In 2026 we're doing it again.
The Quiet Man: The Films of Mario O'Hara was twenty-one years in the making, a collection of pieces new and old on the filmmaker plus a fistful of photographs, some of them never seen before, with a focus on arguably his greatest muse Nora Aunor, and we're launching the book on Sat April 25 (five days after O'Hara's 80th birthday) at 3 PM in Archivo 1984, 5F Building A, Karrivin Plaza, 2316 Chino Roces Avenue, Makati City, Philippines.
Be there if you dare.
Just deserts
Oliver Laxe's Sirat is a little hard to describe: Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona) look for his daughter Mar in a rave in southern Morocco. The pair wander aimlessly while the dancers surround them in an assortment of clothing haircuts hair dyes tattoos piercings, all swaying to the pulsing rhythm. They talk to people, hand out photos; no one has seen her, but there's another rave, closer to Mauritania, where they might find her.
(Warning: story and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail!)
Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme takes its cue from its central character: brassy, loud, unrelentingly annoying, chronicling the life of one Marty Mauser, a nascent shoe salesman and up-and-coming pingpong player. Marty to put it mildly likes to burn both ends of his candle: he hustles players at the local bar; hustles his rich friend Dion (Luke Manley) to finance production of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them; hustles his married friend Rachel (Odessa A'zion) for sex at the shoe store's back room; hustles his Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) for $700 to help finance a trip to the British Open in London (to be fair Uncle Murray's hustling Marty too, trying to manipulate the young man into staying on as salesman while having an affair with Marty's mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher)).
Timothee Chalamet trades in his Kwisatch Haderach stillsuit for a long-sleeved blouse unbuttoned to reveal the sweatsoaked undershirt, glues a dead caterpillar to his upper lip the way I assume Guy Gardner likes to sport a bowl cut-- as a loud 'FUCK YOU' to anyone who objects to his grating personality. It's perfect; like him or not as an actor, have to admit this role fits Chalamet's less-than-charming persona to a t, down to the nipples standing defiantly erect 'neath the thin cotton.
Finally saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc on projected video (thanks to Alliance Francais), with music but without subtitles (no thanks Alliance, though to be fair they tried their level best to get one), so I watched without having understood a word. Nevertheless: an incredible film, one of the greatest-- silent French or otherwise-- ever.
Carl Dreyer’s 1928 French silent La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the greatest films-- French, silent, otherwise-- ever; Luc Besson’s 1999 The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is possibly one of the silliest-- French, epic, otherwise-- and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Such is progress.
Dreyer’s film is an astonishingly spare work, essentially a hundred and ten minutes of gigantic close-ups strung together and little else. No fat nothing extraneous-- each shot adds to the film’s sense of inevitability, each cut (1,500 of them) accelerates momentum. Besson’s at two hours and twenty minutes has little meat-- as if Besson had tossed in everything learned in grade school about Joan but stopped short before freshman year. Dreyer’s has the courage of a consummate artist with an idea of what he wants to present to the world; Besson’s has the courage of a consummate hack, piling special effect upon special effect in the hope that heat and pressure would build inside his digitally enhanced big-budgeted compost heap and ignite to yield a vision.
