Welcome back, readers! My sincere apologies for the uncommonly late-in-the-week tea time, but on top of there being much to discuss since our last get-together there’s also been much happening on your truly’s side. I’m thrilled to sit down with you now, at last, and serve up the latest in streaming TV and film.
On tap we have several series premieres; a fairy tale expressing a progressive view on female adolescence; and the promised retrospective on a unique past work.
If the e-mail distribution cuts off this post, because there are a few longer takes here, be sure to click through to the full website OR download the brand new Substack iOS app. to read the entire episode. (If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.)
Minx (Series Premiere)
HBOMax - Comedy - Ding Dongs for Feminism
Synopsis
A diehard desk-chair activist uncomfortably agrees to publish her philosophies alongside nude photos of men in a new magazine for women, in 1970s Los Angeles.
My take
Minx appears to be the rightful heir to the cultural legacy left by Born Yesterday (1950), and it’s amazing to me that it’s taken over seventy years for us to find one.
For those of you who are unfamiliar: Born Yesterday is the “heart to smart” story of a ditzy moll who, through simple conversation with and encouragement from a noble journalist, becomes a self-possessed and capable individual — not only in other people’s eyes but also (and more importantly) in her own. It’s “first wave” feminism (Lear, 1968) in perfect form, with the female protagonist claiming by the end of the film a legal victory, asserting her ownership over what she never knew she could even try for, let alone have; and Judy Holliday’s performance as that protagonist is the comedic grace that makes that victory endlessly charming. In terms of practical effects on our culture, readers, Born Yesterday is the reason we have Legally Blonde (Luketic [dir.], McCullah Lutz, & Smith [wri.], 2001), Mean Girls (Waters [dir.] & Fey [wri.], 2004), and — dare I even say it — Frozen (Buck [dir.] & Lee [dir./wri.], 2013) swimming merrily through our living cultural memories as popularly adored narratives of women breaking out of antique molds pretty much only because they finally realized they could.
With Minx, it’s as if the writers took the internal structure of Born Yesterday and replaced the woman who must learn how to break out from her constraints with a woman who, already having broken out, must learn how to trade what men would have previously taken as her natural sexual currency for her mind and her ambition, the only parts of herself she actually wants to put forward, to have known and appreciated, and to succeed by using. Consequently, it’s from narratives like Born Yesterday, narratives in which female characters recognize that they are worth more and want more for themselves than just a man to take notice and/or care of them, that Minx takes the next logical step forward, toward the greater achievement of social, professional, and sexual equality beyond initial legal capability for its female characters.
Now, certainly there have been obviously feministic texts addressing that next step before Minx.
Working Girl (Nichols [dir.] & Wade [wri.], 1988),
9 to 5 (Higgins [dir./wri.] & Resnick [wri.], 1980),
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Brooks & Burns [creators], 1970), and
Network (Lumet [dir.] & Chayefsky [wri.], 1976)
are just some of the many that exist in our vivid social memory as “second wave” narratives, capturing and predicting a continuation of social change.
The important distinction I’m making here is, Minx specifically picks up exactly where Born Yesterday leaves off: showing in a subversively comic dialectic with and against the male-based power infrastructure in which its female characters must operate exactly what happens to a fully educated and de-sexualized woman when she attempts to play out her ambitions for a social and professional victory on par with a man’s.1
What does happen is that, unsurprisingly, misogyny looms large, undercutting her and other women’s attempts to so succeed, however large or small — and not just because men actively stand in the way. As anyone aware of how bias works in a social system will sadly recognize, perhaps the most pernicious ill effects, the internalized tendrils of oppression that the oppressed themselves (typically without conscious awareness) accept and perpetuate in their own thoughts and actions (e.g., by choosing not to “lean in” as their fortunate counterparts would), depress the female characters’ attempts just as well as, if not worse than, truly external obstacles. That Minx manages to communicate all that turmoil to progress with wit and class and fun in its character spectrum and its plot points is the show’s own victory, as a story with roots in a mid-20th-century classic but with fruit still nourishing and appealing to 21st-century diets.
And, wow, if it isn’t funny and well-acted, especially by Ophelia Lovibond and Jake Johnson in the leading roles….
So, readers, what am I saying here? Watch it for the feminism, watch it for the comedy, watch it for the acting, or watch it for the full-frontal (albeit sometimes prosthetic) male nudity, readers. Just watch it, I think, and enjoy.
Temperature check
Hot
Lust (Season 1)
HBOMax - Comedy - Maturing Sexuality
Synopsis
Four middle-aged women contend with the bleak possibility that their sex lives may actually be joyless.
My take
On the other side of Minx (Rapoport [creator], 2022) this episode, readers, is Lust, a new Scandinavian show also with female sexuality in focus.
It turns out, Lust isn’t much to lust over, readers, unless the life of a suburban middle-aged Swedish woman is close to home for you. The hybrid descendant of the American staple Waiting to Exhale (Whitaker [dir.], McMillan, g& Bass [wri.], 1995) and the British romp Calendar Girls (Cole [dir.], Firth, & Towhidi [wri.], 2003), Lust tackles the relatively mild-mannered straight female’s point of view on sex and relationships, but with none of the flair of Nora Ephron’s writing, little of the fever of Star’s (1998) Sex and the City, and only hints of the sensuality and attitude that made Waiting to Exhale such a popular and enduring mid-1990s movie.
Though indeed Lust references all of those cultural milestones in the landscape of maturing female sexuality, the proof is in the execution and, while it wanted to be both a stirring drama and a charming comedy, it succeeded at being neither more than a lukewarm rinse. Perhaps it was the genre-based confusion that kept the feeling so weak. Perhaps it was the “O, I’m being so bad right now, having this extra cookie” story-telling vibe, that turned me off rather than drew me in. Perhaps it was the cultural flavors we in the U.S. don’t share with Sweden. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t venture out for it, readers, when there’s so much better available elsewhere.
Temperature check
Cold
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (Series Premiere)
Apple TV+ - Drama / Sci-Fi - A Remembrance of Things Past
Synopsis
An old man, suffering from acute memory loss and its downstream consequences, undergoes an experimental treatment to maximize his recall.
My take
Samuel L. Jackson gives the best performance I’ve ever seen him give, in creating the life — past, present, and confused — of a man suffering from increasingly severe faults of memory that jolt him back and forth from the present to various points in his past.
Past wrongs and a literal hidden treasure hang over his journey as markers in a kind of storytelling sand — a metaphor apt for how easily those markers and other details slip through his character’s and thereby also our fingers. While frustrating on screen for him, that slippage in its communication with us is magnetizing and rich with humanity; and Jackson’s performance as the titular Ptolemy Grey makes the most of what was already solid writing, picking up on the nuances of interpersonal both connection and friction, however tiny the granules, as well as the major themes that make any drama compelling.
Murder, grief, sacrifice, and love all resonate as in Aeschylus’ (ca. 458 BC) Oresteia, making the choice of a Greek name like Ptolemy for a Black American man all the more meaningful than the character-building explanation they offer in show. While not a direct retelling of any of the three plays in that set of Greek tragedies, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey shares the emotional touchpoints that made that ancient work salient enough to win first prize at the Dionysia festival in 458 BC. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if, come next the round of TV awards, we see this show accepting as well.
Temperature check
Hot
WeCrashed (Series Premiere)
Apple TV+ - Drama - Historical Fiction / Biopic
Synopsis
A gamblingly gregarious huckster and his imperious girlfriend put designs on a lifestyle as a living and incur the costs.
My take
Following the recent débuts of Hulu’s The Dropout (Meriwether [creator], 2022) and Showtime’s Super Pumped (Koppelman & Levien [creators], 2022), WeCrashed is the third and to my knowledge final entry into this year’s televisual tableaux of the 2010s’ tech. venture wars. Simultaneously, it is also the third and latest in a series of quick and substantial claims onto our attention from Apple TV+, whose The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (Mosley, 2022) is newly out (see above) and whose Severance (Erickson, 2022) is still airing.
With so many close siblings already out on our screens, you might think that WeCrashed wouldn’t register — or might register but only to negative opinion. However, at least as far as the tech. war dramas go, WeCrashed not only registers, but also turns out to be the very best.
What WeCrashed and the other new Apple TV+ shows are doing right is playing to Apple’s strengths: eyes for design, ears for storytelling, and technology for a body. In WeCrashed, these strengths manifest as attractive visible-world building, backgrounding a charismatic storyteller’s perhaps most compelling yarn about the promise of technology. Sound Apple-y yet? We agree. In particular, we see:
earthy tones and high-definition textures grounding expositive vignettes about professional interests complicated with personal anxieties,
multicolored urban pampas filigreeïng light-soaked offices in the “mind’s eye” of the leading characters, and
cold blue glazes confronting those multicolored fantasies with monochromatic realities, bereft of passion and forged only to size up and to seize;
and we appreciate how complex but clear a perspective those elements set up for WeCrashed.
We also cannot dodge the speculation that in part this excellence in construction comes from the fact that the WeCrashed story is in some ways not unlike the story of Apple itself. Apple’s co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs was famously voted out of Apple leadership in the 1990s, just as Neumann is and was from WeWork. Though this parallelism does stop short when we recall that, of the two, only Jobs would later return to bring his company a renaissance of accomplishment, the existence of any parallelism at all prompts the question, “Where exactly is the line between the visionary and the vacuum, the creator and the consumer, in these stories?” Or, even more simply, “When does motivating an appetite for an idea cross the line into fraud?” The Dropout asks the same question. The answer may appear simple (i.e., “Don’t sell a product you don’t actually have.”), yet — if Boyle and Sorkin’s (2015) Steve Jobs is to be believed — didn't Jobs himself push the NeXT computer not because of its actual capabilities (which he knew were disastrously under par) but rather because of its importance as a chess piece in a game for control of the future of tech.? How does a person with such a vision but without the necessary material to back it up go from a celebrity and icon to a fabulist and disgrace, or perhaps the better phrasing is, how does such a person not fall into that state of disgrace? How long of a lead line is society willing to dole out to visionaries before it requires either compensation or correction?
WeCrashed certainly pre-seeds our opinions on that in Neumann’s case; it’s careful to feature iffy early ventures Neumann pushed essentially door-to-door before he founded WeWork. The greater question remains, however.
Whatever the answer, I applaud Apple TV+ for putting together this caliber of a show (and this caliber of a broader slate of shows) we can not just enjoy but also respect. I’m eager to see this particular one through, for any answers to that last question it may provide, as well as for Anne Hathaway’s riveting performance as Neumann’s deeply insecure girlfriend-then-wife, Rebekah (née Paltrow), a character she seems to feel in her very bones.
Temperature check
Hot
The Adam Project
Netflix - Sci-Fi - Daddy Issues
Synopsis
A fighter pilot travels back in time, to either find his wife or somehow prove she was murdered.
My take
Ryan Reynolds and Zoë Saldaña wanted to hang out, with special effects, while being paid and invited Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, and Catherine Keener (who gives the worst performance of her career) along for the ride.
Temperature check
Frigid
Life & Beth (Season 1)
Hulu - Comedy - Dry, Dry Chardonnay
Synopsis
A late-thirty-something saleswoman experiences layered dissociations from her relationship, her job, and her family as symptoms of an internal crisis of self.
My take
Amy Schumer takes the road less travelled here, painting for us a surrealistically awkward world through which her protagonist, a persistently troubled woman who ironically has a lot going right for her, must trudge bewildered. The result is a black comedy caravan through a desert rivaling the Sahara for dryness. Quips land hot and low, exposing the micro-constraints of living within a particular American consumeristic culture. It’s high-difficulty writing — and sometimes viewing — but it ultimately pays itself off with solid observations throughout, despite its classification as a drama by Hulu.
While it turns out that the protagonist’s journey is just another shade of the journey we’ve all seen Schumer take before (in Trainwreck [2015] and I Feel Pretty [2018]), the especially initial ride — not on a standard horse but effectively a virtual camel instead — is rewardingly not the transport we were expecting.
Dissociative humor fans, rejoice; this one is for you.
Temperature check
Tepid
Turning Red
Disney+ - Animation - Fairy Tale
Synopsis
A Chinese-Canadian girl contends with sudden bodily changes that her mother and aunts expect her to tame.
My take
Readers, it is SO refreshing, to see a classic-form straight-up fairy tale, replete with all the sexual subtext you could ever want or need, set in a modern context! So often our modern tales of adolescence for children come off either castrated or omitted, that we go through really long stretches without genuine bread-and-butter allegories of physical and emotional development like Disney’s new Turning Red. I was genuinely thrilled.
All the favorites were there:
the unwitting and aspiring child;
the child’s nascent sexual interests;
the beastly vs. princely objects of that interest (here, the older males she falls in love with, despite her family’s best wishes);
the overbearing mother, whose ways the child must learn and later overthrow in order to reach adulthood in her own right;
the magical objects the child uses as tools to make that personal progress…
Ugh, I could go on and on (see Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood [Tatar, 2009] and other works by Tatar for a deeper discussion on this topic). They’re all there, right in place, right where you’d want them to be.
And the wonderful thing is, none of it feels rote! Part of that feeling is certainly due to the beautiful animation, the modern context, and the sensitive heart of the story itself. However, I’ll purposefully gloss over those huge lifts here in order to focus on the key, in my eyes: simply that the protagonist in this story is a girl, not a boy, though her quest remains to make peace with the animal within — and not a cushy sweet domestic animal, mind you, but a wild animal, borne from a history of passion, aggression, and bloodlust.
I focus on this detail in part because it may otherwise pass by you smoothly; it’s the film’s obvious first premise and the very first thing you learn about its story in any preview. However — make no mistake, readers — it’s the most important fact about this story in our common culture. Why, you may ask? Simply because it breaks classic associations that I’m not aware have ever been broken before in any large mainstream story for children. Essentially, it means something (in the grand sense of meaning), that we are being told that young women like young men are hormonal, sexual, smelly, and hairy creatures — even at twelve. To me, it signals specifically that our culture may be ready to confront at scale the reality that women and men (or girls and boys) share the natural human experience of active sexual development, or by extension that we as a culture ought dismantle prior notions that gender separates adolescents neatly into the pure and smooth to be protected and the rough and prurient to be supervised.
To my recollection, among prior works only Disney’s Mulan (1998) even comes close to this kind of realization, but crucially lacks joining the smelly with the champion or the horny with the honorific. Even Disney’s Pocahontas, a young woman who came of age in a community intimately tied to literal nature (consider the ‘Grandmother Willow’ character), was portrayed as a lithe and statuesque model, whose looks are as natural and fresh as her spirit and whose (head, not body) hair is as long and lustrous as the most impeccable L’Oreal model’s (Pocahontas, 1995). The change from that imagery in 1990s’ Disney main titles to this imagery of Turning Red is, concisely, progressive gender politics of the first kind. It’s huge.
And, atop a fantastic score by two-time ‘Rich Pick’ nominee and one-time Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson, several songs — all clever parodies of early 2000s’ “boy band” fluff by Billie Eilish and Finneas o’Connell — are fruit of an appropriately red variety.
Temperature check
Hot
Uploaded (Season 2)
Amazon Prime - Sci-Fi - Antidisestablishmentarianism
Synopsis
Behind the façade of a “normal” digital afterlife, a man tries to figure out why he was murdered.
My take
The first season of Amazon’s Uploaded brought to life a not inconceptible future, in which people have the option to have their consciousnesses uploaded into any of many digital afterlives, rather than pass away altogether. This premise is interesting. As a comment on mortality, economy, and justice, the show teased a clever criticism of our culture and cultural dependence on technology. Are we meant to live on? If we do live on, how would that work exactly, in the humdrum day-to-day of it all? And what are the downsides of an ultimate reliance on technology for our existence and our happiness?
Uploaded is, of course, not the first film or television project to explore these questions. Recently, The Good Place (Schur [creator], 2016) tackled two of them with wholehearted thoroughness — and fun results. Before The Good Place, films like Defending Your Life (Brooks, 1991) and shows like Black Mirror (Brooker [creator], 2011) also took up those same philosophical bones. There are no real answers, of course — how could there really be? — except that, in attempting to respond to the questions, each attempt has shed a bit more light onto our common human and mortal condition and — perhaps more prominently — onto the cultural moment in which it was birthed. I digress a bit, admittedly, but all of this talk is really to lay a foundation upon which we can try to understand and place Uploaded, now in its second season, as another attempt at a cultural response to persistent human uncertainties.
The gist of it is, for a show that wants to be a comically lightened reprieve from the doldrums of thinking about mortality and its virtues and vices, the show is just, well, dull. Consider its core conceit. Uploaded means to use the comedy that can naturally follow from an obsession with consumerism as Black Mirror used the thrill of being “along for the ride” that can naturally follow from the abdication of responsibility, The Good Place used the self-effacement that can naturally balance rampant self-involvement, and Defending Your Life used the wit that can naturally preside over careerism: namely, as the feathering that fully fledges the bird. However, Uploaded fails to fly where these other shows succeeded. Uploaded’s contentions with greed, with economic and social inequalities, and with their joint consequences in a post-mortal and almost post-moral interpersonal system are substantial and interesting issues; but these issues flap about wingless, when the writing claims little comment on them more than noting how they could exist. Essentially, where are the (good) jokes? For a show intent on providing comically leavened rather than farcically blunt commentary on substantial personal and social issues, we get far more instances of critiques coming off just as critiques than of didacticism feathered warmly in bright plumage. (Alright, I’ll stop with the bird analogy.) In the end I just felt like the guest of a host whose insecurities repeatedly asked me questions like, “You’re having fun, right? This is fun, yea?” Well, to tell the truth, I wasn’t not having fun exactly, but now that you keep asking I am starting to feel listless.
Of course, readers, you may find other reasons to enjoy the show. There is a B-story romance that perhaps could save the concoction for you. I mean, the actors are generically attractive, and the show discusses coupling and its rituals and trials in several clear ways. For me, however, there just aren’t enough compelling moments to cheer from the sidelines, even for a “long-awaited” union of the uploaded protagonist and his human love interest. In fact, the greatest sense of entertainment I ever felt while watching this new season wasn’t for their love but for the struggles of the protagonist’s best friend instead (depicted above). Far more fun a character than anyone else on the show, he is just so committed to his feelings and his friendship, that it tickles and hurts at the same time.
That minor virtue aside, however, if you’re asking me whether or not I’d upload my consciousness into this second season, I’d decidedly say, “no.”
Temperature check
Cold
Scream (2022)
Paramount+ • Horror • I Slash; Therefore I Film
Synopsis
When a locally famous killer resurfaces, a teen-aged girl and her culturally mindful friends accept help from people who have previously faced the killer, in a communal effort to save their lives and stop the attacks.
My take
I recall going to the theaters to see the original Scream (Craven, 1997). I recall liking it, probably for the same reason most film-goers then and since have liked it: It didn’t just exist, another recitation of a horror film, thrashing and slashing about as prosaically as a Cuisinart blender; no, it actively reflected on its existence and, by ready extension, the existences of its many cultural relatives, from the oldest horror like Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932) through the modern horror like Halloween (Carpenter [dir./wri.] & Hill [wri.], 1978) to the meta horror like Stab, the movie franchise within Scream itself.
That unabashed look back at the audience who patronizes it made that first Scream film both a pop and cult hit and, like any cult hit, the story soon took on a legacy of interest for generations of audiences to come. Fulfilling that legacy, four sequels now exist within the original film’s universe, each successively questioning and ultimately reinforcing that universe’s own metastatic formula once again, only each time with a different cast of characters.
The newest sequel, or “requel” of the franchise, is no exception from the set. While its screenplay pushes at its own formulaic boundaries by actively questioning its own role as a “return to the legacy” film, it ultimately — spoiler alert — chooses to subvert its own ambitions and conform with the simplest expectations of what it means to be a Scream film. For example, even though explicit dialogue exposes the film’s “final twists” directly and early, thus giving the film extensive runway on which to launch itself into an alternative path, the course of the narrative rejects that alternative (and several others along the way) in favor of a recapitulation of the franchise’s earliest plot points and themes. I suppose, to an extent, there is honor of a kind in remaining so faithful to the material that paved the way for one’s existence; but the cost of that kind of honor is wearing down one’s treads, a high cost no matter how attractive those treads may have been at the start. So, I felt the urge to ask the drivers, are we threadbare yet?
The only minor departure from the source implicates the role of the “expert” in the story’s structure. In all prior films, to the expert befalls the fate of the idle armchair critic: snuffed out by way of his or her own hyper-investment in the specifics of the story on the screen, at the expense of any useful awareness of the consonant dangers looming in reality. In this film — spoiler alert, again — the expert staves off the complete irony of being murdered while shouting at his/her on-screen counterpart to “look behind you!” — but far too late to escape all injury and ultimately only just barely enough to save her own life. On the one hand, this departure may be significant, a turning point in the series of films, no longer content with pitch-perfect resonances of the original’s terrific cry. Are horror audiences maturer now, maybe it asks, or at least savvy enough that we can start to edge out of this “woe to the fallible” moralizing, which past works have offered up as a sort of framework for the human experience? Or, on the other hand, is the departure so meager that we can hardly consider it more noticeable or purposeful than an aberrant smudge on otherwise programmatic narrative? Even Xerox machines dabble in variance, copy over copy.
If you ask me, readers, I don’t know if I’m really convinced it’s either. Letting the expert live doesn’t seem to have a clear purpose, when the major conclusions of the story come into full view. The villains still vilify, the heroes still live, and a sequel is still in the making. At the same time, for a film franchise that has completed a Master’s level study of its own navel, engaging itself in a dialectic, no matter how small, is commentary at least that it’s not willing yet to roll over and die, much like the spirit of its seemingly incesssantly repossessed Ghostface killer.
I’d say, perhaps next time we’ll learn more, but I sincerely doubt that we will.
Perhaps this is all the Scream films ever wanted the story to be: tantalizing irony welded in expectation from nuance to title, in a scream we can see better than hear. But then why make us ask? Perhaps it should just tell us, no?
“Look behind you.” O, right — perhaps we should.
Temperature check
Cold
Retrospective
The Last Emperor (1987)
HBOMax - Biopic - End of an Era
Synopsis
The life of Emperor Puyi spans the changing political climate of China from the beginning through the middle of the 20th century.
My take
In the spirit of looking behind us this episode, readers, let’s discuss perhaps one of the most unexpectedly famous films of the 20th century, Bernardo Bertolucci’s (1987) The Last Emperor.
A faithful adaptation of the 1964 autobiography of the last emperor of China, The Last Emperor was the first Western film about modern China made on location in China with the full coöperation of the Chinese government. As TCM spokesperson Dave Karger speculates in an introduction to the film on HBOMax, it was likely partly because of Bertolucci’s own political identity as an Italian Communist, that he was granted this full coöperation and unprecedented access to sacred locations in China’s history. Whatever the complete reason, the result of Bertolucci’s access and efforts is a modern masterpiece, one of the very few films to completely sweep at the Academy Awards (i.e., winning every Oscar for which it was nominated, including Best Picture) — a massively unlikely feat, especially for an arthouse film that reads more like a documentary than a fictional narrative in its pacing and style.
So, how exactly did an arthouse film walk away with (at the time) the third-most Oscars won ever, beating such cultural landmarks as Broadcast News (Brooks, 1987), Fatal Attraction (Lyne [dir.] & Dearden [wri.], 1987), and Moonstruck (Jewison [dir.] & Shanley [wri.], 1987) — subject of a previous retrospective here, on Hot Tea — especially when it wasn’t even nominated in any of the acting categories, where nominations as we know can usually be counted on to at least accompany if not drive a film toward the big award of the night?
The answer, I believe, is in the film’s uniqueness and authenticity.
With the exception of criticism of the film’s early portrayal’s of Puyi’s childhood cruelty toward others — which historians argue is downplayed in the film from its heights in reality (see this article) — the film is generally regarded to be a faithful depiction of the major events in Puyi’s life, beginning most clearly with his introduction to the Forbidden City at the age of two at the behest of the dying Empress Dowager Cixi, whose final act was to install Puyi as the new Emperor of China. The scene depicting this decision and her death, which in reality did occur fewer than 24 hours apart from each other, is the clip I chose for this retrospective above. No matter how many times I see this film or how much I can appreciate the rest of it for its quality, this scene, above all the scenes, always stands out to me for its haunting grandeur, prophesy, devotional language, and irony. It encapsulates what I see as the key features that make The Last Emperor so indelible as a complete work: a fully dressed peek behind the walls of the Forbidden City at a pivotal moment in Chinese history, where the legendary court of the empire must directly confront the pull of a new era on the elaborate robes it cannot move for wearing. James Acheson’s costumes alone in the scene are worth an Oscar, and Lisa Lu’s portrayal of the Dowager Empress lingers in my mind for its teetering force and weakness, a tigress still hunting even with her very last breath.2 It’s so impressive. It’s truly a world I have not seen before or since on the screen in such high and honest resolution.
The fact that composer John Adam’s modern opera Nixon in China, about President Nixon’s historic visit to China in the 1970s, debuted in Houston, TX, less than one month before The Last Emperor opened in American theaters is a detail about the film’s greater cultural context I was unaware of before I began researching it for this retrospective. The coïncidence and order of these dates make an intriguing contribution to an understanding of why The Last Emperor was so warmly received in a year when there were so many other wonderful films also newly released. While I was unable to find any evidence that the two works actually influenced each other’s creations or receptions, it is nevertheless appealing to at least speculate that something in the American Zeitgeist of the time culminated to produce appetite enough for two major artistic depictions of Western-Chinese relations in our public fora and that, though at the time chief music critic for The New York Times Donal Henahan dismissed the opera as “fluff,” both the opera and the film would respond to that appetite in what would become enduring ways. (The opera is also one of my favorites.)
So, if you haven’t yet seen it, I highly recommend taking the time cozy up with a pot of Chinese white tea and Bertolucci’s masterpiece this week, readers — if only to see the delight of Peter o’Toole bicycling around the Forbidden City. The Last Emperor is streaming free on HBOMax as part of TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar.”
Temperature check
Steaming
Before I leave you this week, readers, I’ll just drop this reminder that this upcoming Sunday at 5:00 p.m. Pacific will be the 94th annual Academy Awards, live on ABC.
As I did last year, I plan on live-streaming my viewing of the ceremony (and perhaps an hour of the red carpet preceding it) on my Twitch channel, for anyone who wants to join me; and, while I haven’t yet finalized the official ‘Rich Picks’ for this past year in film, I’ll have them all finalized and ready to be talked about by then.
Cheers! 🫖
To add a bit more detail here to the distinction I mention: Where Working Girl, 9 to 5, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Network, and others diverge from Minx is ultimately where education and de-sexualization meet. Working Girl’s Tess educates herself to get ahead professionally, yes, but never fully sheds her sexuality, even after the make-over she undergoes to “masculinize” her features and thereby her chances of succeeding in business. Proof is in the sexual pudding, as her story is not just about getting ahead but moreover about getting ahead while also falling for and sleeping with her business partner, who basically can’t take his eyes off her. At the same time, the women of 9 to 5 aren’t rising with earned education as much as deploying cunning and moxie, to right persistent wrongs against them in their professional lives. Minx sits comfortably in the pocket between the two. It moves ahead the line that strives to dismantle systems of misogyny objectifying the female body as a vessel, toy, or spectacle without considering the thinking person inhabiting it, toward the much later “third wave” notion that educated women need not de-sexualize themselves in order to have success and be taken seriously. Along the way, it playfully objectifies the male body and makes it subject as a vessel, toy, and spectacle to the female gaze in a neat counterpoint, calling into question patterns of subjection wherever they appear and whoever their targets may be.
Interestingly, Lisa Lu had won the Taiwanese equivalent of the Best Actress Oscar, the Golden Horse Award for Best Actress in a motion picture, for her portrayal of Empress Cixi in Li Han-hsiang’s film The Empress Dowager twelve years earlier.
Steaming and 4-Hots! This is a must stream hot tea