Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

SPOILERS (but gawd, who could possibly care?)

Let's get the paltry good out of the way first. I admired Fennell's Promising Young Woman from 2020 so I had mild hope for Saltburn. Indeed, many of the performances were top-notch (if you care about such things). A few of the vicious one-liners were funny although I never laughed out loud once and wonder about the performative nature of the laughter to which lovers of this film have confessed. The score was intermittently arresting. And the final scene, solely for the long-take display of Barry Keoghan's naked body, promises love-cannon fodder for ages. Beyond that, Saltburn is one of the least promising films of 2023. 

Boosters cite De Palma and giallo in hyping Saltburn, a good shorthand for what I hated about it given that I'm blind to the dubious charms of Carrie and Suspiria. This means we're in Style Over Substance territory here and we're not supposed to question character motivations or address glaring plot holes. But as with De Palma and Argento, Fennell’s sense of style is too half-assed to compensate. A red dining room here, a bacchanalian party there, and plenty of beautiful flesh in between are not enough to paper over the thin story. Why bother with story at all? Why not empty your characters of humanity and transform them into goal-disoriented nodes of pleasure as Cronenberg did in Crash? Why not amp the style beyond the teleological as in, oh, The Color of Pomegranates?

To the extent that Saltburn is a horror film, I hate it too. As with Jason and Michael and Freddie after the first films in the franchises, what does Oliver Quick (Keoghan) want? Fennell gives us so little backstory to chew on that Oliver remains a pug-beautiful cipher. He’s a middle-class lad who wants the good life. So he kills an entire damn wealthy family and dances naked in the palatial estate he has dastardly inherited from them and…that’s the end point of this goal-oriented story? This is what he was truly working towards with reportedly clever flashbacks to show how he pulled off all this mayhem? He seems happy gyrating to the eye-rollingly corny “Murder on the Dance Floor.” But it’s difficult to know for sure that his desire has been satiated given the character’s cardboard construction. What is he going to do tomorrow? Even as a critique of capitalism’s tendency to create arrivistes seething with envy, it’s toothless, weak-minded satire. And I’m not supposed to care about or even mention American cousin Farleigh’s (Archie Madekwe) reaction to his extended family being slaughtered so I’ll bow out here.

Grade: D

 

Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

A film like this made sense in 1946 when Michael Curtiz told the story of Cole Porter as a brash heterosexual in Night and Day. For Bradley Cooper in 2023 to center a Leonard Bernstein biopic on bisexual Bernstein's marriage to Felicia Montealegre is no-steps-forward, six-steps-back Oscar-bait filmmaking. Bernstein's relationships with clarinetist David Oppenheim and musician Tom Cothran, for whom Berstein left Montealegre in the mid-1970s, are given offensively short shrift. The Bernstein-Montealegre marriage structures the entire film and so we get borderline homophobic synopses on Wikipedia such as "his homosexuality is diverted soon afterward, when he meets Felicia Montealegre." When Montealegre becomes ill with lung cancer, Bernstein returns to her and their three kids. Cooper places these scenes as the climax of the film, thus lending the impression that Bernstein's ultimate achievement was taking up his proper place within a heterosexual family unit. 

Even worse, centering such clueless representational politics results in a narratively unkempt film. Maestro comes across as a series of pins in a bulletin board - some musical sequences here, some discussions of craft there, one (can't have any more than one) coke-fueled gay party, all ever so briefly swirling around the heterosexual romance at the fulcrum. The only moments when the film comes alive are during the de facto (and welcome in this context) musical appreciation courses (e.g., when Bernstein is teaching conducting to a young acolyte) or when Cooper abandons the story altogether (the Mahler's Resurrection Symphony scene). A stunningly bad movie.

 

Grade: C-minus (upped a notch so I don't seem like a total crackpot) 

Things I Love!

As with the Things I Hate, so with these deliberately frivolous items to which I much prefer the equal distribution of wealth, the end of genocide, etc.

1. Hotel toilet paper folding - I was going to use a cumbersome descriptor for this practice until I discovered there's a Wiki entry for it! I loved "toilegami" initially for the ease with which it allows you to start a roll without scraping around to find an opening. But Wiki schooled me on the now-obvious point that "the practice is meant to assure customers that their hotel room has been cleaned." The minimum amount of effort in creating of culture of care. P. S. The pic below is from the Hotel Monasterio in Peru. I long to pull up that elegant, gold-plated sticker and start wiping.

2. Cutting boards - Oh you can use these things instead of hacking away at your counter top? Huh.

3. Making sandwiches for the mister - Unlike exhausted parents, I can romanticize making lunches because it's a new activity for me. It just clears away the fog of the day by harnessing your time. If only for a brief moment, the minutes haven't fallen down a TikTok-shaped hole.

4. Bread ends - I don't get the bypassing of bread ends. They're breadier! Or, ok, crustier. But then, I don't grasp why anyone would cut the crusts off their sandwiches. You get more bang for your bread with the crust.

5. Cilantro - Can you sense I've been cooking more? If mint is that motormouth who insists on making your work meetings last forever, then cilantro is the old friend you Zoomed with last week who made you think, "Hey - I need to kick it with them more often." Cilantro has a bite without singeing your mucosa. It's so flavorful, in fact, that Chipotle should charge extra for it instead of guac (counterpoint: both should be free).

6. Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun: Rice + Probiotics (SPF50+ PA++++) - I'm in my unguent era. Let’s see here - cleanser once a day, minimal exfoliation since my gorilla ass must shave often, toner, serum, two moisturizers, and now, because my dermatologist found some actinic keratosis, possible rosacea, and various navi, I have four ointments to cram into pores. All of this beneath SPF, many varieties of which burn my eyes or leave a nasty white cast. This one is a bit pricey. But it seeps in quickly and avoids the heaviness, look, and smell of trad sunscreen.

7. Motion-sensor lights - As I slide into my AARP years, I’m still warmed by night lights. Whether a beloved oven light or a busier bubble light, they are a key component to homemaking, warning of a potential visit from Jason Voorhees and guiding you to your third pee of the evening. For a more environmentally sound alternative, though, motion-sensor lights offer all the benefits of the above without further burning the planet. And they’re perfect for tracking cats as they engage in their gangsta activities at 4am.

8. Discogs - I'm on it weekly, sometimes daily to look at album covers I've never encountered in the record store wilds or to read liners. And I love the lists such as this one detailing odd formats or this one cataloguing queer releases (this one too).

9. Internet Archive (archive.org) - The internet’s library has evolved into one of the greatest cultural services of our era. The range of materials to borrow or download is astonishing. Check out the Marion Stokes Movies, Audio & Video Collection after taking in the too-close-to-home-for-a-digital-hoarder-like-me documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (Matt Wolf, 2019). Watch a rare-as-funk film such as Palm Beach (Albie Thoms, 1978). Get your research on at the Media History Digital Library. Download over 200 Guggenheim catalogues. Listen to hundreds of underground cassettes at the Noise-Arch Archive. Here are over 70,000 zines. Visit one of my favorite sites ever, The Neglected Book Page, and then use Archive to check out one of the godforsaken novels written about there. Search for Wacky Packages and wind up at Miscellaneous Pulp Mystery! Or do none of these things for fear that Adorno will be cackling at you from the beyond. 

10.  The New York Times Games app - There are few greater feelings than arriving at “sleep” as the last item on your evening to-do list. For me, that means slowing down a day of hyper functionality with this app. I get in bed every night with the Mini, the Crossword, Spelling Bee, Wordle, Letter Boxed, and Connections and occasionally Tiles (my fervent Sudoku years are behind me). And hells yes I cheat on the crossword especially. Every sports-related clue is looked up with no guilt. And the Mr. helps me out when a corner is giving me hell. Besides didn't Kahn Jr. on King of the Hill say that's what sophisticated NYC couples do?

Item: Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) slightly better than Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)!

Wherein I concede that Mulholland Drive is indeed better than Lost Highway. But only slightly - ever since Mulholland's release, I've been baffled by its status as the best-reviewed film of the aughts if not the century when I've always found it about on par with its lesser-feted neonoir predecessor. A recent rewatch of Lost Highway confirms the widespread notion that the film loses steam when Fred Madison (a perfectly cast Bill Pullman - like Robert Cummings in Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 Saboteur, he's the kind of average schmuck who makes the evil swirling around him all the more arbitrary and menacing) becomes Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). And Lynch still didn't know quite what to do with his female characters at this point in his career, so Patricia Arquette remains a juvenile fantasy as the this-sex-which-is-not-one femme fatale Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield. Then again, no one comes off as a well-rounded entity here, especially an even more perfectly cast Robert Blake who, in a scene creepier than any in Mulholland Drive, calls himself on the phone. Lynch's genius, such that it is, is for masticating narrative sense while maintaining his hold over us with psychological/emotional sense and Lost Highway still packs a wallop in the unspecified willies department.

Not wanting to add much too much more to the already existing mountains of discourse on Mulholland, I'll just note that its fans are a dreary lot for their insistence that the film does, in fact, tell a story. My take mirrors Jonathan Rosenbaum's: "The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable." Indeed, how could you possibly ruin the story with a Rosebud or Keyser Söze-like spoiler? It simply doesn't work by resolving an enigma or tying down loose narrative flaps. And even if one could prove that a story results from Lynch's plot, why would this be the primary mode of reception when, like Lost Highway, it's selling psychological, not narrative, sense? Great flick, though. And more hardcore lesbian than I remembered.

Lost Highway - A-minus 

Mulholland Drive - A