msicism

A Quick Word About the Golden Globes

This year's COVID edition of awards season should really be ignored, or at least marked with a gigantic asterisk. The very idea that junk like Mank and Promising Young Woman would be in "the conversation," and that a mediocrity like Nomadland would be the leading contender is utterly absurd. Even the foreign category is ridiculous. The Life Ahead? Yeah, sure, I saw  my first and last Edoardo Ponti film almost...

A Lil' Bit o' Rotterdam in My Life

I am not sure how many films I will be watching with my IFFR Press credentials. I must admit, nothing looks unmissable so far. But I wanted to provide quick notes on the films I do see. I'm afraid full reviews would slow me down too much.

Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen, 2020)

This is only the second of Jensen's director...

Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955)

Although I am well aware of the canonical status of Lola Montès, I can't help feeling a certain ambivalence toward it. For one thing, there is the brute fact of history. This was simultaneously Ophüls' final film and his first film in color. It's hard not to think that, had Ophüls lived to make other films, Lola Montès might have been seen as a transitional work. That's not to say that it is a mediocre picture. That's ...

SOPHIE (1986-2021)

This is devastating news. SOPHIE was a groundbreaking artist whose life and career had just begun. Rest in power.

I tried to embed her video for "It's Okay to Cry," but YouTube isn't letting me. So you should watch it here.

From Mayerling to Sarajevo (Max Ophüls, 1940)

I just read that From Mayerling to Sarajevo was a flop with both audiences and critics. Although this surprises me, the more I think about it I can understand why viewers of the time may not have appreciated Ophüls' rather unique depiction of recent European history. Even if we compare Sarajevo to contemporary historical films, it's evident that Ophüls was attempting something quite removed from the dutiful staging of known event...

Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

Prior to watching Le Plaisir, all I really knew about it was that it supplied the final shot of Godard's The Image Book. At the end of the film, Godard shows us a masked man in a top hat, quadrilling himself half to death in a ballroom. Of course now, having seen Ophüls' film, Godard's use of the image has a different resonance. In the opening segment, "Le Masque," we discover Ambroise (Jean Galland), an elderly man who was once a...

"What if we Occupy Wall Street in a DIFFERENT way?"

If the SEC closes out the Reddit investors, and Biden lets it happen, we may witness an insurgence that makes the Capitol bozos look like, well, a bunch of musket-wielding rednecks.

I mean jesus. So a bunch of hedge fund assholes took a million-dollar bath. ASK ME IF I CARE.

Getting to Know You: February Run-Off

Like last time, I'm doing a follow-up poll with the three top vote-getters.

Tomorrow I'll write about the (somewhat disappointing) Le Plaisir. And I have saved the last for best. Lola Montès is on deck.

Atlantis (Valentyn Vasyanovych, 2019)

A few years back, I decided to watch a random selection of films on Festival Scope. My thought was, maybe if I randomized the list of available films and watched a few on a whim, I might discover some gems that wouldn't have otherwise gotten my attention. As you might expect, most of the films were mediocre at best, but a couple were quite interesting. One of them was Black Level, a Ukrainian film from 2017. As it turns out, that film's dir...

Caught (Max Ophüls, 1949)

Caught is probably the strangest of the Ophüls films I've seen so far. In my lexicon, that would typically equal "best," but I am really not sure how I feel about this film on the whole. Obviously it was released the same year as The Reckless Moment, and so it's interesting to see the two movies as a kind of diptych. For one thing, Caught instigates Ophüls' "trick" of concealing leading man James Mason until a good 30 mi...

Getting To Know You #2

I still have a couple of Ophüls films to watch and write up. But I figured I'd go ahead and get the February poll underway.

What will I be watching?

Lux Æterna (Gaspar Noé, 2019)

Following the critical and commercial success of Climax, Gaspar Noé did an odd thing. He accepted an assignment to produce a promotional film for Yves Saint Laurent. While I doubt that any working director short of George Lucas is ever in a position to turn down free money, it's unlikely that Noé really needed to accept this commission. Still, he was given complete freedom -- length, subject matter, formal approach -- so long as the final...

Some Kind of Heaven (Lance Oppenheim, 2020)

Some Kind of Heaven is a tough film to evaluate. As a documentary, it more than accomplishes what it sets out to do. By focusing on life in The Villages, Florida -- the largest retirement community in the U.S. -- Lance Oppenheim's film shows us a group of compelling "characters" who, in their different ways, are emblematic of "the graying of America" and an extreme version of ersatz, neoliberal happiness being sold as the apex of American a...

The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949)

The Reckless Moment may be the perfect auteurist specimen. The story itself is not all that convincing, largely because we have to take so much on faith. Would a mother like Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett), who is clearly controlling and utterly Type-A, actually have no earthly idea that her not-quite-18 year old daughter (Geraldine Brooks) was stepping out with a sleazy older man (Sheppard Strudwick)? And would Martin Donnelly (James Mason) be...