Links & Looks, March 9, 2023
Repertory Programming Is Back, To Leslie, The Trial, A. S. Hamrah Upon Oscar Films
Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Goodbye.
Filmgoers are choosing revival and repertory titles: I talk to programmers from The Music Box, Chicago Film Society, Classic Cinemas, FACETS and the Siskel Film Center. Says Rebecca Lyon of the Music Box: “All the way back in June of 2021 when we screened Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn—a spare telling of the last days of a rundown movie palace in rain-soaked Taipei—”we got what in my memory was a huge crowd. And it was a beautiful show, and I was standing under the marquee after and just looking around at all these young, cool-looking people and just feeling so excited that they were turning out for what is one of my personal favorite films but is also a difficult film. I just checked the numbers for that show, 175! So we’re clearly exceeding that now, but it did feel like a sea change at the time… I don’t pretend to know, but I think people are ready to see films in person again, and the places they are choosing to do so are not multiplexes, but places that feel special and unique to them.”
To Leslie gets a belated Chicago theatrical opening on Oscar weekend after its failed North American release ($31,543 domestic gross) : “It's the moment-to-moment capture of Riseborough's features that counts: the camerawork by Larkin Seiple (Everything Everywhere All At Once) does a dance of rare and haunted intimacy, measuring Leslie's vulnerability, but patient in capturing hurt, always allowing the always-superb Riseborough the breath to show Leslie's innate strength and potential for reinvention.” Also: briefly on The Magic Flute and Film, The Living Record Of Our Memory.
Orson Welles’ The Trial is out in a vivid 4K digital restoration. The intense, immense thematic ground gets covered in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s fine 2012 essay, but I wrote to accommodate Welles’ essential masterpiece of fear and squalor as if it were brand new, and consider less-discussed style elements, including sharp-dressed man Anthony Perkins having a Nick Cave moment (when Cave was but three- or four-years-old). “Dead center is Anthony Perkins: handsome and agile, haunted yet antic. Look up ‘man,’ man as Welles has created him: exacting haircut, encased in timeless tailoring, a trim suit, natty five-button vest, slim pants with pleats crisp as glass. In the hours of the film, among his superhero garments, only his perfect white shirt shows stress. The costume offers no distraction from the study of Tony Perkins in motion. K. is a time traveler: he does not look out of place in these threads containing this commotion in 1915 (when Kafka’s book was written), 1925 (publication date), 1962 (film release), or even 2001, 2023. (The wicked costume design is by Helen Thibault.)”
Triangle Of Sadness
What’s the most underrated Oscar swag each year? A. S. Hamrah’s sardonic, pungent, unsentimental Oscar movie cornucopia at the Baffler.
The superb results this year run about 7,500 words.
Elvis:
If this is Baz Luhrmann’s best film, it’s because Elvis Presley forced him to become a better director. To tell Elvis’s story it is necessary to show the full figure in the frame, head to toe, since Elvis’s leg and hip moves on early television made him a star. That precluded Moulin Rouge-style seizure-inducing cuts. And Austin Butler’s Tarantino-fied performance as the King demanded a full view. Butler here is a co-auteur in a way usually closed to biopics in which the lead actors are more famous than Butler is, and so we never lose them in their roles as other famous people.
Triangle of Sadness:
The annoyance and rancor with which Triangle of Sadness has been greeted by certain cinephiles who consider themselves evolved has mystified me… I understand why the fake humanists and the rich socialists of the middlebrow press are against it; I understand why it bugs the Oscarologists who forced themselves to watch it. What I don’t understand is the struggling writers (who) wonder what (Ruben Östlund) is so happy about… I have a theory. Östlund’s in a good mood because he lives in a country that isn’t a total immiserated mess like the U.S. or the U.K, gets to make movies with great actors about whatever he wants… instead of adapting idiotic IP crap, and keeps winning awards…
Östlund shows many things I have observed in real life but never once seen depicted on screen and he gets castigated for it… Woody Harrelson [plays] a drunken communist superyacht captain not in control of anything. He goes down with his $250 million luxury yacht as his wealthy passengers are puking their guts out, shouting Chomsky at them through an intercom: ‘How people perceive themselves is nothing that interests me. There are very few who look in the mirror and say, “The person I see is a savage monster.” Instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.’ I wonder about people who disliked that.
And Babylon:
As a murky Mad magazine fold-out comedy, Chazelle’s movie achieves a stupid grandeur in evoking a silent era that is half ‘Hollywood Babylon,’ half ‘Everyone Poops.’ It does this by directly imitating the work of filmmakers from the generation immediately before Chazelle’s, lifting ideas and scenes from Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, Baz Luhrmann, even movies as recent as Licorice Pizza… Its real cohort is movies like Zeroville and Under the Silver Lake, disgruntled non-starters from 2019. Like Babylon, they are about the impossibility of achievement in Hollywood filmmaking, made by callow writer-directors who have tasted success and are afraid the supply is running out.