Quaranstreaming V
Here we are again, watching movies at home
Pardon the duplicate emails, Substack was buggy this morning and sent out an unfinished draft.
Watching
Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)
Dick Johnson Is Dead is an unexpectedly, endearingly goofy movie, the collaboration of documentary cameraperson Kirsten Johnson and her father, a retiring psychiatrist who agrees to her wild idea of making a movie about his death. Johnson the Younger is motivated at least in part by regret that she has so little home video footage of her now-deceased mother (most of which appeared in Johnson’s previous film, 2016’s Cameraperson). So there’s plenty of quotidian filming of Dick as he packs up his Seattle office and beautiful home, says goodbye to his west coast Seventh-Day Adventist community, moves to his daughter’s apartment in Manhattan (where she co-parents her kids with painter Boris Torres and filmmaker Ira Sachs; tangent: I really hope Sachs and Johnson do a project together sometime, she makes a documentary about him, he writes a script about her). But then there’s the reenactments.
As part of their coming to terms with Dick’s inevitable (if not yet imminent) death, the Johnsons stage a variety—not as many as I was anticipating, honestly—of faked-death scenarios. In one, an air conditioning unit falls on Dick’s head as he’s strolling down the street. In another, an unseen extraterrestrial force airlifts him out of his room in his sleep. And in a series of more lavish set pieces that pepper the film, K. Johnson enlists the help of her industry friends and colleagues to produce a vision of the afterlife with singing and dancing and chocolate fountains.
Seemingly nothing is too mundane for Johnson to consider shooting. Thus we get a lot of sequences of her and her father talking to the various workers helping to keep him going (like a housekeeper who has accompanied nearly a dozen older New York residents through mental deterioration) or giving him a taste of death before it comes for real (was helping an artist’s 80-year-old dad cope with the sight of a bucket of fake blood the most or least ridiculous job those makeup artists were hired to do that week? inquiring minds want to know). Johnson will also leave in outtakes if they serve an intimate purpose. A few times she needs to put her camera down while filming to tend to some emergency, but leaves it recording and uses the oblique footage and offscreen audio in the finished film for extra emotional weight.
This might not be the most privileged way to process your and your family’s mortality, but broadcasting it so that anyone with a Netflix subscription can take part puts it up there. What sets Johnson apart is the spirit in which she makes her work. As personal as her movie is, you can tell that she believes the project is only worth undertaking if, by it, she can do good for others too.
She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
If sci-fi is your preferred genre for helping you confront your mortality, 2020 has also given us Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow. I didn’t look into why it seems to have been roundly trashed on its release; misogyny sounds like the correct answer, but there’s plenty enough in the text itself to suggest otherwise. A lot of Seimetz’s choices of cuts are abrasive, less in the fun horror-movie way and more in the tiresome this-is-an-indie-film way. The soundtrack samples the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem mass so many times that it goes from being annoying to becoming funny to just being annoying again. There is a sense of humor at least latently at work, though. When Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) browses a tastefully-designed webstore for urns early on in the movie, I instinctively assumed that a targeted ad on social media gave her the suggestion.
She (Amy) dies tomorrow, and anyone she tells it to will, too. Tomorrow never arrives, or at least not the exact moment when. We know nothing about Amy’s premonition except that it spreads invisibly to anyone she comes into contact with, and so on and so forth down to the poor urgent care doctor working the night shift. It’s an unsatisfying movie—purposefully, I assume—but Seimetz does build dread effectively. She couldn’t have known that her movie would be released in circumstances where most of her viewers are so recently and intimately acquainted with end-of-the-world anxiety. I didn’t need to feel how I felt back in March again, and I’m guessing most audiences weren’t in the mood for that either, but I suppose there’s value in being able to relive a version of that from afar.
Also, what is Michelle Rodriguez’s agent doing?
The Nest (2020)
I have a theory which I’m going to start testing out on new movies set in the 1980s or 1990s: if the movie didn’t, strictly speaking, need to be a period piece, how likely is it that the filmmakers made it one so they wouldn’t have to figure out how to make the script work if characters had smartphones and easy internet access?
Maybe The Nest, the second feature by Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene), isn’t such a case. There is a bit of specificity to the story of businessman Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) and his horse-trainer wife Allison (Carrie Coon), who move from New York to London with their two kids so Rory can pursue a new business opportunity. It’s the 1980s! Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and such. Every 20 minutes I kept trying to remember what it was that Rory is supposed to do exactly. Near the end of the movie, a cab driver comes right out and asks him! “I pretend I’m rich,” Law says after a long pause, as though fishing for some disgusting scrap of food stuck in his teeth and, having found it, flicking it out in mock triumph. So this could have been set in, say, 2018—in which case he would have just called an Uber and the rest of the scene in the cab would be rendered unnecessary.
The Nest is a strange movie because it brings together so many familiar types of movie without settling on being any single one of them. Haunted house movie: check. Rich people do the darndest things movie: check. Poor people pretending to be rich people also do the darndest things movie: check. Marital breakdown movie: check. 10 or 15 years ago, Cate Blanchett would have been in Coon’s role. Coon, whose fame derives mostly from her television roles, is making her case here, almost as a Blanchett understudy, for superstardom. She has her withering glances on lock and she is responsible for all of the movie’s best scenes. Confronting her husband over his mismanaging of money while out at dinner, she places a lavish order for the table to put him in his place—then puts the waiter in his (“Don’t look at him, I’ve told you what we wanted”) and tastes the wine she ordered right from the bottle. She exploits the fur coat he buys her as a welcome-to-England gift to usurp his authority and shut down a real estate transaction they both know he can’t afford to make. Coon brings grit to a movie that otherwise glides along a little too easily.
The other selling points here are the score, an earthy and eerie upright bass-anchored number by Arcade Fire instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry, and the cinematography, by Son of Saul DP Mátyás Erdély. The camerawork is sophisticated, but it serves the movie instead of the filmmakers’ egos. Most scenes are blocked so that characters talking to one another are always onscreen together. With that general rule established early on, later dialogue scenes with quick cuts are all the more disorienting. There are a lot of slow zooms and dolly shots, but long takes never tell you how to feel about them (the way they don in, say, an Iñarritu movie). The few handheld shots are reserved for special occasions, including the most devastating scene in the film.
This movie has grown on me the more I’ve sat with it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be fully sold on it. It never quite gets there, that ineffable place where an original story like this one makes a satisfying, new contribution to the ideas it’s working with (in this case, class, greed, and the ocean of difference between British old money and American new money). Even Durkin seems to concede that he’s fallen short on that count by ending his movie with a character beating a literal dead horse.
I Was at Home, But… (2019)
Crow is delicious, which I would have learned years ago if I hadn’t made such a fuss about Angela Schanelec’s movies and refused to watch them. I turned my nose up at her, imagining that her movies were all slow films characterized by opaque storytelling, emotionally distant characters, and inexplicably arty shots. My impressions were absolutely correct and I also absolutely loved this movie.
I Was at Home, But… already announces itself as a game of inside baseball (the title is a riff on the names of some of Yasujiro Ozu’s early films; I Was Born, But…, I Graduated, But…, though it doesn’t resemble them in any meaningful way). It opens, and then closes, with no explanation, on a scene of a fox chasing and then feasting on a rabbit while a donkey looks out a barn window. We are introduced to widowed mom Astrid (Maren Eggert), whose 13-year-old son Phillip (Jakob Lasalle) mysteriously vanished before the start of the movie and just as mysteriously turns up again some 10 minutes in. Astrid tries to buy a used bike from a Craigslist ad; Phillip stars in a class production of Hamlet; some schoolteachers seemingly unrelated to the rest of the plot go on a few dates. All is quietly and impeccably framed. You get a sense pretty immediately for what Schanelec meant when she said, in an interview last year, that her films simply give you “a chance to spend some time with images, bodies, and situations.”
The bodies in this movie are in various stages of processing grief, primarily over the death of Astrid’s husband two years prior. This information is only handed out piecemeal; it’s nearly glossed over altogether. In the centerpiece of the film, an acoustic M. Ward cover of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance (the only use of non-diegetic music in the whole movie), we watch Astrid visit her husband’s gravesite and (in a flashback?) dance with her kids in a hospital room (her husband’s? we don’t see). After the song ended and my body gently descended back to earth, I expected Schanelec to resume to her more clinical style for the remainder of the movie. Surprise! Not this time. There’s a sprint of emotionally powerful scenes right after our music montage. In one, Astrid confronts a filmmaker on the street and castigates him for his bad filmmaking (with regard to a movie she only watched the first half of). In another, Astrid unsuccessfully attempts to clean up the kitchen and completely loses her cool with her kids, sending them out to sit in the street while she collects herself. And from there things settle back down to their previous pace and temperament.
I don’t just want to say that I liked this movie to signal that I am become the consumer of highbrow art that I used to mock from a safe if not-too-great distance. I don’t know how to articulate my liking it, either. This movie offered me a different way of feeling—not totally innovative or alien, just different from the usual. In a year where this is more to grieve than I feel capable of, I’m welcoming any art with new ideas of how to start.
Mangrove (2020)
August 9, 1970: over 100 demonstrators march through London’s Notting Hill neighborhood to protest ongoing police harassment to the Caribbean-born community there, particularly in and around the Mangrove restaurant. 200 police officers greeted the peaceful protesters with violence; nine of the protesters were arrested on charges of incitement to violence and went to court. After a 55-day trial, all nine were acquitted of the charges.
The first installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe Anthology is a stylish recreation of the Mangrove Nine saga. It struck me as the kind of movie that will be shown in schools from now until the end of time, which I don’t mean as faint praise. A movie about Black Panthers (such as Barbara Beese and Altheia Jones-Lecointe, here played by Rochenda Sandall and Letitia Wright, with verve) is necessarily going to involve some explication of theory and some activist speeches. We get both, but what’s especially insightful in McQueen’s filmmaking is how he shows us the process by which experience becomes theory. To take the most obvious example: Mangrove owner Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) is depicted less as a community organizer from the get-go than as a community member who became a de facto organizer by virtue of being the owner of the centralized community meeting place (and subsequent target of racist police violence).
The movie is bifurcated into pre-trial events for the first hour and the trial for the second hour. The artistic grace notes don’t always work as intended. A lingering shot of a colander wobbling on the kitchen floor after one of the raids at the Mangrove is going for poignant and never quite gets there. A quick montage, partway into the trial, using old photographs of infrastructural construction tearing up the neighborhood is much more affecting. With cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, McQueen chooses a color palette that’s broad and rich: tropical greens and oranges for Notting Hill interiors, stark colors on an overcast day for the protest scene, stately, deep-shadowed browns for the courtroom scenes.
For the most part, McQueen leaves his usual ostentatious camerawork to the side. In a courtroom your coverage is limited, anyway, and it’s more important that the acting hold your attention. It does, though it’s also what makes Mangrove an exhausting watch. In a late-movie monologue to Crichlow, who is ready to throw in the towel and plead guilty, Jones-Lecointe hits back with what may be the crux of the film: “All of this, all of our fight, it counts beyond us here. This trial is about more than just our freedom. What is being called into question in this case is the right of anybody, not just us as Black people, but the right of anybody to demonstrate. I’m not just here defending myself, or trying to defend all of us, but if we fall now and let them take over? And give in to that? They will take it all from us. And they’ll take it from our children too. We are the example, and we must bear this responsibility.” May we all likewise bear the responsibilities we find ourselves saddled with today.
Reading
Behind the music and the making of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock:
Beyond the historical significance of songs like “Silly Games,” McQueen and his team also endeavored to make the soundtrack period accurate, rather than a well-curated anachronistic pastiche.
“A guiding principle was to not just get into crate digging territory, because at the end of the day it’s a community party,” said Ed Bailie, a music supervisor who worked on “Small Axe,” adding that they looked for tracks that would “make people who are in the garden go into the living room.” A relatively light moment takes place early on in the night, when the D.J. transitions from the disco group Sister Sledge to Carl Douglas’s novelty single “Kung Fu Fighting,” prompting Martha and the other partygoers to pantomime martial arts action as they dance.
Securing legal permission to use some of these songs wasn’t easy. Many of the original labels that hosted the kind of music heard in the film have since shut down or been folded into a winding maze of corporate parents and their subsidiaries, requiring the filmmakers to be flexible about what would make it into the final product.
For example, getting the rights to Cry Tuff and the Originals’ skeletal dub track “Robin Hood,” which is used to test the sound system before the party begins, required a fact-finding mission. Searching for the owner led Bailie’s team to the estate of Prince Far I, the Jamaican musician who occasionally recorded under the Cry Tuff pseudonym, and who died in 1983. After prolonged communication, including plenty of “late night calls with the clearance team at BBC,” Bailie said, the proper contracts were sent along and signed over smartphones.