Brief thoughts on some movies

February 08, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

I’m trying again to watch all the Best Picture nominations before the Oscars. I’ve made some serious progress but don’t think I’ll actually get there this time (who wants to watch Maestro anyway?). I’m also trying to watch more movies in general. When you train your brain to respond to tweets and TikTok videos, you really need to balance it out by forcing it to focus solely on one piece of long-form media.

It’s also probably a good idea for most people to continue to hone their critical mind, thinking about what they like and dislike about art, and what that piece of art is trying to say1.

Anyway here are some thoughts on movies I’ve seen.2

The Holdovers

I’m not an Alexander Payne fan, but did realize that he was the same guy who directed Election (a movie I love) and the dude who was accused of statutory rape, which is a big yikes I’m learning while writing this! What I love about The Holdovers is it feels like a real return to character study movies where the plot is thin but the characterization is solid. There’s a good bit from the NYT’s review of the film that I like a lot:

Even as the story accrues the heft of personal tragedy, each scene seems to float or bob. That’s touch, and Payne’s always had it, this knack for crudeness and discourtesy, for pleasing whiffs of sweetness that can take the form of wit or revenge, pettiness or justice. But it’s never just one group of emotions with him. I’m talking about crudenesses and discourtesies. Sweetnesses. So Hunham is curmudgeonly as opposed to a curmudgeon; the difference is a matter of disposition rather than vocation, meaning Giamatti gets to stop playing an archetype (tweedy intellectual) and inhabit a figure of contour and surprise. We can savor how much Hunham, like his surname, is a tricky jumble of a human

I really hope someday I’m able to write characters full of crudenesses and discourtesies and sweetnesses.

May December

Zach recommended we watch May December and I had no clue about the historical plot this is related to. That’s a bit of a lie, I did know remember there was a South Park episode about this, but never what the specific case was.

I love the way that May December feels like an ethereal fever dream. The scenes often feel hot and humid, sticky and suffocating but oddly intoxicating. Every actor in the film is giving their all but still, there’s a manufactured fakeness to everything they do. Charles Melton’s performance is amazing to me. The way that man can contort his body, crumbling over himself so he does still seem like a middle schooler is phenomenal.

This movie also fits my film mantra (which I probably learned from a great professor in college) that anytime a mirror is involved in a scene you can be 100% certain something crucial to the point of the film is being explained visually.

Oppenheimer

Look, this was good, but it was absolutely not for me. I thought it was boring overall and tbh don’t really get the hype it has.

Past Lives

Not much happens in Past Lives but, on the other hand, a lot happens in Past Lives. I like the way it talks about love. In Past Lives love is not some grand story but it is a grand experience. Love is quiet and long-lasting, eternal, and connected to past and present by a thousand different meetings. The white husband is not the villain and not the hero, Hae Sung is not the right choice for Nora, he is a choice for her, a love for her.

I think of love a lot like it’s presented in Past Lives: conflicting, contradictory, total, quiet, but bursting with energy. There are some painful scenes too, Hae Sung and Nora staring at each other in the end, Nora hanging up on him. If we’re all honest, I think we’ve had that sort of feeling for someone before, an obsessive kind of love3, a feeling that someone is somehow tied to us by this long history. I think we can love two people (or more). We can love the people we were, the people we are, and the people we might become. We can love the people that were with us, the people that are with us, and the people that might be with us in another life.

Killers of the Flower Moon

I put off watching Killers of the Flower Moon because of the runtime, but finally, Zach and I forced ourselves to watch it4. Despite being nearly 4 hours long the pace works. By the time the movie was almost over the only reason we were ready to be done was because it was 11:45 on a weeknight and Cookie was already snoring in my lap.

This is the type of movie full of beautiful scenes and great performances (Lily Gladstone gave a masterclass in silent acting) that completely went over my head. I’d love to watch this in a film class and have someone much smarter than me point out and debate each frame, which is probably one of the highest honors a film can get from me.

The Boy and the Heron

I thought I already wrote about this, but maybe I didn’t (someone tell me if I did). I read a post online about the best thing about a Miyazaki film5 is he doesn’t hold your hand the entire fucking time. He lets you pick up on what you want or miss what you don’t. He trusts the audience to be smart and get what’s going on without overly explaining it to everyone.

I also read a post complaining about the power scaling in Miyazaki films and let’s just say that the world is really full of all types of people…

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