FILMS
Four-plus hours with you / Well, I wouldn't say 'no'
If you are ever visiting, passing through, or just have the option of flying in or out of (I just did the latter) Manchester, Rose Marie Gill's Manchester Music Tour is an absolute, emphatic MUST. (The guidebook pictured above was co-written by Gill's late husband, the Inspiral Carpets drummer and Haçienda DJ who co-founded the tour group twenty years ago.)
I cannot recommend more highly and effusively this superlative guided tour – one of the best I've ever been on, of any type, on any subject. Rose has a tremendous and uniquely intimate knowledge of the city, its history, and its key musical figures and happenings, which she communicates with charismatic wit, passion, and vivid storytelling. The locations were well-selected (e.g., Strangeways Prison, the Salford Lads Club, the cemetery gates of "Cemetry Gates" fame, the "Joy Division Bridge," the "Haçienda Apartments" where the Haçienda itself once stood, Sifters record store, etc.) to give one a well-rounded sense of this city's staggeringly rich music-related history, especially ca. 1970s–90s. (In the pop/rock era, has any mid-sized city anywhere ever punched so far above its weight class as Manchester during these decades?!)
Four hours and change – and just £35 – very well spent, indeed...but would that it were twenty-four!
will win/should win/should've been nominated
Director
ww: 'the Daniels'
sw: Spielberg
sbn: Terence Davies, Benediction; Albert Serra, Pacifiction (if eligible); Jafar Panahi, No Bears
Actress
ww: Michelle Yeoh
sw: Cate Blanchett
sbn: Frankie Corio, Aftersun
Actor
ww: Austin Butler
sw: Paul Mescal or Colin Farrell
sbn: Benoît Magimel, Pacifiction
Supporting Actor
ww: Ke Huy Quan
sw: Ke Huy Quan or Barry Keoghan
sbn: Ethan Hawke, The Northman and/or The Black Phone
Original Screenplay
ww: 'the Daniels', EEAAO
sw: Spielberg & Kushner, The Fabelmans
sbn: Davies, Benediction
Adapted Screenplay
ww: Sarah Polley, Women Talking
sw: abstain – seen one, liked none
sbn: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Cinematography
ww: Roger Deakins, Empire of Light
sw: anything but fucking Elvis
sbn: Artur Tort, Pacifiction
The Kids Aren't All Right (But Maybe That's Okay?)
Toward a better understanding of the "Zoomer" (a term my son detests) experience of recent years' events and discourses, one can do worse than to think seriously and uncynically about pop culture by-and-for people born in the twenty-first century. Take the video above: an MSG full of tens of thousands of surely diverse, yet presumably majority-Gen. Z, fans sings along most emphatically to the drop-line "I wanna end me!" in a song written by a then-seventeen-year-old Billie Eilish. Or take the lead-off track of then-seventeen-year-old Olivia Rodrigo's Sour, in which she first expresses her doubts about whether she'll manage to survive to the legal drinking age, then asserts "If someone tells me one more time / 'Enjoy your youth,' I'm gonna cry" before delivering the drop-line "God! It's brutal out there!" But, in contrast (or not?), consider also Greta Thunberg: her heroic activism of course, but also her sparkling wit and her embrace of neuro-divergence as a "superpower." She is at least as representative of Kids Today as Billie Eilish, and in particular of a generation that's arguably done more than any since at least the 1960s to take up (figurative) arms against a sea of troubles –– against environmental degradation, climate-change complacency, gun laws that allow them to get murdered regularly at school, the violence and iniquities of systemic racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, etc. etc!
If we olds haven't already irreparably ruined this world they've inherited from us, they're going to make it a markedly better place. Even if by opposing said troubles they can't ultimately end them, they're nevertheless not going down without fighting the good fight; and not just selectively/pragmatically as per usual, but intersectionally, on every possible front of injustice. As an admiring elder, then, my best guess is that the winking nihilism of Billie E.'s "Bury a Friend" and the frustrated fuck it-ism of Olivia R.'s "Brutal" are how they blow off steam –– and it should be noted, too, that both of these pop stars themselves seem to be highly thoughtful and engaged young women. While it may or may not be The End of the World as We Know It, the standard clichés about some kind of cyclical "youth culture" –– Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna, Nirvana, Eminem, rinse and repeat –– just don't hold water. This is different. They've had experiences we haven't, or else had them during a very different phase of life. They know things we don't; and, all things considered, they're holding up awfully well under the circumstances.
The Ten Most Pristinely, Scientifically Perfect Pop Songs of All Time
Tristes Tropiques
Some great films can be properly appreciated and enjoyed viewed through tired eyes as the third or fourth film of a long, over-stimulating festival day. Others cannot. In my experience of last year's VIFF there was no (potentially great) film that fell more clearly into that latter category than Alberta Serra's languorous tropical anti-epic Pacifiction. I knew that I was missing something, perhaps quite a lot. I knew I needed to revisit it. And I knew also that it was one of the more visually spectacular movies I'd ever seen, and so I crossed my fingers that I'd have another opportunity to watch it on the big screen.
Now having done so (thanks, Cinematheque!), my strong suspicion is confirmed: this a singularly awesome (in every possible sense) movie, and its strange brew of political, cultural, and sexual ideas, suggestions, motifs, allusions, analogies, enigmas etc. etc. were much more resonant and interesting to think along with as a day's main event rather than its late encore. (For lack of a better description, think, maybe, Beau Travail meets The Thin Red Line meets The Conversation!)
I still can't say that I totally understand all, or even necessarily most, of it, and I don't expect to after viewings three, four, or five. Yet its dreamlike, appropriately oceanic rhythms are so immersive and seductive –– even hallucinatory nearing the film's stunning climax –– that gradually abandoning any logical, prosaic explanation for what exactly is going on is part of Pacifiction's hypnotic affect.
I can't shake it, don't want to, and – once again – can't wait to see it again. It is one of the few truly great films of this young decade so far.
