Category: Recently Watched

Watching Blur: To The End the other day — a documentary about the last reunion of the band, which is ostensibly about their recording the Ballad of Darren album and then playing Wembley Stadium, but is really a messy, half-formed movie about the band’s relationship with each other now that they’re actually feeling older — I was struck by Damon Albarn saying something along the lines of, there was a point where I realized I don’t have that long left before I die, and pinning that to being 55 years old. I had this immediate bifurcated response of, wait, is Damon Albarn only five years older than me? and I don’t feel like that at all, even though I feel old.

Thinking about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever really had a sense of my own mortality, really. That’s not to say that I think I’m invincible or irrationally immortal, simply that I don’t really think about death so much. When I cast my mind back to my childhood and think about my parents, I realize the same was true about them, at least from my point of view — they didn’t act as if they were especially concerned about death being around the corner, at least to a point of wanting to actually do something about it. (Not only were their diets terrible, but both were heavy smokers and my father a functional alcoholic.) My grandmother, too, the one that lived with us when I was a kid, she did seem immortal to me as grandparents do when you’re a child. There was a sense that she’d live forever, in large part because that was how she acted, even after she had a stroke.

I turned 50 years old last year and felt immediately weighed down by the prospect of being old, but that was an abstract concern of “Now I will ache and be brittle more” than any true thoughts of my time on this earth being slipping away with every breath. Perhaps it’s a problem with my (admittedly flawed) sense of forward planning; I simply can’t imagine the idea of getting so old and then dying. That feels impossible to me, for some inexplicable reason; my brain short-circuits: Do people still do that? it asks, and then moves on to another subject.

Objectively, I know that the odds of me living to be 100 years old are, shall we say, unlikely, and yet… I still feel as mortal as I did at 30, if not younger. Maybe that’ll change in the next handful of years. Perhaps by the time I’m 55.

Albarn is actually seven years older than me, but given the production schedule of the movie, it makes sense he would’ve been around 55 or 56 when it was being shot. Just in case you’re wondering. Yes, I looked it up after.

Let me tell you, dear friends, about the wonder of End of the Road. It’s not a movie I’d heard of before, but one that showed up on the Criterion Channel as part of its Terry Southern collection in May. I love Southern’s writing — I actually was reading his prose before I even knew he was a screenwriter, never mind that he’d written Dr. Strangelove or Barbarella, both movies I was familiar with and a fan of — and, by this point in my life, the concept of discovering a “new” work of his was a particularly exciting one. (This was also my response to finally reading Blue Movie a couple years back; it’s wonderful, and I wish someone would make that into a movie.)

Anyway, End of the Road was hyped up in one review I read before watching as a more somber version of The Graduate (it’s from roughly the same time; End of the Road was made in 1970, three years after The Graduate), but as I watched, the more I realized the better comparison is: it’s the American O, Lucky Man! This is ideal for me, because O, Lucky Man! is one of my favorite movies: a surreal, cynical attempt to explain What Life Is Like, and address the cruelty and kindness inherent in human nature that also happens to be funny, wise, and filled with some familiar faces and great songs. If anything, End of the Road is even more cynical and arguably more surreal — it is a Terry Southern movie, after all — but it’s O, Lucky Man‘s spiritual sibling in all the right ways… and a movie that stuck with me long after waching. Highly recommended.

Oh, I watched other things as well, last month, Here’s the list.

I’ve become one of those people, it seems; people who think about the formats in which movies are “meant” to be watched and have opinions on the subject. I didn’t intend this to happen; I quite liked being agnostic on the subject, and watching movies at home on streaming because I didn’t want to go see it in the theater. But then I watched that damn Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and had thoughts.

This isn’t intended to be a rave review of that film, which has serious pacing and exposition problems and doesn’t really come to life until halfway through it’s outrageous-almost-three-hours runtime. But, at the same time, I can’t deny that the second half did absolutely everything I’d wanted from the movie as a whole, and the final big stunt sequence, as Tom Cruise hangs onto a biplane for dear life… well, that’s what got me thinking, you see.

In the theater, I was into this sequence, in a big way; I was gasping, tense, and practically yelping as I watched the whole thing unfold. On some level, I knew that everything would be fine because, well, it’s a big Hollywood movie, they’re not going to include it if someone died, but at the same time, my disbelief had been suspended entirely: I was not thinking about it as a movie, I was thinking about it as oh my God, he’s hanging onto a fucking biplane and shit the biplane went upside down what if he can’t hold on.

I had a similar excitable reaction to the big train stunt scene in the last Mission: Impossible movie, Dead Reckoning; that, too, had me on the edge of my seat, simultaneously gleefully thrilled and hoping nothing went wrong… or, at least, I did when I saw it in the theater. When I watched it at home, later, I found the impact significantly dulled. Was it because I’d already seen it? Perhaps, but I can’t help but wonder if the fact that I wasn’t being utterly overwhelmed by the image was part of it, as well.

Things do play differently when they’re smaller, especially when those things are pretty much entirely reliant on spectacle and putting the viewer into a state of awe. It’s been more than 30 years, and I can still imagine being entirely stupified by seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. On a TV, it just looked… fine.

Of course, watching something on the big screen doesn’t mean it’s automatically a winner — because of my job, I see a bunch of the Big Genre Blockbusters in theaters, and a lot of them are just as bad in cinemas as they are at home (Some might even be worse; Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, maybe a small screen would have made MODOK look less unfinished) — but I find myself grateful for the opportunity to see so many movies in the theater the more I think about it. Not because Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise really wanted me to do so, but because, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a chance to meet filmmakers halfway in offering them the best chance to succeed at what they’re trying to do.

(That said, Lovers Rock is still made for TVs and intimate viewing, I don’t care what you say.)

Now that, my friends, is more like it. After a few months of not really watching that many movies, I got back up to speed and then some in April — there’s a lot of old favorites in the list below, but what stands out more are the new favorites: Sinners, obviously, was something that just left me in awe and in love, just such a good movie (and such a good vampire movie, at that), but that might sit behind Burnt Milk as my favorite discovery of the month — a short movie that’s basically a spoken word piece with some amazing cinematography that felt at once intensely intimate and speaking to a larger truth that’s difficult to articulate. (It’s on The Criterion Channel, which is where I found it; maybe it’s available elsewhere, but it’s worth searching out nonetheless.)

Also a lot of fun: Companion, Shampoo, and Orson Welles’ The Trial, which I’d never seen before, and which feels very contemporary in the way it’s shot. (And its paranoia, for that matter.) Less fun: Little Murders and You’re A Big Boy Now, two movies in Criteron’s unofficial “New York City in the ’60s and ’70s was a mess” curated collection, both of which proved to be a little too unintentionally misanthropic and misogynistic for my contemporary tastes. (You’re A Big Boy Now also has a brief, pointless sequence that might be the most racist thing I’ve ever seen in a mainstream movie, and I think it was intended as pointed comedy against racism…!)

Also also: not pictures in the graphic below because I finished it after the screenshot: Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, which was absolutely fucking amazing; I have a vague memory of seeing it around when it came out, but I’m almost convinced that has to be wrong, because I was so blown away by it this time around…!

But I digress. What I meant to say is, this is what I watched this past month:

I’m not entirely sure why March is so lacking in movies compared with other months lately; it wasn’t an intentional choice, and somehow it happened anyway. Was I watching too much TV? (No, although I feel like I watched more TV than usual; Severance, The Pitt, Mythic Quest, and Adolescence made sure of that.) Was I just watching less in general? I suspect so, which is a nice thing to think about. So, what movies did I watch last month…?

(Spoilers: I thought A Complete Unknown was laughably bad, and would call it one of the worst things I’ve ever seen if it wasn’t for the fact that I watched Wicked a couple of days earlier…)

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, I watched a bunch of Christmas movies in December. But as much as I love my seasonal treats, the movies that left more of an impression this time around were some of the other movies I watched during the month. In particular, The Outrun — which is harrowing and life-affirming in equal measures, I think, and cements Saorise Ronan as one of my favorite actors working right now — and Conclave, which is exactly the “bitchy Priest Succession” that I was promised by early reviews. The Red Shoes is also on there, which I hadn’t seen in close to three decades and is, if anything, so fucking wonderful that I feel embarrassed for not getting it earlier. Movies! They’re wonderful! (Also on the list: The Virtues, which is technically a TV show but has a movie-length final episode, so I counted it.)

Here’s the month in full.

I’ll be honest: finally watching Deadpool & Wolverine when it showed up for free on Disney+ was something that I had been quasi-looking forward to for some time — I relatively like the other Deadpool movies, and who didn’t want an over-the-top self-aware Marvel roast at that time in the world? That feeling went away maybe inside 10 minutes, and what followed was one of the most exhausting, depressing movie experiences I’ve had in a long time, so much so that I switched off after an hour because I could only handle so much smugness in one sitting. (The second half of the movie felt less annoying than the first, but maybe I was simply in a better mood the next evening.)

The very next movie I watched was The Elephant 6 Recording Co., a documentary about the collective of bands in the 1990s that worshipped at the altar of Pet Sounds, Revolver, and 4-track recording only to become successful despite themselves. Watching a bunch of scruffy middle-aged nerds offer variations of, “We were just so into what we were doing, fuck knows why it got big” for 90 minutes proved weirdly healing after the glossy Marvel of it all. Anyway. Here’s what I watched in November.

It strikes me as very weird that, despite managing to watch literally nothing while I was in New York for a week — I really was far too busy working the entire time, as ridiculous as that sounds — I still managed to see as many movies as I did in the remaining 24 days of the month. Thanks, especially to the Criterion Channel, which I subscribed to as a birthday present to myself back at the start of October.

Really, though, what I’m honestly taking away from October’s movie viewing was that I was too tired to watch The Substance on Halloween when it came to Mubi. What a way to end the month that would have been…!

(Also, I have no idea why Letterboxd decided to format the layout this way…)