Staying on topic for now, the apolitical context makes it possible for any state to band with any other state for the purposes of the Civil War. In the context of the film, the President of the United States has sought and won a third term in office. This being the first of three stated crimes in the film, we will ignore the others for now, which is subtextual, and concentrate on the apolitical first crime: the third term. You do not need, necessarily, a political party stance to believe that a third term is unnecessary or illegal. Only one President has had a third (and a fourth term) when Roosevelt ran in 1940 (and 1944). It was controversial then, and it is verboten now. After his death, Congress saw fit to term limit the Presidency, and this has been the law of the land ever since.  

 The Third Term leads the apolitical level to delve into the subtextual level: which is why is the President seeking a Third Term anyway? This is never explained in the film, as with many, many helpful answers would undermine the apolitical level. This being the case, you can extrapolate the subtextual from the apolitical and answer your own questions about what is going on. To seek a Third Term is a violation of the law. But to seek it why? To seek it to do what? And that leads us to the conclusion the President is a bad actor who is using the Third Term to do very sinister things. This leads us to the subtextual comments by the journalist Sammy who in the film poses questions he would ask the President, including “Why did you disband the FBI?” and “Do you regret ordering airstrikes on American citizens?” 

 The second one, regarding the air strikes, I hope, would start an immediate Civil War against any President who so ordered such wholesale massacre of his or her fellow citizens. This should not be controversial. This should not even be an argument. In this view, I can see Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbot saying, “wait just a fucking minute,” and pooling resources to a common cause of freedom. If you cannot see that, then you go from the apolitical to the subtextual, and you must ask yourself... why would one or the other NOT consider it a common cause to oppose such a President? To extrapolate this, you can insert personalities. If Joe Biden ordered air strikes on American civilians, do you see Gavin Newsom defending him, or joining an effort to oust him? Personally, I cannot see Joe Biden doing this, but I can see Newsom abandoning Biden if he did so. It is not a stretch to say that Abbot would be all over a military junta to oust Biden, so I suppose the remaining question in this scenario is would Newsom help him? If the shoe were on the other foot, one could ask... if President Trump were to order air strikes on American civilians, I could see Newsom losing his shit and leading a coalition (unlike other more tame California governors) but would we expect Abbot to do the same? I trust in Abbot is less... so I am not sure he would ever turn on Trump. Most politicians, even those who despise him, will never turn on him. This man insulted Ted Cruz’s wife and Cruz can’t wait to suck his dick, so... no, I guess my faith in the GOP to partner with a ‘liberal’ state to oust Trump is a zero. So, for the record, the theory works one way, and not the other.  

 But the theory being what it is, works. As Don Coreleone once said, ‘the enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ and to quote the on-screen journalist Sammy in this film ‘once this is over, the Secessionists will turn on each other. Just you watch.’ So, this scenario, however improbable at first glance, actually does work depending on the problem and depending on the personalities in contact and conflict. This being the case, I’m sure most people can get past the initial ‘what?’ factor the trailer imposes.  

 This leads us into an examination of the film on this apolitical level. Having removed modern day politics from the film, we are free to imagine a plot based on face value. The President has defied the 22nd Amendment and is in office for a Third Term. The film opens with a protest in New York City in which people protesting the President’s Third Term are being met with New York City riot control. This scene ends when a teenage girl wearing a backpack with a bomb in it, runs into the crowd of protestors to kill as many of them, and herself, as she can. Judging by the map provided for us in the hotel room later, We see that New York City is in the United States, or what is dubbed the “Loyalist States” which include New England, the Carolinas, the MidWest, and several western states including Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. If the protestors are protesting ‘the government’ then the suicide bomber is obviously for ‘the government’ because her purpose is to kill as many protestors as she can and that makes an already mixed-up situation a little more confusing. Normally, suicide bombers are used by desperate individuals to force a government to make a decision it does not want to make. Here, the bomber is trying to simply kill the protestors. In this case, the bomber is actually on the side of the police, who undoubtably died with the bomber. This is my first criticism of Civil War. This scene would make more sense if it took place in a city in California and the bomber killed dozens of cops fighting protestors instead of just everyone. That way the targeting is clear and unambiguous.  

 The plot of the film, in which a group of journalists cross the country in a warped road trip in order to interview the President of the Loyalist States before he is overthrown, presents itself in increasingly bizarre situations that escalate in tension. The first ‘stop’ reveals to us what neighbors will do to neighbors when the journalists come across a gas station manned by (let’s just say it) rural hicks who have strung up people they went to high school with in a car wash to torture them. No empathy or sympathy is wasted. Off screen, they are executed. What were their crimes? Garland, nor the audience, should care. I happened. Thus, it can happen. In Northern Ireland in 1980, neighbors shot neighbors not based on the color of their skin, but where they went to church. This is not outlandish, or dare I say, political. It is meant to be this way.  

 At the second stop, the journalists get hit by a sniper, forcing them to take cover next to two snipers who are looking for the interloper. “Who are you shooting at?” Kirsten Dunst asks. “We don’t know. Someone is trying to kill us and we are trying to kill them before that.” “Do you know what side they’re on?” This only irritates the soldiers. Again, no politics is in play. No stated purpose other than the one to survive exists.  

The following stop is a full-fledged fire fight between a uniformed, camouflaged military outfit and a bunch of guys in Hawaiian shirts wearing military kit over their weekend attire. We can expect they are not with the Loyalist states. This, coupled with the two previous stops, indicates to us the Loyalists are losing... and losing fast. The next stop is a small town which has decided not to take sides, and instead is choosing to remain like Switzerland, a town in search of stability while surrounded by utter chaos. Lee tells Sammy “I’ve forgotten America is like this.” “Funny,” Sammy replies, “I was going to say it’s exactly as I remember.” This is the height of the apolitical.  

 Even the ending of the film, in which the organized military forces of Texas, California, and their Allies field an army across the Potomoc to suppress the Capitol and occupy it, is as neutral as can be. We are told the Pentagon signed a cease fire and only small pockets of resistance remain. This also includes the Capitol Police, the Secret Service, and small outfits of the Loyalist military. These forces are pushed back to the White House grounds where the President is dragged from behind the Resolute Desk and executed.  

 The Subtextual Reading of the film, in which one must deduct from the events in order to piece together what is going on, is meant to protect the film from being called out right liberal propaganda. In this way, the film succeeds. Though there are right-wing protests online about the film, they are rather muted – usually on two levels. One in which Conservative Republicans say on Fox News how preposterous it all is and isn’t that typical liberal Hollywood – dividing America blah blah blah. The other argument is rather more nuanced. It is in which quietly, noddingly, the Fascists of the country say ‘oh, look at how they paint us, how unfair’ in which they are forgetting of course the follow up questions... which side are you being painted as? And this is where the film reaches a whole new level of disturbing.  

 The key scene in the film, in which two of the journalists are kidnapped somewhere in the Virginias, has by now become famous due to Jessie Plemon’s character, clad in neon orange shooting range glasses, challenges the journalists to identify themselves. As each journalist identifies themself, Plemons chooses to shoot the two Asian journalists. The test, in which Plemons famously asks “What kind of an American are you?” Is now the source of memes and jokes, which I find morbid and dark (although I love the one that reads “what kind of a Star Wars fan are you?”). This horrible scene, in which no one is meant to survive, is backdropped by an enormous dump truck filled with dead bodies being emptied into a recently excavated ditch. Upon inspection, most of the bodies are people of color, and all of the bodies are dressed in civilian attire. Quickly, one surmises Plemons and his gang have been hunting and executing anyone who isn’t white and anyone who is white and helping anyone who is not white. This is ethnic cleansing, circa Kosovo in 1999, Serbia in 1993, Rwanda 1997, and one could argue certain villages in Palestine in 1948 and in Israel just last year. Having stumbled across such a horrific war crime, there is no way any of these pencil pushers are going to make it away from this ditch alive and we know it.  

 Here the subtextual reading kicks into overdrive. If Plemons and his gang are killing non-white people in an organized way and disposing of their bodies as to hide the crime, one must ask what their ultimate goal is? Do they intend to stop at their town? Their county? Their state? Thier nation? Transferred to modern day politics, who is the most xenophobic of the two parties? Although there is an antisemitic streak in the Arab section of the DNC, we cannot ignore that the entire “America First” campaign is rooted in hate and xenophobia and used to scare people in to voting a certain way. This is why there are so many people upset at Plemons uttering this line in the trailer (I doubt many of these people actually went to see the film). It is because it exposes their true nature: the wont of genocide.  

 About four years ago I was at work, I was talking to a colleague of mine in the parking lot when a subcontractor drove up in his huge Trump truck and we had a conversation about whatever. A second subcontractor duly showed up soon after and he also joined us for conversation. As the four of us stood there, my colleague stepped forward and identified a huge dent in the bumper of the second contractor’s truck and inquired how the dent was formed. “Oh,” he replied casually, “I ran over a Democrat this morning. Double points.” Now, I am not a Democrat, and I have never voted straight ticket at any election, but my colleague knew that I was not happy with the present political situation and laughed nervously while slapping my back as if to say ‘oh, wasn’t that funny, please play along.’ But of course, I wasn’t going to play along, and watched the two contractors change their faces as they realized they said something out of line with someone – as if I were the very thing they wished to kill on their way to work that morning. I put them at ease when I replied. “Hey, it’s alright guys. Just throw my body in ditch with the Jews and the Fags. No one will ever know.” 

 I don’t remember how that particular situation ended, but I know now that whenever I see those two, they are very careful how they speak to me. I guess it would be untoward to mention that I am a huge Second Amendment advocate and will not be submitting to my political murder without an enormous lead-filled resistance.  

 My point in mentioning this story in conjunction with the ethnic cleansing scene, is to bring up a string of very logical conclusions. Why are right wingers so upset at the film portraying them this way, considering none of them (that I have read or seen, which is admittedly a limited argument) are citing mass murder as being objectionable? The reason they hate the film, and hate Plemons’ portrayal, is because it hits the nail on the head. They are called out as Fascists. As racists. As white supremacists. These are not people who want a stronger border, better immigration laws, deportations. They are past this point. They are ready to start killing 1) everyone not white and 2) everyone white who is helping everyone not white. The rage the right feels about this scene is intense because it unveils their true feelings about what they hope to achieve in a second Trump term: extermination of the ideological left starting with color. They are unmasked in this way, and it makes them angry. When in fact what they want to do, what they wish for, what they lie awake at night and masturbate to, is to live like Robert Keith Packer. If only they could be so bold, so like him. So like Plemon’s very character in Civil War... if they could do that, they could be complete. They could be men, much like the Hamas murderers of October 7th who raised their bloody hands-on Instagram reels and shouted to their relatives in the West Bank “look at me! I’m a man now because I have murdered a Jew!” 

 From this controversial scene we can then backwards extrapolate the evil intentions of the President. Why did he disband the FBI? So he could avoid being held accountable for his crimes. This is much like Trump firing his FBI Director and his Attorney General. Trump even threatened to fire the top seven lawyers in the Justice Department if they did not take his side in contesting the 2020 election but only backed off when they told him he would be facing mass resignations in the field offices and near total collapse of the legal system if he did so (See Richard Donoghue and Steven Engel on Wikipedia’s sources). Nick Offerman’s absent President, then, does not seem to be that far from what we have had in the past. And this parallel is what pisses conservatives off about the movie. They’re pissed because it is exposed as true. The proof that the whole shebang, The Big Lie, the Capitol Putsch, the ‘Fake News’ wolf cries, that all of the argument of the right is a bunch of shit is exposed here. For if they were right, then they wouldn’t be trying to hide it. They would be trying to promote it. But because they are all going to jail for it, or being prosecuted for it, they are running, fleeing, like scared little liars. They’re not pleading guilty and screaming “TRUMP WON!” They’re apologizing and serving, in some cases, thirty years. They are wrong. And they know they are wrong. That is why the Fascists in the GOP are upset at this film. They can’t wear their “Camp Auschwitz” sweater in public, and they hate the woke libs for it. 

 While I do see a malcontent left criticize the film for being an apolitical mishmash with absolutely no background, I do not see the same hate filled cup runneth over. This is a remarkable difference littered with nuance and debate. I listened to the Big Picture Podcast, in which Amanda Dobbins, Sean Fennessy, and Chris Ryan from the Ringer debated the pros and cons of the movie. They gave it an overall positive review because it took an apolitical stance. In the past, I have gleaned all of them as East Coast liberals, so i expected them to discuss the subtextual, which they did ever so lightly as if to dance around a topic that may offend at least a third of their audience. Again, a positive experience. However, I also listened to Mike White of the Projection Booth roundly TROUNCE this film for an hour in a well thought out, well-argued discussion with Chris Stachiw and Father Malone and I can’t say I disagreed with that. They are, in what I would describe, as way more left that the Big Picture, so here we an unusual situation: three liberals that hate it, and three liberals that love it. This calls back to a hysterical post that Kevin Smith did on his old View Askew page about two people in a carnival slingshot. Once hated it, one loved it – same experience. This is admittedly what I love about cinema. I once praised Kyle MacLachlan’s de-aging on the Fallout series on Hulu as extraordinary. Five minutes later someone replied calling me an idiot for thinking that kinder garden level CGI was anything but horrible. Ah. America.  

 Mike also hated Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s black comedy about the right-wing regime of America denying science in the face of disaster. The right has a long history of this whether it’s climate change or vaccines, or even the information technology behind how voting machines actually work. In his hysterical, one line criticism on Letterbxd, Mike simply wrote “Don’t be obvious.” And this, in effect, was what was wrong with that film in his view. If it were more... well... neutral and universal, it would be more timeless and meaningful. Look at the entire career of Costa-Gavras as an example. Z could be any mediterranean country. State of Siege could be any Latin American country. Both films could take place at any time. For some, what is funny about Don’t Look Back’s obviousness is what is wrong with Civil War, and vice versa. Some are consistent. Some are not. Cinema all one big carnival slingshot with two seats.  

 In closing, I liked the film because these two layers spoke to me. Though I do not think it is a spectacular masterpiece, it presents an intellectual discourse that I have not been able to stop thinking about since I saw it. Thus, Garland has created yet another interesting commentary on modern day. This in itself has value. Whether you love it or hate it might depend on what you find objectionable in the film. The Civil War itself? Or why such a Civil War would be necessary to begin with. The objection over the mass execution scene is befuddling to me because to deny that scene legitimacy is to deny that there are people like that in America. And there are definitely people who are like that in America. And if you don’t believe that, then you must be wearing some kind of vision filter on your side of the slingshot. Like perhaps neon orange glasses.  

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

I should say you look rather lost, but hen I can’t imagine where in the world the three of you would look at home.

Umpteenth Screening. Laserdisc. Kino Room. I’m happy to report the laserdisc is at least 25 years old and is still holding up. I saw this during the pandemic on the big screen and was really impressed with it. That was the first time I saw it in the theatre since opening weekend when I caught it on a huge 70mm screen. It left quite the impression. This time I was determined to meet the racism head on and I’m still mostly clueless about much of the criticism of the film. Let's take it one by one, shall we? 

Years ago there used to be a podcast called Movie Court which featured a courtroom like environment in which film fans debated the merits of a film. Temple of Doom was Amanda Dobbins, of recent Ringer fame, ripping the hell out of Temple of Doom, while the ‘defense’ basically gave up. Spielberg and Lucas were quoted as saying essentially ‘we screwed up’ by makig the film too dark and too problematic. I talked it over with my son over waffles and coffee.  

Point One: The film depicts Indians as a cult (the Thuggee) and inherently evil. My rebuttal to this is fairly passive, but I believe it is correct. The first Indians we meet (dot, not a feather) are humble village people who are farming the land and who have prayed for help from Shiva to alleviate their suffering. The village apparently had a Sankara stone, an ancient magic rock which brought vibrant life to the village. The Thuggee stole the rock, and their children and went back to Pankot Palace. I find it amazing that when people accuse the film of being racist, they always bring up the Thuggee, and they never bring up this village. If I were to live in one or the other, I’d rather the village as they seem like good hard-working people, far away from where Mola Ram is ripping hearts out. Why can’t this stand for the India of 1934 and not Pankot Palace. I think the audience who decides the corrupt Indians should be representative of the (then colony) British Raj are the ones who are racist.  

Point Two: The villagers ask Shiva to send someone to help them and boom... Indiana Jones shows up as a white savior to help those poor little brown people get wealth and justice. This is entirely skewed. First, if you know anything about Hinduism, Shiva will bring whoever the fuck he wants to bring, and he won’t give a damn about your opinion. Shiva is a multi-armed ass kicking God and you’ve got it spinned around. If Shiva wants to send Peter Parker to help the village, then thy will be done. So that answer is first a little insulting to the Hindus.  

Point Three; Secondly, the previous argument passes up three people. It’s not just Indy. It’s Indy, a clueless lounge singer and a twelve-year-old Chinese Orphan. Ignoring the woman and the Chinese kid is ignoring a more diverse rescue party than the straight white male which we are used to being the enemy as of late. Willie and Short Round are not passive members of this revolution. They fight the bad guys, help Indy steal the stones, and are 66% responsible for the freeing of the children from the slave mines of Pankot. Ignore that, and you're ignoring the facts of the story. It also ignores the Maharaja’s turn as he wakes from his induced trance to give Short Round the needed information to leave the palace alive.  

Point Four, thirdly following the same argument, blaming the white savior ignores the fact that you might, just possibly, if you looked at the last five thousand years of Indian history, just might find a hierarchy of Hindus (or Indians, or Sikhs, or Muslims, or whoever) that were not acting 100% with the good intentions of the people they lorded over. Anglo history is full of corrupt white people doing corrupt shit to other people. Pankot was a corrupt cult of rich people that were using their religious power to control their wealth and leverage that power against the surrounding countryside. In America, Pankot is Washington, and the countryside is the rest of the country. It’s not insulting to say there was corruption in India in the 1930’s. There’s corruption everywhere in the 1930’s, not just India. Again, focusing on that as a negative is as strange as it is slightly hypocritical.  

Point Five, Willie Scott is a poor excuse for a feminist message. To this I only ask: when you bought your ticket to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, were you expecting a stong statement from the chorus girl on the politics of Andrea Dworkin? Kate Capshaw is a light in this film. She opens it by coming out of the mouth of a dragon, sings phonetic Cantonese, balances out Indy’s machismo and provides an endless amount of comedy. Feminists may groan at Willie complaining about breaking a nail in a tunnel filled with insects while Indy and Short Round are about to be crushed to death, but if they do then I take it they’re in the wrong film. Ford is the straight man. He's Laurel. He’s Costello. Willie is the funny girl and (it just so happens ) the sexually adventurous type. The word play between Willie and Indy in her room (while she eats an apple and talks about what cream she uses on her face) is fantastic writing and better acting. If she’s annoying in certain parts, it’s because that’s her character. If you don’t like it, maybe you’ve never played hard to get. Get off Capshaw’s back. She’s great in this.  

Point Six, the British show up at the end, led by a bunch of white officers, and save the day, which is just a white supremacist message. I have to really take a breath when I read criticism like this. First, this ignores the factual circumstances of the British Raj. Yes, the Brits ruled India with an iron fist. Yes, they were oppressive beyond the space where such evils can find space here. It is a fact they were in India and it was a fact that white officers led Hindu, Sikhs, and Gurkha troops to suppress inner rebellions and the like. It is also true that those same troops protected India from invasion from Japan, China, and helped the British Empire win the Second World War. I, for one, have no problem admitting that a native Indian army defeated a small but powerful cult and saved not just the one village that Indy ran across, but the entire province around Pankot. Empires are messy and nuanced. For four hundred years, Ireland was a conquered nation that recruited and forced Irish men to join the British Imperial Army. These Irish troops were deployed and loyally served conflicts all over the globe on behalf of the British Crown. They served against Napoleon at Waterloo, and they served against the Russians in Crimea. No one wants to talk about this now because most of the island of Eire liberated themselves and became the Republic of Ireland. It serves no one but itself, but it cannot change the past. India is the same. Get over it.  

Point Seven, India is portrayed as barbaric and the feast scene in particular negatively showcases Indian food. Well, I don’t know what movie you thought you were going to see. I purchased a ticket to an adventure comedy. I didn’t see Indian society as barbaric. I saw Thuggee society as barbaric. Just like I see Branch Davidian society, or the incestuous Morman society, or Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid cult, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The feast does not reflect Indian cuisine. It was not meant to. It was meant to make Willie pass out. It was a joke, not a dick. Don’t take it so hard. And as far as the barbaric side of it. The dinner time conversation between Chattar Lal is a perfect example of putting Indy in his place.  

The whole attitude behind this is pretty strange. It's like people who went to see Attack of the Clones and said the speeder chase in the first act was too unbelievable. Oh. Okay. But a planet full of oversized Muppets taking on a biker gang on a forest moon, that was totally believable, right? Amrish Puri, who played Mola Ram, is quoted as saying something like this takes place in the Temple of Doom. Indy, Willie, and Short Round escape Chinese gangsters, jump out of a plane using a raft, and ride the raft down a mountain, a river, and are rescued by a village holy man. At what point did you recognize you were in a fantasy? Was it before or after you decided this film was sexist or barbaric? This also travels to the “we can do this but you can’t” argument which is also problematic. How many films do Indians make that either misrepresent themselves or cast them in a different light that may be not so kind? I’m betting a lot. Americans do it all the time. Look at the Godfather. That’s a film that BREATHES American barbarity. But a showgirl passing out at Monkey Brains... well that’s an insult to Indian culture (or so the argument goes).  

I reject this. I think there is a margin of error with every audience, but supposing all Americans will derive the same meaning out of one film is not fair. Likewise, thinking Indian audiences won’t understand the threat of the thuggee or the idea that not all Italian Americans are Tony Soprano is insulting. At the end of this film, the children run back to the village, which now is alive and thriving thanks to the life the sankara stone brings to it. How anyone could see this ending and derive a white savior storyline is as dismissive as it is ignorant. It reminds me of the article in The Guardian that said Black Hawk Down was a racist film because there were no black American soldiers and no white Somalis. 

Temple of Doom is a great film that mixes serial adventure films with elements of Busby Berkeley, Universal Horror films, with interesting characters like Lau Che, Willie Scott, Chatter Lal, Mola Ram, and Short Round. Key Huy Quan was so good in this film it boggles the mind. And... It makes much more sense that he’s the one conning Indy out of the Dial of Destiny to sell it on the black market than Phoebe Waller- Bridge – as wonderful as she was in the role. I’m not against “woke” thinking. I think there is room for calling out racism in Hollywood film. But torpedoing this film because the audience can’t understand nuance is overboard. It’s the reason people are getting too wild about existing culture and changes in our culture.  

Covering these topics also takes space away from the elements of the film that make it such a success. In effect, you are spending all your (my) time defending the film rather than promoting it. The Club Obi Wan intro is shockingly good. It is only exceeded by the fight leading to one of the craziest exits in an action film. Look closely and you’ll see the bullet holes from the Tommy gun create new holes in the gong as the gong is traveling towards the window. The car chase is more than an introduction to Short Round, which is gold, but also gives you more insight into Willie when she says, to comedic effect: “I’m not that kind of girl,” when Indy is searching her... body... for the potion. The Lao Che Air revelation leads to the plane crash to the village to Pankot. Before you can breathe, the film hits 45 minutes. The dinner table scene is the crux of the film when Indy risks upsetting Lal and Lal takes the bait. If Lal had not sent the assassins to kill Indy in the middle of the night, he would have had no reason to stay in Pankot any longer than he had to. Lal’s mistake thus led to Indy investigating further. The Temple of Doom itself is cited as being the reason why the film worried the MPAA and led to the PG-13 craze. Parents bemoaned the beating heart on fire and if you look carefully, flayed skins on the walls. This seems crazy to me. Have you fucking seen Jaws? A PG film in which a child is swallowed whole on screen, with a blood spurt into the water. Jaws has a man bit in half by a shark who with his last bit of strength tries to stab the shark with a machete. How this is any ‘better’ than ripping a heart out I’m not sure. And remember when Hooper is cutting open the shark, he is looking for... pieces... of the boy’s body. Yes, he only finds a license plate, but in my view, Jaws is bloodier and darker.  

This diverts from Quan’s ability to illicit sympathy from the audience when Indy is put into a trance. The trance itself, in which Spielberg plays with light, is an acting tour de force by Ford, better than most his other films. Amrish Puri, an amazing actor with over three hundred credits to his name, must go down as one of the greatest villains of all time. He ranks right up there with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3, Gert Frobe in Goldfinger, and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Puri bottles up everything that is wrong with India in the 1930’s when he maniacally laughs after slipping Indy the blood of Kali Ma. "The British in India will be slaughtered, then we will overrun the Muslims. Then the Hebrew God will fall! And then the Christian God will be cast down and forgotten. Soon, Kali Ma will rule the world!” I have to say... objectively, if you replaced the nouns in this speech, it doesn’t sound that far from Fox News on a weeknight. As good Americans, we’re not going to argue that we slaughtered Brits here are we? And what red-blooded American wants Muslims here? Surely those are the same people who want the Jews out. The only one that sticks out is the Christian God, which is kind of strange because most theologians see Jehovah, God, and Allah as the same being. This being the case, all we have to do is swap Kali Ma and God, and we’ve got a case for Trump / Mola Ram ‘24. This speech isn’t insensitive, it’s telling, and it is damn near universal. That is because evil is universal, and everyone has a Temple of Doom whether it’s underneath a Pizzaria basement in D.C. or a cell in Guantanamo.  

The best part of Temple of Doom is the ending, when everyone returns to the village and the women see their children returned. A thousand screams of joy and laughter, repeated with a John Williams score blaring over them and an Elephant trumpeting the victory over Pankot. Indy gets the girl, Short Round goes back to being a kid, and Willie finds contentment if only until shortly before the next adventure. Hating this film doesn’t make someone a bunch of killjoys, but it does mean they are focusing not on the nuance of understanding, but on simple concepts, because they have simple minds.  

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

I don't believe in magic. But a few times in my life, I've seen things. Things I can't explain. And I've come to believe it's not so much about what you believe, it's how hard you believe it.

This review may contain spoilers.

First Screening. Cinemark. Yet another example of how initial audience reactions do not accurately reflect the true nature of the art, usually because they are based on false assumptions, prejudices, and biases. In some ways, this is bound to happen regardless because of the age we live in. In other ways, I blame trailers for ruining the movie experience. I have been putting my fingers in my ears and humming during every Indiana Jones trailer for the last year. So when I went into this film, I had no idea Mads Mikkelson was the villain, that John Rhys-Davies was going to show up in the second act, what the Dial of Destiny was, or that Ford was going to play a younger self. All of this ignorance paid off in the end. I had no expectations, other than this had better fucking be better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And for that, it exceeded. The ranking is 1. Raiders (Five Stars) 2. Temple (Four and a half stars) 3. Crusade (Four stars) 4. Dial of Destiny (three and a half stars), then there's fifty feet of shit. And then below that, there's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Dial of Destiny has one of the best opening sequences of any modern film, and it rivals the Temple of Doom in terms of action. The plot, in which Indy and his god daughter pursue the Dial of Destiny for different reasons, plays in well with the theme of time, well marked by using watches and clocks (Indy has one on his nightstand, he is given one for his retirement party, his dad's watch is stolen, etc). This showcases that time has moved on for Indy as he struggles not only with a perspective of a failed career, but with recognizing that having lost his son and separated from his wife, that he is literally at the end of the road as an aging American male. He is stripped of his masculinity (shirtless in the opener) and is constantly overwhelmed by his enemies.

The antagonist Dr. Voller is everything Indy has been fighting against his entire life. Not just in his Nazi ways, but in the use of archaeology for his own purposes.. Voller isn't just a Nazi, he is a Paper Clip scientist who has gained notoriety for his work on the Space Program and when asked what is there next to conquer after space, the answer he does not mention is time. Who time is up for is constantly a discussion. If Indy's time is up, what does that say about Voller? Or Wombat, as Phoebe Waller Bridge is known.

At the endof the second act there is a trolley chase and a scuba scene that I just did not care for, but it wasn't bad. It wasn't like fencing across the backs of two trucks driving through the jungle or swinging on vines. It wasn't ludicrous. It was well grounded, I had just seen it in a million films and it bored me.

No, the biggest detriment to this film is taking something better than average, namely the plot involving Bridge, and making it truly great, for instance inserting Short Round. This was a golden opportunity, missed by the writers and creators. It could have been great. It could have been the difference between people saying this film was alright, and this film was fucking great. It could have been not just the difference between three and five stars, but 200 million and a billion dollars. Short Round needs money, manipulates Indy to get the Dial. Indy chases him around the world to stop him, Short Round comes to his senses, and Short Round saves Indy from becoming a permanent feature of the Syracuse archaeological find.

No Teddy. No Puss and Boots, the film is 20 minutes shorter, makes the cart cab scene more fun with only two people, and the stupid addition of the second plane in the end which only exists for a return journey. This folks, would have brought the past to the future, and Ky Kuy Quan could have had his own spin off "SHORT ROUND" in three years, ushering in perhaps the journey we all want him to have. Not having this wasn't detrimental to the film, but it reveals the great potential to be the film that will always haunt it. Quan would have been on the heels of an Oscar win, a hit movie, and a hit series. I will never stop thinking about this. Child actors are notoriously difficult, and rarely pay off. Most of them are like Jake Lloyd, not Shirley Temple, and Quan in Temple of Doom was pure gold.

I liked Dial of Destiny. I liked what it was and where it was going. There was very little that I would have passed on. But it could have been eternal. It could have been the film that made James Mangold one of the greats. It could have been like Temple, or Crusade. That melancholy is a lot to shake off. At least this didn't suck.

Cromwell (1970)

“Democracy, Mister Cromwell, was a Greek drollery based on the foolish notion that there are extraordinary possibilities in very ordinary people.”

First Screening. Amazon Prime. There are so many layers to this film that I was forced to think about it for days even though as an overt text to watch I was uninterested and found it trite and boring. However, here we go.  

On the face of it, this chronicles the military career of the dictator of Britain as he moves from failure to success against the King of England, Charles I, for the King's consistent refusal to stick to a plan - any plan. Cromwell is rightly played as a man of God that he was, but is miscast with Richard Harris. Harris is a capable actor, and at this time not a full fledged alcoholic, but he can't pull off the smoldering intensity he is reaching for. This was a role that Richard Burton was born for. Good luck putting him in a hair style like this. Although the sets were opulent, they looked horrible in the dreaded, near worthless color tone this film has. I have no idea what they are going for but Fat City looked better. it was really disappointing to see a film that is trying to be on the scale of something like Lawrence of Arabia just flat out fail so badly. The scope is no where near where it needs to be to compete with films like Spartacus or other epics recently shot in the 60.s. Although Guinness's acting style if fitting for that playing the arrogant and impossible king, he is not surrounding by those who can keep up, and this hurts the scenes. So as a practical film, this just does not work.  

Underneath this is an Irishman, Harris, playing Cromwell, who raised an army, took it to Ireland, and slaughtered the Irish in a near genocidal war that beggars the imagination for a time before 1800. That was a lot to think about. An Irish James Bond would take another 20 years but an Irish Cromwell in 1970... we'll I'm still not ready for it. Again, bad casting with not enough religious anecdotes.  Coupled with this is the timing itself, just a year after the British Army occupied Northern Ireland and shortly before the Troubles would explode in real time. This film has bad timing that it just can't escape. All I could think about in some scenes is how Cromwell's Army is doing to Ireland what the British Army was doing to Northern Ireland at about the same time. That's more than meta.  

Underneath that was this very bizarre reading between the lines of Guinness's King Charles. I almost wrote them down. First there was 'no one tells me what to do but God' which was not too bad but then he sends...an armed mob... to Parliament... to arrest elected officials he does not like and is caught red handed. Then in order to get out of the situation he is caught trying ot make deals... with Britain's mortal enemy. By the time he was arrested I was wondering how many classified documents Cromwell's men had found in the King's bathroom in Mar el Lago. I mean, Buckingham Palace. This was not helped by the lines, in which the king declared that it wasn't illegal if he did it, and he was not answerable to Parliament, only to God. Most of these lines didn't sound like an English aristocrat from four centuries ago. It sounded like the Orange Jesus.  

The King just absolutely refuses to do things in his own best interest. And the parallel is to dramatic. It's not too hard to stay out of jail, you know. Just don't bribe porn stars, steal classified documents, or make deals with your enemies against your own country. After his arrest, the King acted like he didn't care and it was all a farce. And then when he was convicted, he absolutely could not believe this injustice was happening to him. He thought he was untouchable. Above the law. And my interpretation is that Jack Smith taught him different. My only fear is in ditching one dictator, I hope, like Cromwell, we don't make another.   

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

“Is Spider-Man grounded?”

First Screening. Cinemark. A powerhouse virtuoso collaboration from the best forms of cinema as art. From the voice actors to the production team and all the artists in between, this film showcases a voice that ties the teen angst saga to the other worldly aspect of comic book "stories" in order to convey a compelling narrative that rips at your heart, elevates your blood pressure, and keeps you on the edge of your seat. As much as the first film was kinda maybe about diversity, this film is kinda maybe about family - only without cars that go into outer space. Miles Moreles is a true American hero, born in love, dipped in fear, taught right from wrong, and is someone who had decided to do something about it - no matter what 'that' is from purse snatching to destroying the universe. As if this were not enough, he is absolutely stacked with meaningful, deeply read characters that include wives, mothers, fathers, daughters, and that special platonic relationship we all share between each other as siblings or friends. This is a special mojo or je nais se quoi that is not so easily caught on film, much less in a novel. But in a comic book arch or a two our animated masterpiece like this, the bonds we form as a people are tough and unbreakable. This film reflects so much of our American experience it hard to fathom how it all fits on one screen, in a little over two hours, littered with jokes, criticism of woke culture, and totally embracing of the other. It breaks taboos (dare we say the 'ugly' word of miscegenation?), promotes law and order (no Officer Chauvins here), and unflinchingly deals with the tough decisions our society faces (want that debt ceiling lifted? Then you're going to have to fuck over some citizens down on their luck).

The characters are stacked with the same pain and grief, as they share the same experience from their own universe, but front and center, or I should say standing next to Miles, is the tower of a human being Gwen Stacey. If ever there was anyone who understands what it like to be bit by a spider and faced with shitty decisions between bad and worse, it is her. Gwen is drawn to Mary Sue like levels, perfect in an adolescent former gymnast form wrapped in spandex and looking more like Kayla Mulroney than Emma Stone - and that's okay. Emma's Gwen wasn't bit by a spider, or played drums in a punk band. This Spider-Gwen has a special relationship with her father, ever more fraught by his betrayal - the very thing Miles fears in his own 'verse. She is frightened of reality, but not scared by death. She is capable in every way, except how to make tough decisions. She does not conform the the standard gender flip of recent years (just make the girl do man things and problem solved...), she walks like a girl, fights like a girl, does girl things, and wins. It is tough finding a more positive pop-art role model for my cosplay badass daughter than Spider-Gwen. Her only agenda is help, just like (most) of the other Spider-Men and Women.

And as amazing as Gwen is (and she is the leading reason to see this film, full stop), Across the Spider-Verse is filled with other, new, exciting characters from pregnant motorcycle mamas to determined, pirate like Machiavellian leaders. From Stacey's dad to Peter B. Parker's toddler daughter, you never spend a second in this film wonder 'who is that?' or 'why do I care?' Instead, the film very smartly invests you in the verse first so you can understand the story of all the Spider variants an that having been achieved, they introduce personality. Very smart, clever screenwriting. At the end of the spectrum, after many other roles that I am skipping, are two nemeses that challenge the very notion about whether all of this will survive. Though Oscar Isaac is somewhat replaceable, Spot is not, and will make sure that Across the Spider-Verse will forever be re-watchable as he is imbued with tragedy, comedy, and the all dreaded hubris designed to challenge our fear-filled but determined hero. Spot is on spot.

All of this is wrapped in an amazing canvas of brilliant colors, challenging Cinemarks' promise of 23 trillion colors, edged and etched in ways never seen before on film, not even in the first film. For each Verse has a definitive style, planned out before hand, to the nth degree, in a very Kubruckian way to explain the mode, mood, form, and tone of each character. It all makes sense. From a Sid Viscous like Spider Man, to Gwen's own soft hued world, to even a (spoilers) Lego like existence, the animators of this film have gone over the top to tie the environment into the background to inform the character's style and motive. I do not believe I have ever seen this in any other film and if I have, certainly never to this degree of determination and success. Across the Spider-Verse builds on the first film's WOW! effects, heightened by what was at the time a release in 3-D that absolutely blew me away to where I was actually disappointed that I could not see this film in 3-D, the ONLY film I have ever thought that way about since Gravity. Across the Spider-Verse is similar territory pushed to the next level with what you can tell is a thoughtful menagerie of meaning and purpose.

In the end it will be difficult for Marvel to follow this trilogy with the same success it sees in it's live action franchises, which have floundered and evoked pause if not sheer head shaking in recent years. Across the Spider-Verse may be the best film of 2023 so far, and must blow away the competition in the animated film category next next awards season. There is simply no way to deny the sheer force of this much planning and narrative care. To see Across the Spider-Verse is to be moved by the best forces of Hollywood in the comic book tradition, which has been the goal of Marvel since the first X-Men film. Bravo, I say. bravo.

The Covenant (2023)

“In the desert, no one remembers your name and there ain’t no one for to give you no pain…”

First Screening. Cinemark. Tightwad Tuesday. The first Guy Ritchie film I have seen on the big screen in quite a while. I took a look at his credits and although I appreciate Snatch and The Man from UNCLE as masterpieces, the truth is I'm not very impressed with his storytelling, although his technical expertise showcased in some films (Revolver, RocknRolla) is superb. I loved where he was going with The Gentlemen, but it failed to take it all the way into the station (despite stellar next-level performances out of Dockery and Farrell). The Covenant seems to be that rare feat that align's Ritchie's undeniably technical know-how with his ability to concentrate on narrative structure. Part of this, it must be admitted, is because The Covenant is a rather simple story. An Afghan translator saves his Sergeant's life who then returns to save him when the Americans fuck the translator over. That's it. This mean, in effect, Ritchie has an hour to build character and an hour to execute a plan, and he does it super well. 

From the get-go, this is a Call of Duty film without mentioning anything remotely related to COD. I know. I've played that game. I'm Master Prestige on MW, MW2, BO, BOII, MW3, BOIII, Advanced Warfare (take that what you will), MP1 in Ghosts, and I'm so far up the MP chain on World At War that chances are if you played from 2016-2020 then you've played me. So when I say this film looks like a COD game, I know what I'm talking about. Such as:

1) The standard, opening rivalry of all war films in which we rotate around the squad and get to know people. Ritchie punctuates this with on screen credits, which happens naturally during game play when your center falls on another character (Tommy Matoto, Sub-machine Gunner).
2) Long, slow, steady cam shots that creep up through the actions of the enemy, following their movements as they go through the motions of being bad guys. The most famous one is the opener to the MW campaign, but it happens throughout MW2, MW3, and especially BO.
3) Gyllenhaal and Salim slowly walk down a trail at the bottom of a gully with an over the shoulder camera tracking above Gyllenhaal's left shoulder. Anyone who had played any COD game ever could have told you that eventually the trail would reveal a bad guy just around the corner.
4) Predictable but cool as shit FLIR from the point of view of the 30 mil operator above an AC-130 SPECTRE Gunship, which I credit for saving the lives of many of my fellow taxpayers in uniform.
5) Characters looking back and forth in dealing with trauma. This sounds a little vague and you could say typical of all films, but you'd have to see how the performances are engaged to understand what Ritchie is doing. 

I've never seen a film so completely mirror a video game. Even films that take direct plot elements or copy entire characters (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil) fail to execute the not-so-subtle effects that Ritchie masters here. I was really surprised. On top of this, Ritchie is using compellingly long takes to establish points, and emphasizing emotional performances by soft 'popping' this close ups just a bit in, and rolling back almost immediately all in the same shot. The first time it happened I was wondering if it was a mistake. Then the second time it happened, on Dar Salim, I thought "holy shit, that is brilliant." I've seen soft popping in film before, but never used like this to emphasize a performance. For your reference a full pop can be found in fifty thousand instances on the show "Succession," in which the camera (for example) seems like it is across the room and then "pops" in to a full medium or full close up of an actor. Using it too much, like in that show, wears you down and makes you scream at the cinematographer to JUST LEAVE THE LENS ALONE. However, Ritchie's gradual and limited use of it here is masterful. It proves he knows what he likes, knows what he wants, and knows what he wants to show you in order to convey the point of the scene without antagonizing you. Shockingly good. 

The crowning achievement of the film is Dar Salim, a European actor I am unfamiliar with, apparently born in Baghdad and fluent in several languages. He might be the Daniel Bruhl of the Middle East. I was constantly drawn to his screen presence and was completely convinced of his determination and layered characterization. In one amazing sequence, Gyllenhaal is having a breakdown after losing several of his friends in a fire fight. Salim conveys a series of expressions on his face that runs through his character's thinking process. It goes something like this:

1. He's a soldier. He's prepared for this.
2. He's having a moment. He'll get through it.
3. This is worse than I thought.
4. I should say something.
5. It would be inappropriate for me to say anything about his comrades.
6. I want to say something to him to make him feel better but that is absurd.
7. This must be the first time he's lost friends in combat.
8. This poor guy. He's lost almost as much as I have.
9. I don't want to embarrass him by trying to console him.
10. I'm not going to do anything he might interpret as patronizing.
11. I'm just not going to say anything. 

All of that. In one take that may have been edited to show Gyllenhaal's state of mind. It was astounding. Salim must come to Hollywood. He deserves to be there. 

I try to make it a point to not create criticism of actors, but Emily Beechum was clearly out of step with her surroundings. Her American accent was horrible and ultimately Ritchie should have done something about it. I don't think she closed the deal on the devoted and understanding partner. See Sienna Miller in American Sniper.

High Tension (2003)

“I won’t let anyone come between us anymore.”

First Screening. DVD. I make it a point not to see trailers or look at film reviews before I go see a film. Largely the art work is what pulls me in, followed by the cast and crew above and below the line. The image of this short haired girl covered in blood carrying around a gas saw was an effective hook and so for two dollars at Half Priced Books, I took a risk. After the film was over I then read the reviews and I was surprised at how few of the film's attributes were brought up and how easily it was to go to the worst impossible interpretation of the film. It reminded me of Dressed to Kill, when that film was bashed for effectively saying that trans women were killers. When in fact, that wasn't the point of the story at all. That one character in that one film had a split personality, and that is exactly what this film had, I saw in a kind of homage to Dressed to Kill. It wasn't the only one either. The axe murder was clearly a reference to the Shining and the drive through he forest was a call back to Halloween. Beyond Dressed to Kill, this is really much more like Fight Club, in which a schizophrenic is revealed during the third act.

The queer criticism is really strange. First, I didn't see this as a queer film at all. Marie was not gay, her other personality wasn't either. Her other personality was a misogynistic and hateful killer. Other personalities (according to wikipedia) do not represent the secret desires of the 'main' personality or however you want to define it. It is a totally different person reacting differently to the same situation as the main personality. The film's finale, in which Marie is kissing Alex, is misread. Alex is giving into the killer, using sex as a way to draw the killer closer so she can stab him. When the killer gets closer and the kiss, it is the killer kissing Alex, not Marie. Marie does the same thing to the killer in the greenhouse when all of a sudden she starts sucking the fingers of the killer quite suggestively. She's just trying to lure him in. I simply don't think Marie is gay simply because she has short hair, doesn't want to sleep with a lot of guys, and happens to see her friend nude through a window. I feel that scene is misread as well. The criticism is Marie sees Alex shower, go upstairs, and masturbates and the implication of the criticism is Marie is thinking about Alex when she does it. I think this is a false reading. The film uses flash cuts to introduce thoughts or flashbacks to characters, but there isn't one when Marie is masturbating. So she is not thinking about Alex. Another criticism is the killer shows up when Marie is masturbating and the first murder occurs when Marie orgasms. This is simply not true. The first murder takes place before they even arrive to the farm (though how, we do not know, as the entire physical existence of the van is perplexing). I disassociated Marie masturbating with Alex because she was outside and saw Alex showering and that was the time to be masturbating. The opening scene takes pains to tell us the two women are close friends, and it's not unlikely (especially in Europe) for two women who are rooming together to see each other in such a state. At the very least, it could have put Marie 'in the mood' and she decided to rub one out before bed. This is hardly suggestive of her harboring secret desires of homosexuality. I think that's more homophobic. The line that some say decides the case is when Marie says “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore” but it’s not that crazy ( no pun intended ( to think this is the killer talking).

The film is charged with sexism and chauvinism, yet Alex is the only one we see half nude, and only for a few seconds. When Marie masturbates, the only thing we see is her hand down her pants. The most suggestive exposed body part is new navel. This is the opportune time in a horror film for her to be topless in panties and frantically frig herself like Single White Female or a dozen other films, and yet the director does not take that opportunity. Instead, what we see is a flip of what we normally see in horror films where usually the couple that have sex are the couple that dies. In this aspect, no one has sex (unless you count masturbation) and neither of the participants die. Everyone who does die is tangential to the story (although not to Alex as a character). Association of murder with orgasm is not new. Famke Jansen did it in Goldeneye, but in a film with various ways to kill people, the opportunity here was to cut between the orgasm and the penetration of the knife and yet we did not see it. So again, the two are disassociated. Instead what you have is a tale of someone's mental illness getting the better of them and if the film could be criticized for anything it could be this (I didn't read that anywhere on Letterbxd, though).

What I saw instead was a woman (possibly sexually frustrated) who scene by scene was doing what she could to survive having no idea that she was the cause of her own suffering. France's acting goes from clueless (the house) to desperate (the van) to sheer terror (the gas station) and then reverses to determination (the chase) to bravery (the greenhouse) to demented delirium (the road). It is rare for an actor to showcase so many facets in a single performance. I found it compelling when the 'reveal' was made. It was the only way to sell the horror as tale, and that's the crux of the matter. Why is The Exorcist or The Omen good? It is because of the story backed up by a compelling performances, just like any other film. Without that, this is just another slasher film, and most slasher films and horror films are just trash. It is why I do not like the genre. I'm not even a huge Halloween fan. I thought Hellfest was done well, but it had not meaning. Whereas High Tension, which was aptly named because it kept you on the edge of your seat, had a good story with good character development that paid homage in neat ways to the genre without falling into the trap of the genre.

John Wick: Chapter Four (2023)

“A man’s ambition should never exceed his usefulness.”

First Screening. Cinemark. I don’t think I'm ready for this review. I just spent three hours watching something that I’m sure competes with Mad Max: Fury Road and Mission Impossible: Fallout as the greatest action film this century (so far). I don’t know how it could ever be topped except in terms of story. First, let’s go through the positives of the film and one very flaw, the narrative. 

 First and always foremost on any John Wick film excepting the first is and seemingly always will be the fight sequences. One of the most amazing fight sequences ever filmed was the Club Raid in the first film, in which our hero goes level by level through a restaurant / hotel / spa looking for the man who killed his dog and stole his Mustang. Seemingly spare in every action film is the number of bullets per clip, but the first John Wick was very careful to abide by this rule, amalgamating the clip changes into the action sequence as a way of introducing tension. Part Four has two fight sequences that rival that amazing performance: the first taking place at the world-famous Place Charles de Gaulle where the even more famous Arc d’Triomphe stands at the beginning of the Champs-Elysees. This 360-degree fight, involving cars and what must be described as the genuine non-fuckery of Parisian drivers looks like a nightmare to shoot. To put this in perspective, I must bring up a recent podcast in which Olivia Hamilton, one of the producers of Babylon, described the opening party sequence of Babylon, directed by her partner Damien Chazelle. Hamilton, who also has a role as one of the Silent Era’s steadfast and famous directors, put together a shot-by-shot spreadsheet in which every storyboard was labeled, described in detail, and had a list of actors who were in each shot. These actors also had various levels of activity and clothing on, and Hamilton had to distinguish which actor was okay being topless, which ones were consenting to full frontal, and which ones were okay with getting fucked by three guys while being played out on a bronze buffalo living room conversation piece. This spreadsheet had to incorporate dancers, choreography, thus the different levels of dance, and let’s not forget the costumes. It sounded like an absolute nightmare to produce and be the “A.D.” on. Folks, I’m here to tell you, the Place Charles de Gaulle fight scene looked much, much worse in terms of the absolute chaos the line producer and A.D. had to create. To those tireless individuals, I must take my hat off and say, “I respect you.” This being said, if someone were to tell me there was not one frame of CGI in the sequence, I would call you a fucking liar. If that statement comes to be true, then I would proclaim this sequence to be the hardest ever sequence to shoot in terms of the coordination to achieve the measurable visual result wanted. It was simply astounding.  

Coupled with this is a second fight scene involving two very novel developments in the same moment: The first is a moving, tracking shot using the bird’s eye view of a five or six room mansion. I didn’t time it, but it appears to be anywhere between five and seven minutes, putting this in the Touch of Evil / The Player territory of being one of the longest shots ever recorded “on film.” The camera moves from room to room as if there were no ceiling, using the walls as barriers between the known and the unknown. The second element is Wick using incendiary powder with twelve-gauge shotgun pellets, a very brutal, nasty way to kill someone developed by the Americans to scare the fucking shit out of Japanese resisters in the Pacific War, and since then banned by international convention. This element introduces shock value hitherto unknown in the film and matches the famous knife throwing fight scene in the third film, which is all I can remember of that particular enterprise. This double element raises the stakes of the scene and elevates what could be a really neat scene to see something play out from a different angle to a terrifying or bad-ass (depending on how you feel about gun control) way to do something that has been done a million times before.  

This leads to something that I want to emphasize about the franchise in general and the fourth film in particular: the sets. John Wick films are famous for set pieces, and the set designers I think have been shorted in nominations. The beginning of this film respectfully rips off Lawrence of Arabia by way of edit, setting, and design, and uses a familiar back drop from both that film and Rogue One. From John Wick’s House to the Continental New York, to the amazing Tokyo Continental in this film, Chapter Four excels in set pieces. The only thing better than an amazing fight sequence, as Jackie Chan will tell you, is an amazing fight sequence that takes place in a cool setting (not a backdrop). In this way, Four leaves you satisfied.  

The Wick franchise has introduced characters at the pace of one every hour to keep you interested in fresh faces as familiar ones go away. Over time the likes of Geovanni Ribisi and Lawrence Fishbourne have been replaced by Clancy Brown and a shockingly good Donnie Yen. Chapter Four, however, has the Japanese descendant of Tishiro Mifune if there ever was one: the wall of interminable sadness that is Hiroyoki Sanada. Though acting in Japan since he was a child, Sanada burst onto the scene with Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. Though the film mainly focuses on the way more handsome and present Ken Wantanabe, Sanada breaks through the background in an obscure role as an enforcer. Since then, he has matched Wantanabe by paralleling him in the western market. Though Wantanabe continues to get roles like the financial boss funding Leo in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Sanada has given force to roles that don’t have much to go on, including listless characters like you find in Marvel films or otherwise forgettable samurai genre flicks. Sanada here gives purpose to the role, for if you do not believe him, then you will not believe where this movie goes, and that unfortunately is the one place that I feel the film lacks, despite Sanada’s commitment and herculean effort.  

The plot is boring. It just is. It has been since Chapter Two. I don’t even remember what that one was – nor Chapter Three, though I remember Angelika Huston shining in that particular effort. The plot is not in the backseat. The plot just does not matter. An in that, the film fails. Now, don’t get me wrong, look at the rating I give it on Letterbxd, I think this is a good, rewatchable film. And in it’s defense I will quote a rather lengthy defense Christopher McQuarrie gave of Mission Impossible Fallout when that film premiered in the UK on the Empire Podcast. McQuarrie’s argument was just and inconquerable. Who cares what you are after as long as you’re along for the ride. He quoted Bond films that he could not recall the plot of and said it was ll regrettable but, you know, not really important. But that helicopter chase at the end of Fallout? Everyone will remember that.  

This, I take issue with. I think McQuarrie is wrong. I am a James Bond fan, and I have seen all of those films' multiple times – perhaps twenty or thirty or so per film. I know Goldfinger isn’t after the gold. I know Kananga just wants to peddle heroin using fear. I know Moonraker is an elitist supremacist and I know the black-market scheme in Octopussy, even if you don’t. The McGuffin in MI3 is not important, true, but what is true is that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is so morally deranged that whatever the Rabbit’s Foot is, he shouldn’t have it. Rogue Nation is about an organization of disavowed spies using their talents to get rich – kind of like Spectre in From Russia with Love and, well, Spectre. This being the case, I know Chapter Four is about John Wick attempting to be free of “the Table” (read Spectre for organized crime gangs of Eastern Europe) and its’ odious responsibilities. But, and this is the big gap here, the film did not sell it to me. In a huge, tense, opening sequence in which Fishbourne sells the living shit out of the plot (or tries), Wick turns to the camera and says...” yeah.” I’m not expecting pages of dialogue, but a little moist cheek action or a bit of ‘what am I going to do now’ is really what this film needs. I understand the pain the character is going through; this is my fourth Wick film. But the motivation is spare and the reasoning even less so. The film suffers for this. It reminds me a lot of the third Bourne film, which I love like all the others, but which gets quite repetitive. Bourne goes to a different country to find information, gets tracked down, kicks ass, repeat. That happened three times per film. In this series, there are three huge fight scenes per film, lasting about 30 minutes (which is insane by modern action standards). Although the other 30 minutes is considered down time, most of the tension ramps up through this period and leads to the next action sequence, so really you only get about 5-10 minutes or rest. Perhaps they were worried about the run time, but I suspect nothing was shot, or less, nothing was written, that would solve this issue. John Wick is John Wick is John Wick. You’re not paying for plot. And I think relying too much on the action is a mistake. 

The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)

Pierre Laval, the Prime Minister of France from 1942 to 1944, partnered with the President of France Philippe Petain to forge a virtual dictatorship after the Third French Republic fell rather than sign the surrender to Nazi Germany. Here he is in the dark coat on the far right, discussing collaboration with Hermann Goring, the President of the Riechstag and after Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Germany. Goring is holding his hat and Laval is focused on Goring’s translator. Under Laval’s dictatorship, he established concentration camps all over France, deported fleeing Jews to death camps in Poland, signed away millions of able bodied Frenchmen as forced slave labor in Germany, and hunted down the Free French Resistance that was formed for liberation. He did all of this with the support of the great majority of the French population, and used French cops and the French Army to keep himself in power with extra-judicial executions aligned with a healthy dose of Anglophobia and Anti-Semitism. His contribution to French history is bizarrely labeled as controversial.

First Screening. DVD. Probably the most nuanced documentary about this very controversial subject I have ever seen. I was afraid this would be slightly better than a history channel documentary circa 2002 but in fact, this is a very thoughtful and pondering film with no V.O. that largely lays the consequence of decisions into the minds of the audience. There were several times at which I was dumbfounded at the depth of the revelation of discussion, and points of view were covered that I never considered before. Some examples: 

1. Shortly after the fall of France in June 1940, France (in which France was forced by the agreement to be divided into an occupied and unoccupied zone), the government under Petain requested, negotiated, and signed a treaty with Nazi Germany in which it became an ally of that nefarious monster. This was sold under the pretense of fighting Bolshevism (though the invasion of the Soviet Union was still a year away) and heavily pollutes the idea that Vichy had a so-called gun pointed at its head. While it is true the Nazis would have made quick work of any formal government resistance, this very public collaboration (a word which the government used in its' description of the event), exposes the fact Vichy could have just sat back and decided not to work with the Nazis. They did not. They consciously choose to work with the conquerors. This decision is separate from the decision to end the war.  

2. The Battle of Mers-el-Kébir, in which the British sank the entire French Fleet of North Africa, has always been conveyed as a cold-blooded British decision to kick the French when they were down lest they be too powerful to challenge British might. As to most topics in this wonderful documentary, there are layers of nuance in this. The background is an intense amount of Anglophobia. While it is understandable why this had built up over centuries, the rivalry had cooled the previous seven or eight decades and leads observers scratching their heads as to why the Vichy Admirals choose to ignore with contempt Britain’s plea to accept three alternatives to turning over the French Fleet to the Nazis. The Collaborators actually thought their fleet, after signing a deal with the Nazis, was still their fleet and not subject to the whims of Berlin. Both of these mindsets in the middle of a world war are pure fantasy and shows you how out of depth both the Vichy political elite and the military hierocracy was. France had the largest army in the world and surrendered. They had the second largest navy in the world, and they expected Britain to just sit by and wait for it to be confiscated. This seems all academic until you realize over a thousand French sailors died at the hands of their former allies because their officers would rather be a colony under the Gestapo than a partner with Great Britain. At this point, my empathy for the French under occupation dramatically lessens.  

3. Seven thousand Frenchman volunteered to join the Waffen-SS in the fall of 1944... after DDay, that is after the Allied invasion of France. Their mission was to help Germany fight off the Russians on the Eastern Front. They were sacrificed in a rout protecting the Heer in the run up to Berlin. Only about 300 to 700 men made it home. I think it is fair to ask if seven thousand Frenchman decided to help liberate France in the fall of 1944 rather than defend fascism... how would history look differently on them? This film asks questions that momentous and important. It seems trivial, but this greatly affects tens of thousands of lives.  

4. For decades after the war, French Fascists were still complaining about how they were treated by their fellow Frenchman after liberation. “Oh, under Petain... the good ol’ days.” It’s enough to make you sick.  

5. A great minority of very brave men and women fought tooth and nail in what essentially was a French Civil War against a great and powerful majority that spent the rest of the century complaining about being liberated. This is why the French truly distrust and are disgusted by Americans. Because we helped their enemies liberate their own country while they either did nothing or worse, helped the enemy.  

The Sorrow and the Pity break down emotions and politics like I have never seen before. It exposes raw nerves and doesn’t tell you what to think about it. It lets you decide to empathize, sympathize, or damn the participants based on real and flawed decision making. It sometimes makes it easy to condemn the collaborators because, well, the collaborators made it easy.  

State Funeral (2019)

Quantity has a quality all it’s own.

There is something ethereal, sad, and subversive about the documentary State Funeral (2019), which almost silently, and almost without commentary, conveys the awesome spectacle of the internment and edification of Marshal Joseph Stalin; dictator of the Soviet Union for twenty three years and after Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler, probably the third most murderous and evil fiend in world history. The film itself is a very smart edit job of contemporary footage from the March, 1953 mourning and procession of “the boss” himself, captured from the archives of Mosfilm. Other than snippets on the history channel, no footage of this time or event was available, and even in the Soviet Union exposure to the funeral was largely personal, as this footage was never released. What it shows is as shocking as what it does not show.  Blank faces as well as mournful ones. The common people of small villages and famous people of world history. Nameless peasants cry in their town squares. Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, and Zhou Enlai act as pallbearers in a funeral of no religion yet loaded with meaning and iconography. 

It is almost a silent film, loaded with foley grips recreating the shuffling of footsteps. No one speaks in the boss's presence. Even outside, conversations are peripheral and muted. You can tell no one is really speaking. Because no one’s mouth is moving. The few contemporary words used are direct from the radio Moscow announcements, written by the party and read without mistake to the people of the Soviet Union. There are also speeches in factories, no doubt vetted in much the same way. The silence itself is a character in the film, and I suspect it is for several reasons. First because there are some citizens genuinely sorrowful for the death of Comrade Stalin, who murdered their families and tortured their friends, so brainwashed are they. Stalin had been an integral part of the Bolshevik Revolution since 1915 when he slaughtered hundreds of people in Russian Georgia in a bank heist to fund the cause. He waited patiently as Trotsky fought the Civil War and Lenin died. He stewarded them through a depression, famine, and murderous rampage - all of which he started. He led them through what most historians consider to be the largest and deadliest military conflict in all of human history. For most of Russia, there was no time before Stalin. Second, I’m sure is the element of fear that resides in those cadres smart enough to know exactly what Stalin was but will never say anything knowing the cost, and those who fear what might come in the wake of the death of such an all powerful God who lorded over them for so long. 

The color is shockingly brilliant for 1953, and the red especially is another character in a drama that bookends decades of blood. The coincidence cannot be lost on those who participated or those who witnessed this spectacle. The faces of the famous are striking, true believers that they are, but they are not as interesting as the individual Muscovites and Russians, Ukranians and Tajiks, the common people of the world who all look like they are hiding a different emotion. Some cry, and probably for different reasons. The eager and the interested can be seen in the crowd. This is a time when the public was more actively involved in everything, all over the world. Before the days of TV. Before the days of Twitter. We all went to Fourth of July parades. In the cities, we congregated in town squares and attended ticker tape parades for astronauts. The common and the required wanted to see the red coffin draped with black mourning cloth, as if betraying the color of his soul departed. 

The words spoken about him, by radio announcers, by party hacks, by Malenkov at the procession opening, were sincere and earnest at the time, and now they are a bad joke, inciting derision and black humor. He was praised for eliminating wars, not mentioning the ones he started and lost. He was noted for eliminating racism, not for inciting pogroms against Jews and cleansing cossacks. His leadership during the jump from an agrarian society to an industrial workforce was singled out as an economic achievement unparalleled in modern times...which was true...even if you factor how many millions died in the collectives that made it possible. Some of the praise, such as when he is lauded for freeing millions of people from oppression, just seems like a sick joke. “People all of the world know Comrade Stalin,” Malenkov tells a packed Red Square, “for being the torch bearer for world peace.” This is such an enormous lie it is not worth a scoff. “Comrade Stalin dedicated his genius to safeguarding peace for the people of all countries,” he continues. The camera does not show the reaction of the Polish delegation to the funeral, who saw their country destroyed by Hitler AND Stalin at the same time. Their political faction exiled for life, their entire officer corps murdered in Katyn forest in a single day. His foriegn policy, continues the speech, was crucial for restraining foreign military aggression. The faces we see during this recitation seem to show what everyone seems to know about this line. That Malenkov, and his entire retinue, is full of shit. 

When Lavrenti Beria, leader of the nefarious NKVD and the worst manifestations of the totalitarian one-party state, speaks to the people about the tragic loss of such a friend of the people of the world, we can only imagine what the people of the Soviet Union would say if they knew that Beria kidnapped young girls, including minors, raped them, murdered them, then had their bodies disposed of in the backyard of his dacha. After Beria, Molotov speaks. Molotov, who at Stalin’s command signed a peace treaty with the Nazis and sold the fascists oil and steel to kill Frenchmen and Brits. Molotov who flew all over the world as Stalin’s diplomatic lapdog. Molotov, whose wife was accused by Stalin himself, and who agreed that she should be interrogated, jailed, and then when accused himself, then berated himself “oh, what I have done to Comrade Stalin.” Molotov, who was in jail until the day after Stalin died, spent his time on the podium continuing to suck a dead man’s cock: to our glorious leader. I’m surprised he didn’t use the word ‘genius,’ which was bandied about in the first half of this film as if it were candy; probably used more than the word ‘the.’ Could anyone trust what Molotov said? Could anyone trust anything anyone had said? None of this mattered. Indeed, there was no ‘trust’ in the Soviet Union. Trust was shot in the head in 1917. Trust was just as dead as Comrade Stalin. 

The hypocrisy of the time does not take away from the striking motion images of the film: some tightly choreographed, others simply planned by circumstance or patience. The village gatherings no doubt happened. The factory mourning no doubt went as planned. They were of course staged, but a staging that was paired to some sort of reality. The oceans of greenery, made of wreaths of mourning and loss, start as touching expressions of love and end as an absurd overindulgence, almost capitalist in nature. Still, dolly and tracking shots exposing the well laid arrangements were powerful in themselves. 

I cannot help but wonder if the filmmakers used Leni Refienstahl’s notorious ode to dictatorship, Triumph of the Will (1935) as a blueprint for this other film of totalitarian stature. The beginning of the film, in which we watch crowds slowly shuffle across plazas, then line in the streets, then queue onto sidewalks, move down hallways, and into the presence of their passed master, is greatly similar to the opening air sequence in which we sense Nuremberg is going to be eventually visited by a God from above. Much like that film, State Funeral showcases an abundance of iconography. Like Hitler who was raised catholic, Stalin came from a heavily orthodox family and considered going into the priesthood (his favorite story of the bible, which churns the stomach of any person of reason, was the Book of Job - feel free to vomit now). Thus like HItler, Stalin knew the power of symbols, and though we are spared the overuse of the hammer and sickle like that of the swastika in the former work, State Funeral does invoke a religious ceremony that worships a cult of personality in the same way. There seems to be a sameness or a one-ness that is similar to Reifenstahl’s work. Though the look is sad rather than full of joy, there is something about the elegiac gaze that is the same in a mind control, politically programmed type of way. This film could be a film of Hitler’s funeral. 

The end is solemn enough and the film correctly balances the intent of the contemporary filmmakers versus our understanding of that moment in the past. They are sincerely solemn - at least we think they are. What we make of their solemnity is most likely vastly different. The film closes with a record of Stalin’s crimes: “27 million Soviet citizens were murdered, executed, tortured to death, imprisoned, sent to Gulag labour camps or deported…a further estimated 15 million starved to death.” Then we are solemn. On purpose. With no irony or subversiveness. 

State Funeral is a shining example of Soviet filmmaking. There must have been hundreds of cameramen, all of them trained to an ability that is quite frankly very impressive. Nary is there a scene that is out of focus, even inside, with limited lighting. The camera barely moves but what moves during a funeral except for the line passing by? Considering the time period, only eight years after the war, I’d be willing to bet most of not all of these cameramen had experience in the Great Patriotic War in the equivalent of the Signal Corps, and their professionalism paid off. The film stock, definitely of Russian origin, is not as superior as what technicolor and other competitors were doing at the same time, this is true, but it is not a stock to laugh at. The grain is very fine, and the coarseness of the image shows true emotion on the faces of the bereaved. The editors, too, must have done a fantastic job compiling everything together and documenting everything that had been used. Some scenes in color are picked up by the exact same footage in black and white, and it makes me wonder if there were in many circumstances two tripods set up right next to each other. The continuity is that good, and it’s not nearly as distracting as, say, the differing color schemes in Ivan the terrible Part II. Though we cannot ignore the modern producers and editors who slaved (no pun intended) over this project, we should take our hat off to the contemporary Soviet filmmakers who shot and preserved this remarkable footage for us to marvel at. They have a long important lineage dating back to before the revolution, and you can see montage and the Kuleshov effect at work in this great documentary as if in homage to these fine artists. 

It’s amazing how relevant this film is to modern times. Many of us concerned citizens in the United States know the former President is 75 years of age and when he runs for re-election in four years he will be 79. In a macabre way, we hope he doesn’t make it. If he is elected, it is quite possible, if not likely, that he dies in office. 

The history of our republic has shown a very bipartisan attitude when it comes to recognizing the contribution from the other side of the aisle in a time of grief. Eisenhower died before I was born, but apparently that was the last time a President died about whom no one had a cross word to say. We’d have to wait until the 90’s when the next President died - Nixon - and even then there were liberals that pointed out this was the man who signed the clean air act, the clean water act, who put more trees in North America since before the revolution, who isolated Russia, signed a test ban treaty, limited nuclear arms, the list went on. So you see, Nixon, who was the most hated man on the left, who was the epitome of everything wrong with the political right, even he, disgusting he, earned some street cred - even if it took twenty years. Gerald Ford was despised as the President no one voted for, and who pardoned his partner-in-crime Richard Nixon. When he passed away, I heard my liberal college professors admit to themselves Ford had done what was difficult for our last President to do: put the country first. Ford sacrificed his political future for the good of the nation. He knew he was risking his election and re-election. And he did it anyway. As a someone who went to college and found a job in the 1990s, and as a former member of the center-right, I’ve got a long list of nice things to say at Bill Clinton’s funeral: imagine living in a nation without FMLA, NAFTA, the Mexican bailout just to name a few. And although I detested some aspects of Obama’s legislative agenda, I never once thought the man was trying to destroy our democracy from the inside. Even Jimmy Carter, who had a one term of disaster that rivaled Ford’s, has plenty for all Americans to nod to. All of these men made their own sacrifices. They raised their families under unbelievable scrutiny, and fought opposition parties seemingly geared to only want to smear for the sake of smearing. In grief, their followers deserve their place in the sun. Even George W. Bush, as reviled as he is for the Second Gulf War, for his shared mistakes in handling what should have been a successful domestic agenda, has a list of accomplishments not too many people can shake a stick at. If it were not for George W. Bush, millions more Africans would have died of AIDS. If it were not for George Bush, the banking industry would have capsized and destroyed the housing market where tens of millions of blue collar lower middle class Americans hold their only savings. His medicare booster in his second term and obviously his leadership after September 11 do give credence to a hugely checkered career that is obviously hotly debated. When his turn comes to be placed in the Capitol Rotunda, there will still be plenty of democratic politicians and laymen who can find something good to say about the man, despite their heavy misgivings about most of his policies. But you see, those are just policies. 

The only politicians and laymen who will staunchly stand by the bloated corpse of Donald J. Trump will be Fascists, racists, and imbeciles; baskets upon baskets of deplorables who wish for nothing more than the far right dictatorship of Donald J. Trump to push through an agenda that stops all immigration, stops all minorities from voting, stops all funding of social programs save a smattering of social security, and gives carte blanche to massive corporations to do whatever the fuck they want to whoever the fuck they want to make as much money as they want until the end of time. I laughed when critics called W. the ‘Enron Presidency.’ I cried with joy when people called Cheney Darth Vader because he had served as CEO of an energy contractor (not an energy company, assholes). But the followers of Trump will more closely align with the followers we see in State Funeral. This orange real estate con man, a yankee who has bewitched the former Klan and Kappa Alpha Fraternity brothers throughout the South, will have no one with scruples standing next to him. At his state funeral, only the blind, only the faithful, only those willingly suspending their belief system will go to worship a man who told foriegn emissaries to stay at his family’s hotels, who called our Allies in the developing world ‘shithole countries.’ Only deluded evangelicals, or those who know the truth but are lying to others in an attempt to convince themselves that Obama was a harvard trained Muslim spy, will go to a funeral of a man who fucked a porn star in one of his hotels while his wife was pregnant with their child. Only these solid Christians will queue to pay thier repsects to a man who frequently talked, on national television, about fucking his daughter. Only radical militants like the idiotic “3 Percenters” (whose name itself is a created illusion, a fake name about a fake idea), “Oath Keepers,” and other honorably discharged white supremacists will go worship a man who called them ‘losers,’ ‘suckers,’ disparaged Prisoners of War, who got four deferrments himself, and who attacked the parents of a fallen soldier. 

In this State Funeral, we will see a decided similarity in the crowds that form at the Capitol and those at Lenin’s tomb, where Stalin’s body stayed on view until 1961. Only the true believers will go to Trump’s funeral, whereas there were plenty of non-believers at Stalin’s. Within a few days of Stalin’s death, the Central Committee of the Communist Party started rolling back measure after measure of oppression. It wasn’t a kinder, gentler, police state, don’t get me wrong, but thousands were released from prison. Thousands came back from the Gulags. Thousands more received state funds denied them. Within two years, the committee started attacking Stalin within the party organ itself, detailing his crimes against the Soviet people. No one was more jaded at the funeral than the leadership that worked for Stalin for twenty years, knew him best, and organized his funeral for the purpose of giving the masses room to breathe, grieve, and come to terms with the death of their oppressor. It was like a wife crying over the dead body of her abusive husband after he dropped of a heart attack and pissed himself. The masses, the deluded masses, showed up in droves. Those who were not oppressed only thought of themselves that way because Stalin had trained them to think that way. This is the genius and the crime of Donald Trump. He redefined agitation propaganda, and cast doubt on everything. Obama’s birth certificate, the electoral process, certain government secrets, open government dialogues with foriegn heads of state; everything. The man created a new language - newspeak - so he could define and describe the world he lived in for the press, and thus the world. And through this description, which he constantly grew and embellished, he created a lie that he and all his followers lived in. They worshipped the lie because it brought them power. With that power they intended to do all things nefarious: voter suppression of minorities, legal suppression of the opposition, de-legitimization of the media. It all reads in shorthand like Mein Kampf. Those are the proud funeral goers of President Trump, the only President since Adams to skip out on the inauguration of his successor. The leaders, the Mitch McConnells, the Kevin McCarthys, the Josh Hawleys, they will have no shame much like Beria, Krushchev, Malenkov. The masses, they will be just as deluded queuing down the national mall as the mournful did in 1953 as they queued down the side of the Kremlin Wall. 

I suppose there are more differences between the two than what I can list here, but one striking difference is what we as a society have gained if we are lucky enough to have Trump die before he wins a second term. We might avoid a multinational holocaust like what happened in the Soviet Union. And if we’re going to celebrate anything when that man dies, let’s celebrate that. It doesn’t mean democracy is safe - the Soviet Union was only slightly more safe after Stalin died - but it does mean we have more of a fighting chance. The only thing that could force the situation is an assassination, because nothing moves a hated cause more forward than a martyr. No one knew that better than Stalin. The only martyr allowed in Mother Russia was the Boss. Such a martyr on the right would propel this country closer to an internal war than we have seen since 1865. In that circumstance, there will be no more State Funerals. Only mass graves. 

The Far Country (1954)

It becomes my duty to carry out the sentence which I have imposed on these men for killing and stealing within the territory under my jurisdiction. However, I want it strictly understood that there will be no undo shooting or cheering or drunken talk when I pull that lever on account it would offend the dignity of the occasion.

First Screening. Criterion Channel. Now this is my kind of western. It had everything that I wanted, starting with Jimmy Stewart playing a not-so-nice guy. In fact, he's a bit of an ass. How to separate that ass from the others asses in the film is pretty difficult and that was the 'charm' of the film. He was definitely playing against type. In fact, if there was anything I didn't like about the film, it was the tendency at the end to paint him as Rick and the casino as a kind of Rick's Place. There was a turn at the end, and I'm not sure how I would have done it, but I didn't particularly like that. i thought it was against character.

The real reason i love this film was the setting and the background. This was shot in Jasper National Park Alberta. And I know, because I've been to Jasper National Park, and I know what the Athabasca Glacier looks like. There is an amazing amount of outdoor shots that could have been done in Wyoming or Montana, but the production company wanted to shoot them in Canada to get the feel of the Canadian Rockies, and boy do they cash in. Never mind that Skagway is a thousand miles away from Edmonton. It certainly doesn't bother me for a number of reasons I'm about to elucidate.

For anyone who has taken the time to read Pierre Berton's glorious work Klondike, nothing you see on screen here will amaze you. This was one of the most fucked up things to happen in North America. Some dude finds a smidgen of gold in a big vein, and in three years more people travel through Skagway to Dawson than there are IN ALL OF CANADA. If there was a Wild West, it was here, and it started in Skagway. Alaska was a territory at the time, and let's just saw the law was a little slow in coming. To this end, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in this film that is beyond the fantastic. On the contrary, it seems like of tame.

My wife and I were in a Halifax hotel room laughing our asses off at a Canuck commercial that showed their stereotypical image of an American. Some Jeramiah Johnson looking mother fucker who hasn't bathed in a few years, ain't speakin' proper English, covered in killed fur and spittin' tabaccy indoors. As the commercial plays out, he just made it to the border from Skagway (I'll get to that in a minute) and want to come into Canada for the purposes of raping the Yukon for as much gold as he could carry. The Mountie was not just the perfect stereotype of Canadian lore, but it also flows pretty consistently with American images. Red Coat, Proper English, with one hand raised telling that dirty fucking Yankee (even if you're from Georgia, the Canadians consider you a Yank) he's gootah behave by that Queen's law in this territory, eh. This was a horrible way to portray our relationship in the past, but let's face it, there's more truth to it than we'd like to admit.

The trip from anywhere to Seattle was a journey in itself. The Northern Pacific wasn't a decade old and a trip from St. Louis to Seattle was MINIMUM 9 days. Just think of that for a second, and most of these jackleg Yanks couldn't afford sleeper cars, so they were in economy sitting up the ENTIRE TIME. Exhausted yet? Now let's talk about that steam paddle boat trip up to Skagway. There’s a reason we don’t use paddleboats anymore, much less on the open sea. I wouldn’t call people on paddle boats passengers. I’d call them survivors. This was the least persuasive part of the film to me.

Skagway wasn’t the Wild West, it was worse, and the real personage of ‘Soapy’ Smith is conveyed in The Far Country far less out of his rocker than the actual person. Skagway was worse than Winnipeg when they brought the Canadian Pacific through – and that was saying something. Idiots far and wide landed in Skagway to find out the Canadian border was ten days away on foot straight up a mountainside and you would be rejected unless you had 200 pounds of food on you (and other provisions) that would ensure you would survive not just the trip to Dawson, but the following winter. Most just turned back to Seattle. Most could not afford the prices in Skagway of goods shipped… on the same fucking paddleboat from Seattle… sold at ten times the prices. But even if you had the money for that and the mules to get you up to the border, you then had 500 miles of Canadian valley to go through. Say this took you four months to get into Dawson, you’d be lucky. Many turned back, or died in the winter. Dawson doubled in size weekly for two straight years, pausing only in the winter when very few made it in and no one dared leave. And the law you had to contend with was brutish, nasty, and short.

Stewart’s navigation through the times and people looked about as natural as his first shot on a horse coming up to the camera. He seemed to be an amazing horseman, and his scowl though unusual for us was natural for his character. His summation of events was divided into stuff that mattered to him and stuff he didn’t care about. His immediate purpose was to make money and retire on a ranch, a goal that is obscured by the end as we’re not too sure if it made it or not. This was an amazing experience of 97 minutes. In technicolor. With James Stewart. Not too much to dislike.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

To repress one's feelings only makes them stronger.

Umpteenth Screening. Cinemark. My son and I caught the re-release and I was just as blown away as the first time I saw it upon initial release in theaters in 2000. There are so many things to take note of that to do so fails to express what a perfect film this is. But this is Letterbox, so I'll try.

I've actually been to China several times, and one of the many things I appreciate about this film is the inherently familiar environments. It was like watching the animated Mulan and saying "yeah, that makes sense." You could tell the animators had visited the PRC. CTHD drops you into middle Qing (though western audiences may not know or care) and everything from the cobblestone roads, to the balustrades to the utter poverty on the streets screams authenticity. In a way, I feel like I've been on those streets, though they were not on the beaten path. The sets, particularly the saloon and the training room, were unparalleled in their detail. The set direction is immaculate.

Chinese life, like their theatre and their film, is littered with metaphor and word play. Part of this is enforced by their language. There are several scenes that cash in on this advantage, including the scene in which Shu Lien is deliberately baiting Jen with double entendres about swordplay. The title itself, lost to most western audiences, directly describes the threat that Shu Lien is facing: Jen is the Crouching Tiger, the seen and ready threat, while Jade Fox is the Hidden Dragon, the unseen force dangerous to all.

The student-becomes-the-master trope is both reinforced and blown apart. Jade Fox has stolen the Wudan manual of martial art, but lacks the sophisticated education to translate it. She befriends and aristocrat girl a the age of 8 who can translate the text, but Jen keeps the most important revelations to herself. Jen uses these secrets to surpass her master, but without proper Wudan training from someone like Mu Bai, she cannot possibly defeat those she most admires. This is an original contradiction that leap frogs over itself. Great writing.

There are several moments in which the audience is asked to pay attention and infer. Though Jen has stolen the Green Destiny, it is not a real threat because she does not know how to use it. This is why Mu Bai can easily tame her. When she does learn how to harness the vibration the blade creates into a strike, she becomes a dangerous foe to Shu Lien. This leads to one of the top five greatest fight scenes in all cinema history, the training room fight. I tried to think of four others and although I know there has to be some to compete, I simply can't think of any right now. I am fucking dumbfounded at the complex choreography and execution by Ziti and Yeoh. Animated Jedis don't fight this good. Some of the contact points go up to thirteen strikes. It is hard for the mind to fathom.

Just as the student-teacher relationship is muddled, so is the love dynamic. We know from the get go that Shu Lien and Mu Bai are in unrequited love. We expect that to be a form of tension that we hope to see resolved by the end of the film. It is not, and we are heart broken. I cried from their first (and last) kiss to the credits. Call me a pussy. I don't care. The second paring is Mu Bai and Jen, which immediately forms prejudice in the audience mind due to Jen's age and Mu Bai's prior relationship declaration to Shu Lien. Throughout the film we see the growing fascination between the two, and we are left guessing what it is they are both exactly after. In Zhang ZiYi we see a familiar form that is self-evident. In Chow Young-Fat we are faced with a masculine figure that equates to the Man With No Name, Yojimbo, or any other Hollywood Badasses you care to name. Chow Young-Fat elevates all these characterizations with his performance. James Bond might be more fun, but he would lose to Mu Bai in two moves. And Lee's directing of these small moments is so brilliant the end of this fascination has to be spelled out to us. In the final moment between them, Jen exposes her breasts to Mu Bai and asks him what he really wants. In that moment, we know his interest in her was only professional, in the purest form of Chinese tradition. Jen's own relationship with Lo was itself risky for Chinese audiences. Though Manchurian, she is very close to Han in terms of ethnic grouping. Lo is very clearly central asian - possibly Uigher or Mongolian. This cross matching is not appropriate for most of Chinese society, and here it is in the biggest film in Asian history.

Finally, I must center on the acting, and as much a fan as I am of Chang Chen as Lo, Pei-Pei Cheng as Jade Fox, Sihung Lung as Sir Te, and even the draw dropping Chow Young-Fat, the true stars of this film are Michelle Yeah and Zhang ZiYi, and for two separate reasons. Yeoh is so clearly the senior in every possible way, and so dignified in her grace and beauty that you become attached to her struggles and pain early on in the film. What you see is Yeah bottling up Shu Lien's frustration and rage at what contemporary China will and will not allow - and along comes Jen to fuck it all up. Her anger is not blinding, she focuses it to defeat her foe, and when Yeoh finally breaks down over the passing of her love mate, it is the emotional climax of the film. I simply could not believe the rollercoaster ride she took the audience through. Yes, Ang Lee is a genius for plotting the way, but she had to perform to this degree to sell the film. It is all based on this one scene.

Secondly, I am always shocked at seeing Zhang ZiYi be such a capable actor at the age of 21. The close-ups Lee takes of her (Peter Pau was the cinematographer, credit where credit is due), blew me away on the big screen. I was shocked at how beautiful she was. She reminded me of Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina. She was stunningly beautiful. The way Lee used her beauty to showcase a variety of emotions (the dutiful but disappointed fiancee, the spoiled brat, the determined warrior, the lovesick girl who wanted to run away, the repenantent sinner who willingly gave Shu Lien the freedom to kill her, the depressed and experienced young girl who cannot go on knowing what she did with her immature and naive ways) and those performances moved us scene by scene through this film as a counter balance to Yeoh's steadfast determination to catch the crook. This balance of eroticsim and alpha-male like behavior is rare in film, and ZiYi makes it look easy. her close ups look like Vogue covers.

The rest can be catalogued but are probably extraneous. The as-real-as-you-can-get-without-laughing wire flights, the tree fight sequence, the surprise revelations. The patient pacing in the courtyard homes that convey how Asia really was for centuries before we fucked it up. All of these things shout best picture at me. And if I had to decide who got the Oscar for best supporting actress between Yeoh and ZiYi, I'd rather fling myself off a bridge like Jen.

Simply an astounding masterpiece by all parties involved.

Babylon (2022)

Oh God, please forgive us! You sent us this beautiful light and we're squandering it!

First Screening. Cinemark. I have to say the first 90 minutes of this film is so perfect, I knew, I just fucking knew, that it had to swing the other way. And when it did, and it swung hard the other way, I then saw... wow. This is effectively a remake of Boogie Nights. Now I hate Boogie Nights, and I'll never watch it again primarily because I don't even like the first half. But this film, I love the first half. I love it HARD. And it's not that i didn't see the swing coming, or could not foresee what was going to happen to the characters. I totally saw that coming. It was the way in which that was executed was so exceptionally badly done as to defy reality. Why would you create something so perfect only to mishandle the second half? That is the true mystery of this film.

The opening forty minute sequence has an amazing amount of everything in it. There was an amazing amount of queues from LaLa Land, there was a Scarface amount of cocaine at a time when as an over the counter drug, it was not piled high like 1983 on tables. There was an amazing amount of elephant shit. And there were an amazing amount of tits. In fact, the only thing shocking about any of the nudity in the opening was that she didn't take part in any of it. I'm not saying I wanted to see it, or being a pig about it, it just seemed that as the character she was portraying, it was odd that she was not partaking. I mean, she was all about the jazz and the coke and the dancing and the gambling - which we never see. So for that to be excluded was something noticed.

After that, you basically have the pool scene from Boogie Nights, which is a movie set out in the middle of the California desert where several films are being shot at the same time to take advantage of the always present sun. This roundabout, non stop camera opening followed by the nuts and bolts of what it takes to actually film a movie was shockingly good. There is a female director, whom to the best of my research on IMDB seems to be Ruth Adler, which seems to be a fictional construction to convey the fact that early Hollywood employed tons of women in 'above the line' roles like directing, screenwriting, producing, etc. Olivia Hamilton plays this role, and if I have Wikipedia right, she is the current wife of Damien Chazelle. I only convey this because I was trying to find out if Ruth Adler was a real person because the portrayal was so profound. This character pops up again in another sequence I'll get to. To round out this sequence and the absolute chaos these people must have operated in, you have an ad hoc factory churning our scenes by numbers with no studios to speak of because they are simply not needed. In the midst of this is a menagerie of interesting characters including a Chinese director of photography whom I can only assume is the grand master James Wong Howe, who if you looked at his IMDB page, would floor you as the Vilmos of the Golden Age. This type of attention to detail brings me to a point.

This is (obviously) a film about Hollywood, and like a lot of film geeks, I dig films about films. I LOVE F for FAKE to the point that... I really do think it's better than Kane. I love 8 1/2. I love LaLa Land. These introspective films about the business and how it's great and horrible are insanely interesting. There are some that see them as non-productive becaus the majority of the audience has no relationship with Hollywood other than going to the movie theatre and why would they be interested in a single town on the edge of the earth that lives in this out of reach and decadent fashion. I just don't understand this point of view. Why go to the movies at all? Most films are about people and subjects that are unknown. It is the exploration of those stories that create a drive for audience. Why pick up a book? Etc. If in fact people's relationship with the movie theatre should limit their interest in the film industry, then I can't wait to see a riveting docudrama about the success and trials of the distribution industry. Let me check. Oh, there isn't one.

The most impressive section of the film is the deftly written, better executed, brilliantly edited transition to sound in which Margo Robbie's character Nellie LeRoy must perform her first sound scene under Olivia Hamilton's direction. This scene was fucking gold. It had everything. Pacing, ego, attitude, on set pushers, film closets, red lights and not just a little antisemitism. Every actor in this scene, even the ones you come to hate, are doing something special. And when it concludes you realize that this is just as special as the oepning 40 minutes. This is what Chazelle does. he gets a group of actors, and in the opening sequence you're talking a hundred or so actors, to trust each other to the point where they move as one in a tightly co-ordinated group, to ignore everything else around them, even nudity, to perform a long, sweeping, crane or dolly shot and get the one take needed to convey the atmosphere or given objective. The Sound scene is just a microcosm of that opening shot, different in objective but no different in execution. Like the opening scene had reminiscent themes of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, this scene was reminiscent of hundreds of sets all over the San Fernando Valley, but of a certain scene in Singin' in the Rain in particular.

I have also read a lot of people dumping shit on the LeRoy character and about how she seemingly can't stay in her lane and do this or that or the other and how it would be SO EASY to just do what everyone expects her to do and she'd have everything blah blah blah and I think those people do not understand what it was like to work with Lindsay Lohan. Marilyn Monroe, as evidenced by everyone who worked with her, was an astounding actor... when she chose to be. If she wasn't 'there' at that particular moment, well, then you weren't shooting. So what the fuck is Billy Wilder supposed to do with a hundred people on set that he has to pay and feed and put up in hotels etc.? Wait for her to get into the mood to do her job? Of course, you fire people like that. Lohan was the same, with the same addiction issue and the same attitude towards her art. Wrap that into a bad family, a reality show, legal proceedings and a few stints in rehab... yeah. That happens. That totally happens in Hollywood. A LOT. So no, the character never seemed unreal or unapproachable to me. She never pissed me off or made me angry. It made total sense.

I recommend anyone interested in this subject to read Scott Eyman's unparalleled masterpiece "The Speed of Sound" which chronicled the years 1927-1932 and the revolution that happened in Hollywood. Sound destroyed as many lives as it made. Lives like Jack Conrad, Nellie LeRoy, and hundreds of other people who thought they had found the life they belonged in. But like everything that seems too good to be true, this wound up being the same. Eyeman documents the impact of the change on the industry as a whole. How the independents were swallowed up and how from the hip shooters like D. W. Griffith were replaced by cold, ruthless professionals like Irving Thalberg. Like everything it could have gone better but these people were dealing with something that had never BEEN before. All their passions and prejudices were a part of the rise, the transformation, and the success of the Golden Age.

The second half of the film slows way, way down and though I was willing to go quite far, I wasn't willing to go three levels down in an abandoned sewer tunnel with Toby Maguire (obviously miscast) and to casually toss aside characters that we had grown accustomed to. The person I empathized the most with was Jack Conrad. Having two suicides in the film was a mistake. Conrad could have lived the rest of his life like Cary Grant. The script chose to go the other way and it was unnecessary for it to be that dark. Diego Calva has a great performance as Manny Torres, and this character's backstory is important. When people challenge me, and they will, that a story like this is impossible, I will point out that Raoul Walsh was an electrician fixing lights on a camera set in the 1890's and he died with more than two Oscars on his mantle in the 1960's. Most film directors and producers and even screenwriters were not professionals in the business because there was no business. By the time Babylon takes place, the film industry in California is only fifteen years old. All kinds of people were wrapped up in what was a new industry that made no sense to anyone. For a Spanish speaking truck driver to suddenly make a living producing and promoting 'race' films to blacks and latinos... yeah. That's possible. Because it happened. Early Hollywood made films marketed to Chinese immigrants. They wanted everyone's money - even people they hated. Though it seems fitting that Nellie LeRoy just wanders off in the dark, just showing an article of her untimely demise (like a hundred other starlets for sure) seemed to me to be a cop out because you'd rather show some built dude eat rats. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Dante's Inferno should have never left the page, and the entire mob connection could have been more... real. There was a real mob with real threats to Hollywood types and that should have been more realistically conveyed as the threat instead of alligators, people with deformities, and dwarfs. Horrible descent of ideas.

The ending montage is basically a huge failure due to someone's inability to accurately convey what was really important in cinema from 1922 to 2022. There were shockingly good ideas. Tron's light cycles, Gene Kelly, the satellite from 2001. All of these were great ideas, but were absolutely poorly executed. This was not a sensitive assignment. In fact, I'm sure if you thought hard enough, you could probably find a promotional film from the AFI or BFI or one of the studios that did the exact same thing and pulled it off. This film was made by Paramount, and it did not even include a clip of The Godfather, which was their most profitably film in their history. They also had a clip of Avatar, which people did bash, but I will not. Four billion people have seen Avatar. If you hate it, that's your problem.

In the end, Manny doesn't leave the theatre to go walk in the sun. He stays in the theatre and cries. Well, sorry. I disagree with this. But there's a lot I don't like. Again, it's not where they end up necessarily. It would have been moor apropos if Jack Conrad died in a car crash for instance. But the journey to take everyone to the cliff was not exciting, enjoyable or (and here is the key point) re-watchable... at all. And that for me is the kicker. Set your iphone for 90 minutes, then flee. Or in this case.. Flea.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Oh Doctor, I'm so unhappy. I'm a woman trapped inside a man's body - and you're not helping me to get out!

Umpteenth Viewing. Criterion DVD. I must have seen this film in a hundred times in a hundred parts. It hit cable in late '81 if I remember correctly and I was fucking terrified of watching it for two long. This was crossed with the overwhelming feeling when I wasn't even an adolescent yet of seeing something I wasn't supposed to be seeing, which wasn't Angie Dickenson full nude in the shower in the beginning, or Nancy Allen full nude in the shower at the end, but rather Nancy Allen in black lingerie in stockings in Michael Caine's office. This... was to me at six or seven, full blown pornography and I remember it as such. The fact that it was crossed with such brutal and bloody murder was so over the top for me that it greatly affected my thinking of horror as a genre and specifically DePalma as a filmmaker for decades. I remember reading a book called Lustmord that called out Dressed to Kill and DePalma's not-too-well-thought-out responses to his slasher films. I was part of that crowd. "Yeah, fuck that guy. What a pig!" and the like chorus. So I reluctantly bought this on the last Criterion 50% flash sale and watched it last night having not seen it probably since 83 or 84 at the latest. I was amazed at what I saw and didn't see that I thought I remembered and after watching all the bonuses and reading the trivia and the Wikipedia page, I think I'm going to do a u-turn on this while keeping some reservations about the film.

That Dressed to Kill is a horror classic that calls back to Hitchcock in general and Psycho in particular there is no debate. The idea that it is pornographic is ludicrous, and despite the reputation there is only one murder in this film, the one on the elevator. The other two are fantasies and nightmares. I also learned that the opening, rather lurid shot of Angie Dickenson's character in the shower (actually of a stand-in) was not in the original release of the film. Neither was the up close slitting of Allen's character's throat or her vulgar description of what was in Michael Caine's character's pants. All that was cut, totaling 30 seconds, and I have to say, leaving that out it might make the remaining film scary for a six year old but what the fuck are the adults so upset about?

Given my younger screening of it and my hatred of DePalma's later works, I was actually unprepared for how engrossed I was in Angie Dickenson's performance - particularly the museum setpiece. That was like Janet Leigh losing her shit in the car during the rainstorm. DePalma is actually a master at showing short clips of emotion edited together using the Kuleshov Effect that he doesn't need dialogue. Most of this film is silent, and what little dialogue there is doesn't mean much. In fact, some of the contemporary reviews skewer the dialogue I think because they place too much emphasis on it.

As for the piggish scenes, yes there is a close up of a vagina. If you don't like that, then I don't know what to say. If you think that's more horrible than a woman getting slashed, then I think you're fucked in the head. At no time during the film does DePalma insinuate that women should be murdered because they are women. In fact, he goes through great lengths to humanize the victims so you can think even worse of the antagonist, which brings me to the last discussion point.

To say that I was confused as a six year old to see Michael Caine dress up like a blonde woman and cut people up might be an understatement. Cross this with Nancy Allen in stockings during my proto-jerking-off period and I'm surprised I'm not in therapy. Caine's character as trans I can see as problematic at the time as well as now - the characterization that trans people have some innate evil in them that makes them commit crimes could be traced to this film and possibly others... if you choose to read the film this way and I understand if you do. I was actually surprised to see Caine watching a film whilst doing 'research' on a trans woman discussing her previous life as a man and how absolutely normal the interview was. The interviewer was none other than the amazing shitbag Phil Donohue who actually took sympathy with the trans person and admitted he was trying to avoid bias as to 'normal' or conventional questions during the discussion. This is thirty seconds of the film, but if you're going to show a real trans person in a film like this, why not show one that is not a threat and DePalma chooses to do this. He is differentiating and in a genre picture like this it goes without saying he doesn't have to. I don't blame the audience in 1980 for not living in 2020; I'm sure a lot of people left the theatre disgusted with trans people. However, given the film evidence, I fail to see that as DePalma's point. Dressed to Kill is instead a film of ideas strung together (a dissatisfied housewife, a trans killer, the hooker witness, and the fears and fantasies of all of them). If the plot seems to be sacrificed in favor of style... well... all I can say is... well done.

Blonde (2022)

Marilyn doesn't exist. When I come out of my dressing room, I'm Norma Jeane. I'm still her when the camera is rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen.

I've been thinking very hard to write a review for a film that has been so controversial for what it contains, versus a film that came out five days before this, Don't Worry Darling, which seems to be controversial for what it does not contain, but rather how it is made. As I sometimes do before I write reviews, I check a few reviews on Letterbxd to see what other people have written to gain some perspective. On this exercise, I found a review by Brian Scirio that was highly inflected, and I simply do not think that I can repeat or regurgitate everything that he wrote. Please read it here.

See what I mean? A near flawless review. I don't know that I would change anything, but I have thought about a few additives addressing some things that he alluded to which some people would probably want my take on. 

The first is the absolutely beautiful cinematography. It seems like the goal was to make the film as beautiful as Monroe herself and I think it almost succeeds. Since this film is in essence a huge dream, the camera floats in and out of time, space, bodies, and memories without making you nauseous. When I think of this perspective / technical use versus what a lot of filmmakers would do now, which is to do a hand held documentary shaky-cam exercise which is overused and rote, I would much rather prefer the former.  My only criticism is the constant move from black and white to color. I certainly enjoy both, but I thought there was a theme, kind of like (coincidentally) JFK. I don’t think there is one, or I wasn’t smart enough to figure out. Maybe it was simply an aesthetic choice at the time.

As for the dream state itself, it seems fitting and proper for the way in which Dominik is choosing to tell the story. When I was a kid, I remember reading a thousand page novel on Cleopatra which was completely fiction, and recounted all of her 'slutting around' and the misogyny she faced as the only ruler of any kingdom in the ancient world of her day, the first and last in centuries. So to say the author had no right to create an artistic expression of Cleopatra's existence is of course ludicrous. Likewise, it is ridiculous to describe the same effort with Ms. Monroe. The only thing that has changed is the story telling technique, and I am sure more people will see this than read the  Margaret George book. In this vein, we may disagree with it, we may find it distasteful, we may shake our heads at what we interpret to be exploitation. But for the audience to call it 'wrong' is simply not true. 

The open misogyny that Ms. Monroe faced (as well as other contemporary stars such as Jayne Mansfield, Lauren Bacall, or Audrey Hepburn for effectively looking like she was permanently fourteen) was disgusting then, and it is disgusting now. The difference between the other two or three films I have seen on Monroe did not address this. To see it openly confronted on film is something that I have rarely seen in reviews of the film. In one scene, men's faces are contorted as they shout and scream at her. This mimics how terrifying it must have been to be the so obvious object of so many men's desire. And I don't mean many men. I mean, ALL MEN. Monroe had such a hold on men's adam's apple, even priests were jerking off in movie theatres. That level of open sexual desire was not seen since the days of Mae West, and that was never on Monroe's level. It would also never be repeated with any other starlet. This misogyny is hard to watch, and that fact that it seems to have not breached the reviews makes me think male critics would rather not discuss it. 

Instead, what we find is a rather curious mix of racism and sexism regarding Ana de Armas' performance. While I did find one scene in which her accent was slightly noticeable through the entire scene, and there were some vowel pronunciations that must have been hard from an ESL speaker in later scenes, the fact is this performance is gold, and as the film moved foreword you saw Armas disappear into the role. The only film historical parallel I can compare it to is last year's film Spencer, in which Kristin Stewart was nominated for playing Princess Diana. If you read my review of that film, you will find that although I was blown away by her performance in the first half of the film, the second half seemed to be going down the road of sheer parody, and the director was unable to reign this in. This does not happen in Blonde. Armas gets better, and her direction gets better, not worse. 

At last comment, we come to the highly controversial NC17 rating, which I found confusing at the conclusion of the film. The nudity, violence, and gore did not necessitate this rating. There is only one full frontal shot, and it is not of Ms. Armas, and it is not in the foreground. In fact, I am forced to believe the only reason why this rating exists is because of what must be the now infamous blowjob scene in which Monroe services President Kennedy. This scene did in fact cause a marital argument in my house, and I still fail to see how this warranted an NC17. Ms. Monroe was not unknown to oral sex. In fact, a stag film she starred in was discovered in the early 2000's containing her performing fellatio. One of Joe DiMaggio's friends, in an act of loyalty to the late athlete, purchased the film and as far as we know, destroyed it. This is also not the only time in the history of cinema we have seen fellatio on film. In fact, fellatio has been simulated on screen in several films with an R rating. In fact, Jennifer Connelly not only simulated fellatio in Shelter, a film NOT branded with an NC17, but that film also simulated ejaculate on her face. This same fine, academy award winning actress, simulated using a 'double-dildo' with another actress on stage in a strip club with a hundred men in suits throwing hundred dollar bills at them in Requiem for a Dream. Why those films would get an R but this film gets an NC17 shows exactly how broken the ratings system is. I have always been of the opinion, since Henry and June, that half of all R films need to be rated NC17. The rating would then not be a brand of death, and more filmmakers would take more risks with the material knowing their material would not be cut out for the sake of making a softer rating. 

The true controversy people are sometimes admitting to, is the fact the simulation is performed on President Kennedy. For thirty years, Kennedy's image as the savior of liberal democracy for three years as the leader of the free world was not in question. After his father died and his youngest brother failed to replace him as a moral leader, we've come to find out so much about his personal life as to question what it was we liked about his politics. He deflowed virgins without their expressed permission, treated all women (included his devoted wife) like complete shit, had affairs in the White House (in the pool, in the executive residence, in hotels), used Frank Sinatra's mob connections to traffic women to him for sex, and all the while spent most of his private time as an a-plus jack ass motherfucker. If any of us knew anyone like that in our personal lives, we would form very uncontroversial opinions about him. But because Kennedy could smile, talk about Civil Rights, and for thirteen days in October 1962 saved the world from nuclear holocaust... well, then, we'll take him. 

What Ms. Armas simulated in that one scene is no different than the greatest majority of women (or gay men) have done in their lives. To single her out for that is sexist and outrageous. The idea that anyone would defend John Kennedy's behavior as a womanizing misogynist (who's pick-up line was reportedly "wanna fuck?") is the true controversy. There is no penis in the scene. There is no ejaculate in the scene. What there is in the scene, is the realization that John Kennedy was a fucking asshole, and that's what people are upset about. Well, so was Thomas Jefferson. Get over it. And as far as exploiting Ms. Monroe... well that is possible. But I will NEVER think worse of her for doing what everyone else does and enjoys. But I WILL forever think worse of John Kennedy for being the type of man who thinks he deserves that type of servicing simply because he is white, rich, and powerful. 

Blonde is a brave attempt, and it deserves to be screened at a lower rating as long as the MPAA is going to discriminate against sex (blowing a head off and showing brains on the floor, totally okay - just see the remake of Death Wish). 

And finally, as a close, I recommend everyone who is interested listen to Karina Longworth's podcast 'You Must Remember This'  - she did an entire season on Monroe's career and personal life. It was deeply unsettling. She did sleep with practically every photographer and producer in town. She was also subject to mental instability most likely due to childhood trauma and the way everyone looked at and treated her. She was a very complex person, and Longworth tries very hard to wade through those complexities with balance. I don't think there is balance in Blonde. But I also do not think it is a hit job. It is a point of view. Nothing more. Nothing less. 

La La Land (2016)

Sidney Bechet shot somebody because they told him he played a wrong note.

I’m not sure how far I should take this so I’m starting this out on a google doc JUST IN CASE. This is hot off the moment of D to the K to the Motherfucking A to the Third Power texting me late at night after this screening that he had read my Letterbxd review on Destry Rides again and described it as “UNHINGED.” Well, maybe that wasn’t in capital letters. Maybe that was me transposing White House Assistant to the Chief of Staff Cassidy Huchinson’s famous text to a friend in describing what was going on in the West Wing on December 18th, 2020 in which three people who didn’t work for President Trump or work for the government told him to contest the election in some way on the same day Congress was set to certify the electoral vote: January 6th. The protest from a room full of trained and experienced Republican lawyers and politicians ot the President was of one mind and voice: no. The push and pull of that room was what was “UNHINGED” and looking back on my review of Destry Rides Again, well, I think I agree with Dave. It was UNHINGED. Maybe this is one of those reviews. LaLa Land seems like a strange one to dedicate that type of moniker. But you know what, I’m going to give it a fucking try.

Dave and I got into it recently after the Joan Jett/ Poison / Motley Crue/ Def Leppard concert. We left the Juicebox and headed to the IHOP (the full journey is another blog, I won’t repeat it here) and as we waxed intellectual on the meaning of only five thousand people showing up to watch the Queen of Rock and Roll, Joan Fucking Jett, rule for forty five straight minutes, only to have a stadium full of people act like Every Rose Has Its Thorn has more meaning than Bad Reputation, we veered as we always do to film, to musicals, and that’s when I let it drop that it was probably my least favorite genre and I only liked a handful of musicals. Actually, only three. 

“Which ones?” Dave asked.

“Uhhhh, Seventeen Seventy-Six…:”

“Whaaaat?”

“...And Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

“Dude, you’re twisted.”

“Oh. And Blues Brothers.”

“Still…twisted. Maybe a little less, but nevertheless.”

I spiked my coke at the Juicebox with vodka I brought in a plastic flask, and hit my coffee with it as I defended my actions. I repeated this conversation to my son the next day who immediately gave me his copy of LaLa Land on DVD. He found it at Half Price Books in the Montrose. Three dollars. I raised this kid. If he’s this smart, I should watch this film. It sat on my desk for weeks. Life went on, more indictments came, more subpoenas. Then a full on house raid by the FBI, just like in the movies. I cried. I laughed. I wished. I dreamed. Just like the movies. And tonight, I sat down and watched LaLa Land and I fucking loved it. 

Dave and I lamented at a time (I am not sure if it made it onto a podcast) about how if you took a poll of the most ‘popular movies’ of the 1950’s, whatever ‘popular’ means, you would see films like The Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur. The Bridge on the River Kwai. And if you looked up the highest grossing films, you’d see the same. On the Waterfront. Marty. The Apartment. Etc. and if you took a gander on the Academy’s website (or wikipedia, which is probably just as accurate) you’d also find the same films were nominated time after time, year after year. Effectively, there was no difference. The popular films made the most money and were the most expensive art. They were nominated because they were the best. That way of doing business, of marketing art, of making art, changed in the late 1960s when Wall Street bought the Studios from the families that started them and gave control directly to the artists who made Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Star Wars, and Jaws. And in this fucked up world, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next wins best picture, not Star Wars. Which one do you think has the higher name recognition? Which one do you think has the higher gross? Which one do you think is better art (I know this is subjective, etc. come on!). When the 80’s came this rarely aligned. Raiders of the Lost Ark lost ot a film no one remembers. Literally, I don’t remember it. Raiders wasn’t even nominated for best picture. Neither was Back to the Future. Do you know what won best picture in 1994? I’ll give you a guess. It wasn’t Pulp Fiction. 

The bent from popular films making huge money and earning huge awards slowly went down the drain until the Academy literally chose a film about Shakespeare to be best picture over Saving Private Ryan, a film that irrevocably changed action movies forever. Wes Anderson now has a better chance at winning an oscar than Steven Spielberg. And although I love Wes Anderson, I would never suggest he was anywhere close to Spielberg, and neither would he. The last two years of Academy winners has been severely skewed by the pandemic, so drawing conclusions is unfair, but if we take 2019, we can clearly see a divide. The top ten earners in that year were:

Avengers: Endgame

The Lion King

Toy Story 4

Frozen II

Captain Marvel

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Spider Man: Far From Home

Aladdin

Joker

It: Chapter Two

And for the films nominated for Best Picture, we have the enormously high regarded films that follow:

Parasite

Ford v. Ferrari

The Irishman

Jojo Rabbit

Joker

Little Women

Marriage Story

1917

Once Upon a Time In Hollywood

The winner for best actress, Renee Zellweger, starred in the biopic “Judy,” a film that arguably “nobody” saw, while conversely, Joaquin Phoenix won for Joker, a film that based on the evidence, almost everybody (who watches movies) saw. I could sit here and argue valid points or probably waste my breath on other points about how Avengers: Endgame is arguably a better film than Ford v Ferrari, that It: Chapter Two is arguably better that; Little Women or Marriage Story, but we are getting not into semantics, but what I said before about art being in the eye of the beholder. Despite those claims, I think we all know what we are talking about here, and it’s the academy deciding only one film that made it into the highest grossing films of the year deserved to be nominated for best picture. In fact there was only one other in the top 20 (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and still one other in the top 30 (Ford v. Ferrari). The next one, Little Women, is ranked as 72. So I do not think that I need to convince anyone who cares to read this rambling diatribe there is a divide between what the audience thinks is art and what the Academy does. And this goes right to the issue of the popular music category that was so briefly lived in 2018 when it was so glaringly obvious that Black Panther had an impact on the viewing public the voting academy could not understand and the organization of the academy could not plan for: the need to recognize this growing divide. The answer seemed so amazing and simple, I immediately was for it: The Grand Prix. 

In Cannes, as well as in other film festivals, the Best Picture Category is divided into two voting structures. The first one is the Palm d’Or, which everyone says is the ‘best picture’ and the second one, the Grand Prix is for what people generally consider to be the best ‘art’ or ‘art-like’ film. In 2019, the Palm d’Or went to Parasite, which shocked no one. It was a shock in America, though where everyone thought the film that should have won was the dark comic book satire Joker. So the upset in America actually lined up with France. The Grand Prix went to Atlantic, an obscure film about the migration crises. The Grand Prix is thus. In that circumstance we could all acknowledge both Joker AND Parasite. Fewer people get pissed off, and more people decide to watch the Oscars the following year. 2011 is another classic case. Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palm d’Or in 2011 and two movies you never heard of won the Prix. Meanwhile, the Tree of Life was a serious contender for Best Picture in 2011’s Oscar race (It was beat out by The Artist, and even more obscure film which only proves my point). Meanwhile, the top ten grossing films that year was not an impressive year to be sure, but it did rank Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, a not unworthy choice for a split system.  Other choices could have included Super 8 and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. This does seem like I am begging to include blockbuster films in the races to determine the year’s best films, and you would be right. Would I agree that Black Panther was the best film of 2018? No. But clearly there was enough groundswell behind that film in the academy membership to make that impossibiliity happen, but Academy rules simply prevent that from happening.

And here i am sorry to regurgitate something you probably already know which is the Academy is subdivided into voting blocks that do not get to vote outside their category. For the technical fields such as sound design or even cinematography, this makes sense. No one in costume design is going to want anyone in ADR deciding who made a better costume. Film Editors vote for film editing, and so on. This makes complete sense. Unfortunately that also means directors only vote for directing and producers only vote for best picture. If the Academy is going to continue to limit the awards to what is in some cases, only a few hundred people, then they need to find a way to open up the mass of voting members to choose a popular category. Thus, the Grand Prix. 

Don’t get me wrong, Michael Bay sucks, and James Cameron’s Ouvre after True Lies remains to be remarkably mediocre in terms of narrative storytelling, but I will say one thing about even the huge films that I hate: the production quality cannot be touched, even if the story sucks. With the Grand Prix it is entirely possible to recognize the team that made such mammoth projects like Logan or Thor: Ragnarok, which are legitimately important and interesting films that tell a compelling story about human nature but will never be victimized by being included in the Best Picture category. In this case, Mad Max Fury Road, which was famously nominated in 2015 but which had no real way of winning despite its very art house themes and tropes. 

This is becoming ever more important in an age in which the huge blockbuster films are getting less and less respect for being ‘sellouts’ or being ‘popular,’ Scorsese and Coppola are in the vanguard of criticism, but behind them are scores of elitist film makers (and critics) who continue on an anti-cape crusade to distinguish what they do (and what wins) from what other people do, which is namely to make money. This is at the heart of the LaLa Land experience. 

And let’s face it, four pages into a review on LaLa Land, let’s deep dive into this amazing and complicated film that serves as this kind of parallel to the idea that there are art films and there are commercial films and there is not much in between. If that is the case, then I don’t know what LaLa Land is, because I see elements of both. 

LaLa land is special because it straddles this idea that art films and commercial films are separate. Consider the opening, in which it seems a hundred people are in at least a hundred cars stuck in traffic on a flyover headed to downtown Los Angeles on a somewhat clear day doing a song and dance routine of Another Day of Sun. Effectively, there is no difference between this and West Side Story or My Fair Lady or (my personal favorite opening number) Sit Down John from 1776. The choreography, a complicated mix of in between and on top of cars exhibits a thoroughly American experience, complete with jaw dropping camera boom movement which could only have been accomplished with what appears to me to be seamless and hard to catch computer generated images in the background. Having thoroughly pushed you into old Hollywood, the film then entrances you with numbers like A Lovely Night which displays the two leads as akin to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee or Shall We Dance, complete with  an unbroken steady cam that showcases the actors’ unbelievable talent for rote memorization and execution of what seems to my amateurish eyes to be fairly complex and for me unachievable choreography. 

But alas, there are two very important scenes which betray the Old Hollywood and firmly place the film as one musical made after 1970: The dinner break up scene and the City of Stars finale, which is the nail in the coffin so to speak. The evolution of the dinner breakup condenses everything about complex human emotions regarding work and personal life between two people so well that it honest to goodness made me think about Orson Welle’s famous breakfast table montage from Citizen Kane. In five minutes, their relationship was seemingly over, and the smoking ruin of what used to be their love was the burnt roast in the oven. This scene is so good it defies logic, and I’m not sure just any combination of modern actors in this age group could have pulled this off. The ramp up of emotions every thirty seconds was so fascinating, I watched it twice. Not the finale. Not the dream sequence. I watched the argument twice. It said so many things about human nature, and how we humans react in these circumstances when we are so involved with our partner, seemingly inside a bubble of what we thought was trust. It was fascinating. I wrote them both off as pretty people years ago. I was so wrong about both of them. They are fine actors, through and through, the best of their generation. 

The fight centered around the ticking time bomb which was Seb’s (Ryan Gosling) stuck up, arrogant, bullshit view about being a purist jazz musician. The instant he appeared on screen running though jazz tunes on his radio because he couldn’t stand to listen to anything other than what he considered to be perfect music, I had this cocksucker nailed. I know you. The one who thinks Metallica betrayed their fanbase when they put out the Black Album. The ones who shit a brick when Eric Clapton raked in money for After Midnight. You probably are the same people who never heard of Tegan and Sarah until they went Gold in Canada for the first time after ten years and five albums and called them sell outs. Being a musician is like any other job in the world. You get paid for someone to do a fucking job. Do your fucking job. It doesn’t matter who pays you or what you think of them. And as an artist, if they don’t like you, a consumer can just choose not to buy your art. That’s how this shit works. So after Mia so hilariously emoted A Flock of Seagulls’ I Ran (So Far Away) at the pool party (I was in STITCHES) of course Seb said a bullshit line like “I can’t believe you would request such a song from a serious musician.” “Serious musician?” What a fucking asshole to say something like that to Mike Score. What are the the chances of Sebastian whatisname being known other than “that guy who plays keys for the dude who looks EXACTLY like John Legend?” Vs. Flock of Seagulls? You’re nothing next to Mike Score, douchebag. You should be lucky to write a song that has been handed down through history with such pop culture impact. At the time of writing of this blog, I’ve checked on Wikipedia and I still don’t see Sebastian charting… or recording… anything. Maybe he’s running a jazz bar in a fucking basement in west L.A. somewhere.You know, the kind with cheap neon signs? If I were as bad at my job as Seb was at his, I’d probably be in the same place. I have a huge issue with the idea of ‘selling out’ when it means it raises your standard of living. 

At the same time, Mia has a legitimate grievance when she finds out that the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with is going to be gone 200 nights a year. RUSH was on the road for seven straight years, pausing only to record records, usually within a few days. Look at Journey’s tour record. It will shock you.So for her to bring that up, totally on point. For her to pair that with her criticism of him not following his dream - well that was going for the testicles. He had ‘sold out’ and then she called him out for ‘selling out,’ which is total cock. Maybe I should go back to delivering pizzas for pennies in the poorest suburbs of Houston. Or maybe I should have stayed an underpaid school teacher in the slums? As it happens I liked not living slightly above squallor. So fuck that attitude. It was a total attack, and I don’t know what she was intending to gain from it, because it netted her nothing and lost her everything. And let me tell you something, I’ve been in those situations and I’ve had those conversations, and there is nothing to gain from them. There was no way for Seb to get out of that dinner unscathed. Whether she planned it or not, that topic was a trap, designed to destroy what they had, and as women are more experts in relationships, I quite frankly expected more from her.  But then you wouldn’t have a movie to watch or this blog, right?

Mia’s experience as an actor is a debilitating, depressing experience for hundreds of thousands of women trying to make their way as an artist in a very uncaring, numbers driven, and sometimes hostile industry which is orientated to using them until the age of twenty-six before breaking and discarding them for the next hot best thing. Why someone would want to subject themselves to such crushing criticism and unfairness must be the most soul crushing experience. Emma’ Stone’s performance as Mia in the casting office near the beginning of the film shows what a talent she, or Miss Stone, is. The idea of someone looking at their phone instead of someone they deliberately contacted for input is insulting and dispiriting. I understand that casting agents see hundreds of actors, sometimes in a day and giving 100% attention is difficult. But all of those called actors deserve respect and attention. Though the chance of becoming a professional film actor is quite remote, it actually has increased the past few years with the surge of competing streaming platforms. This is the best chance to be an actor in Hollywood since the thirties, when it was about 1 in 65. By the 90’s it was in the thousands and it has dropped a bit since then but you are still looking at an uphill battle unless you have a noteworthy item on your resume like a local television appearance or you just happened to fuck Harvey Weinstien. Those options being eliminated though, Mia had to compete on talent alone when no one would pay any attention to her talent, which was considerable, and watching her fail was heartbreaking.  

When you don’t succeed at anything huge, it is really important that you succeed at anything small, and for Mia it was this one person play she put on basically for her friends in which she described her life. As brilliant as it must have been, we did not see it (but some studio executive obviously did) but as it happened the only person who actually had to be there was Seb, who flubbed up his schedule and missed it. My wife launched all over this obvious loophole. One: just tell her you can’t make it beforehand, via cell phones, Two, tell her after the fact what happened. Three: ritual suicide. What I tried to explain to my wife was this was a no-go in any confrontation. There was no way Seb could talk his way out of this one. First, he should have been there. He either should have kept a better schedule on his iphone (artists are infamously meticulous about their schedules) or he should have just coughed up to John legend: “hey, can we do my shit first…I have to be there for Mia.” Or in the worst case scenario, he could have said “Shit, I’m sorry. I can’t.” and just left. But then there would be a happy ending and we just can’t have that in this modern musical (Which I willo get to by the end, I promise, if I actually do get to finish this fucking article). As my wife pondered these many things, I did in fact lament the fact that the only use of a cell phone in this film was when it was used against the characters, never for them. But effectively, I told my wife, this was the Kobayashi Maru of this relationship. For Seb, it was a no-win scenario. Since he did not plan, and did not react, there was no getting out of it. NMy wife’s assertion that he should have just explained to her after the performance why he could not make it, is as improbable as any other scenario. There are some arguments, that you just cannot win, and it does not matter what evidence you have. Tony Soprano was caught with a strippers fingernail in his pocket that his wife found with his keys when she was doing the laundry. When she confronted him about cheating on her, which Tony was not doing (at the time) she brought up the fingernail. Tony, we all know, got the fingernail by cleaning up evidence from a stripper that one of his soldiers had killed in the Bada Bing. So he wasn’t about to tell his wife He wasn’t fucking a stripper, he was just burying them in the Jersey forests. Let’s get real here. There was no way to win that argument. I’m convinced this is why most women think that men are way more stupid than they actually are. Because men know better than to say “I didn’t make it to the game not because I had to just have one more beer but because Bill had his testical pierced by a stiletto from one of the strippers and we had to take him to the ER. That’s the type of shit I’m talking about. 

My wife likened LaLa Land to being 90% good, and I instantly saw her point. She wanted them to get back together at the end like all the old Hollywood musicals and because they didn’t, well, that’s it. She’s done with it. I, on the other hand, loved the ending, Because anyone who has those contradictions in themselves as these two do, is doomed to failure. They were never meant to be together. Now, she doesn’t have to marry and have a kid with some nameless dude who probably works ‘below the line’ as a grip or something on her first film like a lot of annulled marriages in Hollywood start (it would have been real funny or more appropriate if you recognized the actor. Like maybe Brad Pitt or Jake Gyllenhaal), but the fact that she was with someone who CLEARLY was not NEARLY as attractive as Ryan Gosling in terms of screen presence, well, that did not say a lot for her either.) Judging by her child's age and the time frame involved, this was one of those relationships - it’s not going to last. Despite the fact that if it were not for him, she wouyldn’t have her career and if it were not for the breakup, he wouldn’t either. Sometimes winning or losing everything you have is enough to make you sacrifice everything to get the one elusive element in your life. But if she was going to go live in Paris for a year and make buckets of money, and he was going to go 9on tour ofr almost a year, then what difference did it make. I’d fucking love it if my wife had a job that paid both of our bills in Paris for a year. I’d do nothing bur write stupid, long, uninteresting critiques like this all day, everyday. Fuck my tendonitis. That’s what French universal healthcare is for. So why he did not go with her is pretty stupid. 

The irony of the situation is of course that they both get what they want - just not each other. She becomes a well known movie star and he owns his own jazz nightclub. But they do not live happily ever after. And this irritates the hell out of my wife. Why, she asked, did Hollywood bother making a hollywood musical complete with jaw dropping song and dance numbers, with music that was actually listen-in-your-car-good, if they did not pair them together in the end? Where is the happy ending? Where did you go, Joe DiMaggio? And of course, the long winded hour and a half answer that I had to my wife over that was something to have recorded so I could make this piece of shit review even longer. Because effectively, it’s the audience’s fault. 

You heard me. You decided to stay home three nights a week in the ‘50’s when you bought a television set and when you got a color one ten years later,  you decided not to go four nights a week. By the late 1970’s, you went to the theater twice a month. This coincided with the studio heads retiring or dying, like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer. The response by the New York companies who owned the studios was to just sell them to junk bond holding companies. These assholes didn’t know art from a pothole in Fifth Avenue, so instead of trying to find talented producers like Robert Evans who obviously didn’t grow on trees, they just decided to give the money straight to the filmmakers themselves. This was the birth of American Zoetrope. Lucasfilm. Lion’s Gate. The result was a more realistic cinema, as these new filmmakers came to be after the fall of the Production Code. Criminals didn’t have to pay for their crimes (The Godfather). Sin could be rewarded (MASH). Endings could be ambiguous (Taxi Driver). Sex was and violence were more graphic (Last Tango in Paris, Taxi Driver). 

But while the auteurs possibly saved cinema as an art form, they did not do it any favors in the audience department. When cable TV came in the late seventies, and home rentals in the early 80’s, and with the advent of DVD in the 90’s, there was less and less reason to go to the theater decade by decade, and by the turn of the century it was at an all time (fully a century of all time) low. Streaming is largely thought to have been the nail in the coffin, but people needed to be held back from the cinema, and that wound up being the pandemic. Whether or not the theaters can survive without Hollywood superhero super budget films remains to be seen, but the trend is there. Popular films love happy endings…or do they (Infinity War, Endgame)? Happiness now comes with a price, and since the auteur era, that price has steadily risen. It might be that your hero dies (Tony Stark) or it might be the love of your life moves to Paris, doesn’t invite you, and marries some stud who has no business being with her just because he knows who to call for craft services. This is a long winded attempt to explain to you why Seb gets what he wants (his jazz bar) and Mia gets what she wants (a career in Hollywood that may or may not require her to bare her breasts that get captured on PornHub forever), and yet both of them are unhappy. 

My personal take after the credits it she is going to be torn, re-establish contact, and fuck him on the side until her husband / producer finds out. Then a nasty custody battle takes place, involving lots of thrown awards, beaches across the south pacific, and at least one 90-day stint into a drug rehab. In fact, there might be one overdose, three podcast interviews, and at least once episode in which that bitch Nancy Grace pontificates over ‘doucebag Seb’s’ real purpose in playing jazz and being with Mia. I mean, who does he think he is anyway? Then, after all that, at least two more kids, Mia and Seb separate after a HUGE argument on a learjet discussing the royalties of the winery they share together. After an uncomfortable weekend in Malibu, Mia decides to take the kids to New York, and Seb cries over an alcohol induced all-nighter at the club in which he drops dead. Credits. If this is too harsh for you, then he takes the kids to Maui and she overdoses from cocaine in New York. Credits. Now that is a REAL Hollywood ending. 

Mank (2020)

This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That's the real magic of the movies. And don't let anybody tell you different.

I don’t know how many times I started and stopped typing this article. It wasn’t so much where to start it, but whether I should do it at all. Since Citizen Kane rocked the cinematic and publishing world, people have attacked and defended, praised and assassinated, the name of “the Boy Genius” Orson Welles, over exactly how much involvement he had in the writing of what some people rightly debate as “the Greatest Movie Ever Made.”

Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’ scorned lover, spurned friend, whose split with Welles was only recently painfully acknowledged on the Netflix Welles documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, admitted what so many Welles fans already knew at the end of the commentary track on the Citizen Kane Blu Ray release in 2010: “There are better pictures than Citizen Kane,” he stated, “there are better Welles pictures.” and he’s right. As masterful as it is, and as often as I see it, I am more entranced by the shocking beauty of Othello, or the rapid tension thrill of The Stranger. The Chimes of Midnight, who Welles once said was the film he would want to submit in a bid to get into Heaven, is the most lyrical of his films. His best probably, and I’m being completely serious, is F for Fake, a film that in its totality looks at film and the absurdity of it at the same time. For a man who started so revolutionarily, it seemed like a good way to end his career - being that it was the last film he did before he died, and for forty years the last film any of us thought we would see of his...before The Other Side of the Wind. 

But despite what we know, and what we love, we admit that Kane is so good, so damned GOOD, that we get upset, some of us downright angry, when we hear bullshit like anything Pauline Kael has to say on the subject, or, closely following her in the past few years, David Fincher. The character assassination has been so amazingly brazen by Fincher and Welles’ detractors, that it seems absolutely downright idiotic to rehash all this in another article, from yet another fan, on yet another nameless website by some douche who hosts a film podcast. 

But I am confused. Utterly fucking confused… about the entire situation. I have no way to understand how Fincher, who is probably one of five of the greatest living auteurs working in cinema today, could possibly take Kael’s side against Welles and Andy Sarris - the very author of the auteur theory from which Fincher is so often praised. 

“In an interview with French Premiere, as caught by The Playlist, Fincher advanced the theories of Mank that the authorship of Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane was more collaborative than some people realize. "[A]t 25, you don’t know what you don’t know," he said of the theater and radio wunderkind who stormed Hollywood. He paraphrased Welles saying "it only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography" then called b.s. on that, saying "this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have Gregg Toland around him to prepare the next shot." 

This comes from Fincher’s interview published in Vanity Fair on the Mank press tour, and it’s fucking disgusting. First of all, we can blame Welles, for repeatedly telling this story for four decades. Welles had been working in the studio for almost a year, ditching two projects before centering on Kane with Herman Mankeweicz. Toland, known in the studio system as a master of his craft, came to Welles and offered his services. As he watched Welles work, Toland fixed what he thought needed fixing, but left the rest to see what would happen. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” as Fincher said in his interview. When Welles finally wised up to what was going on, Toland came clean and told Welles “there’s nothing I can’t teach you in four hours” regarding cinematography. This blithe statement did not mean the whole of cinematography as Welles accidentally portrayed it in interview after interview. Instead, what Toland meant was ‘any one thing.’ Focus Pulling? Four hours. F-Stops? Four hours. Etc. Considering what Welles was able to do with a plethora of lesser abled cinematographers after Toland, we should recognize that Welles learned well. Fincher, however, slams Welles as if he didn’t understand the entire concept of ‘any one thing’ about cinematography instead of the entire craft. Either Fincher is a fucking idiot (which I do not believe) or he is being disingenuous. My meaning is this: how is it that Fincher prepared for three years to shoot the definitive film about Mankiewicz and the entire controversy about who actually wrote Citizen Kane and not stumble across this simple fact which Welles aficionados had known and understood for decades? I think Fincher knew exactly what Welles was saying, and I think he either thought Welles was lying (it was not outside the realm of possibility for Welles to lie, he admitted lying to Bogdanovich) or he was telling the truth but, like Welles, didn’t so much care about the truth. 

The truth is, Citizen Kane IS a masterpiece. The truth is, whoever wrote it was a masterful storyteller. The truth is, Welles represented the Sarris auteur theory which Kael hated. The truth is, if you could take Kane away from Welles, you would take away the one unarguable film from his cannon that he had received an Academy Award for (with Mankiewicz). Fincher, in trying to call into question Welles’ screenwriting credit, is trying to do the exact same thing Kael was trying to do: assassinate Orson. As the story goes, Fincher gave his father Jack the essay Kael wrote for the thirtieth anniversary ‘Citizen Kane Book’ which included the award winning shooting script (the shooting script is the final ‘Fifth Draft’ which is compiled by what you actually see on screen, NOT what was written when the shooting started). Kael had paid a few hundred dollars to a researcher at UCLA and used his notes to make a startling assertion: that Welles didn’t write one word of the Kane script, and his credit was a fraud. 

Pauline Kael’s Wikipedia entry is hard to refute or better summarize. She wrote for the New Yorker 1968-1991, “known for her “witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused” reviews, Kael’s opinions often ran contrary to those of her contemporaries. One of the most influential film critics of her era, she left a lasting impression of the art form. Roger Ebert argued in an obituary that Kael “had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades.” Kael, he said, “had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn’t apply her ‘approach’ to a film. With her it was all personal.” In the documentary on Roger Ebert, “Life or Something Like It,” Ebert gushes over Kael and the imprint she had on his career and the career of thousands of professional critics and jacklegs on the internet like me. 

The only problem was, Kael was a fucking liar. Historian Robert Carringer has made a career explaining Kael’s unbelievable lack of standard research skills, using only what she purchased (and never cited) to explain her point. In fact, she never interviewed Welles, who shared the credit, was the producer, or John Houseman, who kept Mankiewicz sober in Victorville writing the script, or Welles’ secretary, who wrote an entirely different screenplay. She seems to be oblivious that there were four drafts (One all Mankiewicz, one all Welles, one hybrid, a second hybrid edited WAY down, and the final shooting script made after editing). Carringer identified five major scenes that Welles re-wrote during filming. All of this escaped Kael, because despite her films, she's just a critic and not a historian. She likes pissing on art, not finding out how the art came to be. Ebert was the opposite. 

In a famous reply, Bogdanovich published “The Kane Mutiny” in which he called out Kael’s B.S. It stunned those who read it. It even stunned Kael. In her biography, a very strange scene played out as Woody Allen brought her the article to read. She was flabbergasted at Bogdanovich’s research. His citations were unassailable. He also has hours of tape in which Orson called out “That was my idea,” or “that was pure Mank.” Kael admitted to Allen (who’s sheer presence was confusing, wasn’t HE an AUTEUR?), “I don’t know how to reply to this.” To which Allen replied, “don’t reply to it.” And she never did. Her lack of silence was worse than an open apology. Millions bought the book, read the essay. Who read Bogdanovich’s article? The first stone hurts the most. Whatever you think he might have deserved, Welles lived with the accusation the rest of his life. 

On the second supplemental disc of the Criterion Collection’s Blu Ray celebrating the 80th anniversary, Criterion included a twenty year old documentary using a collection of old interviews regarding the controversy (the film Mank is not referenced anywhere in this edition). Included is a 1990 interview with Kael herself, unfortunately visibility suffering from Parkinsons, and greatly walking back what she had accused Welles of doing.

“I didn’t want to set up a battery of anxiety about who contributed what to this scene or that. I mean I think that’s fruitless. Welles’ reputation as an artist certainly doesn’t depend on whether he wrote Citizen Kane, it depends on the majestic quality of his movies. I think that some of what he shot on Chimes of Midnight is greater than anything he did in Citizen Kane. I think that battlefield sequence ranks with the best work that has been done in the medium. And I think The Magnificent Ambersons has a depth beyond the spirited craziness we love in Citizen Kane. I think the man’s reputation is so secure that we shouldn’t worry about the trivia of whether someone thought of this or somebody else thought it up. Because you can never find out who contributed what on the set… The essay [Raising Kane] was the introduction to the publication of the script, so naturally I wanted to know who had written this script, because Citizen Kane is unlike everything else of Welles’s, he never made another political film, and going back over it, it became clear that Mankiewicz was the important force behind the writing of the script. And then I discovered what a character he was. A marvelous character, really. People really loved him, partly because he was an immensely naughty person, he was a bad boy like Welles, a gambler, a drinker, a man who blew his talent away, even though he wrote or had a share in writing a couple of hundred movies. I didn’t know at the time that he had a hand in writing the Wizard of Oz. It’s amazing how many movies he had an effect on. He produced  the Marx Brothers comedies and a lot of terrific films. And it was the fun of restoring this character into his proper place.” 

This is a remarkable mix of disingenuousness, flattery, very weird assessments, and a revealing moment in which she explains why she did what she did two decades before. For if Kael did not want to start “anxiety'' over who wrote Kane, she would not have written that Welles did “not write one word” of Kane in the first place. [As an aside, she uses the excuse that Mankiewicz was in Victorville the whole time, so Welles could not have possibly contributed to it, apparently forgetting the thirty year old technology of the telephone or the fifty year old automobile, much less that there is a picture of Welles and Mankiewicz working on the Kane script in Victorville). If she indeed thought it was ‘fruitless’ then why did she write such a contemptible sentence? She throws plaudits to him regarding Chimes and Ambersons as if that excuses her crime of libel. She is also ignoring Bogdanovich’s accusation of motive: “if ever anyone got into an argument about him people would respond, ‘well, he did direct Citizen Kane,” Bogdanovich told the BBC in 1983, “and she wanted to say ‘well, no, he didn’t even do that.’” Then Kael says something so misinformed as to shake the imagination - her contention that one ‘would never know’ who wrote what and who contributed to what “on a set.” Breaking this down is crucial. First, we do know who contributed to what as Carringer and other students of history have broken it down. Welles himself was never shy about saying what was Mankiewicz and what was not. Girl on the ferry? “Pure Mank.” Rosebud? Not only was it Mank, but Welles did himself an obvious disservice by saying how much he actually didn’t like the Rosebud motif. He wanted something stronger. The fact that Kael even uses the words “on the set,” tells us she is aware that Welles changed the script during production, which she never acknowledged in her essay calling him a liar. Then she says something very, very strange when she asserts the reason Kane is so strange is because Welles never made a political film. This…is astounding. Perhaps you could see Kane as a political film. He did run for governor and failed due to party politics. That is the only politics in the film, though. Kane’s description on IMDB reads “Following the death of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane, reporters scramble to uncover the meaning of his final utterance: 'Rosebud.'” Curious description for a political film. Kane is far more social and cultural. Kael also seemed to not recognize The Trial as a political film, though it very seriously discussed totalitarianism. Near the end of this ‘confession,’ she then starts praising Mankiewicz , whom she says was the true ‘force’ behind Kane and marvels at his credits. To anyone in the industry, nothing about Mankiewicz would have been a surprise, even 20 years after his death, but it was to her because she wasn’t, like Bogdanovich, in the industry or interested in academia. Her lack of knowledge about his impact is even more astounding when you consider she didn’t even do her own research, but paid someone else to do it. Maybe, if like Bogdanovich she had cared to ask those involved in the production what happened, she would not have made such an academic blunder. 

Fincher knows all of this. The man is not an idiot. So why is he attacking Welles and why is he attacking the auteur theory that he greatly benefits from? Not only that, he’s being ghastly when Vanity Fair says he’s being “diplomatic,”

“As to what he feels about the Mankiewicz vs. Welles argument that consumed Kael and Bogdanovich and is now affecting responses to “Mank,” Fincher was diplomatic. “There’s absolutely no argument — Welles was a f—ing genius,” he said. “The fact that this is his first movie is beyond shocking. Anybody standing on his shoulders is in awe of him, but having said that, I’ve seen movies he’s made from scripts that he’s written. They’re not in the same league.”

This from the man who directed both Alien 3 and Fight Club. A man who has shared, but not had sole credit on any film he’s ever shot. This contradiction, coupled with the sheer audacity of this statement, is fucking shocking for anyone to read who has a cursory knowledge of Welles’s projects. 

Kane was a final cut with everything Welles wanted at his disposal: we move on. The Magnificent Ambersons (1943) had 40 minutes cut from the end, a new ending shot and tacked on, and the major set piece cut down. The editor, Robert Wise (who directed West Side Story, Star Trek the Motion Picture, The Day the Earth Stood Still, so you know, he knows what he’s talking about) said Orson’s ‘Final Cut’ of Ambersons was “better than Kane.” The Stranger (1946), a thriller made on time and under budget due to great constraints. The Lady from Shanghai (1947), in which there is not a single scene that is not tampered with after the film was seized, and has at least 20 minutes missing. Othello (1954) is a strange case for Fincher, as this won the first ever Palm D’Or at Cannes. Even Kane lost to John Ford’s How Green was My Valley for Best Picture at the Oscars.Touch of Evil (1959), a film that was cut to such shit that Welles protested in a famous 20 something page memo where he called out over fifty change requests. When these requests were followed and the film re-released, it was voted “Best Picture” by the AFI in 1997… for that year. The Trial (1962) which had such limitations on it, Welles focused on one-shots to save celluloid. Its budget was a fraction of Kane. There are arguably stinkers. I like Arkadin, Chimes, Wind. But as films a lot of people can leave them or take them. The fact remains, Welles never had the ability to repeat what he did with Kane, and Fincher knows that. Listen to any commentary Fincher has done on any film to hear him bitch about how stupid studios and thier producers are. Listen to him rail at Fox executives explaining why he needed more money to finish the end of Se7en. Welles was never able to repeat the vision of what he wrote after Kane because when he turned in his project, others in the system massacred it. Nothing Fincher has ever touched after Alien 3 was ever fucked with to the degree that it completely destroyed his vision of his art. To Welles, this was par for the course. The idea that Fincher is unaware of this history is absurd. It’s like blaming a guy who gets hit by a car for not planning his route better. “How come you couldn’t cross the street?” That type of gaslight bullshit. 

Joseph McBride, another film scholar and friend of Welles, chips away at why Fincher follows legions of Hollywoodites that attack Welles and his waste of a career:.

“After the collapse of his Hollywood directing career and his escape to Europe when the blacklist began in 1947, Welles made films mostly with the money he earned from his work as an actor, so he enjoyed the independence that meant so much to him as a director. As he said later, “I chose freedom.” That causes the resentment of wage-slaves in Hollywood who don’t have the courage to go that route. He paid a price by having difficulty getting his films seen in this country and being unable to finish many of his projects, leading to gloating by smug professional filmmakers and commercially minded reviewers even today.”

Maybe, McBride is saying, if Fincher had spent his own money on his dreams, he’d have a different fucking opinion of the work of Orson Welles. You try making Fight Club on a shoestring and see if people think it’s the masterpiece it is now. Fincher has never, ever been in Welles’ shoes, and it must take balls of steel to shake his finger at Arkadin and say ‘look at what shit that is, it doesn’t come close to Kane.’ Is Fincher wagging his finger at John Sayles, or Richard Linklater? Is he watching Kundun and saying “Scorsese is overrated?” I’m exaggerating, but you can see the hypocrisy in what Fincher is saying. Now let’s look at the absurdity of what he is directing. 

I don’t want the reader to think that I don’t like Mank, because I do, but like all films whether bad or good, indie or studio, I put it into context. The Graduate is a masterpiece work, full stop. It is also full of shit. Listen to my podcast for further explanation. Mank is beset by many of these issues, but I will point out the largest one to drive home Fincher’s mind blowing sanctimoniousness and false virtue. Mank actually has a scene in which Marion Davies (wonderfully portrayed by Amanda Seyfried in what may be a career defining role) actually drives out to Victorville to see Mankiewicz, and the two have a nice little picnic, just like Charles Foster Kane would have on the beaches near Xanadu with Susan Alexander. And there, in this absurd setting, Marion not only forgives Mankiewicz for writing a screenplay that calls her a money digging no-talent whore alcoholic, she then proceeds to reaffirm their friendship. Friendship! Let that sink in! The pivotal piece of Kane is the famous sled, lovingly referred to by the young Kane as Rosebud, affirmed by Welles to Bogdanovich that yes, indeed, inside San Simeon circles everyone knew that this was Heart’s nickname for Davies’s pussy (Welles actually said “cunt! It was her cunt!’ somewhat indelicately). No one knows if Hearst or Davies ever saw Kane, but Frank Mankewiecz (Herman’s son) confirmed other well reputable reports that Mankiewicz had indeed given his full first finished draft to Charles Ledherer, a screenwriter Mankiewicz used to work with, whom Welles was neighbors with in San Pedro, and whom happened to fucking be the nephew of Davies. Ledherer duly handed over the screenplay to Heart’s lawyers, who eviscerated it with legal opinions and threats. When it was returned to Mankiewicz (via Lederer), it was heavily annotated with red ink from the Hearst legal team. The point of this diatribe: don’t think for a second Hearst and Davies didn’t know Rosebud was in the film. They knew, because they paid people to find out. Ask yourself if having been the subject of such a character assassination (not nearly as bad as the one on Welles, I would add) if you would drive out and have a picnic with the person whose intention was to tell the entire world what your married boyfriend called your vulva. The idea that Marion and Mankiewicz were friends is absurd. Fantasy. Storytelling, ha! Storylieing is more like it. The idea they met in this context is grandiose bullshit. The idea that Fincher directed this fabrication is absurd. Thus, the film is absurd. 

They are storytellers. The idea that Welles can make Kane and Fincher can make Mank is protected by law and should be protected by the sheer virtue of art. Censorship is one of the most vile forms of oppression, and I am certainly not advocating anything of the sort. Anyone has the right to make the art they want to make and to dress it up how they like. The one huge difference I have about the difference between Welles assassinating Hearst’s character and Fincher’s assassinating of Welles’s, is at least Welles changed the names when he lied to tell a story. Fincher doesn’t even bother. And while he uses the opportunity to point to Kane’s script and call foul, he also admits that he himself edited his father’s script. So, if I am not to believe Welles when he said he helped write Kane, why should I believe Jack Fincher because his son gave him credit?

The final insult is right before the credits, but again we must put it into context. During the scuffle, so Kael rightly documents and has been confirmed by historians, Welles offered Mankiewicz $10,000 in hush money to drop his screenwriting credit. Apparently, Welles’ behavior was his typical boarish over the top ape act, well documented by John Houseman, Robert Wise, and others. Mankiewicz turned it down. Kael presents this as the smoking gun. Why would he have tried to bribe Mankiewicz if not for his own self-aggrandizement? Ego, one can infer. Welles was always over the top, always out of control, always after blood. Or, if one cared to interview Mankiewicz’s son Frank (PBS did), you understand that Welles’ contract with RKO pictures was to “write, direct, and produce '' a film by himself, thereby saving what little money they could on the boy wonder. If he did not fulfill this term in his contract, Welles had justifiable fear (Frank Mankiewicz conveys his father’s opinion) that RKO would not pay him, or use the opportunity to not pay him as much. I’m willing to bet the losses would exceed $10,000. 

Welles didn’t just give Mankiewicz shared credit for the screenplay (which according to Carringer was entirely appropriate given Welles’ direction of the narrative with edits and rewrites), but put Mankiewicz’s name first. Welles later told Bogdanvich this was fitting in the order of effort. But right before the end of the film, Gary Oldman’s Mankiewicz accepts his (shared) Oscar for writing Kane, repeating Mankiewicz’s real refrain that he accepted the award in the spirit in which Citizen Kane was written, that is, “without Orson Welles.” Mankiewicz did indeed say this, and this newsreel was indeed replayed. But what Mank never did was contest this screenwriting credit. And why Mankiewicz , who had fought giants like Mayer, Thalberg, and Selznick, would lay down in a fight over a credit over the greatest film of all time, is puzzling. There are only two possibilities; either the film didn’t mean that much to him, or he was lying. Read a biography of Mankiewicz and tell me if this alcoholic gambler who hated slumming for Hollywood riches and turned his nose up at hard work was capable of lying. Including this scene was rubbing the salt into the knife wound. 

Fincher could have done many things with Mankiewicz’s story. Perhaps with so many interpretations of stories already out in the ether (RKO 281, The Battle over Citizen Kane, just to name two), Fincher was perhaps looking for something with more meat on it, more controversial - as if the real history wasn’t enough. Welles’ innovation with Toland over lighting, montage, in-camera effects, optical printing, and back and forth editing would have been a marvel to convey. I remember seeing Jim Carrey, channeling Andy Kauffman, trying to get CBS executives to approve the use of horizontal hold lines on one of his comedy specials. Occasionally, TV sets receiving weak signals would lose their horizontal hold, sending the square rolling upwards, sometimes at a dizzying pace. Kauffman wanted to do this on command to make viewers get up out of their seats and fiddle with their TVs. I saw this in Milos Formann’s film Man on the Moon, and laughed my ass off. That must have been what it was like for Orson to run around RKO. You want to do what? Back project and forward project at the same time as a live shot? Are you out of your mind? That would play much better than Liev Schriber throwing food at Chas’ Restaurant screaming “Everything I am is in that picture, and everything I’m going to be!” But really, we know why Fincher made the decisions he did, don’t we? We could chalk it up to ego, or id, or curiosity, but we all know what it truly is.

David Fincher is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most subversive film maker barring hard core pornography working in the film medium today. In the span of his storied career he remade Madonna’s entire career in three and a half minutes (Vogue), told us a crazy story about Incest (Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got a Gun), confronted society with it’s very real out out of control morality (Se7en), told us everything that was corrupt with social media (The Social Network), and then pointed out that, let’s face it, some women are just fucking evil (Gone Girl). From one project to another, if Fincher isn’t leading you into what is wrong with our society, then it’s not a Fincher film. In Se7en, John Doe forces a man to put on a phallus with four blades and fuck a woman until she bled to death. In Gone Girl, Amy Dunne fucks Desi Collins until he is literally about to ejaculate, locks her ankles to trap his semen, and cuts open his jugular, his blood coating her entire nude body. This is, after all, the moment when all men are most vulnerable. In The Social Network an entire person is fictionalized to convey to the audience just how much Mark Zuckerburg (the character) can’t emote emotions on any level other than success because he is a 21st century nerd competing against 20th century jocks. He’ll show them, right? Machismo has been replaced by feminized nerdity. Fincher famously said “You know I don't try to piss people off, right? It's just always been the right thing to do.” And from his first movie to his last, he has definitely kept to his words. 

I want to make it clear, like Kael did to Chimes, that I absolutely love Fincher’s films. Even Mank, which is breathlessly filled with bullshit, I cannot turn away from. From the production quality, to the small homages he made to Kane (the bottle dropping by the bedside, a direct lift from the snow globe), to the astounding walk-and-talk steadicam shot of Arliss Howard walking through the MGM studio shouting at people and holding his balls as Louis B. Mayer. Mank is masterfully made, shot, and though I abhor the invented suicide and the sudden importance of the California Governor’s election of 1936 in Mankiewicz’s life (as his grandson TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz described to Frank Santopadre on Gilbert Gotfried’s Amazing Collossal Podcast), one cannot turn away from the extraordinary job Fincher is doing in destroying Welles’s career. Because, unlike Kael’s essay ‘Raising Kane,’ Mank is a film. And though throughout time the essay has diminished as Welles’ impact and influence has grown stronger, we all know that film is forever. The libel that Mank is, however disprovable, will always be pointed to as truth, because that’s what audiences think of film. It doesn’t matter that there wasn’t a bayonet charge at the end of The Battle of Ia Drang Valley depicted in We Were Soldiers. It doesn’t matter that slavery was a horrible existence if you’ve seen the clean white version of it in Gone With The Wind. It doesn’t matter that no one has ever proved an ounce of evidence indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. What matters is JFK. What matters is film. Film is fact, even if it isn’t. And out of everything subversive about society he is saying in his films, it does seem like this is a strange one to pick out. But the fact is there are perverts among us. Serial killers. Split personalities. Billionaires without emotive morals. These things are true. And the film, Mank, is not. 

Citations:

https://www.thewrap.com/mank-feud-pauline-kael-peter-bodganovich/ https://www.indiewire.com/2020/12/mank-what-happened-after-ending-ben-mankiewicz-interview-1234602709 

https://www.wellesnet.com/mank-welles-mcbride

Bogdanovich, Peter. This Is Orson Welles (1987)

Empire Records (1995)

I don't feel that I need to explain my art to you, Warren.

What a fucking catastrophe of a movie. It does not even attempt to make any semblance of sense or critique. Instead it is a flat attempt at whatever the fuck you think Reality Bites is, an even worse attempt of commercialism to criticize commercialism of the current youth culture. Filled with cliches of personality types, clothing and even what we must be listening to, and floor to ceiling with shit that simply does not make sense. This is the most expensive independent record store I have ever seen. Amoeba Records in Hollywood is a shit stained warehouse in DMZ surrounded by homeless people and filled with overpriced blu rays. It’s also filled with shit tons of ‘45s, laser discs and videotapes. I’ve been to Virgin Music Megastores in the mid 90’s that were smaller than this ‘Indie’ store somewhere in rural New Jersey. Other than the nostalgia of Malcom Young, long boxes, and when short skirts could be worn by smart, feeling women with no irony, this film sucks. Checked sweaters, agora shirts, and yet no vans. Four of every five songs literally sucks, and they throw in Dylan for the fifth because they need it to be legitimate. No one has heard of any of the bands featured on wall posters for specific effect - none of the audience is supposed to be cool enough to know these bands. And even if you do, let me remind you, let me remind everyone, NOBODY LIKES GWAR. FUCKING NO ONE. I had a friend of mine that had them on tape. Yes, I copied it. Yes, I listened to their shit. Once. That’s it. No CD. No iTunes. And ask anyone now, in this Oliva Rodrigo-Dual Lips world we live in, if they’ve heard of such ‘trendy’ and ‘edgy’ 90’s music….and prepare to be underwhelmed. In fact, I’m pretty fucking sure 99.9% of people who are reading this have never heard of GWAR. I’m also way into objectification and sexualization as long as it doesn’t get me in jail. However, the jail bait shit in this film is one step from Blue Lagoon and two steps from Pretty Baby. And what is really upsetting is the seeming okay nature of it all, especially in front of an Endless Summer II poster. And what I really don’t understand, will never understand, is why, after masturbating to a rock star for all of her sexual life, would Liv Tyler’s character walk out when said rock star pulls out his cock? This happened sixty seconds after she was rubbing herself through her skirt. Zero sense. Usually the regret comes after the rock star is done fucking the debutante, not before. This was done solely to move us into the third act with the idea that we were somehow more serious than the bullshit that got us this far. And how the film has women turning on each other over slutshaming is, well, shameful. The only honest person in the whole cast is the worst name a David Cassidy stand-in could have when he was dressed like an Elvis that looks way too good, even for Elvis: and that is the name of a football athlete who got caught getting a BJ from a tight end and offed himself on a freeway after the cops found him. Instead of something mid to shit like FM or Airheads (we must save this “X”) we have instead a series of scenes someone thought would lead somewhere if we staffed them with different type of characters. Exhibit one, the opening at the casino in which the luck runs out after the third call… leads you to the wrong conclusion of luck instead of lunacy. The unlikely scenario that a worker whom everyone knows stole 9K from the register is not immediately turned into the police, but the kid who stole five CD’s totaling a hundred and twenty bucks, well, we have to call the cops. Then, when said person shows up with a .44 and starts letting them shots fly, well, let me tell you what really happens when you fire a .44 ANYWHERE in the world. People get the fuck down, and get the fuck out, not wonder ‘where did that gunshot come from?’ Unfortunately, the thinking seems to be that “if we just shorten the skirts and have different hair styles then everything it will make us think we have a diverse cast, like say, the Breakfast Club” or (should I fathom to reach) High Fidelity. And by the way, I know this is suburbia, but are there absolutely NO minorities here? I went to school in whitie whiteville, and even I had 15 South Vietnamese classmates and knew at least three Jews (maybe more, but they don’t exactly advertise it, do they? They just don’t show up to Saturday meets). The worst lines. The worst. It’s like teenagers don’t know how to talk to each other, or maybe they’re all in drama class and have practiced talking to each other this badly. My favorite worst line is “It’s always about her” which is the only unintentional joke in the movie, because every character is so fucking selfish as to push everyone else away. No one, who hates other people, would choose to stay around those other people, And each person in this store hates at least four other people in the group. Which reminds me…. There are, let’s count seven fucking employees of this music store, and the owner wants to know why he’s bankrupt and has to sell out to a huge chain. The Sam Goody that I used to frequent at the mall: two employees. The huge Hastings Records across the freeway? Two people. The Tower Music on Alabama that had every known media known to man? Four (on weekends, the ‘Gay and Lesbian’ section had an extra staff member, but I don’t think they were paid. The list of frivolities that make you think “why, Jesus, why did I choose this over Liquid Sky?”: The mock funeral, complete with the friend make-up, which happens way too early in the third act. The rock out with your simi-cock out in the middle of the store - to a song that is not even good in its badness. If you’re going to do this, a la, Heathers, do with Teenage Suicide by Big Fun. There’s movies, and there’s movies that give you a suspension of disbelief if even to show you a good time, which is all good and in good fun, and then there’s dogshit like Empire Records. I also understand why there is an impromptu concert - we must save the store. But how exactly does the rest of the fucking rural know to come here to save the store? Yes, it’s aesthetically pleasing. Navels and Anthony LaPaglia certainly are nice to look at. But you know what would have been better? A story.

The one star is for Dolores and The Cranberries, and their B-side presence on this disaster of a soundtrack, which at the very least, deserved to be good, but unfortunately, was just as bad as everything else. And two fucking guys arguing about Primus...YES. GENIUS. Too bad it happened behind the credits on the fade out instead of stretching that magic out during the entire film. Then this would have been more like Clerks with a good soundtrack instead of, well, this steaming pile of shit.