Category: Recently Watched

Perhaps because I read so much in September, I really didn’t watch that many movies, especially compared with the past few months. It’s not as if I was sitting around watching TV or other things instead, as occasionally happens — I’ve curiously fallen out of the habit of TV watching with the exception of a couple of shows, unintentionally — but, rather, September was filled with a bunch of other things that required my attention in the evenings and on the weekends. I could joke and say that October will be different, but this is a month with a week-long convention trip right in the middle of it, so we’ll see.

(Also, I realized only when putting the image in here: I missed out Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which got rewatched this month as well. Just mentally throw that in there, thanks.)

Is this late? Listen, bud: he’s got radioactive bl — wait, what I mean it, “Yes, it is; basically, the combination of being in Seattle for PAX West 2024 and then having a down day after returning yesterday kicked my scheduling ass and I only got to this four hours or so after posts normally go live.” What can I say, besides sorry?

Anyway; I watched a lot of movies in August, and that includes some genuinely bad ones — I’m looking at you, Slumber Party Massacre and Hospital Massacre (which, notably, I watched under its alternate title, X-Ray) — however, there were also some new favorite mixed into things, too: Wicked Little Letters, The Apple, and Omen are all destined to be rewatched multiple times, I suspect, for entirely different reasons. Notably, perhaps, only one of the movies on this list was seen in the theater, and maybe that’s something I’d like to change for September… but we’ll see how that works out with everything else that’s coming up over the next few weeks. Intention doesn’t always equal planning, after all…

Anyway, here’s what I watched in August 2024:

There’s a particular genre of movies that I struggle to name, but have become increasingly enamored with over the past few weeks — that weird brand of 1970s (and late ’60s, in one case) rock opera that is at once overblown and theatrically outrageous and also utterly possessed of its own importance and making with the societal pronouncements like they’re going out of fashion.

I’ve written before, more than once, about my love of Head, the Monkees’ highpoint from the late ’60s, and I’m pretty sure I’ve shared my affection for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls around these here parts, as well. (If I haven’t: I’d argue that it’s not only Russ Meyer’s best movie — heresy, I know — but also one of the best movies about the culture gap between straights and freaks in the middle of the 20th century, bar none.) But there are more than those movies: in the past week or so, I’ve watched Xanadu, The Phantom of the Paradise (a true classic), and The Apple, all three of which are variations on the same idea, in some way.

The Apple and Xanadu feel like two different endpoints for this genre, which essentially died a death when both of these movies bombed at the box office. Xanadu is this genre as upbeat, hopeful, optimistic thing with almost no real threat or darkness throughout the entire movie, unless you count the fact that Gene Kelly effortlessly out-charms the rest of the cast without breaking a sweat to be a sign that the future is doomed; The Apple, meanwhile, is a sprawling, messy parody of pop culture devotion and corruption that has to be seen to be believed — think The Rocky Horror Picture Show if it decided to really go for it, and something far more cynical (and, arguably, more realistic, despite a finish that can’t be described).

Rewatching all of these movies, I find myself even more distraught that very little today has the same… lack of giving a fuck, perhaps? Or energy, to be more polite about it. I want to see someone convince Taylor Swift to just go for it and create a ridiculous, unapologetic pop opera about how fucked up everything around her is. I want to see Beyonce do her own version of Swarm but it’s actually a musical with big fuck-off production numbers. I want to see things get less boring, just a little bit.

You’ll have to excuse this one being a little late; I’ve been sick for the last few days, in a final gift given by San Diego Comic-Con. (It’s not COVID, at least according to the home tests; I’m waiting for the results of a test from an actual real doctor, but for some reason that’s taking awhile longer than I’d expected.) On the plus side, being sick has allowed me the opportunity to see some great films… which aren’t included in last month’s total, of course. Ah well; you’ll see for yourself next month. For now, enjoy what I did watch last month — which includes one of my old all-time favorites (The Double Life of Veronique), and a brand-new all-time favorite (Aftersun), as well as some trash (that new Exorcist)…

June was a weird month for movies; I watched some of my favorite movies of the year this month — Godzilla Minus One! I mean, come on — but I also got distracted by the reality TV of it all and didn’t spend as much time with movies as I have done recently. (Five of the above movies are shorts, for context.) I do think that Lovelace and Boogie Nights prove to be an accidental but fitting pairing, as both simultaneously glamorize and sterilize both the porn industry and the 1970s/early ’80s in very similar ways. Given that July has two separate Love Island series running simultaneously and San Diego Comic-Con, don’t be surprised if next month’s list is so short as to barely exist; I apologize in advance.

I admit it; I am utterly obsessed with the UK general election right now. I eagerly pour over the news as it unfolds, with a tab open on my browser to live election coverage as I work. (Not that I actually check said tab all the time, because, well… work. But it’s there, as this constant reminder to just sneak a look and see what’s happening.) It’s not simply that I become unnaturally interested in election seasons in the UK and US traditionally — something I can and do attribute to my dad, who did the same thing; I have fond memories of him staying up to watch the returns every time there was a general election in the UK, him always being eager for things to change — but that, this general election in particular… well, it’s just wild.

There’s something about this one that’s just funny, for want of a better way to put it. (There has to be a better way to put it; there’s so much at stake in this election in the UK, just as there’s so much at stake in our election here in the US this year, too.) Think about the announcement in the first place, and how mishandled that was, with Rishi Sunak ending up drenched through and being drowned out by a sound system nearby. Think about the fact that one of Sunak’s policies was essentially a return of the draft, as if anyone would think that’s a good idea or something to convince young people to vote for you. Or that Sunak left D-Day anniversary proceedings early to go and do an interview and then asked people not to politicize it.

I’m sure that the other parties are also doing things, but that’s not what’s got me so fascinated. Nope, if this election has a story, it’s that the Conservative Party is running a campaign that is so utterly disorganized and unprofessional that it feels fictional — and holding my breath to see what this means when the actual voting arrives on July 4. UK votes have felt like clues about where the US is going to go for awhile, and I keep reading about how completely shambolic the Conservatives are in the UK and thinking, please let them be punished for this, please don’t let them somehow win despite it all simply because I need to think that maybe, just maybe, there’s a consequence to being so obviously inept and uncaring that could be reflected over here, as well.

Fingers crossed, right?

Lord, I think this is the first time a post has run late in… months? Longer? The key to the problem, as silly as it sounds, was that I needed to edit two different screenshots together to make the image below and I kept putting it off because my attentions were elsewhere. I should know better than to do such things, and yet, if I don’t procrastinate, who am I…?

Anyway: here are the movies I watched last month — of note should be the fact that I binged the entire Ocean’s series over the course of a few mights, but also that I finally managed to check out Dune: Part Two at the local theater, and it was every bit as good as I could’ve hoped; I keep thinking about the way in which director Denis Villeneuve managed to communicate a real sense of space throughout the movie, including in the climactic battle, with minimal signalling. It’s a movie I’m going to return to over and over, I suspect.

But what else did I watch? Well… this:

So, I watched the Ocean’s series again recently.

If we judge the idea of our “favorite” movies by the number of times we’ve watched them, there’s a very strong argument to be made that Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s Thirteen are three of my favorite movies of all time. Certainly, they’re movies that I probably watch once a year if not more often than that, despite not owning them. (They’re always streaming somewhere, somehow; you just have to look and see where.)

It’s neither the writing nor the acting that brings me back to these movies over and over again, as good as both are throughout the trilogy. Thirteen is a bit ropey in terms of writing, but apparently the version people see on screen is very, very different than the original screenplay, being the result of significant after-the-fact edits and reshoots in order to make something that moved faster and had a significantly different tone; when you know that, you can see the joins pretty easily on a rewatch. Instead, it’s the sense of style that both Soderbergh and soundtrack maven David Holmes bring to proceedings.

(Holmes’ music — his score, but also the tracks from external sources that he brings in, especially in Twelve, the ultimate style-over-substance installment, and my favorite of the three — cannot be overestimated in how much it impacts the final product in these movies; I’d argue that Thirteen only gets away with working because of his contributions.)

The concept of “cool” is, at best, a fool’s errand, because it’s so subjective and equally so changeable — what’s in today is, as everyone who watches Project Runway knows all too well, out tomorrow. Despite that, there’s an inescapable cool to Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies that, the more I rewatch, seems to come down to the purposefully relaxed feel of all three movies. For heist movies, it’s impressive how not tense these films really are, how the audience is never really able to believe for more than a couple minutes that any of our heroes is actually in trouble. Instead, each of the three feel like you’re getting to hang out with a bunch of people who have just worked out some cosmic truth and are just breezily moving through the world in an entirely different way than you and I, and you get to ride in their slipstream for a few hours.

What’s instructive, though, is to see the way that Ocean’s Eight, the after-the-fact spin-off/sequel to the trilogy centering around Danny Ocean’s previously unmentioned sister, fails to match up to its predecessors. Again, special attention should be paid to the music, with Daniel Pemberton (the man behind killer scores for both The Man from UNCLE and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) understanding the assignment, but director Gary Ross just fails to make the movie as weightless and stress-free as Soderbergh did the earlier trilogy, and as a result, it drags and ultimately fails to match the energy of what came before. You get the feeling that everyone involved isn’t just trying, but visibly trying too hard, and that’s just not what people come to Ocean’s for.

(Of course, now I want to re-watch Soderbergh’s own Logan Lucky, which I suspect might more readily match Eight. Hmm…)

February really didn’t start well in terms of movies, thanks to going to see Argylle for work — it’s really not a particularly good movie, although I’d argue it’s also not as bad as some made out to be; it’s simply “fine and dull and overly glossy,” which feels like the very worst thing a movie like that could be. Thankfully, I made up for it elsewhere in the month, with rewatches for Out of Sight and M, the latter of which I hadn’t seen in decades and appreciated in an all-new way this time out. It really might be close to a perfect movie in so many ways — it’s visually stunning at multiple points, fast-moving for the most part, and morally ambiguous in a way that feels thoroughly contemporary when watched today. It left me wanting to rewatch Citizen Kane again, which feels like the most appropriate comparison, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet. Hopefully soon.

Anyway: here are the movies I watched in February.