MOVIEPUDDING No. 1
What to watch now that you've watched Parasite.
Synonyms
Nadav Lapid
If someone watched Godard’s entire filmography and was told to remake Taxi Driver is how my friend Peter described this Israeli-French thriller. He is correct, but his derision is my commendation, even when the film runs overlong and becomes unwieldy in its themes.
The Israeli director’s third feature criticizes the country’s militarism and feverishly explores the intersections of language, identity, and storytelling through an off-kilter personality — a young man who absconds his home, falls into the affectless arms of an über-French couple, refuses to look up at the Eiffel tower, is frequently naked and emits a stubborn/manic vivacity.
Lapid also made the original version of the The Kindergarten Teacher, which was remade into English starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. It might be acceptable to start there.
In theaters now.
Recommended if you like (RIYL): The way people talk in Yorgos Lanthimos movies, Denis Lavant, the shaping force of language, the idea of Godard remaking Taxi Driver.
Mid90s
Jonah Hill
I can’t stand on a skateboard and was highly suspicious of this film; my brother and boyfriend who can employ this plank of maplewood with varying and impressive levels of success were eager to see it. My skepticism of this movie about skateboarders from the era of Jonah Hill’s youth (which is also my youth) disintegrated into the glossy ochre celluloid as non-actors mouthed-off in this new-to-me parlance of today’s youth. Endlessly watchable — though the success of their performances hinges on your familiarity with or proximity to skate culture. Apparently I am one too old and too far-removed.
Mid90s is like that annoying kid you knew in high school who turns out to be half decent. Most of his peers still hate them, but you, endowed with maturity, can view them more objectively.
RIYL: Displaying older sibling energy, elevated slice joints, Timothee Chalamet, but not romantically because you feel like you’re not the appropriate age.
Watch on Amazon Prime.
Gates of Heaven
Errol Morris
While an older lady talks about her dead pets all I could do was stare the monstrous waxy flora behind her, the world’s largest anthurium threatening to swallow her whole. No matter, though, all part of the viewing process in Errol Morris’ early documentaries: subjects digress long enough to expel a funny tidbit and let you scan the scene to reinforce the absurdity of it all.
I watched this movie about pet cemeteries in a cemetery as well maintained as Disney World (ostensibly; I’ve never had the pleasure), but you can watch it on Criterion Channel.
RIYL: Christopher Guest movies, the library, old diners and dives in middle America, giggling to yourself when you espy the oddball in the corner of a Rembrandt painting.
Chungking Express
Wong Kar Wai
A wistful dream pop ballad of a movie. The melody will trick you into forgetting the undercurrent of sadness. An entry point to Wong Kar Wai’s sumptuous cinema.
RIYL: Missed connections, Cocteau Twins, meeting-cute in a laundromat, overloading on fun-sized snacks.
Breathe
Melanie Laurent
Confirmation that female friendships of the adolescent variety are among the scariest things in life. In this movie as in 127 Hours something will be sacrificed or lost while suffering a tremendous amount of pain, to only your private knowledge. Actress Melanie Laurent’s undersung feature starts out how you might expect: A reserved teen befriends a cool one. But fondness curdles when the former realizes she’s caught in the orbit of the latter, a supernova set to detonate under her own set of insecurities.
RIYL: The back half of Pen15, Queen of Earth, Mean Girls
SHORT TAKES
Vincent Minnelli’s Some Came Running especially when witnessed in glorious 35mm is a “club sandwich of a movie” as opposed to sliced Wonder Bread. The wise words of a Metrograph employee.
Brian Depalma’s Sisters is low-budget Hitchcock set in Staten Island. (It even has the master of suspense’s composer Bernard Herrmann in tow.)
Marriage Story is maybe Noah Baumbach’s 8th best movie and I’m being generous.
Martin Scorsese hates Marvel movies, so you can, too.
This two-page spread in the New Yorker dedicated to a metaphorical political thriller about Anti-Semitism from 1976 (Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein) was enough to compel the cinema-unsaavy to New York’s downtown temple of cinema, which even brought back the movie for another round of showings. (Based on my sample size of three young people, but, behold! the potential power of a movie review.)
I DIDN’T LOVE IT, BUT YOU MIGHT
Man’s best friend represents the last bastion of dignity, humanity, and storytelling in The Rover. Part John Wick (absurd vengeance), part Drive (a man and his car), set to the barren desertscapes and distorted harmonics of the road scenes in Twin Peaks: The Return. David Michod’s “dystopian” action movie feels underdeveloped.
It Comes At Night: a tense allegory of how fear perpetuates fear; stay calm and be nice to strangers. Strike two in my book for Joel Edgerton.
IF YOU LIKED PARASITE, WATCH:
The help overtake the master of the house, the bourgeoisie undone in The Servant (by the aforementioned Joseph Losey “master of interiors and connoisseur of dread”)
Visual demonstrations of class divisions (think of the flood scenes) in Kurosawa’s aptly titled classic High & Low
Gruesome twists in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy
More of director Bong’s genre-blending stye in The Host
Similar anti-capitalist flair and mixing of moods (though resulting in a vastly different concoction!) in Sorry to Bother You
The original Korean upstairs-downstairs melodrama, The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young, 1960). Thumbs up from Scorsese on this one.
But above all — New Korean Cinema. Oldboy, the original progenitor of batshit wtf-storytelling remains the place to start. See the 4K restoration if you’re in NYC.
Is there something you think I should watch? Tell me!