Fincher and Kaiju and Scorsese's big swing all make this November feel special
There's some great stuff right around the corner and in theaters now
I have gone back to work. Thank god.
This is the second major WGA strike that I have weathered since I started working in the mid-‘90s, and it already feels very different from the first one. This feels like a win, like we struck for something significant and we made actual gains. That was not the case in 2008, and considering the atom-bomb-level impact that strike had on my career, I was left feeling sore about everything. The Guild, the business, my future. HitFix came along at that exact moment, and I jumped at the opportunity because I needed some kind of stability. I had a three-year-old son and another on the way, and I saw HitFix as a chance to build something.
I’m not sure it was ever exactly what I imagined in those early days, but for the better part of a decade, HitFix became pretty much everything for me. I enjoyed the work and I liked being able to define what we were doing there in a way that was very different than Ain’t It Cool News. By the time my marriage ended, the site was starting its own death throes, and those two things felt connected in ways that left me sour for years.
I am deeply grateful for the readers who have followed me from spot to spot since the end of HitFix. I remain determined to do things independently, and these newsletters and the podcast I continue to tinker with are ways for me to create very pure platforms for me to express my interests. For me to step back into a situation where I’m working for someone and where I’m pinning my creative hopes and dreams on other people’s decisions requires something extraordinary at this point. I have too many scars from too many projects that died on the vine, and it really doesn’t matter why they died. There are a thousand different ways that movies stumble on their way to the starting block, and some of those were my fault and plenty of them were not my fault, but again… it doesn’t matter why. Every time you try to do something creative that is deeply, authentically felt, it costs you a piece of yourself. You have got to be enormously strong with a deep, deep wellspring of desire to make your art to put up with all of the obstacles that stand in your way.
One of the reasons I admire the artists I admire is because they have not only figured out how to tell the stories they want to tell but because they are willing to get in there and fight that good fight over and over again. It is never easy to get anything made, but it is more difficult than ever to make personal, singular projects in an industry that is absolutely bananas about pre-tested IP. It does not matter how much success you’ve had in the past. Even our most revered filmmakers have to struggle to get things made, and every time they do, it is worth celebrating. Admittedly, I don’t always feel like celebrating when talking about movies right now. Much of the discourse around movies wears me out these days. Everyone brings their own filter into a movie theater with them, of course, and you can’t separate your reaction to a film from who you are and the context in which you see it, but I find myself confused by the way many people engage with pop culture. People use the conversation about movies or TV shows to attack each other on fundamental levels, and I find all of it exhausting. It’s become all context and no content for many people. I think they’re addicted to the arguments and they simply use entertainment as an excuse for those arguments. The problem with that approach is that you often reveal how little you’re engaging with the film when you just graft your all-purpose complaints onto a specific conversation.
For example, I hate when people use the word “woke” as a club against things, as if simply saying that word is enough to justify rabid disgust, but I am doubly baffled by anyone who wants to slap that label on Killers of the Flower Moon, the latest film from Martin Scorsese. This is a Scorsese film, through and through, and I look forward to digging into the film repeatedly as I have with his past work. If presenting the indigenous characters in Killers as human beings who are every bit as important as the white characters is too “woke” for you, I would suggest you are the problem. As an artist, Scorsese has a few different modes he works in, and this film fits neatly into the same category as GoodFellas, The Age of Innocence, Kundun, Gangs of New York, and Wolf of Wall Street. “But none of those films are the same,” you say. I would argue they are very similar and that Scorsese exhibits a curiosity about the way systems work that is unlike any other filmmaker. I love these movies where he’s working in cultural anthropology mode, where he finds a character that allows him access to a subculture that he then explores completely. He is more interested in the system itself than in any individual character, which is not the way most movies work.
It feels rigorously structured to me, and far more interesting than just telling the story of the FBI, something that Scorsese makes almost peripheral to the film. People who expect to see a translation of the book to the screen are going to be disappointed. This is something that results from Scorsese digesting the book and then working with Eric Roth to tell the story that he found in that material. The film opens and closes with the Osage, totally separate from any white characters, but those are almost the only two such moments in the film. The rest of the movie is about the collision of cultures at this very specific time and place. We get a quick brief on what happened when the Osage found oil on their land. They became some of the richest people on the planet overnight. That kind of instant giant money would do a number on any community, but you’re talking about the early part of the 20th century. White culture has already done its very best to corral and control indigenous culture, and all of a sudden, there is a power imbalance that upsets the status quo. Seeing all white faces in positions of manual labor and service in the town of Fairfax while we see Osage faces enjoying every possible creature comfort, there is an immediate sense of something simmering. None of the Osage are given full agency by the white people of Fairfax. Their money and access to it is managed by a network of court-appointed guardians, all white, based on the presumption that they are all incompetent. Yes, the film is three hours and twenty-five minutes long, but it is constantly giving you information and character and ideas. There’s no fat on Thelma Schoonmaker’s final cut. By the time the movie introduces Ernest Burkhart (Di Caprio), returning home from WWI, we already understand a fair amount about the world he’s walking into. Part of that is the storytelling. Part of that is the immersive production design by Jack Fisk, who does such beautiful, meticulous period work that you can stop thinking about it.
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