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Monday February 17, 2025

Movie Review: I'm Still Here (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS

I wish it were less relevant.

Not that I think America 2025 is in the same situation as Brazil 1970. We’re not. But they didn’t think they were in the same situation, either. After Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is taken away, friends assure his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres, Oscar-nominated), that he won’t be harmed. He’s a congressman, after all. Well, former congressman, since his tenure was revoked when the military junta took power in April 1964. With U.S. support, I should add.*

* Is our current situation another case of the chickens coming home to roost?

You’d think more bells would be going off for them. The country was just heaving: new Constitution in 1967, different leader in ‘68, who, in December, per Wikipedia, “gave the president dictatorial powers, dissolved Congress and state legislatures, suspended the constitution, and imposed censorship.” Then that president had a stroke. Then Gen. Emilio Garrastazu Medici took over. He did most of the damage. Damage means: incarcerating people, torturing people, killing people.

So no, the U.S. isn’t there yet. We, like Eunice, are merely surrounded by people who, in Bob Dylan’s words, philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears.

Just there
For a time, I watched “I’m Still Here” as a kind of primer. As homework. And for a time I took solace. Look, even under authoritarianism, life continues. People go to the beach, girls talk boys and play volleyball, friends come over for parties and dancing; couples play backgammon and fathers and sons play loud games of Foosball late at night.

Until they don’t.

Initially, it’s very slice-of-life. What’s the drama? Not much. Other than the impending one, it’s just life. The Paivas have five kids, all girls except for the youngest, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), who, as the movie opens, finds a dog on the beach and works both sides of his parents to keep him. Yes, the eldest, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), and her left-wing friends are pulled over and harassed by the Army after the Swiss ambassador is kidnapped; but she’s going away to London to study, and be safe, and maybe become Mrs. John Lennon. Meanwhile, soufflés are made, and parties hosted, and every once in a while Rubens takes a cryptic phone call or passes something to a late-night door-knocker, but then he resumes being his charming self.

And then there’s a different knock on the door and he’s asked to come along with the men there. He does. “I’ll be back soon, sweetie,” he tells his wife. We never see him again. And the plainclothes men don’t leave. They stay behind and close the curtains. Who are they? Why are they there? That’s the menace of it. Nothing is known and all is accepted. Two of the men are vaguely hippyish, one more militaristic, but they all have a blankness in the eyes. What politeness they have makes them more menacing. They don’t trash the place, they don’t threaten anyone. They’re just there.

At one point, she offers them food, and they eat, and there’s something about the way the men, sitting on a couch or in a chair, set aside their plates with the crumbs on them—not dismissively but also dismissively—that felt so gross to me. Like such a violation. Director Walter Salles (“Central Station,” “Motorcycle Diaries”) filmed the movie in sequence, which Fernanda Torres said helped all the actors get a better sense of the escalating fear and oppression. All of that is translated to us. I think of the Robert Frost line about holding something back for pressure; in these scenes almost everything is held back and the pressure is overwhelming.

And then the mother and eldest remaining daughter are taken into custody. On the way, they’re asked to put a bag over their heads. They do. When it’s removed, half-blind and disheveled, Eunice is immediately photographed. Pop! She’s questioned. A mugshot book is brought out and she’s asked to point out people she knows. She doesn’t know many. Her interrogator is disappointed, disbelieving, angry. She wants to see her daughter. Where is her daughter? Instead she’s put in a small, grimy cell. She’s returned for more questioning and more mugshot pointing. Her husband’s face appears in the book, and then her daughter’s, and then hers. How much time has passed? How many days? She begins marking time on the wall. On the 12th day, she’s released. A guard walks her out, saying he doesn’t agree with what’s going on. But he’s still helping it go on.

The daughter is home—she was released after the first day. It’s late and the kids are asleep, and the mother doesn’t wake them. Instead, she takes a shower and tries to wash it all off, scrubbing until she’s pink.

The family is still watched—a Volkswagen with two men on the other side of the street—and Eunice can’t access money because it’s in the husband’s name. But she still has means. She has a lawyer, connections. They’re an upper-class family with books on the shelves and tons of friends. Some rally, some are distant. She’s looking for evidence that her husband was actually taken because the authorities deny it. That’s how they disappear you. They take you and then say they didn’t take you. A schoolteacher friend can help but won’t. “My husband is in danger,” Eunice tells her. “Everyone is in danger,” the teacher responds.

Solace
When did I realize the family wasn’t fictional? Probably when they skip to 1995 and the boy, Marcelo, is now a well-known author in a wheelchair. The movie is adapted from his memoir of the same name.

By 1995, Eunice is a civil rights lawyer—she got her J.D. at age 48—and that’s the year the government, now civilian, lets her know her husband is dead. She holds up the death certificate before the press and smiles. A different kind of director would underline the moment—maybe give us the smile but the doubt in the eyes, like the final shot of Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill—but Salles doesn’t play that. He knows the Paiva family personally, so I assume he knows. Throughout, Eunice has held that aristocratic stoicism of putting best faces forward. When they leave Rio de Janeiro, she tells her children to smile for the press. She smiles here. The final shot is the family smiling in 2014. Plus I assume Eunice is genuinely happy to get the certificate. She’s happy for the closure. That’s the sadness of it. They leave you in such a state of unknowing that in the end you’re happy just to find out that they killed your loved one in cold blood.

Did we need the 2014 scenes? I might’ve ended with the death certificate. That said, I like the touch of having the elderly Eunice, wheelchair-bound and suffering Alzheimer’s, played by Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro. Some part of her awakens when she sees a news report of the disappeared, including Rubens.

“I’m Still Here” is powerful, particularly the incarceration scenes, but it’s a bit too slice-of-life. It’s a family going through authoritarianism and coming out the other side, damaged but resilient. I guess I take some solace in that. If the Portuguese have a word for soupçon, that’s how much solace I take.

Posted at 09:03 AM on Monday February 17, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2024   |   Permalink  

Sunday February 16, 2025

Demi-Serious

I visited Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere site the other day for the first time in a long while. It was fun. You never have to wonder how Wells feels about something; it's out there.

Example: this post about the best actress race. Movie critic Kris Tapley thinks that if “Anora” wins best director/picture, as it's predicted to after its DGA/PGA wins, why won't it also win best actress for Mikey Madison? Doesn't that often happen? Best pic leading to best lead somebody?

Wells says, no, Demi Moore is going to win it, but she's going to win it because of a dishonest narrative.

In early January, in her acceptance speech after getting the Golden Globe, Moore said that a '90s producer told her she was a popcorn actress and would never be a serious actress and woe is me: “That corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it...” 

I thought that was bullshit when she said it, but everyone else seemed to flip: “Oh, she's so brave!” Amazing to me the narratives people buy. Jeff Wells didn't even reach for his wallet:

For the sixth or seventh time, Moore's narrative is dishonest. She was not forced into a popcorn box by mean old Hollywood executives. She walked right into that box of her own volition, and she totally reaped the spoils (mainstream fame, huge paychecks, flush lifestyle) until she aged out. And then she pivoted into a body horror flick just like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford pivoted into hag horror in the early '60s. ...

I've never read or heard that Moore tried to prove her arthouse mettle by appearing in edgy Sundance films, and she never tried to be in a critically-approved, Cannes-worthy, outside-the-box feminist statement film, and certainly not in a body-horror film. She only took the lead in The Substance when she calculated that she'd aged out (duhhh) and a role like this was her only likely shot at revitalizing her career.

100%.

Posted at 11:15 AM on Sunday February 16, 2025 in category Movies - The Oscars   |   Permalink  

Saturday February 15, 2025

Movie Review: Passage to Marseille (1944)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Does “Passage to Marseille” hold the record for flashbacks? By the middle of the movie, we’re watching one man, Capt. Freycinet (Claude Rains), tell a story in which another man, Renault (Philip Dorn), tells him the story of a prison break, during which Renault again tells a third man the story of a fourth man, who is Matrac (Humphrey Bogart), our ostensible hero.

I was half hoping, like plate-spinners on “Ed Sullivan,” they would keep it going until we lost the thread completely. Or until we landed on something interesting.

Yeah, it’s not a good movie. It has half the cast of “Casablanca” but it’s about a thousand miles from “Casablanca.”

It begins contemporary, 1943 or ’44, as Capt. Freycinet, a leader in the Free French Air Squadron, shows a reporter, Manning (John Loder), their undercover operation: how planes and hangars are hidden amid haystacks and cows in the serene English countryside. Manning is impressed. Particularly by one pilot, Matrac. What’s his story? 

“To begin with,“ Freycinet says, ”I’ll have to take you far away from here…”

Lambasting Daladier
That’s how we wind up in the middle of the Atlantic, aboard a ship, Ville de Nancy, bound for Marseille with a cargo of nickel ore. I’m guessing it’s spring 1940—after the war has started but before the fall of France. The ship then chances upon a small canoe with starving, half-dead men inside. Maj. Duval (Sydney Greenstreet) says with assurance they’re escapees from Devil’s Island, but we’d already heard him say with assurance that the Maginot Line is invincible, so we know what his opinion is worth. Except this time he’s right. The men admit as much to Freycinet. But they have a cause: They’re on their way back to fight for France. Like free men! And that's when Renault tells Freycinet their story.

Now we’re on Devil’s Island, nine miles off the coast of French Guiana, and the men are doing backbreaking labor in the heat and the swamps and the mosquitos. These men are:

  • Renault, our narrator, who turned coward during battle and wants to redeem himself
  • Petit (George Tobias), a hefty farmer with serious guns and a serious hatred of Germans
  • Marius (Peter Lorre), playing trying-to-fit-in Peter Lorre
  • Garou (Helmut Dantine), young, handsome, idealistic

They become friends with Grandpere (Vladimir Sokoloff), a former prisoner who makes a living collecting and selling butterflies. He wants to use the money to escape, but he's told they need one more man, Matrac, currently in solitary confinement. Who’s Matrac? Grandpere asks. Is he a patriot?

Is he a patriot!?! 

And that’s when we flash back yet again. (At this point, I would’ve loved a cut to Manning, perplexed, saying, “Wait, who’s talking?”)

So in 1938, Matrac, wearing the traditional Bogie fedora, is a crusading publisher lambasting Edouard Daladier over the Munich Accords with a J’Accuse! headline. For that, a mob of—I guess—pro-appeasers descends on his newspaper and destroys it. At this point, Matrac takes the stenographer/obvious love interest Paula (Michele Morgan of “Le Quai des Brumes”) and heads to the French countryside, where they get married. Ah, but during an idyllic shopping excursion she sees a headline—Matrac is wanted for murder! It’s a trumped-up charge, led again by pro-Daladier forces, but now they’re on the lam. And now he’s caught and sentenced to 15 years on Devil’s Island.

And that’s why we need Matrac, Renault tells Grandpere. (Or Freycinet tells Manning that Renault told him that he told Grandpere.)

The escape from prison is relatively easy, as escapes go—shadows on the wall—but at the beach they find the boat is smaller than expected and can’t support their weight. Someone will have to stay behind. The man who initiated everything, Grandpere, winds up volunteering, reasoning that he’s old, and these other men are young and can fight. But he asks them to swear an oath on it. They do … save for Matrac, in back, silent and gloomy. Maybe he's not such a patriot after all? Maybe he’s cynical like Rick and sticks his neck out for nobody? Yeah, that’s the feeling they’re going for. Or trying to.

So now, only one flashback removed from our start, all we need is the reason why Matrac goes from holding a grudge against France to fighting for her with all his heart.

You can thank Sidney Greenstreet. Once word reaches the ship that France has fallen, Capt. Malo (Victor Francen) alters course for England. So Maj. Duval, an opportunist and maybe closet fascist, takes over the ship. On deck, guns trained, he offers this realpolitik benediction: “Men, a new order has been born in Europe. France has been given the privilege of being a part of it.”

Especially the criminals, he adds. You’ll all be exonerated. For a moment Matrac looks like he’s considering the offer. But then the cabin boy, who admires Matrac beyond all reason, shouts “Vive le France!” and is decked by one of the mutineers. So Matrac decks that guy. Now it’s a melee. And now they retake the ship. But a German bomber gets their coordinates and makes one pass, two passes. On the third, Matrac shoots it down. Marius dies, but he dies a free man, while Matrac, to the astonishment of the captain, shoots the surviving Germans in cold blood.

Then the cabin boy dies, admiring Matrac unequivocably, as everyone does.

Too tragic
As mentioned, “Passage to Marseille” reunites much of the cast from “Casablanca”—not just Bogie, Rains, Lorre and Greenstreet, but Helmet Dantine, the handsome prisoner who, in “Casablanca,” was the handsome husband Rick lets win at roulette, as well as guitarist/singer Corinna Muna, who sang at Rick’s. And that’s just cast. The director is the same (Michael Curtiz), one of the writers (Casey Robinson), Max Steiner, etc.

Doesn’t work. Apparently they were originally thinking Jean Gabin (in exile in Hollywood) for the lead. I could see that. Not that he's bad, but Bogie’s a bit American for all this.

As for where they are now? Or in 1944? Garou is the air force’s best mechanic, Petit a tireless member of our groundcrew, while Renault, his cowardice long past, is pilot of the plane Matrac is on—in the midst of a bombing raid over Germany. It’s Matrac's five-year-old boy’s birthday, a boy he’s never met, even if his bombers occasionally divert over the town of Romilly to drop a message. That’s the plan for this evening but all the other bombers return except for V for Victor. No, wait, there it is! Renault lands the wounded airplane. And Matrac? More than wounded.

“He got two Messerschmidts. He didn’t get the third one.”

And then the movie just keeps going. 

But maybe good. At Matrac’s cliffside burial site, all the men gathered somberly, Freycinet reads the long letter Matrac had written for his boy but never got a chance to deliver; and it includes these lines about the men he fought with:

Their deadly conflict was waged to decide your future. … My son, be the standard bearer of a great age they have made possible. Because it would be too tragic if men of good will should ever be lax or fail again to build a world where youth may love without fear, where parents may grow old with their children, and where men may be worthy of each other’s faith.

Yes, it would be too tragic.

Posted at 10:29 AM on Saturday February 15, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 1940s   |   Permalink  

Friday February 14, 2025

The Scotten Letter

Well, at least some lawyers, even Trumpian ones, are in favor of rule of law. 

Trump's DOJ wants to dismiss the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, in the Southern District of NY, apparently to ensure his cooperation on removing immigrants from the city and who knows what else. Border czar Tom Homan (w/Adams!) was on Fox News this morning, and said the following:

“If he [Adams, sitting next to him] doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City, and we will be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to? We're going to deliver for the safety of the people of this city.'”

The agreement we came to. Interesting. What quid for what quo, Gracie?

Better, DOJ is having trouble finding anyone in SDNY to actually dismiss the Adams case. A sepulchral figure named Emil Bove, straight out of central casting, but currently the acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General, has sent out orders to do just that; but the Trump appointee leading the SDNY office, Dannielle R. Sassoon, who clerked for Antonin Scalia and is a member of the Federalist Society—i.e., her con credentials are all there—resigned yesterday rather than go through with it. Because it's so contrary to everything. Bove responded to her resignation with a long, nasty letter, standing in for the boss, and then searched for someone else to do the deed. Right, it's Saturday Night Massacre all over again. One thing we know? Hagen Scotten, AUSA, won't be Robert Bork. 

He sent a letter to Bove, and ... OK, before we get to the really good stuff, we get the funny stuff. Scotten has to let Bove know that, though he received a letter saying he refused to dismiss the Adams case, he says he was never asked to dismiss the Adams case. He never got the opportunity. Chef's kiss. The Trumps are not just mean but incompetent, and probably incompetent first. 

My favorite part of Scotten's letter, which is short and sweet, is that he already brands the future Robert Bork:

But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials [i.e., Eric Adams], in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me. 

Encore, please. 

The update, as I was writing this post, is that apparently someone has been found to dismiss the case, a career federal prosecutor, who claims he's doing it so others won't have to quit. But he still has to make his argument before a judge. One hopes, if he's the guy we hope he is, that he burns a few people in the process. 

In a month without much hope, all this gives me a teaspoon of it.

Posted at 11:31 AM on Friday February 14, 2025 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Thursday February 13, 2025

'Anora' Oscar Frontrunner After DGA, PGA Wins

I always forget how often the Directors Guild and Producers Guild agree on best picture. You expect disagreement (art vs. commerce maybe) but in the 35 years between 1989 and 2023, they went samesies 25 times.

Make it 26. Last weekend, both the DGAs and the PGAs gave the best feature film/director to Sean Baker's “Anora.”

Which means “Anora” is now frontrunner for best pic, right? Right. Their agreed-upon films won the Oscar 20 out of 25 times—and when they didn't it was often controversial:

  • 1995: DGA/WGA winner “Apollo 13” loses to Mel Gibson's “Braveheart.” No real controversy other than all the subsequent ones with Mel, but it's just a bad call.
  • 1998: “Saving Private Ryan” loses to the Weinsteins' “Shakespeare in Love.” Promotion/ads win; it's no longer a gentleman's game. Plus all the subsequent Harvey awfulness.
  • 2005: “Brokeback Mountain” loses to “Crash.” Homophobia wins.
  • 2016: “La La Land” loses to “Moonlight.” The envelope.
  • 2019: “1917” loses to “Parasite.” No real controversy. Lessen you don't like furinners. 

I'd be fine with “Anora.” I have no real dogs in this year's Oscar hunt. Just a cat.

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Posted at 08:29 AM on Thursday February 13, 2025 in category Movies - The Oscars   |   Permalink  

Wednesday February 12, 2025

Movie Review: Detective Chinatown 1900 (2025)

WARNING: SPOILERS

The last time the comedy-detective team of Tang Ren and Qin Feng (Wang Baoqiang and Liu Haoran) visited America, it was New York in 2018; and while we got some B-movie stereotypes of the U.S. (everyone carries guns), and the movie took potshots at our dipshit president (the Trumpian police chief wants to build a wall to keep out the Chinese), it was mostly celebratory. We have arrived! We’re rockin’ the USA!

Seems forever ago.

Now and they
Now they’re back, although “now” and “they” aren’t quite accurate. My initial thought, when I saw the title and poster was: “Are they time-traveling?” No, they’re playing their ancestors. Although not stated outright, Qin Feng is now Qin Fu, so same family name. Meanwhile Wang Baoqiang’s over-the-top Tang Ren* is someone who was orphaned as a kid, raised by Indians, and given the name Ah Gui, or “Ghost”; but at the end Qin tells him he should get a full Chinese name and suggests Tang. Again, samesies.

(* From my limited understanding, this is the pun of the title: “Tang ren jie” is Mandarin for Chinatown.)

During its run, the movie series has visited Bangkok, New York and Tokyo, so why not just continue to Chinatowns in, say, Vancouver or London or Kuala Lumpur? Why go back in time? I'm guessing it's the propaganda. There’s no racism like old racism, and by going back in time the CCP and its cultural ministers remind Chinese moviegoers of historical atrocities committed on Chinese by the U.S. These include:

  • The Chinese Exclusion Act
  • Being transcontinental railroad fodder
  • Stealing Chinese cultural treasures
  • Cutting pigtails and general xenophobia

In this movie, we also blame Chinese for bringing “the plague,” which feels a little 2020.

The plot is convoluted and fast-moving. In an alleyway in San Francisco, a young white woman is murdered and disemboweled, an Indian killed beside her, and a young Chinese man, Bai Zhenbang, is charged with the crimes. Because he’s the son of Bai Xuanling (Chow Yun Fat), a powerful leader in Chinatown, Sherlock Holmes (Andrew Charles Stokes) is summoned. Except he’s uninterested in helping so he sends a wide-eyed assistant. That’s Qin Fu.

The Indian who was murdered turns out to be the adoptive father of Ah Gui, and an Indian medicine woman tells him the first person he bumps into in Chinatown will help him solve the crime. That’s Qin Fu again. That’s why they team up.

The girl who was killed, Alice (Anastasia Shestakova), is the daughter of a xenophobic politician named Grant (John Cusack!), who uses the crime, and its accused, to push for passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act—or maybe a stronger version of, since it passed in 1882. There’s also a Qing Dynasty delegation that’s trying to arrest Sun Yat-sen or something. There’s also a celebrated Chinese magician, beloved in San Francisco, who is about to embark on a worldwide tour. To be honest, we get a lot of moving pieces. How many? As of this writing, the plot description on Wikipedia stops halfway through the movie. Like they just gave up.

All the while, the younger Bai is silent on where he was when the crime was committed. Until he isn’t. Ready? Not only was he romantically involved with Alice, not only was she carrying his baby, but he was running guns, stolen from the Irish, to send to China to aid in its revolution. He's a hero! Except two other girls are then murdered/disemboweled, a hooded figure in a factory is confronted by cops and shot by Grant into a pool of water, and when the body surfaces it’s ... Bai. Case closed.

Not so fast! Qin Fu and Ah Gui untangle everything. The first disembowelment was done with surgical precision while the next two were hack jobs, so obviously not the same man. Plus there were shards of wood in a wound in the back of Alice’s scalp. So the killer was ... the xenophobic Grant the whole time! He accidentally killed his daughter during a struggle and disemboweled her to remove evidence of the half-Chinese child. The Indian was killed because he happened upon them. The other two girls knew too much, etc., and were killed by a Grant associate, who, not having been a wartime surgeon like Grant, does a hackier job. Rather than deny all (our heroes have no evidence), Grant confesses and kills himself. Case closed.

Not so fast! The elder Bai still has to go before a town council to plead for the Chinese cause against xenophobic politicians. It’s not a bad speech. Basically: We build your railroads, we do your laundry, we feed you, what the fuck is the matter with you people? The speech staves off the worst of the reforms but his property is still taken away. Think TikTok 1900.

Huaqiao: hao bu hao?
“Detective Chinatown 1900” goes on too long, with too many moving parts; but the production values are fantastic, the leads aren’t bad, and writer-director Chen Sicheng uses the tropes of comedy storytelling well: zoom ins, quick cuts, etc. The direction is as funny as the script. Funnier.

But it could’ve been edited down. Particularly if Chen was required to include all the pro-Chinese speechifying at the end.

Some of those speeches made me feel bad for the mostly Chinese crowd at Pacific Place Theater last Saturday. Near the end of the film, two men talk about what might happen if China pulls off its revolution and becomes a powerhouse: Why would any Chinese need to come to America? Yet here they were. Was the movie trying to shame them for living abroad? Or is this idea undercut by another character’s declaration that overseas Chinese can keep an eye on the rest of the world for China?

Is China upping its rhetoric? I'm used to being the only non-Chinese person in the theater when a new Chinese movie opens, and I'm used to foreigners being villains in these movies (we're forever stealing Chinese artifacts), but the speechifying here felt different. It made leaving the flick a little awkward. I was looking forward to seeing this one and getting that pre-COVID, pre-Trump, pre-Xi-Jinping-for-life feeling. But those days now seem deader than San Francisco 1900.

Posted at 08:03 AM on Wednesday February 12, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2025   |   Permalink  

Monday February 10, 2025

Movie Review: Gladiator II (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Holy crap, what crap. I’m glad Patricia and I watched it at home where we could talk back at the screen now and again and relieve some of the pressure. And it’s 71% on Rotten Tomatoes? Rotten Tomatoes is rotten. Corruption flourishes. Their ruthless aggression spreads like a plague throughout the empire.

Those last sentences are from the movie’s ponderous opening titles:

“16 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius, his ‘dream of Rome’ has been forgotten. Under the tyranny of twin emperors, Geta and Caracalla, corruption flourishes. Their ruthless aggression spreads like a plague throughout the empire. The fall of the great city is imminent. Only the hopes of those who still dare to dream remain…”

I knew we were in trouble then. Particularly since we cut from the declaration of Rome’s imminent fall to Roman soldiers, led by heavy-hearted General Acacius (Pedro Pascal, everywhere), conquering the last unconquered city in Northern Africa. Plus if it’s Caracalla, the Roman Empire has centuries to go before it sleeps. So much for imminent.

Wait, I actually knew we were in trouble when I saw the trailer and a pretty lady hangs laundry only to be surprised and wrapped up by Paul Mescal. I wanted her to go, “Hey, I just cleaned that!” Last movie, director Ridley Scott kept giving us fingers grazing stalks of wheat; now it’s billowing laundry. What Terrence Malick trope will he cadge next?

I take it all back. I knew we were in trouble when I heard Paul Mescal, whom I knew as the suicidal dad from “Aftersun,” was cast. And yes, he’s an actor, and can play many parts; but when “Gladiator” won best picture at the 2000 Oscars, its producer thanked Russell Crowe for “filling a whole arena with the force of your face,” and man did he ever, and no, Mescal doesn’t. Sorry, Paul. You’re cute, and you got those slow thighs, but every time someone says you’re filled with rage I’m like, “That guy?”

And if we’re going to get the fall of Rome would it kill you have some decadence? The only decadence here is a gloriously ribald gesture Denzel Washington as Macrinus makes behind a slavegirl, while the only suggestion of sexuality is a powdered feyness among Roman leaders. Don’t know if that was the intention of Ridley and screenwriter David Scarpa (“Napoleon”), but it’s there for any MAGA dipshit to grab onto.

The kid from the first movie
Mescal plays Hanno, a leader in that African city, who gives a rousing speech before battle:

“Where we are, death is not! Where death is, we are not!”

Right, not rousing. It takes a minute to be proven false. But someone loved those lines enough to have poor Hanno repeat them before the movie’s final battle. Because if it didn’t work once…

Widowered and captured, Hanno is bought by Macrinus, who sees something in him, then he moves up the ladder of gladiatorial escapades. Each fight has to be bigger than the last, and the spectacle has to be bigger than the spectacle in the previous movie, so we enter truly absurd territory. These are his opponents:

  • A big dude
  • A gibbon
  • A gladiator atop what the studio terms a “BADASS WAR RHINO!!”
  • A ship of soldiers, as he pilots a ship of slaves, in an arena filled with water and sharks

Meanwhile, everyone wonders about his origins. How did someone with his skills, who can quote Virgil verbatim, wind up where he wound up?

“He’s probably the kid from the first movie,” I told Patricia.

He’s the kid from the first movie. It’s not revealed until an hour or so in, but it’s so not-a-secret that he’s called by the kid’s name, Lucius, in all the official literature of the film—from press releases to IMDb.

Meanwhile, Mom, AKA Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, doomed to be in these types of movies forever) is now married to the heavy-hearted General Acacius, whom Hanno/Lucius blames for the death of wifey. So, conflict. Meanwhile, Acacius is plotting a coup, the good kind—toward benevolent manliness and away from fey corruption—with his 5,000-man army only 10 days away. Ah, but then he gets ineffectual senators involved, one of whom is in debt to Macrinus and spills beans. Macrinus, in a power move, tells the twins, and then in another power move (all his moves are power moves) convinces the twins to send the very popular general/now traitor into the arena to battle Hanno/Lucius. There, Acacius professes his love for Lucius’ ‘rents, including Maximus, and Lucius refuses to kill him. Instead, the Praetorian Guard does—sticking more arrows into poor Pedro Pascal than in any star since Toshiro Mifune in “Throne of Blood”—and the citizenry is outraged and riot.

I couldn’t help but root for Denzel in the film—he’s Denzel, and plays the only intriguing character. You keep wondering what his game is. Turns out he's a former slave who has designs on the throne and revenge. With the city rioting, he convinces one twin to kill the other, and when the traitors are sent to the arena, and Lucius protects moms, Macrinus kills her with a distant arrow. For good measure, he kills the other emperor. Why not? Now it’s just him. Well, him and Lucius, and Lucius has armies behind him. Or maybe the armies are just standing around to see who wins that final battle? Never were armies so useless.

Are we not entertained?
And that’s our big finale. At a gate outside Rome, Lucius announces he’s Lucius, Macrinus says bloodlines don’t matter, force is how one becomes emperor, and is he ready to fight for it? Yes, Macrinus challenges Lucious to a fight, this man he’s seen defeat everybody. It’s his first not-smart move. And last.

So was a Lucius ever emperor of Rome? Yes! He ruled alongside his adopted brother Marcus Aurelius. Apparently they were a popular duo. There was a bit of free speech and a bit of caring for the sick and vulnerable. Sounds nice.

Posted at 08:24 AM on Monday February 10, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2024   |   Permalink  

Sunday February 09, 2025

Dylan on the Beatles

“The radio was on from beyond a wall and the sound was coming through in static. The Beatles were singing, 'Do You Want to Know a Secret.' They were so easy to accept, so solid. I remembered when they first came out. They offered intimacy and companionship like no other group. Their songs would create an empire. It seemed like a long time ago. 'Do You Want to Know a Secret.' A perfect '50s sappy love ballad and nobody but them could do it. Somehow there was nothing wussy about it. The Beatles blasted away.”

-- Bob Dylan, “Chronicles: Volume One,” remembering a moment in Lousiana in 1989.

Posted at 03:35 PM on Sunday February 09, 2025 in category Music   |   Permalink  

Saturday February 08, 2025

The Most Noise

“The song 'What Was It You Wanted?' was also a quickly written one. I heard the lyric and melody together in my head and it played itself in a minor key. You have to be economical writing a song like this. If you've ever been the object of curiosity, then you know what this song is about. It doesn't need much explanation. Folks who are soft and helpless sometimes make the most noise. They can obstruct you in a lot of ways. It's pointless trying to resist them or deal with them by force. Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on.”

-- Bob Dylan, from the “Oh Mercy” section of “Chronicles: Volume One,” which I've been rereading. The first section, about coming to New York and exploring all kinds of music, was so full of creativity, and it got me so jazzed, that I carried some of that jazz into my life. But then the crash and subsequent crashes as he's just trying to live a life in Woodstock? Oof. He's so good at describing a cloudy mind that I carried that into my everyday life, too, which is why I stopped reading it. But my wife borrowed the book, or I shared it with her on Kindle, and she plowed through the whole thing, loved it all, so I figured I could make it. It gets better. His mind clears. He hurts his hand, wonders if he'll ever play again, and then songs start tapping him on the shoulder again. In a late-night, beer-drinking session, Bono looks over the songs and recommends record producer Daniel Lanois, who hangs out in New Orleans, and New Orelans opens up something in Dylan again and it's fun.

But what an odd book. In the first section, he takes us to the precipice of songwriting and worldwide fame and then cuts to the crashes. Apparently it began as just new liner notes for “New Morning” and “Oh Mercy,” and became this.

Posted at 07:53 AM on Saturday February 08, 2025 in category Books   |   Permalink  

Thursday February 06, 2025

Movie Review: A Complete Unknown (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s called “A Complete Unknown,” as Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary was called “No Direction Home,” leaving “How Does It Feel,” “To Be On Your Own,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” for anyone who wants to complete the chorus.

I’ve watched the Scorsese doc a half a dozen times and recommend it about as highly as I recommend anything, but this one ain’t bad. Timothee Chalamet rocks. Edward Norton completely embodies the good-hearted Pete Seeger. All the actors sing as the performers they play and do a great job. Chalamet and Monica Barbaro sound better together than Dylan and Joan Baez did. They blend.

Yes, it’s not historically accurate but then neither was Dylan. He kept making up a mythos about himself: one moment he was raised in a carnival, another he was pop singer Bobby Vee. Plus the movie gets the basics right. Pete Seeger was the benevolent patriarch of an ever-burgeoning folk scene in the early 1960s, Dylan showed up and became its voice, writing songs about contemporary matters that felt timeless and filled with a wisdom far beyond his years. He was the future—a glorious future. And then he went electric and people freaked.

You could say Seeger was the “we” of that folk scene, but it was a restrictive “we.” There was an ethos; you were supposed to be a certain kind of person. Dylan was an “I,” a loose, all-encompassing “I.” It could go anywhere. Like the motorcycle he rides. And crashes.

Worried in the wings
I saw “Unknown” with my family in a near-sold-out theater in Minneapolis at Christmastime, sitting way down in the third row, and liked it well enough. After reading the book on which it’s based, “Dylan Goes Electric” by Elijah Wald, I saw it again, by myself, in the last row of a sparsely crowded theater in Seattle the other weekend. I still liked it. The moment at Newport ’65 when Dylan and his backing band launch into “Like a Rolling Stone” is thrilling.

This time I caught the comedic bits better—the little mumbled asides Dylan says in conversation that are funny cuz they’re true. Like when he says Joan Baez’s songwriting is all sunsets and seagulls, “like an oil painting at the dentist’s office.” Or how anyone on stage is a freak, and Sylvie (Elle Fanning) responds “Frank Sinatra’s not a freak,” to which Dylan says, “That voice ain’t human.” That’s so good. There’s a dozen of these. I wish I could remember them all.

So I wasn’t going to complain about the historical accuracy, but man I wish they’d given us Dylan’s grassroots rise—scrounging around Café Wha? and the Gaslight and a million other places, cadging off Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack, borrowing this book of poetry and that biography and these albums and that couch to sleep on. Feels like there’s drama there. Being rootless and absorbing it all and figuring it all out. In his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” he writes about going to the New York Public Library and reading newspapers from 1855-65 on microfiche—just to get the vernacular and the rhythm of speech and the concerns people had. Want to sound timeless? Going back in time ain’t a bad start.

None of that’s here. Mangold’s Dylan arrives in New York almost fully formed. On his first night he takes a taxi to visit Woody Guthrie in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, finds him with Pete Seeger, and plays “Song to Woody” for the both of them. The next morning, staying at Pete’s place, he plays him “Girl from the North Country,“ and Pete thinks we got something here. Fact-check: It was a bus, during the day, Pete wasn't there, and Dylan didn't write ”Song to Woody“ until months or maybe a year later—after he'd gone through the Woody repertoire but didn't like feeling he'd gone through him. He wanted to show his gratitude. ”I didn't not consider myself a songwriter at all,“ he says in the Scorsese doc. ”But I needed to write that, and I need to sing it, so that's why I need to write it."

Scorsese’s doc was wholly invested in the how of it: How did the wisdom of the ages emerge from this kid from Hibbing, Minnesota? Is he a shapeshifter? Did he tap into the collective unconscious? Mangold begins and ends the conversation with this lament from Dylan: 

Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they're not asking where the songs come from. They're asking why the songs didn't come to them.

Dylan here seem positively privileged—a top-down phenomenon, like he just knew the right people. He lucks into Pete Seeger, then Pete gets him a gig on the same stage Joan Baez plays, and then he’s getting representation. This early fictional help from Seeger makes the later Dylan look like an ungrateful shit.

The girlfriend stuff doesn’t play for me, either. At a church gig, Dylan meets Sylvie Russo, AKA Suze Rotolo, who tells him about CORE and the Civil Rights Movement and suggests he record more of his own songs. He responds that Columbia Records and his manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), want him to go traditional, when (again) the real Grossman was one of the ones pushing him toward songwriting—and for a very specific reason: that’s where the money was. Dylan wrote songs, Grossman’s clients/creation band Peter, Paul and Mary went up the charts with them, and everyone made a mint. But the movie bypasses Peter, Paul and Mary; it’s just Baez recording his stuff. And why did he let her do that, Sylvie asks, wringing her hands. Poor Elle Fanning. She’s given the thankless task of spending half the movie looking worried in the wings.

Does the movie imply Baez slept with Dylan because of the Cuban Missile Crisis? And where exactly was she going with her suitcase? Out od Dodge? Aren't we all Dodge? Overall, Fanning’s Russo feels too gossamer and Barbaro’s Baez too blunt—flipping off Dylan at Newport ’64 and getting angry that he’s writing music in the middle of the night. In later interviews, Baez always seems to love those moments when the wisdom of the world was flowing out of his fingertips: “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word.” She knew she was in the presence of genius. The movie makes her a bit of a diva: I need my rest, Bob!

Along with “Why him?” a good Dylan question is “Why Newport ’65?” Why did that performance freak everybody out? “Bringing It All Back Home” came out earlier in the year and it’s half-electric. Acts had already gone electric at Newport. Why the freakout?

I think it was partly the attitude. Dylan wasn’t talking or joking with his audience; he had his back to them. He was too cool for school, wearing leather and boots and shades. He just didn’t seem them anymore. The guy who wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” had changed. And yes, you could say it’s the nature of the left to not cohere, to break apart, and yes, that kept happening in the mid-’60s. The difference is when Black Power split off from the Civil Rights Movement, it wasn’t MLK leading the charge. Imagine King raising his fist and shouting “Hey ho, whitey’s gotta go!” and you get a sense of the betrayal some felt from Dylan ’65.

The movie’s kinder to Pete Seeger than it is to Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), who’s another blunt force. He’s the one who flies off the handle with Dylan, Seeger, and Peter Yarrow (Nick Pupo), and gets into a fistfight with Grossman—which did happen. In comparison, Seeger comes across as a calm voice of reason: “Here’s a cup of coffee, Bob, let’s sit and talk about this” kind of thing. During the panic during Dylan’s electric set, they do have him look at 1) the cables and 2) a row of axes, before coming across 3) the stern face of his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune), warning him away. The legend is that Seeger got an axe and had to be held back from cutting the cables, but that's probably just a legend. Wald doubts it. He blames Yarrow—or people misinterpreting Yarrow. After Dylan and his backing band exited to boos (along with applause and cries for more), Yarrow tried to reassure the crowd that Dylan would return with his acoustic guitar. “He’s going to get his axe,” Yarrow told them. Anyway, I’m glad Mangold didn’t go there.

Again, I like Pete Seeger in this, and Norton plays him as such a beautiful man. The morning after Newport, while Dylan’s ready to ride out of town, helmetless, Pete’s out there folding up the folding chairs, doing the work. He always did the work. Before the electric show, Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) tells Dylan to track mud on their carpet, which, sure, great image, but someone has to clean that up, Johnny. Someone has to load the folding chairs into the truck. Seeger was the everyday “us” who did that, Dylan the genius “I” who didn’t, and the startling thing isn't that they broke apart but that the twain ever met. 

Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
In Wald’s book, there’s a great, prescient quote from Seeger that I wish Mangold had included somehow. After Dylan’s British tour, getting booed everywhere even as he rose up the charts, and after the motorcycle accident, Dylan released “John Wesley Harding,” a throwback outlaw album, the beginning of everybody’s throwback albums, and Pete sent a copy of the album to his father with this thought:

Maybe Bob Dylan will be like Picasso, surprising us every few years with a new period. I hope he lives as long. I don’t think there’s another songwriter around who can touch him for a certain independent originality...

Damn, that’s spot on.

The movie’s fun, I enjoyed it, I saw it twice. But it’s not the Bob Dylan of biopics. It’s not even the Pete Seeger of biopics. It’s Peter, Paul and Mary. It sings a pretty tune I don’t quite believe.

Posted at 06:56 AM on Thursday February 06, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2024   |   Permalink  

Tuesday February 04, 2025

Athletics Athletics

The team so shite they named it twice. Not the Mariners, by the way, the team we're playing at the end of March.

I get it, they're rootless. They were in Oakland, they're eventually supposed to be in Vegas, for now (I guess?) it's Sacramento. But c'mon, Marketing, choose a city. Athletics Athletics is just dumb. Or maybe it wasn't even a decision. Maybe no one's at the wheel. Increasingly how life feels. (Unless the people at the wheel are psychopaths; also how life feels.)

The absurdity of “Athletics Athletics” isn't far removed from the absurdity of this overall message, which was received yesterday by M's season ticket holders—welcoming back a second baseman on the wrong side of 30 who's on a downward cycle. Last year, for us, Jorge Polanco scraped together a .213/.296/.355 season, and he was worse at home. Right now the AL West is weak, the American League generally is the weaker league, so it's a helluva opportunity for a franchise that has never won, say, a pennant—who may even be the only team in Major League Baseball to never win a pennant—to finally go for it. That would be a great message for its fanbase. This message is saying the opposite of that. It's what we're stuck with.

That's the truer slogan: “The 2025 Seattle Mariners: What We're Stuck With.”

Posted at 08:24 AM on Tuesday February 04, 2025 in category Seattle Mariners   |   Permalink  

Monday February 03, 2025

Movie Review: The Brutalist (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Twenty years ago, in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” Adrien Brody played an uncompromising Jewish artist struggling to survive in Nazi-occupied Europe; it led to a Golden Globe nomination and an Oscar for lead actor. In Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” Adrien Brody plays an uncompromising Jewish artist struggling to survive in America after the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe; it led to a Golden Globe for lead actor and an Oscar nomination (so far). 

You could say Brody has a niche.

Watching “The Brutalist” at SIFF Downtown last month was an event. It’s three and a half hours with intermission, and there’s a clear demarcation between the two halves. In the first (“The Enigma of Arrival”), Brody’s character, László Toth of Budapest, is a post-World War II refugee in America who maintains his dignity under rough circumstances, and whose talent and artistry are eventually recognized and rewarded. In the second half (“The Hard Core of Beauty”), let’s just say things go awry. The center doesn’t hold. For him and the film. 

I still recommend it. It unfolds in a way most movies don’t these days. It takes its time. It’s literary—right down to the naming of the chapters. 

Upside-down
At the open, we see Toth and a friend arrive in America, celebrating as the ship passes the Statue of Liberty—which, from their point of view, appears upside-down. Yes, hold that thought.

After an unsuccessful hookup at a brothel—“We have boys, too,” he’s told as he leaves—Toth takes the train to Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), with pretty Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird), runs a small furniture shop called Miller & Sons. Who’s Miller? He is. Are there sons? No, but it has a sound people like. As for the furniture? It’s not beautiful, Toth admits. That’s why you’re here, Attila tells him. Toth smiles wearily at all this—this brave new world where people pretend to be what they aren’t in order to sell the second-rate.

But they catch a break. A rich son, Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), wants his father’s study redone while he’s away. What I like? Attila is supposedly the deal-maker but he agrees too quickly to a $1,000 pricetag. It’s László, the artist, who looks at what needs to be done, and the timeframe with which to do it, and says no, not for that, and doubles the price. He does it not because he’s a businessman but because he’s an artist. Attila is willing to cut corners, László isn’t. So he makes the better deal.

A problem I had with the film, particularly its second half, is I’m not a fan of brutalist architecture. Too blocky. But the study László designs is beautiful: simple, clean, allowing for light while ensuring the sun doesn’t fade books. Who wouldn’t love it? 

Well, the father, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce), when he arrives home early with his dying mother and finds a Negro worker on his front lawn. He yells at the cousins and threatens them with lawsuits. Then the son doesn’t pay his bill. So Attila cuts László loose. He wakes him up to kick him out, tossing in an additional accusation of making a pass at the wife, when it was Attila, drunk and happy after the $2,000 contract, who creepily pushed László toward her. I like the way László looks here: slightly stunned, slightly fearful, but with a kind of acceptance:  “Oh, this is who you are. I thought as much.” We never see Attila again.

Because Van Buren Sr. does a 180. The study László designed is such a hit, so visionary, that it winds up in a photo spread in Look magazine. Then Harrison researches him and discovers that, before the war, László was a Bauhaus-trained architect who designed massive public buildings in Budapest. He finds László doing manual labor at a construction site (and, unbeknownst, using heroin for war-related pain), and invites him to the Van Buren mansion, where he is feted at a fancy dinner party. Afterwards Harrison leads the guests outside on a frigid night, to a hill overlooking the town and his property, and says he wants to build a vast community center there, named after his late mother, which will include a chapel, gym, theater and library. And he wants László to design it. Oh, and Harrison’s personal attorney (Peter Polycarpou) will work to expedite the immigration of László’s wife and niece, hung up in channels in Europe.

That’s the first part of the film, and its lines are clear: arrival and rise. In the second half, László becomes a martinet while overseeing the construction of the center, increasingly at odds with cost-cutting and any deviation from his artistic vision. He’s joined by his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), who arrives in a wheelchair accompanied by their near-mute teenaged niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy). The addition of women, damaged by war, creates awkwardness and friction. Is Harrison trying to cuckold László? Does the son sexually assault the niece? “We tolerate you,” the son tells the artist. The pressures of all of this seem to be building toward … something … when it’s derailed by a literal derailment. One of the millionaire’s trains goes off the track, he’s being sued, he shuts down the project. He does another 180.

Now László is working as a cog at a big architecture firm in New York. Now he's called back by Harrison. Now the two go to Italy to look at marble for the center. Now Harrison rapes a drunk László. Now they’re working on the center again as if nothing happened. Now László gives his wife a dose of heroin for her pain but she O.D.s. and nearly dies.

So much for clear lines. The second half is all over the place.

At this point, László and Erzsebet are disillusioned with America (join the club), and discuss moving to Israel as Zsofia and her husband had done. Then we see Erzsebet, suddenly using a walker, and heading up to the Van Buren mansion. How much time has passed? The family is in the midst of dinner but she refuses to sit with them. Instead she accuses Harrison of raping László. The family is shocked, particularly the son, who, to the horror of everyone, physically attacks Erzsebet; and then the father, after a full-throated denial, goes missing. They spend the night searching for him. Is he found at the center? In the chapel? Is he dead? And where is László? And how was Erzsebet able to walk again?

Instead of answers, we fast-forward 20 years, to our epilogue, “The First Architecture Biennale,” where Zsofia, middle-aged and thin, and in clear command of her voice, gives a speech for the now-celebrated László, a wheelchair-bound widower, during a retrospective of his work. We see all the great things we didn’t see him design and build. We hear her say that the Van Buren Center was created with concentration camps in mind. She ends her encomium with a line László often told her when she was a young mother in Israel: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination not the journey.”

And that's the end of our journey.

American Salieri
What to make of it? Was the rape a metaphor for what businessmen do to the artist? And is that too on-the-nose? It’s like the project being derailed by a derailment—all of Corbet’s metaphors are literal. They’re brutalist metaphors. And is that ending quote supposed to preempt the 3.5-hour journey we just watched? Or is the center not holding the point? It can’t all be clean lines, Gracie. Life gets messy and diffuse. We think it makes sense until it doesn’t.

Again, I still recommend it. I loved the scene where a patient László and a furiously impatient Harrison sit in the sun at an outdoor café in Carrara, Italy, sipping espressos and smoking while awaiting the arrival of László’s typically late friend Orazio (Salvatore Sansone). I loved the subsequent hike to the marble mines and the silent way Orazio pours the water over the marble to bring out its highlights, and how Harrison puts his face against the marble.

Despite his name, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. is not old money. He’s a bootstraps guy, built his empire, and runs hot and cold throughout the film. At the initial dinner party for László, there’s that slightly terrifying way he shuts down a friend who intrudes upon his long, pointless storytelling. Best of all? He’s so fucking dull. His voice is flat, his thoughts unimaginative, but he’s what grows in the American landscape.

Wait, is it jealousy? He wants to be an artist but isn’t, wants artistic vision but doesn’t have it; so he buys it and wrecks it. He rapes it. He’s Salieri as American businessman.

Is this the first movie I’ve seen Adrien Brody star in since “The Pianist”? That Oscar didn’t open many doors, did it? He’s done his share of Wes Andersons, and I loved his two-episode turn in “Succession.” There’s a depth to him, a humanity in his eyes.

Watching this, I assumed “The Brutalist” was based upon a novel—epic nature, tattered second half—and looked forward to reading it. Nope. Director Brady Corbet wrote it with Mona Fastvold. Who’s Fastvold? Norwegian actor-producer-director-writer once married to Sondre Lerche. Who’s Corbet? Similar but American, and no Lerche. He’s had a lot of small roles with European directors over the years: Michael Haneke (a psychopath in “Funny Games”), Ruben Ostlund (a post-avalanche dinner companion in “Force Majeure”), Lars von Trier (Tim in “Melancholia”), Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria”). Maybe something rubbed off. He directed two films in the 2010s: “The Childhood of a Leader” with Berenice Bejo, and “Vox Lux” with Natalie Portman. Haven’t seen either.

Well, he’s got our attention. The irony of this one, juxtaposed against its closing quote, is that I didn’t think much of the destination; but the journey was great.

Posted at 01:58 PM on Monday February 03, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2024   |   Permalink  
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