I may write some magnum opus in the next two days, you never know, but here are links to some of the things I’ve written in 2014, here and elsewhere. I have worked hard to keep my site an eclectic and thoughtful place where I feel free to talk about what I want to talk about, be it Stalin, baseball, Supernatural, all things movies, Elvis, the U.S. Founding Fathers, Dean Stockwell, or personal stories from my own life. I have also worked hard to make this a welcoming place for people to hang out. Thank you all who show up here, who segue from topic to topic, who comment from time to time, who read what I write and add your own thoughts. I appreciate you all.
Shooting My Mouth Off in 2014
Thoughts on TV Pilots, including the Supernatural Pilot: What Works, Story Arcs, Starting Out Confidently, Working Blind
“Sometimes the characters have switched off in sensibility, as happens in life (especially with siblings), Luke becoming more Han-ish, and vice versa (which you can also see in the original Star Wars trilogy, especially in the storyline where Luke discovers who his real father is), but the concept is elastic enough to be able to include a hell of a lot of complexity. These are Classic Story Tropes, and they have withstood the test of time. The Supernatural team was also smart enough, in the pilot, to already introduce complexity into both of these guys, complexity that would just deepen and broaden as the series went on.”
On The Wolf of Wall Street
“The Wolf of Wall Street is, primarily, a comedy. It is not a morality tale, it is not a tragedy, it is not a redemption narrative, it is not a serious expose of corruption. The film is a broad almost slapstick comedy about a bunch of terrible people. Every single person you meet (with very few exceptions) is a total assclown.”
On Natan; directed by Paul Duane and David Cairns
“Natan is an important film, and hopefully will open up what has been a closed conversation for over 70 years. There is nothing more sacred than a man’s name. Bernard Natan’s name was taken from him. This situation must not stand.”
On what happened in 2013.
“I had my prescription and I was also trying to find a therapist, which is not easy when you are basically Googling ‘I’m cray-cray, please send help’ from the bottom of the ocean.”
On Lester Bangs’ essay on how he is attempting to not be afraid of Nico.
“Lester Bangs loved the women he loved. He references them all the time in his writing and if you read all of his stuff, you get to know their personalities. He writes about all of them with fondness. He clearly was one of THOSE. Not all men are like that.”
Rogerebert.com contributors remember Philip Seymour Hoffman.
On my script and getting inspired again.
“Having a swanky agent is awesome, but things cannot just stop because of that. This is a common error with representation. The hustle is so exhausting that you sign with an agent and then just sit back waiting for something to happen. I haven’t done that, not exactly, but in the last couple of months, as I have actually experienced what it feels like to be well, the script I wrote started looming in my mind again. I’ve re-read it a couple of times, and found myself thinking, ‘Damn. This is pretty good. Okay, let’s get this thing going again.'”
Review of Child’s Pose, directed by Calin Peter Netzer
“We understand very early on that Cornelia is an unreliable narrator of her own life. In her version of events, she is a scorned martyr, she has done nothing wrong, all she has done is love him, perhaps too much, but is that a crime? In one provocative scene, Cornelia rubs healing ointment into Barbu’s back before he goes to sleep. The expression of relish and satisfaction on her face as she kneels astride her son is more eloquent than any dialogue could ever attempt.”
On Mark Twain’s chillingly prophetic essay “Stirring Times in Austria”
“This is an extraordinary account of an amazing moment in history. Reading the transcript is yet another reminder of how adorable it is that people persist in believing that we live in the rudest age on earth and people were somehow more polite in the ‘olden days’. Adorable! Do those people believe in unicorns too?”
Review of Omar, directed by Hany Abu-Assad
“Love is not easy in the best of times, but in the worst of times it is flat-out dangerous. Being a warrior requires hardness and emotional armor. Omar is not hard. He is open and vulnerable, and those qualities are his very best. He is kind, funny, easygoing, and able to give himself over to love fully. It’s not an overstatement to suggest that these are the qualities that make him a credit to the human race and its positive potential. Without those qualities, we are all doomed. But such openness cannot be allowed to flourish in a treacherous war-torn atmosphere where betrayal is required. Betrayal is the theme of the film.”
On a transcendent moment listening to the Everly Brothers’ “Love Is Strange”
“And as I disembarked from the train, the Everly Brothers’ “Love Is Strange” came on, and for a brief moment, I don’t know how long it lasted, maybe 100 feet, or 200? as I walked through that busy underground passage, the music not only surrounded me but felt like it lifted me up into the air. A warm sense of ultimate well-being flooded through my body, something I almost never experience, and it was such a happy sensation, so all-encompassing, that it is still with me today, at least the memory of it. It was sharp, and sweet.”
Review of The Wind Rises, directed by Hayao Miyazaki
“In The Wind Rises, the fictionalized story of Jiro Horikoshi, Japan’s World War II airplane designer (he was responsible for designing the lethal ‘Zero’ fighter plane), one character says, staring up at the racing clouds in the sky, ‘Airplanes are beautiful dreams.’ Miyazaki’s films are beautiful dreams, too. His presence is already missed.”
Claude Rains Orders Dinner in Deception
“I watch him order dinner in Deception and I want to parse out how he is doing what he is doing as an actor, how he is working, how he has mastered all that ridiculous TEXT, and matched it so perfectly to behavior (the cigarette behavior, the gestures, the asides), and yet my mind goes blank, as minds often do when faced with perfection. The work is invisible. All we have is the end result. Acting students should study this scene. Acting students should realize how high the bar has been set.”
Elvis Presley and Orpheus Descending: The Smoking Gun, At Last
“I admitted that I had searched all of [Tennessee] Williams’ notebooks, journals, and essays, for any mention of Elvis, especially in connection with Orpheus Descending. I came up with nothing. I said in the comments section there that I was looking for the ‘smoking gun’. I was sure it existed, I just hadn’t found it yet…And whaddya know, yesterday I found the smoking gun.”
Review of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, Vol. 1
“Similar to Melancholia, von Trier’s masterful examination of depression, and how it feels like an outside force working on those who suffer from it, Nymphomaniac (which will be released in multiple volumes) sees sex through the eyes of a damaged woman who has made it her mission in life to remove sex from our ‘love-fixated society’. She says, flatly, ‘Love is blind. No, it’s worse. It distorts something. It’s something I never asked for.'”
On Mark Twain’s essay “A Memorable Assassination”
“The other thing that’s interesting is that Mark Twain senses the world shifting into modernism. This is the first assassination in the history of the planet that was known by the entire planet within hours of the occurrence, because of telegraph wires. News now could spread fast, instantaneously. People in Papua New Guinea knew the news at almost the same time as those in Vienna. Mark Twain is in awe at that, in awe of how the world has changed, that the spread of information can move so quickly. He doesn’t quite say, ‘What will this mean for us?’ But he does recognize that it is a watershed moment for the human race. Nothing will ever be the same again.”
On Christopher Hitchens’ essay ‘The Old Man’, on Leon Trotsky
“It is no secret that those who have a horse in this race, Lefties who feel defensive (in other words), have often upheld and defended the indefensible. Those who refused to believe the stories coming out of Russia of what Stalin was up to. Those who still persist in believing that Stalin was just a ‘bad apple’, as opposed to the natural end result of a system that was set up (from the very beginning) to put all power in the hands of one man. Orwell clocked that truth in 1984, that it was never about equality, that that was the Big Lie. It was always about consolidating power in the hands of the few. So the Left has not comported itself well, when it comes to this topic, and Hitchens saw much of that first-hand and would call it out when he saw it.”
My entry in the “My Favorite Roger” series: I wrote about Roger Ebert’s review of Kwik Stop (2001), a movie directed by an old old boyfriend of mine. Oh, and you should see Kwik Stop. If my post over on Rogerebert.com doesn’t convince you, here’s my review.
“Eventually, Kwik Stop did get a short run at Facets in Chicago, and Ebert did a QA afterwards onstage with Michael. To say that this was exciting is to understate the event so much as to make it meaningless. It is in such moments that an artist’s life work is validated. It is in such moments that an artist can find the strength to go on, even if your beautiful little film does not receive the distribution it deserves. Ebert had a huge impact on Michael’s life, and his sense of himself. In darker moments, he will always have the memory that his film, representative of so many dreams and representative of what he was about, was recognized and cherished by Roger Ebert. Ebert did that so for many small films.”
Review of Hateship Loveship
“Kristen Wiig is a chameleon, and many of her comedic characters tap into a strain of tragedy that borders on the Greek. There is a great amount of empathy in her work. She enters into the experience of being another human being, and does so invisibly, without fanfare or wanting to be congratulated for her ‘bravery’. In the short story on which the film is based, Alice Munro writes of Johanna: ‘It was the rare person who took to her, and she’d been aware of that for a long time.’ Wiig has absorbed that character description until Johanna seems as though a role she was born to play.”
Re-cap of Supernatural episode “Shadow,” with thoughts on The Importance of Beauty, a concept I refer to again and again in future re-caps
“And so I would suggest that while Norma Desmond was right, ‘we had faces’ back then, we have faces now, too. The difference is that nobody knows how to light faces in the way that they used to. It’s just not the style anymore in film, so the skill set needed to light weird intense beauty like that freckled face up there has disappeared. It’s almost a lost art. But it still exists on Supernatural.”
Review of He Who Gets Slapped (1924) at Ebertfest
“The film still lives, and plays like a bat out of hell to a live audience. There were moments of profound shared silence, as the audience took in the great tragic spectacle of Lon Chaney’s performance, as well as sudden bursts of laughter at comedic bits, and, beautifully, cheers and claps when one of the bad guys got what he deserved.”
Something Wild (1961); directed by Jack Garfein
“Mary Ann is not an articulate character and that is one of the main fascinations of Something Wild, and [Carroll] Baker’s performance. It is deeply physical, and also deeply interior. Her body cringes from touch, and tries to re-assert its boundaries in a way that comes off as aloof or standoffish (which is what the five-and-dime girls hate about her). She is so pale that she shines through the shadows of the grimy spaces she finds herself in, post-rape, and she stares around her with horror and terror. What world is she living in? How on earth did she get here? How on earth could she ever go back?”
On Zac Efron in Neighbors
“He’s crazy pleasing to look at, and he knows it, and uses it in a way that is aware and interesting. But also a tiny bit sad. Efron is aware of all of that. He is completely in charge of his affect. This is mega-watt superstar-type acting.”
On my long relationships with the work of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
“Back around that same time in Chicago, I dated Michael for a bit. It was a short relationship, but powerful. We clicked. We were in sync on many important things: the kinds of lives we wanted to live, the things that mattered to us, what made us laugh, our values…In the beginning stages, we talked about movies all the time. I don’t remember Cassavetes coming up. One afternoon he came over to my apartment for the first time, and we walked into my room. He saw the image of John and Gena hanging on the wall and stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t say anything at the time. But he stopped as though he had been stabbed. He said to me later, “I should have proposed to you immediately when I saw that poster.”
On Under the Skin
“I can’t believe it’s playing in huge multiplexes.”
On A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
“The film is a goofball classic.”
On Christopher Hitchens’ essay about Karl Marx’s journalism
“One of the things that is almost completely forgotten about Karl Marx (especially by those who hate Socialism in their 21st century ‘understanding’ of it, hate it so much that they are blinded to or flat out unaware of the nuances of its founders’ downright humanist views) is how pro-America he was, at a time when almost nobody shared that view. America held up the torch for liberty, freedom, possibility to Marx, and he paid very close attention to what was going on there. He had never been to America. But he looked on from London at the War Between the States, and wrote a series of pieces that still resonate today with the prescience of a guy who had no dog in that fight but could see clearly what was right.”
Review of Obvious Child, starring the remarkable Jenny Slate
“[Jenny] Slate manages to give us a character who has walls and a certain persona, and yet that persona constantly cracks. It’s part of her act; it’s part of what she ‘uses’ for comedy. Her emotions come up against her will. When she is able to harness them, she is funny and even charming. When they get the better of her, she goes down with the ship. You can understand why Donna has loyal friends who put up with all of that. And it’s also completely plausible that Max enjoys her so much. He’s a subtext kind of guy. He listens to what isn’t being said. He is not completely overrun by the onslaught of her wisecracks, and sometimes gives as good as he gets. He is taken aback by her dirty jokes, but isn’t judgmental. ‘On the page,’ Max may seem like a cliche. But as portrayed by [Jake] Lacy, he feels like a real guy, someone you’ve met, someone you know.”
Review of A Coffee In Berlin
“A Coffee in Berlin veers confidently from melancholy to absurdity and back, and then back again. It’s amazing that it hangs together as well as it does. The film is both silly and profound, a rare combination.”
Re-cap of Supernatural episode “Devil’s Trap”, with digression entitled “Acting Choices, Character Conception, Marlon Brando, Avoiding Cliffs, The Iconic Tough Guy Tradition”
“Jensen Ackles’ work here operates on another level, one even less easily perceived, especially if you operate under the mistaken assumption that cinema began when Star Wars opened or that you ‘don’t watch black-and-white movies’, and if that’s the case, I have nothing to say to you. What Ackles is doing in the role of Dean Winchester is connecting him to the great Tough Guys of the past, the Indelibles, the John Waynes and Bogarts and Gary Coopers. And, a little bit later, the Clint Eastwoods and Burt Reynolds. This type of archetypal characterization that he is doing works on an audience member in an invisible way and you shouldn’t sense it at all in the moment (and you don’t.) It’s not an homage, not really. It’s more about placing the character properly in the right genre/mood/outlook. Those 1930s/1940s Tough Guys were strong, masculine, gruff, sarcastic, and were men of few words.”
R.I.P. Eli Wallach
“His career spanned 60 years. An inspiration to many young actors (including myself as a kid), he worked nearly until the very end.”
The Miracle of Merging: Boys on the Beach
“When I set myself up between these groups, they were completely separate, and had nothing to do with one another because they didn’t know one another. When I left the beach, two hours later, the two groups had completely merged, were drinking beer and talking about the World Cup. If I had arrived at the beach at that moment, I would have assumed they had come to the beach together, had known one another all their lives. So here is how it went down.”
On Christopher Hitchens’ essay on Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived
“Worrying about the fact that adults sometimes read and enjoy books/music meant for tweens seems to be a complete and utter waste of the beautiful brain and its analytical capabilities that God has given you.”
On This Day: July 2, 1956 – Elvis Presley Recorded “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog”
“There was then (and there still is now) an attitude that Elvis was just an untrained genius, a kind of diamond-in-the-rough, a glorified idiot-savant, whose brilliance was captured at a perfect moment in time. It is a huge disservice to Elvis’ gifts as an artist to assume that all of it was some brilliant happy accident, right place at right time. An artist may have one or two hits with a ‘right place at right time’ start. But to STAY on top? For 20 straight years? That’s a smart and conscious artist… If nothing else, the sessions at RCA on July 2, 1956, prove that without a doubt.”
60 Years Ago Today: July 5, 1954 – Elvis Presley Recorded “That’s All Right”
“When Presley told Marion Keisker in 1953, ‘I don’t sing like nobody’ – how did he know that? Because he doesn’t come roaring out of the gate with those first two tracks. So, alone in his room, was he messing around in the way he started messing around one night during his first real recording session at Sun on July 5, 1954, the moment when Sam Phillips said, ‘YES. That’s IT!’ Did he feel in his bones that vast VOID that was in white American culture at that time, a void that just needed someone to come along and fill it up? Or … was he working on instinct? …Sam Phillips is very interesting on his own yearning at that time, saying that he didn’t even know what sound he was looking for, he didn’t know how to describe it because it didn’t exist yet – but the search for it was what drove him on so tirelessly. However, in 1953, Sam Phillips didn’t hear it in Presley. A year later, he did.”
Re-cap of Supernatural episode “In My Time of Dying,” with a digression on “The Man in the Mirror” – an ongoing obsession
“When women stare at themselves in the mirror (in cinema anyway), we know what they are doing, we know what they are seeing. They look in the mirror to perfect their mask: reapply lipstick, check the makeup, the hair. It is practical, what they are doing. But when men stare at themselves in the mirror, they are trying to look beneath the mask, or, in the famous case of Travis Bickle, trying to pump UP the mask, psych themselves up into a public persona that will protect them. It is destabilizing when men stare at themselves in the mirror.”
Interview with director Paul Duane and London-Irish writer John Healy
“JOHN HEALY: It’s terrible to get anger and emotion, Sheila, but you know what I’m angry about? I’m angry that they’ve made me angry. I was dealing with psychopaths. I was treated like Ned Kelly in Australia, like an outlaw.”
Review of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood
“In that laughter I didn’t just hear how funny the exchange was. I heard a collective RELEASE. A sense of almost awed recognition that yes, yes, YES, life is like this!!, talking with an 8-year-old is like this, and how we NEED to see such things on-screen, how we YEARN for our lives to be reflected up there with more subtlety and sensitivity! It was truly cathartic.”
Review of Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer
“Dystopian universe? Familiar landscape made strange and scary by ice as far as the eye can see? The dirty rabble bonding together in order to storm the front of the train? A comment on totalitarianism? Fascism? Moral and ethical questions? And, oh yeah, one of the hottest guys who has ever walked planet earth, frozen or not? Count me in.”
Re-cap of Supernatural episode “Everybody Loves a Clown.”
“In the olden days, people would wear black arm-bands, or even full mourning, for a year. It was understood that it took that long to even get your bearings again and that grief needed to be accounted for in our dealings with people suffering from it. Grief does normalize after a while, you do start to be able to process things. But it takes that long. Our culture’s bounce-right-back expectation after someone you love dies is inhuman.”
Review of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s This Is the End
“I kept waiting for it to derail. Not consciously, but it was there: will this continue to work? Will this mood hold? It does. It holds beautifully.”
Review of Ida (2014); directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
“The Cold War has descended, leaving a chill in the landscape. People lose themselves in music and dance, the little echoing hotel bars filled with revelers, as the outside world looms beyond the windows.”
60 Years Ago Today: July 30, 1954: Elvis Steps Onstage at the Overton Park Shell
“Elvis’ real debut as a live performer, in a major venue, occurred 60 years ago today: July 30, 1954. Nobody knew what he would be like in front of a huge audience. He was the definition of raw. He was a teenager. He could barely play the guitar. But he had something. Everyone sensed it.”
Review of The Strange Little Cat (2014)
“Objects start to rebel against the functions they were meant for.”
Review of Behaving Badly (2014)
“I found myself grasping at straws, a desperate woman, as I watched: The principal (Patrick Warburton) was doing some funny character work. And Selena Gomez is adorable and manages to float away unscathed. But other than that, it’s an unfunny comedy, populated by irredeemable sociopaths.”
Review of Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain (2014)
“Leila Hatami, award-winning celebrated actress, made a public apology for that kiss, saying she had tried to shake the guy’s hand, but he kissed her anyway. I mean, this is the ridiculous bullshit that these fantastic Iranian artists have to put up with. Hatami’s kiss is a petty example of the amount of control the regime has over its citizens. Panahi shows the end result of that kind of medieval fundamentalist dictatorial mindset.”
Review of Computer Chess (2013)
“They are socially awkward, but there’s nothing particularly bad about that. Social ease is highly over-rated, if you ask me, and can cover up a multitude of sins. So someone’s awkward. So? People are not homogenous, dammit, and there’s something extremely refreshing to watch a film representing a closed world, where there is no self-consciousness about being who you are.”
Review of Joe (2013), starring Nicolas Cage
“As I was watching, with a dawning sense of how good it was, I was trying to codify what I was seeing, I was trying to analyze it, and classify it. But I couldn’t. There are precedents. But the precedents fall apart at a certain point. Joe is its own thing.”
Review of Blue Ruin (2014)
“It’s a revenge film that takes a very ambiguous stance towards revenge.”
R.I.P. Robin Williams
“It was almost a physical sensation being in his presence, that he was hearing things on a different frequency, he was in touch with his instincts, and he could feel the joke coming 20 minutes out.”
R.I.P. Lauren Bacall
“Her debut in To Have and Have Not is one of the best film debuts in history.”
Seeing Eminem in concert
“I had multiple moments where I looked around me at that crowd, the crowd above me, the crowd below, and all I thought was, ‘Fame, man. Fame.’ It’s overwhelming.”
Review of Love is Strange
“John Lithgow and Alfred Molina seem so comfortable in their roles that you have no doubt these men have been together for half of their lives. They capture the ease of such a relationship, but also the irritability, the telepathic quick looks, and then the sudden swoons of intimacy (especially when the going gets rough).”
Mitchell and I discuss Joan Rivers, a couple of days before she died.
“MITCHELL: She’s one of those people who says things out loud what we’re all thinking, in our worst moments, and she says it with cleverness and speed. And the monster gets smaller. You know when you’re a little kid and you think there’s a monster in your closet, and you have to take the monster out of the closet and realize there is no monster? Joan Rivers makes the monster smaller. Whether it’s Kim Kardashian or menopause, she makes the monster smaller.”
My obituary for Joan Rivers
“Her extensive plastic surgery, unfortunately, dominated much of the commentary about Joan Rivers. It’s often the first thing people say when her name comes up. At the 2009 Comedy Central roast of Joan Rivers, her plastic surgery was almost the sole topic of the entire evening, as though there was nothing else to say about Joan Rivers. Of course she had too much surgery, and perhaps it revealed that she was insecure about her looks, but wouldn’t we already know that from her blistering lightning-speed wisecracks about herself? Taking her career as a whole, the fact that she had a lot of plastic surgery is the least interesting thing about her.”
Review of the God-awful Elvis-inspired The Identical
“The music in The Identical is what it would be like if Elvis skipped the rhythm ‘n blues part of his influence and went straight to pop-lite power ballads. There is no sense in the film’s music of Elvis’ country and western roots or his love of gospel and there are none of the various intersecting influences that made Elvis’ early recordings so genre-bending and revolutionary. All we have in The Identical are songs that make you feel like you’ve stepped into a community theatre production of Footloose mixed with Les Miserables. And we are meant to believe that the entire culture changed because of the music heard in The Identical.”
Review of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive“
“In its strange undead way, Only Lovers Left Alive is one of the best and most positive films about marriage I’ve seen in a long long time.”
Elvis Presley’s 1st Ed Sullivan Appearance: September 9, 1956
“Dorothy Sarnoff already looks like she’s from another world, especially when Elvis appears later in the program. In one fell swoop he makes her irrelevant. The youth of the world was suddenly like: ‘Oh yeah? Well we want something ELSE from our lives.'”
Re-cap of Supernatural episode “No Exit”, with a digression into the Howard Hawks Woman
“Howard Hawks’ women were not males-in-dresses. They were not tomboys. They were the luscious curvy epitome of femininity, except for the kooky hats and and fact that they all talked at the speed of light. His women were not hard women. Hawks didn’t really do the femme fatale thing. He was interested in the type of woman who could handle Boys Unleashed without getting grossed out or offended, who could assert herself without being a wet blanket. And Hawks presented this in a way that was fun, screwball, sexy, smart, and has never been matched in cinema. Ultimately, women are necessary, and NOT, in Howard Hawks’ world, to ‘keep the home fires burning.’ No, no, no, Hawks wasn’t interested in domesticity at ALL. There are very few married couples in his films. There is no suburbia. Marriage is not the end-game for any of these people. Women don’t wear aprons and putter about kitchens in his films. That would be spiritual death to Hawks. Why would you want to look at your wife/partner as some kind of Mommy? What could be less sexy than that? No, his women stroll into the world of men, shoot back wisecracks, poke through male self-seriousness with teasing jokes and remind the men ‘Oh no, brother, you can’t pull that shit with ME.'”
After all these years … his handwriting.
“I came home the other night and opened my mailbox. There was a big envelope there, with my name written on it. No return address. But I recognized the handwriting immediately.”
Review of Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014)
“The entire village in the unnamed African country turns out to greet Hector joyously, whooping it up supportively as he drinks wine and dances with them. These people have nothing better to do with their lives than try to teach some dumb white guy that it’s fun to have a dinner party and hang out with your friends.”
Close Readings: A QA with Greil Marcus About The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll In Ten Songs
“GREIL MARCUS: There is a point at the end of the song where Lauper holds a note for 11 seconds. It doesn’t sound like 11 seconds is a long time, but it is a long time to hold a note. It just soars over the music. It’s like a black rainbow over the song, over the terrain that the song has laid out before your very eyes. It’s absolutely stunning.”
Review of The Blue Room (2014)
“The Blue Room is 76 minutes long. It does everything it needs to do in that short amount of time.”
Review of Force Majeure (2014)
“Filmed in a formal and omniscient way, with repetitive stunning shots of the slopes, the ski-lifts barreling over the blinding white, the resort seen as a vulnerable block of concrete surrounded by an austere landscape, Force Majeure ends up being a brutal look at concepts of masculinity, heroism, courage, and what all that might mean in a modern world.”
Review of The Last Hijack
“Mohamed is an opaque interview subject. He likes the money and perks of piracy, and that’s about all he’s willing to say. The first animated sequence shows him turning into a mammoth bird of prey, swooping down on a cargo ship from above, grabbing it with its talons, and carrying it off. The animation presents Mohamed’s self-perception, as well as turning him into a vision from out of a nightmare.”
Review of The Skeleton Twins (2014)
“Listen, it’s not a surprise at all that Kristen Wiig is a dramatic actress of the highest order. I rank her up there with Madeline Kahn, in that her ability to channel different characters reach an almost uncanny height, and also allows her to tap as easily into tragedy as she does into comedy. Many of her well-known characters on SNL were masterpieces of loneliness and pain, as funny as they were. Kristen Wiig can do anything. Like Madeline Kahn could do anything. Like Catherine O’Hara can do anything. And perhaps something about coming up via comedy makes one less concerned over being ugly/awful onscreen. Perhaps part of comedy is being able to bring out the grotesque side of yourself. Some young female stars, who get the hefty A-list parts, are still so concerned with being liked that it messes up their work. Everything they do comes across as a plea for understanding. Wiig doesn’t do that. She couldn’t care less.”
Review of Clouds of Sils Maria (2014); directed by Olivier Assayas
“This is a film about acting, one of the best I’ve seen on the topic.”
Review of Nightcrawler
“It’s a great Los Angeles story. It’s a world of insomniacs and weirdos, outlaws, rivals, people hanging to the mainstream by a fraying thread.”
Review of Watchers of the Sky (2014)
“The Nazis did not invent the concept of the calculated extermination of an entire people, although modern technology helped them be more efficient in their methods. It was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew obsessed since childhood with man’s inhumanity to man, who gave that crime a very specific name, ‘genocide’. Watchers of the Sky, an intricate and immensely powerful documentary, directed by Edet Belzberg, is both the story of Raphael Lemkin as well as a harrowing examination of genocide, past, recent, and ongoing.”
R.I.P. Alfred Wertheimer
“Wertheimer will be sorely missed, especially to Elvis fans, who will be grateful forever for his sensitivity towards this new young sensation with the greasy ducktail and the white bucks. Many mocked Elvis around this time. He was treated as a menace to society. He was pilloried for his seductive movements, called ‘vulgar.’ Wertheimer saw that part of Elvis, saw the chaotic and exhilarating performance he gave in Memphis, and saw everything else: his gentleness with fans who approached him, his self-assuredness when being looked at (as though he knew it was his due, as though he quietly knew that being looked at like this and photographed like this was normal for him), his raucous laughter, his strange remote isolation from all of the mayhem around him.”
Elvis Presley’s 2nd Ed Sullivan Appearance: October 28, 1956
“So let’s put that in context: The press Elvis was getting at that time was that he was a dumbbell hick, a roughhouse Southerner, a sex-pot, a terrible influence, uneducated, awful, Satanic, and corrupt. White trash. Trash, in general. Here, Sullivan adds a couple of images as antidotes to that bad press.”
Review of Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman
“The early introduction of the three madwomen is presented hauntingly by Jones. The images flash onto the screen, interrupting the main action of Mary Bee at her farm, and Jones crafts a collage of terror and dread.”
Witness to a Legend: The Career of Gena Rowlands
“In an audience made up of mostly actors, many of the questions were acting-based. When speaking about any advice she would give to young actors, Rowlands said, “For an actor and an actress, the best advice is: Relax. Just relax. And just do it. Like John said to me: ‘Just do it.’ You can see everything on film so well. You can tell when a person is pressing too hard or trying to do something – when all you have to do is know your character, be comfortable with it, and then relax.”
Review of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
“The walls of The Girl’s dingy apartment are covered with posters from concerts she has clearly seen in the course of her eternal life: The Bee Gees, Madonna. She listens to records on a turntable. There is a whirling disco ball spinning above, throwing its lights across the grime. In a wordless moment he moves towards her as she stands at the record player, her back to him, the music creating a wall of sound, a wall of feeling. There is a rhapsodic catharsis in a moment like that, the stasis of all that came before suddenly releasing itself in a whoosh of emotion.”
My interview with Oscar-winner Shawn Christensen
“SHAWN CHRISTENSEN: The best thing is when actors are really trying not to cry but they can no longer hold it back and the dam breaks, and Emmy [Rossum] had this one take like that and I just had to put it in the film. She couldn’t hold it back any longer, she has to admit that they were close and they have history and that she also never really knew how much she meant to him because Richie is not the best at expressing himself. That take from her was beautiful.”
On Sudden Fear (1952)
“To give some perspective, Myra listens to that dictaphone tape for almost three minutes. It is three minutes where Myra goes from happy peaceful woman to a shattered broken wreck. By the end, Myra is so overwrought that she runs to the bathroom to throw up. Students of acting should study Crawford’s work in this scene. John Wayne always used to say that he did not consider his job to be that of ‘actor,’ he was more of a ‘RE-actor’. Joan Crawford’s work in the dictaphone scene is a shining example of what Wayne was talking about.”
Review of Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie, starring Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton
“After Jean and Miss Julie sleep together, Chastain sits in his bed, stiff and traumatized, wiping the blood from between her legs, with plucking frozen fingers, the panic trembling off of her posture. (Miss Julie also, famously, has her period, mentioned in the first scene by Kathleen, who uses it as a possible explanation for why Miss Julie’s behavior has been so ‘queer’ in the couple of days prior.) With all of the monologuing in the film, Chastain’s body language in that scene, and directly afterwards, as she walks away from Jean’s room, in pain and entirely altered, tells the story clearer than any words could do.”
Review of The Babadook
“3/4s of the way through The Babadook, I thought to myself, wildly, “I can’t take much more of this.”
Review of Inherent Vice
“Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a big, druggy, gorgeous, hilarious dream of a movie. It is a story of tangents, of paranoia, of bad vibes and worse real estate deals, of an uneasy coalition of Jewish moguls and their Aryan Brotherhood biker bodyguards, the fear of cults, the deranged tail-end of the 60s burning itself out with little or no fanfare in the beach-y environs where the Pacific Ocean starts. Nobody is going anywhere, not even Bigfoot, the ambitious cop-slash-TV-star, played by Josh Brolin (hilarious, his head is completely square) who is frustrated by his whole life, compelled to walk on the wild side, even as he abhors all that hippie bullshit. His only comfort are his frozen chocolate-covered bananas that he slurps on at all times. It is a portrait of a society in decay, and what beautiful dreamy decay. Them’s were trippy trippy times.”
Review of The Passionate Thief (1960)
“There was a guy sitting in the back who was laughing so hard, and stamping his feet that Charlie murmured worriedly that the dude might be about to have a heart attack.”
On Roger Angell’s essay about the 1986 World Series
“The 1986 World Series was (agony notwithstanding) one of the most amazing World Series experiences in my lifetime. It was epic. It was operatic. It was written by a playwright from ancient Greece. It had tremendous heights, and devastating lows. For the duration of the Series, you felt like you were suspended in No-Man’s Land, the only thing you could do was get ready for the next game. I felt that way in 2004 too, and would experience strange moments of dislocation, mid-series, especially when I would meet up with friends who are not baseball fans, who had no idea what was happening. I was so caught up in it, my life totally dominated by that Series, that it was so WEIRD to meet people whose lives were still … normal.”
On seeing King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928)
“Farran observed afterwards, ‘The sad thing is is that talkies came in just at the time that silent movies were getting this good.'”
Wow, what a great body of work for the year! Thank you for sharing this, I get to experience so many wonderful things because of your writing.
Thanks, mutecypher!
and looking at all of this it is amazing that I had time to do anything else. Like, what the …
This is an impressive list! Discovering your site this year has been fantastic. Though I mainly comment on the Supernatural posts (I’ve spent far too many years of my life thinking about that show), I read just about everything here.
Thank you, Sheila, for all your hard work!
Dear Sheila,
Thanks for putting together this wonderful 2014 omnibus- gives me a chance to catch up on the movie reviews, more Roger Angell (the 86 series feels as if it happened yesterday for us Mets fans), more Hitchens and who knows I may even be inspired to give Supernatural a chance (or at least play a lot more Elvis!). I remain in absolute awe of your inexhaustible energy and remarkable erudition and wish you all the best (in your writing, health, and life) in the coming year. As terrible as it was, with the seemingly unending crises and horrors, I took comfort from the closing lines of True Detective, when Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey’s character ) proclaims “the light’s winning”. Amen to that. John
May- so glad you found my site! Your gif placement is so entertaining.
Thank you for reading and commenting!
John- you leave such great comments. Amen, yes!
I appreciate your presence here and your contributions. I mean, Victor Serge, come on!!
Thank you so much.
And lots of Mets fans in the house!
Wow. Just Wow. What an amazing, impressive body of work. Your site is an embarrassment of riches for those of us who have been lucky enough to discover it. I reread your review of The Wolf of Wall Street, and it’s one of the best pieces I have ever read about the function and purpose of art.
I am in awe of your talents! I hope you have a happy and healthy New Year, and I look forward to whatever you decide to write next.
Thank you so much, Todd!!
I enjoy your presence here so much – and need to respond to your awesome comment on Under the Skin, which came in while I was out of town for the holiday. Can’t wait to discuss with you.
And thanks so much for your comments in re: Wolf of Wall Street. That type of worry-wart commentary seems extremely loud right now – or at least more constant – and it becomes more tiresome each time I hear it. What a boring way to look at a movie. Or any work of art.
Here’s to an excellent 2015, with more excellent things to discuss!!
Ooh, looking forward to Under the Skin comments. Jeepers Creepers! I watched that instead of We are the Best! (which I will get to soon). I imagine that will be a slightly different experience.
Yeah, I saw Under the Skin, The Frozen Ground, and The Iceman over Xmas, that is my idea of Holiday fare! I have issues!
And yeah, anyone looking for easy answers from Scorcese is, not to be blunt, a moron. That is what makes him one of the best directors ever, he makes the audience complicit in the actions of these reprehensible characters. We DO get some vicarious thrills out of the actions of Henry Hill, or Ace Rothstein, or Frank Costello, or Rupert Pupkin, or Jordan Belfort. That is the whole point. He is asking WHY! Why do we find the immorality attractive? Why do we in some small way yearn to be like these men? Is that the American Dream, to Charlie Sheen it up, or Belfort it up? Are we inherently amoral?
This is why he is an artist. He PROVOKES these kinds of deep discussions. Oh yeah, while also entertaining the shit out of the audience in the process.
If somebody thinks The Wolf of Wall Street is endorsing Jordan Belfort’s behavior, well, that says a lot more about the viewer than the movie.
Thanks for your thoughts Sheila, I get tremendous enjoyment out of your site.
Excited to hear your thoughts on We Are the Best!
// anyone looking for easy answers from Scorcese is, not to be blunt, a moron. //
Right? He’s always been a controversial questioner, a man interested in those on the margins, those who fight and claw to get their piece of the pie, who bring up strange feelings of empathy/revulsion in the viewer. To try to iron him out, or criticize him for “endorsing” these views … ugh, so simplistic. And, yes, stupid.
I was just talking about Wolf of Wall Street over the holidays with two family friends. They had just seen it and were completely revolted by the world portrayed. They found the whole thing disgusting. Not like they rejected the movie, but they just found it all sooooo nasty. In discussing it, I said that it was really interesting: watching the movie in a crowded theatre and then watching it at home by myself. I did both.
In the movie theatre, it played like a raucous comedy. The guffaws of laughter – from myself and the whole crowd – never stopped.
Watching it at home, though, the bleakness and grim-ness of Scorsese’s vision was much more apparent. I stopped finding it funny. At least not in the way I found it funny when watching it with a crowd. I found it tremendously disturbing.
The family friends were fascinated by that – since they had ONLY seen it in the privacy of their own home. They could not conceive of finding any of it funny – but in discussing it, they started to see how that could be the case. It was a really interesting discussion.
And definitely a reason to try to see stuff in a movie theatre – see how it plays with a crowd.
Sheila,
I’d dipped a bit into the years’ archive and its already paying wonderful dividends. Your incisive review of Omar persuaded me to get the DVD and it was one of the films a few friends and I watched in a marathon session (washed down with mac and cheese and red wine) on NYE. Very powerful and I think your insight about how the conflict seeps into everyday life perfectly captured his predicament. I’m readying a research grant application at the moment -to study the way in which the arts (broadly defined to encompass novels, film, music, theater and the like) are instrumental in galvanizing social protest and social change, with two historical cases (gay rights in US from Act-Up, Normal Heart, Gran Fury and the like; Czech samizdat culture and the musical underground pre-1989) and contemporary ones (cultural activism in Russia and in Israel/Palestine) – so this proved to be a very helpful addition to the canon that I can draw upon.
And thought I would in a small way repay the favor. I know you enjoy Maria McKee so want to recommend (if you have not already discovered her) the amazing Lydia Loveless who is one of my favorite musical discoveries of the year. This is a live version of the lead song on her cd Somewhere Else. Enjoy, John
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-new-age-outlaw-country-of-lydia-loveless-and-sturgill-simpson/
John –
So excited to hear your thoughts on Omar. I want to see it again now.
// washed down with mac and cheese and red wine // That sounds like the best New Year’s Eve ever.
Fascinating, your grant application! Especially the Czech part of it – would love to hear more.
And I love Lydia Loveless!! I saw her play at Webster Hall here in New York – she was awesome. Here’s one pic I took of her that night – phone camera, blurry, sorry. She covered a Hank Williams song, and for that alone, I fell in love with her.
Thanks so much for the Grantland link – will check it out!!