The Mica Levi score on this is phenomenal. I keep thinking about it. It’s not ambient the way Brian Eno is ambient, and yet there is something of Eno in it, I feel. She took the sounds of apps and basketballs, chirps and thumps and haptics, and composed this sparkling and spare and eerie ass soundscape from it. There’s no motif you’ll be humming later, even though the sound is kind of perpetual, this texture woven into the storytelling. This is a different movie without it, like Under the Skin is a different movie without her score for it. 

And you know what, I think they’re both horror movies! Possibly! One of my favorite questions to ask people is how they define horror, as everyone so far has told me something different. Zola does not traffic in gore or jump scares or other hallmarks of a slasher, nor does it involve supernatural elements like monsters or spells. It can be tense, surprising, gross, but lots of movies can be those things that no one would call horror films. 

What Zola does seem to have though, is an element that one of my friends named as his personal metric: for him, horror is about being hunted. Zola the character is not being stalked down by a killer or a beastie or her own ghosts, but she is quite literally just trying to make it through this weekend alive. The various dangers imperiling her are sometimes extremely overt, and other times insidious and shifty, but always present. That’s where dread lives, I feel, in that mystery of where exactly the threat lies. 

Of course, we know she does manage to traverse this seamy Florida horrorshow, as she lived to Tweet the tale. Everyone seems pretty comfortable calling this the first movie based on a Twitter thread, and I can’t think of what else would be, so looks like we’ve got history here, folks! The original Tweets by A’Ziah “Zola” King in 2015 are funny and shocking and familiar, with a sort of musical cadence of someone telling a riotous story to some friends at a bar and soon they’re holding court over the whole room, playing bigger and badder to reach the back of their gathering audience. King has an executive producer credit on the film, although for licensing issues it is technically listed as an adaptation of a subsequent Rolling Stone article about what was being called simply #TheStory.

But director Janicza Bravo’s adaptation of #TheStory, cowritten by playwright Jeremy O. Harris of Broadway’s Slave Play fame, is something a bit different from the Tweets and article both. Even in the rollicking way the original Zola first told it, the events of this ill-fated Hoe Trip were always pretty uneasy and gruesome, with manipulation in seedy hotels on the mildest end to straight up sex trafficking at the roughest. In depicting the Story as it was actually happening to Zola in the moment, not her punchy retelling of it later, Bravo has made a movie largely about the experience of witnessing more so than the act of storytelling—and how going through much of anything as a Black woman is an experience of survival.

The fellow Black character of X may provide the bulk of the most salient menace, but it is the “white nightmare” of Stefani that is absolutely the most indelible bogeyman of the piece, reflected up on our movie screens in all her baby-haired, AAVE glory through Taylour Paige’s incredible emotive eyes watching her. We see Stefani because Zola sees Stefani, and although Riley Keough pronounces her a demon, albeit a complicated one, forthright Zola never actually goes that far, landing on the honestly probably more trenchant judgement of: “This is messy—YOU are messy.” Because it’s hard to tell where Stefani comes from, how much of the way she is is simply her and how much is the product of her objectively shitty circumstances, our objectively shitty world. Still, like hell is Zola going to sacrifice her own safety for this unhinged white woman who has dragged her into this micro-world of madness, and nor should she! As Jordan Peele slapped on every poster, GET OUT.

I will say I think this movie’s choice (?) to have an oddly unsatisfying ending is not really a good one, given that King’s original Tweets had an ending right there with a) some of the best lines, and b) gave us exactly the kind of coda we wanted and needed, so, why not? What was going on here? And there were some other choices throughout that I also think were just not as successful as they could have been. But, I like that this movie exists, I like that the real Zola got so much credit, I like that Janicza Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris got to adapt it and that they tried shit, I like that score, and I like that A24 doesn’t give a fuck and WILL just keep making Elevated Florida movies for as long as they are to be had.

★★★½

Netflix is placing this with their standup and comedy specials. Netflix doesn’t know what else to do, in their infinite algorithmic prediction never anticipated a poioumenonic one-man cabaret filmed alone through the slow-motion breakdown we’ve been calling the Pandemic. The form of the musical revue is a classic though; I think it’s not an accident that all the people I know who have seen Inside also happen to be part of the flotsam & jetsam of professional theater, and all so eager to talk with one another about what we just saw, spilling out still tentatively into the venue lobbies of each other’s kitchens with the newly rediscovered sensation of having Seen A Show. 

During my own solitary drama of the past year, at one point I ended up on Etymonline looking up the root of the word ‘humor’ to see if it had any connection to ‘humanity’ (no). But at the end of the entry, just like an aside, a tossed off P.S., as if this wasn’t going to change the way I thought about comedy forever, Etymonline offers a guide from a Mr. Henry W. Fowler in 1926, “for aid in distinguishing the various devices that tend to be grouped under ‘humor’.” There are eight sorts laid out: Humor, Wit, Satire, Sarcasm, Invective, Irony, Cynicism, and Sardonic, and for each Fowler has, with just a word or two, defined its Motive/Aim, its Province, its Method/Means, and its Audience. The conciseness of it is truly something to behold—it’s really hit at both of the kitchen tables I’ve read it aloud at in the past week, in the midst of us trying to figure out just what the hell is happening with comedy in Bo Burnham’s Inside. 

I have a theory that like any good personality matrix, a whole new realm of fun pops off when you start layering things. What I’m wondering is if this might be something like Satire approached though the lens of Irony, with the resulting combination feeling way more unprotected than either on their own through this sort of double-negative of deflection. Because it’s like any ironic distancing he’s using is toward the use of satirical mockery itself—haha we’re all in on knowing satire is humor for the self-satisfied—but in pointing this one type of deflective humor at another deflective humor also in the room, and it’s a small room, he’s also catching himself being filmed from this whole other angle in the mirror behind him, and that I think is the strange and new quality to the way vulnerability is being accessed here.

Or you know, that’s just one sort of arcane theory about what’s happening. Another could simply be that the young man who wrote and directed the startlingly empathetic Eighth Grade happens to still be someone capable of startling empathy. The perfect sample case here of course would have to be ‘White Woman’s Instagram’. Maybe his number with the most production value, given just how many set-ups he did for his nearly Unseelie accurate montage mimicking a particular kind of Insta grid; certainly his number with the most Gender in it, which is so very fun. Sure it’s mean, if you want to get technical, but it’s mocking something deserving of being mocked, right, and like, it’s clueless white women, it’s fine.

Until the bridge comes in, and suddenly he is gently, devastatingly reminding us that every social media performance is the filter in front of another real human person, with real feelings and often real loss in their lives. As one of my friends put it, it’s this incredible moment because he’s still calling out something ridiculous, now the wince-inducing experience of people putting their grief online, but at the same time asking, where else do we have to put it? All this trauma? And so then that’s like it’s own level of tragedy as well! Fuck, fuck, Bo. And then! it’s so important to how this part works! that after the song ends we see him watching the playback of himself singing it on his laptop in the dark. Throughout this whole show the usual vectors of who is being implicated in the joke are being thrown off from the either simply other- or simply self-deprecating angles we’re used to in social comedy, catching him & all of us in the disco ball refraction of this little room.

Part of the strength of this meta-project definitely comes from the long legs it has in the historical tradition of the musical revue, particularly the darkly satiric mid-century chansons of Tom Lehrer or Jacques Brel. But I don’t want to miss the particularly of-the-moment legs this work stands on either, and I mean mostly the long bare ones of Bo Burnham himself. Inside is a time capsule of the 2020 condition in many, many ways, but maybe most visibly, god has he captured the lint and horniness of self-presentation in lockdown. Grown-out hair, smudges on your shirt, and posing with no pants like a self-aware depressed pinup just for yourself alone in your house—whomst among us, etc.!

I thought a lot about whether I think the question of “reality” in autobiographical art isn’t missing something about the experience of both art and reality. I thought a lot, throughout, about how he took care to include that early shot, in the sort of visual overture of the piece, of him moving his light source around and tilting his head to see the way the shadows changed on his face, and how I did that too before important Zoom calls. I thought about how the audio & visual cues he had to hit live while filming were always the most fun and the most sad because you saw him do it, because the constraint of just these four walls and these four limbs was so important to capturing…It. I thought about surrealism as a truer kind of honesty and accentuation as a kind of signal flare for something you might miss in the dark. I thought the phrase: “‘millennial-trained Brechtian Vine skills’, is that anything?”

I thought about the Elaine Kahn bit that goes:

I understand myself
only insofar
as it is funny.

(Admittedly I think about that line all the time.)

I thought about my own lockdown isolation. Holy shit I thought about my own lockdown isolation. The wavering, prolonged mental episode of it. The projects, the fixations, the bitter lethargy, the sodium lamp burn of a brief weird joy, and then it was gone. The Days of Crying turning into weeks of crying turning into somehow August, somehow a year. And how sometimes in an attempt to make my outside match my inside, I’d fall into a sort of theatrical heightening of the sad chaotic unwellness I was feeling, just to make it look a little more operatic, even though I didn’t even have a future audience I was trying to communicate my distress to, trying to convey it to them. If I did, I think it could have looked a lot like this.

Excepting of course the one hugely essential thing that somehow, unbelievably, I haven’t even addressed until now: the songs are really good. Bo Burnham is a pretty fucking extraordinary songwriter, and music…it does something to a person. Whether it’s this preposterously catchy, absurd little riff that makes you laugh every time in a way you can’t explain, or this heavily filtered, drowning swoop of strange heartbreaking beauty that you also can’t quite define, music can access emotional registers that we still don’t really have words for, even when the words are part of it. It’s a medium that connects something from soul to soul, something of the human condition. And in a solo show made in this tiny space cut off from the world, suspended in drawn out fear and loneliness for it, the thwarted connection in every song arrives to us now feeling like finally grasping a reaching hand.

Maybe that’s the best explanation for it.

★★★★★

Something I think worthwhile to say first & foremost, is that Promising Young Woman isn’t actually so much a ‘rape revenge thriller’ in the traditional meaning. What it is more so, and how filmmaker Emerald Fennell has presented it in interviews, is a look at that old chestnut ‘female rage,’ but specifically how grief and anger without an outlet to justice can calcify into a kind of self-destructive addiction cycle—perhaps indicting rape culture even more by showing how the damage from sexual assault can continue to eat like cold poison into the people nearby.

That said, and this is what is important to me to get across to any potential viewers: I don’t necessarily think this is a movie for survivors. I also think that’s okay, because I don’t think it intended to be, I think it intended to get some upsetting points across to other groups and it’s sure doing it. But what is much less okay is that there are people going into Promising Young Woman thinking it’s going to be a spikily cathartic bubblegum pink vengeance narrative, only to find that is spiky and it is bubblegum pink, but its thrills are frequently more queasy than empowering, and that pastel candy shell is (deliberately) coating something very bleak.

I am pro this movie ultimately, though I definitely had to sit with it for a few hours and examine all the thoughts and feelings it had churned up before I could tell! Which is why I cannot imagine writing further about my response to this one without ending up revealing mm, the whole plot. So now I’m going to—read on only if you don’t mind utter spoilers.

** spoiler line **

There are a lot of twists in Promising Young Woman. Some are early and quick, like the shot of a red drip on Cassie’s shin as she walks barefoot down the street to a perfectly deployed cover of ‘It’s Raining Men,’ before the camera pans up to reveal ketchup dripping off the hot dog she’s eating. These first little twists are to establish mood and intention, that this movie is going to be hopping genres and crossing expectations. The twists later on are much bigger and much more climactic—plot-based, bright-line turns that forcefully shape the closing action (we’ll get to these). But I think the twists that most affected my reaction to this movie were the ones that turned more gradually. The more slowly twisting stuff of the middle portion, less jarring but perhaps more unsteadying. Most fundamentally: that what Cassie was doing wasn’t good. 

At the start, it seems like it is. Not “good” as in like, angelic, but good as in Good For Her. In the very first scene of the movie, we see Cassie engaged in her nightly psychological warfare: a dead-drop reveal to the men who take her home from clubs thinking she’s too drunk to resist their advances that she’s actually stone cold sober and knows exactly what they were trying to do. But she doesn’t kill them or anything, nothing so Jennifer’s Body; perhaps the first genre-bending moment in Promising Young Woman is simply in revealing what kind of movie it isn’t. Instead Cassie merely leaves these men with their shame—or their fear maybe, as Al will describe it later: “every guy’s worst nightmare, getting accused like that”—while she goes home to just record their name and a tally mark in her journal, though with enough force to carve. 

At first it’s all really quite fun, honestly. Especially visually, when Cassie wakes up the next morning in her parents’ ~sublime~ petal pink suburban rococo daymare of a house, and goes off to her listless job as a barista at a Laverne Cox’s neon & Jordan almonds-hued coffee shop—with her multi-colored manicure to match. The whole thing looks like Sofia Coppola’s Barbie Dreamhouse, complete with the attractively depressed woman in the center of it, and I am, historically, a sucker for that particular kind of, I don’t know, confrontationally feminine aesthetic? I feel like when you go that far into the girlish and pretty it starts to feel dangerous. It starts to feel like a trick. I think that’s so perfect here.

And not just because beautiful, (white), Brigitte Bardot-haired Carey Mulligan, like a chilled florist shop rose with the thorns still on, is tormenting men at night in revenge for her late friend Nina—but because things start to get sooo much stickier when tall affable Bo Burnham arrives, a former classmate of hers from before she dropped out of med school, and brings up some names from the past. Things start to twist, in my stomach, when Cassie—Cassandra, of course—begins to track down other women who hadn’t believed her best friend years ago about what was done to her at a party. Cassie uses the same type of weapon here she uses on the men: psychological warfare. But this time, it’s every woman’s worst nightmare: rape. None of them are actually physically hurt, but it’s like she sickens them with this crawling fear they can’t shake. She makes these women feel disempowered, as Nina did—not from being assaulted, but still intimately, horribly connected to that idea they or someone they care about could have been. Even though it didn’t happen, it’s clear they will never forget what that helpless fear felt like. That is dark, girl.

This was the mid section where I became really unsure where I was with this movie! Because she’s right, but is she in the right? I was entranced and alarmed. But then Cassie began to reach people from the past who did feel great remorse for what happened, and when this also didn’t make her feel any better, when she just continued to drift on after these encounters like a half ghost in her own life, that’s when I began to see shapes in the sickly cotton candy clouds. Mourning. Survivor’s guilt. I realized that while it’s not exactly clear if what Cassie’s doing is accomplishing good in the world, it’s certainly not good for her. Her vigilantism isn’t bringing her satisfaction or solace. And it isn’t bringing Nina back. We can’t know if Nina would even want her to be doing this.

Even though I hadn’t thought about what exactly might happen, I felt a sense of foreboding finality when she headed for the house where the bachelor party was happening. Somehow or other, this was going to end things. Maybe finally confronting Nina’s rapist would bring her closure, but it certainly must bring something. I didn’t feel shock when he killed her in dubious self-defense, I just felt sad. Watching the scenes of the men after, Al’s shaking relief and tearful thanks at being assured by his friend that he “did nothing wrong,” I suddenly remembered that explanation I’ve read somewhere (and we’re going to be speaking in generalizations for the next little bit) for why women tend to be better at writing men than the other way around. It’s this idea that women have to get good at thinking about men’s inner lives and what drives their feelings and behavior, because understanding them is key to our survival. The same explanation goes for portrayals of white people written by BIPOC—anywhere there’s a power imbalance, it’s the more at-risk group that learns to read the people that can hurt them. Anyway, this one moment here felt so simple and illuminating about so much male behavior: the idea that they could be at fault terrifies them. Meanwhile, women assume that everything is their fault. Really that’s the core of rape culture: she shouldn’t have put herself in that dangerous situation.

So, the very end, where Cassie does manage to fuck these men’s lives up a bit from beyond the grave: a win? I don’t think so, but that’s what I think works about it. I think the eye-rolling scene of the detective “interviewing” (reassuring) Ryan when Cassie is missing is a clear indication that we are to assume that just like in our own world, the system is absolutely going to give them all the benefit of the doubt, due not just to being white men but being white male doctors, no less. I think all she’s managed to do is mess up a wedding and put an unsightly blemish on their records. To me the bleakness of this slight victory was resoundingly underscored by the brightly bitter soundtrack: the Juice Newton version of ‘Angel of the Morning’ playing at almost crashingly loud volume. In the end, Cassie finally is angelic, in the sense that she is dead. Two women are dead and gone, her final winking emoticon to her complicit ex like a rictus grin. 

The vision Promising Young Woman presents of the lingering trauma of sexual assault is not strengthening or even hopeful, and while I am very glad not every piece of art dealing with rape is like this one, I do think that what it’s doing is powerful in its own way. This high femme fatale bonbon of a movie curdling over its runtime is something I find really fascinating, though I absolutely don’t begrudge anyone just getting a bad stomach ache from it.

★★★★

Minari (미나리) is an edible plant popular in Korea, somewhat akin to watercress or parsley in appearance and use. It is resilient; when planted on the shores of a wooded creek in rural Arkansas, it grows. This is the metaphor.

Minari the movie is by the Korean American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, and is a semi-autobiographical reflection of his own childhood years on a remote farm in the Ozarks. It is about the farm, but it is mostly about this family, their hopes and hurts and humor. It’s not really a slice-of-life, that doesn’t feel like the right term for something with so much of the softness and piercing poignancy of memory. Maybe like a more grounded Terrence Malick, if you’ll forgive the agriculture pun.

It’s dreamy in the fluid way it moves and in the lingering golden warmth of the light—a movie that warms you just looking at it, even if your heart didn’t feel it too, glowing from within. But it’s not dreamy in the sense of being all sweet weightlessness. Minari folds its delicate layers into something strong, something deep and resonant. It is a flowing drama of the struggles within the souls of these people, and between their souls and the other souls they live with on this land, and their struggles with the land itself—this field, this America.

I respond very feelingly to stories of complexity in ideas and emotions. Contradictory or inconstant notions of nationality and culture, of faith, of gender roles, of what it means to be a partner, a parent, a child, a grandparent—different understandings of all of these experiences and identities slide and glimmer through this movie like sunlight dappled through the trees over the little stream, multi-faceted and ever-shifting. I can’t talk directly about one of my favorite scenes without giving too much away, but I can say that I think part of the reason it rocked me so was the realization that Lee Isaac Chung’s script wasn’t flattening his story into one structural shape that every narrative thread would follow, but instead, like in life, different arcs were having their peaks and valleys on their own time. It means that nothing is one-note, the varied tones drifting in and out of discord and harmony.

Minari is beautiful. Beautiful to watch, beautiful to listen to as my rising fave Emile Mosseri’s score weaves among the lilting hum of insects on the warm air, and beautiful to feel, as the sometimes funny, sometimes bruised nuance of this family’s conflicts and love slips around you. And by the last act, a series of mounting events swept me into the biggest bout of cathartic weeping of any film I’ve seen yet from the 2020 season. I was, simply, bawling. And I think I really needed that right now. If you do too: Minari is finally available to stream in the U.S.

★★★★★

In the category ‘high-profile film adaptations of Black American plays released on streaming platforms this winter’, this one was far & away my favorite. Both still feel quite like the stage their stories originated on, but could be said to embrace that, a kind of purity in how they wear their theatrical hearts front and center—it’s going to be about the words and the performances, it says. After my tepid response to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I began to wonder if, taking its cue from the theatre it’s replicating, the director might have an outsized influence on these sorts of projects. If you take as a given that the bulk of your movie is going to be a handful of characters talking in a room, then it’s all going to come down to how they’re doing that talking. The pacing, the tone, the emotional texture among the actors.

Actor Regina King’s directorial debut was the other of these straight-forward play adaptations, and the living warmth she brings to this philosophical script is an achievement completely worthy of all the acclaim she’s been earning so far this season. One Night In Miami, first performed onstage in 2013, centers on a fictionalized account of what might have been talked about on a real night in 1964 spent between football star Jim Brown, musician Sam Cooke, civil rights leader Malcolm X, and newly minted world heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay, just on the cusp of joining Malcolm in the Nation of Islam, where he would take on the name Muhammad Ali. The conversation topics that night, as imagined by writer Kemp Powers: race, politics, economics, and religion, heavy hitters to match even The Greatest.

Powers, who adapted his own stage play for King to put on screen (and wonderfully without preciousness—the first lines from his original play don’t occur until a good 40 minutes in) has said he was using these dialogues to air out silent debates he’d been having with himself about what it meant for him to be a Black artist in mostly white spaces. The result is a wide-ranging dialogue with a bracing depth of complexity and contradiction. Each new point raised is often in conflict with the one prior, and yet it TOO is a good point! This narrative turns its whole audience into Geminis for the night, basically, though feeling out every thread this way, instead of tugging on just one, seems to slightly loosen the Gordian knot by the end, without ever being so foolhardy as to imply it’s been cut.

But while One Night in Miami offers a lot of rhetoric to chew over, where King’s film version really sings (besides the moments when Leslie Odom Jr literally does), is in the interpersonal dynamics of it all. There’s four of them, when we eventually settle into the hotel room where most of the story takes place, and they talk and bond and spar together in a group and in factions within that group, but we also get scenes with just two characters alone, in every combination at some point, where these differences bloom up in how they might behave with one friend but not another, different forms of vulnerability that come out in different arrangements. It’s an idea movie that’s been intertwined with such rich character studies, such a nuanced and tender portrayal of homosocial interaction, and—and this is far from nothing—all among historical luminaries of Black culture. The movie humanizes these larger-than-life figures, without ever losing sight of the fact that it is their fame itself, and the question of what they should be doing with it as Black men in America in the 1960s, that makes up the stuff of their fiercest arguments and most open wounds.

All the compassion and thought of a writer and a director still needs a standout cast to make these conversation plays really shine though, and by jove they got it here. The only actor I knew going in was Leslie Odom Jr, whose talents absolutely translated from Broadway to the screen. Just impeccable casting for Sam Cooke, because whenever they need him to get up onstage and musically command a crowd, it’s Leslie Odom Jr. Yeah, he can do that for you! No problem! Eli Goree, meanwhile, playing the cheerfully cocky young Cassius Clay, is probably the least known of the cast right now, but he did a very fine job in his important balancing role as the baby of the group. It was about a minute into Aldis Hodge’s first scene where something clicked in my brain and I asked, wait, is that handsome clock man? It is! He has a riveting presence. Out of the four, Jim Brown might be the lightest written role on the page, or perhaps just the quietest, but in Hodge’s hands you never forget that he’s in the room, and he absolutely commands his kind yet piercing half of the crown jewel of the two-hander scenes.

His scene partner there is Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X. At one point fairly early in this movie, I had to pause it for a moment to just silently process some feelings about Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X. Like a containment safety measure, like otherwise I was about to become overwhelmed. Like I needed to calibrate to his levels so I could make it through this. The reason I think I was feeling so much, is because Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Malcolm X is also feeling so much. I don’t know the last time I saw a character that felt more like a prophet, and what I mean is the awkwardness. The genius of this, god it’s perfect. He’s intense and sure and lonely and worried, and he might be going too far but also not far enough, because that’s the curse of a prophet, and damn I loved all the choices of this performance! And when it at last struck me like a physical blow that I knew how this ends for Malcolm, that he’s Malcolm X, all my containment measures fell apart.

But this story here (mostly) takes place on just one night, in Miami, in February 1964. And when it ends, it ends with a cinematic technique, a gesture of editing and close ups, yet the feeling of it is one I recognized from the theatre, these days usually achieved with lighting cues but which I think of as a curtain falling in your heart. And that right there, is a beautiful piece of play adaptation.

★★★★★

The Nest tells the story of a family, a British businessman and his American wife, a horse trainer, who at his sudden & suspicious behest move with their two children from her native New York to his native England, where everything swiftly feels even more wrong, and then precedes to start falling apart.

It is in every way a throwback to those mid-budget psychological adult dramas of the later 20th-century, with an added soupçon of always maintaining this certain artistic edge where you’re thinking, this could still plausibly become a haunted house movie, there’s still time. While it never fully crosses over into horror or any of the other genres that sometimes slip along just under the surface, I still think this would be a good recommendation for people who liked last year’s Parasite, a movie so boldly, sharply crafted that it makes The Nest’s own financial spikiness seem understated by comparison, but they do contain a number of shared elements to enjoy: a narrative of social climbing & tension, a certain twistiness to the emotional landscape, a big rich house in a featured role, and just a lot of sterling direction and cinematography.

I loved this movie. “Yay,” I kept saying to myself happily. The interiors, the clothes, the particularly Reagan flavor of its 1980s, alongside a soundscape subtly but increasingly textured by the teenage daughter’s taste for the British new wave that’s coming in over the airwaves in Surrey. Loved her especially by the way, a great character for this talented young actor in a movie that definitely could have just been dominated by the adults. Though regarding them, I just continue to be so pleased by this career stage of Jude Law, Actor-slash-Producer, where so many of the roles he does now are ones where it’s like he’s having a complete ball expertly deploying his skillset and middle age to play a note-perfect commentary on a movie we associate with him from his twink younger years—here, The Talented Mr. Ripley absolutely. He even pulls out the same grimacing grabby-hands gesture he used as Dickie, and I was incandescent. 

Meanwhile, I had never seen Carrie Coon in anything before, and the impact she had on me here was probably most akin to my reaction to meeting Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread: oh, sorry to the Famous Man, who’s of course great as ever, but that’s why I’m all the more dazzled by YOU babe! This is YOUR movie and you’re killing it! Where have you been all my life! Apparently, in that HBO show The Leftovers. Man, Leftovers fans, you’ve been dining so well.

What else did I love about The Nest? God, so much. I love the nearly impossible to pinpoint yet undeniable way in which the grand wonderful manor house is actually horrible. I love movies where a bunch of adults have a party. I love a black horse, and I particularly love when characters look at a black horse and it seems to become symbolic of their own personal holy mysteries. And I loved, so much, the final scene, going out on something I’m going to call, a certain Joanna Hogg unspokenness. Oh do I love that!

The amount of consideration and invention that went into the sound engineering of this movie should, and I have to believe will, go down in film history. This is what it means to go right up to the edge of your medium and advance the line, transforming forever the idea of what can be done in your field.

In telling the story of a drummer who suddenly loses his hearing, Sound of Metal took the approach of profound subjectivity, most immediately apparent in Nicolas Becker’s sound design, but the camera too is intimately associated with Ruben’s sensory perceptions of the space around him, and gracefully conveying to us the changes in those perceptions over time. In one of my favorite features of the cinematography, the camera position and editing subtly center characters’ signing more and more in the frame as the film goes on, a gradual shift from what initially feels more like a fluttering, disjointed movement of hands around the edges of our (and Ruben’s) perception, into what it truly is: a full and fluid language of gesture, conveying the intricacies of both mood and meaning. And god that’s remarkable filmmaking, to have taken the time and care to reflect on screen the way a character is learning to read the world differently, and to create a sense in your audience that they are sharing some portion of that increase in comprehension, all just through the framing!

I’ve wondered if there were Deaf technicians behind the scenes, in addition to all the Deaf actors onscreen. Because that part I do know: nearly all the Deaf characters were played by actors from the Deaf community, with the exception, obviously, of Riz Ahmed. But beyond how the production certainly would have gotten a bigger budget with a Name attached to the project (and that’s more hours you can spend literally inventing new microphones), I think it does make some artistic sense to cast a hearing actor in that role, as the movie is specifically about someone not previously deaf who is actively struggling to hang on to his hearing identity. 

Truly though, the cast assembled here is all terrific. It was in Paul Raci’s very first scene where I suddenly remembered that there was a supporting performance in this that critics have been talking about, and knew immediately it must be him. Olivia Cooke I had not seen since my beloved Thoroughbreds, and it was such a pleasure to get another movie with her in it. And Riz Ahmed in this, is just…god, what a captivating actor. He can act entire scenes with only his giant eyes and the way he holds his shoulders. His performance is as immersive as the technical design around it, living in every thread of a character flawed and fragile and driven—what he’s doing as Ruben would be remarkable even if it were just about him going back to rehab.

Sound of Metal is a movie about care, I think, ultimately. Different ways caring for someone can look, the different forms that can take, as well the journey of learning to take care of yourself. I thought the intersection between the long road of addiction recovery that Ruben has been on four years now, with this sudden new road of learning how to be Deaf, as Joe puts it to him, was such a smart choice, because man, life often IS multiple things at once, isn’t it. And the contrast between the worn smoothness of one road with the bumpy newness of the other was just so sensitively rendered. The wholeness of this story and this film project is something I keep coming back to, it just feels so whole, but also not too neatly buttoned up. It’s human, and being alive means continuing.

This is the kind of movie where the longer I sit with it, the more enamored of it I am. I love it, in a lasting way. The final shot is going to be in my heart forever. When things in your life are lost, when they change, when you’re coping, this is a movie to draw solace from, and I feel I will my whole life.

★★★★★

The first beneficiary of my “no more half-stars, we commit to the bit” resolution/Letterboxd overhaul, is certainly The Personal History of David Copperfield, which is probably a 3 star movie on a screenplay level, but a 4 for how it personally made me feel! Which was happy! And in 2020 2021, is that not a value to be treasured and praised?

Granted, I have not read the original Charles Dickens novel, in full: The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account), so have no idea if I might feel differently about this film’s merits or demerits if I had. I’ve read a number of other Dickens though, so while I cannot comment on whether this is a “good” adaptation of its specific source material, to me it did feel appreciably Dickensian. My working definition of a Dickensian work is that it is a long, ultimately somewhat moralizing tale that follows a colorful character through an exaggerated series of misadventures alternatively ruinous or fortuitous, throughout which there are approximately 250 other colorful characters arrayed. Critics were fairly right then that Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch has a relationship to this genre, as it hits most of those marks square on the head, with the one key exception being that the main character there is positively drained of all color, and his stuffed suit moroseness contributes to the pretentious pall cast over the whole thing, that Dickens, writing a monthly serial for a general audience, does not fall prey to so much. Now, interestingly, Aneurin Barnard is in BOTH of these 2019-released film adaptations as the lead’s Important Drunk Friend, which really is amazing, and had the effect of making me consider this exact full creative team doing the Goldfinch movie instead, with this same spry, absurdist tone, and then laugh and laugh.

Frankly, writer-director Armando Iannucci always seemed a curveball pick even for this project that he did do, given that most of his work previous has been original political black comedies shot in a faux documentary format, all but The Death of Stalin taking place in contemporary times, and all including The Death of Stalin characterized by his hallmark hilarious meanness. Copperfield, by contrast, is a PG-rated period film and just the cutest fucking thing. It’s sweet and sincere—still a comedy, still with a sense of humor you wouldn’t doubt as Iannucci’s, but without the bitter irony of a The Thick Of It or a Veep. And the nimbleness of the performances all across the board made me consider that while the classic Iannucci insult contains a cavalcade of words that Charles Dickens would NEVER use, it does contain a cavalcade of words. Iannucci is actually supremely suited to directing a script with a lot of stuff in it for his actors to say.

And what actors! Everyone in this is the best. Hugh Laurie plays a genially confused old man experiencing intrusive thoughts of King Charles I, beheaded two centuries prior. Tilda Swinton rockets brightly around every set, in between caterwauling off after donkeys in a field. You have never seen Ben Whishaw deliver a performance as sickening (not the gay definition) as his Uriah Heep. Gwendoline Christie plays an ice woman dressed in black and seven feet tall, and Peter Capaldi plays an orchestrina, badly. I had never seen Rosalind Eleazar in anything before but holy moly is she a delight, what a winning presence, manages the balancing act of a character a bit more sage than most of the others but still absolutely in the same world emotionally, and just so fun. But it is good and right that the most common descriptor I run across for this movie is “the Dev Patel David Copperfield.” Such is his impact! Dev Patel….is so charming. His vim! His heart! His beautiful face! And the little version of him: this precious boy!!

I mean really the biggest part of what I enjoyed about this movie was this cast wearing those clothes in those sets. For speaking of the colorful, this Dickens is colorful through and through, from the buoyantly colorblind casting to their color-drenched Victorian waistcoats and wallpapers, just this side of gaudy, and therefore: accurate. Peter Capaldi is dressed in mulberry velvet with pink vertical-striped socks, and Tilda Swinton is usually draped in head-to-toe turmeric holding court in her Tiffany blue sitting room. In one scene every lanky inch of Dev Patel is covered in patterned fabric and there are at least three of them. All the people and things on screen create together a world so vibrant and welcoming to the eye; it feels fairy tale but alive, fresh and living.

Now, what went wrong? Honestly I think it’s mostly just a script issue, I think there’s not enough material knitting the episodes together, and that it’s overall too quickly paced so trips over its own feet at times. I think the energy being up the whole time is a grand choice, but there were just too many plot beats to cover—I’m citing a speed issue, not a pep issue. Honestly I think Ianucci would have done really well with a miniseries, which is not something I would say for every film director, but in his case I know he’s actually very well-versed in writing for serialized television, and could do a terrific job with say, a 6-part series. I don’t necessarily think the way this was cut together was incompetent (though occasionally….a little cheesy), I think just trying to do it all in two hours was always gonna be an impossible task. The first edition of David Copperfield was 624 pages long.

But although at times this can careen all the way through rollicking into antic, with Hamlet’s unhinged connotations attached there, you can’t say it ever lacks spirit, and too many movies do, in my opinion. This was a right romp and I was glad to have it, jolts and all.

★★★★

A pal wanted to talk about Tom Hardy, which eventually led to me wanting to rewatch Locke, the tiny 2014 film where Tom Hardy’s secretly strangest character just spends 80 minutes driving down the M6 while (mostly) steadily trying to cajole everyone in his life to calm down. This time I finally realized that must be part of why this stressed movie still works on me like a lullaby: so much of the dialogue is delivered to be soothing.

The concept at play is that we begin the movie with a successful construction foreman getting into his car at a building site in Birmingham, and then he proceeds to drive toward London in real time while his life cracks like badly poured concrete (to pre-empt the metaphor) one hands-free phone call at a time. Things that will not compete for your attention in this literal Tom Hardy vehicle:

– scene changes
– other people on screen

because there aren’t any!

Instead, we see only Thomas Edward Hardy in a cozy sweater & his nicest beard, serving up top-grade Resting Concerned Face while speaking in an accent that is PURPORTEDLY Welsh, no one believes this, but it’s as melodic as it is odd so I offer that you simply think of it as Hardish and just go with it. Hardy is a remarkably compelling actor even when half his face is obscured, which is weirdly often, and for once he’s not playing someone wearing a mask or even remotely connected to organized crime—refreshment. Instead, you just get to watch him somehow completely anchor your attention as he tries to remotely explain where a folder is to a slightly drunk Andrew Scott.

On that note, when I first watched this six years ago I definitely did not adequately appreciate the depth of the voice cast beyond the aurally mesmerizing duo of Not Welsh Tom Hardy and Full Irish Andrew Scott, and I really must must impress the rest of the cast list upon you right now: Olivia Coleman, Ruth Wilson, Ben Daniels, and baby Tom Holland. The filming construction they used here, and I think this is neat, is that they essentially shot this movie like a play: each night for a week, Hardy would get pulled down the motorway on a low flatbed trailer, and they would just run through it as written with the rest of the actors genuinely calling him up from a hotel conference room they were all camped in. The resulting film was edited together from the best bits of these complete runs.

One critique I will raise is that the most interesting version of a movie that is composed of just phone calls and one actor’s face is if it truly is just that, and as such we need to lose the couple of theatrical soliloquies to the empty backseat of his car. They seem to exist outside the established constraints in a way that feels sort of like a cheat, and are also easily the most broad parts of both the script and Hardy’s otherwise very very good performance, so it’s easy, we just 86 those and I promise we can do the father issues aspect of Ivan Locke’s character in just a handful of spare yet heavy allusions in dialogue that frankly will probably pack five-fold the punch anyway, why am I phrasing this like I am actively producing this movie in this moment, okay–

Something I think Locke does really beautifully, I have no notes, is how it’s tense & emotional but is all strung together with that familiar hypnotic lull that comes from driving alone at night with the lights of the road sliding over you. This movie feels like driving home from the airport after your late flight gets in. This movie is a poem to that yellowy urban glow over the major roadways at night.

Most importantly: you watch this movie and you are going to know what C6 is forever. You will not be able to help not only learning about concrete, but caring about concrete. Truly, what this movie is about, in order, is 1. concrete, 2. project management, 3. when you’re someone who believes everything can be project management if you can juuust get your little grid-patterned cuffs to stay rolled up over your sweater sleeves.

Just an outright list of reasons to watch one of my very favorite autumn horror films, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), adapted from the Daphne Du Maurier story by the same name. At time of posting, it is currently included free to stream with a Prime account, if you have access to one of those.

1. Don’t Look Now is unsettling and atmospheric and creepy and striking, but not due to jump-scares or gore. Of course everyone has different things they’re frightened by in movies, but for me at least, this is a horror film I have described as “not scary-scary, just eerie.” This is not a movie designed to make you cower with dread, it is a movie designed to make you keep asking softly, with disquieted wonder, “what the heeeck…”

2. It stars young Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in capital 1970s Transatlantic bougie intellectual chic, playing a married couple who have recently lost one of their two small children in a drowning accident.

3. And they then go to VENICE, a city of water!! Obviously the haunting watery imagery is everything you’d want it to be in the circumstances. The reason they travel to Venice is because Donald Sutherland’s character is not simply one of cinema’s many architects, but specifically an architect who restores cathedrals. There could hardly be a better movie career. The combination of artistic, academic, and material know-how here…bellissimo.

4. Anyway it is of course, in the way all good horror movies are “really about” something, really about grieving.

5. I think there are three main components of my love for this movie: the filmmaking style, the setting, and the central couple. Let’s go backwards since we were already talking about them:

5. a. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are so good in this. More so than a lot of movie spouses these two actually feel like they’re married, and it’s partly what was scripted but so much of it just comes from their performances. It’s a relationship I always enjoy watching, whether they’re at odds as they struggle with the strain of their terrible loss, or being close and familiar and cute with one another in a very longstanding kind of way. I feel for and root for them, which is an important piece of investment to have in a movie that is only going to further and more strangely bedevil this pair as soon as they reach Venice.

5. a. i. (Don’t Look Now also features one of film history’s more infamous and influential sex scenes–I like it!)

5. b. VENICE. I’m obsessed with the Don’t Look Now Venice, a sombre ghost city of little waves quietly lapping against stone, the bare, chilly streets with seemingly more pigeons in them than people. It is late autumn here, not the tourist season, the hotel they are staying at set to close for the winter as soon as they check out. It feels bleak and damp and old, perfectly enhanced by that particular taupe & cigarette smoke, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy palette of this period. This is a quiet, half empty Venice, haunting and haunted. If you watched The New Pope, think the Venice of Episode 7—an episode I am now super guessing might have been deliberately referencing Don’t Look Now. Or think the Bruges of In Bruges, which Martin McDonagh said he wanted to function the way Venice does in Don’t Look Now, a movie his references in numerous ways thematically, formally, and of course in the metafilmic moment where Clémence Poésy’s character directly names it as the inspiration for the movie that is currently shooting in the city. Bryan Fuller would also cite Roeg’s Don’t Look Now as one of the reference points of the loss-haunted Italy section that begins the third season of his Hannibal adaptation on NBC—though if we keep going, the amount of filmmakers who have been influenced by this movie is nearly numerous enough to become comical if listed.

5. c. And that is mostly due to the sheer calibre of film craft being deployed here. It is a movie of vivid visual symbolism without feeling overbearing, of experimental editing without feeling remote. Practically any scene in this could credibly be someone’s favorite, they’re all just that good. The way the shots are laid out, the pacing, the finesse with which a plot line that will in time be entirely interrelated with our story begins unfolding first as just a piece of background texture (god I’m so into that!)… The first time I watched Don’t Look Now I immediately watched it again, because I just wanted to appreciate it a second time.

6. “One of the things I love about Venice is that it’s so safe for me to walk. The sound changes, you see, as you come to a canal. And the echoes near the walls are so clear. My sister hates it. She says it’s like a city in aspic, left over from a dinner party, and all the guests are dead and gone.”

★★★★★