The Longest Yard (Robert Aldrich, 1974)

This one is simple to suss out. Check out that mouthy poster below. It doesn't lie. Everything except the 45-minute football game is a mess, tonally, structurally, narratively. The first half drags out the exposition and still leaves many fundamental questions unanswered. This includes dreary attempts at humor and a shoddily written warden character that the normally perfect Eddie Albert can do little to salvage. The game, by contrast, is tight, pure excitement. Any film that gets me to bite my nails over the outcome of a football game has got to be performing some kind of miracle. So that's a strong B indeed. But no crowd-pleasing sports flick needs to run 123 minutes. Trim that first half and we'd have a fabulous genre pic. 

Grade: B 

Deception (Arnaud Desplechin, 2021); Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022); Company (Third Broadway Revival, 2021)

Deception (Arnaud Desplechin, 2021)

Deception is one of the most egregious violations of the Show Don't Tell rule in cinema history. On one hand, Desplechin had no choice but to tell tell tell since the 1990 Philip Roth novel on which the film is based is all dialogue. But on the other, perhaps that was an indication that no one should attempt to film the thing because Deception is a disaster. The French excel at cinema featuring little more than characters talking for the entire running time, e.g., select titles from Rohmer, Eustache, Garrel, etc. But the talk either points to a world outside the local concerns of the story at hand or epitomizes an exquisite waste of time. Deception dotes on Philip (Denis Podalydès) aka Philip Roth. Or the Philip Roth that comes through conversation, i.e., maybe not the real Philip Roth. For who could know the real Philip Roth including the (real?) Philip Roth himself? Isn't all self-fashioning mere deception? The film stays at this level of Philosophy 101 throughout as Philip's King Kong ego pulls all the women in his life (few of whom have names, e.g., Léa Seydoux plays "The English Lover") into his orbit. What any of this has to do with Desplechin remains a mystery. Even worse, sometimes Desplechin will show and tell for double the dreariness as when Philip's wife tells Philip that she's seen a revealing notebook of his and then we see her seeing the revealing notebook. In ventilating this airless novel, Desplechin suffocates it all the more. Nadir: the mock trial in which feminists accuse Philip of misogyny. 

Grade: C

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022)

It's no Crash. But I loved it, of course. I need to see it with closed captioning, though, since I missed a lot of the sotto voce lines - what did Kristen Stewart (a great performance, appropriately unnatural in its perpetual weepiness) whisper to Viggo Mortensen at his first performance with Léa Seydoux? Also, much of the crime aspect of the film escaped me. For now, I read the final shot as hopeful. Or, more precisely, the only hope we have to survive the destructive path of capitalism is to rearrange our bodies to use destruction as our fuel. 

Grade: A-minus

Company (Third Broadway Revival, 2021)

This revival has Katrina Lenk playing a woman, Bobbie, in the role Dean Jones originated in 1970 as a man, Bobby. The gender reversals do nothing to diminish the majesty of some of Sondheim's greatest music and lyrics, their Bacharachian swells, their dizzying repetitions, their absurdly long notes. The finest moments in musicals are ensemble numbers anyway precisely because they subsume a character's particularity. Company's money shot comes early in the opening title (and best) number. The cast is crammed into Bobbie's apartment, waiting to surprise her on her 35th birthday. But in this production, the apartment moves to the front of the stage for the final chorus at which point our audience burst into helpless applause. The sole purpose of this narratively unnecessary movement is to bring us closer into the company. And for a brief moment, there were no protagonists and antagonists, no performers and audience, just orgasmic oneness. No other art form better offers that illusion.

Still, like so many musicals, Company is too damn long - 2 hours and 40 minutes including intermission in this iteration. I felt my attention flagging in the second act despite the presence of several classic numbers. Not being a ballad guy, I suggest cutting "Someone Is Waiting" and "Marry Me a Little," Bobbie/Bobby's solo numbers from the first act. Bobbie/Bobby is the least interesting character in the show, presumably by design. Things happen to and around her/him. So retaining only "Being Alive" for the finale would lend the song extra force and bring to the fore its complexities, holding marriage as exhilarating and marriage as stifling in tension with one another.

Grade: A-minus 

Monthly Top Ten: May 2022

1. Chunky. Now I know why various internet dorks were ripping on me for preferring to read comic books on pdf. I had been unzipping my cbz/cbr files and scratching my head about what to do with the resulting jpgs, often opting to turn them into pdfs. So Chunky, an app for reading comic books on cbz/cbr, has been a revelation. It's reacquainted me with old favorites like Julie Doucet's eternal Dirty Plotte (can you imagine what Muratova or Żuławski could have accomplished in adapting her work?!?) and introduced me to some new favorites such as...

2. Yuichi Yokoyama: Iceland (Retrofit, 2017). Retrofit calls Yokoyama "the creator of neo manga" which here means a slice of indigestible avant-garderie. At 92 pages, the story is no such thing, a sci-fi-I-guess concatenation of disconnected narrative beats. Gawky close-ups and jagged lines flatten the space into one long scream. It seems like a found thing, a energy pulse from the future awaiting a consumption that may never come. 

3. Blutch: Peplum (New York Review Comics, 2016). In his helpful introduction to this reissue of the 1998 Cornélius French original, Edward Gauvin likens Peplum to a remix of Fellini's Satyricon, itself a remix of Petronius' Satyricon. Blutch (né Christian Hincker) follows a group of bandits as they drag a cumbersome frozen woman around the Roman Empire. Tony Shakespearean dialogue (including a straight-forward retelling of the murder of Julius Caesar near the beginning) clashes with coarse outbursts ("Will you shut up?!"). The picaresque narrative throws up a never-ending supply of barely explained dangers. In a sense, Peplum is all clash, with characters, all of whom seem either dead or on the brink of dying, fucking and fighting one another in splotchy environs. An extremely disturbing epilogue does nothing to tie up loose ends. The authorial voice mimics an infant's inability to transition between tones, laughing or bawling within a moment's notice. But a fever-ridden infant. And one with a working knowledge of Roman culture.

4. The Big Gay Comic Book: Volumes 1 and  2 (Bluewater, 2014). Quite the opposite of the two titles above, The Big Gay Comic Book recalls the infamous Rock 'N' Roll Comics from the late 1980s/early 1990s - cheesy pre-Wikipedia biographies of popular musical icons. Here Madonna, Tom Daley, Kathy Griffin, Anderson Cooper, RuPaul, Keith Haring, Lady Gaga, etc. get the same treatment. Poking through the cheese are some bizarre moments as when Robbie Williams breaks the fourth wall in the Kylie Minogue entry or when the Cher title begins with what one presumes to be a stalker claiming intimate knowledge of Cher only to be revealed at the end as Chaz Bono (!). 

5. Vanessa Bayer and Jane Treacy’s Must Haves (QVC, 2022). Do watch Showtime's choking-on-your-tongue hilarious I Love That For You, a half-hour comedy about Joanna Gold (Vanessa Bayer), a woman who fakes a cancer diagnosis and becomes a star on a home shopping network. After you've downed a few episodes, there's a mind-bendingly meta treat for you streaming on QVC. In order to promote the show she co-created, Bayer occupied QVC for an hour with longtime host Treacy selling clothes and jewelry including a herringbone bracelet with a lobster clasp which plays a key role on I Love That For You. You find yourself laughing at nothing in particular, just the crazy fact that this exists. The most disorienting instance of the contradictory pleasures of capitalism since the Oil of Olay musical The Road to Glow.

6. Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977). The incomparable Gena Rowlands (92 in a few days!) stars as Myrtle Gordon, an actress who changes the play in which she's starring because she sees no hope in the fiftysomething main character, a situation that may reflect her own life as a feted professional of a certain age. As a portrait of the difficulty women experience in controlling their own destinies, Opening Night is peerless. And even on a strictly narrative level, where Cassavetes is supposedly deficient, the film keeps you on the edge as you fear opening night may never happen. But Cassavetes clearly didn't know what to do with Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell, 47 years out from her film debut, one year away from her role in Grease, and two years away from her Christmas 1979 death), the playwright whose words Gordon changes. One presumes this is because as an even older woman, Goode has accepted her lot and internalized whatever disappointments have come her way. But that is a truth worth telling too, one we glean in fits and starts from previous rehearsals of her play, and her apparent acceptance of Gordon's changes at the very end of the film feels false. Then again, applying standards of realism to Cassavetes is always a fool's game, no matter how raw his films come across. Instead, it'd prove more fruitful to put Opening Night in conversation with two subsequent films, (the first awful, the other one of the finest films of this century), it may have influenced - Noises Off (Peter Bogdanovich [who shows up in a brief cameo at the end of Opening Night], 1992) and Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2000).

7. A Night in Heaven (John G. Avildsen, 1983). A good movie is lurking somewhere within this Joan Tewkesbury-penned mess about a community college professor (Lesley Ann Warren) who discovers a student (Christopher Atkins, angelic) she flunked in Public Speaking is a stripper. But it was clearly mangled on the way to theatres. At times, it feels like you're watching the sui generis omnibus train wreck Night Train to Terror (Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, 1985). Several scenes lead into narrative dead ends. Basic story information is either needlessly elaborated or given little air. One crucial conversation plays out in a master shot as if no coverage was available or the editor neglected to use any of it. Still, like the "Special Fan Edition" of Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995), the phantom good movie within would be less fascinating than the tattered corpse before us here. At the very least, it's an excellent teaching tool to convey the difficulty of telling even the simplest story with cinema. 

 8. Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986). Criminally boring. Upped a notch for not just the too-short volleyball scene but for Maverick deciding that jeans would be appropriate attire for beach sports. D-minus. Just for the record. 

 9. U.S. Marines Pride Month tweet. Hi, gay! Happy Pride Month! Astonishingly tone-deaf in the wake of the murders in Uvalde (and Buffalo and...), the U.S. Marines have color coded six bullets to resemble the rainbow flag for this most gay of months. Someone somewhere must be proud, probably Adorno in his Super Egotistical way. 

10. The criticism of Kieran Press-Reynolds. You couldn't ask for a better tour guide through what we'll (and he'll) call internet music - the fly-by sounds you hear on TikTok, Roblox, YouTube, Soundcloud, the like. Hyper, long-winded, pockmarked with links, chuffed to create new genres, his essays replicate the amped-up one moment, luded-out the next tenor of the Euphoria generation. His newest piece is on Swedish collective Drain Gang and their de facto pope Bladee whose music "has become constitutional for a rising swarm of offbeat internet artists shooting off in a plethora of directions and shaping the future of music, even if some washed purists whine that it all sounds like liquid ass." You don't want to be one of those people, now do you? So read up. Here's hoping he avoids the path of his daddy Simon who lost his pioneering spirit once he turned 40 and/or had a baby.