The Big Chill
One of those films that made a massive cultural impact on it’s release but has seemed unable to capture the imaginations and attention of later generations, The Big Chill follows a group of former college friends who catch up over a weekend following the suicide of one of their friends. Featuring an all-star cast including Tom Berenger, William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, Kevin Klein, and more, this ensemble piece seeks to capture the ennui that settles over people when the changes of youth stop. The film was a touchstone for the Baby Boomer generation, a film that captured the zeitgeist of growing out of the youthful rebellion of the hippy movement and discovering that there was a life to live on the other side of revolution.
A film that explores social tensions not through direct action but through the growth and actions of their characters, it does make the film somewhat difficult to relate to in a modern setting. We watch as characters who once saw themselves as revolutionaries fall into a life of opulence and decadence, and their bemoaning of such an empty, easy existence is more annoying that gratifying when we live in a world these people refused to change for the better. Separating the political undertones of the failure of the hippie generation, our characters are simply not the most interesting or funny of people to spend two hours with. While the talented cast is able to wring emotion and genuine moments out of the script, their elevation of the material can only take it so far. It remains an interesting watch in terms of understanding a moment long ago forgotten, but otherwise not worth the visit in 2024.
Cat People
A reimaging of the classic 1942 Val Lewton horror, Cat People takes the initial ideas of that film and reworks them into a lurid, sexy, violent 1980s pulp fiction. Following Irena (Nastassja Kinski) as she travels to New Orleans to be reunited with her long lost brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell). During her visit, a mysterious black panther begins to attack and kill the people of the city, and a group of zookeepers including Oliver (John Heard) and Alice (Annette O-Toole) are tasked with capturing the creature. Sex, violence, and destiny all blend together as our characters try and survive the brutal cat that stalks in the shadows of the Big Easy.
Featuring great lead performances from both Kinski and Heard, as well as McDowell giving a fantastically creepy performance as the incestious brother, the film does well in transforming the originally film into a commentary on the excesses of the time. It features some great, grungy, grindhouse flairs to it, while maintaining it’s quality in terms of character and acting. It does tend to spin it’s wheels, as the mystery is quite obvious and yet is played as a shocking reveal, and it feels at times to be repeating the same scenes over and over. But there’s enough atmosphere here to overcome the lulls, and director Paul Schrader gives that glorious, garish sex and violence you’d expect from the director of Hardcore.
Deadpool & Wolverine
I want to like superhero movies, I really do. I used to! I remember being just as excited as everyone else for The Avengers, I loved Thor: Ragnarök. And I even enjoyed the first entry in this franchise, 2016’s Deadpool. But the recent output of the genre has left me extraordinarily cold. They seem less interested in developing the characters they have than reminding us of when we did love these movies. Deadpool & Wolverine is like a high school hero. Not without his charms and still able to get a good joke in here and there, he can’t help but only care about the old haunts and the good ol’ days. And I can’t help but pity that.
Deadpool & Wolverine is not interested in making a coherent film, not in any traditional way. There isn’t any catharsis, or change, or drive to anything that happens. It’s a parade of corpses, moments that are meant to make you point at the screen and say “I remember that thing”. Even outside the script (which is terrible on every level), the film is a hideous, drab mess, with the creativity of beige. There is nothing here to grab anyone for more than a quarter of a second, nothing to surprise or shock or dig at your heart. And it sucks because I genuinely believe Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and the character of Deadpool are capable of creating something really special. But this? This is creativity eating itself.
His Girl Friday
A classic screwball comedy, His Girl Friday features Cary Grant at his feistiest fast pace and Rosalind Russell as his dynamic dame in a film that is likely on the Mount Rushmore of romantic comedies. The two play a pair of divorced reporters, with Russell’s Hildy Johnson trying to move on with both her love life and her career, and Grant’s Walter Burns doing everything in his power to stop her. Chaos and shenanigans ensue as the case of the century draws Hildy back into the business, and Walter schemes to keep her as a reporter and as a wife. Featuring director Howard Hawks’ signature whip smart dialogue and character work, it’s easy to see how this film has become the classic it’s considered.
That’s not to say everything works here. The film is at it’s best when Grant and Russell are together on screen, trading barbs and constantly one-upping each other. The dialogue is the highlight of the feature, and the two actors present it with acid and adoration. But the surrounding plot never reaches the joys or tension found between these two actors. The tale of a condemned man, due to be hung at dawn, only for corruption and sensationalism to turn the story into a completely different beast, should be a compelling one. But whether the writing of this particular section isn’t as strong or whether Grant and Russell are just that impressive with their scenes, you find yourself just waiting for the former lovers to get back on screen together. Luckily enough there are more than enough scenes of the stars verbally duking it out to make up for what lacks in the rest of the story.
Horizon: Part 1
The first film in director Kevin Costner’s big financial gamble, Horizon: Part 1 is not a film as much as the preamble for a better film, stretched out to a three hour run time. Following various groups of people, from Civil War soldiers to new settlers to the Native tribes of the plains, we are treated to five or six different storylines at once. Cutting heedlessly from one story to another, with little to no connective tissue, we see our characters as the final days of the wild west begin to make their way to a new settlement by the name of Horizon. Using the immense vistas of the American West, the film implies an immensity it never fully accomplishes through story.
Meandering and unwilling to be cohesive in it’s editing (at times making you question whether hours, days, weeks, or years have passed between scenes) there is very little to hold onto with this film. Slow paced but without solid characters or story to ground itself, the film feels stuck in limbo, unwilling to admit this is the prologue to a much more interesting story. This is meant to set up the first of four films, and while those films have not come out yet I don’t doubt for a second that this film will be completely unnecessary to understand those films. Needlessly long and overall just an uninteresting experience.
Inside Out 2
The latest output from animation giant Pixar has left much to be desired, especially considering their groundbreaking early work. That doesn’t mean they are incapable of creating genuine and beautiful films anymore, as was the case with 2015’s Inside Out. But nine years after that film, the idea of returning to Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the other emotions felt unnecessary. While diving into the turbulence of puberty on the outside feels like a deep creative well, it’s one that can quickly fall into cliche. While director Kelsey Mann and writers Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein avoid most of this pitfall, they aren’t fully able to justify this film’s existence.
Following Joy as she must deal with the introduction of the new, more complex emotions that appear during puberty, the film quickly becomes a somewhat generic quest film. While there are some delightful visual adventures in the animation, the farther we get into the film the more these fall to the side in order to drive him their obvious message. There are highlights with the new emotions, with Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) all getting their own moments to shine, but they never seem as defined as the original five. The film ends up feeling like an afterthought when compared to the first film, a film made out of a shrug instead of a desire.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day
Animation can be such an inventive and unique tool for filmmakers if only they allow themselves to become unshackled from the conventions of the art. We can see that in Don Hertzfeldt’s 2012 masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day. The film, constructed out of three previous shorts by Hertzfeldt, has no standard plot, doesn’t feature characters or story or a narrative. Instead Hertzfeldt evokes emotion and ideas through a tableau of snippets of the every day. He has a central, non-descript character Bob, through whom we experience the awkward moments we think unique to ourselves, the lightest of thoughts as the galvanize into core beliefs, and eventually the forever which extends beyond our lives and the lives of everything, ever.
This is the rare film that is more of an experience than anything else. It’s a film that gives you double or triple what you’re willing to put into it, a film that can change your life if you want it to. It’s delightful, silly, poignant, powerful; it takes the medium of animation and shows you something that only a singular voice would be able to craft. It’s such a beautiful day whenever one remembers that this film exists in our world.
The Lady and the Beard
An early silent film by Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, The Lady and the Beard is a very simple film. Following a young kendo champion, the film revolves around the friction between his traditional ways and the new, modern world. This mostly displays itself in his sporting of a beard which, at the time, was considered incredibly old fashioned. This leads to him being laughed at by women, dismissed by contemporaries, and generally disregarded for his inability to adapt. While this leads to some fun slapstick, the film falls well short of the greatness Ozu will achieve later in his career.
This conflict between tradition and modernity is a theme often explored in Ozu’s work. We see it in the generation differences in Tokyo Story, and in the impotence of youth in Good Morning. With those films Ozu is able to carefully craft both a loving portrayal of tradition while leaving room for the change of time. In The Lady and the Beard, Ozu is never able to thread this needle, instead making a mockery of the past without ever embracing the greatness of it. Given that Ozu’s use of silence is often a strong motif of his work, a completely silent film may have robbed him of one of his most important techniques. Ultimately this is a film to see if one is a massive Ozu fan, but is unlikely to provide much for casual viewers.
Longlegs
Longlegs is director Oz Perkins throwback to classic serial killer thrillers of the 1990s, films that when good were great and when bad at least had a sense of fun to them. Along with this influence (with heavy references to The Silence of the Lambs) Perkins also draws from more darkly occult work, such as The Devils and The Omen. The combination of these influences gives us a film that is drenched in dread, that invests more in atmosphere than shock, and that relies on the power of it’s central performances to make the narrative work. Unfortunately, while Perkins frames this narrative in new and exciting ways, it’s never fully able to escape the shadow of what has come before.
Following rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she pursues a decades active serial killer Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), she stumbles across ritual killings that are connected in an unknown way to the killer. Certain elements of the film are never quite cohesive, with things mentioned early on only to be abandoned later, and the mystery feels equally contrived and simple. It’s in Perkins camerawork and the performances of Cage and Monroe that the film really shines. Monroe is great as the distant, terrified yet unrelenting agent, playing her smart yet naive with perfect balance. Cage gives another unhinged portrayal in the titular role, both deeply menacing and foolish, depending on the context. And Perkins use of shadows and long takes makes this a film that will quickly gain a devoted audience, even if I may not be among them.
Maxxxine
The final film in Ti West’s “X” trilogy, Maxxxine is a deeply frustrating film. I don’t know what my expectations were for this final film, but following up the well thought and deeply human horrors of X and Pearl with a incoherent and uninteresting dive into 80s Los Angeles was not the path West should have taken. Following Maxine Minx (a returning Mia Goth) as she looks to leave pornography behind and enter the legitimate film business, only for a serial killer from her past to threaten her new life, the film is completely lost on what it wants to be. While the influences in the other two films are apparent, there is no direct correlation to Maxxxine, and the failure of the film makes me wonder if West needs that grounding in order to make his films work.
There are bits of Giallo filmmaking here, pieces of 80s sleazebag cop thrillers, Chinatown references, and a screed against the satanic panic of the time. This grab bag of influences never connect and leave the film feeling disjointed and piecemeal. Goth is given virtually nothing to do as Maxine, her character bland reiterations of what she’s done before. While a supporting performance by Kevin Bacon as greasy private eye John Labat is an absolute standout, the majority of supporting characters are one dimensional and deeply uninteresting. Even the gore of this film, a highlight in the previous entries, is not up to par. A complete miss by almost all accounts.
North By Northwest
My knowledge of the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock is certainly limited. Considering his immense career which featured fifty-five feature length films over six decades, there is much to dive into. With his thriller North By Northwest, Hitchcock takes his penchant for suspense and crafts a fantastic and delightful thriller. Following Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, a New York ad-man who gets mistaken for a spy, Thornhill most go on the run and find the real spy before the evil foreign spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) takes him out. Along the way he runs across femme fatale Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), a beautiful young woman who’s motives and loyalties are constantly in question.
The film is a Bond film before the first Bond film ever came to be. Grand set pieces, great villains (including a fantastic Martin Landou as Vandamm’s right hand man Leonard), and a beautiful woman falling for the seductions of a much older man. The romance of the film is by far the weakest element, as I usually find it is in classic Hollywood pictures. But Marie Saint is still wonderful in the role, her desire and longing making her character stand out in the cast. Grant plays the mark well, his genuine confusion selling his character completely. Add to that set pieces that have become iconic but still thrill (such as the crop-duster sequence) and you get a great mid-century thriller.
Pearl
The second film in Ti West’s “X” trilogy, Pearl is a wonderfully crafted horror tryptic. Following the titular Pearl (Mia Goth) as she pursues a life greater than the one on her family farm in 1918 America, West borrows heavily from the grandeur of The Wizard of Oz while allowing the low budget schlock film The Wizard of Gore to guide the film as well. Goth gives her strongest performance in the trilogy as the young version of Pearl, a girl who’s psychopathic tendencies she’s both fighting against and embracing. She’s so deeply desperate for a different wife than the one she’s destined to live that it births a monster from within her, a bitter horror willing to do anything to live the life she thinks she deserves.
Other elements makes this stand tall in the trilogy. The set design is spectacular, taking us over a century in the past with ease and confidence. The sexual pervasiveness of the script makes for a delightful revisit on top of being thematically resonate with the previous film. The performances of Pearl’s parents Ruth (Tandi Wright) and simply Father (Matthew Sunderland) are wonderful, with Sutherland’s mute terror being a highlight. The two long takes in the film establish Goth as a true talent, and those alone are enough to make this a worthy revisit.
Rush
There will always be a soft spot for the car racing movie in my heart. I have no love for the sport itself, and having attended the events before wish never to again. But through the power of cinema actors, directors, and writers are able to elevate the sport into the thing of legend. With Ron Howard’s Rush, this is accomplished not only through energetic filmmaking and racing sequences, but by allowing us full access to the lives of these two mavericks of the racing world. Following the careers of James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl), two rivals in the 1976 racing season, as love, racing, and fear collide in fantastic fashion.
Writer Peter Morgan developed the script with the intention (or, at least, the ability) for the film to be made without a single racing scene, giving the off track scenes greater depth than you usually find in this genre. Hemsworth and Bruhl both embody the men completely, and the quiet desperation that drives their desires. Hemsworth’s Hunt is a man terrified of inadequacy, and his fear of never being the best causes him both to live in extreme excess and drive away any real relationship. Bruhl’s Lauda is an obsessive, also determined to be the best but instead relying on himself completely, limiting everything outside of his life that isn’t racing. These two men, determined to reach the same goal but destined to go about it in their own, sad ways makes their rivalry even deeper. One of the few films that’s able to portray how your rival is the only person able to truly understand you, and make you actually believe that.
The Sweet Hereafter
The film written about in this month’s issue of The Favourites, to read about loss, frailty, community, and acceptance in The Sweet Hereafter, click here.
The Terminator
James Cameron’s sci-fi horror classic, The Terminator remains one of the greatest films of the 1980s. Following Sarah Connor, the unexpected protagonist, as she must survive the time-travelling killing machine, it’s almost hard to review a film that does everything right. The script is incredibly tight, with almost every throw away line coming back into play later on and the motives and ideas clearly and plainly expressed through the frame. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfect as the unfeeling killer, giving one of the best physical performances you’ll see in cinema. Linda Hamilton transforms Sarah Connor from the girl next door to the badass heroine of the future over the course of the film, without ever pandering or losing the character we see at the beginning.
If there is any criticism to be lobbied at the film, one can maybe argue that the cop plot feels somewhat underbaked. It’s somewhat unfair to say, as when you have such well-rounded characters at the center of your film like Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese it feels guilty to want more. But on the other hand, it feels unfair to have an actor as great as Lance Henriksen on screen and not give him as much meat as possible. But aside from that, the thrills and horrors of this film are still an incredibly fun time forty years later.
Theodora Goes Wild
A 1930s screwball comedy, Theodora Goes Wild follows our titular Theodora (Irene Dunne) as a young woman leading a double life. Living in her small, conservative town of Lynnfield, she exists as the belittled and forgotten niece to two of the residents, helping in church and with the weekly book club. But secretly she’s the number one selling author in America, using a pseudonym to write scandalous and lewd stories for the national newspaper. When Michael (Melvyn Douglas), a nosy friend of her publisher, threatens to reveal her secret, Theodora begins to question where she is meant to be in the world and whether Lynnfield is the town she’s destined to stay in forever.
While the film forces a romance that never carries the sparks one hopes to see in these classic comedies, the comedic beats here are wonderful. Douglas turns from cad to beleaguered man with plum, and Irene Dunne proves she should be as big a household name as Jayne Mansfield or Greta Garbo. The themes of the film still resonate today, with it’s collision between tradition and modernity still being seen played out with families and small towns today. With the suffragette movement still being within the public memory of the time, the freedom which Theodora so desperately wants can still be related to today. A light, fun comedy with a touch of social commentary.
Through a Glass Darkly
A delicate and desolate family drama, Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly is lighter affair for the Swedish auteur that still delves into the darkest elements of humanity. Following a young woman on a weekend vacation with her husband, brother, and father as her mental stability begins to degrade completely. As she continues to spiral, her relationships with the men in her life are changed and twisted, in some cases beyond repair. Featuring Harriet Andersson as Karin, our doomed protagonist, giving a truly stunning performance, Bergman captures a family on the brink of collapse and creates an air of longing and penance that infiltrates every film of the film.
The three men in her life, her husband Martin (Max von Sydow), her father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), and her brother Minus (Lars Passgard) all represent different versions of Karin that exist. Her father, a man of intellect and cold, has been using Karin’s illness to write his new novel, a clinical and calculating view of his own daughter. Martin is loving but is unable to understand her pain, a doting husband who is quickly growing frustrated that he’s unable to fix her. Her brother is young, easily manipulated, and adoring in the way a young sibling is, but unwilling or unable to see her illness. She exists with three men who love her and none that understand her. It’s ultimately a film about the inevitability of feminine loneliness, of how the world as is may never understand the pains faced by women in a man’s world. A devastating and beautiful portrait of emotional turmoil.
X
Heavily discussed in this month’s featured article, I returned to Ti West’s X with some trepidation. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre inspired slasher, upon initial viewing, seemed very much to be an empty pastiche. But on this watch, without the baggage of hype or expectations, the film played much clearer in it’s methods. Following a group of adult film stars as the travel to a remote farmhouse to film a porno in secret, the film quickly falls into a gory mess of sex and death. But the film openly has much more on it’s mind than mindless violence, and West is able to thread the needle beautifully between the grimy influences and the more humanistic undertones that elevate this film above simple guts and gore filmmaking (filmmaking that I can also love, to be fair).
It’s the dichotomy between the quiet moments and the horror that makes this film special. A standout scene when pornstars Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson (Scott Mescudi) perform an acoustic cover of “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac is a beautiful, humanizing scene that develops our characters into dimensional beings. It provides the context of our characters existing outside of porn, and outside the assumptions people place on pornographic actors. This scene contrasted with the brutal slaying of a character later on, with blood soaking headlights and casting the whole scene on a demonic glow, plays again with out assumptions of people. A fantastic, gory exploration of sex, age, and assumption.