I’ve alluded to how in my “real” life I’m a high school English teacher, and one of the classes I teach is a Film as Literature course. One version of that class focuses on Film Genres. We watch films in the major genres in film and think about what define them (what the conventions are) and move into what it means that those specific conventions exist.

The first unit in that class, in my conception of things, has to be on film noir because that’s the most “talked about” genre and provides us with the most fodder for discussion and writing. I feel like there’s been so much discourse and conversation about what exactly film noir is, what makes it up, that using it as a kind of baseline or test case for how we talk about all genres is a smart move.

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What’s been more interesting to me are the other genres that have followed in our class—the western and the romantic comedy. As part of this unit, we’ve watched Stagecoach, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and High Noon for the Western before students will write their essay for this unit defining and analyzing this genre before then considering how a film (Star Wars: A New Hope) draws on the conventions of the Western but moving it into a different context. The romantic comedy work considers some films of the classic Hollywood era (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, and Sullivan’s Travels) before wrapping up with a more contemporary example, Moonstruck. We consider the seminal, foundational films regarding what a given genre is before thinking about a film that came later and either put the genre into a different context or brought into the contemporary world.

As we’ve been going through and watching these films, I found myself thinking about and appreciating the genres much more while also reckoning with how they’ve become something of an afterthought in our collective movie-going minds. There’s been a lot of “the romantic comedy as we knew it is dead” discourse—has it moved to TV? What do we do with Materialists? Watching those classic Westerns though and I could sense how foreign all of this must’ve felt to my students (even though Westerns do exist and are still being made—Deadwood, The Power of the Dog). But before we’d started, few of my students had thought about westerns and barely any had watched or thought about the romantic comedy. These felt so foreign and strange to them in a way that was at least a little surprising (especially regarding the romantic comedy).

I don’t really know if I have a conclusion or takeaway from all this. I guess I’m just wondering aloud if these genres have any relevance and thus are worth spending the time thinking about. I certainly think there are things to be learned or that can resonate even if we’re living in a different world than that of the western, for example. I don’t think it’s about that. It felt important when I was coming of age and starting to watch film closely to know about westerns even if the old west didn’t seem particularly “relevant” to my life. But I’m wondering if now, to be a savvy film watcher, do you need to have some idea of who John Wayne or Gary Cooper or John Ford is anymore? I would argue yes, but maybe that’s not the reality and thus spending time coming to understand these genres is just a waste or a meaningless exercise.

I see a connection with the struggles students have in learning the concepts of proper grammar. Students can write—not always on the right subject or doing the right work, but they can string the words together—but there’s a block about learning why things are structured as they are. It’s not because they don’t understand the concepts in some essential way, but those rules and forms and structures are somehow out of their grasp.

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Now, thinking about those same students as film viewers with their minds expanding, watching more film, but they don’t feel compelled to grasp or think about those formal rules and conventions. How do we change that? How do we instill in them a knowledge about the importance of those forms and constructions? Just as to be the best writer possible you really need to grasp the rules of grammar, if you want to be a truly savvy film viewer knowing the grammar of film (as established through these genres) seems to be of vital importance.

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched Dr. No, and what I found myself really noticing in this re-watch are the seams and limitations of the film. By the time we get to even a Connery film like Thunderball, you’re dealing with a degree of spectacle and production design that’s pretty substantial. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing as the bloat of some of the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan ones hold them back. Not surprisingly, the car chases (like the one in the mountains of Jamaica) or action scenes in Dr. No seem… slight or underdeveloped. The scene in which Bond, Quarrel, and Honey Ryder encounter the “dragon” is filmed in darkness and thus it is tough to really perceive what is happening. Even the final fight between Bond and Dr. No himself feels very quick and ragged. There’s something about it that’s refreshing as it’s worth remembering these films we’re about espionage and not action at the beginning (something we need to be reminded of more than 50 years down the road).

There are moments in Dr. No that feel like you’re watching a play in the “realism” (a strange thing to say about a film centering on a British secret agent). Bond securing his hotel room in Jamaica as well as checking to see that it has been searched over has a slowness or smallness that jumps out when seen through our modern eyes. I also think about the moment Bond escapes from the prison cell Dr. No has put him in—the lack of music, the way in which Bond seems to be physically beaten up— and it’s kind of surprising (until we get to the Craig films where that kind of physical pain is common place. All of this isn’t a negative exactly nor does it take away from the film’s entertaining qualities, but it’s a bit of a shock to see the first Bond film have some things that feel like what the series was striving for in the 21st century.

Dr. No is a bit hamstrung by simplistic portrayals of characters like Quarrel (as the reductive portrayal of a Caribbean man) and Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress, as the first Bond girl, possessing a kind of innocence and lack of agency that’s a bit problematic). Obviously, all these Bond films are products of the times in which they were made and thus possess elements that don’t fit with our modern sensibilities.

Encountering these things is just the proverbial cost of doing business. But I do think there’s a lot of it in Dr. No and perhaps it’s another reason why it’s one I haven’t watched in a while. It’s something we’ll certainly be confronting in those early films in the series.

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While there was clearly room for the series and the films to develop into what it would eventually become, one thing that works coming out of the gate is Sean Connery’s performance as Bond. I feel like Connery had this conception of Bond as cool, detached, suave, but also intense when needed. It’s a slightly different conception of Bond than what you get in Fleming’s novels, but that’s understandable (at that point in time and for a wide cinematic audience, you’d need to sand down some of those rough edges that Bond on the page possessed) and also… a lot it feels in keeping with Fleming’s creation.

Yes, you get some one-liners that feel like something different (“I think they were on their way to a funeral”), but the scene with Professor Dent coming to kill Bond only for Bond to shoot him when he’s out of bullets, that feels like something different from the cinematic Bond (as we came to know him).

I think Bond’s fashion sense is still coming into its own—there are some nice suits worn by Connery but not much that’s as distinctive as what we’ll get in the next films. This one, which anticipates some of his ensembles in From Russia With Love, is perhaps my favorite:

Speaking of introducing and establishing certain tropes, Joseph Wiseman’s depiction of Dr. No sets up a lot of what we’ll get with villains in these films between his metal hands and the Nehru collared jacket (and, of course, the desire for world domination as part of the SPECTRE organization). Dr. No’s scheme, using high powered radio jamming to stop a Project Mercury launch in America, seems spot on given that this was released right in the midst of the Space Race with all the attendant anxieties that came along with it.

There’s also the introduction of many of the hallmarks of the series—the opening gun barrel sequence, the iconic James Bond theme; “Bond, James Bond”; the vodka martini, “shaken not stirred”; the presence of CIA agent Felix Leiter (played by Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord); the appearance of Bernard Lee’s M and Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny—that give you the sense that there was a vision to this as a real series. I also want to call attention to the use of Jamaica as a location (where they filmed) and some of the beautiful vistas that emerged from that as well as the excellent production design by Ken Adam (especially in Dr. No’s lair). These are things the Bond franchise would become known for and they’re very much present at the beginning.

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Ultimately, my sense of Dr. No is that it’s an important film and has a lot of what we’d come to identify with the James Bond films and yet it’s not as strong and good as some of the subsequent entries with Connery. The next film in the series—From Russia With Love—is one of my favorites and is where you see the production team really put it together and make it clear they know what they’re doing.

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I’ve read just about all of the Ian Fleming novels too, so it’s not just about the movies, and that’s led me to be interested in other works about secret agents. While I certainly enjoy a good private eye movie or piece of pulp fiction or film noir, those worlds did not interest me as much as the narratives of Fleming and John Le Carré and the like.

I’ve been thinking about the whole franchise of late, for some reason. Perhaps it’s because of the exciting news that Denis Villeneuve has been named as the next director of the 26th Bond film. Having someone like Villeneuve. who was about as good of a pick to helm the next entry of the franchise as you could imagine (short of Christopher Nolan), makes the potential for Bond seem quite exciting in a way that it hadn’t felt since immediately after Skyfall (a film that is, in addition to being my favorite Bond films, one of my all-time favorites). Villeneuve’s track record (with a franchise like Dune, with an action thriller like Sicario, and with something more challenging like Arrival) makes him, in my mind, a really ideal choice to helm the next Bond movie. Edward Berger, who directed 2024’s Conclave, was an intriguing potential choice, but getting Villeneuve was remarkable and shows there’s still some importance derived from the Bond franchise.

As I revisit the Bond films, I thought it might be fun to turn that into an ongoing series here. On Letterboxd, I made a list in which I ranked the Bond films (starting with Skyfall and then making my way throughout the rest of the franchise).

Thus, I’m officially launching Universal Exports: The James Bond Rewatch. I’ll be going in chronological order starting with Dr. No, which I’ll be writing about soon. Just assorted thoughts, things I noticed or particularly enjoyed or thought were worth noting. Let me know in the comments if there are particular things you’d like me to focus on or address in my posts on each film—I don’t have a specific, determined idea as to what this will look like, so I’m happy to have guidance and suggestions as to what you all would like to see!

The Pitch: “We gave you everything, we gave you your name.”

It may seem strange to frame Pete Campbell—a man of privilege—as an aspirant. But this episode makes clear that Pete wants, needs, to feel like someone who has some kind of power and meaning in a world that (seemingly) denies him that. We come to understand why this sensibility clashes so much with Don, but that understanding comes later in the season.

From both his parents and his in-laws, Pete sees his work diminished in some way. For Trudy’s parents (also, we get our first appearance of the great Alison Brie as Trudy Campbell), that’s not a bad thing—Trudy’s father, Tom Vogel, is clearly jealous of Pete’s life as an ad man, but he also does not seem to take Pete seriously.

For Pete’s parents, who are the bluest of the blue bloods, Pete’s job is a source of embarrassment. It’s “no job for a white man” as Pete’s father dismissively says. Pete’s father sees his son’s work as an accounts man, the work he does with clients for his agency is beneath real work There’s this clear sense amongst the Campbells that Pete has somehow let the family down with what he did. When Pete says to his father that they’ve never given him anything (as he asked about helping with a down payment on an apartment), his father says “We gave you everything, we gave you your name. And what have you done with it?” I do think it’s interesting we have no sense of what exactly Pete’s father does (or did), which makes him seem right out of the “old money” world that Fitzgerald depicts with the Buchannans in The Great Gatsby.

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Out of this feeling of powerlessness, that most of what Pete does “have” is based on who his parents are, Pete clashes a great deal with Don in this episode involving the Bethelem Steel work as a way of asserting some kind of control.

Pete takes Don’s admonition, “You do your job […] leave the ideas to me,” and goes the other way, pitching his own ideas to Bethlehem Steel away from the office. Pete wants to feel important, like he can generate something (in this case, an idea for a campaign). As he says to Don:

I have good ideas. In fact, I used to carry around a notebook and pen just to keep track. Direct marketing. I thought of that. Turned out it already existed, but I arrived at it independently. And then I come to this place, and you people tell me I’m good with people, which is strange because I’d never heard that before.

The humor associated with Pete boasting about coming up with an idea that already existed aside, you see that Pete desires to be that creator, that generator, mainly because of the importance that would be bestowed upon him through creation. Thus, we get Pete pushing his own ideas to the Bethlehem Steel representative while entertaining him in New York. This act, along with Pete’s snide sense of entitlement when the client gravitates toward his ideas, leads Don to call for Pete’s firing.

But as Don and Roger go into Cooper’s office to finalize the termination, Cooper makes it clear that Pete needs to stay and not because of what he can do. It is because of Pete’s mother’s family (and their name, not even their fortune for as Cooper noted they dropped it all in 1929) and Cooper’s desire to not have their agency talked about in a negative manner in the places of prestige and power in New York that Pete must stay. Cooper both makes it clear that he does not think much of this and of Pete’s family (saying of their willingness to drop their fortune in fear of what was to come, “Some people have no confidence in this country”), but also understands how the “game” is played in this world.

It’s not because of anything Pete does or can do, but rather his name (in this case, his mother’s maiden name Dyckman, and what comes along with it) that saves him. But while that saves Pete’s job, it leaves him feeling trapped. As Pete looks out the window of the apartment he and Trudy bought (with help from Trudy’s parents, and not Pete’s), you get this sense that Pete feels stuck in this space where his only contribution is his name (emphasized by the fact that one of the Campbell’s new neighbors is so excited to be living next to someone from the Dyckman family). As he gazes out onto the New York night, Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “Manhattan” plays.

New Business

Though Bethlehem Steel really only makes its appearance in this episode, I do very much enjoy the rank hypocrisy of this client, Walter. In their first meeting, Walter clearly positions himself as an outsider, “I’m not from a city, they just bother me,” but then we see him out with Pete as part of this trip and joined by two call girls.

It feels so shocking and yet gives you a (further) sense of the world of compromised value in which we find ourselves.

The Traffic Meeting

The Betty-Helen Bishop dynamic continues to evolve—we have the encounter with Helen’s ex-husband, standing outside Helen’s home trying to see their child, followed by Helen coming over and talking to Betty about that situation. Again, the moment when Don comes home and sees Helen sitting with Betty… I find myself wishing there’d been some kind of further interaction between Helen and Don. I also enjoy that Helen is a Kennedy supporter and tries to get Betty’s support, with Betty saying “I’m not sure who we’re voting for.”

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You also get the strange beginning of the Betty-Glen Bishop interactions, with Glen coming into the bathroom when Betty is using it and then Glen asking for a lock of Betty’s hair. I cannot overstate how awkward it is when Glen opens the door while Betty is using the bathroom (“young man, what is wrong with you”), but there is something interesting about this relationship between the two of them. It feels, appropriately enough, Salinger-esque.

The Grey-Flannel Suit

He seems absolutely terrible, but I love Pete’s father’s madras shorts.

The Five-Forty-Eight

• You get the quick appearance of Rachel Menken in the episode, with Don clearly going out of his way to “run into” her as she comes from a meeting with Sterling-Cooper. She’s dressed in black and replies to Don saying it doesn’t have to be this way with “We both know how we’d like it to be”

• One of Roger’s greatest lines: “I bet there were people in the Bible walking around complaining about kids today.”

• Some more Gold from Sterling: “I bet daily friendship with that bottle attracts more people to advertising than any salary you can dream of […] You don’t know how to drink, your whole generation. You drink for the wrong reasons. My generation, we drink because it’s good. Because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar. Because we deserve it.”

The Pitch

This is a big episode for Don and, specifically, our understanding that there’s more going on to Don than meets the eye. The show opens with Don taking the train into the city, reading the famous VW Beetle advertisement, and running into someone who knows him as Dick Whitman. Our sense of Don is destabilized. Why is he saying that he’s this “Dick Whitman” and why does being identified as Dick Whitman so shake him? As Harry Crane says: “Draper? Who knows anything about that guy? No one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman for all we know.”

Don’s relationship with Rachel Menken blossoms in “Marriage of Figaro,” from their clear chemistry during the meeting at Sterling-Cooper (as Pete Campbell says, “I’ve never really seen Draper turn that switch on before”) to his eventually kissing her on the roof of Menken’s Department Store with her pushing him away as he reveals that he’s married. There is that clear connection or recognition of something shared in one another, calling back to what Rachel says to Don in the pilot.

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When Don and Rachel tour Menken’s Department Store, they stop at one of the display cases and Rachel picks out medieval knight cufflinks for Don, which shows what she thinks of him, some kind of heroic, chivalric figure in the modern age. While Don represents some kind of virtuous all-American ideal to Rachel (as a Jewish woman in mid-century America, the consummate outsider), Don sees something… I don’t know… authentic in Rachel. Some of the early discourse of the show was that Don was secretly a Jewish man and that his desire for Rachel somehow reflected that. I also noted the moment when Rachel, telling Don about her life, mentions that her mother died while she was having her (which happened to Don’s mother too). They both see something of themselves in each other and also something that they want or aspire to.

This idea of what we want but then what we’ve been told to want (and the dissatisfaction that emerges because of that divide) comes up at Sally’s birthday party at the Draper home and Don’s obvious dissatisfaction with that domestic world while Betty seems much more at home.

When Carlton, the husband of Francine, says to Don “We got it all, huh?” Don pauses before saying “Yeah, this is it.” The scene where Don films the party highlights some of that dissacoation, as well as the moment that Don sees of the parents of one of Sally’s friends sharing a tender moment.

There’s also the moment when Don, standing outside with Helen Bishop, replies to Helen saying “interesting crowd in there,” referring to all the mothers, with “same crowd out here,” as in the children playing in Sally’s playhouse.

We then see Don, having gone out to pick up Sally’s birthday cake, driving past his house and not stopping, clearly not wanting to return to that world. Later, sitting in his car, smoking, Don smokes as he watches a train pass by. Some speculated that Don was contemplating suicide in that moment—idling by the train tracks. But more than death, he seems drawn to escape, to the romantic freedom of “riding the rails,” a theme that appears prominently starting with ‘The Hobo Code.”

Ultimately, Don does return home with a present for Sally to make up for his absence. Perhaps recalling what Rachel said to him during their meeting—“For a little girl, a dog can be all you need. They protect you, they listen”—Don returns home with a dog for Sally, as Betty retorts “I don’t even know what to say.”

Traffic Meeting

Though she’s been brought up before, and seen as Betty drives past in “Ladies Room,” we have our first episode with Helen Bishop. It’s fascinating to watch how the other mothers, led by Betty and Francine, see her as this kind of oddity or sob story or someone to be mocked. It’s clear how much these women are threatened by or don’t understand Helen and what’s happened in her life (as the show progresses, she becomes a more… negative (?) character, but here she’s clearly to be sympathized with).

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Of course, the central irony is that she ends up saving the birthday party with her Sara Lee cake from the freezer when Don doesn’t return. A big part of the first season hinges on the Betty and Helen Bishop dynamic so finally encountering this character is a big moment. I also want to highlight the moment when Carlton offers to help with being a male role model figure for her son, Glen (totally overlooking, as Helen notes, the baby), and how Helen picks up on what Carlton is offering might be more than just throwing the ball around (given that Francine discovers that Carlton has been having an affair, Helen’s concerns were perhaps not so off base).

The 538

• Pete Campbell is back from his honeymoon and there to make Peggy feel bad or weird about their night together following Pete’s bachelor party and tossing some back-handed compliments Trudy’s way.

• Pete also invites Don and his wife to have dinner with him, which only finally happens in Season 5 (with a different wife).

• I always wanted to see more interactions between Don and Helen Bishop as I think here distinctiveness (a divorcee in a time when that was quite notable). I also love how Betty perks up and sends Don to pick up Sally’s birthday cake when she sees Don standing near Helen Bishop. Does she feel threatened by Helen? Worried that Helen would try to steal Don?

• I didn’t put it in New Business because it’s not a client of Sterling Cooper, but VW pops up a lot in this episode. I mentioned it earlier, but the famous Volkswagen advertisement by DDB plays an outsized role in the beginning of the episode. I hate to admit Harry does something well, but I enjoyed his point “you’re supposed to say it’s a great car, not a great ad.” Also, Helen Bishop drives a Beetle, perhaps solidifying her modernity.

• I love the reference to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Just an allusion, but very much in keeping with the literary bent of the show.

• A good line by Rachel, describing Don at her meeting with the other members of their Sterling Cooper team: “Something about the way you talk restores my confidence”

• Another great line from Don, “It wasn’t a lie, it was ineptitude with insufficient cover.”

We’ll pick up with further delving into the mystery of “who is Don Draper” and his contentious relationship with Pete Campbell in the next episode, “New Amsterdam.”

The Pitch: “You know what they want? Everything. Especially if the other girls have it.”

We have two characters who find their way into a titular “Ladies Room” in this episode—Betty Draper and Peggy Olson.

Our first scene in the ladies room involves Betty, while she and Don are out at dinner with Roger and Mona Sterling. While in the restroom with Mona, Betty cannot handle her lipstick as her hands have gone numb. I’m always struck in the first season how much of the show feels like it wants to be about Betty as much as it wants to be about Don. This episode revolves around Betty and her nervous condition, specifically with her hands going numb, and how it leads to her going to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Arnold Wayne.

Dr. Wayne, in a clandestine phone call to Don (revealed at the end of the episode), describes Betty as a very nervous young woman and it’s clear that she’s feeling some sense of anxiety.

Where does it come from? The mention of her mother dying just before we enter the scene/the series starts perhaps reflects an awareness that now Betty is this matriarch/maternal figure. Is Betty having trouble accepting that she is that person or does not think she can be that person?

It’s also worth noting that the second time her hands go numb is while she’s driving and she sees the divorced, single mother Helen Bishop (who Betty’s friend Francine Hanson had mentioned/described earlier) unpacking and moving into her home. After this, Betty’s hands go numb and as she’s distracted her car runs into someone’s bird bath on the front lawn and sends Sally and Bobby tumbling.

Thinking back to that moment, after Don had dismissed the idea of seeing a psychiatrist, Betty describes:

I keep thinking... not that I could have killed the kids, but... worse, Sally could have survived, and gone on living with this horrible scar on her face, and some long, lonely, miserable life...

Going on living even with some kind of terrible scar… worrying about a long, lonely, miserable life… the worth that a woman gets is just from how pretty she looks (she notes it would be ok for Bobby to have a scar), I think that’s getting into a core idea (the old wound that will come up in the season 1 finale?). What do we do when we have that scar, even if it’s a metaphorical one?

Also, the fact that seeing Helen is this trigger has always interested me—does Betty fear what Helen represents, or does this idea of the woman liberated from the more traditional bonds excite her in some way?

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The other ladies room of the episode is at the Sterling Cooper office where Peggy finds herself twice. The first time, while with Joan, she finds a fellow secretary in there sobbing, trying to comfort her. Throughout this episode, Peggy gets more fully introduced to the world of Sterling Cooper. She’s been on Don’s desk for a couple weeks, but it’s clear she has a lot to learn. At one point, she goes out to lunch with some of junior account men (including Harry Crane, who at the beginning is such a dork). Then, another day, the pretentious Paul Kinsey picks up her lunch from the sandwich cart and then gives her (and us as views) a tour of the office and the different departments that make up the agency.

We also get those men of Sterling Cooper making passes at her, both aggressively as Ken Cosgrove does at a lunch with Peggy, Joan, and some other of the Sterling Cooper guys, and in a more passive way as Paul does when Peggy simply asks if he wants to get lunch. As Peggy wonders, “Why is it that every time a man takes you out to lunch around here, you’re... you’re the dessert!”

Feeling this frustration (and letting it disrupt her correspondence work, as Joan notes), Peggy retreats into the ladies room where there is someone else crying. But Peggy does not, and instead seemingly steels herself. We’re learning that Peggy is something different.

It’s worth noting that even if they’re doing it in a crude and more forceful way (as Ken does) or as part of the guise of being a friend (as Paul does), they’re both ultimately after the same thing. Paul’s gestures towards some kind of enlightenment or something are always so funny and also come off as so transparently fake (this will pop up again at the beginning of Season 2).

Traffic: “I can never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you’re doing nothing.”

We still don’t know that much about Don (at dinner, as Betty observes, he’s withholding with Roger about who he is/where he comes from). Describing Don, Roger says “an ad man who doesn’t like to talk about himself, I think I may cry.” But I think we get some interesting insights in the work on the Right Guard product at Sterling Cooper.

Paul’s copy, which plays up the more modern “space age,” does not really resonate with Don. Don’s subdued anger? antipathy?… I don’t know what, but between his dismissing of that approach and how it clearly bugs him that Midge has a television in her apartment, there’s something about that future/better living through technology approach that doesn’t sit right with Mr. Draper

As part of this and thinking about how to sell this product, you get Don trying to find the answer “what do women want”? As he says, that’s how they’re going to sell Right Guard (either a man’s girlfriend or mother is going to want to buy it for them). Don ponders that question with his creative team, with Roger, and his mistress Midge.

He eventually comes, after *extreme euphemism* “spending time” with Midge at her apartment in Greenwich Village, to the realization that the answer is “any excuse to get closer.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Don is dismissive that what Betty needs is a psychiatrist. At one point, he says to her that people see psychiatrists when they’re unhappy and then intimates that because of what Betty has (family, home/material possessions), that she shouldn’t be unhappy. This comes up again when talking about psychiatrists with Roger in his office (at that dinner, Roger brought up that his daughter was seeing a psychiatrist), and he says “Who could not be happy with all this?”

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First-season Don is struggling so much with the image he’s created (we don’t know yet that he’s really Dick Whitman and that Don Draper is a creation) and that the material is what determines happiness. But you can see him brushing up against it, as he says to Midge, “I can’t decide... if you have everything... or nothing” to which she responds “I live in the moment. Nothing is everything.” More on all this later.

Sterling’s Gold

I’ve decide that, because Roger Sterling has so many hilarious lines throughout the series that they’ll need their own space/category to be recognized. Some of the stars from this episode include:

• “You know what? I am very comfortable with my mind. Thoughts clean and unclean, loving and… the opposite of that.”

• Don: “We had one headshrinker in the army. A gossip, busting with other people’s thoughts.”

  Roger: “Hasn’t changed much, just costs more.”

  Don: “And you can’t shoot at them.”

  Roger: “We live in troubling times.”

• (on Pete Campbell’s choice of honeymoon location): “Niagara Falls. Boy redefines lack of imagination.”

The Jukebox

We get one of the very few truly anachronistic music choices in this show with the Cardigans’ “Great Divide” tagging the end of the episode.

I don’t love the choice, but I think these lyrics certainly have a resonance:

There’s a monster growing in our heads
Raised up on the wicked things we’ve said
A great divide between us now
Something we should know

The Five-Thirty-Eight

• Pete doesn’t appear in this episode—he’s on his honeymoon with Trudy, but you feel his presence in the absence in Peggy, the way she fixates on the postcard he sent everyone.

• We also get our first appearance of Francice Hanson, Betty’s good friend and neighbor who will appear throughout the series, as well as the first awake appearances of Sally and Bobby Draper. It will be one of many Bobby’s but there is only one Sally in Kiernan Shipka.

• Another big first appearance—Robert Morse makes is first appearance in the socks of Bert Cooper. Cooper, along with Sterling, make it clear that they will do what they can to support Nixon in the 1960 campaign. There’s also an allusion of the “Checkers” speech Nixon gave in 1952 as being the model for how his presidential campaign will run (as Don described it: “An admission wrapped in a distraction. I’d say they know what they’re doing”).

• An admittedly great line by Paul Kinsey: “Don’t think that just because he’s good-looking, he’s not a writer.”

• And… one of the funniest Mad Men lines to take out of context:

The Pitch: “I’m in the tobacco business-- we’re selling America.”

The most famous part of this episode is obviously Don Draper’s pitch to Lucky Strike for the “It’s toasted” campaign:

We see the genius of Draper in this scene, in which he takes that negative (that these companies cannot say anything about health) and use it (and that no one else can make those claims too). It’s creating something out of nothing to make the product, in this case Lucky Strike, seem better and special.

Especially of note, for thinking about the whole enterprise of this show, is what he closes with :

Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.

But that happiness, that desire, that’s the smoke that’s clouding so many eyes (not just what’s coming from all those Lucky Strikes). Peggy, Pete, and Don are all clouded by what they want.

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Though this will be more explicitly explored in the upcoming episodes, Peggy’s desire to be a part of the “modern” world is clear. Though the appointment is set up by Joan, the fact that she gets a prescription for the contraceptive pill tells us that. Though she’s not “one of those girls,” as she says to Don, it’s clear she wants more out of life and one way this comes through is that she does invite Pete in when he drunkenly shows up at her apartment. The conceit of having one of our main characters be someone who is new to our show’s location is great too—it allows for us to get exposition but through that character’s eyes.

For Pete, he makes it clear what he wants is to be Don— not just the office and the title and the prestige, but the power. It’s interesting to think about what Don has that Pete wants and then what Pete has that Don wants (as we’ll learn, that blue-blood legitimacy and belonging within the important parts of America).

I think about the way Pete treats the girls who come to sit with him, Ken, Paul, and Harry at Pete’s bachelor party. He wants to feel powerful, to assert himself, but it’s clear that doesn’t work (the girl says “you’re hurting me” and then Pete says “I’ll be good”). It’s what makes that moment with Peggy stand out—this isn’t about “power” in that way. As he tells Peggy’s roommate, “for the first time today, I’m not selling anything.” If Pete can get past that desire to be the alpha, then perhaps there would be something meaningful he could find.

What Don is looking for is revealed in what Rachel Menken says to him at their rendezvous for drinks in which he apologies for being abrasive during their initial meeting.

Of course, this is what people most remember about that, are the lines delivered by Don:

The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons. You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.

But what Rachel says, to me, is much more interesting and, again, reveals what this show is really about:

I don’t know what it is you really believe in but I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it. There’s something about you that tells me you know it too.

Rachel Menken understands that feeling of being on the outside, as both a woman in the world of business (and, honestly, just a woman in the world) and as a Jewish person in an America that was still evolving regarding its views towards Jewish people. But this idea of not belonging and seeing that life you want (or think you want)—the belonging—is something Don feels too. The smoke that Don has in his eyes, that’s clouding him, is that he thinks achieving that isn’t possible. He’s truly buying what he’s selling in terms of the “you’re born alone and you die alone” and “living like there’s no tomorrow” (how Nietzsche of him), but it’s holding him back. But what Rachel says about Don turns out to be so true and it’s fascinating watching over the course of the entire series as he grapples with that himself.

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I also loved the wondering if Don’s secret was that he was actually Jewish and that was what he was hiding and thus this connection to Rachel Menken right at the beginning. I think the approach that Matthew Weiner took works though because that connection that Don is looking for and the way in which he feels like this outsider (I always think about the way Rachel says “disconnected”) transcends any one identity or belief system.

Though I think the pilot sets Don up well for what we’ll get during the rest of the series, seeing his anxiety when he stops at Midge’s apartment in Greenwich Village does seem a bit out of place (or that’s something he’ll quickly move on from).

The Jukebox

While the opening “Band of Gold” is a great one and hints at the materialism that will be explored throughout the show: “Just want a little band of gold to prove that you are mine.” Also, the double-meaning/invocation of the band of gold as we think about the gold ring on a cigarette filter. But I want to highlight the show closing “On The Street Where You Live,” which is fitting as we close at the Draper’s home. Using a song written for the musical My Fair Lady, the Broadway musical at the time when Broadway was so closely associated with the status-quo middle/upper class. But also the lyrics can either be understood as the importance for Don of having that image of the successful ad man with the wife and kids and house in this specific kind of place. Or is it hinting at that longing to feel that powerful of a connection he could only achieve after shedding this image he’s built up for himself: People stop and stare, they don’t bother me, for there’s no where else on earth that I would rather be. Let the time go by, I won’t care if I can be here on the street where you live.”

The Bar Cart

“Do this again. Old Fashioned, please.”

We see, in the first moments of the show, Don Draper ordered the cocktail that would be so closely associated with him—the Old Fashioned. Even before I watched the show, it was my go-to drink (I came by it naturally, as it’s my stepdad’s favorite drink and he taught me how to make them). Whiskey (bourbon or rye), bitters, sugar, club soda, and a garnish of orange and cherry, is one of the great drinks to have. It doesn’t dilute the liquor so much you don’t know what you’re drinking, but it makes it just different enough than if you drank the whiskey on the rocks.

The Five-Forty-Eight

• It’s hard to avoid how much they’re telegraphing the Sal Romano being gay reveal— the neighbor who poses for his drawing, the over-the-top reaction to the prospect of getting female models in for a potential Lucky Strike ad, and the following lines/exchanges: “So we’re supposed to believe that people are living one way and secretly thinking the exact opposite? That’s ridiculous.”;

• Because I came into the show after it had aired and knew a little bit about it, the whammy reveal at the end of the episode (that Don has this suburban New York home life with the beautiful young blond wife and children) wasn’t a big shock. I wonder/wish I knew if people felt surprised by that reveal or if they saw it coming

• It’s interesting to see how some characters change pretty dramatically over the course of the show (Ken Cosgrove in particular), but Roger Sterling is who he is pretty much throughout the entire run (and that’s great, because he’s hilarious).

• When Roger is describing working for the presidential campaign, we all thought he was referring to JFK right? At least I did until I, you know, learned about the relationship between business and the GOP/Nixon. But at first you’re thinking, “oh, this show about this genius advertising man, he’s going to work with Kennedy!”

• Another great line by Roger: “Well, it looks like you’re all going to engage in a little mid-level camaraderie, so I’ll be on my way.”

• There’s all the hints about Don’s past—that the Purple Heart falls out on the floor as though it doesn’t really matter and the way he recoils when Pete says, “A man like you I’d follow into combat blindfolded, and I wouldn’t be the first. Am I right, buddy?”

Let me know what you think/what I missed/what you liked in the comments!

In our next installment, I’ll be considering Season 1, Episode 2: “Ladies Room” and really get into the character of Betty Draper.

At some point, I will enumerate the connections between Draper and the protagonist of Catholic and existentialist Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling.

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I was in a moment where, rather than watching something new, I needed to go back to a film I’d watched before. I elected to go with 2011’s Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller and starring Brad Pitt and co-starring Jonah Hill and Chris Pratt.

Our IMDB summary of the film is as follows:

Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to assemble a baseball team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.

Though I’d make jokes about it with others in the past, this was the first time watching Moneyball that I couldn’t help but think about how what was depicted (or the drama) was not what “actually” happened.

How do I know? Well, of course, I was there. This whole story was set when I was a junior in high school, probably at my peak of watching and caring about baseball. I was at games during the season depicted, and I remember what happened and can tell the difference between what actually happened and what is depicted in the film.

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The question I find myself really reckoning with—what level of invention and eliding and synthesis am I willing to overlook in the name of a good narrative when I’m quite familiar with a given subject. Or, in short, what is the difference between accuracy and authenticity (or truth)?

To be certain, there are things in Moneyball that are accurate and true. There was the big organizational concern about how to replace the lost production of Jason Giambi, the signing of Scott Hatteberg and his conversion to first base (also, the “picking machine” line), the A’s slow start to the season and the surge later on, the 20 game winning streak, the methods of Billy Beane as a GM and how he wanted to evaluate players and construct a roster in a way that challenged many assumptions and orthodoxy in Major League Baseball, the ways in which the Oakland ownership was quite unwilling to invest money into the club.

What did Moneyball forget or get “wrong,” as it were? There’s no mention of Cy Young winner Barry Zito and MVP Miguel Tejada (as well as pitchers Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder and third baseman Eric Chavez), Jeremy Giambi was already on the team (famously, not sliding in 2001 ALDS Game 3 against the Yankees), much of the depiction of manager Art Howe and the conflict over Hatteberg and Carlos Pena (like… most of the Hatteberg stuff in the film qualifies), what prompted the A’s rise in the standings, a lot of the Chad Bradford stuff… basically everything that makes up the plot and dramatic tension of the film.

For the first time in my many viewings of Moneyball, I found myself getting frustrated knowing all this, and I found myself wrestling with what does one do when they know and remember the events that a work of art (film, novel, tv show, whatever) is based on? There are certainly higher stakes examples of this—All the President’s Men and JFKaddress much bigger things—but this is the one that’s closest to my own experience. What do you do when you know (as best as one who wasn’t actually participating in it) what happened? When the history being turned into narrative was something you lived through?

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This, in turn, gets us into a larger question about adaptation and what the goal is for an adaptation of one narrative in one media form into another. What are you trying to accomplish when you take a nonfiction book and adapt it into a film (and, importantly, not a documentary)? While Moneyball certainly takes liberties with what “actually” happened in the name of drama, the story it’s aiming to tell about how Billy Beane was forced to radically change the approach he took in terms of player evaluation to account for the financial limitations associated with the Athletics.

Sidebar: Both in the film and throughout the baseball discourse, Oakland is referred to as a “small market” team, which is hilarious given that Oakland and the East Bay (not even considering it as an adjacent of San Francisco) is a major market. It is not a “small market,” though it is (or was) a frugal organization.

That kernel, that idea, that clearly comes through in the film adaptation and it is, essentially, true. This is how Billy Beane and co. had to think and approach the game in order to compete. As Billy says, “if we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.” Those tactics proved to be so successful (even though it did not result in playoff success for the A’s themselves) to the point where the Boston Red Sox built their curse-breaking 2004 team on many of the ideas that Beane stressed.

We then come back to that question of what matters: accuracy or truth? The film is, in many places, inaccurate. Yet, it is also profoundly true. Do those discrepancies matter? If we’re assuming the film is a documentary, then yes. But it’s not. If we’re treating it as an invented work in some essential way (certainly not fiction, but not strictly non-fiction either) with the important point to be the way in which conventional thinking was challenged and a new methodology was introduced? Then those discrepancies don’t matter because that idea is clearly communicated in the film. So while those of us who remember the 2002 baseball season, and the A’s season in particular, might get frustrated or roll our eyes at the way in which Hatteberg’s season is overly dramatized and centralized, it does communicate in broad strokes (in a relatively short amount of time) was was special about Billy Beane, those A’s teams, and their approach to baseball. Therefore, Moneyballis a film that’s worth watching and returning to both for its entertainment value and what it illuminates.

The synopsis of the film from IMDB lays out the film and its premise pretty clearly:

Anora, a young stripper from Brooklyn, gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as the parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.

Mikey Madison won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Anora, or Ani as she likes to be called, and it was certainly worthy of it given how much she is on the screen. She is the movie, the locus, the focal point. For this film to work, she needs to be perfect. Like most everyone, I probably knew Madison just as Susan Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so she was still a bit of an unknown quantity to me (having not seen 2022’s Scream). Madison brings so many different elements the character where she’s equally hilarious, aggravating, and sympathetic. There’s a great deal that this movie has going for it, but above all is Madison and her performance.

Mark Eydelshteyn plays that son who impulsively marries Ani and he captures the kind of unaware, capricious nature that the son of a Russian oligarch would have. Yura Borisov, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, plays one of the men tasked with getting this marriage annulled and brings both comedy and pathos, serving as perhaps not an audience surrogate but a sympathetic figure for us to hang onto.

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It’s also amazing to note that Baker not only wrote and directed this film, but also edited. Baker won Oscars for all three of those jobs. To have one person write, edit, and direct a film, and to do so at such a high level to win those awards, is quite the accomplishment. The cinematography, courtesy of Drew Daniels, is also exceptional and the film captures the glamorous locales (Las Vegas, opulent mansion parties) to the more grounded Brooklyn scenes. It’s a film that runs the visual gamut from the most stunning to gritty and unpleasant.

As I wrote about in my Letterboxd review, Anora is a blend of Pretty Woman and After Hours as well as a dash of Boogie Nights in there too. I do think there’s a lot that it has to say about what we value in America, especially the younger generation coming up. There are also elements to the film that feel like a modern update on the screwball romantic comedy of the early decades of the twentieth century. Is Madison giving us an updated version of the Hawksian girl? I also think what Justin Chang noted in his review of the film for The New Yorker is apt:

But would it be more or less sacrilegious to invoke Preston Sturges, the most class-conscious and marriage-minded of screwball auteurs? Like Sturges, Baker grasps how the clashing priorities of love, sex, money, and status can send an impulsive romance spiralling into matrimonial anarchy.

I wondered if the film was beloved merely because of some kind of prurient sensibility in filmgoers given that it tells of the story of a sex worker, but Anora is about much more than that. It doesn’t have the raw energy of Boogie Nights or the lightness of Pretty Woman. I honestly feel like the third act, the most After Hours-y portion of the film, kind of drags on and does not sustain the more energetic and captivating earlier components. But it’s ultimately a fascinating examination of what we value, what we’ll do to get it, and what love and sex mean in our increasingly transactional and materialistic world.

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If nothing else, Anora stands as a star-making turn for Madison and a clear statement of Baker’s authorial voice. I’m not entirely convinced it will age as well as its awards haul might suggest, and I do wonder how it will look in hindsight. But it is an undeniably interesting film—one that challenges, provokes, and pushes its audience in ways that feel increasingly rare.

Why Mad Men? Well, it’s a synthesis of so many things that I love and enjoy. I wrote my dissertation on mid-twentieth century American literature and Mad Men is steeped obviously in that time period but also that very literature (there are a myriad of name checks and allusions, in addition to ways in which the show reflects the influence of that literature).

The final seasons of the show, which some people didn’t enjoy it as much as the earlier series, feel to me like a great novel or a short story collection from the midcentury steeped in existential philosophy. While the show focuses on a specific world (advertising in the mid-twentieth century in America), it engages and thinks about so much more. It not only references and alludes to literature, it also begins to formally appear like it.

There’s also the music and popular culture of that time too, which I very much enjoy, but it’s hard for me to not start with the literature. It’s also clear that Matthew Weiner and co. were influenced by the New Hollywood cinema, which is (as a Scorsese devotee) my favorite era of film (I mean, Robert Towne worked on the final season). Mad Men really does bring together so much of the culture and history that I enjoy the most all while telling an engaging story.

I also love the fashion of the show—the suits, the hats, the style. Also, as one who enjoys brown liquor from time to time, I appreciate that aspect of the show.

Mad Men also does not have the built-in drama and stakes of shows that deal with the worlds of crime and law enforcement (The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad), which makes its ability to be so engrossing even more impressive.

I initially toyed with the idea of doing this as a podcast, but I’ve come around to the idea of doing this as an ongoing series (yet another one) as part of my newsletter. But I think I’m going to take some of the elements I would have used in a podcast and translate them to the written form.

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There will be a few “segments” in my discussion of each episode of the show. The main portion will be “The Pitch” and will look at the main threads of the episode and what’s going on with our main characters.

There will be other sections that will pop up depending on the episode. Those will include:

• “New Business”: if there’s a new client we need to consider.

• “Traffic Meeting”: if there are plot/story/character things that don’t quite fit into “The Pitch” segment.

• “The Grey Flannel Suit”: any special notes and thoughts on fashion.

• “The Jukebox”: uses of music and needle drops in the episode (and their meaning).

• “The 548,” named after the John Cheever short story that references a train going from New York City back to the suburbs, will be a quick rundown of notes and points of interest I wasn’t able to cover elsewhere.

If I come up with other segments/sections/ways of breaking the recap down, I’ll add them in. But this is what I’m starting with. If there are categories I’m overlooking and should include, let me know in the comments! I’m also open to/considering a podcast at the end of each season as a way of wrapping things up. Maybe I could include a guest on each end-of-season episode. Just throwing some things out there.

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I’ve modeled this structure of this on the Binge Mode podcast with Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion. I’m thinking of this series as a kind of synthesis of that podcast, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald’s The Watch (and to some degree The Rewatchables), and Ben Crew’s Mad World newsletter:

Mad World

Read weekly, comedic breakdowns of Mad Men episodes. Written by Mad Men obsessive Ben Crew, writer of the viral comedy script "Mad Men Returns"

By Ben Crew

The Mad World newsletter probably gave me the kick/push/desire to start this whole endeavor!

I’ll be launching this series with the show’s pilot, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” in the next few days (I probably should have had that ready to go, but I wanted to let everyone know what was coming first). Feel free to join me in this watch-along! You can stream Mad Men on AMC+, you can also buy it through the Apple TV store or get the physical media if that’s your sort of thing. And let me know any comments/suggestions/things on your mind as it pertains to this whole endeavor!

Our Wikipedia synopsis of BlacKkKlansman reads as follows:

Set in the 1970s in Colorado Springs, Colorado, it follows the first African-American detective in the city’s police department as he sets out to infiltrate and expose the local Ku Klux Klan chapter.

John David Washington plays that African-American detective, Ron Stallworth, while Adam Driver plays his partner, Flip Zimmerman, who does the actual infiltrating and deals with the conflict of being Jewish and having to pretend to fit in with these people. Jasper Pääkkönen plays Felix, the chief antagonist amongst the KKK members. Washington (who I only recently learned is Denzel Washington’s son) does good work playing out the tension of an African American man working on the police force and the contradictions that would emerge from that, particularly in his relationship with Patrice Dumas (played by Laura Harrier). Driver is great as well and he remains a welcome presence in any film he’s in and Pääkkönen is menacing and terrifying in his role.

Topher Grace shines by playing David Duke, Grand Wizard of the KKK. What is both entertaining and notable about Grace’s portrayal is that he plays Duke like this boring, meek office worker or bureaucrat, showing both how present that kind of hatred can be while also… making it look ridiculous (hear this kind of dorky-looking guy talk so much about white power and white supremacy and you realize how full of it Duke and all those people are).

What struck me, and I’ve seen this appear in some of the contemporary reviews, is how Tarantino-esque the film felt. That’s not to say that it doesn’t feel like like a Lee film—it’s not as frenetic and it feels a little bit more in “touch” with the real world as opposed to the cinematic world. Now, Lee does make interesting calls to film with the invocation of Gone With The Wind and Birth of a Nation all feeling quite Tarantino. I also think about the incorporation of historical figures and the turning of a historical narrative into an action/caper/exciting narrative that feels a bit like Tarantino’s latter-day work. I also see wish fulfillment played out on screen too to some degree, though Lee is doing it with a bit more reverence. Lee had been pretty pointed with his critique of Tarantino in Django Unchained, saying “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.” Zach Vasquez highlights the ways in which this film connects or overlaps with some of Tarantino’s work

Loath as either man would probably be to admit it, BlacKkKlansman would make a hell of a double feature with any of Tarantino’s last three films, but especially his 2009 World War II revenge drama, Inglourious Basterds. Beyond the surface-level similarities of their creatively spelled titles and their plots — both are period pieces centered on the infiltration of white nationalist organizations (German Nazis and the American Klan) by members of the races they oppose (including, in each case, Jews) — they are also both feature-length essays on the history of cinema.

There are some masterful scenes in the film. In particular, the cross cutting between the David Duke KKK induction ceremony and Harry Belefonte playing a witness to a lynching is quite powerful. Lee is also able to really ramp up the tension when Flip, being “Ron” who is trying to infiltrate and get into the KKK, goes to meet with some of the local KKK members. Lee really amps up the sense of paranoia to make you feel what Flip must’ve been feeling in those moments.

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Lee is also clearly gesturing towards our contemporary politics by having characters like Duke speak about “mak[ing] America great” and “America first.” Lee also ends the movie with images off the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as well as the hit and run attack that killed and injured counter-protesters, part of a speech by David Duke, and comments by President Donald Trump. While that shift felt a bit heavy-handed, I do think being explicit that we’re still living in the world where the ideas of these people who Stallworth infiltrated—violent, hateful people—have a root in certain strains of thought.

While I enjoyed BlacKkKlansman and do think it’s that “return to form” for director Lee, I was left wanting by the end of it. Given that the film took some pretty big liberties with the story (based on the experience of the real Ron Stallworth), Lee could’ve leaned in a bit to playing up the cinematic elements to tell a more… exciting? cinematic? story (this would be the Tarantino way). There were good moments and visuals and strong performances, but it felt like there was still meat on the bone, to use a metaphor. Perhaps it speaks to how high my estimation of Spike Lee and his work is, that I could be saying that after watching such a well-made and engrossing picture, but that was what I was left with at the end of BlacKkKlansman.

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Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the scientist behind the Manhattan Project. The film also features Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh amongst others. Murphy won the Best Actor Oscar while Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Lewis Strauss, the chief antagonist to Oppenheimer. Those awards were certainly well deserved as both were excellent in their roles. More on Murphy later, but Downey Jr. was a standout in his first really dramatic role following his time in the MCU (to which he’ll now be returning, since he got that Oscar). Pugh is captivating as Oppenheimer’s paramour while Blunt is a bit hamstrung by a simplistic and reductive portrayal as Oppenheimer’s wife, but that has to do with the characterization rather than the performance. There’s also some great small performances, including Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, Rami Malek as David Hill, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, to again name just a few. My favorite was probably Hartnett as Lawrence, if only because of Lawrence’s connections to the University of California at Berkeley. Also, there’s David Krumholtz and Matthew Modine! And Gary Oldman!

I’ll get to talk about the visuals and all of the Nolan flourishes we get, but what’s quite remarkable is that this film sustains both amazing visual work while also having a collection of amazing acting performances by an expansive ensemble cast. But the star really is Murphy, who is able to capture Oppenheimer (or something about him) perfectly in his stoic, removed performance. Seeing Murphy, who in interviews is so warm and gregarious, play this very theoretical and detached man is quite shocking.

The film focuses on Oppenheimer’s work in Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb as well as his feelings following the use of that weapon, his 1954 security clearance hearing, and Strauss’ failed conformation hearings to become the Secretary of Commerce under President Eisenhower. It’s not a full biographical rendering of Oppenheimer, but you get to see that most important moment that leads to the development of the atomic bomb as well as the proverbial fallout within Oppenheimer and throughout the United States and the world from its creation and use.

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Coming from the director of Inception and Interstellar, it’s not a surprise that some of the visuals of the film are quite amazing. Sadly, I did not see this film in theaters but I can only imagine how awe-inspiring it would be to see this in IMAX, for example. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, who worked with Nolan on Interstellar and Dunkirk, is distinctive as is the cool color palate seen across just about all of Nolan’s films. Van Hoytema won the Best Cinematography Oscar while Nolan won the Best Director award. There’s also the Nolan-esque flourish of playing with time (moving between the different hearing and conversations through flashbacks) that, yeah, can be a bit disorienting and destabilizing, but is also to be expected in a Nolan film.

The film feels like, understandably so, it’s building towards the Trinity test of the atomic bomb, which is a stunning sequence and up there with the best of Nolan’s filmography (at the same level as the truck chase scene in The Dark Knight). The scene in which Oppenheimer addresses the people in the Los Alamos gym following the use of the weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also quite remarkable and shocking too and is really an effective counterpoint to that Trinity test scene. This also plays out the central…. not conflict, but tension of the movie and obviously what Oppenheimer himself felt. On the one hand, in the Trinity test, you have the success of this testament to science and creation… and yes, weaponry but in the service of winning a war against the evil of fascism. There is a larger discussion one can have about it, but I’m not equipped to do that.

But then that moment of addressing the crowds following the use of the bombs, and you see Oppenheimer really reckoning with the guilt of what he’s wrought. The former is maybe the most traditionally cinematic scene as the building to the big and pivotal moment of the film. But the latter is much stranger, less conventionally cinematic, but plays out the integral anguish and conflict that has been created. There’s also not true resolution, no easy answers given, which is not what you’d expect from a film that had such a broad appeal and yet Nolan challenges us there.

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Because I’m not evolved enough in my cinephile status, I always think about Nolan’s Batman films when it comes to his sensibility. However, I do see traces of his Batman films in Oppenheimer in some of the themes and ideas being explored. I’m particularly interested in the notion of escalation, which appears in all those films. There’s also the question of when one feels like they can do something to help win some kind of battle against evil, but also having to consider the cost… I strangely felt like there was a bit of Batman in Oppenheimer, which is kind of amazing. Perhaps it’s the greatest thing we can say about this film and Nolan’s direction of it is that he makes a biopic of a scientist feel as exciting as a super hero movie.

I think it makes sense that Oppenheimer is the film that earned Nolan his Best Director Oscar. It was a cinematic form readily understandable (the biopic of a major figure in American history), but it also included his directorial flourishes and thematic concerns. Yes, Killers of the Flower Moon was probably my favorite or the best film from 2023 (which I will be writing about, one of these days), but it doesn’t feel like such an injustice that Oppenheimer trumped it at the Oscars as it did when Wolf of Wall Street and even The Irishman was shut out. It’s a testament to Nolan’s ability to engage with big themes and ideas—America, guilt, morality, violence—that makes me even more excited to see what he does with his adaptation of The Odyssey. Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of something for Nolan, giving him a level of success he hadn’t reached, and perhaps sets him up to go even further as his career continues.

What Peele does so well is to take a largely innocuous setting and fill it with such horror and dread. This affluent, large home in upstate New York that, in a different context, might be the setting for light-hearted leisure and entertainment. In that regard, Peele’s very much putting us in the shoes/behind the eyes of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) who, as an African-American man, is accustomed to feeling out of place in environments that appear comfortable and normal to most—particularly white people. Peele, along with cinematographer Toby Oliver (whose largely worked in conventional horror), uses the camera to make you feel Chris’ outsiderness and to establish these visual cues that take on greater meaning after you’ve seen the film once. I think specifically about seeing Walter running at night along with the “Sunken place” and the final confrontation between Dean and Chris in the Coagula operating room as being much more visually interesting than one might expect.

The performances Peele draw out of his actors are also essential to the film’s effectiveness. Kaluuya, as the lead, brings the charisma and warmth that keeps you on his side, but he’s also enigmatic enough that he becomes a kind of cipher so we project onto him just as the gathering’s attendees project (in that case, it’s their desires). Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener, playing Rose’s parents, are perfectly cast in the way they embody a polite, post-racial liberalism that conceals something deeply sinister. For those of us who love The West Wing, seeing Whitford—so closely associated with Josh Lyman—inhabit a role of such menace is particularly jarring. Keener, a frequent presence in the empathetic, humanistic films of Nicole Holofcener, is equally unsettling as a quietly controlling figure.

Allison Williams also plays against audience expectations, drawing on her reputation from Girls as she portrays Rose, Chris’s girlfriend. Lil Rel Howery provides the film much needed levity as Chris’ friend, Rod, which really stands out in this film of very restrained or intentionally off-putting performances. Rod functions as a clear audience surrogate, openly calling out the absurdity of the situation and remaining unequivocally on Chris’s side. While he may not add substantial thematic weight, his presence introduces a necessary levity that enhances the film’s overall balance.

What makes Get Out not just an entertaining film, or one that briefly captured national attention, is its ability to remain gripping while offering a sharp and perceptive commentary on race in contemporary America—particularly among those who consider themselves “progressive” (as exemplified by the line “I would have voted for Obama for a third term, if I could. Best President in my lifetime, hands down”). Peele asks the audience to challenge its assumptions and recognize that even amongst groups that believe themselves to be benevolent or enlightened, something insidious can lurk beneath. At the gathering at the Armitage house, the conversations between Chris and the party goers initially register as awkward, clumsy attempts of older white people trying to make polite conversation with a young African American man. Over time, they are revolted to be manifestations of a desire to own and a fetishization of the black body itself.

Peele melds together different subgenres—body horror, mad scientist, and the haunted house—in Get Out while also delivering commentary that avoids platitudes or simple reassurance. It’s a testament to this film’s achievement that it can operate on so many levels, and do so effectively, without sacrificing coherence or meaning. Like many others, I have been reflecting on the past 25 years of cinema and compiling mental lists of the best films from that period. While there may be some recency bias at play, or influence from the film’s continued praise, I believe Get Out unquestionably belongs on such a list. If not among one’s personal favorites, then certainly among the most important. There are few films that so successfully confront a subject as vast and complex as race in America while remaining propulsive and engrossing. Peele accomplished exactly that with Get Out.

I want to return to my initial point about my general dislike of horror, and how only a small number of films—The Exorcist and The Shining, among them—manage to break through for me. Get Out belongs firmly in that category. It earns this distinction because it is not concerned solely with fear or shock. While it certainly employs those elements, it offers far more beneath the surface, inviting sustained reflection and interpretation. That Peele accomplished this with his directorial debut places him immediately alongside some of the genre’s most accomplished filmmakers and establishes him as one of the most important new cinematic voices of his generation.

OBAA is the second Pynchon work that PTA has engaged with following 2014’s adaptation of his novel Inherent Vice. There is something that really works with Anderson adapting Pynchon given that they have commonalities—the Southern California fixation, the surreal and almost silly humor that can occasionally feel incongruous, larded in a kind of irony. Some of the names in the film, the whole Christmas Adventurers secret society, it all feels appropriately Pynchon-ian.

DiCaprio’s performance as Pat/Bob feels very much of a piece with his role in Killers of the Flower Moon playing characters who are not as bright or as slick or in control as we’re used to seeing from DiCaprio. The former revolutionary who’s let himself go (in some ways) and is not as sharp as he once way really suits DiCaprio in this moment. It lends itself to a great deal of comedy—there’s a whole sequence involving a forgotten code word that plays into this. But I also think there’s some emotional weight to his performance in the ways he wants to protect and save his daughter and when he comes up short of it. Amidst all the chaos and calamity that is both exciting and entertaining, DiCaprio does bring a pathos and humanity to that narrative.

Two performances that really jumped out to me are Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. Penn, coming off his portrayal of William Holden in Licorice Pizza, plays Colonel Steven Lockjaw perfectly as a Pynchon character representing the fascist military industrial complex. There are moments when Penn becomes a cartoon and a caricature, and it’s all quite appropriate for this narrative. It’s also always interesting to see someone play a character who runs so profoundly against their personal beliefs and politics, but that's certainly what Penn is doing, going against “type” just like DiCaprio is doing with his performance.

Del Toro plays Sergio, both Willa’s karate teacher and Bob’s companion, providing a kind of humor and levity that he’s known for. I do find that his character, and what his character is doing, grounds the story and makes it more than just a story about a revolutionary who's gone to seed. While Penn and del Toro are known commodities and thus I was ready for their great performances, I was not prepared for how great Chase Infiniti would be as Willa, Bob’s daughter. I would be willing to wager a great deal of money she ends up with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, and it will be well deserved.

One Battle After Another features the hallmarks of PTA’s directorial style. The production design is absolutely perfect, not surprising for the director behind Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. You also have an examination of America and American ideals, particularly as it pertains to race and class and the conflict between freedom and constraints. You also get the same considerations of the found/created family units and what does it mean to be “family.” I think specifically about the escape of the immigrants from Sergio’s home—the ratcheting up of tension, the steady camera movement—which all feels very much of a piece with the stuff you see in Boogie Nights, for example. There’s also the famous (by this point) showdown/sequence that takes place on one stretch of California highway, which will probably be one of the takeaways from the film. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention cinematographer Michael Bauman, who has now worked on PTA’s last three films. I also think some of the questions the film raises about revolutionary ideology and the costs of that life are very interesting and appropriate (and remain appropriate) in our place and time (I think about the beginning of the film and the pull between Pat and Perfidia Beverly Hills and what that ultimately leads to). It’s a film that does have a certain moral charge and point to it, but it’s not easy or simple.

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One Battle After Another is quite interesting within PTA’s oeuvre and the connections that it makes to may other films. There’s that connection to Inherent Vice that’s obvious, you can see some of those links to Boogie Nights, there’s a dash of There Will Be Blood in there too. It’s a fascinating amalgamation of so many of PTA’s interests and concerns. I don’t know if it’s his best (probably There Will Be Blood) and it’s probably not going to end up being my favorite (Boogie Nights). But I do think One Battle After Another is up there with PTA’s best and will hopefully yield the critical praise and awards that he certainly deserves. I’m still making my way through the films from 2025, but I think at this point it’s probably my favorite and the best one released this year.

Unfortunately, I sometimes lapse into that kind of thinking (that once you “know” the most important thing, you can just move on) when it comes to films. There are plenty of films I’ve skipped over because I know what they’re “about” or what the most important thing is to take away about the movie. Falling into that camp is Deliverance, John Boorman’s 1972 film based on James Dickey’s 1970 novel. I knew about “Dueling Banjos” and the raping of Ned Beatty’s Bobby, and thus I didn’t feel like I really had to see it (I’d also read Dickey’s novel, and this is a pretty faithful adaptation—Dickey himself even wrote the screenplay and appears in the film). Despite my interest in the cinema of the 1970s, I just felt like I didn’t need (nor really wanted) to see it. However, after hearing the film discussed by quite a few people and taking a dive deeper into the films of that decade, I finally caught up with it.

Boorman makes sure to highlight the key concepts at the center of Dickey’s novel, which have to do with questions of masculinity and modernity versus the natural. Even before that pivotal scene, you get Lewis (played by Burt Reynolds) asserting the importance of adventure (“I never been insured in my life. I don’t believe in insurance. There’s no risk”) and reclaiming an essential, non-modernisized and civilized sense of one’s masculinity. I also think the dynamics of the four men on this canoeing trip—Lewis, Bobby, Ed, and Drew (played by Ronnie Cox)—and what they represent are all interesting commentaries on masculinity. Reynolds plays someone who is in many ways what you’d expect from a Burt Reynolds character (a heroic, adventuring figure), but that gets… if not subverted, then at least challenged in a way that would allow him to then really solidify that persona as his film career went on.

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Beatty plays the “weak,” domesticated man in the wild just right and Cox as the artist comes across (Cox gets to show off his guitar-playing skills in the “Dueling Banjos” scene). Voight, as the man caught in the middle—civilized, but also closer to Lewis’ ideas and ideals in some respects—is strong as well and is another in his line of his great performances of the 1970s.

One thing that I really noted was the cinematography, which was by Vilmos Zsigmond (who later worked on 1978’s The Deer Hunter). You see the similar muted color pallet and the landscapes that you get in that film (I’m thinking of the hunting scenes in the pre-Vietnam section of that film). I think Boorman’s restraint as a director, telling a story that is a thrilling adventure story at its core, makes that visual style work a bit better (Cimino really lets things play out). That approach to cinematography, the naturalistic and muted, is quite apparent in that infamous scene featuring the rape of Bobby and the tying up of Jon Voight’s Ed. Things play out for longer than you would expect and you don’t cut away from it as much as you’d think. Again, this is a film that Tarantino writes about in Cinema Speculation and certainly you can see its influence on Pulp Fiction. The scenery, with this film done on location in Raburn County, Georgia (where the film is to take place) is really remarkable and the kind of thing you just don’t see anymore. It’s a cliche to describe the location as a character in a film, but it really and truly is with Deliverance.

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Deliverance is a film that proven to be quite influential and relevant for cinema going forward. Whether it’s the idea of the excursion gone wrong, the depictions of the rural space as one filled with horror, these ideas keep popping. But it really is a testament to how a film is not and cannot just be reduced to just one thing, one scene, and if you know it you know it all. For one thing, the performances and the craft (the cinematography and editing) would be lost. Additionally, this film is about so much more than the horror of the “squeal like a pig” scene. These concerns about masculinity, modernity, and the wilderness are the stuff of great literature. I’ve thought a bit about Tarantino’s connections to Hemingway, but I’m intrigued if there’s a way to triangulate his interest in this film and how Dickey’s narrative was influenced by/connected to Hemingway (I would be willing to bet anything Dickey’s got some kind of connection to Papa).

There are certainly moments in Deliverance that don’t hold up—where the tone isn’t right or the technology takes us out of it (I’m thinking about Ed’s climb up the rock face and some of the day-for-night filming) or something just doesn’t work (a lot of the Drew stuff/his death doesn’t seem to work). But it’s an important film—for Boorman, for Reynolds, for Voight, and ended up being so for Tarantino and other directors. It’s one that took me a while to commit to watching, but ultimately I’m glad I did. Though I don’t think it’s a film I could ever teach given what transpires, I do think there’s a lot about the film that’s interesting to think about and that elevates it from being something so generic or exploitative.

Directed by Sam Peckinpah with a script written by Walter Hill based on Jim Thompson’s novel, the film tells the story of Doc McCoy (McQueen) and his wife, Carol (McGraw) who go on the run following a bank robbery in Texas. It’s only the second film directed by Peckinpah I’ve seen (I watched The Wild Bunch a while ago, but probably need to revisit it sooner rather than later), but I picked up on a lot of the stylistic hallmarks; namely, the slow motion, the depiction of violence and action, and this life outside the boundaries of normal, law-abiding society. The Getaway feature some strong set-pieces that allow Peckinpah to show off a bit. There’s a great, highly stylized shootout in an El Paso hotel near the end of the film that in a strange way makes me think of No Country For Old Men. There’s also a great bit of conning and chasing involving a train station too.

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It’s an interesting McQueen performance that seems so different than the aforementioned Bullitt or The Great Escape. Though Doc is cool, he’s not cool in the same way Bullitt is (or even Hilts in The Great Escape). But McQueen’s magnetism and charisma is in abundance and you can’t help but be drawn to him. It’s the first thing I’ve ever watched starring McGraw (I’m not really one for Love Story). Besides her stunning, obvious beauty, she does have this… live wire quality. The chemistry between McQueen and McGraw is palpable and you can see them, essentially, falling in love and you can understand why.

Tarantino devoted a chapter to The Getaway in Cinema Speculation (I promise I’ll cover films that weren’t discussed in that book at some point), but I couldn’t help but remember what Tarantino wrote about Al Lettieri who plays Rudy, who was part of the bank robbery with Doc before turning on them. Though he’s playing a villainous character, it feels so over the top it’s distracting. You’ve also got Ben Johnson, figure from John Ford’s films, playing Benyon, the Texan who puts together the bank robbery that goes awry while also facilitating Doc’s release from prison that precipitates the action of the film. But the film is about McQueen and McGraw. It’s their show and their stars burn bright.

I’m not sure what my assessment is of The Getaway. I like McQueen and McGraw a lot, and I do enjoy some of Peckinpah’s flourishes and interests. But there’s so much about the film that’s strange, and not in a good way. There’s peculiar stuff dealing with sexuality going on (Carol and Benyon, Rudy and Fran Clinton) that seems so dated and regressive now. I also find the moments of humor, of almost a slapstick variety, to be disorienting. Roger Ebert described the film as “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy […] It functions with great efficiency but doesn’t accomplish anything” and I think there’s something to that. I don’t think it’s “big, glossy”-ness or its “great efficiency” should be forgotten. I also think it’s a tremendously important film as a way of understanding McQueen’s star persona. But I also don’t know if it rises to the level of some of the other great McQueen films, nor do I think it’s an equal to some of the other great films produced at the same time.

Rolling Thunder

Reading Tarantino’s excellent book Cinema Speculation, his chapter on Rolling Thunder was maybe the most intriguing to me. It’s a film that I hadn’t heard much about until Tarantino brought it to my attention. The film, which is part of what is referred to as the “vetsploitation” genre (where an exploitation film centers on a veteran as its main character), is directed by John Flynn based off a script by Schrader and Heywood Gould. William Devane plays the veteran, Charles Rane, who seeks revenge on the criminals who murder his family upon his return to America following a stay as a prisoner of war. The film also features a young Tommy Lee Jones as one of Rane’s fellow returning POWs.

The film has that rickety, exploitation film feel to it. Devane plays Rane as being almost catatonic and non-verbal, which reflects the inability to reacclimatize to the civilian world following the war. It is a bit of a shock to the nervous system to see such a young Tommy Lee Jones, but he’s perfect as one of Rane’s men who ends up supporting him in his quest for some kind of retribution for the violence he’s suffered.

You can certainly see elements of Taxi Driver present in Rolling Thunder: the returning veteran and the sense of displacement, the violent climax that takes place in a brothel. There are certainly differences: namely, Travis Bickle is clearly mentally unstable while Charles Rane is not, or at least not in the same way. Also, Rane’s vendetta is very much a personal one (these are people who hurt him—bad people but specifically bad ones who got to him) while Travis’ quest for retribution is more… philosophical.

What was interesting to revisit in Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation was the way in which Tarantino tied the film to The Searchers in ways I didn’t totally realize. Tarantino highlights the ways in which both feature narratives of men returning home from wars in which they lost (Vietnam for Rane, the Civil War for Wayne’s Ethan Edwards) and struggling to find a place within the world before heading out into a kind of unknown wilderness. While Rolling Thunder was a fun film in that late 70’s action film mode, reading Tarantino’s thoughts on the film and thinking about those connections to The Searchers made it a bit more interesting.

Hardcore

The second film, Hardcore, is not only written by Schrader, but also directed by him. There’s also a chapter in Cinema Speculation devoted to that film, just as there was with Rolling Thunder. The film stars George C. Scott as Jake Van Dorn, a conservative Dutch Calvinist from Grand Rapids, MI (very much the milieu Schrader grew up in and rejected to become a filmmaker) whose daughter goes missing during a mission trip to California and becomes involved in the world of pornography. The film also stars Peter Boyle (strengthening its connection to Taxi Driver) and Season Hubley.

While Rolling Thunder is very clearly in that exploitation/grindhouse milieu, Hardcore is interesting in that is has one foot in that world and another in something closer to Taxi Driver. The tagline and the poster emphasizes the tawdriness and sleaze and degradation, but that’s not all there is relative to what another filmmaker might do with this kind of story. Scott is an interesting choice in the lead role—he does evince that kind of stolid midwestern bedrock morality, but he also feels so much of a different era and world that it seems a bit out of place. I don’t know who would’ve been a better choice (Warren Beatty was initially attached, but I don’t know if that would’ve been any better).

There are certainly the elements of connection with Taxi Driver with a character going into the world of sex work (pornography rather than prostitution) to rescue someone. The way in which Los Angeles is used is like New York in Taxi Driver, in some ways the West coast equivalent. There’s also a reference to a Mrs. Steensma as part of the Grand Rapids crew, with Steensma being Iris’ last name in Taxi Driver.

But its connections to Taxi Driver are not as great as the ties to The Searchers itself. The notion of the man out of place with Scott’s man of Midwestern conservative values so outside the world of progressive sexual attitudes depicted in the film. He’s entering into a land he deems immoral or unjust, just as Ethan Edwards does into the terrain of the Comanche. You also have the private investigator Mast (played by Boyle) frequently referring to Van Dorn as “pilgrim.” The ending, when Jake does find his daughter, also clearly draws on the ending of The Searchers, even though (as Tarantino wrote about) it would have been much more interesting to have the film resolve in a different way.

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It’s obvious to just note the ties between these two films and The Searchers. What I find interesting is how Tarantino, who has issues with Ford’s seminal film, is drawn to these films that engage with and recontextualize The Searchers. I also think it allows us to understand how Ford’s film had become not just important but an American archetype that filmmakers like Schrader would be compelled to constantly reengage with.

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As I've said, Martin Scorsese is my clear, obvious, without a doubt favorite filmmaker. After Scorsese... you've got Bergman, Bresson, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola (by virtue of the Godfather films), Hitchcock, and of the latter day filmmakers Quentin is probably the one that gets included. I can certainly grasp some of those complaints and criticisms, but I've ultimately really come to appreciate his work as a filmmaker and lover of film, putting him into my personal pantheon.

Amongst the many different things I appreciate about Tarantino (his obvious gifts in terms of film and story, his wit), one thing I've realized I really appreciate is his omnivoracious approach to all culture. There's talk about "high" and "low" culture and the mixing of the two, and I think Quentin is quite adept at that. He's just as apt to allude to some piece of world cinema or art as he is an exploitation film or comic book arc. As someone who is a cultural omnivore, I understand that and gravitate towards it.

Also, in his book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino talks about how his mom took him to more mature/complicated movies at a young age, showing him things that challenged him when his peers weren't watching those things. That is something that very much lines up with my experience (the story I always tell--my mom had it on file at our local video rental store that I, even though I wasn't 18 yet, could check out R-rated films because I was making my way through the AFI 100 Greatest Films list and wanted to watch The Godfather and films like that).

I've been filling in some of the gaps in my Tarantino study of late, watching the films of his that for one reason or another I hadn't caught up with. Here are some of my reactions to finally watching those films.

The Hateful Eight

After Django Unchained (which I enjoyed, but is near the bottom of my Tarantino film rankings), I wasn't really in the mood for a QT-Western. I also think I was put off by the expansive run-time and didn't know when I could justify committing the time. Thus, The Hateful Eight sat unwatched and unconsidered by me for a lot longer than I would care to mention. However, I finally caught up with it and was quite disappointed I'd waited this long. In the end, I think I prefer Eight to Django when it comes to QT's proper western films.

Beyond the great performances (Kurt Russell [more on him later], Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern), the plotting and the way in which the tension is continually raised is remarkable. When we think of westerns, we think of sprawling landscapes., and yet Tarantino has created one that takes place within one location (a snowed-in stagecoach stopover). It's not original to note, but the film draws on John Carpenter's The Thing, which starred Russell.

There are some things that keep it from being at the level of Tarantino's greatest work--I wasn't wild about Tim Roth doing essential a Christoph Waltz impression, some of the elements of race as well as gender (in regard to Jason Leigh's character) leave a funny taste in one's mouth, and the size/length does feel as though it could have been cut down a bit. But I think it's an interesting document of a film that doesn't seem like it would fit within Tarantino's oeuvre and yet it bears his thematic and stylistic hallmarks.

Kill Bill: Volume 2

It perhaps didn't help my experience of Kill Bill: Volume 2 that it's been almost 5 years since I've watched Kill Bill: Volume 1. I would be curious to go see these films in The Whole Bloody Affair single package version because Volume 2 very much didn't feel like (or feel like it should have been ) a whole film unto itself. Volume 1 did feel very much like a complete work that stood on its own, but Volume 2 didn't quite feel that way. There were some real standout parts, namely Beatrix/The Bride's (Uma Thurman) escape while being buried alive by Budd (Michael Madsen) and the fight between Beatrix and Elle (Daryl Hannah).

Thurman's performance is certainly great, and the way in which she differentiates between the earlier version of her character (in flashbacks) and who she becomes is very impressive. I also thought David Carridine's casting and use was a nice homage and point of reference. But the final confrontation between Beatrix and Bill (Carridine) feels... not quite right, especially when standing on its own as part of its own volume rather than one whole film.

Death Proof

In a similar vein to the Kill Bill films (which were an homage to martial arts and exploitation films that Tarantino loved), Death Proof really draws on the history of exploitation cinema (more horror/slasher oriented) in his film about Stuntman Mike (played by Kurt Russell) who murders young women with modified cars he describes as "death-proof." Russell has appeared in a few Tarantino films, and I wonder what Tarantino could've done with younger, more proper movie star Russell had he been directing at that time. I could see him using Russell in much the same way he's used Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Russell is able to be both charming in the ways he naturally is but also menacing and horrific, as befitting this role.

Given that it's so clearly an homage to low budget exploitative cinema, it's hard to read too much into the Death Proof in terms of thematic weight and significance. There is some pretty low-hanging stuff when it comes to gender, sexuality, violence, and repression (particularly filtered through the lens of the cinematic experience). I also think putting Zoe Bell, who was Uma Thurman's stunt double in the Kill Bill films, was a nice touch and made this (to trot out a cliché) a kind of love letter to this kind of stunt work (that would be further explored in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood).

I would also be remiss if I didn't note that the music in Death Proof is outstanding as is the use of Austin in the first segment of the film (Guero's and Texas Chili Parlor are all places I'm familiar with as a former Austin-ite).

True Romance

The outlier in that Tarantino did not direct this film (Tony Scott did), but True Romance is very much a Tarantino film even though it has some of the visual panache associated with Scott. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette star as Clarence and Alabama, newlyweds (very much in love) making their way across the country looking to make a big score with stolen drugs all while chased by the mafia. The cast includes so many great names: Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Saul Rubinek, Bronson Pinchot, James Gandolfini, Brad Pitt (?!?), to name just a few. The whole script, and particularly Clarence, bear the witty, savvy pop culture mentality indicative of Tarantino. There's visually a lot of the Tony Scott hallmarks (if you've seen Top Gun at least, you can pick up on them), but the narrative and the characters... that's all Tarantino. It was, of this batch of four films, the one I regret not seeing sooner. True Romance is both a subversion of a lot of cinematic tropes, but also an affirmation of them and the power of those stories.

However, I wasn't familiar with his work, really at all. I decided to dabble in this by watching Westfront 1918. The film, focuses on the lives and experiences of German infantrymen fighting in the front during the First World War and depicts something of the reality of the fighting of that war and something about the horror of war in general (to the point where when the Nazi's assumed power in Germany they banned the film and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels pointedly decried it).

Even in the context of post-World War I and texts like All Quiet on the Western Front, Westfront 1918 is a jarring film that depicts the horror of war as authentically as possible. Lucy Sante's essay for the Criterion Collection does a excellent job of highlighting the points of comparison and contrast between Pabst's film and a contemporaneous adaptation of that famous German anti-war novel:

Westfront 1918 came out almost simultaneously with Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which it resembles in many outward particulars: it is set on the German side; it focuses on a tight unit; it is structured so that a character’s furlough falls halfway through the film and separates everything into before and after; it kills or maims all its principals by the end. The differences between the two films, meanwhile, are instructive. Milestone’s picture, a huge international hit, had Hollywood financing and Hollywood equipment; its cast, including extras, ran to the hundreds, whereas that of Westfront 1918 is in the dozens. Furthermore, All Quiet serves up moral lessons and engages its characters in philosophical discussions. There are no discussions of much moment in Westfront 1918, and its only formulated message comes in its very last shot. And Pabst’s movie is much smaller-scale, having disturbed maybe a couple of acres of ground and demanded only three or four sets to be built, yet its setting is more viscerally credible than that of the Milestone picture, perhaps because it is that much more intimate. And, unlike a Hollywood movie rigged with moments of comedy and romance to appeal to the broadest swath of viewers, it does not let up for long from its bleak intensity of purpose.

I think specifically about this sentence, "Furthermore, All Quiet serves up moral lessons and engages its characters in philosophical discussions. There are no discussions of much moment in Westfront 1918, and its only formulated message comes in its very last shot." Both texts depict the hellishness of this war, but All Quiet is attempting to come to some kind of moral, to make some kind of point. Westfront is just showing the hellishness and does not seem to say anything about it beyond that it is hellish. It shows the atrocity but, in showing it as plainly and directly as possible, does not have to comment upon or elucidate the related ideas.

I took a class in my masters program that focused on World War I in literature and art (including film), and we watched that 1929 adaptation of All Quiet. Looking back on it, I wish we'd watched Westfront 1918 as I think it's a little bit more... I don't know if interesting is necessarily the right word, but would give an even richer text to talk about alongside those major literary works. There's a scene in which the German troops who are the focus of the film's narrative are being fired upon, though it's friendly fire (coming from their own men), which reminds me of similar moment in A Farewell to Arms. There is this highlighting of the confusion of this war and how little those fighting it really matter. They are just pieces on the chess board. If they are fired on by their own forces, that's fine.

Sante's final paragraph too makes some illustrative and useful points about the film:

Westfront 1918 does a signal job of conveying the fear, monotony, dirt, and exhaustion of the trenches, the boredom and uncertainty so poisonous that men would risk their lives just to leave the holes in which they were stuck. The camera is stationary in the trenches but runs wobbling along the surface up top with the soldiers. You see the blackout at night and the whiteout in daytime, hear the unsettling clicks and whirs that fill the silences between blasts. The process takes its toll on the viewer, who has been accorded ninety-six grimly visceral minutes of the outward signs of war. What the movie does not do is take any larger view. The men at the front are being butchered on both sides; at home, the people starve. No one, apparently, is to blame. War is a natural disaster, an act of God, though perhaps it could be alleviated if only we learned to love one another.

One shot of the fighting holds the camera almost remarkably steady and stationary, as if to highlight the unimportance of the men fighting the war itself. You're expecting that camera to move at least somewhat, but Pabst holds it exactly where it is.

The final moments of the film, showing an infantry hospital and all the wounded (both physically and mentally) within it, was another aspect that leapt off the screen and stayed with me after my viewing had ended. The madness, the chaos, the carnage in that space all feels so visceral and real in a way that's striking for a film of the 1930s. The lighting used with the character of Karl as he is in that hospital and how it makes him seem so grim almost like a skeleton.

I also think about the Lieutenant's psychological breakdown in those final moments too, how upsetting that is as it presents the mental torments that come along with fighting a way such as this .

For those interested in depictions of war on film as well as the art and literature of World War I, I would highly recommend watching Pabst's Westfront 1918. Though we are 95 years away from its release, the ways in which it depicts the reality of warfare for those conscripted to fight it remains notable and arresting.

The second film in that series, entitled Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, was released in 2022, delayed and affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The films stars Craig, along with Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista.

Our brief, two-sentence plot description goes as follows:

Tech billionaire Miles Bron invites his friends for a getaway on his private Greek island. When someone turns up dead, Detective Benoit Blanc is put on the case.

That setting, a gorgeous Greek island, gives this film a decidedly different sensibility than the first film. Gone are the chunky sweaters and warm fabrics, traded in for light, summery linen. Steve Yedlin's camerawork and Rick Heinrichs's production design deserves plenty of accolades and praise for making the film so enjoyable and so distinctive from that first film. The allusions and references to the Beatles that about (appropriate given the film's title and the song that plays over the closing credits) are also entertaining.

Craig is magnetic and charismatic as Blanc, in spite of (and perhaps because of ) that ridiculous southern accent. But it's fascinating to see him play this character with... shades of James Bond but without all of the baggage that must make it a challenge to play that role. He's charming and hilarious throughout, and it's a testament to his skills as a performer that he will be now known for not only being perhaps the best James Bond but also this singular movie detective. While in the first film, Craig was just one of many, in Glass Onion he is really the center of attention and gives the film its gravity and force.

Norton is hilarious and equally perfect as tech billionaire Miles Bron. Janelle Monae, who was great in 2016's Moonlight, gives another great performance in dual roles. Kate Hudson, who I will always associate with Almost Famous and her portrayal of Penny Lane, really jumped out to me, playing a ridiculous socialite/fashion designer/former model. It's a very broad, comedic performance, but that doesn't fail to command our attention and interest.

But in a film like this--a mystery--the writing and the narrative construction is the key to everything. That the film works is a credit to Johnson's work and craftsmanship. It's also worth noting that, much like in the first film, Johnson is able to imbue an entertaining mystery with some kind of social critique and theme. This is what, at least in these first two films (the third, Wake Up Dead Man, will be coming out soon), differentiates it and puts it a cut above just an entertaining mystery story. Glass Onion establishes Knives Out as being a bankable series with legs that could carry it into the future. It also solidifies Rian Johnson's place as one of the great writer-directors in Hollywood, particularly of these stylish and entertaining mysteries. I certainly expect Wake Up Dead Man to be a hit and for further adventures with Craig playing Benoit Blanc to be coming in the future.