The problem with this one is easy, especially if you recall the fiasco of Deckard's narration in the original version of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). You'd think filmmakers would have long since learned that unnecessary voice-overs can not only induce derisive laughter but deflate the narrative tension as well. One must assume Fincher as well as screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (adapting the graphic novel by Alexis "Matz" Nolent and Luc Jacamon) had more freedom than Scott did forty years ago so the blame for the risible narration intoned by the titular assassin (Michal Fassbender) falls on them. For the first third of the film, the nameless Killer spends almost all of his time alone waiting for the moment to assassinate a high-profile target. But instead of maintaining an air of menace or existential dread from the visuals and sound design, the Killer's preposterous voice-over thoughts about his profession take a sonic front and center. I swear I'm not trying to be cute when I claim that this narration has the pseudoprofundity of Bela Lugosi's in Glen or Glenda? (Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1953) for competition. This is doubly irritating since Fincher punctuates the sequence with a brief meeting between the Killer and the client paying for the assassination. That's more than sufficient narrative explanation to ground a voice-overless exposition. Instead, Fincher brings us right back to the Killer's rub-a-dub-dub-three-men-in-a-tub philosophizing.
After that, the damage is done even though the narration calms down. But that gives way to a tired revenge fantasy in which yet another actress (Sophie Charlotte) serves as mere foil with barely any screen time. The cameos are fun, particularly Tilda Swinton in Ice Queen mode (does she have any other mode lately?). But the sole reason to watch, or rather, listen is the music. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score alternates between inorganic electronica and non-musical sounds such that any notion of the natural becomes irretrievable. And, for some reason, the Killer listens only to the Smiths as he jet-sets between assassinations and revenge plots. Instead of benefiting the narrative in any discernible way, the indifferent locations blow back into the music and wind up deepening Morrissey's self-absorbed warbling. The world truly doesn't care about him and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," say, takes on an unexpected pathos as a result.
Grade: B-minus (upped a notch for the music but then down again for the Killer's ridiculous pseudonyms - Archie Bunker? Why not Mickey Mouse?)
1.The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Cited by Sontag as part of the canon of camp, Compton-Burnett's novels are comprised almost entirely of dialogue. To borrow film terms, there are few long or even medium shots and no establishing shots. Close-ups dominate such that the reader has no clue who else may be in the same room with the characters chattering at present. They exist only as they speak, closely miked, as it were. This is the camp component. The characters, families engaged in financial squabbles with the help and select neighbors providing mordant commentary, exploit linguistic style to gain an ever-shifting upper hand. Each thesis is met with an exacting, exhausting antithesis in endless verbal skirmishes. The perceived self matters not a whit in Compton-Burnett's world. What counts is the presenting self's ability to wield language as protective armor as epitomized by this astonishing exchange from Darkness and Day (1951) between Bridget and Edmund, a married couple with children who have just discovered that they are not, in fact, father and daughter [sic]:
"We have one gain, an ordinary daily life. Did we like it so much when we had it?"
"We shall like it now. We shall rise and speak and move in the common light of day. Our words will have their meaning. They will have none that is for ourselves. We shall not be afraid of what sounds beneath them, of what is heard through them." (164)
The tragedy here is not the threat of incest but rather the loss of a public self with which to shield oneself from convention. What then emerges across nineteen similarly styled novels published between 1925 and 1971 (I've downed three - the aforementioned Darkness and Day, 1925's Pastors and Masters, her first novel in the style, and The Last and the First, published posthumously in 1971) is not only a respect for camp as a survival strategy but a palpable intelligence behind such extreme emissions. The reader longs to get to that self underneath these battles in dialogue, an unattainable goal that ensures an obsessive drive to consume the next Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. My strong suggestion for newbies is to have Violet Powell's A Compton-Burnett Compendium (Heinemann, 1973) nearby which provides straight-forward synopses of each novel. You're going to need them.
2. Elizabeth Taylor, Angel (1957). Angelica Deverell, "too good a name to be true," indulges in no social niceties ("ignorant of convention as she is scornful of it") and cannot read sarcasm. She trusts not her senses but her idealistic imagination and reality be damned if it impinges on her dream womb. She's altogether insufferable to anyone in her orbit. And despite, if not because, of all this, she becomes a successful romance novelist. As befits someone who counts kitschmeister Frederic Leighton among her favorite painters, Angel writes novels of a gargantuan floridity. We know because Taylor provides a hilarious parody of her style (a "nay" on every page and "coruscating" attached to dozens of nouns). Critics ridicule her, editors try to curb her more rococo flourishes. But Angel holds fast and sells mountains of books. This affords her the potential to live the romantic life of her characters. Unfortunately, pesky reality has other plans. Her husband, a talentless painter named Esmé, keeps a mistress in London. The world wars are inconveniences, especially when Esmé enlists against her wishes. She pens antiwar screeds which tanks her popularity. And her palatial estate, Paradise House, devolves into a Grey Gardens. Even the peacocks she purchased fail to fan their feathers and instead shit all over her terrace. Taylor traces Angel's decline with a tart, Flaubertian irony. But she sketches Angel's uncompromising nature so indelibly that you can't help but admire the punk Barbara Cartland that results. "Always too busy writing about what she thought of as ‘nature’ to go out of doors to look at things," Angel reminds one of Peggy Gravel bitching about trees stealing her oxygen in Desperate Living (John Waters, 1977). And in her claiming that “we may all be equal in the sight of God...but we are not all equal in my eyes,” one spots Patti Smith's "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" on the horizon.
3. Angel (François Ozon, 2007). Ozon gets it. In this savvy adaptation of Taylor's novel, he gives Angel (Romola Garai) the romantic mise-en-scène she craves so much. Cheesy rear projection lets her travel around the world. Esmé is played by an irresistible Michael Fassbender. And right before Angel drops dead, she lets forth with a preposterous "I am Angel Deverell!" But no matter how hard she tries to live in one of her novels, she cannot escape her rotten personality, leaving the Harlequin romance existence forever out of reach.
4. Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943). More difficult people including a Miss Goering who is “used to forcing people into conversation, her fears never having been of a social nature.” Tennessee Williams' favorite novel, Two Serious Ladies is peopled with characters who, when they aren't being mean to one another, exhibit baffling motivation. In bad decision after bad decision, Mrs. Copperfield and Miss Goering go on separate tawdry journeys, the former falling in love with a prostitute in Panama, the latter shacking up with a series of no-goodniks possibly on Staten Island. These two serious ladies are after transcendence, a going to pieces which grants them authority and daring. They meet in the last few pages but the summit yields only more insults. Alone at the end, Miss Goering fancies herself a saint. But she has no followers, a code she doesn't use, and in the last sentence, deems the matter to be "of no great importance." In short, a Fassbinder film avant la lettre.
5. Jonny Gators, Kodachrome 40 Super 8 reversal processing first attempt. Not good. Beach. (YouTube, 2022). Not good, indeed. Great! I learned such terms as "lomo tank" and "caffenol reversal process" from this apparent failure to develop a bit of Super 8 ("Worst roll yet, ugh"). But it turns out to be an absolutely gorgeous experimental film. "Could use some pointers at this point, I suppose." Sure, keep fucking up!
6. Diana Hubbell, "How America Embraced Aspics With Threatening Auras," Gastro Obscura(May 10, 2022). As a veteran of the jellied pork at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, I was hungry for this serious inquiry into the past and future of aspics. Formerly a method of food safety, aspics are now haute cuisine at finer establishments. Check out the takoyaki-inspired aspic with baby octopuses in sake-infused jelly below. But most intriguing was the suggestion that the mid-twentieth-century gelatin horrors we love to ridicule today were the product of home economics pioneers like Lillian Gilbreth and Ellen Richards frustrated at being locked out of the "masculine" realms of science.
7. Ozark (Netflix, 2017-2022). The inability of serial television writers to take larger narrative arcs into consideration reaches its sloppy apotheosis here, one hopes. An office is blown up in season two but the destruction is completely forgotten as season three begins. No mention of clean up and never ever any indication of how such violence might impact the characters. Just keep the stay-at-homes streaming. Luckily, I stuck around for the series finale which offered an unforgiving glimpse into how the white, middle-unto-upper-class central couple of Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) manage to retain their privilege. And helping it all go down was Julia Garner in a performance for the ages as Ruth fuckin' Langmore as my friend Charles rightfully calls her.
8. The Lion King, Minskoff Theatre (September 4).Dump your second acts, Broadway! I begrudgingly admit that the spectacle held me for a good half hour. But then the story kicks in and soon, I was making common cause with the fidgety nine-year-old in front of me. And this was before intermission at which point I heard a mother tell her even younger child, "there's a whole other part." Tragic but true, kid. And yet, I did get choked up, not during the lethally dull second act but when Scar took his bow at the end. I honestly assumed everyone would boo him. Instead, he received just as much love as Simba and Mufasa. Poke fun at the musical all you want, Hell, I'll join you now and then. But no other genre has that capacity for community formation and collective regard.
9. Alfredo Jaar, 06.01.2020 18.39, 2022, video projection, sound, and fans.
This installation at the 2022 Whitney Biennial evokes the National Guard helicopters flying low enough to disperse Black Lives Matters protests in Washington D.C.'s Lafayette Square before Trump's photo op in front of St. John's Church. Patrons were allowed in only at certain intervals so as to experience the five-minute video document in its full horror. But Jaar needn't have worried about diluted impact. It's the sound of the six overhead fans that made us feel the chaos of that day, a sound one could hear roaring at any point on the sixth floor of the Whitney.
10. The Paranoid Style: For Executive Meeting (Bar/None, 2022). At first, Elizabeth Nelson doesn't seem like your bohemian compatriot. Her music is unfashionable demo-style pop-rock. She recently dissed chattering class bands like Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire. And worst of all, she likes golf. But if there's someone recording brainier, more boho songs, gimme their Bandcamp. Did you know that Steve Cropper played guitar on Big Star's cover of "Femme Fatale"? Did you know that the Box Tops recorded a version of "A Whiter Shade of Pale"? Do you know who Barney Bubbles was? You can learn all this and more on For Executive Meeting, Nelson's latest full-length. Oh you knew all that? OK, then how about a mind attuned enough to describe home ownership as "houses pre-haunted"? She ain't heavy, she's your sister.
As a devotee of Ice Road Truckers, I clicked "play" on this sucker almost as if it were Verhoeven's new lesbian nun extravaganza (who has a screener?!?). But the first few minutes contained some of the worst writing on Netflix. Writer/director Johnathan Hensleigh is operating at Sharknado-levels of profundity here and places such bon mots as "Kiss my Irish ass!" in tough guy Liam Neeson's mouth. Soon, though, the humans stop talking and the film settles into its generic structure with a strict deadline, evil corporate overlords, and the long odds we subscribed for - overturned trucks, trucks running out of gas, trucks stuck in ice, trucks hauling other trucks, trucks outracing an avalanche, etc. Dumb, forgettable fun. Along for the ride: Laurence Fishburne picking up a quick paycheck, a nifty country/rock soundtrack, and a rat named Skeeter with a taste for corporate blood.
"Landfill Netflix" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as "landfill indie," that indelible designation for the acres of pedestrian, post-Libertines Brit bands lining the unplayed corners of our iTunes (although I don't see why we can't apply it to the landfill plowed by the success of Nirvana in 1990s America - Rollerskate Skinny, anyone?). But we need a similar term to describe the acres of pedestrian Sundancery acquired via Netflix's cavernous coffers, a catchall phrase for films like Horse Girl which we need to remember to forget. Nothing too hideous or enraging about it. It merely embodies the indie-film aesthetic (here, the Duplass Brothers Productions house style) with all the excitement of a particularly well-executed toenail clip. There's an excellent, appropriately suffocating electronic score by Josiah Steinbrick and Jeremy Zuckerman. Molly Shannon and Paul Reiser are on board in small roles for that crucial 1990s texture. The narrative in several scenes is attractively clipped. But as with drug addiction in Requiem for a Dream, Horse Girl uses mental illness as a pretext for cheap surrealism and an empty ending. It just sits there being all nice and indie and authentic. In short, Horse Girl is selling substance as novelty, to borrow a terrific phrase from Robert Christgau. Which, come to think, does get rather hideous and enraging when meditating on it for more than a chunky paragraph.
The through line in many of the reviews of David Fincher's new film Mank, a biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-author with Orson Welles of the screenplay for Citizen Kane, is that we should not rely on Mank as a historical record, that it must be analyzed for its drama and not its accuracy. Fine. So then I'll try to make this short.
Fincher locates the genesis of the Kane screenplay in Mankiewicz's despair over Upton Sinclair's loss in the 1934 gubernatorial election. In Fincher's telling, the campaign against Sinclair included newsreels produced by Irving Thalberg at MGM (where Mankiewicz was employed at the time) and funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz never forgave Hearst and thus jumped at the opportunity to lambaste him as Charles Foster Kane in Welles' film.
The problem with this narrative gambit is that Fincher bit off more than he could chew. He flits back and forth between the 1934 election and the writing of Kane in 1940 in a hopeless attempt to emulate Kane's jumbled temporal structure and thus, he gives short shrift to dramatizing each event. For a good 45 minutes, the film isn't even all that comprehensible. And while I'll grant that these early scenes have a gulping energy (coupled with the attempts to make it feel like the viewer is watching a classical Hollywood film, e.g., echoing sound, cigarette burns at the top right of the frame, black-and-white photography, etc.), they come off more confusing than anything. The rhythms calm down some after that. But throw in a de facto Algonquin Room of writers (Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, etc.), a few parties at San Simeon, and some chats with Marion Davies and you have a mess.
Not a godawful one, mind. The two lengthy conversations between Mank (Gary Oldman) and Davies (Amanda Seyfried) evince rare moments of grace when the staircase wit stops and people converse with one another like adults. But those are balanced by an interminable, dramatically inert scene in which Mank harangues party goers at Hearst's estate with both Hearst and Louis B. Mayer improbably (oops - sorry for bringing accuracy in) sitting back and allowing him to ramble on (and puke on the floor for a coda). A decent film could have resulted from all of this in the hands of a director who approaches this kind of middlebrow peroject with a sense of economy, say, Stephen Frears. Instead, we get another bloated biopic on its way to Oscar glory.
And now if you'll excuse me, back to my Welles (and Josef Von Sternberg) Criterions (Criteria?).
Bilge Ebiri's Vulture review of His House had me expecting the Sundance favorite to be "terrifying at just about every level." I'm chagrined to report that this tale of a Sudanese refugee couple settling into a haunted slum in London doesn't work as a horror film; it's largely a series of patience-draining jump scares. As a portrait of migrant PTSD, however, it's got plenty of bite. Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) must navigate an indifferent, when not outright hostile, England while attempting to live with a scarred past and their attendant struggle invokes a panoply of demanding spectres. No spoilers but anyone who can easily assign guilt to the couple's decisions while fleeing a war-ravaged country is no doubt judging from a quite comfortable position in their own house.
Lost Girls is less about the Long Island serial killer than a mother's fight against the general police indifference surrounding the case. But that's all it's about which is to say that Lost Girls suffers the fate of all topical films. Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus cannot ventilate the true-crime proceedings enough so that the film possesses a dramatic heft of its own. Still, great performances abound and Garbus has a feel for the working-class milieu that drove many of the victims into sex work.
If indeed the characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) are not paragons of realism, as I've always read, but rather symbols in an anti-authoritarian fable, then one should have no problem accepting the premise of Ratched which imagines an origin story for Nurse Ratched. Like Athena bursting forth from Zeus' head, Mildred Ratched (a typically game Sarah Paulson) enters into a series of grandiloquent events worthy of the soapiest mythology. Whether it's any good is another matter entirely. Sifting One Flew through American Horror Story, Ratched is total trash, preposterous and horribly written in parts, especially the juvenile Sharon Stone subplot. It also suffers from executive producer Ryan Murphy's risible penchant for correcting history so that in one story line, lesbians are sprung free from the barbaric Lucia State Hospital in 1947. But trash can be fun and Ratched lacks the Boomer baggage of the Forman "classic" even though it traffics in a similar kind of anti-intellectual individuality as when head nurse Betsy Bracket (Judy Davis) declares that doctors are unnecessary to the operation of Lucia. The real attraction is the Ross Hunter-worthy production design - dust-free sets, perfectly pressed costumes, screaming primary colors. Mamacita apparently cleaned Lucia because it sparkles like Joan Crawford's Brentwood estate. The Northern California oceanside motel where Ratched stays is supposed to be ratchet (see what I did there?) but comes off enchanting instead. Sharon Stone's mansion is an Orientalist migraine. And the office of Dr. Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), director of Lucia, can comfortably fit a 747 in front of the largest window in Christendom.
Grade: B-minus (docked a notch for not stopping at a limited series)
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)
I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a 134-minute film in which approximately an hour is taken up with conversations between an arty couple driving through a snowstorm at night, conversations that touch on Guy Debord and David Foster Wallace and that quote chunks of Pauline Kael's typically wrongheaded review of A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974) (one of the ten greatest feature-length American narrative films of the 1970s, ya know). The other half of the film features a dance number, a production of "Lonely Room" from Oklahoma!, an animated sequence, and a material narrative allowing the characters to interact with one another from different time periods. Not since Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Journey to the Shore (2016) have I seen such a moving mediation on the inability to live in the present. And you thought I was going to come for a film like this? Insufferable, heavy-handed, devastating, rapturous, this is a film of a free man.
I never would have heard of this actioner if it weren't for dozens of Tumblr posts gushing over the romance between Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), two of the titular Guard. If anything was going to get me to watch another high-body-count movie so soon after the John Wick series, it's two tough guys in love with one another. Turns out it has way more to recommend it. Instead of focusing on one indestructible hero, The Old Guard concerns a posse of immortal (or are they...?) killing machines, some centuries old, tasked with various peacekeeping missions throughout history. It'd be refreshing if they were rabid auteurists, conquering film/disc/bibliographies instead of slaughtering faceless bad guys. But the group evince genuine affection for one another, a rare quality in this genre. And there's a story point (no spoilers) that rivals A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in its intimations of a cruel eternity. Color me impressed.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (David Dobkin, 2020)
Too damn long! Did we really need the montage of Lars (Will Ferrell) and Sigrit (Rachel McAdams) experiencing the splendor of Edinburgh? At the very least, the space could have been used for another show-stopping number like the "Song-A-Long" featuring recent Eurovision contestants (Conchita Wurst, Netta, etc.) joining together for a Cher-Madonna-ABBA-Celine Dion-Black Eyed Peas medley (!). And does "Volcano Man" really only exist in a 1:21 version? Did they not anticipate that these fake songs might be real hits? "Húsavík" (a real city btw) is number ten on American iTunes as I write. Still, this is a cute, affectionate love letter to the looniest of music contests. And at 67, Pierce Brosnan (in the "I hef no son!" role) is a gorgeous wonder of nature.
Grade: B+
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