Mayonaise Pt. II
or everything I watched in May 2024
God’s Own Country (2017)
dir: Francis Lee
Not anywhere near as cloyingly sentimental, or as sublimely ruinous as I’d been led to believe, but anchored by a very good performance from Josh O’Connor. Look, I simply refuse to keep incriminating myself on the Josh O’Connor front*. Having the inexplicable horn for a Nice English Boy that won’t keep quiet about his diet of porridge, Copydex**, and Ratatouille*** is embarrassing torment enough. Luckily, here he is too young, too reminiscent of my nephew, and the film’s rural Yorkshire setting is a 30 minute spit away from where I was born, so I was spared.
*Please see my entry for Only You at the bottom of this post, in which I continue to incriminate myself on the Josh O’Connor front.
**To my great chagrin I am now receiving targeted ads for Copydex. You can never go home again, but apparently you can scrapbook there.
***Counting my blessings that Pete Docter has confirmed that Live Action Little Chef is 86’d from the menu
Speaking of, segue to a salute to spitting: when Josh O’Connor spits, he spits. And he spits a lot in this film. I’m not talking about timid flecks or grainy dribbles from the garden hose, I’m talking about SPITTING; I am talking about a man with a salivary slingshot, hocking globuled rivulets that streak across the frame with pearly torque. Gaston has been demoted to runner up. Leo has been found shaking on the deck of the Titanic. Harry Styles would like some pointers. A++, exceeds expectorations. O’Connor is a skilled physical actor in many ways, but an actor who has no vanity about letting one fly, with crass aplomb? That always whëts my whïstle.
In real life, O’Connor might be the center-fold for Lisa Simpson’s Non-Threatening Boys magazine, but on screen he belongs sneering, crusty, pining and writhing in the muck like vermin. I want him to Journey to the End of Night, I want his incorrigible, dirtbag ass California Split, and I want him Naked so that I might catch something cruel from him.
Bull Durham (1988)
dir: Ron Shelton
“THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM! WILLIAM BLAKE!”
Amen, William! Hot, messy, with a baller script - I am begging the feral Challengers babies, for the love of the game, to seek this one out so they can understand what actual sex looks like. The quantum ripple of Susan Sarandon's omnipotent, kingmaker pussy makes Billy Beane look like a Little League mook, and Tashi Duncan look like a schoolyard coquette (though she doesn’t need much help). The nonchalant brilliance of the fits in this movie. Yes, Timbo Robbins butchering Otis Redding in an Iron Maiden shirt, or pitching in a jock and lacy black garter! Yes, the blue-collar Byronic schmoe vibes of Costner's starched, oversized white shirts! But the game changer genius of Sarandon's custom tailored Bardot sweatshirt? LULULEMON COULD NEVER!
What cinema is brave enough to let me put on a double bill of this and White Palace? Sarandon getting hers in the dregs of spilled Wheaties and mouldy sandwich crusts is what's missing from movies!
Twister (1996)
dir: Jan de Bont
I kind of forgot that this was just a gently bonkers hangout movie. Who the fuck doesn't want to screech and skylark with a elite bevy of soft mavericks that include Philip Seymour Hoffman, Todd Field, and Alan Ruck, and then after a day of barnstorming fieldwork, kick back and have a ribeye with Lois Smith whilst Belly plays in the background? Bill Paxton…F5 in my pants. A jewel, a jester, a maverick, and one of the hottest to ever do it. I miss him so much, and direct people towards a video I watch upwards of 5 times a day, and think about every single time I shuffle down the stairs. Shout out to my main dude Chiara, who made this meme for me after I posted a feral review of Paxton’s all too brief time in Titanic earlier this year - it’s often our guiding light in a world of dismal acting:
Where have you gone Jan de Bont, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you! I'm going to need people calling this 'camp' to take a seat before I Beverly Sutphin them with a copy of Against Interpretation.
Miller’s Girl (2024)
dir: Jade Halley Bartlett
I will not waste breath on this utter dogshit that operates on exactly the same palsied mechanics as Anyone But You, and limply reaches for screeching bonkers in its AO3 hothouse carrion mush of Wild Things, The Crush, and Stoker - but I have to ask: how/why/what to the Martin Freeman of it all. Why did Bilbo have to Baggins. What on earth suggested that this walking, stale custard cream, this soupy cup of Tetley tea gone cold, could fuck, or even be adjacent to fuck. My fuddle is truly beside itself. I cannot find any information on a casting director, and I too would scorch myself off the face of the planet if my name was attached to this decision.
I went round for days with the brain worm 'chickey bickey cokey' lodged in my skull, an actual line in this decrepit goop. The fact that this was a black list script! Old Yeller me, right here, right now.
Hooper (1978)
dir: Hal Needham
I am just a mortal dude, slinging "sweet bippy" in the perplexed, doughy faces of every Englishman I can find. This is one of my all time comfort films, a real, rip-roaring dudes rock joint. Hooper is an easy breezy Bronco buster that's all brash heart in its rough house elegy to stuntmen (and women as the credits stress), and the breakneck, circus pursuit of footage. A deeply personal passion project of Needham's, whose illustrious stunt career included doubling for Reynolds, and incurred the wreckage as totals: "...[broke] fifty six bones, broke my back twice, punctured a lung, and knocked out a few teeth".
No one would typically tar Needham with the brush of poet, but I thought most about that brusque, brittle mortality when watching Hooper get dressed down by his doctor. His vertebrae like a smashed xylophone, his next stunt risking paralysis, we hear the doc's delivery with unbroken focus on Reynold's face, his features stoically reaching for glib, as he blows a bubble from his gum, a mottled-lung pink, that shudderingly inflates and deflates before violently popping. For all its rousing silliness, Hooper is a picture of tender brawl, and even though I know he was a callow sumbitch to her, I am always so touched by Sally Fields and Reynolds together on screen. She always brings scrap and a lightness, the harp string glide of a zephyr through willow branches, that is both playful and quietly bruising.
Needham and Reynolds' partnership was a huge influence on Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - Tarantino's even gone on to say that post hippie cookout, Cliff eventually goes on to direct. If QT's got some time to mellow out after his swan song (RIP The Movie Critic), and he wants to write a dime store paperback about Cliff and Rick getting together in 1978 to rig a rowdy love letter to stuntmen....I'll dig those shenanigans. Such great, joyfully madcap car stunts (someone get Priscilla Page on this for Hagerty). I still desperately need to know if fellow player, pawn, hero, king Johnny Knoxville has seen this.
This time round, Chiara and I were hooting at James Best’s sidekick turn, as the one coworker who without fail always strong arms the clock off corral to the local pub - brimming with road house urges, counting down the hours, just wildly making eyes with everyone in the hopes of ‘Palomino tonite, Queen’? Super Yaki, Human Boy Worldwide, And After That - I beseech one of ye to make those Palomino bar staff shirts! Do it for Cully!
Mother (1996)
dir: Albert Brooks
The boys got together, and declared it Fancy Jam Time. Albert Brooks is my patron saint of self-loathing, and Debbie Reynolds is, as always, fantastic - this would make a great double bill with Postcards From the Edge. I will always lament a possible universe in which Carrie Fisher and Albert Brooks got together to do a commentary for this. If you’re in need of a chaser, please make yourself a spritz and then watch Do It Debbie’s Way, Reynold’s 1983 workout tape, in which she is joined by a slovenly, soused Shelley Long, who slouches and lists through all the exercises, and keeps everyone off their toes by shouting such gems as “WERE YOU THE ONLY BLONDE MARLON BRANDO EVER WENT WITH?” and “HOW MANY GIRLS HERE SLEPT WITH HOWARD HUGHES?”. You can find a full VHS rip on YouTube; you won’t even break a light sweat.
Say Anything (1989)
dir: Cameron Crowe
A shining beacon of new sincerity that never strays saccharine, sprung from Polly Platt's golden fingerprints. She was such a rich, nurturing talent as a producer, blooming from the meticulous, tangible magic that sang in her earlier collaborations with Peter Bogdanovich. Platt, a renaissance woman driven by the turbid heartsong of the director, understood the tactile loom of story in all areas she worked in, from her writing and producing, to her earlier production and costume design. Her instinctive, pragmatic vision for filmmaking anticipated the smallest stitches as flush filaments in the complex visual tapestry of a movie, and crucially, that these elements, be it a glove or a couch, are never incidental or embellishments, but essential architectural proteins of narrative and character. This incredible, industrious disposition is felt and lives on in those she has discovered, mentored, or matchmaked - James L. Brooks, Matt Groening (yes, you can thank Polly Platt for The Simpsons), Cameron Crowe, Wes Anderson, often themselves creators for whom there is little frivolous, errant or fraying in the best of their own tapestries (I’m conveniently skipping over Crowe post-Almost Famous, and harking back to golden age S3-10 of The Simpsons). Platt fostered both Crowe and Anderson’s first features, and there’s such a keen, charming fraternity between Say Anything and Bottle Rocket. Her marvelously alive vision of movies wanes in Hollywood; everything in this special film would be deemed extraneous or pointless by venture capital stooges today. If you haven’t, I wholeheartedly recommend listening to Karina Longworth’s excellent series on Polly Platt from her seminal film history podcast, You Must Remember This.
What a cast - forever and always, Lili Taylor supremacy. Love that it devotes so much time to Diane’s relationship with her father, and I always take delight in the chiral choruses of Lloyd’s sensitive wing-gals, and the boneheaded bluster of the jilted Gas n Sip boys. There’s a small, seemingly unobtrusive scene that I’m crazy about, where Diane and Lloyd are having a phone conversation about her part time work in the elderly care home her father runs. Lloyd tells Diane about how he recoils from old people, describing how they slurp soup, fearing the ‘creepy’ suggestion of inevitable disrepair and death. Diane immediately challenges him about his gross ageism, and Lloyd is disarmed, but welcomes the new perspective. It’s not a fight, but a fleeting moment between two people, one betraying a prejudicial flaw, and the other not letting them get away with it. It’s not mined for drama or conflict, it’s not studded in the film as an ominous fracture in their relationship, it is there because these are the meaningfully mundane confessions that occur between two people opening themselves up to each other. I’ve always been fascinated by why this moment really speaks to me. I think it’s because it’s a scene that is emblematic of the rare, open, earnest spirit of the whole film, a scene that, especially in the current calcified state of ‘plot’ thinking or craven audience capitulation, would either be left on the cutting room floor, or would be mangled into a very jarring “This ☝️☝️/So Important” flag, dialogue hobbled in the writer’s room for viral traction on social media. Above all, I think it’s because it’s a scene that embodies Philip Seymour Hoffman’s eternal line in Almost Famous: that “the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone when you’re uncool”.
You really feel that spirit in Kelly Fremon Craig’s wonderful films The Edge of Seventeen and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Craig herself is a mentee of James L. Brooks), and I dig the intensely palpable dialogue between this and James Ponsoldt’s sweet, smart The Spectacular Now. Miles Teller brutally squandered his potential as the Millennial Cusack!
I have only just found out, 28 years too late, that Ione Skye and Ad-Rock are no longer together, and request privacy at this time.
Hit Man (2024)
dir: Richard Linklater
“why Hopsy....you oughta be kept in a cage!”
I was lucky enough to see this back in October at London Film Festival, and it was love at first sight. A galvanic noir-screwball that resuscitates the romcom, Hit Man is spryly reflexive in its deconstructions, and incredibly sexy, as it exalts the slippery, molten star power of Glen Powell, a chiselled protean freak hotter than Georgia asphalt. Powell has incendiary chemistry with The Lady Adria, who thrillingly keeps toe-to-toe with him, simmering sultry and percussive as she trickly flits from meek to brazen with pliant, sensuous aplomb. Wielding considerable creative rein in the intuitive shaping of her and Powell’s love scenes, Arjona is the libidinous id in a game folie à trois with Linklater and Powell, that itself emerges as its own teasing, fruitful psyche. These are two performers who provocatively unravel the trappings and transformation of roleplay with delicious duplicity, who relish the falter and friction of coaxing, teasing, riling, surprising - themselves, each other, and their rapt audience. There is simply nothing hotter than watching two people get hot for each other!
For those of us who have been Red Hot Riding Hood for Powell since he peacocked into frame in Everybody Wants Some!!, Hit Man is a euphoric vindication that proves not just his chops as star and creative producer in the mode of his mentor, Tom Cruise, but also as a writer. Glen, I know you saw that Mondo Bongo sequence in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and rightly thought 'this should have been the whole movie'! I’m erring on ecstatic in a way that I know is also the mark of poverty in the current landscape, but this was tailor made for me. The hitman is a shapeshifter, metaphysical crucible and camouflage for a host of teeming polarities as they cruise through the cultural underbelly. Like its main characters, Hit Man takes flawed delight in a limber, pop collision of genre identities and faces, that finally fuse in dark, delicious climax. For some, this will seem like a tonal blindside, but I find that it scratches against the queasy swoon of a troubled ecstasy, that is perhaps my quintessential white whale. Whether it’s found in the endings of films like Phantom Thread, or Crash, I can only gesture to the alchemical substance of this moment as it transmutes between two people, a black whorl that inspires such intense rapture in me, announcing itself as the perverse, erotic fission that I (sub)consciously chase and look for in everything that I watch. Maybe the next one, darling. Maybe the next one.
The crowd I saw this with at LFF went fucking wild for this - I’ve never seen that kind of reaction in a theatre before. I came out of that screening and took this following note, a note with now seething sentiment, because Netflix have, unsurprisingly, purposefully botched the theatrical release:
I'm both levitating and sincerely bummed this might be the only time I get to see this in a cinema. This should be the kind of flick that brings about a date night renaissance, that couples venture out of the house to see, and then run a red light in the eager rush to take that frisson back to the sheets. That this should languish in the doldrums of Netflix and chill...fucking perish the thought.
I've long been obsessed with the blank mythos of the hitman (George Armitage, mon amour) and it's fascinating that this past year's two big hitmen movies, are about the craft of the director and the actor, the auteur and the star. David Fincher’s The Killer is about the perfectionist tedium of the filmmaker, a gun for hire looking back at his career, deceptively ascetic and anti-philosophy. Hit Man is overtly and earnestly philosophical, a flush, sensual meta-mechanical ode to star power and transformation, that itself serves to herald the birth of a new star. Hit Man seduces you with the supple multiplicities of identity - The Killer would like you to believe that he doesn’t even have one to begin with. Hit Man is one of my favourite films of 2024; I will be writing something about its place as a gleaming, sly spur in my hagiography of hitmen, later this year. It’s out on Netflix now - go have a ball.
Jaws (1975)
dir: Steven Spielberg
What’s better than Bank Holiday with Bruce? I have now seen this 17 times in cinemas (the pandemic really took a beating to my numbers), and every time, excepting a midnight screening in New York that was just me and Miss Havisham of Greenwich Village, someone always loses it when Ben Gardner’s head pops out of the boat. It gives me life.
Furiosa (2024)
dir: George Miller
Takes the searing, nitrous kiss of Fury Road and lets it canker-blossom into an anguished, ravaged epic. Miller makes incandescent the raw, gleaming well of Anya Taylor-Joy's eyes - she's a scorched salamander, a feral coyote, Musidora spit forth out of the bowels of the desert, a livid flower of carnage. Chris Hemsworth is practically licking his lips to be on that set, in those vehicles, in the salt and gibber with total maniacs. It's so nice to see him come alive like that, after years of the green screen gulag.
It is such a shortsighted shame that Furiosa’s commercial performance is being remarked upon as a failure. Multiple films this year, including original releases like Anyone But You, Challengers, The Fall Guy, and franchise IP like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Dune II, Godzilla x Kong, have proved their longevity and staying power at the box office with a longer release window. Anyone But You was a stealth success that spanned over a few months, and The Fall Guy, lambasted for its limp numbers in the first week of release, then saw a resurgence of theatrical interest in the same week it was dumped on digital, and is still holding strong. The old model of opening weekend box office is an obsolete benchmark, and removing a film from cinemas so quickly only hampers a film’s chance - allowing them a chance to grow, pick up word of mouth and accrue interest, can only be a good thing, for the biodiversity of theatrical offerings, and for the bottom line that has to be justified to vulture shareholders. It needs to be recognised that the general moviegoing audience is at a threshold, a line that was made clear last year by the detonation of Barbenheimer - they may not know exactly what they want yet, but they are clearly hungry for experiences outside of the dire, ambient ‘content’ of streaming, and the bland, hegemonic temple of MCU/DCU.
Furiosa deserves to thrive at the box office, to be seen on the biggest screen possible, so it can scorch your retinae and rattle your rib cage with its rabid revolutions, and fill you up with guzzoline and hi-octane, crazy blood. These films are singular, volcanic experiences, that broil and char my brain. George Miller has the inexorable wind of a 1000 directors a quarter of his age. As Steven Soderbergh said of Fury Road, “I don’t understand two things: I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” I don't need to understand, I'm just here to witness! No thoughts, head empty, just Octoboss! Get off my back Mum, I only answer to OCTOBOSS!
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
dir: George Miller
A glorious, miraculous napalm colossus. Each time I watch this, it feels like it came thrashing out of the earth, metastatic ore spewing crude oil and fire. Imagine if George Miller M.D. had treated you in the ER, and then 40 years later you saw this. I want to talk to those people. Nicholas Hoult is a necrotic little freak, and while he's not quite on the deranged level of Dan Stevens, we're not doing right by either of them. Let them bend in giddy supplication at the altar of Pax!
Fatal Attraction (1987)
dir: Adrian Lyne
I return frequently to watch this with audio commentary by Adrian Lyne, who is, as always, on top mumbling form, and so touchingly (and rightfully!) effusive about that gorgeously puckish little kid actor. Chiara and I spend a lot of time talking about this film, about its real, alive messiness, in the family’s home, in the hot, frantic sex scenes that are willing to edge and embrace sloppiness - a thicket of mess that couches and pricks at these characters, their hungers, fears, stakes, and perilous enmeshment.
Glenn Close's face is her most sublime and terrible instrument, with blazing eyes seemingly plucked from John Sargent Singer's portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, and a medusa mug capable of breeding shadows and tempests. She has always reminded me of Richard Widmark, another actor with galvanic, chiaroscuro control of their features, whose power came from, as I remarked recently in my April review of Yellow Sky, from his snaking intuition that fear and desire pool in the same place in your belly. I love that Close frequently looks into the camera, whereas Douglas can only ever look obliquely or indirectly toward the camera, so as to avert her gaze.
The grammar of Lyne's movies have always reflected his rapier commercial sensibility, and Fatal Attraction’s syntax is one of melodramatic horror. The film I think about most about whenever I rewatch is Evil Dead 2, even if only for playful coincidence. Handheld tracking shots in the park that cut close to the ground like a scythe and move with vengeful force. The terminal velocity with which he ramps and cuts between the roller coaster/car crash scene, that mirrors the literal smash cut from Bobbie Joe being dragged through the woods. The skew and loom of canted, low angles, the pendulum of an exposed ceiling bulb shifting light across the animal rictus of our actors' faces, Close's white eyed convulsions in the bathtub...not to mention Michael Douglas listening to a cursed tape by the light of a bankers lamp. Kandar!
Only You (2018)
dir: Harry Wootliff
AHAHAHA no. If I speak, I'll die. The space between me seeing the trailer for this 6 years ago, my internal furor against 'that insipid poshboy Larry from The Durrells, thinks he can come into MY HOUSE, and seduce someone to MY SONG ie. Elvis Costello's exquisitely queasy, breathless, slinking fuck-craven ballad' and whatever happened during my viewing of this? That stays between ME and ME. Only Me. Horrifying. Josh O'Connor hasn't just shaken the darling buds of May, he's mowed them down under his lewd yet simpering nice boy thresher. I continue to convalesce under the aftershock of Ready Brek! I don't know who I am anymore! Oh no, my darling…not with that clown!!
On that sweaty note, my Challengers essay will be dropping like it’s hot at the end of the month. Just in time for Wimbledon! If you go in for that sort of thing. I don’t. Until I started researching this piece, the nearest I ever got to tennis was accidentally nearly killing a squirrel with my bullish backhand in P.E., perennially overidentifying with Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest, and until a few years ago, I thought Tim Henman was still Tennis Man #1. Clearly those early 2000s Ariel laundry tablet ads are bleached into my brain. Needless to say, my essay will be less prim whites and Pimms on the lawn, and more about serving Wimbledong.
Until then…see you, space cowboys.
