Imagine being at last night’s Rose Bowl drive-in screening of Nomadland. Imagine all the usual distractions — small-looking screen if you were parked in the middle section, not-bright-enough image, people roaming around, ambient sounds.
Now add a guy parked in front of you who decided to watch the film with his air-conditioning on, which of course meant keeping his engine on for two hours straight and thereby bothering nearby viewers with (a) his bright red parking lights (i.e., the drive-in equivalent of twitter-surfing during a theatrical screening) and also (b) the gentle spewing of exhaust. Thanks, homey! The temperature was around 70 so no real need for a.c. Alas, some people want what they want when they want it.
I heard William S. Burroughs say “some people are shits” during a Madison Square Garden appearance about 40 years ago. It always stayed with me.
Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland is a moody, mesmerizing bulls-eye — a 21st Century Grapes of Wrath minus the simmering anger of Tom Joad and the villainy of random predators. Like John Ford and John Steinbeck‘s 1940 classic, Zhao’s film is pure Americana, set against a backdrop of brusque fate and heartless capitalism, shaded with angst and no shortage of adversity and yet sustained by a certain persistence of spirit, both in front of and behind the camera.
It’s a masterful, painterly portrayal of the American dispossessed, and a fascinating, character-rich study of a roaming vagabond and a constantly evolving community of weathered, mostly retirement-age homeless victims of a cruel economy (it’s set in the wake of the ’09 recession).
I respected Zhao’s previous film, The Rider, which, like Nomadland, is about a sympathetic character who’s stuck in a tough situation with no apparent way out. But I didn’t love it for the rigid scheme and an ending that was mostly about resignation.
Nomadland is on another level. Within five minutes I knew it was a much better, more ambitious film — quietly somber and yet grander in scope, gentler, sadder.
A Best Actress nomination is absolutely locked and loaded for Frances McDormand and her performance as Fern, a sturdy 60something, widowed and close to broke and living out of a van and with no interest in settling. She’s an iron-willed survivor coping with extreme vulnerability; amiable and attentive and yet closed off or at least resistant to emotional attentions on a certain level, self-described as “house-less” as opposed to homeless, moving from job to job, camp to camp, parking lot to parking lot. Inscrutable and yet scrutable.
Nomadland, trust me, is going to be Best Picture nominated. Obviously. Zhao will be Best Director nominated. Joshua James Richard‘s magic-hour cinematography will also lasso a nom. But not, I’m told, Ludovico Einaudi‘s haunting piano score, because it wasn’t composed for the film.
A friend told me that Nomadland, which he felt had shortchanged him due to a lack of some of the usual usuals (carefully-plotted story, second-act pivot, decisive ending), would’ve been better as a half-hour short. I strongly disagree due to the incontestable fact that it grows and deepens and adds more detail with each and every scene. It’s a portrait piece.
By the end you’re left with a full understanding of an industrious but somewhat closed-off woman who doesn’t want to invest in anything but her own discipline, and is curiously resistant to any overtures that verge on the intimate. She can only live in the unstable now, in her own hard but not quite miserable life.
Thank fortune for Fern as well as the audience that Nomadland is full of humanist grace notes…charity, kindness, confessions, helping hands.
Shot in 2.39:1 (which none of the critics so far have even mentioned), it’s all character and atmosphere and mood — “tone poem” is the most favored term thus far. The enhancements are, in this order, (a) McDormand McDormand McDormand, (b) a winning supporting turn by David Straitharn as a kindly, would-be romantic partner, (c) a steady supply of brief turns by real homeless folk, (c) the painterly images…gently dusky and soft and glowing, (d) Zhao’s crisp, urgent editing and especially (e) Einaudi’s score, which pulls you in you right away and captures exactly the right meditative tone.
Ammonite star Kate Winslet to Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller: “It’s like, what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.
“And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can’t turn back the clock. I’m grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren’t able to just be fucking truthful about all of it?”
In other words, having worked with Polanski in 201l’s Carnage, which was shot a year after Polanski’s controversial 2009 arrest in Switzerland in concert with a U.S. extradition attempt (or roughly a decade ago), Winslet has suddenly decided that this wasn’t cool, apparently because making Ammonite has strengthened her #MeToo convictions.
Obviously a little Johnny-come-lately but okay, that’s how she feels.
But to equate Polanski and Woody Allen in terms of alleged crimes and offenses isjust forehead-slapping ignorant. Moreover, it was derelict of Miller not to ask Winslet about the mountains of evidence, indications and public statements that indicate Allen is completely innocent.
I’m so tired of having to refute kneejerk anti-Woody slander by obstinate or under-informed persons, but here, for what feels like the 28th or 29th time, is what any reasonable person would regard as the irrefutable truth of things:
(1) There is no evidence to support Dylan Farrow’s claim. But there’s a fair amount of evidence and ample indication that Mia Farrow, enraged by Woody’s romance with Soon-Yi Previn, made it all up to “get” Woody during an early ’90s custody battle, and as part of this determination coached Dylan to make the claims that she did. I happen to personally believe this scenario. There’s simply no rational, even-handed way to side with the “I believe Dylan Farrow” camp.
(4) “In developing our opinion we considered three hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statements. First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her; second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow. While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we can not be definite about whether the second formulation by itself or the third formulation by itself is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.”
The great Diana Rigg has passed from cancer at age 82. She lived a radiantly full life and enjoyed a long, vibrant career (her first professional gig happened in 1957 at age 19, performing in the RADA production of Bertolt Brecht‘s The Caucasian Chalk Circle), and I felt a genuinely poignant pang when I learned of her death this morning.
I understand that I’m obliged to celebrate (a) her Emma Peel role in The Avengers, (b) her wife-of-James-Bond turn in In Her Majesty’s Secret Service (’69) and (c) her ongoing performance as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. But for me Rigg’s sincere but sardonic performance as Barbara Drummond in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital (’71) was her absolute finest moment.
The fact that Rigg was a pack-a-day smoker for 53 years straight (1956 until 2009) probably had something to do with her passing, but then again that was her choice. Quality over quantity, she probably felt. How anyone could believe that inhaling foul cigarette smoke for decades on end constitutes quality is beyond me.
I’m sorry but my interest in Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival has just…well, kind of plummeted.
Due respect but casting Wallace Shawn as a dismayed romantic protagonist (a cuckold) is not what anyone would call audience-friendly. Shawn has always been a brilliant wit and an amusingly thinky performer, but he’s 77 years old, for heaven’s sake. By any semi-realistic biological standard he’s “out of the game.”
And in the film he’s married to an attractive looker (played by Gina Gershon, whose real age is discoverable but who appears to be somewhere in her late 40s). It would be one thing if, say, Allen had cast the 75-year-old Steve Martin in the role. But not a bald Bilbo Baggins.
Yes, Shawn’s character would naturally feel wounded and disoriented by Gershon’s temporary infidelity, but it’s all but impossible to relate to Shawn in this context. My first reaction was “this is almost like John Huston casting Lionel Barrymore in the Humphrey Bogart role in Key Largo.”
41 years ago Allen used Shawn’s appearance as a sexual joke. In a fleeting Manhattan cameo, Shawn played Jeremiah, a sexually dynamic ex-boyfriend of Diane Keaton‘s “Mary” character. Allen: “Well, you certainly fooled me. This is not what I expected.” Keaton: “What did you expect?” Allen: “Well, you said that he was a great ladies’ man and that he opened you up sexually, and then this little homunculus…” Keaton: “He’s quite devastating.”
But now we’re supposed to take Shawn seriously as a husband with a saucy wife and certain amorous capabilities?
A tale of a risky affair between a high-school teacher (Lindsay Burdge) and a teenaged student (Will Brittain), Hannah Fidell‘s A Teacher was a buzzy title at Sundance ’13. (Here’s my review.) The following year HBO announced a plan to turn the film into a limited series with Fidell again directing. Now it’s an FX project with Kate Mara in the Burdge role, and Nick Robinson as her 16-year-old lover. (Okay, maybe 17.)
May I ask something? When it comes to affairs between scampy teachers and male students (in real life as well as dramas), why do things always have to end in shame and prosecution? Why can’t they fall in love like French president Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron did when he was a 15 year-old student and she was a 39-year-old teacher? Or what about a story about an inappropriate relationship that just comes to a gradual, no-big-deal end without the cops and the school principal getting involved?
My mother warned me once or twice about predatory women when I turned…oh, 15 or 16. I used to pray I’d get hit on. If I’d been lucky enough to connect with one of my attractive teachers when I was that age…well, my God! I would have dropped to my knees and given thanks to God the Father Almighty.
This isn’t a color-filtered video — it’s San Francisco an hour or two ago, straight from the shoulder. From ABC7news: “Why is the sky orange in the Bay Area? There is smoke in the air from the Bear Fire near Chico, but the marine layer is protecting us, so the sky is red, yellow or orange even where air quality is good. On Tuesday, we had the wind to blame for those smoky skies — and lack of a smoky smell. The smoke was coming in from the August Complex Fire near Mendocino National Forest, but high winds were keeping the smoke at a high altitude, instead of settling near the surface.”
People really don’t know what to do right now. Everyone on the Embarcadero is stopping to record the sky and chit chatting in a way I haven’t seen since pre-pandemic @sfchroniclepic.twitter.com/ueKQ4g7WTD
As I mentioned yesterday, the Dune trailer (which I saw last Friday in a Flagstaff multiplex) is somewhat impressive. Timothee Chalamet seems to be doing his own Paul Atreides. I recognize that the arc of Paul’s story in Frank Herbert‘s Dune trilogy is about more than fulfilling a head-spinning destiny and achieving heroism, but involves a gradual descent into a Messianic psychology. But that’s the second part, no?
The basic message of the Dune trailer is “here we go again with a story of a young lad imbued with a certain specialness, and discovering super-powers and carrying the old Joseph Campbell torch on a difficult path to greatness…leading a rebellion, defeating evil, ultimate triumph. Oh, and spices.”
In short it’s more or less the same old same old, and I’m astonished how the fanboys continue to cheer this musty, time-worn fable.
That aside, Greig Fraser’s subdued palette seems agreeable. And Chalamet’s costars appear to hold up their end — Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya Coleman, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem.
Due respect, but I can’t wait to suffer through this thing. Seriously.
Earlier today I happened upon some YouTube clips from Alfred Hitchcock‘s Dial M for Murder (’54). To my delight and astonishment they’re presented within a “boxy” aspect ratio (1.37:1), which I happened to see theatrically during a special engagement at Manhattan’s Eighth Street Playhouse in ’80 or thereabouts.
The higher, boxier image doesn’t include unnecessary air space or superfluous material. No dead spaces or boom mikes. Director of photography Robert Burks frames each shot with immaculate balance.
Thanks to Bob Furmanek and the 1.85 fascist cabal, the only high-def version you can watch today (via the 2012 Warner Home Video Bluray or the streaming component) offers a cleavered 1.78:1 aspect ratio — the original with the tops and bottoms chopped off.
Eight years ago Furmanek posted an explanation or rationale for the cleavered version — I’ve posted it after the jump.
Yes, you can still watch the boxy version if you get your hands on a 2006 WHV DVD. But that’s in 480p, of course, which looks fairly weak by today’s standards. It would be so wonderful if HBO Max would present the boxy version in HD, as they recently did with Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket. Here’s hoping, at least.
It’s about an old-time Omaha diner for Average Joes that was forced to close a couple of months ago, because of a furor over a gravy-covered sausage patty sandwich called the Robert E. Lee. Wokesters were enraged by the obviously racist allusion and demonstrated against the 11-Worth and its longtime owners, the Caniglia family. The Caniglias apologized and offered to remove the name of the dish, but somehow this wasn’t enough and negotiations broke down. Now the diner is history. A shame — I love unpretentious, down-home eateries like this.
Observation: The tweet from the Washington Post‘s Frederick Kunkle about D.C. wokesters “blocking the media from filming their demonstration, shining lights into a reporter’s face, blocking shots with umbrellas and following like minders” is a strong indication that they know the media narrative has begun to turn against them.
I’ve been a sucker all my life for scenes of long-delayed revelation or confession that are nonetheless inaudible due to directorial strategy.
Two of my top three are YouTubed below. My third favorite is Leo G. Carroll‘s remarkably concise explanation to Cary Grant about the whole George Kaplan decoy scheme in North by Northwest. The all-but-deafening sound of nearby aircraft engines allows Carroll to explain all the whats, whys and wherefores in roughly ten or twelve seconds; otherwise a full-boat explanation would take at least…what, 45 or 50 seconds? A minute or two?
My favorite is the On The Waterfront moment in which Marlon Brando‘s Terry confesses to Eva Marie Saint‘s Edie that he was unwittingly complicit in her brother’s murder. Because it’s not just an admission but a plea for forgiveness with Terry insisting it wasn’t his idea to kill Joey or anyone else (“I swear to God, Edie!”), and that he thought “they was just gonna lean on him a little,” as he says to his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) in the film’s second scene.
I’m mentioned the Mississippi Burning moment between Gene Hackman and Frances McDormand a couple of times before. It’s arguably the most powerful moment in this racially charged 1988 thriller, which is based on the infamous 1964 murder of three civil-rights workers. A third-act fantasy spin was the main criticism when it opened, but it emotionally satisfied and that’s what counts.
There’s also that Foreign Correspondent moment inside the Butch windmill when Joel McCrea can hear the murmur of bad-guy voices but not what’s being said. Others?
Cary Grant, Leo G. Carroll during the Chicago / Midway airport confession scene.
“The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.” — Stanley Kubrick.
I don’t have much time to write (we have to leave for the airport by 12:15 pm) but Chris Nolan‘s Tenet turned out to be much, much more than I expected.
I kept muttering to myself, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.” It’s not intentionally “funny”, of course, but I was smiling quizzically and a few times literally guffawing with pleasure. It’s all but impossible to fully “understand” (certainly upon a first viewing, and even after reading the Wikipedia synopsis I was still going “wait, what?”) but my eyes, mind and expectations were constantly being challenged and blown. Pleasurably, of course.
Nolan being Nolan it’s a visceral eye-bath first and foremost as well as a cool and dry thing, of course, but it’s truly astonishing in spurts.
The important thing is it that it didn’t infuriate me like Interstellar did. Comprehension-wise I was less engaged than I was by Dunkirk, but then Tenet is a deliberate stretch and reach — intentionally designed to expand your boundaries and to some extent leave you confounded and feeling behind the eight ball.
This is a totally riveting, first-class, thinking person’s action film — brilliant, ahead of the curve, every dollar on the screen.
SPOILERWHINERWARNING: There are…oh, God, several knockout action sequences you’ll never forget. Four or five I can think of right off the top. Three of them — the first time-reverse fight scene (which also includes the dumping of gold bars on an airport tarmac followed by the 747 slowly crashing into a hangar), the multi-vehicle highway heist, the big military assault with bombs reverse-detonating and being sucked back into the ground — left me giddy with excitement and awe, and at the same time perplexed.
I understood so little of the dialogue that I threw up my hands about five or ten minutes in. The sound mix is, in a sense, “worse” than Interstellar‘s but this time I had been pre-warned and I didn’t much care. It was so incomprehensible in terms of actual “sure, of course, I get it” moments that I said to myself, “Fuck it…just go with the aural and visual energy of it and absorb what you can and then figure out the particulars when you read the Wikipedia synopsis.”
But after reading the Wiki…well, it helped a bit but if you asked me right now to repeat the plot in basic, high-school-dropout, proletariat-guy language I don’t think I could.
And I don’t want to hear any shit from any commenters about how I’m too slow or how I need a fucking hearing aid or anything along those lines. Tenet is not intended to be specifically understood in the way that 98% of the films out there are. It’s meant to be jumped into, submitted to, absorbed, bounced off, smeared with, drowned in.
And I was hugely impressed with the performances. I was totally flat on John David Washington after seeing him in BlacKkKlansman but he’s been goosed and made over and elevated by Nolan. RBatz “acts” less than he did in The Lighthouse, but he’s completely engaging and agreeable. Kenneth Branagh‘s Russian billionaire baddy-waddy is, by popcorn villain standards, one of the best (i.e., most Shakespearean) I’ve ever seen. And Elizabeth Debicki slams the hell out of her role as Branagh’s angry and resentful wife-mom-victim — in my mind it’s the absolute finest performance she’s ever given.
Branagh: “Perhaps you’ll tell me, are you sleeping with my wife?” Washington: “No.” (beat). “Not yet.” Branagh: “How do you want to die?” Washington: “Old.” Branagh: “You’re in the wrong profession then.”
And I love that Nolan didn’t make us endure even one scene with Debicki’s young son. Much obliged!
Kubrick again: “A film is — or should be — more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning…all that comes later.”
“It’s the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting…you don’t need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to ‘explain’ them. ‘Explaining’ them contributes nothing but a superficial ‘cultural’ value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.”
