Hey title change.
Top 5 first views:
5. The Square
4. Suspiria
3. 24 Frames
2. Bringing Up Baby
1. Something Wild
Honorable mentions: A Hard Day's Night, Abacus: Too Small to Jail, Cinema Paradiso, Annihilation, A Fantastic Woman, When Harry Met Sally..., Ingrid Goes West
Dishonorable mention: The Cloverfield Paradox
Best rewatch: Cloverfield (actually only rewatch but it is genuinely great)
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also spent part of the morning writing up my Pick 3 for February, chosen by
ZombAid
The Sword of Doom (1966) ***
Powerful when it focuses on Ryunosuke's formidable, horrifying, beautiful talents with a blade. He is a rapist, a murderer, a psychopath, an addict, an abuser. He is an unstoppable force, unassailably skilled at inflicting misery. Tatsuya Nakadai plays him as a man saddled with this burden to do evil, as if on some level he doesn't want to obliterate all in his path but has no other choice. This weight goes hand-in-hand, however, with a sense of invincibility. Acting as an agent of death is his millstone, but it guarantees him corporeal security—or so he believes, until he runs from the assassination of a virtuous samurai (Toshiro Mifune) who handily dispatches all of Ryunosuke's compatriots. If he's not unbeatable, what is he?
Kihachi Okamoto's shadowy high-contrast images and methodically choreographed spars form an acutely grim backbone, and at all moments where Ryunosuke's gory march towards utter madness–right up to the wonderfully open-ended conclusion–is the focus this is spellbinding. Unfortunately, a lot of the film shifts concentration towards boring and outdated soap operatics or inertialess incomprehensible shogunate politicking. (I've since read defenses of this inscrutability and lack of momentum as purposeful opacity that throws the futility of the sphere in which Ryunosuke metes injustice into sharper relief. I'm not buying.) Okamoto and screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto would have done better by the material to mimic their protagonist and act more single-mindedly in purpose.
Ingrid Goes West (2017) ***1/2
Well-trodden material regarding the poisonous nature of social media is deepened and stretched to hilarious and uncomfortable lengths here in Matt Spicer's unflinching black comedy. This some grade-AA cringe inducement, the proceedings escalating until they are rapturously hard to watch. Aubrey Plaza makes a meal of the title role, Billy Magnussen terrifies as a smooth-bodied affluent sociopathic addict, and O'Shea Jackson Jr. excavates layers of complexity (and some of the funniest line reads) from the ordinary nice guy support slot. Spicer shows a laudable level of tonal control for a feature debut, an aptitude for crossing the line enough that your head spins but not so much that you reject the whiplash—especially at the deliciously sour (and, in retrospect, inevitable) ending.
Cinema Paradiso (1988) ***1/2
I was somewhat up in the air on this one until the final section, and the very ending in particular. Alfredo's montage of censored romance is a stunning grace note, retroactively imbuing Toto's memories of childhood and first love–which could be taken as slight and digressive–with sublime beauty. They are more valuable for their vaporousness. Like the scraps of film Alfredo willed to Salvatore, they are quicksilver moments of intense love and idyllic joy, times and places turned to rubble but preserved through recollection and celluloid. In Toto's remembrances we see how, for a time, the cinema was a cultural hub and a living document of the metamorphosing mores of a society. Whether or not this excuses the plot peculiarity of Salvatore, who ultimately had a fairly functional home life, never going home for 30 years (Thirty years! He never went back for a weekend trip to say hello! Never!) I'm uncertain, but even if it doesn't that wouldn't put the tears back in my ducts.
All told a real solid slate of 3 films, love that they were spread out over decade, genre and country. thumbs up.
