OH CANADA - Alice Tully Hall

Another film about dying from an aging director. Schrader describes this movie as a mosaic, which feels similar to Coppola referring to Megalopolis as a fable. But Schrader is purposefully making a movie about reaching death, recounting your life in pieces, being incoherent. The film starts and stops, the central character is an aging and dying documentary filmmaker and draft dodger who escapes to Canada played by an aging but not nearly as dying, Richard Gere. Once again, how do you play a character who does nothing? Schrader was asked when he made "First Reformed", “How did you get Ethan Hawke to do so little?” and now “How did you get Richard Gere to do so little?” Though the mosaic is purposeful, it’s just as frustrating as it is to listen to an older person tell the same story again and again with new details each time, or a central part changed, you love them maybe and the story is good, but can we get to the point? There is no point, we all die one day, and when that happens you want to confess, even if you didn’t really do anything that bad. 

Oh, also, the film was interrupted by the protest group Extinction Rebellion, holding up a banner while Richard Gere is mid-shit on screen. “We’re New Yorkers, we respect the arts, there’s no film on a dead planet,” they said with no real demands to be made. Their only demand was that you think about it. Well, I had been thinking about it since The Friend showed us a winter in New York City with no snow on the ground. I had been thinking about it when I considered Schrader's previous film First Reformed. “What do you want us to do?” someone in the crowd yelled out. They didn’t answer, “we respect the arts!” “No you don’t! Fuck you! Get off the stage!” It went on for surprisingly long. The first thing they said was “We’re nonviolent,” so I had hoped that was the reason they weren’t escorted away sooner. It’s actually so easy to go up front in a crowded theater and just do anything. Which I also am always thinking about, and I knew this theater was going to be hard to evacuate, since I had been attending the festival multiple times in the past few weeks.

Schrader understands that you cast for clout and press, hence the Richard Gere casting, wouldn’t it be interesting to bring him back in something like this? That begs the question of who to cast as the younger Richard Gere. Schrader told a story that I believe he repeated a few times now, about going to dinner with Brett Easton Ellis, who said there is no one who can play a young Richard Gere. Schrader tells him he was planning on casting Jacob Elordi, to which Ellis responded, “Wait, I just came in my pants.”

THE SHROUDS

The Shrouds was a comedy that wasn’t allowed to tell jokes. It fills a familiar role in our time as Existenz did when it came out, using our relationship to smartphones, AI, and the way we can’t let the dead stay dead. However, comparing this to sci-fi concepts in the 80s and 90s, and the way humanity interacts with technology, is hard to take seriously specifically because of the silly language we have surrounding apps on our phone and new technologies. Everything has a name and terminology that’s just embarrassing to say out loud, which added to the cringe factor of this movie. People were laughing a lot, and that was what Cronenberg wanted, but unfortunately the humor stopped the film from feeling sincere. The basic concept is a man who invents and owns a company of graves with a screen that connects to your phone so that you can watch your loved ones decompose in the ground, which he created because he could not let go of his wife who passed. Cronenberg lost his own wife in 2017, something he was channeling in this film. I don’t want to speculate on people’s ways of dealing with grief, but this felt like it had so many jokes because he was afraid to take his own feelings seriously, like it’s always a step away from being sincere. Which from Cronenberg, you don’t expect anything sappy, but at the very least the film could afford to take itself more seriously. 

Thinking about the fictional company and the climate protestors from earlier in the day, I wondered if we were doomed to a similar reality, where even in death we become an app on a phone. For the technological paranoia the film induces it never strays into full-on Luddite territory, and in fact embraces new technologies despite the damage they do to the ones involved. A lot of the films have tackled themes of death and grief, but as Cronenberg said in his Q&A, creating art isn’t cathartic or therapeutic, he’s still suffering, and the pain isn’t going to go away.

THE BRUTALIST - Walter Reade Theater

The Brutalist is a 3.5 hour long film, and it felt more like 5 hours. It was an all day affair. I saw it while extremely hungover, and I was really worried about what I was in for. My physical state mirrored the journey of the film, from being a typical post World War II immigrant arriving in Ellis Island, injectin morphine, going to a brothel, and struggling to find work, to then revealing the splendor the architectural work the main character, Laszlo Toth, is capable of. The film is framed as a biopic, but its subject is fictional. His name is borrowed from an Australian geologist who vandalized Michelangelo's Pietà statue in 1972, claiming to be Jesus Christ. I don’t know if this is a confirmed reference, but I assume it is, framing the construction of the film’s main character with the real person’s destruction as a form of narcissism and mania. The film is ambitious, maybe too much so? The sheer scope of the film made me feel obligated to be impressed, as I let the beauty of architecture wash over me. I also don’t know if this was my screening, or if it was edited so that certain voiceovers would lag with the visual, or people would speak without being in frame, and then back again. This happened often, with quick cuts in between, and was pretty disorienting. I assumed it was purposeful, since there were other odd editing choices that were the only indication of the film being experimental until the very end. Ultimately it’s a moving story, one that’s familiar to the American mindset. I don’t want to give it away but there is a scene that propels the film to its end that pushes the metaphor so far that it makes the entire thing feel like a nonsensical, overbearing, and allegorical nightmare. I can’t tell if that was a good or bad decision but I think I liked it.

QUEER - Walter Reade Theater

Luca Guadignino’s adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel, Queer, is mostly faithful in its dialogue, but transformed in atmosphere. There were many signature Guadigno stylistic shots and romanticism, something that does not necessarily translate from Burroughs’s writing. Does a film adaptation have to be a literal transcription of a book? For example, The Shining is an iconic film that is much different from the novel, but the additions Guadigno makes to the story felt at times superfluous and sanitized. Queer the novella describes its own filthiness, and emphasizes the one-sidedness of the relationship between its central characters, while Guadignino’s film makes the relationship more ambiguous, which he excels at, and it makes me wish he adapted something else or worked with an original script that plays into that more. 

Also, this film exemplifies something I’ve found to be a trend in new movies that I believe is the result of the popularity of TikTok; irrelevant needle drops that create full fledged music videos in the middle of the film. There is a scene where the main character, Lee, is doing heroin from an aestheticized chic 1940s morphine case to Leave Me Alone by New Order. What did the song add to this scene that wasn’t already there? I love New Order, I’m glad to be hearing the song, but it just was a respite in listening to a song I like- not that I was focussed in on the movie. And why New Order? The film takes place in the 50s, and it came out in 2024, not that songs can’t be anachronistic and not current but it seems very trendy right now to include a song from artists like New Order or Joy Division or another 80s-90s artist in that vein to elevate the work you made by including an uncontestedly good song. I’ve heard the writing advice, ‘don’t listen to music while you write, you’ll confuse the emotions from the music as the emotions elicited from the written work, and without the music it will fall flat. This is exactly that principle. Why is there a Nirvana song playing between scenes? Was it necessary? I know Luca can use music effectively, but this took it too far.

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