324. Sinners

Song - Thriller (Michael Jackson)

Movie: Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

Remmick is no Eric Clapton. Sure, he is a vampire and his methods aren't the most gentle, but he is not out there to "Keep Brittain White". In fact, he'd probably rather destroy Brittain. Its people oppressed him and his community just for being Irish, and all he wants now is a bit of cultural exchange with people who have experienced similar horrors. Maybe he is delusional, and maybe his actions will not lead to a multi-racial coalition of the underclass, but he is certainly right about the alternative. "This world's already left you dead, won't let you build, won't let you fellowship." The Ku Klux Klan is ready to attack in the morning. What do you have to lose? 

Sinners has the scene of the decade, but does too little with its implications. My sympathy for the vampire isn't just my white perspective talking. Coogler wants such a response; he knows what he is doing having the vampires sing old Irish folk music, and he knows what he is doing when contrasting them to the Ku Klux Klan. The Smokestack twins certainly can't be blamed for not being too keen to differentiate between separate brands of white people. They've seen Chicago, where there is officially no Jim Crow, be "just Mississippi with tall buildings" instead of cotton farms, but there must have been a way to make the same point while still building on the utopian vision of the scene where oppressed people's music from the past, present and future meets in a single take that lets black American music influences from past present and future come together and blend with each other, whitout losing their distinct sound and aesthetic It's simply glorious to see the traidtional African drumming co-exist in the same space with 1930's blues, Jimi Hendrix-inspired guitarists, synthesizers and DJ's. Adding to Coogler's genius is that Remmick is the only one who experiences what Sammy's talent is capable of conjuring. That vision gives him the idea to use Sammy to bring to life his own Irish ancestry and culture, without supposedly erasing his black compatriots presence:

"I want your story Sammie, I want your songs. And you gonna have mine. 

Our father, who art in heaven, hollowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us for our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power, the glory forever and ever, Amen

Long ago, the men who stole my fathers land forced these words upon us. I hated those men but the words still bring me comfort. Those men lied to themselves then lied to us. They told stories of a God above and a devil below and lies of a dominion of man over beast and earth. We are earth and beast and God. We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I to everything.”

It's worth publishing this monologue in full. It's brilliant, provocative writing, especially in the knowledge that the juke joint where Sammy is playing is a trap set by the Klan. The vampires essentially save the majority of the guests from getting killed, so if you are Coogler and have gotte this far, why not go even further? Why not imagine how music, dance, and joy can connect and unite opressed people of different ethnicities and ancestries against a common enemy? The film's key scene, dialogue and plot machinations set up exactly something like that and it would have been extremely cool to create a scene in which the Klan is defeated through the combined forces of Irish and black (working class) culture, past, present and future. It would have been a utopian vision that's still sufficiently bleak (only through vampirism can America's sins be cleansed!) for audiences that believe optimistic futuristic visions are immoral in Trump's America. I am glad Mamdani became Mayor of New York, because aside from him contemporary American progressivism has a very limited vision, and Sinners suffers for it. Ryan Coogler will however probably use his upcoming blank check on more interesting things than the millionth version of The Odyssey. 

323. Forrest Gump

Song - Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd)

Movie: Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)

"She was born in a barn in 1898. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut."

Mad Men's (I have never seen the show, but its many iconic lines certainly make it sound appealing) Ida Blankenship was in fact an office secretary, but the sentiment applies to many 20th century women, of many different backgrounds. My grandmother, for example was born in rural Serbia where carrots were a luxury. She went on to become a professor in physics, and marry into a family that played a major role in the Yugoslav antifascist resistance; after the war one of her brothers-in-law would share a table with Tito as he was deciding on the future of federal Yugoslavia, and then become a travelling womaniser. Our family is still not entirely clear how many wives and kids he had. My grandmother had two and was pregnant with my father during the greatest earthquake in Skopje's history. Since, she's experienced the moon landing, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the rise of digital communication technologies. These days, she will occasionally share nostalgic memories of Tito's Yugoslavia over video calls with family members in Germany, the Netherlands, New York, Florida and California, but if you are looking for critical assessments on cinema, she is definitely not the person to speak to. Unless you wanna know about Forrest Gump. She once said the film is a great encapsulation of what the American Dream can make possible. It's the only time I've ever heard her give a serious opinion on a movie. 

Forrest Gump has a somewhat diminished reputation these days, partly because it defeated Pulp Fiction at the Oscars, partly because it's seen as uncritical self-flattery of the post war generation. Pulp Fiction is very much a superior film, but art is not sports and the idea that any film can in any meaningful way be described as 'the best' is absurd; the Oscars would quickly become irrelevant if they seriously aspired to determine objective winners. However, getting non-movie people with communist sympathies to wax lyrically about the American Dream? That's pretty much their raison d'etre! I don't know if my grandmother would have heard of Forrest Gump if it didn't win the Oscar, but I am pretty sure she wouldn't have walked around the house quoting Samuel L: Jackson. In any case my grandmother is a wonderful woman who has led a remarkable life, but her story is not exceptional. A majority of mid-20th-Century adults saw, experienced and/or contributed in minor or major ways to events that would have seemed completely improbable based on their upbringing. Forrest Gump is essentially conceived as a representative of that generation and, yes, the film is absolutely uncritical self-flattery. But if you were born in a barn in rural segregated Alabama and saw Neal Armstrong within your lifetime you'd have to fucking pinch yourself too. 

Setting aside that Forrest Gump is born in a plantation house inherited from the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, the film is a sincere fantasy about a man overcoming his physical and mental disabilities through a combination of kindness, naive innocence, self-belief and folksy wisdom (hard to blame anyone for being allergic to lines like "Life is like a box of chocolate. You never know what you gonna get") that allows him to become a successful college football player and shrimp entrepreneur, fight in the Vietnam war, contribute to Chinese-American diplomacy and inspire Elvis Presley and John Lennon. One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema is Marty McFly accidentally becoming an inspiration for Chuck Berry in Zemeckis' Back to the Future. Forrest Gump is essentially a less inspired, but more technically accomplished (it's still astonishing to see how seamlessly Tom Hanks is integrated into real archival footage) 2,5 hour rehash of that scene. I am a sucker for that kind of stuff, no matter how awful it can get. The John Lennon scene conceives the most contrived talk show dialogue possible just to have Forrest Gump inspire Imagine, but even that works somewhat because of its underlying truths. A lot of Beatles songs are inspired by unremarkable people, places and events that would have never found their way to the history books if some dime a dozen working class lads who happened to have enormous talent didn't put them to music. Besides, the Beatles' place in history is as much the result of the music they produced, as it is of the mass hysteria of their audiences. Forrest Gump gets a lot better than many other films how ordinary people's response to historical events becomes as much part of history as the historic event itself. 

The film is at its worst when it breaks its own illusion and explicitly infantilises Forrest, as when we see him running past the end zone all the way to the stadium's exit. The shot finally ends with a cut to his football coach laughing it up about how dumb and fast his star player is. A scene where Forrest visits Jenny (Robin Wright) at her dorm begins with a sweetly intimate conversation at his level, only to pan back at the end revealing Jenny's roommate in the background pretending to be asleep to hide her terror of what she's just heard. A montage of Forrest and Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) cleaning up their army barracks has the latter talk endlessly about the various ways of eating and cooking shrimp. None of these scenes successfully capture the wacky tone they are striving too hard for, and are misguided anyway counteracting the film's core ideas. Zemeckis also puts additional emphasis on Forrest's childishness in his scenes with progressive anti-establishment figures, allowing him to make fun of them without quite taking a stance. Tom Hanks is great throughout, but his performance has been parodied and imitated so much it's hard to look at it with fresh eyes. 

322. The Story of Adele H.

Song - White Flag (Dido)

Movie: The Story of Adele H. - L'histoire d'Adele H. (Francois Truffaut, 1975)

Victor Hugo is a good father. His daughter Adele (Isabelle Adjani) has come all the way from Guernsey to Halifax to pursue a romantic obsession. She's lost her heart (and mind) to Lieutenant Albert Pinson (Bruce Robinson) and didn't cross an entire ocean to meekly accept being rejected. Besides, who knows, the next love letter might just find the right words into his soul. Her writing is self-consciously florid and overheated, going to great lengths to both express her talent and her affection. Albert remains uninterested, but there has always been an audience for authors who want to be seen as capital-W Writers. Victor Hugo actually falls in that category, but if his letters to Adele were anonymous they would never be recognised as the works of a Great French Novelist. They are simple expressions of care that could be written by any loving parent concerned about the wellbeing of his daughter. Victor Hugo never appears on screen, but many other people in Adele's orbit adjust their professional and personal lives to show her love. None of them are Albert...  

The British army has come to Halifax to monitor the latest developments in the American Civil War, turning the town into an excited hub of emerging globalisation. The city's administrative services seem to have seamlessly adjusted to support and facilitate transnational movements, while its residents are willing to go the extra mile to cater to its foreign guests. without asking too many questions about the occasional odd behaviour. Adele's landlady is the perfect example, protecting her lodger's character and integrity at every turn even when she has every reason for doubt. In other words, Halifax is the perfect place for wounded romantics to start anew, if they could only see the opportunities in front of them. Granted, gifting Victor Hugo's daughter a copy of Les Miserables is not the world's most attractive flirt, but the town's librarian is kind and attentive to Adele's needs, and would certainly make a better husband than the Lieutenant of her dreams. Albert is too emotionally immature to be genuinely put off by Adele's aggravating stalking, acting towards her with the same performative displeasure he showcases in all his social interactions. Isabelle Adjani got her breakthrough and an Oscar nomination for portraying Adele as a woman constantly teetering on the edge of sanity, but Bruce Robinson is even better as a guy who has, for reasons known only to himself, made the calculated choice to turn cold indifference into his entire personality.  

In reality, Adele Hugo was diagnosed with schizophrenia and her father had to put her in an institution. Truffaut doesn't emphasise her illness, but does present her as an unquestionably tragic figure whose blind obsession ruined her life. Truffaut however also understands that in moderation romantic obsession can be fun, and while the accumulation of misbegotten decisions becomes horrifically (self-)destructive, many of these decisions are presented in scenes of playful excitement that can almost stand on itself as short films. A spectacular static long take showing Adele crashing a house party to give Albert a note is essentially the entire film in miniature, fully evoking the rush of having ordinary conversations with regular people while knowing that your crush is somewhere out there in reach, doing something without you. 

321. Laura

Song - She's Not There (Carlos Santana)

Movie: Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

A wonderful film, let there be no doubt about that. However, she is there...

Noir at its very best leaves the world unmoored, forcing its heroes to reckon with their moral and rational framework. Even if the murderer is caught, love prevails, or the get-rich-quick scheme somehow works, everyone is still left with a lingering feeling that preconceived notions about what's possible, what's right, and what's true no longer hold water, raising unanswerable questions about what this new reality means. How should we act upon the knowledge that the truths we held to be self-evident are no longer, without being able to fully articulate what has come in their place? Midway through Preminger's film, Laura (Gene Tierney) arrives home from her trip to the countryside, finding Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) asleep underneath her portrait. He's had a long day investigating her murder. 

Laura's return is preceded by one of the few long dialogue-free scenes, following Mark around her apartment looking for clues about what might have happened. He is shown from odd camera angles, with the grand portrait always looming somewhere in the background. The musical score becomes more pronounced highlighting that something's afoot, or about to be, and as Mark falls asleep Preminger slowly zooms in, and then zooms out, signalling the passage of time, without depicting the experience of it. When Mark wakes up to Laura questioning his presence he is startled, while we rejoice - an already intriguing film just got more interesting! How can a person who was supposed to be dead suddenly be alive? Was someone else murdered, or is it perhaps Laura's appearance that is staged? Is Laura really Laura? Is Laura even really there or is she an apparition of the obsessed detective? The set up suggests the answers to these questions to contain great mysteries, but all of it is ultimately explained by a somewhat disappointingly ordinary combination of mistaken identities and male jealousy that won't turn anyone's world upside down. The road to get there is nonetheless exceptional.

The film is perhaps at its most noirish when it suggests that Mark's obsession with Laura is potentially irrational and self-destructive, but it's self-aware enough to know that it can't really meaningfully pursue that path. Have you seen Gene Tierney, the way she acts, the color of her hair (yes, even in black-and-white!)? The chemistry she has with every potential suitor is off the charts, and portraying Laura as a vulnerable woman who is still able to keep her cool and comfort under pressure only makes her more attractive. Dana Andrews too gives a great performance as a detective who is professional and grounded enough to not let his personal opinions and feelings distract from his job. Watching him think through what he can and can't express is one of the film's greatest pleasures, and undermining that would have been a mistake. Even then, it wouldn't have mattered that much. A screenplay this great, with such wonderfully stylised, flamboyantly witty dialogue can go in all kinds of directions with little harm. Especially when the cast is so at ease with it, and in sync with each other. I had never heard of Clifton Webb before, now I want to see every film he's made.

320. Images

Song - Suzanne (Leonard Cohen)

Movie: Images (Robert Altman, 1972)

'Sounds' would be an equally apt title. The opening scene shows Cathryn (Susannah York) writing her latest children's book "In Search of Unicorns" in her contemporary London apartment. As York narrates snippets from her work, she is suddenly interrupted by another unseen voice, faintly calling out her name. Robert Altman, who has been experimenting with sound design his entire career, then suddenly cuts to a still shot of an antique grail set to a John Williams's score that's more interested in combining various incongruous sounds than in establishing a coherent melody. As the sequence keeps swinging between the abstract and the familiar, we hear once again the disembodied voice calling out Cathryn. The plot is finally set into motion when Cathryn receives a call from a friend going on and on about her unsuccessful love life until mid-conversation the voice on the other end of the line suddenly changes, telling frightening stories about Cathryn's supposedly unfaithful husband Hugh (Rene Auberjonois). Hugh eventually gets home, convincing his wife that nothing unsavory has been going on, but when he leans in to kiss her, we suddenly see him from her point of view looking like Marcel Bozuffi.

'Ghost' would also be an apt title. We eventually learn that three years ago Cathryn had an affair with Rene (Marcel Bozuffi) that abruptly ended when he died in a plane accident. Her memory of a failed pregnancy is far hazier; even if it did occur, she couldn't say whose child she lost. Either way, she still suffers the consequences of whatever happened. Though aware that her mind is playing tricks on her, she is unable to consistently distinguish between reality and imagination. Her husband senses something is off, but doesn't seem to be the most discerning fellow even in the best of times, and his supportive suggestions often have the opposite effect. He is some sort of high-end businessman, but mostly specialises in terrible dad (anti-)jokes: "What's black and white and black and white and black and white? A nun falling down stairs!" is innocuous, but "What is the difference between a rabbit? Nothing, one is both the same!" may well be the closest the film gets to auto-commentary. Notably, the other two main characters are Marcel and his teenage daughter Susannah, portrayed respectively by Hugh Millais and Cathryn Harrison, while "In Search of Unicorns" is a real book, written by Susannah York. 

Images is mostly an exercise in style, highlighting that when you are as formally accomplished as Robert Altman you can basically make an entertaining film out of very little. Not much happens here beyond Susannah York hearing sounds and entering rooms, usually shown from her perspective as supposedly familiar spaces of slippery, consistently shifting composition. Altman has a lot of fun putting us halfway in the shoes of Cathryn. We are always aware that we have a better grasp of reality than her, without ever getting the full picture to be able to confidently assess the consequences of her actions. I enjoyed it a lot, but once it ends you do feel a bit like you've been pointlessly yanked around. I have yet to see Altman's other 70's movies, but would not be surprised if this turns out to be the weakest of the bunch.