Elliot's Watching - December 2022
Can anyone write a great whodunnit? Aren’t all the plots already taken? I have to say we were enjoying the BBC series Magpie Murders, which had enough originality within the threadbare conventions to keep our interest: A great popular author of detective fiction dies by falling off a rooftop bannister on his rural England mansion, one of several suspicious deaths in the region that may or may not be connected - although the connections are far from obvious - and at his death he left the eponymous mystery novel though absent any trace of the final chapter. His editor goes off in search of same, aided by her visions of the writer’s main character, Detective Pund, who comes to us from the past and guides his protege - and the editor to a degree - in the search to solve the murder mystery. All good, and surprisingly creative, with it’s multiple time levels and veering backend forth between past illusion and present real time. Interested? Stop right here, then, and though I will not give anything away let’s just say that, as w/ so many mysteries, the “solution” scene is a mess - all sorts of coincidences and improbabilities and encrypted messages and great leaps of faith so that everything’s explained except that the solution makes no logical sense. Oh, well. Back to classic movies and literary fiction.
Among the vast wasteland of mediocre movies streaming in Netflix there stands at least one that was completely engrossing and dramatic, clearly low-budget/indie but not in need of a huge cast or special effects: John Patton Ford’s debut Emily the Criminal (2022). We were drawn to it because of the excellent performance in White Lotus from Aubrey Plaza, who stars as Emily in this intriguing crime drama: Emily in crisis has huge student debt and is unable it seems to get a professional job, result of several arrests in her youth; nearly by chance she takes a flyer working as a “shopping dummy,” for a small syndicate that hires workers on a cash-only basis to buy major electronics using fake credit cards then selling the stolen produce at a deep discount; obviously, she’s in way over her head and faces a # of crisis points, but proves herself tough as nails - and all within the realm of probability and credibility: no superpowers here, no likely sequel at all - but an entertaining (and informative) 90 or so minutes - and hopes that it opens a gateway for director and star performer.
Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis (2022) is informative about Presley’s life for those few who don’t know that song already - emphasizing how, under guidance of his less-than-supportive manager, “Col.” Parker, Elvis melded the Memphis Blues sound of “Black” R&B that he’d heard from his youth with the more broadly popular “White” C&W Nashville sound and - by covering numerous songs from the Black musical tradition Elvis changed the nature of rock/popular music and re-established what it was to be a bigger than life star, comparable in universal popularity of his era with only the Beatles. There’s a good story within these parameters, and Austin Butler’s energetic performance is excellent, but BL can’t leave well enough alone, as this was about the most frenetic movie (aside from the occasional explosive crime or war or space movie) I’ve ever seen; for the hell of it I began measuring each “take” and I believe none was more the 3 seconds! Dizzying! Plus, 2.75 hours is far too long - what ever happened to the 90-minute show? A highlight, for better or worse, was an actual clip of Elvis in late career performing in Vegas - he still had it, in some ways, but he looked horrible and he seemed to be struggling with voice, weight, and life itself. Wish I could give this film a stronger recommendation, but the directing and self-indulgence did me in before the last bell.
It’s disconcerting, troubling, sometimes frightening, sometimes grotesque but a tremendous and powerful true-life film about the infamous Emmitt Till case of 1955; Till (2022) tells the story of a 14-year-old Chicago child (Emmitt) whose mother, Danielle Deadwyler in the sure-bet Oscar nominee role as Emmitt’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who following her son’s murder became a social activist in racial and voting-rights issues. At the outset, she makes an unwise decision to send Emmitt alone on a visit to family in Mississippi, with numerous warnings about how race relationships are different in every way in the segregated Deep South; Emmitt, soulfully portrayed by Jalyn Hall, clearly has some learning disabilities and it’s evident to us that he cannot fully comprehend the warnings from his mom; sure3 enough, Emmit breaks the social code (whistles at a White woman!) and pays for it w/ his life - a brutal, sadistic lynching. The miracle is that two of the perpetrators are arrested and charged; much of the film from that point concerns the national movement for justice, which Mamie has pursued, and the horrors of the Deep South so-called jury trial. Director Chinonye Chukwu does a great job keeping up the pace of the film, never letting the film descend to melodrama or rise to preachiness, keeping the narrative tight and compelling, even though most viewers will know the history and the outcome from the start.
The 2nd season of Mike White’s HBO smash The White Lotus (2022), similar to the first in its luxury hotel setting for the rich and uber-rich, this time in Sicily, despite recent quibbles about its celebration of conspicuous consumption and display and the free ride that the most obnoxious characters get at the end (no spoilers), was a lot of fun to watch from the outset, and if we hate some of the characters, which we’re supposed to and expected to, well, that’s part of the fun as well. As in Season 1, the series opens with a corpse, this time an afloat corpse, and part of the fun trying to figure out who died and who killed. Few will succeed at that. The Lotus team does a great job defining each character while avoiding the most obvious stereotypes, and at keeping several plot lines moving along and clearly defined. It’s no great expose or analysis of society, but it’s honest within its scope and a kick to watch, especially if you don’t expert more than HBO planned to deliver. I actually think Season 2 was better than Season 1 - a rare occurrence - in that the characters across the board were less hateful and less naive.
It’s easy to see how and why Vera Chytilova’s film Daisies (1966) was a significant cinematic event when released as this strange romp - two young women each named Marie with little or no back story (who are they how did they meet what is up w/ their lives???) go about their days (and nights) seemingly surviving by hooking up w/ various elderly men who take them out for dinner (and drinks!) at various dinner/dancing clubs - none of which feels likely or accurate - which is part of the point. The 2 Maries are spirits rather than characters, and their role in life is to poke fun and and puncture the autocratic, Soviet-dominated culture of Czechoslovakia in that era. What today looks self-conscious and ludicrous - souped up by many quick cuts and weird camera tricks, very avant guard even in the US in the ‘60s and now quaint and distracting - was at the time a brave political statement: upend the bourgeoisie! The film, though, still has its pleasures; the 2 Maries are spirited and funny, and the concluding segment, a huge table set up for a banquet (nobody seems to be arriving), accessible only through a scary freight elevator, in which the 2 Maries indulge in the word’s biggest food fight - a great scene and not hard to see its ideology: secret riches kept hidden from the public, vast expenditures, vulnerable to direct attack. And that soon ended.
Tar Fields’s drama Tar (2022) gives us a tour de force portrayal of that chameleonic actor Cate Blanchett - if she could portray to a T Bob Dylan why not the most successful (strictly fictional) female conductor in the world, the eponymous Lydia Tar? She’s tremendous, sympathetic, credible actor in every scene over the course of the nearly 2.5-hour film, and a primary reason for watching - and why it will never be a box-office smash - is the information we get about the behind the scenes workings of a symphony orchestra, both the artistic direction of one such as Tar (although I don’t think any conductor was ever as histrionic as she) and the back-stage politics of who’s staying, going, performing, or not. Personally, I was fascinated by this aspect of the film - can’t think of many other works that touch on this aside from Thomas Mann’s and Yehoshuah’s The Extra. That said, there’s also a deeply troubling side to this film: Why is it that the greatest female conductor etc. uses her prominence to gain sexual favors and to even scores, and why is she so nasty to underlings? To the extent this is true at all, why single out the only woman ever to play this role. Yes, there’s a brief acknowledgement to negative equality - reference to “Jimmy” being chased out of the closet and some lament about Von Karajan without really holding him accountable for his capitulation to Hitler and his all-Aryan orchestra - the setting for Tar btw is the Berlin Symphony - nothing like it in the world, as they note - but why the soft-pedaling re the men and the skewering of the gal? OK, despite all this I was fascinated throughout the film - some of which is tough to understand because of plot complexity and bad sound design on the many one-on-one scenes in which we can discern what Blanchett is saying but not so for her counterparts. Worth watching never the less, and Blanchett definitely earns an Oscar nod.
The multi-talented Sarah Polley directed the film Women Talking (2022), and quite a challenge that must have been as the film consists largely of the eponymous women, who are living in a present-day dystopian settlement in which the women and men are separated at birth and live only among their same-sex brothers, sisters, etc., w/ the women playing subservient roles (e.g., they are never taught to read), engaged in an ongoing discussion about the future of their community, in which the women were on a recent night/day attacked and raped by a group of the men: Should the women stay? Go? Fight Back? Do nothing? Polley gives us nearly 2 hours of their debate - 10 or so women, all dressed in dark clothing, in a single darkened room in the rafters of a hay loft. How could this be interesting? Yet - it will hold anyone start to finish. Polley does a great job keeping the camera alive but never rushing the shots, letting each of the women to speak powerfully of their experience and ideas. Particular honors go to Claire Foy - who knew the Queen got rant in American? The community itself, which seems so improbable, is apparently based in part on such a segregated community in Bolivia - but that aside, there are obvious parallels to various communities that are illegal, cruel, or otherwise: think Hasidic Jews, the Amish, outlaw LDS communities, the Waco project, and this could go on, so, yes, the nearly incredible may be not impossible. Spacial kudos on this project much to novelist Miriam Toews, on whose same-name novel this film is based; as most of the film entails “talking,” the source novel, we can be sure, provided Polley with much of the language (as well as the whole dystopian-present-day high concept) for her screenplay and treatment.
We’re definitely in the midst of a Chantel Akerman revival thanks to the surprising announcement from Sight and Sound that her Jeanne Dielman (1975) was the top-ranked film (i.e., appeared on the most total 10-pick ballots) ever made; I have to think that’s a little overstated - Rules of the Game, Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story anyone? - but a welcome recognition of the work of female and avant-garde filmmakers, and accompanying that surprising (to me) recognition another one of her early films, the “documentary” News from Home (1977). This film consists entirely a series of photos of NYC - where she’d moved - from back in the day, with some voiceover narration from CS’s mother, reading her correspondence with far-from-home daughter; the letters, despite the title of the film, are mostly un-newsy: There are a few updates about her father’s health and accounts of meetings with other relatives and neighbors, but never any detail; the correspondence mostly consists of statements about how much she misses her daughter/CA and pleading with her to come home and to write more regularly, in other words, typical correspondence from that day between parent and away-at-college kin. Watching this film reminds us of how great a distance separated the U.S. from Europe in those days before email, before computers, way way before cell phones and free “long distance” calls. But that’s just the choral background; the brilliance of the film comes from the photographic structure: a series of shots of scenes of NY life, at a time when the city was at its worst, with graffiti and garbage and pretty crime and even prostitution was out there, everywhere. With the possible exception of the final shot, none of the photos show NYC at its best; this is the opposite of, say, Woody Allen’s veneration of NY in Manhattan; CA’s camera focuses on the dirt and the grit - such as long takes about a moving, jostling subway line - the walls scorched with graffiti, the crowd tired and indifferent (hardly ever does anyone notice her camera). After many such still, toward the end CA takes films from a moving car/van (up 10th Ave.) and then downtown via elevated tracks. Her steady camera doing street photography it looks to viewers as though she was taking still photos and the photos are, just a little bit, coming to life - as the occasion car wooshes by, for ex. The film is by no means gripping or dramatic - but it set forth a style largely imitated in the 45 years since by hundreds, maybe thousands of aspiring filmmakers who today are working w/far more advanced and efficient equipment. But Ackerman was there first.
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) is about as a definitive marker of excellence for dark comedy - a film with some horrific scenes of abuse and self abuse and a sorrowful tale of angst and loneliness in a small Irish coastal island; the film owes a debt to the great William Trevor in its notes of Irish melancholy and fierce loyalty, its strange juxtaposition or high drama and sly wit. To summarize would be beside the point: to tell of the brutality would be to lose the the fellowship. But in brief, the film lifts off with an elderly man tell his long-time best friend to get lost - he never wants to speak to his friend again, and will not quite say why that’s so. Improbable, yes - but there’s so much wit and drama drawn from this standpoint: you’ll laugh but won’t exactly know why, as this story is so dire and cruel; you’ll back off, but you won’t exactly know why, as this village seems on the surface to be such a peaceable community - with daily conviviality at the pub, with family loyalty, with the love for animals large and small - a brilliant, sly movie that will stay with you for some time.
Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s film Neptune Frost (2021) is one of those rare films that you have to give yourself up to it and enjoy what you can - especially of the really cool African music and the startlingly vivid costume display and other visuals - while you can because I think most viewers, me certainly, will find the film extremely difficult to comprehend. But does that matter really? Roughly speaking, the film is “about” a young man working in the gold mines of central Africa (Burundi, I think) who strikes (kills?) a team boss and thus goes on the lam to try to save his life and to avenge the killing; he adopts the name Magnanimous Goldmine (or something like that), as well as the title name - as does his sister, in a yin and yang relationship. Neptune (male, though nonbinary) joins up with a cultish group living “off the grid” and hoping to attack the government in some unclear manner. Hmm. Yes, difficult to follow the details and not really necessary if you can just give yourself up to the energy and unusual (to Westerners) Central African setting. To those who prefer or who demand a coherent, accessible narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - this is not your film.
The Steven Spielberg/Tony Kushner The Fabelmans (2022) is a star-dappled work of cinematic auto fiction, re-creating the childhood and adolescence of SS with particular attention, obviously, to his lifelong passion for films/cinematography. I wasn’t at first warm to the film - it seem to reek a bit of idolatry as we see SS at age figuring out how to stage and photography train crashes - story a prodigy, in other words, and I was afraid the film would drown in solipsism - but, no - the narrative takes off in the second “movement” of the film as we see more about the fissures in the Fabelman/Spielberg family dynamics, putting young SS, aka Sammy F., in conflict with his mother, his father, and his beloved “uncle,” as we feel deeply for this child and recognize that film is his life and his salvation - which comes an even greater part of the narrative in the 3rd “movement,” his h.s. years, notably in a wealthy suburban Cal. community in which he is the only Jew and suffers deeply from antisemitism and bullying - and of course his skills as a filmmaker becomes his salvation, but at a cost. Strangely, the movie feels cut short in the superficial treatment of SS’s dropping out of college and seeking to get work in the industry; we could have used more of this - though the film checks in at well above 2 hours, so maybe it could have been done as a series? Or just leave well enough alone. Particularly moving are the sequences of the h.s. bullying - though this has long been a staple of films about adolescence, and the wrenching portrayal (Michelle Williams) as “Sammy’s” troubled mother, a frustrated artist herself - and a true disrupter, who serves, at least initially, as an inspiration for the young Sammy and later as the agent of destruction in this divided family.
Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation (2022) of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985, also approx setting of the novel) is in essence a three-act story, the best of which by far is the middle story - An Airborne Toxic Event - in which a dark cloud of lethal chemicals released ion a truck crash swirls above the mid-Ohio mid-sized city, leading to a mass evacuation of all the inhabitants - all this beautifully conveyed, the tension and conflicting information, the reckless behavior - by NB, a very difficult event to capture I would think. The first part of the story, as in DD’s novel, focuses on the “college on the hill” (in the novel, I’d thought of the setting as Saratoga, Skidmore, though that’s never id’d) and some serio-comic “deconstruction of academic nonsense, as the main character, Jack (Adam Driver) takes pride for his creation of a Hitler Studies program (rivaled by a fledgling program of Elvis Studies) - the satire on academia is kinda funny but let’s face it, these are easy targets (Driver’s lecture on Hitler, which mesmerizes his students in a Hitler-like performance - if this episode is in the novel I don’t remember it, but it’s powerful in this movie, the highlight of Act I). The story line, however, when it moves on to Act III in which Driver’s wife (played by Greta Gerwig, NB’s wife) become addicted to some sort of experimental mood-altering Rx, which sends Driver off to find her Jones - and the film just unravels in this improbable episode: The first half of the film was credible and therefore scary abut the ending seemed to me just a mess (I don’t have a clear recollection of how the novel ended - hey, it’s been nearly 40 years!) - floundering about and way too long a that point, though the highly animated closing credits make it worthwhile to stick around till the end.
Nope? Nope. And it’s such a shame after a few powerful films from Jordan Peele, most notably Get Out, already on the Sight & Sounds list of the best films of all time. And rightly so - it was a perfect demonstration of how to make a great horror film: It has to begin slowly w/only a vague intimation of what’s to occur and why, and there has to be a clear demarcation between reality, fantasy, terror - as well as a divide between those who recognize the danger (and act on that recognition) the doubters and dissemblers. Nope (2022) has none of these - instead, a hard-to-fathom some kind of possession affecting animals on a ranch for a company that provides trained animals for use in films; there are flying saucers, of course, and attacks on the grid, but why? What’s this all about aside from a display of special effects? So let’s just leave it at that: There oughta be a “feels like” scale as with the weather forecast (45 degrees but feels like 20…: How about 2 hours 10 minutes but feels like 4 hours and 40 minutes?
