Seth Harris

Movie Brain – March 18th, 2022

In recent weeks, news reports have been circulating about a study that estimates 50% of the U.S. population has experienced some level of cognitive decline due to lead exposure. This could be through lead paint or lead pipes, even leaded gasoline fumes. Now, just because the news media have picked up a press release about a scientific study doesn’t mean we should accept this as gospel truth until it has been properly peer-reviewed. However, this is not the first time I’ve come across the lead theory. Over the last few years, I’ve seen this pitched in online discussions and brought up in articles, so I think there is something worth exploring here.

Movie Review – The Godfather

The Godfather (1972)
Written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

I would argue that Francis Ford Coppola is the most influential director of the last 20th century, not a giant leap to make, really. He pre-dated the breakout debuts of Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, and more. Coppola also created a type of movie that had been endlessly mimicked and rarely matched. It’s an epic drama focused on characters and their relationships over long periods. Hollywood had been making epics for decades but not like what Coppola brought to the screen in The Godfather. This was also many people’s introduction to the specifics of the mafia. Like epics, Hollywood gave audiences gangster pictures for years but nothing that showcased the family dynamics and the importance of cultural heritage to these criminal organizations. The Godfather really does live up to its hype, unlike anything before.

Movie Review – Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Written & Directed by Chantal Akerman

Our lives are made up of rituals. We wake up, get dressed, clean ourselves, make food, and overall prepare for our day. This is just the opening of a single morning. There is comfort in ritual; repetition provides security because we can easily predict what happens next. The disruption of these rituals can upend all peace we feel, throwing us into a realm of conflict and volatile emotion. From a filmmaker’s perspective, it’s relatively common to compress and delete chunks of time that don’t flow into a structured narrative. You don’t often see a character going through every step of that morning routine on film; only the pieces the director or screenwriter has decided provide shorthand to understand a character or jumpstart a plot. Chantal Akerman threw all of this out the window to present an almost four-hour picture that, by focusing on tedium, illuminates a kind of life often discounted in the medium.

Movie Review – Ratcatcher

Ratcatcher (1999)
Written & Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Western civilization is decaying and all at its own hand. You cannot look to a foreign enemy emerging over the horizon. The collapse of the world order we’ve known since birth was a slowly festering movement of austerity and neoliberalism that is choking the life out of hundreds of millions. The authoritarian British government brutalized its citizens in Northern Ireland and Scotland quite habitually in the 1960s and 70s. This came in the form of militarized police actions, pushing back against unions, and fighting against a higher quality of life. This is the world we enter in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, where garbage is piled up on the streets and canals are full of toxic chemicals. This is squalor inflicted on working people by the wealthy & powerful who want to bring them to heal. It’s hard to find hope in such a living Hell.

Comic Book Review: Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volume 1

Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volume 1 (2018)
Reprints Detective Comics #568-574, 579-582
Written by Mike W. Barr, Joey Cavalieri, and Jo Duffy
Art by Alan Davis, Paul Neary, Jim Baikie, Terry Beatty, Norm Breyfogle, E.R. Cruz, Carmine Infantino, Dick Giordano, Pablo Marcos, and Klaus Janson

At the same time, Frank Miller was reinventing the Batman mythos in the pages of the titular book; very different things were happening in Detective Comics. It was a very different experience and an example of how DC Comics editorial had not thoroughly planned out the post-Crisis period, much like how the New 52 reboot wasn’t as coordinated as it could have been. Things begin messily with Joey Cavalieri penning a Legends crossover. If you have read the Legends storyline (one I highly recommend), you’ll quickly pick up that this crossover is entirely unnecessary and not coordinated with the actual event. You can see this in G. Gordon Godfrey, who looks like this in Legends and looks like this in Detective Comics. I thought there’d be some sort of editorial guidance for artists when using characters from crossovers so that they would, at minimum, look the same.

Movie Review – Perfect Blue

Perfect Blue (1997)
Written by Sadayuki Murai
Directed by Satoshi Kon

I have tried to get into anime throughout my life, and I just don’t think it’s my thing. When I was in college, I had friends who would regularly consume Dragonball, Inuyasha, or whatever else was on Toonami. I ended up watching several films & parts of shows like Vampire Hunter D, Hellsing, Attack on Titan, among others. I can say that I usually enjoy feature films. I love Akira and Metropolis; I think they push past many tropes that generally don’t click with me in this particular animation genre. Of course, Miyazaki is fantastic, but he exists in a category all his own. Perfect Blue is something beyond anything I’d ever seen before, an anime with clear links to some of the best psychological thrillers of live-action cinema.

Movie Review – Persona

Persona (1966)
Written & Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Persona is a fever dream. Literally. Writer-director Ingmar Bergman says he worked out the rough draft over nine weeks while recovering from pneumonia in the hospital. The film is tangled up in Bergman’s rather complicated personal life. At one point, Bergman was involved romantically with actress Bibi Andersson. A few years later, he ran into her in Stockholm, where he met Liv Ullman, who was friends with Andersson. The director says the friends’ resemblance to each other was uncanny, and the idea of this blending of identity came from that thought. Bergman, who was married to this third wife at the time, would eventually start an extramarital affair with Ullman and would have a child with her. Persona ends up being a film as complicated and entangled as the filmmaker’s own personal life.

Movie Review – Fresh

Fresh (2022)
Written by Lauryn Kahn
Directed by Mimi Cave

I got married in 2011, so I just missed the era of ubiquitous dating apps and how these programs have restructured dating in the 21st century. I remember the website OkCupid and Match.com, but apps like Tinder and Bumble are just beyond my dating experiences. The people who have engaged with these apps have gone on to pen stories by “Cat Person” or films like Promising Young Woman. While I have not seen that film, reviews I’ve read expressed some disappointment with how the premise was executed, not sure if it wanted to be serious or a dark comedy. Fresh is much more confident in its tone but still not perfect. This is comedic but has many moments where I couldn’t quite understand what the director was going for because it clashed with other moments.

Movie Review – Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven (1978)
Written & Directed by Terrence Malick

When I was a child, my dad had a bookshelf in his home office. This was the place I first stumbled across the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I never finished (it took me a year to complete Fellowship, and admittedly I was ten years old, so maybe not quite old enough for Tolkien’s prose?). However, another book on this shelf highly interested me even though I didn’t have much context for it, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible by Otto Bettmann.

Movie Review – A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Written & Directed by John Cassavetes

If you have never watched much outside of classic American cinema, even the supposedly envelope-pushing independent film industry that came to prominence in the 1990s, you will likely be turned off by A Woman Under the Influence at first. Writer-director-actor John Cassavetes broke the accepted forms & structures of filmmaking in ways that critics were highly divided at the time of their release. Some could see the brilliant mind at work while others became quickly frustrated at scenes that linger and editing that doesn’t follow the smooth narrative flow we have become accustomed to. I can imagine your average MCU stan wouldn’t know what to make of these pictures at all. They don’t provide easy morals, and their characters are so complex you find yourself always seesawing between frustration and sadness over them.