Friday, January 01, 2021

2020

Intro
I revive this mostly dormant blog only a few times a year, but I always write a long piece in December/January about my favorite movies of the year, specifically movies I watch on a big screen in a movie theater. (Why do I do this? No one is paying me. I don’t have an answer, other than that one of my most passionate interests is my interest in my interests.) Until now, I’ve avoided wading into the hundreds of films I see each year on video and streaming services and web sites, though including them would paint a much more accurate picture of the film-watching part of my life. I never quite manage to put into words what I’m trying to say about individual films or the art of film in general or the often alienating/rejuvenating experience of being a rabid moviegoer, but I make an attempt. Abridged (but not that abridged) version: I give only the tiniest of damns about storytelling and plot. What I love about movies is image, sound, movement, light, shadows, faces, bodies, geography, time passing, voyeurism, other people’s experiences, and the organization of all these things within a frame. I also have a deep interest in genre filmmaking (particularly horror movies, films noir, westerns, screwball comedies, and crime thrillers), silent era to early 1960s Hollywood (but especially ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s), pretty much everything made in the 1970s at any location on the planet, movies from other countries, low-budget/exploitation/b-movie/drive-in/grindhouse movies, experimental/avant-garde movies, “arthouse” movies (not really a fan of the way the U.S. tries to separate art and entertainment, but I think you know the broad and general category of movie I’m talking about here), Internet cat videos, classic Vines, YouTube weirdness, accidental phone camera footage, independent films from all places and eras, and movies by women directors (not trying to be a “congratulate me for respecting women” guy or a “let me marginalize women by making them their own separate genre” guy; there are just so many obstacles keeping women from directing movies that the women who make it happen often make really good, unusual stuff, therefore I like seeking out movies by women filmmakers). It probably would have been easier to say what I don’t like: 21st century Hollywood movies, especially superhero/franchise stuff; recent generic indie movies; most of the stuff that gets nominated on awards shows (middlebrow visually lackluster dramas, inspirational true stories, etc.); most biopics (with some exceptions); most period costume dramas (with many exceptions); most war movies (with many exceptions); generic digitally shot documentaries that begin with an overhead shot of cars driving through the Main Street of a town or the downtown skyline of a city and turn 90 minutes of content into a 17-hour miniseries but I’ll watch it anyway because of my lurid interest in true crime and fucked-up human beings; most television shows (with some exceptions). A bad movie is usually better than a good TV show. Come on. Admit it.   
This year is a whole different bird, for so many reasons. I haven’t stepped foot in a movie theater since early March (my longest stretch of time away from the big screen since I was two years old; my first memory of seeing a movie in a theater is a rerelease of Lady and the Tramp when I was three in 1980 – I tried walking into the screen and my mother had to drag me back to my seat; why were there stairs leading up to the screen if you couldn’t get inside the movie, I reasoned), and I don’t know when I’ll be in a movie theater again. This uncertainty about the future of the theatrical experience (at least for the next few years) would have been much more upsetting to me if a thoroughly life-upending series of events hadn’t rained down on me and my wife like hell’s own confetti. I’ll get into that later. First, my favorite films of 2020, truncated theatrical edition. Then, a true story about the most fucked-up year of my life (the novel coronavirus ain’t even the half of it). Following that will be a not-so-brisk jog through my impressions of the movies of 2020 (and late 2019) that I watched at home on my television set. Then, in an attempt to make this one of the longest blog posts in history (do people even read blogs anymore or is it all just substacking and tweet threading?), I will present a list of every movie I watched at home this year (I may have missed a few; I didn’t start writing them down until a few months into the year). Please enjoy this disjointed mishmash/string of related segments reflecting the tumult of a lived life or, as a juvenile delinquent once said in a later episode of The Rockford Files, go rotate on it.
 
 
2020 on the Big Screen  
(January-March, or 300 years ago or yesterday or this morning or a dream)
 
Varda by Agnes (Agnes Varda)
 
When I was in Washington, D.C., many years ago, I spent some time at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. When I first walked up on it, I thought, “This is it? It seemed more impressive on TV.” I read the names haphazardly, thought about the rest of my day, looked casually at all the stuff (teddy bears, beer cans, tiny TV sets, flowers, packs of cigarettes and the occasional loose cig, cards, handwritten notes) people had placed at the base of the memorial. After a few minutes of unfocused reading and looking, I gradually became overwhelmed by the thought of each name as a life and each life as a part of other lives and each life as many lives, public and private, external and internal, and how much of that life is still moving through the world, and I stood there feeling too much at once, full and depleted, for at least an hour. In a less dramatic fashion, the final film of Agnes Varda, who died at age 90 in 2019, hit me in a similar way. I had an “is this all there is?” moment in the opening minutes of Varda by Agnes’ assemblage of lectures, Q&As, PowerPoint presentations, documentary footage, and film clips and outtakes, but the cumulative effect of seeing this humble, incredible woman give a final summing up of her life, her art, and her life in art lingered for days. Also, I’ve loved Varda’s movies for years, but part of what I value about Varda by Agnes is getting a chance to see her photographs and art installations. I hadn’t been exposed to them before and I really loved them.
On our way out of the theater after seeing this movie, my wife and I were surprised to see the lobby full of fly fishermen who had rented the other screen for a gathering of fly fishing convention attendees. This seemed like such an appropriately Varda-esque thing to encounter after leaving a Varda movie. Will moments like this ever happen again? What I selfishly mean is, will moments like this happen to me again?

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma)
Two of my favorite live albums are Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 and Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis/Live! Both albums were recorded at small nightclubs in front of black audiences, and they have a you-are-there immediacy (you can hear glasses clinking and individual crowd comments), a performer/audience rapport that is both relaxed and full of energy, and performances that are grittier and rougher than the otherwise classic studio recordings. Part of what makes these records so special besides the great music is the palpable lack of white presence in a communal black space. You can feel the shared pain and joy move back and forth between Cooke and Mayfield and their audiences, unfiltered by white gatekeepers. You feel the space, you feel the relief. I love these records, but as a white listener, I also hear the absence of white people. It’s a real education in how much air we take up in the room and how special it is when we’re gone. It’s the aural equivalent of removing a too-tight belt at the end of a workday. It’s a strange and not entirely pleasant feeling to enjoy your own absence or to think about the reasons why.
What the hell does this have to do with a French movie about white women, you may be asking? Well, to get there, I have to share this New York Times quote from actor/comedian Andy Samberg. (Not a sentence I anticipated typing.) He articulated something I felt but hadn’t been able to put into words about watching this movie (and in a related way about listening to the records mentioned above), so I’ll leave him to it: “… I feel like it’s a good movie for men to understand energetically how when they show up it can really change things. It’s not a spoiler to say this. You get lulled into this amazing space of there being no men for a long time in the movie, then a random guy does show up. He’s a nothing character; he’s there to do an errand. He’s not being a jerk or being weird. But him just sitting there eating some slop, you’re like: ‘Ugh, what’s this guy doing here? Get him out of here. He’s ruining the vibe.’”
 
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (Matt Wolf)
It’s fitting that the last film I watched in a movie theater before movie theaters largely shut down is about, at least in part, global events and private obsessions converging on a television screen. Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia librarian, civil rights activist, and public access television producer, inspired by the extensive TV coverage of the Iran hostage crisis and the debut of CNN, presciently realized in 1979 and 1980 that the then-in-its-infancy 24-hour news cycle would document, shape, influence, distort, and manipulate human behavior, technology, culture, public policy, and world events and how important it was to preserve its history in real time and in as much detail as possible. She recorded, on Betamax and VHS tapes on multiple televisions in her apartment, nearly every moment of every 24-hour cable news channel and nearly every local and national network news program from 1979 until her death in 2012. (She also acquired Macintosh computers, newspapers, magazines, books, toys, and dollhouses with similar zeal, though the film focuses mostly on the recordings of TV.)  Her second husband, the black sheep son of a wealthy family who got to know Stokes when she appeared as a frequent guest on his public access talk show, became just as obsessed with her videotape project, and the couple distanced themselves from their own families and much of the outside world to direct the overwhelming majority of their time and attention to the recordings. (Stokes’ son reconnected with his mother in the last years of her life and has devoted much effort to getting the collection digitized and available to researchers and the public.)  Wolf, who made an empathetic documentary about the musician Arthur Russell in 2008, has delivered another complex human portrait in Recorder.

 

 
Non-2020 Movies Seen on the Big Screen in 2020 
(January-March)
 
Diary of a Chambermaid
(Luis Buñuel, 1964)
I consider this minor Buñuel (what a snotty way for me to start this sentence, eh?), but his minor work is still pretty major. Frankly, I feel like I watched this movie 20 years ago, not 12 months ago (in 2020, recalling the year’s beginning at its end is like looking at a photograph of a dead relative you never met), but images of Jeanne Moreau, and Buñuel’s healthy disdain for fascists, remain in the memory like fragments of a dream.
Bay of Angels
(Jacques Demy, 1963)
People have been saying cinema is dead since the early ‘30s, and the latest round of premature mourning kicked in because next year’s green-screen spandex franchise movies will hit streaming platforms before or at the same time as their theatrical releases. So what? Cinema was still alive in early 2020 when I saw a projection of Jeanne Moreau in 1963, smoking cigarettes, wearing and taking off great clothes, and compulsively gambling her money and life away in the casinos of Nice to Michel Legrand’s score, Jean Rabier’s black and white cinematography, and Jacques Demy’s inspired direction. Glamour and resigned disappointment should get together more often.
Cry-Baby (John Waters, 1990)
Waters’ last really good movie before the culture caught up with him remains a nonstop party. In Cry-Baby and its predecessors, Hairspray and Polyester, Waters softened his rough edges enough to bring in some of the mainstream audience without diluting any of the John Waters essence. Now, the whole country is a John Waters movie without any of the style, intelligence, humor, or fun. (Not sure whether we are the dog shit being eaten or the ones eating it. Need to take this paragraph to the metaphor repairman.) Also nice to see Johnny Depp back when he wasn’t a wife-beating alcoholic dressed like Steven Tyler’s mic stand strapped to 14 jackets. It’s not like I’m doing so great these days, though.
 
Smithereens (Susan Seidelman, 1982)
I love this movie. Seidelman’s first is still her best, and such a great snapshot of Manhattan before Giuliani ruined it. I’d love to do an early ‘80s New York City triple feature of Smithereens, Wild Style, and Basket Case. Let’s add Gloria and Variety, make it a quintuple feature. I find Susan Berman so charming and compelling and frustrating and charismatic and vulnerable in this movie, and I wish she’d been the lead in 30 other movies. Smithereens is such a beautiful example of what can happen with determination, no money, a great eye, and a real point of view. I love the way Seidelman has her story follow, not lead, her characters.
 
 
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
I spent a decade trying and failing on multiple occasions to see this movie on a big screen. I missed the first run at a now-closed arthouse theater when I was out of town. A short-lived University of Texas film club screened it on campus on a night when I had band practice. The Austin Film Society showed it four other times before this year’s screening, and I missed each one (food poisoning, attending a wedding, a late night at work, out of town again). I find it morbidly hilarious that I finally managed to see it just a few weeks before a pandemic shut down every theater in the country. Maybe it came to me when I needed it. Elements of it portended the coming weeks of my life (illness, mortality, stillness, change, memory, past lives, new forms, ghosts). I like a phrase that the critic Sukhdev Sandhu used to describe Uncle Boonmee: “It’s barely a film; more a floating world.” Now that I think about it, every Weerasethakul film I’ve seen is a floating world, but this may be the floatiest. I loved moving through it, around it, in it.
 
The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983)
Despite its heavy use of symbolism (not usually my thing), I found all kinds of pleasures in Potter’s first feature; the Icelandic landscapes, a great score by the much-missed Lindsay Cooper (who played with Henry Cow, Comus, Art Bears, Mike Oldfield, David Thomas, and the list goes on), the performances of Julie Christie and Colette Lafont, Babette Mangolte’s black and white cinematography, the way it embraces and skewers pretentiousness (it’s both a Very Serious Movie and a playful, funny one), the dance scene, the scene where the narrative pauses (or keeps going) to watch drummer Marilyn Mazur play a lengthy percussion solo, and a welcome and unfortunately evergreen observation of the connection between capitalism and misogyny in who gets paid for their labor and who doesn’t.

 

Intermission/Purgatory 

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Late in the night/early in the morning in the first week of March, two days after seeing the last movie I will see in a theater until who knows when (Recorder, see above), my wife, Kristy, got out of bed and asked me to take her to the emergency room because she felt like she was possibly having a heart attack. She was also feeling severe abdominal pain and lightheadedness. (On a handful of occasions in the past two or three years, she had experienced a sudden bout of severe abdominal pain and lightheadedness late at night that went away just as mysteriously as it arrived. Her doctors were unsure of the cause, especially since it was so infrequent. She was given vague instructions to keep an eye on it. The pain on this particular night was similar but much more intense and lingering with new pain in the upper chest.) I remember being roughly halfway through the movie I was watching at the time (Susan Seidelman’s Cookie, a mildly forgettable, mildly enjoyable film that will remain imprinted on me forever), and I can still physically feel the worry and apprehension filling my body like I was standing under some kind of panic-dispensing tap. We got in my car, and I drove like a bat out of hell to a nearby emergency room. We checked in with the not-rude but also not-friendly front desk staff, an ER nurse took her away, and I sat in the small, empty, overly bright waiting room in the weird clothes I’d haphazardly thrown on (sweatpants, button-up dress shirt, slip-on shoes) for two or three hours while a wall-mounted television set tuned to one of the sports channels blared commentary and prognostication about professional golf and college baseball and college basketball, and I tried not to have a panic attack. 
The verdict was inconclusive and slightly dismissive (the ER doctor thought it was just gas and seemed to assume Kristy was overreacting to her symptoms, which is ridiculous if you know her), though a heart attack was fortunately ruled out. Testing didn’t reveal much, and we turned down more elaborate scans and x-rays because we had no idea how much of the ER costs insurance would cover (health care should be free for every human on the planet, for-profit health care is a moral monstrosity), it was close to daybreak, Kristy was starting to feel better, and she had an appointment already scheduled with her gynecologist in a week or two for routine exams and a look at a weirdly shaped lump that had appeared in her left breast in February, a lump that Kristy and I naively expected to be a benign, fluid-filled cyst. Meanwhile, the news of the Covid-19 virus was a constant hum in the background and getting louder every day. 
That second or third week of March, the city of Austin canceled SXSW. My band of a dozen years, The Early Stages, had decided earlier in the year to break up, and our celebratory final three shows, one of which was part of a SXSW free day party, were also canceled. Three shows I had tickets for or plans to attend (The Necks, Damo Suzuki, and Wire) were canceled. Businesses shut down, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. On the Thursday of that week, I received an alarming text from my wife while I was at work. Her gynecologist had seen a few unusual things and wanted her to see both a breast specialist/surgeon and an ovarian surgeon. The possibilities of ovarian cancer, breast cancer, fibroids, benign cysts, and endometriosis, or some combination of all these things, were floated. I felt like the floor was shaking. Minutes later, my bosses emailed everyone and told them to go home. My workplace was shutting down for a few weeks except for upper management and the few people who already had work-from-home capability while they kept an eye on the coronavirus and came up with a comprehensive work-from-home plan. A few days later, my wife’s workplace did the same thing. We are extremely fortunate to be able to work from home.
The next four weeks became an endless, lonely, soul-crushing, terrifying, emotionally shattering parade of tests, scans, x-rays, CT scans, lab work, mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies, bone scans, multiple doctor appointments with multiple doctors, telehealth appointments, agonizing hours waiting for test results, a major surgery, and an intense period of recovery for my wife, and an intensely overwhelming, mindboggling, and sorrowful experience for me as a caregiver, supporter, and husband. The hell of waiting for test result and scan result phone calls is one of the most agonizing hells, especially since many of these calls delivered bad news or led to even more tests and scans. The stress and terror were close to unbearable, and I developed an odd little trick to keep myself from spinning out. A few weeks before everything went to hell, Kristy and I were enjoying a trip down a YouTube rabbit hole that culminated in the music video for the 1981 Cher/Meat Loaf duet “Dead Ringer for Love.” Let me tell you, that song and video deliver the over-the-top, high-drama goods that the phrase “1981 Cher/Meat Loaf duet” would lead any sane human to expect and demand. We then went down a Cher Wikipedia rabbit hole, which led to us learning more about Cher’s mother than we ever thought possible on an average Saturday night. Long story short, Cher’s full name if you include her maiden name and ex-husbands’ last names is Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman. I made a joke about what a good mantra that would be, if you were the New Age type. Just a few weeks later, while waiting interminably for doctors’ offices and laboratories and insurance companies and surgeons’ offices and hospitals to call us back and waiting for Kristy to get off the phone with them and let me know what was happening, I would spend what probably added up to three or four hours total walking back and forth in our house, muttering “Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman” to myself, over and over and over and over, to keep myself from spectacularly melting down. I started doing it as a gallows humor inside joke with myself, but it really ended up working as a sort of calming mantra. Thanks, Cher and Cher’s mom. I’ll thank Meat Loaf, too, even though he’s a Republican.
We finally learned what was happening, in three big waves of news. Bad news (treatable breast cancer) was followed by good news (no ovarian cancer!!!; instead, she had severe endometriosis and a large fibroid that needed to be removed but the complicated surgery, which included a hysterectomy, was successful, though I was only allowed in the hospital on the day of the surgery and couldn’t visit her in her room for the week after due to constantly changing pandemic restrictions) and was finally followed by devastating news (incurable, metastatic breast cancer that had spread to the bones). If you have been through this, you know. If you haven’t, you don’t. Nothing anyone can say really helps. Not even Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman.
The remainder of our year not involving medical appointments has been spent in self-imposed isolation to avoid exposure to the virus, with the occasional masked conversation with friends who have come by to drop off food or gift packages or enjoy a distanced beer. We have both adjusted to working from home, and in a weird way, adjusted to her terminal diagnosis. In some ways, Covid-19 made the first year of living with cancer more bearable. We didn’t have to put on happy faces at work when we weren’t feeling it (though I still feel like I’m hanging by a mental thread and am constantly having to fake many human-man-living-in-normal-circumstances responses at my job, particularly with a recently promoted supervisor whose management style is the bureaucratic equivalent of a bird lightly but continuously pecking your shoulder with its beak; at least this fakery is happening from inside my house), Kristy was able to remain in the comfort of her own home while getting used to her medication and its side effects and the hot flashes from surgery-induced early menopause, we didn’t have to feel like we were missing out on friends’ parties and rock shows and social events and gatherings while dealing with the mental and physical drain of recent events, and we could spend so much more time with each other and with our cats (this gets sad, too; stick around for more bad vibes).
I love, admire, and respect Kristy so much, and I’m continually blown away (yet also not surprised) by how she has responded to her diagnosis. I think it’s important to butt into my own paragraph here and say that a metastatic, incurable, stage 4 cancer diagnosis is not an immediate, or even necessarily a distant, death sentence. People have survived 10, 15, 20, 25, and in some cases, even 30 or 40 years after getting this devastating news while holding on to their quality of life. Meanwhile, treatments are advancing and improving, and new treatments look promising. The chances for a longer life with this diagnosis are increasing each year. Things may not shake out for us so positively, and we are mentally preparing ourselves for that possibility (as much as one can), but right now, the course of treatment my wife is on is working extremely well. Despite the occasional aches and pains and discomfort of her side effects and the loss in energy that comes with all of it, she mostly feels good, her tumors are shrinking, and the spread has stopped. We live our lives, we have fun, we do things we enjoy, we sometimes feel depressed and miserable and anxious, I sometimes (OK, often) feel angry at the universe, we cope with the ways the diagnosis has changed our lives, we make lots of jokes, we try to live in the present, we do all these things. In keeping with the subject of this blog, we watch A LOT of movies (and I watch even more than that late at night after my wife goes to bed). (Movies have been such a comfort to me in ways that even I, an obsessive movie freak, never imagined, though in the first month of all this devastating news all I could make myself do was watch TV shows, take care of household chores, and stare blankly at the wall. Gradually, my desire to listen to and play music, read books, and watch movies came back to me in April.) To get back to the first sentence of this paragraph, Kristy has brought all of herself and her personality into living with this diagnosis (not to imply we don’t have bad days; we have many bad days, but many good ones, too): reading books and articles about breast cancer and metastatic cancer, attending online conferences, joining a support group of women her age going through the same thing, writing about her experience with honesty, warmth, and humor, advocating for herself and sharing information with others online, promoting research organizations, being straightforward and open about what it’s like to live with chronic illness. She has eloquently and beautifully chronicled her own experiences on CaringBridge and in a Medium article. Her essay about what she and I call “cancer wives,” a movie and TV cliché that has obviously jumped out at us even more than usual lately, should be of special interest to my fellow movie people.
I don’t even know how to tell you what my life is like now. I feel like a human-sized exposed nerve, and I suppose I will keep feeling that way until my experiment in living concludes. Everything is raw and sensitive and right there on the surface. I don’t know what will happen, but you don’t know, either. Life gives us a handful of line-of-demarcation moments that change our lives permanently, immediately. Going to school for the first time, moving out of our childhood homes and going to work or to college or to the military or to a life of crime or to a lucrative career as the star of YouTube Pokemon card unboxing videos, I assume having a child (I’m happy to be childless, one of the only decisions in life besides marrying my wife that I don’t regret), experiencing a major trauma, you know where I’m going with this so Mad Libs a few of your own. I can’t believe my wife and I got two of the fuckin’ things (cancer and a pandemic) on the same day. Un-fucking-believable. (Also a little weird that of the two line-of-demarcation moments, one is intensely personal while the other affects every single human on the planet, even the assholes who think wearing a mask is tyranny.) “2020, am I right?” people say. Cram it with walnuts, people. Cancer doesn’t magically disappear in 2021.
Remember a few paragraphs ago when I told you to stick around for more bad vibes? Here they are. About late-summer/early-fall, one of our two beloved cats, a tortoiseshell named Fern, started losing a little weight. This wasn’t too alarming since she was still eating and running around the house like a maniac and acting like her amusingly moody self. As the fall wore on, her weight started dropping more dramatically, her appetite disappeared, her breathing became labored, and she sometimes had trouble getting her back legs to move properly. After some tests and blood samples didn’t reveal anything, an ultrasound found a large and most likely cancerous mass in her liver. She went downhill fast after that, and though her appetite returned in part (lots of very tiny meals throughout the day and night) and a prescribed steroid gave her a pretty good week before things went south again, we knew we had to make the decision you never want to make, and we said goodbye to her in mid-November. My wife had the weird, occasionally unsettling experience of seeing our cat go through a series of tests and a cancer diagnosis, which dragged back memories of her March and April full of tests and diagnoses. On Fern’s last day, she snuggled in next to us on the couch as her painkillers kicked in, we petted her and said our goodbyes, the fatal shot was administered, and she died. Our surviving cat, Loretta, has comically and mysteriously picked up several of Fern’s personality traits in addition to keeping her own. It’s a wild thing to see. Everything ends, but nothing is ever completely gone.  
What a tough, sad, alienating year to kick off many tough years to come. I hope some of those years will be less sad and less alienating. I’m staring down a mentally impossible year at work (though my job has been understanding of my situation, I’m about to enter a fairly intense stretch of time there, and my stress levels are already sky-high for reasons having nothing to do with work), so 2021 is not going to be any kind of reprieve. At least we got rid of that shit-pig Donald Trump (maybe), but his voters and the utterly broken and dying country that no one in charge wants to fix because the system is working for them as intended remain.
You can see how I’m not mourning the loss of the movie theater experience as much as I otherwise would have been if Covid-19 was my only problem. In order to keep some semblance of sanity and the desire to give at least one more day a chance, I have been throwing myself into my major passions/obsessions/whatever corny term you want to call it with an overzealous fervor bordering on madness. I listen to at least one album every day (usually several on Sundays) and I watch 7-10 movies a week. I listened to a lot of music and watched a lot of movies before the pandemic, but now I have absolutely nothing else to do except go to my job, and this is not the place to talk about my job. It funds my life. It is not my life. Thanks to the pandemic, it is in my house, which I have mixed feelings about, but despite its closer proximity to my life, I try to make my job stay more than 500 mental feet away from my life at all times. Long story mildly shorter, movies and music and books are keeping me alive.

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2020 on the Small Screen
(2020/2019 movies I watched in 2020 that probably would have screened theatrically in Austin if the pandemic didn’t happen)(OK, a few of these 2019 movies did play theatrically in Austin, but I did not see them then)
I feel less urgency to keep up with new releases since most theaters are closed. If I’m not going to see it on the big screen, the movie can wait several weeks or months or years until the streaming price drops and I can rent instead of buy. (Buying a digital stream instead of renting it seems ridiculous to me anyway, since a corporation can decide at any time that you no longer own it or they no longer want to pay to license it or the service streaming it to you no longer exists. As Homer Simpson once said, “You can’t, like, own a potato, man.”)  
The choices available to stream from the almost century and a half of film preceding the current year are always going to be more interesting than whatever the hell’s going on in, say, August. What I’m saying is, my home experience of an art form exists simultaneously in every year that that particular medium has existed, so it can be 2020, 1914, 1964, 1996, or 1978 on any given night in my living room. Consequently, this is a particularly weird personal overview of 2020 cinema that is very different from what my end-of-year post would have looked like if the theaters were still open. All that said, I watched a lot of newish movies this year. Here they are, hit-and-run style. I even accidentally ended up with a top 10 (i.e., The Best).

The Best

Bacurau
(Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonca Filho)
Two Brazilian filmmakers of different ages and experience levels team up and create a thrilling, righteously angry, genre-hopping working-class revenge tale that blends arthouse drama, horror, comedy, tragedy, western, sci-fi, action, and thriller elements and delivers a cathartically brutal stomping to white supremacists, colonizers, middle-of-the-road cinema, and the bootlicking water-carriers of authoritarian governments, corporations, and developers.
 
Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley)
Director Stanley returns to feature filmmaking after an almost 30-year absence (there were a handful of short films and a few documentaries in that gap) with a heavy, trippy H.P. Lovecraft adaptation that is not afraid to harsh your mellow. Nicolas Cage turns in a relatively subtle performance but still gets to do a handful of patented Cage freakouts. (The “hey, man, Cage goes freaking nuts in this one” thing has become tired, but you and I know we’d be a little disappointed if Cage didn’t go at least a little nuts at least once.) I also commend Stanley for realistically depicting a character living with cancer (played by Joely Richardson) in emotionally real, non-Hollywood ways without making the cancer a tragically melodramatic plot device or a piece of phony sentimental uplift. It’s just something that exists and is lived with on a day-to-day basis. Tommy Chong’s in this weird, wild thing, too. A truly gorgeous psychedelic downer that both increased my anxiety and delighted my eyeballs.
 
Family Romance, LLC (Werner Herzog)
All of Herzog’s films blend fiction, documentary, and an entertaining line of Barnumesque charming huckster bullshit, but I think it’s reasonable to separate them into two general categories: movies that are primarily documentaries in form and purpose and movies that are primarily fictional narratives in form and purpose. This latter category has been pretty underwhelming and inferior to his documentaries in recent years, especially the last two, Salt and Fire (a strange and gripping political thriller in the first half that stops dead in the second half for the characters to wander aimlessly around a salt flat and spout dialogue that sounds like someone parodying a Herzog movie) and Queen of the Desert (in his weirdest move yet, Herzog makes a boringly conventional mainstream drama). Happily, Family Romance, LLC, with Herzog as his own cameraman, is his strongest narrative feature since the hysterically funny Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. It’s a muted, melancholy, quiet movie about loneliness and how we communicate as humans in the 21st century. Herzog shows that honest emotions and yearning are welded tight to lies and fantasies in the ways we communicate and present ourselves on social media and how this bleeds into the physical world, and he makes this point while maintaining empathy and respect for his characters even at their most ridiculous.
 
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
Probably my favorite new movie this year. I am consumed with envy for you lucky chumps in New York and Los Angeles who got to see this on the big screen in the week or two before theaters shut down. I hope I get the chance one day. Reichardt’s second western (after Meek’s Cutoff) (and by western, I mean a story taking place in the early 19th century American west, not a black hat/white hat horse opera, though I like those kinds of westerns, too) and her second film about male friendship (after Old Joy, whose characters were once-close friends who had grown distant; this one is, at least in part, about two men becoming friends, business partners, and early victims of rapacious Big Capitalism), First Cow is beautiful to look at, with some of my favorite uses of the color green, and delicately and finely assembled in its period details, shot compositions, performances (especially its leads, John Magaro and Orion Lee), structure, music (by William Tyler), stillness, language, and pace, but it’s not overly fussy or controlled, and Reichardt leaves plenty of space for a viewer’s eyes and imagination to wander the Oregon landscapes and the characters’ faces. Reichardt (and her frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, who cowrote the screenplay with her loosely based on his novel The Half-Life), begins and ends her narratives in different places than audiences have been trained and bullied to expect, one of the reasons that so much of her work remains a recurring presence in my daydreams.
 
Hubie Halloween (Steven Brill)
Is mine the only 2020 best-of list to include Hubie Halloween and Vitalina Varela? Do you dare enter the twisted mind of Josh Krauter? This movie is so stupid. I love it. I’ve been waiting for an Adam Sandler movie as continuously and chaotically dumb as Billy Madison, and this one comes close. I couldn’t stop laughing. June Squibb’s shirts. Ray Liotta. The black cat double take. Shaq. The nun. Steve Buscemi playing a werewolf. Sandler’s terrible, terrible character voice. The fall colors and Halloween in Capraville (or maybe Zemeckisville) set design and visual palette. I felt so bad so often this year (and I’m really good at feeling bad, but this year was off the charts). I felt good when I watched this movie. Is this how adult babies feel when they watch those superhero movies? Maybe I should stop being condescending about that. (But I won’t.) (Also, I watched all nine Hellraiser sequels this year, so the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, I learned it by watching you, Dad, and so on.)
 
Knives and Skin (Jennifer Reeder)
This one really took me by surprise. The fact that I erased four different paragraphs in frustration trying to describe my admiration for it is a good sign that it’s operating in its own time zone. To put it as simply as possible, it’s mostly about teenage girls finding their own power and worth. It’s also deeply weird, vibrantly colorful, funny, a little pretentious (in a good way), creepy, unpredictable, melancholy, uplifting. None of these adjectives are quite cutting it. It’s stranger than that. It’s also, in its own odd way, a musical. And all the things in it that should be annoying hipster affectations mysteriously aren’t.
 
She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz)
I’m so glad Amy Seimetz directed another movie. She’s an actor, producer, writer, editor, cinematographer, costume designer, and television director, so it’s not like she hasn’t been busy, but I’ve been chomping at the bit for another movie from her as writer/director since seeing her 2012 feature Sun Don’t Shine three or four years ago. So many people online and in reviews have called She Dies Tomorrow a perfect pandemic movie or an accidental psychic predictor of life during Covid-19 (well, not in those exact words), and I can buy that to a certain extent. It’s not what I saw in the movie, though. Instead, She Dies Tomorrow played to me as an unsettling and oddly beautiful visual representation of the ways nameless, unfixed, allusive anxiety and dread and paranoia and defeatism and ominous foreboding move from person to person on social media (especially Twitter) and how that hovering amalgamation of sharp but ungraspable feeling changes our brains. Also, Jane Adams is always great, and Kate Lyn Sheil has one of the most fascinating faces in movies.
 
Shirley (Josephine Decker)
This might be my least favorite Josephine Decker movie, and it still made my best list, which shows how good I think she is. I also know my opinion could change drastically on a rewatch, pro or con, because Shirley is a hard movie to pin down. Unlike my other Decker favorites (Madeline’s Madeline, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, and Butter on the Latch), Shirley, a historical fiction (heavier on the fiction than the history) in which Shirley Jackson and her husband are characters in an invented scenario, is an extremely busy, almost oppressive, movie that doesn’t leave a lot of open space. The narrative initially appears to be more conventional than Decker’s other work, but appearances are deceiving, and the movie becomes much freer and wilder as it proceeds. Decker has such an odd but instinctively perfect feel for sound, images of the natural world, and formal and structural experimentation within a narrative, and her work resists neat categorization. I wasn’t as exhilarated as when I finished Madeline’s Madeline, but there’s something witchy and exciting about Shirley that has stayed with me. I feel like everything I’ve said here is vague, but it’s the kind of movie that left me with more feelings than details.
 
 
Tommaso (Abel Ferrara)
Ferrara is a filmmaker who just clicks for me (maybe it’s the Catholicism/hedonism blend), and even his most ridiculous movies pulse with energy and feeling. He’s a wildman who just keeps making good, bad, and great (never mediocre) stuff (often all at once) against daunting odds (addiction, distribution problems, self-inflicted drama, sobriety, a country and marketplace that don’t want anything personal and challenging, his own advancing years). Here, longtime collaborator Willem Dafoe plays a fictional version of Ferrara named Tommaso, who, like Ferrara, is clean and sober after decades of heavy drug use, a filmmaker, a New Yorker living in Italy only partly by choice, a guilty Catholic, a new husband and father with a much-younger wife and a toddler daughter, and a chaos magnet. Ferrara doesn’t make himself a hero or a villain, just a wildly flawed and immature human being trying to live a less chaotic life and sometimes causing even more chaos in the trying. He throws everything he’s got at Tommaso, and it’s a film that is sometimes silly, sometimes wonderful, sometimes exasperating, sometimes moving, sometimes pretentious, sometimes a hilarious skewering of pretension, always burning with life, always following its own rhythm. The scenes showing Tommaso’s recovery meetings are some of the most formally exciting film moments of my year.
 
 
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
Costa is another difficult filmmaker to write about because he makes films that are as hard to define and describe as they are easy to admire. In his narrative features, he tends to use nonprofessional actors from some of the (economically and politically speaking only) poorest, most marginalized areas of Lisbon (including many immigrants from Cape Verde), often playing versions of themselves within stories based on their own lived experiences, though these stories look and move like no other films. Every frame of a Costa film could be a painting and is often nearly as still, but never to fussily stilted effect. No vulgar, oppressive, empty beauty in a Costa film. The beauty (and the ugliness, too) comes from faces, bodies, light, shadow, color, the occasional movement, and the way Costa places these elements in the frame. Vitalina Varela, playing herself, is a character you don’t see in movies, and your eyes are constantly drawn to her face and the way it holds her experiences and secrets, her terrible losses and her endurance. This may be my favorite Costa movie and, along with First Cow, my favorite movie from this strange and miserable year.

 

The Worthwhile

Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (David Gregory) 

A formally conventional but endlessly fascinating talking heads and movie clips documentary about the life, career, and bizarre 1995 murder of B-movie/exploitation/drive-in filmmaker Adamson. I will never lose interest in stories about the off-Hollywood filmmakers making low-budget movies for the drive-in and grindhouse markets in the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and my favorite part of Gregory’s doc is the time it spends with the eccentric, hilarious B-movie old-timers who were peers and collaborators of Adamson’s, most of them retired and living in the California desert.

 

Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby)

An enjoyable Canadian zombie movie with a Mi’kmaq First Nations filmmaker and mostly First Nations cast and crew, Blood Quantum works better in the first half before the clichés of the genre sometimes drag things down in the second half. I liked the premise of a zombie virus that First Nations people were immune to and moments and images throughout, and I look forward to what Barnaby does next.

 

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner)

I laughed a lot, I cringed a lot, Maria Bakalova and Sacha Baron Cohen make a great comedy team (in which both of them play the straight man and the comedian simultaneously and continuously). Might do an even better job than the first one at showing how deeply fucking weird the people of the United States are. In a sane country, this film would have made Giuliani flee to Siberia or at least the nearest wooded area.

 

Crawl (Alexandre Aja)

An exciting horror-thriller about a young woman and her father trying to escape from several large alligators in the middle of a Florida hurricane. The camera actually shows you what you want to be looking at during the action sequences, the characters are interesting instead of flat, and the suspense is relentless (multiple alligators and a damn hurricane). Quentin Tarantino said Crawl was one of his favorite films of last year, which is probably due to its quality and also probably because Kaya Scodelario is either barefoot or in flip-flops through the whole movie. Dude loves feet.  

 

Depraved (Larry Fessenden)

Fessenden is one of my favorite contemporary indie horror directors, and he also turns up as an actor and/or producer in a lot of other quality independent projects, both horror and non-horror. His modern update of the Frankenstein story is smart, strange, a little heavy-handed, a little ridiculous, and wild. I’m still waiting for another Fessenden movie to knock me over as much as my two favorites, Habit and Wendigo, but this is a worthy and inventive effort.

 

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (J.-P. Valkeapaa)

A heartwarming, unsentimental love story about extreme S&M, processing tragedy, and being a comically negligent single father because you’re out every night at a dungeon. “Aw, that’s sweet,” you’ll find yourself thinking. “He’s letting her yank his tooth out.”

 

Haunt (Scott Beck & Brian Woods)

A solid, creepy, fun, suspenseful horror movie. Whaat? In this day and age? I like how the filmmakers never explain who the villains are, how they got that way, or why they are doing what they’re doing. Less explanations, please, filmmakers of the present. The audience doesn’t need to know everything and shouldn’t know everything. Fuck your backstory.

 

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman)

I was completely absorbed by this movie while watching it, but I get a lingering unpleasant feeling when I try to recall it. That may be an endorsement. I don’t know. I really don’t know what the hell to think. I think it may be a warning to those of us who spend so much of our lifetimes consumed by books and movies and TV shows and music and plays and books about books and movies and TV shows and music and plays. Or it could just be a misanthropic self-flagellation. Or a clever but bitter attack on critics. Or a lonely, dying old man’s memories of his own life and the art and entertainment he consumed getting all mixed together. Or just a really, really bad meet-the-parents experience for a young woman who’s thinking about breaking up with her boyfriend and hasn’t told him yet. Or a ride inside the thoughts of someone considering (or committing) suicide. Or a screenwriter trying to adapt a novel and having a nervous breakdown. Or all these things. Kaufman is an ingenious writer, but he forgets to (or chooses not to) let any light in when he directs his own scripts and adaptations. I’m not sure if this is a strength or a weakness. I’ll never be sure.

 

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)

This movie falls flat on its ass as often as it succeeds, but Eggers really goes for it, and so do Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Failing in interesting ways is a kind of success. Pretentious in a good way, which is a mini-theme this year. I have been trapped in office jobs most of my adult life. I think I was meant to work in a lighthouse. Probably not this lighthouse, but an isolated job on the water that will likely induce madness seems right for me.

 

The Lodge (Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz)

Way too grim and with a few ridiculous twists I couldn’t buy into, but this is still creepy as hell, and I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate mainstream and just-left-of-mainstream filmmakers who actually care about what their movies look like.

 

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (Werner Herzog)

Herzog’s affectionate tribute to close friend, author, and fellow world traveler and walking enthusiast Bruce Chatwin, who died of AIDS in 1989, is at its best when capturing strange and beautiful landscapes in unique corners of Wales, England, Chile, Argentina, and Australia. (Though I would have loved to see what the ecstatically wild Herzog of the 1970s would have done with the same landscapes.) This is not the film for you if you want some of Chatwin’s ideas, assertions, and privileges challenged, and if you’re an archivist like my wife, you will be mildly dismayed at some improper document handling, but I was happy to spend time vicariously wandering the earth with Herzog and the memory of Chatwin as my guides.       

 

The Prodigy (Nicholas McCarthy)

Another ultra-grim downer of a horror movie, and some of the characters are flat as can be, but I kinda liked this one, though admittedly I’m a sucker for evil, killer children.

 

Satanic Panic (Chelsea Stardust)

A really fun horror comedy about upper-class suburban Dallas Satanists and the working-class pizza delivery woman in the right place at the wrong time that gets the horror/comedy balance just right. Also, kudos (see Color out of Space, above) for having a character who is dealing with cancer and not turning it into something stupid or insulting.

 

The Siren (Perry Blackshear)

Blackshear is a newish filmmaker whose two features, They Look Like People and this one, share the same natural and understated young actors and an odd tone that is not quite horror and not quite humanist drama. I like the way he uses silence, stillness, facial expressions, minimal dialogue, sound design, and images to tell his stories instead of the constant jibber-jabber and flat visuals of most current American film and television about people, and I like how he slowly builds unease and dread while avoiding total bleakness. Friendship, kindness, and love are valued and rewarded in Blackshear’s films, and pain and trauma are taken seriously. He also has a decent sense of humor. I have some nitpicky criticisms, too, but I hope and suspect he’s building up to a truly great movie.

 

Young Ahmed (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)

The Dardennes faced some backlash for this movie, mostly by people who hadn’t seen it, because the main character is a Muslim teenage boy in Belgium who gets radicalized by his ultra-fundamentalist imam and plots to kill one of his teachers. The general tenor of the criticism was that a couple old white European guys shouldn’t be making a movie about an aspiring Islamic terrorist, particularly at a time when there is so much anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. I’m sympathetic to that criticism, but the Dardennes have been making unsentimental, radically empathetic movies about hard-earned forgiveness for decades. They’re not bad-faith filmmakers, and they don’t chase trends or controversy. The movie itself shows many different practicing Muslims in a positive or neutral light, including the teacher who is the target of Ahmed’s planned attack, and Ahmed himself is treated with empathy. The story is, in essence, about any lost boy finding an identity in any extremist belief system. Backlash aside, this is fairly minor Dardennes. I don’t think they’re capable of making a bad movie, but this is a more surface-level exploration than they usually accomplish, and I got the sense they knew less about their protagonist here than in most of their other work. This is worth seeing if you’re a Dardennes fan, but it’s a little thin compared to La Promesse or Rosetta or The Son or The Kid with a Bike.    

 

The Rest

3 from Hell (Rob Zombie)

I occasionally give a Rob Zombie movie a whirl to see if I will ever like what he’s doing. It hasn’t happened yet.

 

Bill and Ted Face the Music (Dean Parisot)

I wanted to like this more. Its heart is in the right place, but the execution is awkward and low energy and the ugly digital visual palette reminded me of a Best Buy ad or a Scientology propaganda video. I did enjoy the killer robot named Dennis Caleb McCoy, though.

 

Child’s Play (Lars Klevberg)

Has a few inspired moments, but mostly suffers from the same corporate flatness as the other contemporary reboots/reimaginings/remakes of lucrative intellectual property.

 

The Curse of La Llorona (Michael Chaves)

I continue to be underwhelmed by most of the big-budget Hollywood horror of the last couple decades, and this didn’t change my mind. I don’t even expect to be overwhelmed. I just wanna be whelmed (my third-favorite Ramones song). Come on, Hollywood big shots. Whelm me.

 

Daniel Isn’t Real (Adam Egypt Mortimer)

Well, now we have an indie horror film with an unusual, offbeat approach, and I didn’t like this one, either. The cinematography was too dim, and, I’ll be honest, I was put off by the lead actor’s stupid haircut. It was hard to focus on the movie because I hated his hair so much. This is a superficial reason to dislike a movie, but I’m a very grumpy man.

 

Girl on the Third Floor (Travis Stevens)

A valiant attempt to try something new with the haunted house movie, with an unreliable central character and a pretty good first third. I didn’t care for the execution once the plot kicked in, and professional wrestler CM Punk is pretty awkward in the lead role when he has to emote. I hope he keeps at it, though. He’s got a good screen presence. I did enjoy the score and was pleasantly surprised to see it had been composed by Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac), Tim Midyett (Silkworm, Bottomless Pit, Mint Mile), and Alison Chesley (Verbow, Helen Money).

 

Gretel & Hansel (Osgood Perkins)

An exquisitely gorgeous yet curiously empty and unsatisfying experience.

 

The Hunt (Craig Zobel)

It pains me to disagree with John Waters, who put this movie on his 10 best list in Artforum, but sometimes you have to say “fuck you, old man” to one of the greatest Americans. This is a bad movie. A contemporary take on The Most Dangerous Game, Zobel’s update shares the modern disease of not letting the audience think for itself for five seconds, and it mistakes its cringey dialogue that explicitly spells out the subtext in case the half-asleep guy in the back row didn’t get it (which just makes it text) for the height of sophisticated cleverness. Some of the violence was pretty cathartically gnarly, but Zobel’s mealy-mouthed political both-sides-ism got on my nerves. Much more interesting than the movie was the run of historically bad luck that canceled its planned theatrical release on three separate occasions. The studio got cold feet and delayed the initial release after a mass shooting, a new release date was set and then delayed yet again after Fox News and the right-wing perpetual outrage machine picked The Hunt as their cultural own-the-libs-by-whining-loudly target of the week (even though the film is way more sympathetic to Trump voters than almost any recent Hollywood release that claims to be about These Times We’re Living In) and the cowardly studio caved to pressure from the White House, and the coronavirus delivered strike three to opening weekend number three.

 

Pet Sematary (Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer)

See Child’s Play above.

 

Rabid (Jen & Sylvia Soska)

Another remake, this time of Cronenberg’s 1977 classic. This is a personal, heart-in-the-right-place, independent remodel and is more creative than the Hollywood studios’ IP franchise extenders, but it’s still kinda lousy. Cronenberg’s original was a great horror movie, a great movie about loneliness (particularly loneliness in the big city), and a great movie about pandemics. The Soskas’ take is campier, louder, duller, overloaded with cultural references, and ugly as shit. It’s also one of those movies (see The Hunt, above) where the dialogue turns the subtext into plain text. I mean, the head of the medical institute is named William freakin’ Burroughs in this movie. Come on now.

 

Rebecca (Ben Wheatley)

Me during the first half of Rebecca: Why was Film Twitter so mean to this movie?
Me during the second half of Rebecca: Ohhhhhhhh, that’s why. This thing went off the rails on a crazy train.

 

Scare Package (Courtney Andujar, Hillary Andujar, Anthony Cousins, Emily Hagins, Aaron B. Koontz, Chris McInroy, Noah Segan & Baron Vaughn)

A so-so horror/comedy anthology that has a couple of quality segments and an enjoyable connecting thread filmed at the late, lamented Vulcan Video in my city of Austin, TX.

 

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (Roman Chimienti & Tyler Jensen)

A mediocre documentary that should have been more interesting about actor Mark Patton, a closeted gay man in the ‘80s whose once-successful career evaporated after his leading role in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 due to a combination of homophobia, bad luck, the death of his ex-partner from AIDS, and his own HIV-positive status. The film has a surprisingly flat visual style and loses momentum in the second half, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the story of Patton’s exit from acting than he or the filmmakers were willing or able to explore.      

 

New restorations of older movies

Cane River
(Horace Jenkins, 1982)
The only feature film directed by PBS producer Horace Jenkins, Cane River was restored in 2019 and finally released for the first time outside of festival and bootleg screenings in 2020. It’s a beautiful piece of regional independent filmmaking during a particularly exciting time for regional indies (even if so many of them didn’t get the credit or the audiences they deserved), a warm and funny romance with some political bite (the new couple are from different class backgrounds and religious denominations, and there is tension between their respective light-skinned Creole and darker-skinned families due to colorism issues and the families’ complicated and intertwined histories), and a specific slice of black American life in rural Louisiana and New Orleans in the early ‘80s that you never see in Hollywood movies. I loved it. 
Cane River ran into some major bad luck that kept it out of distribution for almost 40 years. Richard Pryor, in New Orleans filming a movie, attended Cane River’s local premiere and fell in love with it. He asked the financiers if he could help distribute it, but they unbelievably turned him down, fearing that he would get all the credit and press. Shortly afterward, Horace Jenkins died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack, aged only 41. Left with no director to promote the film and with no famous stars in the cast, the financiers decided to cut their losses and forget about distributing Cane River. That was pretty much that until the negative was restored in 2013 and the film’s champions, including Jenkins’ son, finally got it distributed and released.
 
Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet, 1999)
Writing about Straub and Huillet is possibly even more difficult than writing about Pedro Costa, for some of the same reasons. (Costa even made a documentary about Straub and Huillet, filmed during the editing of Sicilia!) Sicilia! is one of their more accessible films, though an oblique relationship with storytelling remains, and one of their most beautiful. A 66-minute black-and-white mini-epic/operatic miniature consisting of stylized shots of conversations, objects, landscapes, and food, the film follows a man who has returned to 1930s Italy after years in New York. He talks to an orange picker after getting off the boat, secret police and a fellow passenger on a train, his mother at her home, and a street vendor. That’s it, but that’s not all. The movie feels like a musical with the songs removed but the feelings created by those songs mysteriously intact, and the speech patterns and cadences of the dialogue have their own musical effect.

 

Every movie I watched at home this year

I have a notebook where I write down every movie I see in a theater. Since that notebook didn’t get much use this year, I started doing the same for every movie I watched at home. Presented all at once, it makes me look mildly insane. And maybe I am. I’ve often felt like I’ve been living the world’s longest, slowest midlife crisis (it began when I was 9 or 10 and will probably continue until my final breath), and 2020 for me was a year-long, slow-motion nervous breakdown within that ongoing midlife crisis. 
I consider the following list an autobiography of my intensely traumatic year in movie title form. I watched some of these movies for the first time in 2020, others for the second, third, or even tenth time. Fifteen or twenty of these movies are terrible. A few are historically fascinating but ethically dubious. The worst movie I watched all year, by far, was the ninth Hellraiser movie, Hellraiser: Revelations.
I occasionally take pictures of some of my favorite shots from these movies as they appear on my television, and I post them on Instagram @joshkrauter. This may defeat the purpose of trying to show what I value about movies because it turns a moving medium into a still one. But that’s interesting to me, too. (My other pandemic hobby is posting a picture of every album I listen to on Instagram. I’m betting a third of my followers have me on mute as a result. Someday I’ll get out on the streets again and take pictures of people and streets and live music. Maybe I’ll even play live music again. Or maybe we’re just going to have one pandemic after another forever and ever. Amen.) Enough jibber-jabber. Let’s bring this looooooong post to a close with a looooooong list. Peace out, dweebs.
 

Movies watched/rewatched at home this year

3 from Hell (Rob Zombie, 2019)

1990: The Bronx Warriors (Enzo G. Castellari, 1982)

1991: The Year Punk Broke (Dave Markey, 1992)

All the Colors of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972)

American Harmony (Aengus James, 2009)

Among the Living (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, 2014)

Amsterdamned (Dick Maas, 1988)

Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, 2014)

Annabelle: Creation (David F. Sandberg, 2017)

Another 48 Hrs. (Walter Hill, 1990)

Antonyms of Beauty (Khalik Allah, 2013)

Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff, 2006)

Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2009)

Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)

Auto Focus (Paul Schrader, 2002)

Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonca Filho, 2019)

Bad Moon (Eric Red, 1996)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2018)

Barton Fink (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1991)

Beast (Michael Pearce, 2017)

Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot, 2007)

Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)

Beyond the Darkness (Joe D’Amato, 1979)

The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955)

Big in Vietnam (Mati Diop, 2012)

The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)

Bill and Ted Face the Music (Dean Parisot, 2020)

Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)

Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1971)

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

Black Christmas (Glen Morgan, 2006)

Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (David Gregory, 2019)

Bloodbeat (Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos, 1983)

Blood on the Moon (Robert Wise, 1948)

Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby, 2019)

Blood Simple (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1984)

Bloodsucking Freaks (Joel M. Reed, 1976)

Blue My Mind (Lisa Bruhlmann, 2017)

Body Bags (John Carpenter & Tobe Hooper, 1993)

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner, 2020)

Brain Damage (Frank Henenlotter, 1988)

The Brothers Rico (Phil Karlson, 1957)

Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968)

Burial Ground (Andrea Bianchi, 1981)

Buried Alive (Gerard Kikoine, 1989)

Burn after Reading (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2008)

A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel, 2011)

Bury Me an Angel (Barbara Peeters, 1971)

But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999)

Cain’s Cut-Throats (Kent Osborne, 1970)

Caligula (Tinto Brass, 1979)

Caligula – The Untold Story (Joe D’Amato, 1982)

Cameron’s Closet (Armand Mastroianni, 1988)

Cane River (Horace Jenkins, 1982)

Cannibal Apocalypse (Antonio Margheriti, 1980)

Cannibal Girls (Ivan Reitman, 1973)

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Cannibal Hookers (Donald Farmer, 1987)

Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)

The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974)

Cassandra (Colin Eggleston, 1987)

Cathy’s Curse (Eddy Matalon, 1977)

Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (Chantal Akerman, 1997)

Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973)

Child’s Play (Lars Klevberg, 2019)

Chopping Mall (Jim Wynorski, 1986)

Christmas Evil (Lewis Jackson, 1980)

Class of 1984 (Mark L. Lester, 1982)

Climax (Gaspar Noe, 2018)

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)

Cold Hell (Stefan Ruzowitsky, 2017)

Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley, 2020)

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)

The Conjuring (James Wan, 2013)

The Conjuring 2 (James Wan, 2016)

Cookie (Susan Seidelman, 1989)

Crawl (Alexandre Aja, 2019)

The Crimson Kimono (Samuel Fuller, 1959)

The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (Kathleen Collins, 1980)

The Curse of La Llorona (Michael Chaves, 2019)

Daddy Longlegs (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2009)

Daniel Isn’t Real (Adam Egypt Mortimer, 2019)

Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959)

Deadbeat at Dawn (Jim Van Bebber, 1988)

Deadhead Miles (Vernon Zimmerman, 1972)

Dead Heat (Mark Goldblatt, 1988)

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)

Depraved (Larry Fessenden, 2019)

Dial Code: Santa Claus aka Deadly Games (Rene Manzor, 1989)

Dillinger (John Milius, 1973)

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (J.-P. Valkeapaa, 2019)

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

Double Lover (Francois Ozon, 2017)

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009)

Elles (Malgorzata Szumowska, 2011)

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (James Signorelli, 1988)

Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2010)

The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

Extremity (Anthony DiBlasi, 2018)

Fade to Black (Vernon Zimmerman, 1980)

Family Romance, LLC (Werner Herzog, 2019)

Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996)

Faust (Alexsandr Sokurov, 2011)

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (Shun’ya Ito, 1972)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1973)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (Shun’ya Ito, 1973)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Shun’ya Ito, 1972)

Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)

The Final Insult (Charles Burnett, 1997)

First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2020)

Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974)

Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992)

Geronimo: An American Legend (Walter Hill, 1993)

Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

The Ghoul (T. Hayes Hunter, 1933)

Girl on the Third Floor (Travis Stevens, 2019)

Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, 2007)

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Alex Gibney, 2015)

Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1978)

Great Expectations (Alfonso Cuaron, 1998)

Gretel & Hansel (Osgood Perkins, 2020)

Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

Hack-O-Lantern (Jag Mundhra, 1988)

Hail, Caesar! (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2016)

Hairspray (John Waters, 1988)

Hatchet (Adam Green, 2006)

Hatchet II (Adam Green, 2010)

Hatchet III (BJ McDonnell, 2013)

Haunt (Scott Beck & Brian Woods, 2019)

Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989)

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988)

Hell Comes to Frogtown (Donald G. Jackson & R.J. Kizer, 1988)

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Anthony Hickox, 1992)

Hellraiser: Bloodline (Kevin Yagher (as Alan Smithee), 1996)

Hellraiser: Deader (Rick Bota, 2005)

Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Rick Bota, 2002)

Hellraiser: Hellworld (Rick Bota, 2005)

Hellraiser: Inferno (Scott Derrickson, 2000)

Hellraiser: Judgment (Gary J. Tunnicliffe, 2018)

Hellraiser: Revelations (Victor Garcia, 2011)

High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)

Hogzilla (Diane Jacques, 2014)

House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

Hubie Halloween (Steven Brill, 2020)

The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1994)

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)

The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

Intolerable Cruelty (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2003)

Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)

It (Andy Muschietti, 2017)

Jesus’ Son (Alison Maclean, 1999)

Johnny Handsome (Walter Hill, 1989)

Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs, 2012)

The Killers (Andrei Tarkovsky, Marika Beiku & Aleksandr Gordon, 1956)

The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964)

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

Knives and Skin (Jennifer Reeder, 2019)

Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, 2006)

Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan, 2006)

The Ladykillers (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2004)

The Last American Hero (Lamont Johnson, 1973)

The Laughing Policeman (Stuart Rosenberg, 1973)

Lenny Cooke (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2013)

Let’s Get Lost (Bruce Weber, 1988)

Liberian Boy (Mati Diop, 2015)

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)

A Little Princess (Alfonso Cuaron, 1995)

La Llorona (Ramon Peon, 1933)

The Lodge (Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz, 2019)

Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)

Madonna: Truth or Dare (Alek Keshishian, 1991)

Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973)

Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)

The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001)

Mayhem (Joe Lynch, 2017)

Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932)

Miller’s Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1990)

Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952)

The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat, 1974)

Murders in the Zoo (A. Edward Sutherland, 1933)

Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933)

The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)

Nick’s Film – Lightning over Water (Wim Wenders & Nicholas Ray, 1980)

Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1956)

Night of Terror (Ben Stoloff, 1933)

No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (Werner Herzog, 2019)

The Nun (Corin Hardy, 2018)

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2000)

O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson, 1973)

One Cut of the Dead (Shin’ichiro Ueda, 2017)

On War (Bertrand Bonello, 2008)

Ornette: Made in America (Shirley Clarke, 1985)

Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)

Papillon (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)

Payday (Daryl Duke, 1973)

Le petit lieutenant (Xavier Beauvois, 2005)

Pet Sematary (Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer, 2019)

Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

The Pleasure of Being Robbed (Josh Safdie, 2008)

Police (Maurice Pialat, 1985)

Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986)

Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, 2006)

The Prodigy (Nicholas McCarthy, 2019)

The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (Sonny Laguna & Tommy Wiklund, 2018)

Rabid (Jen & Sylvia Soska, 2019)

Raising Arizona (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1987)

Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)

Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020)

Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007)

Red Heat (Walter Hill, 1988)

Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)

Ride the Pink Horse (Robert Montgomery, 1947)

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer, 2007)

‘Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986)

Satanic Panic (Chelsea Stardust, 2019)

Scare Package (Courtney Andujar, Hillary Andujar, Anthony Cousins, Emily Hagins, Aaron B. Koontz, Chris McInroy, Noah Segan & Baron Vaughn, 2019)

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (Roman Chimienti & Tyler Jensen, 2019)

A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)

Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973)

The Seven-Ups (Philip D’Antoni, 1973)

She-Devil (Susan Seidelman, 1989)

She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz, 2020)

Shirley (Josephine Decker, 2020)

Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet, 1999)

The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978)

The Siren (Perry Blackshear, 2019)

The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982)

Slumber Party Massacre II (Deborah Brock, 1987)

The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)

Snow Canon (Mati Diop, 2011)

Solo con tu pareja (Alfonso Cuaron, 1991)

Something Wild (Jack Garfein, 1961)

Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948)

The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)

The Sun (Alexsandr Sokurov, 2005)

Sun Don’t Shine (Amy Seimetz, 2012)

Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)

Supernatural (Victor Halperin, 1933)

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

Tale of Cinema (Hong Sangsoo, 2005)

A Tale of Two Sisters (Jee-woon Kim, 2003)

Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross, 2012)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shin’ya Tsukamoto, 1989)

Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954)

They Look Like People (Perry Blackshear, 2015)

Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974)

A Thousand Suns (Mati Diop, 2013)

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002)

To Die Like a Man (Joao Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)

Tommaso (Abel Ferrara, 2019)

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010)

Troma’s War (Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman, 1988)

True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010)

Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

The Ultimate Warrior (Robert Clouse, 1975)

Urban Rashomon (Khalik Allah, 2013)

The Vampire Bat (Frank R. Strayer, 1933)

Victor Crowley (Adam Green, 2017)

Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, 2009)

Violence in a Women’s Prison (Bruno Mattei, 1982)

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019)

Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk, 1962)

Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005)

We Have a Pope (Nanni Moretti, 2011)

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

White Lightning (Joseph Sargent, 1973)

Wild Bill (Walter Hill, 1995)

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber, 1976)

The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944)

Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner, 1931)

Young Ahmed (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2019)  

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