Rope is an ‘experimental’ film that is widely agreed to not completely work. Usually people give one of a variety of reasons why they don’t completely care for it; most common is that the almost-one-take conceit and the various tricks done to achieve it are distracting, whilst others point to the crushed narrative, or that James Stewart’s performance is weak (which even Stewart himself would observe). I do think that Alfred Hitchcock’s deep understanding of story keeps it compelling watching; themes that exist independent of the absurd exercise in style, with the queer undertones and thoughts on nihilism.
I happen to enjoy films – as well as other artistic works – that push themselves to the point of unwatchability, particularly when they push down on one technique so hard that it becomes revealing about what the medium can do. There are three deliberate, visible cuts here – as opposed to an actor getting in the way of the camera for us – and none of them explain themselves, but all of them are motivated by the same thing: showing cause-and-effect. Hitchcock famously explained the Kuleshov effect through a man reacting with a smile to various things; this explains his use of editing here. A cut is a way of showing a reaction. And taking away those cuts for the majority of the film does increase tension quite a bit; for most of the film, we’re seeing cause-and-effect happen in the same frame; other times, we linger on the trunk containing the body, reminding us that the boys could be caught at any minute.
I think it particularly helps when the creator is as prolific as HItchcock was; I’ve seen people – including Every Frame A Painting co-creator Tony Zhou – observe that one way film culture is failing is not allowing creators to ‘fail’; that we as a culture demand perfection from every single entry in every single filmography. I can sympathize with why people do this (on the basis of not wanting to see things that suck) whilst very much being on Zhou’s side here. There’s two reasons: firstly, my approach to watching movies is fairly creative, even through its analysis.
More importantly, though, I prioritize the creator’s vision over my own as a viewer. The creator sets the parameters and I’ll follow them; you tell me we’re doing a romance, I’ll follow the romance. You tell me we’re doing a dumb comedy, I’ll judge you by that standard. You tell me we’re fucking about with what a movie can do with editing, I’ll go wherever you want. When I want to see something that perfectly fits my own perspective and goals, I’ll make it. There’s something churlish, boring, and limited to me about walking into a film with a list of demands it must fit; ideally, I’m here to learn something new, which requires surrendering my motivations for about two hours.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Laura – Preminger’s well regarded, very odd mix of mystery, romance, noir, and mild social commentary. Ebert hit the nail on the head, as usual, that somehow this messy thing with a convoluted plot and a very clearly queer character falling madly in love with the title character works. It doesn’t work as well for me as for him – he gave it four stars and I would definitely stop short of that – but it’s very entertaining and well put together and has stellar performances by Clifton Webb and Vincent Price (no mustache, jovial, and affecting a Kentucky accent). And honestly, it is an interesting twist when the murder victim shows up halfway through the movie.
Baseball Isn’t Dead, “The Relocation Era” – This YouTube channel has occasionally gone longer form, and this time it’s nearly 2 1/2 hours recounting the 20 years when MLB teams moved with startling regularity, leading to baseball in California and the first period of expansion. While this is very much for baseball fans, it also touches on various trends of the 50s and 60s, like Robert Moses trying to control and ruin NYC, the shameful forced evictions of the residents of Chavez Ravine, and the intersection of government and baseball. It’s a bit low energy, but the creator did his research for the most part and even if he hates how baseball is at heart just another business, he still likes the sport, and gets to celebrate the patron saint of baseball iconoclasts, Bill Veeck.
MASH, “The Price of Tomato Juice” – When Radar discovers that Col. Potter likes tomato juice, he has to scheme to convince the requisitions office, Frank Burns, to place an order. Another episode built around horse trading – what Nog on DS9 would call the “river of commerce” – but nearly as complex as the time Hawkeye needs new boots. The most interesting bit is a side scene where Margaret has been asked to attend a party in Seoul by a general, and Potter tells he she can say no because he finds it distasteful but cannot understand Margaret is fine with it. (For reasons, she doesn’t go, and Klinger takes her place everyone is really thrilled with him.)
Frasier, “Daphne Returns” – She’s back from the spa (and Jane Leeves is back from maternity leave), and when she tells Niles that her therapist felt her eating was because she wanted to put some distance between herself and Niles’s unrealistic expectations of her, Niles isn’t having it. When he makes a mess of things, Frasier forces him to re-examine his vision of her. Quite cleverly, we rewatch three keys past scenes (most notably part of the “Moon Dance”) with present Niles and Frasier watching and Frasier making Niles see the truth. As much as things are played effectively for laughs, there is emotional truth here, and this is one of those moments we are reminded that Frasier is a pretty good therapist.
Saw Laura at a Palo Alto theater where the organist played an overture and then exit cue for the movie, and while it’s not a masterpiece, it was an unforgettable cinematic experience!
I really enjoy Laura, in part because I first heard about it from Twin Peaks and in part because I can’t get over how high Webb’s pants are.
Watching Angel Face made it apparent that Preminger was a big influence on Lynch.
When Harry Met Sally…
Rewatch. A classic that kicked off a weekend of romantic comedies.
Bachelor Mother
Delightful, sweet romantic comedy with a touch of screwball for leaven. (Of course, like a lot of screwball situations, this one–a young single woman being forced into raising a child she insists isn’t hers–could be played as straight horror, but here it works out charmingly. I can see the setup being a dealbreaker for people, but it’s handled in a way that largely worked for me, and I can see this becoming a beloved household staple.) Ginger Rogers and David Niven have sparkling chemistry, and the film makes the most of its absurd situation, pushing it to work as comedy, character drama, and quiet social commentary. This is much warmer than it could be, with multiple characters choosing kindness over propriety, and that certainly adds to the charm.
Both this and When Harry Met Sally… feature New Year’s Eve parties with “Auld Lang Syne.”
Hot Frosty
Oh, the things I do for We Hate Movies. Watched this with a friend, and we counted out exactly two genuinely funny moments. I never got closure on why one would sculpt a snowman with nipples.
Top Hat
More Ginger Rogers, this time with Fred Astaire. Here, the screwball elements feel a little more grating, but what matters is that the dance sequences are gorgeous. Dance numbers may be the perfect way to sell a budding romance: there’s such a lovely sense of two people unexpectedly finding a rhythm together and responding to each other. Also, I’d seen bits of “Cheek to Cheek” out of context before, but it really has more luster here, especially since Rogers still thinks Astaire’s lying to her: it’s a swoonworthy dance, but what makes it hit even harder is the way Rogers plays the aftermath like she’s waking from a dream and remembering that this love is a lie (or so she thinks). Beautiful costumes; I don’t care how hard that ostrich feather dress was to dance with, it looks stunning. And tap dancing rules.
My sister loved Top Hat when we were kids and I should give it another shot as an adult, I remember the first number being lots of fun.
I’ve seen quite a lot of Fred Astaire stuff at this point and it confuses me slightly why Top Hat and Swing Time are usually the consensus great ones, I had way more fun with some of the deeper cuts. The musical sequences in Top Hat are obviously great but while a lot of the musicals drag a little between set pieces, here I found the plot actively offputting between dances. Swing Time fares a little better but then there’s a big blackface sequence. Shall We Dance was the Astaire / Rogers one I thought was genuinely great, and I liked You Were Never Lovelier (with Rita Hayworth) and Silk Stockings (with Peter Fucking Lorre… oh and also Cyd Charisse) even more than any of the Rogers ones. I think I kinda prefer non-musical Rogers tbh, she’s got great comic timing.
Woooooooooooooo Bachelor Mother! “I can see this becoming a beloved household staple,” and that is what it is in our house! Just a delight of a movie and you’re right about how the concept could so easily be pushed into something darker but everyone involved, especially Rogers, is keeping things charming instead of horrifying. Some interesting overlap with Raising Arizona perhaps, where a baby is a great object of comedy and distress that is important but without the deeper and more obnoxious character of an actual child — you want the kid to be OK and are free to do so without horrible mugging and cutesy dialogue, you just have to accept the situation as comedy. This is making me think of Smokey and the Bandit of all things, I had a discussion with a friend last night who pointed out how it hasn’t “aged well” and that may be true, but Sally Field and Burt Reynolds are still a lot of fun in it — I think there is a line with older movies where you have to accept certain values or lack thereof but when you get past that, the characterization and interactions are stronger than a lot of works with contemporary values, and what Rogers and Niven are up to here transcends trappings of the time (although the movie is also lightly progressive in that regard).
We watched Hot Frosty last year and my younger daughter was very into it.
F For Fake – Had me grinning ear to ear almost the whole time as Welles doesn’t just invent the video essay decades ahead of time, but also gleefully questions the nature of art, reality, and the difference between the inauthentic and authentic. (This is a distant cousin of The Matrix and Chameleon Street.) There are layers upon layers of falsity here that deepen the nuance and intelligence of the film’s artifice, including editing tricks, overdubs, fake footage, and, in the climax, the inability to see the trick right in front of you. Another filmmaker who wanted to make an outright biopic of Hughes, Nolan, put it this way in The Prestige: “You want to be fooled.”
The Great – Finished the S1 finale. OWNAGE and devastation, though one character’s loss was fine with me, absolute fucking drip. Is this how women feel about implausibly beautiful romantic leads with no real personalities? I much prefer Peter’s violent idiocy (and Hoult is fantastic throughout these episodes, moving from shocked vulnerability to devastation to ruthlessness, as is Fanning). McNamara makes the right calls throughout by ditching history and sticking to what is dramatically the most interesting and fun choice in every plot beat. Really strong, fun season of television that outdoes most prestige shows.
Notes: “You played a game on me.” “I love that you know that.” The Swedish King (played by Gwayne Hightower from House of the Dragon!) and Peter being almost exactly the same person made me howl. It really tracks that Peter would, without much hesitation, agree to stop fucking Georgy. “Thank you for that…I know I don’t talk in my sleep.”
Live Music – went to see my girlfriend’s bandmate’s other band (does that make them my step-band? or does she become my bandmate-in-law?) without doing any homework on the other bands and it turned out to be one of my favourite gigs of the year. The headline act, All Structures Align, did kind of Slint-inspired angular post-rock but they did it so well and definitely added enough of their own personality. There was also a guitar duo called Haress that do kinda folky John Fahey kinda stuff I guess with occasional vocals, including one song with a repeating lyric that they handed out cards for people to join in, felt very festive. Really pristine sound for the whole gig, the tiny venues I frequent locally do generally sound good but somehow this gig was on a whole other level.
Written on the Wind – I’ve seen a couple of other Sirk films but oddly this was my first Technicolor one, which is obviously a big part of his whole thing. It really did feel like an assault on the senses, so many vivid colours and patterns and outfits… and emotions, of course! Really glorious overheated melodrama with some sensation line deliveries (paraphrasing, but is there anything better than a devastated man saying “I can’t dance… I seem to have lost my magical dancing slippers”? No there is not). Dorothy Malone is wonderfully twisted and bitter, I’m glad that was the performance that got rewarded at the time.
AliEN0089 – short film on MUBI, a home invasion thing that is also a commentary on harrassment in online gaming communities? Kinda interesting and visually striking but it didn’t quite hit me like I think it wanted to.
The Signalman – I’ve never really dug into the BBC “Ghost Stories for Christmas” but a friend is VERY into them and picked a couple to watch as a group after we helped decorate his tree. He picked this one as the first he ever saw, and it’s definitely a striking, chill-inducing thing. Based on a Charles Dickens story, it follows a man who has a chance encounter with a railway signaller and ends up hanging out with him on the night shift, listening to an unsettling story of a possible paranormal experience. The signaller is Denholm Elliott and he gives an excellently haunted performance.
The Stalls of Barchester – this was the first official entry into the Ghost Stories (there’s a couple of other things that are spiritually linked, pun intended) and it’s not quite as fully formed as The Signalman BUT it has a big fluffy black cat in it so obviously it gets nine thumbs up from me. It’s about an ambitious clergyman being driven mad after taking extreme means when encouraging his elderly predecessor to retire, other than the cat I think my favourite thing was the candlelit cinematography, really nice.
Twin Peaks, episode 4 – a strong episode for Albert and Bobby, and also the cut from Leland’s behaviour at the funeral to Shelly’s re-enactment at the diner is hilariously cruel. This is my third time through and I’m loving how much things diverge from my memories – I remember the basic events but not the manner in which they take place.
Written on the Wind is pretty great, especially Malone. And woo live music!
Wooooo live music! Love a good surprising gig. And hell yeah British ghost stories, you guys know how to do those right.
Mickey 17 — a filmmaking failure! Bong Joon Ho whiffs extremely hard here, certain thematic tendencies are consistent with other work but holy moly is this sloppy shit — Bong can have big emotional swings (The Host in particular comes to mind) but structurally is very sound, here there is a ton of stuff happening but nothing underpinning it. This could be purposeful to a degree, mirroring the unmoored nature of our cloned hero, but it mostly feels like trying to cram as much of a book into a movie as possible, some characters disappear without warning and some appear with unearned meaning and nothing really sticks, the film just lurches along and doesn’t even have the spatial understanding and eye for movement of previous work. Really don’t know what happened here, but reviewers were way too kind to this.
Live music — coming in strong at the deadline, the band name of the year is Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere. And their music is good too! Commander Cody meets Wussy guitar squall, lots of fun. They were opening for Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, who are having a moment and sold out the small room, it was cool to see a band in those circumstances. And Davis delivered, he is in the Lenderman/Wednesday school of current jammy indie but his songs themselves are longer, constant lyrics delivered in a great and surprising baritone. Eight people on stage making a woozy din, “Junk Drawer Heart” was a particular highlight. Some old concert buddies came to town for this, the first time we’ve all been together in quite a while, and it was great to catch a show with them again.
Ah I missed Ryan Davis when he played here this year, I think there was a clash. Would like to have checked that out, his stuff is pretty good. Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere hits a bit too close to home for me, though.
I had a blast with Mickey 17! Definitely not a great film on Parasite’s level but I like that he went this weird with his blank cheque (“check”).
Of the Bong I’ve seen, Parasite and Barking Dogs Never Bite have a lot of overlap in precise structure and examination of structures, and The Host and Snowpiercer have a good amount of overlap in messier but still focused sci-fi wildness, so I was expecting something on that level. But it just did not hit for me — I got the sense the repeated flashbacks were a slapdash way of fitting stuff in while trying to retain momentum, which Host and Snowpiercer have from the start, and everyone besides Pattinson is lost. Overbaked and understuffed, a true turkey. I think the subject matter is right up his alley and I would not want it to be a longer work like a TV show, but all the weirdness and energy (and the design of the creepers is delightful) just fell flat, is this what 1941 is like?
Snowpiercer is the Bong that really fell flat for me, Mickey reminded me a little more of the “big weird performances and endearing mess” vibe of Okja, which I love. The 1941 comparison is not totally off the mark though, haha.
Sentimental Value: under the influence of Bergman, this film, directed by Joachim Trier, creates enthralling family drama. The ending depicts the human labor of making art (now crucial in the AI-slop era). The film also shits on Netflix and dissects American cultural imperialism (through an actor’s accent).
Live music — as mentioned last week, a Benjamin Grosvenor piano recital, the same program he’s playing later this week at Carnegie Hall, but this was a tiny little community college theater in Columbia, Maryland. Which means that even though my seat was one of the cheap ones at the very far end of the front row, it was still only like 20 feet from the guy, and I could hear his shoe slap the sustain pedal. Chopin’s Piano Sonata #2 was the highlight. He played three encores!
What did we play?
No sooner do we end combat and return one of the wine stones to its rightful owners in the Strahd campaign do we set off to find another wine stone and get into more combat. But take note: if you have Create Water as a spell, you can use it to weigh down airborne creatures in cold climates by forcing their wings to ice up. I am not much for combat, but love any chance i have to be more creative than casting fireball.
Still having fun with Slay the Spire. I had good runs with both the Silent (leaning into a deck full of boosted shivs rather than my usual poison-heavy build for that character) and the Defect (racking up tremendous amounts of block with an orb capacitor relic and a ton of upgraded focus cards). Currently doing some runs as the Watcher.
Part of what makes this game so great is its immense flexibility: not only can you play it any number of different ways, even with the same character, you also have to get used to taking different approaches, unless you want to continuously restart the game hoping for a different set of available relics, cards, etc. You need to learn to work with what’s there and lean into the build you can actually make instead of holding out for a favorite set of factors to come along.
Hotshot Racing on Nintendo Switch
Played a cup and nearly won it, if not for forgetting to switch gears on the car after a minor crash in the last race. Oh well. This is an aesthetic triumph and a top line arcade racer, arguably better to play with than the classic arcade games that inspired. Top Sega vibes too, remarkable for a game not actually made by Sega.
Burnout Paradise Remastered on Nintendo Switch
Played for a few minutes, then got drawn into a couple of hours, like always. Still unlocking great new cars, still winning some close races and time runs, and I even found my groove in a stunt run, where you have to line up different kind of stunts in a limited time, Tony Hawk-style. The goal was 190,000 points, and while I usually struggle to make even 100,000, this time I made over a million after finding the right line around the city. Felt great.
I really like because it’s a good movie. And I like it more than a lot of Hitchcocks people prefer. I would rather Rope a dozen times than watch the technical brilliance and deep misogyny of Vertigo once.
Year of the Month update!
This December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery
And here’s the movies, albums, books, TV, and games from 1985 for you to write about next January.
Jan. 2nd: Gillian Nelson: Return to Oz
Jan. 5th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rambo: First Blood Part II
Jan. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Advice on Lice
Jan. 16th: Gillian Nelson: The Wuzzles/The Gummi Bears
Jan. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Breakfast Club
Jan. 23rd: Gillian Nelson: The Golden Girls