Week 41: holiday movie
This story has been an inspiration on so much Bat-media, from The Dark Knight to the early stages of Matt Reeves’ Batman Epic Crime Saga or whatever the official title is. The period of Gotham history when Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent went after mob boss Carmine Falcone, the tragic results for Harvey, and how Carmine was ultimately brought down by the rise of the supervillains and their freak mafias. So, needing a holiday movie, why not go with a story hinging on 12 holidays all orbiting Halloween? Obviously, even split into two parts, a movie couldn’t fully encapsulate the 12 issue maxi-series, and while the animation’s good enough, Tim Sale’s specific imagery was always going to be tricky to recapture, but overall, they did well with it. Jensen Ackles gives good Batman, Jack Quaid is in there, Bruce and Selina’s dynamic is fun, solid Batman.
I also watched Part 2, and frankly, I know this was hard to avoid, but having the extended sequence of Bruce Wayne being controlled by Poison Ivy and the bit where Batman gets taken down by fear toxin back to back really hobbles Batman as a character in the back half. That said, “Batman thinks of everything” is fun when appropriate but it’s also good to put him on the back foot for a storyline.
Rating: 4/5
Week 42: first film of a famous director
As covered back on page one, I’ve been trying to watch/rewatch the entire Wes Anderson filmography. Thirty-five weeks later, I was still working on it. Actually by this point I was still only four in, I’ve managed four more since, but still have three left, there’s a reason I called this a “gradual” ranking on Letterboxd. Anyway, a ranked list on Letterboxd doesn’t count as “content” so this isn’t so much double-dipping as efficient use of my leisure viewing.
Bottle Rocket is very much the prototype. You begin to see his signature style and framing, and of course both Wilson brothers are here (Patrick Wilson is not related). The whimsy is in its infancy and he doesn’t have the budget to go Full Anderson in production value, set design, and cast, but the base elements are here. You can see how he became the singular artist that he is, and for a few friends making a movie for minimal budget, most of which they blew on James Caan, it’s pretty danged good. That said the prototype is never the best version, is it. I don’t know that he mastered the alchemy of his signature blend of humour, whimsy, and deep melancholy until Royal Tenenbaums.
Rating: 3/5
Week 43: set in a college
And once again, these prompts became excellent excuses to watch movies claimed as classics, things I’d never seen but now had an excuse to devote time to watching, so when I saw “college,” I went for the iconic, archetypical, classic college comedy Animal House.
And it’s… okay, I guess? There are college comedies that came out later and aged worse, but this one only partially landed for me. Maybe as times change we just want different things from comedy.
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 44: best original score winner
It turns out that if you’ve spent the night tossing and turning, too filled with raging anxiety and dread over the possibility that the world’s leading democracy might have actually chosen to descend into fascism controlled by billionaire narcissists, only to abandon sleep after finding out your dread was entirely justified, and now you’re hollowed out with worry, despair, and sleep deprivation…
Mickey Rooney as the Japanese neighbour is still really offensive.
Hepburn is very good, though, and Moon River is really doing its work on the score. If it weren’t for the horrifying racist caricature that just won’t go away, this would be a real treat.
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 45: adapted from a play
Not a first time watch by a long shot, but I’d just seen a community theatre production of the play that… had a lot of heart, as a colleague of mine would say, and I needed to see it done right. And lacking a professional production in my area, this’ll do.
There are a few ways that the movie can never live up to a proper live stage production. Not every bit added for the movie helps… switching locations can break the frantic pacing, describing the soundscape as “noises off” to justify the title is unnecessary, and it’s arguable how much this needs a happy ending, but on the other hand, the tacked on ending actually resolves a big reveal from act two that otherwise goes nowhere.
Plus, a cast this weirdly perfect is rare. Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, John Ritter, Mark Linn-Baker, the final film of Denholm Elliott, and you, too, can be sad Christopher Reeve never got to do more comedy. A spectacularly fun time.
Rating: 4.5/5
Week 46: with your favourite actor/actress
After a brief hiatus from films, Saoirse Ronan came back in 2024 with two movies that seemed strong contenders to be her fifth Oscar nomination, and maybe finally her first win, and at time of writing it seems like neither of them will and that sucks. For someone who only recently hit 30 she already feels criminally overdue, and I feel we have been squandering a once-in-a-generation talent as of late.
Don’t look at me like that, you saw what the prompt was.
Anyway she does great in this story of an alcoholic trying to turn her life around through further and further isolation into rural Scotland, as she finds alcohol was such a key factor of her life in London that even at rock bottom she doesn’t know how to exist there without it. She really captures the mania of Rona’s drunk days, the addictive highs she got from it, without ever glamourizing that mania. Sure she feels good when the booze hits, but it’s obvious to anyone on the outside that this is dangerous and unsustainable for her.
As the story is told non-linearly (meaning one key part of her hitting rock bottom is not left implied as you might hope), they also do a great job of marking time through Rona’s various hair colours. Meaning as much as I wanted the inevitable relapse to be a flashback, the lack of blue dye proved it wasn’t. Recovery, like this story, is not a linear progression, and falling backwards is always, always on the table, and Saoirse breaks your heart with that constant possibility.
Rating: 4/5
Week 47: about a famous person
I think that maybe there are important stories to tell about Lenny Bruce, and his battle against puritanical obscenity laws. That’s an evergreen tale about pearl-clutching conservatives trying to legislate decency by going after naughty words or “deviant” behaviour instead of actually addressing hate, fear, and inequality, the things that actually render a society indecent.
That’s not what this movie does, though. It touches on the legal battles, sure, mostly in the last 15 minutes, and it gives some flashes of Lenny Bruce’s comedy (which Hoffman is nailing, this was Peak Hoffman times), but Fosse spends most of the runtime on Lenny Bruce having not the best marriage. Most of his career milestones happen in the background while the movie fixates on his unhealthy marriage to an addict, then blames her for his downfall as much as the legal woes. It was like Fosse was chasing the high of almost-best-picture Cabaret and couldn’t tell this story without a Sally Bowles.
Rating: 3/5
Week 48: set in a country you want to visit
I haven’t been to Greece since high school and surely would like to go back. Is it odd that I picked the sequel, which is mostly green-screened, instead of the first movie which was actually filmed there? Maybe, but I’ve seen the stage version of Mamma Mia, and during his quarantine talk show era, Patrick Willems explained what an improved sequel this was, so I decided to jump in here. Is it dense with plot? No. Do most of the conflicts just sort of wear off and go away? Sure do. Is it still a good time? It is, and when we hit the full-cast production of Super Trouper at the end, I couldn’t help but grin, it’s just a fun watch.
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 49: based around a religion
“This may as well happen,” I said to myself. Midsommar might be light on traditional scares, but it is very good at maintaining dread. Florence Pugh does great as our central character, constantly trying to repress discomfort and trauma out of fear that her boyfriend Christian will find her a drag and leave her (at a time when she doesn’t have much else), while Jack Reynor does well at making it clear why everybody in this movie eventually says “screw Christian.” They create such an atmosphere of unease that even before the true nature of the ceremony they’re witnessing becomes clear, we the audience can tell something is very wrong here. So when people start disappearing, and the villagers assure us it’s all fine, there’s little doubt that nothing is fine.
You have to be able to vibe with the slow-burn low-key approach, and it will become awkward to watch on your phone on a plane, but it has its strengths.
Rating: 3.5/5
Week 50: 50th anniversary this year
John Cazale was in five movies in his lifetime, all of them were Best Picture winners or nominees, and before this I’d only seen three of them, so I decided to watch the other 1974 Best Picture nominee directed by Francis Ford Coppola co-starring John Cazale, with Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who begins to panic about a conversation in a park he recorded. We hear the conversation multiple times throughout the movie, and it becomes very clear how easy it is to become lost in picking it apart to find the true meaning, which is exactly what happens to Hackman’s Harry as he grows paranoid over what he may or may not have uncovered. It’s a ride, to be sure, and you too will say “Damn it Harry, do not just accept free pens at a surveillance convention.”
Also has a young Harrison Ford in a small but key role, that’s neat. In the Coppola conversation, this one gets a little forgotten, given that it opened the same year as The Godfather Part 2, but I’d say it shouldn’t.
Rating: 4/5
Week 51: film you personally relate to
For a few years in the 90s, Los Angeles was a magical place to me, too. A place of sudden friendship and love at first sight and amazing experiences. It was fun revisiting this one decades later; I thought the satire of how weird LA life can be ran out halfway through, but no, it keeps going, and the magical realism love story hits well. Maybe it helped that Steve Martin’s then-wife was playing his love interest. The cameos were also fun, most notably Patrick Stewart as a demanding maitre’d and Rick Moranis as a gravedigger setting up a Hamlet reference.
It’s a real charmer of a movie, and LA remains that weird, even if the magic of the city in my youth proves hard to reclaim. Time’s arrow moves ever forward.
Rating: 4/5
Week 52: released during the decade you were born
In 2022, Sight and Sound magazine declared this the greatest movie ever made. Bold claim, in a world where Paddington 2 and Demolition Man exist. So I had to check it out. Although it took me a while, this had been on my Letterboxd watchlist for ages.
Okay, chat, I may have lost my Internet Film Guy credentials because I did not care for it. Did I give it my undivided attention? I’m afraid to report I did not. Do I feel I could have? I don’t think so. Because it is oppressively boring.
Which, its supporters will tell you, is the point. Walking us through the oppressive monotony of Jeanne Dielman’s domestic life (punctuated by some sex work that is also implied to be very dull and routine) via exhaustingly long takes of simple chores is the point, so that when her routine begins to crack in the second of three days we witness, that becomes significant. The story is told in the details, the nuances, the little ways Delphine Seyrig plays Jeanne’s deteriorating mental state.
But I am sorry, end of the day, I simply feel that you can tell me a movie is meant to be boring or it can be 201 minutes long, but not both. I could not imagine putting myself through three hours of excruciating monotony a second time in the hopes of better catching the 20 minutes of things actually happening. I will watch Cats twice in a row before I watch this again, because I remain convinced that the worst thing art can be is boring, and Cats was a lot of things, most bad, but never boring.
Jeanne Dielman feels like it couldn’t have existed outside of the 70s, a time of auteurs being given full control to do what they liked… although that’s imposing Hollywood’s film history arc on Belgium so might not be accurate… because this is not a movie meant for mass audiences. It’s the film equivalent of Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, not a piece of art to be enjoyed, but a shibboleth for the intellectuals. You don’t read Finnegan’s Wake for fun, you read it prove that you could.
Anyway I guess I’m not a proper Film Bro, which I guess we knew because I prefer Forrest Gump to The Shawshank Redemption, and will take The Beekeeper over this any day of the week.
And that’s the list! A great way to find new movies to watch from across the decades, and an excuse to revisit a couple favourites. So worth doing, the 2025 list has already begun, and already it’s helping me patch some holes in the Nolan filmography.
Yes I 3.5 star a lot of movies. A lot of movies fall into the 3.5 range, or “I did like this but it has some issues.”
See you soon, hopefully before it’s time to rank order this year’s Best Picture nominees, but I’m making decent progress so who knows.
