Culture

The title song of Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, opens in a style now typical of the thirty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter. Amid the swelling string accompaniment and slow beat, the artist sings “fuck me to death, love me until I love myself.” So far, so in keeping with the musician who made her name with the dark, sensuous songs of 2012’s Born to Die (“my old man is a bad man, but I can’t deny the way he holds my hand”) and 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! (“Goddamn man-child, you fucked me so good I almost said ‘I love you’”).

All worthwhile horror films are products of their culture. They distill its neuroses and fears, forcing protagonists to make value judgments with life-or-death stakes. And that’s why the genre continues to compel: beyond the adrenaline rush of jump scares, watching old chillers is like opening a metaphysical time capsule. They show how past generations understood their world. The exorcism subgenre tracks that pattern — only its questions tend to be explicitly religious. William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, arriving at the height of modernist theology, directly foregrounded the question of faith within a liberal world order.

In January of this year, I joined the yearly flight of "swallows" who descend on Cape Town. Thousands of pasty Europeans swap their own chilly hemisphere for a few weeks in technicolor paradise. A day in, I was sold. Mountains to climb, waves to surf, open-toe shoes, a completely unworn jacket. Everyone I met seemed to make this a yearly thing, and I could see why. I spent a few days gaping at the sublime natural beauty before something else caught my eye: the art scene. Cape Town is the epicenter for African arts. Boutique hotels and restaurants are beautifully appointed with painstakingly handmade creations everywhere you look. Museums and commercial galleries abound with exhibitions spanning the whimsical and politically charged.

I have a confession, or perhaps a boast. I have never played the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, and now, at the grand old age of forty-one, I doubt I ever shall. But there’s no doubt it’s a cultural phenomenon that has long since transcended any suggestion of being the preserve of adolescents, literal and overgrown alike. Since it was created in 1974, sales of the game have grossed billions, and it has been played by tens if not hundreds of millions of people worldwide. To be an aficionado is to find yourself in broad company — but how does that translate at the movies?  The first answer to this question came in 2000, when a film that starred Jeremy Irons as the villainous Mage Profion was released in cinemas.

On the 100th birthday of Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese reflected on his love of the iconic Italian filmmaker in a cover essay he wrote for Harper's magazine. The essay begins by pushing back against a particular excess of the modern film industry, which is “content.” Following his criticism of the predominant Marvel Cinematic Universe as “theme park movies,” Scorsese aims at streaming services for relying on automated algorithms to determine what viewers want to watch. He then praises platforms that emphasize more curation. One of them is the Criterion Channel, a service that is part of the Criterion Collection, a physical media boutique that specializes in the restoration of classic and contemporary cinema.

One of the most popular shows today is the Paramount Network’s Yellowstone, which follows the Dutton family, led by Kevin Costner's John Dutton, who owns and runs one of the largest ranches in the country, the Yellowstone Ranch in Montana. The sprawling cattle ranch, owned by several generations of Duttons, is under constant threat by scheming developers, environmental activists and Native Americans seeking historical justice, not to mention the forces of globalization that threaten to run the family legacy out of business. Writer and director Taylor Sheridan’s hit series has been praised for its breathtaking cinematography, complex characters, gritty realism and modern relevance.

When Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aired on FX in 2019, it was very quickly decided that, whatever it was, it wasn’t Dickens. From Guy Pearce’s foul-mouthed Scrooge to a scene in which Mrs. Cratchit strips and offers Ebenezer sex in exchange for money to buy the medicine she needs for her son Tiny Tim, it was a strange combination of would-be gritty social realism and hysterical prurience. It was not well-received in the United States: Salon’s comment that it was “short on joy and very, very, very long on purgatorial slogging” was typical.

The trailer for Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, depicts the lonesome, desert sci-fi-induced death of twee. A sepia-toned artifice of the American West filmed near Madrid, it has everyone you would expect to be in a Wes Anderson movie, depicting themselves as always, with that special twinge of beautifully centered shots combined with at least one saccharine line which is designed to make you choke up a bit about a character who probably died off screen. Here is the trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FXCSXuGTF4&ab_channel=FocusFeatures There is something so horribly depressing about this.

In the thriller Inside, an art thief named Nemo (Willem Dafoe) breaks into the New York penthouse of a renowned architect and collector. Once there he is all business, liaising with an unseen collaborator via walkie-talkie rather than stopping to admire the art.  It is no accident that the paintings he is there to steal, by the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, depict tortured souls, with emaciated frames and paper-thin skin. By the end of the movie Nemo will be a physical manifestation of Schiele’s works: a man living in wretched limbo, psychologically tortured and physically deplete.  Directed by Greek filmmaker Vasilis Katsoupis, Inside is a reworking of the one-man survival drama, at once euphoric and painful to watch.

Fourth installments of mega-franchises don’t exactly have the greatest reputation — just think of The Phantom Menace, The Matrix Revolutions, Live Free or Die Hard and Jaws: The Revenge, to name a few. By this point, film sagas are usually bogged down by their own internal mythologies and find themselves replaying familiar beats in a bid to recapture the magic. But every so often, there’s that Mad Max: Fury Road, an utterly unexpected burst of wild creativity that outdoes its predecessors. And John Wick: Chapter 4 is such a triumph. As Chapter 4 begins, legendary assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is at odds with the High Table, the governing authority of the assassin underworld.

The arrest of Jonathan Majors last weekend, which resulted in his being charged with several assault and harassment misdemeanor charges — despite his lawyer announcing he is “completely innocent and is probably the victim of an altercation with a woman he knows” — is one of the more surprising developments in recent popular culture. Majors, who recently appeared as the arch-villain Kang in the latest Marvel picture Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, has been progressing steadily towards superstardom for some time, starring as the antagonist in the third Creed film and appearing in a series of ads for the US Army. Those commercials have since been pulled, with a spokesman declaring that the Army was “deeply concerned by the allegations.

Hollywood is America’s greatest export. Yet most museums either fixate on the industry’s tawdriness, as with the Hollywood Museum’s preservation of Marilyn Monroe’s pill bottle, or prioritize indie films over the artistic yet popular movies of Old Hollywood. MoMa’s film program can get so lost in Sundance obscurity that you wouldn’t know movies were a popular art form. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — aka the group that gives out the Oscars — opened the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, Americans hoped an intuition would finally document the products, people and dreams pumped out of La La Land. But the space was so preoccupied with twenty-first-century politics that it failed to honor the Jewish immigrants who built the damn town.

The difference between a divorce and a funeral seems lost on the director Jamie Lloyd; ditto for bird cages and prisons and, in the end, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and a sanatorium. Lloyd’s new, minimalist production on Broadway is so stripped of ornament, so unremittingly rote, that this reviewer nearly handed his valuables to an usher and asked for a padded room. At the play’s close, the director has the embattled housewife, Jessica Chastain’s Nora Helmer, make her defiant exit through the back wall of the theater upstage; a garage door opens and she strides onto the rain-soaked pavement, probably to be harassed by tweakers or shoved into oncoming traffic. Peals of laughter erupted in the audience — here was our chance!

Even though the endless debate about sex scenes in movies recurs every three or four months, it remains fixed. Nothing ever moves forward; nothing more is understood; no one’s perspective is shifted. Dug in on both sides of an argument that remains black and white, people refuse to move. Maybe one day they’ll be able to talk in Technicolor, but for now, some are distressed by erotic cinema and others are desperate for more of it. Stellar home-video labels like Severin, Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome continue to provide high-definition discs of genre films full of naked women and bloody bodies. But if Tom Cruise is the only real movie star left, the world won’t get more than a chaste kiss (maybe) from modern American cinema.

Throughout his career, director Quentin Tarantino has been admirably consistent about his ambition to make ten films — no more, no less — and then move on to other fields. He once stated, “I like that I will leave a ten-film filmography… it’s not etched in stone, but that is the plan. If I get to the tenth, do a good job and don’t screw it up, well that sounds like a good way to end the old career.” He was savvy enough to include a caveat: “if, later on, I come across a good movie, I won’t not do it just because I said I wouldn’t.” He concluded, “But ten and done, leaving them wanting more — that sounds right.

In February 1900, a critically acclaimed art exhibition went up at a Barcelona café called Els Quatre Gats. It was neither the first nor the last show mounted at the establishment, a popular drinking spot for avant-garde artists, writers and others. It was, however, the very first solo outing for one of the café’s regular patrons: a brash nineteen-year-old local art student named Pablo Ruiz Picasso. It has now been fifty years since Picasso died, on April 8, 1973, and even as that anniversary is being commemorated worldwide with new exhibitions and publications, he has never really faded from public consciousness. His art and even personal objects associated with him are avidly collected, and he continues to inspire filmmakers, musicians and other artists.

Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his seventy-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the British royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in precis, with all the swearing removed. Rock begins by pointing up the absurdity of Meghan Markle (winner of the "lightskin lottery," he says) complaining to Oprah: "I didn’t know how racist they were." "It’s the royal family!" expostulates Rock. "They’re the OGs [Original Gangstas] of racism. They’re the Sugarhill Gang of racism." (The 1980s cultural references give you an idea of the age of Rock’s mostly black audience at the live recording in Baltimore.

Growing up, one of my favorite books was Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, the story of a boy whose plane crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness and who must then fend for survival with only a single tool. 65 tries to pull off something similar, but with dinosaurs and sci-fi weapons. And bizarrely enough, it's a far better B-movie than it has any right to be. Yes, the setup of this film is seriously convoluted. Adam Driver stars as Mills, a long-haul space shipper who works for a spacefaring human civilization based on a planet other than Earth. When his vessel collides with an unexpected asteroid belt, he’s forced to crash-land on Earth — 65 million years before the present day. That’s right: this film takes place a long time ago, but in a galaxy not quite so far away.

It was ordained months ago that this year’s Academy Awards were going to be dominated by Everything Everywhere At Once, and so it has proved spectacularly. The film has taken seven awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor. While I was not one of the fans of the duo Daniels’s picture — multiverse spanning fantasy films are not exactly my bag, whether they’re made by Marvel or the hipper-than-hip indie company A24 — it’s still a distinctive and original work of cinema, albeit less likely to be regarded as a future classic than Todd Field’s magnificent Tár, which went home empty-handed. It may well be that Tár’s magnetic star Cate Blanchett lost to EEAO’s Michelle Yeoh for reasons of optics as much as ability.

When Mel Gibson’s ultra-violent, ultra-religious Passion of the Christ made $612 million worldwide, it was not earning its money from teenagers looking for a night out. Despite its R rating, churchgoers were being bused to theaters by the millions, thanks to the heavy support it received from evangelical Christian groups. Everyone from Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell to Pat Robertson and Chuck Colson came out in support of the film, although the Pope’s supposed endorsement — "it is as it was" — was denied by the Vatican. Yet faith-based films have quietly been big business in Hollywood for decades now.

John Heilemann, the shiny-headed former journalist best known for collaborating with Mark Halperin of sexual harassment fame, and who now operates as a hype man for political scam artists like Steve Schmidt and Michael Avenatti, went viral this weekend for his desperate, cloying defense of the corporate media on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher. Facing off against actor, comedian and sex enthusiast Russell Brand, Heilemann found himself in the unenviable position of being a man in a Joy Division T-shirt with a recent hand tattoo standing up for the cause of Morning Joe and the cast of rebellious media rapscallions housed at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It did not go well. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1632095569152811008?

If, in the spring of 1923, you’d somehow found yourself in the tumbleweed junction of Spokane, Washington, you might have shaken the dust from your feet at the strange and magnificent Davenport Hotel. Still standing today, this vast folly, soaring up in the middle of town like a gaudily iced wedding cake, was evidently greeted by cries of disbelief upon its opening in 1914. In the rural west of the early twentieth century, the Davenport was the last word in luxury and refinement. The lobby was a work of art in itself, with lamps in alabaster shells mounted on a twisted bronze column in each corner, and an Italian marble fountain set under a chandelier that tilted at a slightly drunken angle, like one of those ghostly photographs taken onboard the wreck of the Titanic.

When I was in middle school back in the 1990s, there were two sets of books every boy seemed to have in his backpack. One was the Redwall series, Brian Jacques’s swashbuckling tales of heroic mice and tyrannical wildcats. The other was the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. It’s no coincidence, I think, that both Jacques and Pullman are British. What made these books intriguing, beyond their carefully wound plots, was that they were marketed to children yet addressed subject matter that was very much adult. In Redwall, it was the brutal violence. His Dark Materials had some of that too (in the first chapter of the first book, we witness an attempted killing; in the first chapter of the second book, we witness an accidental fatality).