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Film
Favorites of 2021: Films
Here are my favorite — note, not what I feel are the best — films of 2021, in alphabetical, non-prioritized, order:
BARB & STAR GO TO VISTA DEL RAY
“I miss this sort of comedy, the kind of comedy that doesn’t call attention to its jokes, the kind that’s sharply written and doesn’t meander or rely on extended improvised riffs. It’s tightly wound silliness with a ton of great talent”
—
“It was a real tit-flapper!”
BENEDETTA
“[U]ltimately this is a human drama, one which showcases how very little has changed over hundreds of years.”
CENSOR
“[A]n extremely mannered film until, well, until it isn’t. Stick with it and it will fuck you up.”
THE FRENCH DISPATCH
A surprisingly sincere triptych from Wes Anderson.
JOY RIDE
“We’re all healing as we (hopefully) come to the end of this awful era, and seeing JOY RIDE under these circumstances was such an immensely enjoyable time, and I’m so happy I could see it with such giving artists.”
THE SOUVENIR PART II
“I can’t recommend these two films enough, but I would suggest watching them relatively close together. I hadn’t seen PART I since it screened in theaters in 2019, and felt like I was missing out on a lot in PART II because, uh, my memory, and the past two years have been particularly harrowing.”
SPENCER
I’ve had the goddamn hardest time getting people to watch this film, solely because of Kristen Stewart, but hell, the way she casts her eyes … I wish folks would just watch the trailer and see her transformation.
“You are your own weapon.”
[…]
“Will they kill me, do you think?”
TITANE
“I can’t remember the last time I so extensively averted my eyes from watching a film. However, those moments are not exploitative — they are meant to be uncomfortable, they are there for a reason. I simply felt that I was able to glean that reason by listening, instead of watching.”
Missed:
- ANNETTE
- CANDYMAN
- CYRANO
- DRIVE MY CAR
- MEMORIA
- NIGHTMARE ALLEY
- NINE DAYS
- PASSING
- PLAN B
- RED ROCKET
- SHIVA BABY
- TEST PATTERN
- THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
- ZOLA
BURNT OFFERINGS (1976)
(VOD) I happened to read Robert Marasco’s 1973 horror novel BURNT OFFERINGS a few years ago, a properly enigmatic ‘house possesses and feeds off of its guests’ work, focused more on male/paternal/provider anxieties that hasn’t necessarily aged as well as one would hope, but it’s an intriguing enough qualified read.
I had absolutely no idea that, not only had it been adapted into a feature film in 1976, but that it has a surprising roster that features Oliver Reed as Ben, the father who drags his family to a spacious, yet dilapidated, summer house for vacation, Karen Black as Marian, his wife, Bette Davis as Aunt Elizabeth, as well as Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart as the brother and sister renting the house to the family.
As you might suspect based on the roll call, what ends up on the screen is an eclectic oil-and-water mix of performances: Reed brings an old-school stiffness that occasionally balloons to an overly grandiose show; Karen Black plays it a bit more naturalistic, bringing a haunted quality to the film, and Bette Davis gleefully leans into the creep factor of the aunt’s ailing body. Only Meredith and Heckart bring a playful vibe to the film, but it helps that they’re both on-screen for less than ten minutes.
While the film mostly hews close to the novel’s original tale, which primarily consists of putting the family’s young son David (Lee Montgomery) through the physical and psychological wringer, it deviates in two important ways. First, director Dan Curtis inserted a bit of back story for Ben where he keeps seeing a pale, grinning chauffeur, first at his mother’s funeral. Allegedly, this was a bit of dream-inspiration on Curtis’ part, but it slots into the adaptation quite well. Second, the end is significantly more close-ended and shocking than the source material but, again, it suits the work.
Tonally, the film is far more interesting, if not occasionally maddening, especially given how it contrasts against similar horror films of the time. It’s not quite a throwback, but it doesn’t quite embrace the evolving style and leniency of 70s horror.
Warning: the trailer pulls no punches and spoils some of the biggest moments of the film.
SPENCER (2021)
Truth be told, I signed up for this screening solely because of Kristen Stewart’s depiction of Princess Diana. I’m not one who cares about the British monarchy. I barely paid attention to either the anointment of Diana or her death, although I do vividly remember seeing it in print …because it was being used as kitty litter at the pet adoption agency I visited shortly after moving to Chicago. I had a panic attack when my wife tried to walk me through the primary Harrods shop, back when it housed -all- of the Diana memorials, solely because of how populated it was. I haven’t even watched Pablo Larraín’s initial film in his ‘(doomed) princess’ trilogy, JACKIE (2016). Consequently, I expected to find SPENCER well-made, but not terribly engaging.
I certainly did not expect it to be a brilliant, skewed take on THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER. While I often read a lot of Greenaway influence into works, I think it’s undeniable here, as Greenaway’s film was explicitly about the suffocation that climate invoked, the prison one is placed in when bending the knee, and SPENCER is all about feeling trapped, about being boxed in and unable to breathe, and similarly about obligation and servitude, while also mimicking THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER’s visual tropes, notably making Diana the camera’s magnet, fixated on following her across rooms and through walls, flat-framing her, exchanging Gautier for Chanel, even color-coordinating her wear with the wallpaper and meals, such as the inaugural dish served at the opening of the three day Christmas decadence: pea green soup capped with a white foam, while she’s attired in a pea green frock lined in white. Also, her primary confidant and connection throughout this debacle? The chef; food being her only comfort apart from her sons.
SPENCER is a bold tale, singularly focused on Diana mentally spiraling downward, unfurling, and realizing that she’s rebuking this life, struggling to return home and to her roots. She’s opting-out, but yet is still trapped. It’s a story of acknowledging service, service to one’s family, to one’s nation, and of knowing yourself and unceremoniously rejecting your place in that hierarchy.
I’m on record as being a Kristen Stewart booster but even I was a bit on the fence about having her portray Diana, but she’s a goddamn revelation in the role, all wild, sad eyes and angered and antagonistic in a way I’ve never seen from her. It’s brilliant casting and writing, with deft camerawork, and surprisingly one of my favorite films of the year.
GINGER SNAPS (2000)
(Fubo/peacock/Shudder/tubi/Vudu) GINGER SNAPS is an extremely Canadian production from John Fawcett (co-creator of ORPHAN BLACK) and Karen Walton. Fawcett had the concept and directed it, Walton scripted it, but ultimately it was a collaborative effort. It’s about two goth sisters living together in the basement of their idyllic, overly understanding Fitzgerald parents (Mimi Rodgers and John Bourgeois), struggling to make it through high school ridicule. The older sister is Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle, who has had one hell of a TV career, and she glows in AMERICAN MARY), an extremely confident, very protective-yet-belligerent redhead to her younger sister, Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) who is the quieter, less confrontational but more bookish, sibling.
I don’t know why I’m wasting words when the opening title sequence showcases their dynamics and interests perfectly. Even if the rest of the film was garbage, it’d be worth watching for this perfectly executed bit (which is also really NSFW). (Mike Shields’ amazing opening theme also does a lot of heavy lifting there! )
To summarize: dogs in the Fitzgerald’s suburban neighborhood are repeatedly found torn to shreds, but no one really pays much mind. The two Fitzgerald sisters head out to play a prank against a fellow classmate which goes horribly awry. Ginger has her first period at the same time, informs her sister, and is then is grabbed and scratched by something large and wolflike in a wildly Raimi-esque sequence. The two escape to a road, almost get run over, but youthful drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche, who had a small role in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and does a fair amount of TV work now) accidentally runs over the beast with his ambulance.
Brigette drags Ginger home, tends to her wounds and, almost immediately, Ginger is a different person, a different species, growing hairier, more bloodthirsty from there, but handwaving it away as cramps until she’s full werewolf and embodying a vengeful Carrie.
Brigette tries to keep Ginger on the down-low, but … she’s uncontrollable. Matters escalate.
GINGER SNAPS wasn’t the first horror film I’d seen that was a woman transformation parable — that’d be Neil Jordan’s IN THE COMPANY OF WOLVES but it was almost certainly the first I was overtly aware of, and it was quite the revelation.
A lot has happened since then, so here are a few links:
Karen Walton reflects on GINGER SNAPS, 20 years later.
Apparently, it’s slated to be rebooted as a TV series soon, which I hope will be brilliant.
BENEDETTA (2021)
(Cinemas) BENEDETTA, the latest from the always inventive and thrilling filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, is based on the true story detailed in Judith C. Brown’s text IMMODEST ACTS: THE LIFE OF A LESBIAN NUN IN RENAISSANCE ITALY. Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) was pledged to the church by her rich family after a very troubled birth. Benedetta felt that Jesus spoke to her from a young age, and then when she was a youth, her parents paid for her to stay at a nunnery, which according to the film was a slightly disillusioning experience, partially because of the very brusque, practical abbesse Soeur Felicita (the always exceptional Charlotte Rampling) at least until — later in life — a young Bartolomea (a wide-eyed Daphne Patakia) stumbles into the nunnery and Benedetta’s life, chased by herd of sheep and her abusive and rapey father. Benedetta convinces her parents to pay for her to stay there, and she and Bartolomea spiral into a very complicated, charged relationship, with severely uneven power dynamics on both sides.
Apologies for yet another ‘hey I saw an advance screening of this film’ post, but I saw an advance screening of this film a few weeks ago, and it’s the first film I’ve seen in some time to have protestors castigating those walking through the Music Box doors. (Heads-up: I didn’t capture this footage and this isn’t my account.)
The screening was at least two-thirds populated and, if you can attend a nearby screening, are vaxxed, and are comfortable with it, I would suggest attending. The film looks great — although two loud film nerds of a certain type directly behind me complained about the ‘shit CGI’ without realizing that’s part of Verhoeven’s cartoonish violence schtick — but, given the nature of the material, you wouldn’t think that this film is funny, but it is. It’s Verhoeven — it’s irreverent, but it comes from a place of wanting better from people and society. Always has been, hopefully always will be. There’s a purpose behind his cutting humor beyond sugar-coating some rough moments and being clever; it helps to provide insight and flesh out the characters. Consequently, hearing how people laugh and respond to the material in a crowd situation is surprisingly enlightening, although I will note that at least a good third of the laughs were of the nervous kind.
Yes, Verhoeven did take certain liberties — I won’t mention what they are as one is pretty important, one could say the crux of the film — so there is definitely some fictional sensationalism, but ultimately this is a human drama, one which showcases how very little has changed over hundreds of years.
DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (1940)
Programming note: NaNoWriMo is over, and I hit my goal! That said, now I’m on the wane, so posts will be intermittent until 2022.
I’m embarrassed to say that this film wasn’t on my radar until Turner Classic Movies featured Maureen O’Hara’s monologue in one of their ‘monthly promotional vignettes’. I quickly snapped up the Criterion Blu-Ray and wow, I’m glad I did. This is a bold, brazen film from one of the most prolific women Hollywood directors, Dorothy Arzner, based on a text by Vicki Baum.
It’s the story of two dancers from a ramshackle dance troupe that specialized in burlesque which had the misfortune to be preemptively dissolved. The star of the troupe, Bubbles (Lucille Ball), goes on to have an exceptionally popular mainstream striptease career under the name of Tigerlily White, and she enlists fellow prior troupe-mate Judy (Maureen O’Hara), a woman with aspirations to be a ballerina, to serve as her ‘stooge’, where Judy dances her high art act while the audience boos and jeers here in order to tease Tigerlily White’ return to the stage.
If you only know Lucille Ball from I LOVE LUCY, she had quite the career as a supporting film actor prior to her sitcom career — she had a few stand-out roles in noirs like Douglas Sirk’s LURED (1947), and also held her own against Katharine Hepburn in the extremely entertaining STAGE DOOR (1937). While it was an earlier film for Maureen O’Hara — she was coming off of JAMAICA INN and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME — she brings her A-game to this.
Ultimately, DANCE, GIRL, DANCE is a powerful film about exploitation and appeasement and the willingness to settle, to be content to not attempt to rise above your current station, and it is not subtle or apologetic about it. For its time, hell, even now, it is an astounding work from Dorothy Arzner who, sadly, has been mostly forgotten by film academics. (Thankfully, not all.)
Dorothy Arzner was the first woman sound director and, for many years, the only woman director in Hollywood. Not only that, she was as unapologetically openly gay as you could be back then, hair shorn short and her uniform consisted of menswear. Dancer and choreographer Marion Morgan was her partner, and Arzner leaned on her skills for DANCE, GIRL, DANCE.
Despite that, she’s rarely talked about today, which is a crime because this film is Arzner using her platform to dissect the role of a viewer and the role of a creator, while also featuring a woman taking advantage of another woman explicitly because of capitalism, all without completely vilifying her. It’s a complicated work, one that also manages to be severely entertaining.
“Give ‘em all ya got, baby.”
“They couldn’t take it.”
THE SOUVENIR PART II (2021)
(Cinemas) I wrote a bit about THE SOUVENIR (PART I from here on out) a few days ago, in case you missed it. You might want to start there.
Given that I will watch anything from Joanna Hogg, I intentionally neglected to watch THE SOUVENIR PART II’s trailer (PART II from here on out), going in cold. What I saw wasn’t even close to what I thought we would get. I was thinking it would be something along the lines of THE UP series — checking in on the character as they age.
PART II is far more interesting than that.
PART II, an overtly autobiographical piece from writer/director Joanna Hogg, picks up approximately where the first part left off and follows aspiring filmmaker Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) as she tries to process the events of the first ‘film’ of her life (in several ways), while also becoming a more singular being.
I imagine there will be a number of folks who will find PART II to be too inside baseball. (That said, film nerds will eat this up.) Instead of focusing on a realistic relationship melodrama, PART II is specifically about Julie trying to find the images to deal with what she’s going through, and most of that is done through her work on her final student film. There’s a lot of riffing on PART I, there’s a lot of film jargon, and a lot of time spent on film sets and film crew members angrily bickering with each other.
In other words, the narrative propulsion is the polar opposite to PART I, but the center is still the same: it’s all about Julie’s journey, and Hogg handles it masterfully. Just like with PART I, it’s so beautifully and effectively shot — you can tell it’s a Hogg film based on how she frames buildings and navigates interior urban spaces, how she opts to obscure people’s faces more often than not, have them ‘turnout’ or ’turn in’.
I can’t recommend these two films enough, but I would suggest watching them relatively close together. I hadn’t seen PART I since it screened in theaters in 2019, and felt like I was missing out on a lot in PART II because, uh, my memory, and the past two years have been particularly harrowing.
Lastly, Vadim Rizov’s A.V. Club review touches on a lot of film and autobiographical references and riffs I wish I had time to note.
THE SOUVENIR (2019)
(hoopla/kanopy/Prime/Showtime/VOD) I saw THE SOUVENIR during its theatrical release on a sparsely attended Sunday afternoon matinee at the Lakeview Century Cinema, an act only a handful of Chicago folks would do, even in the before times.
THE SOUVENIR is a story from writer/director Joanna Hogg — who also wrote and directed EXHIBITION, which I dragged some folks to a Chicago International Film Fest screening many years ago which I loved, but I’m pretty sure they have yet to forgive me — about a young woman named Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne, and yes, Tilda Swinton appears as her mother) who makes terrible relationship decisions that she firmly believes in, but can’t see that they’re awful. Classic youth romanticism. There’s a lot of class work thrown in, commentary about art and film, facets of addiction and the like, but ultimately it’s about her navigating, discovering, reckoning.
Right before the credits rolled, I thought I couldn’t love THE SOUVENIR more, then it closed out with a new Anna Calvi song (see also the previously recommended music video STRANGE WEATHER) and I shivered. Then an older women behind me complained to her companion:
“I don’t know, the whole film was weird. I mean, this song too! So weird!”
Damn right it was, and we need more of it.
Astoundingly, Hogg received funding for a sequel in which Robert Pattinson was to co-star. Then COVID and THE BATMAN happened, but the sequel did go into production — sans Pattinson — and is now in theaters! Give yourself the dramatic double-feature you deserve!
DEFINITELY, MAYBE (2008)
Programming note: I’m swamped this month balancing NaNoWriMo and work and life, so the few posts I’ll eke out will be brief and will often lean on others.
(peacock/VOD) DEFINITELY, MAYBE is one of my favorite modern rom-coms, and I was elated to see that Caroline Siede featured it in her fantastic WHEN ROMANCE MET COMEDY series (despite the fact that it took me several months to finally read it):
“Definitely, Maybe isn’t a “soulmate rom-com” about how there’s one perfect person for everyone. Instead, it looks at the realistic ways in which timing, circumstance, and miscommunication can impact and upend relationships. And it finds hope in the fact that good things can still come out of a romance that’s not meant to last. Definitely, Maybe is essentially the cinematic equivalent of the adage that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime—and that there’s value in all three.”
https://www.avclub.com/ryan-reynolds-traded-snark-for-sincerity-in-an-underrat-1847432954