Two by Two
Two books and twenty-two movies.
Bones, Bones, Dinosaur Bones is the fourth book I’ve read by the gaudy, primitivist children’s book author and illustrator Byron Barton. I read it in two minutes standing in place while perusing a display of dinosaur-related picture books at the public library. Barton’s style is nothing to write a newsletter about, but then after all his books are intended primarily for the proto-verbal set, and I’m enthusiastic about anything dinosaur-related.
I also re-read one of my favorite books by one of my favorite writers, Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow. I’m still camped out in the apartment of an absent bibliophile friend in San Francisco; a copy of this book with the original old-fashioned cover art was on his extensive shelves and I’ve been meaning to read it again for quite a while — in fact for the approximately decade and a half since I first read it.
Of Bellow’s fourteen works of long-form fiction I have read nine. Eventually this number will go to fourteen. Of those nine this is now the third that I’ve read twice, along with the 1956 novella Seize the Day and the lengthy, brilliant, confounding 1975 novel Humboldt’s Gift.
Henderson the Rain King was published in 1958, just after Seize the Day and several books before Humboldt’s Gift in the Bellow chronology. It is longer than the former and shorter than the latter and overall is arguably superior to both, largely on the strength of its finely-calibrated balances between comedy and tragedy and between madcap adventurousness and intimate relatability. It depicts several of Bellow’s most interesting and sensitively-imagined characters, not least of all in the physically imposing aristocratic dilettante and ne’er-do-well Henderson (interestingly said to be Bellow’s only non-Jewish protagonist, which has some intriguing implications for the character and text). The character of the tribal King Dahfu is also a fascinating and unique figure rendered in the fine resolution at which Bellow excelled; this brilliant, exceptional, lion-worshipping exemplar in whom the eccentric, needy, insatiably restless narrator Henderson perceives a profound sense of “Being” in contrast to his own problem with compulsively “Becoming” feels both authentic and distinctive enough for the reader to fall as hard for Dahfu as does Henderson in encountering him and as Bellow seems to have in conceiving him.
The whimsical passages in which Henderson elucidates the magic of Dahfu’s wisdom, charisma and strength of character are just several among many in which Bellow’s prose style still feels electrifyingly fresh and ahead not only of his time but of our own. To me this is a unique and worthwhile read, and I’d be interested to receive any assenting or dissenting assessments, particularly from Bellow neophytes. Meanwhile I will make a point somewhere down the line of getting around to tackling the five Bellow novels I haven’t yet touched, and probably re-reading The Adventures of Augie March, which would be my recommendation to someone who was interested in Bellow but was only going to read one book. If you’re open to at least two, I would suggest starting with Henderson the Rain King, which is funny, heartfelt and reasonably-lengthed.
For no particular reason I progressed through the last twenty-two movies I’ve watched by grouping them in thematic pairings. It was my second time watching Dead Man, The Lighthouse, The Last Emperor, both Crank films, Phantom Thread and The Big Sleep. Everything else listed below was a first watch except for House of Games, which I’ve seen probably five or six times at this point.
Two in black and white.
Dead Man, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1995. Johnny Depp plays a displaced misfit who gets mortally injured and traverses the border between life and death, symbolized by the wild frontier of the Old West. Interesting, clever, methodically violent and ultimately shallow and self-satisfied film. I read in a magazine years ago that Jarmusch is suspected by some of having stolen the premise of this picture from an unrealized screenplay by a writer named Rudy Wurlitzer.
The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers, 2019. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson give great performances as a couple of lighthouse hands working around the turn of the twentieth century who alternately attract and repel one another and may or may not represent (or be) figures from Greek mythology. Their relief doesn’t show up and they get stranded during a gale-force sea storm, leading them to turn on one another as they descend into paranoid hallucinations. Excellent-looking, chilling, explosively funny, deeply bizarre and unsettling slapstick nightmare. Great movie; highly recommended.
Two with Juliette Binoche.
Let the Sunshine In, directed by Claire Denis, 2017. Binoche is fantastic in both of these pictures. In this one she plays a successful Parisian gallery artist with an alienated ex-husband and daughter, a rude and standoffish married lover and a yearning desire to find a functional and fulfilling relationship. Gorgeously filmed and narratively engrossing. Denis and her collaborators made an odd choice for the coda, which left me vaguely unsatisfied and a bit adrift without derailing what is otherwise a very fine, heartfelt, enjoyable movie. Great camerawork, costumes and performances.
Certified Copy, directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 2010. Binoche and an opera performer named William Shimell, who does fantastically well for someone who apparently had never acted on film before, play two attractive, dignified forty-something sophisticates wandering through a Tuscan village together. For half of the film they appear to be strangers until the characters pass through some sort of opaque narrative prism and spend the back half litigating a messy and complicated personal history. It is left to the viewer to question and contemplate precisely what is transpiring between them, as they are by definition performing some strange pantomime for at least half of the picture, though it’s impossible to adjudicate which half. The character played by Shimell is a scholar and author who writes about imitation and reproduction in the fine arts, which is related to these mysterious interpersonal themes. Great camerawork, costumes and performances. Arresting and technically impressive final image which sticks the landing better than the above-mentioned Binoche film.
Two from 1987.
The Last Emperor, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987. A compressed telling of the life of Puyi (played by four actors at different ages), the last emperor of China, and of the country’s painful transition from imperial dynasty to nascent republic to totalitarian dictatorship. Sumptuously filmed and plotted at a stately pace, this would-be historical epic manages to remain engaging while straining towards the sweep and scope of superior genre antecedents like Lawrence of Arabia or Reds. The Last Emperor rests on an interesting three-act structure in which the character of Puyi is trapped within three different types of prison: the royal Forbidden City to which he is confined throughout his youth, the puppet province of Manchukuo where he is pressured into a pathetic sinecure as Chief Executive by the bellicose Empire of Japan and finally the literal prison of the Maoist authorities after the War. Good movie with a lot of individual qualities to recommend it which don’t quite add up to more than the sum of their parts.
House of Games, directed by David Mamet, 1987. Lindsay Crouse plays a psychiatrist and author who becomes intrigued by a professional conman played by Joe Mantegna; they spend the movie trying to seduce and outwit one another, spitting Mamet’s cast-iron bebop dialogue in oddly muted, restrained performances. I dig Mamet’s influential writing style and unshowy eye as a director, even though he doesn’t have the best batting average overall as a filmmaker. There are some undisputed greats and some real pieces of shit in his filmography, but occasionally it’s even tough to tell whether he’s hit one out of the park or scored a modest lead-off single, as with his first film House of Games. I’ve been watching and revisiting this one since I was a kid; it took me for a thrilling ride the first time and keeps me coming back to try to come to terms with some of the fascinatingly bewildering choices Mamet made along the way. If you don’t know more about it than what I’ve written here, go in cold and see what it does for you. It’s overall very good, fairly unique for its time and offers up some surprising turns that I imagine would still feel fresh to a first-time viewer.
Two by David Cronenberg.
The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg, 1986. Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist who has invented teleportation pods and uses them to accidentally get his DNA mixed up with that of a housefly, which begins to turn him into a fly/man monster. Geena Davis plays a journalist who starts out in search of a story, becomes his girlfriend and nearly ends up as his victim. This is a horror/science fiction movie on the surface but the substrate theme is the arc of a passionate but troubled relationship. I’ve never liked Cronenberg as a filmmaker because until these viewings I’d only ever seen his later, more mainstream and higher-budget action/suspense pictures A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, which are both pretty terrible, and the terminally boring Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch. (I saw Cronenberg’s Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone on television one afternoon as a kid and loved it, but have no idea how it holds up.) I liked The Fly and Videodrome enough to at least finally understand that Cronenberg has indeed done decent, distinctive work in his career, so I can begin to understand his cult following which has heretofore left me befuddled and annoyed. These movies have by no means made of me a cult member or even a passing fan, but they are both solid and interesting pictures.
Videodrome, directed by David Cronenberg, 1983. This was the better, weirder and deeper of these two. James Woods gives a good performance as a television executive looking for sleazy material that still has the power to shock in the burgeoning era of videotape and stumbles on something that appears to be part snuff video guerrilla campaign and part political conspiracy (I think). It also becomes a complex of addiction, delusion and self-destruction for Woods’s character. As with The Fly the filmmakers do a good job of making the surface-layer desire to know what happens next feel charged and enlivened by the deeper moral implication, which in this case is that the overwhelming power of moving images combined with the cheapness of videotape and reach of broadcasting will lead to some warped minds, frayed social fabric and ruined lives. (And nearly four decades later, here we are.) An important, ahead-of-its-time statement wrapped inside of a garish, pyschologically dark, high-strung suspense picture.
Two Crank movies.
Crank, directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2006. Jason Statham fills out one of his finest and best-cast roles as an assassin whose enemies have injected him with a drug that will kill him in a few hours if he doesn’t keep his adrenaline levels surging, which means he has to do increasingly wild and risky things as he careens from point to point to dispatch bad guys. Gleefully trashy, very fun and highly original (for its time) action caper that has been often imitated and never equalled, not even by its sequel which was made by mostly the same team.
Crank: High Voltage, directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009. Crunchier and even more disposable sequel in which Statham’s character reprises the same premise with electricity instead of adrenaline. So now he has to get shocked by electricity to stay alive and lethal. This one takes more visual and conceptual risks than the original but doesn’t manage to weave them into the fabric as seamlessly, so it feels more episodic, less cohesive and a touch desperate. One thing this movie has over its predecessor is a relentlessly pulsating, deeply weird score by the ingenious composer and vocalist Mike Patton.
Two from 2017.
1922, directed by Zak Hilditch, 2017. Netflix presentation of a feature film Stephen King adaptation. Thomas Jane plays a lonely, amoral farmer who writes out a flashback confession detailing how in 1922 he cajoled his teenage son into conspiring with him to murder his wife, played by a well-cast Molly Parker, who I always loved in the excellent television program Deadwood. This is a functional, slickly-assembled, reasonably engaging noir drama. The main thing of interest is Jane’s fine performance, built around a powerful voice he’s found that embodies this character sturdily, which is important because so much depends on his voice-over narration to set the right tone for the proceedings. I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to see 1922 but it has some qualities that make it worth a glance if you like this kind of thing or if you’re a fan of King’s writing.
The Florida Project, directed by Sean Baker, 2017. Bracing and enthralling piece of narrative vérité, set around a pay-by-the-week motel in Florida that is walking distance, and yet culturally a world away, from Disney World. The loosely swirling story settles around three generations of struggling individuals — a preadolescent girl played by Brooklynn Prince, her prostitute mother played by Bria Vinaite and the building manager played by Willem Dafoe (in a performance as self-assured as it is different from his part in The Lighthouse). All three actors are magnificent and disappear into their respective roles. Excellent, heartfelt, interesting and watchable. One of the best on this list.
Two with Vicky Krieps.
Beckett, directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, 2021. A conservatively-realized neo-Hitchcockian espionage thriller about a normal American guy played by John David Washington going to extraordinary lengths to evade would-be killers and uncover a conspiracy while stranded in Greece. Krieps plays a good-hearted journalist who saves his life and helps him unravel the conspiracy. She does a fine job with her narrow role but the movie belongs to Washington, a devilishly handsome and quietly confident screen presence with the alluring physicality of a jaguar. This is the third movie I’ve seen, along with BlacKkKlansman and Tenet, in which Washington’s lead role is one of the best things on offer. Like those pictures Beckett, which has problems with act structure and pacing sufficient to make it tiresome, is ultimately overly-ambitious and flawed.
Phantom Thread, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017. In this one Krieps plays a young woman from continental Europe who is living in postwar England and falls in love with Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, a master tailor and designer of haute couture who runs a fashion house with the help of his right-hand sister played by Lesley Manville. Krieps does a fine job contending with two of the best screen actors alive who both turn in masterful performances in this excellent movie. Glossy prestige pictures don’t get much better than this, and as a great fan of Anderson’s work I was relieved to see him back in form here after Inherent Vice, which was his first, and to date only, bad movie. Phantom Thread is about a lot of things but appears to me to be primarily concerned with the kind of discipline and selfishness required of an exceptional craftsman to make the most of his gifts and the tradeoffs such a person might have to make to allow a truly intimate relationship into his circle of trust without decaying it from the inside. I suspect this is largely autobiographical or at least on some level deeply personal for Anderson. Besides Day-Lewis’s towering performance, this film has a tightly-structured and interesting story, a great score and breathtakingly beautiful mise en scène, embodied especially in delectable hair, makeup, costume and set designs. Excellent, outstanding, highly entertaining picture.
Two by Howard Hawks.
Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks, 1938. Cary Grant plays a handsome, fuddy-duddy nerd (kinda like Henry Fonda’s character in The Lady Eve) who can’t seem to steer clear of a high-spirited, wise-cracking “dame with moxie” type played brilliantly by Katharine Hepburn, who appears to be having a great time and can’t help but invite the viewer to do the same with her dazzling overflow of charisma. The two of them endure slapstick antics while they negotiate the care of a leopard named Baby, salvage Grant’s character’s career and realize they belong together. This is a pretty good movie, a little tiresome, featuring some genuinely impressive on-set work done alongside a live, unrestrained leopard (I’m not clear how they actually pulled this off but it looks good on the screen). One viewing is enough for me.
The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks, 1946. Famously hard-to-follow detective noir with a solid lead performance by Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, the protagonist from famous stories that I have never read by Raymond Chandler (I’m a Hammett man myself). This movie is all sizzle and no steak. Too much talk and indecipherable double- and triple-crossing. It does have a noteworthy number of genuinely sexy, noirish, old-school-cool young female characters.
Two with Matthew Broderick.
WarGames, directed by John Badham, 1983. Broderick plays a rebellious teenaged computer nerd in Seattle who accidentally hacks into a computer that is playing imaginary war games with itself in preparation for a nuclear showdown with the Soviets; by accepting a challenge to play what he mistakenly thinks is a game with the computer, Broderick’s character accidentally leads the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. to the brink of nuclear war and has to elude the authorities and track down the computer’s reclusive designer for help in averting catastrophe. Solidly-constructed and entertaining movie that effectively intertwines Cold War suspense thrills with teenage angst. The movie starts out strong with a really cool opening scene featuring the great character actors John Spencer and Michael Madsen, and my only gripe is that the feel-good ending should have had one more scene where it recapiluted the killer opener and brought the structure full-circle. Still, pretty good overall.
To Dust, directed by Shawn Snyder, 2018. Broderick plays a mild-mannered community college science instructor who is dragged by a Hasidic Jewish widower played by Géza Röhrig into an obsession with the widower’s wanting to know when his dead and buried wife might fully decay into the earth so that her spirit can be free. Good-looking, well-cast movie with a bone-dry sense of humor and a genuinely novel premise that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Makes good use of Tom Waits music. Peculiar, offbeat and pretty good.
Two with the word “Count” in the title.
Count Me In, directed by Mark Lo, 2021. Innocuous, tiresome, toothless documentary about rock and roll drummers. This is a subject that is important to me but I don’t think my bias is clouding my reasonable assessment of this junk food Netflix offering.
The Count, directed by Charlie Chaplin, 1916. Short silent comedy from the early part of Chaplin’s career. He plays a worker in a tailor’s shop who bluffs his way into a fancy ball by impersonating a count. Wackiness ensues. There are some impressive acrobatics and light chuckles. Silly and harmless entertainment probably chiefly of interest to Chaplin completists or little kids; nothing to recommend it over later masterpieces like Modern Times or The Great Dictator.
Two from 1971.
Macbeth, directed by Roman Polanski, 1971. Surprisingly dreary, muddily-colored, histrionic Shakespeare adaptation that goes to pains to render the setting realistically and contemporaneously, which turns out to be a drag and demonstrates why many Shakespeare film adaptations shift settings. It seems like Polanski and company were going for realism but the proceedings end up feeling more fantastical and implausible than I imagine the play feels on stage. Polanski’s best work always gives me the feeling like he’s pulling back the curtain on something I’m not supposed to be witnessing and leaves me with trouble getting these psychological horrors out of my head; a trippy central sequence in Macbeth is the closest he comes to deriving that sensation from one of Shakespeare’s darker and creepier plays. Kurosawa did much better in his Samurai Macbeth Throne of Blood.
Klute, directed by Alan J. Pakula, 1971. Standout detective thriller in which Donald Sutherland plays the titular policeman from a quiet part of Pennsylvania who goes on a personal mission into the den of sin New York City to try to find a close friend who has been missing for six months and whom is suspected to be stalking a call girl played by Jane Fonda. Structurally this movie flips the script in two noteworthy ways — first by allowing most of the events to unfold not from Klute’s point of view but from that of Fonda’s character Bree, and secondly by cluing us in early as to who is really behind the disappearance, stalking and assorted other crimes but keeping us in captivating suspense as to motivation and final outcome. There are also great writing choices in study of character and culture; Fonda’s character is a struggling model and actor who compulsively turns tricks against her better judgment not because she is a desperate victim without agency but because it gives her a sense of power and control in her life, while her chemistry and common cause with the straight-laced and conservative Klute represents an interesting duel of hypocrisies between the square and hip communities. Like a few others mentioned above, this movie has something interesting to say, has every detail in place and is spiked in the end zone by skilled professionals who seem to believe wholeheartedly in the strong material with which they’re working. Great movie; highly recommended.