Luca Guadagnino Wouldn’t Play Bout Him
December 2024, January 2025, and what I watched.
Two real housewives seasons (Beverly Hills and RHONY), two kings of comedy (Spike Lee’s and Martin Scorsese’s), A Complete Unknown, and more…
Dead Calm
First time watch
This one was huge for the program (the “program” being my thesis that Billy Zane was the hot one in Titanic). I’d never watched this, but it’s streaming on Criterion as part of the Nicole Kidman series. A thriller that is so expertly put together, but structured so that you almost never notice how seamless it is. Look at that photo above and tell me he Zane wouldn’t seduce Tilda Swinton in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love…
Challengers
Rewatch (Obviously)
Something that might mean nothing to you but means everything to me: Steven Soderbergh watched This Is Me Now and The Greatest Love Story Never Told but didn’t watch Challengers?
Anyway: I did a Q&A with Challengers (and Queer) screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes at MoMA at the top of January. It was fun! I wish I could’ve run it here, too. A very boring logistical question because I’m in my tennis era, but I have always wondered if he made a master timeline of what exactly Art Donaldson won when (he had), and how to write what is an otherwise small and forgotten tournament but make it feel big. Justin brought up He Got Game, one of my favorite movies: to anyone who passed by on the sidewalk, the ending of that movie looks just like a regular pick-up basketball game between two guys. But to Denzel Washington and Ray Allen, it’s an entire world.
The King of Comedy
Rewatch
I introduced this to a sold-out Metrograph audience last Friday. Typically I’ll rewatch the movie being screened and jot down some notes for an intro ahead of a gig like this, but I didn’t have time the week before, and who I am kidding? I know this movie by heart. There are so many little jokes in the background of scenes that I’m still uncovering with every watch. This time I was particularly thrilled by the way Sandra Bernhard stomps through every scene, a freaky yuppie who does her best impression of glamour.
An excerpt from my brief intro: A lot of what I write for this newsletter is just trying to keep up with the conclusions The King of Comedy has already come to. To covet something is to resent it a little bit, to be truly bewitched by something is to give up the part of you that sees it with clarity. Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) is an autograph hound, but more than anything he wants to be seen. A great trick of the movie is that the longer we look at him, the bigger and more brazen his performance becomes until we’re questioning what was a performance at all. De Niro plays against type here; usually, his characters rush to betrayal or resentment or try to resist their own emotions. Sometimes it doesn’t even occur to Rupert to be offended, or that he’s being politely rebuffed. He would feel right at home on stan Twitter or jumping to conclusions on TikTok. You can draw a direct line from him to Club Chalamet.
The Original Kings of Comedy
First time watch
Directed by Spike Lee! Steve Harvey has the prosperity gospel veneers, Cedric the Entertainer has the mischievous little grin, D.L. Hughley… is also there. Bernie Mac is everything: petty, unscrupulous, loud, harsh, impatient, hot-tempered, and cold-blooded at exactly the right moment. (I kept thinking of Katt Williams on Club Shay Shay, defending Bernie Mac as the only one of the group who deserved respect.) After I finished watching it, I saw a Cedric the Entertainer commercial for a pharmaceutical I think? I couldn’t decide if it made me sad, or if that’s just part of getting older.
A Complete Unknown
New release
Thank you to Hung Up reader Nick Britell, who I sat next to at the NYC premiere, for giving me the most comprehensive primer on Bob Dylan 30 seconds before the movie started. I’m generally not that moved by James Mangold’s work, and some parts of this movie felt like a cipher to me. I didn’t mind that Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) remained stubbornly unknowable throughout, but to believe the movie’s thesis about Dylan (that he’s an iconoclast, a rebel, genius, and tortured and mischievous) is undermined by how otherwise conventional the movie itself is. The scenes I liked best had the thrill of invention (Dylan and Joan Baez, played by an excellent Monica Barbero, playing onstage together, or Dylan and a blues player, played by Big Bill Morganfield, having a jam session), not the dutiful recounting of basic biography.
I did have a real problem with how this movie treated its women characters. It’s outright contempt! Mangold reduces both of the female leads (Barbero and Elle Fanning) to creative thieves or romantic landlords; they exchange sharp glances from centerstage to stage left. As Dylan becomes increasingly famous and uncomfortable about that fame, we see this through his disappointed glances at his women fans, but the men who actually hampered his career with their stern ideas about folk (or making him record covers) get redeemed by the end.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 1
First time watch
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