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Short Takes

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New Pollution

Short Takes

๐˜ˆ๐˜ง๐˜ต๐˜ฆ๐˜ณ ๐˜ ๐˜ข๐˜ฏ๐˜จ โ€ข ๐˜›๐˜ฉ๐˜ฆ ๐˜‰๐˜ข๐˜ต๐˜ฎ๐˜ข๐˜ฏ โ€ข ๐˜‹๐˜ฆ๐˜ค๐˜ฆ๐˜ฑ๐˜ต๐˜ช๐˜ฐ๐˜ฏ

Keith Uhlich
Mar 24, 2022
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Short Takes

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Deception

After Yang: Much too Instagram Stories: The Motion Picture for my taste, though casting Colin Farrell as a cogitative tea connoisseur is aces. Also now want โ€œOzu-visionโ€ as an option for FaceTime, so get on that Tim Cook.

The Batman: The film I imagine Ricky Fitts would grow up to make after the events of American Beauty. Gotham City certainly has the emo-depressive aura here of a discarded plastic bag blowing in the windโ€ฆfor three hours that admittedly proceed at a gallop, and which are bookended by the same earnestly deployed Nirvana needle-drop (OK, doomer). Like many from the J.J. Abrams school, โ€˜Aโ€™-For-Effort is director Matt Reevesโ€™ aesthetic ethos. He can construct, but his and Greig Fraserโ€™s images are never more than competently oblique. Preferable to Nolanโ€™s chaotic, bludgeoning bombast, of course, but thatโ€™s beyond a low bar. Pattinson gives good brooding-billionaire Chiroptera; Paul Dano stinks in that uniquely Paul Dano way (his dweeb-psycho act is now in its pushing-40 paunch phase); I might very well watch Colin Farrell as goombah Penguin when his spinoff HBOMax series hits the streams; and Zoรซ Kravitz, youโ€™re no Michelle Pfieffer, shockerIknow. Penning this capsule right as Reeves has released a telling deleted scene featuring Irish Tye Sheridan as Hannibal Jester: โ€œHeโ€™s got a vision.โ€ โ€œYou think his motive is political?โ€ โ€œOh no no, this is very, very personal.โ€ From your acid-gnarled lips to geek-Godโ€™s ears.

Deception: Many have tried, and most have failed, at successfully translating Philip Roth from page to screen. Arnaud Desplechin makes it work in his take on Rothโ€™s 1990 novel of (maybe-real-life) infidelity by, in part, leaning into verbal artifice. The elder Roth avatar (Denis Podalydรจs) is American; his younger lover-muse (Lรฉa Seydoux) is English. Yet everyone speaks, with nary a hint of knowing irony, Desplechinโ€™s native French. Itโ€™s the right approach given that Rothโ€™s dexterous prose, if adapted and enacted literally, loses much of its impact. His work (at best shameful, shameless, probing, pointed, offensive, hilarious) is ideally transposed through an authorial hall-of-mirrors, which means you need as knotty and nimble a voice as youโ€™re getting. Desplechinโ€™s close enough to that, and often equal to the challenge. I laughed especially hard at the smash-cut transition between post-coital discussions of foreskin (cut? uncut?) and the sociopolitical aims of the state of Israel, Rothโ€™s unclouded profaneness being one of the crucial keys to his profundity.

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