First-Time Views: January 2024
ICYMI: John Mulaney hosted the Governor’s Awards a couple weeks ago, and the world finally recognized what a fantastic Oscars host he would be. I documented the moment for Decider.
First-Time Views
Perfect Days (2023)
Legendary German director Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) was hired to make a short film about Japan’s public toilet system. He became so fascinated by the people who cleaned them that he went ahead and crafted a feature about them instead. Perfect Days follows a week in the quiet life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), a middle-aged man who cleans the toilets by day and…well, doesn’t do much by night. It’s a monastic existence, but human drama finds a way in, illuminating as much as it darkens. Anchored by Yakusho’s stirring central performance, Perfect Days is a brilliant demonstration of how to align the viewer with a character. In every frame, you are feeling what Hirayama feels, culminating in its bravura final shot. It’s a film that would have slotted nicely into my Top 10 of last year, among other works of quiet triumph and everyday sadness.
The Voice of the Nightingale (1923)
Imagine wandering through the Museum of Modern Art. You spend some time with Picasso. You wander through the colorful minds of Matisse and Rivera. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and it’s too crowded to linger for long, so you slowly begin to make your way out. Before you go, you take an escalator down to the basement, past the cinema where you say the restoration of Once Upon a Time in the West last month, and into a dark room with the words, “Beyond Technicolor: Early Color on Film” painted on the walls. You’re alone in the room, except for four flat-screen TVs and a few padded benches. You sit and watch this. I doubt seeing it embedded in a Substack post will capture the trembling majesty of that moment I experienced a couple weeks ago, but it will have to do.
Taken (2008)
Can you believe I never saw this before? Taken is the spiritual sequel to Die Hard, an action classic whose reactionary politics are inextricable from its pleasures. Whereas Die Hard drew on the culture wars of the Reagan Era xenophobia, anti-feminism, economic anxiety), Taken embodies the insecurities of the fragile American male psyche after 9/11. Liam Neeson plays a former CIA agent and divorced father of a beautiful young virgin who, on her first trip overseas, gets kidnapped by Albanian sex traffickers. Before she is auctioned off to the highest bidder, he puts his “particular set of skills” to use tracking down the bad guys and saving her from defilement. The key moment comes when he uses “enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e. electrical shocks, to get the relevant info from a particularly nasty fellow. There are no Zero Dark Thirty-esque debates about the merits of torture here. Once he extracts the information, Neeson turns the electricity back on full blast and leaves the room, subjecting his victim to a torturous death. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Good One (2024)
I didn’t “attend” the Sundance Film Festival this year, either in person or virtually, but I did pay attention to what critics were saying about the films. It helps to curate the rest of my year. When the festival made a few of them available again for single-ticket purchases at the end of the month, I jumped on Good One. They said it was a film about a father and daughter who go hiking, which sounds like the kind of thing I’d be into. It was indeed about a three-day hike, but in reality it’s a piercing document about men and women, and the numerous little indignities the latter suffer at the hands of the former. Good One is a remarkably assured debut from writer/director India Donaldson, and (hopefully) a star-making turn from Lily Collias, who also had a small role in last year’s stellar, similarly-themed Palm Trees and Power Lines. Special shout-out to James Le Gros, one of my favorite character actors, who I’m pretty sure is playing the same guy here than he did in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, a schmuck who will side with pretty much any man over the women he claims are most important to him.
The Battery (2012)
In my quest to see every baseball film ever made before my book comes out (just in case some wiseacre on the road wants to test me), I stumbled upon this hangout zombie film about a pitcher and catcher from a pro team who are among the two last people on the planet after an undead invasion. There’s not much baseball in it, and the film’s tricky tonal balance falls flat for long stretches. But I appreciate the attempt to merge the rhythms of a naturalistic indie (like Good One) with blood and gore. At times, it feels like what would happen if Richard Linklater got bit by the horror bug. The third act, which finds the two characters trapped inside a station wagon for days while zombies flail at the windows, is unlike anything I’ve seen before in a film.
Worst View: Who Can See Forever (2024)
This is probably a little bit harsh, but I must speak my truth. If you’re a fan of Sam Beam, who for 22 years has gone by the moniker Iron & Wine, you’ll probably enjoy this little concert film, but I don’t love his music, and I had a real problem with the short interviews and snippets of Beam’s daily life that the filmmakers stuck between the songs. These scenes reveal so little, or rather they reveal a person who is committed to not revealing himself. Either way, it is frustratingly inert, and makes the whole thing feel more like a promotional video than a concert film or music documentary. I panned it pretty hard (for me) over at Washington City Paper.
Top Rewatch: Nightcrawler (2014)
I know I’ve been on this kick lately where I say twisted movies like The Killer and The Killing of a Sacred Deer are actually comedies, but I’m pretty sure Nightcrawler really is. I liked this one on my first viewing, but it didn’t come into full comic bloom for me until this rewatch. In one of his best performances, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis, a petty thief who begins independently filming the aftermaths of horrific accidents to sell the footage to local news stations. As he strives to grow his business (supported by self-help thinking that The Killer himself might have endorsed), he begins to blur the line between observer and perpetrator. It’s a nifty dramatization of the Observer Effect, but Nightcrawler never gets snagged on its thorny ideas. Instead, it moves forward like a scavenger, always looking for the next laugh or thrill. It finds plenty.