April + May 2023 Media Roundup
sorry i'm late
Illustration: Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Hello friends!
The past couple months have been quite busy, so apologies for this super duper late roundup! I’ll be covering both April and May here, with June/July following later on in another double post
Some highlights:
In April I gave a lecture on horror and the internet for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and it was so, so fun. If you’re interested in spooky academia I highly recommend keeping an eye on their programming: https://miskatonicinstitute.com/
I wrote about some beloved films over at Screen Slate
I chatted with the sci-fi film podcast They Came From Outer Space about Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2012)
If you’re reading this, thanks for coming along <3
FILMS
How to Blow Up A Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber, 2023)
I’m still rather stunned that this movie (a) exists, and (b) got the release that it did. I know there’s been criticism of it from a couple leftist film critics, some of which I think is valid, some of which I think is ridiculous. All in all, it’s great that a movie that depicts such radical politics without equivocation saw a wide-ish release. Packaging the ideas in Malm’s original book in a wrapper of hot young actors and the conventions of a tense 70s political thriller is a-ok with me and makes for great propaganda. It’s an unapologetically ideological film that simultaneously doesn’t rest on idealism. Yes, the plot to blow up the pipeline succeeds (spoiler alert), but that doesn’t mean our heroes are off scott-free like Ocean’s Eleven. The closing montage takes us from terminal illness to surveillance; life keeps going and the individual consequences are coming. But as we see other people clad in all black on their way to sabotage yachts, it’s clear that other consequences are coming as well. Ultimately the key to How to Blow Up A Pipeline rests in the rupture that can happen in a single action, in a single day, in a single hour, that radiates outward in the socio-political fabric.
P.S. If you think characters like the punk couple getting so horny by property destruction that they need a quickie in the desert are ridiculous, you may be right, but unfortunately these people are very real in the young activist landscape, sorry!
There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
I caught this at the beautiful National Gallery of Art theater in DC and what a treat it was. Apparently Sirk originally wanted to film There’s Always Tomorrow (which is adapted from the novel by Ursula Parrott) in color, but Universal refused. And while I’m a tremendous fan of Sirk’s trademark colorful melodrama, the black and white suits this film and its more emotionally restrained subject matter so well. Fred MacMurray is a successful toy designer with the perfect suburban family, thus the perfect life everyone wants on paper. His wife is dutiful and lovely, even if she is always likely to put the childrens’ needs and whims before him all the time. When an old friend played by Barbara Stanwyck, an independent successful woman in her own right, comes back into his life (and impresses his family as well) he begins to wonder about roads not taken. While the characters feel trapped by the expectations and conventions of adult life and marriage, there is constantly the inverse of that at play: the fragility of the whole deal, and just how easy it is for it all to fall apart if one person just stepped outside the door. By the end, that door is left shut, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was cracked open in the first place. Allegedly Sirk also wanted to end a very overtly symbolic shot of one of MacMurray’s toys, a plastic robot falling on the floor and spinning in circles, but the “nuclear family is intact and all is right with the world” coda that one assumes was the studio’s demand ironically creates a more haunting finale: a loyal wife who has no idea how close her husband was to leaving, a husband making a decision to continue performing his role, and their children’s innocence dashed. In the last 2 minutes the family basically steps into a different movie from the one they were actually in.
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2023)
This is the happiest I’ve been in a theater so far this year. The work that Kelly Reichert and Michelle Williams do together deserves to go down in the cinema pantheon of director/actor collaborations. Williams’s performance as Lizzy is representation for all us girls whose brows are constantly furrowed, always contemplating, always a little bit frustrated. I’ve never seen the life of artists depicted with such care, from the process to the competition to the camaraderie (frenemies?), as well as showing an artistic educational environment that’s not skewering the artists within it. Throughout the movie you constantly see people in progress on various pieces: weaving, painting, sculpting, installing. You rarely see anything finished. And it’s so quiet by thrilling to see everyone just making, the tactility filling the background of each scene.
OTHER FIRST WATCHES
Disco Boy (Giacomo Abbruzzese, 2023, New Directors/New Films)
Family Time (Tia Kouvo, 2023, New Directors/New Films)
Enys Men (Mar Jenkin, 2023)
Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell, 1984)
Air (Ben Affleck, 2023)
Honeycomb (Avalon Fast, 2022)
Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981)
Indecent Proposal (Adrian Lyne, 1993)
Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin, 2023)
Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1988)
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk, 2023)
Tightrope (Richard Tuggle, 1984)
Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2023)
Fast X (Louis Leterrier, 2023)
Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954)
Reality (Tina Satter, 2023)
REWATCHES
Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994)
The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995)
Smiley Face (Gregg Araki, 2007)
Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014)
Cruising (William Friedken, 1980)
Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978)
C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, 1984)
