It’s cold as all heck outside in Chicago, which means a few things: My apartment sounds like a babbling brook, courtesy of the ambitious radiator, my only daily activity is a brief and reluctant 2pm walk, and the time spent indoors avoiding the outdoors begs for long, immersive movies (or Real Housewives of New York, depending on how the work day went).
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Now on to the good stuff:
I watched CLEOPATRA for the first time last week, and it gave the gift of entry to a rabbit hole of trivia, history, and gossip. For starters, there’s the story of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and Marc Antony, with its sex, power, and politics. Then there’s the affair of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, with its sex, power, and filmmaking. AND THEN, there’s the mayhem of the actual production of the film, with its sex, power, and outsized budget. Delicious! If you’re willing to give this four-hour movie a whirl, I recommend watching as we did: in two chunks, conveniently divided by a red curtained intermission. An evening of Cleo and Caesar, followed by a morning watch of Cleo and Marc. Part I is more confusing and dry (I’m using the word “dry” very liberally, this movie is absolutely bombastic), Part II brings a bit more heat and duh-ramaaaaaaaa, thanks in large part to the kind of gnarly, sweaty chemistry of the leads. Really fun stuff, folks.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: AP World History, caftans worn with full jewelry, early 2000’s tabloid coverage of Brangelina, the Golden Age of Hollywood baybee!
Streaming on Criterion and Disney+
Worlds away in both form and content is the 59-minute BLACK GIRL. Written and directed by Senegalese novelist Ousmane Sembene in 1966, the film is quiet but potent polemic on colonialism (in this case that of the French persuasion). M’Bissine Thérèse Diop stars as a girl brought to France from Dakar to work for a white family. We see her daily confrontations with post-racial racism, expectations of deference and submission, and homesickness. It’s a movie about microaggressions before microaggressions were microaggressions, and the deft, brutal climax is a radical acknowledgement of the consequences of living with cruelty, no matter the scale.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Djibril Diop Mambéty, knowing the references in Beyonce music videos, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, smashing the state
Streaming on Criterion and HBO Max
LEVIATHAN is a 2014 deceptive epic from Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev. Massive in scope but granular in detail, the film presents a Chekhovian problem, complete with battles of church and state, alcoholism, love, work, and family, all drenched in ice cold vodka. Bleak, despairing, and very, very good. Features one of the most jaw-dropping demolition scenes I ever did see.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: describing things as Kafkaesque, neutral grain spirits, smashing the state
Streaming on YouTube, Amazon, and several other services.
Man, I hope I never run out of Jane Campion kool-aid. My introduction to her was the romantic and aching BRIGHT STAR, which I watched in high school with my friends after a Keats lesson in our favorite English class (🤓). Then I watched her short PEEL: AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE. This past year I watched AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE and TWO FRIENDS, both of which left me floored in awe and appreciation. I was hoping to get to the theaters to watch her newest, THE POWER OF THE DOG, but Omicron being what it is, Alli and I watched from the comfort of our couch. “Deep” is a sort of misused and mangled word, but I think this film deserves the descriptor in its truest form: heavy in tone, thoughtful. I love a Western and I’ve appreciated the ways in which some modern filmmakers have toyed with the genre. I’m not really talking about Quentin Tarantino, I’d argue even his HATEFUL EIGHT is less a Western than a (forgive me) meta-Western, so referential and hyperactive in its homage-yness (new word alert!) and characterizations that it doesn’t examine any new facets of the genre, it just grinds on the form so hard the screw gets stripped. What I’m talking about is work from Kelly Reichardt, who turns the form as gently as a key, like in MEEK’S CUTOFF. And now, yes, Campion, whose submission to the genre is haunting and raw. But raw for her is never ugly. In fact, often her work is so bathed in beauty that my breath catches when I see the pain at play. Her films contain assaults, repressions, hospitalizations, deaths, and dire misunderstandings, but often what I remember most is, say, a gauzy shot of a hillside, or a poolside conversation between a pair of teenage best friends. Maybe this is a way in which she is a capital-W Woman in capital-F Film: she deploys an arsenal of feminine tools (gentleness, tenderness, and prettiness) in order to tell feminine stories (untold, of feminine people (not just women, but the broadest scope of the term). No surprises here: the cast is fantastic, Jonny Greenwood’s score is foreboding and elegant.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Slow burns, Kirsten Dunst, a finger of whiskey, leather chaps
Streaming on Netflix
MAɬNI - TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE, the debut feature from MacArthur Genius grant winner Sky Hopinka, was the latest art film on our watch list. Through a combination of rough and ready documentary filmmaking and lyrical interludes, Hopinka presents a film about birth and death myths that seems to rest in a space that is as much poetry as film. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard Chinuk Wawa, the language of the Chinookian people of the Pacific Northwest, and Hopinka centralizes that language—any spoken English was subtitled, a subtle but pointed suggestion as to exactly who the film is meant to serve.
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: wandering in to the video art room at the museum, myths, decolonizing your watchlist, analyzing your dreams
Streaming on Criterion
Well, that’s enough for now! Watch anything you loved this week? Or hated? Please, I beg you, tell me.
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With love,
Nina