Pets and Wars
Fiction, nonfiction and comics. Ten movies.
I noted several entries back that I was pondering whether The Big Chill is the worst movie I have ever seen. But I was recently flipping through streaming options and with the holidays upon us was reminded of the existence of Love Actually. I only saw it for the first time about three years ago and must have immediately set about trying to repress the memory. Will let you know if I think of or see any others that are in the running for worst ever.
I moved from the apartment in San Francisco to the other side of town where some other friends own a house they won’t be using for a few months and invited me to hang out and keep an eye on things. I lived here for a time a few years back and already spotted a few titles on their shelves that I read back then, including The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (in which they make the case for how they think the universe spontaneously arose from nothing, which I found fascinating without really understanding) and a cartoon book called The French Cat by Siné, whomever that is.
This change of venue compromised my access to the Pevear/Volokhonsky Anna Karenina translation, but not before I got through the first one hundred and two pages of the text. Love what I’ve read so far. I ordered a used copy online and will have to wait for it to arrive to make further headway.
To keep busy I’m skipping ahead and taking a bite out of the Lionel Shriver novel I mentioned in the previous entry. I knew nothing firsthand of Shriver’s fiction up until this point; I only became interested in her 2021 book Should We Stay or Should We Go after hearing her discuss its novel premise and unique narrative conceit on Meghan Daum’s podcast, and as explained in the previous entry I was lucky to find a copy in a Little Free Library. I’m actually disarmed by the brittleness and excessive formality of Shriver’s prose style, but I’m holding out for the parts I heard her discuss on the podcast where she starts to play around with the structural possibilities of the novelistic format, exploring multiple sets of branching and diverging possibilities for her married protagonists which depend on if and when they do or don’t honor their commitment to a suicide pact.
Concurrent with those first one hundred and two pages of Tolstoy, I also squeezed in a reading of John McWhorter’s new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, known for his heterodox views, literary output and regular public dialogues with his fellow Ivy League professor and “sparring partner” the economist Glenn Loury. (McWhorter has also done Daum’s podcast, incidentally, which has little if anything directly to do with why I’ve been reading him and Shriver around the same time.) I respect McWhorter’s forthrightness and integrity and agree with almost everything he writes in this book while not particularly enjoying his tweedy, professorial writing style. But this is just one individual’s personal taste and only slightly occludes my view that in Woke Racism McWhorter levels soberingly sound arguments on an important cluster of issues. It’s a quick and worthwhile read.
As usual I’ve also been reading some more newspaper comics collections. I used to read Patrick McDonnell’s newspaper strip Mutts in the comics section every day as a kid, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a whole collection before and certainly haven’t spent much time with the strip as an adult, and it’s pretty nauseating to read so many installments of this twee, schmaltzy, sloppily-written strip stacked atop one another. McDonnell has considerable skill as a draftsman and a pleasant Zen-brush aesthetic but the purpose of his life’s work appears to be to find new ways to daily express an “Aren’t cats and dogs silly and don’t we love them anyway?” kind of sentiment. Or worse, “Who’s really the pet and who the owner?” and so on. Excuse me while I throw up.
On the brighter side, I’ve kept up with reading old collections of my beloved Life in Hell by Matt Groening. With Binky’s Guide to Love I had the wonderful and, for me, rare experience of stumbling upon a collection of Life in Hell strips that I mostly hadn’t read before. I read the whole book in two days and I think it’s some of Groening’s best work (and that’s coming from a devoted Life in Hell fan).
I’ve been watching too many good and interesting movies and I have to do a round-up before the list grows more ungainly. In upcoming entries it might be fun to go back to the format where I can stretch out and spend more time focusing on one or two movies. Best to keep it as succinct as possible here.
Pig, directed by Michael Sarnoski, 2021. This one came recommended by a close friend who rightly observed that the only thing noteworthily out of place in this otherwise slickly-filmed and pleasantly unconventional movie is an atonal scene in which Nicolas Cage’s character penetrates an underground fight club for restaurant workers that has supposedly been going on for decades in an abandoned space hidden between buildings in downtown Portland. The rest of the picture is quite good, involving Cage’s character Rob emerging from seclusion in the woods of Oregon to maraud through the Portland food scene in search of the people responsible for violently kidnapping his truffle pig, which is his only friend. Narrative breadcrumbs leading from the woods to the city and back again tell us that Rob was a brilliant and revered Portland chef who ditched the scene when it became more about flash and buzz than the craft of cooking and the joy of connecting with colleagues and customers; he comes out of the woods and confronts the metastasizing excesses and pretensions of this trendy dining culture. The point turns out to be a bit different from what one has been led to think; rather than mete out punishment, Rob gets where he needs to through skill and sensitivity and by keeping himself open and vulnerable in ways that are hard for others to perceive (with the notable exception of a female colleague who is a master baker and seems to understand him on a level that nearly transcends words). An actor named Alex Wolff appears in this whom I recognized from his fine performance in the great 2018 movie Hereditary.
Mommy, directed by Xavier Dolan, 2014. This was another recommendation from another friend and I was cautioned to go in knowing as little as possible, which I did. Offbeat and unusual movie with a curious tone and some insight about different ways to approach cinematic storytelling. The awkwardly-established premise involves a hypothetical change to Canadian law whereby parents of troubled youths can voluntarily give up custody and remand their kids to imprisonment by the state. In this movie a single-mother character played well by Anne Dorval struggles to deal with her out-of-control adolescent son whose emotional disorder causes him, among other troubling issues, to take a sexual interest in her. Their neighbor has a family and emotional problems of her own, and for a time the three of them form a bond that forestalls Dorval’s character’s temptation to surrender and make recourse to the controversial custody law.
What I liked most about this movie was Dorval’s outstanding acting and a really cool choice by the director to confine most of the film to an aspect ratio of 1:1, occasionally widening it out to a more modern presentation when he feels like it and when the story calls for it. Old-timey silent film directors used to do stuff like this a lot, simply blacking out parts of the screen when they wanted to forcibly shift the viewer’s focus or sense of intimacy; I’m not sure why more don’t do it now but I’m glad Dolan was game to explore its utility in the twenty-first century. He makes some other unusual choices that I found interesting even as they didn’t all cohere into something I loved. For example the not-quite-incest storyline kind of floats along ultimately without clarity of purpose or significance.
I don’t know much about Québécois culture and maybe that has something to do with what to me felt like the unusual dramatic tone of this picture. Whether or not I’m right about that, I’m glad I gave this a try.
if…. directed by Lindsay Anderson, 1968. This was probably my fourth time watching one of the best movies I’ve ever seen and I figure out new things about it every time. It’s the first of Anderson’s loose, jangly “Mick Travis trilogy.” Malcolm McDowell plays Mick in all three films, though Mick appears to find himself in a different narrative universe in each one. In if… Mick is a rebellious and free-spirited lad returning for a penultimate year at a posh English boarding school. Mick and his several closest friends are the freethinking rebels of the form and have all come back from the summer having imbibed the spirit of ‘68 with nonconformity, revolution and violence on their minds. (Eventually their chemisty is perfected and aims aligned by the addition of a sexy and mischevious town girl who becomes the gang’s hood ornament.)
The unforgiving environment of the traditional English public school system, where lads from the right sort of families go to get dominated and abused by staff and fellow students in preparation to scale the heights of the British social hierarchy, gives them more than they need to feel oppressed enough to lash out, first through school infractions, eventually through petty crime and finally through irrevocably explosive and bloody guerrilla tactics, figuratively and quite literally taking aim at representations of conservative authority figures of old-guard British society — clergy, the military, the school headmaster and even little old English ladies.
Ahead of their time, Anderson and his screenwriter David Sherwin seem to be conscientious objectors when it comes to the thought-provoking question of just how full of shit these would-be revolutionaries are, and the film presents at least some subtle suggestions that they might primarily be spoiled brats whose objections are more aesthetic and social than moral or political. The filmmakers could be calling these kids out as rambunctious poseurs or indicting the society that forces freethinkers and eccentrics along that path, and/or simply describing two orthogonal historical trajectories (British tradition and Sixties countercultural radicalism) and seeing what happens when they intersect and ignite. The ability to see it in contrasting ways is part of the strength of the film, especially since the shocking outcome is the same in any case. Once Mick and company have crossed the line and carried their ideas and ideals to a conclusion that is a bit quaint by the standards of 2021 but would have had immense power to shock and provoke in 1968, the filmmakers and protagonists have most decidedly put their mortars where their mouths are.
As the film builds patiently to this harrowing and invigorating slapstick nightmare of a dénouement, its tone careens off the rails of plausibility and descends into outright farce, getting not just darker and scarier but also sillier and weirder. It works unlike anything else I’ve seen. I jotted down a lot of notes about specific details that would be better discussed in a longer entry or over a drink, so I’ll leave it there for the moment.
Day for Night, directed by François Truffaut, 1973. My father taught me the expression “day for night” when I was a kid, I think maybe while I was watching The Bridge on the River Kwai or something. Whatever it was it had a day-for-night sequence in it and that’s what led to him explaining the term to me. He also told me there was a famous film by that title but I never got around to finding out anything about it. Turns out it’s Truffaut presenting a seriocomic, semiautobiographical ensemble piece about what it’s like to make a movie in Europe in the Seventies (international cast and crew, Nouvelle Vague production sensibility, libertine social and sexual mores, alcohol and tobacco). Basically it’s Truffaut’s take on what the movie-making process is like for him and his colleagues, tellingly playing the director of the movie-within-a-movie himself. Part of the point is that this film business attracts high-performance eccentrics and egomaniacs (and their needy hangers-on) who don’t fit in anywhere else and so are forced to band together not only as coworkers but as makeshift family, which makes for a delirious high-stakes mess that with luck and skill can be steered toward an end result that will make its money back. This movie (Day for Night itself, not the movie within the movie) is spry, colorful, entertaining and fresh-feeling. It’s only the third Truffaut-directed film I’ve seen and I really liked it.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, 1996. It’s odd that I never got around to seeing this until now, since I was an adolescent when it was released and since I spent many a weekend in middle school and high school renting and watching videos with my friends. Anyway, I finally saw it and I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the editing, pacing or much of the acting. Claire Daines was very good. I love John Leguizamo and find that he’s consistently one of the best things about whatever he’s in, which holds true in this case.
Things to Come, directed by William Cameron Menzies, 1936. This was my second time watching this and I don’t remember it being such a ghastly chore to sit through the first time. Its heart is in the right place and the plainly-stated moral at the end is correct but it’s a tough road getting there for a modern viewer. It’s based on a book by H.G. Wells imagining several stages of future for humanity over a century, beginning in the Thirties and positing the onset of World War II with keen foresight. It drifts into tedium from there but comes around to a cogent point about the nature of ongoing progress through science, creativity, problem-solving and knowledge-creation and about the responsibility of humans to venture away from the Earth and colonize other planets and solar systems. While the last two thirds of the film are too boring and melodramatic to take seriously, there is some fantastic retro-future design and a couple of shots (just a couple, mind you) that were striking enough in the film’s rough-hewn monochromatic look that I wanted to freeze the picture and hang them on a wall. Overall Things to Come is not especially fun to endure but is an interesting artifact of its time.
Val, directed by Leo Scott and Ting Poo, 2021. This is a documentary about the life and career of the movie star Val Kilmer. Since Kilmer has throat cancer and has lost the quiet power of his soothing, mellifluous speaking voice, his voice-over narration explaining the story of his life is performed by his son, and this proves an effective choice: you know you’re hearing words that Kilmer has written being spoken by someone else who sounds enough like the Kilmer we know from his many fine performances that you forget it isn’t literally the same voice, until interspersed footage from the present jars the viewer into observing how much Val Kilmer’s life has changed since his cancer diagnosis and throat operation.
Kilmer comes off as a weird individual in a very good sense, a good-hearted eccentric with some personal difficulties in his family background who was great at his job and gracious to his coworkers and fans. If he later developed a reputation for being a diva during a string of bad choices, the film at least presents his side of the case in a way that manages to make his life relatable and underscore the reality that even fantastically successful people are still human beings just trying to make it through each day and year. One leaves Val with an appreciation for just how good and unique Kilmer really was as an actor and how surprising it is that someone as unconventional as him became so successful in the movie business. I could have stood for a little more attention focused on the underrated 2004 David Mamet film Spartan in which Kilmer gave a great central performance, but I get why they had to focus most of their attention on the big marquee hits and flops. One thing I know without question is that I’m way overdue for a rewatch of Kilmer’s legendary performance in Tombstone.
The Power of the Dog, directed by Jane Campion, 2021. I’ve only seen one of Campion’s other pictures and it left me a bit cold and unengaged, as did The Power of the Dog. The story has to do with repressed sexuality, buried history, emotional intimidation and sub rosa power-grappling on a cattle ranch in Montana in 1925. The two key performances are by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is outstanding, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, who at first seems out of his depth in a way that turns out to be one of the movie’s assets.
The photography is really beautiful in this film. The movie has an austere, airy, spread-out feel to it and not just because it’s set in the wide-open American west. What I’m describing feels deeper than that, as if everyone on both sides of the camera are keeping a distance from one another. I wonder if this gives some indication of a kind of general tone of spareness and restraint that we can expect to characterize movies from our new decade. Maybe all post-pandemic prestige films will have a sort of haunted aloofness, which The Power of the Dog most certainly does. This movie is somewhat tedious but the surprising and satisfying ending works pretty well. Worth it mainly for Cumberbatch’s great performance. A movie I admired much more than enjoyed.
The Handmaiden, directed by Park Chan-wook, 2016. As with the previous film, this one also has to do with characters living in a time, place and social environment where they have to repress or navigate around their sexual preferences, although in this one the tension is too hot to not eventually boil over, which boy does it ever. In this case the setting is Korea while it is being occupied by imperialist Japan, I guess prior to World War II. Among many other things, the film is about the clashing and intermingling of Korean and Japanese languages and cultures, realized on screen by the clever choice to transcribe subtitles for the Korean and Japanese dialogue in different colors.
This is a narratively ambitious and thematically elaborate picture with an elegant but dense structure involving a cascading series of revelations about who of the three central characters is conning and seducing whom at each stage of story development. It’s great stuff all around — visually intoxicating, emotionally engaging, narratively surprising and discomfitingly sexy. This is the flip-side of my point about The Power of the Dog; The Handmaiden is a self-serious drama that’s not afraid to weave in as much detail, style and momentum as possible. The film comes close to sticking the landing; there were just a few hasty storytelling choices near the end that kind of zipped past me in a rush toward the reasonably gratifying conclusion. A very fine movie with a lot going for it; one just has to be prepared to focus and keep up, knowing even then that some details might still get overlooked.
Cold War, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018. I can’t say enough good about this one. If you’re not interested in plumbing the depths of cinematic history and require something more pleasing to a modern filmgoing sensibility, I would even recommend this over if…. (adding a parenthical here literally just because it’s annoying to place the title if… at the end of a sentence).
Expansive, economical, strikingly filmed, perfectly cast, deeply felt and about as sad as a story can be without succumbing to despair or heartbreak, Cold War covers roughly fifteen years in the lives of a pianist and a singer who meet in communist Poland in 1949, orbiting one another in concentric circles — an explosive love affair within a masterful creative relationship within the soul-endangering difficulties of being free and open-hearted in a totalitarian society. They connect, lose touch, reconnect and desperately fight with and for one another on both sides of the Iron Curtain in a film that manages to make every single one of these details and occurrences feel realistic, relatable and unhurried in less than an hour and a half. The stark black-and-white photography is astonishingly beautiful and has some meaningful implications for the story’s nested themes. It also adds to the already considerable pleasure of watching the excellent lead performances by Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot, who look too good and perform too convincingly to let a viewer get bored for even a second watching them. Kinda feels like if old black-and-white photos from some hard-hitting international journalism magazine from the middle of the last century were to leap off the page and come to life before your eyes. Whatever you do, don’t miss this one.