The Juniper Tree (1990)

The Juniper Tree is a nice companion piece to The White Reindeer, also a film about witchcraft in the frozen north. The Juniper Tree's main draw, though, is that it stars a very young Björk as a medium who is able to communicate with the dead. It's an odd little film that I thought I understood until it took a gruesome turn in act three. 

I watched it as part of my unseen movie club, and it was someone else's pick, so I'm not actually sure how to access it, but it's sort of a fun little curiosity.

Hill of Freedom (2014)

Hill of Freedom (자유의 언덕) is designed in such a cute way, and it's sort of adorably made, but I thought that Moon So-Ri, who plays the female love interest gave an outstandingly terrible performance, and this really got in the way of me enjoying Hill of Freedom. I like the storytelling, but the acting was just awful. I couldn't get into it.

I watched this on Mubi. It finally got distribution in the U.S. in 2020 even though Hong Sang-soo made Hill of Freedom in 2014. 

Your Name Engraved Herein (2020)

I really liked Your Name Engraved Herein (刻在你心底的名字). I worry that love stories between two high school boys are a bit too much of a retread, but I am usually interested in a good gay romance either way, and the actors here are so very good. This film is set in Taiwan in the 1980s, and I found it compelling and beautifully shot, even if the plot didn't really break new ground.

This is on Netflix.

Take Aim at the Police Van

Take Aim at the Police Van ('十三号待避線'より　その護送車を狙え) is playing as part of a series on the Criterion Channel called Nikkatsu Noir, and I couldn't resist watching one this week even though I have plenty of other stuff I'm supposed to be seeing for 2020. Suzuki's taut crime thriller did not disappoint. It's filmed just like a film noir from the Hollywood of the 1940s, and it is just as mysterious and fun. It's odd, though, the only Suzuki stuff I've seen is the late surrealist work (I only recently watched Zigeunerweisen), and so something like this was quite a delightful surprise. I kind of expect that I will watch every one of these Japanese noir films.

Let Them All Talk

Let Them All Talk is good. It's not great; in fact, it seems sort of slight, but it slowly sort of grows on you and moves into profound territory. I also thought it was pretty funny, and I loved Candice Bergen. Lucas Hedges is also very good.

Australian Outlaws = Right Wing Conspiracy Theorists

True History of the Kelly Gang is a pretty-looking violent mess of a film that has absolutely no through-line to it. It's a kind of rambling tale jumping from one unmotivated act of violence to the next. At the film's center is the emptiness and abuse of Ned Kelly's mother, who treats her child terribly, abusing him endlessly until he loves her (as the film itself tells us) for those moments when she isn't abusing him.

Justin Kurzel knows how to make a movie stylish, and this has lots of beautiful shots of the Outback. It also has a superb cast, with Russell Crowe and Charlie Hunnam and Nicholas Hoult. George McKay, who I love, is less effective here – he mostly just acts confused. Worse yet is the film's odd celebration of Australia's version of entitled Trump voters. At the end, when Kelly tells us that he's been wronged since he was young and only wanted to live and get something for himself, it was clear to me that the person who created this man's misery was his mother. I am not sure that this is quite clear to the filmmakers, but the film itself tells this story quite clearly, even if the rest of the film is a jumbled mess.

That Kurzel's most recent film was Macbeth is, I think, no small hint to how he understands Ned Kelly's mum.

I watched this on DVD – not sure where it's available to stream, but you don't want to stream this anyway.

Driveways (2020)

Andrew Ahn's Driveways had me wrapped around its finger. I felt like I knew every move it was going to make and I didn't mind one single bit. It's just a lovely film. Can't recommend enough.

The Vast of Night

I was not expecting The Vast of Night to be as cleverly written, as imaginatively and brilliantly shot, as wonderfully acted, and as mysterious and interesting as it turned out to be. This was one of my favorite movies of the year. It's exciting and unnerving from the jump and I loved it.

The Uninvited (1944)

What a cool movie! The Uninvited is a bit of a generic anomaly. It's definitely a ghost story, but I am not sure it's much of a horror movie or monster movie. I mean, there is a scary ghost who haunts the house, but this is charming and romantic for much of the story, and it never really moves into scary territory. The score and photography are both excellent.

I watched this right before it was about to leave the Criterion Channel on January 31st and I'm so glad I did. This is not to be missed.

The Widow Couderc (1971)

La Veuve Couderc (The Widow Couderc) – which was released in France in 1971 and in the U.S. in 1974 – is a lovely, sultry film about a widow and a younger man and their love story. He is a criminal, of course, and the small town's morality won't let these two people be happy, but I liked this a lot. Also, listen: if there is any excuse to watch Simone Signoret in absolutely anything, I just go ahead and take it. As far as I know, she's never given a performance that I didn't adore. She's just a brilliant performer, and I am always happy to watch her. As for Alain Delon... that icy stare is perfection (although I do like him better sans moustache).

I watched this as part of the Criterion Channel's Alain Delon series. It's last day on the Channel is January 31st, so I wanted to see this film before it left.

Being Impossible (2018)

Yo Imposible is a Venezuelan film about a person named Ariel who discovers she is intersex. It's a really difficult watch. Ariel is in pain for the majority of the movie; couple that with the treatment of the medical establishment, the treatment of others, the treatment of her family... it's a lot. I can't say I liked this movie very much, but it feels like an important movie for people who don't know much about intersex, especially because the main narrative is intercut with testimonies from intersex characters whom Ariel will meet later in the story.

This film never made it to a U.S. theatrical release but it was Venezuela's submission in the Best International Feature category for the Oscars, and you can watch it now on HBO Max.

The Personal History of David Copperfield

It feels crazy for me to say that an adaptation of David Copperfield by Armando Iannucci is one of my favorite films of the year, but I loved this movie. It's so much fun. Dev Patel is so wonderful, and his joy is infectious. This is also gorgeously styled, so that the entire thing unfolds like a storybook. Some of the transitions actually took my breath away they're so clever and beautiful. It's also very, very funny, and the adaptation is very strong, mercifully avoiding the entire marriage between David and Dora as well as reducing the role of Uriah Heep (also a mercy). 

This David Copperfield isn't perfect: Tilda Swinton is no Edna May Oliver, and at times the usual Dickensian threads come to seem outlandish, but even this is dealt with by Iannucci in a clever way. 

I am comparing this film, by the way, to George Cukor's 1935 The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, & Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, which I first watched about six months ago in anticipation of the 2020 adaptation. One intriguing point of comparison is that the star of the 1935 film is Freddie Bartholomew, who was about ten years old when the film was made, so that movie skews in a cutesy, childlike direction, and David's growth is delayed so the actor can keep playing the part. The 2020 adaptation is trying very hard to get us to Dev Patel as quickly as possible, so his time at school takes up a great deal more space. But this new film also has an excellent child actor in Ranveer Jaiswal, and Iannucci uses him beautifully, and his return at the film's end was perfect.

Either way, I had a blast watching this adaptation and really loved it.

On Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask is a really great little documentary in Isaac Julien's signature style, where Fanon is played by the British actor Colin Salmon. I liked this a lot, and I learned a lot about Fanon and his life and dreams. This also puts his books in context very nicely. Appearances by Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès make this a must see, I think.

This played at at least on Gay and Lesbian film festival, but there's no hint that Fanon was queer, and there are no queer topics here. Its presence in LGBT circles must be due only to Julien.

Syndromes and a Century

Syndromes and a Century is a wonderful film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I love his work, and this is definitely a kind of bridge between the documentary-inspired work he was making in his earlier career and the later stuff like Cemetery of Splendour and Uncle Boonmee. This is really charming.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

Eliza Hittman's new movie is very, very good. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is honestly a heartbreaking movie that turned my stomach numerous times and at one point in act two just plain moves into brilliance. It's excellent, and as usual Hittman gets very good performances out of her actors.

She Dies Tomorrow

She Dies Tomorrow is a weird, apocalyptic kind of thing that feels perfect for 2020. Jane Adams is great in it. I am not sure I'm into the neon lights – actually I'm positive I dislike this pulsating red and blue neon situation – and I do not understand Amy Seimetz' interest in Kate Lyn Sheil, but this was a very interesting film. It's funny and smart and scary. I liked it.

Bell Book and Candle (1958)

With Judy Holliday in the main role Bell Book and Candle would have worked perfectly. As it is, it doesn't work at all. It's a broad, very silly comedy based on I Married a Witch, and yet Kim Novak is a downer in literally every scene. It's so weird because all the scenes that don't include Novak are silly. Jack Lemmon, Jimmy Stewart, and Elsa Lanchester all are playing very funny comedy, but Kim Novak is doing her usual Jennifer Lawrence thing. It does not work at all. 

P.S. I loved the cat.

Tesla (2020)

Tesla is a Peter Greenaway film but, like, not as good as Peter Greenaway? I don't like Greenaway, so I'm definitely insulting Tesla. Michael Almereyda has done something... quirky (?) here. Tesla and the other characters play scenes in front of giant projections of locations. They are interrupted by a character in the present day talking about how many Google results come up when you look up Thomas Edison. All of this means that we should be learning about Tesla and Edison and what happened with electricity in the 19th century, but in fact we learn very little about Tesla, the people he worked with, his dreams, the politics behind the feud with Edison, the politics behind Morgan's squelching of Tesla's plans, all of it. We know about it, because a character is reading us a Wikipedia entry on it, but there's no need for this to be a film. It's like a kind of report done by undergrads as a group project. And when Nikola Tesla sings (very badly, I might add) a karaoke version of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" near the end of the film, I was positive I hated this movie. Like... why??? I still can't believe that actually happened in the film. I have no idea what Michael Almereyda might have been thinking with that.

When you google Nikola Tesla x number of results come up. This is historiography?

I watched Tesla on Hulu, where, I suppose you could watch it too, but you don't want to do that. It's embarrassingly bad.

Soul

Soul is really sweet. It's a little too cutesy for me to truly love it – rather in the vein of Inside Out. Like Docter's earlier film this seems like an entire movie about teaching a life lesson to a teenage kid. This one's lesson is that there isn't one purpose in life. We don't know what we're going to be good at or what impacts we're going to have; so we need to be careful not to discount the great things around us that don't conform to our idealized version of ourselves. And we need to avoid getting stuck in a dream that is hampering us. This is, quite honestly, an excellent lesson, and this is a very charming movie, but I wouldn't really say it is for adults. 

Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, QuestLove and Rhodessa Jones (!) are all great.

Theatre of Blood

Theatre of Blood is amazing, delightful campy fun. Vincent Price is a terrible actor who devises a series of murders based on Shakespearean deaths as revenge on the critics who refused to recognize his genius. Each murder is more insane than the last. It's hilarious. This is a must for any Shakespeare fan. It's also delightfully gruesome. I had a blast.

Kajillionaire

Miranda July is so fuckin' weird. This movie is very funny and very awkward, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. Evan Rachel Wood and Gina Rodriguez are both brilliant. The script is excellent and so fucking weird. This was great.

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

I suppose I ought to be kinder to this film. It was made in 1998, and so it's part of the New Queer Cinema, and it's trying to do something by telling a queer story and filmicly canonizing Francis Bacon as a queer artist. But... 

Did I hate this? Yes, I believe I did. It's so miserable, and there's just no reason for the script to be quite this miserable. But worse yet, it is shot bafflingly. It's all fisheye closeups and disrupted angles and distortion. Until it's not. But there isn't any rhyme or reason to it. It's pretending, I suppose, to be doing a filmic version of Bacon's paintings, but it doesn't actually do that at all; it's giving us distortion, but it isn't Baconic distortion. 

Daniel Craig offers some very good acting here, and he is a brightly miserable light in this miserable movie, but this is a definite misfire.

I watched this on Criterion just before it left the channel at the end of December 2020. I'd been meaning to see it for years, mostly because it was a) early Daniel Craig and b) Bacon, whose work I love. But man what a miserable film.

Oh also, the devil appears nowhere in this movie, and I'm not sure if a single person utters the word love even once. 

Zombi Child

Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child is great. It's two stories in one and both are very interesting. We follow a young girl in France today as she makes friends at high school and tries to fit in. We also follow a zombie in Haiti in the 1960s. The film's two halves work wonderfully together, and Bonello's movie is fascinated by the way we all live with the dead. This is a science fiction movie, in a way, but it's also maybe just spiritual. I really liked it.

The Midnight Sky

I was in the mood for a sci-fi film, and then I remembered this new release, so I watched it. The Midnight Sky has a couple of really good scenes, and I love the score, but the movie just isn't that much fun. 

George Clooney's new movie is a downer. It's also sort of... well... it takes the sort of zen point of view that literally everyone is well meaning. Everyone in this film behaves rationally, and everyone explains his or her behavior, and everyone does precisely what he or she believes is right. This is not the point of view I would personally take of the world. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, but it does make everything in the film feel sort of trite, and certainly much less universal and global than the film wishes to be.

This also feels like the kind of adaptation of a novel where everything sort of fits together in a sentimental way. I don't know. The film feels better than that, but not much. 

I'm kind of a sucker for stuff happening in space, though, so I liked that. And the scene with all the blood was really cool.

Humoresque (1946)

Humoresque is a truly overwrought mid-century melodrama. It's so overwrought that it ends with a long sequence set to the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Crawford is glamorous and lovely and spends most of the film being very drunk. John Garfield, on the other hand, is relentlessly stern and sullen. He's completely unlikable from start to finish. Worse yet, the supporting players are no better. Oscar Levant keeps up a steady stream of unfunny jokes, and Ruth Nelson, who starts off as a sweet mother with a tear in her eye, turns into a sternly moral maker of misery. What does this movie think it's about? I couldn't tell you, honestly. Maybe its only function is to give a bunch of actors something to do. No thanks.

This was the last of the Joan Crawford movies I caught before they got kicked off the Criterion Channel. I think I'll be taking a bit of a break from Joan.

Vitalina Varela

I was really disappointed in Vitalina Varela. It has been touted as a great film for many months now, and critics have really fallen for it. But I didn't understand its bold theatricality. Costa chooses to light everything as if we're on a theatre set. It's all dark surroundings and spotlights. People move slowly and speak slowly and quietly, and I'm just not sure why. It felt stylish to me but oppressive. I assume both are intended, but I just don't get it. In the last five minutes of the film, Costa opens things up and we are outside and the wind is blowing, and we are no longer in a theatre. This I understood and enjoyed. 

It's funny, I really love theatre but when a movie plays up a theatricality without telling me why or acknowledging it, I often feel very frustrated.

Vitalina Varela is streaming on the Criterion Channel

Videodrome (1983)

Videodrome is... kinda great. It's obviously dated, in its effects, in its interests, and in its politics. But it's compelling the entire time. It's also weirdly sexy and totally focused on bodies and their capabilities. I don't think I understand why the film's two villains died the way they died (one explodes? and the other one rapidly crudesces or something?), but I fully liked this. It's creepy and fun and surprising – and it's like a weird sequel to Network.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was originally a stage play by August Wilson, and it's the second of Denzel Washington's promised adaptations. The film is directed by George C. Wolfe and it stars Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman, and Colman Domingo (my goodness do I love this man). 

Now what you need to know is that the original play is not Wilson's greatest. It's an early one – the second that he wrote – so early that's it not even set in Pittsburgh. He wrote it before he had begun to shape the plays according to what would come to be called the Pittsburgh Cycle or the Century Cycle. It's also, notably, the only play with a noticeably queer character and the only play with a famous historical personage. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is, in more ways even than this, an outlier in the entire cycle. 

In any case, all of that preamble to say that Wolfe has made a very, very good film. The camerawork is dynamic. So dynamic that the film doesn't feel like something made on a soundstage. It feels larger than the theatre.

The opening fake-out shot is brilliant. The performances are excellent across the board. The makeup is fantastic. This is good stuff.

Still... I remain unsure if the film really justifies its third act – the play certainly doesn't, and I don't think the film does much better here. And maybe I have also always felt as though the play doesn't need what happens in act three (of the film). It strikes me as overly dramatic, just a little too much for what the story is trying to do.

Anyway, that's the source material. And Wolfe and his cast do a great job with the text. I really liked this.