#13: February Round-Up

Lot of movies about dead guys this month.

February’s over and I still don’t have a coffee table and I’m getting this out a few days later than I meant to (so I did see Dune 2, but I’m not talking about it here). C’est la vie! I’ll probably be back with another installment next Thursday and hopefully be back to biweekly-ish Thursday pubs after that.

Movies

New Releases

My favorite movie of the year so far is Lisa Frankenstein. This was unexpected because:

1. I really thought I would like Drive-Away Dolls better

2. I’m not a Jennifer’s Body fan, &

3. I am also not a Cole Sprouse fan

It turned out that:

1. While Drive-Away Dolls was fun/messy in a similar vein, I liked it less

2. The Diablo Cody script was neither Jennifer’s Bodyian (mean, not as sharp as it thinks) nor Junoian (masterpiece), it was a secret third thing (half-baked but super cute and fun), &

3. Cole Sprouse is working REALLY hard and while I still think he is generally uncharismatic it would be a betrayal of my values to be too mean to him

Lisa Frankenstein is small, zany and flawed. It was advertised as a movie about a teenager in the 80s who Frankensteins her dead crush, which is sort of misleading! Like many girls, Lisa has two crushes—one is a sensitive, artsy boy at school (I get it) and the other is a hot looking bust in a “bachelor’s graveyard” in town (again, I get it). When she accidentally wishes the hot bust guy back to life after an exceptionally bad night, she explains all she meant by “I wish we could be together” was that she wished she was dead too.

Something I like about Lisa that later turns out to be the film’s Big Flaw is that she isn’t particularly devoted to either crush. Like a lot of high school girls, she’s just bored and weird and horny and her crushes mostly serve to delineate her own identity—the kind of girl who crushes on school paper editors and dead men, not jocks. The other thing I liked very much was the exaggeratedly ugly 80s look of Lisa’s stepmonster-decorated house—tanning beds, stuffy florals, shell-shaped lamps, Precious Moments figurines—very Edward Scissorhands in its attitude toward suburbia. She doesn’t really regard her zombie boyfriend as a zombie boyfriend (he’s “The Creature” in the film, let’s call him that) for much of the runtime. He’s a plaything for a makeover montage, a confidante who she talks about her living crush to, a confidence-booster who encourages her to wear fun, sexy, goth girl outfits, and later her partner in crime when they start axe murdering Lisa’s enemies and requisitioning their body parts for The Creature. In the third act, Lisa does fall in love with The Creature which sucks because Newton and Sprouse have fun friends-who-kill-together chemistry but little romantic chemistry.

Lisa Frankenstein is a bad rom-com but it is a great portrait of the general TYPE of teenager I was in high school: pretentious, nostalgic, self-involved, and in the midst of forging an identity out of various cultural markers that differentiated me from “everybody else.” Lisa Frankenstein is smart enough to softly critique this with Lisa’s perfect, peppy cheerleader stepsister Taffy, the only truly decent person in the movie, without ever asking Lisa to stop being a miserable weirdo.

Like I said, I wish I liked Drive-Away Dolls more. It’s a pretty fun road trip movie with a gratingly accented, not-quite-charismatic-enough Margaret Qualley performance and dialogue that feels so “lesser talent aping the Coens with some success” that I sort of could not believe a whole Coen brother was behind it. Still! The Bill Camp scenes are good, I laughed enough, and I REALLY laughed at the surprise Matt Damon performance, one of the great cameo-givers of all time. I regret to say I prefer Joel’s immensely un-fun The Tragedy of Macbeth.

I also saw Bob Marley: One Love (Adam’s fault). Prior to BMOL, I would have told you “I like Bob Marley as much as the next person.” I guess I do not! Every one of my friends who saw this movie said, well yeah it was bad but the music’s so great. To be clear, the music is great but I guess I don’t love it enough to power me through this.

Oh, I also saw The Taste of Things again (masterpiece!) & went to see the Tenet IMAX re-release which I will write about more in the future, but suffice to say I have 100% come around on Tenet, a fabulous piece of nonsense that I love!

Rep Screenings

Early in the month, I caught a screening of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song at the IFC Center. The movie is great—electrifying, triumphant, and still fresh after 53 years, but it’s hard not to really fall in love with Melvin Van Peebles’ biography. He was a painter, writer, astronomer and cable-car driver before landing on filmmaking.¹ Failing to find financing in the U.S., he moved to France and learned French in order to write novels that could be adapted into films there so he could come back to the U.S. with a resume. He was the mastermind marketer behind Sweet Sweetback who came up with “rated X by an all white jury” (the movie made back something like 100 times its budget). He accidentally invented blaxploitation insofar as he made the film that every blaxploitation movie tried to be. It’s just a real life, you know.

I am also loving living around the corner from Film at Lincoln Center. I probably would’ve skipped an 8:30pm weekday screening of the 2 hour and 40 minute Robert Altman masterpiece Nashville back when I lived an hour away but no longer! Great movie! Nashville is kind of American Playtime. Is this a nuts thing to say? Nashville has actual characters  and it is also vastly less optimistic (on account of it being truly ABOUT America, with all the violence and denial that entails) but mostly you’re just bobbing around, observing all these sad, sweet, pathetic, heartwarming, thoughtless people in various bars/hospitals/highways/concerts and it is very, very funny when it’s not being devastating.

I also saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind at FLC. I wanted to go because I wanted to hear the final piece of score loud and because it turned out my friend Obie had never seen it before. We actually double-billed this with Drive-Away Dolls which was only slight maniac behavior. What a picture!

Afterlife Hijinks

For no specific reason, I watched three more films this month where a guy was dead (four if you count Adam putting Soul on in the background one time, but we didn’t finish it).

The first was Ernst Lubitscsh’s Heaven Can Wait, in which Don Ameche has just died and is petitioning to go to hell for not being nice enough to his beautiful wife Gene Tierney. Pretty early into this movie, a woman is sent down a trapdoor to hell screaming which led Adam and I to believe this movie would be way goofier than it was. Really this is mostly a tearjerking series of flashbacks about how it isn’t cosmically EVIL to be a vain cheating idiot but it’s not nice or a good use of time—time you could be spending treasuring your wife!

On the recommendation of my friend Sarah, I watched Ghost (you can read her thoughts in her excellent newsletter!!). Ghost!!!!!!! Ghost is GOOD. The world told me Ghost is cheesy, but Ghost is romantic and funny and wacky and great. Ghost kind of devastated me because it’s about a happy couple who have just moved in together in New York and are having fun doing ‘living together’ activities like pant-less pottery and having sex to “Unchained Melody” and they are starting a whole life together and then he dies. The detail that really won me over was Patrick Swayze singing “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” over and over to get what he wants and the bigger thing that won me over was how electric Whoopi Goldberg is as the scammer/psychic Oda Mae Brown. It’s one of those “I can’t believe they got it so so right” Oscar winning performances, alongside Marisa Tomei for My Cousin Vinny and Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton.

In honor of finally getting around to A Matter of Life and Death, Adam made a beautiful English fry-up.² This movie has one of the best, most wildly romantic opening sequences I have ever seen in my entire life, and then for some reason³ a good chunk of this movie is about how English people shouldn’t hate Americans so much, but they should hate the French because French people sound dumb. It’s still gorgeous and heart-swelling, despite the detour.

New York Shorts

Adam threw on Shirley Clarke’s Skyscraper, a short doc about building a skyscraper. Building a skyscraper is completely insane!!!! Immensely stressful!!!!!! Part of me thinks man isn’t meant to be all high up like that, and part of me really is impressed by what we get up to. We also watched Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round which is just zipping through and around various NY bridges set to music. This movie is what I am fearful being dead will feel like.

After those, I demanded we put on D.A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (which I kept calling “Take The A Train”), 6ish glorious minutes of the old Third Avenue elevated subway line set to Duke Ellington’s “Daybreak Express.” Perfect movie obviously, because I feel very romantic about the subway no matter how many times it fails me. And I love New York, no matter how annoying it is to say that or be here.

A bunch of other stuff

Here’s where I run out of unifying themes, mostly.

I watched two more pieces of British WWII-era paranoid thrillers—Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, a really great movie about Tallulah Bankhead’s belongings getting knocked into the ocean one by one (but seriously, watch Lifeboat! Tense, romantic, funny!) and Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear, a mediocre one that will make you very scared to ever win a cake at a small town fair.

On my own, I watched The Ides of March while packing up my old apartment and sort of listened to it like a podcast. I really eat up this sort of talky, politicking schlock but the extent to which the Evan Rachel Wood character is a plot device more than a person is a touch too icky for my liking. I also watched La Poison, a very mean film about a married couple who are both trying to kill each other starring Michel Simon, who I’m sort of obsessed with (the movie’s kind of about that).

Adam and I watched Behind the Candelabra while building our bed frame and both thought it was good, but no masterpiece, until the very last scene where Liberace sings “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha and we realized we were both weeping, clutching Allen wrenches and pieces of wood.

On our fully built couch, we watched Yentl. I really tried to love Yentl. Barbra is a charisma bomb with one of the world’s greatest singing voices and “Mandy Patinkin at his utter hottest in an early 1900s Polish yeshiva” is a strong pitch for me but I simply could not get past the songs. I tried so hard, but they were insane, and why exactly would you not let Mandy Patinkin sing?? The crazy part is how perfectly solid the film is without Barbra singing “look at her she’s so much more perfect and docile than meeee” over a wonderfully acted scene with Amy Irving. Like, I know! I can see that! Honestly the really unforgivable aspect of Yentl for me is that SHE DOES NOT CUT TO THE STATUE OF LIBERTY AT THE END. SHOW ME MY GIRL????? I love the Statue of Liberty and I like to see her at every opportunity.

Finally we watched Bresson’s Pickpocket (we both have major Bresson gaps) and I felt bad that I respected but did not love it until I watched the Paul Schrader special feature on the Criterion Channel where he’s like “what I love about Pickpocket is that it resists being normal and developing its characters at every turn.” The thing with Pickpocket is—does the leap into emotion in that very last moment work for you? The answer for me is, as of now, not quite!

Books

As suspected, moving into an apartment where my commute is no longer 2 hours of serviceless underground time and instead a gorgeous 15 minute stroll has been totally disastrous for my reading routine. I have barely read a thing!!!

Anyway, I did finish Joe Sacco’s Palestine which took me an embarrassingly long time for a work of graphic nonfiction. It’s brilliant and what struck me most is how sharp and self-lacerating Sacco is about the exploitative nature of journalism and his own Western liberal mindset—mining people for their greatest sorrows in the hopes that he will be rewarded as a hero, sympathy that glazes over into mild disinterest when faced with repetitive stories of hardship, annoyance in the face of overbearing hospitality and an itch to return to Western sensibilities. And after story after story of arbitrary arrests, shootings, beatings, the question “What about peace?” unaccompanied by any material suggestion for change, reparations or autonomy. By the end, Sacco is aware of how deeply inadequate the hand-waving of “well, there’ll be a peace deal, later, someday” is.

I also finally finished Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine, which is so overdue at the library and the NYPL is probably about to send a hit squad out on me to retrieve it (I’m sorry, I’m sorry).

The whole book is worthwhile, but I think just seriously sitting with the title of his second chapter “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” is a valuable exercise. Said is painstakingly thoughtful in his acknowledgment of Jewish pain, dispossession, fear, and the trauma of the Holocaust, but from the perspective of a Palestinian, a Jewish state has meant nonstop dispossession, violence, trauma, second-class citizenry within Israel, apartheid in the occupied territories, a statelessness and longing abroad that we as Jews, of all people, should understand, restriction of movement, and now well over 30,000 dead, not just from bombs but shot in the street trying to get flour. I cannot possibly face all this and think “worth it.” Nothing is.

Oscars Corner

If you’d like to participate in an Oscars pool where 100% of the proceeds goes toward the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, let me direct you to my friend (and podcast co-host) Brad’s pool.

The other day I ranked the 10 Best Picture nominees by how much I like them right now, this moment, and to my genuine surprise this is what I came up with:

I think all 10 of these are baseline good movies even if I didn’t personally like them all. Not a single one of them is an embarrassment on the level of a Green Book or Promising Young Woman or Bohemian Rhapsody (I can keep going), but this is where I’m at. I didn’t love Barbie when I first saw it, but the more I thought about it, I just felt it has a special chutzpah some of the others lack.

I won’t reveal my predictions (I’m trying to win my pools!) but a few thoughts:

• Even though the Oppenheimer score is my favorite of the year, I’m a big believer in “it’s fine to give other very good work an award for emotional reasons” which is why I’d like Robbie Robertson to win posthumously for his very good Killers of the Flower Moon score. Also that category is bananas, WHERE is Joe Hisaishi.

• A Godzilla: Minus One visual effects win would be sweet.

• If Lily Gladstone does not win, with all due respect, I will [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]!!!!!!

1. I got all this from the Q&A with Odie Henderson whose new book on blaxploitation sounds amazing and from a very cool interview my dad did with Melvin Van Peebles in 1992!

2. This is a pro-beans on toast newsletter forever!

3. World War II is the “for some reason”