1. These Movies Changed My Life
There aren't many years where there is even one of these. Speaking plainly, there hasn't been one since I've even been doing lists like this (probably the closest were Drive and Inside Out). But there were two this year and you can probably credit/blame them for my complete inability to rank things this year. These transcend rank, and I'm so obsessed with both of them that I'm certain they'll end up as all-time favorites, not just best of a year or decade. Again, in alphabetical (not ranked) order.
I was raised by a community that doesn’t bicker over what’s theirs
and what’s not theirs. That’s what you were given. But I have always felt
held by a family. A real family. Which everyone deserves. And you deserve it.
I tried to write something about Midsommar just after I saw it and failed utterly. I have 13 or 14 paragraphs of three different started attempts that I never published because I couldn't get my head around the enormity of my love for this movie. So let's see how well I do with this. This is a movie that is essentially about a bad breakup, with the trappings of folk horror. It reminds most people of The Wicker Man and it should, and I think Ari Aster wants you thinking about that because what he is ultimately doing is quite different. Dani (played by Florence Pugh) takes a trip with her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends to Sweden and the community where one of these friends, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), was raised. The community is going to be celebrating a midsummer festival that only happens every 90 years (which means, according to what we learn in the movie, that no one alive in the village has seen it). The American visitors witness some disturbing practices, made all the more disturbing because most of them occur in broad daylight, but these practices are mostly swept under a cloak of culture until one by one the visitors start disappearing (slasher-style, in case there's any question this is a horror movie), and eventually only Dani and Christian remain.
There is so much to say about this movie — about gaslighting, about the emotional labor that women are often required to do (I could write for hours about the little moment when Dani wrestles with whether to call Christian, weighing how much the conversation is going to cost her in the relationship), about academic ethics, about the subtle and (I've heard) realistic portrayal of drug use, about the power of sharing someone else's pain, about how great this movie is at making you unsure how to react and whether you should laugh, about how deeply upsetting that thing that happens 10 minutes in is (to the point that many people have had to walk out at that point), and about how freakishly talented Florence Pugh is. But I'll limit myself (after all that) to this. I am LIVING for this new breed of the Final Girl, seen in this movie, as well as The Witch and the Suspiria remake. These ladies don't just react to being stalked by a masked killer. They step up and claim their power and agency. And yes, most of them arguably become villains in their own right, but only because they reject the stale dichotomy of good versus evil. Because hey, if you're going to call us witches, we might as well be witches.
Jay Sebring: Sounds like you had a hell of a night.
Rick Dalton: You have no idea.
Kill Bill, I will always love you, but I think I've found a new life partner in the Tarantino-verse. I did manage to post something about this movie several months ago, but sadly, it was a War-and-Peace-length plot summary on crack and full of spoilers (ergo, useless to anyone who hadn't already seen the movie). When it was announced that Quentin Tarantino, a director famous for hyper-stylized violence in his movies, was making a movie about the Manson murders, most of the culture reacted with a "yeah, but can we not?". No one could imagine how such a thing could not be grossly exploitative. As it turns out, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (ellipses optional) is an incredible deep dive into a very specific era of Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. Tarantino uses his encyclopedic knowledge and memory of being a kid in LA in the late 1960s (not to mention old KHJ radio broadcasts) to immerse us so fully in this world, and create an entire place for his main characters within it, that you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is all real and Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth really existed.
Boiled down to its essentials, this is a hangout movie. We spend two and a half hours hanging out with Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth and Sharon Tate, most of which occurs over a day and a half. We watch Rick shoot a couple of scenes of a TV pilot, we watch Cliff drive around and drop a hitchhiker off at Spahn Ranch, and we watch Sharon Tate running errands and going to a movie theater to watch herself in The Wrecking Crew (and I'll forever love that Tarantino uses the real movie, not recreated, with the real Sharon Tate, not Margot Robbie digitally inserted). And I would gladly watch another two hours of Cliff driving around, with another hour watching Rick and Cliff watch that episode of The FBI. The last half hour of the movie is serious spoiler territory and hugely controversial, but I think it's brilliant and the sweetest and most heartfelt Tarantino has ever been. In the end, you don't come away from the film thinking about Manson; you're thinking about Sharon. That said, I would highly recommend (either before or after seeing the movie) checking out Karina Longworth's podcast series on "You Must Remember This" about Charles Manson's Hollywood. Especially if you're not that familiar with the events and names.
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