Movies in 2026 171

 

Bergman Island (Mia Hansen'Love, 2021)

Last night I re-watched Mia Hansen-Love's 2021 film Bergman Island, which is a film I like although not as much as I want to. It's centered around a couple, Chris (played by the wonderful Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) Sanders, who visit Faro Island, the home base of the legendary Ingmar Bergman. They're a couple at a crisis point in their relationship, typical Bergman fare). Tony is there to screen a copy of his latest movie at a film fest, and Chris is working on a screenplay for a film she hopes to direct.  At a certain point it segues into her screenplay and then her film, starring Mia Wasikowska (as Amy) and Anders Danielsen Lie (as Joseph). And then it goes truly meta, with the actors inside her film. More than anything else, it's a love letter to Ingmar Bergman (including his son in a walkthrough at the end) and it's hard to critique that. The component parts are interesting, and the acting is first rate, but I don't think any of the sections are given the room to breathe, and hence the viewer is left a tad emotionally disconnected. Like I said, I like it, I just don't know if it came together as cleanly or impactfully as it might have. I definitely will watch it again down the road, and you should check it out.

Movies in 2026 170

 

Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

I've (obviously) seen a ton of film noir, including its Japanese and French and Scandinavian and Argentinian (it goes on and on) cousins, and I don't know if there is a better example of the genre than Jacques Tourneur's 1947 absolute classic Out of the Past. How many times have I seen this film - I'd hate to guess, but it's one that I never miss. It's been featured this past month on the Criterion Channel and so I had to re-watch it, even though I also own the DVD. Robert Mitchum is amazing as Jeff Bailey/Markham, a former detective, now gas station owner, who can't outrun his past. Once, in the antediluvian past, I was involved with a woman who proposed that I possessed Mitchum's "sleepy intensity," which I think I only partially understand, but which I like. Jane Greer is wonderfully wicked as Kathie Moffat, who gives Barbara Stanwyck a run for greatest film noir femme fatale of all-time. It also  features a very young Kirk Douglas, who is great as the venomous Whit Sterling. The very definition of Required Viewing.

There are so many great lines, almost more than you can count:

Jeff: "That's not the way to win." Kathie: "Is there a way to win?" Jeff: "There's a way to lose more slowly." It's spoken very early in the film, related to a scene when Kathie is gambling, but it essentially is the line that defines the entire movie.

Ann (Jeff's nice girlfriend): "She (Kathie) can't be all bad. No one is." Jeff: "Well, she comes the closest."

Kathie: "Don't you believe me?" Jeff: "Baby, I don't care."

Kathie: "I don't want to die." Jeff: "Neither do I, baby, but if I have to, I'm going to die last."

Kathie: "Don't you see? You've only me to make deals with now." Jeff: "Well, build my gallows high, baby."

Barnacles

 Janet is out of town again, which means that I am festooned by very needy cats (especially Cici, who is the more Janetcentric of the two). Still, there are worse ways to spend the morning when you're working on your Italian. 

Half of this scene never changes, in that Mollie (the Horizontal Cat), on the right, would always be here, but Cici (the Vertical Cat) would be in the other room attached to Janet.

Movies in 2026 169

 

It Came from Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, 1955)

It's rare that you can say that you went down a Kenneth Tobey rabbit hole, but I guess it can happen. The other night when we were watching The Thing from Another World I told Janet that Kenneth Tobey eventually did a series of monster movies (none as good as Nyby's classic). This led us, on a night when she was tired and didn't have the energy for longer film, to Robert Gordon's 1955 It Came from Beneath the Sea, which she had also never seen (apparently not everyone spent every Saturday night watching monster movies - such a wasted life, her, obviously, not me - she probably had a date or was reading classic literature or something). A giant octopus, generated by H bomb fallout (which happened a lot in the 1950s) causes mayhem, including destroying the Golden Gate Bridge. Today the film is mainly remembered as the beginning of the Ray Harryhausen era of stop motion model animation (Dynamation) era. I think it is required viewing, but only if you grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Indiana in the age before cable TV or the Internet.

Movies in 2026 168

 

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

After watching John Carpenter's The Thing the other night, I guess it was inevitable that we'd end up watchin his 1978 classic Halloween a couple nights later. Somehow Janet (who I always accuse of growing up in a nunnery) had never seen Halloween. It is definitely on the short list for greatest independent films of all time (Carpenter made it for $300,000 and in its initial run it made $70,000,000).  It also inspired an entire genre of movies, most of which, sadly, were terrible (including his own Halloween II). I've always thought that it was much more like a Hitchcock film than a Romero gore fest, with most of the shocks being based on timing and suspense. Movie fans will love the kids watching the beginning of The Thing From Another World on TV, a film that Carpenter would himself remake four years later (and certainly could not have dreamt of the budget for that film when he was making Halloween. Required viewing.

This Dreadful Hour

 This dreadful hour when I shrink to being possible or rise to mortality. If only the morning wouldn't dawn. If only I and this alcove and its interior atmosphere where I belong could all be spiritualized into Night, absolutized into Darkness, so that not so much as a shadow of me would remain that could taint, with my memory, whatever lived on. 

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 185

This passage from Pessoa seems to fit the mood I'm in, and the terrible liminality that haunts me.

Other Spaces

 As I mentioned earlier, yesterday was an emotional day, mainly in a wonderful way, but also more than a bit elegiac. Yesterday I emptied out my office. Everyone knows I'm retiring - and I'm filling out a lot of related paperwork - and there have already been two retirement parties - but seeing the desk sitting there cold and depersonalized carried a dreadful finality. Every time I've sold a house over the years and I walked out of it for the last time, I've always thought back to an early Japanese poem, which says (I may be paraphrasing): "Someday someone else will celebrate the Festival of Dolls in your house." That is, your house is your home because of the people, your loved ones, who are in it. I reflected upon that yesterday when I looked at my desk, a desk that could be used by literally anybody next year - sitting in an office that could be used by literally anybody next year. Any remnant of who I am and how hard I worked and what I accomplished will dissipate in a few months, if it lingers that long. I told Janet that one of the strangest things about retirement so for is that for the first time in over forty years I don't have another space. When I was in graduate school at UC, I shared the history graduate TA office and even managed to carve off an unused office for my own purposes when I ended up teaching a year-long large western civilization class. I did the same thing when I was teaching adjunct classes at Franklin College while I was finishing my dissertation. During my nine years at Georgia Perimeter College I had two offices.  Throughout twenty-nine years at Champlain I've had six offices (one in Joyce, one in the library, three in Aiken, and finally one in Wick). I even had offices when I taught in India and the UAE. When I was offered the job at Hong Kong University they went out of the way to show me my office and where my staff would be. The point being that I always had a separate secondary space, and now I don't. For some reason I find that very unsettling. I'm very happy at home, certainly much happier than I've been for the vast majority of those forty years, but you get used to the existence of those other spaces and the freedom and tangibility that they represented.

I'll still pop in throughout the end of June. It's a nice space to sit and write when I'm up in Burlington, and, of course, to spend time with any of my friends who are around. However, soon all too soon, the buildings won't recognize the card swipe (stupid metaphor, working overtime)