Spotlight: Shishir Jha | The Seventh Art

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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

Shishir Jha is a filmmaker from Darbhanga, Bihar, who lives and works in Mumbai. An alumnus of the National Institute of Design, Shishir began making short films to teach himself particular aspects of moviemaking while also holding a job in the advertising industry. He has recently made his debut feature Dharti Latar Re Horo (Tortoise Under the Earth, 2022), a meditative docu-fiction set in an adivasi region of Central India plagued by the ecological repercussions of unchecked mining. While Tortoise Under the Earth is still seeking distribution, viewers can get a good sense of Shishir’s work from two of his short films, The East Wind (2016) and Te Amo (2016), both presented below along with a classroom project, Goodbye and Other Stories (2018).

A monodrama set in a mountainous stretch of Maharashtra, The East Wind centres on an unnamed middle-aged man seemingly mourning the disappearance of his wife. The film, however, only hints at this premise, refusing to spell it out except as visual clues: photographs of the man and his now-absent family, a dream-like tracking shot suggesting a journey away from the protagonist, who gazes yearningly at the photos or off-screen. Images of the man cooking his sorry meal or fetching water from across the valley, and of clothes left unattended to, signal a breach in the routine without putting too strong an emphasis on it. The wind blows, ushering in the first rains. Life goes on.

Ostensibly influenced by Béla Tarr, The East Wind demonstrates Shishir’s taste for elliptical, contemplative storytelling that privileges mood, atmosphere and landscape over character development or narrative detailing. The film doesn’t narrate a story as much as dwell on a state of mind — a kind of static portraiture that characterizes the filmmaker’s other work as well. Even so, it helps that he has a professional actor in Robin Das, whose weather-beaten face and downcast body become the primary expressive vehicle of the film. Shishir has subsequently worked predominantly with non-professionals, which certainly stretches their capabilities even as the films gain in documentary authenticity.

In 2016, Shishir participated in a workshop by Abbas Kiarostami at the EICTV film school in Cuba. Scouting neighbouring villages with an interpreter for possible subjects for a short film, he found an elderly couple living on the ground floor of a housing complex in Pueblo Textil, Bauta. On Kiarostami’s advice, he spent time getting to know them, observing their environment and shooting them in their routine while proposing to them small situations to improvise on. “I don’t speak Spanish, and I developed something intuitively based on my impression of their interactions,” says Shishir.

The result was the film Te Amo, a charming picture of old-age togetherness, routine pleasures and the banality of a contended life, unfolding on a lazy summer afternoon. Arcadio and Nelsa, the couple, have obvious charisma and their endearing chattiness and enthusiastic participation draw Te Amo far away from the laconism of The East Wind. “I discovered the power of language to express emotions for the first time,” says the filmmaker. “I realized that this was magic.” The film was well-received at the workshop and garnered Kiarostami’s appreciation. “The experience gave me confidence that I can make a film anywhere,” adds the filmmaker.

Speaking of his first feature film, Shishir notes that Tortoise Under the Earth was an extension of Te Amo: “With the same approach, I wanted to tell a longer story.” At the time, he was reading Paul Olaf Bodding’s work on Santhali folklore and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s short story collection The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015). Inspired equally by the play of myth and nature in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Shishir set out to the district of East Singhbhum in Jharkhand, exploring the area with the help of the activist Jeetrai Hansda. “I realised that Bodding’s Santhal is far away from today’s Santhals,” he says in an interview, ”there are new problems, new possibilities and new issues.” Instead of forcing his experience into a pre-determined narrative framework, Shishir spent his months simply gathering images and sounds from the region.

It wasn’t until he came across Jagarnath and Mugli Baskey that he found his human-interest story. A middle-aged couple who have lost their daughter to unstated causes, Jagarnath and Mugli live by themselves in a spacious house in the village. Like in Te Amo, Shishir recreated their everyday interactions as fiction, partly conceived by the protagonists themselves, giving us a picture of a loving couple living in harmony with the nature around them. Mugli speaks to flowers and sings songs of lament; Jagarnath talks to a bird and buys bangles for his wife. Woven through these domestic scenes are images from an annual festival in which Jagarnath plays percussions and a village fair where the couple have themselves photographed at a makeshift studio.

This soft, rarefied drama of rural idyll is, however, interrupted by environmental threat. We learn that the region has been poisoned by rapacious Uranium mining, the footprint of which hasn’t ceased to expand. True to the understated nature of Tortoise, this invasion first appears as noise — a distant thud of the machines — before we see its material consequences in the form of water poisoning and forced eviction. Jagarnath tries to sensitize the youth of the area, who seem playful and somewhat indifferent to their collective plight, showing little desire for action. Jagarnath is, on the other hand, determined that he will not leave his home. In a beautiful night-time sequence, he stares straight at the headlights of an ominous off-screen vehicle — heels dug into the ground, fists clenched — offering an uplifting note of defiance.

Tortoise Under the Earth is above all a humanist portrait of Jagarnath and Mugli. Shishir does not regard his film as a work of activism. The politics of Uranium mining, says the filmmaker, is not something that he was expressly seeking to address. But having spent time with the couple as their guest, it was something he couldn’t avoid, so much was it a part of their identity and existence. In that respect, Tortoise serves to register that, for people like Jagarnath and Mugli, the business of living is inextricable from their struggles against erasure.

 

Bio

Shishir Jha is a Mumbai-based filmmaker born in Bihar, India in 1988. He graduated from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, with a bachelor’s degree in Film & Video Communication Design. He received a Diploma in Filmmaking at the workshop of the late Abbas Kiarostami at EICTV (Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV) in Cuba in 2016. He has made several short films, and Tortoise Under the Earth is his first feature film.

Contact

rumrainroad[at]gmail[dot]com | Instagram | Twitter

Filmography

  • Meghna, 2009, 2 min., digital
  • Guddi, 2011, 5 min., digital
  • The East Wind, 2015, 15 min., digital
  • Segment in Shuruaat Ka Interval, 2014, 5 min., digital
  • Te amo, 2016, 18 min., digital
  • Goodbye & Other Stories, 2018, 18 min., digital
  • Dharti Latar Re Horo (Tortoise Under the Earth), 2022, 97 min., digital

Showcase

The East Wind (2015)

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_VyI0zK_cU[/embed]

Te amo (2016)

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HhGoCAnC5U[/embed]

Goodbye & Other Stories (2018), password: humara123

 



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Observations on film art : POKER FACE: Detective off the grid

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Poker Face, Ep. 10 (“The Hook”).

DB here:

Charlie Cale, an easygoing but tough young woman from New Jersey, has a unique gift. She can detect when someone is lying. She has exploited this in a career as an itinerant poker player, but after the word gets out about her ability, she winds up working as a waitress in a Las Vegas casino. A free spirit, she enjoys living from paycheck to paycheck, sharing beers and smokes with other staff. But the casino boss Stirling Ford Sr. learns of her gift and recruits her for a scheme targeting a rich patron.

That scheme collapses, and Charlie winds up having to flee across the United States. Driving the backroads, trying to stay off the grid, she keeps running into crimes in a wide range of settings. She stops at a Nevada Subway shop, a Texas barbecue joint, a stock-car race, a dinner theatre, a special-effects movie company, the venues of a touring heavy-metal band, a care facility for the elderly, and a remote mountain motel. We come to know each of these with remarkable specificity, noting details like lottery tickets and music amplifiers and Steenbeck flatbeds.

Charlie has the common touch. When she spots a lie, she’s likely to blurt out, “Bullshit!” She can freely talk and eat with working stiffs and is naturally suspicious of the plutocrats she keeps running into. She’s ready to deploy her ability to expose the less wealthy who want to exploit others. Eventually we come to learn that her sympathy for virtuous innocents may be compensation for her frosty relations with her family.

Charlie is the protagonist of Poker Face, a ten-episode series designed by Rian Johnson. Johnson is an admirer of classic mysteries. Earlier I’ve tried to chart his debt to Golden Age whodunits, as seen in Knives Out and Glass Onion. Unsurprisingly, he planned Poker Face as an homage and an updating of the TV show Columbo.

Apart from enjoying Poker Face on its own terms, I’ve admired its efforts to innovate. In my book Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder I argue that we have three useful tools for understanding plots. We can ask about the sequence of events in time; the way point of view structures our access to those events; and the way the events are broken into distinct parts. Noting how the plot handles time, viewpoint, and segmentation can help us grasp the ways Johnson has revivified the classic mystery–in ways that shape our experience.

I’ve had to indulge in spoilers, but I decided to confine those wholly to the first episode. Later episodes would justify a similar depth of analysis. And even in the first episode, I’ve tried to conceal major plot points when I could. In any event, I hope that people who haven’t yet seen the show (streaming on Peacock) might be intrigued enough to try it. It’s free although interrupted by commercials, but in a nifty use of segmentation Johnson manages to turn their timing to his advantage.

 

The inverted plot

Columbo, Ep. 1 (“Murder by the Book,” 1971).

The typical investigation plot begins with the crime already committed. The detective proceeds to unearth earlier events that led up to it. The alternative is, unreasonably, called the “inverted” plot. Here we witness the crime committed and perhaps are shown the motives involved. Then the detective arrives on the scene and we watch the investigator try to discover what we already know. We watch for slip-ups in what initially seems a foolproof scheme.

The inverted schema was developed most vividly in the Golden Age by F. Austin Freeman in a series of short stories. His sleuth, Dr. Thorndyke, arrives on the scene only after we have watched the culprit do the deed. The puzzle comes in trying to grasp how Thorndyke, using reasoning and scientific analysis, solves the mystery. In the process, he sometimes calls our attention to betraying details that we didn’t notice on the first pass.

This pattern of action comes off well in the short-story format, but it can be difficult to sustain in a longer tale. So the author may have the culprit resort to trying to impede or confuse the ongoing investigation, or to committing other crimes that need solution as well. These techniques come into play in Freeman’s novel Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight, which devolves into a battle of wits between Thorndyke and Pottermack.

A similar sort of stretching was common in Columbo, whose reliance on inverted plots inspired Johnson for Poker Face. The first episode broadcast, “Murder by the Book” (directed by Steven Spielberg), starts with disgruntled author Ken Franklin shooting his collaborator. Columbo, in his rumpled raincoat, doesn’t show up for the first eighteen minutes, and even after that he’s offstage during Franklin’s further schemings. These include creating a false trail for the crime and killing a witness who threatens him with blackmail.

We get some access to Columbo’s investigation behind the scenes, but the high points are his visits to Franklin. We enjoy the clash of slob versus snob when this obtuse flatfoot peppers the wealthy author with maddening questions–and always seems to accept a lie in reply. Eventually, when Franklin is trapped, Columbo reveals that he suspected him from the start; he just needed more evidence.

Despite its name, the inverted plot is usually linear. It traces events chronologically from crime to punishment, though flashbacks may provide chunks of backstory. This is where Johnson saw an opportunity to try something new. Assuming that viewers are familiar with the inverted plot schema, he juggles the sequence of events in unusual ways–exploring a different time layout in each episode.

 

A matter of timing

Poker Face, Ep. 1 (“Dead Man’s Hand,” 2023).

Except for the final installment, Poker Face follows the inverted schema: crime first, then investigation. But after we see the crime committed, the episode’s narration typically skips back and even “sideways” to show us circumstances leading up to the deed. Eventually the crime will be take its place in the chronological sequence–perhaps through a brief replay, or at least by reference in dialogue. Put another way, the crime segment is a kind of flashforward.

The first episode, “Dead Man’s Hand,” provides a tutorial in method. In a Las Vegas casino, the housekeeper Natalie finds horrific pornography on the open laptop of Kasimir Caine, a millionaire guest. She reports it to the boss, Sterling Frost Junior, and his fixer Cliff. They send her home. Cliff follows and shoots Natalie in her living room. He’s already shot her husband Jerry and he arranges the scene to look like a murder-suicide.

This block of brief scenes is followed by a linear story starting a few days earlier. Charlie works at the casino as a waitress, and she offers Natalie a place to stay after her drunken husband Jerry has raised a ruckus in the gaming room. In the meantime, Frost Jr. has learned of Charlie’s lie-detection talent and recruited her to watch Caine’s clandestine poker game by remote transmission. Frost will use her information about who’s bluffing in order to fleece Caine, while proving to his father that he’s a good manager.

Frost’s scheming with Charlie is interrupted by Natalie’s visit to report Caine’s pornography, so now the lead-in sequence falls into place. While Charlie is briefed further by Frost, Cliff is offstage killing Natalie and Jerry. The pivot is signaled by repeated dialogue: Cliff phones Frost (“It’s done”) and Frost resumes his explanation (“Where were we?”). The sequence of events is firmed up the next morning, when Charlie sees an online report of Natalie’s death.

The rest follows chronologically. Charlie feels guilty for not returning Natalie’s call, made shortly before her death.

Her phone record leads her to notice disparities in the timeline and investigate, while she and Frost Jr. are preparing for the Caine scam. A slip of the tongue allows her to spot Frost’s lie about Cliff’s call, and he realizes she’s on to him. The result is Frost’s death and his father’s demand that Cliff capture Charlie. She flees and begins her backroads odyssey across America.

Later Poker Face episodes elaborate this template. Sometimes the crime is embedded in a large block of consecutive scenes, with all the backstory shown (ep. 2, “The Night Shift”). After that we skip back to still earlier events centering on Charlie’s travels leading up to the night of the murder, which takes place while she is next door in a tavern. That’s why I said that some of the scenes move sideways, showing incidents near her. This “proximity principle” is pushed further in ep. 3, “The Stall,” when Charlie is hovering just offscreen in the opening scene, as the murder conditions are laid out; the replay will reveal that.

Another variant: The leadup to the crime is extended for much longer than in the earlier episodes, with the murder coming a third of the way through the show’s running time (ep. 4, “Rest in Metal”) and the replay witnessed by Charlie over halfway through. Later episodes adopt mixed strategies. They still start with the crime, or at least the planning, and skip back in time, but they seed the later blocks with ellipses, brief flashbacks, and replays. It’s as if the series were teaching us week by week to accept an increasing flexibility in moving forward and backward and sideways, while still adhering to the basic convention of the inverted plot. We’re also helped, of course, by dialogue and intertitles telling us where we are in the timeline.

The exception to these pyrotechnics is the last episode, “The Hook.” It’s stubbornly linear in tracing Cliff’s pursuit of Charlie. It starts ab initio, with Frost Sr. ordering him to find her, and following that with scenes from earlier episodes in which Cliff misses her. In a way, this entire prologue is a kind of flashback that ends with him seizing her as she leaves a Colorado hospital. The final episode is the most conventionally readable because it isn’t an inverted plot. The crime is missing from the opening but is saved, as is common, for a climactic revelation.

What makes all this variation possible is a coordination of segmentation, viewpoint, and causal-chronological order. The blocks of time are dictated by attachment to the killer (s) or to Charlie. Typically the lead-up to the crime keeps us with the culprits. The flashbacks following the first statement of the crime are motivated because they’re attached to Charlie, who is just getting involved with the situation. The later segments are either purely tied to her, or (as in the Columbo episode) devoted to the culprit’s efforts to thwart her inquiry. In “Dead Man’s Hand,” for instance, scenes of her investigation are garnished with moments in which Frost Jr. and Cliff plan ways to circumvent her. In all, these maneuvers create pretty clever plots, their segments accented by the way that the end of a block tends to initiate a commercial break . . . just as in old network TV.

 

Charlie’s little gray cells

Poker Face, Ep. 8 (“The Orpheus Syndrome, 2022).

How good a detective is Charlie? Given her gift, shouldn’t sleuthing be utterly easy? Johnson has engineered his series to give her several handicaps that require her to sweat as much as any hardboiled dick.

For one thing, as a working-class woman of fairly slight stature, she starts by facing a bias in favor of the bulky, wealthy men (mostly) whom she challenges. In addition, after the first episode, she’s on the run and has to be discreet. Going to the police about anything would inevitably reveal her whereabouts to Frost Sr. Moreover, during her flight she’s deprived of what helped her crack the first case: her cellphone access to the internet. After Frost Sr. threatens that he will find her, she destroys her phone so she can’t be tracked. But now she’s got to rely on other sources of information.

Even her gift proves problematic. Unless a suspect explicitly denies committing the crim, her bullshit detector can’t know the person is guilty. Not incidentally, this condition puts a fruitful constraint on the screenwriters. They have to make sure the culprit’s dialogue circumvents the sort of declaration that Charlie would see through.

Confronted by all these obstacles, Charlie is obliged to act like a classic detective. Let’s count the ways.

For all the pledges to strict reasoning, the traditional sleuth is often triggered by intuition, the sense that something is just not right here. (The prototype is Chesterton’s Father Brown, but even logicians like Ellery Queen and Hercule Poirot are sensitive to “atmosphere.”) Charlie’s gift is an extravagant form of intuition, since it’s both illogical and impossible to explain scientifically, so even when it doesn’t expose the killer it can set off a minor alarm. In the season’s first episode, her suspicion is aroused when Frost Jr. lies about his phone conversation with Cliff.

The classic detective spots or unearths clues, traces of the criminal’s action and pointers to identity. Charlie’s case against Frost Jr. and Cliff in “Dead Man’s Hand” is built out of such traditional clues as a problematic timetable, uncharacteristic behavior (Natalie didn’t sign out when she left work), and hand dominance (would a leftie wield a pistol with his right?).  Later episodes of Poker Face are packed with physical clues, from wood splinters to discarded candy wrappers. As Jacques Barzun puts it, in the classic detective story “bits of matter matter.”

Charlie is especially good at spotting the absent clue, the dog that didn’t bark in the night-time. In the first episode, she notices that video footage of Jerry hustled out of the casino shows him passing through Security unscathed.

But if he had his pistol with him, that would have been detected–which implies that Cliff kept it. Yet Golden Age conventions demand fair play: we must have access to all the clues the detective has. In his films Johnson has adhered to this, and he has in Poker Face. So we are shown the Security station in the casino twice earlier. Early on, Cliff breezes through, counting on the staff’s recognizing him and letting him pass.

Later, Charlie is stopped because her phone sets off the scanner.

Consequently, when Jerry doesn’t set off the alarm as Charlie had, he can’t be packing the gun.

Reasoning puts the clues together, but sheer reasoning isn’t enough to justify arresting somebody. There must be evidence. Charlie often finds herself convinced of the killer’s guilt but lacking something that would stand up in court. And without a cellphone she can’t resort to tricking the killer into confessing on a hot mic. Yet some solid evidence is needed to clinch the case. The screenwriters have been ingenious in finding other damning records. Episodes recruit heart-monitor charts, 16mm film, CCTV footage, and digital audio and video captured by Charlie’s helpers or the culprits themselves.

In a classic whodunit, as we approach the climax, the detective is often blessed with a stroke of good luck that advances the solution of the puzzle. It’s often something apparently trivial–an overheard conversation or a slip of the tongue, or an irrelevant detail that inspires the detective to reinterpret a clue. In “Dead Man’s Hand,” Charlie spots the TV report of Jerry passing through Security not by diligent research but by sheer accident. She’s just dropped by the bar when the broadcast appears.

One more convention, one that the series adopts gradually: an alliance between detective and law enforcement. The classic detective cooperates to some extent with the police, either wholeheartedly (Queen, Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey) or grudgingly (Nero Wolfe). Even tough guys like Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and Philip Marlowe may  exchange information with their friends on the force. At the start of Poker Face Charlie is a loner, but as the series proceeds, she gain an ally in the FBI, and because she helps him crack cases he comes to her aid on occasion. “At this rate, if I stick with you I’ll be head of the Bureau in a year.”

In all, Poker Face has engagingly modernized the inverted plot schema while benefiting from classic principles. Those permit the detective to show off powerful intuition, systematic reasoning, and Machiavellian cleverness in trapping the prey. In addition, the series has added to the gallery of admirable sleuths a hard-boiled but compassionate wise-guy woman. And it’s done with a strong dose of social criticism. This have-not from Jersey wreaks vengeance on those who victimize innocents.

 

Poker Face is scheduled for a second season, with Charlie once more on the run across America. We may expect that it will continue to show how ingenious play with time, viewpoint, and segmentation can revivify conventions of the whodunit. Keen fans learned to ask not only How will Charlie discover the crime we’ve seen committed? but also ask, with a teasing meta-curiosity: What ellipses and time jumps and hidden clues will we get this episode? Johnson seems unlikely to give up the game any time soon.


In Deadline, Antonia Blyth provides a very informative interview with Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne about Poker Face.

Martin Edwards discusses the inverted plot schema as part of a broader trend toward empirical, scientific investigation techniques in The Life of Crime (2022), Chapter 10. For a thorough survey of Freeman’s work, see Mike Grost’s discussion. Jacques Barzun emphasizes the role of physical clues in his superb essay, “Detection and Literature,” The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern (1956), 313.

I discuss the inverted plot in more detail in Chapter 5 of Perplexing Plots, considering it as a hybrid of the pure investigation plot and the psychological thriller.

Poker Face, Ep. 3 (“The Stall,” 2023).

This entry was posted

on Sunday | June 25, 2023 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Directors: Johnson, Rian, Narrative strategies, PERPLEXING PLOTS (the book), Television.

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William Friedkin created unforgettable horror and pleasure with equal brilliance | Movies

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William Friedkin was a director who created so many visceral, unforgettable experiences for moviegoers; he was a film-maker who could offer films with the thrillingly intravenous excitement of hard drugs. For some reason, the one that stands out for me is his neo-noir corrupt-cop drama To Live and Die in LA (1985) and, the first time I saw it, almost rising from my seat during the airport car chase and a particularly gasp-inducing high-fall stunt.

Friedkin gave us a number of classics in the early 1970s, but his queasy and diabolically inspired masterpiece was surely The Exorcist from 1973, adapted by William Peter Blatty from his original novel. This was the quintessential horror-pleasure of that period, the era of people lining up around the block to get into the cinema to see something that they hoped, expected and feared would scare them half to death, a roller-coaster ride out into the void. Just as Steven Spielberg was to give the Roger Corman schlock-horror fantasies about evil creatures a sophisticated upgrade with Jaws, so Friedkin effectively did with horror, making it thrillingly contemporary and respectable.

Like porn, horror had been turbocharging cinema’s fortunes since the medium was invented, but which was considered marginal. But horror, and perhaps specifically Satanic horror, had often been associated with something exotic, strange, foreign: a world of Transylvanian castles and elegant vampires with British accents. The Exorcist was so devastating because it brought Satan and evil into the modern-day American suburb (albeit a well-heeled American suburb) in a film which in its opening scenes could as well be a heartrending drama about family dysfunction, or about political intrigue, about ordinary Americans. (Even Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, which emerged a few years before, involved a Hammer-style cast of alien devil-acolytes.)

Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair were outstanding as the mother and daughter Chris and Regan MacNeil, the pre-teen daughter behaving strangely and the mother worried, and looking for help. Exquisitely, The Exorcist contains what could be the premise for a TV movie of the week about drug abuse or eating disorders. With diabolic ingenuity and flair, Friedkin made it the springboard for the incursion of pure evil. Regan is possessed by an evil spirit and they need a professional; and here you have to admit that only someone from the haunted Old Europe will do: Max von Sydow’s gaunt and frowning Father Merrin.

Horror films are often now admired for how funny they are – but there was nothing funny about The Exorcist which took the existence of Satan with a seriousness that was unfashionable in the movies, then as now. I remember being afraid, genuinely afraid, at what I was going to experience in Regan’s bedroom and it never occurred to me then to dismiss it all as an allegory for anxious sexual awakening. The evil spirit in The Exorcist is not a metaphor; it is an evil spirit.

William Friedkin, Gene Hackman, Jane Fonda and Philip D’Antoni at the 1971 Oscars
William Friedkin, Gene Hackman, Jane Fonda and Philip D’Antoni at the 1971 Oscars Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Similarly compelling was Friedkin’s The French Connection from 1971, the true-crime thriller which introduced Brit audiences to the scuzzy world of New York, which really was grittier, nastier and scarier than any British city, and whose squalors tourists really could come across quite easily – just like in the movies. It also gave birth to celluloid’s version of the New York underworld in Lumet’s Serpico and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. There’s a gripping car v subway chase (though, as I say, the car chase in To Live And Die In LA bears comparison), an amazing lead performance from Gene Hackman as “Popeye” Doyle (Friedkin leaves his nickname and backstory coolly unexplored and unexplained), and an incomparably brutal evocation of normalised racism in the NYPD.

But what is often forgotten about The French Connection is Friedkin’s masterly and restrained controlled use of pace. A modern-day cop thriller would have to bust out some tasty action violence quite soon after the opening credits, or even before the credits, but Friedkin takes everything very slow, very downbeat, as Popeye and his partner brood and roam around the New York streets. It is fully 1hr before any gunshots are fired. And the film’s unhurried surveillance scenes are surely an inspiration for the TV classic The Wire.

Friedkin’s 1977 gem Sorcerer, set in South America – critically ignored at the time due to the avalanche of attention going elsewhere, mostly to George Lucas’s Star Wars – was an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel The Wages of Fear, which had already been famously filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot with Yves Montand. Perhaps the idea of it being a remake (which Friedkin disputed) contributed to the film’s relative neglect. It’s an intriguing slow-burner of a film, content with its own inordinately long fuse, fizzing menacingly away; appropriately so, in fact, because it’s about four desperate guys driving a truckload of nitroglycerin which could explode at the slightest unanticipated jolt. Yet Friedkin’s genius for strangeness, loneliness and existential fear comes out when the truck is marooned in a sinister Conradian wasteland. It’s a fiercely austere film to which Friedkin brings his piercing film-making intelligence.

Elsewhere, his underworld drama Cruising from 1980, with Al Pacino as the cop going undercover to find a gay serial killer, has perhaps been derided for expressing not much more than the straight world’s fear of gay sexuality. But there are some extraordinary moments in it: such as when Pacino’s boss – played by a young Paul Sorvino, later to gain immortality in Scorsese’s GoodFellas – calmly asks him: “Have you ever had your cock sucked by a man?” and Pacino calmly says no, though without insisting he is straight. It is a brutal, rough-edged drama which scrapes tactlessly against the guardrails of what a 21st century audience would consider good taste. Meanwhile Bug, from 2006, was a piece of pure pulp craziness and insect horror from screenwriter and dramatist Tracy Letts, while Letts also gave him the basis for his violent and amoral cop drama Killer Joe, which gave Matthew McConaughey his “McConaissance”. Friedkin was a master of cinema and a magus of pure celluloid sensation.

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Here’s What’s Leaving Netflix In August 2023

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Horror fans, take note! It’s the last call for multiple hit scary movies on Netflix.

More than 80 titles are joining the streaming service in August, but 22 are set to depart, including two hit supernatural horror films ― 2002′s “The Ring” and 2007′s “Paranormal Activity.” Another spooky offering on the way out is the TV show “Scream,” an anthology series based on the hit slasher movies of the same name.

The show ran on MTV for two seasons starting in 2015 and was renewed for a third season by VH1, which aired the final six episodes in 2019. Currently, TV and film writers and actors ― including those who worked on the aforementioned projects ― are on strike over fair pay and working conditions in the streaming era.

ABC Photo Archives via Getty Images

"Sister, Sister" is among the shows leaving

On the non-horror side, multiple Academy Award-winning films will no longer be available on Netflix by August end. “Les Misérables” (2012) departs on August 15, and “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018) is out on the last day of the month.

All six seasons of the beloved ’90s sitcom “Sister, Sister” and both seasons of the History Channel’s Middle Ages drama “Knightfall” leave the platform in August as well.

Check out the full list of movies and shows leaving Netflix below. And if you want to stay informed about everything joining Netflix on a weekly basis, subscribe to the Streamline newsletter.

Aug. 12

“Knightfall” (Seasons 1-2)

Aug. 14

“Winx Club” (Seasons 6-7)

Aug. 15

Aug. 24

Aug. 31

“If Beale Street Could Talk”

“InuYasha the Movie: Affections Touching Across Time”

“InuYasha the Movie 2: The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass”

“InuYasha the Movie 3: Swords of an Honorable Ruler”

“InuYasha the Movie 4: Fire on the Mystic Island”

“Moving Art” (Seasons 1-3)

“Paranormal Activity”

“Scream” (Seasons 1-3)

“She’s Gotta Have It”

“Sister, Sister” (Seasons 1-6)

“Sleepless in Seattle”



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‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway

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The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.

And by star, I of course mean the car.

So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live.

Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound.

Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.

Certainly the musical’s book, by Bob Gale, sticks as close to his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the movie’s director) as stagecraft and current-day taste permit. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as yet has no defenders.

But Marty is still the same frustrated would-be rock ’n’ roller, stuck in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a family of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean accidentally transports the teenager to 1955, during the exact week in which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mother) fell in love at a high school dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his own existence.

You wouldn’t expect the adapters to change that; the working out of the paradox is the best thing about the screenplay. Nor would you expect them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” though invoking it 13 times is perhaps a dozen times too many.

Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie and performed by Marty at that high school dance — including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are of course effective as ensemble opportunities. But neither they nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y main title music, repurposed here as a brief overture, they are too generic for that.

The exceptions underline the problem. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a song for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That nice but underfed idea from the screenplay becomes a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner here, with a classic musical theater theme (underdog dreams big) sparking a classic musical theater performance (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar song that introduces George in 1955, creates the illusion of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot hole.

Rando’s staging of that number is not ideal; though George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it looks more like he’s in a rowboat made of leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection because she’s using her open bedroom window as a mirror.

It’s a rare visual misstep for Tim Hatley, the show’s set and costume designer, who has generally provided astonishingly satisfying theatrical versions of the movie’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the illusion designer Chris Fisher — those surprisingly old-fashioned newfangled effects.

The inventiveness and surprise of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the crucial clock tower in a hilariously fake layering of live action behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the show’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere feel like a cheap compromise.

And yet it’s not really faithful. The movie is carefully balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London production, which won the 2022 Olivier award for best new musical, essentially duplicates and then vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to copy the idiosyncrasies of the movie’s Christopher Lloyd, instead adds a descant of commentary atop them, sometimes seeming to extemporize a different show entirely. And Likes, though not at all reminiscent of the expert Michael J. Fox in the movie — in tribute to whom there’s a nice Easter egg — is given nothing new to do except sing, which he does very well.

That the problems of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to define the production — good workarounds are not the same as good work — suggests the “Why?” problem at its heart. Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to?

I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. The movie’s two hours were barely enough to tell the story; to tell it in about two-and-a-half, while leaving room for those 17 new songs, everything else has been cut to the bone, with no room for subtlety, let alone expressivity. Why then bother with the songs in the first place?

Making material shallower, even if cleverly, is not a great argument for adaptation. It can be defended if some other value is countervailing. For me, the show’s stagecraft and general high spirits come closest to providing that value, but they are too often undone by 1955-ish ideas of Broadway style (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot points held over from the movie. The Libyans may be gone, but the story still valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests that a white boy introduced “Johnny B. Goode” three years before a Black man actually wrote it. That’s what we call a caucausal paradox.

Though much praised at the time of its release and more recently beatified as one of the all-time greats, the movie, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has always struck some people — including Glover — as morally hollow. One of the sour notes in the musical is the way it sings the same tune. Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.

Back to the Future: The Musical
At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.

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Sight and Sound Poll 2022

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My ballot for the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll for the greatest films of all time:

La Jetée (1962, Chris Marker)
Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-98, Jean-Luc Godard)
The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912, Ladislaw Starewicz)
Sátántangó (1994, Béla Tarr)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charles Chaplin)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Up! Series (1964-ongoing, Michael Apted, Paul Almond)
The Crowd (1928, King Vidor)
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927, Walther Ruttmann)
Homework (1989, Abbas Kiarostami)

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“Best Picture” ≠ “Live Action”

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Wreck-It Ralph (2012).

Kristin here:

Way back in 2006, I posted a long piece on the increasing prominence of animated features being released each year. This was in the infancy of the blog, and the entry shows it–few photos, inserted as thumbnails. We only gradually worked up to our format of posting plenty of illustrations. By contrast this current contribution offers plenty of visual pleasure.

Basically I argued three points. First, that by their nature animated films would tend to be among the highest-quality films in any given year, despite their relatively small number in those days.

My argument laid out some reasons for this high quality. First, the fact that animated films were perforce thoroughly planned in pre-production, meaning that every detail was carefully considered. This means that relatively few inadequate scenes are reworked in production. Live-action films these days tend to be heavily dependent on shooting lots of coverage and making many decisions in the editing stage. Not true of animated films. Similarly, the soundtrack is recorded in advance and the images animated to sync with it. Hence the sound is meticulously planned. The voice actors record their voices and leave, usually not hanging around to try and change their scenes during shooting or fluffing lines and thus requiring multiple retakes of scenes.

My second point addressed the opinion, widely circulating in the trade press, that the spread of animation, and particularly digital animation, was a mistake. I quoted a recent Screen International article: “Much has been made this year of the seeming over-saturation of studios’ computer-generated titles, with critics and analysts pointing to growing movie-goer apathy.” I pointed out that such a claim didn’t fit the facts: “As a proportion among the total number of films made, CGI’s box-office successes seem fairly high compared to live-action films.”

My third point was that American distributors did not know how to market films from abroad, so that Ghibli and Aardman titles did not get nearly the audiences they deserved. Since then the distributor GKIDS has shown that it’s possible, at least for a relatively small company, successfully to release such films. They currently offer films with eleven best-animated feature Oscar nominations (with one win, Spirited Away), having gained distribution rights to Ghibli films, previously controlled by Disney.

Since I wrote that entry, the number of animated films, mostly digital, released yearly has sharply increased. And the disproportionate number of those animated films that appear among the top hits of the year continues to demonstrate that people are not apathetic. The spread of streaming services, combined with the decline of theatrical attendance during the pandemic, make it difficult to judge the success of films. Going back to 2019, where it’s a bit easier to judge, the top ten films included two animated successes, Toy Story 4 and Frozen II. An additional two were in the top twenty, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and The Secret Life of Pets 2. Animated films did not make up 20% of all films released, but that’s the portion of the top twenty they occupied.

I followed up that entry with one that found additional evidence that animated features were doing well, including the fact that Ice Age: The Meltdown was, though not the top box-office film of 2006, the most profitable film of that year.

So many developments have occurred in the world of feature animation since that first post that I decided to write an update.

 

The neighborhood is getting crowded

To some extent today’s update was inspired by a recent online post concerning new competition for Disney, which had absorbed Pixar and easily led the box-office race for years, with Dreamworks a second-run. Current developments led Alexandra Canal to point out some interesting figures. In 2022, Disney’s box-office total was $1.93 billion in ticket sales, for 26% of market share. Universal, number two, generated $1.64 million, for 22%, and Sony’s box-office coming in at a mere $834.8 million, or 11%. But things are changing. Other studios’ investments in building animation wings have started to challenge Disney’s dominance of the market for these films.

So far in 2023, as of July 1, Universal has The Super Mario Bros. (released April 5) at number one on the top-grossing list and over $1.3 billion worldwide. Sony has Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (June 2) at number four and approaching $620 million worldwide. By contrast, Disney has had two flops in recent memory: Lightyear (which I found mildly entertaining but not what I expect from Pixar) under-performed last summer, and Disney’s own Strange World (November 23) ended up with less than $74 million. Disney’s film in the top ten is the live-action version of The Little Mermaid (May 26), at number five with just over half a billion.

It will probably take several years for the long-term effects of streaming and the theatrical distribution recovery (if any) will have on Disney’s dominance. Still, it seems that the other Hollywood studios’ move toward creating their own animated departments is succeeding to some extent. The trend toward a greater variety of animated films may last.

 

Best Animated Feature or Best Picture? Which will win?

For this entry I have picked a rather arbitrary method of comparing quality animated films with quality live-action ones. I’m going to look at the Best Animated Films Oscar winners and nominees in comparison to the Best Picture ones.

Every now and then someone points out that such excellent animated films are now being turned out regularly that it would be logical to nominate the best of them for Oscars in the Best Picture category. There has never been a rule against such a crossover. So far it has only happened three times: Beauty and the Beast (1991, before the Best Animated Feature category existed), Up (2009), and Toy Story 3 (2010). None won, though they did take home Oscars in their own race. Other categories are technically open to animated films. Seven have been nominated for best screenplay, all Pixar films, with none winning.

A somewhat comparable situation has happened in the Foreign Language category. We tend to forget, but ten foreign-language films have been nominated for Best Picture: Grand Illusion (1938), Z (1969), The Emigrants (1972), Cries and Whispers (1973), Il Postino (1975), Life Is Beautiful (1998), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006), Amour (2012), Roma (2018), Parasite (2019), Minari (2020), Drive My Car (2021), and All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). Oddly enough (maybe there was some change of rules), starting in 1998 with Life Is Beautiful, six of these also got nominated for Best Foreign Language film: Life Is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Amour, Roma, Parasite, Drive My Car, and All Quiet on the Western Front. All of them won in the Foreign-Language category, but only one, Parasite, won Best Picture as well. Presumably if a film was good enough to be nominated for best picture, it certainly would be good enough to win the Foreign-Language Oscar.

The same was true for animated films. Up and Toy Story 3 were nominated in both categories and won just the animation awards. (The animated feature award was started in 2002 for films released in 2001, so Beauty and the Beast could not do the same.)

Now we turn to another way of looking at the Best Picture and Best Animated Feature categories. If one is on Facebook, as I am, or, presumably, other social-media sites, as I am not, in many years one reads many vociferous complaints about the quality of the Best Picture winners. Since online people love lists, there are plenty of people weighing in on the ten worst films to have won that prize. These ten are usually fairly recent, since these online commentators usually don’t watch older films. Occasionally someone mentions Cavalcade (1933), but those are the real cinephiles.

I’m going to compare the Best Picture and Animated Feature nominees and winners, starting in 2002, when the latter category originated (for films released the previous year). The questions are, are some of the animated nominees and/or winners better than the live-action films that won Best Picture in the same year, and if so, how often does this happen? This is not, of course, to say that the Oscars are a true reflection of the cream of the crop, especially in the live-action Best Picture category. The best animated films (at least, English-language) tend to rise to the surface in terms of nominations because there simply are so few of them in comparison.

Logically, having chosen the Oscars as a means of comparison, I should compare all the excellent nominated animated films with all the excellent nominated live-action films. After all, the film or films deserving to win seldom do so. Maybe some of them are better than the animation winner. I’m not going to include all the nominees, because first, it would make this entry more lengthy and convoluted than it already is. Second, I haven’t seen all the nominees in either category, though I have seen a higher portion of the animated ones. Still, I shall mention in parentheses live-action titles that in my opinion were more deserving of the Best Picture Oscar than the actual winner.

I have seen all the animated winners and all of the live-action ones apart from Crash. Thanks to the reviewers and friends who warned me off the latter. (To be honest, I turned Chicago off about twenty minutes in.)

 

The Face-off

So let’s go year by year and see how the Best Picture fares against the Best Animated Feature–or in some cases multiple nominees in that category.

Going by release years rather than the years when the awards were given, we start with 2001. A Beautiful Mind was the winner. I’ve actually seen it on a list of worst-ever Best Pictures, but I think it’s a fairly good film. Shrek, the animated champ that year, was much admired, but I was disappointed by it. Monsters, Inc., however, was up against Shrek, and in my opinion deserved to win. It’s arguably better than A Beautiful Mind.

There’s no contest for 2002. Even today, awarding a foreign-language film the best-animated prize is nearly impossible–or indeed, a non-Hollywood one. (Non-American winners come from the UK and Australia.) To be sure, many Academy voters probably saw the dubbed version of Spirited Away. Nevertheless, the obvious sheer brilliance of Miyazaki’s film (above) won the day. Indeed, with Godard gone, Miyazaki may be our greatest living filmmaker–though no one can see enough films from around the world to make such a judgment.

2002 was the first year in which there were enough eligible animated features that five rather than three films were nominated, something that wouldn’t happen again until 2009. Nevertheless, the animated competition was pretty lackluster: Ice Age, Lilo and Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Treasure Planet. Spirited Away, arguably one of the greatest films of our current century, is miles beyond Chicago. If there is any evidence that the animated films can top the live-action ones, this year provided it.

Unlike our Supreme Court and other federal judges, I shall recuse myself from judging the 2003 contest. Having written a book on the subject of The Lord of the Rings film franchise and having had extraordinarily generous cooperation from the filmmakers, I can’t really be objective. Quite possibly Finding Nemo is better than The Return of the King,

2004 saw a return to only three animated features–a situation that would last until 2007. Three nominations were enough, however, since The Incredibles was up against Crash, a film high on many lists of the worst-ever winners. I doubt many would dispute my claim that The Incredibles won this face-off by a mile. (Again, I haven’t seen Crash or some of the other nominees, but I very much suspect that Spielberg’s Munich should have won.)

I am less confident in calling the 2005 winner. Million Dollar Baby is a decent film, though I wish Eastwood had not injected the heavy-handed point that Maggie wins Frankie’s heart because she’s a substitute for the daughter who has willfully disappeared from his life. Frankie losing his prejudice against training women boxers would be more powerful if it was simply based on her skill and determination. Still, I hesitate to say that the animation winner, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (above), is better. (One of the English-language imports that have won.) I am a huge Aardman fan, but Wallace and Gromit work better in the shorts (especially the sublime The Wrong Trousers). Of the other two nominees in the category, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride isn’t a contender, but one could make a case for Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki again) as the film of the year.

Scorsese’s The Departed is a more complicated case in the 2006 face-off. Those of us who know the Hong Kong film it’s based on, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Internal Affairs (2002), know how very much Scorsese used from the original. Plus who can forgive that final shot? Being a George Miller fan, I was quite disappointed by Happy Feet (the second English-language import to win). Rather bland, I thought, and certainly no Babe: Pig in the City (1998). I think Cars should have won best animated feature, and it outdoes The Departed as well. For some reason a lot of people don’t like Cars all that much compared to other Pixar films, which I don’t understand. Certainly Cars 2 is awful and Cars 3 pleasant enough. But the original is terrific.

The 2007 contest must be a draw. It’s hard to choose between the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men and Rataouille, the animated winner. (If Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has won best picture, I would give it the edge over the Pixar film. It’s another of the great films of the current century.)

It’s safer to say that in 2008 WALL-E tops Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire. The first half hour of WALL-E, set on Earth, is perhaps the best thing Pixar has done. It falls apart a bit once the hero and Eve get onto the giant spaceship to which humanity has fled once the Earth became uninhabitable. It turns into a prolonged chase that isn’t nearly as interesting as the incredibly clever exploration of the detritus of civilization that WALL-E diligently searches through in that first half-hour. Still, for that half-hour, I give it the edge against Slumdog Millionaire.

In 2009, there were for the second time five animated nominees. The category would return to three in 2010, but thereafter there have always been five. Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was probably one of the stronger films to win best picture in the period I’m covering. Still, can it really be said to be better than both Pixar’s Up (the winner) and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox? And possibly Coraline or The Secret of Kells, Laika’s and Cartoon Saloon’s first entries into the fray respectively. (One benefit of writing this entry is that I watched for the first time all three of Tomm Moore’s lovely nominated Irish films, including The Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers.)

My case is pretty strong in 2010. With only three nominees, the animated winner, Toy Story 3, easily tops Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech. (We should remember we’re in the period when Harvey Weinstein was bludgeoning his company’s films into the winner’s circle.) Some would say How to Train Your Dragon would as well. (Among the live-action nominees, I would vote for Inglourious Basterds, but it would be a miracle if the Academy members chose such a film.)

With 2011 we reach another case where the best-picture winner is widely decried as among the worst to pick up the trophy: Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. The line-up of animated entries was pretty weak apart from Rango, directed by, of all people, Gore Verbinski. This brilliant outlier within the animation industry (produced by Nickelodeon), is a sort of cross between Chinatown and Once upon a Time in the West. That’s Rango with the villainous-tortoise mayor, above; the latter is a combination of Noah Cross in Chinatown and Mr. Choo-choo in Once upon a Time in the West.

Rango seems to have largely slipped from people’s memories, perhaps partly because it’s not a Disney or Pixar film that you buy on disc for your kids and have around forever. I don’t know what kids would make of Rango, but it’s definitely more aimed at adults. And hilariously imaginative.

2012 was a banner year for great animated films. The Oscar winner, Pixar’s Brave, was the first of six films in a row from Pixar and Disney, both at that point under the leadership of John Lasseter. I don’t find Brave among the best of these, but it’s OK and it no doubt benefited from all the fuss about it having Pixar’s first female protagonist. For me, there were no fewer than three wonderful nominees that were better: Laika’s Paranorman, Aardman’s The Pirates!: In an Adventure with Scientists! (the British title, changed to the much more boring The Pirates! Band of Misfits for North American release), and Disney’s Wreck-it Ralph. All three offer a flood of clever jokes and original concepts that could only be understood by adults. In Wreck-It-Ralph there’s the AA-style meeting of video-game villains that Ralph attends (top). Or in The Pirates!, the Pirate of the Year awards ceremony that puts the rival contestants in split-screen à la the Oscars show (second from top).

Any of them beats the “best picture,” Ben Affleck’s Argo. Remember that? (I haven’t seen all its live-action rivals, but Lincoln and Amour would have been creditable winners.)

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave fully deserved to win Best Picture. There’s certainly nothing to rival it in the somewhat set of nominations in the animation category. I did not find the winner, Disney’s Frozen, particularly interesting. It seems to be geared to appeal to small children. Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises was the only plausible nominee to go up against Sir Steve’s film, but I’m not going to make that argument. (It’s a real pity that Gravity was in the competition this year, since it truly is a great film and also deserved to win.)

Moving on to 2014, the live-action winner was Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence). The list of animated nominees was not as strong as some years, but I think Birdman is overrated, and Disney’s Big Hero 6 tops it. (I’ve only seen some of the live-action nominees, but The Grand Budapest Hotel and some of the others were pretty strong contenders.)

In 2015 the winners in the two categories were Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight and Pixar’s Inside Out. I don’t really have a preference. (Here’s another case, similar to Inglourious Basterds, of a marvelous but violent, over-the-top masterpiece deserved Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road. It pretty much swept the technical awards to end up with six, but Spotlight won only two–picture and screenplay. Go figure.)

I remember watching Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight in a theater in 2016. I sat there thinking that this film was made by a talented young man who someday might win an Oscar. To me, his The Underground Railroad was a more impressive achievement and deserved a slew of Emmys. Three excellent animated films were nominated in 2016: Disney’s Zootopia, Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings (bottom), and Disney’s Moana. I was convinced that Kubo would finally win Laika it’s first, well-deserved Oscar. Zootopia won over what I think is a slightly better film, Moana, but one can’t really complain in this case. (My preferences for Best Picture would have been Arrival and La La Land.)

The situation was reversed in 2017. Much though I like many of Guillermo del Tor’s films, I’d have to give Pixar’s Coco the edge over The Shape of Water (talk about a Mexican stand-off!). (The true masterpieces among the nominees that year were Nolan’s Dunkirk and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. At least, as so many of my friends have said, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri didn’t win.)

Now we come to the notorious year of 2018, when Peter Farrelly’s (!) Green Book won best picture against competition that included Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Curaón’s Roma. This incomprehensible choice throws an even greater light on the high quality of the animated race that year. Three masterpieces were among the five nominees: Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (above), and Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet. Any one of these rolls right over Green Book. Incredibles 2 is pretty good as well. I enoyed the fifth nominee, Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai, but it hadn’t a chance against these three.

2019 is easy. Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite beats everything, even Pixar’s Toy Story 4. Probably a lot of people agreed with my assessment that the franchise was showing a bit of wear and tear, though not nearly as much as last year’s Lightyear. (Again, it’s a pity that two other masterpieces nominated that year couldn’t also win: Little Women and Once upon a Time in Hollywood.)

For 2020, when theater-going was difficult if not impossible, studios delayed many films or sent them straight to streaming. The result was a somewhat uninspired lineup of animated nominees. Soul almost inevitably won. I must admit that I preferred Pixar’s films as they were until recently–adventures of various sorts, whether involving actual superheroes, groups of toys, or an old man flying his house to South America to learn how to be sociable again. These had psychological depth, but they didn’t make it explicit by making emotions into characters or sending them to heaven. So Nomadland comes out ahead this time. (I would have preferred two other nominees, The Father or The Trial of the Chicago 7.)

In 2021 I found Sian Heder’s Coda as heartwarming as anyone, but Oscars are purportedly for picking great films that we assume till be watched in the future as classics. Not that they get it right very often, but, well, Oscar-bait ain’t what it used to be. The Danish animated documentary Flee leaves us with a tear in the eye as well, but the Academy stuck to its long habit of rewarding Pixar and/or Disney films and made Encanto its top animated film. This film had many good moments, but it annoyed me every time it got into a lively scene. Suddenly the characters (and virtual camera) started zipping about through the settings. Those settings were gorgeous, but we didn’t get a chance to look at them. Just compare it with Moana, which also had scenery worth lingering over while still managing to drip with exuberance. (For the live-action champ, I would have gone for Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, or West Side Story. It was a pretty good year.)

There was, however, one animated feature nominated that year: the unmissable The Mitchells vs. the Machines–though many may have missed it when during the pandemic it skipped theatrical and went straight to Netflix. It was produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who also did Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for Sony Pictures Animation, and although a very different film, it has all the energy, imagination, and craziness of that film. It also plays out the potentially apocalyptic rebellion against humans by AI and the robots run by it. The premise is that an angry computing system being replaced by a new generation sends robots to put all humans in plastic cubes and fire them into space–including its own inventor. The dysfunctional Mitchells are humanity’s only hope. The funniest and most telling scene is when they stop at a mall and all the products in the stores, which have chips installed holding a kill order to destroy the family, start attacking them. This culminates in a bunch of Furbies going after them, led by the world’s largest Furby (above).

What happened in the 2022 category is sort of like what happened in 2002, when Spirited Away won. An outlier from outside the traditional Hollywood studio structure (Netflix) was nominated among a somewhat weak group of animated films and won the day. I settled down to watch the broadcast of the ceremony wondering if Academy members would recognize what a remarkable film Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio is and not just reflexively vote for the Pixar film. That was Turning Red, which got a lot of attention for daring to show a teenager hitting puberty and experiencing her first period. I didn’t think it was a very good film and confirmed my sense that Pixar has declined in recent years. It’s probably better than The Good Dinosaur and now Lightyear, which is not saying much. (Carolyn Giardina’s recent “Elemental Steps into the Ring in Major Box Office Test for Pixar,” astutely sums up reasons for the aesthetic decline of Pixar–and, one might add Disney Animation.)

I know a lot of people for some reason are enthralled by Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, which won the 2022 Best Picture. I found it mildly entertaining but at least it gave Michelle Yeoh a career win for Best Actress. Pinocchio is miles beyond it. (Everything won against a slew of superior films. In alphabetical order: The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelsmans, Tár, and Women Talking.)

 

Totting up the live-action vs. animation winners in this face-off, we find one recusal, one draw, five decisions in favor of the live-action winners and fourteen for the animated winner or one or more of the animated nominees. As I mentioned at the start, the figures would be quite different if I had compared all the Oscar-worthy animation awards with all the Oscar-worthy Best Picture nominees. Still, in general this comparison may suggest that animated films are unfairly treated as one of the minor categories that people don’t pay much attention to.

I’m not suggesting that the Academy change their categories or rules. There’s probably no way to boost the prestige of the Animated Feature nominees.

The point here has simply been to add some evidence to my claim that a higher percentage of animated films tend to be excellent in a way that compares favorably with the live-action films nominated in the more prestigious category. Despite this, animated films are simply not taken seriously by most people, inclined cinephiles. They are still viewed as children’s fare, despite the successful appeal to adults built into many of the titles I’ve singled out here. They are also mostly comic to some extent and often involve fantasy, while Oscar bait leans toward drama and, with rare exceptions, away from fantasy/science fiction.

The conclusion is that if you think, for whatever reason, that live-action Oscar winners and films in general have declined in the past few decades, check out some ‘toons.

 

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016).

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Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist review – an intimate document of family tragedy | Movies

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With its piles of white sheets and whirring machines, the inside of a hospital room can feel oddly impersonal under the cold fluorescent light. Giving a poignant warmth to this sterile environment, this compelling documentary from Lebanese director Corine Shawi intimately captures how her family comes together during a time of tragedy. Struck by sudden paralysis, her father, Andre, is confined to bed and Shawi’s film grapples with this state of reduced mobility as well as her own emotional stasis, caught between the past, the present and the future.

As it examines Andre’s hospital room, the camera tenderly observes how the space is transformed into a second home. Containers of food lovingly prepared by Shawi’s mother are stacked by the bed, while the radio hums his favourite songs. The film does not shy away from moments of uncomfortable friction, either, as Andre’s frustration and Shawi’s helplessness erupt in arguments and sudden emotional outbursts. However, as Andre braves lengthy sessions of physical therapy with a smiling resilience, it is Shawi, not her father, who needs more courage to deal with this difficult new reality.

This brings us back to the film’s beautifully enigmatic title, which gets at the heart of Shawi’s crisis. During one particularly momentous conversation, Shawi’s sister advises that she should also follow her own dreams, instead of being tethered to the needs of their admirably self-sufficient parents. Like the film’s recurring images of a hand peeling off dried tree-bark to reveal a fresh surface underneath, the film appears to seek the same kind of renewal.

Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist is available from 4 August on True Story.

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New Film ‘Kokomo City’ Chronicles Black Trans Sex Workers

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D. Smith never set out to be a filmmaker. For years, the Florida native enjoyed major success in the music business as a producer and songwriter, collaborating on projects with Lil’ Wayne, Katy Perry and other artists.

All of that changed, however, when Smith came out as a transgender woman in 2014. Suddenly, she says, her opportunities in the recording studio ground to a halt, and she lost her home and her car as a result.

Amidst that professional upheaval, however, Smith bought a camera and quietly began making plans for her latest project. Her new documentary, “Kokomo City,” offers a thoughtful and startlingly intimate look at the lives of four Black transgender sex workers ― Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver ― in New York and Georgia. The film, shot in stylish black-and-white, opened in theaters Friday after premiering at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival in January.

“I had no intentions on being the director of this film, but it worked out that way,” Smith told HuffPost in an interview. “I asked maybe five or six directors to do it. I’m like: ‘Hey, I got this great idea. You want it? Here you go.’ I saw it as clear as day. Everybody else saying no allowed me to be the director.”

Filmmaker D. Smith (second from left) with "Kokomo City" stars Dominique Silver, Daniella Carter and Koko Da Doll.

Emily Assiran via Getty Images

The music industry’s rejection still weighed heavily on Smith as she began work on “Kokomo City.” That “definitely not entitled” approach, she said, helped her establish a jovial rapport with the sex workers in the film.

“I was in a really low place in my life, so I had this demeanor that they were helping me, and I wanted to help them as well by telling their stories,” she said. “I was very transparent about what the process of making this film was going to look like. It’s not going to be glam. There’s no fancy lighting person, no hair and makeup. It’s just me. And they were drawn to that.”

She went on to note: “They were drawn to the fact that they didn’t have to worry about the politics of being in the LGBTQ community or of being trans. It’s very stressful, very taxing, actually. A lot of the rules and regulations that we have dehumanizes us.”

Still, “Kokomo City” is being released as violence against the transgender community is at an all-time high, and not surprisingly, the film finds its subjects sharing moments of trauma and tragedy. In one of the film’s opening scenes, Mitchell recalls spotting a loaded gun beside the bed of a client just as she’s about to have sex with him.

Liyah Mitchell in "Kokomo City."
Liyah Mitchell in "Kokomo City."

D. Smith, Magnolia Pictures

Sadly, that reality was emphasized when Koko Da Doll ― also known as Rasheeda Williams ― was fatally shot in April, just weeks after appearing at the film’s Sundance premiere.

But Smith was adamant that “Kokomo City” depict Black trans sex workers as more than just victims and is quick to highlight the joy and occasional humor of her subject’s private lives. She also interviews a number of trans-attracted men who have been involved with or, in some cases, had lengthy romantic relationships with the women.

After its Sundance premiere, “Kokomo City” was warmly embraced by critics, who praised the film’s vérité approach to an often-dehumanized subset of the LGBTQ+ community. The Washington Post called the film a “meditation on masculinity, femininity, what constitutes pleasure, and the bitter price of personal and social denial,” while The Hollywood Reporter praised Smith for “stepping into relatively uncharted territory with grace and courage.”

Smith is, of course, heartened by the success of “Kokomo City” thus far. Ultimately, she’s hopeful the film who help humanize a derided and much-overlooked subset of the LGBTQ+ community, too.

“Even as a trans woman, I was completely unaware of the things that sex workers and their clients go through,” she said. “All of that happens because people are not able to be who they are. That’s what it boils down to at the end of the day. And once you watch this film, you really don’t want anything to happen to the girls.”

Watch the trailer for “Kokomo City” below.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdM2voAE-ok[/embed]



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Despite Acquittal, Kevin Spacey Faces Uphill Battle for Hollywood Roles

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The two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey said last month that he was ready to return to acting after years in the wilderness following sexual assault allegations.

“I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges in London,” Mr. Spacey told a German magazine, referring to accusations that he had assaulted four men. “The second that happens, they’re ready to move forward.”

Mr. Spacey was right in several ways: A British jury found him not guilty of nine counts of sexual assault this week, nearly a year after a federal jury in Manhattan cleared him of battery in a civil case filed by the actor Anthony Rapp. And he has two small projects awaiting release, with directors who could not be more publicly supportive.

But the starry Hollywood roles, like Mr. Spacey’s conniving politician in “House of Cards” and droll advertising executive in “American Beauty,” may not come back anytime soon, if at all.

Despite Mr. Spacey’s legal successes, his public perception is tarnished and a turnoff to studios and streaming services desperate to avoid controversy, said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.

“He’s in real trouble,” said Mr. Galloway, who previously served as executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “On the 0-to-10 scale, this is like a minus one.”

During Mr. Spacey’s trial in Britain, he testified about the damage to his career after the public accusations began to emerge in 2017. “There was a rush to judgment and before the first question was asked or answered, I lost my job, I lost my reputation, I lost everything,” he said.

Within months of the initial allegation, Mr. Spacey’s character was killed off in the final season of “House of Cards,” his scenes as J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World” were reshot with a different actor, and Netflix scrapped the film “Gore,” in which he played the writer Gore Vidal.

Beyond two recently filmed parts listed on IMDb, a movie database, it is unclear whether Mr. Spacey is attached to any new projects. His team did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Spacey did not provide career insight after being acquitted this week. “I imagine that many of you can understand that there’s a lot for me to process,” he said from the courthouse steps.

Mike Paul, a public relations expert who specializes in reputation and crisis management, said that considering the nature of the accusations Mr. Spacey faced, he must avoid “pouring gasoline back on issues that you don’t want gasoline on.” Hollywood, he said, wants to see a time of reflection and quiet analysis.

The best bet, Mr. Galloway said, is for Mr. Spacey to develop projects for his production company, Trigger Street, or to pursue indie projects that value his acting prowess or consider the publicity a boon.

Mr. Spacey’s two known upcoming roles are in minor movies: “Control,” a British film in which he plays a hacker who takes over a politician’s smart car (his part is voice only), and “Peter Five Eight,” a comedic thriller in which he plays a shadowy stranger who arrives in a small mountainside community.

Michael Zaiko Hall, the writer and director of “Peter Five Eight,” said in an email that the film, which does not have an official release date, represented a return to the smaller independent films with which Mr. Spacey started his career.

“We have here a double Oscar winner with legendary screen presence whose name has just been cleared,” Mr. Hall said. “I imagine there will be a thaw period, followed by a re-emergence into the culture.”

Gene Fallaize, the writer and director of “Control,” said that he approached Mr. Spacey for the voice role last fall, and that the recent verdict showed “our gamble had paid off.” Before the jury’s decision, his movie had distribution deals in Germany, Russia and the Middle East. Now, Mr. Fallaize said, it was negotiating with American and British distributors.

Mr. Fallaize added that Mr. Spacey might need to do independent movies for a year or two, showing he could generate commercial returns, before major studios would be prepared to work with him. Those movies might have to be in countries that have a more “lenient” view to allegations made against stars, Mr. Fallaize added.

“It’s more likely for Europe to be receptive,” agreed Dominik Sedlar, a Croatian-born director and friend of Mr. Spacey’s whose father made a movie this year in which the actor played the country’s first president.

Mr. Sedlar said that although Mr. Spacey had twice been vindicated by juries, Hollywood studios might keep shunning the actor “rather than admit they were wrong.”

In recent years, both the Venice and Cannes film festivals have been happy to showcase work by directors and actors whose reputation has been stained in the United States, including Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp. On Thursday, spokeswomen for both festivals said their artistic directors were unavailable to comment on Mr. Spacey.

There was similar reluctance from members of the London theater world, where Mr. Spacey was a regular star in the 1990s and 2000s and served as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater from 2004 to 2015. Representatives for 15 producers, West End theater owners and artistic directors either turned down or did not respond to interview requests to discuss Mr. Spacey’s future.

Alistair Smith, editor of The Stage, Britain’s major theater newspaper, said in an email that Mr. Spacey’s return was “highly unlikely.” In 2017 the Old Vic published the findings of an independent investigation into Mr. Spacey’s tenure that revealed that 20 unnamed people accused him of unstated inappropriate behavior.

“Those allegations have never been satisfactorily addressed by Spacey,” Mr. Smith said. “Unless they are, I can’t see him working in London theater again.”

Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative. For those who have succeeded, such as Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr., the road was long.

“You need to completely reset your reputation,” Mr. Galloway said. In “fortress Hollywood, the drawbridge is pulled up, and it’s a dangerous moat to swim across.”

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Spotlight: Supriya Suri | The Seventh Art

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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers.]

Delhi-based Supriya Suri has made four films, short and long, that could hardly be more unlike each other: an experimental profile of a celebrated filmmaker, a fictional character study of small-time urban criminals, an expositional documentary about a film personality and a diaristic feature about a family pilgrimage. Taken together, they attest to a constantly self-reinventing creativity trying out various subject matters, styles and modes of expression. Professionally trained in film direction, Supriya segued early into film criticism and curation before making works of her own. “I never saw filmmaking as a journey,” she says. “Making one film was the ultimate goal, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to get it right. For the longest time, I didn’t get into direction.”

Supriya’s two documentary featurettes comprise a study in contrasts. Commissioned by the now-defunct Films Division, her debut Maestro, a Portrait (2013) is an oblique, non-biographical profile of Bengali filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta that synthesizes vastly disparate material—poetry, paintings, classical music, film excerpts and archival footage—in its attempt to arrive at deeper insights into its subject. Eschewing exposition or direct interviews, the film presents a silent Dasgupta striking solemn poses in different environments while a cluster of voices reads out heterogenous texts in English, Bengali and even Portuguese.

In a more radical departure, Maestro refuses to demarcate Dasgupta’s words and images from those by others that are cited; for instance, excerpts from the films of Dadasaheb Phalke, Luis Buñuel and Satyajit Ray are seamlessly woven with ones from the Bengali auteur’s works. What we get in effect is a mosaic of cinematic and literary references in dialogue with Dasgupta’s cinema, arranged into themes of memory, dream and myth—a stream of images and texts that flow into and out of Dasgupta’s films. In its rejection of authorities and hierarchies of information, Maestro registers as an unusual, ambitious study that assumes some degree of familiarity with the subject.

Aruna Vasudev – Mother of Asian Cinema (2021), on the other hand, crafts a relatively more conventional portrait of the eponymous film critic and programmer. Through talking-head interviews, archival material and voiceover, we come to learn about an enterprising individual who significantly contributed to giving Asian cinema an identity as Asian cinema. Quickly covering Vasudev’s years as a student and an apprentice filmmaker abroad, the film devotes more attention to the magazine Cinemaya, the organization NETPAC and the film festival Cinefan, all of which she co-founded with a view to foster and promote Asian cinema.

“I was making a short film in which she played herself,” Supriya recalls. “But I realized that she was old and had started forgetting things.” Supriya, thus, abandoned the short film for the documentary with a view to preserve Vasudev’s stories and experiences. The testimonies in Mother of Asian Cinema capture a sense of Vasudev’s outgoing, friendly personality as well as her astounding capacity to forge lasting links across the globe. At the end, we see Supriya herself in front of the camera, recounting Vasudev’s influence on her own journey and, in some respect, tracing her professional lineage—a theme that finds echo in Supriya’s most recent work, the mid-length feature We Shall Meet Yet Again (2022).

At the centre of the short film Boys from Hinterland (2019) are two men on a bike; poker-faced, clad in black leather and almost comically representative of a strain of brash Haryanvi masculinity. They mug pedestrians and other commuters in a series of orchestrated robberies, only to blow their loot on booze. In lateral tracking shots, we see them cruise the vast, desolate highways around the national capital, high-rise buildings in the background furnishing silent commentary. Yet it is neither sociological portraiture nor genre thrill that Supriya is after. Ostensibly inspired by Robert Bresson, Boys from Hinterland strives to capture the feeling of drifting under the open skies, finding existential freedom if only in criminal behaviour.

Produced by Supriya herself, We Shall Meet Yet Again documents her journey with her mother and grandmother to pilgrimage sites in Northern India. For the most part, the film unfurls like generational road movie around their trip to Haridwar, Hrishikesh and Kashi. The three women revisit the places where they once lived and meet local priests to help them trace their lineage using bahis, pilgrim registers maintained through the centuries and updated whenever a birth or a death occurred in the pilgrim’s family. Between these visits, we witness the women in conversation in guest houses and in trains, speaking reverently of the river Ganga or philosophizing about the ephemerality of life. “I would tell them the beginning, middle and end of a given scene, and they would fill up the rest,” explains the filmmaker. “It was a very improvised process of shooting.”

If We Shall Meet Yet Again presents three generations of women, it doesn’t, however, place emphasis on their differences. There are certainly superficial distinctions: the filmmaker converses in Hindi with her mother, who uses Punjabi with her mother. Serial shots underscore the hair, attire and footwear of the three women. But absent is the kind of friction and clash of worldviews typical of intergenerational narratives. The reticent Supriya hardly speaks in the film, and mother doesn’t seem to have much to disagree with grandmother either. If anything, commonalities—such as a shared interest in spiritual literature and ancestry information—bring out continuities between the three women.

The apparent unity is compounded by the fact that the film offers us no privileged perspective; no voiceovers, texts or instructive moments that tell us how we should interpret the events we see. Even the film’s autobiographical dimension is obscured to the viewer who is unaware that it features the filmmaker and her real family. This absence of a discursive framework keeps us at a distance from the women’s words and experiences, but it also empties the film of an egocentrism that lends it an unassuming, self-effacing quality.

Even so, the film takes matrilineage as its central theme, if only to examine its otherness within Hindu social and religious contexts. Firstly, the notion of women undertaking a pilgrimage by train, all by themselves, runs counter to both road movie conventions and the reality of Indian public transport. But the fact that the ladies successfully trace their lineage or conduct shradh rituals, traditionally male prerogatives, on the ghats of the Ganga attests to changing times and mores.

Times are indeed changing; grandmother’s son (the filmmaker’s uncle), we learn, is planning to emigrate, leaving her alone in the house and under the sole care of her daughter, who lives separately in the same city. Supriya’s film eventually becomes a record of this delicate bond between mother and daughter, who are filmed in two shots side-by-side on the train, often re-enacting fictionalized exchanges. What emerges from this portrait of maternal inheritance isn’t nostalgia or family pride, but a muted sense of patriarchy’s failings. “I’ve always regretted not knowing my paternal grandparents well enough,” Supriya recalls. “So the film was also an excuse to spend more time with my naani.

We Shall Meet Yet Again is currently looking for a distributor.

 

Bio

Supriya studied film direction with Egide Scholarship at Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français in Paris, France. She started her career as the founding member of Cinedarbaar in India in 2009. With her organisation, she has been involved in curatorial practices, film criticism and educational programmes, and has organised several film festivals across India. She co-founded and wrote for a film magazine Indian Auteur and ran a cinema gallery 13BCD in New Delhi. As a film curator, she was nominated by the U.S government for the IVLP to talk about Indian films in the USA. She also runs her production company Maison Su that focuses on international co-production projects. She was a jury member for Cineaste International Film Festival, India, in 2021. She was recently invited by META Cinema Forum, 2022 in Dubai as a speaker on Asian Cinema. She was also on the jury of 28th Kolkata International Film Festival, 2022, for Asian Select category awards.

Contact

info@maisonsuentertainment.com

Filmography

  • Maestro, a Portrait — A Film on Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 2013, 52 min., digital
  • Boys From Hinterland, 2019, 14 min., digital
  • Aruna Vasudev — Mother of Asian Cinema, 2021, 65 min., digital
  • Main Tenu Phir Milangi (We Shall Meet Yet Again), 2022, 65 min., digital

Showcase

Maestro, a Portrait (2013)

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIsDqlTP95k[/embed]

Boys From Hinterland (2019), password: hinterland@watchnow

https://vimeo.com/703848579

Aruna Vasudev — Mother of Asian Cinema (2021), password: vasudev@2021

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Art, entertainment, and the hard-boiled mystique

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The Maltese Falcon (1941).

DB here:

The traditional opposition between Art and Entertainment still holds some sway. Art, some believe, is the realm of higher significance and profound emotion, while entertainment yields mere diversion and superficial engagement. Art embodies wisdom and technical breakthroughs, while at best entertainment is home to talent and cleverness. Art harbors genius, entertainment offers ingenuity. Art expresses the creator’s personal vision, entertainment recycles collective fantasy (or the Zeitgeist). There’s usually an implied hierarchy of quality and of appeal: art is for a sensitive elite, entertainment is popular (read vulgar).

One problem, though, is that for long stretches of history much art has been thoroughly entertaining. Mozart, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hiroshige, Austen, and many other major artists have found wide popularity. They provide pleasure aplenty. But with urbanization and the rise of capitalism, mass production created a huge public, and tastemakers have tended to treat art as a realm apart. For a hundred years or more, entertainment has been equated with mass culture, and art with high culture, most notably with modernism and its successors.

Another problem is cultural endurance. In a recent column, Michael Dirda points out that genre fiction often outlasts prestigious literary fiction of its era.

Take fantasy and science fiction: In 1997, I praised William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” John Crowley’s “Little, Big,” Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” and the works of Ursula K. Le Guin — all remain vital to contemporary writers and readers. 

Similarly, classics of mystery fiction by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Patricia Highsmith still attract readers, while “mainstream” novels of their eras are forgotten. Dirda’s second point is no less valid.

More generally, American novelists have wholly embraced the energy and potential of fantasy in its various forms. We are all fabulists now. This century revels in comics, graphic novels, manga and superhero movies. Authors as varied as Colson Whitehead, Walter Mosley, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand and Michael Chabon, to name a few prominent figures, all grew up loving fantasy and science fiction.

Genre appeals have infiltrated prestige literature, as in the crime plots of Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, and Richard Price. (I consider Colson Whitehead’s and Richard Wright’s contributions here.) Likewise, we have horror-infused tales like George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home .

Creators of entertainment have felt the distinction keenly. “A wedge has been driven into the industry,” says Christopher MacQuarrie, director of the latest Mission: Impossible installment. “Are you an artist or an entertainer? Tom doesn’t see them as mutually exclusive.” But some creators have seen a forking path. Rex Stout, after several “serious” novels failed, came to two conclusions:

First—that I was a good storyteller, and second—that I would never be a great novelist. I’d never be a Tolstoy, or a Dickens, or a Balzac…. So since that wasn’t going to happen, to hell with sweating out another twenty novels when I’d have a lot of fun telling stories which I could do well and make some money on it.

The Art/ Entertainment distinction runs through my recent book, Perplexing Plots, because many mystery writers have aimed at “elevating” their work to the level of prestige literature. This urge drives them to experiment with the norms of plotting and writing. Even when the genre limits remain in force, there’s a chance that skillful exponents can accept them and still yield “literary” pleasures. A good example is what happened to hard-boiled detective fiction in the hands of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

 

The Op

Hammett launched his fame with a series of crime stories mostly published in the pulp magazine Black Mask from 1923 to 1930. His protagonist is a nameless investigator for the Continental Detective Agency. The Continental Op, as he came to be called, is a pudgy but tough middle-aged detective who values camaraderie, crafty stratagems, and a good cheap steak. Women flirt with him, but he sees through their schemes. The Op’s drabness and humility give him a realism that is amplified by the milieu Hammett depicts. He had been a Pinkerton agent and larded the stories with underworld argot and tips on investigative technique.

Black Mask stories put a premium on action, so the Op was often at the center of violence perpetrated by crooks, sociopaths, and corrupt cops. Unlike other hard-boiled detectives, the Op isn’t a swaggering sadist. Violence is his last resort; he favors obstinate everyday professionalism. Sometimes he’s fooled by the grifters and has to wriggle his way out. At other times, he can set crooks against one another and watch the mutual destruction.

Hammett wrote the stories in the first person, giving the Op a telegraphic, visceral style laced with sour humor. A 1923 story shows his American vernacular already in place.

Just at the wrong minute Henderson decided to look over his shoulder at us–an unevenness in the road twisted his wheels–his machine swayed–skidded–went over on its side. Almost immediately, from the heart of the tangle, came a flash and a bullet moaned past my ear. Another. And then, while I was still hunting for something to shoot at in the pile of junk we were drawing down upon, McClump’s ancient and battered revolver roared in my other ear.
Henderson was dead when we got to him–McClump’s bullet had taken him over one eye.
McClump spoke to me over the body.
“I ain’t an inquisitive sort of fellow, but I hope you don’t mind telling me why I shot this lad.” (“Arson Plus”)

In 1929, the publisher Knopf issued two Hammett novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, based on Black Mask serials. The Op had not lost his wit or his gift for staccato narration. Here are three excerpts.

I didn’t think he was funny, though he may have been.

He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me with solemn eyes. I sat on the bed and looked at him with whatever kind of eyes I had at the time. We did this for nearly three minutes.

The latch clicked. I plunged in with the door.
Across the street a dozen guns emptied themselves. Glass shot from door and windows tinkled around us.
Somebody tripped me. Fear gave me three brains and half a dozen eyes. I was in a tough spot. Noonan had slipped me a pretty dose. These birds couldn’t help thinking I was playing his game.
I tumbled down, twisting around to face the door. My gun was in my hand by the time I hit the floor.
Across the street, burly Nick had stepped out of a doorway to pump slugs at us with both hands. I steadied my gun-arm on the floor. Nick’s body showed over the front sight. I squeezed the gun. Nick stopped shooting. He crossed his guns on his chest and went down in a pile on the sidewalk.
Hands on my ankles dragged me back. The floor scraped pieces off my chin. The door slammed shut. Some comedian said:
“Uh-huh, people don’t like you.”

As he was finishing The Dain Curse, Hammett wrote to Blanche Knopf confessing that in future work he wanted to go beyond Entertainment to Art.

I’m one of the few—if there are any more—people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously. I don’t mean that I necessarily take my own or anybody else’s seriously—but the detective story as a form. Some day somebody’s going to make “literature” of it (Ford’s Good Soldier wouldn’t have needed much altering to have been a detective story), and I’m selfish enough to have my hopes, however slight the evident justification may be. 

The question is: How to do this?

 

Inside and outside

Hammett proposed an answer in his letter to Blanche Knopf. He wanted to try that he wanted to try out modernist technique in a third novel.

I want to try adapting the stream-of-consciousness method, conveniently modified, to the detective story, carrying the reader along with the detective, showing him everything as it is found, giving him the detective’s conclusions as they are reached, letting the solution break on both of them together. I don’t know whether I’ve made that very clear, but it’s something altogether different from the method employed in “Poisonville [Red Harvest],” for instance, where, though the reader goes along with the detective, he seldom sees deeper into the detective’s mind than dialogue and action let him. 

His mention of stream of consciousness may mislead us about his intentions. In that technique the verbal narration seeks to mimic the flow of the mind as it flits across sensory impressions, memories, and fantasies. The process is often rendered as sentence fragments, often introduced by a sentence indicating the behavior of the character.

Here’s an example from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the most famous showcase of stream of consciousness. Mr. Bloom is in a Catholic church.

He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn’t know what to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

Sometimes the images and phrases are separated by commas and periods, but sometimes they simply pile up. In the book’s last chapter, Molly Bloom’s drowsy imaginings are given in an unpunctuated, sparsely paragraphed flow.

It’s likely that Hammett didn’t want his usage to be as fragmentary as what we encounter in Joyce and others. His invocation of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) suggests something closer to what many now call inner monologue. (Ford called it “impressionism.”) Here the flow of thought is given as a sort of soliloquy, a flow of more or less cogent and coherent ideas and impressions. What makes it a modernist technique is that inner monologue may not respect story chronology and it’s likely to be biased, uncertain, equivocal, and subject to revision. Ford’s narrator, John Dowell, tells a rambling, out-of-order tale of marital infidelity and suicide, in which flashbacks are analyzed and re-analyzed.

Looking over what I have written, I see that I have unintentionally misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet that was the impression that I really had until just now. When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.

At the climax, Dowell makes a provisional sense of what the characters knew and why they acted as they did.

The problem in importing this to the detective story is evident. How can the detective’s ongoing reasoning, bristling with mistaken inferences and reconstructed impressions, be passed along to the reader without causing confusion? For this reason, detective story narration, whether first-person or third-person, suppresses most of the protagonist’s reasoning. The Watson figure and the dumb authorities exist to be baffled and play with misleading possibilities while the detective holds back even a partial solution.

By convention, the climax of the tale is the revelation of the truth–not when the detective discerns it, but at the moment when it can be announced with decisive impact (often in a gathering of suspects with the police present). Raymond Chandler noted that the delayed revelation was a serious constraint of the genre, even when the detective, like the Op, is telling the story. “The first person story is assumed to tell all but it doesn’t. There is always a point at which the hero stops taking the reader into his confidence.”  The detective “stops thinking out loud and ever so gently closes the door of his mind in the reader’s face.” This prevents the public announcement of the solution from being anticlimactic.

Worse, Ford’s protagonist Dowell is an unreliable narrator, as the above passage suggests. To make the detective’s first-person account unreliable would be more than a “convenient modification” of the standard plot schema. It would push toward the experiments seen in Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (1937) and later “anti-mysteries.”

Hammett admitted in a later letter that he would put the “stream-of-consciousness” experiment on hold while he wrote material for Hollywood in “more objective and filmable forms.” (That would include his script for City Streets of 1931, which does include a subjective auditory flashback rare in films of the time.) But in his next novels Hammett turned sharply away from the interiority he had considered. Instead, he went toward extreme objectivity, almost completely shutting us out from his protagonists’ inner lives.

The action of The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1930) attach us closely to his protagonist, scene by scene. We’re confined to his activity and his range of knowledge. But this doesn’t get us into his mind. For these books Hammett switched to third-person narration and made it radically objective, sticking almost completely to reporting dialogue and character interaction.

In Perplexing Plots, I explore how this strategy works, but here’s an example from The Glass Key.

At Madison Avenue a green taxicab, turning against the light, ran full tilt into Ned Beaumont’s maroon one, driving it over against a car that was parked by the curb, hurling him into a corner in a shower of broken glass.
He pulled himself upright and climbed out into the gathering crowd. He was not hurt, he said. He answered a policeman’s question. He found the hat that did not quite fit him and put it on his head. He had his bags transferred to another taxicab, gave the hotel’s name to the second driver, and huddled back in a corner, white-faced and shivering, while the ride lasted.

The narration presents what a third-person observer would have seen and heard, and it won’t venture into Beaumont’s thinking. The cues are behavioral: he seems cool enough in slipping out of the crash, but his true reaction is given through his nervous reaction while riding back to the hotel.

As Hammett’s second letter to Blanche Knopf suggests, this flat objectivity would seem an ideal novelistic basis for a “filmable” treatment. John Huston’s screen adaptation of The Maltese Falcon confines us almost completely to Spade’s range of knowledge. (The big exception is that we see his partner Miles Archer shot by an unknown killer.) The film’s visual narration mostly follows Hammett’s impassive neutrality. But when Casper Gutman drugs Spade, we get Spade’s clouded optical viewpoint.

In the novel the narration reports that Spade’s eyes seemed to muddy over. When he says, “And the maximum?” we’re told that “An unmistakable sh followed the x in maximum as he said it.” This isn’t Spade’s experience but rather what an observer would register, an “unmistakable” impression confirmed when we’re told that “a sharp frightened gleam awoke in his eyes.” As Spade tries to walk, he’s tripped by Wilmer. He falls and Wilmer kicks him. “Once more he tried to get up, could not, and went to sleep.” The whole scene is rendered externally.

So instead of giving the detective story a modernist subjectivity, Hammett went to the other extreme. Did he intuitively recognize the problem of revealing the detective’s inferences too soon? Maybe, although his increasing involvement with Hollywood may have kept him on the objective, “filmable” path. The Thin Man (1934), his last novel, is a fascinating effort to return to first-person narration while incorporating the dry objectivity of the two previous books.

Perhaps inadvertently, Hammett’s radicalization of the objective method yielded what he had hoped for. The Maltese Falcon was greeted as a serious work of literature and was soon incorporated into the prestigious Modern Library series. His works have become part of the canon of American letters enshrined in the Library of America collection. The convention of delaying the detective’s solution didn’t prevent the genre from becoming accepted as a legitimate literary form–at least as practiced by Hammett, and his most prominent successor.

 

Overtones, echoes, images

That successor was, of course, Raymond Chandler. Ten years after Hammett wrote to Blanche Knopf with his hopes of elevating the whodunit, Chandler wrote to Alfred Knopf about his plans for The Big Sleep (1939) and the novels that followed. It has an echo of Hammett: “I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in evidence, rather than by the slow and sometimes long-winded concatenation of circumstances.”

But what Chandler means by “understanding” doesn’t include full-blown reasoning. First-person narration, he explains in a 1949 note, must “suppress the detective’s ratiocination while giving a clear account of his words and acts and many of his emotional reactions.” This seems a response to the detached reportage of late Hammett prose. Chandler also rejects the Op’s streetwise patter by explaining to Knopf that his method will use  “a very vivid and pungent style, but not slangy or overtly vernacular.” He wants “to acquire delicacy without losing power.”

Hammett, while a voracious reader, learned a good deal of his craft from actually investigating crimes. Chandler, who began writing mysteries as Hammett’s productivity tailed off, owed his knowledge of the mystery genre to reading. He studied crime fiction of all sorts with almost academic passion and became one of the most nuanced commentators on the tradition. He claimed to have learned plotting from outlining pulp stories by Erle Stanley Gardner. His literary tastes didn’t run to modernism. He admired the Greek and Roman classics, Flaubert, James, and Conrad and thought highly of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Hammett imagined elevating the genre by “conveniently modifying” modernist technique, but Chandler sought to make the hard-boiled detective story more like the ambitious mainstream novel.

He believed he could do that through style. In his crucial essay, “The Simple Art of Murder (1944/1946),” he praises Hammett’s prose but objects that “it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill.” Chandler sought to give style a greater novelistic richness not only through probing his protagonist’s mind but also through fairly dense descriptions colored by the protagonist’s emotions and judgments.

Hammett sketches characters in quick strokes and he merely indicates settings. But Chandler dwells on his characters and their surroundings. The opening of The Big Sleep devotes a page and a half to Philip Marlowe’s impressions of the Sternwood mansion (stained-glass  window of a knight rescuing a lady, plush  chairs, a mysterious portrait) and another page and a half to his meeting with the coy Carmen. These are filtered through Marlowe’s running commentary. The knight doesn’t really seem to be trying. The chairs appear to never have been sat in. The portrait looks threatening. Carmen’s infantile flirtation reveals that “thinking was always going to be a bother to her.” Here are the overtones and echoes that Chandler finds lacking in Hammett. This is an ominous household–as Marlowe will later say, this will be “no game for knights.”

Chandler would pursue this method in the following novels. Yet at times the narration plunged deeper into subjectivity. In Farewell, My Lovely (1940) Marlowe is repeatedly knocked out in tussles, and in the second passage Chandler writes:

The man in the back seat made a sudden flashing movement that I sensed rather than saw. A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night.
I dived into it. It had no bottom.

The film adaptation, titled Murder, My Sweet (1944), uses this subjective device in every knockdown. Marlowe’s voice-over narration runs through the film, and after the first assault we hear:

I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.

Onscreen we see Marlowe’s crumpled body blotted out by a miasma that leads to a black frame.

In a later sequence, a knockout of Marlowe is rendered as wild optical exaggerations before following the novel’s report of Marlowe seeing a room full of smoke. That’s translated as wispy superimpositions over the shots, with explanatory voice-over.

The film tries a bit too hard, but its use of voice-over and delirious visual subjectivity would become common in film noirs of the period.

In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe’s recovery from his first knockout is rendered with vigorous subjectivity across two pages, as Marlowe realizes that the voice he hears reviewing what happened is his own. “I was talking to myself, coming out of it. I was trying to figure the thing out subconsciously.”

Marlowe is able to reconstruct bits of the crime through this process, but it’s a provisional solution, not the decisive one. That one he keeps from the reader until the climax. By then, as per convention, the door to his mind has shut in the reader’s face.

Hammett’s novels were published when most crime fiction consisted of genteel whodunits and gangster sagas, so he had the advantage of novelty. By the time Chandler published The Big Sleep, he was competing with many book-length stories of hard-boiled investigators. Aware of the need to establish a distinctive presence, he presented work that stood apart by its social criticism and the romanticized realism of a righteous avenger alone on the mean streets of a corrupt city–sure-fire attractions to intellectuals then and since. Just as important was his self-consciously literary style. “In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”

Through concern with language’s echoes and overtones, he established himself as Hammett’s successor. The literati followed his lead and declared him a significant novelist. His books, along with “The Simple Art of Murder,” provided an enduring rationale for the tough detective story. While adhering to the conventions of the classic puzzle (clues, faked deaths, false identities, least-likely culprit), he acquired lasting prominence. Like Hammett he has found a home in the Library of America.

Arguably Hammett and Chandler also elevated their genre. Their achievements encouraged other ambitious writers and stimulated critics and readers to look more closely at the possibilities of the murder novel. No wonder that prestigious writers have turned to mystery plots. Fans still labor to make a case for Golden Age puzzles as art rather than entertainment, but most critics and readers assume the hard-boiled mystery to be at least potentially serious literature–especially when it goes under the alias “noir.”

 

Nowadays the Art/ Entertainment duality has weakened its hold. If, as Dirda suggests, we are all fabulists now, we’re also probably mystery fans to some degree. It’s likely that film played a role here, in showing intellectuals that films by Hitchcock, Ozu, and other popular directors were of high quality. More and more, I think, people aren’t as eager to see the split as absolute. Instead of a hierarchy, we have more of a spectrum.

In harmony with this, Perplexing Plots argues that culture offers us a plenitude of individual works with varied appeals, all of which can be realized with, to use Chandler’s terms, delicacy and power. Some works rely on subtlety, others on immediate impact. We have the refinements of Baroque music and the direct force of The Rite of Spring. If Treasure Island is a masterpiece a well as a rousing yarn, so is Die Hard.  There is heavy art and light art, brooding art and and diverting art, intellectual density and emotional charm. None of these qualities is simple or easy to achieve; all can repay analysis. The slogan might be: “There’s valuable work at all levels. And there are no levels.”

One source of value, not always acknowledged, is the role of entertainment in revealing fresh expressive possibilities in the medium. For example, the martial arts cinemas of Japan and Hong Kong opened up new vistas of cinema. And yes, as Hammett and Chandler indicated, a lot of the freshness lies in style. This is why Perplexing Plots spends time looking closely at how mystery fiction and film work, word by word or shot by shot. Even Agatha Christie’s supposedly bland verbal texture points up ways in which language can mislead us.

So Hammett and Chandler didn’t “elevate” the hard-boiled story so much as blur the line between genre fiction and the “legitimate” novel. Ambler and Le Carré did the same for the spy story, as did Highsmith for the psychological thriller. For such reasons, Perplexing Plots discusses hard-boiled detection extensively. I explore the Art/ Entertainment distinction because it has obsessed critics and creators. But I try not to buy into the split, opting instead for the looser idea of “crossover.” It’s a swap meet, with storytellers ransacking works “high” and “low” for subjects, forms, techniques, whatever.

I wanted to put up this entry on 23 July, Raymond Chandler’s birthday. It happens to be mine too. No cheerleading here, though. I prefer Hammett, as maybe you can tell.


My quotations from Hammett’s letters come from Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921-1960, ed. Richard Layman and Julie Rivett (2002). I take Chandler’s remarks on mystery fiction from Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (1981) and Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorley Walker (1962).

Michael Dirda, as my mentions of him should lead you to expect, has written an admirable example of taking popular storytelling seriously but not solemnly: On Conan Doyle, or the Whole Art of Storytelling (2014). Kristin does something similar in her Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes, or Le Mot Juste (1992), available here and here. Her immensely popular subject, P. G. Wodehouse, was regarded as a master of English prose by Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and many other literary celebrities.

What about the third celebrated hard-boiled pioneer, Ross Macdonald? Read Perplexing Plots to find out!

Murder My Sweet (1944).

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on Sunday | July 23, 2023 at 9:07 am and is filed under 1940s Hollywood, Film and other media, Narrative strategies, PERPLEXING PLOTS (the book).

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‘It just feels warm and fuzzy’: how Hallmark built an empire of unashamedly schmaltzy rom-coms | Movies

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Avon, Connecticut, lies toward the north of the US state, a small town of perfect contour and construction, where even on a bare-branched midwinter afternoon, the light falls pleasingly across East Main Street. The population is largely white and affluent, and alongside the Walmart and the Whole Foods, there is a congregational church and a country store that, in the autumn months, offers hayrides to a nearby pumpkin patch.

When Julie Sherman Wolfe moved to Avon from Los Angeles five years ago, it was a relocation she came to regard as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sherman Wolfe is the screenwriter behind 22 Hallmark movies, from The Convenient Groom, via Right in Front of Me and Always Amore – films that were often set in precisely the kind of quaint New England town to which she and her family had moved. The draw for Sherman Wolfe echoed the on-screen appeal for viewers. “I think the more unsafe the world seems, the safer a small town seems,” she says. “It’s the idea that less bad stuff is going to happen to you in Avon than it is in Brooklyn. It’s a nostalgia thing, where it just feels warm and fuzzy.”

For the uninitiated, the Hallmark movie is a genre of made-for-TV romantic comedy now so ubiquitous that the term “Hallmark movie” has extended to encompass any TV movie of a similar tone and aesthetic, regardless of whether it has been made by the Hallmark Channel. There are variations on the basic theme – different locations, the possible involvement of royalty, perhaps an element of the supernatural – but the plot invariably runs along the lines of: high-flying career woman returns from the big city to the small town where she was raised in order to sell the family pecan farm. She insists upon wearing inappropriate footwear and brims with disdain for small-town life. But a series of unexpected events leads her to appreciate the charms of a simpler existence, and to rekindle her love for her high school sweetheart, who is now the town baker.

Jesse Metcalfe and Autumn Reeser in A Country Wedding
Stable relationship … Jesse Metcalfe and Autumn Reeser in A Country Wedding (2015). Photograph: Cinematic Collection/Alamy

Thanks to the predictability of the Hallmark movie framework, over the past few years the films have become rich meme-fodder. There was even an AI experiment in which a bot was fed 1,000 hours of Hallmark movies then asked to write its own screenplay (the result was a heartwarming tale of a widowed single mother working for a small-town snow globe company).

So unchallenging and untextured is the Hallmark world that it is easy to regard these movies as harmless entertainment. But as their reach has spread they have also diffused an idea of home and life and relationships that has been traditional and conservative, and perhaps even retrograde. “In this particular kind of romance, there’s always an affirmation of some really conventional standard,” says Billy Mernit, author of the bestselling textbook Writing the Romantic Comedy, and a story analyst for Universal Pictures. “It’s straight up middle-American heartland values.”

The Hallmark Channel can trace its lineage back to the early 1990s, when two religious cable TV channels, the American Christian Television System and Vision Interfaith Satellite Network, began companionably sharing time on a satellite service. Over the years that followed, the combined network moved through several incarnations and investment structures, until in August 2001, now owned by Crown Media Holdings, itself owned by the Hallmark Cards Inc, it was rebranded as the Hallmark Channel.

While the network introduced secular shows alongside its faith-based output, its programming remained resolutely wholesome (aside, perhaps, for the vague lustfulness of repeats of the Golden Girls). When it began creating original movies, the romances they portrayed were remarkably chaste. To this day, there is no sex, drugs or swearing in a Hallmark film, no politics or violence or drunkenness. “In standard theatrical romcoms it all busted open in the 60s,” notes Mernit. “But Hallmark movies kind of act as if that never happened.”

For Sherman Wolfe, these parameters make for something distinct. “The thing that makes these movies special is they’re a safe thing for everyone to watch,” she argues. “Your little kid and Grandma can watch it together.”

While other production companies have attempted to imitate the genre, she argues that they often fall flat precisely because they don’t work within the same family-oriented restrictions. “They have more freedom, they can have sex and swearing and murder, but it dilutes the beauty of what it’s supposed to be,” she says.

Compared to your average cinematic release, Hallmark movies are cheap to produce, rumoured to be a little over $2m per film. Accordingly, there is something gently low-budget to the productions: the sets, the wardrobe, the effects feel more homely than Hollywood. Although the likes of Danny Glover and Megan Markle have starred in Hallmark fllms, the actors are usually familiar but not famous. You are most likely to recognise them from other Hallmark movies (Candace Cameron Bure, for instance, has 30 Hallmark credits to her name).

Elizabeth Henstridge and Rebecca Street in Christmas at the Plaza
I wish it could be Christmas every day … Elizabeth Henstridge and Rebecca Street in Christmas at the Plaza (2019). In 2021, the network made 41 Christmas movies. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

There are, after all, a lot of movies to make. The Hallmark scheduling year has nine distinct seasons: films devoted to New Year, to spring, and to Valentine’s Day; then comes the countdown to summer, followed by actual summer, June weddings, Christmas in July, and autumn. Then, in October, the channel begins its much-vaunted countdown to Christmas. The season is big business for Hallmark. In 2021, the channel made 41 Christmas movies – an increase from just 11 in 2010, and more than 35 million people tuned in to watch them – the majority female, aged 25 to 54. With the holiday market secured, it makes sense for the channel to also try to corner other seasons.

The weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day have been branded as Loveuary by Hallmark, and this year offerings number six new films, including Sweeter Than Chocolate, A Paris Proposal and Welcome to Valentine, which stars Kathryn Davis as Olivia, a career-driven New Yorker who loses both her boyfriend and her job in quick succession and must return home to her home town of Valentine, Nebraska. Along the way she hitches a ride with her roommate’s friend George (Markian Tarasiuk) and as their roadtrip unfolds, she begins to re-evaluate her ideas of love.

This is Davis’s second Hallmark film, and her first as a lead (she made her debut in a supporting role in 2020’s A Christmas Carousel). As with most Hallmark movies, the turnaround was fast. “I got the offer on the Thursday, I took the offer on the Friday, and then I was flown out to Ottawa on the Wednesday,” Davis says, speaking from her home in Toronto. “Then we started rolling the Monday after.”

Welcome to Valentine’s premise seemed to Davis both hopeful and accessible. And there is a place, she believes, for this kind of story in among rolling news cycles and the disconnection of social media. “It’s just optimism,” she says. “Good stories kind of get buried in the turmoil of everyday life. So I think it is that opportunity to just remember that just beyond your door, there’s the opportunity to fall in love, to meet someone, to make a connection.”

Sherman Wolfe is the first to admit that there is a formula to Hallmark movies. There are nine acts (as opposed to a conventional movie structure of three) to accommodate eight advertising breaks. “Act one and act two, is setting everybody up, a little conflict,” she says. “Act three, they’re put together and maybe there’s a couple of little moments where they think: ‘Oh, I really think I really like this person, despite my misgivings.’ And then acts four, five, six, they start actually falling in love. But that conflict is still there. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we know something’s going to go wrong. And in act seven something goes wrong. In act eight, it’s over. And then the last act they make up happily ever after.”

Traditionally, she says, the Hallmark formula did not allow the actors to kiss before the final scene. In more recent times, they might be permitted an earlier kiss, somewhere around the midway point, to shore up their burgeoning affections.

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Meghan Markle and Christopher Jacot in When Sparks Fly
Queen of hearts … Meghan Markle stars alongside Christopher Jacot in When Sparks Fly (2014). Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

Alongside this structural pattern runs a distinct moral path for the films’ protagonists. “One of the most important things that we try to do is make sure that where we have a relationship, each one of them helps each other in some way to grow,” Sherman Wolfe says. “So a lot of times if people are just starting out writing for Hallmark, you’ll see a story where the man will change the woman, or the woman will change the man. But we like to have both of them help each other get on the right path.”

You could trace Hallmark’s familiar narrative all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, the founding father who did most to imbue the US with this notion of rural superiority and the pleasures of the simple life. “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe,” he said, “we shall become as corrupt as in Europe.” Rural America, he argued, was the real America.

Ever since, this trope has played a recognisable role in American cultural and political rhetoric. When Pete Buttigieg embarked on the presidential primaries in 2020, he drew on his midwestern upbringing to bolster his campaign: “We need Washington to look more like our small towns, not the other way around,” he declared. Bill Clinton’s political narrative has long rested not on his time spent at Oxford or Yale, but on his childhood in Hope, Arkansas – a town that all but sounds like a Hallmark movie setting.

Finding the archetypal small town often falls to Andrew Gernhard, locations specialist and founder of Connecticut-based Synthetic Cinema International. When we speak, Gernhard is in North Carolina, shooting a film called A Biltmore Christmas, which stars Hallmark favourite Bethany Joy Lenz. Gernhard came to Hallmark movies via horror films (a curiously common route), and is now adept at finding the kind of warm and intimate setting appropriate for a TV romcom, sometimes shooting in Canada or even Iceland, but most often in Connecticut. “Connecticut is perfect because it’s this old New England style,” he says. “There’s something about the Victorian houses and the history that’s there. It just feels like Christmas.”

Mernit likens the sets of Hallmark movies to model train layouts, “where you could assemble your little town and the people in it. They are trying to reconstruct a quasi-imaginary America of some 40 or 50 years ago.” It is a strange depiction of America, Mernit says, suggesting that a more accurate portrayal might be 2020’s Nomadland, in which Frances McDormand leaves her fading industrial town to find seasonal work, living out of a mobile home, her life becoming increasingly itinerant.

But the more unrooted our lives and communities feel, the more we might cling to the idea of a world that seemed simpler, safer, sweeter. “You have this determined attempt to turn the clock back, says Mernit. “Where else are you going to find the apple pie you baked for dinner, with the family in that imaginary cookie-cutter home? It’s alive and well on the Hallmark screen.”

Those who work for Hallmark are keen to note how the channel is evolving. Davis says that as a mixed-race actor she has noted an increasing diversity in casting. Sherman Wolfe, who is Jewish, talks of writing the Hallmark film Hanukkah on Rye, and of a broadening, more inclusive notion of what “the holiday season” might mean. Last year also brought the network’s first gay romcom. “The core of it is still where it was, which is about love and family and friendship and all those things,” says Sherman Wolfe. “It just expands the world that we can see them in.”

Still, the Hallmark world is so distinct for Sherman Wolfe that she carries the thought of it – accessible, joyful, comforting – into her office each morning. There she lowers the window blinds, turns on the Christmas lights and sits down at her desk, in her white colonial house, with its red front door and its black shutters, in her small Connecticut town, where the light falls pleasingly across East Main Street.

In the UK you can watch Hallmark via Amazon Prime.

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