Winter Kept Us Warm, David Secter, 1965.
(1) I promised myself I would produce another newsletter within a two-month window and we almost made it, I’m off by a few weeks. I was asked if I would ever consider branding or marketing this newsletter more proactively or if I would turn on paid subscriptions. But anything more than that seems like pulling teeth so everything will stay as is: lowkey and low-stakes and free. I wrote more here, about criticism and the role of the critic and making soup and what a busy year it’s been, etc etc etc… But something about saying less as I turn the corner seemed just as sensible, like looking out the window to conclude a conversation.
(2)
Winter Kept Us Warm (David Secter, 1965): Recently restored in 4K, Winter Kept Us Warm is one of the earliest Canadian queer films. Two students, upperclassman Doug (John Labow) and freshman Peter (Henry Tarvainen), cross paths at the University of Toronto. Their increasing time spent together, listening to records with knees touching and frolicking in the snow, suggests some future revelation too agonizing to confront in the present. Like the Cambridge of Maurice, the university is held together by strictly surveilled rituals and rules that only intensify the closeness between the young men. The truth is limited to cautious gestures: a delicate touch, a quick glance, a heartfelt gift presented as a spontaneous afterthought. Doug and Peter’s ambiguous relationship is so contained within subtle cues that even the cast and crew (mostly Secter’s university friends) admitted to not knowing what the film was really about. But even this touches upon how fear renders love a secret most effortfully kept from oneself.
When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989): Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) spend over a decade agonizing over whether men and women can ever be “just friends” as the romantic and sexual tension between them escalates. The clarity required of a close friendship is muddled by the science-fictional element of sexual difference. Gender becomes a cheap shorthand for all misunderstandings, but this escape hatch only leads to more dead ends. Sexual difference fails to fully explain why some “men” hate cuddling after sex and others don’t mind staying, and it fails to clarify why marriage would resolve any such uncertainties. The best romantic comedy about this subject is actually My Best Friend’s Wedding, because at least there is a gay person present to look on at this madness with a raised eyebrow.
Notting Hill (Roger Mitchell, 1999): What I especially love about Notting Hill is its depiction of the very real role that gossip plays in shaping the memory of romance and the decisions made based on pure speculations about that shape. Gossip places the lovers (Hugh Grant’s bookish bookshop owner and Julia Roberts’s A-list actress) in the same position as the audience, spinning the details of every encounter around and around before tomorrow comes too soon. In both the honest and dishonest retelling of the tale the true feelings reveal themselves.
Anything Else (Woody Allen, 2003): On one hand, I can concede that this film starring Jason Biggs and Cristina Ricci is a decent romantic comedy about how much easier it is to fall in love with someone who appears to be a better version of you than to actually become that person yourself. Within the narrow parameters of Woody Allen’s world, this means chasing after someone who appears to have acerbic wit, sophisticated taste in movies and music, an insatiable libido, and an assured confidence in their artistic career. Once the heat of infidelity has faded, neither person possesses any of those qualities and very little art has been made. The protracted crash-and-burn does yield some of the best gallows humour of this period in Allen’s oeuvre. But the fact that Jason Biggs’s foul-mouthed best friend (and the human embodiment of his id) is played by Woody Allen never settles. And as is typical of the films directed by Allen during the 2000s, Anything Else is a blatantly vindictive film about entering new beginnings after dark times with clean hands. I was half-jokingly offered money to share even more thoughts on this film but I will not do that.
A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024): Mangold’s Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet, whose sugar glider stare miraculously registers as ingenuity) is a mumbling master of seduction effortlessly ahead of his time. He can do no wrong, whether he leaves a civil rights protest early or shows up at an ex-girlfriend’s house one year after the break-up, because another great hit is waiting around the corner. Because breaking with tradition is small potatoes to “BD”, a large portion of this film is actually dedicated to his overlapping situationships with Suze Rotolo (here named Sylvie Russo) and Joan Baez. I do not reside anywhere in the Venn diagram of Bob Dylan, James Mangold, and Timothée Chalamet fans. But I admit I was charmed by how this hagiographic film revealed itself to be a romantic comedy about the mystery of an artist’s time management. A successful, talented, and extremely busy artist chooses to expend energy on hot-cold entanglements because everything else seems so easy. But the unfortunate truth is that artistic achievements do not transfer over as credit in the realm of romance.
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024): Corbet places the myth of the tortured genius against a larger backdrop of hostility against art, an all-American prejudice compounded by capital. Nazis, collectors, banks, private investors, governments, and religious institutions create defensive, sensitive, angry, and traumatized artists who’d rather tinker quietly and not answer any personal questions. Ironically, Corbet’s dependence on repetitious, conventional coverage (and his obvious indebtedness to Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood) make The Brutalist more contemporary (derogatory) than modern. Like a cleverly designed but narrow loft with tastefully arranged mid-century modern furniture, the novelty of its scale (in relation to its actual size) eventually wears off and your mind starts to wander...
My Brother’s Wedding, Charles Burnett, 1983.
(3) Things I enjoyed in 2024, not all, some old some new:
Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)
Sirius Remembered (Stan Brakhage, 1959)
Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
Near Orouët (Jacques Rozier, 1971)
Gloria (John Cassavetes, 1980)
My Brother’s Wedding (Charles Burnett, 1983)
Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988)
The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)
Les Trois Désastres (Jean-Luc Godard, 2013)
Wajib (Annemarie Jacir, 2017)
*
Brandy, Full Moon
Utada Hikaru, Science Fiction
The Radio Dept., Pet Grief
Pet Shop Boys, Behaviour
Elliott Smith, XO
Playboi Carti, Whole Lotta Red
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack for The Adventures of Milo & Otis
Deftones, White Pony
*
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Gary Indiana, Do Everything in the Dark
Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
Willow Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
William S. Burroughs, Queer
*
In May we were in Ottawa celebrating our anniversary and walking in circles around Parliament Hill and drowning in true love when Kendrick Lamar dropped “6:16 in LA,” then Drake dropped “Family Matters,” then Kendrick dropped “Meet the Grahams.” And I think right then and there the wind stopped blowing through the flags lining the streets, and every OVO shopping bag gained about 10 pounds. The next day we were at the hotel eating cake and continuing our conversation about the future and us. Then Kendrick dropped “Not Like Us” and we had to pretend this didn’t overshadow the cake but really it was the best thing ever. I’d never laughed so hard in a single weekend. And of course Drake dropped “The Heart Part 6” the next day. So I was on the Via Rail listening to a balloon deflate for 5 minutes, and I thought about how Drake’s childhood dream was to move to Los Angeles and live in a house that looks like the Playboy Mansion (which was his desktop background) but now he’s back in Toronto in a mansion that looks like Yorkdale Mall, and how I’ve been in Canada for over 6 years now but sometimes I stop in the middle of the street and I still feel uprooted, like 10cm off the ground. This, however, is exactly how California felt all the time. All of these disparate details compressed together by the interstitial train ride became flattened into something comfortingly simple and really, really funny. And that was one of the best moments of my year.