Movie Enthusiast Issue 26: Hidden Figures, Paterson, and more end-of-2016 housekeeping
January always ends up an appendage to the previous calendar year when it comes to movies. Now that all the late-year films that opened in New York and L.A. just early enough to qualify for awards show voting deadlines are finally making their way to the rest of us, I’ve caught up on pretty much everything I wanted to see in theaters in 2016. Some thoughts:
Silence—I’ve already said just about all I have to say, for now, here. If I could add anything, it would be that Issey Ogata’s performance as the Inquisitor Inoue is an immediately legendary one. The falsetto voice, the way he compresses like an accordion in the face of Fr. Rodrigues’s obstinance—sometimes it’s what isn’t in the script that makes a character great.
Hidden Figures—Quite delightful. Possibly because I just finished reading Mark Harris’s excellent Five Came Back, an anecdote-laden history of five Hollywood directors who were tapped by the U.S. government to make propaganda films during World War II, I can’t help imagining the chapter that will be dedicated to this movie in the 50–75-years-forthcoming history of black cinema in early 21st-century America. (Recall that this movie was greenlit and rushed out the door within weeks of last year’s Oscars So White controversy.)
The hasty assembly of Hidden Figures shows most of all in its writing. Maybe another draft or two would have fixed most of my major problems. The very first scene establishes the amazing chemistry between Janelle Monae, Octavia Spencer, and Taraji P. Henson. As the film progresses, the three lead actresses are siloed off into their own individual stories and pretty much cease to interact with one another. And how needlessly! It’s clear by the final scenes that even though these women were all doing different jobs at NASA, their jobs—and their friendship—ought to have continued to inform one another’s work. Plus, you can’t just give us a wonderful first act full of female camaraderie and then take that away for the rest of the movie and expect us not to notice.
Paterson—Last week I saw someone liken this movie to Groundhog Day: “Imagine you wake up every morning and…it’s just another day!” Adam Driver plays a poetry-writing bus driver named Paterson in Paterson, New Jersey (home of William Carlos Williams, whose “This is just to say” gets the dramatic reading it deserves here). His wife, played by Golshifteh Farahani, is a whimsical creative type, who paints the house every day, dreams of opening a cupcake business, also dreams of becoming a famous guitar player, and dresses seemingly exclusively in black-and-white leftover fabric ensembles she’s assembled herself. Her endless flights of fancy nearly gave me a heart attack. I didn’t expect this movie to be an exercise in revealing precisely the kind of person I could never marry, but there you go.
So anyway the movie. Paterson is pleasant and droll and it features a lot of free verse poetry that I just didn’t think was all that great—but, in a way, that makes it okay, since part of the point of the film is that you don’t have to be a genius at whatever creative thing you do for it to be worth doing. It is, some would argue, the anti-La La Land. Also, Paterson keeps a copy of Infinite Jest on his desk at home and I’m choosing to believe it’s the exact same copy of that book that Tilda Swinton packed up in her suitcase when she went to bring books to Tom Hiddleston in Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch’s previous movie).
Articles, News, and Interviews
Barry Jenkins shares the visual inspiration behind Moonlight.
A review of the best movie fashions of 2016.
Point: La La Land is a self-aware throwback about the limits of embracing the past.
Counterpoint: La La Land plays best to people who aren’t sure if they turned the oven off before leaving the house to go see it.
Matt Zoller Seitz interviews pioneering film scholar Molly Haskell on Steven Spielberg, “male weepies,” the evolution of women’s role in Hollywood films (spoiler alert: she thinks they were better off pre-Code), and politics in film criticism: “I think you can almost feel a kind of self-censorship in a lot of the writing about film now. It’s almost obligatorily political now. It has to cover that, it has to cover the political angles, even if the reviewer might not be inclined to do so.” Boy do I ever relate to that.
Works in progress:
Certain Women director Kelly Reichardt has begun work on an adaptation of Patrick DeWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor.
If you loved The Lobster (I’m gonna keep my opinions to myself on this one…), you’re in luck: Yorgos Lanthimos will be returning sometime this year with another Colin Farrell-starring movie, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. And, if that news isn’t enough enough to whet your appetite, you’ll be seeing a lot of the Greek director around soon: he’s also working on a TV miniseries with Kirsten Dunst as a water park employee who scales the top of the pyramid scheme that ruined her life in the first place (working title: On Becoming a God in Central Florida), and he’s attached to a project about Queen Anne with Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz (Olivia Colman, better known as the HBIC in The Lobster, will be Queen Anne).
Adam McKay, director of The Big Short isn’t done mucking around with corruption and capitalism yet. He’s working on a film about Dick Cheney, to be released this year, and he’s also attached to Bad Blood, a project with Jennifer Lawrence about blood-testing startup Theranos.
Poster of the Day
In memoriam: remembering the actors, actresses, and moviemakers we lost in 2016 through movie posters.