I used to write a lot about television. I used to watch a lot of television. Not as much now ... I've watched 176 movies so far this year, 185 the year before that, and that's where my viewing time goes. In fact, this is the first blog post about television I have written since last December. So this is mostly just a reminder to me of what I've watched this year that mattered, even if I didn't write about it. In no particular order:
Blitz carries an aura of prestige: Oscar-winner Steve McQueen takes on life in London during the German attacks during World War II. Saoirse Ronan has four Oscar nominations of her own, and although I think she's at her best in her Greta Gerwig movies, she certainly shines here. New discovery Elliott Heffernan as 9-year-old George is a real find who would seem to have a strong career ahead of him.
Blitz's look is eye-catching in an appropriately dreary way (Yorick Le Saux is the cinematographer), and Ronan's blonde hair stands out strikingly (as do the red clothes she often wears). McQueen presents the historical story as a personal one ... Ronan plays a young mother, Rita, who sends her son George off as part of an evacuation of children. George escapes that fate, and works his way back home to London. McQueen effectively moves between the various elements he has concocted, with just enough flashbacks to establish Rita's character. And the cast is filled with fun names: Paul Weller of The Jam plays Rita's aging father, poet Linton Kwesi Johnson turns up, and there's the ever-present Stephen Graham as a frightening stand-in for Fagin. We even get Christopher Chung from Slow Horses as one of Graham's henchmen.
Somehow it doesn't quite add up to a classic. Harris Dickinson is completely wasted. His scenes could have been eliminated without damage to the film. There is an inherent intensity in the situation, the incessant bombing, George's long trip home, but outside of a few strong set pieces, everything feels a bit slack. Blitz is a good movie that will probably earn a couple of Oscar nominations. But it's my fourth McQueen movie, and it falls short of the others (Hunger and 12 Years a Slave for sure, even Widows).
Before this, I had seen a dozen Godard movies, and I consider myself a huge fan, with two classics (Breathless and Vivre sa Vie) and many others I rate highly. But ... and it's a big but ... the most recent of those films is Weekend, which came out in 1967. I have seen a dozen, but still have a limited understand of Godard's work overall.
So now I've watched Goodbye to Language, considered one of his late highlights (#117 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of the 21st century). And I fear it doesn't convince me that I need to watch more post-Weekend Godard.
It's pretty much what I expected, given my limited knowledge about Godard's later work. It's highly experimental, purposely inscrutable, very "in your face". Godard challenges the viewer to interpret what he offers, and makes interpretation difficult if not impossible. I have no insights, but it seems to me that he is uninterested in meaning as a theme or subject. Instead, he wants to challenge the standards of cinema, in the process challenging us as an audience. Indeed, Goodbye to Language is challenging. Clearly, some have found the film insightful. But it completely missed the boat for me. Godard made it in 3D, and the print I watched was in 2D ... maybe it mattered, but I doubt it.
This is the fifth bonus film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Bonus Week 5 is called "Past Hosts Week":
When Benjamin Milot took on hosting duties as the third host in LSC 4 he created a theme to honor past hosts' favorite movies that he kept going up until LSC 7, sometimes combining the theme with his own favorite movies list as the current host.
This bonus challenge is to watch a movie from one of our past three hosts favorite movies lists. Monsieur Flynn's (LSC 1) is here, kurt k's (LSC 2-3) is here, and Benjamin Milot's (LSC 4-8) is here.
I didn't expect to like Dear Zachary. I knew it was highly regarded, and it felt like a regular inhabitant of the myriad Letterboxd lists I have of films to watch. But it looked to be a true crime documentary, and I imagined something like the things that turn up regularly on television programs like Dateline NBC: a voyeuristic account of a real tragedy involving real people. It's true, my sense of those programs is biased in useless ways, since I don't watch them and so don't actually know if my description of them is accurate. I still don't know.
But Kurt Kuenne is up to something different with his film, something more personal, something that rejects voyeurism to focus on the real tragedy and the real people. Most obviously, Kuenne was a childhood friend of the victim, Andrew Bagby. He couldn't treat the story dispassionately, because he was among the mourners. He dealt with it in his own way ... he was a filmmaker.
The story took a turn when the woman accused of Andrew's murder, an ex-girlfriend named Shirley Turner, announced that she was pregnant with her and Andrew's child. That child, when born, was named Zachary, which helped provide a focus for Kuenne. He would make a film about his friend, one that his son could watch in the future to see what kind of a man his father was. It wasn't hard to get people to agree to be interviewed, because Andrew was universally liked.
The story takes further turns that I will avoid here in the name of spoiler prevention. Suffice to say that the case overall resulted in changes to Canadian law.
The point is, the personal experiences of Kuenne and Andrew's family, friends, and colleagues raise the film above something you watch on a Friday night to pass the time. Dear Zachary carries an emotional wallop that I wasn't expecting.
Here is a short film about the aftermath. Do not watch unless you have already seen Dear Zachary.
It's easy to see why The Return was made. You've got a classic tale based on Homer's Odyssey. You've got two top actors in Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, appearing together for the first time since The English Patient in 1996. One of the screenwriters was the esteemed Edward Bond, his last film before his death at 89. The director was Oscar-nominated Uberto Pasolini.
Epic story, honored actors and crew, what could go wrong? Honestly, nothing goes wrong. But after watching The Return, I'm not sure why anyone bothered. Oh, Fiennes and Binoche might get Oscar nominations, and cinematographer Marius Panduru will be in the Oscar discussion as well. Perhaps the problem lies in the decision to turn Homer's epic into a brooding character story. That gives the two stars plenty to chew on, and they deliver, but the action is pretty limited until an ending so violent it earns the picture its "R" rating. It takes forever to get things going ... Odysseus washes ashore on Ithaca, naked, unrecognizable, then for what felt like forever we go back and forth between Odysseus keeping his identity a secret and Penelope pining for the man who left her so many years ago. It's not boring, not with two actors as strong as the leads. But it did feel like it took ten years to get Odysseus, naked on that beach, to finally claim his identity. The Return is not a waste of your time or the talent involved, it's just inconsequential.
This is the fifteenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 15 is called "Different Drums Week":
Think outside the box: wear a giant papier-mâché head and front a band. Don't conform: master an other-worldy-sounding instrument. Blaze a new trail: start singing metal in your 90s. Be unexpected: bring pop to the opera and opera to the club. Embrace the unconventional: start a one-man band. Stray from the beaten path: become the greatest, worst singer ever.
This week's challenge is to march to the beat of your own drum by watching a film that marries documentary and decidedly non-mainstream music in a swirl of sound and storytelling that converges outside the popular consciousness. Thankfully, Mike Sean has curated a handy selection of fitting novelties on his delightfully esoteric Different Drums: Documentaries on Musical Curiosities list.
Johan von Sydow takes a stylistic kitchen-sink approach to his documentary on the singer Tiny Tim. He blends old performance footage with animated recreations, interviews with relevant people in Tiny's life and voice-over narration taken from Tiny's diary read by Weird Al Yankovic. There is a lot of love for Tiny Tim in the movie ... the film wants us to embrace the eccentricities in the man's life, wants to show us the art behind the man's presentation. We hear from avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and are reminded that Bob Dylan and John Lennon were fans.
There is no attempt to offer a complete version of Tiny's life. The film's short running time (78 minutes) helps ensure this, since von Sydow is covering the entire length of Tiny's life and needs to squeeze in what von Sydow thinks is important. We don't know what von Sydow is leaving out. The movie isn't merely a gloss on Tiny Tim. We see the ups and downs of his private life, including his three marriages (one of the interviewees is his daughter), but I never lost the feeling that something was being left out.
The film ends with a marvelous anecdote that I can't resist spoiling. The legendary Wavy Gravy, who knew everyone in Greenwich Village during Tiny's formative years, tells a story about he and Tiny Tim catching a ride with Neal Cassady. As Wavy tells the story, we see an animated representation.
We were driving up the west side highway in New York ... with Neal Cassady driving the car, and Neal and Tiny singing Bing Crosby duets as we drove along. Every now and then he'd go, "Oh Mr. Cassady, not so fast!" "Oh relax, Tiny, everything's cool! I'm just gonna roll this joint and drive with my knee.
Perhaps it helps if you know me a little bit. The idea of Wavy Gravy, Tiny Tim, and Neal Cassady together in a car makes my day.
Over the past few weeks, I have taken part in a, what do you call them, not memes I don't think ... on Bluesky:
"Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order."
Here are my 20 books:
Albert Camus, The Plague Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only Greil Marcus, Mystery Train Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths Walter R. Brooks, Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper Bill James, The 1982 Baseball Abstract Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer Ariel Schrag, Awkward and Definition
I've started posting a video of a song a day on Bluesky, and today I am up to 1959.
Rarely has a popular song been so perfectly troublesome to a certain group of people, because "Shout" has overwhelmingly clear roots in black gospel music. "Shout," needless to say, is rather secular.
Probably to most famous version, over the years, is this one, a modern staple everywhere a crowd needs to be driven into a frenzy:
This is the fourteenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 14 is called "Voodoo, Hoodoo & Afro-Caribbean Religions Week":
Western films that depict religions and traditions with roots in African spirituality are often highly problematic, containing many inaccuracies and stereotypes that vilify practitioners of Voodoo, Hoodoo, and the many other varied religions, traditions, beliefs, and practices of diasporic Africans as they were enslaved and forced to labor in North and South America. Fear of the role that practitioners of Vodou had in the successful Haitian Revolution led to action against practitioners of Voodoo in the United States and elsewhere and since then Voodoo has been synonymous with a generalized evil, dark magic or even witchcraft or satanism in direct opposition to white Christianity. The most famous trope of Voodoo in popular culture is Voodoo dolls, which are not even a part of either Haitian Vodou or Louisianan Voodoo. The term Zombi also comes from Voodoo and refers to people who are magically emptied of agency and thus easily manipulated, a great metaphor for enslavement.
This week's challenge is to watch a movie featuring Voodoo, Hoodoo or other Afro-Caribbean religions from MikkelHH's list here.
Way back at the beginning of my foray into the Letterboxd Season Challenge (the second movie from my first participation), I watched a pretty terrible movie. The director of the movie actually saw this and left a comment, explaining what had gone wrong with the film, and recommending another of his movies that he was more proud of (I later saw it, and it was a definite improvement).
I mention this because, while I don't have a very large readership, I still worry when I am going to pan a film, that I'll be stepping over the bounds of fairness if one of the creators pops in.
Dead & Buried came out in 1981, but a lot of the people who worked on the film are still around, so if any of them see this, I want to emphasize that this is an honorable attempt at a horror film, one that has developed a cult following over the years. (It has a Metascore of 71/100). Having said that, Dead & Buried didn't work for me.
The best thing about the film is the work of special effects artist Stan Winston (in his career, he won four Oscars for his work). There are lots of truly gruesome things in Dead & Buried, great stuff if you're so inclined.
Another selling point was the participation of Dan O'Bannon, although O'Bannon later denied having influenced the film.
The budget was small, which makes Winston's work all the more impressive. The cast was filled with recognizable actors. The lead, James Farantino, had been a regular on the TV series The Bold Ones, and had plenty of other TV credits. Melody Anderson was another who was frequently seen on television (and we remember her from Flash Gordon). The biggest name was Jack Albertson, who had won an Oscar, an Emmy (as "The Man" in Chico and the Man), and a Tony. Albertson had cancer during filming, and died soon after the film's release. The movie even has Robert Englund, who three years later began his long run as Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
These people are all professionals, and they do a professional job. It's pointless to complain, especially since the movie has a lot of fans. It's not so-bad-it's-good, it's not embarrassing, it's not a waste of time. But I'm going to forget about it as soon as I am done writing this.
For a different take, here is the great Guillermo del Toro: