Tomorrow in the Book Club section, around noon, I’ll post the first entry in our book club for Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, concerning the opening story “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking.” If you’ve never participated in a book club before, this is a great chance to get on board - we’ll be doing one short story a week, so you can drop in and drop out as you please. I encourage you to get your hands on a copy of the book, but you can find this story online with a little digging if you need to.
I eagerly looked fwd to There Will Be Blood and found it awful. I reluctantly watched No Country and found it magnificent. I can't for the life of me see how the two are even remotely comparable. Just me though....
I remember seeing The Master in a theater with my dad, mesmerized by its gorgeous opening shot of the ocean and staying that way for almost the entire film, and then finding, to my surprise, the reception quite mixed at the time. I think now people tend to regard it as I did, but totally agree that The Master is indeed masterful. Give me Philip Seymour Hoffman awkwardly riding a motorcycle while Joaquin just goes on forever towards the horizon. 'Good for him'
Woah. I got assigned “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” for class two weeks ago. I bought Jesus’s Son immediately and am halfway through because I am a slow reader. It’s beautiful and also low key makes me want to kill myself. Sorry for not reading the rest of your posts. Very groovy.
I dunno--for me There Will Be Blood is very much a movie that doesn't quite work, in this way. I have a dim memory of Ross Douthat once calling it a Shakespearean tragedy that was missing the third and fourth acts. You go from (in my memory, at least--it's been a while) a dark but sort of nuanced and ambivalent character study to this totally depraved and grotesque ending, and you have to speculate a bit as to what his trajectory looked like in between--there's a big, suggestive silence there. I feel like this kicked off several films of Anderson's where characters' motivations and interiority are very deliberately withheld, in a way that I find equal parts frustrating and compelling.
Freddie, you ever watch any Herzog? You should really watch more or less everything he's ever done in chronological order, but if you want recommendations: The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Aguirre, Stroszek, Lessons of Darkness, and, though one of his lesser films, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans is essential viewing nonetheless.
1. I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but I will ONLY listen to The Rewatchables if it's a movie I myself rewatch -- and then I consistently find that they don't know the movie nearly as well as I do and I'm insulted they deemed themselves worthy of commentating on it as rewatchers. I realize this is a weird problem.
2. "And there are movies I want to like more than I do because of these sorts of problems." This, for me, describes every Coen brothers movie. Like the kid in Role Models, I like the idea of the Coen brothers movies more than I like the movies. I watch a new one every 6 months thinking this will be the one that does it for me. Serious Man, Llewyn Davis, Fargo, Raising Arizona, No Country, Burn After Reading, etc. I still only like Lebowski.
I could imagine a drunk Nick Cage in a bar telling me about the time he and his wife kidnapped a baby. I can't imagine the characters from There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men telling me their stories in any situation. Both stories feel like none of my business, somehow.
Loved reading this and I second the call for shaggy, perfect imperfections.
But we're just not going to see eye-to-eye on There Will Be Blood, Freddie. Maybe the difference is that I rewatch TWBB regularly. What lingers in the mind is a sense of perfection and craft, but the experience of sinking into the movie is weirder than that. DDL's performance gradually gets big and juicy - pure pulp, not prestige. By the end, he's so unhinged and elevated that he'd be at home as a demonic, cartoonish evil in Raising Arizona. I think Freddie's memory is being tricked by the fact that it starts in prestige territory and only gradually descends into weird, shaggy, perfect imperfection.
_Raising Arizona_ was the Coen Brothers attempt to sell out, so it's a weird and wonderful failure at multiple different levels. I have to wonder if H.I.'s quietly sentimental ending monologue is their attempt at a conventional happy ending. I love it as well.
_No Country_ is impeccably crafted and very polished but isn't that appropriate for a movie that is a takedown of Hollywood tropes and clichés, the anti-action movie? The film's real climax is at the end I think, after all of the fighting has petered out and Bell visits his disabled uncle, Ellis. To paraphrase James Blish: "You're going to die. That's the same fate faced by every man, woman and child that's ever lived. They faced the same choice that you're faced with, which is how you deal with it, and that is up to you." As mottos go it's equally as valid for the religious as well as the godless universe that _No Country_ posits. Then Bell's dreams at the end of the movie: aren't they clearly the dreams old men have right before they die, tired and worn out?
If anyone is also a fan of the Coen Brothers I recommend _Miller's Crossing_ and _True Grit_, which are both wonderful fun.
Melting internally that someone has finally made the case for Inherent Vice, the ugly duckling of PTA's oeuvre. I love it for all the reasons outlined above.
I love your writing and criticism immensely Freddie, but we really have different tastes in movies. I would trade ten Raising Arizonas (a movie I do like, fwiw) for another Old Country, and I’ve watched the “flip a coin” scene more times than I could count. I don’t mind meandering movies if the characters are truly engaging (see: The Big Lebowski) but I think I get bored more easily without a clear plot structure.
In crystallography, there's a concept called "ideally imperfect" that might fit with what you are saying Freddie.
[Dropping into the rechnical, and dramatically over simplifying, it is that when crystals are too perfect they interfere with their own ability to diffract light without interfering with themselves. Thus, when they are imperfect in just the right way, you get the strongest diffraction effect, i.e., the most light duffracted by tge crystal.]
I eagerly looked fwd to There Will Be Blood and found it awful. I reluctantly watched No Country and found it magnificent. I can't for the life of me see how the two are even remotely comparable. Just me though....
Mine is a Raising Arizona stan account.
"I don't know what his damn jammies looked like... they had Yodas and shit on them!"
michael clayton best flick of aught 7
Raising Arizona is a real gem, and one of Cage's best performances of all time I might add.
Favorite line:
"Do these balloons blow up into funny shapes?"
"Not unless round's funny."
I remember seeing The Master in a theater with my dad, mesmerized by its gorgeous opening shot of the ocean and staying that way for almost the entire film, and then finding, to my surprise, the reception quite mixed at the time. I think now people tend to regard it as I did, but totally agree that The Master is indeed masterful. Give me Philip Seymour Hoffman awkwardly riding a motorcycle while Joaquin just goes on forever towards the horizon. 'Good for him'
“… and when there was no crawdads, we ate sand.”
“You ate sand?”
“We ate sand.”
Woah. I got assigned “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” for class two weeks ago. I bought Jesus’s Son immediately and am halfway through because I am a slow reader. It’s beautiful and also low key makes me want to kill myself. Sorry for not reading the rest of your posts. Very groovy.
I dunno--for me There Will Be Blood is very much a movie that doesn't quite work, in this way. I have a dim memory of Ross Douthat once calling it a Shakespearean tragedy that was missing the third and fourth acts. You go from (in my memory, at least--it's been a while) a dark but sort of nuanced and ambivalent character study to this totally depraved and grotesque ending, and you have to speculate a bit as to what his trajectory looked like in between--there's a big, suggestive silence there. I feel like this kicked off several films of Anderson's where characters' motivations and interiority are very deliberately withheld, in a way that I find equal parts frustrating and compelling.
Freddie, you ever watch any Herzog? You should really watch more or less everything he's ever done in chronological order, but if you want recommendations: The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Aguirre, Stroszek, Lessons of Darkness, and, though one of his lesser films, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans is essential viewing nonetheless.
1. I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but I will ONLY listen to The Rewatchables if it's a movie I myself rewatch -- and then I consistently find that they don't know the movie nearly as well as I do and I'm insulted they deemed themselves worthy of commentating on it as rewatchers. I realize this is a weird problem.
2. "And there are movies I want to like more than I do because of these sorts of problems." This, for me, describes every Coen brothers movie. Like the kid in Role Models, I like the idea of the Coen brothers movies more than I like the movies. I watch a new one every 6 months thinking this will be the one that does it for me. Serious Man, Llewyn Davis, Fargo, Raising Arizona, No Country, Burn After Reading, etc. I still only like Lebowski.
I could imagine a drunk Nick Cage in a bar telling me about the time he and his wife kidnapped a baby. I can't imagine the characters from There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men telling me their stories in any situation. Both stories feel like none of my business, somehow.
Loved reading this and I second the call for shaggy, perfect imperfections.
But we're just not going to see eye-to-eye on There Will Be Blood, Freddie. Maybe the difference is that I rewatch TWBB regularly. What lingers in the mind is a sense of perfection and craft, but the experience of sinking into the movie is weirder than that. DDL's performance gradually gets big and juicy - pure pulp, not prestige. By the end, he's so unhinged and elevated that he'd be at home as a demonic, cartoonish evil in Raising Arizona. I think Freddie's memory is being tricked by the fact that it starts in prestige territory and only gradually descends into weird, shaggy, perfect imperfection.
_Raising Arizona_ was the Coen Brothers attempt to sell out, so it's a weird and wonderful failure at multiple different levels. I have to wonder if H.I.'s quietly sentimental ending monologue is their attempt at a conventional happy ending. I love it as well.
_No Country_ is impeccably crafted and very polished but isn't that appropriate for a movie that is a takedown of Hollywood tropes and clichés, the anti-action movie? The film's real climax is at the end I think, after all of the fighting has petered out and Bell visits his disabled uncle, Ellis. To paraphrase James Blish: "You're going to die. That's the same fate faced by every man, woman and child that's ever lived. They faced the same choice that you're faced with, which is how you deal with it, and that is up to you." As mottos go it's equally as valid for the religious as well as the godless universe that _No Country_ posits. Then Bell's dreams at the end of the movie: aren't they clearly the dreams old men have right before they die, tired and worn out?
If anyone is also a fan of the Coen Brothers I recommend _Miller's Crossing_ and _True Grit_, which are both wonderful fun.
Melting internally that someone has finally made the case for Inherent Vice, the ugly duckling of PTA's oeuvre. I love it for all the reasons outlined above.
I love your writing and criticism immensely Freddie, but we really have different tastes in movies. I would trade ten Raising Arizonas (a movie I do like, fwiw) for another Old Country, and I’ve watched the “flip a coin” scene more times than I could count. I don’t mind meandering movies if the characters are truly engaging (see: The Big Lebowski) but I think I get bored more easily without a clear plot structure.
In crystallography, there's a concept called "ideally imperfect" that might fit with what you are saying Freddie.
[Dropping into the rechnical, and dramatically over simplifying, it is that when crystals are too perfect they interfere with their own ability to diffract light without interfering with themselves. Thus, when they are imperfect in just the right way, you get the strongest diffraction effect, i.e., the most light duffracted by tge crystal.]
http://pd.chem.ucl.ac.uk/pdnn/diff2/kinemat1.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689186/