Movie Enthusiast Issue 58: BlacKkKlansman, Bergman Centennial V, Farewell to the Village Voice
Watching
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Spoilers ahoy!
This feels like a fraught movie to have opinions on, so here goes nothing! I would say I fall somewhere in the middle here: I liked BlacKkKlansman, not as much as its biggest fans, and I’m not as cool on it as Miriam Bale and Alissa Wilkinson were. I would differ from Bale in my assessment of this movie mostly in that I think the craft actually is really good! The whole way Lee films the Kwame Ture speech—the dramatic spotlighting, the faces of his audience melting in and out of the darkness—is one of the most beautiful passages of filmmaking I’ve seen this year. The movie also has other formal strengths, as in the way it builds tension, both narratively (see: the lingering closeup on the rotary phone right before the KKK calls Ron Stallworth back) and thematically (hear: the ominous gunfire from the shooting-range scene bleeding backward into the preceding scene of the cops talking about what it means to be a cop, ricocheting through the theater ominously contextless for the heavy ten seconds before the visual edit between the scenes). The double dolly shot at the end of the film is yet another powerful case in point, though I wonder how much of the spine-tingling sensation it provoked for me had to do with knowing what was coming.
Yes, let’s talk about it: Spike Lee ends his broad and chummy undercover cop comedy with footage from last year’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. (According to an interview with Film Comment, the rally happened after the screenplay had been finished but before principal photography began; Lee decided before filming started that this would be how he ended the movie.) So it’s there, and some people hate it (typical Spike grandstanding) and others say it’s the whole movie. Well, which is it?
Sure, it’s an effectively shocking way to end your movie which lampoons the KKK by reminding the audience that white nationalists are still very much active in this country and that there is a very real toll for the persistence of racist ideas in America. But…who needed reminding? And, moreover, does reminding us, in this particular way, at this particular moment, in this particular movie—a movie which paints its white nationalist characters in unhelpfuly broad strokes, and which, as Boots Riley has complained, plays fast and loose with the facts to make the cops in this story look more interested in fighting racism than they actually were—do anyone any good? Because the film is operating in such a cartoonish register much of the time, it’s difficult to parse the ambiguity around the more on-the-nose dialogue of its white nationalist characters: is Spike Lee just spoonfeeding his already-sympathetic woke viewers with connections between past and present that will be obvious to most of them, or is this an honest examination of where present-day racists got their slogans and ideas from? (It could be both!)
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Look, this movie is fine, representation is great, book Constance Wu all the roles in all the movies, give us more romcoms and, heck, every other variety of movie that isn’t just humongous-budget blockbusters; I am happy this movie exists and that people are seeing it as many times as all my Greek friends and relatives saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding when it was in theaters. However: you do not cast legend Michelle Yeoh in your film and give her a thin pork chop of a role to chew on when an actress of her caliber deserves the filet mignon!
Autumn Sonata (1978)
For her last film role, Ingrid Bergman collaborated for the first and only time with cinema’s other legendary Bergman. This is a preternaturally exhausting movie to watch, which means it’s a bad idea to watch it if you yourself are exhausted! (Vegan brunch at 2 in the afternoon on a Sunday: recommended, but not when paired with this movie right afterwards.)
I love Farran Smith Nehme’s essay on this movie, especially these details:
[Ingrid Bergman’s character] Charlotte ended up as a triumph of emotional rawness, but director and star fought bitterly during rehearsals. He said she’d mapped out every facial expression in the mirror and was stuck “in the 1940s.” It seems clear she was grasping for anything that could soften Charlotte. The actress pleaded for a joke or two. No jokes, she was told. (Autumn Sonata, outside of some wan sallies from Charlotte, is indeed a joke-free zone; Scenes from a Marriage, arguably a depiction of even greater emotional damage, is a laugh riot in comparison.) They clashed over whether Charlotte had been absent from her children for seven years, as the director wrote, or five years, as his star insisted, which does sound less biblically harsh. “So to keep me quiet,” wrote the star in her memoirs, “he cut it to five—even though I noticed seven came back in the finished picture.” He won that battle, and by the time cameras rolled, he’d won the war. The finished film exposes not only a mother’s mistakes but also her searing terror of what those mistakes have wrought.
Actress told auteur, “Ingmar, the people you know must be monsters.” With Charlotte, Ingmar Bergman got the fully human and ultimately tragic monster that he wanted.
Reading
Founded in 1955 by Ed Fancher, Norman Mailer, and Dan Wolf—and some would argue that Jerry Tallmer, a theater critic who created the Obies, the Off-Broadway awards, and British journalist John Wilcock were the fourth and fifth founders—the Voice was one of the first alternative newsweeklies in the country and, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, unquestionably the most influential. It had struggled for several years, though, before hitting pay dirt. In a fascinating history of the cultural influences on the paper’s founders and the Voice’s impact, in turn, on what would become the New Journalism, Louis Menand notes in a 2009 piece for the New Yorker that, by 1967, “it was the best-selling weekly newspaper in the United States, with a single-day circulation higher than the circulations of ninety-five percent of American big-city dailies.”
—Remembering The Village Voice
There’s only so much these shots can do, there’s only so much information Wang’s camera can forensically and meaningfully absorb. But the concerted attention has meaning in itself. This shard was a person. This femur was a person. He wasn’t treated like one. He’s not even remembered as one. But look, please look. This was a person.
—on Dead Souls, Wang Bing’s documentary about the survivors of Maoist gulags
Coming Soon
Behold, the trailer for Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, which looks…fascinating!
I have now seen the trailer for A Star Is Born in theaters several times and I am convinced this movie is making like $300 million dollars.
Word on movies from Venice is starting to trickle in! My very hazy and almost certainly inaccurate read of things:
Great: Roma, The Sisters Brothers, The Favourite, Non-Fiction
Good: A Star Is Born, First Man
Your Mileage Will Vary: Suspiria, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
No: Sunset, Peterloo