Device Notes

Many of my favorites from 2020 are not mentioned here, either becuase I already discussed them elsewhere or because someone else had already better said anything I could say.  Not that I'm so original, but there are specific things I like to call out.  The movies I appreciate the most tend to be ones that do something I haven't seen before, ones that spend time on characters demonstrating some kind of practical knowledge, or ones in which the scope starts to expand if you pay attention to small, tangential details.  In any case, while not all the movies here are among the absolute best ones I watched in 2020, some of them certainly are, and I recommend all of them. The Bank Dick (1940) For W.C. Fields’s pharmacists, dentists, and bank dicks, there’s no place worse than the home.  At home, his family despises him.  I would add he despises them too, but he behaves antisocially no matter where he is, though he's easily distracted from whatever's bothering him....

Adapted from a play, and makes little effort to be other than theatrical, except that on stage it would look rather strange the way the characters keep getting up from their seats to sit down somewhere else in the same room. It works better with a cut and a new camera angle. Just a bunch of dreams stitched together, how Gertrud sees the world. There is some ironic humor in this film, like the student who gives a speech about Gabriel’s work. He says his poetry eschewed old-fashioned, restrictive values about sex in favor of treating eroticism as the only real part of love. A very serious-looking man in a suit speaking about the significance of radical erotic passion in the middle of an excessively formal proceeding.   Gertrud not only leaves her lovers, but insists that their love can never be rekindled. Since it ended once, it no longer can ever live up to her standard. It's not clear what that standard is, and it's evolved over time, according to her. She leaves them when she ...

  This film’s narrator attributes its mixed use of monochrome and color to the main character’s “monochrome dreams”.  And yet the film will shift between color and monochrome in a continuous scene, and some shots contain monochrome and color at the same time.  Whatever is meant by “dreams” is something that overlaps with reality, such that one freely translates into the other.  Of course, this is exactly how it should be.  Things we experience as ordinary and unremarkable worm their way into our dreams and our dreams can be implicated in our actions.  This is true regardless of how we use the word “dreams.”  It could mean the sensations we have while asleep, aimless daytime fantasies, or our hopes for the future.  We perform balancing acts with all of these, all the time. A significant portion of this film comprises unlikely meetings and impulsive, dramatic excursions.  Men with leather coats duel for honor in dangerous motorcycle games....

  Since Inception , the subjective experience of time versus its objective flow has been central in all of Christopher Nolan's films, except maybe The Dark Knight Rises .  Of course, most films bend time, claiming that some sequences are longer or shorter than they actually are on screen.  But Nolan’s films make heavy use of crosscutting, setting several sequences of events in parallel—sometimes, as in Dunkirk , sequences of events that don’t happen at the same time or take the same amount of time.  It stretches out a period of time by cutting in different angles on it.  T here isn’t even always a lot of plot in all the parallel sequences.  That’s often where the action scenes fit in his films, padding out the length of one sequence as opposed to the others.  There are many films that do this.  But there aren’t many that make it such a central device, nor many that take it so literally.  Nolan’s sci-fi films always seek to give us some rea...

  In his Criterion essay for A Woman Under the Influence , Kent Jones says: “Tagging a movie like Woman with something as neat as a ‘subject’ is a fairly useless activity.  .  .  .  Cassavetes rode the whims, upsets, vagaries, and mysterious impulses of humanity like a champion surfer.” He describes it as a film which uses human activity the way other films use color.  Jones has unique insights about Cassavetes, and points out where his assessment diverges from many others’.  But from those others you often see similar sentiments about the uniqueness of Cassavetes’s films, and often in language that’s difficult to understand.  They speak about them in superlatives, sometimes mentioning how poorly other films compare.  But without having seen the films, it’s never been clear to me what experience they’re trying to describe. Now, having seen a few, I can phrase it in a way that makes sense to me, and I hope it makes sense to everyone else....

In Anatomy of a Murder , the defense's case depends not on an account of what happened, but why it happened—was the criminal defendant seized by an “irresistible impulse” that made him commit the crime?  For the jurors, that question is: how bad was the event that caused the irresistible impulse? It hinges on a vague point of law that reflects certain values.  In what context do people generally think it makes sense to be violent?  It’s no coincidence that our defendant is a veteran of the Korean War: the defense attorney, Paul Biegler, has a witness make a direct comparison between the conditions of war that produce “irresistible impulses” and the events leading up to the murder.   A lawyer who wants to exploit notions of when violence is excusable, or even justifiable, must embody those notions.  The jury isn’t going to believe a story about when it makes sense to explode if the lawyer telling the story doesn’t seem to care.  The lawyer has to visua...