Some notes on Days of Heaven
I was invited by VIFF to introduce a screening (on 35mm!) of Days of Heaven as part of their terrific "Summer in the '70s" series. Here's what I came up with (though I opted at the last minute to cut the last paragraph in case some might consider it a spoiler):
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Five Things
01. Paschasius Radbertus's Epitaphium Arsenii is the greatest, and most inexhaustibly fascinating, literary prose text of the earlier Middle Ages. Mayke de Jong and Justin Lake's English translation, extensive annotations, and critical apparatus are all superb.
02. Delbert Mann's film version of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables is quietly masterful –– and unexpectedly relevant for our present moment in time, despite having been made in 1958. David Niven's Oscar-winning performance is devastating.
03. FKA Twigs' "Killer" is the best single so far this year. If it's a sign of things to come, she might give Rosalia some real competition for album of the year.
04. Joan Micklin Silver's Between the Lines is one of the great workplace comedies; seeing it (for the first time) on the big screen was a real delight. John Heard's best work outside of The Sopranos.
05. Nope feels like it could well be Jordan Peele's finest (and scariest) film to date...until its silly final act. When he cites The Goonies as a key influence, he isn't kidding.
Best so far...
Top tens if 2022 ended now, in early August:
It's so good, it's so good, it's so good, it's so good, it's so good
Lemonade was a perfect translation of the personal/autobiographical into the musical/lyrical; like Plastic Ono Band, an iconic superstar's damage and demons and cathartic passage through them rendered into popular art readily legible to anyone and everyone with a culturally osmosed understanding of said superstar's specific domestic and professional circumstances. In lieu of primal scream therapy Beyoncé smashed shit up with a baseball bat; "Hold On," "Hold Up," mummy issues, daddy issues, heroin withdrawals, Becky with the Good Hair, "You ain't married to no average bitch, boy," "God is a concept by which we measure our pain," etc. etc. And, naturally, both Grand Statements were replete with Great Songs too, Bey's strong suit going back to the early days of Destiny's Child and John's(/Paul's) going back to the Cavern Club and Hamburg.
The shock of the 2014 self-titled record that preceded Lemonade wasn't that of the ultra-personal but more formally of an all-time great Singles Artist who wasn't above inserting filler alongside forever cuts like "Crazy in Love," "Halo," and "Countdown" deciding she wanted to be our foremost Album Artist, give or take her husband and Kanye. Try to find an objectively weak track on Beyoncé. You can't. The same goes for Renaissance. It's all fantastic, start to finish, from "I pull up in these clothes, look so good / 'cause I'm that ho" to "I Feel Love," even if nothing here jumps out quite as urgently and immediately as "Flawless," "Partition," or "Drunk in Love." What that means is that her transformation into full-on Album Artist is now complete, with the best unflagging dance-pop LP this side of Robyn and Kylie.
In any case, there are plenty of great songs here, though which ones register as such may shift from listen to listen. Right now, my favourites are "Cozy," "Alien Superstar," "Cuff It," "Thique," "America Has a Problem," and "Summer Renaissance," but in a few days' time I might cite a totally different half dozen. And while these tracks and others surely bake in enough juicy bits of winking lyrical allusion for seasoned pop-music detectives trained on Lemonade and every Taylor Swift song ever to busy themselves with weeks of exegesis, gone is the personal-as-vulnerable dimension of "The Visual Album." This is Beyoncé the world-beater at the peak(?) of her powers, Beyoncé the consummate producer of pop-music pleasures you haven't experienced before, and Beyoncé the vital Black artist still, at 40, figuring out what exactly it means, or can mean, to be a Black female superstar in a country where racism remains as hardwired in as ever despite the auspicious promise of Barack & Michelle being Eight Years in Power.
She's in the mood to fuck something up, and she's one of the very few celebrity artists – in our post-celebrity/everyone's-a-celebrity age – with the real potential to do so.
