MOVIE DIARY 2023: I HAVEN'T HAD THAT THING YET, WHERE YOU REALIZE THAT YOU'RE NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD.
Hello! This week’s MOVIE DIARY 2023 special guest is an old internet pal of mine, Abhay Khosla! I know Abhay mostly from when I was active on Tumblr (which is apparently back/never left) and a great stint he had on The Comics Journal. I’ve always been a big fan!
A quick note before we get into it— I have been pretty behind on my writing, so in an effort to get the blog caught up I’ve tried to be a little more fast and loose with some of these, Lightning Round style. Of course, if you wanna talk more about any of these movies, the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord is always there for you!
Slither (1973) - dir. Howard Zieff
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: ABHAY KHOSLA
The best time I had watching a movie this year so far has been with 1973’s mostly-forgotten Slither.
It’s the very first movie of two people. One, WD Richter,who would later write the ‘78 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Big Trouble in Little China, as well as direct Buckaroo Banzai. (Ask an elderly nerd to find out more and/or to be lightly kissed on the nose.) And two, Howard Zieff, who would later direct the Dudley Moore murder-your-wife laffer Unfaithfully Yours, Michael Keaton crack-em-up comedy The Dream Team, and My Girl, which concluded the story of Kevin McCallister.
It’s James Caan’s very-next-movie after starring in The Godfather, where Caan played The Biological Son of the Godfather. (In retrospect, a tricky role). How do you follow being in The Godfather? With a movie called SLITHER… that’ll pack ‘em in! Americans love them some slithering.
They asked Caan later– he said he starred in Slither because he needed the money.
It has fans: Pauline Kael said it has “fractured hipsterism”; Roger Ebert said “little effort is made to explain things”; Bill Hader said “it doesn’t make a lot of sense.” Cinematography by the legendary Lazlo Kovacs. Paul Thomas Anderson’s mother is in it extremely briefly (kind of foxy in a Goldie Hawn sort of way, maybe). Also: a brief appearance from Quentin Tarantino’s acting coach. 1973’s Slither: I read about it on Wikipedia, afterwards.
So, the story? James Caan plays a dumb-but-sweet ex-con who finds out how he can get his hands on a stolen fortune. That sets him off on a nearly-incoherent, ultra low-key, and mostly uneventful road trip through California… where he is (very, very slowly) stalked by a mysterious-but-violent enemy.
The story doesn’t matter a lot– the story is an extremely flimsy excuse to watch Caan interacting with various (often A+) character actors, in a series of scenes that beg the question, “Why is this funny? Wait: is this funny?? I’m laughing but would this be funny to normal people? Are there normal people still??? Do they still have those? Why don’t I know any? What have I done, oh god, what have I done to deserve this life of–”
Slither has two qualities I especially like. One, every character, no matter how minor, is broadcasting on their own frequency. The pleasure of the movie is just watching James Caan trying and failing to “tune in” to the low-ambition schemers around him. Especially James Caan– I think Caan had a way of being frustrated in front of a camera that was the most fun thing about him, maybe his hallmark. When I like him the most, he seems almost annoyed with having to star in a Hollywood movie, at all– cameras and gaffers and craft services?? Jimmy could have been in a grotto! A sexual grotto! Those were very popular in the ‘70’s, sexual grottos and fondue. He had other hobbies and interests!
Two, Caan is stuck in a Classic Movie Adventure. “There’s treasure over yonder”-- that’s a premise that came from a dimestore Western. But none of the characters are Classic Movie Characters and they’re certainly not living in a Classic Movie Adventure Universe– they’re stuck in a “Everything is Broken” 1970’s America where the Old Stories stopped making sense, the Old Songs sound cornball, the Wild West got replaced by Pismo Beach.
I get (maybe unusually) excited when a story “interrogates genre” in some small way, without insisting upon mocking the genre. “Movie stories get life all wrong” seems unsexy and ungenerous, dull and adolescent; but “we don’t get to live in a movie story, not in this world” is heartbreak and poetry, a lament that only could come from someone who once truly believed.
I don’t know where you can watch Slither– I found it on a Random Website, the integrity of which I did not dare to question. It’s not a movie people talk about very often– I only heard about it when James Caan died, and every person who ever saw Slither seized the opportunity, any opportunity, to say “wait, wait, has anyone seen this Thing he made???” Heck, I’m not sure if I can even “recommend it”– maybe it’s a movie you sort of have to find for yourself, to really dig. Maybe Slither needs that joy-buzzer surprise, the craphound delight in finally pulling a little tiny gold nugget out of a dry creek.
But Slither sure is ideal to stumble across– it feels so intentionally like a movie that wants its audience to be co-conspirators. It isn’t a “get them laughing” joke machine as much as a series of Inside Jokes, that it lets its audience be in on. It’s more vibes than gags, a comedy where no one’s being made fun of, especially– the vibe is more “America, huh?? What’s going on with that place? Seems lame.”
Most comedies age terribly, but Slither has a 70’s exhaustion with America to it that felt very current to me. Almost everyone in Slither besides Caan has something wrong with them– they’re mean or selfish or disconnected from the people around them. And it’s not presented as some great mystery why– it’s because of money. It is always because of money.
And James Caan’s character… He isn’t playing the Hippest Guy in a room full of bozos, the way Bill Murray or Michael Keaton did in the later 80’s comedies; he isn’t playing a man-child like Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler did in the 90’s, or an emotionally stunted bro-mancer like the early 00’s comedy stars. (Millennials eventually strangled comedy to death in front of us, with a piano wire, while we begged them to stop– so the comparison ends soon thereafter, unfortunately).
James Caan’s character is just the most tolerable idiot in a room/movie/country full of idiots… tolerable for at least being dumb, trusting, a handsome goofball. That feels timeless, a goal always worth aspiring to, no matter how terrible the context; a character worth cheering no matter how grim the business of America may become.
Himbos: truly, heroes for all times; cinema should belong to them.
Like the Russians discovering montage, James Caan unlocked a great secret to film. In a sexual grotto sometime in the early 1970’s. Which brings it back to what I always say, “Listen to your most sexual grottos, America... Listen to the grotto, for from such humble penicillin-resistant origins comes the truth.” I always am saying this!
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Abhay Khosla is just this creepy very-online guy, you know? A lot of unhealthy going on over there, probably. He lives in Los Angeles, near Hollywood, sort of inbetween Larchmont and Koreatown. If you drive down Melrose and you hit Normandie Ave., you've gone way, way too far east, say-- you're way off track; plus, if you're coming from the westside, you might want to consider taking 6th Street, instead of Melrose.
You Hurt My Feelings (2023) - dir. Nicole Holofcener
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I loved this one. The only other Nicole Holofcener movie I’ve seen is Enough Said (2013), which I really enjoyed as well, so yeah, I think I’m pretty down with Holofcener’s whole deal so far. I guess if you count The Last Duel (2021), which she cowrote, I’m up to three Holofcener movies. I’m going to go ahead and count it because I liked that one too and also it’s still kind of nuts to think of The Last Duel as a Holofcener movie.
You Hurt My Feelings is more in line with Enough Said, which is to say it’s largely a showcase for Julia Louis-Dreyfus to do her thing. Which is great! Her whole thing is great. She’s terrific at those little tics, small gestures, fleeting expressions, the kind of physicality that adds so much to her character and to the humor of both of the movies. She plays Beth, a writer who’s about to publish her first work of fiction. Through some happenstance, Beth overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) confessing to a friend that he doesn’t really like Beth’s new book, which understandably sends her spiraling.
The movie is a kind of exploration of the white lies we tell to those closest to us. It’s very funny, but it’s also kind of uncomfortable in how closely Holofcener wants to examine the idea of “being honest” in our everyday interactions with our partners, our friends, and people in our professional lives. I really admired how the movie really looks deep into the nuances of what we mean when we want someone to be honest with us. The inciting incident with Beth overhearing Don’s true opinion on her latest work also begins to trigger similar questions and drama among others in Beth’s family and social circle, which works to put the central question of what an honest opinion means in different contexts and relationships.
There’s a lot of very funny stuff in this movie, it’s not just Julia Louis-Dreyfus carrying it. My personal favorite was the thread of Don being a bad therapist, and being on the receiving end of unintentionally hurtful honesty from some of his clients. The idea of a bad therapist is already good stuff, but on top of that, Don’s such an interesting and funny character, and it’s fun to see the movie’s central question of honesty contextualized in a professional relationship with clients who are paying Don to help them be honest with themselves.
The movie’s interrogation of honesty and white lies has the potential to unravel all the characters’ illusions about polite interaction in society, and maybe in another filmmaker’s hands it would do exactly that, but ultimately You Hurt My Feelings has a kindness to it in that these people all really do love each other and they want to be better to each other. No one is every truly villainized in this movie, and they really shouldn’t be! Everyone is just doing their best to be a good person, and a lot of times these kinds of situations get to be completely out of their hands because you can’t ever really control how someone will react. Everyone in this movie is just carrying on despite their foibles, and it gives the movie such a nicely sympathetic and human tone.
The Innocent (2023) - dir. Louis Garrel
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
This movie was such a nice surprise! I didn’t know anything about it going in, which was ideal, I think, because this movie takes so many wild turns. I really couldn’t tell where it was going to go next. Like another one of my surprising favorites, Housebound (2014), The Innocent juggles and switches between a bunch of different genres and tones, and it does it so smoothly. One minute it’s a rom-com, then a mother-son family drama, then a heist, and it all works together to make something original and fun.
Abel (Louis Garrel) has suspicions about his mother Sylvie’s (Anouk Grinberg) new, recently released ex-con husband Michel (Roschdy Zem). Abel gets his friend Clémence (Noémie Merlant) to help him follow Michel around and figure out what’s actually going on with him when he says he’s going off to work at his new job. The whole situation is very zany and wacky as Abel and Clémence are not very good at being covert, but as the movie unfolds the tone and the style change, lending some really compelling dimensionality to the characters.
The performances are all top-notch, and everyone has to pull off these really interesting shifts in their characters as we learn more about who they are. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily this way in France, but I think sometimes modern American comedies will lure you in with the laughs and then hit you over the head with the trauma and the pathos, as a way to signal that they must be taken seriously (to be fair, I guess mostly I’m thinking about TV comedy). I typically find that kind of bait-and-switch a bit overdone and sometimes I think that it might be an indicator that writers, directors, et al might be a bit embarrassed about making a lowly comedy. The Innocent does a similar thing, but it doesn’t have the same problems. I never got the sense that it was embarrassed by its comedy because it was so closely intertwined with the drama of it. The Innocent is difficult to place in any one genre because it truly is a blend of a lot of things and I think that’s what makes it so fun and unpredictable.
The standout of this movie for me was definitely Noémie Merlant. I only know her from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Tár (2022), both of which I loved, and both of which I loved her in. I think she’s an incredible actor, but I was totally blown away by how funny she is in The Innocent. I didn’t know she had it in her! She gets to have some compelling dramatic moments in the movie, but for a lot of it she’s playing kind of a silly, plucky screwball comedy-type, and it’s really delightful and charming. She gets all the funniest lines, and it’s really moving to see how Clémence and Abel’s friendship evolves over the course of the movie.
LIGHTNING ROUND! LET’S GET THIS BLOG CAUGHT UP AND WORK OUR WAY THROUGH THE BACKLOG!
Margot At The Wedding (2007) - dir. Noah Baumbach
This movie has such a threatening aura, I felt like my fight or flight response was getting triggered the entire time! It’s a great portrait of petty family dynamics, and everyone is turning in a mean performance— it’s extremely uncomfortable. There’s also a tenderness in it, but it’s intertwined with such a mean-spirited tone that it’s difficult to not be wary of those tender moments. All great performances and a lot of darkly funny stuff where the laughs come from a certain pain that only those closest to you can deliver. It works really well, and I mostly liked it, but I’m not actually sure I had a “good time” watching it. And that’s ok! Movies that you like but you don’t necessarily enjoy are a whole genre, I’m sure of it.
Pickpocket (1959) - dir. Robert Bresson
Very lean, very stylish movie. I loved all the pickpocketing sequences! The ones in the train station and on the train are deftly paced and very tense. I had kind of a tough time understanding Jeanne and Michel’s relationship and what eventually brings them together, but I guess the how is less important than the actual thematic impact. Sometimes two hot people just end up together, who needs a reason?
8 1/2 (1963) - dir. Federico Fellini
That dream sequence is one of the coolest, most stressful things I’ve seen in movies. A great movie about filmmaking, and it’s really cool to see how deeply it’s influenced movies stylistically. The weirdest connection my brain made was that Guido’s fantasy sequences were kind of tonally/aesthetically similar to Ralphie’s in A Christmas Story (1983) (who says no??). It felt a little difficult for me to get into what was actually happening at first since a lot of it sort of felt like a kind of self-referential ouroboros, but the feelings of each scene are very clearly evoked. I remember reading that Fellini was a Marvel Comics fan, and after watching 8 1/2 I can definitely see Fellini reading Peter Parker’s downtrodden ass struggling with the rent, everyone in New York thinking he’s a criminal, and Fellini shouting “Molto bene!”
Infenal Affairs (2002) - dir. Andrew Lau, Alan Mak
Fucking incredible! I loved this. I’ll spare you from my thoughts on Infernal Affairs vs. The Departed here, but I did talk a little bit about it in the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord if you wanna see. The romance between Yan and his therapist was the only part that didn’t really work for me, but the rest of it is absolutely perfect. Tense, stressful, shocking— a real thriller in every sense of the word!
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
I guess I’ve already plugged the Discord a couple of times today. Come join if you want!
I loved this article about the decline of screenshot culture in Screen Slate.
My new dumb thing is I want to get good at Street Fighter 6. Ken and Cammy are my two favorites (I’m sorry if this makes me annoying), and I’m trying to not lean on special moves and learn all the combos for once. It’s hard!
The last three weeks of my life have been consumed by Vanderpump Rules. Please talk about it with me on the Discord because I can’t stand a lot of the Reddit forum talk.
I’ve also been reading Dorohedoro by Q Hayashida. Highly recommend if you want some funny, violent, sometimes very unsettling manga!
That’s all for today! I’ll be back again later this week with more!