“If the thing is there, why, there it is.” Happy Birthday, Walker Evans

Posted on November 3, 2024 by sheila

Sadie Tingle, Alabama, 1936.

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That last photo is Walker Evans’ innovative perspective of the parade for Charles Lindbergh after Lindbergh successfully crossed the Atlantic in 1927. It’s one of the first photos Evans took, and shows that he had a “good eye” from the start. A conventional photographer would have shown the parade, the cheering crowds, the scope and size of the event, Lindbergh himself. Evans, however, was struck by the backs of the marching band, and the carnage of ticker-tape. The empty aftermath.

And the photo above that one I love in particular, since I love Carole Lombard, have that movie poster on my wall, and Carole Lombard with a shiner is my Twitter avatar.

Walker Evans captured America at a certain time of upheaval, gigantic events which had wide-sweeping consequences, for the world, yes, but more importantly, for individuals. It was a time of both technical innovation and abject poverty. He focused on American’s homes, the objects in the homes, the rusty bed-steads in the shacks of the poor and destitute, the stoves in the corner, the kitchen utensils. Beds were important. Beds represent a respite for the economically-ravaged people he photographed. But Evans, too, just had an eye for the detail, the one essential thing that would make a photograph pop. It is a remarkable record of what America looked like at the time, its cars, its billboards. Ordinary life was what he was after. You can feel the dust in the air from the unpaved roads, smell the sugary soda from the fountains, the quiet of those small towns. But he was also an urban street photographer, taking pictures of women on subways wearing little hats, gossiping, collapsed against one another during the commute, lunch rooms crowded with office workers, the vast bustle of city life. It’s an amazing archive, an incredible historical record.

In 1936, James Agee, film critic, novelist, reporter, asked Walker Evans to come down to Alabama with him to document the life of sharecroppers for Fortune magazine. Hard hard times in America, all around. Evans’ photographs (Agee and Evans stayed with three tenant-farmer families, so you get to know the faces) are haunting. The direct gaze. The dirty children. The hovels. The gaunt cheeks. The hard-bitten eyes. Evans initially felt uncomfortable with the assignment, photographing people in such misery. He worried he was exploiting them. A common issue with photographers who go into terrible areas. But the issue is two-fold: documenting horrors brings news of events to the world, makes it palpable, energizes people to “get involved”, whatever that might mean. (One remembers Kevin Carter’s horrifying photo of the starving child in the Sudan curled up on the ground with a vulture crouching nearby. While there are conflicting reports on how that photograph came to be, Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for it. It was one of those photos, like the “napalm girl” that sears into your brain once you’ve seen it. The horror of humanity. Carter committed suicide. He had photographed many horrible things, executions, torture. His suicide note spoke of not being able to bear all of the things he had seen, they had blotted out the possibility of joy. AND, as a photographer, his job was not to change things, or provide aid. It was to document, to bear witness. That’s it. This is an ethical struggle that Walker Evans felt acutely as he photographed these families in dire straits.)

The collaboration with Agee eventually became, of course, the classic of American literature/photography, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee’s prose is incantatory and emotional, free-flowing and high-flung, tapping into the human condition and the terrible beauty of our drive to survive. Here is an excerpt:

Each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:

Moreover, these flexions are taking place everywhere, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:

Each is intimately connected with the bottom and the extremest reach of time:

Each is composed of substances identical with the substances of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars:

All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.

Walker Evans’ contribution to the 20th century cannot be measured.

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Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Art/Photography, On This Day | Tagged , | 19 Comments

“I’ve had the kind of fame which I felt was just the right amount.” — Lois Smith

Posted on November 3, 2024 by sheila

Lois Smith, who turns 94 years old today, made her film debut in 1955, where she played a young prostitute in East of Eden. She has a small scene with James Dean, and then exits the film forever. But she makes a huge impression. The memory of her lingers.

In 2021, 66 years later – let me say that again – 66 years after she made her film debut – Lois Smith won a Tony for her performance in The Inheritance. She was – at age 90 – the oldest Tony winner. Her speech was amazing. Unfortunately it’s not on YouTube. The speeches of all the YOUNGER winners are on YouTube. Typical. Let us honor our history. The video is here. She was so happy, and so was the audience.

Some years ago, I was involved in a theatre workshop where we developed a play about the artist Joseph Cornell. We workshopped in one of those giant airy studios at Juilliard. We played around with format. We envisioned the play taking place IN one of Cornell’s boxes. I played the young woman who came into his life late – one of those aimless Automat girls he loved so much – and he gave her money and was obsessed with her. She ended up stealing a couple of boxes and – like a dummy-dumb – tried to sell them to New York galleries. Cornell was famous. Everyone knew him. So they called Cornell to report that a raggedy strange young woman was trying to sell his boxes. Horrible. He was devastated but refused to press charges. She had a horrible end, murdered in a hotel on the UWS – a murder which was never solved. Some of the details are hazy, my research was a long time ago. A sad episode in JC’s life.

The point is: Joseph Cornell loved Lois Smith, and knew her casually, and made a box for her. It was 1955, and she was on Broadway in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Young and the Beautiful. This was before East of Eden dropped. Lois Smith actually has the box (unlike, say, Lauren Bacall – the box Cornell made for her is probably priceless at this point). It hangs in her hallway. In a New Yorker article, the writer, Michael Schulman, gives a description of the box:

Cornell, who knew Smith through the writer Donald Windham, cut out her image, in a white tulle gown, from the Playbill cover. “The back of it is wonderful,” Smith said recently, flipping the box to reveal papier-mâché text. “It has a quote from Hölderlin: ‘Home, poor heart, you cannot rediscover, if the dream alone does not suffice.’ ”

So back to the workshop: the director – my friend Ted – knew Lois because of her work at Steppenwolf (she’s a company member). When we both lived in Chicago, Ted and I went to see her in a new play (The Mesmerist) at Steppenwolf, and the three of us went out to dinner afterwards. I was starstruck, and so wanted to ask her about James Dean, and at first I was just trying to put together the images: the beautiful white-haired woman before me, and the girl at the bar in East of Eden – but she was so friendly, so nice, I soon forgot about being starstruck. We all just discussed the play, its problems, its triumphs, the process of development, regular old shop talk among theatre people. I’ve always loved her, but ever since that night I had dinner with her, she is a role model for any working actress. The whole thing is about the work. Success – or at least the regular meaning of the word – is truly irrelevant. It’s just work.

Later, Ted and I were both in New York, working on the Cornell project, and Lois came on as adviser for our project. She knew Joseph Cornell. She opened a lot of doors for us, including getting us into the private screening room at MoMA to watch his chopped-up and now-famous films. We were shown the JC collection, including the ones not on display.

As I said, when I met her I kept seeing her defeated pose at the bar in East of Eden, the movie that “turned me on” to acting and also moviemaking as an artform. I saw that movie at age 13. I remember wondering who she was. She made an impression, even in the bombardment of James Dean on my psyche. I memorized the name. “LOIS SMITH.” And there I was, an adult, so many years later, having dinner with her, and then, a couple years after that, talking with her about Joseph Cornell in a huge rehearsal studio at Juilliard, and it all seemed perfectly normal, a straight line between back then and now. It was as though 13-year-old me had already cleared a space for this moment.

It is a rare kind of experience. The rarest.

Thank you Lois for all of your work, for being a role model, for opening up the possibility for others what a good working career looks like – success doesn’t matter, keep doing the work, keep striving, it’s the work that matters – and also for showing an interest in our experimental open-ended project – and not just an interest – but actually HELPING us achieve our goals (one call to MoMA by Lois Smith and we were in). Thank you for taking the time out of your busy career to meet with a ragtag group of young actors to tell us stories about this artist who loved you so much.

And we loved you right back.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

October 2024 Viewing Diary

Posted on November 2, 2024 by sheila

Downfall (2005; d. Oliver Hirschbiegel)
I’ve watched a couple of times. Always good to have a reminder of the madness of those final months, where even the most hardened monstrous men were like, “… uhm, yeah, he’s a lunatic, I’m out of here.” I always forget that this film is bookended by interviews with the real Traudl Junge, whose memoirs provided the basis for the film. In the interview, she talks about how she had excused her behavior for many years with “I was young, I had no idea what was going on, I didn’t know what Hitler was doing, I was so young …” and then one day in Munich she came across a little plaque commemorating the bravery and martyrdom of the “White Rose”, a tiny group of students protesting Hitler and the war. The students – Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans – were executed. (Wrote about these heroes here). Junge realized her youth was no excuse. Sophie Scholl was the same age as she was when she chose to follow Hitler into the bunker. This is a huge thing to admit, and it’s why I admire Junge. To own your part in it. To own fully what you were propping up and supporting. Sophie Scholl saw through the lies. You bought the lie. Own it. Props to Junge for owning it.

Wizard of Lies (2017; d. Barry Levinson)
One of the reasons the Madoff thing continues to fascinate me is the level people were willing to NOT ask questions. The sheer delusion. For decades. I am also riveted by the mere FACT of “the 17th floor”. The 17th floor was right there, and … nobody asked. Nobody even seemed to wonder. De Niro’s take on this guy seems, from what I understand at least, pretty accurate. Madoff was definitely at least a partial sociopath – the LEVEL of lying that had to occur, the level of compartmentalization, of concealing just boggles the mind. How could anyone continue like this? Well, lying is a gift some people have. They lie without shame, without overwhelming anxiety. Maybe he thought it would last forever. Why wouldn’t he believe it? He got away with it for decades. He had everyone in his pocket. And yet when he was busted, he owned up to it in almost shockingly transparent ways. He didn’t even defend himself. Yup. I did it. He took the fall, once it came. He didn’t really defend himself. Although there’s always a justification for what he did, and maybe not a concept of the “little people” he hurt, the retirement funds wiped out, stealing from synagogues, stealing from a Holocaust survivor … Who cares about the billionaires? Those people have too much money anyway. Too much power. They make things suck for the rest of us. You wanted even more? You deserve what you get. Live in your car like the rest of us schmucks. But the regular people … who didn’t know how to read financial statements … and of course had no reason to question Madoff’s operation … those people didn’t deserve it. He had the support of the SEC, etc. So De Niro captures that disarming LACK of anxiety … lack of MORAL anxiety, that is … The whole thing is fascinating.

Finishing School (1934; d. George Nicholls Jr., Wanda Tuchock)
Had never seen this one and I am in love with it. Frances Dee plays Virginia, a girl sent to a finishing school for debutantes by her snobby selfish mother (Billie Burke). The school is run by the great Beulah Bondi, a terrifying martinet determined to turn these girls into happy obedient rich housewives. The classes are like “How many cards should you leave when you go visiting?” “What is the proper way to set the table?” It’s horrible. The girls in the school are all rebels, in their way, lying their way out of things, sneaking out to go to the city and meet up with men, keeping liquor in their rooms, hidden in their shoes. Ginger Rogers is the ringleader. The girls are all friendly and welcoming to Virginia, but Virginia starts to get in real trouble. The vice closes around her. Loved this film.

The Wild Robot (2024; d. Chris Sanders)
Went with my sisters and nieces and nephews. We had such a blast. Wonderful movie. My nephew Ernie sat beside me, wiping away tears at one point. Heart-crack. We loved the specificity of the animals and their personalities. The socially anxious porcupine (he can’t make friends. He hurts people without meaning to). The OCD beaver, made fun of everyone until his skills are needed (“We suddenly take an interest in the project you’ve been working on!”). So many more! My niece loves the book series, so it was extra fun for her. It was so fun to go to the movies. IN A THEATRE.

Between the Temples (2024; d. Nathan Silver)
Loved this so much! Jason Schwartzman plays a widowed rabbi, living with his two moms, who are determined to get him another woman. The rabbi can no longer sing – his trauma has removed his voice – and so this has created in him a whirlwind of crisis: what is his purpose? What is his faith? He teaches religious classes to kids. Everything is very lackluster for him. Then he meets Carla Kessler, played by the great Carol Kane, in a role she was born to play, and I am just so glad it’s happened. I have missed Carol Kane being a “player” in the older-woman-actress space. Carla is her own person, and at first their dynamic is prickly and strange. She was his music teacher when he was in elementary school. She never had a bat mitzvah (because her parents were Communists), so she starts taking his classes. Which is a very weird situation for him. Beyond this set-up, I’d rather not say more. The way it unfolds is eccentric and authentic, at times legitimately hilarious. The film is filled with character actors, real people, who look like real people (another quality I’ve missed. Everyone is so pretty now. And fake-looking with too-white teeth. Give me some fucked-up real-looking people.) There’s a dinner scene which feels like the best of Woody Allen – it was almost too much to take in at one sitting, all of the performances happening simultaneously, there was so much going on at that crazy table. As funny as the film is, its tone is more melancholy than comedic, more contemplative than extroverted. Mysteries remain intact. Not everything is explained. The whole thing rests on the chemistry between Schwartzman and Kane, which is considerable. Adored this film.

Green Border (2024; d. Agnieszka Holland)
A very difficult watch, and a must-see. Agnieszka Holland is a master and she outdoes herself here, in the three-dimensional and multi-pronged portrayal of the refugee crisis going on – for years, and still – in the no-man’s-land forest-border between Belarus and Poland. Refugees tossed back and forth between the two countries, and the situation is completely lawless. Happening with no oversight. The treatment of these people, fleeing oppression (mild word for ISIS’ “rule”), is appalling. Holland chooses one family’s journey to be representative, but she doesn’t stop there. She looks at the situation from all sides. She follows the activists (lawyers and medics), determined to give aid to the helpless people trapped in the border, legal and medical help. This is very dangerous and illegal. Holland also gives us a portrayal of a Polish man who works as a Border Guard. He thinks it is a patriotic duty until he sees what is going on. And so Green Border is also about the moral/ethical corruption of regular people engaged in containing the crisis, and how it’s not just “pressure” to put aside your fellow human feeling – but the law). This is an important film, in the truest sense of the word, and so difficult to watch I couldn’t shake it off for days afterwards. Gorgeously shot in black and white, Green Border is one of the best films of the year. (I also loved a brief scene late in the film which demonstrates the international currency of hip-hop.)

Evil Does Not Exist (2024; d. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car was stunning and deep in its emotions, so much so that the final scene – where the subliminal dynamic between acclaimed theatre director Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki, his driver (Tōko Miura), bursts to the surface in devastating and cathartic ways. It was a gorgeous film, too, about the power of theatre, and not just theatre, but Chekhov. The organizing principle of Drive My Car is an international production of Uncle Vanya. Bah, it’s so good. The anticipation for Evil Does Not Exist was intense. It has a different mood entirely from Drive My Car, and there are more differences. Drive My Car was an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story. Evil Does Not Exist was written by Hamaguchi. It’s the story of a small community, close-knit, dealing with the infiltration of their area by a company who has bought up land to establish a high-end “glamping” site. The townspeople are assured it will bring tourism to the area. It will be good for all! The townspeople may be semi-rural and not rich, but they are not dumb, and they are very concerned about what the influx of cityfolk will do to the fragile ecosystem of their land. There are raucous town meetings, where the condescending representatives of the glamping company are met with staunch resistance. This is also a story of a father and daughter, their sweet relationship, its closeness, seems increasingly fragile as the glamping threat intensifies. Like, the glamping is GOING to continue, whether or not the town wants it. There are no protests that will “touch” these rich people’s plans. The film is a reminder, and a painful one, that the wrong people are in charge. People who just don’t give a fuck. People like that try to ruin everything, try to create a world that reflects their materialist values. It’s all they understand. With every passing day, it disgusts me more and more. Evil Does Not Exist is ambiguous, including its title. I keep thinking about it. It’s an upsetting film.

Sons of Anarchy (2008; season 1)
I’d never seen it. I love everyone involved, and I’m stressed out and looking for a binge. So I gave it a shot. It didn’t grip me to the point that I feel the need to move on to Season 2. The whole “dad was a hippie biker and the current club has betrayed his dying wish” was a little bit dumb, and didn’t give much to grasp onto, although the moral conflict of Jax is beautifully played by Charlie Hunnam, an actor I’ve loved for a while now. Please see Last Looks (my review here). I feel like people maybe didn’t see Last Looks because Mel Gibson is in it, which, of course, is a choice I understand (but don’t share). It’s hilarious, and feels like it was made in 1975. Hunnam is so good in it as the shaggy raggedy disgraced-cop P.I., riding his bike around Hollywood trying to solve the case. In Sons of Anarchy Katey Segal crushes in her performance. If I continued to watch it would be for the sheer pleasure of watching her in action as that monstrous matriarch. Monstrous but also sympathetic, shades of Edie Falco in The Sopranos, although Gemma has more power than Carmela.

Nickel Boys (2024; d. Ramell Ross)
Ramell Ross’ directorial debut, the poetic Hale County This Morning This Evening, was one of my favorite films of 2018. An astonishingly beautiful film, a tone-poem of images and feeling. Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, which – in turn – is based on the real-life horrors experienced by boys, primarily black boys, in these “juvies”, basically schools/reformatories. Boys went into them for minor offenses, or even just minor misunderstandings, and – in some cases – never came out. In the early 90s, unmarked graves were discovered behind many of them. Boys just disappeared. I feel like the story would be well-served by a docu-series, since survivors are still out there, and their stories should be heard. Nickel Boys is told in first-person POV, meaning totally from the main character’s view point (with some twists as the film progresses). This means you don’t see anything the character doesn’t see, and his voice emerges from behind the camera. It’s like Bogart in Dark Passage. But, like Dark Passage, I didn’t feel the choice worked because – no matter what you do – a camera can’t BE a person. You don’t feel more immersed in it. You just notice the “device”, and there’s a disembodied voice coming from off-screen, which never quite creates the illusion that the voice is coming from within the camera. I feel like this might be an unpopular opinion because the subject is important. I totally think it’s important, too. I just don’t think this device served the story. The film makes you think about power. It’s like the Stanford Prison Experiment, only it’s not an experiment. The film made me realize – yet again – that humans should not be put in positions of absolute authority over other humans, without serious and detached oversight, to keep a close eye on abuses of power. Humans can’t be trusted with power over other humans, end-stop.

Saltburn (2023; d. Emerald Fennell)
Finally caught up with this. It’s very silly but entertaining. Joseph Losey did it better in The Servant. So many bodily fluids!!

Woman of the Hour (2024; d. Anna Kendrick)
Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut is excellent! It’s such a wild story! I loved her approach. The trailer doesn’t really capture what she pulls off. Woman of the Hour is very specific. It is its own thing. The tone required great control, which Kendrick shows. There’s the main story – which you can’t even believe is real – but then there’s the other story, the REAL story, which is the stifling atmosphere of sexism and misogyny at every level of the culture. I loved it. I admire her for donating all the money she made (and will make) from this to RAINN and the National Center for Victims of Crime.

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara (2024; d. Erin Lee Carr)
This is a well-done documentary about the … years-long stalking of the popular twin-sister lesbian singer-songwriting duo. It’s not really stalking, though. It’s worse. Someone purporting to be Tegan reached out to fans, befriending them, and of course the young vulnerable fans were thrilled to hear from their hero. But things get darker. The film is very good because it’s not just about this one incident. It’s also about fan culture and its more toxic side. Like, sometimes the GOOD fans are the WORST. The over-identification with the worshipped figure, the needing them to be exactly what you want them to be, the death threats if they don’t comply, the harassment their loved ones get – like the girlfriends – these fans are vicious. I don’t know WHAT they think they’re doing. Sticking up for their idol? This is new, make no mistake. Because now things can spread, on Tumblr, Reddit, wherever. Like, I get it, Olivia Wilde might be (is) annoying, but the misogynistic vitriol flung at her – by primarily girls and women – during her thing with Harry Styles – was disgusting. Like, what exactly are you protecting? So Tegan has a normal breakup with the woman she loved. Meanwhile, she had shared about her in shows, and so – of course – fans were (overly) invested in the relationship. When the two broke up, the fans turned on the girlfriend. It’s just appalling behavior. Get a life. Get laid. Grow up. I liked how Erin Lee Carr was basically investigating what the identity of the mischief-maker. It continues to be a mystery. Clearly this doc got to me a little bit. I liked it.

Cruella (2021; d. Craig Gillespie)
Watched this with my nieces and nephew. Wow, it’s a bit much! The costumes are – deservedly – celebrated. They’re basically the whole shebang.

Magpie (2024; d. Sam Yates)
This was really good. I reviewed for Ebert.

Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare (2024; d, Lyttanya Shannon)
I was catfished from ages 12-14. I told the story once on Twitter but I never go on there anymore. My age range means I was catfished by actual letters in envelopes with stamps. This person sought me out. I sometimes wonder who I would be if that hadn’t happened to me. It could have been so much worse but major damage was done. I looked for this person, or at least I did once the internet came along. I haven’t been able to find any trace. Catfishing is now so much easier to do – you don’t have to go to the post office and buy stamps, for one. This is one of the more extreme examples of catfishing I have seen – it’s DIABOLICAL and I truly felt for this poor woman, and I think it’s really brave for her to share her story (since in general people are scornful/judgmental about the victims of catfishing). Her getting sucked in made sense to me – it was such an elaborate con – and her desire to be married and have children, and the pressure from her community to do these things – made her vulnerable. When you find out who was doing the catfishing … mind. blown.

This Is the Zodiac Speaking (2024; d. Phil Lott, Ari Mark)
You know I devoured this one. It basically tells us what we all probably already know, or strongly suspect, but there’s all this other detail added I never knew about, the Seawater family – yes, that’s their name! – and how this man basically rampaged through their lives. All of them are interviewed. I was particularly struck by the news reporter who tracked down Arthur Leigh Allen, and interviewed him – on camera. Lots of things I’d never seen.

Jackie (2016; d. Pablo Larraín)
Larraín uses an extremely heavy hand with his styling and music and approach – and yet somehow fails to make a point. I feel like his approach leaves the actor stranded a bit, doing too much of the heavy-lifting in a context that doesn’t really support them. I am all for unconventional biopics. I have written about this so much I won’t bore you. I like films that dig into what a person MEANS, not just what they DID. This is why I can appreciate Blonde, even if I don’t agree with the “take” on Marilyn. The film was trying to do something else, and was also trying to interrogate fame itself, and death, and artifice, and isolation. It was ambitious and I wish more biopics were. So I appreciate the idea and the attempt. I just feel that it was pretty empty.

The Goldman Case (2024; d. Cédric Kahn)
Fantastic film about the famous trial (or re-trial) of Pierre Goldman, charged with a couple of robberies as well as the cold-blooded murder of two pharmacists who happened to be there. All this happened in 1969, a crazy year in France, with all kinds of left-wing militant actions going on – and Goldman was a part of that, but also somewhat detached. If anything, he was more militant than the students shutting down their universities. He was convicted of the crime and wrote a book in prison: he admitted to the robberies but refused to admit to the murders. His book made him into a cause celebre, so much so that there was a second trial in 1974, I think. This film takes place entirely in the courtroom and – I imagine – was taken mostly from the actual transcripts. There’s almost no off-the-cuff dialogue, and no real scenes outside the courtroom. Witnesses are called. The atmosphere is raucous, the courtroom filled with his supporters, who have to be told repeatedly to be quiet. It’s gripping. Plays like a bat out of hell.

Shayda (2024; d. Noora Niasari)
Quickly risen to the list of my favorites for the year. We still have two months to go. Zar Amir Ebrahimi first came to my attention with the fantastic Holy Spider, about the true story of a Jack the Ripper type killing prostitutes in the holy city of Mashad. Here she plays an Iranian woman, living in Australia, hiding in a shelter for battered women. Her husband is abusing her and refuses to grant her a divorce. If they DO divorce, he will take their 7 or 8 year old daughter back with him to Iran. There is no way he will ever EVER let her take the child. She is totally trapped. Amazing film.

Dinner in America (2022; d. Adam Rehmeier)
I was so excited to see Dinner in America picking up steam, mostly via Tik Tok, in the two years since it was released, so much so it’s having a short theatrical re-release over the next couple of months. If it’s playing in your area, go see it! Support these little films. It is important. Dinner in America was on my Top 10 of 2022, and I felt very alone. I’d mention it and even film critics would be like, “What’s that?” I felt so gratified when the great John Waters – whose Top 10 list in Artforum is one of the most highly anticipated lists in all of film criticism – put Dinner in America on his Top 10 of 22!! Not that I need to be CONFIRMED in my love of something, but I was still thrilled! I just re-watched for the fun of it, and because of the announcement of the re-release. Here’s my review in Ebert. And I wasn’t done. I had to write about it more. “You need to take it down a notch.”

Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter (2024; d. Ryan White)
The hunger for true crime “content” (gross) is so intense right now the quality has fallen off in many of the docs I’ve seen, as well as mention the channels devoted to these stories. I appreciate when it’s a story I haven’t heard before AND when there’s art to the telling of it. I was incredibly moved by this terrible story, mainly because of the presence of Cathy Terkanian, the central figure, the grieving mother, but really the avenging angel. You don’t really need to add much to the story, because she is such a compelling figure. All you have to do is point the camera at her. They don’t add too many bells and whistles, a couple of harmless re-enactments … re-enactments can be a problem, but here they just add to the haunting mystery of what happened to this poor disappeared girl. Ryan White directed. I really admired his film Ask Dr. Ruth, which I reviewed for Ebert.

No Other Land (2024; d. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor)
Painful and angry. I reviewed for Ebert.

 
 
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Review: No Other Land (2024)

Posted on November 1, 2024 by sheila

A very tough challenging watch. But it should be watched. (In my review for Ebert I mention Green Border, directed by Polish master Agnieszka Holland, released earlier this year. See it. One if fictional – but barely – it’s really a work of reportage – the other is documentary: both are powerful acts of bearing witness.)

 
 
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“I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not to be among the greatest.” –John Keats

Posted on October 31, 2024 by sheila

I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know. Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

Born in 1795 on this day, John Keats was orphaned at fifteen. Because his father’s finances were in a wreck, Keats always had to struggle for money. He thought of going into medicine and apprenticed himself to a surgeon. At the same time, he began to write. He was inspired by other people, he was suggestible. Example:

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Orwell’s “nightmare world”

Posted on October 31, 2024 by sheila

From George Orwell’s essential essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, where he reflects on all the lies and falsifications of that essential conflict, the rehearsal for Hitler-Stalin and all the monstrousness that followed. (It is the Spanish civil war that served as the breeding ground for 1984, although evidence of the dystopian nature of totalitarianism would become mechanistic and even more monstrous in the years following the war. This essay pre-dates the writing of 1984 by a decade:)

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world: After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such an event, “It never happened”–well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.

2+2=5. I have written about this concept so much – in fact I see it all around me, even in billboards – and have done so since the birth of this here blog. 2+2=5. The essential description of fascism/propaganda/brainwashing (so complete that the brainwashed eventually brainwash themselves) and what Orwell called “thoughtcrime”. It’s all you need.

I read 1984 before I understood all of these issues, although I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War and knew in my bones the horror/intimidation of this faceless enemy, and the threat of annihilation hovering over everything. It was very real. I wrote about this period – and the proliferation of nuclear winter movies at the time – on my Substack. So maybe a part of me grokked it from that. I was 16 when I read 1984 and it got under my skin. I barely need to re-read it now because it is IN me. I am grateful. It has helped me stay the course as I maneuvered through propaganda as well as peer pressure, those who want me to say that 2+2=5. And it’s not just one side of the political fence demanding it. I credit Orwell for keeping my senses sharp, or as sharp as they can be. I think the books you read when you are young, before you understand context or history, sometimes enter you in a deeper and more permanent way than books you read when you’ve grown up a bit and are supposedly wiser to the ways of the world.

 
 
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“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath

Posted on October 27, 2024 by sheila

It’s her birthday today. She always hated her birthdays, “looked forward” to them with grim white-knuckling determination.

I have “had a relationship” with her my whole life. I discovered her at 15, like a lot of girls do, and took to her right away. I devoured every single thing I could get my hands on. I continued to revisit her work over the years, and as I changed, so, too, did the work. It’s wild. It looks one way to a 15 year old, and one way to a 35 year old, and etc. I am just happy that I lived long enough for her two-volume full correspondence to be published – a GOLDMINE. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940-1956, and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963. For such a major figure of American letters, it is a DISGRACE that there hasn’t been more “out there” in the public realm, letters and journals (don’t even get me STARTED on the debacle with those). Now let’s not get it twisted: I’m not talking about her reputation. She is one of the most famous American poets who has ever lived, and anyone who claims she is somehow underrated has an axe to grind and is not to be trusted. She’s basically the James Dean of American letters, and more ink has been spilled over every single word she ever wrote than most other poets attract in a lifetime. What I AM saying – in terms of there not being much “out there” – is that the Plath estate – run by Ted Hughes (but mostly run by Ted’s sister Olwyn – who always hated Sylvia) – was so draconian, so imperious, that nobody was ever allowed to publish anything or quote anything, without going through them first. The estate put the kibosh on ANY inquiry that may have “hurt the children” or whatever. It had a completely chilling effect on Plath scholarship: there hasn’t really been ANY proper biographies of her, either. She died in 1963, for God’s sake. She’s a MAJOR poet. Janet Malcolm wrote a whole BOOK about the challenges of writing about Sylvia Plath considering the state of the estate. This stasis all changed with the death of Ted and Olwyn – and then Ted and Sylvia’s daughter Frieda took over the estate, and we are seeing the results of that thaw. So now, for the first time, we could read Plath’s correspondence – to someone OTHER than her mother – and see what she was like with multiple people, not just the people-pleasing A-student she always had to be with her mother.

That correspondence was an absolute eye-opener for this lifelong fan. I honestly thought I had a grip on her. Turns out I was wrong. As I read the letters from December 1962 into January 1963, where she describes Ted helping her find an apartment in London, letters to her friend Marcia who was planning a trip to visit in March, all of these letters to editors and radio producers and all the rest … I found myself for the very first time NOT taking her suicide as a foregone conclusion. I actually thought at one point, “I think she’s gonna pull through this.” And then I remembered.

The correspondence is that powerful and that revelatory.

One of the many revelations in those volumes was what a massive movie fan Plath was. I never knew!! Why has this information been KEPT from us. Aurelia Plath edited out ALL of Plath’s comments on the movies she was seeing, 3, 4 a week sometimes. Why Aurelia would do that is anyone’s guess. Since for 40 years we have ONLY had the heavily-edited correspondence with her mother – where Sylvia often put a bright spin on things (understandable) – AND because Aurelia saw fit to leave so much out … well, you can’t know what you don’t know. Reading Sylvia’s letters, gushing about this or that movie, gave me a whole new perspective. She got a babysitter so she could go see Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.

Anyway, I won’t go on and on because I wrote about this newfound knowledge of Plath’s cinephilia in my column at Film Comment. As far as I know I am still the only person to have dug into Sylvia’s cinephilia. (This is the first time I’ve ever been able to say that about any topic I’ve written about. Someone ALWAYS got there before you … but here, since for whatever reason, Sylvia’s mother edited OUT all the references to movies in the letters Sylvia wrote – none of us had any idea how big a movie buff she was.)

I rarely think “I was BORN to write this piece” but in this case, I did. I’d been preparing for this one since I was in high school.

Sylvia Plath Goes to the Movies.
 
 
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“When the words do come, I pick them so thoroughly of their live associations that only the death in the word remains.” — poet Dylan Thomas

Posted on October 27, 2024 by sheila

“[My] poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.” – Dylan Thomas, 1952

Dylan Thomas was born on this day.

I got a chance to write about him when I reviewed Last Call, a truly gruesome “experimental” film about his last day. No thank you. But at least I got to write about him, because he – and his trajectory – the heights, the depths – are really interesting. He was SO influential on his generation that he ruined many up and coming poets who just tried to write like him – and it took some people years to shuffle off his influence. His influence was not entirely a good thing. He was a brilliant PERFORMER of his verse … and many people thought they saw through this at the sham underneath. That Thomas created a mood through his voice that then people assigned as “Genius”. Thomas felt uneasy about this himself. Anyway, you can hear a lot of this in the collection of quotes at the bottom of this post. Thomas’ star has fallen – a bit, anyway – but for the generation coming up around him and after him, he was the cat’s pajamas and EVERYONE had to grapple with him.

Continue reading →

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On This Day: October 27, 2004

Posted on October 27, 2024 by sheila

Foulke-Mientkiewicz

And nothing was the same ever again.

Here is a beautiful essay by my brother Brendan about the family tradition of the Red Sox, as embodied by my crazy godfather, Uncle Jimmy.

My stomach still clenches in anxiety when I watch Foulke toss that ball to first. He tosses it to Mientkiewicz in an overly gentle – almost gingerly – fashion, not wanting to over-throw, every muscle of his body screaming in taut tension, “Do not screw this up, do not screw this up….” It was a little gentle bloop of a throw. And then all hell broke loose. Almost a century of multi-generational disappointment vanished. People lost their ever-loving minds. I called my mother at one point during the final inning because I could not bear to be apart from my family and she hung up on me. My mother has probably never hung up on anyone in her whole life, let alone one of her children. But that’s how anxious and obsessed she was: Splitting focus was too nervewracking. And I thought, not, “Jeez my feelings are hurt” but “Wow, that was stupid of me to call right now.”

I was watching in a Red Sox bar in Hoboken, deep in enemy territory. I had been going there for a straight week-and-a-half, to watch those long … long … LONG games … and thought: “I can’t keep this up much longer. I’ve been drunk for 6 days and getting 4 hours of sleep a night because these games are ending at 1 in the morning.” This was my first post the next day. Let’s not forget too that there was a lunar eclipse on October 27. The bar where I watched the game had a skylight in the center of the roof. So as the game progressed, we would glance up through the skylight and watch the eclipse. If you put this in a screenplay, it would be rejected as too obvious.

Joe Castiglione’s call of that play on WWI in Boston:

Swing and a ground ball stabbed by Foulke! He has it, he underhands to first – and the Boston Red Sox are the World Champions! For the first time in 86 years, the Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship! Can you believe it?

I wish my Uncle Jimmy lived to see that day.

 
 
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Review: Magpie (2024)

Posted on October 25, 2024 by sheila

There’s a lot that’s fun here, particularly the subtleties of psychology on display. You might miss the subtleties because of the style of the film and the twisty-clever plot – but for me the emotional insights were the real point of this. At any rate, it’s fun. I reviewed for Ebert.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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