I Got My Mind Set on You
Best so far...
Top tens if 2022 ended now, in early August:
01. Benediction (Davies)
02. The Northman (Eggers)
03. The Batman (Reeves)
04. Kimi (Soderbergh)
05. Navalny (Roher)
06. In Front of Your Face (Hong)
07. Everything Everywhere All at Once (Kwan/Scheinert)
08. Turning Red (Shi)
09. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Gormican)
10. Nope (Peele)
01. Rosalia, Motomami
02. Bad Bunny, Un Verano Sin Ti
03. Beyoncé, Renaissance
04. Prince and the Revolution: Live
05. Neil Young, Citizen Kane Jr. Blues 1974 (Live at The Bottom Line)
06. FKA twigs, Caprisongs
07. Mitski, Laurel Hell
08. Lykke Li, Eyeye
09. Grace Ives, Janky Star
10. Drake, Honestly, Nevermind
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.
Dulce et decorum est...
"It's magnificent," Siegfried Sassoon tells Wilfred Owen after reading his poem "Disabled." "It pierces the heart."
Although Sassoon's own marvelous poetry is present throughout the film –– evoked by memories and experiences and nightmares of war and trauma –– it is only in Benediction's devastating final scene that we hear Owen's poem that so affected Sassoon earlier in the film, underscored by Ralph Vaughn Williams' haunting Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees,
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,—
In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.
There was an artist silly for his face,
For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now, he is old; his back will never brace;
He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race
And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.
One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,
After the matches carried shoulder-high.
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he'd better join. He wonders why.
Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts.
That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.
Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.
Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.
Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?
It is magnificent. And it pierces the heart.
Precisely the same may be said of Terence Davies' latest masterpiece. This is one of the greatest films to date by one of the world's greatest living filmmakers, or artists active in any medium; a truly magisterial work of power, sensitivity, real thought, and real feeling.
There Is a World Elsewhere
I was invited to an advance screening of The Northman not as a movie reviewer but in my capacity as a member of a university History department. This makes sense given that, arguably, no other active filmmaker takes the the past as seriously, and as much on its own peculiar terms, as does Robert Eggers.
Yet, in The Witch, The Lighthouse, and now The Northman, Eggers is rigorously committed not only to the standard checklist of "period accuracy" production-design components, he is also singularly focused on getting inside the thought-worlds and proprioceptive experiences of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a remote nautical outpost in the 1890s, and the visceral landscape of early medieval northern Europe, specifically from the perspective of pre-Christianized Vikings – though, true to period, this modern term is never used (digressing here: anachronistic name notwithstanding, if you happen to be in the Montréal area, this serendipitously timed special exhibition is a must!).
These are immersive visions of (more or less) alien milieux, equal parts awesomely beautiful and awesomely terrifying. And Eggers' films betray remarkably little interest in the concerns, debates, and assumptions of current culture, except insofar as Eggers-the-craftsman-of-spectacles seems to know intuitively how to entrance and thrill modern audiences as well as any contemporary director. The perspectives of these three films and their encoding of meaning belong as far as possible –– Eggers would make a very good professional historian –– to the distant moments in time and space they make palpable and immediate. The Northman's narrative rhythms, its moral tone and internal logic, its eerie beauty and ghoulish grotesquerie all derive from the world of the Icelandic Eddas and of Beowulf, although there are also unmistakable (pre-)echoes of Shakespeare, with the primordial ooze that would much later coalesce into the Hamlet and (to a lesser extent) Macbeth stories mixed in with the mud and blood and bile on screen.
Given an obviously larger budget, a wider canvas on which to create, and a terrific cast of movie stars (including, best of all here, the one of Eggers' own partial making), Eggers compromises or tones down none of his esoteric or idiosyncratic artistic impulses; he delivers his most impressive film yet. As a cinephile, I'd say it's a masterpiece, and also that it's extremely unlikely to be surpassed by any Hollywood release – or film, period? – this year. As an historian of the Early Middle Ages, I wonder if it might be the best, and the most indelibly evocative, movie set in that period – a time before the knights and castles and codes of chivalry that have attracted far more cinematic attention than this stranger, liminal lost epoch separating the High Middle Ages from Roman Late Antiquity.
Top 25 Canadian Films
01. Goin' Down the Road (Shebib, 1970)
02. Les ordres (Brault, 1974)
03. The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan, 1997)
04. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Kunuk, 2002)
05. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Obomsawin, 1993)
06. Action: The October Crisis of 1970 (Spry, 1974)
07. Mon oncle Antoine (Jutra, 1971)
08. A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg, 2011)
09. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (Maddin, 2002)
10. Winter Kept Us Warm (Secter, 1965)
11. Exotica (Egoyan, 1994)
12. MS Slavic 7 (Bohdanowicz/Campbell, 2019)
13. Cairo Time (Nadda, 2009)
14. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Tailfeathers/Hepburn, 2019)
15. Dead Ringers (Cronenberg, 1988)
16. Spider (Cronenberg, 2002)
17. Crash (Cronenberg, 1996)
18. Hookers on Davie (Cole/Dale, 1984)
19. Wavelength (Snow, 1967)
20. One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Kunuk, 2019)
21. Never Eat Alone (Bohdanowicz, 2016)
22. Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Barnaby, 2013)
23. My Winnipeg (Maddin, 2007)
24. Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012)
25. Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Canuel, 2006)
The fields shudder, the woods shudder, the marshes shudder
Angelbert on the Battle of Fontenoy (841), the bloodiest battle of the Carolingian civil war; translated by Peter Godman in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London, 1985), pp. 262–265:
When in the earliest morning dawn cleaved the horrors of night
that was not the day of the sabbath but the cauldron of Saturn.
The wicked demon rejoices in the breaking of peace among brothers.
The hubbub of war resounds. A terrible battle arises on all sides.
Brothers prepare death for brothers, uncles for nephews,
nor do sons do their duty to their fathers.
There has been no worse massacre on the field of battle.
Christian law is violated; blood flows in waves;
and in hell the maw of Cerberus opens with glee.
The hand of almighty God protected Lothar
who himself put up a valiant struggle.
Had the rest fought like him swift victory would have been won.
But even as Judas once betrayed the Saviour,
so, Sire, your generals abandoned you in the struggle.
Be careful lest you be deceived like the lamb before the wolf.
Fontenoy is the name the peasants give to the spring and village
where Frankish blood was shed in slaughter and destruction.
The fields shudder, the woods shudder, the marshes shudder.
May neither dew nor showers nor rain fall on that meadow
on which mighty men, seasoned warriors, were laid low,
and wept for by fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and friends.
I, Angelbert, witnessed this crime which I have described
in rhythmical verse, as I fought with the others.
I alone survived among the many in the front line.
From the height of the hill I looked down into the valley's depths
where the brave king Lothar was vanquishing his enemies
who fled to the other side of the brook.
On Charles' side and on that of Louis too
the fields become white with the linen garments of the dead
as they often grow white with birds in the autumn.
The battle does not deserve to be praised or to be the subject
of fine song. Let every quarter of the globe
lament for those who died with such suffering.
Cursed be that day, may it not be counted
in the round of the year, but expunged from all memory,
unlit by the brilliance of the sun or by dawn's morning-light.
That night and the following day, the night was especially terrible
a night mingled with lamentations and suffering,
when some died and others groaned in dire straits.
O grief and lamentation! The dead are stripped naked,
vultures, crows, and wolves greedily devour their flesh.
They grow stiff, and their corpses lie there, unburied, helpless.
I shall not describe further the weeping and wailing.
Let each man restrain his tears as much as he is able to.
Let us implore the Lord on behalf of their souls.
Good Things from a Rough Year
With the Oscar nominations coming tomorrow, here's what I would've voted for, now having seen a few more really good movies; roughly in preferential order for each category:
PICTURE
Drive My Car
The Card Counter
The Power of the Dog
Memoria
Passing
Eternals
Flee
The Velvet Underground
Summer of Soul
Benedetta
DIRECTOR
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Paul Schrader, The Card Counter
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria
Rebecca Hall, Passing
Paul Schrader, The Card Counter
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria
Rebecca Hall, Passing
ACTRESS
Tessa Thompson, Passing
Paula Beer, Undine
Tilda Swinton, Memoria
Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza
Paula Beer, Undine
Tilda Swinton, Memoria
Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza
ACTOR
Hidetoshi Nishijima, Drive My Car
Andrew Garfield, tick, tick...BOOM!
Oscar Isaac, The Card Counter
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog
Will Smith, King Richard
Oscar Isaac, The Card Counter
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog
Will Smith, King Richard
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Ruth Negga, Passing
Tiffany Haddish, The Card Counter
Charlotte Rampling, Benedetta
Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog
Tōko Miura, Drive My Car
Tiffany Haddish, The Card Counter
Charlotte Rampling, Benedetta
Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog
Tōko Miura, Drive My Car
SUPPORTING ACTOR
Andrew Garfield, Spider-Man: No Way Home
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog
Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog
Ed Harris, The Lost Daughter
Timothy Spall, Spencer
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog
Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog
Ed Harris, The Lost Daughter
Timothy Spall, Spencer
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Paul Schrader, The Card Counter
Christian Petzold, Undine
Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn, Free Guy
Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe, The Mitchells vs. The Machines
Aaron Sorkin, Being the Ricardos
Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe, The Mitchells vs. The Machines
Aaron Sorkin, Being the Ricardos
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Ore, Drive My Car
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Rebecca Hall, Passing
Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, Spider-Man: No Way Home
Steven Levenson, tick, tick...BOOM!
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Rebecca Hall, Passing
Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, Spider-Man: No Way Home
Steven Levenson, tick, tick...BOOM!
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Eduard Grau, Passing
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Memoria
Ari Wegner, The Power of the Dog
Hidetoshi Shinomiya, Drive My Car
Haris Zambarloukos, Belfast
Lost Futures
Since posting the (admittedly severely limited) best-of list down below, I've seen three more 2021 movies of note: Drive My Car, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, and The Lost Daughter. The first is not only far and away the best film I've seen that was released last year, it's one of the best, and most genuinely profound, films I've ever seen (no hyperbole intended); one of the true masterpieces of this still-young century. The second is thoroughly terrific –– funny, touching, and very on-point without ever being on-the-nose. The third one I'm more split on, admiring the uniformly strong performances and the main, present-tense narrative, but less so the cliché-ridden flashback scenes and ultimately too-neat schematic structure.
2021 Films
I did not see too many 2021 movies – and, frankly, I did not think very much about movies this past year – but, for what it's worth, these were the fifteen I liked best:
01. The Card Counter (Schrader)
02. The Power of the Dog (Campion)
03. Memoria (Apichatpong)
04. Eternals (Zhao)
05. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts)
06. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (Neville)
07. Free Guy (Levy)
08. Licorice Pizza (Anderson)
09. Luca (Casarosa)
10. Space Jam: A New Legacy (Lee)
02. The Power of the Dog (Campion)
03. Memoria (Apichatpong)
04. Eternals (Zhao)
05. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts)
06. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (Neville)
07. Free Guy (Levy)
08. Licorice Pizza (Anderson)
09. Luca (Casarosa)
10. Space Jam: A New Legacy (Lee)
11. Being the Ricardos (Sorkin)
12. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Cretton)
13. Black Widow (Shortland)
12. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Cretton)
13. Black Widow (Shortland)
14. Encanto (Howard/Bush)
15. Spencer (Larrain)
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