MOVIE DIARY 2023: HE'S SAD FUNNY.

Hello! We’re really coming down to the end of 2023 here, yikes! I’ve got a couple more MOVIE DIARY 2023 posts before we officially call it a wrap, so thanks for sticking with me. This week I’ve got Lily Puckett joining the MOVIE DIARY 2023 team! I’ve only known her as an online friend for a couple of years, but Lily is absolutely one of my favorite writers on the internet, and she’s brought us a great one today. I’ve been trying to get Lily on here for a while, so this is obviously huge for me. Thanks Lily!

The Last Waltz (1978) - dir. Martin Scorsese
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: LILY PUCKETT

To begin with we should define beauty, which is not so impossible if we try. It’s what strikes you, maybe, what draws you in. It is of course subjective, but we do know that it exists, so whether or not it can exist at the same time in one person without existing for a different person is not that important; either way, it’s real. It’s helpful to have a clue, so here’s one I will say: beauty inherently has an air of surprise. It hits you because it doesn’t look like everything else. The shock is the thing that feels good.

This isn’t relevant to our beginnings, which start, ironically, with After Hours, but to set the scene I’ll say that I watched the movie with my husband, Zac, who is in fact very beautiful. So I know what it looks like. 

When the movie ended we looked up where it fell in Scorsese’s timeline, and this is how I found out something I’d never known, which is that Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is not, as I had always assumed, a tragic romance between two downtown artists which happens to have the same name as the movie about The Band, but actually is that movie, he’s the one who directed it. Obviously the next realization was that I had never actually seen it, and Zac said, well, let’s just watch that scene where Van Morrison is so drunk, that’s so good, and I said okay sure but what are you talking about, why is Van Morrison there, and he said what, do you really not know this, this is all really weird, considering how you grew up, and I said okay well let’s put it on, and we did.

The scene was Van Morrison singing “Caravan.” I knew this from the first note. I have heard this version of Caravan my entire life, along with several other versions of the song, but this one in particular, I have heard all my days. It is hard to explain, truly, what it means for me to say I grew up with this music. Its presence in my life is physical; there was not a time without it. It is rare for me to take a drive with my father in which he does not say “turn on, your rah-dio.” I have seen Van Morrison, also, at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, when he was much older. 

I had never seen this version performed though. I had never seen this video. I knew which person, immediately, was Van Morrison; as I said, I had seen him in person, and the cover of Astral Weeks, and the cover of Veedon Fleece, a favorite album cover of mine. What I did not recognize was anything else I was seeing. I understood, because I now knew what movie this was from, that The Band should be present. But this was not The Band’s song, so maybe, I thought, they weren’t there. So I asked Zac, I said, “who are these guys,” and here he just looked at me and said, what, and I said, who are these great guys, these crazy guys, and he said, Lily, that’s The Band, and I said, “what - are you talking about.”

Imagine that from the time you were here there was a song. This song was made before you were born, that was obvious, but whether or not the song was made for you specifically or not was never clear. It seemed to know you were going to arrive, it seemed to have been waiting for you, it seemed to integrate itself perfectly into all of your days, from your very first breath to the step you took away from home, eighteen years after the first time you heard it. When you hear this song you can time travel, you can be five or eight or twelve or 23 or ten, and you are positive that you are not alone, you can bring others with you, and they can take you to their time too, as long as you both were there. You know that this is because you and this song are not separate at all, you are pretty sure actually that you never were. It is your belief, the longer you live, that you were not built and then sat alongside the song, but built by the song itself, built with the song weaving its way through your bones, layering itself into every part of you that can move. Whether or not you would be able to move at all without the song, actually, is unclear. Either way, the song is inescapable. It lives inside of you, yes, but it lives in your air too. It has never, ever, ever been anything that you did not love wholly. There has never been strife. You have never tried to get it out of your bones. You have tried to get every single other thing, actually, out of your bones, at various times in your life. But you have never tried to remove the song. You are, no matter what, no matter how bad things get, always, always only comforted by the song. 

What would you do if one day, when you were almost 33, you found out, after a whole life, that one of the people in charge of this song, this part of you - that person, it turns out, that person you thought you knew better than anyone - what would you do if you found out that person was actually extremely, mind-blowingly, singularly hot?

“Robbie Robertson is one of the most beautiful men ever made,” my mother texted me, unhelpfully, at least 32 years too late, when I alerted my family to the fact that I had just seen The Band for the first time in my entire life. 

What did I think The Band looked like? It isn’t that strange to me now that I never looked it up. I have heard The Last Waltz my whole life; it makes sense to me that I just assumed I had seen the recording too. It wasn’t just them, either. What’s in my bones is so much music I am overwhelmed. To say that it was never quiet in my house is not an exaggeration, but it’s also true that it was simply never quiet anywhere I went. I didn’t grow up in a commune but my home might have resembled one. How could I have never seen Levon Helm? If you had been around my family at any point in time without knowing who Levon Helm was you would have to assume he was at least my uncle, if not a beloved family friend, someone who had smushed up my hair at holidays. In fact it’s hard for me to truly conceptualize that I have never actually met Levon Helm.

Anyway, in general I thought they looked like the cast of Duck Dynasty. This disparity, between what I assumed were just a bunch of old guys, and the most beautiful man in the world and his equally young friends, was an experience I cannot describe as anything but “insane.” It is one of the craziest things that has ever happened to me in my entire life. 

My family thought it was very funny, very sweet. As it happens, I had already spent much of the year reflecting on my family’s music. Back in the spring I watched Summer of Soul in sync with my mom, who was watching in Alabama. On the phone with her right after it finished I blurted out “I’ll never be able to watch this after you die.” But she understood - that movie, like The Last Waltz, was my mom walking around, sitting in a chair, driving me anywhere in the world, our whole family singing along to “Higher” like it was being performed right there with us in the kitchen.

What does that sort of house look like from the outside? I have no idea, I’ve never been out there. Last summer we were all sitting around in the dining room and my dad was playing the guitar and we were singing along and my nearly-2 nephew was dancing in that stumbling toddler way and I thought, I bet this is what people think our family is doing at basically all times, but it’s sort of true, it really was like that, at basically all times.

Isn’t it strange, then, that I almost never listen to anything these days? During Covid I stopped walking around with headphones on outside, so desperate for snippets of conversation and life outside of my apartment that I walked dozens and dozens of blocks listening for anything, a complaint or a piece of gossip or just a person muttering to themselves that they forgot what they left the house for. I found that I never fully returned to the habit after I heard people normally again. I wondered why and came to the same conclusions a lot of people have come to lately: that the hunt for new music makes me incredibly sad, and somehow the act of reaching back made me a little sad too. 

Talking to my mom the day I found out Robbie Robertson was hot, I was surprised to hear myself say “these things will never happen again,” and more surprised to hear her say, yes, they will, someone will come along. We were talking about not just The Band, but all bands, all the bands who have holed into our bones and guts and blood and made us who we are. But more than the bands, we were talking about Martin Scorsese, we were talking about the idea that these bands could be preserved and cared for and sent out to all of us in this dignified, loving way. That someone could make a movie about a concert because it was something to be seen, not because it was simply another way to get money out of the fans sworn to follow them wherever they go. That music could exist without those fans at all, curated by artists wise enough to know that they can’t make money if no one believes they’re so holy they have to see them in person, ruthless enough to turn themselves into gods for profit. 

For most of my life I believed that she was right. I looked for that music constantly, I became excited when I thought I saw it happening. But whatever glimmers there were are extinguished now. It did not make money to make music like that. And it turns out gods have nothing much more to say to us besides buy, hold, buy, forever, until they die, which they can’t, or they won’t make money anymore. So when it was revealed in The Last Waltz why exactly The Band was quitting - that they were simply retiring - I was stunned. Robbie Roberston was 33 when they filmed it, the same age I am now, and he really just didn’t want to do it anymore. It was exhausting, he had a family, he had more to do than be paid. Can any of us who make art in any way imagine being able to retire while we’re still that gorgeous? Can any of us imagine being able to say that we’re tired and have it matter?

Of course Robertson didn’t stop making music, or working at all. He continued with Scorsese right up until his death this year, ending on the lurking note of the Killers of the Flower Moon score. It’s beautiful and weird and eerie. It’s not something you’d expect someone nearly 80 to write, and 80 isn’t the age you expect anyone to die, it’s still too early. But watching every interview that surfaced after his death, I noticed that his beauty never faded, that his calm never waivered. He was at peace and he was happy. An artist who gets to work on their own terms always is. 

At one point in the concert, Neil Young walks out, a harmonica attached. He is grateful to be there, he calls it a pleasure of his life. He tunes his harmonica, he looks out over the crowd. He begins to play and then stops. He turns towards his friend and says “They’ve got it now, Robbie.” And Robbie just smiles. He believes him. He’s done, I think, one job. He has enough hope in the prospect of more than he can move on. 

I haven’t watched The Last Waltz again, but I have spent a lot of time listening to it, reacquainting myself with walking around listening to anything, sitting at home and letting someone else in via speakers. Still a few nights ago we were sitting in silence when Zac looked up from his phone and said “what do you think ancient Greek music actually sounded like?” And I said, well, I think it’s an interesting question, which surprised him, because, I continued, with most things from the past I assume they were very bad, like food, but I think probably we’ve always been good at making music, so I assume it was very good. He nodded, and I kept thinking about it, and he played a video of someone playing an ancient lyre, and I said, hm. 

It didn’t sound very good, actually, but I still think I’m right. It’s a natural thing for us to do, after all. We make music with our bodies, we dance when we’re just little nephews and can barely stand. What is not natural, of course, is to drive ourselves into the ground to make things that don’t even last, to turn ourselves into impossible caricatures that no one can stand to hear say anything less than a quip set to melody, to let our art be turned into commerce until it makes so very little money that it turns into nothing instead, or really less than nothing, just the eternal dullness of a commercial that sounds very fun but really only exists to lull you into being so comfortable that you never leave. But I don’t think the music that opens us up and crushes us is ever going to go away. And it’s worthwhile to me, I guess, to wait around for the shock of something truly beautiful, maybe for the rest of my life, maybe just for the little while longer we have until all these vultures give up on making money and let us back into our world. 

———
Lily Puckett is a writer living in New York. She has a substack called Scream and a twitter called twitter.com/lilypuckett.

Godzilla Minus One (2023) - dir. Takashi Yamazaki

Conceptually, I think this was a really interesting movie but it didn’t really thrill me the way that Shin Godzilla (2016) did. I really like the idea of a period piece kaiju movie, and I thought the approach of Godzilla Minus One as a more personal Godzilla movie was cool, but I never felt all the excitement and suspense that I was hoping for here. I was honestly kind of surprised by how schmaltzy it all was. Not really a negative, it’s just something I’ve never really seen in a Godzilla movie. It’s surprising and it’s effective, but it makes some of the emotional beats of this movie feel pretty predictable.

Godzilla Minus One follows Koichi, a failed kamikaze pilot who’s living with the guilt of surviving a Godzilla attack during the last days of World War II. He returns home to find that his town has been bombed to shit, and his entire family is dead. On top of that, when people recognize that he was a kamikaze pilot, they get all weird about it because 1) he’s still alive when his whole job was to die, and 2) everyone assumes he’s here because he’s a coward and a deserter. Koichi finds himself somehow in the middle of more Godzilla encounters, surviving each one, but watching more people die only further fuels his survivor’s guilt. If only Koichi could have fired off his gun at Godzilla all those years ago when he first encountered him on that little island, maybe then all these people would have still been alive. I like that this responsibility is left open for debate. At first blush I found myself thinking “Go easy on yourself, Koichi. You were scared, and even if you had fired when you were supposed to there was no way a shot from your plane’s dinky gun could have killed Godzilla.” But then I was thinking, “Well, I don’t know, when he first saw Godzilla they were much smaller and not so full of powerful radioactive energy that gives them the power to heal and blow up anything in their path, so maybe a good blast from a kamikaze plane could have killed them and prevented a lot of this from happening.” Damn, glad I don’t have to live with that question bearing down on literally everything I do, sorry Koichi. But um text me if there’s anything I can do I guess.

As interesting as exploring the emotional beats of a survivor’s guilt story in the context of a Godzilla movie is, at the end of the day we’re here to see a Godzilla movie—we’re here to see grandiose spectacle! Godzilla Minus One delivers that with the scenes where they’re encountering Godzilla in the water, also something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a Godzilla movie. It’s a lot of fun watching Koichi and his crew of ocean minesweepers riding around in their tiny wooden boat, trying to stall Godzilla to give the big naval destroyers time to get in the fight. For a bit there, I was getting excited that we’d be watching something like an aquatic menace movie more along the lines of Jaws, but it didn’t really last as long as I’d hoped. We get some of the expected kaiju stomping around the city and destroying everything scenes, and they’re cool and exciting, but I’ve seen those—I wanted to watch more of the movie where Godzilla is Jaws or Moby Dick and our small crew of guys are grousing and flailing about, trying to figure out how to keep their pathetic little wooden boat afloat while fucking Godzilla is stalking them. This is on me for imagining a better movie while watching this one, so it’s kind of an unfair criticism, sorry.

My other main gripe here is mostly with the confusing politics of the movie. First of all, the big war that everyone is talking about here is World War II, and we’re supposed to be sympathizing with these men who fought on the objectively wrong side of things. We can do some hand-waving here and say that all war, no matter what side you’re on, is awful, and the people who get drawn into it are permanently scarred by it. That’s fine, but the movie feels that it’s less about the abject horror of war and more about fixating on what losing a war does to the psyche of the people who lost it. Godzilla Minus One seems to argue that these men feel less than because they lost their war, and they need redemption that can only come from… winning another war?… It’s a war against Godzilla though, so I guess it’s more… righteous? War is bad except when we need it to feel good about ourselves/if it’s against Godzilla? I don’t know, I think the messaging here was pretty muddy. Like, I guess I get Koichi’s involvement and his obsession with Godzilla and “redeeming” himself from his failure to act, but what about these other guys? I guess gathering all these guys to create a private citizen’s army against Godzilla could be more about organizing your community to protect itself when the government won’t do anything to help, but having that message couched with the baggage of being on the wrong side of a horrific war just sort of makes it feel like everyone needs a win to get the bad taste of losing out of their mouth. It’s weird to me. It seems like the movie is presenting as anti-war, but it’s also saying “Look, sometimes you need to fight a war, and winning that war will make you feel good and make men feel like men again and there are no downsides. Sorry.”

American Fiction (2023) - dir. Cord Jefferson

American Fiction follows Monk, a frustrated novelist who adopts a pen name to write a stereotypically “Black” novel as a goof on how the only Black novels being published are the ones that flatten the Black experience into a set of stereotypes and tragedy porn. His book takes off because an artist of color pandering to white audiences in an industry that’s largely run by white people just works, much to Monk’s eternal disappointment. I usually enjoy anything that likes to poke some fun at the art world, particularly at the realm of publishing, and I was excited to see something that would tackle the hypocrisy of the publishing world’s various pushes for diversity and inclusion that usually just end up being more about publicity, marketing, and optics. The trailers for American Fiction made it seem like it would be doing just that, and to be fair, it does do exactly that in a very funny and sharp way, but that’s also just like maybe thirty percent of the movie. The rest of the movie is a family drama about loss, grief, and caring for an elderly parent, and the strain that it puts on this family. It felt a little bit like a bait and switch, but also, if I’m being real, a full movie-length satire about the publishing world probably wouldn’t have worked out. The thing with satires about the publishing world is that across the board they all have the same jokes and they all have the same grievances. All the jokes come from truth and all the grievances are right but there’s no way that someone not even tangentially involved with publishing wants to sit through jokes about like distributing galleys for awards consideration or how shelving works in chain bookstores. I’ve worked in publishing for years now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting the exact moment that a stranger at a party’s eyes begin to glaze over in my explanation about what I do and how publishing works. This usually only takes a couple of minutes, so I’m sure there’s no way that doing this for two hours would work.

The satirization of the publishing world was really funny, and I thought it worked really well. My whole body clenched during the scene where they bring on the marketing guy to talk about how they’re going to promote Stagg R. Leigh’s FUCK (the book that Monk wrote under his “ghetto” pseudonym) with Michael B Jordan on the cover wearing a tank top and a durag. American Fiction’s looks on the whiteness of the publishing world are exaggerated, but not by much. Publishing can really be exactly that stupid and frustrating. There’s a part where Monk and fellow Black author Sintara Golden are outvoted about awarding the generically named Literary Award to FUCK. Monk and Sintara don’t even want it on the top 10 list, but they are outvoted by the other three white judges, one of whom oblivioulsly tells Monk and Sintara that FUCK should be the winner because “it’s so important to listen to Black voices.”

The rest of the movie follows Monk as he tries to figure out a way to care for his elderly mother after his sister dies suddenly. His sister was usually the one that took care of their mother, but now it all falls to Monk and after drifting away from his family and moving across the country, he’s finding it difficult to get back into the lives of his remaining family. The performances here are all wonderful, and the relationships between Monk and his family all felt very lived-in. I also particularly enjoyed the budding romance between the family housekeeper Lorraine and the old security guard Maynard. It just felt very sweet and touching to see these two older people fall in love, a nice breather from the heaviness of Monk’s struggles to deal with his mother and her alzheimer’s disease.

American Fiction has a lot of very interesting and skillful individual parts and performances; I liked parts of the movie about the publishing world and I liked parts of the movie about the family drama, but as a whole, I don’t think the movie really blew me away. A small part of it might have been the sort of bait and switch feeling that I got while watching it, but mostly I think it’s because the publishing satire and the family drama portions of the movie were all things that I’d seen before. These things were all done well, but I sort of feel like they could have taken things further with either the publishing or the family. I had the sense that just as things on either side of the movie started getting really interesting, it would pull back to something less prickly. On the family and relationships side of things, it all just sort of felt like too neat of a resolution, which I guess is fine, Monk and his family have been through a lot, they deserve a neat resolution. But on the publishing side of things, I think things definitely could have gone further. The most interesting part about the publishing portion was the relationship between Monk and Sintara. Monk initially sees Sintara’s book as representative of everything that is wrong about the publishing world and how it chooses which Black stories to tell, but as they spend more time on the Literary Award judges committee, he starts to see that Sintara is smart and savvy and that she shares a lot of his opinions about how publishing should be approaching Black voices. The two finally have a sit down where they talk about their somewhat opposing points of view on who gets to determine what is an authentic Black voice and how the publishing industry can help or harm the experience of making and consuming Black art. It’s a really interesting conversation, and there’s no clear right or wrong with either of these characters’ viewpoints. However, just as their conversation really starts going, it gets interrupted by one of the other judges who’s just stepped into the room. Maybe that’s purposeful, but it did really feel sort of deflating to think that we were stopped just short of finally getting to the meat of what this movie has to say. I’m not saying this conversation should have necessarily continued, but it would have been nice to have seen more of Sintara’s side of things throughout the movie as I think that would have muddied the waters a bit for Monk and his worldview.

I don’t really want to turn this post into a list of my grievances with the publishing industry because I might as well start a whole other blog if I wanted to go that route, but I did really like what American Fiction was trying to bring to light about the publishing world. Not really sure how to wrap things up here, but I will say that when I stepped out of the theater I thought “Well that was just ok,” but as I’ve been writing this, I’ve been finding more about this movie to chew on. I think it’s a worthwhile movie that just didn’t click with me as much as I had wanted it to, and I’m having trouble pointing out why, but maybe my thoughts will change on another watch sometime.

The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord

Tomorrow’s the last day to get your picks in for MOVIE DIARY 2023’s end of the year wrap up! Make sure to join the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord for all the details!

I just watched Cool Blue Car which I guess came out a while ago? Patti Harrison is a genius, but we all knew this already.

What else has been going on? Mostly I’ve just been recovering from holiday stuff and trying to get all my little tasks done before the end of the year, like I assume everyone else is doing. Hope things are going well for you! See you next time! Actually, wait I don’t think the next post is coming til after the New Year lol. Happy New Year! See you next time!