Arts Reviews

In March 2021, during his last major interview, Jean-Luc Godard reiterated a previous point about the coronavirus being a form of communication. “At first, I thought that production was the main aspect of cinema, and I realized distribution was more important, today more than before. Distribution has choked production by pretending to be at the service of the audience...The virus in its own way, distributes. Today, it would be interesting to know how the virus produces, but we only care about what it distributes.

The pitch meeting for Violent Night must have been fun: why not make a big-budget film where Santa Claus himself (David Harbour) must protect a spoiled rich family from a home invasion? It might even settle the age-old debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie: this is what a Die Hard-style Christmas really looks like! Violent Night largely delivers on that premise, serving up high-octane holiday mayhem for the grownup set. Here, we get a disenchanted (and borderline alcoholic) Kris Kringle, who’s grown tired of modern kids requesting only cash and video games and is contemplating hanging up his hat. We’re a long way from the jovial protagonist of The Santa Clause or even the crankier iteration of Elf. Years of munching Christmas cookies haven’t made this Santa soft.

Towards the end of her life, the Cheers and Look Who’s Talking star Kirstie Alley, who has died of cancer at seventy-one, did something that made her a pariah among her Hollywood associates: she tweeted support for Donald Trump. On October 17, 2020, Alley wrote, "I’m voting for @realDonaldTrump because he’s NOT a politician. I voted for him 4 years ago for this reason and shall vote for him again for this reason. He gets things done quickly and he will turn the economy around quickly. There you have it folks there you have it." The public response was swift and merciless. Writer and director Judd Apatow remarked, "Shelley Long was way funnier than you"; the actress Patricia Arquette announced, "Well my vote for Biden canceled yours out. I have done my civic duty of the day.

Fiddler on the Roof is a study of Eastern European Jewry: it is based on Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s short stories and is set in a Yiddish-speaking village in early twentieth-century Imperial Russia. Yet, in the hit musical, which premiered on Broadway in 1964, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics only feature a handful of Yiddish words. Harnick later confessed that the creators downplayed the Jewishness of the story — something they thought might be too sticky; too specific — in order not to put off American audiences. As scriptwriter Joseph Stein said: “These were stories about characters who just happened to be Jewish.

Life imitated art to a depressingly predictable degree when a clip from Todd Field’s Tár circulated online. It’s part of a scene where the film’s title character, superstar conductor Lydia Tár (played by Cate Blanchett), leads a masterclass at Juilliard. She haughtily dismisses students’ reluctance to learn the classical canon because of their difficulty “identifying” with its composers. To some, Lydia’s monologue was a vindication: a righteous tirade against "wokeness." To others, the speech exemplifies Lydia’s abuse of power, which includes not only dressing down students and mentees but sleeping with many of them and torpedoing their careers.  But oversimplified views of Lydia as a crusader or villain flatten the film’s wrenching complexities.

Screen adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries never go out of style. The problem is that they're so often concerned with literal fidelity that they get bogged down in self-seriousness, so desperate to “update” everything that they veer into the ludicrous. With 2019's Knives Out, Rian Johnson successfully updated the Christie-style whodunit because he had a deep knowledge of its formula and he played it with a pitch-perfect, kooky sensibility. For Knives Out’s sequel, the newly released Glass Onion, Johnson does what you should do when Netflix gives you buckets of money to make a whodunit. There are expensive locales and production design, a bevy of great character actors and a twistier murder plot.

Sweeping down and around the Aran Islands, The Banshees of Inisherin begins as any Irish film would. The official trailer had given little away, besides a couple of strong-sounding accents and weak-looking Guinness. Very Irish; too Irish, perhaps. Despite my respect for Martin McDonagh and reverence for In Bruges, even I felt trepidatious. My father, too, had an air of skepticism about him. The line between Irish and Oirish is so fine — so easily and often overstepped — that when the film opened on gray cliffs and green fields, you could be forgiven for fearing the worst. For despite the accelerated evolution of contemporary Irish cinema, Hollywood still speaks fluent Oirish.

Traditions are good. If you don’t have any for Thanksgiving — or if you’re severed by space and circumstance from the people with whom you do share traditions — you could do worse than “Alice’s Restaurant.” Radio stations across the country play Arlo Guthrie’s rambling, folksy, satirical, eighteen-minute 1967 anti-Vietnam ballad at noon sharp on Thanksgiving Day. Wherever you are, scan through your radio, and I’ll bet you'll find it. The song tells the (mostly) true story of eighteen-year-old Arlo, the son of folk legend Woody Guthrie, attending “a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat” at a deconsecrated Episcopal church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Ray and Alice Brock, a hippy couple who taught at Arlo’s high school, own the church.

"Every single song is like a road map to what that relationship stood for, with little markers that maybe everyone won't know, but there are things that were little nuances of the relationship, little hints,” Taylor Swift told Yahoo! Music in 2010. A decade of songwriting turned those “little hints” into complicated numerology, a scarf metaphor at the centerpiece of her canon, coded song titles, storytelling scattered with cardigan sweaters, Shakespeare references, faded blue jeans, true crime, YA tropes (e.g., witches, cats, prom dresses, teen love triangles and evil alter-egos) and glitter-glue covered diary pages — sealed with red lips. Taylor Swift was fifteen when she began incorporating easter eggs and (wink-wink) secret messages into her work.

Blockbuster is a single-cam sitcom about the last Blockbuster (located inside a strip mall in Michigan). The set is dressed in authentic signage, fluorescent lights, blue walls and an oddly prophetic Howard the Duck poster. The employees have real Blockbuster name tags and uniforms (the producer, John Fox, acquired the rights and handed it over to established showrunner Vanessa Ramos: I have the rights to Blockbuster. Would you like to develop a workplace?). Every episode is packed with movie references and checkout-counter humor. The transitions between scenes are scored to hip-hop beats that sound like something you’d hear on Nickelodeon in the Nineties. You’re inside a Blockbuster for the first time since Carol Danvers fell through its roof in Captain Marvel.

Later this week, probably the world’s greatest living film director will celebrate his eightieth birthday. However he celebrates — whether in the company of friends and family in his no doubt opulent Manhattan home, or working on his eagerly awaited new film Killers of the Flower Moon — Martin Scorsese can reach his milestone age in the confidence that his position in cinematic history is assured forever. For a man so steeped in the art and practice of filmmaking — and who has made several excellent documentaries about movies — it must be intensely gratifying for Scorsese to be aware that he is that rarest of persons, a living legend, whose contributions to film will live forever.