Cinema Soul

There's a scene early on in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood   that perfectly captures a moment in time. Cliff Booth, the stuntman played by Brad Pitt, drives a convertible down an L.A. highway to his home in a trailer behind a drive in movie theater. The combination of the radio blaring 60s commercials and hits, the camera angles, the roaring engine, the peculiar acoustics of a parking lot full of drive-in movie speakers, creates an immersive experience. It's a wonderful moment, the best evocation of a summer night's drive since American Graffiti . Like that movie, it is transporting us to an idealized version of a lost world. In this case it is Hollywood in 1969. Tarantino is my age. I have no doubt that, like me, the one time enfant terrible  of Hollywood is beginning to notice the first signs of rust as he moves toward the far side of middle age.   Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is elgiac in tone; its hero is past his prime

Mustang , currently streaming on Netflix, is a coming of age drama about five sisters growing up in Turkey. While there is a good dose of humor throughout, Deniz Gamze Ergüven's film is clear eyed and unsentimental about the abuse and oppression that young women face in conservative religious societies. The sisters are orphans living in a rural area with their grandmother and their bachelor uncle. The film begins on the last day of school as Lale, the youngest sister, bids a tearful goodbye to her favorite teacher, who is moving to Istanbul. Istanbul serves as symbol of freedom, enlightenment, and salvation in the film, a promised land where the harsh religious reins of rural Turkey are loosed. Most of the film is from the point of view of  Lale. Throughout the movie the camera watches her watching; mostly watching her sisters as they sneak out of the house for secret trysts, parade about, and get pawned off in arranged marriages. Lale seems to know that there is a better worl

In Spider-Man: Far From Home,  the teenage wall crawler leaves Queens behind and heads to Europe on a class trip. In Homecoming , Tom Holland's first go as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, the emphasis was on the neighborhood. With it's corner bodegas and suburban enclaves that film was a pleasant reminder that there is more to New York City than midtown Manhattan. In one memorable scene a frustrated Spider-man has to run to save the day on foot, as there are no skyscrapers to swing from in Forest Park. Everything is on a larger scale this time around; both the scenery and the destruction. While the film often plays like a teenage romantic comedy from the 80s, the fact that our awkward lovestruck hero is secretly a web spinning Avenger is fair warning that this trip will be interrupted by large scale mayhem. The destruction is courtesy of four "elementals", cosmic beings from a parallel universe. They have already destroyed earth in that dimension an

Yes, this is supposed to be a film blog, but Bruce Springsteen is one of our most cinematic songwriters, and his new album Western Stars is drenched in the iconography of westerns old and new. It also reminds us that if you ride far enough west you end up in Hollywood; forgotten b-list actors and limping stuntmen make up some of the characters in this collection of stories put to music. Listening to a Springsteen album from beginning to end is like watching a movie full of separate stories intertwined around a central theme or location, like Short Cuts or American Graffiti . Even if they are now streamed rather than spun his songs always sound best in the context of an LP: his aesthetic sense was forged in vinyl. His work retains the sense of structure and thematic unity that was a hallmark of the great albums in the glory days of FM rock. Springsteen has always been fond of western imagery, but this time around instead of the monochrome noir of Nebraska or the Depression era