My year with David Dastmalchian and the sexism of Letterboxd

One part of that title is a joke and one part of it is true.

I haven't consumed all the year-end movie stuff you might expect a fanatic like me to consume. There are too many lists out there, too many videos, too many think pieces on the year just completed. At this point of my own year, with only 11 days left before I finalize my list, I do want to deepen my engagement with some of the year's top contenders, to decide where they go on my list, but I also don't want to burn out on 2023 postmortems and get sick of it all before then. 

Things that fall into my lap, though, are fair game -- especially when they have to do with my whole movie year just completed, including non-2023 movies.

A few days ago Letterboxd sent me a wrap up of my year in movies, which contained interesting stats I already knew (I watched 259 new-to-me movies in 2023) and some I didn't and which actually surprised me (my busiest day of the week for watching movies was Sunday, when I logged 44 movies in 2023). 

Two particularly interesting tidbits were presented to me, namely, the actor I watched most in 2023 and the director I watched most.

They didn't tell me how many David Datsmalchian movies I watched in 2023 -- I'd probably need the paid version of Letterboxd for that -- but they told me that I watched no actor more than David Datsmalchian in 2023. 

Checking IMDB for myself, I saw it was six movies, which is indeed quite a lot.

Five of those came out in 2023: Last Voyage of the Demeter, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Oppenheimer, The Boogeyman and Boston Strangler. If those movies weren't all over my chart, he'd certainly be a candidate for one of my "three who had a good year" in the piece I post the day after I post my list.

The last was a 2022 movie, which I caught up with in 2023, that being Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

Since Dastmalchian is a character actor, it's possible for him to work a bit more than a lead would. He's a really good character actor, the kind who had prompted me to learn his name (though probably not how to spell or pronounce it) long before 2023.

It was the director I watched most in 2023 that causes me to issue the joke sexism charge.

That was Guy Hamilton, whose three Bond films Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun won him this honor. (Incidentally, the week I attended the Bond marathon was also identified by Letterboxd as my busiest watching week of the year.)

The thing is, I also watched three movies apiece directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow as per my bi-monthly series Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro.

I suppose if you have to choose one, there has to be some sort of tiebreaker, and maybe that's recency. I watched the three Bond films after I had entirely completed watching the movies of both female directors. But forgive me if I don't register just a little bit of skepticism here. (I mean, "guy" is even part of his name, ha ha.)

In the past, this would certainly have been dominated by a director in this bi-monthly series, since I was watching six of their movies. I'm quite sure Martin Scorsese took home the award last year when I finished off his filmography. 

By getting only three in each, Bigelow and Campion were subject to tying with Hamilton, whose three movies were for an entirely different reason. And I guess Bigelow only co-directed the first film of hers I watched last year, The Loveless. Campion's got a legitimate beef though.

Or the tiebreaker could have been how much I liked the films. Each of Hamilton's three films got at least 3.5 stars from me, and two of them got 4. Sadly, Campion only managed one 3.5 stars and she had a two-star film in there. Bigelow's track record was even worse.

So I guess if Letterboxd is erring on the side of showing me the movies I preferred, I rescind even the joke accusation ... and may have to point the finger at myself instead.

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: In the Cut

This is the final installment of my 2023 bi-monthly series Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, in which I watched the remaining three films each I had not seen that were directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.

To paraphrase former football coach Dennis Green, "It was what we thought it was."

Because Jane Campion is the only woman ever to receive two Oscar nominations for best director, winning one of them, there's been an inclination to reappraise her 2003 thriller In the Cut. At the very least, the hosts spoke about it with some favorability when they looked back on it on Filmspotting. It's tempting to give an artist who has made some indisputably great films a little leeway when looking at her misfires. Dare I say this tendency might be even greater when it's a woman, of whom there are relatively few to celebrate at this level in this industry.

But everyone is capable of making a stinker, even Jane Campion.

I should say the rating I am giving my final Campion feature on Letterboxd is two stars. That might clear it from "stinker" territory. So either this film does have some saving graces, or I am not immune to the notion of boosting my appraisal of the films of someone like Campion.

It's just that when it came out in 2003, it seemed like yet another one of those erotic detective thrillers that had their heyday in the 1990s before slowly starting to peter out in the 2000s, and that's pretty much exactly what it is.

In fact, if I were looking for something to differentiate this from others of its ilk -- some little twinkling idea that Campion brought to the project that a lesser director couldn't have -- I can't really find it.

If you're hoping for a strong character from Meg Ryan, representing an undercurrent of feminism in the film, you'll be disappointed. Even someone with Campion's smart sensibilities is unable to prevent this from being a character who has things happen to her, not who drives the action. She spends a fair bit of time crying pathetically as men toss her around like a rag doll. This was standard practice for a woman in a thriller in 2003, but it has not aged well, and it would have seemed like Campion could have done better by her lead character, even back then.

Then there's the men. Each is reprehensible in his own way, which is okay depending on how it's handled -- perhaps this is the feminism of Campion peeking through. But even though their behavior reads to us as vile, within the film itself it is not sufficiently repudiated, leaving an unsavory taste. Particularly unsavory, at least by today's standards, is the monstrous behavior of a young Black man who is one of Ryan's students, one of the red herrings about who might be the killer. There's a scene where it is implied he would have raped her had there not been a deus ex machina sort of intervention.

Mark Ruffalo is good, as he always is, but I loathed his character and his retrograde opinions about women, even some possible racism. (He says the way to flirt with a Black chick is that you stare back at her.) Clearly Campion is not trying to present us a knight in shining armor, but even within his own character there are inconsistencies. For example, he violates protocol by asking Ryan's character out even though he's just interviewed her as a potential witness to a murder. Perhaps it's not the same as asking out a suspect, but it's sketchy anyway. Then later in the movie there's a line where he says "I was doing perfectly fine before I met you," as though she were the instigator of their relationship and to blame for messing with his head. Then he's got a sexually aggressive quality throughout that is especially hard to stomach today.

In the Cut is one of those movies that uses the psychosexual dynamics of its lead characters as a driver for the parts of the story that are supposed to interest us most, and that's the problem with every erotic thriller -- maybe the reason why it essentially died out as a viable genre. Maybe there was a time we did feel like the animal magnetism between two characters and the various ways they tear each other's clothes off was enough to hold our interest. That time has now passed.

Really, I doubt my impression of In the Cut would have been any different 20 years ago -- no better, no worse. I don't think any one of those erotic thrillers became a special favorite of mine, though if I drilled down into my Flickchart account I'd probably start to find the exceptions. Watching this movie, I kept trying to find the Campionisms, the bits of filmmaking prowess that elevated this material. Outside of a few shots -- there's one involving water on an out-of-focus light that I found quite distinctive -- this felt like it could have been the work of any old hack. 

It's also one of those movies that reminds me of something that's probably obvious, which is that 20 years ago is now a long time ago and films looked a lot different back then. There's a lot of super saturation of color and unfocusing of backgrounds that probably registered as visually dynamic back then, but today just ages the film. I don't suppose any film can really escape the era in which it was made, but some are more indebted to it than others. The great films become ageless, while the lesser ones become part of the wallpaper that defined a particular time period.

Well I wish I could say the end result of this series were more positive. It turns out I'd made smart choices in which Campion and Bigelow films I'd seen and which I'd left to catch up with at some future unspecified date.

There's some positive news in that I loved Bigelow's Near Dark, the vampire movie she made in 1987. (Which almost certainly looks like a film made in 1987, though at least that's a look we aspire to nowadays.) However, I was significantly negative on the other two films I watched, The Loveless and Blue Steel, with Blue Steel actually having a huge amount in common with In the Cut. If I were ranking these six films, Bigelow's would be at either end of the spectrum, occupying spots 1, 5 and 6.

It's hard even to say which Campion film I liked best, though I guess it would have to be An Angel at My Table from 1990. The way the film is tied into her New Zealand roots -- almost to the same extent as her debut, Sweetie, which I really like -- gives it a certifiable edge over Holy Smoke, which shares too much in common with In the Cut in terms of the aforementioned psychosexual dynamics. So I suppose, that does make In the Cut a logical part of her oeuvre, even if it's too generic in all other respects. 

Having now done this in three straight years with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and these two women, I plan to give the "complete a filmography" format a rest in 2024, at least for one year. But that doesn't mean I won't have a bi-monthly series, maybe just the one, as opposed to the three I've been working through in 2023. I'll tell you all about that in January. 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: Holy Smoke

This is the fourth in my 2023 bi-monthly series watching the remaining three films each I had not seen directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.

I had already thought of Harvey Keitel as our leading portrayer of depraved men with psychosexual hangups before I had even seen Jane Campion's fifth feature, Holy Smoke (1999). (The exclamation point seems to be used sometimes and not other times, though IMDB has it without, so that's what I'll go with. Excessive punctuation in titles usually bothers me, and in any case, the exclamation point doesn't appear on screen in the movie itself.)

The fact that the movie doesn't fully see him this way, despite ample evidence to the contrary, was just one of the problems I had with it. However, I did still like it overall.

Keitel re-teams with Campion after her third feature, The Piano, where he was also a highly sexualized though clearly more sympathetic character. He doesn't show his junk in this one, so Campion must have nixed his request.

It's her first (and so far only) collaboration with Kate Winslet, who does show her junk, if the female genitalia can be referred to as "junk." It's a naked performance in more ways than one, as Winslet portrays Ruth, an Australian in her early 20s who has come under the spell of a guru on an Indian ashram. That choice is an obvious example of her unstable mental state, but the cure by her family -- luring her back to Australia on the false pretense that her father is dying, then handing her over to a man (Keitel) who specializes in extracting people from cults -- is liable to cause even more confusion for the young woman.

Especially when the horndog played by Keitel, DJ Powers, proves quite incapable of keeping his junk in his pants, even if we never see it on screen.

It's probably obvious where things will go with the two of them when the are alone in a remote hut in the outback, within a reasonably close drive of her family if they need to check up on the progress. That's because DJ also has a tryst with Ruth's married (sister? I think? I wasn't sure about all the family connections) earlier in the story, and we already know he has a female partner who stayed back in the U.S. who is also his romantic partner. 

However, I think we assume that DJ has never been unprofessional in situations like this before, with other confused young women who were in cults. This is where seeing the tail end of one of DJ's previous successes may have been helpful. It's an old screenwriting trick to show the skills of a central character in practice at the start of the film, to demonstrate both their talent for their job and what a successful outcome of these skills looks like. (Something, for example, Christopher Nolan's Inception does not do, to its detriment.) If we'd opened with DJ breaking the spell on another innocent young woman, we'd know that he typically earns both his paycheck and his reputation as one of the premier practitioners of this very specialized line of work.

Since this is really Ruth's story, though, the opening is devoted to images of her in India, involved in cult behavior that does not seem all too toxic, and perhaps, may actually be the quest for enlightenment she direly wants and needs. The movie interestingly refuses to condemn the guru, who we see only briefly, leaving us unable to determine whether or not he's a charlatan. The opening credits and the few minutes afterward actually make this whole thing look sort of joyous, as they replicate Ruth's perspective more than the perspective of her concerned friend who dobs Ruth in (to use the Australian lingo) to her family. In these scenes, Campion also dabbles with some visual effects to document the dizzy delirium of it all -- while stopping short of saying this can do Ruth no good. It's a good look on Campion and I'm sorry not to have seen her go back to that sort of thing more often in her career.

So we don't really get DJ until the movie is maybe 20 minutes old, at which point, we are going only on what he's showing us in the here and now. And at first it all looks very promising. He's using an approach that is more cooperative than confrontational, attempting to challenge Ruth's assumptions in unexpected ways that really seem like they have a chance of succeeding. We can see why he's successful at this, so in a way, this does fulfill the script function of showing us DJ at the height of his skills. Since we've never seen him close the deal, though, we have no idea if he falls apart at the end in other cases. (Presumably not, because that sort of thing would have gotten out.)

Since he does fall apart in this case -- it's not spoiling too much to tell you that -- we then don't really know what it is about Ruth that causes this reaction in him. It's very challenging, from a screenwriting perspective, to communicate to a viewer exactly why a particular close-quarters relationship results in something emotionally tumultuous. In his exceedingly frank way, DJ himself admits that his attraction to Ruth is sexual, an immediate inability to deny his physical urges, rather than intellectual or emotional. However, his initial loss of professional distance becomes less of a slip-up and more of a full-bore spiraling downward, at which point it's obvious that there's an intellectual and emotional connection he can't resist. 

Problem is, this isn't really in Campion's dialogue. Ruth is manipulating DJ as much as DJ is attempting to (benignly, at least at first) manipulate her, as much as the guru (possibly benignly) manipulated her. She wants to destroy his defenses, mock and laugh at him, pretend she's interested only to pull the carpet out from under him -- all as a complicated form of payback for being placed in this situation to begin with, even if those feelings would more appropriately be directed at her family. However, Campion also want us to find her genuinely vulnerable and possibly in the midst of some sort of breakthrough -- though we can rarely distinguish this from her (justifiable) trickery.

The end result is that when things go big in the finale, it doesn't really feel earned. If DJ does this for a job, he should be up against these fragile emotional stakes all the time. And if this is the career he's chosen for himself, he himself should not be so vulnerable to the beauty and breasts (at one point he admits to having a particular thing for her breasts) of the women he is trying to help.

Even though it does get a bit confused, and seems to let DJ off the hook too much for behavior that is shamelessly exploitative, I was ultimately won over by Campion's filmmaking and her perspective. If you set aside the two main characters, the way the supporting characters act is quite reminiscent of the eccentricities we saw in her first film, Sweetie, and even on into her second film, An Angel at My Table, which is the first Campion film I watched for this series. There's a sort of wildness to these Australians that we might also see in a film like Mad Max -- a blue collar shagginess that is somewhere between punk and bogan. ("Bogan" being the Australian word for redneck.) 

I want to call attention to two actors in particular, one I didn't know and one I did. The one I didn't know plays Ruth's mum, and her name is Julie Hamilton. She has a lot of traits that are really familiar to me from living in Australia, and I guess she did a lot of work before this, not so much after. She's the neurotic and panicky type, so her trip to India to try to convince Ruth to come home, where she's worried about being touched by everything, is both brave and comedic gold. Then there's Dan Wyllie, a character actor who shows up in Australian TV and movies all the time, but whose work I mostly know from the last ten years. It was good to see him show up here. 

Okay, in September we get to my final Kathryn Bigelow movie for this series, Blue Steel. 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: The Loveless

This is the first in a 2023 bi-monthly series watching the films of Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow I haven't yet seen.

I'm struggling to the finish line with my 2022 viewings. I have a lot of movies I could watch, but the collective exhaustion is sapping my will a bit.

So when I had an afternoon to myself on Sunday and just wanted to unwind with a movie, I chose to watch something from 1981.

It'll be the first in the new bi-monthly series I announced less than a week ago. I figured I'd be cramming it into the period between January 25th and January 31st, once I'm well and truly done with 2022 movies. But the truth is, after that I like to take a day or two off from watching movies entirely, and I've already got two others I need to squeeze in before the end of the month due to various other commitments, both on this blog and elsewhere.

And though this series is devoted to the films of women, I had to get through one man first. 

I didn't realize it at the time I selected this series, but Kathryn Bigelow had a co-director on her feature debut, who was also making his directorial debut. His name is Monty Montgomery, and I'm choosing to blame him for why I liked The Loveless so little.

It's also the film debut for Willem Dafoe, but I don't blame him for the movie's problems. It's not his fault they asked him to play a too-cool-for-school motorcycle greaser from the late 1950s, one of my least favorite recurring character types on film. But I'll get to the specifics of what I don't like about this film in a moment.

Now, Monty Montgomery has some good credits to his name. He would go on to work as a producer with David Lynch on Wild at Heart, which is not a huge surprise as that movie shares some DNA with this one. (Though to be clear, I like that one much better.) In a particular coincidence for this series, he also served as a producer on The Portrait of a Lady, which is a film directed by Bigelow's series partner, Jane Campion. Who knew I'd be able to link the two so successfully in terms of mutual collaborators. 

Interestingly, though, Montgomery is not a director -- not even on this film, according to IMDB. Yes IMDB lists him as co-director on the film's main page, but if you go to Montgomery's page, he only has producer, writer and actor credits, getting only a writer credit on The Loveless if you were to go just by that. His acting career was not a lot more prolific, as his primary credit is playing The Cowboy in Mulholland Drive. 

David Lynch, Jane Campion and of course Bigelow are great collaborators, but I still want to blame Montgomery for what I dislike about The Loveless, even knowing as little about him as I do.

One of the reasons for that is the movie has a hard time accumulating much of a female perspective. In order to tell you the ways it falls down in that area, I should probably set up the plot a bit.

Plot? Yeah there isn't really one. We meet Dafoe's Vance (heh, a nickname I sometimes use, but it did not ingratiate me to him) as a solo biker out on the road, who stops to help fix a flat of a woman broken down by the side of the road. He proceeds to extract more of a cash fee from her than she wanted to give, plus a non-consensual kiss that she seems to start to like as it goes. I can't specifically fault the film for this sort of thing as not only were we considerably less concerned about the agency of attractive women in films 42 years ago, but the film is also set in what appears to be the late 1950s, when society was even less concerned about such things than it was in 1981.

The opening is a bit of a false friend, though, as Vance is actually part of a larger group of bikers who are on their way from (they say) Detroit to Daytona, when one of the bikers has trouble with his Harley and needs to stop in a small Georgia town to get it repaired. There, now I've given you pretty much the whole plot.

The action, such as it is, involves the bikers standing around looking cool, chain-smoking cigarettes, continuing to pop the tops of ten-cent Coke bottles from the vending machine, sneering at each other and the locals, playing various games of chicken with each other (the most memorable being a game where they repeatedly throw a knife as close as possible to the other's boot without hitting it), and generally creating trouble. Each guy is trying to look tougher and cooler than the guy next to him, though there is also one female biker. 

Anything resembling a story comes in the form of a local teenager Vance hooks up with, who drives a convertible sports car. She tells Vance about how her mother killed herself when she could no longer tolerate the girl's abusive father, and the girl shows a scar on her forehead courtesy of the old man as well. (Since I'm disappointed in the representation of the film's female characters, the least I can do is name the actress here. She's played by Marin Kanter, who only made five more films.) Of course Vance ends up despoiling her, though at least this liaison appears to be consensual.

The father becomes an antagonist to the bikers, eager to run them out of town and perhaps even try to kill them. 

The film spends so much time on nothing that the only conclusion you can really reach is that its primary raison d'etre is to show how cool bikers are. I hardly think that would be a reason Bigelow would list for wanting to make a movie, but it was her first movie, and sometimes you don't get a lot of choice in subject matter in such a situation. I will say that the filmmaking is plenty credible, even though it is in service of something that does nothing for me. 

I've just never thought that someone posturing in a leather jacket and combing grease through their hair made for a very aspirational icon. I'm completely immune to the charms of such a character, which I think might be one of the reasons I was slow to become interested in Elvis Presley, though certainly that's only one incarnation of Elvis as a performer. I did like the Fonz in Happy Days, though, so who knows. Maybe it's just these particular greasers I don't care for. All the sneering and the false bravado and the worshipping of vehicles with loud engines and the idea not to mess with them because they could end you ... it doesn't work for me either when this type is put on a pedestal or when it is critiqued, the latter of which is probably supposed to be the case in The Loveless. I'm just too quick to find such a person an insecure, infantile personality, even in a movie 42 years ago where the character deficits of such a person were not nearly as clear as they are now.

Should I be giving The Loveless a pass for the period in which it was made? I don't think so. In whatever period you make a film, you have to decide whether you are going to put the effort into a compelling story or are just going to trot around your characters for 80 minutes and decide that's story enough. 

And yes, the depictions of women are bad. Other than the biker chick, the stalled motorist and Telena, the girl with the convertible and the bad daddy, the most prominent female character is the bored waitress in the diner where a lot of the action takes place. She ends the film performing a striptease at a local bar, for reasons not entirely clear.

Two telling bits from this end portion of the film that I jotted down:

1) The song that plays during the striptease is something called "You're Wasting My Time." Indeed.

2) In one of his last lines of dialogue in the film, Dafoe's Vance says "We're going nowhere. Fast." You said it Vance, not me. It's an on-the-nose comment not only for these characters, but for how I felt the entire time watching this movie -- which seemed like an eternity even at barely 80 minutes long.

I have no doubt Bigelow's career and her depictions of women will start to improve with Near Dark, her next in the series, and certainly by the time of Blue Steel, which features Jamie Lee Curtis as a cop.

Before then, though, I've decided to go with Campion's first film I haven't seen, An Angel at My Table, in March.

Completing more filmographies, but leaving the old white men behind

To say that I have only completed the filmographies of old white men during my bi-monthly series over the past few years is not exactly accurate. I mean, this whole quest to finish off filmographies sort of started with Spike Lee, who may be old and male, but is certainly not white. Of course, I didn't actually finish his filmography, since there were nine Lee features I hadn't seen and the bi-monthly schedule only allowed me to watch six of them.

As a corrective to failing to finish Lee's movies, I did choose auteurs in 2021 and 2022 whose filmographies I could finish with exactly six movies, though there were asterisks next to each. With Orson Welles, I had to ignore certain movie fragments that existed under his name, and with Martin Scorsese, I had to disregard documentaries. With both, the problem remained that they were old and white and male. 

In 2023, at last, I am turning this impulse in a distaff direction.

The problem is, due to age-old inequities in the film industry, there are almost no female directors who are both significant enough to be worth investigating in a series like this, and have a directing credit on six features I haven't seen. That's partly a credit to me for having stayed on top of the work of the more prolific female directors, but also partly a sad reality that there just aren't that many to choose from.

Now, if I dug back into history, I could find directors who worked decades ago who may be largely unseen by me, people like Lina Wertmuller or Vera Chytilova or Ida Lupino, who may have six or more films I haven't seen. But the impulse behind this series is not to discover somebody I'm unfamiliar with, and then work through their filmography. It's to take somebody I already know, whose work I already admire, and to finish it off.

So I've come up with what I think is a pretty good idea: I'm going to split the six films between two directors.

And to give a clear relationship between them that would make sharing this series logical, they'll be two of the three women who have won best director Oscars.

With apologies to Chloe Zhao, who has directed only one feature-length film I haven't seen, that means I'm focusing on Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion in 2023. 

And because of course I do, I've got a fun name for this series: Campion Champion and Bigelow Pro.

Yes that's a bit of a mouthful, but you only have to say it six times. 

Each director has three feature films I haven't seen, and yes, I may have watched K-19: The Widowmaker last year just to allow that to be the case. I may have. 

With Campion, it's An Angel at My Table (1990), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003). With Bigelow, it's The Loveless (1981), Near Dark (1987) and Blue Steel (1990). 

Is either director particularly a favorite of mine? Not necessarily, but they've each made at least one film that I love. With Bigelow it's Strange Days, which is in my Flickchart top 100, and with Campion, my most passionate feelings would probably be divided between The Piano and The Power of the Dog. 

There can be no doubt of these women's historical significance to the movies, though, considering that they were indeed the first and third women to take home the Oscar for best director, Campion just completing the feat a year ago.

Considering that all of my unseen Bigelow movies come before the first Campion movie I haven't seen, chronologically -- even though Bigelow is only three years older than Campion -- I could just watch all Bigelow's movies first, then switch to Campion for the "back nine," as it were.

Or, I could give the series more of a sense of evenness throughout by alternating titles, starting with The Loveless and then going to An Angel at My Table, and so on. Whatever I decide to do, I will go in chronological order at least within each director's filmography.

However I choose to approach it, I'll make that decision within the next week or two, as I plan to start this in January and have subsequent installments in March, May, July, September and November. 

And while I often do this bi-monthly series starting in February and ending in December, I have another bi-monthly series that will be filling that slot that I haven't announced yet -- partly because I haven't settled on it yet. It will be watching the films of one of two directors, and in this case it will be revisiting films I've already seen.

In either case I will likely start out with The Loveless as the oldest film on the list, having just confirmed its availability on iTunes. If you want to play along, you can watch that now and join me back here in a couple weeks for a discussion.