#11: January Round-Up
Birthday, big moves, good movies.
In January, I turned 29 (!) and Adam moved to New York (!!) and after two-ish frantic weeks of Streeteasying we signed a lease on an apartment with a cute private terrace (!!!). He’s already vetoed me on a beautiful buffalo lamp (it was very Ken’s mojo dojo casa house meets Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel—that is to say, perfect), so things are off to a tough start.
Anyway, I celebrated 29 at the Wall Street banya with a big group of friends, sweating it out and rehydrating with borscht before stepping out toasty and cleansed into the first beautiful snow of the year. Amidst the dreary apartment tours (many a fridge in the living room) and bizarro texts from property managers (is there any other kind), I did find time to watch a lot of movies & read a few books.
Movies
I rung in the year with Remember the Night, the Barbara Stanwyck movie I failed to finish on December 31st. I continue to like Preston Sturges best when he’s writing for Mitchell Leisen, a role I know he hated. Sorry! Barbara Stanwyck plays a thief named Lee Leander (cool) who ends up spending Christmas with the lawyer who tried to put her in jail. I sort of wish she didn’t need a redemption arc here (she can steal whatever she wants in my book!) but what really works is how heartbreakingly she plays Lee’s loneliness and barely concealed desire for family and love, and how melancholic the ending is. Very January!
Birthday Movies
On my actual birthday, I went to see Ferrari with friends. No regrets here (good company, happy to have seen it) but I thought Ferrari was pretty bad—insane accents aside, I never felt like I was getting any kind of worthwhile insight into Enzo the man, or that I understood the precise nature of his business and ambitions or the importance of the Mille Miglia, or even which racer was who in the Mille Miglia (for the love of god, just color code them, it’s a movie).
I guess I was all duds that weekend, because post-banya I came home, ate almost an entire wedge of Mt. Tam cheese and watched James Gray’s Two Lovers, an entirely decent movie hampered by my growing allergy to Joaquin Phoenix.
Last of the 2023 Catch-Up, Maybe
Remember when I said I thought I would love Dicks: The Musical? I did not! What a grating and unfunny movie, equipped with a singular, limp joke (they have penises! Big penises!). I knew I was in for a bad time when the background gag posters for made-up musicals were bad. Nathan Lane and the Sewer Boys innocent!
I liked American Fiction more. It’s less high-concept literary satire than it is a solid character study and affecting family drama. Also, this may not be the sharpest publishing satire imaginable but honestly the industry IS often like this and I laughed! The real world is stupider than we can possibly imagine. Jeffrey Wright and John Ortiz, as his agent, are having so much fun together, giggling their way through phone calls as they joke themselves into wilder lies. Adam Brody continues to be one of our great screen jerks, and Sterling K. Brown is magnetic, funny, and devastating. I pretty much hated the cop-out of an ending, but I was having fun until then.
Then there’s Society of the Snow and here I get to admit that I love J.A. Bayona! I haven’t rewatched Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom since I saw it but I do remember that I liked it (dinosaur chase in an old house! ending that gave me chills!). Unlike Fallen Kingdom (boring leads) and The Impossible (awesome in the old-fashioned sense, a little conceptually racist), Society of the Snow is free of fundamental flaws to be enormously entertaining and tense and sad. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before but I was so absorbed by the survival process and these sweet handsome boys and Bayona is a great steady hand for epic scale destruction.
Re-watches
I went to see Oppenheimer in IMAX again (round 3, good stuff) and I also saw Killers of the Flower Moon a second time at the Museum of the Moving Image, which was great because they really keeps the lights off during the credits and I didn’t get to see the credits the first time. Turns out these are my favorite credits since The Thin Red Line? *spoilers* The film ends not with the coda of white men, including Scorsese himself, turning the story of the Reign of Terror into radio entertainment, but with an overhead shot of modern day Osage people dancing to the song “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People).” As that song fades out and the credits begin, we hear a field recording of crickets, birds, grass and then the sounds of a storm. Like The Thin Red Line, these credits are totally essential, a continuation of its emotional conclusion—like Mollie to Ernest some 3 hours prior, the credits ask the audience to be quiet for a while in the face of a powerful storm. Also after the absolute wallop of this film, you should want to sit quietly for a few minutes!
From the Twisted Mind of Ken Russell
I got to two films from the Ken Russell collection on Criterion—first, The Boy Friend, a super charming musical and the first time I’ve ever really engaged with Twiggy, who I only knew from photos and the notion that her popularity was to blame for skinny models. She is so sweet! So gangly and mesmerizing! I forgive her for any accidental domino effect! It seems like Russell improved vastly on the original stage version of The Boy Friend by adding a framing device in which the musical is being performed by a theater troupe for a Hollywood agent, and Twiggy’s character is thrust into the spotlight as a last minute understudy. Otherwise the story’s pretty boring? Plus, you get a lot of shitty-theater-troupe hijinks in this movie.
Second was Russell’s The Devils! I truly think Russell’s over the top grotesqueries and Derek Jarman’s eerily bare, modern and sort of alien sets actually give this film the period flourish it needs because I think 1600s France was probably really disgusting and weird. I like that everyone is obsessed with Grandier because Oliver Reed is visibly the only hot guy in town and maybe all of France.
Rep Screenings
A friend was in town and I tagged along to plans she had to see I Hired a Contract Killer,1 a movie with a perfect premise: suicidal man hires a hit man to kill him, promptly falls in love & tries to cancel the job. This movie is so attuned to what I find funny and life-affirming, for example: Jean-Pierre Léaud walking into a sort of criminal speakeasy and shouting “I want a ginger ale!” And at the same bar, two criminals drunkenly trying to convince him life is worth living (there are flowers! nature!). I think an Aki Kaurismäki deep dive is in order for me this year. His brain is perfect?
I went to see Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala alone because Adam saw it at the BFI last year and loved it and I was really jealous. Dersu Uzala is Kurosawa’s only non-Japanese film, about a Russian explorer and a Nanai hunter (the titular Dersu) traversing the Siberian wilderness and becoming best friends in 1902. It is one of the most boys hanging out features I’ve ever seen and I cannot emphasize enough that if you see this, you WILL come to love Dersu Uzala too.
Last night, Adam and I saw Cronenberg’s Crash, about people who get horny about car accidents, at the Roxy and I am very happy for this vroom vroom polycule but I wish I felt more invested in James Spader & Deborah Kara Unger’s relationship? In theory Crash is so romantic (they find something to do together again! They’re alive!) but I didn’t really feel that way while watching.
A bunch of other stuff I watched at home
Let me try to power through this a little faster.
I thought Three on a Match was going to follow three vastly different women as they make their way in the world, like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but it is actually an anti-drug PSA that doesn’t give Bette Davis anything to do.
Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of The Makioka Sisters, which regular readers will know is a book I loved about my 4 best friends, is regretfully bad, if gorgeous looking. Ichikawa removes the huge, pivotal flood scene and all the rich, emotional details that made the book so good.
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) is silly, frothy fun—loved the final anti-heist.
In advance of Lily Gladstone winning an Academy Award (I am manifesting, I am knocking on wood, my belief system is varied and contradictory), I watched Certain Women. Gladstone is so arresting and quietly charismatic and her section (hanging out with Kristen Stewart in a diner, riding a horse together) is the best of the three short stories that make up the film.
Shoutout to J.A. Bayona once more for his Letterboxd Top 4 recommendation of Luis García Berlanga’s The Executioner, a sharp and brilliant comedy about abandoning your convictions for a nice apartment.
I’ve wanted to see The Pirate since the horny-Gene-Kelly-in-The-Pirate fan cam2 first made its rounds a few years ago, so I was excited to find it on the Criterion Channel. It is delightfully stupid, sexy, and very funny if you can get past Judy Garland playing a character named Manuela.
Fun with Friends
I went to my lawyer friends’ house with two baguettes for a Michael Clayton night. Goddamn that movie is good. Speech after speech, and they all work.
Kicking off 2024
My first 2024 release film was The Beekeeper, the Jason Statham movie where he is a beekeeper (keeper of bees) and also a Beekeeper (super secret agent) out for revenge. Nice and stupid. I liked that the villains were a specific type of wellness-oriented NFT-bros (Josh Hutcherson having so much fun!) and I didn’t like that all of the action was filmed in blurry close-up with little sense of the choreography.
Books
Okay so the first book I read this year was The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Whatever, I had fun! It does feel fairly instructional—500+ pages of Suzanne Collins explaining how fascism is justified and begging you to reject it—rather than a fun revolution + love triangle featuring a likable heroine. The resonances with Israel are impossible to ignore (collective punishment, “they’re all terrorists,” starvation, etc.) which I only bring up to say it’s embarrassing to fail a children’s test of right and wrong.
I also finally finished Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine which I found thoughtful, well-reasoned, humane, and entirely convincing and I also agree with people who have said this isn’t a super base introductory text! Like you definitely need some familiarity with the major stakeholders/wars/deals of the last century.
Exhibits
I want to talk about another book I read, Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows in conjunction with an exhibit I went to see with a friend at the Guggenheim. Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows is an essay on Japanese aesthetics, specifically the beauty of darkness in traditional Japanese rooms—dusky light, the glow of lacquer in darkness—that contrasts sharply to the Western obsession with bright light. One of the most interesting points Tanizaki makes is his belief that shadows and darkness illuminate Japanese art and even people better than Western light and the notion that had Japan been left alone, they would have developed technologies which suited them better. It made me think of the many recent conversations about cinematographers properly lighting black actors on film.
Anyway, of course the Guggenheim is basically one big spiral staircase, brightly lit and brilliantly white. The exhibit, Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, is all about race and invisibility and featured many pieces formally occupied with shades of darkness. My friend and I found that it was often difficult to make out figures and outlines on dark canvases in the harsh light of the Guggenheim, or that we kept seeing our own reflections or glare on glass covers. It made me wonder if these pieces would be better served–literally more visible— in intentionally dimmer spaces, with light adjusted to the needs of the work.
Danielle was also seeing this, which is a thing that happens to me and Danielle a lot. We could probably be better at coordinating, but the happenstance is kind of friend romantic.
Can’t link because it foolishly got taken down for copyright reasons, but I saved it so I’ll text it to you if you ask.