Written by Tom
I’m watching at least 10 films a month and reviewing them on this blog. My reviews for the month of February are below.
[Previously: January]
11. Eyes Without a Face (1960, Dir. Georges Franju)
An influential French horror movie about a scientist kidnapping people and trying to transplant their faces onto his disfigured daughter. The opening scenes are slow but they build towards the reveal of the daughter in a really effective way, the pace being justified by just how creepy the scenes with the daughter are. The issues come in Act Three when it focuses on a police investigation that’s just being used to wrap things up, yet is played as slowly as the opening. It has an iconic Act Two but there’s a lot you have to sit through to get to it.
12. Toy Story 2 (1999, Dir. John Lasseter)
It is, of course, a masterpiece which transported me straight back to my childhood. It isn’t quite as good as the first film. I remember revisiting Toy Story for the first time in a decade with what I assumed where the film’s highlights lodged in my brain. Turns out those highlights constituted the entire film – there was not a single scene that I didn’t remember and couldn’t quote ten years after having last watched it, that’s how well written that script is. In comparison, Toy Story 2 is good but slightly flabbier – it has its iconic moments but also a lot more connective tissue. There is also the fact that the first few Toy Story films (and most early Pixar stuff in general) was masterminded by a man we now know to a serial sexual predator, something I wasn’t aware of for my Toy Story viewing but am very aware of now. It’s just not quite as good an object as I remember anymore. But it is still objectively very good – its greatest crime is being a little bit worse than a movie I consider to be one of the Greatest Films of All Time.
13. David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020, Dir. Spike Lee)
A film recording of the stage play adaptation of the concert based on David Byrne’s American Utopia album. It’s fantastic because it’s David Byrne and a band of great musicians playing David Byrne/Talking Heads songs – there’s only so wrong that can go. Add to it some great staging and engaging political polemics and you have a winner. The polemics do have a sense of “preaching to the converted” about them – you’re telling me the types of people who go to openly political theatre productions aren’t already the types of people who vote? – but if you’re on board with what it offers, you won’t be disappointed.
14. Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (2019, Dir. J.-P. Valkeapää)
A man mourning the loss of his wife develops an erotic asphyxiation fetish after starting a BDSM relationship with a psychologically-scarred dominatrix. The film isn’t about BDSM in the slightest – people don’t get choked because it makes them hallucinate their dead wives and the dominatrix is absolutely terrible at her job, what with her tendency to forget safe words and almost kill her clients. Instead, the film turns into this bizarrely curdled romance between two traumatised and broken people as they slowly come to terms with themselves through each other. It’s a painful, strained and complicated process, yet is captivating. You might need a truly skewed view of romance to get the most out of it but this was the best film I’ve watched since Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
15. My Bloody Valentine (1981, Dir. George Mihalka)
The teenagers of a small town get hunted and murdered by a miner who’s opposed to the town’s Valentines Day Dance. It’s an interesting movie in that it has two focusses – mining and Valentines Day – neither of which have anything to do with each other, nor does the film ever really try to link them. The slasher bits are really good (though you can see its plot twist coming a mile off) but what makes it most memorable in that slight incoherence in the film’s central concept.
16. I Care A Lot (2021, Dir. J Blakeson)
Rosamund Pike plays a woman whose business is finding old people, shadily becoming their legal guardian, throwing them in an old folk’s home and asset-stripping their lives. She gets in trouble when it turns out that one of her targets is the mother of a Russian mob boss. Pike’s character is a businesswoman who appropriates legal talking points to justify moral obscenities – a very neoliberal villain through-and-through. Pitted against her is a violent mob boss but the point isn’t to create sympathy for Pike or make her the lesser of two evils – the point is that the two get treated as equals, the difference between gangsters and businessmen being basically nought (see: the film’s wonderfully barbed ending). Capitalism is a con game where humans are collateral, and this is a razor sharp satire dedicated to pointing that out.
17. Idiocracy (2006, Dir. Mike Judge)
An average man gets sent into the future, only to find that Western society has got dumber over time and he’s now the smartest man on the planet. This film has aged bizarrely. With its concept that the clever people are being breed out of society and replaced with the stupid trash, there is a sense from a 2020 perspective that this is pre-emptively about such things as the Trump administration or Brexit, events which have been characterised in certain liberal circles as stupid bigots ruining everything by refusing to listen to their betters. Inherent in this is a lot of classist assumptions, many of which see themselves represented in this text – the stupid people in this world are all rednecks and slackers; i.e. they’re visibly working class (and the types of people with whom Trump would make his biggest advances), etc. A lot of the Brexit and Trump votes were driven by these people feeling dismissed by the mainstream though (whether justified or not), so when you get a pre-2015 comedy where all the humour is driven by that dismissal… I’m not saying Idiocracy caused Trump, I’m just saying it didn’t help.
Still, the sets and special effects are surprisingly well done (you wouldn’t get this type of money thrown at a comedy nowadays), the actors do good stuff with their material, and the whole thing is enjoyably high concept. I can see where this film’s cult fanbase has come from. If it’s meant to be judged as a satire though, I don’t think time’s proved it to be a particularly productive one.
18. Jennifer’s Body (2009, Dir. Karyn Kusama)
The cult horror comedy about a high school girl who is murdered by an indie band and becomes a zombie/vampire who must drink the blood of fellow students to keep her looking fresh. It’s a cool mix of genres with a good sense of humour and an absurdly good cast of actors from just before they got famous. It’s really fun and, in the age of Riverdale and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, slightly ahead of its time.
19. The Fly (1986, Dir. David Cronenberg)
Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist whose experiments in teleportation end with his DNA being merged with that of a fly. Being a Cronenberg film, this results in Goldblum turning into an ode to body horror. The horror elements are handled as well as you’d expect, though the film shines due to its great sense of character and tone, resulting in a low-key but well-balanced horror film that punches above its weight.
20. Saint Maud (2020, Dir. Rose Glass)
A young nurse with image issues and strict religious beliefs is hired to treat an old American artist; things slowly go south from there. The film is scrumptiously directed and Morfydd Clark is electric in the starring role, though I perhaps don’t know enough about the underlying structures of Christianity and sainthood to know what it’s actually meant to add up to in aggregate.
FNORD 