AT ETERNITY’S GATE.

Directed and written by Julian Schnabel. Starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh.

GATE CRASHING!

The sunflowers are withered.

It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with this poetically sensitive depiction of the last three years in the life of the Dutch painter, Vincent Van Gogh. These were years spent in around Arles, years of a chaotic chain of circumstances—corrosive relations with Paul Gauguin, pleas of help to brother Theo, incarcerations in hospitals and asylums—that miraculously produced the masterpieces we now know and celebrate. AT ETERNITY’S GATE, I must admit, surely benefits from lushly photographed landscapes and an outstanding performance marked by Willem Dafoe’s trademark intensity. It’s just... well, I’m probably the one at fault, for expecting a more insightful and interpretive conjoining of image and music from painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel.

Instead, Schnabel trots out the Usual Suspects about the troubled painter’s mental and physical turmoil—the visions, the erratic emotional temper, the restlessness that damaged friendships and home life, the stabbing painterly “performances” at the easy... And he serves them up with pertinent, brief excerpts from the painter’s letters. But it lacks context for all these things. The painter’s words, about his God and about his work, about his fellow painters, are shorn of the needed nuances of time and circumstance that they deserve. Please note: Van Gogh was an extremely gifted and expressive writer, as measured and steady in his letters as he was impulsive and reckless in his behavior. But eviscerated and clipped as are his words here, his thoughts seem merely artificial and cliched. He is ill-served here. Consult his letters. See for yourself.

And there are those annoying, wordless, interpolated passages where Schnabel’s camera follows Van Gogh on his interminable ramblings across the countryside. We see his feet, we see his face limned against the sky, we see through his eyes the landscape ahead... Walking, always walking. On and on. A lot of screen time might have been better served than this preoccupation with walking, climbing, scrambling. Worse, during these walking sequences, there’s an annoying solo piano on the soundtrack, lamely hammering away at repeated chords, likewise, on and on...

But there is a final irony here—one that I assume is intended by director Schnabel. He defies our expectations of filling the screen with Vincent’s signature images of blazing-yellow sunflowers. Instead, all we get is a field full of desiccated blooms and stalks, pitiful brown remnants of a once proud glory. But that is fine. That is fine with me. This bravely, rudely works against our expectations. It’s the sort of debunking touch that we had found and welcomed so frequently in an earlier Van Gogh biopic, one that I much prefer—Vincent and Theo, by Robert Altman.

COLD WAR

Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and starring Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Victor.

SONGS OF THE EARTH?

COLD WAR is a story of two lovers who meet, separate, reunite, stray apart again... over fifteen years, from 1949 to 1964... and then finally march steadily toward the fate that has always awaited them. It’s a great film.

Warsaw, 1949. Zula is a fresh-faced young Polish girl who auditions for the famed Mazurek Ensemble of singers and dancers. Like them, she is young, relatively untutored, from farm and the country. They come from the earth, they perform music of the earth, they bring their quirky, plaintive folk songs to audiences across Poland. But it’s not quite as simply stated as that: Zula auditions a song she calls “Two Hearts.” Is it a Polish folk song? Not really: She heard it in a movie soundtrack. And that’s not the first musical irony of many to come. Attracted to her is Victor Tomasz, the conductor of the ensemble. On his off hours he is performing--not a Polish folks song... no—he’s belting out a more sophisticated Polish tune, Chopin’s “Fantasy Impromptu.”

Are you getting the sense these two performers are slightly out of kilter with the program?

Soon, Zula and Victor fall in love. They and their ensemble quickly come under the Communist agenda promoting Joseph Stalin’s so-called People’s Music. And yes, now dressed in beautifully tailored peasant costumes, here they are, on stage in a crowded opera house, performing a gruesome but festive “Stalin Cantata” in front of a huge curtain bearing Uncle Joe’s fiercely-mustached face. Music of the earth is ground down under the dictator’s heel. The audience dutifully applauds. Touring takes the Mazurek Ensemble to Berlin and East Germany. Yugoslavia.

The lovers split when Victor escapes to Paris. He performs in a piano bar. Years pass. Now she’s also in Paris but married with a son. She’s gaining fame as a cabaret singer. (I might add that more and more she looks like Monica Vitti, which is fine with me!) Listen closely, and you’ll hear underneath the sultry smoke and slow, slightly dissonant harmonies that same song she same years ago, “Two Hearts.”

Regarded as a political dissident, Victor is dragged out of Paris by the Polish police. A jail cell waits for him.

And so it goes. More years pass. Crossing borders. She returns to Poland and performs a bongo-band version of “Two Hearts.” He follows. They try to reunite, but it hasn’t worked before, but maybe, just maybe, it’s going to work now?

COLD WAR is a history of music as much as of the political fortunes of two lovers. Of, I should say, what happens to music... as it springs from the rough, frayed hearts of the peasants, slumps to political agendas, transmutes into the discords of cabaret and blues, and erupts to Zula’s frenzied dance to “Rock Around the Clock.”

COLD WAR has a measured, rather stolid pacing, moving along in discrete chunks of story fragments. It frequently leaves gaps that allow us to fill in the story. Was it Miles Davis who once said, “It’s not the notes you play, but the notes you don’t play? COLD WAR is like that.

It’ll be a miracle if this Polish-French-British finds a home in local theaters. Check Amazon. But know that elsewhere, it’s garnered a fair share of international awards.

SUSPIRIA

Directed by Luca Guadagnio and starring Dakota Johnson as Suzy Bannion, Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc (and two other roles). Mark Coulier is in charge of the prosthetic effects.

BODY HORROR

It’s not often that a movie review will lead off with the name of a “prosthetic effects” artist. But SUSPIRIA, a remake of a Dario Argento classic from 1977, demands it. His name is Mark Coulier, and his body-twisting prosthetic effects headlight the movie.

This story of the infernal doings at the Markos Dance Academy in West Berlin in 1977 is more than an exercise in the strenuous balletic physicality in the Martha Graham tradition. . . much more. The central image of the movie depicts dozens of dancers, endlessly grinding away on the floor, arms and legs contorted, torsos convulsing. There’s no balletic grace and beauty here, only self-inflicted pain and bone-cracking contortions.

At least that’s what dance mistress Madame Bland tells her new protégé, a young American named Suzy Bannion, who has just come to the Academy in search of a career. What Madame Blanc has in mind and what young Suzy achieves is nothing less than a ritualistic worship of something else, something dark, even Satanic.

Indeed, the Markos Academy is a witches’ coven. There are Three Mothers in charge. And Suzy is the newest recruit into the coven.

I use the term “Body Horror” to describe SUSPIRIA as dark fantasy historian John Clute defines the term. In his book, The Darkening Garden (2006), he describes “body horror” as the indulgence of the visceral affect, “the atrocity of the thing itself”—the subjection of the body to tortures and dislocations—in the service of a new aesthetic of horror. Well, not so new. The pain and dismemberment of Jacobean Theater, the French Grand Guignol tradition, the flayed-body images of painter Francis Bacon, and the monstrous entities of H.P. Lovecraft are old hat. But the more recent revelations of Abu Ghraib have brought these perversions to a newly disturbing reality.

No, the horrors of SUSPIRIA are not comfortable. They’re not supposed to be. And the camera’s unblinking gaze into ripped bodies spilling out their entrails is not incidental. It is front and center. It ventures into self-parody, by no means incidentally bordering on laughter.

A defense of this, if one is needed at all, is that gruesome displays like these are a needed revelation of the savagery of the human soul. Nothing less will do.

SUSPIRIA and its close relation on the distaff side, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, suggest that pain and pleasure are closely joined, not opposed, but as integrated extremes that approach a dark purity of its own. It’s a chthonic ideal that rips out our own innards. It turns our eyes away from the upper air and plunges our gaze downward into the earth.

We might violently reject it this excess. But it’s too late.

SOMETHING WICKED... AGAIN!

The Good News is that a new edition of SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, Ray Bradbury's classic fantasy from 1962, is forthcoming soon from Centipede Press. It will feature three of my interviews with Ray and with his illustrator, Joseph Mugnaini.

This is the cover of the First Edition, artwork by Gray Foy:

And here is the cover of the first British Edition, with Mugnaini's artwork:

Most spectacular was the the poster art from the Walt Disney adaptation, directed by Jack Clayton in 1983. Alas, the movie itself was nowhere as good as this poster art:

I am so looking forward to this new 2019 edition of SOMETHING WICKED, since it brings back memories of my encounters with both Ray and Joe. Here's Joe and me from an interview in the mid-80s in Los Angeles:

Rarely has a partnership between writer and artist been more happily fruitful than that between Bradbury and Mugnaini. They first met in the early 1950s in Los Angeles and remained staunch friends and sympathetic collaborators ever since. Here they are: Mugnaini on the left.

May they both rest in peace,,,

THE HAPPY PRINCE

Written, directed, and starring Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde; supported by a stellar cast including Emma Watson, Colin Morgan, Tom Wilkinson, and Colin Firth.

“DYING BEYOND HIS MEANS”

THE HAPPY PRINCE is not a happy movie, and it’s not really about a prince. The title comes from a curious fairy tale written by Oscar Wilde in 1888, about a beautiful statue brought down from sublime innocence to sordid reality by the sorrows of the world, leaving behind only an unbroken heart. We flash back to Wilde telling the story to his two sons at times throughout the film. It’s the linking device that binds together the free flow of images past and present.

Viewers relatively unfamiliar with Wilde’s life will not see the parallels between the fairy tale and Wilde’s life during the years after his imprisonment in 1896 for two years at hard labor. Immediately before his conviction and incarceration for the “crime” of homosexuality, Wilde had been a sort of “prince,” the witty and boastful toast of the London stage. His greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest had lately packed in audiences. But within a matter of months all had come to smash. For two years he suffered greatly as he was passed from prison to prison, barren cell to barren cell, forced to endure gruesome privations that nearly broke him.

A recent book, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years, by Nicholas Frankel, tells the whole sadly fascinating story of his decline from his release from Reading Gaol in 1897 to his death in Paris in 1900. And now THE HAPPY PRINCE retells events with remarkable fidelity to the historical record, accurately documenting the restless shifts in locations, the struggles for money, even down to the pathetic scene where a priest is called in to conduct a last-minute absolution to Wilde on his deathbed. Which is to say that aside from moments of witty badinage in his best epigrammatic manner, and of boisterous gaiety from the drink-sodden Wilde in the cafes and with his Italian rent-boys, there is little attempt to varnish over events, no false romanticism on display, no sidestepping the spectacle of a man seeming willing his own decline and death. His words, “I run to my ruin,” are all too true. Indeed, one of the chief fascinations of the Wilde story is that very fact—that he seems to have done everything he could to encourage his own downfall. Was there in him what Edgar Allan Poe once described as an “Imp of the Perverse” that impelled him to stage-managing his downfall, as if to imitate the “art” of the fairy tale?

At the same time, the cast of THE HAPPY PRINCE is so skilled and the sheer craft of the movie-making so expert, that the free-flow shifting of events in time and space is deftly executed and, ironically, a pleasure to watch. And as excruciating at times as is the narrative—flashbacks to the privations of his imprisonment, the sordid details of his heavy drinking, his sexual indulgences, and the fatal attraction to Lord Alfred Douglas (the charismatic and heartless youth who played such an important part in Wilde’s life, before and after his incarceration)—the drama remains fascinating and compelling. Now, although Lord Douglas—affectionately called “Bosie” by the besotted Wilde—is here an unalloyed monster, I should note that for some historians Douglas’ role in the whole business has been unfairly impugned.

The jury’s still out on that.

If I must cite a lapse or two in this otherwise faultless narrative, it’s the unwelcome intrusion a couple of time of an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony. The music of this late 19th century Russian homosexual is obviously yanked in to corroborate the pathos of Wilde’s last days. Sorry, it’s just too obvious in a movie that is otherwise canny and subtle in its effects.

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

Directed by Marielle Heller, scripted by Nicole Holofcenor, starring Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel, Richard Grant as Jack Hock, and Dolly Wells as the bookstore owner.

SORDID AND FABULOUS!

Yes—“a pretty sordid and fabulous story” is what the New York Times said about real-life writer Lee Israel’s memoir of her days forging the signatures of celebrities such as Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, and Marlene Dietrich.

I could say the same thing about the new movie, CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

Make no mistake about it, this is no cozy collection of beguiling eccentrics plying their fraudulent trade, but a shabby collection of people who feint, dodge, and barter for survival against the grime of the city and the loneliness and desperation of their lives. But at least they live in a New York City in the early 1990s, a poignant, vanished world where you can still find wonderful, independent bookstores and where writers still use pens and typewriters.

Melissa McCarthy’s “Lee Israel” and Richard Grant’s “Jack Hock” are willing, even enthusiastic malefactors. We find her at story’s beginning a down and out writer, an alcoholic with a sick cat, a smelly apartment, many bills to pay, and a readership no longer interested in her biographies of entertainment celebrities like Fanny Brice. (Hey, it’s 1991, years past the popularity of Hello, Dolly! From the late ‘60s.) And Jack Hock is a gay hustler just this side of homelessness, with scars to show from his latest tricks. Together, they form an improbable partnership that provides some of the best moments in this or any movie in recent memory. Granted, we already know Richard Grant as one of our finest dramatic actors. But McCarthy—well, who knew??? Hers is a finely nuanced portrayal of a sadly defiant woman who takes no prisoners.

At first, Lee’s forged letters are a profitable success. It’s one of the nicest ironies here that she can write wittier and more interesting letters by Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker than they could write themselves! Indeed, an even nicer irony is that Lee truly “finds” herself as a creative writer by impersonating other writers! But when autograph collectors get wise and set the Feds on her trail, she enlists Jack Hock to continue their nefarious trade while she stays out of sight.

Inevitably, disaster catches up with both of them. But if you expect Lee to appear before the judge crying real tears, you’re wrong. Her unrepentant speech--and McCarthy’s performance—belongs to the A-list Oscar performances this year. Similarly, Richard Grant’s performance as Jack Hock’s valedictory speech belongs to the ages.

Add CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME—the title comes from a Dorothy Parker quote—to the list of outstanding films over the years about forgers. Coming to mind are The Hoax and F Is for Fake, both about Clifford Irving, and Shattered Glass, about the exposure of a series of fraudulent articles in Vanity Fair. We live in strange times, after all, where collectors pay the big bucks for every scrap and scrawl of a celebrity autograph. We know full well many are faked—the sports world is particularly guilty of this sort of thing—but still we want to believe. Indeed, what is it about our own fascination with this sort of thing? Why are we so willing to suspend our disbelief? Why do we enjoy the illusions of stage magicians, knowing all the while we are being fooled? Or, most pertinent of all, why does the votership base of our President unswervingly support him, with his own bag of tricks on full display?

HALLOWEEN

HALLOWEEN, directed by David Gordon Green, and starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Haluk Bilginer as Dr. Sartain, Will Patton as Officer Hawkins.

HIDE AND SEEK

You come away from the new HALLOWEEN almost suffocated from two hours confined in safe rooms, crawl spaces, and cages; from two hours hiding and seeking in a dark tangle of Halloween tricks and treats.

Yes, here is another HALLOWEEN, or, more properly, a second take on the original John Carpenter classic from 1978. Improbably for some (including me), that original outing has spawned over the years a host of sequels and a plethora of copy-cat slasher films. Praise it or blame it, it’s a force that has come to be reckoned with.

Now, forty years later, Laurie Strode (Curtis) has turned her encounter with stalker, Michael Myers, into an obsession to kill him, should he ever escape the insane asylum that has housed him all this time. She has amassed an arsenal of weapons (which she proudly displays in a scene evocative of Travis Bickel’s weapons array), rigged her house with a basement saferoom and fitted out the rooms with cages, alarms, and booby-traps. Michael Myers has given her a Purpose in Life.

He has likewise given his psychiatric keeper, Dr. Sartain (Bilginer) a decades-long fascination with his charge that threatens to swamp his own identity to the point that, late in the movie, he actually dons Myer’s face mask in some weird sort of Brotherly Love. Watch him tenderly stroke Myer’s face and then don the mask. That’s the most disturbing scene in a movie that all too often lapses into just another collection of pop-up scares.

Another scene that pulled me out of my almost somnolent state also transpires late. That’s when director David Gordon Green baldly copies the most famous scene from the original film. I refer to the moment when Laurie has pushed Myers out a window onto the street below. When she takes a second look, the body has disappeared. It was a great moment, the instant that a physical horror transitioned to a transcendent evil. The new HALLOWEEN reverses the polarity: This time it’s Laurie who has been pushed by Myers out the window; and this time, it is Laurie who disappears upon a second look.

Now, both Predator and Prey have surpassed their mortal coils and belong to the ages.

At least, that’s about the best I can come up with regarding an only mildly interesting horror film.

Maybe the Final Horror is that David Gordon Green, a director capable of the wonderful George Washington, has come down from the sublime to the ridiculous.

FIRST MAN

Directed by Damien Chazelle, starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong and Claire Foy as his wife Jan.

A SPACE CASE

FIRST MAN is a big box of visual and aural tricks with which the film manages not to tell its story of the first man on the moon, but to suggest it. It’s almost—but not quite—a ho-hum event. Witness this brief exchange between spaceman Neil Armstrong’s wife and son: She tells the boy his father is going to the moon. The child replies, indifferently, “Can I go outside and play?” Life is like that in this movie: Daddy “goes outside” to the moon; his son “goes outside” to play.

Nice.

Thus, FIRST MAN is an almost offhand treatment of events that will be familiar to those of us alive and aware at the time of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. Newer viewers unaware of the details of the story are likely to spend moments in this movie puzzled and wondering just what is going on. The movie is an evasive maneuver and seems perversely determined to catch those viewers guessing, while parsing out the story in dribs and drabs.

Consider. Notably lacking is the apparatus included in most historical films, i.e., those helpful narrative devices of billboarded titles, a few newspaper headlines, newsreels, and radio broadcasts that contextualize the narrative. Only at the end, as Armstrong’s foot plants itself in the lunar dust, do we get a smattering of same. Instead, for most of the time, snatches of conversations are sometimes muttered, evaded, interrupted—even unintelligible at crucial moments. The characters keep their backs turned to us at times; at others, they are almost lost in the background of a shot. And what they say is, well, more unsaid than said. And the Big Moments of the drama are so downplayed as to be almost repressed. Example: When the final decision is made that Armstrong will be commander of Apollo Eleven, you can almost hear him saying, “Okay, now pass the salt.”

Now, all of this is quite appropriate to the way Armstrong himself comes across to us. At times he’s IN space; at others, he’s rather OUT of it—

Space Case.

Seldom has a visual style and a psychological portrait been so strongly unified as in this portrait of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. We see him sidelong, as it were, from a skewed angle, his words few and his expressions spare. He is remote, diffident, distant from his fellow astronauts, mostly absent from home life. His emotional distance from his long-suffering wife and children is as remote as his distance from the moon. It’s all his wife can do to persuade him to talk things over with his children before the Launch. No matter the chaos around him—be it an unruly child, a test pilot crash, a space capsule emergency, a near-miss of the moon—he is unruffled and remote.

What’s explains the psychic and emotional trauma behind this man? The film gives us an answer—sort of. It begins with the apparent loss of his baby daughter to cancer. At least, I think that’s what happened. The montage of images is so select and so subtle, that we wonder if it happened at all. By the way, the child does appear to him in later scenes. In a way, to him, she never died—

Space Case.

I might add that Ryan Gosling’s performance as Armstrong is perfectly attuned to this sort of measured distance from people and feelings. No one on the planet—or on the moon—can better convey this sort of thing. Remember Lars and the Real Girl?

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE

Directed by Drew Goddard, starring Jeff Bridges as the priest, Cynthia Erivo as the singer, Lewis Pullman as the hotel proprietor, Jon Hamm as the FBI agent, Chris Hemsworth as the false prophet, and Dakota Johnson and Cailee Spaeny as the sisters.

A QUIRKY GUEST REGISTER

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE might be the best thing in the theaters at the moment.

Check in at the most bizarre hotel this side of Barton Fink, where a group of travelers gather for a night of confrontations, revelations, and gruesome violence. And speaking of the Coen Brothers, BAD TIMES is right out of their playbook. It’s a dangerous Neo-Noir set in the late 1960s. It’s a dark and stormy night. Lightning flashes fitfully illuminate the scene. The blood-stained guest register introduces a motley cast of characters. And despite the grim pleasures of it all, there’s a moment of grace that tops it all off at the end.

There’s the priest who’s not a priest but a thief and ex-con looking for buried money under the floorboards of one of the hotel’s rooms; a vacuum salesman who’s an FBI agent keeping the hotel under surveillance; a struggling lounge singer who just wants to get to a gig in Reno; two young ladies on the run from a phony evangelist, and a self-styled hick evangelist who lives by his own infernal playbook. And yes, the hotel proprietor with lots of secrets of his own: He’s left a string of bodies in his wake; moreover, he possesses an incriminating piece of surveillance film. Did I say “surveillance”? The El Royale Hotel is a voyeur’s paradise. A secret corridor of one-way mirrors affords uninvited glimpses into the unholy activities of the occupants within.

The narrative line is a tangle. We view brief vignettes of each of these lives, only to be rudely wrenched out of the scene by savage and abrupt shock cuts. Events are then rewound and repeated by reverse angles viewed through the one-way mirrors. It’s disorienting, but fascinating. Indeed, a certain diabolical pleasure holds us in a kind of thrall as we piece together the shards and fragments of the story.

Of course, it all ends up in a holocaust of flames, bullets, and bodies. Everything gets sorted out... sort of. But amid the penultimate moments, when the priest who’s not a priest hears a last-gasp confession and delivers his own absolution, we are moved by an experience that is nothing less than an epiphany.

So many things could gone wrong here; the kaleidoscopic assortment of characters and fractured incidents could have fallen apart at any moment.... However, the conviction and power of all these players keep things under control. In particular, Jeff Bridges and Cynthia Erivo deliver beautifully crafted performances. Bridges’ faux confession scene is among his very finest moments on screen. Erivo’s quietly nuanced a capella singing provides the soul of the story. Indeed, I came away, wondering, who is this Cynthia Erivo? I had not seen or heard her before. But her quietly desperate lounge singer is a miracle of subtlety. On both counts we have here Oscar-caliber moments. (Note: Erivo is a British actress and singer recently distinguished for her Tony Award-winning performance on Broadway of “Celie” in The Color Purple.)

In brief, this is a movie for the jaundiced eye.

THE WIFE

Directed by Bjorn Runge, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce as Joan and Joe Castlemans and Christian Slater as the journalist.

GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY!

In THE WIFE, veteran actors Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce have been ill-served by a lame and improbable script. Too bad. It should have been fun to see these two pros on screen. What results, however, is mostly a pompous, strutting Pryce and a showcase for the Glenn Close Enigmatic Stare.

Dramas about writers and writing are notoriously difficult to bring across. There are exceptions, notably Jane Campion’s Angel at My Table, about Janet Frame, and End of the Tour, about David Foster Wallace. And recently we have had Genius, about the relationship between Thomas Wolfe and editor Maxwell Perkins—whose subject of an editorial hand behind the writer’s success rather resembles THE WIFE.

But THE WIFE doesn’t belong in that accompany.

After more than thirty years spent ghostwriting her husband’s books, Joan Castleman watches in dismay as her husband Joe thanks her during the ceremony in Stockholm for being his muse and support. Disgusted, she leaves and threatens divorce. She would rather live in anonymity than be credited merely as his helpmate. But she is more than that. She wrote his books in secret, all of them, behind a closed door, the family unaware of what was going on. All this time, her husband’s main job has been to stay out of her way. Check that: He does do something: He cracks walnuts a lot. I kid you not. He not only cracks them for her, but he cracks them for all his mistresses, too. That’s a lot of walnuts. And a lot of mistresses. Even the title of one of his books is The Walnut. Really. I expected a “walnut wrangler” on the end credits. How he’s been able to disguise the fact that he hasn’t been writing at all is never explained. Maybe the walnut-cracking was enough to fill his spare time. The closest he gets to literature is to quote James Joyce to any young lady who catches his eye. Have a walnut?

Poor Joan Castleman. Is she another downtrodden female writer? Not a bit of it. She’s not only content to be his ghostwriter, but flashbacks reveal that she had wanted to write his books. It was her idea from the get-go. He thinks he is seducing her; but in reality it is she who has been seducing him, catering to his ambitions for the success, fame, and privilege of a successful writer. She is no victim. This is her choice. Who is guiltier of hoaxing the public, he or she? As for that celebrated Glenn Close Enigmatic Smile, is this the expression of a wronged wife or a crafty manipulator? And yet, at the end, we’re supposed to believe that she has HATED this all along. Please.

I realize this is probably a subversive reading that I’m offering here, one that is completely counter to the movie’s putative commentary on The Wronged Woman. . . but that’s my take and I’m sticking to it.

Meanwhile, what about the Castleman books? What do we know about them? Why the Nobel Prize? According to the speech at the Nobel ceremony, Castleman’s books have “changed the course of literature.” Whatever that means. Too bad such superlatives don’t describe this script.

We can’t forget another character who shows up at the proceedings. He’s a trash journalist, a ruthless opportunist who wants to write the tell-all expose of the Castleman’s chicanery. Christian Slater is perfectly cast and perfectly hateful. He’s right where he belongs. He and the Castlemans deserve each other. His dialogues with Mrs. Castleman demonstrate only that she’s a greater fake than he is.

Lastly, there is one more tag-along character in this wearisome parade. And that is Castleman’s son, a budding writer, God help him. He wears a perpetually surly expression and wrings his hands because Daddy won’t praise his own pitiful stories. Does he know that the best example Daddy can provide him is how to find a beautiful graduate student who will do the writing for him? As for the nut-cracking, he is on his own.

THE NUN

Directed by Corin Hardy, starring Taissa Farmiga and Demian Bichir. Story by James Wan.

TOO MANY SPOOKS SPOIL THE BROTH

That’s a maxim that too few horror movies observe. THE NUN has too darned many nuns. There are nuns to the left of us, nuns to the right of nuns, they volley and thunder. . . All apologies to Alfred Tennyson.

All we’re missing are a few clowns! A reasonable expectation. What is it about clowns and nuns that creates such unease in us? It’s not enough that both wear costumes and enact rituals. No, we wonder if our reactions to clowns and nuns alike are rooted in some pre-historical fear, some disturbance in the human genome past understanding? I bet that somewhere in the mists of dawn, there was a cave where a clown capered and a nun prayed? Small wonder that one of the writers of THE NUN, Gary Dauberman, also worked on the ultimate clown movie, It.

You recall there were fleeting images of a ghastly nun that appeared in the other “Conjuring” movies. Now, in THE NUN, a deranged Holy Mother—that is, an Unholy Mother—gets a film all her own. And boy, does she “holy roll”! The setting is a Romanian abbey in 1952, where nuns have the uncomfortable, er, “habit,” of hanging themselves from the nearest stained-glass window. Somebody must have seen the epic Powell and Pressburger classic, Black Narcissus. So, the Vatican, which in 1952, had yet to wrestle with demons of its own, dispatches an exorcising priest and a nun novitiate who sees visions to the site. And such a sight it is. It’s a structure riddled with passages and subterranean vaults. One of those vaults functions like a plug that holds back an infernal creature that for centuries has been trying to break through and destroy the world. Hey, give a demon at least an “A” for effort!

So as long as the nuns pray, the hellish beast remains shackled. But by the time our intrepid ghost busters arrive, the Evil One has grown impatient and is about to bust loose.

Some of the nuns are for real. Some are not. The fact that it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other is, somehow, the whole existential point.

By the time we viewers crawl out of the theater, anxious to bust loose like the Evil One from His cell, we have grown tired of the endlessly repetitive shock tactics. Every moment Something jumped out of the Gothic Jack-in-the-Box. And all the while, the soundtrack growls, moans, and bursts into deranged mashups of medieval chants. Maybe worst of all, the damned movie is TOO DARK. I bet 95 percent of the thing is cloaked in a cheap chiaroscuro that Caravaggio would have disowned. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that this cloaking darkness ABETS the sense of dread, or if it’s just a good thing that it prevents us from SEEING anything. Hey, be grateful for small favors.

Let me just add, in closing, that Crucifixes and Holy Water and even a vial containing the blood of Jesus Christ prove ineffective deterrents against Evil. Think about that a minute.

THE NUN is indeed a film For Our Time. Where everything these days is upside down—even the Cross.

THE BOOKSHOP

Directed by Isobel Coixet and starring Emily Mortimer as Florence Green, Patricia Clarkson as Violet Gamart, and Bill Nighy as Mr. Brundish. Based on the 1978 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald.

SPOILER ALERT

It’s a pity that old Mr. Brundish will never get to read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Thanks to Florence Green’s book shop, and her recommendations, he’s already read Fahrenheit 451 and is ready for more. But Mr. Brundish dies before he can turn a page. Moreover, the book shop itself perishes in the flames of a fire. And the picturesque little seaside village can only limp along without it.

Mr. Brundish’s tragedy is the tragedy of this film in microcosm. Indeed, it’s the tragedy of literacy these days; and I’m writing this on the very day that the demise of The Village Voice has been announced.

All the elements of a small English village idyll are here: The East Anglia town is the very picture of a rustic fable. The villagers are the usual collection of types—the crusty old curmudgeon who lives on the hill, the social matriarch who controls society, the young widow who comes to town as a stranger bent on winning over the inhabitants, and the clever little girl who learns to love books. But leave your expectations at the door. THE BOOK SHOP is so much more than that. THE BOOK SHOP is so much better than that. Although I can sympathize, I guess, with those disgruntled viewers who will leave the movie theater with a sour taste in their mouths. They want muffins, tea cozies, and a view of the sea. And this is largely denied them.

Let’s get this straight: THE BOOK SHOP is a devastating indictment of insular small-town life. And it’s emblematic of the crisis loyal book readers are facing today. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel was written in 1978, and she certainly could see what was to come.

No sooner has Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) come to town to open her book shop than the city elders take deadly aim. The banker is dubious. The neighbors are chilly. And Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) is a study in pure evil: Under the feint of seizing the store’s property in order to open an Arts Center, she’s simply bent on destroying Florence’s dream. Clarkson’s quiet and studied portrayal is calculated to leave you writhing in fury. Aligned in Florence’s corner is that crusty old hermit on the hill. And here we have Bill Nighy in a brilliantly restrained portrayal of an old man who’s finding out too late what love can be all about. He dies while on an errand to save Florence’s shop from destruction. And if you thought that Violet’s evil gnashes your teeth, prepare yourself for the rage that will shake your dentures with what happens to him. And if you love Dandelion Wine like I do, then you are overwhelmed at the book that will remain unread by his side.

But there is a book that will be read. And that is Robert Hughes’ masterpiece, The Innocent Voyage. (Here, it bears its alternate title, A High Wind in Jamaica, the title with which Alexander Mackendrick’s film adaptation reached the movie screen in 1965). This is the book that Florence Green gives the little girl, Christine (Honor Kneaf), who has been working for her in the book shop. And in case you don’t know, this is the book that turns the tables on the Stevensonian kind of pirate yarn: Here, it’s the children who are destructive and the pirates who are their captives. Anyway, taking her cue from the book, little Christine salutes Florence Green by burning up the book shop in a gesture of defiance, depriving wicked Violet Gamart from getting her greedy hands on it. The voice on the soundtrack turns out to be her voice, looking back from the distance of fifty years on the book shop that changed her life.

THE BOOK SHOP is a painful blend of stark village depravity with a winning, fable-like quality. The scenes between Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy are the finest, albeit chaste, love scenes this writer has seen in years.

Honor this movie. Celebrate it for all its bumps in the road. And, by all means, read Dandelion Wine and A High Wind in Jamaica.

BLACKKKLANSMAN

Directed by Spike Lee, written by Lee and Kevin Wilmott, starring John David Washington and Adam Driver.  

My impression after my several interviews with Spike Lee is of his genuine passion for educating today’s generation—white and black America alike—about the realities of racism in America. I say “educating” because he sincerely feels that his films are his “weapons” in that cause... As Gordon Parks has famously said, you choose your weapons; and as Parks’ weapons were his camera and pen, so too are Spike’s weapons his movies.

John Tibbetts with Gordon Parks

When Spike and I talked about his movie, Malcolm X, for example, he was dismayed that today his generation doesn’t know who Malcolm was, not even who Jackie Robinson was. That ignorance, he says, which is born of ignorance, complacency and narrow thinking, cannot stand.

Autographed painting of Spike Lee by John Tibbetts

Interesting, isn’t it?—that now his BLACKKKLANSMAN features Denzel Washington’s son , John David, in the role of the crusading policeman, Ron Stallworth? The distance from Denzel in MALCOLM X and John David in BLACKKKLANSMAN is not very far, is it?

John Tibbetts with Spike Lee

It is not surprising that one of the knocks against BLACKKKLANSMAN is the sledge-hammer indictment of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy in America, that it is more polemic than storytelling. Spike can’t help himself. But he’s right. There’s no room for subtlety in sequences like Belafonte’s recounting of the lynching in 1916 in Waco of Jesse Washington (a moving scene penned, I suspect by Kevin Willmott); and there’s no room for subtlety in Spike’s indictment, at the end, of the rancid racism festering today in Trump’s America.

Autographed drawing of Spike Lee by John Tibbetts

One can only hope that BLACKKKLANSMAN proves to be both the entertainment that Spike needs to reach his audiences, black and white, and the hammer-blow sermon that that same audience needs to confront and understand our own history. When the Jewish policeman (Adam Driver) admits that his involvement in the undercover operation of the Klan has caused him to reflect, for the first time, on his own Jewishness—one of the great moments in the movie—he is speaking for all of us who need to reflect, even if it’s for the first time, on our own complicity in the tensions of race in America.

HEREDITARY: THE GODS DESCENDING

Written and directed by Ari Aster, starring Toni Collette as Annie Graham, Gabe Byrne as Steve, and Alex Wolf as Peter.

SPOILER ALERT

Object if you may to a horrific story about ghosts, gods, and seances, but at least pay homage to a cast of performers who give their all to the tale. Indeed, Toni Collette ratchets up a wrenching intensity as the mother to a haunted and traumatized family that places her on a par with Essie’s Davis’s frenzied performance in a similar role in The Babadook. And that’s high praise indeed.

The recent death of the reclusive matriarch of the Graham family triggers events that accelerate from a standing start to an all-out Gothic sprint at the end. The deceased’s daughter, Annie, is greatly troubled during the funeral, and her memorial speech is likewise troubling. She doesn’t seem to have liked the old girl, very much. And soon we find out why.

I should have known that something seems very wrong with this story at the very beginning: A slow camera dolly moves in to a cutaway of a doll house interior and into one of the tiny rooms. The stiff tableau of miniature family members suddenly comes to life. Welcome to the Graham family—father, mother, son, and daughter. Are they literally living in a doll house? Of course not. Well... maybe not.

True enough, their lives are exposed, the fourth wall torn away. And what we find is a family in the grip of nothing less than a coven of Black Magic worshipers inhabiting nearby a little hut perched on stilts. We don’t know this, at first; we have to pick our way through a thicket of sudden deaths, decapitations, and empty graves before the payoff. And all the while, we watch with mounting horror the psychological deterioration of Annie Graham and her son, Peter (another extraordinary performance by Alex Wolf). We can take comfort, I suppose, by ascribing the nightmares and apparitions of the dead to deranged mental states. But that’s too easy. HEREDITARY won’t allow us this refuge. It relentlessly confronts us finally with the reality of a witch’s cult.

Relentless, yes, but a slow-burning fuse at that. If ever there were a sincere film about witchcraft, this is it—rivalled only, perhaps, by Carl Dreyer’s classic Day of Wrath. The subtlety of camera work, editing, and mise-en-scene is marvelously suggestive without sacrificing the blunter aspects of the witching. And the impassioned conviction of the entire ensemble doesn’t allow us for a moment to ridicule or reject the Gothic claptrap to which the movie is occasionally liable.

And if the oddly lyrical and worshipful climax, delivering a stiff tableau worthy of any haunted doll house, doesn’t send you busily hunting down references to the demon god, Paiman, then your own demons are not worth their salt.

BOOK CLUB

BOOK CLUB. Directed by Bill Holderman, and starring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen. Oh, yes, a few guys are on hand for the ride, including Andy Garcia, Don Johnson, Craig T. Nelson, and Richard Dreyfuss.

BOOK CLUB is not about a book and not about a club.

In the first place, the book that is being read by the women in this club is hardly a “book,” but Fifty Shades of Gray, more of a screed about kinky sex indulged in by men and women alike than a tome for active discussion. And in the second place, this “club” is more of a refuge for women talking about men—the men they dislike, the men they yearn for, the men they forgot, the men that disappointed them—than for women talking about politics, home life, local gossip, professions, and, yes, sometimes about men.

Either way, this movie is an equal opportunity insult—to books, to the women who enjoy them, and to the clubs that bring readers together.

The women in question here are Jane Fonda, a wealthy hotel owner who avoids commitments to the many men who slip in and out of her bed; Mary Steenburgen, a wife disappointed by a husband who straddles a motorcycle instead of her; Diane Keaton, lately widowed, whose possessive daughters restrict any opportunities for a new man in her life; and Candice Bergen, a federal judge who for decades would rather handle court documents than a man. Of the bunch, it is only Bergen who delivers a candid and lively performance that bears the remotest connection to the realities of a woman of a certain age navigating today’s freewheeling singles scene.

For these four women the Book Club is more of a group confessional in which they exchange smarmy winks about Fifty Shades of Gray and trade advice about how to snare a man than it is for anything more intelligent and engagingly personal. Just ask any women you know in book clubs and they’ll share the dismay at what’s on screen. I have. And they do.

Do the men come off any better? Well, yes and no. Andy Garcia has a winning charm. And Don Johnson is, well, he’s Don Johnson. He has the best line in the book: “Love,” he says, “is just a word; it’s what you make of it.” They both cut through the nonsense thrown at them by, respectively, the flighty and annoying Diane Keaton and the hardened, unlikeable Jane Fonda . I hate to say it, but neither Fonda nor Keaton transcend their by-now standard collections of tics, grimaces, and, in Fonda’s case, dismaying plastic surgeries.

Which leads me to my greatest disappointment. These four actresses have obviously settled for less in doing this movie. They deserve better. And so do we, who have grown to love and respect their work.

Is there a real movie in here, somewhere? Indeed, what would a movie about a women’s book club look and sound like? BOOK CLUB grants us no answers.

LET THE SUNSHINE IN

LET THE SUNSHINE IN. Directed by Claire Denis and starring Juliette Binoche as Isabelle. With a surprise appearance by Gerard Depardieu.

How sadly funny this movie is!

That is not apparent, at first. For awhile, you think you’re watching a throwback to those French films of the 60’s by Eric Rohmer or Chabrol or Godard, where everyone talks seriously and endlessly about everything and anything. That’s what our 50-something Isabelle (Binoche) is doing with the various men in her life. In the bedroom, the art gallery, the theater, the country, they talk, endlessly, their words, sentences, looping in and out of each other, tentative, halting, stopping altogether, reversing course, circling back again; full of reversals and contradictions; and ultimately, and maddeningly—all of it irrelevant. Life, love, relationships, the arts, the landscape, the Whole Damned Thing, are all here to be talked about examined, analyzed, questioned, and dismissed.

It’s all so serious, in a deadpan way, until you realize that this is really a sad comedy where, despite all the talk, nothing is happening. Indeed, nothing makes any sense. And that’s the joke that begins to dawn on us. Isabelle’s gallery of men—the brusque middle-aged banker, the ambivalent young stage actor, the distant gallery owner, the former husband and father of her 10-year old daughter—advance and retreat, here, then there, then gone again. She seems to be hungering for commitments but moves in a world that offers none.

Isabelle is the still-point of all this, sometimes wracked in sobs, sometimes regarding it all with that amazing bemused smile of hers. But hers is a restless centering as people and situations revolve around her, popping in and out of her life, inscribing a weird kind of geometry.

A random geometry of life and love.

And so it is, finally, that Isabelle sits down with a man who seems to be her advisor, her guru, her Mystery Man. Who the hell is he??? Then comes the surprise: it’s Gerard Depardieu, sitting there in the half-light! He gazes at some photographs of her lovers. He launches into a monologue. He spins out this remarkable nonstop string of observations about her lovers past and present. Some will fulfill her needs, some will not. Others are yet to appear. And they might be the Great Love. Or maybe not. On and on he goes. While Isabelle just sits there, an enigmatic smile on her face. “Be open,” the man is telling her. “Be open.” She repeats the words, over and over. It’s her mantra. And while he talks, the camera tilts down ever so slightly to reveal that all the while he is waving a pendulum over the photographs, like a divining rod, seeking their Mysteries.

Even while the credits scroll down the screen he keeps talking. Nothing can stop him. Until the screen grows dark.

We are laughing, by this time. Even if we can never be sure what we are laughing at.

DISOBEDIENCE

DISOBEDIENCE, directed by Sebastian Lelio and starring Rachel Weisz Ronit Krushka, Rachel McAdams as Esti Kuperman, and Allessandro Nivola as Dovid Kuperman. Music by Mathew Herbert.

Rabbi Rav’s last sermon strikes the discordant note that reverberates throughout the rest of the new film, DISOBEDIENCE. “God has created the angels,” he declaims, “who can only follow their blessed gifts; and the beasts, who can only follow their earthly instincts; and there are we humans, in between, neither one nor the other, but who must choose... “ Thereupon the rabbi is stricken with a heart attack and collapses, dead, on the spot.

Those words will be repeated near the end of the movie by the rabbi’s successor, Dovid Kuperman. But at those fateful words, “you must choose,” he suffers an insight; and that revelation allows him two choices: The first is to resign his appointment; and the second is to free his wife from her obligations by marriages.

Both are stunning admissions in this rigidly patriarchal Jewish community. In between those two scenes is a drama of love and faith that are severely tested. The late rabbi’s daughter, Ronit Krushka, has left her New York home to return to her family community in London. She seeks forgiveness for leaving her father and the faith decades before. As a youth she had formed a passionate attachment to Esti Kuperman, which had shocked the heterosexual tenets of the faith. And now, back in London, that attachment rekindles. Complicating an already tense situation, Esti is the wife of the rabbi-to-be, Dovid.

Immediately, as the sexual tension grows between the two women, the community is outraged. Esti resolves to leave her husband and go back to New York with Ronit. Dovid himself is placed in an untenable position: He is expected to succeed the late rabbi; moreover, Esti announces she is pregnant with the child they had hoped to have.

Before the resolutions come at the end—they are not as simplistic as it would seem—we have an absorbing drama highlighted by the strong intensity of the performances by the three principles. The London streets and houses of the Jewish community are entirely convincing, i.e., there is not one moment we feel we are watching studio; rather, this is a place that is lived in, where people really do work, raise families, and worship. And the music score by Matthew Herbert is a wholly engaging, subtle, yet piquant complement to the action.

In other words, the choices by the filmmakers, cast, and crew, are wonderfully right and work together to convey a beautiful experience. Here is a movie that is really about something, an always welcome event to some of us moviegoers exasperated and dismayed by much of what else we see on the screen these days.

RBG: “THE NOTORIOUS RBG”

RBG, produced by Julie Cohen and Betsy West.

“The Notorious RBG” is emblazoned on tee-shirts across the country. And amidst the current crop of super heroes on screen, Variety magazine trumpeted about this modest little documentary: “How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Became a Summer Box Office Avenger.”

Wow, do we need this story of the 84-year old Little Woman That Could! Judging from the enthusiastic response of the packed house at the Tivoli Theater, it’s striking a nerve with hammer blows that put Thor’s hammer to shame.

The narrative strategy of RBG is standard-issue: We have a profusion of film clips and photos from Ruth’s childhood, her education at Harvard and Columbia, her remarkable string of Supreme Court victories in the 1970s, her rise to the Supreme Court in 1993 , her subsequent fame as the Great Dissenter in favor of women’s issues cases, her current status as Guru to a new generation of women and liberals, and numerous encomiums from Gloria Steinem, Nina Totenberg, and other women on the Front Line. And speaking of Women on the Front Line, there’s a breathtaking citation of a quote from 19th-century abolitionist Sarah Grimke: “I ASK NO FAVOR FOR MY SEX; ALL I ASK OF OUR BRETHREN IS THAT THEY WILL TAKE THEIR FEET FROM OFF OUR NECKS.” On a more personal level, Ginsburg is revealed to be an opera lover (a few choice bits from Lucia de Lammermoor), a proponent of physical fitness, and an educator.

This last provides one of the funniest moments in the film: She describes her days in the ‘70s arguing before the Supreme Court as a “kindergarten teacher” before an all-male court teaching the realities of women’s issues.

Most moving of all are the glimpses we get of her relationship with her beloved husband of more than 45 years, Marty Ginsburg, who died in 2010. He is the Man Behind the Throne, so to speak, whose love, support and advocacy of his spouse paid no little role in her career.

Through it all, the quiet-spoken RBG is a Sphinx with a twinkle in the eye and a gentle jibe at the ready.

Female filmgoers will support the film. But it is the men who must also go, watch, and be educated.

Meanwhile, there has been some talk that female viewers attracted to the current Book Club will flock to RBG. What a stupid expectation that is. Viewers of RBG will likely consign Book Club to the Graveyard of Misbegotten Movies. The only possible connection between the two films is that one of the women in Book Club has a cat named “Ginsburg.”

AVENGERS AND OTHER SUPERHEROES

Whether or not you’re a fan of recent super-hero epics like Avengers: Infinity War, which breaks box office records, a colossal testament to cinematic greed and excess, or Logan and Unbreakable, which are master classes in how the whole superhero-genre can gain our respect, our attention might rightly be directed to one of its profoundly influential literary prototypes, which remains particularly relevant today.

Once upon a time, Philip Wylie wrote a novel called Gladiator. It was about a man who could lift weights of four tons with ease, leap such distances that he almost seemed to fly, shed machine-gun bullets with ease, rip bank vaults apart as if they were paper-mache. No, it wasn’t a Superman story. It was published in 1930, eight years before Schuster and Siegel produced their first “Superman” comic. Superman and every other superhero owe it a lot. In the opinion of fantasy and SF historian Joe Moskowitz, “Gladiator is probably the greatest tale of a physical superman since the Biblical story of Samson.”

In brief, it is the story of Hugo Danner, born the results of experimental drug treatments given to his mother. When the baby smashes his crib to smithereens, Mom knows she’s got trouble on her hands. She and her husband take great care in the training of their child to hide his strength and deal with the psychological impact of his growing awareness of his “differentness.” After demonstrating remarkable athletic feats as a youth, Hugo leaves home after accidentally killing a fellow athlete. Hugo has difficulty finding a place for himself, exploiting his great strength in prize fighting, strongman acts, pearl fishing, soldiering, farming, and even banking. But when he faces the inability of others to accept him, he determines it would be best to kill himself. The passages at the end of the book when Hugo considers his end are among the most moving in the genre:

Conscience was bickering inside him. Humanity was content; it would hate his new race. And the new race, being itself human, might grow top-heavy with power. If his theory about the great builders of the past was true, then perhaps this would explain why the past was no more. If the Titans disagreed and made war on each other—surely that would end the earth.

Amidst a raging thunderstorm, Hugo raises his fist to the lowering clouds. A lightning bolt strikes him dead.

With apologies to Nietzsche, Wylie himself had this to say about the possible advent of a race of superheroes. “For if ever there does appear upon this planet a tightly knit minority of really superior people, it will be the end of all the rest of mankind--and mankind knows it, not having come through a billion-odd years of evolutionary struggle for nothing.”

Fortunately, Wylie’s prophecy has yet to be fulfilled. But in the subsequent race of literary superheroes,” which his Gladiator so profoundly predicted, we find ourselves awash in their ilk. You can’t swing a stick—or Thor’s hammer, for that matter—without bumping into one. But be careful: You don’t want to piss them off. The moment they shed their benign agendas, we’re all in trouble.