our songs will all be silenced: 2023 so far
Me top 20 of 2023 + adrenocromo hits from my movie year, such as it is.
Hey folks, heads up this one’s a long boi, highly recommend opening in your browser or via the Substack app. Also, I’m currently recapping Special Ops: Lioness, the latest Taylor Sheridan joint, for Vulture. Watch the show and read my recaps if you’re into that sorta thing. As for the screed before you, dig through and you’ll find my top 20 movies, highlights from my movie diary, and quotes ’n links to some o’ my favorite reviews and essays this year so far. Cheers!
No visible means of support
And you have not seen nothin' yet
Everything's stuck together
And I don't know what you expect
Staring into the TV set
Fightin' fire with fire
-Talking Heads
Goddamn, 2023 more ‘n halfway up in smoke. Checkin’ the ole ticker tape here, looks like I’ve clocked around 240 movies so far in this foul year of our great ‘shittification’ age. Ask me which one of ‘em really burrowed into my lizard brain, it’d be Orson Welles’ F for Fake.
No big Welles head or nothin’, seen Citizen Kane, caught a few others over the years (Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, that “long lost” Netflix one)—all bangers for sure but this is the first one that really felt like it was capturing…hell, leapfrogging Kane’s radical, hypnotic register.
So what is F for Fake? A doc about professional art forger Elmyr de Hory and the European high society that courted his illustrious career and persona? Started out that way, then documentarian François Reichenbach hired Welles to edit his footage and our guy went full galaxy brain with it. In the company of de Hory biographer Clifford Irving (known for his own scandal in forging a whole ass autobiography of Howard Hughes), Orson Welles discusses the theme of art and fraud, drawing parallels to his infamous radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, in which he convinced the public a real alien invasion was happening. Welles executes a glorious mess of editing and story techniques to create one of the first true "essay films.” It still hasn’t been topped in style and narrative ambition, closest things I can think of are How To with John Wilson and, like, dope essay videos on YouTube (ContraPoints comes to mind, I’m sure there’s an example from whatever niche internet waters you’re swimmin’ in).
“It’s as though you said to Orson Welles, ‘what do you have to say about the subject of fakery, art forgery, charlatanism, musicianship, the idea of authorship, and experts?’” recalls Peter Bogdanovich. “I think that my favorite moment is when he talks about Chartres, this extraordinary cathedral which nobody knows who designed, and Orson talks about how its authorship is anonymous, and he connects all that to the whole idea of fakery.”
“Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two,” Welles whispers over scenes of the cathedral. “But everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die.”
We’re truckin’ through some morbid times man. To paraphrase an old comrade, decaying worlds die every day and new, increasingly fake ones erupt from the bowels of monsters, falling to golden ash as quickly as they materialize. Top ‘o the year I discovered a new Adam Curtis doc had been out for months and nobody told me. Came online to Curtis with 2021’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the documentarian and visual essayist’s “emotional history of the modern world.” His latest, TraumaZone, is a long, uncanny media collage of archival BBC footage of Russia from 1983-1999, put together in true Curtis fashion to convey “what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy.”
And though it’ll prove a frustrating watch for anyone looking for a clear, concise history lesson, TraumaZone certainly mindmelts you into the headspace of exhaustion, disorientation, and uncanny despair that befalls ordinary people living inside the implosion of an empire. Hard to watch without thinking “oh fuck, we headed about this way?” Maybe not, if we’re lucky. But living with the existential dread of the climate crisis to yer left and the fractal misery of the pandemic to yer right does seem to shroud the present in a lo-fi melancholy end-times vapor—the future on the other side an arid, broken horizon in an all-consuming liminal space.
Speaking of liminal spaces, got our first real ripper of a new release this year in Skinamarink—a low-budget indie horror about two kids who wake up in the middle of the night to find their father missing and all the windows and doors in their home vanished.
Minimal lighting (mostly from the old television that plays ominous public domain cartoons on a loop), obscured framing, and a slow-burn pace punctuated by sparse, uncanny effects make Skinamarink a worthy experiment and a mostly effective horror film. Director Kyle Edward Ball and cinematographer Jamie McRae shot this joint on a $15,00 budget at Ball’s childhood home—not a virtue in and of itself but certainly a factor in why this movie works—recalling the quiet, malformed existential dread of half-sleepwalking through a childhood nightmare.
Picked up Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation ‘round the end of last year, read it pretty quick and been slowly makin’ my way through the movies covered in it that I ain’t seen yet. Old QT is settling into his Problematic Gen-X Uncle of Cinema era—a term I coin with much affection for the guy who not only made the movie that inspired the name of this fuckin’ substack but opened like a whole influential moviescape portal for myself and countless other millennial film fans. Key to Tarantino’s first book of reviews, essays, and personal history is an entertaining breakdown of the two director generations that made up the New Hollywood: the Anti-Establishment Auteurs and The Movie Brats. Both groups were raised on the same old movies, but the elder anti-establishment guys (Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, etc.) were deconstructing all the old Westerns and gangster flicks and shit “to finally examine and demonstrate America’s history of fascism, racism, and hypocrisy.”
The Movie Brats (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, and Paul Schrader) were more enamored of the John Ford movies they grew up watching on T.V., and they set out to make the best possible modern versions of Old Hollywood genre pictures (see Jaws, Star Wars, The Godfather, hell even Dressed to Kill). But the Anti-Establishment Auteurs and the Movie Brats undoubtedly shared a certain post-modern anthropological sensibility—emerging from the dream life of the proverbial American male, shifting the angle of the prism just enough to reveal its twisted nature.
Been on that same trip for most of my adult movie-watching life now—re-examining the reactionary American cinema canon that dominated my youth through a world-wearier but no less enthusiastic lens. On the Movie Brat side of things, Cinema Speculation turned me onto a deeper examination of Paul Schrader, the film critic-turned-filmmaker who wrote Taxi Driver and sorta led his director class’s obsession with spiritually remaking John Ford’s The Searchers again and again. Tarantino spends a lot of ink on Rolling Thunder, the Schrader-penned revenge flick that was supposed to be a scathing critique of revenge flicks and the American reactionary mind that housed the genre before script changes smoothed out its roughest edges. Still, great movie and from what I hear’ll play a big role in Tarantino’s “final” film, The Movie Critic, which he’s described as Taxi Driver if Travis Bickle was an underground film critic for a porno mag.
Speaking of the ‘70s L.A. porn scene, one of the other big Schrader entries in Cinema Speculation is 1979’s Hardcore, starring George C. Scott as a Midwest Calvinist who ventures out to the bloody red sun of fantastic L.A. to find his runaway teenage daughter. Once again, studio-mandated changes forced Schrader (also in the director’s chair this time around) to punt on the ending, but the film’s heart-of-darkness journey maintains its bite. As Josh Lewis puts it, this is a movie about “opening the doors that shouldn't be opened, navigating the economy of a thing that doesn't exist, literally breaking through the sets all around you, and finding nothing but your own failure. Schrader exorcises his repressed Midwest Calvinist upbringing in the gutter filth movie houses he escaped to, and where his own career got started.”
Schrader’s got a new one out this year, the third in his late-period “God’s lonely man” trilogy (preceded by 2017’s First Reformed and 2021’s The Card Counter). Master Gardener stars Joel Edgerton (possible career-best) as Narvel Roth, a meticulous horticulturist who tends the grounds of a beautiful estate and pandering to his employer, the wealthy dowager (Sigourney Weaver). Turns out our master gardener is an ex-white supremacist in witness protection — another Schrader protagonist with a damned past who’s turned to the focused routine of a quiet profession as ritual, spiritual cleansing.
Schrader’s made the podcast rounds a bit to promote the film, and he’s been throwin’ this line around a lot, a paraphrase of a lyric by singer/songwriter S.G. Goodman: “I used to be an artist who never wanted to leave this world without saying f*ck you, and now I’m an artist who never wants to leave this world without saying I love you.” Master Gardener critiques American revenge films as much as Hardcore or Rolling Thunder, but where those films are meant to scathe, this one subverts the genre toward hope, tenderness, and the dream of a way out of all this blood and hate. It’s a calm, well-earned coda to a cinematic oeuvre so steeped in the infernal.
What can ya say except shit just hits different the older you get, man. Like (not to overload you with Letterboxd-brained discussions of different generational filmmaker cohorts or nothin’) it recently occurred to me that among that golden ‘Sundance’ class of directors, I’ve kinda shifted from being a Tarantino ’n Paul Thomas Anderson guy to being more of a David Fincher ‘n Steven Soderbergh guy. Soderbergh I’ve gotten especially hip to as the preeminent honest-to-goodness indie filmmaker of the bunch.
“I think it's fair to say that I'm the cockroach of this industry,” Soderbergh told Marc Maron in 2021, “I can find a way to survive in whatever version I am confronted with.” And survive he has, having made two films for Netflix and three for HBO Max in the last five years—bangers all. None of Soderbergh's peers have adapted to the streaming era quite like that, and whatever comes after this particular entertainment bubble bursts I’m sure he’ll keep on making fucking dope movies with whatever tools are at his disposal.
But this year, Soderbergh is back in the theatrical arena with Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a wonderfully old-school feel-good spring release and the charming third entry in the Magic Mike franchise. Soderbergh was inspired by the Magic Mike Live in London show to return to the cultural juggernaut he originated, spinning its “final chapter” into a Singin’ in the Rain type romance where everyone’s favorite stripper with a heart o’ gold (Channing Tatum) catches the eye of a wealthy socialite (Salma Hayek Pinault) who hires him to work his magic on a new live production at her London theater.
Call me old-fashioned or whatever but I never thought the romance subplots were a “weak link” in the other Magic Mike movies (Mike is a LOVER ya know?) so my reception to this one was warmer than a lotta critics. Tatum and Hayek are two of our brightest stars and their chemistry was a worthy focal point for the movie. It may not be the Magic Mike entry that speaks to you most (I know my fealty still lies with the perfect ensemble road comedy that is Magic Mike XXL), but Last Dance is a delightful musical entertainment about hearts in flux and bodies in motion. “No one crafts a film like Soderbergh or stages a body in motion quite like him,” writes Maxance Vincent. “And there is absolutely nothing more cinematic than a body in motion.”
Last Dance wasn’t the only feel-good indie of the dumpuary-Spring slate. Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings was a joy for those of us lucky enough to catch it at the theater. Came online to Holofcener through 2013’s Enough Said starring Julia Louis Dreyfus and James Gandolfini (MUST-SEE performances from both these gems). You Hurt My Feelings stars Dreyfus as a writer who’s finished her first non-fiction work and overhears her therapist husband (Tobias Menzies) say he doesn’t like it. Simple, human premise played out to simple, satisfying, and truthful comedic ends. Tons of great scenes and a joy to see a lower-stakes relationship comedy amidst all the high-intensity stuff at the theater.
Ok, forget theater releases for a sec. In fact, forget corporate streaming releases for a sec ‘cause we ‘bout to get into some DIY indie filmmakin’ here. Been on this beat for a while now—tracking the work of Joel Haver and some other creators out there making micro-budget movies and putting them on the internet for free. Yes, by and large these are movies made “for the internet,” or more accurately for an audience on the internet. But that’s what makes them real movies, man. It’s 2023 “and I’m tired of pretending it’s not” feel me?
Anyway, Joel Haver’s latest feature is a 40-minute entry in the popular creator’s own ”make a movie during the Oscars” challenge. Unsurprisingly, this is Haver firing on all cylinders, quietly coaxing a searing emotional current out of sparse materials. Described by one Letterboxd reviewer as “the reverse Banshees of Inisherin,” Things Could Always Be Worse stars Haver and frequent collaborator Trent Lenkarski as a couple of friends who get locked in a room together with no phones or screens and sort of casually rediscover their humanity together while fighting off boredom and trying to find a place to pee. Great stuff.
Last year, no DIY indie was more successful or cohesive in execution than No Shark. Director Cody Clarke has absorbed the totality of a shockingly prolific genre and made himself the Paul Schrader of sharksploitation. Now he’s doubled down on the existential factor in this spiritual No Shark sequel (complete with a shark movie within a shark movie) about a woman (Belle Pace) whose life turns upside down after a violent encounter with an invisible shark.
“Seeing the attacks in the context of a cheesy b-movie is probably healing in some way. It makes one realize the silliness in all things. This mortal coil is nothing to be afraid of. This mortal coil is just a funnel cake or something topped with powdered sugar.”
This is Clarke’s biggest canvas yet, and he takes advantage of it by doing what he does best—casting interesting people with interesting, beautiful faces to tell idiosyncratic stories. Invisible Shark captures the experience of living in a permanently fractured world of people driven to melancholy madness, beset by invisible entities and apparitions both real and unreal. “In a weird way it's cut from the same cloth as Inglourious Basterds,” says Clarke. “Which is as much about memory and history and trauma as it is about the power and freedom of cinema.”
Truly class-conscious films are scarce in the grand scheme of cinema, even fewer still are the ones that don’t inevitably punt on the subject. Maybe it’s just I’m hungry for more “pro-labor” movies but if you ask me Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires don’t punt on nothin’. Major movie discovery for this guy in a year full of labor action unprecedented in my lifetime. In 1870s Pennsylvania, Sean Connery (in one of his earliest and most effective post-Bond conscious-image-shift roles) leads a secret group of Irish immigrant miners in fighting the oppressive mine owners through extra-legal means. Richard Harris is down-on-his-luck detective James McParlan, hired to go undercover and infiltrate the Molly Maguires. McParlan’s sick of being kicked around at the bottom of the food chain and takes this job for the fat paycheck, chance to be the one punching down for a change.
But it don’t take long for McParlan to go sour under the dire working conditions and wage theft that define the lives of this mining community, and up until the very end you’re left wondering where McParlan’s sympathies will ultimately lie, and whether he’ll join the cause for real or let his comrades perish. It’s a grimy class warfare fable performed and directed with an economical style befitting the subject matter, setting, and professional chops of all involved (especially Connery and Harris—standout work from both my guys).
Class films are rare. Protest films are even rarer, especially ones that work. Enter How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Went into this one mad intrigued by its premise: taking a nonfiction book and making its case to the masses through the visual and narrative grammar of a modern entertainment. Not only does How to Blow Up a Pipeline present industrial sabotage as a viable and even necessary antidote to slow, ineffective, pacifist climate activism, it’s one helluva good heist movie. Day after I watched it I set off for my usual bike ride down the boardwalk in Long Beach ‘n threw the How to Blow Up a Pipeline soundtrack on me Spotify, thinking about the cast and how the Portland anarchists (Kristine Froseth and Lukas Cage) were conspicuously L.A. actor-looking compared to the rest of the cast but they were also really good that’s just one of the myriad ways the film blends realism with Hollywood formalism to keep you both entertained and aware that you’re watching a movie with direct real-world implications — hit the boardwalk right at noon, pass the beach parking lot and all the usual folks are out, workers grabbing a bite from the beachside shack, guys rolling blunts and getting haircuts, vibes are decidedly on as they usually are ‘round these parts, ahead the Long Beach skyline beyond it the real oil refinery that gives the fictional Theo (Sasha Lane) leukemia and inspires her best friend Xochitl (Ariel Barer, also co-producer and co-writer) to assemble a crew of young misfits from around the country and blow up a West Texas oil pipeline. Point is, How to Blow Up a Pipeline really fed into my fetish for movies that occupy a liminal space between real life and “the movie world” on accounta that’s where we all live internally, the root of our cultural cog dis you dig? And movies like that can guide you through that space to the bomb that blows it all up, freeing you from the shackles of the stories that placate and imprison—Inceptioning the American "dream life."
Been spending a lot of time with Robert Altman, groovin’ on the stoney visual grammar and mosaic sense of storytelling he carved out for American independent cinema. “Altman's characters are decidedly American men and women,” writes Helene Keyssar in Robert Altman’s America (one of my personal bibles as of late). “These characters fuse typical images of men and women in American film with pedestrian modes of behavior and appearance. Altman's characters strike us as out of place because they appear to us within the structures established by the myths of American film, yet their behaviors are contiguous with the actual society of American life.”
Take Quintet, Altman's much-maligned hazy chillwave retro-futuristic dystopian sci-fi that takes these ideas to their ultimate apocalyptic ends. Set in a future ice age (now an imminent possibility, what with the collapsing Atlantic current ‘n all), the film follows Essex (Paul Newman) through the remaining vestiges of human civilization where folks fill their time playing a board game called "Quintet." Essex hasn't played the game in years, and he's only interested in finding honest work or whatever's left of it. But a random act of violence leads him to an exclusive "Quintet" tournament where the players are actually killing each other for losing in the game.
Altman and crew shot the film on the abandoned site of Montreal's Expo 67 world's fair (in the middle of an actual Montreal winter, eesh), giving the whole thing an immersive "frozen-over Tomorrowland" feel. And they smeared vaseline or some shit on the edges of the lens so every shot is encased in a hazy soft-focus, like looking at a bad dream through an icy window. Lock into its rhythm and focus and the film becomes a potent, melancholy sci-fi prophecy of our gamified way of life in this late-stage capitalist-into-techno-feudal era. No matter how advanced or rudimentary the technology, we eventually lose our humanity to our amusements. To paraphrase St. Christopher, a power player in the film who's started his own "Quintet" religion, the number five is the break in the void, and "the game" is what we make of life when there's none left to be had. The inoculation for the non-future—survival, or even peace, is never enough. You have to win, and someone else has to lose. Don't wanna play? Too bad. The game will find you.
So how will you play? And what will you make of the other players?
Most of Altman's films, in some way or another, are playful yet mournful meditations on the fractured American dream, the nagging Hollywood archetypes we all desperately cling to, and the inevitable moments of weakness that shape our futures. Brewster McCloud is the stoniest and most radical of Altman joints—“A very strange adult fairy tale about a mass murderer and a boy who wants to fly” is how Larry Karrazewski describes it in the Trailers from Hell above. Bud Cort (Harold and Maude) plays the title role, a strange introvert with a hair-brained scheme to build workable wings for himself and fly above the Houston Astrodome where he secretly lives. To quote my favorite Letterboxd review of this movie, “this is Robert Altman's Playtime, a sprawling, somewhat freeform series of gag-filled scenes that are loaded with social commentary/criticism. It's an incredibly angry movie that uses a spoonful of sugar to help the vitriol go down.” It’s an anti-establishment anthem wrapped in live-action cartoon high-jinks, portending late-Wes Anderson in its kaleidoscopic bird’s eye view of three-dimensional humans moving through immaculate, cluttered spaces under the cruel auspices of two-dimensional caricature.
And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly the type of Wes Anderson joint that just came out. “Basically had a lump in my throat the whole time,” says Jake Bart. “Anderson takes dings for his films feeling studied and manicured, but the emotional hits here are lightning bolts (or perhaps atomic bomb testing)— they strike quick and linger.”
World-changing events spectacularly disrupt the itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention in an American desert town circa 1955. That’s the Asteroid City’s main story, framed as a televised production of a play (that also occasionally ventures out into the story behind the play). It’s Anderson’s most complex and confounding nesting doll narrative yet, the more I sit with it the more it beguiles me—characters bumping up against the confines of their roles, humans in melancholy flux. Macro and micro, artificial and intimate, all mixed up in a meticulously fabricated world swirling with emotional and spiritual chaos, the 1950s atom punk setting laying bare the Quaalude trip we’ve all been on ever since we dropped the bomb, forever trying to access the pain of our avatars in hopes of someday finding our own.
I reckon it was inevitable that a culture dominated by copies of copies of copies of everything would go all in on lionizing the brands that “made us” through the ancient Hollywood art of the historical biopic or whatever. Top half of ‘23 we got a whole ass trend of these “brand movies,” arguably headlined by Ben Affleck’s Amazon-released Air Jordan: Origins. Nah, it’s just called Air—a fitting title for something so airy and terminally serviceable. Here’s how a bunch of schlubby white guys at this goddamned sneaker company created Michael Jordan ain’t that some shit? There was also Apple TV’s Tetris and the fuckin’ Flamin’ Hot Cheeto movie, neither of which I ever heard much about.
Then there was BlackBerry, a real good one that slid in on this “brand biopic” trend and made a critical name for itself as something of a Canadian Social Network. Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton star as the co-founders of RIM, the company that invented the smartphone. Howerton in particular slays as Jim Balsillie, de-facto business-side CEO and raging, Patrick Bateman-aspiring huckster. As Joel Haver notes, this movie’s “at times by the books, but it did a really good job reading the books.” Director Matt Johnson (who also plays RIM co-founder Doug Fregin) applies an off-kilter, quietly voyeuristic lens to a by-the-books corporate rise-and-fall story and the results are deceptively hypnotic. “On a long enough timeline, everything fails,” Johnson says of the BlackBerry saga. And that’s really the thing about even the most game-changing technology or moments in history. All is eventually undone by the vampiric intersection of time and capital.
“This is a movie about people with anxiety, people who are afraid of their Mom, and people who are afraid of their penises. And I can only relate to two out of the three so it didn’t fully work for me.” Is what my wife said about Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid. An incredibly apt description of this episodic extra-cranial fever-dream manifestation of the Millenial Beta male’s existential hangups. Aster himself has described it as many things (sometimes all in the same interview): A “Freudian Odyssey,” a “Borgesian ouroboros narrative,” “very Jewish,” and “like you’ve been traveling through someone’s nervous system.” All of that bears out in the film following the title character Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) through a colossally embarrassing, surreal journey home to see his overbearing Mother (Patti LuPone).
But for all the literary machinations and references ascribed to Beau is Afraid, end of the day it ain’t that deep. “I just wanted to make something really strange,” Aster has also said, which may sound like a cop-out, but the magic of the film is truly in its viscera and laughs. And this shit is fuckin’ funny dude. Buñuel and Tati by way of Verhoeven and the Farrelly bros, mad emphasis on the Farrelly bros though—a weird-ass epic comedy for the interminably anxious end-times crowd.
Which brings me to Infinity Pool, my own personal Beau is Afraid. True to form, I am ashamed of anything and everything that says about me. Then again, who doesn’t want to be cucked by Mia Goth amirite? Alexander Skarsgård plays James Foster, a failed novelist riding out an all-inclusive island resort vacation on his wife’s rich family’s dime. Ensnared and enraptured by fellow resort guest Gabi (Goth) and her gang of sociopathic dilettantes, James gets into some weird, violent, metaphysical high-jinks off resort grounds and discovers an all-consuming underworld of Western imperial tourism.
Both this joint and Brandon Cronenberg’s previous sci-fi terror ride, Possessor, have garnered a lot of unflattering criticism when compared to the work of the guy’s legendary father David (quick reminder that Crimes of the Future was the best film of last year, check it out if you ain’t already). From my line o’ sight, though, Infinity Pool bears some literary influences and ideas that Brandon shares with his dad (sci-fi surrealists William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard come to mind), but the tone, humor, and visual sensibilities are his own. There’s a hypnotic but nauseating quality to Infinity Pool’s camera work, and a propulsive non-literal nowness to the story. It’s another eat-the-rich, lizard people satire exploring the tentacles of privilege and global capital—a 2020s wage-gap refraction of Hostel and the Bush-era torture porn genre. Fun movie.
Ok Andy but what about something actually fun and not just a pervert’s idea of a good time? Best I can do is John Wick: Chapter 4. Keanu Reeves and stunt extraordinaire-turned-action-auteur Chad Stahelski parlay the bullet-laden, fist-bumping, bodies-in-motion mythic martial artistry of the previous three Wick movies into one helluva coda—complete with all the world-building eccentricities and unparalleled stunt sequences that make this fuckin’ samurai neon western ballet the best action series of the 21st century. Priscilla Page, who’s written extensively and beautifully about John Wick calls it “The Divine Comedy with headshots”—“action movie as epic poem, blending Dante[...] with bits of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid” and “the moral muddiness of the spaghetti western — there’s no good and evil, only shades of bad.”
“The story of John Wick is a powerful allegory for the devastation of losing someone,” Page adds. “What it can turn us into, and every ugly emotion that comes with it: the fury, the agony, the desperation. And then maybe, if we’re lucky, a hard-won kind of peace. It’s an experience made that much more difficult for us by a universe that feels uncaring, even hostile to our pain.”
Been thinkin’ about that a lot lately—this hostility we can’t help but feel from an otherwise neutral universe. Reckon it’s the stories we tell ourselves doin’ us dirty like that—imposing a canon of reality by which we measure our place, our character, our very being—youth fenced in, stabbed and shaven, taught words propped up to die.
Never thought a superhero cartoon would get me tearfully quoting Bukowski but here we are. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a goddamned miracle and an immediate testament to the words of Guillermo Del Toro when he won the Best Animated Feature Oscar for last year's Pinocchio: “Animation is cinema. Animation is not a genre. Animation is ready to be taken to the next step.” Been five years since the first Spider-Verse film came out and deftly handled the whole comic-book multiverse idea. Since then the superhero movie industrial complex has done little with it except use it to funnel different brand properties into newly (and barely) consumable bundles.
“If films of this ilk point to anything,” writes Angelica Jade Bastién, “it’s that our culture is choosing the false comfort of a past that has never existed,” cocooned in “the fleeting pleasure of drowning in our own idealized pasts.” Had a reasonably good time at The Flash on accounta I’m more of a DC guy than a Marvel guy, took in the fleeting pleasures of seeing Ben Affleck’s, Michael Keaton’s, and even Adam West’s Batmen all in the same damn movie more willingly than I did watching Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield suit up again for Spider-Man: No Way Home (a comparable IP-baiting shit show no matter how much y’all love Tom Holland and Zendaya). But Across the Spider-Verse, as Bastién points out, moves far beyond the easter eggs (of which there are plenty) and announces itself as “a strong work of art that cares about the interior lives of those that inhabit its worlds and builds an aesthetic terrain that is indebted to the comics but not only defined by their aesthetic grammar. It says, fuck the canon.”
The story of Miles Morales—a reality hopping, canon-breaking young Spider-Man looking for peace in an infinite, hostile comic-book multiverse—is a story about stories, not in the mediocre modern “meta” sense you dig but in the sense of looking forward not back, escaping those deep narrative grooves from which we no longer seek definition. Your life is your life, don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes.
Not every big IP thing can be Spider-Verse mind you, but it ain’t all The Flash out there either. Last year, Top Gun: Maverick sorta crystalized this Biden-era diminished blockbuster genre of old bucks throwin’ on the old pair of aviators and sayin’ “Step aside, Jack, I still go this.” The results have been mixed, though thanks to our collective fever-pitch investment in proppin’ up our old-guy icons, some of these movies really cook (Maverick being the prime example, but more on the Cruiseverse in a minute).
Harrison Ford’s been on this trip since he revived (then killed) Han Solo in 2015. He brought an aged Rick Deckard to Denis Villeneuve’s underrated Blade Runner 2049, and now he’s taking one last crack o’ the bullwhip in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. In each of these characterizations you’ll find shades of John Wayne’s The Shootist—a legendary gunslinger now a tired, lonely old man beckoned to one last ride. On one hand, it’s a sorta cynical way of dusting off an old IP just ‘cause the guy in it’s still alive but you still get a workable story out of it. But it’s a story that works to Ford’s strengths and elder persona. James Mangold, no stranger to making Westerns of other genres, applies The Shootist to the Indiana Jones formula to tell a story about the past imposing on the future and the insidious, enduring presence of fascism in post-war America.
As a whole, the movie suffers some of the same pitfalls as other rushed spectacle films from the House of Mouse—way too long and somewhat lacking in visual cohesion, pre-vis or some shit messing with the flow of the action. Great beginning (I’m usually pretty allergic to this digital de-aging stuff, but the de-aged Indy looked as good as I’ve ever seen this shit look and I couldn’t help but love seeing my old pal in his prime, punchin’ his way through a whole-ass train fulla Nazis) and a great ending, beset by a bloated, meandering middle. Not what you want but there’s also Phoebe Waller-Bridge batting a fuckin’ thousand through the whole thing so we got that goin’ for us. And there’s no denying old age fits Indy like a glove, illuminated by Ford’s enduring passion for the character. There’ll never be another one like him folks.
And there’ll never be another one like Tom Cruise, fresh off an “I saved the movies” victory lap with the release of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1—a truly maximalist espionage adventure in the vein of the Kingsman movies or some of the more fantastical Bond movies—taking the genre to its biggest, wildest, borderline sci-fi ends.
This time around it’s Cruise’s analog superspy Ethan Hunt vs. The Entity, a sentient A.I. weapon with its sights fixed on world domination. Global powers (chief among them the U.S. intelligence community, blech) want to control The Entity. Ethan Hunt aims to kill it. The globe-trotting race against time and digital pre-apocalypse ensues with what might be the series’ most vibrant cast of colorful heroes and villains (Pom Klementieff’s Paris is well worth the price of admission alone) and some action sequences that rank with the best of ‘em. Not an absolute top-tier M:I joint (the designation still reserved, in my mind at least, for the first movie, Fallout, and Rogue Nation) but pretty close. Plus, there’s the wild timing of a mega spy movie about the looming threat of AI coming out on the cusp of the WGA + SAG-AFTRA strike.
That’s right, Hollywood’s writing and acting labor forces are on strike, together, for the first time in 60 years. The streaming takeover opened up a window for the execs to hoard more profits at the top than ever by all but dismantling the systems that allowed writers and actors to make a modest living (which, for most in the unions, it is modest) in the biz for decades. Very much in line with America’s broader labor crisis. And if that weren’t enough, the money changers seem weirdly keen on replacing creative labor with this cluster of new chatbot technology that passes for “AI” these days, “I’d buy that for a dollar” amirite? Seems we’re seeing the literal manifestation of this quote from Altman’s seminal Hollywood satire The Player:
I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.
Hard to say how this is all gonna shake out and what it’s gonna mean for the future of the art form. Short term, only a full agreement to union demands is acceptable. Long term, cinema must evolve beyond the confines of a dilapidated industry if it’s to maintain a pulse. Meantime, I just hope my humble trips through the movies are a worthwhile ride for the people who love cinema and the people—the artists, the craftspeople, the truth tellers and yarn spinners—who make it.
Say, it’s also pretty nuts the strike went down right before Barbenheimer, the cultural phenomenon that brought movies back to the mainstream, like for real this time. God only knows the ratio of marketing psyop to organic memes that made the simultaneous release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie a bona fide monocultural event. All I know is everyone seems to be talking about movies in a way this movie nerd hasn’t heard since before the pandemic. Am I hallucinating?
Anyway, Oppenheimer’s very, very good but nowhere near a five-star new classic from where I sit. Still open to being wrong about this but the first and last acts just don’t work like they’re supposed to. It’s that middle 90 or so—the making of the Manhattan Project, the Trinity Test, word of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer’s POV in the immediate aftermath—that delivers on the promise of an existential horror movie for the modern world. Death, the wheel turning America’s vision of tomorrow. Like George Carlin said, “Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it.” And so did the bomb.
But it was Barbie that won Barbenheimer in the end (if you call the bigger chunk of the box office and all that pink winning, and why not?). Went into it with pretty high expectations seein’ how Greta Gerwig’s secured her spot as like the filmmaker of her generation (along with Jordan Peele). Walked out loving it as a worthwhile big-budget comedy for the masses, absolutely blown away by the production design and costumes and performances, and even the broad-based “Feminism 101” of it all. Really deftly handled. Margot Robbie plays a tulpa of an idea trying to be a person with a warmth and authenticity that shouldn’t even be possible, and Ryan Gosling proves once and for all that funny Gosling is the best Gosling (don’t get me wrong, my Nicolas Winding Refn-stanning ass still loves the brooding Gosling).
As for the big pink IP elephant in the room, Barbie is ironically and genuinely as interesting and human as you can get with this kinda thing. “To be a film fan these days is to be aware that franchises and cinematic universes and remakes and other adaptations of old IP have become black holes that swallow artists, leaving you to desperately hope they might emerge with the rare project that, even though it comes from constrictive confines, still feels like it was made by a person,” says Alison Wilmore. “Barbie definitely was. But the trouble with trying to sneak subversive ideas into a project so inherently compromised is that, rather than get away with something, you might just create a new way for a brand to sell itself.” Spitting straight facts here. Is anything really subversive or even meaningful in a society where nothing is safe from co-optation? Don’t know, but it ain’t no small thing that Barbie is a movie first and elaborate brand ad second feel me? Like end of the day it was marketed as a real movie helmed by a respected filmmaker, focused on genuine cinematic craft and centered in human performance. And it delivers on all o’ that, man. Not necessarily the definiton of subversive, but I’ll be damned if Gerwig and partner/co-writer Noah Baumbach didn’t take the reins of this brand exercise and make a brilliant 21st century existential-dread comedy out of it. Very much a spiritual sequel to Baumbach’s White Noise in that sense, deeply concerned with the nostalgia, pop-heteronormativity, and arrested development that’s been strangling us since the baby boom.
Had Damien Chazelle’s Babylon on the brain since I caught it at a matinee on New Year's Eve, 2022. Really set a tone of “ain’t life grand” and “oh it’s all a big bag o’ shit anyway” for the year ahead. A flawed, flailing extravaganza for sure, not nearly as sexy or debauched as it coulda, dare I say shoulda been. But where Babylon lacks in true grime and grit, it makes up for in its kaleidoscopic scope of character and community. An organic yet deeply considered mode of Hollywood representation filled with artists, dreamers, and frauds from all walks—a vibrant cinematic tree of life by way of Pandora’s box.
It’ll surprise no one that, of all Babylon’s POV characters—each a living, breathing emblem of some corner of Hollywood typically hushed or straight up white washed out of the corporate canon—my ass honed in on Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad, the immaculate silent-era star and MC to a circus of misfit toys, his domain a bleeding mirage of life, love, grunge and glam pulsating beneath the Hollywood sign. The ultimate enthusiast—up and down at once, always, there’s so much more to be done. You marvel at the scene you nudged into existence, you see its pre-ashen complexion and that’s when the tears start. It’s over before it ever really started. Style, talent, and a good eye for the beauty on the margins—fenced in by greed, ambition, depression, excess and power. The bitter chalice. The head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
My house
Is out of the ordinary
That's right
Don't wannna hurt nobody
Some things sure can sweep me off my feet
Burning down the house
So what’s the antidote? How do we avoid the Jack Conrad syndrome, keep from despairing at our own transience? Hard to say (a fuck the canon attitude’s been known to help) but there’s somethin’ Robert Altman once said sure been helpin’ me grin more easy through this bad trip that is the searing ‘20s:
It’s like getting [a small group together] to go down to the beach and build a sand castle. And we go down there and we work our asses off and everybody’s working. At the end of the day, we’ve got what we think’s a pretty good sand castle. And we sit up there and open up a couple cans of beer and we smoke a joint and we sit on the edge and we watch the sand castle. And as the ocean comes in, woosh, pretty soon, it’s gone. The beach is smooth again and we get up and we start goin’ home, and say ‘you want to meet next Saturday and we’ll do another one?” And I says, “Well, ok but I’m not doin’ the windows next time, I wanna do the towers.” And everybody comes back the next week and does it again. It doesn’t have to last. And that’s what all this is. That’s what art is.
Took a trip home to Utah this summer, got some good nature time in. Toured one of the state’s natural gems, the Timpanogos caves—their rolling, gurgling, mystifying formations a monument to the rushing veins of the earth they once were. The time in which we breathe and see, and everything we create an anonymous flash of color in a snapshot of the earth’s cosmic heartbeat. All is transient. All is transcience. Incarnate. Our lives and the movies we make running on time, made possible by time. Born of time, ringing out in time, falling to time. A single frame. A blip of sound. Like Orson Welles said, “everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes.”
“Be of good heart, cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced. But what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”
Here’s to the lies that visualize the truth.
My Top 20 of 2023 So Far
Beau is Afraid
John Wick: Chapter 4
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Asteroid City
Infinity Pool
Master Gardener
BlackBerry
Barbie
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Magic Mike’s Last Dance
Invisible Shark
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
Skinamarink
Oppenheimer
Things Could Always Be Worse
Talk to Me
You Hurt My Feelings
Evil Dead Rise
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
They Cloned Tyrone
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