Through some combination of the kids being older, sabbatical, and insomnia, I’ve seen more movies recently than. . . well, more than whatever becomes before recently. Despite the increasing crapification of all things against which writers and actors are engaged in a heroic struggle, I keep finding interesting, serious and compelling work: a lot of documentaries, a lot of it directed by women, lots with various shades of feminist ideas and methods, so I explored a few in my favorite way of writing about film, the purely subjective mini-response.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
The collaboration of two powerful, righteous female artists, the documentary director Laura Poitras and the photographer Nan Goldin, produces a meditation on the collaboration of art and activism as Goldin, who lost many friends to AIDS, draws on the legacy of ACT-UP to take on the Sackler family, the criminals who made billions off the half a million and counting opioid deaths of this epidemic and washed their blood money by slapping their name on a bunch of museums. Essayistic in structure, framed by the story of Goldin’s sister who took her own life following being institutionalized for failing to conform, and making brilliant use of Goldin’s photographs of a lost world, it’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, achieving something like what Chris Marker did with the form. Reading picture books to my kids, I think a lot about how the good ones understand the pictures don’t just illustrate what happens, they give you something you don’t get from the words - beauty, mood, color, a world, and that’s what we get here. I won’t soon forget the visual contrast between the vital, blurred, life-force colors of her photographs with the sterile art mausoleums bearing the Sackler’s name. Or the miraculous continuity between the young artist who, among many many other things, took photos of herself having sex (because, she says, as good teachers know, you shouldn’t ask someone else to do something you wouldn’t do yourself), and the sixty-something artist commanding the room of activists, strategically planning actions. And the emptiness of the Sackler’s faces on the zoom call where the are compelled to listen to testimonies of families, next to her knowing, compassionate, alive face, and how they all laugh when she jokes about the paradoxes of being a radical who knows punishment doesn’t work but that we desperately need accountability: “If anyone should be in prison, they should. When we abolish prisons, they should be the last ones out.”
Meet Me in the Bathroom
I’ve read countless books and watched countless movies about lost New Yorks like the one Goldin chronicles, and they always stir something even when they aren't the masterpieces Poitras’s film is. Meet Me in the Bathroom, a record of the early ‘00s scene around bands like the Strokes, Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, isn’t a masterpiece but it makes a few smart choices that give it an uncanny power. There’s no contemporary footage, so the musicians are suspended in time; all middle-aged musings are kept in the voice over. The scene dies less dramatically than Goldin’s: people disperse because the rents get too high, Napster fucks up their sales. There’s no “where are they now” titles at the end so it’s up to you to google, should you choose, and discover that, despite the usual indulgences, everyone is alive and still making music, although mostly to smaller fragments of the more fragmentary world.
It’s particularly uncanny if, like me, you lived in NY at the time, knew these bands, went to some of the places shown in the film (RIP Mars Bar) but had nothing to do with that world. No matter what you come for, or why you stay, something about this place rubs off on you. And what a delightful dork James Murphy is. Apparently he asked his therapist before trying ecstasy. There are stupider ways to go about such things.
To the End
The follow up to the amazing Knock Down the House, which tracked the campaigns of four insurgent progressive women running for congress in 2018, of whom only AOC won. (One of them, Cori Bush, ran again and won in 2020). To the End has the somewhat harder task of telling the story about the much harder task AOC and activists face of actually trying to shit done to make the world burn somewhat more slowly, in the form of the Green New Deal. This presents narrative challenges since unlike with an electoral campaign, even the passage or non-passage of various laws doesn’t make a real end. There were several versions shot with the changing fates of the various climate bills leading up to passage of the IRA. But it’s a great portrait of the day to day of activism, and especially of young people who - much like those in ACT-UP thirty some years before, face the injustice not only of their horrific situation but of having unfairly been given an impossible task not of their choosing, the shock and terror of being young and realizing that you might not know what to do, that nothing you do can fully rise to the task, but you have no choice. It also made me think a lot about how I relate to “the news” - a term that feels pretty insufficient to describing the reality it gestures towards. I “consume” a lot of news - strange world, that - but I don’t experience it in the integrated, seamless way I did when I watched the news as a kid with my parents. Seeing footage of young people standing bravely in front of Joe Manchin’s car, begging for their lives, I had this strong sense, not so much of, why didn’t this work more effectively, but more, why isn’t this an iconic moment we all know? And are these things somehow connected?
She Said
A tale of the New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story. Not a great movie, but one thing I really appreciated about it were the matter of fact way the working mother element was handled. The kids are there in the background but there’s no big artificial conflict about the roles. And when Carey Mulligan’s character has postpartum depression, her boss just asks if she thinks working will help, and she says yes, and that’s that. The other thing I love is a tiny detail: when Zoe Kazan’s character is trying to get a famous actress to talk, and they start complaining about being mistreated by the Times, she doesn’t get defensive and she doesn’t make a big speech about the obligation to go forward. She says: “I'm sorry that was your experience.” A sentence and impulse you learn if you want to be good at listening, at being a friend, a parent, teacher, therapist, organizer, and probably as important to many kinds of journalism as all the macho President’s men stuff. #Metoo or not, that little detail was the most feminist thing about the movie to me.
Barbie
My five year old son, who loves all things pink, was really taken in by the posters for this and really wanted to see it. I kept hearing about how much it wasn’t for kids, but I decided to give it a try, his first full length movie in the theater. I’m glad I saw it with him because, though his eyes, it wasn’t at all a movie about the Woman Question but about the relationship between the world of play and the one we call “real,” about what we want from our dolls and what they want from us. In a conversation with him a few days after about what counts as “real” he said Barbie land was real and not real. “Like it’s real in your imagination?” I asked. No, he said. “It’s not real in this world. Barbie land is real in Barbie land.”