2023 on the Big Screen Part 1: The New Stuff

Before 2020, these year-end posts used to be about movies (though everything I write is also a cry for help/autobiography/rant). They're still about movies, but, in 2020, my wife's stage 4 metastatic breast cancer diagnosis and the simultaneous arrival of COVID-19 turned that year's post, and all the year-end posts after that, into a stranger and more expansive attempt to place the movies I watched the previous year into the overall context of my wildly transformed life. There was also some talk about how Cher's full name is Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman if you include her maiden name and the last names of her ex-husbands. It all ties together. Trust me. If you want to get up to speed, the link to the 2020 post is here. Collect them all.

What can I say about 2023? It was the second worst year of my life after 2020, and I feel like a living haunted house. The good news is that my wife is approaching the fourth anniversary of her diagnosis and is doing well, but there have been some complications. We ended 2022 and began 2023 in a period of uncertainty, as a small progression of the cancer in a lymph node in her armpit forced a change in treatment. In March, she was given targeted radiation and placed on a second line of treatment. This seemed to work for a few months, but we were soon back where we started with the lymph node, which was tremendously disappointing for both of us. She's on her third line of treatment now, and things seem to be heading in a positive direction once again. I hope they stay that way. She's the best. (She even got a big promotion at work. If you'd told me when she was diagnosed in 2020 that we'd be celebrating a work promotion for her in 2024, I would have fallen over in relief.)

Things are otherwise rough (see haunted house reference above). I've been dealing with the most prolonged stretch of depression I've ever experienced, and my state agency job has been a profoundly miserable place to work for most of the year because the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general of my disgusting state are three of the biggest pieces of shit who ever lived (the speaker of the house is just a run-of-the-mill piece of shit). My creative life is stagnant (I want to play music again, but I'm not having any luck making anything happen), and I'm directionless and lost. I miss the community I used to have from playing in bands for 15 years. Outside of my own self-pitying echo chamber (as Neil Young once sang in my second favorite Young song, "though my problems are meaningless/that don't make them go away"), I'm depressed about what's happening in Gaza, the end of abortion rights and bodily autonomy in states controlled by Republican legislatures, the anti-immigrant and anti-public education crusades the soulless ghoul governing my state is paid to pursue by the evangelical oil billionaire scum who own him, and the miserable choices we have in the upcoming presidential election. I am angry and sad about all these things, but it feels performative and banal to say much about them on social media. As Hammerin' Hank Rollins once yelled, "Life will not break your heart/it'll crush it," but, as Zelmo Swift once yelled, "I go on." 

Speaking of crushing it, how 'bout those movies, eh? I watch a movie and listen to a record almost every day. It's my heroin. (Also my heroin: heroin. Just kidding. I'm saving that for retirement.) Here are my favorite new releases I saw on the big screen in 2023, plus the honorable mentions and disappointments. My usual disclaimer: I'm not a plot or storytelling guy. I can appreciate a story in a carton-for-the-eggs kind of way, but what I really care about are the eggs: image, movement, sound, silence, character, performance, structure, form, light, shadow, setting, mood, tone, atmosphere, detail, digression, visual texture, local color, mirrors, windows, carpet, wallpaper, cigarette smoke, dirt, bodies, faces, trains, water, lamps, streets, trees, voices, interiors, exteriors, the juxtaposition of scenes, opening credit fonts, and the score. That's what a movie is to me, and if it isn't that, then I don't want it.

Some of this post (but less than last year's) has been cannibalized, revised, and/or stolen from my letterboxd page. Click here or here if you have any interest in my reviews and want to follow me there. It's pretty much all I got going right now.  

MY FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2023 AS SEEN ON THE BIG SCREEN

(in alphabetical order because I'm not the hierarchical type)

FALLEN LEAVES (Aki Kaurismaki)

I'm a longtime Kaurismaki fan, but there's something special about this one. I try to watch movies like they're a body of water I'm submerging myself into instead of an ego-mirror reflecting my own experience back to me (pretentious enough for you?), but life has been kicking me so hard for the last four years that I couldn't help but see myself in the two lonely characters at the center of this sad and very funny film. It's a movie that knows the world is a place that doesn't ever stop crushing you, but it also knows that inside this place are many small, wonderful things hidden in plain sight. Not a single image is wasted or perfunctory, and nothing is shown just to move the story along. There's a visual and an emotional reason for every shot. Kaurismaki's actors, too, are so good at tapping into a deep vein of emotion without any Big Acting Moves. Every tiny gesture has the weight of a dozen big speeches. Who needs heavy drama when a wink will do?

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: KING CRIMSON AT 50 (Toby Amies)

One of my favorite music documentaries of the last several years (I enjoyed it almost as much as Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground), In the Court of the Crimson King is surprisingly hilarious in its candid, multi-perspective portrait of interpersonal band dynamics. Filmmaker Toby Amies, instead of spending the bulk of his time on Robert Fripp, understands that the story of King Crimson is really the story of how every member of the band (including Fripp) handles or doesn't handle being in a band with Fripp. (Classic Fripp moment: He tells Amies that he took a cold shower that morning because a cold shower is unpleasant and it's a way of telling your body "you will do what I tell you.") I also can't thank Amies enough for the scenes with the late, great Bill Rieflin. I'm obviously someone whose life has been drastically changed by my wife's cancer diagnosis, and these moments with Rieflin mean a great deal to me. The world of film is littered with so many bullshit depictions of people with cancer, and this is such a welcome corrective. 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Martin Scorsese)

A historical drama with expressively abstract touches and both a fiery and mournful tone, Killers of the Flower Moon is an outsider's take on an Osage story made in collaboration with the Osage, and Scorsese acknowledges this outsiderdom humbly and respectfully. He's been criticized in both thoughtful and clickbait-y ways for emphasizing Hale and especially Burkhart (Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio), but I think Scorsese is making his predominantly white audience reckon with the white supremacist hell of our own making without an escape hatch or a breather, and he's not trying to speak for the Osage, many of whom made vital contributions to the film. This critique also tends to isolate the central importance of Lily Gladstone's performance as Mollie, which can't be isolated, and downplays the Osage presence (or pointed lack of presence) in every frame. Gladstone carries the film and connects every piece of it to every other piece. I'm glad the multiplex crowd is getting a chance to see how great she is. The rest of us have known since Certain Women (#humblebrag). The 81-year-old Scorsese continues to push himself, and the final three scenes, both separately and in relation to each other, are some of his finest work, with the risky penultimate scene one of his most radically self-aware.

MAY DECEMBER (Todd Haynes)

I have no idea if he would even agree with my assessment of what he's doing, but Todd Haynes in May December pulls off the incredible feat of making a movie in four different modes (deeply felt melodrama, ruthless observational comedy, intricately constructed art film about performance and predation, and distanced satire/simulation of a mildly trashy Lifetime-style made-for-cable TV movie). Instead of blending these modes into an inconsistent sludge, Haynes keeps all four running on parallel tracks, creating a strange and unsettling space where earnest emotion and ironic detachment have no trouble coexisting. The scenes with Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman looking directly into the camera or at their reflections in mirrors create this electric tension between the audience, the characters, and the actors playing the characters. Haynes' filmography is an embarrassment of riches (even Velvet Goldmine, where his reach exceeds his grasp and certain scenes fall flat, is admirable in its crazy ambition), but I think May December is one of his masterpieces. (IMO his other masterpieces are Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (his unsanctioned faux biopic using Barbie dolls as actors), Safe, Carol, and The Velvet Underground.) I've mostly talked about Haynes here, but everyone involved in this movie did some of their best work. I know this is streaming on Netflix, but see it in a theater if you can. The images really demand and exploit the space of a big screen in ways they won't on a TV.

PACIFICTION (Albert Serra)

Paradise and hell, leaking into each other. Pacifiction is lush, hypnotic, and creepy, and its uniquely odd portrayal of colonial rot in French Polynesia has a seductively unhurried novelistic sprawl. Benoit Magimel is in nearly every scene as De Roller, the French high commissioner of Tahiti, who moves through the island in his trademark white suit and expensive shades, glad-handing and schmoozing the locals, unaware of his own unimportance as a mid-level bureaucrat filling a colonizer's role on an island that doesn't need him. A submarine full of French Navy men shows up unexpectedly, stirring up dark rumors and mysterious events that rock De Roller's confidence and understanding. The structure of the film follows De Roller's mental state, and Pacifiction grows more fragmented, paranoid, and hallucinatory in its wild final third. It's hard to pick a favorite moment, but the jet ski scene is way up there.

SHOWING UP (Kelly Reichardt)

The Hollywood depiction of artists as magical beings or tortured souls furiously creating works of genius is every bit as stupid as the Hollywood depiction of people with cancer that I bitched about several paragraphs earlier. Kelly Reichardt, one of the great American independent filmmakers, gives us a finely detailed ensemble portrait of artists as regular, flawed people with a compulsion to make stuff and shows the making of art as the hard work it is. The movie is tough and brittle but also warm and funny, and so smart about interpersonal relationships between longtime friends, family members, coworkers/colleagues, creative peers, and landlords and renters (some of these characters are all these things to each other). My sympathies with and frustrations toward the characters fluctuated quite a bit during my second viewing, so I think this will be one of those movies that will provide a new experience every time I watch it. Michelle Williams and Hong Chau are great separately and together and deserve much praise in the lead roles, but the smaller parts are so damn good, too, especially Andre Benjamin, Amanda Plummer, Matt Malloy, James Le Gros, and Heather Lawless.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

(Not quite up there with my six favorites, but pretty strong)

ASTEROID CITY (Wes Anderson)

Asteroid City's baked desert landscapes (shot in rural Spain, set in a heightened southwestern U.S.) and its constructed sets (a roadside motor court, a mechanic's shop, an unfinished overpass, and the quintessential rectangular '50s diner are among the highlights) combine the natural with the postcard-artificial, and the story's layers within layers of artifice catch hold of real emotion in a complementary way. I wish Anderson would let a little spontaneity and a few jagged edges into his meticulously controlled and symmetrical compositions, but this is still immensely pleasurable to look at. A busy man in 2023, Anderson also made four short Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison) that brought out something weirder, bleaker, and creepier in him. I hope he explores that menacing tone in a full-length feature.

BARBIE (Greta Gerwig)

Finally, a 21st century Hollywood movie unafraid of a vibrant color palette. I love the look of this thing, and I laughed at most of the jokes. Not all of it works, and some of the big speeches are a little cringy, but Gerwig did not make this movie for depressed fortysomething men like myself, and a funny line or visually inventive set piece is never far away.

THE ELEPHANT 6 RECORDING CO. (C.B. Stockfleth)

I'm not a nostalgic person, but an uninvited nostalgia for my '90s college years has been squatting in my brainpan for months. College town, cheap rent, no social media, no apps, no streaming, no poptimism, not many possessions, no money, making weird stuff with friends for the sake of it. (Imagine a long, heavy sigh after you read that sentence fragment.) This movie was no damn help at all in getting rid of any of that, though it did make me fall in love with the Olivia Tremor Control all over again. 

THE HOLDOVERS (Alexander Payne)

The plot synopsis makes this sound like a screenplay written by the second-best student in a how-to-write-screenplays class (outsiders at cross-purposes thrown together through circumstances beyond their control? check! they become unlikely allies? check! they teach each other life lessons? you better fucking believe that's a check!), but the execution is so well done, the characters are so finely drawn and so lived-in (even the slightly exaggerated character played by Giamatti), and the homage-to-'70s-movies visual style is so textured and detailed that the whole thing feels like a warm blanket and a bowl of leftover chili on a winter day. Payne is playing it a little safe here after taking a crazy swing with Downsizing (which is not as bad as its reputation though still pretty messy), but it's not a sterile safety. The movie's got a lot of blood in its veins.

THE IRON CLAW (Sean Durkin)

Like The Holdovers, Durkin's mildly fictionalized biography of the Von Erich pro wrestling family and its many tragedies is an old-fashioned classic drama, made with real feeling and skill, with actors who have great chemistry together. 

Long digression ahead: I was a rabid pro wrestling fan in the last gasp of the territory system days from roughly 1982 to 1992. Of course, I loved the cartoony WWF product as a kid, but I considered Jim Crockett Promotions/Mid-Atlantic/NWA, Mid-South/UWF, World Class, and, to a lesser extent, AWA the real wrestling. I've dipped in and out occasionally since then, but I don't connect with modern pro wrestling much except for keeping up with the news about behind-the-scenes scandals and business dealings. I regularly watch archived episodes of '70s and '80s territory wrestling on YouTube (I've fallen in love with Memphis wrestling, which never made it to my Midwest hometown), but the modern stuff is too slick, too corporate, and too brightly lit. I need to watch overworked, pilled-up, coked-up, eccentric men (and a few women) living their gimmicks inside and outside the ring, performing in family-owned regional territories across the country in front of local audiences full of elderly people, kids, and nutty adults who believe deeply in the truth of what they're seeing. I miss when old ladies stabbed the heels with hatpins, when fans would riot when a babyface got ambushed, when the babyfaces and heels could not travel or be seen in public together, when the gimmick had to be lived even when a wrestler was buying groceries or getting his car washed, when promos were improvised instead of scripted. As a famous fan once said, "it's still real to me, damn it." Vince McMahon ruined everything. I'm pleased that my love for this era of wrestling is shared by filmmaker Sean Durkin.

Though the film is primarily about a family and its dynamics, and, in particular, how the surviving brother, Kevin, dealt with so much loss, the wrestling looks good. The details are mostly right. The respect is there. Pro wrestling scenes in movies mostly look terrible, but not here. I have plenty of minor nitpicks about the changes this movie makes to Von Erich history (chronology is shuffled, the actor playing Ric Flair botches it hard, a few "facts" are invented —World Class didn't have a Saturday night ESPN deal in the early '80s for example, certain events are simplified or absent, poor Chris Von Erich is written out of the film entirely and so are most of the grandchildren and all the wives except Kevin's, the mat is too clean in one of the matches (dirty that shit up)), but the spirit and flavor are correct. 

Besides the wrestling stuff, the movie does so many things right. Its late-'70s to early-'90s period setting is presented with lived-in care and subtlety. It doesn't punch the time period too hard the way most biopics do. Those movies tend to turn their settings into a theme park of the particular year's music, slang, cars, and furniture instead of understanding that things change gradually. This movie gets it. The tragedies are also approached subtly and empathetically, and the movie goes for quiet moments instead of overheated drama, often pulling away to focus on a small character detail when you expect it to run headlong into melodrama. There is some sentimentality, certain things feel rushed (I wish we got to see the brothers hanging out together a bit more; the scenes we do get are pretty great), and important facts are absent or changed for sometimes unclear reasons, but for the most part this is a thoughtful and sincere movie, and I didn't think it would be. 

MASTER GARDENER (Paul Schrader)

The concluding installment of Schrader's recent thematic trilogy (following First Reformed and The Card Counter) is the strangest of the three and the most out of step with the zeitgeist. I can't imagine this movie working well in a crowded theater, but the mostly empty late-night screening I attended because of my nutty 2023 work schedule was the ideal setting. I think some of the resistance to this movie comes from the contemporary tendency to distrust any kind of acting that's not based in either pseudo-documentary realism (lingering ghost of the Method) or the broad strokes of Hollywood blockbuster mythmaking, and the possibly related tendency to see every human as either all-virtuous or all-terrible, especially on social media. Schrader's trilogy uses parable (or near-parable) in settings that have most of the trappings of the real world but with elements of that world quietly removed, heightened, muted, or rearranged. In Master Gardener, that rearrangement is the unnamed city the characters live in, impossibly containing parts of New Orleans and New York. As always, Schrader is unafraid to embarrass himself a little, but there's something inhuman about a perfect movie. Also, Sigourney Weaver gets to be scary.

NO BEARS (Jafar Panahi)

Jafar Panahi's successful struggle to keep making movies even as the Iranian government has imprisoned him, placed him on house arrest, or simply banned him from working in film has turned him into an international symbol. This sometimes overshadows the work itself, which is pretty damn good, though it was even greater in the '90s and early 2000s when he had more choices and fewer constrictions and was experiencing less harassment. No Bears has some heavy-handedness and a sprinkling of sentimentality previously absent from Panahi's filmography (mostly in the film-within-a-film scenes), but these stray moments are easy to forgive, and the scene of Panahi, playing a version of himself, silently debating whether to step across the border into Turkey is one of his most affecting pieces of work.

TORI AND LOKITA (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)

The Dardennes, in their last few films, have lost a bit of vitality, and they seem surprisingly hesitant to explore their characters with the depth of their pre-Young Ahmed work. Are their social realist docufictions starting to become stylistically dated? Maybe it's the switch from film to digital? Whatever the cause, Tori and Lokita is still well worth seeing if you're a Dardennes fan, with a compellingly detailed narrative and strong performances from the young leads, especially Pablo Schils, who gives the film the urgency and energy it needs. Despite my criticisms, this is a step up from the curiously flat Young Ahmed, and it's a tense and gripping movie.

DISAPPOINTMENT

THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER (David Gordon Green)

I'm North America's premier David Gordon Green apologist, and I also think some of this film's naysayers are being a smidge hyperbolic, but this is ultimately too damn ordinary. The opening third is effective at setting the mood and tone and getting us to care about the characters, but once the lost girls are found and the demonic possession biz kicks in, it's Peggy Lee time (is that all there is?). I love the first three Exorcist movies (yes, even John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic), which were each directed by a different strong personality and are all intense, perverse, nutty, and darkly hilarious in their own special ways. This one is just a little too standard issue. I wish Green had given it some of his Vice Principals energy.

TV

I don't usually talk much about TV in these posts unless a filmmaker I like makes a TV show because I try to focus on the theatrical experience versus the home viewing experience, and I'm also not that wild about most contemporary television (my TV viewing largely consists of The Rockford Files, '80s territory-era pro wrestling, and Match Game reruns on the game show channel I can pick up in clear weather with my rabbit-ear antenna that's missing an ear; I've also been watching Monk), but I'm halfway through Boots Riley's I'm a Virgo, and I'm loving it. I don't want to reveal anything about it because it constantly surprises. I just want more people to see it.