My Favorite Movies of 2023

     Often, I haven't always seen a lot of new movies, usually watching older movies on streaming, but this year had a lot of good stuff come out. I missed other films, but will likely catch them on streaming next year. So these my favorites:

Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)

I saw this while on vacation in Amsterdam, and while I had Dutch subtitles during the Korean language parts, which was challenging for me having only learned Dutch for a few months, I still really loved how this film was quiet and thoughtful, about childhood friends growing up in different countries (him in South Korea, her in Canada), and having had a puppy love phase as kids, and growing more connected through Skype chatting, and Greta Lee as Nora having conflicted feelings over growing apart from Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) while seeing him as her connection to her childhood in South Korea. And when he comes for a visit in New York and she is long married, more confused feelings between them come up, wondering about fate and destiny and what could have been. Lee is is stunning and wonderful in this film, and a more starring role as years in supporting roles in comedies like High Maintenance and Russian Doll. This film felt like a mix of Love & Basketball and the Before series by Richard Linklater, but had this poignant quietness that I really resonated with.

May December (dir. Todd Haynes)

I have seen this twice, and I really liked it a lot both as a comedy making fun of the fragility of white women being manipulative to get their way, as one (Julianne Moore) is a sexual predator who abused a young boy but presents it as a "great love story" to avoid guilt, the other (Natalie Portman) a duplicitous actress studying her and her family to play her in a film to get critical acclaim for herself, and a drama about a young man (Charles Melton0 who was sexually abused as a child and groomed to marry his abuser and have kids with her, and who is coming to terms with his abuse in his 30s as his kids are all young adults and leaving the nest. I've always liked Todd Haynes' films, and like his creative collaboration with Moore and Portman, and seeing a standout performance by Melton, coming fresh off of Riverdale.

No One Will Save You (dir. Brian Duffield)

Kaitlyn Dever was incredible in a dialogue-free tense thriller, playing the town pariah living alone in her childhood home, mourning the losses of her mother and best friend, and being terrified by a home invasion of extraterrestrial aliens, and forcing her to confront her past and what made her a pariah in the first place. Dever was excellent in her physical performance and subtle facial expressions that tell so much of the story, she has this raw scrappiness contrasted with a sweet girlish face that works really well in this role. This film also reminded me a lot of a classic Twilight Zone episode called "The Invaders," and would be a great companion piece to this film.

Rye Lane (dir. Raine Allen Miller)

I really enjoyed this British romantic comedy set in South London among Caribbean communities. A dorky, timid guy named Dom (David Jonsson) is grieving a breakup that happened three months past, and meets a charismatic woman named Yas (Vivian Oparah) by chance, and they spend the day hashing over their exes and goofing around the neighborhood and learning how to move on from their exes and have fun seeing each other. It was witty and breezy, and it had a sequence centered around A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory album, and a karaoke scene with them rapping Salt n' Pepa's "Shoop."

Broker (dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu)

From Kore-eda Hirokazu, the director of Nobody Knows and Shoplifters, is a Korean film helmed by a Japanese director, with similar themes to Shoplifters of a makeshift family of underground criminals and misfits. It features a cast of major film stars, like Song Kang-ho (The Host, Parasite, Snowpiercer), Bae Doona (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Air Doll, Cloud Atlas), and Lee Ji-eun, aka IU (famed South Korean pop star and actress). It's a really interesting film about mothers, adoption, and feeling rejected by society and being outcasts. It centers on two men who run a black market business stealing babies who are placed for adoption in an anonymous baby box, turning them over for a broker price to sell to couples. A baby's mother, a sex worker in a rough situation, wants her baby back, then agrees to be a part of the process selling her baby, as long as she approves of the couple. Plus two detectives are trailing them and setting up a sting operation to bust them. It's an excellent and compelling film to watch.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (dir. by Joaquim dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson)

The film was fantastic, and so intense to watch with all the different animation styles and comic panels. It's longer than the first, so there's much more going on, especially more with Gwen (big highlight to Hailee Steinfeld in this role). I appreciated that Miles' mom, Rio Morales, got more screentime in this film, it was great to hear Luna Lauren Velez shine in this role. And Daniel Kaluuya as Spider-Punk looked like a punk 'zine cutout come to life, and I loved how Miles kept feeling so envious of his ease with coolness and street London accent. The film gets more complex with the multiverses and Miles growing up more and finding more shades of gray with being Spider-Man, including trying to change the future so that tragedies are not inevitable to a superhero's origin story.

Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lathimos)

I really liked how this movie starts off with a bonkers premise (a pregnant woman dies by suicide, and a mad doctor transfers her still-living baby's brain to her head so she is resurrected with an infant's brain), and she grows and matures throughout the film, gets into sexual pleasure and hedonism and immaturity, before coming into her own as a philosophical, intelligent young woman who discovers herself, and realizes that all the men around her want to control her, either as a daughter or a wife or a sex plaything. Emma Stone was fantastic in this film, and her evolution of her character of Bella feels natural throughout the film, which is a testament to her talent as an actor.

Bottoms (dir. Emma Seligman)

A really fun queer teen sex comedy starring co-writer Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri as teen girls in this weird, heightened reality of high school where high school football stars are worshipped to a ridiculous degree, always wearing their uniforms, and students run the pep rallies with seemingly no intervention from adult school officials. The girls, PJ and Josie, want to have sex with cheerleaders, so they decide to start a school fight club, lying about having been in juvie fights, with the pretense of teaching self-defense to girls, but really wanting to get close to the girls they want to have sex with, feeling like fighting will raise endorphins and make them horny. It's a goofy premise that ends up leading to girls feeling more self-confidence, becoming friends with each other across clique lines, and the main girls feel moral conflicts about lying while getting close to the girls they like. It's a really fun movie to watch, and I'm looking forward to anything else Seligman has next.

Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismaki)

A deadpan Finnish romantic comedy about two working-class stiffs who are struggling to get by, and trying to build a romance with each other, while dealing with conflicts like alcoholism, missed connections, and bouncing around jobs. Both the characters (Alma Poysti, Jussi Vatanen) have this quiet charm about them, as well as a no-bullshit, sarcastic way of delivering lines and being blunt without being hurtful. The film has this feeling of being old-fashioned with her vintage radio and the tube trains, but being current with the news on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, smartphones, and the pair going to see Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die. There are recurring scenes in a karaoke bar where characters sing old mid-20th century pop crooner songs, and largely seem outside of the main metropolis of Helsinki, living more in the working-class outskirts among dive bars, construction sites, and quiet apartment houses. I just liked how this film felt more quiet and funny and lowkey, and really enjoyed it.

Honorable Mentions: (I liked all these movies, but didn't have strong enough opinions to put them on the Favorite Movies list)

Joyride, Godzilla Minus One, They Cloned Tyrone, Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Shorts, Barbie

Thoughts on Godzilla Minus One

 

I went to see Godzilla Minus One today, and liked it a lot. I wasn’t interested initially, because I’ve never been into Godzilla movies, but this one got great reviews, so I checked it out. The film was written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. I liked that most of it is a character story about a Japanese kamikaze pilot named Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) in the last days of WWII who backed out of completing his suicide mission, then felt like a coward for not saving others, and struggled with survivor’s guilt, coming home to a bombed Tokyo, and falling into a makeshift family with a young woman named Noriko (Minami Harabe) and an orphan baby she found, and keeping himself emotionally distant because he doesn’t want to get too close.

    All the while, Godzilla is attacking, and growing more powerful with nuclear energy, and looking like a rough barnacled monster of the sea. And the government doesn’t want to tell civilians about Godzilla to avoid panic, so they won’t even tell them if Godzilla is headed their way.

    It’s an interesting movie about the emotional conflicts of being told to die for your country and die with honor, then feeling like a failure for not doing that, or not even being in a war, then questioning the government for not supporting civilians and withholding information for “their own good,” even if their lives are destroyed by a giant monster stomping on them and breathing fire on them.

    And the parts in the storyline about shaming someone for being a coward in war reminded me of the Tales from the Crypt episode “Yellow,” which takes place during WWI and is a father-son story of a general and his son (played by Kirk Douglas and his son Eric Douglas), where his son was raised in a military family and given a higher rank, though he is opposed to war and is a pacifist, and his cowardly actions cost others their lives, and he is court martialed and shamed for not sacrificing for his country. It had a lot of similar themes that I found in this movie relating to patriotism and war.

    I found this really interesting, and liked the shifts between the human stories and the Godzilla scenes. The only other Godzilla movie I’ve seen is the 2014 Gareth Edwards one, titled Godzilla, and aside from a good final battle, I thought most of the movie was dull with boring characters, so this one, all in Japanese with English subtitles, was a great deal better. And it kept playing the Godzilla theme, which I keep associating with a hip-hop song that sampled it, Pharoahe Monch’s “Simon Says.” So overall, it's a really good movie, and a much more interesting monster movie than I had expected.

Thoughts on 8 Seconds

   On Tubi I watched 8 Seconds, the 1994 movie starring Luke Perry as the bullrider Lane Frost, who was a rodeo champion in the 80s and died at age 25 when a bull gored him in the ribs in 1989. I thought the movie was OK, remembering it as a flop when it came out, and it was Luke Perry's attempt to be a movie star in a big biopic, crossing over from being a teen TV idol in Beverly Hills: 90210, and I'm sure the title made it easy for critics to make jokes, like saying it lasted 8 seconds in theaters or whatever. After that, Luke Perry mostly had an average career, though by the time he died of a stroke at age 52 in 2019, he had more success on Riverdale as Archie's dad, and I still felt bad for him anyway for dying of a stroke in early middle age. His son Jack Perry is a major wrestler with AEW, wrestling under the name Jungle Boy.

    The movie was fine, I liked Stephen Baldwin's performance more as his fellow bullrider friend Tuff Hedeman, and I had to put on captions to understand characters speaking in Oklahoma accents, as stuff would just fly past me. Cynthia Geary was OK as Lane's wife Kellie, a barrel runner (a horseback rider who races around barrels in rodeos), and I don't know if any of the marital drama in the movie depicted was true or not, or the running theme of Lane trying to please his taciturn dad (James Rebhorn) and never hearing "I love you." I didn't really care, I just watched it as something light, but never felt invested in the sports drama because I don't like bullriding, think it's a dumb sport, and couldn't feel any emotion for Lane winning or losing.

    Renee Zellweger had an early bit role as a groupie who goes after Lane while he's on the road, and I had known she was in the movie, but thought she would be the female lead. I was wrong, and honestly, given how far her career has gone, she could have been more fit as the spunky, funny wife who can still deliver tearful emotional scenes. Geary was OK, but not memorable at all, and even when the movie is having her question herself on putting her dreams aside to support Lane, it didn't feel like she was genuinely torn, more like "other characters tell her how to feel and then she parrots what they say." So I also didn't really care, and think in retrospect that Zellweger would have been way better as the lead than as just some random floozy.

    I know I'm being mean, but I did laugh at how quickly the movie glosses over his death. He gets gored by a bull, his friends rush out to save him, then it jump-cuts to his coffin being carried out of the church, and it was a ridiculous edit, like if people came in not knowing he had died in real life and the movie is like "He died, next scene." And most of the credits are a PowerPoint slideshow presentation of Lane Frost's life, with sappy country ballads playing over it to try to wring out emotion, and I didn't feel anything, not liking the forced manipulation for sadness. Though I did like how his wife in real life had 80s permed hair while the movie wife had straight hair.

    So mostly I thought the movie was just OK, and Perry himself was fine, looking more like the Hollywood version of Frost. The movie isn't very memorable, just middling, but was fine to watch.

Thoughts on Fallen Leaves

     At the Quad Cinema in New York City, I saw Fallen Leaves, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, and starring Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen. It's a deadpan romantic comedy about two single people in Helsinki with quiet, solitary lives who try to build a romance, but keep dealing with obstacles like job loss, missed connections, and alcoholism. At just 90 minutes, it's a quiet tragicomedy about two people who would seem like lonely losers, at the bottom of the labor chain, but who want to build a connection to feel less alone. This film is part of Kaurismäki's Proletariat series, which includes Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and the Match Factory Girl (1990).

Ansa (Pöysti) lives in a tiny apartment she inherited from her godmother, and works at a supermarket, pricing and stocking items. She gets fired for taking expired food home that she was told to throw out, and bounces around odd jobs, like a dishwasher in a bar and a factory worker sorting recyclable plastic. She listens to news updates on her vintage radio about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and meets Holappa (Vatanen) by chance, a construction worker who is a habitual alcoholic, and who keeps sneaking drinks from his flasks on the job, which continually gets him fired. They initially encounter each other at a karaoke bar, but don't really meet each other until later. They're trying to make their budding relationship work, but his drinking gets in the way, they both switch around to different jobs, and the relationship seems dead before it can even get started.

But both of them have this quiet charm about them, as well as a no-bullshit, sarcastic way of delivering lines and being blunt without being hurtful. The film has this feeling of being old-fashioned with the radio and tube trains, but being current with the news, smartphones, and the pair going to see Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die. There are recurring scenes in a karaoke bar, where patrons sing old mid-20th century pop crooner songs, and largely seem outside of the main metropolis of Helsinki, living more in the working-class outskirts among dive bars, construction sites, and quiet apartment houses.

    This film is shortlisted by the Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film, and won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, so it has been highly acclaimed. I feel like at the Oscars, the more likely winners for International Films would be either Anatomy of a Fall or The Zone of Interest, both much heavier films, but I liked this film as a quiet romantic comedy about two ordinary people dealing with job insecurity and trying to make a romance work against the odds.

Thoughts on Poor Things

     Yesterday at the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan, I went to see Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos' new film. An adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the film stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, and Ramy Youssef. It's a dark comedy that is inspired by Frankenstein with a feminist enlightenment twist, and started off weird and got more deeper to watch. 

    In Victorian London, amidst a lot of steampunk imagery, Dafoe plays Dr. Godwin Baxter, a doctor with a scarred up face from his father's experiments on him as a child, who has created hybrid animals a la The Island of Dr. Moreau, like pig-hen hybrids or roosters that bark like dogs. He hires a medical student, Max McCandles (Youssef) to work with him on treating a woman with a brain injury (Stone), who is a grown woman with limited speech who acts like a baby, tossing things around and being immature. Early in the film, the woman's unusual backstory is revealed, where it turns out she was a pregnant woman who had died by suicide by falling off a bridge, only for Baxter to retrieve her body, and instead of reviving her, feeling it's not his place to bring back a suicide, decides instead to replace her brain with her living baby's brain, and resurrected her with electricity, bringing her back to life, as a woman with an infant's brain, and naming her Bella.

    Bella's brain matures more, and through masturbating, she discovers she has a high sex drive, and though she has accepted Max's hand in marriage, she desires freedom, as Baxter has kept her as a prisoner of his home, and she wants to see the world and have adventure. So on a whim, she goes off with the rakish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo) to Lisbon, Portugal, and other travels, indulging in her sexual escapades and learning more about the world. And as she learns more, and meets intellectual types on her travels, she learns not just about pleasure and hedonism, but also about sadness and despair, and becomes more aware of her own feminist and philosophical thoughts, especially as she sees her sexuality and her mind as her free will to use however she wants, and how the men in her life keep trying to imprison her or keep her in her place as a daughter, wife, or plaything.

    The film's first quarter is all in black and white, and then immediately switches to color once she has sex for the first time, as her awakening. I also just watched a video analyzing Pleasantville (1998), and the characters see swatches of color once they have more epiphanies and awakenings in their life, so there seemed to be some cinematic inspiration there, as well as, of course, from The Wizard of Oz.

    Emma Stone is a natural comedienne, and uses a lot of slapstick physical comedy initially when Bella has an infant's brain, throwing things around and breaking things, but as her character grows and evolves, she becomes a more interesting person, slowly aware of the limitations that men want to put on her, and seeing herself as a free person with agency who cannot be trapped. Even when she eventually finds work as a sex worker in a French brothel, she is not interested in just being seen as a hole for men to use, but wants to engage with them with jokes and philosophy and chat, to make the play more fun and more worthwhile for her. It's nice to see Stone back on the big screen after a break during the pandemic and having a child, and her intelligence and sense of humor brought a lot of depth and thoughtfulness to her portrayal of Bella.

    Mark Ruffalo is a lot of fun to watch in this film, playing a seductive cad who starts off a charming rogue, and over time, through frustration with Bella not having emotional ties to him and doing whatever she wants, starts breaking down and becoming more pathetic, and it's hilarious to watch. Ruffalo often gets cast as shy and bashful types, which seems close to his real-life persona, as he seems very humble about his success and career. A couple of times in films like In the Cut and Collateral, he played more macho cops, but that didn't feel as believable. Here, he plays a character more outright sexual and flirty, but the character becomes better when he starts coming apart, and Ruffalo's comedic chops come through, just being ridiculously funny to watch as he goes insane over this woman that he claims is the "the devil" because he cannot control her.

    The production design has a cool steampunk look to it, with matte paintings of Victorian London in the distance on rooftop scenes, trams on cable cars practically appearing to fly above the streets, and warm colors for the seaside scenes in Lisbon. It can look a little overly whimsical, but not in an over the top Tim Burton kind of way, and I liked the dark fantasy world of it, finding the film more interesting as it progressed, as it went from having a ludicrous premise to being more about a woman discovering her own agency and philosophical look on life, which made it much richer to watch. I recommend this film as one of the highlights of 2023's year in movies.

Thoughts on The House of Yes

   On Criterion, I watched the 1997 film The House of Yes, written and directed by Mark Waters and adapted from the play by Wendy MacLeod. I had seen the film as a teenager, but had forgotten a lot aside from Parker Posey's character being obsessed with Jackie Kennedy, dressing as her in her Halston pillbox hat and pink suit. Rewatching it, I really liked it as a dark comedy that deals with an obsession with Jackie Kennedy, mental illness, and a dysfunctional family, with Tori Spelling as the new fiancée who just walks into all this mess and is completely blindsided.  

  Set at Thanksgiving in 1983, Marty (Josh Hamilton) and his fiancée Lesly (Spelling) arrive from New York City to McLean, Virginia to visit his family: his mother (Genevieve Bujold), his brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), and his twin sister, Jackie-O (Posey), who just got released from a psychiatric hospital. Jackie-O is obsessed with Jackie Kennedy, and the film opens with a childhood home video from 1971 of a young Jackie-O (Rachael Leigh Cook) recreating Jackie Kennedy's famous TV tour of the White House, reciting her dialogue as she makes her way through their expansive home. She connects the loss of JFK with the loss of her father, and has been deeply psychologically impacted, as well as having an unhealthy relationship with her brother Marty, bonding over trauma, which Anthony tries to warn Lesly about.

    Parker Posey is fantastic in this film. She has this airiness to her voice that can capture so much with subtle humor, saying dark things with a deadpan face, and laughing to get past anything that is uncomfortable for her. She is a gem to watch, is delightfully weird, and I'm happy that Criterion is doing a retrospective of her work, many of which I have seen, from Party Girl to Clockwatchers to Broken English. I love that even when she's in more mainstream movies and TV, she still stands out as being charming and interesting, like in Blade: Trinity as a vampire or Josie & the Pussycats as an insecure record exec wanting to be seen as cool by teenagers.

    Besides Posey, the cast in this film works well as a strong ensemble. Freddie Prinze, Jr. in an early role shows a lot of heart as an awkward brother who has stood witness to his twin siblings' disturbing relationship, and is trying to woo Lesly away from his brother to spare her from learning about it. Josh Hamilton comes off as a straight-laced dork trying to appear normal and together, but gets lured back into the dysfunction by his sister. Genevieve Bujold as Mrs. Pascal is more of a conservative and wealthy mother who turns a blind eye to what is going on with her children. Rachael Leigh Cook as a young Jackie-O has brief screentime, but captures the energy and manic feelings that would further affect Jackie-O later in life. And Tori Spelling is sweet and naive as the newcomer to the family who thought that Marty was just a normal person and believed his cover stories about his scar or thinking that Jackie-O was in a regular hospital.

    It's a wonderfully weird dark comedy, and Mark Waters would go on to direct the teen classic Mean Girls, as well as many other Hollywood films. I'm happy I revisited it and got to understand it much more as an adult and pick up a lot more on the details of the family dysfunction.