What I Watched In . . . January 2020
Welcome to a brand new series on the blog entitled WHAT I WATCHED, a monthly series which documents all of the feature and short films I was able to watch during the previous month. It is to serve as a log of sorts and to share some brief thoughts on each film. Last month I was able to see 16 feature films and 4 short films, all of which I greatly enjoyed.
I've been on a quest recently to build up my repertoire of "classic" (I'm using that term very loosely) cinema (really just important movies from before the turn of the century). Over the next few months, there's going to be way older films appearing on this list.
Let's see how this thing goes.
Here is what I watched in January 2020 . . .
Jurassic Park (1993) [rewatch]
Dir. Steven Spielberg
An all-time favourite of mine. I remember watching it for the first time in my Grandfather's Office when I was maybe six or seven years old. I asked my uncle to find my the ITV series "Prehistoric Park" on the internet. He didn't know what that was and found this instead. I think he might have traumatized me. I loved it.
I hadn't seen this film in years, so I was happy to find it on Amazon Prime. I was amazed by how well it holds up. The original Jurassic Park is such a fun, tightly written, and surprisingly thrilling film. It goes to show that true, quality filmmaking never gets old. The music goes really hard. The opening scene is one of the best opening scenes in cinema. Jeff Goldblum is an absolute legend here. As is the entire cast, but Goldblum really stands out.
What's really cool about this film is how they never decided to make a sequel. No Jurassic Park 2, no Jurassic Park 3, no Jurassic Park Quasi-Remake, Quasi-Sequel Two Decades After the Original, no Jurassic Park Quasi-Remake, Quasi-Sequel Two Decades After the Original 2, and no Jurassic Park Quasi-Remake, Quasi-Sequel Two Decades After the Original 3 coming in a few years. It's just one solitary movie.
It also continued my Laura Dern binge which started with Little Women (2019) and Marriage Story (2019) last month and continues throughout January.
Score: 5
Cold War (2018)
Dir. Paweł Pawlikowski
I've been meaning to watch this forever, but have only gotten around to it now. This was Poland's submission for the foreign-language category at the Oscars last year.
Set over many years from the late 1940s to the early 1960s in Poland during the Cold War, the film follows the love story of a musician and an up-and-coming singer as they navigate their tumultuous relationship, the European music scene, and the challenging politics consuming their nation.
Really fantastic stuff here from Pawlikowski. Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot are excellent in their roles as well. The cinematography is a highlight here. It's a slowly paced film, which works well in its favour and is certainly intentional, but the film does drag at points, especially during the second act.
However, it's all-around a pretty solid piece of cinema and an interesting portrait of a country I know so little about. If you like foreign films, music, or just want to try something new, check this film out. It's available on Amazon Prime.
Score: 4
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Dir. Wes Anderson
Another film I have been sleeping on for far too long. I started getting into Wes Anderson's films last fall and this was next on my list. Fantastic Mr. Fox is radiating with so much warmth and energy radiating from every single frame of the film. The A-list voice cast is really solid here and the animation is absolutely beautiful, very charming, and full of that classic Anderson-style.
It is a great movie for all ages in every sense of the word. It's an amazing movie for kids without sacrificing excellence in cinema.
The humour is absolutely top-notch which comes greatly from the incredible screenplay written by Anderson and fellow filmmaking Noah Baumbach (director of Marriage Story) and adapted from the work of Roald Dahl. Dahl's work is complemented by Anderson's filmmaking craft and I would love to see him do something else with the legendary author's work.
Claymation and Wes Anderson is a match made in heaven. His iconic visual style is elevated to another level here. Fantastic Mr. Fox may just be the ultimate Anderson film. It has everything we have come to know and love about the man: quirky camera work, surrealist comedy, bizarre characters, a fantastical world, and Bill Murray.
Score: 5
Dir. Shane Black
Sometimes you need to watch a movie that is just pure entertainment. This is just that. Pure 'style-over-substance', and boy does it have style, but that isn't a bad thing. It's all a matter of intention.
Shane Black (the man behind Iron Man 3) directs a tale of two-private eyes investigating a series of murders in the LA crime scene in the 1970s and slowly get pulled into a twisted web of lies, deceit, and evil corporations.
Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling are on the top of their game here. They both deliver super funny and charismatic performances. The film whips along and an extremely fast pace and keeps you engaged the entire time. It's not a piece that's going to change cinema in any meaningful way, but it's a fun use of two hours.
Score: 4
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017) [rewatch]
Dir. Rian Johnson
My sister realized that she hadn't seen this one after she came home from a screening of The Rise of Skywalker so we gave it a watch one afternoon. I've seen The Last Jedi three times in the past ten months and it just gets better every time. I felt somewhat cold towards after I first saw it when it was first released and never returned to it. I finally decided to watch it again and liked it a lot. Then I saw it again in December for my Star Wars rewatch. Then again now.
The Last Jedi really is fantastic. The Luke-Rey-Kylo arc is a stroke of genius. The film challenges what Star Wars is and makes you think really critically about the property. The cinematography is glorious and is some of the best in a any recent blockbuster. The performances, especially from Adam Driver, are really solid throughout and the special effects are really incredible. It's thematically cohesive and it all works together to drive home its messages.
And the Porgs. How can you not love them?
I'll admit that the Cantonica sequence (Canto Bight is the name of the city, not the planet) is a little wonky, but it doesn't stick out as much upon repeat viewings and helps illustrate the film's central themes.
Part 4 in my Laura Dern binge.
Score: 4.5
Toxic Vice (2019) [short]
Dir. David VanDyke
A friend of mine stars in this so I had wanted to check it out for a while.
It's a pretty great short from a group of amateurs. The visuals are really strong and the direction is super solid. The premise is simple enough (a drug trip gone wrong), but that simplicity allows for the film to surprise you and not let you guess what's going to come next. I loved the production design as well.
I wish that it was longer, frankly. This could have easily been expanded by a couple of minutes to really develop the film to make it vaguer by giving us more to work with.
I am super excited to see what this team does next. They have so much talent.
The Scarecrow (2019) [short]
Dir. John Graves, Josh Bullock, and Alex Hunter
I've been watching Alex's YouTube stuff for a long time and was pretty excited to see what he could do with a short film.
Honestly, it's pretty great. Some fantastic direction going on and certainly frightening at points. The extremely colour choices don't always work, but I appreciate what he was trying to do. The team is trying to create a distintive style, and while it's distinctive, it is at points obnoxious.
But that shot of the Scarecrow (no relation to the Batman villain) standing at the bottom of the stairs silhouetted by the red light is absolutely amazing.
Alex and team are certainly a talented bunch and I hope that they continue to pursue this road. Films like this make me want to create my own.
The Master (2012)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Man, what a crazy story about a cult founded by a charismatic science-fiction writer in America during the early 1950s based upon the writer's own work and uses borderline hypnosis to psychologically 'treat' members of said cult. It certainly has nothing to do with any real-world cults and religious organizations, and especially is not about Scientology.
This movie is complete fiction. Nothing true about it in any way.
Please don't hurt me, Church of Scientology.
PTA's The Master is really good. Joaquin Phoenix, giving a better performance than that in Joker, and Philip Seymour Hoffman absolutely kill it. The script is wonderful. The cinematography is really good, and the direction is brilliant, as it always is with Anderson (not Anderson from Fantastic Mr. Fox). The film slowly drags you into a world of insanity and instability as the inner workings of the Master's world are revealed.
Extremely engaging and a difficult watch, but in a good way. It puts you on the edge of your seat and doesn't let you go until the very end. It makes you root for people you should hate, and hate those that try to do good. It's an upsetting film in all of the best ways. People can be terrible.
The fifth and final part of my Laura Dern binge.
Score: 4.5
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Dir. Stanley Kubrick
Classics Series Part 1
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room!"
I've made it a personal goal to watch more old classic films this year. My experience of films older than 1990 is terribly limited. I've seen the big ones: Apocolypse Now, Star Wars, 2001, Indiana Jones, the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, and a handful of others, but there is so much I have yet to discover. I've put together a list and this is where it starts.
Dr. Strangelove is such an excellent comedy.
Set during the Cold War, trigger happy American general Jack D. Ripper sends out a squadron of bomber planes to drop nuclear warheads on several Russian military targets to incite war between the two superpowers. The film, primarily set in the War Room of the White House, is about the attempts to shut down the planes before they drop their payloads.
It's a wonderfully tense comedy filled with killer writing and a great triple-performance by Peter Sellers as British RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President of the U.S.A. Merkin Muffley, and German definately-not-a-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove.
The film is a brilliant 90-minute comedy and keeps the humour at 100 the entire time.
Score: 5
Westworld (1973)
Dir. Michael Crichton
Classics Series Part 2
Written and directed by Michael Crichton, the guy who wrote the novel on which Jurassic Park is based, Westworld follows the adventures of two rich young socialites who travel to the theme park Westworld, a park that allows you to experience the Wild West as it actually happened. Everything is going well until the robots that serve as the characters of the western world begin to malfunction and rebel.
Westworld is certainly a unique film and very much a product of its time. The editing is totally strange and the pacing is all over the place. I'm glad I saw it as it helped me understand the guy who helped create one my my favourite movies, but otherwise, it's not really worth it. There's some really cool ideas to be found within, but they are executed far better in the currently running HBO series of the same name.
Score: 2.5
Roma (2018) [rewatch]
Dir. Alfonso Cuaron
My second contemporary foreign film shot in black-and-white this month. I think that's a record.
Based on his own family and experiences growing up, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron's latest piece is set in Mexico City, circa the early 1970s. The film follows Cleo, the maid of an upper-middle-class family, and her struggles and the conflicts within the family she works for amongst the political unrest in Mexico at the time.
Roma is a masterpiece. I mean that in every sense of the word. A flawless masterpiece. From its gorgeous visuals to captivating sound design to the powerful performances, everything within the film only serves to make it great. The cinematography is the highlight here - with its long, moving takes and incredible blocking, the visual style is unparalleled.
And it's on Netflix, which makes it super accessible. Check it out.
Score: 5
Goldman v Silverman (2020) [short]
Dir. Josh and Benny Safdie
A week after the terrible shut out of their film Uncut Gems (2019), the Safdie Brothers have reunited with Adam Sandler and gave themselves their own golden man.
It's a pretty great short. The film is about two performers in Time's Square, New York City arguing over the best spot in the square.
The Safdies again prove their ability to craft truly unique narratives and share new perspectives, while Sandler proves his ability to be a truly excellent actor.
It's a fun, harmless use of six minutes.
Stalker (1979)
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Classics Series Part 3
It's a masterpiece, obviously, but we all knew that.
In the dystopian future, outside of a grey and nameless city, there is The Zone, a mysterious land where the laws of reality don't always apply. Two men - a writer and a scientist - journey with a stalker, a guide who can take them through the Zone, to The Room, a place where their deepest desires can be fulfilled. Along the way, they converse about humanity, and art, and the meaning of life.
This was my first exposure to Tarkovsky and to Soviet cinema in general. It took me long enough. Tarkovsky crafts a really excellent and captivating narrative. The cinematography is gorgeous and the performances are incredibly moving.
Score: 5
The King of Comedy (1982)
Dir. Martin Scorsese
Classics Series Part 4
Man, the new Joker movie is pretty great. Oh, this wasn't Joker? Joker just ripped this off? Makes sense.
I'm always amazed that people seem to reduce Scorsese's legacy to "that guy who made a lot of gangster movies" when that doesn't describe his filmography. Gangsters certainly play a role, but the man is far more talented than that. Scorsese's filmography is a wealth of diverse films and thrilling tales from one of the greatest film artists in history.
Set in New York City, the film follows Rubert Pupkin (a last name often misspelled and mispronounced) and his obsession with fictional late-night television host Jerry Langford. Scorsese is such a master of cinematic craft. Robert De Niro is fantastic. It's a genuinely thrilling and funny film. If you liked Joker, or even if you didn't, check this one out.
Score: 4.5
1917 (2020)
Dir. Sam Mendes
This is a 2020 movie. It was released in January of this year and so should be treated as such. It shouldn't be considered for Oscars until next year. Change my mind.
Every war has that movie - a movie that defines what that war. It encapsulates the feelings around it, the aesthetic of it, the feeling of it like nothing else. For the Vietnam War, that movie is Apocolypse Now (1979). For the Iraq War, that movie, at the moment, is The Hurt Locker (2008). World War II is special because of how complex it was so there’s a few to look, but the most famous are the two Steven Speilberg directed features Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
1917 could be that film for World War I.
The film is gripping and engaging and enthralling. Wonderfully paced and incredibly tense - Mendes has struck gold with this film. Definitely see it in the theatre.
Score: 4.5
What Did Jack Do? (2020) [short]
Dir. David Lynch
American filmmaker David Lynch, while in an interview, launched into a lengthy rant about watching films on cellphones. He railed against streaming on phones saying "you can't say you've watched a film if you've seen it on a f*cking telephone." Whenever anyone watches anything on their phone - a sports game, a movie, a television show, a YouTube video - they are morally obligated to write a formal apology letter to David Lynch. Consider this my apology.
I am deeply sorry, Mr. Lynch, for watching your new short film What Did Jack Do? on my phone while on the bus.
The film itself is weird. It's 17 minutes of David Lynch, here playing a police investigator, interviewing a monkey, the eponymous Jack, about a murder he was closely associated with. Certainly check it out. It's right there on Netflix and it only takes 17 minutes.
Rope (1948)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Classics Series Part 5
Following up from 1917, I decided to watch the grandfather of all single-take films: Rope by Alfred Hitchcock. Based on the play of the same name written by Patrick Hamilton, Hitchcock pioneers a lot of experimental filmmaking techniques within this film: single-take cinema, tracking shots, and weird new camera angles.
Cinema changed a lot during the 1940s, which lead to the greatest period of cinematic excellence during the 1950s, and Hitchcock is a big reason for that change.
While Rope certainly isn't as famous, or as good as some of his other classics - Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window stand out as the go-to Hitchcock - it's certainly a welcome inclusion in the filmmaker's filmography. It's unlike anything the director has done in terms of presentation and visual style. While the man himself wasn't particularity warm to this one in later years, it is worth the watch for anyone who likes his other works.
Score: 4
Babette's Feast (1987)
Dir. Gabriel Axel
I am really happy I was able to see this finally. It's one of my mother's favourite films and so I felt like I needed to watch it with her. I mean, I've dragged her into enough of the films I've wanted to watch. I needed to pay it forward.
The film has a lot of heart going for it and it wears it on its sleeve. The emotional core is definitely the strength of Babette's Feast. The titular feast is a powerful, moving scene. It's a gorgeous pay off to the film and is so rewarding to watch.
The rest of the film just doesn't quite deserve that perfect ending. The film has visually dated poorly. It looks like something older than the 1980s and not in a good way. Older films can get dated, that's accepted about them, but Babette's Feast's dull visual style doesn't help it. Also, the narration didn't do much good.
Score: 3.5
The Godfather (1972)
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Classics Series Part 6
"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse."
Masterpiece. C'mon, it's The Godfather. What more do you want me to say? This film has been talked about to death. Anything I say about it will be a cliche or redundant. Even acknowledging the fact that it has been so widely discussed and that we're just in a cycle of cliche and redundancy in the discourse surrounding it is a cliche.
It's very good. Very, very good. Great acting. Great direction. Looks amazing. If you are like me a week ago, watch this movie. It will not disappoint.
Score: 5
No Country For Old Men (2007)
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
This is absolutely brilliant. The Coen Brothers knocked it out of the park with this one. No Country For Old Men is a contemporary western which follows the stories of three different men all tied up in a single crime. First, Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, gets tied up in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and ends up with millions of dollars in cash then goes off on the run. Next, serial killer Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is after the funds and so sets his sights on Moss. Finally, Sherif Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is chasing Chigurh across the States.
It's a subtle, thoughtful, and subversive film. It's clever and respects its audience as intelligent viewers. Impeccably acted and beautifully show - the film is destined for legendary status. In fifty years, when film lovers look back upon the 2000s, this is going to be one of the most discussed films of the bunch. The story is unique and fresh while feeling familiar. It's the perfect contemporary version of the western.
Lessons from the Screenplay did a fantastic video on the film which perfectly explains the point and the Coen's main goals. Spoiler warning.
Score: 5
And that does in for January. I'll see you all the next time around.
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