BuysCollection MUST be complete. Got me the Doctor Who: Flux DVD as soon as it was available.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: With the gorgeously shot 70s setting, Paul Thomas Anderson seems to return to his roots with Licorice Pizza, but I thought less of Boogie Nights than Inherent Vice in terms of the comedy. In that the supporting characters are all weird, amusing creeps worth their weight in giggles. And of course, it's a return to Anderson's actual roots, incorporating memories and actual locations from his youth, all made more personal by the casting of family and close friends. Which brings us to the Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, naturalistic new faces making their film debut in a story about an unlikely romance. Beyond the "don't do this at home" factor, the film is quite sensitive to the realities of a 15-year-old's crush on a 25+-year-old and the latter being drawn in by flattery. The numbers don't lie, but emotionally, it's made more complicated by the adult life Hoffman's character is living, that of a child star turned businessman, while Alana is in arrested development (and yet put off by the immature shenanigans of her friend and business partner). It's more a coming of age for her than for him, even if she's older. It's a chill movie with a title that evokes hanging out and listening to some tunes - I do sometimes think period movies like this exist to sell soundtracks - and not unlike a lot of PTA, meanders from moment to moment, but pleasantly so. And it's not without excitement. I wonder if the runaway truck sequence was easier to film because pandemic streets are as empty as gas crisis ones. Look, I'm gonna say it. Personally, I'd rather PTA do more deadpan comedies like this than arctic blast dramas like Phantom Thread.
At home: If you liked James Gunn's Suicide Squad, you're gonna love Peacemaker. Gunn brings the same deflation tactics he perfected in Guardians of the Galaxy to put the entire DCEU on notice and the lead on a necessary redemption arc. If you're a fan of any character appearing of even referenced from the comics, you're in for a savage take-down of your fave. None more so than Vigilante who might be the weak link as I think the joke of his being a psychopath on the spectrum wears thin long before the finale. On the other hand, the series also gives us the character find of 2022, Adebayo (Orange Is the New Black's Danielle Brooks), and one of Gunn's trademark animal heroes, Eagly, as well as badass cop played by Annie Chang. And of course there's John Cena himself who, though he can do action, is essentially a comic actor. There's no amount of humiliation he isn't ready to put himself (and Peacemaker) through for a laugh or a touch of pathos, and that's how we come to care for what could also have been a one-note character. Gunn's capacity to soundtrack a project is on show, though I'm not really into the hair band stuff that typifies the series. It still gives us the most unskippable of opening credit sequences though (and very relevant to the emotional through-line of the season). So yeah, a fun R-rated superhero comedy.
More pastiche than spoof, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is a humorous take on the wine mom thrillers that have similar titles, but is at its best when it could almost be about the latter-day like of Veronica Mars. The thriller has legs and the humor works when it's character-based or highlights every-day absurdities. Gags meant to be part of the parody - the changing epitaph, the blunt cop spewing exposition, the overlong epilogue, and depending on your tastes, possibly even the solution - are more jarring. It's perhaps difficult to be TOO funny when gruesome tragedy is built into the character. So the tone is odd, and the structure suffers because of it. But whether Kristen Bell is a hallucinating sad sack or an amateur sleuth, she's eminently watchable and I can't deny I was entertained for most of it (the final episode really drags for me, though I'm in if they want to do a follow-up based on the final scene).
I might call Dead to Me "Wine Mom Breaking Bad", but that would be giving it short shrift, because I really loved this dark comedy series (both seasons, Netflix promises a third is on the way). Two women are united in friendship by grief - Christina Applegate a widowed mom whose husband was the victim of a hit and run, and Linda Cardellini the barren free spirit who meets her at grief counseling and knows more than she says (and she's terrific in this, absolutely terrific). Eventually turning into a bit of a crime thriller, especially the second season, this is pretty dark stuff, but manages to work as a comedy thanks to the comic performances and many misunderstandings keeping secrets generate. And while some of the guest stars are definitely playing their quirks for laughs, all the main characters are very precisely drawn psychologically, which makes the drama engrossing. Many clever plays on the title too. But yes, "Wine Mom Breaking Bad".
50 Years of Criterion/2017: Going back to the themes of Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki's last film, The Other Side of Hope, presents another story about the refugee crisis, but this time the refugee is an adult Syrian, and the old man who helps him is a failing restaurateur (from which the deadpan humor of the film comes). He's much more ambiguous too, and you're wondering if he's a gangster, but that's a deft inversion of public perception. Our POV character is definitely Khaled, through whom we get a glimpse at the system, not just in Sweden, but elsewhere in (mostly Eastern) Europe. He's faced with systemic and endemic racism, we feel for him, and we don't see him as a criminal regardless of what some people think of refugees. So the closed-off character of Wilkström, who is also starting a new life and burned all past bridges to do so, is a privileged mirror of Khaled, a reflection to which we do ascribe some nefarious purpose, and we are probably wrong. Like Le Havre, this is about people helping people for no other motivation than that's the right thing to do, though it also feels more serious and ambiguous... more adult.
Paired Short: Niki Lindroth von Bahr's The Burden is an ambitious, existential musical starring stop-motion animals trapped in open-at-night businesses off an interstate somewhere. The best characters are the fish, and not just because I relate to their hotel room depression. But largely because of that.
2018: Chloë Grace Moretz is a 90s teen sent to Christian conversion therapy in The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a striking depiction of the wrong-headed practice because we're not shown a horror show. Everyone is kind and nice and churchy and the vibe is rather absurd (like the Christian-specific aerobics), as "professionals" use every rhetorical trick in the Good Book to explain away same-sex attraction. A smart kid will see right through it. Cameron is such a kid. No matter how gentle the camp councilors are, we can't miss the fact that this kind of "programming" is mental and emotional abuse, and the cast is large enough for us to see different reactions to the so-called therapy. I was especially glad to see a character who identifies as Two-Spirit (Indian Horse's Forrest Goodluck), that's a reality we never see. Not that cinema is littered with conversion therapy stories. This is a good, thoughtful entry in the LGBTQ+ film canon.
Paired Short: Hair Wolf uses horror tropes to talk about cultural appropriation and consequently feels like an extended Key & Peele sketch. I mean that as the utmost compliment.
2019: In the near-future, Brazil is thrown into political upheaval, but the remote, eponymous town of Bacurau is largely untouched by the chaos. It's a tight-knit community with a lot of quirky characters and our stay with them is pleasant and amusing. So I initially resented the appearance of some brutal and heinous villains, come to terrorize the small town for reasons of their own. Suddenly, it's a siege movie, and we lose sight of Bárbara Colen's Teresa who, up to this point, had been our point of view character (and a strong one too). Still, what happens next is quite satisfying and pays off the many characters and locations delineated in the first act. I still think the movie would have been just as good or better if it had just been about their water crisis, or whatever. But then, would action fans have been drawn to this gorgeous little Brazilian film?
Paired Short: The Brandon Cronenberg short Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You would make a good preface to Possessor - a mindfrack about head chips that blur the line between dreams and reality with great visuals.
2020: When neurosurgeons fall in love... Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is really a kind of reverse Before Sunrise. The characters are supposed to meet up in Budapest a month after their first encounter, but while Márta is all in, János acts like he doesn't know her. The relationship, if it can be said to restart, is largely silent. We're not in Linklater's world, but perhaps in Kieślowski's, since many seem to have made this comparison. There's certainly an emotional ambiguity, and we wonder if Márta has imagined the whole thing, is still imagining it, or was gaslit, or maybe it's all a misunderstanding (and those abound because, again, people don't talk to each other). Natasa Stork is excellent in the role, playing an intellectual woman who keeps things very close to the vest; she has to do a lot with little. This is a slow burn to be sure, and we're heading for a rather elliptical ending as well. Some might feel impatient and even unsatisfied. Not me though, I was into it.
Paired Short: Guy Maddin offers another of his faux-silent era shorts with Stump the Guesser, and it's a doozy! Not only does it look cool and experimental, but the story is imaginatively insane. No synopsis can do it justice. A little film from a parallel dimension.
50 Years of Fantasy/1971: In the same genre as Mary Poppins, Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks has Angela Lansbury as a would-be witch taking on some war orphans during WWII and seeking a spell to help Britain fend off the Nazis. It's pretty charming. There are a couple of fun songs, and both Lansbury and David Tomlinson (who is in all the big Disney fantasies, it seems) are evidently having fun. I don't know if the double-entendres are on purpose, but that's fun too. They're perhaps inevitable when the story requires you to jump into bed and give a knob a bit of a twist. As with Mary Poppins, there's an animated sequence with some pretty great live action interaction, though it's mostly a crazy soccer game with cartoon animals, a weird distraction, perhaps, but a worthy short. And it all ends where you think it will (the witch falls for the kids) and where you've forgotten it would (witch vs. Nazis). Seems kind of forgotten today in Disney's canon of family fare, but doesn't deserve to be.
Actual best from that year: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
1972: When 70s interest in the occult gets the TV movie treatment, we get something like Gargoyles, which isn't VERY much about the occult. It features a demonologist and his daughter fighting what the intro calls Satan's own army on Earth, but in truth, the gargoyles could have been just about any monster from a 50s B-movie. It's still fantasy because their life cycle doesn't make any scientific sense, but then, what does here? There are enough plot holes, inconsistencies, unmotivated behavior and obnoxious slow-motion (every time the gargoyles are on screen) that it would be worthy of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. The third act does almost achieve a kind of cheesy grandeur, and it's cool that the monsters all look different, just like there's a variety of them in art and architecture. It's Stan Winston's first feature and the make-up won an Emmy. It's a bit as if Bosch inspired the rubber suits. So we have to say the Emmy-winning Gargoyles, no matter what we think of it.
Actual best from that year: The Pied Piper
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