[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]
Class, cuisine, Catholicism and climate change intersect in compelling ways in Rishi Chandna’s absorbing new work Virundhu (The Feast), set for its world premiere at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in February 2024. Produced in collaboration with the Krea university, Andhra Pradesh, The Feast is the first of a trilogy of films around the broad theme of water, with a focus on the sociological aspects of the relationship between humans and water systems.
A self-taught filmmaker with a professional background in advertising, Chandna honed his craft making candid, feature-length wedding documentaries for his friends. After a few years of making commercials, he chanced upon the subject of his first documentary, the widely circulated Tungrus (2017). This short, endearing portrait presents an eccentric glimpse into the foibles of human-animal co-existence. Featuring a middle-class family in Mumbai that has a rowdy rooster for a pet, the film draws its energies from the surreal sight of this rustic bird lording over the urbane surfaces of a high-rise apartment until it’s shown who’s the boss.
If Tungrus limits itself to the private realm of a cramped apartment, Party Poster (2022), in my opinion Chandna’s best work yet, is explicitly a work about public spaces. Made during the pandemic, Party Poster trains its lens on the phenomenon of civilian, group-commissioned posters erected during Mumbai’s Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations. Both an aesthetic object subject to meticulous design and densely symbolic field of signs, the poster offers Chandna a chance to examine the city’s fraught class dynamics as well as the contradictions of urban living in general. I’ve written about the film in more detail here.
The observational humour inherent in both these documentaries (which you can watch below) feeds into The Feast, Chandna’s first foray into full-fledged fiction. Set in an impoverished fishing village in the wetland region of Ennore-Pulicat in northern Tamil Nadu, the 25-minute film has two narrative strands. In the first, we follow the efforts of Mary, a woman of about forty, as she sources ingredients for a traditional fiesta she plans to throw: prawns, milkfish, mullets, mud crabs. With the area’s industrial pollution turning the waters increasingly hostile to life, and to fishing as a profession, this is no mean task. Enterprising and resourceful, Mary is obliged to search far and wide to secure her raw material.
The primary (and it turns out, the only) recipient of the feast is Thomas, an affluent politician of some power who was once a boy in the same fishing community. We understand from their interaction that Thomas and Mary were childhood friends who still maintain a cordial if somewhat formal relationship. Christmas is around the corner, and Thomas is dillydallying on an approval he is expected to give for the establishment of a cement factory in the village.
And so, the day of the feast arrives, and the local chapel – which seems both long abandoned and haunted by spectral presence – is spruced up. This place of worship soon turns into a theatrical stage as Mary orchestrates an unforgettable evening for Thomas. The Proustian repast shows him glimpses of a long-lost heaven, while the prayer that precedes it puts the fear of hell in him. The solemnity of the setting, as well as the stateliness of the compositions, are balanced by the wit and the humour of the scene.
The film calls to mind Babette’s Feast (1987), in which a lavish meal thaws the frozen spirits of an orthodox Protestant community in rural Denmark. In The Feast too, food is a repository of shared memories and values, capable of effecting profound spiritual transformation. But the emphasis of Chandna’s film is less theological than political. Mary is a curator figure, and the sumptuous variety of her menu, which has her negotiating with many villagers to get the right kind of fish, speaks of a personal touch. At the same time, it reflects an ecological crisis where the diversity of marine life is endangered by human activity. The film thus zeroes in on the precarity of an extended ecosystem: marine biodiversity, but also the ways of life around it such as food and religious traditions.
The Feast features noteworthy performances by professional actors, primarily Antony Janagi (who is a theatre practitioner) and George Vijay Nelson (who transitioned from television into cinema). But the film’s acute sense of place is entirely a product of the filmmaker’s documentary eye, which makes The Feast a very interesting alchemy of diverse approaches. An alumnus of the 2021 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the NFDC Film Bazaar’s Co-Production Project, Chandna is currently working on his first feature, Ghol, about a penniless fisherman whose fortunes change when he makes a prize haul of a rare fish.
Bio
Rishi’s debut short documentary, Tungrus (2018), was shown at Hot Docs, Visions du Réel, BFI London Film Festival, IDFA and became an Oscar-qualifying short documentary after winning at the Slamdance Film Festival. His second short, Party Poster (2022), showed at Palm Springs International Film Festival, Krakow Film Festival, DocAviv, Glasgow Short Film Festival and others. Both films released online on New York Times’ Op-Docs. Rishi’s feature film in development was selected at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Cannes Film Market and Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum where it won the top HAF Fiction Award for a non-Hong Kong project.
I was a funny little girl with lots of little girlfriends. A friend of mine said I always had the best shoes. She had to wear orthopaedic shoes – she had weak ankles. I wore red patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother was very stylish. I suppose that sense of style was in me, too.
I was a bit of a rebel, but I never got caught. I didn’t get up to anything really naughty – I just wanted people to have fun. I did once get up on stage at 17 and start singing with a band. I thought I was pretty good. Nobody else did.
I ran away from college and arrived in New York at 19, and I felt a lot of pressure to make it. I got paid $50 for my first published piece and modelled in punk fashion shows for the free clothes. I used to say to people, “I’m a writer. Do you need a writer?” I was determined. Aged 20 I got paid $1,000 to write a children’s book and thought I was rich.
I saw people doing drugs and women dancing topless in Studio 54, but I wasn’t down in the basement with Mick Jagger. That’s probably because I’m from a nice family in Connecticut. I was more of an observer.
Sex and the City didn’t change my life. It was an evolution. I was two years into the show, working in the writers’ room, having just written my second book, Four Blondes, when I got a million-dollar contract. That was what changed my life. TV didn’t make me successful. It was writing the novels.
Before the show took its own direction, Carrie Bradshaw was pretty close to Candace Bushnell. The character really was my alter ego. There are a lot of things in the show that happened to me in real life. Some of them were better in my life. Some of them were worse.
Sex and the City struck a chord because it’s about women taking charge. In the 80s, women were going to do and have it all. By the 90s, a lot of those women had careers and money, but they still hadn’t found a guy. What I realised was that when you take the “I need to depend on a man for my finances” out of the equation, women’s sex lives start to look very different. There’s more control, more freedom and more partners.
I got married very quickly [to ballet dancer Charles Askegard]. We married three months after we met and were together for 10 years. The day we signed the divorce papers was the last time I saw him until I ran into him in the street three years ago. We talked and laughed a little, but I’ve never seen him again.
I got divorced 11 years ago. The editor in chief of the New York Observer described the feeling of divorce best to me. He said, “You walk around feeling like you’re full of broken glass.” It’s a terrible experience.
I dated a 21-year-old and a 91-year-old in the same week. I go out with guys of all different ages. I’m not having sex with these people, but I do like going to dinner with them. Younger guys ask a lot of questions; the older men only talk about themselves.
When it comes to sex there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Another lesson is that you can’t rely on a relationship for your happiness or a roof over your head.
I have no idea what the future holds. What defines that is how healthy I end up being. People have very different trajectories when they’re in their 60s. Some people end up with cancer and that’s it. But I have friends with mothers well into their 90s. You just don’t know.
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City premieres at the London Palladium on 7 February, visit candacebushnell.entertainers.co.uk
On a not-at-all red carpet inside Cipriani 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, Da’Vine Joy Randolph was glowing.
“The fact that these people actually even seen my work is just mind-blowing,” said the actress, a star of “The Holdovers,” who was being honored with the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress prize at its annual film awards gala, just days after she had won her first Golden Globe on Sunday for her role in the film.
A few feet away on the gray carpet was Celine Song, who came to accept the prize for best directorial debut for “Past Lives.” She was sporting a tuxedo jacket, a long skirt and a bow tie.
“Because the movie is so personal, any time somebody connects to the film, I always feel less lonely; I feel very seen and understood and embraced,” said Ms. Song, who based the romantic film partly on her own experience with a childhood friend.
Just then, a clamor erupted: Paul Giamatti, another star of “The Holdovers,” who was also being honored at the film awards gala for his performance, had stepped onto the carpet.
Mr. Giamatti had also won a Golden Globe, for best actor in a dramatic film. But it was the In-N-Out burger he had consumed, oh-so-casually, during a post-ceremony stop at a Los Angeles area location after his win last week that people wanted to address.
“Were you making a statement?” someone shouted.
“No, I was just hungry,” he said. “I just wanted a burger.”
Ms. Randolph, Ms. Song and Mr. Giamatti were three recipients of 17 awards that the National Board of Review, a group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers and academics, handed out at the gala, which honored the best films and performances of the past year. Anne Hathaway, Amy Sedaris, Daniel Day-Lewis, Elizabeth Olsen, Ethan Hawke and Jessica Chastain all attended as presenters.
A traditionally irreverent gathering that is not televised, and for which the winners are announced in advance, the gala has become an annual East Coast stop for stars on the Oscars campaign trail. This year’s ceremony took on added significance because Oscar nomination voting opened on the same day.
Others honored by the National Board of Review were Mark Ruffalo, for best supporting actor for his role in “Poor Things”; Martin Scorsese’s crime drama “Killers of the Flower Moon,” for best film and best director, and Lily Gladstone, a star of “Killers,” for best actress. (Ms. Gladstone also won a Globe for best actress in a dramatic film, becoming the first Indigenous person to do so.)
A handful of actors were also honored for collective performances, including Zac Efron (best ensemble for “The Iron Claw”) and Andrew Scott (The Board selected “All of Us Strangers” as one of its top 10 independent films).
As Mr. Ruffalo and Mr. Scott chatted at their table — each one was topped with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling dolls — Ms. Hathaway, wearing a glittering, strapless, black gown, posed alongside Ms. Olsen, who was wearing a ruffled white blazer. Ms. Chastain, dressed in a magenta-and-purple Vivienne Westwood gown, threw an arm around Justine Triet, the French director to whom she would later present the award for best international film, for the courtroom thriller “Anatomy of a Fall.”
After a dinner of seared ahi tuna with baby fennel and prime Wagyu sliced sirloin, the “Morning Joe” co-anchor Willie Geist kicked off the awards portion of the evening. Freed from the time constraints and censors on national television, remarks and speeches often exceeded the 10-minute mark and were occasionally sprinkled with profanity.
There were also moving moments: Michael J. Fox received the night’s first standing ovation as he came to the stage with Davis Guggenheim, the director of “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” which was honored for best documentary. The film charts Mr. Fox’s experience learning to live with Parkinson’s disease.
“Parkinson’s has been a gift,” said Mr. Fox who retired from acting in 2020 because his speech was becoming increasingly unreliable. “It’s been a gift that keeps on taking, but it’s given me an audience to talk about what’s possible.”
Later, while Ms. Hathaway was presenting the annual icon award to Bradley Cooper, the director and star of the Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro,” which the National Board of Review named one of the 10 best films of the year, she shared how their families had become friendly during the pandemic while sharing pizza Mr. Cooper had made.
Then Mr. Cooper shared his own highlight of the evening: Meeting Ms. Randolph for the first time, and getting the chance “to tell her how inspiring she is.” (“Did y’all just catch that Bradley Cooper knows who I am now?” Ms. Randolph quipped when she accepted her own award a few minutes later.)
Ms. Gladstone also received a standing ovation as she approached the stage in a long black dress that had lattice sleeves studded with silver circles.
“It’s a strange thing as an actor to speak your character’s language better than you speak your own,” said Ms. Gladstone, who has Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage. She then shared a word in the Blackfoot language she had recently learned, which she said meant “I can feel the good in what you have done.”
An unexpected turn came when Ms. Sedaris, after presenting Mr. Giamatti with the best actor award, took a tumble while heading to the back of the stage. She ended up flat on her back. Though Mr. Giamatti hastened to help her up, it appeared not to be serious: She remained motionless on the floor throughout his acceptance speech as the room erupted in laughter.
Would Mr. Giamatti be celebrating with a late-night Shake Shack trip?
“Uhhhhhh, maybe,” he said. “I love In-N-Out. I’m not going to diss Shake Shack, but, I mean, if they had an In-N-Out here, I’d probably go.”
If you’re not in the market for what David Ayer is forcefully selling in batty January thriller The Beekeeper at the point when someone says to the titular character, “To bee or not to bee, that is the bloody question,” then you might as well just give up and walk out. By this stage, late in the film, Ayer and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer have given us just about enough bee puns, bone cracks and bizarre cameos from British actors to give those in the right headspace (read: drunk) a solid, low-stakes, medium-reward new year’s effort. I can’t imagine a devoted Beekeeper hive emerging any time soon (it’s far too derivative and far too rough around the edges), but there’s enough energy and well-pitched silliness to have audiences, ahem, swarming to cinemas this weekend.
It’s primed as Jason Statham’s John Wick (not that the actor needs another franchise since out of his last 10 movies, only two were not part of a series) and its desperation to be so can often be distracting, but in a crowded landscape of equally desperate imitators, it makes a more persuasive case than most. Statham knows exactly what to do here, more than most would, and has figured out just how seriously, or not, to take such material. During the cold open, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was going to be more serious than most. He plays a withdrawn beekeeper working on land owned by a retired teacher, played by the luminous and wasted Phylicia Rashad. In a surprisingly wrenching set-up, she gets hoodwinked by a crooked call centre into allowing access to her accounts, leading to automatic bankruptcy and a self-inflicted bullet through the head. Statham is spurred into tackling the system that preyed on her and so a mission begins.
It’s an effectively involving motivator, although Ayer rushes through it so fast that one can sense his boredom shooting a scene without shooting (a shame as more of Rashad and her relationship with Statham wouldn’t have gone amiss). It introduces her FBI agent daughter (a wildly unconvincing Emmy Raver-Lampman) and allows for the start of some hilariously rubbish dialogue delivered with a very grave face (“Taking from an elderly person is as bad as stealing from a child ... maybe worse!”) as well as many, often confusing, lines involving bees (“When someone hurts an older person, sometimes they’re left to face the hornets alone!”). In screenwriter Kurt Wimmer’s world, a beekeeper isn’t just a beekeeper but is also a trained assassin, part of a hive protecting the queen bee, which means that the FBI agents on his trail are forced to, you know, read books on beekeeping to get to the bottom of this.
Like most of these films, it’s then structured like a video game all the way to the Big Bad Boss. Given that it was set in the US but filmed in the UK, these road stops involve an underused Minnie Driver, a snarling Jeremy Irons and a dead-behind-the-eyes Jemma Redgrave, none of them having anywhere near as much fun as Josh Hutcherson’s obnoxious nepo baby tech bro. Bizarrely and ambitiously, the Beekeeper finds that the honey leads all the way to the White House and Wimmer aims to vaguely make some sort of commentary about the fine line between the evils of politics and the evils of big business. But then not really, he’s not taking any of this all that seriously, proven in a finale that’s all action and little talk (an ebulliently gory hallway fight scene is a real blast) and an end-note that clumsily leaves things open for more.
Statham is ever the pro (one wonders if he’s had enough training at this stage to make a dangerously good assassin for real), but it’s all more of the same. His two non-franchise films of late showed how great he can be when afforded both a little more lightness (Operation Fortune) and a lot more darkness (Wrath of Man), and it would be satisfying to see him try something just a little out of the ordinary next. He works well with Ayer, who himself works better on a smaller, gnarlier scale, allowed more freedom to get nasty (his Suicide Squad remains a great-looking, what-if disaster). There’s a grubby, late-night appeal to his dialled-up trash aesthetic and The Beekeeper mostly works because of it. Bee prepared for a sequel.
Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, including one of a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, Conn. He was 95.
His daughter Jenny Raucher confirmed the death, in a hospital.
Mr. Raucher spent the 1950s and ’60s writing scripts for anthology television series and advertising copy for the Walt Disney Company and various agencies.
But recollections of his own summer of ’42 lingered. So did the memory of one of his close friends, Oscar Seltzer, a medic who was killed on Mr. Raucher’s 24th birthday, in 1952, while caring for a wounded soldier during the Korean War.
“Summer of ’42” tells the story of three 15-year-old friends — Hermie, Oscy and Benjie — and their early exploration of girls and, tentatively, sex, during a summer vacation on a Nantucket-like island early in World War II.
Hermie (played by Gary Grimes) becomes infatuated with Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill), a woman in her early 20s. In one scene, he visibly trembles on a ladder as she hands him boxes for him to place in her dusty attic. Their tender lovemaking occurs after she receives a telegram telling her that her husband was killed in the war.
The scene parallels Mr. Raucher’s real-life experience at age 14 with a woman on Nantucket, Mass.
“I was in love with her before the incident ever happened,” Mr. Raucher told The Stuart News of Florida in 2002.
“Summer of ’42” won an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s original score and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1971, taking in $32 million (or about $245 million in today’s currency) at the box office.
Herman Raucher was born on April 13, 1928, in Brooklyn. His Austrian-born father, Benjamin, was a traveling salesman who had been a soldier, a boxer, a bouncer and, Mr. Raucher said in an interview, possibly a gun runner in Cuba. His mother, Sophie (Weinshank) Raucher, was a homemaker.
Mr. Raucher graduated in 1949 from New York University, where he majored in marketing and created cartoons for a campus newspaper and magazine. He was soon hired by 20th Century Fox as a $38-a-week office boy. He was drafted into the Army in 1950 and served two years stateside during the Korean War.
After being discharged, he got a call from Disney — he did not know how the company discovered him — and went to work in the company’s advertising department. He also wrote for ad agencies in the 1950s and ’60s and was hired by Gardner Advertising as a vice president in 1964.
Mr. Raucher had begun writing for television and the stage in these years, including scripts for the anthology shows “Studio One,” “The Alcoa Hour” and “Goodyear Playhouse,” as well as a play, “Harold,” starring Anthony Perkins and Don Adams, which opened on Broadway in 1962 but closed after 20 performances.
Mr. Raucher adapted his unproduced play, “Sweet November,” into a romantic melodrama starring Anthony Newley and Sandy Dennis in 1968. He then collaborated with Mr. Newley on the script for “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” (1968), which was a notorious failure. Mr. Newley, who was also the star and director, plays a singing star simultaneously making and showing a movie about his self-indulgent life.
Mr. Raucher’s next film, “Watermelon Man” (1970), starred the comedian Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white insurance salesman who overnight turns Black. Critics were not kind; writing in The Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas said the “script is so uninspired and the direction so inept that ‘Watermelon Man’ runs out of gas long before the end is in sight.”
Mr. Raucher told the film website Cinedump in 2016 that the director Melvin Van Peebles turned “Watermelon Man” into “more of a Black power film than I’d wanted.”
Then came “Summer of ’42,” his biggest cinematic success. He had written the screenplay in 1958, but movie companies had rejected it, by his count, 49 times by the time Warner Bros. acquired it in 1970. The studio put it in the hands of Robert Mulligan, who had been nominated for an Oscar for directing “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).
“Bob fell in love with the screenplay,” Mr. Raucher told Cinedump. “They asked how big a budget it was, he said a million dollars,” he added, referring to Warner Bros. executives. “They said go make it; they never read the script, they left us alone.”
The studio did ask, however, that Hermie be 15, not 14 as Mr. Raucher had been.
During the filming, on the coast of Mendocino in Northern California, Mr. Mulligan told The San Francisco Examiner, “The story deals rather simply with the process of growing up, not unlike Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ which has some of the same comic spirit.”
In the film, Dorothy leaves the island after her romantic interlude with Hermie and writes him a farewell note. The same thing happened to Mr. Raucher.
Sometime after the film’s release, Mr. Raucher said, he received a letter, with no return address, from a woman in Ohio who he believed was the widow.
“She wrote that the ghosts of that time were better left alone,” he told The New York Times in 2001 when a stage musical version of “Summer of ’42” was being performed in Connecticut.
Mr. Raucher wrote several more screenplays, including “Class of ’44” (1973), a sequel to “Summer of ’42”; “Ode to Billie Joe” (1976), which was inspired by Bobbie Gentry’s song of the same name and directed by Max Baer Jr.; and “The Other Side of Midnight” (1977), based on Sidney Sheldon’s novel about love and vengeance set in Washington, Paris, Athens and Hollywood.
He also wrote the novels “A Glimpse of Tiger” (1971), about two con artists; “There Should Have Been Castles” (1978), about a playwright and a dancer in the 1950s; and “Maynard’s House” (1980), about a troubled Vietnam veteran who is bequeathed a house in Maine by a slain comrade.
Besides his daughter Jenny, Mr. Raucher is survived by another daughter, Jacqueline Raucher-Salkin, and two granddaughters. His wife, Mary Kathryn Martinet-Raucher, a dancer, died in 2002.
After the filming of “Summer of ’42” was completed, it was in postproduction for a year. During that time, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay.
“As fate would have it, the book comes out and becomes a best seller,” he told Cinedump. “So when the movie is finally released, the ad line is ‘Based on the national best seller.’ Which is absurd, because the book was written after the movie!”
Baby Yoda, AKA Grogu, is set to make his debut on the big screen in a new Star Wars movie.
The director Jon Favreau has been tapped to take on The Mandalorian and Grogu which will go into production later this year. “I have loved telling stories set in the rich world that George Lucas created,” Favreau said in a statement. “The prospect of bringing the Mandalorian and his apprentice Grogu to the big screen is extremely exciting.”
Details of the plot remain under wraps but Kathleen Kennedy, the Lucasfilm president, called the story “a perfect fit for the big screen”.
Since being introduced in self-titled Disney+ series, the Mandalorian, played by Pedro Pascal, has become one of the more popular and critically acclaimed new characters in the Star Wars universe. It was nominated for best drama series at the Emmys with a fourth season on the way.
As well as creating the series, Favreau has written and directed multiple episodes. He’s also known for directing Iron Man and The Lion King.
The film marks one of many Star Wars films on the way after a decision was made to focus more on exploring the universe on the big rather than small screen. “You pull back not just to focus, but also as part of our cost containment initiative,” the Disney CEO, Bob Iger, said last year. “Spending less on what we make, and making less.”
Daisy Ridley is set to return as Rey in a film from Canadian-Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who will become the first woman and first person of color to direct a Star Wars film. “We’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away,” she said.
Other future films are set to come from James Mangold, Donald Glover and Taika Waititi. “It’s gonna piss people off,” Waititi has said of his film.
Lucasfilm has also announced and then cancelled a range of Star Wars projects in recent years including films from Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige and Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins.
The last Star Wars film was 2019’s Rise of the Skywalker which made $1bn worldwide but received middling reviews.
The Golden Globes averaged 9.4 million viewers on Sunday night, according to Nielsen, an increase over the 2023 ceremony ratings but still significantly lower than the audience totals of just a few years ago.
Until 2020, the Globes regularly drew 17 million to 20 million viewers. In 2019, the Globes was narrowing the viewership gap with the Oscars so significantly that it appeared the telecast could become the most-watched awards show.
And then disaster struck.
First came the pandemic, which deprived the 2021 Globes of its usual booze-soaked freewheeling ceremony, sending the ratings tumbling. Then came a scandal for the organization that administers the Globes, which led NBC to refuse to broadcast the 2022 ceremony. Last year, NBC gave the Globes a one-year chance, and the audience figures were still low: just over six million people watched.
For months, there was speculation that a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon could pick up the rights to the Globes. That did not happen. In November, CBS picked up the rights for another one-year arrangement. (In a statement announcing the deal, George Cheeks, the CBS president, said that the Globes could help promote scripted programming that had been delayed by last year’s strikes in Hollywood. Those shows premiere next month.)
CBS announced a host — a relatively unknown Jo Koy — only a few days before Christmas.
Reviews for Mr. Koy were harsh, with critics taking particular issue with the comedian’s bizarre mid-monologue pivot, in which he blamed other writers for some of his dull jokes. “Yo, I got the gig 10 days ago, you want a perfect monologue?” he said. “Yo, shut up. You’re kidding me, right? Slow down. I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
Critics were not kind to the telecast, either. Vanity Fair called it a “near-total disaster” and a critic at The Hollywood Reporter said it was “the dullest awards show” he had ever seen. The Ankler likened it to the “RC Cola of award shows.”
As the race for the 2024 Oscars heats up, Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction 2017 book of the same name, is widely tipped as a frontrunner for the top prizes. Last month, the drama about the real-life Osage murders, masterminded by white men intent upon stealing the oil-rich land “headrights” of the Indigenous people in early 20th-century Oklahoma, topped Sight and Sound’s poll of best films of 2023. In the run-up to Christmas, Awards Daily placed Killers of the Flower Moon as the “best picture frontrunner”, while Variety named Scorsese and actor Lily Gladstone as probable Oscar nominees, with leading man and executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio (first nominated for What’s Eating Gilbert Grapein 1994 and winner for The Revenantin 2016) as on course for his eighth nomination.
With all this awards interest, it’s no surprise that DiCaprio and Gladstone are out on the campaign trail, finally able to talk about the film after the resolution of the actors’ strike, which prevented them from promoting it when it came out in the autumn. And while DiCaprio has a reputation for being less than fond of press interviews (we’ll get to the matter of his very public private life later), he’s clearly eager to support rising star Gladstone, who has much to say about the movie. Indeed, when I ask for somewhere to place my recording device, he goes into an elaborate comedic pantomime of moving a table, then a chair, then another table (“I should have just moved the chair first, shouldn’t I?”) before sitting well back in the sofa he shares with Gladstone and letting her take centre stage.
“It’s long overdue, this particular story,” says Gladstone of this saga of love, death and betrayal – in which a white man, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), marries an Osage woman, Mollie Kyle (Gladstone), in order to inherit her family’s oil rights, against a backdrop of murder and exploitation. “The Osage community didn’t speak about it for such a long time – it’s such a fresh trauma. When David Grann’s book was written, it opened a lot of old wounds. But sometimes you need to open wounds to begin a healing process. The book is not taught in public schools in Oklahoma because teachers have been made too afraid to teach it on any curriculum. So it’s important to have a film out there that people can connect with and be shown as part of history. It’s a long-overdue moment of representation.”
For Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfeet Nation reservation, and whose previous acting credits include Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and First Cow, the key to that “moment of representation” is the degree to which members of the Osage Nation were involved in the film’s development, and the number of Indigenous actors on screen. Indeed, she argues that the casting and production of Killers of the Flower Moon marks a watershed moment in Hollywood, with potential to change the industry.
“I think we will get a lot of other TV shows and films that are made by Native people,” she says, contrasting this with the portrayal of Indigenous people in “the era of the ‘classic western’ which relegated us to being bloodthirsty savages. We didn’t have our leading ladies in our sweeping, tragic love stories like classic old Hollywood. So placing this incredible Indigenous cast in these roles that we’ve been excluded from in film history is very restorative. We had so much Osage input into Killers of the Flower Moon, and that really shaped everything you see on screen. I hope this will set a new precedent for people working with communities in Hollywood.”
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio as Mollie Kyle and Ernest Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple
I ask DiCaprio – who has been listening intently to Gladstone, careful not to interrupt – about his role in reshaping the film’s script from its original inception, a key factor in Osage involvement in Killers of the Flower Moon. “Well, it was a long development process,” he sighs. “We got the option to the book, and that was particularly exciting for me, because it was this lost chapter of American history. And in a lot of the environmental work that I do [DiCaprio is a longstanding campaigner], you see Indigenous communities all around the world with similar stories. Some of these environmental heroes are at risk of perishing from major oil companies, drilling companies, mining companies. So this story is not something that we could just look at as being 100 years old. This was a place rich with oil and resources, and rife with conflict, and that’s happening everywhere now.”
Scorsese, who was equally interested in this “amazing story”, set about developing a script based on Grann’s book, much of which focuses on “the birth of the FBI”, in which Thomas Bruce White Sr (the law officer who led the Osage murders investigation) plays a key role. It was this role (ultimately played by Jesse Plemons) that was originally earmarked for DiCaprio. But “after a year or two of developing that, we started to have these read-throughs, and we just didn’t feel anything. Emotionally. I remember we had a roundtable before Lily was involved, and we kind of just looked at each other. And we’re like: ‘OK, well, this is a pretty great whodunnit.’ A Hitchcockian murder mystery. But I’m not interested in plot, I’m not interested in that type of structure.
“Then we started to look at these few scenes between Mollie and Ernest and we realised that was really the heartbeat of the story. That also brought us into the Osage world and community more, which led us to scrap the whole script and start anew. Then, after we got our new draft, which was largely based on films like A Place in the Sun and The Heiress – this very twisted, bizarre love story – Marty was invited by the Osage to listen more deeply to their story and their version of what happened. And then after Lily came on as well, the whole story started to take on an entirely new structure.”
So how exactly did Scorsese “listen more deeply” to the Osage people?
“Osage actually extended the invite,” Gladstone replies. “Gray Horse [an Osage County community] has had an eye on it since the book was written, and I knew that there was interest in the film. When it became clear that things were moving forward, and that it was going to be Leo and Marty doing it, they reached out – the community of Gray Horse got together and signed this letter saying: ‘Our community has a really strong vested interest in the story and its adaptation, and we just want to invite Mr Scorsese and the film-makers to come to our community and have dinner with us and discuss and hear some of our thoughts and concerns about the adaptation.’ And Marty accepted that invitation.”
Even with this Osage input, Killers of the Flower Moon still provoked its fair share of negative reactions. The Indigenous Canadian actor Devery Jacobs, who plays Elora in the TV series Reservation Dogs, took to social media to slam the film for being “painful, gruelling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic”, adding: “All the incredible Indigenous actors were the only redeeming factors of this film” and concluding, “After 100 years of the way Indigenous communities have been portrayed in film, is this really the representation we needed?”
Despite their best efforts, it seems the film-makers simply couldn’t please everybody.
Martin Scorsese in discussion with Gladstone during production. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Courtesy of Apple
“Well, art shouldn’t please everybody,” says Gladstone. “What matters to me most is that Osage people feel good about it. And by and large, the ones that I’ve spoken with, whether they were involved in making the film or not, are very supportive. Former chief Jim Gray was one of the most vocal opponents of it being made. He was very, very sceptical, as was a lot of the community. But after he’d seen the film, he released this really long, beautiful Twitter thread that was just such a glowing endorsement of what he had seen. That meant a lot to me, because Jim was somebody whose opinion I ended up really caring about. Some of my closest friends who weren’t involved in the film avoided me when I was in town because again, they were sceptical of what this film would do to sensationalise this really ugly chapter of the tribe’s history. And now it’s one of their favourite films! Of course, there’s going to be people in the Osage Nation who have different feelings too, but overwhelmingly it feels like there’s a lot of support. And there’s a protectiveness of the movie.”
In its finished form, Killers of the Flower Moon centres on a relationship that is clearly abusive – a white incomer marrying into an Indigenous community in order to inherit and steal the oil money that has made their land wealthy. Yet on screen, DiCaprio and Gladstone conjure a sense of intimacy between Ernest and Mollie that is at odds with that entirely exploitative narrative, hinting at something more tender beneath the surface. How would the actors characterise Ernest and Mollie’s relationship?
“It’s interesting,” muses DiCaprio, whose character is the biddable nephew of Robert De Niro’s oleaginous schemer William King Hale, one of the key instigators of the crimes against the Osage people. “This Mollie-Ernest dynamic was almost something that a writer couldn’t imagine. I mean, obviously this was an incredibly abusive relationship. But was there a real bond? You have this ecosystem in Oklahoma, where you have this massive white population, taking over what was Indigenous land. But after talking over and over with members of that community, they told us that while Hale has been literally erased from memory and history books because of the banality of evil that he was, Ernest was different. He was this sort of manipulated nephew of Hale’s. He’s obviously incredibly culpable. But we kept hearing over and over again that there was a real bond and connection between Ernest and Mollie – there was something there.”
I suggest that that sense of connection is crucial to the engagement of Scorsese’s film, and that without it, audiences may have felt disconnected from the twisted and duplicitous goings-on. If the whole thing is just a murderous setup, it’s hard to invest emotionally.
“Right!” says DiCaprio. “And it wasthere. So much so that even after the trial, Mollie and Ernest were still seen driving around Fairfax together. In other words, I couldn’t imagine this relationship having existed as long as it did unless there was a real relationship there.”
“There were lots of white men that married Osage women,” says Gladstone, “and lots of white women that married Osage men. And they would never have gone to the lengths of wanting to communicate with their spouses in their language. Ernest was a simple man who was illiterate; he wasn’t a great intellectual by any means.” (“By any means,” interjects DiCaprio, laughing.) “And yet he picked up the language and spoke it with this family, he spoke it with his kids. I think he found, as a lot of people do when they marry into Indian country, a very unconditionally accepting family. A very grounded, well-defined, impeccably maintained, communally maintained culture to belong to. And I think Ernest felt a great deal of belonging when he was with his family. But he also had this other culture he’d come from, this other entity, essentially this strong hand of the patriarchal overlord.”
Our conversation turns to activism and environmentalism – a subject close to them both. While Gladstone was recently quoted as saying “acting is my activism”, DiCaprio has become something of an eco-celebrity. In a poll conducted by the Hollywood consultancy the National Research Group of about 1,500 18- to 64-year-olds, DiCaprio was named the public figure or celebrity they most trusted on sustainability, ahead of Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and President Joe Biden.
“Look, I mean, I’ve been doing it for quite a long time now,” says DiCaprio. “And I’ve realised there’s been this great narrative perpetuated by, whether it be governments or the private sector, that it’s the individual’s responsibility. And by the way, that isn’t to say that that’s not true. I mean, we can do what we can from a local level; we can vote, there’s plenty of things that we can do. But governments need to change their policies, which is what all these Cops are about – holding nations and the private sector responsible for global emissions. We’re waiting for technologies like carbon sequestration; we’re waiting for AI supercomputers to give us these answers. This is the largest endeavour that civilisation and humanity has ever had to take on, and possibly the most important. We’re affecting every future generation and all life on Earth. Many people have said: ‘Oh, the Earth will still be around.’ But what kind of Earth will it be like to live in? For its inhabitants?
“So my focus right now is to ask: ‘How do we protect the natural world?’ You protect the stewards of the land, you protect the people on the ground, the local communities, the Indigenous people that have been doing this for thousands and thousands of years. So the whole focus of my foundation work now is the idea of saving nature by protecting, and funnelling 100% of all funds to the Indigenous groups on the ground. Giving local communities the means through which to protect these places, rather than extract from them, and to protect them from massive corporations that are there to cut down their trees for cattle farms, soy or palm oil. And by and large, by doing that, you protect all the biodiversity that coexists with that.”
Lily Gladstone in her 2016 breakout role in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women. Photograph: IFC films/IFC Films/Courtesy Everett /RE
“Regardless of politics,” says Gladstone, “that’s one thing I admire so much about Leo’s activism – it acknowledges human beings and grassroots efforts. Throughout the history of mankind we’ve always been subject to the whims of whatever our ruling body is saying. However the political pendulum swings, that human-level, grassroots resistance remains. There’s always going to be an Indigenous element, a people-based movement. It’s always going to be allies joining the people who, regardless of politics, are holding that frontline, maintaining the Earth, taking care of community. It’s sort of circumventing whatever government is doing and just addressing the direct needs of the people on this planet.”
Bearing in mind how vocal De Niro has been about the threat posed to the US and the world by Donald Trump, how alarmed or optimistic are they about the forthcoming American election?
“It’s a long answer,” says DiCaprio, who studiously avoids the kind of quotable anti-Trump soundbites with which his and Gladstone’s co-star has made headlines. “I have no idea what direction things are gonna go in. All I see is more and more polarisation on a number of different issues in our country. From an ecological perspective, there’s one party that I have sided with – it’s been traditionally the one that actually believes in 99% of the scientific community and their findings, which I happen to be a proponent of. I believe in science!
“I remember doing a film called Before the Flood, and I was with one of the Nasa scientists who, for the first time, gave me a map of planet Earth and literally said: ‘Look, you see everything along the equatorial line here?’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, that’s close to where I live in Los Angeles’, because this was seven years ago. ‘So you’re going to start to see fires pop up as the Earth starts to warm, things are going to start to incinerate, there’s going to be too much drought, the trees will not have enough resistance.’ And literally, a few years later, you’re starting to hear about massive forest fires. And now this is a regular thing. So we’re seeing everything else start to happen, almost to a T, that scientists have predicted. And we have one party that has systematically denied the scientific community and has not been a proponent of protecting our climate.”
Cannes festival, 2023 (l-r): Yancey Red Corn, Chief Standing Bear and Leonardo DiCaprio at the Killers of the Flower Moon premiere. Photograph: Abaca Press/Alamy
In stark contrast to the unfolding catastrophe of the climate crisis, I ask if we can discuss more trivial matters. “Like, what’s your favourite colour?” laughs DiCaprio. No, like the actors’ strike. How did they each manage it?
There’s a long silence, eventually broken by Gladstone.
“It was frustrating to not be able to speak to the film,” she says wearily, “to really be out there representing it. But I will say that there was one silver lining that I hope also created a new precedent with films like this. Because the actors couldn’t talk, it was really nice to sit back and allow Osage people to take the carpet and speak first about it. I’m always looking for silver linings. It’s maybe a character strength, maybe a character flaw. But it was really inspiring. I mean, in some ways I feel like us actors have done our job when the film wraps – we pour everything into the character, we pour it into the story. There’s a huge conversation about what happens when a piece is done. Is it still yours or do you hand it over to the audience? And in that process of handing this art back to an audience, really back to Osage people first, it was appropriate that you heard those voices.”
Does DiCaprio feel the same?
“Look, Marty’s been out on the campaign trail because we haven’t been able to speak about it,” he replies. “But if I’m being quite honest, I really wanted to have Lily be able to have a pulpit to talk about this movie. And it’s been interesting to hear her perspective and what it means. So what can I say about the actors’ strike? Nobody worked! You know. And now, we’re gonna get back to work! And I’m glad it’s all over.”
Does DiCaprio ever get bothered by press interest in his personal life?
“As far as my personal life is concerned, you know, my answer is pretty simple. I got into this industry at a very young age. I felt incredibly compelled to do this. And the irony is that I was born and raised in Hollywood. People think:‘Oh, OK, just add water’, right? But I tried to become an actor multiple times and I got rejected. And at 12 or 13 years old, one of those agents said: ‘OK, we’ll give you a shot.’ Since then, it’s felt like winning the lottery. And to be honest, I would have been happy doing any sort of acting jobs – commercials, television.
DiCaprio and Gladstone on set. Photograph: Courtesy of Apple
“I got the one opportunity doing This Boy’s Life with Robert De Niro. I watched his work, realised the calibre of actor that he was and said to myself: ‘I will never squander this opportunity.’ So since then, a lot of other stuff comes hand in hand with that. The complete loss of your private life. And you know what, a lot of people have to deal with a lot harsher things than having their private life be public knowledge. That’s just one of the byproducts. I feel too lucky to do what I do to sit here and complain about it. It’s just one of the things you have to accept and you adapt.”
Our time is almost up and I have one last question for each of them: what’s the best thing about the other person? DiCaprio turns to Gladstone, clearly determined that she’s going to go first.
“Well, I’ve said it several times,” she says. “And it’s honestly the best compliment I can give somebody. He’s such a nerd! He gets so invested in everything he cares about. And he cares so deeply. He is humble about it, but it’s intriguing and awesome to see how excited and invested he gets in things.”
And Leonardo, what’s the best thing about Lily?
“There’s a lot of things that I could say,” he smiles, “but I think she’s a good person. I notice small things in people, and look, she does a lot of amazing activism. She’s great – I don’t want to get too deep into it – great to her family, great to her community. She’s a sort of scholar in a lot of ways of her own history. But I always watch the little things and she’s consistently an incredibly gracious and nice person to everybody.”
Gladstone looks genuinely moved. “Thank you,” she says quietly.
And since you brought it up, what isyour favourite colour?
“I go back and forth between green and blue,” laughs Gladstone.
And you, Leonardo?
“Blue.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Lily says to him. “Is your favourite colour blue because of… Captain Planet?”
“It’s always been blue,” DiCaprio beams. “Probably because I’m just a boy.”
As Hollywood heads into the heart of its awards season — a three-month orgy of frothy self-celebration and pop culture glamour — celebrities and their handlers find themselves with a serious decision to make: what, if anything, to say about the Israel-Hamas war.
Movie stars have become increasingly willing, even determined, to use award shows like the Golden Globes, scheduled for Sunday on CBS, to bring attention to progressive causes and concerns. In recent years, winners like Meryl Streep, Russell Crowe and Michelle Williams have incorporated topics like sexual harassment, the global refugee crisis, abortion rights, Trumpism, climate change, Black Lives Matter, veganism and the Ukraine war into acceptance speeches.
Viewers from both political sides sometimes bristle at what they see as elitist lecturing. But in the Los Angeles ballrooms where these trophies are awarded and such speeches are made, the response is usually uniform praise. The couture-clad A-listers leap to their feet to offer ovations.
The Israel-Hamas war is much more complicated.
“It’s such a treacherous topic — there’s no response, especially in the sound-bite scrum of a red carpet, or in a breakneck acceptance speech, that won’t offend someone,” said Martin Kaplan, who runs the Norman Lear Center for entertainment, media and society at the University of Southern California. “Add alcohol to the mix, as is often the case at these awards dinners, and what could possibly go wrong?”
Reaction to the conflict has convulsed Hollywood, where there is a large Jewish presence, along with many other parts of America. On one side, there is ardent support for Israel. On the other are those who view the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial and social justice movements that swept the United States in the summer of 2020.
Stars have been fired from movies. Agencies have dropped clients; clients have dropped agents. Friendships have been severed, with people accusing one another of hypocrisy and betrayal.
Ahead of the Golden Globes, which kick-starts the awards season in earnest, some publicists and agents have been advising celebrity clients to say nothing about the Israel-Hamas war. One carelessly chosen word could torpedo their hopes for an Oscar, and maybe even their career. One longtime Hollywood publicist who has clients in this year’s Oscar race summed up her advice on the topic as “run for the hills.” A couple of A-list clients, she added, would walk red carpets but skip interviews. Too risky.
Others worry that silence itself is a political message. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, most Hollywood unions rushed to condemn the violence. But one leading union, the Writers Guild of America, refused to put out a statement and stuck with its decision in the face of enormous backlash from hundreds of its members.
Some leading Hollywood communications firms, including Rogers & Cowan PMK and ID PR, have offered yellow ribbons to wear in support of the hostages in Gaza. They see the effort, managed in part by Ashlee Margolis, who runs an entertainment and fashion marketing firm called the A-List, as nonpolitical, though some might disagree.
“Wearing a symbolic yellow ribbon to support the 136 women, children and men — both Israeli and American — who were brutally kidnapped by terrorists and remain in captivity is not only powerfully human, and certainly noncontroversial, but camera ready,” Melissa Zukerman, a managing partner of Principal Communications Group, said in an email.
The parade of ceremonies after the Golden Globes will include the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards and the British Academy Film Awards, before culminating on March 10 with the Academy Awards. This year, the strike-delayed Emmy Awards and Governors Awards have also been squeezed into the corridor.
Most of these galas come with red carpets lined by reporters. Stars should expect to be asked about the Israel-Hamas war, said Marc Malkin, a senior Variety editor and co-host of the official Golden Globes preshow on Sunday. “If they have posted about it on Instagram or signed an open letter it’s fair game,” he said.
That would seem to include the Israeli-born actress Natalie Portman, a nominee for “May December,” who has posted on social media expressing horror about the Hamas attack, and Jeffrey Wright, a nominee for his acting in “American Fiction,” who has questioned the wisdom of Israel’s retaliation. Bradley Cooper, a multiple nominee for “Maestro,” signed two public letters, one about the hostages that urged “the fight for their freedom to continue” and the other calling for “an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire.”
Spokeswomen for those nominees either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries.
The coming self-congratulation-athon could certainly go off without a hitch, with celebrities speaking knowledgeably about the complex and divisive topic. But the odds are not in Hollywood’s favor. The movie business has a long if not proud history of tone-deaf behavior.
There was the time in 2008 when Sharon Stone, walking a red carpet, started a media frenzy by saying an earthquake in China, which left 88,000 dead or missing, was perhaps karmic payback for the country’s handling of Tibet. In 2022, jaws dropped in living rooms across America when, moments after Will Smith attacked Chris Rock on the Oscar stage, guests inside the theater gave Mr. Smith a standing ovation after his teary best-actor acceptance speech.
Award shows used to have a fiery speech here, a political shout-out there — whether it was Marlon Brando’s sending out an activist for Native Americans to decline his 1973 Oscar for best actor or Vanessa Redgrave’s denouncing “Zionist hoodlums” in 1978. For the most part, however, stars worked at being stars, turning on the charm and saying nothing that might alienate a single ticket buyer.
That has changed, and the Golden Globes have led the way.
In 2017, Ms. Streep tore into President-elect Donald J. Trump from the Globes stage. The next year, the Globes became a de facto rally for the Time’s Up movement, with actresses wearing black to protest sexual harassment and Oprah Winfrey delivering a scorching speech. In 2020, Ms. Williams gave an impassioned plea for abortion rights, while Mr. Crowe called attention to climate change and a bush fire crisis in Australia.
Last year, the Globes gave airtime to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who gave a speech about his country’s war with Russia.
Representatives for the Globes did not respond to queries about whether this year’s show would teeter into politics.
Producers who specialize in awards telecasts say research, compiled mainly from Nielsen, indicates that most viewers dislike it when celebrities turn a trip to the stage into a political bully pulpit. One recent producer of the Oscars said minute-by-minute ratings analysis indicated that “vast swaths” of people turned off televisions when celebrities started to opine on politics. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential metrics.
The comedian Ricky Gervais, hosting the Globes in 2020, used part of his monologue to tell Hollywood that it was testing the public’s tolerance for mixing serious causes with awards bacchanalia.
“You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything — you know nothing about the real world,” Mr. Gervais said, adding: “If you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god” and get off the stage.
The German-born US actor Christian Oliver, who performed in films alongside Tom Cruise and George Clooney during a 30-year career, died alongside his two daughters on Thursday in a plane crash off the coast of a Caribbean island.
Oliver, who was born Christian Klepser, and his daughters were passengers aboard a single-engine airplane that took off at approximately 12.10pm local time from an airport in Bequia, a small island belonging to the nation of St Vincent and the Grenadines, according to authorities.
Officials with the Royal St Vincent and Grenadines police force said that the plane – headed to nearby St Lucia – encountered unspecified difficulties moments into the flight and then plummeted into the sea.
Fishers, divers and members of the nation’s coast guard descended on the scene of the crash, and the military personnel were able to recover the four bodies of people onboard the plane.
Oliver, 51; his daughters Annik and Madita Klepser, 10 and 12, respectively; and the plane’s pilot and owner, Robert Sachs, were all pronounced dead at the scene by medical staff, police said. The coast guard brought the bodies of Oliver, his daughters and Sachs – a Bequia resident – to a local mortuary by boat, and autopsies meant to determine their exact causes of death were pending on Friday.
Thursday’s deadly crash drew an outpouring of condolences for the family and friends of the late actor, who had finished filming his final scenes on the set of an upcoming film titled Forever Hold Your Peace just five days before Christmas, Deadline reported.
Forever Hold Your Peace’s director, Nick Lyon, paid tribute to Oliver late on Thursday by posting a photo on Instagram of him and the late actor on their last day of filming.
“We talked about producing a film together for years and finally did it,” Lyon wrote, adding that he and Oliver had worked on five projects together. “Thank you for being a great colleague, actor and friend.”
His Forever Hold Your Peace co-star Bai Ling also published a tribute to Oliver on Instagram, calling him “such a brave actor and a beautiful person”.
Ling, who noted that Oliver was on vacation when he died, added: “Life [is] so beautiful yet so unpredictable and so precious. Let’s love and cherish our lives each moment.”
Oliver’s acting career began in 1994 with a 26-episode role on the show Saved by the Bell: The New Class. From 2006 to 2008, he portrayed characters in Clooney and Cate Blanchett’s The Good German, Emile Hirsch’s Speed Racer and Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie.
In addition to his role in Forever Hold Your Peace, the Los Angeles resident’s more recent credits included voice work on Call of Duty and Medal of Honor video game series entries in 2017 and 2020, respectively.
Hollywood horror often attempts to work out collective anxiety about the suburbs, that place full of pleasant-looking houses creaking with ghosts and terrors. Suburban life is, admittedly, fundamentally strange, with neighborhoods full of atomized worlds and natural features turned into individual, highly-controlled assets. A forest becomes manicured bushes. A lake becomes a pool.
Pools are ubiquitous across the American suburbs (just peek out the window when you fly), and the affluence, comfort and fun they represent can turn a middling kid into the most popular one at school, at least during the hot months. They are also ubiquitous in horror, from “Gremlins” to that greatest instance of suburban anxiety, “Poltergeist.” For the Waller family of “Night Swim,” the pool means freedom, friends and a new lease on life. But pools can also be deadly (accidental drowning is the No. 1 killer of young children), so the pleasure comes with an edge, a fact the Waller family are about to learn.
Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a former major-league baseball player, a real slugger, whose multiple sclerosis has taken him out of the game. His wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), is eager to finally settle down, proving a lasting home for their two children: breezy teenage Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), who struggles more than his sister to fit in with other kids. They find an old house outside the Twin Cities, fall in love, and buy it, then commence cleaning out the gloppy, unused pool in the backyard. It becomes an oasis. And for a while, the pool seems to be helping Ray get better.
But this is a horror film, so the Wallers cannot have nice things and, unfortunately, neither can we. “Night Swim” is the feature debut of Bryce McGuire, produced by the horror mavens James Wan and Jason Blum and based on McGuire’s 2014 short film. (A tidbit too odd to ignore: that short was filmed in the musician Michelle Branch’s backyard pool.) The first half of the movie is remarkably effective, especially if you’ve ever had a pool, and especially if you’ve swam in it at night, though lots of “Night Swim” happens during the day. Jumps abound, and a scene with Izzy and her crush is especially terrifying.
But it goes downhill at some point. The inciting concept is so strong — the pool, to rephrase the meme, that makes you dead — that all additions after a certain point start to feel like overkill. The strongest horror concepts are spare and uncluttered: something is chasing you, something is thumping under the bed. They tap into an anguish that is fundamental and gut-level, a level way lower than your head.
The problem with “Night Swim” is that it’s trying to say a little too much, which isn’t a complete pleasure-killer, but can get distracting. It’s partly a movie about a primal fear of the water, and that’s where it’s most effective. (In the grand tradition of “Jaws,” I anticipate a few viewers being hesitant about dipping a toe in next summer.) But other horror tropes pop up here and there — the “Indian burial ground,” the sick kid — themes surfacing in an ungainly manner. It’s a movie about the dark side of ambition and the true nature of sacrifice; also family favoritism, and illness, and maybe hell? By the end I wasn’t really sure, and the general goofiness that emerges in the third act undercuts the emotional resonance it’s going for.
McGuire clearly has the chops and the imagination for horror, so I’m excited to see what he does next. And for a winter horror release — typically a great time to go to the movie theater, munch popcorn and get your pants scared off — it does the job. In fact, pool owners should be glad it’s a January release. You’ll have a few months to let the dread wear off. Maybe.
Night Swim Rated PG-13 for scariness and children in peril. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters.
Each passing year seems objectively, measurably worse than the one before, at least on a world-historical level, unveiling new lows for evil, stupidity, hypocrisy and tyranny across the globe. I’ve done nothing to change any of it, but I’m glad that, unlike me, there are people who aren’t desensitized, wilfully blind or paralyzed by analysis fighting the good fight. More power to them.
The blog hasn’t been terribly active this year. In February, I started a curatorial section on the site to showcase work from up-and-coming filmmakers, but I haven’t been able to keep it up at a rate I would like. I hope I can resume the section in 2024, even if at irregular intervals.
The primary reason for the inactivity is that I made my first foray into festival programming this year. I was on the South Asia selection committee for the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October-November 2023) as well as the upcoming Berlin Critics Week (February 2024). Both assignments meant six months of intense, non-stop film viewing. A revelation from my time on the MAMI committee is that South Asian cinema is absolutely exploding, with crazy, ambitious works emanating from unlikely corners of the subcontinent, made by passionate individuals with little institutional or industry connections, with private resources unrelated to traditional channels of funding. It was truly an eye-opening discovery. Exciting times ahead for South Asian cinema.
For the first few months, however, I had a voluntary, almost systematic immersion into the history of avant-garde film, especially works from North America. I watched over 700 titles, long and short, canonical and lesser-known. I complemented this with reading books on the subject: Sheldon Renan, Amos Vogel, P. Adams Sitney, A.L. Rees, Stephen Dwoskin, William C. Wees, Jonathan Rosenbaum. But the single most instructive source was Scott MacDonald’s A Critical Cinema (1988-2005), five volumes of magnificently detailed interviews with avant-garde filmmakers from across generations and geographies. These exhilarating, demanding months of watching and reading truly felt like a substantial phase of my cinephile education.
It was also the year I published by second book, Moving Images, Still Lives, a lavishly illustrated monograph on Amit Dutta’s film Nainsukh (2010), published by Artibus Asiae of the Museum Rietberg Zurich. (Readers in India may consider buying a copy off Amazon, where a very, very limited number is on sale.) This book was an opportunity for me to undertake a different kind of writing — less spontaneous but more scholarly, with arguments propelled more by citations than passion. Also, until now, my references in visual arts were almost entirely European and American. Writing on Nainsukh meant researching into Pahari miniature painting and the world it issues from — an exposure I’m really grateful to have gotten.
I had no greater experience this year than watching Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (2022), a work I would without hesitation count among the ten or so finest films ever made in India. Heck, had I seen it a few months earlier, it would’ve made it to my ballot for Sight & Sound’s all-time poll. With age, I encounter fewer and fewer films capable of shaking me up the way Pellissery’s masterpiece has. It is one of the great spiritual works of the cinema.
I didn’t see as many commercial releases as I would’ve liked, and the ones I did weren’t too inspiring. I’ve consistently had problems with Martin Scorsese’s films set in cultures foreign to him, and despite the thrilling opening hour, Killers of the Flower Moon felt crippled by the same respectful distance that hamper Kundun (1997) and Silence (2016). I found Oppenheimer and Barbie equally tedious, both movies arriving with their own halo. Among Indian releases, I found things to like in several works, such as Thankam, Maaveeran, Kaadhal: The Core, Chithha, Jigarthanda DoubleX, Animal, Viduthalai Part 1and Haddi, but few were convincing in their entirety. So the list below is entirely composed of titles I saw at festivals or as part of my programming work. They all had their world premieres in 2023 at the festivals mentioned. Needless to say, this is a somewhat arbitrary list, and I can count about seventy other films that could be here instead. But I’ll spare you the hand-wringing. Happy new year.
Rare are Indian films centred on marked Muslim characters, and rarer are those that don’t employ these characters primarily as objects of violence and social injustice. In Shahrukhkhan Chavada’s tender, trailblazing Kayo Kayo Colour?, Muslim bodies exist in an existential autonomy, untouched by dramatic aggression and capable of accessing a whole range of human experience. Chavada’s film depicts the everyday life of an extended working-class family in a Muslim quarter in the outskirts of Ahmedabad on a historic day. We see a woman waking up early to do household chores, her husband trying to procure funds to buy an autorickshaw, their children playing gender-segregated games. Public spaces come alive with shrieking middle-schoolers, a mother folds clothes with a daughter who has made it out of the ghetto, a girl sleeps over at her grandparents’ place—routines that become electrifying expressions of communal life. With striking passages of dead time and non-narrative digressions, the film creates space for its characters to breathe freely, to simply be. This is a work that opens up a new way of looking at life in India. In its wonderous gaze at the world, in its incredible generosity, in its profound humanity, there’s little I’ve seen of late that comes close. [World Premiere: International Film Festival Rotterdam]
2. Mr. Junjun (Niu Niu, China)
In a masterpiece the world is sleeping on, Niu Niu forges a simmering, Dardennes-style character study of a middle-aged taxi driver on the brink of explosion. A fifty-year-old single man responsible for a recalcitrant, semi-paralyzed father, Mr. Junjun must recover his debts to get out of a deep financial hole, but every effort he makes in this direction pushes him further towards the point of no return. The cruel pleasure the film offers is in prolonging Junjun’s moment of rupture through a series of secondary errands that he must run order just to stay afloat: the picture of life passing by even before you can get a hold on it. And yet, this is no mean neorealist melodrama. We have very little access to the inner universe of the bespectacled Junjun, who is a pure man of action, filmed from behind, moving purposefully through the world if only in order to stay where he is. You sense that this man will break down any minute, yet there is tremendous tenderness and grace in him — and in the film, for him. Prepare to be knocked down by the most sublime ending of the year. [WP: Pingyao International Film Festival]
3. Slow Shift (Shambhavi Kaul, India-USA)
The work of Shambhavi Kaul, which has a knack for transforming real landscapes into otherworldly vistas, finds its perfect subject in the medieval city of Hampi in Southern India. The seat of the Vijayanagara Empire in the fourteenth century, Hampi is today a World Heritage Site attracting tourists from across the globe. In Slow Shift, Kaul crafts a spectral, non-narrative travelogue of the site that unearths its historical, mythical, geological, ecological and cultural layers. Weaving together images of stately rock-cut monuments, precariously posed stone clusters and an army of langurs taking over the depopulated site, the film forges a post-human space eerily resonant with the barren cityscapes that became common during the pandemic years. In a manner reminiscent of Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures, Slow Shift strikes a precarious balance between majestic stasis and imminent collapse. By combining moments of instantaneous change in the landscape with more long-term transformations as evidenced by Hampi’s weatherworn structures, the film evokes the different time scales simultaneously at work in nature, reminding us that even the mightiest empire will turn to rubble one day. It’s truly a planet of the apes, and we’re only squatters. [WP: Toronto International Film Festival]
4. Fauna (Pau Faus, Spain)
Aging shepherd Valeriano lives with his herd on the outskirts of Barcelona. With his children away and with a debilitating orthopaedic problem that requires him to hang his boots, he struggles to keep his profession alive. He supplies sheep to a high-tech laboratory next door, which runs tests on them as part of its research to develop a vaccine for the Covid19 virus. Except for animals brought in through carefully controlled doorways, the lab is hermetically sealed from all biological intrusions, while Valeriano makes periodic visits to the city hospital for his therapy. From this incredibly rich scenario, Pau Faus’ Fauna weaves an extraordinary, complex examination of the ways in which science, ecology and tradition prove inextricably linked in contemporary life. “I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction,” these words from Georges Bataille form the epigraph to Faus’ deeply moving, frequently heartrending observational documentary. With equanimity and wit, the film shines a light on humankind’s curious tendency to accelerate change while also fighting it, to master nature and technology while also being overwhelmed by them. Fauna creates ample space for reflection and critique, but supplies no easy answers. [WP: Visions du Réel, Nyon]
Maxime Martinot’s short essay is a brilliant investigation into the ways in which cinema exhibition and spectatorship are mediated by paratexts within and outside the films. Repurposing a range of verbal material intended to set context for viewing — disclaimers, introductory warnings, fourth-wall breaking intertitles, notices from theatre management — the film examines the fraught, slippery nature of the relationship between text and image in cinema. Systematically interspersed with these title cards are excerpts from across the history of moving images, arranged more or less in chronology. The Film You Are About to See cogently demonstrates the extent to which such title cards serve to fix the meaning and affect of images, and to counter, as Roland Barthes put it, “the terror of uncertain signs.” The disclaimers we see in the film have a striking resemblance to modern-day trigger warnings that seek to shield viewers from presumed psychic assaults. However, in its savvy assembly of ambiguous movie clips, Martinot’s film suggests that this is an ultimately futile enterprise, for images will always find a way to escape domestication and remain polysemous in the face of texts that seek to pin them down. [WP: Cinéma du Réel, Paris]
6. Valli (Manoj Shinde, India)
Valli is a man forced to be a Jogta, a living deity with a female form, believed to be capable of blessing those who worship and honour her. When he isn’t in his Jogta form, though, Valli is bullied by the village men for his feminine ways. The premise prepares you for an overwrought, sentimentalist work, yet Valli is anything but. Manoj Shinde’s stellar film is less about an individual trapped in a body than about a body trapped in a role, deified and debased, outcast and central to the social fabric at once. Valli takes an ultra-melodramatic subject and drains it off all excess, at times with the grace and wisdom of Hou-hsiao Hsien. The lead character is subjected to abuse and insult, but what we see as his reaction is defiance, contempt, indifference, anger, humour — everything that assures us that his dignity and integrity can’t be taken away. Vast passages of non-dramatic action allow the individual to just be. Delivering what is for me the screen performance of the year, Deva Gadekar is phenomenal as Valli, infusing every frame he is in with astounding bits of non-narrative magic, his androgynous body and its gratuitous gestures becoming transfixing without being fetishized. [WP: Singapore International Film Festival]
7. Camping du Lac (Éléonore Saintagnan, Belgium-France)
“I’d like to tell you an odd thing that happened.” So begins Éléonore Saintagnan’s gentle shape-shifting epic that metamorphoses from an understated fable to an absorbing myth to an startlingly immediate ecological parable. There will be no shortage of odd things in this one-of-a-kind film that revels in the power of invention and storytelling. Éléonore, played by the director herself, is stranded in Brittany, France, after her car breaks down on the way to the ocean. With little choice, she decides to lodge at a camping site by the Lake Guerlédan while her car is repaired. As she observes a host of characters at the camp, the film itself embarks on strange and beautiful narrative excursions. Together, these quaint detours, whose significance remains tantalizingly elusive, impart a starkly spiritual dimension to Saintagnan’s film, a sense of wonder at the various realities around us, visible and invisible. A gorgeously shot exploration of isolation and community, Camping du Lac may ultimately be about the ways we are (or fail to be) in communion with the mysteries of the world, and in that regard, this is a work wholly in tune with our times. [WP: Locarno International Film Festival]
8. Mithya (Sumanth Bhat, India)
After the sudden death of their parents, eleven-year-old Mithya and his young sister are taken by their aunt and uncle to their home in Udupi, much to the exasperation of the boy’s paternal relatives back in Mumbai. While the two clans fight for custody, Mithya struggles to find his moorings in a new environment, his growing sense of security undermined by a creeping feeling of re-living his original tragedy. Engineer-turned-filmmaker Sumanth Bhat’s supremely assured first feature makes us intimate with the experience of its young protagonist while also keeping us at a critical remove from his thoughts. A work that trusts the audience’s capacity for imagination and empathy, Mithya equally respects the complexity of a bereaved child’s inner world, never giving into facile poetry or genre convention. The adults, too, are invested with great dignity even when they are flawed individuals; Mithya’s uncle gets possibly the most piercing line of dialogue I heard this year, one that reveals an entire childhood. With its magnificent child performances in long shots, bold sense of ellipsis, delicately sketched character motivations and unnerving editing associations, Mithya is a virtuoso work end-to-end, an exemplar of honest, personal filmmaking. [WP: MAMI Mumbai Film Festival]
9. Dreams About Putin (Nastia Korkia & Vlad Fishez, Russia)
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the widely reported phenomenon of people dreaming about Vladmir Putin found a new life, with Russian citizens turning to social media to describe their nocturnal encounters with their dear leader. In Dreams About Putin, Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez put together a hypnotic anthology of such dreams, recounted by interviewees to the camera and subsequently rendered as oneiric mindscapes in a 3D video-game engine. Periodically woven between these animated passages are archival clips of the real Putin delivering a Christmas address, atop a glider or going on a hike. Are the interviewees dreaming, or are they being dreamt? A work perfectly reflective of a world of tinpot dictators, lopsided wars and generative AI, Dreams About Putin presents a stunning look into the deliriums of those in power and the powerlessness of those who can only be witnesses to it. Korkia and Fishez concoct a bleak vision of a Russia trapped in a megalomaniac’s nightmare in which even live-action footage of Putin’s macho outings acquires a thoroughly surreal quality. Simple, funny, entrancing, with an end sequence that is the most glorious dream of all. [WP: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam]
10. Berlin (Atul Sabharwal, India)
Few Indian filmmakers have a firmer command over vernacular genre filmmaking than Atul Sabharwal, who is at the top of his game in Berlin, a scintillating spy thriller revolving around sign language (!) in which we become, as one character puts it, outsiders who feel like insiders. 1993, New Delhi. The Indian Intelligence Bureau has arrested a deaf-mute man suspected of plotting the assassination of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who is in the country to renew diplomatic ties after the fall of the Soviet Union. They recruit Pushkin, a sign-language instructor, to help them with their interrogation, but the translator is soon nudged out of his neutrality by a rival governmental organization. Berlin, named after a café that was a safe trading post for spies of all stripes, finds Pushkin, as well as India, at a moment of swaying allegiances. A masterclass in staging what is essentially an extended, talky interrogation, Sabharwal’s super-smart, giddily plotted film sweeps us into a treacherous terrain of self-preserving intelligence agencies competing for legitimacy in a new world order. Come for the spectacle of Rahul Bose chewing scenery, stay for an exquisite treatise on the slow demise of the Non-Alignment Movement. [WP: Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles]
Special Mention: The Other Profile (Armel Hostiou, France-DRC)
Due to health problems, we have been reposting older entries lately and will continue to do so. Still, I could not skip this year’s contribution to the inexplicably popular series of ten-best lists for ninety years ago. Previous lists can be found here: 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928,1929, 1930, 1931,and 1932.
Last year’s list was easy to fill with marvelous films. Surprisingly, 1933 proved to be a thin year for masterpieces. The major auteurs of Hollywood and France created relatively minor films and German filmmakers were busy finding safe places to live and work. In short, there were some obvious films to head the list, but there are some titles here that I would include in a stronger year.
Fortunately one of the greatest filmmakers hit his stride in 1933. Yasujiro Ozu made three films that could be among the top ten. I usually don’t put two films by the same director on these lists, but I’m including two of his (sorry, Woman of Tokyo). Earlier Ozu films that featured on these lists can be found in the 1930, 1931, and 1932.
Dragnet Girl
2023 has been the 120th anniversary of Ozu’s birth and the 60th anniversary of his death. Retrospectives and exhibitions internationally have no doubt widened fans’ awareness of his earlier films. For decades almost none of his films made before Late Spring (1949) were much known outside Japan. Ozu’s gentle family dramas were so familiar that few would have believed that he began with genre films: student comedies, family comedies, salaryman comedies, and even gangster films. Now, fortunately, his entire surviving output is available on DVDs and Blu-rays, though sometimes not in versions with English subtitles.
The Criterion Collection’s Eclipse series brought the best of the very early films to DVD, including the two Ozu films on this list.
Film buffs familiar only with Ozu’s late films might well ask, could Ozu make a good gangster film? Actually, he could make a great one. Dragnet Girl is one of his early masterpieces.
Ex-boxer Joji is a small-time thug, living of his mistress, Tokiko. An aspiring young boxer and wannabe gangster, Hiroshi, idolizes Joji and spurns his sister Kazuko’s pleas to stay in school. Joji falls for Kazuko, and Tokiko finds that she likes the girl and wants to emulate her by persuading Joji that they should leave their lives of crime. But there’s one last job …
The style is quite noir, and Ozu has fun playing with the various Nipper figures and decals in the music shop where Kazuko works (see top). And Kinuyo Tanaka, best known in the West for tragic roles in Mizoguchi films, does quite well as a gangster’s moll (above).
As part of the slow discovery of Ozu’s work outside Japan, Western audiences finally got a glimpse of his early work when I Was Born, But … became available. As wrote last year, it “may be the one where he achieved the perfect balance of humor and poignancy that characterizes so many of his best films.” Or maybe it was Passing Fancy that struck that balance perfectly.
In a way, Passing Fancy reverses the premise of I Was Born, But …. In the earlier film, two boys become petulant and rebellious when they realize that their respected father is a mediocre salaryman taking orders from a wealthy boss and even playing the clown to entertain party guests for the boss. The parents realize the sadness of their situation but manage to handle the boys with understanding.
In Passing Fancy, the father, Kihachi, is an illiterature, carefree worker who approaches his duties as a single father to his bright son Tomio. Tomio acts as the parent, dragging his father out of bed, dressing him, and seeing him off to work. Tomio strives for an education, insisting on doing his homework when Kihachi tells him to go out and play. The two get into a serious argument, and their reconciliation (above) is one of Ozu’s most poignant of many poignant scenes.
As David says in his book on Ozu, Passing Fancy is more focused around complex characterization than his other early films. The secondary characters include Harue, an unemployed young woman, whom Kihachi briefly believes he can woo despite being considerably older (the “passing fancy” of the title). There is Kihachi’s cynical friend Jiro, who accuses Harue of being a gold-digger and rejects her growing love for him. The plot focuses on the characters and their changing attitudes, especially Kihachi’s alternation between fits of fatherly responsibility and selfishly neglectful behavior.
Passing Fancy is available on DVD in the Criterion Collection’s “Silent Ozu-Three Family Comedies” and streams on The Criterion Channel. The same link leads to David’s discussion on editing in Passing Fancy in our “Observations on Film Art” series. A PDF of his book, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, is available for free here.
Design for Living
Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) is generally considered one of his very best films. It tends to put Design for Living in its shadow. Still, this Ben Hecht adaptation of a Noel Coward romantic comedy is nearly as good, with three marvelous stars–Gary Cooper, Frederic March, and Miriam Hopkins–and enough witty dialogue for three features.
It’s also as risqué as anything Lubitsch did, narrowly missing the introduction of the Code in 1934. The three leads, Tom Chambers, a painter (Cooper), George Curtis, a playwright (March), and Gilda Farrell, a commercial artist (Hopkins) meet on a train in France and soon move in together. They swear a gentlemen’s agreement that there will be, as Gilda forthrightly says, “No sex.” This doesn’t work out, as Gilda has affairs with both, one after the other. Eventually they reunite and swear another gentlemen’s agreement–which clearly is leading to a menage à trois.
Design for Living is interesting to contemplate in relation to the Code’s dictates that characters who transgress moral or legal strictures must be punished by the film’s end. Most obviously here the three characters end up settling into a comfy romantic trio. Beyond that, though, Gilda’s desire to become a mother of the arts by guiding the pair’s unsuccessful careers has paid off spectacularly by the end. Her pitiless criticisms of their work (“Rotten!”) goad both of them to fame and fortune. The only one punished by the end is the wealthy advertising executive Max Plunkett (Edward Everett Horton), whose brief, straitlaced marriage to Gilda ends disastrously. The Lubitsch Touch indeed.
Design for Living is available on DVD or Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection and streams on the Channel.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
As is well known, Fritz Lang, despite not being Jewish, left Germany for France and ultimately Hollywood in 1933 when Hitler came to power. His last German film until he returned in the late 1950s was The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The film was banned immediately, with the German version having its premiere in Budapest. A French version, also directed by Lang but with different actors, circulated in Europe and the US, and various recut versions were circulated thereafter.
A sequel to the two-part serial Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (which was on my top-ten list for 1922), Testament took a very different approach to its titular villain. Now Mabuse has become insane and is incarcerated in a mental institution. There he obsessively scribbles down plans for a universal reign of crime. To escape the institution, his spirit enters the body of Dr. Baum, his psychiatrist (above), who becomes his surrogate in leading the gangsters who carry out Mabuse’s plans.
The sequel is not quite up to the original, in large part because the menacing Rudolph Klein-Rogge, who played Mabuse in that film, is barely present here. We see him briefly in his cell and occasional in some sort of spirit form, but Dr. Baum is not nearly as fascinating as a surrogate Mabuse.
Stylistically, however, Testament is pure Lang, with high long shots along dark, deserted streets, art-deco interiors, and a spectacular fire at a gas factory. There’s also a justly famous scene of an assassination from one car to another on a crowded street. Lang also seems to bid good-bye to Expressionism, with a subjective shot from the point of view of an asylum patient (see bottom).
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is available on DVD from The Criterion Collection and streams on the Channel. The DVD set includes the French version and a restoration of the German version missing three minutes of the original running time.
Zero for Conduct
Zero for Conduct has been another victim of censorship. Jean Vigo’s depiction of the miseries in a school for mainly working-class boys and especially the rebellion that some of the foment was too much for the authorities. It was only discovered after World War II, being released in the USA in 1947 and being taken up by cinephiles and the New Wave filmmakers in France.
I first saw the film as a graduate student. It was a muddy, gray print that did not reveal to me what all the fuss was about. Modern restoration has revealed the details and the luminosity of the cinematography by Boris Kaufman, as in the nighttime dormitory rebellion (above).
Vigo is sometimes referred to as a surrealist director. There are moments in Zero for Conduct that could be described as surrealist, as when the one kind teacher Huguet, draws a carticature while doing a hand-stand or the life-sized dummies that represent the attendees at the school fête where the rebellion breaks out. On the whole, however, the odd touches seem more to represent the way the children see the world, for the film is told largely from their vantage points.
It’s not often that a completely new animation technique is introduced, but it happened in 1933. Claire Parker and Alexander Alexeieff had invented the pin board or pin screen method. It involved a perforated board three by four feet, with hundreds of thousands of headless pins stuck through it. By pushing pins forward selectively and casting a raking light across the board, they could create images that resemble moving engravings.
A Night on Bald Mountain is set to Mussorgsky’s tone poem. There is no narrative, only a series of unconnected, disturbing images pass quickly across the screen, often morphing from one shape to the next. The result, as the above images suggests, is eerie indeed.
Given the labor-intensive work required on each film, the pair produced a small number of animated shorts across decades, supporting themselves by making many advertising shorts. The Wikipedia entry on Alexeieff has an excellent summary of the couple’s career and an extensive filmography.
1933 was a remarkable year for the series of Warner Bros. musicals famous for their numbers staged and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. No fewer than three major titles were released that year: 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade. I can’t put all three on the list, and I suspect the general opinion is that Footlight Parade is the best of the entire series.
It’s far livelier than the others, with the crazy premise that a company forms a service delivering live stage prologues to movie theaters. The result is a frantic race to get from one theater to the next. It has James Cagney, whose fast patter and unique, jittery dancing style injects an energy that offsets the bland Dick Powell. It has a string of big numbers, from “Honeymoon Hotel” to “By a Waterfall” to “Shanghai Lil,” all showing Berkeley at his flamboyant best.
Speaking of surrealism, the Marx Brothers ended their five-film contract at Paramount with what is widely considered their best film, Duck Soup, directed by Leo McCarey.
At Paramount, the brothers were allowed to create messy scenarios without the logic and unity dictated for most Hollywood films–including those made at MGM under the dictates of Irving Thalberg. The result is a series of comic set pieces loosely held together by a plot involving the tensions between two Ruritanian countiries, Fredonia and Sylvania.
The most famous of these set pieces is the mirror scene, where Pinky (Harpo), dressed as Firefly (Groucho), struggles to hide the absence of a broken mirror by mimicking his actions perfectly. Rather than confronting Pinky, Firefly devises ever more elaborate movements to reveal the ruse, inevitably copied flawlessly by Pinky (above). Other comic highlights that have nothing to do with the plot involve Pinky and Chicolini (Chico) running a peanut stand and carrying on a feud with the neighboring lemonade stand run by the master of the slow-burn, Edgar Kennedy.
This feud foreshadows the battle scene at the climax of the film. Staged entirely in the Fredonia headquarters, the action becomes increasingly nonsensical, with Firefly’s military outfits changing at frequent intervals and madcap dispatches coming in from the front.
Duck Soup also has the advantage of not including either of the hitherto obligatory harp and piano solos by Harpo and Chico. There are no such “serious” interludes or subplots involving young lovers, as there would be in A Night at the Opera and other later films. It’s the Marxes’ only film with unadulterated crazy humor throughout.
King Kong was released only a few years after Universal had seemingly identified ed the horror genre with vampires, sub-human monsters, and old dark haunted houses. Kong was different, a monster that could be sympathized with. Viewers could attribute human feelings to Kong as he saves Ann Darrow from a tyrannosaurus (above). As documentary filmmaker Carl Denham remarks, the giant gorilla’s affection for Ann turns the plot into a beauty-and-the-beast tale.
The film also added a touch of novelty by having Kong climb the Empire State Building, which had been opened to the public only two years earlier.
The impact of the film was no doubt enhanced by Max Steiner’s revolutionary musical track. It used leit motifs and a large orchestra, and the music played for a larger portion of the film than was usual in early sound films.
King Kong also expanded the methods of special effects available to filmmakers with its extensive use of Willis H. O’Brien’s puppet animation for Kong and the dinosaurs of Scull Island. (As I discussed in a previous post, O’Brien’s puppet animation was used extensively eight years earlier in the 1925 version of The Lost World.)
Despite being a major force in the American film industry by this point, Walt Disney has been little-represented in my lists. So far only The Skeleton Dance (1929), the first of the Silly Symphonies, has represented his output. The Three Little Pigs wasn’t a technical milestone in Hollywood animation. The first three-strip Technicolor short was Disney’s bland Flowers and Trees, which won the 1932 Oscar for an animated film (the first years this category was included). The Three Little Pigs won for 1933. In 1994 a large group of professional animators voted it number eleven on a list of the fifty greatest animated shorts. (An interesting list available here.)
Obviously people like the film a lot. It grossed ten times its production cost. It’s considered a classic. It has all the advantages of the best Disney shorts–beautiful color, fast action, and a catchy song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” It’s also quite funny. The framed pictures on the walls of the three pigs’ houses are easy to miss, but they characterize each pig cleverly.
The Three Little Pigs is available from multiple sources. My frame was taken from the “Walt Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies” DVD set. The “Treasures” series, recognizable by its aluminum cases, is out of print and hard to find, though there are a few copies available on eBay. (The same version has been posted on YouTube, but beware, it is distinctly out of focus.)
