Talking Late Style: a 2005 Discussion from a_film_by

In memory of Bill Krohn (1945-2026), a film critic/journalist whose work has meant a lot to me over the first decade plus of my cinephilia, I present here a conversation from the old internet film discussion group a_film_by which Krohn participates in on the subject of late films. You’ll probably recognize some of the other names that are a part of the conversation, and perhaps mourn the loss of these kind of spaces where serious in-depth conversations about movies etc. had, well, just a little more room to breathe. I first came across this conversation a couple years ago as I began the journey towards writing my book about late style in film and found it rewarding enough to read that I had the idea of excerpting it here on my blog to get more eyes on it, and in an easier-to-read format. Something prevented me at the time, but I thought with Krohn’s passing now would be as good a time as any to dust it off and share. I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning it up a bit, italicizing film titles, adding orienting dates in brackets, fixing typos, and giving the real names of the participants where necessary (Krohn’s contributions are given under the username “hotlove666”, for example), but the beginning of the original conversation can be found at this link.

From: Maxime Renaudin  Date: January 8, 2005, 12:23 a.m.

I'm not that obsessed by the last work of great directors. As if something exceptional had to be expected from a film that nothing, in most of cases, predestined to be the very last. But... I was a little excited in reading the new program of the Cinematheque: "Leur dernier film.” For the last program before a long closing (reopening in a new location in several months), they decided to show the last film made by about fifty famous directors. To name only a few of them, among my true favorites: Street of Shame [1956], The Cavern [1964], Most Dangerous Man Alive [1961], All the Marbles... [1981]. A program I dreamed about, I guess. There is actually some obsession here, which I cannot explain. Incidentally, I discovered both Ulmer and Dwan trough these very last films, and, moreover, during the same week... I barely exaggerate in telling that these movies really left their mark on me. I don't know if it is the recollection of a story that had to be read backward. I don't know if it is this strange atmosphere of ending worlds (also a genesis in Ulmer's), when every sentence reaches us as the ultimate cry, when the walls and stones seem to be burning before collapsing. But this program is a celebration for me.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 8, 2005, 7:15 p.m.

Lyons did a "last films" retrospective, and there was an interesting catalogue of articles. I'll send it along if I can find it. For me, arriving late, the first films I saw of great directors were often the last ones, or the late ones. I bought my first TV set to see The Amazing Transparent Man [1960], based on what Sarris had written about Ulmer in The American Cinema.

I had become a "buff" by seeing Red Line 7000 [1965] in its first release and then, after catching up with Rio Bravo [1959] on Times Square, watching the amazing "end game" of Hawks' last works as they appeared: El Dorado [1966], Rio Lobo [1970] (seen on psilocybin). My subsequent discovery of the rest of Hawks (working backwards by seeing other recent works at my college film society: Man’s Favorite Sport? [1964], Hatari! [1962]) was very much affected by this wrong-end-of-the-telescope approach—when I looked at the earlier works I had the endgame in mind, and Daney's “Rio Lobo: Viellese du Meme” in hand.

There is simply no doubt that late works are very, very different, and my genre film cinephilia has been marked by that difference (whereas my discovery of arthouse films was more or less contemporary with the first films of the NV [Nouvelle vague]. The other thing you may have been reacting to, as I was, is the fact that in the late ‘50s, (The Cavern, Rio Bravo were made that year, as I recall) classical cinema itself was coming to an end.

You mention Aldrich: In a sense, all his ‘60s and ‘70s work was one long Farewell Symphony, with films like Ulzana's Raid [1972] or The Grissom Gang [1971] self-consciously posited as The Last Western or The Last Gangster Film. That can certainly be felt in All the Marbles...—but after all, what does one expect from a man who started his career as assistant director on Limelight [1952]? The same remarks apply to the last—and best—period of Billy Wilder's work. Some directors did not do well during this period at all—I was never enamored of the monumentally self-conscious The Shootist [1976], for example, or of most late Seigel.

Often a last film is notable for reversing the premises of the oeuvre: Seven Women [1966] with its all-woman ensemble, Family Plot [1976] being made "against its own storyboards" as I have written elsewhere, with Hitchcock working out the blocking with the actors and then filming it. Ford had one more last film up his sleeve—about a black cavalryman who becomes an Indian—and so did Hitchcock and Hawks ("a peculiar little western," as he described it to CdC [Cahiers du cinéma])—these works and the ones before them were conceived in the shadow of death, and each is the negative image of the oeuvre that preceded it.

Another historical feature of these works is that they were much misunderstood by mainstream critics at the time, and passionately defended by us.

 

From: Adrian Martin        Date: January 8, 2005, 10:39 p.m.

I find this thread begun by Maxime and continued by Bill to be fascinating, Quite simply, I wonder whether the “wrong end of the telescope” entry into cinephilia is not an almost universal experience? One that has a particularly “ritual” intensity, too, in that one often encounters these strange, charged last works already “primed” on whatever auteurist writing one has read—and so you get—and partly no doubt hallucinate!—in one almighty hit, the vision/sensibility of that director in its compacted, “testament” form. (For how long has the trope of the “testament film” reigned in film criticism, I wonder?)

I think this process tends always to be the same but simply “shifts along” in time. Bill mentioned how in the early-to-mid ‘70s the last Hawks and Ford fascinated him, but not Siegel. However, I can tell you—even though I am not a Siegel aficionado now—to be a budding teen cinephile in 1975 in Australia meant getting the first significant “hit” from Charley Varrick [1973] and The Black Windmill [1974] in glorious 35 mill at the cinema, and The Beguiled [1971], Madigan [1968] and Coogan’s Bluff [1968] on TV... I remember in 1980, when I was 19, attending my first academic film conference: Rick Thompson (of the Farber-Patterson interview fame) led a group of us eager young-un's on a slightly transgressive “afternoon off” to see and then earnestly dissect back in our scummy rented dorm rooms Rough Cut [1980], a film nobody remembers today !!!! ... and a lot of the local Clint Eastwood/Burt Reynolds cultism to follow came from those “initiatory” experiences... Same for Aldrich (as Bill mentions); Emperor of the North [1973], Twilight’s Last Gleaming [1977], All the Marbles... (shown here as California Dolls) at the cinema doubled on TV by The Legend of Lylah Clare [1968], Ulzana’s Raid, Grissom Gang: well, the intellectual fruit of all that came much later in the Screening the Past issue devoted to Aldrich (co-edited by Rick T—where Bill also appears!)... and one of my first long texts was on The Big Red One [1980]! I even vividly recall discovering Corman through Gas! [1970] and Von Richthofen and Brown [1971] (later celebrated by Chris Marker!!), with a copy of Paul Willemen's zany early ‘70s Edinburgh Film Festival book—just about my first film book purchase, for $1—virtually glued to my hand!!! (In there, David Wills was already talking passionately about “testament” works, as he would right up to his discussion of Once Upon a Time in America [1984] in the pages of Framework.) So for me proto-Screen-magazine structuralism came in that first “hit'” too, just as Daney and others accompanied Bill's explorations.

I am sure many members will have stories like this, but fixed on different “twilight” works and directors (and theories) “of their time.”

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 8, 2005, 7:38 p.m.

As far as I can remember, seeing the Rick Schmidlin “reconstruction” of Touch of Evil [1958] in theatres was my first experience with Welles, followed in close succession by Chimes at Midnight [1965]. This has certainly influenced how I rank Welles's films, I think! I, too, remember seeing three late Hawks films—Red Line 7000, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo—near the beginning of my discovery of his work. I remain partial to all three (while another late Hawks, Hatari!, has supplanted them as my favorite Hawks.) They All Laughed [1981] was one of my first Bogdanovich films seen, while The Searchers [1956] was my very first Ford, I'm almost certain. I could think of other examples. In fact, it just occurs to me that I saw Topaz [1969] and Frenzy [1972] during my first wave of appreciation for Hitchcock! I remember being astounded by the ceramics sequence in Topaz and thinking that this was a definitive Hitchcock sequence.

But it's important to note that in my case, I pursued late films consciously; it wasn't by accident, in most cases, that I sought them out. I guess somewhere along the line I got the idea that they were often greater than the early stuff and I knew from seeing them that I enjoyed their self-consciousness (or whatever you want to call it) and other "late period" attributes, much discussed by our group's members over the almost-two-years of our existence.

 

From: Jean-Pierre Coursodon    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:52 a.m.

Each one of us may have a different experience based on age (both age of the viewer and age of the filmmaker) as well as on place (where you lived was important). I saw all of Aldrich in chronological order. Saw his three early masterpieces—Apache [1954], Vera Cruz [1954] and Kiss Me Deadly [1955]—over a period of less than a year, in Paris in 1955-56. (Only his first two films—the minor World for Ransom [1954] and Big Leaguer [1953], which was not released in France—I saw much later).

On the other hand I largely "discovered" Hawks with his late ‘40s and ‘50s films—Scarface [1932] was legendary but impossible to see, his thirties films were largely unknown in France except for Bringing Up Baby [1938] and Only Angels Have Wings [1939] and no one seemed to have seen His Girl Friday [1940] (Rivette doesn't even mention it in his famous "Genie de Howard Hawks" Cahiers article). Of course all the Paris cinephiles had seen A Girl in Every Port [1928] at the Cinematheque, but that was the extent of our knowledge of "early" Hawks. The auteurist glorifying of Hawks in France was largely based on The Big Sky [1952], Monkey Business [1952], Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953], Land of the Pharaohs [1955] and Rio Bravo.

With Ford it was worse because there was very little cinephilic interest in him in the ‘50s and ‘60s, his only ‘30s film circulating in French cine-clubs was Stagecoach [1939] and most of his late ‘40s-‘50s films were neglected or underrated (except The Quiet Man [1952] which was probably overrated—but not by cinephiles). I even missed The Searchers when it came out (wasn't it panned by Truffaut in Cahiers?) Practically all of Ford's ‘30s films I saw in New York (MOMA, New School and other venues) in the ‘70s.

 

From: Aaron Graham       Date: January 9, 2005, 12:53 a.m.

I find this a fascinating thread. Bill and Adrian's posts have gotten me to think of my own roots of cinephilia. Being born in 1983 (and nowhere near any repertory theatres when I was old enough to attend) prohibited me from experiencing director's final films theatrically firsthand. But these final films were always the ones readily available on video, laserdisc and DVD and so they were always the films I'd catch up with first in a director's career.

I'd seen Aldrich's The Longest Yard [1974] and Hustle [1975] before getting a chance to develop my appreciation with Kiss Me Deadly and Attack! [1956]. This also happened with Hawks, Ford, Minnelli and others. Certainly with Ulmer: I attribute seeing The Cavern during a rare television broadcast when I was sixteen as one of the more important developments in becoming an auteurist. On the surface, this was just an ordinary picture, but below that surface, I could sense a real style or "voice" coming from the director of the piece. I quickly read everything I could find on Ulmer (very little, but Bogdanovich's interview in Who The Devil Made It was crucial) and seeing all of the films of his that I could find.

What I see in these final films is a talent fully formed and refined. The filmmaker at the top of his/her game.

 

From: Jean-Pierre Coursodon    Date: January 9, 2005, 1:06 a.m.

[Responding to Peter’s recollections of his first experiences of Welles:] This is a perfect exemple of what I was saying in my previous post about age. My first Welles was The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] followed by Citizen Kane [1941] and The Lady from Shanghai [1947]—but I saw Chimes 25 or 30 years later!

Unlike Peter I must say I have never had the auteurist fetishism of the late work, of the “testament” film. Yes, 7 Women is a great movie, but I really don't care for late Hawks (which probably disqualifies me as a true auteurist). And I dislike Frenzy and
Family Plot.

[Responding to Peter’s conscious pursuing of late films:] It would be interesting to know why/where/how you got the idea that the late films had to be "greater"—was it the influence of auteurist writings or just a personal instinct?

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 1:50 a.m.

I discovered Ford through his last film, 7 Women—which I saw on 42nd street when it premiered in 1966. It was the subject of my first lengthy article, published in December the following year. I was primed for it due to my exposure in 1965 to Dreyer's Gertrud [1964]—the locus classicus of "Last" films.

Other "Last" films of note:

The Saga of Anatahan [1953]

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse [1960]

A Countess From Hong Kong [1967] (a classic "film maudit")

L'Argent [1983] (with its great 3-D finale)

Romance of a Horsethief [1971]

Un flic [1972]

Eyes Wide Shut [1999]

Parade [1974]

The Boy Who Turned Yellow [1972] (TV film by Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

The Honey Pot [1967] (more than Sleuth [1972])

The Voice of the Moon [1990]

Three Seats for the 26th [1988]

Blue [1993] (The film Derek Jarman made after he went
blind)

 

From: Craig Keller Date: January 9, 2005, 2:00 a.m.

This is the first positive something I've heard for this film [The Voice of the Moon] outside of the I, Fellini book. I've never seen it, but have always looked forward to it—but only after I've caught up with Casanova [1976],  I clowns [1970], and Ginger and Fred [1986]. BTW, another tremendously underrated Fellini, Intervista [1987], is getting a new disc release in the US next month or March from Koch Lorber. A nice Italian disc of this was recently released, with a pristine image and English and Italian subs... unfortunately, due to an authoring error, every other subtitle is missing if you have set the subtitles to English (sentences are never finished, or begin halfway through)—with all missing subs cropping up in the Italian subtitles—which in turn are missing all the lines that appear in English!!

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:09 a.m.

[Answering the question Jean-Pierre posed to Peter about late films being “greater”:] Both, but "greater" is the wrong word. Only a madman would call Rio Lobo "greater" than Rio Bravo. Here we enter the realm of personal expression valued as such—the late work expresses the last "thoughts," to put it too succinctly, of great artists.

Needless to say, such "fetishism" exists in other artforms. Shakespeare's late plays, Beethoven's late work, van Gogh's last painting, etc. Nothing specifically cinephilic about it.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 2:12 a.m.

It's [The Voice of the Moon] a very strange work in that it stars Roberto Benigni. But it isn't a Begnini vehicle as such (and in this it's close to Ferreri's Seeking Asylum [1979] also with Begnini.) It's a rather close adaptation of Ermanno Cavazzoni's novel and as such is part of a school of "Magic Realism" that connects Italy with Latin America. It was Fellini striking out in something of a new direction in that there is less distinction between "real" and "dream" than even in City of Women [1980] (a very important late Fellini.)

I first saw Voice of the Moon at a special screening Mazursky arranged at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was open to the public and jam-packed.

At the time I thought Fellini had beat Beniex at his own game vis-a-vis The Moon in the Gutter [1983].

I also saw The Lovers on the Bridge [1991] right around that time. Just got it on DVD the other day. Great, great film.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:19 a.m.

[Responding to Adrian’s Siegel talk:] Well now that you list those films, with the excepetion of Black Windmill, and Rough Cut, which you mention later, I still love them! Charley Varrick, Madigan and Coogan's Bluff in particular. I guess The Shootist left a bad taste, and I was influenced by P[ascal] Kane's attack on The Beguiled. I recently picked up Jinxed! [1982]—I was on the set and talked to DS afterward—to see if the parts without Bette Midler are as great as I remember. I'll let you know, Adrian.

[Again responding to Adrian:] It does give you a concetrated "hit"—I was dazed after Red Line 7000, my first Hawks—and virtually demands critical theorizing—which I found in the CdC issue, my first ever, with Red Line on the cover. The three reviews of the film (Comolli, Narboni and one other) talked about repetition, abstraction, mathematics, irony... everything I had seen in the film but was unable to believe I had seen!

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:24 a.m.

[Responding to Jean-Pierre’s note on no one in France seeming to have seen His Girl Friday:] When I first met Olivier Assayas he told me The Front Page [1931] was the funniest movie he ever saw. I considered The Front Page [1974] (the Wilder-Diamond) a tragedy. Then I realized he'd never seen His Girl Friday...

[Noting the list of ‘50s Hawks films Jean-Pierre said the auteurist glorifying of Hawks in France was based on:] Except for Rio Bravo, those are films Hawks considered failures! He took four years off after Pharaohs to figure out what he had been doing wrong!

[To Jean-Pierre’s question of if The Searchers was panned by Truffaut:] It was panned by the CdC critics cited in the Conseil des dix—I wouldn't be surprised if Truffaut panned it.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:31 a.m.

[On Roberto Benigni being in The Voices of the Moon:] And survives that casting decision.

[Replying to David saying where he saw Voices of the Moon:] Me too. People were perplexed. I've grown to love it. It starts off very "lunar" and poetic, and morphs into a series of increasingly frightening visions having to do with death. It ends with an all-out attack on commercials and TV. It is one of the great last works.

No one has mentioned one of my favorites: That Obscure Object of Desire [1977].
What a joy that film is!

 

From: Jean-Pierre Coursodon    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:36 a.m.

[Responding to Bill’s responding to his question for Peter:] Thanks for answering for Peter, Bill! By the way I hope I have used the term "fetishism" enough here and there for everybody to realize that I am not using it pejoratively. And for the record I admire Beethoven's late string quartets above most anything else he produced.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 2:50 a.m.

There’s also Losey’s La truite [1982] and Steaming [1985]. Much prefer the former.

 

From: Richard Modiano    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:51 a.m.

"Here we enter the realm of personal expression valued as such—the late work expresses the last ‘thoughts,’ to put it too succinctly, of great artists."

A lot of last films weren't intentional: Ford's next MGM picture was cancelled because 7 Women flopped, and he had three or four other projects he wanted to do (Bogdanovich and McBride contend that he was pysically capable of directing until about 1970, and until 7 Women he was making one picture a year), Hitchcock worked on Pursuit [The Short Night], Hawks planned another picture, Sternberg optioned a Southern gothic novel after Anatahan, Lang wanted to make Death of a Career Girl, Mizoguchi completed preperation on Osaka Mongatari before entering the hospital (the studio made it from his plan after he died), and Welles died at the typewriter working up scenes for the next day's shoot. No doubt there are other examples.

In fact, I can only think of a few artists who've declared a given work their last: Hayden Carruth said his contribution to the anthology Poets Against the War was to be his last poem; Shinoda Masahiro said Spy Sorge [2003] is his final film. And most famously Mishima finished his last novel hours before his suicide.

I think you've accurately described these last films as late works rather than "final statements" embodying the last thoughts of their makers, thoughts that they apparently intended to work out in other pictures had they lived long enough or been allowed to make them when still strong enough to do so.

 

From: Matthew Clayfield           Date: January 9, 2005, 3:18 a.m.

Although he didn't openly "declare it," Cassavetes had an inkling (while making it) that, given his health, Love Streams [1984] would be his last film.

 

From: Adrian Martin        Date: January 9, 2005, 3:49 a.m.

Bill mentioned late Wilder. It is amazing for me to remember this now—as Wilder doesn't occupy my mind much these days—but in 1975, at the age of 15, my first powerful shot of understanding of what mise-en-scène was (i.e., bodies in space, framing, camera movement, etc.) came from seeing in 35mm at the biggest popular cinema... Wilder's The Front Page. And discovering Wilder through his late works in the ‘70s was a special thing: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes [1970], Avanti! [1972] (still probably my favourite Wilder) and Fedora [1978] put me in touch with that tender/melancholic side of the cinephilic sensibility (all three films are rather sad, and dwell on ageing and/or death)—and definitively put me on a different, warring planet to all those non-cinephile film fans who worshipped Wilder only for Sunset Boulevard [1950] and Some Like It Hot [1959]!!!

Another special passion born in that period—which I still cultivate—is Blake Edwards. Again, The Return of the Pink Panther [1975] on the big, wide, loud screen in 1975 was a “plastic” revelation in terms of the mise-en-scène/gag nexus (which cinephiles discover also, variously, through Keaton and J. Lewis... or today, Stephen Chow). It's salutary to remember in those days how little critical attention Edwards got; he really was “maudit.” Sight and Sound or Film Comment published virtually nothing on the guy in that period; neither did Cahiers, if I am not mistaken. I did not yet know, in '75, about how Positif and (even earlier) Présence du cinéma had championed him. Nor did I know a certain Coursodon/Tavernier tome yet!! How incredible and satisfying it was then—believing as I did that “no one” valued this director—as I was reaching 20, that Edwards hit his “royal road” with 10 [1979], S.O.B. [1981] and Victor/Victoria [1982]—which to my mind was a string of masterpieces on par with Hitchcock in the ‘50s or Fuller in the ‘60s! “Late” Edwards continued to be full of gems, not in an “unbroken” line of course: and there too the death-driven melancholia of The Man Who Loved Women [1983] (I still have yet to see Truffaut's original!), Skin Deep [1989], etc...

 

From: Saul Symonds        Date: January 9, 2005, 4:07 a.m.

In a similar vein to Last Films, is Longest Films... that film when a director was able to indulge every passion and desire to the nth degree, when all his or her excessive tendancies reach full fruition—and they often provide rich thematic and formal bases from which to explore the rest of a director's ouevre. Hence: Bertolucci's 1900 [1976], Bergman's Fanny and Alexander [1982], Visconti's Ludwig [1973], etc.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 4:55 a.m.

And with that nobody beats Warhol.

**** (Four Stars) [1967]—25 hours long. And every minute counts.

Cast of thousands (Allen Midgette, International Velvet, Patrick Tilden Close, Ondine, Nico, Brigid Berlin, Edie Sedgwick, Dorothy Dean, Ivy Nicholson, Henry Geldzahler, Mary Woronov, et. al.) dozens of stories—and stories within stories.

Shown in its entirety only once in the Winter of 1967, then dismantled.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 4:59 a.m.

There was always going to be another picture, but no one on the set of Family Plot was under any illusions: the writer who was there described the crane shot to the diamond, ending on Blanche, as the last shot of the oeuvre. Hitchcock called a break for lunch, and when the writer was gone, he called everyone back and filmed the wink! So it's we—and death—who write The End. No artist ever felt he or she had said the last word when saying it. Hitchcock loved making films—he didn't want that to be his last shot, so he came up with a better one. But the one he came up with was also a farewell to his audience.

Buñuel knew he was making his last film when he did Obscure Object—he had announced his retirement for the second time, his diabetes was pretty bad, and Silberman and Carrière had to fly to Mexico to convince him to give it one last shot. The last sequence of the film is such a studied compilation of motifs from An Andalusian Dog [1929]—Wagner, La Dentelliere, the cut being sewn back up—that it's hard to see it otherwise. He actually went back two weeks later and reshot it to get it just right—expressing again the desire to sign the testament with a flawless flourish, and the desire not to stop.

And of course he kept thinking—he started work on Agon, about the dreams of a female terrorist in prison. And he kept revising: he undid his ending by denying its obvious meaning—Don Lope has finally depucelated Conchita, as in the book, but now he wants her sewn up so they can start over—by telling Colina and Turrent that if they got that out of it, he had botched the ending! Nevertheless, the ending says everything that can be said: like Don Lope, Buñuel would love to sew up the eyeball and start over from scratch. We all will at that point.

The garden fragment is Welles' last film, but thru no intention of his. We talked a couple of days after he shot it, and he was rarin' to go on King Lear. The producer, Jacques Lang's brother-in-law, per Oja, screwed him out of his last creative years, then an inept American producer screwed him out of Cradle (abetted by Spielberg, who could have restarted the project at Universal but was afraid Amy would cuckold him if she spent two months at Cinecittà playing Virginia—I'm sure she cuckolded him right here anyway). Mercedes, the script he wrote not long before he died and was rewriting as Mercy to set it in the American South (it had been set in Spain), is pretty much the testament, as far as I'm concerned: it's actually about a testament—a contested one. And a poltergeist.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:01 a.m.

[Responding to Matthew about Cassavetes and Love Streams:] He even waves goodbye to us. But then he wrote and staged Woman of Mystery, and would have tried to film it, I imagine, if the cancer hadn't written The End.

All these examples are making me think that testament films are real, but that any testaments is a deeply ambivalent act.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:10 a.m.

[Responding to Adrian about late Wilder:] Exactly—and CdC were right on top of this. The first sign of thaw in the magazine after the Maoist interlude was a piece by Kane on Avanti!.

[And then again about Edwards:] He was highly prized by LA cinephiles, and a few in NY, if I’m not mistaken. I wrote a very long piece on Skin Deep for CdC called “Ars Poetica.” It actually got me laid.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 5:11 a.m.

[Responding about Cassavetes:] I was lucky enough to have seen A Woman of Mystery. I sat between Lelia Goldoni and Seymour Cassel so it was a 3-D experience. Cassavetes was there with an edema that puffed his stomach out in way that made him look pregnant.

He was in excellent spirits.

 

From: Craig Keller      Date: January 9, 2005, 5:15 a.m.

Then how does Big Trouble [1986] figure in to the "final film" equation, with regard to the Cassavetes oeuvre?

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:19 a.m.

I like Frenzy very much (the dolly shot down the staircase and out of the apartment building is one of the most haunting things in Hitchcock), but I don't like how critics at the time over-praised it as a "comeback" film for Hitchcock. I think the films which preceded it—especially Marnie [1964] and Torn Curtain [1966], but also the best segments of Topaz [1969]—are better.

Family Plot, however, I love, mainly for the reasons laid out by Bill in his chapter on it. The mise-en-scène is really something to behold. For a long time, I flirted with selecting it as my favorite Hitchcock, but then I saw Vertigo [1958] in 35mm...

[Responding to Jean-Pierre’s question about getting the idea of late films being “greater” from auteurist writings or personal instinct:] Undoubtedly it was some combination of the two. Sarris was an influence, as were the writings of Fred and Jonathan [Camper and Rosenbaum, presumably] which I found online, but I also very early on identified, I think on my own, what Aaron termed as the "fully formed" quality of the late works I saw. Or to put it another way: given my auteurist inclinations (clearly formed partly due to the books and articles I'd been reading), late films usually gave me the most to chew on. I'm sure many here can relate to this or would say the same thing in so many words.

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:23 a.m.

[Responding to Bill’s “only a madman would call Rio Lobo ‘greater’ than Rio Bravo...” remark:] Then I think I may have been a madman around age 15 or so! I was really, really high on Rio Lobo in those days. Jonathan's comment in his capsule review comparing it to King Lear (albeit Jonathan qualified this by saying that one could only compare the two if Hawks's film were "better and more substantial") really resonated with me.

These days, I see it clearly as a flawed work, much inferior to the masterpiece Rio Bravo, but it's still a film I admire and cherish.

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 5:23 a.m.

[Responding to Craig’s question of how Big Trouble figures in Cassavete’s ouvre:] The same way Steaming does for Losey—an "extra." He only did Big Trouble because Peter Falk wanted him to. It's not a Cassavetes film in any real way.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:24 a.m.

It was a job of work he took over because Falk was in it. He still spent months working on it, and it's a wonderful film. In my CdC obit, “The Two Endings,” I praised it lavishly as the film that stands in for all the H'wd genre stuff—and all the comedies!—he never got to make, describing the production David and I saw of Woman of Mystery the real goodbye (despite the wave at the end of Love Streams). So call it three farewells. The one at the end of Love Streams feels awfully final to me, somehow. But works also change with time and exceed their author's intentions.

Hey, I'm the lunatic who thinks “The Star” [1985 episode of the The Twilight Zone] was Gerd Oswald's eulogy for his own blighted career. I'm sure it was an assignment he was thrilled to get. And if there's another TZ, which I haven't seen, I'm fully prepared for it to be even better than “The Star”! I hope it is—I love his work.

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:25 a.m.

[Responding to David’s list of last films:] I like or love all of the films you name which I've seen, though the two late films I tirelessly push these days—even as recently as our group's New Year's Day chat session—are Preminger's The Human Factor [1979] and Mulligan's The Man in the Moon [1991]. They both have fairly secure places on my evolving top films list.

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:30 a.m.

Don't forget that 7 Women isn't Ford's last film, only his last narrative feature. After it, there's Vietnam, Vietnam [1971] (which I've not seen) and Chesty: Tribute to a Legend [1970/1976] (which I have). The latter is a great film in many ways; mostly when the footage Ford shot is on screen (as opposed to stock footage). When Chesty Puller (the Marine general the film is paying homage to) visits the tomb of Robert E. Lee, you know you're witnessing a great Ford moment. Also, Joseph McBride has compared the ending to the amazing conclusion of The Long Gray Line [1955] (and with great justification, too).

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:33 a.m.

[Responding to Bill re: Gerd Oswald:] You mean you haven't seen Oswald's "The Beacon" [1985], Bill? It's absolutely superb! In cinematic terms (if not personal ones), I was more impressed by it than "The Star." The first season of the '80s Twilight Zone is now available on DVD (which is how I saw the two Oswalds being discussed), so you might want to look into getting a copy.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:39 a.m.

[Responding to Peter about Rio Lobo:] I wasn't just high ON it—I was high IN it. Those guitar strings.... You should track down “Shootout at Rio Lobo,” George Plimpton's delightful TV doc about being an extra in that film. And read, if you haven't, "Mostly About Rio Lobo," Greg Ford's article on the "Rio Trio," in Focus on Hawks.

Frenzy is a superb film, but it was much less than Kaleidoscope would've been, and Mary Rose, of course. It is above all a remarkably INFLUENTIAL film—it really opened the floodgates for films like Chainsaw Massacre, and even for the LOOK of those films, which all came about in the ‘70s. There were Psycho ripoffs in the ‘60s, but nothing like what came after Frenzy, which coincided with the lifting of the Motion Picture Code restrictions. By all indications, Short Night would have kept pushing that envelope.

 

From: Dan Sallitt   Date: January 9, 2005, 6:19 a.m.

[Correcting Bill’s dating of The Cavern to the late ‘50s:] Is The Cavern as early as that? The IMDb has it as a 1964 film.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 6:36 a.m.

Or later—right again Dan. I was thinking of when the project started, 1957. It took him a long time to get it made.

 

From: Damien Bona         Date: January 9, 2005, 7:58 a.m.

No one has mentioned Minnelli's A Matter Of Time (1976). Even though it was butchered by AIP, it's nonetheless a beautiful film and very Minnellian both in its style, mise-en-scène and its focus on the vulnerable dreams of the artistic temperament. A wonderful sidenote is that Minnelli's last film played at Radio City Music Hall, where he holds the record for most films shown.

 

From: Damien Bona         Date: January 9, 2005, 8:07 a.m.

[Responding to Bill re: Family Plot:] In Family Plot, Hitchcock's "appearance" was as a silhouette seen through the frosted glass of a door. When I saw the film the night it opened, the friend I was with—who was not a cinephile (although he is Dustin Hoffman's nephew)—commented, "Hitchcock's only letting us see his shadow. It's as if he feels this is his last film and he's already moved on, leaving only his spectre behind."

 

From: Damien Bona         Date: January 9, 2005, 8:24 a.m.

[Responding to Adrian re: Blake Edwards:] My passion for Edwards also first came about with Return of the Pink Panther. (I was 20.) Bill Paul wrote a rave in the Village Voice, where Sarris was still a major supporter of Edwards (The Carey Treatment was on his 1972 Ten Best list). As was Stuart Byron, although I don't quite remember if he was still at the Boston Phoenix in the mid-‘70s, or was at the Voice. Janet Maslin, of all people, wrote a rave review of The Tamarind Seed [1974], for the Phoenix (or was it the other Beantown alternative weekly, the name of which escapes me?). Myron Meisel and Dave Kehr were both major, and eloquent, advocates for Edwards, although I'm not sure what their venues were during the time of Carey, Tamarind, and the re-established Pink Panther series.

 

From: Adrian Martin        Date: January 9, 2005, 10:12 a.m.

re: Edwards and his critical reception, as per Bill and Damien's listings: it was really only through this group that I have learnt of the more cinephilic-cultish appreciations of Edwards (and Minnelli) among critics in the American press during the '70s. What I was saying that, as a kid sitting in a public library in Melbourne in 1975, I had no access to stuff like Village Voice—but I did have access to Sight and Sound and Film Comment, and a while later I could find Cahiers in a University library. And it did seem to me reading that sort of stuff that Edwards was a kind of invisible, maudit figure—and many mainstream critics (I imagine in many countries, certainly Australia) really did deride him, regarding him as the guy who once made maybe one good film, The Party [1968], and had since declined to the deepest trash. Remember, 10 received an awful amount of mainstream abuse in its day. Later, of course, I did read Bill on Skin Deep, Gilbert Adair on Man Who Loved Women, the Luhr-Lehman books, and various other positive takes on Edwards. And he did eventually get that honourary Oscar or whatever the heck it was! But I still think there is a slightly maudit aura around Edwards among a certain sector of middlebrow moviegoers and commentators—all that low comedy, plus Julie Andrews too! Proclaiming that something like Tamarind Seed is a masterpiece can still draw snorts of cultured derision, let me assure you!!

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 3:30 p.m.

[Responding to Damien’s mention of A Matter in Time:] The best, and most Minnellian thing in it is the scene where Liza sings “Do It Again.” Bergman and Boyer are quite good in it as is Maria Montez’s daughter, Tina Aumont.

A trio of shot last films that no one has mentioned yet: Sirk’s Talk to Me Like the Rain [1976], New Year’s Eve [1978], and Bourbon Street Blues [1979].

 

Late Style in Film (2026)

The purpose of this post is to announce that my new book, called Late Style in Film, is now available for purchase from Sticking Place Books. You can order it here, in either paperback or hardcover; there's a very nice discount if you buy it directly from the publisher.

If you’ve been here before, you may have seen or read the piece I wrote about the late style of Howard Hawks that I shared around Thanksgiving of 2024. I’d originally written that as a sample chapter to send out to publishers along with a book proposal I’d put together that summer, a venture I eventually became disenchanted with and more or less dropped for the time being. So as to not let that piece lay dormant and unread, I published it here, in the case that the book it was intended to be a part of never did come together.

But I guess enough people read that and word got around, leading to an out-of-the-blue message from Sticking Place Books’ Paul Cronin encouraging me to write the actual book and offering to publish it. The contract was signed in January 2025 and the rest is history. If you like the book, you can thank Paul, because I’m not at all sure it would have ever happened without him.

A description of the book can be found at the link provided above, but if you’re interested in knowing more concretely what kind of stuff is included in the book, here’s a short list:

• a foreword from legendary film scholar (and fellow Wisconsinite) Joseph McBride
• an introduction to contemporary debates about the idea of late style in film
• an overview of the history of late style thinking in general, with special attention given to recontextualizing Theodor Adorno and Edward Said’s contributions amid larger, more diverse discourses
• an attempt to redefine late style towards more concrete, inclusive, and productive ends
• an exploration of film history’s two “golden ages” of late style (roughly, the 1950s-1970s and the 2000s-present)
• a look at how auteurism and late style have interacted throughout film history
• an argument for the kind of philosophy of viewing that I believe late style thinking should be inspired by
• three long, in-depth, one-of-a-kind chapters engaging with the late period work of filmmakers Howard Hawks, Charles Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock that demonstrate late style criticism in action
• a brief concluding note that extrapolates late style thinking to more generalized effect
• a bonus list of 100 of my favorite late films (one per director)
• and much more!

As a year-plus, nights-and-weekends kind of labor of love, I hope you get as much out of reading it as I put into the research and writing of it. Be sure to share to the book’s existence and/or your enjoyment of it (or even lack thereof!) with anyone you know that might be interested, online or off, as word of mouth remains the best marketing tool at my disposal. Thanks, and much gratitude to all the family, friends, online acquaintances, and anyone else who in one small way or another helped or supported me in making this a reality.

Shadow Ticket (2025) by Thomas Pynchon

 

My first encounter with the work of Thomas Pynchon came in high school when for some uncertain reason I decided to start reading Mason & Dixon—perhaps having google searched for the best books of 1997, because it’s my birthyear, and deciding this one looked the most interesting—which after making it a few hundred pages or so in I for some other uncertain reason stopped reading and never did finish—perhaps the simple result of life’s frictions slowing down the inertia of my progress, rather than any particular dissatisfaction. Who knows; I was young. My next encounter came in my first post-college summer, the summer of Covid, the summer of 2020, this time with more foreknowledge of what I was getting into and indeed who Thomas Pynchon even was, when I picked up Gravity’s Rainbow as my nighttime reading. With free time galore and the mental space provided by a slowed-down world, I had disciplined myself into dedicating a full hour to reading fiction before bed every night, and at a rate of about 30 per I’d swept through all 700-some pages in what was probably my quickest journey through a book of that size in my adult life. But here’s the question: did I understand any of it? I’d have to answer that with a qualified No. Skimming the book’s Wikipedia page the other day, I didn’t recognize much that I actually comprehended at the time of reading, even things as simple as when and where the book supposedly “took place.” No matter. I’m sure I’ll read it again some day down the line, older and wiser and all that, and if I failed at grasping some pretty fundamental facets of it I still went away with whatever edification comes from the simple act of having spent so many hours in a book/world so clearly the work of a skilled, substantive, stylish author. I breezed through The Crying of Lot 49 last summer as a short palette cleanser after a six month trek through War and Peace, and then read Vineland earlier this year—you wouldn’t believe me if I tried to claim that it largely wasn’t prompted by the then-upcoming Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so I won’t. I enjoyed both of these books, and I “understood” them, at least on a logistical level, more than those Pynchons previous. The announcement of a new Pynchon novel in Shadow Ticket felt serendipitous on multiple personal levels. I’d acquainted myself with his work enough for this to be the first real instance of “anticipation for a new fiction publication” I’d felt since, I don’t know, whatever popular adult fiction I’d been interested in as a teenager (which I’d been literarily reared on via my dad); the preceding decade had mostly been spent reading “classic” literary fiction, your Dostoevskys & Hawthornes & such (in whatever time I could find outside of my obsessive film viewing schedule of course); and I’d only read one novel published in the 2020s up to this point (Michel Houellebecq’s great Annihilation). Secondly, as the work of an author in his late 80s, the late style associations brought by a new Pynchon book came perfectly timed with my work on my book about late style—any time I spent reading Shadow Ticket could be chalked up as research, making myself feel slightly better about trading progress in my own work for pleasure in someone else’s, and would generally be a thematically and therefore aesthetically appropriate addition to my life at this point in time. (If you’re out of the loop, check my last blog post for details, but my book Late Style in Film is still on track to arrive sometime early next year.) Lastly, Shadow Ticket wasn’t to be just a Thomas Pynchon book, but a Thomas Pynchon book set in Milwaukee. As a southeastern Wisconsin lifer, this brought me no small amount of pride, and to see my very own hometown—Waukesha, which lies about 15 miles west of Milwaukee, to get personal for a second—mentioned more than once is enough to be one of those “sorry, this is the only thing I’m gonna be talking about for the next week” kind of things that I will treasure to the point of being kind of sad that there aren’t actually that many people in my local life familiar enough with Pynchon for the coolness of this to even register if I told them about it. I’m less of a local historian than I’d like to be, but everything about Pynchon’s evocation of 1930s Milwaukee and the beer & cheese-ness of it all is just catnip to me, as are the hilarious Pynchonian tangents related to it (from Chapter 13: “Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”). For the record, if you’re interested, here is a list I kept of every Wisconsin city mentioned in the book: Baraboo, Delafield, Grafton, Green Bay, Kenosha, Kewaunee, Madison, Milwaukee, Oconomowoc, Oshkosh, Racine, Sheboygan, Two Rivers, Waukesha, Waupun, Wauwatosa, West Allis, and Wonewoc. Shadow Ticket is surely being proclaimed “slight” by certain critics and readers by virtue of it’s sub-300 page count and seeming lack of grand literary pretentions beyond its simple quasi-metaphysical detective plot, but man if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy reading this more than almost anything in recent memory. The ‘30s setting lets Pynchon go crazy inventing dialogue that’s like a more literarily tangled version of pre-Code Hollywood existentialism, and the way he wields language in general is just a line-by-line treat. He does this thing with vernacular phrases where he’ll throw in little clauses, sometimes offset by commas sometimes not, that shake up a sentence and keep everything just humorously off-balance enough to keep the writing from ever being anything less than alive. It’s very funny without ever diffusing the stakes—to the degree that the actual stakes can be ascertained, an aspect of the book that makes it slippery and mysterious and, again, very funny. If I had to nail down one of Pynchon’s main themes, it would simply be that History is Weird, and that living through it is even weirder. Weird as in funny but also concerning, confusing, and so forth (a phrase Pynchon never gets tired of appending to the end of sentences or paragraphs in Shadow Ticket, and which I never got tired of enjoying the deployment of.) Accusing Pynchon of turning a blind eye to the (very Pynchonian, you know) present day for a tale of conspiracy and confusion in 1932 instead is not just very funny but also to miss the fact that the world has always been Pynchonian: 18th-century early America was Pynchonian, WWII-era Europe was Pynchonian, ‘60s & ‘80s California was Pynchonian, 1930s Milwaukee and pre-WWII Europe was Pynchonian, and, yes, the present day is rather Pynchonian. I’d even argue that Shadow Ticket is not inconsequential to present-day concerns at all, but in fact might be useful for articulating and therefore navigating whatever proto-fascist malaise you might feel we are currently living under. But I leave all that for someone who has more time to get into it, happy just that I could contribute even this casual little piece to the pile of thought in the world and—even though I have been hard at work this year, I promise—to at least get one blogpost up so it doesn’t look like I had a totally blank 2025.

Brief Thoughts on a New Malick Book

 

I didn’t know about this book (Martin Woessner’s Terrence Malick and the Examined Life [2024]) until I randomly happened upon it at the library a couple of months ago. I instinctively checked it out and have been gradually making my way through it during free throw breaks during the NBA playoffs and other interstitial moments in my life, until I finally sped through the last few chapters today because it’s due back and I want it out of the way so I can focus on material more pertinent to my current project. I have some thoughts about it and when I started typing them out it got longer than a tweet, so I decided to write this little blog post, which because written on a whim will be brief and non-exhaustive. Verdict: the book is O.K. It definitely has a decent amount to recommend to anyone interested in Malick—heavy contextualization of the state of philosophy both in general in the mid-to-late 20th century and specifically at Harvard around Malick’s time there in the 1960s, as well as detailed information about the AFI’s inaugural film school and Malick’s activities there; a deeply researched accounting of Malick’s wide and disparate influences both artistic and otherwise (I particularly found insightful the pinpointing of Jean Renoir as a stylistic influence on Malick as it pertains to his penchant for nature montage, including Renoir’s 1959 film Picnic in the Grass, a rare and still-unseen-by-me-because-of-that-reason picture that was the topic of discussion at a March 1970 Center for Advanced Film Studies seminar that Malick introduced); as well as other miscellaneous trivia / interesting ephemera about Malick that I had never heard before or had forgotten about, scattered throughout the book—but my main disappointment with the book can be hinted at by a simple mathematical accounting of the book’s content structure: full chapters on Badlands (47 pages), Days of Heaven (36 pages), The Thin Red Line (37 pages), The New World (37 pages), and The Tree of Life (39 pages), but then only one combined chapter on To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Voyage of Time (43 pages) and on Song to Song and A Hidden Life (47 pages). Woessner’s enthusiasm progressively starts to wane slightly as we hit To the Wonder and Knight of Cups and then reaches an obvious low point with Song to Song, where he goes from mostly hiding behind quotes from dissatisfied and confused critics to speaking outright on his opinion of it being lesser Malick. He still continues to provide interesting reference points and discussion of Malick’s evolution as a film-philosopher, so they aren’t totally worthless, but I’d be lying if I didn’t start to get a little worked-up during the Song to Song section in particular. He comes back to life a bit in the A Hidden Life section, a predictable move, but you can still sense that he’s uncomfortable to a certain degree with Malick’s progressive turn away from what one would probably call philosophy towards what one would probably call theology. His decision to do away with the common grouping of the three contemporary-set films does, however, strike me as usefully thought-provoking; he instead groups The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and Knight of Cups as part of what he calls the “confessional” trilogy—films explicitly based on parts of Malick’s biography—and recategorizes Song to Song next to A Hidden Life, two films that are more explicitly Christian in their outlook. As noted before, Woessner can’t quite hide his skepticism of the theological forwardness of these works, at least to the degree that in his mind it overshadows the philosophical or, in the case of A Hidden Life, the political; as a philosopher and academic, Woessner obviously seems more comfortable with questions than answers, and is noticeably more interested in the searching, wondering films of Malick’s pre-2012 career than his more “didactic,” per him, recent works. But another thing his regrouping of the 2010s films might hint at is an emphasis on Malick the thinker-philosopher rather than Malick the poet-stylist. There is a heavy imbalance throughout the book—I’d generously estimate it at 90/10—between discussion of ideas and discussion of style. I recognize that this is his prerogative as a writer coming from the academic field of philosophy, but I mention it because this seems to be the case for almost every book that gets written on Malick these days (caveat: I might be wrong, I haven’t read basically any of them, and it’s partly for this reason), and because, to me, any true accounting of Malick as an artist needs to grapple at-length with what he’s doing on the very specific level of cinema as an art. Even though Woessner tries to go beyond the academicism of other writings on Malick—the book jacket claims that it “suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer”—as an academic his writing still inherently has an academicism to it that, while certainly readable, can’t quite jump into the thick of life the way many of the texts and films he references are able to. Nevertheless, to repeat the praise from the beginning, there’s enough here to interest the average Malick fanatic to warrant a look; apparently “newly available archival sources” were used by the author, and the information and insight those sources provide is probably the #1 reason why I’d tell someone to pick up the book if they were interested. Finally, part of the reason I find myself with many of the criticisms mentioned here, and that I’ve felt like taking the time to write them out, is that I’ve been increasingly envisioning myself as a writer of books, and it’s something I hope to make a vocation out of if the world will allow it. I’m in the trenches of attempting it right now, and I hope I will have good news to share on that front in the near future. But to return to Malick—after years of mostly refraining from trying to write about his films, I think I’ve finally reached a point where I’m looking forward to the day that I’ll be able to write my own book about them. (Such a book would probably be too concerned with theology to interest many cinephiles and too concerned with cinema to interest many theologians, so who knows how in the world I’d get it published, but that’s a future battle I’ll fight when I get there.) In the meantime, however, reading this new Malick book has inspired me to once again go back and take a chronological look at the films, and to take a very casual, preliminary stab at writing about them. The results of that can be found on my Letterboxd, where as of this writing I’ve scribbled notes about Badlands and Days of Heaven so far.

Shameless Engagement Boosting Blogpost About the Oscars

2023 was the first year of cinema where I happened to watch every nominee for Best Picture since my early days of movie fandom, circa a decade ago, the time in which the Oscars served their brief but instrumental role for me as a bridge from casual moviegoing to hardcore cinephilia. If memory serves, I watched the award ceremony in full for 2014’s movies, and maybe peeked at it for a few minutes for 2015’s, after which I stopped watching or caring—and thus ends my history with the prestigious Academy Awards. 

But, like I said, I watched the ten nominated films this year, and as a trickle of writing motivation has reemerged in me after a year-plus drought I thought it would be funny and/or interesting to make use of it by writing about the films that will be attending Oscar’s big night, as nothing sets the film world on fire like a new batch of highly publicized films to have a “take” on, and it tickles me (if no one else) to dedicate a post to such a subject on this esoteric little blog of mine. Why not attempt to draw more readership (as of this writing, my last post has received a whopping 47 views!) by shamelessly tapping into the zeitgeist? *Cracks knuckles*.

I don’t feel much impulse towards making State of Cinema diagnoses here whatsoever, so I’ll just say that what’s interesting to me about these nominees is that, looking at the list, I notice that all ten of the films have at one point or another been used as punching bags by certain camps of viewers and critics, bête noires that various people online have been vocal about not only being worthy of indifference, dislike, or even hatred, but as summing up, as being shining examples of, some of contemporary cinema’s worst tendencies. Such attacks—especially when coming into contact with perturbed defenders of the target—have catalyzed some of the most mind-numbing, head-scratching, brain-dulling “discourses” of the year. What would online film culture be without them? (Don’t answer that.) But anyone who is even halfway familiar with my whole thing will know that I try my best to not fall into what I see as the fallacies of criticism that litter much of these discussions, and to approach all films with a heart/mind openness that seeks opportunities for edification rather than occasions for excoriation, to put it succinctly.

And I found those opportunities, to varying degrees, in all ten of these films. I watched over 100 films that premiered in 2023, and without double-checking I would say only a few of them were things I ultimately didn’t find much edification in, relatively speaking. Movies are incredibly rich and complex objects; one thing that I can guarantee is that when reading someone’s thoughts or opinion on a film, positive or negative, you will never, ever encounter anywhere near 100% of the richness or complexity that that film possesses. Even something as simple and seemingly discountable as a tree in the background of a random shot has a value that cannot be accounted for within the thumbs-up or thumbs-down nature of any given person’s post-viewing verdict, whether it’s a joke Letterboxd review or a 10,000-word Substack essay; now expand that principle to a whole film, and you start to appreciate the absurdity of the tossed-off take that is online film culture’s bread and butter. As I like to say: it is impossible to do good film criticism without first realizing the impossibility of doing film criticism. And maybe one day I will borrow Richard Linklater’s debut title and write something called “It’s Impossible To Learn To Watch Movies By Reading (What Passes For) Film Criticism.”

Which is maybe a long way of announcing that I will not actually be writing about the ten films nominated for Best Picture. Well, I will—sort of. To do the films justice as films would take too much time and effort, and anyway I want to use this opportunity as an excuse to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, which is not film criticism, but rather: film criticism criticism. That is, take as my starting point not the films, but criticism of the films, mainly addressing various flaws in film critical thinking via writing on these specific films, which should, if I do it the way I’m imagining it, end up producing writing on the actual films, if in an unorthodox, circuitous way. We’ll see.

I’ve decided that rather than hunt down particular pieces on each of the films, or expend untold effort trying to synthesize common criticisms I’ve seen of each film, I will simply use the writing of one film critic and one film critic only. The (un)lucky winner: Richard Brody. I select him for a number of reasons: first, because I know he’s written about all ten films in one place or another; second, because there is no other tenured film critic of his stature that I respect more. Brody was my first favorite film critic, and even though over the years I’ve outgrown the need for such a thing, I still enjoy reading his thoughts, and either enthusiastically agreeing with them (as is often the case) or testing my own critical philosophies against them. He writes with a sharpness and clarity of thought that makes both scenarios fun. And I know that on the off chance that Mr. Brody reads this, he’ll take it like the gentleman and scholar that he is; anyway, it’s hardly worth noting when I disagree with a critic, because the only person I agree with 100% on all matters philosophy of film viewing is myself, and at times not even him.

Before we get started, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that I’m very aware of a certain ridiculousness and irresponsibility that comes with dedicating a year-end piece of sorts like this to the ten films that by dint of their Oscar-nominated status have already received and will continue to receive the most attention out of all the hundreds, thousands of films that 2023 gave us. Surely my time, efforts, and blog’s however-little-read space could be better used to shine a light on the many great new films that first came my way in 2023 that are much more neglected, much more unjustly derided, or simply put much more deserving of having words written after them. For example, radical new international films like in water, Pacifiction, Trenque Lauquen, The Plains, or De humani corporis fabrica; new and surprising works from old masters like Master Gardener, Ferrari, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Padre Pio, The Boy and the Heron, Napoleon, or Silent Night; shorts from recently departed greats like Trailer for the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’ or Passing Time; audacious films from younger directors like Beau Is Afraid or Infinity Pool;  continued greatness from established filmmakers like Asteroid City, Priscilla, or Showing Up; unjustly derided films like Gran Turismo, The Boogeyman, or The Exorcist: Believer; smaller hand-crafted films like The Sweet East, Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater, or The Adults; non-English films that made it stateside like Afire, Fallen Leaves, Godland, The Taste of Things, Walk Up, Unrest, or Godzilla: Minus One; fascinating objects like Marlowe, The Lost King, A Haunting in Venice, BlackBerry, or Shadow Kingdom; French-language films crossing the Atlantic like Scarlet, Saint Omer, Tori and Lokita, One Fine Morning, Revoir Paris, or Other People’s Children; films hiding out on Netflix like The Killer, May December, Reptile, the first part of Rebel Moon, or Wes Anderson’s quartet of Roald Dahl films beginning with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar; to name just a few.

So hopefully I can make it up to you all in the near future with some more esoteric posts about more neglected things, but for now—the Oscar nominees for Best Picture (in preferential order):

(PS: Scroll past all the word blocks to skip to the fun part where I pick my own Oscar nominees/winners.)

....

10. American Fiction 

Of the ten films here, American Fiction was the one I was most on the edge about seeing—part of what ultimately makes a philosophy of viewing like mine possible (in other words, what gets me tagged as “that guy who likes every movie”) is that I rarely ever put myself in a situation of watching something that, based on appearances, seems unlikely to be of much interest. Film history would be overwhelmingly large even if we had twice the expected lifespan, so prioritization is a must. But in the end I couldn’t pass up a film with a title like American Fiction; the world of American literature, especially modern American literature, seemed too esoteric of a subject to produce something not worth watching. (Also, I admit, a small sense of completionism compelled me, as I was sitting at 9/10 nominees seen.) Although the topic interests me I can’t claim any expertise (I’m too busy reading War and Peace et al. to seemingly ever pick up something contemporary); still, the film’s conjuring of the modern publishing landscape reads as humorously accurate to me, where serious, challenging fiction is an afterthought to the all-consuming pull of mass-marketability, be it in the form of cheap thrills/romance/etc. or, as here, socially conscious fiction intended to flatter the average middlebrow liberal. This is something I have cause to casually think about pretty often, and though if presented with a representative of each option I will nine times out of ten choose to read the socially useless doorstop that aspires to high art, I’m glad that American Fiction ultimately finds an interesting dialectical line to walk within this conversation. Still, the film’s real aspirations are of the meta-fictional kind, and the way the story eventually infiltrates the film industry finally leads to a moment just before the end of the film that was to me far and away the most interesting, complex and edifying thing about it, a shot-reverse shot between Jeffrey Wright’s novelist and a black extra chilling on a film set in slave garb with airpods in, which conjures a hundreds-years-long story of oppression, representation, and exploitation that raises more questions than answers, which is a cliché phrase that I use to simply stand in for the inarticulatable complexity that cinema is capable of trafficking in.

Brody calls the film a watered-down version of the novel it’s based on—Pericval Everett’s Erasure (2001), which sounds fascinating—and I can’t argue with the examples he gives to prove it. He also calls it “style-challenged,” and although I agree the film’s form isn’t anything to write poetry after, I do recall a couple memorable scene transition cuts, including one that transitions from a character death to a close-up shot of a bird flying across the sky, which is the sort of thing that really does the trick for me. Brody writes that “it was impossible not to feel that something was missing—some sense of style and abandon,” relative to the book, even before he had read it. A film need not have any loyalty to its source material, content- or form-wise, and a film by definition cannot be “missing” anything—it is what it is—but I mostly just take this to mean exactly what Brody says in the introduction to the piece where he writes on the film, which is basically that some works of art are less interesting than other works of art, which, relative to the best films of 2023, happens to be the case here. Which is much less sexy and provocative than calling this a “bad movie,” a phrase which pretty much implies the same thing, but also a phrase the connotations of which set people off in the direction of anti-nuance, anti-complexity, and anti-[a lot of important things when thinking/talking about art], besides showing me that the user of it probably harbors his or her fair share of critical fallacies. So you won’t ever see me using it.

9. Poor Things 

I had originally planned to wait to watch this until it came out on DVD, but I ended up seeing it in theatres due to an unfortunate circumstance involving a power outage that left me unable to see my original selection (The Zone of Interest) and unwilling to return home with nothing to show for my travels. It’s a compliment to the film that I didn’t regret my decision to stay. This is one of those films that is entertaining and interesting and original enough on a minute-to-minute basis to make me not really be all that worked up about what I found unedifying about its contents, so I’ll mostly leave that be—suffice it to say that what many have pointed out, Brody included, about its radical feminism perhaps being neither as radical or feminist as it would like it to be, is in the ballpark of where my unedification would lie. Even so, the film still manages to stage a general narrative arc of personal enlightenment for Emma Stone’s character that ended for me on a surprisingly moving note, and a funny one, too—as far as such clever movie-world shenanigans go. But what I really want to talk about is style. So much of the criticism of the movie I’ve seen from cinephile folks seems to come in the form of nausea at the film’s retro-futurist aesthetic and fisheye-friendly form. Brody terms this Lanthimos’ “overbearingly ornate décor.” His style is “without substance; it’s simply ornamental, imposingly garish, insignificant,” and “over-reliant on fish-eye lenses... as if he were conducting real-estate tours of his scenery.” Having your décor be too ornate, having your style be too garish, and using a fish-eye camera lens too much are all crimes that I cannot find listed in the encyclopedia of legitimate movie criticism—they’re made up, and had Brody found substance in the film’s content I think it’s probable that the above list of criticisms would disappear. It’s the classic all style no substance argument, which has been trotted out again and again by critics for over a hundred years now. I see what is meant here—as hinted at above, I agree that “substance”-wise Poor Things is not in the top tier of this year’s films—but to me no style is without substance, as the style in and of itself makes up its own substance. The “substance” of a stylized shot of a Victorian bridge against a deep blue sky is that Victorian bridge against that deep blue sky. Additionally what it cuts from and what it cuts to. Plus whatever sound or silence is on the audio track. Et cetera. It all goes together to make what we call cinema. I don’t think calling any style ornamental and insignificant really says much, given that without it there would be no movie at all. (Forgive me if I’m taking the words too literally.) Still, to my eyes Poor Things appears passionate and excited to be a work of moving image art/entertainment, and its grab bag style seems to match the immature yet creative nature of its protagonist—at the very least, it’s something new, and odd, which is invigorating and of interest in itself, at least to me. Accusations of “baby’s first weird movie” are ironic, because that’s kind of what the movie is about—while watching I admit to thinking of words from Stan Brakhage’s famous opening to his Metaphors on Vision (1960): “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’ How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?” The film is wondrously awash in color of every kind, and at times seems to take on the toddler’s glee of the world that teems around them. Perhaps this perspective—understandably so, in aspects—was ultimately a bit too infantile for many adult cinephiles to fall for.

8. Maestro 

It pains me for the sophomore feature from the director of A Star Is Born (2018) to be so low on this list—not because it’s not an interesting movie, but because I think I failed to really appreciate the idiosyncrasies of it on first viewing, which is the only viewing I’ve had. (So take what I say here with a grain of first impressions’ salt.) Even after an introductory paragraph calling it out as a “bad critical habit,” Brody mostly plays the game of basing his review of Maestro around what was left out, good and bad and complex, from Leonard Bernstein’s real life. “The danger of yielding to that feeling is that one spends more time and effort thinking about what a movie isn’t than confronting what it is. Yet this emptiness, in its way, often proves—as it does in Maestro—so pervasive that a movie seemingly undermines itself.” In a way, I don’t disagree—on first glance Maestro does come across as rather vacant, at least where conventional cinematic drama and emotion is concerned. But I think to stop there is to stop short of just where this movie becomes interesting, and to give in to cliché movie viewing and reviewing tendencies. In order to make any headway with this movie, I think we have to double down on exactly what Brody bypasses: to spend time and effort confronting what the movie is, not what it isn’t. I can’t say I learned very much about Leonard Bernstein from the motion picture Maestro directed by Bradley Cooper. But this isn’t necessarily the purpose of movies; if I wanted to do that, I’d pick up a biography and read it—and with pleasure. I can’t even say I felt very much of Leonard Bernstein’s inner life from the motion picture Maestro directed by Bradley Cooper. Which also—as hard as it is to say—isn’t necessarily the purpose of movies. But isn’t it?? It very often is—for example, just think back to last year’s TÁR, itself a strange movie but still containing a moving scene of a video of Bernstein being watched by his fictional protégé, which aroused in me a more conventionally emotional feeling than anything I felt in Maestro—and yet where does it say it has to be? Once we get past this admittedly difficult hurdle, and rewire our brains towards really, honestly taking the movie for what it is, a new field opens in front of us with many avenues towards appreciation. For example, the idea that this movie is much more about Bradley Cooper than it is about Leonard Bernstein. Or that the nearly grotesque imitation-acting that’s going on by Cooper and Carey Mulligan isn’t just Oscar mugging, but some kind of physical-spiritual possession that is attempting to conjure a three-dimensional ghost-image of history. Or that this hyper-material scheme combined with the fantastical, elliptical scene- and narrative-structure is out to reach some kind of bizarre, quotidian yet transcendental meaning out of man-in-history cinematic storytelling. Something is going on here, and I think it is highly unusual, thus why many people were left stumped, indifferent, or disgusted. (Or you loved it, in a normal way, and my first viewing was just a misviewing and most of what I’m saying makes me sound loony.) When late in the film Bernstein pulls up to a concert venue in his car and the radio is playing the exact part of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” that references Bernstein, this can’t be a corny meta-joke, it must be a sign that Bradley Cooper is operating on a galaxy brain level of actor-director-shamanist that most are not privy to. Or so it seems to me.

Look, I have to see the film again. Years from now this might look like complete gibberish to me. But this is, in the here and now, my brief attempt to go beyond the kind of critical outlook that shuts down when not provided with what a “great film” is supposed to give you. Brody ends his review calling it “a failure of imaginative sympathy, or, simply, of imagination.” Brody shows his own imagination in all the details that he subjectively calls to mind about Bernstein that would have, in his mind, made a more complex and edifying film about Bernstein—and these details are edifying to read in and of themselves. But I believe it is the job of the critic and viewer, when faced with a film that does not conventionally satisfy, to first test if the failure of imagination is one’s own, rather than the filmmaker’s. The flexing of imagination it takes to perform this test is worth doing for its own sake, anyway. And you may just happen upon something that makes the film click.

 

7. Anatomy of a Fall

Something I find charming about Brody is that when he really wants to go for the jugular in judging a film’s form, he goes straight for the TV comparison. “It’s prestige cinema,” he writes about Anatomy of a Fall. Later: “The direction of the courtroom scenes has the blandly declarative generality of a TV movie cramming its script details in ahead of the next commercial.” It’s been many years since I watched a contemporary prestige TV series that wasn’t made by someone I followed there from movies, so I try my best to keep silent about the medium. Yet I think I understand what Brody is getting at when he makes the comparison, which is simply that the form does the bare minimum; that is, it’s simply there so the script can be filmed. Brody calls the form “numbingly conventional”—but viewed from a more forgiving lens, couldn’t we just call it classical? It shows what it needs to show, simply and efficiently. Admittedly, of all the nominees Anatomy of a Fall is probably the one I that remember the least, which could be chalked up to having seen some of the others more recently and also, maybe, to the merely illustrative nature of the form, what I might more cynically term somewhat forgettable; although the images I do recall I don’t think deserve to be called that.

In his review Brody does a lot of script nitpicking. He lists examples of how the film merely reinforces “prefabricated attitudes,” “artistic failings [that] are obvious and distracting throughout.” Most of them have to do with how the film ostensibly sets the viewer up to exonerate Sandra Hüller’s character from the get-go. To put it bluntly, this seems more a problem with viewers that have script-brain than a problem with the film itself. None of these examples, in the nitty gritty of the film, are or should be seen as script elements, but rather 3D characters or characteristics that complicate the film as a whole, as a world, rather than just its did-she-or-didn’t-she narrative. (Well, maybe one—the prosecuting attorney, which seems more an issue of the profession rather than the film’s depiction of it; for whatever reason, prosecutors in movies are the epitome of unlikable to me, and I have an easier time empathizing with much more ostensibly despicable characters than with them.) Brody’s criticisms imply something that I think a lot of viewers, for or against the movie, take to be the case: that the movie is in fact a did-she-or-didn’t-she drama. To me—and this may just be a symptom of the way my brain works, which I like about it—the film seems decidedly unconcerned about “what actually happened.” Even Hüller’s character herself seems unconcerned, and defends herself neither out of a sadistic desire to get away with it (if she did it) nor out of a deep-rooted need to be seen as innocent (if she didn’t). Everytime I see a Twitter poll about the true anatomy of the titular fall, I see the Point being missed. I think the movie has a lot more up its sleeve than being a courtroom drama, and that the old Hollywood point of reference isn’t Preminger but Hitchcock, where the entire accident and resulting trial is one huge MacGuffin used merely to hang the real—and much less sensational—drama on. And anyway, nobody “did it”—it’s a movie, and I think the movie knows it’s a movie, in the best way, where the fake is used to get at the real, fooling the audience into contact with the latter via the spectacle of the former. So while I agree with Brody that the film wasn’t exactly deserving of the Palme d’or—the winner rarely is—given some of the other films in competition, I also don’t feel like taking away any laurels from a film that ends with a shot and an idea as great as the one that ends this film—another one of those moments that cinema is so good at, where a runtime’s worth of accumulation suddenly settles into something inarticulatably deep and complex, and then the credits roll.

 

6. Past Lives

When Brody finally published words on Past Lives there was one particular line that I kept seeing passed around victoriously on Twitter by all those who had been oh-so-rebelliously proclaiming the film “mid” for weeks and months before: “But Past Lives is a movie of A students, by A students, for A students so accustomed to analyzing works for their structure and their unities that they connect around a movie that, apart from the actors’ own presences, offers nothing else.” Brody again finds himself imagining a different, better version of the movie he’s seen and using it to beat up on the actual film as it is; he bristles at the too-clean structure and the underwritten characters, at a strong story idea that doesn’t succeed in transferring the passions of those behind the movie into the movie itself—“it’s a movie waiting to be realized.” The film Brody imagines in his head may very well be, were it to exist for comparison, a more edifying movie. But it doesn’t exist, and once again looking at the film for what it actually is can lead us down some interesting paths of appreciation. The film’s carefully calibrated three-act structure, of equally spaced time jumps from youth to young adulthood to adulthood, of clear thematic and conceptual throughlines, need not be ungraciously attacked as some kind of overly perfect cinematic schema that is more script than cinema. Why can’t a film be structured so? Movies are not real life, so movies do not inherently need to capture some kind of messiness that so often invades or even defines our lives over any given number of years. The clear lines of Past Lives strike me less as film school screenwriting tics than as signs of a certain structural tenderness that works towards an overall gentility and maturity re: the nature of time. And anyways—who cares about the script?? Anyone who speaks of a “good script” or a “bad script” shouldn’t be let within fifty miles of film criticism. Start your own genre of script criticism if you must, but don’t bring that garbage over here. A film is a film, not a stack of paper with words on it. Brody even gestures at this idea when mentioning that the only thing the film offers is “the actors’ own presences”; but the concept of an underwritten character is a fantasy, because what makes a character is what the camera sees and what the microphone hears as it is trained upon the actor—presence, a three-dimensional being, in all its material and emotional particularity, to the degree that the filmmakers are able to capture it via their particular style. Last year I tweeted out a vague thought related to Past Lives’ form by comparing it to one of my favorite films of last decade, Kogonoda’s Columbus (2017), another film people took umbrage with for being too... formalized, I guess is how I’ll put it. This isn’t a criticism to me; it’s a description. I said that “I have a soft spot for stuff like Past Lives or Columbus, aestheticized stillness, ‘obvious’ themes/emotions, similar to Netflix romance originals where beautiful people w/script-induced problems are perfectly articulate and/or movie-inarticulate.... It’s just another version of the heightened/distorted/etc. reality that cinema can be.” I stand by this, because so many criticisms of so many movies can be easily and freeingly dismissed by a simple declaration that, “OK, cinema can be this, too.” And maybe Past Lives’ story concept was just too much catnip for me, but in the end I was moved by the film’s patience, its visual tenderness, its mature handling of fantasy/reality, and its contemplative, sit-and-stare approach to the complexity that flows from life multiplied by time.

 

5. Barbie

...and now for some real fun! The most enduring pleasure—or for many, pain—across the year on film twitter was Brody popping up regularly to effusively praise Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as the best thing since sliced bread, haters and naysayers (of both himself and the movie) be damned. While I can’t go quite as far as Brody here—the film landed at a high third place on his year-end list—I have nothing but admiration for the way he bobbed and weaved with an Ali-esque grace through a whole host of film critical fallacies that the movie inspired in many other critics. Where many “serious” cinephiles found an apparently self-explanatory and annoyingly pompous rallying cry in Amy Taubin’s succinct hand-wave dismissal of the film (“It’s about a fucking doll”), Brody stood behind the more mature and imaginative belief that meaningful, serious, personal art could be made out of any subject—yes, even a doll.  Others pointed to the fact that the film was produced by the doll’s own manufacturer as some kind of obvious evidence that it de facto could not be a serious film, and in fact was nothing more than a “toy commercial,” whereas Brody saw an artist confronting her own circumstances of art-making with subversive leaps of imagination in a film that unashamedly addresses the real via the fake: “She doesn’t borrow pop culture ironically; she embraces it passionately and directly, in order to transform it, and thereby to transform viewer’s relationships to it and render that relationship active, critical, non-nostalgic.” Part of Brody’s defense of the film was also an impassioned defense of anti-realism, of the kind of stylish fantasy that—because of its infinity of possibilities compared to realism’s—is the stronger test of a filmmaker’s imaginative capacities. And I pretty much agree that Gerwig passed the test with flying colors, albeit relatively speaking; compared to something like, say, this year’s Beau Is Afraid, the images/editing don’t inspire the same enraptured, mouth-agape awe in me. Even Gerwig’s last effort, Little Women (2019), sings to me on a level of montage that far outpaces not just Barbie, but almost all Hollywood films of the last five years—yet, along with Lady Bird (2017), Brody for some reason finds it a much lesser work. The substance of my own appreciation of Barbie is, however, a few steps removed from Brody’s. Although many commentators attempted to recruit the film into the culture wars as some kind of ultra-feminist, radically anti-patriarchal text, tears were brought to my (male) eyes more for the film’s complexly simple evocation of Being. Of defining yourself not by being a man or a woman but by being a person who lives in the world with other people. Of existing not to be reliant on but responsible to those other people. (For me, the documentary analog to Barbie that I would encourage everyone to seek out is the incredible Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry [2021], a film that opens itself up to the complexities of Living as a Human more than anything else in recent memory.) On the surface “I am Ken-ough” may have looked like a cute slogan offered to wrap up a side character’s arc, but in the trenches of the film it hit like the kind of motto that if taken to heart could be a legitimate salve to gender relations. Maybe I’m a pushover (and if so, glad to be one), but the film’s “cliché” closing montage through its punchline ending felt like a moving paean to being human that called on the history of non-human yearning in cinema from Disney’s Pinocchio to Spielberg’s A.I. There were a couple dozen films I saw in 2023 that were more interesting than Barbie (just to keep everything in perspective here), but few other films produced more consistently short-sighted takes from the serious cinephile set, which to someone who aims to rid cinephilia of such things was, although not unexpected, somewhat disappointing. “But the film made a billion dollars, it doesn’t need defenders!” The almighty dollar does not speak for me.

 

4. The Zone of Interest

From one of Brody’s most loved to one of his most hated; another film which repeatedly set online discourse aflame, and another one which made my brain ache for all the critical fallacies which it inspired—more understandable fallacies, I will grant, given the film’s serious and sensitive subject matter, and yet fallacies all the same. Many of the negative reactions to the film, Brody’s included, spout a similar refrain: that Glazer’s film doesn’t “pull it off.” What they’re referring to of course is the film’s formal and conceptual conceit, which you’re probably well aware of even if you haven’t actually seen the film. Herein lies the problem: the vast majority of critiques aimed at the film seem to address themselves to the film’s concept, what the film is on paper, rather than to the film itself. This goes back to something I mentioned in the introduction to this piece, which is essentially that movies are way more complex than we subsequently pretend they are when we talk about them—there is way more going on. For example, when critics talk about The Zone of Interest, they mention the mise-en-scheme of immobile, surveillance-esque montage and the film’s geographic relationship to the walls of the concentration camp, but I’ve yet to see anyone pay detailed attention to the actual aesthetic substance of the film’s images beyond their role in the conceptual program. Let’s merely begin with the film’s opening shot, of the family lounging in swimwear on a grassy hill above a lake, the camera seemingly hiding behind them in some tall grass. Can we speak of the beauty of this shot? Of its simple, ontological pleasure, of its sharp sound-image capturing of man in nature, of its camera-stolen staged reality? (And then of course the complicated co-existence of this beauty with the brutal ugliness of the surrounding goings-on, as underscored later in a river-bathing scene.) And as the montage unfolds, can we speak of the pure visual and aesthetic interest of this bold editing blueprint? Of the totally fascinating cinematic pleasure of things like, say, the avant-garde collage of flowers at one point (recalling another of the year’s boldest films, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener)? The movie cannot be approached just on the level of idea—it must be grappled with on the level of material, cinematic reality. Brody, like others (even those who responded positively), watches the movie and then produces his read on what it does (and his problems with said doings) as though it were a simple matter of film critical math, Glazer’s apparent intentions neatly added into the equation. (A quick Googling of “the intentional fallacy” would do good for many here, by the way.) “Showing off hands kept knowingly clean is no less vain or vulgar than getting them naïvely dirty,” writes Brody of the “faux-abstinence” of the film in a tweet inspired by flipping the idea behind Serge Daney’s famous “Tracking Shot in Kapo” essay. We’re again at a point where I think it would be more edifying for people if they simply let the film be what it is without accusing it of posturing. I haven’t read a lot from the film’s makers, but it may very well be that Glazer’s stated intentions were misguided from the get go or were unsuccessfully realized. However, the film is its own beast, and lives and breathes on its own, apart from its makers, on the screen, for those who view it. Like for me, who came away from it with the impression that the film basically amounted to a simple family drama—dad is forced to take a new position in his company and has to work away from home for a while—made fascinating and involving and complicated by its incredibly specific historical context. Part of the problem for many viewers, I am guessing, stems from an understandable inability to grant human three-dimensionality (and therefore any shred of empathy) to historical characters that represent, culturally, the personification of evil. But if total moral complexity is allowed to stay, one grants oneself a more dense film, and the resulting feeling of confusion and sadness in the face of quotidian moral failings is more robustly human. The film’s audacious jump to the modern day utterly moved me, in a juxtaposition that does as much to complicate our relationship to history as the more well-received coda of Killers of the Flower Moon. So in the end, I walked away having experienced a serious work of art rather than merely some kind of intellectual art installation. The mélange of carefully calibrated artfulness and unsentimental moral reckoning made the film a thrilling alien object that shook me to a rare and unique degree.

 

3. The Holdovers

Much of the criticism directed at The Holdovers involves Alexander Payne’s decision to not only set the film at the beginning of the 1970s but to also give it the veneer of the kind of movie made back then. The “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” appraisals wrote themselves, and in turn so did criticisms of the film’s perceived nostalgia. “Not only does this hermetically sealed, historically reduced drama falsify the times in which the movie is set, it falsifies the characters and turns them into automata of the plot’s mechanism,” writes Brody. The real core of the movie’s nostalgia is “a cinematic nostalgia for an earlier generation’s coddled mainstream, one fabricated by Hollywood’s calculated suppression of whatever might risk controversy too wide or serious to be monetized.” As is a recurring theme here, Brody spends a whole paragraph listing things he thought should have been in the movie, such as the various political ferments circa 1970 that “it was impossible to be alive, even as a teenager, and not be aware of....” I won’t rehash my argument against such critical maneuvers, so I’ll just say that if Brody wants to direct a movie so bad, he should(—again; to anyone with a file of 1995’s Liability Crisis, my DMs are wiiiiide open.) Part of the problem is taking Payne’s gesture of setting his film when he does and making it look like what he does in bad faith. Brody posits that the film “returns to a way of telling a story that reflects what, to Payne, comes off as a simpler, clearer, perhaps more humane time.” Regardless of what I think Payne’s reasoning behind his decision was, the film bears out a human complexity on the level of story and character and environment that makes such a statement appear unfair. Payne has more than acquitted himself in telling a modern day story—The Descendants (2011) and Nebraska (2013) are both contemporary classics—and even a futuristic one with Downsizing (2017), and all of these films contain the same attention to detail in story and character and environment as The Holdovers. But I do think a 1970-set drama blanketed by a sheen of faux-film grain does allow for a certain purifying of all these things, a removal of distractions of sorts, so as to really, truly get down to the business of telling a complex story on a movie screen, where that story and its complexity is all that matters. Brody is spot-on when he says that “the movie is a pile of clichés reprocessed with such loving immediacy that it feels as if Payne were discovering them for himself.” À la another director who debuted in the ‘90s, James Gray, Payne shows an uncommon and old-fashioned dedication to the art of storytelling that is decidedly unsexy. First time feature film writer David Hemingson provides a script that is classically shapen and which doles out character information parallel to the film’s progression, in Good Script fashion. We saw Brody call the characters “automata of the plot’s mechanism,” and in the sense that is absolutely true—but I can’t use it as a pejorative, because this is simply how much great cinema, especially classic Hollywood cinema, works: characters follow a predetermined path from the beginning of a movie to the end of a movie. (There are other types of movies, and those are great too, but it doesn’t make these not great as well.) Of all the Best Picture nominees, The Holdovers is in a sense the least original; but in another sense it’s one of the most radical. To make another Gray comparison, Payne’s art here is not in wowing us with the new, but reacquainting us with the old, at a deeper level—he actively doubles down on what came before, and as a result, inherently produces something new. Contributing to the newness is the simple fact that it is 2023, not 1970, and the film is not actually shot on film, but merely a digital facsimile of it. The act is not quite as radical and rewarding as that of, say, Mank (2020)—which merely claimed to copy 1930s movies on its way to looking like nothing else has ever looked—but it still creates a dissonance with modern moviegoing that forces the contemporary viewer into a new mode of seeing and hearing, and thus perhaps a new way of being-with-a-film, one that’s more still and slow and pushes you into engagement with the film (and by extension, life) at a more thoroughly enveloping level. Ultimately The Holdovers was 2023’s humblest film this side of Hong Sang-soo, and thus for me a radical gesture, not only cinematically but existentially. It rewards a sensitivity to movie- and life-things in the way the best films always do.

 

2. Killers of the Flower Moon

Scorsese’s latest groundshaking opus was Brody’s #1 movie of the year when it came time for list-making, so I’ve been afforded a rare opportunity to tag team with him re: this film’s thunderous greatness before we end this little exercise at a final site of disagreement. The enormous amount of movie Killers of the Flower Moon contains within its brisk three-and-a-half hours is appropriate for the enormity of the subject that Scorsese tackles, which is basically nothing less than injustice itself, and history’s forgetting and/or exploitation of it. The film’s story sprawls across its American landscape and into every pocket of Osage County’s population, roaming from its newly wealthy Native people to the white settlers who’ve arrived to strip it from them and everything in between. The teeming sense of a community on the brink of and in the midst of uninvestigated tragedy is as rich and detailed and unique a creation as American cinema has ever seen thanks to Apple’s generous $200 million loan to one of the premiere artists in the world of film art going back fifty years. The film is astoundingly watchable while still striking a fascinatingly unique chord in the history of megabudget mise-en-scène—this could very well be the formal and moral endpoint of Scorsese’s run of gangster/gangster-adjacent films going back to Goodfellas (1990) and through Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and The Irishman (2019), the last of which heralded this end-of-career downshift away from the vivacious thrills & kills mentality of those earlier films and towards a more haunted register of trans-historical sadness. The kills in Killers are absolutely numb, totally gleeless, unglamorized, and dully hyper-material, scored by silence—the sound of a gunshot and a body slumped to the dirt. There isn’t even a hint of vicarious thrill; indeed, they actively hurt to witness, and the way Scorsese and longtime editor / fellow octogenarian Thelma Schoonmaker cut to them unlinearly in the midst of the unfolding quotidian horrors is a brutal and bitter artistic choice. Killers of the Flower Moon is not a traditional movie in any sense beyond its basic Griffith-descended film grammar (in fact the mass of characters and extras dodging in and out of Rodrigo Prieto’s camera frame feels like something out of The Pigs of Musketeer Alley, given the period setting); the performances by dual Scorsese legends DiCaprio and DeNiro are ungainly, actorly creations of complex near-mugging that play on both stars’ talent for bumbling charm, which feed into a movie-wide contrast between the whites and natives, whose performances are furiously and calmly naturalistic, as led by Lily Gladstone. What this contributes to is a deeply complex rendering of human nature uneasily summarized or explained, which is appropriate for an historical tale that defies our common sense understanding of what people are capable of—hence the difficulty for some in being “convinced” by the central portrait of a marriage, as little of it is spelled out beyond the bodies and faces and voices of DiCaprio and Gladstone. “The movie doesn’t explain what Mollie is thinking while her sisters are dying young,” writes Brody, “or while she’s getting sicker during Ernest’s treatments. It doesn’t explain what Ernest thinks when he’s first put up to nonviolent crime and then is dispatched on lethal errands. The character psychology of Killers of the Flower Moon is minimal—because Scorsese instead presses its action furiously, urgently, onto the screen as if it were something like dramatized documentary in the first person, his own bearing of witness.” Part of what I find fascinating about the film’s form is its similarity to the kind of docudrama series one might find on, say, the History Channel, all while still being supremely cinematic—soaring drone shots over masses of cattle and oil fields, landscape shots of flowers and dancing natives, etc. While retaining the complexity of a movie, Scorsese explicitly makes a moral history lesson, something that educates as much as (if not more than) it entertains. Hence why Scorsese’s final cameo is so meaningful and moving, for all the obvious reasons and more; it transcends the film and direct-addresses the audience in a way that both does and does not break the fourth wall, speaking to history and to the present, to both the audience and himself, with a dead-serious compassion that is all the more heartbreaking because, for the people it commemorates, it comes a century too late. Such is living through history, and with this film Scorsese has written it with not just lightning but thunder as well. I left the theater shocked and shaken, and knowing that no words would do it justice, just as these haven’t.

 

1. Oppenheimer

I don’t even know where to start with this one, as Brody is so wrong on so many counts, and this film is so magnificent in so many ways. You know what? Maybe I’ll just leave him out of this one, because at a certain point there’s no use either reading or reacting to criticism that flat out does not respect the film in front of them as the film in front of them. We’ve already seen this before, and it’s maybe Brody’s favorite fallacy to try and get away with. But that won’t fly here. Here is a quote that wins the prize of most outlandish thing I’ve read from him as part of this little project: “For long stretches of the film, Nolan’s direction is a merely literal depiction of actors dispensing dialogue with efficiency but without flair; if his name weren’t attached, the direction might well be ascribed to a serial-television journeyman.” (Emphasis mine.) What? What?! Oppenheimer only represents maybe the most serious attempt at Soviet montage at a big budget level in the history of modern American cinema, but sure, what you said. “The movie is as sluggish as if Nolan were underlining the script’s most salient passages onscreen, and, with a more vigorous pace, it could have amplified the script without adding a minute of screentime.” Yeah, sure—a three-hour long historical biopic 50% of which is in black & white made close to a billion US dollars despite being “sluggish” and not having a “vigorous pace.” What film was being watched? Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame only went into another artistic stratosphere to conjure up a project with such immaculate rhythm and pacing that it is nothing less than pure visual music from IMAX frame #1 on. The opening fifteen minutes or so is already maybe the most iconic editing sequence in recent cultural memory, and rightly so: Nolan intersperses young Oppenheimer’s school years with subatomic visions, and his artistic and scientific intake with scenes of a troubled mind straining towards the bleeding edge of intellectual modernity. Despite its incredibly dense wordiness at times, Oppenheimer takes an image-first (and cut-second) approach to cinematic storytelling. Cillian Murphy’s face becomes it’s own vast and infinite terrain as close-ups turn into abstract portraits (like the Picasso he views in the abovementioned sequence) and reaction shots become glimpses into not just emotion but soul and conscience. Nolan stages a drama both immense and intimate via the counterintuitive use of bulky 65 mm IMAX film on a by-all-accounts high-focus high-paced shoot. The energy and vitality of every single filmed moment is astonishing. The film is, in one word, a symphony. Nolan’s ambitions have only been growing and his art has kept up with him every step of the way. Everything is bolder; more intuitive. Each cut speeds into the next with a confidence and a purpose that would make Eisenstein and Griffith lock eyes from across a hypothetical screening room. The film’s play with time and competing perspectives ricochets into a complex web of drama that accumulates morsel after morsel of emotional and intellectual information in order to reconstruct the man Robert J. Oppenehimer via cinematic mosaic, all while still letting him remain enigmatic, an Other that we will never be able to fully access, a man of contradiction and paradox and nuance. The world doesn’t like complicated people. And vice versa: people don’t like a complicated world. And yet Nolan graphs as much world-historical complexity as he can muster onto this story of the bomb and the man who made it, from the tiniest invisible details all the way to a God’s eye view of a planet racing towards self-destruction. At the end of the day cinema has nothing to do with critics or criticism; it’s about sitting down in front of a film like this and giving yourself over to it, mind body and spirit, and letting every last inch of whatever aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual edification it contains make full-force impact with every last inch of who you are as an irreducibly complex human being. That fusion is what it’s all about, and the fusion between me and Oppenheimer back in the summer of 2023 happened to be hands down one of the most electrifying experiences of my movie-going year. And sure, I look forward with mild amusement to receiving a stream of second- and third-hand news Monday morning about all the gold this took home.

 

.....

 

Now that you’ve made it this far (or skipped down—no offense taken), here are my own hypothetical Oscar picks, in as many categories as I could reasonably fill, from all the films that first became available to me to legally see from January 1 through December 31, 2023 (sorry for the extra spacing, I can't for the life of me figure out how to fix it):

 

Best Picture:

Beau Is Afraid

in water

The Killer

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Lost King

Master Gardener

May December

Oppenheimer

Pacifiction

 

Best Director:

 

Wes Anderson – Asteroid City

Hong Sang-soo – in water

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer

Paul Schrader – Master Gardener

Martin Scorsese – Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Best Actor:

 

Michael Cera – The Adults

Leonardo DiCaprio – Killers of the Flower Moon

Michael Fassbender – The Killer

Thomas Schubert – Afire

Keifer Sutherland – The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

 

Best Supporting Actor:

 

Jason Clarke – The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer

Jacob Elordi – Priscilla

Glenn Howerton – BlackBerry

Charles Melton – May December

 

Best Actress:

 

Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon

Natalie Portman – May December

Talia Ryder – The Sweet East

Cailee Spaeny – Priscilla

Sophie Thatcher – The Boogeyman

 

Best Supporting Actress:

 

Haily Atwell – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Maeve Courtier-Lilley – Gran Turismo

Mia Goth – Infinity Pool

Hannah Gross – The Adults

Quintessa Swindell – Master Gardener

 

Best Original Screenplay:

 

Wes Anderson – Asteroid City

Laura Citarella & Laura Paredes – Trenque Lauquen

Christian Petzold – Afire

Nick Pinkerton – The Sweet East

Paul Schrader – Master Gardener

 

Best Adapted Screenplay:

 

Wes Anderson – The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Steve Coogan & Jeff Pope – The Lost King

William Friedkin – The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

Matt Johnson & Matthew Miller – BlackBerry

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer

 

Best Cinematography:

 

Xavi Giménez – Marlowe

Hong Sang-soo – in water

Hoyte van Hoytema – Oppenheimer

Artur Tort – Pacifiction

Łukasz Żal – The Zone of Interest

 

Best Film Editing:

James Vanewater – Infinity Pool

Kirk Baxter – The Killer

Thelma Schoonmaker – Killers of the Flower Moon

Jennifer Lame – Oppenheimer

Sarah Flack – Priscilla

 

Best Sound:

 

The Exorcist: Believer

Ferrari

The Killer

Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest

Best Visual Effects:

 

Beau Is Afraid

Gran Turismo

Infinity Pool

The Killer

Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire

 

Best Production Design:

 

Asteriod City

Beau Is Afraid

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Oppenheimer

 

Best Original Score:

 

Joe Hisaishi – The Boy and the Heron

Hong Sang-soo – in water / Walk Up

Devonté Hynes – Master Gardener

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – The Killer

Robbie Robertson – Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Best Original Song:

 

“Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven)” – Cast, Asteroid City

“Evening Mirror” – Paul Grimstad & Talia Ryder, The Sweet East

"Speed Drive" – Charli XCX, Barbie

“What Was I Made For?” – Billie Eilish, Barbie

voicemail birthday song – Shin Seok-ho, in water

 

Best International Film:

 

Afire

Fallen Leaves

in water

Pacifiction

Scarlet

 

Best Animated Film:

 

The Boy and the Heron

 

Best Documentary:

 

De humani corporis fabrica

Godard Cinema

The History of the Minnesota Vikings

 

Best Short Film:

 

The Daughters of Fire

Passing Time

The Swan

Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar