for reels: to hell with poverty (we'll get drunk on cheap wine)
What I watched in the first half of May
Welcome to for reels, highlights from my movie diary. Here’s what I watched in the top half of May.
Hey, as both a film ‘n TV critic and someone who writes for a living in many capacities, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the WGA strike. All’s I can say is we’re really seein’ the literal manifestation of this quote from Robert Altman’s The Player (a prophetic Hollywood satire about a studio executive who murders a screenwriter and gets away with it):
I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.
Pay people sufficiently for their work—an edict so simple, practical, and obviously right that our entire economic system is built around obfuscating it. If your extinction as an artisan of any kind in the labor market feels imminent, that’s probably by design. Make no mistake, it’s been fight or flight the moment you entered the workforce (and much earlier than that). And as a couple of the movies we’ll soon get to would have us know, self-defense often demands loud, collective action.
Anyway, here’s some stuff I watched in the top half of the month.
The Neon Demon (2016) - Refn’s Showgirls
Hadn’t seen this one in a minute and it came up on the “physical media Tuesday” raffle at our house where we pick out something at random from our Blu-rays, DVDs and VHS. I feel like there’s two types ‘o folks in this world: those who like or acknowledge Drive and those who actually dig on the rest of Nicolas Winding Refn’s nonsense. I remain firmly one ‘o the latter, and though this ain’t my personal fave from Denmark’s most ardent neon schlockmeister, it certainly holds up as a worthwhile Refn joint. Aaron Casias, co-host of Hit Factory, a podcast about the films and politcs of the ‘90s, called this one “no less than Refn’s Showgirls,” and though a masterpiece on par with Papa Verhoeven’s magnum opus this ain’t, it definitely is Refn’s attempt at a Showgirls-type deal for 2010s Los Angeles, very much in tonal and stylistic sync with 2013’s Only God Forgives and the Amazon series Too Old to Die Young (not to sound like a tool here but I feel like I’m one of five or six total sickos who earnestly loves both those joints with the fervor of the guy from the “poetic cinema” meme lol).
You can stream The Neon Demon on Prime.
The Covenant (2023) - Ritchie’s Rambo II
Ritchie’s on a roll, man. Having just released the Statham/Plaza spy farce Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (jfc that title still kills me lol), our generation-defining British crime thriller remix auteur turned industry battle axe for hire is out here with a classic imperial actioner. And “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” so advertised, is no less than Guy Ritchie’s Rambo II—a perversely popcorny chest-pumping “go back for the dudes we left behind” type Hollywood war story where both Jake Gyllenhaal and co-star Dar Salim (no less than a revelatory presence here) get ample opportunity to cook. I think pretty much everyone acknowledges Gyllenhaal as a great actor but he’s still somehow underrated. He’s really on that Pacino level of deep well of interiority meets blaring, theatrical exteriority—enthusiasm and full-throated performer’s bravado vary from film to film, but he’s never not great to watch.
Anyway, Salim plays an interpreter in Afghanistan who risks his life through unrelenting desert terrain to save an American soldier, Gyllenhaal, who goes back to save the interpreter and his family in the second half. Barring some horrendous end-credits “made in memory of the brave interpreters we left behind” stuff that just feels too weird and gross, this is a very enjoyable piece of retro-reactionary action cinema. And I again I dig this version of Ritchie, trading in his flashier sensibilities for a stripped-down efficiency befitting the ever so slightly elevated b-genre fare he’s working with.
The Covenant is still in theaters.
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) + Dune (2021) - an unhinged sci-fi fantasy genesis double feature for the real heads
Every saga has a beginning.
So May the 4th came around and for evening viewing we landed on a Phantom Menace rewatch. Big Phantom apologist over here. Last time I did a Star Wars ranking I called it a gorgeous mega-franchise experiment, right at the technical sweet spot where we were starting to fuck around with CGI in earnest but still shooting on film.” Though absent of the playful charm that makes the OG trilogy so enjoyable, Phantom Menace has aged like fine wine in its presentation of shiny, Flash Gordony future-past in which the looming tragedy of Darth Vader takes its primordial shape. Jedi Master Dave Feloni explains it best in the YT Short above.
After The Phantom Menace I settled in for the second feature to fall asleep on the couch to halfway through, and seein’ how that Dune: Part Two trailer just dropped I couldn’t think of throwin’ on anything but Dune: Part One. Despite the fact that part of me kind of longs for a more psychedelic vision of Dune (akin to Jodorowsky’s unmade version or even the groovier parts of the David Lynch joint), Denis Villenueve’s miracle of an epic adaptation is the platonic ideal of a space opera that hits like The Empire Strikes Back meets The Phantom Menace with a touch of Apocalypse Now and Heavy Metal. And hey…
“This is only the beginning.”
You can stream The Phantom Menace on Disney+ and Dune on HBO Max or Max or whatever. RIP HBO Max by the way, best streamer to come out of the streamopocalypse and soon to, uh, most definitely not be.
Army of Darkness (1992) - spooky scary skeletons :)
I remain, as ever, firm in my stance that Army of Darkness is the best Evil Dead movie on accounta it’s the only one with a literal army of Harryhausen skeletons. There’s also this:
Bruce Campbell the true GOAT. You can rent Army of Darkness on Prime.
The Molly Maguires (1970) - to hell with poverty
Truly class-conscious films are scarce in the grand scheme of cinema, even fewer still are the ones that don’t inevitably punt on the subject in some way. Maybe it’s just I’m hungry for more “pro-labor” movies but if you ask me Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires don’t punt on nothin’. Sean Connery (in one of his earliest and most effective post-Bond conscious-image-shift roles) leads a secret group of Irish immigrant miners in 1870s Pennsylvania fighting the oppressive mine owners through extra-legal means (there’s a great slow-burn opening sequence where Connery and the rest of the Molly Maguires set charges and blow up a mine, the title card coming in on flames bursting through the opening of the mine shaft). Richard Harris is down-on-his-luck detective James McParlan, hired to go undercover and infiltrate the Molly Maguires. McParlan’s sick of being kicked around at the bottom of the food chain and takes this job for the fat paycheck, chance to be the one punchin’ down for a change. To hell with poverty, we’ll get drunk on cheap wine.
But it don’t take long for McParlan to go sour under the dire working conditions and vociferous wage theft that define the lives of this mining community, and up until the very end you’re left wondering where McParlan’s sympathies will ultimately lie, and whether he’ll joint the cause for real or let his comrades perish. It’s a grimy class warfare fable performed and directed with an economical style befitting the subject matter, setting, and professional chops of all involved (especially Connery and Harris—standout work from both my guys).
You can stream The Molly Maguires on Pluto TV.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) - James Gunn’s Island of Dr. Moreau… in SPACE
Wow, who knew Marvel would put out a movie so enjoyable and, dare I say, visually accomplished this late in the game. Too bad for them it’s James Gunn’s “see ya losers” farewell to the whole damn thing. The typical Marvel ticks (and bloat--fuck man, even this one’s two and a half goddamn hours) abound, but I’ll be damned if the James Gunn-ness (and unique, enduring appeal and enthusiasm of these characters and this group of actors) doesn’t win out. Feels much more of a companion piece to Gunn’s The Suicide Squad than it does to the other two Guardians movies. My only big note is they could’ve toned the heart-wrenching elements down just a notch or two. Like I get that hinging the emotional pull of the film to Rocket Racoon was a slam dunk, but god, can you just be a tad less upsetting about it?? Nah but what a pleasant surprise overall.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is now in theaters.
Room 237 (2012) - I want a dream reader so I don’t have to dream alone
Threw this one up on a faded whim the other night and realized it might have planted the seed of my whole ass outlook on movies today.
No matter how you slice it, The Shining is an exceptionally cryptic, subliminally titillating film—one that coaxes patterns of what we might loosely call conspiratorial, sign-seeking thinking out of its most fixated fans. To be sure, much of what’s discussed this documentary examining the film through a variety of obsessive “fan theories” ranging from strangely convincing to down-right delusional (The Shining as Kubrick’s veiled confession that he faked the moon landing footage for the U.S. government falling on the latter end of the spectrum) falls far outside the bounds of whatever Kubrick probably “intended,” but the most interesting ideas come from a place that doesn’t necessarily require conscious intent. Like my favorite theory discussed in the film comes from Bill Blakemore, who postulates that The Shining is a subliminal treatise on the genocide of Native Americans, because he also lays the case for the broader, undeniable implications of such a reading:
The way Kubrick made movies was not unlike the way our brains create memories and, for that matter, dreams. That’s the ultimate “shining” that Kubrick does. He is like a mega-brain for the planet who is boiling down with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of our world, and then giving them back to us in a dream of a movie. ‘Cause movies are like a dream. […] What Kubrick also gave us in The Shining is a movie about the past. Not just any past. The past. Pastness. It’s a movie about how the past impinges.
It’s that whole movies are dreams thing—not just dreams, but dreams brought into waking life to be experienced and interpreted and re-interpreted again and again—that’s the secret sauce of cinema baby. And all the best American movies, however intentional, are refractions of this idea—the emblematic moving image of the past that transposing itself on the present like some electric Pandora’s box of civilization in a loop of self-discovery and self-destruction. The diabolical dream that explains “the American dream.”
…anyway calling Kubrick a “mega-brain” is pretty funny though.
You can stream Room 237 on Tubi.
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) - we used to be a proper country that made proper queer cult cinema
We really did though. Case in point: Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader. Been on a Natasha Lyonne kick lately—like everyone else who watched it we found Poker Face to be absolutely delightful TV ‘round my house, caught Slums of Beverly Hills last month, made our way to this joint and had a great time. Love the John Waters-esque softcore porn-parody Barbie-house aesthetic applied to the story of a teenage lesbian (Lyonne) whose religious family send her to one of these shady conversion therapy places. Super funny queer coming-of-age piece about the absurdity and artificiality of Western heteronormativity and gender anxieties, pulled off by a stellar cast (including RuPaul as an “ex-gay” camp counselor lol) and a strong, playful ‘90s pop-intellectual feminist indie style.
You can stream But I’m a Cheerleader on Prime.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023) - how to blow up a heist movie
“There has been a time for a Gandhian climate movement; perhaps there might come a time for a Fanonian one. The breaking of fences may one day be seen as a very minor misdemeanour indeed.”
-Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire
Went into this one mad intrigued by its premise: taking a nonfiction book and making its case to the masses through the visual and narrative grammar of a modern entertainment. Not only does How to Blow Up a Pipeline present industrial sabotage as a viable and even necessary antidote to slow, ineffective, pacifist climate activism, it’s one helluva good heist movie. Day after I watched it I set off for my usual bike ride down the boardwalk in Long Beach ‘n threw the How to Blow Up a Pipeline soundtrack on me Spotify, thinking about the cast and how the Portland anarchists (Kristine Froseth and Lukas Cage) were conspicuously L.A. actor-looking compared to the rest of the cast but they were also really good and know what fuck it that’s just one of the myriad ways the film blends realism with Hollywood formalism to keep you both entertained and aware that you’re watching a movie with direct real-world implications. I hit the boardwalk right at noon and the sun is starting to burn the morning gloom out of the sky, see, crows shaking loose from a palm tree and fluttering and clustering in the air, passing the beach parking lot and all the usual folks are out, workers grabbing a bite from the beachside shack, guys rolling blunts and getting haircuts, a couple tables set up here and there in the small grass area between the boardwalk and the lot, offering pipes and bongs and bubblers and sports memorabilia and flowers and such, an unhoused guy is pushing another unhoused guy in a wheelchair. Vibes are decidedly on as they usually are ‘round these parts at noon. Ahead ‘o me the Long Beach skyline beyond it the real oil refinery that gives the fictional Theo (Sasha Lane) leukemia and inspires her best friend Xochitl (Ariel Barer, also co-producer and co-writer) to assemble a crew of young misfits from around the country and blow up a West Texas oil pipeline. Love it when a movie is shot in Long Beach and explicitly takes place in Long Beach, not just like generically L.A. you know? Point is, How to Blow Up a Pipeline really fed into my fetish for movies that occupy a liminal space between real life and “the movie world” on accounta that’s where we all live internally, the root of our cultural cog dis you dig? And movies like that can guide you through that space to the bomb that blows it all up, freeing you from the shackles of the stories that placate and imprison—Inceptioning the American "dream life."
You can rent How to Blow Up a Pipeline on Prime.
If you liked the post, please hit the heart button below // It helps us reach more readers on Substack // Also, tell a film-loving friend to subscribe //
Follow me on Letterboxd and Twitter // Read more of my writing: whoisandyandersen.com