for reels: December 2020
A monthly look back at my movie diary on Letterboxd.
Welcome to for reels, a monthly look back at my movie diary on Letterboxd // Today, I’m looking back at December 2020 //
Well FUCK guys, welcome to 2021. It’s got everything shitty about 2020 only our flailing cult-leader president incited his MAGA minions to stage a failed fascist-clown coup at the Capitol.
God, it feels weird to be looking back at all the entertainment I passively consumed in December when, between then and now, all this wild shit happened in one fucking day. But seein’ how it’s a new month and technically a new year and I honestly don’t know what else to do but bludgeon myself with movies and memes and politics every day I guess I’ll just keep this ball rollin’.
I spent most of December watching comfort movies, holiday movies, and new movies I wanted to either catch up on or rewatch as I solidified my year-end list (coming soon). Not a ton of surprises but certainly a pleasant mix of cozy holiday favorites and great new shit that makes the state of cinema feel slightly less apocalyptic.
Now to the fake awards for 9 notable joints from my December diary.
Best New Movie: Let Them All Talk (2020)
Like I said, I watched a lot of great 2020 movies in December (highly recommend First Cow, Lovers Rock, and Emma, among others), but the cream of the crop was Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk, most of which the director shot and edited himself with a minimal cast and crew on an actual cruise ship over the course of its two-week Atlantic crossing. Boy do we love Soderbergh or do we love Soderbergh?? The most nimble, ahead-of-the-curve director of his generation. He still experiments in ways other, equally or more “successful” directors wish they could. Guy says “fuck it I’ll try filming a thing on a cruise ship real quick” and it’s a moving, funny, transcendent delight in the eye of a global shit storm. This one made my top 10 so stay tuned for a more in-depth discussion on it soon.
Best New-to-Me Movie: The Silent Partner (1978)
Finally checked this one out after years of seeing stills and memes from it on Film Twitter every holiday season. Did not disappoint. Elliot Gould and Christopher Plummer in Canadian giallo. Fuckin’ rad. Highly recommend adding it to your holiday horror/thriller rotation if you’re into that sort of thing.
Most Rewarding Rewatch: Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)
Started another Star Wars rewatch at the end of the month and I’m happy to report that I’m still right about The Phantom Menace and the rest of you are wrong. It rules. A lot of people have come back around to the prequels in recent years and I’m certainly one of them. Though absent of the soul, spunk, and character at the heart of the original trilogy, the prequels are gorgeous experiments in pop-mythology and fantasy filmmaking, and to me The Phantom Menace remains the weirdest and prettiest of the three. George Lucas hits the digital effects-but-still-shot-on-film sweet spot of the late ‘90s/early 2000s, and really digs into the Flash Gordon roots of the franchise to create an undeniably beautiful outlier.
Least Rewarding Rewatch: Mank (2020)
Last month Nic and I posted a Discord chat of our initial reactions to David Fincher’s Mank. We’ve both rewatched it since and both of us now favor it significantly less than we did. I still like the movie and think pieces of it are excellent (still a big fan of the political stuff. Class-oriented discussions in Hollywood films are so fucking rare I’ll take ‘em where I can get ‘em, ya know?) but once the hype wore off, the flaws in it became too apparent and the whole thing started looking a lot less cohesive. I sympathize with Fincher for wanting to make this thing that his Dad wrote and I think he added something special to the Citizen Kane discourse. At this point I just feel like he was too close to the material in an unhelpful way so it didn’t come together how he intended. Siiick black & white tho.
Most Pleasant Surprise: Tenet (2020)
If you read Nic’s latest on the recent Twitter thread of Liam Neeson drunkenly pissing himself as a metaphor for Hollywood, you’ll recall Christopher Nolan’s public temper tantrums over Warner Bros. decision to move its 2021 releases to streaming. You may also recall that Nolan went all in on trying to get people out to theaters to see his latest film this summer when really NO ONE should have been doing that. All this shit turned me off of Tenet, so it was pretty weird to have finally watched it and LOVED it once it became available for home viewing. The extent to which this movie is just an overt love letter to Bond movies is honestly a chefs-kiss win for me as a Bond fan. And like a Bond movie, I never fully knew what was going on plot-wise and, get this, didn’t care, because I didn’t feel like the movie was urging me to care. It isn’t precious about its sci-fi time travel concepts the way other Nolan movies are, thank god. Anyway, I have a lot more thoughts on Tenet’s minute-by-minute riff on Bond so stay tuned for those in the next addition of “cutting room.”
Dankest 4K: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
Tenet and the holiday season put me in the mood for Bond, so the day before Christmas Eve I got high and fired up the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 4K available on Amazon Prime while I wrapped presents. At some point, I think every Bond fan has to accept that this is the best and most beautiful Bond. A new wave/60s pop-art collage of the series thus far. As Steven Soderbergh puts it, “It’s like [director] Peter Hunt (who cut the first five Bond films) took all the ideas of the French new wave and blended them with Eisenstein in a Cuisinart to create a grammar that still tops today’s how-fast-can-you-cut aesthetic.”
Walked So Halloween Could Run: Black Christmas (1974)
Black Christmas has become annual holiday viewing for Jenna and I in recent years. Was a real treat to watch it in 2020 at a double-feature drive-in with Silent Night, Deadly Night (put on by the great Frida Cinema, which I admonish you to support if you live in LA or Orange County). If you haven’t seen Black Christmas, you should know it’s a fucking banger of a proto-slasher that bridges the gap between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, and is kind of better than Halloween if you ask me (no disrespect to John Carpenter, who’s got three to five of the greatest sci-fi and/or horror movies ever made in his filmography).
Best A Christmas Carol Adaptation: Scrooge (1970)
There are like a million adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol out there, and maybe your family had a favorite that you watched annually growing up idk. Mine did and it was 1970’s Scrooge, which I still watch every Christmas Eve. Probably the nostalgia talking but it remains imo the best Christmas Carol adaptation. Interesting aesthetic sweet spot between classic Hollywood and modern filmmaking, Albert Finney’s take on the Scrooge character is weird and original and iconic, and the musical numbers are pretty fuckin’ fire. There’s also a great apocryphal scene in a literal Hell that looks like Heat Miser’s pad in The Year Without a Santa Claus. What else do ya need??
Most Inexplicable Movie Ever: Cats (2019)
Kid, I’ve flown from one end of the movie galaxy to the other, and I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. But I’ve never seen anything as viscerally and grotesquely WTF as 2019’s Cats. Finally took an edible and indulged in this mfer over the holiday break and I gotta say, I don’t think I’ve seen something this inexplicable in my entire life. Anyone who has ever used the phrase “cursed image” to describe anything other than an image from this movie was barking up the wrong tree. Went in blind knowing nothing about the stage musical, so it was a perverse joy to balk at the utter nonsense of the text itself. As for everything else, I just. don’t. know. what to say. All the CGI cats are relentlessly strange, their faces are literally impossible to process at any given moment, and their proportions are literally never consistent from scene to scene. I could go on ‘cause seriously this is the most wack thing to exist. If you’re curious about how fucking wrong a rushed, bloated Hollywood project can get, by all means check it out.
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