Steven Rubio's Online Life

film fatales #215: the breaker upperers (madeleine sami and jackie van beek, 2018)

This is the fourth 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 4 is called "Her Dark Material Week":

Are you familiar with Letterboxd user's hyper-specific lists? You know, the ones with weirdly-similar, surprisingly common details shared by two or three otherwise unrelated films? It's too bad there aren't enough options for an LSC weekly challenge. They're inspiring, though, so, in that vein, we'll cast our attention toward a list that goes a bit broader but still feels sufficiently focused. The first shared element for this week's challenge is that the movie be female-led (or the storyline at least female-driven.) Tipping the scales more equitably is something we're interested in here at LSC, and setting our sights on stories about women is a small but conscious step in that direction. Second, there's a twist! Forget light and frothy. Instead, we need something with an undercurrent of darkness, as there's nothing like a streak of controversy to keep things interesting. And, third, let there be LOLs! Laughing has myriad health benefits (it can increase your immune response, for one), and who couldn't be in better health?

Voila! Your challenge this week is to watch a title from Kevin MJ's The Best Female-Led Dark Comedy Films list. It might not carve out as meticulous a nano genre as some others, but it'll give us a wealth of options and hopefully prove as much fun!

Well, I was warned. The Breaker Upperers is a dark comedy, and I'm not a fan of modern comedies. Using the Letterboxd definition of comedies, I have given my highest rating to only two comedies in the 21st century. At some point (and I reached this point a long time ago) it is pointless for me to comment on modern comedies. Good ones, bad ones, they connect with me so rarely that I have nothing to say, and my evaluation is so biased that no one can learn anything from my opinion. So I'll say that The Breaker Upperers is refreshing in that it's a buddy movie about women, and Madeleine Sami and Jackie van Beek, who directed, wrote, and starred, are talented. And Lucy Lawless has a blink-and-you'll-miss it cameo.

from up on poppy hill (goro miyazaki, 2011)

This is the third 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 3 is called "Nicecore Week":

After the stress of last week, let's go the other direction and take it easy with a nice film. Specifically Nicecore, a term I first heard several years ago associated with the release of Paddington 2. “If you’re kind and polite, the world will be right," says the titular bear. In the rather unkind political reality during which the term arose, people looked to the movies for "radical kindness". Although these films are "nice", they can still hold emotional depth, conflict, and complexity. This list is a helpful reference, from Winnie the Pooh to Totoro too.

This week let's celebrate all kinds of kindness and watch a previously unseen Nicecore film.

This is the second film directed by Goro Miyazaki, son of the great Hayao (who co-wrote the script). Compared to some of the classic Ghibli movies, From Up on Poppy Hill is relatively straightforward, missing much of the flights of fantasy associated with Goro's father. It tells the story of teenage love in 1963 Japan, with specific ties to the history of the time. This works fine, so maybe it's on me, but I kept waiting for supernatural beings to turn up, if not Totoro, at least some soot bunnies. The plot, about young romance and coming-of-age family life, captures our attention, and there's really nothing wrong with the movie. It just wasn't quite what I wanted.

That's no one's fault but my own, and your mileage may vary. It is a very good movie. Also, being set in 1963 Japan, it includes a nostalgic memory from my own youth. In 1963, a Japanese pop hit, "Ue o Muite Arukō", was released in the United States under the title "Sukiyaki", where it reached #1 on the charts.

Many years later, my niece gave herself a birthday party where she asked each of us to present something special, not a gift but something creative. I printed out the words to "Ue o Muite Arukō", downloaded a karaoke version and adjusted the pitch to fit my vocal range, and for the party, I sang the song, reading the lyrics off the page. Afterwards, the crowd was split between those who said "I didn't know he could sing" and those who said "I didn't know he spoke Japanese".

I'm not the only American who remembers that song. Bob Dylan played it in Japan in 1986:

geezer cinema: night moves (arthur penn, 1975)

This is the first 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 1 is called "Roger Ebert's Great Movies Week":

The first bonus entry for this year's challenge is the very first theme from the very first Letterboxd Season Challenge! In fact Roger Ebert's Great Movies made it as a theme on the first five LSCs until previous host Benjamin Milot retired it, with one last time as a bonus theme in LSC 5. We're resurrecting the theme again for the 10th anniversary!

This bonus challenge is to watch one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies!

This may be a cheat. I think I saw this many years ago, but since I can't remember anything about it, I figure it's OK to treat it as "unseen" for the Challenge.

Roger Ebert wrote of Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby in Night Moves:

There is a profound disconnect between his investigation and what is really happening, and essentially the movie shows him acting like a private eye while the case unfolds independently in front of him.... What [Hackman] brings to “Night Moves” is crucial; he must be absolutely sure of his identity as a free-lance gumshoe, even while all of his craft is useless and all of his hunches are based on ignorance of the big picture.

The typical old-school private eye is a bit smarter than everyone else. It's the noir "hero" that gets it all wrong, which is how Night Moves is more neo-noir than private eye movie. It's a bit like Altman/Gould's The Long Goodbye, if not as good. The film takes its time getting to the core mystery ... it's almost a character study at first, and while the acting is good and the characters are interesting, I was getting a bit impatient. When the mystery plot begins to unfold, things pick up, but since Harry Moseby is always unknowingly a step behind, the forward momentum is hesitant at best. Also in the Raymond Chandler tradition, once everything is played out, it's not entirely clear who has done what to whom for what reason, if that kind of thing matters to you.

Night Moves was the first pairing of Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman since Bonnie and Clyde. Crucially, editor Dede Allen is also present, although Stephen A. Rotter is listed as co-editor. I found the film to be more interesting in the post-mortem than in the actual watching ... there are some intriguing things going on with genre here that make for good discussion, but I wanted more from the movie itself.

sabotage (alfred hitchcock, 1936)

This is the second 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 2 is called "Anxiety Week":

“Anxious-nervous, like he’s dreading it or anxious-excited like he’s looking forward to it?” I, like Nick from The Parent Trap, am anxious-excited for this week. Last year we featured the Polish Moral Anxiety movement, which featured films made in response to real-world anxieties. This year it will be the films themselves that provide the anxiety. Here we celebrate films that get under your skin and keep you on edge, whether it's action, horror, cringe comedy, or, uh, Stuart Little 2 apparently? I haven't seen it but I can only imagine the tension.

This week we invite you to make yourself uncomfortable and watch a previously unseen anxiety-inducing film.

I can't be particularly fair with Sabotage. I didn't realize it when I started the film, but I was tired, and soon I was struggling to stay awake. It only lasts 77 minutes, and I did manage to keep from falling asleep. But I'm not sure I really appreciated the suspense ... I wasn't anxious enough.

Sabotage was adapted from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, and is considered by some to be Hitchcock's finest film from his British period. That feels excessive to me, even if I try to be kind in order to compensate for my sleepiness. It's certainly worth a second viewing after I've had some caffeine. But I found the buildup to the suspenseful scenes to be draggy, such that even at 77 minutes, it felt long. Sylvia Sidney and Oskar Homolka are fine in the leads, and I wasn't annoyed by teenager Desmond Tester. But I didn't care enough about the characters, the setting, anything. Still, as with even the worst Hitchcock movies, there is one classic scene, when the teenager is unknowingly sent off to deliver a bomb to Picadilly Circus station. For these few minutes, Hitchcock delivers the anxiety.

african-american directors series: sweet sweetback's baadassss song (melvin van peebles, 1971)

This is the first 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 1 is called "The American History of X Week":

Hollywood has a fickle relationship with the letter X. These days it's a popular (if increasingly uninspired) choice for the rare franchise that makes it to a tenth installment: The Land Before Time, Friday the 13th, The Fast and Furious, and Saw have all adopted the roman numeral. But before this new millennium fad, X meant something very different.

In 1968, in response to the desire for a more faceted system of ratings—and, in its early days, to promote the kind of artistic freedom the Motion Picture Production Code had quashed—the MPAA replaced its "approved" and "not approved" seals with a quartet of letters: G, M, R, and X. The X-rating indicated, simply, that a film was appropriate for adults only.

Soon after, in 1969, Midnight Cowboy burst onto the scene. Worried about exposing youngsters to the film's frank homosexual content and depictions of drug use, United Artists chose to self-apply the X-rating, hoping the choice would not only protect American youth but drum up publicity, too. Because the MPAA had failed to trademark their new content advisory system, everyone from Walt Disney to Gerard Damiano (director of Deep Throat) could slap any rating they wished on their work. And the porn industry wished. Once the floodgates had opened, however, the X-rating didn't last long. By 1973, Hollywood studios had given up on the rating (the adult film industry's tongue-in-cheek co-opting having soured it), and the purveyors of explicit films had done the same, instead preferring to use "XXX" to denote the strength of the adult content in their movies. The X-rating languished in Hollywood until 1990 (although independent and international filmmakers didn't shy away), when the MPAA replaced it with the newly minted—and trademarked—NC-17.

To kick off The Letterboxd Season Challenge's tenth installment (LSC10, incidentally, not LSCX), we take a look back at the original era of X. This week's challenge is to watch a mainstream (non-porn) MPAA X-rated film from the rating's 22-year lifespan, conveniently compiled in this list from C Collins.

In 1971, Huey Newton wrote an extensive analysis of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, beginning, "It is the first truly revolutionary Black film made and it is presented to us by a Black man." Newton found the film ripe for explication, and his lengthy piece provides insight into the film and the times. Watching Sweet Sweetback in 2024, we recognize it as a movie of its times, but it retains relevance today, for the situation for black men in America is only partly improved from 1971.

Speaking solely in terms of its impact on American cinema, Sweet Sweetback is trendsetting. Yes, it was "rated X by an all-white jury", and it comes by that rating honestly, with several seemingly unsimulated sex scenes. There is also extreme violence, but these scenes affect us differently depending on who is performing the violence. When white men beat black men, we feel anger ... when black men retaliate, we feel redemption.

As a kid, I remember hearing music on FM radio made by Van Peebles. It was like nothing I'd heard, a combination of jazzy underpinnings and poetic readings. Van Peebles told of lives outside of my white suburban situation, and it was memorable ... it opened up some odd new worlds. Van Peebles is present on the soundtrack to Sweet Sweetback, backed by Earth, Wind & Fire, who released their first two albums in 1971. What sounded like music from outer space on the radio makes perfect sense as the accompaniment to Sweetback's adventures.

Van Peebles worked on a very low budget, partly because no big studios would finance him, although that gave him the independence he needed. He uses an experimental touch at times ... the film has roots in the French New Wave. Things get repetitive near the end, but it doesn't ruin the movie. There is a clear auteur behind the film, as befits a movie where the same person is producer, director, writer, editor, star, and soundtrack contributor. No one else could have made Sweet Sweetback. Along with Shaft, also released in 1971, Sweetback also kicked off the blaxploitation genre.