Worst Moviegoing Experiences: This One Time, In Moscow...

Once again, resharing an old post from Ye Olde Nerve Screengrab...

In 1997, I was working for a few months on a film shoot in Moscow. The Moscow Film Festival had just rolled into town, and, having been largely deprived of movies for a few months (despite working on a film), I decided to go see a flick. I wound up in a cavernous theatre, in a packed, premiere night screening of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. (Let’s ignore the fact that, by a strange twist of chaotic film festival programming, this also happened to not be the film I had actually meant to see.) 

I should preface this story by briefly noting two things: First of all, this was a time when the Russian mob was quite active in Moscow. Indeed, many people held up mobsters as heroes. A local English-language paper ran a story on how ridiculously little it actually cost to have a foreigner offed. Secondly, many movie theaters in Moscow had numbered seats. You didn’t always have to abide by the numbers – but in the case of this special, crowded screening, everybody seemed to be sitting where their tickets told them to sit.

Anyhow, before the movie began, while people were still filing in, a youngish gentleman (whom I will refer to as Youngish Gentleman) a few seats to my right in the row in front of me got up, put his coat down on his seat, and went off to the bathroom. The seats to his sides were empty. A minute later, as if straight out of Central Casting, a big, incredibly tough-looking guy (whom I will call Big Scary Guy) in an impossibly tacky suit, escorting two leggy supermodel-types, came and looked at the seat. He took the other guy’s coat, placed it on the seat behind him (which was empty), and sat in the seat, placing his two dates on either side of him. 

A minute later, the seat’s previous occupant came back. Seeing that his seat number no longer matched his ticket, he went to Big Scary Guy and said, “Excuse me, you’re sitting in my seat.” Big Scary Guy, without even looking back at him, said, brusquely, “You can sit somewhere else.” 

Silence. “No, I can’t,” said Youngish Gentleman. “My ticket has that number. That’s my seat. What does your ticket say?” he asked. “Who cares,” replied Big Scary Guy. “Look at these two beautiful women I’m with. Do you want to tell them they have to move?” 

 Youngish Gentleman, clearly unprepared for this debating point, hemmed and hawed for a few seconds, then said, “But…that’s my seat. If you have tickets, they’ll have seat numbers for you.” 

Big Scary Guy, still not looking back, scoffed, “Go away.” 

Youngish Gentleman stood there for a second, seemingly wondering if he should buzz off to the other side of the theater and actually sit where his jacket was placed, right behind his scary tormentor. Finally, he sat down behind Big Scary Guy. After about half a minute of silence, he said, “You’re very rude.”

Again without looking back, Big Scary Guy said, very casually, “After the movie is over, I will kill you.” 

Silence.

At this point, the lights began to dim, and the movie started. But as the film was beginning, Youngish Gentleman, probably after mustering up untold depths of courage, spoke once more: “You’re very rude,” he said again. 

Without missing a beat, in fact almost interrupting the other guy's statement, Big Scary Guy said, “I will kill you. Just wait.” 

Anyway, on that note, William Shakespeare’s pulse-pounding action adventure about gangland killings and techno music and hot young movie star lovers began in earnest. 

The screening itself was without incident. But as the film was winding down, perhaps spooked by the violence onscreen, Youngish Gentleman quietly slipped out of the theater. 

 As the credits rolled, Big Scary Guy asked one of his molls, “Did he leave?” “Yes,” she said. “Did you see what he looked like?” he inquired. The girl shook her head no. Big Scary Guy said nothing. Instead, he just gave a sigh of exasperation, as if he’d been deprived of his fun for the evening. I decided at that point that it was time for me to leave, too.

Here's Everything I've Written About Christopher Nolan (So Far)

I've written a lot about this fellow Nolan over the years, and people will occasionally ask me if there's a place where they can find links to all my pieces on him. So with Dunkirk opening, it seems like it might be a good idea to collect it all here. And while it seems fairly certain that I will write more about this guy in the future, for now, here's pretty much all of it:


-"Dunkirk Is the Movie Christopher Nolan Was Born to Make." My review of Dunkirk for The Village Voice.

 - "All 10 Christopher Nolan Films, Ranked." For Vulture.

-"Interstellar: The Loneliest Journey in Human History." My lengthy essay about Nolan's much-maligned by some, beloved-by-others sci-fi epic.

"Christopher Nolan and the Brothers Quay Hold Court at Film Forum." A report from a screening and Q&A at Film Forum, where the Quays and Nolan screened some of the brothers' most daring animated works, alongside a short documentary Nolan made about them.

-"You Must Become a Terrible Thought: Nolan, Batman, and Hope." An exploration of The Dark Knight Rises and how its theme of hope fits into Nolan's work.

-"Knight Falls on Gotham." My review of The Dark Knight Rises for the Nashville Scene.

-"What Is Christopher Nolan's Big Idea in The Dark Knight Rises?" This is, I think, the first piece where I lay out my theory that each Nolan film is a fugue built around a specific idea. Written before The Dark Knight Rises came out, I go from discussing the big ideas in his previous films to speculating on what the new film might be about. (I'm wrong.)

-"The Hidden Inception Within Inception." My slightly-deranged, personal theory, written for Vulture, about what's really going on in Inception. (I'm right.)

-"When It's Safe to Hit the Bathroom During Inception." Service journalism at its nerdiest. You need to take a leak. But you also don't want to miss any key information in a movie packed with data. Again for Vulture, I identify two brief moments in the film when you can run out and run back.

-"The Number of Times Each Character Dies in Inception." It's, like, a lot.

-"Six New Things We Learned from the Inception Blu-ray." I don't know if you noticed, but I was kind of obsessed with Inception once upon a time. Luckily, Vulture was there to enable me.

-"This is Probably Not the Last Piece I'll Write About Inception." Hilariously, it sort of was. (At least for now.) But this is also probably the closest thing I wrote to a review of Inception.

-"Christopher Nolan Opens Up at Tribeca." About a live 2015 filmmaker talk that Nolan gave at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"Wherever it hits me is where it's going to be": Reports from Cannes 2016

As those reading me at the Village Voice may know, I was at the 69th Cannes Film Festival over the past couple of weeks. Here, for your convenience, are all my reports from the festival (along with the films discussed), in one handy list o' links:

Spielberg and Horror

A conversation about Poltergeist today reminded me of something I’d been meaning to post about for a while. A couple of months ago I went through a Steven Spielberg binge – partly for this essay on his development as a political filmmaker, partly because, hey, Spielberg. But as I went back over his earlier work, it struck me just how much Spielberg’s filmmaking language owes to horror. Obviously, several of his earliest films – Duel, Something Evil, Jaws – actually are horror films. But I’m intrigued by how many of his other films rely on horror tropes.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - A Galaxy Not-So-Far Away

One thing I always found interesting about George Lucas's Prequel Trilogy was the way he expanded the Star Wars universe by going back to his original well of inspiration for the first film: the popular movie genres of his youth. So if the first Star Wars (aka A New Hope) was an homage to old sci-fi serials and Westerns, then The Phantom Menace was a Biblical epic (complete with a chariot race), and Attack of the Clones a combination of noir and syrupy romance and sword & sandal flick, and Revenge of the Sith a gangster movie. Watching Lucas try and bring such oddball genre elements into his otherwise fairly well-defined sci-fi world was fascinating, even endearing -- and it's one of the reasons that I don't hate the Prequels like many others do. Though they're wildly uneven, they're still dazzling feats of imagination, and even their very unevenness feels like a result of a directorial personality at work.

J.J. Abrams, who directed The Force Awakens, comes from a different generation than Lucas, and he most likely didn't grow up with those genres. The good news is, he evidently grew up watching Star Wars. So, in his own way, he’s made a movie that homages the film genre of his youth. In other words, The Force Awakens feels very much like a Star Wars movie -- maybe even more so than the Prequels. It doesn't expand the universe so much as indulge in it.

Inside "Out 1": A Revisitation, Of Sorts

"Sadly, madame, today is not the day for private conversations."

Here’s another one from the archives. Back in 2006, I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Jacques Rivette’s 750-minute long, largely-unseen 1972 film Out 1, described by many at the time as a kind of Holy Grail of moviegoing. It’s a challenging film, to be sure, and despite the extreme patience involved in sitting through such a long film I realized it also warranted multiple viewings. Beautiful, haunting, and uniquely engaging, this seminal phantom of world cinema was no less mysterious to me, having seen it, than it had been beforehand. That still didn’t stop me from writing about it for Nerve.com at the time.

The film is now making a two-week stand at BAM. I was hoping to revisit it beforehand to try and write about it again, but, well, 13 hours and all that. (It was hard enough to see back in 2006, when I didn't have a family, or a life, or a job, or two.) So I thought I would re-run, with some modifications, the Nerve piece -- which I also revisited several years ago, when Out 1 made an appearance on German DVD. Enjoy.

The Duke of Burgundy: Discipline and Languish

It’s hard not to look at Peter Strickland’s portrait of domination and desire and not feel at times like it’s a corrective to how sexuality is portrayed in the mainstream. The Duke of Burgundy, which came out with a whimper earlier this year (right around the same time as Fifty Shades of Grey) but hits Netflix this week, even begins with a nod to the softcore films of the 70s: A beautiful woman in a cape, Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna), rides her bike through a woodsy setting as soft pop plays on the soundtrack. The colors are super-saturated, the credits are blocky and old-fashioned; we even get the occasional freeze-frame. But that self-aware opening belies the film’s deeply felt sense of place and passion – not to mention the rigor of the filmmaker’s vision.

Time Out of Mind: Watching Richard Gere Disappear

As a homeless man wandering the streets of New York in Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind, Richard Gere does the opposite of commanding the screen; he vanishes. Not in the way that an actor might “disappear” into a part: Gere isn’t that kind of transformative performer. He vanishes in a more basic sense. He cedes the frame, and the soundtrack, to the people and the city around him. His character has lost everything, and is quickly losing his sense of self as well. The very form of the film reflects that.

Eden: A Very Sad Movie About Bringing Joy

Save for a couple of brief, telling instances, nobody in Mia Hansen-Løve's Eden ever seems happy. Surprising, perhaps, for a film about DJ culture. Or maybe not. "Between euphoria and melancholia," is how the film's central character, Paul (Felix de Givry) describes the particular subset of electronica he specializes in, “New York Garage with a Parisian twist.” And Eden captures that balance well. It's a very sad movie about bringing joy.

“This Is Our Furiosa.” Mad Max: Fury Road and the Moments In Between

There’s a moment about two-thirds of the way through Mad Max: Fury Road that speaks to one reason why I love the film so much. It comes during one of the film’s rare quiet scenes. Max (Tom Hardy), Furiosa (Charlize Theron), and their small lot of refugees have arrived among the Vuvalini, the all-female warrior tribe from which Furiosa was stolen, along with her mother, many years ago. Most of the women remember Furiosa only dimly: She was taken, as she says, “7000 days” ago, “plus the ones I don’t remember.” They ask what happened to her mother. “She died, on the third day,” Furiosa replies. And then the Vuvalini reflexively perform a quiet, brief mourning gesture – holding a hand up, grabbing at the air, and bringing it to their chest. After seeing them, Furiosa herself slowly does the gesture as well.

This exchange lasts all of twelve seconds, and it’s probably easy to miss, or ignore, for some. But every time I see the film, it strikes me as a deceptively profound moment. Watch Theron’s performance here: As she grabs at the air, her haunted eyes watch her own hand, as if she were seeing it for the first time. Her face is that of someone remembering something that was once probably very much a part of her – not just her mother, but this whole Vuvalini ritual, and the sense of belonging it implies. She’s re-learning, in other words, the person she used to be.

Forgotten Films: Rachel, Rachel (Paul Newman, 1968)

The death of screenwriter Stewart Stern a couple of weeks ago brought some fine remembrances from numerous writers, many of whose lives he touched as a mentor as well as a filmmaker. Obviously, most folks who knew Stern's name -- if they knew it at all -- was as the screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause. But his passing reminded me that, years ago, I’d written a “Forgotten Films” feature for Nerve.com about another work -- Rachel, Rachel, Paul Newman's directorial debut. Lesser known but almost equally as great as Rebel, it's since been released on DVD by Warner, so now there's actually a chance that people might rediscover it. What follows is a slightly edited version of my original piece.  (For more on the Forgotten Films project, go here.)

My Top 20 (Actually, 21) Films of 2014

I’m late with this. I’m always late with this. In part it’s because, not having to worry about deadlines, I can be late with it. (None of my outlets ever seem to want a Top 10 list from me, for some reason.) In part it’s because I don’t usually think of my movie year as being finalized until I’ve submitted my poll in Mike D’Angelo’s Skandies poll, which usually closes in February and whose results are being rolled out as we speak, over here. Anyway, I won’t clear my throat so much, other than to ask: When the hell did I become such a big sci-fi nerd?

Selma: Of Moral Arcs and Men

One of the most fascinating things about Ava DuVernay’s Selma is the way history itself seems to become an actual character in it. But not in a portentous, solemn way. Depicting the explosive events in the Alabama city in 1965, which culminated with the epic march from Selma to Montgomery, the film seeks not to contain the entire Civil Rights struggle, or even to offer a biopic-style portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. (played by the great David Oyelowo). Rather, it focuses on the machinations, negotiations, in-fighting, and backroom dealings that went into the organization of the march and Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Watching the film, I was occasionally reminded of Francesco Rosi’s political dramas of the 1960s and 70s. In films like The Mattei Affair, Rosi gave us the spectacle of men talking and arguing about process, activism, methods, and organizations – history told through the mundane poetry of acronyms and theory, the kind of thing most filmmakers would ruthlessly avoid. It takes a unique kind of patience, sobriety, and skill to make that compelling on a movie screen. DuVernay’s clearly got all of that.
 

Interstellar: “The Loneliest Journey in Human History”

He wept to think that his dreamless slumber had spanned the entire lifetime of his first child.  When he could face the ordeal, he would summon the records that were waiting for him in the memory banks. He would watch his son grow to manhood and hear his voice calling across the centuries with greetings he could never answer…One day the pain would be gone, but never the memory.
           - Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth*

You don’t hear the word “subtle” tossed around much in discussions of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, but here’s something I found quite nuanced about its first hour: The sly hint of a smile that creeps on Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) face whenever he discusses the idea of going off into space. For all his insistence that he has a family he needs to care for, Coop can’t help but grin – ever so slightly – when Professor Brand (Michael Caine) tells him that he’s the right man for a daring new space mission. And watch his eyes as he tries later to justify leaving to his distraught daughter Murph: “They chose me, Murph,” he says, and he seems to be beaming – more a proud child than a regretful father.

Coop, whose very name suggests restlessness, and whose one previous attempt to go into space was aborted before he left the stratosphere, basically is a child. Early on, when Murph comes to the breakfast table with a broken lunar lander toy from her bookshelf, he says, “What’d you do to my lander?” Coop’s daughter walks around school with his old science textbooks. He’s a loving parent, but not a particularly attentive one. He forgets parent-teacher conferences; he doesn’t know how to deal with his daughter’s problems; he’s more excited about chasing stray Indian spy drones than he is about getting his kids to school on time. He’s a dreamer, out of his time and place.

The Ice Harvest: Something To Do With Death (R.I.P. Harold Ramis)

The sad and untimely passing of Harold Ramis yesterday exacerbated my need to revisit his 2005 film The Ice Harvest. The film, shot for a very modest budget, flopped in its initial release, but has gained admirers in the years since. At the time, it struck me as a solid comedy with more than the usual on its mind, but in recent years, I’ve come to think of it as a stone-cold masterpiece. Maybe that’s why it was the first film I thought of when I heard that Ramis had died – not Ghostbusters, not Caddyshack, not even the wondrous Groundhog Day. Or maybe it was something else – something to do with the film itself, which is one of the most haunted and despairing comedies I’ve ever seen.

The Wolf of Wall Street: Performance, Transaction, and the Big Sell

Martin Scorsese loves to watch Leonardo DiCaprio. I guess we’ve known that for some time, but it never quite hit me as it did during The Wolf of Wall Street. We can argue all day over whether this is an attempt to remake Goodfellas or whatever (it isn’t), but there’s one thing that’s pretty clear to me: This is as much one of Scorsese’s concert docs (Shine a Light, The Last Waltz, etc.) as it is one of his narrative epics. Jordan Belfort, the real-life “Wolf of Wall Street,” didn’t just become famous for his crooked financial practices; he was also renowned for his revival-like, inspirational speeches full of blustery bullshit to his workers. He sells stocks with messianic fervor; then he sells selling stocks with messianic fervor. It’s a perfect subject on which to hitch an extended DiCaprio concert. Half the movie is just him performing in front of people, and much of the rest of it is people reacting to him. There are even a couple of scenes one could call dance numbers.

(Spoiler alert for the rest of the review, to the extent that there can be spoilers for this movie...)

Inside Llewyn Davis: "Like King Midas's idiot brother"

A mesmerizing, haunted red herring of a movie, the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis is full of glancing blows and half-hidden truths. Every once in a while some kind of meaning or pattern emerges for just a brief shimmering second and then disappears from view, like the cats that keep slipping away from our lonely, dour protagonist. But if this beautiful film seems unnaturally elusive, there’s a good reason for that: The real story is happening somewhere else.

Five Things I Liked about Spike Lee's Remake of Oldboy

Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy is getting trashed left and right and flopping with audiences. But sue me, I kind of liked it. And while I love, love, love the original to death and still vastly prefer it to this one, I figured it might be worth noting down some things about Lee's film that I thought worked. It ain’t exactly Losey’s remake of M (though let it be noted that that film too was much hated for many decades before its reputation slowly began to repair) but I think this new Oldboy is worthwhile. I’d certainly be interested to see the rumored longer version some day.

Captain Phillips: "Relax. It's just business."

The real-life piracy thriller Captain Phillips opens with what feels at first like an inelegant bit of exposition. Preparing at home to embark on his next voyage, Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) checks the itinerary on his computer for his date of departure, and his destination: Mombasa, Kenya. You may find yourself asking: Wouldn’t the captain of a major cargo ship know where he’s headed well before the day he leaves? You may even have similar thoughts a couple of scenes later, as Captain Phillips listens to one of his crew members tick off the contents of their container ship, the Maersk Alabama. Again, shouldn’t he already know all this?

But what seems early on like awkward filmmaking convention soon reveals itself as the first hint that Captain Phillips, for all its expert, armrest-tearing suspense, is about more than just a ship taken hostage by Somali pirates. “Companies want things faster and cheaper…You gotta be strong to survive out there,” Phillips says in another early scene, and it becomes clear that, for all his protestations of strength, he is a mere cog in the engine of global commerce. It doesn’t matter if he knows where he’s going, or what he’s carrying. But soon enough, he and his men, speeding through international waters off the horn of Africa, are being pursued and boarded by a ragged band of pirates led by a gaunt, intense teenager named Muse (Somali-American actor Barkhad Abdi, in a remarkable debut performance). “Relax, Captain. Just business,” the young pirate tells the middle-aged sailor. He’s right.

'80s Action Week: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)

Okay, it’s hard to do five posts on the best action films of the 1980s and try and sneak in anything remotely surprising in there. (I guess the closest I got to was yesterday’s post on RoboCop, if only because most folks who know me know I’m fairly cool on Verhoeven.) And this, of course, is another no-brainer. It’s certainly the best of the Star Wars films (though a couple of the prequels are better than people like to give them credit for being). But it bears looking into, still: Why does The Empire Strikes Back continue to work so well?