Before, in simpler times, you could virtue signal just from watching a film. Was it about gay people? Was it the debut of a person of color? Did you like everyone in it except for the all powerful being Susan Sarandon? Those were the good old days. The Old Normal if you will. Nowadays, even more importance is placed on how you watched it. Did you see it at a theater chain whose stock you’re hodling? Did you make sure to tell everyone it had been two years since you saw a movie in a theater thus admitting you missed out on the big screen joys of Tenet, Freaky, and Tom and Jerry 2021? Or maybe you’re the responsible type and caught up with it on a streaming service. If you went out hopefully the venue asked for papers, and you kept the mask on because…science.
While we prepare for the avalanche of Covid cringe guaranteed to hit the arts at large let’s look back at the year of delayed films peeking their head out for some box office gross.
You must be boosted beyond this point.
Never before has the purity of the cinematic experience been more important.
On the day I watched Dune, The Last Duel, and Venom: Let There be Carnage, it was the gay, superhero bedroom farce that was the most subversive. Take the time to say goodbye to the chickens.
If we’re being honest, the trailer to Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City might actually be my favorite film of the year. It just brings a smile every time I see it. Worth noting is how it avoids the still trending trailercore. The film itself was pretty fun - it’s from the same guy who made Strangers: Prey at Night - and hopefully they go for RE4 with this goofy version of Leon.
Haute tabloid made a comeback this past year. My pitch for another entry in this style: the title is @gabspetito. It will be shot in academy ratio so that every shot will look like an Instagram photo. The final shot is the heroine, riding shotgun with the window down, her hand outstretched in the wind. A blur of Americana shifts further in the distance.
I’m pretty sure this is Jessica Rothe in a Coca-Cola ad:
Anyways, here’s the list. There’s thirteen of them ranked. The Japanese selections can also be found here with other new Japanese films I dug:
Favorites//Japan//2021The Town of Headcounts
Men drowning in debt, a woman escaping an abusive husband, someone living in a cyber-cafe being taken forcefully by dudes in matching uniforms. They all find retreat in a town where everything is provided to them as long as the town’s set of rules are followed. There seems to be a lack of filmmakers tackling the world of today and the more pressing matters of surveillance, speech control, information wars, and ultimately how the oligarchs distract and maintain power. No identity politics, no safety of period pieces or fancy future-trips, just a low-budget allegory of today where most of the cast wears hoodies. The film’s understatedness sets it apart from other speculative fiction where too much worldbuilding and thinly veiled critiques of easy targets never rise above juvenile social commentary. Instead of a smug tone saying “this is where we’re headed,” we’re already there and can parse out what real world happenings each moment might be referring to. A big net is cast over many an issue; intertitles flash onscreen with some statistic like the number of those missing in Japan, personal bankruptcies, homeless and unemployed, voter turnout. Almost like it’s all connected. There’s even the depiction of crisis actors but it might be a metaphor pointed at bigger targets. The film doesn’t punch down on those living in the town, it’s sympathetic to how hard it is just to survive through new world orders and great resets. There’s a sophistication to the film, on the topic of speech for instance, it doesn’t scream just “censorship!” but instead depicts how speech is controlled, the allowance of both critical and negative writing tricks those into seeing freedom. It’s so richly detailed that no one’s going to see the same dystopia. For me, it’s hard not to find shades of New Normal in all of it.
Sasaki in My Mind
In a similar mode to A Story of Yonosuke. Between this and Remain in Twilight it was a strong year for stories about suddenly remembering an old friend you haven’t seen in years, a species of the haunted-by-past genus. An aspiring actor starts thinking about the class clown he was friends with. The one who told him he would make for a good actor and would strip down at a moment’s notice whenever his friends egged him on, chanting his name. It’s the same one he had a glimpse of his broken home outside of school and wonders if there was something more he could have done. This one works because of how dead inside the main guy is, making it a slow burn emotionally until the finale lets loose and tries to disguise how deeply tragic it all is.
Profile
Films like this push what’s already been done with screenlife and give a view into the possibilities still out there from such an underutilized method of telling a story. More films had to turn to screenlife out of necessity from pandemic restrictions but never did much more than record Zoom calls, diluting the blue ocean where Timur Bekmambetov has produced ambitious films like Unfriended 1 and 2 and Searching. This time he’s also directing. A British reporter investigates ISIS recruitment techniques targeting young European women. I was worried about the backdrop being the dirty war on Syria but the film has a more nuanced, humanist view. Never once is Assad’s name dropped and the so called “moderate rebels” are not portrayed as this righteous resistance. The recruiter’s backdrop is the Islamophobia he encountered while trying to make a living in Europe but the film doesn’t make this an excuse for his actions.
Profile uses the 1x1 view of the entire screen instead of what I call the eye-tracking mode where we move across a zoomed-in view of the screen. It’s almost PlayTime-esque the more windows open. Favorite bit of screenlife: the reporter’s audio starts echoing during a moment where she is starting to reconsider how deep she’s getting. A common occurrence with video calls is now a tech manifestation of her conscience regarding her double life.
The Card Counter
If you want to keep up the illusion of Paul Schrader best to avoid his Facebook musings. Ignoring the tongue wagging for IDF lady Gal Gadot, recent highlights include sharing a pro-regime change Atlantic article for empire babies and unironically reposting Obama’s 2021 movie list that featured The Card Counter. A little ironic considering he whitewashed the torturing of detainees by the US military and gave immunity to CIA torturers. The image of a tormented man writing in a diary consistently is extrapolated to the image of Schrader writing a script. The better comparison you can draw between Schrader and his screenplay surrogates is that he too is a walking contradiction: a challenging filmmaker but also a neoliberal basic bitch.
Wife of a Spy
This one received a bit more attention than To the Ends of the Earth which despite being only a few years old is in need of reassessment. Maybe its lack of a genre (suspense travelogue?) hurt it where Wife of a Spy apparently has enough to sell audiences on it from title alone. It just sounds sexy and readymade for Step-Family of a Spy reinterpretation. Even a masterpiece like Tokyo Sonata could still be pigeonholed in the “Japanese family drama” genre. This is not to say that there’s nothing of merit in Wife of a Spy, it’s just another success in Kurosawa’s streak of nebulously reinventing himself. Instead of Brechtian music cues, a purposefully phony and digital look achieves the same function. It makes for a good buddy-cop clash with the genuine intrigue of its espionage tale that is mirrored and repurposed in the film-within-a-film that the spy works on as a hobbyist. Once everything has gone to pieces Yu Aoi resembles Setsuko Hara in No Regrets for Our Youth, you watch as she develops ideologically in a performance that makes you lean in.
Remain in Twilight
The other memory-of-a-friend film. This one is a bit more broad than Sasaki (Kisetsu Fujiwara is in both by the way) but it’s able to mix it up by having the group of friends able to collectively interact with an imaginary version of the one no longer able to be there. All five of them each get the time to go over their individual connections with him as they gather for the wedding of two old classmates. This gives a much more detailed look at the group dynamic. A lot of the humor works including a scene stealing cameo from Atsuko Maeda. But again, no matter the antics, they’ll hit a wall reminding them you can’t go back to make things right. But it’s a real hoot to watch them try.
Calls
I want to believe this was originally conceived as a film. All the episodes together are about two hours, each segment starts with the chronological location of the prior story before shifting the clock to the one about to start. It’s just the audio of phone calls, transcriptions are displayed together with screen saver visuals. The visual elements are dynamic and help add understanding to character relationships. It would have been a wild experience as a theater experience you can go straight through. It’s still a unique experience with actually chilling moments.
Riders of Justice
This one will be joining Tokyo Godfathers and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as an annual Christmas time watch. A perfect re-imagining of an old-guy action movie. Setting it at year end is a clever move as the season is ripe for reflection and being haunted by the past. Maybe it’s the expiration of the year that causes this but regardless, old guys have a lot of past to be haunted by and the men in this one have been absolutely molested by the past, some literally so. The ways anguish is dealt with range from wanting to find meaning in coincidence to the more healthy method of shooting bad guys. One person’s Christmas miracle might result in a tragic butterfly effect for someone else.
It’s a Summer Film!
A trio of girls drool over a VHS quality Shintaro Katsu during their film club meetings. They’re working on a good old fashioned chanbara picture, competing with the popular girl whose production of a vapid romance always seems to be close by. The assembled ragtag Fuck Bombers look even more ragtag when standing in the same shot as the yes frills other production. It’s another one of those let’s-make-a-movie movies (a plot type which I’m just now realizing has a lot in common with the heist film) but there’s a genre shift so straight faced and unassuming it’s shocking but reflects the feeling that anything is possible which only makes sense given the youth of the characters. A handful of the micro-budgeted films on this list achieve that feeling of gathering your friends to make a movie in someone’s backyard which should be mandatory for a film about characters embarking on a cinematic endeavor with not even a shoestring. What’s most impressive is how the film finds the ways that jidai-geki and sci-fi relate to coming of age. The finale (which multiple characters even say is the climax of the story as they pull out their smart phones to film it) is able to blend being inspirational with the bittersweetness of knowing how the future has a way of destroying the memory of the present.
Dashcam
Even though reading Letterboxd reviews can give you Covid cancer AIDS, sometimes you just want to die but don’t have the courage to kill yourself in more normal ways. God damn the upvoted negative reviews on this are terrible. At the time of writing, the three most popular reviews drag what I thought was this tense thriller about conspiracy and cover-up. How many cop-kills-man stories do we know the full story to? Look up Johnny Hurley. Or last April when Homeland Security set up some New Mexico police officer to justify gunning down a drug dealer. This film is taking on real timely shit but sure let’s fixate on it being shot on the cheap during the pandemic. Also I guess some other film named Dashcam was making the rounds last year : “I watched the wrong Dashcam hardy har.” Not to sound paranoid or anything but it’s almost as if any film coming out as pro-conspiracy has a Manchurian effect on Letterboxd Pros and Patrons. Good on Nilsson and company for not bitching out and being able to engross us in watching a guy download zipped files and using video editing software. Don’t forget to say you were bored and that it’s similar to Blow Out when logging this one.
Flashback
Flipping between different sketches of the same face. It’s an encapsulation of how the film does the same thing with crosscutting between past/present, reality/hallucination, alternate timelines, memories with varying amounts of decay. I’m not really sure. This worked for me as some sort of cerebral mood piece, constructed like a puzzle. The trippy version of the memory-of-old-friend story. If it’s not one of the 36 dramatic situations let’s replace elevated horror with it.
Malignant
James Wan fucking around with other people’s money. This was one of two high profile giallo throwbacks to come out last year and instead of fixating on the usual visual clichés that most homages get their shirts snagged on, it captures the feel of a giallo by embracing that all-famous disregard for logic. There’s a bit of bathing scenes in colorful lights but the more actual Italian murder mysteries I watch the more I realize how much contemporary filmmakers have amplified that low frequency stylistic choice. As far as other similarities to the giallo tradition go we have a character witnessing murders through visions but that’s about it. Instead, Wan is drawing from his own interests to create a true monster mash of ideas. Part of the film is in haunted house mode like Insidious or The Conjuring. There are elaborate action sequences one-upping the work Wan did in things like Death Sentence and Furious 7. The cops in the film would fit right in with the ones from Saw 3D: The Final Chapter based on how hard they go about the whole cable TV cop act [see the reference to “backyard filmmaking” in the blur for It’s a Summer Film!]. It’s brilliant how straight-faced all these ridiculous little details are. Like the movie is daring you to nitpick things that feel “off.” When visiting an abandoned hospital a character parks their car right at the edge of a cliff. A Corman women-in-prison type picture is used as the location for the big reveal, because it’s just funnier that way.
National Champions
A couple of college football players try to get a strike going and bring widespread coverage to inequity of compensation and healthcare in the days leading up to the championship game. One of them is the star quarterback with some leverage looking out for the players who won’t go pro but will go the rest of their lives with bodies damaged and no healthcare lined up. As he reads off big game profits and head coach salaries on TV the advertisers and league officials scramble in backroom dealings trying to stomp out the movement. They’ll go for the dirty play with no hesitation if the inspirational heart pouring from JK Simmons doesn’t do the trick.
What’s funny in this one is how Covid doesn’t really seem to be a thing anymore but in its most prescient moment Covid is used as part of a shame campaign against the striking quarterback. The young, healthy athlete caught Covid at some party while maskless. What a monster. The parallels with players like Kaepernick and Lynch are obvious but look at how late-nite hacks dish on Kyrie Irving for “doing his own research.” They don’t want you thinking for yourself and will portray that behavior as downright retarded. Remember, only idiots try to find out things for themselves. And there were WMDs in Iraq by the way, because NYT said so.
College athletics is so specific as a setting but I loved how the film didn’t try to dummy down or stop for annotations for each instance of inside baseball. Beyond all of that what’s universal is the futility of change but the glory of trying to throw a wrench in the status quo. Look at the Force the Vote movement to see how dearly the majority of voices with a platform will cling to the way things are. The bigger question is why have politicians who ran on a platform of Medicare for All abandoned it once in office and during a pandemic no less.
Others of Note:
Zeros and Ones//Wrath of Man//Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy//West Side Story//Venom: Let There Be Carnage//Seance//Sayonara TV//Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City//The Pizzagate Massacre/Duncan//The Marskman//Mandibules//Lone Wolf//Limbo//Licorice Pizza//Junk Head//In the Earth//Ice Road//Godzilla vs. Kong//The French Dispatch//F9//Escape Room: Tournament of Champions//Dark Web: Cicada 3301//Broadcast Signal Intrusion//Bolt//Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes