so long 2023: not really here for the hunting, are we
Me top 20 of 2023 + adrenocromo hits from my movie year
Hey folks! Getting my ‘best of’ deal out under the wire, here. Heads up it’s a long boi, highly recommend opening in your browser or via the Substack app (it’s also easier to watch the clips that way). Dig through and you’ll find my top 20 movies, highlights from my movie diary, and quotes ’n links to some o’ my favorite reviews and essays from the back half of 2023. Cheers!
I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake.
-Werner Herzog
Man this has got to be the most old world dying new world strugglin’ to be born feelin’ New Year I ever lived through. Been the vibes of the movies too since the last time I checked in on the state of things around here (ICYMI: “our songs will all be silenced: 2023 so far”).
“The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson on 9/11. “The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now.” Two decades later the bill is coming due on that party. Today’s queer youth are living in the weirdest possible mindfuck of a crossing point in American culture—their represented presence and ability to assert their identities arguably never stronger, only just as the full weight of the reactionary boomer right is coming down on ‘em. The times, fractured and incomprehensible as they are, grow more existential for these kids by the minute, and the only thing we’ve given them to hold onto is the same crumbling pop-culture emblems of teendom we been peddlin’ since Eisenhower was president. What’s a rabid teen to do?
I saw the insurgent teen comedy Bottoms twice over Labor Day weekend with all the energy of Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock sayin’ “How do you do fellow kids?” to all the Zennials and Gen Zs in the theater. What can I tell ya, when an honest-to-goodness subversive summer genre film punches its way onto theater screens in the dog days of Hollywood, this old cat’s gonna show the fuck up. To call Bottoms a “meta comedy” in a year filled with meta movies (ranging from great to mediocre to dumb) is to diminish the idiosyncrasy of its meta explorations, far beyond the mode of “oh look how meta” copy of a copy of Joss Whedon’s stalest "well that just happened" type bullshit. Bring it On, Clueless, and Not Another Teen Movie have been the most cited urtexts for this joint about a pair of lesbian teens (Rachel Sennot, Ayo Edebiri) who start a Fight Club at school so they can get laid before graduation. But there’s really a feeling of every era of the genre sorta melting around the edges of the frame, filtered through a barrage of surreal, uncanny images of American high school (like a football player locked in a man-sized cage in the background of an otherwise “normal” classroom, or PJ (Sennot) and Josie (Edebiri) finding F*g**t #1 and F*g**t #2 tagged across their lockers - “I got number 2 this time?”). Sometimes, it feels like a Gen Z bad-acid trip through an old copy of the National Lampoon High School Parody issue. As Alison Willmore notes, “this is still a world in which a semi-sentient football quarterback (Nicholas Galitzine) is believed over women, and in which fight-club members casually mention stalkers the police can’t do anything about and getting assaulted regularly on birthdays. It’s not that Josie and PJ aren’t aware — they just have other priorities.” Bottoms is a “fuck it all” feminist bomb set to go off just as the book on the old world’s a closin’ with a whimper.
American nightmare,
Guilty generation
Fingers on the pulse
Of their parents alienation
From the history,
Histories of western civilization
-Ty Segall
“Party for rich kids” or not, the last half of the 20th Century has indeed cast a long, toxic shadow over our dystopian Future World proceedings. The fate of the media critic, such as it’s been my bag through these searing ‘20s, is to walk a crumbling digital road between nostalgia and sleuthery—combing what remains of the old Matrix code for entertainment and clues in equal measure. Hoping the mutated lies of our collective dream life amount to some semblance of workable truth.
Reckon that’s the same hallucinatory path walked in Zardoz, a major recent addition to my cinema headcanon. John Boorman’s 1974 Science-Fantasy Sativa stars Sean Connery as a 23rd-century barbarian who infiltrates a sealed community of immortal elites (led by an all-seeing AI) to unlock the last vestiges of collected human knowledge. “I wanted to make a film about the problems of us hurtling at such a rate into the future that our emotions are lagging behind,” said Boorman. Deeply felt in 2023, if you can get past the hilarious distraction of Connery's wardrobe.
Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri was another big film discovery for me this year, also in the “one man’s rage against the dying of the light” category. Listen I’m a real noob when it comes to these classic samurai films but I’m sure this is the best one I’ve ever seen. Set in Japan’s feudal Edo period, the film follows a retired samurai (Tatsuya Nakadai) who requests seppuku (or harakiri), the samurai practice of ritual suicide, at the house of a ruling clan. What the clan and its entrenched, corrupt leaders don’t know is this rōnin’s got revenge on the brain, fueled by insatiable, righteous anger. Kobayashi was arguably the most adamant of the era’s postwar dissident filmmakers, using the jidai-geki, or period film, to draw disturbing parallels between Japan’s feudal past and capitalist present. “In the film’s condemnation of the Iyi clan,” writes Joan Mellen, “[Kobayashi] condemns, simultaneously, the hierarchical structures that pervaded Japanese political and social life in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the zaibatsus, the giant corporations that recapitulated feudalism.”
Corporations recapitulating feudalism. Sounds so familiar it makes you want to reach for your coffee mug and say “this is fine" as the flames build around you eh? Seems every day another whole ass industry bites the dust on accounta it’s been strip-mined down to a few numbers at the end of some big faceless financial entity’s bottom line. Only recourse is “do. not. give. a. fuck” and take your pay when it comes. Stumble through another anonymous gig to the tune of a tired, Gen-X-coded nihilism.
“You’re not really out here for the hunting, are you.” The Expert (Tilda Swinton) gets arguably the best punchline of David Fincher’s The Killer, closing out the old joke about the hunter and the bear, uttered between slow, deliberate swigs of a whisky flight (her last meal). What are any of us in this devolving cat-and-mouse empire if not tired hunters doomed to the wrong end of a competitor’s rifle? Hunt or be hunted, that’s the game. Are we not men? We are K_.LLERS.
Popeye the Sailor probably said it best: I am what I am. And I was a mark for David Fincher’s The Killer ever since word got out my man was cookin’ up a Don Siegel-esque hitman joint starring Michael Fassbender — the crystalline makings of Andycore cinema right there. But what of the final product? Does The Killer translate as a modern gig-economy comedy? Straight-up techno-thriller that’s maybe too fussy for its own good? Or, as David Ehrlich puts it, “a movie about how awesome and embarrassing it must be for a 60-year-old man to live with the fact that he directed Fight Club?”
By my line o’ sight, The Killer fires on all these cylinders and more. And what it shares with the other best film of 2023 (other than the word “killer” in the title) is it sort of contains everything about us in a highly emblematic, mass-distributed visual narrative. Does the Brechtian thing of embodying and satirizing its chosen genre in equal measure, painting a vivid portrait of the killers we are today.
Whereas Killers of the Flower Moon pushes worlds past all genre constructions (some distantly held narrative beats of the “Scorsese gangster picture” aside) to tell a true story of the killers we’ve always been. Speakin’ of, been studying John Ford Westerns in recent months. Westerns were big in my house growing up, but none of the big Ford ones ever made it into the family canon. Finally watched My Darling Clementine and, first off, I’m thinkin’ with Ford, black and white’s the thing, man. It just is. The Searchers looks great and all but there’s something about the stark, minimal, light-and-shadow architecture of Clementine that really cooks.
Also been thinkin’ about the “great American Western” as it relates to Killers of the Flower Moon. As of now I’ve still only seen Martin Scorsese’s latest medium-advancing masterwork once (a singular experience confirming, if not the necessity then the sheer creative integrity of the 3 ½ hour runtime), but I think it’s safe to say, this is not a Western we’re looking at here. It isn’t even revisionist or anti-Western. Scorsese and crew and the participating Osage people push past that, making the Western myth an entirely false notion to the point of anti-matter.
“The Reign of Terror is almost impossible to fathom in its cruelty: white men brazenly attempted a transfer of wealth through mass murder they barely bothered to cover up,” writes Miles Surrey “Unfortunately, these crimes aren’t exactly an aberration, either. The kind of violence and racial animus that the Osage experienced a century ago still reverberates today—something that’s as intrinsic to our nation’s DNA as the oil lying underneath its soil.”
My Darling Clementine was a strange antithesis to watch in tandem, perversely fitting in its absence of any indigenous character or presence — the vision of the West the William Hales of the world aimed for all along. Two separate universes, one made manifest by the evil realities of the other.
How we’ve lived. And killed. And how we live and kill now. If there’s something to extrapolate from Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest—a groundbreaking portrayal (or anti-portrayal) of the holocaust through the lens of the family that ruled over Auschwitz—it’s that the dream of a fortified life, well and comfortably lived (for over half a century now, we’ve called it “the American dream”) is one we inevitably realize through unspeakable carnage. And our ability to temper our conscience is less a function of proximity to power as it is the sociopathic drive that power bestows upon its loyal subjects. Kicks in the second we get a chance to skip a few rungs up the ladder. Secure the bag in a white-hot flash, mere layers of cement between you and the grinding gears of genocide.
In the year’s final quarter we got two good (but not great) movies about the great social climb and the trail of carnage inevitably wrought in its wake. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Emerald Fennell's Saltburn are both about grotesque, boyish, upper-middle-class social climbers who bring a proto-Trumpian brand of chaos to the table. Napoleon continues Scott’s recent run of films about social and spiritual decay at the heart of white European imperial society, the title character (Jaoquin Phoenix) pitched as a spoiled brat with an insatiable penchant for battle strategy and bad bitches named Josephine. Nah but Vanessa Kirby is what’s up with this movie man. Her Josephine Bonaparte is a shrewd power player whose volatile dance with the throne casts mesmerizing light on this otherwise comically masculine “film about men with poor dick game,” as Angelica Jade Bastien puts it. The other thing with Napoleon is, the battle scenes are every bit as awesome as you’ve heard. Scott and team have made an almost exact science of shooting these types of scenes, and they get some incredible new images out of the minutely controlled calamity.
As for Saltburn, listen I get this one’s corny or whatever. Hell, I’m still dubious about it. End of the day, I think it ain’t that deep to warrant the level of ire it’s gotten from its most ardent detractors. Also not without its own clever ideas and formal flourishes. Plays like a groovy, if not half-baked, British aristocracy satire in the tradition of The Ruling Class that slowly morphs into a tongue-in-cheek erotic thriller. Remains lavish and indulgent throughout, thanks to some decently timed gross-out provocations and weird sex scenes. Barry Keoghan cranks his twitchy-hot weirdo energy to 11, embodying upper-middle-class suburban lust for wealth and dominance with a foreboding wink and a smile.
Then there’s Priscilla, a marvel of “dual awareness,” as Alison Willmore explains, in “how it’s able to immerse us in the bubble-bath-balmy perspective of a teenager experiencing an astonishing bout of wish fulfillment and, at the same time, always allow us to appreciate how disturbing what’s happening actually is.” Sofia Coppola’s back, she’s so back with this one — deftly translating Priscilla Presley’s autobiography into an undeniable spiritual sequel to Marie Antoinette. We’re talkin’ Goodfellas to Casino territory here (coming from a Casino fucking STAN mind you). Coppola applies the low-lit, richly textured atmosphere cultivated in her recent and under-appreciated bangers The Beguiled and On the Rocks. A slow-burn menace surrounds every dollhouse frame of her Stepford Wives-y Graceland. Elvis (Jacob Elordi) oscillates between absent and all-consuming presence, and Cailee Spaeny imbues Priscilla with a vibrant, slow-glowing interior, so when she finally leaves her elaborate cage, you feel the smoldering force of hard-earned will behind it.
Despite the heavy “movies are back” vibes of 2023, it was something of a mid year for horror. Sure there were some decent ones in the mix, just not as many as you’d hope. In the franchise-horror realm, Saw X brought our beloved John Kramer aka Jigsaw back to the center of the series, making for a winning “greatest hits” joint with its own twisted heart ‘n soul (and some gruesome new traps that rank with the best of ‘em). David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer was poorly received, though in my mind an interesting humanist take on the material that takes the spiritual elements outside the bounds of Catholicism in favor of a world religions and spiritual practices uniting against evil type deal. Eli Roth finally made a no-frills holiday slasher out of the beloved Thanksgiving Grindhouse trailer. Delivers the goods, no leftovers needed.
But the real gem of Spooky Season was Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh, a continuation of the cult-classic Lovecraft adaptations of Stuart Gordon, penned by the same screenwriter, Dennis Paoli. This cosmic body horror/erotic thriller hybrid stars Heather Graham as a psychiatrist whose soap-opera-idyllic life is turned upside down by a new client carrying an ancient body-swapping curse (not sexually transmitted, but often transmitted whilst fucking). If you’ve seen Re-Animator or From Beyond, it’s hard not to think of what might’ve been had Gordon lived to direct this joint. Still, Lynch overcomes “the generic underlit, shallow focus indie style/sheen,” as Josh Lewis notes, by “pumping this with nonstop erotic thriller melodrama camera tricks” — amounting to a vibrant, “borderline De Palma parody” in which “Graham is fully committed to every perverse, gruesome detail asked of her.” Bona-fide Master of Horror Barbara Crampton co-stars, which say, come to think of it, Suitable Flesh would be a killer double-feature with this other great 2023 De Palma riff centered in gonzo performances from two Queens.
Yeah I see you, there, Todd Haynes. Way to follow up your sick-ass Velvet Underground documentary with a timely De Palma riff brother, always lookin’ out. Based on the infamous Mary Kay Letourneau case (and, by extension, the salacious Monica Lewinski-era tabloid soup we millennials were raised in), May December makes a stomach-churning thriller of a prolonged 2015 encounter between an actress (Natalie Portman), the woman she’s portraying in a true-crime cable movie (Julianne Moore), and her much younger husband (Charles Melton), who she groomed and sexually abused when he was a teenager. Haynes filters this perverted love triangle through an equally tragic and satirical lens, striking the same nerves that drive our collective fascination with public scandals and the cheap entertainment we make of them. Voyeurism in the name of truth-seeking, at an unspeakable cost.
Moving along our gallery of image makers and persona peddlers, we got Dream Scenario, which was essentially marketed as an A24 version of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent — like a comedic dissection of Nicolas Cage the man, artist, and meme but more ‘indie.’ Certainly works on that level, even as Cage burrows deep into the role of a nerdy, vainglorious professor who starts showing up in other people’s dreams. The notoriety and fame is fun until our guy’s hit with a barrage of hilarious consequences, some earned, some the inevitable result being an uncontrollable image in the minds of the masses. Beyond the Cage stuff, the movie works as a Verhoeven-esque cancel-culture satire because it really wraps its arms around the economy and predetermined media circus of it all. Presentation over everything. The demand to posture first and be second, the way we drive ourselves crazy posing at all times, hollowing out every aspect of our lives until we’re left longing for some semblance of the intimate connections we let go sour.
Alright, before we wrap this up I gotta say, I just love a new cult classic that shoulda been the biggest movie in America don’t you? That’s right I’m talking about Dicks: The Musical! Based on the two-man stage show by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp and directed by the great Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat), Dicks is a grade-a piece of Mel Brooks meets John Waters-type genuine counterculture mayhem that takes the whole “camp” thing back to its roots: queer culture lampooning straight culture for all it’s worth. Jackson and Sharp play two ‘incredibly straight’ salesmen who discover they’re identical twins, Parent Trap style, sending them on a hallucinatory midnight-musical trip with nothing less than a Megan Thee Stallion number and all kinds of phantasmagoric Broadway nonsense from Nathan Lane and Megan Mulally along the way. This is an actually subversive gross-out comedy and an irreverent proclamation that all love is love and God is a F…ather and Mother and Sister and Brother and LOVER to ALL ;) Pure cinema baby.
Speaking of pure cinema, Hayao Miyazaki’s back in town with another post-retirement masterpiece. The Boy and the Heron is an instant classic to put on the Studio Ghibli shelf and, for a guy still working through the loss of a parent, a deeply healing movie. For traversing all the big human emotions, Miyazaki continues to build strange, beautiful worlds of runway. The years since COVID are starting to pile up now. So many of us have lost family, friends, jobs, health, confidence, artists whose work made a difference in our lives. Really felt Paul Reubens’ passing this year. Hard to think of another performer who created something so original and perpetual and joyous in a single character. Anyway, Jenna Ipcar called The Boy and the Heron “a meditation on the passage of time – learning to confront loss without backsliding into the poisonous trap of nostalgia and fantasy. The only way forward is to forgive and accept, embrace your worst fears and antagonists, use these experiences to propel you instead of hold you back.”
Other day I was thinkin’ about the heavy existential-comedy vibes of the movie year and this succession of images from Barbie and The Killer queued up in my head like a telepathic DM from my future self:
“Of those who like to put their faith in mankind's inherent goodness,” says the Killer, “I have to ask, based on what, exactly?" Sure, man. I mean, this whole dog-eat-dog thing’s all we’ve ever known right? But I reckon comin’ into 2024, odds mounting though they are, couldn’t hurt to try and be more like Barbie. Embrace empathy. Choose life, like unironically. Be chill and nice and determined and rage against the dying of the light with grace. Get out and touch grass and all the stuff the hippies were right about. Go to the doctor. Do the thing whatever the thing is. Maybe it’s just the New Year talking I dunno. However things shake out, I remain yours in watching the hell outta movies. XOXO
My Top 20 of 2023
1. The Killer
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Beau is Afraid
4. John Wick: Chapter 4
5. The Boy and the Heron
6. The Zone of Interest
7. Asteroid City
8. Dicks: The Musical
9. Infinity Pool
10. Priscilla
11. BlackBerry
12. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
13. May December
14. Bottoms
15. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
16. Dream Scenario
17. Master Gardener
18. Invisible Shark
19. Magic Mike’s Last Dance
20. Suitable Flesh
My Top 10 Film Discoveries of 2023
Barb Wire (1996)
Busting (1974)
Chameleon Street (1989)
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
The Dirties (2013)
F for Fake (1973)
Harakiri (1962)
Quintet (1979)
Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone (2022)
Zardoz (1974)
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