Three episodes about our images of the past, the present, and the future, each with a different relationship to memory and world. In the first episode (my favorite), we see a relic of obsession with the past, a rose in space (recalling Dante's Paradiso) containing a dead world that is too afraid of dying to give itself up. It is the only story in which a character is able to successfully fight against the oppression of his society, but he finds himself utterly isolated in return. In the second, we see our obtuse present, where anxiety rules our minds, anxieties recalling the past and predicting the future, and our work is so bent towards preserving ourselves that we destroy ourselves. It is the most difficult here to see the fatal flaws of the world, because it is the most similar to ours, but we must consider it as much a warning as the other episodes. In the final episode (extraordinarily beautiful and a marvelous technical accomplishment), we see a future that has gone beyond memory, where a totalizing fascism has created a living corpse without even the enlivening past of the rose from the first episode. This is a dead world that knows that it is dead, and keeps moving anyway. A death rattle, a chicken with its head cut off, dying gasps of a humanity that wants to let go but has forgotten how.
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Lots of interesting stuff in here and Fisher's interpretations of the two titular modes are compelling. I find his analysis more novel if not more compelling when he writes about music and literature than film, the penultimate essay on Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Nolan in particular seems rather obvious. But the essays on The Fall and Eno are particularly engaging, and I will certainly spend some time with their music as a result. Gives a solid framework for noticing the weird and the eerie as I read/watch/listen more, and I'll be noticing those creeping feelings and whether the framework seems to hold.
A few years ago, I would not have believed you if you had told me I would be committing to spend six years of my life in Kansas. It just wouldn't have made sense. I knew that people lived here, of course, but I had never taken the time to picture the life of a Kansan, never accorded the lives lived here with my own as equally real. And when I was living in Portland, with too much to do and plenty of people to do things with, it just wouldn't have seemed like the way my life was supposed to go. I had a category for myself, and, by virtue of distance, the category of Kansans was different.
At the end of the movie, when Moze starts to consider turning back to get Addie, and sees Addie running away from her aunt's, there was a part of me that objected. Yes, this life seems to make them happy, but Addie is a kid, she's supposed to go to school, make friends her own age, grow up without the danger of bootleggers and cops looming over her. I had this image of what her life should be. But the magic of Paper Moon is to remind us of a world that was different from ours. To remind us why we made those classic movies, what we were trying to tell each other. Bogdanovich reminds us what we were trying to remember. People scraping by through the Depression, in the deprivations of prohibition, stealing from each other because there's not enough to go around. The category in my mind of what Addie's life is supposed to look like didn't exist in Kansas in 1936. There was no perfect childhood, no perfect coming of age, no perfect life. The categories were different. Addie knows that better than I. And so she picks what will make her happy.
There's still no perfect life. It's pretty easy for me to pick out things about my life that were better in Portland or back home in California than they are now. But it's getting easier and easier to go the other way. My categories are shifting. And I think I'm getting old enough to spend less time imagining a perfect life and work on building a good one. It's going pretty well. Maybe soon I'll be as wise as Addie.
A lot that I loved here, a lot that I'm worried about, but one thing is for sure: this is the loudest move I've ever seen.
Spoilers below.
I'm going to start with the bad so the review doesn't seem as negative by the end. The AMC really pumped up the volume to an extent that it was uncomfortable at times. I'm not sure I can get behind the frenetic editing here, it didn't feel purposeful enough to be worthwhile. The drab washed out look was a little rough in some of the daytime sequences (although whenever it was dark it looked phenomenal). A lot of goofy decisions in the script that I really tried to overlook, but every time Matt Damon said "Zeus' law" I had to stop myself from laughing, even though it's clearly meant to be an ad hoc translation of xenia. The whole theme surrounding the fall of civilization raised an enormous number of red flags and although I'm sure it's not meant to be a fascist dogwhistle it did make me squirm a bit (the overuse of the word 'civilization' also ticked me off a little). Final item in my list of complaints is not exactly a straightforward complaint, but I've got a lot of concerns about the recharacterization of Penelope. I don't care about fidelity, but changes to the source text make choices more apparent, and while I think Nolan did a better job than he almost universally does with women, his choices were odd to say the least. Nolan's Penelope is a much more straightforward, singularly motivated character, and while Anne Hathaway does a wonderful job with the nuance of her situation, the script does not meet her there (the other women in the movie are even more one-note, but so are a lot of the characters and it's a big cast so I'll let those slide, though Morton deserved more). She is given more agency in the final episode with the suitors, but she is also made more cruel. Shifting responsibility for the slaughter of the female slaves from Odysseus to Penelope, even if it's just one who Nolan makes sure we understand is a bad guy, is a particularly uncomfortable choice, and the fact that Melantho just sort of disappears, confirms that Nolan has no idea what to do with the fact that women are victims of violence. Even in the Circe scene, though Morton does a stellar job with her material, the only specific violence that’s suggested ends up being a result of a paranoia that we are left to imagine the source of whole cloth. Back to Penelope specifically, Odysseus' homecoming with respect to Penelope is so much easier than I want it to be, so without conflict or mystery or estrangement. Odysseus is not quite a quintessential Nolan protagonist because he has been away for too long, and while Homer mixes his and Penelope's yearning with estrangement, Nolan essentially does away with the latter. So that's a disappointment that made me want to rewatch The Return.
Now on to the good. Whenever the light got low, I was in heaven. The Goya-esque compositions of the cyclops sent me to the moon, the fight with the suitors was perfect, the fall of Troy and Damon's accompanying monologue had the kind of sublime beauty that I was looking for futilely in the monsters (not a knock there, I think it does a great job of refocusing the viewers' priorities). Even when the civilization talk gets a bit iffy, the Troy parts are where the movie comes together for me (I would probably have preferred a Nolan Iliad). The cyclops is beautiful, Circe's shit absolutely rules, and a bunch of stellar performances (Nyong'o and Leguizamo really stood out, Holland impressed me, Pattinson is wonderful). I can't stop thinking about the weapons being thrown down through the hole in the roof and Pattinson just shouting out what gets thrown down. Probably most importantly, Damon convinces me of his Odysseus, and his Odysseus is interesting. His anxieties, his compulsions, his disappointment, his relief, all reveal themselves. And, second only to the fall of Troy sequence, what I think I will remember is his description of the siren's song, when Damon's Odysseus became real for me, a wandering man, a man of many ways, a complicated man.
It told you what you most want is what you most can't have and what you most can't have is what you already had and lost. It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don't really want to go home.
Love the structure here of five one-scene acts, each with perfect rhythm. But the thing that will really stick with me is the mannequins. I won't pretend to know anything about Sartre, but the one excerpt of Being and Nothingness I read and remember describes the reaction of the self to the other, the transformation under the gaze, and specifically mentions the feeling of seeing a mannequin, transforming oneself into the observed, and then only reverting after realizing the falsity of the gaze.
Petra fills her home with mannequins, reasonable enough for a fashion designer, but the way they seem to skulk through the sets across each scene recalls the imagined observer. They parallel Marlene, the continual observer, the voyeur, on whom Petra relies to create her character of a successful, alluring socialite designer. If she is always observed she can consider herself only as her image (the use of mirrors in the film also belies this idea). We, of course, also watch her carefully constructed facade, and watch as real emotional turmoil penetrates her and she lashes out in every way she can, always putting on a display, of desperation, fawning, shock, wrath, or various other theatrics. But she knows the mannequins are always watching, Marlene is always watching, we are always watching.
Until she awakens in her bed, stripped of her wardrobe and her wigs, laid bare before her mother, and decides to reach out to Marlene. To observe the observer. To know she who has known her so well. She assumes, because she imagines herself so fulfilled by the gaze of others, that she has been depriving Marlene with her erotic callousness. But this is not what Marlene wants. So Marlene leaves. Marlene packs up her suitcase in indignation of being acknowledged, while Petra quietly slips into bed, no longer in focus. Not a mannequin in sight. Her ever-watching maid on the way out. Finally, Marlene shuts off the lights and even we cease to observe. Petra finally leaves the spotlight. How exhausted she must be.
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A completed reality realized across these six chapters, in which the world brought about by the event is on display, culminating in the description of that event. It takes time to realize that there is such a singularly contextualizing occurrence, that we are swimming in a wake, but we gradually come to understand that there is one most important piece missing. And then we learn. I do not know the biographical reality of this event, and so do not take my interpretation as any statement of what did or did not happen to Oe. But it is so beautiful to read a novel about how to tell a story that becomes the route the author takes to tell that story. When we read about the event, it is clearly monumental, but the understanding of just how great a realization we have been witness to comes only with time. We are carried along, a part of the project ourselves, as we, as audience, become a part of the process of telling the story.
The epilogue completes the novel. An extraordinary showcase of empathy and one of the best elaborations of the power of fiction I have read. Chikashi's 'outside' perspective makes the event comprehensible in the social world of its aftermath, and devastates. She, like us, did not experience it, but she has had much longer to understand its ripples, which compose the true subject of the novel. And we learn, or are reminded, just what it is like to know someone who has changed.
Expected this to be fun enough but it really impressed me! Loved the way it looks, the insane apartment, great performances (if a little caricatured at times) and strong direction. Ending is really wonderful, the final scene feels a little perfunctory but I guess it would have been rough leaving it off. Laughed the whole time.
Some of the greatest range I've ever seen. Among the best photographed battles, courtrooms, prison cells, ballrooms, all mushed together in a toxic heap of officerial delusion. The final scene slingshotted me from a cynical horror into tears of hope. Douglas is great but Macready is a phenom. Same diction as Jeffrey Wright in Asteroid City.
In those stark, spacious, Danish rooms, miracle after miracle after miracle. Among the most moving films I have ever seen. Perhaps the single most gracious. Dreyer, himself playing the mason, builds a home. And in this home, the faithful and faithless find a place to feel the warmth of life and the shiver of death, to feel completely their sorrows, their prejudices, and their forgiveness. And, in whatever it may be, what faith they have. And for that forgiveness and that faith, wielding a magic so many imagine but so few accept, a magic that we can feel, that we can know when it lights up our screens, Dreyer blesses us with one last miracle.
And I am frustrated, as I was when I read Lewis' Till We Have Faces, because Dreyer knows every complaint I could make, every trepidation I could feel, and he still puts these miracles to screen. And even though I'm among the faithless, even though I don't believe, I do believe in what I feel when I watch this. I think it must be love.
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Didn't know anything about this before watching it (besides being a Black lesbian movie and very good), and I'm so excited to have just watched the most effective blend of documentary and narrative filmmaking I've ever seen. Not until the epigraph did I realize how entirely fictional it was (and even after that I had to look it up because I was so convinced). I was planning on writing about how beautiful it is to find oneself in history, but this is an even more significant feat, watching Dunye sculpt reality into a fiction about her own cultural history and pseudohistory. Blown away.
Give us your bombers and you can have our baskets.
Expands the revolutionary mind significantly. Should be shown to every citizen of the imperial core, not because it will persuade them, but because it has a chance of revealing them to themselves.
Alright movie. Fun when you're watching it, and moving at the end, but gets muddled in retrospect. Not really sure why he made this one. Really visually boring. As much as I don't want to compare to the rest of his oeuvre, it's impossible not to think of the much better Close Encounters.
I don't have the linguistic or emotional prowess to write about this movie. It is indescribable.
Suffice it to say that there were two other people in the theater with me, a couple. For almost the entire runtime I was imagining how utterly different our experiences of the film must be, how utterly alienating it is to fall into Lynch's rhapsody. I have never felt more alone than knowing how incommunicable that experience would be even to someone watching the same thing at the same time as me. Then, the song started to play, and we saw the screen in the screen in the screen, and, at the same time, each of us started to cry.
Maybe the only honest coming of age movie. The process of becoming in a world with evil and good. On second watch, spent the whole time thinking about the final scene. Is love really so destructive, even if the thing it destroys is twisted and wrong? Why does it feel so wrong to watch the robins do our work for us? Why does the world after pain feel so empty? Is salvation empty? Does Jeffrey feel the emptiness? Does Sandy?
They must. Salvation is death. The angels have gone away, until the robins come. And then all will be love. And then all will be over.
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In my first year of undergrad, deep in the COVID lockdown, there was a windstorm that ripped through Portland. For a few days, I would look out my window and see trees swaying, silently but with such strain that it seemed they would be pulled from the ground. Some were. The day after it ended, I walked outside into a still world. The feeling of quietude so overwhelmed me that I tried to elaborate it to myself in a piece where I compared the world to a snowglobe that had been shaken and put down, and was tinged in its stillness with the dreadful possibility it may never be picked up again. I rewrote that piece a number of times, I doubt if I'll ever share it with anyone. Soon after, I decided, with greater intention than it seems like most people require, to start making friends. And for a while, I didn't think about that feeling of stillness at all.
It snowed. I figured that, in any case, life had come to a halt … that nothing more would happen … and that I should wait for the snow to stop and then melt. It snowed for a very long time. Four days.
