If you’re a genre nostalgic who’s looking for a romantic comedy that could’ve been made in the ‘90s or early aughts, and that features all of the comforting types (including the widowed protagonist, the dreamy lost love, the sassy, truth-telling best friend, the equally hunky potential new love and his cynical yet adoring sister) “The Greatest Hits” will tick most if not all of the boxes. The problem, in the end, is that you’re probably going to be too aware of the boxes as they’re checked—and although the performances are nearly faultless, the characterizations rarely rise above the requirements of their respective “types.” And only one of the three central relationships in this love triangle (between a grieving woman, the memory of her dead boyfriend, and the incredibly appealing new guy that she meets in a grief counseling group) comes completely alive as a person, thanks more to the performer than the role.
As a piece of filmmaking, “The Greatest Hits” doesn’t lack ambition, much less a pedigree. Writer-director Ned Benson took a huge swing ten years ago with “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” which recounted a relationship from two lovers’ perspectives, and was reedited into a combined, “Rashomon”-sh story (they were subtitled “His,” “Hers” and “Them,” and are available in all three versions). This new feature has a splash of “Slaughterhouse Five,” in that its heroine Harriet (Lucy Boynton) trips backwards in time whenever she hears a song that reminds her of a moment she shared with her late boyfriend Max (David Corenswet, James Gunn’s newly anointed Superman), and one of Benson’s smartest decisions as a screenwriter is to keep you guessing during first two-thirds as to whether Harriet’s condition is scientifically quantifiable or if she’s so deep in the grief-pit that she’s starting to crack up.
The big problem, for this viewer anyway, is that when the movie finally pulls the trigger on its concept and entirely commits to it, in a scientific procedural way, the story is getting ready to be over. Chung Chung-hoon shimmering, lens-flare-y photography, Page Buckner’s dense and meticulous but never showy production design, and Olga Mill’s costumes go right up to the edge of a sci-fi parable love story (parts of it are reminiscent of “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” particularly the moments when Harriet is triggered by a song and the movie itself seems to be straining and vibrating inside the projector) but don’t quite cross over.
I wanted it to. I’m admitting that here, even though it’s poor form to dock a movie for not being what you wanted it to be rather than embracing what it is, because what it is becomes repetitive, and without enough real-world messy specificity to make the repetitiousness the point, and the reward, of watching. Harriet’s best friend Morris (Austin Crute), a DJ, keeps sweetly but firmly informing her that she’s stuck in a self-punishing grief loop and needs to get out of it because it’s turned into a sort of twisted safe place giving her permission never to move on. (“Grief is temporary, but loss is forever,” is her group’s mantra.)
The better realistic dramas about grief have either an anthropological level of detail about how and why people feel certain things, or else translate it into bold but easy-to-grasp metaphors (science fiction and horror are particularly adept at this). This one is stuck somewhere between the two, unable to move ahead and make choices, rather like Harriet. I’d applaud the movie for taking the form of its heroine’s pathologies if the result was something more than a good try with a lot of heart.
Boynton does a lot with a little here. The character is defined almost entirely by her loss (which is something nobody who’s lost a mate would want) and the steps she takes to cope with her condition (such as wearing noise-canceling headphones in public avoid hearing a triggering song, culling her own music collection to remove anything that could send her into the grief zone, and getting a job at a public library, which is of course silent). Her great, lost love is an abstraction. You don’t learn much about him except that he was incredibly handsome and loved Harriet and was a musician and that she produced his albums and (a belated bit of detail that one wishes were explored) he could be a bit of a self-centered prat. Are we seeing him this way because Harriet idealized him to the point of dehumanizing him? There’s nothing in the movie to indicate this, except for a couple of too-late intimations in the third act. All of the other supporting players have maybe one-and-a-half dimensions at best, though they’re so appealingly performed that it’s hard not to like them regardless.
Justin H. Min, who made such a strong impression in “After Yang,” rescues the movie from the doldrums just by showing up. He’s got a naturally sunny presence that could seem self-regarding and irritating if it weren’t so brilliantly modulated. No matter what he says or does, you believe that he has Harriet’s best interests at heart and is a fundamentally good dude. He might be the latest evolutionary iteration of the character that John Cusack played in “Say Anything,” who was—despite the scene with the boombox, which has been retroactively identified as “stalking”—nearly a perfect specimen of young straight American manhood, so pure of heart that you might have rejected him out of hand if the actor playing him didn’t make you believe every moment.
Reviewed at South by Southwest 2024. It premieres on Hulu on April 12th.
]]>Gene Wilder couldn’t have chosen a better stage name. “Gene” is so ordinary, so sane. It promises gentleness: genial, congeniality. But Wilder? That’s the sort of actor who could play Leo Bloom, Willy Wonka, Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson, or The Waco Kid.
Sure enough, from his breakout role as Bloom, the accountant who gets pulled into a criminal scheme opposite Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” through his Emmy-winning supporting performance as Mr. Stein on TV’s “Will & Grace” in 2003 (after which he retired), his performances blended gentleness, volatility, and a romantic spirit. He was mesmerizing whether starring in classics like “The Producers,” “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles” or misfires like “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” or his self-directed “The Woman in Red.” He was calm and chaos, reason and madness. He made you believe in whatever he was doing on screen, no matter how preposterous. He had that gift.
His personal life was marked by tragedy. Born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and dropped into cinema via theater in the late 1960s, he lost his mother to ovarian cancer at 23 when he was serving in the Army, and his wife Gilda Radner to the same disease decades later. He remarried (to Karen Webb a clinical supervisor for the New York League for the Hard of Hearing who advised Wilder on his performance as a deaf man in “See No Evil, Hear No Evil”), battled non-Hodgkin's lymphoma into remission with chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, but died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2016.
“Remembering Gene Wilder” covers this and more, though not too much more. It’s patchy and digressive, and the overreliance on syrupy music becomes off-putting towards the end. But fans of the actor will probably enjoy it, because it’s a chance to appreciate the life and art of a remarkable talent whose period of superstardom was actually much briefer than we might have realized.
Wilder’s glory years were roughly 1968-1980, a stretch bracketed by “The Producers” and his biggest box-office success “Stir Crazy” (opposite Richard Pryor, with whom he made five features). After the one-two box office punch of “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” in the same year (Wilder co-wrote the script to the latter and was Oscar-nominated) he decided to go the route of his pal Brooks by writing and directing his own star vehicles, starting with “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother” and “The World’s Greatest Lover.”
But the productions were a mixed bag, and the movies he made for other directors tended to be worse and less intriguingly personal. By the ‘90s it became clear that he was the sort of acquired taste that audiences wouldn’t automatically come out to see. After losing Radner and then his friend and comedy teammate Pryor (to multiple sclerosis) Wilder started to lose interest in acting and filmmaking, and by the end of his life concentrated mostly on writing novels and nonfiction, painting watercolors and tap-dancing with Webb, and raising money for cancer awareness and treatment in honor of Radner.
The movie doesn’t offer much critical analysis of Wilder’s creative or personal choices. Even for a film about a guy who was, by all accounts, a decent chap who brought joy to the world, this is a borderline hagiography–and that’s too bad, because Wilder was a complicated, fascinating person. He clearly had an ego as big as that of any of the legendary artists he worked with. He was catnip to women: married four times (always quickly); no biological children, but an adopted daughter from his second wife Mary Joan Schutz’s previous marriage. Schutz divorced Wilder after “Young Frankenstein” because she thought he was having an affair with costar Madeline Kahn, but it was another castmate, Teri Garr, that he ended up dating after the split. None of this is in the movie.
Gene Wilder seems to posthumously narrate parts of his own story, thanks to tracks lifted from audio books (a technique also used in the half-hour documentary “Gene Wilder: In His Own Words,” as well as other nonfiction celebrity bios, including “Listen to Me Marlon”). There are also interviews with Webb; Brooks; Carol Kane (his co-star in “The World’s Greatest Lover”); Alan Alda (a friend); Wilder’s cousin Rochelle Pierce; Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz; and musician-actor Harry Connick, Jr., whose connection to Wilder is unclear, but who offers sharp insights, including this description of Wilder’s voice: “It was almost like the way a wise person would speak to you from on top of a mountaintop.”
The editing (also by Frank) is smooth within each section but chunky overall. The movie lurches from one phase of Wilder’s life and career to another. The quick fade-ins and fade-outs make it feel like the commercial TV version of the movie, minus the commercials. Some key works are represented by full-length clips, others by behind-the-scenes material that seems to have been pulled from DVD extras. Brooks is such an entertaining storyteller that the movie gets sidetracked by him. Fans of both entertainers will have already heard most of the anecdotes about their collaborations, but it’s still fun to hear Brooks tell them again.
The film is held together by Wilder’s eerie bright energy, which is palpable even now, years after his passing. His eyes are haunting, and haunted. There are a lot of closeups, still and in-motion, that capture the sadness Wilder endured and subtly communicated to viewers, on top of the hilarity he was known for.
]]>Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else."Civil War" is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it's already divisive. I look forward to reading all of the arguments for and against, even though both early raves and pans seem to be operating under the reductive assumption that it's one of three things: (1) an alternative future history of a divided United States that's intended as a cautionary tale; (2) a technically proficient but empty-headed misery porn compendium that derives much of its power from images redolent of genocide and/or lynching, but ducks political specifics so as not to offend reactionaries; or (3) a visionary spectacular with ultra-violence that might or might not have something important to say but will definitely look and sound great on an expensive home entertainment system.
As it turns out, "Civil War" is mainly something else: a thought experiment about journalistic ethics, set in a future United States, yet reminiscent of classic movies about Western journalists covering the collapse of foreign countries, such as "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Salvador," "Under Fire," and "Welcome to Sarajevo."
How utterly bizarre, you might think. And in the abstract, it is bizarre. But "Civil War" is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.
Specifically, and most originally, "Civil War" is a portrait of the mentality of pure reporters, the types of people who are less interested in explaining what things "mean" (in the manner of an editorial writer or "pundit") than in getting the scoop before the competition, by any means necessary. Whether the scoop takes the form of a written story, a TV news segment, or a still photo that wins a Pulitzer, the quest for the scoop is an end unto itself, and it's bound up with the massive dopamine hit that that comes from putting oneself in harm's way. The kinds of obsessive war correspondents who rarely come back to their own countries don't care about the real-world impact of the political realities encoded within the epic violence they chronicle, or else compartmentalize it to stay focused.
The main characters of "Civil War" are four journalists. The film introduces them covering a clash in New York City between what appear to be police forces from the official government and violent members of the opposition (we have to infer a lot because Garland drops you right into the deep end, as Haskell Wexler did in "Medium Cool," about a news cameraman covering the 1968 protests in Chicago). Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a legendary white female photojournalist in the mold of her namesake Lee Miller. She's partnered with a South American-born reporter named Joel (Wagner Moura). Both work for Reuters news agency and are fond of Sammy (veteran character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson), an older African-American journalist who writes for “what’s left of the New York Times,” as Joel puts it; he walks slowly on a cane, definitely a liability when covering protests and battles.
The group gains a fourth member, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, the title character of "Priscilla"), a kind of junior version of Lee who idolizes her. Jessie charms the hard-drinking, on-the-prowl Joel and ends up joining the trio as they drive to Washington, D.C. in hopes of interviewing the president (Nick Offerman) before he surrenders to the military forces of something called the WA, or Western Alliance. The WA consists of militias from California and Texas (with secondary support from Florida, which is apparently a different separatist group that shares the WA's values).
The first full-length trailer for "Civil War" got picked apart as if it were the movie itself rather than an advertisement for it (a weird regular occurrence in "film discourse," such as it is). But the actual movie turns out to be more politically astute and plausible than early reactions said, even though it's likely that Garland's "you already know the story" approach (like the way the overall arc of the US occupation of Vietnam was depicted in "Full Metal Jacket") will seem to validate the gripes for the first hour. Yes, it's true, Texas votes Republican in national elections and California votes Democratic, but as of this writing, Northern California is increasingly controlled by libertarian-influenced tech billionaires, and much of central and eastern California leans Republican and loathes California Democrats so much that they've advocated "divid(ing) parts of coastal California, including the Bay Area, from California to become an independent country." The president is referred to as a fascist. I’m not sure how literally we’re supposed to take that because both Trump and Biden have been called that by people who don’t like them.
But if you had to make a list of what "Civil War" is trying to do, "diagnosing what ails the United States of America" might not crack the Top 5. Yes, if you wanted to treat the movie so reductively, you could. But if you pay attention to what the movie is actually doing rather than cherry picking elements that validate whatever take you brought in with you, it won't be easy. I went into "Civil War" with arms folded, expecting to hate it, because so many contemporary films about US politics by foreign filmmakers seem to have cribbed their worldview from New York Times editorials and bad Tweets. It upended my preconceived notions.
As far as "future shock" goes, Garland, an Englishman, isn't cynically avoiding specifics or talking out of his behind. He's burying the text under subtext, in the name of creating a compelling but credible experience, until said text explodes through the screen via Jesse Plemons, who has a cameo as a soldier who might or might not be a Western Front officer but is surely a parasite on the remnants of the body politic. This soft-voiced, smirky hellion interrogates the terrified group of journalists (which consists of two white women, a native-born Black man, and a South American emigre, plus an Asian-American and a Chinese immigrant who joined them on the road) with all the delicacy of Gene Hackman's racist white cop Popeye Doyle terrorizing Black people in "The French Connection" for kicks.
A terse line of dialogue reveals that Lee became famous for taking a prize-winning photo of something called the "Antifa massacre" when Jessie was very young. "Antifa massacre" is initially tossed off in a way that makes you wonder if Garland is hoping progressives will assume it was anti-fascists who were murdered by reactionaries, but reactionaries will assume it was the reverse. Thanks to Plemons' demonic showstopper and the thunderous, ultimately chilling finale (set during the attempted coup in Washington) I think it's clear what happened. But your mileage will vary.
Nevertheless, these characters aren't constantly exposition-ing to each other and explaining the world to the viewer because that's not what people would do in real life, whether they were trying to survive mass extinction in Gaza or Ukraine or endure a military dictatorship in Argentina or Myanmar. Indeed, one of the most fascinating (or if you don't like it, perplexing) aspects of "Civil War" is that it often plays like an artifact warped into our world from some future popular culture that has decided it's finally time for a "big statement" movie in the vein of "Apocalypse Now" or "Full Metal Jacket," but for people who remember an American Civil War and have enough perspective to consider buying a ticket to a blockbuster about it.
Garland is known as mainly a science fiction storyteller. He wrote "28 Days Later," "Sunshine" and "Dredd," adapted "Never Let Me Go" from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, and wrote and directed "Ex Machina" and "Annihilation," all of which had an intense and believable physicality on top of dealing in metaphors and visceral experiences. (He also did the gender essentialist horror flick "Men," which some people defend but that I consider his only failure.) "Civil War" isn't science fiction, exactly, nor could it be described mainly as "speculative fiction," although it falls under that umbrella. The world-building is masterful. But the world-building is not the movie.
I appreciated it as a story about journalists whose own country is cratering but who keep chasing the story and are determined to catch it even if it kills them. Would they have embedded themselves with Hitler's army if they'd somehow survived behind enemy lines in Germany in the 1940s and been given the opportunity? I wouldn't rule it out. They will probably come across as unlikable, or at least off-putting, to most viewers—the New York Times and other supposedly "neutral" mainstream outlets have come under fire in recent years for seeming to give the rise of American fascism the "both sides" treatment, and when their reporters are called out, they often say that their only duty is to tell the story. Certain members of certain professions have that code. Other members disagree. Both factions are represented in "Civil War," but in a fictionalized context that asks "Is the storyteller's highest obligation to tell what happened or choose a side?" and then lets the audience fight over the answer. A case could be made that the title is not just about the civil war in the future US, but within contemporary journalism.
I've purposefully avoided describing a lot of the story in this review because I want people to go in cold, as I did, and experience the movie as sort of picaresque narrative consisting of set pieces that test the characters morally and ethically as well as physically, from one day and one moment to the next. Suffice to say that the final section brings every thematic element together in a perfectly horrifying fashion and ends with a moment of self-actualization I don't think I'll ever be able to shake.
This review was filed from the SXSW Film Festival. It opens on April 12th.
]]>David Bordwell was a teacher who became a friend. He opened my eyes to what cinema actually is. His influence on multiple generations of filmmakers, scholars, critics, and movie buffs is incalculable.
David wrote books on aspects of film style and genre, and how they intersected. He wrote about form as well as content, and the impact of one on the other—an increasing rarity in an anemic media landscape where film and TV criticism are increasingly uninterested in how things are said; which is to say, the art part of storytelling. Never in a million years would David publish a “take” on something, much less a “hot take.” He made arguments. More often, he explained things, or asked questions.
David reached people first through the books he published solo and in collaboration with his wife and fellow University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kristin Thompson; after the turn of the millennium, he adapted to new technology, re-inventing his work for the CD-Rom format and starting a blog, davidbordwell.net, where he and Kristin published one-off essays. I don’t think David began to grasp the totality of his impact until the last few years of his life, when multiple generations of cinema appreciators quoted him, reached out to him, and got to know him. I was one of them.
I’ve loved movies all my life, but didn’t begin to understand their language until I was assigned Film Art: An Introduction in a basic film studies class in college, circa 1987, an illustrated scholarly text that explained how movies work in easily graspable language. Nothing was the same for me after that. Cowritten with Kristin and first published in 1979, Film Art is probably the most important book in the entire film studies canon, and has been in print continuously since the 1970s and translated into many languages. It’s about the language of pictures in cinema, i.e. how a filmmaker can say something about the story, characters, themes (or all three) through camera placement and editing.
The section of the book that has lived in my mind ever since is the one where Bordwell and Thompson analyzed the scene in Jaws (released just four years before Film Art!) where Hooper and Chief Brody confront the mayor of Amity over the shark problem. It hadn’t occurred to me before that part of the reason this scene and others are so effective is because Steven Spielberg blocks the actors in a way that reveals the shifting power dynamics between the characters.
Notice how Brody and Hooper are either standing together or separated by the mayor depending on whether the mayor is on defense or offense. Notice also how characters are diminished in size by the placement of the camera at key points. as when Brody rushes offscreen or into the background in frustration, or at the very end as they all stand beneath the vandalized billboard. This kind of stuff isn’t just garnish on the entree of story; it’s the means by which the entire meal is prepared. It affects you subconsciously even if you don’t know the slightest thing about filmmaking—much less neoformalism, the water Bordwell and Thompson usually swam in: a method of study that focuses on the formal characteristics of cinema in order to demonstrate what makes it different from other art forms.
We take for granted how important that kind of textbook was, and how hard it was to create in the pre-digital era. There were no desktop computers in 1979, and no home video to speak of. You couldn’t make screenshots. Maybe you could point a camera at a low-resolution TV showing a Betamax cassette of a movie, but that wouldn’t yield a good enough quality image for a college textbook. David told me that up until the 1990s, when laserdiscs and DVDs and home computers came into common use, he had to get ahold of actual 35mm prints of movies he wanted to include in his work, screen them in an actual theater or screening or editing room, and take actual photos on actual film with an actual camera on an actual tripod and develop them with actual chemicals in an actual darkroom.
I used “actual” excessively on purpose here, to drive home that each of these steps involved its own process and constituted a task (or tasks) that required training and skills, whether it was threading up a 35mm projector and fixing any problems that arose or calibrating a still camera to yield quality images of a movie flickering away in front of you. (It was possible to stop a film and go backwards, but not advisable because it could chew up the celluloid in the projector’s gears.) David was about as polite and cheerful a person as I’ve ever met in my life, but he was ferocious, and seemingly tireless, when it came time to commit and see a task through to the end.
The image of a young David standing for two hours in the back of a dark theater taking photos of a movie screen, day after day for weeks on end, is one that I think of often. It’s inspiring. He often went to those lengths, because it was the only way to gather the data he needed to complete whatever study he was engaged in.
Another example of his commitment: during the last couple of decades of his career, David wrote often about what he called “intensified continuity,” which is different from regular old movie continuity, the system by which commercial cinema lays out story and defines characters through an orderly pattern of long shots, medium shots and closeups. In older movies, which practiced what David and Kristin describe as “classical continuity,” directors relied more on blocking actors for the camera and then letting shots run long, compared to today, where the camera gets much closer much faster, the cuts are quicker, and there’s generally a lot more camera movement, much of it falling under the heading of what earlier generations of film scholars would call “unmotivated” (for instance, the way some action filmmakers have a camera circle groups of people very quickly to generate “excitement” even if they’re just having a regular old expository conversation).
To that end, one of David’s pet projects was watching films from different eras with a stopwatch and timing every shot to determine average shot length. This let him demonstrate in various articles and books not just that the average shot length in films had decreased over time, but by how much, which opened the gateway for speculation on why this was happening, and when it seemed to be organically integrated into the story (he thought Christopher Nolan and David Fincher did a good job with fast cutting) and when it seemed like pointless business or an attempt to cover up the fact that the director didn’t actually have a style. Kristin, meanwhile, was engaged in a similar sort of taxonomic study of cinema, and convincingly showed that, contrary to what most screenwriting books tell you, the shape of a story in most commercial films is not three acts, but four parts.
In recent years, David and Kristin started releasing most of their books online as free PDFs in order to further democratize the kind of film scholarship they’d devoted their lives to. A complete list of publications can be found on their website. One I want to single out here is Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, a full study of the works of japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (“Tokyo Story,” “Floating Weeds,” “Late Spring” et al) that focuses on how the master’s style articulates what he’s trying to say about people, families and societies in changing times; among other things, it shows that Ozu’s style, which is often described in the west as rigorous, austere or minimalist, was actually quite progressive for its time, aesthetically and politically. Another great one is Planet Hong Kong. David was among the first major American film scholars to take Hong Kong action cinema seriously as a form of artistic expression, not just popular spectacle. Readers may also be interested in Figures Traced in Light, which was generated from a series of articles about cinematic staging (i.e. blocking for the camera), focusing on four directors: “Louis Feuillade, master of the French silent serial; Kenji Mizoguchi, the great Japanese director; Theo Angelopoulos, the Greek filmmaker who rose to prominence in the 1970s; and Hou Hsiao‑Hsien, the distinguished Taiwanese director.”
In the blog post announcing the latter, there’s a phrase that jumps out at me, given all that David’s work has meant to so many: “theoretically guided film criticism.”
There’s never been much of a commercial space for film writing that even acknowledges the role of form, much less that gives it more or less equal emphasis with “content” (a word I despise now because of how the tech industry has corrupted it). A lot of people don't even consider something to be criticism if it gets at content through form, or even if it gives a lot of space to the discussion of form. It’s almost impossible to do that type of writing anymore for a wide audience, except under very particular circumstances (such as this platform, Vulture, The New Yorker, and a few other major outlets) and it tends to be minimized in regular reviewing. That's what prompted me to write what ended up being one of my most-read and most controversial pieces (though I never intended it as such), “Please, Critics, Write About the Filmmaking,” which David predictably loved, since I wrote it partly as a way of continuing the work he and Kristin had always done.
“Preconceived methods, applied simply for demonstrative purposes, often end by reducing the complexity of films,” David and Kristin once wrote. That’s a sentiment I heartily agree with. It bears repeating today, now that so much of “cultural writing” consists of “takes” that discuss works of moving image art as if they were pamphlets or PDFs, and that seem mainly interested in provoking a response, often with all the grace and erudition of a stick in the eye.
I never had David for a class, but based on my conversations with him, he must have been a marvelous teacher. He once explained classical continuity versus intensified continuity to me by citing Howard Hawks’ classic screwball comedy “Bringing Up Baby” as an example of the older type of continuity. Filmmakers in the pre-television era, he said, tended not to cut unless they felt there was a reason. They also understood that performances in a physical comedy are funnier if the camera stays farther back and shows us most or all of the performers’ bodies, so that they are somewhat diminished in the frame and we begin to think of them almost as machines or objects or dolls. The more we see them as warm, complicated, psychologically plausible human beings (mainly through closeups) the less likely we are to belly-laugh. That’s why Hawks doesn’t give us the first closeup in “Bringing up Baby” until halfway through the movie, when he cuts to a shot of Katharine Hepburn as she silently realizes she’s in love with Cary Grant. The moment leaps out and is unexpectedly powerful because the director hasn’t been jamming the camera up into actors' nostrils for the preceding 45 minutes. “Your brain thinks, ‘Oh, this is different, this might be important’ and then you wonder why,” David told me. “In a lot of modern movies, the closeup is the default.”
David was wildly productive right up to the end, writing books under his own byline and in collaboration with Kristin, and contributing essays to other people’s work. (David did essays for three of the books in my Wes Anderson Collection Series: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and a forthcoming, not-yet-scheduled book on Asteroid City. The French Dispatch book is dedicated to him and Kristin, and he wrote the introduction to Asteroid City.) He remained plugged into the world of film criticism and scholarship, often making a point to seek out and mentor younger writers who had been inspired by his and Kristin’s work. And he was generous in acknowledging the contributions of others: a blog post from last year on James Cutting’s book Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement (which, like so much film scholarship, would not have existed without Bordwell and Thompson’s work) is not only extravagant in its praise for Cutting but goes out of its way to mention six other film scholars in the space of a single paragraph. David was always keen to let people know when he’d cited their work or said something nice about him, and there are probably thousands of people out there who, over the decades, had their days made by the arrival of a Bordwell email with the subject header, “You’ve been BLOGGED!”
David once wrote to me years ago that he didn’t see the sorts of video essays I’d started doing in the mid-aughts as being all that similar to the picture-augmented formal analysis that he and Kristin did in their books. But he later came around to the idea that they were different paths toward the same destination. I think he proved it beyond all doubt in the pieces that he did for Criterion Channel with Kristin and Jeff Smith, which are compiled here. It’s one more astonishing body of work to accompany all the others.
The world already seems like a poorer place without him. The best way to honor his memory is to talk about filmmaking. The stuff the dreams are made of.
]]>Richard Lewis was the first comedian I tried to model myself upon. That’s a nice way of saying I straight-up stole his look, vibe, and way of speaking for several years in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. I am sure I was insufferable during this period—more than I am now, if you can imagine. I had a couple of friends who also stole Richard Lewis’s entire deal. One even grew his hair out and bought a wardrobe of baggy black t-shirts or short-sleeved collared shirts with strangely opulent pockets and stitching, and jet-black pants and black shoes. When we all did stuff together in public, we looked like members of a cult. Because we were.
Most people had no idea who Richard Lewis was back then. Sure, comedy fans knew he was on track to become one of the greats, and he was sort of breaking through, slowly, in his own way. But he could probably have walked down any big city street in America and not been noticed by anyone but people who watched a lot of late night talk shows (he was a regular on Johnny Carson and David Letterman) or saw his standup specials on cable (between 1988 and 1991, the years in which I slavishly impersonated Richard Lewis, he released three classics: I'm Exhausted, I'm Doomed, and Richard Lewis: The Magical Misery Tour).
But those who knew, knew.
He could act. He was good. His best performance is probably on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as himself, aka Larry’s best friend. (He’d been friends with David almost his entire life.) But he was also memorable as Prince John in Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” where his mole changes position from shot to shot. And he was in sitcoms that were never big but built loyal audiences. One was “Anything But Love,” starring Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis as writers at a Chicago magazine who had sexual chemistry galore but weren’t a couple. It ran three seasons and got overhauled twice by the network, which kept trying to turn a cult favorite into a hit. “Daddy Dearest,” which ran less than a year in 1993, was a father-son relationship show that teamed him with insult comic Don Rickles. It never quite figured out what it was doing, but it never got the chance to, either.
No matter. It was the standup, the monologues, the patter that made Lewis great, and that gave me a target to shoot for—in my warped mind, at least. I could’ve listened to him talk for twelve hours straight, given the chance. He might have been the coolest comic that ever lived whose stage persona was based entirely on confessing what a disaster he was.
It was the standup that made me not just love Lewis, but want to be Lewis. Even as a young man, I knew I was never going to be one of those guys who seemed to have it all figured out. But when I looked at Lewis, I saw a guy who knew he didn’t have it all figured out; in fact, he knew that he didn’t have the slightest clue how his own personality worked or what it would take for him to become happy. That appealed to me, that level of self-knowledge. Knowing what you don’t know is progress, right? Maybe a little?
I probably first saw Lewis on David Letterman’s show in high school and found him hilarious; a West Coast, self-aware, self-lacerating Baby Boom-generation comic, in the tradition of somebody like Albert Brooks, though Lewis, unlike Brooks, seemed content mainly to be a performer who often wrote his own stuff, and never tried to be a triple-threat auteur filmmaker, as Brooks ultimately became. Lewis represented himself as a mess, as his own worst enemy, as a boiling vat full of largely untreated neuroses, and as such an incompetent relationship partner that he drove women either towards marriage or away from heterosexuality, but at the same time, he was obviously great at what he did and was on TV a lot—and his persona was that he had no trouble getting women, just keeping them.
That last part appealed to me because I was an inexperienced young man just starting out in the world of dating and sex and relationships and thought that if Lewis’s description of himself was true, it meant there was hope for a guy like me, who was well-read and had a sense of humor and could look presentable under certain circumstances but would never be mistaken for a movie star, a jock, or one of those Michael Douglas master-of-the-universe types, which was the template for “desirable” then. One of the lines I loved to quote was, “One of these days I’m gonna write a sex manual. It’s gonna be called Ow! You’re On My Hair.” “I tried phone sex,” he said once. “It gave me an ear infection.” “During sex, I fantasize that I'm someone else.”
He exaggerated. Even his exaggerations were exaggerated. One of his most lasting contributions to the English language was appending the words “from hell” to a noun. “Girlfriend from hell.” “Restaurant from hell.” In season three of “Curb” there was a subplot about Lewis trying to officially be given credit for creating the phrase “[BLANK] from hell.” The Yale Book of Quotations credited him. He wrote to Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations asking them to include him there, too. They refused. The nerve! He titled his 2015 memoir Reflections from Hell: Richard Lewis’ Guide On How Not to Live.” It was a bestseller. Eat it, Barlett’s.
Part of Richard Lewis' thing was that he was disappointed, always, by everything. Everything! Sometimes he would pre-disappoint or anticipate disappointment. He’d also do a thing where he’d start a line with what sounded like a greeting card platitude and then in the back half of the sentence, shred it completely. It was hilarious because for a second there, his bright delivery made you think maybe he was going to say something to indicate that he’d found happiness, that he’d found hope, that he believed in something. But no: “When you’re in love, it’s the most glorious two-and-a-half days of your life.”
His bits about growing up Jewish were incredible. He mixed classic standup kvetching with surreal embellishments that turned his life into a pretzel-twisted dreamscape. “We aren’t very religious—we had a Menorah on a dimmer.” “New Year's Eve was a drag. We’d go to my grandmother's apartment in Brooklyn and at midnight we’d watch our hopes drop.” “My dad was such a successful caterer that he was booked on my bar mitzvah, and I had my party on a Tuesday. Talk about low self-esteem.” When he brought up Hanukkah, it was to gripe about what a slog it was after day one. “You get to the seventh day and you’re like, 'Oh, thanks, pop,’ and it’s like, an 8x10 glossy of Soupy Sales.”
He was the first comedian I can recall who brought up therapy not just to make therapy jokes, though he certainly did that (“I’m out of therapy—if I do go back, I’m gonna take a pass/fail”), but to talk in detail about his mental health struggles. He was very, very depressed. He was a hypochondriac. He had social anxiety. He had all sorts of phobias. I’m just going on what Richard Lewis said when I list all his challenges. He might’ve been exaggerating for comic effect, as comedians are known to do. But I don’t think so. Something in the eyes told you that he wasn’t actually kidding about the details. He had a haunted look, even when he was laughing.
Lewis went public about being a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and talked about that part of his life with journalists and talk show hosts. He was probably the highest profile comedic actor since Dick van Dyke to do that. “It's hard to accept all the stupid things I've done in my life,” he said of his addiction and recovery, “but it's even harder to accept that I can't undo them.”
Lewis retired from acting last year after revealing that he had Parkinson’s disease. He’d broken bones from injuries prior to that and was in bad shape near the end. His frailness was turned into the subject of humor in late seasons of “Curb,” including the twelfth and supposedly final one. There was even a subplot about a kidney donation.
“Comedy is defiance,” he said. “It’s a snort of contempt in the face of fear and anxiety.”
He believed in being kind to himself and forgiving himself, and that resonated as well. He must have known how brilliant he was because people kept telling him, and they were right. But he never carried himself with arrogant pride. He wasn’t here to teach us lessons, but to talk about what he was thinking and feeling. If you got something out of it, great. He erred on the side of, “Don’t take advice from me, I’m a disaster.”
“I saw Richard Lewis being interviewed somewhere in an all-black outfit giving advice to young comics,” wrote his friend Andy Kindler. “He was saying you don’t have to start in LA or NY. Just get good at it somewhere. Then he said: ‘But what do I know? Look at me. I’m dressed like Satan at a barbecue.’”
“I may not have all the answers,” Lewis said, “but I'll always have a joke.”
]]>Jonathan Glazer has always skirted the mainstream without becoming part of it. Maybe it's his interest in the destruction of the self that will always keep him at arm's length; maybe it's a formal alienation that insists you stare headlong into the abyss while he watches you do so. It's an impish strategy and it has yielded some of the best films made during my lifetime. "Birth" is the film of his that I return to the most and with the heaviest heart, as its view of a New York so brittle it seems poised to snap when a little boy discovers too soon the world of adult betrayal is infinitely relatable and yet a place we'll never have back, because it broke in the interim. I lived there for almost a decade and saw how far removed it is from what "Birth" showed, the death of it, as well as the beautiful life the city once had. A place for resigned bourgeoisie who know they're building complacency on the grave of risk and trauma. "Birth" is a eulogy for a nervier time, where genuine danger crept into art.
I can't wait to watch both parts of Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" on the biggest theater screen I can find. I would imagine they'd fit together as perfectly as the first two "Godfather" movies, which they evoke not just in their sepia portraits of corruption, power trips, and generational succession but in their 19th century potboiler-novel attitude toward the characters.
The second chapter of the story (Villeneuve wants to adapt "Dune Messiah" next) is, like the first, rated PG-13. But it plays like an R-rated movie, because of the mythological or epic poem nastiness of the violence (which registers sharply even when they cut away from the worst of it) and—even more so—because it feels genuinely adult in how it creates and presents a world with its own rules and traditions and expects us to translate it into our own experience. There's no special pleading to convince us that the more expediently ruthless good guys are in fact quite decent and sympathetic compared to their enemies, but rather, more presentable. The most morally evolved character on the Atreides side, Paul's dad Leto, dies halfway through the first movie, and when he's characterized here as somebody who ruled from the heart and paid the price, his own son does not disagree.
Technically, the film is stunning, as Villeneuve's films always are. The production design, lighting and costumes and Greig Fraser's cinematography were remarkable in the first film, too. The sepia-toned graphic novel Rembrandt look suited the material and made the environment feel suitably exotic or "alien" yet at the same time plausible as a place that could exist. The movie made sure to give the audience lots of close-ups that let you know how the still suits and ornithopters and sandworm-summoning "thumpers" and other devices worked. You believed they could do what the script said they could do. And you got the gist of what was happening whenever there were technical problems that prevented them from functioning (as in the escape into the desert, when the film shows us exactly how an excess of sand wreaks havoc with the ornithopter's wings and vents).
Like "2001," the original "Star Wars" trilogy, and Ridley Scott and James Cameron's science fiction filmography, you feel as if you're in a real world rather than a figurative one, a place where people sweat and need to eat, machines have to be properly maintained or they'll break down, and blood and guts and slime and pollution are shocking. Physicality is all. Villeneuve and Frasier even improve upon the first movie's long-lens digital photography, which almost always anchored the shots in a specific, even map-able perspective. We watched a sandworm swallow up a harvester from inside the cargo bay of a hover-transport. During the ground battles, we raced along with the soldiers and felt the looming presence of the giant vehicles and machines that made them seem as tiny as aphids. We often felt as if we were watching news coverage of the war on Arrakis, or maybe internal video records from a spice-mining corporation. The second "Dune" goes all-in on the "you are there" aesthetic. There are, by my count, maybe two dozen shots in the film that feel like traditional movie sci-fi, and the rest seem like records of an actual thing that happened somewhere.
As Michael Corleone puts it in the first "Godfather" film, his face swollen after being punched in the face by the corrupt Captain McCluskey: "Where does it say that you can't kill a cop?" This sequel, even more so than the first "Dune," is the closest cinema has gotten to "The Godfather in Space," something that many films and TV series made after the David Lynch "Dune" have attempted. You have to reconcile the contradictions and contextualize the various hypocrisies and self-serving ethical exemptions just as you do when reading the Old Testament or "The Iliad" or watching the Corleones in action.
Like the other adaptations of "Dune," this new one can't do much with the exotic mix-and-match appropriation of Middle Eastern traditions, language and religious concepts except keep them, since the story wouldn't be "Dune" without them. But it does seem to consciously lean into it a bit more in the second chapter, perhaps by way of provocation and complication, while maintaining plausible deniability about what it might be up to.
The movie casts the more radical tribespeople on Arrakis with darker-skinned actors and foregrounds the fact that they're from "the South" of the planet, but it also includes quite a bit of dialogue skeptically debating whether Paul is a messiah or if he's just cannily modeling himself on the prophecy. Paul and his mom are definitely coded as "white" though, whatever that means ten thousand years into humanity's future. Javier Bardem's Stilgar, a man of the people, is also a representative of the presumably more credulous and conciliatory Northern Arrakis and is often held up for ridicule or at least criticism by characters like Zendaya's Chani. Bardem plays Stilgar with hilariously unselfconscious gusto. He desperately wants something to believe in and is borderline pathetic in his eagerness to convert everyone else within earshot. The character is as much of a hype man for the teenage would-be Che Guevara of Arrakis as George Kennedy was for Paul Newman's chain-gang Jesus in "Cool Hand Luke."
The film is a bottomless galactic gumbo-pot of cultural and ethnic allusions and metaphors that sometimes creates dissonant or allergy-provoking reactions but at least seems like a deliberately constructed thing that's meant to be argued about, or decoded, rather than digested without thought or objection. This "Dune" goes difficult places with a spring in its step. The result is far more compelling than a hypothetical version that tried to make Frank Herbert's novel "modern" by superimposing 21st century North American college liberal attitudes onto it and making sure that we know that when the characters we're supposed to identify with do objectively horrifying things, it's because they had no other choice, and we're not bad people if we get a thrill from watching them slit throats and blow things up. There is also an enhanced sense that things are happening in the in-between spaces of existence, on other planes or maybe inside of individual souls, that cannot be explained or quantified, but can be channeled. Spend a few hours in this world and it makes the "Dune"-inspired elements in "Star Wars" seem quite tame.
The Force is a thing that can be mastered, but the supernatural or paranormal parts of "Dune" are startling in their ferocity and unknowability. The characters crack open doors to somewhere else, and what they see and feel transforms them.
“Dune” is a sandworm for would-be adapters. Many have summoned it, but until now, none have been able to ride it. Alejandro Jodorowsky tried and failed to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 bestseller in the early seventies. David Lynch made a perverse, hallucinatory interpretation forty years ago, filled with startling images and moments. But because he never really cared about commercial linear narrative (to his credit, in most projects) the baseline “...and then what happened?” pleasures of the book remained untapped or were rendered in a perfunctory manner. Lynch later later said that a better version was killed in a creative turf war between himself and his backers, but it seems increasingly clear that it was a bad match of material and interpreter from the start. (Paul’s assumption of the mantle of messiah happens so fast that it feels as if several reels went missing; blame the studio all you want, but where else in Lynch’s filmography has he seemed even the slightest bit interested in military and political ascensions?).
The SyFy cable network adaptation of 2000 was a flipside version of the Lynch film. It covered all the narrative bases, to the point where it felt like an exhaustive slide-show illustration of the text, and had functional-looking designs and a solid cast (William Hurt starred as Duke Leto Atreides). But it lacked the sense of wonder and terror that made the book such a commercial juggernaut. The ideal director was probably somebody more in line with Peter Jackson or Guillermo del Toro, somebody who knew how to tell an epic, crowd-pleasing story but could also handle the moral relativism of Herbert’s fantastic societies and embellish every frame with design flourishes so numerous that fans would want to see it three or four times in a theater, to properly take it all in.
The Denis Villeneuve version of “Dune,” also known as “Dune: Part One,” hits that sweet spot. The French-Canadian director started out in high-concept visionary art house cinema (“Incendies,” “Enemy”) before migrating to blockbusters. Over the past six years he’s worked exclusively in big budget science fiction projects that generate a real sense of wonder while also seeming restrained, even coolheaded—so much so that detractors call him cold, or a mere technician. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there were people who said the same of Steven Spielberg, even as the director’s distinctive visual language and focus on specific, personally resonant genres and themes proved that he was as much of an auteur as any of the workhorse studio directors that the French New Wave critics would’ve championed in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Villeneuve has that Spielberg aspect, of seeming to have a good handle on every aspect of a gigantic project even when he’s blowing up the scale of the thing until you start to worry that it’s gotten too big, and the machine is about to swallow up the poetry. It doesn't happen because Villeneuve also has the workmanlike, let’s-keep-it-simple ethos of an old-school studio infielder like George Stevens (“Shane,” “Giant”), Fred Zinnemann (“From Here to Eternity,” “Man for All Seasons”) or Victor Fleming (“Gone with the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz”). That’s probably what keeps even the grandest Villeneuve movies from feeling puffed-up and self-regarding. Even when he’s making his own answer to “Close Encounters,” 2016’s “Arrival,” or one of the longest, most expensive, most ambitious “legacy” sequels ever produced, “Blade Runner 2049,” the work feels focused, purposeful, deliberate, even when the movie is stretching its legs, pacing-wise, and letting us watch as a character makes a long journey from Point A to Point B, or moving through a stunningly designed, unimaginably vast interior space.
“Dune” is the culmination-to-date of Villeneuve’s “simple/gigantic” phase. The story of House Atreides is a tragedy that becomes an underdog revenge-and-reinvention story, while at the same time plugging into mid-century Western pop culture’s fascination with hallucinogenic drugs, altered states of consciousness, a substratum of Orientalism, and what’s now called a “white savior” narrative, in the tradition of Tarzan, Doc Savage, and the real life T.E. Lawrence, the blond, blue-eyed Englishman who helped unite the warring tribes of “Arabia” against the Ottoman Empire. Parts of the first novel seemed inspired by the 1962 film “Lawrence of Arabia,” based on Lawrence’s memoirs.
Villeneuve summons Lean's movie again here, not just in his elegant but unfussy framing (by Greig Fraser) of the young messiah-to-be (Timothee Chalamet), his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and the still-suited Fremen roaming the dunes, but in the approach to characterization. The movie sketches supporting characters vibrantly, with an old-movie sense of lived-in, grizzled-character-actor vitality (especially Josh Brolin as Gurnee Halleck and Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho), while depicting the more powerful and cautious central characters (including Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto) as internalized, somewhat enigmatic people: tough nuts to crack. Even the interior monologues and moments of thought transference don’t explain or simplify motivations. They are as unknowable to us as people in a history book. We can empathize and understand, but we can never really get into their heads.
But we’re watching people do things, often the thing we know they have to do because of how they’ve been conditioned. And so the result is a story that has a pre-novelistic, even pre-Shakespeare sensibility. The Old Testament, the Greek myths, the Mahābhārata, the “Godfather” saga, “Game of Thrones”: that’s the mode of Villeneuve’s “Dune.” You’re not sitting there in the dark because you’re expecting to see a world that perfectly jibes with your own contemporary sense of what’s acceptable and what makes logical sense so that you can congratulate yourself on being a good and consistent and advanced person. You’re here to enter into a world with its own codes, rules, and internal mechanisms. “And Cain talked with Abel, his brother: and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him.” “You lose yourself, you reappear/You suddenly find you got nothing to fear/Alone you stand with nobody near/When a trembling distant voice, unclear/Startles your sleeping ears to hear/That somebody thinks they really found you.”
“Dune” is at ease operating in this very particular epic narrative mode. It’s as good an example of this kind of storytelling as Robert Bolt’s “Lawrence of Arabia” script and Coppola’s interpretations of Mario Puzo, neither of which explored the interiors of their main characters through any means besides showing them talking about the relative advisability of actions and then doing them. The screenplay (by Villeneuve, Jon Spaights and Eric Roth) has that “Godfather” knack for compressing and slimming a bestseller that readers loved partly because it was so thick with incident and legend, without making devotees feel that the source has been gutted, or twisted into inappropriate shapes. As of this writing, I’ve watched Part One five times, in whole or in pieces. With each revisit, I find myself more awed by the confidence with which it decides what to show us, and when to truncate a moment to get to the point or let it play out because what’s happening on-screen is awesome and the viewer wants to be able to luxuriate in it.
The second half of this long-ish movie has unstoppable forward momentum, that rolling, rumbling energy that the great screenwriter William Goldman observed in commercial films like “Free Willy” or “Rocky” or “Titanic” when the story and characters fuse as the film heads into its grand finale and the entire contraption is “on rails.” “The Godfather’ is on rails from the moment when Michael fakes having a gun in his pocket to protect his dad from being killed through the final shot where he shuts the door in Kay’s face. “Die Hard” is on rails from the scene where Takagi is killed through the bloody embrace of John and Holly after Hans falls to his death. From the opening moments of the Harkonnen attack through the death of Duncan, the escape by ornithopter into a sandstorm, and Paul’s defining challenge in the canyon, “Dune” is on rails. It has that sort of inevitability, that level of craft.
The first time I saw it, I came away thinking it was a technically excellent adaptation of a behemoth of a book, with committed performances by an ensemble that all managed to be themselves but also the characters. (Ferguson, Chalamet, Isaac, Brolin, Momoa, Dave Bautista and many other cast members have movie-star energy here, by which I mean that they are doing the sorts of things that you expect them to do based on their other roles, yet it’s fun and engrossing to see them do them again, in a different register or mode. Audiences in an earlier era probably felt that way watching Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon” as opposed to “The African Queen,” or Thelma Ritter in “All About Eve” as opposed to “Rear Window.”)
But the next time I saw “Dune,” on a 15-meter-wide screen at a drive-in near Dallas, Texas, I appreciated it as a colossal digital spectacle, a series of widescreen moving paintings of Brutalist architecture, interstellar vistas, ant-hive troop formations, and shock-cut visualizations of betrayal, torture, prophecy, and madness. Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a perfect cinematic object, a visual and aural and physical experience that worms its way into your mind and embeds it with timecode, so that the next time you watch it, you’re looking forward to your favorite moments, and can anticipate them without a watch, almost down to the second.
Tomorrow: 30 Minutes on Dune: Part Two.
]]>There's a wonderful scene in Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater's sprightly comic docudrama "Bernie," about a murder in the town of Carthage, Texas, where a man in a diner explains that Texas is actually five states, then pithily summarizes each one. A version of that sensibility animates series "God Save Texas," now on Max. Inspired by the same named book by Texas writer Lawrence Wright, and featuring Wright as a sort of mascot and sounding board throughout, the series offers three episodes, each directed by a different Texas filmmaker (Linklater, Alex Stapleton, and Iliana Sosa), each concentrating on a distinct region of a state that has 29 million people and is big enough to cover France. It's fascinating to see Texas portrayed through sets of eyes that share a baseline political sensibility (all three directors are liberals in an institutionally right-wing state) but that differ in terms of their cultural background (Linklater is white, Stapleton is Black, and Sosa is Mexican American and has family on both sides of the border).
Ultimately, however, "God Save Texas" is a work of protest and lament. It regularly circles back to the idea that all is not well in America or Texas, despite what our self-serving mythology keeps telling us—and that prejudice is at the heart of most of the trouble, and always has been. The three episodes don't break any fresh ground in terms of style or structure and aren't really trying to. They're put together like road-trip documentaries, and position each filmmaker as a combination host, reporter, local culture expert, and memoirist. The material might be depressing beyond endurance if it weren't leavened with a distinctively Texan brand of droll humor, as well as autobiographical detours and self-contained bits that feel almost like Wikipedia rabbit-hole dives.
In addition to all that, Linklater's opening episode doubles as a guided tour of the Texas part of his filmography. His hometown is Huntsville, Texas, where the local economy is based on incarceration, and where over 1000 people have been executed in the city's eponymous penitentiary. (They do lethal injection now; they used to have a workhorse electric chair, nicknamed Old Sparky.) Driving around town with Wright, Linklater keeps encountering places that inspired his Texas movies, including a rooming house that he shared with some football teammates ("Everybody Wants Some!!") and the part of town where teens used to hang out, make out, and drive in circles ("Dazed and Confused").
But there's a sorrowful undertone to the trips down memory lane, because the coming-of-age happened in the shadow of one of the more relentless carceral engines in the nation, with wave after generational wave of mostly poor and minority inmates being dehumanized, rented out for barely-paid or slave labor, and brutalized or killed by guards. One of the most subdued yet affecting parts of the episode shows the ritual of released inmates leaving prison with barely any preparation for the brick wall of indifference and exploitation they're about to slam into. Punishment is supposed to be coupled with rehabilitation. But post-1980s, the US gave up on the second thing, and now seems to sadistically enjoy the first, even dreaming up ways to make the penal experience crueler for inmates' family members.
Stapleton's episode moves to the Gulf Coast area, the nucleus of the state's petroleum industry. We find out about Texas's longtime commitment to slavery, which not only sparked its decision to break away from Mexico in the 1840s (it used to be a territory) but seems to have carried forward as a mentality, into the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras and beyond. Like the other episodes, this one is loose and discursive and gives itself the freedom to take thematically relevant detours. We learn about the racial redlining that denied Black war veterans the chance to own homes under the G.I. Bill, legislation that mainly benefited white families; anti-Black discrimination in real estate development, banking, petroleum, and trucking; white Texas city bosses' long-standing preference for dumping garbage and toxic chemicals in Black neighborhoods; and the so-called "sundown towns" that warned people of color to get out by nightfall or be lynched by morning.
Thanks to the restrained, unsentimental way that Stapleton's subjects speak for themselves (displaying a variety of regional accents in the process) there is a never a "woe is me" sense to any part of the larger story. The director has the instincts of a committed regional novelist. In the Linklater tradition, she lets her subjects speak long enough to establish themselves as characters. We get a sense of what their voices sound like, how they tell stories. Some anecdotes are so understated in their delivery that they transform into an existentially bleak kind of comedy, as when Dennis, the filmmaker's cowboy cousin, talks of driving through Jim Crow-era sundown towns that have maintained their animosity: "You can just tell that a person like me shouldn't be there, just by some of the stuff they have written on the gas stations out there. You'd see on a sign, 'Don't let the dark catch you out here.' I kinda know where they're aiming at with that."
Sosa's episode focuses her roots in the border area between Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, often referred to as La Frontera. "Two sister cities with one heart" is how they were described to Sosa as a girl, but it won't startle you to learn that this, too, turned out to be something between a mirage and a cover story. Sosa and many of her subjects touch on the idea of a bifurcated consciousness, living simultaneously on two sides of a divide that's political and cultural as well as geographical. (If anybody ever wanted to remake "Wings of Desire," they could set it here.)
Just as Stapleton's episode was rich in mostly untold stories about institutionalized discrimination against Black people who helped build and maintain the Lone Star state, Sosa's delves into the border region's role as a gateway for immigrants who have cycled between being courted or lured here when their labor is desperately needed (as it was during World War II) and treated as vermin by xenophobic politicians at the same time that they were being employed off-the-books for sub-minimum wages. One of the most heartbreaking sections is about attempts to bulldoze a working class Mexican-American neighborhood of El Paso in order to build yet another sports stadium. (Northern white folks shouldn't get too smug watching this part of the episode: nearly all of the freeway interchanges and stadium complexes built in Yankee as well as Southern cities originated in eminent domain seizures of minority-owned land.)
This material connects with stories of political and territorial mistreatment of Black people in Stapleton's segment, in particular a section where Dr. Robert Bullard, the Texas Southern University professor who's known as the "Father of Environmental Justice," reveals that between 1920 and 1978, four-fifths of all the garbage produced in Houston was dumped in Black neighborhoods. It's all part of the same ongoing story. The through-line is the tail of white supremacy wagging the dog of governance.
All three episodes express a guarded optimism about the possibility of lasting progress, even as they warn that their state is entrenched in reactionary regression and it takes a stubborn, combative sort of progressive to decide to stay and keep fighting rather than move somewhere hospitable. A white liberal activist in Linklater's episode says that he tried relocating to a "granola" part of Colorado but came back to Texas because he realized that his personality required more people to argue with and try to convert. That's kind of the same predicament faced by this series. "God Save Texas" fits snugly into the progressive, multicultural, "urban" grid of HBO-Cinemax. But in an ideal alternate universe, it would have premiered somewhere like Country Music Television or Fox News Channel, where its impact would have resonated like the cannons of the Alamo.
]]>I have Spectrum Wi-Fi and cable service at home, and it offers “free” on-demand movies, so I called one of them up recently: “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen this 15-year-old film: Towards the end, the beloved wizard Dumbledore is killed by his colleague Severus Snape while the hero looks on in horror. There’s more to that bit of story than initially meets the eye, but what’s important to know here is that it’s one of the all-time mass culture downers, up there with the deaths of Bambi’s mother, Simba’s dad, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and half the population of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was looking forward to wallowing in the doom-and-gloominess of Dumbledore tumbling into the abyss.
But it wasn’t possible because as soon as he started falling, the movie cut to an ad for PetSmart.
I’ve seen this happen with increasing regularity while watching films and TV shows on streaming platforms, whether it’s cable TV or Amazon’s FreeVee (formerly IMDb TV). I first noticed how bad it had gotten while watching "Columbo" reruns on the latter service during the pandemic semi-lockdown of 2020. Ads would just appear, seemingly at random, often cutting off Columbo or his quarry in the middle of a monologue. Then I noticed it happening during on-demand content across platforms, including YouTube, and not just with visual content: Sometimes you’ll be listening to a full album and ads will appear in the middle of songs. It even happens on the official YouTube channels of record labels.
Are tech companies deliberately making the experience as bad as possible to get more money out of us? I wonder. When you log onto YouTube or similar services, the first thing you usually see is an ad promoting the ad-free version of the service. It has a feeling of a protection racket: If you don’t want us roughing up the art, pay us. They are already making money from ads, and from selling your personal information, but if you want even a smidgen of a work’s integrity to be preserved you have to pay extra.
“But commercial interruptions aren’t a new thing, Matt,” objects a hypothetical reader of this piece. True! But as irritating as commercial interruptions have always been (the editing of movies for content was just as irritating, and more pernicious), they at least tried to do things to soften the annoyance of the interruption. There was a sense that the people doing the interrupting understood that they were doing something deeply obnoxious and fundamentally wrong, and therefore had an obligation to smooth the transition from movie to ad. Movies shown on commercial TV are meticulously prepared for that type of fragmented presentation. An editor goes through the running time of the film, figures out where the ad breaks might go, and does quick fade-ins and fade-outs to indicate proper placement. In between is where the ads are supposed to go. If you’re ever watching a movie on a traditional broadcast or cable platform and pay attention to the rhythm of scenes, you’ll get to the point where you can sense another transition coming.
I’m not saying that anybody deserves a medal of valor for creating gaps for ads. What I’m saying is that it’s not your imagination: art and entertainment are being straight-up mutilated by corporations now, without the slightest genuflection toward the idea that they have innate value.
Corporations used to cut movies for secondary markets with a scalpel. Now they use a meat-ax. Sometimes it seems like they close their eyes before swinging the ax. I bet if I watched “Jaws” on demand right now, when Quint slid down the deck towards the shark’s open mouth there’d be an ad for dietary supplements.
Sometimes they stick whole other programs into the ad spaces. One time I tried to watch one of the “Underworld” movies on-demand from our cable service, and it not only jammed several regular-length ads into the opening sequence, it then made me wait 15 additional minutes while it showed me an inspirational TV newsmagazine segment about a young hockey player recuperating from terrible injuries.
For the life of me, I cannot understand how or why that piece got inserted in there (maybe to promote a channel related to the company that released the film?). Don’t get me wrong: it was a heartwarming story. But I was there to watch vampires and werewolves. I tried to watch another on-demand action-horror movie a couple of days later, and the cable company inserted not one but two sports news stories into the movie, back-to-back. You couldn’t fast-forward through them. The tech wouldn’t allow it. I gave up a couple of minutes into the second inspirational sports news story. I just wanted to watch “Blade 2.” Why wouldn’t they let me do that?
This is what happens when we allow tech guys and money guys to redefine creativity as “content,” a gross, degrading word that reduces centuries of imaginative efforts by the human race to a tube of flavorless gray paste.
I first heard a tech guy refer to writing as “content” almost 25 years ago, during a presentation at the Star-Ledger of New Jersey about the brilliant idea of putting all of that daily newspaper’s content online for free and “monetizing” it with display ads. It’s everywhere now, that word. “Content.” Even some artists have surrendered and now use the language of the oppressor. Maybe there’s widespread understanding, perhaps weary acceptance, that the tech industry has never actually viewed creative effort as anything but a pack mule that can be saddled up with commerce. Whether the money is generated by selling users’ personal information to third parties or by encrusting it with additional ads is of no importance to them.
It’s been explained to me that the random cruddy ad-breaks problem might be traced back to coding issues. The software for the presentation platform is looking for the correct spots where ads can be placed but—because of somebody’s technical failure—failing to accurately detect them.
But this is more an explanation than an excuse. It’s like being told that the reason so many night scenes shot during the era of digital cinematography are illegible coffee-colored smears is because your TV is improperly calibrated, or not expensive enough. Incomprehensible night photography didn’t used to be a common problem. Ads in the middle of a scene, sometimes cutting off a sentence or an important piece of action, didn’t used to be a common problem, either. Both are symptoms of a culture that has stopped even pretending to care about presentation. We are now at the point in the history of show business where a bad experience is free and a decent one costs extra.
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