Let’s go to the Movies
… or a review of how many sexually explicit movies Emma can see with her parents in one week.
Happy 2024 everybody!
Did I make a New Year’s resolution to actually write this newsletter this year? Maybe!
Will I stick to this resolution? Who knows!
So now— a vignette. It is 2013. Pedro Almodovar has just released a new film. I am 14 years old, which is old enough to know about sex, but not old enough to feel brave or confident in that knowledge, and definitely not old enough to let my parents know that I know anything about the topic.
My parents were longtime Almodovar fans. I’d already seen Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Volver. Of course we were going to see I’m so Excited! We came into the movie theater expecting Almodovar, and get Almodovar we did… but a different brand than usual. This was not an exploration of motherhood, still highly stylized, instead it was Airplane! with oral. Snakes (of a certain kind) on a Plane. Not the Almodovar who understands women and places their stories at the forefront of his films, but the Almodovar who is raunchy and explicit about gay sex.
So while we laughed so hard that we cried the ending of the movie came as a sweet release.
Since this moment many years have passed. I am 25 years old. My parents have taken to watching gay spanish television and I recently explained how PrEP works to them over the phone. But even with such newfound freedom, it’s unclear how this Christmas season we managed to watch the three movies which are perhaps the least family friendly on screens right now.
Fallen Leaves
This Finnish rom-com, to quote my father, was rather lacking in both the rom, and the com department. This is not to say that it was not a good movie, but it managed to create a backdrop of bleakness that only alcoholism and spotless interior decoration could solve. Lucky for us, the movie had plenty of both.
Note: In the summer of 2019 my father and I saw Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die in theaters because my mother was away, and we wanted to see a fun movie that she wouldn’t have seen with us. In Fallen Leaves the two lovers go to see The Dead Don’t Die. As Bill Murray and Adam Driver hack apart zombies on screen, the pair look at each other’s faces lit up by the flickering violence, and just as we are happy to be at the movies, they are happy to be there too.
Additional note: A friend once remarked that the Finnish are not a talkative people, unless you get them drunk, in which case they are very nice, but then the next morning they feel ashamed and are more silent than before. This is not what the movie was about, but it wasn’t NOT what the movie was about.
Poor Things
The problem with this movie was not the acting, and it was not the sex. It was the script and it was the plot and the sheer lack of imagination used for what had the potential to be an interesting film. What we got was window dressing. A cake boss cake of a movie, all fondant and PVC pipe, but not a single tasty morsel to be found. At the end of the movie I was surprised to find myself faintly angry, as if I had been tricked into wasting over two hours of my life on something my good friend described as “Yorgos at his Lathimost.”
Of course, it goes without saying that the set design of this movie was beyond compare, and that the costumes were thrilling, that Emma Stone is attractive and strange and puts on the performance of a lifetime. That is not what I am here to discuss. But an issue with a lot of movies and art these days, at least for me, (imagine an old man shaking his fist at the sky), is how they refuse subtlety for their social messaging. Of course, men stupid, Bella Baxter good. Of course, liberation good, imprisonment bad. Of course, it is bad that women were so restricted and how wonderful that this freak of science experiments can show us how it should be. I was not offended by the lack of realism, I wanted the fantasy to go further. If we can have magic and beauty, why not spice up the plot a little, have us experiment with more than the age-old plot of women discovering and freeing themselves through prostitution, and the age-old plot of Helen of Troy, where men ruin their lives in order to possess the beautiful and unusual and… childlike.
There was also quite a lot of sex, some fun, most of it boring.
This tweet, while I disagree with 98% of its sentiment has something to say.
And for that I am grateful.
Eyes Wide Shut
My parents said “What is this movie about?” and I said, “Don’t worry, it’s a Christmas movie!”
I did not lie.
I’m not sure how much there is to say about this movie except that Kubrick does not miss, and that it is OK to see a semi-pornographic movie with your parents as long as it is really good, because then the quality of the art cancels out the pornography.
Tom Cruise has an unsettling face and a weird intensity to him which is easily explained by Scientology and… his whole thing. Nicole Kidman is ridiculously beautiful. (You can tell when she is being a mother because then she wears glasses which are supposed to make her look frumpy, but don’t).
After the movie my family spiraled into research, and discovered that:
The author of the novella this movie is based on (Arthur Schnitzler) is a family friend of sorts. His brother was besties with my great grandfather, and my grandfather spent time with his family in Cleveland because Arthur’s nephew was a close friend.
The novella is set in Vienna during Karnival. The various transpositions of time and location that Kubrick uses in the film are necessary to make the plot comprehensible to American audiences, but all the masks and weird sex rituals make more sense in the context of Karnival, a holiday about masks and weird sex.
Otherwise the plot of the movie is shockingly similar to the novella. Man discovers wife can have sexual fantasies not about him, totally freaks out and tries to cheat on her but fails, creepy weird orgy, confession, fine.
Saltburn
I tried to miss this movie, but I REALLY didn’t want to see Maestro again and we were running low on options. Controversial opinion, but I kind of liked it. True, the plot twist rings a little hollow, and true the movie is mainly aesthetics over comprehensible messaging, but there was relief to be had in the complete lack of structural integrity, and Emerald Fennell is good at cinematic pastiche. The movie also had a good amount of symbolism to interpret, and I love nothing more than doing comparative literature to film.
If you’ve seen the movie here are a few things to think about:
In the maze, who is the minotaur? Who wears wings and who wears horns? What does this tell us about the story?
Dancing to disco music (nudity not necessary) is the abrupt final scene of one of my favorite movies (Beau Travail). Coincidence that both of these movies spend a lot of time lingering over attractive male bodies? Probably not.
Some Honorable Mentions to close out the newsletter:
La Boheme is the platonic ideal of an opera. It is impossible to see too many times. I also did not realize until this time around that it is an opera about situationships/malfunctioning relationships. The love is there, but it cannot last. Also, to quote a guy on the train returning from the Metropolitan Opera. “Philosopher isn’t a profession in the way that it used to be.”
The Jews dug an illegal tunnel in Crown Heights (my neighborhood) and it made the news.
Days of Heaven is the type of movie that makes you wonder why they can’t make CINEMA like that any more.
I work at the New York Review of Architecture now.
And that is a wrap til next time.