MOVIE DIARY 2023: STICK TO THE PLAN.
Hello! MOVIE DIARY 2023 is back, and so are you, it seems! This week, we’ve got the return of our pal Mattie Lubchansky! I’m a big fan of Mattie’s comics (buy BOYS WEEKEND now!), and Mattie wrote one of my favorite pieces for MOVIE DIARY 2018 so obviously I’m very excited that they’re back this time to talk about a beloved movie at Movie Diary HQ.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Mattie’s piece for this entry of MOVIE DIARY 2023 contained some nicely formatted and numbered footnotes, but I have no clue how to make footnotes work for this particular Squarespace template, so you’ll have to deal with asterisks instead. I’m sure you’ll all be fine, but apologies to Mattie and the rest of the MOVIE DIARY 2023 community.)
Hail, Caesar (2016) - dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: MATTIE LUBCHANSKY
Okay so here is the thing. I'm a big Coens-head (American Jew) and I saw this baby in theaters, which caused me to have what I'm calling Lubchansky's Unified Late Coen Brothers Movies Reactions Process, which is sort of a four-step thing. This entails:
Leave the theater, smiling to myself, thinking "that was a blast but I'm not sure it hits the highest highs of the canonical Coeniana*."
One week later, notice I've thought about the film maybe every 30 seconds.
Re-asses, rewatch it 5-10 times, going more and more insane each time.
Go insane at someone about it at a party 3 years later.
Anyway we're fully in Step 4 on this one, folks**! Imagine Geoff's beautiful MOVIE DIARY 2023 as a party that I have crashed and will not leave! Would you like to hear some stuff about Hail, Caesar! (2016)? Because you're about to. Geoffrey was thinking about having some more Coen movies on MD2k23 and tbh I've been thinking about this one a lot lately mostly because of seeing Friend of Movie Diary Tessa*** learning how to lasso, on her social media. It brings to mind the perfect lad we all know and love Hobey Doyle! But I get ahead of myself. I think this movie is not necessarily maligned but certainly considered minor in the Two Bros Co(en)s filmography, and I think that's a mistake!
One of the things I love about Hail, Caesar! is how much it almost operates like a symphony – all these moving parts, repeated themes, this complex structure building and building themes weaving throughout, and a cathartic release. Characters float in and out of the story, each in their own little modalities****. To strain my dumb analogy further and then I promise I'll drop it, the two big overlapping movements of H,C! are of course Faith and Communism. What else do you want out of a picture!
FAITH
Much has obviously been made of the Coen's wacky cosmology over the years and the sort of Old Testament nature of it. They're obviously Jewish filmmakers and that informs a lot of the worldview and how things operate – A Serious Man is obviously the most pure expression of this. It's strange, then, for a movie of theirs that focuses so much on faith to be so overtly Catholic! But! Much like the titular movie they are shooting in this movie, this is a "Catholic" movie made by a bunch of showbiz Jews*****. Get in! We're inventing horseshoe theory for religion where the two ends are "Jewish" and "Catholic." Anyway, Brolin's Eddie Mannix wants so, so, so, so bad, to be punished for being a bad boy like any Catholic but also is neurotic in a very, let's say New Yorky kind of way (complimentary). But much like the in-universe film Hail, Caesar! (1951), Hail, Caesar! (2016) is only superficially about religion, really. There's lots about the search for meaning all over this movie, sure – more on that below – but most of the God talk specifically, like the scene****** with all the theologians in the conference room, is just that: talk.
COMMUNISM
So OBVIOUSLY a movie does not need to have "good" "politics" to be "good." However, I think there is an issue amongst the filmgoing ELITES (critics, annoying people on "Twitter") that caring about a movie's politics is a critical dead-end. And I certainly don't disagree, but I think if a movie is explicitly political, yeah it kind of matters! And this might be the best major American release since the 80s "about" Communism that doesn't completely fumble the bag on the topic*******. I am not here to tell you what is in the Coens' heart: certainly that is a critical dead-end! But the representation of the "study group" at Channing Tatum's Burt Gurney's house is not the only place the specter of Communism haunts this movie – it's completely shot through with what I will very sophisticatedly call Labor Stuff. The scenes with the study group are some of my favorite in the movie and have an absolute murderers row of Guys We Love to See delivering completely insane dialogue. And sure, it's the worst DSA meeting of all time, but all the talk of getting messages into art vs doing some damn praxis is really fascinating and layered********. Is this the heart of the movie? A thesis statement for a lot of later Coen work? I think so! Also watching this I was struck: much like the writers putting communist thought into their work on a sub rosa level, are these scenes the most Marxism the average American moviegoer is exposed to, in their entire lives? Insane to consider. We're not talking about money. We're talking about economics!
More Labor Stuff:
Fran's incredible slapstick scene where her scarf gets caught in the literal machinery of the industry while her boss watches, doing nothing.
Hobey Doyle and Carlotta Valdez's (insanely cute) scenes. They're just talking shop! Is America…good?
Brolin is not involved in his own life at all, and is clearly struggling with his work, but is offered an "easy" job by the man at Lockheed Martin, who calls what he does "serious business" while showing Brolin a shot of the Bikini Atoll – which he calls "a couple of rocks until last week" getting blown to smithereens. Crucially here, the atomic bomb is obviously evil, and the atoll WAS inhabited by an indigenous population that suffered brutal occupation at the hands of the Japanese and then the Americans (who resettled, briefly starved, and than re-re-settled off the island).********* Brolin, though, is presented with a choice: your tough life as it is now, or head to easy street if you'd simply submit to being an unthinking cog in the ruthless machinery of war. America sucks.
It's a little moment, but the way they treat the guy playing Jesus (Todd) on set. Brolin goes on and on earlier to the assembled clergy guys about the talent search to find this guy, and he's literally playing Jesus, but he's treated like dirt in the last scene of the film and doesn't know if he's an extra or a principle. Romans before slaves!
Okay this is stupid but it's literally called "Capitol Pictures." Maaaaan!
After his run-in with the Communists, Clooney is going on and on about how showbusiness is just that – a business, and he and the other actors are just getting exploited like any other worker. Brolin immediately comes around the table and uses his monopoly on the legitimate use of force (wink) to slap him around and get back to work. Sure, Clooney's Baird Whitlock is a dipshit of Clooney-in-any-Coen-movie proportions, but he's onto something. It's not the old truth, but a new one. One that feels right, deep down. If we had but…but faith!
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* Putting the footnote here so you can really chew on this phrase. It's good.
** I realize we are not 3 years out on this one anymore, it has in fact been 7 years since 2016, which is crazy, considering that freaking DRUMPF is still the president? You know it's interesting because he is orange but soon he will be wearing orange,
*** I think she and Geoff would get along.
**** This isn't how symphonies work but I haven't been serious about orchestral music since about 2003. Don't email me!
***** I'm allowed to say this.
****** This scene is incredible, perfect, hilarious, I'm screaming and crying and throwing up just thinking about it. God doesn't have any children! He's a bachelor…and he's very angry!
******* See: The Ricardos, Being (2021, Dir. Aaron Sorkin)
******** The reason they switched from putting Communism into popular films to kidnapping movie stars is that a professor from Stanford told them to. Darkly funny if you've read Malcom Harris's excellent Palo Alto.
********* Sorry this part made me go briefly "Google Ron Paul" mode. Google America sometime!
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Mattie Lubchansky is an award-winning transsexual. Their new book, BOYS WEEKEND, is now out from Pantheon.
The Killer (2023) - dir. David Fincher
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I saw this a couple of weeks ago and when I bring it up, friends will ask “Was it good? Did you like it?” I usually reply with something like “Yeah, sure. Do you like watching Michael Fassbender walking around doing stuff and listening to The Smiths and just sort of talking about whatever?” which I guess can sound reductive or dismissive when I’m typing it all out, but my friends know me enough to know that when I say that, what I mean is, “Yeah, sure. I love watching Michael Fassbender walking around doing stuff and listening to The Smiths and just sort of talking about whatever!” I haven’t seen much talk about this online, but to be fair, I sort of avoid reading about movies that I’m going to write about for MOVIE DIARY 2023, so I guess I haven’t actually sought out what people think about The Killer. Do people like it? Do people like watching Michael Fassbender walking around doing stuff and listening to The Smiths and just sort of talking about whatever? I certainly can’t speak for them, but I do on all those counts.
The Killer is a fun and punchy little airport thriller of a movie, but it’s a David Fincher movie, so there’s this sort of atmosphere of menace that pervades. That being said, I think this is sort of lighter Fincher fare—more a quaint jaunt through the world of contract killing than the sort of more heavy and moody reflection on the evil that men do that we’ve seen from something like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. While I was watching the movie, I was kind of thinking that this is seems more of a mash up of styles and influences than I tend to associate with Fincher’s movies. I saw a lot of Soderbergh in the kind of cool, detached, but funny style (and wow, it turns out I wasn’t wrong), I saw a bit of his own Fight Club in the narration, and I saw a heavy connection to Michael Mann’s Thief. All of these are things that I like, so I didn’t really have a problem with any of it.
I think the Fight Club and Thief connections are pretty interesting to me, so let’s roll with those. Fight Club, Thief, and The Killer are three very different movies, but they are all concerned with the idea of a man and his place in the work that he does and the world he exists in, and how he defines himself in relation to that work and that world. The Killer to me feels like a bit of an evolution or a progression from the starting points of Fight Club and Thief. The nameless main character’s narration is central to both Fight Club and The Killer, but where Fight Club’s narrator is at once snarky, angry, contemptuous, and ultimately depressed, The Killer’s narrator seems to have moved on from that petty lashing out at the world. The Killer’s narrator has seen the ugliness and the violence of the modern world and rather than setting out to burn it all down, he’s resigned himself to figuring out a place for himself in this world where he can see himself above the fray, content to live his own life at his own pace. I think it’s funny that both of these nameless narrators are fully invested in self improvement via self help philosophies, which in Fincher movies usually is an indicator that a character is has a darkness in them (to clarify: I absolutely agree with Fincher on this point).
The Killer is also definitely in conversation with Michael Mann’s Thief. Very obvious parallels between the two protagonists, both highly skilled men in the criminal underworld who so deeply value their independence, sure, but I think The Killer reads as a more up to date take on the state of work today. Where Thief enshrines working for yourself as an ultimate goal for Frank, The Killer’s nameless protagonist is sort of already in this position, but the infrastructure of the world is no longer the same as it was in Thief. He’s skilled and in demand enough that he can pick and choose his jobs, and he’s got the independence of working for himself that Thief's Frank so deeply desires, but what we learn in The Killer is that you’re never really working just for yourself under capitalism today, especially if you’re a contractor, especially ESPECIALLY if you’re a contract killer. The Killer is about the gig economy, where you have the pretense of working for yourself, but because of how today’s world works, you must always be working, and worse, you’re beholden to not only the people who set up the jobs for you, but to the clients who’ve hired you (and who are frequently clueless, rich morons who don’t know how any of this works). Tessa had a joke about how this is a movie that asks, “What if you gave your Uber driver a one star review, and Uber responded by sending out people to kill your driver?” That’s pretty much what The Killer is about.
One thing I really enjoyed about The Killer was the sort of funny and cynical looks at how the trappings of modernity have made invisible the human face of labor and turned everything into disposable garbage. The movie starts with a dumb sight gag about how his stakeout spot is an abandoned WeWork office, he’s constantly buying and destroying new smartphones, he’s able to sneak into otherwise secure places by posing as an everyday worker or Postmates delivery man, he orders his infiltration and assassination tools on Amazon (and gets them delivered to an Amazon drop location). In keeping with the Fight Club connection, The Killer exists in a place where Tyler Durden’s dreams have failed—the working class is faceless and meaningless to the people in power, culture continues to be vacuous and expendable (there is no more “culture” because it’s all “content” now, and any symbols of rebellion have been co-opted by those who we’d be rebelling against, used against us. Or worse, they’re sold back to us as rebellion through consumerism (I laughed out loud when we finally meet the billionaire that’s been causing all this trouble for our guy and we see that he works out at an Equinox equivalent and wears a fucking SUB POP tshirt). I think it’s interesting that the highest place of “culture” that we encounter here is the very high end, refined restaurant where we see Tilda Swinton eating delicate dishes and knocking back expensive whiskey after expensive whiskey, never even taking a moment to savor this expensive meal, even knowing it’s going to be her last. In The Killer, even the highest culture is centered around literal consumption.
Priscilla (2023) - dir. Sofia Coppola
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I don’t consider myself a Sofia Coppola stan, but I do generally enjoy most of what she does. I think she makes a certain type of movie very well, and when she successfully does her thing in a context that fits, it hits very hard. Priscilla is sort of a perfect fit for Sofia Coppola’s whole deal, so I was definitely into it. A movie about a lonely woman barely able to comfort herself with the perks and conveniences that come with wealth and privilege? This is child’s play for Sofia Coppola, she can do this stuff in her sleep.
The movie is pretty much what you’d expect if you had any familiarity with Priscilla Presley’s life and Sofia Coppola’s style. Cailee Spaeny is really great as Priscilla. I think she’s doing some really interesting things with her performance. I enjoyed how quiet she plays Priscilla. She plays her with this inherent timidness and it makes it very interesting to watch her as she hangs back and observes this strange world of fame and glamour that she finds herself in. As the movie progresses, that timidness pulls back, but it never really seems to turn into a brash confidence. She does become more confident, more self assured, but even by the end of it, she realizes this new confidence in herself brings more uncertainty to her life than anything. I think that idea arc of going from timid to quietly confident to uncertain about what the future holds is really interesting. If it were anyone else besides Sofia Coppola directing this movie, I’d worry that Priscilla’s arc would be more about having the courage to find your own voice and be an independent woman and leave the your husband, the biggest celebrity in the world, and never look back or whatever, and leave it at that, but Coppola wisely keeps the camera going and we get to see Spaeny deal with the flood of mixed emotions that would have to come with leaving a life like Priscilla’s behind.
One thing that I initially thought was sort of goofy was the height difference between Spaeny’s Priscilla and Jacob Elordi’s Elvis. Elordi is so tall and Spaeny is very small, which makes Elordi look SO tall and Spaeny SO small when they’re next to each other, but eventually I came around on this and I thought the height difference was kind of a neat externalization of the differences between Elvis and Priscilla. Priscilla is small and careful, doing her best to settle into a place that will never really be hers. Elordi’s Elvis is an imposing figure, a larger than life celebrity who storms in and walks around like he owns the place because the instant he steps inside, he does. We don’t get to see him in full performance mode much, but Priscilla is more about what Elvis was like at home, and what we get is a charming, but mercurial (and sometimes violently so) man. Elordi towering over Spaeny underscores how Elvis’ life and celebrity loomed over Priscilla’s, and since we’re seeing all of this from Priscilla’s perspective, it also makes Elvis look really fucking scary when he’s throwing one of his tantrums or being manipulative and controlling or even when he’s just saying something shitty to Priscilla around all of his dipshit friends.
Priscilla has a lot of very beautiful shots of interiors, a lot of very iconic looks and moments for Priscilla, plus the soundtrack is just hit after hit. All of these things had me thinking a lot about Sofia Coppola’s impact on culture and how that may have cycled back into the aesthetic of Priscilla. I’m kind of wondering if we’re at a point where Sofia Coppola is now just kind of iterating on the public perception of what a Sofia Coppola movie is. Like, I think there are connections to be made with the behind-the-scenes photos from Marie Antoinette and its influence on Tumblr culture, how The Bling Ring kind of feels Sofia Coppola making a movie about the girls who would be vibing with the cool, aloof, vaguely criminal aesthetic of a Sofia Copppola character, how Lana Del Rey’s early career kind of happens alongside a Sofia Coppola peak, and how Lana’s early aesthetic was very Priscilla Presley-inspired, and how that might have influenced things in Priscilla like the moment where Priscilla is going into labor, but she still takes time to put her fake lashes on. The part where Priscilla is matching her look with her guns felt very Born To Die/Ultraviolence era Lana to me. Somewhere in this connective tissue is that image of Peggy Olsen walking out of her job with sunglasses on while she smokes a cigarette. I have no cohesive theory about how all these fit together, but it all seems connected, and I suspect Sofia Coppola is kind of at the center of it. Especially considering all the talk of “Indie Sleaze” in the last couple of years and the aesthetics of that era coming back into the culture! Sofia Coppola really knows how to pick a moment, I guess! Or maybe I’m crazy! I don’t know! Someone smarter than me please figure this out!
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
BROOKLYN! If you are in Brooklyn this month, my favorite micro cinema, Spectacle, is screening a series of Films of Palestinian Resistance every Sunday this month at 3pm. All proceeds go to relief efforts!
PHILADELPHIA! On November 14th South Philly Autonomous Cinema (run by MOVIE DIARY 2023 special guest Lilly H-A!) is screening 5 shorts on Palestine to help fundraise for Palestine Legal!
I frequently talk about my favorite newsletter FRAN MAGAZINE on here, but this week’s issue is even more my favorite because it was guest written by Tessa! You can check out this must-read special issue of Tessa Magazine here.
For those of you that have read the above mentioned issue of Fran Magazine: Tessa Magazine, here’s who I think is the horse in the MOVIE DIARY 2023 movies this week:
Hail, Caesar! — Eddie Mannix and Hobie Doyle are the horse.
The Killer — The Killer is the horse.
Priscilla — Priscilla is the horse. Elvis is usually the horse, but in Priscilla Priscilla is the horse, which really goes to show that being the horse can really depend on perspective I guess.
If I’m wrong about these, let’s talk about it in the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord!