A Rhode Island friend reports that Showcase Cinemas Seekonk is no more.
Her photos show it already torn down, piles of rubble behind a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. She pays tribute:
A depressing scene….that’s all that is left. If only it were just a scene in a film…but this time it’s real. My heart sunk. Goodbye forever Showcase Seekonk! I have many memories of a multitude of incredible films I once viewed up on your big screens.
Any mention of rubble inevitably invites comparisons to the photographs we see of war-torn places. While no one would ever put the decline of an industry on the same plane as the destruction of war, there is a destruction that goes beyond buildings and entertainment. There is something happening here that is exactly clear if we see it in the context of how we live, what we value, what we honestly want.
It is the battle of private vs. public interest.
True, cinemas are privately owned, but they do provide a public life. People gather and sometimes talk with each other about what they have come to see. Far more often, they will talk on the way out about what they have just seen.
As a projectionist at The Screening Room, a small arts cinema in Newburyport, Mass., I have often seen patrons outside our door after a film agree to stop in The Port Tavern next door to share thoughts and reactions. I’ll never forget the woman who, following Spike Lee’s BlackKlansman, blurted out, “I’m going to The Grog to defrag!” Several patrons still stepping out the door volunteered to join her. That may be an extreme example, but just the look on other viewers’ faces and the tones of their overheard voices gives us a sense of public participation.
Always nice to have family or friends at home with you to share reactions. But you have them with you many, perhaps most other times. Compared to the public life of a cinema, this is a self-imposed privatization. Not a privatization of a business, of a building, of a choice of entertainment, but of ourselves.
As for all of the privately-owned cinemas that I am calling vital to our public life, I can tell you that all of us view other cinemas far more as allies than as competitors. Far from the cut-throat world of streaming services, the better any of us do, the better we all do.
Any cinemas’ success means that more people are going out, that more of us have a public life away from privatized confinement. The closing of Seekonk, like that of many cinemas large and small across the country in recent years, is a trend. As a trend, it is subject to change. And it stands to reason, that an increasingly isolated public will eventually grow hungry for a public life.
Any cinema’s closing is bad news, but here’s hoping that Seekonk’s patrons keep going to cinemas nearby, keeping them strong until the trend changes.
If you’re considering films to see this holiday season, there are two I’m tempted to recommend with just one word each: WOW! and WOW!
Neither Sentimental Value nor Hamnet will ever be called celebrations or described as feel-good, but they leave audiences feeling good and celebrating those who persevere. What recommends both for the season can be stated in one word: Redemption.
Stories–the settings and the time as much as the plot–are so different that it’s hard to believe they have so much in common. You may, for example, wonder if they share the same screenwriter and editors. I’ll refrain from hinting at anything else for fear of spoilers, but I can name similarities that have nothing to do with plot:
Both lead actresses, Norwegian Renata Reinsve (Worst Person in the World 2021) and Irish Jessie Buckley (Wicked Little Letters 2023) deliver performances as convincing and with as much range of emotion as any I’ve ever seen on a screen.
Worth noting here that Sentimental Value Director Joachim Trier earned two Oscar nominations for Worst Person, and that Hamnet Director Chloe Zhao won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 for Nomadland.
Also in common: Screening Room audiences have been very slow to get out of their seats when Sentimental Value and Hamnet are over, and they let us know why on their way out. Their words, their tones, and their facial expressions are very much the same.
We think of history as a window to the past, but at times find ourselves looking into a mirror of the present.
This month, as if to prove that point, cinemas are showing the riveting two-and-one-half hour Nuremberg and PBS offers The American Revolution, a six-episode series equally compelling. Both offer details never hinted at, much less mentioned in school texts, and which would imperil teachers in many states if they assigned them for classroom viewing.
Whoa, you may say, what does an international tribunal 80 years ago, or a war for independence 250 years ago have to do with America today?
See for yourself. Watch Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) explain the appeal of Adolph Hitler by saying, “He made us proud to be German again,” or listen to the psychiatrist (Rami Malek) dissect him as a narcissist who “cares only about himself.” See what runs through your mind. In the Screening Room, the collective recognition was palpable for each scene.
If that’s not enough, notice the archival footage of newspapers, with sub-heads quoting Nazi leaders claiming, among other warped things, that all liberal concerns for humanity are a weakness. Compare that to Elon Musk’s “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Musk was a fluke, you say, now he’s gone. Well, then compare it to several Republican senators who opposed the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court in 2010 for her crime of being “empathetic.” Many of those senators are still in office.
Rather than its echoes in the present, The American Revolution is more notable for what it reveals about the past. The late and controversial historian Howard Zinn–he of A People’s History of the United States–told us that the distortions of history in our schools is done not so much with lies as with emphasis and omission. Ken Burns’ latest documentary for PBS fills in omissions, often with surprise and shock.
This is especially true of the last two episodes which cover the complicated and nuanced reasons why many Native tribes sided with the loyalists and as many sided with the patriots. To some extent this was also true of both enslaved and free African-Americans, but the kaleidoscopic alliances of tribes from New England and the Carolinas all the way to the Mississippi reveal a war–or two theaters of war, the Great Lakes and the South–that most of us never hear of. And who knew that Spain joined our cause?
Most sobering was hearing of tribes across New York State that had villages of two story homes with hearths and glass windows, and with well-tended orchards and gardens. Weren’t they supposed to be nomadic, living in tents? Wasn’t their lack of settlements and unwillingness to “develop” land the justification for Manifest Destiny?
The documentary doesn’t waste time with the rhetorical question and the obvious point it makes. Instead, it just tells us that George Washington ordered it all destroyed on suspicion of those tribes’ alliance with the British. Even when it was over, while the historians concur that the terms of The Treaty of Paris in 1783 were agreeable for both the USA & England, one lets us know: “Biggest loser was the Indian tribes.”
For all of its revelations of the past, the present is not to be denied, most of it delivered in the last episode. That’s when the historians analyze what went into the Constitution with reverential praise for what the founders anticipated, especially internal attempts to undermine a federal government for individual gain.
We hear of Hamilton’s “man unprincipled in private life… known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty” who will
… mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—… to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’
More than windows that show the past, Nuremberg and The American Revolution mirror the present. Give such mirrors an honest look, and we may start finding doors to the future.
If you’ve been to any of the No Kings or Hands Off rallies this year and heard any of us Boomers say we “can’t believe we’re still doing this,” the title of this film is for you.
As is the film. Though the promos offer scenes from an action-packed thriller, One Battle After Another is impossible to categorize–which makes it worth all of its two-and-a-half-plus hours.
My endorsement comes right away because the opening scenes had me wondering if I should sit so long through something that seemed so outdated and misleading. A subtitle at the start telling us that we are 17 years in the past would have helped. Instead, we get one identifying an immigration detention center, which reinforces the misconception of being in the present. In retrospect, that may have been intentional.
Despite that, the clashing political and sexual intrigue in every breath of revolutionary Perfidia (Tenyana Taylor) kept me in the thrall of what-happens-next. About then, we get the subtitle, “17 years later,” and it all falls into place–especially for those of us who placed ourselves at Anti-War and Civil Rights rallies 50 and 60 years ago, only to reprise our roles in 2025.
Falls into place not just as a story of its own, but as the latest bid for inclusion into the catalog of films that capture a national era. With police raids of a workplace and a school looking so much like the ICE raids described daily on TV and radio, One Battle‘s place should be as secure. Yes, we are inescapably in the present.
For comparison to others fitting that description, One Battle is as incisive as Wall Street (1987) and at times as zany as Network (1976). Sean Penn’s Col. Stephen Lockjaw, as weird as his name, loudly echos Dr. Strangelove. Characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro could have been drawn out of an early Woody Allen movie; their scenes together more like the stylized sight-gags of director Wes Anderson than of Director Paul Thomas Anderson who is best known for Boogie Nights (1997) and the film that One Battle most closely resembles, There Will Be Blood (2007).
The women are more seriously drawn, even if one has a name that, like “Perfidia” and “Lockjaw,” sounds like it’s from an R-rated version of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Deandra (Regina Hall) does all she can to protect the young while devoted to the revolution. And it is her charge, Willa (Chase Infiniti), conceived and born in those explosive first twelve minutes, who emerges as the film’s center and soul until she answers the call of a ham radio and drives off to Oakland for yet another dubious battle.
While car chase scenes fill movies I tend to avoid, Anderson puts brakes on one that screams up and down rolling hills with cameras that put us in the car. But there are no brakes in the father-daughter relationship. This is DiCaprio at his best–as pliable as he was in Don’t Look Up and yet as scheming as in Flowers of the Flower Moon–in scenes with Infiniti whose performance may well earn her an Oscar nomination.
For that, you can add “Character Study” to “Action Epic,” “Political Thriller,” and “Dark Comedy” as yet another tag. But if I had to settle on just one category, I’d propose a new one:
With the effortlessly hilarious June Squibb channeling a squinting Queen Elizabeth on the poster, you might think Eleanor the Great is a feel-good comedy and no more.
Oh, there’s more, much more to Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut despite all the laughs from the opening credits to when Eleanor Morgenstein (Squibb) turns out the night-light.
Before long you might squirm with laughter at references to the Holocaust, but memories of it steer the plot when we learn that Eleanor had been an inseparable companion to a Holocaust survivor who passed away before the film begins.
All the comedy serves as disguise; Eleanor the Great is about how we deal with grief.
To tell you what Eleanor does would be to spoil most, if not all, of Johansson’s deft surprises. To avoid that, I’ll say only that it catches the attention of a novice journalist, Nina, played by Erin Kellyman, which, in turn, catches the attention of veteran journalist Roger, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Roger hosts one of NYC’s most popular TV news-shows, New York Fabric, and is about to make Eleanor famous much to the dismay of Erin who has learned something after the fact. Their story becomes as central to the film as Eleanor’s when we consider that they are father and daughter, both dealing with a heavy, recent loss of their own. The humane professionalism of both offsets the antics of what most critics call “the witty, proudly troublesome” Eleanor.
Most critics–and many Screening Room patrons this week– have called the film surprising. As surprised as anyone, I tried to think of a film to which it might be compared–a film about which you could say, “If you liked Eleanor, you might also like ________.”
Of course, if you’re a fan of the nonagenarian June Squibb, there’s her breakout hit. As an octogenarian, she stole the opening scenes of the show with a supporting role in the little-noticed but superbly crafted indy film, Nebraska (2013). And she could have been auditioning for the role of Mr. Magoo’s soulmate in the title role of the wild and wacky Thelma (2024).
As for the tone and feel of the film, however, the only comparison my memory offers to Eleanor the Great is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) in which an aging Joan Plowright, also in the title role, also tells a story that may be called wrong, but is her way of making things right.
Like Eleanor, and like Roger and Erin, Mrs. Palfrey was also dealing with grief.
Can’t think of a film that took and shook me by surprise any more than The Life of Chuck, based on a Steven King story, now playing in cinemas everywhere.
In recent years, perhaps Don’t Look Up, and if I may reach into the past, I’ll include 1995’s Dolores Claiborne, also a child of King’s imagination, an older sister to The Life of Chuck.
Chuck is also a riff on Walt Whitman’s “I am vast, I contain multitudes.” That line from Song of Myself plays a leitmotif through three acts offered in reverse order. Unsung are any lines from John Donne’s “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” but Chuck rings those bells as clearly as it sings of multitudes.
Act Three opens the film with an environmentally plausible horror story, while Act Two is titled “Buskers Forever.” I should probably recuse myself from a review a film in which busking is so prominent, but not before I recommend the dance scene featuring Tom Hiddleston (the oldest of four actors cast as Charles Krantz at different ages) and Annalise Basso as Janice Halliday, one of a dozen compelling characters who appear in just one or two scenes that make Chuck a film you’ll want to see a second time.
Another reason: Chuck is genre-bending puzzle that all falls into place at the end in Act One. I’ll quit the description here rather than invoke a spoiler alert. But I will mention that the narration by Nick Offerman, mesmerizing and at times hilarious from start to finish, is something you’ll be hearing for a day or two after.
To sum up The Life of Chuck, nothing I could say could match the lilting Celtic (and Renaissance faire) favorite, “The Parting Glass” that plays during end credits. Summed up not just by the lyrics, but by the warmth with which Gregory Alan Isakov sings and strums it.
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The Life of Chuck plays at The Newburyport Screening Room through Thursday, July 3, each day at 4:15 pm.
A long time fan of the actress Julianne Moore, I’m stunned to learn that her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, has been banned from schools run by the US Department of Defense for the children of enlisted men and women in America’s armed services.
Of course, I soon remembered that our new Commander in Chief is America’s first dictator, a reckless buffoon whose supporters are so gullible, so paranoid, so intolerant of those who don’t resemble them in appearance, thought, and action, that the idea of a mixed-colored face and day-glow hair must seem a dire threat.
Or it may have been another edict from the dictator himself, afraid that the color strawberry might upstage orange. Or one of his lackeys reacted to the name of the actress and thought that Boogie Nights, Far from Heaven, and The Big Lebowski were about to be screened for third-graders.
Maybe the lackey heard that her current role is in Spanish Director Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door. The Screening Room is already showing the trailer and, though I don’t know for sure, it does appear that Moore’s character is involved in, as the promos put it, “a strangely sweet situation” with the character played by Tilda Swinton. Can’t risk that, whatever that is.
To be honest, it did surprise me to learn that Moore had written a children’s book. But I myself play happy little jigs and maudlin versions of “Greensleeves” at a Renaissance faire when not calling for the heads of Newburyport’s mayor and city council president in the local paper, so it’s not that much of a stretch.
Ironically, as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, Moore graduated from the American High School in Frankfurt, Germany, run by DoD. Now, she’s left wondering why “kids like me… will not have access to a book written by someone whose life experience is so similar to their own.”
Let’s pick our way through the book’s synopsis to see if we can find clues why it has been banned by a government bound by a Constitutional right of all citizens to free speech:
If you have freckles, you can try these things:
Ah, right away we have an inducement for children to act without first consulting their parents!
1) Make them go away. Unless scrubbing doesn’t work.
And now she’s giving what amounts to medical advice! She’s not a doctor, nor has she played one in any film I’ve seen. And I’m a projectionist, mind you! Let’s get RFK Jr. to worm his way in here and make an official medical ruling!
2) Cover them up. Unless your mom yells at you for using a marker.
See! I told you! She’s anti-parent, anti-family! And if she wants kids to cover up freckles, what’s next, their genitals? This book is looking more and more like a gateway drug to transgender procedures!
3) Disappear.
And now she’s telling them to run away from home. Who the hell does she think she is? The Pied Piper? She blasphemes my ancestor! I’d never tell kids to disappear. Well, not all of them, but you know…
Um, where’d you go?
Oh, there you are.
Oh, now she wants to play dumb! Best leave that act to our new dictator. Ever notice how often he begins an answer to a thorny question with “I haven’t seen it” or “I don’t know her” or “Some people say” or some such dodge that allows him to make a point or float an idea without taking any responsibility for its veracity? He has mastered playing dumb. Moore can only act the part.
There’s one other thing you can do:
4) LIVE WITH THEM!
And now she’s yelling ALL CAPS at American children! Child abuse!
Because after all, the things that make you different also make you YOU.
And there it is! This is America where we only say that we value difference. In truth, it’s just another word for “diversity,” which leads to “equity” and “inclusion.” All the things that drove up the price of eggs, flooded North Carolina, burned Los Angeles, and are now making airplanes fall out of the sky!
No more of that! This is the “land of the free and the home of the brave”–free of strawberry, whatever she means by that, and home of blood red, pure white, and true blue!
In the supermarket today, a woman stopped me to ask how the film currently playing at the Screening Room has been doing.
This is common, but today’s inquiry came with a serious tone and an expression of worry which made me think for a moment that she was asking about my hospital stay the previous week. I had to snap out of it:
“Fairly well, I’d say, considering that it’s three and a half hours.”
Make that 3:45, with the built-in 15-minute intermission. The Brutalist is the first film I’ve ever shown with an intermission in my 27 years as a projectionist.
“Glad to hear it!” Smiling, she tapped my shoulder and went on her way.
Maybe she was concerned that such a long film might put Newburyport’s cherished, quirky little cinema out of business, but it’s more likely she was relieved to hear that people were willing to absorb that long a tail of immigration and fleeing the Holocaust.
That much can be gleaned from the ads. But few realize that “brutalist” is an architectural term for a movement that reached America soon after World War II. The style is heavy on concrete blocks and the exposure of natural, raw materials with geometric shapes rather than any decorative design. Best known example in New England is Boston City Hall.
I had forgotten it, even though I always took visitors to see an invigorating and somehow charming example during the two years I lived in North Dakota. Just south of Bismarck on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, Mary College (now the University of Mary) was a must-see. Tellingly, Mary’s website proudly describes the architecture–without the word “brutal.” As another former Bismarcker just wrote me, “I have fond memories of exploring Mary College. It always seemed as if it had been deserted.”
Yes, it’s inspiring while at the same time putting us in our place. So, too, is the film which seems to fly by more quickly than many two-hour flicks. An intoxicating soundtrack and score sure help. By the time the break arrives, it’s more like a 15-minute intrusion than intermission.
Reminds me of There Will Be Blood, in which the Daniel Day Lewis character is a composite of oil prospectors in Texas in the 19th Century, and Martin Eden, in which the title character is Jack London’s fictionalized version of himself.
Adrien Brody’s performance is as convincing as that of Day Lewis, and the character appears be a composite of two Hungarian architects from the Bauhaus School. “Laszlo Toth” surely owes his high temper to Erno Goldfinger who lived and worked in England after fleeing the Nazis in 1934. But the primary model is Marcel Breuer who fled to the USA in 1937 and whose buildings–many of them churches and synagogues–are easy to find in Pennsylvania where the film is set, as well as in Connecticut. He also designed, as I used to tell visitors to Bismarck, Mary College.
There’s been confusion about this. Is it a true story? Was there a Laszlo Toth? If you can accept “historical fiction” as a classification of books, then yes, this is history told as drama with dialogue filled in to make sense of what we know happened. From Shakespeare’s histories to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and BlackKklansman, it’s a time-honored form. The Brutalist‘s architectural story is certainly true. What complicates such talk of this film is that, yes, there was a Laszlo Toth.
Unfortunately, Toth was the Hungarian geologist who, after declaring that he was Jesus Christ, vandalized The Pieta with one of his little hammers in 1972. He spent two years in an asylum before disappearing into obscurity. Is this a director’s inside joke, a brutal clash of art?
There’s a parallel for this. Remember Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino? Eastwood played a character named “Walter Kowalski,” same name as a celebrated wrestler in the 1950s-early-60s who went by “Killer Kowalski,” a favorite son of Detroit, same city where Torino is set.
And then there’s the sculptor Peter Wolf Toth, likely a cousin, possibly a nephew, also from Hungary, who landed in Akron, Ohio, before traveling to every American state and Canadian province to create the Trail of the Whispering Giants. When I tracked him down in Ontario in the mid-80s, with a very tall Iroquois just beginning to emerge from a tree trunk, he seemed leery of me for a good fifteen minutes before opening up.
In retrospect, I wonder if he thought I might ask about Laszlo. More than that, I wonder what he thinks of the name’s selection for this film. Then again, the woman in the supermarket never asked about the character’s identity.
What matters is that such stories, no matter how uncomfortable, be told. And that there be places to see and hear them.
In the summer of the year I turned nine, the name “Patrice Lumumba” came from a faraway place that had nothing to do with anything my friends or I cared about. But it was fun to say, and say it we did.
The year was 1960, and news on the networks and front pages of newspapers made the name unavoidable. Safe to say that all of us–parents too–heard Lumumba always described as a communist, and that was all we needed to know. He was a bad guy, and so we did not care at all when he was executed after just six months as the first Prime Minister of a Congo Republic he helped free from colonial rule.
Nor did we hear much jazz unless you count Desi Arnaz’ Cuban rhumba on I Love Lucy. But the word itself was intriguing: That’s a jazzy shirt you got on! Or, His brother jazzed up his car. Or, describing a stylish play on a basketball court: That was jazz, man! As if it, too, came from a faraway place but with an allure that had everything to do with what we hoped for.
Add those two subjects, and you get:
History with a Pulse
The new documentary, Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat, doesn’t simply explain both, it combines them. Call it history told in jazz, or American music played by global politics, there is no other film I know of that is anything like it.*
The rise and fall of Lumumba in the Congo serves as a foreground story, but the film covers–and the music plays–colonial struggles around the globe as well as the odd controversy in NYC between the United Nations and Harlem when the young new ruler of a newly independent Cuba made a trip across town to chat with Malcolm X.
When Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe on a UN table, you might wonder if he’s adding percussion to Duke Ellington’s Orchestra–even though you’ve already heard him on tape saying he can’t stand jazz.
Something else we never knew in 1960: The American wire services–Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters–agreed that photos of anyone deemed a communist by the American State Dept. would always show them scowling in anger, preferably with a stabbing finger. That list included Martin Luther King as well as Malcolm X, Castro, and Khrushchev. Reminds me of the stereotype of jazz held by those who think it’s all dissonance and unapproachable. In Soundtrack, they all show the full range of, well, the soundtrack.
A photo of a broadly smiling Lumumba, waving at the camera from the backseat of a car? American papers would have been quicker to publish pornography in 1960.
Also prominent are Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Thelonious Monk and others that toured Africa–and that the Eisenhower Admin tried to use to gain intelligence. While Khrushchev, Castro, Malcolm X, Lumumba and others railed against colonialism, the US “abstained” when it came to a UN vote. You hear the railing in the music. As for the abstention, Dizzy will make you dizzy.
Dennis Ade Peter, writing for an on-line magazine, OkayAfrica, nails it:
Lumumba’s murder is central to [Director Johan] Grimonprez’s documentary film, but it’s much more than that. Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat is a sprawling, masterful interweave of colonial cruelty, western callousness towards Africa, the singular power of music as an amplifier, the unparalleled strength and unspeakable suffering of women when everything goes awry, and the lasting, definitive impact of a failed revolution. It’s a gripping historical treatise with a distinct pulse.
Lumumba and his movement ridded Congo of the Belgians, but the mining interests and the rich uranium deposits remained. And while America’s kindly Pres. Eisenhower was publicly proclaiming Congo’s right to independence, what he was saying in private was more in tune with the Belgian mining company as well as American arms manufacturers who needed the Congo’s uranium. Much of which would be dropped on another colony seeking independence–Vietnam.
The film ends with Lumumba’s death, and so it spares us the mysterious death on UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold nine months later in a plane shot down over nearby then-Rhodesia, now Zambia. But it reminds us that, like jazz, the corporate demand for uranium plays on. Why else would it flash an array of colorful mobile devices for an instant among so much black and white archival footage?
As for colonialism, it was just twelve years ago that Newt Gingrich ran for president accusing Barack Obama of being “anti-colonial.” Call it his version of “Make America Great Again.” It was as if the Declaration of Independence came from a faraway place that had nothing to do with We the People.
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*My first rule of writing a film review: Name other films that are somewhat like it. I can’t, although some feature films have soundtracks that describe the setting as much as does the camera. In the film I recently reviewed, A Real Pain, Chopin plays Poland. But the film that first comes to mind is Nebraska, a delightfully quirky but moving art-house hit in 2013, accompanied by a Tejano soundtrack, a fusion of Mexican and Eastern European sounds that began on the Plains over a century ago.
While we prepare for the holidays, Hollywood, as always will release the big-budget, star-studded films that open with Oscar-buzz.
For years you have surely noticed how many open on Christmas Day and wondered why theaters would target a day associated with family gatherings. The logic is rather simple. The industry figures that most of those families gather on Christmas Eve for dinner and song and good cheer, followed by breakfast and opening of presents on the morning of the day itself, and then there’s lunch. The logic holds that, after lunch on the 25th, people are now getting tired of each other, but it’s Christmas and they want to stay together without having to listen and respond to each other. Plus, there’s a lot of good food and drink remaining to put on that dinner table. What could fill that void better than a movie?
This year it’s a biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, that figures to meet that need by opening on Christmas Day.
From another angle, it’s saving the best for last. Or, more to the point, making Hollywood’s best efforts fresh in our minds by qualifying for a year’s Oscars in the final week of that year. This also guarantees that most of their audiences will see these films in the first two months of the next year, which takes us right to the time of the Oscar awards ceremony.
If you ever wondered why you and so many others haven’t been able to see most of the nominees before the list is announced, or even before the winner is picked, this is why.
With apologies for that, it is also why I do see most of them before a ceremony. Some, especially the hyped-up block-busters based on spectacle and fantasy, such as Wicked and Gladiator, are films that I avoid. Easy to do because they are never on the Screening Room’s menu. As for the rest, let’s just say that I’m no fan of special effects, car chases, explosives, or slackers. In a category all its own are films with F-bombs punctuating every phrase in every sentence. No, I’m not a prude, but in this case I have to say, “Fuck that!”
Last month, the Screening Room ran Anora about a sex-worker who may or may not have gotten married in one of those Las Vegas “chapels.” More accurate title would have been Annoyingra. While in the lobby that first night, I was thinking that if you took out the obscenities and the screaming, you’d have a silent film which might be called Somewhat Less But Still Annoyingra. Unable to kill the sound–which would have improved the film but prompted an audience rebellion–I, for the first time ever since becoming an SR projectionist in 1998, actually considered calling in sick. But I must admit that audiences, including men and women my age and older, praised it.
Last year, all ten nominees for Best Picture played the Screening Room. I saw them all, most of them more than once, and told anyone who would listen that all ten were worthy of the award.
Nominations are at least a month away, but I’m quite certain I have seen at least four films that will be on the list for the top award. All four are worthy. My last blog reviewed A Real Pain. Only reason I reviewed that but not Lee or Conclave or Small Things Like These is that I wasn’t able to view them until the end of their Screening Room run. Here’s three short reviews:
Academy members may pick Small Things because the story is told more visually than in dialogue, and because it is two stories. In the foreground we have a man paralyzed by his conscience and struggling to act, while in the background we see and hear scenes from Ireland’s infamous Magadeline Laundries that turned “fallen women” into slaves for three centuries ending just 30 years ago. At times, we overhear the horror even when it’s out of view, a device that made last year’s German film, The Zone of Interest, a contender.
Conclave, a thriller from start to finish, fast-paced despite its contemplative setting, will gain the votes of Academy members who favor plot twists, MacGuffins, and superb ensemble acting. Ralph Fiennes will likely gain a nomination for Best Actor, as will Cillian Murphy for Small Things and Keiran Culkin for Real Pain. That’s already a heady line-up, and we have yet to see Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Also recommending Conclave are its parallels to the political, social, and cultural turmoil now erupting around the globe.
My favorite to date is Lee. This was Kate Winslet’s project from the start, and she finished it with a tour de force performance that ranks with the best of Frances McDormand. Really a dual performance portraying the very real Lee Miller as an older woman in the late ’70s and as a young American photo-journalist who broke gender barriers in Berlin 1944-45. Her scenes under bombardment and in the line of fire are memorable enough, but what sticks more than any are her feuds with editors who, while they want to get the story out, do not want to risk upsetting their readers too much.
Lee (Winslet) grabs her graphic photos of victims at a concentration camp: “And what about them! What about upsetting them!”
This week I heard that echoed in Real Pain when Benji cries, “Why does everyone have to be happy all the time?” The same statement describes the dilemmas faced by the coal merchant (Murphy) in Small Things and by cardinals Lawrence (Fiennes) and Bellini (Tucci) in Conclave. Whether mere coincidence or not, it’s spot on that these leading contenders for Oscars all pit the call of conscience against the love of ease. Each of these four films mirrors us, insisting that we answer a question:
For the sake of what is right, for the sake of truth, are we willing to upset the comfortable? Are we willing to upset ourselves?
Mouth of the River 