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ccthewriter · 1 year

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CC’s Top 10 New Watch Ranking - March 2023

Every month on Letterboxd, I make a list of the 10 best films I’ve seen for the first time. It’s a fun way to compare movies separated in time, genre, and country of origin, and helps me keep track of what I’m watching! This is a breakdown of those films.

March! A month of frost and defiant sunlight; mud and budding flowers. As winter is besieged by a burgeoning spring, I stay inside watching movies until the predominant weather isn’t Wet. This month is always defined by Blank Check’s March Madness poll, and the accompanying community tradition of March Sadness. We watch one movie from each director as they’re knocked out of the competition. I didn’t fully complete my Sadness this year, but those that I did see have soared to the top of the list. I adore this podcast and its community - it really is the reason I’m a movie fan in the first place. The accidental theme that emerged from my Sadness picks are Futures We Did Not Imagine. Each film features characters whose visions of their lives have changed. Some find themselves in better worlds than they could have imagined; others are left in the cold wake of their dreams.

Click below to read the breakdown! Click HERE for the list on Letterboxd!

10. Perfect Blue

1997 - Satoshi Kon

I remember watching Paranoia Agent on Toonami when I was a kid. It was one of the first weeks I had a TV in my room. A little 10” screen that sat four feet away from my bed, so I’d have to strain my eyes in the dark to see the image. I didn’t understand why Cartoon Network changed at night. It felt haunted. It felt like living creepypasta. This movie returns me to that feeling. There’s an immense sense of dread as Mima’s life begins to spin apart in delusion horror. She’s a popstar turned actress whose support staff keep getting murdered. As the film goes on, she questions whether she’s done something to cause these death, perhaps killing them herself in a psychotic break. Though I did not find this quite as insightful or visually impressive as Paprika or Millennium Actress, it’s still one of the best anime movies ever made. It captures an incredible spirit of thrill and horror.

9. La Ciénaga

2001 - Lucrecia Martel

A slow and horrifying film that embodies the lazy, muggy, sodden days of summer. Not the invigorating heat of a vacation from school: these are the endless bored days stuck under a parent’s thumb, where they are trying to ignore you from existence and maintain a Malibu buzz. Brought to mind certain Florida vacations with my family. Martel has created a very specific familial web that feels lived in and real. The adults want nothing to do with their kids, but demand their constant attention. The kids fight to create their own fun, and are allowed to play with rifles. Their upper-middle class airs makes them feel possessive over their hired help. Class struggles, incest, and bored cruelty all intermingle in an Argentine villa. I enjoyed it for the breadth of wonderful performances, which seems to reach hyperreal levels of embodiment through unshowy moments. The way these characters don’t look at each at dinner says so much about what their relationships are like.

8. No

2012 - Pablo Larraín

Few films I have seen so embody the feeling of a specific moment of history. This is achieved by this movie’s main attraction - it is shot entirely using equipment that existed in the year of the film’s setting, 1988. There’s a VHS, television incandescence to every frame. All the shots are slightly fuzzy, rainbow-tinted. This reinforces perfectly the rainbow logo at the center of the film. The Pinochet regime has been forced to hold a popular vote to see if YES, the dictatorship should continue, or NO, the country should democratize. A young advertising exec is hired by the NO campaign to sell their message. Gael García Bernal aces this performance, embodying someone who believes in the cause, but believes in their own talent more. He’s so jaded, so disbelieving in any sort of grand victory. And yet he wakes up and finds himself living it. The advertising dream he sold is real. I adored this for the visual style, that performance, but also the underlying message about the nature of dictatorships. It’s a self-defeating impulse. People crave freedom in the deepest part of their soul, and will strive to achieve it no matter what. Fascism always contains the seeds of its own destruction. Happiness, joy, life itself are gravitational forces that will draw the public towards freedom.

7. Sunshine

2007 - Danny Boyle

From my Letterboxd review:

“Humanity pushed to the brink. Some find peace in the little things, some focus on what has to be done, some discover they are avenging angels who need to enact the whims of a bloodthirsty god. Others sit in peace and tend their gardens.

I don't think I would have liked this so much if I had seen it before the pandemic. I know what people are like when facing an uncertain oblivion now. The visual styling is *incredible.* The way Boyle uses overlapping reflections and nonsensical, out-of-focus shapes is just immaculate. He's inspired me to pick up my old digital camera and use it for all its worth! If nothing else, watch this for some truly remarkable transitions between shots. Love the crunchiness of the sci-fi, love the leaps of fancy, *love* all the performances. Just an incredible treat through and through.”

6. An Cailín Ciúin

2022 - Colm Bairéad

An Irish film!! I would feel legally obligated to celebrate a work as Gaeilge no matter what, but I can proudly say that this is a brilliant film worthy of attention regardless. Cáit is the titular child, bullied and neglected by her poor family. They send her off to her mother’s better-off cousin for the summer. She slowly opens up under their care, experiencing the joys of a small farm house in scenes that reminded me of My Neighbor Totoro, in terms of their pastoral beauty. She discovers tragedy among her new caretakers, too, and fragments of cruelty among her neighbors. Though she must ultimately return to her unhappy home, she holds on to the lessons of this summer forever, having found strength to voice her worries and stand up for her own joy. I mean, that sounds fucking brilliant, doesn’t it? This is beautiful and precious and painted in gorgeous colors. I’m really honing in on this live-action Miyazaki quality. It’s a small film of a young girl’s journey closer to adulthood. It’s simply so beautiful to witness.

5. Mississippi Masala

1991- Mira Nair

I wanted to watch this because I heard it was one of the most romantic, sexy movies of all time. It certainly contains that, but its reputation overshadows the intense drama and other types of love shown in the film. Mina is a child living in Uganda, who is forced to leave her home after the new political regime threatens the Indian minority population. Twenty years later, she’s living in Mississippi at the motel her family runs, without peers or dreams. All that changes when Demetrius, played by Denzel Washington, arrives in her life. He inspires her to find a new path in life. Her family holds a lot of baggage around their romance, painted by their experience in Uganda and good old fashioned American racism. But ultimately, they embrace that they can’t keep controlling her future. If they want her to be happy, they have to let her go. It’s a sweeping narrative that focuses on an interesting intersection of history and identity that I haven’t seen spoken of anywhere else. I adore this central romance, which seems so genuine and spontaneous. I adore the complex web of characters that shape Mina’s life. It’s a beautiful demonstration that no romance happens in a vacuum, that we all carry the expectations of the people around us and the history we have lived through. It makes the ending so triumphant.

4. Le Bonheur

1965 - Agnès Varda

I know Wes Anderson fucking loves this film. The colors, the brilliant staging, the reinforcement of every character through a very specific visual theme. It is brilliant. You can tell Varda helped make The Young Girls of Rochefort. They share a perfection in imagemaking. This film tells the story of a young family over the course of a few seasons. They start in brilliant, shining, happy Summer, like a family in a postcard, and pass towards the cooler weeks of Autumn. François, the husband, develops an affair with a woman at the post office. The title of the film means Happiness, and as it goes on you realize that the happiness they’re focusing on is his. He gets everything he wants - a beautiful home, a great job, adorable kids, and a self-sacrificing wife who would do anything for him. The meandering aesthetic joy of the film turns sharp when he reveals he’s having an affair, and asks his wife to be ok with it. It’s her duty to protect his happiness, after all. It makes him a better husband. She agrees - and then takes her own life a few moments later. Even in the wake of her death, we see his happiness become paramount. His mistress becomes the new mother to his children, and all their other family members seem perfectly happy with this arrangement. The brilliant feminist thinking that goes into this film demonstrates this period of history where the entire world really was built around men’s happiness. Reality seems to contort itself so that he never, for a moment, has to feel too guilty, too responsible. The technicolor joy continues. By the end of the film, we suspect that the vivid, beautiful colors may be achieved with lead-based paint. There’s a little arsenic in that palette.

3. Metropolis

1927 - Fritz Lang

From Letterboxd: “Capital G Great film, even if it is an exhausting watch that ends in a lame both-sidesy message. Pleased to see that critics for decades have pointed out the stupidly simple moral center. Still, incredible to think such a massive, visually inventive work is nearly a century old. Contains every big budget narrative that can be: sci-fi, fantasy, disaster, thriller, spy, horror... simply immense.”

I enjoyed this as a historical artifact more than an actual movie, if that makes sense. It really is impressive to see how grand these sets and costumes were. In terms of actual flow, it felt like work to get through. But I feel richer for having completed it. I finally understand why that dang poster is so iconic! Having had some time to reflect on this, I think the most powerful thing within the movie is its reflection of Weimar Republic thinking. The two forces, the oppressed underclass and the all-powerful dictator shake hands at the end of this film. THE HEAD AND THE HANDS MUST BE MEDIATED BY THE HEART, the film loudly proclaims. That Heart is the church. These people really thought that their society could be balanced through this little arrangement… but barely a decade later, Germany would see how wrong they were. This overwhelming liberal idea that the two sides just need to talk it out, or be mediated by some mystical third force, is a false fantasy. There is no reason the underclass shouldn’t have just fucking murdered this dictator who engineered their oppression! Whose only redeeming act was, at the very last minute, realizing he had fucked up. I hope people watching this film in the present day embrace the warning surrounding this film, rather than the message the film itself wants to send. If our world is going to survive, we are going to need a much stronger sense of justice than can be found here. We have to hold the architects of these global, fascistic systems responsible for the terror they have bred.

2. Alphaville

1965 - Jean-Luc Godard

From Letterboxd: “Finally, a Godard that I'm crazy about. A film that speaks to this moment of history where the AI question looms on the horizon. Is it technology that should be nuked out of existence? Something to quarantine and ignore? To surrender to? I can't deny that I, too, view the people who give their lives up to this fad as mutants. I despise how willing some people are to surrender to it, who salivate at the idea of their own obsolesce.

"Yes, Machine Alpha, think for me. Make my art. I will close my eyes and consume what you wish. I will walk the path you lay out for me. Your thinking must be perfect, because I do not understand it. The man in the white coat doesn't understand, either, and that must be good too. I'm so afraid of anything I can know - make my future opaque."

These folks will stumble around like blind ants, too, when life forces them to confront the messy realities of human existence that machines can't predict. The loose craft of this film reinforces that idea. This is a near-future made of things Godard found lying around, shot with on-the-fly impulsivity. Its messy edges are the point. You have to strive to understand it. You have to communicate with the filmmaker - you have to connect with a human being.

It's all about love, folks. Everything in your life, past, present, and future: it just comes down to love.”

1. Platform

2000 - Jia Zhangke

From Letterboxd: “There are days when you look out at your life and realize everything has changed. The vision you once held for the future is now impossible. How did it happen? Slowly. So slowly. A thousand small decisions made every day, plus ordinances passed down from echelons of power you'll never touch. At least you're alive. That's alright. Maybe the next generation will find the dreams you left behind. Maybe they'll even live them.

Phenomenally slow-burning slice of life, admittedly a bit inaccessible if you're not familiar with this part of history. But the small changes that suddenly become global shifts are *fascinating* to track. Everyone's being towed around on a hacked tractor, then you blink and everyone has a car. It's amazing to see these idealistic kids quietly give up on their dreams. They put them away on the shelf, waiting for the time to be right, and a few decades pass before they realize the moment never came. The train flew past the platform, and it's never coming round again.”

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Thank you for reading! If you liked any of these thoughts feel free to follow me on Letterboxd, where I post reviews and keep meticulous track of every movie I watch. Look forward to more posts like these next month!

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