From the podcast recording: “I wanted to be fond of it, because there are lots of things on the surface level I want to root for, and maybe kind of like, but none of it actually pulls through. “
Author: Dan Stalcup
What’s amazing about this movie is that every time you hit 2-3 minutes where you think you know where it is, it throws a curveball at you.
Here’s a quick rundown of the three films in this anthology:
Water and ham
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The Elephant Man (1980)
Still a biopic with too many biopic-y moments. But it’s David Lynch so there’s plenty of weirdness, dual-sided themes, and moral grayness. (Though it is the most conventional Lynch I’ve seen.) Looks amazing, sounds brilliant (Lynch was the sound engineer, too!).
The makeup/prosthesis is masterpiece-level, and John Hurt is phenomenal underneath it, too. Observing a person gradually emerge from something that looks so viscerally grotesque is the film’s greatest strength.
On the one hand, I might have over-binged on Woody Allen movies in the past three months. Some of his themes and rhythms of writing are starting to seem repetitive and shallow to the point I rolled my eyes a few times.
On the other hand, this a pretty marvelous art house drama. “Bergman-esque” is the term they use for this kind of morally complex retrospective style, I think. There’s also something almost spiritual about the central gimmick: a woman overhearing another woman’s confession in a nearby shrink’s office, but what she hears feels so personal that it almost reads as a reflexive hallucination. (The young psych patient’s name is “Hope” for crying out loud.)
Gena Rowlands is amazingly controlled throughout a movie that asks her to do a LOT. And Allen is, against all odds, a better director than a writer at this point, I think. The camera holds an intense gaze that amplifies the film’s themes.
It’s quite groggy in its pacing and energy, but the emotional threads teased out are remarkably sharp, especially Allen’s increasingly cynical view of marriage always dying a slow, wheezing death.
One of those movies so good and rich and unique that it’s tough to figure out where to start. Every scene has stuff to admire and unpack. Its brand of black comedy and violent crime story works magically.
But the main sensation I felt watching this time was chilly emotional exhaustion. (It’s the rare movie that feels longer than its runtime and that’s a marker of good filmmaking.) So many of the characters, and subsequent plot points, are really bleak and pathetic.
Listen, I get why most of you rate this lower than Spirited Away or Totoro or Princess Mononoke.
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Valley Girl (2020)
There’s a fine line between “carrying a movie” and “being completely wasted by a movie that you totally outclass,” and Jessica Rothe toes that line this entire musical as it bounces between bearable and dire.
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The Circus (1928)
What a delight. Chaplin in fine form, with one sketch after another that plays to the setting well. (A high-wire monkey attack is, in particular, chaotic perfection.) There’s also a strong undercurrent of reflection on the life of performer and authenticity in entertainment, and an ending unusually bittersweet for early/mid-Chaplin.