Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsules are taking a break

Just a quick note that after 85 reviews Nate is taking a break from his Quarantine Qapsules... or rather the publication schedule is changing.

Because Nate is now a back in school he is shifting the publication of his reviews from daily to just on or around the weekends. As much as he would love to continue the daily pieces he simply doesn't have the time.

That said, Nate has promised that he is planning on going to at least 100 before stopping. (The series will stop when Nate's full school workload kicks in) so there is at least 15 more coming.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #85 The President’s Barber [2004] ★★★½

In the years since its release, many have pointed out that Im Chan-sang’s The President’s Barber feels like a South Korean companion to Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994). Both films are about, shall we say, slow protagonists who through chance and coincidence find themselves thrown into climactic events in their nations’ histories. But while Zemeckis’ hero found himself pushed and pulled across continents and countercultures, The President’s Barber mostly restricts its hero to his home neighborhood. Of course, said neighborhood is the Jongno-gu district of Seoul, the location of the Blue House, the official residence of South Korea’s head of state.

The protagonist Seong Han-mo (Song Kang-ho) would love nothing more than to keep his head down and operate his barber shop in peace. But after a madcap kerfuffle with a man he mistakes as a North Korean spy, Han-mo is summoned to the Blue House and becomes the president’s personal barber. The president, however, is Park Chung-hee (Jo Yeong-jin), a former general who seized power in a coup d’état and ruled over South Korea for almost twenty years as a brutal military dictator. As Chung-hee’s barber, the hapless Han-mo gets a front-row seat to Chung-hee’s tyrannical reign, enjoying an odd personal immunity usually reserved for a dictator’s private doctor. Unfortunately, as Han-mo finds out, that immunity extends to him and only him as the film takes a sharp dramatic turn from breezy comedy after the first hour. After a group of North Korean assassins are foiled mid-mission by a sudden wave of diarrhea, Chung-hee’s government begins a round-up and purge of anyone in the capital suffering the same affliction, making the logical authoritarian deduction that having the runs proves someone had illicit contact with the spies. Among those disappeared for “questioning” is Han-mo’s son who—after a bizarre sequence involving a reluctant torturer, an electric chair, and Christmas lights—is returned to their house a cripple.

This speaks to the essential difference between The President’s Barber and Forrest Gump: the latter film assumes that someone can blithely bumble their way through history without being scarred by it while the former realizes that assumption is ridiculous. Unrestrained power corrupts, and anyone said power rubs up against will get hurt in one way or another, even if they’re just there to cut the boss’s hair.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule # 84 High Hopes [1988] ★★★½

Throughout the seventies and eighties, director Mike Leigh established himself as one of the most vital voices working in British theater and television. His plays and made-for-TV movies were caustic examinations of his country’s deeply entrenched class system. And though Leigh is now rightfully revered as one of Britain’s greatest film directors, having won top prizes at both Cannes and Venice, there was a time when he couldn’t get his movies funded. Leigh’s creative method favored heavy improvisation, both in terms of dialogue, scene direction, and plot progression. The result was that whenever Leigh went hat-in-hand to producers, he wouldn’t have a working screenplay to pitch.

After releasing his first feature in 1971, he’d be forced to wait seventeen years to make his second, the bittersweet family drama High Hopes that examined class and generational barriers in a rapidly gentrifying late eighties London. Leigh largely divides his cast into two groups, the first being the proletariat represented by Cyril (Phil Davis) and his partner Shirley (Ruth Sheen), both of whom cling to revolutionary ideals of socialism but are trapped in a perpetual stasis of boredom, despair, and simple laziness. After so many years of disillusionment, both are content to work just enough at their 9-to-5’s to pay the bills and spend their off-hours tuning in and dropping out. The other group represents Britain’s upwardly mobile yuppies, assuming nouveau riche airs of rampant materialism and a sociopathic disregard for their “lessers.”

Consider Cyril’s insufferable sister Valerie (Heather Tobias) who puts up with her philandering husband’s escapades solely for the weight of his checkbook and the accoutrements of wealth that come with it. Neurotic yet cruel, she’s practically a Labour Party’s caricature of the Tory-voting bourgeoise. In the center is Cyril and Valerie’s bitter, taciturn, and senescent mother Mrs. Bender (Edna Doré) whose dawning senility leads to the two cringe-inducing centerpieces of the film—her locking herself out of her apartment and Valerie’s throwing her a surprise birthday party which, of course, is actually about showing off her own wealth. She’s the crucible through which the values of both social classes are tested, revealing the innate selflessness of Cyril and Shirley’s and the innate selfishness of Valerie’s. Though frequently funny, the film’s overall mood is one of resigned melancholy that never tips into the outright anger that characterizes Leigh’s most incendiary work.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #83 The Lineup [1958] ★★★½

In 1971, director Don Siegel changed the face of the police procedural forever with his film Dirty Harry about a violent, rule-breaking San Francisco police inspector who kills and tortures above and beyond the purview of the law. Correctly identified by Roger Ebert as fascistic, it’s since served as the template for any number of copycat cop characters who shoot first and ask questions later. (The legacy it’s had on the self-image of real-life cops is one we’re tragically still dealing with today.) But those who turn to Siegel’s earlier film The Lineup—another police procedural about San Francisco cops chasing mentally unstable killers—hoping for a precursor to Dirty Harry will be sorely disappointed.

With a script penned by Stirling Silliphant who’d go on to perfect the police potboiler with the shows Route 66 and Naked City before winning an Oscar for Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), the film has more in common with its fellow 50s noir which frequently eschewed the dreamlike atmosphere and carefully constructed studio sets of late 30s and 40s noir in favor of gritty, realistic stories shot on location in major cities and suburbs. Curiously, though, the film could also be seen as a crime procedural, as it gives equal narrative weight to its villains and their criminal methods as it does its police heroes. The villains here are Dancer (Eli Wallach) and Julian (Robert Keith), two unbalanced collectors-cum-hitmen for an international drug-smuggling ring who “visit” a number of recently returned tourists who unknowingly had heroin stashed in their souvenirs. As they leave a trail of bodies all over the city, they’re chased down by Lieutenant Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson), a no-nonsense (and no-personality) cop who embodies the kind of impersonal yet dogged professionalism the police were desperate to project to the 50s American public.

The story itself is competently told yet hardly remarkable for its era, and with the exception of Wallach and Keith’s performances none of the acting is particularly memorable. Instead the film’s main selling point is its intense visual beauty; veteran cinematographer Hal Mohr made the best of his locations, more than once pausing the story so the film can drink in its characters being dwarfed by their surroundings like the cavernous hallways of the San Francisco Opera House or the spacious inner shell of the Sutro Baths

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #82 Doctor Dolittle [1967] ★½

At a certain point, Richard D. Zanuck should’ve realized that the universe didn’t want a Doctor Dolittle movie to be made. Between an initial year’s delay for songs and a screenplay from Alan Jay Lerner that never materialized, the expense of training not one but two sets of animals after the first batch got stuck in quarantine en route to the UK, catastrophic weather delays at their British and Saint Lucia shooting locations, the bombing of their Wiltshire set by a disgruntled local, the racist and antisemitic prima donna antics of star Rex Harrison, perpetual cast and crew illness, feces-covered sound-stages, and the near-fatal heart attack of producer Arthur P. Jacobs, one can assume that Zanuck would’ve gotten the cosmos’ hint that Richard Fleischer’s Doctor Dolittle wasn’t meant to be. (All these details and more can be found in Mark Harris’ superb book Pictures at a Revolution which examines the production of the five 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture nominees which included Dolittle. It turns out that industry block voting and the bribing of Academy members with free screenings, dinner, and drinks can go a long way towards making voters hold their noses and pick a stinker.)

But the earth-shattering success of Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965) had Zanuck—and every other major Hollywood studio head—convinced that overlong, over-produced road show musicals were their ticket to print money. So despite everything, Zanuck persevered and ground out a film that bored audiences, exasperated critics, and made only a fraction of its money back.

There are many reasons why Doctor Dolittle fails as a musical, but the major one is its crushing 152-minute length. The film’s episodic narrative structure results in a story that’s not really a story but a succession of tedious cul-de-sacs each more eye-rolling than the next. There are, surprisingly for a musical, too many songs, most of which sound the same and all of which go on for two or three verses too long. And while the spectacle of seeing so many real animals onscreen never quite loses its charm, Zanuck’s expectation that the spectacle itself should be enough to sustain the whole shebang cratered the whole production. The only redeeming moments come from spasms of unintended campiness like a scene where Harrison sings a love ballad to a seal dressed as an old woman.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #81 The Watermelon Woman [1996] ★★★½

In an era when it was still difficult for women—let alone black women, let alone gay black women—to find work as directors, Cheryl Dunye carved out her own damn space in the 90s American indie scene, creating a highly idiosyncratic body of work unique within black, feminist, and LGBTQ+ cinema. Frequently setting her films in her adopted home of Philadelphia, Dunye’s work is a dizzying kaleidoscope of cinematic modes and audiovisual formats that’s completely unconcerned with the strictures of fiction and documentary filmmaking. Termed “dunyementaries,” these self-reflexive confessionals explore Dunye’s complicated feelings about her race, her gender, her sexuality, and her love-hate relationship with the lesbian community. Frequently she’ll interview herself and her actresses—and they’re almost exclusively lesbians; of the casts of the ten or so Dunye films I’ve seen I can only think of maybe two men—both in and out of character, commenting on the story they’re in and its real-life production. The result are films that shatter the boundaries between the act of creation and the finished creation itself, pulling the audience into the disorienting dialectic of artistic production.

Consider her 1996 movie The Watermelon Woman. Inspired by Dunye’s real-life research on black actresses in the early Hollywood studio system, the film follows a fictionalized Dunye’s attempt to discover information on “The Watermelon Woman,” an unnamed, uncredited black actress in an old film called Plantation Memories. During her search through archives, interviews, and the nooks and crannies of LGBTQ+ academia (including a visit to the…*ahem*…Center for Lesbian Information and Technology) she discovers that the Watermelon Woman was, in fact, a lesbian and quite possibly Dunye’s dream girl.

Of course, there was no actual Watermelon Woman and neither was there a film called Plantation Memories—both were creations of the real-life Dunye to deliberately expose and interrogate the paucity of black lesbians in film history. But the observations she makes on black film history and the interviews she secures with real-life queer artists and academics are very real, forcing us to ask where the fiction begins and ends. This might seem hopelessly dry, but The Watermelon Woman is both hilarious and sexy due to Dunye’s interweaving of her quasi-fictionalized explorations into film history with the hopeless romantic escapades of her cinematic counterpart. It’s groan-inducingly cliched to say, but there’s honestly no other film like it.

Nate Hood's Quartantine Qapsule #80Songs My Brothers Taught Me [2015] ★★★★

John Winters knows he’s killing his community. He knows that when he illegally sells booze on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, he’s murdering a small part of it. He’s seen the scars of alcoholism in his family, in the face of his desperate mother, in the actions of his absent father. He’s attended meetings of recovered alcoholics at the local church and listened in silence as the pastor preached that God will scorch the impurities from their souls with fire. He’s chatted with relatives around late-night bonfires about legalizing alcohol and how it might do more harm than good, but certainly anything is better than what they have. Yet still he sells the stuff. For John is a man of no small ambition—he intends to leave his people’s South Dakota reservation and move to Los Angeles with his girlfriend. For that he needs a car. To get a car he needs money. And the only way a high schooler like him can get it is by peddling poison. So he distances himself from everyone else save his younger sister Jashaun whom he adores and dotes on.

Unlike John, Jashaun doesn’t see dead-end desperation in their reservation. The poverty, perhaps. But when she looks upon the land she sees tides of flame upon the prairie, leaving blankets of ash smoking silently under the stars. She sees cowboys breaking horses but leaving enough of their wild souls intact that they don’t lose their spirit. She sees powwow dresses, plates of fry bread, tattoos, and sacred numbers. She is the bank of hope John crashes against day by day. And for that reason he knows he’ll eventually have to leave her, too.

So it goes in Chloé Zhao’s feature debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), an achingly poignant portrait of contemporary reservation life. Shot on location and with nonprofessional actors, the film adopts an almost cinéma vérité style. Unlike her widely acclaimed follow-up The Rider (2017), Zhao embraces a sentimentality that could’ve come across as hollow and mushy if not for the film’s ever-present undercurrent of melancholy sadness. Much of this is due to Peter Golub and Tom MacLear’s spare, understated soundtrack which manages a remarkable amount of emotional heavy-lifting with just a piano and some strings. But whatever the reasons, the film is an astonishing debut for one of American cinema’s most promising new voices.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #79 Dry Wood [1973] ★★★★

Many know filmmaker Les Blank primarily (or solely) for Burden of Dreams (1982), a making-of documentary about Werner Herzog’s shot-on-location-in-the-Amazon epic Fitzcarraldo (1982). The film’s reputation as one of the greatest in the sub-genre focusing on chaotic movie shoots isn’t unearned—it’s a penetrating exploration into the psyche of one of world cinema’s most over-the-top figures making one of his most over-the-top films. But those who limit themselves to just this one film will cheat themselves of one of the richest and most warmhearted filmographies in American cinema, documentary or otherwise.

Blank was primarily an explorer of the hidden nooks and crannies of America, exploring subcultures and communities largely unknown to or ignored by society at large. His documentaries were frequently about traditional music, often about food, but always about people first and foremost. But it was the way he approached said people that made his films so unique. Blank would never treat his subjects as figures in a vacuum, transforming them into sterile talking heads dully reflecting on their lives and careers. Instead Blank would immerse himself in the culture that produced and sustained them, replicating its rhythms and moods.

Consider his superb Dry Wood, a look into the world of black Creoles in French Louisiana. Ostensibly a portrait of accordionist Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin and fiddler Canray Fontenot, both groundbreaking pioneers of zydeco music, the film treats its subjects as entry points into their community, not the other way around. Consider one early scene shot during a Mardi Gras dance party. Musicologists might be exasperated by Blank’s refusal to hold his camera on them, choosing instead to frequently cut away to shots of children sitting on benches on the sidelines playing with each other or staring off blankly into space. From the ecstatic celebrations of Mardi Gras, Blank then turns to their everyday toil, of men working in rice fields and women tending house and children. Much of the film concerns their tireless efforts to make, grow, catch, kill, and cook food. And this too is used as an in to explore the Creole people, whether it’s watching a young girl struggle to eat an oversized pork crackling or a group of women gossiping about a friend who burned her “murderer boyfriend’s car” while sorting through guts. Blank finds humanity amid the gory viscera and zydeco twang.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #78 Cat Ballou [1965] ★★

Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou feels like what would’ve happened if a Hollywood studio tried to make Blazing Saddles (1974) without Mel Brooks as a director or Richard Pryor as a writer. Ostensibly a tongue-and-cheek send-up of the Western genre, it neither satirizes nor parodies; it doesn’t mock its conventions nor explore their cultural underpinnings. It is, quite simply, a rote Western.

After her father is murdered for refusing to sell his ranch to a nearby town, Catherine “Cat” Ballou (Jane Fonda) swears vengeance and hires notorious gunslinger Kid Shelleen (Lee Marvin), a dead-eyed dead drunk, as muscle. Together they, and an assorted motley of other Western archetypes like the subservient Native American and the good-hearted outlaw, pull off a heist stealing the community’s payroll and hunt the gunslinger who killed Cat’s dad. Astute observers will note that in some ways this plot predicts Charles Portis’ seminal novel True Grit and its famous film version starring John Wayne by several years. Yet it’s Portis’ novel and Wayne’s film we remember better, mostly because those two works weren’t half-deluded about their identity. Cat Ballou, on the other hand, can’t realize that it works better as a musical than it does as a Western, and certainly better than it does as a comedy.

The most inspired moments in the film come from Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye’s cameos as the film’s Greek chorus, popping up now and then to ironically comment on the story while ostentatiously pretending to play the banjo. Whenever the film embraces the elasticity of the musical, it succeeds wonderfully. But these moments are few and far between. Most of the film consists of tired comedy that felt tired even by the sixties. Consider one sequence where Cat’s gang flees from a posse after robbing a railroad. Sped up like a silent film, they chase literal circles around each other like Laurel and Hardy were waiting just off-camera for their cue to make a pratfall.

A few words must also be said about the elephant in the room: Marvin’s winning the Oscar for Best Actor as Shelleen, beating out the likes of Olivier, Burton, and Rod Steiger’s career-best performance in The Pawnbroker (1965). Not only was he a supporting character at best, his performance was hackneyed burlesque. Marvin gave many Oscar-worthy performances in his career. This wasn’t one of them.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #77 The Pawnbroker [1964] ★★★★½

It boggles the mind that Sidney Lumet isn’t held up alongside Kubrick, Coppola, and Scorsese as one of America’s great canon directors to emerge in the wake of the collapse of the Hollywood studio system. Despite directing numerous films that routinely show up on shortlists of the best of their eras, he’s avoided the deification that’s blessed and cursed so many of his contemporaries. One wonders if this is due in part to his reputation as an actor’s director—indeed, many of his films seem more famous for their performances than as holistic works in and of themselves. We remember Henry Fonda’s quiet conviction in 12 Angry Men (1957), but not Lumet’s deceptively brilliant mise en scène; we remember Al Pacino screaming “Attica! Attica!” in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), but not Lumet’s calculated sense of place and pacing; we remember Peter Finch’s ravings in Network (1976), but not Lumet’s mastery of tone.

The Pawnbroker is another of his films that threatens to lose itself in the shadow of its central performance, in this case Rod Steiger’s portrayal of Sol Nazerman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor operating a Harlem pawnshop. In stark contradiction to his usual overacting, Steiger’s Nazerman is a masterclass in repressed emotion. He acts and emotes like a block of granite; he feels neither animosity nor sympathy for his customers—desperate tenants, jonesing junkies, doe-eyed single mothers—as he undercharges them for priceless family heirlooms and obviously stolen goods. He navigates the world in a daze as memories of his old life and murdered family flicker before his eyes like lightning bolts.

But the film is more than just Steiger’s performance, it’s a savage exploration of the lingering effects of trauma (and a historically significant one, too, as it was the first American film to explore the Holocaust from a survivor’s perspective). Consider a notorious sequence where a prostitute strips naked in a feeble attempt to sell herself to Nazerman. As his eyes linger over her breasts, he flashes back to images of his own dead wife’s bare breasts as she was raped in a concentration camp. It’s a horrifying use of montage that de-eroticizes the female body so effectively that the Production Code granted the film their first ever exception on their moratorium on bare breasts. The Pawnbroker is the rare film that’s Important with a capital “I” as well as Great with a capital “G.”

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #76 Medium Cool [1969] ★★★½

In the wake of the police riot where security forces tear gassed hundreds of demonstrators protesting the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago mayor and “last of the big city bosses” Richard J. Daley made Freudian slip history when he misspoke saying that “the policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

But if Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool is any indication, the true preservers of disorder are the press themselves, the sacred Fourth Estate which seeks to record and not interfere. This is shown most bluntly at the beginning of the film where the protagonist, television news cameraman John Cassellis (Robert Forster), stops at a car accident to film the carnage, ignoring the cries of a survivor, and only calls for an ambulance after he’s got his footage. From there, the film charts Cassellis’ political awakening from neutral bystander to active participant in the social upheaval he's assigned to cover, climaxing in the actual DNC riots where Wexler and his crew found themselves trapped in the middle of the chaos. (In one famous moment when the cops start firing tear gas, we hear someone offscreen shout “Look out, Haskell—it’s real!”) It’s the kind of cinematic kismet most directors only dream of, and it’s one of the most chilling examples of a filmmaker’s camera being in the right place at the right time this side of Barbara Kopple unexpectedly recording an attempted strikebreaker assassination in Harlan County, USA (1976).

But unlike Harlan County, Wexler’s film is a docu-fiction hybrid that puts, as Roger Ebert once memorably described, “fictional characters in real situations [and] real characters in fictional situations.” On the one hand we have Cassellis whose political awakening—spurred on by a confrontation with black activists and the discovery that his news station has been giving his footage to the FBI—is matched with his romance with Eileen (Verna Bloom), a single mom from West Virginia who struggles to provide for her curious but emotionally withdrawn son Harold (Harold Blankenship). On the other we have vignettes—some staged, some apparently not—of America’s nervous breakdown, from belligerent, white gun owners at a shooting range to a training montage of National Guardsmen rehearsing crowd dispersal techniques. Do the two mix? Not always, particularly the odd flashbacks involving Harold and his deadbeat dad back in West Virginia, but as a document of 1968 America’s psyche it’s irreplaceable.

Nathaniel Hood's Quarantine Qapsule: #75 Black Peter [1964] ★★½

Ever dreamed of running in place? Ever dreamed where, no matter how far or fast you ran, the thing you were chasing never got any closer? Miloš Forman’s Black Peter is a cinematic distillation of that sensation, strained through a sieve of awkward teenage self-discovery in the shadow of mid-century Czechoslovakian Communism.

Filmed with a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, the film follows Petr (Ladislav Jakim), a teenager mired in recursive adolescent inertia. No matter how he struggles to get ahead in life, to get the girl, to get some money, to get some self-respect, he always ends up exactly where he starts. Consider his job as a floor detective at a grocery store. His imperious boss gives him blatantly contradictory instructions for how to monitor for shoplifters, browbeating him for standing around seemingly doing nothing then browbeating him again for moving around and openly watching customers. His first day climaxes in a hilarious segment where he catches a shoplifter in the act but literally can’t do anything about it other than follow the thief out of the store, through the streets, and into another shop before losing sight of him and returning home empty-handed. Once at home, he’s browbeaten a third time by his father (Jan Vostrčil) who gives long, rambling tirades about manliness and responsibility that change directions mid-sentence, leaving the confused Petr frozen at the dinner table with a spoon of soup halfway to his mouth.

The obvious interpretation of these scenes is that they’re a not-so-subtle commentary on government surveillance and the Kafkaesque realities of living under Communism’s byzantine, self-perpetuating bureaucracy. (Indeed, in addition to being Forman’s first feature film, it was his first of many that got him into trouble with government censors. It was only after it won the Locarno International Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Leopard award that they relented and allowed it distribution.) But it can also be read more superficially as a simple statement on the confusion that comes with growing up, particularly the lengthy (and dull) middle section dominated by an extended dance party sequence where Petr and his friends try and woo girls but end up alone, drunk, and passed out. It would seem some aspects of being a teenager are universal.

Though rough and amateurish, Black Peter is a fascinating starting point for the defining figure of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #74 The Blood of Jesus [1941] ★★★½

Films about Christianity were nothing new in American cinema when Spencer Williams’ released his 1941 race film The Blood of Jesus. From its very beginning, Hollywood figured out that movies about the Bible could bring in beaucoup bucks if made and marketed properly. The master of early crowd-pleasing religious filmmaking was undeniably Cecil B. DeMille whose more is more philosophy helped pioneer the bloated Hollywood epic with goliathan sets, spectacular action set-pieces, and massive crowds of extras. (It didn’t hurt that he also realized one could cram as much sex and skin onscreen as one wanted so long as unrepentant sinners were rewarded with damnation or perdition by the end.)

Williams’ film, then, represented this formula’s diametric opposite. While filmmakers like DeMille had veritable blank checks for financing, Williams shot the entire movie with just $5,000 (a little over $87,000 when adjusted for inflation). Where DeMille had world-famous stars, Williams had a cast of nonprofessional amateurs sourced from the area around his Texas studio. And while DeMille’s style drew from the pomp and ostentation of the High Church—his family were Episcopalian—Williams’ film feels like the flowering of a syncretist Christianity that blended Low Church Protestantism with Southern folk mythology.

Consider the opening sequence which shows a procession of white-robed faithful singing gospel hymns while marching down to a river to be baptized. There’s gravity to the proceedings, but no solemn pompousness—women gossip and bicker while in line and a reluctant convert pretends to see a snake in the river so he can scurry off back to whatever den of iniquity he crawled out of. (This latter moment is played for comedy, something that DeMille wouldn’t and couldn’t do—he would’ve regarded the scene as a shocking breach of religious propriety.)

The plot further underscores the influence of black mythology: after accidentally being shot by her husband, a woman named Martha (Cathryn Caviness) is tempted at a literal crossroads in the afterlife between fast living and Satan—appearing as a suit-wearing, jazz-loving trickster—and salvation and heaven (this last represented by a conspicuously black angel and images of an even more conspicuously white Jesus). Williams’ style vacillates between the amateurishly primitive and the symbolically sophisticated, even lifting shots from a silent Italian film showing souls entering the gates of heaven. Overall, the film is a bona fide piece of religious folk art.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #73 Death in the Garden [1956] ★★★½

From the outside looking in, Luis Buñuel’s Death in the Garden seems a pale imitation of a big budget American adventure film. This Mexican-French co-production, with its South American villages, rain-drenched jungles, and marooned European heroes, feels at times like a European answer to John Huston’s The African Queen (1951). After getting trapped in the middle of a populist uprising against a corrupt government takeover of a mining outpost, a band of mismatched misfits flee into the Brazilian rainforest. Two of the principle actors in particular feel like riffs on established Hollywood figures: with his beefy build, rough-hewn good looks, and no-nonsense attitude, adventurer Shark (Georges Marchal) feels occasionally like a French Kurt Douglas or Burt Lancaster; with her icy attitude, withering disdain, and sharp beauty, greedy prostitute Djin (Simone Signoret) appears a Buñuelian take on Marlene Dietrich.

But despite appearances, Buñuel brings his particularly singular worldview to bear in this film, creating something that stands far apart from its proto-blockbuster predecessors. For starters, it demonstrates the Spaniard’s trademark hatred for authority, whether it comes from the state or the church (although, due to his Catholic background, in many of his films these two forces are one and the same). The government officials who seize the mine and hunt Shark, Djin, & co. are bizarrely aloof and detached in their cruelty. For them the slaughter of unarmed miners and the humiliation of local townspeople is positively blasé. (In one of Buñuel’s only surrealist flourishes in the film, a dead rebel is “executed” by firing squad to maintain appearances.) The local Catholic church is also portrayed as totally impotent, both incapable of stopping the exploitation of the natives and, one expects after watching them, unwilling as long as they aren’t good Christian converts. This is best demonstrated in Father Lizardi (Michel Piccoli), one of the jungle escapees who time and again commits the only true sin one can commit in a Buñuel film: trust in mankind’s better nature. In a running joke, Lizardi repeatedly “personally accounts” for people who turn traitor and betray him and his group. That’s he’s doomed to die for his foolishness in rejecting Buñuel’s misanthropic nihilism is a given from the moment we first see him. Though belonging to the oft-overlooked Mexican phase of Buñuel’s career, Death in the Garden is nonetheless as caustic and vicious as anything he ever made.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #72 Death in Venice [1971] ★★★

One must needs be in the proper mood for Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice. It’s not a film for those seeking the neorealism of Visconti’s early career or the lavish, melodramatic epics of his later work. Instead Death of Venice is a deliberate attempt to transpose the literary prose of German author Thomas Mann into cinematic images. As film critic Lauren Humphries-Brooks once explained, one of Mann’s predominant obsessions was the aesthetic death of the soul, and whether he was examining the petrification of Europe’s nineteenth century bourgeoisie in Buddenbrooks or interrogating the cryptic elusiveness of man’s inner heart in The Magic Mountain, he plumbed the aesthetic boundaries of the written word and its capacity for capturing the self-destruction of man’s deepest yearnings. Visconti’s adaptation therefore is almost completely lacking in story. It elects instead to dwell on absence and emptiness, sucking the sweet wound of upper class inertia like one would a cut on the lip or a sore on the tongue.

The film follows Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), a composer whom we learn in intermittent flashbacks developed a heart condition after suffering the death of his cherished daughter and the failure of his latest symphony. He arrives in Venice under doctor’s orders to get some bed rest, and for the first act of the film we watch and consider the world around him exactly as he does. He—and by extension Visconti’s camera—regards things with a detached aloofness, gliding through dining rooms, canals, and beaches like an unseen, incorporeal phantom. But his life snaps into focus when he spies a Polish teenager named Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) vacationing with his family in the same hotel. For the first time in years, perhaps even decades, he recognizes an embodiment of everything in life that is lovely and wonderful, and he finds himself desiring—truly desiring—once again.

Modern commentators have dismissed Aschenbach’s affections, and by extension Visconti’s film and Mann’s novel, as pedophilic idealization. But this feels like an ignoring of the text of the film which considers Tadzio less as a sexual being to be corrupted—despite his beautiful physique he frolics and plays with his fellows like a pre-sexual innocent—than as an aesthetic ideal to be cherished. Death in Venice can at times be tedious and slow, but it’s always intimately considered, delicately composed, stirringly acted, and resplendent with an otherworldly beauty.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule # 71 The Hanging Tree [1959] ★★★★

The settlers ride into the skeleton of the mining camp, cresting a hill overlooking the river valley infested with prospectors like ticks on a dog. At the top of the hill a single bony tree stands sentinel. “Every new mining camp’s got to have its hanging tree,” the driver cheerfully tells his companion as they ride by, “makes folks feel respectable.” It’s a brief moment, almost a throwaway aside. Yet this juxtaposition of the reality of mob violence with the fantasy of civility brilliantly encapsulates the worldview and philosophy of Delmer Daves’ The Hanging Tree. A viciously cynical Western, it interrogates the false front of respectability mankind drapes over its meanest impulses and finds them laughably pathetic.

The fifties had already seen Daves direct some of the darkest Westerns produced by the Hollywood studio system this side of Anthony Mann, beginning with the revisionist tragedy Broken Arrow (1950), the Shakespearean melodrama Jubal (1956), and the subtly anti-capitalist Cowboy (1958). But The Hanging Tree outdoes them all in terms of bare-teethed anger. The film follows Joseph Frail (Gary Cooper), a wandering doctor and gunslinger who sets up shop in Skull Camp, Montana. On his first day there he rescues a gold sluice thief named Rune (Ben Piazza) after he’s shot and almost lynched by mine guards. Frail forces the recalcitrant Rune to work as his manservant to pay off his medical debt under the threat of turning him in to the murderous authorities. Soon the two take in Elizabeth Mahler (Maria Schell), a Swiss immigrant hurt and blinded during a stagecoach robbery that killed her family while en route to Skull Camp. Elizabeth too falls under the influence of Frail, first falling in love with him, then being unwittingly bankrolled by him when she, Rune, and local prospector Frenchy (Karl Malden) stake their own gold claim.

The pattern here is obvious: though Frail might have legitimately good intentions—his selflessness in caring for impoverished locals who can’t pay him is proof enough of that—he’s incapable of maintaining relationships where he doesn’t have the upper hand. The other Skull Camp villagers are hardly any better, with the womenfolk being vicious gossipers and the men violent maniacs egged on by the clearly insane faith healer Dr. Grubb (George C. Scott). The microcosm Daves creates here would make Billy Wilder pause, and the final five minutes are a masterstroke of nihilism.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #70 Daddy Longlegs [2009] ★★★½

Jean Webster’s novel Daddy-Long-Legs told the story of an orphan girl’s adolescence and young adulthood in the shadow of a mysterious, unseen benefactor who pays for her education without revealing his true identity. A smash hit, the book was adapted into movie form no less than six times, not counting the 1990 Japanese television series (or the 2009 stage musical). Surprisingly, none of these adaptations were Josh and Benny Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs, a film based in large part on the brothers’ experiences growing up with their divorced father.

But this title similarity couldn’t have been a coincidence, particularly for two film buffs like the Safdies. Indeed, if the original novel followed a child who struggled to know their parents, then the Safdie’s movie was about a parent who struggles to know their children. Case in point, the film’s protagonist Lenny (Ronald Bronstein). A divorced, irresponsible screwup who struggles to make ends meet working as a projectionist in Manhattan, he only gets custody of his two sons Sage and Frey (Sage and Frey Ranaldo) two weeks every year. The film follows one such round of custody, and watching him we quickly realize that while his love for his sons is genuine, he has no business whatsoever being a parent. Some of his wise parenting decisions: getting into a belligerent fight with the boy’s principal and a homeless man on his first day of custody; blowing his sons off at night to cheat on his girlfriend; drugging them with sleeping pills that accidentally puts them in a two-day coma when he needs to work an extra nightshift and can’t watch them; getting arrested by the police for spraying graffiti with his idiot friends. In a way, this film is the inverse of King Vidor’s The Champ (1931), one of American cinema’s archetypal father-son stories. While that film saw a clearly unfit father’s paternal love redeemed through self-sacrifice, Daddy-Long-Legs sees a father whose selfishness and immaturity make redemption impossible despite his paternal love.

But the film is far from maudlin melodrama. Filmed largely with handheld cameras shooting Super 16 blown-up to 35mm, it has the jagged rawness of early Cassavetes mixed with the Safdie’s trademark emotional volatility. It doesn’t quite match the nerve-shredding intensity of Good Time (2017) or Uncut Gems (2019), but it’s still like watching slowed-down footage of a car crash.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule # 68 Warning: Do Not Play [2019] ★★★½

There’s something distinctly Lovecraftian about Kim Jin-won’s Warning: Do Not Play. No, there are no Old Gods, no extra-dimensional aliens, nor any faux-Darwinian racism. The Lovecraftian flavoring comes from its protagonist’s incessant, unstoppable, unappeasable curiosity. Like so many of Lovecraft’s protagonists who followed clues and bread crumbs against all common sense to uncover forbidden rites, blasphemous temples, and inconceivable monstrosities, Jin-won’s hero finds herself helpless at the hands of her own need to know what shouldn’t be known.

The film follows Mi-Jung (Seo Ye-ji), a rookie film director who made waves at film festivals with a short film but now finds herself stuck with a case of artist’s block for her follow-up. After hearing a rumor about a mysterious student film from a nearby university which was hushed up after it supposedly drove people screaming from the theater, she goes in search of it. Her research eventually leads her to discover that, yes, the film is real and, what’s more, its director Jae-Hyun (Jim Seon-kyu) was clearly driven insane by the experience. But instead of taking Jae-Hyun’s desperate warning to forget the film when they meet seriously, she soldiers on to discover a secret lair in a nondescript suburb that would make Kevin Spacey’s John Doe from Se7en (1995) feel right at home. Every red flag imaginable shows up to warn Mi-Jung away: eerie red lights, a decrepit interior, wooden crosses strewn over everything. The kicker: a room sealed with a giant padlock straight out of a Looney Tune. But against all common sense (and self-preservation instincts), she breaks the lock, retrieves the only surviving copy of the haunted film, and gets herself targeted by an old-fashioned murder ghost.

What can you say? Curiosity’s a killer.

The rest of Warning: Do Not Play plays like a traditional ghost story made slightly more interesting by a layer of self-reflection on horror filmmaking and its capacity to exorcise and heal past trauma. Both Mi-Jun and Jae-Hyun turned to horror filmmaking for the catharsis it allowed them to achieve from their traumatic childhoods, and indeed Mi-Jun finds herself using her phone’s camera as a weapon to simultaneously shield herself from the supernatural and capture it so its existence can be proven. With more than its fair share of effective scares, the film’s a satisfyingly ambitious chiller.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #69 Da 5 Bloods ★★★½

Spike Lee’s movies refuse to exist in a vacuum. They’re always reflections and responses to the world around them, to the course of popular (read: white) cinema, to the arc of God’s justice in the face of man’s injustice. His new film Da 5 Bloods may be his most ambitious yet, a bold attempt to reconcile the contributions of black soldiers in the Vietnam War, the lingering effects of Western colonialism in the Third World, the valorization of American soldiers in Hollywood cinema, and the looming shadow of the Trump administration overhanging the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Yet ultimately, that expansiveness is one of the reasons why the film struggles to reach its full potential.

For one, it lacks the laser focus that makes his longer movies fly by—though only nineteen minutes longer than his last film BlacKkKlansman (2018), Da 5 Bloods feels at least an hour longer. Much of this is due to the first act which feels oddly perfunctory for a filmmaker like Lee who takes such giddy pleasure in playing with and subverting traditional storytelling expectations. Much of its feels like he shot it on autopilot. We meet four African American Vietnam veterans who return to Vietnam in the modern day to recover the remains of their beloved squad leader “Stormin’ Norm” Holloway (Chadwick Boseman)…and the massive shipment of gold bricks pilfered from the US Army payroll they buried near him. Along they way they’re joined by David (Jonathan Majors), the son of their unofficial leader Paul (Delroy Lindo), a deeply traumatized and emotionally unstable man who, to risk minor spoilers, becomes the Humphrey Bogart to the expedition’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Things only snap to life after the first hour once they recover Norm’s remains and the treasure—we can practically feel Lee’s interest waking up as Da 5 Bloods transforms from recycled war film to deeply troubling exploration of guilt (both national and personal), grief, mental illness, male camaraderie, fatherhood, and, surprisingly, patriotism. Lee never quite gets his disparate thematic considerations to emulsify, but when the movie works it’s positively galvanic, particularly the scenes involving Lindo who might have the most captivating screen presence of any character in any Lee film since Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X. The scenes near the end where he addresses the camera like a maddened Shakespearean villain giving asides to the audience is the stuff of nightmares and Oscar clips.

Nate Hood's Quarantine Qapsule #67 Parade [1974] ★★★½

If you aren’t of the personal opinion that Jacques Tati’s last film was Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist (2010)—the heartbreaking animated story of an aging magician and a young woman who thinks his powers are real that was based on a previously unproduced script Tati wrote for his estranged eldest daughter—then his final feature was his made-for-Swedish-television Parade. If The Illusionist was a summation of Tati’s worldview and convictions on the human condition, then Parade acts as a similar summation of his feelings about the capacities of cinema to blur the line between audience and performer.

Filmed in 1973 at the Stockholm Cirkus, it features Tati in one of his only non-Monsieur Hulot roles as the emcee of a circus performance which he periodically interrupts with some of his real-life pantomime routines. (Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, Tati uses the same visual language he used for Hulot for his emcee, filming him only in long and medium-long shots and unceremoniously introducing himself by practically barging into and out of another performing group’s scene.) From the start Tati makes the point of transforming the audience itself into a character, watching as the spectators wait in line outside the theater, goof off in the lobby, and file into their seats. They even get some of the earliest and most Tati-esque gags in the film such as a bit where a woman asks the man sitting in front of her to remove his giant motorcycle helmet. When he obliges, the helmet reveals an afro that’s even bigger. As the show continues we get the expected revue of circus acts: a magic show, tumblers, clowns, musical performances.

But Tati periodically cuts to members of the audience whose antics become just as important to the texture of the film as the professional ones on the stage. Some of them are revealed to be audience plants like a nondescript man in a suit who’s revealed as an acrobat during a routine with a live donkey. But others are clearly just extras. Nevertheless they take on lives of their own, most importantly two children Tati turns his camera on at the end of the film to record their spontaneous play among the abandoned props. Tati’s message is clear: a show is never just the show itself—it’s the people in the stands and their reactions that brings things to life.