And the Ship sailed on

 Federico Fellini's last highly acclaimed international success was Amarcord, released in 1973.  The director continued to make movies until his last picture in 1990, The Voice of the Moon.  There are seven films that follow Amarcord.  These pictures are little known and received only limited release outside of Italy.  With some exceptions (most notably Arthur Penn and William Friedkin), a great director doesn't suddenly lose his faculties and, so, it is a fascinating exercise ,to view Fellini's late work and try to discover what, if anything, is wrong with it.  An important case in point is Fellini's And the Ship sailed on, an elaborate historical allegory released in 1983.  The movie features international stars, mainly from the U.K., and, certainly, doesn't scrimp on resources -- this is a big-budget feature with elaborate and expensive special effects, in some ways a precursor to James Cameron's Titanic.  Fellini is said to have made the movie to refute Hollywood productions like the Star Wars pictures in which computer generated effects were prevalent -- all of the spectacular effects in And the Ship sailed on are "practical" and the director glories in these theatrical images that announce that show real objects in real space.  Indeed, near the end of the movie, the camera takes us backstage to show exactly how the effects are produced.  At least in a later film like And the Ship Sailed On, there is no deficit in imagination, no diminution in ambition or scope of the production.  If anything, the movie is too ambitious, too crammed with visual and rhetorical ideas, too diffuse, in other words, expending energy in all directions but not exactly bringing anything to a tight focus.  Fellini's earlier pictures, before Amarcord, address the fate of the artist in a decadent society.  And the Ship Sailed On is about the fate of the world -- its ambitions are not to limn the existence of a single man, or group of men, but to consider the fate of the collective, in this case, Italy and Europe as a whole.  The movie contains images of astonishing beauty, but they are often artificial and heavily stylized:  the picture bears a closer relationship to works by Hans Juergen Syberberg such as Hitler, A Film from Germany than to the surreal neo-realism of something like I Vitelloni or La Dolce Vita.  In my estimation, And the Ship Sailed On, functions best as an elaborate series of tableaux on themes central to European history on the eve of the First World War -- it is, in some ways, an experimental film, filled with disorienting imagery and obscure historical references.  Fellini's highly theatrical spectacle also becomes an allegory as to the history of film and, indeed, art.  

The movie's premise is that of the late Medieval "ship of fools".  A group of neurasthenic aristocrats and artists of various kinds set sail from an unnamed harbor to return the ashes of a great diva from the world of opera to the remote island where she was born.  The film's geography is intentionally vague but, it seems, that the island is somewhere off the coast of Albania in the Adriatic Sea.  World War I is looming; the archduke has just been shot in Sarajevo resulting in the displacement of many Serbs as refugees fleeing collective punishment for assassination.  Setting forth under luminous skies and sailing at night under a huge moon, the ship makes its way toward its destination.  There are several opera stars among the passengers.  They are also egomaniacs -- there is an amusing scene in which the singers enter the vessel's boiler rooms and from a high ledge sing competitively for the brawny sweat-soaked men shoveling coal to fire the ship's steam turbines.  There are flirtations.  A prince worships a woman who has just cuckolded him, caressing her toes and the soles of her feet.  The opera singers rehearse an oratorio that they intend to perform when the deceased diva's ashes are returned to her natal island.  An androgynous crown prince with a chest laden with medals practices fencing.  There is a journalist aboard who serves as our guide to the various rogues and luminaries on the ship, the Gloria.  The journalist asks the Crown Prince how he perceives Europe and he says that people are dancing on the brink of a Schlund using the German word that an interpreter translates as "edge".  This leads to a colloquy on the meaning of Schlund which is a term that signifies here the crater of an active volcano.  One singer who has a preternaturally deep voice goes into the fiery and crowded kitchen on the vessel and uses his basso profundo to put a hen to sleep.  The crown prince travels in the company of a blind woman who is, perhaps, some kind of prophet -- the part is played by the German choreographer Pina Bausch who registers as an uncanny sort of zombie.  In the hold of the ship, there's a rhinoceros that looks exactly like the armor-plated beast that Duerer imagines in one of his prints -- the rhinoceros with its hard plates looks like the Austrian-Hungarian battle ship that the voyage encounters in the last part of the film.  The rhino is dirty and stinks -- it is hoisted into the air and washed-down with jets of water.  (The rhino hanging placidly from the ship's hoist reminds me of Christ carried over the city in La Dolce Vita.)  The artists sponsor a seance to try to attract the soul of the dead diva -- this is a sequence that has eerie overtones like much of Juliet of the Spirits.  A romantic young man who looks like Keats or Shelley mourns the diva's death by watching her again and again in sepia images projected on the wall -- the beginning of the film, set in the silent film era, is shot without sound in honey-colored sepia.  At the end of the movie, the last scenes are also shot in sepia invoking the era in the movies before 1915.  A slender plot begins to emerge about an hour into the film.  The ship has picked up about 40 Serbian refugees who were floundering about in the sea and close to disaster. When the Serbs begin to sing and dance, slowly, the sophisticates on the ship participate in their folk music revels and a kind of harmony exists between the refugees and the opera singers.  But this cameraderie is short-lived.  An enormous and hideous battle ship approaches -- the thing looks a dark grey wedding cake only tenuously afloat on the ocean, sprouting huge cannons and covered in metal armor.  The commander of the Austrian-Hungarian battleship demand that the Italians surrender the Serbs to be punished for the assassination of the Archduke.  Several alternative endings to the film seem to be proposed -- in one the Serbs are protected by the Italians on the vessel; in another ending, the artists and aesthetes on the ship surrender the Serbs to the enemy; in that latter case, a Serbian terrorist throws a bomb into the battleship which retaliates by sinking the Gloria.  The English journalist, Orlando, escapes on a lifeboat with the enormous rhinoceros, casually remarking (with a wink) that rhinos give the best milk.  Near the end of the film, the camera tracks to the side revealing that the entire massive set is an illusion.  The ship rocks back and forth on huge hydraulic rams and the metallic grey sea turns out to be huge sheets of mylar that are animated from below.  Both the moon and the sun are painted on the walls of the vast soundstage and camera crews with grips are elevated over the teeming set by large cranes.  After the silent film beginning, the movie transforms into an opera with big choral numbers and many soloists.  This operatic approach to the story is abandoned as the film progresses although the picture includes many interludes involving song and histrionic operatic acting.  At the end of the film, the characters sing in a mighty chorus that sounds like the chorale of Hebrew slaves from Verdi's Nabucco.  (Another film which the movie resembles are scenes in Bertolucci's 1900 in that movie's last hour -- that is, the Communist May Day festival.)  As always with Fellini, the casting is marvelous and the makeup and clothing design present the actors as angelic figures from the silent era.  It seems as if we are peering into a past that Fellini has reconstructed with perfect confidence -- the faces look like images glimpsed in old photographs of the Edwardian era.  

The film is a spectacular achievement and, no doubt, intensely imagined as a tribute to European life on the eve of the Great War.  Folly rules; the blind woman hears voices as embodying colors -- it's a form of synesthesia.  But the entire extravagant and baroque opera that we are presented in this film is a bit tedious, sometimes devoid of interest, and the picture drags a little.  I don't doubt that it's a masterpiece but the movie is rebarbative -- it's repellent and fascinating at the same time and I can't pretend to understand all of it.  Beginning in 1963, Fellini began studying Jung's writings.  He began use of LSD in 1964. After Amarcord, Fellini's lifelong project was to film the Yaqui way of Knowledge -- that is, the books by Carlos Castanada.  This sort of arcana animates the movie and, probably, motivates some of its sequences.  It's psychedelic, trippy stuff but, also, obscure and cold.  This is a kind of cinema that demands more study.  Study, though, is not affection and not love.  

Highest 2 Lowest

 It's possible that Spike Lee isn't angry anymore. Or, perhaps, he's concluded that anger doesn't accomplish anything beyond self-affirmation, something that the wealthy and successful filmmaker no longer requires.  A case in point is Lee's rather jovial and, even, inspirational crime picture Highest 2 Lowest.  This 2025 movie, based on Akira Kurosawa's noir High to Low, proves that crime doesn't pay, that there are resources of generosity in people that are surprising and life-affirming, that community is all-important, and that art, ultimately, will show us the way.  Lee solves the problem of America's intrinsic racism by showing us a thriving Black community that has only the most limited contact with White folks.  There's no racism on display because there are no White people and, therefore, no racists in the movie.  (There's a peckerwood White detective who is initially portrayed as a potential source of racial conflict -- but the character doesn't develop in that direction.)  Highest 2 Lowest is big, loose, and epic in some respects.  It's also ill-focused with some scenes that feel a bit perfunctory -- without the rage, Lee is a little diminished. Spike Lee aspires to being an idealogue, but his movies are complicated, objective, and inhabited with vital characters who are not merely spokespersons for their respective positions -- in interviews, he tends to describe movies that are agit-prop and that no one would want to see.  But, in practice, his films are much more complex and open-minded; the movies display a "negative capacity." a skepticism and willingness to question things that Lee, the mouthpiece of Black power, doesn't admit to possessing.

In form, Highest 2 Lowest begins by closely following the Kurosawa movie.  A wealthy and privileged man, David King, (Denzel Washington) has risen to great fame and fortune as the visionary entrepreneur of Stack Records, a recording powerhouse that produces rhythm and blues, soul, and rap pop songs.  (He is said to have the "best ears in the music industry.") Tired of the financial constraints on his studio, King intends to raise money and buy out his partners so that he can run the business as he desires.  He is engaged in negotiations to these ends when his son is apparently kidnaped by some half-crazed thug who demands 17.5 million dollars ransom in 1000 franc Swiss currency.  King immediately reports the kidnaping to the cops who, a bit implausibly, set up a complicated and technologically elaborate command headquarters in King's spectacular Brooklyn condominium, a terraced suite that overlooks the Bridge and Manhattan.  Important to the film's themes is King's collection of Black artists, heavily focused on Basquiat -- a group of pictures that are featured in inserted shots throughout the action.  It turns out that the inept kidnaper has, in fact, captured the teenage son of King's Black Muslim chauffeur.  King needs the money for the buyout of his business and initially (for about ten minutes) resists paying the ransom for the chauffeur's son -- but, he sees the light, and agrees to fund the ransom although intending to make sure that his money is protected and that he gets back every penny (or Swiss franc).  A series of chases ensue and, after a botched hand-off on the subway, the bad guy gets the money.  The bad guy is laughably stupid and it takes King and the Muslim chauffeur about three minutes to get his home address.  King goes to the man's home and talks to his wife.  The bad guy is around the block working on recordings in a penny ante dungeon of a recording studio.  It turns out that the villain has named his first son after King and is just trying, albeit through rather hamhanded means, to break into the recording industry.  After some sharp and penetrating dialogue between King and wannabe recording star -- the two of them have rap duel, slinging rhymes at each other -- the hero overcomes the bad guy and, with the help of the chauffeur, retrieves his money.  There is an extended and important epilogue.  King's heroic exploits to save the chauffeur's boy has earned him the acclamation of the community and he is now even more famous, with his artist's songs steadily climbing in the charts.  Similarly, the bad guy is famous also and has record labels courting him for his back-catalogue of gangster rap songs.  The movie ends with two songs, encapsulating the idea of sanctified music  (gospel as it were) and the devil's music (rap).  In a hallucinatory sequence King interviews the villainous rapper (he's called "Yung Felon") and has a vision of his song as a video complete with writhing big-booty dancers and the sullen, sneering gangster rapper in the midst of the infernal display.  (Some aspects of the film's ending remind me of the great final minutes of Lee's Bamboozled which has similar themes.)  Throughout the movie, King's teenage son has been trying to get him to listen to a girl named Sula, who the young man believes will be a big star.  In the last sequence, Sula sings to King with his family present and King begins to hear the score and orchestration with which he will accompany the song.  The music is transcendentally beautiful and King, who is now wearing a cross and running a boutique recording studio, compliments the girl and says he will make her into a star.  

Highest 2 Lowest is well-written:  King's unerring ears allow him to correlate the kidnaper's voice with the rap song performed by the bad guy and, on that basis, track the man down.  Similarly, a turning point in the film occurs when King's son, Trey, says to his father that "you have the best ears in the music industry...but the coldest heart."  Lee uses close-ups sparingly -- the first close shot of Denzel Washington seems to be about a third of the way through the film.  Set pieces including a wild ride on a subway full of Yankee fans and a Puerto Rican celebration with great music and a parade punctuate the action with impressive chases that have some of the flavor of Brian De Palma's action films.  Ultimately, the movie preaches the value of integrity and community; various forms of false consciousness tangled up with fame and money are subjected to subtle critique and the film avoids unnecessary violence -- there's a single shooting (and the victim survives); no one is killed in the movie.  King's rooms are full of large-scale works of art on which the camera often lingers.  The emphasis on paintings and graphic works is consistent with the notion that music and other forms of cultural expression are, ultimately, sacramental, the means of grace -- the girl's song, an extended sequence, at the end of the movie makes this theme palpable and inescapable.  (There's a fundamental incongruity in the plot:  King struggles to raise the 17.5 million dollars for the ransom, the same sum needed to buy out his partners in the music studio.  First, this figure seems relatively modest given King's apparent success and fortune; second, he could readily raise the money by selling off a couple of his larger Basquiat canvases, works of art that I would estimate as being worth 100 million dollars (In 2017, a Basquiat painting sold for110 million dollars; more recent prices have been between 65 million and 88 million dollar.) 

Little Siberia

 The Finnish neo-noir, Little Siberia (Dome Karokoski,  2025) demonstrates the broad influence of the Coen Brothers' Fargo in world cinema.  This modest film clearly employs a narrative template established by Fargo.  The template is pretty good and the movie, therefore, is reasonably entertaining.  

Little Siberia is set in the icy boondocks in Finland in a hamlet that looks like many junction villages in northern Minnesota.  The village stands in a pine forest and possesses a few commercials buildings that look like pole-barns, houses and structures scattered around a sloping main street that local navigate on small scooter-shaped sleds.  It's always icy and the characters spend almost more time falling than they do speaking.  The villagers are mostly morose eccentrics. Everyone seems dogged by the bad weather -- it is always overcast and snowing.  The town's pastor is a nondescript pale man with a haunted look.  (The film employs the laziest of all post 9-11 cliches -- he's a combat veteran of Afghanistan and, therefore, depressed but also equipped with certain military skills.)  The Finnish church seems to have next to nothing to do with religion; the pastor basically serves as a psychological counselor and social worker.  The pastor's genitals were wrecked somehow in the war and his sperm are not viable.  This condition leads to consternation when the pastor's attractive wife (she's a fitness and dance instructor) discovers she's pregnant.  The pastor has never bothered to tell his wife about his reproductive dysfunction -- the Finns are a taciturn group.  But, when his wife announces her pregnancy, the film's hero, reasonably enough thinks he's been cuckolded.  The primary premise for the film's violent action is that a meteorite has landed near town, indeed, penetrated the car body of a drunk who was planning suicide only to be interrupted by the falling star from the sky.  The meteorite, a chunk of stone about fist-sized, is believed to be fantastically valuable.  The rock is displayed in the local museum but has to be watched around the clock because a gang of Russian thugs have resolved to steal the meteorite and sell it for profit.  The pastor, due to his military background, is persuaded to guard the museum, an activity that involves various midnight assaults and attempts to snatch the stone.  Criminality corrupts the town and pretty soon people are threatening one another and taking hostages, bad behavior all involving the town's sole treasure, the meteorite.  There are a couple of murders, a duel with sharp icicles, and, at last, the treasure (like the money in Fargo) is lost, but, nonetheless, possibly accessible to someone who knows where it is located.  

Little Siberia is marketed as a "black comedy" -- it's not comical at all and, in fact, is simply a serviceable crime movie involving some eccentric characters and bursts of surprising violence.  There's nothing in this trifle that you haven't seen before.

Pluribus

 The pod people are coming.  In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956 based on a 1955 Jack Finney novel) human beings are replaced by muted, robotic collectivist aliens.  The film has been generally interpreted as reflecting Cold War anxieties about Communism and communist infiltration of American institutions.  In 1978's remake, Phil Kauffman imagines the pod people as Nixon's minions, ultra-disciplined henchmen for a regime that seeks to abolish human individuality -- the movie is set in San Francisco and features Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.  The Communists are stopped in the '56 movie; Nixon's goons win in the '78 film.  These pictures focus on the initial onslaught of the collective hive-mind aliens on the human race.  Vince Gilligan's Pluribus, at its core a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is more audacious and intellectually challenging -- in Pluribus, the initial subjugation of the human race to the "hive-mind", occurs before the credits.  The nine episodes, all about 50 minutes long, of the show are devoted to the implications of a world-wide regime of soul-less hive-mind collectivists.  After a brisk prelude, Pluribus explores a reality in which everyone on earth, save a dozen or so outliers, are psychologically fused into one vast entity -- every man, woman, and child share exactly the same sensations, memories, expertise, and knowledge.  With the exception of the remnant, inexplicably not affected by the worldwide "joining", everyone knows everyone elses' experiences and all human knowledge is shared by the collective hive mind.  (The situation seems to some extent to be an allegory of the internet and world wide web -- everyone on-line knows potentially everything that can be known).  Furthermore, the collective mind's unitary personality is exceptionally gentle and benign.  The hive mind is a sort of Buddhist super-entity that is peaceable, kind, and devoted to the enlightenment of all sentient beings.  The pod-people in this iteration of The Bodysnatchers cannot lie or deceive, can not act with malice or cruelty and, indeed, are so pacifist that they are unable to even pick fruit, let alone, eat animal tissue -- as we learn, they subside on a milky fluid that is derived from human cadavers, people who have naturally died are converted to edible protein.  The pod-people seem wholly passive - if one of the stand-alone outliers challenges them, they have a tendency to collapse into seizures which have the effect of paralyzing the whole world, and, further, slaughtering anyone who is driving or flying or working with power machinery.  The premises of the hive-mind intelligence are convincingly developed, thought-through, and demonstrated -- the show is logical enough to satisfy its viewers with the notion that the nightmarish scenario (which may, in fact, be paradisical) is plausible enough to sustain both belief and interest.

The series is a star-vehicle for Rhea Seehorn, the actress who played against (and as love-interest) for Bob Odenkirk in the brilliant Better Call Saul series, also a Gilligan program.  Seehorn is inspiring as Carol Sturka, a fantasy novelist in the Anne Rice, bodice-ripping genre.  Sturka is fantastically successful and travels around promoting her books, which she secretly considers dreck, with her spouse -- she's one of TV's newly visible, normalized, and proud lesbians.  When the "joining" occurs, Carol is excluded for some reason that's never explained.  (Her wife dies, knocking Carol, who has alcoholic tendencies into heavy drinking and, even, drug use.)  The hive-mind sends a guardian angel to her in the form of Zosia, an attractive woman who looks like one of the "thirst-trap" characters in Sturka's novels.  Carol is adamant that she will not join the others in the hive-mind although everyone provides her with testimonials as to how beautiful and serene life will be for her as a member of the collective.  In fact, she violently resists being annexed by the collective.  Her aggression, in fact, causes world-wide spasms when the objects of her fury collapse into seizures bringing everyone and everything to its knees for a few minutes.  The first three or so episodes are broadly comical -- Carol connects with the other persons resistant to the hive-mind:  they are a motley group, mostly yearning to join with the others, although one of them, a hedonist African has figured out how to exploit the situation -- he jets around in Air Force One with a bevy of sex-slaves, travels from one lavish destination to another:  the Caribbean or Las Vegas or the French Rivera.  This amusing character is no help to Carol whose ambitions are to save the world by figuring out a way to reverse the universal utopian peace prevailing everywhere.  As it happens, Carol has a stubborn soul-mate, a Paraguayan man named Manousas who absolutely refuses to accept any of the perquisites offered to him by the pod-people -- he calls them "weirdos."  The hive-mind lets Carol do anything that pleases with her and she communicates with the belligerent Paraguayan -- after a number of misunderstandings, principally due to language problems, the Paraguayan sets forth by automobile driving all the way from Asuncion to Bernalillo, New Mexico where Carol lives.  Manousas is the proverbial righteous man who acts in accord with his ethics even when no one is watching.  (For instance, he pays for gas by leaving money in envelopes or slipped under windshield wipers as he siphons fuel out of stranded cars).  Ultimately, the bloody-minded Manousas reaches New Mexico, more than a little the worse for wear -- he's been impaled on some kind of thorn bush in the Darien Gap. Carol has been deteriorating -- after her confrontations with the pod-people have induced world-wide paroxysms, the people in her city have simply moved en masse to get away from her; when she calls them by phone, they answer:  "Our feelings for you Carol haven't changed, but we think its best to take some time off from you.  But we will still deliver anything you want--"  Carol has been asking for things like weapons and booze and one gets the sense that she is near suicide.  Robinson Crusoe-style isolation is disastrous for her and she is deteriorating psychologically.  After pleading with the pod people to come back to her, Zosia re-appears and embarks on a sexual relationship with Carol.  They jetset around the world skiing, lounging in Japanese hot baths, and engaging in the most sybaritic luxuries.  Zosia professes to love Carol and persuades her to consider joining the hive mind.  (We've just seen one of the last hold-outs, a teenager in a very remote valley in Peru, agree to a ritual in which she joins the hive-mind.)  Carol loves Zosia as well and seems about to succumb to her blandishments -- she's tempted to give up her individuality and be submerged in the pluribus of the hive-mind.  But, Manousas arrives and tells her succinctly:  "You have to make a choice:  either you save the world or you get the girl."  After some agonized deliberation, Carol decides to save the world from the beneficent but soul-less pod people.  And that's where the first series ends.

The show is wonderfully shot in a combination of extreme long shots of the Peruvian mountains or the New Mexico desert and close-ups showing the protagonists.  The New Mexico settings are stark and beautiful and the atmospheric touches are great -- Carol invades the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe and takes one of the pictures to hang on her wall, an interior decorating decision applauded by the pod people.  Small details create the sense of reality and fascination that characterizes the show:  there are coyotes who try to unearth Carol's spouse buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of her suburban McMansion.  Translation problems with a cell-phone app provide interesting complications.  The pod-people are not really eerily blank and ill-formed but to the contrary wonderfully gentle, kind, ministering angels.  In one scene, in which Carol beds down with the pod people in a public high school gymnasium,  the film all but dissolves in tenderness -- the weirdos aren't human but they are certainly not less than human; indeed, they may represent a better, more perfect form of consciousness.  Carol skeptically says to Zosia as they are going to bed on the gymnasium floor:  "What is this? Some kind of sex-orgy?" where upon Zosia says "Not unless you want it to be Carol."  Pluribus is widely acclaimed as one of the best shows ever produced and it lives up to its hype.    

Under the Silver Lake

 Two ilms adapt Thomas Pynchon novels to the screen:  One Battle after Another which is loosely derived from Vineland and Inherent Vice based on the novel of that name.  (Both pictures are by Paul Thomas Anderson.)  David Robert Mitchell's remarkable Under the Silver Lake isn't based on Pynchon but it's truer to certain aspects of the novelist's sensibility that the films based directly on his writings.  Under the Silver Lake (2018) channels the eerie obsessions and paranoia that motivates Pynchon's most accessible and shortest novel The Crying of Lot 49.  Pynchon is a writer with political interests and his larger books are full of satire:  the books mercilessly caricature characters whose political affiliations and beliefs are problematic -- subtlety isn't Pynchon's strong suit and his big, ambitious novels are full of Mad magazine parodies, film allusions, and characters with Terry Southern-style names; there's an aspect of Dr. Strangelove in Pynchon's political parables -- this is evident in the two Paul Thomas Anderson adaptations that luxuriate in characters with exotic names like Perfidia Beverly Hills, Doc Sportello, and (to cite a few examples) Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw.  Under the Silver Lake is deeply embedded in the aspect of Pynchon's writing that posits the world as a grotesque labyrinth replete with clues and emblems that present themselves as riddles to be solved.  One of Pynchon's themes is that conspiratorial forces rule reality and, although they are mostly occult, malign traces of their existence and activities are everywhere around us -- if we are willing to experience the horror of exposing these forces, we can decipher these coded messages; to live in the world is a form of cryptography -- we are obliged to decode our experiences.  Although Under the Silver Lake is not an adaptation from Thomas Pynchon, it is closer to his certain important aspects of his works (these are the arcane scientific and pop culture references) than movies actually inspired by his novels.

A slacker named Sam lives in steamy little apartment complex, a moist pit in what seems like a jungle.  One of his neighbors is a woman who walks about topless with a white cockatoo that periodically makes cries that sound like words but can't be deciphered.  Sam spies on his neighbors with binoculars and meets a beautiful young girl with a small white dog; she lives with two other young women in a nearby apartment also part of the miniature compound.  (It turns out that this woman is a call girl with an enterprise called Shooting Stars --these are prostitutes who can claim some scant relationship with TV or movie productions; apparently, Shooting Stars requires this as part of the resume of the women that it employs).  The beginning of the film is like a combination of Rear Window, de Palma's Body Double, and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye with the nude girls practicing yoga on their balcony terrace.  This being Hollywood -- or the Silver Lake neighborhood of East L.A., everyone is movie mad.  Sam's mother keeps calling him and demanding that he watch Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven (1927, Frank Borzage) and the beautiful young woman has a weird shrine to the film How to Marry a Millionaire in her apartment.   She watches the comedy in her bed with Sam.  Everyone has movie posters on their wall -- Sam favors horror films from the thirties.  Although Sam and the girl kiss, their lovemaking is interrupted by the return of the girl's two roommates.  The next morning, the apartment is completely empty and the three girls have vanished --a hobo cipher on the scrawled on the wall warns "Keep Quiet!"  Throughout the picture, various hobo ciphers appear as emblems to be decoded and the closing credits contains a little compendium of some of those secret signs.  Sam sets off to find the missing girl.  (This is notwithstanding the fact that  he has a girlfriend who comes to his apartment to have sex with him dressed in various bizarre costumes -- she claims she's auditioning for parts to justify her apparel).  All of the women in the movie periodically bark and howl like dogs.  This may have something to  do with the fact that a dog-murderer is abroad, stalking people's pets and gutting them -- all of the utility poles are festooned with posters identifying missing dogs.  Two other context or background points are important:  there's folklore about Silver Lake always being associated with failed actors who are dog-murderers; this is said to relate to an actor in the twenties who went berserk out of envy for Rex, The Wonder Dog.  A beautiful succubus like something out of Max Ernst, a willowy naked woman with an owl 's head is said to seduce men at night and kill them -- this is called "the Owl's  Kiss."  Finally, a playboy millionaire named Jefferson Sevence has also gone missing after an expedition to Catalena Island -- ultimately his corpse is found (or thought to be found) burned up in his 1935 Duisenberg; the blackened bodies of three prostitutes are found with him as well; one of the dead girls has a charred bichon frise in her purse.  

There's almost too much in this film.  Sam attends various debauched parties looking for the lost girl, although the evidence suggests that she's the woman burned in the car with the dog in her purse.  He goes to a bookstore and buys a 'zine in which cartoons explain the legends of Silver Lake.  Later, he visits the cartoonist who seems to be a full-blown paranoid conspiracy theorist.  His bar buddy is also a conspiracy theorist who urges Sam to pursue the clues.  Sam believes that Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune blinks her eyes in a sort of Morse Code.  Using that code, Sam decodes a song by Jesus and the Brides of Dracula that contains in its lyrics a message about James Dean and Isaac Newton.  This message leads him to a rendezvous with the King of the Homeless, a shabby man wearing a cardboard crown who apparently rules over a subterranean terrain of maze-like pits, tunnels, and luxury bomb shelters that, in fact, turn out to be pharaonic tombs for an ultra-wealthy death cult.  Sam follows clues to mansion atop a mountain -- it's portrayed by painted matte image on the camera lens.  In the mansion, there's an evil old man called the Songwriter doodling on the piano; he claims that he has embedded clues in the lyrics of all popular songs dating back to Beethoven's Ode to Joy.  He mocks Sam for his naivety and Sam beats him to death with Kurt Cobain's guitar -- the Songwriter's studio is full of souvenirs of famous musicians.   Sam follows more clues and ends up in a gulch on Hollywood Mountain where he meets with a man and three girls that are members of the death cult.  Sam is poisoned but rescued by the Homeless King who later prepares to torture him on suspicion that he is the dog murderer (Sam has dog biscuits in his pocket.)  Sam talks himself out of this dilemma.  He now knows the whereabouts of the beautiful young woman who is still alive but immured under a million tons of concrete awaiting the opportunity to "ascend" with her patron, a plutocrat member of the death cult.  Sam returns home -- his car has been repossessed and he is about to be evicted from his apartment due to nonpayment of rent.  He flees to the bare-breasted neighbor's apartment and has a romantic encounter with her.  The cockatoo shrieks and Sam asks what the bird is saying.  The woman doesn't know.  This summary elides many parties including a wild one in the crypts under the Hollywood Forever graveyard.  After insulting a homeless man, Sam and Millicent Sevence, the daughter of the missing plutocrat go swimming in the Silver Lake reservoir.  Someone shoots at them.  Millicent is shot and a plume of blood pours out of her body -- she is filmed in a way that duplicates a Playboy magazine cover of a model under blue water clutching at her chest; Sam found the Playboy magazine in his father's toolbox and it was the first image to which he masturbated. The movie is full of weird coincidences.  After the party in the crypt, Sam passes out.  He wakes up on Glora Gaynor's grave, next to her headstone.  At the end of the movie, Sam disconsolately watches a video version of Seventh Heaven that is mother has sent him.  

I like this movie a great deal and recommend it.  It's witty and continuously entertaining.  This is one of the only movies that I've seen to have on staff a world-class cryptographer as consultant.  This is the celebrated cryptographer Kevin Knight who deciphered the so-called Copiale Cipher, a 105 page manuscript written in code that resisted all efforts to decipher it between the mid 18th century and 2012 when the results were published.  (What was the manuscript about:  apparently arcane initiation rituals used by group of Freemasons called the "Oculists" -- they were, in effect, Shriner eye-doctors.   

The Mastermind

 Most people seriously overestimate their abilities:  we all think we are excellent drivers, skillful and proficient writers, and able to successfully multi-task.  Most people rate themselves as excellent in their professional capacities.  And, yet, of course, mediocrity reigns.  We are heroes to ourselves but feckless so far as the rest of the world is concerned.  Kelly Reichardt's new crime film, The Mastermind, explores the incongruity between our self-confident pride and the actual measure of our abilities in the context of a fairly standard heist picture.  In films of this sort, a crime is planned, a team assembled, and, then, the heist consummated; because crime doesn't pay, the second half of the movie documents the unraveling of the scheme, the accomplices betraying one another, and the ultimate failure of the enterprise --the model for this genre (or, perhaps, its most successful example) is John Huston's 1950 The Asphalt Jungle; in that movie, a group criminals commit a crime and are hunted down one-by-one:  the film shows us how the fate of the men depends entirely on things outside of their control -- the Professor, the film's criminal mastermind, is arrested because he tarries in a cafe and is in the wrong place at the wrong time.  None of the thugs are too smart and the bravest, but most dim-witted, ends up face-down in a pasture with a couple of curious horses nuzzling at him.  Reichardt's minimalist picture follows the same pattern but is, even, more dispiriting.  Several disaffected kids carry out a heist at a suburban art museum, stealing four canvases by the American expressionist, Arthur Dove -- the crooks aren't ambitious enough to snatch paintings by more famous artists:  the museum has a couple of iconic pictures by Frederick Erwin Church and a canvas by Thomas Cole.  Third-rate crooks steal third-rate pictures.  Almost immediately, the plan goes awry.  One of the co-conspirators informs on his colleagues; other more accomplished thieves snatch the pictures from the gang-leader and, then, hold them for ransom before returning them to the museum.  The so-called mastermind goes on the run, but unsuccessfully.  This summarizes the film's plot.  The film's interest lies in its meticulous staging and carefully detailed, if ultimately opaque, character studies.

JB is the son of a local judge.  He has a solicitous mother who loans him the money necessary for the heist.  It's a modest sum and she thinks her boy is making cabinets -- a lousy criminal, JB is a skilled cabinet-maker; at least, there's something that he's good at.  JB is married, has a mousy wife and two bratty sons. The film is set in 1970 -- Nixon is the President and war in Vietnam, although winding down, is still triggering big protests on campuses and near federal buildings.  JB thinks he's a bold individualist and seemingly wants nothing to do with the protests in the streets.  Ironically, in the film's last scene, JB gets the beat-up by the cops and is whisked away in a paddy van, implying (I think) that he will be arrested for the heist -- by this point in the film, warrants are out for his arrest.  JB assembles a team of fools and ne'er-do-wells.  The most reckless in the group is a black kid named Gibson who, notwithstanding JB's orders, brings a revolver to the heist -- this is fortunate because were it not for the gun, the crooks would have been arrested at the museum; it's less fortunate, however, because the gun ups the stakes. The crime, involving a stolen car as a getaway vehicle, is completely botched.  Teenage girls see the criminals snatching the canvases and sound the alarm.  (An old couple observes the crooks pulling down the canvases on the wall, but think they are maintenance men simply implementing a re-hang in the gallery.)  Everything goes wrong.  JB's kids are not in school due to a teacher work-day and, so, he has to watch them when he supposed to be stealing the paintings.  Within hours of the caper, the black teenager with the gun robs a bank, gets arrested, and, immediately rats out his accomplices.  JB takes the paintings and puts them in an elaborately constructed and elegantly designed cabinet-like box.  Every film of this sort requires a suspense sequence.  Reichardt obliges by staging a terrifying sequence in which JB climbs up a very frail-looking ladder into a hayloft to put his loot into the cabinet that he has dragged up there.  The ladder looks sketchy and JB isn't too sure on his feet and we expect that he will fall and be badly injured.  He does knock the ladder backward and has to leap out of the hay mow, landing in pig manure.  No sooner is he back at home when some sinister men confront his wife; they seem to be mobsters although they claim that they are special art cops.  A little later, more mobsters arrive, big, beefy and surprisingly affable thugs who make JB give them the paintings.  The dragnet is closing on JB.  He flees from Massachusetts to what seems to be upstate New York.  By this time, he has abandoned his wife and two boys.  His old art school buddies welcome him at their rural home, but the wife doesn't want him around -- it's too dangerous.  Without much money remaining, JB takes buses and stays in grim-looking upper rooms in boarding houses or motels.  Ultimately, in Cincinnati, he mugs an old woman for funds to buy a bus ticket to Toronto.  He gets swept up into an anti-wire protest in which a bunch of jolly local cops are busting heads with their nightsticks and ends up detained in paddy wagon, whereupon the movie ends with a shot of the police clowning around with a hat dropped by demonstrator.  

The film is influenced by Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville -- it has several elaborate scenes detailing criminal procedures (laboriously putting the canvases in the cabinet, casing the museum, altering a passport for the trip to Toronto that never takes place.)  These sequences are shot in silence, unpretentiously but effectively.  The entire movie has a washed-out appearance, as if shot on super 8 or 16 mm and, then, blown up with the images appearing somewhat hazy and slightly out of focus; the color schemes are monochromatic with the only color provided by the paintings.  There are dispiriting rural landscapes all grey and brown and shabby taverns (memorably a place called "The Salty Inn") with everything muted and faintly claustrophobic.  The movie that the film most closely resembles is Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us, a picture set during the great Depression about a gang of hapless bankrobbers (and starring Shelley Duval) -- The Mastermind has the same bleak interiors, blurry landscapes and sense of hopelessness and betrayal.   I liked the movie.  Reichardt's pictures attune you to tiny details and nuances and it's fun for me to explore the images, looking for things are significant but half-concealed.  I'm not sure that the film would appeal to all tastes.  Thieves Like Us was released in 1974 -- that is forty years after the events in the Great Depression that provide the context for the movie.  It's remarkable to me that The Mastermind is about events in 1970 some of which I can readily remember --1970 is more distant from today than the Great  Depression was from Altman's picture; The Mastermind is set fifty-five years in the past.  There's an early scene that epitomizes JB's selfishness.  He takes a small figurine out of a display and puts it in his glasses case.  He, then, slips the figurine into his wife's purse.  As they are leaving the museum, he kneels to tie his shows as his wife walks out ahead of him with the two boys.  JB is testing to see if there's some kind of electronic marker on the objects in the museum.  He wants to see if the figurine triggers an alarm.  It does not, but the import of the scene is that he allously casts the risk on his innocent wife.  

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

 Daniel Craig is a good businessman (or has an excellent agent); at the point, where he has become too old to be plausible as 007, Craig has made himself indispensable to a mystery franchise, the Knives Out series.  Knives Out is self-consciously retro -- the movies have the atmosphere of a tony, beautifully acted British mystery, the sort of thing featuring prestigious actors (slumming from their Shakespeare roles) solving crimes in beautifully shot mansions and bucolic villages -- these are the kind of shows broadcast on PBS as part of its Masterpiece Theater Mystery series, introduced with plummy enthusiasm by Alan Cumming.  Like Masterpiece Mystery, Knives Out is light on gore, witty, and features plots that are, by my standards, excessively intricate. Craig acts the part of Benoit Blanc, an eccentric New Orleans private detective, who (like Poe's protagonists) solves crimes for the pleasure of exercising his highly developed faculties of ratiocination.  Craig is a little campy in his vanilla white suits, like a slightly brawnier version of the novelist Tom Wolfe.  He speaks with a soft lisp most of the time but can command the stage when this is required -- typically in the fourth act of the show when the detective has to explain, at tedious length, how the murder was committed, why, and whodunnit.  Benoit Blanc is now considered one of the classic sleuths, on par with Hercules Poiret and Mrs. Marple.  The Knives Out franchise features top-rank actors populating the program, often turning up in showy cameo parts.  The whole thing has a slightly cozy aspect:  the crime is committed amidst a group of people, mostly eccentric and neurasthenic;  the suspects are isolated in a country manor setting.  The writing is witty and the movies are, if anything, overly ambitious -- they purport to contemporary commentary, are politically alert and timely, and, even, explore themes that are more sophisticated than one might expect in this genre.  Rian Johnson writes these films and directs them as well.  All Knives Out pictures have been wildly successful on Netflix, the streaming service that owns the franchise, and, no doubt, the formula will be repeated in a number of future iterations much to the benefit, I think, of the canny Daniel Craig.  

Wake Up Dead Man:  A Knives Out Mystery (2025) is crammed with all sorts of stuff, but, nonetheless, projects a certain staid, and intrinsically moral, perspective on the murderous events that it depicts.  The show, as I've noted, has some elements of classical British "cozy" mystery -- it takes place in a pleasant small-town setting, involves whimsical and eccentric characters (one guy has built a moat around his house), and is, more or less, genteel; the movie is self-evidently a sort of throw-back relying in large part of the charisma of its star-powered cast.  Josh Brolin plays a fearsome Catholic priest, Monseigneur Wicks, whose Christian Nationalist ravings from the pulpit have reduced his congregation to about a half-dozen crazies, all of them suitable as suspects once the murder plot gets underway.  A young priest is dispatched to the parish, located in upstate New York at a place called Chimney Rock.  The congregation consists of an embittered medical doctor (his wife has left him), a failing science fiction writer, a young right-wing podcaster, a sort of Charlie Kirk figures, a female lawyer, and several sad elderly people affiliated with the Church, Martha, a half-crazed acolyte to the Monseigneur -- the part is played by Glenn Close -- and a cynical janitor and maintenance worker (Thomas Haden Church).  There are complicated backstories -- some of the characters are related by blood in surprising and Gothic ways.  Although initially amiable enough, the alpha male here, Wicks, tries to intimidate the upstart young priest (who seems like he is a liberal Democrat or "libtard" as one of the characters has it); he makes the young priest, Father Jud, take his confession which always involves lurid masturbation fantasies.  There is dissension in the parish when Father Jud tries to set up his own prayer circle and bible study group.  Then, Wicks is stabbed to death in a small cubby-hole, a closet-sized recess next to the altar.  The police are called, led by an indefatigable police chief (Mila Kunis imitating Selena Gomez in the Only Murders in the House series).  The killing presents the classic features of a locked-room mystery and can't be solved.  Enter Benoit Blanc, who takes over the case for his own amusement.  He jousts verbally with Father Jud -- Blanc is a strict rationalist, an atheist, and an enemy to religion.  The story contains many twists and turns and can't really be described without spoilers.  It suffices to say that the plot involves, in effect, two mysteries -- how was Monseigneur Wicks killed and by  whom? and how does it happen that Wicks is resurrected and stalks about like Lazarus in the movies' third act.  The viewer here gets two mysteries and their solution for the price of one with some ornate speeches about faith and politics thrown in a for a good measure.  The movie divides neatly into four acts:  in the first act, the characters are introduced, the Wuthering Heights backstories involving scandal, hatred, and violence, are established and we learn that every one of members of the congregation has a good and sufficient reason to hate Wicks.  Act Two involves the solution of the locked room mystery ending with Wicks' apparent resurrection; Act Three is about solving the mystery of the dead priest's revival together with another murder that is collateral damage to the resurrection; Act Four is a lengthy speech, some of it boomed out of the pulpit, by Benoit Blanc in which the various unsolved or enigmatic aspects of the plot are discussed and, then, assigned solutions.  I dislike this sort of resolution to a mystery -- that is, the long and tedious lecture on the clues and how they can be amassed to solve the various questions posed by the plot.  To me, this seems anticlimactic and, since some of the mysteries rely upon very obscure bits of evidence, capriciously interpreted, the viewer usually walks away from the show with the vague sense that he or she has been cheated.  The plot-solution as finally announced typically relies on bits of evidence never properly disclosed to the viewer.  To its credit Wake Up Dead Man plays pretty fair and is carefully written -- there's nothing sloppy about this movie and the solution to the various crimes and enigmas does make sense.  To my taste, the movie takes itself too seriously -- I would like the show better if it were funnier and more over-the-top.  This film is most avowedly not a thriller, not a crime picture, nor a police procedural -- it's British-oriented genre mystery with a big-name cast.  My problem with the movie is not with its execution, or acting, or plotting (all of which are impeccable); I just don't really have much interest in the formula itself.    

Caught Stealing

Caught Stealing is a brutal, serviceable neo-noir.  Set in 1998, the movie is about a handsome and appealing kid who becomes entangled in a clash between different groups of mobsters vying for a 4 million dollar pay day, ill-gotten funds that are locked away in a storage compartment.  I don't recall the source of the money -- it's immaterial to the movie in any event.  Several picturesque and psychopathic members of the Russian mafia are looking for the cash; they are allied with a crooked lady cop.  Two Hasidic mobsters also appear, criminals so vicious that the other crooks fear them -- they have a propensity for gouging out people's eyes.  The action is more-or-less non-stop with the naive hero rocketing about NYC like a silver ball in a pinball game. The protagonist is named Hank and he's a cheerful alcoholic bartender in a dive in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan.  Hank was scouted by big league baseball in his High School year, but crashed his car in a drunk driving incident, killing his best friend in the accident and, further, destroying his knee and, thereby, ending his career in the major leagues before it even begins.  (We see the crash every twenty minutes in a spectacular flashback.)  Hank's next door neighbor at his apartment, a punk with a huge rainbow colored Mohawk, returns to England because his father is dying -- Russ, the Mohawk-punk, asks Hank to care for his cat.  No sooner is Russ out the door, the Russian mafia descend on the scene, savaging poor Hank, who is just collateral damage, to the extent that one of his kidney's is kicked to pieces in the assault.  Hank wakes up sans one of his kidneysin the hospital.  His girlfriend, played by Zoe Kravitz, warns him that he can't drink any more and that he had better get rid of his stores of booze (he has bottles stashed everywhere).  The bad guys are indignant about the fact that Russ has absconded the scene (they think) to enjoy his four million dollars in stolen drug money in Tulum, Mexico.  They think they can torture Hank into telling them where Russ is hiding.  Poor Hank gets persecuted and harassed some more.  There is additional collateral damage and Hank has to go on the lam himself.  Then, the really nasty mobsters intervene, Lip and Schmully, the Hasid "scary monsters" complete with hand grenades, machine guns, huge patriarchal beards and curled forelocks.  (Lip and Schmully are amiable enough when they're not busting heads and they are good sons to their mother, Bubbe played by Carol Kane.  A lot more people get killed.  Hank, who seems a rather dim bulb, figures out a way to get the "scary monsters" to kill off the other bad guys in competition for the four million.  The film's carnage ends happily enough.  Hank gets away-- we see him kicking-back on the beach at Tulum.  Furthermore, he finds a way to send his mother, played by Laura Dern for one 30 second shot, a couple million bucks.  Mothers and sons are a sort of theme in the movie:  Lip and Schmully are extravagantly faithful and loving with respect to Bubbe; Hank is always calling his mother to discuss baseball with her and their beloved team, the San Francisco Giants.   

Caught Stealing plays like an amiable, if violent, mash-up between the Coen Brothers and a crime picture by a hard-boiled neo-noir director like the British Ben Wheatley or the Safdie Brothers.  In fact, the film is directed by Darren Aronofsky.  The movie is well-made with plenty of clever twists and turns and it chugs along efficiently -- it has a break-neck pace and the poor hero has lost his kidney (and his girlfriend, killed execution-style) in the first half hour.  The body count is implausibly high. A certain taste for the sordid and grim-looking locations near Coney Island mark the film as the work of Aronofsky who seems to be slumming here. The picture is made with plenty of  flash and pizzazz.  The action is all heightened, amped up to the edge of surrealism and there's lots of taut, bitter dialogue.  Griffin Dunne appears in long-shot -- I didn't recognize him until the credits identified the part and there's lots of well-known talent in the picture.  There's nothing new in this tour of murder and mayhem, but the picture is entertaining, even companionable for its two-hour running length.  I was sent on a mission to meet a girl in Alphabet City on the lower East Side and, so, some of the movie looked vaguely familiar to me -- the dingy sidewalks and decomposing store-front bars, the alleys clogged with garbage, the drug dealers transacting business on street corners and on the stoops of grim cast-iron buildings the color of congealed smoke. The movie's sufficiently atmospheric and pungent that you can almost smell it.  But my adventure was in1982 and the movie (released in 2025) is set in 1998 -- I guess these areas have long been gentrified.     

Jay Kelly

 Jay Kelly (2025) feels like a vanity project for George Clooney.  This is an implausible reaction to an interesting, and mostly charming, movie.  Why in the world would the gorgeous George Clooney need to pat himself on the back, or attest to his artistic integrity or, for that matter, cry mea culpa for his neglect of family or friends -- an ostentatious display that is just another aspect of pride albeit inverted?  Clearly, the movie is about George Clooney and revels in his presence -- he dominates just about every scene in the movie and, in fact, when he is off-camera, the picture's energy lags.  As evidence of Clooney's stardom, his supporting actor, Adam Sandler, is, more or less, eclipsed by the radiance emitted by the leading man, a fellow who compares himself to Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper while mournfully surveying his glamorous visage in the mirror.  Any actor who can eclipse Adam Sandler (who is also very good in this picture and even gets to shed a tear) is, indeed, a giant of the silver screen. 

Clooney plays a Hollywood star, now about sixty years old, and taking stock of his life and career. In an opening sequences, built from a lavish tracking steadi-cam sequence shot (with Orson Welles and Altman style overlapping dialogue), we see Jay Kelly, Clooney's character, "wrapping" a movie.  Evidently, it's some sort of neo-film noir because Kelly dies slowly from a gunshot wound while speaking a mournful soliloquy about the meaningless of it all -- a little pooch trots up and licks the dying man's hand. After the elaborate shot is completed, Kelly is disappointed with his performance and says to the director:  "Can I get another?," meaning "can we re-shoot and improve the scene."  (The director says "no" -- they already have eight takes.) Kelly is divorced, with two children (Jesse is 33 with another daughter about to leave home to tour Europe who is 18).  Kelly is melancholy between projects.  He has lunch with an old friend, a director, who begs Kelly to "lend his name" to his new project -- the man is obviously out-of-favor in Hollywood and no longer bankable. Kelly, rather coldly, refuses.  A few days later, the old director dies.  At his funeral, Kelly runs into a man who studied acting with him.  A flashback reveals that Kelly stole the young man's ideas at an audition, got the part that the young man was seeking and, for a good measure, stole his girlfriend as well.  Kelly and the old colleague from their method-acting class go out for a drink.  Things deteriorate when the man (he is now a child psychologist) gets drunk and begins to berate the movie star.  Kelly breaks the man's nose and gets a black eye in return.  This contretemps alarms Kelly and he decides impulsively to embark for Tuscany where he is supposed to be awarded some kind of "tribute" -- this part of the movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense:  do small rural towns in Tuscany routinely sponsor film-festivals for American movie stars so that they can award them bouquets of blown-glass roses?  Here you will have to suspend your disbelief.

Kelly with his entourage consisting of Adam Sandler (his agent) and about a dozen other people including a chef, make-up man, and a menacing-looking security guard, take the star's private jet to France.  Kelly wants to catch up with his daughter who is touring the Louvre with a new boyfriend and her friend Rio.  (Kelly can track the kids because they have access to charges put on Rio's credit card, actually her mother's card).  The young woman is appalled to see her famous father appear in Paris.  Everyone gets on a train to Tuscany where various adventures ensue -- at one point, Kelly chases a purse-snatcher running at an impressive sprint for a sixty-year old man and, then, wrestles the bad guy down to the ground.  In Tuscany, Kelly meets his own father -- he's about ninety and still fancies himself a womanizer.  (This sad, but memorable, sequence is extracted almost shot-for-shot from a similar scene in which Marcello encounters his father on Rome's Via Venuto in Fellini's La Dolce Vita.)  There's a big orgiastic dance scene ala Paolo Sorrentino in The Great Beauty.  Kelly's entourage, one by one, is leaving him -- his make-up lady and publicist go back to Paris; his father, flown to Italy, gets sick from too much excitement and departs, the security guy's foot gets broken which takes him out of the game, and, at last, even  Adam Sandler has doubts about his thirty-year long relationship with Kelly.  Kelly wanders around in a picturesque dark forest, lost, and grieving his past betrayals of friends and colleagues and his failures as a father. With Sandler weeping at this side, Kelly watches a montage from his pictures at the tribute -- with bittersweet irony, he says that he's dissatisfied with the image and himself and says:  "Can I get another?"  

The film is directed without ostentation by Noah Baumbach.  The script is good although heavily influenced by other, better films.  George Clooney seems hesitant to play the Hollywood star as ruthless and cold-hearted, although there is plenty of evidence of this aspect of his character.  Clooney is so ingratiating that you don't realize until the film is over that Jay Kelly is amoral and, even, capable of behaving viciously.  Kelly's fame is based upon stealing ideas from his best friend in acting school.  Although he is accommodating to his fans, pausing often to sign autographs, he bullies the people around him and turns a cold shoulder to the old man whose direction years earlier made him a star.  He whines about being alone when people in his entourage are constantly serving him -- his factotum gets him drinks without being asked to do so, gliding silently up to the protagonist from time to time with a cold beverage.  We see him skimming his pool in a brief scene and this seems a task too mundane for the glamorous movie star -- sure enough, a pool boy shows up and takes the skimmer from him with a sullen look as if he has caught Kelly in the midst of playacting.  Furthermore the resolution of one important plot point turns on Adam Sandler's character literally blackmailing someone -- this is all handled in a jocular manner.  Some of this is ugly stuff but Clooney is so pretty, we let him get away with it unscathed.  It's my contention that Clooney, who is indeed a charismatic movie star, had never been in a feature film that fully exploited his charm and intelligence.  He seems to dwarf that material in which he chooses to appear.

Frankenstein (2025)

 Recently, I read a review of a Netflix western called The Abandons.  This series is an upscale project starring some notable actors and featuring gorgeous scenery.  The script is rudimentary:  a motley crew of cattle ranchers defend their range against encroaching mining interests.  The two opposing clans are lead by headstrong matrons and the program tilts toward some kind of catfight between the two female protagonists.  The good guys are a rainbow coalition of Indians, feminists, and other disenfranchised people.  The villains are entrenched politically and their machine controls the organs of the law and commerce.  This is the kind of show in which the viewer has a sinking feeling when a cute and inoffensive dog is introduced -- you will win your wager if you bet that the villains will kill the poor canine before the end of the first episode.  In the essay on the show, the critic noted that the series is reasonably entertaining but, nonetheless, represents a MVC production with the initials standing for "Minimum Viable Content" -- The Abandons, the reviewer suggested, exemplifies what is wrong with contemporary cable and streaming TV, that is, shows structured to keep you watching with a sort of grim persistence but which are otherwise forgettable and meretricious.  Normally, I wouldn't put much stock into a dour opinion of this sort but perceived almost immediately what was meant by "minimum viable content" when I watched Guillermo del Toro's decidedly maximalist version of Frankenstein -- in the first ten minutes of the show, the Monster attacks a company of shipwrecked Danish sailors, clambering aboard the ice-bound vessel, hurling men into bonfires and pots of flaming oil, and sustaining about 20 mortal wounds, none of which slow him down,before plunging into icy water foaming up through slabs of ice shattered by a charge from a spectacularly lethal-looking blunderbuss.  The havoc is exquisitely choreographed; the tall ship trapped in the ice looks fabulous as does the steppe of snow extending to a horizon rimmed with colors like a gas chromatograph's output or a tequila sunrise.  The monster's roar is deep and resonant -- one can imagine what it sounded like on a theater audio system (an earthquake I presume).  The creature's pallid features and jigsaw-scarred face make him look like a saint or martyr in an El Greco painting, elongated and greyish mucous crowned with wounded and ecstatic eyes.  There is nothing minimalist about this spectacle -- everything is contrived to create the maximum impression on the viewer and del Toro manages to transform his film into a miraculous Wunderkabinet of odd and morbid sights:  there are ranges of mountains that stretch across the horizon like the menacing peaks glimpsed in the background of a Brueghel painting ("November: the Return of the Flock"); corpses are looted from a battlefield, bodysnatchers displacing sinister flocks of black ravens -- the battlefield looks like the aftermath of Waterloo, lit by flaming heaps of rubbish and freezing with snow, littered with dead bodies out to the horizon. Bodysnatchers seize hanged men who are sent to the gallows in platoons, three convicts hanged at a time and their bodies still spasming as Dr. Frankenstein inspects the teeth of unfortunates about to be executed.  Alleyways are full of butchered animals and pigs' heads line a corridor.  The mad doctor's laboratory is a pinnacle of masonry perched on the very edge of a turbulent ocean that seems to be about four-hundred feet high, a grim edifice that features a screaming stone gorgon or Medusa-head looming over the charnel house full of fragmentary corpses; ballrooms are a quarter-mile long and huge palatial mansions rise over foggy basins and autumnal trees.  There are masive explosions, vast pillars of fire, and still-life color shots that resemble some of the more grotesque visions of the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin -- a bouquet of flowers is clutched in a cadaver's hand severed from the body at the elbow, strange, glistening surgical instruments also on display.  The women look like Elizabeth Siddon, the famous pre-Raphaelite model with the flaming red hair and they wear outlandish bonnets with spirals of silk ribbon wrapped around their ice-white faces.  Corpses are carried to their graves in torpedo-shaped anthropomorphic caskets chiseled from alabaster; the dead face wrapped in lustrous scarlet is covered when the mask-lid of the sarcophagus is screwed down.  In one scene, the camera surveys a gloomy, brown alleyway in some reeking, smoky city.  A man walks down the alley with his hands clutched behind his back.  Both hands are covered by bright green gloves, the only color in the otherwise monochrome composition.  The costumes, sets, and palatial interiors are all ornate and grotesque.  Everything is immense and colossal.  (Sometimes, the extravagance of the set decorator goes awry -- in one scene, the monster shivers in the corner of a mill full of elaborate wooden gears and ratchets and flywheels; the place is infested with an army of rats, and is an exquisite creation -- there is only one problem, there's no water anywhere near this huge mill and, therefore, no way for the intricate contrivance of gears and pinions and rotating axles to be powered.)  The whole thing is colossal, vast, and teeming with elegant detail.  It's certainly the hallucinatory opposite of the idea of MVC.

I often find del Toro's films to be lavish, but empty.  (This was my impression of Pan's Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley as well as The Shape of Water which I thought was inert, overwhelmed by its design.)  Frankenstein is a better film, more powerful emotionally, and the performances of its actors fight the sets and decor to a draw -- the mere humans aren't overwhelmed by the spectacle but hold their own.  The film's narrative is clear enough and del Toro obviously admires Mary Shelley's novel because he incorporates much material from the book into his film.  The ardor with which the film was made is evident in every frame and the movie is wonderful in many ways.  I still sense something lacking in the picture and the fantastically beautiful set design, decor, and costumes seem to be compensating for a certain hollowness at the heart of the endeavor.  That said, this movie is clearly del Toro's labor of love and it is impressive in all respects.

Victor Frankenstein is abused by his fierce, atheistic father, a scientist who beats the boy with a cane (on his face no less) for failing to properly answer anatomical questions:  he won't cane the boy on his hands because a surgeon needs those instruments for his trade but the "face...that is for vanity."  Victor's mother adores her son but seems remote from her cruel husband.  When she dies in childbirth, Victor is bereft.  Shortly thereafter, the old doctor dies and is buried in the family crypt.  Victor figures out that galvanic charges can animate corpses and make them cry out, even enable them to catch balls pitched their way -- this is visualized in a macabre scene in which parts of a cadaver riveted to a board are displayed by Victor in a dissecting theater.  "It's not science, it's a crucifixion!" someone declares.  One of the curious attending the lecture with the animate corpse is a German named Heinrich Harlander; he's the scion of an arms manufacturing company.  Harlander finances Victor's experiments which take place at an immense, abandoned fortress on the cliffs above the sea. Harlander's niece, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is betrothed to little William Frankenstein, Victor's brother whose birth resulted in the death of his mother.  Elizabeth is a spectral figure, herself enamored of elaborate dissection specimens and bugs -- she reads books on entomology and, although doomed to marry William, in fact, falls in love with Victor.  After much lurid carnage, including a visit to a European battlefield with the sardonic , Harlander, Victor animates his creature. (Harlander misses out on most of the fun; he has acquired syphilis and is perishing:  "devotees of Venus, become slaves to Mercury".) The tall, emaciated-looking figure is kept chained in a huge crypt where Victor, following in the footsteps of his abusive father, torments the creature.  Despairing of the creature's intelligence, Victor sets the laboratory on fire using not a few but a thousand or so red tins full of some sort of inflammatory accelerant.  The monster escapes and hides in a mill in the middle of nowhere -- it is here that the monster reads Milton, taught his letters by a blind shepherd and a little girl.  About ten huge wolves attack and rend the blind shepherd into pieces.  The monster escapes through the forest full of skeletons dumped there from the experiments in the nearby fortress tower. A year passes and the monster shows up on William's wedding day to embrace and threaten Elizabeth.  Confronting Victor, who remains in love with Elizabeth, the creature demands that the scientist alleviate his suffering by making him a mate.  Victor refuses.  When Victor sees the creature embracing Elizabeth, he recklessly fires his revolver.  The monster can be wounded but his damaged flesh regenerates.  Elizabeth lacks this miraculous ability and she is killed by a stray bullet.  The monster and creatures pursue one another toward the North Pole, locked in a duel to the death.  The duel ends at the Danish sea-captain's ice-breaker, locked in the snow and ice floes.  The Dane is like Ahab -- he is pursuing the fata morgana of sailing to the North Pole although his men are about to mutiny.  Victor is grievously wounded.  The monster demands that the seafarers surrender the dying man to him.  When they refuse, the creature again attacks the vessel and its crew.  He breaches the boat and confronts his creator where there is a weird sort of reconciliation.  Freed from the burden of vengeance, the Monster uses his titanic strength to shove the three-master out of its prison of ice.  The Dane now understands that his pursuit of the North Pole is obsessive and as megalomaniacal as Victor's promethean effort to overcome death.  He tells his men to set sail for home.  

The story is lucidly told and so spectacularly illustrated that its various plot holes are not really apparent.  The film is divided into a prologue (the monster's attack on the ship in the high Arctic), Victor's story, the Creature's story, and an epilogue (the final encounter on the ship, the reconciliation between Victor and his creation, and the Monster's generosity in freeing the ship from the ice.)  The writing, by del Toro, is crisp and excellent -- there are many great lines.  I have my reservations about this film, but can't exactly pinpoint them -- I'm afraid it's some kind Puritan instinct in me:  the movie is so lavishly beautiful that I attribute flaws to it, just on the basis of its visual splendor.  There's no doubt in my mind that the picture is often thrilling, majestic, and, even, intelligent.    

 

Tarr Bela I used to be a filmmaker

 The Hungarian director, Bela Tarr, is inextricably connected to the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the author of the scripts for Tarr's most famous films.  Krasznahorkai was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and, so, there has been a brief flurry of interest both in books written by the novelist but, also, in the films adapting those novels to the screen, Tarr's Satantango, Damnation, The Werckmeister Harmonies, and other pictures that Krasznahorkai wrote specifically for Tarr:  The Man from London, that adapts a Georges Simenon crime novel and The Turin Horse, the director's last film.  Jean Marc Lemourne's film Tarr Bela I used to be a Filmmaker documents some aspects of the production of the monumentally grim The Turin Horse and tours some of the director's earlier works, most notably Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies.  None of these films are exactly a walk in the park -- Satantango is seven plus hours of unremitting misery, cat torture, mud, drunkenness and suicide; The Werckmeister Harmonies (an adaptation of part of Krasznahorkai's novel, The Melancholy of Resistance) concerns a village in rural Hungary destabilized and thrown into hysteria by a traveling sideshow exhibit featuring an enormous embalmed whale; the townspeople riot and end up destroying their own hospital. The Turin Horse is set on the windswept Hungarian steppes and remorselessly documents the poverty of a man and woman who live in a primitive stone hut in the middle of nowhere.  The wind blows ceaselessly and leaves swirl around in the air, an odd effect since the nearest tree is about two miles away crowning a hill in what looks like central North Dakota.  As a consequence, Tarr Bela is singularly morose, images of a group of elderly people staggering around in the mud as they film the long takes that comprise The Turin Horse.  (The title refers to the legend that Friedrich Nietzsche went mad when he saw a teamster beating an old horse in Turin; sobbing, Nietzsche is supposed to have thrown his arms around the long-suffering beast before proclaiming himself both the Crucified One and Dionysius -- so far as I can see, and I've sat through the movie, the film has nothing to do with this anecdote.)

The main character in The Turin Horse is the relentless gale-force wind.  The documentary shows the film crew using a helicopter to whip the lone tree on the horizon into a flailing frenzy.  Pushing wind machines on wheels, the grips move alongside the tracking camera while another worker throws out handfuls of dry leaves for the wind to whip about.  Tarr complains about shots through the hut window in which the tree is motionless and simulated gale not visible.  The hut itself, which seems like a primeval kind of grotto in the movie, was built from the ground up from field stone with a heavy gabled roof -- it's surprising to me that this set was laboriously constructed, downhill from the lone tree and beneath a bare grasscovered ridge.  (The characters set out for the edge of their world, the grassy ridge, reach the place, and see that there is nothing beyond the ridge but an endless, empty steppe -- so disappointed they come back to the stone hut where they eat roasted potatoes but nothing else.)  If transfer of information is the purpose of a documentary Lemourne's film is, more of less, a failure.  We don't really learn anything about Tarr except that he is a wizened curmudgeon with a three pack a day habit -- he isn't endearing or charismatic.  He boasts about this being his last film and, when he has his crew dig a pit to hold the enormously heavy camera for a low-angle shot, he says that they should delve the pit three meters deep and bury the camera.  The crew is polyglot and, sometimes, Tarr directs in Hungarian; at other times, he uses English.  The crew goes to the collective farm where Satantango was filmed for a special screening of the enormous movie -- the collective farm is in ruins, falling into the weeds on the Hungarian plain.  The water tower advertises in English "Industrial Park for Sale."  The female lead in The Turin Horse (she has about 6 lines) was the strange-looking girl with the cat who kills herself in Satantango.  She's now all grown up, but still pretty odd-looking and miserable.  (She was raised in an orphanage and felt that Tarr and his longstanding female editor, Agi, became her parents during the shoot.)  We see some rehearsals.  Two actors sit in a bar bathed in red light and talk about their work with Tarr.  One of them is named Jani, an actor who has appeared in a half-dozen films directed by the difficult Tarr.  Later, Tarr uses a cell phone to summon Jani to the location on the desolate plain.  He demands that Jani sober-up before coming on the set and that he not drink on location.  There are more scenes with the wind machine, more mud, more vantages through the rock hut's window showing dogs prancing around in the gloom.  Tarr says directing is "not a democracy" -- it's feudal he tells us.  The mob in The Werckmeister Harmonies has advanced through the rural hospital, looting and burning -- in the final room, at the center of the medical complex, they encounter a wrinkled, emaciated old man naked and standing in a bath.  This discomfits the mob and they sullenly leave the scene of the crime.  

At the beginning of the film, Tarr says that he has a repertoire company with whom he always works.  And he tells us that he has worked with Krasznahorkai for 23 years.  (The film was made in 2013).  Yet, mysteriously, Krasznahorkai is absent from the movie and doesn't appear in a single shot.  Nor is he ever mentioned except as aforesaid.  

The Beast in Me

 The Beast in Me is suspense thriller mini-series (eight episodes) on Netflix that is accomplished enough that you can watch 2 or three episodes in a row without tiring of the thing.  Most mini-series are repetitive and, because designed to be consumed an episode at a time, are repetitive, overly explicit as to plot points, and crammed with filler -- generally three or, even, four episodes too long in an 8-part mini-series.  This is not the case with The Beast in Me (2025), a show that is lean enough to be rewarding when watched a couple shows at a time.  Only one episode, an extended series of flashbacks providing backstory as the seventh episode seemed superfluous -- that show spells out subtexts that an alert viewer has already figured-out and feels, just a wee bit, like padding before the program's finale.  

The Beast in Me (2025) alludes to Trump's career as a Manhattan real estate developer, features a stand-in for Donald's grim father, Fred, in the form of the wonderful character actor Jonathan Banks who plays a variant on the omni-competent enforcer qua grandfatherly hoodlum, that is Mike Ehrmantraut in Better Call Saul;  there's a community organizer and alderwoman who stands in for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and agents provocateur at protests, and an FBI that seems cheerfully corrupt.  This colorful stuff is all background to a hard-edged duel between a female author, the Pulitzer prize-winning Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) and a billionaire property developer, Niles Jarvis (the show's surrogate for Trump) who is widely reputed to have killed his first wife and got away with murder.  Jarvis lives next door to Aggie in an exclusive neighborhood on Long Island called Oyster Bay.  Aggie has an enormous empty mansion, a  hunted house as it were that is exploited for various chases, jump-scares, and long, lonely corridors pulsing with sinister shadows.  As in most shows of this sort, Aggie comes equipped with trauma --  her bratty eight-year old son was killed in a car crash for which Aggie is partly responsible.  The crash and resulting grief have made Aggie haggard and hollowed her out except for a core rotting with rage against the drunk driver, a teenage boy.  Aggie has mercilessly harassed the kid, criminal activity that makes her a chief suspect when the kid turns up dead, wrapped in clear plastic like a choice piece of meat, and tucked into a corner in her dead child's bedroom.  Aggie is proudly lesbian and has an aggrieved ex-wife who is in the art business and runs a gallery.  The sinister plutocrat, Niles Jarvis has built a jogging trail connecting some of the property through woods in the neighborhood.  He wants all the neighbors to agree to easements through the woods so the jogging path can be paved and rendered operable.  Everyone is intimidated by Niles and agrees except for Aggie who doesn't want the woods desecrated.  This sets up a couple of hostile encounters with the oligarch.  Jarvis admires Aggie's writing and, after some tense jockeying for position, agrees to Aggie writing his biography.  In the course of writing and researching the biography, Aggie interviews various witnesses about the mysterious disappearance of Nile's first wife, Madison.  On the basis of various clues, Aggie concludes that Niles did, in fact, murder Madison.  Niles discovers that Aggie knows that he killed Madison and has proof in the form of a suicide note opportunistically used to imply that the woman has killed herself.  Complicating the situation are several subplots -- an FBI agent is obsessed with proving Niles' guilt; he is having an affair with a fellow agent also tangled up in the nefarious activities of the Jarvis family; the AOC lookalike clashes with Jarvis and his formidable father about a big development project that will gut a working class neighborhood.  Further, Niles Jarvis, acting on Aggie's expressions of rage about the drunken teenager, abducts the boy, leaves a spurious suicide note, and keeps the kid in some hidden location (possibly a storage locker) where the boy is half-naked, fettered, and seemingly periodically tortured by the villain.  Jarvis has a bad temper and a propensity to beat his victims to death with blunt objects -- it becomes increasingly obvious that the villain did, in fact, kill Madison; he has apparently killed others.  When Niles Jarvis figures out that Aggie has evidence proving he killed Madison, his first wife, the writer becomes his target and, of course, he tries to intimidate her into silence, frame her for murder, and, otherwise, attempts to destroy her.  Jarvis has a "Stepford Wives" spouse with a typical over-made-up and botox-stretched Mar-a-Largo face.  She befriends Aggie and, slowly discovers herself, that Jarvis is a psychopathic killer.  This sets up a climax in which Aggie is suspected of murder and has to flee a dragnet that is closing in on her; at the same time, Jarvis' wife who is pregnant, understands that, for the sake of the unborn child, she must detach herself from the vicious  oligarch. Jarvis goes to prison and Aggie, who still admires his chutzpah and intelligence, visits him in the hoosegow, gathering additional materials that she incorporates into another bestseller.

There's a lot of stuff in the teleplay but it's all intelligently deployed and well-organized.  Until the last episode, the plot is mostly plausible -- some suspension of disbelief is required near the end, but his is acceptable.  Claire Danes is gaunt, unattractive, and seems perpetually harassed -- but she gets a scene in the middle of the show in which she parties with Jarvis, ends up very drunk, and some sparks of attraction flash between her and the villain.  This is an excellent scene that humanizes both of these rather stylized and schematic characters.  Matthew Rhys is suave, charismatic, and sinister in the role of the villain.  All of the supporting characters are imagined with great intelligence and are persuasive in their roles, including the bug-eyed figure who mimics Ocasio-Cortez and ends up as prone to corruption as everyone else in the cast.  The set design, lavishly decorated million dollar condominiums, Manhattan art galleries and huge buildings under construction.  A signal that the set design will be voluptuous and rhetorically exact occurs in an early scene.  Aggie Wiggs is urinating in her bathroom.  She gets up from the toilet and an overhead shot depicts a puddle of urine in the bowl -- a nice touch, I thought.   

Death by Lightning

 Cable and streaming services have an insatiable demand for "content".  This demand leads to the production of shows with eccentric subject matter.  Every nook and cranny of storytelling will ultimately be explored and embodied in programs for broadcast.  What would you think if someone told you that Netflix had produced, and was prepared to host, a four-part mini-series on the political adventures of James Garfield?  I presume you would express astonishment.  But, in fact, the Netflix four part show Death by Lightning, indeed, dramatizes James Garfield's ascent to the presidency, the first three-months of his administration, and, then, his death at the hands of the assassin Charles Guitreau.  Even more astonishing, I think, is that this unlikely subject matter has been adapted into an excellent and, even, inspiring program.  This is big budget, lavishly produced, period piece, featuring many well-known actors, the men most disguised by great tufts and blankets of facial hair -- Guitreau, in particular, sports a pointed spade of a beard that seems dense enough to dig a hole.  Michael Shannon plays the noble and courageous James Garfield.  Matthew Macfadyen has the part of the psychotic Charles Guitreau, and Nick Offerman, cursing majestically, plays Chester Anderson.  (If you research these Gilded Age politicians, you will observe that the show portrays their features with, more or less, accuracy -- Betty Gilpin who has the important part of "Crete" short for Lucretia Garfield also displays an uncanny resemblance to the woman she is impersonating.)  The show is probably a "hard-sell" for most viewers, but it's remarkably good, cogently scripted and impressively mounted, and I recommend it.

Charles Guitreau is a con-man, thief, and ne-er-do-well.  In one funny sequence, he joins the Oneida Commune, a community that espoused free love.  Everyone else in the commune is enjoying plenty of robust sex -- but not Guitreau; at a meeting for self-criticism of commune members, some of the women in the group admit that they are not attracted to Guitreau and that they have nicknamed him "Charles Get-out".  Thrown out of the Oneida community, Guitreau flees to Chicago where he lives with his sister, Florence.  There is some intimation that Guitreau was badly abused by his father and that this mistreatment has left permanent scars on the man's psyche.  But this doesn't excuse Guitreau's misdeeds -- he steals money from his sister's household and, ultimately, ends up in Washington D. C., hustling there and pestering people with utopian schemes and grandiose self-aggrandizing plots.  It is in Washington that Guitreau's path collides with that of the new President, James Garfield.

Garfield is an Ohio Senator.  He's not ambitious, portrayed in the film as more of a "home-body" (the real Garfield was a philanderer and much more obviously ambitious than his fictional counterpart). At the 1880 Republican Convention, Garfield makes a nominating speech for Blaine, a reform candidate for President and a dark horse.  The speech is received with immense enthusiasm -- Garfield is an excellent orator.  When the Convention deadlocks between the Reform candidates and the corrupt New York party entrenched in the Manhattan Custom house -- this is where Chester Arthur serves a thuggish boss named Conkling -- the delegates look to Garfield and, over the course, of 34 ballots, he's becomes the Republican candidate for the Presidency.  As a compromise measure, Chester Arthur is elected candidate for the VP position.  Garfield doesn't want the nomination and can hardly be persuaded to campaign. He runs his campaign from the front porch of his house back in Ohio. If anything Arthur is even worse -- he does nothing but carry on extra-marital affairs and drink.  Nonetheless, Garfield is narrowly elected president and has to return to Washington with his wife, daughter and two sons.  In the course of the election, Guitreau, who fancies himself an imposing political operative.  He demands the opportunity to speak at various rallies and, after a couple very brief meetings with Garfield and his wife, Crete, comes to believe that he is their good friend. 

Garfield, who is believer in civil rights for the freed slaves, has trouble appointing his cabinet.  He is being subverted by Chester Arthur's boss, Roscoe Conkling of the custom's house.  There's some political intrigue and, with the encouragement of Crete, who is a staunch  ally, Conkling is expelled from the Custom's House and loses his power base.  Chester Arthur invites Garfield to fire him because he has been part of Conkling's schemes to thwart the President's appointments.  But Garfield intuits that the cheerfully corrupt Arthur harbors a more decent and upright spirit than appears on first blush and keeps him as VP.  Guitreau seeks an appointment in the Garfield administration as an ambassador to France  (on account of his French Huguenot name).  Guitreau meets Garfield who is remote and preoccupied and, although civil, has no office for Guitreau. Other members of the administration are less civil and they forcefully eject Guitreau from the White House.  Guitreau seeks to exploit the tension between the Conkling and Garfield wings of the Republican party and he comes to imagine that he is an ally of Chester Arthur and that killing Garfield will elevate Arthur to the presidency.  At a train station, Guitreau shoots Garfield twice, a 45 caliber bullet lodging in his abdomen.  The doctors of the era know nothing about germ theory and they dig around in Garfield's entrails with dirty fingernails and bloody bare hands.  In the harrowing last episode, Garfield succumbs to sepsis brought on by this treatment.  Crete visits Guitreau in jail and denounces him -- she says that his book called Truth has been intercepted by him and will not be published.  (As it happens, the book was a plagiarized collection of sermons and speeches by Noyes, the leader of the Oneida cult.)  She tells Guitreau that he will be forgotten.  In the same breath, she admits that James Garfield's abbreviated three month term of office will pretty much insure that he's wholly forgotten too.  Guitreau, still megalomaniacal, is hanged, chanting some sort of little ditty that he has written.  Two autopsies end the show:  Garfield is autopsied and, it seems, evident that he has died of medical malpractice -- the bullet, "tucked behind his pancreas" didn't damage any organs.  Guitreau's brain is extracted from his skull and put in bottle.  (I saw the bottle and brain at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia where there is a rather brutal exhibit about Garfield's assassination and the medical misadventures attendant upon it -- for instance Alexander Graham Bell deployed an early version of a metal detector to try to find the bullet that had perforated Garfield; the iron springs in his bed confounded the instrument.)  The show begins with Citizen Kane-like moment in the vast archives of the Smithsonian Institution in which a worker in 1968 finds the jar containing Guitreaus's brain (or part of it) while rock-and-roll blares on the soundtrack.  The show is decidedly funky -- everyone, including Crete, uses the word "fuck" continuously and the program has a lurid little title sequence showing mechanical men executing one another -- someone bawls out a sort of folk song scored to electric guitar; it sounds like Jack White.  The irony of Crete's last speech to Guitreau is that, based on Stephen Sondheim's musical about assassins, most people remember Guitreau better than they do Garfield.  A title at the outset of the show tells us that the program is about two forgotten men, one of whom killed the other. Garfield is portrayed as noble, lacking in vulgar ambition, and kindly.  His death has a tragic cast and the program is generous enough to spend a little sympathy on the assassin.  The term "Death by Lighting" that titles the show derives from Garfield's remark that you can't guard against political assassination any more than you can prevent "death by lightning".  The show is brilliantly written by Mike Makowsky and adapts a bestselling history, Destiny of the Republic, about Guitreau and Garfield byCandice Millard.

Train Dreams

 Train Dreams  (2025, Clint Bentley) is an American art film.  It's solemn and gravid with beauty.  Here are three quotes from the memorable dialogue in the film:  "If the Lord was a redwood, would you try to cut him down?";"The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as it needs a preacher in a pulpit;" and "The forest is an intricate thing where you can't tell where one things ends and another thing begins."  This last description also characterizes the movie -- as the film progresses, it becomes ever more a collage of memories, epiphanies in the present moment, flashbacks, and fantasies so that, at one point, the protagonist confesses that he can't distinguish from reality.  The performances in the movie are wonderful in a predictable sort of way and the photography and staging is gorgeous -- all the shots seem to be made at the "magic hour"; the wilderness landscapes are suffused with the pinkish highlights and purple glow of twilight.  Many critics think this film is the best American picture of the year.  I'm not one of them.  Although the movie is appealing, it is all lazy, sloppy, and meretricious.  

Train Dreams involves a cipher, a man named Robert Grainier, who spends his life working as a logger and, then, living as reclusive hermit in the forest somewhere near Spokane, Washington.  The picture encompasses Grainier's entire life and ends with his peaceful death in 1968.  Living on the frontier, he survives to see it close.  Grainier is an orphan -- this is a convenience to the filmmakers because it's not necessary to give him any background, place him in any pioneer social milieu, or figure out a convincing socio-economic and family context for him.  We see him wandering around the woods as a handsome young man.  There's an extraordinary shot of people posing next to a giant fish plucked out of one of the swift rivers in the area.  The young man brings water to a fellow dying from an injury inflicted on him by some unknown assailant.  Grainier brings the water in his boot.  He finds himself working on a railway trestle over a deep gorge.  For some reason, several of the roustabouts seize a Chinese man and, although Robert tries to save the man (he gets incapacitated by a kick in the belly), the railroad workers hurl the man off the high trestle.  The movie counts on us being "woke" and interpreting the attack on the Chinese worker as evidence of brutal racism -- but like Robert Grainier's biography, there's no context supplied:  for all we know the Chinese worker is being lynched for theft, or murder, or pedophilia.  For the first half of the movie, Robert is haunted by the impassive ghost of the Chinese worker and blames his misfortunes on that specter -- it's guilt that he suffers for not aiding the worker.  (In the second half of the movie, the filmmakers more or less abandon this motif and the ghostly Chinese man vanishes from the story.) In a startling prolepsis or flash-forward, we see Robert riding on a train crossing the high trestle sometime in the 1960's.  The voiceover (Will Patton who read the audio book of Denis Johnson's novella of the same name) tells us that the trestle on which so much labor was expended was replaced by a highway bridge and ended up obsolete.  This is another sign that the movie is striving for effects that it hasn't earned.  Obviously, the trestle is still in use since Robert is riding on the train crossing it on the way to Spokane.  The highway bridge serves a completely different function that the train trestle -- so, in fact, the rather portentous narrative is a kind of cheat.  I understand the lyrical effect that the film is laboring to achieve, but you can't strain for poetry by dissembling.  

After the lynching of the Chinese laborer, Grainier walks away from working on the railroad and becomes a lumberjack.  One day when he goes to Church -- this seems decidedly unusual for the laconic frontiersman -- he runs into a beautiful girl named Gladys.  She's bold and aggressive and initiates a relationship with him.  There's some poetic shots of them courting by a stream and, then, they are said to be married -- at least, in the eyes of Gladys and the Lord.  Gladys picks out a site for a log cabin which they build with their own hands -- the cabin is located within forty or so feet of a beautiful mountain river and the structure is built so the couple can look out on the stream from their bed.  (This is a memorable part of the movie involving the couple placing big stones to outline the future building with the rippling river nearby.)  Every summer and autumn, Robert goes to work at the dangerous lumber camps.  Trees fall on men and a snag called a "widow-maker" drops out of the crown of the forest and deals a mortal injury to a loquacious old man played by William Macy -- it's a Walter Brennan role and some people might applaud the snag for knocking the talkative oldtimer out of the movie.  There's a scene in which a righteous Black man invades the camp and guns down another loudmouth, a fundamentalist Christian who is always citing the Bible.  This is also a lazy scene that is irritatingly "woke" -- of course, the fundamentalist turns out to be a racist who shot the avenger's brother in Gallup, New Mexico merely "because of the color of his skin."  Of course, Christian fundamentalism here is equated with virulent racism -- this is a very lazy approach to the script and irritating.  There's tension between Grainier and his wife.  The couple now have a child, Katy, and Robert misses milestones in her childhood because he's away chopping down giant trees.  Robert tries to find work near his cabin in the woods, but can't locate anything that pays enough.  So he returns to his labor as a lumber-jack.  He and his wife plan to build a sawmill on the conveniently located river and, when he's earned enough to begin this project, he returns to his homestead.  But a horrific forest fire is under way and, when Robert reaches the site of the cabin, it has been burned to silvery ashes and there's no sign of either Gladys or Kate, the little girl.  (The film seems heavily influenced by Terence Malick's Days of Heaven and there are a number of similarities, most notably the voice-over narration and the spectacular fire scenes.)  Overcome by grief, Robert goes back to the woodcutting business, but, when he sees, one of his old cronies disabled by what may be Alzheimer's disease, he decides he want to avoid that fate and returns to the ruined cabin.  He sleeps in the ashes in the rain.  A friendly Indian who runs a general store in town assists him and the two men kill a big buck with enormous antlers -- in this part of the movie everything that happens triggers a reprise of something occurring during the idyll with Gladys:  so when the Indian aims and fires his rifle, for instance, we see a flashback to Gladys firing her rifle at a deer.  Robert rebuilds the cabin.  Times change.  He meets a spunky former nurse whose husband died -- probably as a result of being gassed in World War I.  The movie implies a romance might blossom between Robert and the young woman who is forest ranger assigned a fire-watch on the mountain. But nothing happens and she vanishes from the movie.  Robert sometimes goes into Spokane to walk around and attends a freak show there -- the "monster" is just a boy in a costume.  In one puzzling scene, a girl with a broken leg appears at the cabin in the woods and Robert, who may be hallucinating, thinks she is his lost daughter, Katy.  In the morning, she's mysteriously gone and Robert doesn't know whether she was real or a fantasy generated by his grief.  At a county fair, Robert takes a ride in an airplane and gets a vantage not only on the great woods, but also on the shape of his life. On a TV in Spokane, he sees John Glenn riding in his space capsule.  He dies in his sleep and the last shot of movie is his corpse in the cabin more or less indistinguishable from the lush moss and vegetation sprouting out of his body.  

This is all poetic and gorgeously filmed.  But falsehoods accumulate.  Grainier acquires a pregnant stray dog and this allows the film to luxuriate in shots of puppies playing with the hero.  But when Grainier has to spend the season at the lumber camp, he just leaves the dogs to their own devices.  (Later, when he returns, the dogs greet him happily -- who was watching them when he was chopping down trees?)  The most grievous instance of this sloppy screenwriting is the river rippling away merrily right in front of the cabin.  In the last forty minutes of the film, we see the cabin repeatedly, but there's no sign of the river.  When Grainier staggers out to the cabin in the fire-storm, the river has mysteriously vanished.  What has happened?  Someone has figured out that Gladys and Katy could have survived the fire if they had gone to the river and stood in it.  There is not much brush around the cabin and surely it would have been an easy thing to escape the flames by hiding in the river only a few feet from the cabin's door.  But the plot requires us to believe that Gladys and Katy were burned alive in the forest fire and, even, shows us Gladys collapsing in the fiery woods with little Katy loyally standing next to her body. (This is likely a morbid fantasy experienced by Grainier.) To avoid the problem of Katy and Gladys being spared death by seeking out the river, the stream simply vanishes from the movie -- it has moved and is not where it was during the showy scenes in which Gladys and Robert lay out their dream house. This is a cheat.  When Robert goes for the ride with a daredevil pilot in a biplane, the aircraft dives and climbs steeply over the woods and does barrel-rolls.  I have been in small planes of this kind and the fact that Robert seems to enjoy the flight rather impassively is another cheat -- certainly, a pioneer like Robert who marvels at the height of fire ranger tower would spend the entire flight puking up his guts and terrified out of his mind.  These may seem trivial  cavils but they are illustrative of the sloppy way in which the movie is constructed and the fact that it aims for implausibly lyrical effects not really justified by the circumstances.   The movie wants to dazzle you with its beauty and hopes that you won't really pay much attention of the factual elements of the story.  (I read a summary Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams and observe that the book does not contain the "cheats" that troubled me when I watched this movie on Netflix).  

The movie is so "woke' and virtuous that I expected a final title to say that "no trees were harmed during the making of the movie".  But there was nothing of the kind.