Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The South by Southwest Film and TV Festival kicks off this week and, by the time you read this, I will be in Austin, Texas, with a team from The Times to cover the festival out of our photo and video studio.
Friday night’s lineup of Paul Feig’s “Another Simple Favor” starring Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, Seth Rogen’s new series “The Studio,” a satire of contemporary Hollywood, and Michael Shanks’ midnight body-horror sensation “Together” (co-starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco), neatly encapsulates the off-kilter ethos of the festival.
Other titles to look out for include Jay Duplass’ “The Baltimorons,” Chad Hartigan’s “The Threesome,” Annapurna Sriram’s “F—toys” and Matthew Shear’s “Fantasy Life.” Not to mention Ben Affleck in “The Accountant 2” and Nicole Kidman in “Holland.”
Festival chief Claudette Godfrey spoke about what it means to get together for an event like SXSW right now.
“Things are dark and terrible and I think that people are getting enough of that,” Godfrey said. “To a certain extent, people have always felt like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go on this trip to SXSW and take a little break’ from whatever it is they’re being weighed down with. And I think also if we’re going to make anything better, then we’re going to have to get together and figure it out.”
I also spoke to actor Kate Mara about having three films at the festival, Jess Varley’s “The Astronaut,” Andrew DeYoung’s “Friendship” and Andre Gaines’ “The Dutchman.”
“I crave going all over the map with the characters that I play. So that’s why I was open to doing all of these movies back-to-back,” said Mara. “I just crave being uncomfortable. In my work, I really like to stretch myself.”
Podcaster Karina Longworth on ‘At Long Last Love’
Last year we featured the podcast “You Must Remember This” as it celebrated its 10th anniversary. For the show’s latest season, “The Old Man Is Still Alive,” writer-producer-host Karina Longworth is examining the late careers of filmmakers such as Vincent Minnelli, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder and others — specifically focusing on how they did or did not keep up with the changing culture of Hollywood into the 1960s and ’70s.
Starting Saturday, the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana will launch a series “At Long Last Longworth,” featuring films programmed by Longworth herself. Longworth will be there in person for a rare screening of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1975 musical “At Long Last Love,” starring Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd.
“At Long Last Love” is a fascinating film, a huge flop in its day that has now become an endearing must-see oddity. A purposeful throwback to films of the 1930s with live-sung musical numbers that lend the film an amateurish charm, it’s just a delight.
The response at the time of the film’s release is perhaps summed up by Charles Champlin in his original review, “Peter Bogdanovich’s ‘At Long Last Love’ fights vainly our old ennui. His homage to Cole Porter and Cybill Shepherd is the year’s most frustrating failure. The songs are as delicious as the day Porter wrote them, the intentions are honorable, the production design is impeccable, there are attractive people doing things that are intermittently amusing… and the damn thing just doesn’t work.” (Your mileage may vary on whether you agree with that last line.)
The movie is not available on streaming and a 2013 Blu-ray now resells for hundreds of dollars online, so this screening alone is worth the drive down to the theater. Longworth will be there in person for “At Long Last Love,” with pre-recorded video introductions for the other films in the series, Victor Fleming’s 1939 “The Wizard of Oz,” Emir Kusturica’s 1993 “Arizona Dream” and Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 “Trouble in Paradise.”
On March 15, Vidiots will also screen two films chosen by Longworth, Billy Wilder’s 1972 “Avanti!” starring Jack Lemmon, in 35mm and Wilder’s 1960 “The Apartment.” And for those who can’t make it, the Vista Theater will be showing “Trouble in Paradise” in 35mm on March 29 and 30 at 10 a.m.
Longworth answered a few questions via email, both about the films in the Frida series and the latest season of “You Must Remember This.”
Why do you think “At Long Last Love” was such a flop when it came out? And what do you like about it now?
“At Long Last Love” was released in 1975, the same year as “Jaws,” “Shampoo,” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” While there had been a wave of hit period-piece musicals in the mid-to-late ’60s, by 1975 that was pretty much dead. And this was a big-budget period piece musical, which celebrated the music and the movies of 1930s, so it was doubly out of time.
I love how baldly uncool it is. It is a movie Bogdanovich made to please himself and the woman he was in love with (Cybill Shepherd), without a care for what the audience or the industry wanted. This, of course, is something it has been attacked for, but in this day and age marked by so much homogeneity and algorithm-chasing, I think it should be inspirational.
And just personally, I love the way in which it plays on your knowledge of movies in the 1930s, if you have knowledge of movies of the 1930s. Which is actually an easier thing to strategically acquire now than it would’ve been in 1975.
In some ways “The Wizard of Oz” might have an opposite problem of overfamiliarity. What keeps it fresh for you?
I think people may forget how many incredible sequences there are. When I was a kid, the scariest part for me was the field of poppies and I would often have to turn off the VHS tape then because I couldn’t handle it. This fantasy movie for kids has such a wide range of emotion in it, all anchored by Judy Garland, whose talent is fully formed at age 17; if anything, she seems more capable of modulating her vulnerability here than she would as a full-grown woman.
In the prompts for the series, “Arizona Dream” is noted as a film to be reexamined. What about that film do you think makes it worthy of reappraisal? Is there anything specific about the extended version that you prefer?
I’ve actually never seen any other version — this is a movie that I completely missed until I happened to be in Paris this summer when a 4K restoration of the director’s cut happened to be premiering there. I found it so fascinating and wanted to advocate for it because it has seemingly fallen into such obscurity, due to unavailability but also likely because so many people involved with it, from Emir Kusturica to Johnny Depp, are now “canceled” or considered toxic. I believe that if people feel troubled or triggered by the personal behavior of people who make movies, they should know their own boundaries and everyone else should respect those boundaries, but I compartmentalize these things. So when I watch “Arizona Dream,” I can rationally know about all kinds of unsavory things that Vincent Gallo has been accused of, and also find his performance hilarious and touching and feel wistful about how the film opens a window into an alternate universe in which he could have become a huge movie star. Less problematic but no less impressive, for me, is Lili Taylor, who truly knocks my socks off in this film.
“Trouble in Paradise” is an elegant romantic comedy and something of a caper film. When you’re watching classic Hollywood films, are you transported back to another era or do you find it is the movies that are pulled forward into our time? Put another way, are you struck by classic films that feel “modern,” or do you like the feeling of stepping into the past while watching them?
I don’t know that I feel either way, to be honest. But I do think “Trouble in Paradise” should be at the top of the watchlist for anyone who has the impression that “old” movies are boring.
As you have been researching the history of aging directors in Hollywood, has it caused you to reflect at all on the vast crop of filmmakers now working into their 70s, 80s and even 90s, including Clint Eastwood, Nancy Meyers, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann and others? Has the nature of a director’s “late work” changed?
I don’t think very much has changed at all. To see Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” sweep the Razzies is to watch someone who gave up a significant chunk of their personal fortune to make a movie that only they could make, only to see an incredibly conservative, greed-driven industry punish him for it. There are a lot of stories like this in “The Old Man Is Still Alive.” I’m immediately reminded of George Stevens putting on the line his standing as the 1950s’ most reliable director of movies that both audiences and the academy loved, to spend over half a decade making “The Greatest Story Ever Told”; or Vincente Minnelli ending his career with an extremely personal showcase for his daughter only to have the film taken away from him and butchered; or the ways in which Robert Evans schemed for years to get a 60-something Otto Preminger off the Paramount payroll.
Especially in the stories of the recent filmmaking efforts of Eastwood, Meyers, Coppola and Mann, it feels like it would be more convenient for the industry if directors who are in their 70s and 80s (and who, admittedly, are mostly 20 years or more removed from their greatest financial successes) would just go away. At the same time, it’s not like Hollywood is actively courting young filmmakers, and there is no studio system in which they can work their way up starting as a teenager or young 20-something the way many of the “Old Man” subjects did. The directors who are pegged as the “new generation” today largely didn’t start to see success until their mid-30s at the earliest, and are now in their 40s and 50s. So there is just as tight a window in which to put together a full career as there ever was.
Points of interest
Alan Moyle double bill
Friday at the Aero will be a double bill of Alan Moyle’s 1990 “Pump Up the Volume” (in a 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive) along with his 1980 film “Times Square.” Moyle will be there for a Q&A moderated by Jake Fogelnest, an avowed fan of both films.
In “Pump Up the Volume,” Christian Slater plays an Arizona teenager who launches a pirate radio station, where his acerbic on-air persona of “Hard Harry” galvanizes the local kids and upsets the authorities.
Reviewing the film, Michael Wilmington wrote, “The movie mixes a lot of volatile elements — modern rock, Bruce, ‘Talk Radio’ — into a mostly brave, topical double theme. It’s about adolescent discontent and the assaults on media free speech by pressure groups and vote-hungry politicians. But there’s a catch. This is also a film floating along on teen-movie archetypes and wish fulfillment. Trying to strike a balance between John Hughes and Oliver Stone, it hits neither.”
In response to what he thought were misguided reviews, Charles Champlin wrote a spirited defense of the film, noting, “There are what I’ve sometimes called mine-field movies: scripts that tread so fine a line they can go blooey at any step. ‘Pump Up the Volume’ deals more than incidentally with the power of a medium to influence behavior for good or for ill. … The young audience with which I watched the film the other night went along with it. Whatever it has or hasn’t said to critics, it has set up reverberations in the audiences at which it was aimed.”
And “Times Square” is worth revisiting as well: a movie of rambunctious energy about two teenage runaways (Robin Johnson and Trini Alvarado) who form a band under the encouragement of a local DJ (Tim Curry).
Michelangelo Antonioni
The American Cinematheque is launching a series celebrating Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, beginning with a 35mm screening of 1966’s “Blow-Up” at the Egyptian on Saturday. Other films in the series include 1960’s “L’Avventura,” 1962’s “La Notte,” 1964’s “Red Desert” and 1970’s Zabriskie Point (also in 35mm at the Egyptian).
On Wednesday there will be a 35mm screening at the Aero of 1975’s “The Passenger” starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider in the story of a disillusioned journalist who assumes the identity of a gun runner.
In a review published on April 8, 1975, Kevin Thomas wrote, “At once a suspenseful adventure, a parable on the inescapability of responsibility and a tender lover story, Michelangelo Antonioni’s long-awaited ‘The Passenger,’ starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, is a masterpiece of visual beauty and rigorous artistry that is as tantalizing as it is hypnotic. It is a major achievement by one of the world’s greatest filmmakers and boasts another of those splendid portrayals from Nicholson, up for an Oscar tonight for ‘Chinatown,’ that are establishing him as the foremost American screen actor of his generation.”
Bertolucci’s ‘1900’
Through March 13, the Vista will be playing Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 epic “1900” starring Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu in 35mm. At a little over 5 hours — making 3-and-a-half hours of “The Brutalist” something of a warm-up — this is a rare chance to see the film in a theater.
The film follows two men born on the same day, the wealthy Alfredo (De Niro) and the working-class Olmo (Depardieu), as they witness the political shifts in Italy throughout the early 20th century.
Writing about the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Charles Champlin said, “Bertolucci, whose ‘The Conformist’ and ‘Last Tango in Paris’ were widely seen in the United States, is an uncontested master of film who proves, however, to be a pretentious, condescending and ham-fisted propagandist. His bold and epic-scale enterprise ranges from the absolutely brilliant to the absolutely silly. The silliness unfortunately clusters toward the end of the film, and it puts the patience of even the most dedicated faithful to a severe test.”
In other news
The Oscars
If you’ve read this far into this newsletter, you are probably well aware that the Academy Awards happened this past weekend, with “Anora” winning five Oscars including best picture and a record-breaking four of those going to filmmaker Sean Baker personally.
I was there at the show for the first time and, along with colleagues Cerys Davies, Jessica Gelt, Kaitlyn Huamani and Amy Kaufman, tried to give some sense of what you didn’t see on TV.
And Ryan Faughnder considered whether the industry will actually listen to Baker’s “battle cry” on behalf of movie theaters.
Amy Nicholson put the evening into perspective, writing, “ ‘Anora’ is about sex work, yes. But it’s really about work work. The film feels wild and loose when four characters are shouting over each other at once. Yet, almost every scene is a comment on the desperation of struggling paycheck to paycheck in America.”
Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Mickey 17’
Filmmaker Bong Joon Ho has followed up his own Oscars success with “Parasite” five years ago with the new “Mickey 17,” a satirical science-fiction story starring Robert Pattinson as a low-ranking worker who is “reprinted” every time he is killed in the line of duty and sent back to work.
In a review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote, “As semi-inessential as ‘Mickey 17’ feels in Bong’s canon, I’m at peace that he keeps asking how to give everyone’s life value. He’ll keep repeating the question until we come up with an answer.”
Bong spoke to Josh Rottenberg about what the movie is really about, saying, “For me, that is the point of making a sci-fi film. It seems to be a story about the future, about another planet, but it’s actually a portrait of us now and the reality around us, not of somewhere far out in space.”