This Week, You Will Slow Down For:

• O’Neal
• Cage
• a ghoulish trope
• a 90s revisit
• SEX!

A tap on the brakes for Simon Del Monte and wallflower for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

Vulture‘s Bilge Ebiri writes in remembrance of star Ryan O’Neal and his surprising contributions to drama:

Indeed, some of the greatest films ever made have been about passive characters, and a fair number of them were made in the 1970s in the United States, and a surprising number of those starred Ryan O’Neal. A generation was tumbling out of the ’60s and swirling through the chaos of the ’70s. So, the heroes of these films—even if the films were set in 18th-century Britain—didn’t transform their world, but were rather at its cruel mercy.

As a follow-up to his book Age of Cage, Keith Phipps makes captions for each of the seven(!) movies Cage appeared in this year:

Sympathy for the Devil (2023) *** : Cage is all-in as a psycho with flaming red hair in what’s essentially a two-hander co-starring Joel Kinnaman. Kinnaman plays David Chamberlain, an ordinary (?) guy who’s carjacked by The Passenger (Cage) in the parking garage of a Las Vegas hotel where David has hurried to be by the side of his wife as she gives birth. Uh uh. The Passenger has plans for David that involve a late-night desert drive toward a murky destination. The Luke Paradise-scripted, Yuval Adler-directed thriller ambles in spite of a tight running time, but Kinnaman’s effective as a man in fear of losing everything and Cage goes big without losing his character’s menace. For fans of Cage at his most outré, it’s a must.

At Longreads, Cat Modlin-Jackson calls for the unceremonious offscreen demise of the Dead-Mom Holiday Movie trope:

The subtext is that the holiday season is a great backdrop for closure—there’s something in the air and some fluke meeting or supernatural encounter will heal thy spirit. Like in The Knight Before Christmas, when a romance springs up and the love of Vanessa Hudgens’ chainmail bae motivates her to finally bust out her dead mom’s treasured decorations. After years of finding them too painful to look at, all it takes is a few hours with a knockoff King Arthur, and the grief spell is broken. Or again in The Holiday, when a widower can at last open his heart to someone who’s basically a stranger, and the whole family then lives happily ever after (because of course the kids will be equally psyched about New Mommy). Filmmakers use a character’s grief to evoke viewers’ sympathy and cravings for a quick fix. The Christmas widower trope exploits these very human tendencies, triggering sadness for the sake of sadness and making the cheap promise of a neat resolution tied up in a pretty bow. 

At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Brandon Tensley explains the reclamation of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit:

The [contemporary] critical consensus apparently misunderstood the allure of a movie that has become a cult classic among Black audiences, comparing it unfavorably to 1967’s To Sir, With Love and 1980’s Fame. The first Sister Act zeroes in on the bonds between Deloris and her white convent crew, mostly giving short shrift to the fact that the sisters live in a poor Black neighborhood. Reviewers seemed to prefer Deloris magically saving a white convent and cared less about her serving her own community. The sequel, meanwhile, directs its powers at exploring this wider environment. In doing so, it positions itself in the canon of 1990s hood dramas that sought to change how the country sees Black Americans.

For Vox, Esther Zuckerman describes a great year for movie sex scenes, and their value in their movies despite criticism to the contrary:

Sex this year has been absurd and nightmarish, getting at the particularly carnal fears, threats, and humiliations that make up human life: Like the moment between Joaquin Phoenix and Parker Posey in Beau Is Afraid or any number of scenes in Emerald Fennell’s often ridiculous Saltburn, including the period oral sex that indicates the bloodlust of Barry Keoghan’s striver protagonist. It has also been used to try to illuminate the personal lives of various historical figures. In Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Phoenix’s inept thrusting represents his insecurity. Or there’s Oppenheimer. […] Of course, there is a point to the sex scenes in Oppenheimer. Director Christopher Nolan uses them to show his protagonist’s hubris, hubris that will lead to the creation of a weapon that haunts society. J. Robert Oppenheimer is in the middle of his tryst with psychiatrist Jean Tatlock when he recites the words from the Bhagavad Gita that will become his grim catchphrase: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” Tatlock will eventually become canon fodder in his ascendancy toward greatness.