Month of Movies: May 2018

Total Films Watched: 12. Short Term 12, Faces Places, Shut Up and Play the Hits, The Florida Project, Manhunt, Kill Bill: Volume 2, Sabotage, Certain Women, Only Lovers Left Alive, Deadpool 2, The Hurt Locker, Spider-Man.

Top Two Films: The Florida Project and The Hurt Locker. In addition to this blog, I keep track of all the movies I watch on my Letterboxd account. As a part of that, I am constantly updating my ranking of the best films from 2017, which is the year I'm most familiar with. The Florida Project is currently in my top 5 for that year, which makes it an easy choice for one of this month's best. Sean Baker and his team just capture so many moments of beauty and drama in this small Florida motel. The image I chose at the top is wonderful, but it's not even my favorite element of the film. I like the adventures that Mooney and the other kids have, their free-wheeling anarchy turning a sad situation into a playground. And Willem Dafoe easily earned his Oscar nomination for this surprisingly caring performance.

The Hurt Locker is a completely different kind of film. It's a brutal and detailed war movie, where the heat of the desert and the omnipresent threat of the bombs and snipers are oppressive. Instead of children and negligent mothers, we have three soldiers with very different approaches to their month of deployment. But there's still a magic to the way Kathryn Bigelow shows the conflicts faced by Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty. There's the dramatic slow motion, which is used sparingly but memorably. There's the lack of closure to most of the attacks, where the perpetrators are never caught and the exits from scenes are abrupt. This is probably the best of the Bigelow movies that I've seen, although Point Break is excellent in it's own, very different way.

Movie Death Match: Ridiculous throwbacks to Asian action films- Manhunt or Kill Bill: Volume 2? Neither of these are movies that I loved. When it comes to the directors, I am significantly more familiar with Tarantino than John Woo. After watching this one, there's only one Tarantinto movie I have not seen; in contrast, this was my first Woo action film. I appreciate a lot about the style and speed of Manhunt. The plot starts out normal and quickly spirals into absurdity. About half the turns actually work, with the action moments generally doing better than the plot elements. The jet ski chase seems like the most memorable, though I prefer the farmhouse fight where the leads are handcuffed together. And I'm a sucker for movies with code-switching and multiple languages, even when it's this clunky. Overall it's a soft recommend but it got me interested to see more of Woo's work.

Kill Bill: Volume 2 is also a soft recommend, though I think it works better overall. Both parts of the Kill Bill series are blatantly indebted to Asian action films and forgotten 70's features that Tarantino loved. I think those elements work well in the first film and are the low point of this one. Everything about Pai Mei is a disaster- a Fu Manchu knockoff without any subversion or nuance. It also stops the progression of the film to foreshadow all three of the moves that The Bride needs to succeed by the end. But aside from all that, there are two elements here that lift this movie above Manhunt. One is David Carradine, who delivers over-written monologues with the perfect pitch and performance. The second, slightly related element is the ending. The daughter scenes are as sweetly human as Tarantino has ever been and add another level of stakes to the final confrontation. It's definitely bottom-tier Tarantino for me but I'll still put it above bottom-tier Woo.

Longer Thoughts About: Sabotage. Technically speaking, Sabotage is not an early Hitchcock film. When it came out in 1936, he had already made dozens of films. On the Wikipedia list of all his films, it appears at the top of the second of three columns. But because the most well-known of his films came out afterwards, it still feels a bit like a warm-up exercise. There are definitely rougher edges to this film compared to Hitchcock's A-list films and a little less elegance.

Loosely based on a Joseph Conrad novel, Sabotage takes place in London in between the World Wars. It starts with the titular act of sabotage, when sand in a generator causes a small blackout in the city. We soon find out that the attack was caused by a local movie theater owner (Oskar Homolka), who's being paid by an unnamed foreign country to perpetrate this attack. The movie centers on him, the kind-hearted wife he keeps away from the crimes (Sylvia Sidney), and the undercover agent investigating them (Desmond Tester).

Of course the stakes escalate when Homolka is forced to participate in a bombing plot. And of course the investigator falls for the innocent wife that's swept up in this tragedy. And of course the ending is violent and puts a surprisingly neat bow on the proceedings. Not having a lead character means that Hitchcock can jump to whatever part of the story is the most interesting or is the most relevant to the plot. But it also leaves the movie a little unfocused. How sympathetic is the bomber supposed to be? How did Tester's agent get this undercover job in the first place, since he's already working next door when the movie starts? Why is there an original Disney cartoon that only appears for 30 seconds? The lack of closure is not as deliberate as it was in The Hurt Locker, which is frustrating.

Still, there are a few scenes that show the expertise you expect from a Hitchcock thriller. The best scene in the movie is the bombing, which Homolka tricks his son into performing under the guise of returning a film print. The audience know about the bomb but the boy doesn't, so every wasted second on his trip is filled with tension. It starts when he's pulled in by a street vendor to demonstrate toothpaste. It plays out comedically, like previous moments involving vendors, but all the while there's the package that undercuts any sense of lightness. The delays get bigger and the reminders of the bomb more obvious, but the entire setpiece drips with tension.