The Stunt Man

 Released in 1980, director Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is a vibrant example of seventies' counter-culture film-making at its best.  There's plenty of casual sex, nudity, and grind-house style violence.  The picture has a loose, "anything goes" atmosphere.  At the same time, there are pot-head profundities on display:  the movie is about the ubiquity of betrayal in Hollywood, about the effects of the Vietnam war, and, even, a meditation on the nature of reality:  since the picture is the backstage chronicle of an ambitious director shooting a World War One epic, we are invited to deliberate on what is real and what is fictional.  The director is played by Peter O'Toole, probably a caricature of Francis Ford Coppola on t location for Apocalypse Now.  O'Toole as Eli Cross, a narcissistic director, never has his feet on the ground -- he is literally suspended on his crane, hanging in midair, generally with no obvious means of support, or zooming around in a small helicopter, the so-called "chopper" as it is called in the movie.  I said the movie features pot-head profundities, a comment that is not intended to be derogatory, and the film insists, I think, that Cross is not only a flamboyant film maker but, also, "the grand inventor" of all things, God himself.  (O'Toole is more convincing in this role than the deity that appears in the Bible.)  The picture is a peculiar and unstable mixture of serious subject matter, high-flown eloquence, and down-and-dirty pulp fiction with gratuitous sex, tits and ass, and lots of elaborately staged explosions and chases.  The director, Richard Rush, is an enigma -- he cut his teeth on low-budget exploitation films, made The Stunt Man, which was highly regarded in its time, and, then, slipped back into audience-pleasing genre pictures. Critics determined that Rush was neither 'fish nor fowl", not exactly Francis Coppola but, also, considerably superior to the exploitation films that he ended up making.  Hollywood likes type-casting not only in its actors but also directors and, since no one could really assimilate The Stunt Man (famously praised by Pauline Kael as one of the best pictures of the year) Rush wasn't given the right material for his talent and ended-up slipping out of view.

The Stunt Man was one of two novels written by the New Yorker investigative reporter Paul Brodeur.  It was published in 1970 before Brodeur became well-known for his crusading journalism -- he was one of the investigators that exposed the carcinogenic effects of asbestos and was, generally a specialist in pollution and toxic tort exposes.  My suspicion is that the unique qualities of The Stunt Man derive from what were probably literate and, even, high-toned aspects of the source novel.  The picture involves a Vietnam war veteran on the run from the cops and probably suffering from what we would call today "PTSD."  The veteran stumbles onto a film set involving a classic car crashing off an old bridge into a river.  The car is driven eccentrically and the vet believes that it is trying to run him down.  He interferes with the car and, then, sees it plunge off the bridge and into the river.  (Although the car crash is an effect in the film that Cross is making, the vet interprets it as occurring because of his efforts to avert the vehicle from running over him.)  A stuntman drowns in the crash.  The vet continues his escape and ends up at a beach where a battle is being filmed "with five cameras", a big spectacle involving many showy explosions, fragmentary corpses (they turn out to be men in make-up half buried in the sand) and bi-planes strafing the advancing troops.  A cop is investigating the disappearance of the stuntman whom we know to have drowned in the river.  He harasses the director and his crew and, under pressure, they claim the scruffy fugitive is, in fact, the missing stunt man.  The cop smells a rat but he can't get to the bottom of the ruse.  Cross hires the vet who is impersonating a stunt man to perform real stunts in the movie.  They call the vet "Lucky."  Lucky turns out to have genuine gift for "hell for leather" stunts involving significant danger.  He has sex with a make-up girl and, then, is seduced by the film's leading lady played by an angelic-looking Barbara Hershey.  After some amusing chases filmed in Keystone Kop manner by Cross -- Lucky evades an army of inept German troops wearing comical Pickelhaube (that is, Prussian helmets with spear-point tops) by clambering all over the complicated gables and eaves of the Coronado Hotel (a landmark on the beach in San Diego).  Some of the stunts seem lethal and are increasingly dangerous and Lucky comes to believe that Cross is trying to engineer his death -- probably to conceal the actual death of the stunt man in the river.  In the course of his love affair with the film's leading lady, Lucky learns that the character is also sleeping with Eli Cross.  This leads to some quarrels.  Hershey is puzzled by Lucky's naivety -- she says that actresses having sex with directors is just the way the industry works.  Lucky and the actress get drunk and have a slapstick love scene involving a set that they partially destroy and about forty gallons of paint.  (There's a fantastic purely seventies' line in this scene -- Barbara Hershey who is half-naked and covered in paint, cries out:  "We gotta get organized!")  Lucky acts out the offense for which the cops are chasing him -- he beat up his wife's boyfriend  (she was unfaithful when he was in 'Nam) in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop -- and persuades Hershey that he is fundamentally harmless.  (As a Vietnam vet everyone has suspected him of rape, murder, and various war crimes.)  Cross persuades Lucky to perform the stunt that killed the other stunt man.  He and the leading lady plot to flee the film set and avoid the potentially deadly stunt in the river.  This sets up the climax of the movie.  

Pauline Kael commended the movie as "kinetic" and film's mise-en-scene is, indeed, a triumph of controlled, vivid chaos.  In the opening scene, a buzzard snatches an apple as two line-men look on and, then, are confronted by the fleeing vet.  The sequence involving the first river stunt features a picture perfect stream running in a narrow gorge -- there's a tree off-balance and about to topple into the water, a memorably strange image.  Much of the film is staged like a silent comedy, in particular, the scene in which the vet clambers all over the facade of the Coronado Hotel as dozens, if not hundreds, of German soldiers pursue him firing guns and dodging bullets blasted down on the crumbling structure by a pesky bi-plane -- this is a triumph of action film-making both comical and scary and it's as good as anything Steven Spielberg has done.  Even dialogue sequences jerk and spastically dance around -- huge waves batter a sea-wall splashing thirty feet in the sky in one scene.  The camera placement is exemplary and the editing is sharp as a razor.  Pennants whip in boil in the wind.  Surf pounds the beach and, overhead, the helicopter banks and turns and spirals.  Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross seems sometimes to underplay and act down to earth, but, most of the time, his British diction is perfect and rotund and he declaims his speeches as if they were Shakespeare.  O'Toole's dramatic delivery if offset by the grungy appeal of Steve Railsbeck who plays Lucky -- the contrast between the two acting styles is one the pleasures offered by this movie.  Expensively made and brilliantly acted, The Stunt Man is as fun as a cult movie, but better, I think.  

Sentimental Value

 Joachim Trier's 2025 Sentimental Value is an ambitious picture that explores, among other things, intergenerational trauma, art as therapy, self-destructiveness, and intricate family dynamics.  Trier is painting with a broad brush and freights his film with too much material -- there is too much neurosis, guilt, and reconciliation in the movie; I found it exhausting and, after ninety minutes, was longing for the thing to be over -- I think its two hours and 13 minutes long.  This is an estimable movie by an important director but it's excessive in the sense that the viewer can't quite keep the various patterns devised by the director in mind -- presented in short sequences that end with the screen suddenly dark, the movie has a staccato rhythm and, despite its potentially lugubrious subject matter, the film has a light touch -- it's like one of Woody Allen's pictures from the eighties without the one-liners and Borscht belt gags; in fact, the movie has a role that seems tailor-made for Woody Allen -- this is the part of Gustav, the manipulative director, who seems brazenly willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of his art.  With a little spin, the movie's rather Gothic subject matter could be presented as a black comedy -- Trier doesn't opt for comedy but, I admire him, for not shaping his material into some sort of tragedy or melodrama either.  He's a realist, at least in this movie and most of what we see and hear is plausible on the level of quotidian observation -- these seem to be real people and their interactions aren't heightened, nor do they veer into Bergman's metaphysical darkness.  In its odd way, it's a companionable movie.

The intergenerational trauma underlying the movie is socio-historical and, also, personal.  Gustav's mother was a psycho-therapist, practicing in the family's wonderful-looking early Victorian house.  During World War Two, she was betrayed by neighbors as a member of the Resistance, sent to a camp, and severely tortured.  When Gustav was eight, his mother hanged herself, an enigmatic and catastrophic act that is either over-motivated or under-motivated depending upon how you view things.  Gustav is a film-maker and has achieved international fame.  He's also seventy and hasn't made a movie for fifteen years.  But he has written a script about his mother which he regards as his magnum opus.  Netflix is interested in financing the movie and Gustav is engaged in machinations to cast the film, hire a director of photography and a technical crew, to get the picture made.

Gustav has two daughters by his wife whom he has divorced.  The movie begins at the family home where people are gathered after the funeral of Gustav's ex-wife.  No one seems particularly griefstricken -- these are Norwegians and they are masters at maintaining a stiff upper lip.  Nora, the eldest sister, is an actress who has appeared in a TV series but is mostly active in Oslo's theater.  She suffers from severe stage-fright.  In an early scene, we see her refusing to go on-stage during the premiere of some classical drama -- it may be Chekhov's The Sea Gull or some other work in the classical repertoire.  Nora flees through the backstage area, fights people trying to drag her on stage, and, then, summons her married boyfriend and demands a lightning sexual encounter with him.  He says there's not enough time and, so, Nora replies that he should hit her hard in the face to knock her out of her hysteria.  He slaps her and, after some more struggles, she goes on-stage and, apparently, amazes everyone with her performance.  Later, Nora says that she's only 20% functional and 80% fucked-up.  Her dysfunction consists of anger and loneliness with depression.  By contrast, Agnes, Nora's little sister, is successful -- she seems to be happily married, has an eight-year old son on whom she dotes, and works as an "academic historian" as she says.  Gustav's flamboyant and belated appearance at the family Leichenschmaus or funeral buffet destabilizes the situation and knocks the sisters back into memories of their childhood.  Agnes starred as a child in one of Gustav's movies, indeed, probably his last movie before the fifteen years dry period.  The movie, a fragment of which we see, harkens back to the Occupation of Norway and involves Nazi soldiers snatching a young boy while his sister, played by Agnes, watches from a nearby train.  Since that movie was shot, neither of the sisters has had much to do with Gustav -- he's selfish and has been an absent father.  Gustav approaches the older sister, Nora, and asks her to play the role of the mother in his new play.  Nora refuses angrily and won't even read the script.  At a retrospective of his films at Deauville, Gustav meets a Hollywood starlet, Rachel (played by Elle Fanning) and, after a night drinking with her on the beach, casts her in the role of his mother. Rachel comes to Norway where Gustav is planning to shoot the movie in the family home (where Agnes is living).  He intimidates Rachel by showing her the footstool that his mother used to climb up to a noose to hang herself in one of the rooms in the house -- this is a lie:  everyone in the family knows the footstool came from Ikea.  It turns that Rachel is a bad fit for the part.  The plan is to shoot the movie in English which seems problematic.  Gustav has Rachel cut her hair and change its color so she looks more like Nora.  Finally, Rachel, recognizing that she is miscast, graciously withdraws from the movie.  Gustav has written the role for Nora, whom he recognizes as sharing traits with his mother.  He hopes her performance in the film will free her from the burden of the past.  At first, Nora refuses to even read the script.  But, then, at last, Agnes prevails upon her to study the script.  (This is in the context of Gustav trying to cast Agnes' son, Erick, as the little boy in the movie -- that is, as Gustav himself as a child; Agnes refuses and accuses her father of egoism and being opportunistic and malevolently manipulative.)  Gustav has a heart attack but is too mean and tough to die.  He directs the movie with Nora playing the part of his suicidal mother and, in fact, Erick as the child.  There's an intentionally confusing sequence near the end in which we don't know whether we're watching the movie or a film within the film.  (This echoes an earlier scene in which Nora begins crying and curls into a fetal posture by her bed -- a scene that turns out to be a part in a play in which she is acting; we can see the audience in the long shot of her on the floor.)

This summary omits many interesting things in the movie.  There's a bitter and moving meditation on old age:  Gustav's long time cameraman is not sufficiently spry to manage the hand-held camera shots in the proposed film and his old friend, at first, seems to reject him for the project.  Nora's married boyfriend gives up on her -- now that his wife has divorced him, Nora thinks that they can expose their love affair, but the boyfriend isn't interested in committing.  There's biographical scenes from Gustav's youth and middle-age and a long sequence in which Agnes, the historian, researches her grandmother's capture and torture by the Occupation forces. Trier films family squabbling about the dead mother's possessions and there's conversation about the status of the old house -- Gustav's wife was granted the house in the divorce but the papers were never filed and Gustav expects the home to revert to him.  Much of this material, broadly speaking, is superfluous.to the main plot which involves Gustav persuading Nora to act in the role of his mother.  The staging of the final scenes suggests that, perhaps, Gustav has re-written history so that his mother does not commit suicide -- but this is very unclear.  (The clue is whether we hear the Ikea foot stool knocked over when the act occurs -- Gustav's mother has shut the door on the chamber where she commits the act.,)  Another curiosity in the film is narration, seemingly by the old house itself.  The house has a crack running from its foundation up to the attic -- it's like the fatally flawed House of Usher.  

Sentimental Value is never less than highly cultured, subtle, and beautifully made and acted.  It's a little too diffuse for my taste and I prefer Trier's earlier The Worst Person in the World which seems more focused and coherent to me.  But it's probably important for those interested in cinema to see this movie and the time spent watching the film is certainly not wasted.  

Macbeth (Guthrie Theater on February 8, 2026)

 It pains me to say that culture in the United States is slowly, but inexorably, renouncing Shakespeare.  The urgency, it seems, that once underwrote prestige productions of Shakespeare has leaked away and, somehow, dissipated.  You won't see evidence of this tendency anywhere but in the repertoire theater companies that once regarded Shakespeare as central to their project -- elsewhere Shakespeare's theater is so far from the mainstream as to be invisible, a tissue of misinterpreted legends buried under detritus like Grand Theft Hamlet.  However, this trend is most obvious at the regional festivals once mostly dedicated to Shakespeare but now slumming with musical comedies and politically correct and virtuous shows about oppression, abuse, and fortitude in facing hardship.  In the little town of Lanesboro, picturesquely nestled under the pale cliffs looming over the Root River bridge and the old grain elevator, an Ibsen festival flourished for about twenty years.  The sponsors of the festival produced all of Ibsen's major plays, including a heavily redacted version of Pillars of Society, but, then, energy flagged and audiences diminished and, two years ago, I think, the Ibsen festival announced that it was pleased to continue is summer repertory productions except without any Ibsen at all -- the shows on offer now are versions of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, British farces, and other audience-pleasing fare.  What is the cause for Shakespeare's shrinking importance?  (Ibsen has already been forgotten.)  I think this has something to do with the notion that post-George Floyd and post-me-too feminism, the works of the Bard have become increasingly irrelevant -- when a play needs apologies and contorted justifications to be presented, the work seems unnecessary.  Color-blind and gender-blind casting can supply some rationale for a new look at Shakespeare's plays, but, ultimately, those measures create more havoc and trouble than they are worth; in Elizabethan theater largely concerned with dynastic issues, the tyrannical power of fathers, and intricate family melodrama, gender- and color-blind casting is a distraction on which many progressive directorial ambitions have foundered. There are no queer subtexts in Shakespeare, although this sort of emphasis can be provided from outside (and, indeed, far outside) of the Shakespearian canon.  But just because you can distort a text to support a currently fashionable thesis or interest doesn't mean that it should be done.  I'm wounded to say that Shakespeare, with his peculiarly impenetrable diction and surfeit of plotting, hasn't got a lot to say to audiences in 2025.  And, so, I can feel the Bard of Avon slipping away, his plays drifting toward the status of artifacts in a museum.  This process has been continuing all my life -- people older than me will recall Lawrence Olivier's versions of Hamlet and Henry V; I recall Peter Brooks mounting a Midsummer Night's Dream that featured Diana Rigg in a state of (mostly) undress.  But, as Shakespeare became more and more culturally remote, the plays began to seem less and less important, perfunctory exercises in tongue-twisting diction.  They say that a frog will sit in water with the heat gradually increasing until it is boiled to death.  (This is a myth).  The new Guthrie production of Macbeth, however, is the performance for me that has made this particular frog leap far and wide away from the water in which it is immersed.  Shakespeare, I'm afraid, is no longer persuasive of anything.

A famous man of the theater, Joe Dowling, has directed this Macbeth.  Everything seems hastily contrived and slipshod.  The play is cut to an hour and fifty minutes, which, in itself, is not a problem.  Macbeth has to move at lightning speed to dramatize the sudden and lethal destruction of its two main characters.  There should be a sort of ritualized frenzy about the play.  In this production, the violence is downplayed -- the bloody soldier who announces Macbeth's berserker courage and ferocious slaughter of the King's enemies is scarcely wounded at all.  He was not bloody, in fact, as far as I could see.  Modern sensibilities in polite theater-going have banished the gore (beheadings and so on) to an offstage status.  There's a bow to horror fans -- and Macbeth is more akin to a modern horror movie than a well-made play -- in the show's final moments in which dead Macbeth is hoisted by his ankles above the stage, to dangle head downward at the curtain.  But this effect is spoiled by the time it takes to engineer this effect -- supernumeraries are busy attaching bondage-style cuffs to dead Macbeth's ankles and this labor seems contrived.  (Better to just sever Macbeth's head off-stage and have MacDuff brandish the thing by its gory locks at the final blackout -- again, confident velocity is everything in the staging of this show.)  The play looks like it's done on the cheap -- when Macbeth tells his servant to strap on his armor for the final showdown, the harness looks like a poorly made leather vest; it's not armor at all.  The only elaborate effect is saved for the penultimate scene when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane -- six or seven soldiers stand behind neon-lights configured like straight 30 foot tall pine trees; it's showy but, also, tone-deaf:  a glitzy Las Vegas effect imported onto the dour, grim Wurtele Thrust Stage.  The show's is badly cast.  Macbeth is played by a handsome pipsqueak of a boy -- he has absolutely no charisma and no gravitas.  Lady Macbeth is better and she seems palpable older than her youthful husband.  The witches aren't frightening.  They prance around a hole in the stage from which some fog emerges, chanting in unison, an effect that doesn't ever work successfully in the theater.  Mercifully, the dramaturge has cut the two scenes intended to cater to King James' morbid interest in witchcraft and demonology -- these are the scenes in which Hecate makes a completely redundant appearance.  The idiotic scene in which Malcolm claims all sorts of damnable vices to test MacDuff (I think -- the whole thing makes no sense) is inexplicably retained.  "I'm a really bad, bad guy," says Malcolm and, then, tells the baffled MacDuff that he's exceedingly temperate and virtuous -- this is awful stuff and really should be omitted from any reasonable performance of the play.  Otherwise the cuts are mostly local, inconspicuous, and scattered -- of course, the witches aren't going to be allowed to put boiled Jew in their potion.  The Scottish troops wear black jumpsuits and have little red berets like Curtis Sliwa's subway vigilantes.  The final duel between MacDuff and Macbeth is staged as a knife-fight -- it looks tawdry and unconvincing, a couple of slender pretty boys pretending to be bar-toughs in a tavern scuffle.  Ultimately, this production by the much-vaunted Guthrie Theater smells like a High School show featuring a precocious, but callow, cast.  It's not the Guthrie's fault -- it's the Zeitgeist.

La Grazia

 Paolo Sorrentino's new film, La Grazia (2025) concerns a man on the brink of old age taking stock of his life.  This situation (it doesn't amount to a narrative) is amplified into consequence by the fact that the movie's protagonist is the President of Italy.  The irony explored by the film is that its famous and successful hero, who seems almost universally beloved, has come to doubt his achievements -- in fact, he wonders whether he has accomplished anything useful at all.  Some elderly men afflicted by this doubt might arrange to sit down with their pastors for a philosophical chat; President de Santis, the film's hero, has a collegial conversation with the Pope, an African with grey dreadlocks and a snazzy motorcycle.  The Pope turns out to be not much help:  "You have no future," Pope bluntly tells the President.  The Pope also diagnoses the President's problem:  "You must make yourself light."  The President has only a few months left in his regime -- he has been in the lavish Quirinal Palace (the President's residency) for seven years. But there are a number of things weighing him down, resisting the Pope's injunction to be more "light":  among the affairs of State, there are two pardons testing the limits of the criminal law -- an abused woman has stabbed her husband while he was sleeping 18 times but claims his mistreatment justified the act; a high school teacher who has resigned his position to care for his wife with Alzheimer's is the subject of a pardon petition made by his ex-students:  the teacher suffocated his wife claiming that this was euthanasia justified by the woman's violent rages and anger.  Adding to his burdens, the President is considering a law authorizing euthanasia in certain circumstances, a politically risky enactment that is strongly opposed by the Pope and his Church.  The President's relationship with his daughter, herself a renowned jurist, is suffering due to his vacillation as to the euthanasia bill -- she acts as the President's closest advisor and is one of the drafters of the bill. (If I sign the bill, the protagonists says, I'm a murderer; if I don't, I'm a torturer./ The President's son lives in Montreal where he produces pop music, neglecting his vocation as a classical composer.  To add to his misery, the President's horse, Elvis, is slowly dying -- and the President is unable to give the order to put the horse out of its misery; this reluctance mirrors his hesitation at signing the euthanasia bill into law.  Further, the President is mourning the loss of his wife, the love of his life, eight years earlier.  Complicating his mourning is his knowledge to an absolute certainty that his wife was unfaithful to him at the start of their forty year marriage.  The President who declares himself as a famous Judge to be an absolute advocate of the truth wants to know the identity of the man who cuckolded him -- he's still prone to undignified jealous rages.  And the poor fellow is hungry all the time:  his daughter has put him on a diet of quinoa and broiled chicken breast -- no pasta for him.  Cigarettes have been banned but he bums them off the cuirassier, his bodyguard and confidante.  President de Santis has written a two-thousand plus page treatise on the criminal law (no one can get through the text which is apparently incredibly detailed and exhaustive.)  The only thing he seems to like is rap music -- he listens on ear-buds and memorizes some of the lyrics.

The film, although visually extravagant, is simple enough.  In the course of the two hour picture, the President will issue a pardon to one of the two convicts serving time, his horse dies, his daughter leaves Rome to visit her brother in Montreal and is off-stage when the President's term ends; the President will sign the bill authorizing euthanasia, and will discover the secret about his wife's affair.  He will take the advice of the Pope and imagine himself as very light, as weightless in fact.  Most of the movie's principle conflicts will be resolved and, in effect, all will be well -- it's all somewhat predictable and sentimental but moving as well:  despite his unhealthy obsession with his wife's adultery, President de Santis is a decent man, a good and fair judge, and a politician whose self-sacrifice has saved the Republic -- at least, this is what people claim when de Santis goes to La Scala and is acclaimed by the other operagoers as a hero.  Sorrentino's picture is quiet and self-restrained -- it's a rare thing, an attempt to explore the life of a man who is virtuous and, what's more, a politician.  The movie contains a number of spectacular images and set pieces; it's lush with interiors full of ancient books and huge marble statues.  It's Rome and everything is outsized, larger than life including the lavish rooms in the Quirinale Palace.  All of the episodes are discrete, chapters in a book that seem set off from one another, but they are carefully configured to echo and resonate with one another.  The President's fear of aging and the feebleness of old age is embodied in a scene in which the Prime Minister of Portugal comes for a state visit -- they've rolled out the red carpet but a sudden squall with rain uproots the carpet and blows it around so that the old, feeble ruler ends up on the ground.  Rain falls in torrents. The imagery is slowed to a nightmare stagger:  "Am I as old as he is?" the President wonders.  In another scene that develops the idea of the "lightness of being" (to quote the Milan Kundera novel), the President watches an astronaut at a space station -- the sound is disabled and video has failed so the astronaut can not see the President.  He sheds a tear  and, then, laughs at the tear which floats in the air like a small quicksilver planet.  The President's daughter goes to visit Isa Rocca who stabbed her husband while he was asleep.  The woman is beautiful and transfixes the lawyer with a steely intimidating stare -- her eyes seem to spark with electricity.  Later the President goes out to the same prison where he insists on sitting in the waiting room with the hard-bitten family members of convicts.  He interviews the ascetic school teacher whom he concludes to be fundamentally dishonest about his own motives. After bidding farewell to his staff (his social calendar secretary, a handsome woman, seems to be in love with him), the President walks back to his apartment overlooking the Spanish Stairs -- since his daughter is gone to Montreal and not controlling his diet, he orders a pizza for his first night at home alone.  In a video face-time session, he talks to his son and daughter.  It's a warm conversation but I don't think it restores the rift between parent and child.  The president finds out who cuckolded him but, as one would expect, that information doesn't make any sense.  Make sure, you stay for a final scene embedded in the credits.  The President has an old friend, Coco, who is fashionista and art collector -- although paradoxically she's proclaimed that she wants to burn all the museums.  Coca is a plump matron who wears huge round glasses and she is impulsive, outspoken, and amusing; she's flamboyantly selfish -- when she sees what is on offer at a dinner party with the President (it's quinoa and broiled  white fish served in tiny portions) she excuses herself and says that she will go out to some place for a better meal.  In the last scene, Coco is slurping her soup while the President, seated before his own bowl of soup, glares at her with disturbing and utter hatred.  "Get off my fucking back!" Coco says, an imprecation that seems to soothe the ex-President.  

I liked this movie and, of course, enjoyed its stunning photography and locations, as well as the dense, aphoristic chatter.  But, I think, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts.  It's a jigsaw and a movie that is ceaselessly clever in articulating its themes and crafting episodes that embody and challenge those themes.  But it also feels somewhat inorganic and schematic -- Sorrentino can exhaust you with all the heavy lifting required to stitch this non-narrative into a discourse on old age, suffering,and friendship -- these are worthy subjects but, also, a bit confining.  The movie never really opens up to let the fresh air in.  Toni Servillo, Sorrentino's surrogate as an actor, is astonishing as the President.  There's a sleek and inquisitive-looking robot dog that leads the procession from the Quirinal Palace to the Spanish Stairs - it's some kind of anti-terrorism weapon but elegant as whippet or Norwegian elkhound. 

The Grapes of Wrath

 During the Battle of Minneapolis in January 2026, Bruce Springsteen accompanied by Tom Morello played a concert at First Avenue on the stage made famous by Prince.  The concert was in support of the armies of protestors who openly opposed and, in some instances, impeded ICE personnel brutalizing people on the streets of Minneapolis.  The concert's motto was "ICE out!", a phrase chanted by the people in the room and balcony overlooking the stage.  Springsteen played his protest song written for the occasion, an anthem called "The Streets of Minneapolis" in which the singer calls out the authoritarian violence occurring on Nicollet Avenue and declares resistance to the goons who killed the American citizens Rebecca Good and Alex Pretti.  Springsteen also sang "The Ghost of Tom Joad", another anthem about poverty in the United States and the progressive forces arrayed against that poverty.  In this song, the symbol for resistance to the corrupt "New World Order" is the protagonist of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad.  The song cites some of Joad's famous promise to his mother that he will be present in spirit any time the forces of injustice oppress the poor and, also, anytime the poor rise to express their joyous resistance..  Morello unleashes a savage guitar attack on the evils identified in the song -- he uses every possible virtuosic technique to dramatize the ingenuity, rage, and hurricane-level force with which people will oppose tyrants:  at one point in the concert, he plays his guitar with his teeth (after the manner of Jimi Hendrix) turning the instrument over to reveal a placard that reads "Arrest the President!"; the front side of his guitar is emblazoned "ARM THE HOMELESS!"   The idea seems to be that the storm is coming, wrath is at hand, and the righteous will trample out the "vintage of the grapes of wrath" in an irrepressible uprising, a sonic storm of steel.

Inspired by this concert (you can see it on You-Tube), I decided to take another look at John Ford's 1940 Grapes of Wrath.  The movie is made with fierce urgency and feels like a documentary.  (It's somewhat like Guzman's The Battle of Chile or Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.)  In a hundred years, people will understand the Great Depression through Ford's film -- it's imagery, I expect, will replace actual footage from the Depression in the imaginations of Americans; I think this is a phenomenon similar to what will occur with Spielberg's Schindler's List -- the Hollywood movie that will likely come to stand in for the horrors that it presents.  (Something similar has a;ready happened with regard to Eisenstein's films -- footage from Eisenstein's pictures about the Russian Revolution have actually come to signify the Revolution to the extent that the tentative and very uncommunicative real pictures and film are mostly banished to the outer darkness.  

Ford's documentary effects are achieved by a variety of means.  First, there is the bleak but spectacular photography by Gregg Toland -- images that have an iconic force;  lone figures striding through desolate landscapes, night shots full of shadow and light that look like George la Tour (for instance, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad delivers his famous speech by the light of a cigarette -- his sharp features are sculpted in an acid-bath of shadow; the crowd scenes in shanty towns or near fence-lines mobbed by striking workers have a singular power and immediacy without surrendering the authority of single faces and contorted bodies to choreographed group motion:  German expressionism and the Russians reduce crowds to abstract vectors, diagrams of force.  Ford's crowds, whether brawling or dancing, display a unity of motion highlighting, however, individuals within the group. The protagonist, Tom Joad, is no saint -- he's a walking hair trigger of anger and bitterness.  When his mother says that she prayed that prison would not make her son "mean", you can see that it has been "touch and go" with Tom -- his rage is explosive and when he strikes, he kills.  Tom constantly makes cynical and bitter comments even to those helping him (he taunts a truckdriver who gives him a ride) -- he's a highly flawed and, even, frightening protagonist.  Midway through the movie, my wife said that the people "all looked so weird" and asked why the extras and, even, some of the main figures in the movie were so eccentric in appearance -- in fact, downright ugly.  Clearly Ford is simulating the austere and stark portraits of victims of Depression as portrayed by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans -- the people in the film, look gaunt, haggard, they have bulging eyes and, often, move in a shaky way; clearly these are people who have been starved.  The young girls are bony and there are big-eyed skeletal children and wretched old ladies trying to uphold their dignity in frayed sun-bonnets and threadbare dresses.  Everything is vividly imagined and clearly shown - the farm trucks weighted down with  immigrants seem impossibly frail and overloaded; the small impoverished towns look suitably unwelcoming, the ruined farms squashed by caterpillars, the pointless gestures of defiance:  men brandishing guns that they are too beaten and crestfallen to fire, meaningless brawls, a preacher defiantly holding out his arms to be cuffed at the wrist.  There's four-fifths of a work of genius on screen.  The last ten minutes declines a little into sermonizing and the sermons are delivered in bad faith -- obviously, the only answer to the misery that we see is some form of Communist Revolution, but John Ford (and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson) aren't willing to endorse the logic of that solution and, so, the movie glides into a kind of mysticism about the omnipresence of Tom Joad and the resilience of the People. (with a Sandbergian capitol "P").  In the film's last shots, we see Tom Joad striding alone against a barren horizon.  Then, Ford shows us a great procession of  rattle-trap trucks, crowded as floats in a May Day parade, crossing the desolate land -- it's supposed to be a sign of the ever-enduring power of the people.  But, ghosts don't lead flesh-and-blood revolutions and Bruce Springsteen's song is about "the ghost of Tom Joad."  But the picture's delirious, half-baked ending is also filmmaking of a high order just not as powerful as the genius stuff of the first 4/5ths of the picture.

The excellence of the movie lies in its innumerable, powerful details.  When a gun is discharged in a Hooverville, an old lady is hit by the bullet and lies dying in the dirt street.  Two other old ladies cradle her body in their arms and cry out:  "She's bleeding to death."  A sheriff's officer shrugs and says "those 45's do sure make a mess."  The matriarch of the Joad clan tries to feed a crowd of starving childrn.  One of the kids sniffs that he's had a chicken recently and doesn't want hand-outs -- another little kid says the boy and his dad are lying and that they are just as hungry as rest of them.  Ma sends the mob of urchins to "get flat sticks" so they can scrape out the bottom of her stew pot.  But the kids run to a mountain of empty cans and pick them up so they will have something to put their booty in.  The cop in a small California town says that he came from Oklahoma only two years earlier and, then, warmly greets the Joad family -- a breath later, he tells them to get out of town before sundown.  In a work-camp built like a KZ Lager, management systematically cheats the workers, unilaterally reducing their wages to less than starvation pay.  People protesting this injustice get beaten with ax-handles.  The half-crazed former preacher, played with wild-eyed enthusiasm by John Cassavetes is killed for advocating "mutual assistance" and collective action.  In the final scene, the migrant workers have left a WPA camp where they are treated kindly, provided medical care, and protected by the Federal Government.  What has enticed them to leave this safe harbor?  I guess it's Ford's desire to end with a spectacular image, that is,  to show us a panorama of old and battered trucks stretching to the horizon and rolling down the highway into the sunset.  

Der Tiger (The Tank)

 Der Tiger, dubbed The Tank in English, is a morose and hopeless German horror film masquerading as a war picture.  It's claustrophobic and literally dark -- the titular tank rumbles through inky forests and hides submerged at the bottom of a river. The inside of the Panzer is a jumble of tight metal boxes that isolate the five-man crew into small metal coffins -- the photography is incoherent and the interior space within the tank although researched, I assume, with Teutonic thoroughness, makes no sense at all.  This is problematic since half of the movie is shot within the Tiger tank. The film has a M.Night Shymalan plot twist that an alert viewer will see as easily as we can visualize the huge specter of the tank lumbering forward a mile or two miles away.  The plot twist is a kind of warped theological variation on Ambrose Bierce's famous story, Zwischenfall auf Eulen-fluss Bruecke.  The movie represents an attempt to make a war film for German audiences.  Obviously, the picture has to be strenuously anti-war without any semblance of heroics, cold, morbid, utterly without the specious exhilaration famously implicit in the tracking shots in All Quiet on the Western Front or the helicopter assault in Apocalypse Now.  The movie must make industrialized warfare look drab and hellish as well as idiotic to boot.  If this is the film's objective The Tank succeeds; the picture seems influenced by Das Boot, the submarine epic made in Germany forty years ago or so -- it shows men in a can with bolts breaking, gouts of fire harassing them, and water drizzling all over their sweaty faces and heads.  And, in a surreal scene, the tank in this picture actually goes underwater and becomes a kind of U-Boat.  I understand that this movie is something of a success in Germany:  there's a hunger for war movies even when they are largely deemed politically incorrect -- but, if a film is made to strip every ounce of glamor or excitement or, even, suspense out of war, then, of course, this should make us question why the picture was even produced in the first place.  War doesn't have many defenders these days and, if the point is to show us, in a doggedly literal way that War is Hell, I think, everyone will likely agree with that proposition.  

A tank is retreating across a night-time battlefield lit like a Bosch hell-scape by innumerable little fires.  The Russians, viewed as shadows in the distance, are advancing and they intend to blow up the bridge over which the tank must drive to escape the sledge-hammer of the Russian attack.  The bridge is bombed and, also, mined by the Russians.  A whirling firestorm ensues and, as the tank crew see a sinister-looking deer on the bridge, the span appears to collapse.  The tank commander has some orders in a folio and, after a conspicuous lacuna during which the bridge over the Dnieper melts into the fire, the soldier rejoins his four member crew where they are repairing the Tiger tank in what looks like the ruins of a church or monastery. ) The tank commander has orders called "Operation Labyrinth" to drive the tank through No Man's Land and, then, behind enemy lines where he is supposed to liberate a general supposedly killed at Stalingrad but, now, thought to be alive and hiding in a bunker in Russian territory. This general is named von Hardenberg -- I have no idea why the name invokes Philip George Friederich Freiherr von Hardenberg, the German romantic who wrote under the pseudonym "Novalis".  (Go figure?) The tank with its five man crew sets out, rolling through a landscape that is a sort of oak savannah with stands of big trees, meadows, and dirt tracks running in all directions.  There are a bunch of adventures.  The tank wanders into a minefield and some big nasty-looking mines have to be defused -- the men are lying on their bellies and sweating profusely.  They pass some zombie-like soldiers rerouting road signs, presumably to confuse the enemy. On the radio, they can't get any signal but some priest solemnly intoning the Latin mass.  There's a tank battle filmed in a sober analytical manner that is devoid of any real interest.  One of the soldiers dies when his lungs are shredded by shrapnel.  We see lyrical shots of one of the commander reunited with his wife although this turns out to be a flashback.  A Concentration Camp light next to cyclone fence blinks on and off.  In a Russian village, a ghost general has his men round up all the women, and children in town, lock them in a factory or warehouse and, then, use a flamethrower to inundate the building in a sea of flames. (Lots of shrill screaming)  At long last, the tank reaches a prairie where there is a deep bunker filled with orangish flame, a spider-hole hide-out full of whores and carousing Nazi soldiers enjoying a last post-apocalyptic chug of Schnaps.  Friederich von Hardenberg, the general killed in Stalingrad, is there, whining about the battle and the evil orders given by Hitler and, of course, sans one of his hands.  It turns out that the tank commander and Hardenberg are not just old buddies, but that the scary-looking corpse-general introduced him to his wife in 1939.  We learn that these family members in Hamburg, for instance, have all been killed.by incendiary bombs.  There's a few more explosions and speeches about following orders and, then, the movie ends in s flashback to the bridge over the Dnieper, the firestorm there, and the malignant-looking stag glaring at the doomed tank and its crew.  I can give you a clue about the picture:  after the bridge collapses, the tank crew perishes and the movie is set in Hell.  The horror! The horror!

This movie is fairly well-made.  The acting consists of grunts and cursing.  It's completely superfluous and unpleasant and so, although I sort  of liked it as a guilty pleasure, I recommend staying away.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Blue Moon

 I like Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025) and recommend it with reservations.  The movie has an unlikely subject, demise of the great lyricist Lorenz (Larry) Hart and observes the Aristotelian unities -- it takes place in what feels like real time in one location and with limited number of actors.  Obviously, the picture is a hobby-project, a movie made for the sheer love of the script and its subject, and the film is lovingly crafted, a work ripened over a dozen years.  (Linklater is patient and takes time on his projects; Boyhood was shot over a period 13 or 14 years.  The director wanted to use his favorite leading man in the lead role but didn't think the handsome actor, Ethan Hawke, looked sufficiently ravaged to play the role -- and, so, Linklater waited a decade for Hawke to age into the part.)  The movie has a claustrophobic aspect, shot on a single complex set in Dublin, a set that simulates the appearance of Sardi's, a famous restaurant and bar, popular with show-folk, in New York's theater district.  Essentially, the movie consists of a series of monologues interpolated between snatches of very witty and allusive dialogue.  The picture, therefore, will not be to many people's tastes.  A half hour of it put my wife to sleep.  It is more akin to Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre than to recent biopics about Johnny Cash, Dylan, and Springsteen.  The speeches and the clever repartee carry the movie.  Furthermore, the show has no real dramatic arc and has no place to go.  These defects, if they can be so characterized, are consistent with the film's subject matter --  the hero Lorenz Hart is washed-up, a self-destructive alcoholic and he has literally no place to go; his luck has run out.  As a man of the theater, it is appropriate that the film is also a very theatrical and stagy interpretation of events involving him that it portrays.  The burgundy red, lushly upholstered piano bar with its walls of framed caricatures, is a sort of "no exit" set, a portrait, as it were, of the inflamed interior of its protagonist's soul. 

Larry Hart has spent 25 years making highly acclaimed Broadway musicals with his partner Richard Rodgers.  Hart is tiny, about five feet, bald and unsightly.  He defends himself with his wit which is cutting, razor sharp, and self-deprecatory.  Alcoholism has limited his ability to work as Rodgers' partner.  While Larry was drying out in the Doctor's Hospital  (where he will die in a few months at 47), Rodgers composed the music for Oklahoma with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein III.  The show is a huge success, although Larry thinks it's simple-minded, conventional, and sentimental.  It's war-time and the show is defended by Rodgers and others as being an idealized work intended to raise spirits and morale during the fighting.  Larry, although he admires the musical more than he cares to admit, tends toward satire -- he mocks Hammerstein for always going for the easiest and most obvious rhyme ("grand" / "land" for instance).  Hart leaves the show early -- he's seen rehearsal productions in New Haven -- and goes to Sardi's  where an after-party is planned.  He engages  in banter with the bartender played by Bobby Carnavale.  The bartender is gruff but kindly and he hesitates to serve Hart since he doesn't want to jeopardize his sobriety.  The lyricist is waiting for a girl with whom he has fallen in love, Elizabeth Weidell -- this is a 20 year old that Hart theoretically desires.  In fact, he's probably gay and his passion for the young woman is a creepy blend of possessiveness, masochistic fawning, and voyeurism -- he wants her to regale him with stories of sexual encounters with fellow students at Yale where she is studying.  Hart, the piano-player, and the bartender quote lines to each other from Casablanca and imitatethe actors in the movie.  Hart mournfully cites Humphrey Bogart's line from the movie:  'I knew then that nobody would ever love me like that --" a key citation in the film.  Oscar Hammerstein III, a huge beefy walrus of a man, and Richard Rodgers come into Sardi's with their entourages and a mob of patrons and backers.  Elizabeth, whose mother is a backer, appears.  Rodgers has bought her flowers and some other gifts, some of them intended to commemorate a trip to a lake in Vermont which Hart remembers with great (and misguided) tenderness.  (Hart's infatuation with Elizabeth doesn't keep him from flirting with the boy who delivers the flowers -- he invites him to his party after the party, a big soiree for which he has retained the "Golden Gate Quartet".  Hart keeps inviting everyone that he meets to his party but it's obvious that no one is going to come -- success is a magnet and, after Sardi's, everyone (including Elizabeth) intends to attend the part of Rodgers' place; people seem embarrassed by Hart's invitations.  After some more monologues and dialogue, Hart makes his plea to the girl in the locked coatroom at Sardi's (he has prevailed on the coatroom attendant to let him importune Elizabeth in that place).  She tells him about a sexual encounter with a handsome boy with whom she is hopelessly in love.  After intercourse, the man has "ghosted her" -- he hasn't called for the four months since the interlude.  Larry is strangely excited by the story.  She says that although the man was impotent in their first encounter and has avoided her after their second interlude, she would, nonetheless, drive thirty hours across the country to see him again.  Larry remarks that no one will ever love him like that.  Elizabeth admits that she loves him but "not in that way."  Larry understands; he says that in every love affair there is someone who gives love and someone who, more or less, passively receives the love given to them.  The party at Sardi's is over.  Larry introduces Elizabeth to Richard Rodgers who seems a little too interested in her -- she leaves to go with him to his party.  The pianist plays "Blue Moon", Larry's most popular song, but a composition that he doesn't like because it is too simple and too sentimental.  In the opening shot, we have seen Larry collapse in an alleyway in a rainstorm.  A title tells us that Larry died at Doctor's Hospital four months later after being found in the gutter half-frozen to death.  He dies at 47.  Rodgers goes on to compose another 15 successful Broadway musicals with Hammerstein.  

The film is understated and laced with interesting allusions to World War Two era culture in New York City.  The characters are carefully drawn in depth:  Rodgers, for instance, who has jilted Hart is portrayed as a man driven to the limits of his patience by Hart's self-destructive drinking; he seems to wish Hart well and this is not merely a theoretical aspiration -- he actually agrees to hire Hart to write lyrics for a revival of a show that they co-authored years ago.  (It's a Connecticut Yankee and Hart did in fact scratch out five new songs for the revival, before his drinking killed him.)  We see a young Stephen Sondheim, apparently nine years old, sniffing dubiously at the rhymes in Oklahoma and pronouncing the prosody sloppy and simple-minded.  (Hammerstein has brought the boy to Oklahoma)\. George Roy Hill, the film maker from Minneapolis who made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, gets a brief cameo as a starstruck Yale theater student.  The great essayist E. B. White also appears in the film as a fellow alcoholic, writing notes as he sips on a martini and exchanging quips with Hart -- it's a fine, dignified part that grounds the movie and keeps it from spinning into the untethered fantasies in which Hart is trapped.  (Hart is given credit for the idea behind E. B. White's children's book, Stuart Little - spelled with a "u" as Hart insists; this is pure fantasy.)

If a movie leaves a lingering series of ambiguities and complications in the viewer's mind and if it is pleasing to contemplate those uncertainties -- the film's negative capacity as it were -- the day after watching the picture, then, I am willing to account the movie as very good, a successful enterprise.  If you are still sorting through the intricacies in the film several days later, then, the picture was, I think, excellent. Linklater is a softspoken director who works directly without any flash or spurious glitter -- it's easy to underestimate him.  But he is certainly one of our best contemporary film-makers.