You Hurt My Feelings (2023)

It may be less than helpful to the general cause to say that the best movies by director and writer Nicole Holofcener compare favorably to the best Woody Allen movies, before he got to be so hard to take (ca. 1992)—Friends With Money, Enough Said, Please Give, and the others are narrowly focused, good-humored meditations on your vexing life and getting along with the people in it. You Hurt My Feelings has some small flaws but it’s well representative of what Holofcener does. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the center of it as Beth, a professional writer in New York City who teaches adult education classes on writing and has published a memoir about verbal abuse. She’s a little defensive with people, anticipating they won’t take her experience seriously as abuse. She has also recently finished her first novel. Her husband Don (Tobias Menzie) is a psychotherapist possibly edging into burnout. He thinks botox might help. We’re privy to some of his sessions with a few comically neurotic clients. Beth’s son Eliot (Owen Teague) works in a cannabis store and may or may not be an aspiring writer. Beth smokes weed herself but refuses to buy from his store. She also has some unpleasant streaks of racism around this, appearing to believe street crime can break out right there, a jarring note (when it does, it’s even more jarring, the picture’s weakest moment). Beth hangs out a lot with her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) and sometimes Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed). Beth and Sarah frequently visit their mother Georgia (Jeannie Berlin). Around and around these characters go. The cast is big and the cast is good. The movie is essentially built out of conversation, as they shuffle along their appointed daily rounds, getting coffee and trying to figure it all out. The plot turns specifically on Beth and Sarah bumping into Don and Mark out shopping and overhearing their conversation before the two men know they are there. Don is telling Mark that he doesn’t like Beth’s novel and has been lying about it and doesn’t know how to come clean. Yes, it’s the ol’ eavesdropping gambit, that’s right. And then the knotty issue in relationships about how to support a partner’s creativity, tending to shade any criticism sought toward the positive. Because what else are you going to do? You Hurt My Feelings, notwithstanding the occasional pains, is a good time, warm and enjoyable, with some sharp edges of poignance and humor worked into it well.

“The Haunted Woodshed” (1961)

Harold R. Daniels was more of a crime fiction writer, thus perhaps it’s not surprising this is more like a mystery story, complete with nifty solution and happy ending. In some ways that makes it a relief in this These Will Chill You anthology, whose stories more have the capacity to become unpleasant with torture, putrefaction, etc. “The Haunted Woodshed” involves a murder and the search for a corpse and is often lurking on the edge of gruesome. It also telegraphs its main points so it’s not that good as a mystery either, a genre with which horror was often conflated in the postwar decades. The haunted woodshed of the title does not have a ghost, exactly, but only a bad vibe, although that might be close to the same thing. The main character is a retired schoolteacher, a woman approaching 60, who buys a property in a small town. Everything about it is perfect except the woodshed. When she looks into the history, she finds out the wife of the previous owner mysteriously disappeared not long before and the case is still open. The woodshed has a dirt floor but police dug it up and never found a body. Meanwhile there’s discussion of a community meat locker, a freezer space where locals can rent space and keep the meat they buy at quantity for better prices. No one stopping by for that night’s chops and cutlets seems to be factoring in thaw time, but anyway, you see what I mean about telegraphing. The mind goes to the obvious places. There’s still one more twist from there, then the corpse is recovered and the mystery solved. Huzzah! I like how Daniels goes to lengths for a specifically happy ending, for a feeling that may best be expressed, with sighs of satisfaction, as Awww. All’s well that ends well. It clarifies some differences between horror and mystery. The supernatural and/or “hunches” may or may not occur in either, and downbeat endings happen in both. But so rarely does horror have upbeat endings it almost writes them out of the category. At the moment, the only other one I can think of was written by Agatha Christie, straying from her usual territory but with her usual instincts.

These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Story not available online.

Three Colors: Blue (1993)

Trois couleurs: Bleu, France / Poland / Switzerland, 99 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Slawomir Idziak

Photography: Slawomir Idziak

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Juliet Binoche, Benoit Regent, Florence Pernel, Charlotte Very, Helene Vincent, Philippe Volter, Claude Duneton, Hugues Quester, Emmanuelle Riva, Julie Delpy

Trilogies are an idea that comes from the literary world, where it appears to have become every novelist’s ambition to write one—that is, three novels that are linked somehow. Did you know William Gibson’s Neuromancer is the first novel in a trilogy? (I’m not even trying to address series that can run for many, many often very big novels. People like them too but no one appears to want to call them octologies or whatever. Make it “cycle.”) Sometimes a trilogy can amount to a single long work—John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are good examples. Sometimes it’s more notional. Beat writer William Burroughs has at least two trilogies that are united only, as far as I can tell, by consecutive publication dates and/or by Burroughs (or someone) saying they are a trilogy.

Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy is more like the latter, with separate narratives and characters, playing with larger political and cultural themes. One way that point is emphasized at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT) is by listing the three titles separately. (They do the same for the Lord of the Rings movies, but I’m more inclined to take those as a single very big movie.) (To confuse the matter further, there is also another 1993 picture, written and directed by Derek Jarman and featuring Tilda Swinton, called Blue.) Three Colors is formally united by the colors of the French flag—the “blue, white, and red,” as they say—which in turn represent liberty, equality, and fraternity, respectively. Kieslowski treats them separately by film (perhaps ironic that white is equality in the weakest of the three, but we’ll get to that). This very impressive first picture in the trilogy formally plays with the idea of “liberty”—it may be somewhat strained, loaded down with art film markers, and it may be a somewhat narrow view of liberty (“emotional,” per Kieslowski), but nonetheless it works well and makes a good picture.

“After You, My Dear Alphonse” (1943)

Some interesting points over at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) about this very short Shirley Jackson story. First, as always, ISFDB's sort of inverted bias makes them quick to declare anything suspiciously realistic as “non-genre.” “Although this story is listed in Ashley & Contento's Supernatural Index, there isn't anything supernatural in it,” they note. And that’s certainly true, at least if you exclude a certain level of future-seeing prescience. It’s a story about racism, and it couldn’t be any more clear, though what’s remarkable may be more the publication date, arguably early in terms of 20th-century integration, even before the U.S. military was formally desegregated in 1948. Mrs. Wilson’s son Johnny has brought home a new friend for lunch. Boyd is “a Negro.” They are about 8 or 9 years old. The moment Mrs. Wilson sees Boyd everything changes. Her bigotry is not based exactly on hatred but more on a mix of uninformed compassion and condescension. She assumes Boyd is poor, has numerous siblings, and doesn’t get enough to eat. She offers to make up a box of blankets and used clothes for his family. She means well, maybe, but she is also overbearing. Boyd very tactfully turns her down, which annoys her. You get the feeling Boyd has encountered this treatment before. He appreciates the kindness, but plainly all he wants is to be treated like anyone else. Johnny is the only person who seems to be genuinely colorblind here. The giveaway about Mrs. Wilson is when she becomes annoyed Boyd won’t accept anything but a small lunch from her. And what works more than anything is the clarity of this story, clarity being one of the greater virtues in Shirley Jackson’s work. It’s a very short story, maybe four pages, and you may want to call it obvious but Jackson packs a lot into it. The title comes from a joke whose sources lie in a turn-of-the-century comic strip about hobos, a joke that Johnny and Boyd share, politely exchanging with one another, “After you, my dear Alphonse,” and then, from the other, “No, after you, my dear Alphonse.” The story is excellent, as clear a crystallization of racism as you could hope to find even today and a painful reminder of how deeply enmeshed with race so many of our problems still are.

Shirley Jackson, Novels and Stories
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Contact (1997)

USA, 150 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: James V. Hart, Michael Goldenberg, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan

Photography: Don Burgess

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, David Morse, William Fichtner, Jake Busey, Larry King

I had to start by asking myself what kind of a nut am I for movies about UFOs and first contact with aliens from outer space? Some kind of a nut anyway, as I tallied the titles from a generic “best first contact movies” search of the internet: The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind are favorites I have looked at over and over, as it happens, with others I have at least appreciated (Arrival, Interstellar, E.T., even The Abyss). Contact is high on a lot of those lists too, although I hadn’t seen it since it was new. I liked it then but, more than 25 years later, I felt some trepidation about approaching it again.

Part of the reason I’ve been working at a roundup of movies by director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and I probably should have got to Romancing the Stone) was exactly about that trepidation, hoping to get some perspective on the intriguing Zemeckis before I returned to Contact. On that point, I think now that Zemeckis’s strongest period was in the late ‘80s, with Roger Rabbit and the respectably resolved (and family-friendly!) complexities of his Back to the Future trilogy. Forrest Gump was a kind of crucible from which Zemeckis may never have fully recovered, leaning into flashy distracting special effects by rote, for their own sake, and putting narrative coherence into the backseat. There’s a lot of that in Contact. Start with the ridiculously repurposed footage of Bill Clinton, which has not aged well.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

I looked at Into the Spider-Verse a few years late and with low expectations and I liked it a lot—don’t miss it, really. Then I went to this sequel shortly after it opened and with high expectations, and came away feeling a little meh, not least because it is obviously a bridge episode in a longer series, at least a trilogy. Ho-hum, getting tired of the big narrative arcs that feel big more for commercial reasons. Everything I liked in Into is basically still there in Across, but it wasn’t nearly as surprising this time. The effects are spectacular like fireworks, capable of burning into your retinas, figuratively speaking, I mean—high-contrast, colorful, very fast, and impressive. Already I’m seeing the colorful blurry ray used here (something multidimensional, I’m sure) showing up in memes. I also like the story of Miles Morales (voiced by Shemeik Moore), the Spider-Man who’s a Black kid from Brooklyn in a parallel universe. But they don’t lean into it as much here. Instead, it’s a lot of thunder and lightning about multiple dimensions and a multidimensional superhero / Spider-Man security team putting it all back in balance because otherwise we’d have to go through the Big Bang again, or something. Also rampant wisecracking, of course—it’s the Spider-Man brand to a certain degree so that’s always going to be there. It’s even the Marvel brand, come to think of it. And don’t think these characters don’t notice it and comment on it, because they do. The fights are too fast to follow but the action is rousing. One fun point here is all the Spider-Man variations mixed in with all the Spider-Man lore we know. So there’s a Lego Spider-Man, a horse Spider-Man (my favorite so far), Spider-Men previously seen in video games, a few Spider-Women, etc. And yes, there’s a brief scene where a cast of hundreds of Spider-Men are all standing in circles pointing at one another like the meme. That got a big reaction at the screening I saw. I can’t remember if it was in the first one too. The voice talent on hand is also impressive, though not necessarily particularly recognizable as such in the swift pace and clanging battles: Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy, Mehershala Ali, Kathryn Hahn, Oscar Isaac, Daniel Kaluuya, Ziggy Marley, Elizabeth Perkins, Jason Schwartzman, J.K. Simmons, ET freakin’ CETERA. So a big show and a reasonably good time and my first visit to a multiplex since the pandemic, but somehow, for me, just slightly underwhelming.

“Journalism in Tennessee” (1869)

This very short piece by Mark Twain, even as relatively early as it is in his writing career, feels typical of his humorous sketches. Calling it an essay seems a little misleading—it’s all obvious lies, basically. But, perhaps because of the way it’s presented, “short story” doesn’t really do the job either. The first-person narrator who gives it more the feel of a memoir tells of his experience working for a small-town newspaper in Tennessee. The editor gives him a stack of press releases and tells him to make a story out of them from the highlights. He does so, with polite summaries. The editor goes to work on the typescript as soon as our guy hands it off to him. At that point the ridiculous action starts. Someone fires a shot through the window. A hand grenade comes rolling down the stovepipe. The rewrite is an obvious specimen of yellow advocacy journalism. “The inveterate liars at ... “ it begins. The seams are showing, but in a general way it works. It’s the deadpan quality Twain manages so well. As the extremes of violence ratchet higher, it starts to feel like a Buster Keaton picture. Here’s this guy trying to do his job—he came to the South in the first place on doctor’s orders, for his health. Now: “Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel’s bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh.” It piles on until finally our guy tenders his resignation to the vicious, fightin’ editor. “After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital.” That’s how the piece ends. It's short but eventful and silly. It’s also weirdly constructed, lurching about randomly across the through-line of mounting violence. “Journalism in Tennessee” has the sloppy anecdotal structure that makes me hesitate to call it a story. Does “humorous sketch” fall within the definition of an essay? Oh, whatever. It’s entertaining and a reasonably good jolt of Twain for beginners and everyone. Much better, in fact, than that jumping frog thing we were forced to read in school.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches. (Library of America)
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Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)

I wandered into the Spacemen 3 complex late, by way of their cover circa 1991 of Mudhoney’s “When Tomorrow Hits” (it'll hit you hard). I had known them before—I think everyone did, more or less—for their famous credo “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.” They owned that Mudhoney track, brought out all its power on their way out the door. I listened to it a lot and think of it as a Spacemen 3 song. They splintered shortly after, but I followed or caught up on various spinoffs and side projects. Spiritualized, headed up by Jason Pierce (aka J. Spaceman), was probably the biggest, certainly the most enduring and commercially successful—1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, got most of the attention. Some versions of that album were sold in a package that mimicked pharmaceutical blister packs, carrying on a familiar theme. And Pierce and an ever-shifting cast have hung in there all this time. Their 2018 album And Nothing Hurt and their 2022 album Everything Was Beautiful (hi, Kurt Vonnegut!) are both on Fat Possum, which suggests another Spiritualized theme has also continued, finding one thread of their arch roots in gospel and country blues. Lazer Guided Melodies is the first Spiritualized album, a quiet masterpiece that bears most of the seeds of what was to come. I’m still not convinced you need to go any further. It’s built in many ways on the grungy aesthetic of its time, alternating quiet parts with loud parts, but the dynamic is more working steadily across the length of the LP. The early songs are lulling and shorter, setting a meditative tone. My first impressions were more that they were vaporous but close attention discloses the strategy, setting up the longer, symphonic pieces to come, incrementally growing larger and larger until the album has become quite big by the time of “Step Into the Breeze” and, especially, ”Symphony Space” forward. Horns and strings show up just as if they belong and somehow they do. Principal songwriter Pierce checks his influences on the fourth track, “Run,” which is co-credited to J.J. Cale but plainly also paying reverence to the Velvet Underground, perhaps the single greatest influence. Another way to look at the structure of Lazer Guided Melodies, no doubt, is in terms of psychedelic drug use (with or without pharmaceutical enhancements). The first half of the album (sections designated as “Red” and “Green”) are in the reflective and tenuous mood of dropping and waiting to come on. A 15-minute swirling floating-in-space peak is delivered in the “Blue” section (“Take Your Time” and “Shine a Light”), and then the gospel-inflected coming-down aftermath of the “Black” section. It’s so understated in its totality that the effects may not even be detectable at first. Use once daily.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, France, 122 minutes

Director/writer: Céline Sciamma

Photography: Claire Mathon

Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Arthur Simonini, Antonio Vivaldi

Editor: Julien Lacheray

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino

I promised myself I would keep horserace talk to a minimum with these movie reviews based on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT). But honestly I’m still absorbing some of the recent changes. One of the most notable is the arrival of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, emerging from practically nowhere in the past four years to land in the top 200, in the latest update of the TSPDT aggregated critical ranking of the greatest movies ever made, at #187. TSPDT, in turn, relies heavily on the Sight & Sound polls conducted every 10 years, the latest just concluded last year, where we find Portrait landing at #30, one of only nine movies from the 21st century to make the new S&S top 100 and by far the most recent, with Parasite, which is tied down at #90 with The Leopard, Madame de..., Ugetsu, and Yi Yi.

Is Portrait of a Lady on Fire a great movie, or is it a passing critical infatuation? Obviously that will take some time to understand. It’s certainly a very good movie. Another feature of the recent S&S survey is that films focused on and/or made by women outperformed most expectations, most famously Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which landed at #1 in the Sight & Sound poll, all three hours and 22 minutes of it (which pushed it to #12 on the TSPDT list). The present auspicious regard for Portrait of a Lady on Fire may turn out to be a high-water mark, driven by fleeting enthusiasms. But nonetheless it’s a picture worth seeing and I’m glad I was pushed to seeing it sooner rather than later.

“The Unsettled Dust” (1968)

What’s most enjoyable for me about Robert Aickman at this point is that I’m still discovering how good he is, still finding these above-average “strange” stories, and they still surprise me a lot. His floor is higher than the ceilings of many who are better known. The first-person narrator in this one is a corporate officer of the Historic Structures Fund, an organization dedicated to preserving buildings of interest. He’s telling the story of a past experience by way of contributing to the work of a new group within the Fund, the Psychic and Occult Research Committee, whose mission is to investigate reports of hauntings. The haunted house in this story is one of the Fund’s properties, where the narrator stayed while he was working on another project in the region. The former owners of the house, and the last remaining heirs of the family who originally built it, still live there—two sisters, Agnes and Olive. They are required to put him up because the Fund now owns their home. They are reasonably cordial. “The Unsettled Dust” has lots of Aickman touches, perhaps most notably the dust. It covers everything and no one does anything about it—no one can do anything about it. Even the dining table where they eat is dusty. Rings created by glasses and plates are covered again by dust by meal’s end. No one really knows where it comes from, but they take it as a given, with their own theories—wind, unpaved roads, high country, etc. The narrator thinks there must be a cement factory nearby. The expectation for the sisters is that they will be old, crotchety types, and Agnes certainly is. But the narrator finds himself strangely attracted to Olive. He also sees a ghost, a man he finds in his bedroom one afternoon who says nothing to him and eventually leaves. The housekeeper (“the grey Elizabeth”) assures him he will only see it that once—everyone sees it only once—and that turns out to be true. I like the dust in this story, it’s a very strong and, yes, unsettling element. It makes the narrator’s hands visibly dirty just living there day to day, and the thought of eating at that dining table makes me a little sick. I also like the narrator’s attraction to Olive, who is eerie, ethereal and a little indeterminate even within the story, but also indeed somehow attractive. She plays the piano and bears an air of melancholy. The narrator’s infatuation is wrapped into his stiff manner, but it’s quite evident. Through him, Olive becomes attractive to the reader as well. Neil Gaiman: “Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully.”

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
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Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica (2007)

I was sad to find out the author of this entry in the 33-1/3 series, Kevin Courrier, died in 2018. His book on a very difficult album stands up a good defense for it, explodes various myths and misinformation about it, and continually extends sympathies toward the haters, who are legion. For many, it’s an album that exists as the very epitome of terrible, unlistenable music. Courrier met his share of them along the way, even before he was working on the book. He came to the album a few years after its release and the anecdote about that, from his time working as a youth counselor in a crisis center, sets a nice, slightly comical tone about the project of taking on the album. I knew Trout Mask Replica myself in about the same timeframe, when I was in high school, at which time I defended it with “you have to listen to it a few times.” I might have added, “also, you have to want to like it.” I still have to remind myself to “listen to it a few times” every time I think to come back to it. Among other things, Courrier does a good job of charting its respectably big influence. The main part I appreciated was Courrier’s thoughtful history of the troubled relationship between Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and nominal producer Frank Zappa. Their friendship started in the ‘50s when they were schoolmates in a California junior high. Courrier is also good on some of the mistaken ideas around how the music was conceived. Legend has it that Van Vliet went to each member for each song and literally told them exactly what to play. Courrier says the reality is that the drummer, Drumbo (John French—everyone in the band gets a funny alias), was more the mediary between the band and Van Vliet, who didn’t always have the vocabulary to explain what he wanted. Courrier has some fun with Van Vliet’s disappointment about the lack of commercial success, which Van Vliet believed was the fault of Zappa and others. For his explanation, Courrier wryly pivots to the avant-garde, often atonal music itself—I think he has that right. People are driven from rooms by this album. The approach of many of these 33-1/3 books, I’ve learned, is a history of the band or artist to the point of the specific album under consideration, then a track-by-track rundown. Courrier’s rundown may be a bit rushed—hey, it’s a double LP with lots of tracks—but his history of Van Vliet, Zappa, and the Magic Band (they stopped being “His” eventually) is quite good. It cleared up a lot of points for me on how this vexing album came to be. Courrier, a Canadian, also wrote books about Zappa and Randy Newman and, from 1990 until his death, was a film critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If you care anything about Trout Mask Replica—love it, hate it, or meh—Courrier’s book is probably a useful stop.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

By about the second hour of the mammoth new picture from director and writer Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), I was already uncomfortably remembering the excesses of Mother!, Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 exercise, and thinking of the kind of movies that are sold on the premise of “from the mind of.” Then Beau Is Afraid went seriously deep into its bizarre mother fixations and all I could think of was the comparison. Look, at least I can say Beau Is Afraid is better than Mother! It’s often entertaining, scary, a little thrilling, even though it doesn’t make much sense. But the not making much sense does get to be a problem. From the mind of Ari Aster, and with a pretty impressive cast in tow—Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey (!), Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind, and Bill Hader, among others—comes a head explosion of a mother and son relationship. It starts in a nightmare dystopia of urban breakdown. Is it all a dream or perhaps a paranoid fantasy of Beau Wasserman (Phoenix)? It might be comedy. Corpses lie in the street unattended while panicked policemen assiduously ignore them and draw down on anyone who approaches for help. Beau is a nervous, high-strung fella in therapy, preparing for a visit home to see his mother, evidently his first in some time. About the first hour is spent on the hellscape of Beau’s life. Scary neighbors blame him for the unexplained loud noises shaking the walls of their apartments. An unlikely home invasion goes down related to Beau’s loss of house keys just before he is set to leave on his trip to see his mother. Then he gets word that his mother has been killed, her face and head crushed by a falling chandelier. Her wishes were that she not be buried until Beau can be there. He’s attacked in the street by a naked serial killer and thus held up due to his serious injuries, waking in the home of a strange professional couple who are caring for him. But all is not as it seems and strange things go on and on and on, connected only by random circumstances. Beau Is Afraid is more entertaining than Mother!, but that’s a low bar to clear. I wish there would have been more story to it and/or that it were just shorter. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is an interesting high point—he really has some range. Still, for me, “from the mind of” is not enough by itself, even if the mind in question is a promising or impressive one. David Lynch and the Coen brothers have both had the sentiment applied to them. I’d say Aster qualifies on the strength of his previous features. But I’m hoping this is just something he needed to get out of his system.