Sunday, August 19, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Parting Thoughts
To begin with, I would like to send thanks out to everyone who voted. Obviously, this couldn’t have happened without all of you.
Jason Alley
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Donald G. Carder
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Steven Erickson
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Sam Juliano
Craig Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Scott von Doviak
Isaac Weeks
Bryce Wilson
And here are the results of this year's Hall of Fame voting:
2018 Muriels Hall of Fame Inductees
Play Time (1967, Jacques Tati, France) [50th Anniversary Award winner]
What’s Opera, Doc? (1957, Charles M. Jones, USA) [14 votes] {appeared on short films ballot}
A Trip to the Moon (1902, Georges Méliès, France) [13 votes] {appeared on short films ballot}
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming, USA) [12 votes]
Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur, USA) [11 votes]
Freaks (1932, Tod Browning, USA) [11 votes]
Scorpio Rising (1964, Kenneth Anger, USA) [11 votes] {appeared on short films ballot}
Wavelength (1967, Michael Snow, Canada) [10 votes] {appeared on short films ballot} {first year of eligibility}
Night and Fog (1956, Alain Resnais, France) [9 votes]
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler, USA) [8 votes]
Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio De Sica, Italy) [8 votes]
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks, USA) [8 votes]
Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir, France) [8 votes]
King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, USA) [8 votes]
Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau, Germany) [8 votes]
Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur, USA) [8 votes]
Point Blank (1967, John Boorman, USA) [8 votes] {first year of eligibility}
7 votes
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray, USA)
The Red Balloon (1956, Albert Lamorisse, France) {appeared on short films ballot}
Le Samouraï (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville, France) {first year of eligibility}
6 votes
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA)
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra, USA)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson, France)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder, USA)
5 votes
The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder, USA)
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju, France)
Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, USA)
The House Is Black (1963, Furough Farrokhzad, Iran) {appeared on short films ballot}
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst, Germany)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Robert Mulligan, USA)
4 votes
Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder, USA)
Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein, USSR)
Bigger Than Life (1956, Nicholas Ray, USA)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn, USA) {first year of eligibility}
Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné, France)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles, Spain)
The Crowd (1928, King Vidor, USA)
The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise, USA)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais, France)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk, USA)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick, USA)
Kwaidan (1964, Masaki Kobayashi, Japan)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli, USA)
Napoléon (1927, Abel Gance, France)
Seven Up! (1964, Paul Almond, UK) {appeared on short films ballot}
Stagecoach (1939, John Ford, USA)
The Thin Man (1934, W.S. van Dyke, USA)
The Train (1964, John Frankenheimer, USA)
Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966, Mike Nichols, USA)
3 votes
All My Life (1966, Bruce Baillie, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
Beauty and the Beast (1946, Jean Cocteau, France)
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel, France) {first year of eligibility}
The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor, USA)
Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks, USA)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith, USA)
A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan, USA)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy, USA)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin, USA)
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922, Benjamin Christensen, Denmark)
Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel, Spain) {appeared on short films ballot}
The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti, Italy)
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey, USA)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford, USA)
Mothlight (1963, Stan Brakhage, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor, USA)
Unsere Afrikareise (1966, Peter Kubelka, Austria) {appeared on short films ballot}
Week End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard, France) {first year of eligibility}
2 votes
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor, India)
Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard, France)
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR)
Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger, USA)
Fantasia (1940, various directors, USA)
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914, Winsor McCay, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
Gertrud (1964, Carl Th. Dreyer, Denmark)
Jules et Jim (1962, François Truffaut, France)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff, France)
One Week (1920, Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
Orpheus (1950, Jean Cocteau, France)
The Pawnbroker (1964, Sidney Lumet, USA)
Red Desert (1964, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
The Steel Helmet (1951, Sam Fuller, USA)
Sullivan’s Travels (1942, Preston Sturges, USA)
Suspense (1913, Lois Weber, USA) {appeared on short films ballot}
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage, USA)
1 vote
L’Âge d’Or (1930, Luis Buñuel, France)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Robert Wise, USA)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Simon of the Desert (1965, Luis Buñuel, Mexico)
Very Nice, Very Nice (1961, Arthur Lipsett, Canada) {appeared on short films ballot}
See you this winter for the 2018 Muriel Awards!
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: What's Opera, Doc? (1957, Chuck Jones)
"Warner Bros. animation director Charles M. ‘Chuck’ Jones was known for his love of the snootier aspects of culture, specifically opera and ballet. He also craved far more lowbrow material like comic wordplay, violent slapstick and parody, characteristics for which the Termite Terrace brand of shorts were notorious. Jones’ 1957 Merrie Melodies feature What’s Opera, Doc? is the quintessential synthesis of these seemingly disparate elements, a take on Richard Wagner that is simultaneously a parody and a working example of what it mocks. Under all the jokes, there’s an earnest respect for opera and dance; Jones and his animators were serious enough to ensure the physical accuracy of the ballet moves of his characters, despite the fact that they are a rabbit in Bavarian drag and a lovestruck bald man armed with a spear and magic helmet."
~ Odie Henderson
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: a final salute to all of our participants, and this year’s complete results.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: King Kong (1933, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper)
“Like many great films, King Kong is bottomless. It repays multiple viewings across a long lifetime. I first saw King Kong when I was nine years old on a Saturday afternoon when one of the television stations was showing a bunch of monster movies. I’m (mumble mumble) years old now, and when I watched it for this essay, it was just as fresh and compelling as it was when I was a kid. Maybe more so. So many films lose their magic when we age, but Kong remains evergreen."
~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: sing along with our final inductee of 2018, the top vote-getter in this year’s Hall of Fame polling.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: A Trip to the Moon (1902, Georges Méliès)
"Perhaps the most potent magic of A Trip to the Moon, certainly its greatest legacy for modern viewers, may be how effortlessly it transports the receptive audience back to a state where everything about the medium of motion pictures was new, marvelous, frightening, too much to process rationally. It leaves us in a mode of receptivity to the gorgeous, lunatic whims of its creator, to the true imaginative magic of seeing and believing, that should be the envy of anyone who, after having seen it, decides to try and tell a story on film."
~ Dennis Cozzalio
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: a beastly favorite that’s a real wonder.
Friday, August 17, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur)
"Cat People wasn’t the first or last film to draw terror from a city street by night, but it does stand alone as a dense psychosexual tragedy. DeWitt Bodeen’s screenplay is a braid of digressions and sinister motifs. Through Jacques Tourneur’s direction, it became a masterpiece of desolate beauty.”
~ Alice Stoehr
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: we take a trip in the Wayback Machine to salute our oldest inducted film yet.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau)
“Among the most celebrated effects of The German Expressionist Movement was that of bringing to external life an interior subjective headspace. The nightmare, the hallucination, the vision of the madman. Nosferatu achieves something altogether more difficult and more insidious, that of the interior nightmare spilling over and breaching into the orderly rational world. Breaching the walls of reality and poisoning what it finds there."
~ Bryce Wilson
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: we honor our second inductee from this year’s only double-dipping director.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Night and Fog (1956, Alain Resnais)
"Resnais leaves the viewer with many questions, but he unflinchingly conveys the fundamental contradiction in the normalized conceptions of the Holocaust that persist to this day: it was (and is) at once unimaginable and inevitable.”
~ Ryan Swen
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: a movie that has appeared on all Muriels HOF ballots to date finally graduates to full Hall of Fame status.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio de Sica)
"De Sica's film combines a ruthless critique of post-war Italian society with the warm sentimentality of Chaplin or Capra. In this lies the key to the film's greatness, that De Sica and his collaborators found a way to walk the line between alienation and saccharine simplicity."
~ Jeff McMahon
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: The latest of our short film inductees this year is pretty harrowing stuff.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)
"When I think of what we mean by the phrase 'film noir,' chances are THIS is the film I'm thinking about. It’s got everything encompassed by 'noir:' deep and telling shadows, an inescapable past leading to a bitter doom, and the most fatal of femmes fatale. Robert Mitchum’ Jeff Bailey is the very model of a morally compromised noir hero, one who is tangled in the web of a criminal past, one whose easy morals lead him into a downward spiral. The film builds him out of shadows and into shadows he is consigned."
~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: a world cinema favorite that’s guaranteed to do a number on your tear ducts.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)
“The central mystery is messy, for sure (just ask Schrodinger’s chauffeur), with a lot of the original text’s more lurid and exciting details excised. But it’s okay, the film itself says to the viewer, what Will Hays doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and so we make a deal with the film, and it creates its own way of speaking the unspeakable."
~ Jason Shawhan
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: two of Hollywood’s most iconic cool guys face off in a smokin’ classic.
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)
“The Best Years of Our Lives is a film about a war, a war that changed the character and direction of an entire nation, told from the perspective of those that lived through it. Three men, each damaged in some way by the experience, and the women who waited, ‘steadfast and true,’ for their return. In somewhat of a departure from most war movies of its time, this one spends its time examining not the conflict itself, what comes after, once the blood has cooled and the body politic returns to a state of equanimity and peace."
~ Donald G. Carder
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: if you can puzzle out the plot of our next inductee, you’re a better man than I.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir)
“Based on the experiences of a flyer he knew during the war, Renoir’s La Grande Illusion is unquestionably one of the masterpieces of the silver screen, a film of incredible humanity set during a period of great inhumanity. In short, it’s probably the greatest anti-war film ever made (for me a flat footed tie in that regard with Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front), a film that cannot help but move people every time they see it."
~ Sam Juliano
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: believe it or not, our next inductee will be the first Best Picture Oscar-winner we’ve inducted since our inaugural year. However, it may not be the film you’re guessing…
Monday, August 13, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Point Blank (1967, John Boorman)
“Start watching Point Blank at any point in the movie and you'll immediately be able to tell that it was made in the latter half of the sixties... at the same time, a good fifty years on, the film feels startlingly modern. The past bleeds into the present, just as sound from one scene will bleed into another. Words are repeated, or sometimes omitted altogether; images are refracted."
~ Hedwig van Driel
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: A humanist classic from one of cinema’s true masters.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Wavelength (1967, Michael Snow)
"Films like this ask us to practice our gaze, literally, to get used to looking at the world, aware of every second going by. This is a lot to ask of human beings and so avant-garde cinema scares people. Meaning hides from plain sight, time ticks away, and we're watching something that doesn't resemble other films but instead resembles us. Breathing, blinking, organically functioning, going nowhere in a hurry, and getting there with only the accumulation of time arming us against the inevitable disappointment of returning to reality."
~ Scout Tafoya
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: the Muriels HOF honors a badass classic as laser-focused as its hero.
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Scorpio Rising (1963, Kenneth Anger)
Note: in a change from previous years, there was a separate category on this year's ballot for short films. This will be the first of several short films we've inducted this year.
"Anger captures the solitary pleasures of assembling a persona, focusing on the reverie of the ritual. With Scorpio Rising, Anger once again begins by again fetishizing vanity... The camera watches as they assemble their custom bikes, chrome additions glistening in Anger’s loving light."
~ Kevin Cecil
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: we pay tribute to a true masterpiece of its kind, and a fundamental building block of a broad-based cinematic education.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Freaks (1932, Tod Browning)
“The film implicitly offers the uneasy exploitative thrills of a traveling freak show from its cast of known attractions, to its title and its sensational carnival barker opening moments which literally busts through the screen at you. But once it gets going, its perspective on its performer characters shows that exploitation is certainly not the first thing Browning had in mind. Browning, who ran away to work in the circus at 16, first and foremost sees the ‘freaks’ as people."
~ Patrick J. Miller
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: we honor our first short film of the year, a rockin’ tribute to bad boys and their toys.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)
“It’s impossible to imagine today: a studio greenlights a big-budget fantasy adapted from a popular series of books... Multiple directors come and go on the project, and one of the lead actors is replaced after filming has begun after the demands of the production literally make him sick... The production goes over budget and schedule, goes through reshoots and, after test screenings, is substantially recut. When it’s released, it gets generally warm reviews but fails to turn a profit. A couple of decades later, it’s one of the most iconic movies of all time."
~ Andrew Bemis
Coming tomorrow at 7:00 PM: one of the great outliers of 1930s Hollywood gets the Hall of Fame treatment.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2018: Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati)
Welcome one and all to our annual Muriels Hall of Fame inductions. We started these festivities as a way for our loyal Muriels voters to remain active in the summertime (if they so desired), while honoring the great films of the past. And now, after six years, I think we've amassed a fairly good canon of movies, if I do say so myself!
Anyway, we'll begin in our usual fashion, by inducting the most recent winner of the 50th Anniversary Muriel Award. Check back at 7 PM and 9 PM every night for the next week or so for our latest honorees!
“In the category of ‘super-expensive personal visions that basically ruined a director's career,’ Play Time is hard to beat, leading Tati into debt for the rest of his life. And yet, what a glorious folly, a quiet, delicate symphony about the absurdity of everyday urban life that rewards patient observance and attention to tiny details, from the smirk of a waiter to the buzz of a neon light.”
~ Jeff McMahon
Coming tonight at 9:00 PM: one of the most beloved movies in Hollywood history finally gets some Muriels Hall of Fame attention.
Monday, February 26, 2018
2017 Muriel Awards: The Winners' Circle!
For those who may have missed some of this year's Muriels announcements, here are the winners.
Best Film - top 10:
1. Phantom Thread - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
2. Lady Bird - dir. Greta Gerwig
3. Get Out - dir. Jordan Peele
4. Nocturama - dir. Bertrand Bonello
5. Personal Shopper - dir. Olivier Assayas
6. The Florida Project - dir. Sean Baker
7. A Ghost Story - dir. David Lowery
8. Call Me By Your Name - dir. Luca Guadagnino
9. Good Time - dir. Josh and Benny Safdie
10. Dunkirk - dir. Christopher Nolan
Best Lead Performance - top 5:
1. Daniel Day-Lewis - Phantom Thread
2. Saoirse Ronan - Lady Bird
3. Vicky Krieps - Phantom Thread
4. Daniel Kaluuya - Get Out
5. Cynthia Nixon - A Quiet Passion
Best Supporting Performance - top 5:
1. Laurie Metcalf - Lady Bird
2. Lesley Manville - Phantom Thread
3. Willem Dafoe - The Florida Project
4. Tiffany Haddish - Girls Trip
5. Michael Stuhlbarg - Call Me By Your Name
Best Direction: Paul Thomas Anderson - Phantom Thread
Best Cinematic Moment: Stairwell fight - Atomic Blonde
Best Documentary: Faces Places
Best Screenplay: Get Out
Best Ensemble Performance: Lady Bird
Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049 (Roger Deakins)
Best Music: Phantom Thread (Jonny Greenwood)
Best Editing: Dunkirk (Lee Smith)
Best Cinematic Breakthrough: Jordan Peele - Get Out
Best Body of Work: Michael Stuhlbarg (actor - Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, The Post)
Best Youth Performance: Brooklynn Prince - The Florida Project
10th Anniversary Award: Zodiac - dir. David Fincher
25th Anniversary Award: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - dir. David Lynch
50th Anniversary Award: Play Time - dir. Jacques Tati
The Muriels web site has been updated to include this year's results. Thanks again to everyone who's been following this year's Muriels! See you this summer for Hall of Fame announcements!
Best Film - top 10:
1. Phantom Thread - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
2. Lady Bird - dir. Greta Gerwig
3. Get Out - dir. Jordan Peele
4. Nocturama - dir. Bertrand Bonello
5. Personal Shopper - dir. Olivier Assayas
6. The Florida Project - dir. Sean Baker
7. A Ghost Story - dir. David Lowery
8. Call Me By Your Name - dir. Luca Guadagnino
9. Good Time - dir. Josh and Benny Safdie
10. Dunkirk - dir. Christopher Nolan
Best Lead Performance - top 5:
1. Daniel Day-Lewis - Phantom Thread
2. Saoirse Ronan - Lady Bird
3. Vicky Krieps - Phantom Thread
4. Daniel Kaluuya - Get Out
5. Cynthia Nixon - A Quiet Passion
Best Supporting Performance - top 5:
1. Laurie Metcalf - Lady Bird
2. Lesley Manville - Phantom Thread
3. Willem Dafoe - The Florida Project
4. Tiffany Haddish - Girls Trip
5. Michael Stuhlbarg - Call Me By Your Name
Best Direction: Paul Thomas Anderson - Phantom Thread
Best Cinematic Moment: Stairwell fight - Atomic Blonde
Best Documentary: Faces Places
Best Screenplay: Get Out
Best Ensemble Performance: Lady Bird
Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049 (Roger Deakins)
Best Music: Phantom Thread (Jonny Greenwood)
Best Editing: Dunkirk (Lee Smith)
Best Cinematic Breakthrough: Jordan Peele - Get Out
Best Body of Work: Michael Stuhlbarg (actor - Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, The Post)
Best Youth Performance: Brooklynn Prince - The Florida Project
10th Anniversary Award: Zodiac - dir. David Fincher
25th Anniversary Award: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - dir. David Lynch
50th Anniversary Award: Play Time - dir. Jacques Tati
The Muriels web site has been updated to include this year's results. Thanks again to everyone who's been following this year's Muriels! See you this summer for Hall of Fame announcements!
Sunday, February 25, 2018
And the 2017 Golden Muriel Award for Best Film goes to...
Phantom Thread [340 points / 28 votes]
"Before Phantom Thread was released, a friend of mine commented that, though she usually looked forward to Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, she'd be skipping this one. She had no interest in, as she put it, another movie about a brilliant, tortured artist who is abusive to his loyal muse. I could see how she could get that impression from the film’s trailer, but the brilliance and pleasure of Anderson’s film is how he subverts that expectation at every turn. While designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) fits the 'tortured artist' mold in many ways, with his uncompromising manner and meticulous attention to detail, Anderson is less interested in celebrating him than in puncturing his obsessive routine with the arrival of Alma (Vicky Krieps), his new would-be muse. Though Alma is in awe of her lover’s work, her refusal to fulfill the role of a passive and ultimately disposable clotheshorse upends Reynolds’s hermetically sealed existence, ultimately rendering Phantom Thread as a portrait of the artist as a petulant, fragile boy. One of the movie’s driest running jokes is that it’s not even clear Woodcock’s dresses are any good, or if it matters.
"And this is a movie with many jokes – one thing that seems to have been partly lost in discussions of Phantom Thread is that it’s a comedy. Anderson is often compared to Kubrick, and Phantom Thread’s severe, rigorous visual style invites the comparison (not to mention its visual references to A Clockwork Orange), but Anderson also shares Kubrick’s adolescent sense of humor. Besides naming his main character 'Reynolds Woodcock' after Day-Lewis texted the name to him as a joke, Anderson has fashioned what is, on the surface, a highbrow British period piece around a bluntly scatological metaphor for relationships. Whether one considers the games Alma, Reynolds and his sister/manager/life partner Cyril (Lesley Manville) play in the film’s second half abuse, co-dependence, kink or an exaggeration of the routines all couples create for themselves (or all of these at once), this is a tasteful, visually sumptuous movie in which vomit and diarrhea are signifiers of emotional attachment. The bodily fluids are kept offscreen, as are Reynolds and Alma’s sex life; food is substituted for onscreen coupling, with a series of increasingly fraught meals charting their relationship through infatuation, lust, malaise, commitment, more malaise and, ultimately, bliss. In fashioning his own Rebecca, Anderson has taken the repressed tensions of gothic romance to their logical, sadomasochistic end. It’s a deeply perverse film, and yet I wouldn’t trust any couple who claims they can’t relate to it on some level." ~ Andrew Bemis
"Before Phantom Thread was released, a friend of mine commented that, though she usually looked forward to Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, she'd be skipping this one. She had no interest in, as she put it, another movie about a brilliant, tortured artist who is abusive to his loyal muse. I could see how she could get that impression from the film’s trailer, but the brilliance and pleasure of Anderson’s film is how he subverts that expectation at every turn. While designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) fits the 'tortured artist' mold in many ways, with his uncompromising manner and meticulous attention to detail, Anderson is less interested in celebrating him than in puncturing his obsessive routine with the arrival of Alma (Vicky Krieps), his new would-be muse. Though Alma is in awe of her lover’s work, her refusal to fulfill the role of a passive and ultimately disposable clotheshorse upends Reynolds’s hermetically sealed existence, ultimately rendering Phantom Thread as a portrait of the artist as a petulant, fragile boy. One of the movie’s driest running jokes is that it’s not even clear Woodcock’s dresses are any good, or if it matters.
"And this is a movie with many jokes – one thing that seems to have been partly lost in discussions of Phantom Thread is that it’s a comedy. Anderson is often compared to Kubrick, and Phantom Thread’s severe, rigorous visual style invites the comparison (not to mention its visual references to A Clockwork Orange), but Anderson also shares Kubrick’s adolescent sense of humor. Besides naming his main character 'Reynolds Woodcock' after Day-Lewis texted the name to him as a joke, Anderson has fashioned what is, on the surface, a highbrow British period piece around a bluntly scatological metaphor for relationships. Whether one considers the games Alma, Reynolds and his sister/manager/life partner Cyril (Lesley Manville) play in the film’s second half abuse, co-dependence, kink or an exaggeration of the routines all couples create for themselves (or all of these at once), this is a tasteful, visually sumptuous movie in which vomit and diarrhea are signifiers of emotional attachment. The bodily fluids are kept offscreen, as are Reynolds and Alma’s sex life; food is substituted for onscreen coupling, with a series of increasingly fraught meals charting their relationship through infatuation, lust, malaise, commitment, more malaise and, ultimately, bliss. In fashioning his own Rebecca, Anderson has taken the repressed tensions of gothic romance to their logical, sadomasochistic end. It’s a deeply perverse film, and yet I wouldn’t trust any couple who claims they can’t relate to it on some level." ~ Andrew Bemis
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 2nd Place
Lady Bird [268 points / 26 votes]
“Coming-of-age stories are a dime a dozen. So many are released on a yearly basis that it’s surprising that the words ‘coming-of-age story’ still manage to get people’s attention, no doubt because of the universality of the best of them. I’m one of those people. Many of my favorite films could at least be loosely described that way. Writer/director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is the best one I’ve seen in years, top of the heap just above the other best coming-of-age films of recent years (including The Spectacular Now, The Edge of Seventeen, and this year’s Call Me by Your Name).
“So what makes it so special? Admittedly, one of the main reasons I connect to it so strongly is where I live. A major theme in the film is that it’s set in Sacramento, CA, a not-quite-but-almost-big city I’ve called my home for nearly two decades. One character in the film describes the city as the ‘Midwest of California.’ That’s very true in a lot of ways - though let me tell you, there are areas of California that are way more rural and conservative than this. As a Sacramento native, Gerwig captures the feel of the city better than I could have even hoped, both its specialness and its ordinariness. Numerous locations in the film are familiar and beloved places to me, some within walking distance of where I sit now typing this. The Crest Theatre’s gorgeous marquee is briefly glimpsed, and that’s where I worked and co-managed for a decade and made dozens of friends who will last my lifetime. Not only that, but the Tower Theatre’s marquee is also shown, which is where I was actually watching the movie (that’s a surreal experience but only the second time that’s happened to me, the first being Colin Hanks’s excellent Tower Records documentary All Things Must Pass). The ‘Fabulous 40s,’ so named because it’s the neighborhood consisting of 42nd Street, 43rd Street, etc…, is a wealthy area of town where many cruise by on Christmas Eve because they go all-out with decorations. I got my Halloween costume the year before last at Thrift Town. Gunther’s Ice Cream is a must.
“While Sacramento has its shortcomings and it’s understandable why the teenage Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is not crazy about it being her hometown (most teens are not pleased with their own respective hometowns), anyone who walks away from this film thinking that part of the film’s message is that Sacramento sucks are mistaken. This film radiates love for Sacramento in a way that only the work of a native - and a truly talented filmmaker - could.
“I don’t mean to talk your ear off about my (mostly) beloved hometown, for now and for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, Lady Bird has much more going for it. As compelling as Ronan is as the protagonist, so recognizably human and so very teenage, part of the film’s power comes from its wealth of interesting supporting characters. Laurie Metcalf is so brilliant as her mother, Marion, and the bond between mother and daughter here is so realistic it’s painful and beautiful all at once, but there’s also Tracy Letts as her wry and forlorn father, Lois Smith as a nun with a memorable sense of humor, Lucas Hedges and Timotheé Chalamet as two of her boyfriends that turn out to not be right for very different reasons, the wonderfully named Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, Jordan Rodrigues and Marielle Scott as her goth adopted brother and his girlfriend. Perhaps best of all, though, is the great character actor Stephen Henderson as a priest and drama teacher with a great sadness not far beneath his friendly surface, the source of which we never discover. Henderson packs such a depth of feeling into what couldn’t be more than a few minutes of screen time that it’s honestly breathtaking.
“There are so many things I love about Lady Bird (its setting, its characters, its writing and direction, its salute to both the joys and follies of youth, its recognition of both the best and worst traits in all of its many characters) that I’m not sure how to end this other than to say that I couldn’t be happier that it’s become a surprise hit, and not just in Sacramento - where I believe it will continue playing for quite a long time.” ~ Jason Alley
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 3rd Place
Get Out [245 points / 26 votes]
“What’s left to say about Get Out, at this point? That it’s terribly clever, and rewards repeat viewings? That it’s both funny and genuinely thrilling? That it manages to be an unapologetically black film while not forgetting about non-black audiences? That it’s the first movie that’s distinctly of the Trump age, despite having been made before the election?
“All these things, and more, have been said. Yet they’re still worth repeating, because it’s easy – as some have – to dismiss Get Out as ‘merely’ a competent genre flick with some social messaging. It’s easy to see why some people underestimate it: Jordan Peele makes everything look easy. But that doesn’t mean it was.
“Some stories have come out that show how the movie was finessed, even during filming. An earlier ending was a lot darker, with Chris arrested. The movie’s ultimate resolution is better. When the police car shows up, your first thought isn’t ‘at last!.’ It’s ‘oh shit!’ – even as a white viewer, because the movie skillfully manages to shift your perspective. The fact that Peele had the confidence to know that that ‘oh shit’ was enough, and that the movie would be best served by offering us a release instead of doubling down, shows how sound his instincts are.
“Another story came out recently, about a subtler point. As written, it seems, there was a discussion during which Chris wanted to leave, but Rose convinces him to stay. In the end, the roles were shifted: it’s Rose who is outraged on Chris’ behalf, seemingly just realizing just how racist and insensitive her family members are. She’s the one trying to get Chris to leave… which results in him being the one who argues for staying. After all, his unease is probably just paranoia. White people aren’t actually out to get black people… are they?
“The movie is full of these kinds of choices: Peele may be a first-time director, but his hand is assured. The final result is a deeply satisfying popcorn flick that lingers and reveals its intricacies only gradually. It builds on earlier movies – The Stepford Wives and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner most obviously – but it is, in the end, a fully original movie. A movie that, whether through accidental timing or unconscious prescience, could not have arrived at a better time.” ~ Hedwig van Driel
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 4th Place
Nocturama [139 points / 12 votes]
"The plan: detonate explosives around Paris, then spend the night in hiding. The conspirators’ refuge: a vast department store. The outcome: not in their favor. That’s the whole 130-minute arc of the shocking thriller Nocturama. Those first and last portions unfold with alacrity, their chronologies sliced and diced, footsteps and gunshots puncturing the air. The middle is a waiting game, as the young culprits kill time with clothes and makeup, food and drink, TV news and go-kart rides. They blast songs — 'My Way,' 'Call Me,' 'Whip My Hair' — which act as droll counterpoint to the action. Sinister camera movements follow them through this languorous interlude past the store’s array of mirrors and closed-circuit cameras.
"From start to finish, Bonello draws on the conventions of crime and horror movies. Consequently, his work’s not only experimental but perversely entertaining, too. The widescreen framing, applied to Parisian architecture both indoors and out, insinuates a terror in open, empty spaces. The precise pacing toys with viewer expectations while expanding the grammar of screen violence. These thrills and chills lack any moral or catharsis. They just linger in the stomach, like a razor it’s failed to digest." ~ Alice Stoehr
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 5th Place
Personal Shopper [137 points / 14 votes]
“Stanley Kubrick once famously said that he believed any film about ghosts was, regardless of other content, spiritually optimistic, since it suggested there was existence after death. These remarks were made in relation to his own film, The Shining, which, metaphysically-speaking, is about as far from optimistic as you can get while still hinting that death is not the end. On the other hand, Kubrick wasn’t talking about vampires or zombies, but specifically ghosts, and the ghost story is the one subcategory of horror than can exist completely apart from that genre. There can be funny ghost stories, sad ones, romantic ones, all without even nodding at anything frightening or dangerous. (A zombie story that tried to do something similar would at the very least need to deal with the fact that it deliberately wasn’t doing certain horrific things.)
“Yet rarely does a ghost story come along which attempts to be both of the horror genre and separate from it, but that’s, more or less, what Olivier Assayas is up to with Personal Shopper (which, for the record, I consider a horror film, just to make things confusing). In it, Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a young woman in France with the titular job who works for a massive celebrity (Nora von Waldstätten), who is never around to buy her own outrageously expensive clothes. Maureen is also a medium who, when the film opens, has just suffered the loss of her twin brother Lewis, also a medium. Lewis’s belief in his own powers, and what they said about life and the universe, was a lot stronger than Maureen’s is in hers. However, she’s staying in France, rather than joining her boyfriend on another continent, because she expects Lewis to give her a sign that life, in some form, continues. Or she hopes he will. This was a promise he had made to her. And she does encounter a ghost, but one she doesn’t believe is Lewis, and one that may be malevolent.
“Assayas being who he is, Maureen’s investigation into spirits and spiritualism is done with and depicted through, and communicated to the audience via, various kinds of technology. Early in the film, Maureen is told that she would be interested in Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter and spiritualist whose abstract paintings predated the official beginning of the abstract art movement. To learn about Klint, Maureen watches Youtube videos. This brand of exposition occurs more than once, and I’m not sure how Assayas is able to get away with it, but he does, and there is something inexplicably artful about how he goes about it. It probably doesn’t hurt that this is actually what people do. Anyway, Klint said her strange paintings were inspired by spiritualist photographs of the early 20th century. So the technological advancement of photography led to a new type of modernist art whose roots, at least as far as Klint was concerned, are found in the oldest, most primitive, yet complex, questions about human life. And if you’ve ever seen those old spiritualist photographs that Klint and Assayas are referring to, you’ll remember that they feature people clad in just-barely-post-Victorian garb with great, waxy gouts of ectoplasm pouring from their mouths and noses – if you’re looking for an abstract image to illustrate man’s quest for meaning, you could do worse. Assayas even recreates this when Maureen first sees the ghost.
“At first it resembles, intentionally or not, the ghost effect (itself a small slice of technological modernity, though we needn’t make too much of this) in Lewis Allen’s 1944 light horror film The Uninvited. Then as it seems to be about to attack Maureen, its features solidify into something human, and it vomits ectoplasm. Life in a nutshell. That it might excite Assayas to explore much of these ideas through Maureen’s smart phone should surprise no one. An already, and justly, famous texting sequence about midway through Personal Shopper is one of the most suspenseful and eerie in any film last year.
“But much of Personal Shopper is about grief and loss. There are two ghost stories running alongside each other: the dangerous one that could lead Maureen to her death, and the one about her brother, dead of a heart attack at 27, from whom she just wants one irrefutable sign that he’s still around, talking to her, in his way. The film tells the audience little about Maureen’s life prior to our first sight of her, apart from what we know about her relationship to Lewis, and even though this forms the emotional center of Personal Shopper, we’re not even told much about that. But it makes it possible to wonder about her, and how different she might have been before Lewis died. Now, though her job is ostensibly glamorous (but also ‘stupid’ as one character puts it, a judgment Maureen doesn’t refute), and she’s young, and has more resources than most, she pretty clearly would rather be alone, somewhere quiet. Or barring that, she’d rather be someone else, as she admits. Who, though? Someone who knows more about the universe than she does? Someone whose brother isn’t dead? At times, Maureen shows that she has the same shallow desires as the rest of us, that it’s not all agonized ‘what does it mean??’ brooding, and the crucial texting scene seems almost to be about those desires – this is when her admission that she’d rather be someone else comes out, which itself leads to her secretly trying on her boss’s clothes, something she’s been tempted to do before. This basic unadorned humanity, a kind of subplot here, eventually reaches an endpoint, in a scene that is the film’s most unapologetically of the horror genre.
“Which means what? The very job Maureen is paid to do, the job of personal shopper, is itself a kind of exhausting example of modernity, an abstraction of the act of buying clothes for oneself. Horror is an abstraction of the fact of death, and horror movie deaths, which we get in Personal Shopper, are abstractions of the process of dying. And Olivier Assayas, through layer upon layer upon layer of modernity, technology, and art shows us that after a while, everything, including, or especially, the most vital things, will one day have an abstraction of itself, a doppleganger, a twin with a flawed heart.” ~ Bill Ryan
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 6th Place
The Florida Project [134 points / 13 votes]
“So why didn’t The Florida Project get nominated for Best Picture or Best Director? Willem Dafoe was given a nod for Best Supporting actor for his reserved yet heartfelt performance as the manager of ‘The Magic Castle,’ a dystopian motel down the road from the manufactured utopia that is Disney’s ‘Magic Kingdom,’ but other than that the film was ignored. I would think the film’s indie budget of $2 million might have hindered its chances of an Academy award, pushing it towards the many Independent Spirit nominations the film did garner, but last year’s Best Picture winner Moonlight was reportedly made for less, $1.5 million. Even if budget isn’t the reason the film was overlooked, money still might be at the root of the snub, more specifically the story of money.
“Many critics have pointed out that the unromanticized look at American poverty, especially women in poverty, might be the culprit behind the film’s lack of Oscar nominations. Though Lady Bird deals class difference it hugs much closer to the middle-class; Lady Bird lives in a small house longing for a mansion, while the mother and daughter protagonists of The Florida Project scrape by in a motel, having to change rooms occasionally to appear as though they aren’t permanent residents. Baker recognized the disconnect between Hollywood and reality in his film early on; he knew that casting a starlet worth millions in a film telling the story of a very specific version of need wasn’t going to work sending him to cast in non-traditional ways- through Instagram, inside a Target, at an actual roadside motel called home for many children. Despite Baker’s best efforts, and the resulting darkly honest story, the only Oscar nomination went to the only Hollywood star.
“Moonee (young Brooklynn Prince) sits in the bathtub of her hotel room playing with her toys in an imagined world. Her mother (Bria Vinaite) turns up the music and closes the door trying to shield her daughter from the actions unfolding in the other room, actions she must take to pay her rent. When a strange man enters the bathroom one night, Moonee is faced with confusion, fear and reality. Childlike dreams slowly harden into the American one, a capitalistic narrative that the Academy is more than happy to support and one that the stark realness of The Florida Project turns away from. Baker’s preoccupation with those not so much living on the fringe but those living in vastly overlooked populations- both by Hollywood and beyond- continues to set him apart as a humanistic auteur; an echo of the Italian-Neorealists and a needed change in the overly curated/Photoshopped lives of current image based culture. Hopefully Sean Baker will continue to tell these vital tales and lead others to do so, and hopefully the Academy, as it seems to have done for decades, will lag behind, slowly recognizing that audiences exist outside of its gilded gates, outside of its own focused frame of pretend.” ~ Donna Kozloskie
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 7th Place
“Out of all the movies I saw in 2017, A Ghost Story was hands down the most original. The premise seems simple: a couple live in a small house that the husband is more attached to, but then he dies in a car accident. He comes back as a ghost who watches his wife continue to live her life. Where it goes from there is utterly unpredictable and leads to an ambitious, contemplative, existential film on life and time's impact but ultimate indifference to it.
“The most noticeable aspect of A Ghost Story is writer-director David Lowery's audacity to depict the ghost as someone in a sheet with two holes cut out for the eyes. It's a reference to a very different time - the 19th and early 20th century. Back then, in an allusion to burial shrouds, the bed sheet ghost made for an easy, inexpensive Halloween costume. Today, such a depiction brings an element of absurdity and comedy since the costume has been satirized in everything from Charlie Brown to Scooby Doo to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Regardless that a bed sheet ghost has never looked more elegant than here, Lowery playing it perfectly straight creates a Brechtian dissonance through the audience always being aware of the deliberate artifice. Brecht wanted to avoid too much emotional identification with his characters to allow for conscious critical evaluation for the viewer. Such identifying with the character is further debilitated by watching a ghost with no facial features here. That one can't help but feel for the ghost anyway is a testament to the power of Lowery's filmmaking.
“Lowery also chooses to shoot in a square 1:1 ratio with curved corners. That's a reference to an earlier, more quaint period of photography, further calling attention to a story set in the present seen through the lens of the past. And so is time a central theme of this story. The immense expanse of time covered might seem to lessen the meaning our ghost is seeking when it foregoes the chance to leave this plane of existence. What is one person's attachment to another or to a house in all of that forgotten memory? (Note that the main characters all go nameless.) Or perhaps the flood of time actually makes that struggle for meaning all the more powerful for what it's struggling against, the vastness of eternity. A Ghost Story is not a horror movie and it's never really scary, but its power is still haunting.” ~ George Wu
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 8th Place
Call Me By Your Name [112 points / 12 votes]
“Film is an audio-visual medium. In principle, it offers only sound and images, engaging our ears and our eyes.
“Apparently nobody told Luca Guadagnino this.
“More than any other director working today, he consistently engages all the senses. In Call Me By Your Name, you can feel the sun on your skin. You can taste that peach. You can smell the teenage hormones.
“If there’s one quibble I have with the film, it’s that it seems to agree a little too much with the wonderful speech given by Michael Stuhlbarg in the end. His wistful monologue frames the affair between Elio and Oliver as the ultimate romance, profound and rare. It’s true that most of us – alas – could only dream of such a perfect, bold, bittersweet affair when we were teens. It’s also true that the romance is about more than just teenage lust, and maybe even about more than infatuation.
“Still. It’s not not about teenage lust, and the silly things it makes us do. It’s not not about the fact that Oliver, faced with a perfect soft-boiled egg, confesses that once he indulges in something he finds it impossible not to over-indulge. And in Luca Guadagnino’s sensual cinema, affairs of the mind are incomprehensible: love is impossible to separate from the act of love. It includes tearfully staring into a fire, but it’s also messy bodily fluids and unbearable embarrassment and the smell of your crush’s underpants and the illicit thrill of wearing their shirt. It’s also the delicious, unbearably ache of their absence.
“Call Me By Your Name is undeniably sweeter than the first two films in Guadagnino thematic trilogy about desire, Io sono l’amore and A Bigger Splash. In those films love was more mature, uglier. More violent, too. But the strength of Call Me By Your Name is that it never becomes too saccharine. Oh, it will make you long for long lazy summers in Italy – the cinematography is lush, the landscapes and towns are gorgeous, and the food looks simply amazing. And it will make you look back nostalgically to the silly things you did as a teen. But I doubt many viewers will truly want to be teens again, because the film is clear eyed about the fact that this intensity of feeling has drawbacks too.
“Thus, we end the film with that shot of Elio, crying into the hearth. Summer’s over. But as the memory of his affair with Oliver will stay with Elio, the sensations of this film stay with us.” ~ Hedwig van Driel
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 9th Place
Good Time [112 points / 11 votes]
"So often the default metaphor for big budget Hollywood action/adventure cinema has been a rollercoaster. And if you’re speaking in terms of visceral sensation, that’s fair.
"But what metaphor does that leave for the Safdies’ Good Time, as jarring and kinetic an experience as one could have on a dozen emotional Tilt-A-Whirls? That live-wire menace is the foundation that the film is built on, but there’s no way of knowing where things are going to go. No matter how many times you watch it, Connie’s frazzled charm and increasingly more uncertain certainty leaves a viewer tangled up in knots.
"That the proceedings end up in an actual amusement park seems perfectly natural, whether through internal, speedy nightmare logic or just a case of game recognizing game. But even with that flourish, the knife turns and things escalate further as we witness what is simply one of the cruelest things ever done to a bystander character, as Barkhad Abdi’s night watchman character gets dosed with enough hallucinogens to know that he’s never going to be all right again.
"That isn’t meant as moralizing- merely an observation that there is no logical way for anyone to think of Connie as a positive influence on any situation. He’s loyal, but he’s got that destructive stealth macho bullshit in the driver’s seat for so long that he can’t help but be destructive to everyone around him. Two moments in the film help puncture his seal, and they provide the notes of transcendence that make the shifts and sinking turns bearable, even without the necessary antacid/benzo combo that the film’s emotional itinerary demands- the final shot, of course, and the moment in the bail bonds place where Connie has to backburner himself while Jennifer Jason Leigh tends to business.
"To scream 'I’m trying to be a helpful person' and mean it. That’s Good Time in a glorious, gripping nutshell." ~ Jason Shawhan
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 10th Place
“The latest film by Christopher Nolan is a new way in which the director expands visual and genre horizons that he has explored before, this time in the realms of war cinema. A difficult genre, it’s always dangerous to speak about it, especially when it comes to its moral and representation issues. What does the war genre want? What does a filmmaker want from it? François Truffaut opened fire saying that there’s no such thing as pacifist cinema, which was expanded upon by Spielberg many years later by saying that there’s no such thing as a war film that isn’t pro-war. So, let’s get away from those big names and those issues and let’s get this straight: I usually don’t like war films. Now, there are some films among them that I hold dear, and Dunkirk has turned into one of them. But why?
“Nolan’s film is ambitious, telling the story of the escape from the battle of Dunkirk, where more than 300,000 British soldiers were evacuated from the shore of the French city after a catastrophic defeat by the Germans. Nolan divides his approach into three different space/time segments, which are edited together and in parallel: the shore of Dunkirk (showing events that last a week), the English Channel (during one day) and the airspace above (an hour). For this reason, it’s one of the most experimental pieces of mass media in terms of editing and misé-en-scene in a long time. Even though Nolan takes his time to introduce every one of the three aspects of the film, the editing between them provokes the sensation that you are seeing every corner possible to the conflict. At the same time it’s not a totalizing film or one that aims for a complete experience of what that battle in particular was like, but it only tries to get across one idea: war is an uphill battle not between two forces, but internally, against the loss of humanity that war causes.
“Dunkirk happened at a time during the War in which any outcome seemed possible: Russia was still swamped by its non-aggression pact with Hitler and the Americans hadn’t yet entered the fray. The evacuation of France was the final stage of a lost battle. One might call it a ‘moral victory’, but the film constantly undermines that concept by showing that there’s nothing moral to be seen. As each of the British and French soldiers (not one German soldier shows up until the very end) do what’s possible to survive, they’re capable of anything: betrayal, clamoring in the dirt, trampling over others, and other acts that could be construed as cowardice. Nolan’s film is not the glorification of a triumph - there’s no triumph here - but it isn’t one that condemns the soldiers for their actions either, but it understands them for what they are: humans in the worst possible circumstances.
“It makes sense that in the weeks prior to the world premiere of the film Nolan would list films and directors that inspired him visually and thematically, he specifically praised the works of Robert Bresson. I don’t want to suggest that Nolan is the sole heir and successor of one of the greatest directors of all time, but each one of the segments that he puts together applies or gives an idea of Bresson’s cinema, as if Nolan had made this film as a sort of dissertation on how the legacy of that master is all but dead.
“For example, the segment in the shores of Dunkirk, where we see thousands of soldiers waiting, hiding when the bombs come, anonymous… here the used of mostly unknown actors as the soldiers suggests Bresson’s casting process, as the master mostly used people he found in the streets, generally similar to the role they were going to play. Now, clearly Nolan couldn’t cast actual WWII soldiers, but most of these performers are unknown (the exception being Harry Styles, though Nolan didn’t know who he was until he was already cast). These actors follow simple acting directions, mostly reacting to things happening around them - hiding when a plane buzzes over, rushing forward when a boat appears, protecting themselves when attacked - much like the ‘models’ of Bresson. This straightforward style makes them believable and relatable to the audience in their simple and sensible approach to what they should do, and you feel almost entrenched alongside them.
“Completely moving away from anonymity and possible distance, we go to another Bressonian aspect that is manifested in the scenes that take place on a boat on the ocean. A father sails in a small craft from London into Dunkirk with his son and a humble kid from town who volunteers to help. All of this is part of a general call from the the British military, which commandeers every ship possible to go in the search of stranded soldiers. Mark Rylance plays the father, delivering a performance that could be identified with an almost Christian piety, similar to the one that Bresson felt or wanted his characters to feel. This old sailor wants to save as many as he can not necessarily for a patriotic conviction (although there is some of that), but a more personal one: his firstborn died in the first weeks of war, and he desperately wants that no one else follows on that similar path. Much like other characters in Bresson films, from the animals to Mouchette, the character played by Rylance is confronted with signs that what he’s doing makes no sense, that evil and death is what surrounds him. Still, he stoically presses on, faithful to his convictions, never mind the risk, even if a shell-shocked man pleads him not to go to Dunkirk, because there’s nothing left to be done there.
“Finally, the sequence on air, in which three airplane fighters (led by Tom Hardy) do a routine maneuver of defense for an hour to assist those stationed in Dunkirk by protecting them from assaults by German bombers. Here Nolan’s debt to Bresson is seen in the construction of shots, editing and direction similar to those in his later films. Feet, heads and objects are the actions that give deep sense to the story. We’re mostly confined to the small cabin of Tom Hardy’s airplane, feeling how every second counts, how he writes with a piece of chalk the amount of fuel that’s left after every detour he makes on the way for his main objective. These scenes generate suspense through their immediacy, which carries over to the other storylines through the editing, even though these other scenes have more (non-diegetic) time to develop their events.
“Is this Nolan’s masterpiece? Hard to say. Like much of his work, Dunkirk has been divisive. But watching the film, one gets the feeling that Nolan is less interested in surpassing Bresson than in paying him homage. In addition to making one of the best war movies of recent years, he’s also made one of the best analytical exercises on cinematic language, not only spending hundreds of millions of dollars in studio money to do so, but also winning them back and then some. In an age when many blockbusters are timid, Nolan’s bravery is encouraging.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Addendum (The Elephant in the Room)
“It’s not a movie. Congratulations! We concede the point. Twin Peaks (subtitled The Return by Showtime but not on its subsequent video release) aired in weekly installments over the summer of 2017 just like I’m Dying Up Here, which no one in their right mind is claiming for cinema. Having established that, however, a few things need to be noted for the record. The director of all 18 hours of Twin Peaks, David Lynch, referred to the project as ‘a feature film in parts’—and while it’s true that every ambitious and/or pretentious showrunner under the sun has claimed the same, well, none of those people are David fucking Lynch. Per co-writer Mark Frost, the script was a document the size of a Manhattan phone book and encompassing the entire story, undivided into episodes. The production was shot on a feature-film schedule, with Lynch adding more material on the fly as his muse dictated. So maybe we can put it this way without causing too much controversy: Twin Peaks is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, delivered in the form of a television series.
“The strict guidelines of the Muriel Awards prohibit those of us who would otherwise be so inclined from voting for Twin Peaks in any of the existing categories, but to ignore it altogether would be a miscarriage of justice. Let’s start with the unlikelihood of its existence at all, and the degree of difficulty involved in successfully pulling off such a belated revival. In recent memory, only Mad Max: Fury Road has managed such a feat, and even that wasn’t a direct continuation. Twin Peaks not only picked up the threads of a story that had been left dangling for more than 25 years, it brought back dozens of original cast members, most of whom didn’t miss a beat when it came to reprising their long-dormant roles.
“But Lynch and Frost had no exercise in nostalgia planned; in fact, quite the opposite. The story sprawled far beyond the borders of the quirky Pacific Northwest town fondly remembered from the original TV series, to New York, Las Vegas, South Dakota, and various bizarre planes of reality. The cast ballooned to include Lynch stalwarts like Laura Dern and Naomi Watts as well as unlikely co-conspirators ranging from Michael Cera to Jim Belushi. Through it all, however, the two central figures of the Twin Peaks saga remained the axis around which all else revolved. Kyle MacLachlan gave the performance of his career as the many aspects of Special Agent Dale Cooper, from the physical comedy and pathos of Dougie Jones to the contained fury of Mr. C to the tantalizingly brief but remarkably assured reappearance of original recipe Agent Cooper. And while Sheryl Lee’s screen time was limited, Laura Palmer continued to haunt the narrative—her absence remained the gaping hole through which all pain and suffering (garmonbozia) poured forth.
“While David Lynch would never think in such terms, Twin Peaks plays a grand career summation, incorporating obsessions and imagery from throughout his entire body of work. Absurdist humor rubs shoulders with cosmic mystery and heartrending emotion, and it all feels, well, Lynchian in the best possible way. ‘Part 8,’ with its atomic origin-of-evil pyrotechnics, has understandably garnered the most attention as perhaps the most experimental hour of television ever aired. For me, Lynch/Frost’s achievement is best summed up by the opening minutes of ‘Part 15,’ in which the soaring emotion of the long-delayed romantic reunion of Norma and Big Ed at the Double R Diner is immediately followed by the uncanny mindfuck of Agent Cooper’s evil doppelganger meeting with a former FBI agent now in the form of a giant teapot. Both of these events were equally Twin Peaks, and whether you call it a TV show, a movie, or an 18-hour interpretive dance, 2017 was far richer for having it.” ~ Scott Von Doviak
2017 Muriel Awards: Recent and Definitely Better Than Decent
Just because a movie didn't crack our top 10 doesn't mean there wasn't any passion behind it. I invited a handful of voters to write about movies about which they felt some affection even though they might not have gotten all that much love from the group as a whole.
14th Place: A Quiet Passion
“It's not often that a literary biopic fully works as cinema—writers, almost by definition, lead visually uninteresting lives devoid of physical drama unless your idea of riveting kineticism is the image of someone staring sadly at a blank page—but when one does, it's a cause for celebration. A Quiet Passion is, as proclaimed, quiet, but it stirs with a love of art, and the inextricable connection in the heart of the artist between the life force and creative work.
“While it's a film with no weak links whatsoever, in the interests of brevity the two main players will suffice to highlight: writer-director Terence Davies' cinema is one that is equally theatre, painting, and poetry, yet wholly cinematic. It's a vision of cinema as art, and art as cinema, exquisitely rendered and so fully, warmly alive that invites its audience in, in a friendly embrace. All this would collapse without a centerpiece, which is Cynthia Nixon's performance as Emily Dickinson. It's a stage actor's work in a film that requires just that, creating in full a great American poet without breathing down the back of the audience's neck that they're to gaze upon A Great American Poet and genuflect. Nixon's Dickinson is the most wondrous subject of attention there is: a full human being.
“A Quiet Passion is a brilliant, erudite film about a great artist, and it's also a ruefully funny movie about a woman who could kind of take or leave most people. It's bursting with a love of language, and a love for those who shape it, like clay, into the stuff that lives on forever. It's a great film, and one that shouldn't slip through the cracks of history.” ~ Danny Bowes
26th Place: Mudbound
"The American dream: earn a little money, buy a bit of land, and build yourself a place to call 'Home.' Is the dream achievable? For some, maybe, but for others the enterprise is a Sisyphean chore, a never ending struggle against the land, its inhabitants, and its history.
"Mudbound, written by Rees and Virgil Williams, and directed by Rees, is a study in struggle. Two families, the McAllens and the Jacksons - one white, one black - share a plot of farm land in Northern Mississippi. Pride and prejudice, despair and hope, are all hallmarks of a story that is ultimately about how we set about establishing a place in the world we can call our own. How we fight to express an identity that is uniquely our own, and how the world fights back when it thinks that identity has crossed a predetermined line.
"On the surface it is a story all too common; a story of racial relations that have echoed through film and literature in many thousands of tales. But, thanks in large part to the subtle and sure-handed direction of Dee Rees, with a gorgeous visual assist from cinematographer Rachel Morrison, what could have been a heavy handed exercise became, instead, an almost poetic ode to the characters and characteristics that shape this country to this very day. It is an eternal struggle, it seems, one destined to trap us all in the mud, forever damning us to dream in brown." ~ Donald G. Carder
35th Place: On the Beach at Night Alone
“The Korean master Hong Sang-soo had a breakout year in 2017, premiering three great films – On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After – and garnering both acclaim and US distribution for all three of them. The latter two will be released in 2018, but On the Beach at Night Alone feels both of a piece with and yet distinct from its coequals, and not only because it was released the year it premiered.
“Hong’s style – that of single-take conversations punctuated by conspicuous pans and zooms, mercurial relationships between men and women, and soju-sodden outbursts amid naturalistic dialogue – is so recognizable, but it always varies in fascinating ways from film to film. Informed to no small extent by his experiences as a member of the film industry, they always take on some veneer of self-referentiality (if not autobiography), something that On the Beach at Night Alone takes almost to the limit.
“The film, in its portrait of an actress (played by Hong’s muse Kim Min-hee) essentially in hiding after her brief dalliance with a director is exposed, obviously invites comparisons with Hong’s real-life affair with Kim. But it almost seems more productive to take the film in the context of an entire career rather than the past few years; if this – along with the films he has made since 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, almost all of which feature Kim – signals a new phase of his career, it is nevertheless deeply, vitally indebted to his other work.
“Like many of his films, it takes place in two parts, the first set in a self-imposed exile in Hamburg, and the second taking place an indeterminate amount of time later in a resort town in Korea. The chronology appears to be straightforward, unlike many of Hong’s other works, but the implication that the first may just be a dream or even a film within the film is never far from the viewer’s mind.
“What makes this, to my mind, one of the best films of a career defined by its uniformly excellent quality is the level of examination and emotion on display. It is at once among his most even-keeled, almost placid works and among his most self-lacerating, but the emotions never feel telegraphed or forced whatsoever. They emerge out of Kim’s extraordinary performance, characterized by such control and ambiguity that every moment feels charged with a simmering undercurrent.
“It is enlivening and gratifying to see one of my favorite directors continuing to flourish and develop, and the final image, that of a slow release and acceptance, seems emblematic of that. Infinite possibilities within a single framework is Hong’s MO, and so many grace notes, so many conversations only make the power of On the Beach at Night Alone more mysterious, yet more palpable.” ~ Ryan Swen
14th Place: A Quiet Passion
“It's not often that a literary biopic fully works as cinema—writers, almost by definition, lead visually uninteresting lives devoid of physical drama unless your idea of riveting kineticism is the image of someone staring sadly at a blank page—but when one does, it's a cause for celebration. A Quiet Passion is, as proclaimed, quiet, but it stirs with a love of art, and the inextricable connection in the heart of the artist between the life force and creative work.
“While it's a film with no weak links whatsoever, in the interests of brevity the two main players will suffice to highlight: writer-director Terence Davies' cinema is one that is equally theatre, painting, and poetry, yet wholly cinematic. It's a vision of cinema as art, and art as cinema, exquisitely rendered and so fully, warmly alive that invites its audience in, in a friendly embrace. All this would collapse without a centerpiece, which is Cynthia Nixon's performance as Emily Dickinson. It's a stage actor's work in a film that requires just that, creating in full a great American poet without breathing down the back of the audience's neck that they're to gaze upon A Great American Poet and genuflect. Nixon's Dickinson is the most wondrous subject of attention there is: a full human being.
“A Quiet Passion is a brilliant, erudite film about a great artist, and it's also a ruefully funny movie about a woman who could kind of take or leave most people. It's bursting with a love of language, and a love for those who shape it, like clay, into the stuff that lives on forever. It's a great film, and one that shouldn't slip through the cracks of history.” ~ Danny Bowes
26th Place: Mudbound
"The American dream: earn a little money, buy a bit of land, and build yourself a place to call 'Home.' Is the dream achievable? For some, maybe, but for others the enterprise is a Sisyphean chore, a never ending struggle against the land, its inhabitants, and its history.
"Mudbound, written by Rees and Virgil Williams, and directed by Rees, is a study in struggle. Two families, the McAllens and the Jacksons - one white, one black - share a plot of farm land in Northern Mississippi. Pride and prejudice, despair and hope, are all hallmarks of a story that is ultimately about how we set about establishing a place in the world we can call our own. How we fight to express an identity that is uniquely our own, and how the world fights back when it thinks that identity has crossed a predetermined line.
"On the surface it is a story all too common; a story of racial relations that have echoed through film and literature in many thousands of tales. But, thanks in large part to the subtle and sure-handed direction of Dee Rees, with a gorgeous visual assist from cinematographer Rachel Morrison, what could have been a heavy handed exercise became, instead, an almost poetic ode to the characters and characteristics that shape this country to this very day. It is an eternal struggle, it seems, one destined to trap us all in the mud, forever damning us to dream in brown." ~ Donald G. Carder
35th Place: On the Beach at Night Alone
“The Korean master Hong Sang-soo had a breakout year in 2017, premiering three great films – On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After – and garnering both acclaim and US distribution for all three of them. The latter two will be released in 2018, but On the Beach at Night Alone feels both of a piece with and yet distinct from its coequals, and not only because it was released the year it premiered.
“Hong’s style – that of single-take conversations punctuated by conspicuous pans and zooms, mercurial relationships between men and women, and soju-sodden outbursts amid naturalistic dialogue – is so recognizable, but it always varies in fascinating ways from film to film. Informed to no small extent by his experiences as a member of the film industry, they always take on some veneer of self-referentiality (if not autobiography), something that On the Beach at Night Alone takes almost to the limit.
“The film, in its portrait of an actress (played by Hong’s muse Kim Min-hee) essentially in hiding after her brief dalliance with a director is exposed, obviously invites comparisons with Hong’s real-life affair with Kim. But it almost seems more productive to take the film in the context of an entire career rather than the past few years; if this – along with the films he has made since 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, almost all of which feature Kim – signals a new phase of his career, it is nevertheless deeply, vitally indebted to his other work.
“Like many of his films, it takes place in two parts, the first set in a self-imposed exile in Hamburg, and the second taking place an indeterminate amount of time later in a resort town in Korea. The chronology appears to be straightforward, unlike many of Hong’s other works, but the implication that the first may just be a dream or even a film within the film is never far from the viewer’s mind.
“What makes this, to my mind, one of the best films of a career defined by its uniformly excellent quality is the level of examination and emotion on display. It is at once among his most even-keeled, almost placid works and among his most self-lacerating, but the emotions never feel telegraphed or forced whatsoever. They emerge out of Kim’s extraordinary performance, characterized by such control and ambiguity that every moment feels charged with a simmering undercurrent.
“It is enlivening and gratifying to see one of my favorite directors continuing to flourish and develop, and the final image, that of a slow release and acceptance, seems emblematic of that. Infinite possibilities within a single framework is Hong’s MO, and so many grace notes, so many conversations only make the power of On the Beach at Night Alone more mysterious, yet more palpable.” ~ Ryan Swen
2017 Muriel Awards: The Big Day Has Arrived!
Well, today is the big day, with the countdown to the announcement of the Golden Muriel Award for Best Picture, which is coming at 7 PM Eastern tonight. But before we begin the countdown, I'd like to thank everyone who voted in this year's Muriel Awards.
Jason Alley
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Scott W. Black
Danny Bowes
Sean Burns
Donald G. Carder
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Andrew Dignan
Kevin Dufresne
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Jim Emerson
Steve Erickson
Molly Autumn Faust
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Russell Hainline
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Daniel Cook Johnson
Stacia Kissick Jones
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Peter Labuza
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Overbeck
Bill Ryan
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig Van Driel
Vern
Scott Von Doviak
Clayton Walter
Bryan T. Whitefield
Bryce Wilson
George Wu
And a big thanks to everyone who's been following the Muriels this year!
Jason Alley
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Scott W. Black
Danny Bowes
Sean Burns
Donald G. Carder
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Andrew Dignan
Kevin Dufresne
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Jim Emerson
Steve Erickson
Molly Autumn Faust
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Russell Hainline
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Daniel Cook Johnson
Stacia Kissick Jones
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Peter Labuza
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Overbeck
Bill Ryan
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig Van Driel
Vern
Scott Von Doviak
Clayton Walter
Bryan T. Whitefield
Bryce Wilson
George Wu
And a big thanks to everyone who's been following the Muriels this year!
Saturday, February 24, 2018
2017 Muriel Awards: Lead Performance Retrospective Poll
Here's the second part of this year's special ballot, in which we've polled the voters to see their preference of their male and female lead performance winners from years past. Who do we like best? Here are the results:
2006:
*Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat - 18 votes
Helen Mirren, The Queen - 14 votes
2007:
*Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood - 27 votes
Carice Van Houten, Black Book - 3 votes
"How could you make me choose????" - 1 vote
2008:
*Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married - 15 votes
*Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler - 15 votes
2009:
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker - 9 votes
*Tilda Swinton, Julia - 19 votes
2010:
*Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network - 20 votes
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit - 13 votes
2011:
*Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy - 20 votes
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter - 13 votes
2012:
*Denis Lavant, Holy Motors - 15 votes
*Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea - 15 votes
2013:
*Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a slave - 17 votes
Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Color - 16 votes
2014:
*Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel - 16 votes
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin - 15 votes
2015:
Michael B. Jordan, Creed - 13 votes
*Rooney Mara, Carol - 21 votes
2016:
Casey Affleck, Manchester By the Sea - 10 votes
*Isabelle Huppert, Elle - 20 votes
2006:
*Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat - 18 votes
Helen Mirren, The Queen - 14 votes
2007:
*Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood - 27 votes
Carice Van Houten, Black Book - 3 votes
"How could you make me choose????" - 1 vote
2008:
*Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married - 15 votes
*Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler - 15 votes
2009:
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker - 9 votes
*Tilda Swinton, Julia - 19 votes
2010:
*Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network - 20 votes
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit - 13 votes
2011:
*Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy - 20 votes
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter - 13 votes
2012:
*Denis Lavant, Holy Motors - 15 votes
*Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea - 15 votes
2013:
*Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a slave - 17 votes
Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Color - 16 votes
2014:
*Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel - 16 votes
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin - 15 votes
2015:
Michael B. Jordan, Creed - 13 votes
*Rooney Mara, Carol - 21 votes
2016:
Casey Affleck, Manchester By the Sea - 10 votes
*Isabelle Huppert, Elle - 20 votes
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Lead Performance, 1st Place
Daniel Day Lewis - Phantom Thread [318 points / 28 votes]
“Maybe he’s the most demanding man." – Alma (Vicky Krieps) speaking, of course, about sought-after dress designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) near the beginning (but really, near the end) of Phantom Thread
“Alma is speaking to someone, who will eventually be revealed as a doctor, about her exacting, exasperating, mysterious husband, but as the doctor remains off-screen for the moment she might just as easily be speaking to us, laying down in loving, unforgiving terms the groundwork for our eventual acceptance or rejection of Woodcock’s insular manner, his refusal to compromise, either in his celebrated sartorial vision or the minutiae of daily procedure that seems to be his tether to self-expression, to his minimalist articulation of emotion, to sanity itself. And Day-Lewis, always a generous receptacle into which his characters can be poured, molded, and realized with an acuity and commitment rare among modern movie actors, could perhaps himself be described in a similarly evocative, inquisitive, slightly awestruck fashion.
“Yet I’ve actually heard some people, perhaps those who hold in high regard Day-Lewis’s three Oscar-winning turns, as well as his Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s superb rendition of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), describe Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, in what he has hinted will be his final movie performance, as, well, boring. Yes, in comparison to his relatively ostentatious appearances in in My Left Foot (1989), There Will Be Blood (2007) and Lincoln (2012), Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock is certainly subdued. But boring? Perhaps only if you’re disengaged from the entire movie. However, those who find themselves caught up in the hushed, meticulously structured routine and the underlying tension woven into the fabric of the film by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, are magnetized by the confidence with which Day-Lewis draws his audience in. Every glance up from a sketch pad and over glasses, every hitched breath, prepares the table for the expected histrionics which, gratifyingly, never come in quite the timbre, the pattern, the timing in which we feel prepared to receive them.
“For me, the height of the movie’s emotional pitch arrives in a moment so off-rhythm and cloaked in reserve that it might be easy to miss. Reynolds, beginning the long, measured process of unveiling himself to Alma during a phase of what could be described as mannered infatuation, turns his reticent, reedy voice to the subject of his late, revered mother, a persistent ghost whose presence is ever felt, yet never quite so much comforting as unsettling. Her eerie silence is, for Woodcock, a terrible barrier, a measure of unattainable perfection for the designer who fears his work will never fill the void created by her absence. To Alma he hints at secrets which he routinely incorporates into the very fabric of his clothes, invocations and bits of physical memory sewn into the lining which make them unique to their owner. He then reveals that a lock of his mother’s hair has been hidden in the breast of his own jacket, and in doing so he hitches and swallows, interrupting but for an almost-imperceptible moment the flow of the confession. It’s a perfectly modulated moment from the actor, one that barely moves the ‘Acting!’ needle but somehow still registers an earthquake’s worth of character truth and mystery, and it’s as moving as anything on Day-Lewis’s Oscar résumé.
“If Phantom Thread does turn out to be Day-Lewis’s final film, then Anderson seems well intent on drawing Woodcock’s character in terms that also reflect on the intent and character of his lead actor. In addition to Alma’s framing observation near the film’s beginning, we also hear Alma say of Woodcock, ‘When you love your work, you can give like he does.’ Then later, when the pressures of reconciling his relentless work pace with the intangible, yet paralyzing yearning for romantic fulfillment which he can barely articulate begins to wear him down, she observes, ‘Sometimes it’s good for him to slow down his steps a little,’ knowing well the plans she herself has devised which will bring their relationship into full, twisted bloom. It’s difficult to hear these expressions and not think of Day-Lewis as well, a mercurially tempered, Method-precise actor who has decided that it’s time in his life to turn away from that which has brought him and his audiences so much reward and toward a life of carpentry and other pursuits involving the craft of his hands as well as his heart.
“Many of those fans of Day-Lewis’ film work, in admiring his achievements, have also expressed a somewhat imperious selfishness when contemplating his imminent retirement: How could he do this to us? And again, in Phantom Thread Reynolds Woodcock seems to address both the pressures of delivering couture to the exacting denizens of London society in the 1950s and the ambivalence interlacing the conviction of Day-Lewis to forever step away from the spotlight: ‘I think it’s the assumptions and expectations of others that cause heartache.’
“To what degree Anderson and Day-Lewis have consciously conceived of Phantom Thread as the actor’s last hurrah is unknowable, but Day-Lewis’s announcement of retirement, which came before filming began, and our awareness of it as an audience, certainly colors the experience of seeing the performance. And it’s profoundly satisfying to see the actor meld more with the director’s physical and spiritual vision for the film than stand apart from and somehow above it, in the manner which has brought him such a bounty of previous glory. But really, if this is the last we see of Day-Lewis as professional inhabitant of his characters’ fantasies, nightmares and obsessions, it’s hard to imagine a more resonant way to bring down the curtain.
“After all, Phantom Thread provides this meticulous craftsman, this artist among journeymen, an exeunt informed by an elegant, piercing rumination on meticulous craftsmanship, sending him off into a new life of an entirely different sort of scrupulous and painstaking accomplishment. It’s a pursuit which is honored by his embodiment of Reynolds Woodcock, the artist as mad scientist, demanding lover, uncompromising visionary, emotional cripple, and Anderson rewards him with the most passionately optimistic, yet peerlessly perverse conclusion of any in the director’s oeuvre. When Woodcock pleads to Alma, ‘Kiss me, my girl, before I get sick,’ it’s an anticipatory consummation of passion that signals moving from a plane of controlled, yet unsatisfying pleasures to a new realm where fulfillment will come with much more private, personal intensity, an adventure that may be understood entirely only by the one embarking upon it. On those terms, and among a symphony of deepening shadow and softening light radiating from Anderson’s palette, Daniel Day-Lewis creates in Phantom Thread a most exquisitely realized swansong.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)






























