Rightwing Film Geek

Liturgy of the Ordinary

ORDINARY PEOPLE (Robert Redford, USA, 1980, 1)

I’d absorbed a vague sense of ORDINARY PEOPLE from pop-culture osmosis, but I didn’t expect to hate this film as much as I did. ORDINARY PEOPLE is practically a summa of everything I find detestable in the Therapeutic Society and its influence on contemporary popular art … the solemnity, the whininess, the shallowness, the intellectual privilege, the preachiness.

Ah … the preachiness. Christian “alternative“ cinema often takes a lot of (deserved) shit for valorizing and hyping one-dimensional, small-e evangelical message movies where everything turns on the characters’ accepting Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior and/or living a relationship to His body on Earth. The good characters accept Him, at the start or come to do so. They prosper. The bad characters do not. They suffer. ORDINARY PEOPLE is similar evangelism, just for a different god who demands total surrender to His will.

Here the god is the psychologized self as it submits to His head-shrinker priests, instanciated here by Judd Hirsch (from “Taxi”) as Dr. Berger, handling Freudian case studies Sensitive Son, Domineering Mother and Castrated Father, with supporting roles by True Love, Toxic Bros, and Affluenza (don’t poor people have heartache?). Redford lays it on thick. Hirsch is not only a wise oracle, he’s so much more real than the Jarrett family. His office is warm and inviting; their home is cold and antiseptic. The film as a whole opens with credits in plain white letters on a black background telling us this is Super Serial Cinema and gradually we start to hear the Baroque era “Canon in D Major,” the word “canon” reminding us that we are at a Mass. There’s a solemnity throughout that weighs the film down. Son Conrad (Timothy Hutton) reads Thomas Hardy and feels unloved by his mother, who always favored the older brother for whose death Conrad blames himself. A train passes early on and Conrad suddenly flashes to some sort of suicide or death and the only ambiguity is whether it’s a flashback or flashforward.

Of the three principal family members, two are washed in the blood of the lamb, and one is not. Conrad is the first to be saved as he accepts Dr. Berger as his personal Lord and Savior, who shows him the way to happiness. Later, father Calvin (Donald Sutherland) is gradually drawn in and sees da light. But mother Beth remains reprobate, refusing to believe in the Holy Trinity of Freud, Janov and Sullivan. She is both scandalized by mentioning in public that Conrad has joined the church and also refuses to go to services as a family. As Mary Tyler Moore plays her, she is simply a cold, unfeeling bitch (sorry … that’s the appropriate word to describe this woman in this work) who destroys everyone around her with her heresy. She heads for exile in the next-to-last scene, walking out on her family. In the last scene, the two Good Believers embrace on the lawn saying they love each other … up and out.

In 1978, two years before ORDINARY PEOPLE, Ingmar Bergman released a movie about an unloving mother and her damaged child (in that case, a daughter). But AUTUMN SONATA differs in at least two key respects from ORDINARY PEOPLE and they make all the difference. In Bergman’s movie, the daughter is nothing like Bottoms’ avatar of martyred purity of soul. Eva is a bit of a pill herself and she clearly goes over the top in her long night’s litany of damnation. Further, Bergman doesn’t turn Eva’s husband or anyone else into an Objective Oracle or the priestly role that Hirsch plays here. Rather, as Roger Ebert put it:

Ingmar Bergman, standing apart from this material and regarding it with clarity and detachment, refuses to find any solutions. There are none, I suppose. A lesser filmmaker would have resolved everything at the end in some form of neat Freudian bookkeeping, but Bergman finds in his story only two people, each demanding love from the other, each doomed by the past to fall just short of the ability to love.

ORDINARY PEOPLE exemplifies exactly the “neat Freudian bookkeeping” Ebert was warning against in 1978 (yet he somehow placed it #5 for the year in 1980). There are masterpieces that push worldviews I find odious, from TRIUMPH OF THE WILL to EARTH. But I can still love one if it have some combination of formal brilliance, intellectual seduction, narrative ambiguity or (and I’m being honest here) if the ideas are of little to no contemporary salience. But in ORDINARY PEOPLE, besides looking like the TV disease-of-the-week movie (this week, affluenza) that it is, there is only the Mass along with lumpy liturgical lines that inspire me to eyerolling, snickering or intellectual rebellion — “maybe you think she doesn’t love you because you see yourself as unlovable”; “God, I don’t know what anyone wants from me any more!”; “you were always so hard on yourself, I never had the heart … I never worried about you, I just wasn’t listening”; the whole “tie at the funeral” sequence; or (and this in unbelievably ironic) “we would have been all right if there hadn’t been any mess. But you can’t handle mess. You need everything neat and easy.”

[Victor Sheepishly Raises Hand]

But ORDINARY PEOPLE itself is so down-the-line and overdetermined, even when it’s occasionally effective like the Moore-Sutherland fight at the Houston golf club, that Redford and/or scriptwriter Alvin Sargent make it clear that they are the ones who want no ambiguity or messiness. They only care about hammering home the message, their gospel, so the only reaction you can have is to the message. I am unrepentant heretic, and so at this filmed liturgy, I was the equivalent of a Muslim at Mass, muttering about God having no son and wanting to turn toward Mecca.

March 10, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Anachronistic Cook

THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER (Peter Greenaway, Britain, 1990) 10

If an American director had made THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER in 2026, it’d be impossible to see Thief Albert as anything other than a Donald Trump caricature. It wouldn’t be because Albert is the film’s villain, and therefore definitionally a stand in for Bad Orange Man — that’s the stuff of TDS “criticism.” Nothing that happens in COOK THIEF is an obvious political signifier on any but similar TDS terms. But what would make Albert a Trump clone would be the characteristics Greenway gives him that are not dictated by love-triangle plotting (“toxic masculinity!”) or the genre conventions of his being a criminal (“indicted!” “war crimes!”) That kind of stuff is wholly dependent on the critic’s substantive politics and thus too easy to make and easier to dismiss.

No, COOK THIEF reminded me so often of Trump (but not Putin or Khamenei or Woodrow Wilson or Obama or whatever historical villain you prefer) because of his vulgarity and how many examples Greenaway provides of it. And how much plainly (albeit obviously unintentionally) parallels things known of Trump that have nothing to do with ideological judgments. The film more or less never leaves the restaurant and doesn’t really showing much of the criminal activity that sustains Albert’s organization and funds his appetites. He’s shown to be brutal all right, but in service of his self-muthos as the ruler of the restaurant, the pinnacle of his excellent taste. He’s a vulgar ruler more than a thief.

Albert is casually and unnecessarily cruel, doing things like tossing cigarettes into a sauce pan just because he can and it suits his whims. He surrounds himself with sycophants, whom he still abuses in a manner that would now be called trolling, especially because much of it serves no end. You can be a criminal, but also a smarter one.

Albert is incredibly talkative and loves holding court and being the center of attention. But what he spews is not much more than a stream of consciousness that is occasionally interesting, often inane, and always aggravating, an expression of domination and love of hearing one’s own voice.

Albert believes he “stands for quality” and consider himself a gourmand; the entire movie takes place in a fancy French restaurant. And he proudly displays a much sexier wife. Yet he eats crudely (“with his fingers,” laugh the wife and her lover), and repeatedly mangles the French dishes he’s pronouncing to show his quality. He’s so proud of representing quality that he replaces all the cutlery in the restaurant … until the cook shows that it is shoddy crap. This is basically the only rebuke he accepts until the film’s ending sequence.

Albert says the restaurant needs to be redecorated and remodeled according to his wishes. He suggests early on that the Le Hollandais be renamed “Spica & Boarst” and brings along the needed neon lettering. There is even a line (if you blink you miss it) in which he says the decor needs more gold. Later on, he brings a floor show with dancers and cabaret music and removes tables to accommodate them (i.e. him). When the cook and the staff protest that there are other diners, he responds “I am this restaurant.”

Albert measures merit by popularity and ratings. He not only ridicules the books that the lover reads but says the bathroom graffiti is more important because “you’re the only person that reads this book. But every man in this room has read the bathroom wall. It makes you think, dunnit?” It gets better ratings.

The Baltimore audience with which I saw COOK THIEF, rather large for an 1130am show I must say, probably was consuming it in Trumpian terms. As the film approached its climax, I detected an unusual amount of anticipatory buzz and there were cheers when the last plot point happened. When the lights went up and the credits rolled, it was obvious that the audience was enjoying its catharsis. And walking in the hall afterward, I twice overheard references to (in the words of one) “the current dictator.”

And yet … unless Greenaway had invented time travel, this is all accidental, viewed as intentionality. I noticed all that stuff (well, except the eerily specific detail about gold fittings) when I saw COOK THIEF 12 times in theaters between 1990 and 1992. Indeed the one negative review of COOK THIEF I read at the time in an outlet I respected (Terrence Rafferty in THE NEW YORKER) basically said that Greenaway was a snob creating a cardboard villain who was nothing but a culturally inferior oaf. Whatever else might be said, justly or not, about substantive policies, there is no doubt that a significant share of today’s Derangement is such a view of Trump.

Seeing COOK THIEF for the 14th time overall, and for the first time since the early-00s, it again amazed me with its fanatical degree of formal control and symmetries, both in the plot and the decor. In 1990, I’d never seen a film like this before — clothes changing colors as the characters enter different rooms; a main character being mute for an hour and then naked for an hour; the unhidden stage-ness (the film literally starts by panning up stage support beams into a parking lot); baroque decor that goes past naturalistic use value; and the unnatural lighting and mannered camera movements. I’ve seen most Greenaway films since and dug back into his earlier stuff, almost all of which got re-releases in the year or so after COOK THIEF’s U.S. succès de scandale in 1990. His formalism has never waned, but only here does he get real performances by virtuoso actors (Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren and Alan Howard … in titular order) and a story worth following, however obviously allegorical. Martin Freeman as Rembrandt in NIGHTWATCHING and Elmer Bäck as the titular EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO are basically the only other real dramatic performances in his oeuvre.

So to some extent, COOK THIEF is an exception; I’ve never graded another Greenaway film higher than 7. But those exceptional features are what allow you, well me anyway, to simply luxuriate in the formal elements, especially Michael Nyman’s music and Sacha Vierny’s cinematography. “Memorial” is a great piece of music, both the plaintive trumpet accompanying love scenes and the propulsive driving violins playing as both exhilarating and threatening — the essence of an illicit affair. The arrangement somehow feels thicker and louder and faster for the magnificent denouement (my favorite detail in that scene … the enormous black bridal train on Wife Georgina’s dress, which requires someone to hold as she moves around the room). It tells us “This Is The Climax Coming.” The most shocking moment for me was the timing of a sudden rise in that score and the rushed opening of a truck for the lovers’ retreat. The combination felt like I was being hit by the smell of rotting meat.

The look of the film is again, like nothing I’d seen before, every conspicuously gorgeous element matching the room — blue, green, red and white. While the Frans Hals partygoer painting dominates the main dining room, and Albert’s party parodies it (or maybe not), the painting’s red decor and the red waiter and customer uniforms contrast against the back of the house. In the former, the lighting is high-key and rich, while in the latter, you see Rembrandt lighting schemes sometimes with mere candlelight, both matching the Dutch Master-style physiognomies and costuming. All of both are wrong for a present-day-set film, which COOK THIEF is — the cars settle that. But the decor is as flagrantly anachronistic as … well, a political allegory for 35 years in the future.

March 10, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The 2025 Oscar-nominated shorts programs

LIVE-ACTION NOMINEES

“The Singers” (Sam A. Davis, USA, 8)
If it had had a great walk-off it’d’ve been the best of either series, instead it just sort of ends with the ultimate one-upmanship … an opera tenor. But that crescendo of one-upmanship is amazing. The vibe is BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS, but the bar line of drunks talk about not only their sadnesses but who can and can’t sing. Also a rarity for this series in that it’s visually interesting, shot like an oak-burnished film noir with only intermittent pools of bright, bar lighting and meticulously composed frames.

“A Friend of Dorothy” (Lee Knight, Britain, 3)
As cliche and aggravating as its title, a slang term for a homosexual. Miriam Margolyes plays the sort of wise old oracle who helps a teenage stranger realize that he too is a Friend of Dorothy over several days of tea and biscuits. She also speaks an apologia that hits you over the head with what was already barely-“sub” subtext. Also if I see a worse performance this year than Oscar Lloyd as her one-note snotty grandson, God and/or the muses is one sick mofo.

“Butcher’s Stain” (Meyer Levinson-Blount, Israel, 3)
The instant I saw an Arab butcher being accused of tearing down Israeli-hostage posters, I knew he would be vindicated as innocent and the only suspense is whether he will be unjustly destroyed or justly turn avenging angel. There is also a minor thread about custody of his (very girly) son and his ex-wife and I’ll be damned if I can figure out what the two have to do with one another or what the takeaway is supposed to be from the way the film ends and the final pullback shot.

“Two People Exchanging Saliva” (Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, France, 7)
As often with a short, the premise carries all, AND it’s one I don’t think could sustain a feature. It’s an upper-class dystopia where kissing is forbidden, and that’s only the third-most bizarre thing in this low-tech sci-fi film, behind … “currency” and “faces.” Shot in black-and-white, the Nieman Marcusesque indoors are dazzlingly white and the outdoors gloomily dark, while the story naturellement is about a forbidden love with those bizarre saliva acts.

“Jane Austen’s Period Drama” (Julia Aks and Steve Pinder, Britain, 8)
As often with a short, the premise carries all, AND it’s one I don’t think could sustain a feature. But while the French film was barbed and ironic, this is flat-out hilarious. The title reads like “Bram Stoker’s Vampire Movie” and it starts in parodic mode, an overwritten and overacted Austen romantic climax (which is funny enough), but the English word “period” has … many meanings and the film becomes a sustained dirty joke about unmentionables. But it’s acted and directed spot-on as if Austen (or consultant Emma Thompson) had written about it in her own style.

ANIMATED NOMINEES

“The Three Sisters” (Konstantin Bronzit, Russia, 7)
The flat, cut-out animation style is like “South Park” in perpetual long shot, though there is no resemblance in subject matter or dialogue style (there is none here). The story is fairy tale in threes … three women on an island in three houses, and then one man comes along. The tone is whimsical and witty as alliances change among the near-stick-figure personages, and there is an ironic conclusion. No great revelation but perfectly enjoyable.

“Forevergreen” (Jeremy Spears and Nathan Engelhardt, USA, 2)
Also dialogue-free (a majority of the animated films year-in, year-out seem to be like this), but there is no whimsy or wit at all in this heavy-handed and pretentious Green allegory about a smiling tree who nurtures a smiling young bear. However, the little cub acquires a taste for ultra-processed human food, to tragic results, especially for the sacrificial tree. But the circle of life gives redemption as the leap of faith gives us a band of hope. [BarfEmoji]

“The Girl Who Cried Pearls” (Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, Canada, 9)
Thankfully, the next film was a true gem #HackStamp. An old man tells his young granddaughter the story of how he acquired a single pearl as a homeless young boy hovered up next to a poor family where … the title. He profits from her suffering, which he can only watch and avoid getting taken himself. It’s stop-motion animation in a deliberately ugly environment with faces and bodies like character-betraying gargoyles. If Dickens had made cartoons, he might’ve produced something like this.

“Butterfly” (Florence Miailhe, France, 5)
The degree of difficulty in the animation is high, the look of post-impressionist pastels in motion, as if Cezanne or Van Gogh were the animation director. But I never got involved with the story, a stream of consciousness biopic of an interwar French Jew and swimmer (who apparently was real). We go suddenly from his being snubbed at a swim meet for Jewing up the water to his French teammates rallying around him at the 1936 Olympics. There’s no tension or build in a story that, unlike some of the others here, requires that for its ambition.

“Retirement Plan” (John Kelly, Ireland, 7)
This animation is a lot simpler than its immediate preceding film, a flat, DILBERT-like succession of comic book-style cels with few and slight motions, though such movements are often telling in their minimalism. But its lower ambitions are more realized. Domhnall Gleeson reads a middle-aged man’s bucket list, with many lines coming in the form “when I retire, I will … X.” The poetic list is quite funny, with entries often commenting on the previous one, and the ironies gradually seep through as the illustrations approach death.

“Eiru” (Giovanna Ferrari, Ireland, 4)
This was not one of the nominated shorts but was added to the program to fill out the length. It got on the wrong side of me right away with a prominent production credit to “Herstory,” a term used only by the ignorant. It could have recovered, except that the “you go, girl” empowerment story of a girl in a warrior clan is exactly what you’d expect from a user of the word “herstory.” The animation at least is stylistically interesting … the eccentric angles and rich colors of the Irish studio that made “The Secret of Kells.” But I hated the bizarrely false ending, which is that children are interchangeable.

March 2, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Centennial project — Heavy Love and Careful Please

I have long been on the public record as saying the greatest year in film history was 1928 / the greatest period was the end of the silent era. It’s an era I genuinely love and love to champion … the medium having fully learned itself but on the cusp of death-by-talkies. So I made a plan for the 1926 centennial. I have chosen one or two films per month, all with grades of at least 7, matching their premiere months at the time, to re-watch and write about. So let’s get to two shorts that premiered in February 1926.

HEAVY LOVE (Scott Pembroke [Ton of Fun], USA, 7)
CAREFUL PLEASE (Norman Taurog [Lloyd Hamilton], USA, 7)

For January, I chose a short subject by Harry Langdon, a comedian whom I’d expect most cinephiles to have at least heard of, however many films of his they might have seen. But for the films released in February 1926, I went with two shorts by comedy stars only known to dyed-in-the-wool silents buffs. The sort of people who’d attend silents-only (or mostly) festivals. For about seven or eight years, I went to Slapsticon, a festival of slapstick comedy run by collectors of silent rarities and their programming shied away from Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd silents on the assumption “we’ve seen all those and they’re easily available if you have not.” Slapsticon was about discoveries and obscurities, about 2/3 silents and 1/3 talkies, though many of those talkies were by silent stars. The programming ran the gamut from Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew and Ford Sterling to the Taxi Boys and Andy Clyde. It was hit or miss … I treasure the Drews and will die happily if I never see another Billy West film. But two of the places the festival led me were Ton of Fun and Lloyd Hamilton.

I’ve placed links to HEAVY LOVE and CAREFUL PLEASE at the end of this post. One great thing about silent movies is that because they’re out of copyright, they can be posted on YouTube or elsewhere by anyone. One bad thing about silent movies is that because they’re out of copyright, they can be posted on YouTube or elsewhere by anyone. I have to note that each is accompanied by a score about which I have very mixed feelings (more so the modern jazz in the Hamilton). Sound effects can sometimes work and even add a new layer of comedy, but they’re usually not necessary (and the Ton of Fun leans too hard on them). And realistic ambient noise or “chatter” is almost always distracting or mood-breaking.

As the 7-grades indicate, I think both these shorts are enjoyable and funny, though not quite great. And that’s … OK. They’re good enough, they’re … [/Smalley]. But familiarity with a mass of slightly lesser films from these two comedy teams (and much lesser films by them and others) emphasizes and lets you appreciate more what made Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd great. Quantity becomes its own quality.

Ton of Fun consisted of three men — Fatty Alexander, Fat Karr, and Kewpie Ross — who all look to be in the 300-pound range. They had a brief run of about three years and almost 40 shorts (no features) as a team. But like Fatty Arbuckle and Oliver Hardy in the era and through John Candy and Chris Farley in another, they weren’t funny because they were fat, they were funny because they were athletic and didn’t know they were fat. Also, I think having three such persons raises the comedy exponentially, not arithmetically, though it has the downside, and a fatal one at the highest level, that the three didn’t (as far as I can see) develop into individual characters. It’s always three interchangeable guys, never “Fatty” or “Olly.”

In HEAVY LOVE they’re an incompetent team of carpenters building a house on a bluff for a woman and they build a domicile as exquisitely beautiful as Keaton did in ONE WEEK. The house is an amazing set and the three guys and director Scott Pembroke milk it for all the possibilities of vaudeville-style pratfalls that it offers. But no matter how broad, comedy requires some sense of timing and surprise and Ton of Fun definitely had that. A belly bump on a smaller man isn’t intrinsically funny, but have the actor do it offhandedly in a split second after a telegraphed series of threatening gestures, and … it’s funny. There is a swiftness of onscreen movement and offscreen cutting that prevents HEAVY LOVE from collapsing into fat-joke tedium. They also get the comic rule that you save the punch line for the third time that, let’s say, you’re walking across a plank. And I loved what the film does with the old cliche about painting yourself into a corner and with the barrel roll too elaborate to be believed and with violations of the laws of physics. And while I do wish they could have found a way to shade and build the gags about the staircase, HEAVY LOVE is basically a precursor to a Road-Runner cartoon … all gags, no plot.

Near the end, because of 10 seconds of plot machinations from a real-estate agent, the guys have to move the whole constructed house (well … “constructed”), to the other side of a canyon, intact. And they do … try. This isn’t at the level of the ship in FITZCARRALDO or the train at the end of THE GENERAL, but there is a “wow!” factor that just can’t be had in an era of CGI, green screens and the rest. That’s really a house being pulled across a canyon and … not quite making it.

In a similar vein about primitive technology adding comedy, if you know anything about editing techniques, camera framing and/or stuntwork, when you watch a person falling out of a second-story window and then getting right back up, you must wonder “how did they do that?” That’s something seen early on in both HEAVY LOVE and CAREFUL PLEASE, and I have to admit that I could tell how it was done in the former film (pay attention to the image frame at the bottom) but not the latter, when the first bill collector is thrown out the house. You can tell it’s a dummy when the camera is inside the apartment and he’s being tossed out the window but it’s not when you see the man land onto the street and start to get up.

The most notable thing about CAREFUL PLEASE is how much violence it has and how normal it’s portrayed as. The film is obviously an exaggerated comedy and not a documentary. Of course. But it starts with an anonymous foreclosure man going to an apartment and getting the shit kicked out of him by an ugly, hulking patriarch. And this is just a set-up for the second foreclosure man, played by Hamilton, to appear and for the comedy to begin. In the course of that appearance, with only women and children around, Hamilton throws everything out the apartment and then the patriarch comes home and goes berserk … and nobody calls for “de-escalation.” Just a couple days ago, one of the Top 10 scenes in the annual Skandies poll was the fight between Carey and Paul in SPLITSVILLE. And I’m convinced that part of the reason that scene is so hilarious (it got points from me) is that slapstick violence as a routine normality is now a very rare thing in broad comedies. In 2025, we saw something in SPLITSVILLE that is now unique. But in CAREFUL PLEASE, it’s not only enough of an environmental fact as to be used for a comic setup but the payoff, including another exaggerated mass brawl, takes much of the first reel before it turns into resolving its (loosey-goosey) kidnap story.

It’s an oversimplification to say I prefer Hal Roach’s situation- and character-based shorts to Mack Sennett’s violence- and chase-based shorts. But it’s not false. For all the violence in CAREFUL PLEASE (and also the pratfalls in HEAVY LOVE), there’s actually not a chase in either and the former does come down to Hamilton’s character. Hamilton’s comic persona is key to why much of that violence is funny. He generally played a kind of boyish fussbudget. He was not exaggeratedly feminine like a Franklin Pangborn or as childish as a Larry Semon or a Harry Langdon, but he was a bit (tackily) overdressed for both his station and for his round, boyish face and its often sickly smile. So when he shows up to foreclose and takes all the furniture, we fear for the inevitable confrontation with the brute and when it finally does go down, he’s gonna stay off to the side and/or ignore matters while everyone else is knocking each other around. Naturally, he’ll end up king of the castle / Battle Royal winner without having taken or thrown a punch. Of course, he takes credit for lickin every man in da house. But what DOES get Hamilton in a fluster? A cat.

Director Norman Taurog had a career that stretched decades into the future, directing multiple films in the 50s starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and the 60s with Elvis Presley. Taurog’s not terribly well regarded today but that career trajectory was far from unique. Not only did many of the most important Hollywood sound auteurs — Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Ernst Lubitsch and King Vidor — start in silent pictures, but many others even started at the comedy-short factories of Roach, Sennett and others. Frank Capra, George Stevens, Allan Dwan and Leo McCarey quickly come to mind and many of their silent shorts hold up very well.

LINK TO HEAVY LOVE

LINK TO CAREFUL PLEASE

February 28, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My 2025 Skandies ballot

Title of the post pretty much says it all, and the photo is my favorite film of the year, with my favorite Supporting Male performance in the foreground. These were my votes for the Skandies, an annual film-critic poll in which I’ve participated since the late 1990s. You vore for your top 10 in eight categories, seven of them following the Oscar categories (though there is only one Screenplay category for both original and adapted), with the eighth being Best Scene of the year. I left off the points initially, but added them when the final results, including my ballot and everyone else’s, were unveiled here

PICTURE
Sinners (Ryan Coogler, USA) 18
Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, Belgium) 17
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, USA) 12
The Empire (Bruno Dumont, France) 12
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, Iran) 9
Predators (David Osit, USA) 8
Eephus (Carson Lund, USA) 8
The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, USA) 6
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, USA) 5
Seven Veils (Atom Egoyan, Canada) 5

DIRECTOR
Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, 25
Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia, 10
Ryan Coogler, Sinners, 10
Atom Egoyan, Seven Veils, 10
Mona Fastvold, The Testament of Ann Lee, 10
Bruno Dumont, The Empire, 9
Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite, 9
Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme, 7
Rungano Nyoni, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl ,5
David Osit, Predators, 5

LEAD MALE
Fabrice Luchini, The Empire, 18
Liam Neeson, The Naked Gun, 16
Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent, 12
Timothee Chalamet, Marty Supreme, 10
Josh O’Connor, The Mastermind, 10
Joel Edgerton, Train Dreams, 8
Hugh Jackman, Song Sung Blu,e 8
Josh O’Connor, Wake Up Dead Man, 6
Adonis Tanta, Dracula, 6
Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value, 6

LEAD FEMALE
Emma Stone, Bugonia, 20
Kathleen Chalfant, Familiar Touch, 18
Amanda Seyfried, Seven Veils, 12
Amanda Seyfried, The Testament of Ann Lee, 12
Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value, 8
Kirsten Dunst, Roofman, 7
Diane Kruger, The Shrouds, 7
Susan Chardy, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, 6
Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, The President’s Cake, 5
Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue, 5

SUPPORTING MALE
Delroy Lindo, Sinners, 21
Jesse Plemons, Bugonia, 14
Ralph Fiennes, 28 Years Later, 13
Ebrahim Azizi, It Was Just an Accident, 11
John Carroll Lynch, Sorry, Baby, 9
Jack O’Connell, Sinners, 8
Yannick Renier, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, 6
Gabriel Basso, A House of Dynamite, 6
Chris Bauer, Henry Johnson, 6
Adam Sandler, Jay Kelly, 6

SUPPORTING FEMALE
Gwyneth Paltrow, Marty Supreme, 18
Glenn Close, Wake Up Dead Man, 15
Mariam Afshari, It Was Just an Accident, 12
Cate Blanchett, Black Bag, 10
Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners, 8
Rebecca Ferguson, A House of Dynamite, 8
Hailee Steinfeld, Sinners, 8
Anna Maxwell Martin, Fackham Hall, 7
Felicity Jones, Train Dreams, 7
Julia Garner, Weapons, 7

SCREENPLAY
Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident, 16
Michael Basta & Nate Fisher & Carson Lund, Eephus, 15
Kleber Mendonça Filho, The Secret Agent, 12
Kelly Reichardt, The Mastermind, 12
Will Tracy, Bugonia, 10
Dan Gregor & Doug Mand & Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun, 10
Ryan Coogler, Sinners, 8
Zach Cregger, Weapons, 6
Michael Angelo Covino & Kyle Marvin, Splitsville 6
Bruno Dumont, The Empire, 5

SCENE
“The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent”, Live Action Oscar-Nominated Shorts 2025, 10
Walking in on his routine, Is This Thing On?, 10
Japanese newsreel, Marty Supreme, 10
Racial shooting at the camp, Train Dreams, 10
Final sequence, The Mastermind, 10
Snowman, The Naked Gun, 10
Besties brawl, Splitsville, 10
Papillon Nuit at the casino, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, 10
Rock (blues, jazz, hip-hop) of ages, Sinners, 10
Stopping for gas, The Secret Agent, 10

February 23, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Still pretty after all these years

PRETTY IN PINK (Howard Deutch, USA, 1986, 8)

I saw PRETTY IN PINK for the first time at the weekend (yeah, yeah … I know) at a 40th anniversary Fathom Events showing, which included a short introduction from director Howard Deutch. In it, Deutch said something that made me quite mad as the final lights dimmed. He discussed the fact that he and John Hughes had to reshoot a different ending when previous audiences hated how the film originally resolved its plot … does Andrew McCarthy or Jon Cryer wind up with Molly Ringwald. I will acknowledge, a definite statute of limitations on spoiler avoidance (folks … he becomes both Thane of Cawdor and King thereafter). But my immediate thought was, how do you introduce a film by having the director spoil the ending to those of us seeing it for the first time ever (yeah, yeah … I know … shaddup).

WARNING: All spoilers from here

However, Deutch was a little vague, and I was doing more filling-in than I realized (though I did realize I was inferring). Pop-culture osmosis had given me a general sense of the character types, and whatever else can be said about it, PRETTY IN PINK definitely tells a pretty basic old chestnut of a story. Does the good girl get to go to the prom with her dream boy? But I thought Deutch was saying the re-shot ending of the film we were about to see had Andie (Ringwald) getting together with the goofy poor boy Ducky (Cryer) rather than the rich Blane (McCarthy) and that the original ending that audiences hated was for McCarthy to have won over Ringwald.

But I was wrong. PRETTY IN PINK ends with McCarthy and Ringwald kissing in the parking lot at the prom with Ducky having moved on to one of the rich girls and even blessing the other two getting together. I will admit possible bias in that the ending we have came unexpectedly to me. But I think this was the right ending. It was the right ending for the genre and it was the right ending for this specific story.

Despite (or maybe because of) the casting of Molly Ringwald, PRETTY IN PINK isn’t really a story of class *conflict,* something which the ending would betray and be a symptom of Ronald Reagan, the Decade of Greed, blahblah-blahbetyblah. Rather it’s a story of class *gaps* being overcome. Ringwald will for me always be Clare in THE BREAKFAST CLUB, so she always feels in PRETTY IN PINK as a little “off” as the poor girl, even though the film “subtly” begins with a pan from one side of the railroad tracks to the other. It’s not sex appeal per se, but she has an inherent appeal she can’t suppress, at least as a teenager … something closer to being an aristocrat of the spirit. She makes her own clothes, which are stylish and eccentric if a little too clearly impoverished. I initially gave a start at the fact, she drives a Karmann Ghia, which I just thought of as a sports car. But I noticed later a couple of dents in the body and though it now has a cult following, in 1986 it was a low-end sportscar that had been out of production for some years and had had the same engine as the Volkswagen Beetle (though enthusiasts would soup them up). With all that knowledge, it seems like the perfect car for her to have driven … respectable but a bit shabby, despite its better soul. Same with her prom dress … it’s gorgeous but something put together in her own style rather than the most expensive thing off the rack. All this to say, PRETTY IN PINK leans much harder into the Cinderella tradition than LES MISERABLES. Andie is better than her material circumstances and under these genre requirements, she should end up with a prince.

And the prince is worthy of her … though don’t get me wrong. The rich kids are jerks, most especially James Spader’s Steph, about whom one can reasonably criticize the script as over the top. But Blane is specifically and throughout drawn as the exception. McCarthy predates the Slacker archetype but he’s clearly a forerunner … the rich guy who doesn’t care about money and is faintly embarrassed by it. His character does love Andie and while for a brief period early in the third act, he freezes her out, the film also specifically portrays this as something he doesn’t really want to do and as succumbing to peer pressure. Rather it’s Andie who throughout thinks that the class gap is too great for her and Blane. The engine of the plot is *her* class anxiety, not *his* class snobbishness or entitlement or oppressing of her and her ilk. In metaphoric terms that the film doesn’t use, she’s embarrassed by her Karmann Ghia around the Mercedes crowd. Her own design in a room full of Chanels.

Then there is Ducky. I get thinking Cryer’s performance is just too much (Gene Siskel certainly thought so). Ducky is clearly the best character-role (or “most” Character) in the film and Cryer commits to it. He totally throws himself into “Try A Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding, and makes a fool of himself for love. It’s one of the high points of 80s movies (and I also really liked Annie Potts as record-store owner Iona … both are perfect character roles). But that adjective gives the game away I think. Ducky is a Character, not a Fantasy Prince. He’s funnier and would be a good social night out companion than Blane. But that’s not the telos of romance. There’s one other issue with having Andie end up with him, and it’s a big one. He turns on her mercilessly during the second half on multiple occasions, calling her a betrayer and more at the club where Andie and Blane flee for example. Not only is he cruel to Andie, but is so in front of Blane and Iona, and both take him to task in the middle of the scene. I think these scenes take him morallyout of the running especially since Blane’s betrayal is reluctant and contrary to his character while Ducky is acting with gusto and in character. So even in the climax of the film we have, it’s tough to take him welcoming Andie at the prom.

Never forget that the romantic comedy as we know it descends from Jane Austen, and indeed PRETTY IN PINK has some Austenian undertones and I hope Amy Heckerling watched them too, saw them too, and began thinking of CLUELESS, which is a true modern-romance masterpiece. But in Austen, romantic heedlessness is also condemned and Andie winding up with Ducky would be the preferred ending for the Lydias in the audience who want to run away with the entertaining Mr. Wickham into a reckless and foolish match. Andie, like Elizabeth, belongs with a Darcy, however diffident McCarthy may be playing him. And his wealth is not reason to reject him.

February 18, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

It’s no SCTV

NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE (Matt Johnson, Canada, 2026, 5) 

I wanted to like this more than I did but a lot of the humor wound up playing to me as mostly conceptual, in the bad sense. I got the idea, but mostly just smiled “good idea.” Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol expand a TV sketch comedy series (with which I am unfamiliar) and this feels like a lot of those 90s and 00s movies based on popular SNL characters or sketches. NIRVANNA etc. is better than most of those films but not actually good.

Matt and Jay have an all-consuming desire to play a specific Toronto club and that premise is well set up for a newbie like myself but the film just meanders away. The two play well against each other and their chemistry goes a long way. But at feature length, you need a plot, and this film quite literally steals one, from BACK TO THE FUTURE, rather than develop one based on their obsession.

The pair often interact with randos, including cops, on the Toronto streets. But unlike with, say, Borat or Ali G, almost never for long enough to develop into comedy beyond the theoretical “that was / might have been a good idea.” What happened to the guy holding the plug near the end, say? The Brazilian chick was wasted. As was the French girl. There’s also too much sloppy execution for my taste, and I got rather irritated at seeing the whiteboard with at least two sets of writings throughout the late scene of Matt and Jay trying to figure out the steps to undoing everything.

Another category of failed follow-through … jokes that aren’t even really jokes. Matt “randomly” picks a day to go (farther) back to … “Sept. 11, 2001.” But the camper doesn’t go back to that date and the pair don’t even really seem to let on any reaction. As I just said regarding racism in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, any subject can be funny, but you actually have to try harder than (in this case) just dropping in a date reference. Same with the very title “NIRVANNA THE BAND.” OK, cute,  but why that specific misspelled group rather than Arrowsmith or Furriner or Boys to Men.

There is however one amazing scene where you just wonder HTH did they manage to do this. It involves jumping from the CN Tower into the nearby Skydome but actually onto the roof as it closes. I’m sure there’s some editing tricks, sound disjunction and stunt performers. But … hell if it doesn’t look real and some of the footage looking directly down onto downtown Toronto very definitely is. The sequence also includes one of the few “civilian” interactions that really work, as the pair try to get a pair of wire cutters past security. It’s a hilarious tightrope act (almost literally) and promises a lot more than the film is finally able to deliver.

February 15, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What about BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S … I kinda liked it

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (Blake Edwards, USA, 1961, 7)

There’s no way around the fact that in 2026 the dominant reaction to BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S has to do with Mickey Rooney’s role and performance. I am as unwoke as they get; I will defend at least some ethnic humor (more anon); I have nothing but contempt for ethnic pressure groups, CRT et al; and I believe that watching any old movies at all requires thicker skin than today’s educational system is designed to produce.

And still my reaction to Mr. Yunioshi is … yuck. Indeed, I had not officially seen BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S until yesterday, because every time I started to watch it over the decades on TCM or elsewhere, I’d be turned off and turn it off. It probably didn’t help that I am/was familiar with the Truman Capote novella and the character just isn’t like this at all.

Having now seen BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S all the way through (and at a Regal multiplex for some reason), let me just say that the character is worse than racist … it’s not funny.

I believe that any subject, and I do mean ANY subject, can be funny … by the right artist, in the right movie. Rooney is not the right artist and BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S is not the right movie.

Mr. Yunioshi isn’t not-funny because he’s a “crazed Jap” caricature. He is not-funny because he is ONLY that. All he does is yell in excitement, mangrul Engrish, and mug at the camera with bug eyes and buck teeth. There is neither rhyme nor reason to his actions, and he is barely connected to the plot. Just look at John Belushi’s samurai or just about anything in Mel Brooks’ BLAZING SADDLES to see what can be done with this sort of broad “Japanese” slapstick or other ethnic typing. But Rooney is all wrong. He has the old-school charm of the schoolboy go-getter … romancing Judy, proving his mettle to the Father Figure, battling his slum neighborhood’s bad influences, etc. He has no flair for over-the-top comic caricature. 

Director Blake Edwards doesn’t help him either. He appears in the film only about seven or eight scenes, all of them tangential (I don’t think he has a substantive conversation with more than two lines with another named character). His only dramatic function is to play the spoilsport landlord complaining about the noisy party downstairs. They could’ve got Mr. Roper for this; you don’t need a Toshiro Mifune wannabe. I know this isn’t what happened, but BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S feels like a Lubitschian romcom by a producer whose notes entirely consisted of “needs more racist caricature,” like Christopher Walken insisting on more cowbell.

I used an adjective just now for which there is no higher praise in my vocabulary … Lubitschian. The German-American director was a master of comic stylings and a Yunioshi-free cut of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (which actually wouldn’t be hard to produce) was clearly working in his tradition of protagonists’ valuation of surfaces, a story of priviliged girl Holly Golightly putting forth a front to the world, preferring such an illusion to the reality of her backstory. Even if you had Belushi playing Mr. Yunioshi and truly interacting with tolerant whites who know only politeness … those SNL sketches, no matter how funny on SNL, would clang in a movie like this, like bricks dropped onto a goldfish bowl.

The rest of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S is indeed a lovely goldfish bowl.

Let’s start with Audrey Hepburn, who has a persona of such sweetness and innocent charm that it hardly registers that she’s playing a semi-whore. It’s Audrey! Dressed by Givenchy! With a cigarette holder. The movie is essentially a romantic fantasy, first that Holly’s lifestyle was a sustainable and viable ego ideal, and then that she could still be redeemed by the right man. OK, OK … in the novella, he’s gay and Holly disappears who-knows-where. That’s more realistic, but Holly in the movie it’s not about that. She doesn’t want realism; she wants magic. You can dump Cat and then find him right away. You can make $100 relaying a “weather report” and get $50 to go to the powder room. The latter metaphor is clear, even if the code doesn’t allow its literalization.

There are a number of great scenes, most especially one of the best party scenes in movie history, which captures the chaos of trying to deal with one importantmatter while everybody around you is trying to have a fun night. Edwards would later raise this gesture into a whole movie, THE PARTY — hey, there’s a comedy centered on an ethnic stereotype, done well. I also really did love the morning date between Holly and Paul where they go to Tiffany’s, and the short sequence with her and husband Doc. The latter hints at Holly’s past and thus her present without … er … dropping bricks in a goldfish bowl. In a great moment of comic tact specific to the movies of 1961 — still bound by the production code, but not really believing in it — Holly dismisses to Paul the marriage to Doc as long ago annulled and we don’t know whether to believe her or not. The film remains suspended between reality and illusion. As for the former sequence, going to Tiffany’s (though they don’t have breakfast?) most displays the film’s Lubitschian ambitions in the gap between the couple’s means and ambitions. They get a ring from a Crackerjack box engraved while the salesman acts with perfect propriety, neither a snob indifferent to the sale nor the demystifier joining in the class warfare. He is the gentleman.

February 14, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Sundance 2026 — Day 10

TUNER (Daniel Roher, USA, 4, 2 stars)

If you didn’t know better, you might think that Dustin Hoffman walked off this film because he realized the script was rubbish, a la Bette Davis in “Wicked Stepmother.” That’s a little harsh (“Tuner” has good things in it), but there’s basically two movies here — a quasi-paternalist occupational story and a crime-caper film — and I didn’t believe anything that happened after Hoffman’s first-act medical emergency put a premature end to the former. The venerable Hoffman runs a piano-tuning business and Leo Woodall plays his apprentice with an uncannily sensitive musical ear but also an allergy to loud noise. Hoffman felt less grating than Alan Arkin in “Little Miss Sunshine,” perhaps because pushiness was always part of his persona. But he plays to the back row in Unfiltered Codger mode, which makes Woodall’s lower-key modesty welcome. That ear is useful for (pre-electronic-lock) safe cracking and Woodall gets semi-coerced into joining a criminal gang (all of whom give terrible performances). It wouldn’t be wrong to call “Tuner” a fairy tale about a man with superhero powers that ruin him, only to regain his soul by losing that power, Woodall has another sweet relationship with a piano student-composer (Havana Rose Liu). There’s elements of “Baby Driver” and “Whiplash,” plus a sound design that cracked the latter film’s aural track up to about 12. But the caper material is under-realized and then becomes risible/unclear in its climax and resolution; and everything Jean Reno does as the maestro is even worse.

TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN (Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazic, Montenegro, 8, 4 stars)

In the remote highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of the violence that shattered their family.

That’s not wrong but IS the kind of logline written to appeal to Sundance’s leftist patrons’ muthoi … here military bad and patriarchy bad. A worthy winner of the World Documentary grand prize, “To Hold a Mountain” is set on Montenegro’s cheese-making Sinjajevina plateau and although the loglines’ two threads are mentioned, “To Hold a Mountain” is mostly an observational portrait of traditional farm life. Three women — a grandmother, a mother and a daughter (though these exact relations get gradually revealed) — live in ways that feel unchanged for a century. Only the daughter’s cellular phone and the presence of her Yugo to head off to college (we never see it) set the film in the present. The three women don’t even have male farmhands and almost do everything by hand, and the presentation of farm life is both lovely and completely unsentimental. When a cow accidentally injures her calf, not only does the calf get taken away in a wheelbarrow the two women can barely handle (the film’s motherhood theme is reflected in the cow’s obstruction efforts), but they determine the calf has to be euthanized. They must use the means available, which is not a ready supply of pentobarbital. Of the three threads — farm life, NATO exercises, memories of a domestic murder — the ratio felt like 75% / 15% / 10%, which is exactly right. And the film shows no interest in the mechanics of the latter two. We learn the outcome of the exercises plan but don’t follow the bureaucratic wrangling, parliamentary votes, etc.; we hear about a restraining order but never see the object, go to court, etc. They’re what intrudes on the stuff of Dasein.

SOUL PATROL (J.M. Harper, USA, 3, 1 1/2 stars)

Wait … this wasn’t a Taylor Hicks biopic?!? More seriously, I’m not gonna say this is just a DEI pic; one can make a great movie about an all-black Long Range Patrol (Special Forces) company during the Vietnam War. I am gonna say that had someone made a film like this that didn’t have the element of race and no opportunity to show footage of “black leaders” Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale talk about killing whites / cops / white cops instead … it would not have made one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. I would rather have seen Spike Lee of some other director turn the story of this unit into a fiction feature than have this (mostly) assemblage of talking heads at a reunion. There’s just far too much self-referential throat clearing at the start, including having Ed Emanuel introduced as the author of the book “Soul Patrol.” And frankly, the soldiers here don’t really say much in the current-day interviews and reunion that hasn’t been said in numerous Vietnam films already, and the footage of them in Vietnam is mostly ordinary still photos … nothing revelatory or that dramatic. They do describe one incident in which there’s multiple NVA units around and overrunning them and they never opened fire. One soldier said he thought “Charlie” showed mercy, which is (a) not believable; and (b) not nearly as dramatic in bald description 50 years later as it might’ve been in depiction. (Spike, where are you?!) Director JM Harper does try sone “meh” re-enactments and an expressionistic framing device that simply falls flat of having the soldiers as old men in the supermarket coming across themselves as young men in combat gear and toting rifles (Kathryn Bigelow, where are you?!)

BUDDY (Casper Kelly, USA, 9, 4 stars)

Well THAT was a way to close what will probably be my last Sundance Film Festival. Not since the first time I saw “South Park” in the late 1990s have I seen a “kids show” so utterly demented and sociopathic and contemptuous of “kid shows” … IOW, such Victor Catnip. It’s a parody of Barney (“Buddy” is a pink unicorn) in which the all-loving TV host becomes a mass murderer, starting with a kid who just doesn’t want to play Buddy’s upbeat game but would rather read his book. IOW, such Victor Catnip. A couple of the kids just want to escape the show but realize once outside that they begin feeling hunger, needing to pee and having it land on Mr. Flower, and using the p-word for your little wee-wee. It played for a while like the anti-Pleasantville. It closes with an impalement and congratulations to the blood-splattered “bitch.” IOW, such Victor Catnip. Discussing it with bud Jeremy Matthews, who made everything possibly by letting me stay at his home in Salt Lake City, we alighted upon how hating Barney seems like a generational thing most acutely felt by Generation X and older millennials for whom the purple dinosaur / pink unicorn was everything our childhood culture was not — relentlessly positive, constant congratulation, directly speaking to the viewer, and not even an aspiration to adulthood. My favorites as a boy were Bugs Bunny and the other Looney Tunes characters; Scooby Doo and other Hanna-Barbera shows; and even live-action shows like Blue Peter and Magpie sometimes tried to make you a better person, they weren’t as aggressively and patronizingly childish as Barney/Buddy. And thus such a threat to their child viewers.

February 1, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Sundance 2026 — Day 9

By Way of Explanation: Scott released me from capsule-writing duty yesterday afternoon, saying he wouldn’t be posting new reviews for the festival’s last couple days because interest is so low. The remaining time was mine to use as I wished. But I’d already written one of these capsules, was midway through watching another of the planned pics on my laptop, and had a pretty good plan for the rest of the fest. So soldiering on through the last two days and posting here. (Will also continue updating the post linking to all my reviews, just back to this post and the one for tomorrow).

CLOSURE (Michal Marczak, Poland, 6, 2 1/2 stars)

It’s a feast for the eyes and ears, but not for the brain. Even watching on a laptop at a coffee bar, as I did, “Closure” is still a visual and aural sensation in which my interest flagged every time someone opened his mouth. In what I thought it was a fiction feature until reading up later, we see Daniel obsess over finding his missing son Chris, last seen on a bridge over the Vistula River in Warsaw months ago when the movie starts. Much of “Closure” is Daniel, sometimes alone and sometimes with a companion, dredging the river. The views and sounds of the river, sometimes from on boats and sometimes from underwater and bobbing along the surface, is visceral, menacing and Otherizing. The Vistula is cold and dirty, and not especially from pollution (though the water is never “blue”) but also from debris and flotsam, which create clogs under which a body or bones can get stuck. In other interesting elements, Chris’ disappearance becomes sufficiently notorious that other parents with missing children solicit Daniel for help … and sometimes with “success” (seldom are quote marks so necessary as here). This is what desperation looks like. Unfortunately, too much of the film is Daniel and wife Agnieszka (sometimes others too) discoursing on the meaning of it all and thinking through why they are doing this, far too self-consciously about the meaning of the quest and The Meaning of Everything. It’s the dramatic equivalent of chewing with your mouth open.

LADY (Olive Nwosu, Nigeria, 7, 3 stars)

Nothing “Lady” does is very surprising, but is a near-perfect example of termite art Nollywood-style, and with a bit more polish and acting chops than I might’ve expected. “Lady” is the name of the protagonist, played by the amazing Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, a taxi driver in Lagos during a few weeks of political upheaval over the government’s plan to eliminate fuel subsidies in Africa’s largest oil exporter. To some extent, “Lady” is a political radicalization story — an early scene has Lady scoffing at male cabbies saying more-expensive fuel just means they have to hustle harder and the film ends with her at the wheel being caught up in (and then joining) an “Enough Is Enough” march. For most of its body, the film follows Lady in her major job to transport a rich pimp’s hos, getting hired in a powerful scene in which she takes no shit. She and the prostitutes form a contentious sisterhood in which Lady looks down on them (even Pinky, who was raised with her) and they on her (she’s a virgin, y’know; and also just as much a sellout). In one incredible scene, Lady walks through a mansion while work goes on, like Tom Cruise in “Eyes Wide Shut” and in another, her bid to rescue Sugar from an abusive client … goes badly. The film ends with a “Casablanca”-type parting and as a measure of the film’s emotional care, we see “Bogart” crying in the “hangar.”

TELL ME EVERYTHING (Moshe Rosenthal, Israel, 7, 3 stars)

I mean, this as praise, but “Tell Me Everything” may be the most novelistic film I saw at this festival, in the sense of revealing the most layers as it went along. At one level it’s a father-son story of gay revelation, but not the one you might expect given the very Freudian dynamic shown … tween Israeli boy Boaz likes to lip-sync and dance to what sounds like the Israeli equivalent of Madonna and is close to both his older sisters. Boaz sees his father (Assi Cohen) doing something he half-understands, to disastrous effects. The 80s setting tickled me and NGL, any movie that both features Air Supply’s “Makin’ Love Out of Nothing At All” and someone hurriedly and excitedly starting a cassette to record a favorite song off the air would have to eff up everything else to lose me. The handling of AIDS through a child’s eyes was also smart and accurately non-presentist, if a bit sitcommy (see Arnold and the facts of life on a “Different Strokes” episode). I didn’t care as much for the interwoven decade-later story in which Boaz is now played by Ido Tako because … reaction-formation can’t be this self-conscious(one of the reasons the Belgian film CLOSE was just a treasure a couple years ago) and I flatly do not believe a father wouldn’t recognize his boy’s voice. Still, Boaz’s two late conversations, one with his father; one with his mother, do honor to the descriptor “novelistic.”

January 31, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Centennial Project — Saturday Afternoon

A few weeks ago, I teased a friend about doing a 50th anniversary project, specifically watching and writing about movies from 1976. I told him “centennial or go home!” to which he replied “others are more qualified for that than I am.” I don’t agree with that assessment factually, nor did I get the sense he was specifically calling me out. But I have long been on the public record as saying the greatest year in film history was 1928 / the greatest period was the end of the silent era. But I say with no braggadocio that among those who don’t making their living as an archivist / programmer / preservationist, etc. … there are few people in the world more qualified to do a 1926 project (and 27, 28, 29) than I. It’s an era I genuinely love and love to champion … the medium having fully learned itself but on the cusp of death-by-talkies (and knowing that … SINGIN IN THE RAIN oversimplified things a bit)

So I made a plan for the year. All told, I’ve seen 66 features and shorts from 1926, with the majority of them (35) rated 7 or higher. I have chosen one or two films per month among those 35, matching their premiere months at the time, to re-watch and write about. Keeping ahead of the curve, I’ve already re-watched both the February films I chose and have sketched out the notes for a review of one of them. So let’s get to a film that premiered in January 1926 …

SATURDAY AFTERNOON (Harry Edwards [Harry Langdon], USA, 1926, 8)

I’ve already written a little about Harry Langdon, but about his sound films (at least some of which are great, contrary to their rep!). He was one of the four silent clowns celebrated in James Agee’s classic Life essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” along with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, with Langdon being the only controversial pick, the only one of the four whose standing can be seriously disputed. If there’s a Mount Rushmore of silent comedy, “everybody” agrees that it’s Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and someone else. With all due respect to Charley Chase, Lupino Lane, Larry Semon, Laurel and Hardy (whose standing relies just as much on sound work) and even Fatty Arbuckle (who’s helped by the martyrdom / “what might’ve been” factor) … none of whom would be “bad” choices, I hasten to add … I think Agee made the right fourth pick.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON was a 26-minute short that Langdon, director Harry Edwards and co-writer Frank Capra made for the Mack Sennett studio. Sennett was and remains best known for his Keystone Kops films and launching the careers of Chaplin, Arbuckle and Mabel Normand with that style of broad, knockabout physical comedy. I have to confess that this Sennett “house” style doesn’t appeal that much to me, which is why seeing Langdon feels like Mack was explicitly counter-programming himself, or “diversifying his portfolio” if you like. His comic style was not just different from, but practically the opposite of, the Keystone Kops. He did nothing. “Harry” was an infantile naif who never understood what was happening around him. The current therapeutic society would refer to a more realistic version of him as autistic/spectrum. But because this is a comedy, the social cluelessness and deep contemplation are cranked up to about 12. His character is a doormat who barely realizes it, the sort of man who, if he met a woman he liked, would spend two minutes figuring out how to say “hello.”

… which is part of what makes SATURDAY AFTERNOON so hilarious: It’s a film about sex, starring the most asexual protagonist imaginable.

This three-reel featurette’s basic story is that hen-pecked Harry and his best bro (Vernon Dent) plot an assignation with a couple girls after work on a Saturday afternoon. And things go badly. SATURDAY AFTERNOON is almost exactly the length of a classic-era TV sitcom and has a similar trajectory. Coincidentally, I happen to have recently re-seen an episode of THREE’S COMPANY in which Mrs. Roper‘s derision of Stanley’s manhood prompts him in anger to go out and pick up a woman, to prove he still can. That’s basically what happens here. Only Harry isn’t as effectual and deliberate and sexually hot as Mr. Roper (if that line doesn’t sell you on SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I don’t know what might).

Much of the early part of the film is Harry at home, trying to assert his masculinity against his shrewish wife. Some of the domestic scenes, on the print that I re-watched, are accompanied by cello-heavy “spooky horror” music. Mrs. Harry is less sympathetic than Mrs. Roper (this is a 1926 film, and a silent, so we don’t get Helen’s bedroom putdowns / related desperation), which sets up Harry’s pathetic attempts both at establishing patriarchy and the workarounds from his knowledge of those inevitable failures. She literally treats him like the figurative child he is, fretting about giving him a dime for popcorn that he actually spent it on tobacco — a parental attitude and a childish workaround. After handing over every cent, including what he had hidden inder the rug, Harry gives an elaborate speech putting his foot down as the man of the house, but not only is it the [intertitled] solilquy to nobody at all rather than to the only relevant audience, but that relevant audience then walks in to listen backstage. For a looooong time. My father once said to me about THE HONEYMOONERS and Ralph’s bluster about punching Alice POW!!!! all the way to the moon, “is she acting as if he’s ever laid a hand on her? Or she even fears he might?” Alice Ward plays it the same way here. There’s even a domestic violence joke here, though it’s funny because it’s FTM not MTF.

In my essay on Langdon’s sound shorts, I called him “the Tsai Ming-liang of silent comics,” meaning that his scenes constantly overstretch the comic arc past its breaking point, making the anticipation its own joke. In Langdon films, and not just this specific scene, it’s more than Harry’s glacial stock process but also the direction and staging. Ward stands so long in the unseen-to-Harry background while he continues to blather on, and I kept laughing harder as the shot continued and she kept listening without reaction. Silent film is ideal for this kind of glacial comic style because you really look at Harry’s face without the distraction of dialog and natural sound. It’s focusing.

Once the rendezvous has been made and Harry has escaped Domestic Hell, he goes out to the meet Dent and their hot chicks. But because of Harry’s inevitable delaying, Dent thinks that their girls have not shown, and an eager-to-please Harry goes off screen and finds two other girls. Between their dress and their gestures, it’s pretty clear, even in 1926, that he’s unwittingly picked up two streetwalkers (the lead art). The actual pickup, however, happened offscreen because while those mechanics COULD work on their own merit, for the sake of this punchline they don’t matter. SEINFELD supposedly mastered of the art of all punchlines / no set ups. No. Not-relatedly (but relatedly), one great thing about the pre-Sexual Revolution society is that these kinds of jokes were possible. The word “ho” or any equivalent is never breathed, even when Harry’s companion realizes what has happened and would have every naturalistic reason to use such words. If the society is innocent, the innocent can be comic.

And make no mistake,Harry’s innocence IS the joke. When he first meets “his” girl between the two with whom Dent has set them up, he shakes her hand with more formality and distance and nerves than two fighters touching gloves after the bell has just rung. Later on, there’s a scene where Dent and his girl coo and peck from either side of an outside mailbox with an Harry innocently framed between them politely and unwittingly accommodating them. Later still, Dent gets a car, he puts himself and the two girls in the cabin’s single bench seat, while putting Harry in the outside rumbleseat, eagerly peering into the cabin with a look somewhere between a toddler and a cocker spaniel. If Harry were at all convincingly masculine or had any self-awareness, it’d risk bathos.

Despite my heaving said that Langdon’s humor is not the typical Sennett style, there is a chase and a fight (turns out their two girls broke a date with two other men who show up in the third reel, angry at being jilted). It’s commonplace to say that silent comedies had an advantage in that naturalistic dialogue and sound effects made a lot of violent physical comedy too hard to take — consider as Exhibit A the iconic climactic scene in Lloyd’s SAFETY LAST with a near identical sequence to cap off his second sound film FEET FIRST. In SATURDAY AFTERNOON, this goes one step farther on that “unseen/unheard is better” hypothesis. While driving around town with his buddy and their girls, Harry suddenly sees his wife driving nearby, and, terrified, he pulls the outside rumbleseat over his head and basically hides inside the trunk. (I’m too inexpert on the designs of 1926 cars to know whether this would’ve actually been possible or purely a visual gag.) Anyhoo, the car hits several potholes, goes off-road and makes all kinds of violent maneuvers, as we not only don’t hear but also don’t see anything of what is going on inside the trunk. But we know. The others in the car think that Harry is missing … obviously having been thrown or jolted into the street … routine stuff for 1926, and gold for comedy. When Harry reappears, his clothes are torn, he’s as woozy as a KO’d fighter, and the trunk’s spare auto parts are garlanding his body like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Who cares about all the pain and screams he went through to get that way … we neither heard nor saw all that stuff and so that’s funny. All punchline: who needs setup?

Even the one eternal moment of physical comedy in SATURDAY AFTERNOON is the running board scene. A dazed and bewildered Harry sits between two cars, his butt on the running board of one and his feet on the running board of the other. They then both drive off. He betrays absolutely no awareness of what is happening, even though this is 1926 and there are no green screens or CGI to help Langdon the actor. There’s safety accommodations in the camera set up, obviously, but that only goes so far. Those are still really two cars, they are still really moving, and that’s still really his body straddling them. And this is why silent physical comedy is both funny and amazing, and why each feeds into the other. You can’t believe you’re seeing what you undoubtedly are seeing.

Because this is a 1926 movie, even an adultery drama has to end “happily.” But as befits an adultery comedy, the happiness is somewhat ironic. A dazed Harry is found by his wife driving their (or her) car and she takes him home, after having found him wrapped around a telephone pole (don’t ask). The family unit is restored, yes, but not only is it not clear that the marriage was ever “happy” … that’s easily baked into the setup, it’s also not certain that the wife ever knew Harry actually strayed even to the extent he did … she had explicitly told a girlfriend that she “called his bluff.” Nor is it really all that clear that Harry ever had immoral intentions … between his own infantilism and his childishly going along with Dent’s scheme, could he ever have any such intent? That THREE’S COMPANY episode ends with Stanley suggestively inviting Helen to bed (I think the only time ever). That’d obviously be impossible in 1926, even at the level of explicitness allowed 50 years later, much less what you could do now, another 50 years in the future. Instead, Harry sits in the passenger seat and curls up next to his wife, cuddling next to her, somewhere between a toddler and a cocker spaniel.

January 22, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2026 Sundance Film Festival

I just picked up my press credentials for Last Tango in Park City aka the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where I will be writing reviews daily for the Salt Lake City Weekly.

I’m gonna use this post as a Sundance log, updating it daily with grades for all the movies I see and links to reviews in the Weekly by me and colleague bud (and near-annual two-week boss Scott Renshaw). I also can’t exclude the possibility of adding a thought or two that I couldn’t get into my 200ish-word capsules.

And a Sundancin we go.

Glitch in the Matrix … there will be no updates for day one, during which I saw three films and liked two, because unlike in previous years, reviews from press screenings are embargoed until the public debut. All three films I saw did not make theirs and so their reviews must run later.

This is Day 2. My contributions are:

THE LAST FIRST: WINTER K2 (Amir Bar-Lev, USA, 9)
Some of the world’s most experienced climbers, dogged sherpas, and a tourist group head for the only one of the world’s 8000m mountains never to have been scaled in winter. All independently at the same time. Recipe for disaster.

HOT WATER (Ramzi Bashour, USA, 2)
A labored, aggravating quirkfest that lacks even the energy or outrageousness that might be funny

THE DISCIPLE (Joanna Natasegara, USA, 7)
A hiphop version of “All About Eve” — the outsider worming his way into the inner circle of artistic idols, here hiphop legends the Wu-Tang Clan

HANGING BY A WIRE (Mohammed Ali Naqvi, Pakistan, 7)
I may be the ideal viewer, going in with no knowledge/memory of the 2023 incident, in which a cable-car’s wires snap over a 900-foot ravine, leaving eight people stranded in the gondola.

https://www.cityweekly.net/film/sundance-film-festival-2026-day-2-capsules-367d33ff

Day 3 reviews from #Sundance2026 by me and Scott Renshaw. My contributions are:

BIRDS OF WAR (Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak, Britain, 4)

Thirteen years is forever in the tumult and twists of Middle Eastern politics, and you bet this film will give you about 30 seconds on every one of them.

FILIPIÑANA (Rafael Manuel, Philippines, 3)

A short’s worth of ideas in an irritatingly arty empty box containing no credible human behavior or non-Symbolic characters

NUISANCE BEAR (Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, Canada, 6)

There is an amazing Northern Hemisphere rival to March of the Penguins somewhere in here, mixed with too much mediocre human material. 

https://www.cityweekly.net/film/sundance-film-festival-2026-day-3-capsules-01092d39

Day 4 at #Sundance2026 with me and Scott Renshaw at SLC Weekly. My contributions are:

THE MUSICAL (Giselle Bonilla, USA, 8)
Imagine if “Dead Poets Society” made Mr. Keating a jealous incel who taught his students that the greatest power in the universe is spite and hatched a Max Bialystock plan to ruin the school, especially the smarmy principal. It’s even better than that sounds.

THE FRIEND’S HOUSE IS HERE (Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei, Iran, 6)
The unavoidable comparison with Iran-smuggled illegal films “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” and “It Was Just An Accident” is crushing.

MUM, I’M ALIEN PREGNANT (Thunderlips, New Zealand, 7)
Well that was one helluva cautionary tale against, in the words of Mrs. Costanza, using your body like an amusement park.

https://www.cityweekly.net/film/sundance-2026-day-4-capsules-1d082e7a

Day 5 of #Sundance2026 capsules for SLC Weekly. My contributions are:

FRANK & LOUIS (Petra Volpe, USA, 7)

There is nothing to say, even in animus. But life goes on. It’s a perfect end to a movie about Sisyphus’ little moments of happiness despite the rock, which is prison, yes, but also aging. 

RUN AMOK (N.B. Mager, USA, 7)

obviously accomplished, obviously contains terrific performances, obviously swings at an important subject (a school shooting aftermath), obviously has one svene-of-the-year contender. And to me, obviously chickened out from where the third act had been headed.

HOW TO DIVORCE DURING THE WAR (Andrius Blazevicius, Lithuania, 8)

imagine that Michal Haneke has a bone-dry sense of humor. A bone-dry one. While this is the most sedate, lowest-key farce you’ll ever see, a farce it still is, specifically a comedy of remarriage.

https://www.cityweekly.net/film/sundance-film-festival-2026-day-5-capsules-1e77a07d

Day 6 of #Sundance2026 capsules by me and Scott Renshaw. My contributions are

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM (William Greaves and David Greaves, USA, 8)

Surviving figures of the 1920s and 30s Harlem Renaissance were shot at a 1972 party at Duke Ellington’s house. They discuss, debate and recount one of the towering moments in American culture—yes, they debate. Sometimes hard.

ANTIHEROINE (Edward Lovelace and James Hall, USA, 3)

A “Behind the Music” episode by Courtney Love, as she totally coincidentally makes a comeback album. She ends it with a PSA message to the audience about herself as a test case, looking into the camera and speaking to “you.”

IF I GO, WILL THEY MISS ME (Walter Thompson-Hernandez, USA, 6)

Another director expanding his own short subject of the same title, which is intermittently power, but too married to the kind of arty ticks and surreal flourishes that can carry a short but not a feature.

https://www.cityweekly.net/film/sundance-film-festival-2026-day-6-capsules-8067dc4f

Day 7 of Sundance 2026 capsules. My contributions are

KIKUYU LAND (Andrew H. Brown and Bea Wangondu, Kenya, 4)

In a movie about legal disputes about decades-ago land expropriation, lawsuit filer Mungai says the land taken from his family is worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. Question: How did his family acquire that much land? From whom? How?

CHASING SUMMER (Josephine Decker, USA, 4)

But Iliza Schlesinger grows, and there is hugging and learning amid the quasi-incest, small-town gossiping and yahooism. I don’t mind coarse comedy; I do mind coarse dramedy.

UNION COUNTY (Adam Meeks, USA, 8)

It’d be dizzying overpraise to compare director Adam Meeks to the Dardenne brothers, but he does have their unblinkered but genuine love for dislikable characters, coupled with a flair for milking sudden dramatic turns without going over the top. 

https://www.cityweekly.net/film/sundance-film-festival-2026-day-7-capsules-8aedc6b5

Day 8 of #Sundance2026 capsules for SLC Weekly with Scott Renshaw. My contributions are:

SHAME AND MONEY (Visar Morina, Kosovo, 2)

When cinephiles tell “normies” we’re going to a film festival, they imagine we’re gonna see opaque, boring, slow-paced, over-long, non-stories that function only as pretentious allegories. In this case, they would be correct. 

WHEN A WITNESS RECANTS (Dawn Porter, USA, 9)

So outrageous a case of law-enforcement misconduct (the notorious Georgetown jacket murder in a Baltimore school) that even I put aside by resistance to the ACAB genre. A prosecutor office IG says usually in wrong convictions. you can at least see what authorities were thinking. Not here.

https://www.cityweekly.net/film/sundance-film-festival-2026-day-8-capsules-519b1fd8

Day 9 of my #Sundance2026 capsules, at my site:

CLOSURE (Michal Marczak, Poland, 6)

It’s a feast for the eyes and ears, but not for the brain. Even watching on a laptop at a coffee bar, as I did, “Closure” is still a visual and aural sensation in which my interest flagged every time someone opened his mouth.

LADY (Olive Nwosu, Nigeria, 7)

A near-perfect example of termite art Nollywood-style, and with a bit more polish and acting chops than I might’ve expected. The film ends with a “Casablanca”-type parting and as a measure of the film’s emotional care, we see “Bogart” crying in the “hangar.”

TELL ME EVERYTHING (Moshe Rosenthal, Israel, 7)

I mean, this as praise, but “Tell Me Everything” may be the most novelistic film I saw at this festival, in the sense of revealing the most layers as it went along.

Day 10 of #Sundance2026 capsules at my site, where the last film of the fest was also the best.

TUNER (Daniel Roher, USA, 4)

There’s basically two movies here — a quasi-paternalist occupational story and a crime-caper film — and I didn’t believe anything that happened after Dustin Hoffman’s first-act medical emergency put a premature end to the former.

TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN (Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazic, Montenegro, 8)

an observational portrait of traditional farm life in which a grandmother, a mother and a daughter live in ways that feel unchanged for a century. The three women don’t even have male farmhands and almost do everything by hand — lovely and completely unsentimental.

SOUL PATROL (J.M. Harper, USA, 3)

One can make a great movie about an all-black Long Range Patrol (Special Forces) company during the Vietnam War and I wish Spike Lee of some other director turn the story of this unit into a fiction feature than this (mostly) assemblage of talking heads at a reunion.

BUDDY (Casper Kelly, USA, 9)

Well THAT was a way to close what will probably be my last Sundance Film Festival. Not since the first time I saw “South Park” in the late 1990s have I seen a “kids show” so utterly demented and sociopathic and contemptuous of “kid shows” … IOW, such Victor Catnip.

January 22, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Thoughts on scoring … (settle down, Beavis)

THE FIRST DEGREE (Edward Sedgwick, USA, 1923) 5 V

Though take that grade with one honking great caveat … it mostly isn’t about THE FIRST DEGREE itself and I’d happily re-watch it under a defined circumstance that will shortly become obvious.

THE FIRST DEGREE, which I watched on TCM late-night Sunday, concerns farmer Sam Bass (Frank Mayo) heading into a grand jury room, confessing to causing his enemy half-brother’s death, and lamenting that nobody will believe his account, which he proceeds to give in a series of flashbacks that constitute the bulk of the film. The half-brother had been blackmailing and exposing Sam’s past time in prison, which he kept trying to flee. In other words, an archetypal film-noir story, with undertones of the Javert-Valjean story … for a film set in 1923! Director Edward Sedgwick (known to me only as Buster Keaton’s early MGM director) clearly already was learning from the German Expressionists some of what film historians say was absorbed into Hollywood in noir, like heavy shadowing and this fate-heavy still of the judging jurists looking at the Sam. Mayo’s performance will not be to every taste but it’s certainly in the Expressionist style, and the story unfolds well through the flashback structure. So in several ways, DEGREE was a film ahead of its time and I’m glad it was found after being thought lost for decades.

So why the 5?

Simply put, this movie has the worst score I have ever seen (or heard, I guess) on a silent movie. About 90% of my notes consist of reactions to the score and wrestling through what I found so off-putting about it. In ascending order of importance: it’s music that I’m not intrinsically crazy for; it’s music that doesn’t fit the movie; it’s music that’s not fitted to the movie; it’s music that barely realizes it’s a movie score. It’s shockingly inappropriate on every level possible. Perversely, this experience was a worthwhile critical exercise for me because it made me think more about film scoring and what a film score does (or in this case “doesn’t”) and how it’s used than any film I’ve ever seen.

THE FIRST DEGREE was set in the then-present but the music is a bizarre melange of about eight or ten tunes in a variety of different styles, most from decades later. At various times I was reminded of prog-rock, cool or modal jazz, and Muzakized versions thereof. It’s like Kenny G Does Miles Davis. I also heard at various times drum machines or other synthesizers, electric guitars. Anachronistic scores can work. The very first silent film I ever saw (and liked) was the 1984 Giorgio Moroder version of METROPOLIS, which accompanied Fritz Lang’s 1927 film with electronic music and disco-dance songs. I also love the Alloy Orchestra and its avant-garde instrumentation and arrangements.

So that’s forgivable, except that it feels like the eight or ten themes are played through consecutively (or sometimes returned to) and switching as they end, paying no heed to what’s visually on the screen. One theme in Style X turns another in a different Style Y in the middle of a scene, without a dramatic reason for the switch. We’ve just reached the end of the song and onto the next. There was one moment when the score threatened to work (I noticed it like one notices a pearl in a sewer). The half-brother returns on a dark and stormy night to the farmhouse. The dramatic cue fits as Sam is threatened and the music at least sounds menacing. But it’s all a coincidence because the film segues back to smooth jazz in the middle of the quarrel.

Much of the time the music also doesn’t fit what’s going on dramatically. The film is a fairly broad melodrama with tense confrontations and suspense. The climactic scene is a wrestling-with-a-gun showdown, but there’s none of the “tension music” that even Bernard Herrmann’s nonunion Mexican equivalent could write by the ream and shrink-wrap to order. Hallucinations in Sam’s mind, in which Sedgwick is learning from CALIGARI, cry out for expressionist music but we get what Nick Nightingale’s pickup band was playing when Dr. Harford walks in on them in EYES WIDE SHUT. For a major public showdown at a railway station, in which Sam is threatened with being run out of town, there’s instrumental soft pop slathered all over it.

And when I say “slathered all over it,” I mean that fairly directly. There is no internal cutting of the music … turning it up or down or out as the film switches from one character to another, or as the tension rises or falls within a scene. You have a theme and you just hear it for three straight minutes, or however long that piece might be. A piece will be accompanying part of the flashback and then continue without missing a beat back into the present day, missing and even undermining the whole point of structuring a narrative this way.

For decades, fans of Judy Garland and Pink Floyd have watched THE WIZARD OF OZ while cued up to DARK SIDE OF THE MOON and noted some coincidences. Watching THE FIRST DEGREE felt like that … listening to music composed separately without the film in mind, but occasionally sidling up against it and paralleling the action. And while the coincidences in the Pink Floyd lyrics and the film can make fun discussions on Internet forums, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON is not a real film score. This one isn’t either.

January 14, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2025 EU Showcase Part 3

CIAO CIAO (Keith Albert Tedesco, Malta, 8)

Of all the films on these posts, this is the one I most want to highlight, because it’s not only excellent, but both underhyped and a type of film that rarely gets done well — a broad farce with the epigrammatic bitchiness of a Ben Hecht play. It divides into three parts: two families at dinner, two teens in a bedroom; and a suicidal man and his savior. Each is basically a one act play, but with connections between the three gradually getting revealed. One of the greatest pleasures for me was thinking late in act one “I don’t ever want the film to leave this house or this night,” only to have act two begin with different characters in the afternoon … but not having my wish denied. Downside is that the third part is the weakest as some of the connections get a little tenuous and underdeveloped. But any movie that starts with four cretins and gives them the fate that they have and basically IGNORES the “how” … you always have a special place in my heart. The first act is one of the best films of the year (think Polanski’s CARNAGE), and the second an excellent complement. The “Malta for export” elements (this is the first film from that country I’ve ever seen) are there, these homes look amazingly weird and we learn why, and like with BELOW THE CLOUDS, the daytime Mediterranean sun has a wonderful blanching look in black-and-white. And while this would only be catnip to language buffs like myself, I was constantly enjoying how much English is spoken without English ever actually being spoken (apparently it’s the defining characteristic of Maltese speech).

DUSE (Pietro Marcello, Italy, 6)

The closing title card of DUSE is one of the biggest and worst cheats ever. It says that Eleonora Duse left Italy for the U.S. and died there, having rejected the life pension from Mussolini. The film itself had shown La Divina meeting the great dictator and gladly accepting that pension, saving the national treasure from penury. There are many ways to handle this bit of bio in a biopic of the great Italian actress, but the one thing you literally cannot do is show the acceptance and not show the rejection. That rejection, however handled, should’ve been the climax of DUSE, particularly since Valeria Bruni Tedeschi portrays her (brilliantly and regardless of the actual history) as the sort of person/artist who would happily have fellow-traveled with Mussolini. Her acting as portrayed is pure fascist aesthetics; she is clearly of an aristocratic temperament whether she has a title or not; and she sees herself and is seen as the nation’s glory embodied (this is the point of the opening scene of her on the World War I front lines). Think Miss Jean Brodie with actual talent. So the title card betrays the film, which is a pity because it’s enormously enjoyable in a hothouse register until then. It contains only the end of Duse’s life which limits the wikirambling that sank A MAGNIFICENT LIFE. Tedeschi turns the role into one of the tastiest hunks of guanciale in recent memory, outdone only by the scene with Noemie Lvovsky as Sarah Bernhardt (Duse’s great foil) giving it the whole charcuterie. Duse’s path crosses d’Annunzio … his second appearance in this festival. However, the film mentions a break, which it wisely doesn’t detail and was almost certainly the result of the kind of uninteresting-to-outsiders theological squabbles that exist in every mass (which is to say, diverse) political movement.

YOUNG MOTHERS (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 8)

To quote the man with whom I saw this film: the haters can suck it. It is the least of their films and it does play like four short-film telescoped condensations of four heretofore-unseen features. But. … that’s four telescoped condensations of four DARDENNES features. Heretofore-unseen! YOUNG MOTHERS is about four teen women in various stages of crisis pregnancies, each dealing with people varying unsupportive, supportive and too supportive. The a-word is never mentioned except negatively and this is also the rare film that shows social workers actually doing good and both effectual and firm, which strikes this reactionary as a little idealized, but is still a breath of fresh air dramatically. The crises are varyingly dealt with and it ends … about as “happily” as any film they’ve ever made (coming immediately after their first film ever to portray a murder). Look, I know I’m the biggest Dardennes fanboy in the world, but how can people not SEE how much formal greatness they show off even from memory, and how much love they exude and display (a rare thing today), and how much their love and love itself does and does not matter. Sometimes love just ain’t enough in Patti Smyth‘s opinion. But Dardennes films are a pleasure to share a room with in a way that I don’t think any other filmmakers ever can say (and I do mean ever). Their stories are always morally fraught and high stakes without ever being didactic or melodramatic. The narrative always grip from sheer urgency. Their characters are always a rare mix of lovable (worthy of love) and varying degrees of dislikable. They always get amazingly naturalistic and TRUE performances from non-actors. You can say YOUNG MOTHERS is the least of their movies. You cannot say it’s a bad one without rejecting their other movies. There’s just too much here.

MOTHER’S BABY (Johanna Moder, Austria, 4)

A head-scratcher and not in a good way. I saw it with two friends and we spent much of our first post-film round wondering what actually happened at the end and why. Not even to speak of “how.” The premise itself is a bit unbelievable; no new parents would both be so cooperative about not-seeing their newborn. But it’s a better film than either of the two postpartum movies this fall — DIE MY LOVE and IF I HAD LEGS, I’D KICK YOU. Give this film its insane premise, and the jump scares are definitely there … including what I’ll just call “falling off the shelf.” MOTHER’S BABY is clearly going for the “is this a nightmare or is the crazy chick just hysterical” vibe. The baby is clearly extremely bizarre in objectively measurable ways regarding its development. But it’s never a bother … but … isn’t that a problem? Don’t babies cry and keep you up at night, to your torment? Or is all this a mom problem. There’s bluntly subtle hints about Munchhausen syndrome … and worse. Who doesn’t name a baby FFS? The ROSEMARY’S BABY comparisons are so obvious that you needn’t have seen the Polanski film (I have not) to see the template. Marie Leuenberger convincingly handles the wild mood swings and tonal shifts, and Claes Bang is nicely handsomely creepy as the doctor (though the less said about Hans Low’s husband the better). But really, no movie can end with this revelation about what had been going on and then end so suddenly.

SMARAGDA: I GOT THICK SKIN AND I CAN’T JUMP (Emilios Avraam, Cyprus, 3)

The screening was really more memorable than the movie as the digital file had to start from the beginning three times before the subtitles began displaying. Waiting for them to start during the first two attempts, I began mentally testing something I’ve heard — that Greek sounds like Spanish as pure sound, only they’re not saying actual “real” (Spanish) words. And … yeah, it does. As for the film, it seemed both unfocused and out-of-date, the central character gaining social media clout by behaving like a ho while it apparently never occurring to her that it might reflect back on her “real life.” Cyprus can’t be THAT far behind the times, can it, Theo? The whole title is taken from a speech that’s way too lumpy a metaphor for my taste. And I really didn’t buy how the film resolves its many half-baked threads. The film put all chips on our identification with the heroine played by Niovi Charalampous. But she divests herself of what’s set up as her dream for no discernible reason, the medical drama around the eye condition is just sort of there in the Oakland sense, and what are we to make of the casual boyfriend and the not-so-casual consequences? Also, Mike, this film ends with a close-up of her face.

December 28, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2025 EU Showcase Part 2

BELOW THE CLOUDS (Gianfranco Rosi, Italy, 6)

Kinda ashamed that I never really got on this movie’s wavelength because I generally like city symphony documentaries, the black-and-white stylization looks amazing, especially for a documentary, the resulting ghostly feel is perfect for a movie significantly about excavations and building a city (Naples) on top of a dead old one (Pompeii). The mix of inky nights, hot oozing mud, white dust and fog is never not-amazing to look at. Reading the good reviews, I recognized the film the critics are writing about. But watching the movie, I felt like I was watching one of Federico Wisuomo’s weaker efforts. The unionized American original was a master of getting institutions to reveal themselves in operation, finding conflicts, getting “holy moments” and the drama of life without the “voice of God” narrator or sit-down interviews. Here though, there were a couple of scenes where it seemed fairly obvious that characters (especially archaeologists) were talking to themselves or between each other specifically for the benefit of the camera, while never actually looking at it. There are some very good scenes though, primarily the lengthy call from a battered wife, the climax of several interspersed scenes at the 911 Call Center. A “mixed” for me, but if you’d ever be caught dead at a subtitled documentary at all, I advise you to ignore me.

DRACULA (Radu Jude, Romania, 7)

Yes, Jude tosses a lot of random shit at the wall, Mike, but he doesn’t do it randomly, if that makes sense. There’s a premise, signposting, and an overall structure. And the “director” of the “outer framing” material both keeps things grounded and is funny both in his own right and his material. The effect is rather like 170 minutes of SCTV being introduced by Joe Flaherty’s Count Floyd. Like with any 170 minutes of SCTV and constantly cutting away to the Count, some of the stuff doesn’t work — dicks seem to be to Jude what boobs were to Russ Meyer or the n-word to Tarantino. Even if it’s morally defensible and sometimes hilarious, there’s just so much that it becomes an unpleasant fetish. Same with AI “bodies” and Coppola … I got the point and it continued and it continued and it continued and it continued. But Jude remains a great clown in a very black vein and he goes so bananas here that you eventually just roll with it, waiting in anticipation for the next bit of WTFery. A Romanian-born friend once told me that Vlad the Impaler is generally regarded as a national hero because he was impaling Turks … except when he wasn’t. The sequence in which this history is debated is accompanied by a bald man, the back of whose head with its smirking human-face tattoo is turned toward the camera the whole time. The “inner framing” story of the Dracula and Vampira performers becoming too real similarly pushes into “BARBARIANS”-style satire. The climax gets brilliantly and cheekily interrupted at the perfectly wrong moment (which makes it even better). The couple of moments where something resembling reality intrudes onto this troll show thus stand out even more … the references to the Dracula theme park (which is what this film essentially is) and the closing sequence, which is mystifying despite/because of the odd poignance of the garbageman father in a traditional Romanian neo-neorealism style and the stilted reading of national muthos. Quite deliberately stilted.

FIUME O MORTE! (Igor Bezinovic, Croatia, 8)

It doesn’t quite have the sharp and deep teeth of Radu Jude’s “I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS,” but it’s the same jawline, eyes and brain … experimental re-enactments, often by men on the street, in service of a surprisingly nuanced treatment of fascism’s role in history. It sounds pretentious … a narrated account of Giovanni d’Annunzio’s attempt to annex Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) to (an unwilling pre-Mussolini) Italy that mixes archival photos and newsreels with contemporary re-enactors in the same sites without hiding — indeed leaning into — how the city and world have changed around it. The narrators change, the contemporary re-enactments are filled with photobombs and cheerful anachronisms (my favorite: d’Annunzio’s use of a Fiat convertible … I sorta once owner that car), and the acting in new scenes is Straub-Huillet awkward. But it sold me right away with man on the street “have you heard of d’Annunzio” interviews that mix Italian (the Fiume dialect) and Croatian and betray who knows what according to what they’re speaking and their age (sometimes not in the obvious ways). I loved touches like “Marconi” being played by a Slav who barely speaks Italian, and also the late dressing down of an “Italian militiaman” by a Croat woman on the street … and how he responds. It’s a heady, alive film if you go with its bonkers premise (in which the juxtapositions of Rijeka/Fiume are astonishingly well executed, matchingwise.

SIRAT (Oliver Laxe, Spain, 6)

It ends so strong and has such an OMG!! moment in the middle with the truck that it’s easy to walk out on such a high that you forget how weak it had been early. First, a little of that kind of music goes a long, long, VERY long way with me, and there’s so much of it for so long with little else on screen/soundtrack that I was getting restless early. That’s a mileage-varying kind of thing, but what is not is the absence of well-drawn characters. That latter lack is attributable both to the lassitude of the plot — for more than an hour it’s MAD MAX without any fighting — and to the (mostly) inexperienced actors whom Laxe seems to have cast just for their looks/tattoos/disfigurements. They’re not hideously amateurish, they just don’t bring any depth or soul. Well, the music returns and drugs start getting synthesized, and my mind changes its snarky mental description from PACIFIST MAD MAX to TIMOTHY LEARY’S THE WAGES OF FEAR. But like this film, Leary would not have had the patience to set up and milk the hairpin turn in the Clouzot, which SIRAT weakly mimes. But that closing sequence … accompanied by a different kind of music that almost sounded like JOE 90 … achieved not only Hitchcockian suspense but also implied something cosmic in the midst of this mundane desert drudgery.

SOUND OF FALLING (Masha Schilinski, Germany, 1)

Michael Sicinski said that he (as had I) had read that there was four time frames on this “one house through history“ film but he could only discern three. TBQH, I’m not sure he’s wrong. That really tells you everything you need to know about SOUND OF FALLING. I have little to say about this antidramatic, incoherently jumbled melange of suicidally unhappy females because I was so stupefyingly bored that I longed for the concete coherence of recent Malick. Nothing is set up, nothing is signposted, none of the jumping around follows any logic. You could jumble the reels of this movie with no discernible effect. It’s the cinematic equivalent of confessional free verse “poetry,” emphasis on the “confessional” part.

SOUTHERN CHRONICLES (Ignas Miskinis, Lithuania, 4)

It starts off as at least potentially interesting, promising to be a version of VISION QUEST, but instead of wrestling, rugby (that’s popular in Lithuania?) is the appealing high-schooler’s sport. But it just meanders about, never really developing much tension or momentum or even comedy as the hero drifts between schooling, rugby, and petty dishonesty, and interacts with parents, a sidekick and two women, none of whom have enough personality in their own right. The closest we get to a meaningful arc is the books he reads. Lead actor Dziugas Grinys is likeable but clearly too old for a high schooler and distractingly like a real-life Slav athlete whom I could not think of. This isn’t a “visual” film, I realize, but it still looked amateurish and a bit ugly at times. The soundtrack is fun as a period piece (it’s set in early 90s … Sadeness FTW!) but has IIRC zero references to the cataclysmic political events of the time.

December 28, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2025 EU Showcase Part 1

I saw 16 films that played at December’s annual European Union showcase at the AFI Silver and I had something to say about all of them; some more than others. Once I finished writing, I realized this was far too much for one post, so I broke the films into three groups based on how I first saw them … first before the Showcase, second at the Showcase on my own (planned), and third at the Showcase with my visiting Pittsburgh buddy Russell. This produced as even a three-way breakdown as possible for 16. I also had posted about a few of these films on X and Bluesky immediately and used those posts as a base for these paragraph capsules.

KONTINENTAL 25 (Radu Jude, Romania, 7)

This has stewed in the mind wonderfully over the last several weeks, but it’s neither as comically demented as BAD LUCK BANGING or DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, and it’s not as intellectually pointed as UPPERCASE PRINT or “I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS.” A great series of environmental pillow shots to close (think Antonioni’s ECLIPSE) helps enormously as does Eszter Rompa giving a great anchoring performance as a good liberal humanitarian, in her own mind. Imagine a SEINFELD episode in which George or Elaine spend 100 minutes searching for validation from others for their acts in the first 10, only this is not nearly so broad/manic as that would be. Those first 10 minutes begin by following a different character who leaves the story having set up the existential crisis for an ethnic Hungarian social worker/bailiff, a crisis to which she seems almost addicted in order do buttress her self-image — specifically, her “failures” with a recalcitratant homeless guy and the city bureaucracy. She’s like the central character in TASTE OF CHERRY in her “please validate me” picaresque and the film is almost sincere if you can ignore the cosmic irony or identify too closely with Tompa. But the others’ varied reactions/non-reactions to her tour of Cluj are bone-dry funny, feeding into Jude’s long-term critique of liberal do-gooders. Certainly it’s the greatest “shot-on-iPhone during downtime of making a big budget movie” movie (DRACULA) ever made. And not a trace of shakiness or carelessness in framing despite that provenance. Already convinced myself I underestimated it.

LA GRAZIA (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 7)

It fits into a strange place in Sorrentino’s ouevre. By his standards, LA GRAZIA is almost sedate in its style — which makes sense as an aging story. As the lame-duck president (Italy elects a president but he’s largely a figurehead unlike the US or French presidents) Tony Servillo gives great stasis as a man called “concrete” behind his back (as if the point of a figurehead president is to be anything else). An MVP award goes to the art direction and set decoration, which leans into gigantist classicism that oppresses with its vast emptiness. I haven’t seen the Italian government look like this since Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST. Yet the few times the movie violates that tone are some of the most effective when viewed in isolation … receiving the Portuguese president during the rainstorm with the red carpet blowing everywhere while the techno music as the only soundtrack is approproately inappropriate, the dramatic world intruding on a pro forma irrelevance. The story is centered on Legacy, most particularly three “dilemmas” for Servillo’s last days as president — two pardon requests and a pro-euthanasia bill. “Should he sign or not?” Grace touches like the Italian astronaut and the dog hit more often than they miss; Milvia Marigliano is a total hoot as the kind of bulldozing Divina that Italy produces without limit; and the African pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin … who??) was terrific, worldly-wise and rode a moped. The three issues are fleshed out reasonably well, as is how a president who had been a jurist would approach them. But as a whole, I would’ve liked it better if even one of the three had gone differently. Just give some variety, Paolo. Particularly when combined with the modernizing daughter as his chief political adviser, the resolutions make the film play too much like pandering left-wing fan service. Or as American political conservatives once sarcastically referred to it … “growing in office.” I don’t insist on being pandered to; I do resent being anti-pandered to.

A MAGNIFICENT LIFE (Sylvain Chomet, France, 4)

If you watched TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE or THE ILLUSIONIST and thought … “what these films really need is a lot of English dialogue and a whole-life biopic-by-the-numbers plot” … HERE IS YOUR MOVIE!!! I saw the film at another festival dubbed into English and it was even shown that way at the EU Showcase, despite the partnership with the French embassy. But this dubbing job is trying something tricky … it gives some characters broad and low prestige English accents (like Oirish Blahrney) and it’s obviously meant to produce the same effect that the southern Marseilles accent / dialect has on native Francophones. But it just sounds weird, probably because the dialogue and the drama still center on that southern Marseilles accent / dialect … but we hear heavy accents in English. As for the plot, even by the standards of whole-life biopics, A MAGNIFICENT LIFE is still incredibly “skimmy,” rushing through Marcel Pagnol’s life highlights and credits while developing virtually no drama during or surrounding any of them. There are some good moments around the invention of cinema and I enjoyed the way actual Pagnol films’ footage find their way into the animation (think Gene Kelly, dancing with Jerry the mouse, only in reverse). I also like the caricature facial style of Chomet’s animation, person’s faces matching their characters. There’s actual invention and ideas in there, and I wish the story had some too.

MIROIRS No. 3 (Christian Petzold, Germany, 6)

Maybe the festival’s most crushing disappointment partly because Petzold’s last film (AFIRE) was my No. 1 film for its year, and partly because this slow-burn riff on VERTIGO was playing like gangbusters for its first two acts. A person falls into the company of an accidental family in a very immediate wake of a tragedy for her (as far as we know). But she fits in just a bit too well and you’re waiting for a PHOENIX ending or some other thematic explosion. This family (mother-father-son) is using Paula Beer’s character as the substitute for a dead daughter, which becomes fairly clear fairly early. Everything falls apart from the moment … the brother explicitly tells Beer (superb, as all four leads are) what’s going on in Marvin Gaye‘s opinion, but he does so as if it were a mighty revelation. The air has gone out of the balloon as much as when David slept with Maddy on MOONLIGHTING. Even worse though, everything after that is unbelievable, too-on-the-nose, or both. And the resolution is worst of all. Instead of the song in PHOENIX, imagine a basically happy ending that just more or less continues a bizarre status quo.

TWO PROSECUTORS (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia/Latvia, 9)

The only negative thing I’ve read about this movie that I find remotely convincing is that the end is predictable / foreordained. Well … yeah, I guess. To riff off a Bugs Bunny conclusion, what did you expect? A happy ending? But the fun (seldom is a noun correct but so wrong) is the how. Test case: what did you think of POLICE, ADJECTIVE … another lightly plotted but quietly and mordantly hilarious journey through a legal system by a single-minded crusader, lensed by a Romanian (though Oleg Mutu didn’t shoot POLICE, ADJECTIVE — that was Marius Panduru, the other big RNW cinematographer). Like the Porumboiu and other Romanian black comedies, this film is so static it becomes funny … the absurdly labyrinthine prison, the repetition-but-not in the justice ministry, the sheer number of guards, and the way the film grinds to a formal halt for the sincere speeches and the body displays. It’s funny until it isn’t. Which we knew wouldn’t last. We still hope. Because we must. And boy does Loznitsa stick the landing. I was praying “please let this be the last shot.” It was. The other caveat (I think my 9 will be an outlier) is that you have to enjoy shaggy dog black humor — a particularly Russian genre, a fact that even gets lamp-shaded in one of the train rides. The guy met Lenin … and … and … and … he met Lenin!

December 28, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hearts of Darkness

HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE (Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, USA, 1991) 8 (was 7)

When Gene Siskel unveiled HEARTS OF DARKNESS as his #1 film of 1991 on their annual “Year Best” show, Roger Ebert immediately noted that this was higher than he ever had APOCALYPSE NOW, a film that Roger admired much more than his partner-antagonist did in 1979. Gene replied “that is absolutely right. I find that there is more drama in this documentary than I found in [APOCALYPSE NOW].” Roger gently (by his standards) demurred before circling back to how great he also thought HEARTS OF DARKNESS was, though it wasn’t in his Top 10. “Number 11” he told a disappointed Gene.

Seeing it again for the first time since it was in theaters, I see exactly what Gene meant. I was never the APOCALYPSE NOW skeptic he was (though he came around later), but the standard negative take on the film in 1979 was that the scale got too big, that the script was too loose and unfinished, and that the whole production got away from Coppola. Stipulate that, and yes, the actual making of the film could then become a better story than the film itself. Part of the greatness of HEARTS OF DARKNESS is that if you are, to this day, an APOCALYPSE NOW skeptic, your case is laid out for you. We see the grandiosity/pretentiousness. We see all the uncertainty. We see the production get away from Coppola. Most important of all, we see Coppola realize all these things.

The key is the existence of Eleanor Coppola’s backstage footage. In 1991, she narrates for HEARTS directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, but in 1979, she is very much Mrs. Francis, i.e., the one person around whom Francis can be fully naked. Because so much of this movie is in real time, we know this is not the performative print-the-legend enacting of a lot of “The Making of….” movies. There are some retrospective interviews of this general genre, with Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, John Milius, and the Coppolas. But it jibes with what we see in “real time” so it comes off much better. We hear Francis tell Eleanor that he’s making a terrible movie, that this movie will bankrupt him and that he’s even contemplating suicide. These are private calls that Eleanor surreptitiously recorded; not some celebrity appearance on Oprah.

This journey comfortably fits both Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS and the Vietnam War (or at least Millus’ conception of it). Both are journeys into the unknown, doing which an innocent (who isn’t quite as innocent as he presents himself) discovers, in tragic detail, both his inner soul and the meaning of the universe. One emblematic APOCALYPSE scene involve a tiger, and as unpacked in detail by Bahr, Hickenlooper and Eleanor, the literal (and hungry) tiger is shown being poked dangerously and closely for the sake of the shot. But you have to get closer. Look the Tyger in the eye, burning bright and framed by the immortal hand of Francis. And with Experience, a man, in the words of the film, cannot go back to the Innocence he was. “Just like Willard.”

Coppola comes across badly in other ways too. For example, in one scene, he openly contemplates Sheen’s death (he had a heart attack on the set that we pretty much see) in terms of “what’s this gonna do to my movie?” In a different sort of film, this would be either a classic villain “heel turn” line or a comic punch line by a Montgomery Burns type. In another scene, Millus describes one anecdote in an extended metaphor which casts Coppola as Hitler, and Millus is not the sort so prevalent today to engage in cheap Hitlerisms.

And yet …

In an early interview in HEARTS OF DARKNESS, Fishburne alludes to Truffaut’s famous maxim about it being impossible to make an anti-war film, because movies make war look like fun. But it helps to be a dope fiend., or look at a movie directed by Francis Coppola. The great paradox at the heart of APOCALYPSE NOW’s greatness is that so much of the film IS fun. There are a few if any more-thrilling scenes in history then the helicopter raid on the village, scored to Wagner. Surfing really is exhilirating, and made more exhilarating in this context by the danger.

One could dismiss HEARTS OF DARKNESS as a mere supplement, a “making of” documentary that really just belongs as an extra on the DVD of APOCALYPSE NOW. That’s not totally groundless — it definitely tags HEARTS OF DARKNESS in the correct genre, but it isn’t much of a critical criticism because of two things: one historicist and one eternal.

First, HEARTS was made in the pre-DVD era (Laserdiscs were around, but very much a niche luxury), and thus before this genre could became routinized and (arguably) calcified. The easy market didn’t exist yet. Bahr and Hickenlooper didn’t know they were making a cliched marketing device, and so they didn’t. And second, this film is about the making of APOCALYPSE F. NOW — one of the most troubled and notorious productions in Hollywood history. From the sacking of Keitel and Brando‘s self-indulgent behavior to the typhoon wiping out the sets and Coppola mortgaging his home, the very existence of APOCALYPSE NOW is kind of a miracle. And, to circle back to Gene’s words, APOCALYPSE NOW is one of the movies the making of which WAS its own drama. Or if you’d rather riff off something Coppola said about APOCALYPSE NOW and Vietnam, this movie is not about APOCALYPSE NOW; this movie is APOCALYPSE NOW.

December 2, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Connection

THE CONNECTION (Shirley Clarke, USA, 1961, 6)

A movie done in by its gimmick premise. THE CONNECTION could’ve been a terrific film if it were just a straight-up play: Heroin junkies and jazz musicians (but I repeat myself) hang out waiting for their fix, then get it — consequences.

Instead, Clarke engages in some meta-messing, having the film supposedly be a documentary about junkies, only the subjects rebel against the auteur (who’s a real git) for demanding more real performances, the cameraman appears in front of the camera, POVs switch making the lights and other camera sometimes visible, and there is an unfunny would-be gag about the wiring and a chair.

I get this was 1961 and “it all” hadn’t been made yet, but you’ve still seen it all. The film also doesn’t commit all the way to the premise, instead often reverting to the stage play that it began as, but with the added twist, the only meta thing that works, of getting the director hooked on drugs himself.

It’s always trying to be both fish and fowl. SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM this ain’t.

But the more central problem is that documentary acting is a legitimate form of its own, and very different from live-theatrical acting. And not one person on stage is good at documentary acting. Look at something like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THIS IS SPINAL TAP, or ZELIG to see how to do “documentary acting“ that is actually fictional. Or look at any film by Frederick Wiseman to see real people act around the camera. They do not look into it and recite polished speeches while the filmmaker or the lighting crew guy mess around the side.

In addition, the “this is found footage” opening title card was so overwritten that (you’ll just have to trust me) even though I didn’t know going in that this is a fake documentary, I immediately discerned it and was thus groaning for the first 20 minutes and intermittently throughout.

Still, this is a 6 film so it has considerable virtues, the prime of which is the jazz score, some of it the playing of records, others of it diegetic live performance (this is one of those junkie tenements with its own piano and drum set). Top marks go to sax player Jackie McLean (the other ensemble members were pianist Freddie Redd, bassist Michael Mattos, and drummer Larry Ritchie). None are very good actors, but Clarke doesn’t ask them to act much except through their music. It’s not just the music itself (though it’s very good), but that they get across a great deal in their manner of playing, McLean pitching both the sweat and the desperation in every riff.

When the film remembers it’s a stage play and forgets the meta messing and trying to be “cinematic,“ the material and some of the performers are strong enough to make me wish the whole film were this way. Carl Lee dominates the film as the titular non-French connection, and Clarke‘s staging/blocking of his entrance and his providing the drugs offscreen until he doesn’t are powerful. I’m not sure if Sister Salvation belongs in a non-comedy version of this premise, but Barbara Winchester resists the easy caricature, makes the naivete believable and earnest, and has the right relationship with the meta camera.

I was attracted to this film from having seen (and loved) a later Shirley Clarke film, PORTRAIT OF JASON, which is a film that commits to its premise — an interview that goes sour as the relationship deteriorates between the titular subject and the interviewers, Clarke and her boyfriend. With this film, a little wicked little voice inside me thinks that Clarke took a joke at her own failures with the two appearances of a hoop, one explicitly cinematic, the other ignored; the former an aggravating failure, the latter a perfect side gesture.

December 1, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hamnet

HAMNET (Chloe Zhao, USA, 2025, 4) 

I went through four stages of reaction to this film, about Mrs. William Shakespeare and the death of their son, Hamnet, which the opening title card helpfully tells us is a name interchangeable with “Hamlet.” Chronologically while watching:

(1) “This is really opaque except to the extent we can accept Anne Hathaway as some chthonic mythopoetic Woman, writhing on expressionistically colored trees or communicating with the animals” … which, I did not, partially for reasons I will make explicit next.

The film never wholly leaves this mode, helped by Zhao’s excellent if repetitive-by-now eye for nature photography. I’m not sure whether Hamnet sucked the bubonic plague out of his twin sister as atonement for being born first or simply caught it while being around her in the usual ways siblings are.* but I think the film wants us to believe it. There isn’t much else to cling to early, in part because so much of the dialogue is whispered that I could hardly follow the psychological dynamics going on. Except for that “dialog” that is Jesse Buckley screaming like she’s in a Safdies movie or a Wes Craven Final Girl.

(2) “If you think Oliver Stone should have made a film about Sissy Spacek, wife of Jim Garrison … have I got the movie for you.”

The core problem with the film, is that Hathaway’s only possible specific interest (especially given that so little is known about her otherwise) is being Mrs. William Shakespeare. Say what you like about the wholly fictitious SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, but at least Gwyneth Paltrow was inspiring him to write ROMEO AND ETHEL, THE PIRATE’S DAUGHTER. For much of the middle section of this movie though, “Angie” is such a Liz Garrison-level pill, complaining about his absence and other domestic issues that you want him to tame that shrew.

(3) “Finally, some Shakespeare.”

I will admit that after the death of Hamnet, the film sort of worked for me, at least by giving us what matters … a sense of why Paul Mescal’s recessive, henpecked schmuck matters. And the actual premiere of HAMLET got some of the feels from me. While it couldn’t be Brian Blessed with Branagh, I got a lump in the throat as Shakespeare himself played the ghost of King Hamlet, talking from the beyond to his son, cast look like his late real life son. And the hands scene was so primal that you couldn’t not react. It had a Griffithesque simplicity.

(4) After the film … “wait a minute. That was horseshit.”

I’m willing to give the film some historical slack because it’s dealing mostly with material that is unknown rather than changing what is known. But on reflection, I simply could not accept three things. One, we DO know when Hamnet died and not only was it not even close to HAMLET’s premiere, but Shakespeare wrote several very differently toned plays in those intervening years. Two, people grieve differently, I understand. I do not understand why writing or performing in or watching a play with your dead son‘s name would be cathartic if that play is a tragedy in which he and nearly everybody else dies. And last, I cannot take seriously that the greatest speech ever written in English was, word for word mind you, extemporized in an internal monologue while standing on the edge of a precipice, even if it IS a speech contemplating suicide.

—————

* According to my mother, when my wee sister caught chickenpox, I spent hours with her in our bedroom, playing board games and cards and reading to/with her without ever catching it (and not because I’d already had it; “you must just be immune” she said).

November 30, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Train Dreams

TRAIN DREAMS (Clint Bentley, USA, 2025, 7)

In the context of tweeting about Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, I complained about the ubiquity of biopics set in the 1960s always having to have scenes set on the days of King’s assassination or the Kennedys’ deaths when (as in most cases) the person was not directly involved in such events. I obviously believe that politics is important, but the plain fact, an unwelcome thought in this hyperpolitical era, is that for most people, the most important events in their lives are not the historic ones. 

I was alive for the events of APOLLO 13 and the dominant memory I have is an annoyance that my cartoons were being preempted. (Come on … I was 3.) As an adult, I’ve lived through the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and numerous other epochal events. But they didn’t affect my life trajectory in defining events of the V-Mort biopic (though there is an amusing story about my being trapped in Canada without a passport on Sept. 11). 

But the world has of course changed profoundly and in ways that ground the possibilities, like how a bank shapes a river’s flow despite not being part of the water. I am writing these words on a device that didn’t even theoretically exist when I was first learning to write formally (with ink) and is not even related to the first machine I used for that purpose (a Smith Corona electric typewriter).

TRAIN DREAMS is the first life-length biopic I’ve ever seen that understands that.

The film roughly runs from 1890 to 1970, the lifespan of Robert Grainier and it’s essentially the same kind of biopic that one might make about Springsteen or Marley or Winehouse, etc. But with the big difference that the person is not a celebrity and the huge difference that the great events of that era appeared glancingly or not at all. World War I is mentioned a couple of times to the extent that it affects the fortunes of the lumber industry in which Grainier works. World War II is not mentioned at all. And yet there is a late scene about the world having changed around him that parallels an all-time scene in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

I don’t know if Cesare Zavatini would approve of TRAIN DREAMS’ lengthy sweep but it’s as much a realistic portrait of a simple, uncomplicated man as BICYCLE THIEF. If neorealism could be applied to a life biopic, it would look like this, going through several “careers“ and ending in hermitude. Two or three events which I won’t spoil haunt Grainier throughout his life, but he doesn’t go loco or have his consciousness raised. He’s too pre-psychiatric and apolitical for that. There’s a line late in the movie about how this is the first time he’d looked in a mirror for decades — Lacanian and anti-Lacanian at the same time. The most important thing that happens to him is his marriage and his child. His greatest regrets concern the course of those two things and how he handled them. And TRAIN DREAMS makes it explicit (perhaps too explicit) that people like him are parts of God‘s plan too.

In one emblematic scene, a black man comes upon the camp of lumbermen that includes Grainier, looking for someone else. He shoots that person, explains his motive as revenge for a racist killing by his target, and asks “does anyone have a problem with that?” Neither Grainier nor anyone else does. Not from Critical Race Theory or because someone quotes DuBois (they’re working-class 1910s whites FFS), but because they’re working-class men who just wanna earn a living. This isn’t a representation of the great racial dramas of Grainier’s life, but a representation of how the great racial dramas of Grainier‘s life affected Grainier’s life (mostly not).

“Progress” does happen. The film notes that the gorge-spanning train bridge that Grainier helps build via his logging and related labor performs a huge public service, and is made obsolete a few years later, as wood is replaced by steel and concrete and thus by a new bridge elsewhere. A second woman comes into his life, a massive contrast by being an educated government worker, and just the way she talks marks her as a person from another or future world. Dislikers of this film will point to her speech about the Ice Age’s impact as too explicit. But the occasional moment like that does feel right as an occasional moment.

Director Clint Bentley also made the film JOCKEY, another unassuming movie about working-class stoicism, though it was hampered a little by the cliched sports-film formula plot into which the observationalism was shoehorned.

TRAIN DREAMS is better still but not quite a great film because, as gorgeous as it is to look at (especially to those with more of a disposition for nature than I have), it’s more of an illustrated novel than a real adaptation. It’s also one of the most voiceover-narrated movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t think the latter is fatal, though there were some parts, particularly early, that sounded more like what a 2025 person would say than a 1910 one. But it allows us to look more at Joel Edgerton, who is just about the perfect actor and physical presence to play a taciturn man who is neither “brooding” nor resentful. Just simple. It also gives the film the retrospective feel that a life story demands. Or in the words of the great philosophers Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley … “ain’t it funny how time slips away.”

November 9, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Plastic Age

THE PLASTIC AGE (Wesley Ruggles, USA, 1925, 7)

Bros before hos, amirite!

OK, that’s obviously reductive and unfair … but not false (until it is). 

THE PLASTIC AGE is the movie that made Clara Bow a star and you can really see why. Especially in an early scene of the college men invading the women’s dorm, she just owns the screen with an inter-related combination of self-assurance, sex appeal, agency and insouciance. She’s not only the star of this film, she’s the star of this world. She plays little role in the early part of the third act except reaction shots in the bleachers and the film loses something as a result.

It’s a basic college story, a bildungsroman in which The Boy, at the age of needing to be molded, learns to focus on his studies (which we never actually see) and his football (which we see a lot of, basically the whole third act) and put away childish things such as women. There’s also the male roommate who breaks up with him over romantic rivalry regarding The Girl. (Bros before hos, amirite!)

The football game takes as much time, relative to the film’s overall length, at the climactic football game in MASH, but it’s not terribly funny. Comparison with THE FRESHMAN is inevitable and not favorable (it should go without saying that lead male Donald Keith is no Harold Lloyd). TBF though, this film isn’t really trying for that, but until then I had thought it was actually quite funny. Again it’s not remotely at Lloyd levels and not even in his style, but it’s rather something more like one of the earliest film romcoms.

The coda mostly sees Bow crying on the side while Keith leaves campus after graduation and shares congratulations with all the bros. With what turned out to be about a minute left, I was saying to myself “is this film going to have the most radical romcom ending ever?” It doubles down on that in … a character looking at two others. Buuuuut … no.

November 8, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Kick In

KICK IN (Richard Wallace, USA, 1931, 6)

Interesting and entertaining pre-code film that was Clara Bow’s last at Paramount, but not at all what one would expect, either from her or the film overall. It’s really an ensemble crime film in which Bow isn’t the protagonist. She’s The Girl of the protagonist, an ex-con who tries to go straight, but the cops are busting his chops, especially after a jewel robbery by his associates.

Bow is fine — actually quite good in the moments she does get, which are mostly dramatic scenes and gestures not comic or romantic ones. It feels strange; the role doesn’t need ClaraBowness, but it does make you wonder what range she might have acquired had she liked making talkies. Introducer David Stenn said the film was shot while Bow was finally coming apart personally and confidencewise. But, with a stipulation that this is an ensemble piece that she doesn’t need to carry, you don’t see that onscreen.

There are other good supporting performers (though some of the acting is period broad) but the whole film gets stolen really by Juliette Compton as one of the women in the gang. I don’t mean this as a slam, but she’s like a middle class person’s Marie Dressler in her too practiced, but still owning-the-room hauteur.

The film is also shot quite well and fluidly for a 1931 talkie, and it was ahead-of-its-time in some ways  Stenn called it a proto-noir (and not wrongly; the plot especially) and there are memorably noir-lit shots, especially of the central couple with a giving-the-third-degree light shining on them. The early gunfight is a shocker because it’s dropped so suddenly and without warning. And the film grabs you right away with an edited scene of a man in a cell anxiously looking at a clock.

The fundamental lack at the center though is a stiff performance by Regis Toomey as the ex-con. The role calls for a Cagney or a Robinson (if Warners never remade this, I wanna know why). But we have the 20s poor man’s Timothee Chalamet, and a Chalemet who only learned how to recite his lines perfectly five minutes before the camera begin rolling.

November 8, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Popeye Altman

POPEYE (Robert Altman, USA, 1980, 8)

This may be the most amazing movie ever that doesn’t work as a whole. The very premise is misguided … you can’t make a cartoon in a world in which gravity exists. And yet so much is so unique, so wonder-full, so dementedly humorous even when not exactly hilarious that it hardly matters. You’re admiring even what doesn’t quite work.

Altman commits to making a live-action film as close to the cartoon as he (or anyone else given the technology of 1980) could make. It’s often brilliant … Sweethaven is one of the greatest movie sets ever and it behaves like a cartoon background, suffering comically-timed destruction while never seeming all that perturbed by it. And every detail and gesture is aimed for brilliance in a way that just put (and puts) so many other big-budget, existing-IP films to shame.

Setting aside the grandfatherliness that has Swee’ Pea steal every scene, Shelley Duvall owns the movie. It’s not just the physical casting but also the way she can move and act to make that eccentric look look natural. Or correctly and funnily unnatural, as when she dances through “He Needs Me.” Duvall is no Ginger Rogers, but Olive Oyl dances as if she is. And her voice nails both the “Popeye, save me” yells and the tender scene the two share with their baby. Her gifts as a comedienne are also on ample display, speaking and acting deadpan and bendy like the great silent clowns, yet without the affectation that sound can often add to attempts to duplicate them. She’s literally a cartoon come to life.

Robin Williams was the obvious choice for Popeye — that era’s greatest stand-up comedian as a performer, possessing a cartoon voice in every possible style or register, and an infinite talent for mimicry. His childish quality that made Mork so funny is also ideal for Popeye — an equally guileless outsider whose every other word is a malapropism coming out of a distorted face. This childishness made Popeye thoroughly asexual and so of course Swee’Pea just gets found, rather than … well, yes. In those sorts of ways, Williams’ is a better performance than Duvall’s but in other ways it’s a weaker one. His character is just less interesting once he is as perfectly embodied as Williams makes him.

At a director, Robert Altman would seem entirely wrong for a big-budget adaptation of a beloved cartoon character; he was a maker of realistic, adult communities in specific settings. (And I get why this film was a commercial bust.) What he brings auteurially though is another of his attenpts actualize a pre-existing environment, but rather than a Chicago ballet company or a country music mecca or an NPR radio show or a wartime medical unit, it’s a cartoon / comic strip.

As I said, the town looks amazingly real while keeping its comic-strip character. It also looks as jumbled and chaotic as Altman’s better known ensemble films. I loved the absurdly conveniently-present tax collector, how the townsfolk become a chattering Greek chorus, and the (re)scaling of such details as the horse races and the defeat of the unbeatable fighter. Even if familiar characters like Wimpy and the Oyls and (most especially) Bluto seem a bit thin, our pre-existing knowledge does some lifting, though an all-time masterpiece would not have relied on this.

I have to admit that music numbers took a while to grow on me (this is the rare musical when the best numbers are relatively backloaded) because the lyrics are so … childish? simplistic? elemental? cartoonish? (yes, all) “I Yam What I Yam” and “I’m Large” are nothing if not a declaration of simplicity, both lyrically and character-wise. That’s all that they yam. Some of the mumbling early, right though it is for “Altman sound mix,” doesn’t work for musicals. But when everything becomes crystal clear with “He Needs Me,” as lyrically … simple … as it is, it’s transcendant.

In a different movie, one might complain of the climax on multiple levels — the octopus is neither scary nor convincing, Popeye’s post-spinach transformation is even less impactful, and the choreography and editing are slapdash. I still do complain some (my grade is not a 9), but I found myself admiring for Altman nevertheless for getting what he could like the visual of Olive in the bulbous bow while sticking to his cartoon guns in service of something that could never come off in live action. All throughout, gestures like Popeye landing 20 consecutive punches on a baddy with a single revolving fist, or Castor Oyl being launched like a missile from a boxing ring, or Bluto spinning into the ground like a corkscrew — they look weird and aren’t as funny-haha as their cartoon equivalents. But they are so grand and inventive that, imperfection aside, we still love the gesture. Which is kind of my take on the whole movie.

August 30, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Ain’t nobody got thieves like us

THIEVES LIKE US (Robert Altman, USA, 1974, 9)

This is one of the most brilliantly perverse films I’ve ever seen. It basically tells the same superficial story as BONNIE AND CLYDE in the same era and milieu, and some of the garlands are even the same, like talkatively funny kidnap victims. But it could hardly be less like Arthur Penn’s masterpiece in its emotional impact, the things that interest it, and its refusal to glamorize the protagonists. 

Part of it is baked into the casting — instead of Warren Beatty and Gene Hackman, we have Keith Carradine and John Schuck; instead of Faye Dunaway, we have Shelley Duvall. With all due respect to Altman’s actors (who ARE terrific), none of them exude the glamour or the star power — and that’s deliberate. Another part of the deglamorization is the handling of the media attention the respective gangs’ rampages earn. Starting this write-up an hour later, I’m 90% sure we only hear about, but never see, the front-page headlines. (There is a photo of their mugs in a true-crime magazine.) And there was nothing at all like the photo of the Texas Ranger or Bonnie’s poem, i.e., criminals playing into their own celebrity; instead, it’s a threat, albeit not one they take terribly seriously. That would require that they be smarter

But it’s not as if Altman’s thieves are stupid in a comic way — see Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead along those lines. They’re more like ordinary people doing things ordinary … to them. They are committing crimes without the great effectiveness, the perverse genius, or the psychotic viciousness that often wins over our sympathies to criminals. We do sympathize with them (they are the protagonists and the title tells us that we are just like them), but Altman doesn’t take those shortcuts.

THIEVES LIKE US is largely about the things robbers do when they’re not robbing. Like Co-cola. It also actually has a couple of love stories that offer (or seem to offer) more of an out than Bonnie and Clyde could be for each other. Multiple robberies and one major character’s death are pointedly offscreen. There are two jail escapes, both surprisingly easy and unrisky. We only actually see one bank robbery and that from basically the objective, removed POV of a securitycam (forgive the anachronism; but I’m certain it was a deliberate angle on Altman’s part in 1974, when that invention did exist). And while that robbery is also funny (customers walking into the bank mid-crime) it also ends with a murder more gratuitous than anything in BONNIE AND CLYDE.

Instead, the most memorable “robbery“ is the play-acted scene with a couple of kids, real guns, and all-too-real sexual desire on part of one of the robbers. Tempers do fray and it is one of the most terrifying scenes Altman ever made. As for the climatic scene, Altman even altered the source book, in which the couple suffered the same fate as Bonnie and Clyde. Instead he gives us a screaming observer and an shot-to-pieces criminal who remains unseen while being shot to pieces (very unlike Penn) and only seen when the cops drag out his corpse and dump it in the mud.

Another outstandingly perverse feature of this film is the radio. It is seemingly on all the time, diegetically or nondiegetically, sometimes pointedly commenting on the drama, sometimes pointedly ignoring it, but always coloring it. A couple couple for the first time to a radio broadcast of ROMEO & JULIET, which the announcer trumpets as one of the greatest love stories, as oblivious as the couple here to how it ends. Later, she listens to a domestic how-to show, and throughout, there’s crime shows like THE SHADOW or CRIMEBUSTERS.

It’s a soundtrack style one associates much more with Scorsese, Tarantino or PTA, but Altman does not use it in the propulsive manner that they do, inviting us to rock along with Dirk and the Emotions, or Henry and George Harrison. Here it serves almost as background noise to produce something like the Greek chorus feeling of “Altman dialogue” for a non-ensemble film where that isn’t really possible. (This may be the most straightforward, least-populated, least “Altman-dialogue-y” film he ever made.) The radio also gives Altman a tremendous walkoff, though it would make no naturalistic sense if it were diegetic. The film’s last surviving major character facelessly blends into a crowd as the radio makes explicit for the first time in words the notion that these characters represent the working class, and it’s a point preached … by Father Coughlin.

August 16, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Weekend viewing — past films

AFI Silver is running a number of amazing series in the late summer — Gene Hackman memorial, Robert Altman centennial, Francis Coppola AFI award, a second Godzilla series in two years, a Marcello Matroianni centennial, a VistaVision series, and others. They are of varying comprehensiveness obviously (I’m able to contain my grief that READY-TO-WEAR didn’t sneak into either the Altman or Mastroianni retros). In the last week I’ve been able to see some interesting work (if only one film I thought great) from those first three-mentioned gentlemen.

THE RAIN PEOPLE (Francis Coppola, USA, 1969, 4)

Maybe if I thought WANDA was a masterpiece, I could more tap into this protagonista. But I don’t.

Shirley Knight, like Eva Victor in SORRY BABY, please the sort of woman custom-designed to aggravate me — in its Me Generation (instead of Gen-wired) iteration. In this form, the passive-aggression, meltiung-stick-of-butterness expresses itself more in puzzlement about why she’s doing what she’s doing. “Why are you leaving me?” “I can’t say because I need to find myself.” A little of such cant goes a long way with me and Coppola handles it with tongs. (It didn’t help that I saw Altman’s THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK a few days later.)

The first substantive scene has wife Natalie leaves her husband over the phone on the run in another state, and a film is in real trouble if at the end of that conversation, you more associate with the husband and his puzzlement. This movie came out two years after BONNIE AND CLYDE, another movie about a woman’s boredom that causes her to take a long cross-country drive. But at least Bonnie teamed up with a guy and did some shit, sted of this Wanda Parker.

In her trip from New York to Nebraska, she does join up with two men … a brain-damaged man-child (“Killer”) played by James Caan and a redneck motorcycle cop played by Robert Duvall. Coppola would make stars of both men obviously, and there is one unqualifiedly great scene — Knight and Caan on the mirror, as she tries to seduce him while realizing that his slowness is more than shyness. Even Duvall plays his character well enough but I checked out when he took her home to his trailer to fuck and there’s a daughter of 7 or 8 played by a mouthy child actress who thinks she’s in DIFF’RENT STROKES.

There’s a potentially good trajectory about Natalie and Killer and how the former becomes a kind of unwilling mother because circumstances force her. But it throws it away at tend with a resolution that, while not narratively ridiculous, is a thematic cop out. It takes the heroine (sic) off the hook for the one thing that has complicated her character throughout the whole movie.

THE DELINQUENTS (Robert Altman, USA, 1957, 3)

Important in film history not just as Robert Altman’s debut but also as the movie in which Robert Altman touted “respect for civil and paternal authority” and the role of the church. And it has value for showing that experts will call anything a “disease” if that helps their ideological bottom line. But it’s just an auteurial curiosity otherwise. Between those campy opening and closing voiceovers that Jack Webb would’ve thought a bit much, DELINQUENTS is … well, better than REEFER MADNESS.

However, there is quite literally no indication whatever either that the director would go on to be one of his era’s most revered geniuses, or of the way in which he would do so. THE RAIN PEOPLE isn;t a much better movie, but it at least showed flashes of a great director and great actors. DELINQUENTS is just a lengthy public service announcement about bad juveniles and corrupted good juveniles, all played by actors and actresses who are clearly adults with some years to spare. The lead “Scotty” would grow up to be Billy Jack, but is a complete straight arrow here. It isn’t reasonable to demand COLD WATER, but shouldn’t a lengthy juvenile party scene at least SHOW more fun than this one does?

PRIME CUT (Michael Ritchie, USA, 1972, 5)

Can’t say I ever bought this film, a crime thriller that completely lacks a meaningful Maguffin. Hitchcock said it didn’t matter what it was, but its existence is essential.

Gangster Lee Marvin is given a contract to go collect the Chicago mob’s money from Kansas City’s slaughterhouse owner Gene Hackman after he had killed a previous collector in the film’s bravura opening scene. And to kill him. Which means the details of how it plays out make no sense. Why isn’t their first meeting the last? Or at the latest, the county fair? To put it another way the entire film is Ebert’s Talking Villain fallacy and there aren’t really enough complications to spin this out.

I also really didn’t buy what I’ll just call the foster-home coda. And I really REALLY didn’t buy perhaps the film’s most arresting image … the drugged-out, naked women lying on the hay in a pen next to naked pigs in the next pen over. That’s the stuff of horror grotesquerie, not an American independent film of the early 70s with this pedigree. I don’t think you can say this film actually is exploitation (and that I went into it with unreasonable expectations). Both Hackman and Marvin at least are acting like they’re in something for Boorman or Penn (or even the auteur of DOWNHILL RACER or THE CANDIDATE), not something by Craven or Hooper.

And yet … I can’t totally dismiss PRIME CUT because some of the bizarrerie really does work. There’s a Hitchcock-like love for violence in anomalous places (and not just the opening slaughterhouse scene). There’s a late shootout in a sunflower field that would be an all timer if I gave a shit about the characters. And I know the Hitchcock of NORTH BY NORTHWEST would’ve been cackling at the turkey shoot and the way Marvin uses an anomalous public gathering to get away from an assassin like Grant does … and then segues into what is very obviously a takeoff (can’t really call a parody; it’s not trying to be funny) of the cropduster attack.

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (Robert Altman, USA, 1969) 8

See what happens when you use birth control!

To be more serious, the first words I have written in my notes are “VIRIDIANA or PERSONA?” Certain elements of both remain to the end — a rich person bringing a bum into her house to redeem him, and a two-handed chamber film with one of the characters playing mute as a protest. But that’s not the way COLD DAY turns out at all … it’s a bit more like TIE ME UP, TIE ME DOWN with the sexes reversed.

Altman centers his film on a bored rich woman (brilliantly embodied by Sandy Dennis) who takes in a soaked and mute bum off a park bench — he stood out a little in the film’s opening shot in which she was clearly furniture and then becomes … furniture in a different sense. Dennis surreptitiously falls for him and becomes increasingly controlling/insane. (We learn a little of his previous life in some escape scenes.) Someone on Letterboxd compared it also to Tennessee Williams, which makes total sense both as a texture,comparison and explanation for why I flipped for COLD DAY as much as I did.

Obviously I’m seeing this because “early Altman” but just as much as the juvenile delinquent movie, COLD DAY doesn’t resemble its aureur’s signature style, which appeared suddenly the very next year in MASH. However there was also one sequence that really REALLY stands out because it’s so clearly DOES foreshadow what Altman would become known for while just about nothing else in the movie does. It’s the visit to the gynecologist, which is mostly seen from outside the windows while most of the soundtrack is irrelevant, otherwise-unseen characters talking in naturalistic ways (over one another, incomplete sentences, etc). We get little observational details like how the group of three women talk about sex, while the son of one of them sits away, uninterested in anything but a SUPERMAN comic. But the heroine needs to go to the gynocologist, to get … armored for conquest.

July 21, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Weekend viewing – current films

SORRY, BABY (Eva Victor, USA, 2025) 4

Well, she does a public service by making a shit film. OK, that’s too cruel (if unavoidable) but what to do when a movie also lampshades LOLITA as a form-content disjunction? What is not too cruel is to say that this film is like a liturgy at the Church of the Therapeutic Society, a religion towards which I am very much a heretic.

But it’s also mystifying. I couldn’t abide such weird tonal disjunctions as the way the best friend acts during the rape examination, and every movement or word by total pill that Kelly McCormack is enacting. There’s a possibility the former is meant to be a joke, but I doubt it. And when the lead character (played by auteur Eva Victor) bids off a lesbian couple, one of whom is pregnant, with “go off to the lighthouse and make another baby,” is that also meant to be a joke on her.

I am simply not sympathetic to the sort of actions that here get packaged as trauma response (the thesis and the window, e.g.), but which also seem so much a part of the pre-rape Victor, a sort of person Victor can’t stand IRL — the recessive, passive-aggressive melting stick of butter whom Camille Paglia laughed off the stage decades ago.

But yet … I can’t simply dismiss SORRY, BABY as a heathen rite because there are two lengthy scenes that are genuinely great, in part because they both center around someone other than Victor. One concerns jury duty, one a sandwich. In some ways, they are the opposite, even. The former is about how others have to move on and react to you objectively and unsympathetically, while the latter is about the needed moments of grace and love from other others. But then I remember how it ended and I want to give the film the middle finger.

EDDINGTON (Ari Aster, USA, 2025) 4

Those of you who like this movie, your being manipulated. Gawd what an undisciplined mess this movie is, the second straight such offer from Aster.

It’s occasionally intriguing but all it really does for the first 110 or so minutes is throw “2020” signifiers at the wall. And then nothing after THAT and the appearance of a drone makes any sense or flows at all. Just two days later, I barely recall anything that happened after a certain killing rampage.

The ending has a Hawkingesque vegetable while Big Whatever chugs along and Kyle Rittehouse is in Congress on the QAnon platform, The Black Guy is firing off guns and Joaquin’s wife is with a guru … and … what the hell is the point of it all. The more I think about it, the less I like it.

Lord knows I want a movie to take the piss out of BLM activism and COVID Karens, but this movie has only punchlines with one very outstanding exception (“are you fucking [kidding]!”) and memento gestures that remind us that Aster was alive during the pandemic too. Nothing grows out of either a worldview on the pandemic or fron a sufficiently black heart to make something like DR STRANGELOVE.

Some people are suggesting that the real subject of the movie is not COVID for the lockdowns in the narrow sense but technology and how it has changed us in quite fundamental ways. One of which is apparently the scriptwriting craft.

July 20, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Cut to the chase

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, USA, 1971, 9 R) 

Two things struck me more than in previous (all TV) viewings.

First, Popeye pretty much sucks as a cop, even though he is vindicated plotwise with the reciprocal wave to Rey and the now cliché “his hunch turned out to be right.” Nor is he a bad cop because he … does not … er … does not cultivate cooperative relationships with our marginalized communities. (Cutting out almost that whole scene is ridiculous on multiple fronts. It both establishes the cops as antiheroes AND indicates how successful this can be.) 

Nevertheless, everything manages to get botched for one reason or another, from his triggerhappiness to his obsession even before the closing “where are they now” montage. The failure of the first surveillance of the importee Lincoln Continental could be chalked up to dumb luck, but on two occasions (one seen, one unseen) he gets cops killed. And as exciting as the film’s most famous scene is … it can’t have been good interface for community relations. (Apparently some people consider the very end an example of police brutality; those people need to learn some policing history.) 

The other thing is the shockingly unsettling score by Don Ellis, both what it is and how it is used. Among A-list films by a major US studio (20th Century Fox), I can’t recall a score this atonal, dissonant, unmelodious and eccentrically arranged. I’m not gonna compare it to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but it is an even more radical version of some of Giovanni Fusco‘s scores for Resnais and Antonioni. It’s also used in appropriately unsettling ways. It’s the first thing at the start of the film, the images of which cut into the credits, of plain white letters on black background. And the closing is similar, the score crescendoing up and out over the gut punch ending and onto another blank, black screen. It does continue through the montage of fates, which isn’t as formally confrontational as the opening and closing, but is as morally unsettling. This is not a good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers (drug smugglers, OK) movie with a happy ending.

The film’s virtues are, of course, as undeniable as ever.

Gene Hackman’s performance is one of the most deserving of Oscar winners, making Popeye as likable and as dislikable as the situation requires and keeping him both as smart and reckless as the job requires without giving him too much “psychology“ or turning him into a therapeutic case. He just is. While the judgment come on the same basis, actors are just as much cast for their looks as are actresses, and Hackman just looks like a working-class stiff, who would scarf pizza on a cold street corner rather than sit down to escargot (that’s Fernando Rey obviously.* AFI is doing a Hackman memorial retrospective, the occasion for showing this, and I typed much of this review while waiting for a later show in the same series — PRIME CUTS. (Post-film addendum: a much-inferior character, though Hackman lends it inherent gravitas.) 

I gotta admit I was a little tickled when I knew from the story that the iconic chase was the next scene and realized as it started that it was beginning with a kid of about 3, peddling a toy tricycle. Because this 1971 movie predates the idiom, rather the possibility of the idiom, “cut to the chase“ it has a freshness and “innocence” (if that word should ever be used in re this of all movies) later chases lack. Among other things, it doesn’t end the movie and I’m 90% sure there were no fruit carts here. Technically, its age also helps it “play.” There have been chase scenes in the CGI green-screen era that probably outdo this one in terms of pure motion and “impossible” feats. But that ruins them. We’re not born when we go into a movie theater. When we see Chaplin in CITY LIGHTS, we don’t wonder why there’s no talking or why that idiot director didn’t correct the color properly. If you’re over the age of eight, you can’t not know the circumstances of production. Nor should you. THE FRENCH CONNECTION has no CGI, no green screen, no AI. Everything that you are seeing, whatever camera angles/speeds or cutting strategies there might be, is an actual thing. Stuff that breaks and runs into other stuff, men who bleed and breathe, space that exists in three dimensions. And that is why its chase between Popeye in a car and an assassin on a train will forever remain one of the all-time greats.

——————

* Strictly irrelevant aside, I noticed for the first time just how strong a Spanish accent Rey has when speaking French. And then I remembered that the two all-French films in which I’ve seen him both had fellow Spaniard Bunuel work around this. In DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, he played a Latin American ambassador. In THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, he was dubbed by Michel Piccoli.

July 19, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment