Housekeeping:
My 15-year-old dog has been on the brink for some time, but she’s been especially bad this week. If we all join in positive thinking she will live forever 🙏
Sally September in October is in full swing. There’s a sale to subscribe if you want to keep up with Thursday discussions of Intermezzo.
I think I resolved my eye infection but I had to leave the Vampire Weekend matinee halfway through because I was worried I was going to puke or faint (reason unimportant—if it were something contagious I would complain more). I went home and got Zofran and rallied for Queer, which I will talk more about in a second. What this bullet point is about is the fact that Amazon has a service you can pay $9 for in order to get a prescription for things like antibiotics for your eye infection or Zofran. I am in love with the app “One Medical.”
🍎 NEW YORK MINUTE 🍎
After spending a net 14 hours at NYFF, I’m not sure I ever need to spend any more hours anywhere near Lincoln Center as long as I live. I understand that those with badges spend many multiples of that amount of time at NYFF each and every year. But I think that Criterion should have supplied Alice Tully with a mobile bathroom, instead, and if Caught Stealing goes to TIFF next year I’m never coming back. The very premise of watching fellow citizens get excited about seeing “Drew Starkey” (hold this thought) get out of a car a block from Color Me Mine really casts an unpleasant shadow upon all of the Upper West Side to me. I very much enjoyed visiting the new Salt & Straw to eat ice cream called “Essence of Ghost” which tasted like nothing I have ever before tasted in my life, but going to uptown otherwise felt like going to the airport. There’s not much going on up there.1
⚾️ CAUGHT STEALING ⚾️
In terms of things going on in the city of New York, I have much preferred purposefully and accidentally walking through the set of Caught Stealing most days for 2 weeks, easily picking Darren Aronofsky from an entourage of PAs with baby bangs and texting 1-7 people about whether or not he was wearing a scarf. I never witnessed any active filming because waiting on Ave A at 2 AM to see Austin Butler from a block away is too demoralizing, even for me.
A few mornings ago, however, I ran out to get a pastry. My plan was to go get this pastry, sit in Librae, and call my mother. On the way to Librae, I noticed one of the Caught Stealing trailers had been re-oriented, and that the sidewalk was littered with PAs: not good. I proceeded to Librae. I ordered the pastry and sat down and called my mother. Then I said to my mother, “I have to go back.” I stood up and left and walked by the trailer and saw the back of a blonde adult head through the window. Not many adults are blonde, you know.
I walked around the block twice so that the crew wouldn’t get mad at me, but nothing else happened. I met up with my boyfriend, and I said, “let’s check one more time.” As I said this, we turned the corner to Austin Butler approaching us head-on. He was maybe 6 inches from me, but it only took me 6 minutes to stop behaving abnormally. I hope he enjoyed the Gracie Abrams concert.
💭MY DREW💭
In the movie Queer, there is an actor named Drew Starkey. He seems not to possess talent or thoughts. I’m told he is popular amongst youths for his role as a villain in a Netflix programme. I’ve learned he sometimes has a buzzcut and dresses like a jock. For 30 hours I have been calling Drew Starkey “my Drew.” I am monitoring this situation closely.
Here are some capsule reviews of films and plays I have seen in the last week:
Saturday Night
I think I am the only living person who cares that this movie exists. I thought it was inoffensive and, at times, funny. I don’t remember much else of it because I watched it whilst eating $7 Dippin’ Dots and felt so at ease I think afterwards I said “I love movies.” I also said that Jason Reitman should be put down like a dog, but not with any real ire (passive observation). Maybe I don’t care about Saturday Night. But it was nice to see it.
Cory Michael Smith, Andrew Barth Feldman, Dylan O’Brien (?), and Nicholas Braun (sorry) are quite promising performers. Two new women (Emily Fairn and Ella Hunt [“Mary Boone”-ass names]) were weirdly good, also. There are two other women in the film who were very, depressingly terrible at delivering lines and mannerisms—so bad, I felt uncomfortable—but I will keep that to myself and let it work itself out in due time.
Hold On To Me Darling
If Adam Driver has acted in something that isn’t White Noise or 65, I have seen it. What began as sexual interest circa 2013 has transformed into unwavering reverence for his celebrity and craft. People throw around the fact that he is the “best” working actor, but I find it difficult to imagine how you could make a different argument. He is exclusively in the weirdest or best projects and is a beautiful dramaturg and original comedian, the likes of which we have not known since I don’t know.
He’s in a Lonergan play right now called Hold On To Me Darling wherein he plays a country music star named Strings McCrane. You don’t need to know anything else about that.2 It was very harrowing and surreal to be maybe 20 feet from Adam Driver’s almost completely nude body for 3 hours, and I enjoyed it.3 He is extraordinarily buff right now—moreso than usual—which makes me wonder: what’s next for him? And, what’s next for me?
Oh, Canada
This was more formally interesting than Schrader’s movies usually are, but that is like saying “Taylor Swift rhymes ‘bar’ with a word other than ‘car’ in this song.” I find his exploration of aging to be grotesquely vapid and self-obsessed and his intellectual engagements with “the meaning of cinema” (citing Sontag on images wholesale in the movie) to be like baby’s first reading of a book. I have never considered Uma Thurman nor Michael Imperioli to be great talents, and “Richard Gere”—there’s someone I care about. Elordi actually does do some interesting stuff, but I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Jacob Elordi is a character actor trapped in the body of a Riverdale actor. He should be doing roles that were once meant for Jason Schwartzman and not being made to talk normally. It is unfair to him.
I thought Oh, Canada was the most boring, annoying movie I’ve sat through this year (until I saw The Brutalist!) and was grateful when it was interrupted by climate “protesters” (topical, prescient, and precise thing to protest at NYFF 2024 the week of October 7) with a banner that said “no film if planet dead,” or something. I bet they feel really good about themselves, just like Paul Schrader.
Hard Truths
I understand Mike Leigh, I appreciate Mike Leigh, and I am very happy for fans of Mike Leigh.4 In the Q&A, Marianne Jean-Baptiste suggested this film is an exploration of “what’s wrong with people” through the kinds of questions—Trauma? Illness? Pain?—we don’t typically ask ourselves when we encounter a freak in the world. But whenever I see a freak my immediate impulse is to clinically diagnose them. I am not a humanist and British people aren’t anything I care deeply for or about.
Queer
Paying Luca Guadagnino too much mind is a fool’s errand. He was born bored and horny and will never be satisfied: each film he makes is merely an activity for him, and he must always keep busy. Some of the movies are more thoughtful than others, but they are always reverse engineered opportunities for him to work with, in his words at the Q&A, “buddies,” more than they are “art.” I like all of his prior projects except Bones and All and Suspiria, which are both hideously juvenile and boring. Queer is just as juvenile, and I could see why you might think 2+ hours of Daniel Craig as Michael Fassbender in The Killer if The Killer were gay and nervous might be boring, but I was not bored and I have the attention span of an infant.5
Queer is about how calling yourself a “sex monster” is frequently a cover for wanting desperately for people to fall in love with you, a defensive description of endless pursuit sans fulfillment. The titular queer cannot relax unless “Drew Starkey” admits that Daniel Craig’s evaluation of their relationship is correct: Drew Starkey loves him and enjoys having sex with him. That they have sex, that Drew Starkey concedes to international travel and drug trips with him, is not enough. They are inside each others’ skin, but when the act is over, Drew Starkey is impossibly hard to read and it drives the queer to insanity. I relate to this and it makes me laugh. Connecting with the entertainment medium of cinema needn’t be such a challenge.
I don’t know what all this business is about the sex scenes, because I found them sparse and far less graphic than whatever is going on in Call Me By Your Name.6 But they were hot and Craig was shockingly funny, in and outside sexual encounter. Jason Schwartzman wears a fat suit for no reason and Lesley Manville wears a onesie, for a reason, I would argue. I think Daniel Craig will win best actor at the next Academy Awards!
Cabaret
I have seen Cabaret live, like, 5 times. The 1998 revival is narratively stronger than the film and versions that preceded it, and the Alan Cumming of it all is the best theatre has ever gotten, as far as I care. I wanted to see how Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin defiled it but never got around to it. They were replaced by Adam Lambert and Moana which I thought were more fun and less ridiculous picks, the way Sweeney Todd hired Annaleigh Ashford and Josh Groban before landing on Sutton Foster and Aaron Tveit.7
The new production is like if Cabaret were this image:
I found the choreography and direction actively offensive, above all odds rendering the best book in broadway history—a truly frightening exploitation of sonic might to warn of the diversity in personality and ideology necessitated by fascism—a boring embarrassment with the sheen of a 2012 cocktail bar. Rather than imply the characters die (WW2) with a (hot) Emcee succumbing to Hitler drag, this version has Nazism force the cast of the Kit Kat Club to wear matching suits: genocide is like when Spongebob becomes normal. There is a sexless and perverse individualism to this and most other choices, which all suggest the scariest possible outcome of fascism is that you can’t wear makeup. The replacement of an uncomfortably pornographic “Mein Herr” performed by, like, Emma Stone, with poor, faultless Auli’i Cravalho stomping demurely in Doc Martens (?) actually makes me want to scream. The theatre community cannot be trusted, so I am confiscating this book and giving it to Bradley Cooper.
The Brutalist
I have a really good idea. I am going to adapt American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Yes, I am going to suture them together; I have too many interests to choose but one. But I am going to cast only French people in the production, so that all the dialogue must be spoken by French people in American accents that sound like when I do an impression of Alicia Vikander. In roles made in the role lab for Armie Hammer and Joel Edgerton, I am going to cast Joseph Alwyn and Guy Pearce.8 Speaking of Guy Pearce, I was born in 1988, so, while I might have a great fondness for the formal epic and films made by Jacques Demy or Andrei Tarkovsky, I also clearly know what a prestigious televisual mini-series is. I recently watched Mare of Eastown—the strangely stilted and boring mini-series about Pennsylvania on the Home Box Office channel—and kind of want my adaptation of American Pastoral and The Plot Against America to be like that. I am not Jewish, but have been thinking a lot about how the pain of Judaism led to Zionism, which is a very complicated topic, as my film will allege.
Frequently, people, usually boys, are not intellectually stimulated to their content. They sense they are brighter, more inquisitive, than the other people around them. So they read and watch movies compulsively, looking for competitive brilliance in the acquisition of citations. To them, despite their incessant profession of brutal materialism, history is a hysteric mess with no clarity: a complexity of horrors no one can or will ever untangle. But leave it to them to try, boldly and tiredly, wading through a headiness of their own imagination. The citations they amass are saturated both in misery and individualist genius, and they invent aesthetic and emotional problems only they can solve, nary putting the things they watch and read in dialogue with one another. They are interested in everything, but, most importantly, showing you how many complex interests they possess.
When more and more complete and total morons—with nothing sloshing in their heads but citations and feelings they are too busy amassing citations to parse beyond a reactionary hysteric—see The Brutalist in coming months, they will likely tell you that it is “thorny.” They will lecture you with paragraphs about the film’s epic “explorations,” conceding to the “complicated” fascist tendencies and bullish petulance of its protagonists in order to demonstrate they are smart enough to understand the film, and you, for hating it, have overlooked something brilliant. What they understand and you are unable to, they will claim, is that history is unsolvable; it is a punishing onslaught of horrors you must indulge. The only way to be smart is to admit the horrors are unrelentling and ungraspable, and instead rehearse them loudly. These people want misery because they think it makes them brilliant. They want confusion, thinking it is nuance. And they want me, Clare, to laugh.9 At them, at Felicity Jones, and at this:
The same could be said about many film curators and distributors!
I hope this gets adapted—that Timothy Olyphant originated the role in 2016 for it to be back and bigger than ever is a good sign, no? I don’t really respect the theatrical medium and prefer when films are made.
After Austin Butler spoke to me no celebrity encounter can shake me. C and D listers are always talking to me, these days, and I see Bs pretty frequently. I even got through another encounter with Austin Butler without (public) incident. I can imagine the kind of situation that would make me behave badly—and I will—but there isn’t any other scenario that would trip me up, I don’t think. That one imbued me with a lot of psychic strength, and put things into perspective in an almost religious sense. And I know things now, many valuable things that I hadn’t known before: Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood, they will not protect you the way that they should, and take extra care with strangers—even flowers have their dangers—and though scary is exciting, nice is different than good.
When he intro’d this movie, he said that any director who talks too much before a screening should be shot. This is exactly how everyone on the earth should speak and behave.
I also watched Queer at the end of the longest day of my life, wherein I had to leave Vampire Weekend halfway through because I was scared I was going to puke due to my many chronic ailments—don’t know if you remember this from 3 paragraphs ago. I had to run home and get Zofran before Queer, where I had 20 minutes to decide if I was well enough to go to Queer. Navigating the borough of Manhattan in this state only for Steve Buscemi to get in my way in line for the Alice Tully bathroom: all these things prepared me to hate Queer. And yet I did not. A24 should be paying for this kind of endorsement.
Gayness is still couched in scandal in a way that annoys me. Women are always bouncing around with their mouths open but here comes Daniel Craig with a prosthetic, CLOTHED penis NEXT TO his mouth, and now we’re all giggling? No.
I like this song:
the more I read about The Brutalist the more it seems clear I have no idea what's going on -- either in it, or any other movie
this is exactly how i too felt about Saturday Night, a movie i watched with a big coca-cola and smiling like this: :)