LIVE from New York
Wow! Phoebe Bridgers just killed it on SNL!
Reading, Watching, Listening
–Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
–Barack Obama, A Promised Land
–Jason Lutes, Berlin
–Jessica Maier, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
–Barack Obama, A Promised Land
–Jason Lutes, Berlin
–Jessica Maier, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
–Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
–Small Axe (Steve McQueen)
–Terrified (Demián Rugna)
–The Queen's Gambit (Scott Frank)
–Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki)
–Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
–Sinéad O'Connor, The Lion and the Cobra + I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
–The Cranberries, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? + No Need to Argue
–Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
–Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B
–My "Best of Gillian Welch" playlist on Tidal
Excellence
It should not escape our attention or appreciation that CRJ's B-side-album toss-offs are better than most artists' lead-off singles, and this has been the case for nearly a decade. This is consistent excellence like Prince in the '80s, PJ Harvey in the '90s, Timbaland in the 2000s. Or maybe, for a more categorically apt comparison, Kyle Minogue's stellar run between Impossible Princess and Body Language.
Best of 2020
FILMS
01. Moving On (Yoon)
02. There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)
03. Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)
02. There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)
03. Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)
04. First Cow (Reichardt)
05. Da 5 Bloods (Lee)
06. Soul (Docter)
07. Servants (Ostrochovsky)
08. Emma (De Wilde)
09. My Rembrandt (Hoogendijk)
10. Days (Tsai)
PERFORMANCES
01. Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods
02. Pierfrancesco Favino, The Traitor
03. Paula Beer, Undine
04. Imogen Kogge, Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis
05. Pierfrancesco Favino, Hammamet
06. Amanda Seyfried, Charles Dance, and Gary Oldman, Mank
07. Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
08. Choi Jung-woon, Moving On
09. Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Rylance, The Trial of the Chicago 7
10. Lee Kang-sheng, Days
ALBUMS
01. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
02. Morrissey, I am Not a Dog on a Chain
03. The Microphones in 2020
01. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
02. Morrissey, I am Not a Dog on a Chain
03. The Microphones in 2020
04. Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
05. Chloe x Halle, Ungodly Hour
06. Kathleen Edwards, Total Freedom
07. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B
08. Jessie Ware, What's Your Pleasure?
09. Soccer Mommy, Color Theory
10. Selena Gomez, Rare
SINGLES
01. Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion, "WAP"
02. Dua Lipa, "Levitating"
02. Dua Lipa, "Levitating"
03. Morrissey feat. Thelma Houston, "Bobby, Don't You Think They Know?"
04. Megan Thee Stallion, "Girls in the Hood"
04. Megan Thee Stallion, "Girls in the Hood"
05. Chloe x Halle, "Forgive Me"
06. Dua Lipa, "Love Again"
07. Phoebe Bridgers, "Kyoto"
08. Megan Thee Stallion feat. Beyoncé, "Savage Remix"
09. Stephen Malkmus, "Xian man"
10. Dua Lipa, "Don't Start Now"
We just watched this –– a perennial childhood favourite of mine –– and, I'm not gonna lie, it legitimately gave me goosebumps at times.
Grace Jones! k.d. lang! Magic Johnson! Little Richard! Oprah! Charo! The Marine choir!
(Thank god, he didn't invite a certain Manhattan real-estate developer...)
You must got me fucked up
We saw Chloe x Halle open for Beyoncé and Jay-Z a few years ago. They were good. But I more or less forgot about them. Now, I can't stop listening to their album, Ungodly Hour. In certain respects, it reminds me of Destiny's Child crossed with En Vogue, but the production and some of the unusual melodies are really quite different from both. "Forgive Me," the first track after the intro, for instance, is the closest Chloe x Halle come to a "Don't Let Go," yet it ultimately sounds unlike anything I've heard before – somehow portentous and funereal and sleekly sexy at the same time. The closer, "ROYL," evokes FKA twigs, but with Southern gospel inflections, evincing their Atlanta roots. This dynamic of familiarity and strangeness is one they totally sustain across the ten tracks in between. And they sing the shit out of all of it.
Home viewing
Having recently revisited some old favourites for the first time in many years, I decided to revise my 100 movies list.
"Youth" is served
There are some terrific Obama quotes in the new Atlantic interview, among them:
“You’re in high school and you see all the cliques and bullying and unfairness and superficiality, and you think, ‘Once I’m grown up I won’t have to deal with that anymore.'"
“And then you get to the state legislature and you see all the nonsense and stupidity and pettiness. And then you get to Congress and then you get to the G20, and at each level you have this expectation that things are going to be more refined, more sophisticated, more thoughtful, rigorous, selfless, and it turns out it’s all still like high school. Human dynamics are surprisingly constant.”
I kind of love that the former president (by far the best one in my lifetime, and probably since FDR) is now essentially saying, "Most people are fucking stupid and puerile jerks, and this is a really big part of why we're so screwed – because adults with enormous responsibilities are shockingly incapable of consistently acting like adults and just doing their damn jobs." For a guy who famously campaigned on "HOPE," and still ostensibly adheres to that optimistic vision in his more official speeches, this is a very archly pessimistic vision of human nature!
He's right –– and he's only getting sharper and more acutely perceptive with age.
2020 isn't all bad...
...I mean, this happened--like it, really, actually happened; objectively, in reality! And this did, too! Oh, and there have been some really good movies and music.
VIFF 2020: Best of the Fest
01. Moving On (Yoon)
02. There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)
03. Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)
04. Servants (Ostrochovsky)
05. My Rembrandt (Hoogendijk)
06. Undine (Petzold)
07. Memories to Choke On, Drinks to Wash Them Down (Leung/Reilly)
08. Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis (Wagner)
09. Summer of 85 (Ozon)
10. Hammamet (Amelio)
VIFF 2020, pt. 3: You Can't Go Home Again
Twilight's Kiss The loveliest film at this year's festival, and one of the loveliest, period in an awfully long time, is Ray Yeung's romantic portrait of two Hong Kong seniors, a taxi driver with a wife and adult children and a retired divorcé whose son has convinced him to convert to Christianity. The former secretly cruises for furtive encounters with other men; the latter is more integrated into Hong Kong's community of gay older men, though he is careful to keep this important part of his life and identity concealed from his family. What is initially a chance encounter develops into something far more meaningful and impactful for both men. Yet, as their relationship progresses and deepens, even the sweetness and joy of shared moments are strained with the weight of secrecy and regret. As a swooning, circumstantially doomed, romance, there are some echoes here of In the Mood for Love, another great Hong Kong film––but Yeung's love story, of two men in the autumn of their lives, is a very different one. The social and personal factors that constrain the full flowering of their relationship are markedly different, too. And, in contrast to Wong Kar-wai's eye-poppingly stylish '60s Hong Kong, Yeung's representation of the contemporary city feels more lived-in and open. The elegant period elements in Wong's tightly constructed film converge in on his lovers, and seem to exist for them and their ephemeral moment of connection. In Twilight's Kiss, Yeung's couple are just people living ordinary lives surrounded by many others doing the same. Their relationship adds an intense charge of feeling that is theirs alone. The world around them keeps going on at its normal rate and rhythm, as other people, including their families and friends (all presented as complex, interesting individuals, none of them mere foils for or accessories to the lead characters), have other experiences, feelings, and relationships.
Hammamet The consistently superb Pierfrancesco Favino gives another astonishing performance, here as notorious Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. Gianni Amelio's film focuses primarily on the final years of Craxi's life, after he had fled Italy for the titular town in Tunisia to avoid facing trial on corruption charges. This abbreviated biographical scope allows for an unhurried rhythm and long, patient scenes centering on extended dialogues between Craxi and his visitors. As in Suburra and Bellocchio's The Traitor, Favino is considerably stronger than the rest of the movie playing out around him, but given Amelio's near-constant focus on Craxi –– a kind of disgraced lion-in-winter figure –- Favino's tour de force performance very nearly is the film, together with some stunning scenic backdrops on both sides of the Mediterranean.
John Ware Reclaimed This passion project of novelist/playwright/documentarian Cheryl Foggo illuminates a thoroughly interesting and significant chapter of Canadian – or really, North American – history that deserves to be better known: that of an African-American man who, after the U.S. Civil War, ventured to Canada and became a successful and prominent Prairie rancher. For Foggo, her brother, and other African-Canadians she interviews, Ware's legacy is distinctly personal. With a good historian's resourcefulness and tenacity, Foggo endeavours to push past the vague legend of "Alberta's Black Cowboy," to learn more about Ware, his family, community, and social context, and to share widely what she discovers so as to dispel the notion that Canada, and particularly Western Canada, is lacking in Black History.
My Mexican Bretzel Like, say, Tarnation, Stories We Tell, and Dawson City: Frozen Time –– films that seemingly share little in common –– Nuria Giménez's found-footage montage (for lack of a more precise definition; it's borderline sui generis) is a remarkably clever piece of storytelling assembled out of fragmentary shards of the past; moments richly evocative and mundane stitched together as a kind of diaristic narrative. It's as much a "documentary" as F for Fake, but Giménez plays it much straighter than Welles, and the cumulative effect of her film is genuinely haunting, whatever its other claims to "authenticity." If nothing else, this is another illustrative reminder of just how irrelevant the conventional binary of "documentary" and "fiction" has become – if it wasn't already so back in Welles's heyday.
Moving On Yoon Dan-bi's quietly excellent family drama is one of the great surprises of this year's festival. Yoon and her wonderfully naturalistic cast capture in such subtle and exacting detail the dynamics within a family, whether in group dinners and celebrations or in small, one-on-one moments between, say, an aunt and her niece or an adult brother and sister both going through tough times. There is a rather obvious impulse to situate Moving On within the illustrious and extensive tradition of the Asian family drama, from Ozu to Hou to Koreeda (all three auteurs are mentioned in the festival catalogue blurb!). However, the movie that most immediately came to mind for me was You Can Count on Me. In its tenderness, warmth, humour, and real empathy, so many scenes in Yoon's film recalled that indelible last scene in Lonergan's, with Laura Linney's Sammy saying a reluctant goodbye-for-now to Mark Ruffalo's Terry (neither actor has been better before or since). Moving On's final moments are no less poignant, though they're so much sadder because it's goodbye-for-good, and in more ways than one.
Mickey on the Road It's a bit of a shame, really, that I happened to watch Lu Mian Mian's entirely solid and occasionally inspired film right after seeing Moving On. Mickey on the Road –– a road-trip drama/comedy about two young women who travel together from Taiwan to Guangzhou, though for different reasons –– is probably not overly melodramatic or excessively aesthetically showy, yet it seemed to be both after the masterful subtlety of Yoon's film. And while Lu's work is, at times, quite funny, its laughs felt somewhat forced and too self-consciously quirky compared to the wholly organic humour of Moving On. That is to say, it's not Mickey on the Road's fault that I'm exceptionally smitten with Moving On (even more so after a follow-up viewing, post-Mickey). To be sure, Lu's movie has plenty to recommend it, including a pair of charismatic lead performances and some really rich and fascinating insights about cultural differences between Taiwan and the southern (Cantonese) Mainland. But watching some dozen and a half movies over just a couple weeks' time ultimately, emphatically underscores the differences that separate great films from good ones. Where Mickey on the Road feels through and through like a promising feature debut, Moving On is a first feature that is almost unbelievably assured and mature.
VIFF 2020, pt. 2: Stately horrors
Servants Ivan Ostrochovsky's stunning, noir-influenced film is similarly, though more immediately, concerned with the power of the state over the moral and spiritual lives of its citizens. The setting here, rather than present-day Iran, is Czechoslakia in 1980, as the totalitarian communist government attempts to root out resistance within the Catholic Church, specifically in a Bratislava seminary where some teachers and pupils have expressed criticism of the state-sponsored Pacem in Terris movement. In Ostrochovsky's vision of the past, this historical milieu is a strange and ghostly space shot through with dread; a soul-crushing, Kafka-esque nightmare. Yet, there is a stark beauty and a sense of mystery within every monochrome frame. The spiritual tumult of the young priests-in-training and their aged ecclesiastical mentors is most evocatively expressed in Servants' many moments of eerie calm, only barely suppressing the profound anxiety just below the surface.
Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis Centering on Angela Merkel's bold and fateful decision to allow hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees to enter and seek asylum in Germany, Stephen Wagner's film focuses, above all, on the long period of indecision and the behind-the-scenes bureaucratic wrangling and maneuvering that led up to Merkel's eventual, humane stance. It's a political thriller of sorts, but one concerned with the place (or possibility) of morality and empathy in a world of Realpolitik pragmatism and micromanaged economic minutiae. As Merkel, Imogen Kogge is excellent, transcending mere impersonation, and the rest of the cast is nearly as strong. Though Wagner's style is rather pedestrian and clearly televisual, his vocabulary of rapid cuts between scenes and locales, frequent establishing shots of European capital cities, and news footage mixed in with terse conversations in state offices, cars, and via phone meetings feels perfectly pitched as an aesthetic representing the complicated governmental and intergovernmental strata of present-day Germany and the E.U.
The Town of Headcounts Shinji Araki's film, an odd mix of drama, comedy, and science fiction, plays like an especially clever episode of Black Mirror, but situated within the specific context of Japanese society. It's a dystopian tale of a cult-like community that provides a life of dull leisure for its trapped members, who are then supplied as "headcounts" for various corporate or political ends necessitating the anonymous presence of crowds of people. While this premise sounds convoluted on paper, it largely works in practice, particularly because the cast is equally good in comic circumstances and in the film's darker moments. The most unnerving aspect of Araki's work is that its dystopia exists within normal reality and contemporary society, albeit at its creepy, invisible margins, not far off in some distant future.
Special Actors Shin'ichirô Ueda's movie shares some conspicuous similarities with Araki's: namely, a weird cult and the use of ordinary people as performative props inserted purposefully into certain real-world situations. Both films are also critiques of certain aspects of Japanese culture (though, as such, I can't pretend to be able to fully "read" them). Ueda's work, however, is a much broader, zanier comedy. The "special actors" of the title are amateur performers hired to add some movie-like excitement to regular life. One "actor," for instance, is tasked with threatening a customer and then taking a fake beating so that said customer can impress his date. In the main storyline, the stakes are higher: the team of "special actors" are hired by the sister of a brainwashed inn owner to infiltrate a Scientology-like group in order to prevent the group from taking possession of her family's inn. Much silliness ensues, some of it a bit tedious. But with Ueda's light, screwball touch, it's mostly a lot of fun.
Last and First Men Of all the movies at this year's festival that have suffered unfairly from the indignity of being streamed off a laptop to a TV, the late Jóhann Jóhansson's deep-future time-capsule might be the worst served by this virtual fest format. Tilda Swinton narrates a message addressed to us from a future race of man (the 18th; we're still the first) some two billion years in the future, reflecting on the end of their own Neptune-based civilization, over long-held black-and-white shots of brutalist futuristic structures and cryptic monuments now in a state of ruin. It's at times hypnotic, at times boring. But I suspect the former impression would dominate were this projected on a proper movie screen –– or better yet, presented as an art-gallery installation, where this really belongs, partitioned off in a dark, quiet space amidst the mixed, strange fruits of human imagination.
Sanzaru For horror connoisseurs like us, too many horror movies – including many good ones – are thoroughly predictable from about ten minutes in, their characters all stock types, the scares pro forma. Xia Magnus's film, about a Filipina nurse and her nephew residing with a terminally ill older woman and her son at a house in rural Texas, is refreshingly inscrutable through much of its runtime. While this haunted-house story ultimately hits some familiar horror notes, its patient plotting helps to build thick atmosphere, interesting, multi-dimensional characters, and general goodwill. More unsettling than jump-scary, Sanzaru is a slow burn that gradually worms its way under one's skin.
The Curse of Willow Song Far less successfully, Karen Lam's Vancouver-set feature aims, at once, for horror, neo-noir, and gritty social realism. It misses all these targets, but it falls especially short on the last one. Perhaps non-Vancouverites won't mind (or even notice), but, speaking as a longtime resident of the city, Lam's representations of the Downtown Eastside and some kind of vague, shadowy Lower Mainland criminal underworld feel really off-base and simplistic. (This is just local nitpicking, but at one point a character is picked up on the DTES, the driver seems to drive south across the Second Narrows Bridge, and they end up at an industrial park that is said to be in Surrey...) Willow Song's guiding template seems to be Sin City, or something of that sort. In consequence, the film's depictions of serious social issues like drug addiction, homelessness, sexual harassment, and the difficulty of life after prison are regrettably cartoonish. There is some good stuff here: the b&w photography looks sharp (again, it would benefit much from the big screen); Valerie Tian's lead performance is solid, relatively subtle, and gets better as the film goes along; and the horror special effects are pretty impressive for a low-budget indie. But these bright spots are just not enough to make up for all the ways this movie goes wrong.
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