Monthly Top Five

Only took you 10 years to listen to me.

I will notify Criterion to remove all the movies I want you to see. 

I like Boomerang — and Distinguished Gentleman.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

I only watched four films this month. I might squeeze in one more today to make it an even five.

Lots of very good but not quite great movies in December. Some honourable mentions: Trouble in Paradise, Quest for Fire, The Muppet Christmas Carol, The Mission, and Wag the Dog.


5. Good Time (The Safdie Brothers, 2017)

Watched post-2019, Good Time definitely feels like a trial run for Uncut Gems. This is another pressure-cooker of a movie where a low-time criminal's increasingly misguided choices spiral further and further as a dirtbag hero tries to overcome the odds. I think the Safdie Brothers really mastered that type of story in Uncut Gems, with a fascinating protagonist, interesting world, and a rather thoughtful portrait of addiction. Good Time, by contrast is a bit more straightforward, but the brothers' talents as filmmakers are certainly apparent. The film does make for a stressful watch that unfolds unexpectedly and is aided by an awesome score. The film also has an almost inappropriately poignant ending set to a beautiful original song sung by Iggy Pop. Anyway, I don't think Good Time is quite great but I definitely had fun watching it.


4. Prince of the City (Sidney Lumet, 1981)

A common narrative of the late 70s and early 80s is New Hollywood directors helming massive productions as a sort of last hurrah for the era. Prince of the City feels like such a product for Sidney Lumet, a bustling epic of police corruption which is very much apiece with Lumet's 70s crime dramas Dog Day Afternoon and especially Serpico. Running almost three hours, the film chronicles a New York police officer who works with Internal Affairs to expose corruption in the department by indicting crooked cops. The film functions as both thriller and character study as Treat Williams's officer Danny Ciello gradually collapses psychologically over his endeavors. The film is largely very good, with a neat supporting cast and handful of very exciting sequences where Danny is in danger. An extended scene in a restaurant which becomes a fight is especially remarkable and Lumet generally captures that gritty aesthetic you want from this kind of cop movie. Despite being made in the early 80s, this is very much a 70s movie and depicts cops in that French Connection/Serpico mode.

3. Kanal (Andrzej Wajda, 1957)

This is a movie about a doomed Polish resistance fighting against the Nazi occupation who are slowly driven into the sewers by their oppressors as it slowly becomes clear these characters are doomed. Needless to say, Kanal is a pretty bleak movie, but a well-realized one. Andrzej Wajda seems to borrow some influence from neo-realism in Kanal's cinematography and the whole thing has a harsh authenticity. The film's first act does a decent enough job setting up the characters and situation, but it's once the resistance is driven into the sewers that Kanal really cooks. There's a real morbid fascination in watching the characters slowly breakdown as the hopelessness sets in, with the setting taking on an almost surreal atmosphere. I'm not sure the film offers much beyond a visceral look at the Warsaw uprising and I think someone like Gillo Pontecorvo pushed the core ideas here much further. That all said, I do think Kanal is a great piece of world cinema and I like forward to seeing more Wajda films.


2. The Decline of the American Empire (Denys Arcand, 1986)

A lot of reviews of this film on Letterboxd bemoan these insufferable intellectuals and their general douchebaggery but I'd argue Arcand is keenly aware of their shortcomings. The film is very much a critique of these snobby boomers who've largely sold out whatever ideals they might have had in youth. There's a rich irony to the fact that the characters are largely professors at the University of Montreal and barely talk about anything of real substance. Hell, these cats talk about fucking almost as much as the leads in Superbad, often with as much invention too. Furthermore, the third act really breaks the façade of carefree indulgence when the pain of one character's infidelity comes to bear. The movie ends on a note of seeming pleasantry, but it's also clear some lines have been crossed for at least one couple.

The Decline of the American Empire sort of snuck up on me. I was certainly interested in the well-written dialogue and Arcand's way of presenting these characters both on their own terms yet from a detached perspective, but the film's third act really brings the movie together beautifully, as both a story and a critique of boomer complacency. I certainly get why spending so much time with these characters would not be for everyone, but a lot of the problematic elements are very much deliberate and they end up being very rewarding.


1. Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller, 1998)

Babe was such a self-contained little fable that any sequel would seem like an inherently bad idea. But Babe: Pig in the City is not bad at all. In fact, it's even better than its predecessor. Don't get me wrong, the first Babe probably works stronger as a story, but Pig in the City is so wonderfully creative. George Miller wastes no time in changing things up, moving from the warm nature of the farm to an urban jungle that's almost noir-esque. This city is a real gem of creative visual effects and atmosphere, openly artificial and brimming with character. Miller and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie also capture some beautiful imagery, with sequences like the chase scene or especially the raid in the animal hotel (itself a wonderful set) being genuinely harrowing. The story itself is mostly just a vessel for set-pieces and the finale is probably too wacky for my tastes, but I can't deny the creative energy on screen. Miller feels totally uninhibited, fearlessly committing to his eccentric characters and inventive filmmaking choices. More than even the original Mad Max trilogy, Babe: Pig in the City feels like the true precursor to Fury Road.

That this movie was a box-office failure and largely a critical disappointment (despite massive praise from Siskel and Ebert) is just crushing to me. I can certainly see why this wouldn't be for everybody, but given how often kids movies are uninspired drivel, the unbridled passion at the heart of Pig in the City is to be valued. Frankly I'm at a loss by how much fun this was.

Looks like that last movie isn't happening, but I tried. It's been a month.

1. Soul
2. WW84
3. Monster Hunter
4. Coherence

U da man

This would be another month where the vast majority of what I watched were 2020 movies, so it was kind of slim pickings. Aside from my number one, most of this stuff is kind of in the three star range.

4. Death in the Garden (1956): "Now that inter-library loan is back up and functioning I can finally re-start my attempted chronological journey through the works of Luis Bunuel and I’m slowly getting up to the point where I’m getting to the movies that aren’t a major pain to find. It’s also one of the first films the guy made in French even though it is actually set in South America. The first half of the movie seems to be rather invested in Bunuel’s political interests as it deals with a labor unrest at a mining outpost and then the second half, in which ex-pats flee that conflict and become stranded in the jungle, fits more within his surrealist sensibilities. It was filmed in color and was one of his larger productions up to that point but I’m not really sure it quite worked for me. The film’s characters are basically archetypes, pretty much by design, and I think the ideas was to make them represent a cross-section of society but I’m not sure that idea really translated. There are some interesting images and ideas here and there but it doesn’t work great as a narrative and I’m not sure it really amounts to that much as a statement, or at least it didn’t really connect for me but it’s certainly a neat little progression in the filmmaker’s career."

3. Where is the Friend's House? (1987): "I blind bought the Abbas Kiarostami Koker Trilogy boxed set recently and this weekend seemed like as good a time to finally watch it as any. The first film of the three is Where is the Friend’s House? a small and intimate movie about a child who accidentally takes one of his classmate’s notebooks home with him and needs to return it to him so he can finish his homework that he could well get in a lot of trouble for not finishing as he’s already on thin ice with the teacher. So much of the rest of the movie consists of the boy looking around the rural city of Koker for another kid, which in and of itself doesn’t sound too thrilling but the point here isn’t so much the narrative as it is that the film is trying to capture the feeling of being a kid and trying to get what should be a simple thing accomplished but failing because you can’t really communicate in a way that adults will listen. In that sense it’s successful and Kiarostami certainly finds some good local flavor in this town, but this is definitely one of those movies that will have conventional audiences saying “nothing happens in this” and I’m not entirely in disagreement even if I kind of get the idea behind it. In fact I’m kind of surprised this was something of a breakthrough for the filmmaker in the international festival world because it feels more like the kind of early work that people are more likely to go back and appreciate after the filmmaker’s later successes. I can confirm that watching this first is kind of a legit precursor to the other two Koker movies though so don’t skip it."

2. Hombre (1967): "Hombre was a western made in that buffer space when revisionist westerns were still going on, but original recipe westerns were also still being made and some movies kind of landed somewhere between the two and Hombre would be one of the movies that fits in that later category. The film was directed by Martin Ritt, who was sort of an anonymous studio journeyman, and the film has the look and feel of an old school western and most of the basic plot points would not have been out of place in a John Wayne movie but the film has a certain interest in Native Americans that those other movies often didn’t. The film stars Paul Newman as a white drifter who was raised by Apache Indians and feels a kinship to them, which comes up later because he ends up on a stagecoach with a government agent from the bureau of Indian Affairs. So, despite the fact that this is a movie where almost everyone is white, the film is very interested in confronting the racism of the West and the plight of indigenous people. But again, this is largely in the background, the foreground story is something closer to what you’d expect from a western of the era. Paul Newman is pretty strong in the lead and the film is generally quite well put together. The film never quite went to that next level for me, but is a strong entry in the genre just the same."

1. And Life Goes On (1992): "After Where is the Friend’s House? I was a little worried whether this Koker Trilogy was going to work for me but this second film in the trilogy impressed me quite a bit more. Now, this Koker trilogy was never really supposed to be a trilogy it just kind of emerged as one because the movies sort of slotted together. Where is the Friend’s House? was made in 1987 and after it was completed Kiarostami went on to make Close-Up and then Koker (amuch of the region it was in) was hit with a devastating earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people. Unsure what had become of the people he met while making that first movie Kiarostami and his son drove up to the region both to see the devastation and try to find that movie’s non-actor star. Then a year later he made this film, which is something of a meta re-enactment of that trip he took to Koker but with an actor (actually a non-actor sociologist) playing the unnamed character based on him and another child playing his son. The film doesn’t really stop to explain all of this either so it would be a mistake to watch this without watching Where is the Friend’s House? and knowing the backstory. The film is generally a bit weightier than a lot of Kiarostami’s other more idiosyncratic films insomuch as it’s set against this backdrop of people recovering from this deadly disaster and the various landscapes that are driven through are striking. Kiarostami has grown a lot as a filmmaker between this and Where is the Friend’s House? both in terms of confidence and resources and this would be one of the key works in his filmography."

Doing my number five last since it makes sense to read the last Koker trilogy review last.

5. Through the Olive Trees (1994): "This third film in the Koker trilogy also looks back on the last film in the trilogy, in fact it’s specifically about the making of that movie. It looks at the story of Hossein Rezai and Tahereh Ladanian, some locals who played a pair of newlyweds in And Life Goes On, and apparently the real Hossein found himself attracted to the real Tahereh and proposed to her but was rejected in part because her family didn’t think he was good enough for her and Kiarostami observed this whole human drama while filming the movie. So, we’re kind of moving beyond the serious look at the aftermath of disaster which characterized the last movie and are moving into more playfully meta territory here. In fact the damn thing really folds in on itself because when he was making it Kiarostami was directing one actor playing a version of himself as he directed another actor also playing a Kiarostami alter-ego searching for an actor from yet another Kiarostami film… which probably makes this sound more egotistical than it is given that his stand-in here is really more of an observer than an active participant here. This is probably the most famous of the Koker trilogy in terms of showing up on lists and whatnot, which I must say I find rather curious as And Life Goes On strikes me as the more accessible title and that this one probably makes the least sense to audiences who haven’t seen the other two films. Also the gender politics here have probably not aged perfectly as this is in essence a story about a guy harassing a woman for scorning his advances in the workplace and just generally not taking “no” for an answer. The movie is not necessarily on this guy’s side as he does all of this, in fact he looks kind of pathetic by the end, but it doesn’t come down as hard on him as some might like and also rather pointedly makes the woman something of a mysterious figure rather than really getting her perspective on all of this."

It's the Fury Road of Babe movies.

Oh, dear God, I remember Gordy.

I never saw Gordy back in the day, but I do vividly remember this soundtrack cut from it by the "Whoop There It Is" guys: