Gifts'Twas the season, so what did I find in my Christmas stocking that fits the mandate of this blog? China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, Kotaro Isaka's Hotel Lucky Seven, and a Fantastic Four t-shirt. The rest was all very practical and will feature on my House Chores Blog.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: As the ping pong ball goes from one side of the table to the other, so do the fortunes of Marty Supreme, and at about the same rapid pace. Josh Safdie has bettered Uncut Gems, in my opinion, by giving his desperate asshole "hero" a destructive arrogance that undermines every win with a failure caused by his own hubris and venality. And it's a tense delight to watch Timothée Chalamet auto-destruct. Loosely based on a real table tennis pro, Safdie happily abandons the biopic for some truly outrageous set pieces as Marty struggles to get to a World Championship. The ping pong sequences are high quality, and they say something about the purity of sport, but I wouldn't call this a sports film - rather, it's about ego, self-sabotage, and the destructive nature of the American Dream. I also feel like it's commenting on talent and how to monetize it, which is a particularly modern concern. I know Safdie loves to cast non-actors (Abel Ferrara, David Mamer, Tyler the Creator, and Penn Jillette are all in this) - or otherwise surprise us (Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard), but I'm gonna dock him half a star for giving Canadian business douche Kevin O'Leary such a big role. He's basically playing himself, but I found his presence distracting. Otherwise a great film to end 2025 with.
At home: Mike Flanagan's adaptation of The Life of Chuck is optimistic and life-affirming as Stephen King can be, which is to say we're told or shown how everyone dies in memorable detail, but it's in the service of showing how even the most ordinary lives are precious. And so the end of one is equated to the end of the an entire universe. We access Chuck's life at different points, largely going backwards, with Nick Offerman's voice as very funny companion (move over, Morgan Freeman, I've got a new life narrator), to put this point across. In some ways, it feels like the story is cribbed from different sources (it isn't), with its existential doomsday at the top (what I want to call The Life of Marty) not entirely connecting to the horror room in the last part (except thematically). In others, everything is connected through the lens that is Chuck, played by several actors, the most engaging of which is Broadway child star Benjamin Pajak, perhaps just because he's at that age. Didn't expect so much dancing in a film like this - poster or no - but it becomes the metaphor for living, and Flanagan indulges himself with long sequences. Over-expository here and there, The Life of Chuck is nevertheless incredibly charming, darkly amusing, and above all, surprisingly relatable.
I am the right Hamlet nerd to market Ophelia to. The female characters in Hamlet are so under-written (unusually so, for Shakespeare) that a reinvention showing the story from her perspective (and, to a point, Gertrude's) is totally up my alley. I think it does require some working knowledge of the play to appreciate fully as the intersections with Hamlet's bits are cursory, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. What they've done successfully is take every that's said in the play and built a backstory to fit - Ophelia's connection with nature, how she could be at court of a common girl, being raised by an overwhelmed single father, etc. - and given her a lot of agency. That's where purists will be annoyed, no doubt, as it reinvents key scenes to put Ophelia "in the loop", as it were, and much of what we see - what the court sees - part of Hamlet's scheme (indeed, often OPHELIA's scheme). I like all that and the dialogue (and Ophelia's music theme) uses either some of Shakespeare's language or language that sounds Shakespearean through imagery, without going into pentameter. Very well done (and I've heard some bad cod Shakespeare in my day). I'm a bit more neutral about the complete fabrications. To fill out the mostly off-stage romance, for example, they take a couple pages from Romeo & Juliet, and pluck a trope or two from the rest of the Bard's canon. Less successful is the oddness of the witch subplot. It works within Shakespeare's mirroring effects in the play (King/Ghost, Queen/Witch), but it's pretty wild, and I feel like the film goes off the rails every time it invokes these elements, or the fruit of its poisonous tree, which here includes more agency for Gertrude (I am bound to love Naomi Watts in anything, so I won't complain too much). At the very least, it's interesting to use this as context to ask WHY Shakespeare made Ophelia so "weak", what it props up instead, and so on. The young girl "broken" by the toxic men around her is a powerful indictment of ego, it's just not the story the film wants to tell, and I don't have a problem with it.
I'm always up for a presentation of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and National Theatre Live delivered a lively one in 2017, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Joshua McGuire. Radcliffe is equal to himself as the dumber, less talkative Rosencrantz, I've seen this kind of performance from him often. McGuire, as the more philosophical and manic Guildenstern, carries the play on his shoulders. David Haig, as the Player, is extremely funny, so should not be discounted when applauding specific performances. The comedy is generally played up in this staging, with fun entrances and exits, especially when we intersect Shakespeare's Hamlet, but the existential drama of two supporting characters, ignored and abused by their Author, still comes across. What happens when characters are mostly left in a liminal space between scenes? What do we know of them from the original play, especially given they are a casting pun that perhaps fits the Bard's mirroring agenda. Well, here's another mirror, of the play itself. It's fun, doesn't mind mocking Hamlet's problems, and puts tragi-comical meat on the bones of three dramatis personae non gratae. Liked it better than the Oldman/Roth film, but still don't think it's the definitive performance.
The greatest trick Chekhov ever pulled, for me, was nailing the humor of unhappiness. Vanya on 42nd Street is a staging of his Uncle Vanya, with the great Wallace Shawn as literature's greatest grump, directed by Andre Gregory, and then filmed by Louis Malle, so I guess it's part of the My Dinner with Andre cinematic universe. The origins of this project are fascinating: With no plans to ever show it to an audience, Gregory assembled a troupe for laboratory experimentation, just rehearsing the play over and over, doing it differently every day, only eventually for intimate groups of friends. For four years, on and off. As an end to the project, they decided to film it and Malle jumped on board, forcing the cast to "fix" one version of the performance... and what a performance. Yes, Shawn is powerful as a man disappointed with his life, but it's Julianne Moore who steals the show as the one (acknowledged) beauty in their dreary world, and therefore the "light" all the moths are attracted to... and she may be the unhappiest of all. I found her incredibly moving. Although full props to Brooke Smith as well, who got the final and very touching word in the play. I sometimes wondered if we needed the intro and "breaks", showing the actors as themselves, which I suppose only exist as a document of what the project WAS. But they so seamlessly became their characters that I didn't realize the play had begun, and whatever "bare bones" production limitations are on screen, I don't think you ever realize you're seeing anything but the decaying world of Vanya's estate. Okay, maybe that "I love New York" coffee cup.
The first Ozu film I ever saw was Floating Weeds (1959) and it secured my absolute fandom for his work. I still think it's one of his best, if not his VERY best. Like much of Ozu's work, it's a remake of his own work. 25 years earlier, he had made A Story of Floating Weeds with the same plot - an aging actor returns to town to visit his old lover and illegitimate son, drawing the attention of the actress he's currently involved with, leading to personal tragedy - the two versions much closer than the usual Ozu "remake", which normally just takes the same premise and does something completely different with it. The 1934 film is, of course, a silent film, as as with most of Ozu's pre-war output, is much lighter in tone. The core is still the father's shame at his position in life, but there more moments of comedy, often with the kid actor. He makes you laugh, so it's more shocking when you want to cry. And while it has much in common with his films of this era, it also feels like he's already developed his post-war aesthetic - fixed cameras, tatami shots, characters facing camera, lyrical establishing shots. If it hadn't been a silent film, you could have inserted it into the post-war era without a thought. He refines this story in 1959, but dang, that 1934 original still packs a punch.
Dorothy Parker and Otto Preminger's take on Lady Windermere's Fan - simply The Fan - tacks on a post-Blitz (contemporary) frame tale, which feels both interminable and to which we frequently return, as if audiences couldn't accept Oscar Wilde's world of unserious whimsy (and in 1949, perhaps they had a point). It's a choice that pushes the drawing room comedy into melodrama because the characters have to exhibit psychological truth and can't be Wilde's delivery devices for artful wit. The tale of a mysterious social climber becomes a bittersweet story about things lost and found, but it's not Wilde, even if his arch dictums often come through. It's an interesting experiment in how things can be interpreted through direction and acting (both are strong), but between the dialogue replaced with conventional Hollywood fare and the lacklustre framing - I'm sure you're expecting this pun - I'm not a fan.
Though Happy New Year starts with very New Wave ideas, it's a bit of a con on the audience, and not the last bit of shell-shuffling the film will do. Lino Ventura is a convict released on New Year's Eve, and in a color flashback to his black & white reality (one of the aforementioned formal twists), we discover the crime that landed him in prison. And it's as intricate and well-designed as heist as any put to film - I love the procedural elements - but it's still almost secondary to his pursuit of Françoise Fabian, an antiques dealer from next door to the target jeweller's. The grand and very adult romance between polar opposites is what he has to live for after his incarceration. If she waits. If she can be trusted. But then, can he? The courting is like a heist onto itself. I suppose that's the thief's nature. Very well crafted by Claude Lelouch on both fronts.
Gianmarco Soresi's one-hour special, Thief of Joy, is anything but. I came to Soresi through his podcast and crowd work clips, and jumped on his comedy special when YouTube suggested it. The man is very funny, and quite disarming, so he gets to go dark and audiences accept it. The special is pure stagecraft, with none of the crowd work included, even keeping a couple of mistakes to keep things "live". He's just so lithe, making strong use of his "theater kid" - his MUSICAL "theater kid" - background to not just tell jokes, but perform them. That fun physicality is why he's so disarming, probably. And he is the master of the "classic switch", which is a comedy principle (no idea if anyone uses that term, but my group of improv friends) that manifests as a surprise left turn. I'm used to it, I know it well, so I often see it coming. Not here. The way he weaves the classic switches in the middle of a sentence is always a delight, and when I expect it, it's not the turn I expected. Had a great time with it.
Not to be confused with Cinema History, but then again... So I just finished a movie watch where I ended up seeing something from every country and territory on the map. I did SPACE, now I'm going to do TIME. Yep, it's one movie for every year that produced movies since way back in 1874, now more than 150 years ago. Selections will be based on availability and will all be films I've never reviewed (only about 8 have I ever seen). I'm going to stick to fairly popular things I just haven't seen (gets harder over time), and will mostly be things that tie into my personal proclivities and interests, mixed in with big titles people would be surprised to learn I hadn't checked off any lists, with an eye, yes, towards Film History. The early years are going to go by pretty quickly, as movies were, at most, a few minutes back then. You ready? It goes a little like this.
[1874] Passage to Venus: It had to start somewhere, so we started there. It would be 28 years before Voyage dans la Lune.
[1878] Sallie Gardner at a Gallop: Yep.
[1882] The Kiss: Queer cinema started way before I would have thought. Very cute when the few seconds are looped.
[1885] L'Homme Machine: It's pretty neat that we see a man running in a few lines and dots.
[1887] Man Walking Around a Corner: Had it been made a year later, I could have used my Jack the Ripper joke.
[1888] Roundhay Garden Scene: Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody kn---
[1889] Hyde Park Corner: Preserved frames create movement the way a decontracted comics book does.
[1890] Monkeyshines, No. 1: I think they just captured a ghost on film.
[1891] Newark Athlete: Edison-stolen technology got this shot of Boy Not Juggling.
[1992] Poor Pierrot: 1892 is the year they realized they could tell stories in this medium. It's a little like being haunted by Commedia del'Arte.
[1893] Blacksmithing Scene: I don't think you should be drinking on the job when that job is swinging a giant hammer so close to your co-worker's hands.
[1894] Dickson Experimental Sound Film: More early queer cinema, but the actual experiment in sound is interesting.
[1895] Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory: Goes to show that employers' surveillance of their workers isn't new.
[1896] Le manoir du diable: First horror film? Méliès really started something with his live action scenes of fantasy fiction, but there wouldn't be someone like him until, I dunno, Stephen Spielberg.
[1897] Serpentine Dance: Great subject for showcase both smooth movement and (new!) hand tinting.
[1998] The Astronomer's Dream (La Lune à un mètre, lit. The Moon at One Meter): What if the Moon was evil and you didn't yet have the means to poke its eye out with a rocket?
[1899] Cinderella: Watching Méliès is like watching a magic show, so of course we start with the fairy godmother, and later transition to... uhm, I don't remember the living clocks in the original fairy tale, but I like it!
[1900] Grandma's Reading Glass: Invention of the funny cat video. (Oh and of the POV shot; it'll never take off.)
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