Reading, Watching, Listening 11/22/2024
A few words about busyness
First of all, apologies. I haven’t had an update since last week, after promising a new Five-Star Three-Star Cinema Club entry (it’s still on the way). Simply, I was busy this week. With family, friends, work. All of it good. But busy.
There’s a funny thing that happens to time when you’re quite busy over an extended period. Everything seems to move fast, in a way, but you get a bit lost in it all at the same time. It was only Wednesday when I realized it had been less than a week since my birthday, the evening of which I spent at a bar with friends where another friend was DJing. Two weeks that felt like five or six, though not in a bad way. I’ve felt productive, in fact!
I also saw Gladiator II last night, a movie that would be an unappealing bore if not for my guy, Denzel Washington. The man absolutely tears up the screen, playing a flashy schemer, a kind of role he’s never done before. You can also tell he knows he’s operating at a higher level than everyone else in the film. Paul Mescal, from my beloved Aftersun, is not a movie star, unfortunately. He’s certainly no Russell Crowe. Where are the young movie stars? None of them quite seem to have “it.” Or, few of them do. I think Florence Pugh might, and Zendaya, but even with them I’m not completely sold. Do they have whatever that extra oomph is? That special relationship with the camera and the audience? That star quality? We may be in a crisis.
No new updates in the newsletter this week, but I did publish an interview over at GQ with Juror #2 writer Jonathan A. Abrams, who shared with me how he came up with the film’s ingenious premise while sitting in on a lawyer friend’s trial.
I was there one day for voir dire for one of his cases, and it's a scene that's in the movie. The judge was not letting any of the prospective jurors talk their way out of serving. And I said to myself silently, What could you say to this judge right now that would get you kicked off? “Your Honor, I can't serve on the jury because I perpetrated the crime.” And I laughed, and I’m like, That’s a monster. That's the hook. That's amazing. And so I didn't know what the movie was, but that was the scene, right then and there in the gallery of the courthouse that day.
Reading, Watching, Listening
A few recommendations this week:
“The Thin Line Between Biopic and Propaganda”, by Zach Schonfeld, is a great read over at The Atlantic, examining the biopic Reagan and placing it within a long history of presidential biopics, many quite good, and others… not so much.
They say history is written by the winners. But sometimes the winners like to put on a bad accent and cosplay as the losers. Yet despite heavily negative reviews, Reagan remained in theaters for nearly two months and earned a solid $30 million at the box office, playing to an underserved audience and tapping into some of the cultural backlash that powered Donald Trump’s reelection. The film’s success portends a strange new era for the presidential biopic, one in which hokey hagiography might supplant any semblance of character depth—reinforcing what audiences already want to hear about politicians they already admire.
“The Look of Shame”, by Beatrice Loayza, is a great long read about the excellent filmmaker Catherine Breillat, whose films have pushed the boundaries of sexual frankness and explicitness. “Breillat is often labelled a ‘provocateur.’ But that word suggests pushing buttons for the sake of it, when her work is nothing if not measured and self-aware,” Loayza writes in the New York Review of Books piece. “Her films don’t glamorize masochism, but they take the appeal of submission seriously.” Breillat has also been the subject of serious controversy, both for her stated views on things like the #MeToo movement, as well as accusations of essentially fascillitating rape on one of her shoots involving unsimulated sex scenes. Loayza takes these issues with this great filmmaker seriously in a way I’ve rarely seen in writing about “problematic faves.”
The Wood Brothers are a band I’d somehow never heard of before, but my roommate had an extra ticket to a concert of theirs here in Toronto, and I figured why not? I was glad to have attended. The audience wasn’t the greatest (I’ve never heard so much talking during a show in my life), but the band was wonderful. Great music across a range of genres one could classify within a “Southern” sound, and excellent live. Take a listen.
“The Secret Behind America’s Moral Panic”, by M. Gessen, is a new editorial in The New York Times addressing “the trans issue,” and specifically argues against the notion that Democrats need to be throwing trans people under the bus in order to make a compelling case to voters in future elections. Gessen, who is nonbinary, explains with great clarity the ways in which rights issues, including reproductive rights and trans rights, are intrinsically tied together, and why an affirmative position for trans rights must be upheld.
Trump’s and Vance’s politics are coherent, and their legislative agenda is clear: Roll back trans rights, lesbian and gay rights, reproductive rights and women’s rights, all in the name of making America great, straight and white again. It’s entirely possible that Harris’s evasions on the issue of trans rights helped cost her the trust of voters, and by extension the election. But the price trans Americans will likely pay if we are abandoned by the Democratic Party as a small and unpopular constituency may be much higher.
I hope this is read by people who need to read it.