The Ringer: All Posts by Scott Tobias2022-04-19T06:30:00-04:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/scott-tobias/rss2022-04-19T06:30:00-04:002022-04-19T06:30:00-04:00Three Films in, Robert Eggers Is Already a Singular Director
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<p>Just three films into his career, Robert Eggers stands as a singular director with a penchant for exacting attention to detail and hard-earned madness</p> <p id="VU77if">“What went we out to this wilderness to find?” </p>
<p id="CBo9IR">These are the first words uttered in Robert Eggers’s debut feature film, <em>The Witch</em>, a line that now reads like a thesis statement for a director whose career feels singular just three films in. None of Eggers’s films takes place any later than the 1890s, and all are rich in the ascetic hardships of people exiled from society and laid low by physical, psychological, and spiritual torments, often of their own making. When William (Ralph Ineson) barks this rhetorical question at the leaders of a Puritan community in 1630s New England, it’s hard to fathom that people who fled England and crossed the sea to practice their faith could be called “false Christians” in a public forum. William is a seeker, willing to put himself and his family through the pain of banishment and isolation in order to get closer to God. He’s also a madman and a fool—but in an Eggers film, there’s scarcely much difference. </p>
<p id="t7dfOM">For 2015’s <em>The Witch</em> and his 2019 follow-up, <em>The Lighthouse</em>, the 38-year-old filmmaker famously immersed his cast and crew in the muck of his own obsessions, striking out to the hostile climes of northern Ontario and Nova Scotia in a bid to achieve bone-deep authenticity. (The $90 million budget for his new film, the superb Viking adventure <em>The Northman</em>, does not appear to have been spent on creature comforts.) Apart from any of their other qualities, Eggers’s films always strive to re-create a premodern time and place so vividly that they feel three-dimensional, alive with the menacing white noise that seeped through the walls before radios and television could drown it out. Close your eyes and you can hear the howling winds and bleating goats; a braying foghorn that harmonizes with clanking, coal-fired machinery; seagulls that shriek with the cursed souls of dead seamen. Open them and it doesn’t get better. </p>
<p id="Lmf23D">In Eggers’s first two films especially, there’s such a devotion to meticulous world-building that the director seems almost reluctantly obliged to move the story forward—or, at least, to satisfy whatever preconceived genre expectations an audience might have. <em>The Witch</em> is classified as a horror film, and earns that label through its chilling tale of Calvinist farmers nestled against a forest of Satanic allure. Yet it doesn’t behave like a conventional horror film, always favoring strange and uncanny events over overt shocks, while limiting much of the violence to a family torn asunder by its own lies, repression, and hypocrisy. <em>The Lighthouse</em> exists within an even less identifiable realm, like an experimental staging of <em>Waiting for Godot</em> that cycles through horror, psychodrama, and black comedy. Eggers may have finally given in to something close to a straight-up Viking revenge flick with <em>The Northman</em>, but he doesn’t seem to think about how his films might be tucked into one category or another. And that’s to say nothing of his unsettling payoffs. </p>
<p id="q2peO7">What Eggers cares about is obsessive, Kubrickian attention to detail, putting faith in the idea that if he invests enough care in the particularities of language or architecture or costuming, the films will come to life long before the plot asserts itself. Interviews with Eggers <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/19/11059130/the-witch-director-robert-eggers-interview">tend to focus on his research</a>, with <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/15/20914097/robert-eggers-lighthouse-interview-witch">an itemization of all the minutiae</a> he gleaned from looking into a specific era. The Shakespearean language of <em>The Witch</em>, a stylized Early Modern English, was inspired by 17th-century primary sources, as were the hand-stitched and woven garments and the farming techniques. When shooting in New England proved too expensive, Eggers chose an alternative spot in Ontario because it had the tree types he needed. For <em>The Lighthouse</em>, he had a 70-foot working structure built on a godforsaken piece of land on the southern tip of Nova Scotia. <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/robert-eggers-lighthouse-influences">The list of influences is long there, too</a>: Jean Grémillon’s 1929 obscurity <em>The Lighthouse Keeper</em>, old code-of-conduct manuals, the region-specific dialect in the work of 19th-century Mainer Sarah Orne Jewett.</p>
<p id="5d3Gdv">The tension in Eggers’s New England in the early 17th and late 19th century comes from the relationship between the hard realities of everyday life and a not-entirely-unjustified belief in folktales and superstitions. When William and his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), take their five children—an infant, a young son, fraternal twins of <em>Shining</em>-like uncanniness, and the eldest, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), who’s developing a troublesome curiosity—to a clearing in the wilderness, the idea is to live in stricter accordance with biblical ideals. As their Garden of Eden starts to bear rotten fruit, they’re thrown into a crisis of faith that owes as much to the cold austerity of an Ingmar Bergman drama as it does any shocker about supernatural phenomena. When the youngest child disappears during a peekaboo session with Thomasin, there’s grief over the boy’s certain death, but the real horror is the fact that he hadn’t yet been baptized. They could bear the loss if they weren’t also certain he was going to hell. </p>
<p id="oL2IQX">Eggers doles out the scares sparingly, just enough for the audience to know that witches do haunt the forest and intend to engulf the family in their gruesome rituals. Even these devout Christians don’t doubt that such forces exist, and suspect Thomasin might be in league with their witchy ways, but Eggers approaches the situation much like Kubrick did in <em>The Shining</em>, seeing these outside stresses in part as a manifestation of deeper problems within the family. Sin trails them like Pig-Pen’s cloud of dirt, and cleansing themselves of it turns into a daily mantra, with William quizzing his eldest son about his “birth sin,” and the boy mechanically reciting words about the “corrupt nature” that dwells within him, imputed by Adam. The infant’s disappearance sows distrust in the family when it should bring unity, and the lies and recriminations spill out from there, as William especially fails to live up to his own standards. </p>
<p id="TVJhlQ">For the Puritans and other settlers, America was a land of freedom and possibility, unspoiled and lush. <em>The Witch</em> is a brilliant countermyth, following the most righteous of families as they carve out their own slice of paradise and yield a bitter harvest in return with rotten corn and eggs, and a Satanic goat known as Black Phillip. It may be just desserts for occupying a land that wasn’t theirs to occupy, or, more likely, a suggestion on Eggers’s part that America wasn’t founded on virtue but corruptibility. Who can blame Thomasin, a virtuous young woman who’s nonetheless targeted for everything that happens, for finding herself susceptible to the devil’s temptations? “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Wouldst thou like to see the world?” Of course! Point those horns to the nearest pagan ritual, Black Phillip! </p>
<p id="id1cAu">Though set almost 300 years later on another barren plot in uppermost New England, <em>The Lighthouse</em> offers a new set of miseries to a pair of cantankerous “wickies” who drink themselves blind while maintaining a lantern on a craggy rock off the Atlantic coast. Eggers again makes salty poetry out of an obscure regional dialect, but the crucial difference here is that it’s often uproariously funny, which helps to counterbalance another heap of terrible misfortune visited upon his characters. No actor has ever looked more in his zone than Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake, a veteran keeper who boozes and farts vigorously when he’s not showering his new assistant, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), with ornate invective. When poor Ephraim gripes about having to swab the unswabbable floors of their living quarters again, Thomas blasts him with an incredible speech about obeying orders, even if that order is “to yank out every single nail from every molderin’ nail-hole and suck off every speck of rust till all them nails sparkle like a sperm whale’s pecker.” </p>
<p id="FUAdbG">For Ephraim, working at the lighthouse quickly turns into a Sisyphean hell of rolling wheelbarrows full of coal up a hill and depositing them in the fiery maw of a furnace, as well as emptying chamber pots, hauling barrels of kerosene, and doing whatever chores Thomas imagines for him. But at least this physical and mental prison comes with a short sentence: In four weeks, he’ll be relieved of duty and move on to the next odd labor. But then he kills one of the gulls that had been pecking at him like he was Tippi Hedren, not realizing that it’s bad luck to kill seabirds, which Thomas claims host the angry souls of departed sailors. Sure enough, the wind shifts and the island is pummeled by a never-ending storm that spoils the food supply and any remaining goodwill between these two men. Ahead lies madness and death, just as it does in <em>The Witch</em>. </p>
<p id="rAsMSc">Beyond the lead performances, there’s much to savor in how far Eggers and his crew go in creating the world of <em>The Lighthouse</em>, which at times evokes the clanking industrial ambience of David Lynch’s <em>Eraserhead</em> and at others a seafaring adventure without the sea or the adventure. It turns out that Eggers and his brother Max, who cowrote the script, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/robert-eggers-the-lighthouse-interview-898545/">based the action on a real-life incident from the period</a>, but the list of sources is much longer, including an unfinished Edgar Allan Poe short story, nautical dictionaries, and inspirational assists from Robert Louis Stevenson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Eggers’s fussiness over the visual texture of the film also led to the use of century-old camera lenses and a B&W 35mm stock that needed to have a satisfying “grain structure.” </p>
<p id="uhgHAU">Stripped to its essence, <em>The Lighthouse</em> is mostly a two-hander that could be squeezed onto the tiniest of theatrical stages, but in Eggers’s hands, it’s a feast for the senses, trapping the audience in multiple confinements at once—an island shrouded in fog and pounded by waves and rainstorms, the fart-filled attic of two men condemned to live with each other indefinitely, and Ephraim’s mind, which is sickened by alcohol and troubled by dreams of mermaids, tentacled creatures, and drowning deaths. There’s a spiritual element to <em>The Lighthouse</em>, too, in a lantern room that Ephraim cannot access; Eggers makes it seem like the gates of Heaven, with Thomas as Saint Peter holding the keys to the kingdom. In truth, it’s more like the glowing suitcase in the noir classic <em>Kiss Me Deadly </em>or the Ark of the Covenant in <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark</em>, a coveted item right up to the moment when somebody cracks it open.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="3aYMfP">With Eggers dialing the clock back to the first century for <em>The Northman</em> and using another imposing site of human barbarity as his backdrop, he seems to be establishing himself as a master of forgotten, nightmarish realms and the people within who struggled to keep the last flicker of their humanity (and sanity) alive. <em>The Witch</em> and <em>The Lighthouse</em> are also reminders of a spiritual hunger that may take wildly different forms, including a deranged goat. The trick is to figure out the false prophets from the real ones, and which curses, superstitions, and unholy temptations might actually be consequential and life-altering. In Eggers’s mortal pits, sometimes a deal with the devil can’t be signed fast enough. </p>
<p id="LnipyH"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/4/19/23030834/northman-robert-eggers-career-witch-lighthouseScott Tobias2020-12-29T06:20:00-05:002020-12-29T06:20:00-05:00The Man Behind Pixar’s Deepest Explorations
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<p>Pixar always has been known for making profound animated movies, but no one has pushed that imperative further than ‘Soul’ director Pete Docter</p> <p id="vLtZ7U">There’s a moment late in the new Pixar movie <em>Soul</em> when Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a jazz pianist, finally performs on stage, realizing a dream he drifted away from for a teaching job in the dim catacombs of the New York City school system. The gig, with saxophonist Dorothea Williams (voiced by Angela Bassett) and her quartet, is every bit as transcendent as he’d imagined it would be—perhaps <em>literally</em>, in that we’ve already seen his music exalt him to the astral plane. After the show, when everyone has filed out into the night, Joe turns to Dorothea and asks, “So … uh ... what happens next?” </p>
<p id="ZIGfm9">“We come back tomorrow night and do it all again,” she replies.</p>
<p id="2liPzz">To say <em>Soul</em> has been building to this small moment understates the vast celestial architecture that makes it possible. By this point, we have learned that the souls of the dead are set on an escalator to the heavens. We’ve met the persnickety bean counter who keeps track of them all on his abacus—or, barring that, in a filing system that would not seem out of place in the bureaucratic hell of Terry Gilliam’s <em>Brazil</em>. We’ve witnessed how new beings are shepherded through a mentorship system via which personality aspects are acquired like merit badges in places like “Excitable Pavilion” and “The Hall of Everything,” before they get “Earth Pass” that allows them to be jettisoned to the maternity ward. We’ve discovered the wasteland of lost souls and the sign-twirling hippie who patrols it in a pirate ship blaring Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” </p>
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<p id="X8cuGI">And so the revelation for Joe, and for us, after discovering how the entire mechanism of life and death operates, is that your dream, should you be lucky enough to achieve it, will soon turn into a job. To believe that performing every night with the Dorothea Williams Quartet will lead to some deeper sense of fulfillment and purpose is a trap that’s taken Joe his entire life (and death) to fall into, much like the open manhole he steps in. Even if <em>Soul</em> is working toward better news about life’s truer and more omnipresent gifts, it’s a sobering point for dream-chasers of all ages, especially in the context of a happy-making Pixar animated movie. And it’s aimed at adults, at least as much as it’s aimed at children. </p>
<p id="Auq3U9">Such is the particular magic of Pete Docter, who has had a hand in nearly every Pixar production since the original <em>Toy Story</em>, but is credited as the director for four of them: <em>Monsters, Inc.</em>, <em>Up</em>, <em>Inside Out</em>, and <em>Soul</em>. Trying to identify a single artistic voice in an apparatus like Pixar is tricky, given the consistency of the house style and the creative brain trust that fusses over every project, down to the last pixel. But Docter has emerged as the finest in the rotation, with a Charlie Kaufman–like knack for using elaborate metaphysical conceits to express profound truths about human desires and frailties and dimension. Just as Kaufman sends Jim Carrey scurrying through his own medically scrubbed memories to argue for the value of failed relationships in <em>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</em>, Docter uses a film like <em>Inside Out</em> to argue for the value of sadness by imagining personified emotions operating a control panel inside an 11-year-old’s head. </p>
<p id="CoRgyT">The prevailing themes of Docter’s work are development and growth, with the worlds of each film functioning like an apparatus for its characters to understand themselves—and one another—a little bit better. It’s not for nothing that his films tend to be the most emotionally gratifying in the Pixar line, because their whimsy is always checked by real, often bittersweet sentiment. He’s probably wrung more tears out of audiences than any other director in Pixar’s rotation—whenever people talk about one of the studio’s films being made more for adults than for children, they’re most likely referring to something of his. Knowing it’s OK for a preadolescent to feel unhappy sometimes may not be a big scoop for preadolescents, for example, but it’s a major shift for parents used to managing their kids’ emotions. </p>
<p id="eURDjD">Of the four films Docter has directed, <em>Monsters, Inc.</em> seems less personal on its face, perhaps because it’s the only one that doesn’t put a human being at its center. But Docter had just become a parent when <em>Monsters, Inc.</em> was made, and the film could be read as him coming to terms with the chaos and possibility that a toddler brings to a neatly ordered world. In the city of Monstropolis, residents rely on a power company that harnesses the screams of scared children for energy, which is a cute way of explaining why monsters are always lurking in the closet. The CEO of the scream factory, Henry J. Waternoose III, warns his “scarers” that “nothing is more toxic or deadly than a human child,” and it takes a babbling imposter named “Boo” to convince two monsters, Mike (voiced by Billy Crystal) and Sully (voiced by John Goodman), otherwise. </p>
<p id="R7nxe2">Once Boo enters the picture, the odd-couple friendship between Mike and Sully turns into a manic form of surrogate parenthood, as their terror gives way to an instinct to protect their young charge. The intrigue within <em>Monsters, Inc.</em> eventually leads to the sort of zany Rube Goldberg finale that was a Pixar signature from the beginning, and Docter is just as adept at handling big sequences like that as he is the emotional beats or the tiny jokes. (Mike actually saying “Hello” when the villain asks him to “say ‘Hello’ to the scream extractor” is particularly inspired.) But the heart of the film is not just about coming to terms with the toxic and deadly threat of parenthood, but tossing away your assumptions about it, too. Of course the laughter of children turns out to be more potent than screams. </p>
<p id="0NmRXq">The first 11 minutes of Docter’s <em>Up</em> are rightly celebrated as one of the most beautiful stretches in Pixar’s entire filmography, comparable only to the wordless majesty that opens <em>WALL-E</em>, which had been released the year before. Within one decades-spanning montage, we witness the deferred dreams and heartbreaks of Carl and Ellie, a couple of adventurers who long to travel to the hidden idyll of Paradise Falls in South America but are met with compromises and setbacks, including infertility. (The way the montage follows an image of Carl and Ellie setting up a nursery with a doctor giving them the bad news is extraordinarily audacious in the context of a mainstream animated movie.) By the time <em>Up </em>actually begins, Ellie is gone and Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) is a lonely, dyspeptic old man clinging to his home, the one thing they were able to create together. </p>
<p id="y7JWlB">Of course, <em>Up</em> gives Carl a late-in-life opportunity to visit Paradise Falls by turning his house into a makeshift airship, held aloft by the colorful helium balloons he once hawked as a salesman. It also gives him the child he never had, a misfit young Wilderness Explorer named Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), who has a sash full of badges but zero experience in the actual wilderness. The touching lesson of <em>Up</em> is that life’s adventures don’t always take the form you might have expected or planned, which is something Ellie understood better than Carl, who needs to drift all the way to Paradise Falls to realize the trip wasn’t necessary. The film now seems like a companion piece to <em>Soul</em>: Both are about characters who come to understand that achieving a long-held dream is not actually the point of being alive. </p>
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<p id="dchVW6"><br>Though Docter’s follow-up, <em>Inside Out</em>, taps into the mind of a character whose age is more in line with Pixar’s target audience, it’s arguably even more directed at adults than <em>Up</em>, which at least has funny talking dogs and thrilling aerial sequences that recall Hayao Miyazaki’s <em>Castle in the Sky</em>. While children may see themselves in Riley, an 11-year-old shaken by a move from Minnesota to San Francisco, the film is actually about Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), the most dominant of the emotions that control Riley’s actions, and a stand-in for parents who are intent on keeping their kids happy. <em>Inside Out</em> goes beyond the moment-to-moment impulses of Riley’s brain to explore other abstract ideas, like the role memory plays in determining who we are and the fragility of mental health (suggested by islands that hang over a precipice). </p>
<p id="YssA6T">For much of <em>Inside Out</em>, Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith) is an annoying burden to Joy, which speaks to parents who become experts at rallying their children out of a funk. Even the sadness that can’t be chased away easily, like Riley missing her friends or having a rough first day at school, require an attitude adjustment, a little of the irrational optimism that Joy brings to her every waking moment. What parents are slow to accept is that children will grow into complex emotional beings, and that Sadness and Joy will become necessary partners, coloring a more sophisticated response to the world. <em>Inside Out</em> may follow Riley through this transitional period in her life, but it’s not a film about her. It’s about fathers and mothers learning that kids develop beyond their parents’ ability to manage them; that may be the goal of parenthood, but it’s painful all the same. </p>
<p id="GxaWcH">Docter is currently the chief creative officer of Pixar, replacing John Lasseter, who stepped down in 2018 following <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/business/media/john-lasseter-leaves-disney.html">multiple accounts of sexual misconduct</a>. Over 25 years, Docter has gone from one of the company’s foundational voices to its defining voice, an evolution that has resulted in films that feel more personal and more inwardly directed. Docter <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/julaug/pete-docter.html">has been upfront about his Christianity</a>, which may not be explicitly present in his work, but might explain his desire to use animation to tackle big-picture questions about the meaning of life and how best people can navigate their mortality. Despite the tearjerking melancholy that often underscores his films, he’s an unwavering optimist about human nature and our capacity to better ourselves. <strong> </strong></p>
<p id="zzQfnL">Though <em>Soul</em> finds Docter treating the afterlife as another one of his byzantine systems, full of little rules and mechanisms for keeping the universe humming like a car engine, it’s also more down-to-earth than any of his films to date. To the extent that <em>Up</em> and <em>Inside Out </em>address their urban setting, it’s to show them as hostile and alienating, the types of places where homes are noisily leveled and pizza is ruined by broccoli. <em>Soul</em>, on the other hand, is a overwhelming sensory tribute to New York City, but a man like Joe Gardner needs death—and his mentorship of 22 (voiced by Tina Fey), the most jaded soul in history—to see the city in a new light.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="Xb7MoA">Docter depicts New York as a paradise of by-the-slice pizzerias, subway buskers, and neighborhood barber shops, the sorts of out-and-about communal pleasures that the pandemic has rendered painfully bittersweet. And yet the fact that we’ve been denied that New York for the better part of the year gives <em>Soul</em> a kind of power that Docter could not have anticipated. Joe runs down heaven’s escalator because he wants desperately to get back to his former life, which is finally coming to professional fruition. What he doesn’t know about himself is that the gig doesn’t matter. What matters are all the things that he took for granted. The best hope for all of us in 2021 is to know, too, what it feels like to come back from the dead. </p>
<p id="LnipyH"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/12/29/22203462/soul-director-pete-docter-pixar-up-inside-outScott Tobias2020-10-02T08:21:11-04:002020-10-02T08:21:11-04:00Kirsten Johnson Wants to Talk to You About Death
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<p>Loss isn’t an easy thing to deal with, but what if you tried to address the inevitable before it happened? That’s the premise of the documentarian’s latest for Netflix, ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead,’ starring her dad.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="EEFknE">At the beginning of her one-of-a-kind cinematic memoir from 2016, <em>Cameraperson</em>, Kirsten Johnson sneezes. It’s a funny kind of introduction to her, but a practical one, too: Even if she’s always behind the camera, this is a film <em>about</em> her. The sneeze lets the audience know that she’s present, and there are periodic reminders of that sprinkled throughout the film—her hand wiping a camera lens, her voice warning a driver that she may ask him to pull over quickly for a shot, her murmuring nervously as a toddler waddles over to an ax buried precariously in a piece of wood. And yet the magic of <em>Cameraperson</em> is that Johnson’s presence is <em>always</em> felt: The sneeze is just our whimsical cue to start thinking about the woman setting up the shot; the rest is easily intuited. She may be invisible, but her gaze—disarming, probing, intense, and empathetic—is unmistakable. </p>
<p id="peOVNJ">In real life, there’s no missing Johnson’s presence: She checks in at about 6 feet tall and has a taste for ostentatious colors and patterns. This year, however, it’s her latest work that’s making her stand out. <em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em>, which premieres on Netflix on Friday, is a “long goodbye” to her father as he struggles with dementia. It’s unsurprisingly affecting, but also stunning in its daring and humorous approach—much of the movie follows Johnson and her father as they playfully stage his death in increasingly absurd fashion, before he ascends to a delirious, candy-colored heaven. But even as deeply personal as it is, perhaps what’s most remarkable about Johnson’s docu-fiction hybrid is the way it taps into a universal experience. </p>
<p id="Hgrbfx">When we met for coffee on the last day of the True/False Film Festival in March, we followed what was then understood as COVID-19 protocol: An awkward elbow-bump, followed by an hour-long conversation at close range. And like so many others, I found myself talking to her about my father, who’d missed his 70th birthday party after a heart attack and was told his exhausted arteries, after multiple bypasses and other surgeries, could hold out for only another five years at most. That was 12 years ago. </p>
<p id="JbiqeI">I share this with Johnson because when my dad finally does pass, the lights will simply go out. There will be no cognitive decline, like Johnson had to experience with her mother, whose death from Alzheimer’s was a key part of <em>Cameraperson</em>; or her father, whose decreasing lucidity inspired their joyous and heartbreaking collaboration in <em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em>. I was curious whether the many fake deaths that populate the film—the freak accidents of a falling air-conditioning unit or stumbling down a flight of stairs—were her fantasy of a quicker ending. What if she didn’t have to watch her parents drift away from her? What if the lights went out? </p>
<p id="65w14l">“Death is always unexpected,” she counters. “Even if you know you’re dying of cancer, or you know you’re dying of Alzheimer’s, how it comes and when it comes, you just don’t know. And I think that’s the power of documentary work. You never know what’s going to hit you emotionally, what’s going to be meaningful. I’ve had hundreds of hours of experience of thinking I know something and then <em>boom</em>, out of left field just completely misjudging a person or a situation. And I love that.” </p>
<p id="ikqfJk"><em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em> is easy to misjudge, too. A documentary about a filmmaker who bears witness to the decline of her dementia-addled father sounds too painful to watch. And while it’s certainly advisable to watch with a fistful of tissues, the miracle of the film is that it’s not only palatable, but often pleasurable, tied to a father-daughter collaboration that reflects the humor, optimism, and lust for life that the two have in common. “I don’t have a wish for the audience’s experience,” says Johnson, “other than wanting to get some laughs out of people. Because I’ve never done that before. I’ve never tried purposefully to make something that would allow people to laugh. But that was one really strong desire.”</p>
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<cite>Netflix</cite>
<figcaption>Kirsten Johnson</figcaption>
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<p id="0S67vT">The mix of staged sequences and intimate portraiture keeps <em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em> off-balance, especially when the two elements collide unexpectedly. There are scenes in which the two Johnsons are out faking deaths on the streets of New York City or traipsing around in a soundstage Heaven, and scenes in which Kirsten guides her father gently through the process of dismantling his life in Washington, like boxing up his psychiatry practice or informing him that he can no longer drive a car. (His resignation to this piece of news is as devastating as any scene in the film.) But Johnson’s camera is alive for those moments when real emotion pierces through the artifice. </p>
<p id="zPe2YL">“The thing I thought I had to do as a fiction director is to pretend to know what I’m doing,” says Johnson, “when in fact you can allow for the not-knowing, and just work collaboratively.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="rKKmC8">Johnson took her own circuitous route to filmmaking. Her parents were Seventh-day Adventists, so moviegoing was not permitted, though as she shares in <em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em>, her father snuck her and her brother out to see <em>Young Frankenstein</em> when they were kids. When I ask about her cinematic origin story, she tells me her father took them to a series of Australian films at the University of Washington because it seemed “educational,” which is how she got to see Peter Weir’s <em>Picnic at Hanging Rock</em> and Fred Schepisi’s <em>The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith</em>. (“My dad even got me into <em>Mad Max</em>,” she says, “but my mom pulled me out.”) She was able to purloin a VHS of <em>Harold and Maude</em> from friends, too, but it wasn’t until college that her tastes grew more eclectic; she was particularly drawn to West African films by directors like Ousmane Sembène (<em>Xala</em>) and Djibril Diop Mambety (<em>Touki Bouki</em>). </p>
<p id="DMydzt">But for Johnson, a bigger formative experience from childhood was watching slideshows about missionaries in the basement of her church. That became an early window into the world outside her own, and raised some questions that she would follow in the years and decades to come. “You would see a picture of people in Papua New Guinea wearing these beautiful feather outfits and then you’d see a picture of them in pressed khakis and light blue shirts,” she says. “And they had been ‘saved.’ And I was seeing those really early on, and sort of saying, ‘But I really like the first outfit.’”</p>
<p id="nUjbnT">Once Johnson grew up and got some distance from the church—or, as she puts it, “access to an education that wasn’t telling me the apocalypse was coming”—she started to pursue her interest in the wider world and her path to a career in documentary cinematography became clearer. She studied colonial Africa and African American history. She lived for two years in Senegal and went to film school in Paris. Then she seized the opportunity to film interviews for the Shoah Foundation, which was collecting the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. It would not be the last time she’d encounter victims of global genocide.</p>
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<p id="vunC91">Though her career as a cinematographer started mostly with domestic nonfiction with a social justice bent, including an early break shooting Kirby Dick’s <em>Derrida</em>, Johnson’s international experience would eventually become her stock-in-trade. When putting together <em>Cameraperson</em> using leftover footage from previous shoots, she included work she’d done for well-known filmmakers like Dick and Michael Moore (<em>Captain Mike Across America</em>), as well as the historic moment, captured in Laura Poitras’s <em>Citizenfour</em>, when Edward Snowden disclosed NSA secrets to reporters in a hotel room in Hong Kong. Yet Johnson’s career also often has led her to sites of historical atrocities in places like Darfur, Yemen, the Balkans, and Afghanistan—or to a courtroom in Texas, where she heard the case of James Byrd Jr., a Black man dragged by chain from the back of a pickup truck. She became a witness, a collector of stories that would exact a cumulative emotional toll. </p>
<p id="PDRebC">The first assembly of <em>Cameraperson</em> was two and a half hours of unrelenting horror. Johnson calls it “the trauma cut.” It was loaded with stories of genocide and rape, glimpses into the worst ward in Nigeria for maternal mortality, and grim monuments to not-so-distant mass tragedy. It’s part of Johnson’s personal mission to bear witness to these events. As she says tearfully on a Criterion supplement about editing the film, “When you see those things, over and over and over again, there is a need to say, ‘I saw that. I saw you. You matter to me.’” But if <em>Cameraperson</em> was to be a true memoir, then she would have to find more of herself in the footage. For that, she turned to editor Nels Bangerter, who came back with a 40-minute cut that proved “how I’m actually a person who’s optimistic, who loves the world, who enjoys my work.”</p>
<p id="WRb8Yr">When reflecting on “the trauma cut,” Johnson explains the stark duality of her experiences. “A lot of things I filmed were [people] in really poor situations,” Johnson says. “But then it can also be hilarious and tender—people surviving and making a way, people with a great sense of humor and a great sense of fashion. And all of that was sustaining and interesting to me, too. I was experiencing pleasure and curiosity at the same time I was encountering this trauma.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="TGbDBN">Those same dualities are a defining feature of <em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em>. This may be a film about Johnson’s father dying, but it’s also a film about her quest to keep him alive forever. Her mother’s reticence to appear on camera kept Johnson from getting footage of her before she was lost to Alzheimer’s—and even then, she proceeded with caution—but her dad would do anything for her, which became an ethical quandary of its own. She knew she wanted a film that would “embody his humor and spirit and soul,” but she also wanted to see what would happen when the lines between life and death, and fact and fiction, were purposefully blurred. </p>
<p id="ErQ27Z">“I wanted to treat the approach as a quest for the unexpected,” she says. “The idea was there was the present, in which he’s alive. There’s the future, he’s dead. And there’s a moment when those two things meet. … And that’s truly a documentary moment, when something unexpected will happen.” </p>
<p id="hKJmOX">Films like <em>Cameraperson</em> and <em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em> are part of the vanguard of nonfiction filmmaking, which tosses out antiquated notions of documentary truth in search of more experimental forms. The common denominator here is transparency: Both films do away with the illusion that there’s any distance between the filmmaker and her subject. Without appearing on screen in <em>Cameraperson</em>—or announcing herself through voice-over narration or even using the <em>titles</em> of the films she’s excerpting—Johnson wants the audience to know that there’s a person behind the camera; that she has a relationship with the people in front of the camera. They’re not subjects. They’re collaborators. </p>
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<cite>Netflix</cite>
<figcaption>An image from ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’</figcaption>
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<p id="LSf7HR"><em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em> takes it one step further by making Johnson’s father a partner in mischief, and by proving that emotional truths—about their relationship, about mortality, about a shared design for living—can surface under any circumstances. The films also give Johnson the chance to engage in an open discussion of ethics: What should a cameraperson do, for example, when that toddler starts reaching for the ax? Or how far can she push her father to participate in this project without feeling like she’s being a poor caregiver, or taking advantage of his willingness to do anything for her? </p>
<p id="NRVxLj">“I’m always looking for a new language,” says Johnson. And part of that search is rooted in the fact that audiences are far more conscious of the camera than they have been in the past, when the fly-on-the-wall illusion that they were watching reality unfold was easier to sustain. “More and more audience members know what it’s like to be filmed and to film,” she says. “They understand more and more that what we see on screen is always a construct. I think that freedom of knowledge is allowing this much more sophisticated language to emerge that is available to both the audience and the makers.” </p>
<p id="Zpjzwp"><em>Dick Johnson Is Dead</em> is that rare combination of intellectually formidable and emotionally accessible, which is a good reflection of what it’s like to spend any time with Kirsten Johnson. There’s hardly a person on earth who hasn’t gone through some version of what Johnson is documenting in the film. And though not everyone has the talent to cheat death through cinematic sleight-of-hand, as Johnson does, they will know how it feels to wish that such a thing were possible. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="KJ0O84">Johnson sees the making of <em>Cameraperson</em> and <em>Dick Johnson</em> as a chance to understand things about herself she didn’t yet know. She paraphrases an Arthur Miller quote about how “it’s the artist’s quest ‘to reveal what has been hidden.’” But her personal quest is a universal one, too. She cracks open the door to share her journeys, but knows the discoveries she makes are not limited to herself. “[The audience] expands the meaning. They create new questions. They inform it in ways that amplify it,” she says. “For me, there is no completion.”</p>
<p id="pDNAqy"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/10/2/21497564/kirsten-johnson-dick-johnson-is-dead-documentary-netflixScott Tobias2020-09-18T08:25:37-04:002020-09-18T08:25:37-04:00The Future of Film Talk Is on Letterboxd
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<figcaption>Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>As the pandemic and expansion of streaming changes how and when we see a movie, one unassuming social media site is positioned as a haven for the film-crit community</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="C5P3pm">One of the most popular reviews ever written on Letterboxd, a social media site for cinephiles, was posted about <a href="https://letterboxd.com/bratpitt/film/fight-club/">David Fincher’s <em>Fight Club</em></a> in early 2018. It was authored by Mia Vicino, a 24-year-old from Los Angeles who posts under the handle <a href="https://letterboxd.com/bratpitt/">Brat Pitt</a>. Vicino writes a repertory column for the <em>Willamette Week</em>, an alt-weekly in Portland, but her entry for <em>Fight Club</em> dispenses with the formalities. She writes in lower case. She doesn’t italicize the title. (If you’re posting directly to the site, you have to put in the HTML code yourself.) There aren’t even periods. Yet this 183-word nugget perfectly captures the film’s turbulent two decades in the culture, where it’s been celebrated as a barometer of masculine outrage and vilified as an instigator of the same. And it’s the type of writing that could have a home only on Letterboxd: a casual, personal shorthand that’s aimed squarely at the cognoscenti.</p>
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<p id="fipFmL">Vicino has been on Letterboxd since she was 19, when she had a developing passion for movies and wanted to keep track of everything she watched. “I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of the stuff I said in 2016,” she says, but the habit of logging titles and reviews, creating what the service calls a “Diary,” has allowed her to track her evolution as a moviegoer—and, to some extent, as a human being. That <em>Fight Club</em> review is a reflection of how our understanding of art can change as we do, reshaped by our own experiences or by the perspective of others, or how it settles in the culture. </p>
<p id="z4CQIh">“The diary aspect is my favorite part of it,” says Vicino. “Just having something that charts your life. For me, the movies and my life really intersect.”</p>
<p id="yYjnuA">“Diary” was one of the words Matthew Buchanan focused on when he and his cofounder, Karl von Randow, were conceiving Letterboxd in the years before it launched in 2011. The other word was “Lists.” Those were the building blocks of the service, and they’re almost embarrassingly true to how the cinephile mind works to compartmentalize the films that pass through it. The common denominator among Letterboxd users tends to be a compulsion to log and order the things they’ve seen, which many of them were already doing using spreadsheets or pen and paper. Letterboxd is a social media site that opens up those habits to public scrutiny, but the trade-off is that it also functions as a vast warehouse of opinion and hard data, an opportunity both to survey reactions to popular films and head down various rabbit holes. “Social film discovery” is how the homepage labels it—a phrase that’s in keeping with the no-frills, unassuming nature of the site.</p>
<p id="3J1qPF">For as long as users have trickled onto it, Letterboxd has seemed less like a dot-com than a utility—something that is simply <em>on the internet</em>, changing so incrementally that it never appears to have changed at all. There was never a time when its presence was trumpeted to the world, no event or scandal that suddenly drew attention to it or led to an eye-catching spike in membership. Most people either stumbled upon it themselves or had it recommended to them by a friend, and its growth to 2.5 million users (1 million of them active) over the past eight years has been slow and organic. Modesty is a defining aspect of Letterboxd: It’s the rare social media site that could be described as self-effacing.</p>
<p id="e6YHP7">Still, even though a site like Letterboxd could never have “a moment,” the winds of film culture are shifting in ways that are favorable to it. The pandemic has hastened the migration from theaters to home viewing, as well as the migration of film criticism from vocation to hobby. Fewer people are watching movies at the same time, and the traditional windows that used to separate theaters, home video, and cable television were already eroding before they collapsed entirely during the COVID shutdown. Whatever non-virtual ways we used to talk about films before—in college clubs or post-screening dinners or run-ins with fellow obsessives—are all but canceled for the time being. Letterboxd is suddenly positioned to be that place.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="eXvkNz"><q>“With Letterboxd, it feels like I can watch a movie whenever and luckily there will be a forum around it right there if people want to discuss it with me.” —Demi Adejuyigbe</q></aside></div>
<p id="aXEYDs">Release dates don’t matter at Letterboxd, and conversations can happen about any film at any time, which gives it an advantage over formal publications, which peg their coverage around embargo dates—often before the general public has access to a film—and quickly move on to the next thing. For the writer and comedian Demi Adejuyigbe, who approaches Letterboxd with a lightness of touch that fans will recognize—from his musical riffs on<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo1zR9Jmiek"> Will Smith</a> and his<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPwG6L73-VU"> annual</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPpUYXZb2AA"> video</a> for<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG7YHFT4hjw"> Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September”</a>—the diminishing significance of when people watch movies is part of the site’s appeal. “One thing I’ve always not liked about watching old TV,” says Adejuyigbe, “is that it feels like the discussion aspect around it is done. It’s like the day a show drops, you have <em>that day</em> to discuss it with people on the internet. Whereas with Letterboxd, it feels like I can watch a movie whenever and luckily there will be a forum around it right there if people want to discuss it with me.”</p>
<p id="3c4vUz">As a source for aggregate opinion, Letterboxd has an advantage over sites like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic because users can draw from hand-picked sources: The information page for a film on Letterboxd gives the average of all ratings on the site and the range of opinion, too, so it’s possible to know whether a title gets, say, three out of five stars on average because it’s a love-it-or-hate-it proposition or just an agreed-upon mediocrity. More helpful still is the chance to look at ratings and reviews exclusively from trusted friends and contributors to the site, who may have a more common sensibility. It’s not the most reliable source for criticism per se, but as a thumbnail sketch of what you might want to see or avoid, it’s uniquely personal and helpful.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="BL6CwS"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Highlights From a Surreal, Remote Toronto International Film Festival","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/9/18/21443840/tiff-2020-best-movies-american-utopia-nomadland"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="WthaWA">Letterboxd began as a side project. In 2001, Buchanan and von Randow cofounded an Auckland, New Zealand, firm called Cactuslab, which remains the parent company of Letterboxd and an active builder of apps and websites, from cultural enterprises like New Zealand International Film Festival to corporate work in health care and accounting. Even today, Letterboxd doesn’t consume all of Buchanan’s time, and his team is still fewer than 10 people. At the time they first conceived the site, around 2008 or 2009, Buchanan was frustrated that there were social tools for sharing music, like Last.fm, or sharing photos, like Flickr, but that film didn’t have a good home. So he created one. </p>
<p id="4dRhdC">“The IMDb existed, but didn’t have profiles,” says Buchanan. “It had no follower model. We really wanted to graft an experience that was a little bit of Twitter and a little bit of Tumblr and a little bit of IMDb, and put those together and see if we could create a space that people would feel comfortable sharing their experience with film.” Buchanan confesses to having the “collector mentality” that defines many Letterboxd users—he used to log his own huge DVD collection on Delicious Library, a Mac OS X software app that arranges titles on a shelf with covers, like a video store. That simple design aesthetic has been the foundation of Letterboxd from the beginning, with entries arranged against a black backdrop like a poster gallery. Click on a poster and a wealth of information appears: the cast, crew, and other production details; stats on how many users have seen it, how many lists it appears on, and how many people like it; a graph of aggregate ratings on its five-star scale; profile thumbnails of friends who have seen it (or want to see it) and their ratings; and a sampling of popular and recent reviews. </p>
<p id="r5iHuJ">Little has changed about Letterboxd over the years. It’s been a site of minor tweaks and refinements, rather than the aggressive, pageview-courting overhauls that have crippled IMDb or Metacritic. There’s something charmingly Old Internet about having to use HTML to italicize titles on diary entries—the mobile app has ironed out that quirk—but also a sense of stability and sustainability that’s absent from <a href="https://www.theringer.com/boom-bust-podcast">the boom/bust model</a> of Silicon Valley start-ups. Because so much of Letterboxd is user-generated and operated on a relative shoestring budget—even the film data is imported from The Movie Database, a crowdsourced site, rather than IMDb, which was deemed too expensive—it never seems like there will be a day in the future when years’ worth of diaries and lists will be vaporized. </p>
<p id="Jh5USL">In terms of monetization, Letterboxd has a model more common to nonprofits. Free accounts are subject to the occasional third-party ad, but “Pro” and “Patron” accounts are ad-free and provide mostly greater profile-page flexibility and advanced statistics. If you want to know the genre you watch the most or the stars or directors whose films you’ve rated highest, that information is there for you, along with the number of hours you’ve spent watching films and the countries you’ve sampled. There are bar graphs and pie charts, and a detailed spread of ratings given and breakdowns of films watched by weeks in a year or days in a week. Statheads may pore over the forensics of their raging cinephilia, but most of the power users I talked to tend to think of Pro and Patrons subscriptions more as support levels than essential services. </p>
<p id="hTWYNY">“There’s value in our data for sure,” says Buchanan, who says that the model supports future expansion, but hastens to add that the site is “fiercely protective” of its members and wouldn’t want to do anything they would consider “creepy.” “People can sniff out bullshit pretty quickly, especially in our community. There are other ways to run a business like this, but this is the way that works for our members.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ZUH1dB"><em>IndieWire</em> critic <a href="https://letterboxd.com/davidehrlich/">David Ehrlich</a> considers himself “the MySpace Tom of Letterboxd.” At over 74,000 followers, he’s currently the most popular user on the site, an early adopter whose reviews have surfaced on the home page for seven years, which in his words are “a self-sustaining mechanism” to reinforce his ubiquity on the site. Letterboxd does have an “Activity” stream that’s similar to the feeds on social media giants like Twitter and Facebook, but it’s mostly a decentralized culture where users curate their own space—who follows them, who they choose to follow—and conversations are limited to the comments below an individual review. Ehrlich is the rare exception, which has turned him into a kind of mascot for the site, and occasionally a target. </p>
<p id="joaa2V">Ehrlich says he’s the type of guy who keeps a messy apartment but orders his Criterion Blu-rays by spine number. “Film lovers are sick people,” he says, knowingly quoting François Truffaut. “I think it has something to do with having affinity for a medium that is so ubiquitous but also so young. There’s still the delusion that you can see everything, that you can really have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire expanse and breadth of the medium, which is not really on the table when it comes to literature or art.” </p>
<p id="e99AKc">The compulsions that Ehrlich describes certainly apply to Sean Baker, the director of independent films like <em>The Florida Project</em>, <em>Tangerine</em>, and <em>Starlet</em>. Since high school, Baker has written down all the films he’s seen—first in notebooks and later on a log he kept in his email. Letterboxd was a user-friendly platform that was “as easy as writing myself an email”—and it could show him whether any of his friends had seen a film in question as well. He likes the chance to communicate with other cinephiles, finding out about titles that he hasn’t seen before, and, in rare instances, connecting with users who link him to obscurities. “I had one filmmaker reach out and give me the original cut of Boaz Davidson’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_Popsicle"><em>Lemon Popsicle</em></a>, which was the original coming-of-age sex comedy, the one that spawned all the Hollywood rip-offs,” he says. </p>
<p id="KhsKG8">Baker approaches Letterboxd as if it’s a personal database. He always notes how he sees a movie—specific streaming services or movie theaters, screener links, and various physical media, often with special features listed—and will occasionally offer a drive-by opinion, though never anything negative. The only film he’s ever rated is <a href="https://letterboxd.com/lilfilm/film/the-florida-project/">a one-star review of his own movie <em>The Florida Project</em></a>, which was his way of announcing that he was deep in development on his next film and wouldn’t be doing much more on Letterboxd than logging titles. “As a filmmaker who’s working right now,” he says, “the last thing I could ever want to do is criticize another filmmaker. So I really just lean toward what I find positive about the movie.” This has led some commenters to speculate on their own. “If I write too little,” says Baker, “if I write just like, ‘I watched this on a DVD,’ people say, ‘Oooh, Sean didn’t like it because he has nothing to say about it.’ That’s not true.” </p>
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<p id="I2Q1xP"><br>The community aspect of Letterboxd isn’t easy to define, because it can vary greatly depending on where conversations take place. Each member can build a mini-fiefdom out of followers, like interacting with a circle of friends, but there’s not a mechanism for calling attention to any one review post. Links can be shared on other social media platforms—the popular Twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/InsaneLetterbox">Lebbertoxd</a> (@InsaneLetterboxd) screengrabs absurd reviews that get referred to it—but it’s mostly a closed circuit for those without a big following. That limits the amount of blowback that regular members can get from strangers, since they’re mostly interacting with a friendlier core of followers. </p>
<p id="WEnIyX">At times, Letterboxd can seem like a million small tributaries without a river, in that it’s better understood as a collection of subcultures than one big, definable culture unto itself. No one is getting paid to write for the site, so the majority of diary entries are drive-by reviews or jokes, or perhaps an isolated observation or memorable quote from a film. Enough likes will elevate entries from average members to “Popular Reviews,” just as likes or retweets would on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites: One popular review of<a href="https://letterboxd.com/thehandmaiden/film/tenet/"> <em>Tenet</em></a><em> </em>quips that director Christopher Nolan is “so scared to flop he designed a movie you have to see twice”; a <em>Mulan</em><a href="https://letterboxd.com/hstrawberry/film/mulan-2020/1/"> pan</a> simply lists better ways to spend $30 (“buy your mom some flowers”); and one user gives Charlie Kaufman’s new Netflix film, <em>I’m Thinking of Ending Things</em>,<a href="https://letterboxd.com/blackphillips/film/im-thinking-of-ending-things/"> an elegant one-word response</a> (“same”). But individual pages also have options for spoiler-filled reviews, which can naturally lead to more substantive discussions of details that cannot be mentioned in formal reviews or bandied about on open forums. </p>
<p id="JKyeTH">If ordinary members want to expose a lot of people to their opinions, however, they usually have to congregate on heavily trafficked accounts like Baker’s, where the comments section can become a free-for-all. For better <em>and</em> worse. Though Baker has interacted frequently with fans on the site, he doesn’t believe the site is removed from the problems that affect other social media platforms. “Somebody is going to have an issue with something you’ve written, or perhaps even what you’ve <em>watched</em>, which is mind-blowing to me,” he says. “I understand we’ve gone through a time when some filmmakers out there are starting to be seen as problematic, and perhaps even canceled by certain people. And therefore, if you watch their films, you’re looked at as supporting these filmmakers. And then suddenly <em>you’re</em> attacked. People literally want to destroy your livelihood because you’ve watched a Louis C.K. movie.” </p>
<p id="FQnVoV">Moderating any social media network is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, and Letterboxd is partially populated with the abusive reply-guys present on other sites. There are community policies in place, enforced by an anonymous volunteer team of moderators who pore through flagged comments. “For every public spat that blows up on Twitter about Letterboxd,” says editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood, “there have been 500,000 things dealt with behind the scenes swiftly and quietly and very deliberately.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="SXiHHg"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="80uguQ">The closest Letterboxd has come to a major public controversy <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/letterboxd-apologizes-removing-inglourious-basterds-fan-review-nazi-1202162197/">is its decision to pull a review of <em>Inglourious Basterds</em></a> from its site because its author wanted the soldiers from Quentin Tarantino’s WWII epic to come back and take up arms against the Nazis currently living in the United States today. The company’s explanation via Twitter—“We don’t wish to promote any form of violent hatred on our platform, no matter which side you come down on”—drew a backlash. There was then <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/letterboxd-apologizes-removing-inglourious-basterds-fan-review-nazi-1202162197/">a follow-up tweet</a> that the people behind Letterboxd were not, in fact, Nazi sympathizers, and an update to its policies to make its rejection of white nationalist ideologies absolutely clear. It was obvious that Letterboxd was guilty of a too-literal application of its moderating policies, rather than providing an unexpected safe space for genocidal cinephiles. But it was a lesson in how difficult moderating a community can get. “Part of the job is to basically wake up and do a sense check of how America is feeling today,” says Gracewood.</p>
<p id="8wWlym">Up until this year, members had no ability to combat abuse on their own review pages, other than to flag ugly comments and hope for the best. Now they have the option to curate their own space. They don’t have to wait for moderators to make judgment calls. </p>
<p id="DvBvaD">Yet it can still be a hassle—the culture of Letterboxd is still messy. (Buchanan estimates that there’s about a 60-40 split between men and women on the site.) Adejuyigbe will occasionally mix it up in the comments, but he’s become more wary of the drain on his mental energy. His <a href="https://letterboxd.com/demiadejuyigbe/film/joker-2019/">two-star <em>Joker</em> review</a> underwent multiple edits in response to a barrage of responses (nearly 500 comments), with Adejuyigbe finally sighing, “Alternatively, I can just agree with whatever you guys think if it means you’ll stop yelling at me.”</p>
<p id="bxxlOd">“There was a time where I was like, ‘If someone’s gong to have a fight, let’s fucking hash this out,’” he says. “Now I’ll block them or make a pissy comment about how dumb I think it is that they’re yelling at a stranger because I didn’t like <em>Joker</em> or whatever.” </p>
<p id="9f5elg">With Gracewood on board as a full-time editor-in-chief, however, Letterboxd has started to discover its voice and shape the conversations that happen on the site. Before she took over social media, the Letterboxd Twitter page was just technical support. (“I was like, ‘You’re not even into movies, you weirdos,” she says.) Now it can encourage film enthusiasm and lead people back to a site that has an editorial voice, with a <a href="https://anchor.fm/letterboxd">new podcast</a>, filmmaker interviews and lists, and calls for crowdsourced list-making “showdowns” on topics like <a href="https://letterboxd.com/showdown/a-league-of-their-own/">underdog sports films</a> or <a href="https://letterboxd.com/showdown/la-story/">L.A. stories</a>. In the past, Letterboxd could seem like a warehouse of opinions; now it has a more human identity. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="erhJaD">Adejuyigbe and Vicino have formed a close friendship through Letterboxd—Vicino makes an appearance in Adejuyigbe’s<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tXUYy3uRgY"> new video for Eric Slick’s “Over It.”</a> When Vicino moved to Los Angeles in January, Adejuyigbe was one of the only people she knew in the city, and they’ve been part of each other’s quarantine pod for the past six months. (“It’s been totally worth the mean comments,” says Vicino.) Though Gracewood emphasizes the “friendships and romances and marriages” that have grown out of the Letterboxd community, the site now seems well-suited to a time when such real-world connections are put on temporary hiatus. In the most literal sense, it’s the safest space for film discussion we’ve got. </p>
<p id="FdOcVb"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
<p id="ZSEw7V"><em>An earlier version of this piece misspelled Demi Adejuyigbe’s name.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/9/18/21444082/letterboxd-film-discussion-site-streaming-moviesScott Tobias2020-08-25T06:10:00-04:002020-08-25T06:10:00-04:00The Birth of the Cheerocracy: A Q&A With ‘Bring It On’ Director Peyton Reed
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eXlX5Ga9DJo_VbTb10ePc3hHPIM=/400x0:2800x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67290602/bringiton.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://juliettetoma.com/" target="_blank">Juliette Toma</a></figcaption>
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<p>Twenty years ago today, cheer captain Torrance Shipman learned that her team had been stealing routines from the East Compton Clovers. Teen movies—and cheerleading—have never been the same since.</p> <p id="GU5VHV"><em>Tied to the 20th anniversary of </em>Bring It On<em>, we hereby dub the next five days </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/8/24/21399621/welcome-to-the-ringer-teen-movie-week"><em>Teen Movie Week</em></a><em>. Dig up your varsity jacket, pull up to your cafeteria table, and re-live your adolescence as we celebrate the best coming-of-age movies ever made. </em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="lZnCiu">
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="hSX3V4">The state of the cheerocracy was not always so strong. </p>
<p id="qpcqQS">Twenty years ago, <em>Bring It On</em> opened to middling reviews and just respectable late-summer box office numbers, the latest in a seemingly endless string of low-to-mid-budget, PG-13 high school comedies. (A year later, the parody <em>Not Another Teen Movie</em> sighed glibly at the trend.) <em>Bring It On</em> seemed easily dismissible as factory-made fluff, no different than the usual foray into lunchroom caste systems, humiliation comedy, and a little light romance. But months later, <em>Bring It On</em> was a DVD phenomenon. A few years later, it was spun off into the same direct-to-video cottage industry that was built around <em>American Pie</em>, which had been a much bigger hit for Universal the year before. (The one difference: <em>Bring It On</em>’s five sequels did not have a Eugene Levy quietly cashing checks.) Now it seems like only a matter of time until cults collide and the 2011 musical version of <em>Bring It On: The Musical</em>, with music and lyrics cowritten by Lin-Manuel Miranda, gets a Broadway revival. </p>
<p id="wqt9UW">So what changed? It’s probably as simple as audiences assuming the worst of a teen comedy released in the dog days of August and slowly figuring out they were wrong. <em>Bring It On</em> wasn’t a radical break from end-of-the-century high school comedies, but it was simply better than them in every respect: bright, stylish, impeccably cast, and extremely funny, with the right mix of earnestness and irreverence in its approach to the world of competitive cheerleading. Working from an original script by Jessica Bendinger, first-time director Peyton Reed wrings all the laughs he can out of this combination of gymnastics, dance, and demented pageantry, but respects it as a sport of high stakes and true athleticism. The film also pivots on themes of cultural appropriation that not only seem unexpected in a cheerleader comedy, but remain pressing and pertinent 20 years later. Conversations about choreography fit right alongside conversations about white privilege. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="lNr8zr"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Teen Movie Bracket, Round 2: Here Comes Harry Potter","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/8/25/21400223/teen-movie-bracket-round-2-results-harry-potter"},{"title":"It’s a Dunstocracy: ‘Bring It On’ and the Magic of Kirsten Dunst","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/8/25/21400662/kirsten-dunst-bring-it-on-career-path"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="MEvXlL">Reed also lucked into casting Kirsten Dunst as Torrance Shipman, the new squad leader for the Toros of Rancho Carne High School, along with several other great actors in secondary spots: Importing much of the punk irreverence she brought to Faith on <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</em>, Eliza Dushku contrasts perfectly with the squeaky-clean Torrance as Missy Pantone, a transfer student who helps the Toros chase their sixth straight national title; Jesse Bradford had starred in Steven Soderbergh’s Depression-era drama <em>King of the Hill</em> as a child, and he’s charmingly low-key as Missy’s brother and Torrance’s love interest; and Gabrielle Union is a revelation as Isis, leader of the Clovers of East Compton High School, whose routines have been lifted by the Toros for years. </p>
<p id="81lkHp"><em>Bring It On </em>has proved far stickier than anyone would have imagined 20 years ago. As a sport, cheerleading itself has grown out of a subculture and into the mainstream, and when the Netflix’s <em>Cheer</em> and USA Network’s cheerleader noir <em>Dare Me</em> premiered within a couple of weeks of each other last winter, there were traces of <em>Bring It On</em> in both of them—the intense friendships, the intrasquad rivalries, the massively elevated stakes of a seemingly frivolous pursuit. For his part, Reed parlayed the success of <em>Bring It On</em> into the retro style of 2003’s <em>Down With Love</em>, and then the hit comedies <em>The Break-Up</em> and <em>Yes Man</em>; more recently he’s claimed a piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the director of <em>Ant-Man</em> and <em>Ant-Man and the Wasp</em>. In quarantine, putting the final touches on a second-season episode of <em>The Mandalorian</em>, he took time to reflect on the making of <em>Bring It On</em>, the current state of studio comedies, and why Sparky Polastri is a prime candidate for a spinoff series. </p>
<p id="ZPjVlN"><strong>You came to </strong><em><strong>Bring It On</strong></em><strong> with a pretty long résumé of directing music videos and TV comedies, but this was your first feature film. How were you able to make the leap to doing it?</strong></p>
<p id="XJrIfo">I was in New York doing the first three episodes of Season 2 of <em>UCB</em> and before I left, I got this script from my agent. He said, “Listen, I’m going to send you a script. It is a high school comedy, and I know you’re into high school comedies.” And I was like, “Oh, what’s it called?” He said, “It’s <em>Cheer Fever</em>.” And I said, “Well, what is <em>Cheer Fever</em>?” He said, “It’s actually ... well, it’s a competitive cheerleading comedy.”</p>
<p id="bkLT3o">[<em>Sighs.</em>] “OK, yeah. Send it.” I admittedly was thinking it was something I would read a few pages of and would not be into it. But I read it, and in the first couple of pages, Jessica Bendinger’s script had that opening cheer, which was almost verbatim to what ended up being in the movie. And I thought it was really smart from the beginning, because it grabbed you, and it confronted the audience’s preconceived notions about cheerleaders right up front, and it was really funny, and also felt like, “Wow, this is really visual. This could be like a mini Busby Berkeley musical number to open the movie.”</p>
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<p id="DBu2gF">So I got really excited on those first couple of pages and kept reading, and then found the specificity of her writing really exciting. It had its own sort of vernacular, but it really examined this subculture that I knew nothing about and it made a case for competitive cheerleading as a sport, with these really memorable characters.</p>
<p id="E3sm5j">Then you got further into the script, and it’s like, “Oh, holy shit, they’re dealing with themes of cultural appropriation and race and gender and all this stuff.” It had some serious themes going on underneath the frothy trappings of a cheerleader movie. It felt like a whole different way into a high school movie. </p>
<p id="NrppHH"><strong>What were some of the teen movies that were most pertinent when you were thinking about approaches to this story?</strong></p>
<p id="EpyCM1">It was really a wide range. <em>American Graffiti</em> meant a lot to me growing up. Later, <em>Say Anything…</em> was a big one. I loved that. I like stuff in some of the John Hughes movies—this was a different tone, but it wanted to sort of incorporate some of those things. But I think the commonality of the ones that I like is how they create specific and interesting characters and deal with the politics and the status system of high school. Jessica’s original draft was almost like the <em>Godfather</em> saga. She was examining the relationship between cheerleaders and the dance squad. There was stuff we ended up having to cut out of the script, because it was just too unwieldy. But she had created this whole ecosystem in her draft and clearly had done the research.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="y0bgPw"><q>“Jessica Bendinger’s original draft of <em>Bring It On</em> was almost like the <em>Godfather</em> saga.” —Peyton Reed</q></aside></div>
<p id="XXXQSb"><em>Bring It On</em>, to me, was about positivity more than anything. I wanted it to be a very hopeful movie. The cultural appropriation thing was really interesting to me, because your protagonist, Kirsten’s character Torrance, is a product of white privilege. The Toros are this well-moneyed, five-time-national-championship-winning cheerleading squad, and she learns that it’s all built on theft. Her first instinct is like, “Let’s hire somebody and maybe cheat our way back into it.” Then she decides that she has to make it right, and ends up making mistakes in that. That subplot was grounded in reality, but it was also very positive.</p>
<p id="QAlVps"><strong>The theme about white people co-opting Black culture is one of the aspects of </strong><em><strong>Bring It On</strong></em><strong> that makes it unique among teen movies. You said a few times on the director’s commentary that you didn’t want it to be preachy, so how did you approach that?</strong></p>
<p id="QWjonu">If you’re making a movie that people expect to be just fun and frothy, and if you’re going to wade into those more serious themes, they can’t feel like they’re coming out of left field. You have to feed them into the thing, and that was one of the biggest challenges of the movie—how to do that in a way that felt real.</p>
<p id="Rro94H">I wanted to create characters that did not seem like mouthpieces for a certain point of view. One of the great things about Jessica’s original script is that it Trojan-horses these themes in there. To me, it was just trying to make all the moments as real as possible, in the writing and certainly in the performances; to elicit all the actors’ points of view about it. Gabrielle Union was invaluable in creating the character of Isis. We talked a lot about issues of race and what we did and didn’t want to do between Torrance and Isis.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Xz8zioWswdFSVAz5OiwuDVn0AIk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21812922/image__2_.jpeg">
<cite>Universal Pictures</cite>
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<p id="oxIsiz"><strong>A scene that stands out is the one where Isis tears up the check. So many films about the relationship between white people and Black people emphasize white charity or white participation in the advancement of Black characters. This seemed like a pretty conscious rejection of that idea.</strong></p>
<p id="zfEdSK">We never wanted to set out to make something that even remotely approached being a white savior movie, because that’s not what the movie was about. We liked the idea of Kirsten’s character having a genuine desire to make it right and to try and level the playing field. And as a child of privilege, her first instinct is to go to her dad and see if the company will come up with the money and sponsor the other team. In her mind, that’s sort of her privileged white girl reaction like, “Oh, I’m going to solve this thing.”</p>
<p id="F3XazQ">Isis doesn’t want charity. [The Clovers] want to get there their own way on their own merits and not be beholden to anybody else. That felt real to us. This is a character learning from another character and taking her first step outside of her worldview and realizing that she’s complicit in this sort of institutionalized racism, and that the Toros are direct beneficiaries of cultural theft. And what does that mean? How do you make it right? Finally landing on this idea that they can’t be the best unless they’ve gone up against the best, and the Clovers are the best.</p>
<p id="ml9CdW"><strong>How much research into the world of competitive cheerleading did you do, and what kind of impact did that have on the movie?</strong></p>
<p id="zJi4hs">Jessica Bendinger was the one who did the lion’s share of the research and put it into the script. But I went down and spent time at these cheerleading competitions and at the cheerleading camps. And San Diego, where we shot the movie, is a huge hub of this cheerleading activity. As we put our actors through this cheerleading camp, I wanted to make sure that we were as accurate as possible, because for me it wasn’t like making a baseball or basketball movie, where I essentially knew the rules of the game. There were all these specifics about how high school cheerleading rules are different than collegiate, all of these things. There are still some mistakes in the movie, but it was all about capturing the spirit of it. I did a lot of research in terms of the scene, the vibe. I really wanted to immerse myself in that subculture—all the positive things about it and the negative things about it—and try and get as broad a view of it as possible.</p>
<p id="KrTH6l"><strong>One detail that made it into the movie is that these big trash cans were set up backstage, anticipating the certainty that some girls would be vomiting before the show.</strong></p>
<p id="OQF8x6">Oh yeah. It’s weird. Cheerleading competitions combine that fierce competitive spirit of any other sport, but also the glamour of a beauty pageant. And like any of these things, they practice and they practice, they rehearse and they rehearse, and then it all comes down to one key performance. It’s just so fraught with tension. It’s amazing in that way. You can feel that energy.</p>
<p id="7DAE6Z"><strong>Was there a casting process for Torrance? Was it always going to be Kirsten Dunst?</strong> </p>
<p id="RiUa22">It wasn’t always going to be Kirsten. Before my involvement with the movie, [producers] had actually gone out to Kirsten, and Kirsten had passed on the movie. So when I first got back to L.A., one of the first things in prep was to meet with Joseph Middleton, our casting director, who had set up a lunch with me and Marley Shelton. I had lunch with Marley and I thought, “Oh, wow, she could be a really good Torrance.” But I remember Joseph Middleton saying, “OK, you should know Marley is up for another movie, so she might not be available.” And then he says, “And you should also know it’s another cheerleader movie.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="mH32rp"><q>“It’s been 20 years, and it feels kind of quaint to me and almost like a minor miracle that we got to make that movie.” —Peyton Reed</q></aside></div>
<p id="ti87HY">[<em>Laughs.</em>] My first reaction was like, “Holy shit, there’s another cheerleader movie? What the fuck?” And it turned out it was this thing at the time that was called <em>Sugar & Spice & Semi-automatics</em>. It later became <em>Sugar & Spice</em>, about bank-robbing cheerleaders, which is very different than <em>Bring It On</em>.<em> </em>But at the time, you’re just thinking like, “How can there be two cheerleader movies in the marketplace?!” </p>
<p id="kY109L">Marley chose the bank-robbing cheerleader movie, so then my first instinct was to go back to Kirsten. Jessica and I had done more work on the script, and I wanted to be able to send it to her and talk her through what we wanted to do with the movie. At that point, she was in the Czech Republic doing another movie. But Kirsten and I got on the phone and talked about it, and I answered all her questions and stuff, and she ended up signing on to the movie, which was fantastic, because you knew from a very young age that Kirsten was such a talented and soulful actor—like, she really went deep and would be such a great anchor for this movie. So that was a thrill.</p>
<p id="NoF6ES"><strong>We’re also gonna have to talk about Sparky Polastri. </strong></p>
<p id="6P2uEL">That character was always in Jessica’s script, with “spirit fingers” and all that. And having just come off <em>UCB</em>, I had been just blown away by Ian Roberts’s improv skills, so he was cast. Jessica and I talked a lot about that character, because in the initial drafts, he was just sort of this kitschy kind of cheerleading choreographer who was peddling these bad routines. And Ian brought this great anger to the character. I like the idea of a guy who thinks he’s Bob Fosse, but he’s really this sort of pill-popping crook.</p>
<p id="vWdkHi">Jessica and I have talked about in the streaming age, like, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to get Ian to come back and play the Sparky Polastri role, but design like a <em>Better Call Saul </em>series, where he’s involved in the seedy underworld as some kind of weird, failed choreographer, with a <em>Rockford Files</em> kind of vibe?” I liked putting Ian’s energy up against these young high school cheerleaders—that always seemed to have comedic potential to me. And again, if you know Ian or know his work, he just throws himself into it. So that was something where he was always there in the script, but when Ian came in, we encouraged Ian to throw as much as he could into that character. </p>
<p id="Ai8wwG"><strong>He’s kind of like the monorail salesman in that </strong><em><strong>Simpsons</strong></em><strong> episode, going from town to town, selling the same broken routine. </strong></p>
<p id="WL9HAn">Yeah. It’s going to be part of the <em>Bring It On</em> Shared Universe. It’s going to go on and just have all these different tendrils in different genres.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/L4sTWHbhB493bAOejstW_dyx2z8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21812923/Bring_it_On___Spirit_Fingers.png">
<cite>Universal Pictures</cite>
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<p id="q7Aj0H"><em><strong>Bring It On</strong></em><strong> was a fairly low-budget studio comedy, which just doesn’t really exist anymore. How does a film like </strong><em><strong>Bring It On </strong></em><strong>get made today, and where might it get made?</strong></p>
<p id="CAeerJ">I don’t think <em>Bring It On</em> would get made at a studio. They don’t have the interest or the ability to make and support movies of that budget. Because they spend so much on prints and advertising and all that, that it doesn’t make it worth it. It’s very rare to see that. It’s been 20 years, and it feels kind of quaint to me and almost like a minor miracle that we got to make that movie. Because I think if that movie were made today, it would be a streaming thing—maybe for the same budgetary range, but it would definitely be a streaming thing.</p>
<p id="0tsEPa">I don’t want to look back on it through some sort of romantic lens, but I did like the idea that I got the opportunity to do a low-budget movie at a studio. And it felt like at the time, they kind of wanted to nurture young talent. In the studio environment now, that’s increasingly rare. Those opportunities are moving to streaming, because I do know a lot of young filmmakers who have gotten a shot at Netflix or Amazon or something, whether they go from TV to do features, or coming in and doing low-budget features. I also think it’s getting more diverse, which is great. </p>
<p id="HXDdfx"><strong>But wasn’t it Mel Brooks who talked about how a comedy needs an audience? That’s something missing from this equation, at least in terms of a bunch of people gathering in the same space to watch and laugh together.</strong></p>
<p id="3xgFeV">Selfishly, as a filmmaker, there’s no greater thing than to be in an audience, packed with people, and have them laugh at something in your movie. It’s the best, and you don’t get that in streaming, obviously. I’d like to think, without sounding out of touch, that there’s always going to be a place in pop culture for the communal moviegoing experience and not just giant blockbuster stuff.</p>
<p id="qwKgXt">But you could see comedies migrating to streaming, even before the pandemic. With studios, unless you have a gigantic name attached to it, it’s harder for them to justify making those movies. So streaming, in some ways, feels like it’s been a savior to comedy. I like to think that there’s going to be some business model that works for the theatrical distribution of medium- and smaller-budget comedies, but it’s a mystery.</p>
<p id="BYp3z5"><strong>Looking back at reviews of </strong><em><strong>Bring It On</strong></em><strong> at the time, I was surprised to discover they were not terribly kind. How’d you take that at the time—and how do you feel about the movie now?</strong></p>
<p id="bvLmIb">I remember initially, [Roger] Ebert’s was not a glowing review. And then years later, he went back and reassessed it, and ended up calling it “the Citizen Kane of cheerleader movies,” which was always hilarious to me. Jessica and I have talked about this over the years, how particularly male audience members would come up to me and say they liked the movie, but would always sort of qualify it at the beginning by saying, “Hey, I know that movie is not for me.” Or, “Listen, I had no intention of going to see a cheerleader movie. But, hey, man, I really dug it.” There’s always that qualifier at the beginning. But it was always our intention to make something that appealed to guys and girls. </p>
<p id="wsOX7P">Over the years, the more serious-minded underbelly of the movie has aged well. But also, a lot of the movies I love are just engineered to be repeat-viewing movies. I always like something like <em>Back to the Future</em>, which I can just watch ad nauseum on TV when it comes on. I wanted the movie to have that narrative thrust. Hopefully, it’s kinetic and exciting, and it can withstand the scrutiny of repeat viewing.</p>
<p id="4mPr1G"><strong>I’m guessing you’ve watched the documentary series </strong><em><strong>Cheer</strong></em><strong>? </strong></p>
<p id="buaDkm">Yeah. That documentary has this creepy sense of dread constantly. You wonder, “How hard are they going to push these kids?” I think there was a character who had maybe like three or four concussions. And at a certain point, you’re just like, “<em>What are you doing?!</em>” It’s nuts. I was watching that with my wife and seeing these kids who had multiple concussions, and thinking “Well, this is not worth it.” And then I thought, “Oh, holy shit. Am I even remotely responsible for this in some way?”</p>
<p id="xueZDQ"><strong>That’s true. The film is cited quite a bit as a touchstone for a generation of cheerleaders.</strong> </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="axjNw0">Yeah. I don’t know if Sylvester Stallone felt that way about boxing.</p>
<p id="zPwpli"><em>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.</em></p>
<p id="j6iM9c"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/8/25/21400018/bring-it-on-anniversary-peyton-reed-director-interviewScott Tobias2020-03-10T11:43:01-04:002020-03-10T11:43:01-04:00The Next Great Sports Movie Director Has Arrived
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<p>With ‘The Way Back,’ Gavin O’Connor continues to hone the intense, captivating style he previously showcased behind the camera in ‘Miracle’ and ‘Warrior’</p> <p id="pE4qIB">When Team USA hits the ice against the Soviet Union in <em>Miracle</em>, a nation is counting on them to shake off a decade’s worth of ignominy. Director Gavin O’Connor has already set those stakes with an opening-credits montage: The invasion of Cambodia, the 1972 men’s basketball Olympic final against the Soviets, the fall of Saigon, Watergate, disco fever, the oil crisis, Three Mile Island, the death of Elvis, Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech, and Billy Beer, the short-lived product of Carter’s “professional redneck” brother. At the time, even the NHL All-Stars were no match for the seasoned and surgical Soviets, much less a patched-together team of amateur skaters funneled mostly from colleges in Minnesota and Boston. The line on the U.S. team recalls Tim Tebow’s scouting report from the late, lamented <em>Kissing Suzy Kolber</em> blog: “Strengths: Intangibles. Weaknesses: Tangibles.”</p>
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<p id="5tKu6M">But it actually happened. The same team that had been embarrassed by the Soviets 10-3 at Madison Square Garden in an exhibition mere days before the Olympics beat them 4-3 when it counted, thanks to a legendary Mike Eruzione goal and a 10-minute defensive scramble under relentless attack. No more crisis of confidence, Mr. President. Team Intangibles had done it. They had made up for a deficit of talent with an abundance of grit. </p>
<p id="i0yGai">All of this underscores the main reason O’Connor’s three underdog sports movies—<em>Miracle</em>, the MMA melodrama <em>Warrior</em>, and his new basketball movie <em>The Way Back</em>—are so much better than almost any other films of their kind: He absolutely believes in this shit. In toughness. In discipline and will. He believes there’s nothing in the world that wind sprints cannot overcome. If he were a basketball coach, he’d be exactly the type of guy to follow a storied college career with a single-season flameout in the NBA. But thankfully he’s not—he’s a film director. And a good one. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="LYDspi"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"What If Ben Affleck Had Stayed on the Kansas Basketball Team in ‘The Way Back’?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/3/10/21172566/the-way-back-ben-affleck-kansas-basketball-alternate-universe"},{"title":"‘The Way Back’ Shines a Light on the Darkness of Ben Affleck","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/3/6/21166841/the-way-back-review-ben-affleck-alcoholism"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="7SnzLp">Broadly speaking, O’Connor has made <em>Hoosiers</em> twice and <em>Rocky</em> once. <em>Miracle</em> is about a ragtag, overmatched team that thrives under a taskmaster of Midwestern stock. <em>The Way Back</em> is like <em>Hoosiers</em> if the Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper characters were rolled into one composite character, a sideline screamer with substance use issues. <em>Warrior</em>, meanwhile, may be about brothers at odds, but those brothers are rooted in the hard-hat Pennsylvania of Rocky Balboa, and the biggest obstacle in their rise through a winner-take-all MMA tournament is an undefeated Russian who pulverizes the field like Ivan Drago in <em>Rocky IV</em>. These types of story beats are achingly familiar to moviegoers, who have seen many humble boot-strappers scrape and claw their way to a Big Game payoff. If you watched the trailer for <em>The Way Back</em> and felt like you’d already seen the whole movie, you’d be right. </p>
<p id="iHw65l">But you’d also be wrong. </p>
<p id="r599eC">O’Connor may believe in miracles, but he doesn’t excuse himself from the hard work of making them persuasive. That starts with an appreciation for tough guys with tender souls, all excellent at masking turbulent emotions until they spill out onto the surface. In <em>Miracle</em>, the scene in the arena after Team USA defeats the mighty Soviets may be the stuff of <em>Sports Illustrated</em> covers, but coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) dashing back to the concourse alone and bursting into tears is the bigger moment. In <em>Warrior</em>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27_H7xumAbA">the climatic bout</a> between the estranged Conlon brothers, Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton), ends in a stranglehold that doubles as an embrace, the only acceptable way these beasts can express love for each other. And in <em>The Way Back</em>, Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck) gets carried home from the bar every night because he’d rather numb a private pain than confront it. </p>
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<p id="Urz1B7">“The legs feed the wolf, gentlemen,” Brooks barks at his players as he puts them through the merciless conditioning drills that will give them the stamina to outlast their opponents in the third period. Here again, O’Connor practices what his characters preach: He loves a good montage, as he should, but he otherwise doesn’t allow himself any narrative shortcuts to get where he needs to go. Tommy and Brendan don’t even cross paths in <em>Warrior</em> until more than an hour into the film, after O’Connor has drawn their past and present in full: Tommy the war hero/deserter who’s hiding out after a troubled tour of duty as a Marine in Iraq; Brendan the suburban science teacher who tries to fight his way out of debt in parking-lot brawls outside a strip club. Both are angry at their father Paddy (a never-better Nick Nolte), who tore the family apart with his alcoholism and domestic violence, and is now clean and sober, but too late for redemption. </p>
<p id="g3QUyX">O’Connor lets these scenes play out at unusual length. That first scene between Tommy and his father in <em>Warrior</em> is as brutal a beatdown as any he delivers on his way through the Sparta tournament in Atlantic City. Looking around at his father’s empty house, Tommy says, “Must be hard to find a girl who can take a punch nowadays.” Paddy absorbs the blow, accepting that he had it coming. In <em>The Way Back</em>, when Jack’s wife (Janina Gavankar) tells him over lunch that she’s seeing another man after a year’s separation, that piece of information is allowed to linger in the air. Jack absorbs the blows just like Paddy, knowing that he’s responsible for his own pain, but his wife still shares a little of the burden, too. Coaching a middling basketball team at the Catholic high school where he’d once found glory may cauterize the wound at the center of his life, but it won’t heal him. </p>
<p id="Yo67nq">The emotional stakes are high in O’Connor’s sports movies, and the slow grind of establishing them are the legs that feed the wolf. There’s not as much excitement in Brooks and his team winning in Lake Placid without first noting the toll all the work takes on their minds and bodies in the lead-up to the Games. Brendan stands to lose his home, his job, and his entire way of life if he doesn’t win Sparta, but he doesn’t have his brother’s brute strength, so every step forward feels like part of a long war of attrition. Jack’s new job leading his alma mater back to hardwood glory gives him a sense of purpose that’s been missing in his life, but it’s not clear what victory will mean for him. Affleck had acted for O’Connor before in his enjoyably dopey thriller <em>The Accountant</em>, but this is a different kind of performance, drawing on stakes he knows all too well. Onscreen and off, <em>The Way Back</em> feels like a 12-step program that may or may not take this time. </p>
<p id="bAH09g">Of course, none of this hard work would pay off if O’Connor botched the action sequences. He cares more about X’s and O’s than the typical inspirational sports movie director, so there’s plenty of talk about the innovative schemes that will surprise the Soviets in <em>Miracle</em> or the motion offense that frees up open shots in <em>The Way Back</em>. But O’Connor is distinguished most by taking the bruising aesthetic of his dramatic scenes into the arena, rarely settling for the types of shots that are seen on a television broadcast. He treats the rinks in <em>Miracle</em> and the rings of <em>Warrior</em> with the same close-up, ground-level, inside-the-lines intensity of men in action, and he isolates the sound of skates slashing through the ice or the “huh-huh” exhales of fighters giving effort. Yet he’s capable of varying his style during pivotal moments: After Eruzione’s go-ahead goal, O’Connor registers the terror of these young underdogs having to survive the last 10 minutes like Steven Spielberg treats the soldiers on the boats in the minutes before the D-Day invasion in <em>Saving Private Ryan</em>. During attempted tap-outs in <em>Warrior</em>, he’ll bring the camera so tight that it’s just tired bodies locked in resistance. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="XwEkWy">O’Connor isn’t defiant of the Big Game formula like, say, the great Ron Shelton, who made a career out of upending sports movie clichés in films like <em>Bull Durham</em>, which ducks out midseason, or <em>White Men Can’t Jump</em> and <em>Tin Cup</em>, which are about how wins are hidden losses and losses are hidden wins. When Herb Brooks gives his pregame monologue (“Tonight, we are the greatest hockey team in the world”), O’Connor <em>wants</em> to send chills down your spine; no one who doesn’t believe in the transcendent nature of sports would make a film about the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team. The difference is that there’s not a whiff of the cynicism or laziness that mars <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Marshall">other</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Road_(film)">films</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Arm">of this kind</a>, which are eager to get to those moments without putting in the work. With the three sports movies he’s made to date, O’Connor has had the third-period stamina to bring them home. </p>
<p id="uXBuaj"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/3/10/21173215/gavin-oconnor-sports-movie-director-way-back-miracle-warriorScott Tobias2020-02-13T08:20:38-05:002020-02-13T08:20:38-05:00‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Is More Proof of Céline Sciamma’s Genius
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<p>With ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire,’ French filmmaker Céline Sciamma is now four films into an already impressive career—and on the verge of a breakthrough</p> <p id="nFr9Yk">Four movies, four moments. </p>
<p id="2Afybs">A shy, inexperienced 15-year-old girl wants to join a synchronized swimming team because she’s infatuated by its star performer, who sparkles above the surface with a placid smile and delicate hand motions. When she straps on goggles and watches the routine from below, she can see the legs churning to keep them afloat, the invisible athleticism that serves as the engine of feminine pageantry. </p>
<p id="9Y9mJH">A 10-year-old girl poses for her little sister. After moving to a new home, she’s decided on a whim to be a boy for the summer. She’s pulling it off, thanks to her ambiguous looks and rough-and-tumble playfulness. Her sister is drawing is a silly doodle, but it’s really the audience who gets to study this beautiful, uncertain creature and wonder who she’ll ultimately become. </p>
<p id="FEfQuF">A blackFrench teenager from a rough housing project in the Paris suburbs gets roped into a girl gang that often fights, steals, and provokes, but also gives her the strength and camaraderie that’s missing in her life. One night, they pool enough money to get a hotel room in the city, put on shoplifted dresses with the anti-theft tags still attached, and lip-synch joyously to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” For a few precious minutes, she can forget everything. </p>
<p id="KAR0S4">On an isolated island in the late 18th century, a painter has been commissioned to do a wedding portrait. But because the bride-to-be has refused to pose for any artist, she has to observe her model in secret, on long walks by the sea and in conversation. One afternoon on a cliffside, wearing a mask protecting the bottom of her face from the ocean wind, the model shoots the painter a look so intense that their relationship is suddenly flush with new possibilities. </p>
<p id="NJs5Be">The director responsible for these moments—from <em>Water Lilies</em>, <em>Tomboy</em>, <em>Girlhood</em>, and <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em>—is having a moment of her own. Céline Sciamma has been a presence on the festival circuit since her first film, especially in queer filmmaking circles, but with <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em>, she’s poised for a breakthrough. In a Cannes competition that included near-career-best work from established auteurs like Bong Joon-ho (<em>Parasite</em>), Quentin Tarantino<em> </em>(<em>Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood</em>), and Pedro Almodóvar (<em>Pain and Glory</em>), <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em> was still rightly regarded as a standout, and it snuck away with Best Screenplay. And while Neon, the company that distributed <em>Parasite</em>, gave it an awards-qualifying release in December, it can now stand alone against the craggy backdrop of mid-February, post-Oscars, and give us a flash of the eyes. </p>
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<p id="Pxj1Hy">Though all of Sciamma’s work has been distributed in the U.S.—and all three of her previous features are currently streaming on Criterion Channel—<em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em> will be an introduction for many, hopefully sending them scrambling back through her filmography. All three of her previous films are connected as her “coming of age trilogy,” each about girls at particularly vulnerable times of their lives, when they’re following an impulse that’s full of possibility, but teetering on the edge of disaster. They’re all about gender or sexual fluidity and the stresses of defining yourself against the rigid expectations of society. They’re contemporary stories, centuries removed from the electric love story at the center of <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em>, but they connect in the gulf between who their characters are expected to be and who they really are. </p>
<p id="l2uD4F">More than anything, Sciamma’s films are about freedom, those precious stretches of time when these girls and women can do whatever pleases them. These stretches can be as long as a summer or as short as a song—or in the case of <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em>, a few unsupervised days on an island. What’s moving and true about Sciamma’s work is that her characters are willing to risk everything for that time, even when they know that “Diamonds” is only four minutes long or that school is coming in the fall or that ships will eventually come to take them back to civilization. They can’t hold onto this feeling forever, but it’s theirs for however long it lasts. </p>
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<p id="nhU0ZV">“Cinema is the only art where you can share somebody’s loneliness,” Sciamma said in an interview at the BFI London Film Festival last year. That level of intimacy is apparent from the opening scenes of <em>Water Lilies </em>(2007), as Marie (Pauline Acquart) settles in to watch the Stade Français Swimmers, though her eyes are fixed on one swimmer in particular. Played by a young Adèle Haenel, who would later play the object of desire in <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em>, too, Floriane is impossibly glamorous to Marie, though her “bad girl” reputation has turned her into a pariah on the team. A third girl, Anna (Louise Blachère), also obsesses over Floriane, but mostly out of jealousy over her boyfriend, who caught her undressing in the locker room and was slow to look away. </p>
<p id="ZSnJBu">For Sciamma, synchronized swimming, the only Olympic sport without a male equivalent, is the ideal metaphor for the performance of being a woman: all makeup and smiles on the surface, made possible by unseen and unacknowledged labors below. Much like Catherine Breillat’s <em>Fat Girl</em> six years before, <em>Water Lilies</em> is about the power dynamics between girls who take their insecurities out on each other, as well as the ruthless assessment of different body types and how that affects their sense of sexuality. No one benefits from these adolescent hangups, not even the conventionally pretty Floriane, who isn’t as experienced as everyone assumes and seems doomed to her own kind of loneliness. </p>
<p id="n0Bmoz">There’s more pleasure in Sciamma’s exquisite <em>Tomboy </em>(2011), because 10-year-old Laure (Zoé Héran) gets to spend most of it as a child at play, even if she has to live with the anxious inevitability of being revealed as an imposter. It’s not quite accurate to call it trans cinema, because so much of Laure’s identity still seems up for grabs, but her instincts tell her to introduce herself as Mikäel to the like-aged kids in her new neighborhood. There’s a practical explanation for why Laure decides to be Mikäel: Most of the kids she sees outside are boys, so it’s a matter of assimilation; and because Laure is an athletic type who like to wear shorts and play soccer, it’s easier for her to assume the gender to which those qualities are most often ascribed. </p>
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<p id="dl1rHr">Sciamma taps into the intuitive innocence of Laure’s summerlong experiment, though she doesn’t turn this question mark of a child into a period or exclamation point. Héran is a discovery, not only for the either-or look that allows her to straddle genders so persuasively, but for never seeming like an actor at all. Sciamma presents a world that’s inhospitable to kids like Laure—even her loving and attentive mother reacts to the big reveal in a less-than-progressive fashion—but the child herself doesn’t betray a whiff of self-consciousness. She’s just acting by feel. </p>
<p id="dg3o2B">Contrast that with 16-year-old Marieme (Karidja Touré) in Sciamma’s <em>Girlhood</em>, who’s painfully aware of who she’s supposed to be at every waking moment. The daughter of an absentee father, Marieme lives with her mother and siblings in a low-income project in a Paris banlieue, but with her mom logging long hours as a hotel housekeeper, she mostly contends with her older brother, who physically brutalizes her. She makes low grades at school, and the future seems to hold little promise. With nary a place to go, she joins a tough girl gang and gets into different kinds of trouble. </p>
<p id="DchYgM">It’s a deflating irony that a lesser film about life in a Paris banlieue,<em> Les Misérables</em>, got submitted over <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em> for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar. A few years earlier, <em>Girlhood </em>was a far subtler and more incisive film that received less attention. Marieme’s entrance into a gang presages some bad turns in her life, but Sciamma doesn’t impose judgment on these girls, who find solidarity and power (and fun) in each other while being stripped of it at home, at school, and in other institutions. Sciamma keys into the isolation of being a young black woman with no quarter, and makes sense of Marieme’s will to push against cultural forces that will push back twice as hard. She’s a diamond in the sky, unnoticed in a place where everyone keeps their head down. </p>
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<p id="dzFPPy">With <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em>, Sciamma takes a great leap forward in terms of scale and ambition, trading her delicate etchings of contemporary youth for a period piece that recalls Jane Campion’s <em>The Piano</em> in its untamed island setting and story of unrepressed passion in a deeply repressive time and place. The phrase “female gaze” has been used a lot to describe how Sciamma develops the spark between the painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Haenel), her elusive subject. It’s hard to define what that means, other than to say that Sciamma has made an explicit and sexy film that’s not a leering one: Marianne and Héloïse observe each other closely, Sciamma does likewise, and the looking becomes its own allure. </p>
<p id="L3jJeu">The one certainty that hangs over <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em> is that Héloïse will do as she’s told and marry a Milanese nobleman, but she and Marianne have a few days when Héloïse’s mother is off the island and anything goes. Though heartbreak is inevitable—the denouement perfectly expresses Sciamma’s ideas of cinema and loneliness—their choice to live those few days without regard to the end is blissfully romantic, like the dusk-til-dawn love story of <em>Before Sunrise</em> if a sequel were never possible. On this island, the rules of society don’t apply to them, so what starts as a period piece turns into a transcendent science fiction where women get to write their own rules for a change. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="sEE0nE">For small windows of time, in these bubbles her characters create for themselves, Sciamma renders their elation in full. Her films may end on a note of uncertainty or heartbreak once those bubbles pop and society asserts its will again, but there’s something deeply romantic about the director’s sensibility. A film like <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</em> may have an air of tragic inevitability to it—a lesbian relationship wouldn’t survive in 18th-century high society, and Marianne and Héloïse don’t pretend otherwise—but it swoons at the possibilities. The girls and women in Sciamma’s work have cruel limits imposed on their desires, but she lets them flourish vividly for as long as they last. </p>
<p id="HEhzqu"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/2/13/21135405/celine-sciamma-guide-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fireScott Tobias2020-02-04T06:30:00-05:002020-02-04T06:30:00-05:00Scarlett Johansson Deserves an Oscar for ‘Marriage Story’
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<p>In a story about divorce, director Noah Baumbach—advertently or inadvertently—puts his female lead in the unenviable position of being a villain. Only an Oscar-deserving performance can overcome such a disadvantage.</p> <p id="X8y2PF">Nicole is being unreasonable. </p>
<p id="jMD6hY">At the beginning of Noah Baumbach’s <em>Marriage Story</em>, Nicole and her husband, Charlie Barber, are sitting down with a mediator in a warmly lit space, both clutching handwritten odes they’ve written about each other. The mediator—and by the way, slapping a sweater vest and five rings on Robert Smigel, the man behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, is a masterpiece of counterintuitive casting—is explaining that he wants to set a positive tone before the inevitable contentiousness that comes with separation and divorce. These are two people who loved each other once, and it’s helpful to remember those good qualities before the bitter recriminations start.</p>
<p id="QRG84k">But Nicole is having none of it. She doesn’t want to read her letter. She doesn’t want Charlie, who likes what he’s written, to read all the nice things he has to say about her. And what’s more, she’s really not liking the conspiracy of reasonability that’s developing between Charlie and the mediator. “Well, I think I’m going to go,” she snorts, “if you two are gonna just sit around and suck each other’s dicks.” </p>
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<p id="oFlZgh">From the onset of <em>Marriage Story</em>, Scarlett Johansson has a hill to climb. As Nicole, she is the instigator of this divorce. It’s her initiative to leave New York for the West Coast to try to pick up the Hollywood career she abandoned when she married Charlie and became the cornerstone of his independent theater troupe. (That detail alone makes her seem like a sellout, underlined later by a scene where she’s on set, cradling a baby-to-be-CGI’d-later.) It’s also her initiative soon afterward to hire a high-end divorce attorney and establish a case for residency in Los Angeles, which blindsides Charlie and puts him at an unrecoverable disadvantage in their custody battle. She’s opted to play this cruel game for keeps.</p>
<p id="Ln0kSM">“No-fault divorce” may be the law of the land, but it’s not a law moviegoers are required or inclined to follow. Much of the discussion around <em>Marriage Story</em> has boiled down to “Who’s the bad guy here,” which leads to further questions about how well Baumbach has balanced the audience’s sympathies between the two parties. And again, in the early going especially, Johansson’s Nicole is put at a disadvantage, because it’s Charlie who has been laid low, and it’s Adam Driver who seems most vulnerable. The grace of the film is found in Charlie’s (and Baumbach’s and the audience’s) coming to terms with why this divorce was necessary, but before getting there, it’s more about why it’s happening to <em>him</em>.</p>
<p id="itFIpQ">Though both leads are Oscar nominees, Johansson’s performance has been the slightly less heralded of the two. She doesn’t match Driver’s emotional pyrotechnics. (Though she comes close.) She doesn’t have the most memorable Stephen Sondheim number from <em>Company</em>. (Though hers is awfully charming.) And fundamentally, <em>Marriage Story</em> isn’t <em>about</em> Nicole. While Baumbach gives her the space to clarify her feelings and motivations, he doesn’t structure the film like a courtroom, where both parties get equal time. Charlie’s perspective is more privileged, leaving Johansson to keep Nicole from becoming the villain. And it’s on Johansson, too, to make it seem like Nicole has made the right choice—not just for her but for both of them, and for their 8-year-old son, Henry. </p>
<p id="iir7gv">Considering the full arc of her career—which is now 25 years old, even though she’s only 35—it’s a bit unusual that Johansson is playing an up-front, assertive character like Nicole, because she tends to take on characters who are obscure objects of desire or who wait in the tall grass for their moment to strike. Her other Oscar-nominated role this year, the mother of a member of the Hitler Youth in <em>Jojo Rabbit</em>, is a typical example: She’s mounted a quiet resistance to the Nazis, including hiding a Jewish girl in their apartment, but she’s a passive mother to little Jojo, who’s taken Der Führer as an imaginary friend. She bets the patience and persistence of her love will be more persuasive than anger and admonition would be. Hitler is the Beatles at Kennedy Airport to him—the director, Taika Waititi, opens the film with a German version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—and there’s no competing with that. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="kMBhQV"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Noah Baumbach’s Movies, Ranked","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/11/6/20950362/noah-baumbach-movies-ranked"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="mUafYD">There’s an essential privacy to Johansson’s characters, who are mysteries to others, if not mysteries to themselves. As Rebecca in <em>Ghost World</em> (2001), she mostly defers to her best friend Enid (Thora Birch) because she hasn’t formed a personality of her own; when she does find herself, she’s heartbreakingly bourgeois. Her detachment is total as a listless college grad who gloms on to Bill Murray’s movie star in a Tokyo hotel in <em>Lost in Translation</em>, and her beauty is treated as the dramatic fulcrum of her Woody Allen movies, starting with <em>Match Point</em> (2005) and bleeding into other films like <em>Girl With a Pearl Earring</em> and <em>The Prestige</em>. This characteristic finally began to evolve in 2013, though, as <em>Under the Skin</em> and <em>Her</em> both recognized Johansson’s secret power: She’s alluring to men right up to the point where she grows past them (or, you know, grinds them into meat).</p>
<p id="arYNBJ">What’s striking about Johansson in <em>Marriage Story</em> is her accessibility and emotional directness. Her money scene in the film, when a lawyer (Laura Dern) coaxes Nicole into venting about her marriage to Charlie and her own stifled dreams, is startlingly unvarnished for <em>any</em> movie star, much less one who’s so often asked to hide her feelings. There’s something thrilling about seeing Nicole come into herself in that scene. At first, she’s worried about what this will mean for Charlie, who’s not going to like the move to L.A., and she doesn’t want any money from him. (Dern’s response to that, a barely floated “Hmmm …,” is reason alone to support her Best Supporting Actress campaign.) But as Nicole continues talking, she literally gets her feet under her. Johansson stands up and starts prowling around the office, reminiscing about the early part of her relationship with Charlie before accounting for her disappearance in their marriage, which served his ambitions while distancing her from her own. She describes the chance to do a pilot as “a piece of earth that’s yours,” and the mockery and jealousy that followed from Charlie, who could accept it only as a check to fold back into his theater company. Though Charlie has had an affair, that’s not really at issue here, which makes Nicole’s motives for a divorce a much harder lift for Johansson than infidelity alone might be. She has to sell the audience on her craving for personhood, which is something that’s expected to be sacrificed at the altar of marriage and motherhood. Johansson does it through tears, but with increasing confidence and conviction. And we have to hold on to that for the rest of the film. </p>
<p id="NGCYFE">The height difference between Driver and Johansson would seem to put her at a disadvantage, but she leverages the situation to make Nicole seem more courageous, finally able to assert herself against this much more imposing figure. Nicole and Charlie’s doomed last-ditch effort to come to an agreement may take time to rescue from the memes, but it’s worth watching again with the volume turned off, just to see how Driver and Johansson handle themselves physically. Charlie gets angry to the point where he fantasizes about her death, and Driver screams and pounds the wall and weeps uncontrollably. Johansson, meanwhile, insistently leans into him and cedes no ground, suggesting that one result of this terrible process is that it has affirmed her instincts and left her in a more powerful position. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="wsmJiD">And she’s in the right—that’s where this whole ugly journey into the legal system eventually leads us. <em>Marriage Story</em> is sneakily optimistic about the possibilities of divorce to usher in new relationships and new happiness, and it wouldn’t be possible if Nicole weren’t doing the hard thing and setting the events in motion. There’s a lesser version of this film where Nicole comes across as selfish and Charlie as the victim of her shallow impulses, but it’s not the one starring Scarlett Johansson. Her Nicole is the director of this uncoupling, and now she gets to be the one with an uncompromising vision. It may not win her a MacArthur “genius grant” or land her on the cover of <em>Time Out New York</em>, but it’s a triumph nonetheless. </p>
<p id="NMPdZu"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2020/2/4/21120988/make-the-case-scarlett-johansson-pulls-off-the-impossible-in-marriage-storyScott Tobias2019-12-17T08:41:20-05:002019-12-17T08:41:20-05:00Does the Movie Industry Need an Unsafe Space?
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<figcaption>Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>If so, the micro-studio Cinestate—and its burgeoning media arm—is here to make us a little less comfortable. Meet the merry band of ultraviolent genre enthusiasts trying to upend independent movies.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="WPgaWk">It’s the last day of shooting on <em>Run Hide Fight</em>, and we’re crammed into the back corner of a hallway in a Comfort Inn in Red Oak, Texas, a tiny Dallas suburb that had once served as the exterior location for David Byrne’s 1986 curio <em>True Stories</em>. This $1.5 million production isn’t large enough to affect hotel business—at one end of the hall, housekeeping is still wheeling in and out of rooms, and, outside the window, a worker surreptitiously glances inside as he clears the branches that have tangled around a satellite. The filmmakers are treading lightly in the few hours they have in this location. At the end of a five-week shoot, everything seems second nature. They quietly go about their business, getting sustenance from a giant communal bag of SkinnyPop and a caffeine jolt from the espresso machine that cinematographer Darin Moran has been manning under his video cart. </p>
<p id="bk1Axl">They can stay quiet for only so long. The stairwell at the Comfort Inn is standing in for a primary location that’s only a single floor, and the heroine, a high school student in terrible trouble, is fleeing armed assailants down the stairs. The film’s producer, a commanding 27-year-old named Amanda Presmyk, examines the lead actress, Isabel May, as she’s about to head into the breach. Presmyk wonders whether the blood crusted under her nose and across her forehead is a “too advanced look for her,” and she fiddles with May’s hair, which wants to be more sculpted than it should be for a wounded girl who’s been fighting for her life. But they can’t get too fussy on a day that began at 1 p.m. and won’t wrap until after sunrise the next morning. </p>
<p id="wex7mo">Every shot on the stairwell includes a blast from the fog machine and frantic action, but they’ve saved the noisiest disruption for last. The weapon master has loaded blanks into a 12-gauge shotgun, and the sound of the blast, reverberating off the concrete, will be loud enough to knock a star or two off the hotel’s TripAdvisor ratings. The biggest concern is that all doors are manned and secured before the take. This is Texas, after all, and there are men in trucks who are fully prepared to return fire in situations like this one. I politely decline the earplugs getting passed around, figuring that I’ve seen Dinosaur Jr. in concert and can withstand an aural assault of any kind. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake: The jolt shocks me a little, even though I knew it was coming.</p>
<p id="jS4Fcv">Now here’s a jolt for you: The elevator pitch for <em>Run Hide Fight</em> is “a 17-year-old female <em>Die Hard</em> in the middle of a school shooting.” For many, the recoil from that premise is probably 12-gauge-shotgun-esque, given the plague of mass shootings that continue to shatter communities across the nation. In fact, the film’s cast and crew paused production for a moment of silence on November 14, when a 16-year-old gunman killed two students and himself at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. The script was passed around Hollywood studios like Paramount, which expressed interest, but writer-director Kyle Rankin admits that, after Parkland, it had become “radioactive.” Everyone I talked to for this piece confessed to initial trepidation about the project, which scared them and <em>still</em> seems to scare them, despite their firm belief that it can play a positive role in the conversation. But in an increasingly risk-averse industry, the answer was a hard “no.” </p>
<p id="Yftf0O">Enter Dallas Sonnier, the founder and CEO of Cinestate, a rapid expanding film production, distribution, and publishing operation in the city that bears his name. He was born Joseph Sonnier IV in the city’s Highland Park neighborhood, where he currently resides with his wife and three young children. But the childhood nickname “Dallas” stuck, which has a tendency to turn mundane conversations into an Abbott and Costello routine. (After landing in Dallas that Friday morning, for example, I was told that Dallas would drive me to set.) But the name makes more sense when you meet Sonnier, a tall, imposing 39-year-old who holds the company together like a gravitational force, absolutely confident that the risks that seem extreme from the outside are, in fact, part of a prudent and cohesive vision. And if there’s one thing certain to raise Sonnier’s ire, it’s being told he cannot do something. </p>
<p id="3PkEne">Not only is <em>Run Hide Fight</em> being bankrolled and distributed by Cinestate, Sonnier is also using it as the launch title for <a href="https://twitter.com/REBELLER/status/1206929313658032129">Rebeller</a>, a new branch of the company that handles what he calls “outlaw cinema.” The Rebeller banner will essentially complement <em>Fangoria</em>, the legendary horror magazine that Cinestate bought and revived in February 2018, turning it into a robust print quarterly and website run by Phil Nobile Jr., formerly of <em>Birth. Movies. Death.</em> Under Cinestate, Fangoria has also been turned into a brand name for the company’s podcasts and horror productions, starting with last year’s Nazi-themed gore comedy <em>Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich</em> and continuing last September with Chelsea Stardust’s clamshell-box throwback <em>Satanic Panic</em>. Next year will bring Joe Begos’s <em>VFW</em>, which pits war veterans against rampaging punk mutants, and a remake of Stuart Gordon’s 1995 film <em>Castle Freak</em> that reportedly hews closely to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="1P5VL1"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Director Who Doesn’t Care What You Think of His Movies","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/22/18276913/s-craig-zahler-dragged-across-concrete-brawl-in-cell-block-99"},{"title":"‘Dragged Across Concrete’ Pushes Buttons Until They Break","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/21/18274818/dragged-across-concrete-mel-gibson-vince-vaughn-review"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="psXExB">Rebeller will handle all genre fare outside horror, which makes it a natural home for a provocateur like S. Craig Zahler, the filmmaker who put Cinestate on the map. All three of Zahler’s films—the ensemble Western <em>Bone Tomahawk</em>, with Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins; the two-fisted jailhouse odyssey <em>Brawl in Cell Block 99</em>, with Vince Vaughn; and the recent policier <em>Dragged Across Concrete</em>, with Vaughn and Mel Gibson—have gotten attention for their hyperviolence and reactionary politics, though Zahler and Sonnier are both cagey about the conservative sentiments critics often read into their work. The singularity of Zahler’s work is harder to dispute, characterized by old-school genre toughness, uncompromising brutality, moral ambiguity, and a gift for slow-burn storytelling and observation that pushes his movies well past the two-hour mark. (<em>Bone Tomahawk</em> and <em>Brawl in Cell Block 99</em> are the shortest, and they clock in at 132 minutes apiece.)</p>
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<cite>RLJE Films</cite>
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<em>Brawl in Cell Block 99</em> (2017)</figcaption>
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<p id="Upd2eU">In addition to <em>Run Hide Fight</em>, which Sonnier intends to distribute through Cinestate in late summer or early fall of next year, the Rebeller flag will also fly over the Universal thriller <em>Till Death</em>, director Aharon Keshales’s follow-up to <em>Big Bad Wolves</em>, starring Jason Sudeikis as a parolee for armed robbery who tries, with great resistance, to give his cancer-stricken childhood love (Evangeline Lilly) the best last year of her life. Less is known about <em>Shut In</em>, about a mother protecting her children from a violent ex, but Sonnier loved the script by first-time writer Melanie Toast, and Cinestate will produce the film for New Line. <em>Till Death</em> and <em>Shut In</em> are both larger operations than completely in-house productions like <em>Run Hide Fight</em> will likely be, but even then, the goal is to square commercial potential with the “unfiltered” grit and intensity of a Cinestate film.</p>
<p id="EfTXbx">To keep the label in line with Fangoria, Cinestate is also launching the <a href="http://rebellermedia.com">Rebeller website</a>, which will mirror <em>Fangoria</em>’s mix of aggregation and original features from writers and filmmakers. The site’s editor-in-chief, Sonny Bunch, is a culture columnist for <em>The Washington Post</em> and has contributed film reviews for conservative outlets like <em>The Washington Times</em> and the <em>Washington Free Beacon</em>, where he was also the executive editor. Bunch likens the aggregation section of <a href="https://twitter.com/REBELLER/status/1206929313658032129">Rebeller</a> to the Drudge Report, which links directly offsite to various publications, and he plans an ambitious menu of essays, features, and retrospective pieces that fit within the site’s conceit. Bunch’s <a href="https://www.rebellermedia.com/original/outlaw-cinema-and-beyond">opening-day manifesto on “Outlaw Cinema”</a> clarifies what is and isn’t “a Rebeller film”—of the recent war movies, for example, <em>Midway</em> doesn’t qualify but the action-oriented <em>1917</em> does—though I got the impression from several people at Cinestate that Lee Marvin is a patron saint.</p>
<p id="czamRQ">The idea behind Rebeller the site and production label—along with Fangoria the magazine, site, and production label—is an integrated brand reinforcement, with the site as a daily hub for fans of hardcore genre filmmaking. An unsafe safe space, if you will. The communities that grow around Rebeller and Fangoria become the core audience for the films that Cinestate releases and those releases, in turn, bring viewers back to Rebeller and Fangoria. Launch-day features on the site include part one of <a href="https://www.rebellermedia.com/original/african-american-cinema-and-white-american-cinema-sounds-like-self-discrimination-if-you-buy-into-this-idea">a two-parter by blaxploitation legend Fred “The Hammer” Williamson</a> on getting into the movie business, and a piece by <a href="https://www.rebellermedia.com/original/dallas-on-wwe-stars">Sonnier on producing nine Stone Cold Steve Austin movies</a> in four years. (Some of them, it turns out, were not so great.)</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="K7ozii"><q>“There are movies made for everyone, and Disney makes them and they make them very well and they make a ton of money with them. [Cinestate’s] movies aren’t for everyone. They’re going to appeal to a select—I will say ‘discerning’—audience, and hopefully they’ll enjoy it and spread the word.” —Sonny Bunch, RebellerMedia’s editor-in-chief</q></aside></div>
<p id="fjYVbZ">Bunch has more essays lined up by critics like Sheila O’Malley and Abbey Bender, filmmakers like Zahler and Fred Raskin, who edited <em>Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood</em>, and some regular columnists to be named later. He’s also cohosting a movie-review riff on the “Left, Right, & Center” political podcast called “Across the Movie Aisle” with the <em>Post</em>’s Alyssa Rosenberg, Bunch, and <em>Reason</em>’s Peter Suderman as left, right, and center, respectively. (“I’m all about overcoming ideological barriers, right?” Bunch jokes. “By mutual artistic appreciation.”) Though Bunch is known for poking at liberal cultural perspectives in print and <a href="https://twitter.com/SonnyBunch">on Twitter</a>, he confesses to having grown tired of the “unpleasantness” of the D.C. political scene. He’s always considered himself a cinephile and a critic first, and Rebeller is giving him the chance to build a sensibility-driven site from the ground up.</p>
<p id="HvreQm">“There are movies made for everyone,” says Bunch, “and Disney makes them and they make them very well and they make a ton of money with them. [Cinestate’s] movies aren’t for everyone. They’re going to appeal to a select—I will say ‘discerning’—audience, and hopefully they’ll enjoy it and spread the word. Every once in a while, when I’m feeling a little like, ‘What am I doing here?,’ I just throw <em>Bone Tomahawk</em> into Twitter search and see people talking about it, years later.” </p>
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<cite>RLJ Entertainment</cite>
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<em>Bone Tomahawk</em> (2015)</figcaption>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="mTCTsi">The Cinestate office occupies half of a modest two-story in a row of small brick buildings in Old East Dallas, but the space doesn’t seem likely to accommodate it for long. Even with <em>Run Hide Fight</em> shooting half an hour away, every corner of the place is occupied: Nobile and his managing editor, Meredith Borders, have improvised a space for themselves to put the finishing touches on the new print edition of <em>Fangoria</em>, and I’m introduced to an accountant, an analytics person, and an important gatekeeper named Preston Fassel, who’s first line of defense on the screenplays that pass through Cinestate. The walls are festooned with beautiful Mondo posters for films like <em>The Shining</em> and <em>The Cabin in the Woods</em>, and the <em>Fangoria</em> purchase has given Cinestate its own version of the Criterion Closet, where all the back issues are neatly stored and sometimes signed by visitors like Tony Todd, who played the original Candyman. </p>
<p id="Vk0DEp">In the back of the first floor, one corner room, presided over by a still-boxed Chucky doll and other props and memorabilia, there’s an expensive-looking sound board and microphones set up for the company’s <a href="https://audioboom.com/channel/FANGORIA">podcasting network</a>, which currently includes shows like <em>Post Mortem</em>, hosted by director Mick Garris, and <em>The Narrow Caves</em>, an audio horror story written by Zahler. The other corner room contains decades of press kits, slides, and other promotional materials from the <em>Fangoria </em>archives. When Cinestate bought Fangoria, Sonnier tells me, these assets were stacked floor to ceiling in storage closets on Long Island, and movers dumped them into the room. “It took us, no shit, a year to get through it all.” </p>
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<p id="9pxMjR">The Cinestate staff likes to plunder the archive for treasures, and today a slide projector is full of stills from <em>The Lost Boys</em>, a film with special significance for Sonnier. His parents were extremely permissive of his moviegoing habit from a young age, but they wouldn’t let the 7-year-old Sonnier see <em>The Lost Boys</em>—which, in keeping with his grown-up aversion to the word “no,” invited an obsession. He liked action movies as a kid, not just the new films by Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the low-budget genre fare from companies like Full Moon Features or Cannon Films, which had a rawer aesthetic that Cinestate seeks to emulate. As a producer, Sonnier expresses equal admiration for Roger Corman and Jerry Bruckheimer: Like Corman, he’s refining a formula to eke out profits on low-budget, director-driven exploitation films, but Bruckheimer’s commercial packaging and populist instincts have him thinking bigger.</p>
<p id="5LRijk">In the early part of Sonnier’s career, he seemed firmly on the Hollywood track. He lived in Los Angeles for 16 years, starting with four at the USC film and business school before cutting his teeth at the United Talent Agency and eventually getting into management, because he wanted closer access to the production side. Though he managed several huge talents in the making—Greta Gerwig was a client, as was future <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/2/2/18206883/leslye-headland-russian-doll-bachelorette"><em>Russian Doll</em> cocreator Leslye Headland</a>—he had always felt like “a man on Mars” in L.A., and he was feeling creatively restless. </p>
<p id="uV1qCF">Sonnier makes decisions on instinct, and his instincts were telling him that Zahler’s script for <em>Bone Tomahawk</em>, a gruesome Western about a posse that tries to rescue captives from savage cave-dwellers, was the way forward. He’d managed the prolific Zahler through 25 scripts for films and TV pilots that were sold but never produced, in part because he was not inclined to take studio notes. “He wasn’t going to dilute anything or shorten it or cut a scene,” says Sonnier, “because everything’s a domino to him, and if one drops, the whole thing falls apart.” For years Sonnier and Zahler tried to get <em>Bone Tomahawk</em> off the ground, and Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins were attached, but financiers kept passing. </p>
<p id="PCwEiJ">Eventually, when Russell was about to pull away, Sonnier cobbled together money from a U.K. production company called the Fyzz, took out a personal loan, and mortgaged his house to get <em>Bone Tomahawk</em> made. The gamble paid off: The film sold to RLJ Entertainment for $2 million on a $1.8 million budget, and made much more on the back end, enough for Sonnier to save his house and plot a return to his hometown, where he could turn Cinestate into a renegade outfit between the coasts. It also created a rough business model for the company, so long as budgets are low. Except you’re not supposed to have an independent movie studio in Texas. You’re not supposed to revive a print magazine in the 2010s. You’re not supposed to make a movie with Mel Gibson. You’re not supposed to have a theatrical run for low-budget genre movies anymore, which Sonnier intends to do for Cinestate releases. And you’re probably not supposed to launch a new label with a daily film site and a <em>Die Hard</em>–style thriller set in the middle of a school shooting.</p>
<p id="8keDoc">Sonnier is convinced there’s an audience eager for the types of risky, hard-edged films that don’t have a natural home at multiplexes or arthouses and don’t fit into the glossy ethos of streaming services. “We will put our money where our mouth is and prove it,” he says. “Or die trying.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="493mru">A lot of Sonnier’s counterintuitive impulses are hard to understand, but the tragedy at the center of his life makes them all the more confounding. Within the space of two years nearly to the day, in 2010 and 2012, Sonnier lost both his parents to separate incidents of domestic gun violence. Though he remembered a happy upbringing with his younger brother and a neighborhood friend who would become an unofficial member of the family, his parents got divorced when he was a young adult. His mother, Becky Gallegos, had remarried and relocated to the town of Fredericksburg in central Texas, but she was unhappy with her second husband and announced that she planned to divorce him. As she was packing her bags, he drank a bottle of Jack Daniels, shot the family dog, and killed her before turning the gun on himself.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="V7XvS5"><q>“We will put our money where our mouth is and prove it. Or die trying.” —Dallas Sonnier, Cinestate founder and CEO</q></aside></div>
<p id="oG7PKw">His father’s murder was even more complicated. Bachelorhood had been fruitful for Dr. Joseph Sonnier, a pathologist, but he wasn’t aware that his new girlfriend had been the other woman in an extramarital affair that had broken up a marriage. When the man who’d left his wife proposed to her, she turned him down, because she had met Sonnier’s father in ballroom dance class and fallen for him. Sonnier says his dad came home one night to find a 6-foot-5, 380-pound stranger asleep on a lawn chair in his backyard, apparently tuckered out from stalking him on a 100-degree summer day in Texas. When he knocked on the window from inside his kitchen to wake the man up, the stranger pulled a gun out of a backpack, shot him multiple times through the window, entered the house, and stabbed him 11 times. Sonnier and his family later learned the man was hired by his girlfriend’s jealous former lover, the one who’d had his proposal turned down, to check into her new squeeze. </p>
<p id="eKdSJW">The years leading up to the production of <em>Bone Tomahawk</em> were plagued by the stress of police investigations and multiple murder trials and the unimaginable grief of losing both parents under such horrific circumstances. When the trials were over and <em>Bone Tomahawk</em> had paid off, Sonnier chose to come back home to Dallas to make movies that are known for—and defined by—their extreme violence. It would seem to take Olympic-level compartmentalization for Sonnier to sell his house in Calabasas (to Kylie Jenner, of all people!) and move his family to Highland Park and run Cinestate, like a man deliberately choosing to set up residence in a haunted house. And yet he’s always inclined to steer into the curve. Over lunch, he tells me he’s in negotiations with the current owner of his childhood home to loan it out for his 40th birthday party next year. Sonnier was notorious for throwing parties in high school and wants to re-create the experience. No ghosts allowed.</p>
<p id="TmQUTu">It can be a little hard to pin Sonnier down ideologically: He considers himself libertarian-leaning (“I tell no one how to behave”) and uses the language of self-starters and free speech absolutists, but he’s not dogmatic on any one issue. When I ask him about gun laws, in the wake of his parents’ deaths and mass shootings of the kind depicted in <em>Run Hide Fight</em>, he takes a moderate stance. “I want to protect my home,” he says. “And I want people to be able to hunt. I also think it’s absurd that we have high-capacity magazines. I think it’s ridiculous that we have weapons of war. I want to do whatever it takes to keep my family safe and provide for my family. Outside of that, I think everything is up for grabs.” </p>
<p id="hOfOUa">In prefacing his defense of <em>Run Hide Fight</em>, Sonnier is careful to express respect and sympathy for families of domestic gun violence and school shootings, because he knows firsthand what it’s like. But when he encountered the script, he said, “I saw it as the cathartic journey of a girl who got to fight back and kill her abusers.” And he insists that the film can have a positive role to play in a national conversation that’s of keen personal interest to him. “I hate that this is the state of affairs for our kids,” he says. “It’s fucking miserable and I want to fix it. I’m not a politician, so I can’t change the laws, but I can change some hearts and minds through movies, through our art, and through our company.”</p>
<p id="Vptcuc"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="4tamC3">Later that afternoon, Sonnier walks me through the main location for <em>Run Hide Fight</em>, a recently abandoned middle school in Red Oak that could kindly be dubbed “nondescript,” but more precisely called a remnant of a period in the mid-1980s when schools were architecturally indistinguishable from prisons. It’s the ideal Everyschool for the film, but there are fun little touches throughout the fictional Vernon Central High School, home of the Vipers, like the scotch-taped notifications on bulletin boards and classrooms, and posters for an original school musical called “Goodbye Trisha.” On one wall, there’s a collage of small, individualized banners around the prompt “Where will you be next year, Seniors?” made poignant by the fact that some of them won’t live to see graduation. </p>
<p id="ZN2HaN">Sonnier starts with the cafeteria. He points to the window where four Vernon Central students—the dead-eyed ringleader Tristan (Eli Brown), doughy outcast Kip (Cyrus Arnold), and two siblings, Chris (Britton Sear) and Anna (Catherine Davis)—smash a van into the building during lunchtime with a detailed plan for maximum casualties. In another echo of <em>Die Hard</em>, our hero, Zoe (May), happens to be in the bathroom when the shooting starts, but Sonnier points to the kitchen, where she accidentally draws attention to herself. Earlier in the film, Zoe’s capacity to take on four assailants is established through a morning hunting trip by her father, played by Thomas Jane. Her recently deceased mother, played by Radha Mitchell, becomes an imaginary companion of sorts, counseling her through this terrible ordeal. </p>
<p id="gbTEE8">Down the hall from the cafeteria, Sonnier shows me the area near the principal’s office where an explosion is detonated, though it’s been turned into a makeshift production hub now, a place to throw our coats on this unusually chilly day in November. In an editing bay set up inside the library, Sonnier has arranged all the money shots for my edification: three different explosions, the van smashing through the cafeteria window, Treat Williams’s sheriff dodging a fusillade of bullets coming at him from inside the school. Cinestate may not spend a fortune on production, but it gets a literal bang for its buck. <em>The Standoff at Sparrow Creek</em>, a formally impeccable thriller the company released earlier this year, is mostly a <em>Reservoir Dogs</em>–type scenario about a militia penned into its hideout, but when it’s time for the standoff to end, the great bursts of gunfire are staged for maximum impact. </p>
<p id="dUXMJM">There are two scenes on tonight’s shot list: One is a backward-moving tracking shot of Zoe running down the hallway, warning students to get out, that recalls the drifting camerawork on the most famous movie made about school shootings, Gus Van Sant’s <em>Elephant</em>. The other is far more complicated. One of the sick ironies of <em>Run Hide Fight</em> is that the attack takes place during Senior Prank Day, so not only do some students mistake the mayhem for a joke, but there are obstacles, like a Slip ’n Slide, scattered around the school. The teacher’s lounge, for example, has been filled with hundreds and hundreds of balloons—and it’s here where Zoe gets the jump on Anna, the one female attacker, and tries to disarm her in a fog of colorful, popping balloons.</p>
<p id="2YP8dC">Over the five hours it takes to get an acceptable master shot, the production interns and other members of the crew are in a nearby classroom, inflating dozens of balloons that are brought out in billowing trash bags. These balloons are added to the ones already jammed into the room, including a wall taped together in front of a big light that’s giving the cinematographer fits. This darkly whimsical conceit recalls Rankin’s stint on the second season of <em>Project Greenlight</em>, when he and his codirector, Efram Potelle, were chosen to direct Shia LaBeouf in <em>The Battle of Shaker Heights </em>on the basis of their funny short films. Over 16 years later, Rankin is still grateful for the experience, but it turns out that following first-time filmmakers with multiple cameras as they try to make a low-budget movie isn’t the ideal way to make a good movie. </p>
<p id="yZXjJa">On the show, producer Chris Moore often blasted Rankin and Potelle for their lack of authority on set, but Rankin still prefers to go about his business quietly, and Presmyk and Sonnier accommodate him. Sonnier sees Cinestate as an auteur-friendly outfit: He likes writer-directors and trusts them to know the material better than anyone, even if he needs to push back on them on occasion. Of his working relationship with Zahler, Sonnier says, “We have knock-down, drag-out screaming matches in the editing room, but he tells me to go fuck myself on any note.” He catches himself. “Actually, he’s a kind soul. He tells me, ‘Nope, your note is garbage and I’m not going to do it.’ And that’s it. That’s the end of the conversation.” </p>
<p id="m4lSBj">Balloon Fight: Take 1 is a disaster. The crew has done too good a job filling up the room with balloons, and both actresses are completely buried by them, like infants tossed in a ball pit. All that can be seen on the monitor are little waves of balloons where the women are fighting, and their precisely choreographed movements are reduced to screams, the pop of a few balloons, and five bullets released from the chamber. And so the subsequent hours are all about removing balloons without diminishing the effect, which must sustain a fight-to-the-death tension while suggesting a perversion of the most innocent of childhood delights.</p>
<p id="GciGHy">After a few more takes fail to satisfy the filmmakers, Presmyk walks over to explain the obvious: No one has ever thought to shoot a fight scene in a room full of balloons, and so they’re learning some new things tonight. It’s easy to forget the context of the scene, which is about halfway through a script about a 17-year-old trying to stop a school shooting. It’s easy to forget the real-life context for the film itself, which is ongoing and politically fraught, and may create an inhospitable environment for its release. And it’s easy to forget this is only one movie among many in the Cinestate arsenal, part of a comprehensive plan to become the dominant name in low-budget genre cinema. For now, it’s just process. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="8yDPct">They get it right on the ninth take, just after midnight. There’s an explosion of applause from cast and crew. Then it’s on to the next shot.</p>
<p id="VRrR1k"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/12/17/21024790/cinestate-rebeller-run-hide-fight-dallas-sonnier-craig-zahlerScott Tobias2019-06-11T10:00:38-04:002019-06-11T10:00:38-04:00Truth and Legends: The Extraordinary Documentaries of Martin Scorsese
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<p>The filmmaker’s best known for gangster sagas and epic tales, but his docs are among his best work. And a new one on Bob Dylan’s ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ has the hallmarks of his best and most mischievous work.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="bjD5Lv">In the 50-plus years since <em>Who’s That Knocking at My Door</em>, we’ve gotten a good idea of what to expect from a Martin Scorsese picture. An active camera. A soundtrack charged with killer needle drops or an eclectic score. Characters in a state of mortal and spiritual torment. Entire worlds brought to life in sumptuous detail. And when it all comes together, as it nearly always does, you get these unforgettable movie moments: That slo-mo <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ7UwnfQ2nA">dolly-in on Johnny Boy in <em>Mean Streets</em></a> as he strolls into a bar to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”; the one-take tour through the Copacabana to “Then He Kissed Me” in <em>GoodFellas</em>; Jake LaMotta shadow-boxing in the ring to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXdvq1JZfWA">“Cavalleria Rusticana Intermezzo”</a> during the opening credits of <em>Raging Bull</em>, prowling the lonely space he’ll be caged in forever.</p>
<p id="X7UoeF">And those are the obvious ones. Cinephiles can pile on dozens of personal favorites after that: the overhead crane shot of slain monks in <em>Kundun</em>, the reflected sunlight that leads Newland Archer to imagine a different destiny for himself at the end of <em>The Age of Innocence</em>, the tracking shot away from Travis Bickle as he’s rejected one last, painful time in <em>Taxi Driver</em>, etc. The examples are endless. And the one unifying impression is that Scorsese has brought his full imagination to bear on every shot, and that his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, has cut them together with the pop of <a href="https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/2c653af2-ec91-41a6-88d2-93507fdfa2be">Tom Cruise’s “sledgehammer” breaks in <em>The Color of Money</em></a>. There’s a dynamism and intentionality that’s made him perhaps the greatest living American filmmaker.</p>
<p id="OkSB7F">He also makes documentaries.</p>
<p id="xypNxW">Are those Martin Scorsese pictures, too? With very few exceptions—<a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/12/23/16047062/martin-scorsese-movies-50-years-72de1e5b173d">one of them from <em>The Ringer</em>’s Sean Fennessey</a>—ranked lists of the best Scorsese films usually include only two documentaries, <em>The Last Waltz </em>and <em>Shine a Light</em>, two studio-produced concert films about the Band and the Rolling Stones, respectively. And the reason for that, beyond the higher stakes of Hollywood financing and distribution, is Scorsese seems to have the same creative investment in them as he does in his other features. The choreography is mapped out, song by song, for maximum effect, with Scorsese and a battery of top-flight cinematographers orchestrating each camera move to maximum effect. In one funny behind-the-scenes bit in <em>Shine a Light</em>, the Stones prank Scorsese by withholding the final setlist until the last possible moment, forcing him to arrange his shot list in piles from “definite” to “unlikely.”</p>
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<p id="1MKPPA">But forgetting Scorsese’s other documentaries leaves about a dozen more films out in the cold, including extraordinarily accomplished ones like <em>Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese</em>, which premieres in theaters and on Netflix this week. Granted, there’s an argument to be made for this categorical neglect. There are certain master filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick or Quentin Tarantino who curate their careers tightly, and each new film is a years-in-the-making event. Scorsese’s adventures more closely resemble someone like Jonathan Demme, whose Talking Heads concert film <em>Stop Making Sense</em> is in the pantheon with <em>The Last Waltz</em> as the best of their kind, but whose nonfiction sojourns into Haiti (<em>The Agronomist</em>) or Jimmy Carter’s book tour (<em>Man From Plains</em>) or his own family (<em>Cousin Bobby</em>) were regarded as side projects, if they were regarded at all. They weren’t <em>Melvin and Howard</em> or <em>Something Wild</em> or <em>The Silence of the Lambs</em>.</p>
<p id="H3GjyQ">In Scorsese’s case, it’s not necessarily unjust to file his nonfiction films a little differently—if it’s even worth caring about such filing systems at all. Several of his documentaries, including the under-an-hour portraiture of <em>Italianamerican</em> and <em>American Boy</em> and the Fran Lebowitz profile piece <em>Public Speaking</em>, find Scorsese simply bringing himself and a camera into a conversation. (Or in <em>American Boy</em>, into a hot tub.) Others lean heavily on archival footage, like his two Dylan docs, <em>Rolling Thunder Revue</em> and <em>No Direction Home</em>, his George Harrison career-spanner <em>George Harrison: Living in the Material World</em>, or his many professorial tours through the cinema that influenced him, like <em>A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies</em>, <em>My Voyage to Italy</em>, or <em>A Letter to Elia</em>. His docs are not lacking in substance or imagination, but they’re not exactly pushing the formal boundaries, either.</p>
<p id="QiGxSs">Yet Scorsese is a champion of personal filmmaking, and in that respect, his documentaries are full of curiosity and passion, and a fascinating window into the things he cares about most deeply. He’s a collector of stories. He’s a fan and archivist. He’s a thinker and political radical. And in its best instances, his nonfiction accesses his sensibility more directly than any fiction feature could—how he thinks about himself as a commercial artist, what excites him as a connoisseur of popular entertainment, and the specific works that delivered an asthmatic boy from a tiny apartment on Elizabeth Street in New York to Hollywood’s upper echelon. In a given year, he may have expended less energy on <em>Public Speaking</em> than <em>Shutter Island</em> or on <em>George Harrison: Living in the Material World</em> than <em>Hugo</em> or on <em>Rolling Thunder Revue</em> than his upcoming Netflix crime epic <em>The Irishman</em>, due in December. But the effort is meaningful all the same.</p>
<h3 id="H674GY">The Story Collector</h3>
<p id="35So48"><em>Italianamerican</em> (1974), <em>American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince</em> (1978), <em>Public Speaking</em> (2010), <em>The 50 Year Argument</em> (2014)</p>
<p id="ZfxqgE">Among the many charms of <em>Italianamerican</em>, Scorsese’s 49-minute conversation with his parents, Catherine and Charles, is the closing credits, which detail the recipe for his mother’s spaghetti sauce. Throughout the film, as Scorsese listens to stories about the family’s journey from Italy to the tenements and immigrant neighborhoods of New York City, Catherine will drift back to the kitchen and tend to the sauce, and then find her place alongside her husband in the same modest apartment where Martin grew up on Elizabeth Street. Fans of Scorsese’s work know his parents well, especially Catherine, unforgettable as the disembodied voice of Rupert Pupkin’s mother in <em>The King of Comedy</em>, pleading with him to “lower it,” as he practices monologues in the basement, and as Tommy DeVito’s mom in <em>Goodfellas</em>, who gives him a butcher knife to take care of the deer “hoof” caught in the car grille outside. Scorsese couldn’t have guessed they’d live another 20 years after <em>Italianamerican</em>, but he has an instinct to record them for posterity—not just these precious family stories, which are the stories of so many immigrants, but the way they interact with each other and with him. It’s a rare thing, a home movie with universal appeal.</p>
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<p id="qyfSbJ">The aesthetics of these story-collecting documentaries are simple and deferential, with Scorsese often bringing himself into the frame and interacting with his subjects, to draw out anecdotes as if they were at a bar or sitting around the dinner table. <em>American Boy</em> places him on a couch across from Steven Prince, who’d had a scintillating bit part in Scorsese’s <em>Taxi Driver</em> as “Easy Andy,” the black-market salesman who sells weapons to Travis Bickle but can’t interest him in recreational pharmaceuticals. Prince’s harrowing stories of drug addiction and his various stints as a Neil Diamond roadie and a gas-station attendant are so wild they sound like urban legends, and Tarantino was sufficiently inspired to use two scenes from <em>American Boy</em> for his own movies: Chris Penn and Michael Madsen wordlessly greeting each other with a wrestling match in <em>Reservoir Dogs</em> and the shot of adrenaline to the heart that revives an overdosing woman in <em>Pulp Fiction</em>.</p>
<p id="mtZJH8"><em>Public Speaking</em> and <em>The 50 Year Argument</em>, each produced for HBO’s documentary line, bring in the fine cinematographer Ellen Kuras for a cleaner look, but they’re both about Scorsese recognizing New York institutions while they’re still running hot. Scorsese doesn’t need to do anything with Fran Lebowitz, the endlessly opinionated author and public wit, other than turn up for drinks at The Waverly Inn and bellow infectiously at Lebowitz’s jibes. <em>Public Speaking</em> plugs in footage of Lebowitz on stage and on the go, but it’s mostly just a forum for the one New Yorker who talks faster than Scorsese to sound off on race and gender disparities, her judgmental nature, and what happened when James Thurber got put on a postage stamp.</p>
<p id="pBYf8I">Codirected by David Tedeschi, the editor on his past few documentaries, <em>The 50 Year Argument </em>is a natural companion to <em>Public Speaking</em>, both about the virtues of risk-taking and provocation. Scorsese’s tribute to <em>The</em> <em>New York Review of Books</em> and its longtime editor, Robert Silvers, sees the publication as an intellectual movement, given to questioning state power and conventional wisdom on issues like Selma, Vietnam, and gun control, and allowing important debates to spill out onto its pages. Silvers would die shortly after the film’s release, but continuity of the magazine’s principles, in the face of dramatic changes in the media business, tracks with Scorsese’s own 50-year career. They have in common that mix of risk-taking and rigor, a willingness to bust open the conversation while minding the tiniest editorial detail.</p>
<h3 id="m1CDkM">The Fan</h3>
<p id="7LSyGK"><em>The Last Waltz</em> (1978), <em>Shine a Light</em> (2008), <em>George Harrison: Living in the Material World</em> (2011)</p>
<p id="pPUzNx">These films all have the same kind of end-of-an-era urgency that inspired <em>The Last Waltz</em>, which turns the final concert of the Band into a raucous, all-star celebration of a generation of rock and folk giants. Scorsese’s connection to the music scene went all the way back to <em>Woodstock</em>, which he’d coedited, and the Band’s frontman, Robbie Robertson, recruited him to film the show on the basis of <em>Mean Streets</em>, which had used songs so dynamically. Because the entire show and its special guests—including Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, and many others—had to be stage-managed so carefully, it was the perfect opportunity for a planner like Scorsese to redefine what a concert film could be. Marshaling some of the best cinematographers in the world as camera operators—Michael Chapman (<em>Taxi Driver</em>), Vilmos Zsigmond (<em>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</em>), and future Oscar winner John Toll (<em>Braveheart</em>) among them—Scorsese not only storyboarded the entire concert, but set up a soundstage at MGM for additional performances, including a stunning version of “The Weight” with the Staple Singers.</p>
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<p id="ORXlXy">Though some of the backstage interview footage in <em>The Last Waltz</em> drifts into the rock-god self-mythologizing that would inspire <em>This Is Spinal Tap</em>, Scorsese redefined the notion of what a concert film could be. The focus on the stage, without cutaways to the audience, allows for an unmediated you-are-there experience, but Scorsese aims for something deeper than that. The cuts, close-ups, and camera moves, all timed on rhythm, put the filmmaking on par with the musicianship, and have an impact that even sitting in the front row couldn’t. The cameos are all superb, especially Dylan’s three-song run to close the show, but when the entire cast of characters gets on stage for “I Shall Be Released,” it’s a synthesizing, galvanizing moment for ’70s music, a piece of meticulously fussed-over history in the making.</p>
<p id="deA0wY">After putting the Rolling Stones in such heavy rotation on his soundtracks, Scorsese returned the favor with <em>Shine a Light</em>, which takes his <em>Last Waltz</em> planning to another level, with stages explicitly designed to accommodate the type of camerawork he wanted to do. At best, the film is a perfectly fine way to experience a late-period Stones arena show at a fraction of the cost, with the bonus of special appearances by Jack White, Christina Aguilera, and an electrifying Buddy Guy. Yet there’s a canned, hermetic quality to <em>Shine a Light</em> that takes away all the spontaneity and passion associated with a good rock show, much less the uniqueness of an event like the Band’s final concert. There’s a gulf between the culmination of a rock era and a benefit for the Clinton Foundation, and Scorsese’s camera pyrotechnics aren’t enough to bridge it.</p>
<p id="zSvZXJ">Of his documentary profile subjects, George Harrison is somehow more elusive than Dylan, who’s made a career out of slipping in and out of characters, and refusing to let his critics or his fans pin him down. As the third wheel to the Lennon-McCartney songwriting bloc, Harrison was usually good for one or two songs per Beatles album, from the gentle <em>Abbey Road</em> duo of “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” to more far afield efforts like the sitar-based “Within You Without You” and the epic sprawl of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” For Scorsese, though, it’s Harrison’s life as a spiritual seeker that draws the most personal interest, rooted in the discovery that money and fame were not going to slake that deeper thirst. <em>George Harrison: Living in the Material World</em> works as a conventional Beatles documentary from another angle—this being Scorsese, every living witness offers themselves as a talking head—but the film really takes off once Harrison goes solo and reveals a fullness of vision that the band had stifled. Stories about the making of his hit triple album <em>All Things Must Pass</em> make a good argument for his artistic genius, but Scorsese stays attuned to Harrison’s contradictory nature. He was a peaceful man devoted to some higher calling; he was also the materialist who wrote “Taxman.”</p>
<h3 id="JmiITO">The Artist</h3>
<p id="1yq4hR"><em>A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies</em> (1995),<strong> </strong><em>My Voyage to Italy</em> (1999), <em>No Direction Home: Bob Dylan</em> (2005), <em>A Letter to Elia </em>(2010), <em>Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese</em> (2019)</p>
<p id="fPuZK9">Though his George Harrison doc is a comprehensive, birth-to-death biography, Scorsese’s impulse is to emphasize the parts of a story that mean the most to him and discard the rest. And length doesn’t matter: <em>A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies</em> (225 minutes), <em>My Voyage to Italy</em> (246), <em>No Direction Home: Bob Dylan </em>(208), and <em>Rolling Thunder Revue</em> (142) are only partial histories, narrowed to the themes and images that most interest Scorsese as an artist. “This is like an imaginary museum,” Scorsese says in <em>A Personal Journey</em>, “and we can’t enter every room because we just don’t have the time.” He’s there to give audiences the best lecture they’ve ever witnessed, but they’ll only come away understanding cinema as he sees it, not as the pocket history they might expect over four hours.</p>
<p id="XDLifL"><em>A Personal Journey</em>, <em>My Voyage to Italy</em>, and <em>Letter to Elia</em>, his shorter ode to Elia Kazan, could be watched together in installments, like supplements to an informal film education. There’s nothing dry or high-handed in Scorsese’s enthusiasm for these films, in part because the clips themselves are so charged with emotion and stylistic brio. Scorsese starts <em>A Personal Journey</em> with memories of seeing <em>Duel in the Sun</em>, a Technicolor Western that was critically reviled at the time, but ripe with a sinfulness that stayed with him. Seeing these documentaries is the best possible way to understand how Scorsese’s sensibility developed—his attraction to the high drama and emotional vividness of American genre films by directors like Sam Fuller, Anthony Mann, and Vincente Minnelli; the street realism and operatic grandeur of Italian cinema from mid-’40s to the early ’60s, and masters like Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Federico Fellini; and the bedrock intensity of Elia Kazan.</p>
<p id="hYq7dv">Scorsese’s comprehensive knowledge of film history is beyond dispute, but what makes these documentaries special is how much they’re connected to his memories and how much they’re attuned to the way movies make him <em>feel</em>. When he talks about Kazan’s <em>On the Waterfront</em> in <em>Letter to Elia</em>, it’s not a dry disquisition on social realism and Method acting, but a still-vivid reverie on the power of seeing your life on screen. “It was the faces, the bodies, and the way they moved,” he narrates. “The voices and the way they sounded. They were like the people I saw every day. … I saw the same mixture of toughness and tenderness. It was as if the world that I came from, the world that I knew, mattered. As if the people I knew mattered, whatever their flaws were.”</p>
<p id="MJa85l">There’s no overlap between Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentaries: <em>No Direction Home </em>covers Dylan’s career in the lead-up to his infamous Newport Folk Festival set in 1965, when he set down his acoustic guitar and went electric, and <em>Rolling Thunder Revue</em> covers his extraordinary 57-show road show through smaller cities and venues in 1975 and 1976. But the central question of each is the same: How do you manage the conflict between personal expression and commercial expectations? That’s the theme of Scorsese’s career, as it would be for any director who’s survived and thrived in a studio system that has changed so dramatically over the past century. In Dylan, Scorsese recognizes the chameleonic genius of an artist who’s constantly reinventing himself and defying what’s expected of him, but who stays in the picture.</p>
<p id="pxG0b0"><em>No Direction Home</em> keeps circling back to the Newport ’65 show as an act of defiance—not to thumb his nose at the “Judas” crowd that booed through the set, but to reject the idea that he needed to stay in his countercultural box. A label like “the voice of a generation” was not self-applied, and his commitment to continuing Woody Guthrie’s tradition of acoustic protest songs lasted for only as long as he felt comfortable wearing that particular skin. Dylan made tormenting music journalists into a sport—see <em>Don’t Look Back</em>—but he plays it straight with Scorsese, who understands what it’s like to pursue your ambitions in the face of those who have a narrow idea of what you should do.</p>
<p id="odiObl">In the new <em>Rolling Thunder Revue</em>, Scorsese leans again into the “This film should be played loud!” force of <em>The Last Waltz</em> and the Newport ’65 show, but in between the treasure trove of live footage collected on the tour, he also engages in a bit of Dylan-style prankishness. Some of the talking heads and anecdotes in the film are absolute nonsense, like testimony from a pissy Dutch filmmaker or Representative Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy), the fake politician from Robert Altman’s mockumentary <em>Tanner ’88</em>. This is a “Bob Dylan Story,” after all, so it’s not all to be taken at face value, which may be Scorsese’s way of paying homage to <em>Renaldo and Clara</em>, the misbegotten (and impossible-to-find) four-hour film that Dylan constructed around material from this tour.</p>
<p id="wkvEZE">The label “documentary” doesn’t comfortably apply to <em>Rolling Thunder Revue</em>, which doesn’t bother to demarcate the line between fact and fiction, but there’s truth in the rambling roadshow that Dylan leads through 2,000- to 3,000-seat auditoriums across America. For an act of Dylan’s stature to downsize his venues while welcoming more and more guest performers and musicians to the stage is an insane, money-hemorrhaging undertaking—and that’s before the added strangeness of conceiving it as part old-timey medicine show and part homage to the 1945 French classic <em>Children of Paradise</em>.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="fwRSX2">Forty years removed from the tour, Dylan frequently laughs about the real and fake incidents from a tour he only hazily remembers, and Scorsese the story collector, the fan, and the artist laughs along with him. He knows his John Ford well enough to recall the famous line from <em>The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</em>: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”</p>
<p id="a97w0N"><em>An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that </em>Italianamerican <em>was in black and white.</em></p>
<p id="PFJEFK"><em>Scott Tobias is a freelance film and television writer from Chicago. His work has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, NPR, </em>Vulture<em>, </em>Variety<em>, and other publications.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/6/11/18661084/martin-scorsese-rolling-thunder-bob-dylan-netflix-documentariesScott Tobias