I accept that my problems are not anyone else’s problems. I also accept that, when my going gets tough, I have zero bandwidth for your business-as-usual requests for my (free) psychic take on your love life or astrology or spirit guides; your mass-printed holiday cards featuring kid pictures I already dutifully liked on social media; your relationships that would’ve ended years ago if you didn’t fear being alone or broke; your family dramas that don’t come close to a good year in my storyline; your preaching-to-the-choir in lieu of real political action; your housecleaner-stole-my ring “holiday stresses” while the world is hand-basketing to hell. Maybe next year I’ll summon a fuck, but not now, not while you don’t notice the person you’re petitioning also is tackling heavy shit even if she’s keeping it together. For the rest of this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2016, I’ll be watching Deneuve not give a fuck in “A Christmas Tale,” the best anti-holiday film ever made. You’re on your own, kid.
Archive | Film Matters
Don’t Worry About the Government
I’ve been quiet because I don’t want to preach to the choir and I don’t want to be preached to, and right now all other posts seem frivolous, even I can see that. But this morning I’m up early after two consecutive weeks of late nights. My hair is up in curlers, my zit is smeared with a Vitamin E salve, and I’m drinking coffee while watching my neighborhood wake up through the bedroom window. Continue Reading →
‘Nocturnal Animals,’ Empty Calories
As a film director, Tom Ford is a great art director. By this I mean that, with the exception of “Bling” director Sofia Coppola, he is uniquely concerned with the surface of things. This is not surprising, for Ford has made his name as one of the premier fashion designers of his generation. But in his movies – “A Single Man” (2009) and now “Nocturnal Animals” – he expresses ambivalence about appearances, especially when it comes to keeping them.
It’s also not surprising that both films are literary adaptations. You get the sense that Ford knows he’s best at fleshing out someone else’s content; form and function, baby. Starring Colin Firth, “A Single Man” is curated from Christopher Isherwood’s interior novel about the melancholy of a closeted professor, and Ford’s fascination with midcentury American style allows us to glean the depth of his protagonist’s depression; if these creamy colors and sharp angles aren’t going to make this man happy, nothing will. But based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel, Tony and Susan, “Nocturnal Animals” is a tougher sell, mostly because the director amps up the book’s stakes – vamps them up, too – without locating its core. You could dismiss it as a stylish exercise, except that he’s chasing some messages that never deliver. Continue Reading →