October 20, 2023
You can replace a people with yourselves: genocide. Or you can replace two peoples with new peoples: decolonization.
One of the basic truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict is that there are no acts within it that can accord with universal human rights: the conflict itself is the trespass. Let me be clearer: the colonization, itself, is the trespass. It is the original sin against human rights. It is the disease.
August 4, 2023
A symposium
My mind was racing with questions like, Why is there a transfemme Barbie but no transmasc Ken? Did I just pay $17.50 to witness the spectacle of capital subsuming dissent? Have the filmmakers deliberately cast “Weird Barbie” with an actress who dated Bari Weiss and played “Hallelujah” on the piano while dressed as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election in order to politically center “weirdness”? Why is there no mention of doll materials designer Jack Ryan and his past employment engineering missiles for Raytheon?
Boundless feeling has to be bound if it is to be encapsulated.
January 6, 2023
Jafar Panahi after the ban
That Panahi was arrested shortly after completing the film—and that he is now serving out the six-year prison sentence originally handed down in 2010 in Tehran’s infamous Ervin Prison—is an irony that would have been out of place in all of his work until the stark horror of No Bears.
December 22, 2022
A vanity project about vanity
If Iñárritu longs to have his masochism and refute it, too, Bardo can be seen as an overfull-length elaboration on the theme, an entire movie about a man desperate to get the last, measuredly self-deprecating word.
On Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022)
Godard always seemed to be asking What is a movie? What can it do? knowing that he would never find a satisfying answer, forever in pursuit of what was still beyond the grasp of his own prodigious powers.
September 13, 2022
Godard never forgot that in art, as in life, beauty persuades
“Art today is Jean-Luc Godard,” the French poet Louis Aragon wrote in 1965. “Godard is not satisfied with the world as it is, he remakes it in his own manner . . . in Pierrot le fou red sings like an obsession.” It would again, decades later, in The Image Book. Godard has long been one of the few who believe that color is not a given, that it is a craft like any other. If his movies—the ones with Belmondo, with Gorin, with Miéville—have staying power, it is because he never completed his own search, for color or anything else. It is customary for any legendary artist to lapse into an academicism of the self. They have figured out how to do what they do and do so indefinitely. Godard wasn’t like that.
June 27, 2022
When’s the last time you felt someone was looking at you for the first twenty minutes of a movie?
March 26, 2022
Sooner or later, the gringos kill everything
My favorite genre is the movie musical; my least favorite, the musical-theater-kid movie. Both Spielberg’s Story and last year’s other corny pretender, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, have arrived as quaint, todos-juntos representatives of the latter brand. Bright, high-pitched, and would-be weird, they come from a time when we weren’t shaken by a global pandemic that wiped out millions of the bottom and made billions for the top. Miranda had the audacity to state in a promotional podcast for In the Heights that he wanted to “transcend” (“progress beyond”) West Side Story by not making “yet another gangster movie.” Good for him.
March 25, 2022
In his attempt to swap out comedy for cautionary tales, Adam McKay has become one
Gravity is at the center of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, an apocalyptic comedy in which Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio play twin Chicken Littles gesturing broadly toward a falling sky. But more than anything it’s gravitas that McKay seems to be after. Don’t Look Up was recently voted the winner of this year’s Writers Guild Award for Original Screenplay, and, this Sunday, it may win a few Oscars as well. The film, which was subsidized by Netflix, is a messy and inane statement of purpose by a director who is drowning in purpose—and statements. At this point, another statuette could serve as a life preserver.
How Hollywood killed celluloid
Eventually DCI scrubbed celluloid film almost entirely from the film industry, ushering in the most significant technological shift since the introduction of sound. The digital revolution transformed nearly every aspect of filmmaking for Hollywood and independent filmmakers. This revolution was invisible, and it was designed to be that way. Its success depended on audiences never noticing at all.
December 3, 2021
On Benedetta
Within the first two minutes of Benedetta’s prologue—in which its namesake’s younger incarnation compels a bird to shit in the eye of a potential assailant—it’s clear that Verhoeven is in his comfort zone; if the movie doesn’t necessarily push beyond those confines, it confirms them as a uniquely spacious and fertile patch of cinematic terrain, where provocation and pleasure get intertwined on a molecular level and nearly every line cuts two ways, as a statement of principles and a sick joke.
