The Assassination of Trotsky (Joseph Losey, 1972)

This film appeared in the Medveds' 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Like many of the titles included therein, The Assassination of Trotsky isn't quite deserving. But it's a head scratcher for sure. The main problem is that there seems not to have been a script or perhaps it arrived on location in tatters. A screenwriter is listed (Nicholas Mosley, who later wrote a critical biography of his father, British Union of Fascists founder Sir Oswald Mosley). But much of the screenplay consists of Trotsky (a paycheck-mopping Richard Burton) dictating his memoirs which does little to push the narrative (or even any ideological project) forward. Slow, lazy pans document the exile's Mexico City compound lending the production a travelogue feel. Alain Delon is on board as Trotsky's assassin Frank Jacson, canoodling with Romy Schneider and reciting risible dialogue that one hopes was improvised or written moments before shooting. Losey et al. convey so little sense of Trotsky as a Great Man that one could claim the film instantiates a Communist aesthetic. But The Assassination of Trotsky is more a Swiss cheese wheel than a film, car-crash fascinating but not exactly a pleasurable or recommendable experience.

Grade: B-minus

A Sopranos listicle!

SPOILERS!

 

Best character: Livia. Even more fathomless than Ruth Gordon's satanic coffee klatcher in Rosemary's Baby. I could never read the precise level of her deceit/evil. A virtuoso, hypnotic performance from Nancy Marchand even in Max Headroom mode. 

Second-best character: Janice. I've known so many people like Janice in my life and The Sopranos is the only show I know of to get the character right. The accuracy could split an apple in the next county. Aida Turturro, we're not worthy. 

Best episode: "Two Tonys" Season 5, Episode 1

Most infuriating episode: "Two Tonys"

Best season: 5

Most dour season (not a negative critique): 4, the first post-9/11 season

Season with the sharpest, most redolent costumes: 4, particularly Carm's.

Percentage of the series I remembered from when I first watched the thing 17 damn years ago: About 5% including almost all murders ever. 

Amount of times I screamed out loud: Lost count.

Weirdest moment: The freeze frame and wipe in "Cold Cuts" that no one involved with the production seems to remember. See it here. 

Secret comedic geniuses: The Sopranos kids because they get away with saying shit to Tony that would get anyone else whacked.

Grossest food: The tripe and tomatoes Richie brings Carm. 

Shows The Sopranos is better than (of shows I have watched in their entirety): Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Leftovers, Succession, others.

Show I cannot say The Sopranos is better than since I am stuck in Season 2: The Wire but... (coughs)

Series that disproves the theory that I loved The Sopranos (and any other series) because I watched it with someone: Rectify (although I did watch it the second time through with the Mr.)

Books that I will read now that I've finished The Sopranos (again): Nick Braccia, Off the Back of a Truck - Unofficial Contraband for the Sopranos Fan; Dana Polan, The Sopranos.

What I would say to anyone who refuses to watch the show due to its thorough unpleasantness: Yeah, don't. 

Best ending to a series ever: The Sopranos

Where I will be going soon to enjoy some onion rings: Holsten's in Bloomfield, NJ

A Downton Abbey listicle!

SPOILERS!

 

Best character : Mrs. Hughes, and I'm glad she retained her name when she married fuddy-duddy Mr. Carson.

Second-best character: Mrs. Patmore, and isn't she ready to be Head Chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant by series' end?

Character I started out hating but wound up adoring about halfway through: Isobel Crawley. She was so mealy-mouthed, especially with the Dowager spitting staircase wit all around her. But I loved her tough-minded spirit and her ability to plain talk through a situation.

Hottest character: Tough call but probably Henry Talbot, although don't sleep on Lord Grantham's zaddy energy (drool here).

Character treated with the most cruel indifference by the upstairs (for a time!): Moseley - they couldn't find anything for him to do after Matthew died, especially with all sorts of help running around downstairs throughout the entire series?

Character who could have used a fresh Dynasty-style slap and I don't recall her ever getting one: Take a wild guess (rhymes with "scary")!

Character who could have used not a slap per se but maybe a thorough shaking: Daisy, especially because Andy was cute and he had cool hair (see below).

Character who should have gotten some (more): Barrow. Yes, he was a jerk. But maybe he wouldn't have been had he traipsed up to London now and then for some alley nookie. 

Fun, trashy movie featuring Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan): No Way Up (Claudio Fäh, 2024)

Great movie I watched in the midst of watching Downton Abbey: Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)

TV series I should probably check out after watching Downton Abbey: Upstairs Downstairs (the 1970s one)

Already caught up: The Gilded Age

Savviest aspect of the series: The fact that most of the stories come at you in 50-second soapy chunks.

Most elegant aspect of the series: How the theme song plays over the first shot/bit of dialogue in each episode.

One-word line that could have been said to every character who realizes something in the final episode: "Duh!," e.g., Lord Grantham realizing how hard Cora works at the hospital. Duh!

What the title of the final episode should have been: "Duh!"

Level of corn in the final episode: About waist-high but perfectly acceptable. Terrific show!

Item: Concept Films Sometimes Good

One measure of an excellent narrative film is the complexity of its story world - how it outlines a community so the audience can grasp its traditions and modes of survival/rejuvenation, indeed, how it pauses the forward pull of the narrative in order for us to bask in that world's rich textures. A recent screening of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) confirmed it as just such a film. In fact, Ford thematizes the tension between vertical world making and horizontal narrative pull which grafts onto the western's fundamental civilization vs. wilderness dichotomy. Ethan Edwards' (John Wayne) bloodthirsty drive to find Debbie (Natalie Wood) would seem to brook no obstacles. And yet Ford's characteristic narrative trills try to impede his search. Edwards has no time for such civilizing traditions as funerals even for his recently slaughtered brother and his family. "Put an amen on it!" he barks to the preacher, itching to start his search.

Another measure of an excellent narrative film is the novelty and brilliance of its conceptual thrust. These films subjugate texture and world making to the concept, an idée fixe that structures the entire experience, often a mystery that the viewer must decode in order to make sense of various narrative lacunae or inconsistencies. One of the benefits of a concept-heavy film is that it ignores the rote methods of creating a lived-in story world - the formation of the heterosexual couple, another heterosexual couple to shadow and uphold the primary one (often providing comedic relief), the formation of the nuclear family on the heels of the formation of the primary heterosexual couple, etc. 

M. Night Shyamalan is the current master of the concept film. So it's no surprise to learn that he produced Caddo Lake and like most of his films, the concept so dominates the narrative that a critic must ruin the twists in order to discuss it at all. So in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I'll just note that Caddo Lake involves time jumping with two stories separated by decades running concurrently. It results in a materialist narrative à la Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974) with characters looking in on events that they have already experienced and the concept is handled with pop-art (not Pop Art) deft and grace.

Tuesday is even better. A terminally ill 15 year old, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), encounters Death in the form of a shape-shifting macaw. Tuesday's mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is understandably alarmed by the bird's presence and takes some drastic measures to prevent it from taking away Tuesday with some world-historic consequences. The concept perspires glucose and the reduced narrative/cast of characters has a drawback in its failure to lend any complexity to Tuesday's Black nurse (Leah Harvey). But the simplicity and force and sheer weirdness of the Grim Parrot steamrolls over most of the saccharine moments and helps us organize our own inchoate thoughts about death.

Best of all is The Substance, a repulsive body-horror film I was certain I would loathe. Demi Moore stars in a career performance as Elisabeth Sparkle, a 50-year-old actress fired from her aerobics show for the crime of aging. She encounters a serum called The Substance which will allow her to appear as a younger version of herself. Problem is tight-bodied, twenty-something Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges from her back all Manitou-like and leaves a ripped-apart Elisabeth writhing on the bathroom floor. As per the concept, the two must switch back and forth every seven days for injections of stabilizer fluid. But as Sue starts to self-actualize (and take over Elisabeth's aerobics show to great fame), she ignores these instructions with grotesque results for both of them.

Any professor working on next semester's Feminist Film Theory 101 syllabus couldn't find a starker, more course-ready text. It explains Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One for the slasher-film set and the purity of the concept makes few concessions to a complexly textured story world. Feminist rage powers the film forward with a punky anger-energy augmented by Raffertie's howling techno score. It's about misogyny rather than being misogynistic although that's very much open for debate (as with The Searchers' racism*). And it's getting under audiences' skins, the rare non-franchise film to clean up at the box office. Howl along today!

Caddo Lake (Celine Held and Logan George, 2024) - A-minus

Tuesday (Daina O. Pusic, 2024) - A-minus

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) - A-minus

The Searchers - A+ (just in case you needed to be told) 

*Lehman, Peter. “Looking at Look’s Missing Reverse Shot: Psychoanalysis and Style in John Ford’s The Searchers.” In The Western Reader. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, eds. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998, 259-268. [taken from Wide Angle 4.4, pp. 65-70, 1981].

Direct Action (Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, 2024)

Direct Action is a 212-minute documentary comprising just 41 shots observing the daily operations of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes commune, one of the ZAD (Zone à Défendre, or Zone to Defend) communities engaged in eco-activism against the French government. They successfully halted an airport project in 2018 but continue to fight various ecologically destructive initiatives. Russell and Cailleau spent about 100 days filming at the commune's 4,000-acre autonomous zone and despite occasional footage of violent protests, much of Direct Action has a quiet, Jeanne Dielman-like feel to it - long takes of making bread, sawing wood, cooking crepes, gardening, etc. 

About ten minutes into its U.S. premiere Monday night at the New York Film Festival in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, a loud sound came from the back of the theater. It didn't feel like it came from the film and it had many viewers, myself included, looking around for the source. The sound was of a possibly panicked crowd, quite chaotic and disorienting. Since it kept playing for at least ten minutes, everyone in the audience (again, myself included) took it to be part of the film somehow. The sound played over several cuts which felt sloppy, especially given that one shot was a stationary low angle of a tower and another was a close-up of an activist explaining the best ways to deal with police interrogations.

At one point, the panicked crowd sound traveled to the front of the theater and I began to accept that the film was being accompanied by some sort of sound installation. As I was trying to figure out how the filmmakers achieved this effect, I heard a verbal fight between two women in what I assumed was also part of the sound installation. I prepared to strap myself in for what would promise to be a wild sonic ride; perhaps the filmmakers were using these sounds as a Brechtian distanciation device. 

It was only then that I could discern that an animated audience member was yelling at someone. I adjusted my eyes and finally saw that there were two people standing in front of the screen and staging a protest. They started in the back row and moved up front but I was completely oblivious to all of this activity. I heard "They're aestheticizing direct action rather than engaging in it" and "While you're watching, bombs are dropping!" I filmed about 40 seconds of it which you can see below. The film stopped and security ejected the two protestors.

I spoke with a guy sitting in my row and he noticed that the protestors had a large backpack with them which must have been housing a speaker from which the panicked crowd sound emerged. That would explain how the sound traveled with them to the front of the theater. The film started up again and an employee shouted an apology to us and asked if we wanted the film to start over. After a collective "No!" the film continued with no other interruptions apart from the usual talkers and phone users.

As for the film itself, difficult, rewarding, but I have to concede that the protest made it all the more memorable and, at the very least, an excellent teaching tool for the upcoming sound module in my Introduction to Film course. 

Grade: A-minus

 

The Damned (Roberto Minervini, 2024)

The Damned is purportedly a fiction film with a screenplay written by Minervini. But his m.o. has always been to blend fiction with documentary and it's unclear how much of the dialogue was improvised or how much was influenced by Minervini's discussions with his actors (or entirely the product of Minervini's imagination). Despite a mostly stationary camera, The Damned feels more like a direct cinema documentary than a hermetically sealed diegetic world. In the Winter of 1862, a group of volunteer soldiers are sent to the western territories (specifically, Montana where it was filmed) and, with the Civil War raging back east, they wonder about the purpose of their mission. The film is comprised of disconnected scenes of the men grappling with their day-to-day existence as soldiers - discussing why they joined the army, learning how to scan the landscape for dangers, helping one another with various wounds, trying to find a balance between idealism and cynicism (and perhaps even nihilism), etc. Minervini treats the Civil War with a parallax view at best. As he notes in the press kit, "I wanted to shed the weight of history a little bit to facilitate this experiential journey, to allow for something more cathartic and more primordial to come from within and from these individuals." He achieves this goal as The Damned sweeps you up in the flow of these men trying to find meaning in their work as they try to stay alive. But so far, Roberto Minervini has yet to fulfill the promise of his expansive Louisiana/The Other Side (2015), one of the finest films of the century. Hypnotic as much of The Damned is, it feels slight compared to Louisiana, so rigidly focused that you long for the weight of some other force to bear down on the project, if only to ensure you will recall the film a year from now. 

Grade: A-minus

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are two Malayali nurses living together in Mumbai. Prabha's husband from an arranged marriage lives in Germany and she hasn't seen him in years. Anu, younger and more idealistic than Prabha, is in love with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a Muslim man, and they're both worried about how Anu's Hindu family will accept the news. An older coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is being harassed by her landlord who wants to sell the apartment building in which she resides to real estate developers. She quits her job in disgust and moves back to her seaside village. Prabha and Anu accompany her on the journey and the change of locale, an explicit contrast to the bustle of Mumbai, winds up rejuvenating for all three women.

Before the New York Film Festival screening Monday night, Kapadia explained that the subtitles would indicate which non-Hindi languages were being spoken throughout the film. It's a perfect illustration of how disorienting Mumbai can appear for anyone trying to navigate their lives in the city, with language a specific story point as some characters profess difficulty with learning Hindi. Kapadia's Mumbai is one where people work long hours and then greet insomnia upon finally getting home. Artificial light dominates as day and night become meaningless distinctions, hence the perhaps utopian promise of the film's title. But as much the "imagine" part of the title as the "light." The seaside locale, itself festooned with a variety of party lights, affords the three principals the time for reflection so much so that the climactic event may be entirely the product of Pradha's imagination. It's a beautifully acted, delicately observed film, one that threatens to get lost between brasher films if not in your own overstimulated memory bank.

Grade: A-minus

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

The most straightforward Cronenberg film since A Dangerous Method (2011), The Shrouds tells a downright Oedipal tale of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a wealthy businessman mourning the loss of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). With apparently bottomless reserves of capital, he founds GraveTech, a state-of-the-art graveyard that allows clients to monitor the decaying bodies of their loved ones. The bodies are wrapped in full-coverage shroud technology that facilitates close-up and 360 views of the deceased. One evening, a select number of graves are vandalized, including Becca's, and Kash's IT guy Maury (Guy Pearce), who is unhappily divorced from Becca's sister Terry (also Kruger), eventually regains access to the grave feeds. But he discovers nodes growing on some of the bones (again, including Becca's), nodes that may be surveillance devices. This wrinkle plunges Vincent into a maelstrom of conspiracies and he spends the second half of the film wondering who to trust, even his sexy AI avatar assistant Hunny (also Kruger). 

However convoluted all of that sounds, Cronenberg drops not a single spinning plate over 119 minutes, apart perhaps from a few awkward dream vs. reality moments. In fact, as with Twisters, of all things, I honestly thought there was an hour left to go as the final credits started to roll. But that left an empty feeling that might not work in the film's favor. I kept longing for some pushback from the women characters akin to an early scene in which a first date, Myrna Slotnik (Jennifer Dale), at GraveTech doesn't go too well; in classic feminist film theory mode, Myra makes it clear to Karsh that she does not want to look at Becca's decaying body on the GraveTech monitor. And Kruger's sex-which-is-not-one characters are not so much foils as enigmas helping Karsh speed along his oedipal path towards knowledge. 

Then again, maybe a bit of emptiness is what Cronenberg was after. Karsh is an obvious stand-in for Cronenberg who lost his wife Carolyn to cancer in 2017. He presents himself as a husk incapable of believing that someone so vibrant and alive as Becca (or really anyone?) can just be gone one moment and then spend eternity rotting away. And when confronted with larger, inconceivable structures of political intrigue that generate conspiracy theories, as Karsh must do, perhaps a modicum of emptiness serves as a necessary component of mental health, keeping cynicism, nihilism, and madness at bay.

Grade: A-minus

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024)

On one level, this is Serra's least difficult film to date - a direct cinema gaze at Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey in action at various arenas in Spain. But on a level most Serraesque, it's a brutal watch - two women sitting next to me at the New York Film Festival screening last night left about 40 minutes in ("We just can't take anymore," they apologized but I was more than happy standing up to allow them to leave our row). Digital technology affords Serra the opportunity to hang back and observe the violence unfold in unflinching, unforgiving long takes. The camera focuses so closely on Rey and/or the various bulls that it sometimes feels as if he's performing on a Dune-like sand planet. We hear the crowds (and an occasional ominous score) on the soundtrack but we never see them. These lengthy moments are interspersed with scenes of Rey getting ready in hotel rooms and post-fight car rides in which Serra planted a camera and a light in the vehicle and left the footage up to fate given that there was no room for him in the car. As with his fiction features, he shot hundreds of hours and then spent months editing. 

As an anthropological document, it's fascinating although it grows numbing over 123 minutes, a condition you may welcome. Knowing next to nothing about bullfighting, I learned a great deal, chiefly that bullfighting is a team sport with several handlers/players assisting Rey in vanquishing the bull and extolling his prowess in the car rides after (his huge cojones are celebrated many times). The extreme theatricality, not just of the performance/sport but the preparation as well (jumping into the skintight pants, kissing a rosary, checking for bleeding wounds, etc.), provides added visual/dramatic interest.

But now that I've taken it all in, I'm not sure of the use/replay value of the film. Which is fine because neither does Serra. At the Q&A after the screening, the phrase he used most was "I don't know." He certainly didn't know what footage he would get from the car rides and he explained that he originally intended to follow two bullfighters but decided the other lacked whatever amount of élan. Like all his films, Afternoons of Solitude came alive in the editing and even then, the result feels aleatory and fiercely experimental. His m.o. has its detractors and he doesn't do himself any favors in claiming "I'm the greatest editor in the world" as he did last night. But I can't help but guffaw in pleasure at such an uncompromising, and extraordinarily well-spoken, auteur. After several successive masterpieces, he's made a merely good film. And given that he claims this will be his last documentary ever, I'm excited to see the transcendence he serves up next.

 Grade: A-minus

Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024)

Sometime around 2020, the great 1990s indie band Pavement wanted to make a film about themselves. But ever the rakish ironists, they wanted one that would, according to the Q&A after the New York Film Festival screening last night, "avoid the legacy trap." So they purposely did not seek out a documentary filmmaker and instead enlisted Alex Ross Perry, a specialist in spiky indie dramas although he'd already proven himself as a worthy chronicler of 1990s indie rock with the fictional 2018 Her Smell. To give the band what they wanted, i.e., to critique the very nature of the rockumentary, Perry devised three events/art pranks that he filmed over the course of several years - a Tribeca pop-up museum in September 2022 called "Pavements 1933-2022” (“New York—London—Tokyo—Stockton”), a musical called Slanted! Enchanted! at the Sheen Center in NoHo in December 2022, and a cheesy, feature-length Pavement biopic called Range Life, starring Tim Heidecker as Gerard Cosloy and Jason Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi of Matador Records and Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus, which was screened at Brooklyn's Nitehawk Cinema in 2023. Footage from these events, including lengthy interviews with the actors tasked to portray the band in the musical and the biopic, combine with archival footage and material shot by Perry during the band's 2022 tour to create Pavements. 

These events are the ones that avoid the legacy trap. The museum was bedizened with faux artifacts, the musical injected earnestness into an oeuvre high on slacker snark, and the biopic told lies. Pavements, then, turns out to be a rather straightforward chronicle of what transpired over the last few years in this project. This is not a film which stacks fiction onto documentary to inform and confuse one another, e.g., Roberto Minervini's bountiful Louisiana AKA The Other Side (2015). The art pranks, no matter how wacky and legacy-demolishing, are set apart from the archival and recent footage which wind up telling a conventional rockumentary story anyway as it traces the band's history through its formation, discography, breakup, and various reunions. You keep waiting for Pavements to confuse you but it feels like two hours of throat clearing before a Godardian genre-scramble that never comes. 

During the Q&A, Perry tried to sell the film as precisely such a scramble by noting that the museum was a de facto film set. And instead of interviewing contemporary bands about how Pavement influenced them, he had Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Speedy Ortiz and Bully perform Pavement songs at the event because "you need B roll." But how B roll of bands performing, as well as typical documentary fodder such as a shot of Rob Sheffield's Rolling Stone article praising the musical or an article about the belated TikTok success of the b-side "Harness Your Hopes," instead of talking heads extolling Pavement is more legacy/genre-defying remains unclear. 

To be certain, Pavements is still a wild ride. It borrows the frames-within-frames palimpsest style of Todd Haynes' superior The Velvet Underground (2021) and, as such, the editor (and huge Pavement stan) Robert Greene deserves as much credit as anyone. But the glimpses of Range Life and Slanted! Enchanted! are even wilder. So here's hoping both appear as extras on the Blu-ray.

Grade: B

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)

For his first Spanish-language film, Audiard is in a bit over his head here with this musical about Mexican drug cartel leader Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) who offers millions to going-nowhere lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) to help speed up gender confirmation surgery and transition into the titular character. Under Manitas' threatening gaze, Rita researches the possibilities of such an endeavor which takes her all over the world, including a transgender surgery hospital in Thailand. This occasions a number called "La Vaginoplastia" which, like most of the songs in the film, was co-written by Audiard who also wrote the screenplay. For an unknown jarring reason, the surgeons and patients sing of surgery with a crassness that verges on the offensive. Audiard may have intended it as a parody of trans paranoia. But that suggestion evaporates in a later earnest ballad sung by Emilia about being "half woman, half man" as if gender conforms to precise recipe measurements. So while Audiard could stand a visit to the Genderbread Person, he makes up for this deficiency through the sheer chutzpah of telling this story through spontaneous outbursts of song. Like the performers in all fine musicals, the main characters here, including Selena Gomez as Manitas' beleaguered wife Jessi and Adriana Paz as Emilia's love interest Epifanía, sing into what the great theorist Scott McMillin calls "the voice of the musical," a collective identity that transcends the individual psychology of any particular character no matter how principal. It's a testament to the art form that all four performers shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes in May. And it's a testament to Audiard's conception that we wind up falling in love with each one of them despite their (and the film's) various shortcomings.

Grade: B+