Beltmann

I tend to like Jason Statham movies, but A Working Man is colossally bad, a tired, by-the-numbers stump that is substandard in every which way. Each scene is presented as if the script never evolved past the outline stage. There's no personality, no style, no suspense. But it's worse than that: The last thing we need right now is a dopey cartoon that glorifies extralegal measures and knowingly stokes the same fears that are currently being used to justify such authoritarian impulses. "It's just entertainment," you might say, and I hear ya. But right now, I can't help but feel that "escapism" as an excuse is simply not good enough. It may just be a movie, but in this all-hands-on-deck moment, it feels like a movie that has deserted its post.

Last month one of my most inquisitive students engaged me in a discussion about the role those with settler privilege might play in decolonization. When might gestures toward allyship become a form of recolonization? That’s an important question, but it’s one that primarily occupies the Western mind and presumes a Western point of view.

Our conversation came to mind while watching Mati Diop’s excellent new documentary Dahomey, which chronicles the return of 26 treasures that were stolen from the Kingdom of Dahomey more than a century ago by French colonial troops. Today in the West, the issue of looted cultural goods often centers on whether repatriation is the appropriate means of reparation. These treasures are therefore defined first as colonial trophies and second, perhaps, as commodities. Dahomey, by contrast, uses a formal inventiveness to present ways of thinking that supersede those Western perspectives. Through a series of narrators, Diop gives poetic voice to the stolen artifacts. She also becomes a fly-on-the-wall witness to a vigorous debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi in the west African country of Benin. Their points of view are thoughtful, contentious and contradictory. What value might these items have beyond historical interest? How should their return be received? Nothing in Dahomey feels pinned behind glass; its meanings are alive and stacked in a way that no European or American museum diorama could ever capture.

I didn't buy large swathes of Magazine Dreams, but I was nevertheless riveted. Sometimes a fearless performance, and the right tone, can carry a movie right past its many flaws. We are invited deep into Killian Maddox's head, and we leave with him deep inside of our own.

"If you understand what I'm talking about, you're gonna take the money. If you don't, then I'm gonna have to worry about you."

Liked Bound a bunch in '96, but at the time I wouldn't have guessed that it was destined to become one of the decade's defining movies. (I've seen this watery, handsy noir more times than just about any other movie from that era, and the new Criterion 4K makes all those whites and blacks and reds look better than ever.)

On 1/28/2025 at 10:28 PM, Beltmann said:

 

That's a strong list. I liked all of 'em--except for The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which I haven't seen yet. (I have a copy here, though, and am eager to watch soon.)

Update: Watched and LOVED.

On 10/21/2024 at 6:50 AM, Albert Tatlock said:

 

This should lift your spirits today - Blossoms new single.

Hell yes. Awesome!

I've really been rocked by this loss, much more than I anticipated. Obviously David Lynch was a major artist--some of his films mean a great deal to me--but he was also an articulate advocate for personal art and in every which way a fantastic human being. Those familiar only with his movies might be surprised to discover that the artist behind that strange, abrasive content was in real life the (slightly off-kilter) Guy Next Door, a big softie, a generous spirit who loved people and loved being kind. I think this loss hits me harder than most "celebrity" deaths because he's been a constant presence in my life for 35 years and deep down I may have adored the man even more than I adored the movies.

Anyway, a few days ago I decided to watch a few choice scenes from Mulholland Drive and ended up watching the whole damn thing. And now I'm rewatching Twin Peaks from the start (I haven't seen the first two seasons since they originally aired!) and even though it's been two weeks I can't stop looking up fun David Lynch videos on YouTube, including his hilarious L.A. weather reports from the lockdown era.

On 1/25/2025 at 7:54 PM, Brian F. said:

Here’s what sparkled in 2024

 

That's a strong list. I liked all of 'em--except for The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which I haven't seen yet. (I have a copy here, though, and am eager to watch soon.)

Speaking of Mohammad Rasoulof... I'm friendly with an obscure Iranian documentarian who splits her time between Tehran and Milwaukee, and some years back I invited her to see Rasoulof's Manuscripts Don't Burn with me. Afterward, she dropped the bombshell that she knew Rasoulof and was a little pissed: "I'm going to yell at him when I go back to Iran. He didn't warn me that it would be so grim. It was like watching a documentary about some of the worst parts of my life." (I loved it.)

I haven't really thought about compiling a Top Ten, but Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World would probably sit at the top, rivaled only by About Dry Grasses (technically a 2023 release, but unavailable to me until 2024.) Also, there has been a weird year-end amnesia surrounding both Challengers and Furiosa, both of which I loved.

The chemistry between Keke Palmer and Sza is so electric, their hijinks are so funny, and the pace is so zippy that when the main plot arc of One of Them Days succumbs to formula it feels a little deflating. Still, when no one's looking the movie spikes the punch bowl: The coolest thing about this supercool comedy is the way the script sardonically reflects upon American economic inequality and the intersection of class, race and capitalism. It's all so breezy that it might be easy to underestimate its lethal takedowns. Heed has not been taken!

Yesterday I stumbled upon an old Super 8 film shot by my father in the summer of 1980. It features the six-year-old me riding a bicycle on the dead-end street leading to our village apartment in Jackson, Wisconsin. No cars, no fear... until, as the movie undeniably proves, our asshole mailbox refused to yield the right of way. My mind doesn't actually remember that crash--I must trust the movie when it tells me about that day, including how my silly faces mugged for the camera--but I do remember the sensations of that chrysalis age, and comprehend how those sensations entered a kind of perpetual metamorphosis that still hasn't ended after another 44 years of life proceedings. And, as the years pass, the changing way I perceive those images from 1980 provides its own kind of evolutionary map.

This universal yet elusive dynamic is nearly impossible to put across in a film, which is why Up, Michael Apted's nine-part documentary series spanning 56 years, is one of the cinema's greatest miracles. Apted started chronicling the lives of 14 British seven-year-olds in 1964 and then checked in on them every seven years until 2019 (even though Apted died in 2021, future installments have not been ruled out). The first few entries are bluntly engineered to bear witness to class immobility but eventually the series becomes more personal than political, and there is accumulating wisdom to be found in accompanying children as they travel toward young-old age, their hopes and worries shifting right along with the sands of time. What happens when "the future" gives way to mortality?

I've been watching Apted's movies for decades, and even though my actual age somewhat trails the participants (at the time of 63 Up, I was 45), I've always been able to identify with their position of having to reckon anew with their choices, with their aging, and with who they once were--or at least who Apted's camera tells them they once were. Fifty-six years later, there's a sense that the participants only know those children from Seven-Up! the way audiences do, meaning all they know is what Apted's recorded fragments show. Those children are resurrected every seven years, but they are increasingly strangers from another life and sometimes they are unwelcome interlopers in the participants' current lives. What's most curious to me, I think, is that my own aging has caused me to also have an evolving relationship with these archival images, these individuals, and these movies. In a sense, that makes me--and by extension any viewer--the real subject and beneficiary of Apted's magic.

(I watched 63 Up last night after several years of waiting to legally acquire a physical copy. I finally gave up and caved; thank you, person who uploaded a high-quality copy to YouTube. But YOU shouldn't watch it. This series is best viewed in order, preferably with years in between each installment!)

I've seen All of Us Strangers three times now (this viewing: Criterion's 4K disc) and it just keeps getting better. It's the kind of film that asks you to scoot forward and lean in before it whispers its secrets to you. I love this movie.

Despite their stylistic differences, both Edward Berger's Conclave and Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 feel like distressed responses to the same five-alarm fire. At a time when ideological divides in the Western world have led leading democracies to empower strongmen, Berger contemplates what it means to be a good leader and Eastwood goes even further, pondering whether "truth" and "justice" have been made so malleable that their utility has been vaporized. Both of these movies put on a good show, but it's hard to watch without trembling, too.

The closing shots of Juror #2 have been widely read as a demand for accountability, but I'm not so sure. I'll avoid spoilers and simply observe that while we witness a convicted conscience, what happens next is less knowable. Might that final scene be about the acceptance of duty? Or might it be about kindred spirits bonded by parallel sins and a fraught desire for mutual understanding and pardon? That Eastwood refuses to clarify is entirely to his credit, because Juror #2 is at its best when reverberating with the dangers of abandoning core values, whether it is an individual, a justice system or an entire nation.

I'm unfamiliar with Gregory Maguire's novel and the Broadway musical, so perhaps they have more to offer than this movie's primitive proposal: What if everything we knew about the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch was wrong? The first two-thirds of the movie answers that question in the most generic of ways, with a patchy songbook, sludgy visuals, and interminable scenes that simply do not have the dramatic weight to warrant such bloat. (The best this anti-fascism allegory can muster is some performative dismay, which hardly meets this moment in American history.)

The final third perks up considerably, but in terms of pacing, the movie suffers from a terminal case of the Netflix Plague, which means it unnecessarily pads everything out as if it's trying to fill a 10-episode quota. Until recently, Hollywood knew such a simple children's fantasy ought to be a fleet 100 minutes rather than an endless "content" delivery system; one wishes a few swell editors from the Golden Age had pushed their way into the cutting room, put their thumbs under their trouser braces, and showed 'em how it's done. Maybe they could also, in their wisdom, recommend that the movie's drab colors be given a shiny Brylcreem treatment. "Listen, buster, a little dab'll do ya!"

What's this chatter about Wicked being the best musical of the last 10 years? Some people haven't seen Steven Spielberg's West Side Story and it shows. Hell, Wicked isn't even the most interesting musical of the month (Emilia Pérez).

Showed my wife My Old Ass (sorry). There's a tactile beauty to the cranberry farm and the surrounding lake that creates a real yet modest sense of place; similarly, this is a movie that wears its wisdom lightly.

Imagine this lugubrious movie being made in the '80s as a bright buddy comedy and marvel at what they've taken from you.

Emilia Pérez / dir. Jacques Audiard, 2024

Often the real mission of criticism isn't making precise observations but rather deciding, when set against each other, how much those things matter. Those carping about the flaws of this garish musical melodrama aren't wrong--by turns it is clunky, tone-deaf, maybe even irresponsible. But it also obliterates conventions in exhilarating, joyful ways, and I suspect over time those pieces that work will overwhelm those that don't. They will emerge as the ones that most matter.

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) is a slasher with a disembodied tone--the loopy, late rockabilly rupture between what we see and what we feel creates pure '80s delirium. Is this good? Is this bad? Ohh, God. Anybody got any tranqs?

You say Saturday Night dodges any real character insights or thematic reasons to exist? Well, la-di frickin da! This SNL kid with an encyclopedic knowledge of every era of one of TV's true institutions was left helpless to resist. Rather than present a factual portrait of that galvanizing opening night in 1975, director Jason Reitman aims instead to capture SNL's animating spirit, the one that knows irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of art. Like SNL itself, Saturday Night embraces high-wire chaos, volcanic highs and lows, and a naive yet sincere conviction that the "let's just put on a show!" ethos is self-justifying. It's entertaining as hell. I had a blast. Is that enough? Talk amongst yourselves.

Some of the reliable Wisconsin contingent was in attendance, so it was terrific to run into quite a few friendly faces. We missed you, pal!

Jeff's banter was in top form, even if some of the "material" was recycled--for example, he told familiar stories about Sue being upset about that one time Jeff didn't dedicate "I'm the Man Who Loves You" to her and about the shenanigans that went down when he managed a liquor store at an age too young.

One highlight: While Jeff was setting up "Lou Reed Was My Babysitter," a patron near the front stood and hastily made her way up the aisle, prompting Jeff to interrupt his introduction: "Oh, you have to go to Tinkle Town? Well, you're going to miss the best song."

"Sorry, Jeff!," she replied without stopping, to wide laughter.

The sold-out audience was enthusiastic, respectful and totally game. After one early song ("I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," if memory serves), the crowd erupted in applause that was uncommonly thunderous and Jeff seemed genuinely taken aback. "What was that for?," he asked, clearly curious about whether something had happened beyond his comprehension. Based on last night, "Lou Reed" is also a prime candidate for booming crowd participation. Come on, other members of Wilco... get over your hesitations and record a version that is a full-on, balls-out rocker!

At one point Jeff apologized for talking too much and a fan near the back reassured him by shouting, "We don't have anywhere to be!" That's how the entire night felt: Jeff had everyone in his hands and time seemed beside the point, perhaps more so than at any other Jeff solo show I've seen. When Jeff wrapped up at 10 p.m. after a 90-minute set--he eschewed the fake encore-baiting departure, to great hurrahs--my brother-in-law, who is only a moderate fan, simply said, "Wow, he really commands that stage."

I saw Terrifier 3. In my view, Art the Clown should be arrested for murder.

Announced today: Jeff Tweedy and Karly Hartzman have contributed a live Solid Sound recording of "How Hard It Is For a Desert To Die" to Cardinals at the Window, a 135-song collection of previously unreleased material being sold at Bandcamp to assist the victims of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina.

In Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters, estranged sisters Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne gather to watch over their dying father. One of my favorite choices is to set this three-hander in a small, plain, undistinguished apartment, rather than the kind of sprawling estate that normally houses such stories (first to come to mind: Cries and Whispers, August: Osage County, September, This Is Where I Leave You). For me, the choice is especially uncanny--and unnerving--because the furnishings and cramped layout of this particular space closely resemble the modest condo where I spent many weeks pinballing against siblings as we watched our mother succumb to pancreatic cancer.

8 hours ago, Brian F. said:

"Tried the corner and missed" is the most underappreciated joke in film history.

True! Pure gold.

Sports junkies are usually open to any story recapped in the "30 for 30" style, but the new documentary Just a Bit Outside: The Story of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers might prove perplexing for anyone who isn't a local fan still clinging to the 1982 season. After all, it's not an underdog story (the Brewers were expected to contend) nor a triumph-over-adversity story (the Brewers came up short). Why chronicle a glorious run that ended in failure, ushering in another 40+ years of franchise futility?

I'm not sure this movie can answer that question for anyone who isn't True Blue Brew Crew. But as someone who can still name every player on that '82 roster and whose childhood was traumatized when Cardinals closer Bruce Sutter, with his burly black beard, struck out Brewers slugger Gorman Thomas to end the World Series, this documentary zealously catalogs many of my core memories.

Brimming with new interviews, the movie's main contribution is to showcase how these blue-collar teammates had a special chemistry with each other and the Milwaukee fanbase. It also confirms beyond doubt that, like the fans, the players were deeply wounded by that Game 7 loss and carry that ache still today. There's no sugarcoating the pain that has fermented over decades, which is why there's an emotional tension brewing inside Just a Bit Outside: While fans will relish the celebratory nostalgia trip, it's sometimes difficult to escape the nagging feeling that the story is also marching toward inevitable doom.

Side note: Among my prized possessions are baseballs signed by Robin Yount, Pete Vuckovich and Bud Selig, and a game program signed by Ben Oglivie. All four are interviewed at length, but the most skilled raconteur on screen is Ted Simmons. Give that guy his own movie!

FYI: All six songs were shared on Wilco's YouTube page on Thursday.