Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (2022) is for people like me who don’t want to read the long Joyce Carol Oates novel on which the film is based. Well, yes, the film itself is long—long enough to get tedious—but it is also a remarkable dreadnought of visual poetry. Everything cinematographer Chayse Irvin touches here turns to gold. Blonde concentrates on Marilyn Monroe, except that primarily, as Emina Melonie correctly notes on the web, the movie is “about the notion of personae, both acting and sexual, and how this strange metaphysical make up has been embodied by Marilyn Monroe.”

Ana de Arnas ardently gives the role of MM everything it calls for. The shots of her nude breasts are usually magnificent. In one sapid scene, for example, her first husband (Bobby Cannavale) rails at Marilyn for posing for soft core porn as she sits on the floor of the couple’s bedroom naked (as though she has just finished the porn shots) and fearful, vulnerable. There is art in this scene.

True, elsewhere aestheticism exists. Even so, this very figurative work is largely a success. It presents an American woman, an American icon, with movie-star privilege, who is nevertheless, from start to finish in this film, an American sorrow.

(A Netflix production)

Directed and scripted by Rodrigo Garcia, the 2005 Nine Lives is a film drama of vignettes about nine women. That they have in common sins and agonies and a willingness to live on (with, they hope, quality in life) is the movie’s reason for being. By no means, further, does Garcia ignore the permutations of their personalities, as witness the vignette where Holly (LisaGay Hamilton), a young black woman, undergoes an emotional breakdown in front of her father and, in a later vignette, is shown placidly doing her work as a nurse.

Garcia is serious, and with a vision more likable than offensive, which is good. How right he was to have Glenn Close‘s not-so-young Maggie, visiting a graveyard with her small daughter (Dakota Fanning), briefly weep and say to the girl, “I’m so tired, honey.” It is unsentimental and implies much. . . Every actor, from Robin Wright to Ian McShane, provides stupendous merit. One is glad that Garcia is interested in women, for it has led him to make the fine Nine Lives and then the fine Mother and Child in 2009.

Peter Sellers is extraordinary with his triple roles in Dr. Strangelove (1964), and the movie—a Cold War black comedy—is still quite funny. Unlike five or six other Stanley Kubrick pictures, however, it is a failure. The jokes about male sexuality and military forcefulness are stupid when they aren’t vulgar, and the character of Dr. Strangelove, the German scientist, is silly. Satire should be more palatable than this.

In some ways DS is as brilliant as Kubrick’s 2001: consider the ironically lovely credit-sequence music at the beginning of the film. Still able to be seen as daring, the work is nevertheless presented from the same left-wing perspective that ultimately led the American people to deeply distrust the Democratic party regarding the Soviet Union. Liberals discovered that they can’t have everything.

A short story by Sigrid Nunez, “The Plan” (2018) has as its narrator a horrid criminal—a serial murderer of women. The author harbors no sympathy for him—he wants more culture (i.e. the arts) in his life but also, on the last page, he strangles a whore because murder “was one of the things whores were for.” (He never learns anything.) Yet Nunez underscores the strange truth that a human being, like me and thee, is responsible for this wanton slaughter. Why? Is it not true that nothing human is alien to us?

“The Plan” is a propulsive fiction written with many short paragraphs. It is cruelly honest, as it should be, but does not descend to nihilism, cheap or otherwise. Maybe, just maybe, it gets close, though.

No doubt it is one of “the best American short stories” of the year it was published, found in the 2019 book of the same name.