Since glimpsing this college film-course chart, I’ve been reading about the influential Dziga Vertov. who was very close to Vladimir Lenin. But before this morning I had never heard of the guy. At least I’m willing to admit it.

Eric Clapton and Van Morrison earned their disrepute for Covid-ignoring, mask-refusing obstinacy. But Roger Waters has outdone them by becoming a Putin admirer, or at least a supporter of Russki slaughter in Ukraine.

To me the Nuart has always been the West Los Angeles version of the Cinema Village — a certain storied, neon-marquee, down-at-the-heels atmosphere but never a theatre to get excited about attending, much less write home about.

If you ask me it peaked in the ‘70s and ‘80s, which many regard as the summit of L.A.’s arthouse era (Fox Venice, Beverly Canon, LACMA’s Bing, the varied Laemmle westside showplaces).

From a presentational or impressionistic viewpoint, the Nuart has always been a bowling alley-slash-quonset hut with a smallish screen.

My last viewing at the Nuart was the restored Becket (Glenville + O’Toole + Burton). The quality difference between that subdued, somewhat murky-sounding presentation and what this 1964 film undoubtedly looked and sounded like in big-city, first-run bookings, not to mention the first-rate Bluray….forget it, man.

The best aspect of the vaguely grubby Nuart is still the pinkish-red neon marquee, and even that isn’t what anyone would call spectacular. Okay, maybe I’m being too harsh.

The Ankler‘s Tatiana Siegel is reporting that Apple is seriously thinking about “crashing the Oscars” with Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon, if and when it opens in December. World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has repeated the story sans paywall. If Scott brings the same intense historical realism to Napoleon that be brought to The Last Duel and especially The Duellists, his forthcoming Apple-distributed drama will almost certainly be a keeper.

Nationalist anti-immigrant sentiments have surfaced in several European countries over the last few years, and now Georgia Meloni, a hard-right, anti-immigrant politician whose principal affiliation is with the radical Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), has been elected Italy’s prime minister.

It is fair to presume that Meloni’s’ victory is mostly about ground-level, Average Joe racism — wanting to protect traditional Italian culture from a feared flooding of the country and the culture by Middle Eastern and northern African immigrants.

The electoral ascension of the hard-right Sweden Democrats represents another cultural convulsion caused by this same concern.

N.Y. Times reporter Steven Erlanger: “European Union leaders are now watching [the Meloni] coalition’s comfortable victory in Italy…with caution and some trepidation, despite reassurances from Ms. Meloni, who would be the first far-right nationalist to govern Italy since Mussolini, that she has moderated her views.

“But it is hard for them to escape a degree of dread. Even given the bloc’s successes in recent years to agree on a groundbreaking pandemic recovery fund and to confront Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the appeal of nationalists and populists remains strong — and is spreading, a potential threat to European ideals and cohesion.”

Some are under an impression that Ti West‘s Pearl (A24, currently playing), the X prequel, is some kind of unusual, imaginative gothic slasher film blah blah. And I’ve been told “you really ought to see this.”

Well, I caught it last night, and shame on the above-described. They need to beg for forgiveness, take their shirts off and beat themselves with birch branches, wash their mouths out with soap.

That goes double for a friend who wrote that “while X is a generic slasher flick, Pearl does flesh out some of the X characters. X is X but Pearl is something completely different. I don’t know if you’ll like it or not, at the very least the cinematography is fairly stunning.”

Allow me to ask a question of the Pearl fan clubbers. The question is “what is wrong with you?”

Pearl is a facile, lazily conceived, sloppily written, incongruent American gothic slasher flick that basically asks “what if Dorothy Gale was an enraged, self-hating, mother-hating, animal-hating, everything-hating fiend who uses a three-pronged pitchfork the way Norman Bates used a kitchen carving knife?”

I know what strikingly handsome, wow-level cinematography shot in a wide-open farming locale looks like. Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler‘s lensing of Days of Heaven is one example. The bucolic farm images of Pearl (shot in New Zealand, pretending to be Texas) are decent but nothing to get too excited about. Bothersome at times…under-lighted, sometimes muddy compositions. It reminded me of the visual palettes of The Hills Have Eyes, I Spit On Your Grave and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Seriously, fuck this movie.

Random jottings during the screening:

(a) “This is low-rent crap…perverse, brainless, derivative psycho Americana“;
(b) “Pearl’s hard-nosed German mother (Tandi Wright) emphasizes that life is hard and they need to struggle to survive, but she refuses a neighbor’s gift of a stuffed pig?”;
(c) “An alligator living in a lake in Texas?”;
(d) “Mia doesn’t like to be stared at by the brown cow”;
(e) “For my money the cinematography is on the muddy and grainy and under-lighted side”;
(f) “Wright’s performance is pretty good”;
(g) “The 1920s silent stag film was diverting”;
(h) “Masturbating with the scarecrow was okay“;
(i) “The allusion to the 1918 pandemic was interesting”;
(j) “Why doesn’t she chop her father’s hands off with an axe and feed them to the alligator? Why doesn’t she feed herself to the alligator?”;
(k) “Stupid crap…wasting my life watching this shit…feed him to the fake gator!”;
(l) “Where does Pearl get the idea that she’s some kind of good singer or dancer? I know she’s delusional but why go to an audition if she doesn’t have some kind of half-reasonable hope that the audition guys will respond to her skill and talent? That said, the World War I chorus girl sequence isn’t bad”;
(m) “Pearl pitchforks the only nice, sensible guy in the whole film because he begins to realize she’s a bit of wacko, which of course she is”;
(n) “I’m soooo glad I never saw X. I’m ecstatic that I missed it.”
(o) “Ti West is an animal…a serious primitive…the polar opposite of a filmmaker like, say, Todd Field.”