Movie Time: October
I write a blurb review for everything I log on Letterboxd but since most people aren’t sickos who check it every day like I do, I figure it’d be nice to do a once-a-month roundup and revisit my thoughts on the stuff I liked days-to-weeks later. I’ll omit my last couple VIFF films since I’ve already talked about em’ a lot elsewhere.
Southland Tales (2007)
I don’t use “fever dream” as a descriptor much for stuff that is intentionally made to feel experiential but Southland Tales is a fever dream-turned-film. We watched the director’s/Cannes cut and I’m still thinking about it a month later because I’ve just never seen anything quite like it. An unmistakably post-9/11 movie, it portrays an early 2000s America that is garish, vulgar, crude, bloodthirsty, and morbidly entertaining. Its directorial lens is so ambitious the entire affair comes off as incredibly rough, sometimes abrasive, but the jagged edges give it a shape so unique it wraps around to being genuinely forward thinking and predictive of what would become our normalized media consumption.
Friendly fire. Friendly fire. Friendly fire.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Anyone hear of this Spielberg guy??
Knocked this one out of my “I’m surprised it took me this long to watch it” list. It’s impossible to view it with fresh eyes now, even without having seen it before, because its influence reaches every single videogame and film set in war time released since. Still a contiguous story, its structure of being sequential “vignettes” makes the entire thing feel like an arduous adventure but its incredibly sharp writing and editing make the actually-2h50m runtime fly by.
Cellular
Known to my friends as “loud mids” or a “three stars and a heart” for the Letterboxd-types, I watched Cellular because I watched Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer on a hotel TV a bit ago and wanted to dig more into the “early Chris Evans” movies. I think he has a lot of charm in that era?? I mean, he still does. He can carry a movie from abysmal to salvageable pretty easily.
Anyway, this is 100% of the same era of film that brought you shit like Phone Booth and Red Eye. Hostage situation with a Singular (get it?? Cellular?? Singular mobile?? Any Need for Speed Underground 2 fans in the house?????) premise. Person is trapped in X with Y and that’s the whole movie-type beat. A lot of folks are just barely trying here, William H. Macy is not putting in his best performance, but everyone is having a little bit of fun with it. Especially Jason Statham, who is desperately trying to conceal his natural accent.
The Aliens
God I would watch an Alien sitcom, though.
My wife and I watched the entire Alien franchise because Romulus hit ‘streaming’, and it was spooky month, so I figured why not rewatch the whole thing and catch Resurrection in the process since I’ve never seen it.
My ranking, after a lot of thought, ended up being Alien > Covenant > Aliens > Prometheus > 3 > 4 > Romulus.
You can see my thoughts on each individual movie in their respective reviews but I’ll defend my standing for those who think I’m crazy for ranking Romulus so low: It is the de facto worst Alien movie because it is the only one that doesn’t do anything new.
I’ve realised rewatching all of these that I really fucking love Alien the franchise but I don’t love the “franchise” in a nightmare Funko Pop-enjoyer way, I love it because it is a conduit for directors to explore whatever ideas they want to. It’s a space for them to take chances and go deep and hard on themes and ideas that might not always land but they all try.
Romulus doesn’t try. It almost does—the film opens with an offworld Weyland-Yutani colony sequence which the series has never shown in-depth before—but it gets to the Alien Situation pretty quickly and from then on it’s… just playing the hits. Like, all of them. It’s liberally pulling from 1-5 in both lore and literal dialogue. Its worldbuilding moments are taken from the Alien: Isolation game. The best it can toss as a new idea is how Andy’s character is handled, which ultimately builds to him being given a trolley problem to solve. That’s the level we’re operating on, here. Alien 3 had the confidence and, at the time arrogance, to treat Ripley’s role in the franchise as a terminal disease to be purged and the best Romulus can do is a thought experiment so painfully dull it’s literally a meme template. It getting a sequel is infuriating for a number of reasons but it mostly is as a signifier that media literacy is kind of dead. Franchise movies are no longer a place for experimentation but a space for the bored to be coddled in familiarity.
Look Back
There’s little I can really say about it that I didn’t already say in my review, especially without spoiling anything that happens in it. It’s an incredibly personal work, as are all creative endeavors I suppose, and I think it’s impossible for any artist to not walk away from it with a burning desire to create. I don’t think the movie provides any good answer for “why do you create” because it’s such an unquantifiable quest but to exist in the space of that question for an hour, from all the angles and vectors it gives you, is powerful.
It also makes me really excited for the future of Fujimoto’s work. Chainsaw Man is fine but this, to me, easily cements him as one of the greats. That we’re still so early in his career and get to enjoy years and years more of his future work is a blessing.
The Fall (4K restoration)
I spent a bunch of October seeing screenings at the VIFF Centre in Vancouver because (I want to support them and,) they updated their main theatre to have a 4K laser projector, which coincided with the 4K restoration of Tarsem’s The Fall, **which they had a screening of. I’ve never seen the film or really heard much about it other than a few sparse people reverently talking about it but the increased “You HAVE to watch this” when the restoration hit had me seek out tickets and… man.
Colors. There’s paragraphs to write praising its strict adherence to on-set filming and overall production but what really had me floored was how beautiful an exercise it is on collaborative storytelling. Roy and Alexandria play off each other so naturally, a feat accomplished by so much of their acting being improvised, and the end result is a story that feels truly written in front of you with details only visible if caring enough to understand both characters’ place in the story overall and their own personal journeys.
I’ll be going back to The Fall a lot in the future, I think. The entire thing left me in complete awe at how beautiful film, and creative media as a whole, can be.
Smokey and the Bandit
I get why everyone thought Sally Field was the hottest at that time. She has a bit where she asks Bandit what they’ll do when they get home and he says “Go to bed for a week” and she thinks he means fuck so he follows with “… and sleep” and she takes a long drag of her cigarette and goes “Wanna bet?”
Anyway, the whole movie takes place inside or around cars, so you can guess why I like it. It’s also 90 minutes of everyone fucking with cops. The movie hates cops. It’s awesome.