Arts & Culture

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’: Waning Hope, Aging Masters and the Moment

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This article spoils Killers of the Flower Moon, though it should be noted that the nature of the film renders the spoilers somewhat benign. 

TW: Genocide

I’ve spent the weekend caught between two entirely contradictory thoughts, each reflected in a piece of media from the week before. The first is the conclusion to Arielle Angel’s article on the Hamas attacks and Israel’s genocidal response, articulating in a moment of truly devastating hopelessness a vision of possibility to hold close. There has never been a period in U.S. history of greater solidarity with Palestine, nor of greater Jewish participation in that solidarity. The other is the concluding moments of Martin Scorsese’s new masterpiece Killers of the Flower Moon: Both bitterly satirical and somehow earnest, a vision not just of evil’s inevitability, but of the function of art as a commodity to fetishize it, and all spoken by a man who’s dedicated his life to the rejection of evil and embrace of art. Scorsese’s exclamation point of bleakness comes at the end of perhaps his deepest felt tragedy to date, an indictment absent of nearly any reprieve. 

Killers of the Flower Moon adapts David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name and follows a string of murders perpetrated against members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation by white capitalists and their manipulated lieutenants.

Arts & Culture

‘Ride Lonesome’ at the Cornell Cinema

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Content Warning: This review contains discussion of violence and anti-Indigenous racism. 

Last weekend, the Cornell Cinema presented the 1958 low-budget Western Ride Lonesome on a tattered, well-loved 35 mm print, both a fitting visual experience for a genre which has largely fallen out of fashion with contemporary audiences and an ironic one, given the genre’s depiction of a lifestyle that, even in the genre’s hay day, remained a wistful reflection of a time since passed. Ride Lonesome, appearing as part of the Cinema’s Cinemascope series, is the most famous of the so-called Ranown cycle, a series of B-Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott at the tail end of a period of non-revisionist Westerns before Italian Spaghetti Westerns reimagined the genre in the 1960s. Underrated in their day, the films were quickly reappraised by French Critics and have since received wider acclaim stateside, being hailed by Martin Scorsese and awaiting canonization in the Criterion Collection this July. 

Ride Lonesome opens with a quintessential Western image: a lone figure on a horse riding through the dusty hills of an unknown, and perhaps unnamed, territory. Ben Brigade, played reservedly by Randolph Scott, is a mysterious bounty hunter, pursuing and capturing the murderer Billy John, who is to be hanged once the two get to town. As they go on, they are joined by a woman and two men who are themselves hunting after Billy John, all while fleeing from the looming threats of Native Americans and Billy John’s brother Frank, who is chasing the crew with his own gang of bandits. 

The West of Ride Lonesome is sparse, populated not by towns with saloons, railroads or ranches, but by isolated ruins, minimal structures and miles and miles of blank landscape.

4/20

Pollack: A Martha Story is Going to Change Cinema Forever

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Last week at the Cans film festival, thousands of lucky fans, critics and members of the film community were treated to a sold out premiere screening of the much anticipated new movie, Pollack: A Martha Story. Reuniting Martin Scorsese as director and Paul Schraeder as writer, Pollack stars character actress Margot Martindale as Cornell’s very own beloved president, following her through the early years of her life. It opens from humble beginnings, with Martha only a student at Dartmouth — one of the worst schools in the Ivy League — and follows her as she works her way up to become a graduate student at a marginally better Ivy League school. It charts serious setbacks (serving as an administrator at a public university) and brilliant accomplishments, such as working in the field of AI a mere decade before it actually got exciting. Scorsese films each titillating scene with his trademark flourishes, and presents the hallowed halls of academia in the same manner that he’s previously captured the Mafia, Wall Street Criminals and Gilded Age politicians. 

Of course, every biopic is only as good as its central romance, and Pollack is no exception, featuring a brilliant turn from Tilda Swinton as Vice President Ryan Lombardi.