Pivot to Paper
(or, Living in the Material World)
IF ANYONE REMEMBERS my screed last summer about Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, you might recall my sorting new releases into two highly problematic categories: there are films which, whatever their flaws, I consider “real movies”, and then there’s everything else. Of this summer’s new releases, I can say I pretty much hated Celine Song’s new “romantic comedy” Materialists—a cold, intellectually lazy, shallow and unfunny film about people who can be described as same—but, by sheer dint of trying to do or be about something, I can begrudgingly concede it was a Real Movie with discernible human logic guiding its (nevertheless bad) artistic decisions.
Something I’ve been reluctant to share here is that, starting last summer, I’ve gravitated back towards my childhood passion of cartooning1. Curiously, I found myself working out my animosity towards Materialists in the form of a joke “fan poster”. Having taken a step back, I can see my influences included Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities, Guy Jouineau and Guy Bourduge’s poster for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (“Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now”) and Fukuda Shigeo’s proto-Mad Men silhouettes of doomed salarymen…
Later in the summer, my pals Davis Fowlkes, Cosmo Bjorkenheim and John Wilson (of HBO’s How to with John Wilson) announced they were going to be showing Song’s film at LOW Cinema, their new 45-seat theater in my neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens2. I facetiously offered to make a cleaner version to promote the screenings. To my surprise and delight, they said yes, and last night it was officially installed in the LOW poster case. But why give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome shilling for a movie you hated? All I can offer in my defense is, there’s more than one way to criticize a film…
Separate from my official debut as a poster artist (move over, Drew Stuzan!), I also wrote a short piece for Screen Slate in praise of Elia Kazan’s 1960 melodrama Wild River, which screens tonight at Anthology Film Archives, a movie I respect too much to try sullying with bad cartooning. I wish I had had more room to get into Kazan’s explicit references to the agitprop films he made with Leo Hurwitz and Sidney Meyers before going full snitch, his second wife Barbara Loden’s casting in Wild River as one of many checks on Montgomery Clift’s liberal conscience, and Kazan’s increasingly problematic posthumous reputation, alas.
Current Mood: ArTiStiC 🎨
Current Music: Handel - Sarabande (from Barry Lyndon)
You can order the latest issue of the utterly genius movie-theater-worker zine Cashiers du Cinema here, which includes a five page comic teaser for my upcoming graphic novel They Saved Biden’s Brain (yes, really…)
I used to be much more aggro about “real” versus “fake” movie theaters, according to some zealous standards of programming; at this late stage I’m just happy when a movie theater exists or continues to exist. A new movie theater opening is almost too much to ask for.