March 2022 Viewing Diary

I’m going along my own viewing way, and then I get a gig, and everything changes. You can tell when it happens. Not announcing this gig yet, and will not be confirming or denying anything. The viewing diary is what it is.

Huda’s Salon (2022; d. Hany Abu-Assad)
I was super impressed with Hany Abu-Assad’s latest. The Palestinian filmmaker addresses topics important to him – reflecting his world and its concerns – etc. – but he also crafts well-structured and deeply intense thrillers. I think Huda’s Salon is his best so far. I reviewed for Ebert.

Trouble in Paradise (1932; d. Ernst Lubitsch)
I love this story of glittering amorality, amorality cloaked in such charm that it makes morality look bad. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins are two thieves, making their way through the playgrounds of the rich, with Marshall posing as a baron, the best way to infiltrate the rarified air of the wealthy. He inadvertently falls for a rich woman – Kay Francis – which throws his relationship with Hopkins into crisis. These two grifters infiltrate Francis’ home, making themselves indispensable to her, all while keeping a close eye on what goes into the safe. Planning for the big score. The dialogue is so witty, the chemistry is so crackling, everything is funny and light and inconsequential and therefore weirdly emotional. Only Lubitsch could pull it off.

Million Dollar Legs (1932; d. Edward F. Cline)
A very silly movie about a fictional country filled with insanely gifted natural athletes – and all kinds of weird customs – who end up going to the Olympics. W.C. Fields plays the insanely strong President of this fictional country, and his daughter falls in love with a guy visiting the country, and all sorts of hijinx ensue. The course towards Olympic gold never runs smoothly, though, because WC Fields’ cabinet ministers set out to destroy the teams’ focus, by hiring a German vamp who reduces the entire Olympic team into a sexual frenzy. Anyway, you get the idea.

Kiss and Make Up (1934; d. Harlan Thompson)
Early Cary Grant is always so interesting. You can see the elements of the persona that will eventually solidify, the things about him that made him the most important movie star the world has ever known – basically because he invented the whole damn thing, AND his whole persona was an “act” – a completely manufactured personality. He just blows my mind. So it’s interesting to see him in the movies he appeared in before it all coalesced for him. Movies like Kiss and Make Up, where he plays a plastic surgeon who’s developed new ways to turn ugly women beautiful, to completely re-make people’s faces, his whole life devoted to (basically) women’s insecurities about their looks. He himself hectors women about their looks left and right. Meanwhile, he marries one of his biggest successes – a woman he re-made from scratch – and the reality of marrying a woman so devoted to her looks comes crashing in on him during their honeymoon. She takes hours to get ready! She sleeps with huge gloves on her hands, gel rubbed on her face, and her head wrapped in a turban. None of this is romantic at ALL. She looks FINE, can’t she RELAX and enjoy the moonlight? Well, no, Doctor, she can’t, because you MADE her value beauty above all other things!

Raging Bull (1980; d. Martin Scorsese)
It’s been a while. I was just talking with someone about the movies we (the collective we) see early on. As burgeoning movie fans or actor nerds, in our teens. Those movies STICK in a way other films – seen later on – don’t. There’s a certain kind of attention given to movies when you’re a teenager ON FIRE and OBSESSED with acting and actors. You analyze every moment. You rewind the VHS tape – because that’s what we’re talking about – to watch, at close range – the tiniest facial expression, or change of facial expression – and then watching the whole scene again, with your deeper knowledge in operation. At least, that’s how I watched movies as a teenager. Dog Day Afternoon was the start. I was not watching 1970s movies DURING the 1970s. I came to them during the era of the VCR and that’s how I caught up. It’s how I saw all the Scorsese films, Sidney Lumet’s films – all the gritty New York-era films – Midnight Cowboy – I IMBIBED all these movies, by myself, in a fugue state. I wasn’t an audience member. I was a STUDENT. I was already acting, and I took it very seriously, and so this was LEARNING for me. “How did he make that transition?” “Wait, so he came into this scene with all THAT churning around inside him?” I found it all endlessly fascinating, and people like De Niro and Pacino and John Cazale and Robert Duvall – I was mostly focused on the men, because the 70s movies are male-dominated – were excellent teachers. They are all so SKILLED. It’s not just flailing around. It’s highly technical what they’re doing, in the same way that Brando was technical. Brando had great technique. The idea that he just mumbled and emoted randomly is wildly incorrect. He knew what he was doing. Another excellent teacher. Anyway, so I don’t even know how many times I’ve seen Raging Bull over the course of my life. Twenty times? I don’t know. It’s wildly unpleasant, and it lacks a proper catharsis, and you’re not really “rooting” for anyone – except maybe for Joey and Vickie to get the hell away from Jake. One of the fun things about re-watching all these early Scorsese movies is to reiterate for myself just how UN-realistic they all are. These movies have a reputation for being “gritty” and “realistic” but … that’s just not the case. They are Expressionistic, bordering on Surreal. Even the violent boxing scenes are filmed in a totally surreal and phantasmagorical way, down to the sound design, the slo-mo, the unrealistic way blood spurts out into the air, etc. This is not a realistic movie. It’s about a real person, but Scorsese’s approach is dream-like and hallucinatory.

Calendar Girl (2022; d. Christian D. Bruun)
A very interesting slice of fashion-industry history that I had no idea about until I was assigned to review this documentary for Ebert.

Phoenix Rising (2022; d. Amy Berg)
I reviewed this two-part doc about Evan Rachel Wood going public with her abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson. Not crazy about it.

An American Tragedy (1931; d Josef von Sternberg)
The first film adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s celebrated novel (the second being the far more famous A Place in the Sun. The marvelous Sylvia Sidney is heartbreaking in “the Shelley Winters” part, the regular factor girl impregnated by the ambitious social-climber and then abandoned, as he cavorts with the boss’ daughter, a rich girl. Sidney’s pleading with him to marry her – to make the child legitimate – to give her SOME boundary of protection – is just wrenching. She was such a wonderful actress. The movie also LOOKS fantastic.

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2019; d. Radu Jude)
Radu Jude came on my radar, as is the case for a lot of people, because of Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn, filmed during the height of the pandemic (its first wave, at any rate). Bad Luck Banging was in my Top 10 of 2021. I’m so excited by this filmmaker, from the younger generation of Romanian filmmakers. Romania is an cinema Giant – and has been so for about 20 years. Radu Jude is so current it takes your breath away. Our Idiotic Age is laid bare in his films. Perhaps (hopefully?) outside of our own time, they might need copious footnotes. But for right now? When many demand didactic message-making “this is what we have learned” or “this is how we should behave” lessons from art … Jude comes along and – with the exaggeration of caricature – shows us how things ARE. And they could not possibly be any dumber. I mean, we all KNOW this, but Jude SHOWS it. Bad Luck Banging is a work of genius. (Please note the film opens with explicit porn.) I Do Not Care is on equal terms with Bad Luck Banging, although it digs more into the past – specifically Romania’s past – than Bad Luck Banging does. A young theatre director is in the process of creating a performance piece addressing Romania’s appalling WWII history, in particular the 1941 Odessa massacre. This makes it sound super serious, and it of course is, but it is also hilarious, fast-paced, with dialogue about history and denial and politics, the role of art in society, and big big questions like: is collective responsibility even a “thing”? America does not make big idea films. Or, it THINKS it does. But not like THIS. I think what is most striking is the humor. America makes plenty of serious films about serious subjects. Radu Jude knows what he is doing is serious, and his strategy is to LAMPOON, and through the lampooning make us think.

The Irishman (2019; d. Martin Scorsese)
My third time through. It’s so rich and detailed and layered I see new things each time. It’s a feast. I am so glad it exists.

Casino (1995; d. Martin Scorsese)
I don’t know this one as well as I know the 70s/80s Scorseses – I think Goodfellas was the first one I saw in the movie theatre. All the rest were battered video tape viewings, watched over and over and over. Therefore, the scenes and transitions and moments are engrained in my memory to a degree they just aren’t with Casino. What’s so interesting to me about Casino is that it shares a lot with Goodfellas – particularly the Goodfellas sequences where Henry lays out how the business worked, and the how the wise guys operated. Casino takes that and pushes it to the far far extreme. Character itself takes a back seat. It’s chillier than Goodfellas. I love it.

Goodfellas (1990; d. Martin Scorsese)
Seeing this in the movie theatre was a huge thrill. Seeing it for the first time was one of the most exhilarating moviegoing experiences in my memory. Hard to remember now but this film was NOT embraced initially and was in fact very controversial because of the violence. This has been true of Scorsese since the jump. Mean Streets was controversial. Taxi Driver was controversial. Raging Bull was controversial. Wolf of Wall Street was controversial. Now people are just making UP shit to be mad about. The “discourse” around The Irishman was Stupidity Writ Large. I was in love with Goodfellas from the jump.

Stone (2010; d. John Curran)
This is a major De Niro performance, and it came and went, without much recognition. Critics loved it. But … I don’t feel like enough attention was paid to what De Niro did, and how the film helped him do it. It’s a very VERY unnerving film, with a howling void at the center. Not much happens, and yet in that space of time an entire life – and self – is vaporized. Frances Conroy is incredible. Ed Norton is great. Mila Jovovich is very disturbing. She’s hard to even watch. But De Niro … My God. It made me think: Travis Bickle had a void inside of him, and critics/audiences loved it and still talk about it. Jack (in Stone) has a similar void inside of him – but now that the critics/audiences who “felt seen” by Travis are middle-aged or older – they don’t want to “see” themselves in this pathetic mess of a man, surrounded by nothingness, broken dreams, and a wasted life. Therefore, they don’t hail the performance as loudly as they should. Travis is a psychopath but he FLATTERS the lonely and misunderstood (this is part of the film’s disturbing power). Jack does NOT flatter the middle-aged emasculated men in the audience, and therefore they keep their mouths shut about this one – because it would reveal THEM. Nobody WANTS to be “seen” as Jack in Stone. This shit runs deep and I am speaking only speculatively … because watching this performance I’m amazed it wasn’t more talked about, particularly since everyone is always bitching and moaning about how De Niro sold himself out. Oh shut UP. This is a GREAT performance, and vulnerable in the extreme. Exposing is more like it. De Niro strips himself bare and exposes himself to the audience. It’s as bold a performance as Travis, except in a very different tune.

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973; d. John D. Hancock)
It’s interesting to watch De Niro play the dim-witted childlike character – and do so without condescension. It’s almost like a magic trick. How does one play a man-boy, without commenting ON the man-boy-ness? The script is overly sentimental, and much of it is rather silly. Michael Moriarty plays second banana, and Vincent Gardenia is wonderful as the harassed team manager. Watching De Niro play baseball makes me so happy. He’s very believable, all the little tics that ballplayers do when they’re at the plate, adjusting the gloves, moving the hands, tapping the bat – all that OCD stuff – he does it like it’s second nature, and his swing is believable. De Niro said something like – in the research phases, he watched baseball games constantly, and his main take-away was how “relaxed” the players were. Relaxed because there was nothing else going on besides the game. The whole point of this thing is that the player’s illness brings the team together, and also his illness makes them all realize they’ve been being assholes to him. Okay. Doesn’t really “come off”, but it’s still worth it to see De Niro just before everything came together. Because it’s all there. The meticulous process, the transformation – without making a huge tic-ridden deal about it – the relaxation, the in-the-moment-ness, etc. And the tobacco chew in his cheek is disgusting!

Taxi Driver (1976; d. Martin Scorsese)
A movie I know by heart. Shot for shot. But I still come to it new and fresh every time.

You Are Not My Mother (2022; d. Kate Dolan)
I really dug this new Irish film, branded “horror”, but it’s really more about generational familial trauma, passed down, manifested in this monster story. It’s moody and good. I reviewed for Ebert.

Midnight Run (1988; d Martin Brest)
Seeing this in the theatre was a very memorable experience. I’m one of those people who was obsessed with De Niro from a purely technical standpoint: he was someone I tried to learn from. Same with Al Pacino. And Brando. Like I said, when you get obsessed as a kid it’s different than getting obsessed as an adult. Things stick like a burr. So seeing him in a mainstream comedy – with another guy I loved – and to see how funny he was, how in-the-moment he was in those conversations – all those REACTIONS – unspoken, yet present – the almost presentational quality of it (and he does have that: he is not a “let me churn about privately in my own little corner” kind of actor. That’s Pacino. Different processes, same startling results. Here: he’s all extrovert, and presentation of character. What a thrill. It still is.

King of Comedy (1983; d. Martin Scorsese)
I wrote about the restoration for Capital New York (re-built on my site). A very strong case could be made for his performance here as his very best. To me, it’s top 5 De Niro. It’s unbelievable, what he does here. But everyone’s fantastic in this.

Bloody Mama (1970; d. Roger Corman)
Back to the source. A quick and dirty B-movie, elevated by the impassioned and disturbing presence of Shelley Winters. Her performance is crazy, destabilizing, gross in a lot of ways. De Niro stands out. He’s practically non-verbal. Straight out of Deliverance.

The Death Collector (1976; d. Ralph De Vito)
A B-movie about the mob in Jersey City. Joe Pesci AND Frank Vincent, long-time pals and collaborators. They’re not the leads, but they stand out. The film misses them when they are gone. It’s fun to see Joe Pesci before he “hit”. It’s all there already. He is the complete package, fully realized as a presence. His off-the-cuff vibe – so essential to who he is, making him always entertaining and unpredictable, is totally present here.

Born to Win (1971; d. Ivan Passer)
A bleak black comedy starring George Segal as a heroin addict wandering the grim streets of New York, looking for a fix. Along the way he meets a rich kooky girl (Karen Black) who takes him home with her and basically has her way with him. Hector Elizondro is in it. So is De Niro, in a small part. He’s a cop – what looks like a plainclothes cop, or maybe even undercover. I love George Segal.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971; d. James Goldstone)
This is often difficult to watch – the comedy is broad and a little vaudeville-stereotype – but it’s a cast of greats: Jerry Orbach, Jo Van Fleet (but WHAT is this performance?? The VOICE.), and De Niro, as the perfect man, an innocent man-boy from Italy, a professional bicycle racer, in New York for a race, and finding himself embroiled in some gang war, where he dresses up like a priest. He also falls in love. There’s a lot going on here. Jimmy Breslin wrote it. I suppose it’s supposed to be a satire.

Mean Streets (1973; d. Martin Scorsese)
I know this one by heart. And it never gets old. “I ain’t never goin’ on no retreats.” That line-reading … GENIUS.

The Bubble (2022; d. Judd Apatow)
Judd Apatow’s latest, a satire on the early pandemic and Hollywood “getting back to work”. It’s on Netflix. I reviewed for Ebert.

Nitram (2022; d. Justin Kurzel)
Coincidentally, I watched Snowtown Murders last month, also directed by Kurzel. Here, he takes on another notorious Australian criminal, a man who killed thirty people – an incident which made Australia overhaul its gun laws in a matter of weeks, people turning in their guns to the government en masse. Can you imagine? A country that actually has a sensible response to the outrageous situation of a guy buying an automatic weapon without registering it, or licensing it, no questions asked? Fantastic cast: Anthony LaPaglia (heartbreaking), Essie Davis (so disturbing), and Judy Davis in a great performance (no surprise there: but it’s important to continue to be surprised – and delighted – when someone as major as Judy Davis goes as deep and dark as she does here.) Ugh, when she moves away from contempt into denial: her devastated FURIOUS eyes tell the real story. So upsetting.

The Godfather Part II (1974; d. Francis Ford Coppola)
Every shot is a masterpiece. I mean … just LOOK at this UNEARTHLY Renaissance-Baroque-era beauty? The movie is so brutal – not in its violence, but in its focus on how a person chooses evil, who fully realizes the evil within him. The transformation of Pacino – as dramatic in this one as it is in the first. The final shot. Wow.