Gemko Quibi: February 2024 (Patreon)

As a reminder: These are brief (though they always wind up growing longer and longer) thoughts on films that I'm revisiting mostly just because it's been at least 20 years and I’m feeling nostalgic and/or want to have a rating for them. Mostly stuff that's about to be removed from a streaming service to which I subscribe, so far. See the original post for a fuller explanation. (I'm now throwing in repeat viewings of more recent films as well; those generally used to get no additional words unless my opinion significantly changed or something new occurred to me.) 

Sommersby (1993, Jon Amiel): 63/100

Previously seen: 8 February 1993, New York, NY (Movieland 8th Street, which was purchased by NYU around 1996 and I assume still serves as a screening room for classes or something).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, no memory.

Now: Still haven't seen The Return of Martin Guerre, so I can't say whether this is a pale shadow, or whether transplanting the story to Reconstruction-era Tennessee constitutes some sort of betrayal. On its own, though, it's a sturdily effective melodrama, hampered mostly by the improbability of Sommersby reinventing not merely his identity but his entire damn psyche. Yeah, people can change, but rarely does a noted coward and scoundrel just sort of decide to hoist himself into the 99th percentile of selfless decency; that he's prepared to die so that former slaves' land deeds won't be nullified, for example, is a bit much to swallow. Still, quite interesting to see what's effectively a variant of The Crucible's "Because it is my name!" martyrdom with the slight wrinkle that it is not, in fact, his name. Gere and Foster do solid work, while Bill Pullman, in the same year that saw him play yet another wan Baxter (Sleepless in Seattle), gets to chew on a much more spiteful and rancid version. Would make a good double-bill with The Imposter, as it dramatizes that doc's thesis: People will persuade themselves to see what they desperately want to see. Oh, and I was brought up short early on by Danny Elfman's score, one small bit of which I not only recognized but knew I'd heard dozens if not hundreds of times; turns out Regency Pictures lifted that passage for its production logo. 

Flatliners (1990, Joel Schumacher): 35/100

Previously seen: ca. August 1990, San Jose, CA (Century 23).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, but negative. (When I reviewed the remake, my main complaint was that they made the same stupid movie again.)

Now: This movie's stupid. Rejecting the very premise always seems like dirty pool, but I have a hard time getting past the fact that there's literally nothing scientific about their experiment—all they do is report what they experienced while clinically dead, which people have been doing for ages, and it's no more meaningful just because now it's coming from med students who temporarily killed themselves on purpose. And then all of the ostensibly spooky business in which they're stalked by people they'd hurt in the past (poor Kiefer Sutherland has to deliver the deathless line "Somehow we've brought our sins back physically. And they're pissed") isn't even intrinsic to flatlining—there must be at least a dozen horror movies employing the same basic idea, except that the vengeful ghosts were triggered by an old lady's curse or whatever. Schumacher makes everyone's afterlife resemble a fucking Skyrizi commercial (I watched it on Hulu and genuinely thought that an ad break had started at one point), though I'm fine with his comically absurd decision to have the gang's secret lab appear to have been set up in an entire disused wing of the Louvre. Only Platt has a worthwhile (or at least mildly amusing) character to play, but Sutherland's commitment to being repugnant, even way back then, is impressive. (Now that I think about it, my introduction to him was as Stand by Me's bully). And, hey, this is better than the remake.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023, Joaquim Dos Santos & Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson): 59/100

Previously seen: 13 June 2023, Oxnard, CA (Century Riverpark).

Original opinion: 59/100. Reviewed it for y'all.

Now: "You say 'the fate of the multiverse' and my brain dies." Same here, Peter B. Parker / Spider-Man From Earth-616B. Watching this again confirms it as last year's most yawning (sometimes literally) form/content chasm for me—it's a visual marvel and I never care one iota about what those images signify beyond themselves. (Even then, the way that they're edited is too frenetic for my taste much of the time; I'm an oldster who neither demands nor really enjoys constant opening-titles-of-Enter-the-Void-level stimulation.) When the dialogue isn't prattling on about superhero "canon" (the most annoying metaphor for societally-imposed restrictions imaginable), it's indulging in the sort of rah-rah positivism (Miles' mom: "You have to promise to take care of that little boy [inside yourself] for me. Make sure he never forgets where he came from. And he never doubts that he's loved") that's laudable out in the real world but is turning mainstream popcorn movies into sickly mush. Also, the ending really plays like a TV series' season finale; when I was a lad, the franchise cliffhangers (e.g. Empire Strikes Back) weren't quite so aggressive. 

Raja (2003, Jacques Doillon): 74/100

Previously seen: 18 October 2003, New York, NY (Alice Tully Hall—apparently I missed the NYFF press screening and saw it at the festival proper); 22 November 2004, New York, NY (dvd).

Original opinion: 74/100. Reviewed that for Time Out New York, though word count got tightened right around then and I didn't have space to say much.

Now: Man, what a minefield this would be today. Yet the film itself is still gratifyingly complex, acknowledging that the middle-aged wealthy European holds all the power in this "relationship" while also noting that he can never achieve his actual goal, which is neither sex nor love but possession. (It's Fred's stifled sob as he wanders away in the final shot, after reassuring himself "When she needs money, she'll be back," that really makes the movie.) Films in which every aspect of human existence is fundamentally transactional have been in fashion for a while now, and Raja was ahead of the curve, doing it better than Soderbergh ever has; Doillon's touch here is often superbly counterintuitive, as when Fred decides that he'll keep pursuing Raja if she turns back to see whether he's watching her—she does, but we see it from her perspective and never cut back to his excitement or renewed resolve, instead staying with Raja and her friends. I do wish that Najat Benssallem, who'd never acted before and hasn't since (though apparently there's a documentary about her troubled life since appearing in this film), were more of a match for Pascal Greggory, who placed 5th in the Skandies and should have won outright. (That year was Giamatti's Sideways sweep.) Terrific film, happy I didn't have to wade through a lot of age-gap outrage—especially for a film (like May December) in which that's the whole point.

Planet of the Apes (2001, Tim Burton): 34/100

Previously seen: 24 July 2001, New York, NY (press screening, Ziegfeld).

Original opinion: C-minus. Reviewed for Time Out New York.

Now: This had become an outright abomination in dim memory, so it was actually sort of a pleasant surprise to be reminded that it's just deeply mediocre. (The nonsensical twist ending was all that stuck; now, "How did Thade repair the spaceship that its astronauts couldn't and figure out how to pilot it and find Earth at an even earlier time?" bugs me less than "How the fuck does a single-occupant pod have enough fuel to get Leo from at least Saturn to Earth, a journey that would take eight years at non-light speed, especially considering that OMG this film is set when Ayo Edebiri will be age 34?") Honestly, I suspect that the basic problem lies in Planet of the Apes as originally envisioned—despite having begun life as a novel, it's always felt more like a first-rate Twilight Zone premise, which is surely why Rod Serling was hired in 1968. There's always too much "What if human society, but apes?" for my taste, and this version doesn't even make the "local" humans more ape-like as a contrast. Handful of worthwhile aspects include the opening-titles font, Danny Elfman's martial score, and the reveal that Calima derives from a partially obscured sign reading CAUTION: LIVE ANIMALS. That's clever. Everything else is dull, vacuous (Estelle Warren), or obnoxious (Bonham Carter's exaggerated reactions, every single thing Giamatti does). 

The Book of Life (1998, Hal Hartley): 65/100

Previously seen: 8 October 1998, New York, NY (NYFF press screening, Walter Reade).

Original opinion: B+. Never completed my NYFF coverage that year (it was strictly for my own site, so all deadlines were self-imposed), but I did write "Quite possibly my favorite Hartley film to date" as a teaser. Which surprises me, since I'd seen and loved Henry Fool just a few months earlier. Didn't remember liking this almost as much if not more, but I only saw it the once.

Now: Definitely not my favorite Hartley (a title now held by Trust, which I didn't love in '92 for some reason), but still a fun here-comes-the-millennium doodle, with Martin Donovan and Thomas Jay Ryan ideally cast as Jesus and Satan, respectively. It's possible that what had me so enthused in '98 is the "film's" genuinely striking use of early digital video's limitations, which to my mind wipes the floor with Inland Empire; just the way that every window is blown out, leaving actors enshrouded in a vaporous white halo, demonstrates that Jim Denault (who'd previously shot Another Girl, Another Planet and Nadja for Almereyda, and knew something about low resolution) put more thought into DV than just about anyone else at the time. Apparently, this was shot with the same camera as were The Idiots and Chuck & Buck and Bamboozled, all of which offend my eyeballs. Mostly, though, I just chortled at the law firm of Armageddon, Armageddon & Jehoshaphat, and obtrusive microphones showing up whenever Satan wants to soliloquize, and the '90s PowerBook prompt asking in Chicago font whether Jesus wants to open the fifth seal, and lines like "Any purely biological unit attempting to mechanize its own survival would seem likely to pass you by," and Edie using millions of dollars in lottery winnings to distribute carrot soup to all of New York City. 

Josie and the Pussycats (2001, Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont): 56/100

Previously seen: 30 November 2001, New York, NY (on DVD).

Original opinion: C+. From the nerd group: "In moldier news, I caught up last night with a couple of semi-acclaimed (here if nowhere else) comedies, Josie and the Pussycats and Pootie Tang. These two uneven films should have been combined into one really good film in my opinion. Both of them are about the fight against coercive commodification and neither one really gives a shit about telling a proper story, so why not just go whole hog into daffy surrealism and have Pootie be Val's love interest or something (as well as another cog in the MegaRecords machine)? Not only would this give the other Pussycats something to do besides sulk and squeal, it would combine the best 40 minutes of each movie into one brief, anarchic burst of lunacy, leaving no room for painfully unfunny shtick like Fiona's failed attempts at sotto voce, or pretty much anything involving Chris Rock."

Now: Apparently my sense of humor has shifted, as Parker Posey muttering sinister things way too loudly and then improvising innocuous explanations made me laugh aloud twice this time. On the whole, I'd say I liked the movie a bit more, too (56 is a low B-minus), though claims of satirical genius remain wildly overstated—sharpness-wise, it's all downhill from some random girl at the beginning who screams "Dujour is like my most favorite band of all time!" (All of the "Dujour means..." jokes actually undercut how funny the band name is all by itself.) Haven't seen either Rachael Leigh Cook or Tara Reid in anything since, which now seems a shame; Reid, in particular, commits to Melody's bubbleheaded daffiness without any winking, and keeps stealing scenes with her childlike enthusiasm. ("More coasters!") Songs are surprisingly decent, with "Three Small Words" genuinely sounding like it could have been a minor indie-rock hit during the late '90s. The more aggressively Kaplan and Elfont foreground corporate manipulation, though, the more leaden Josie becomes, and poking fun at product placement via excessive examples of same was already a tired bit even then, a decade after Wayne's World. Most prescient gag: "Heath Ledger is the new Matt Damon," at a time when Ledger was known in the U.S. only for 10 Things I Hate About You and The Patriot.

Okay, breaking format now because I rewatched another half dozen highly acclaimed 2023 U.S. releases right before the Skandies deadline. (I do this annually, partly because sometimes my opinion shifts—I wound up liking Aftersun a good deal more the second time, for example—and partly because it helps to have many contenders fresh in memory when I'm working with Best Scene, determining which votes are for the same scene.) This year, my initial opinion was reinforced in every case, so there's not a whole lot more to say. But I did make a few notes. Speed run! 

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan): 56/100. Still completely uninterested in both Oppenheimer's security-clearance show trial and Strauss' confirmation hearing. Clever structural device with real thematic heft, but compared to the Manhattan Project it's just all so petty and inconsequential. This time the film didn't truly come alive for me until Damon shows up (about 45 minutes in), even though there's plenty of worthwhile stuff prior to that. Also Nolan's not totally immune to Biopicitis or whatever you want to call it. "That mesa we saw today—one of my favorite places in the world. Tomorrow we'll climb it." "What's it called?" "Los Alamos." [rickdaltonpointing.png] 

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese): 66/100. Specifically watched it with an eye toward DiCaprio's performance, as what this film asks of him—what Scorsese and Roth bet the farm on—is damn near impossible. He just doesn't pull it off, where by "it" I mean simultaneously conveying Ernest's sincere love for Molly and sociopathic disregard for how much he's hurting her (by murdering her entire family, even if you want to believe that he's ignorant about the insulin). What Leo does instead is dramatically change his performance depending upon the needs of a given scene. Watch him when Ernest hires Blackie to kill Bill Smith and Reta—suddenly that guy seems like a whole different person, crafty and Machiavellian and predatory. Good work in a vacuum, bears little or no relation to the dim-bulb Ernest we see elsewhere. I guess you could make a case for that as accurately reflecting compartmentalization, but it doesn't play for me. Good film in spite of that!

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Trier): 68/100. Didn't really register the first time, but there's a "one year later" jump in this film—totally realistic, that's probably about how long it'd take for the case to go to trial—and I'm more interested in what happened during that year that I am in blood-splatter analysis and so forth. The state hires someone to essentially serve as an information buffer and household spy, she's inserting herself between mom and son for an entire year, and we see none of that. Everything hinges on the kid, and there's too much obfuscation there for my taste—it's weird, for example, that we repeatedly get what basic film grammar unmistakably suggests are Daniel's imaginings of things he didn't see, happening in a place that he's never seen (they moved to that chalet after the accident), which nonetheless conform precisely to reality*. And while you can hypothesize a reason for it, Daniel insisting that Sandra leave the night before he testifies again retroactively feels like cheap misdirection. Always absorbing, and I love stray images like Sandra's attorney holding his cigarette out a half-open door while videotaping her cross-exam prep, but I remain a bit frustrated by it.

* Though I get why Triet went that route—Daniel imagining the chalet looking sort of as it actually does, but different and/or fuzzy in many details, would be more accurate but would confuse the mighty fuck out of most viewers, possibly including myself. I'm not convinced that any imagining on his part was necessary at all, however. It's mostly a way to remind us that he's there.

They're getting longer...

May December (Todd Haynes): 51/100. Really hoped I'd find my way into this, especially after finally reading a rave review that actually describes the film I saw. "[Haynes] utilizes a tonal approach that suggests his three main characters are in three different movies within the movie, each one clashing with the other." I only saw two separate movies—one about an actor preying on the real-life people who inspired the film she's preparing for, one about the Letourneau case's lingering emotional damage—but had suggested that maybe Haynes intentionally set them in opposition as meta-commentary, so this time I looked hard for discrete formal shifts based on which character is central in a given scene. Did not find them, alas. It still seems clear to me that Burch tried to do two largely irreconcilable things simultaneously. Or, no, it's not that they can't be reconciled; it's just that they don't inform each other in any constructive or interesting way. Gracie the predator out hunting foxes does not qualify as incisive in my opinion. Also, while I may regret saying so, Elizabeth's honest answer regarding sex scenes doesn't seem inappropriate for a high-school classroom (except maybe insofar as today's teenagers are weirdo prudes), and "These actors aren't sexy enough for the character" is a legitimate casting concern vis-à-vis that particular story. (This film cast Charles fuckin' Melton! Whose much-ballyhooed performance, btw, seems to me overly illustrative—"I'll just behave like an overgrown child.") If anything, it's refreshing to see a woman lodge that complaint against male actors for once. 

Odd detail I missed the first time: When Elizabeth is flipping through tabloids, we see at least one actual photo of Letourneau and Fualaau among all the Moore and Melton mock-ups. Presumably an intentional "slip." 

De humani corporis fabrica (Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor): 69/100. Okay, this one I can keep short and sweet. Same exact reaction: love the film when it's intra-corporis, not so enthused when it's extra- (which includes, in addition to the dementia-ward scenes, its opening 12 minutes, following a dog into the hospital for some reason and then offering a static murky view of staff at work through windows). Sorry to report that nobody joined me in voting for "lost in the prostate" as one of last year's best scenes.

The Killer (David Fincher): 60/100. "Smoothly watchable, empty calories" reads my sole note this time around. I get what the voiceover's doing, but it's still a chore to endure, honestly; this doesn't excite me as a warped character study, only as pure conventional tension (that Finch sorta seeks to undermine). Which means my favorite stretch by far—and probably my #2 scene of the year, after About Dry Grasses' "Give me back my letter," if I could justify it as one scene rather than two—is The Killer infiltrating The Lawyer's office and then acquiring info at Dolores' house. Charles Parnell was already on my Skandies Supporting Actor list; this viewing added Kerry O'Malley for Supporting Actress. Neither made the cut, alas, though O'Malley came close. 

Okay, back to our regular format. Though there's only one film left.

Flirt (1995, Hal Hartley): 54/100

Previously seen: 1 June 1997, New York, NY (VHS).

Original opinion: C. I reviewed it for Entertainment Weekly's video section: "Deadpan maestro Hal Hartley tells the same story three times with three different gender combinations in three different cities and winds up with a textbook example of diminishing returns. The New York permutation, involving a male flirt (Bill Sage) torn between two women, is a first-rate short film, but subsequent variations in Berlin (with Dwight Ewell as the flirt, gay this time) and Tokyo (in which the flirt is a woman, Miho Nikaido), employing the same dialogue in each segment, make Flirt ultimately seem more a series of screen tests than a movie. For those viewers sucked in by the echo effect, watching on tape, with the rewind button at the ready, has its advantages. But in the end I hold with the Berlin construction worker who’s caught discussing Hartley’s work in progress with his pals during a lunch break (no, really): “Yes, he’ll fail,” the German opines, ”but in this case, the failure is interesting.”

Now: Interesting failure. Impossible today not to think of Hong's many similar exercises in repetition, going back to Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors; what Flirt mostly confirms for me is that Hartley's unique tone is tricky to master and best performed by his stock company (heavily represented in the superior first iteration). There are more divergences from the original short than I'd remembered—Japan '95 actually scrambles the order of many scenes—but few, if any, that truly demonstrate milieu imposing itself upon material. Interesting that this is the one and only time that Hartley's ever "acted," albeit essentially as himself making the very film we're watching. Anyway, I liked it a bit more this time (54's a C+ right on the B- borderline), even as it reminded me of why Hartley's later globetrotting features don't quite hit the mark. 

As a supplement, some brief notes re: movies I bailed on last month.

Inshallah a Boy (Amjad Al Rasheed): Dismal narrative architecture here. The film opens with a couple who are explicitly trying to conceive a child; then the man immediately dies; then the widow's employer's daughter announces that she's pregnant with a baby she doesn't want; then it becomes clear that the widow will lose her apartment and possibly her daughter due to sexist Jordanian inheritance law; then you remember that the title is God Willing Your Baby Will Be Male; then you work out the three possible ways things could play out from here and realize you don't really want to watch any of them. Oh wait maybe that's just me. Also, I get that the circumstances as dictated are ludicrous and wrong, and that she shouldn't be forced to sell the truck in order to keep her entire life from falling apart, but if you don't know how to drive or have any real need for a large vehicle, for fuck's sake just sell the damn truck. Standing on principle is clearly not worth it in this instance. 

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Phạm Thiên Ân): The shot in progress when I turned this off, at the one-hour mark, had been going without a cut, across multiple locations, for more than 20 minutes, and for all I know does not end until the film itself does. Perceived no good reason for that formal approach other than it being the current fashion, but I'd already pretty much checked out by then, as this is another case (see immediately above) of the filmmaker stating his intention much too plainly from the jump. In the midst of death we are in life, so a languid philosophical discussion among three young men gets interrupted by a fatal motorcycle accident, following which we observe one of the young men get a semi-erotic massage for many real-time fixed-camera minutes, while he ignores numerous texts and phone calls, until finally someone shows up to tell him that he'd better answer, it's an emergency, and he learns that the accident victim from earlier was his own sister-in-law. One or the other of those sequences might well have been effective, but not both in quick succession! Also the lead actor is just intolerably bland. None of my friends who's seen this has liked it much, but it does have passionate fans. 

How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker): No doubt this eventually finds its way to a more interesting place, but the first third plays like a distaff version of Go's weak midsection, except all three of them are Desmond Askew (the painfully annoying British one). I stuck around just long enough to see Mia McKenna-Bruce start to develop a personality for Tara, but Manning Walker's commitment to tedious Dionysian-hormonal realism—or, worse, her belief that it's something other than tedious—did not inspire confidence. Reminder: I didn't like Spring Breakers, either (though they're quite dissimilar tonally.)