Clearly, I need to stop claiming I’m going to double up on these per month to “catch up” and just try to stay on schedule going forward. We hade a blizzard here in Connecticut this weekend, which made it feel particularly cozy to serve tea and scones (complete with clotted cream!) for this very English tale.
Had I seen this one before?
Nope. I read the book years ago and loved it, but until now the only adaptation I had consumed was this excellent song by Taylor Swift:
(Ok, I know it’s not actually an adaptation…but she has said this song was inspired by the second Mrs. De Winter, and I can hear it.)
Top 3 observations on this viewing?
Has there ever been anyone as well cast as Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers? So creepy, so cold and menacing yet upright. Perfect.
Joan Fontaine is also well cast, but is so committed to the shakiness of her performances that, at times, it was distracting. Laurence Olivier is Olivier – charming, but distant. Seemed a little young for this role to me.
2. The pacing of this is so strange to me, the emotional core of this story is obviously Manderley, so why does it take half an hour to get there? And more grievously, why is there so much time spent at the coroner’s inquest? No one is watching this as a procedural! Stick to the emotional horror!
3. I’d only ever seen much later Hitchcock before this and it was fun to see the roots of what would become his trademarks, particularly the use of the score and the contrast of light and dark.
Wow, 1940 was quite a year! My personal Oscar would be between Grapes and Philadelphia Story, but Rebecca has a lot going for it. I think in hindsight the split Best Director to John Huston/Bust Picture to Rebecca makes sense, but the Academy probably should have given the top prize to Grapes.
Yes! Most of the conversations are about the titular Rebecca, even the conversations that are about a man are actually about a woman.
Just a woman having a totally normal conversation with her new boss about her old boss, nothing weird going on here
I had originally planned to make a traditional Cornwall dessert, but changed course to serve a lovely tea and scones, because this couple is definitely more fancy English before they are specific to any region.
I should be writing a recap of the Critics Choice Awards today, but they got postponed due to Covid concerns. (Which is obviously appropriate, but I am anxious for the season to start!) As I’ve talked about before, I will not be commenting on the Golden Globes this year.
So, instead, I spent the last week watching a bunch of movies (I’ve got almost all the Critics Choice Best Picture nominees done, just 2 left!) Here’s what I saw:
I’ve never seen the 1940s original version of this, but you can tell from every frame of the new one that Guillermo del Toro loves it. And I love a director who lays his enthusiasms out so plainly – the art deco! the lighting! (Could have done without the pickled fetuses but Guillermo loves to make it weird!)
If you’re going to take a gamble on building your movie almost completely around close ups of 3 faces, you could do a lot worse than Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. (Love the call back to when the very idea of a lady psychiatrist was an instant signal for danger.)
This is filled with great performances (David Strathairn! Toni Collette! Willem Dafoe!) and I definitely want to see the original now – which is what a good remake should inspire.
I read Hilton Als’s great piece about writer-director Rebecca Hall‘s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella what feels like a million years ago (thanks Covid), and had thought of the questions it raised about representation and identity in art often. So often in fact that I was a little worried that the movie itself would be preachy, but that was my mistake.
It’s theatrical, but not in a bad way. It’s not an easy watch, not because of its politics, which are somehow both subtler and more on the surface than I expected, but because Hall’s camera is almost unrelenting in its loyalty to the point of view of Irene (the astonishingly good Tessa Thompson in a truly vanity-free performance). Her uncertainty is felt in every shot of the film, and as it builds to anxiety and despair as it goes on, Hall takes us right along with her.
The perk of being so tied to this perspective? Getting to spend a lot of time looking at André Holland and Ruth Negga work acting miracles.
Despite what I mentioned last week, I’m not against a new movie being in black & white if it has a reason to be, and this one does. Not only because of the period, but the contrast between skin tones is highlighted in the format, foregrounding the stakes for Negga’s Claire without having any character having to stop and spell it out to us in every scene.
(Side note: Does Alexander Skarsgård tell his agent, “tell everyone I’m available to play every evil white man?}
I know I’m not breaking any ground by saying this, but – Olivia. Colman. She is so good in this that I just wracked my brain for an appropriate superlative and none of them felt grand enough. There are multiple scenes where her Leda cannot hide her pure disdain for the presence of other people in a way that felt so intensely relatable, I wanted to hide behind my couch.
I’ve never ready an Elena Ferrante, but this movie makes me want to give her a try, because it is a rare example of a story truly about a female anti-hero, who is recognizable as a woman, whose choices I don’t condone, but are made completely comprehensible to me. This is partly a feat of adaptation of course, and it is wild to me that this is Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s debut feature, because, while sometimes hard for me to watch, it is expertly crafted. And I think it may be my new go-to example of what I mean by “the female gaze.” This is a movie that captures the feeling of women looking at each other perfectly. (I can’t really explain what I mean by that just…go watch the way Dakota Johnson looks at Colman looking at her…and…you’ll get it.)
Jessie Buckley, as young Leda, who has not yet committed her cardinal sin, is as fantastic as she always is. Brief nod towards the supporting men – Paul Mescal continues to play pretty and hapless very well, Jack Farthing goes 2 for 2 this season as the almost completely silent husband about to be left, and I will forever cherish the image of Ed Harris and Olivia dancing to “Living On a Prayer.”
All I knew about this movie before pressing play was that Troy Kotsur was getting Best Supporting Actor buzz & if he gets the Oscar nomination then he will be only the second deaf actor to get the honor (the first being of course his costar here Marlee Maitlin.) I didn’t know that the movie was a remake of a French film or that CODA is an acronym for “Child of Deaf Adult.”
So, I was pleasantly surprised to find a lovely (if a bit paint-by-numbers) coming of age story about a girl (Emilia Jones) who helps her deaf dad and brother on their struggling fishing boat, but dreams of singing (and the cute boy in the choir.) It’s charming, and I cried, and the buzz for Kotsur is warranted. He’s hilarious and heart-wrenching in equal measure. A breath of a fresh air on my kind of bleak looking “still to watch” list for this season.
The only Asghar Farhadi film I had seen in its entirety before this on as The Past and I spent a big part of the day after seeing this trying to remember its plot, because I felt like I had been left with a similar feeling in my gut, but I couldn’t remember why that was.
That feeling isn’t east to describe, but its something like a justified unease. It’s clear that Farhadi uses melodrama to knock his audiences off center. The title of this might as well be in air quotes, because I don’t think that the writer-director believes in the idea of heroes.
So, this gave me a lot to think about regarding the nature of the media and altruism and the lack of space for nuance and ambiguity in the way we get told “news stories.” But I think what I will mainly remember from it is Amir Jadidi‘s face and the way he used the slope of his shoulders to convey everything we needed to know about his character. A truly virtuoso performances that deserves more recognition.
Happy new year! I’m not officially back to work until tomorrow (which of course means I’ll be going to the movies this afternoon), but I saw a bunch of great stuff over my vacation (and some stuff that is good, with caveats – I have yet to find my awards season nemesis this year! Is everything really good or have I gone soft? There’s still time I suppose.) Anyway – here’s what I’ve seen since the last post:
The original film adaptation of West Side Story has long been in my personal pantheon of favorite films, so when I saw that Steven Spielberg was making his version, I was cautiously excited. (Musicals should be remade! It’s like a cinematic revival!)
I don’t think this version will be in the pantheon going forward, but its got a lot going for it. Rachel Zegler is a wonderful, almost luminescent Maria, and Mike Faist brings a heartbreaking mix of vulnerability and menace to Riff. The changes made to the script by Tony Kushner, especially the swapping in of Rita Moreno as a truly believable Doc character, put the always gritty story back in its historical context without ever feeling overly preachy (to me.) The dancing is fantastic and I wish there had been more of it.
The real strength of this version is the way that every character feels like a human being not an archetype. Making Anybodys a trans man played by nonbinary actor iris menas* is a particularly moving example, but I also appreciated the way they fleshed out Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) into a real person.
As heavy and beautiful as the original on a story level, but visually it felt like it was being shot through a filter, but that’s basically a quibble.
*I have seen hir referenced in some articles as ezra menas, and I’m unsure which name zie prefers, so I went with the name in the credits of the film. If I am using a previous name, I apologize and will update!
I’m having trouble deciding how I feel about this one. On the one hand, I’m a sucker for a behind the scenes drama and Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem both inhabit their characters well enough that it never felt like caricature. But on the other, I’m not sure this ever fully cohered into a full story as much as Aaron Sorkin thinks it did. (There’s a lot of Sorkinesque nonsense going on here with timeline and dialogue, but that kind of works for me, so it’s OK.)
I really like the parts of this that take place on the set of “I Love Lucy” and focus on how genius Lucille Ball was at her job. (The conceit of showing her vision of how an episode will look, as they’re rehearsing, really worked for me.) And Nina Arianda‘s subplot about how hard it is to play the “ugly sidekick” – with excellent comic timing from J.K. Simmons, is done well too.
The cinematography is oddly dark, as if the creative team thought it needed to be to add gravitas, but Lucy and Desi don’t need it, and it kept taking me out of the story.
I have to confess that I watched this late on Christmas after a larger than anticipated martini, so during some parts my attention wavered, which other than the fact of the quietness of some sequences, can’t really be blamed on the film itself.
That being said – Alana Haim is a star and she has an openness of expression in this that was almost astounding at moments. Cooper Hoffman is also great, but I found the tone of his character kind of confounding. Hoffman has a fantastic charisma, despite his unconventional-for-Hollywood look, and so I bought his character’s supreme confidence, but I expected the movie to, in the grand tradition of both coming of age movies and the Paul Thomas Anderson films I have seen before, undercut this view of himself, but it never did. In other words, I found myself confused as to why all the adults in this movie take this 15 year old as seriously as he takes himself. (This is not a comment on the age gap between the two leads, that discourse doesn’t interest me. I actually found their connection completely believable and not creepy, it was all the other adults, who weren’t as obviously stuck as Alana is in an aimless extended adolescence, that confused me.)
That confusion aside though, there are moments of transcendence in this movie that I will be thinking about for a long time, particularly a dinner scene between Benny Safdie, as real life politician Joel Wachs, and Joseph Cross and Haim that broke my heart in three minutes flat.
I say this with the most amount of delight possible…What the fuck did I just watch? I’m not going to try to describe the plot (the closest analog I can think of is Austin Powers? Maybe mixed with a non-tragic Beaches?) It is surpremely weird, hilariously funny, and includes an extended musical sequence where Jamie Dornan sings out to heartbreak to birds, while climbing a palm tree. Also, a hermit crab named Morgan Freemond (Josh Robert Thompson) that makes fun of Driving Miss Daisy. Am I describing a fever dream or a film? I’m not actually sure, but I loved it. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are sages of female friendship, and even in this surreal world, they never lose their sweetness.
Part 2 of my Jamie Dornan double feature (where he once again breaks into only slightly explicable song.) Kenneth Branagh‘s cine-memoir of his family’s last year in Belfast before The Troubles pushed them out, this is almost more a collection of scenes than a plot. Which, is fine, some of my favorite movies are episodic, but there was a slightness to the story that I didn’t expect.
The real standouts are Caitriona Balfe, who carries her exhaustion and fear on her face in a way that feels nuanced and real, and Ciarán Hinds as the folksy grandpa with romantic and mathematical advice. Great use of the Van Morrison, weird use of the Titanic shipyard. Maybe didn’t need the black and white with pops of color.
Writer-director Mike Mills always pulls off the high wire act of telling sad stories without ever being maudlin. In this one, Joaquin Phoenix plays an NPR-type radio producer who suddenly is given charge of his nephew (Woody Norman, who is incredibly good, cute without being cloying) when his sister (the believably exhausted Gabby Hoffmann) has to go take care of her bipolar husband (Scoot McNairy) who is having an episode.
Should be bleak right? And it is, but that is tempered with Mills’s light touch and emphasis on the quiet absurdity of life. (There’s a running bit where the nephew pretends to be an orphan, and it is delightful and strange.) As you all know by now, I’m a sucker for a quiet movie about real humans and Mills is one of the best making those today, and this is a great one.
I didn’t ever finish the tweet thread that this movie is based on, because it was very long and as engaging as I found A’Ziah King, I could tell at a certain point that it was just going to make me scared and sad. And, while I did finish it, my feelings about the movie are very similar. Director Janicza Bravo makes a lot of intriguing stylistic decisions to highlight the intimacy between her two leads and the seduction between them, that I found really compelling and unique. And Taylour Paige (Zola)’s facial movements alone would compel my attention, but I felt so scared and sad for her and Riley Keough‘s Stefani that I was tense through much of expereince, even when it was supposed to be a funny scene. (I did find the interlude of Stefani’s racist narrative incredibly funny and well placed.) My issues are definitely taste issues rather than quality ones though.
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I Get a Bit Obsessive 