In Which We Exercise A Spiritual And Moral Preference

Always the Bridesmaid

by ETHAN PETERSON

Bright
dir. David Ayer
118 minutes

I recently received an e-mail from a concerned reader, a member of the guild. He asked me why we put the only name of the director on a movie review when the writer of a film is often just as important to the final product. As an example, he cited The Princess Bride, which required almost no input from Rob Reiner at all, and was possibly made substantially worse by the director’s presence. Well, this concerned reader had a point, and I will take it under advisement. But today is not the time, since the writer of Bright is dogshit, and whether the changes director David Ayer made to the script are good or bad, it is spiritually and morally preferable to pretend that Bright was more like an immaculate conception.

Pretending only goes so far, however. Bright still features the awful, patterned, unfunny dialogue of He Who Shall Not Be Named, and listening to it is something of a chore. On the plus side of the ledger is the presence of two likable and disciplined actors: as a police officer in Los Angeles, Will Smith, who is finally beginning to look seriously old, and Joel Edgerton as his partner, an orc. The former is somewhat traditional casting, but the latter is inspired. Edgerton’s chameleonic face is intrinsically unmemorable. Slathering it in blue makeup gives him the distinctiveness required to slip into a particular role.

For the amount of adjectives I have used so far in this essai, I should probably try to get my name removed from this review. Sometimes such words are required to say what you mean. (I will try to be more plainspoken from now on; like if Raymond Carver had a child with the guy who wrote The Trumpet of the Swan.) Bright has its own vocabulary/lore, although it is pretty shitty/dumb. Urban fantasy is new to Max Landis, since the only book he has ever read is the Model Penal Code. This Los Angeles is filled with different races: orcs, elves, centaurs (I didn’t see any, but I think it says this in the wikipedia). OK actually there are not that many races.

Envisioning Bright as the first effort in a series of films, Ayer never has the Dark Lord of the Elves make an appearance in Bright, but we are told that a thousand years ago he was fought off by orcs and elves and humans. Since the Los Angeles depicted in Bright features rampant police abuse (“Everybody hates cops,” Smith’s daughter tells him before never appearing in Bright again), racism, sexism (Noomi Rapace has all of four lines), anti-Semitism, poverty, gang violence and prostitution, drug use and slavery, it is unclear that the Dark Lord did not, in fact, win a significant victory.

Smith and Edgerton spend the entire movie trying to protect a magic wand from its rightful owner, a powerful elf played by Ms. Rapace. The majority of the running time consists of running between two locations, as it was clear Netflix was intent on paying most of Bright’s $90m production budget to Will Smith. I can’t attack the wisdom of this move, since no other actor clicks so completely with the streaming service’s core audience, and Smith’s recent choices at the actual box-office have been wretched. Ayer does enough to make Bright feel like his other cop stories (End of Watch, Training Day). He is knowledgeable, at least, about how cops feel and think, and several scenes reflect this experience.

Like many of Ayer’s films, he tries to convince us of a variety of plot twists that only make sense in his mind. Unfortunately, this is also the execrable trend of the writer behind this project, and the pairing leads to a messy, unemotional final project, which is probably one of two reasons why Bright received some seriously harsh reviews from critics. As bad as Bright was, there is something redeemable about the project that could probably be salvaged by another writer. Then again, you could say that about anything that does not involve Colin Trevorrow.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Escape From The Pursuing Army

Dead Air

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Last Jedi
dir. Rian Johnson
152 minutes

There is a scene in the middle of The Last Jedi, the second Star Wars film made by Disney, where Benicio Del Toro is disinterestedly ransacking a ship he has stolen, looking for treasure. He comes across a collection of coins, preserved for their sentimental value because, of course, in an age of interstellar travel, there could be no actual reason to have individuated currency. Therefore these objects only have whatever meaning their owners, or others, ascribe to them. To a thief from another planet, they would be nothing more than useless baubles, unless they happened to contain precious metals or gems.

Well, nothing in this interminable movie has any actual value. It is good, solid fan service that only has meaning because of sentimental referents. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is looking somewhat rough, but the past two decades in voice acting have made him expert at that particular field, and everyone else short of the preternaturally talented Adam Driver as Ben Solo sounds mealy mouthed in comparison. In The Last Jedi, Luke never leaves the isolated island on which he resides, but he is still the clear highlight. He is the only character in this entire production capable of change.

This is no slight on the rest of the cast. The main protagonists of The Last Jedi never actually do much in the empty chase narrative supplied here, which consists of General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) slowly, slowly pursuing the rebels across space. But they are all genuinely likable in their own way. As Rey, Daisy Ridley possesses a faithful masculinity and imposing physical strength befitting the final Jedi. As Finn, John Boyega is given rather less to work with, but he continues to prove that his breakout performance in the British comedy Attack the Block announced the arrival of a serious talent in need of a writer, any writer.

Director Rian Johnson is not that, but he does his best with what Kathleen Kennedy and Co. have permitted him. No one we care about dies in The Last Jedi; no one particularly lives either. There is one brief moment where mechanic Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) murders three enemy pilots and Boyega lets out a cheer. This isolated incident only emphasizes how little there is to enthuse about for in The Last Jedi as a whole.

A major subplot, one that ends up of being of absolutely no consequence to the story as a whole, involves Boyega and Rose freeing a number of animals abused by jockeys and trainers on a racetrack in a snooty, upscale town. Given that Disney reaps financial rewards from promoting a Saratoga Springs Resort in Orlando, this seems a bit hypocritical, but it is still a positive message.

Actually The Last Jedi is full of such preachiness, as if to prove that this saga will be about something through sheer force of effort. Animal rights comes into focus a number of times, and the film seems to delight in the inclusion of a diverse cast, none of who we actually begin to know or understand. Is this simply the empty virtue signaling of a massive, hegemonic company? Probably, but it seems somewhat well-intentioned just the same.

These general practices do not come anywhere near actual artistry, of course, and those who say they enjoyed The Last Jedi are on some level lying to themselves. This movie is the paradigmatic example of a work of mercenary fiction, emphasized by the deliberate criticism Johnson levies against such people, who take money from both sides, in his impotent, inoffensive script for The Last Jedi.

As Johnson presciently observes, we tend to mount our strongest attacks on our major weakness as they are displayed in our enemies. The Last Jedi reserves its withering critique for individuals devoid of substance and purpose, in an attempt to distract us from its total lack of the same. At some future moment, though, Star Wars will have to again have to tell some kind of original story. In life, you can only postpone that essential task for so long.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Here Is A Director We Would Like To Work With

Ammunition

One of Italy's finest directors and an accomplished actor in his own right, Vittorio De Sica did come to America to work in Hollywood in the 1950s, when he took money from Howard Hughes. (He fumed in a hotel while Hughes gave him no work.) De Sica was much happier in his homeland of Italy, where he fiercely prized his independence, making films of classical beauty on infinitesimal budgets. Even his worst projects possess an incontrovertible liveliness that makes them worthwhile. A few years before his death, the American biographer Charles Thomas Samuels completed De Sica's best interview.

CHARLES THOMAS SAMUELS: Signor De Sica, how did you meet Zavattini and what made you decide to collaborate with him?

VITTORIO DE SICA: I met him when I had decided to film a novel by Cesare Giulio Viola, called Prico. A short time before that, I had met Zavattini in Milan and thought, "Here is a writer I would like to work with." I admired his style, which had just then been revealed in his novel They're Talking So Much About Me. The film we made together, The Children Are Watching Us, had a great success because of the poetry and melancholy of a marriage failing before the witness of a child, who learns that adults make mistakes, who is forced to suffer his mother's adultery and his father's suicide. But when it came out, we were in the middle of our Fascist period, that absurd little Italian republic of ours, and I was asked to go to Venice to lead the Fascist film school. I refused, so my unfortunate little film came out without the name of its author.

CTS: Your collaboration with Zavattini seems to me the most fruitful partnership between director and writer in film history. Has it been completely untroubled?

VDS: Sometimes producers, after discussing a project with Zavattini and me, have turned to other writers, thus disturbing our rapport. But in these so-called betrayals, I was never at fault. Unfortunately, our producers often make films with American backing, so sometimes they say they want an Anglo-Saxon flavor and hire an English-speaking writer. But I stoutly maintain that a good film must reflect the country of its origin. A French film must be truly French, a Yugoslav film truly Slavic, etc. When one starts making these Italo-English, Italo-American films, he bound to fail.

CTS: Would you go so far as to disown those films you made outside of Italy, such as A Young World?

VDS: Not A Young World, because that film deals with an international problem which is still being talked about. When we decided to make it, a million women a year were dying in France because of abortions. The film was a defense of the birth control pill, and it argued that abortion should be a recognized fact, dealt with efficiently and not hidden. At this very moment, there is a scandal in France because of all those prominent women who declared they had abortions in order to oppose the law against it. Look at all the trouble their sincerity has brought them!

CTS: Signor De Sica, you are one of the most famous of neorealists. What does neorealism mean to you?

VDS: I recently discussed this question with a British journalist. You know, people think about neorealism means exterior shooting, but they are wrong. Most films today are made in a realistic style, but they are actually opposed to neorealism, to that revolution in cinematic language which we started and which they think to follow. Because neorealism is not about shooting films in authentic locales; it is not reality. It is reality filtered through poetry, reality transfigured. It is not Zola, not naturalism, verism, things which are ugly.

CTS: By poetry, don't you mean scenes like the one in The Bicycle Thief, where the father takes his son to the trattoria in order to cheer the boy up only to be overcome with the weight of his problems?

VDS: Ah, that is one of the few light scenes in the film.

CTS: But sad at the same time.

VDS: Yes, that is what I mean by poetry.

CTS: Was that scene improvised?

VDS: It was written in advance, but of course, during the moment of filming, gestures are produced by the actors that reflect their dreams and taste. I knew there must be some shift in the scene to show the change in the father's heart, and I directed toward that end.

CTS: You say that neorealism is realism filtered through poetry; nonetheless, it is harsh because you forced your compatriots right after the war to confront experiences they had just suffered through. Didn't they resist?

VDS: Neorealism was born after a total loss of liberty, not only personal, but artistic and politics. It was a means of rebelling against the stifling dictatorship that had humiliated Italy. When we lost the war, we discovered our ruined morality. The first film that placed a very tiny stone in the reconstruction of our former dignity was Shoeshine.

CTS: Usually, audiences resist such reconstruction.

VDS: In fact, Shoeshine failed. It is easy to see why. After the war, Italians were hungry for foreign films. They flocked first to American, then Russian movies, but both proved a great disillusionment. Slowly, bit by bit, the public came back to their own. Rossellini, Zavattini, and I came out too early. Many films that were shown then would have had a greater success if they were new today.

CTS: Do you know the films of Olmi?

VDS: Of course.

CTS: What do you think of them?

VDS: I like them very much. He is a very delicate director. He doesn't try to epater le bourgeois, he says what he thinks in his own way: simple, modest, humble.

CTS: I'd like to know what you think of his contemporaries. Bellocchio?

VDS: I don't like him. He is too propagandistic and presumptuous.

CTS: Pasolini?

VDS: He is good, particularly in his Roman films, like Accattone, but I also admire his Oedipus Rex.

CTS: Don't you find his theme banal?

VDS: Perhaps Pasolini is a bit too literary, too educated. It's been said that Shakespeare is better played by ignorant than by overly cultivated actors. Pasolini imposes his immense cultivation on his work, he could probably use more freedom, greater simplicity.

CTS: I find that Godard has badly influence most of these directors.

VDS: Godard is a master, a totally personal artist, but the inventor of the New Wave. He creater followers, imitators, and imitation is always deplorable.

CTS: What about his most important Italian imitator, Bertolucci?

VDS: No. Bertolucci is our best young director. I liked him from the first, when showed La commare secca to me. He is a young man with a new vision of cinema.

CTS: How do you compare his Conformist with your Garden of the Finzi-Continis?

VDS: They are totally different.

CTS: They have similar subjects and the same leading lady.

VDS: Okay, but Sanda is not very good in his film. Still, the picture is very beautiful, except for a certain willful and eccentric aetheticism. For example, when the father's madhouse is made to look like the Roman Senate, I find the effect too recherche, too painterly. Bertolucci admits he followed Magritte. Another young director I like is Carmelo Bene, unlike all the others, he has a sense of humor. And he doesn't make propaganda, which to me isn't art.

CTS: How do you feel the younger critics treat you? For example, the Cahiers du cinema group.

VDS: They have never liked my films, and they are welcome to their opinion. I am never affected by critics I don't esteem. I go my own way, mistaken or not. I trust my conscience and my sensibility. On the other hand, I have listened to those critics who said that De Sica made no important films since Umberto D., and how, fortunately, feel there has been a revival with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. They are right, because I made too many films dependent on the will of American financiers. For example, I made a film with Sophia Loren, which earned her an Oscar. I made films that are too industrial, not as deeply felt as Umberto D. When I offered that film to Rizzoli, he said, "Why do you want to make Umberto D.? Why don't you make Don Camillo? I will give you a hundred million lire, half of the grosses." But I was full of noble intentions then; I didn't make Don Camillo, I made Umberto D, The Bicycle Thief and Shoeshine myself, and I became dependent on producers who wanted me to make films I won't say that I didn't believe in, but that I would rather not have made.

CTS: Are you nostalgic for the earlier days?

VDS: Very. Umberto D. was made absolutely without compromise, without concessions to spectacle, the public, the box office.

CTS: What about Brief Encounter? Your rule doesn't hold up.

VDS: Yes, Brief Encounter is beautiful.

CTS: Even allowing for the ill-suited subject, why did you smother it in such beautiful scenery and chic costuming? It seems to me a film about Faye Dunaway's wardrobe.

VDS: Faye Dunaway brought her personal dressmaker with her. That's the way with all actresses!

CTS: Such a film gives ammunition to those who use your later works to dismiss your entire career.

VDS: It was a mistake. Like all artists I make mistakes.

CTS: How do you direct nonprofessionals?

VDS: I explain and explain, and I am very convincing. I seem to have a special gift for making myself understood by actors. Either I play the part or I explain it, slowly, patiently, with a smile on my face and never any anger.

CTS: Do you have many takes?

VDS: No.

CTS: If it isn't right?

VDS: If it isn't right, I sometimes repeat, but usually I keep what I have shot. But I rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.

CTS: Is it difficult for you to act for others, as, for example, in General Della Rovere?

VDS: That was my best role because the film was made by a director I esteem.

CTS: You are also very good acting for yourself, especially in The Gold of Naples.

VDS: That was painful. I couldn't see myself and kept asking the cameramen and mechanics, 'Do you believe me? How am I doing?" A line of dialogue can be said a thousand ways; you need someone behind the camera to tell you which is the right one.

CTS: You have the rushes.

VDS: Yes, but in Italy there is never enough money. Producers always tell you that once a thing is shot it must remain that way.

CTS: You've worked in color and black and white. Which do you prefer?

VDS: Black and white, because reality is black and white.

CTS: That's not true.

VDS: Color is distracting. When you see a beautiful landscape in a color film, you forget the story. Americans use color for musicals. All my best films were made in black and white.

CTS: What do you think of the color experiments of Antonioni?

VDS: He is an aesthete. He takes red apples and paints them white.

CTS: Most critics today maintain that the true film artist writes what he directs.

VDS: That's not true. Directing is completely different from writing; it is the creation of life. If Bicycle Thief had been directed by someone else, it would have been good, but different from the film I made.

CTS: Does this mean that you think dialogue less important than images?

VDS: Images are the only important things. Let me give you another example of what I mean. Five films have been made of The Brothers Karamazov, all bad. Only one came close to Dostoyevsky: the version by Fedor Ozep. That's how the director is an author. In all these films the same story was used, but only one of them was any good.

CTS: You have often said that you greatly value Rene Clar and Charlie Chaplin. How have they influenced you?

VDS: In no way.

CTS: Not even in Miracle in Milan?

VDS: No, that is a wholly personal film. I detest imitations. In fact, I sometimes don't go to see a certain film for fear I'll want to imitate it.

CTS: How does your success affect you?

VDS: Success has never made me drunk. I have never told myself one of my films is wonderful; I have always thought I could have done better. I always want to improve. When I have done something badly, I recognize it. When I do something well, I want to do better.

1972