This is just a post for posterity’s sake - to say that Kelvin Harrison Jr. is the real deal. He had a magnificent year in acting between Luce and Waves. At only 25 years old, he seems to have mastered the art of perfectly calibrated performances that waver between empathy and Machiavelli - between tragic hero and self-aware player. I think he’s a talent that’s here to stay and will be making a lasting mark. Excited to see his work in the upcoming Trial of the Chicago 7 . Also worth nothing that his first EVER credit was in 12 Years A Slave. He’s also starred in Roots (2016) and The Birth of a Nation (2016). So, he’s really consistently devoting himself to high-caliber films that explore race in America in unflinching and inventive ways which is, again for someone only 25 years old, downright impressive.
Worst Sentence Contest
Sentences have never made me laugh harder than the brilliantly offensive works in this contest.
Some of my top picks:
“Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago.”
“As they sprinted together down the echoing, looping ramp of the deserted Guggenheim Museum, closely pursued by three swarthy members of the resolutely vicious Cannelloni gang, square-jawed British Royal Marine art historian/world's deadliest sniper John Savage and his voluptuous young modern art critic/Navajo linguist Samantha Silver cursed architect/interior designer/writer/educator Frank Lloyd Wright for designing such a circuitous route out of the building.”
Enjoy…
Robert Eggers Defines Cinema - Authorial Voice
It happened again, I wrote a whole post and then the post disappeared right before my very eyes - gone from this earth, like the snows of yesteryear… Sigh. I suppose this is the universe telling me to be more concise, dammit. To get to the point before the platform falls apart beneath me. (Or to employ better practices when it comes to how I draft my blog posts).
In either case, I listened to a WGAW interview with Robert Eggers yesterday and found myself very much in agreement with his position on the Marvel’s-Not-Cinema debate.
You can listen to the interview (and many other good ones) here.
Eggers states that ultimately the presence of an authorial voice qualifies something as cinema. A superhero movie can be used as a genre vehicle, as with any other genre, for a director’s voice. Eggers cited Nolan’s and Burton’s Batman films. Whether you liked them or not, they had a clear and unique voice and style. But for him, the Marvel series (and Star Wars too, mostly) prioritized other things over authorial voice - and I think we’re all in agreement that the individual films lack specific authorial voice in service of creating a broader, unified series. It’s entertainment, absolutely, but without the authorial voice it is not cinema.
The fascinating sidebar that Eggers brings up is that Marvel is still extremely important - because it has become the modern-day “pagan pantheon” for the world. He didn’t explain that further but I think I take his point. Religion is not a viscerally important thing for many people today. The stories we tell again and again, that make us feel connected to something larger, have shifted to pop culture entertainment — and the stories of these uber-people, the Avengers, etc., has taken on this ritualistic, communal aspect. We all line up for the midnight screenings, we dress up, we cheer together in the audience, we feel catharsis, and so on. They’re grand mythic tales of individuals using god-like powers for good or for bad and there are inherent moral societal lessons imbedded in these tales. It serves the same function as the Norse gods did for the Vikings, essentially, telling us how to behave (and Thor is among the Marvel pantheon too, of course). Eggers distinguished Star Wars by saying it has a slightly more Judeo-Christian bend, but I take his point altogether that important storytelling that connects a vast swath of society in a ritualistic, cathartic way serves a sort of pseudo-religious purpose nowadays.
Total sidebar, but there’s another podcast in that series with Steve Conrad. Dude, has the coolest voice (and way of speaking) in the universe. Hearing him delve into the artistic/musical/spiritual nature of working on Patriot is totally engrossing. So, I highly recommend.
Final sidebar: yesterday apparently was a big day for me listening to successful writers talk - I attended a panel with Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander who talked about their process of mega-in-depth research for their biopics (Larry Flynt, Margaret Keane, Ed Wood, Rudy Ray Moore, etc.) It was fascinating and also terrifying how long they will research. They said on average a first draft takes them about a year to write, after at least 6+ months of research. One of the most interesting facets of their process is that they collected trivia, organized by theme, and just constantly try to find ways to put it into their scenes when they’re actually drafting the first draft. They only do it if there’s a real character vehicle to put it in as a colorful punctuation point (like Bela Lugosi, in Ed Wood, telling Ed that he could’ve been Frankenstein as they’re in a shitty situation on set one night in Griffith Park). The trivia is that Lugosi could’ve been Frankenstein. The character moment is one of desperation, Lugosi is looking back on his choices with regret. The plot is that they’re in the middle of a horrendous filming of a bad movie. Good stuff - it makes me want to see Ed Wood and also Dolemite Is My Name!
Using Horror to Make Movies
As a sort of follow-up to my previous article about cinema in 2019, I want to share this article by David Ehrlich at Indiewire. I also want to apologize for forgetting to list MIDSOMMAR in my previous list of movies - gross oversight!
I like how Ehrlich positions filmmakers Eggers, Peele, and Aster as “fixing” Hollywood by manipulating the commercial trappings of theatrical distribution to get access for “genre” events that are really so much more. Beyond genre, they’re an excuse for these directors to tell extremely specific and idiosyncratic stories that have very little to do with the marketed horror genre. But they’re so good that the audience doesn’t care that they’ve been duped. THE LIGHTHOUSE is an arthouse Harold Pinter play. MIDSOMMAR is a breakup fairytale (the old school scary kind). US is…. my god, where to even begin. Just go see it - it’s indescribable!
As Ehrlich puts it, “Peele sold $255.1 million worth of tickets to a movie about Hands Across America. He made another original mid-budget mega-hit that doesn’t fit into Hollywood’s current binary, and he used his brand to show people something they might not otherwise be able to see. “Us” doesn’t work because it transcends horror; it works because it forms a human chain that connects horror to everything around it.”
The article ends with a short quote from Eggers about hoping that cinema can continue to welcome the obscure, however it is genre-packaged. I love that idea and I think it can extend far beyond horror. We’ve commonly gotten it with sci-fi too (AD ASTRA, the upcoming DUNE no doubt) — but what about other “B-Movie” genres? If we’re currently in a horror renaissance I’ll be excited to see what thing next will be upturned.
2019 - Year of the Auteur
Hopefully not “Last Stand of the Auteur” as Scorsese sort of implies in his NYT Op-Ed… but compared to 2018, which I wrote in an old post was the year of the documentary, this has felt like a true resurgence (or at least a sinusoidal peak) of independent, completely auteur driven films. I haven’t even had a chance to see all of them — specifically, JoJo Rabbit, which I would argue is the most independent of them all considering that Taika Waititi completely financed the thing himself.
But what inspired me to write this post is The Irishman which I had the good fortune to see in theaters during its short window of release — caught it at the Landmark with my good friend and insane cinephile Josh. The groan in the theater was audible when the Landmark employee announced that we’d be sitting in our seats for roughly 3hr 40min. But when the film finally ended, Josh and I both shared a look of exalted complaint that it was over, already?! The film not only flies by, it’s the flight of a master. Of course, Scorsese is a master but even masters miss the mark, or don’t react well to changing times, or feel the pressure of returning to the material (gangster films) that originally defined them. Not Scorsese. This film wasn’t just his sandbox, it was the result of playing in his own sandbox for over thirty years. The man’s willpower is simply crazy. I’m not being very articulate here but I guess what I’m trying to say is that Scorsese is the old guard of auteur-driven, new-hollywood cinema, for sure, but now he has become the vanguard amidst the fray of whatever is happening to cinema now. He used Netflix, potentially part of the problem - he might argue, to make the strongest, best, and only version of his huge auteur-driven film. He had to do it because no one else would help him make it. Mandates have become too strict with tent pole releases so he created his own path and I think we’re all the better for it. But if anything, I hope the sheer existence of this film (and hopefully some box office success) gives creedence to all the other young auteurs fighting to one day have Scorsese’s stature and options.
And just for posterity, I wanted to list the other films of 2019 that have truly blown me away, that signal the arrival of a whole new school (or schools) of talent for me personally. Many I’ve already talked about, many are already quite famous and have not “just arrived” but regardless - they all killed it in 2019 and they proved in their own respective ways that independent, auteur-driven cinema can carve out its own niche in today’s hectic industry. Monos - Alejandro Landes. Parasite - Bong Joon Ho. The Lighthouse - Robert Eggers. Pain and Glory - Pedro Almodovar. Ad Astra - James Gray. Once Upon a Time In Hollywood - (I know, he’s sort of a weird exception to the rule but it’d be even weirder not to mention it) Quentin Tarantino. Luce - Julius Onah. Us - Jordan Peele. To Dust - Shawn Snyder. And ones I haven’t seen yet but reckon would qualify. The Farewell - Lulu Wang. Greta - Neil Jordan. An Elephant Sitting Still - Hu Bo (R.I.P.). Birds of Passage - Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra. Doubtless, I’m missing other very important ones but that’s sort of the point! It’s impressive. Scorsese laments the state of the industry while simultaneously fighting against it like he’s always done (and I might add, he’s a huge supporter of international cinema) - and as long as auteurs create new options and utilize newcomers to the industry to achieve their own means, then the state of cinema will be fine.
Peaky Blinders - EP6, S6
At this point, we’re so far into Peaky Blinders that you’re either reading this as an objective non-fan reader or a die-hard devotee like myself. All I can say is that EP6, S6 - the “finale” episode of that season, if you can categorize it as such, is one of the best episodes of the entire show - and personally for me, a masterclass in TV writing generally. Character twists, betrayals, probably the best single episode soundtrack I’ve ever heard… but also, this insane writing structure. The first 30 minutes of the 1-hour episode takes place across the span of one “meeting” - all the “items” that Tommy has to run through as boss of the Peaky Blinders. It’s something we’ve seen every season, sometimes multiple times across a season, and actually hearkens back to season 1 where the audience was just getting to know the inner mechanics of the gang. What’s so incredible is this vaguely nostalgic, quaint “meeting schedule” (quaint, given how huge their operations are now) now becomes this epic, Shakespearean roller coaster where members challenge Tommy in a pseudo coup, people are executed, relationship dynamics are flipped, there are breaks and recommencements, generational standoffs, it just keeps going and going! It’s really a bold move by Steven Knight. So much so that I was sort of disappointed when the meeting ended and the remainder of the plot had to happen. I have to admit though, the one flaw of the episode is that really it’s a bridge into the (likely final) season 7. It doesn’t have resounding conclusion by any means, so it’s not really a finale so much as a midseason climax. On those terms, it is some GREAT TV.
Parasite - and the Architect Auteur
I had the great pleasure of watching Parasite by Bong Joon Ho at the Landmark last night with my cousin. Of his previous films I’ve seen The Host, Snowpiercer, and Okja while my cousin had seen his 2003 film Memories of Murder (as well as Okja, but not the others). So, we had an interesting and varied view on Ho’s work and style. Personally, I had always seen him as a tonally unique genre-bender who got into crazy world-building (chemical monster, apocalyptic future, apocalyptic nearer-future) to comment on society. But having seen Parasite I can now say he is much more than that – having wrought a story that Hitchcock would be proud of, to say the least. I’ll try not to get too spoiler-y about the film since it is recently released, but I will say that this is a film absolutely best enjoyed if you go in knowing nothing. So do yourself a favor and don’t read on if you haven’t seen it yet.
All I’ll concretely say about the movie is that it’s a seemingly straightforward story about a poor family trying to swindle their way into all being hired by a rich family. And then things turn southwards as they’re want to do. I was delightfully and frightfully surprised, especially going into the second half of the movie, practically every ten minutes. Ho seamlessly brings the story from dry comedy to absurd comedy to thriller to horror and then to something else entirely. He was an auteur to me before I saw this film, but of a certain niche and style. I can now say that Ho is an auteur of a more universal quality. By universal quality, I mean that his scenes and story and choices can pretty much be emotionally accessed by anyone – and yet he strikes at the core of an idea, or a facet of society, that no one has examined in the way he has.
But to add yet another category of auteur to this rant, I’ll label Boon Jong Ho an “architect auteur”. Other filmmakers in this totally made up category are Michael Haneke, Yorgos Lanthimos, Lynne Ramsay, Robert Bresson to an extent. All these creators are auteurs because they create their own visual style, their own world mechanics, and tell distinct narratives. But to me they are architects because they value a concerted thesis at the core of their films above all else. Whatever that thesis statement is, invariably about society or human nature, their entire film grows from that point – for the sake of building to make that point. And strangely, miraculously even, their dialogue and style specifically break rules meant to keep the audience interested – all in the name their thesis. Their films can be bare, essential, totally unrealistic, awkward, jarring, and almost never “comforting” – but they have a point, and they prove their point logically, intellectually and emotionally.
I guess what set me down this line of thought in the first place was the dialogue in Parasite. I found myself thinking that the dialogue was never “great” – it certainly wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have much flair or shock built into the style of the conversations themselves. What’s more, the dialogue had a slightly comedic, stilted, and silly tone to it (most of the time). It felt like a way more subtle and grounded cousin to Lanthimos’ films – which are so detached from humanity it becomes instantly absurd. Haneke’s come to mind too – a certain serious sterility that forces you to really look at what the characters are saying and why, rather than be distracted by innate empathy to people in (usually) dire circumstances.
Each scene builds towards a point Ho is making, several points really. And sometimes the dialogue feels repetitive, or downright boring, but his filmmaking is so brilliant that you set it aside in the moment, still rapt in the overall momentum of the story. But then, when the truly insane turns of the plot come to pass – you realize the point of those scenes from before, the ones that trained your eye to something other than the conversation, were just as essential to the climax as anything. To me, the architect auteur has an unabashed intent to design the story to their ultimate purpose and will bravely pursue it with choices that may make their story seem pared away or sub-optimal. But just as they are training your eye to see what they want you to see, and how to see it—they are also training your mind to learn their sense of logic, their private way of looking at the world. And with Parasite, Ho leaves you looking at the stratified structure of modern society through his lens. And it is shocking, true, and brilliantly entertaining all at once.
Brick Moon Fiction - "Let's Get Small"
I’ve posted a permanent link to my first short story / podcast published by Brick Moon Fiction in my Fiction samples tab — but I wanted to make it available here as well: Let’s Get Small - hope you enjoy! I’m looking forward to their release of my horror short story Cold Root for Halloween, which should be out in the coming weeks. I’ll be sure to link it here as well.
Monos
Well, I wrote a whole post on this amazing film called Monos but my computer had a bit of a blip that erased the piece. Instead of being angry I’m going to take this as a sign from the universe not to over explain, analyze, or describe this film — because you should just go see it. It’s a visceral fever dream that almost unconsciously transitions into fever nightmare. It’s beautiful, terrifying, and gripping. Props to NEON distribution for bringing this film to America (and generally for being so on point with their latest slate: Parasite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Luce — all top of my list to see).
Chernobyl + General Catch Up
Hey folks - it’s been a long while, I have to admit! Wish I could post more these days, especially given the fantastic films I’ve been lucky enough to watch recently. The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Hit (the 1984 Stephen Frears film), John Wick 3 (yes, it’s worth discussing), A Man Escaped, Stalker… And on the TV side, Ramy, the interesting and perhaps unfortunate case of Perpetual Grace, LTD., Killing Eve, Warrior…Just listing them here in case I can get to them at some point.
But I found myself with a rare window of opportunity last night when I was waiting up to pick up my wife from the airport and so I started watching Chernobyl on HBO. Unfortunately for my wife, her flight kept getting delayed and delayed again - so I kept watching Chernobyl. Ended up watching the entire thing in one sitting which I believe qualifies as a binge watch even though it’s only 5 episodes. I never binge watch anything - usually after episode 2 or into episode 3 I start to feel a little queasy, like narrative overload. I’m just a plot-absorbing machine at that point, unconsciously absorbing important emotional beats and missing valuable details in favor of trudging ahead at a clip. So, I usually avoid it and savor / digest the story over breaks between episodes. But with Chernobyl, I never got that queasy feeling (definitely queasy at times, but that would be from the sheer body horror during many incidents of the show. It is truly incomprehensible, even when you see a depiction of it onscreen - the pain of a body torn asunder from the inside by radiation poisoning.) I was totally rapt.
Anyways, the series is riveting, magnificently acted (Jared Harris IS one of the greatest living actors and I argue that he will go down as one of the top television actors of all time. Man, need another article on just him. Between The Terror and Chernobyl and The Crown and yes The Expanse too - this guy is unstoppable. Paul Ritter plays probably the most unlikable, nasty villain this side of reality. Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgard too, right up there with the best).
Here’s what it does well. It forces you to understand the truly sublime power that man has created in nuclear energy and then methodically breaks down, explains, and reminds you how horrible it can be when not respected - how horrible it is for man, woman, child, nature and the earth itself. Johan Renck, the director, accomplishes this through eerily alluring imagery - equal parts terrifying and beautiful. In multiple instances, I was mesmerized by liquid cement swirling around coffins (the only way to contain the bodies’ radiation), or the alien glow of the open air radiation, the horrifying living decomposition of human bodies…
The mini-series also helps you understand much of the world that created the disaster. The bureaucracy. The lying. The political backstabbing and mistreatment of the common man. The tragic spirit of Russia. By containing the narrative essentially to Jared Harris’ character, the nuclear scientist at the heart of the Chernobyl containment and investigation, we get to experience a harrowing yet also extremely lucid journey towards the truth. All the other ensemble characters (including Barry Keoghan as a newly minted soldier who must “deal” with the animals in the containment zone - a powerful vignette in and of itself) — they all serve to prove Jared Harris and Emily Watson’s characters’ righteous stance for the audience. The mistreatment and tragedy of these regular people caught up and / or murdered by the man-made disaster. Overall, it is a gripping tale of doomed heroism and an amazing recreation of a time and place and scope. Many kudos to creator Craig Mazin.
But as I watched I couldn’t help but feel that something was a little weird about this whole narrative experience. It felt so heroic at times that I couldn’t help but question its veracity. Eventually, I put that feeling away since: A) this is television, isn’t it? It needs central heroes, doesn’t it? (to be discussed) — and B) sometimes you need to compress narratives into simplified heroic arcs in order to get the story across in the time you’re allotted. This is what happened with Emily Watson’s totally fictional character who is, as it tells you in the end text, supposed to be an amalgamation of all the scientists who helped Lagazov (Jared Harris’ character) get to the bottom of the Chernobyl cover up. Okay, all makes sense. And yet, when I was finished watching - though I was basking in the show’s accomplishments, this odd feeling persisted. So, I turned to smarter minds for answers…
First, Masha Gessen’s concise and severe article in the New Yorker. Her argument is that the mini-series turns the entire Chernobyl experience into a totally Americanized, ra-ra, a man against the system hero’s journey. When in reality, the bureaucratic morass of Soviet culture is precisely designed to prevent individualism in this way. She points out all the inaccurate moments of government depiction. She points out the painful irony of a story about deadly lies being replaced by other sorts of lies. That the heroics we witnessed never took place precisely because of the effective evilness of the government. Many of the criticisms can be explained away by Mazin simply needing to help the audience understand a point through a single character rather than a host of apparatchiks. But in other senses, I think she hits the nail on the head.
It made me think of Zeynep Tufekci’s opinion piece on Game of Thrones and Institutional Storytelling. This chronicles the evolution (or de-evolution, depending on your taste) of Game of Thrones’ style and structure of storytelling. Essentially, that it was from telling a institutional and sweeping story from the point of view of the world over to a specific and individual storytelling from a few heroes’ point of view. The Wire being the gold standard for institutional storytelling — the point is that when you focus on the mechanics and forces of the world, the individuals become more ambiguous morally speaking because you understand how little control they have. “Evil” decisions seem less so, because survival and fear and desperation make more sense in a clearer context.
This is a very roundabout way of saying: maybe Chernobyl could of used a little more institutional storytelling. Granted, it was awesome to fit in as much as it did in 5 episodes and that’s all they got - but imagine if they had more? Or, if they cut out the powerful vignettes and instead showed more of the cultural forces at work rather than just have a few fictional heroes describe them to us as they impossibly went up against them. Or to be more precise, what if it wasn’t all about Jared Harris and instead every single vignette we saw carried equal weight - and thus, they all felt more equally powerless?
I thought about this and even that seemed a little ridiculous to ask for. That’d be cutting out all the juicy good stuff - the real human drama! I wondered about Leviathan the 2014 film by Andrey Zvyagintsev. This was a story about the oppressive nature of Russian culture and its contortion of the truth. It was made by Russians, starring Russians and obviously there is a huge difference with this sort of story. But at the same time, Leviathan gives us both the individuals and their drama, trauma, and tragedy and struggle against the government — while also maintaining the sense of realism, the powerlessness, the unsuitable open ended “conclusions” to their story. It is less satisfying to an American audience because it is predicated on real pain rather than heroism.
Henry Fountain’s review in the NYT is a nice middle ground. He identifies the literal inaccuracies and the dangers of Hollywoodification. As he puts it, “the mini-series gets a basic truth right — that the Chernobyl disaster was more about lies, deceit and a rotting political system than it was about bad engineering or abysmal management and training.” This facet of the story, I think, is the most important thing as well for today’s age - when truth is almost as malleable and weak in America as it was in the Soviet Union then.
Last article, by Emily Todd VanDerWerff for Vox. The most sympathetic of these reviews - she delves into Mazin’s choices from his point of view, the choices he “had to make” - and the brilliant episodic storytelling structure which I absolutely agree with her on. I think all three reviews are right in their own ways.
I guess this is all to say: Chernobyl is a great piece of writing and an intense and unique viewing experience that is no less than a feat of verisimilitude and an achievement in film making. But I also can’t help but wonder at the more fully realized hypothetical version. The version that keeps the gripping storytelling intact while showing us the gritty reality of the detached, non-communicative array of bureacrats and scientists - heroes and victims - the institutions, as they really were, how they really dissembled the truth. What were the human and inhuman forces of the real world that led to this disaster - rather than simply the fictional heroes who impossibly overcame it?
