People seemed to like it the last time I did one of these and I liked writing it. So here’s a few movies I saw this month that I really enjoyed.
Videodrome- More gross body stuff from the master of gross body stuff. At times this almost felt like a second crack at Scanners, as both center on a sort of holy war for control of a new psychic phenomenon that twists the mind as much as the flesh. As much as I love that film there’s plenty to be improved upon, especially the wooden, Sierra-adventure-game-protagonist-reading-through-a-dialogue-tree performances. And improve they did, James Woods is fantastically sleazy in the lead role. It’s a shame he would go on to be James Woods later in life.
Dog Day Afternoon- No one told me how funny this hostage drama is. I was fortunate enough to see a 35mm showing with a mostly packed house and the whole place was cracking up nonstop. You don’t need me to tell you that Al Pacino can act, but the degree to which he is this movie can’t be overstated. There isn’t a moment where he isn’t going for it completely and yet his performance never comes across as hammy or overacted; it feels like he’s just playing a dude who really is like that. Which isn’t to say the whole cast doesn’t bring their A game, but even the brightest candle will escape your notice when it’s standing next to a housefire.
American Pop- Rotoscope animation following four generations of an immigrant family in the US, spanning from the turn of the twentieth century to the early seventies, set to some of the most iconic music of the time. Ambitious is rarely a good word to see in a film review but if American Pop doesn’t fit the description than nothing does. I’ll admit that the back third lost me a bit, once the story moves to the sixties it stays there a little too long for my tastes. But I found myself really taken in by the first hour, put through an emotional ringer by the breakneck speed with which we move through the lives of the cast. Fortunes gained, love found, lives lost, friendships made then forgotten all in the span of a song. There’s nothing like it.
Music (The 2023 Greek film, not the ableist 2021 Sia movie)- What would Oedipus be if, instead of a man cursed by the gods and by prophecy, he was just some guy with truly shitty luck? By removing the mythology and updating the setting to the modern day, we get our answer: a gripping human tragedy where we can only watch in suspense as two seeming strangers become friends, lovers and, finally, new parents, obliviously playing out a tale only we know. But even in the tragedy there is genuine warmth, innocence, and love, highlighted by some beautiful shots of the mountains and beaches of Greece. This one’s doing the arthouse circuit in the US, highly recommend checking it out if it’s playing near you. Just do your homework first; you are expected to know the text going in. There is not one word of dialogue for the first thirty minutes so if you don’t know your classics you’re going to get lost.
Twilight (The 1990 Hungarian film, not the 2008 vampire romance)- More Hungarian slow cinema, this time from a collaborator of Béla Tarr rather than the man himself. A crime drama about the hunt for a child murderer turns into a horror story through the hopeless atmosphere alone. The visual quality of the widely available version is admittedly pretty poor, but at risk of sounding like that one guy who insists that the original release of Twin Fantasy is better than the re-recording it really worked for me. Something about the way that anyone who isn’t in extreme closeup is constantly in danger of being swallowed up by a miasma of film grain and fog just works with a movie this bleak.
Lost in Translation- If you’re like me, universal praise is just as likely to make you suspicious of a film as it is to draw you to it. I was cautious when I finally sat down to watch this in 35mm as part of a Sofia Coppola retrospective. And yeah, the critics were right; it’s a masterpiece. I’d call it a perfect movie if it weren’t for a terrible scene with a sex worker that went over like a fart in an elevator at my showing. Dated gags aside, Coppola is unnaturally good at getting you to empathize with the leads. You will root for two people with a thirty plus year age gap between them to cheat on their spouses after knowing each other for less than a week. It’s tender, sweet but never cloying, and the script is perfect, full of dry wit delviered just awkwardly and improvisationaly enough to be believable. The ending is on the same level as the head-in-a-box from Se7en when it comes to pop culture spoiler osmosis but it’s still a beautiful, perfectly bittersweet goodbye for story that you, me, and our star-crossed insomniac protagonists all knew could never support a truly happy ending.
Hotel- Okay, this one’s cheating because I watched it months ago, but I’m adding it here because I just found out that it’s now available on streaming. Previously if you wanted to watch this in the states your only hope was that the 360p version with hardcoded subs had been reuploaded to YouTube, at which point you had about a week to watch it before copyright holders buried it again. So you’ll have to forgive me for championing this relative unknown now that it’s widely accessible. If The Shining was about being physically isolated in a remote location with only the people closest to you, Hotel is about the social isolation that comes with being surrounded by people who either ignor you or treat you with complete disdain. So little is ever revealed about what’s actually that it verges on not having an ending, but that just makes sense for this story. Sometimes you never find out why that one coworker just fucking hates you. Sometimes you never find out why the girl you replaced at the front desk disappeared. It do be like that sometimes.
And those were the top movies I watched this month! There were plenty of others that I liked but these were the ones I both enjoyed the most and felt I had the most to say about. If you're looking for more off-the-cuff, up-to-date remarks and reviews on movies I've seen I'd recommend checking out my Letterboxd. Thanks, see you next month!
