It’s that time of the year! Sajda and I recorded an episode of Movie Marriage in which we talked about our favorite movies of the past year, so you can listen to that below. Otherwise, here are some written thoughts on my personal favorites.
Memoria
I have seen a few film critics put Memoria in the middle of their top 10 lists for the year and I have been simply puzzled. I just can’t fathom how you can watch this movie, like it, and not conclude that it is the most transcendent experience you’ve had watching a movie this year. How can you put this at number 4, 6, or 8? Only the top of the list seems appropriate. Tilda Swinton plays a British woman in Colombia who wakes up in the middle of the night having heard a loud bang that apparently came out of nowhere. She spends the rest of the movie wandering around trying to figure out exactly what is going on inside (or perhaps outside?) her head. Answers are suggested but not confirmed. Instead, the movie opens up a series of questions about difference between experiencing something and remembering that experience. About how the senses, the mind, and the body all exist in relation to our environment, our past, and our future. Without getting into spoilers, the movie’s profound centerpiece involves Swinton meeting a lonely man whose ability to remember has pushed him toward the edges of society. It is all very artsy and slow, but also very silly, and often pretty funny. That is one of the great talents of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an art-house staple who is making his first movie outside of his native Thailand, where he has felt increasingly unwelcome since the military dictatorship took over almost a decade ago. South America – and Colombia in particular – is the perfect place outside of Thailand for the director to continue telling stories where past and present are in constant communication with each other.I have said this many times before and I will say it again: I just love the fact that Apichatpong so thoroughly understands that the ridiculous and profound are often the same thing.
Licorice Pizza
There’s been quite a bit of controversy regarding the age difference between the characters in the film. Cooper Hoffman plays Gary, a 15 year-old who is already growing out of his child-star career and seeks to turn himself into an entrepreneur. Alana Haim plays Alana, a young woman who the movie suggests is 25 years old and has no idea what to do with her aimless life. Disregarding the fact that the romance in the movie is incredibly chaste, let alone the small hints the movie gives that Alana might be younger than she says she is, the discourse around the age gap has been quite exhausting. It’s not that the movie disregards the fact that Gary is a minor, nor is it that the movie is about grooming and Alana is a bad person. The movie seems to begin from the boyish fantasy of imagining what would happen if the older babysitter you have a crush on would reciprocate your affections. What make the movie so special is that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson goes beyond adolescent fantasy and tries to imagine the kind of woman who might actually find herself in such a position. Alana is the main character of the movie, and her overwhelming frustration with the ways things are going (or not going) in her life draws her to this slick, young charlatan who plays the part of having his shit together. Along with Phantom Thread and Punch-Drunk Love before it, the movie is another great entry in Anderson’s canon of incredibly romantic but also kind of fucked up relationships.
Days
I am glad I got to see Days on the big screen this summer, and I am glad I was under a certain influence when I did. The movie opens with a five minute static shot of Lee Kang-sheng staring out a window as it rains. After a few minutes of fascination, I found myself synchronizing my breathing with Lee’s. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of breathing in unison with someone else, but it is an incredibly powerful and emotional experience. I first experienced its full power during acting class, when my scene partner and I couldn’t quite get into the scene and our teacher told us to embrace each other and start breathing together. It’s a quick, effective, and powerful way of establishing a connection. I had never had an experience like that watching a movie. By the time the movie cut to its second shot – about five minutes into the movie – it landed like with the level of shock most plot twists can only dream of achieving. As the movie goes on, we follow Lee (who is a longtime collaborator of director Tsai Ming-Liang) as he tries to deal with some sort of chronic back pain. We intercut this with a young man played by Anong Houngheuangsy as he goes about making dinner. The meditative, mundane, and entrancing rhythm of the movie is broken when the two men finally interact with one another, and what seemed like a melancholy, lonely movie becomes uncommonly intimate. This centerpiece is followed by a rather melodramatic gesture (for Tsai standards, as the most on-the-nose moment in this movie would be the subtlest of almost any other) that struck me as a little simple upon first viewing, but has grown on me ever since. The movie is presented without subtitles (there is barely any dialogue). The universality of sound and vision without words builds the perfect bridge from mundane life to hyper-reality, building towards an ending that touches – in its own way – the immense sentimentality of the best Charlie Chaplin movies. Not coincidentally, this moment of connection is scored with the theme to Chaplin’s Limeight – another movie about the tender meeting of two weary people.
The Matrix Resurrections
I saw this back-to-back with the latest Spider-Man movie, and the contrast in each movie’s relationship to the profitable nostalgia that led to their making in the first place couldn’t have been starker. Spider-Man mines our associations with older (and better) incarnations of the character in order to inject emotion into an impersonal, corporate, soulless franchise. Meanwhile, as she mourned the passing of her parents, Lana Wachowski found solace in the idea of revisiting Neo and Trinity. After almost ten year of pressure from Warner Brothers, it was the reunion of these characters that made her agree to direct a fourth Matrix movie. The result is a movie that fits in the recent trend of “legacy sequels” in which a younger character, often a “fan” of the originals, picks up on the legacy of the main characters – see: Tron, Star Wars, Blade Runner. Only this movie ends up being a critique rather than a continuation of this trend. Not only that, but does this by following the themes laid out in the Matrix sequels to their logical conclusion and becomes an essential addition to the series.
There’s so much to dig into in this incredibly dense movie, but let’s touch on a few things. For example, the way in which this new “matrix” is different form the one we were introduced to in 1999. Neo isn’t stuck at a dead-end job alienated from the world but not knowing what is going on. This time he’s on top of the world – a successful video game creator – yet he still feels deeply depressed and disconnected. Not only is the world keeping him in his place, it is squeezing him for all his worth. An even more obvious metaphor for being a human battery, an even better way of depicting the all-consuming crush of late capitalism in the digital age. The wild west internet of 99, full of possibilities for hackers and weirdos, has given place to a digital police state run by giant corporations.
There’s more, of course. The movie doubles down on the original trilogy’s ideas that love and imagination are the key to liberation – that imagining a better world is not only possible but necessary. At the same time, it rejects the binary between good and evil and continues on the bittersweet ending of Matrix Revolutions by showing the ways in which Neo’s sacrifice both changed and didn’t change the relationship between humans and machines. If that wasn’t enough, this is also Lana Wachowki’s first movie without the collaboration of her sister, and it’s a all about how the power to disrupt the matrix doesn’t lie in any “one” person, but in the connection between Neo and Trinity. This movie is a clever commentary on franchise fatigue, a blunt but dense sci-fi epic, and a sweeping love story. You can’t find a major studio blockbuster more personal than this. Why people seem to prefer the spider movie is beyond me.
Heard She Got Married
The Matt Farley-Charlie Roxburgh collaboration is one of the most exciting in independent cinema these days. I am talking true independence cinema here, not big stars pretending to slum it with slightly lower budgets. This is shot in our backyards for as little money as possible with a cast made up of family and friends independent. The way in which Farley, Roxburgh, and their familiar list of collaborators are able to spin inventive, hilarious, inspiring tales despite their logistical limitations is one of the great joys in my personal movie watching. I just discovered their movies last year during the pandemic, when Farley’s auto-biographical Local Legends (2013) touched me like very few movies have before. It is the story of a struggling artist who – like Farley himself – has found a way to make a living writing novelty songs and putting them on streaming services. It is a testament to how frustrating it can be to make art that people are not interested in, but how life wouldn’t be worth living without creativity. Heard She Got Married plays like that movie’s darker cousin. Dropped on VOD with little warning, the new movie sees Farley play another musician, this time a middle-aged man who has come to his hometown loaded with youthful memories and regrets. Along the way he encounters old flames, old enemies, and a mysterious mailman. The movie is a major step for Farley and Roxburgh as filmmakers. Like their previous work, it is full of delightfully ornate lines and ridiculous situations, but it also goes into a much darker, borderline cynical, places than anything they’ve done before. We are living through tough times, so it was wonderful to see two of my favorite filmmakers be able to embrace the darkness that surrounds us while retaining what makes their work so delightful.
The French Dispatch
I have already written two reactions to the latest movie from Wes Anderson, so I would like to use this space to dig into something I mentioned in my initial entry: the nuances in the way the three main narrators relate to the story they are covering, and how these relationships paint a far more critical and cynical view of journalism than the superficial “ode to the New Yorker” read on the movie would suggest.
The first one sees Tilda Swinton playing a farcical art critic/historian who not only documents the story of the tortured painter played by Benicio Del Toro, but entangles herself with him romantically, and retells his story not only the pages of the Dispatch but in a ridiculous public lecture. The seeming frivolity and looseness of Swinton’s presentation is almost shocking when juxtaposed with Del Toro’s deeply wounded and haunted artist. His might be the most moving and haunting performance in the movie – drained and wounded to a degree the actor hasn’t quite shown before. This section of the movie – probably my favorite – is all about art being commodified, including by the very magazine Anderson seems to be celebrating.
The middle section is the trickiest one for me to love, as Frances McDormand’s rugged American practicality clashes against the Romanticism of the young French revolutionaries. I wonder if Anderson, a Texan who is clearly more comfortable bottling emotions in simmering pain than with histrionic explosions sees something about his homeland in the experienced detachment of the McDormand character – who really seems to see no discrepancy in sleeping with her subject and maintaining journalistic neutrality. Her approach is quite paternalistic, justifying her corrections of the manifesto, her ideas of adulthood and proper behavior, and her meddling because these are just kids. Anderson’s politics in this sequence are sketchy, but there is something very poignant about ending the segment with Chalamet’s poem scoring his motorcycle ride into oblivion followed by McDormand quietly typing in a barely furnished office.
Finally, the third segment sees quite a different approach. Jeffrey Wright’s character – the lonely expat – is the narrator less eager to get embroiled in the events of the story he is re-telling. This is clear in the framing device where the story has been transformed into a parlor trick, and is made most poignant in the revelation – in one of the movie’s most moving scenes – that Wright has omitted the part of the story that implicates him the most. The connection he shares with Lt. Nescafier in that moment, the longing they share as people who have abandoned their homelands looking for something they might never find, is undeniable. Why doesn’t he want to put it in the story? Is it too much to take? Does he not see its profundity, or perhaps being in the middle of it, takes it for granted? I wonder if he is too aware of the way moments in a person’s life are transformed when turned into words printed in a magazine. Incredulity, perhaps, that the experience described could be captured into words. Or a fear that it will simply be the perfect ending to a nice parlor trick.
Coco Hits New York 