Still from The Lost Weekend (1945, dir. Billy Wilder).

Diana “Baby Peggy” Cary, age 5, in Darling of New York (1923, dir. King Baggot).

Ann Margret in Tommy, 1975.

“Pull my finger.”

Oh, dear

Le cochon danseur, Pathé, 1907

Miss Kubelik, I adore you

Carey Mulligan is the Shirley MacLaine for a new era. No samsara jokes, please.

I enjoyed Drive more than I expected to, but felt a little ashamed. It’s hard to deny it is a very decadent film: the Byronic intensity! The smouldering! The lingering! And above all the gazing—punctuated by convulsions of the old ultraviolence.1 Is this what we’ve come to? Well. And isn’t the unnamed hero something out of a chanson de geste, what with his mighty steed and his noble mien? Such rarefied courtliness! Of course, a lack of carnality in the bedroom is made up for in dead Saracens. The white knight even sports prominent heraldry! The dissertation all but writes itself.

All joking aside, this is what straight action movies ought to be. I watched Escape From New York last week (for a reason, honest), and by the end I felt as though I’d spent the evening with a dry-cleaning bag over my head. And while the anachronism emphasizes John Carpenter’s essential want of taste, nothing much has changed since 1981. An instructive comparison to Drive might be Jason Statham’s breakout vehicle, a very typical piece of high-octane flatulence called The Transporter. Macho stoicism, fisticuffs, car chases, damsels in distress, moody glares, double-crosses—but only one of these films is functioning above the level of the limbic system. Which one is it? 

1 In the words of Oliver Stone, “Holy shit—you see that fuckin’ head come apart, man?”

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of The Sandpiper, 1965.

Midnight In Paris

If Match Point, Woody Allen’s last really fine picture1, was just Crimes and Misdemeanours transposed an octave younger, Midnight in Paris is a variation worthy of a Bach fugue, in which the theme of The Purple Rose of Cairo is played, as it were, inside-out. The stars align on this one: the whimsy is unforced, the cast is in perfect tune, and the script’s treatment of nostalgia, anachronism, and the ambivalent consolations of art is subtle without being clever, more wise than wiseacre. God, I sound like I’m trying to get into The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town. Playing through Thursday at the Wiltshire, East 32nd Street. Or whatever. Good flick, though, is all I’m saying.

1 Excepting, possibly, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which I haven’t seen.