Daring Independence
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This past weekend, Ivan Reitman, who directed Bill Murray in Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981), and Ghostbusters (1984) and tapped Arnold Schwarzenegger’s willingness to poke fun at his own action-hero persona in Twins (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1990), passed away at the age of seventy-five. “At their most memorable, Reitman’s comedies all but erase the line between goofy slapdashery and polished craft,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times.
Chang’s clear favorite is Dave (1993), “a Capra-esque charmer starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, superbly matched as a presidential doppelgänger and his initially unsuspecting first lady. As a political farce, Dave may seem even tamer and less outrageous than it did on its initial release; its mix of gentle sentimentality and warm reassurance feels out of step with our more cynical times. Which is precisely why, as with so much of Reitman’s work, it’s hard to resist revisiting.”
A couple of in-house notes before turning to this week’s highlights: Six months after creating the Black Film Archive, Maya Cade talks to Laura Zornosa in the New York Times about a few favorite titles “from various decades of the archive, which she framed as ‘looking at Black fame across time.’” And on the occasion of the Toshiro Mifune retrospective running at New York’s Film Forum through March 10, Moeko Fujii, who wrote a marvelous appreciation of the actor for us in 2020, talks to Dan Mecca and Conor O’Donnell, hosts of the B-Side podcast, about five films starring Mifune that may be less familiar than the classics he made with Akira Kurosawa.
- With his contribution to Reverse Shot’s symposium on objects in movies, Julien Allen presents an excellent primer on Jean-Pierre Melville, his influence, and key misconceptions about his work. The object here is the ring of maybe a hundred keys that Jef Costello, the profession assassin Alain Delon plays in Le samouraï (1967), uses to steal cars. “Costello, in his cool, determined, almost obsessive professionalism, is a convincing alter ego for Melville himself (certainly more so than the conflicted Lino Ventura in Army of Shadows),” writes Allen. “In this sense, each key Costello tries in the car’s ignition is a different Melville take.”
- The new issue of Black Film Bulletin is dedicated to the memory of Menelik Shabazz. “No British Black filmmaker has produced work with the same level of authenticity and perspective,” says June Reid. Shabazz’s first fictional feature, Burning an Illusion (1981), “offered an examination of the impacts of racist Britain in a way that draws the film into dialogue with Horace Ové’s Pressure (1975) and Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980),” writes Clive Nwonka. And Dada Imarogbe remembers Shabazz as “a visionary collaborator—drama, documentary, exhibiting films and the printed word—who documented British African life and related it to the pan-African world for more than forty years. He related the past to the present and the future—in an early form of African futurism, as exemplified in his film Time and Judgement [1988] and in his unfinished work The Spirits Return.”
- From today through March 28, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Outfest, and IndieCollect will present Pioneers of Queer Cinema, a series that pairs underseen yet potently influential early works with landmarks of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. “The value of this program isn’t simply in the way it allows us to see how far we have come,” writes Ernest Hardy, “or even to celebrate past heroes and heroines of cinema and their groundbreaking cultural production—although that is certainly part of this program’s purpose. But it’s also to keep the queer imagination limber and expansive, to celebrate (and reinvigorate) queer aesthetics.” The front cover of the program features a still from The Watermelon Woman (1996), and on Instagram, director Cheryl Dunye remembers Marlon Riggs (Tongues Untied, 1989) and a visit to the set of his Black Is . . . Black Ain’t (1995), where she was “blown away with what I saw: queer Black and Brown folks in front of and behind the camera! . . . Everything felt expansive. I thought to myself ‘this is how I’m going to make work, with my queer community.’”
- Each of the four features Patrick Wang has made to date is “so effortlessly dense, experimental, inventive, and emotional that it’s almost impossible to do them justice with mere words alone, or a single viewing,” writes Glenn Heath, Jr. at Little White Lies. In the Family (2011), The Grief of Others (2015), and A Bread Factory, Parts One and Two (2018), all opening in the UK today, “stand tall with a graceful and tenacious outsiderdom,” writes Phil Hoad in the Guardian. Talking to Philip Concannon about the challenges of getting his films made and seen, Wang notes that “you can't clever your way out of the real challenge that independent art always has.”
- Chances are you’ve seen snippets from Zach Baron’s terrific profile of Francis Ford Coppola for GQ, and if you haven’t read it yet, do. After the astonishing run of The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979), Coppola, loaded with cash and five Oscars, went to the studios with One from the Heart (1982), a film that, as Daniel Allen argues at the Quietus, remains underappreciated and misunderstood. There being no takers, Coppola “spent $26 million of his own money to make it and lost every cent,” writes Baron. Now Coppola, at eighty-two, is preparing to spend $120 million on Megalopolis. “What he dreams about,” writes Baron, “is creating something like It’s a Wonderful Life—a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. ‘On New Year’s, instead of talking about the fact that you’re going to give up carbohydrates, I’d like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it.’ Somehow, Megalopolis will provoke exactly this discussion, Coppola hopes. Annually.”
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