Month of Movies: November 2018

Total Films Watched: 13. You Were Never Really Here, The Other Side of the Wind, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, SampleThis!, RoboCop, Chicago, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Rope, Se7en, Lady Bird, Love Actually, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Madeline's Madeline.

Top Two Films This Month: Lady Bird and Rope. Lady Bird I love a lot but I'm not thrilled to have it as my top film of the month. I've already talked about it as one of my favorites from last year and there are plenty of other titles I could rave about. Am I really going to rank this above titles from the Coen Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles? For these specific titles, yes I am. Greta Gerwig's directorial debut is effortlessly charming, memorable while still being easy to rewatch, and relatable even though I never visited Sacramento or changed my name. Along with Creed and Inception, the movie has become as the movies from this decade that I love revisiting the most. And I ranked it as the third-best last year! Get Out might still be better overall!

Rope is one of the most famous one location, 'single-take' movies of all time. It's just a dinner party thrown by fake Leopold and Loeb (John Dall and Farley Granger, somewhat respectively)to discretely flaunt the 'perfect murder' they just committed of a friend. The single-take gambit can feel gimmicky in movies, but Hitchcock proves unsurprisingly good at wringing the drama out of the conceit. Keeping the attention focused on this short span of time raises the stakes and guarantees the audience knows the location of every important detail, from the hidden body to the titular murder weapon. Dall gives an excellent on sociopathy as the lead, spinning psycho-sexual circles around most of the guests, and James Stewart predicts the Purge franchise while playing an excellent supporting role.

Movie Death Match: Best depiction of the film-making process behind The Other Side of the Wind- The Other Side of the Wind or They'll Love Me When I'm Dead?

The Other Side of the Wind is both a real Orson Welles film that was edited and released this year, decades after his death, and the fictional film made by John Huston's charismatic aging director within that movie. There are a lot of parallels between the real-life drama of Welles' late-period filmmaking life and the depiction of the craft within this movie. Those parallel moments are where They'll Love Me When I'm Dead is the most effective, as Morgan Neville creates a collage that attempts to delve into Welles' psyche and the chaos behind the scenes of the film. He has the restored movie footage, behind-the-scenes footage of the production, archival film of Welles and new interviews with... well, I'm not sure exactly. The movie makes the strange choice to never credit the talking heads that speak about Welles. And the strange choice to frame the documentary using elliptical scenes of Alan Cumming narration. And the strange choice to use footage from The Other Side of the Wind and F for Fake to talk about extra-textual events. The movie ends up being as all-over-the-place as the subject, which is absolutely intentional but tougher to grapple with when the director is good but not a cinematic legend.

For the record, I am not going all-in on praising The Other Side of the Wind as a masterpiece. It feels strange to credit Welles with the entirety of the final product, given how important the editing of the movie is. It starts off with a dense barrage of cross-cut scenes where every named character is introduced at once and without any clear delineation of their roles. There are four different car rides and scenes from the film-within-a-film intercut aggressively. If you can make it through that opening section, the narrative starts coming together even though the pace never lets up. The dynamic between Huston's faux-Welles mentor and Peter Bogdanovich's faux-Bogdanovich protege is the most emotional, while The Other Side of the Wind is a great intentionally vague piece of cinema. A lot of critics have cited the car sex scene as a highlight, which feels like way too much credit to give Welles filming his girlfriend's bouncing boobs. I side more with the studio head and the critic in the movie, minor characters who are justifiably skeptical of the self-indulgence and mythmaking going on around them. The movie feels like a hypnotic barrage of images and genre-blurring action, which is a metaphor I'm sure Welles would have appreciated.

Longer Thoughts About: Madeline's Madeline. Oh man. Of all the movies that I've ended up unpacking in this section, Madeline's Madeline is the one that most requires that much discussion. There is so much going on in Josephine Decker's small 90-minute drama. On the surface, it's just a story about a troubled high-school girl arguing with her mother and taking lessons from an experimental theater troupe in New York and how those two worlds end up colliding. But that dramatically undersells how strange the film actually is. The visuals border on psychadelic, the sound effects and music are totally surreal, and the first half of the movie has not interest in narrative propulsion or clear explanations. It feels totally of a piece as a movie from the point of view of teenage girl working out her mental issues. I just have no idea if I actually like the movie or not.

I'll start with the elements that I know are good about the movie. Helena Howard has earned a lot of praise as the unknown actress in the titular role and that is earned. Any time an actress plays a character who acts is catnip for critics, but Howard pulls the theater scenes off so well. The best scenes in the movie let her cycle through emotions as elements unfold around her. The photo shoot is the best example of that as she works to get comfortable as the theme of the shoot becomes more and more personal. Her impression of Miranda July as her mother is better than the majority of July's performance. I also love the sound mixing and the layers it adds. Effects will shift in and out of the mix, sometimes so casually that you barely notice how strange their use is. The dialogue also moves in and out of sync with the action, which combines to really make the movie feel subjective. Add in the thumping percussive score, a riff that repeats in order to earn a bigger reaction to the final setpiece, and it becomes an incredibly unique work.

Despite all of this, I still can't quite wrap my arms around the movie in the way a lot of critics have. The closest film I've seen to this one is The Fits, Anna Rose Holmer's low-budget debut from 2016. That movie is also about a young woman of color trying to find herself in the world, with physical performances and scenes that blur into surreality. The endings even have similar staging, although the tone is very different. I love The Fits a lot more than this movie, and I think it's because the movie is both more straightforward and more mysterious. Madeline's Madeline doesn't really have a story until the last half, when her home life and the theater world really start to overlap and she begins to take more control. That's not a bad feature, but it makes the early scenes of her feel a little disjointed in retrospect. And the ending of the movie is definitely out-there, but it's not as obviously surreal as the finale of The Fits. Without giving too much about either movie away, Decker's movie is subjective and dream-like without going into full-on magical realism. And I think I just wanted more of that magic to elevate the film into another level.