Stranger Things, Season 2, episodes 5, 6, 7 (2016)
Continuing the very slow “binge” watch with my niece Lucy, and having so much fun. She gets such a kick out of showing it to me. She knows every moment and every detail. We discuss things. It’s so funny because it takes place in the era of my childhood, and is full of references to movies of the time period. So I’ll be like, “Hey, that’s from ET!”, like a true old-timer. It feels like this series has been going on for a decade and I guess it kind of has.
Small Things Like These (2024; d. Tim Mielants)
The entire horrible story of the Magdalene Laundries is there on one man’s face. One of the best performances of the year. I reviewed for Ebert.
The Substance (2024; d. Coralie Fargeat)
The scene where Demi Moore prepares for her date, and has an increasingly fraught relationship with her reflection in the mirror, is the best scene in the film. The rest I found intriguing, in some respects, but not particularly insightful. I was mostly enjoying it as this twisted pas de deux between two naked actresses flopping all over each other in a white-tiled bathroom, shoving needles into each others’ arms. I couldn’t help but think – what an interesting acting challenge. It’s such a bizarre sight, unprecedented really, but the two of them – and the filmmaker – and the crew – clearly created a space of trust and exploration where nudity is non-sexual and where the reality of the “given circumstances”, in good old acting talk, is given full rein. You totally accept it. And this was probably not an easy feat.
All We Imagine as Light (2024; d. Payal Kapadia)
One of the best films of the year. Clearly I am crafting my Top 10. I was totally captivated by this story of three women doing their best to get by, and also live lives of meaning and integrity, in the “impermanent” bustle of Mumbai. Kapadia really knows what she’s doing. And she’s young, so this is very exciting: so much to look forward to.
Gilda (1946; d. Charles Vidor)
I had so much fun introducing Gilda at the Jacob Burns Film Center in November. It was a packed audience and half of them hadn’t seen it – which is always the best case scenario, in my opinion. It’s a thrill to watch a classic surrounded by people discovering it for the first time. Good to see friends too – Monica, Ian – Allison came with me, and my sister Siobhan met us there. I actually don’t think I’d ever seen Gilda in a theatre. Hayworth is overwhelming. (My first booklet essay for Criterion was on Gilda.)
The Brutalist (2024; d. Brady Corbet)
A movie about brutalist architecture and the Holocaust survivor immigrant experience? Shot on VistaVision – !!! – and printed on 70mm? And it’s almost four hours long with an intermission? And it’s …. amazing? From the jump, Brady Corbet announced himself as a singular artist, not particularly interested in pleasing the so-called masses. He started off with Childhood of a Leader, which I considered one of the best films of 2015. It is the opposite of an ingratiating work. But it sticks, and also turned out to be one of the most “relevant” films of the year, if you consider its release date and what was coming. Childhood of a Leader actually had something to say, and said it without pamphleteering. It was haunting, and – fascinatingly – Scott Walker did the score. Corbet’s use of music is old-fashioned, in the best sense. His movies have real scores. And … Scott freakin’ Walker, come on. Walker also did the score for Vox Lux, Corbet’s riff on pop stardom in the mirage-like late 90s/early aughts, which I loved, and reviewed for Ebert. I appreciate works of art that don’t give a damn about me, they’re too busy doing what they need to do to worry if I am keeping up, or even if I like it. They don’t care about being “relatable”. They are just trying to say something. Sometimes this type of art is unnecessarily obscure, or obscure just to be obscure – but Corbet’s films aren’t like that. He has big ideas. Vox Lux is, perhaps, the best way to be introduced, because if you hear the plot of the film, you’ll think it’s maybe a slightly grittier A Star is Born, or another Beyond the Lights, a girl’s rise to fame. But it’s so much weirder than that. I don’t know much about him – nor do I want to know, actually. It’s fun getting to know him solely through his work. What I can guess is that he goes so deep into these obsessions – like dictatorships/power/psychology, pop stardom/fame/pre-internet virality/the emptiness of living in a dying empire, or … brutalist architecture/class/immigrants – that they overtake him, balloon out into all kinds of imaginative spaces. This is a free-ranging eclectic and intellectual mind at work, and I am always here for that. I saw The Brutalist at a press screening – having done my best to avoid the buzz. There Will Be Blood is an obvious reference point: it is a similarly uningratiating movie about a long-past time period which helped shape the world we live in today. Both feature a monomaniacal central figure, battling his demons – outer and inner – on the field of his workplace, either oil wells or architecture. Guy Pearce is incredible in The Brutalist. It’s not just a performance. It’s a psychological case study: he understands the TYPE, because we all are “types”, whether we like it or not. I follow a couple of Instagram feeds devoted to brutalist architecture, because I’ve always been fascinated by it. I thought a couple of the plot points in The Brutalist were a little bring-down-the-hammer, obvious and maybe even imposed, stretching the point Corbet was trying to make into the implausible. But these are nitpicks considering the accomplishment. The film is a sprawling audacious prickly accomplishment, and I value that over easy safe perfection. It’s like PTA’s Magnolia. I don’t listen to people who criticize things for being too long, or uneven, or “messy”. All of those things may be true, but that’s just describing – in a way – your own limitations, as a viewer and as a writer. What is the film doing, and how is it doing it? It may not work for you but the “messy” and “uneven” parts of things are often features/not bugs. So how are you engaging with the film? I can’t stick with the writing if the thinking is shallow. Honestly, I can’t even believe The Brutalist exists, and I am happy it does. I can’t wait to see it again.
Blue Road — The Edna O’Brien Story (2024; d. Sinéad O’Shea)
Fascinating documentary about the recently-passed Irish legend Edna O’Brien. I interviewed the director for my Liberties column.
The Morning After (1986; d. Sidney Lumet)
It’s such an un-Lumet movie, particularly the bleak emptied-out Los Angeles-wasteland environment. Lumet films it like the outsider he is, fascinated by the desolation, the alienating sun, the no-mans-land of the Valley. The visuals are striking, artificial even – unlike his normal house style. None of these are criticisms. I think it shows Lumet’s sensitivity to material. The Morning After is a chilly modern noir, a California story, Hollywood-adjacent. The style suits it. I hadn’t seen it in years so it was fun to re-visit. It made me miss Raul Julia all over again.
Red Riding: 1974 (2010; d. Julian Jarrold)
The books by David Peace are extraordinary. They totally were not what I thought they would be. They are very loosely based on the Yorkshire Ripper case, but the quartet is really a vast sprawling experiment with language. Joycean. And I rarely make that comparison. Toni Morrison, to me, was the only real heir of James Joyce, the one who took up where he left off, and pushed forward in similar ways but into new territories. Only someone who really really understands language can even begin to experiment with it. And Morrison loved Joyce. She read Finnegans Wake on her own, and laughed out loud throughout. That’s someone who got what he was doing. David Peace experiments similarly. I was dazzled by Peace’s books. I’d seen this trilogy before. The first entry – with a very young Andrew Garfield, losing his innocence minute by minute – is the best.
Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980
The trilogy loses steam almost immediately.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024; d. Tyler Thomas Taormina)
Stunned by it. Flattened. Made me feel all kinds of things I normally avoid. I couldn’t shake it. It’s not depressing. But there is an ache to it. Wrote about the experience of this film, a surprise for me. Quickly raced to the top of my list for the year. Was not expecting to be rocked by it when I pressed play.
Hundreds of Beavers (2024; d. Mike Cheslik)
I think I’ve covered my adoration for this one.
Stay the Night (2022; d. Renuka Jeyapalan)
A fellow critic over on Blue Sky was introducing herself by putting up links toher writing, one of which was a review of Stay the Night, which jolted my memory of how much I had loved the same film. I was assigned to review, and it was one of the more happy discoveries of recent memory. Our exchange about the film inspired me to watch it again and, yes, it still works. I adore it! Unlike The Brutalist, this one gets in and gets out. It’s barely an hour and a half long. It’s perfect just the way it is. (This is not to say The Brutalist is “too long”. I think I’ve covered my thoughts on that.)
Oh Canada (2024; d. Paul Schrader)
It’s so cool I lived long enough to see a reunion between Paul Schrader and Richard Gere. (Here’s the huge piece I wrote about Richard Gere in American Gigolo, and Richard Gere in general.) Based on Russell Banks’ 2021 novel Foregone, it’s an elegiac and incomplete – hauntingly so – look at one man’s grappling with his past, the lies and deceits, but also his self-justifications for why he did what he did, and do those justifications work anymore? (Describing this loops it in with American Gigolo in intriguing ways.) Gere is terrific and I’m so happy for him. I’m weirdly invested in his career and have been ever since I saw An Officer and a Gentleman in high school. He’s so good. And it’s great to see him playing this deeply morally ambiguous man. It’s a good spot for him.
Conclave (2024; d. Edward Berger)
I haven’t read the novel on which this excellent film is based, but it’s kind of amazing how well it works as a thriller, with twists and turns, and a growing sense of almost unbearable psychological tension (it works with or without any ambivalent and/or hostile feelings you may have about the Catholic Church – which, please, I grew up in this thing, I know of what I speak). Ralph Fiennes gives what I consider to be his career best here. But everyone is great: John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, Lucian Msamati (a heartbreaking performance, which is some feat considering the character’s views on women and gays), Brían F. O’Byrne, Sergio Castellitto and Carlos Diehz … an acting feast. The film is such a great example of one of my pet themes: character actors are the engines on which stories run, and character actors play such an important role in … everything. The current trend of casting drop-dead gorgeous people in even smaller roles does a great disservice to the storytelling impulse and you go back and watch something like Diane Keaton in Reds, a leading lady with gold-capped teeth, or the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman carrying films, and you mourn for what once was. Real people. Character actors as leads. People with real SKILL in acting: not “stars” but real actors. I love star power. Everyone should know that. And stars are worth discussing. But so is skill. And character actors don’t often get to play sympathetic characters whom everyone loves and roots for: their job is often to counter-act the leads, to show other shadings and bring the real world close to the action. Here, all we have is flawed humans wrestling for power, motivated by so many things other than the divine office, but not snarling villains: each with a point of view and history and biases. The film wildly swings from candidate to candidate, and you’re never sure if the gossip mill in the Vatican is clouding your judgment. This whole thing is funny to me because on one level what you’re looking at is a bunch of guys in red cloaks who run an organization which has a terrible terrible history of abuse and oppression. Like, burn it all down. I get it. On another, though, this is a gripping film about a power struggle, and one man’s troubled “call” to “manage” the event, struggling against his own impulses and nature, battling doubts (in this world doubt is suspicious). Fiennes is magnificent. But Tucci is up there too. They all are. I LOVED watching these actors do their thing, all of them. Highly recommended. Do your best to avoid spoilers.
Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024; d. Mohammad Rasoulof)
In May of this year came the news that the great Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to a flogging and eight years in prison. The regime has been after him for years. You don’t make a film like Manuscripts Don’t Burn and expect you’re going to “get away with it”. His new film – Seed of the Sacred Fig – was just about to premiere at Cannes when the news dropped. History of Rasoulof’s persecution here. Shortly after he was sentenced, Rasoulof – and some of his crew members – escaped from Iran. (Rasoulof’s passport was confiscated back in 2011, I think). He practically walked out of the country, being hidden in safe houses along both sides of the border. It took him a month to escape. Meanwhile, as far as the world knew, he had been “disappeared”. Finally he emerged on the other side. So. Seed of the Sacred Fig. It was filmed entirely in secret. Every single person involved – from actors to crew – has taken their lives into their hands making this film. The fact the film exists is a miracle. No other film this year was made under these circumstances, and no other film represents so well the fight of the individual against oppression. The film isn’t just ABOUT that. It IS that. The cast is small and it mostly takes place inside an apartment – understandably. Outdoor scenes are shot from out of windows. There are some scenes in cars and a final scene in a deserted desert-mountain area north of Tehran. It is an intimate family story but – as with all films from Iran – has a serious political critique: the regime’s fanaticism infiltrates this family, creating distrust where before there was happy accord. The “woman life freedom” movement sweeps away this family, creating rifts that will never be repaired. At a certain point, things go too far. There’s no way back. An angry film. Its existence is a triumph but my God, at what cost.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
I’ve really enjoyed Stranger Things but I’m impatient for season 5. I feel like the plot is going to have to be, the kids have to go into the Upside Down in order to claim their social security benefits
Other one I’m really champing at the bit for is Brutalist, which I’m hoping will drift onto one of the streamers eventually.
As always, thanks for these viewing (& reading!) lists, interesting and lots of fun
// the kids have to go into the Upside Down in order to claim their social security benefits //
LOL!! I know!!
The Brutalist is wild. audacious. he clearly HAD to make it – and I kind of love that. very There Will Be Blood-ish – although not quite as mythic-fable-ish. will be curious to hear what you think. Did you like his other ones?
I haven’t seen anything he’s directed; Crowded Room is on Apple I think, which I subscribe to, & it’s on my to-watch list, but there’s a lot on that list (like everyone’s). My eagerness to see it is based on reports, yours included, that it’s really good. & it certainly looks unusual!
Melancholia is his only acting credit that I’ve seen, I think, but I don’t have any distinct memory of him in that. Mostly Kirsten Dunst, a bit of Charlotte Gainbourgh, and a bit of the various already-famous parts of the cast. Which, you know, not to minimize all the cast’s work, and I probably am doing so, sorry, but, Dunst pretty much carries that whole movie.
Oh interesting I hadn’t heard about Crowded Room – that’s cool. Totally recommend his other two – for a full immersion in his weirdo very BIG style! The Brutalist is that times 10!
and yeah I have no idea who he was in Melancholia either – in the big wedding scene I imagine – the people who make an impression in that scene are the parents – Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt – wackadoos. That movie in my Top 10 of the last 30 years – lol – I’m not a list maker but it’s kind of fun to take a “long view”. Melancholia is what turned me around on Lars von Trier.
I watched Melancholia a few years back on the strength of your post on it. It was great (though I’ve never rewatched), and having your remarks in mind, about feeling like the movie somehow rendered part of your own experience with mental illness onto the screen, threw interesting light on it. Not that I think I now therefore understand it from the inside or whatever, but it helped me make sense of what might otherwise have been an inexplicable strange movie.
About “turn[ing you] around on Lars von Trier”, I recently came upon a post of yours where you mentioned having hated Breaking the Waves (hope that’s a fair paraphrase/summary). That’s another one I’ve seen just once, but I remember having a much more positive reaction than yours. (I can certainly see why it could be hard to take.) Did you ever go back to that one?
I actually have never gone back and re-watched Breaking the Waves. I felt like it was being hailed as some feminist classic and I still feel like … I don’t know how you could watch that film and think it is in any way feminist. Not that a film has to be feminist to be good – it doesn’t – but I felt like that film was positioning itself as having something to say about women – and I felt that the very male filmmaker was full of shit. lol and he may very well be full of shit.
But what I understand now – and didn’t then – is that LVT is obsessed with women to such a degree that he barely gives a shit about the male characters (if you’ll notice). He is so taken up with the women that the men are the ones who are cookie-cutter nonentities – you don’t even remember them.
And this puts him in line with similarly woman-obsessed directors – like Howard Hawks or Josef von Sternberg – people who also are often tagged with labels like “sexist” or even “misogynist”. But I don’t think so. like, these guys THOUGHT about women all the time. they had other interests – Hawks cared a lot about so-called all-male spaces (pilots, fighters, soldiers) – but his real interest was male-female dynamics, and women in general. a lot of men won’t admit to this. They think caring that much about women makes them look weak. OR, they’re like “oh yeah I know all about women, they’re all like THIS.” Idiots, in other words. But someone like LVT has no other interest – well, okay, he cares about death and cinema too – but women are what gets his motor running cinematically, AND he doesn’t think he has “us” all figured out.
We LOOM in his imagination blotting out everything else. Chantal Akerman made that observation. I’ll see if I can find the quote. She said something like no other filmmaker is giving women the space in their films that LVT gives in his. and this is something I sensed but hadn’t quite put into words.
I don’t need women to be central in order to be interested in something. I do not judge filmmakers on whether or not they align with my views on things. But I’m certainly not going to tolerate a filmmaker who shows zero interest in women while at the same time insisting on making movies with women in them. (John Sturges is a great example of a director only interested in men, who didn’t try to shoehorn women into his films, and who didn’t fill his films with negative sexist stereotypes of women. He made so many great movies including The Great Escape. He had no interest in women. Onscreen, that is. He liked them fine offscreen. But he found romance boring. So he made movies only about men. and he got shit for it back then too. But … The Great Escape would SUFFER if women were in it. same with Magnificent Seven. Sturges just left women out and it was totally the right call. Women who demand filmmakers put more women in their movies are … I mean, life is short, and this is how you want to spend your time? I don’t know what you think you’re doing but it’s not “activism”.)
But Breaking the Waves – my negative response to it – may very well have been me responding to the rapturous reaction to it – as opposed to what LVT was actually doing. I found a lot of the rapture suspect, I admit. I was like “why are you SO INTO this movie of a woman being totally destroyed? You think that’s … admirable?” I was younger then. LVT still drives me crazy at times but at the same time I see now he’s interested in the same things I’m interested in, and his pessimistic view of the world – and people – is one I share.
So I probably should go back and re-watch. I’m just dazzled by him, even when I think he’s full of shit, lol. Like I loved Nymphomaniac, parts 1 and 2. and loved Anti-Christ. again, he’s only interested in women. I think some women find that creepy or predatory. No. No. I don’t think that at all. It’s where his art comes from. and oh God the House that Jack Built – people were so up in arms about that movie and it was so STUPID. it was less graphic than your run of the mill true crime podcast. I think the reaction to that film was a hangover from his stupid comments at the Cannes film festival – like, the guy’s a little bit dumb sometimes. a brat.
But I love him!
here’s the Chantal Akerman quote:
“Lars von Trier is very, very, very clever about women. He gives the woman a space that I don’t know any filmmaker does. Because in Breaking The Waves, protagonist Emily Watson is the Christ. Which man is doing that? I don’t know any man giving that space to a woman. No one.”
So my thought on Breaking the Waves is that it’s a retelling of the Abraham & Isaac tale from Genesis, or at least it starts from the same what-if: What if God delivered to His faithful servant a monstrous command? “Kill your beloved son”, “Allow yourself to be gang-raped & beaten to death.” And it’s a provocative kind of hypothetical to look at; “provocative,” right up LvT’s alley.
Of course there are salient differences between the biblical story and LvT’s: Bess is made to victimize herself, rather than a dependent child; the vicimization/“sacrifice” is sexualized; and God does not intervene to stop it. The latter two things make the story extremely easy to read as a sexist, incel-style fantasy.
(Incidentally the change to Bess herself being the victim suggests reading it as a Passion-inspired story. But Bess, like Abraham, hears God speaking to her, and the gospels give no such insight into what sort of communication Jesus had from on high. (Kazantzakis goes into this a bit in Last Temptation of Christ, though as far as I can remember, Scorsese does not include that in his film—though it’s been a while since I’ve seen that one.) That’s why it seems more Genesis/Abraham/Isaac than Passion/Jesus to me. (Oh, and now I’ve read the Chantal Akerman quote you included, and see that she goes the Christ route. That’s not wrong, clearly, but I think the Abraham & Isaac angle provides an interesting point of view on it.))
Uncomfortable similarity to anti-feminist fantasy aside, the sexualization, and lack of God’s intervention, seem to me to focus the attention on the horrific nature of the whole thing in a way that the Bible story does not; or at least, those of us brought up being taught the Bible as a source of ethical stories, in particular the kind of ethical stories you tell to children, are encouraged NOT to focus on the horrific nature of the story. “Don’t worry! God stepped in and stopped Abraham! It was just a test!” von Trier takes away that escape valve.
So, compelling hypothetical, delivered via a pretty repellant story
Mike – I like the Abraham theory ! It makes a lot of sense.
which makes me curious – if you had to choose your faves from the last 30 years what would they be?
(Not using the Reply button b/c this is long-ish and might as well use the full width. I hope the length is not pushing the bounds of good etiquette.)
Nice of you to ask!
I just commented somewhere on bluesky the other day about how the mere act of making a list of great movies tends to generate a Great Movie frame of mind, and you only want to pick recognizable great, respectable movies, so people will look at your list and admire your taste. I say “you/your”, but really I mean “I/mine”, though I do think it’s a common thing.
So my way of trying not to do that is to keep to just movies that I have at some point been so taken with as to be rewatching them on a loop, as long as the movie is available to me to do so. I used IMDb’s yearly movie lists from 1995 on to remind myself what-all there has been, though I’m sure I’m still missing a ton; IMDb is pretty US- & popular-centric. Then I cut the list down b/c there’s just too many that I’ve liked enough to binge rewatch. Here’s what I got.
My immediate thoughts were
The Master
Tar
Oppenheimer
These are all prestige-bias choices. Tar & Oppenheimer are definitely recency-bias choices; they do pass the binge-rewatch test though. The Master came to mind right away b/c you just mentioned There Will Be Blood, & when I see TWBB mentioned my thought is always, “Didn’t like that one so much, but you know what I DID like. . .”
After scrolling through movies-by-year lists at IMDb, adding:
Inside Llewyn Davis (would include Miller’s Crossing, but it’s too early)
No Country for Old Men
The Tragedy of Macbeth (could just include everything Coens since No Country)
Ronin
Get Shorty
Le Havre, Kaurismaki
Zodiac
Death of Stalin
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Spiderman into the Spiderverse
Knives Out
First Reformed
The next few I haven’t actually binge-rewatched, but want to mention anyway. They all feature especially fine performances
Marie Antoinette—first saw this year, a revelation, both Dunst & Coppola doing amazing things. Also would like my list to not be entirely a sausage fest. (My favorite Jane Campions, Sweetie & An Angel at My Table, are too early)
Training Day—Denzel in this one combines actor & movie star like I don’t know who else ever did. Overwhelmed by his performance, up there with Blanchett in Tar and Downey in Oppenheimer
Amour—Michael Haneke has that reputation as cerebral & unemotional, & I’ve felt that, but this wasn’t that
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse—I dunno, I just love it.
No Scorsese even though I like almost everything he’s made in the time range, and have even loop-rewatched Casino and Irishman. But my favorites of his are all too early; Age of Innocence just missed.
Fascinating! Thanks for this!
PTA is an interesting case – I feel like we;re really really lucky to live in a time when he’s an active filmmaker. We’re basically the same age – so I feel this proprietary (ridiculous) almost generational pride in his accomplishments. The Master I think is superior to There Will Be Blood – and, in a way, even less ingratiating. It doesn’t feel like an American movie at all – and a lot of his feel that way.
I haven’t rewatched either Tar or Oppenheimer – so now I’m curious to do so. I liked both of those films!
We’re in sync on a couple of choices!
Training Day!! Good choice. I haven’t seen that one in years but it left a deep impression.
Off the top of my head:
Zodiac
Inherent Vice
Mulholland Drive
Melancholia
Certified Copy
This Is Not a Film
Somewhere (imo Coppola’s masterpiece – but I love Marie Antoinette too).
Death of Stalin
Zero Dark Thirty
Memories of Murder
Beyond the Hills
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (recency bias: but I’ve rewatched multiple times since it first came out and I am still not sick of it)
This Is the End
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Get Out
In the Mood for Love
The Worst Person in the World
Certain Women
Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight (maybe a cheat but still)
Under the Skin
The Master
LA Confidential
Werkmeister Harmonies
Chungking Express
Moonlight
Eternal Sunshine of the Sp0tless Mind
Titanic
Morvern Callar
Pans Labyrinth
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
Inland Empire
Safe
All About My Mother
A lot of yours I haven’t seen. I suspect that, even if you were not a working critic, you’d see a lot more movies per year than I would, I just have a lower threshold for how much I can absorb. Also I like rewatching more than most do, I think.
I count 20 from your list, that I have seen. So 13 misses. (Or maybe 21/12, I missed Safe before.)
Of the ones I have seen, I have almost all of them up high too, even if I didn’t list them—probably b/c I haven’t rewatched them enough.
In the Mood for Love—this was on my longer list, but haven’t rewatched it. My take is, it’s the greatest Powell & Pressburger movie not made by P&P. The color! The sound! The sexual tension! (More Maggie Cheung than the Archers generally included, but that’s all to the good.)
Actually it occurs to me that In the Mood for Love would fit on a list I started thinking of last night, Color Spectaculars, prompted by starting to rewatch Tales of Hoffman. Marie Antoinette’s on there too. Maybe Black Narcissus, though not sure if multiple from 1 directing team is allowed. John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
Only one of yours I out & out disliked was Werckmeister Harmonies. I think it was during the opening sequence, when the guy (Janos?) was walking into town making ominous remarks while everyone else was like, “Hey! How are ya!”, that I said to myself, This movie is going to make a big thing about all the portentous stuff that going to happen, then nothing portentous is going to happen, right? That turned out to be right. I hate that, hate it like Hedley Lamarr hated heading them off at the pass.
Chungking Express left me a bit cold, I think I was wanting it to be In the Mood for Love, which is a problem for me when I’ve seen/read just one thing by someone and really liked it, then see/read another. Related to why I rewatch a lot, I suppose.
Morvern Callar, I also have a take, which is that, just as Taxi Driver is a kind of twisted retelling of the Searchers, Morvern Callar is a kind of twisted retelling of An Angel at My Table. Someone from a bleak background makes a sudden success in the literary world, then goes off on an adventure in Spain with the money they make out of it. A stretch I suppose; I know Scorsese & Schrader were conscious of the parallels when they made Taxi Driver, I wonder whether Ramsay had Angel in mind at all.
Pan’s Labyrinth is another on my longer list, though my favorite of Guillermo’s is Devil’s Backbone. Surprised I did not include that one; it might be too long ago. (Nope, 2001, just a mysterious whiff. Only watched a couple times, maybe that’s it, apparently I took my own rule seriously.)
Oh I love All about My Mother, probably should have included that, though I’ve only seen it once.
I’m with you that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is in, it’s my favorite of his since Pulp Fiction. Even though I love Jackie Brown, I feel like some parts of it drag (whenever neither Pam Grier nor Robert Forster is on screen). Only seen OuaTiH once though, mostly omitted those.
Even the ones of yours I haven’t seen, I’ve heard of them, with 1 exception: Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere. I have no recollection of even hearing of it. I’ll seek it out. Loved Stephen Dorff in season 3 of True Detective, which I think is all I know him from.
In the Mood for Love is definitely a Color Spectacular! I love that! I think Paris Texas might be on my list if that were a genre. Those GREENS and PINKS and BLUES.
Werckmesiter, lol. Yes, I see it as an overall analogy of the MOOD of totalitarianism – where the horrible thing has actually already happened and so there is no big thing coming. It’s done. For sure a challenging watch. I felt similarly about his Turin Horse – which I did not like as much as I liked Werckmeister. I think Central/Eastern European films – particularly the people who grew up under Soviet control – have a different language, so to speak, due to what they were up against.
Morvern Callar just makes me miss Samantha Morton. For a while, she was the great hope for me – of a TYPE of acting, a type of woman – blue collar, rough (Morton’s life was very tough – and continues to be tough) – without any illusions. Without any nod to “let me pretty and nice and adorable so people will like me”. Morton gave so many good performances – Longford is just incredible (hard to find, I finally just bought it on DVD because I need to have it around).
Oooh Somewhere!! It’s unbelievable to me it even exists. It’s like a Michelangelo Antonioni movie, directed by an American woman in the 2000s. a MAINSTREAM American director making a film like this is wild to me. It seems like it should be commercial – it’s Chateau Mormont and American celebrity and also a touching father-daughter story – but … the mood is one of empty alienation, almost dissociated. I think it’s her very best and it was mostly rejected by critics upon arrival. The same critics who go gaga over Antonioni’s L’Eclisse somehow failed to connect the dots. Would they have rejected L’Eclisse back in the 60s? I feel like we need to be open to experiment – to not instantly reject something just because it’s not what we expect.
and yeah – Dorff! he’s so good in it.
If you haven’t seen Motel Life I highly recommend it. I interviewed one of the directors at Ebertfest – another movie that kind of came and went – unfairly. It’s Dorff’s best, I think!
thanks so much for all your thoughts and sorry it took me a while to get back to my own damn site. end of year movie-time is crushingly busy.
Central/Eastern European stuff, I’ve liked some, not others. Actually, from Bela Tarr I liked Satantango quite a bit; never seen Turin Horse, don’t think it’s been easily available to me (wait, local library has it). With Werckmeister as I said I thought it promised a thing then didn’t deliver it, which annoys me. I see your point about a symbolic reading. Maybe I’ll try again someday, I’ve been known to do a 180 from hate to love on 2nd viewing, but then again some things are just not for everyone.
Is Samantha Morton not still working? Seems like she’s still active; maybe she dialed it back more than you like?
They have Somewhere at my local library, so I plan to pick it up when I head down on Saturday to pick up a book they’re holding for me. Deliberately only skimmed your comment, to go in with minimal information. They have Motel Life too it seems (the book too). (I added my name to the waiting list for Megalopolis; they don’t have the Brutalist, which is a shame, maybe they’ll get to it, or maybe it’ll bubble up on streaming. The Beast seems to be getting the “everyone’s talking about it” treatment lately, so I’ll have to look around for that. . .oh apparently it’s on Criterion. Ugh, dog help me, too much to watch, there’s a bunch of “leaving at end of month” I want to (re-)watch there, too.)
You write: “sorry it took me a while to get back to my own damn site”—from where I sit you’re incredibly generous with your time & comments here, both on the front page and in the comments sections. So grateful.
Samantha Morton is still around – lots of TV – the walking dead! – I guess I wish she was more of a player in the Lead Actress categories in film. she was nominated for 2 Oscars. She has had health problems and has taken a couple of different years-long hiatus to focus on that and on her family, which of course I respect. but when someone like her steps away, nobody replaces her. she’s not cookie cutter. She’s not a “type”.
The Beast is great! Just responded to another comment about it. For a long time it was on my Top 10 until I had to bump it – reluctantly.
Somewhere / Motel Life will be a nice Stephen Dorff double feature.
// I’ve been known to do a 180 from hate to love on 2nd viewing, but then again some things are just not for everyone. //
yeah so maybe I do need to revisit Breaking the Waves especially – esPECially – since LVT is now one of my faves.
so turns out The Brutalist isn’t even coming out until this weekend. the 20th I think?
I finally saw Conclave. What an excellent movie! I thought it was wonderfully written, with a humane viewpoint on the people looking to become Pope. Or at least, not everyone wanting to become Pope is vile and venal. Fiennes and Tucci and Msamati and Diehz were all excellent. I almost want a movie about the last days of the dead pope, he seemed like a nearly omniscient, malice-free machiavel. Though I suppose we got all of that with him being the equivalent of Kevin Costner in The Big Chill.
I loved the scene of Lawrence praying with Adayemi. Lawrence was a minister at least as much as he was a manager. Also loved the scene with Bellini apologizing to Lawrence.
And the ending… quite a new Pope.
Yes, it was very good, I thought! Glad you saw! It’s hard for me to care about any of it because of my feelings about the Catholic Church – and what it has done and covered up. I thought the script was excellent – it’s based on a book I think which I have not read. I loved the mini-conclaves going on – in stairwells and hidden corridors – all the wheeling and dealing. Tucci was great! Fiennes was haunting too – it’s my favorite kind of acting. Just so interior and therefore full of surprises!
and Lithgow!! I said this in my little piece about Fiennes – one of the main pleasures of this film is it’s filled with character actors. Wall to wall character actors and … it’s just better for all involved.
And Isabella Rossellini. She really dropped the hammer on Lithgow’s character. And the guy who was Fiennes’ aide, he was also excellent.
I didn’t expect little moments of visual beauty, beyond Vatican art in the background. The shot of all the cardinals with white vestments, red mozzette (had to look up the word for that) and then white umbrellas in the courtyard, moving around the fountain, that was just gorgeous.
also are their bedrooms THAT uncomfortable and industrial looking? it looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.
That’s true. They looked penal.
I saw that Pope Francis has upped the number of cardinals to 140. So maybe it makes sense to go all Holiday Inn when you need to make accommodations for that many folks. And make it so that small clique is getting the really nice rooms.
no small clique is getting the really nice rooms.
Honestly, I was kind of rooting for the terrorists.
also the acoustics in that hallway were terrible! everyone can hear everything!
Yes!
I remember thinkings, “dudes, whispering ain’t gonna keep it secret.”
and if you have a love spat with a Nigerian nun … everyone’s gonna hear!