Phantom Thread

What a gift to be on your back, helpless and in need of care. Of course, it means you are in pain and immobile. These are the “dangers of falling in love” but also the dangers of letting your ego run amok. Mr. Woodcock knows not what he does or, more importantly, how he does it. One of the first impressions we get is of a man who acts like a three-year-old, and I say this not to libel the guy but to speak to my own experience of walking on eggshells during the hallowed breakfast routine. His lady friend offers him a pastry and he turns it down, quite patronizingly, complaining about its texture similar to how my daughter Flora complains about the soggy cereal that she lets sit. It’s one of many mercurial mood swings that seem to spring from interruptions. Whether he’s aware of it or not, Reynolds is being rude and perhaps his lofty place in the 1950s postwar London couture scene has him convinced that this disposition is a merited roost from which to stare down at the world. That he despises distraction isn’t wrong in and of itself and if I’m being honest, much of his vocational predilections hit a little to close to home. There is something truly monstrous about the way artists/authors/musicians/directors innately neglect the people who have the most personal investment in their well-being. It’s not exclusive to gender, but being pumped with testosterone doesn’t help. Just the other day I was watching Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery when Tara sat next to me and started to ask me questions about what I was watching. I nearly went Woodcock on the poor lady.

Reynolds meets Alma, a war survivor and immigrant whose history is only implied only through facial cues. Facial cues are the heart and soul of this movie, which doesn’t lack for lavish gestures both of the directorial and thespian varieties (this is a PTA movie). Much has been made of the fact that this is supposedly Daniel Day Lewis’ final movie (and what a magnificent and measured way to leave us) but to fail to appreciate the work done by Leslie Manville and Vicky Krieps would be silly. Anyway, the Alma/Reynolds affair begins with games and power structures as you would expect in that particular day and age. One takes it on the chin while the other floats through life oblivious to etiquette, not of the bourgeois variety, but the way a man of his stature addresses and treats those of a very different caste. He’s not the dictatorial prick you see typically see in films like these, but his superciliousness is almost worse. Alma puts up with it for a while, but after a very existent and hilarious fight she takes matters into her own hands. I won’t spoil it, but it involves a fungal bit of tough love/reawakening.

If the movie were content to settle on this rebirth it’d be great but it’s the backsliding and ultimate acceptance on the part of Reynolds that really got to me. Truth is, you fight and make up. Usually during this squabbling, you see something truly awful in yourself that needs fixing. Then you begin to let those foibles crawl back into your monthly, weekly, and daily customs. We could all be so lucky as to have an Alma in our lives to “feed” us when we need to be fed. We all need to get sick from time to time. To see this power dynamic shift is a thing of beauty. It’s the death of pride and the birth of understanding.

*also, it’s as carefully composed as you would expect. Those lilac socks, the lavender bowtie, and the mauve car really were a feast for my eyeballs.

*my personal favorite scene was towards the end where the doctor was checking Reynolds and he darts a batshit look at Alma.

*  I get the Rebecca comparisons, though comparing Cyril to Mrs. Danvers is lazy and disrespectful to perhaps the only character who tries to add some stability to a house built on pandemonium.

* Sure, Johnny Greenwood deserves props for the score but let’s give some love to whoever chose to add Quebec’s own Oscar “the Maharaja” Peterson’s My Foolish Heart or My Ship, Daydream by the Duke, and Dolly Suite Op 56:1 Berceuse by Gabril Faure, Katia Labeque, and Marielle Labeque to the mix.  

1990

A lot of objectors to Goodfellas, and other Scorsese movies, seem to fixate on whether the actions onscreen are held liable enough to corroborate and reinforce their held values. I find its viciousness a genuine strength. The nastier I feel the better. What was once a brisk and funny piece of unceasing directorial flair, an ostensibly commemorative movie about the lure of hoodlum routine, turns irretrievably dark once poor little Spider gets popped for an infraction as silly and trivial as wounding tiny dick Tommy’s inflated ego. Tommy, a once endearing psychopath, is now an object of scorn and a man whose comeuppance we craved. It’s not simply that Scorsese has the decency to show these goon’s obligatory downfall, it’s that these men start to become the sniveling rats that they once hated so much. They lived long enough to witness themselves/each other change into wretched losers and traitors. Scorsese would bear witness to a lot of similar riffraff growing up on Elizabeth between East Houston and Prince. My own father had a similar experience with wise-guy sodality, and the confusion felt upon realizing his father’s friends were criminals. His godfather was a racketeer and killer, my grandfather’s friend from the homeland. He remembers having pillow fights with him, wrestling, and playing baseball in his aunt Mary’s backyard. His was privy to only one side of a very complicated and wicked man, a side advantageous at that time and place. His chameleonic nature was part of his survival. My father only learned of this man’s transgressions later in life and I’ve always sensed that he had a conflicted respect despite actions that were very easy to castigate. It’s the deception that makes Goodfellas such a singular entry in an already rich subgenre. I don’t mind heaping praise on this movie, one of my favorites without question.  

Goodfellas was the only movie in this strong year that I didn’t have a hard time ranking. It’s a vapid chore; false (I will change my mind about the order as soon as I look at it again) and needlessly taxing. How can you compare Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan to Ron Underwood’s Tremors? I can’t. They are both great for very different reasons. Ron Underwood’s Tremors was my son’s favorite movie at the age of three. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he watched it upwards of forty times in the span of a year. That’s probably a low estimate. I saw it once when I was in fourth grade, at my friend Brett Rathbone’s house. I also looked at Penthouse and drank beer there. My son saw it because the television was accidentally left on AMC during and after his nap. We came downstairs and witnessed a toddler completely horrified and enthralled. When we tried to turn the channel he started screaming. It reminded me of my former self, watching AMC’s Monster-Vision at my grandmother’s house. I’ll never forget the horrifying radiation victim’s from Eugene Lourie’s The Giant Behemoth (1959) or Peter Cushing hiding out in a cave and witnessing the existence of the eponymous Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957). It was also thanks to an unsupervised AMC station being left on that I saw Michael Carreras’ The Lost Continent (1968), where a tramp steamer full of degenerates accidentally discovers the hellish landmass full of prehistoric beasts and evil Spanish conquistadors. My point being that it was Dean’s destiny to stumble upon a monster fixation that will both scare and infatuate for many years to come. Tremors isn’t merely a bygone creature-feature, it’s a solid comedy and one of two great Fred Ward performances in 1990.  

On that note, I will add that I was very glad to have had an opportunity to watch Miami Blues, Trust, and An Angel at my Table for the first time. All three of these sparked an interest in directors that either had been off my radar or that I had seemed to underappreciate.

1.      Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)

2.      Metropolitan (Whit Stillman)

3.      A Bullet in the Head (John Woo)

4.      Tremors (Ron Underwood)

5.      Miami Blues (George Armitage)

6.      Close-Up (Abbas Kiorostami)

7.      Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante)

8.      Trust (Hal Hartley)

9.      White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood)

10.  Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar Wai)

Honorable Mentions: Miller’s Crossing (Coens), Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton), Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven), Back to the Future Part III (Robert Zemeckis), Wild at Heart (David Lynch), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Steve Barron), Cry-Baby (John Waters), Nightbreed (Clive Barker), King of New York (Abel Ferrara), Life is Sweet (Mike Leigh), An Angel at my Table (Jane Campion), Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismaki), A Tale of Springtime (Eric Rohmer), To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett).

You can’t argue with that bunch.

On the fence/enjoyed/respected: Godfather III, Dick Tracy, La Femme Nikita (Luc Besson), Darkman (Sam Raimi), The Exorcist 3, Frankenhooker.

No way: Leather:, Texas Chainsaw 3,

Kid picks: Kindegarten Cop, Dick Tracy, Home Alone, The Witches, Predator 2, Problem Child, Arachnophobia, Child’s Play 2, House Party, The Rescuers Down Under, Marked for Death, Another 48 Hours, Ducktales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, Narrow Margin, Ernest Goes to Jail, Delta Force 2, Graveyard Shift, Maniac Cop 2, Ghost Dad,

Haven’t seen: Joe Versus the Volcano, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Hardware, Dreams, Mo’ Better Blues, The Grifters, The Guardian, The Field, Vincent and Theo, Boiling Point, Dr. M, Nouvelle Vague, Archangel.

Lanthimos, Morrison, and Malick

The majority of Dawson City: Frozen Time has the sonic ambiance of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven mated with Takk on loop. For the most part, it works wonders exalting the steady flow of information accompanied by pictures and footage dug up or found, seemingly by the grace of God. Sometimes it felt smothering (to me), like studio time ran out for the musicians, thus requiring Bill Morrison and Alex Somers to recycle the same string arrangement just to quash some white noise. This is the only complaint I have, which is to say that I think this is one of the good ones. It tells the story of the titular Yukon city whose population and notoriety fluctuated based on the lust and need for its local resources. It’s tragic and I’m not sure exactly how or why. Dawson was the final destination of hundreds of silent film prints, most sunken at the bottom of the Yukon River, the rest dug up and at least partially restored. It’s not as simple as this, though. A lot of Morrison’s film is about the restoration but so much of it is about loss, be it to nitrate’s flammable properties or just time doing its thing. See it.

I’m depressed that critics are so quick to dismiss and demand directors be sent to pasture. Fuck that, and fuck you. You will never toil over anything half as much as these men and women, as you sit comfy with such misguided brio. Again, fuck you. Terrence Malick has cut his teeth long enough and hard enough to do whatever the fuck he wants and it just so happens that he’s making movies unique enough to be considered an affront to dwindling attention spans all over our cinematic wasteland. This is not to say that I necessarily carry his water. In fact, I found Song to Song a tough sit, not because of its pace nor its length but rather its dialogue, which I found mostly unfortunate, but that’s me and I don’t measure up. I’m not saying you can’t hate it, I’m saying that you can’t dismiss it outright. I’m also saying that by suggesting that he’s spent, you’re suggesting that artists have an expiration date based on your own subjective views on quality, which are probably bullshit.

I’m not so sure that I’ll ever give Yorgos Lanthimos another shot. He insists that he is incapable of doing anything “straight-forward” which sounds a lot like a man admitting that he’s sheepishly trussed to a gimmick. He’s perfectly content to be the scalawag, the pebble in the shoe to bougie patron pushovers who fall prey to his cheap baiting. The problem isn’t that he’s without talent, nor that he’s eagerly playing the cat toying with the prudish mouse, it’s that he has absolutely nothing to say about anything. It’s a lose/lose scenario for those who react to the scenes boobytrapped to elicit disgust. Disliking his work or having any sort of moral reaction to his puckish onscreen incitements only makes him stronger. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer he toys loosely with the mythology of his homeland, specifically that of Princess Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon, who is offered up to the sacrificial slab to appease an angry goddess. The goddess here is a 16 year old boy named Martin, whose father dies under Collin Farrell’s surgical knife. The guilt therein is never truly established, though it is implied that he may have had “two drinks” before the procedure. The crime certainly doesn’t fit the punishment, but Lanthimos is not concerned with justice as much as he’s smitten with cruelty. Thus, the only atonement will be the sacrifice of a family member. As Farrell’s kids fall mysteriously ill, Martin’s empty threats become a very real and urgent certainty. You can probably guess where it goes from there. You probably predicted that the dialogue is delivered in Lanthimos’ signature dry tone. You probably guessed that there would be several scenes of taboo sexual behavior. You might not guess that this story somehow manages to be stretched maliciously to a two hour running time. All of it, though occasionally elevated by its poised aesthetic bluster, feels like a lazy means to a mean end. The punchline, which is played simultaneously for laughs and devastation, might have worked if Lanthimos wasn’t dangling the lives of caricatures and metaphorical cyphers (as opposed to humans) in front of us. I don’t mind being punished or teased, but his apparent aversion to straight-forwardness, aka his supercilious perch high above the genre he’s aping, will continue to render him worthless to my square tastes.