All Bangers, All The Time, Vol. 3
recs from santa
Ad-Supported Content Consumers,
Ho ho ho!
As the year ends and your birth family drives you to nervous exhaustion, as the streaming juggernaut crumbles into cratering stocks & insufferable commercials, as our democracy & climate teeter on civilization-ending collapse, please remember: Max is here for you. Baby, I got us.
Here are some things I’ve loved recently. And of course it's only Bangers for this listserv. Enjoy fam. And lmk what you're digging too?
Did The Oscar Winning Director Asghar Farhadi Steal Ideas? - Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker
In the last decade, the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has won the Best Foreign Language Oscar twice and traveled the international awards circuit with another three films. “A Separation” launched him to the elite company Name Brand Art House Foreign Guys, and he has stayed there since.
What is the engine that powers him? "Plagiarism" doesn't describe it. What Farhadi does in sourcing his ideas & writing is a kind of pathological leeching, perpetrated repeatedly in close relationships, leaving subjects & collaborators in disbelief when, suddenly, he refuses to acknowledge them. The consistency of his behavior galled me.
And yet, he sees himself as the victim here -- which is the sort of heady Rashomon scenario that animates his better movies.
The article's writer, Rachel Aviv, is a heavyweight at The New Yorker whose work is all about human experiences that can't really be described by science, law, or ethics. She once wrote about a dancer studying Butoh whose suicide was blamed on her teacher, but in Aviv's telling, if the teacher was to blame, so too was the intensity of the art form itself. So in that spirit, her piece about Farhadi is so much more than a takedown.
There, There - the new film by Andrew Bujalski
If you know of Bujalski, you may associate him with "mumblecore," which may make you think his movies are navel-gazing and badly-sound-mixed. The term doesn't come close to capturing his scope, weirdness, humor, and literary seriousness. He is a fucking hero of American independent cinema whose stuff has always been uncompromising, and now it’s getting increasingly hilarious.
This one is composed of vignettes -- scenes between two actors who were never actually shot in the same room at the same time. Yes, it's a pandemic adaptation, but it's carried off with a carefree spirit that I found infectious. The basic format is that you meet a character in one scene and then see them again later in a different context. You never know what you're going to get, but the insanity all feels right.
This is the rare movie that’s wayyyy more alive & of the moment than whatever else I’ve been watching. He writes the shit out of long conversations that twist & twist & twist. It's almost as if this movie is the first to catch up to the spirit of our young decade, with its general surreality, shamelessness, and collective sense of: We're barely holding on here!
Denial - a novel by Jon Raymond
I don't read much sci-fi, but this stripped down climate fiction was very well-suited for me. Told through the neutral voice of a journalist who tracks down a fugitive oil exec in Mexico City, the book describes what the world will look like after another thirty or so years of bad weather & political fury. The world keeps turning, but the horizon looks blurry.
Raymond is the screenwriting partner of Kelly Reichardt, whose new movie for A24 looks characteristically gentle and rad. Raymond also wrote the miniseries Mildred Pierce, which I've never seen.
LOOK Dine-In Cinema in Glendale & Joanna Hogg's new movie The Eternal Daughter
I miss the Arclight and may be grasping here, but the hilariously-capitalized LOOK Dine-In Cinema in Glendale is a totally solid theater. I want you to go there, because I want it to stay open. It has big screens, good sound, big chairs, and parking right across the street. The tickets are comparatively cheap (I paid $30 to see Avatar at the Chinese last week). And as for the "dine-in" portion? It's just not a distraction. The "waiters" are stealth.
So I've seen two movies there recently: Aftersun, from A24 with Normal People hottie Paul Mescal, and The Eternal Daughter, also from A24 & the third installment in Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir trilogy. My hot take is that Aftersun, which is getting raaaaave reviews, is beautifully-made and frankly overrated, but The Eternal Daughter is a little fucking miracle.
A total departure from the (harrowing) kitchen sink realism of The Souvenir, The Eternal Daughter is a sublime ghost story: Tilda Swinton plays both a middle aged-woman and her elderly mother on a weekend trip to a hotel where the mother stayed as a child. But with the deft gothic touches, it isn’t clear who or what is a projection of Young Tilda’s mind.
Hogg isn’t the only well-established indie director to try a movie in this vein — gothic dramas with low-fi, almost literal supernaturalism — with little to no experience in genre fare. I'm thinking of Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper, David Lowery's A Ghost Story, Lenny Abrahamson's The Little Stranger, and Celine Sciamma's Petit Maman. At risk of being ungenerous, I don’t know that those movies, despite feeling both personal & artful, really work in the way that the directors’ best stuff generally has.
I suppose it's a beguiling subgenre, but I always root for it. Way back in high school and college, I loved reading Henry James’s gothics, especially The Turn of the Screw (adapted often & weirdly). As a kid, I listened to an audiobook of Du Maurier's Rebecca. (I've never seen the Hitchcock adaptation on a big screen.) And in real life, I love being in a drafty old house or hotel. This texture is seductive for me. I should love all this shit.
Well, The Eternal Daughter is the movie I had been waiting for. And of course, it wasn't the perfectly-rendered soundscape of creaking floorboards or cinematography with eery depth. Or at least I don't think so. In the end, what's scary to confront in the this movie’s haunted hotel, is our everyday frailty, our survivable loneliness, what we never really got right with our family, what we'll miss about them.
There's one more recent movie that's sorrrt of in this subgenre that I really loved... that also happens to star Tilda Swinton! It's Memoria. If you live in LA and missed it earlier this year, you can catch it at Braindead on Fairfax at 1/5.
Tildatown Forever Y'all,
Max
P.S. Can anyone tell me if Israel has ever produced a filmmaker with a body of work or renown anywhere close to Farhadi’s?
P.P.S. The poster for There, There is rad.
