July 2018 Recap

(image via The New York Times)

Despite my continued lack of posting, I've actually been doing more writing in the past few weeks than I have all summer; somehow, I just cannot bring myself to actually go back and edit everything I have been writing and post it. Instead, I write these massive essays in a creative furor, sometimes staying up half of the night getting them done, and then abandon them to move onto something else. Hopefully in the future I actually work up the motivation--and the nerve--to get these pieces out there, but in the meantime, I'm at least keeping up with these recaps. July saw a whole bunch of first time viewings, as usual, but also a number of re-watches. Often I feel so overwhelmed by the number of films out there that I've yet to see that I neglect returning to old favorites, but when I finally do I remember that it's in re-watching that you really learn about a film and come to appreciate it; a single viewing is never enough. In particular, re-watching Sex, Lies, and Videotape affirmed it as one of my favorite movies, but even more rewarding were my viewings of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Crying Game, two films that I thought were merely okay back in 2015 but gained a whole new appreciation for upon my revisits. Despite these great re-watches, however, I also discovered some excellent films that I am confident will also be affirmed as favorites when I come to revisit them; see what they are after the cut.


First-Time Viewings: 48
Re-Watches: 7

1. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
2. The Breaking Point (1950)
3. Re-Watch: Real Life (1979)
4. Lady on a Train (1945)
5. Two Seconds (1932)
6. The Walking Stick (1970)
7. The Clay Pigeon (1949)
8. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
9. Smart Money (1931)
10. Trapeze (1956)
11. The Big Cube (1969)
12. The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996)
13. M (1931)
14. Golden Boy (1939)
15. Lady in the Lake (1947)
16. Amarcord (1973)
17. Ace in the Hole (1951)
18. The Shopworn Angel (1938)
19. Fury (1936)
20. Fat City (1972)
21. The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
22. Thoroughbreds (2018)
23. Tampopo (1985)
24. The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow (2014)
25. Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938)
26. Tall Story (1960)
27. Bridge to the Sun (1961)
28. Re-Watch: The Little Rascals (1994)
29. Early Summer (1951)
30. Equinox Flower (1958)
31. Re-Watch: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)
32. El Norte (1983)
33. Modern Girls (1986)
34. Putney Swope (1969)
35. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927)
36. The Wildcat (1921)
37. Stormy Weather (1943)
38. Straight Time (1978)
39. Re-Watch: Incredibles 2 (2018)
40. Coco (2017)
41. Straw Dogs (1971)
42. Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015)
43. Manhandled (1924)
44. California Suite (1978)
45. The Handmaiden (2016)
46. Le Bonheur (1965)
47. Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)
48. Tomorrow is Forever (1946)
49. Re-Watch: Being John Malkovich (1999)
50. Parnell (1937)
51. Tess (1979)
52. Maudie (2017) 
53. Re-Watch: Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)
54. Re-Watch: The Crying Game (1992)
55. My Favorite Year (1982) 

 By Decade:

• 10s: 0
• 20s: 3
• 30s: 8
• 40s: 6
• 50s: 5
• 60s: 6
• 70s: 9
• 80s: 5
• 90s: 4
• 2000s: 0
• 2010s: 9

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) (image via Medium.com)

My best movie day of the month actually occurred on July 1st, Canada Day, which I celebrated with a double feature of John Garfield movies: The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Breaking Point. While the latter was perhaps the better film of the pair, my breath was taken away by the aching romanticism of Postman, the glossiest Noir I have had the pleasure of viewing. With every movie I see of Garfield's, I come to appreciate him more, and here he not only proved his acting chops but did a superb job allowing Lana Turner to show hers, something she unfortunately did not often get to do in her lengthy career. Together, they are an unbelievably beautiful couple, fully making up for the Code-mandated lack of explicit sexual content with romantic chemistry that lights up the screen even in the still photo included above. The Postman Always Rings Twice is more iconic than it is revered, with many diehard Noir fans preferring grittier takes on crime than this glossy MGM picture that is just a few steps away from being a romantic melodrama rather than a Noir, but for my tastes--which will always lean in favor of Garfield, who is no question a top-tier Noir protagonist even if his surroundings here are a lot prettier than usual--this is just about as good as Noir gets.

Ace in the Hole (1951) (image via Rotten Tomatoes)

It is rare nowadays that I watch a critically acclaimed classic and find myself surprised by how good it is; I have seen so many fantastic films from Hollywood's Golden Age that usually the problem is the opposite, with bona fide masterpieces unable to top films I have already seen. I was particularly worried that would be the case with Ace in the Hole, since I am perhaps the only cinephile on the planet who does not tend to enjoy films about newspapers and journalism. As it turns out, I should have trusted Billy Wilder, because from the opening frames I was hooked, and as the film went on, my jaw started inching down, and by the time a crane shot of a massive crowd happened, it was all I could do to lift my jaw right off the floor. This is a film that breaks down every barrier, constantly shocking its audience with how far it will go and how savagely it is willing to take down those who profit off of the suffering of innocent people. Kirk Douglas gives perhaps the best performance of his career as the self-centered newspaperman at the film's center, a man who would be the villain in any other film, yet here somehow comes out as the most human among the skin-crawling cast of characters, save for the man in the hole. It is nearly impossible to select a best film among the filmography of Billy Wilder, but--despite my deep love and affection for Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, and so many more-- I believe this might just be his masterpiece.

The Honeymoon Killers (1970) (image via Letterboxd)

The Honeymoon Killers is a strange blend of arthouse and exploitation, and I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it. Contrary to the film's lurid and, to my mind, pretty off-putting marketing, Martha's weight is not given a lot of focus in the film; in fact, very little would change if she was merely a homely, average-weight woman (and as it is, she is far from being morbidly obese as a tagline like "fat Martha" implies). Instead, this is a rather intuitive, even sensitive exploration of a lonely, overweight woman and the lengths she will go to in order to avoid being alone again. Shirley Stoler puts in a great performance as a woman who starts out sympathetic but whose obsession with her boyfriend slowly morphs her into something quite different and even monstrous, and Tony Lo Bianco is perfect as the charming and handsome blank slate that Martha projects all of her romantic ideals onto. The whole film is shot with clean black-and-white photography that gives the events a sense of importance and poignancy that is more appropriate in arthouse cinema than the exploitation picture this was likely intended to be, and cements it as a legitimate and worthwhile entry in the true crime genre.

Thoroughbreds (2018) (image via Parade.com)

The common theme among my favorite movies this month are unhinged and/or criminal characters. In Thoroughbreds, the lovely ladies at the center of the action are both: Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, two of the most gifted young actresses working today, play a pair of teenage sociopaths who are quick turn to crime when conventional solutions fail. What most impressed me about this film was how free of exposition it is: it takes a plot that easily could have played out in a 20-minute short film, and turns it into a complex puzzle for the viewer to solve, never offering easy answers about even the most basic elements of the plot. For example, the context of the very first scene, in which Cooke visit Taylor-Joy's home, is not explained for about 15 or 20 minutes; up to that point, the viewer has to make a series of guesses about the characters' relationship based on subtle clues in their dialogue and behavior. The second most impressive thing was how the film does not give the audience an obvious character to root for. In many ways, this film reminds me of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, but that film offers an easy out in Farley Granger, who is clearly the good guy to Robert Walker's psychotic. In this film, the options are not so straightforward: Cooke is a very intuitive character who has a great understanding of other people, but she feels no emotion herself, and as such has no capacity for empathy; meanwhile, Taylor-Joy is a very emotional person, but completely self-centered, putting her feelings ahead of all else. The great fun of this film is trying to understand these two complex characters, and the success of the film is evident in the fact that by the end, you're still guessing.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) (image via Film Forum)

When thinking about all of the world's film movements, the French New Wave seems so old-hat, and yet I really have not delved into it nearly as extensively as I feel like I have from all of the reading about film I have done in the last few years. This month, I took a big step in my French film education by watching two films from Agnes Varda, one of the biggest names from this period that I had not yet begun to explore. Le Bonheur was a great surprise--and inspired one of those essays I mentioned in the intro to this post--but Cleo from 5 to 7 was the one I really fell in love with. It has so many of my favorite things: it's set in real-time, it's an intimate character study, it's shot in beautiful black-and-white. And while it is more formally straightforward than many other classics of the French New Wave, it devises its own methods of subverting expectations. In particular, I spent much of the film conscious of the title's promise of taking place over 2 hours, and the film's reality as being set in real-time and only having a 90-minute run-time; at what point would there be a time-jump? I kept waiting for one, until the film ended, and then I realized the clever trick the title played on me. However, despite that last half hour going un-filmed, the title makes it a reality: where most films definitively end when the last frame fades out, this one has a half hour of possibilities, unseen but ripe in the viewer's imagination. This is a really lovely film, one that makes me excited to keep going in my exploration of the French New Wave.