#yes i had to look through my Letterboxd to remember what i watched
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TAKE YOU DOWN A PEG ─── neil lewis ✧𖦹
ೃ⁀➷ “I want you. Your bones. Your body heat. The bite marks your teeth leave. To see how bad and beautiful those eyes look beneath me." — Beau Taplin.
pairing. sub!neil lewis x reader
summary. gumshoe video’s got a rude customer who neil can’t seem to ban…
warnings. swearing, voyeurism, unprotected sex, creampie, p in v, semi-public sex, breathplay, oral sex (m), cockwarming, degradation/insults, SMUT UNDER THE CUT!
word count. 5.3k
a/n. the hardest thing about writing this was scouring letterboxd for obscure films that i think neil would foam over. pls don’t beat me to death if my film references miss the mark 😭
Neil loves his job. Seriously, seriously, he does. It's completely self-satisfying, his personal passion project that’s taken up a large amount of his life, and brings him the uttermost joy of allowing him to do what he does best: recommend films.
Gumshoe Video is like his fucking baby, and he takes care of it, immensely; he wipes down every tape every Sunday, he sweeps the floor and rearranges the furniture, he organizes the tapes almost constantly, and he does his hardest to provide stellar, passionate - if almost annoying - film advice. He wants the reviews up on this place, alright, otherwise it feels like he’s letting his baby down.
Now, if there’s one thing Neil hates about his job, just one minor, teensy weensy thing, it’s probably you. You, the rude customer who came in three months ago and has come in everyday since.
The day you and Neil Lewis met was one just like the rest. Gumshoe Video was promoting old spaghetti westerns; Neil was wearing a cowboy hat and opening deliveries from a video tape shop in Calabasas that had closed down; you were coming off work and were daydreaming, dizzily entering shops to get your mind off the irritatingly mundane job you had. Unlike Neil, you fucking hate your job.
You had entered Gumshoe, browsing lazily through the Film Noir section, when Neil sprung up like a weed behind you, speaking animatedly about how the best film noir’s had to be Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard, or Double Indemnity, and if you’d ever watched them before.
As Neil blabbered on, your left eyebrow became increasingly raised. Finally having enough of him, you spoke. “So, are you one of those guys that talk all over the girl and ask them if they’ve ever seen Citizen Kane, or if I can even name five Ingmar Bergman movies for you?”
Neil spluttered, flustered with being confronted about his obsessive cinephile talking habit of carrying the conversation away like a track runner in a relay race going off with the baton in the wrong direction. “What? I was just —“
“— name dropping film noir’s, ‘cause I’m some ditzy, uncultured bimbo bitch who mistakenly walked in, right?” You said, rolling your eyes. Later, in retrospect, you’ll wonder if you were too rude; then, you’ll remember you don’t give a fuck, you were having a bad day, and Neil Lewis had one hell of an annoying face.
Neil’s face grew offended, an irritated furrowed brow wiggling onto his features. “If you don’t want to watch what I recommend, you don’t have to!” he exclaimed, arms up placatingly in the air.
“Uh huh, okay, and you don’t have to shove your pretentious cinephile knowledge up my ass.”
He just stared at you, boring his bright blue eyes into your own, face contorted so exasperatedly you might as well have climbed up to the stars, plucked the moon from the sky, and used it as a pillow.
My god, Neil thought. Are you just a rude customer? Or did you get off on berating small businesses like a sadistic freak?
After a moment of you two staring each other down in the fluorescent artificial light of Gumshoe, both looking terribly affronted, you left.
Neil would then rant about this “insane customer” for at least twelve hours straight to anyone who’d liste. The next day, the distasteful experience was extremely close to thereby fully exiting his mind, but didn’t, because you, yes, you, walked in again.
You shot straight daggers with your eyes at Neil, but your expression became soft, demure, and gentle when you saw Jonathan manning the register instead. You trailed through the aisles unperturbed, Jonathan too busy sporting a hangover from working the late shift at that obscure speakeasy copycat bar (in which, as often as possible, he would sneak a shot to stay awake) to recommend films.
In any case, that was Neil’s job, and Jonathan leaned over to whisper in his ear: “Neil, man, do me a favor and please distract that customer -- fuck, this headache’s killing me…”
Neil protested, shaking his head rapidly. “That’s her.”
“Her who?”
“Her! The - customer who -- who yelled at me!”
Jonathan blinked blearily, clearly still too incapacitated to think about the matter much. “She yelled at you… and she’s back. Here. And why exactly is that…?”
“To yell at me s’more, probably!” Neil whisper-shouted incredulously.
Suddenly, you broke Neil and Jonathan out of their not-so-quiet argument by slamming down Gumshoe Video’s copies of Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard, and Double Indemnity. The irony did not miss Neil - honestly, it was a little on the nose, even for him.
“Thought I’d see what all the rage was.” you explained “sweetly”, gesturing to Neil as you spoke, indignation seeping through your every word. Your grudge was, well, mostly unexplained, ‘cept for the fact you yourself were an avid cinephile, had watched those three movies more than you could count, and did not take Neil’s “have you watched these before” kindly.
Thus started you and Neil’s long-winded rivalry slash animosity slash terribly caustic back-and-forth correspondence.
You keep coming to Gumshoe Video, because, despite your anger towards Neil, you fucking adore the place. The films are downright amazing, the atmosphere is like fucking heaven with the walls lined full of video tapes, decorated in classic film props, campy lifesize cardboard cutouts making you jump at every turn, and Gumshoe Video’s concept is insanely different (and lightyears better) than the corporate monolith that is Media Giant.
He keeps coming to Gumshoe Video because, again, Neil loves his job, and treats Gumshoe like he carried it for nine months and has been lovingly raising it for the five years it's been open.
From that first incident, you and Neil’s relationship twisted a little into something like this: you come in, insult him on whatever costume he’s wearing, return the tapes you rented the other night, argue with him for exactly an hour and a half on the couch, insult him for another ten as you browse the store, ignore his film recommendations, and rent three more movies.
He waits for you to enter, wears the ugliest costume he owns to visually assault you, gladly takes the tapes back, argues with you for 1 and ½ hours, fires back retorts as you insult him, recommends movies he thinks will make you jump out your apartment window, and gives you your movies.
You’re the minor, teensy weensy headache Neil experiences everyday, but at least, at the very least, Gumshoe makes daily dollars from your rentals - kinda like the payback or relief fund a town gets after a hurricane’s run through it.
But, (somewhat?) shamefully… there’s a reason Neil doesn’t just ban you from the store and live his life without ever thinking of you again.
This reason occurred to him a month ago, when he was in the backroom, pasting barcodes and information stickers on tapes that were yet to be placed in the store. You were looking for the washroom, awkwardly stumbling through the back hallway of Gumshoe Video, and since you couldn’t find Neil — he, in spite of the nature of your relationship, trusted you to look around and rent the tapes by yourself, having done it several times while arguing with him at the counter — you had to brave through it alone.
Now, the thing about the room Neil was in — more of a shoe closet than a room, honestly — was that it was locked from the outside, and he didn’t have the key. The key was currently in the hands of one Lucien, who had gone to buy takeout for the two of them because of the late night cataloging of new tapes ahead of them.
And… he was taking about a hundred years to come back because he was trying to get the cashier’s number at their usual Chinese restaurant.
Anyway, imagine this: you’re looking for the washroom, and the door to a small room is propped open. You enter, don’t think much of the small stack of empty tape boxes acting as a door stopper, and let it close. The light in there is dim, just a shitty little ceiling light; Neil turns, tapes in his hand; you turn, after closing the door.
Finally, remember: the room is more of a shoe closet than a room.
“Jesus -- christ!” Neil yelped, startled at your sudden appearance. “What -- the hell are you doing here?”
“I take it this isn’t the bathroom?” You murmured, ignoring his question and shifting uncomfortably. Seriously, the tape closet was only meant for one person in it at a time.
If the lights were brighter, you would’ve seen how hard Neil rolled his eyes; they almost rolled out of his head. “Well, I don’t think so, given the lack of toilet, sink, and light, no.”
“Well, Neil,” you purred, hot breath curling around the sensitive skin of his neck, “maybe, just maybe, you should have a sign for the bathroom, so I don’t have my tits any closer to your face than I want them to.” You said this sweetly, voice husky, low, and oddly sultry, but Neil knew better than that: you probably wanted to fucking kill him right now.
You were right, though; your tits were flush Neil’s bandy chest, the heat between you two growing the longer you were this close in proximity.
“Now get me out of here,” you said quickly after, ignoring how warm Neil felt against your body. You’d turned so your back faced him, hands twisting at the silver knob of the door - which, Neil honestly didn’t know why was there, considering it didn’t fucking work.
Neil sighed. “The door locks from the outside.”
“What?” You said, distracted by leaning down to press your weight against the door like it was just sticky. Moments later, “…What?” you all but shrieked, hands falling from the knob, turning to face him once more.
And, again, if the lights were brighter you’d have seen Neil’s face better: he was bright fucking red, because, apparently not accounting for the small space of the room, you’d leaned and obliviously had your ass pressed right against him. It didn’t help that his large, warm hands, having long since dropped the tapes he was labeling, hung near the flesh of your rear, having nowhere else to go in the limited space.
Neil thanked the small mercy God graced upon him that there wasn’t any kind of friction, so his soft cock remained just that: soft, and barely noticed by you.
“The door locks from the outside.” Neil repeated breathlessly, the amount of air in the shoe-box room being incredibly small, too small to share between the two of you.
“Fucking…” You cursed under your breath, shaking your head in disbelief. “So, what, we have to stay here ‘till someone busts us out? What’re you gonna do if I go batshit and eat you or something?”
“For one, Lucien isn’t going to take that long to come back. Anyway, why’re you assuming you’ll overpower me - what if I go batshit and tear into you?”
You snorted, like the connotation he could overpower you was completely implausible. “Neil, Neil, Neil,” you repeated nonsensically, before lifting a hand up to his shoulder and digging your nails into him, the fabric of his shirt obviously not thick enough to distort your strength. “I could have you pinned down in less than a minute. I do other things than watch movies all day, unlike your lanky ass.”
Neil merely let out a chagrined laugh in response, hands clammy at the thought: you pinning him down— he then shook himself mentally, about to slap himself upside the head. Fucking hell, this situation was doing things to him.
“You don’t believe me?” You retorted with a raised brow. Swiftly, your hands curled around Neil’s wrists, pinning them behind him and pressing his back against you. “How about now, huh?” you whispered softly in his ear, making his head swim.
Your chin rested on his shoulder, your nose brushing against his neck, and it took everything in Neil not to let out a breathy keen — this was all too much for him: your touch, your voice, and the apparent dawning on him that he found you terribly, massively, attractive.
“Fuck, I, er - - um,” Neil scrambled for a response, when the door to the tape closet suddenly opened. Your hands released him immediately, and you strided out, breathing in deeply.
On the other side stood Lucien, plastic takeout bag in one hand, closet key in the other. “What happened to you?” he asked confusedly, as Neil filed out after you, gaze trained on your stretching figure walking off.
“We got, uh -- locked, in the- in the tape closet.” Neil murmured, thoughts still fuzzy from your rough touch.
“With her?” Lucien shuddered, handing Neil the chinese takeout bag sympathetically. “You need this food more than I do.”
So, there it was. Neil’s reason. He would’ve called you an insufferable bitch that he never wanted to see enter Gumshoe Video ever again hundreds of times by now — if your sensual voice insulting him didn’t get him all tight in the pants.
He began having thoughts — thoughts of you. You, whispering vulgar, humiliating words in his ear, your hands carding his hair, pulling tight against his scalp, selfishly making him do whatever you wanted him to do, no matter his pleas.
The fantasy was unlike anything Neil had dreamed up before, having always believed it should be him on top, him controlling the situation, him dominating — but it wasn’t a bad one. He’d come faster than he ever did before, just by imagining you were rolling your hips into his own… your strength pinning him down… your lips brushing past the shell of his ear, telling him he was so fucking dirty, so filthy for being this needy.
However, that was all just a vague, distant pipedream, especially with how you seem to actually hate him. All the interaction he’d had with you consisted of poisonous, irritated words, insults and curses — which had him feeling both incredibly turned on, and sick at the fact he was attracted to you just by being mean to him.
Sometime after that, nearing the end of the work day, Neil was the only one left there: Jonathan had taken the morning shift, and Lucien was, surprisingly, on a date with the cashier at their usual Chinese restaurant place. Looks like he succeeded in getting her number, while Neil had been pressed against you in that tiny tape closet, moments away from getting a hard-on.
So, Neil was the only one there - and you were the only customer there. Your daily routine of stopping by and verbally attacking him was late today, so it was nearing midnight when you and Neil sat on the couch and began arguing.
“I’m sure your “manly” ego isn’t at all pathetic and easily hurt by the superiority of Mia Farrow’s performance in Rosemary’s Baby.” You spat, leaning into the diverse array of old throw pillows that sat on the couch day after day.
Neil rolled his eyes, hands up in the air animatedly. “My manly ego - and I don’t enjoy the sarcasm nor the air quotes you’re using - isn’t pathetic, nor easily hurt! Mia Farrow just wasn’t better than John Cassavetes was. I stand by the fact they were equal.”
You let out a disbelieving laugh, your hand coming down on Neil’s knee to dig into him angrily. “Neil, I don’t expect you to understand her performance - I don’t think anyone does, not with that little cinephile brain you have. Do you do any thinking up there, or is it just The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on rewind?”
Neil flushed, both at the insults and how your hand was on his fucking leg. “What about you? What is it that makes you keep coming back here if you think my opinion is so… worthless and entitled?”
You grit your teeth, leaning in closer to him. “Because, Neil, this is the only other video tape shop for miles, and I will not be caught dead at Media Giant. Trust me, I despise this - “arrangement” of ours, far more than you do.”
He huffed, his gaze trailing over your features, unable to come up with a response: he was too busy focussing, trying not to zero in on how your face was inches away from one his, your fingers oddly inching up his thigh.
“Don’t go making this about me. Why is it,” your continued, hands traced dizzying circles into the fabric of his jeans, “that you don’t just kick me out? I come in here, day after day, berating you, ignoring your recommendations… shouldn’t I have been banned a long time ago?”
Neil gulped. “You’re still a - a customer, one who rents daily I might add—“
You smirked up at him. “Don’t lie to me. I know Gumshoe’s doing just fine… and I heard you, y’know? Last week… in your office.”
“What? What are you talking about?” He stammered out, racking his head for what he might’ve been doing in his office— fuck.
Fuck, he thought, mind racing rapidly, he thought you had already left by the time he started—
“I heard you, hiding in your office… stroking yourself, moaning my name.”
You’d rented just one tape last Friday, for a movie date with a guy from work, and you almost left - before realizing Neil took your membership card and never gave it back. You waltzed back in, and to your obvious surprise, Neil wasn’t at the register.
“Neil?” You called out softly, trying not to spark an argument with him that would span hours, because you were trying to show up to this date on time.
You walked down the back hallway, and found his office door, which had a gleaming NEIL LEWIS printed on its foggy glass.
Your hand had almost reached for the handle, his name on the tip of your tongue, when you heard a needy whine slip past the door. Shocked, you lingered and pulled your hand away, pressing your ear against the pane to listen closer.
“God, fuck,” you heard Neil curse, his name slipping from your lips like a prayer. “Need you so bad,” you heard him whisper to no-one but himself, before a low moan belted out of him.
Your face grew warm, immediately, flushed at the news that Neil-fuckin’-Lewis was jerking off, in his office, mumbling your name. You squeezed your eyes shut, continuing to listen to his pretty voice, and after several moments of your lust-riddled mind drinking in his sweet noises, how he was so focussed on his pleasure while completely oblivious to your listening in, you found one of your hands coming up to tweak your erect nipple — fuck, his stuttered little moans had your cunt pulsing with utter need.
Neil was getting close, you could tell, hearing him buck into - what you assumed - was his wooden desk, sloppily muffled mewls leaving his mouth.
You were biting down on your lip, hard, an incredible amount of self control in place. The man was so horny, sounding so fucking submissive it drove you insane: just the thought that he’d bend to your will and do whatever you wanted made your legs clench.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending who you ask, you felt your phone begin buzzing in the waistband of your modesty shorts - probably the date you were late for - and you had quickly fled.
“Oh, jesus,” Neil blurted out now, alarmed, immediately in the flight part of fight or flight. “I- whatever you heard, I can - I can explain, really, so please don’t—“
Your hand gripped his thigh, keeping him from getting up. “Hey, hey, shh,” you said, bringing a finger to your lips. “You don’t have to explain yourself. I know, just as well as you do, how bad you want me.”
Truly, Neil couldn’t control himself that night. You had walked in, wearing a delicious little dress with a sweetheart neckline, strolling around in 3-inch heels, cooing mockingly at his costume for that week’s theme — a criminal wearing nifty little handcuffs to promote the double feature promotion of crime films and dramas — purposely leaning down to make him feel smaller than you.
Neil had flushed, looking away, willing himself not to let out a needy groan at your get-up, instead silently checking out your tape rentals and quickly handing them back to you. After you’d walked out of the store, he’d dashed to his office, feeling the tent in his pants grow warm, aching.
Quite similarly to how he felt now, your eyes coursing over his entire form, so close Neil felt himself sinking into the couch.
“Look how fucking hard you are already.” you whispered, hand drawing away from his thigh and reaching for the bulge in his jeans, palming him between the fabric. “Does it turn you on? The fact you got caught?”
Neil’s breath hitched. “Fuck, please, I—“
“You’re so pathetic.” You said, laughing at him. “I can feel how big you are, such a thick cock, and all you know how to do with it is beg.”
Your plush lips were curled into a cheshire grin, baring your sharp teeth at him, and Neil was ashamed at how badly he wanted those teeth to press painful bites into his sensitive skin.
He was about to whine again, plead desperately, but he shut up when you slipped off the couch, sinking to your knees, fingers undoing his belt buckle and fly. Shifting his jeans down, you dipped your hand down the waistband of his boxers and pulled his cock out: it was angry, hard and begging for release.
But you wanted to tease him before you got to the good part. First, your warm breath fanned over his cock, making him jump, trying to rut up into your mouth, and your soft lips slipping past his leaking head had his hands tugging at your hair, trying to pull you closer to him.
You thinned your eyes and got up, hand pressing his cheeks together and forcing his jaw open. You spit into his mouth, then patronizingly patted his face, “Do that again and I won’t touch you - I’ll take my tapes and leave you a needy fucking mess on this couch.”
Neil groaned, your spit foreign and hot on his tongue like lava. “God, I… I just wanna — want you so bad.”
You tutted, sinking back down on your knees to face his rock hard length up and pressed flat against his abdomen. “Not yet. You haven’t earned it, you desperate fucking pervert. D’you know who jerks off in their office to someone they barely know? Fucking perverts.”
He leaned his head back, a moan leaving his lips at your insulting choice of words. It felt like you were torturing him, but his body wanted nothing more than you.
Your lips then ghosted past him for another moment before you started your assault on his strained cock: you laid tentative kitten licks all the way down his length, enjoying how he squirmed under you, wanting nothing more but your wet mouth around him. Then, without warning, you took him in your mouth whole, tongue dragging and curling around his cock. You devoured him salaciously, hollowing your cheeks, sliding his cock in and out of your full mouth at an alarming speed, hitting the back of your neck with each thrust.
Your tongue felt heavenly on his cock: wet, warm, and sticky, lapping at him without stopping. Your teeth grazed against him lightly, and Neil’s back arched into your touch.
He was practically convulsing now, drooling as his eyes rolled to the back of his head at the pure pleasure you were inflicting on him with no split second or moment for him to regain his composure. You wanted to see him fall apart, come undone just by your mouth, he realized, and he wanted to let you, wanted to let go — but, as fast as you’d taken his hard cock into your mouth, you let him drop from your lips.
“Why did you - please, fuck -- why did you stop?!” Neil whimpered noisily, head rolling onto his chest to look down at your face: lips plump, faint tear tracks running off your cheeks, your gagged spit falling from your chin.
“I oughta take you down a peg, Neil. Show you what a dumb fucking loser you are, pretending you’re so confident, so dominant, like you know everything there is about movies.” You responded nonchalantly, getting up and shedding your panties and leggings.
“M’not dumb,” he whined, looking at you through heavy lidded eyes, “god, you’re killing me here.”
“You’ll live,” you grinned, climbing on his lap and lining your wet sex with the fat head of his cock. Then you descended down on him, watching blissfully as his cock disappeared into your folds.
Neil’s hands wrapped around your waist, burying his face into your neck. He mewled against your skin, drunk on your tantalizing scent, lips wet with drool and leaving a slick trail.
Despite your dominance in this situation, completely controlling Neil’s pleasure, you couldn’t control your own: Neil’s cock felt fucking good, long and thick in all the right places, a curve that arched right against your cervix, veins rubbing against your walls pleasantly. He stretched your cunt completely, making you wince, but there was still pleasure there, the feeling of your crevices being filled with his fat cock making your toes curl.
After a moment of getting used to his cock, you rose back up, then sunk down, your hands gripping his shoulders for dear life. Neil’s head shot back, a labored cry leaving him as you set a steady, almost too slow pace, torturously sliding his cock in and out of your tight hole.
Your hands trailed across his still-clothed chest, and you grieved the chance lost to have stripped him, your touch teasing him every step of the way — but having him deep within you was probably better.
“Your- fuck, you’re so -- so soft,” Neil squeaked below you, revelling in how you took him, bottoming out each time like it was nothing.
You simpered at his words, how helpless he was, succumbing to the pleasure; to you. “Knew you were,” you slammed down on his cock, making Neil choke, “pretending to be arrogant. You just needed someone to put you in your place.”
Neil hadn’t realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question until your hand came up to his hair, tangling through his locks and tugging. “Who d’you belong to? Who put you in your place?” you murmured lowly.
He whimpered at your roughness, leaning into the sofa obediently. “You! You own me,” he pleaded, desperately chasing his own pleasure.
“That’s it,” you said, shutting your eyes, bobbing up and down on his cock faster. Your ass bounced above him, and Neil’s hands rested on the flesh of your rear, massaging you.
Greedily, Neil tried to thrust into you, but you weren’t having any of it, deterring his attempts by pushing him so he laid flat on the couch, your hands pinning his wrists above his head, the new position pushing him deeper into you.
“You stay down, you dirty fuckin’ loser,” you said caustically, but your actions said otherwise: your walls were squeezing around him needily, your cunt sucking him in so far you could feel his balls brushing against your clit.
The tip of his cock brushed past your g-spot each time you rutted into him, and soon enough you felt it: that pulsing, that heat, that familiar coiling within your insides. Neil was reaching it too, his face flushed pink and his breathing as heavy as it was back then, in the tape closet.
You began thumping down on him, your fingers tightening around his scalp. Your pace had gotten feverish, bordering feral, both your minds focussed on one thing: release. You could feel your cunt tensing, your mind going foggy, and then, there it was: your pleasure ran through you like electric current, shocking your body. You felt numb, tingly like when the blood flow to your arm gets cut off for a moment, making your pace stutter.
You didn’t stop, however, riding out your high on his cock, bouncing up and down on Neil’s thick length. He felt fucking delicious, piercing you in all the right ways, and you adored how malleable he was right now: so horny and submissive he stopped speaking and was merely letting dirty moans leave his mouth without any protest. His gaze, his focus, was elsewhere, lost in the deep haze of pleasure your cunt was subjecting him too.
You leaned down, pressing small love-bites onto his skin like he’d fantasized so many times before, and it broke him out of his stupor. “Did you think of this, in your office?” you whispered, “did you think of me, my tits bouncing, your cock deep in my cunt?”
“Ugh,” Neil groaned, reveling in how your seductive voice sounded like music. He was much, much closer than he thought, and when you licked up his jaw, your hot breath on the shell of his ear making him sweat, your cunt still fucking him roughly, he let go.
You felt it first, the familiar liquid bursting past his thick head and painting your fleshy walls creamy, like a new coat of alabaster that Gumshoe desperately needed.
“So good, so wet,” Neil groaned, shutting his eyes and pressing his forehead to yours. You stared at him, watching his lewd expression throughout his entire high, waiting for that beautiful blue gaze of his to open and face you again.
“I’m milking you dry. Look how fucking full you’ve made me, you filthy pervert.” You were taking him for every drop he could offer, and it was delectable.
You two were heaving now, both coming down from your highs. You’d effectively ruined the couch, your slick soaking the cushions and his jeans, as well as his come, which was leaning out of your still-stuffed hole.
“I think you’ve gotta replace this manky ass couch, Neil,” was the first thing you said, your hands sliding down from their grip in his hair to his pink cheeks, rubbing his skin delicately.
His eyes opened, watching you carefully. “It was about time,” Neil shrugged breathlessly. “Do you… do you actually - hate me?” he continued, murmuring self-consciously.
You laughed, but it wasn’t sharp, not at him like before, no; it was tender, like a scarf Neil wanted to wrap around him in the winter time.
“I never hated you,” you murmured, tone reverent, “you’re just a little, how does it go��”
“Presumptuous?” Neil finished for you.
You nodded, then grasped at his shirt and pulled him from the couch so he was sitting upright again. “Jus’ wanted to, ahem, “take you down a peg” like I said earlier..” you trailed off, cheeks growing warm remembering your earlier behavior during sex.
This was all very new, to the both of you — you, in all your relationships and flings, were not the dominant partner. You guessed there was a first time for everything.
Then, you were about to get off his lap, but Neil held you steady on his cock. “Don’t go,” he said simply. “I’ve got Brief Encounter in the player, if you want to, y’know…”
He wasn’t hard anymore, but it just felt good, cozy, having you two talk and regain your composure with him filling you nicely. It felt right.
You smiled, a gummy, blissful smile. “Okay. I’ve actually never seen this,” you said, turning to face the tv, wincing slightly.
“Really?” Neil said, an amazed joy seeping into his voice.
“I’m joking,” you snorted, and you could practically see Neil pouting behind you. “But I don’t think we’ll be paying much attention…” you purred, clenching your thighs around his length.
“Jesus fuck,” Neil groaned behind you, hands coming under your shirt, “you’re exactly like those movies.”
“I’m even better, baby.”
#cillian murphy x reader#cillian murphy#cillian murphy smut#neil lewis x reader#watching the detectives#neil lewis smut#sub!neil lewis x reader
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friday update!
we are reaching the end of my vacation week which is both good (I miss my routine and my own apartment) and sad (I have to go back to work and no longer have all day just to write)
reading:
(finished) The Great Transition - Nick Fuller Goggins : Not quite as good as Station Eleven but...surprisingly decent for a book doing stuff I normally find annoying.
(in-progress) Kill Show: A True Crime Novel - Daniel Sweren-Becker : Look I LOVE trying to recreate found footage in literature. House of Leaves, S...I'm not sure this one is doing it for me. I wish there was something more than just the interview transcripts, which he has room for. Like at one point there have been quotes from a journalist and a professor, instead of doing the same interview block quote, he could have put in excerpts from articles/dissertations, we could have had more narration and description that way. It's just a little flat with it all being the same and also I'm not sure he has enough distinct character voices to justify it all exclusively being interview quotes. I feel like you need really good, unique character voices to exclusively do transcript quotes. And there are other issues I feel like he didn't think through, like I still don't really know how old the brother is supposed to be in relation to the main missing girl because it's not in the character intro and no one's mentioned it. But I'm not super far in, I'm going to stick with it to see if it gets better.
(in-progress) Jaw Bone - Monica Ojeda: Also only a little ways in, intriguing though, I like this one much better than Kill Show so far.
Lord of the Rings reread: I did fall a little bit behind by a couple chapters this week, but! We're onto the last book of Return of the King.
(phone book) Into the Dark - Claudia Gray: haven't had to read on my phone much this week since I've been on vacation, but the High Republic reread continues!
watching (tv):
*vibrates* Yellowjackets (Paramount+/Showtime): oh my GOD I have been wanting to watch this for years and I finally did, binged all two seasons this week. (Minus two episodes I have left to watch, so no season finale spoilers yet!) Yellowjackets. What is there to say? It's great, you all knew it was great, I was late to this party. There's like a venn diagram you could make between this show, NBC's Hannibal, and Black Spot/Zone Blanche but I can't articulate it yet. It's just got everything to appeal to me specifically: spooky forest settings, plane crashes, cannibalism, antler gods, murder, not one but two cults. It's great, extremely on brand for me, Shauna is my poor little meow meow, Melanie Lynskey should play more cannibals, murderers and warlords, she does it so well.
watching (film):
Pearl / X (2022) (double feature): Is it an unpopular opinion that I like X better? I'm also a bit late to this party but I feel like I remember people being like 'oh X is fine but Pearl is so good!' (Confirmed by looking at their comparative Letterboxd scores.) I just think X had a more interesting time period setting, better ensemble cast, better cinematography...which I think make sense given my understanding was X was the film they were originally making, and then they added on Pearl as an origin story project while they were working on X. It felt like more thought was put into X. Also, the 'Don't Fear the Reaper' scene was great. It seems like most of the reviews just comment on Mia Goth's performance as a highlight but like...it's just a lot of yelling and then a very long monologue and then the end credits. Idk, I think X just worked better as a whole, with the ensemble cast.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2023): This movie was so funny, probably my favorite ending/explanation to a 'wow everyone went from no murder to yes murder really fast' film I've ever seen. I also just love Lee Pace. Lee Pace sabre-ing a bottle of champagne. That is all.
there is no video game update because I have no mobile video game consoles so they are all at my apartment and I am not there, and since I had to leave early Friday instead of my original plan (Sunday) I didn't get to do anything before I left
craft update: slow sweater progress, so close to linking up the armholes and no longer having to purl, so close...
writing to-do list update:
I didn't end up working a ton on oneshots or 'omens' because...
I did it! I got up through chapter 6 on the longfic tentatively titled 'the station'. that's about the halfway point in chapter count, and I've been doing a pretty good job keeping the lengths even and hovering around 5k so far. It's 33k words now so I expect the final word count to be around 65-70k? Thereabouts? Which will be my longest Star Wars fic by quite a lot, even counting adding up the two pieces of the dark ocean duology. But since I'm only at the halfway point, maybe I shouldn't get ahead of myself. It's so much. I love it. I'm terrified it's secretly bad. But it's probably fine haha, I'm actually feeling pretty good about the plot I'm using to string together a bunch of self-indulgent angst, which really, what is fanfiction if not finding a suitable plot to tie together self-indulgent scenes, angst or otherwise?
list for the upcoming week:
I still have to extract my dogsitting fee aka do all of my laundry
got a couple social events over the weekend
pack up and head back to the city sunday
I'm considering doing a probably ill-advised chaos rearranging of my room when I get home unless reason and logic kicks back in and stops me
go back to work (boo)
also clean whole apartment throughout the week because I have eclipse guests
eep somehow acquire eclipse glasses yikes I put this one off
keep chipping away chapter-by-chapter on this fic. I'm just getting to the action, which is both fun because a bunch of things are coming to a head and terrible because oh god writing action scenes is so hard
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MUTANT MAYHEM Stuff
I finally saw this big deal of an animated movie... As always, review is on Letterboxd.
Yes, I've heard that they got a sequel lined up already. Though with the writers and actors strike going on, I don't expect work to begin on it any time soon. This means, to me, that it'll be here in 2026 at the earliest, should these dingus CEOs keep it up in being dinguses. But all I know is, I'm ready for more!
It seems like Paramount Animation, after so many years of false starts, might have something going. Yes, it may be with a recognizable superhero-action comic book-based IP that's been adapted into movies **multiple** times... And I mean MULTIPLE... You have the early 1990s live-action movies, you have the 2007 animated movie (remember that?), you have the two Michael Bay-produced movies where the turtles look like tanks, and now this movie. In addition to what seems like a gazillion TV show adaptations going all the way back to the classic late '80s Saturday morning series.
So far, the $70m-costing movie has made about $100m worldwide. It admittedly hasn't had the greatest start. It even opened below MEG 2, which goes to show where the moviegoing public's priorities are at the moment, post-Barbenheimer. But I see a leggy run for this, similar to that of the first SPIDER-VERSE, which only opened with a fairly meager $35m. I guess most of the public made the 2014 TMNT movie open so big because live-action just a lot of audiences them a way in to such an outlandish concept. I remember some "Why is there a cartoon Spider-Man now?" reactions to SPIDER-VERSE Uno when that was coming out in 2018, especially after three big live-action iterations that came out back-to-back. It makes me curious to see how TRANSFORMERS: ONE opens next summer, if it does come out next summer that is.
Paramount Animation, if that's even a thing anymore (for that logo or name does not show up in the opening logo rollout), has a weird future ahead that seems very IP-reliant. They recently demoted UNDER THE BOARDWALK to a Paramount+ release, and it seems like book adaptation THE TIGER'S APPRENTICE is still on for a January release despite no trailers or images or any kind of promo being out there at the moment. Or for a while even, before the strike. Following that are things that have been done as big movies before: Transformers, The Smurfs, PAW Patrol, etc. We have plenty of 2D AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER movies on the horizon, too, which is great! But at the same time, coupled with Paramount CEO Tim Robbins' recent comments on making original animation for theaters, this studio's slate is just... Franchises. Now, if these future entries do what MUTANT MAYHEM did, that's cool and all... But at the same time, new stories are always welcome, because when some franchises run out of juice... You'll need something new to start another one? I don't get Hollywood.
But yeah, this is looking to be Paramount Animation's first theatrical score in a while, after a slew of movies like SHERLOCK GNOMES and WONDER PARK and PAWS OF FURY: THE LEGEND OF HANK.
The other day, I watched sections of RANGO... One of my all-time favorites! Gore Verbinski's film through and through, weird as fuck throughout, it was released by Paramount all the way back in 2011, and despite not making back its budget theatrically, Paramount leadership were so impressed with the movie - and also upset that DreamWorks wasn't going to renew their distribution deal with them - that they founded Paramount Animation in 2012. Like, RANGO's the reason that all took off! And yet, I don't see Paramount greenlighting something like that today. Or most studios, for that matter. How did it even get greenlit in the mid-2000s is my question?? I feel like we're lucky to even have it. And that the thing managed to make over $100m domestically alone.
Anyways, I see MUTANT MAYHEM doing quite well for itself. They already have sequels and TV show lined up, so we shall what that entails. In the mean time, it's cool that we even got such a dynamic and neat new take on this property, in animated movie form. Another win for mainstream feature animation. And for interesting big budget studio cinema in general, really. Much like SPIDER-VERSE, BARBIE, GUARDIANS VOL. 3, and a few others, it shows that filmmaker-driven unique takes on classic properties are much more desirable than workmanlike network TV-lookin' franchise movies.
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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.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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!
#movies#film#letterboxd#movie ranking#CC OC#Platform#Jia Zhangke#alphaville#jean luc godard#Metropolis#Fritz Lang#le bonheur#agnes varda#Mississippi Masala#mira nair#The Quiet Girl#an cailín ciúin#colm bairéad#Sunshine#Danny Boyle#No#Pablo Larraín#La Ciénaga#Lucrecia Martel#Perfect Blue#Satoshi Kon#blank check with griffin and david
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In me, were lives I was never meant to live: Thoughts on Celine Song's Past Lives.
Past Lives (2023) is that cathartic movie.
I've been quite emotionally (and physically) dysfunctional these past few weeks that I could only stomach movies that I have already seen multiple times. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), Interstellar (2014), and now, Past Lives.
I first watched Past Lives on 23 August this year, nine days after I turned 28. I remember immediately writing a Letterboxd review of the movie while crying. I called it a multiverse movie. It felt like it. "It's a powerful story about past lives, longing, and so many unnoticed in-yuns we experience in life," I wrote. Only this time, after re-watching it 4 months later, it felt like home.
In a way, I saw myself in Na Young (she now goes by the name Nora, an Americanized version of her Korean name). To borrow words from the movie, Na Young crossed the Pacific Ocean to be in a foreign land and it cost her something.
"Some crossings cost more than others. Some crossings, you pay for with your whole life."
At 28, I know I have sacrificed too many things in my life just to survive. I was a different person then, and when I look at my life, and where I came from, I see the things I have lost in trying to be here. In my poverty-stricken youth, I was a dreamer. They're a stranger now but I know I was that kid. I have been through the worst kinds of shit. And now, there's me me.
I am a 28-year-old nobody who sacrificed their youth and naïveté to become an early-career researcher who lost everything. I would give anything to meet who I was back then again. I know I would.
Similarly, I also found myself in Hae Sung. When he said, "But the truth I learned here is, you had to leave because you're you. And the reason I liked you is because you're you. And who you are is someone who leaves," I felt that.
I am Hae Sung.
I would very much like to explain why I feel this way in this post, but I don't think I can. I don't think I have the words. All I can say is, yes, I would do what he did, and I would go to New York even though Na Young is with someone else, and yes I would love the man she now loves.
In the movie, Nora grieved her old self, Na Young, when Hae Sung finally left. I know she didn't cry because she loved Hae Sung (she didn't, at least, not in that way); she cried because Hae Sung reminded her of her old self—the twelve-year-old girl she left behind with him in Korea.
This is their past lives.
And here's a poem I wrote months ago.
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Heart Beat.
Minari’s film composer Emile Mosseri (also responsible for the Kajillionaire and The Last Black Man in San Francisco scores) tells Ella Kemp about his A24 favorites, Nicholas Britell’s friendship and the boldest Paul McCartney needle drop in movie history.
What do you think a broken heart sounds like? How about a warm, beating one? It’s something that Emile Mosseri has been thinking about for a while now. The past two years have seen him complete a hat-trick of beguiling, transporting scores for Plan B movies: Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’ The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire and now, the film voted the best of 2020 by our community, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari.
What binds these scores together is a delicacy that knows when to break free and turn into something altogether spectacular. But on Minari in particular, Mosseri is in full bloom, working for the first time in a way he’d always dreamed about. While The Last Black Man in San Francisco saw him compose to a loose edit, and on Kajillionaire he worked to a locked cut, Chung gave him the freedom to write music directly to Minari’s script. “It was a dream to work this way on Minari,” Mosseri says. “It was so beautifully written and so visceral.”
‘Minari’ composer Emile Mosseri.
Minari is an intimate portrait of a Korean family making their way in rural America, and the composer was interested in “trying to figure out musically how you can feel connected to your deepest childhood memories”. These memories belong, in the film, to David—a tiny king played by eight-year-old Alan Kim—as he comes to terms with his new life on a small farm in Arkansas, as his family strives for their own version of the American Dream.
The Yi family is made up of David and his sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho), their parents Monica (Han Ye-ri) and Jacob (Steven Yeun) and their grandmother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung). It’s a personal story for Chung, one that Mosseri felt honored to be a part of. “It’s a very intimate story with these five characters, which takes place mostly in this small mobile home—but emotionally, it’s very epic.”
There was something about Chung that had caught Mosseri’s attention early on. “I had met him at the LA premiere of Last Black Man,” Mosseri says, “and I sent him the Kajillionaire score.” Mosseri was already familiar with the filmmaker’s work: “His first film, Munyurangabo, is incredible.” He calls Chung “very open, but also sly” in terms of hitting the right notes and “gently steering the ship”. The partnership between composer and director was about working on “a more emotional level,” Mosseri says. “There was never any talk about what we wanted stylistically.”
The ‘Minari’ ensemble cast.
The result is a film graced with music at once lush and raw, grandiose and vulnerable. Mosseri is keenly aware of these nuances, and always made sure to walk the tonal tightrope in the writing process. “There aren’t sad cues and hopeful cues,” he explains. “Every cue has both feelings. Each musical moment dips in and out of the hopefulness and joy of a family, and then the pain and frustration and dissonance that they hold.”
The way Mosseri’s music swells and flows often feels intangible, magical, even—which comes more from knowing what to avoid, rather than acting with too much forced intention. On his first film, Mosseri brought brass and strings to the streets of San Francisco, and with Miranda July, he worked old Hollywood glamor into the concrete blocks of Los Angeles. Here, we twirl through the tall grass as gentle acoustic guitars and elegant string sections sigh and sway, while the Yi family work through their growing pains.
“We didn’t want to hear Korean music when you see Korean characters, and we didn’t want twangy music when you see an American farm,” Mosseri explains. “We wanted to come at it from the side somehow, in some way that’s unexpected.” ‘Rain’, his collaboration with Minari star Han Ye-ri, which features on the official soundtrack, encapsulates this juxtaposition. It’s an epic lullaby of sorts; Han sings in Korean to a gentle guitar; a pleasing swell of synths climbs alongside her voice. The effect on the listener is as if liquid love is trickling from every vein. “I wanted this score to feel like it had a warm, beating heart.”
youtube
Two of your three feature films to date have been released by A24, and so we must ask: what are your favorite A24 film scores?
Emile Mosseri: Three come to mind. First of all, Anna Meredith’s score for Eighth Grade. It’s so adventurous and unexpected and fresh and just brilliant. It’s so pure and out-there. It also does this impossible thing of being hip and exciting and deep, but also hilarious. The pool-party scene fucking kills me.
Then there’s Under the Skin by Mica Levi. I remember seeing that at the Nighthawk theater in Brooklyn and feeling like it was the best score I’d heard in as long as I could remember.
And then of course, Moonlight. That film got under my skin in a way I didn’t see coming. I saw it by myself in a theater, after hearing all the hype for months and months. When a movie has that much hype you can get a bit cynical and it can distract you, so I went in a bit guarded, but I left the film destroyed. For weeks and weeks it resonated with me in a way that was so profound, and a large part of that is due to Nick [Britell]’s music. And the film is just perfection.
Scarlett Johansson in ‘Under the Skin’ (2013), scored by Mica Levi.
You’ve been described as Nicholas Britell’s protégé more than once…
It’s funny, I think that came from me being a fan of his and saying nice things about his music. I met him at Sundance two years ago when Last Black Man was premiering. I went with my wife and my brother and I was so excited, I’d been waiting for this moment for so long. We walked in and Nick and Barry [Jenkins] were walking in behind [us]. And there was also Boots Riley, Kamasi Washington… all these people I looked up to. I hadn’t considered that I would see this film in the room with them, and it was the first time I was hearing the final mix and just agonizing.
Nick was incredibly generous and said great things about the score and was super encouraging, and he became a friend and mentor. But I’ve never studied with him or worked with him. Although, if you’re a fan of somebody’s work, you’re a student of any of these composers that you admire. Anything you watch and listen to, you absorb.
What was the first film that made you want to be a composer?
It was Edward Scissorhands. Danny Elfman’s score was the first one that made me realize that this was a job. I’m always attracted to big, romantic melodies, and over-the-top sweeping stuff—but done tastefully. In that score, he sets the high-water mark for me. It’s so unapologetically romantic.
And then there are other obvious ones like The Godfather. It’s maybe a dorky choice because it’s the most famous movie ever, but it really is the best. And that got me into Nino Rota, and from there I found [Federico] Fellini and all these movies through Nino, the composer. And then I got really into the score for La Dolce Vita and more movies that he’d written for, which are so beautiful.
The ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990) score was an early inspiration for Mosseri.
Which films, new to you, blew you away in 2020?
Take Shelter by Jeff Nichols blew me away. It unfolded in a way that was intoxicating and really exciting, and it just really stuck with me.
What’s been your favorite needle drop on screen this year?
Aside from Devonté Hynes’ score being stunning, there’s an amazing piece of music placed in an episode of Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are. They use a Paul McCartney song called ‘Let Em In’, and they dropped it in this incredibly tasteful but unexpected way, in a really dark, emotionally loaded scene. It worked in such a beautiful and graceful way. It’s because it’s the most cheery McCartney, it’s full-blown upbeat and poppy McCartney. And this is the darkest-of-the-dark human pain, and it lands in this way that is such a bold choice, such a powerful move.
What should people listen to after watching Minari?
One record I’ve been listening to a lot recently is Jeff Tweedy’s Love is the King. It could be a good companion to Minari. I’m a huge fan of his and it’s a gorgeous record. It’s very stripped-down and emotionally raw, and it’s both hopeful and heartbreaking.
Which filmmakers would you love to work with next?
I’m always afraid to answer this question because there are so many filmmakers I admire. There are filmmakers I grew up with loving their films—working with Miranda was that for me. Spike Jonze or Yorgos Lanthimos are directors in her world that I also love and would love to work with. But there’s so many others. Derek Cianfrance is amazing and he works with different composers. I love his choice of collaborators musically. I love that he used the late great Harold Budd to do his shows [including I Know This Much is True], and then Mike Patton, and Grizzly Bear… the music is always incredible in his projects, but he doesn’t have a go-to person. His films are so heartbreaking and powerful and really, really raw. He’s fearless.
I feel very lucky that I’ve worked on these three films which are all very much like somebody’s ripping their heart out and putting it on the screen. I feel like Derek Cianfrance does that in his films too, in this unapologetic, super-vulnerable way of just ripping his soul out and putting it out for everyone to see. It’s incredibly appealing to find those projects, because they’re really rare.
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Follow Ella on Letterboxd
‘Minari’ is available everywhere in the US that movies can be rented, and screening in select theaters in the US and other regions. Listen to the official soundtrack and more of Mosseri’s film compositions in the official Spotify playlist via Milan Records. ‘Kajillionaire’ is available on VOD now.
#minari#letterboxd year in review#kajillionaire#the last black man in san francisco#emile mosseri#miranda july#lee isaac chung#a24#a25 films#film composer#film soundtrack#film score#derek cianfrance#nicholas britell#nino rota#letterboxd
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Monthly Movies #3: August 2019
Ít’s that time of the month again! Time to look back on all of the movies/specials I watched in August!
Missing Link (2019): By the Ancients, this movie came out in 2019? It feels like years ago to me somehow. Maybe it’s because of weird sudden influx of Sasquatch/Yeti movies recently. I don’t know. Anyways, this movie was kinda okay? I enjoyed it fine. The animation was breathtaking obviously and Susan was a nice character. The main character is a bit of a problem for me because he’s such an unlikable and selfish jerk throughout a lot of the movie that his redemption kind of feels too late. There’s also some possible transphobic subtext in this movie I’ve noticed (and seen others notice, too) with how everyone keeps “deadnaming” Susan.
Coco (2017): What even can I say about this film that hasn’t already been said? It’s gorgeous, has amazing characters, a true heart to it, memorable songs, a twist villain that actually kind of works, wonderful world-building for the Land of the Dead... I just love this movie and it’s up there with some of my favorites of Pixar.
The Lion Guard: The Rise of Scar (2017): I remember so little of this. Like, I really like this show, but I just for the life of me cannot recall what happened in this special of The Lion Guard. I know Scar returns but, really, that’s it? I didn’t enjoy this special too much, that’s what I do recall, since I only gave it two out of five stars.
Savva: Heart of the Warrior/Hero Quest/A Warrior’s Tail (2015): Yes, this movie really has three titles. It’s a chaotic mess of a film, mostly in tone and character designs. I felt like it did have a good idea somewhere deep down inside this. The world and world-building isn’t too horrible and could actually be interesting with more fine-tuning and some rewrites. The character designs were also promising, and some of them were definitely good (the wolves, the Rickies, Savva, the dragon). Even the main message wasn’t too horrible. But the rest... not so much. The main villain, a three-headed ape, is simply comic relief and not really a threat. The comic relief was just over the top and all over the place in this film. It’s just a tone-deaf mess. Don’t even bother watching it for the wolf designs like I did.
The Croods (2013): I remember really hating this movie when I first saw it, but, honestly, I don’t get it anymore. Sure, Dreamworks has done the “overprotective father figure against another character that brings all sorts of new ideas with them”-trope before with Over the Hedge, but it felt new enough. The world this family of cavemen live in is nicely colorful and has tons of interesting animals. The characters weren’t anything new, but the rest held up well enough. The animation is good, though I never liked the human character designs in this movie much.
Hoodwinked! (2005): I’m saying what a lot of people have already said. The animation is utter shit, but the humor is so absurd it’s actually kind of hilarious. I laughed out loud quite a bit at this movie. So ultimately I do recommend it, if you can stomach the shitty visuals.
Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling (2019): I have like no memory whatsoever of the original show, but this special had a trans arc in it so I obviously needed to see it. I support Rachel Bighead so much. You go, girl. As for the special itself, it was pretty funny and had a good message. Nice animation that looks similar to the screenshots and clips I did see of the original.
Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus (2019): Come on, I had to watch this. It’s got Richard Horvitz in the role of an over the top small villain. As a Kaos fan I cannot pass up the opportunity. Now, for this thing, I also had no idea what the original show was about. I watched it when I was little, unlike Rocko, but never truly liked it or got it (probably was too young). The animation in this one was nice and I liked the voice acting, but the rest just became one big blur for me. It was really hard to keep my attention on this one.
Alpha and Omega: Dino Digs (2016): I present to you, the after-one worst movie I’ve seen all year until now. Funnily enough, the actual worst movie I’ve seen is also an Alpha and Omega sequel, except it’s the fifth. The only reason this one isn’t below Family Vacation is that FV was so unforgivably lazy with everything. It’s just a clip show with some new tidbits of animation added in between. As for Dino Digs, it’s every bit as nonsensical and bizarre as you expect, but not in the good way. The writing is lazy as shit, things just go unexplained forever, the animation horrible, the villains complete jokes and there’s... bird dance numbers. Enough said.
Dark Shadows (2012): It had some fun moments in it. That’s all I can say. The rest is just a blur of a memory by now. It has some vampires and werewolves in it, so that’s nice.
Speckles: The Tarbosaurus (2012): This movie/documentary focuses on a Tarbosaurus named Speckles and his struggles in life. I’ve been recommended this movie several times and, yeah, it was all right. Informative (though I don’t know if the information is still accurate) while also telling a story. Honestly, this movie is pretty depressing considering the amount of death in it. My main point that’s holding it back is the voice acting. The voices just sounded too forced and the acting wasn’t too great.
The Lion King (2019): Yes bitches I watched it in cinemas twice. I love this movie, I love the hyenas, I really like the visuals and music. The rest I’ve already said in my July Movie Thoughts when I first saw it.
The Angry Birds Movie (2016): It’s just really, really boring. A nice colorful world, but the rest is just such a drag to get through. Props for the animation, but not much else. I will give them credit for at least succeeding to make a movie out of something as small as a mobile game.
The Last Unicorn (1982): This movie is just really pretty to look at. It feels like an old painting come to life. I didn’t find myself caring particularly much about any of the characters, but the animation and visuals were definitely what gives it major points in my book. Just look at this one if you want a nice hand-drawn fantasy movie.
Beauty and the Beast (1991): This is a very good Disney movie. Belle and the Beast are wonderful characters, the animation is nothing short of spectacular, the colors beautiful, the villain genuinely threatening and enjoyable to watch... It’s just one of the better Disney movies if you ask me. It does still have some iffy stuff in it with how the Beast treats Belle at first and I’m actually not a fan of the songs in this one, particularly Be Our Guest. But other than that, this is a definite fave.
The Jungle Book (2016): I re-watched this one to see whether I prefer this one or The Lion King remake, since I both love them very much. I’ve ultimately come to the conclusion that I still like this one better, but The Lion King 2019 is a close second for sure. Beautiful animation on the animals and a remake that actually differs in the right ways from the source material and surpasses it by far.
Leafie: A Hen into the Wild (2011): A gorgeous movie that should get more recognition. A wonderful mother-son story that will tug on your heartstrings (especially the uncut ending). Perfect backgrounds and amazing animation. My only gripes with it are the completely useless subplot with the rooster and some of the gross-out.
Kayla: A Cry in the Wilderness (1997): Just a nice “kid befriends husky and ends up doing a sled dog race”-movie. I’m pretty sure that’s a genre by now? The simple story of a boy coming to terms with his father’s death and befriending a feral husky named Kayla in the process. Nothing really stood out about it.
Two Brothers (2004): A cute idea for a movie idea about tigers, but I really think they should’ve used less actual animals in it and more animatronics/CGI/greenscreening. It might not have looked as spectacular, but with the real tigers they did use I pick up on a lot of scenes that made me and, looking at the animals’ body language, the animals too, uncomfortable.
My Little Pony: The End of Flutter Valley (1986): This just should’ve been a special of the series instead of ten awkwardly cut episodes that form one movie/special. The way they paced it, especially with this being ten episodes, was just really awkward. This might work for shorter specials (two/three-parters), but not a flat out movie. The animation is average, the villains jokes (seriously, who thought it was a good idea to bring back the annoying as fuck witches from the original?) and the voice acting really grating.
The Lion Guard: Battle of the Pridelands (2019): Nearly forgot to put this one on the list because it doesn’t have a Letterboxd entry yet. But it definitely counts. I really enjoyed this special episode of The Lion Guard, actually. It may not be the strongest series out there, but season 3 definitely was much better than the rest. This special has a lot of what I wanted to see: nice songs, the cast aging up, more explanation as to what exactly Scar and his “mark of evil” are and Janja’s redemption arc. It still has some flaws. When Scar first said “Sisi Ni Sawa” in his threatening speech, it actually felt genuinely fear-inducing. But then he started to sing the rest of the song as he went on and it just became cringe-worthy. Also, as much as I love his character, Janja was too easily forgiven and redeemed. He literally attempted to murder two cubs in season 2. You can’t just suddenly come back from being an attempted child murderer and get forgiven just like that.
Frozen (2013): I don’t get the hate nor love for this movie. It’s nice. That’s it. Good animation and songs, but I don’t connect much to any of the characters. Also, hey, guess what? A twist villain that doesn’t work.
The Lego Ninjago Movie (2017): These Lego movies are just so damn good for whatever reason? While the animation is a bit different in this one (not everything, including elements like water, smoke and fire, is made out of existent Lego pieces anymore), it’s still really good. We also get some breathtakingly realistic cat animation on Meowthra. Lloyd’s arc also felt really heartfelt, and the villain was quite enjoyable.
Equestria Girls: Sunset’s Backstage Pass (2019): Eh, still not a fan of these Equestria Girls specials, sorry. While I thought this one was a tad better than the last few we got, I still do not care much about them. Pinkie was quite obnoxious in this one, which just irked the heck out of me.
Another month full of movies! See ya’ll in October!
#equestria girls#my little pony#my little pony friendship is magic#sunset's backstage pass#lego ninjago movie#frozen#battle of the pridelands#the lion guard#the rise of scar#the end of flutter valley#kayla: a cry in the wilderness#two brothers#leafie: a hen into the wild#the jungle book#2016#the lion king#2019#beauty and the beast#the last unicorn#the angry birds movie#speckles the tarbosaurus#dark shadows#alpha and omega dino digs#hoodwinked!#the croods#rocko's modern life: static cling#savva#hero quest#heart of the warrior#a warrior's tail
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The Five Best Songs in Movie Scenes, According to a High School Senior
Written by Jennifer Moglia. Graphic by Laura Cross.
As a girl who was born in the 2000s, lived out my childhood in the 2010s, and turned 18 years old in the year 2021, all forms of media have played a huge role in my experiences growing up. From movies and TV shows to all different types of music to YouTube videos and social media creators, I’ve spent a large portion of my life watching other people do things, whether it was acting, singing, playing an instrument, or even just reviewing makeup products on Vine or TikTok.
However, one of these mediums has stood out from the rest; movies (or as the nerd in me would like to call them, “films”). As a freshman in high school, I decided to try to start watching more movies when I realized that my favorites consisted solely of Disney cartoons and the occasional cheesy rom-com.
Over the years, I’ve practically exhausted Netflix and Hulu’s libraries, bought a ridiculous amount of DVDs, and my Letterboxd diary has just reached 200 films (shameless self-promo, you can follow me there @happilyjennifer). When watching movies, especially ones that I’ve never seen before, I always try to pay attention to the music used in each scene - not the instrumental score, but the specific songs used to highlight pivotal moments.
The right track can make a sad scene heart-wrenching or a happy scene exhilarating, a romantic scene fairy tale-worthy or a death scene absolutely traumatic; a particular song can elevate a key scene in a film, making it that much more impactful. So, without further ado, here are my five favorite uses of songs in movie scenes, from films I’ve seen throughout my 18 years.
Honorable Mention: Heroes by David Bowie in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
Some might be shocked at this scene’s placement in the “honorable mention” section due to how revered it is, but that’s almost why it lands there. This film and book have both been overhyped to death as a coming-of-age staple for as long as I can remember, and for that reason, I was underwhelmed when I first read and watched it.
However, I don’t think it should suffer because of its reputation, which is why I simply couldn’t pick a numbered spot for it. Standing alone as a scene, without any of the praise, this song and movie combination is absolutely breathtaking.
The visual of Emma Watson’s character Sam standing up in the car with Patrick and Charlie, her arms outstretched as the trio zooms through the tunnel to the city, is a visceral experience. Charlie proclaiming that he feels “infinite” is the cherry on top - he finally feels free, free from any past trauma or current stresses or general pressures of being a teenager.
It’s a beautiful moment, and it’s made iconic by the addition of Bowie’s hit song. The pairing of Heroes with “Perks”’ instantly recognizable “tunnel scene” is unforgettable.
5. God Only Knows by The Beach Boys in “Love Actually”
As a member of “Gen Z”, you won’t be surprised to hear that my attention span is not the best. That’s why, at times, “Love Actually” dragged a bit for me - I felt that the two-hour and 15-minute runtime was just a little much, especially with so many different stories to keep up with.
Despite all of that, though, I think that the ending practically saves this movie. The words “one month later” flash across the screen, and we are brought to Heathrow Airport, the place that David, played by Hugh Grant, spoke of at the beginning of the film.
We’re reminded of his opening sentiment, that whenever he’s feeling down, he thinks back to watching families reuniting at the gates in this airport, and he instantly feels better. It’s a perfect opening to a film about love, and calling back to it makes for a perfect ending.
The viewers see each of the film’s stories wrapped up neatly with a bow, particularly helpful for people like me who practically forgot about some of the characters by the time the two-hour mark was reached. What really makes this scene one of my favorites, though, is the very end of it.
As the lyrics “God only knows what I’d be without you” repeat and start to fade out, we are taken away from our characters and the screen now shows real families reuniting in Heathrow Airport, not actors. The clips form a collage and then, ultimately, a heart, before it all fades to black. True human connection can warm even the coldest of hearts, and this classic love song by The Beach Boys is the perfect soundtrack to these heartfelt moments.
4. Fooled Around and Fell in Love by Elvin Bishop in “Guardians of the Galaxy”
Throughout my middle school and early high school years, I knew more about Marvel movies than I did about my family or the material I was learning in school. I saw “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in theaters five times, skipped my first spring formal dance to see “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” in 3D on opening night, and even had a personalized Iron Man sweatshirt that I wore nearly every day.
The Marvel franchise that utilizes music, or at least recognizable music, the most is definitely the “Guardians of the Galaxy” series. Chris Pratt’s character Peter “Star Lord” Quill’s mother made mixtapes for him while she was still in his life, filled with pop music from the 1970s-80s that she listened to when she was younger.
Titled “Awesome Mix Volume 1”, Quill becomes attached to it as it was one of the only items he had left of his mother after they were separated. The music that she shared with him becomes a key piece of this movie as well as its sequel, from Baby Groot swaying in a flower pot to “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 to Star Lord completing a mission while Redbone’s “Come And Get Your Love” plays through his headphones.
My favorite use of a classic song in a “Guardians” movie, though, is in an interaction between Quill and his love interest, Gamora. The two are bonding over their unusual relationships with their parents with Quill talking about how music connects him to his mom, pulling out his tape deck and headphones.
The dynamic between the two characters here is hilariously adorable, as Gamora explains that she doesn’t believe in music or dancing, which appalls Quill and leads to him explaining the plot of the movie “Footloose” to her, applying it to the people on her planet. He then takes off his headphones and puts them on her head, allowing her to listen to “Fooled Around and Fell in Love”, though she doesn’t quite appreciate the moment, talking over the music about how the “melody is very pleasing.”
I’m a sucker for awkwardly cute couples and the mini enemies-to-lovers storyline between Star Lord and Gamora gives me butterflies every time; I can’t help but giggle when Quill goes in for the kiss and Gamora immediately pulls a weapon on him. The use of such a well-known love song makes this moment that much sweeter.
3. Where is my Mind? by The Pixies in “Fight Club”
Yes, I realize that I’m automatically breaking the first rule of “Fight Club” by even listing it here, but I had to. This is a movie that countless people (men, countless men) had told me to watch for years, and I finally caved about a year ago out of “quarantine boredom.”
While I don’t praise this film as much as others do (men, as much as men do), I can certainly appreciate the influence that it has had on the world of film at large. There’s a lot of commentary on consumerism, violence, individualism, and the concept of masculinity packed into these two hours, even though many people (you know what these parentheses are about to say: many men) miss all of that and just watch it for the fight scenes.
The scene I chose from “Fight Club” as one of my favorites uses of a song in a film is the ending, which includes “Where is my Mind?” by The Pixies. The Narrator (Ed Norton) has just shot himself, effectively killing his alternate personality of Tyler Durden, and his love interest Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) has been kidnapped and brought to him by his Project Mayhem workers.
Marla is horrified upon finding The Narrator in the condition that he’s in and learning that he’s the one who put himself in this situation, or at least he thinks so. All he can offer to her is to say this: “I'm sorry...you met me at a very strange time in my life.” This is when the buildings start to fall.
All of the explosives planted by Project Mayhem begin to detonate, exploding and imploding as Marla and The Narrator look on, The Pixies’ hit playing softly in the background. She looks startled at first, before relaxing and allowing him to take her hand, and the two watch the city crumble to the ground with “Where is my Mind?” as the backing track; it’s masterfully done.
2. Everytime by Britney Spears in “Spring Breakers”
I want to start this section by saying that I’m fully aware that this scene shouldn’t work, let alone be beautiful, and the same could be said for this movie as a whole, but for some reason, there’s something captivating about “Spring Breakers” and the renowned “Everytime” scene. Netflix first suggested this movie to me as a freshman in high school (complete side note: Why, Netflix? What was okay about suggesting this to a 14-year-old?), and it has stuck with me for years after.
The way that “Spring Breakers” sugarcoats itself in its marketing is almost a microcosm of its themes and storyline. The neon color schemes and promos including former Disney Channel stars Selena Gomez and Vaness Hudgens hide a story of four girls on their spring break consumed by crime, drugs, and murder, and this scene exemplifies that perfectly.
After Gomez’s character Faith gets scared and goes back home, drug and arms dealer Alien (James Franco) takes Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) to a strip club where they meet his rival, fellow drug dealer Big Arch. Alien arms the girls with shotguns and pink ski maks adorned with unicorns (hello, symbolism!), and they gather around the piano next to his pool to listen to him play.
Franco’s character begins to play Spears’ hit “Everytime”, the girls singing along, before Britney’s original version takes over, playing as a montage of the group participating in multiple armed robberies plays out on the screen in slow motion. The juxtaposition of the soft, feminine song with the violent crimes being carried out sums up this entire film in a nutshell; I strongly believe that this scene helps this film earn its title as a masterpiece.
1. Young Blood by The Naked and Famous in Disney’s “Prom”
Giving the top spot to a movie that most people probably haven’t seen could be seen as a bold move, but I’m telling you, this movie raised me. I have such a vivid memory of seeing it in theaters with my mom when I was only eight years old, dreaming about the day that I’d get to dress up and go to my own prom; pretty crazy that ten years later, I’ll be attending my high school’s prom in a month, and I still think about this movie often.
I identified with Aimee Teegarden’s character Nova Prescott heavily when I was younger, the star student who always wanted to be the best and do the best, quickly turning into the obsessive perfectionist who doesn’t know how to have fun and let go. Thomas McDonnell’s portrayal of Jesse Richter, the bad boy with a soft side who introduces Nova to a whole new world, has always tugged at my heartstrings.
The scene in this movie that has stuck with me for a decade now comes when Nova and Jesse are starting to work together to plan and decorate for prom while also started to develop feelings for each other. Nova is stressed that another school’s theme is too similar to theirs and that they will be upstaged, to which Jesse says, “let’s see how starry their night really is.”
The pair hops onto Jesse’s motorcycle and sets off to visit the rival school. As they take the ride, indie band The Naked and Famous’ song “Young Blood” plays in the background, the upbeat chorus and “yeah yeah yeah”s perfectly framing Nova’s change of heart towards Jesse.
They sneak into the other school to check out their decor, only to be caught by the police and taken home by their parents. Nova’s father snaps at Jesse, and while the girl she was at the beginning of the movie would have agreed with her dad, she doesn’t; in fact, she defends Jesse, and apologizes to him for her parent’s behavior the next day.
In addition to being one of my favorite coming-of-age movie moments, this movie also introduced me to The Naked and Famous and the album that this song is on, “Passive Me, Aggressive You”, which has become one of my favorite records of all time (listen to Girls Like You and Punching in a Dream and you’ll be hooked). As I mentioned earlier, the right soundtrack can make a romantic scene a million times more magical, and that’s exactly what the use of Young Blood does here.
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823.
All About the Letter D
Please List! (at least one)
Animals I Like:
>> Dogs, deer... d...dragonflies? I guess that counts. There aren’t too many animals in general I can think of that start with D.
Foods I Like:
>> Dim sum? Gonna go ahead and count that. Also, dumplings (of a variety of types). And Daiya (brand of vegan cheese products).
I Know Someone Who’s (jobs)
>> I don’t know a lot of people, period, and most of the people I know work some level of retail or something like that, or I don’t know their job at all. So I don’t think I’ll have many answers for this one on these surveys.
I Wouldn’t Mind Visiting:
>> Hmm... I wouldn’t mind visiting Denmark or the Dominican Republic. Or Denver, Colorado.
Sometimes I Feel:
>> Despondent, dysphoric, distressed.
Music I Listen To:
>> Deftones, Dream Theater, David Bowie, The Dear Hunter, Dethklok, Devin Townsend, Disturbed, The Doors.
Movies I’ve Seen:
>> I mean, I’ve seen a lot of movies so I’d rather stick to movies I enjoy for this question (on this and all the related surveys). Plus, that’s more personal. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dead Ringers, The Devil Wears Prada, District 9, Dorian Gray, Do the Right Thing, Drive.
Names I Like:
>> Oh, god, I can’t do this one. At least with the music and movies ones I can refer to my Spotify and Letterboxd accounts.
And now, onto the random questions!
What is today’s date?
>> Juneteenth. (13 June)
Have you ever had a dog?
>> When I was a child.
Have you ever gone on/been put on a diet?
>> No.
Did you know that donkeys can mate with zebras and with horses?
>> Yeah, I’ve heard that.
Do you ever feel like you want to die? Do you have any loved ones who have died?
>> I feel like that more often than I’d care to recall, to be honest. It seems to be a pain reflex at this point, more than an actual, legitimate desire to consciously plan and execute the end of my life. I’ve had one loved one die.
Did you know that degus are actually a type of rodent that can be kept as a pet?
>> I’ve never heard of a degu, but okay, cool.
What do you like to drink?
>> Water, kombucha (specifically, this one local brand that makes the best I’ve had), San Pellegrino, ginger beer, tea, various alcoholic beverages.
Have you ever tried to count the spots on a Dalmation before?
>> Nope.
What’s your favorite kind of dinosaur?
>> I’ve never had a favourite kind of dinosaur.
What’s your favorite dessert?
>> I don’t have one.
Daffodils, daisies, or dandelions?
>> Dandelions are one of my favourite flowers, period. I love them so much.
How often do you cook your own dinner?
>> I don’t, usually. Sparrow does. Otherwise, I just eat something microwaveable or easy to cobble together, like a salad or a sandwich.
Do you remember your first date?
>> I mean, vaguely. Not with any real detail.
Have you ever kept a diary?
>> Yeah, I used to keep them diligently. Now I can’t be bothered. This and my personal tumblr serve well enough as diaries, particularly since I update them almost daily.
Are you a daring person? Do you take lots of risks?
>> No, I don’t think I’m particularly daring. I prefer a low level of risk, generally, especially since I’ve done a lot of risky stuff in the past. I got it out of my system.
Have you ever filed for divorce?
>> No. I genuinely hope I never have to go through that experience.
Do you have a doorbell?
>> Yes, but sometimes I dearly wish I could disconnect the goddamn thing. Especially when people start ringing random doors in order to get someone to open the main door... especially especially when that happens at fucking four AM...
Do you ever feel like you are doomed?
>> Absolutely.
Have you ever smoked dope?
>> No.
Do you ever experience dysphoria?
>> Frequently.
Which day of the week is your favorite?
>> I don’t have one. They’re pretty much all the same to me, with minor differences (like Saturday is Farmer’s Market day).
Do you know anyone who has diabetes?
>> I doubt it.
How many DVD’s do you own?
>> Zero. Wait, no, I do have a copy of Romeo + Juliet, that I found at a Goodwill for like a buck. But neither of my computers have a disc drive, so I’m unlikely to ever watch that copy.
What is your dad’s name?
>> Fuck that.
Do you like to dance?
>> I love to dance.
Do you drive? Do you have your license?
>> No and no.
Do you believe in destiny?
>> I come from a world where that’s pretty much acknowledged as a fact of life, so yeah, I guess I “believe” in it. Not sure how well it applies in this world, which is a bit farther removed from... well, the Tower. Anyway.
Have you ever been dumped before?
>> I have.
How often do you experience diarrhea?
>> Rarely enough that it’s rather alarming to me when I do experience it.
What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done before?
>> I have no idea.
Have you ever dyed your hair before?
>> Yep.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever dressed up as for Halloween?
>> ---
Do you know how to dab?
>> Without context, I have no idea which definition of “dab” is being used here.
How often do you go to the doctor or the dentist?
>> Never. But now that I’m on Sparrow’s dental plan, I’ll be going to the dentist as soon as I can (I was supposed to go in April, and then the world stopped).
How often do you dust your house? Are you allergic to dust?
>> Not fucking often enough, I know. Dust abounds in this apartment, for some reason (I don’t know what it is that makes some places dustier than others, but this is definitely on the dustier end), but I always forget to keep on top of it and then everything just looks ashy. :|
What’s the last good deed you’ve done?
>> I have no idea.
[a-zebra-is-a-striped-horse]
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The Other Bill and Ted.
As No Man of God hits theaters and VOD following its Tribeca premiere in June, director Amber Sealey talks to Dominic Corry about her Ted Bundy two-hander and answers our Life in Film questions.
Amber Sealey has been very acknowledging of the fact that her new film is one of many to center around the horrific crimes of serial rapist and murderer Ted Bundy. As she outlined in her Tribeca Q&A with Letterboxd, one way she intended No Man of God to stick out from the pack was through the use of consciously silent background characters who represent Bundy’s voiceless victims.
The structure and source of the film also help distinguish it from other Ted Bundy movies: No Man of God is based on the recordings of FBI agent Bill Hagmaier (played in the film by Elijah Wood), who was tasked with interviewing an incarcerated Bundy in the years leading up to his execution, in order to help determine whether or not he was criminally insane, which could’ve helped to remove Bundy from death row.
With many of Bundy’s victims never officially attributed to the killer, Hagmaier also sought to draw confessions, and something resembling remorse, out of Bundy, to help bring closure to those victims’ families. As detailed in the film, much of which was taken directly from transcripts of the interviews, Bundy and Hagmaier’s relationship was complicated, and the intimacy that develops between them informs No Man of God in often uncomfortable ways.
Luke Kirby and Elijah Wood in a scene from ‘No Man of God’.
Wood (also a producer on the film) and Luke Kirby turn in career-high work as Hagmaier and Bundy, respectively, while Sealey textures the film with some of the most emotive stock-footage montage sequences this side of The Parallax View. Among positive reactions to the film, Claira Curtis, in a four-star review, writes: “Perhaps one of the most successful elements lies in Amber Sealey’s uncentering of the ‘genius’ moniker that has followed Bundy through his years of infamy.” On the pairing of Wood and Kirby in the leading roles, Connor Ashdown-Ford notes that “the chemistry between them both is so authentic it’s darn right unsettling”.
Unsettling is right. Late in the film, Sealey depicts a real-life TV interview that took place between Bundy and evangelical preacher/author/psychologist James Dobson (played by stalwart character actor Christian Clemonson), who uses Bundy to forward his anti-pornography agenda. Throughout this scene, the camera lingers on a young female member of the TV crew (played by an uncredited Hannah Jessup) as she silently reacts to being in Bundy’s presence. Emblematic of Sealey’s aforementioned philosophy in constructing the film, it’s a moment that appears to be having an impact on audiences, as detailed in Nolan Barth’s review: “She might have one of my favorite performances of this year? She shows us fascination, guilt, disgust and fear in like only 30 seconds of screen time. Give her an Oscar. Please.”
In an awkward incident that represents a perhaps unanticipated effect of there being so many contemporaneous movies with the same subject matter, director Joe Berlinger (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, the Paradise Lost trilogy), who recently directed both the Zac Efron-starring scripted Ted Bundy biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and the documentary Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, sent an email to Sealey ahead of No Man of God’s Tribeca premiere about remarks she had made while discussing how her film differentiated itself from the existing Ted Bundy movies. He felt she had accused him of glorifying Bundy. After Sealey took the exchange public, she explained to Variety that she had never singled out Berlinger’s films in any of her remarks.
In a conversation with Letterboxd, Sealey delves into her approach to No Man of God, and talks about some of her filmic inspirations.
‘No Man of God’ director Amber Sealey.
There is really effective and creepy use of stock-footage montages in this film. Sometimes you see that sort of thing at the beginning of a film, but it’s interesting that you keep going back to them after using them in the opening credits. What was the thinking in using those montages and how did you select the footage?
Amber Sealey: The thinking for those was a couple things: One, we don’t leave the prison, and I wanted [the audience] to know a little bit what’s going on outside, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, like what’s the tone of the time? What movies are popular? What books are popular? What are people wearing? I wanted to have there be a kind of cultural touchstone outside of the prison, but at the same time I wanted it to represent potentially a little bit of what was going on inside Bill’s mind. So the story of the montages as they go on, it gets a little bit more fucked up, for lack of a better word, for Bill, inside of his head.
We were originally going to shoot the crowd scenes [of protesters outside the prison] and recreate them and then because of Covid restrictions, we couldn’t do that anymore. So then I knew we were going to be using archival footage for the crowd, and I didn’t want the archival crowd footage to suddenly jump out as being so different from the rest of our film. We’re shooting on an ARRI camera, [so it’s] not going to look like a Hi-8 from the 1980s. I needed to incorporate this look, this ’80s grainy look into the rest of the movie so that it feels like it’s part and parcel of the film, part of the storytelling.
We got [the footage] in different ways. I have an old friend that I’ve known since I was like, two, he lived next door to me, and my cousin, they both had video cameras in the ’80s and would film everything. So some of that footage is old family footage of their family or friends. There’s a couple shots in there of my neighbors when I was growing up. Then some of it, we did a lot of research on [stock-imagery services] Getty and Pond5, just finding archival footage that we could use that really told the story that we wanted to tell with the montages. It was a lengthy process finding all of that footage for sure.
What was Bill Hagmaier’s involvement in the film?
Bill is an executive producer on the film, so he was very involved. The transcripts of those conversations between Bill and Ted, we got from Bill. Bill gave us so much great stuff to work with—the newer FBI files that he was allowed to share with us and the recordings, and when the script was originally written it was written based off of those recordings, and the writer originally spoke to Bill and then when I came on board, I talked to him and then I changed the script, even more from conversations I had with him. He was just a resource.
Almost every [character] you see on screen, those are real people, and he hooked us up with a lot of those real people. I spoke with the prison guards and the wardens and all of that. Then he was just a resource in terms of like, I would ask him, “what color were your shoes?” “Did you carry this kind of briefcase or that kind of briefcase?” Because it was important to me that all that production-design stuff was really authentic. I liked to know, like, “what were your haircuts like then, Bill?” So he was available to talk about the emotional side of things, and then the real just humdrum kind of things. He’s just a lovely guy, he’s really supportive of me and of the film and he just wanted to be accessible as much as he could and he was. He’s a very humble, generous person.
Aleksa Palladino plays civil-rights attorney Carolyn Lieberman to Luke Kirby’s Ted Bundy.
What films did you watch, or cite as reference points in preparation for No Man of God?
Literally hundreds and hundreds of movies. When I’m looking for my creative look, I just watched so many films, and a lot of old films. I’d have to go back and look at my look book to tell you all of them but I pull images from the weirdest places. But once I get past figuring out the creative look of the film, I don’t then like to watch the movies a lot because I try to really make it its own thing and I worry too much that I’ll be copycatting other artists and I want to try [to] avoid that.
What’s your favorite true-crime movie?
Oh god, what was the one about the guy who like, went to the bathroom and confessed, accidentally? He forgot his mic was on? Do you remember that one?
The Jinx?
Yeah. Even though it’s a documentary, I’m going to go with that.
What’s your favorite big-screen serial-killer performance?
It has to be Luke Kirby. Luke Kirby as Bundy.
What was the first horror film you saw?
My dad had me watch Cat People when I was nine. Does that count?
The Val Lewton one?
The ’80s one.
Oh, the Paul Schrader one?
Yes! The Paul Schrader one.
Nastassja Kinski in Paul Schrader’s ‘Cat People’ (1982).
When you were nine years old?
Yeah. I also watched Blue Velvet when I was nine. Oh wow, thank you Dad.
What’s the most disturbing film you’ve ever seen?
Most disturbing, hmm… Kids.
What film made you want to become a filmmaker?
It was Michael Winterbottom’s Nine Songs. My first film was a reaction to that movie. I’m a huge Winterbottom fan. That’s a great movie, but also it advertises itself as being a real relationship and real sex and I watched it and I was like, well that’s not like any… it was like two models, you know? Their sex scenes were like a perfume ad and I was like, well that’s not what real sex looks like for real people. I made my first feature after that.
What’s your go-to comfort movie?
Oh, so many, let’s think. The Proposal. I love Trainwreck. I really like rom-coms, like if I’m sick or something, I’ll watch rom-coms. Roman Holiday, stuff like that.
What’s a classic that you couldn’t get into or that you think is overrated?
Umm. Star Wars. I’m trying to think, there’s something else that I just don’t like… everyone loves that singing movie. What’s that singing movie that when Moonlight won the Oscar, it got announced?
La La Land.
Yeah. I was not into that.
What filmmaker living or dead do you envy/admire the most?
Yorgos Lanthimos. Or Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
If you were forced to remake a classic movie, what would you remake?
Grease.
Who would be in the cast of your Grease remake?
Oh I don't even know but it would be much darker. It would still be a musical and still be funny, but much darker.
I would like to see that movie.
I would too.
Related content
Diego’s list of films featuring the FBI
Boris1980’s list of films about serial killers
Follow Dominic on Letterboxd
‘No Man of God’ is in theaters and on VOD from August 27, 2021.
#amber sealey#luke kirby#elijah wood#ted bundy#bill hagmaier#fbi#serial killer#thriller#courtroom#fbi movies#letterboxd
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Animated Enchantment.
A recent restoration of Son of the White Mare sends our animation correspondent Kambole Campbell on a quest for a few words with legendary Hungarian filmmaker Marcell Jankovics, about the external cosmos, inner spiritual worlds, and the latest season of Vikings.
“The true arts are receiving less and less space in every genre.” —Marcell Jankovics
Much adored and highly rated by Letterboxd animation fans, Marcell Jankovics’ 1981 masterpiece Son of the White Mare is, frankly, some of the wildest imagery ever put on the big screen. A swirl of psychedelic depictions of folkloric beings are flattened out into a gorgeous 2D tableau. The titanic figures of the characters twist into impossible and often abstract shapes, all realized with eye-popping and heavily contrasting color.
Arbelos Films recently restored Son of the White Mare to 4K, and it was due for release in cinemas this year. Instead, the film is now available for US animation fans on Vimeo OnDemand, and it’s unmissable. “The restoration made everything pop so much, that at a point I think my brain melted,” writes Bretton, on Letterboxd. “The kind of film that makes me happy to be human,” raves Will. “Appropriately immense imagery for a creation myth,” agrees Lindy.
Hungarian filmmaker Marcell Jankovics.
Based on Hungarian folk tales and poetry, Son of the White Mare begins at the gates of the Underworld, at the base of a massive, cosmic oak tree that holds seventy-seven dragons in its roots. To combat these monsters, a dazzling white mare goddess gives birth to three heroes—the protagonist, Fanyüvő (‘Treeshaker’), and his brothers—who embark on a journey to save the universe. In the telling, Jankovics is clearly only interested in the kind of imagery that, well, only animation can provide.
Son of the White Mare (Fehérlófia) is one of four feature-length films by the animator—his others are Johnny Corncob (János Vitéz, 1973), which was Hungary’s first feature-length animated film, Song of the Miraculous Hind (2002) and the drama The Tragedy of Man (2011), which took Jankovics almost three decades to complete. These features have found continuing acclaim in the animation industry and amongst cult enthusiasts. Jankovics’ shorts are just as celebrated: Sisyphus (1974) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short at the 48th Academy Awards, and The Struggle (1977) received a Palme d’Or for short film at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival.
Born in Budapest in 1941, Jankovics began his career almost casually; after realizing his family’s status meant no higher education would be available to him, he passed a test to work at Pannónia Filmstúdió. He has said that the animated Russian film The Humpbacked Horse (1947) directed by Ivan Ivanov-Vano was the first cartoon he remembers watching, but that art books inspired him more than films. His career has traversed post-war Hungary, including the end of the Communist regime in 1989, and Soviet military regime in 1991. These events led to greater storytelling freedom, a shift that can be spied in his art, which has included television documentaries, commercials, books, teaching, and a Disney paycheck (for work that was never seen in The Emperor’s New Groove).
In our interview, Jankovics remains steadfast in his commitment to his “chosen path”, celebrating—but not being distracted by—others in his field, and revealing glimpses of his renowned sense of humor.
This restoration and re-release marks the first time that your film has been distributed in America in decades. Have your views on Son of the White Mare shifted in the time since?
Marcell Jankovics: They have not changed.
A lot of Son of the White Mare unfolds on a flat, often circular plane. What inspired you to frame things this way?
I never considered 3D. I don’t use it even today. The circularity is a part of what I have to say. A fairy tale (all fairy tales) traverses a particular arc, the year, of the eternal cycle.
Could you run me through the development of the style of Son of the White Mare?
Use of the color wheel accompanied the above-mentioned circularity; this was partly adapted to the circle of time and partly to the characters. I wanted to get rid of contours. I could manage this because my characters are illuminated, this is why I could take advantage of light contours.
I notice that a number of your short films have focused on Greek mythology, while your features have mostly drawn from Hungarian folklore or influenced by Judeo-Christian religion. Did your interests shift?
Absolutely not! All are projections of a similar spirit of the same world. I’m currently writing a book about Biblical symbolism, and in it I make numerous references to (Hungarian) folk tales.
What fascinates you about these myths and legends?
They remain eternally true. They are harmonizations of the external cosmos and man’s inner, spiritual, unconscious world.
Looking at some of the sequences of Fehérlófia, I was reminded of the sequence where Susano’o battles the Fire God in The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963), directed by Yūgo Serikawa and Toei Dog. Is that a film you’re familiar with?
No. And I don’t need to [be]. Tales and myths are universal, the differences are stylistic. Of course, I’d love to see it. When I designed the Fehérlófia figures, I drew countless Japanese woodcuts. I also used Japanese theatrical masks for my heroes’ facial expressions. It’s not common knowledge but the Hungarians and the Japanese consider themselves to be related.
I’ve read in an old interview that you don’t watch much new animation. Is that still true?
Yes. I don’t want to be distracted from my chosen path.
What films, live-action or animated, would you say have made the greatest impression on you?
I’d rather give you directors: Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Fellini, A. Wajda, Ken Russell. In animation: Frédéric Back, Richard Williams, John Hubley. I don’t know if they influenced me but I have the greatest respect for them and I always enjoy watching their films.
What’s the first film you would suggest to someone looking to discover more animation?
My own Sisyphus. It might be particularly shocking for anyone who has never seen animation before.
What was the film that made you fall in love with animation?
It was a little different for me, I was rather forced into it as a career. It’s a long story and I’ve told it many times. As a young kid I only watched Soviet cartoons, but still I was enchanted because animation impressed with its own kind of genre surrealism. When I started working in the profession and I had the chance to see others as well, I realized that everything was possible in this world, even what I wanted to do.
Do you have a favorite myth, or one that you’ve been wanting to adapt?
Not any more. At the age of 79, I yearn for less laborious work.
Are there any upcoming films you’re excited to see yourself?
I haven’t been to the cinema for a very long time. The sort of films that I would be interested in are broadcast on TV late at night. I usually look forward to the latest season of the Vikings series.
How do you feel about the future of animation?
The true arts are receiving less and less space in every genre. It is sufficient for me merely to mention the latest restrictive aspects of the Oscars. I hope that the marginalization of the arts and this kind of restriction prove to be only temporary.
Related content
Psychedelic Animation—Peter Hemminger’s list
The 303 Hungarian Films You Must See Before You Die—Bence Bardos’ challenge in progress
Hungarian Films/Magyar Filmek—a list by Máté Tóth
Drawing Closer—Kambole’s preview of ten animated features to look foward to
Follow Kambole on Letterboxd
‘Son of the White Mare’ is available now for online rental in the US via Vimeo OnDemand. ‘Johnny Corncob’ is also available in select virtual cinemas. With thanks to Arbelos and Michael Lieberman.
#animation#animated feature#son of the white mare#hungarian cinema#magyar filmek#kambole campbell#animated film#marcell jankovics#johnny corncob#letterboxd#interview
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Natural Woman.
Filmmaking power-couple Julia Hart and Jordan Horowitz chat to Jack Moulton about exploring untouched female perspectives in genre films, a fateful viewing of Michael Mann’s Thief, the humbling magic of babies on set, and Letterboxd’s small role in their filmmaking process.
I’m Your Woman puts the gangster’s moll, a classically underwritten character, at the heart of the action. We barely meet the gangster himself in this taut, 1970s-set crime thriller from director Julia Hart and her co-writer and producer husband Jordan Horowitz. Rachel Brosnahan occupies a tense and unusual space as Jean, wife of Eddie, a no-good chap who turns up one day with a very young baby then abruptly disappears, leaving her to raise this unnamed child.
In other versions of the story, we’d follow Eddie to a guns-blazing conclusion, but this is a Hart-Horowitz jam, so we’re quickly on the run with Jean and the baby, and we stay with her. I’m Your Woman is a compelling, unsettling twist on the genre. “What impressed me most … was how well it keeps its cards close to the vest,” writes Mikey on Letterboxd. It’s also an empathetic portrayal of new-motherhood in all its exhausting confusion, where getting a baby clean, fed and sleeping is as much a priority as finding the next safe house. “Despite valuing tension quite highly, Julia Hart still has the wherewithal to let it sit in its more tender and thoughtful moments,” writes Paul. “The ending really sneaks up on you in terms of the specific feeling it elicits.”
Marsha Stephanie Blake and Rachel Brosnahan in ‘I’m Your Woman’.
Hart and Horowitz have children, aged two and six, who have grown up around film sets. Before becoming a filmmaker, Hart spent her days with other people’s kids as a teacher; her 2016 debut, Miss Stevens, stars Lily Rabe as a high-school educator, but her follow-up films have been wider-ranging, from Fast Color to this year’s Stargirl. Hart credits this genre-jumping to her absolute love of movies. “I don’t have a favorite genre. I love musicals, Westerns, crime dramas, coming-of-age movies, superhero movies. It was so fun getting to learn about how to create musical numbers in Stargirl and how to direct a car chase in I’m Your Woman.”
Horowitz, meanwhile, is known for producing The Kids Are All Right and La La Land. Yes, he’s the “Guys, guys, I’m sorry, no, there’s a mistake” guy. Horowitz is also a Letterboxd member, and a hunt back through his diary reveals the date he first watched Moonlight, along with his wholesome reviews of Julia’s films. “I always tried to remember to log my movies in so many different ways,” Horowitz explains, “and then once Letterboxd came out it was a very easy solution.”
Jordan Horowitz corrects that famous Oscar mix-up.
Horowitz keeps diligent lists of references for his upcoming films, years before they’re even announced. It’s here that the roots of I’m Your Woman are found, if you’re looking closely: a fateful viewing of Michael Mann’s Thief nearly seven years ago was the primary influence on I’m Your Woman, “especially Tuesday Weld’s character, and the moment where she is basically asked to leave the movie before James Caan burns everything to the ground,” he tells me. “Our hope with this movie was to follow some of the women in those movies that don’t necessarily get the spotlight and shift the gaze of the camera to follow this car as it drives away with her in it, instead of staying with the criminal of this movie.”
Hart picks up the thread, naming Diane Keaton in The Godfather, Ali MacGraw in The Getaway, Theresa Russell in Straight Time. “Those were interesting characters played by incredible actresses but they only have a handful of scenes so I loved the idea of exploring a woman in that world and time but telling the story through her perspective.”
Horowitz defines master filmmakers Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt and Jonathan Demme as Hart’s “spirit animals”, for their humanist takes in multiple genres. A particular recommendation of a Lumet classic from an Amazon executive changed the way they looked at their writing. “Running on Empty has this great scene where they all sing [James Taylor’s] ‘Fire and Rain’ together. Originally in our script, the ‘Natural Woman’ scene was just [Jean] singing. After watching that movie it inspired us to consider what if the Cal character joins in with her? What happens to the moment if it becomes a bit more of a community moment?”
Bill Heck in ‘I’m Your Woman’.
When talking about their writing process, Horowitz admits that he always has his producer hat handy: “I’m never thinking about writing for the sake of writing. I’m always keeping how we make this thing in mind. Do we have too many extras? Is this location gettable? That can help me when we get into production because I’ve already considered some of those things, but I do wish sometimes that I could just sit down as Julia does and just write.” Once the duo makes it into production, Horowitz admits “[I] definitely put writer mode behind me, to the point where we’ll be on set and someone will ask me something about the script and I’ll be like ‘I don’t know, ask Julia’ and they’ll say ‘didn’t you write it too?!’”
However, Horowitz credits Hart as the “idea generator” of the two. The premise to have Jean struggling to connect with her adoptive baby was always part of the conception of the character, largely based on conversations Hart had with mothers, pre-lockdown. “It sometimes feels like Hollywood sees mothers as a monolith where there isn’t much nuance and subtlety, especially when it comes to negative feelings about motherhood, so they’re often shamed into not talking about them,” Julia laments. “It was really important for me to explore a side of motherhood that isn’t talked about as much and make sure that mothers know that they are seen and heard.”
The decision to have a baby (performed by brothers Justin and Jameson Charles) in almost every scene was a big risk, and not one Hart took lightly. “Movie people can think what they’re doing is very important, but there’s nothing more humbling than when you’re on a whole set with hundreds of people [and] you’re waiting for a baby’s dirty diaper to be changed. It made everything feel so real and immediate, so everyone on set really had to live in the moment and adapt. You prepare, and prepare, and prepare, but you have to throw out so much if the baby is sleeping instead of crying, or crying instead of smiling. I think it’s important to portray babies as real people, because as a society we often forget that.”
Lead actress Rachel Brosnahan came on as a producer many years after the script was already in Hart and Horowitz’s heads, but Hart explains that Brosnahan brought a history and interior life, “more in the wordless moments of acting than in dialogue itself.” Along the way, Jean meets Cal and Teri, who guide her to refuge. They’re the heart of the film, and Hart elaborates on their importance to the narrative: “they have been through the hell that Jean is currently going through and her circumstances force them to go through it again, but this time they have honesty, truth and love on their side. In watching Teri and Cal, Jean starts to understand what real love, family and support are.”
Rachel Brosnahan with director and co-writer Julia Hart.
When you examine Hart’s filmography, it’s impressive how productive she’s been in such a short time, releasing four films within five years, with those pre-schoolers under foot. Horowitz makes a comparison to a prolific filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh, who advises to “fail as fast as you can”. Horowitz acknowledges that “I don’t think we set out like, ‘we’re gonna have two children and we’re gonna make four films in five years.’ If we knew that we were gonna do that we would’ve said, ‘wow, that’s a little bit insane, maybe we shouldn’t do that!’” But they did, and the film world is richer for it.
We always like to ask about the film that made filmmakers want to become filmmakers, and Hart lands on All That Jazz. “I’ve always been a fan of Bob Fosse since his [early] work. How he turned moving your body in a way that people haven’t really moved their bodies before into an empire is very inspiring. [Roy Scheider] is also my favorite actor, which doesn’t hurt. He’s so good.” Horowitz, meanwhile, is a huge fan of Back to the Future. “That was the movie when I was a kid that just opened my eyes to the power of movies, to make you obsess and dream about what other movies could be.”
“I remember going with my parents to see Back to the Future Part II on the Friday night it opened and when we got there it was sold out. We saw some other movie, but I was so upset so all I was thinking about was Back to the Future Part II. As we were leaving the movie theater, I saw through the back little window of the screen where Back to the Future Part II was playing and watched the end scene where Marty is standing in the rain and someone comes and gives him a letter. I did not sleep the entire night. That feeling of anticipation and imagination defines the way I like to look at movies and the way they can make me feel.” A subsequent look at Horowitz’s Letterboxd diary reveals that this conversation perhaps inspired him to take a trip back in time the following day.
Related content
Jordan Horowitz’s list of research for I’m Your Woman
She did THAT!—A list of women who kill
Mothers, Mommy Issues, Moms, Matriarch, Grandmothers
Letterboxd’s Top 200 Crime Films
Disillusionment in Sun-drenched 1970s American New Wave Cinema
Follow Jack on Letterboxd
‘I’m your Woman’ is on Amazon Prime Video now.
#julia hart#jordan horowitz#i'm your woman#rachel brosnahan#crime film#crime thriller#gangster film#gangster's moll#marvelous mrs maisel#directed by women#female director#52 films by women#jack moulton#letterboxd#filmmaking
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How I Letterboxd #10: Chad Hartigan.
Filmmaker Chad Hartigan talks to Jack Moulton about his prescient new sci-fi romance, Little Fish, why radio silence is worse than a bad review, and his secret system of Letterboxd lists.
Chad Hartigan has won prizes at the Sundance Film Festival and the Film Independent Spirit Awards for his acclaimed films This is Martin Donner and Morris From America. He’s also been a Letterboxd member since way back, joining what he proclaims as “my favorite website” in 2013. Hartigan has always been an obsessive logger: he has transcribed all of his viewing data since 1998 and continues to work on filling in the gaps in his downtime.
Like many ardent Letterboxd members, Hartigan is a diligent list-maker, keeping tabs on his best first viewings of each year and assembling an all-time top 1,000 films over the summer (with an accompanying 26-minute supercut). Perhaps unusually for a member of the film industry on Letterboxd, he’s unafraid to hold back his opinions and regularly voices his critiques on even the most acclaimed films.
Hartigan’s newest film, Little Fish, is a sci-fi love story starring Olivia Cooke (Sound of Metal) and Jack O’Connell (Unbroken). Written by Mattson Tomlin, it’s set during an imagined pandemic—shot long before our own actual pandemic—wherein a disease causes people to lose their memories. It was set to premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, and then postponed due to Covid-19. It’s now out in limited theaters and on demand, and we were delighted with the excuse to put Hartigan in the How I Letterboxd spotlight.
Olivia Cooke as Emma and Jack O’Connell as Jude in ‘Little Fish’.
You made a pandemic movie before the pandemic. How do you feel about accidentally hitting that unfortunate zeitgeist and now consequently being asked questions like this one?
Yeah, strange. The questions are fine. If it wasn’t this one, it would be another that you would have to answer over and over again. One of the things that drew me to the project was that it felt like a fantasy that wasn’t necessarily rooted in reality in a way that my other [films] were. I liked that it’s old-fashioned in its attempts to purely take you somewhere and wasn’t intended to hold up a mirror to our times—but then in the end that’s exactly what it’s doing. I’m curious myself, and I’m checking Letterboxd to see the reactions from people because I really couldn’t guess what it would have been like [now].
Are there any prescient details you’re proud of getting right?
I’m so grateful and happy that Jack [O’Connell] is wearing his mask correctly. That’s the number one thing that I’m glad we got right. I think it was very smart of Mattson to focus the movie on [the relationship] rather than the details of this global pandemic. I feel the reason it’s not in bad taste is because it dealt with those things as a backdrop and instead focused on people just trying to remember what’s important and clinging onto those that they love.
Onto our own favorite memory aid, Letterboxd. How did you discover us and how did you manage without us?
I’ve been on since 2013, so I’m probably one of the earliest people to jump on it. I love the interface and the diary, just aesthetically it was really fun. I’ve been keeping track of what I see with analog [methods] for as long as I can remember. I have diaries and planners so I logged all that old information. If I was running for president, my platform would be that everybody is required to use Letterboxd comprehensively, because I just love to know what everybody is watching all the time.
Do you talk about Letterboxd in the real world with the other filmmaking people?
Yes, and I’m often trying to convince them to join. Other filmmakers are more concerned about having their opinions on peers be public knowledge than I am, I guess. I’ve made four films now and each one’s been bigger and more widely seen than the last. The very first one was a total no-budget affair that couldn’t get into any festivals and I was very excited when I finally got it into the Hamptons Film Festival. It was about half-full and one or two people came up to me afterwards and said they liked it. This was pre-Twitter so I spent the whole next day Googling to see if anybody had written anything. I was so curious to see what people thought and there was nothing—not a review, not a blog—just total emptiness.
When the next film got into Sundance, there were people tweeting their reactions and actual reviews and I read everything. People were asking if the bad reviews hurt me. Absolutely not—nothing can be worse than the radio silence of nobody caring about the first film. The fact that people care enough to sit and write about this movie—good or bad—is a win, and I’ve carried that onward. I like to see what people think, it can be helpful in how you view the film as a success or failure. You learn and move on.
Jack O’Connell at least remembers how to wear a mask in ‘Little Fish’.
Some filmmakers have told us they’re kinder to films after making their own, but you’re not shy at all about being critical. How did making your own films change your perspective as a critic?
I don’t consider myself a critic so that’s why I’d be less concerned with someone reading what I thought. Why should they put any stock into what I think? If they get hung up on it then that’s their own stuff because I’m not a critic. Like everyone else on Letterboxd, I just love watching movies. Obviously I can appreciate and understand some of the technical aspects maybe moreso than people who don’t make films, but at the end of the day, rarely that’s the thing that makes you love a movie or not. There’s a great bit in Francis Ford Coppola’s commentary track for Finian’s Rainbow where Fred Astaire’s doing a dance number and [Coppola admits] he totally messed it up because Astaire’s feet aren’t fully in frame. He’s very honest about his mistakes because it’s one of his earliest movies. Then he goes on to say that he thinks there’s the same number of mistakes in Finian’s Rainbow as there are in The Godfather, it’s just that he made mistakes on the things that don’t matter for The Godfather. No film is perfect, but if it can latch onto this one magical aspect that connects you to it, that’s what makes you love it or not.
You had a project where you chart the best films made by directors at certain ages as you reached that age. Tell us more about it.
That was a great project. I got the idea when I was 26. This was back when I had a Netflix DVD subscription and it was just hard for me to randomly choose DVDs to throw in the queue. I needed a system. I decided to watch movies from directors when they were my age and see if there’s some common denominator, something I can learn. At that point, there weren’t many, there were films like Boogie Nights and Fassbinder films. Not many people had made stuff when they were 26 or 27, so it was very feasible. Every year there were more movies and more directors to add to the list and it became time-consuming. I did it all the way up until I was 34 and the reason I stopped was because I had a son and there was no way I could continue this level of viewing output.
My favorite part of your account is the fact that you log every viewing of your own films. You know for a fact that you’ve watched Morris From America 26 times and Little Fish fifteen times. Why do you log them? What counts as a viewing?
I’ve clearly watched those movies many more times in little chunks but I’ll only log it if we’re sitting down and watching it from beginning to end. I have a ticket to see Little Fish in the drive-in on Saturday, so it’s going to be logged again. Why do I do it? Like I said, I wish everyone was required to use Letterboxd comprehensively. That’s what it’s there for for me, an accurate log of what I watch. This is psychotic behavior but I’m tempted to have a Letterboxd account for my son. I’ll do his views for him once he starts watching movies until he’s old enough to take over. It’ll just be, like, Frozen a thousand times but he’s not old enough to watch anything yet, so we’ll see.
Have you discovered any films thanks to Letterboxd discourse that influenced your approach to filmmaking?
For sure, I can’t maybe say specifically, but once I dropped the directors my own age system I didn’t replace it with nothing. I’m a Virgo and I have a little bit of OCD, so I have to have some system. I’ve replaced it with a new complicated system where I pull from different lists and that’s now my main source of how I choose a movie to watch. I have like ten or twelve different lists, each about a thousand movies with a lot of overlap. One of them is my own list of every movie I’ve seen in a theater and I’ll go and look through that and if it’s something I want to revisit. Recently I rewatched Twister, which I hadn’t seen in a long time and is an old favorite from when I was in high school.
I have a bunch of private lists I cycle through; every movie nominated for a Spirit Award, every movie that’s won an Oscar, every movie that’s played in competition at Cannes, the top 1,000 films at the box office. There’s another great website that I use as a biblical resource which is They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? and their lists of acclaimed films for all-time and the 21st century. I hit those up often. Something that I watched purely because of the very high Letterboxd rating and really loved is Funeral Parade of Roses. I try to see as many movies as I can that have a 4.0 rating or higher.
You respect the Letterboxd consensus.
I do, but I don’t always agree with it.
‘Little Fish’ director Chad Hartigan.
Which is your most underrated or overlooked movie according to Letterboxd?
I can say I was the very first person to log a movie called Witness in the City, which is an Italian noir movie I watched when I was doing my ‘directors my own age’ series. Literally nobody had logged it, so my review was like “whoa, I can’t believe I’m the first person to log this!”. It was very exciting for me because it’s great, but I’m the OG logger of that movie.
From your list of every film you’ve seen in a theater since you were twelve, which was your most memorable experience?
The cheap answer is that it’s hard to top my own movies. The Sundance premiere of Morris From America at the Eccles Theater is maybe the best, but if I’m disqualifying my own films, seeing Scream 3 in a very packed theater in Virginia Beach was really fun, really rowdy. There was a trailer for a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie and I remember the climax was Van Damme going “you lied to me!!!” and everyone laughed. Someone did a George Costanza move later during Scream 3 and yelled out “you lied to me!!!” and everybody laughed again—so that’s a high. That’s the thing I miss the most about movie theaters, and the worry I have if theaters go away, is that so much of how we feel about a movie can be tied to the experience; who we saw it with, what we did before or after, what the crowd was like, or if anything strange happened. There are a lot of movies I have strong memories and affection for because of the experience of seeing them and I probably wouldn’t feel the same way about if I just watched it at home on my laptop.
I typically like to cap interviews off with what filmmakers thought was the best film of the past year, but we have your data to hand. For you, it’s Garrett Bradley’s documentary Time. Can you talk a bit about what makes the film stand out for you?
One thing I learned about myself from the pandemic is that the motivation and desire to see new things is very closely tied to the theater-going experience for me. Once that was taken away and you could watch a new movie at home, it joins the pile of all the other movies. The fact that it’s new doesn’t really do anything for me. Why would I press play on Da 5 Bloods when I still haven’t seen Malcolm X? I gotta see Malcolm X! There wasn’t an urgency, so I saw far fewer films than in an ordinary year. But Time I found incredibly moving and important. Similar to what I liked about the Little Fish script, it’s so hyper-focused on one relationship and within that one story it has so much to say about larger issues and the world at large. It was an emotional and rich viewing experience.
‘Little Fish’ is on demand and playing in select theaters now. Images courtesy of IFC Films.
#little fish#chad hartigan#life in film#film director#letterboxd#how i letterboxd#letterboxd member#letterboxd tips#olivia cook#jack o'connell#romance#romantic film#sci fi romance#pandemic movie#covid movie
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How I Letterboxd #9: Julie Collette.
Christmas movie lover Julie Collette tells Jack Moulton all about her seasonal movie habits, the best big screen Santa Claus of all time, disability visibility in festive films, and some of the weirder holiday picks.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: when Letterboxd members turn to the Neverending Christmas List to help plan their Christmas movie viewing. Arrange it by highest rated, arrange it by newest release, or by popularity—any which way, there’s something for everyone, from corny TCM romances to obscure seasonal horrors.
Created six years ago by Canadian member Julie Collette, the list runs to more than 4,300 titles, and contains the word ‘Christmas’ 1,837 times at last count. Julie and her husband are die-hard Letterboxd fans, having allegedly used the platform every day for the past nine years. She’s logged every film she’s seen in theaters since 1996.
A message from John McClane in ‘Die Hard’ (1988).
What inspired your Neverending Christmas List? Can you please explain the minimum requirement for eligibility?
My husband had told me about a list on Letterboxd of Every Horror Film Made from 1895–Present and that gave me the idea to start the neverending Christmas list. My eligibility rules are not strict at all. It can be a film that centers on or around Christmas time. Even New Year’s counts in my book—as long as there’s a moment in the film that has a Christmas song, a Christmas scene, or Christmas decorations. Die Hard is definitely a Christmas film. First of all, it takes place on Christmas Eve at an office Christmas party. There’s that great note that John McClane sends to Hans Gruber on a dead guy’s shirt: “Now I have a machine gun, ho-ho-ho.” Now that’s Christmas! There are a couple of titles that test my relaxed requirements. Examples would be Psycho—there are a few Christmas decorations at the beginning [and Bryan Fuller agrees]—and the documentary Beauty Day by Canadian director Jay Cheel, which has Christmas lights at the end.
And what percentage of the films have you seen?
As of right now, I've watched 20 percent—that’s 882 of the 4,322 films on the list. I’ve got a lot of homework to do. Here’s a few hidden gems I recommend: Mon oncle Antoine, Holiday Affair, Remember the Night, Olivia, On the Twelfth Day…, Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas and One Christmas, which is Katherine Hepburn’s last role.
David Bowie and Bing Crosby sing ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ in ‘Bing Crosby’s Merrie Old Christmas’ (1977).
When does your Christmas movie viewing season start?
I usually start mid-November to try to keep up with the TV rom-coms because they start to air even before Hallowe’en. This year on Hallowe’en night we rewatched The Night of the Hunter and I had forgotten that there was a sequence that was set at Christmas time. It was a perfect segue between Hallowe’en and Christmas, so I started November 1st. As far as how I pick what to watch, I go through my list and randomly pick some. I try to watch as many first-time watches and mix up the genres. But the closer I get to Christmas, the more I want to watch my favorites—for the most part I go with the flow. Christmas Day is usually a day of family time, but I try to sneak in one favorite if I can.
What was the first Christmas film that got you into all of this?
I’ve always loved Christmas and growing up I watched the yearly airings of vintage Christmas cartoons and A Muppet Family Christmas. When Home Alone came out it was an instant obsession, then Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was just as good. Even now it’s our yearly tradition for my husband and I to watch the Home Alones while we decorate the Christmas tree.
If not Home Alone, what is your all-time favorite Christmas film?
It’s a Wonderful Life is up there for me. Partly because growing up I watched it every Christmas Eve and kind of forced my dad to watch it with me. I think he secretly didn’t mind. As a kid, I didn’t dwell on the sad parts of the story, I just wanted to go to that candy shop and run in Bedford Falls like George in that beautiful thick fake snow. Now as an adult, I appreciate the story about a small town coming together to support a man at his lowest of lows more. Jimmy Stewart is amazing as George Bailey and we can all see ourselves at some point in his journey in the film. The chemistry and comedic timing between Stewart and Donna Reed is one of the best. Every time they sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, I always get a bit misty-eyed.
メリークリスマス Japanese style, in ‘Tokyo Godfathers’ (2003).
What have you noticed about the ways in which Christmas films have changed over the years?
In classic Christmas storytelling, there are a lot more religion-centered ones like The Bishop’s Wife and It’s a Wonderful Life. The ’80s and ’90s were about the blockbusters that the whole family could enjoy; Batman Returns, Home Alone, and The Santa Clause. The last twenty years have brought us a lot of different movies, but I do find that the start of the 2000s had a better crop of Christmas movies; Love Actually, Elf, Tokyo Godfathers, Far from Heaven, Bridget Jones’s Diary, About a Boy and so many more. The last decade has been saturated by the rom-coms of Hallmark, Lifetime and their imitators, but from the last five years, a few stand out that could be destined to become Christmas classics: Carol, Little Women and The Night Before.
The best, most rewatched Christmas stories tend to be remade. Do you have a classic Christmas story that you always love, no matter who’s telling it?
Hands down Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. From my favorite—Scrooge—to The Muppet Christmas Carol, to Scrooged. Growing up, I had the book of Mickey’s Christmas Carol and I loved the cartoon adaptation. I love to see the different actors’ excitement and elation at the end when Scrooge wakes up on Christmas Day. My ultimate favorite is Alistair Sim in 1951’s Scrooge. He’s so jubilant asking the maid what day it is and wishing himself Merry Christmas in the mirror. It’s a bit darker than others. When I was a kid, the intro with Jacob Marley and the build-up of the chains scared me, but I couldn’t stop watching. Patrick Stewart’s Ebenezer [in the 1999 TV movie] is also great for his relief that he survived the journey through time. What an actor! An honorable mention to The Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail, which are all based on [the 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie by Miklós László].
A Christmas Treat in ‘Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square’ (2020).
Treat Williams stars in not one but two of this season’s films (who knew he could sing?!). Which actors bring that special spark to festive films for you?
Yes, and boy can he sing! Another actor who can sing and puts me straight in the Christmas mood is Bing Crosby. Those classic songs in White Christmas and Holiday Inn are favorites of mine. Jimmy Stewart is an obvious one. He has that charm that’s perfect for Christmas movies, especially in The Shop Around the Corner.
What’s your guiltiest pleasure on the list? Why do we love cheesy movies so much?!
Every year I watch TCM’s Classic Christmas marathon [but I also watch] the Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas rom-coms. For me, I love them partly because there’s always a happy ending. I love to see all the decorations and all the cute small towns—some I wish existed so I could visit them because they’re so darn cute! Another reason I love them is the nostalgia, as some of the better ones star TV actors from the ’90s and ’00s like Candice Cameron Bure, Lacey Chabert, Jonathan Bennett, Adrian Grenier, Mario Lopez, Alicia Witt, Alison Sweeney and so many others.
One of the other great Christmas-themed lists on Letterboxd is the one about Christmas movie posters with white heterosexual couples wearing red and green—though many members pride themselves on having seen none of them.
I like those movies because I can zone out and enjoy the predictable Christmas ride. However, like other Letterboxd members, I know that these aren’t Oscar-caliber films—though some are better than others! I’m glad that the powers that make these movies are starting to be more inclusive with more POC and LGTBQ+ characters. As a wheelchair user with a physical disability, I was happy to see that Lifetime has an upcoming one called Christmas Ever After, starring Ali Stroker.
Ali Stroker finds love in ‘Christmas Ever After’ (2020).
Indeed, our Make the Yuletide Gay list is an attempt to highlight queer festive films, but the pickings have been slim.
Yes, very slim. There’s been queer characters in Christmas films but it’s your stereotypical gay friend or something like that. This year I feel there’s a shift in the air to be more inclusive. My favorites this year so far have been the star-filled lesbi-rom-com Happiest Season, The Christmas House—featuring a landmark first gay couple in a Hallmark festive film, Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square and Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey—with Ricky Martin! I’m looking forward to checking out A New York Christmas Wedding, The Christmas Setup and Dashing in December.
What is the scariest Christmas film that your horror-loving husband has made you watch?
The best one is Black Christmas. I love that it’s female-centered and ahead of its time in their portrayals. The killer’s POV really gets me into it and still to this day puts me on edge, so much so that an ornament fell off our tree while watching it this year and it freaked me out!
Also, should we be watching The Nightmare Before Christmas on Hallowe’en or on Christmas?
I watch The Nightmare Before Christmas on both holidays so you get the best of both worlds—the ghoulishness of Hallowe’en and the merriment of Christmas!
What other films on your list show Christmas in an unusual light?
The first weird one that popped to mind is The Star Wars Holiday Special. That was weird! Also, from what I’ve watched I would say Eyes Wide Shut, The Ref and 3 Godfathers are not your usual Christmas films. I do have quite a few on the list I have to watch that seem weird and unusual like Elves, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
[Editor’s note: Previous How I Letterboxd interviewee Dave Vis urges you not to watch Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny under any circumstances.]
Which actor is the quintessential Santa Claus?
For me, it’s the Santa in Miracle on 34th Street, played by Edmund Gwenn. He truly embodied the part in the way he plays Kris Kringle. The gentleness and innocence he shows throughout the film is magical. It’s no wonder he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his performance.
Gunn Wållgren in ‘Fanny and Alexander’ (1982).
Of course, so many films in the Christmas canon are American films. What are some of the best Christmas films from around the world?
This question makes me realize I haven’t watched enough Christmas movies from around the world. With that being said here’s a few; A Christmas Tale from France, A Child’s Christmas in Wales from the UK, Tokyo Godfathers from Japan and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander from Sweden. Mon oncle Antoine is a great Canadian film set in a small mining village during Christmas. It reminded me of the stories my mom and grandma talked about their Christmas traditions in their small village.
Are there any overrated classics you want to protest?
I didn’t watch A Christmas Story growing up, so when I finally did watch it as an adult, I didn’t connect with it. The iconic scenes are funny and all, but it’s just okay. Now I’ll be on my hubby’s naughty list!
Does the film marathon continue through that purgatory week between Christmas and New Year? Do you have any film-related traditions to ring in the New Year?
It does continue during that week to a certain extent. Some years after Christmas I’m done and what I haven’t watched goes to the following year but other years I can watch a few more and not feel overwhelmed. On New Year’s we have no traditions per se, but this year we might do a Tarantino marathon.
Christmas season is also synonymous with awards season. You keep track of a lot of Academy Awards history. How are you feeling about the awards season this year?
First off, like many others, I haven’t even set foot in a theater this year and that is sad. I hope that the theater-going experience is not irreparably damaged. One good thing that came from the pandemic is film festivals streamed online and we were fortunate to watch some great titles from TIFF from the comfort of our home in September. I saw Nomadland, and it’s going to be a frontrunner for many of the main categories. I hope Regina King’s One Night in Miami gets some love. Miranda July’s Kajillionaire script is so unique—Evan Rachel Wood and Richard Jenkins should be contenders. I haven’t watched a lot of docs yet but Boys State stands out. I’m also eager to see First Cow, Minari, Ammonite, The Truffle Hunters, Soul, Mank, The Father and Promising Young Woman.
This Christmas is going to be weird for a lot of people. What’s one film you’d recommend for a guaranteed happiness injection?
Weird indeed. If I have to pick just one it would be John Favreau’s Elf. Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf instantly brings a smile to my face. You can feel his joy for Christmas from start to finish. From the classic claymation, to New York City at Christmas, to eating all that sugar, to that hilarious scene with Peter Dinklage—it’s Christmas gold!
And finally, are there some other Letterboxd members you recommend we follow?
Emily, Flurryheaven, Guyzo997, Peter Spencer, Michael Dean, Brent Vanhomwegen, Ara Hiddleston and also some more Christmas lists.
#letterboxd#how i letterboxd#letterboxd community#letterboxd culture#letterboxd members#christmas#christmas films#christmas movies#holiday movies#holiday films#jack moulton
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Locked In.
The director of new documentary Spaceship Earth on snark, queer cinema, the survival of our species, and the ten films he’d take into a biosphere.
In 1991, eight people entered a vivarium to conduct a two-year experiment on whether humans could become fully self-sufficient inside a closed system on this—or any other—planet. Calling themselves the Synergists, the small collective, led by a charismatic chap named John Allen, had backgrounds in theater, art, science and business, and they became media superstars for a short period of time.
With much of the world sheltering in place in cramped apartments, many of us can only dream of being locked-down inside a human-scale terrarium complete with lush gardens, creative friends and a cook as inventive as Biospherian Sally Silverstone. Biosphere 2, which still stands on a ranch in Arizona, looks really inviting right now.
But there are complexities, tensions and controversies in an experiment like this, as documentarian Matt Wolf explores in his new film Spaceship Earth, which blends fantastic archive footage and present-day interviews to bring those two years to light.
Biospherians (left to right): Bernd Zabel, Taber MacMullen (top) Mark Van Thillo, Jane Poynter, Linda Leigh, Roy Walford (middle), Abigail Alling and Sally Silverstone (bottom) posing inside Biosphere 2 in 1990. / Photo courtesy of NEON
Wolf talks with Letterboxd’s editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood about the lessons we can learn from the Biospherians amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the ten films he’d take into a biosphere with him, and the dangers of ignoring young people.
How (and where) are you during this pandemic?
Matt Wolf: I’m doing well. I’m in my living room in the Lower East Side of New York, where I am every day, and I’m doing okay because I'm throwing myself into this film release. It’s been a real relief to have something to do instead of just reading the news and being trapped at home. The timing is uncanny, but I’m seizing the moment. I’m very happy to be participating and doing lots of virtual events and promoting the film so that people will watch it, because I hope that it will give some perspective for what we’re going through.
That’s the next obvious question: how did your work on Spaceship Earth prepare you for this extraordinary moment, and what advice do you have for those of us sheltering in our own tiny biospheres?
It’s funny. My producer Stacey Reiss says the Biospherians were in their world for two years; we were in our filmmaking bubble for two years, too. And so, we could relate in that way but we never thought we would relate so vividly to that experience. And I think, you know, talking to the Biospherians, something that they relayed was that it really was a transformative experience, because they were responsible for creating their own atmosphere, for producing the food they needed to eat, and they really couldn’t take anything for granted—even a breath of fresh air. So when they came out they felt a renewed connection to the larger world, and a different sense of responsibility and consequence for their actions.
I hope that in some ways we all feel transformed by this experience, and it allows us to engage with the world in a different way, because we’re going to have to think and act differently now that we really understand in a visual sense how fragile the world really is.
The exterior of Biosphere 2. / Photo courtesy of NEON
Yes, it feels like the Earth is breathing. It’s such an interesting time.
Yeah. I think we need to make a connection between climate change and what’s happening now. If we don’t change how we behave, the threat of long-term catastrophe is inevitable. Not to take this to a dark place, but it’s true.
From a filmmaking perspective, we’re living in a time where, with social media and smartphones, we are creating our own content every second of every day. One thing that’s endlessly fascinating about archive-based films like yours, is how lucky we are to have had people—who were not necessarily filmmakers themselves—document these extraordinary experiences. What was it like when you first started diving into that footage?
I’m actually always on the lookout for stories that have a strong basis in archival material that can help activate them and bring them into the present. I was certainly determined to tell this story; it was extraordinary and I knew there was a great deal of media coverage. But when I went to meet the Synergists at their ranch, I was brought into this temperature-controlled room that had hundreds of 16mm film canisters, analog video cassettes, thousands of images; it was astonishing that they had had the foresight to not only document what they were doing but also to preserve it in such a meticulous way.
To me it was an indication that they recognized that what they were doing was history, but also kind of poignant because nobody had taken an interest in that archive and tapped into it, so it felt like an incredible opportunity, but also a responsibility as well. It would have been a much less potent film had we not had that material as well as the video diaries that Biospherian Roy Walford shot inside.
For me, it is unprecedented to be able to tell a story—particularly a story with so many narrative twists and turns—that has archival footage that covers literally every beat of the story. I don’t expect that to happen often in my filmmaking career! This was an extraordinary situation.
Biospherian Linda Leigh and tourists. / Photo courtesy of NEON
Okay Matt, you’re heading into the Biosphere, with no internet, and you can only take ten films with you. What are the films that you’d pack to take? To help you choose, we’ll give you some guidelines. What’s the movie you’ve watched the most?
I would say the movie I’ve watched the most, ever, is Todd Haynes’ movie Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. It was a movie made with Barbie dolls about Karen Carpenter’s life. I have just watched that movie over and over and over again, and it’s a bootleg movie because the Carpenter estate suppressed it. It’s one of those things made of lore, in which people exchanged low-quality file transfers, and I got my hands on a high-quality restoration recently. I love showing it to people who haven’t seen it, and it’s a total joy to watch that movie. That is the movie that I would definitely need to have access to if I could never see anything again.
Can you name a favorite documentary; one that has meaning for you?
Every once in a while I watch this documentary that really is in some ways my favorite. To me it’s like taking a bath to watch this film, a bath for my brain. It’s called A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake. I’ve only been able to find it on YouTube; it’s not in distribution. I’m a fan, but the film is just made in such a delicate and visually precise way. It represents the type of filmmaking that I really love. It’s seemingly straightforward as a documentary, but I think in its subtlety it is really just a soothing and absorbing film.
What’s the film you’d take to entertain your fellow Biospherians on a Friday night?
One of my favorites from when i was a kid that I think would be fun to watch on a Friday night is Troop Beverly Hills. If you want just like cotton candy, that would be my version of that.
Shelley Long and her Wilderness Girls in ‘Troop Beverly Hills’ (1989).
A film for the inevitable long, lonely, insomniac nights?
If I was feeling depressed and lonely, and like really leaning into those feelings of isolation, maybe like Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. I remember that as being a film that was at once devastating but also comforting. Just about human connection and human alienation. I just think it’s so deep and true.
What about a film that you like to impress people with because of the way it looks, or makes you feel?
One of my favorite movies that I just love to show to people because it’s so amazing—well, there’s two that fit into that category, movies that are fun to show people because they are unbelievable and true. One is Hail the New Puritan by the artist Charlie Atlas. It’s a documentary about Michael Clark, a kind of punk ballet dancer from London in the 80s, who collaborated with Leigh Bowery and The Fall. Charlie, the filmmaker, made it in the model of A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles vehicle, and it follows this gay punk ballet dancer on his nightlife and pseudo-celebrity adventures through 80s punk London.
And then my other film that is too good to be true is A Bigger Splash [the 1973 Jack Hazen documentary, not the 2015 Luca Guadagnino feature], which is a similarly constructed documentary about David Hockney that feels like a fiction film staged with all the characters from his orbit during the height of his popularity in swinging London. It’s such a great depiction of an artist’s life and it’s completely baffling how the filmmaker was able to generate such access and to construct a film that feels so dramatized.
What film has had the biggest impact on you, whether for its meaning or for its execution?
One of the films that had a big effect on me and that I really think the communal experience is central to, is Derek Jarman’s film Blue. He made it when he was dying of AIDS and it’s a lush soundscape with a kind of like non-linear stream of thoughts coming from Derek Jarman, and a beautiful soundscape, with material from Brian Eno. It’s a feature-length film where the screen is just blue. Every time that film screens in the cinema, I take the opportunity to go because it’s almost a religious experience. A cinematic religious experience. I feel really moved by it but it also is something to share with other people, in an unusual way.
And a film that’s stuck with you since you were young?
American Family—the documentary series that gave birth to reality TV. In the 1970s Alan and Susan Raymond made this epic PBS cinema-vérité series that followed this upper-middle-class San Diego, Californian family. In one episode, their son Lance Loud moves to New York and is living at the Chelsea Hotel and his mum comes to visit and he comes out of the closet. It is a unique, different world, many of the Andy Warhol superstars are there. It [felt like] the first time a gay person had appeared on television and the drama unfolds over many episodes.
It was this huge controversy, people thought they were disgusting and perverse for putting their lives on television like this, but it also is kind of mundane and boring, just like a lot of the early cinema vérité, but it really laid the groundwork for what would become reality television, except it’s not constructed for the camera in the way that we expect these shows to be. I like watching serialized family stories like that, and this is the foundation of it.
What’s a recent queer film you’d take in with you?
There’s this movie I was obsessed with. I just thought of it the other day: Saint Laurent, by Bertrand Bonello. It came out a few years ago and it’s a completely narcotic, kaleidoscopic biopic, and I think it’s so rare that biopics actually inhabit the psyches of their famous protagonist and that the actors don’t just feel like they’re doing pantomime. This film really captures not only the disintegrating psychology of Yves Saint Laurent, but also the context of the gay subcultures of Paris in 1970s and the 80s. It’s this super-vivid depiction of subculture, but through a very narcotic lens. I just was obsessed with that film. It’s not really considered ‘queer film’, I think it’s more considered a biopic, but to me it’s one of the more interesting depictions of queer culture in recent years.
Gaspard Ulliel as Yves Saint Laurent in Bertrand Bonello’s ‘Saint Laurent’ (2014).
And finally, a fond, family-viewing memory?
I always loved Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favorite films but every time I see it, it’s like, “Oh, I get why I was obsessed with that as a kid”. I love the visual world and Gene Wilder is so bizarre and a little creepy. If you look at it as an adult there’s something kind of perverse about it, but I love a kind of analog fantasy world! So that film is, you might say, delicious.
You could say Spaceship Earth is a kind of analog fantasy world—the Biosphere itself is a living fantasy. I’m interested to know what you’d say to younger film lovers of today about what they might get out of seeing these avant-garde theater-makers-turned-Biospherians of yesterday?
This film is more targeted towards younger people. I feel like there is a certain cynicism amongst adults that completely discounts young people and their ability to reimagine the world in creative ways. This is something I really dealt with in my film Teenage, the history of the invention of teenagers: adults always try to control young people. They corral the inventiveness of young people and the languages that they speak and invent. Young people all fight back, trying to define the world on their own terms, and this is really a film about a group of people who came together in their 20s and decided to reimagine and redefine, literally, a new world. There are all sorts of forces of establishment that tried to stop them and question and discount them.
We live in a world that’s pretty cynical and brings a lot of skepticism to people who try to do things differently, and I think as a 20-year-old you might see yourself in the idealism of these unusual people. Don’t you think that’s true? That, like, 20-year-olds aren’t as snarky and cynical? I feel like 20-year-olds are earnest and sincere and idealistic. Maybe I’m out of touch, but that was my experience and part of what I’ve observed in other young people.
I just feel like that ‘snarkiness’ that is often represented in the media is the cynicism that comes with the bitterness of life experience. And when you’re young and don’t have hardships and disappointments that have maybe hardened you with a certain kind of cynicism, it is possible to think more expansively and more optimistically about the world. We really need to tap into that energy. It’s not really helpful at this moment to, I don’t know, to shoot down anyone who’s trying something new. I hadn’t thought about that, but I'd be really curious what young people think of the film.
That’s a useful perspective, and makes me think of how, over the last couple of years, we have seen so much grassroots activism from young people, and now with the global lockdown there’s been a quieting of the youth climate movement, at least out there on the streets.
You’re totally right. It was this big loud wave of activity and now with the pandemic it has really been washed over. But what they're talking about is long-term consequences, and if we don’t address the underlying issues that have related to the collapse of our society as a result of uncontrollable environmental factors, the survival of our species is threatened.
Related content
Matt Wolf’s 10 Films for Quarantine on Letterboxd
20 Films for Earth Day 2020
10 Great Space Science Films
‘Spaceship Earth’ is available for virtual screenings and on streaming services now. Our thanks to NEON.
#matt wolf#spaceship earth#biosphere ii#biospherians#john allen#documentary#queer film#queer filmmaker#letterboxd#NEON#virtual screening
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Most Picture.
There are many ways to predict how the Oscars will go. How much money is the studio spending on the campaign? How highly rated are the nominated films? How much work have nominees put in during the awards season? Is it simply their time?
For this 2019 horse race, we thought it would be fun to go for a different metric. A fool-proof statistical analysis to find not what is the Best Picture, but what is the Most. And with that, we set about investigating the stats on rewatches of the eight films nominated for Best Picture.
It turns out that plenty in the Letterboxd community have logged the Best Picture nominees more than once, and in some obsessive cases, well into double figures. We had a feeling, based on anecdotal mood and general noise, that A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody would be right up there in the stanning stakes. And they are (read on for our Q&A with Letterboxd’s most obsessive A Star Is Born fan). But also: The Favourite made the top three, and the film you have rewatched the most left the other seven in the dust.
Without further ado, Letterboxd presents the 2019 “Most” Picture Awards, ranked by the number of members who’ve watched the 2019 Academy Award Best Picture nominees two or more times (total in brackets, as of today).
Each film features a review from its greatest fan, i.e. the Letterboxd member who has logged the film more than any other (at the time of writing).
And the 2019 “Most” Picture Awards go to…
1. Black Panther (13,268)
“Would I see this movie a personal record high of seven times in theaters? For Wakanda? Without question.” —Krys (12 watches, seven in cinemas)
2. A Star Is Born (5,943)
“TIRED: discourse about whether or not the film hates pop music, all think pieces about whether the film thinks Ally is a sell out and what that means for feminism, discourse on whether Why Did You Do That? is a bop or not.
WIRED: discourse about whether or not Jackson Maine even had an ass good enough to inspire such pop perfection.” —Juliette (16 watches)
3. The Favourite (5,378)
“I miss this so much I dreamt it. Instead of riding, Sarah was doing cartwheels.” —CBotty (15 watches)
4. Bohemian Rhapsody (4,928)
“The critics can go fuck themselves. THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE I HAVE SEEN! (for the fifth time).” —Iain (16 watches)
5. Roma (4,270)
“Yes I’ve seen this twice today, yes i cried like a bitch both times, yes this is the only movie.” —Eve (7 watches)
“My feelings regarding Roma are complicated to say the least. It’s like dating the girl of your dreams, only to realize that you are completely incompatible, which ends in desperate clinginess for an ideal that was never true to begin with. It’s been a strange journey of love, disappointment, and eventual acceptance, where I’ve come to terms with my feelings. I still admire the hell out of it, and I hope it wins all the awards in the world.” —Orrin (7 watches, admittedly more times than they have actually seen it)
6. BlacKkKlansman (3,669)
“This movie is so fucking powerful, and I loved every second of it.” —Kota (6 watches)
7. Green Book (1,370)
“OK what a way to start the new year. I love this movie so much. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali are for sure going to get nominated (and it’s well deserved).” —Anthony (5 watches)
8. Vice (1,164)
“8.4/10” —Harrison (4 watches)
Unpacking the re-watchability of A Star Is Born.
“I just expect it to be exactly what it is and to be there.”
Of the eight Best Picture finalists, Black Panther has been out the longest, had the largest budget, and has done the rounds of the streaming services. It was always gonna take the top spot in a rewatch match. But to figure out the rewatchability of second-place-getter A Star Is Born, we went to the film’s hardest stanner, Juliette, to help us understand why fans keep coming back even though it’s a complicated watch.
While Juliette’s multiple reviews are meme-tastic, quippy, punctuation-free gems of observation, when we asked her to explain herself, she went remarkably deep. Her replies may just make you want to take another look at Ally and Jack. [Note: this interview contains spoilers for the film’s plot.]
How many times do you think you have seen A Star Is Born?
Juliette: I think I have seen the film sixteen times? I know for certain I have seen it fourteen times in theaters, but I’m not sure how many times I’ve watched it in the comfort of my own home since it’s been released on digital. There’s just something about the energy in a theater while this film is being screened. It gives me chills just thinking about it!
What keeps you coming back to it?
It's so hard to pinpoint what exactly it is that draws me back to this film time and time again. I love a good love story when properly executed! I’m kind of obsessed with celebrity culture! I love a great musical! And like many people, the subjects of this film: alcoholism, mental illness, suicide, self-doubt, the cultivation of the self, love, mentorship, and reconciliation of one’s experiences with a flawed parental figure are all things that have permeated my life. Some of these things, I understand and have a firm grasp on, they feel definitive and their impacts are a tangible output. Some of these things, I still grapple with daily. There is little definition, largely just confusion and sporadic outbursts of pain.
When I return to this film, which I often do, the thing I don’t expect it to give me is answers. I don’t expect the film to be able to define for me what I must come to define for myself. I don’t expect it to clarify my confusion. I don’t expect it to eradicate the pain. I just expect it to be exactly what it is and to be there.
There’s a scene towards the end of this film where, while mourning the loss of his brother, Bobby explains how he heard one of Jackson’s songs performed at a bar. At first, it angers him. He feels like no one really knew Jackson. But then, something shifts and just hearing the song begins to soothe him. It reminds him that, in spite of their trauma and their turmoil, it isn’t all for nothing.
That’s what this film is for me. It soothes me. It reminds me that the facilitation of our healing can come through art. It reminds me that for people, who once felt broken and irreparable, it is possible to find love and happiness not just with another person, but within one’s self. It reminds me that our pain and our devastation can be met in equal measure with (and even maybe be overcome by) our brilliance, our triumph, and our devotion to one another.
What have you noticed with each rewatch?
What I notice most with each subsequent rewatch of the film is what a massive undertaking the sound editing and mixing for this film must have been. I have such deep and profound respect and admiration for all the work that went into crafting the audio for this film! The film is such a visceral experience, one that truly engages all of the senses. I remember physically recoiling in the theater the first time I heard the sound of Jackson’s tinnitus. I remember feeling my entire seat shake in time with the music during the concert sequences.
I also have a sincere recommendation! Once you watch the film a few times, I really encourage you to watch the film just through the lens of watching Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real in the background of the pivotal scenes. It adds so much dimension to scenes you thought you already knew!
What is the single greatest scene in this version of A Star Is Born?
As clichéd or “basic” as it may seem to say, there is no denying that the greatest scene in this film is when Ally joins Jackson on stage and the two perform Shallow together. It’s a cataclysmic and mesmerizing moment.
It’s the way Jackson physically steps back and acquiesces his spotlight to new talent. It’s the combination of awe and support in Jackson’s eyes as he watches Ally assume center-stage. It’s the way Ally assumes her place at the mic for the first time. It’s how Ally—all at once terrified, shocked, overwhelmed, empowered, and free—finds a version of herself she had long thought impossible to access under the stage lights. The arc of which is punctuated by Gaga’s impeccable performance in this scene, most noticeably by the shift in her physicality, from her hands covering her eyes, unable to make eye contact, to grabbing the mic and belting her now patented cathartic wail.
It’s the way, two artists—no, two people—are separated physically on the stage singing into their individual microphones, but slowly find their way to meet in the middle and sing as one. In itself, this scene is the film in miniature. If this scene hadn’t worked, it’s very unlikely the rest of the film would have worked.
Not to mention, the scene is just absolutely stunning. Of course, the music is heavenly, that’s a given. In terms of the composition, I love how the camera moves around and captures each protagonist in different ways. And the color palette is gorgeous. The way that blue and red light dance around our protagonists throughout the sequence is just jaw-dropping. It’s the kind of high an artist, and in a turn a viewer, could spend their whole life chasing.
What do you wish haters understood about the film’s greatness?
My first priority would be to tell the haters that Lady Gaga is not playing herself in A Star Is Born! Just because Gaga is a singer playing a singer, doesn’t mean she isn’t acting!
Furthermore, to me, it feels unfair that the power of her performance is sometimes diminished just because she sings in the film. Anyone can sing in a way that is technically proficient with enough training, but to tell a story through song? To act a song? To perform with every iota of your being musically? That’s a whole other skill and it is just as worthy of recognition and respect as any other leading performance this year.
Secondly, I would like to convey that just because something is a remake doesn’t mean that it lacks value or that it lacks something to say. I can’t pinpoint what exactly it is about this story that seems to capture the collective imagination every few decades, but I think it has something to do with how it presents ascension at the expense of descent, art as both artifice and freedom of authentic expression, and love in spite of sacrifice and self-destruction. There’s something about that cocktail that becomes the perfect receptacle for the expression and examination of our cultural anxieties.
Its malleable formula allows for questions to be asked about how we think about celebrity and fame, the self-identification process, and the value of art. In that sense, a remake of A Star Is Born is vital and refreshing, and certainly not tired and uninspired, and most importantly, it doesn’t lack something to say. It’s inherently reflective of the culture it was created in by its very nature. It allows us to ponder not just how Hollywood tells stories about itself, but also how we tell stories about ourselves. And if you ask me, there’s so much value in that.
What do you think should win Best Picture at this year’s Oscars?
Well, I’m clearly biased towards A Star Is Born, but I would not be mad to see Roma or The Favourite walk off with the evening’s top prize!
What do you think will win Best Picture?
My heart says Roma, my head says Green Book.
#oscars#oscars 2019#academy awards#roma#best picture#the favourite#black panther#a star is born#film#movies#letterboxd
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