Favorite First Watches of January 2024
Taking a swim across American suburbia, exploring loneliness in 1970s New England, mining real trauma for entertainment value, queer Hitchcock, and more
One of the only good things about freezing cold weather is that it excuses spending almost every weekend marathoning movies all day instead of leaving the apartment to be social. I always start the year with an annual re-watch of Paul Thomas Anderson’s delicious (literally, because there is so much breakfast food in it) masterpiece Phantom Thread on New Year’s Day. This year, I also cheekily made my husband and myself mushroom omelets and Welsh rarebit to go along with our morning viewing. Don’t worry: my husband is very much alive and not food poisoned. (*wink wink*)
I’ve spent a lot of this month catching up on some major awards contenders from the past year I missed. I’ll get into it more in my movie breakdowns below. Since it’s not included in my favorites this month, you can read more in-depth thoughts on my issues with Saltburn here. [Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it yet]
Rope (1948, dir. Hitchcock)
I won’t get into the rather obvious—at least to anyone paying attention to such things—queer subtext here because there are plenty of queer writers who have done an excellent job of analyzing it in detail. Let’s just say that I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t clock that the two leads are gay when one of their party guests is a fabulously dressed, wealthy older woman who’s super into astrology and the pair also spends half the evening trying to ruin their dead friend’s relationship. Classic stuff.
In all seriousness, Rope is a fascinating technical exercise for Hitchcock even if you can tell where each long take ends and another begins, despite clever camerawork. As an actor, I obviously appreciate longer takes—especially if you have a bunch of disciplined actors who come from the theater—as they allow the actors to find the rhythm of the text and also build real tension into their performances. That works to this film’s advantage enormously, because you’re watching everything play out in basically real time and wondering if or when these two will be caught for murdering their friend. It’s also why Columbo is so good to watch because when you already know who the murderer(s) is, it creates a natural tension.
I also think Rope, which was his first collaboration with Hitchcock, is one of James Stewart’s sharpest, most cynical performances. Once he enters the party, the whole film takes a real turn. The last act is absolutely riveting to watch. Stewart is an actor fully in control of the camera and text. Movie stars! We used to have them!
Rope is available to stream on the Criterion Channel and to rent on Amazon Prime.
The Holdovers (2023, dir. Payne)
This is an instant holiday classic; perfect for anyone who has ever experienced loneliness or melancholy during the holiday season. Beyond its terrific three lead performances, what makes The Holdovers work so well is just how lived-in the movie feels without also feeling like setting it in 1970 was purely an aesthetic choice. Nobody here has “iPhone face” (i.e. faces that look like they’ve never not known what an iPhone is) and everybody also has normal teeth instead of the same veneers more than half of Hollywood seems to be sporting these days.
The Holdovers is equal parts funny, melancholy, and earnest without ever being overly saccharine, and it’s difficult to imagine Da’Vine Joy Randolph won’t take home Best Supporting Actress at the upcoming Academy Awards. Her performance of a grieving mother just trying to get through the holidays is tender and heart-wrenching. But Paul Giamatti turns in some of the best and funniest work of his career here in what is shockingly only his second collaboration with Alexander Payne. Between this flick and the phenomenal Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, 2023 was a great year for movies about young people in the early 70s struggling with things way above their maturity level and the adult parental figures in their lives also still struggling with similar issues.
The Holdovers is available on Peacock.
May December (2023, dir. Haynes)
According to star Charles Melton, both Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Three Women, Robert Altman’s dreamy 1977 drama, were among the movies director Todd Haynes asked the cast of May December to watch in preparation for the film. Both films, which deal with the female psyche and obsession, are somewhat polarizing. In the case of May December, which follows a famous actress (Natalie Portman, giving one of her best performances to date) trailing the real-life subjects (frequent Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore and breakout star Melton) of her next project with increasingly disturbing results, it is also polarizing because the “real life subjects” in the film are inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. May December is about a lot of things—grooming, the often murky boundaries between women—but it is primarily a damning look at how self-absorbed artists thoughtlessly mine real-life trauma for “art.” As Melton’s Joe begins to re-examine his past, his entire body language morphs back into one of a teenager. It’s an astonishing performance that should have taken Melton all the way to the Oscars but hopefully that snub will turn into a long, fruitful career. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
May December is currently streaming on Netflix.
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004, dir. Miyazaki)
So far, there hasn’t been a single Miyazaki movie I’ve watched that doesn’t make me cry. Howl’s Moving Castle—with English language dubbing from Christian Bale, Billy Crystal, Emily Mortimer, Blythe Danner, Jean Simmons, and Lauren Bacall—is yet another highly imaginative, gorgeously rendered dreamscape from Hayao Miyazaki. It’s also incredibly anti-war (it was conceived in response to the Iraq War as Miyazaki is a pacifist) with a message about kindness and compassion that resonates maybe even more deeply today in the wake of everything happening in the Middle East. I don’t like thinking of Miyazaki’s work as “children’s pictures,” because the messages and themes are always universal. Of course the artwork is incredible, but what always stays with me is how it only serves to strengthen the story; to show the devastation of war and cruelty but also how love and kindness can literally transform us.
Howl’s Moving Castle is available to stream on HBO Max.
The Swimmer (1968, dir. Perry)
Maybe the best thing I watched this month but most definitely the movie I’ve thought about most. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I hit play on this, and if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you keep yourself in the dark. The Swimmer’s premise is simple enough: a well-off ad man decides to “swim” across a series of his neighbors’ pools in suburban Connecticut to travel back to his own house. But that premise hides not just the simmering existential crises of suburban America but also the film’s hypnotic, dreamy visual style. Each neighbor’s pool offers not just clues into Burt Lancaster’s sunny, charming Ned, but also serves as increasingly difficult physical and emotional hurdles the nearer Ned gets to his own backyard and the realities he’s trying to escape.
The camerawork serves as a window into Ned’s psyche, moving as he moves; whether that’s trying to watch zooming cars as he attempts to cross a busy highway, running down a country road, or gazing into the sunny sky. Extreme closeups add tension to both the viewers and Ned; we wonder just what’s going on in his head and his life. It’s a gorgeous-looking movie that feels more in line visually with the movies of the 70s rather than the 60s.
No doubt a huge influence for Mad Men and Don Draper, Lancaster’s Ned is a charming cypher until all the pieces come together by the film’s inevitable, devastating conclusion. That we realize it’s coming doesn’t take way from its gut punching final minutes. The Swimmer is a stone cold masterpiece that I’d pair with Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur for a great double feature.
The Swimmer is streaming on Criterion Channel and to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.
The Nest (2020, dir. Durkin)
In a sort of similar vein to The Swimmer, Sean Durkin’s The Nest is also about the haves/have nots of suburban America and England. Set in the 80s, the film follows a middle class suburban NY family who relocate to a huge English manor they can barely afford in Surrey, England. The family begins to fracture under the weight of their stretched finances and Rory’s (Jude Law) obsession with keeping up appearances at his old office. While the film didn’t totally work for me, the performances—particularly Carrie Coon and Jude Law—are excellent and the moody, gothic vibes give the whole film an unsettling feeling. I think this would have worked better for me if Durkin had either ratcheted up the creepy, haunted house vibes or made Law’s character a total Patrick Bateman-type. What’s onscreen feels like a lot of cool, half ideas that don’t fully develop into anything super impactful. It’s still worth a watch though.
The Nest is streaming on Netflix.
Maestro (2023, dir. Cooper)
Maybe a controversial inclusion since so many of my colleagues hated this, but more of Cooper’s second directorial effort (after A Star is Born) worked for me than didn’t. The cinematography is gorgeous—if a little pretentious at times—and there’s an earnestness to the whole thing that I appreciated. Do I also think it still kind of reeks a lot of purposeful awards-bait? Yes. But I was less bothered by its approach than other similar award-bait. That’s just me.
The first half is kind of fun, playful, and spontaneous (a musical number!) in a way I really wish had been sustained through the second half of the film, which felt way more stilted and biopic-y. The more the movie leans into the melodrama, the less genuine it feels somehow. Plus, Cooper’s voicework as older Lenny was distracting and the performance felt kind of stodgy by the end. All the stuff I enjoyed most about his performance was in the first half where he, ironically, looks and sounds more like Bradley Cooper than Leonard Bernstein. No doubt Carey Mulligan is doing the heavy lifting here, which Cooper seems to agree with considering he makes her look gorgeous in every shot. Mulligan’s performance is fabulous; she manages to keep it grounded and impulsive even while doing a pitch-perfect Mid-Atlantic accent.
What’s disappointing for me is that I don’t feel Maestro has much to say about anything. It’s a fairly cold portrait of one of America’s most towering musical artists where you don’t feel much about his love for music. It’s in his face while he’s conducting, but there’s no real through-line; it’s all a kind of general “busyness” in terms of “oh darling I have a concert here” or “I have to compose this thing for [name drops a towering musical giant of the 20th century].” There’s no real sense of Leonard Bernstein the artist. There’s also no real sense of Leonard Bernstein’s sexuality. It doesn’t even have much to say about his marriage to his wife. Cooper is clearly passionate about Bernstein and music but this seems to be a case where a lot of facts are on the screen but none of those feelings really made it.
Maestro is streaming on Netflix.
Past Lives (2023, dir. Song)
Celine Song’s extremely assured directorial debut Past Lives is maybe the most lovely and wistful exploration of the “what ifs” that accompany every meaningful relationship I’ve seen onscreen. It’s also a layered look at the complications of what it means to be an immigrant stuck between two worlds and identities. Nora (a radiant Greta Lee) has a wonderful husband (John Magaro, who broke my heart) she loves, but when her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) comes for a visit 24 years after she left Korea, she’s caught up in a lot of complicated feelings about the past, herself, and her desires. This is a gentle movie that asks hard questions but allows for messy answers and feelings. It’s a quiet stunner.
Past Lives is available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.
Poor Things (2023, dir. Lanthimos)
My initial reaction was that I enjoyed this overall, and I’m glad it exists, but the longer I’ve sat with it, the less it holds together for me; particularly in its dual exploration and exploitation of female sexuality. Bella Baxter’s (a committed and commanding Emma Stone) journey from reanimated corpse of a formerly suicidal woman to sexually “liberated” scholar and, as the film’s ending alludes to, future scientist/surgeon appears to be a completely feminist one where she never puts a moral value on sex. And there is a lot of sex in the film to the point that I went from being “okay this is fine” to being “okay we get the point! she’s willing to try and do anything! how many times do we need to make the point?” I’m no prude about onscreen sex and I don’t even need every sex scene in a movie to push the plot forward in some way, but in the case of this movie where sex is mostly depicted as the core of a woman’s journey to supposed liberation, I did start to feel it was all a bit much and wound up accomplishing the opposite: objectification. And while I do think there are men out there who are capable of writing/telling feminist stories, in the case of Poor Things, I personally find it to be an example of men’s limiting idea of feminism rather than one that is actually liberating. Bodily autonomy, especially with regards to sex, is always at the crux of women’s liberation, but it is not the only way to liberation, and I don’t feel good about the way the movie presents Bella’s freedom solely tied up with how much she—and the other women in the film—have sex in a variety of positions. We are obviously meant to feel uncomfortable about the way a man with the literal name God had no ethical qualms about sticking a baby’s brain inside an adult woman’s body and how it’s men who try to place restrictions and morals on Bella but it’s all still a little too Basic White Feminism 101 for me. There is also the matter of how Bella is shown discovering sex but never once has to deal with menstruation which is also kind of…weird.
I love the world-building and costume design and there were lots of bits that made me laugh. Mark Ruffalo in particular gives a very fun, arch, over-the-top performance as a caddish lawyer who whisks Bella away. I wish everyone else had matched his foppish, satirical energy. I think I was expecting more of that in this film, but there’s no way to sustain that through 2 1/2 unevenly paced hours. In fact, I think there is a much zippier, funnier 90 minute black comedy inside of this visually ambitious epic; shaving even 30 minutes off would help tremendously. Still, I can’t deny I mostly had a good time with this one.
Poor Things is currently in theaters.
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