Last Night in Soho [2021)

First off.

I am in love with Thomasin McKenzie.

I think Saoirse Ronan has lost her touch.

Kat Dennings doesn’t even bother with films anymore.

And Thora Birch is too much of a liberal moron.

But then all actors are liberal morons, aren’t they?

Except for a precious few.

Jon Voight.

James Woods.

Rob Schneider.

Kirstie Alley.

Robert Davi.

Jim Caviezel.

Secondly.

This film is a masterpiece.

Edgar Wright is the best filmmaker in the world right now.

Is he better than Jean-Luc Godard?

No.

But Godard is not making films for mass consumption.

Is he better than Wes Anderson?

BY A MILLION FUCKING MILES!!!

Don’t get me wrong.

Wes Anderson made one perfect film.

And that film was The Grand Budapest Hotel.

And that film wouldn’t have been perfect without Saoirse Ronan.

That’s how important her presence in that film was.

Saoirse has made another perfect film.

Hanna.

But her others are mediocre.

Brooklyn.

Meh.

Lady Bird.

Even more meh (not a good thing).

Saoirse has gone astray.

Just as Thora Birch went astray.

Ghost World is a perfect film.

And American Beauty is close to perfect.

For my money, Homeless to Harvard is her other perfect film.

Kat Dennings films kinda suck.

Her masterpiece is actually 2 Broke Girls.

I’m serious.

But that’s not cinema.

Twin Peaks is cinema.

Even though it’s a TV show.

Histoire(s) du cinéma is the best film ever made.

And it was made for TV.

Homeless to Harvard is a Lifetime movie.

Made for TV.

It is not cinema.

Not exactly.

But it may be a perfect film.

Wes Anderson made his perfect film with Saoirse Ronan.

And he made a good film (Tenenbaums).

The rest are shite.

I did not understand Edgar Wright’s film language when I first saw Shaun of the Dead.

I thought it was crap.

How wrong I was!

Here is my contention.

Every Edgar Wright film is perfect.

Shaun of the Dead?

Yes.

Hot Fuzz?

Yes.

The World’s End?

Yes.

Baby Driver?

Yes.

Scott Pilgrim?

Yes.

And this film is perfect too.

But this is not quite the Wright you are used to.

This is a genuinely scary film.

But it stands up with Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Shining as one of the four best horror films ever made.

Edgar Wright films are all about detail.

But not the twee obsession with detail that Wes Anderson has.

Edgar Wright is overflowing with talent.

Wes Anderson is not.

Anderson needed Saoirse Ronan to make his perfect film.

And there was a bit (just a bit!) of grit in Grand Budapest.

Saoirse is missing from his other films.

And there is no real grit in any of the others.

Tenenbaums is good.

But the Wes Anderson players are tiresome.

Is Bill Murray amazing?

Yes.

But are his performances in Wes Anderson films his best work?

Absolutely not.

No more Jason Schwatzman (for fuck’s sake!).

Is Luke Wilson a great actor?

Yes.

What’s his best film?

Masked and Anonymous.

Maybe it’s Paltrow and Hackman which make Tenenbaums good.

For my money, Luke Wilson is the one who makes that film go.

But it is not on the same level as Grand Budapest.

Last Night in Soho is the Grand Budapest of the ’20s.

We’re in the ’20s now.

Are they roaring?

Like a fucking mouse.

Last Night in Soho is a gazillion times better than No Time to Die.

This film has everything the Bond film didn’t.

Substance.

Competent directing.

A story worth sticking with.

And so it is fitting that Diana Rigg’s last role should absolutely trump the death of James Bond.

The one George Lazenby film was WAY better than No Time to Die.

The death of love is more sad than the death of the hero.

Diana Rigg is the linchpin in the Bond franchise.

Pull that thread, and the sweater unravels.

Léa Seydoux is boring as fuck in the Bond films.

She was great in Blue.

But she was nothing compared to the one who carried that film (Adele Exarchopoulos).

Exarchopoulos made one perfect film.

Blue is the Warmest Color.

None of her other films are even good.

Wright makes what Youth in Revolt might have been.

He is not glib.

This is not a hipster film.

Michael Cera (who has made one perfect film [Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist]) is, mercifully, NOT in Last Night in Soho.

[correction…Kat Dennings DID make one perfect film]

Thomasin McKenzie’s obsession with ’60s London music is real.

It’s not a fucking Austin Powers joke.

Rita Tushingham is wonderful as Gram.

Excellent casting.

[take note, Bond franchise]

Thomasin hooks up with a black dude.

No big deal.

Take note, Bond franchise.

NOT EVERY FUCKING PERSON HAS TO BE BLACK IN ORDER FOR A FILM TO BE VIABLE!!!

Thomasin’s love interest is a black fellow.

I have no problem with that.

He does a good job.

For fuck’s sake…he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!

Michael Ajao.

Fine acting!

There can be important black characters WITHOUT A FILM BEING A WOKE FUCKING JOKE (like the recent Bond film).

No big deal.

Don’t make it a big deal.

It has to fit with the story.

The story is the most important thing.

The writers of the Bond film (Purvis and Wade) have allowed their name to be attached to the fucking pathetic shit of No Time to Die.

So you get a kiwi to speak in a Cornish accent.

GREAT ACTRESS!

Thomasin McKenzie.

Say that name with me.

Jacinda Ardern’s father (or mother?) was a horse.

Ugly bitch.

Ugly soul.

Thomasin McKenzie is the best thing to ever come out of New Zealand.

However, there has been one perfect kiwi movie: Eagle vs Shark.

Synnøve Karlsen is so fucking annoying in Soho.

And she was supposed to be.

So, good job (I guess).

Every film needs a villain.

And Jocasta (Karlsen’s character) is the real villain of this film.

Thomasin is different.

Jocasta beats her down.

Mentally.

A stingy spirit.

Can never share in any of her joys.

Do you know anyone like that?

But Thomasin is troubled.

Hallucinations?

Maybe.

Seeing ghosts?

Maybe.

We’re trying to solve a case here.

Cold case.

Maybe a lot of cold cases.

Maybe a serial killer.

To the Belle and Sebastian bedsit.

Salad days are short-lived.

Don’t underestimate Sandie Shaw.

Always something there to remind me.

1964.

Puppet on a string.

Gotta pay your dues.

As a wind-up bird girl.

Brian Epstein.

Giorgio Gomelsky.

Andrew Loog Oldham.

ABKCO.

The influence of Vertigo upon Last Night in Soho cannot be understated.

The red of the Café de Paris.

The blonde of Anya Taylor-Joy’s hair.

And Thomasin’s hair.

[also, don’t underestimate Bergman’s Persona]

The glance to the side.

It’s not Jimmy Stewart.

It’s Thomasin.

Allusions to The Way of the Dragon and The Lady from Shanghai in the mirrors.

Sure, a bit of Pulp Fiction.

But that’s just for the kids.

Edgar Wright’s grasp of cinema history is way deeper than some Tarantino bullshit.

And yet, he likes zombies.

And shitty horror films from the ’80s.

I mean REALLY shitty, camp ones.

Slasher films.

Back to Vertigo.

Kim Novak’s apartment is bathed in green neon.

But Thomasin’s bedsit is a red, white, and blue homage to Godard.

An homage to Une Femme est une femme.

Dancing.

Dancing girls.

Prostitutes.

Vivre sa vie.

Pink dress fembot.

Pew pew.

Thomasin is way sexier than Anya Taylor-Joy.

Thomasin is the girl next door.

The frumpy hair of Homeless to Harvard.

I love it.

It must be this way.

To juxtapose the transition to Swinging Sixties glamour.

Is Trump just culture jamming with his vaccine tack?

Either that, or the hero has become the villain.

Did the D.C. swamp make Trump into a swamp zombie?

Maybe no one comes out clean.

International law was broken.

War crimes.

All these Wright films have zombies.

Or robots.

Faceless automatons.

A bit of Dragon Tattoo.

We all like a good microfiche scene!

Is Terence Stamp her father?

If Sandie is her mother?

Could be.

Otherwise, she would be the daughter of a prick.

But Stamp tried to save Sandie.

Arsenic and old lace.

The ones you never suspect.

Sicario.

“Buried” in the walls.

Decomposing.

Poe.

Gacy.

Wright’s “sympathy for the serial killer”.

What happened to these people that made them monsters?

Don’t underestimate Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (his only English-language film…and a flat-out masterpiece).

In the world of Edgar Wright, it is records.

Vinyl.

Not books.

And sometimes the elderly want to die with their memories.

They are not going anywhere.

They are not fleeing.

It’s been a good life.

Going down with the ship.

Up in flames.

The shitbags want their deaths avenged.

After all, they were just horny, well-to-do dads who needed a little excitement.

Prostitution.

It’s the law, after all.

Murder is murder.

Crimes of passion.

By reason of insanity.

Not guilty.

Not insane.

But traumatized.

But Thomasin has been on the adventure.

She knows what Sandie has been through.

Trump was abused for four years.

That is true.

And he fought like a champ.

Is there no justice?

Is it culture jamming (I ask again)?

Confusion.

Keeping his enemies off balance.

Getting a foot in the door.

Truth Social will censor “hate speech” with a Silicon Valley AI bot.

In order to get on Apple App Store and Google Play.

But the roll out is delayed?

Lie about the vaccines.

“Safe and effective”.

Move in for the kill shot.

Against whom?

Big Pharma and the New World Order.

But we have to call out serial killers for who they are.

If you are saying the COVID vaccines are “safe and effective”, you are spreading misinformation that is endangering the lives of those who hear and trust you.

CDC: 11,879

Open VAERS: 23,149

Neither safe,

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html

https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality

nor effective.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-covid-deaths-2021-vaccines-b1963790.html

10,000-20,000 vaccine deaths should be read as 100,000-200,000 vaccine deaths because of this:

https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/02/underreporting-vaccine-adverse-events

And correlation does not necessarily equal causation…unless this (peep the myocarditis…you think that’s all JnJ? [nigga please!]):

https://openvaers.com/covid-data

But the election was stolen.

Or was it allowed to be stolen?

When will the other shoe drop?

Or does the other shoe even exist?

This charade is going to go on until 2024?

Maybe Sandie is not her mother.

-PD

Sunset Boulevard [1950)

This is the story of O.J. Simpson.

This is the story of Phil Spector.

Too much foreshadowing?

Scramble. Scramble.

Scramble the meaning.

This is Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon come to life.

Fifteen years before anger published.

In France they have Angers.

And every George is a multiple.

Georges.

But what passion!

Yes, dear friends…

Sunset Boulevard is one of the strangest films ever made.

If you want to know from whence Mulholland Drive came, start here.

SUNSET BLVD.

Mulholland Dr.

If you’re really daft (and I am), you’ll think you’re watching that guy who played The Professor on Gilligan’s Island in one of the best films you’ve ever seen.

But there’s a big fucking difference between Russell Johnson and William Holden.

Or is there?

Just let the wind blow through the bellows of the pipe organ for a moment.

And imagine yourself in a dream so dark it could be a nightmare.

But it’s merely spooky.

The great art.

Has mystery.

What was director Billy Wilder groping for?

Never mind, for a second, the bursting cast.

Every extra a novel in themselves.

Just the story of Sunset Boulevard is enough to make a thinking person stagger into the intersection on the Rue Campagne-Première.

But there are so many intersections…

Mon ami.

It starts bad.

Like a second-rate Raymond Chandler ripoff.

But it compels you to stay with it.

A little underwater photography.

Novel.

The adjective.

So much hinges on Paramount Pictures.

The gate.

The arch.

And how criticism can thwart a career.

The straw that broke the needle in the camel’s eye.

It’s like something out of Breathless or Dr. No.

The precipitous turn.

Kicking up dust.

Before the boulevard was broken dreams and crack vials.

Syringes.

Just ordinary fascism.

Triumph over violins.

And we trace the line.

A shoulder.

A chin.

A palazzo. A collection of post-Impressionists.

Because we want to know.

For nothing could be more mysterious.

Lost a husband to the Spanish flu.

Lost two more, too.

But one lives as a ghost.

And his monocle groove is strangely vacant.

Erich von Stroheim.

Unreal.

Whether in a Jean Renoir picture or here.

Whether behind the camera or acting in his own film.

In two places at once.

Like Schrodinger’s cat.

But nobody remembers Schrodinger’s chimpanzee.

And a little coffin.

And the steps Stroheim has to take to stand in a hole.

This is the story of Michael Jackson.

This is the story of Emmett Miller.

Not gone, but forgotten.

And it is the true way entertainment worked.

When mass media was born.

At a million miles an hour.

1900.

Or 1898.

Churning out pictures.

From the dream factory.

And wax cylinders.

And who cares about these young girls…we can always find more.

But Buster Keaton sits in for Miller.

Because there is nothing more sad than a sad clown.

The waxworks…

The rogues gallery.

It could have been Elektra.

But it had to be Richard Strauss.

1909. 1911.

Great silence on one coast.

And great noise on the other.

Direct from Europe.

This is the story of Thora Birch.

The greatest star who ever was.

And I am just a humble servant.

Max.

There will be Max.

Always a sadness over beauty.

When beauty is counted in but one way.

One dimension.

3-D clustered, but without 4 time.

But you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

And actors are all full of nothing.

Must empty out.

Each time.

To fully fill.

May the best shell win!

So that she stalks the shit outta him.

Like some Transylvanian octopus.

And Igor schleps his stuff in the middle of the night.

Like some dream from Dreyer’s Vampyr.

What the fuck?!?

Poor William Holden is living in the decline of the West.

The sagging tennis court.

The bowling alley in the basement we never see.

Because it would be like the Biltmore on hard times.

Truly grotesque.

Decay. And decadence.

Taken separately. Different connotations.

A piece of rotting fruit in the trash.

And champagne supernovas of drunken, naked excess.

But they are one and the same.

When rooted word-wise to rot.

Gloria Swanson is the hysterical car-wreck-of-an-actress here.

You can’t look away.

Bride of Frankenstein. Hell, Frankenstein himself. Sex changed. Sexless.

More hideous internally than externally.

And more nuts than the peanut gallery of an old picture house.

But no locks.

Perhaps a lock of hair…

But no gas.

No blades.

No.

It’s quite a spooky thing to be trapped in such luxury.

Such trappings.

Camelhair. Vicuña.

What the hell!

She’s paying, right???

Tails.

For godsake, man…Valentino danced the tango here!

But now the tarantula hums.

Manipulative receives new meaning.

An actress. A star! And that Roaring Twenties, gilded, cocksure, brassy optimism.

Unfazed by decades of disuse.

“She’s doin’ the ballet on/both of her wrists”

Goddamn…

If Echo & the Bunnymen were around in 1950…

William Holden has been sucked in.

To a vortex.

And it ain’t no fun.

No funny business. No funnymen.

Plenty of echoes.

Of his past life.

Mingled with her omnipresent portraiture fecundating the stale mansion.

“He could die happily ever after”

Bob Dylan knew about the pillars.

And the pillory of fame.

And so C. B. DeMille was a natural choice.

To depict the heartbreak.

Of a washed up life.

Hate to break it to you, kid…

But the diva is in denial.

Yes, the bitch is back.

Take Elton and a whole gaggle of crocodiles…and the Isotta Fraschini with the leopard seats.

Several leopards died for your ass(es).

How’s the weather up there?

And so she rides a white swan because she’s born to boogie.

With the swagger of Bolan.

Norma Desmond.

Monomaniacal about beheading the past.

On a platter.

American montage shows the unwieldy devices–to make young again.

Strobo-oscillo-sonic skin tauteners.

Franju had a less frightening story sans yeux.

Face without eyes.

Ah! […]

But the eyes have it all!!!

The fire of once-great dominance.

Champagne. Caviar.

The eeriness of Sunset Boulevard is that Gloria Swanson WAS once a great star (sort of).

And even more so, Erich von Stroheim WAS (REALLY FUCKING WAS) a great director!

And so Billy Wilder managed to tell their stories.

Only the names were changed to protect the guilty.

Devotion till the end.

Love for cinema.

Love for a woman.

A woman is a drum.

Where’s Duke Ellington when you need him???

Jealousy.

Jalousie.

Film noir.

Horizontal shafts of light.

But shadows all the more prominent.

This is our Rembrandt.

Our chiaroscuro.

How insensitive…

Norma with bitter, vindictive precision.

And then the curtain is pulled back on the waterworks.

And the fucking Pompidou explodes in hideous reds of dysfunction.

Yes.

Come and see where I live.

In a lonely place…

Maybe it’s better you don’t know me.

But he really wants to say, “Will you marry me?”

On this night.

What sadness.

We think such overwrought misery only exists in the movies.

But the intersections of real life sometimes make such tragedy possibly.

And we shouldn’t wish such on our worst enemies.

She can’t stand the shock.

But cinema is the ultimate beauty.

So fragile at the end…

We give thanks to see such a picture.

To see Stroheim one more time.

“Alright, boys… Let’s rev up those cameras!”

To see the silent era stagger down the stairs one more time.

Like a wrought-iron flower.

With a green patina.

Nickelodeons penny on the dollar.

Kicked to the curb.

Save for Langlois.

She just needed one more shot at youth.

It was too much, too soon.

One last shot in the arm of that excitement!

That camaraderie of Hollywood.

Before it became a drag.

Her youth.

Memory is scary as hell.

-PD

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paulydeathwish

musician and film critic

Tag Archives: Roaring Twenties

Sunset Boulevard [1950)