Movies At The Moment
Coming up: reviews of Asteroid City and Indiana Jones And The Title I Forget and I’m A Virgo. But that’s not this week!
Blue Jean opens: “Georgia Oakley’s sincere, plain-spoken British lesbian coming-of-age Blue Jean is a tactile account of self-acceptance, its images composed with uncommon assurance, which accentuates the film’s themes of control against control. It bears a gentle, lingering punch.”
Excerpts from entries (at the link) inspired by Chicago’s revival & repertory this week, including Do The Right Thing, Bound, The Grand Budapest Hotel
When first released thirty-plus summers ago by Universal Pictures, cultural commissars warned of the potential impact of Do The Right Thing: the apparition of this thrilling city symphony-Brechtian-Broadway-street scene-drama-dance musical would be an incendiary act, that it would set cities ablaze. Watching Do the Right Thing in 2023 is as much cloudburst as thunderclap: Lee’s indignation and furious creativity do not simmer, not unto this day. Lee’s movie stands far above the saddening crowd of today’s releases, and is born anew as it lights the screen, any screen.
More here.
The Grand Budapest Hotel:
Anderson’s everyman-in-no-man’s-land is Gustave H., the concierge of an ocean liner of a wedding-cake deluxe hotel in the fictional duchy of Zubrowka, The Grand Budapest Hotel. He is a man with a job, if not a surname or a notable nationality. Ralph Fiennes invests H. with the brusque panache of both the boulevardier and the comic lights of the stage. Lubitsch’s blithe cosmopolitanism is supplanted by brute snippiness in the person of Fiennes. Speaking faster than he fast-walks, his H. is given to “oh fuck it”s that are the verbal equal of Indiana Jones choosing to take out a pistol and dispatch a scimitar-wielding opponent. (Fiennes is nourished by H.’s bursts of comic filth.) His impatience, his hurry, accelerates the sense that a narrative, an era, is hurtling to a close, as well as setting the tempo for the heist-and-chase design of the movie.
H. is in a constant state of verbal fury, yet as a figure, he is stateless, without citizenship outside the walls of the hotel, just as the dream design of the film is timeless, set in no place, but sprung from many imaginations. And the vast, teeming cast is as much a relentless rush of footnoting as performance—young Tony Revolori as Zero, the bright-eyed Lobby Boy to Gustave H., escaped from a revolution, F. Murray Abraham as Mr. Moustafa, the mysterious owner of the hotel and the narrator who may have been the boy, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Bob Balaban, Waris Ahluwalia and Owen Wilson, as well as a fantastic fake Schiele painting, its line writhing with tribadic electricity.
Seeing The Grand Budapest Hotel a second time only amplified the disorienting sense of frames upon frames, boxes upon boxes, rabbit hole after rabbit hole. Beneath the plastic sensory pleasures of Anderson’s work lies infernal patterning. In the mosaic of leaps between time settings, the film even shifts aspect ratios, from panoramic widescreen for the time nearest us, a middling, common format for the farther past, and for the bulk of the story, at the downfall of the heyday of the hotel and its caretaker, M. Gustave, in the nearly-square “Academy” format in which movies of the 1930s and 1940s were shot and shown. The success of Anderson’s admirable ambition is to have elevated anachronism, pastiche, personal passions and larger cultural memory to a heady froth, but one that also knows the butt-end of a rifle.
A longer review here.
There’s part of a 1996 interview with the Wachowski about Bound here. (As well as the first page of the screenplay.) Another portion:
Veteran producer Dino De Laurentiis had bought Assassins from the Wachowskis for "not very much money" and asked to see their next script. "You have to hand it to Dino. He's made a long career on taking chances," says Lana.
Lilly takes on the gruff accent of the 77-year-old De Laurentiis, "Now what you working on?"
Lana says, "He's this old Italian guy, can we just come out and tell him it's about lesbians? So we're hemming and hawing and like, well, it's sorta about this woman and this other woman..."
"Dino is like, 'The first woman, she is a lesbian? And the other woman, she also is a lesbian! We have a deal!'"
But the process of casting took them aback. Lilly says, "It was amazing. We thought we would write a really hard-boiled script for women. Usually men get these kinds of roles, and we thought we would have women lining up around the block to be in it. But that was not the case.
"I guess they would get to the sex scene and flip! It would go flying out the window. What matters is that pretty much, they're the same woman. The butch/femme aspect is very much yin-yang, two parts create a whole. We wanted the women to have elements of both sides."