The White Tiger

I thought I was going to like The White Tiger a lot, but oh boy is it boring. Director Ramin Bahrani's pace is consistently off, and although he spends a ton of time explaining why the character does what he does, he never quite lets us in. In fact, he has an odd contempt – as is quite clear in the narrative frame – for a character we're supposed to love and with whom we're supposed to empathize. We wait and wait and wait for the protagonist to do something. When he finally does – after I am not kidding you 100 full minutes – it is too little, too slowly filmed, and too late.

They Live by Night

Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night is a different kind of crime film, or, rather, it feels different because Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger are so young. They're sweet and kind and sad, and the whole thing is very good.

I saw They Live by Night on the Criterion Channel. It's leaving on April 30th, so I needed to get it in before the end of the month. I need to remember to check out some more Farley Granger movies. He's a legendary midcentury gay actor, but I hadn't realized he'd been in quite so many movies!

Druk (Another Round)

Another Round is such a male film. And it's about a group of men waking up to the lives they're living and learning to see them in a new way and be better men. These are men with a lot of privilege who get away with rather a lot. This film also made me very, very anxious. While also resonated with me deeply, even though I am not very similar to these guys. It's impeccably directed, and Mads Mikkelsen is flat out brilliant.

2020+ in Review

LOVED
~ ~
1. The Personal History of David Copperfield
2. Martin Eden
3. Beanpole
4. Bacurau
5. Nomadland
6. Tenet
7. The Father
8. Another Round
9. Babyteeth
10. The Vast of Night

REALLY LIKED
~ ~
11. La Llorona
12. A White, White Day
13. Driveways
14. WolfWalkers
15. Minari
16. The Climb
17. The Half of It
18. Zombi Child
19. Two of Us
20. Onward
21. The Painted Bird
22. First Cow
23. Judas and the Black Messiah
24. The Twentieth Century
25. Apples
You Will Die at Twenty
Kajillionaire
Spoor
Nina Wu
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
No. 7 Cherry Lane
Lucky Grandma
Your Name Engraved Herein
Love and Monsters
Palm Springs
The Kid Detective
Heroes Don't Die

LIKED
~ ~
And Then We Danced
Young Ahmed
Corpus Christi
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Sound of Metal
Pinocchio
Eurovision Song Contest: the Story of Fire Saga
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
Enola Holmes
Bull
Yellow Rose
Let Them All Talk
Soul
My Little Sister
Sibyl
The Traitor
Over the Moon
The Whistlers
A Girl Missing
Dear Comrades!
Fire Will Come
Ammonite
Mulan
The Trial of the Chicago 7
She Dies Tomorrow
The Wild Goose Lake
The Way Back
Being Impossible
Lingua Franca

LIKED MORE THAN I DISLIKED
~ ~
Da 5 Bloods
Promising Young Woman
Divine Love
Pieces of a Woman
The Midnight Sky
Greyhound
One Night in Miami...
Mank
Hope Gap
Emma.
Butt Boy
Hill of Freedom

BARELY LIKED MORE THAN I DISLIKED
~ ~
News of the World
Vitalina Varela
The Gentlemen
Blow the Man Down
Charm City Kings
The Life Ahead
The Prom
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
I Was at Home, But...
The Wanting Mare
The One and Only Ivan

DISLIKED
~ ~
The Burnt Orange Heresy
True History of the Kelly Gang
Calm with Horses
The White Tiger
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Hillbilly Elegy
Made in Italy

HATED
~ ~
Cherry

COMPLETE AND TOTAL WASTE OF TIME
~ ~
Tesla

My Picks for Best Actress for 2020+
My Picks for Best Actor for 2020+
My Picks for Best Supporting Actress for 2020+
My Picks for Best Supporting Actor for 2020+

+The awards year for 2020 included the first two months of 2021.

This above All (1942)

The first act of This above All is great. It's a class conscious story about a very rich woman who joins up with the Women's Air Force unit in Britain and pays no attention to her class. The second act of this is even better. It's a love story in which Joan Fontaine (who is luminous and charming) falls in love with the most handsome stranger she could possibly meet. He's super mysterious and secretive and the whole thing is sexy and intriguing and fun. And then act three happens and we're in full blown WWII propaganda mode. It's all faith and truth and fighting for what you believe in and marriage and god and England and well... whatever. Let's just say it lost steam. Still, the effects are great, the production design is excellent, and the bombing of London sequence is stellar. Tyrone Power is gorgeous (obviously) but speaks in a US American accent the entire time and literally never bothers to try to pass as a Briton. Meanwhile Joan Fontaine might as well be in a George Eliot novel.

Rusty Knife

Rusty Knife (錆びたナイフ) is a pretty good Japanese noir, but it's a little too wordy, and the big villain doesn't really show up until the end, so his big reveal isn't that interesting. I really liked the ending, though. The relationship between Ishihara Yūjirō and Kitahara Mie makes this an above average yakuza picture.

I, of course, watched this on the Criterion Channel as part of their series Japanese Noir. This series has been incredible.

Signature Move (2017)

I was excited to love Signature Move (سیگنیچر موو). How often do you get to see a love story between a Pakistani American luchadora and a Mexican American bookstore owner. But Signature Move is honestly just a typical straight-to-video gay romantic comedy with very low stakes, a low budget, and more than its fair share of bad acting. The most exciting moment I had watching this was when my friend Kareem had a cameo I wasn't expecting as a random dude who kisses another guy.

 I watched this with my unseen movie club, and I sort of felt bad for choosing it. But you can watch it anywhere you stream movies.

Better Days

This is the most accurate poster I've ever seen. In Better Days (少年的你), Dongyu Zhou cries for the entire 2 hours and 15 minutes of the film. Then she meets Jackson Yee, and he adds his tears into the mix. There is barely a shot in the movie that doesn't involve one of these two actors crying. I don't believe I've ever seen a movie with this many tears. It'd be different if there were something else in the movie at all, but there isn't. All we get are tears here. 

Oh, also this movie is ostensibly about bullying, which Derek Tsang informs us is a "universal" problem. It is happening everywhere, and it's terrible. I find it very confusing that the film refers to the awful violence that occurs in it as bullying when it is actual violence. 

I am not sure when this movie was released. IMDb says November of 2019. Better Days wasn't on the Academy's eligibility list for 2019 or 2020, but then it was nominated for Best International Picture in 2021 (which is why I watched it). I don't know how this all shakes out, but I'm going to consider it a 2019 movie. Either way it is not a good movie, so it doesn't much matter.

 

Le Roi et l'Oiseau (1980)

Magical and weird and delightful, The King and the Mockingbird or The King and Mister Bird, as it was originally titled in English, is a classic.

The United States vs Billie Holiday (2021)

Terrible. Just terrible.

The Legend of the Surami Fortress (1985)

The Legend of Suram Fortress or The Legend of the Surami Fortress (take your pick – in Georgian script it's called ამბავი სურამის ციხისა) is a sumptuous film about a Georgian legend that is composed beautifully and has gorgeous costumes. It has a visual poetry that functions more like a weird 1960s piece of theatre than anything else. I was into it.

The Life Ahead

This adaptation of La Vie devant Soi takes the tactic of the film Transit – adapting a film about a woman living in the aftermath of the Shoah in France and her relationship with a Muslim boy – and transfers it into a seaside town in present day Italy. All good and well, and the spirit is in the right place in a lot of ways, but Edoardo Ponti's film is trite. We don't spend enough time with the characters really to love them, and the entire thing operates on the idea that we know every move before it happens, as if giving us familiar tropes were the same thing as emotional investment. I didn't find this affecting at all, although it did make me want to rewatch Moshé Mizrahi's excellent 1977 film.

Collective (2020)

Damning and frustrating and terrifying all at once. Collective is a stunning film. I was seven minutes in, sitting with my jaw dropped. What an excellent film.

Quatrilho (1995)

Fábio Barreto's film initially feels as though it's just going to be a kind of sexy early twentieth century tragedy about forbidden love and a cheating spouse. But no! Instead O Qu4trilho is a delightful film about love and choosing a different life, and living life to the fullest despite the idiocy of the world. This film's third act is a total surprise and completely wonderful.

I have been looking for a copy of this film for at least a decade. O Qu4trilho was never released in theatres in the U.S. It was the only movie from the 1996 Oscar season I hadn't seen. Finding a copy of this Brazilian film with English subtitles proved difficult. One day a couple weeks ago I searched YouTube, and lo and behold there was a copy with English subtitles just sitting there waiting for me.

The Father (2020)

Florian Zeller's film of The Father (based on his play) is a very smart portrait of dementia. It's also very clever. It's almost too clever, but at the center of this film is Anthony Hopkins, who gives such an extraordinarily sensitive and beautiful performance, that even amid the cleverness of Zeller's script and the genius production design, the deep humanity of the character comes through. It's a great film.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Well, Smokey and the Bandit is a delight from start to finish. I loved the screenplay. I loved Jackie Gleason. I loved all of the car stunts. I had a great time. And this is so funny.

Peeping Tom (1960)

Peeping Tom is creepy and interesting and just a little bit unhinged. The fact that Michael Powell directed this X-rated picture in 1960 (without Emeric Pressburger) is sort of nuts to me. This is a really important movie.

The Fan (1981)

The Fan is a good and somewhat scary genre picture with some big stars but a decidedly B-film vibe. It's well made and campy, and I enjoyed it a lot. There is some typical gay-baiting happening at one point, and this, too, works well. The actual screenplay is not great, but the story is fun. One other highlight is the musical number at the end of the film, in which Lauren Bacall sings about diamonds and hearts and which she'd rather have. It's (unexpectedly) pretty great.

Eurovision Song Conest: the Story of Fire Saga

This is really funny, and the music is also really fun. I had a great time. I love Dan Stevens. The Song-a-long was amazing. The whole thing was delightful.

A New Pinocchio (2019)

It is sort of crazy for me to imagine that Matteo Garrone directed this adaptation of Pinocchio. I love Garrone's work, but his movies have thus far been about criminals and violence. Pinocchio is pure magic. It's gorgeously shot in beautiful locations, and it's dreamily, wondrously imagined and filled with fascinating characters. This Pinocchio is also very funny at times, and always playful, charming, and surprising. I really liked this.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)

Preston Sturges' The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is a very silly screwball comedy that is very funny and completely fascinating. The first thing to underline is just how funny it is, and how pleasurable the laughs are. The film begins by making fun of a sweet young man who loves a young woman but is way too unattractive and uncool actually to get a date with her. Eddie Bracken is a strange movie star, but his comedic timing is perfect. He's like a junior Danny Kaye with the pratfalls turned up.

The true genius of Sturges' movie, though, is the skewering of the USAmerican value of marriage. It's brilliant. This young woman, played by Betty Hutton, finds herself pregnant the morning after a long night of drinking and dancing (and driving!) with a bunch of guys headed off to WWII. She is sure, during this period of being blackout drunk, that she got married to some G.I., but she can't actually remember which G.I. it was, since she knows she was dancing with at least three guys. So she's pregnant, and the dumb townspeople now have things to say about that, so she decides to get married to our dorky young friend. Hilarity ensues, about half of which is due to Bracken's extraordinary characterization and about half of which are due to satirizing the value of marriage. 

The whole thing is great. And in the end, [I'm about to spoil one of the big jokes in act three] Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton get married, the governor of the state steps in and makes everything ok with the law, and our young mother gives birth to six boys. She's married already, of course, and he's happy to be the father–husband, but the implication here is, quite clearly, that this respectably married young woman had sex with six strangers during her all-nighter. The fact that this got past the censors in 1944 is kind of insane.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel.

Newzzzzzzz of the World

News of the World is very well made. It's shot beautifully and scored beautifully, and the production design is gorgeous. 

So why is this movie so boring? With all of the goodwill and excellent work poured into it, News of the World has no right to be as boring as it is. I really don't understand, but this thing is truly a snooze. Greengrass gets a couple of moments where he gets to do what he's great at doing – viz. a pair of runaway horses and a wagon crash – but this kind of movie doesn't play to his strengths as a director at all. 

Also maybe I just think Tom Hanks is kinda boring.

Morrer como um Homem (2009)

I found To Die like a Man indulgent. I really enjoy Rodrigues's sensibilities, and I love his portraits of desperation and longing, but this one takes odd, unmotivated turns that didn't work for me. Twice during To Die like a Man, all the color leaves the movie and we sit in an odd wash for longer than is interesting. It's not a bad movie, per se – not at all, in fact – but Rodrigues needed to curb his own tendencies here, I think.

Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Hillbilly Elegy is an intensely frustrating piece of work. It's supposed to be some sort of tale of survival and family and... you know, I don't actually know. Instead it is a portrait of a lot of abuse that the film seems to want us to believe is not abuse but is just, like, family time. 

I think for me the problem here is that if you've spent any time with drug addicts in your life – or with any abuse, really – then this film will be triggering and painful. And if you haven't, then the film doesn't get you anywhere closer to understanding addictive behavior or economic hardship or the frustrations of young motherhood. 

I really loved Haley Bennett in this. And honestly Amy Adams is very good in Hillbilly Elegy, playing one of the true villains of 2020 cinema. This character is impossible to love.

I am just going to pretend that Glenn Close did not take part in this.

You can watch this on Netflix, but I wouldn't recommend that you choose to do that.

Another CGI Gorilla

The One and Only Ivan is relentlessly saccharine, but honestly the effects were great.

I have to say something about Bryan Cranston. I don't understand it. I know everyone watched him on television in this Breaking Bad show, and I know everyone loves him, but he's awful in movies. I can't think of a single movie I thought he was good in. I honestly just don't get what you all see in him.

Odete (2005)

I didn't love Odete, which was released as Two Drifters in the U.S. (where they wanted to market it to gay audiences. I think the reason I didn't love Odete – although I love João Pedro Rodrigues – is mostly because Odete herself is a total nutjob. Rodrigues's film is about loss and lack, and the young man at the center has lost the man he loves, but the young woman at the center is missing something more existential. I don't know. I was into this for a while, but Odete really started to get on my nerves, and then the ending was really just not for me.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Forgettable

Farmageddon was boring. I laughed a couple of times, but mostly I was tuning out.

Promising Young Woman

I don't know. I'm really on the fence with Promising Young Woman. On the one hand, this is a message film with a smart message – it's even a film about sexual violence that smartly avoids the question of consent. On the other hand, Promising Young Woman is smug and sleek in places where it doesn't need to be. And it settles for metaphors and symbols in place of real people. And the end is really perplexing. The film itself decides to commit a gruesome act of violence against one of its characters. I don't know how to justify that.

If you haven't seen it stop reading now, but I want to explain myself, so I'm going to describe a couple of moments in the film where I got frustrated with its gaze.

The first was when the protagonist, Cassie, sort of loses it in the middle of the street and take a tire iron to a random stranger's car and breaks the windshield and all the lights. Cassie is having a breakdown. She's frustrated and feeling powerless, and she commits this more-or-less random act of violence, but Promising Young Woman isn't interested in Cassie's experience of this event. Instead, the camera follows... the tire iron. We see Cassie from the back and she breaks the lights and comes around the rear of the car, and then the camera focuses on the car's driver and his experience of the event as he screams at her and calls her crazy. This frustrated me because I felt like it asked me to see the event as an outsider and not as someone who was identifying with Cassie and her experience of this.

The other time the film really lost me was when Cassie is murdered in act three. The film doesn't show Cassie's experience of this event at all. Because Fennell's focus is on plot and surprising the audience, she doesn't have Cassie let us in on what she's planning. We don't know what's going on, and when the man begins murdering her, we are caught up in the question of what is going to happen. The thing is, that Cassie is completely out of the picture by now. Cassie's murder, which takes rather a while, is shot from the murderer's point of view. What we get is his experience of her death – and he's freaked out and panicked, even, to a certain extent, sympathetic, at least in this moment. 

And I'm not sure I forgive the film for this. Promising Young Woman is a good film, but it never really felt dangerous to me. I knew we were in trouble when the screenplay finally reveals that every weekend Cassie pretends to be drunk, performs very elaborate ruses, goes home with these deadbeat assholes, and then lectures them??? Seriously? That's as dangerous as the film wants to get? I think this movie plays it safe the whole time. It feels, moreover, like a kind of morally superior exercise in smugness that cares more about winning than in the actual suffering of survivors of sexual assault.