There’s one thing I know about this little Substack project of mine: I am loathe to turn it into anything resembling a personal diary. My guess is you’re not that interested in the details of my personal life, and frankly, neither am I. That’s why I spend so much time working.
The other thing I know is that I don’t want to turn it into a series of weekly movie recommendations. If you want my reviews, you can find them at Washington City Paper and The Rye Record, and occasionally elsewhere, and I’m still over at Twitter dot com, even though the idiot in charge is doing his best to turn it into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. This particular moment, however, feels like a good one to break my own rules and let you into what is always a bizarre time in the life of a critic. I’m talking, of course, about “screener season.”
If you’re in a critics’ group that has year-end awards, November and December are the busiest and best months of the year. We stuff yourself with new releases and catch up on the best movies we missed earlier. In a sense, it’s not entirely different than the experience of non-professionals; most of the good grown-up movies are released near year’s end, anyway, but the process is even more intense for critics. Screeners usually start arriving in early November, and some critics’ groups begin voting in early December. That’s a mere month to catch up on anything that might possibly be worthy of an award, which is hell on a critic’s relationships, day job, and social life.
At this point, you might be asking: Who cares? Why do these silly awards matter? A reasonable question! In the grand scheme of things, they don’t. Of course, my conclusion from a cursory study of existential philosophy in my early twenties is that nothing really matters, so we’re free to assign importance to whatever we want. Critics’ awards do matter, however, in that they create, reinforce, or subvert awards season narratives that ultimately influence what wins at the Oscars, and the Oscars matter because they’re basically the only reason movies for grown-ups exist anymore. Films that are nominated for Academy Awards typically make money, and many films get greenlit in part because they’re the type of movie the Academy likes.
So to wrap up: I’ve been watching a lot of great movies lately, some of which aren’t even available to you yet. But they will be, so l thought I’d catch you up on four films I watched recently that you might like:
Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-Wook) – I’ve been working on a theory that every good thriller could also be a comedy, and vice versa, and that some of the best movies are a combination of both. Silence of the Lambs, for example, is pretty funny, and What About Bob? is basically a “[blank] from Hell” movie, in which a psychotic character ingratiates themselves to a family and causes mayhem. Except it stars Bill Murray, and it’s all played for laughs.
Hitchcock is the guy who managed to make his movies both tense and funny at once. There’s mortal danger in the offing, sometimes even murder, and yet you’re smiling through the whole thing as if in some state of euphoric tension. There have been many heirs to Hitchcock’s throne as the master of tension, but none greater than Park Chan-Wook, the Korean director who made the original Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and a bonafide Hitchcock remake, Stoker (based on Shadow of a Doubt).
His latest film, Decision to Leave, is a neo-noir about a detective who becomes infatuated with the wife of a murder victim. Is he interested in her as a suspect or a potential lover? Does it matter? Sex and death are forever entangled in cinema, and Park knows exactly how to push those buttons. It’s almost a serious remake of So I Married an Axe Murderer—in essence, it’s about a woman whose husbands keep dying—but it’s not a straight thriller either. It’s tense and funny and profoundly playful, and it has one of the best final scenes of the year. It’s only available on MUBI right now, but it’s worth a free trial.
“Sr.” (dir. Chris Smith) – The first time I heard the name of the late Robert Downey, Sr. was on the director’s commentary track for Boogie Nights. RDS plays the owner of a recording studio in the film, and during his scene, Paul Thomas Anderson raved about the director’s films. I looked them up and found I had heard of exactly zero of them. Turns out the father of Iron Man was a maverick filmmaker in the ‘60s and ‘70s who made films so radical and independent that even New Hollywood wouldn’t touch him. I sought some of them out. They’re weird and, in some cases, wonderful.
“Sr.” is a documentary about Robert Downey, Sr. produced by his son, who needs no introduction. Both appear in the film, which chronicles several years in their relationship, and while the result initially feels a bit shapeless—although never unenjoyable, due to the charisma of both father and son—it soon morphs into a profound mediation on addiction, family trauma, cinema, and, well, love. RDJ has convinced Netflix to make a documentary about his father, presumably with the stipulation that he also be in it, and has used their money to let his father make his own (final) film within the film. It’s a little bit avant-garde and a little bit radical, even if it doesn’t add up to what it says it will.
Look, I’m an easy mark for a film like this because I have also struggled with addiction and had a fucked-up father and can’t begin to imagine processing life without the aid of cinema, but its themes are easy to jack into. It’s just a film about flawed people trying hard to understand each other. It’s a real-life tearjerker that would make a neat double feature with The Fabelmans, another work about how cinema can both save and ruin your life. Available on Netflix right now.
Glass Onion (dir. Rian Johnson) – If you saw Knives Out in 2019, you probably liked it, and if so, you don’t need me to recommend a sequel that features the return of Benoit Glanc (Daniel Craig) and a new cast of shitheads played by Edward Norton, Janelle Monae, Kate Hudson, Dave Baustista, Kathryn Hahn, and Leslie Odom, Jr. I didn’t watch a trailer for Glass Onion because I didn’t wany anything spoiled. I’ll do you the same courtesy: No plot points will be given away here.
So I’ll just say that I liked it even better than the original. Writer-director Rian Johnson is a wizard. His plots are like Rube Goldberg machines, creating levers of tension and navigating them with absolute confidence in his abilities. He can puncture a moment with either a joke or a plot twist, it doesn’t matter. He also displays an uncanny ability to identify and expose the villains of our moment. For Knives Out, he pitted a virtuous immigrant against a family of entitled, rich assholes. With Glass Onion, his aim has gotten even more precise and way more prescient. I won’t say any more, but I plan on digging into it further, especially if it’s the Oscars conversation. See it if you can. It’s in theaters for a couple more days and will hit Netflix in late December.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio – There’s something about the films of Guillermo Del Toro that never quite land for me. Pan’s Labyrinth is probably his masterpiece, but I haven’t seen it in 20 years and have never been inspired to revisit. The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley were both effective works of cinema but somehow ended up less than the sum of their parts. His understanding of human nature just feels shallow to me, and his characters don’t really come to life. I guess you could say he never becomes a real boy.
His Pinocchio film is the second one to be released this year, following a dreadful adaptation by Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks that premiered on Disney+ in November. Good news: This one is better. In fact, I would even say it’s good. Featuring the voices of Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, and Cate Blanchett, Del Toro’s animated film gives you exactly what you expect from him: It flirts more heavily with the implicit darkness of the story than previous adaptations. It’s occasionally grisly, often very sad, startlingly political, and quite funny.
Unlike in a Grimm’s fairy tale, however, these elements never cohere into a single tone, so you might find yourself liking certain parts better than others. I was most enthralled when it engaged with the real world. It’s set in the era of Mussolini, and it features a takedown of the dictator that would make Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin smile. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio is wickedly funny in these scenes, but it also made me cry big, salty tears in the end. Yeah, it’s a little all over the place. It’s also earnest and beautiful and it finds the profound humanity in a story about a wooden doll. See it on Netflix on December 9.
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So those are a few recommendations and a brief glimpse into my life over the last few days. I promise not to do this often.
Nice read! in what way is it similar to Knives Out? Really enjoyed that movie.