Snake is a monthly newsletter covering vintage.
GQ LETTER
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-junya-watanabe
Same newsletter, but on Substack now and not Tinyletter, which keeps getting caught in spam. All the old letters are here now: snakeusa.substack.com. All the shop links are here: snakeusa.bigcartel.com. There are going to be more emails going out too, hope everyone is down with that.
in case you missed it, I put out a record last month:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/first-demonstration-ep/1481118947 | https://ontherunusa.bandcamp.com
Today’s letter is on GQ under my name:
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-junya-watanabe
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-junya-watanabe
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-junya-watanabe
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-junya-watanabe
Here are some movie reviews for email subscribers:
The Irish Man (USA 2019):
The Irishman is a movie about a Pennsylvanian truck driver who gets a promotion and commits crimes of increasing importance. Along the way he develops a rewarding friendship with Jimmy Hoffa. Does he keep it? You have to watch the movie to find out. I saw it at the New York Film Festival a few Saturdays ago. The day after the premiere, with tickets available for a few dollars more than a regular movie at a theater. Premiere tickets were about $120, showing at Alice Tully Hall, a nice theater on the Upper West Side into which you can bring snacks—something you cannot do at the Museum of the Moving Image.
The movie isn’t out until next month, so I am going to list spoilers here, and if you don’t want to read them, continue to the next paragraph. The first spoil is Action Bronson plays himself in the movie. Did not expect that. Al Pacino as James Riddle Hoffa wears white socks and black loafers throughout the film and has an … Indiana? … accent? Like many movie accents, it’s most pronounced in the character’s first scene. Pacino upgrades to Gucci loafers later in the film. He is introduced to the audience at the height of his fame and power and wears plain black shoes. Later he upgrades. Plain black shoes could be a power move, like how Lloyd Blankfein wears a Timex. More likely it is that all the characters in the film dress louder in the scenes that take place in the 1970s. When [redacted] is presented with a [redacted] at the [redacted] awards, the same night we find out [redacted] is sick of [redacted]’s [redacted], everyone is in formal-wear with wide lapels. More spoilers: Harvey Keitel is barely in the movie but he has a nice mustache in the scenes he is in. Crazy Joe Gallo, another character in the film, is alluded to live on President Street. I did some research and he lived at 51 President Street, between Columbia and Van Brunt, in a tenement that no longer exists. My friend Ben lives up the block—very cool. More research revealed that Arthur Miller came up with “A View From The Bridge,” the play, at Montero, the longshoremen’s bar near my apartment. The play takes place, I think, on President and Union, also near my apartment. Does he see the bridge? I won’t spoil it.
*** end spoilers***
So, anyways, there are no real shots of Carroll Gardens in the movie. It’s based on a book by Frank Sheeran’s lawyer. In it, Sheeran (who is Irish) goes to Monte’s, on Carroll and Third, the oldest Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, to pick up guns for the Kennedy assassination:
I went a few Thursdays ago and won’t go again and can’t recommend anyone else do. Gallo (scroll up if you dare) dines at Umberto’s Clam House, in Manhattan, with the big Pepsi sign outside. It looks good enough to make viewers want Pepsi. Miracles such as this are why Scorsese is considered a religious director. The Irishman is closest to Kundun I think, since both are stories about aging men who goes through a lot. Unlike the 14th Dalai Lama, Sheeran has a mortgage and kills people. It’s not established whether he’s nearsighted. It’s an ambient film. Colleagues of mine once said Scorsese was not a good director because he stretches his legs all the time at the expense of telling a story. As if that is the point. As if film is for explaining how a jewel thief bought his beach house or how Winston Churchill behaved at Oxford or how commuters are affected when a Queens teenager gets bitten by a lizard again. Come on. The marvel(1) of these Scorsese pictures is that they are sprawling frescos which stretch out, with joke after joke, where not much gets done, and characters aren’t at the office all the time, but no one goes broke. Scorsese also expresses, somehow, things people feel for a split second, how they react, when things go wrong or right, like something in a novel, but with union tradesmen involved. All of Scorsese’s movies are about religion and this one is about that and really getting old. I never thought about getting old, like really old, like not being able to walk, before, not once in my life, until I saw this movie.
What a great film. It is incredible that a process involving 1,000s of people holding microphones that hews to the most important law of filmmaking (people need to die) can express what someone feels. It is reassuring someone so widely admired is also so anarchic and changing in his style. People love to discuss Scorsese but he doesn’t get enough credit as a free spirit. What a great artist, and what a gift to see a film like this.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (USA 2019):
I think this is the least enjoyable and most difficult Tarantino movie in a while and also the one that puts him in the pantheon of serious directors. He is making a serious artistic statement here that is evident from the very beginning of the movie. The movie was hard to watch and for the first hour I kept thinking and wondering when it would start. It almost never did, it started at the end. Early scenes in the film have the two main characters together, which is very satisfying. That ends abruptly and they are apart for most of the rest of the movie. It is frustrating. The movie spends time with Sharon Tate and the expectation is that the hammer will fall. It is so frustrating. The tension builds, but slowly, and as a tease. Can't the two of them just hang out again?
It is jarring because so many Tarantino movies are about friendship and two (or more) funny people hanging out. Only a couple are about people being alone, like Jackie Brown. Even then, Ordell and Louis hang out, sometimes with Melanie, and Jackie and Max spend a lot of time together, too. I guess Bruce Willis' boxer character is a loner, but he is in love, which is what drives him, and after the incident at the pawn shop he also becomes friends, or bonded in trust, with the man he double-crossed. Kurt Russell's various characters in Tarantino's films are antisocial, but they are also good at bullshitting. Scorsese says a lot of his movies are about loneliness:
(from Mark Singer’s New Yorker profile.)
None of Tarantino's movies are about loneliness, or solitude, which is crazy now that I think about it. Until this one. A hefty chunk of this movie is Brad Pitt driving around doing errands and listening to the radio. None of the music on the radio is good and a lot of it is annoying ads. They are worse. Tarantino used ads to effect in other movies, like the one where Kurt Russell ate nachos in Austin, and it was frustrating there too, but they would cut out quickly. Here the ads don't, and you wonder when they will.
Pitt is alone and also thinks about things a lot. DiCaprio's character does too, but he is good at it, and at doing his own thing at home. Maybe it is because he drinks more. Maybe all this loneliness is a love letter to Los Angeles. I don’t know, I never lived there. If it is, it's not much of one. There is a payoff at the end, of course, and lots of jokes along the way.
I think the tease and the waiting and the difficulty is the point of the movie. Watching this movie, the first half at least, is like listening to the Nuggets compilation. It is supposed to be enjoyable but is not. No one can enjoy it on an immediate level. So much time is spent listening to cars rev up, and not only that, but drive and drive, and not on empty highways, but in traffic. The best thing about Two Lane Blacktop (USA 1971) is that there is no traffic. Imagine if there was. Like I said, it is tough.
The point here is the interminable scenes of waiting, the upended conversations, the solitude, happen off-set, in Los Angeles. The fun happens around the house and on the set, at the movies. Dalton makes friends with a child because they work together. That is the point of this movie, that the art matters. The important timeless things are rare and take so, so long to foment. Much of life is waiting, doing errands, saying nothing, hearing nothing, until the effortless good times come. Dalton expects the good time to flow like water out of a tap forever, and stay. Booth doesn't expect a single drop. I don't think either one is right. The point is that even for movie stars things are hard and there are stretches of time when life doesn't seem just pointless, but is. The boredom is a lot, even when the excitement is so surely coming.
The King (USA 2019):
In this period piece, Timothée Chalamet consolidates his power, but only after he gets a bowl cut.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
shirts are for sale here—most sizes are sold out:
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/mount-rushmore-shirt
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/snake-america-pocket-tee-shirt-in-grey
(1) gee whiz, pun intended, I wrote this before the whole comic book thing but stand by it. Not discussing Scorsese’s comic book movies statement, obviously he is correct.