LUIGI COUNTERPROGRAMMING
Reunion Newsletter [12.13.24]
What I really want to talk about this week is Luigi Mangione. I have to tell you, everybody’s got it all wrong. Let me explain.
Just kidding. Enough already. Jesus Christ.
But I hope they let (make?) him watch Mufasa.
With the success of Interstellar rerelease, and some others, I thought about what my favorite favorites movie movies of recent years would be. An ideal day at IMAX. I think those would be Interstellar, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Mad Max: Fury Road, La La Land, and Phantom Thread. That would be the best day ever at the movies. All masterpieces, all profoundly emotional, all for very different reasons. I hope they make these revivals a regular thing. I think the future of movie theaters will be much more mixed with repertory.
A few things I wrote notes on that seem to matter so little, but here anyway. They’re examples of criticisms of how things get made but go wrong, so I guess from that aspect it’s valuable to consider. But I also feel kinda silly giving so much ink. Look for that at the bottom. And lots more important stuff too.
Sundance announced this week, but not doing a deep dive right now. Feel free to read every single other person doing that in meantime. I’ll talk about it when there’s more actual things to say. One big note, everything is for sale this year, which is a wild maybe exciting maybe terrifying aspect. Does that mean a lot of cool stuff for distributors to invest in? Or does that mean few of these films have viable distribution prospects?
— Sean Glass @sdotglass
NEWS
The important stuff on the important stuff. TL;DR + links if you want more.
Angelina Jolie, who should win best actress this year, sits still and poised when she speaks. If she moves her hands, the motions add to the meaning of the words and engage you. She speaks of performing, and turns her fingers upside down to act out performing. She speaks of someone else, points away; speaks of herself, points to herself. Speaks of ‘strait jacket’ and wraps arm across chest. Watch how Cynthia Erivo uses her hands. Then listen carefully and consider the meaning of what each of these people say. I walked out of Wicked around the same time the boys left to do poppers. To be clear, I did not walk out to do the poppers, I walked out to carry on with the rest of my life, slightly sooner than the 3 hour run time.
Sundance 2025 Lineup Revealed [The Film Stage] Congrats to all our friends who are involved this year.
Kino Lorber Head Talks Drawing Cinephiles to Oh, Canada and the Streaming Kino Film Collection Channel [IndieWire]
Interstellar and Coraline Rereleases Were Box Office Triumphs. Why Aren’t Studios Doing More? [Variety] I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg with the recent rerelease wave. But this isn’t a new trend—what’s new is about manufacturing the perceived value of seeing these films at this moment, in this format. SG and I have mentioned the eventizing of IMAX and premium formats. This is just an extension of that. Telling audiences this is a limited, timely experience, and using films from the last 15 years that they would already rewatch.
Jews Depicted on TV Play Down Their Identity: Study [THR]
Read the study [here].
Austin Butler Poised to Star as Patrick Bateman in Luca Guadagnino’s American Psycho [Variety] This finally puts the Jacob Elordi narrative to bed.
Fred Hechinger Had to ‘Break All the Rules’ as an Actor for RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys [IndieWire] Fred Hechinger low key had best year of any actor maybe. Next big thing.
Nightbitch Director Marielle Heller Says the Film Is ‘Rebellious’ in Trump Era of ‘Forced Motherhood’ [Variety] Burying Nightbitch sucks. This movie deserves more attention.
A24’s Membership Program Will Finally Include Movie Tickets [IndieWire] I didn't read the article, but I thought this was always there. I've never used any aspect of my a24 membership. It's really just for super fans who want random things with perceived / self-fulfilling prophecy value. They offer tickets to new movies opening, I guess maybe not the biggest ones, but I never use it, because I generally either don’t want to see the movie, or I use my AMC pass at IMAX or a better screen. I don’t want to go to the Alamo Drafthouse to smell everyone's chicken fingers and have people walk past me throughout. And the rest of the perks are really really niche. The factory is such that someone goes and makes a movie, and then a bunch of young tiktok staff at the NYC office brainstorm on ways to extract meme worthy value from the movie which becomes a sort of property / product for them. I dunno. It’s weird. That being said...what would a membership that makes sense look like?
PETA Plans Protest at Nosferatu Screening: Rats ‘Didn’t Cause the Plague!’ [Variety] This week’s hilarious headline.
Marco Bellocchio to Be Honored With Major Retrospective by Toronto Film Festival’s TIFF Cinematheque [Variety]
Frankie Shaw Feature Directorial Debut 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank With Liam Neeson Lands Orion Distribution, Miramax & Picturestart Financing [Deadline] This is based on a very solid comic book and will star Talia Ryder (The Sweet East), Spike Fearn (Alien Romulus), and more up-and-comers. SG: someone texted me about this that they see it as a sign of cancel culture ending. Google Frankie if you don’t know about that.
Girls Like Girls Movie From Pop Star Hayley Kiyoko Lands At Focus Features [Deadline]
Variety’s Directors on Directors list has been released. Fairly logical pairings. Not sure why Matt Reeves is here—he didn’t make a movie in 2024. But I guess there’s The Batman connection with Kravitz. Jon Chu & Shawn Levy will be one of the worst things you’ve ever heard. Denis x Luca will be must watch for one kinda ambitious filmmaker, and Brady x Sean will be an entirely different one. These people took very very different paths. Those chats will be cool.
Jennifer Love Hewitt Confirms Return for New I Know What You Did Last Summer Movie at Sony [Variety] Now that the new Scream has sort of imploded, we’re dredging up other horror franchises. SG: Scream was already terrible, but the fact that they won’t pivot and are just trying to do the same thing, but more wack, is probably the most wack thing I know of happening right now. Howeverrrrr…I’m ridiculously excited the real JLO is doing this. I hope they make it really weird and it’s not another straightforward thing.
Bloodlust – Halsey Writing, Ti West Directing Amazon Series [Bloody Disgusting] Ti West and Halsey reunite for Amazon series Bloodlust with Halsey serving as the creator/writer and West directing. Truly the last thing we wanted to come out of the X trilogy for Ti West.
SUBTSTACK RECOMMENDATIONS
One of the all-time greats.
WATCH
Fantastic events happening at [New Plaza Cinema]
“The Best Films Playing in New York and Los Angeles Repertory Theaters in December 2024” [IndieWire]
Film at Lincoln Center Announces Winter/Spring 2025 Programming Lineup [Film Linc]
Nickel Boys [Angelika] One of the year’s best.
You can also see it in 35mm! [Angelika]
Kraven the Hunter [wide] Abs
The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim [wide] Another weird one.
The Day of the Fight [Angelika] The only way I found out this released was bit torrent. Sad. I really want to watch but am out of town. Heard it was $10mm which is wild.
September 5 w/ filmmakers in person [Angelika]
Daft Punk & Leiji Matsumoto’s Interstella 5555 [Angelika]
AI upscaling strikes again:
Endless Summer Syndrome [Quad]
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 [IFC]
Brando 100 series [Film Forum]
Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary retrospective [Film Linc]
DEC 18: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl [Film Linc]
DEC 19: Richard Linklater’s Texas True Crime: Bernie and Hitman [Paris]
DEC 20: The Room Next Door [Film Linc] I hated this movie so much.
JAN 3: SE7EN returns to theaters in IMAX for its 30th anniversary.
JAN 19: New York Jewish Film Festival 2025—lineup has been announced on [Film Linc]
STREAMING
Jaume Collet-Serra’s Carry-On now streaming on [Netflix]
Maria now streaming on [Netflix]
Conclave streaming on [Peacock]
Ramell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening on [Le Cinéma Club] One of the best documentaries of the last decade.
Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s Dream Team on [Metrograph]
Apparently [Netflix] released a miniseries of One Hundred Years of Solitude. So many new random Netflixes actually. Like how did we get this random Solitude adaptation a month after Paramo adaptation and only way to find out is home page. I will never have the time to watch these sadly.
ON OUR MIND
THREAD: Film Comment’s Best of the Year Picks [Twitter]
Barry Jenkins moderates a Q&A with Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín on Maria. Barry Jenkins is really really testing good will.
I got this email, spoiler alert, it’s NOT Mufasa
The Metrograph magazine has launched!
There should always be a marquee somewhere in New York City with Metropolitan on it.
BONUS READING: Past Utopias: The Enduring Charm of Whit Stillman’s Cinema [MUBI Notebook] “... the atomization I experienced in America in those years was just terrible. So I became obsessed with this idea of creating, through film, a kind of social fabric.”
Another great NYC marquee—this time from 1987. Someone told me this was AI. Unsure haha.
READ: Paul Schrader’s Favorite Works of Fiction [The New Yorker]
Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted, The Last of Us) has announced a new game—including the surprise reveal that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross will be scoring it. Here’s the full trailer + NIN announcement.
Jodorowsky’s Dune Bible—one of the holy grails of film ephemera.
READ: Armond White on Gladiator II [National Review]
When the brand requires synergy.
THREAD: The truth about The Wizard of Oz’s Ruby Slippers [Twitter]
Explore the Wim Wenders Experience on [Galerie]
Gen Z writes an intro for TCM as delivered by Ben Mankiewicz. This is and the Luigi stuff in same week.
Triple H meets the Knicks.
COOL: Film critic Travis Woods writes about Basic Instinct via the lens of the violent porno-smut novel-within-the-film, Shooter. [BW/DR]
You learn something new everyday.
Not who you would expect to be talking about lenses.
Maria is great. I’m going to see that again. I have a best-of I wrote up that I’ll drop next week, still need to see what I missed. And a few other long reads I need to finish up and will drop em here and there over holidays or save for January.
Re Showtime / Paramount’s new streaming show The Agency. Remake of a French spy show I never watched bc why tf would I? I can’t think of a cast as gigantic and mostly wasted as this. It’s not a terrible show actually, much better than typicals in the category that a thinking person can’t last one scene in. Actually I shouldn’t even compare, I have no idea, I never watch this junk. Haven’t for years. So anyway, there are so many famous actors in it, good ones too, so I wanted to sample. They’re there for absolutely no reason. This isn’t super complicated stuff. The action scenes feature day players even. The famous people exclusively talk to each other in offices and apartments. Why do they put so many famous people in this show? Does it boost ratings (is ratings the right word? I have no idea)? Does a show like this do better than The Old Man with Jeff Bridges and Amy Brenneman? Westworld had a cast like this, but it was deserved. Every actor had things to do, at least for S1 and maybe S2, before it became purely set piece nonsense. There’s so many superfluous characters in The Agency too. The show is written structured with people saying and doing things the audience doesn’t understand, but the superfluous characters are there to function as the audience, with the savvy characters explaining what just happened to them and thereby the audience. I don’t actually think the overcasting and this structure have anything to do with one another. I think they wrote it with this style and then also overcast it. So Jeffrey Wright is the boss who deals with things, and Richard Gere is the boss’ boss mostly removed from the action but knows things. Richard Gere also talks to his 20 years younger boss Dominic West on Zoom here and there, for no reason, with no impact on anything. They could be one character. We know nothing about any of them as characters, nor do we care. Gere and West filmed exclusively on one set each. Wright moves around and is actually in the show. But the utility will be that they explain things to one another. So instead of the boss just making decisions and taking actions, they have each other to tell things to and thereby explain to the audience. Some kids would call this a feature some a bug. Michael Fassbender rotates between talking to himself and talking to Kathryn Waterston, who has some kinda job, unclear what. But of course no character. Fassbender could just talk to Wright. And John Magaro also has a similar job to Waterston, they could easily be one character, along with another member of their team inexplicably there for Magaro to banter with. There’s multiple trainee characters too. It doesn’t give the show scale, it thins it out. Makes it such that there’s just a whole lot of nothing. We can’t keep track of anything and don’t care. Fassbender’s accent sucks, super weird, it takes you out of his performance. You just know this is not how he talks. Jodie Turner-Smith is probably the only unique character, actually given a character of sorts, albeit one we’ve seen a million times before. I watched S1 of The Old Man, haven’t watched S2, didn’t think I needed to. But that show gave these characters stuff to do. We lived with them for a while. The Jon Watts directed pilot was also great, very cinematic, the best thing Watts has ever done. The show didn’t do much afterwards, but it gave us a ton of time with Bridges, Brenneman and John Lithgow. We could really say who these people were and why they were doing what they were doing. It didn’t have enough story to tell, would’ve been better as a movie. But The Agency has even less story, and is just dragging that out by squeezing in an episodic monster/crisis-of-the-week plot into each. The gigantic cast means we get a few minutes with each of them per episode. I don’t know why you waste Richard Gere, John Magaro, Kathryn Waterston and more in this show. Let it be the Fassbender spy show. Jeffrey Wright is the boss. Jodie Turner-Smith is the girlfriend maybe spy. You can keep one more agency character if you come up with a reason for their character to exist. I guess this all adds up to…I’m continuously mystified as to how decisions get made around these things. I rewatched Armageddon this week for some reason, and It's kinda like that, where they have a thousand actors show up and do a few things. But even a movie for dummies like that, everyone's having a blast and all the small parts are excellent. Like just watch the opening. Billy Bob Thornton plays space traffic controller amidst camera spins...totally miscast yet perfectly cast. Keith David and Grace Zabriskie both get to scream. Eddie Griffin does funny stuff to add to the inertia of the thing. They all get to do fun stuff and make the movie enjoyable. Everyone's in a movie movie. They're cashing a check but also partying. The Agency is joyless. This can't be satisfying for anyone.
Justin Kurzel’s The Order. Great scenes. Weirdly directed. He cuts too much. Takes us out of it. Has the wrong angle so often. The wrong intensity. Like you want him to be tight when he’s wide. Want him to show a reaction or a glance, and he holds on a hand. Want to look in eyes, and we get profile. Performances are great, but yeah, camera does them no favors. The scenes. The strip mall. The moose hunt. The rally. Those three scenes could have been Heat level. They’re devised so well, so so cool. But they miss. Same with some of the writing choices. The scenes lack emphasis points. Maybe they don’t know what the emphasis is, where the emotional response is to come. So they shoot coverage, or they just picked the wrong aspect. When Jude Law gets back in car he could have done something incredible with Ty Sheridan. I thought that whole sequence was ready to be the thing you tell someone to go see the movie for. And then it just wasn’t. So close but no. Nicholas Hoult could have fired at the moose. It sent the wrong message. Why didn’t he? I don’t get the moose metaphor in the form they used it. The rally needed a big visual at end. Something outlandish. Visually connoting that this man is ready for action beyond words and burning crosses, beyond his mentor. Something to shock the audience. Rather, he just used words to replace the other guy using words. The written elements of the showdown siege were so cinematic yet the way it was shot made the whole impact limp. Scenes that could be 10s but end up 7/8. It’s a great movie made into a mediocre one. Has all the elements, but just didn’t work out. Still worth seeing, still one of the better movies of the year.
Was cool to watch this coincidentally the week I was reading Wright Thompson’s new book “The Barn,” (it doesn’t let me underline) about Emmett Till, the barn he was murdered in, and the surrounding area’s history. It’s a mega book. Also watch Tom Berenger x Debra Winger ZOG movie 1988 The Betrayed. Fargo took scenes from it, the bath tub with the kids. Terrifying. The Order could have achieved that with Odessa Young, but just whiffed. Also watched another pseudo adjacent 1989 movie The Package with Gene Hackman chasing fugitive Tommy Lee Jones, who a few years later would reteam with same director by Andrew Davis to be the chaser character in the far superior The Fugitive. But The Package was actually decent, because it leaned into Hackman’s character relationships rather than being just another Jackal esque assassin circle jerk. It doesn’t go as hard as The Betrayed on the white supremacy and antisemitism commentary. The Betrayed really gets into it. The Order doesn’t say anything about antisemitism, it just is the topic I think. Marc Maron is barely used, he’s just a guy calling out antisemites, and then the antisemites kill him. That’s it. The Betrayed shows the same thing with much more realism and fever.
Crazy Nicholas Hoult run. 3 in a row. You wouldn’t even know he’s in this movie from the marketing though, I didn’t. I guess they excluded him from marketing so he could focus on Nosferatu? Or is it just because Vertical released and they maybe picked their battles and focused the whole thing on Jude Law? Hoult having The Order, Juror #2 and Nosferatu in the same quarter is wild.
