SEAN BAKER'S (AND MIKEY MADISON'S) ANORA

 

Way back in May it was that Patty, Emma and I drove to the SEE Film Multiplex in Bremerton to take in I Saw the TV Glow, and while there I took a pic and linked the theater to it here on FB. A couple days later I got a message from the theater thanking me for talking about the theater and the movie, and as an expression of that thanks they gave me two Golden Tickets good for free admission the next time I paid a visit. Well, it’s taken me six months to get back there, but I finally did today and, by cracky, those Golden Tickets were waiting for me just like the theater had promised. So, I used one (1) to treat myself this afternoon to the latest from writer-director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project), the Palme D’Or-winning Anora, with the second ticket still waiting in the wings for when the time is next right.

Depending on the degree of male and/or female gaze operating behind the viewer’s eyes, Anora has what has to be described as a captivating opening title sequence, introducing the title character (as played by Mikey Madison, strikingly alert and engaging) and her colleagues in their strip club’s neon-soaked environs. The sequence might just be a jolt to some viewers not necessarily because of the (nonjudgmental) depiction of those sex workers hard at their labors, but because three minutes into the movie those viewers may also notice they are watching that rarity in American film, a movie which features what was once if not a staple on the movie landscape, then at least something about which not to be afraid— actual nudity and sex, delivered with a soupçon of joy, freshness, frankness and abandon, and without a moralizing lesson attached This is writer-director Sean Baker’s M.O., even, as it turns out, when the idyll goes bad.

Anora, or Ani as she prefers, knows a bit of Russian and is directed toward Vanya, a young, callow high roller who has landed in the club with wads of cash to burn and a desire to meet someone who speaks his native language. The two unexpectedly connect on an emotional level to compliment their rowdy yet somehow tender physical one, and soon, during a whirlwind trip to Vegas with a group of friends (all of whom are happy to cut loose and party on Vanya’s seemingly endless dimes), Vanya proposes marriage and he and Ani soon find themselves proclaimed man and wife at the front of one of the city’s express wedding chapels, where Ani giddily pronounces that their union will last forever.

But in a fairy tale like this one (the Cinderella motif is openly acknowledged early on), wedded bliss is, as it turns out, short-lived. Vanya’s parents, well-heeled and extremely impatient Russian capitalists who want him to return home to start work in the family company, are not happy to get the news and soon send a couple of their goons to get the marriage annulled and make sure Ani, who Mom and Dad assume is an opportunistic hooker set on taking advantage of their irresponsible son and laying claim to half the family business fortune, is unceremoniously sent on her way.

At this point I found myself marveling that I was at all engaged in the adventures of such a group of hedonistic, wealth-obsessed young punks, folks whose company I would not likely seek out in real life nor who would likely welcome me into their company. And that unlikely empathy, combined with the aforementioned nonjudgmental attitude, turns out to be Baker’s secret weapon. Suspicion about Vanya is warranted right away, but Baker keeps it at bay through his lively actors, whose motivations seem to be all right there on the surface. If we don’t quite believe this kid’s engagement in their relationship—the Vegas getaway is set up by his blithely paying Ani $15,000 to be “exclusive” to him for the week—there’s little doubt, the way Madison dives into the character, that as seduced by Vanya’s opulent surroundings and obvious access of lots of money as she may be, she’s also in it because she’s starting to love this guy, and believe he loves her too, and she hardly allows herself a moment’s doubt about it.

Which is why, when the goons arrive (Armenians, as Vanya sarcastically observes) and Vanya, rather than defend his love or her honor, saves his own ass (for the moment) and leaves her behind with them, the movie’s emotional charge deepens as Ani continues to defend not only the legality of their marriage to these cretins who would see it annulled, but also the veracity of their mutual love. Ani may undeniably be in it for Vanya’s money, but she’s also there for his heart, a commitment the movie wisely refrains from expounding upon as her passport to a life where she imagines she might be appreciated for herself, not just for what she does. That emotional depth is there even though Baker lets this midsection of the movie sag when it should snap; in the long sequence during which Ani is subdued and made to accompany these goons on an increasingly desperate search for the runaway Vanya—they need to find him before Mom and Dad arrive on the private jet from the old country and demand satisfaction—Baker trades in his Demme-esque empathies for a queasy relentlessness that more resembles Safdie Brothers lite, albeit thankfully minus the apocalyptic dread of something like Uncut Gems. But later, during this long, cold night of seemingly pointless pursuit, one of the goons offers a freezing Ani the comfort of a scarf earlier used to bind and gag her, she accepts, we remember his earlier silent, seemingly sympathetic regard for her, and Baker, like letting loose a breath he’d been holding for too long, effortlessly ushers in an overwhelming and quite unexpected third act which mainlines the Demme influence that had really only been hinted at before.

Buoyed by a star-making performance from Madison (it’s her and Lea Seydoux in The Beast at the top of my list of female performances of 2024) and the residual buzz from the movie’s tender, startling ending, Anora lives up to the description one friend of mine made of it as “the screwball comedy of the year.” Baker’s movie, his best as far as I have seen, offers the pleasures of refashioning that beloved genre more in the mold of Something Wild rather than the endless rom-coms which have more obviously been designed  to co-opt it over the past 30 or 40 years, and it sent me out of the theater on a melancholy high the likes of which I haven’t experienced since seeing Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth in 2015. Every song I listened to on the way home, from Emmylou Harris to Thin Lizzy to Wayne Shorter, seemed to be accessing elements of Baker’s big-hearted beauty (Ani and the movie) in ways that almost seemed supernatural, as if the movie had opened up the world in a way I couldn’t have been anticipated, and it made me want to know more about the characters with whom we find ourselves at that final cut to black. Yet there’s no way I’d trade the feeling the movie left me with, and how that emotion has managed to linger, for the cheap satisfaction of an unnecessary sequel which probably wouldn’t stand comparison with the original anyway. Sublimely earned, the tears Baker leaves us with as the lights fade on Anora are better savored as memories.

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) at 50

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974; Tobe Hooper) never showed in my hometown when it was released in 1974. The closest it ever came was a hundred miles away at the Tower Theater in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on a Bryanston Pictures double bill with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon. My cousin saw that double bill and told me stories of how TTCM was so intense that he wanted to join the few who couldn’t handle it and flee the theater. He didn’t, though. He stayed to the horrifying end. His stories of that screening gave me nightmares and made me imagine it would be too much for me to ever see it for myself. 

In fact, I never even got a chance to until three years later, when I screwed up the courage to catch it on a double with Sergio Martino’s Torso (1973) at the West 11th Drive-in in Eugene, Oregon. I’ve seen it in drive-ins three or four times since, and countless times either in theaters or on home video formats, and I’ve come to think of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as probably the scariest movie I ever seen, certainly a masterpiece, perhaps even one of my two three favorite horror films, period.

And it’s never been as scary as it was seeing it the weekend before Halloween, at the Wheel-In Motor Movie here in Port Townsend, a unique venue to my experience, one enclosed on all sides by dark, moody forest and unspoiled by intruding noise from nearby highways or light pollution from off-property sources.

Experiencing Franklin and Sally Hardesty’s trudging through the brush after dark, Franklin’s horrifying murder at the whirring, raging blades of Leatherface’s saw, and then the nightmarish chase through the woods as Sally flees toward even more abject terror, all backed by the trees enveloping and rising above the screen itself, made for an absolutely providential match (or the opposite of providence) of film setting and theatre setting which created a disorienting sort of melding of the two that made the sequence, and the rest of the film, even that much more intense, closely approaching the effect the movie had the first time I saw it. 

The 50^th-anniversary restoration of picture and sound was brilliant as well; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has never looked so good as it did on the Wheel-In’s eerie- forest-enclosed screen, so clear and yet still in complete possession of the raw, unpolished visual power it has always had. And the sound was mixed so well as to fool both my daughter and I into thinking footsteps heard outside the filing station/barbecue joint where Sally seeks and fails to find help were those of someone approaching our car from the outside, perhaps someone ready to pull the cord on a gas-powered weapon of their own.

It’s really rare for a movie to retain as much of its original power 50 years down the line as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has, and it was a great privilege to be worked over by it in such a setting. That pre-Halloween screening definitely won’t be my last run-n with this movie in my lifetime, but I can’t imagine ever being lucky enough to see it exhibited to such overpowering effect as Nonie and I did tonight. Bravo, Wheel-In Motor Movie, and thank you!

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RELIGION AND POLITICS: HERETIC (2024) and CONCLAVE (2024)

 

Unlike Barbarian, Cuckoo, Longlegs and even Alien: Romulus, the startlingly effective Heretic is in the game not for the shocks (though there are a couple of really good ones) or gore or reassuring genre fans with familiar tropes and recycled stories. No, Heretic understands and revels in the queasy pleasures of slow-burn suspense, and, unlike those disappointments mentioned above, it actually does not become less interesting in proportion to the amount of information which slowly becomes clear as the movie moves to its satisfying conclusion. 

And finally, unlike those other movies, it is unapologetically a horror movie based on ideas; the film lays the foundations of its standoff between two Mormon missionaries and the simultaneously accommodating and intimidating subject of their witness (Hugh Grant, maximizing his talent at instantaneously shifting between and exposing gradations of unctuousness and menace) in terms of, of all things, theological debate and inquiry— perhaps not the most tantalizing come-on to sensation-seeking audiences, but once the movie gets its hooks in you (which doesn’t take long, thanks to the appealing performances of Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher as the missionaries) it’s hard to look away, and also sometimes hard to breathe. 

Writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who wrote A Quiet Place) have confidence in their concept and they know how to use Panavision-sized close-ups better than just about anyone since the Brian De Palma of Dressed to Kill and Blow Out— getting this close to Grant in particular would probably be no one’s first choice, but the strategy yields almost unbearably tense results as the narrative begins to bear down on the missionaries and the audience. 

And no one would likely ever guess that a horror thriller centered around characters for whom the evolution of religious and mythological history actually seem to mean something would be anything much more than a dry misfire. But the power Heretic derives from that framework is about as improbable a development in the horror genre as any that has come around the pike in a good, long while, and it finds a way to terrify and satisfy its audience in a way that none of those aforementioned (and acclaimed) pictures ever managed to do. Finally, it ought to undermine the comforting scent of blueberry pie for a generation or so to come. See it on the big screen if you can.

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Conclave, directed by Edward Berger, may seem like it could be nothing but a slog based on its subject matter, but trust me, it’s not a dry dud on the order of the 1968 film made from Morris West’s novel The Shoes of the Fisherman.— this new drama is about as absorbing and compelling a movie as I’ve seen this year and it doesn’t have an overcooked, histrionic scene in it. Ralph Fiennes is a cardinal whose lack of ambition presiding over the Vatican election of a new pope to replace the recently deceased Infallible One will not keep him out of the running, whether he likes it or not, and no matter what others in the running may or may not do to keep him in or out of the contest.

As sociopolitical allegories go, Conclave isn’t subtle— it all but declares its intentions about halfway through, if you haven’t figured it out yet. (“It‘s like we’re at an American political convention,” one incredulous cardinal decries to no one’s great surprise.) But it doesn’t necessarily need to be. Writer-director Edward Berger’s storytelling instincts serve him far better than they did in his overblown Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front from a couple years ago— here he displays an almost eerie confidence without relying on insisting on his authority over the narrative, and the result is a movie that is almost sinfully watchable.

And to that end, he’s got a great stable of actors to complement Fiennes and himself in Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucien Msamati, Sergio Castellito, Carlos Diehz, Jacek Koman and, perhaps most welcome of all, Isabella Rossellini, who holds the screen with Fiennes and Tucci despite not having a number of strong scenes in which do so. Go in cold, as I did (I’d only seen the solid trailer, which sets up the tone and interest but gives little away), and even if you’ve never set foot in a Catholic church I predict you’ll cave for Conclave.

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BURN AFTER READING (2008) REVISITED

When I saw it in its original theatrical release back in 2008, I thought Burn After Reading was brutally hilarious— as far as I could tell, though, the general reaction was less enthusiastic. Yet speaking as a fan who has never warmed to The Hudsucker Proxy (a movie frequently cited when one wants to find a red-headed bastard stepchild among their filmography to champion), it’s one of the Coen Brothers’ movies I think is most underrated and one I find myself regularly returning to. 

I’m watching Burn After Reading again tonight (11/15/24), after the past week and a half of fear and loathing and anxiety and watching a seemingly endless roster of idiots and toadies ponying up to take up space in a clown car careening toward a spectacular crash into the next presidential cabinet, and I suspect that it’s a movie that is just going to seem sharper, more astringent with impending age. As Frank Zappa said in 1981, assessing the population’s predilection for being fleeced by evangelists whose credentials as certifiable con men and women were more than obvious to those not tithing under their sway, “Dumb all over/ Yes, we are/ Dumb all over/ Near and far/ Dumb all over/ Black and white/ People, we is not wrapped tight.” Burn After Reading is nothing if not an accurate reflection, from 16 years ago (when some took it to be overly cynical and even a bit sour), of just how deep, and how dangerous, that dumb goes. 

And really, as an avatar for our age of unenlightenment, Brad Pitt’s inspired turn as an intellectually translucent gym trainer who thinks he’s way brighter than he turns out to be, reveals this as the performance for which he more credibly should have won an Oscar.

Here's the link to my original piece on Burn After Reading, dated September 25, 2008.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES (11/2021): 1941, FOR JII-JII

 

We laid my father-in-law to rest three years ago this month, and I am reminded of something that happened just a few months before we lost him. Jii-Jii was a US World War II veteran *and* an internment camp survivor (think on that one for a bit), so I’d always approached showing him one of my favorite movies, 1941, with understandable trepidation. It’s not a movie that denigrates the Japanese, even as it satirizes and depicts some of the ways that the Japanese (the army, anyway) were denigrated by patriotic Americans at the time. Even so, I wasn’t sure how he would respond, or if he’d even be interested in seeing it. Well, a few months ago, when he was still feeling well enough, we had both Mommy and Daddy over to the house and I felt like the time was finally right. So we fired up my 1941 Blu-ray, and darned if they didn’t both love it. On the ride home he just kept saying, “Boy, that was one crazy movie!” and laughing at my stories of the multiple times I’d seen it and how, no matter how low I am at any given moment, it always cheers me up, gives me hope, makes me look at the world a little differently. It’s entirely probable that 1941 was the last movie Jii-Jii ever saw, and given that it made him laugh so much I couldn’t be happier that it was.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES (11/15/20): FRANCESCO ROSI'S CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (1979)

 

I’m currently 64 years old, and though I still have an alarming collection of blind spots in my experience,  I have seen a lot of movies in just over 23,000 spent days. But back in November 2020, on a quiet Saturday night, I erased one of those blind spots and replaced it with a vision of clarity that was, to me, quite unexpected. 

Around 8:45 p.m. I started looking at the new Criterion Blu-ray of the uncut, original four-part, four-hour presentation of Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), based on Carlo Levi’s memoir of his political exile in a remote village in pre-WWII Southern Italy, a time defined and scarred by Mussolini and that fascist regime’s  attempt to impose a new colonial presence in Abyssinia, now known as Ethiopia. It had been a long day the day before, and by the evening I was plenty tired— I figured I’d just dip into the disc and take a look at how it looked, with no expectation of actually watching it, and certainly not getting any further than an hour or so before drifting into unconsciousness.

But the alchemy of the movies is a mysterious thing. From the opening images of Gian Maria Volontè as Levi, bearded, solemn, in repose and surrounded by a multitude of paintings of his own creation, to the title card “1935” imposed over a shot of a train which bears Levi to the town of Galiano, in the province of Lucania on Italy’s southern bootheel, to the slow revealing of a culture in the impoverished Galiano, people, traditions, customs and superstitions left behind in the wake of the rest of the country’s economic development and relentless political oppression, the movie’s patient gaze, its nonjudgmental approach to its characters and their environment is established immediately. 

As Levi is introduced to the various people who will expand and enrich his own dissent from the fascist establishment that has made him (and a few others in the town with whom he is not allowed to speak) a political prisoner, I found myself succumbing to its rhythms and knew after 10 or 15 minutes that I was in for the long haul. But it was hardly a chore. It is a rare thing, but that Saturday night in November 2020 I felt myself succumbing to what Rosi wanted to show me, and the way he wanted to show it, in a particular fashion that I can’t recall experiencing often in other films. There was a distinct sensation of my mind and body sinking into the imagery which, on this spectacular new Blu-ray, has a clarity and richness that promises the sort of seduction few movies are capable of fulfilling. 

I spent four hours seeing the world of these Italian peasants, who for Mussolini and his enforcers existed simply as subjects and fodder for war, through Levi’s (and Rosi’s) eyes, feeling my way toward an understanding that would, like it would for Levi, I suspect, remain just out of reach while also changing his life forever. In my own way, I feel like seeing Christ Stopped at Eboli has been a life-changing experience, one that contained within it the possibility of a genuine expansion of perspective, of yielding to a way of seeing the world that already, just 12 hours later, felt like it was in there tinkering with my synapses, becoming an essential part of the blood flowing through my veins. The movie, a giant vision of humanity, began expanding inside my head that night, and four years later I’m beginning to reflect on the ways it had seemingly helped equip me for the new reality America and the world are facing in 2024.

At 60 years old I certainly didn’t expect, sitting by myself on a quiet Saturday night, to discover a relatively less-well-known film that deserves consideration as one of the greatest I’ve ever seen. But that’s what happened. Christ Stopped at Eboli is surely a landmark in this old man’s continuing experience of education about life and the movies, and I cannot wait to see it again. And now, at age 64, that time may be coming again very soon indeed.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES (11/16/13): IF YOU COULD ONLY COOK and THE LAST ACTION HERO

 

Woke up feeling kinda crummy this morning-- first inklings of a winter cold to go along with the delightfully gloomy weather outside today (the weatherbots on local news assure me all will be back to sunny normality early this week). All I felt like doing was (surprise!) watching movies, so I wrapped up in a blankie and started in on the DVR queue. First up was If You Could Cook (1935), a charming romantic comedy (it didn't seem screwy enough for the "screwball" label, in my view anyway) starring Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur as a disgruntled auto magnate and a down-on-her-luck bench warmer who conspire to get jobs as the butler and cook for an Eye-talian mobster (Leo Carillo). The movie was apparently falsely promoted (according to Leonard Maltin's book) as a Frank Capra joint-- right down to bogus credits in some European markets-- to capitalize on the director's popularity at the time. But as directed by William A. Seiter it stands on its own just fine, with plenty of laughs, surprisingly spiky chemistry between the two leads and a cheerfully cranky supporting turn by Lionel Stander as the mob boss's second in command.

 

I followed up with The Last Action Hero (1993; John McTiernan)-- a 20-year-old relic from a not-all-*that*-different age, which I'd never sat down and watched before. I'll admit I was hoping for a "Misunderstood Masterpiece" sort of revelation, or at least the sort of "Gee-it-ain't-as-bad-as-advertised" moment like the one I experienced with Hudson Hawk a couple of years earlier. Well, forget about "Misunderstood Masterpiece," and it really isn't so bad as to warrant the level of embarrassment it registered for Schwarzenegger and Columbia when it came out-- I remember an awful lot of hand-wringing and pointing of fingers and very impatient reviews (no studio execs flinging themselves from tall buildings, however). But neither is it as clever as it seems to think it is, nor as nimble as a spry, self-aware genre parody should be. Frankly, this deliberately unsubtle picture might have been helped by a better performance by the kid in the lead-- Austin O'Brien isn't exactly Jake Lloyd, but after a while he does make you want to stick him in the back seat with a comic book and threaten to turn the car around and go home if he doesn't shut up. A couple of weirdly prescient winks toward Schwarzenegger's political ambitions gave me the chills too.

The Last Action Hero is a big, loud white elephant, but it's not so much the tin-eared mess I was expecting as it is a movie that hums along with considerable energy (it gets better, briefly, when the fictional characters step into the "real" world) and seems, finally, somewhat indifferent to its own wacky premise. There are some funny jokes along the way, and a clever celebrity cameo or two, but I suspect it'll be longer than another 20 years before I ever see this one again.

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