Todd Haynes

def think melton gave an astonishing performance. still thinking about him getting stoned with his son on the rooftop, incredible tension-release dynamic in that scene, or the way he rubs his hands against his legs when he's in bed with natalie portman, still 12 years old

but portman... portman!!! her most natural performance bc she is effortlessly gliding on the line between natural and artificial, a practiced guilelessness

Yeah all good. Believe it is Julianne Moore’s birthday today.

but portman... portman!!! her most natural performance bc she is effortlessly gliding on the line between natural and artificial, a practiced guilelessness

she is amazing.

She plays a mediocre actress so well. I don't mean it condescendingly.

Will watch sometime in the next week.

She plays a mediocre actress so well. I don't mean it condescendingly.

no, exactly. this actress is...not exceptional. she's not terrible either, which would have been a different task. she's not just great. She (the character) almost is great when she does the letter read...but what happens to that spark in the final scene (the retakes)? It's totally gone.

For me, Portman’s best moment was the high school inside the actor’s studio interlude, letting it get off the rails and inappropriate almost immediately

best line delivery of the year may december best writing of the year pic.twitter.com/t7gmNcKDBD

— Moreira (@cinemoreeira) December 1, 2023

The name of the show Portman was on (“Norah’s Ark”) was perfect.

Also, I was very relieved this wasn’t actually much like Persona.

that music cue (with the fridge opening) is hilarious

I liked this, but I thought the moral judgments were rendered a bit woodenly, and for a story about illicit love I thought it could have been even hornier!

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/todd-haynes-may-december
Haynes interviewed by Amy Taubin

That was great, thanks. Feel like Amy Taubin is the perfect person for him to be discussing this with, especially after seeing her in The Warhol Diaries.

imo this is a real goddamn movie. still thinking about it days later. all the miles-wide negative space extending beneath the tightly-controlled performances

knew i loved it from the moment the camera follows portman into the stockroom

Longtime pal Kelly Reichardt interviewed him (and quite well) for a collection called Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process enclosed with the screener

imo this is a real goddamn movie

Yep, what the film bros have been crowing about endlessly in response to Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, I'm now happy to report myself and the film gays are happily going overboard with in the very same vein

Something really Chabrol-ian about this film. Good stuff! Portman is indeed excellent.

Good description!

For the first time! Xpost

Watched it tonight, really liked it. I liked that it both was and wasn't Haynes' Mary Kay Letourneau movie. Also his second Citizen Kane nod, right? Like Velvet Goldmine, you have the outsider piecing together the story of the person. Except that the outsider is actually the main character. This one also reminded me a bit tonally of Assayas.

Haynes is such a smart and interesting filmmaker, really one of my favorites.

echoing the chorus of praise for melton in this, love the strange energy field he carries around with him, especially in contrast to the very different stuff portman & moore are doing. he didnt strike me so much as an arrested man-child so much as someone who had just started to develop a personality only to have it slowly disappear over 20 years. its like behind his eyes theres the faintest hint of a pilot light thats just barely flickering but never quite catches.

have to admit i'm not really swayed by the camp readings of this, feel like the "not enough hot dogs" music sting is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for that. the only other time i felt it got close was the retake scene at the end, which looked like something out of mulholland drive

I'm still not sure what to think of the final scene. Because to my eyes...nothing got better from take to take. It's the same thing over and over again. I read one review (or maybe it was here can't recall) that implied that the movie she is making is another TV movie but I don't think that's the case; it's supposed to be an independent film, right? She watches a scene from a TV movie in the film. And at the end...I don't feel like the quality of what they are doing is any better than what was reflected in that TV movie; Haynes seems to be saying that no re-enactment is ever going to be a pure expression. You can reshoot it a thousand times and it will always feel false.

I thought the final scene was a great punchline. After all that high-minded prep, the movie they end up doing is just a junky, sensationalistic thing, The Amy Fisher Story more or less.

It's double underlining that the actress (who is as fragile and susceptible to Elizabeth's influence as Joe was) is no closer to understanding Elizabeth than she was at the beginning ... less close, even. She nailed the take when she thought she had a handle on her background, but Elizabeth cut her off at the knees in the second to last scene.

otm

yeah. to me it almost feels like a final caution to the viewer: if you thought of her as your audience surrogate, a gumshoe peeling back all the layers for you, you look as dumb as she does right now. after that last scene btwn her and moore its basically unnecessary, putting a hat on a hat, but i still liked it.

I thought about that too and, ultimately, I disagree. We do need to see her flail on camera after that moment.

Idk guys. I hoped for better.

and it was!

It reminded me of like the accident or reflections in a golden eye (campy, ponderous, blurry) or something like foxes (that 70s shampoo ad look) also why was it set in 2015? It wasn't an excuse to get people to dress like it was 2015. I'm curious to see what people sincerely trying to do the 2010s in costume will look like because I want to know what type 'office girl in wide legged trousers' will signify

I suppose to get the math about their age gap accurate-- based on the original true life incident

That's what I figured, too, although since it was a fictionalized version, why did it need to have happened at the exact same time the Mary Kay LeTourneau scandal did?

oh i didn't realise it was based on a true life story. I would have fired the costume designer though. some of it was funny in a valley of the dolls way. I didn't find the final conversation between the two leads that devastating.

I mentioned this movie to my wife as one to watch, and she surprised me by saying she actually watched half of it and *hated* it. She said it was like watching a cheesy from-the-headlines Lifetime movie and didn't get the point. She did say that if I watched the first half and saw something it it that she didn't she would consider watching the rest.

I watched most of it again last night and had an even better time. Portman's earnestness (which we learn is inseparable from her guile) is hilarious.

I noted this second time Cory Michael Smith's performance as Georgie, damaged beyond reckoning and barely insouciant about it. I wrote down this bit after Elizabeth asks him about how Joe told him about what was happening b/w him and his mom:

"It was right before my birthday so we forgot to cancel the party but only one guy came anyway and we just hung out in my room and ate so many warheads that I threw up, and we watched TV until the sun was almost up and I gave him a hand-job and then he never spoke to me again."

georgie steals the very few scenes he's in. amazing performance

i really liked the way the lawyer talked to & about georgie in the scene with his bar band, a great little bittersweet comic performance by that guy

re:2015 I read an interview w/Haynes where he said he didnt want to risk audiences bringing any Trump-era baggage to the story, especially given the southern setting. I'm not sure that would have occurred to me as a viewer, but that was his reasoning anyway.

Josh, your wife is wrong.

I believe it! I was just struck by the strength of her reaction.

I didn't find the final conversation between the two leads that devastating.

In a way, it shouldn't have been. That it sent Portman's character reeling is part of what's so damning

I primarily read that conversation as Gracie's assertion of control over her own story. That no matter what Elizabeth did she'd never really know her. What she thought was her Rosebud moment maybe actually wasn't — and, pace the original Rosebud, wouldn't have really explained the truth of Gracie even if it was true.

The movie felt like it had a very glossy surface for most of the time I was watching it, but it has really been something to ruminate on. I just loved the melodramatic piano score, it added a lot of both pathos and humor

The score is the score from the Go-Between

Its a wonderful score but for me a major contributor to the self conscious late 60s Losey pastiche which i found tiresome, not least because every Losey film I've seen since the Servant has been a major disappointment. In that way I guess he's similar to Haynes for me, I feel like they both lucked into one great film where everything clicks and its a miracle but everything else theyve done is laboured and smug. I haven't seen every Losey film though and Haynes hasn't done anything as bad as Eva.

I thought Portman was way too much, the gags felt overdone. The screen is a mirror. I'm not really sure what I was supposed to be confronted by. Maybe it needed another hour or so of portman wandering around in a sunhat. The Chabrol comparison feels way too kind, at least there would be a dead body or a painting or a suitcase of cash it was Chabrol. I was going to say maybe Haynes should adapt a Highsmith novel but then I remembered he already has. I wonder what Laura Mulvey would say about it.

I was disappointed by this too, weird kind of mix of trashy and prestige but not really nailing either

My Letterboxd this weekend was a feast of May December backlash