Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung, 2024)

Not much to say about this one except to note that it's predictably and ominously okay, corporate, quirk-free, and threatening to derail the career of the promising Chung who helmed Minari, the best film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 2020. Three brief observations:

1. The film is in a long Hollywood tradition of crapping on traditional avenues of expertise, perfect for the internet era when scores of malcontents are "just doing their own research." Daisy Edgar-Jones' character represents the status quo of education while Glen Powell's crew are Salt of the Earth nomads who are supposedly free of institutional constraints and a profit motive (how do they eat, though?). They look so crunchy that they could slip imperceptibly into Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. 

2. I was in chronic pain and on a variety of drugs while watching and I honestly thought there was at least another half an hour (or more!) at the end of the film. I assumed Jones' would go talk to The Weather Council or whatever in New York, they would dismiss her findings, and then she'd rejoin the Powell crew for more tornado thrills. I'd wager that that's a mark in the film's favor (or I was on some primo pain killers). 

3. Don't let Powell blind you to David Corenswet's hotness.

Grade: C+ (downgraded a notch so I'm not tempted to revisit)

Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981); The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980); Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947)

In his terrific new book Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema, Steven Rybin writes that the images in The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) "haunt us in ways that go beyond their functional place in a cleanly modulated, classical narrative, taking on, as so many images in Carpenter’s cinema do, a distinctive status as haunting details that remain with us long after the details of the narrative drive have been forgotten" (167). Rybin's contention here is, of course, the escape valve defenders of horror/slasher films wield to dismiss the genre's frequently sloppy narratives, especially their often risible endings. And while I agree with Rybin at least with respect to The Fog at its best, the narrative drive sometimes sticks with you despite your best efforts to go along with the style-over-substance defenses of the genre. This is an unenviable situation to find oneself in because you get pilloried if you dare to bring up some narrative inconsistency or even just request basic story information to make sense of the thing. 

Unfortunately for me, the one moment I remembered from Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) when I saw it first-run at 11 years old (!) was the scene with the hooker and the sailor in the train station phone booth. Given my age, I thought there was some arcane sex thing happening that caused the sailor to leave the phone booth in disgust. But over forty years later, watching the film again last week, I still don't know! Or rather, I know only slightly more. I'm assuming what happened is that the sailor came too quickly. I also assume that they're both upset about this because they had agreed on $30 for a 30-minute session. But a 30-minute blow job in a public place? Why is such a ludicrous deal even on the table? And why does the hooker get so initially upset about the sailor's quick nut? It's $30 for a job that took about a minute tops. 

OK so fine, I'm focusing on something drearily specific and ignoring all of De Palma's hallmark fireworks. But then why include this exchange in the first place? Since Burke (John Lithgow) is going to kill the hooker anyway, why not just have Burke proposition her and cut out the sailor entirely? And this in a scene which is extraneous to begin with as greyer eminences than me such as Robin Wood (in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond) have pointed out. Why not cut the fat and get to the fireworks that are De Palma's raison d'être? 

Criticism of this nature gets you accused of being one of what Hitchcock called "our old friends, the plausibles," those viewers who would ignore questions of form while harping on implausible plot points. The irony here is that the only such moment in Hitchcock's entire oeuvre that renders me a plausible, as opposed to dozens in De Palma's, is the scene in which Cary Grant holds onto the knife in Townsend's back in North by Northwest, an action I find narratively lazy. But all viewers become plausibles at some point, even De Palma's most ardent supporters. My plausibility meter gets triggered by violence, especially against women whose murdered bodies have been strewn across a century-plus of cinema. If a director is going to have a character murdered, then all the narrative t's better be crossed in order to justify the slaughter to whatever extent justification is even possible. If a murder is not going to approached with a certain amount of gravitas, then a narrative gaffe will only cheapen the effect and infuriate all the more. For me to accept an implausibility, there must be some other compensation beyond a gorgeous tracking shot or rococo set design. And I get it, misanthropes - humans are difficult to like. Let me hold off on any moral indignation to therefore state that it's easy and hence boring to imagine them slaughtered. Attempting to make even the barest of interpersonal connections with others would make for a fresher cinema if only because such a route is more difficult and hence consistently ignored by mainstream Hollywood filmmakers. (And quick, horror fans - name the actress who played the hooker).

Another irony is that the hooker/sailor scene did not cancel out whatever pleasure I took in Blow Out. In fact, I prefer it to Sisters, Carrie, Obsession, The Fury, and Dressed to Kill. It's never boring, the film production milieu is a cinephile's delight, and there are plenty of moments ridiculed by the plausibles that I'm perfectly fine with, namely, Jack's (John Travolta) reconstruction of the car crash via photographs from a magazine. A bigger problem, as always, is where the film winds up. Jack grows obsessed with pursuing justice for the Chappaquiddick-like incident he witnessed near the start of the film. Meanwhile, Burke is tasked with covering up the incident by killing Sally (Nancy Allen), the hooker who survived the car crash and can confirm what really happened on that bridge. Burke uses this convenience to become a serial killer and murder several other women in the hopes that Sally's eventual murder will be chalked up as merely one more thereby dissociating it from the car crash. The final shot confirms that Jack has abandoned his pursuit of justice in mourning Sally's murder. The film thus morphs from a political thriller into a slasher film, a trajectory that Chris Dumas, in his punky Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible, claims "makes Blow Out so difficult to read, to sort into coherence" (185). 

Quite to the contrary, Blow Out is all too coherent. It exemplifies Hollywood's compulsion for supplanting meditations on larger sociopolitical structures/institutions with stories driven by the psychology of an individual character. And it belongs to a distinctly post-1960s tradition of relinquishing oneself to the idea that corruption and violence are an indigenous part of American life and there's nothing one can do about it. In this respect, Blow Out is of a piece with such dubious faves as The Godfather saga and Chinatown. For Dumas, "this is how De Palma might be said to have a purely negative politics, as Adorno might be said to have had" (197), one which highlights how we are all whores with a price (200), how political crime "disappears in a blizzard of information noise," and how a "protagonist can only and always fail" (184). For me, it's permission to remain weak-willed and mutter "we're so fucked" when political corruption gets (or rather, continues to be) intense so we can hide our heads in the sand instead of organizing to fight. It's an insult to those who (foolishly, in this hopeless conception) hold doom at bay and battle for a better world. 

The Fog is certainly less ambitious than Blow Out. And its narrative is even more of a mess. As per horror ordinance, the ending is godawful; it's Carpenter admitting "oops - we forgot to kill off this important character so let's get that out of the way immediately before the end credits." And it has implausibilities that drive me bananas such as Jamie Lee Curtis wasted as a young gal implausibly (and quickly) falling for a man many years her senior (the few times it's the other way around, it's almost cause for a 20/20 exposé). But other implausibilities won my heart because they're not tied to violence and/or political resignation. For instance, Adrienne Barbeau's DJ is the source of much of the film's bizarre, even poetic charm. Implausibly, she plays a sort of cocktail jazz during her third-shift sets (I later discovered all of the songs are library music!). And there's a gorgeous shot of her implausibly playing station identification tapes (they sound eerily like number stations) on a cumbersome recorder as she descends a mammoth staircase to a lighthouse, the implausible location for her radio transmissions. Here is where implausibility shades into bafflement and the film takes on some of the hypnotic, indigestible quality of the best art films. By the climax, I didn't mind when she implausibly broadcasts to her listeners the trajectory of the murderous fog, tracking its every movement with a hilarious specificity (a paraphrase: "It's now winding its way down Applebury Lane right past Mrs. Fish's house!") 

Also lulling and attractive were the many shots of the still waters awaiting the fog's impending invasion. They reminded me of the infinitely superior Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947). One of the great head films, Le Tempestaire runs 23 minutes and does indeed feature a story. But it's merely a skeleton through which Epstein spaces out over the waters crashing off the coast of Brittany on Belle-Île-en-Mer. Through slow-motion, fast-motion, reverse, and long takes, Epstein transforms the titular tempest into a newly baptized form of nature, one with rules that transcend the natural world. It may be just as politically escapist as Blow Out. But it's far breezier and inexhaustible in its ability to dumbfound.

The version here has no English subtitles but you really don't need them. EDIT: Or you can enjoy it in better quality and with English subtitles here (thanks to the great Patrick Friel).

Blow Out: B+

The Fog: A-minus

Le Tempestaire: A+

Six 1960s films

Select Boomers shall be delighted. But it's difficult not to read Hollywood films of the 1960s through a countercultural lens, even those released at the opposite end of the decade. So in the final scene of The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960), Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran (Shirley MacLaine) drop out of not quite society but rather, the corporate nine-to-five grind and leave Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) to his Don Draperesque lechery. As proto-hippies, they may go on to lose each other at Woodstock or, more likely, in the halls of MOMA, given Baxter's penchant for festooning his apartment with replicas of Picasso and Mondrian. But as the decade progresses, the tenor of the dropping out becomes more strident and intense, at least as it's played out in the films below.

There aren't many obvious connections between Baxter and Paul Newman as the title character in Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963). Lemmon feels of an older generation even though Newman is thirteen days his senior [sic]. But given the considerable swagger Hud exhibits in every scene, one might surmise that Baxter realizes his Hudness at the end of The Apartment when he finally gathers up enough fortitude to forsake an executive position in the hopes of saving his soul. 

What exactly Hud is swaggering over is open to interpretation, though. He rails against big government prompting Pauline Kael to conclude that for her, "Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater" (18).* But I took him for another proto-hippie because he rails against everything, a cousin to Marlon Brando's Johnny spouting "Whaddaya got?" in The Wild One a decade prior. On the precipice of dropping out, he could just as soon vote for no one as for LBJ or Goldwater. And to the extent that Ritt and screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. (adapting Larry McMurty's 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By) intended audiences to hiss at Hud as a materialistic brute and instead revere his morally upright father Homer (Melvyn Douglas), the film must be counted as largely a failure. As Kael notes, "it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy...Hud, the 'villain' of the piece, is less phony than Homer" (ibid.). But that doesn't mean the good liberals in the audience can't claim Hud as their own. This is what happens when filmmakers play with ideological fire - you showcase Oz at the risk of audiences wanting to remain there instead of returning to the sepia drabness of Kansas. James Wong Howe's unshowy, even skeletal photography assists in this endeavor, staying out of the way as we project whatever ideology onto Hud's attractive frame.

The most remarkable aspect of the lesser-known All Fall Down (John Frankenheimer, 1962) is that it's a dry run for Hud and all the more attractive for it. It's the far quirkier film with Brandon deWilde preprising [sic] his role as Lonnie, the nephew who looks up to but eventually rejects his uncle Hud. The Hud here is played by Warren Beatty as a young stud named Berry-Berry who escorts and discards a string a middle-aged women. His younger brother Clinton (deWilde) adores him. But Eva Marie Saint arrives on the scene and Clinton becomes repulsed at Berry-Berry's sadistic treatment of her. As with Patricia Neal's Oscar-winning role in Hud, Saint exists solely to enact a Freudian battle of wills and libidos between two male relatives. Still, Frankenheimer makes the thing digestible in the end by bedecking the Oedipal drama with odd trills and featuring a powerhouse performance by Angela Lansbury as a matriarch even more incestuous than the one she played for Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate released the same year. 

Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965) is the most rebellious film here in terms of form. Beatty as the title character spouts such Hudisms as "I gotta live the only way I'm at least free" and, indeed, he seems in perpetual search of something. But to give you an idea of the chaotic nature of the film, we never learn the character's real name. In flight from the Mafia which may or may not be after him, he gains a social security card stolen from a man named Miklos Wunejeva and he gets rechristened Mickey One. The film is all flight comprised of evanescent vignettes and confounding detours. Scenes of religious fervor, intense melodrama, and comedy both good and bad seem to drop in from other movies. They hook viewers in for two or three minutes and then baffle us by neglecting to connect to the subsequent scene. Written by Alan Surgal and edited by Aram Avakian (who would go on to direct his own chaos theorem with 1970's End of the Road), Mickey One reportedly baffled even Beatty himself who kept losing his footing with the project. In this, he's a stand in for the viewers themselves who wind up either exhilarated or annoyed by the tsunami Penn and company make of the narrative. Classical Hollywood types Franchot Tone and Hurd Hatfield are on board and they seem more game than Beatty with the swirl of emotional registers and story fragments, perhaps because they portray the purveyors of the paranoia that keeps Mickey in flop sweat and bandages. In the same year, Bob Dylan sang on "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Something is happening here/ But you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?" and that same omen infuses Mickey One with an agitated energy that feels indelibly rock 'n' roll (jazz being a foregone conclusion given that Stan Getz scored much of the soundtrack).

If so far these reviews exemplify the proclivity of critics for making connections between any two disparate films, then Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964) shall be the fly in that particular ointment. It shares a vague sense of disaffection and soul desertion with the other films. James Franciscus plays the title hunk who moves from Kentucky to Manhattan and becomes a best-selling author. But soon, under the influence of various big-city sybarites, he compromises his integrity and must return to Kentucky to finds his true self. Overall, though, it shares little with the angsty titles here except insofar as it serves as their negative snapshot. The frequent book porn points to a majority far more silent than Hud (at least for now), the audiences who purchased the chunky tomes that would be adapted into the highest grossing films of the decade: Spartacus, Exodus, The Longest Day, The Carpetbaggers, Doctor Zhivago, and onward to Hawaii, The Sand Pebbles, Valley of the Dolls, etc., a list Herman Wouk hoped to join with his 783-page Youngbloood Hawke (1962). 

It would be simple to claim that these were the people who were repulsed by Hud or Berry-Berry, maybe even Baxter and the men Lonnie and Clinton became, and afraid of encountering them in the big bad recently deserted cities or, worse, fearful that they'd infiltrate the well-tended suburbs. Peter Bogdanovich was not one of those people. But with his 1968 directorial debut Targets, he adds fuel to the suspicion that Hud and his ilk wind up like the Charles Whitman stand-in Bobby Thompson (Tom O'Kelly, chilling in his blasé malevolence). There's an icy fatalism to this film that would have impressed Fritz Lang if not made him shudder. But no title of the 1960s did more to presage the resignation that permeated the New Hollywood (The Godfather, Chinatown, etc.) if not Boomer ideology overall, the sense that violent fragmentation, maybe even history itself, was a fait accompli and there's nothing we can do about it. Bogdanovich essentially plays himself in the film, shushing Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself in the film, while he watches Karloff on TV in The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931) while intoning "All the good movies have been made." One must wonder how Bogdanovich managed to go on having a career in directing after such a doomy pronouncement (at the very least, he could've spared us 1975's At Long Last Love). But in this conception, cinema is not just dead but deadly. In the most brilliant moment of rhetoric in this term paper of a film, the movie screen literally becomes murderous - Bobby has positioned himself behind a drive-in screen and shoots through it with his rifle at the moviegoers in their cars and environs. 80-year-old Karloff manages to stop him with his cane and slaps him across the face as if Bobby were a mere petulant child. "Is that what I was afraid of?" asks after 90 minutes of mourning over how the world had become more violent and scary than any of his films. It seems like a message made for the Silent Majority who voted Nixon as their president that same year. But they didn't know the film existed. They were busy seeing Funny Girl and The Love Bug.

The Apartment: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

Hud: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

All Fall Down: A-minus

Mickey One: A

Youngblood Hawke: C+ (docked a notch so I'm not tempted to watch it a third time)

Targets: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

* Pauline Kael; "Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood." Film Quarterly 1 July 1964; 17 (4): 15–23.

 

Barbenheimer! Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023); Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

Greta Gerwig's transformation from mumblecore darling to Oscar-bait writer-director has been smooth and triumphant. I adored Lady Bird and Little Women and was excited to learn that she was helming a Barbie project. I gleefully bought into the Barbenheimer hype and carted my ass to an actual theatre to see the thing on opening night. And now, with both excitement and hype dissipated, I'm left feeling empty as so often happens when wrestling with contemporary Hollywood cinema. 

Part of the problem is that I naively, if not flat-out stupidly, ignored the potential for Mattel to exert a heavy hand over the proceedings. This is not to suggest that Gerwig failed to make the film she wanted to; everything I've read suggested she won most, if not all, of her battles with Mattel, e.g., deeming Margot Robbie's character Stereotypical Barbie instead of Original Barbie as the corporate overlords wanted. But more than even Gerwig's bid to compete with the tentpole franchise flicks, Barbie's most decisive identifying characteristic is its status as a cog in Mattel's burgeoning intellectual property empire. 

To be sure, Barbie is spunkier than such airless slabs of synergy as The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie, and the freakishly overrated Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. The film opens in Barbie Land, a matriarchal utopia done up in gauche Pepto-Bismals where every day is the same. Barbie needs no water to shower, no food to eat, and goes disco dancing every night with all the Kens and other Barbies. The closing credits (and IMDb) neglect to distinguish between Barbies; they're all named Barbie. But Wikipedia provides more product differentiation - Issa Rae plays President Barbie, Hari Nef Dr. Barbie, Dua Lipa appears as the Mermaid Barbies, etc. All is shiny and happy until Margot Robbie Barbie wonders aloud about her mortality. It ruins the disco vibe and so she must seek out Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) for advice on why she's suddenly feeling gloomy. 

Weird Barbie is so named because she's the mangled Barbie that results from children getting too bored with their dolls - body defaced with markers, hair chopped up, appendages twisted out of their sockets, etc. In a sugar-rimmed Twilight Zone turn, she tells Barbie that Barbie Land is the imagination of the children playing with Barbies and whoever has taken charge of Stereotypical Barbie has grown disillusioned with her. So she must travel to the real world and find the child playing with her in the hopes of inspiring her to keep on playing.

A+ up until this point. The plastic life in Barbie Land is indeed fantastic as per Aqua's catchy dictum. It feels queer even though there are no overtly queer characters. The Kens are all cute and dopey. Ryan Gosling damn near steals the film as the main Ken ("often referred to as 'Beach Ken'" as Wiki helpfully notes) and will later provide the comedic highlight leading all the Kens in a hilarious rendition of Matchbox 20's vacuous himbo anthem "Push." And the female empowerment themes are so welcome that they elicited applause at my screening and many others so I've read. 

But while Gerwig and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach initially keep the real world distinct from Barbie Land, working in the grand tradition of The Brady Bunch Movie and The Addams Family, they jettison the world building and the two realms blend into one another imperceptibly. As someone who despises world building, I am not longing for any more here. But the person playing with Stereotypical Barbie is Gloria (America Ferrera), not only an adult who has taken command of her teen daughter Sasha's (Ariana Greenblatt) Barbie doll but also an employee of, wait for it, Mattel. She learns that the CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell) plans to put Depressed Stereotypical Margot Robbie Barbie back in her original life-sized box. Barbie resists and flees with the CEO and his board of directors in pursuit. And in the weakest story development, Gloria and Sasha decide that the best escape route for Barbie is back to Barbie Land. There's no indication about the rules governing passage between the two realms. The characters, whether real or plastic, simply employ a variety of forms of travel - snowmobile, convertible, tandem bicycle, camper, spaceship, all with real world (or is that plastic?) counterparts on store shelves - to arrive at either side of the divide. As the real world characters filter into the plastic fantastic, the story becomes governed less by narrative than corporate logic and it sucks the oxygen out of the film. The smooth flow between realms mirrors the smooth flow of Mattel commodities into our lives.

What's excluded from Barbie is an outside, a realm away from playing with and purchasing Barbie dolls and accoutrements sold separately. Mattel has colonized Barbie Land/the imagination so absolutely that the atmosphere grows as stifling as those venal Lego films. One can glean this from how deftly Gerwig fashioned a movie that could be all things to all people except right-wing lunatics, some of whom purchased tickets anyway and contributed to its “record-breaking” box office numbers. It’s queer, DEI-certified, open to trans allegorization, and forthcoming with feminist critiques of Barbie’s unrealistic body standards, all while causing no damage to Mattel's bottom line. The balance is so careful, perfect really, that it often feels as if Gerwig shot the film while holding her breath for fear all plates could spin out of control.   

No spoilers but I read the ending as a canny way to kick off a franchise. That's why it rings false when  Screen Rant titles an article about Barbie's historic box office take "Barbie Box Office Breaks Records With Biggest Opening Ever For Non-Superhero Movie, Sequel, Or Remake." Because it will engender sequels off its status as an already-proven property. And if it hadn't, no matter. According to a New Yorker article by Alex Barasch that reads like a battle plan, Mattel is aggressively pursuing I.P. filmmaking. At least one attempt has been made at a screenplay for Uno (yes, the card game). But Barasch perfectly summarizes the suffocating nature of the intellectual property arms race when he notes that, "Some of the projects have an ouroboros quality. Tom Hanks is supposed to star in Major Matt Mason, which will be based on an astronaut action figure that has been largely forgotten, except for the fact that it helped inspire Buzz Lightyear."

***

"Nothing permits everything. To have a narrative logic is to pattern out inclusions and exclusions," wrote my Facebook friend Charlie Conway in a recent post. Plot must delimit characters and events in order for an audience to perceive a story which then governs what kind of stories get told. Any given narrative film will ignore this demographic or forget that history and in response, film critics applaud the inclusions and/or damn the exclusions.

For many critics, a remedy lies in inserting positive representations or underrepresented demographics - Total Recall but with gay characters, as I once thought I longed for until I saw a film like D.E.B.S. (Angela Robinson, 2004), a sort of lesbian Charlie's Angels, and felt empty. That emptiness results from what Kristen Warner calls, in a super-useful article I never tire of quoting, plastic representation - the characters change but the oppressive structures, e.g., the stories that ignored them in the first place, remain in pernicious place.

All these thoughts came to the fore when watching Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who spearheaded the Manhattan Project. Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer is a feat of deftness as surely as Barbie. Nolan jumbles temporal order throughout most of the running time, flitting back and forth largely between Oppenheimer (played with impressive concentration by Cillian Murphy) leading his crew in the creation of nuclear weapons during WWII and the subsequent attempts by U.S. Atomic Energy commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. in his best performance to date) to discredit Oppenheimer and relieve him of his highest-level security clearance. The editing is in keeping with the dictates of intensified continuity in contemporary Hollywood cinema. For the first few minutes, I honestly thought I was watching a trailer for Oppenheimer so fast are its editing rhythms. Where intensified continuity would typically result in de trop editing, however, Nolan uses it to keep his 180-minute film moving briskly. For a project that threatens to be consumed by elephantiasis, Oppenheimer is remarkably fleet, almost light on its feet for such a grim project.

But as plenty of critics have pointed out, Nolan remains blind to certain demographics. He has little feel for the interior lives of his women characters although Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh acquit themselves admirably as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty and doomed paramour Jean Tatlock respectively. More damningly, the impact of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are relegated to a few photographs; Nolan never took his camera to Japan, saving his third act for the white man's guilt over birthing a weapon of mass destruction. 

As Warner would no doubt concur, peppering in Japanese characters would not automatically result in a better ventilated film. But allow me to suggest some structural inclusions that might satisfy the demands of both politics and aesthetics. The fulcrum of Oppenheimer is the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 when a nuclear weapon was detonated in a New Mexico desert. Shot without sound and bathed in light requiring SPF-500 until Nolan unleashes the full sonic assault on us, it's likely to go down as Nolan's finest moment ever. But what if after the successful test, the story switched to Japan...never to return to Oppenheimer or even America again?!? Instead of centering the story on one individual, what if a dual-structure narrative took over? After watching Oppenheimer, I was thirsty for a Japanese perspective on the end of WWII and saw a remarkable film called A Night to Remember (Kôzaburô Yoshimura, 1962) about a reporter trying to trace the effects of the bombs on the Hiroshima populace. Guess what - no one wants to talk about it and those too young to have experienced it fail to treat the event with any gravitas (the Japanese title translates, ironically one assumes, as I Will Never Forget That Night although it also goes by Hiroshima Heartache). 

Now imagine how rich and dialectical a fusion of Oppenheimer and A Night to Remember could be! What would 1945 Los Alamos have to say to 1962 Hiroshima and vice-versa? I don't want positive representations; that way leads to more Hallmark Christmas movies. I want different foci, dialectics, broken gestalts, indigestible, unconsumable images, structures so porous as to trigger trypophobia.

Addendum: I'll take no questions about the format in which I saw Oppenheimer. I saw it in a theatre and that's all ye need know. After the debacle of seeing Dunkirk in IMAX laser, the theatrical experience has no corner on ideal screening conditions. And given many viewers who are younger and have better hearing than I do have complained about the difficulty of making out bits of dialogue in Oppenheimer, the film is sure to benefit from closed captioning at home.

Barbie: B+

Oppenheimer: A-minus

The Lego Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017)

Inbred and lacking even the first one's (groans) chickenhearted critique of Big Business, this hebephrenic followup is pure teaching moment for a media studies professor. It blends content and commercials almost as shamelessly as a Hallmark Christmas movie. Damn near every image and sound is a property of Warner Bros. (a division of Time Warner) such that the movie is nothing but a marketing hall of mirrors (quite literally at one point in yet another dreary ripoff of The Lady From Shanghai). And when Gotham is cleaved in two at the climax, the Lego characters bridge the two sections together by locking into one another to remind us how Legos work (and to get the toddlers up to speed). Were I not repulsed by untrammeled media conglomeration, I'd call it genius. But I might still have to append an "evil" to it. 

Oh and apparently it has some lessons to teach about the importance of family or not going it alone or whatever. But don't forget to ask your parents for some more Legos, kids.

Grade: C 

SpaceCamp (Harry Winer, 1986)

This is the infamous space-shuttle-accident film released mere months after the Challenger disaster condemning it to box-office hell. Surprisingly, you can do far worse on a lazy Saturday afternoon than watch this solid-plus entertainment. Once you get over the premise of kids surviving an accidental launch into space, it generates some legit nail-biting tension. An 11-year-old Joaquin Phoenix is on board under the name Leaf Phoenix, many light years away from his 2019 Oscar. Kate Capshaw (a doppelganger for JoBeth Williams) plays an astronaut frustrated over never having gone on a space mission. The irony of an accident affording her the opportunity will not be lost on anyone with even surface knowledge of women at NASA. Most Americans cognizant in the 1980s will recognize the rest of the cast: Lea Thompson, Kelly Preston, Larry B. Scott, Tate Donovan, Tom Skerritt. There's also a robot named Jinx who brings problems. Forgettable but I was stunned by how much I dug it.

Afterward, the Mr. jokingly asked if it was one of the ten best films of 1986. But you know what? If we limit ourselves strictly to Hollywood product, it just might be, so pathetic was the decade for Hollywood cinema. It's quantum leaps better than the #1 box-office champ that year, Top Gun. For the good stuff, Manhunter. That's Life. Something Wild. Aliens. I have issues with Blue Velvet and The Fly (don't ask, Lynch/Cronenberg dorks). Haven't seen Platoon in a minute. And then, um, er, uh...SpaceCamp??

Grade: B+

Post-1980 Mostly Hollywood Films I Like!

Here's a running list of post-1980 mostly Hollywood films I like and even, in some cases, love. I have it around in case anyone accuses me of hating mainstream cinema. Post-1980 because that's when I think Hollywood really shat the bed although I could profitably extend it back to 1965 or even 1960. Too lazy to put in years and directors.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

Aliens

Amadeus

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Back to School

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar

Big Top Pee-Wee

Blade Runner

The Blair Witch Project

Booksmart

Bound

The Breakup

Bring It On

Bulworth

Cabin Boy

Casino

Cast Away

Cliffhanger

Collateral

Coyote Ugly

Crazy in Alabama

Death Proof (director’s cut)

The Devil Wears Prada (Miranda Priestly scene only)

Diary of the Dead

Down with Love

Empire Records

Enchanted

Escape from New York

Escape from L.A.

Femme Fatale

Fierce Creatures

Flags of Our Fathers

Goodfellas

Gran Torino

Grease 2

Groundhog Day

The Happening

Heathers

High School Musical

The Hours

The Hurt Locker

The Insider

The Iron Giant

Jackie Brown

Josie and The Pussycats

Lady in the Water

Land of the Dead

Legally Blonde

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde

Letters from Iwo Jima

Magic Mike

Magic Mike XXX

Mamma Mia!

Manhunter

Marci X

Miami Vice

Minority Report

Moulin Rouge

Nothing but Trouble

Old

The Old Guard

Open Range

Parasite

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure

Point Break

Pulp Fiction

Pump Up the Volume

The Queen

Rabbit Hole

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion

The School of Rock

Showgirls

The Sixth Sense

Snowpiercer

Southland Tales

Spy Kids

Stuart Saves His Family

Teen Beach Movie

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Top Secret!

To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar

The Twilight Saga

Unbreakable

Unforgiven

Vampires vs. The Bronx

V For Vendetta

The Village

The Visit

War of the Worlds 

Whiplash

Wild Things

Xanadu

Zero Dark Thirty

Z-O-M-B-I-E-S

Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021)

The severe betrayal of The Last Airbender and the more routine disappointment of After Earth were clearly glitches. Ever since 2015's The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan has held on to his title as the best Hollywood director standing and the incredible Old proves that any contender will have to come up with a Showgirls to approach his level. I won't say much here because a talent as formidable as Shyamalan deserves more than a blog post and I want to avoid spoilers so as to preserve the many shocks coming your way. But Old continues his knack, most legible in my beloved Lady in the Water, for creating meta-narratives - stories in which the characters are trying to figure out the stories. Thus, the first act becomes blissfully foreshortened and lends the impression that Shyamalan is not adept at traditional storytelling. (As if that matters. A colleague once complained that Unbreakable had only two acts. Um, yeah, that's part of why it's so great!) In actuality, he's enormously economical, dropping brief bits of narrative information in the first ten, twenty minutes of the film that will become necessary to push the story forward later on. A tight, resourceful, consistently surprising mainstream horror film that doesn't exploit gore and trauma and refrains from wallowing in sexual puritanism? I believe in miracles. 

Grade: hardcore-ass A!

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (Josh Greenbaum, 2021)

I do too love contemporary Hollywood cinema. It's just that I cannot stomach franchises and Marvel/DC/Disney tentpoles and feel-bad horror flicks and middlebrow Oscarbait which leaves...Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar! For sure, it adheres to a formula as much as anything listed above, xeroxing the template for Booksmart and, especially, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. And the Marxist in me needed more information about how the title duo can afford to go to Vista del Mar after being laid off from Jennifer Convertibles. But Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo's stoopid screenplay has no room for logic or even information as evinced by my favorite line of the film screenshot below. And they deserve props for the warm, gentle fun they poke at a culture rarely represented for being so widespread: middle-aged women of middle America who attend craft fairs, watch QVC, join book clubs, and chat 'til they drop. All that and it's a musical too! Hooray for Hollywood! 

Grade: A-minus

The John Wick series...so far (ugh)

I watched them all because projectile vomiting would have occurred had anyone told me that the second and third installments were soooo much better. And right, Chapter 2 is the best of the series. It had to be better than the first, so shoddy that I started strawmanning about my preference for hardcore pornography.  Hollywood is supposed to offer tense narratives over porn's thin pretexts and dull action. But the storytelling in what is now retroactively known as John Wick: Chapter 1 is so inept that I had to check Wikipedia to see if John Wick actually killed Viggo, the main villain, at the end. And why bother fleshing out Wick's precise relationship with The Syndicate of The Council of Twelve or The High Table or whatever when a sequel can pick up the narrative slack? I did love, however, when right before the climax Viggo's perpetually beleaguered henchman sees Wick in the rear view mirror and says, "Goddamn, I knew he'd come!" Hey, me too!

But the excruciating boredom I experienced when watching these films got me thinking about Ara Osterweil's perceptive quote about the relation between porn and the avant-garde: "Whereas the boredom of pornography seems to derive from its uninterrupted and sustained fullness, the ennui of the avant-garde is often generated by the lack (or perceived absence) of narrative event or conventional character development" (453).* So it comes down to which fullnesses we allow ourselves to experience. The John Wick series is full: endless fights (or "choreography"), shopping sprees for weapons, sound effects amplified such that a door closing sounds like a dumpster dropped from a skyscraper, etc. But its fullness services two venal tendencies in American thought: a conspiracy-cured belief in totalities like The High Table and toxic individuality. The moral: There is a Council of Twelve that controls everything with intricate, narrative-drenched codes of conduct that must be adhered to but you, individual, can break those codes. And trust you'll get a sequel that "justifies" your transgression. 

That these ideologies have led to Trumpism makes the John Wick series important on sociological grounds. But it's definitely not my idea of a fun Saturday night, especially since the body count in these films already rivals the Friday the 13th series (proposed law: every murder in a Hollywood film must be accompanied by a one-minute history on the person murdered). And John Wick is only marginally more compelling than Jason Voorhees. His motivation growing ever more cloudy the further the series moves away from his dead wife and dog, he remains a self-serious dullard throughout. The only thing I could possibly want from His Taciturnity is a one-night stand. And therein lies my preference for hardcore pornography. 

As far as the folly of treating these films as individual units, I like Chapter 3 the least because the fights take up an appalling amount of screen time, generating a lack of narrative event suitable for cat napping. And it ends on an even more egregious cliffhanger than Chapter 2 which means this is a television series that will be with us for as long as Keanu Reeves' bones hold up. Nevertheless, I loved Administration, "an organization that stores killer files, processes orders and distributes them," according to the John Wick Fandom page. Staffed mostly by women who resemble 1940s gangster molls updated with copious tats and piercings, Administration is where the series finally becomes ridiculous. This is the excess space where the totality is made flesh. Crucially, it's not mentioned in any of the plot synopses on Wikipedia. As such, it's both narrative-drenched and non-narrative. I like to think the women find all the machinations of the High Table preposterous and are just waiting for their weekly check. And I dream of Lily Tomlin's Ernestine taking over management and pronouncing John Wick "ExcommuniKondo."

John Wick (Chad Stahelski [who?], 2014) - C

John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski [him again?], 2017) - B

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski [hmm], 2019) - C-minus

John Wick: Chapter 4 - Parallelogram (Chad Stahelski, 2022)  

John Wick: Chapter 5 - Paramecium (Chad Stahelski, 2025) 

John Wick: Chapter 6 - Perineum (Chad Stahelski, 2030) - I predict this will be the best.

*Osterweil, Ara. 2004. “Andy Warhol’s Blow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-garde.” In Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams, 431–360. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 

Saving Mr. Banks (John Lee Hancock, 2013)

Damn straight, I got verklempt towards the end of this falsified account of the run-in between P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson, cartoon-hating but cartoonish up to her Aqua-Netted coif) and Walt Disney (Tom Hanks, who else?) over transforming Travers' Mary Poppins book series into the celebrated 1964 film. I'm not a robot or a zombie although HAL and the walking dead in Joe Dante's Homecoming evince more human feeling than anything in this sorry slab of PR.

Why does Disney have to lie? We know that Travers resented many aspects of the Mary Poppins film and forbade any subsequent Disney adaptations of her work. But this reality isn't all that cretinous or surprising. Who would be stunned to learn that Walt Disney was a rabid capitalist? More importantly, would Disney stock plummet due to a portrait of his ruthlessness in getting exactly what he wants? Hell, I imagine the core audience for this film would applaud *any* of his attempts to get Mary Poppins on film.

But lo - we're served ever more pablum ooze in Saving Mr. Banks with a tearful Travers succumbing to The Magic of Disney at Mary Poppins' premiere and Walt as an anthropomorphic Ideological State Apparatus sitting directly behind blowing pixie-dust platitudes into her ear. Bags and bags of sugar but not a drop of medicine in the 310.

Also, 125 minutes? Nuh-uh. No, ma'am.

Finally, can we have a permanent moratorium on tiles of the Present Participle + Character variety, especially since another Tom Hanks vehicle already used Saving?

Grade: B-minus

Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)

Expert direction. Barely a wasted moment. Never boring. Excellent performances (yes, yes, Kathy Bates deserved her Oscar). Extremely effective thriller overall. And empty.

Yet again, as with so much Hollywood product, Misery is the equivalent of eating a bag of wet pork rinds and feeling like (what else?) crap immediately after. The very economy rendering this such a tight thrill ride contributes all the more to the film's pointlessness. With little context and few secondary characters (nor, Lawd knows, a dialectical mise-en-scène à la Sirk), the sadistic two-character story has to provide all the meaning. Instead, it provides pork rinds. I want my heart rate to increase for more than just expertly reduced storytelling, especially when it offers a sexist and condescending account of the lives of women who consumer romance fiction. Hey - there is a context after all.

And don't just bitch at me. Leonard Maltin didn't even dig it that much, stating that the Stephen King novel on which the film is based was more nuanced, a fact I will likely never confirm.

Hooray for Hollywood!

Grade: C+

Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993)

Like so much Hollywood product, Mrs. Doubtfire pushed and pulled me. The pie in the face is truly classic, a savvy variation on an ancient comedy staple. And the climactic restaurant scene in which Robin Williams switches between Daniel and Mrs. Doubtfire generates some genuine (albeit silly) narrative tension. But though I know full well that 1993 was a long time ago (was it, though?), I still bristled at the transphobic, "Oh I'm not really a dude" comments. I admired the fact that a heterosexual couple was not formed at the end of the film. But the effect is severely diminished by Mrs. Doubtfire's closing monologue about how there are all different kinds of families, failing to mention that Heather could have two mommies. Then there's the pathetic portrayal of Daniel's gay brother (Harvey Fierstein) and his boyfriend (Scott Capurro) who exist solely (and with mere minutes of screen time, barely!) to uphold the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Then there's the demonization of Sally Field as a working mother. And the suggestion that men do better at the housekeeping roles to which women have been relegated. And Columbus' workaday direction. ARGH! Hooray for Hollywood! Grade: C+.

I didn't need to see Dunkirk in IMAX (or even 70MM)

By now, you've heard that you just HAVE to see Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) in IMAX 70MM. And maybe you do. But I certainly didn't. 

According to this helpful article in Entertainment Weekly, "IMAX provides more of any given image for a viewer to see — ideal for films with vast, natural settings like Dunkirk." I saw Dunkirk in IMAX 70MM at AMC Lincoln Square 13 & IMAX (!) in Manhattan and can attest that "more" certainly doesn't mean "all." The image is so immense that you have to dive your head down to see the bottom of the screen and then sit back to take in the upper extremities. And the volume was so loud that it distorted the high end in several scenes of dialogue. Sometimes more is more and that's an annoyance.

But even if these imperfections were eliminated, the captains of industry will ensure that ideal conditions are forever receding in order to keep us spending money on the same thing. Can't visit all the parks at Disney World in a week? Then you'll need to go back. Think the recent reissue of Sgt. Pepper is perfection? Guess you haven't heard the white hot stamper currently going for $699.99 at the evocatively named Better Records. Did you see the face of Elvis at the IMAX 70MM of Dunkirk? Then you'll see the face of Jesus in IMAX with laser. Yes, it's not enough to see Dunkirk in plain ole IMAX because with IMAX laser projection, "a laser light force is used instead of a standard lamp, which broadens the color palette (blacks look darker, for instance), amplifies contrast for highlights and shadows, and brightens the image." The Entertainment Weekly article reports that the IMAX with laser presentation nearest to me is in Reading, MA over 200 miles away. But the IMAX site itself claims that AMC Lincoln Square 13's IMAX is indeed with laser. 

So hey - maybe I did see it in laser which would justify the $27.54 [sic] I spent on my ticket, right? Maybe I did see even more of the image, perhaps the most ever - endless colors and bottomless blacks as the IMAX laser advertising copy screams. But this pursuit of more and most and deeper feels like an unnatural impulse in my lifelong passion for cinema. I want to see more films not more of the few hungry dinosaurs on the block. If you want to chase after lasers or early pressings of Pepper, it's your time and money. Me, I'd trade my Dunkirk experience for a chance to see Larry Clark's rare Passing Through, missing from Lincoln Center's 1977 series starting Friday.

As for Dunkirk itself, perfectly fine. A sort of reverse Voyage of the Damned, it features an amazing score by Hanz Zimmer built on suffocating rhythm patterns rather than motivic development. And Nolan builds an unbearable sense of disorientation such that we don't know where or even when we are for a large part of the film, ping-ponging between disparate times and locations. But the last quarter becomes quite conventional as the various narrative strands congeal and the score heaves with pride. See it, by all means. But see some other damn films too, kay? Maybe something lacking vast, natural settings like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or a Nathaniel Dorsky film.

Memorial Day catch up

An evening of eh.

Call Me Madam (Walter Lang, 1953) bears all the markings of 1950s Hollywood bloat. Too long and too expensive, it helped render the musical an increasingly untenable proposition despite containing perhaps the quintessential Ethel Merman film performance. A pop-friendly editor could easily chop 25 minutes from the running time. At the very least, the moments when George Sanders sings (!) have got to go. Still, even the non-Ethel numbers roar, especially a drunk Donald O'Connor in "What Chance Have I With Love?" singing the type of clever/corny lyrics that made Sondheim roll his eyes. Try "Look at what it did to Romeo/It dealt poor Romey an awful blow" or "If an apple could finish Adam/They could knock me off with a grape."

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (Don Weis, 1953) - That pop-friendly editor would leave just two Youtube clips - Bob Fosse, Debbie Reynolds, Barbara Ruick, and Bobby Van hoofing it up at a college juke joint and Van alone in "I'm Thru With Love." Otherwise, Slog Central even at 72 minutes.

Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013) - The last shot shows Anna and Elsa skating together rather than Anna locking lips with Kristoff (and Elsa remains partnerless). A mildly radical payoff for sitting through a slate of crummy, dead-bottomed songs. Best part - Olaf confessing he has no bones.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) - I'll admit that every time Leo started to explain IPOs or whatever, I wanted to ask him to slow down. But that's no excuse for Scorsese allowing him to abandon the explanations. So, slow down! As Todd Haynes proved with his even longer Mildred Pierce, there's enormous drama in laying out processes. In any event, we need to update Richard Dyer's dictum in "Entertainment and Utopia" to demonstrate that Hollywood films show us not how to organize dystopia but what it feels like (for those who organize dystopia). Sequel: The Schmucks of Any Street - a glimpse into the lives destroyed by Jordan Belfort et al. and an investigation into Belfort's current life of exorbitant speaker fees and pokey paybacks.

Beam Me Up, Scotty

In 1946, a handsome former marine named Scotty Bowers was working at a gas station in Los Angeles when he was propositioned by Walter Pidgeon. Bowers took him up on the offer and, as word got around about his talents, rather quickly found himself the de facto pimp to the Hollywood stars (and lesser known industry personnel). He could hook up anyone but his clientele was mainly Tinseltown's closeted firmament. Now pushing 90, he's recently come forward with a tell-all called Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. And like clockwork, the dreary question of the verifiability of his accounts has moved to the center of discussion.

Naturally, David Ehrenstein makes it plain that "there's no question it's all true" in Film Comment while The Democratic Republic of Amazon Comments (I won't even link there) has deemed Bowers an unethical liar. It's the fate of most queer historiography no matter where your book lands on the scale between well-researched scholarship and pure trash. William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, summed up the dilemma in the New York Times: “Some of the pushback is going to be homophobia...But there will also be people who say he’s making it up to sell books and others who say why can’t you let these people rest in peace.”

But, of course, both the latter claims exhibit homophobia too in all their "the personal is NOT political" glory. Shipwrecked in the quest for truth and ethics, queer historiography becomes, well, queer - always a half-measure no matter how shiny the evidence or dusty the archive. So the most fascinating aspect of Full Service is not the saucy recreations of sex with the stars (which get numbing a third of the way through) but rather its unexpected glimpse into the policing of history.

In the late 1970s, writer Hector Arce approached Bowers for confirmation on rumors that Tyrone Power, a former client, was into scat. Bowers convinced Arce that the stories were untrue and thus they did not appear in Arce's 1979 biography The Secret Life of Tyrone Power. Upon publication, however, Bowers admitted to Arce that the stories were, in fact, true providing the following rationale: "It was too soon after Ty's death [in 1958] to be shattering the myth of one of Hollywood's golden boys. Twenty years after his death Ty was still looked upon as an idol. It was right for us to protect his fans from any disappointment or disgust they may have felt after reading about his odd sexual habits. Much time has passed and, as we know, time heals everything. Perhaps Ty's followers are more ready for the truth now than they were thirty years ago when the book was first published" (206). Perhaps, Scotty, perhaps. But what if they're not? Might they be soothed by a federal law stating that fifty years after the death of a celebrity must pass before an author can write about their odd sexual habits? And what counts as disgust? Shouldn't there be some sort of measurement for it the way homosexuality must be constantly verified else it winds up in the dustbins of silence? Does silence have dustbins?

Oh well. There's a least one classic line in the book (concerning Charles Laughton): "Jesus, why did he even take the trouble to wash the fucking lettuce and tomatoes?" (204)

Sheesh! Way to make it plain!

For those who refuse to believe that the endings of most classical Hollywood films (contemporary too, as an unlucky screening of The Green Lantern didn't need to remind me) are contingent upon the formation of the heterosexual couple, we now have incontrovertible proof that it is so. Take that, evidence queens!