The Apprentice

Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan

Due to its subject matter, Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice had a hard time finding an American distributor and audience. The film, thanks to a sharp and well researched screenplay by Gabriel Sherman, depicts the young Donald J. Trump in the 1970s and 80s receiving tutelage in the dark arts of persuasion and power by legendary heel and New York power lawyer, Roy Cohn. Cohn is portrayed as paving the way for Trump's gargantuan real estate projects with his legal acumen and blackmail skills. We also get to witness Trump's awkward courtship of Ivana and the dysfunction within Trump's family, with a special emphasis on the alcoholism of Trump's brother, Fred Jr. 

Fred Trump Sr., played here by an unrecognizable Martin Donovan, was a chilly and cruel figure known throughout New York City as one of the metro area's most infamous slum landlords. Trump Sr.'s troubles with the IRS and the US Department of Justice provides the impetus for the Donald to seek out Cohn's counsel. Some critics thought that The Apprentice was too soft in its satire, but I think one of the reasons it succeeds is its humanization of its main characters. Neither Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump nor Jeremy Strong as Cohn ever resorts to caricature or burlesque. They offer us portraits of powerful men who are not at ease in their own skin. Trump because of his warped family dynamics: he seeks his father's esteem because he knows he will never get his father's affection. Cohn is portrayed as a self-hating queer who views relationships as transactional and instructs Trump to do the same.

Both the performances by Stan and Strong rank among the year's best. Besides Donovan, I also liked the supporting turns by Maria Bakalova, Charlie Carrick, Mark Rendall, Catherine McNally, Stuart Hughes, Bruce Beaton, and Barbara Katz. Abbasi has given the film a verite look. This prevents the film from seeming too handsome and makes the actors seem more bracing and lifelike. He shot the 1970s sequences in 16mm, often hand-held, and filtered the 80s sequences so that they look like they are VHS tape footage. This makes the segues between the dramatic footage and stock footage, usually showing Gotham in decay. flow more smoothly.

The use of "video footage" also dovetails nicely with the film's theme of the manipulation of the media by Trump to further his own ends. Fawning interviews of Trump are juxtaposed by one of Mike Wallace eviscerating Cohn. Stars rise and inevitably fall. The film opens with video of Nixon's infamous "I am not a crook" speech. Screenwriter Sherman is trying to link the sleazy maleficence of Trump to Tricky Dicky and Cohn and the Red-baiting era. Opinions will vary, depending on how much MAGA Kool-Aid one has drunk, on whether this is a valid stand. What the film is a irrefutable success at portraying is how Trump's career has been one long promotional video feed featuring continuous episodes of The Apprentice.

             

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Jonathan Pryce

As Something Wicked This Way Comes unspools, the first thing we see is a cursive signature that announces the film as Ray Bradbury's. Bradbury had published the novel on which the 1983 film was based in 1962. He had been tinkering with the tale since 1948 when, in its first guise, it was a screenplay. After the novel was published, many adaptations were tentatively planned with such disparate names attached as Kirk Douglas, Peter O' Toole, and Christopher Lee. Possible directors included Gene Kelly and Sam Peckinpah. Jack Clayton was poised to direct the film as his follow up to The Great Gatsby, but was felled by a stroke in 1977. After a lengthy recovery, filming began in 1981 with Jonathan Pryce, then little known outside the UK, as the nominal lead.

Pryce is one of the better things in the flick, giving the picture the saturnine malice it badly needs. He play a traveling carnival proprietor with diabolical powers. The story is framed as a boy's own story amidst 1900 Americana. Two pre-pubescent lads crawl out their window to get a gander at the new attraction, but soon they discern that evil is afoot. One of the lads' father has disappeared and single mother Diane Ladd has to pick up the slack. The other boy is saddled with Jason Robards as a father. Robards uneasily plays a librarian with guilt issues towards his son. Robards is great when he is having a shot of hooch or lighting his cigar, at ease in a Eugene O'Neill milieu, but at sea having to navigate the goo that surrounds Bradbury's concept of psychology. The father and son moments probably could not been redeemed even if a more suitable actor, say Henry Fonda, was cast.    

Something Wicked This Way Comes was a troubled production. Bradbury clashed with Clayton because the latter brought in an uncredited John Mortimer for rewrites. Disney was not happy with the film, after dismissing Clayton, the studio shot retakes through 1982 and 1983. The studio felt that Clayton's touch was too dark for them which makes me wonder if they had seen his work on The Innocents or Our Mother's House. That said, I don't feel Clayton was enough of a visual artist to salvage this project with or without studio interference. The town in this film, shot at Disney's Golden Oak Ranch, always looks like a well swept studio set. Clayton's style was chiefly realistic. In his adaptations of Henry James and Pinter this has benefits, but in projects that call for romantic flair ( like The Great Gatsby) or fantasy, like this one, Clayton cannot create a suitable setting for his tale.

To give him the benefit of a doubt, his conception of the film was largely altered. A CGI segment was discarded. Most of the remaining effects, even the matte painting, looks cheesy. A score by Georges Delerue was scrapped for one by the anodyne James Horner. The film's commercial failure is indicative of Disney's loss of direction for almost two decades after the death of Walt. Disney releases of this era like The Black Hole and Tron display a studio badly out of touch with its audience. It was only with the founding of Touchstone Pictures in 1984 that the mouse was able to roar again.

As with The Great Gatsby, the best performances are by the supporting players in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Royal Dano, Pam Grier, James Stacy, and Ellen Geer all do yeoman's work with nice little bits. I often wish Clayton took as much care with his mise-en-scene as he did with his players. Though, perhaps because of the space he gives his cast in ...Wicked, the film feels pokey and slow, even at just 95 minutes. Bradbury defended the film, his baby, saying it was "not a great film, but a decently nice one." Unfortunately, decency and niceness were not the right tone for this tale of the supernatural. 

Book Review: Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy by Burt Kearns

Lawrence Tierney

Burt Kearns' biography of Lawrence Tierney is obviously a labor of love and a must read for noir fans, but I found it somewhat monotonous. This is not really Kearns' fault because he applied due diligence in his research. I doubt we will ever get a more complete survey of Tierney's career and alcoholic misadventures. Kearns' background is in tabloid journalism and it appears he was quite eager to comb through the voluminous newspaper clippings that chronicled Tierney's brief rise to Tinseltown stardom and numerous scrapes with the law. Kearns certainly seems to have tabbed every Tierney mention in the gossip columns of his heyday, from ones still remembered like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper to figures now largely forgotten like Jimmie Fidler and Earl Wilson. 

However, if you've heard the tale of one Lawrence Tierney barroom scrape, you've pretty much heard them all. There are variations, but the theme is always the same. Kearns' prose is simply a device to connect the pasted press clippings he has unearthed. There is very little in the way of analysis of Tierney's psyche or his acting craft. More ink has been spilled in this book on fisticuffs than Tierney's love life or career. Now, in Kearns' defense, Tierney's propensity to end up his evenings in the hoosegow did blight his career and personal life. He had a brief comeback in the 1990s, but always managed to alienate colleagues and employers. Still, I expect a biography of an actor to try to evoke the poetry a performer conjures. Because this may be out of his ken, Kearns doesn't try.

Kearns fills up Lawrence Tierney... with the grubby tabloid scandals of the day, ranging from Robert Mitchum to William Tallman, that have only a tangential relationship to Tierney. Now I think it is possible to write a good biography on a pop figure utilizing the tabloids of yore as a source, Nick Tosches' classic Dino comes to mind, but you cannot provide a full chronicle of a figure within such a limited worldview. Kearns reports that Tierney recited Shakespeare to his dates, but such tantalizing details are limited. What did Tierney like to read or enjoying eating? Beats me after reading this book. Kearns reports that Tierney dated Gloria Vanderbilt and was a drinking buddy of Brendan Behan, but these are Page Six facts and don't give a clue to the flavor of the man and what made him tick. Kearns should have remembered Oscar Wilde's line in Lady Windemere's Fan: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." This biography wallows unrepentantly in the gutter. 

               

Only the Animals

Nadia Tereszkiewicz

Dominik Moll's Only the Animals is a very good 2019 French drama based on Colin Niel's novel Seules les bêtes. The plot concerns the disappearance of a woman during winter in the rural Massif Central region of France. The film interweaves the stories of eight or so characters whose lives intersect with that of the missing woman. The film is divided into four parts, each part focusing on one of the main characters. Since the narrative hinges upon revelations resulting from the film's changing perspective and time shifts, I won't play the spoiler by spilling the beans. Only the Animals contains enough elements for three thrillers: unburied corpses, a lesbian affair of mismatched partners, additional adultery, Ivory Coast catfishing, and more. Moll handles the unwieldy plot adroitly and, as usual for his films, elicits a host of accomplished performances; especially by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Laure Calamy, and Denis Ménochet. 

Moll has directed six features in his career. I'd put Only the Animals in the top rank of his films along with his debut, Harry, He's Here to Help and his most recent feature, La Nuit du 12. Moll has proven to be a consistent talent, but his work, thus far, lacks the underlying passion and grandiose vision necessary for great cinema. It is telling that the material he generally works with, like Only the Animals, culminates in the hermetically sealed closure of irony rather than the catharsis of tragedy. Still, a film like Only the Animals may be exactly the type of material suited to Moll's misanthropic rationalism. Moll does a wonderful job of drawing out the themes of loneliness and repetition compulsion that emanate from Only the Animals plot and locale. His pans intimate a world of shifting perspectives in which his characters navigate without a lodestar. 

The Beast

Léa Seydoux

Bertrand Bonello's La Bête is made up of three variations of Henry James' novella "The Beast in the Jungle", a formal approach that dovetails nicely with Bonello's former career as a session pianist. The James tale features a male protagonist, John Marcher, who ruins his own life and that of his lady love through a lifelong fear that catastrophe is lurking for him like a beast of prey. The protagonist of Bonello's film, in three iterations, is named Gabrielle and is played by screen icon Léa Seydoux. Her would be suitor is named Louis, who is played by George MacKay (1917, Captain Fantastic) in the three time periods covered by the film. In each strain of the film, the ending is tragic.

The three time frames captured by the film allow for variations in story, production design, and locale, but the theme remains pretty much the same. One part is set in the Belle Époque Paris of 1910. In this section, Gabrielle is a married pianist living a complacent existence hinted at by her husband's business, manufacturing baby dolls. Gabrielle is tempted by English expatriate Louis who is privy to her secret fear. This story line is juxtaposed with one set in Paris in 2044. An unexplained plague has decimated the populace. Those who survive wander the streets with protective masks. AI and robotics dominate the landscape. Gabrielle is undergoing a sinister seeming "purification" treatment recommended by her AI medical pooh-bahs. A very different kind of doll is available for humans, Gabrielle's robot is embodied beautifully by Guslagie Malanda (Saint Omer) . Gabrielle meets Louis at a bar that morphs into different periods. She pines for him, but has difficulty tracking him down.

At La Bête's midpoint, Bonello wraps up the 1910 story and sends this version of Gabrielle and Louis to a watery grave. He introduces a story line set in 2014 Los Angeles. There, Gabrielle is a struggling model/actress who is house sitting for a wealthy client. Louis is a menacing incel type who ends up stalking Gabrielle. One of the few off notes of the film for me was MacKay in the 2014 section. He nails his character's cynicism, but seems overly hale for an incel. Otherwise, he is quite good trading je t'aimes in French to the 1910 Gabrielle or apparating in the future in a Pierre Cardin Beatle suit. Even in a dud like Laurent, Bonello has been masterful in exploiting his costume and production designers, coiffeuse, and sound mixers. The technical aspects of La Bête are all top notch. The floral displays and Ms. Seydoux's hairstyles are sublime. The outfits for her also contribute to the film's mise-en-scene in intriguing ways. When Gabrielle invites Louis to her husband's doll factory for a tryst, her red ensemble incinerates the screen with repressed longing before the muted blue and white set literally explodes in flames due to the Paris flood of 1910.

The only other brickbat I could hurl at the film concerns a scene where a forbidding pigeon attacks Gabrielle. The ability to film action scenes does not fit with the Gallic temperament. Otherwise, this is Bonello's best film thus far and one of the best of the past year. Bonello, not surprisingly, excels in his use of music. Patsy Cline's "You Belong to Me" is used for ironic effect as Gabrielle is stalked and Roy Orbison's "Evergreen" is a beautifully appropriate hymn to eternal love. The film, ultimately, belongs to Seydoux. She is onscreen for nearly all of this 145 minute film and handles the subtle modification of the various Gabrielles like the master technician she is. The actor of her generation? Peut-etre.

The People's Joker

Vera Drew

Vera Drew's The People's Joker is a queer and trans coming of age tale that appropriates the mythology of the Batman universe. It first debuted on the festival circuit in 2022, but a subsequent release was delayed due to copyright issues. Ms. Drew responded with the longest and wittiest disclaimer I have ever seen attached to a film which graces the stream now available on MUBI. The delay of its release was unfortunate because The People's Joker is a superior satire, brimming with aesthetic energy and nerve. Certainly, it a funnier and more incisive lampoon of life under Trump (aka Lex Luthor) than Todd Phillips' two Joker films. Drew portrays a fascistic Gotham where the populace is made compliant by the twin opiums of mass media and pharmaceuticals. The conformity inducing drug is called Smylex which causes one to smile like Cesar Romero.

Against the oppressive regime and its muscle, the predatory Batman, a band of misfits with familiar names (Penguin, Riddler, etc.) bond together at a renegade comedy club. Drew's background is in improv comedy and the film benefits from his timing, his informed sense of the comedy community, and his contacts. Drew plays the autobiographical protagonist who becomes Joker Quinn in a queer metamorphosis. The acting is uneven in the film's few dramatic scenes with live actors. Only Nathan Faustyn as Penguin can hold the screen with Drew. I also thought the musical moments were outside of Drew's talents.

However, the animated sequences explode with inventiveness. Drew made lemonade out of lemons, enlisting the help of scores of animators when COVID threatened his production. The variegated animated sequences explode the boundaries of the film into a true multiverse of human stories and lore. The film goes beyond the Batman universe to include Betty Boop, Freddy Krueger, Richard Pryor, Lovecraft, "RuPaul's Fracking Ranch", and other strands of joyous dada.

A viewer has to have some tolerance for camp to enjoy the psychedelic rainbow that is The People's Joker, a film tellingly dedicated to "...Mom and Joel Schumacher." All in all, I found the film one of the past year's most rewarding comedies.

The Best of David Lynch

1946 - 2025

              Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies depict it in a

              completely flat way.  

                1)     Twin Peaks                                                            1990-2017

                2)     Mulholland Drive                                                      2001

                3)     The Elephant Man                                                    1980

                4)     Blue Velvet                                                                1986

                5)     Inland Empire                                                           2006

                6)     The Straight Story                                                    1999

                7)     Eraserhead                                                                1977

                8)     Wild at Heart                                                             1990  

                9)     Dune                                                                           1984

               10)    Lost Highway                                                            1997

Bifurcated from the start, he veered from Americana to dislocations of time and space, Lynch became one of the most successful surrealists in the history of the cinema. Whatever Mel Brooks, producer of The Elephant Man, saw in the the wall scraping textures of Eraserhead, his prescience resulted in a singular career in Hollywood. Despite his love for coffee, pie, and Bob's Big Boy burgers, Lynch was too abstract and rarified to craft blockbusters, but has done more than any other director of his generation to expand Hollywood's artistic horizons. 

                       

John Waters, David Lynch and friend.

                         

               

                   

Juror #2

Nicholas Hoult

Juror #2 shows off the unfussy craftsmanship that has been Clint Eastwood's hallmark as a director since High Plains Drifter. The expert tongue and groove style disguises some of the improbabilities of Jonathan Abrams' flashback laden script, but brings out with full force the portrayal of a justice system compromised by the financial iniquities of American society. The 12 Angry Men type jury deliberations are the weakest moments in the film. Abrams capture the vocalese of his own generation, but the elder and youthful jurors are given very silly lines of dialogue.  I did like the portrayal of the collegiality between opposing lawyers Toni Collette and Chris Messina, an aspect of the legal profession that has not been fully explored by the American cinema. 

Though reportedly a wolf in his personal life, Eastwood has always made an effort in his films to show his support and empathy for strong women. It is significant that he casts one of his daughters as the victim in the homicide case that is at the center of this film. The character is not a weak victim, but one who stands up for herself and talks back to her man. Furthermore, if their is a hero in the film it is Toni Collette's prosecutor, who has enough backbone to admit she may have tried the wrong man. Eastwood's mise-en scene has always been more at the service of his plots then in the service of expressing personal themes. There are exceptions, like the strip mining scene in Pale Rider, but, like most actors turned directors, he is more interested in giving his players space than in controlling every detail within the frame. In Juror #2, this gives us one of the best ensemble casts of the past year. Besides Ms. Colette and Mr. Messina, the film has indelible performances from lead Nicholas Hoult, Zoey Deutch, Gabriel Basso, Francesca Eastwood, Kiefer Sutherland, Leslie Bibb, Cedric Yarborough, and J.K. Simmons, the Walter Brennan of his generation.

Juror #2 is one of the few recent mainstream American films that seems to be aimed at adults. This perhaps explains why it was deep sixed by Warner Brothers. Nevertheless, it further demonstrates what a solid and consistent film craftsman Eastwood is. If this is his final film, it is a worthy send off.   

Les Favoris de la lune

Fetching a price in Les Favoris de la lune

Otar Iosseliani, a Georgian filmmaker who died just a year ago, has gone largely unheralded in the English speaking world. Les Favoris de la lune, his first feature after emigrating to France in 1982, won a jury prize in Venice, but, like most of his films, failed to make much of an impact outside continental Europe. Most of the English or American reviews of it I could dig up, like those by Neil Young and Vincent Canby, gave it the back of their hand, but I found the film to be spritely and enormously entertaining.

This 1984 film follows the lives of twenty or so characters, from the haute bourgeoisie to beggars, in then present day Paris. The films also leapfrogs across time as it follows the modern provenance of a 19th century painting and some 18th century crockery. The interlacing stories has brought comparisons to the films of Robert Altman and I noted some traces of Blake Edwards in how Iosseliani and co-scenarist Gérard Brach, most famous for his scripts for Roman Polanski, inject tart observations on sexism, racism, and classism within the framework of an absurdist farce. Les Favoris de la lune focuses on the exchange of commerce between people by both accepted and nefarious means. Everyone is on the make for financial and sexual gain. The matter of fact portrayal of sex workers tips us that the director's sympathy is with the dispossessed. The film is not dissimilar to Robert Bresson's 1983 masterpiece L'Argent, if Bresson had had a sense of humor. Some have criticized the director for being more interested in objects than people, but that misses the point. Iosseliani bluntly described the film as "...an attack on those who seek to fill the void around them with a false culture of objects and possessions."

I feel that the most obvious comparison of this film is to the work of Luis Buñuel, a point seized upon by Vincent Canby in his 1985 New York Times pan of the film. Certainly Iosseliani wants to takes pokes at the European bourgeoisie just like the Spanish master, but there are also other areas of intersection: Surrealism, Marxism, terrorism, voyeurism, and, avoiding the isms for a sec, carnivorous plants. Iosseliani also slips in portents of the surveillance state which was unforeseen in Bunuel's ouevre. Canby was perhaps partially right in that Les Favoris... is not quite as strong as Belle du Jour or The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but what films are? I prefer Les Favoris de la lune to such late Buñuel efforts as Tristana, The Phantom of Liberty, and even That Obscure Object of Desire.

Iosseliani works wonders with his cast of figures who, mostly, only had periphereal film careers. The sole castmate who was sprinkled with stardust is the young Mathieu Amalric who plays a neophyte hoodlum. However, this is a film that stresses ensemble playing over star turns. The essence of this anarchic film is best summed up by Shakespearean quote from Henry IV  Part 1 which inspired Les Favoris de la lune's title and which is cited within the film.

                        Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon,

                        and let men say we be men of good government, being governed,

                        as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress of the moon, under

                        whose countenance we steal.

Falstaff's tribute to his criminal cohorts sums up the unruly energies governing Iosseliani's film.

About Dry Grasses

                  
I highly recommend Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses with the usual caveats about the Turkish director's work. The film is over three hours and very talky and deliberately slow. The camera rarely moves and views the characters remotely. The protagonist is unlikeable. Yet, I savored the film like a fine wine. Ceylan 's remote camera fits a story which is largely concerned with distance between individuals, an ongoing theme in his work. Neophyte directors like Zoë Kravitz in Blink Twice tend to overuse close-ups. In that film, when things get horrific, close-ups of terrorized victims don't have the impact they should because the previous surfeit of the effect ameliorates subsequent usage. Because Ceylan is sparing in his dynamic use of the camera, whips pans and close-ups, particularly one of a pistol, convey the emotional impact intended.

The use of long shots also fits the plight of the main character isolated in a remote village in the hinterlands of Eastern Anatolia. There, the protagonist of the film, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), teaches middle school. He is bitter about being stuck in such a Podunk burg and does not endear himself to his colleagues by constantly complaining about his plight. Of all his colleagues, Samet is closest to Kenan (Musab Ekici) with whom he shares a house. A comely teacher from a larger town nearby named Nuray (Merve Dizdar) enters into a triangular relationship with them that remains superficially pleasant, but underlying tensions simmer. Ceylan's long shots emphasize the beauty and the harshness of the locale. It is extremely difficult to get around in the Anatolian winter, especially for Samet who does not own an automobile. He is constantly bumming rides and sloshing slowly through the slush.

The film's main two plot threads concern sexual power dynamics. Nuray seems to prefer Kenan to Samet, but Samet is able to manipulate Nuray into a one night stand. Nuray is missing a leg from a terrorist attack in Ankara. She fears her attractiveness has diminished and Samet, though not in love with her, is able to manipulate her to his own ends. Samet and Kenan are also embroiled in a small scandal at school when they are charged with being too friendly with young female students. Certainly, what we see of Samet's relationship with his favorite, Sevim, while not overtly sexual, borders on grooming. On the other hand, Sevim is a bit of a minx who has her own subtle power. When Sevim incurs Samet's wrath, he lords his petty power over her. Still, at film's end, it is difficult to say which of the two has gained the upper hand.

This theme of sexual power plays is just one of the motifs in About Dry Grasses that has caused the film to be called Dostoyevskian. In the crazed Russian's fiction, even frustrated virgins and cripples have sexual magnetism and power. The servant often becomes the master when individuals are possessed by eros. Other Dostoyevskian themes here include exile, free will versus determinism, and the plight of animals as a metaphor for eternal suffering. As one character puts it, " How do you expect to care for dogs when no one cares about people." Like Fyodor's Russian, Ceylan's Turkey is a paranoid police state with the icons of power (Atatürk and Erdoğan) watching over. Perhaps the most Dostoyevskian aspect of the film is Samet himself. Samet, much like Ivan Karamazov, is ruled by reason. He sees life's ambiguities rather than its possibilities, hobbled by what Bob Dylan calls "useless and pointless knowledge." He lacks the saving grace of compassion. The only grace notes he strikes are in his photographic portraits, a skill he downplays but which betray traces of empathy and humanity. 

Merve Dizdar won most of the critical accolades for her performance as Nuray, and she is very good, but it is a Mother Courage type role of the sort that begs for awards. I was equally impressed by Deniz Celiloğlu who, as Samet, embodies the contradictions of his character. About Dry Grasses is an actor's feast, as Ceylan gives the cast long, digressive conversations usually, but not always, over tea. This is not everybody's ideal of cinema, much as Dostoyevsky is not everybody's ideal of literature (especially Nabokov who thought Fyodor should have written for the theater), but I'll take it over whatever CGI comic book movie you can think of. 

Quick Takes, January 2025

So This is Paris

Ernst Lubitsch's So This is Paris, from 1926, is the director's third and final silent film done while under contract for Warner Brothers. He went out with a bang. What starts as a typically droll bedroom farce concerning two married couples, one bourgeoise and one bohemian, erupts into a dance party sequence that sums up the mad hijinks of the era. For the "Artists Ball" sequence, the director whips up a freneticism in his work barely glimpsed since 1919's Die Puppe. Lubitsch employs superimpositions, kaleidoscopic effects, and, when his characters get tipsy, double exposures. A under sung masterpiece currently streaming in a gorgeous print on Max. 

With nearly a century of hindsight, Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, from 1927, seems more successful in its documentary evocation of a bygone metropolis than in its attempts at constructivist poetry. Certainly, Ruttmann's celebration of industrial and  technological might seems dated. What does not is the fabulous cinematography of Karl Freund and his cohorts.

Quentin Dupieux has crafted an amazing number of short and peculiar features with soupçons of surrealism since I came upon his films starting with Rubber almost a decade and a half ago. Yannick, a one act coup de théâtre set entirely in a jewel like Paris playhouse clocks in at only 67 minutes, but is his most accessible and successful film. Raphaël Quenard plays the titular parking lot attendant who pulls a gun and disrupts a numbingly routine boulevard comedy entitled The Cuckold. The cultural conflict between populism and elitism that currently grips the West is enacted by a uniformly excellent cast. Quenard, already a César award winner delivers a titanically amusing performance that finds him balancing charisma with sociopathy. Funny and unsettling.

Despite its title, Román Viñoly Barreto's El Vampiro Negro is not a horror film, but a remake of Fritz Lang's M. The expressionism of Lang's film is very much in evidence, but this 1953 Argentinian film adds a dollop of feminism to the mix. Barreto's misanthropic regard of his character rivals that of Lang and Joseph Losey, director of the 1951 American redo. Barreto's marshalling of memorable and disturbing images marks him as a distinctive original.

Damian Mc Carthy's Oddity has been marketed as a horror film, but I would describe it as a slow burn revenge thriller with supernatural elements. The film represents an incremental advancement rather than a great leap forward for Mr. Mc Carthy after the promising Caveat. This time he has written some actual characters and devised a much more complex plot, but his cast is subpar. I did enjoy the performances of Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, and Steve Wall, though.

Molly Manning Walker's How to Have Sex is a coming of age film in which three young British females travel to a cheesy resort in Crete. The usual hijinks ensue in a film not all that dissimilar to Where the Boys Are. Lead Mia McKenna-Bruce, who emanates a star's talent and charisma, provides rueful notes that ground a film teetering on the brink of insubstantiality.

Zoë Kravitz's feature debut as a director, Blink Twice, shows promise. The film is slick, maybe too slick. However, the script ends up regurgitating White Lotus and Knives Out with Channing Tatum starring as Jeffrey Epstein. I did like the supporting cast, especially Alia Shawkat, Christian Slater, Geena Davis, Simon Rex, and Adria Arjona.  

Joker: Folie a Deux

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix

Before I give the back of my hand to Todd Phillips' Joker: Folie à Deux, I will admit that I have a tiny more respect for it than its widely praised predecessor. Like Gremlins 2 and Raimi's Spider-Man 3, this sequel is an auto-critique from a filmmaker who is, at best, ambivalent about his previous success. Pairing the tortured larynx of Joaquin Phoenix with Lady Gaga in musical numbers seems like an attempt to alienate Joker's incel fanboy base. Mission accomplished.

I kind of liked the goofily burlesque musical numbers. Maybe Phillips learned something when he made that Phish documentary. The rest of the film, though, is a disaster. Gaga has no character to play, so no real sense of folie or amour develops between her and Phoenix, just performative energy. Speaking of which, Phoenix is electric. I could rewatch the film just to savor his smoking, he is the Paganini of puffs, but won't because of the vacuousness that surrounds him. Phillips and his-co-writers base the script's structure around Joker's trial, so they can beat us over the head with the theme that Amerika is a cruel, infotainment based junk culture. A beaten and dead horse as far as I am concerned since Kazan's A Face in the Crowd in 1957. Witnessing the trial means we see a tiresome rehash of the first film with no new insights. It also strands an undynamic director visually within a rigid and static mise en scene. Even the car bombing of the courthouse is dull. I did like the performances of Brendon Gleeson and Steve Coogan and Mark Friedberg's production design. However, Joker 2 confirms that Phillips is not cut out to wrestle with weighty themes. He works best exposing the comic idiocies of the American male in his most entertaining films: The Hangover, Starsky and Hutch, Old School, and, Joker's evil twin, Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. 

Biff Favorite Pop Music Releases of 2024

                         

 1) Where's My Utopia?                                      Yard Act

 2) Hit Me Hard and Soft                                     Billie Eilish

 3) GNX                                                                 Kendrick Lamar

 4) Hummingbird                                                 Carly Pearce

 5) Ehhthang Ehhthang                                      GloRilla

 6) Cloudward                                                      Mary Halvorson

 7) North American Adonis                                 Buck 65, Doseone & Jel    

 8) Cowboy Carter                                               Beyoncé  

 9) Blackgrass                                                     Swamp Dogg

 10) The Collective                                              Kim Gordon

    

I also enjoyed A Dancefloor in Ndola and albums by Charles Lloyd, Old 97s, X,

Previous Industries, Kate Nash, Jack White, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Jon Langford, Doechii, Sprints, Mdou Moctar, Adrianne Lenker, Dua Lipa, Waxahatchee, Tierra Whack, The Paranoid Style, Vampire Weekend, Miranda Lambert, Megan Moroney, Jamila Woods, Shaboozey, Chappell Roan, Jamie XX, Fake Fruit, The Linda Lindas, Sleater-Kinney, Kali Uchis and Schoolboy Q.

             

Biff's Best Books Read in 2024

   

 1) Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

I've enjoyed Whitehead's prose since his days as a reporter for The Village Voice and have looked forward to each of his novels since the release of The Intuitionist in 2000. I waited a bit to read Harlem Shuffle because of the praise it received and because I anticipated that a book about New York City in the 1970s would give Whitehead a chance to show off his reportorial skills on a city he loves. I was not disappointed and thoroughly savored the book. He belongs to the American realist tradition: Crane, James, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Mailer. Perhaps the preeminent American writer after the death of Cormac McCarthy.

 2) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

This 2009 novel by the Polish Nobel laureate is a ferocious thriller. Recent events in Europe has only made this work more timely.

 3) The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Pierre Manchette

The best novel by the French writer who in the 1970s combined pulp and philosophy. A book at once delirious and, yet, tightly focused.

 4) They Don't Shoot Cowards by John Henry Rees

A wryly amusing Western genre tale from 1973 set in a mining boom town. I sought out this author because he wrote a novel entitled The Looters which provided the basis for one of my favorite films, Don Siegel's Charley Varrick. They Don't Shoot Cowards is a memorable rebuke to Western machismo. I'll be scouring the bargain bins of Portland's book shops for more of Reese's work. 

 5) You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

A gory, phantasmagoric, and funny novel about Cortez and Montezuma from the Mexican writer. Enrigue's novel about Caravaggio, Sudden Death, is one of the great novels of the current century. You Dreamed of Empires is almost as good. 

 6) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 I never expected to enjoy a novel about game programmers, but I was enthralled by this book which contains interesting ruminations on love, friendship, technology, and Macbeth. 

 7) Low Life by Lucy Sante

The only non-fiction book on this list unless you count King Jesus. Sante's book is a portrait of the demimonde of 19th century New York in all its seamy glory. History can be fun!

 8) Normal People by Sally Rooney

 I give.

 9) The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

 I never expected to enjoy a novel about physicists, but the Chilean's novel entertained and educated me. 

10) King Jesus by Robert Graves

 A historical novel that gives an alternate history to the Lion of Judah. Cracked, but brilliant.

I also enjoyed:

Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb

Holding My Own in No Man's Land by Molly Haskell

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem

I'm Glad My Mom's Dead by Jennette McCurdy

Mortals by Geoffrey Rush

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead