#wesley morris

[filmnoirfoundation]

SPECIAL PROMO CODE FOR FNF SUPPORTERS

After a two-year hiatus, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns for its 29th year to the newly restored Castro Theatre, May 6-10, with a slate of silent classics from around the world. As always, all film screenings will feature live musical accompaniment. The FNF is pleased to be supporting the SFSFF’s screenings of Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1929) and Marie M. Harder’s Bookkeeper Kremke (1930).

Queen Kelly opens the festival on Wednesday, May 6, at 7:00 PM. The late silent-era masterpiece that never was, as well as the last major production entrusted to Erich von Stroheim, has been reconstructed from surviving footage by Milestone Films. Bearing all the Stroheim hallmarks—lush visuals, meticulous attention to detail, and rank corruption at every level of society—it’s also a showcase for Gloria Swanson who runs an emotional gamut from innocent convent girl to hardened brothel keeper. Live musical accompaniment by Eli Denson conducting the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra. Introduction to the film by American film critic and podcast host Wesley Morris.

Bookkeeper Kremke screens Sunday, May 10, at 1:00 PM. This is the only narrative feature completed by director Marie M. Harder, one of the few women to direct in German cinema during the Weimar era. Ukrainian-born Anna Sten makes her German-cinema debut as a daughter coming into her own despite the fury of her tradition-bound father suddenly downsized from middle-class respectability. Music for Bookkeeper Kremke will be provided by pianist and violinist Guenter Buchwald and percussionist Frank Bockius. Film restoration and digital preservation expert Julia Wallmüller of the Deutsche Kinemathek will introduce the film.

The SFSFF has extended a discount to FNF supporters. Use code NOIRSF for a $2 discount for a maximum of 2 tickets per order.

The full schedule, passes and tickets are available on the SFSFF website.

[threadbareturnbacks]

These movies are predicated upon a certain amount of visual chaos and are comfortable with trauma as long as it goes unplumbed. But for all of the bureaucratic, interstellar darkness, there’s scant human desire, despite the signals being sent by the tight, rubbery costumes — no lust, no petty transgression. If you see a gutter in one of these movies, it probably leads to a state-of-the-art crime-fighting cave. The job here is to remove stains, to take out the trash. But what would happen if Spider-Man tweaked Dr. Strange’s nipples?

Our culture has always been at its most pure when it’s in the gutter, when it’s conflating divine and ugly, beauty and base. Blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz: Somebody was always on hand to cry debasement (not unjustly in minstrelsy’s case). But the crude truth of trash is that we like it — to cry over, to cringe and laugh at — even when we say we don’t. The gutter is where our popular culture began, and the gaminess lurking there is our truest guise.

So really what I mean when I say trash vanished is that it vanished from movies. But trash is a persistent, consumptive force that’ll set up shop in any eager host. And its shamelessness went and found a new home, in American politics.

American Culture Is Trash Culture by Wesley Morris

[luststricken]

THE NEW YORK TIMES PRESENTS: FRAMING BRITNEY SPEARS (2021) dir. Samantha Stark

[goodblacknews]

Katori Hall, Les Payne and Tamara Payne, Darnella Frazier, Wesley Morris and More Win Pulitzer Prizes in 2021

Katori Hall, Les Payne and Tamara Payne, Darnella Frazier, Wesley Morris and More Win Pulitzer Prizes in 2021

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson) The Pulitzer Prize winners for 2021 were announced today. Notable among them were Katori Hall for Drama for The Hot Wing King, Les Payne and Tamara Payne for Biography for The Dead Are Rising: The Life of Malcolm X, Tania León for Music for Stride, Marcia Chatelain for History for Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Mitchell S. Jackson for…

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[librarycards]

It’s grueling work, the business of becoming a butterfly. Long, ugly periods of churn and slog. But then you have this light, fluttering thing. It might have seemed inadequate — or incongruous, at least — for King to grip the sides of a lectern to tell congregants that they were all striving to bring the nation closer to embodying the hair beneath his nose. But when you know that he thought of his look as bespeaking a kind of weightlessness, you could also surmise that he knew the price of such flight might be life itself.

Wesley Morris, My Mustache, My Self. 

[01sentencereviews]

Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?

In many Oscar bait movies, interracial friendships come with a paycheck, and follow the white character’s journey to enlightenment.

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[fullregalia]

Nostalgia is history for dessert.

Wesley Morris on the symbolic role of New York in the new High Fidelity reboot in a post-COVID city. So grateful Jenna and Wesley are back for Still Processing: Quarantine Edition.

[reactingtosomething]

We still crave movement on screen and this year’s great performances were magnificently physical.

Everything about “The Favourite” is a little geometric. Everybody is angling for something. But what Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and particularly Olivia Colman are asked to do with their bodies becomes an achievement stranger and far more delightful than regular math. It becomes origami. They do flabbergasting amounts of rising and falling, topping and bottoming. Has there ever been a movie whose comedy is predicated upon physical abjection as a literal expression of its political and sexual corollaries? That’s a long way of saying that each woman’s performance has to keep a lot on the table and in the air. And Stone and Weisz have to orbit the bewitching solar object that is Colman.

Which is why picking just one of these performances seemed unthinkable. Remove one leg of the triangle, and the structure collapses, the B.D.S.M. Rube Goldberg contraption sputters and stalls. The three-way juggling act that Stone, Weisz and Colman undertake seems almost calculated to flummox the Academy, which insists on dividing performances into lead and supporting. For one thing, “supporting” in this case is synonymous with “undermining,” and for another, the shifting power dynamics work at the level of the narrative as well as in Queen Anne’s court. Stone’s Abigail might be the protagonist, as it’s her rise from the kitchen to the queen’s bedroom that propels the plot. But to the extent that “The Favourite” rewrites “All About Eve,” it’s Weisz’s Duchess of Marlborough who occupies the Bette Davis slot. Her fall is perhaps a richer drama than Abigail’s rise.

As for Colman’s queen, she can’t rise or fall — absolute monarchy is like that — but she is nonetheless the source of the film’s sharpest comedy and its deepest pathos. At a time when we seem to be fascinated with portraits of power, her combination of majesty and abjection feels like something new under the sun. 

by Wesley Morris and A.O. Scott

Click through below for the rest of Morris and Scott’s picks: Yoo Ah-in (Burning), Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade), Yalitza Aparicio (Roma), Julia Roberts (Ben is Back), Regina Hall (Support the Girls), Lakeith Stanfield (Sorry to Bother You), Toni Collette (Hereditary), Ethan Hawke (First Reformed), and Glenn Close (The Wife).