[Thanks for spending your Christmas Eve with Cinema Sentries. While Santa spends the evening working through his Nice and Naughty lists, see what Mat has on his Cool list this week. – Gift-giving Gordon]
“Los Angeles” by Big Thief
I live in a small town in Oklahoma. It mostly sucks, but there is a local college, and they have a radio and TV station. The radio station plays a wide range of music. It is mostly indie/alternative stuff through the day – real college radio music, you might say—but on the weekends they play an eclectic collection of genres. There’s Folk Alley on Saturdays, which is exactly what it sounds like; after that they do a blues show from Memphis. On Sunday mornings, they run a Native American show full of tribal music, and later that afternoon, they do a Grateful Dead thing. There is one show that’s just music made by women and another that is full of electronic music that I don’t understand.
I don’t always listen, but I sure love that there are radio stations like that still in existence, run by real people who play what they love and not what some algorithm tells them to. The other day I had it on, and they played this song. I’d never heard it before; I’d never heard of the band before, but I immediately loved it.
The singer has this Emmylou Harris thing going on, and I love that she’s got this kind of half singing/half talking vocal on this song, and she sometimes goes so fast it feels like she can hardly get the lyrics out fast enough. It has a great, groovy vibe, and I can’t stop listening.
Mr. Scorsese
Martin Scorsese is my favorite director (probably, I go back and forth between him and Alfred Hitchcock). His films are, well, not difficult exactly, but complicated and not always easy to watch. I remember the first time I watched Taxi Driver, and after it was over, I knew I had watched something brilliant, but I also felt kind of dirty and sad. I had that same feeling with Raging Bull and Casino. More than just about any other director, Scorsese has made a career out of chronicling the lives of horrible people. Despite what some dumb bros on the internet might tell you, Henry Hill was not a good guy. Jordan Belfort is not someone you should emulate.
Buy Martin Scorsese: The Iconic Filmmaker and His WorkScorsese understands this. His films understand this. There is something important about chronicling these people’s lives, interrogating them, and trying to understand what made them tick. Scorsese has been there, too. He grew up around and has lived amongst these people.
I love so many of his films, but I also love the man himself. Or at least the persona he’s presented to the public for decades. Scorsese is the cinephile’s cinephile. I could listen to him talk about movies forever (and he loves to talk about movies).
I have listened to him talk about movies in interviews and commentaries. I’ve read numerous books about the man and have several books of interviews. As such, I know quite a bit about the man and his films. I know more about Scorsese than probably any other director.
Which means that there isn’t a lot of information presented in Mr. Scorsese, the five-part documentary directed by Rebecca Miller, that I didn’t already know. I’m well versed in most of his life story, especially the early years through the 1980s, which this movie mostly focuses on.
But what is new to me, and what is totally awesome, is hearing those stories from so many different people. Miller interviews a huge cavalcade of folks who know and have worked with Scorsese, including actors like Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio and fellow directors like Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg, and his longtime editor Thelma Schonmaker. But she also tracked down relatives and childhood friends. Best of all, she was able to sit down with the director himself and have several long chats.
And this is no glossy portrait designed to make Scorsese look like a saint. It dives deep into his depression, his excessive cocaine abuse, and his anger issues. It is that later one that I found most interesting. I’d not read or heard about how angry Scorsese could be at times. Various friends and coworkers talk about it, and Scorsese is quite candid about it, and about how he’s worked to calm himself down over the years. It seems to have worked because the Scorsese we see these days is like an elderly grandpa telling us about the good old days of cinema, while still making something new and vital.
“Good People (Thank Me)” by Hayes Carll
Hayes Carrl is an artist I’ve heard about for years, someone people keep recommending to me, but for whatever reason, I’ve never gotten around to paying him much attention. I recently grabbed his most recent album, We’re Only Human, and immediately wondered why I waited so long.
This is great music. It is a great album. Carll is a great songwriter and performer. This album lives in the folky Americana tradition. His lyrics are heartfelt and meaningful with a sly humor. There are better songs than this one on the album, but this one makes me deliriously happy. It has these great, feel-good, sing-along lyrics, and the music just lifts me up.
Wake Up Dead Man
When Knives Out was released on Thanksgiving 2019, it felt like a breath of fresh air, like a brief respite from the horror going all around us. This was right in the middle of the first Trump presidency, and just before Covid shut everything down (but we knew it was coming). Knives Out was the perfect movie for that moment. It was a throwback to old Agatha Christie-style whodunnits with an amazing cast and a wonderfully twisty plot. And it had just enough of a political edge to make it seem modern.
Buy Knives OutIts sequel, Glass Onion, wasn’t nearly as good. It felt a little too modern with its tech billionaire plot and its use of technology. I still quite enjoyed it, but it was hard not to feel a little let down by it. And now we have the third film. It feels like a mixture of the modern and something old. Its plot involves a locked-room mystery where a volatile priest (Josh Brolin) is murdered right in the midst of his sermon.
Private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) will once again be called in to solve the crime, and he’ll engage a young priest (Josh O’Connor) as his assistant. Once again, the film boasts an incredible cast (including Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Jeremy Wright, and Thomas Hayden Church), all of whom seem to be having the time of their lives. The mystery is good and twisty, and the script does a nice job of exploring faith and a person’s need to find something meaningful to do with their lives.
It still isn’t as good as Knives Out, but I hope they keep making these things until the day I die.
The Running Man (2025)
When I first heard that Edgar Wright had directed an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man, I was all kinds of excited. I’m a huge fan of both the director and writer, so I figured putting the two of them together should work nicely. But then the reviews came in, and they were mixed to say the least. I let that keep me from seeing it in the theaters, but I finally gave it a watch this weekend at home.
Buy The Running Man (2025)It isn’t bad; in fact, quite a lot of it is really good. But it does seem to be missing that certain something that makes a movie truly great. I haven’t read the book (I started it when they first dropped the trailer for the film, but I got distracted with other books and haven’t picked it back up), but my understanding is this version follows it much closer than the ridiculous Arnold Schwarzenegger adaptation from the 1980s did.
It stars Glenn Powell as a down-on-his-luck everyman who desperately needs some money to help his sick child. It is set in a dystopian world where the rich have everything and the poor can barely survive. To distract the poor from realizing the horrors of their lives, the rich distract them with wild game shows that offer a few of them the chance to gain a little quick cash (or literally die trying). The biggest game is called The Running Man, and it sends its contestants out into the world for 30 days. If they can survive, then they get huge amounts of cash. Trying to stop them are numerous hunters and basically everybody else, for if a regular citizen locates the runner and tells the officials, they get a cash prize as well.
Powell is good as an average guy who’s fed up with everything and who will stop at nothing to get enough money to get his family out of poverty. Wright continues to be a great director of action, but he’s lost his zip. His earlier films had a kinetic energy that was unrivaled. That’s missing from this film. What we get is good fun, but it pales in comparison with his best work.
“Fairy Tale of New York” by the Pogues
Christmas is but a day away, so I thought I’d share my very favorite Christmas song. These days it seems that as soon as the summer ends, we start hearing Christmas music. So much of it is saccharine sweet. There are dozens of classics that get played over and over and are covered and recovered until it makes you sick just thinking about hearing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” again. Christmas is a time of celebration – a savior was born after all – and of love and family.
But for many it is a time of loss and loneliness. There are loved ones who are no longer with us and better times behind us. Times are tough, budgets are tight. The holidays can make you feel so alone.
Buy The Pogues – If I Should Fall from Grace with GodThis song is for those people. It is a song that begins in a drunk tank where an old man wonders if he’ll ever see another Christmas. It is a love song. A duet where the two singers toss insults at each other. Where the woman (sung by Kristy MacColl) tells the man (sung by Shane MacGowan) that he took her dreams from her, and he replies that he put them with his own, that he can’t make it on his own, as he’s built his dreams around her.
It is a song that always makes me cry, and smile, and feel some sense of hope for the year to come. Or, as the song says, “The boys of the NYPD choir, still singing ‘Galway Bay’ / And the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.”
Merry Christmas, everyone.
