Richard Linklater, 2016
#7, 2016 Skandies
For some reason I had thought that La La Land was #6 and Moonlight was #7. When I found out that Moonlight was #8, I wondered why #7 had looked so unappealing that my 2017 self decided to skip it. That became even more of a head-scratcher when I discovered that #7 was the next Linklater film after Boyhood, which I’d done a whole Calen-deliria show about. So I decided to add #7 back in. And it turns out that it was pretty good! I guess 2017‑me might have been turned off by the premise, viz., that we’re spending two hours watching the members of a college baseball team in Texas engage in frathouse antics before the start of the new school year. Maybe on another day I might have been grumpier about having to spend a whole movie with these characters, but at least when I saw it, they were having a good enough time that it was hard not to have a good time as well, even if in real life I would find hanging out with these guys to be the opposite of a good time. And then there’s the real saving grace of the movie: it’s set in the dying days of the disco era, and as Pattern 24 notes, I sure do love me a chronologically grounded narrative. Betamax players! Space Invaders! The hardcover companion book to Cosmos, for cryin’ out loud! I read one article that described the film as a portrayal as the last four days of the main character’s childhood, with the first day of classes—1980, September 1—as the beginning of his adult life. Coincidentally, on 1980, September 1, I got on a plane for the first time in my life and touched down in California, which would be my home for 33 of the next 42 years (and counting). It was kind of weird to think that, offscreen, this was also a chronicle of the last four days of my life as an east coast kid.
Mike Mills, 2016
#9, 2016 Skandies
Shakedown, 1979! We stay in the Carter era for this one but head out to Santa Barbara, where we meet Dorothea, a single mother to a 15-year-old son who, as 15-year-old boys tend to be, is a little shit a lot of the time. Dorothea tries to keep up with the times, and has a pretty wide permissive streak—she is worried but not mad when her son Jamie stays out all night, and when he skips school she argues with the principal that determining whether he feels like going to school that morning should be Jamie’s prerogative—but she is an older mom, 55 when Jamie is 15 (and looking a lot older due to her chain-smoking), and there is a significant generation gap there. Deciding that it takes a village to raise a child, she turns to her circle of acquaintances for help. Her first choice is William, a handyman who fixes up her huge old house in lieu of rent, but Jamie and William have nothing in common: “This is, like, really, really, boring—he’s talking about, like, wood and stuff!” Jamie complains. So next she turns to two people with whom Jamie is already close. One is her other renter, Abbie, age 24, a photographer with day-glo hair who dropped out of art school in New York and returned home to Santa Barbara when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The other is Jamie’s best friend, Julie, age 17, who climbs up the house’s scaffolding every night to sleep with him, though literally just to sleep—when he tries to make moves on her she rebuffs them, saying that they’re too close emotionally for her to have sex with him, even though she’s had sex with half the other boys in town. Abbie and Julie are dubious about Dorothea’s request that they put a conscious effort into molding her son—“Don’t you need a man to raise a man?” Julie asks—but Dorothea scoffs, “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I think you’re what’s going to work for him.”
This would be a great premise for a movie, and to the extent that 20th Century Women actually is about this, it is very good. For instance, there’s a thread in which Abbie gives Jamie a copy of Sisterhood Is Powerful, which Mr. Sawaya had on prominent display in my high school English class, and he just devours it. But this is a bridge too far for Dorothea—sure, in the abstract she wants her son to be a feminist, but she doesn’t want him getting beaten up at the skate park for reciting passages from “The Politics of Orgasm” at the other boys when they brag about their sexual conquests. Unfortunately, the movie loses its focus on this premise and devolves into “so here’s a bunch of stuff that happened to these characters”. The characters are very well drawn—distinctive individuals, not types—with Annette Bening’s Dorothea particularly memorable: a trailblazer in many ways, pretty chill yet remarkably argumentative, progressive yet very clear on just how far the boundaries of that open-mindedness extend. The conversations are fun to listen to, as when Abbie advises Jamie that “You need to get out of this town before you start working at a sunglasses shop!” Had 20th Century Women only been stronger on plot, this could have been a strong “pro” for me instead of a high “mixed”.
Sarah Waters, Seo-kyeong Jeong, and Park Chan-wook, 2016
just to talk about whatkind of movie this is
is kind of a spoiler
#10, 2016 Skandies
Not set in the Carter years! Rather, this one is set in Japanese-occupied Korea, and initially looks like it’s going to be a grim affair along the lines of Silence, with Japanese troops forcing Korean women into prostitution. Then it looks like instead of prostitution it’ll be domestic service. But just a few minutes in, the film takes a sharp swerve, and we discover that the premise is very different indeed. And this turns out to be just the first of many swerves, both in terms of the who’s-zoomin’-who plot and in terms of the tone. I had no idea the swerves were coming and so they were all that much more effective on me. Revisiting previous scenes—not just with new knowledge, but from different perspectives—also worked very well. So, on the level of plot, a big thumbs-up. I liked the protagonist, Sook-hee, and I liked the Mulholland Dr.-esque turn the story takes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is my favorite movie from the 2016 list so far. It seems like for a while now I’ve been liking each one more than the last! Maybe I should have started from the bottom and worked my way up. But…
…I still can’t put The Handmaiden into the “pro” category, because there are some elements that kind of ruined it for me. Hate sadomasochism—the shot of whipped buttocks pretty much divided the score I was going to give this film in half. (The same thing happened last year with Nymphomaniac.) Hate torture. The less said about the giant squid, the better. I gather that these elements were meant to be turds in the punch bowl—again, this is a Korean movie about the Japanese occupation, so the Japanese are gonna be the bad guys. When a bunch of Japanese aristocrats are getting all hot and bothered listening to a young woman read sadomasochistic stories, my understanding is that we’re supposed to be thinking, “Gyah, what a bunch of pervs! Goddammit, Japan!” But even acknowledging the role these elements of the movie served, they were still a net negative for me. So, still looking for my first 10+ of 2016!
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