for reels: time out for fun
What I watched in the back half of November.
Welcome to for reels, sorta-weekly highlights from my movie diary. Here’s what I watched in the back half of November.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) - rewarding (4K) rewatch
Top ‘o the month with the holiday season on the horizon I saw this, the ultimate crowd pleaser of 2022, at Target on 4K at a reasonable price and couldn’t pass it up. Now my home setup is no IMAX or nothin’ but this shit does hold up at home lemme tell ya. Highly recommend listening to the Chapo Trap House review for a comprehensive rundown of Top Gun: Maverick as both a peerless, emotionally rewarding Hollywood thrill ride and a sad, extravagant piece of Biden-era propaganda (the line “Put THAT in your pentagon budget!” got me cacklin’ every time). Not sure I can fully articulate why, but this is like a better Star Wars movie than the last couple Star Wars movies. Like if Patty Jenkins still does that Rogue Squadron movie, I can’t imagine it not feeling redundant and obsolete because Maverick already exists know what I mean?
You can rent Top Gun: Maverick on Prime.
Grave Encounters (2011) - pretty good for found footage mids
The Mrs. was hungry for a good ole fashioned scare so we gave Grave Encounters a shot. Makes excellent use of the ghost-hunting reality show craze or whatever, trapping a production crew inside a haunted mental hospital to face a hoard of “real” supernatural entities. The more explicit effects and scares (overly dependent on mid-CGI) mostly don’t work, but the premise, performances, and time-warpy, inter-dimensional terror subliminally infused into the setting make this a worthwhile watch for casual and maybe even more discriminating found footage enthusiasts.
You can stream Grave Encounters on Shudder or Prime (free w/ads).
Black Adam (2022) - gods and wizards punching and/or fist-bumping each other
What can I say, didn't hate it folks. Mostly enjoyed even. Other than The Batman, this is like for sure the best superhero movie I've seen this year LMAO. It's, like, crazy dumb but at least it's the kind of modern superhero dumb I can hang with (y'all can make fun of Snyderverse slow-mo punches and whatnot all you want but I'll take that shit directly in my veins every time). Good mix of both intentional and unintentional humor you don't find in the more contained, deliberate Marvel joints. Also, my guy Pierce Brosnan steals the fuckin' show as Dr. Fate, currently the DCEU answer to Dr. Strange I guess. Honestly my main takeaway was Dr. Fate > Dr. Strange kindly don't @ me.
Black Adam is still in theaters.
PlayTime (1967) - “so you’re living under the gun”
My first foray into the work of legendary French comic filmmaker Jacques Tati. Absolutely floored by it — an endlessly absurd, relentlessly funny cinematic fractal of controlled chaos — the engine still running our modern world. Life may be a simulation but that don’t mean we ain’t a bunch a lab rats making a futile mockery of its mazes you dig? Brings to mind the words of DEVO:
Tension mounts in a foreign place
The screw turns someone callsTime out for fun!
Time out for fun!So you're living under the gun
Circumstances have you on the run
A doctor frowns you feel bad
Take this you've just been had!Don't you lose it now listen to us
Everything's gonna be all right
You can rent Playtime on Prime.
We Have to Leave Here Together (2022) - doin’ the “I love you” dance
I'm in what I imagine is a tiny fraction of folks who discovered YouTuber/filmmaker Joel Haver via his feature-length films and not his shorts and sketches and animations and such. Because of that, no matter how many great shorts this poor guy puts out in a given month, I'm over here waiting with bated breath for his next feature to drop. But hey, Haver never disappoints and certainly hasn't with his latest, We Have to Leave Here Together. Leveraging his approachable, sympathetic persona as both a creator and performer, Haver plays both central roles in this small, quiet, devastating film about a couple whose Airbnb weekend alone together becomes what several Letterboxd reviewers are calling the most authentic depiction of a breakup in ages. Amazing to pull off literally all on your own, then again this ain't Haver's first time at the rodeo.
Just smash the play button above to watch We Have to Leave Here Together.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - “your love for the halflings’ leaf has clearly slowed your mind”
So this summer I was fully in my Tolkien era. Read the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time and got well settled into the Tolker's* lifestyle (*smoking weed and reading LOTR on the beach while listening to Led Zeppelin). Anyway, watched the movies over the Thanksgiving holiday, first time since reading the books (or watching the new Amazon show). Main takeaway: Fellowship remains the best of the three (I've oscillated between it and Return of the King over the years), a lush, ethereal, rousing rendition of Tolkien's world and characters, equally attuned to the needs of literary adaptation and Hollywood-epic making. Just an absolute high-fantasy banger that, for whatever reason, wouldn't have been quite as good had it been made only a year earlier or later than it was.
You can stream The Fellowship of the Ring (theatrical and extended editions) on HBO Max.
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull‘s History Lesson (1976) - “guess nostalgia ain’t what it used to be”
Robert Altman trolls America for its bicentennial. A show business satire as much as it is a takedown of American Western mythology, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (“if you’re not into the whole brevity thing”) stars Paul Newman as William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, gettin’ on in years and leveraging his own myth as prolific frontiersman and indigenous-peoples hunter to put on an extravagant wild west show for the masses (true story), which Altman frames as both the birth of show business and a metaphor for showbiz today. Newman famously portrayed Buffalo Bill as the real face of himself, McQueen, Gable, and every other macho movie star who ever lived. There’s as much to find in common with the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! here as with, say, Altman’s more acclaimed revisionist western, McCabe and Mrs Miller. Watched the morning of Thanksgiving and couldn’t have picked anything more apropos, really, as we all nervously wait for the sun to set on the American experiment… only thing with the sun is it always comes back around to smack ya in the face the next morning.
You can watch Buffalo Bill and the Indians on YouTube (free w/ ads).
Bones and All (2022) - “life’s such a treat and it's time you taste it”
In addition to Lord of the Rings, I also got really into KISS this summer. That's right, the hottest band in the land, KISS! Watched (and loved) Detroit Rock City in August and the whole KISS brand and imagery and sound sorta stuck with me as an apt, cheap hot American avatar for my cheap hot American summer. Anyway, had no idea both of my summer obsessions would pay off big time a few months later in Bones and All, Luca Guadanino's Twilight to the tune of Texas Chainsaw. Talk about a chefs kiss amirite? Probably the best Guadanino joint I've seen. Based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis, Bones and All is a coming-of-age romance between two cannibals (Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet) or "feeders," in the parlance of the film, set in middle America during the Reagan years. This particular cocktail of road movie, '80s teen drama, and '70s proto-slasher elements, infused with the magic of Arseni Khachaturan's cinematography and a fuckin’ stacked cast really goin' for it, make Bones and All a perverse, sensual, and emotionally riveting American genre-fable well worth checking out while it’s still in theaters, if you're game for a bit of gore of course.
Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery (2022) - best documentary of the year
The streaming era has been a big one for documentaries, making them more mainstream than ever before. Here’s the thing, though, the best documentaries being made today are on YouTube, and they’re seldom even thought of as “documentaries,” nor are the folks who make them considered “documentarians.” We know them as YouTubers and content creators. Not the worst thing in the world, but I think many of these longform explainers or niche deep-dive videos you come across on YouTube should be respected as the great pieces of documentary filmmaking they really are.
Case in point: Kevin Perjurer’s Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery, the lastest long-form documentary to drop on his Defunctland channel, which covers theme park history and other millennial nostalgia obsessions with a keen balance of enthusiasm, humor, world-weariness, and journalistic scrutiny. Starting with a simple internet question — Who wrote the four-note Disney Channel theme that played over the promo bumpers in the 2000s? — Perjurer takes us on an investigative journey that ends in a more profound place than the original question could have suggested. He connects with the people behind the faceless corporate marketing monoliths that house these projects, and finds a story of human creativity seeping through the cracks as long as the monolith still needs artists to actually do the work. Don’t know what else to call this if not the best documentary of the year.
Just hit play above to watch Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery.
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