Jonathan Glazer's film-per-decade approach

I doubt it could be intentional or likely something he's ever considered -- he doesn't seem like the sort of person to dwell on superficial patterns -- but Jonathan Glazer appears determined to grace us with his talents only once per decade.

"But Vance," you say. "Glazer put out two films in the 2000s, Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004)." (Yes, you include years in parentheses when you speak.)

Ah but did he?

If you believe all those smartypants who wanted to be pedantic when the year changed from 1999 to 2000, the 21st century didn't start until 2001 -- meaning that the year 2000 is technically the final year of the 1990s. No one actually really thinks of it that way, but if you are being as accurate as possible, it's true. (I didn't see and rank Sexy Beast until 2001, but it played festivals in 2000.)

In any case, the point is, Glazer does not make very many movies. And if he were to reveal after making his final film in 2042 that he had purposefully made only one film per decade, I wouldn't be surprised. If Quentin Tarantino can decide he's going to make exactly ten features, Glazer's hypothetical mission statement might not be much different in concept.

Which is why the fact that I didn't love The Zone of Interest is particularly disappointing.

Oh, I started out loving it. For about the first 30 minutes, I imagined the post I'm currently writing would be entitled "The movie that would have been my #1 of 2023." But Glazer made a couple choices in the direction the narrative went that just didn't really work for me. I don't oppose them on moral grounds -- I understand there is some outrage out there about how this subject matter is handled, but I haven't delved into it. I oppose them on storytelling grounds only.

If you want to read my full review now that the film has finally released in Australia, it's here.

Will I now have to wait until 2031 -- or, if we are considering the ten-year gap between Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest to be the new standard, as late as 2033 -- to get another of Glazer's incomparable conceptions of the world we live in?

It's hard to say. I'd hoped to be surprised and go to IMDB and see another project in pre-production. I mean, even Terrence Malick eventually started becoming more prolific, and then he became so with a vengeance. (On the music side, this can also be said for my favorite band, Nine Inch Nails.)

Alas, no. And if we are to take his previous patterns as a prediction of future patterns, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with shorts and music videos and other bits of ephemera that occupy a creative person between major symphonies. 

Before I go, I should circle back on two bits of business:

1) You may recall that earlier in the month, I watched the aforementioned Sexy Beast as the inaugural film for my bi-monthly Audient Outliers series. At the time, I stated that I chose to watch that before Zone of Interest, even though I could have worked it out in the reverse order, because if I didn't like Zone of Interest, not liking Sexy Beast wouldn't be such an outlier. If you didn't follow the link to my review previously, you won't know that I ended up giving Zone of Interest an 8/10, only dropping from a 9/10 in the last 20 minutes of the film. (I actually may have dropped all the way from a 10/10, or five stars, in those last 20 minutes.) So at least you know Sexy Beast remains a valid first choice for that series. 

2) This is a potential future entry in another series, Audient Bridesmaids, but as discussed a few days ago in the post about The Prince of Tides, we don't actually know for sure that The Zone of Interest will not win best picture this year. So to save myself the hassle, I'll limit the reference to that series to the two sentences you are currently reading. 

Audient Outliers: Sexy Beast

This is the first in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I'm revisiting a single film I didn't like by a director whose work is otherwise a hit with me.

When I went to look up to see whether Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast was available on any of my streaming services, I came up with a funny result on Netflix.

(I'll waste some space here so when I paste the picture in, it will steer clear of the proper Sexy Beast poster and will not create a layout headache for me. You can't post a second picture too close to the first picture or else the text doesn't look right. Just trust me as I continue to type nonsense here that you can either read or not read, as you see fit. Discuss amongst yourselves. Here, I'll give you a topic: the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman.)

When you put that search term in Netflix, you get this amusing result:

What looks like an alien saying "Oh behave!" left me curious, for sure. But when I saw it was a TV show rather than a movie, I passed on the longer commitment and just satisfied myself with posting the picture here.

However, I did think there was about as much chance of me liking a TV show about naughty aliens as there was of me liking Glazer's 2001 feature debut, which stands out in stark contrast to Birth and Under the Skin, both of which I adore. I suspect I will also at least greatly respect, if not love (can you really love a film about the Holocaust?), The Zone of Interest, which doesn't release here until the 22nd of this month. In fact, I had considered holding this viewing back until after I'd seen it, but I decided to watch Sexy Beast first for two reasons: 1) February was ticking along and I needed to start watching movies for this, for Blaxploitaudient and for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, and 2) If I watched Zone of Interest and didn't like it, well then, Sexy Beast isn't really an outlier anymore because then I don't like half of the man's feature films.

(By the way, I looked up Sexy Beasts and it's a reality dating show where people don elaborate makeup to prevent appearances from being a major factor in determining their chemistry when they are on a first date. Interesting idea. Maybe I'll watch it after all. Rob Delaney is involved, which helps.)

Well, if the intention of this series is hopefully to find something in these films that I didn't find the first time, we're 0-1 so far.

The problem with Sexy Beast is what it was back in 2001: Don Logan.

It's a name that's supposed to strike fear into the hearts of men, and their women. In fact, that's what happens when Jackie (Julianne White) and Aitch (Cavan Kendall) show up at dinner with Gal (Ray Winstone) and Deedee (Amanda Redman), looking ashen, like presumably they've just had an argument about one of the many things couples argue about. Instead, it's that they got a call from London just before leaving their house, from someone wanting Gal to come back for "one last job."

So what? Gal seems to say. "I'm retired." Yep, we've already seen what Gal spends his time doing: baking in the Spanish sun as he lies, oiled up, by his pool. 

"It was Don Logan."

Record scratch.

Now Gal looks like he's about to throw up.

The problem, then, is that when Don Logan shows up to make the offer in person -- an offer Gal can't refuse, I suppose -- he's Ben Kingsley playing a petulant baby given to stomping his feet and throwing temper tantrums.

Now, I should pause here to say that there are lots of different ways a character who's supposed to be frightening can be frightening. The only truly menacing character in this film, Ian McShane as Teddy, comes by this by never blinking, and by letting the silences turn his conversational opponent into a quaking puddle of nerves. In fact, I'd like to have seen this movie with McShane as Don Logan.

Kingsley? He stomps his feet and throws temper tantrums like a petulant baby.

Not menacing. Never was.

And because of the odd structure of Glazer's film, we have to watch this behavior for about 50 minutes of an 88-minute movie. Or at least, up until the 50-minute mark, starting maybe at the 20-minute mark.

A menacing character should barely need to lift a finger to accomplish his goals. If there is a threat about what a character will do to you, you shouldn't be able to turn him down a dozen times, and actually force him to head to the airport without knowing whether you're actually going to do the job he wants you to do. And the fact that you look extremely scared while repeatedly rejecting him just makes it all the more of a disconnect. If you are scared of someone, you don't reject their request even once.

Because of the way Kingsley plays Don Logan and the way Glazer asks him to play Don Logan, I immediately lose all my bearings of what Glazer wants to convey about this world. It would seem Glazer is showing us that a gangster can never really be retired, because there is always someone trying to pull you back in -- someone who holds something over you that compels you to be pulled back in. Glazer presents two different metaphors for this in the film, one a massive boulder that rolls down the side of the hill and lands in Gal's pool, nearly hitting him (which would have killed him), and one a six-foot rabbit-like creature that looks like it has been chewed up and spat out, who shows up in Gal's dreams as sort of a grim reaper figure with a gun. (In fact, I was thinking about how when this came out in 2001, it was the same year as the six-foot rabbit in Donnie Darko.)

His non-metaphorical version of the idea that you can never really retire? It's a petulant baby yelling "No no no no no no!," whose big transgressive act is to pee on Gal's carpeted bathroom floor.

There is what I would call a fairly useful 25-minute stretch at the end of Sexy Beast that features the job in question -- in which Gal does participate, but not under the conditions Logan would have wanted. It's got a lot of McShane, who is great, and it's an interesting set piece for a robbery, as it involves safety deposit boxes and men in scuba gear. There are also some techniques in here that preview some of the camera movements and editing we'd see later from Glazer, specifically in Under the Skin.

But even this portion of the film feels like a weird footnote, after Glazer had already chosen to spend way too much time on Don Logan, including an odd tangent where Logan refuses to put out his cigarette on a plane, is taken to be questioned, then accuses a male flight attendant of groping him. It's only because of this episode that he remains in Spain at all.

And even this portion contains some narrative bits that don't make any sense or are unexplained, like how they pull off a heist involving scuba gear while remaining essentially unnoticed, and like why Teddy does a certain thing he does to a certain character who hasn't come into the story before now. (Don't need to go into spoiler territory as such.)

One thing I appreciate about Birth and Under the Skin is how Glazer does not feel as though he needs to explain everything that's happening. But in the genres those films are in, that's much easier. In a film that is effectively a descendent of the Tarantino style -- a milieu in which Glazer probably doesn't naturally see himself -- plot and narrative connectivity are far more important. You might say a heist film, which this is for its last third, demands that sort of logistical clarity even more, just so we understand the stakes of the heist and have an idea what failure would look like.

I started this piece with a funny picture of a TV series with a similar title. As I was looking up Sexy Beast on IMDB to get some of the names of the actors, I found another TV series with the same title -- and based on the same characters. That's right, only two weeks ago, what would appear to be a prequel to the movie Sexy Beast began airing as a TV show, with the same characters as younger men.

I just don't understand this. Whatever any individual viewer may get out of this movie, I can hardly see how it can be viewed as a cohesive whole. Mileage may vary on the individual components -- I happen to not really like any of them -- but as a complete unit, Sexy Beast is a first film showing some promise in its very kindest interpretation. 

I just don't think Glazer thinks of himself as this kind of filmmaker. There's a reason he didn't try to become England's next Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn. He had bigger things on his mind, and I think he would consider this a career outlier too.

And now that I have seen Sexy Beast twice, I'm glad I don't ever have to see it again.

Identifying the outliers in 2024

I'm going to ease up on my cinematic commitments in 2024. That's not to reduce my overall viewing of movies, but to give myself more flexibility, rather than three or sometimes four movies I'm compelled to watch each month for different reasons.

I'll continue my monthly Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta viewings, which pair me randomly with another person in the group and give me that person's highest ranked film I haven't seen to watch. That's separate from this blog and it's something I enjoy.

But in six of the 12 months last year, I had two other movies to watch for two of my three bi-monthly series, as well as one to watch for my monthly series. Because two of the three bi-monthly series were rewatches, as was the monthly series, that's 24 movies I rewatched rather than watching something new. Which is not a problem, since I love revisiting favorites, but it does almost exclusively explain why my 2023 new viewings dropped from 282 in 2022 to 259 in 2023.

So only one bi-monthly series this year and one monthly series, and today I'm here to tell you about the former, which will begin in February.

There'll be no "finish up the filmography" bi-monthly series in 2024, as there has been each of the past three years when I polished off Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and the tag team partnership of Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion. I'll probably resume that in 2025.

Instead in 2024, my bi-monthly series will be a rewatch series, and I'll be figuring out what it is about one particular movie I don't love by a director whose other work has been a hit with me.

I'm calling it Audient Outliers, and basically, I'll take six directors whose work I love and rewatch the one of their movies that doesn't work for me. 

The series was supposed to be inspired by the release of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, one of 2023's most praised films that I will likely not have a chance to see before my list closes. With how I've felt about Glazer's last two films, Birth and Under the Skin, I thought Zone had a decent shot at my #1.

Thinking about the three films -- the two I love and the one I was anticipating watching -- it brought my mind to the one of his four that I really dislike, also the first I ever saw, Sexy Beast. A friend and I went to see it in L.A. and we both though it was sort of laughable, when it wasn't too boring by half.

Deciding Sexy Beast was worth a revisit within the context of the other films he's made, I decided to find five other films that fit this criteria of serving as an outlier relative to the rest of the filmmaker's work. I actually found 16 others that fit the description in one way or another, though none as perfectly as Sexy Beast -- either because there isn't only a single film in the filmography I don't like, or because the director has made too few films for the concept of an outlier to make sense. 

Nonetheless, I will choose five more from these 16, and watch and write about them every other month from February onward. I won't reveal them in advance because I'm enough of a big boy to know that you won't watch them along with me in order to get the most out of my blog. I wouldn't expect you to, but that's the only purpose served by revealing them in advance. 

I will indeed start with Sexy Beast in February. And now the question is whether I will try to wait until after the February 22nd Australian release of The Zone of Interest before I watch Beast ... at which point, it conceivably might not even be an outlier as the only Glazer film I don't love.

Well, I guess we'll see how flawed a premise for a series it is as we go. 

I'm looking forward to it, anyway. 

Filmmakers who have to wait

There's a price to be paid for making crazy, brilliant films and doing whatever you want in them.

Sometimes you have to wait for your next project.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

When I watched Upstream Color for the third time (but first in six years) on Friday night, I was inclined to wonder when we would be getting our next film from its director (and writer, and producer, and editor, and DP, and composer, and star), Shane Carruth.

But it's not going to be any time soon. See, Shane Carruth is a filmmaker who has to wait.

He had to wait nine years between his debut film, Primer, and Upstream, despite some high praise (though not by me) and a cult following for the former. It came out in 2004 and Upstream wasn't until 2013. It's not yet been another nine years, so maybe that's why his third feature has not yet been forthcoming.

It's easy to see why a studio or other investor would not take a risk on Carruth. His immense respect for his audience means that he doesn't spoon feed them anything, meaning they have to make what they will of opaque stories that are more like poetry than narrative filmmaking. And what gorgeous poetry, at least in the case of Upstream, which looks about as good as any film I've ever seen -- and a big step forward from his understandably grungy origins in Primer.

So I convinced myself that Carruth shot himself in the foot for future funding efforts when he made Upstream, but that should have only been the case if the reviews for the movie were tepid. A stroll through its Wikipedia page reminded me how rapturously the movie was received, how effusive (most) critics were in their praise. They may not have known what to make of it any better than most of us, but they knew it was something singularly enthralling. And how often can you say that about any movie?

Carruth has had other work since Upstream, but no features in which he sat in the director's chair -- only a single episode of a TV show I've never heard of called Breakthrough. This could be some kind of self-imposed hiatus, but I doubt it. I have to figure that a guy like Carruth, reaching an inarguable peak in his command of the language of cinema, would have had other inscrutable stories bursting forth from him. Heck, if you're Carruth, you don't even need a story. All you need are dreamy story fragments that you can sequence in such a way as to deliver us another singular experience.

It hasn't happened yet. And I see no future feature in pre-production on IMDB.

In doing a little deeper googling (er, in googling at all) I have discovered that he was preparing work on something called The Modern Ocean, which was to have had a star-studded cast, but that it was shelved. Maybe he shelved it, and maybe that was a good thing. I'm not sure "star-studded" is a good look for Carruth. He apparently was also working on something ages ago called A Topiary, but this was even before Upstream.

I'd like to think he's just following his own iconoclastic path, but I have to think that if someone gave him some money he'd make something quick smart. But even in the face of overwhelming critical acclaim, investors are gun shy if they know they just won't make any money on it.

I thought of another guy in a similar boat who also had a movie in 2013 ... and before that a movie in 2004.

Jonathan Glazer did not impress me with his debut film, much like Carruth in that sense. I couldn't understand the praise for 2000's Sexy Beast, which I found laughable in parts, and not the parts it (may have) wanted me to laugh at.

But after that, forget about it. I was mesmerized by 2004's Birth, which I saw twice, and even more so by 2013's Under the Skin, which I have now seen four times. That makes it one of the highest total number of viewings of any movie this decade. I only watched it a couple months ago most recently, and if someone wanted to put it on again tomorrow night, I'd be down for that.

But these are not financial winners. They leave regular moviegoers scratching their heads. Sure, the promise of nude scenes from Scarlett Johansson undoubtedly goosed the box office of the latter film, but it still made only $2.6 million in the U.S., and only twice that worldwide. That's nothing, especially since it cost $13 million to make.

But oh the reviews. They were breathless in some quarters, including this one.

Jonathan Glazer will not have to wait as long as Shane Carruth. Next year he's scheduled to release a film with a truly great title: Untitled Jonathan Glazer Project. That'll jump right off the marquees.

The Wikipedia page for the movie is only a placeholder, and the IMDB page has little more than that, nary even a star attached, and only "Plot unknown" to describe anything about the movie. It does tell us that Glazer is both writer and director.

"Plot unknown" could be the description of these directors' films even after they've been released, and that's why I love them. I don't love all abstract films that have lost their moorings from reality, but I love the films of Shane Carruth and Jonathan Glazer -- after they got their first misfire out of the way, anyway.

But to keep nourishing that love, it is I who will have to wait.