The Completist

November 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for November 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

November 1

• Model (1981) 

November 3

• Seduced: Insider the NXIVM Cult, Episode 3, "Enslaved" (2020)

• The Love Test (1935)

• New York, New York (1977)

November 4

• The Night of the Party aka The Murder Party (1935)

• The Last Waltz (1978)

• American Boy: A Profile of – Steven Prince (1978)

November 5

• The Phantom Light (1935)

• Raging Bull (1980)

New Pollution #3: NYFF Guys Finish Last

𝘔𝘢𝘭𝘮𝘬𝘳𝘰𝘨 (credit: Shellac)

[Also published on (All (Parentheses)) and Letterboxd]

More on the mostly-virtual, now-concluded New York Film Festival, Ed. 58, focus on the bad boys — Romania’s Cristi Puiu and France-by-way-of-Brooklyn’s Eugène Green — and the degree to which extracurricular behaviors taint an artist’s work. Separate creator from creation? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Each situation is different. It’s like my underwear…Depends.

Puiu’s rumored anti-LGBT right-wingery and his anti-mask rant during a COVID-19 restricted fest screening (though his words in context and his overall points seem slightly more nuanced) didn’t at all mitigate my enjoyment of the three-hour-plus Malmkrog, a rigor-mortised, yet perversely invigorating adaptation of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s forbiddingly titled War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ (1915). (Only a short story?)

Puiu makes hilarious comedies at which I never once laugh, and Malmkrog (English title: Manor House) is among his bleakest and blackest farces. Abstract: A bunch of Euro rich twits gather at an isolated mansion around the turn of the 19th-century. They argue about the state of the world, their afternoon-to-evening discourse stretching on and on, past the point of dying. The ultimate curse/the ultimate privilege: not even death can keep ’em from it. ‘It’ being a dense, in all senses of the term, confab that reinforces these cloistered characters’s of-the-moment anxieties and obstinate perspectives until mortality itself is transcended (or negated — depends on your POV).

October 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for October 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

October 1

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 5, Episode 4, "Reedickyoulus" (2008)

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 5, Episode 5, "Hoppy Bunny" (2008)

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 5, Episode 6, "Laser Lenses" (2008)

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 5, Episode 7, "Dummy Love" (2008)

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 5, Episode 8, "The Marines" (2008)

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 5, Episode 9, "Bible Fruit" (2008)

October 3

• Two for the Road (1967)

October 4

• Columbo, Season 4, Episode 5, "Playback" (1975)

• The Vow, Season 1, Episode 7, "The Dossier" (2020)

October 5

• Fargo, Season 4, Episode 3, "Raddoppiarlo" (2020)

October 7

• We Are Who We Are, Episode 4, "Right here, right now #4" (2020)

New Pollution #2: Boom!, NYFFft, Ssssss

Credit: Searchlight Pictures

[Also published on (All (Parentheses)) and Letterboxd]

I’ve made as much peace as possible with current likelihoods/inevitables, though I think it’s advisable, in a column about the art of the mo-pic, to acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on filmgoing. A good buddy of mine said during this year of years that there’s no reason to expect anything good to happen, ever. He wasn’t necessarily being pessimistic. And I’d just personally tweak that to say that I prepare for the worst (to a fault, most days) so that I can be pleasantly surprised by the best. Though what I really strive for is a more consistently equable state of being, which meditation has certainly helped nudge me toward in recent months, and which my decades-spanning engagement with audio-visual media has done as far back as I can remember. (Good allusion on which to plug my friend Glenn Kenny’s Made Men. Buy his book!)

But yes, the act of watching something on a screen is my ne plus ultra nerve-soother. And it’s rarely mattered what kind of screen, or in what company. Nothing theatrically is ever going to beat opening day of the first X-Files movie at the Ziegfeld in Manhattan. I attended all six shows: 10 a.m. in the morning until 3:18 a.m. the next morning, and the tidal wave crest of reaction to Mulder and Scully’s “almost kiss” is as close as I’ve come to nirvana. Pair that with the sheer hell of traveling to Washington D.C. with food poisoning so that I could watch Mikio Naruse’s 50-minute Hideko, the Bus Conductor while slumped feverishly in a front row seat and, really, the rest of my cinephile life could only ever be gravy, icing, what have you.

There’s a lesson here: It’s easier to adapt when you feel like you’ve already experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows. Doesn’t mean you actually have (life and art are always moving the goalposts). But it’s a liberating perspective if you can get there and, then, maintain it. That way you can commit more completely to the doing of the thing that matters most.

For me, the doing is the watching. I love, and I long for, that moment when the projector starts or I hit the “Play” button. That split-second in which sound and image are first conjured. Even if the lights don’t literally go down, they do in my mind’s eye. And whatever the quality of the mo-pic in question, I slip easily into the zone. In that space, my computer screen can become as big and booming as IMAX, and an ideal audience can be whipped up from ether — one not unlike the packed house that held its collective breath during the demolition derby finale of my beloved Kurt Russell vehicle Breakdown the third time I saw it on first release.

Mirrors, Carnivals and Condoms (designed by Jodorowsky): Four exchanges on Married to the Mob

By Odie Henderson and Keith Uhlich

[Also published on (All (Parentheses)) and Letterboxd]

[Note from Keith: This is the first of what I hope to be multiple collaborative projects with fellow writer/critics. For this installment, Odie Henderson joins me to discuss his favorite Jonathan Demme picture, Married to the Mob (1988).]

Odie—

There’s that old saw about movies being either mirrors or windows. Do we look at them and see a reflective, likely egocentric variant of ourselves? Or conversely, do movies help us to overcome our own myopia; by gazing deeply into other worlds and other lives, by bearing witness to a wide spectrum of human experience, are we somehow changed for the better? As with any dueling/dualing principle, it’s probably six of one, half a dozen of the other. Yet I’m certain it’s the “mirror” half of the equation that explains why the opening sections of Married to the Mob, the 1988 Mafia comedy directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Michelle Pfeiffer, are so fixed in my psyche.

September 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for September 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

September 1

• The House of Mirth (2000)

• The Crown, Season 2, Episode 5, "Marionettes" (2017)

• The Crown, Season 2, Episode 6, "Vergangenheit" (2017)

September 3

• City Hall (2020)

• The Crown, Season 2, Episode 7, "Matrimonium" (2017)

• Swimming to Cambodia (1987)

• The Crown, Season 2, Episode 8, "Dear Mrs. Kennedy" (2017)

September 4

• The Crown, Season 2, Episode 9, "Paterfamilias" (2017)

• The Crown, Season 2, Episode 10, "Mystery Man" (2017)

September 5

• The Crown, Season 3, Episode 1, "Olding" (2019)

• The Crown, Season 3, Episode 2, "Margaretology" (2019)

• Dick (1999)

New Pollution #1: All Features Great and Small

[Also published on: (All (Parentheses)) • Letterboxd]

Why "New Pollution"? In part from having Beck on the brain after a beach day re-listen of Odelay. The rest because I like the idea of "New Releases" (and I plan on stretching the term) as contaminants to sift through and refine via critique. I've long loved the wrap-up columns, circa the '30s and '40s, of Otis Ferguson in The New Republic and James Agee in The Nation, and wanted to try my hand at something similar and sustained. So this is that. Though given my generally erratic creative drive, I won't commit to any concrete schedule. Experience has taught me that some days/weeks/months are more prolific than others. Also, not everything need, nor should, be written about. Though as an ethos, I tend toward unattainable completism. It's a fun way to live, knowing you'll never get where you want to go and forging ahead anyway. Last thing: I'll be considering motion picture art of all stripes — theatrical, televisual, gallery. All features great and small. Shorts, too. And series. And forms that, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, don't exist yet. In such matters, I prefer not to discriminate, or differentiate (too much, anyway — as an aesthetic catch-all, I quite like Amy Taubin's descriptor, "lens-based"). You, however, do you. I'm not out to convince. Just, maybe, entertain and edify. Thanks for reading.

The X-Files: One Shot ("Shadows")

[Also published on (All (Parentheses))]

1x05: “Shadows,” Season 1, Episode 6 (October 8, 1993)

(Director of Photography: John S. Bartley)

An ode to the late Lorena Gale, incorrectly credited in “Shadows” as “Lorean Gale.” She’s appears in three X-Files installments (this one, Season 2’s “One Breath,” and Season 4’s “Elegy”), in addition to the second movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008). The take-no-shit death stare is her specialty and she has a prickly voice to match: “Howard Graves is very dead,” she scoffs at Mulder and Scully when they visit her office. Gale is playing medical examiner Ellen Bledsoe (she was frequently cast as medical or legal professionals on this show and others), who is tangentially involved in the case of a maybe-murdered CEO with a psychic connection to his devoted former secretary (Lisa Waltz).

Gale’s scene-stealing is the highlight of an episode (written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, and directed by Michael Lange) that’s weak overall. Though it does feature some intriguing beats in the Mulder/Scully relationship, such as the giggly, girlish smile Scully shoots Mulder after he posits “psychokinesis” as the case’s likely rationale, or the way Mulder continues to cavalierly invade Scully’s personal space (throwing his arm around her; glancing at her suggestively). Their bodies are talking. Their emotions are playing catch up.

A few other striking images: An otherworldly light source leaking in through a hospital window, as well as an establishing shot of an interrogation room that leans heavily on negative space and ably illustrates (in side-by-side comparison with the original full-frame DVD release) the gains and losses, depending on how you look at it, of the early seasons’ widescreen remasters. “Shadows” also features a pair of stoic Mulder and Scully doppelgängers, Webster (Deryl Hayes) and Ms. Saunders (Veena Sood), which results in some evocative sight gags.

 

August 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for August 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

August 1

• The Night Strangler (1973)

• Mask (1985)

August 2

• Safe in Hell (1931)

• Perry Mason, "Chapter 7" (2020)

August 3

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 7, Episode 20, "August 2, 2020"

• Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Episode 1, "The Ripper" (1974)

August 4

• The Hot Box (1972)

• The Color Purple (1985)

August 5

• The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 4, "Conduit" (1993)

The X-Files: One Shot ("The Jersey Devil")

[Also published on (All (Parentheses))]

1x04: “The Jersey Devil,” Season 1, Episode 5 (October 8, 1993)

(Director of Photography: John S. Bartley)

My prior caption (from June 25, 2015):

One of my (many) interpretations of the series is that it’s about one person perverting another to their perspective, of which this image is a more comical variant. “Perverting” might be too harsh, honestly. I think, instead, of what Don Bachardy said of his time spent with long-term love Christopher Isherwood: “He warped him to his mold…It was exactly what the boy wanted.”

More thoughts: “The Jersey Devil”—written by series creator Chris Carter—is an important episode in the run of The X-Files, though not for its modern Bigfoot (or, really, Bigfootess) monster plot, which is pretty tossed off. It’s a crucial installment, however, for the Mulder/Scully relationship, illustrating the, at this point, cavernous ideological and emotional divides between them, gaps that can only be bridged by the divesting of almost all other attachments. This is something Scully in particular engages in here, burning personal bridges much as she did professional ones in “Squeeze.” By episode’s end, she’s more in Mulder’s orbit than ever, and it’s quite evident that there’s no going back.

Carter couches this in the language of screwball comedy. Character peccadilloes and longings (Mulder’s porn obsession; the pull Scully feels between career and motherhood) are treated like shocking reveals in a slamming-doors farce. Dialogue often overlaps and tends to the sarcastically rapid-fire (see the Afterimages below for one shockingly callous, and hilarious, exchange), while this climactic M&S banter has more than a bit of His Girl Friday about it:

Mulder: Don't you have a life, Scully?

Scully: You keep that up, Mulder, and I'll hurt you 
like that beast woman. 

[She holds the door open for him.]  

Mulder: 8 million years out of Africa…

Scully: …and look who's holding the door.

Bartley conjures some beautifully atmospheric images; the show’s soon-to-be-signature flashlight-piercing-the-darkness shot gets a test run here, interestingly enough at the break of dawn. Carter plants some unconscious narrative seeds that pay off way down the line in the later-seasons “William” arc. (“Having kids changes everything.” Boyhowdy, will it.) And the scene in which Scully goes on a date with the divorced, über-boring, Cirque du Soleil-loving Rob (Andrew Airlie) is its own special kind of incongruity, looking and feeling like it was air-lifted and dropped in from a much lesser FOX drama of the period. (Perhaps the short-lived Class of ’96, on which Gillian Anderson guest-starred. But why bring up bad memories?)

The X-Files: One Shot ("Conduit")

[Also published on (All (Parentheses))]

1x03: “Conduit,” Season 1, Episode 4 (October 1, 1993)

(Director of Photography: John S. Bartley)

My friend and colleague Abbey Bender likened this shot to Last Year at Marienbad (1961), an apt comparison given that that film’s director, the great Alain Resnais, was an unabashed X-Files fan. In a November 2006 interview with Positif, he sang the praises of the series’ most frequent director, Kim Manners, who began his years-long tenure in Season 2: “[Manners] directed some 50 episodes of The X Files [1993-2002], and the virtuosity of his shot-breakdown technique and of his mise-en-scène, and the way in which he treated actors’ performances, all of it impressed me. He’s the best of the best.” Resnais would also collaborate with series composer Mark Snow on his last four features, Private Fears in Public Places (2006), Wild Grass (2009), You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (2012) and Life of Riley (2014).

Like many a Resnais film, The X-Files is about characters searching for an—if not the—ultimate unknowable. It’s always arguable whether they’re in control of the quest or running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The hope is that all the micro grunt work will result in a macro epiphany akin to the scene here in which a series of coded documents, laid side by side and end to end, begets a mosaic of abducted teenager Ruby (Taunya Dee), who is a stand-in of sorts for Mulder’s abducted sister Samantha. It more often feels like these people are playing perpetual catch-up, particularly with each other. At this early stage of their relationship, Scully and Mulder are very much at a distance, and Bartley and episode director Daniel Sackheim emphasize this numerous times throughout: a jesting invasion of personal space; decoupled glances; an exasperating walk-and-talk; an invasive shoulder-grab. At one point, Scully unconsciously bridges the gap with Mulder after the surreal appearance of a wolf that leads the pair to a shallow grave. They are most connected when the inexplicable manifests itself.

Scully’s climactic close-up in “Conduit”—as she silently listens to a tape of one of the regression hypnosis sessions in which Mulder recalls Samantha’s abduction—is one of Anderson’s major moments, maybe the first time in the series that she hits that perfect sweet spot between emotional expressiveness and enigmatic opacity (it won’t be the last time this happens). Freezing the image, I think the opacity registers slightly more, to the point that, bringing it back to Resnais, you can trace a line, if so inclined, from Delphine Seyrig in Marienbad to here. This also contrasts nicely with the ending scene in which a grief-stricken Mulder has a good cry in church. Duchovny doesn’t have the same up-close dramatic ability as Anderson. He works best in defensively comic-sarcastic mode or, like here, in long shot, as a mournful object in space. A space, not so incidentally, that has some of the similarly shadowy/suggestive nooks and crannies as the labyrinthine palace in Marienbad, where God, or Alfred Hitchcock, is in the details.

July 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for July 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

July 1

• Perry Mason: Chapter 2 (2020)

• [4K HDR] THE LAST OF US (Grounded / All Collectibles / NO HUD) Walkthrough part 8 - Pittsburgh (2019)

• [4K HDR] THE LAST OF US (Grounded / All Collectibles / NO HUD) Walkthrough part 9 - Pittsburgh (2019)

• [4K HDR] THE LAST OF US (Grounded / All Collectibles / NO HUD) Walkthrough part 10 - Hotel (2019)

• Citizen's Band (1977)

July 2

• Impostors (1979)

• Labyrinth of Cinema (2019)

• [4K HDR] THE LAST OF US (Grounded / All Collectibles / NO HUD) Walkthrough part 11 - Financial District (2019)

• [4K HDR] THE LAST OF US (Grounded / All Collectibles / NO HUD) Walkthrough part 12 - Escape the City (2019)

July 3

• Queer Eye, Season 5, Episode 8, "Father Knows Fish" (2020)

• Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna (2019)

• [4K HDR] THE LAST OF US (Grounded / All Collectibles / NO HUD) Walkthrough part 13 - Sewers (2019)

• [4K HDR] THE LAST OF US (Grounded / All Collectibles / NO HUD) Walkthrough part 14 - Suburbs (2019)

• Conrad Veidt – My Life (2019)

June 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for June 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

June 1

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 7, Episode 13, "May 31, 2020"

• Rick and Morty, Season 4, Episode 10, "Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri" (2020)

• The Scenic Route (1978)

• Becoming Anita Ekberg (2014)

June 2

• Our Stars (2015)

• Max & James & Danielle (2015)

• Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) (1986)

June 3

• Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka) (1988)

• My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) (1988)

• Columbo, Season 7, Episode 2, "Murder Under Glass" (1978)

• Who Am I This Time? (1982)

June 4

• Kiki's Delivery Service (Majo no takkyûbin) (1989)

May 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for May 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

May 1

• Sada (Sada: Gesaku · Abe Sada no shôgai) (1998)

May 2

• The Gang's All Here (1943)

May 3

• The Store (1983)

May 4

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 7, Episode 10, "May 3, 2020"

• Rick and Morty, Season 4, Episode 6, "Never Ricking Morty" (2020)

• Crazy Horse (2011)

May 6

• The Truth About Charlie (2002)

April 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for April 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

April 1

• Domestic Violence 2 (2002)

• Dark Star (1974)

April 2

• Devs, Episode 6 (2020)

• The Whistlers (La Gomera) (2019)

April 3

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 21, Episode 18, "Garland's Baptism By Fire" (2020)

April 4

• Hackers (1995)

April 5

• Canal Zone (1977)

March 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for March 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

March 2

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 7, Episode 3, "March 1, 2020"

• La Comédie-Française ou L'amour joué (1996)

March 3

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 21, Episode 16, "Eternal Relief from Pain" (2020)

• Better Call Saul, Season 5, Episode 3, "The Guy For This" (2020)

• Public Housing (1997)

March 4

• Lancelot of the Lake (Lancelot du Lac) (1974)

• So Late So Soon (2020)

March 5

• Belfast, Maine (1999)

February 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for February 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

February 1

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 21, "The Longest Night of Rain" (2020)

• BoJack Horseman, Season 1, Episode 1, "BoJack Horseman: The BoJack Horseman Story, Chapter One" (2014)

• Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (Gojira tai Megagirasu: Jî shômetsu sakusen) (2000)

February 3

• Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (Gojira, Mosura, Kingu Gidorâ: Daikaijû sôkôgeki) (2001)

February 4

• New York, New York (1977)

• Doctor Sleep: Director's Cut (2019)

For Whom the Zell Tolls or: I Ren/I Ren So Far A-Née

[Published on The Completist, Letterboxd, and Substack]

The Oscars are a good excuse to throw a party. (If you come by, I plan on cooking a ham.) That's about the extent of my regard for this annual orgy of self-congratulation — though I'd love it if Banderas won and Zell de Jour didn't. To that end, pain will surely outweigh glory.

A good time, still, to play catch-up with several of the nominees (or not, in one case) that I have some first-time or additional thoughts about.

I'm already on the negative review record with the three Js: Joker, Judy (aka Scary Stories to Zell in the Dark) and Jojo Rabbit. The latter, one of the worst movies ever made, is well on its way to a Grolsch People's Choice-portended upset, and I'm sure it will take gold just to spite me. Rest assured that my two (!) FYC screeners will be getting gleeful, Silence-like foot stompings throughout the ceremony.

I also previously published a very positive take on The Irishman, a movie that only grows in my estimation. There's an essay to be written on the F/X work alone and how the unconvincing nature of some of it (and not just the digital shellac; see the Dick Tracy-esque prosthetics on Dominick Lombardozzi as "Fat Tony" Salerno) illuminates the themes of regret and loss. Of realizing, even if only subconsciously, that you've lived your life in exactly the wrong way. Photorealism is the party line when it comes to special effects. I much prefer it when discernible seams are a large part of the intent.

January 2020: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for January 2020. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

January 2

• What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018)

January 5

• Peterloo (2018)

January 6

• Film About a Father Who (2020)

January 9

• Darbar (2020)

Jonas Mekas Dance Program

• Film Magazine of the Arts (1963)

• Erick Hawkins: Excerpts From "Here And Now With Watchers"/Lucia Dlugoszewski Performs (1963/83)

• Cup/Saucer/Two Dancers/Radio (1965/83)

Decade-Dance: 10 for '10s

[Published on The Completist, Substack, and Letterboxd]

1. Certified Copy (2010)
2. Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids (2016)
3. Song to Song (2017)
4. Vitalina Varela (2019)
5. Godzilla (2014)
6. Monrovia, Indiana (2018)
7. The Green Fog (2017)
8. Not Fade Away (2012)
9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
10. Step Up 3D (2010)

Any list worth its salt is idiosyncratic and inadequate. I'm sure many readers will look at the titles above — ten favorites spanning the 2010s — and play the "what about?" game. That, or rage against the machines (cultural, sexual, socioeconomic, political, etc) that my selections explicitly/implicitly endorse or extol. A tidal wave of response-riposte is more often the exception, of course. Deafening silence tends to be the rule, and I've increasingly found bliss in the collective hush. It doesn't mean the work isn't resonating; to those indeterminate ends, I'm more than happy to cede control.

I live in fear less and less these days, though I do feel more than a twinge of terror whenever the virtual hive mind begets literal mob rule, which is too often lately. That's me preemptively pleading that you put aside any thoughts of "consensus" or "authority" in my choices. I already look at the ten titles above and think of innumerable others, by artists from all walks of life. Say, Aaron Schimberg's Chained for Life (2018), which is so singular that "listing" it feels reductive. Or Pier Kids (2019), Elegance Bratton's disquieting documentary about homeless queer and trans youth, which should really be paired with my #10, the effusive stereoscopic teen musical Step Up 3D, as a yin-yang that exposes the fallaciousness of, and the horror underlying, Obama-era (p)optimism.

I submitted this list to publications that asked for theatrical releases only, so the most glaring omission — since I'm of the "motion picture" persuasion that considers theatrical, television, and gallery work equally — is the third season of Twin Peaks (2017). That and the death-obsessed yet teemingly alive finale of Deadwood (2019) are the decade's crowning achievements, while Too Old to Die Young (2019), Nicolas Winding Refn's exuberantly protracted study of toxic masculinity in descent, is the neon shit-stain on the king's assless chaps. (A compliment, yes. And, borrowing Brian Cox's description of his uproarious series Succession, an "absurd show for absurd times.")

December 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for December 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

December 1

• 1900 (Novecento) (1976)

December 2

• Richard Jewell (2019)

• Mr. Robot, Season 4, Episode 9, "409 Conflict" (2019)

• The Man Who Loved Women (L'homme qui aimait les femmes) (1977)

December 3

• Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas) (1976)

December 4

• Knives Out (2019)

December 5

• That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir) (1977)

Creepazoid Groupie Stalker Meets Cahiers du Poopheads: An Ode to the Extraordinary Ordinary NYPress Film Section

[Author's Note: I wrote this piece in 2016—the final draft is dated December 5th of that year. It was to be the introduction to a book, a version of which is being published next year by Seven Stories Press, that collected the film criticism of Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz and Armond White, all of it culled from their time at the alternative weekly NYPress. It was ultimately not included, for rather unpleasant reasons, and the whole experience left me uncertain about aspects of the piece, particularly whether its outlook was too rose-colored and sentimental. I put it away. But I often recalled it fondly, which is rare when it comes to things that I've written. I wanted it to see the light of day. And the fact that I conceived it as an "ode"—a tribute to people who mentored me both in print and in person—I think justifies the at times elevated tone. If my emotions about these events are more complicated now, that doesn't invalidate the place I was at when I composed this essay. I recognize this Keith, and acknowledge he once felt this way. Thanks for reading. (12/16/2019)]  

This is a book about movies. So it's only appropriate to begin with an image. Picture, if you would, a box. Not a perfect square, but an imperfect rectangle, standing lengthwise on a New York City street corner. It's about as tall as an average 12-year-old. It's made of weather-resistant plastic. "Green is its color." (Couldn't resist the Twin Peaks reference…sorry/not sorry.) There's a door on the front. You open it, look inside and discover a stack of newspapers. (Remember those?) Pick one up and ink rubs off on your hands. Hold it long enough and people will assume you've just been fingerprinted at the local precinct. There is something, come to think of it, illicit about what you're doing. At the least intensely private. Or that's how it felt to me whenever I picked up a copy of the NYPress.

What is (was) the NYPress? I get that question more and more as the years pass. So, the facts as I know and perhaps rose-tintedly embellish them: The NYPress was (is) an alternative weekly newspaper founded in 1988 by conservative writer Russ Smith. In part, it was positioned as a competitor to the long-established, left-leaning Village Voice, and I'm betting, at this point, that you think you've got the publication pegged. It's the elephant to the Voice's donkey. The red state to its blue. (Funny that the Voice was peddled in a street-corner plastic box of the rouge-iest rouge.)

In truth, the Press defied labels, defied classification, often defied common sense, which gave it that much more of an edge on the Voice—if not in numbers, then in synapse-stoking brashness. Here was a true melting pot, much of it overseen by John Strausbaugh, who edited the paper between 1990 and 2002. Smith had his column "MUGGER" in which he held "rightly" forth on the issues of the week. Other conservative voices included future Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell and Greek journalist/aristocrat Taki Theodoracopulos. But turn the page and you might find a broadside penned by Irish anarchist Alexander Cockburn. Flip a few more and you'd come across one of the nakedly personal confessions of J.T. "Terminator" LeRoy, a teenage maybe-trans former male prostitute who was years later revealed to be a hoax-prone thirty-something female named Laura Albert.

The distinguished (of a kind) contributor list goes on: Soul Coughing frontman M. Doughty ("Dirty Sanchez" pseudonymously). Heartbreaking genius (to some) Dave Eggers. Jonathan Ames, trying his hand at the distinctive, if oft-irritating tweeness that would inform his two cult TV series Bored to Death (2009-2011) and Blunt Talk (2015–2016). Can't forget Jim Knipfel, who worked his way up from Press office receptionist to full-time staff writer (his column "Slackjaw" frequently dealt with the degenerative eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, he'd been diagnosed with as a teenager). Or Ned Vizzini, the boy wonder who wrote funny, penetrating essays from an advanced adolescent perspective, and sadly killed himself in 2013, succumbing to a lifelong struggle with clinical depression.

I personally recognized how special the Press was after opening an issue and spotting a just-debuted theater column by Claus von Bülow, the British socialite (played with reptilian allure and insidiousness by Jeremy Irons in 1990's Reversal of Fortune) who was accused and eventually acquitted of the attempted murder of his wife Sunny. What shameless insanity! What glorious lunacy! By that point I'd been a regular Press reader for a few years, though I couldn't date first contact except to say it occurred while I was a film production student at New York University. I guess you see enough of those green street-corner boxes and you have to know what's in them. But none of the people I've listed above were my reason for returning to the paper each week. For within this gem of a rag lay another treasure: a nonpareil film section written by Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz and Armond White.

November 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for November 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

November 1

• Queer Eye: We're in Japan!, Episode 1, "Japanese Holiday" (2019)

November 3

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 3, "Call for Help" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 4, "…Brings Back Some Memories" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 5, "Case Files" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 6, "Don't Die" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 7, "There's a Body All Right" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 8, "Gotta Light?" (2017)

November 4

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 6, Episode 28, "November 3, 2019"

• Queer Eye: We're in Japan!, Episode 2, "Crazy in Love" (2019)

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 21, Episode 6, "Murdered at a Bad Address" (2019)

• Mr. Robot, Season 4, Episode 5, "405 Method Not Allowed" (2019)

• Watchmen, Season 1, Episode 3, "She Was Killed by Space Junk" (2019)

October 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for October 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

October 1

• The Deuce, Season 1, Episode 7, "Au Reservoir" (2017)

• The Deuce, Season 1, Episode 8, "My Name Is Ruby" (2017) 

October 2

• The Cotton Club Encore (1984/2019)

October 3

• American Horror Story: 1984, "Slashdance" (2019)

• Uncut Gems (2019)

October 4

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 21, Episode 2, "The Darkest Journey Home" (2019)

October 5

• The Deuce, Season 2, Episode 1, "Our Raison d'Être" (2018)

• Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (Gojira vs. Kingu Gidorâ) (1991)

September 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for September 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

September 3

• Succession, Season 2, Episode 4, "Safe Room" (2019)

• The Terror: Infamy, Episode 4, "The Weak Are Meat" (2019)

September 5

• A Hidden Life (2019)

• Honey Boy (2019)

• The Report (2019)

• The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

September 6

• WAVELENGTHS 1: WLS19: "Austrian Pavilion" (2019)

• WAVELENGTHS 1: WLS19: "SaF05" (2019)