January 2023 Viewing Diary

Friday Night Lights
No time like the present. I binged this entire series in a couple weeks. This took commitment, and a couple days of sick leave, while trapped in my hotel room in Memphis, too sick to move. I inhaled it. I now understand the epic proportions of Tim Riggins. My God. No time like the present. That character. He emerges from a myth, a myth scorned and dismissed, even then, a myth the character doesn’t even believe in, because it’s too corny. He’s got a golden glow around him, but it’s more like the golden glow is inside him, regardless of the dirt under his fingernails and beneath his feet. It’s interesting: the show could survive without, say, Smash, or even Matt Saracen, who receded for a season or two before returning in the last eps. But the show could not survive without Tim Riggins. I’m still reeling from the impact of that character and Taylor Kitsch’s coolly confident and sneakily complex performance.

Dirty John (2018; d. Jeffrey Reiner)
Friday Night Lights was not, of course, the Tim Riggins show, although … well, okay, it kind of was. I mean, the last shot is Tim Riggins’. He embodied the whole VIBE. But everyone was great. I fell in love with all those people. Connie Britton is a phenom, so I decided to go back and watch Dirty John again, and it was super fun because the character she plays is so totally different from “Coach’s wife”. Her character work is fascinating, and up there with anything Meryl Streep pulls off. She is such an infuriating character! Britton makes her make sense (and Jean Smart REALLY makes the character make sense: she’s this woman’s mother. It all clicks when you see Jean Smart).

Me and My Gal (1932; d. Raoul Walsh)
Went on a little Joan Bennett tear (Criterion was streaming a bunch of her films). Such a tough cookie. Such a forgotten figure. She was totally natural. And just a moment to sing the praises of Raoul Walsh, an actor’s director who doesn’t get the credit for it. But look at the films he directed, and the performances in those films. He didn’t GUIDE actors to performances: when critics say stuff like that, they betray their total lack of understanding of 1. directing 2. acting and 3. collaboration. But what he DID do was clear the deck so the actors felt free. It’s a matter of creating an environment where an actor feels safe to take big big risks. Walsh clearly was all about that.

Big Brown Eyes (1936; d. Raoul Walsh)
Cary Grant and Joan Bennett! This is interesting because – almost without precedent – Grant plays just a regular boyfriend, he’s hooked up with Bennett through the whole thing. They’re partners. There’s no real romantic pursuit. She’s convinced he’s cheating. He’s protests his innocence. He is innocent. They make a great pair.

Primary (1960; d. Robert Drew)
Although I’ve seen footage from this landmark documentary – everybody has – I never sat down and watched the whole thing. I posted a screengrab here. Primary details the 1960 Wisconsin primary, what would be an historic primary, a battle between Hubert Humphrey and the new glam-boy from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, through the farmlands of Wisconsin. Extraordinary footage, shot by a murderer’s row of eventually legendary filmmakers: Richard Leacock, DA Pennebaker, Terence McCartney-Filgate, Albert Maysles.

Moonlighting (1982; d. Jerzy Skolimowski)
I hadn’t seen this and I am MADLY IN LOVE WITH IT. Posted a screengrab here. Skolimowski’s EO won our Best International Film award (by “our” I mean the NYFCC) and I’ve been filling myself in on the rest of his career, and there’s so much to discover. Moonlighting is a gem. Look at the date. Think of Poland and think of that date. The “end” hadn’t come yet. Moonlighting is an often-funny but sneakily infuriated film about the crushing of the Solidarity movement, but told from the side. Four Polish men (led by Jeremy Irons) are sent by their “boss” to England to renovate a townhouse (the labor is cheaper). They are given limited amounts of cash, and only have a month to get the job done. They must work round the clock. They are outsiders. News arrives, international headlines, every television station, reporting on the violent crackdown back home. You can’t get through on the phone. Flights suspended. Nobody has any idea that the end – the real end – is only 6 years away. Skolimowski had been working in England, and he wrote this script quickly. It was his response to the crackdown. The film was shot in less than two months. It feels like it (this is a compliment). The men run into issues every step of the way, issues with the renovation, with getting supplies, with spending money. There are issues with dumpsters and with each other. This is a very political film. I adored it.

Little Foxes (1941; d. William Wyler)
Dorothy Parker worked on the screenplay! A masterpiece. Bette Davis gives one of the all-time great movie performances. It’s perfection.

When You Finish Saving the World (2023; d. Jesse Eisenberg)
I didn’t like it. I reviewed for Ebert.

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker (2023; d. Colette Camden)
I missed this whole thing because it happened in 2013 and I was super busy having a nervous breakdown. It’s amazing people actually bought the bullshit and thought he was cool and heroic (for a month or so, at any rate). He is so clearly UNHINGED. Okay, sure, he saved someone, but he also smashed someone in the head with a hatchet. He has a hatchet on him at all times. Didn’t this seem odd to people?

The Woman On the Beach (1947; d. Jean Renoir)
One of the films Jean Renoir made during his American sojourn. The fog is thick, the mood fraughts and mysterious. Joan Bennett, wearing rolled-up jeans, appears from out of the fog, gathering driftwood for fires, hanging around an old rusted hulk of a ship. She has a husband but … she doesn’t quite seem like a wife, if you know what I’m saying. Ryan is tormented by PTSD-fever-dreams of a catastrophic storm at sea. You’re never really sure who to believe in this one, and that’s always fun.

The Girl Can’t Help It (1956; d. Frank Tashlin)
An absolute classic. So psyched Criterion released it: there’s a terrific interview with John Waters included in the special features. He’s a SCHOLAR on The Girl Can’t Help It, both the time period, the effects, Jayne Mansfield, and the impact it had on him as a kid. It’s so heavily imitated. Those jitterbugging couples sashaying across the empty colorful soundstage are lifted wholesale by David Lynch for the opening of Mulholland Drive. And then of course, The Girl Can’t Help It features performances from the singer-songwriters blowing up the world at that moment: Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent. These people are SCARY. And the humor in the film is placing these wild figures in a 1950s supperclub environment. The whole thing is so much fun.

Dishonored Lady (1947; d. Robert Stevenson)
Hedy Lamarr plays a promiscuous woman, with a high-powered job, who basically goes off the rails and retreats into anonymity in order to … live a better life, a saner life, where she can use her brain and not just her body, or something like that. She is helped by a psychiatrist – Morris Carnovsky, in a thankless role. The film is a little bit confused.

Senso (1968; d. Luchino Visconti)
Glorious madness. You’ve got history and war and trauma and forbidden love and Farley Granger as a wonderful CAD. The beauty is overwhelming.

Look at this shot.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2020; d. Lili Horvát)
More on this one later. Much more.

Damaged Lives (1933; d. Edgar G. Ulmer)
I can’t retrace my steps but I tripped over this one on Amazon Prime. I have since learned more about the film but I went into it cold. It’s not even an hour long. It tells the story of a young married couple. They’re newlyweds. The wife discovers she’s pregnant and during her examination she learns that she has a venereal disease. It’s clearly been passed on to her, unknowingly, by her husband. It’s a frank presentation of the issues of STDs, with a clear “for the public good” intention behind it, to spread awareness of the dangers – particularly of syphilis, a killer – and to provide hope for those who are infected. It’s quite forward-thinking. Even the woman who gives it to the husband during a one-night stand is not demonized as a bad girl. She’s a party girl, yes, but she’s also been treated poorly. She didn’t know she had it when she passed it on. I watched this because Ulmer directed, and he’s a very good director: there are a couple of sequences that really stand out. One, when the doctor takes the husband through the hospital, showing him different patients, basically to scare him into taking this very seriously. Two, when the wife is led out of the hospital, horrified at what has been done to her: there are hallucinatory effects added to draw us into her POV. And three, the scene where the wife decides to turn on the gas while her husband lies sleeping on the couch. She can’t live with the shame he has brought upon her. Best to end it all for both of them. Extremely effective. I posted about this on Twitter and learned a lot more about it. It’s about a serious subject and it was treated as an exploitation film, but it’s really not. It’s educational and also compassionate.

White Lotus, season 2
Just devoured this with Allison. It’s amazing.

Baby Ruby (2023; d. Bess Wohl)
I reviewed this for Ebert. Review out tomorrow.

Party Girl (1995; d. Daisy von Scherler Mayer)
This movie was so huge for us Gen-Xers at the time, particularly those of us who were actors. Parker Posey was this new It Girl, and she represented something – a vibe, a mood, a fashion statement, a whole THING – which had great resonance at the time. It was so exciting. I was even more excited because the Party Girl finds liberation and self-respect and a sense of purpose in her job as a clerk at the public library. I mean … COME ON. This was a movie so sure of itself, so confident, and it captures such a moment in time: the downtown scene in New York, the party scene, the squatting in warehouses, when you used to be able to do that, the velvet rope at clubs, the food trucks, the graffiti, the sense that maybe it’s about time you start getting serious about your life? But maybe not yet? Really happy to see this movie getting so much play and re-released and also playing on the Criterion channel. It’s a time capsule, but it’s also universal.

I mean, how can I not love a movie that has an emotional catharsis engineered by familiarity with the Dewey Decimal System? I’m a librarian’s daughter. I learned the Dewey Decimal System along with my alphabet. My first job was as a clerk in a library.

The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park (2019; d. Ricki Stern, Anne Sundberg)
Talk about a time capsule. What an ugly fucking time.

Elvis (2022; d. Baz Luhrmann)
Back in theatres for the week! You know I had to go see it.

To Leslie (2022; d. Michael Morris)
The whole controversy about Riseborough’s nomination is pretty toxic, although Oscars have a way of going toxic. At any rate, the controversy forced me to catch up with this, which I had missed when it came out. It really is a great performance. But … the film is super corny. There’s this ugly embarrassing performance at the center – some scenes are excruciating to watch – and then there’s this corniness imposed on it. I found the whole setup difficult to “buy”. It’s like her performance is at war with the actual movie she’s in.

 
 
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