My gauntlet had been run. I’d entered a month-long marathon of baseball movies and emerged victorious. To complete that task, a new infrastructure had been built – I’d gotten a Criterion Channel subscription and added a third disc to my Netflix mailer account – and like America after WW2, the possibilities of what to do with that infrastructure were endless.
Perhaps you’re wondering if I wasted this moment, squandered this unique opportunity. I did not, my friends. I did not. What followed was a beautiful period filled with movie after movie after movie.
As such, I can hardly get to everything I watched, or even everything I enjoyed, but here’s a sampling of my favorites – of various eras and genres – over the last month.
First, all the stuff I’ve been revisiting:
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Good news, everyone, Seven Samurai is still a masterpiece.
It doesn’t matter how many times I rewatch them, Kurosawa’s films still have the power to amaze me. His technical perfection and groundbreaking style inspire genuine awe, yet they were always in service to story and character. His films are rooted very particularly in Japanese history and life, they critique and comment on very specific parts of his culture, and yet they are timeless and universal. He should be canonized with history’s greatest artists.
Bonus fact: Toshiro Mifune, a highlight of the film and one of the greatest actors and film personalities of all time, would have turned 100 in April.
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Again and again, His Girl Friday is about as much fun as any movie I’ve ever seen. This is the rhythmic, dizzyingly paced, perfectly delivered dialogue by which all the rest should be measured, and I love every word. The film is also the gift that keeps on giving, as it’s in the DNA of so many of my favorite things that came later. My favorite sort of comedies and dramedies exist because of this movie.
It’s also objective fact that no one will ever play a lovable cad better than Cary Grant.
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Em and I are also continuing to rewatch our way through the MCU.
There were certainly some duds along the way, but I’m so impressed by how high the highs were. I mean, even if we only talk about Phase Three, Black Panther, Winter Soldier, Civil War, and Homecoming are genuinely good movies, and Thor: Ragnarok is firmly entrenched as one of my favorite films of all time.
And we haven’t even gotten to Infinity War and Endgame! The MCU experiment was unprecedented, and to be honest, sticking the landing was damn-near impossible. I’ve made no secret of my delight in the remarkable job the Russo brothers did in delivering a finale that was better than even the most optimistic of us could have expected. I’m probably a broken record at this point, but being in the theater for Endgame opening night, with the communal energy and joy of that moment, was a singular highlight of my entire movie-going life. [The cut to black at the end of Inception and Cap picking up Mjölnir in Endgame are my two favorite audience reactions I’ve ever seen.]
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And now for the new [to me] stuff I watched:
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I’d write about how glorious Jackie Chan’s Police Story is, but Tony Zhou already covered Chan’s brilliance far better than I ever could.
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Aaaand with my new Criterion Channel subscription, I watched Kihachi Okamoto’s gorgeously shot samurai film, Sword of Doom. It’s an episodic story following a despicable, amoral, seemingly unbeatable ronin.
Toshiro Mifune isn’t in the film for long, but he makes every second count. [Have I ever mentioned my love for Mifune before?] His long ‘one katana against a mob of assassins’ fight scene is glorious – and somehow only the third best fight in the film.
And speaking of the film’s fight scenes, Sword of Doom’s best scene – its worth the price of admission on its own – must be the reason we eventually got that long, crazy, one-shot hallway fight in Oldboy.
[Spoiler warning]
The film’s final frame is brilliant, and it turns out, completely accidental. The movie was originally intended to kick off a series that never materialized, and so the film ends frozen in suspense and ambiguity that works beautifully from a narrative standpoint, and yet was entirely unintended.
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Speaking of gorgeously shot films, I finally got around to seeing Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden. It’s amazing.
Even after all the praise the film received, I still had no idea what it was actually about. Which is the perfect way to watch it, so I won’t provide a synopsis. Just know that every facet of the film is damn-near perfect, and the film has almost as much hot and/or kinky sex as it does [omitted for spoilers].
And let’s all stand amazed by how Park’s tamer films are still more fucked up than 99% of world cinema.
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Transit wasn’t on my radar at all until December, when I started my yearly routine of scouring the internet for legit ‘best movies of the year’ lists. It was on many, many lists – not just for the year, but the decade – and it was easy to see why. Other than the immersive visual aesthetic, I knew nothing about it going in, and as with The Handmaiden, I’d recommend you do the same. It’s unique when a quiet drama can force you to take time to get your bearings the way Transit does, and you should just let it happen.
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I should write more about these, but I’ve enjoyed watching auteurs at the top of their game: Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Kurosawa’s Kagemusha.
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If you’re ever in the mood for a surreal, fucked up, beautifully photographed sci-fi fever dream, then Under the Skin is the platonic ideal.
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In a world where Rocketman exists, filmmakers should henceforth be banned from making anymore paint-by-number biopic bullshit. If you can’t craft an emotionally resonant film that plays with form and genre to uniquely illustrate the life and character of the subject, could you just not?
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And, if any of you are in the mood for some exciting, satisfyingly competent action films, you could do far worse than Extraction (thank you John Wick) and The Night Comes for Us (thank you The Raid: Redemption).
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