Movie Enthusiast Issue 32: TV Killed the Movie Star
Is it just me or are all the exciting movie directors going to TV now? To wit, we’re currently expecting miniseries from:
Barry Jenkins – will adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad into a series for Amazon
Damien Chazelle – will direct The Eddy, a musical series set in a Paris nightclub
Yorgos Lanthimos – is attached to the wonderfully-titled On Becoming a God in Central Florida with Kirsten Dunst for AMC
Nicolas Winding Refn – is working on Too Old to Die Young with Miles Teller about Los Angeles criminals who become…samurais…of course
David Lynch – obviously, is returning to TV for the new series of Twin Peaks
…to say nothing of the likes of Paolo Sorrentino, Jane Campion, and Bruno Dumont, who have already tried their hand at directing full TV series. In other news, David Fincher is leaving TV for movies once again, as he’s been nailed down to direct World War Z 2 in a turn of events that really threatens to challenge my allegiance to watch everything Fincher puts his hands on.
This is not news for anyone who consumes pop culture today—who doesn’t love the golden age of television we’re living through? But I personally have been lightly skeptical of this mass move towards television storytelling. I guess I don’t really have any reason for feeling this way other than that I agree with Mia Hansen-Løve’s assessment about what makes movies different from TV (emphasis mine):
There are two very opposite ways of withholding information. One way is about creating suspense but ultimately delivering information that is nothing more than information. The other way is to make life bigger than cinema. Which is as it should be. Telling a story is about holding back information, but it can have the total opposite meaning, and for the opposite reasons.
There are holes. Holes exist. It’s not like there’s nothing behind it. I used to make films with these huge time gaps, ellipses. I didn’t feel the need to provide information about what was [left out]. And that was the point. [Asking the audience to] fill these voids and blackouts was part of what the film was about. […] I know that TV is so popular, but the few times that I tried to watch something, I couldn’t connect with it at all because I could feel that the writing was determined by the fact that you have to keep information away from the audience in order to have them come back for the next episode. That’s the opposite of whatever vision I have for what filmmaking is about, which is talking about life, and not just creating dependence.
For those of you who were playing along at home in the last issue, I correctly guessed 8 films that will be playing in competition at Cannes! Of my remaining guesses, I correctly named 4 other movies that are playing elsewhere at the festival but won’t be competing for the Palme d'Or. The Cannes Film Festival kicks off on May 17 and runs until May 28. I’ll give you the full rundown in a future newsletter.
The day after my last newsletter came out, I had a short review of Personal Shopper published. The movie’s kind of old news by now, but in the spirit of being better at self-promotion, here’s what I had to say about the film’s depictions of technology and how cell phones in particular are changing our relationship with movies.
Articles, News, and Interviews
Jonathan Demme (1944–2017) gets a touching tribute from his biggest fan (or at least his biggest fan that I’ve ever encountered). “Few artists have proven themselves so deeply empathetic, so attuned to everyone and the stories on the sidelines they have to tell.”
ARCHIVE PICK: Now seems like the right time to revisit one of my favorite reviews ever, Wesley Morris’s brilliant piece on Demme’s Ricki and the Flash. (“And because, alas, Ricki — poor, super-duper-down-on-her-luck Ricki — is played by Meryl Streep, her version of ‘Bad Romance’ can’t simply be a cover. It has to be a trudge among the Stations of the Cross.”)
A documentary film programer on learning about the political echo chamber he’s only helped to reinforce in his community, and some attempted advice for fellow programers hoping to avoid the same: “It hurts to admit this, but after five years of earnest programming, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have wasted my time, and I suspect others’ as well. Perhaps it generated some money or volunteer work for the partnering organizations. Maybe it introduced a few new regulars to the space. I’m certain it helped the filmmakers pay rent. But more than anything, it fed into the myth that this pervasive, pedantic sort of documentary can change the world. As I step into the head programming job this summer, I’ve decided that I’m never touching another one again.”
Meanwhile—an interview with French New Wave pioneer Agnès Varda on how she became a filmmaker and what role she sees her documentary films playing. “We cannot solve the problem. We can just speak with other people in the country, people who look for peace, people who look for sharing. Because… The lack is that, it’s there. We have to share with people, share words, share time. And if the film reflects that, it’s a drop of… Friendship and compassion in the world.”
This week in nunsploitation news, Paul Verhoeven’s next project has been announced! Titled Blessed Virgin, it will star Virginie Efira (the Catholic neighbor in Elle) as “Sister Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century nun who suffers from disturbing and erotic visions that lead to an affair with another nun.” Uh…I’m just going to leave that there.
Poster of the Day
Wes Anderson returns next year with Isle of Dogs, a stop-motion animation film set in Japan. It now has a poster—and with it, a cast list to rival the ensemble he assembled for Fantastic Mr. Fox.