Army of Shadows (L'armée des ombres) (1969)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

This film about a French Resistance cell, made 25 years after the events it depicts, treats with great seriousness the danger and essentially tragic nature of opposition to the occupying Nazi forces. It’s a man’s business, where men with grave expressions trudge about trying to coordinate and train Resistance cells across the country.

At least that’s what it claims to be about, though it shows precious little of either that support or anything the Resistance is actually doing. Much of the film’s over two-hour length is spent on two kinds of scenes: either rescuing each other from Gestapo custody, or killing traitors. It might be that the viewers were expected to fill in the actual work of resistance — sabotage, selected assassinations, support for the community — based on their recollection of the times. But for those who didn’t suffer through the occupation, the film isn’t enlightening in the least. It offers no praxis, no lessons for us in the future.

Simone Signoret, as Mathilde, the sole female member of the resistance cell, provides a little relief from the relentlessly male viewpoint, but in truth her character is just as single-minded and tough as those of her comrades.

The film gets darker and darker as members of the cell are captured by the Nazis, tortured, and killed. One wonders if there will eventually be some catharsis, perhaps when the Allies liberate France. But in fact, the last scene takes place in 1943, more than a year before D-Day, and after the cell is forced to eliminate Mathilde, who has been compromised, the movie ends with a crawl that tells the fates of the remaining few members of the cell, all who would be captured and killed by the Gestapo.

This morose ending seems unnecessary, given that the film was adapted not from actual events but from a novel. The viewer is forced to wonder what the point was. Certainly the French had much to be proud of with respect to their resistance to the occupation, and a movie that valorized and celebrated this resistance would be understandable, especially by the end of the 1960s when the government nearly collapsed following intense student protests. But that’s not what this is, at all. The film almost begs the question of whether any resistance at all was worthwhile. It certainly doesn’t encourage it.

Caught Stealing (2025)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky

This movie is about a traumatized and rather accident-prone aging hipster who is accidentally caught up in a case of mistaken identity by some Russian mafia drug dealers, and bang bang bang boom! because that’s never been done before.

There's a scene in Robert Altman's “The Long Goodbye” in which a gangster, operating under the belief that protagonist Phillip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) knows where their apparently mutual friend Terry is, or where the gangster’s money is, and along with a bunch of thugs twice busts into his apartment to threaten him. These scenes are regarded as classics because they are brilliantly played for a combination of comedy and horror. Similar scenes where gangsters threaten innocent people were common before Raymond Chandler wrote the source material in 1949, and have become such a common trope in movies that they appear not only in gangster or action flicks but even romcoms like “Anora.”

This scene of threat isn't the only thing that “Caught Stealing” has in common with Altman's brilliant movie -- both protagonists, additionally, have a cat -- but once a classic situation has been done, and brilliantly reinvented, by a brilliant filmmaker like Robert Altman, you’re under an obligation to do something that at least attempts to be inventive. “Anora” achieved this by giving the gangsters the limitation that they couldn't hurt the innocent woman they were questioning, and by delaying the arrival of their boss, and making the resulting scene so comic and absurd that it should be regarded as a classic of slapstick in and of itself.

“Caught Stealing,” not so much. The thugs are by the numbers; their apparent boss, same; the dialogue, yeah. It’s only when people start dying, earlier and then more regularly than the viewer might expect, that things get remotely serious. And the problem isn’t the direction (by the competent Darren Aronofsky, a cult figure for some) but that the protagonist himself is hard to take seriously.

The protagonist Hank (Austin Butler) is, as I said before, traumatized. A promising high school baseball star from northern California (and a big San Francisco Giants fan, though he now lives in New York City), he ruined his life by damaging his knee and killing a teammate while driving drunk. Since then he’s become an alcoholic, albeit with an extremely hot girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz); to be fair, Hank, played by the beautiful Austin Butler, last seen in “The Bikeriders,” is also extremely hot. On the other hand, Hank is also extremely stupid.

I get that characters have to take certain actions in order for a movie plot to move forward. In horror movies, stupid decisions are a necessity; without the characters making bad choices (let’s take this shortcut, let’s stop in this deserted small town, let’s spend the night in this creepy place, etc.) there’s no movie. (This trope was entertainingly satirized in a television commercial for Geico:

“Let’s hide in the attic!

“No, in the basement!”

“Why can’t we just get in the running car!?”

“Are you crazy?!”

In this case, Hank’s stupid decision is not to agree to take care of his middle-aged punk neighbor’s cat while he goes to his ill dad’s bedside in England. It’s when he sees two bald thugs banging on the neighbor’s door and tries to intervene. They naturally assume he knows something, proceed to beat the crap out of him, and the plot is off and running.

Me, when a character does something that stupid, I immediately get disinterested. Why should I care about a man who’s that stupid? When he’s hospitalized and told the beating damaged his kidneys and thus can never drink again, he almost immediately gets drunk. That’s strike two. I was tempted to walk out at this point, but I stuck with the movie. It got… if not better, at least more entertaining in parts.

The best thing about the movie’s second half are two Russian orthodox Jewish brothers who are hit men. Played by Vincent D'Onofrio and Liev Schreiber, they’re a level more menacing and brutal than the two bald Russian goons who beat up Hank in Act I, but they’re also more interesting and more intelligent than anyone else in the film, despite their trade. By Act III you almost like them. They made sticking around until the end of the movie worth it for me — but it also makes me wonder why, if they’re the most interesting characters in the whole movie, the filmmakers didn’t make them even more central to the story.

But stepping back, all you really need to know is that this is essentially an action-dramedy featuring male characters fighting, beating each other up, killing the female characters — the violence escalates to the point where hand grenades are tossed into a crowded restaurant, although the movie spares us the gore — and then reminding the viewer that they are just regular guys. I think the film is telling viewers that men, despite their capacity for stupidity and violence, are also lovable in some way.

Sure. But I already know men have a capacity, even a tendency, toward stupidity and violence; I also know this may or may not be a result of trauma. Now that PTSD is better understood by the general populace and “trauma” has become a convenient explanation for damaged psyches, we’re seeing lots of movies that try to pass off a character’s traumatic past as backstory that excuses their behavior — and that is way too convenient for filmmakers. You see it more and more.

All this is simply to provide a narrative reason to depict shooting, explosions, chase scenes, etc. on screen. That’s what this movie boils down to. Your kind of entertainment? Then sure, you’ll probably enjoy this. I can think of lots of better ways to spend your time, but unfortunately they rarely appear in multiplex cinemas.

Honey Don’t! (2025)
Directed by Ethan Coen
Written by Coen and Tricia Cooke

After she starred last year in the noir comedy “Drive Away Dolls” from the same filmmakers, and appearing in a featured role in the everybody-saw-it French take on Hollywood “The Substance,” moviegoers understandably wanted to see more of Margaret Qualley, a statuesque, classically beautiful brunette with an interesting presence and a penetrating gaze.

They get their wish fulfilled in “Honey Don’t!”, a quickly paced but disorganized noir dramedy from Ethan Coen — apparently the “fun Coen brother,” if Joel Coen’s output, 2021’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and in-production horror film “Jack of Spades” provide any comparison — and the second installment of a “lesbian B-movie trilogy” Coen and his spouse and collaborator Tricia Cooke plan.

Whether the third movie in the trilogy, an outdoorsy adventure tentatively titled “Go, Beavers!” — at least one hopes they don’t stick with that title — gets made might be in doubt after “Honey Don’t!” This new release, starring Qualley and Aubrey Plaza, is entertaining and stylish — until the narrative goes completely off the rails and the viewer is left wondering what that actually just was.

Qualley plays a wisecracking, poker-faced private detective in Bakersfield, a city which has little to recommend it to outsiders. As depicted in “Honey Don’t!”, except for the inclusion of modern transit buses the city and surrounding Kern County have not had an upgrade for 60 years; it resembles the Bakersfield of 1970’s “Five Easy Pieces” or, even more, the Stockton of 1972’s “Fat City”: Composed of boarded-up structures that were built and painted in the 1950s and 60s and never maintained since, the city is populated by losers, the poor, and scammers of one kind or another who prey upon them. Against this background, Qualley’s Honey O'Donahue stands out. Attired in silk dresses and suits, and seemingly always in control both of her fetchingly set curls and every social situation, she is the one bit of perfection in a landscape of dust and dereliction.

The other person who stands out is a chic Frenchwoman (Lera Abova), not that anyone notices her. This mysterious character is in town only to chastise a local druglord — who is also pastor of a church-drug ring-sex cult. The pastor, Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), manipulates the women in his congregation to fuck him whenever he wants, while some of the men deal drugs supplied by a European mafia known only as “the French,” as in “the French are not happy.” That is the message delivered by the mysterious lady. She buzzes around on a motorscooter unnoticed, as I said, by anyone, even after committing a murder: she leaves the scene of the crime on her Vespa, seemingly firm in the knowledge that no one is paying attention.

“No one paying attention” might be the theme of the movie — no one but Honey — if the movie had a coherent theme or plot, but it doesn’t. In addition to the drug-dealing sex cult run out of the “church,” the movie features a church member who dies in a traffic accident which no one but Honey finds suspicious; she spends the first half of the film looking into it, for no apparent reason than her own curiosity. Certainly the police don’t care, neither the amiable homicide detective Marty (Charlie Day), nor Ofc. MJ Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), who wastes away in the basement evidence room. Both cops are interested in Honey for her honey; Honey discourages Marty and beds MJ.

Plaza brings some of her trademark deadpan presence to the role of MJ, but something about her performance seems off kilter. It turns out that the character is suffering from deep trauma, so I decided that Plaza was trying to indicate that her character is unbalanced before the viewer finds out she is, and this was disappointing, because Plaza has always been a better actor than that. But when I realized that any problem with the film lies in the tattered, vanishing narrative, I had stopped blaming any of the actors for anything.

The pastor of the church/sex cult/drug ring, who seems to be the movie’s primary bad guy, meets his end two-thirds of the way through the film. But that doesn’t solve any of the mysteries that Honey is looking into, or does he die because he is a creep and a soul-dead murderer; he dies because he is losing control of his minions and scattering too many dead bodies around, and this annoys his patrons “the French.” So his death in the film is essentially meaningless.

This brings the narrative to a dead stop, not because Honey had evidence against him and his death stymies any investigation she was conducting, but because there are no longer any antagonists in the movie. Yet it continues; Honey starts looking for a new missing person unrelated to the first half’s story. Even so, a more talented filmmaker could have made something of this situation; movies more damaged than this one have been salvaged.

Not here. The climactic scene, though bloody, is poorly prepared for. That makes it all the more shocking and, from a viewer’s point of view, incomprehensible. This started out as a comedy — a Coen-type comedy, to be sure, with deaths and a modicum of imaginative gore — but the story’s climax has nothing comic about it. It’s as if “Fargo” ends with Marge having to feed the psycho Swede into the woodchipper, rather than taking him captive and then giving him a talking-to in the car on the way to jail.

Even so, viewers who come to the movie to see Margaret Qualley will be entertained. And anyone who’s as much of an Aubrey Plaza fan as I am will be glad to see her at all. (Her most recent significant role was a supporting turn in “My Old Ass,” where she gives a modest but ultimately very moving performance. Soon after she finished shooting “Honey Don’t!”, her life was upended when her husband Jeff Baena committed suicide. Baena was a filmmaker who directed Plaza in a number of her early movies — see below — but in a real-life version of the story in “A Star is Born,” her career eclipsed his and he had not had a movie greenlighted since before the pandemic.) If you’re not a particular fan of either, this ill-fated movie will not please.

Margaret Qualley movies previously reviewed in this space:

• Drive Away Dolls

• The Substance

Aubrey Plaza movies previously reviewed in this space:

• Megalopolis

• Emily the Criminal

• Three Jeff Baena-directed films starring Plaza: Life After Beth, The Little Hours, Spin Me Round

• Four early Natasha Lyonne movies, including “But I’m a Cheerleader,” featuring Plaza

• Damsels in Distress (just a cameo, but again, the best thing in the movie)

Moon (2024)
Written and directed by Kurdwin Ayub

In the first scene of this tense, deceptively plain thriller, mixed martial arts fighter Sarah (Florentina Holzinger) suffers a brutal loss in a televised match. As she's being simultaneously held down, punched, and strangled by her opponent, and British-inflected announcers intone that this defeat must surely mark the end of her competitive career, Sarah can barely manage to tap out.

This opening scene is only remarkable because of the way it bursts upon a viewer who might be unfamiliar with the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) and its violence – or who might be avoiding it because of its violence. Otherwise, this scene, and the next six or seven minutes of the movie, seem to perform the purely narrative function of introducing the main character and her dilemma. Then the story gets properly started. It's only later, at the end of the film, that the viewer has reason to recall the scene and understand what the opening moments – again, the scene only seems to perform a quotidian narrative function – are really telling us.

Following her defeat, and after failing to establish herself as a trainer at a local gym, Sarah is hired as a private trainer by a rich Jordanian heir. This genial 30-year-old Arab fellow Abdul (Omar Almajali), whom she has contact with over Zoom a couple of times, wants to hire her as a private trainer for his three sisters at their wealthy family's mansion-compound in Jordan. With no other options, Sarah jumps at the opportunity. The movie follows her to a luxe Amman hotel and then to an SUV, which delivers her to Abdul's family's isolated property in the desert outside the city.

The setup could lead to a fish-out-of-water comedy, a culture-clash romcom, or an inspiring women's lib picture. "Moon" is none of those, but it's worth keeping in mind that almost every movie, like a fetus that possesses both male and female qualities before it (usually*) develops one way or another, contains multiverses. Setups are almost commoditized; it’s the way you develop a story based on the setup that determines what it will be. (Digression: The film industry, driven by [among other considerations than an auteur’s own vision and capabilities] necessities of funding and by trade-offs between content and which country's distributors will buy a film1, is a sort of multiverse-generating cultural locus. The bigger a film (its budget, its stars, how important it is in the career of a producer or film executive) when a film is complete, it can change.2)

So Ayub, an Iraqi Kurd who immigrated to Austria as a child, has made the movie she wanted to make. And what we have is a taut thriller. The movie develops as a mystery, with the sisters – who aren't really interesting in learning cage fighting techniques – slowly revealing to Sarah their situation and what Sarah can really help them with.

Things go wrong from the start. In the initial training session for the three younger sisters of the genial man — I would guess they range in age from about 25 to about 17? I guess? — the one who seems the oldest, Shaima (Nagham Abu Baker) clearly doesn’t want to be there. Within less than five minutes, she claims an injury, but this is clearly just an excuse to leave. The middle sister, Nour (Andria Tayah) — clearly the one who tries to get everyone to get along with each other, says she’ll talk to Shaima and bring her back, so she too departs.

That leaves the youngest, a doe-eyed teenager named Fatima (Celina Antwan). At least the first two girls were able to keep up with the less-than-demanding physical strain of Sarah’s opening exercises; Fatima has hardly gone through the motions, and evinces no stamina whatsoever. After staring at Sarah for a moment with a vague smile that she wears almost constantly, she too goes out. A middle-aged female servant shrugs apologetically and follows them, leaving Sarah nonplussed and alone.

Sarah joins them in a TV room furnished with ugly, ridiculous imitation French empire sofas, where the ladies slouch listlessly and watch an Arab soap opera. After sitting in disbelieving silence for a few minutes, Sarah asks them what they have planned for the rest of the day. They don’t even look at her as they answer “…. This. … Nothing.” Don’t they go out? “To the mall.” Don’t they go to school? “Teachers come here. We are home-schooled.” What about in the evening, Sarah asks; Abdul, their brother, had mentioned there were clubs in Amman. “For him,” Shaima says, an edge in her voice. “Not for us.”

It becomes clear that the young ladies simply aren’t allowed to go out, except to the carefully secured environment of the shopping mall, and then with a retinue of beefy, suited guards. Perhaps because the family is extremely wealthy, out of concern for their safety, but also perhaps because there is no place for affluent unmarried women to venture out in Jordanian society. None of this is explained. Frustrated, Sarah pulls out her phone and asks how to connect to wi-fi. There’s no wi-fi.

By now it has dawned on the viewer that these women are essentially captives, living incommunicado in a (tastelessly) gilded cage, without friends, school mates, or anyone to interact with besides each other, the servants, the guards, and their brothers. The irony is that Sarah herself used to be a cage fighter in MMA, get it, and now… Anyway, they have no use for Sarah as a boxing coach. That’s not why they asked Abdul to get them one. It turns out that the sisters — well, Nour, at least — have an escape plan, and it’s Sarah.

Here again the story is at a turning point. A film by an American would show how their coach-cum-liberator trains them into an efficient team, drumming them into shape in the guise of martial arts training, then leading a dramatic escape. But this is not that movie. For the next 30 minutes or so the film devolves into a sort of horror movie showing progressively more disquieting and then horrifying levels of powerlessness and victimization endured by the women. By witnessing these scenes, Sarah becomes convinced that she has to help them. But there's only a slapdash plan and not all the sisters are even on board with it, even as Sarah performs her role (only she can drive a car), so things don’t go well.

At this point we can pause to ponder what lessons the movie has for us as anti-fascists.

The movie is entirely centered on women, and a woman wrote and directed it. On its face, it's a feminist film that lays out the humiliations and powerlessness even of coddled daughters of the ultra wealthy … I was going to say “especially in a patriarchal society,” but in what other kind of society could the ultra-wealthy exist except in a patriarchal one?

On the other hand, the filmmaker constantly undermines the narrative tropes we associate with feminist movies. The sisters aren't united; neither they nor Sarah seem to have any political or feminist consciousness or education. Sarah's ability to fulfill the rescuer role she's been assigned (by Noor as well as by the tropes of the genre) is limited by her capacities: she’s there to physically train the women -- indeed, it seems to be the only thing she is capable of -- but she doesn't actually know how to train anyone besides herself. She doesn't even know how to do the basic coaching task of helping students with motivation; in fact, she fails at this even at the beginning of the movie with her first would-be client. And in the end, the sisters never resolve whatever keeps them at odds with one another; they don’t even learn how to fight. And they aren’t rescued.

As a viewer, one can admire the filmmaker’s commitment to a realistic ending, albeit one that contains no emotional satisfaction. Another viewer might wonder why Ayub went to the trouble if the story was going to end this way. But the director apparently doesn’t see it this way. Interviewed at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, Ayub said, “I wanted to make a film about sisters, but also about sisters you're not necessarily biologically related to. You can find a sister in another country, find common ground and help each other, no matter where you come from. The movie was about solidarity between women.” This is almost risible, given that the three sisters never unite with each other, and that Noor doesn’t seem to have included anyone else in planning for the escape, even Sarah.

At the end of the movie, back in Austria, the traumatized Sarah is decompensating. When her sister casually complains that her baby is a chore to care for, Sarah offers to kill it, and there’s a side of her that’s not kidding. The last scene is a single shot at a karaoke club. Sarah performs the Rihanna song “S&M” in its entirety. Written by Ester Dean,

The lyrics are about sex, sadomasochism, bondage and BDSM fetishes, including the sexual fantasies and turn-ons of its protagonist. The song opens with the hook "Na, na, na, c'mon". During the chorus, the lyrics include, "'Cause I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it / Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it." … [The singer] describes herself as "bad" and openly praises her own sexual prowess. Lyrics include, "Sticks and stones may break my bones / But chains and whips excite me."

Thus Wikipedia. The extended single take in which Sarah wails out the song — first, in a controlled, and then increasingly unhinged, manner — as well as its position in the film as the final scene, leads the viewer to take her seriously. And then we remember the first scene of the film, in which she’s a cage fighter getting the shit kicked out of her.

Some people just don’t know how to play.

Further reading:

• 14 Aug 2024, Cineuropa.com: Interview with filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub

In my recent review of “Casablanca,” I pointed out that it was filled with refugees from European cinema and theater, from Ingrid Bergman to Peter Lorre to Madeline Lebeau — the young woman who tearfully sings “La Marseillaise” — to Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser), and to its writers, Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein. The hundreds of actors, writers, directors and crew who fled their native Europe ahead of Hitler’s invasions naturally came to New York and Los Angeles, where they rejuvenated the theater and cinema worlds with both an infusion of fresh talent and a strong anti-Nazi sentiment.

These talented refugees were, of course, eager to help create anti-Hitler propaganda movies that Hollywood rolled out one after another from 1941 onwards, cheap melodramas like “Underground” (1941), in which Nazis were depicted as unreservedly evil (and the cast was almost all German refugees). More sophisticated movies had slightly more three-dimensional Nazi characters. “Casablanca”’s Maj. Strasser — played by refugee Conrad Veidt, a star of German cinema who fled with his Jewish wife — is very handsome and mannered, even charming. In “The Train,” the Nazi bad guy, played by Paul Scofield, is almost as debonaire. “To Be or Not to Be” lacks a handsome Nazi; the Germans are often comedic and easily taken in by members of a Warsaw theater troupe.

It was Charlie Chaplin — an English Jew — who created the most enduring cinematic portrayal of Hitler in “The Great Dictator” (1940). Here, the Führer dances daintily with a globe as he dreams of domination — but the globe is a balloon, bouncing comedically off his head. After that, it became difficult for Americans to think of Hitler as anything but an insufferable little twerp, infinitely punchable.

(There was another side to Hollywood’s attitude toward Nazis. As recounted in an article “Hollywood’s Confrontations with Naziism,” Hollywood studio heads — many of whom were Jewish — spent the 1930s kissing Hitler’s ass in order to preserve the German market for American films. This part of the story is ignored, while the refugees who populated Hollywood are what we remember.)

“To Be or Not to Be” shows another level of ambivalence about what was going on in Europe. In this film, which depicts the Blitzkrieg and its aftermath, the victims of the war (and the heroes of the movie) are hardly Jewish. Specifically, the film elides this question, though one of the actors in the Warsaw theater company, which in the film stands in for all of Poland, reads as Jewish. His character is named Greenberg (which seems odd for a film that opens with a joke about how all Poles have names like Lubinski, Kubinski, Lominski, and so on). Played by a somewhat spectral but dignified actor, Felix Bressart, Greenberg the character is a bit player in the company who appreciates any opportunity for a good laugh. But his dream is to play Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” so he can utter the famous monologue that contains the line “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” (He gets his opportunity when he is arrested by the Nazis later in the movie.)

These references made the character’s Jewishness quite clear to audiences of the 1940s, but in a movie that mentions “concentration camps” — a thing that Americans had hardly even heard of in 1942 — the word “Jew” is never mentioned. The Poles could be heroes in a 1942 film, but Jews as Jews could not. They were so despised by many Americans that movies of the day could not even say the word.

The cast members — both of the theater troupe that appears in the movie, and of the movie itself — who seem the least Polish are, of course, the stars. Jack Benny (a Jewish actor, though definitely not a Polish one) and Carole Lombard (from Fort Wayne, Indiana) appear as Joseph and Maria Tura,1 Warsaw’s most famous actors. He’s vain and mediocre; she’s flighty. She has a dalliance with a Polish pilot, Sibosky, played by another American, a very young Robert Stack (who would go on to become an action hero in B-movies and eventually the FBI man Eliott Ness on television). It’s this romantic triangle that provides the engine for much of the movie’s comedy; it’s the B-plot that runs under the main one.

(Finally we arrive at a description of the film’s actual story.) When the war starts and the Nazis march into what’s left of Warsaw following the Blitzkreig, the theater company puts its skills and extensive collection of German military uniforms — before the war, they had been rehearsing a play about the Gestapo — to the service of the Polish underground. Their mission is to intercept a Polish turncoat, Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), who has a list of Polish pilots in exile flying with Great Britain’s Royal Air Force. To succeed, the theater company must deploy their arts of disguise, acting and yes, uniforms, to make fools of the Germans and save themselves.

The result is a farce that employs both Shakespeare’s strategy of mistaken identity as a source of comedy as well as a certain expressionistic use of dream logic and repetition. Benny disguises himself as the local Gestapo chief in order to interrogate the turncoat Prof. Siletsky, and later disguises himself as Siletsky to get information from the real Gestapo officer, Col. Erhardt (Sig Ruman, who appeared in several Lubitch films, and whose pop-eyed rage inspired generations of writers and actors, including the way that Col. Klink yelled at Sgt. Schultz on “Hogan’s Heroes”). Two different members of the troupe disguise themselves as Hitler at various points.

The movie has some lessons to teach us as we work to undermine fascism today.

First, although mocking satire has become a dulled weapon in today’s world — how are you going to satirize a president who behaves like a five-year-old? — we still have to use it. In my opinion it’s most effective nowadays not in movies, TV, or writing, but in live displays of derision. The appearances of giant inflatable Trumps at demonstrations draw attention, lighten the mood, encourage the crowd, and signify a refusal to give Trump what he most wants: credibility and acceptance.

Second, resistance requires small groups that trust each other and bring skills to the work. In “To Be or Not to Be,” the Germans forbid the theater company from putting on performances, so they pivot and become a resistance cell. Despite the petty bickering that they indulge in before the invasion (and which continues for the sake of lightening the mood, they work closely together against the invaders.

Hollywood could never summon the courage today to create effective anti-authoritarian movies. A viewer can find subtle notes of dissension in American films, but the financiers and corporations who back film production nowadays will never — could never — summon the courage to attack fascism. Like many newspapers, they play both-sides games. The compelling (if ultimately frustrating) movie “Civil War” (2024) was careful to disguise, and mostly leave unsaid, the beliefs, aims, or motivations of the various combatants, to an almost risible degree. The cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” by CBS shows why: Paramount, the corporation which owns CBS, was threatened by Colbert’s constant withering criticism of the Trump administration’s people and policies: they want the FCC to rule in their favor on a proposed merger. There’s too much money to be made.

More reading:
Jews Who Fled the Nazis to Make Films in Hollywood. The Jewish News of Northern California, 27 Nov 2014

“Materialists” doesn’t have a definite article in its title. I misnamed it in a note the other day, and when I walked into the theater and asked for a ticket, the guys behind the counter both referred to it as “The Materialists.”

Certainly, the film’s central hypothesis — which is that even a successful matchmaker must be in want of a husband — does have a strong Gilded Age vibe. But there’s no “The.”

“Materialists,” no the, is about the work and the romantic life of said matchmaker. The setting is New York of today, not 1880. Instead of being an unmarried, middle-aged yenta, or even Cher in “Moonstruck,” she’s Dakota Johnson and her I’m-31-and-still-hot set of bangs strongly suggest her character is named Zoe or Andi. Actually, her name is Lucy, and she is only the most successful of at least a dozen similarly fetching female employees of a high-end matchmaking service for ambitious, high-earning people who need help finding other, even richer, mates.

At first the viewer is given just what they expect. Two of Z̶o̶e̶'̶s̶ Lucy’s clients are approaching project completion — i.e., their wedding. Her co-workers at the match agency squeal in delight as they throw a minor party for Lucy’s… drumroll… ninth wedding in nine years. (This is treated as exceptional performance, and maybe it is? An average of one per year? Okay. Writer-director Celine Song used to be one of these matchmakers, so it must be accurate.)

When she attends the wedding, Lucy saves the day, warming up the bride’s cold feet with a mixture of realism:

BRIDE: What's going on is that I am a modern woman. I could have been anything. Anything. But I chose to become a bride. I chose this. It's not like I'm getting married because I need to forge a relationship between two kingdoms. It's not like my family needs a cow.

LUCY: Do you not want to get married today?

BRIDE: I have to. My parents spent so much money on this wedding — hundreds of thousands of dollars just so that I could feel like a fucking woman.

LUCY: What's the real reason you do want to marry him?

Several lines of back-and-forth in which she makes Lucy promise never to reveal what she’s about to say. Then:

BRIDE: (My fiancé) thinks my sister compromised. She's never said that, but I know it's true. She thinks he's better than her husband. She thinks he's got a better job, that he's better looking. And… that makes me feel like I won.

LUCY: This is about value.

BRIDE (thoughtful): He does make me feel valuable.

LUCY: Charlotte, marriage is a business deal. And it always has been since the very first time two people did it. You can always walk away if the deal isn't good.

This transactional approach works with Charlotte. Problem solved.

After the ceremony, Lucy meets the groom’s brother, Harry (Pedro Pascal), an extremely rich, masculine guy who’s so confident he lets himself be diffident, even vulnerable. He sets out to woo her, and it isn’t hard, because we next meet Lucy’s ex, John (Chris Evans), the epitome of a starving actor. He’s extremely unsuccessful, and they fought all the time; by contrast, all Harry has to do is be a bit charming and show Lucy his penthouse apartment.

You can see where this is going, and the question is, do you want to go along for the ride? The answer is yes, and viewers have just been shown why: At a crucial moment in a scene, the dialogue gets extremely sharp and revealing. We saw this when Lucy saved the wedding in Act I; after that, at every subsequent moment where it counts, the writing sharpens and casts a revealing light on character, motivation, the scene’s conflict — and in a way that feels natural. Here’s Harry admiring Lucy’s technique:

Your sales pitch is perfect, because you make it feel like it's their idea. It's not like you're telling people they need you — nobody wants to hear that. If they need you, well, something is wrong with them. Instead, you're saying “you could do this on your own, but if you're lucky enough to be able to afford me, why not? You're a luxury good, and they really do feel like they need you, just like they need every other luxury in their lives.

Game recognizes game — but it’s more than that. Not only does this speech neatly (and accurately) analyze Lucy’s sales super-power, it echoes the idea Lucy previously expressed: dating is transactional, and each party has to feel like they’re making out great in the exchange.

The whole movie turns on this concept of transactionality in relationships. And the best thing — I’m not really spoiling anything here, because I’m not going to tell you how the characters resolve this conflict between cold transactionalism and true love — is that the story’s resolution isn’t as simple as “true love wins after all.” Instead, the script gives a more illuminating and interesting both-and solution.

It’s more than a nice trick; it’s really good writing, and just what I expected from writer-director Song. Her first feature, “Past Lives” (2023), was marked by the same unexpected realism and clarity. Both movies feature a love triangle which compares and contrasts two men in a woman’s life, but it brings freshness and insight to the emotional possibilities such a story can contain. “Past Lives” got a Best Picture nomination. I think “Materialists” is better.

I want to give a nod to a particular scene. And maybe this really is a spoiler you’ll want to avoid reading. Not because I’m going to give away the movie’s ending — it’s not the ending. But it is a turning point.

You may remember the 1997 film “Gattaca,” in which competition in a society of the future is so intense that people will do anything to measure up to a set of standards — one of which is minimum height. To do this, it’s possible for people in that future era to add several inches to their height by having a surgeon break their legs and insert, say, six inches of steel rod. After several months of healing and rehabilitation, wow, you’re over six feet tall.

In “Gattaca,” this notion seemed like the stuff of science fiction — a dystopian adaptation to the cruelties of a fascist society. In “Materialists,” it’s a reality,1 and it turns out that Harry (and the brother whom we saw married at the beginning of the movie) both did this to themselves — modified their bodies to add inches to their height and, as Harry explains, double their value:

I know it sounds stupid, breaking your legs to get a few extra inches, but we keep saying it's definitely worth it. It changed our lives. Women, completely, of course. Women just approach us and talk to us now, which never happened before. I haven't struck out since. You can also tell the difference at work, and at restaurants, and at airports. You're just worth more.

To drive home the point, Harry goes up to Lucy. He’s four inches taller. Then he slowly bends his knees until his head is at his original height, and she’s looking down at him. He’s two inches shorter than her.

There’s something both ghastly and brave about this. As a viewer, I admired the character’s commitment to being vulnerable about the part of himself he was (or had been) least confident about. And it’s great to see an illustration of the fact that men are also capable of going to extremes to correct something they are insecure about.

But it was impossible for me not to feel that he was revealing too much. There are some things about oneself that should be left in the past because you’re not that person anymore. Revealing them doesn’t say anything about you now; it just goes to show that you were once an asshole, or a weakling. I once told someone with whom I was in an intimate relationship about how, many years before, I had allowed a tow truck driver to bully me into giving him cash. Instead of being sympathetic, my lover was angry. “Why did you tell me that!?” she yelled. In the movie, Lucy says she feels the same way about Harry as she did before this unfortunate moment, but he’s clearly ruined everything. So don’t do that.

But apart from the cringe factor, this scene, again, shows Song’s ability to get to the heart of things. It’s a talent that makes what could have been a by-the-numbers romcom from another filmmaker into an honest work — best of all, one that never condescends to the characters, or to the viewer.

My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Written (after Shakespeare) and directed by Gus Van Sant

I saw this movie when it came out over 30 years ago in 1991, and I remember really not Getting It. Like many road movies, “My Own Private Idaho”1 has a meandering approach to narrative, but unlike them, not an episodic one; perhaps this made it hard for me to get a grip on the story. The movie also contains impressionistic scenes in which imagery overwhelms any narrative content, and this also derails any attempt on the viewer’s part to cling to a story.

One of the main characters is Mike (River Phoenix), whom we see in the first scene standing by a lonely rural highway, then collapsing, his body half in the roadway. We’re later told that he is afflicted not by a seizure disorder but by narcolepsy. This means he falls into a deep sleep whenever he feels stressed by a situation. Given the fact that Mike had what we would now characterize as PTSD from a difficult, broken childhood, and that his sole means of support is the money he earns as a street hooker, stress causes these collapses quite often. Whenever they occur, the movie spends a few long seconds regarding his contorted, twitching body — are we sure this isn’t a seizure? — and then jumps to the moments before he awakes again.

These jumps out of and into consciousness frequently involve waking up in another locale, usually the home of someone who has picked up his inert body and taken it to a safer place. Occasionally he wakes up abandoned just where he fell or slumped over. And the moments when he’s awake are none too comfortable either. He’s part of a ragged community of gutter punks who live in a boarded-up Portland, Ore. hotel, along with a Falstaffian figure (played by William Richert) who is their leader.

More about Bob, the gang’s chief, in a moment; but first there’s Scott (Keanu Reeves). He’s another hustler, a member of the gang who asserts that Bob is his “true father,” and a close friend and occasional protector of Mike. But unlike Mike and the other teenaged street urchins, Scott doesn’t have an addiction or a trauma or a disability; in fact, he really isn’t one of them. He’s the son of Portland’s mayor and is on the verge of coming into his inheritance. Bob stupidly assumes that Scott will share this bounty with him and the gang when the time comes, and maybe that is the reason he and the real punks let him hang around; the other reason is that he is a charismatic guy, and in the realm of the personality-challenged, bereft gutter punks, the most clear-minded is king — or at least a king-in-waiting.

Viewers with more than a passing familiarity with Shakespeare will, around this point in the film, cotton on to the fact that Bob is a literal Falstaff; his character and his relation to Scott are modern iterations of the character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV history plays. And in case you didn’t get it yet, Bob speaks in language adapted from Falstaff’s lines, and Keanu Reeves in lines derived from the Prince Hal character — a genuine king-in-waiting.

This may sound over-precious. But in fact, the scenes that echo Shakespeare are the most lively in the film. And one doesn’t have to be familiar with the Henry IV plays at all to both understand the movie’s Shakespeare-derived dialogue or to enjoy it. (Wikipedia’s page on Shakespeare’s Falstaff2 will explain it quite clearly for viewers of the film.) Writer-director Gus Van Sant restages the scene from Henry IV Part 1 in which Falstaff leads his band of thieves in an attempt to rob another gang. As in the play, Prince Hal/Scott, accompanied by Mike, breaks off from the group and, after the initial theft of the other gang’s loot, disguise themselves and rob the robbers.

It’s all great fun, but when the film returns to its normal milieu and what turns out to be its actual theme — unreliable parent figures in the lives of both Scott and Mike — the forward thrust stalls. A search for Mike’s long-lost mother eventually leads them to Italy, where their partnership goes off the rails. All they have to go on is the woman's last known address. Off they go to this remote Italian farmhouse, and guess what, Mike's mother was there a year ago but departed, this time without leaving a forwarding address.

Scott makes the best of it by falling in love with the young woman who lives there, has a lot of sex with her, abandons Mike, and takes her back to Portland. There, having turned 21, Scott now has access to the estate of his father, who has obligingly died, and transforms himself from a gutter punk into a sharply dressed rich kid. Mike makes his way back to Portland as well, to Bob's redoubt; but rejected by the now moved-on-up Scott, Bob has also kicked the bucket.

That’s the story. Its end lacks a satisfying resolution, and in fact the characters have no arc. Scott goes from slumming scion to actual scion; Mike’s character (and affliction) don’t change or improve. Like most road movies, these standard narrative concerns are less important than the scenery — at least, the rural scenery of Idaho or Italy — and the minor characters met along the way. Mike has a recurring client, a German named Hans (Udo Kier), who is just as simultaneously icy and outrageous as the theater director Roger DeVries in “The Producers.” Hans performs a crazy lip-synced dance to a German disco number that is practically worth the price of admission. But like most of the film’s drama, the musical number is choked off before it ends when Scott impatiently pulls the hi-fi’s plug out of the wall.

At this point you might be thinking that “no climax” would be a suitable theme for a movie about gay hustlers, but that’s not made much of, either. Van Sant isn’t interested in story, not in this movie anyway. What does he spend time on, then? Chiefly the interactions between Mike and Scott, the ambivalence that is a necessary component where older teenagers haven’t quite decided whether they’re gay or what. I will say that, despite the lack of standard elements of narrative and character development, I was never bored. While neither Reeves nor Phoenix are great actors, I couldn’t stop watching them. This pleasure must be due to Van Sant’s own fascination with the young men. If he couldn’t stop watching, neither can we.

Mountainhead (2025)
Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong

Billionaires are everywhere, it seems. In the White House, in the news, on magazine covers and gossip pages and as the subject of op-eds, thousands of op-eds. How have we come to have so many of them? How have they become so seemingly influential upon the economy, politics, professional sports, and — menacingly — the future?

They’re everywhere — except in real life. They don’t drive, they don’t shop for groceries or pump gas or take a hand in raising children or any other domestic task, they don’t have any of the worries that adults have. They are — unless they get indicted for something — the wizards behind the curtain, the string-pullers, the brainiacs, the rulers of this world. Or they think they are.

Their outsized role in today’s world has already led to any number of stories and movies. These always start with the idea that a single company, led by an (always reclusive) billionaire, has invented some technology that supposedly frees humanity from some alleged evil — physical toil, disease, death — but has accidentally or on purpose resulted in the despoilation of the planet and the enslavement or murder of vast swaths of its inhabitants. To take just one example, in the movie “Blade Runner” (1982), a robotics company has created androids impossible to distinguish from real people, but has made them too smart, and now they’re rebelling. The company’s founder lives at the top of a golden pyramid, surrounded by his creations, while ordinary people live on the ground in a grimy urban warren.

The latest iteration of this fascination with billionaires is “Mountainhead,” a TV movie just released on HBO Max. Its writer and director is one Jesse Armstrong, creator of the hit HBO series “Succession,” which itself spent years exploiting the public’s simultaneous fascination with and revulsion toward the uber-rich. I wonder whether Armstrong did this movie because there were some aspects of wealth he hadn’t yet explored, or because he’d pigeon-holed himself into the genre. Whatever the reason, he had a chance here not only to satirize his subject, but give them a comeuppance, and in the latter, failed.

The premise is this: four tech company founders who are long-time friends gather at the mountain aerie of one of them for an annual poker game. One of the guests, Venis by name, is the world’s richest man, having given users the ability to generate deepfake videos that are impossible to distinguish from real videos. The latest release of his technology has led to worldwide riots, ethnic cleansing, savage bloodletting, and the collapse of economies.

For the most part, the gathered friends see this state not as an emergency to shut down, but an opportunity to exploit. One of them, Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has retained some semblance of conscience: the violence worries him, and he makes constant sarcastic comments intended to puncture Venis’s weird, affectless presentation. He also owns a technology which provides “guardrails” that assists people in distinguishing false videos and fake news from the real. The other two attendees are Randall, an eminence gris played by Steve Carell, and Hugo, aka Soups (Jason Schwatrzmann), in the role that Carell would have played 20 years ago: the “poorest” among the quartet who constantly yes-mans Venis and Randall, the group’s whipping boy. (One of the only really smart things about the script is that his inferiority is balanced by the fact that it’s his Bond-villain mountain retreat where the group gathers: at least, he can occasionally assert himself by reminding the others that it’s his house.)

The satire is fun for the viewer, if you can stomach a lot of male razzing where the vocabulary and intent is someplace in between the board room and the locker room. A work that excludes women — and not even in a way that is funny — is just a sausage party, and a white one (although it would have been worse if they had made one of the characters a token non-white individual). One of the attractions of movies and TV shows about the uber-wealthy is a voyeuristic gaze at their possessions, but the mountain aerie is so bland and undistinguished that even the characters make fun of its ugliness. So the viewer is denied even this pleasure.

But if you can get past the general lack of imagination, the movie is fun until the third act, when the tension among the rich guys devolves into an actual physical struggle which is 1) all too foreseeable, and 2) not well directed enough to be funny or engaging. (A really good example of staging and directing a physical conflict is the Act II sequence in “Anora”1 when the two goons invade the home of the Russian oligarch’s son and his new American wife, aka the protagonist. The resulting struggle is an absolute classic of slapstick and advances the plot.)

And even worse, the movie thinks that the main conflict in the movie — the one that it chooses to make a stab at resolving in the end — is Venis’s destructive deepfake vs. Jeff’s software antidote. The real conflict is not between these twats, since they’re essentially all alike, but between them and the rest of the world. I would have liked the ending to show the equivalent of villagers with torches and pitchforks ready to besiege the castle. But there isn’t even a suggestion that the world is pushing back against these would-be emperors. So if you don’t find the glib satire satisfying in the first place, there’s really nothing left.

Sinners (2025)
Written and directed by Ryan Coogler

The last movie I wrote about was “Casablanca,” and whenever I write about a classic, well-loved, and seemingly universally known movie1, I’m aware that enough ink to fill, say, Lake Michigan has been used to write about it. It’s not like I struggle to find something new to say, aware that everything has already been said; it’s more like I have to pinpoint why the movie is still relevant, still capable of exciting viewers.

“Sinners,” written and directed by Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station,” “Black Panther”), is a little like that, even though it was released just two months ago. Word of mouth was huge, and it’s still in theaters, impossible to ignore. And yes, a lot has been written about it. Because everyone has to see and talk about what is most likely the movie of the year.

“Sinners” is, first of all, a tour de force — a brilliantly imagined total work of art that combines drama, music, dance, violence, and the supernatural, and none of it seems out of place. A story about two former sharecroppers who return, in the year 1922, to the Mississippi delta from years in Chicago sharply dressed and carrying a substantial bag of cash— suspicious enough to raise questions and to preclude any exact explanations — intending to open up a backwoods juke joint.

That could be a comedy premise, but despite occasional light moments, “Sinners” is no comedy, but a drama — with parts that venture into the supernatural — about black people trying to go into business and the forces of white America that try to make them fail.

But that makes it sound didactic and documentary-like. “Sinners” is actually a gripping story, superbly acted, directed, photographed, and edited. While it contains moments of magic realism, it’s not the “magical Negro”2 kind. While it features vampires as a main element, it’s not a fantasy movie. It just all works together to produce a moviegoing experience that will be very hard to top for a long time.

Award for reminding American viewers who grew up on white, often British or Irish, “blues rock” figures like Eric Clapton and John Mayall what the blues actually are.3 Award for best hate-dancing an Irish jig. Award for best conversion of a former child star (Hailee Steinfeld, who got an Oscar nom for her starring, excuse me, supporting role in the 2011 remake of “True Grit,” followed by quite a few generic teenage roles) into a truly sexy and dangerous adult.

One exception to the extremely experienced cast is Miles Caton, who plays a young prodigy named Sammie, He plays slide guitar and sings so well, the two brothers (both played by Jordan) opening up their own backwoods juke joint immediately hire him as the star entertainer.

Yes, there is a ton of music, both sung and played, which made me wonder partway through, is this a musical? Technically no, because not enough story drama is advanced in song. But it is a great soundtrack.

In the second half, things get weird. I don’t feel like spoiling it here, though you might well have gotten enough word of mouth to know. All I’ll say is that you will never hear white, Irish-type American folk music again without picturing the characters in this movie who perform it and the uses they put it to. In fact, if it is possible for one movie to single-handedly undermine an entire subgenre of American roots music, this is the movie to do it.

So much has been written about “Casablanca.” The critical consensus is that the movie — a film about not sitting on the sidelines, presciently shot in 1941 before the U.S. was drawn into World War II — is the perfect example of the brilliance of the Hollywood system of the day. Even though Michael Curtiz was an ordinary director, he outdid himself with this picture, supported by a savvy, well-structured script, a brilliant cast, and a fantastic turning-point scene that, for all its corniness, has stood the test of time; more than the sum of these parts, the movie still rates high among both critics and the public. Anybody who watches movies even casually has probably seen it, probably more than once, and they can relate the premise: in a Vichy France-ruled Casablanca, refugees from Europe wait while they try to get visas or an exit permit that would allow them to reach Lisbon, Portugal, a neutral port from which they hope to get passage on a ship to the New World.

At the center of this community of exiles is Rick’s Cafe Américain, the most popular nightclub in town. (Having recently seen “Cabaret,” given the introductory shot of the club, in which the camera pans past its mishmash of customers — Europeans, Africans, Foreign Legionnaires, French police, Russian bartenders, Nazi officers — I half expected the black American pianist Sam (Dooley Wilson), who plays and sings between staged numbers, to break out singing “Willkommen.”

In this setting, the mysterious American who owns the place, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), glowers and pouts and issues clipped orders to staff and customers alike, and suffers fools not at all. When a slimy procurer, Ugarte (Peter Lorre), tries to ingratiate himself by saying that the bribes he takes from refugees to get them exit visas are compassionately less than the bribes taken by the local Prefecture of Police, Rick snarls, “I don’t mind a parasite; I object to a cut-rate one.”

This snappy bit of dialogue, along with the fact that these two actors played off each other in the previous year’s “The Maltese Falcon,” puts the viewer in the land of Film Noir. It may seem an incongruous dimension of a Moroccan city, but in the beautiful work of cinematographer Arthur Edelson (who also shot “Falcon” and many lesser-known films noir for Warner Brothers), the blazing sun of Morocco is only an excuse to darken the shadows, even in daytime. Comparing his filmography with that of director Michael Curtiz, one gets the sense that Curtiz’s success at the helm of “Casablanca” owes much to the experience and brilliance of his director of photography. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that was true of a picture, and far from the last.

But that’s the kind of movie-critic inside-baseball lore that others have literally written volumes about. I’m more interested in the movie’s anti-fascist themes and scenes. Because a film about refugees is one thing; add Nazis and it becomes another thing altogether.

The part about Nazis begins with the entrance of commandant Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) who, like most Nazi commanders in Hollywood movies, is handsome and has a charming side. When the Prefecture of Police Louis Renault (Claude Rains) welcomes him at the airport, Strasser warmly thanks him — but this is just politics. He has to get along with the French authorities, especially since Renault reminds him that Morocco is part of “un-occupied France.”

Renault’s a great character. The script has him constantly on the knife-edge between submission and independence, and each time someone thinks they’re forcing him into a corner, he elegantly escapes with élan:

Renault: Rick, we are very honored tonight. Major Strasser is one of the reasons the Third Reich enjoys the reputation it has today.

Strasser: You repeat “Third Reich” as though you expect there to be others.

Renault: Personally, Major, I will take what comes.

But it’s not just Bogart vs. the Nazis. There’s a love triangle as well. Ingrid Bergman stiffed Bogart after a fling in Paris because she was secretly married to Europe’s greatest pro-democracy politician, Viktor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). And this plot line plays out against the movie’s real theme: Whether it’s possible to remain standing on the sidelines (as illustrated by Bogart’s famous line, uttered twice during the film, “I stick my neck out for nobody”) while the world is in flames around you. And that is why “Casablanca” is an anti-fascist film.

You have to understand two bits of context. One is that all during the 1930s, as first Spain and then Europe fell to the fascists, a strong isolationist movement (funded largely by anti-Semitic millionaires) argued against first the U.K.’s and then the U.S. involvement. By remaining neutral and keeping out of the war, these capitalist nations could continue making money off the conflict without risking their own citizens’ lives.

The second thing you must understand is that by 1941, when this picture was made (before the December entry of the U.S. into the war), Hollywood was host to a very large contingent of refugees who had managed to flee to the U.S. This included many German, Hungarian, and other directors, actors, composers, and so on — many of whom appear in “Casablanca.” Conrad Veidt himself, who plays the Nazi commander Strasser, was a Jew who fled Germany with his wife in 1933. Same with the Slovakian-German Jewish actor Peter Lorre, who fled around the same time; though he had just attained stardom with his appearance in Fritz Lang’s “M,” he risked leaving his career behind when he left Germany. S.Z. Sakall, who plays the rotund, kindly waiter, was a Hungarian-German who also fled Germany. Perhaps just as important, the film’s American writers, Howard Koch and the brothers Philip and Julius Epstein, were all Jewish.

This makes Rick’s Cafe Américain a reflection of Hollywood — of the U.S. itself: filled with immigrants whose work carries forth their identities even as American anti-Semitism soon forced them to downplay their Jewishness. To them, there was no question of whether or not the U.S. should enter the war and play a part in defeating Hitler. And so the film focuses on this question, symbolized by Rick’s internal struggle — not to mention his own pain at having fought for the losing side in Spain’s civil war. It’s that trauma, suppressed at first (“I stick my neck out for nobody”), that he has to get through in order to take a side by the movie’s end.

The film’s emotional turning point happens halfway through. Angered that the Nazi officers have captured Sam’s upright piano and are spitting out a German war lied, the heroic Laszlo strides through the club and up to the orchestra, ordering them to play the French anthem:

The camera lingers on the face of a young French woman, Yvonne, whom we met a few scenes before. Rick 86ed her because they had a toss the night before but she has become ungraciously needy; this night she has come to the club in the company of a German officer. Seemingly gone over to the other side, she’s startled back to herself by joining in the singing of “La Marseillaise.”

The actress is Madeleine Lebeau, and she, too fled the Germans when they invaded France. In fact (according to IMDB and Wikipedia), her personal history was very literally reflected in “Casablanca,” as she and her husband landed there as refugees and procured forged visas that allowed them to travel to Lisbon and eventually on a ship to Mexico; she learned English from her husband during the crossing. Less than 18 months later, she was a 19-year-old appearing in “Casablanca.” Knowing this, it’s hard to see the tears that appear in her eyes as she sings as anything but heartfelt.

Everyone cheers Laszlo, while the Germans are pissed at this “demonstration” and order the club closed. The effect on Rick is not as dramatic. It’s only later that he surrenders to his better nature and helps send Laszlo and Ingrid Bergman off to freedom. The “Marseillaise” scene — one of the most famous in the history of cinema — is not for him. It’s for the audience.

Yes, it’s Hollywood corn — but it’s also great.1 Perhaps such scenes — another one that springs to mind is the filibuster scene in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which James Stewart drives himself to exhaustion defending the nation against corruption — unfairly raise the bar for real-life politicians and others. Indeed, one big problem is that people have been trained by Hollywood to expect a hero.

But look at the scene in “Casablanca.” Yes, it begins with the heroic Laszlo, but its power is in the fact that everyone joins in the liberating experience of singing together about a shared struggle. This is the way: to unite with those around us. We may not have a great song to sing, but the outrage with and resistance to fascism and the billionaires is all we really need.

Aimée & Jaguar (1999)
Directed by Max Färberböck

All biopics and historical dramas are dubious, because 1) memories are faulty, and 2) every screenwriter shapes the real events to fulfill the demands of drama. This is simply common practice, even when the real-life events have been carefully documented and a ton of proof exists to support an account of them; even in such well-documented stories, the characters and events are changed at least a little so that the movie is dramatically whole and satisfying.

I’ve discussed these principles before, in my “Bonhoeffer” review last year, among other essays. A good example is the movie “A Complete Unknown,” in which the real woman who appeared on the cover of Bob Dylan’s first album, walking with him down a snowy West Village street — her name is Suze Rotolo and she was in fact Dylan’s girlfriend — is changed into a fictional character called Sylvie, because Dylan, who consulted on the movie’s script, suggested it to the filmmakers. Whether this was done to protect the still-living Suze Rotolo’s privacy, or to erase her memory, is not known.

But the story in “Aimée & Jaguar” is not well-documented. It is based on a 1994 book titled “Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943,” which told the “true story” of a cell of German lesbians living in Berlin who risked their lives to forge documents to attempt to save some people from arrest and murder. Author Erica Fischer based her book on written notes and interviews with Lili Wust, aka Aimée. Given that Wust waited more than 40 years after the war to remember it all, the chain of custody of these memories is somewhat loose.

That’s not to mock or undermine the story told in the film, nor to dispute the experience of many viewers who love the movie because of its depiction of erotic love between the title characters. It’s really up to the viewer to decide — as one does with any representation in cinema of historical characters — whether the filmmakers have imbued the film with enough credibility that the exact facts might not matter as much as the message of resistance and love that the movie contains.

I’m certainly in no position to judge. I don’t know anything about the German anti-Nazi resistance, except that they bombed Hitler and failed, and that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, perhaps the best-remembered figure in the resistance, was somehow involved. Also there was that Oskar Schindler character, and many others, doubtless including women.

I would have liked for the movie to depict more details of the actual resistance work the characters were doing. The film contains little cloak and dagger or derring-do, instead focusing on the relations between the several women who were members of the cell, including the love affair of the two title characters. So for those hoping to learn much about how you operate a resistance cell under the noses of the regime’s police and military, the movie will fall short.

Where it doesn’t fall short is in the erotic department. The affair between the two title characters, Wust (Juliane Köhler) and her Jewish lover Felice (Maria Shrader) — depicted as the group’s most daring member — is front and center, and lovingly and sentimentally presented. Its romantic portrayal is why the film is close to the heart of many a lesbian movie fan; to this day, for some people there’s nothing more erotically bracing than a woman with closely cropped hair wearing a tuxedo and top hat seducing a curly-haired femme. And the fashions of the 1930s and 40s are so gorgeous.

Of interest is an actress named Heike Makatsch, who appeared in “Love Actually” as the secretary who seduces the Alan Rickman character. Yes, the woman who slumps in her office chair and provocatively parts her knees. Here she has much more than that to do, even as a supporting character, and is also probably the most glamorously made up and attired actress in the movie. Despite her exposure in that runaway British comedy hit, Makatsch didn’t go on to make it big in English-language cinema, probably because her home-wrecker character was the most odious one in “Love Actually.”

I guess the message of “Aimée & Jaguar” is that you can be a spy in the house of the devil and look plenty glamorous doing it. Could this be why people fostered the myth that Melania Trump was a secret member of the resistance, that her scowling expression whenever she had to appear in public with her husband was somehow sending a message, either “I cannot stand this creep” or “Help me?” That myth always seemed suspect; it conveniently supplied Mrs. Trump with an alibi while it painted her as a victim and not one of the perpetrators, albeit one of the most pained and incompetent (and that’s saying a lot).

Some people needed to believe the “Free Melania!” myth. Some need to believe in the concept of the “Good German,” which I discussed at length in essay on “The Lives of Others,” a movie about a Stasi officer who become sympathetic to a playwright who is the target of his surveillance because the writer plays the piano beautifully. In the same way, some people needed to believe that the writer of "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," as well as others working for Trump during his first term in office, were at the same time protecting the world against Trump’s worst impulses. And many hoped for a salvific “Mueller Time,” when a report by the former FBI director and Trump-appointed special counsel would once and for all publish incontrovertible evidence of the president’s crimes (it didn’t).

The appeal of such fantasies is obvious. We want to believe that powerful figures within the system will use their power and influence to control and redeem a frightening and out-of-control situation. We want to believe that cinematic actions like bombing (as in “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” in which environmental activists do just that) or assassination can make a difference and are worth the danger and destruction.

These are not real options. And hoping that someone will do them (“It’s Mueller Time!”), instead of doing something yourself, is at best a waste of your time, and at worst robs you of your agency as it deprives your community from benefitting from the positive things that you could be doing.

What do you hope for now?

If you await a time when Trump, whether through death, or resignation, or by being declared incompetent under the 25th Amendment, stops being president, you’d have to believe that J.D. Vance — one of the least qualified Vice Presidents in 100 years — would be better. If you believe that any Republicans currently in Congress might vote for impeachment, go ahead and count the votes, and remember you need two-thirds of the voting US senators. If you hope for a civil war (a la the movie “Civil War”) — that ain’t going to happen either.

And if you believe that acts of violence from individuals or groups will somehow topple the regime, that’s the worst fantasy of all. Such an act only brings us closer to a real police state, and you can bet that people like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller and the dog-shooting lady Kristi Noem are itching for that to happen.

I believe that there is hope today. The people of the U.S. can prevent the country from sliding into dictatorship — but only if we simultaneously do three things: learn and practice nonviolent sabotage; confront the criminals in public and in large numbers; and protect each other while we do it. Our strength is in numbers — and in demonstrating and confronting criminals in the light of day.

Magic Farm (2025)
Written and directed by Amalia Ulman

People who bemoan the lack of imagination in movies nowadays are correct when it comes to the repetitive output of Hollywood. Revenge action thrillers rooted in male insecurity, animated musical film offerings to weary mothers and their elementary school-aged children, and horror genre tweaks, all on endless parade at the closest multiplex, are what they have in mind.

And it’s not their fault that people feel this way: Can most people go to Sundance or the Toronto Film Festival? No, they have jobs. Are they aware of great streaming alternatives like Mubi? No, they’re too exhausted by daily life in this crumbling capitalist nightmare to notice. The corporations want them to think that the same three or four types of film are all that exist, because that’s the most efficient way of getting money from them.

Fortunately, platforms like Mubi do exist. While I have no idea how it works financially, somehow the company is able not only to stream amazing movies like “The Substance,” “The Delinquents,” and “The Girl with the Needle,” but to have a hand in producing and releasing them too. Thus we have “Magic Farm,” a candy-colored satire of Americans, internet-first journalism, and yes, capitalism.

In this dark comedy, a small film crew goes to Latin America to shoot another in a series of culture/newsy/documentary shorts, sort of like Vice News. The overarching theme of their series is unclear — music? travel? the exotic? — but in any case, it’s obviously not serious.

The videos are hosted by Edna (Chloë Sevigny), apparently a famous but now somehat washed-up figure in the entertainment industry. She looks down on what they’re doing, and makes almost no effort whatsoever to facilitate the making of the finished product. You can see her thinking “I’m only the talent, I’m not going to tell the crew what to do.” This sidelines the character to a significant degree; viewers who go to the film expecting it to be a Chloë Sevigny movie may be disappointed she’s not the main focus.

The crew is a collection of young, pretty men and one woman, who are all almost hopelessly incompetent, starting with the first big mistake they make. They’re ostensibly out to investigate a band that performs wearing bunny ears, and all they have is one bit of information: the band is from a town called San Cristobal, and something about a doomsday cult. (This could be the premise of a horror scenario, but this is a comedy. On the other hand…)

They arrive in the rural town of San Cristobal, Argentina. No one there knows anything about any musicians who wear bunny ears. Eventually the Americans are gently informed that a town called San Cristobal exists in practically every Latin American country; perhaps they were looking for one of the others?

But rather than turn around and find the right town in the right country, the crew stays; the production doesn’t have enough budget to relocate them. So, ordered to bring back footage of something that can be slapped into an episode, they decide they may as well just make something up.

The plot doesn’t primarily follow the crew’s efforts to develop this fraud, but pays closer attention to relationships between the Americans, and between them and the locals. The sound man, Justin (Joe Apollonio) is a gay man who develops a surprisingly sweet flirtation with the fleshy desk clerk at the hotel where they’re staying. The clerk (Guillermo Jacubowicz), or “receptionist” as the Americans refer to him, is kind, diplomatic, and apparently very excited that another gay person has come to his town and seems nice. That’s about as profound as their relationship gets; there’s no climactic kiss or anything, but you can see in the eyes of both characters a simultaneous attraction to the other and surprise that it’s happening. It’s simply a very sweet aspect to this movie, one of the only sheerly positive aspects of the story.

By contrast, Jeff (Alex Wolff), the team’s incompetent producer, divides his time between oversensitive reactions to what someone else has just said to him, and an attempt to seduce a young local woman, Manchi; their relationship is anything but sweetly carried out or rendered. The whole gestalt of the movie is wrapped up in the character of Jeff. “Magic Farm” is a sendup of Americans abroad, mercilessly depicting their naïveté, ignorance, unexamined privilege, inability to see things from any point of view than their own, and raging neuroses; Jeff embodies all of these aspects.

As for Manchi, played by Uruguayan actress and model, Camila del Campo, she’s a very pretty and typical teenaged wannabe TikTok star who has to climb a tree to get a phone signal strong enough to upload a clip. In addition to the direct, critical attitude that typifies all teenagers, Manchi sports a discomfiting facial blemish; in fact, when she removes her top, we can see patchy discolorations in many places on her body. (In fact, her rather jarring facial discoloration — a large red patch that in places darkens to an unhealthy-appearing blackness — is not makeup but del Campo’s real face.)

These apparent disfigurations draw viewers’ attention to the fact that undergirds the whole movie: the town is being poisoned by dioxins contained in a pesticide being regularly sprayed on their crops. Children have birth defects, young people die, and everyone avoids drinking tap water.

But the villagers aren’t enraged — or are perhaps in a post-rage state. They don’t even talk about this calamity, seeming to accept it as their fate. No one suggests that the Americans should devote their skills, their expensive video equipment, and their platform to documenting this tragedy, and the Americans never even notice it. The prime irony of the movie is not that Americans are ill-behaved colonizers but that they miss the story that has dropped into their laps, instead continuing to pursue the trivial “trend” story they set out to capture.

For the locals, the satire is much gentler, depicting them respectfully. The writer-director, Amalia Ulman, is an Argentina-born Spanish filmmaker who is equally comfortable in both worlds, the rural South American town and the attention economy of the internet. She delights in the lives of the Argentinian characters and their foibles; yet they can’t be viewed as wholesome due to the poison in their bodies. The primary question the film asks is to what extent can the feverish, trivial FOMO culture represented by the Americans ( which Manchi wishes to be part of) also be viewed as poison.

But there’s another framing that’s easy to miss. The film begins with the image of a late-middle-aged woman — like many of the performers who play locals, the actress is uncredited on the film’s IMDB page — riding a motorbike into town, entering her office at a local evangelical church, and taking a phone call confirming the imminent arrival of the American video crew. Though she’s their only contact, she then leaves town until the film’s penultimate scene, in which she takes the microphone at a party attended by both the townspeople and the video crew and begins delivering an apocalyptic vision of the townspeople being cleansed of their illnesses by the love of Jesus.

A viewer might see this moment as just one more surreal ocurrence in the movie’s series of weird images, not the least of which is the blemish disfiguring Manchi’s face. But if you’ve been paying attention, one of the Americans mentions at the beginning of the film that the town contains some kind of doomsday cult. I think Ulman is suggesting that such an apocalyptic vision is perfectly understandable, even normative, in a town being crushed by late-stage capitalism that sees these people as merely collateral damage to the profits to be made by corporate agriculture. If your whole town is being decimated by a world-encompassing force, whether satanic or economic (and who’s to say that the devil wouldn’t use a real-world institution like hedge-fund agribusiness to drive people to despair?), the apocalypse doesn’t look so bad.

“Magic Farm” is in theaters now, but will soon be available for streaming on Mubi.

I hate to lead with a spoiler alert, but in this case it’s important. In my opinion, it’s better for you to see this movie with only the barest of notions what it’s about:

Two brothers are on leave from the Navy during the Korean War. The older brother Lee (Will Poulter) is boffing his fiancée Muriel, as the younger brother Julius (Jacob Elordi) is headed their way. Lee is conventional, able to see little in his future besides an American Dream of a house, a wife, and a job; Julius is not so much a nonconformist as he is an inhabitant of “another world than us,” to use Lee’s phrase.

Julius is also very beautiful in a big dumb handsome hunk sort of way (though his character isn’t dumb except in the ways that matter when you’re 25 or so and about to become an adult); he has no physical resemblance to his older brother whatsoever. He looks like the gorgeous trainer in a high-end gym whom all the middle-aged ladies wouldn’t mind paying to sleep with. Lee, on the other hand, has a narrow, freckled face, resembling no one as much as Howdy Doody, and he’s not helped by a pale red pompadour.

This is all to say that once Julius walks in the door, Muriel is extremely distracted. The two have an instant connection, and Julius — displaying an insight that is one of the attributes that makes his character much more than a dumb hunk — within a few hours of meeting Muriel, tells her “You see right through it” — meaning the standard American life and future that Lee represents. Nevertheless, she says yes to Lee’s marriage proposal.

From this premise, you might think that Julius and Lee are the main characters, but they aren’t — it’s Julius and Muriel. And not for the obvious reason; the love triangle setup is only the first of the clever misdirections that the movie, scripted by Bryce Kass from a novel by Shannon Pufahl, has in store. And Muriel does see through it all, and proves herself both resourceful and capable of leading a double life.

There, that ought to be enough to get you to the movie. You’ll be glad you did. Unfortunately, this indie movie is having a very limited release in theaters, so go TODAY if you read this, I mean April 30 to May 2. It won’t be around much longer anywhere.

Spoilers from here.

As you might have gathered from my insistence on not spoiling the film for you, there are some genuine narrative surprises in the movie, and the pleasure of encountering them as a viewer is one you should experience. But I can’t talk about what the movie is really about without revealing them.

From the first, the movie drops hints that Julius isn’t what he seems. The first hint is that he’s been discharged from the Navy and doesn’t have to go back, whereas Lee is on a 72-hour Christmas leave and expects to shortly find himself back in Korea. Julius announces this fact without elaborating, almost as if he’s daring his brother to ask questions. But Lee doesn’t, because the answer to why and how Julius has been discharged is something Lee implicitly already knows but can’t talk about, even with Julius. Muriel watches this exchange mutely; there’s no sign she understands either. But by the end of the movie we’ll not only understand that Julius is gay, but that Muriel is too.

As it turns out, the last two-thirds of the movie are dedicated to exploring the ways queer people, who were almost universally closeted during the era (1952-1957) in which the film is set, lived double lives. Julius lives his life on the margins of society as a card shark and a thief, and Muriel is passing as the perfect American housewife — though the story cleverly posits her and Lee’s starter home in a new development outside San Diego where none of the other new houses have been completed yet, so we don’t get any of the other-suburban-moms pushing baby carriages.

Their only neighbor, it seems, is a comely short-haired Latina, Sandra (Sasha Calle), who is obviously cut from the same cloth as every appealing working-class butch lesbian in every queer-friendly movie ever (“Desert Hearts” (1985), “Bound” (1996), “Love Lies Bleeding” (2024 )): short dark hair, practical, handy, seductive, excellent boundaries. Muriel seeks in Sandra authenticity and passion, but the movie is full of so many little surprises that their sexual affair doesn’t seem inevitable until the scene where it starts.

As usual, I’ve left the best performance until last. Daisy Edgar-Jones’ performance as Muriel is just terrific. A lot of it’s the writing, of course: her character is fascinating. But Edgar-Jones has a gaze that’s both searching and, as Julius says, penetrating — she “sees through” people and situations, but this trait is founded in an abiding curiosity. And the role has range. Muriel is a happy housewife, a cool, lipsticked bettor on horses, and a passionate lover, and the brilliance of Edgar-Jones’ acting is that the viewer is confident that there are even more personas inside Muriel. Watching her work is a genuine pleasure.

This is the first feature by director Daniel Minehan, but his IMDB page shows his deep experience in TV. His direction is superb, giving viewers exactly what’s needed in each scene, while only rarely venturing into the sheerly poetic.

Again, highly recommended. But don’t wait.

The Dreamers (2003)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

I had to order a DVD of this movie in order to see it, and thus had to wait more than a week to begin writing about it, so I couldn’t review it in tandem with the last film reviewed, “Summer Palace.” While they’re from different continents and different eras, the two films have a lot in common. In each, university students toy with each other and have lots of sex, while outside the door, and outside their windows, all the other students are engaged in a historical struggle — one that is as much against the adults and what they’ve done with the world as it is against the political-economic system that protects and enriches them.

Spoiler: both revolts end badly.

Both films are also about dreamy obsession, a pursuit of a state of love where the characters hope to find salvation but which remains frustratingly out of reach. In “Summer Palace,” Yu Hong seeks fulfillment first by making an intense friendship with a girl on her dorm floor, and then through an obsessive sexual affair with an older student, Zhou Wei. Submerging herself in her journal, in which she describes the real affair in exaggerated terms and flowery language, she exists in a kind of dream state. You get the feeling that she wants never to wake up from the dream, because it’s only there that she really achieves the depth of feeling she wants. The affair expires before she reaches this nirvana, so she tries again with each successive lover, becoming more cynical but lacking any alternative method for gaining the love she seeks.

The scope of “The Dreamers” is much smaller, transpiring over only a few months, but these are the months of May 68 — a phrase which became not only a reference to the unique and romantic period of student revolt in Paris, but also, as time went on, acquired a bitterness, a sense of duende. This happened because after less than ten years its principals lost their heroic status and the changes which the students struggled to achieve proved effervescent, as France and the rest of the West, from Germany to Japan, were lulled into consumerism and the same bourgeois life which the students of Paris had specifically rejected and tried to escape from.

The films of Jean-Luc Godard are highly informative of this era of change. In “Masculin Feminin” (1966), Godard depicted young people in the first fresh months of adulthood and at the crossroads of exactly the alternative futures that real French youths would face just a few years later. A title card reads:

THIS FILM COULD BE CALLED
THE CHILDREN OF MARX AND COCA-COLA
UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU WILL

And shortly after “Masculin-Feminin” — a movie which feels comparatively light and entertaining compared to later Godard works — Godard made “La Chinoise” (1967), in which… well, let’s just quote IMDB: “A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.” While lacking in narrative thrust, the movie once again deftly captures the mood of France’s younger generation: In love with the idea of revolution but marooned in the bourgeois class of their birth, their particular revolutionary struggle is to free themselves from privilege long enough to take action — a struggle which takes place in a nice apartment none of them could afford to pay for.

The fascination of the college generation of France in the mid 1960s with Maoism — repeated in the U.S. by factions of the Weather Underground and in West Germany by various would-be Communist parties in the early 1970s — always seemed strange to me, an American. Surely one could be against the Vietnam War (the main thing that young people were really rebelling against) while refraining from embracing the authoritarian regimes of China or the USSR. But to live in that middle ground was impossible for both the most romantic youths (who went to Cuba to harvest sugar cane) or the strictest ones (who formed revolutionary communes which mostly devolved into cults).

In any case, I missed all of it. I didn’t graduate from high school until 1974, a year after the Vietnam draft ended. By the time I got to college that fall, there was nothing left to protest against, and hippies had become irrelevant. Fortunately, sex still offered its own canvas upon which a form of revolution was still possible.

Anyway, in “The Dreamers,” the setting is Paris, early May 1968. Making this film 35 years later, Bernardo Bertolucci — a once highly creative director who, at his peak, made gorgeous films ranging from “The Conformist” (1970), “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), and “1900” (1976), decided to spend millions on recreating riots and other May 68 scenes at the film’s beginning and end, even though the movie happens mostly inside an extremely nice Parisian flat — again, the unaffordable apartment, paid for in this case by the characters’ parents, one of whom is apparently a famous, rich poet (?!?) — and, as in “Summer Palace,” the politics going on outside the window hardly touch the lovers inside.

The film is narrated in the beginning by an American visiting Paris for a year to study French. He’s played by Michael Pitt, an actor who has mostly specialized in rough roles — he starred as a boxer a couple years ago in “Day of the Fight,” a well-done indie feature — but here he is almost a waif, 24 years old and so beautiful he might have stepped out of a Chanel ad. Bertolucci seems to be forcing a comparison with Leonardo DiCaprio, but this only makes it seem like he failed to get Leo for the role and had to settle. As written, Pitt’s character Matthew is mostly a naïf who is also a film buff. Not a very worldly character.

With other members of the church of cinema, he haunts the Cinémathèque française, a museum-cum-temple of film. The emotional home of the French New Wave and its fascination with American B movies by the likes of Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, the Cinémathèque became, briefly, the scene of an early skirmish between the May 68ers and the police.

Just before Bertolucci stages this mêlée, Matthew is picked out of the crowd by a comely lass who is doing a performance.

Wearing a bright red beret and with a Galoise hanging from her lips, Isabelle (Eva Green) appears chained to the facility’s doors as a form of protest. But she isn’t really chained, as she quickly demonstrates. She hails her twin brother Theo (Louis Garrel) and the three of them run away when the police charge.

What made her pick Matthew out of the large crowd outside the doors of the closed museum? Also movie buffs, the twins had noticed him attending the nightly shows alone; “everyone,” Isabelle tells him, “is wondering who you are.” This is the first of the splashes of fantasy, sprinkled throughout the film, that strain credulity. Every single man had this experience in their 20s, going to a new place and hoping to be noticed somehow, and talked to, and every single one knows it doesn’t work this way but wishes it did. In fact, almost every movie that centers a romantic or even merely sexual couple begins like this: the girl speaks to the guy first and sets him at ease. Without this departure from real life, the movie cannot proceed.

In short order, Isabelle and Theo initiate Matthew into their somewhat mentally and emotionally unbalanced fantasy life, which their parents’ affluence gives them the funding and the space to live out. The brother and sister sleep naked with one another and by all appearances appear to be lovers, though it’s soon made clear that they don’t actually have sex; that’s one of the things Isabelle needs Matthew for. They also need someone as knowledgeable about films as they are in playing an impossibly difficult combination of movie trivia and truth or dare.

As Theo, Garrel is even more beautiful than Matthew, with an ass right off Michaelangelo’s David. More importantly, he’s a better actor, his face able to portray the complex flow of genuine emotion, neurotic fixations, and whatever mix of rage and shame that underlie his and Isabelle’s relationship. For Eva Green, this was her first film role, and as he did thirty years earlier with Maria Schneider in “Last Tango,” Bertolucci exploits her inexperience and has her do things which shocked her when she saw the finished film. (She didn’t go in blind; her mother, French actress Marlene Jobert, was well aware of Schneider’s experience and warned her about Bertolucci.) On set he was “manipulative;” the actors “wanted to please him.”1

But what remains in the film, aside from full nudity, isn’t nearly as shocking as the intense bits in “Last Tango;” all of the sex in “The Dreamers” has a sweetness that befits the characters’ youth.2

For all the incestuous and ménage à trois vibes, the film never shows sex between siblings, nor do the two men even come close to getting it on (see footnote 2). This is a disappointment, because the premise, the shot where Matthew first sees the twins sleeping nude together, and the constant sexual atmosphere all seem to demand it. Given that the hit Mexican film “Y tu mamá tambien,” with its explicit ménage à trois, came out before “The Dreamers” was shot, I find the failure to stage a threesome between these characters — or at least to include it in the movie, if that’s also among the cut footage — even harder to understand. My guess is just that Bertolucci wasn’t confident enough to add it to what ultimately got an NC-17 rating anyway.

Ultimately, the movie is a disappointment, promising what it can’t deliver — though the nude scenes featuring the kind of perfect, nearly angelic bodies (and minus the ridiculously over-defined abdominal muscles that are inescapable in movies today) are worth the price of admission. Similarly, the expensively-staged riot scenes at the beginning and end of the film seem irrelevant to the film’s main subject. How well this movie captured the zeitgeist of May 68 is something that only someone who was a youth in Paris at the time can say.

Instead of this exercise in nostalgia, I recommend the 1975 film “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000,” a Swiss film by Alain Tanner that sweetly captures the disappointment of that generation with the results of their attempt at revolution. Now in their 30s, its characters live on a communal farm and teach their children on-site. It’s sweet, but without an obligation to pretty things up, depicting the realistic conflicts that erupt over the inevitable issues of who does chores, who works at an outside job to bring in cash, who acts responsibly and who doesn’t. There’s little talk of revolutionary goals, more about groceries. This vision of living in community is vital. Nothing’s perfect, but it may be the only path in the next years that will enable us to live at all.

Summer Palace (2006)
Directed by Lou Ye

I caught a showing of this film at my beloved Roxie Theater in San Francisco in the middle of a Lou Le festival. It’s the only one I have time to see, as I drove in from Reno in the morning, have church this evening, and leave for the Mojave Desert in the morning. I’ll publish a quick review for now, but later I want to compare “Summer Palace” to Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers.” That film similarly sets a passionate love triangle against a scene of revolution, in its case Paris 1968. “The Dreamers” seems to be impossible to see on any streaming service at the moment, so I’ve gone so far as to order a DVD.

“Summer Palace” centers on youths who are students at Beijing University during the student-led, ill-fated freedom movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But the freedom revolution is a mere backdrop to the primary story, in which a girl from a remote town near the North Korean border decides to lead a life of intense excitement. Yu Hong (Lei Hao) commences a passionate though platonic friendship with a girl who lives down the hall in her dorm, Wang Bo (Xueyun Bai), but really finds her groove in an affair with an older male student, Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). Their constant fucking makes them the talk of the campus, allegedly, and earned the disapproval of real-life Chinese authorities.

But all the sex — and there’s a lot of it — isn’t what earned director Lou Ye a five-year ban from filmmaking in China. What really pissed them off was the depiction of the Tiananmen Square movement. At first it’s just discussions in classes led by liberal-minded professors, but as 1988 turn to 1989 and spring arrives, the movement really starts rolling. At first the movie shows students marching in the background, or seen through a window; as the movement intensifies — Lou mixes documentary footage taken in 1989 with staged scenes — the movement shifts into the foreground. These scenes are what earned Lou a five-year ban on filmmaking.

But don’t expect a clear account of the movement, or the day when Chinese troops crushed it by massacring many hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen Square. Even when these scenes are in the foreground, Lou depicts the events in an impressionistic, almost chaotic fashion. The handheld cameras employed throughout the film take on the point of view of a confused bystander lost in a mêlée, while at the same time the dozens of extras rush past in every direction. Even the school hallways are filled with people running to and fro. If nothing else, this approach communicates the sheer excitement of an undisciplined protest that almost became a revolution; it also dramatizes what was threatening about the movement, as far as the authorities were concerned. Authoritarians can’t bear the physical manifestation of a populace that is suddenly out of control.

Still, the 1989 scenes are merely the midpoint of the film. Before them, Yu Hong is the main focus; afterwards, the film follows her friends as well as her. But the thing is, Yu Hong’s character doesn’t develop; she has affairs with man after man, drowning herself in passion. Toward the end she starts to seem a little unbalanced, as would anyone whose rambunctious behavior is attractive when they’re young but sours ten and twenty years down the road.

Any film that earns the approbation of an authoritarian regime qualifies as anti-fascist, certainly — even if its critique is mostly in the background.

What I haven’t discussed is how Lou’s fluid camera and the script’s concentration on the dreamy, poetic aspects of romantic obsession makes for a very beautiful film. The viewer is tempted to sink into a woozy, dreamy state along with the protagonist. It made for a nice escape while outside in the afternoon, thousands of protesters against Trump filled the streets of San Francisco.

Night Moves (1975)
Directed by Arthur Penn

Night Moves (2013)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Funny thing happened a couple weeks ago. I was in San Francisco and for once it was really hard to find a movie I wanted to see. I searched the listings on showtimes.com and finally something popped up, a movie called “Night Moves” that was not the 1975 Gene Hackman neo-noir but an eco-thriller set in Oregon. I’d never heard of this 2013 movie, but I went to the rep theater where it was supposed to be playing, and sat through the coming attractions, which advertised three different Gene Hackman movies. This seemed understandable, I told myself, since Hackman had recently died.

Then the movie started and, of course, it was the 1975 Arthur Penn-directed neo-noir, set in Hollywood and in the Florida Keys. I’d seen most of it before, but I’d never seen the first hour, so I sat through almost all of the movie. Then I left before the depressing ending. Of course, it’s a classic, marred only by second-act longueurs. Hackman plays a brash but solid and incorruptible private detective, and a fine but (except for this movie) little-known actress named Jennifer Warren is an oddball romantic interest.

So what about the eco-thriller? Directed by indie favorite Kelly Reichardt, it stars Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard as activists who blow up a dam to “free” the river it contains. The mission succeeds — though don’t expect either a spectacular explosion or a flood scene — but accidentally kills a bystander. This unexpected death throws the conspirators into guilt-ridden paranoia, yet they fail to take the necessary steps to protect themselves from arrest. Tension builds until one of them breaks.

Clearly working within a tiny budget, Reichardt does all she can to build tension both before and after the explosion, which takes place at the movie’s midpoint. There’s no first act; the characters don’t have backstories at all, which handicaps the character development. The movie begins as the conspirators collect the necessary materials (a boat, several hundred pounds of explosive ammonium nitrate fertilizer) and execute the job. The last half shows how two of them, Josh (Eisenberg) and Dina (Fanning) crack under the pressure.

As an activist who deals constantly with security measures (though, I hasten to add, they are in service to work that is strictly non-violent and non-destructive), I found much to criticize. If “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (2023) is mocked (and it is) for the security practices that its eco-terrorists try to follow, real activists can learn even less from “Night Moves.” (Why in the world would you hang onto and use the burner phones you got to communicate with each other when the operation is finished? You get rid of them, that’s the whole idea of a burner phone.) The movie doesn’t even attempt to make the characters seem heroic; the activists’ world seems grim and futile from the get-go. Not even Dakota Fanning’s character, an activist filmmaker, shows much passion for the work, and even less joy.

As for Eisenberg’s character, from whose perspective the second half plays out, he has one expression throughout the film, a glowering frown that makes it impossible to know or follow what his character is really thinking. Without these emotional cues, the film relies on ominous music to communicate the building tension, but it’s not enough.

Frankly, this script would have benefitted from being directed by a horror director who knows better how to introduce tension and paranoia into a movie. Reichardt’s movie is flat by comparison.

“Night Moves” (2013) is available on the Peacock streaming service.

Sacramento (2024)
Directed by Michael Angarano
Written by Angarano and Chris Smith

Turn to any news-talk radio station, cable pop-psychology show, newspaper op-ed page, or half-serious magazine and you will hear it said: Men are in trouble. All men, perhaps, but at the very least all American men. Or most of them. They’re babies who depend on the women in their lives to finish shepherding them through the emotional development they skipped for several years of their adolescence, and meantime the women must treat them with kid gloves lest they risk damaging men’s fragile egos.

Then when they finally realize they’re fucked up — usually after they’ve blown through relationships with wives, girlfriends, partners, dates, hookups and, most tragically, their children — they must spend several years learning what they should have learned from ages 10-20. By the time they emerge from their rotting chrysalis at age 47 or so, they’re isolated. They either become bitter, having lost their youth, or they become know-it-alls who think that simply growing up is some kind of achievement.

The film “Sacramento” does not argue with this depiction; it illustrates it. The main characters are two middle-aged men with serious neuroses. Rickey (Michael Angarano) has had the luck to meet a random woman with whom he goes camping for a few days, then ghosts for a couple of years because his father has died and it fucks him up, not that there’s any evidence that he was any less fucked up before that, since he’s clearly in his mid-40s with no sign of a family or a job. Glenn (Michael Cera) is even luckier, because despite the fact that he’s lost his job as his wife is about to have a baby, his wife Rosie (Kristin Stewart) is six kinds of awesome. But Glenn is terrified of parenthood and is having a nervous breakdown more or less throughout the picture.

The premise is that having been evicted from the outpatient grief counseling program he’s been in for over a year after his father’s death, Rickey needs his “best friend” Glenn to go on a road trip with him to scatter his father’s ashes. He hoodwinks Glenn into coming, and they proceed to have cringe-worthy adventures for about 48 hours until returning to Glenn’s wife Rosie, who looks even more exhausted than she did before Glenn left. The trip has done him zero good, because the next thing he does is accompany Rickey on another trip, this time to make amends to Tallie (Maya Erskine), the woman whom he impregnated, then ghosted. Recognizing that Tallie is living hand-to-mouth, Glenn decides he’s going to save her one-year-old baby from her “neglect” and kidnaps the child.

That’s at the end of the movie. If Rickey has managed to figure out that he owes Tallie at least some childcare, Glenn has accomplished nothing. He’s just as much a mess as he is in the first scene — in fact, demonstrably worse. Viewers would be forgiven for thinking these men are irredeemable and should be dropped into a canyon. But the people I feel really sorry for are the couples who make the mistake of thinking this alleged comedy would be a good date movie. Any woman who sees this film will never go on another date with a man again.

Perhaps the only good thing about this movie is the discovery of the actress Maya Erskine as Tallie. She’s funny, expressive, and absolutely believable, and I would love to see her in something else — perhaps the TV series version of “Mr and Mrs. Smith” with Donald Glover (early 2024, on Prime Video), or the Hulu series “PEN15” (2019-21). The great Kristin Stewart, of course, needs no defending.

So what are we going to do with men?

With my then-wife Cris, I visited Argentina years ago. One of the contacts we had been given was a relative of our next-door neighbor in San Francisco. This woman lived with her husband and two grown sons and a college-age daughter in Buenos Aires. The sons were polite, friendly, confident; they were in their early to mid 20s but were clearly young adults. Their father was similarly confident, warm, humorous. None of them seemed neurotic, immature, hostile, or missing part of their emotional development.

I thought of those young men in comparison with not only the characters in “Sacramento” but those across American television, where cringe comedy is performed nightly and the allegedly adult male characters are invariably the butt of the jokes. Some manosphere bros would probably say that’s the problem — that today’s entertainment provides no healthy role models — meanwhile they lionize Republican pigs who seem to be competing for who will be judged the worst. Can you imagine what Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, or Matt Gaetz are like at home, swaying drunkenly before the bathroom toilet and struggling to find their tiny penises in their own underwear before they piss themselves? Can you imagine how they treat their wives or their own mothers? As for Trump and Musk, two emotional children acting out a Three Stooges farce where they’re driving a bus toward a cliff at top speed and handing the broken-off steering wheel back and forth, only the bus is the whole country — they are the latest men to demonstrate the maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’m sure we’ll all have a good laugh at that as we drown in rivers swollen by catastrophic storms or die in a pandemic that could have been stopped by the drugs scientists are no longer perfecting. Yes, “Sacramento” is a comedy! God help us.

HOW TO DEAL WITH NAZIS

1. Punch Nazis

2. See no. 1

— maxim quoted on social media

Since moving to Reno I’ve been impressed by the tone of the r/Reno subreddit. The forum depicts the city as decisively non-affluent and, if not precisely working class, it’s even more not the voice of the managerial class (I guess that’s LinkedIn) or the Karen class (Nextdoor) or Facebook. Members— the forum seems very male — often post about the challenges they face. They seem underemployed, and frequently confess to being lonely. There’s no expectation that everyone’s gone to college, and the forum clearly lacks the enthusiasm for ironic discourse you would find elsewhere. When I posted extensive comments on a restaurant, I got shot down (“This isn’t Yelp!”). I’ve learned to temper some of the default (and unexamined) assumptions that I started out with.

“Freaky Tales” is a film showing the joys and dangers of life at a certain similar level. Because it’s a movie, there’s more criminality and more Tarantinine dirtbaggery. Because of this tone, and because the film contains multiple episodes with overlapping characters, it is reminiscent of “Pulp Fiction”— but minus most of the male preening, strutting, and homophobia.

Set in 1987, the movie’s four episodes are these: 1. Habitues of a Berkeley Flats punk club, 924 Gilman, face off against a large gang of Nazi skinheads (this part, at least, is based on a true incident). 2. Two friends who work at an ice cream shop enter a rap battle against recording star Too $hort. 3. A debt collector for a criminal attempts to quit, but a figure from the past has already come for revenge. 4. A local basketball star’s family is killed in a home invasion, and he wreaks revenge upon the robbers.

The stories are all set in Oakland in the same time period: spring 1987. That’s accurate for two of the episodes based on real events: the conflict between punks and skinheads at 924 Gilman, and the record-setting performance of Golden State Warriors guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd in Game 4 of the NBA semifinals. The link to real events, however much they are exaggerated and valorized in the movie, builds authenticity.

The fact that a basketball player’s nickname was “Sleepy” leads to the following line from the film. It’s spoken by the main bad guy, an Oakland police detective referred to in the credits simply as “The Guy” (Ben Mendelsohn). He is secretly the director of the neo-Nazis who got their asses kicked in episode 1, the same criminals who pillage the Golden State Warriors’ homes during the aforementioned playoff game. But by this moment in the movie, they’ve all gotten their asses kicked yet again, this time by Sleepy (Jay Ellis). The Guy looks around at the carnage, scowls at Sleepy and growls, “Tell me something. Did you do this all by yourself or do you have Dopey and Sneezy hiding in a closet somewhere? Huh?” That’s funny, but nobody laughed, because it’s the episode’s climax.

But also because The Guy is white, and alongside his basic cruelty, one of his main weapons is that sneering sarcasm. It strikes me now that he’s the only character who employs sarcasm; everyone else, even the Nazi skinheads, are straightforward and even sincere. Is that a sign that the young filmmakers, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, are representing their generation’s exhaustion with Gen X and early millennial cynicism?

Aside from the sheer enjoyment of watching vengeance visited on the strong by the supposedly weak, “Freaky Tales” has great performances from Pedro Pascal as a mob debt collector and new father, Ji-young Yoo as a punk out of 924 Gilman who wreaks havoc among the Nazis, DeMario Symba Driver as Too $hort, and especially Jay Ellis, whose role as Sleepy Floyd demands a range from a goofy new-age pitch man for a meditation business to a fierce avenger. Too $hort himself serves as the movie’s narrator.

But the most important character is the city of Oakland itself. Like “Sorry to Bother You,” the brilliant and even more surreal feature by Boots Riley, “Freaky Tales” shows Oakland as a land of strivers and schemers, full of creativity, tenacity, and courage. One of the things I admired about “Sorry to Bother You” is its refusal to reassure viewers that Oakland is but a satellite of San Francisco. Unlike most movies that show San Francisco across the bay from Oakland and Berkeley as if the smaller cities need it to feel important, Riley’s film doesn’t devote a single frame to the City by the Bay. In “Freaky Tales,” Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck show their city is just as solitary and independent, so I was surprised by the movie’s last moments that show Sleepy Floyd flying over the Bay Bridge on a motorcycle. This is the only false note in a movie as fun as it is violent, because almost all the victims are fucking Nazis. What can we learn from this essentially anti-fascist film? Punch Nazis.

Secret Mall Apartment (2025)
Directed by Jeremy Workman

In 2000, before the World Trade Center was destroyed in the events of Sep. 11, an Austrian artists collective executed a remarkable act of subversion there. Through a program that supported the arts at the vast office complex, they gained access to a tiny office on the 91st floor of one of the WTC towers. There they constructed a car-sized object that they could hang on the side of the building. When they were ready, they surruptitiously spent the night in the office. At dawn, they removed a window from the office and installed the device they had made. It was a tiny balcony, portruding from the side of the skyscraper only a foot or two. A co-conspiritor had gotten a hotel room across the street and took a few photographs to document the achievement. Then they removed the device, replaced the window, and had breakfast.1

That feat, as well as the now-legendary tightrope act performed by Philip Petit in 1974 and other acts of defiance2, is art, because it interrogates and subverts the real and imagined qualities of the site. The WTC — despite, or maybe because of the 1993 bombing that had killed six people and injured hundreds — was thought to be impregnable and featureless, over 100 stories of uninterrupted vertical lines. The balcony, which was on the side of the building for only a few minutes, punctured its façade, literally and figuratively, and made everyone who noticed it, or heard about it later, reconsider what the WTC actually amounted to.

The new documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” is about how some former Rhode Island School of Design students responded to the demolition and gentrification of their warehouse district. In an event experienced by many an artist or artisan, their funky art studio/performance space/makeshift loft in a ramshackle building in an old warehouse district met the wrecking ball of capital. Michael Townsend and his fellow artists were evicted, and the old warehouse was demolished in favor of a new development.

Meanwhile, an enormous, brutalist concrete mall was being completed nearby in downtown Providence, R.I.; in fact, the new mall was what made real estate developers think the whole area was ripe for redevelopment. Instead of fleeing this monstrosity, Townsend, an artist and Rhode Island School of Design instructor who was celebrated locally for working with patients at a children’s hospital to adorn their rooms and hallways with whimsical murals, allowed himself and his friends to be swallowed by it. They hung out at the mall constantly, eating cheaply (or not paying at all by consuming left-behind portions of other patrons’ food-court meals) and shopping at a Goodwill Store.

Townsend had closely observed the mall’s construction. Because of its unusual setting on a riverbank and by a busy railroad, the enormous building was constructed in oddly-shaped sections, and this had produced a void within the structure. Already something of an urban explorer, Townsend found ways to access the mall’s back passageways and superstructure. Soon he was leading his friends on a sort of revenge art project: If the mall and the changes it had wrought resulted in their evictions, then it owed them one: they would establish a secret pied-a-terre within the mall’s negative space and live there on and off. This documentary doesn't actually put it in terms of revenge, but that's how it seems to me. By literally occupying the mall, they were taking back what it had taken from them.

They accomplished this over the course of a couple of years, with a certain amount of giggling, captured by small, cheap video cameras that they carried around. This grainy footage is blown up to usable film and provides an acceptable document of their hijinks, I mean their art project. But is it art?

Whether or not the establishment of a secret mall apartment -- or a simulation of one -- actually constitutes art is a question the film does attempt to address, to some extent. Chiefly, the conflict is most meaningful in the relationship between Townsend and his girlfriend and fellow artist Adriana Valdez Young. As faithfully recorded on their video cameras, they confront the issue while relaxing in the mall's food court. After several years of devoting his energies to the apartment, he still seems to be just as gleeful about the project as ever, but she's getting tired of it. When she says “I don't want to spend more time making the mall apartment better. I want our home to be better. I want to spend time on it,” I got the feeling that Townsend wasn’t lifting a finger to care for the actual apartment they both lived in. The filmmakers also interview Townsend’s current girlfriend, and she, too, is perplexed about what differentiates the project from, say, a treehouse.

That’s the closest the movie comes to a critique of Townsend and his mall apartment. Mostly it presents him in a flattering light, working with kids at the hospital and in New York City to memorialize the victims of 9/11. The film expects you to be delighted by the whole idea of the “secret mall apartment” and the youngsters’ efforts to create and decorate it, but one of them comes closer to the truth when they describe it as “prison-like.” There are, of course, no windows, and to use the bathroom the artists have to travel through maze-like passageways to enter the mall proper. Most significantly, all the electricity is from extension cords leading who knows how far away to outlets, and clearly there’s never enough power to make it an actual work space for artists — which seems, you know, ironic. I like cool improvised spaces and tiny houses and so on; they appeal to almost everyone. But if it wouldn’t work for me to actually write in, I wouldn’t be that interested. Isn’t actually doing your work the whole point?

What makes the secret apartment less successful as art than the WTC balcony is that its critique of the mall and what it represents is muted. The Providence artists took over a space that was unused and essentially forgotten, and made little use of it themselves except as a clubhouse. No one was really housed in the apartment.

What I found most meaningful was the way the artists formed a community to carry out what was essentially a sabotage mission. There’s nothing like working on a project together to make new friends, a phenomenon that helps countless volunteer organizations survive and also provides a key motivation for people joining more negative groups like criminal gangs. Humans are preternaturally social. They form bonds with one another. Despite the triviality of mall apartment project as depicted, the biggest takeaway is that it’s rewarding to form affinity groups, no matter what you’re trying to accomplish.

Thanks to Bob Ostertag for the link to the publicdelivery.org article where the picture of the WTC balcony appeared. Bob’s new book is “Encounters with Men” from Black Lawrence Press.

You’ve heard of that rare genetic disorder which gives the people who have it the inability to feel pain. While this may seem like a sort of superpower, it means that the people who have it must be extremely careful not to hurt themselves, especially when it comes to burns and cuts that a normal person would react to instantly. It also means setting an alarm to remind yourself to use the toilet; otherwise you might forget to until, well, you get the idea.

At least that’s how Nate (Jack Quaid), a mild-mannered bank assistant manager, approaches life: with extreme care. So when the extremely hot new teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder, who resembles Aubrey Plaza only with really plush lips) comes on to him and gets him to live a little, he's a sucker for her charms. For the first time ever, he eats cherry pie (“This is pie?! Oh my god!”), and later on the date, metaphorical cherry pie. (This isn’t shown, but the character of Nate is written as a thoughtful, nice guy, so it seems like he’d be down for it.) The next day, the bank they both work at is robbed by a trio of really violent guys in Santa suits (like that’s never been done before). They get Nate to give them the vault combination by threatening to shoot Sherry before grabbing all the cash and taking her hostage.

It all happens a little too fast for the viewer to question what’s going on, which is a good thing, because if you thought about it all too hard you might question Sherry’s motive for suddenly coming on to a manager at work, or the manager’s apparent complete lack of sexual harassment training, since he doesn’t question it either.

Meanwhile, Nate has stolen a cop car and pursued the robbers, intent on saving the only girlfriend he’s ever had. Along the way, he gets into an increasing number of violent situations that have him getting shot, plunging his hand into a deep fryer, and being struck on the face, on the head, and all over the body over and over again without feeling pain. Somehow all the mayhem he endures fails to cause massive bleeding or internal injury, nor does he have to go to the head during this very busy and violent day, but don’t question that either, it would just spoil the fun.

And it is fun, to a point, because it's increasingly played as a comedy. It has to be, because to keep things interesting, the filmmakers have to keep upping the ante when it comes to subjecting the protagonist to violence. Eventually, long past the point where the violence felt threatening — at least to the characters — it goes past being cartoon violence, arrives at slapstick, and ventures into the absurd. About this time, when he was tripping booby traps at the residence of one of the robbers who seems to be a medieval weapons geek, Nate gets struck by a spiked mace and shot by a crossbow. I could see where it was all going and I left, about 75% of the way through the movie.

What I wondered about, as I walked to my car, was not the character of the violence on the horror-to-slapstick continuum, but the character of Sherry. Spoiler here: she’s in league with the bank robbers, one of whom is her brother, and seducing Nate was part of the plan. (His imperviability to pain and his wild attempt to rescue her were apparently not part of the plan, which makes me wonder how well these robbers really researched their target.)

This plot twist is meant to provide an explanation for why this hot young woman would launch herself at this ordinary, unimpressive guy. But it doesn’t explain why the film relies on such tired tropes about gender and sex in the first place. To unpack: The plot point is based on acceptance of the sexist trope that women and men have high or low value in the sphere of dating — which sexists can’t help seeing in capitalist terms as a sexual marketplace.

Sherry is coded as having high value; Nate is, if not low value (he does have a job and no bad habits, which has to count for something), certainly not entitled to even pursue someone as hot as she is. In these terms, there has to be an exterior explanation for her seducing someone like him, and the plot provides it: she only does it because she wants to soften him up, so that when the bank robbers threaten to shoot her if Nate doesn’t give them the combination to the vault, he does so.

So the business of Nate’s inability to feel pain is simply a comic element that has little to do with the plot, which turns on this question of why — to use the terms that the intended audience would — a hot girl would fuck a guy whose value in the sexual marketplace is so much lower. Not that this is an unusual premise in movies. But here it struck me as retrograde and adolescent. Ascribing relative value to other people or seeing relationships as transactional are social norms related to capitalism, a system we inhabit like fish live in water. More than an economic system, capitalism underlies most of our social relationships as well. When we’re in high school, it seems natural to see ourselves in terms of our relative value to others whom we might wish to, or deign to, date. Applying this template to adult relationships strikes a mature person as juvenile.

That fits the intended audience for this picture: young men and, ideally (to the young men) their dates. What their dates might think about the premise is something they’re likely to hide, or else they’d have to talk about it later on at Pizza Hut or wherever high school kids on dates go after the movies.

Maybe that’s the trick to enjoying so many movies: imagine you’re among the indented audience. There must be a trick to this that I’ve forgotten, or else I wouldn’t walk out of many movies twenty minutes before they end.