[ I’ll be spoiling the films I write about here, so don’t read further if you haven’t yet seen ’em. ]

Been trying to take in more film. I used to be very film-oriented, not so much in recent years. I know the things I see will spill out of my consciousness with the swiftness of tears from crocodiles; perhaps a few notes are in order? Giving it a shot, anyway. We’ll catch up with a few here and see what happens.

I saw Crimes of the Future (2022) a few weeks ago, Cronenberg’s vaunted body horror renaissance. Tragically boring. Not even a provocative concept. We’ll evolve to eat plastic? Who gives a fuck? Surgery as performance art? Okay, whatever. The performances have a certain oddness, but feel mostly unmotivated and unfulfilling. Oddness for its own sake. The only character that thrives onscreen belongs to Kristen Stewart: she at least seems turned on by what’s happening, an engaged inhabitant of her world. Everyone else is phoning it in, they might as well be zonked on a couch in some opium den. This movie would have been much better with Kristen Stewart at the center and with some kind of conflict or narrative to drive it forward. The concepts alone are unstimulating, certainly not worth marinating in without relief from dramatic elements. I peeked around online; the reviews seem to be muted but respectfully positive, but I didn’t find anybody who found an interesting idea in it, so I daresay I’ll probably not give it another chance. [LATER] I suppose I’ll put a pin in this film. Having recently attended a literary event that turned out to be mostly devoted to the philosophy of Cronenberg, I feel I may too lightly have dismissed a work by someone so clearly advanced and plugged-in…. If I return to it, however, it will probably be after some extended marination in his earlier filmography.

I also saw Men (2022). Garbage. I’ll let the crocodile weep it out, I don’t care to remember it. I take that back, I’d like to remember at least the scene wherein our protagonista encounters a musical tunnel in the countryside. [LATER] Actually, I also very much enjoyed the extended weirdness of the multiple birth sequence at the end, just can’t stand the final product of all that… emergence.

Anything else in the theater? Oh yeah, The Northman (2022). Very enjoyable. Big Screen emanations from both Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy. There’s a kind of lust you feel for a movie star who’s putting out certain charismatic emanations, not sexual but existential, as if they could inhabit your body, or vice versa. Whereas Nicole Kidman just looks bizarre, I was kind of shocked; she’s not aging gracefully, shall we say. (I haven’t seen her in years, maybe it’s simply the contrast with my memories from the 90s. She used to emanate strongly to me, not so much in this one!) The story is apparently the original version of Hamlet, without all the self-doubt and PSYCHOLOGY ’n shit. Just single-minded bloody revenge. To be or not to be? Pshaw! More like, do you feel lucky, punk? And then you climb Yggdrasil to Valhalla, it’s all good. Robert Eggers has had a good run, three movies so far, all terrific, the others being The Witch and The Lighthouse. Logan enjoyed those, I’m sure he would have loved this. He wasn’t much for arthouse fare, but if it contained the entertaining elements, he was game. Entertainment’s entertainment, after all. (Fun fact: the cowriter of this movie (I discovered when it came up in the credits) is Sjon, a fella from Iceland whose novel From the Mouth of the Whale I excerpted in Gone Lawn several lifetimes ago, back when I was a little more, hmm, “active,” you might phrase it, in the literary scene.)

They have a bunch of French New Wave films up on Criterion right now. Seems like a good opportunity to catch some films I’m ashamed to say I haven’t seen. Last night, for example, I watched Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962). Punched me right in the gut. For one thing, Anna Karina in this role reminded me of Laurie in so many ways, it was unnerving. I hadn’t noticed that in other movies of hers that I’ve seen, so I’ll have to pay attention next time! There are some incredible scenes in this film. Karina’s character is an aimless girl who vaguely wants to be an actress but falls into prostitution instead. Works for a pimp who’s playing pinball when they first meet, and guess what, she essentially becomes his pinball for the rest of the movie, careening from john to john, her trajectory pretty much predetermined by some kind of social / moral physics. At the moment when she attempts to direct her own fate (leave the pimp), she’s rubbed out like a pencil mark. She might as well have never lived. And yet, the scenes! If she hadn’t lived, we wouldn’t have these incredible scenes from her life! Par example, she watches Dreyer’s Joan of Arc in a movie theater, and Godard simply cuts her into the scene, as if she were Joan! Or at least, with Joan. The part where they tell her she’s going to burn at the stake… you see Joan’s tears, then Karina’s tears! If there’d been a camera, you’d have seen my tears, too! And there’s a scene later that is so Laurie-like. The pimp takes her into some dive where he confers with a, uh, business colleague, and she wanders around, out of place, ignored, but wanting to be seen, plays the jukebox, improvises a dance, makes herself the center of attention, attends to the attention she’s receiving, swells into significance by proxy of being seen, yet there’s nothing inside, she’s all surface and triumphant for it. She’s a character with a void inside that she calls freedom, that she uses to justify herself—her decisions or lack of them—but she’s yearning for meaning… martyrdom maybe, like Joan? Impulses and emotions flit in and out of her expressions, across the icy shimmer of her eyeballs, her bodily movements instinctual and feline. This is the first Godard I’ve seen that grabbed me so completely. I liked Breathless well enough, I guess, but other than that one, I had never been able to connect much to a Godard. This one, however, just shattered me. My understanding is: Godard varies wildly, so it could be this will be the only one that floors me like this, but at least it’s possible now. And maybe I just need to revisit the other Godards I’ve seen. It’s been years. Could be I wasn’t ready, and now I am? I really grokked the weird edits and off-kilter timing of the music, for example. The camera was simply looking around the way a person would, indeed the way Karina herself would. And the music jumps in and out the way your attention does. You’re lost in thought and the sounds of the world fade, and some other soundtrack replaces them, but then you snap back and the music falls off, the world returns, you’re back in it, you don’t even know why….

I had some others in mind, but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe another night, if the moxy moves me.