Roxana Hadadi on the New Western

Posted on July 8, 2018 at 3:14 pm

One of the best essays about film I’ve read this year is Roxana Hadadi’s “Amid the Latest Western Genre Resurgence, ‘Lean on Pete’ and ‘The Rider’ Challenge Cowboy Masculinity in the American West” in Pajiba. She discusses several recent movies, including “Logan,” HBO’s “Westworld,” and “Hell or High Water,” but focuses on “Lean on Pete” and “The Rider.” The Western has always been the quintessential representation of the American spirit of independence, isolation, adventure, arrogance, as well as a way to explore our nation’s deepest conflicts and history of brutality and racism. And, as with most movie stories over the past century, the stories have almost always been about men and from their point of view. Hadadi writes:

The American experience has long been linked to the masculinity of the solitary cowboy, pushing the limits of the frontier. But what happens when there is nowhere left to go?

…Which brings us to Lean on Pete and The Rider, two films that also fit into the Western genre but are less about what the New West represents and more about what it actually is….These are stories about boys on the cusp of being men, each of whom is attempting to navigate selfhood in situations of poverty and desolation, in places where the cowboy code was once enough but isn’t anymore. Where so many Westerns focus on exploring (and romanticizing) the destructive ways that masculinity manifests, Lean on Pete and The Rider are concerned with what happens when those stereotypical markers—violence, sex, and lawlessness—are not only stripped away but are never the right choice at all. If you reject what it is to be a cowboy but you exist in the shadow of that figure, who are you?

You won’t read a better, wiser, or more goregously written essay on film this year.

Latino Critics on “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”

Posted on July 8, 2018 at 8:00 am

I didn’t like “Sicario: Day of the Soldado.” But I made no pretense of being fit to evaluate its portrayal of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. So I was glad to see this round-up of responses to the film from Latino critics. All are worth reading in full. Here are some highlights.

Carlos Aguilar:

If you are someone who can actually sit in a theater and watch this film without thinking about its political implications and how it feeds into the Trump narrative (even with its mid-movie glimpses of truth) then this is clearly for you. For the rest of us who believe there should be a certain level of responsibility to what’s put on screen, the mere existence of a work so blatantly obtuse signals the terrifying possibility that those who already dismiss the lives of immigrants and Muslims will find new ammunition for their hatred here.

It’s not that cinema shouldn’t explore the complex relationship between Mexico and the United States in a provocative manner, the problem is that writer Taylor Sheridan has a taste for writing stories where people of color are a central component, yet their perspectives are ignored (see Wind River as another example). He makes it obvious that his gaze is that of a straight white American male who can write a good thriller, but gives little importance to non-white characters aside from making sure stereotypes are perpetuated.

Kristen Lopez:

Nearly every Latino in this film is either an unnamed (or unseen) cartel member, is paid off by the cartels, wants to be in the cartel, or is generally associated with drugs….Having just rewatched the first feature, Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro is also problematic. This is a man who had no compunction killing innocent children in the first movie, yet will sacrifice himself for a teenage girl in this one. (Taylor Sheridan is a little too fascinated with foreign teenage girls.) Del Toro is perfectly fine, but this movie doesn’t get a cookie for having one prominent Latino in the cast who supposedly isn’t terrible. In the times we’re currently living in, I don’t need to pay $20 to see Mexicans erroneously portrayed as horrid people.

Claudia Puig:

The latest Sicario, as ham-fistedly written by Taylor Sheridan, has a kind of vacant timeliness, lacking any nuance in its depiction of incendiary issues. Of course, the filmmakers couldn’t have known that this border thriller would be released in the midst of one of the worst immigration crises in the nation’s history. But context is sorely lacking. Why does a quiet middle school kid get mixed up in shepherding refugees for cash? Virtually all the Latino characters in the film are portrayed as clichéd villains – drug dealers, dirty cops, or greedy kids taking advantage of hapless immigrants.

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What Was Your All-Time Best Movie-Going Experience?

Posted on July 2, 2018 at 9:00 pm

Scott Derrickson asked people on Twitter to respond with their best movie-going experiences and the results are a lot of fun to read. Some are just the pleasure of discovering a great movie or a movie that feels great because it spoke to them in a personal way or at just the right moment. Many others are about sharing a movie with just the right person. The movies named include “Raising Arizona,” “The Sound of Music,” “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “Harold and Maude,” “Gravity,” “The Blair Witch Project,” and “Interstellar.”

Here’s mine:

Walking out of the two day bar exam after law school into the bright sunlight and going to a theater a block away to see the first Star Wars movie. Liking it so much we sat through it twice. Also: a night of Laurel & Hardy, WC Fields, Keaton, Lloyd at a time I needed to laugh.

Needless to say, I was not the only one who mentioned Star Wars.

While you’re on Twitter, check out this @TCM thread with people posting their favorite movies set in their home states for TCM’s 50 Movies 50 States series.

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Rita Hayworth, Part 2: Ticklish Business Podcast with Kristen Lopez

Posted on July 1, 2018 at 2:18 pm

Many thanks again to Kristen Lopez for inviting me on her Ticklish Business podcast to talk about Rita Hayworth. Listen to part 2, our conversation about the movie with the worst Irish accent, the worst Hayworth haircut, but the best fun-house mirror denouement, The Lady from Shanghai, directed by and co-starring Hayworth’s then husband, Orson Welles.

Critics Need to be as Diverse as the Audience

Posted on June 23, 2018 at 2:20 pm

Becca Harrison writes in Prospect about “From Ocean’s 8 to #MeToo: why the gender bias in film criticism matters:”

This week, Hollywood stars and reviewers alike have waded into debates about the gender of film critics.

In a promotional interview for Ocean’s 8, its stars—Mindy Kaling, Cate Blanchett, and Sandra Bullock—suggested that they’d like more women to review their film.

Bullock talked about the need to “balance out the pool of critics” so that it “reflects the world we’re in,” while Kaling said that “often I think there is a critic who will damn it in a way because they don’t understand it, because they come at it at a different point of view.”

Responding to the cast’s view that men might be more dismissive of their film than women, Buzzfeed critic Alison Willmore tweeted that this was “the same argument an angry teen boy uses when telling me why I shouldn’t get to weigh in on Suicide Squad.”

“It’s also an argument whose end point is that there should never be bad reviews, because that just means the critic wasn’t the right audience.”

But Willmore’s argument misses the point. The issue of individual films aside, there is a pressing need for publishers and editors to diversify criticism—and to trust that women and people of colour can write critically about films, even when they are “the right audience.”

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