The Envelope Please…
This Week: Second-Guessing the Oscars — with A.S.Hamrah, Beth Gilligan and Katherine Irving. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.
We had an Oscars party in the studio this week, even though one of our guests, Scott Hamrah, told us in advance that he hates the Oscars. We were looking for an excuse to do a movie show (and for an excuse to catch up on some movies) with this hot film critic who writes a column for n+1 magazine and has a new book out of his collected pieces called The Earth Dies Streaming. Turns out Scott Hamrah was the projectionist at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge in the ’90s when he says he saw (or more likely heard) Casablanca 300 times.
Scott is opinionated in the best way — he can be both biting and passionate, and his takes are great and quotable:
Spotlight: It captures an essential truth about Boston, that feeling of drabness mixed with hostility and peculiarity anyone who has ever had to knock on a stranger’s door in that town has felt. The key scene in this regard is the one in which Rachel McAdams stands at the front door of a disgraced priest, who happily admits to his crimes, while his sister barks and snipes, shooing McAdams off. I’m sure that woman puts an orange traffic cone in her parking space in May.
Brooklyn: Eilis almost makes the decision not to go back to the Brooklyn of 1952, a choice unimaginable to the renters of Brooklyn of 2016 who would take the first boat to that Brooklyn if they could. For all their strenuous effort in vintage bar and restaurant design, they watch a livable Brooklyn drift further off each day. For Eilis, Brooklyn meant freedom from the past. Someone direct me to a place in this city, besides a movie theater, that represents freedom in the present.
Blue Velvet: Blue Velvet, in addition to providing material for post-structural analysis, is one of those films in which every line is memorable…Isabella Rossellini was Lynch’s significant other at the time, and as the hostage- chantreuse Dorothy Vallens, her line “You put your disease in me” sums up what the film did to people who saw it when it came out in theaters, or later on VHS tapes.
Moonrise Kingdom: Making a film featuring the music of Benjamin Britten and a biblical flood so you will get the chance to see a 12 year old girl dancing in her underwear is a perfect example of going the long way around the barn. And the barn is the perfect color.
The Hurt Locker: Far from being nonideological or apolitical, The Hurt Locker is actually pro-war, and it’s not a contradiction that it’s the best American film made about the war in Iraq so far. Kathryn Bigelow’s film explicitly states that it’s better to spend every day of your life risking getting blown to pieces defusing IEDs in Baghdad than it is to spend even one day in the US shopping for cereal at Costco with your family….maybe it’s implicit in the film that the freedom the United States is supposedly helping Iraq achieve will, if successful, lead to the construction of a giant Costco in Baghdad.
The whole book is terrific. And here, hot off the presses, is Scott’s Oscar column.
Scott was joined by Beth Gilligan from the Coolidge Corner Theater and Katherine Irving from the Museum of Fine Arts film department, and together we binged on movies and movie talk for an hour. Here’s some movies they loved you might not have seen:
Leave No Trace — Scott told us about this one, and we all loved it. It was a huge snub this year; director Debra Granik most definitely should have been up for a best director award for this one. Katherine also mentioned Madeline’s Madeline, and I am Not a Witch about witchcraft in modern Zambia and also Zama from the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. Another one of Scott’s favorites this year was Orson Welles’s last unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind which is on Netflix now.
Chris loved First Reformed and Never Look Away; write to him if you have an opinion on the ending of First Reformed (he’s having a family argument about it) and if you liked Never Look Away or didn’t. Scott haaaated it.
Rebecca hopes Olivia Colman wins Best Actress for The Favourite, but is mostly salty about the Oscars since Eighth Grade, Sorry To Bother You, and Leave No Trace went un-nominated. I loved two foreign films: Shoplifters and Burning, and the documentary Hale County, This Morning, This Evening. Conor’s faves were Escape Room, Solo: A Star Wars Story and most especially Sorry to Bother You.
Coming up: Robert Pogue Harrison on René Girard
A few months ago, Chris read Stanford Professor (and podcast host!) Robert Pogue Harrison’s piece in the New York Review about the philosopher and theorist René Girard and his relevance in the age of social media, and of Trump. Stay tuned for a podcast episode on Girard, his protégé Peter Thiel, and the contemporary applicability of Girard’s concept of “mimetic desire.”
Coming Up: Bauhaus
Bauhaus turns 100! With exhibits at the Harvard Art Museum and the MFA, there’s tons of Bauhaus in Boston this spring. Get ready for the Open Source take on your favorite mid-century art school.
What we’re reading:
Domestic workers’ labor rights. Who is Bernie’s foreign policy guy? Jedediah Britton-Purdy on Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Matt Bruenig on Elizabeth Warren’s childcare policy proposal. Johanna Fateman on Andrea Dworkin. Patricia Lockwood on the Internet.
That’s all for this week! Like, tweet, subscribe.
❤ the os team
