Author: eglenn

Ezra Haber Glenn is a lecturer in urban planning in MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning and the editor of UrbanFilm.
Posted on

Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

I had a lot of fun reviewing Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland for The Arts Fuse, which was nicely paired with a commentary from Peg Aloi.

In the same year you got your license, you saw Easy Rider at the drive-in and were turned on by Canned Heat singing “Going Up the Country” at Woodstock, followed by a steady diet of “Going Mobile,” “Going to California,” and counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. The highway was calling and you rose to answer — but then life intervened, with a husband and a mortgage and a job at the gypsum plant and shopping lists and gutters to clean and 1,001 other daily responsibilities and hassles, and being on the road was just something Willie Nelson would sing about on the jukebox.

And then like that, decades later, with a whoosh of the undertow and a great sucking sound, the plant closed and the bottom dropped out of the world and everything that was once stable evaporated – husband, job, house, community – and all that was left was you and the road again….

To read more, see The Arts Fuse — and be sure to also read Peg’s commentary on the site as well. (And for fun, check out this Nomadland “filmerick”, too.)

(please share! all is takes is one quick click...)
Posted on

Nomadland: the Filmerick

As described previously, I’ve been exploring a new medium, the “filmerick” (limericks to summarize great films). Here’s a new one in honor of Chloé Zhao’s poignant and meditative on-the-road epic, Nomadland:


Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

They may think that you don’t have a plan,
When they see that you poop in a can,
    But it’s them that did go mad,
    You hard-working nomad:
You’ve a home on the road in your van.

For my longer (and slightly more serious) review, see The Arts Fuse.

(please share! all is takes is one quick click...)
Posted on

Herself (Phyllida Lloyd, 2020)

Now out on the Arts Fuse, my review of Herself, Phyllida Lloyd’s new feature produced in partnership between Amazon Studios and Screen Ireland.

Through this classic cinema framing, we come in for the close up: by watching Sandra’s story — by attending to this particular life, as lived and experienced slowly, by this individual — we may hope to understand a more general story playing out elsewhere.

Sadly, this “elsewhere” is more accurately an “everywhere,” as there are loads of Sandras not just in Dublin, but in Dayton, Durban, Dallas, Dubai, Delhi, and Da Nang — as well as right here in Boston and its suburbs. Based on a true story and reminiscent of too many others, Sandra is a mother fleeing an abusive spouse, hoping to find a safe home for her children in a world where even something this simple would seem to require a miracle.

To read the full review, click here. To watch this film, head to Amazon Prime.

(please share! all is takes is one quick click...)
Posted on

Nimic (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2020)

A big thanks to mubi for releasing Nimic, the latest work from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favorite).

This delightfully-eerie short combines Matt Dillon (who can pull off “clueless and confused” like no other actor working today) with a devilish Daphne Patakia (who quite literally steals the show from the more senior actor), capturing all the End-of-Empire fear of a host of recent offerings in the “stalker/imposter/body-snatcher” genre (It Follows, Goodnight Mommy, Get Out, Us, Under the Skin — and even Lanthimos’s own The Killing of a Sacred Deer) and distills this anxiety down to its purest essence in a 15-minute package. (Also worth noting, as with a number of these other films, there’s some subtle race and gender subtexts at play here; one only need do a quick search for “you will not replace us” to discover the real ugly fears at the heart of so much of the current cultural divide, explored in these collected works: far more threatening than serial-killing maniacs or flesh-eating zombies is the terror of being usurped.)

Dillon plays a middle-aged father of three, a cellist who gets up like any other day, boils an egg for breakfast like any other day, and heads off on the subway for rehearsal — just like any other day. But returning home, something is off — a glitch in the matrix, perhaps — and he finds himself followed by a doppelganger: the sweet and sly Patakia, who — strangely, mysteriously, intriguingly — looks nothing like Dillon (just roll with it). As she follows him home, Diego Garcia’s deft cinematography provides the perfect “stalker-cam” viewpoint: we find ourselves at once both in pursuit and pursued, as the fish-eye lens bends the very streets of the city around the characters. (The score — starting, stopping, on-screen, then off: strings whining, bending, screeching, humming, all at once — heightens the pace and the sense of tension and pursuit.)

As the circle bends back on itself, we begin to question even more of the reality we’ve just seen. See it once, and then watch again to truly appreciate how much mystery, confusion, fear, and dread a great director can pack into a short.

(please share! all is takes is one quick click...)
Posted on

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Ross Brothers, 2020)

I had a great time reviewing the new quasi-documentary, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, directed by Bill and Turner Ross, set in an staged recreation of a dive bar, but exploring some very real interactions. It’s a super film that really stretches the limits of the medium.

Here’s a teaser from my write-up:

The tone is what critics love to call “elegiac,” but one senses that using such language in “The ’20s” (as the bar is known to locals) might earn you the titular bloody nose, so we’ll just say it feels like the bar is hosting an Irish wake for itself. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tonight we die” could well be the subtitle for the film – or perhaps an updated and more accurate NSFW version, given the multiple paths to “merry” taken over the course of the night: “Eat, drink, smoke some weed, drink some more, fool around a lot and fondle a little, fall down a few times, pick a fight, drink some more and make up and hug it out, for tomorrow we finally accept the fact that we’ve all died a long time ago….”

To read the full review, head on over to The Arts Fuse.

(please share! all is takes is one quick click...)