This Week in Cinema, I Learned…Jan 28-Feb 03 2024
Written by Cameron Geiser
Welcome to This Week in Cinema, a yearlong film criticism project wherein I will be watching a new film that I haven't seen every single day.
So far in this journey through cinema on a daily basis I've tried to create a throughline each week connecting the films by an idea or theme. This week, however, is different. It's a strange one as we’re straddling the end of the first month and the beginning of the second. Especially because the whole month of February is dedicated to Black Cinema. So, this week we have a sci-fi thriller, a documentary about the First World War, my new favorite film from Jean-Luc Godard, my first rewatch of the year, and the first three movies of February. Those three are Watermelon Man by Melvin Van Peebles, Black Caesar by Larry Cohen, and Bamboozled by Spike Lee. All I can say is Wow! That's some confrontational and often hilarious insanity! Art is a beautiful thing, people, go watch something new!
January 28th
Dark Skies (2013)
4/5
I wonder how many movies have cast Keri Russell as “Mom”? Mercifully this time around her character is more interesting than say last year's animal oddity, Cocaine Bear. This is a low-budget sci-fi horror with a slow-burn pacing, so set your expectations accordingly, because the film uses these parameters to its advantage. I quite enjoyed this one. Dark Skies wisely utilizes implied horror frequently as a family in suburbia is visited by Aliens night after night until every family member is uniquely affected by typical Alien invasion tropes. That's the thing about this film though, it uses well-worn ideas and embellishes these ideas skillfully. The film executes good tension, slowly ratcheting up the taught night scenes with the emergence of odd phenomena happening during the day, like three flocks of birds being directed at the afflicted family's house in the middle of the day. The standout performance goes to a cameo from J.K. Simmons, the expert exposition dump if you will. Though the real star however is the superb sound design and the sense that nothing the family does can stop this small-scale invasion. Utter helplessness is authentically depicted.
January 29th
They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
4/5
Ever since catching a trailer for Peter Jackson's documentary film, They Shall Not Grow Old about World War One, I've wanted to give it a watch. Now that I've seen it, it has stayed with me and I've thought about it almost every day since then. The hook, for the unaware, is that Peter Jackson (and his team) took reels of old footage that survived the twentieth century and modernized the material and colorized it too. The horrific amount of tedious effort this must have taken is beyond me- but it was worth it. The film is bookended with the typical black-and-white footage of that time paired with voice-over audio recordings of the soldiers that lived through the war. Once they get to the actual war footage the film widens its scope and fades in the earthy colors while matching the speed to something comparable to modern filmmaking. The documentary does us a terrific service in showing, in grave detail, just how hellish war is. We see dead bodies of young men floating in the upturned earth while the ghostly voices tell us of their time in the trenches. This documentary should be shown in history classes so we can destroy the romanticism of war appropriately. They Shall Not Grow Old erases a century between us and these soldiers, making them essentially us.
January 30th
Tout va bien (1972)
5/5
In the early 1970’s Jane Fonda joined forces with Jean-Luc Godard and his frequent collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin to form what the Criterion Collection called an “Unholy Artistic Alliance”. That alone was enough for me to give Godard another chance. Out of all the French New Wave filmmakers, I was never much impressed with Jean-Luc Godard. Before Tout va bien I’d only seen Breathless, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, and Weekend. I understand that he had a huge impact on the medium, so some respect was due, sure, but none of the previously mentioned films ever connected with me, and Alphaville in particular felt purposefully designed to lull people to sleep. However, this film has changed all that for me. I absolutely adore this film, and though I have not looked into this- I have a feeling that this film is 100% Wes Anderson's jam too. Aside from Anderson's entire aesthetic being 1970's French Bourgeoisie anyways, the general plot reminds me of an aspect that may have influenced Anderson's Isle of Dogs. It's just a fun, small, link between the two that I found charming (if real at all).
There are also lots of lateral shots, opaque performances that are artificially stilted to further distance the performers from reality, and long takes with characters directly addressing the camera with monologues from their perspectives on the divide between the economic classes. Jane Fonda's character is an American reporter in France observing a wildcat strike at a sausage factory and Yves Montand stars as her French Husband, a former New Wave filmmaker who now directs commercials. As a critique on commercialism in filmmaking and a story about class struggle itself, the film succeeds in this regard brilliantly. It's also really damn funny at times. I was overtaken with laughter during the scene where the factory owner is released for a piss break only for all of the employees to occupy each bathroom until he manically races back to his office and smashes his large window overlooking a busy intersection to violently relieve himself. I highly recommend seeking this one out.
January 31st
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
3/5
This is the first rewatch of the year. As someone who’ grew up with Nintendo games and a fair amount of them starring the famous Italian plumber, I was wary but optimistic when the news dropped that we would be getting an animated version of the global phenomenon. The main reason I decided on this animated film for my first rewatch of the year is fairly simple. Its January and I need some vibrant colors in my life. I also kinda dig this one, it does enough with rewarding, but not overly obtrusive, easter eggs and references paying homage to the decades that these characters have been around. The voice acting is stellar and the animation style is unique but fits with Nintendo's overall aesthetic excellently. However, my main gripe with the film is the over-reliance on “Dad Rock” pop music throughout the runtime. I counted, and including five generic and overused songs like Take on Me or Thunderstruck is just stupid when you have SO MUCH music from dozens of video games over the years right at your fingertips. There were several themes used sparingly, but the whole film should have taken this creative route in my opinion. Though, they did have the sense to include the D.K. Rap, so, at least they got that right.
February 1st
Watermelon Man (1970)
4/5
As we begin February, I plan on watching all Black cinema for the entirety of the month. So, with that in mind, part of me chuckled at the idea of starting with a film where a Black Actor played a White character, in whiteface. However, this is only for the beginning of the film. The hook of the film is that Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge), a boorish and bigoted suburban family man in the 1960s, wakes up one morning to find that he's turned into a Black man overnight. The scene of Jeff flipping on his bathroom lights and freaking out at the sight of a Black man staring back at him is an absolute riot! I feel I must address the fact that you should assume all trigger warnings related to race and bigoted speech by the way. The film goes through every bad joke or racist term, or social faux pas possible. The film is also smarter than you might expect, this isn't racism depicted solely to make anxious white audiences laugh in the early 1970s. While Jeff’s wife Althea (Estelle Parsons) espouses liberal views, she eventually decides to leave him well into the film.
In theory, she has consideration for the Black community, but when it comes to upending her social connections and altering what others think of her just for living with Jeff after he's turned Black- well, it seems it wasn't a relationship based on love. Funnily enough, his children didn’t give a damn about him being black, they just want to know why he races the local bus into town every day. Which, after he starts to accept that he has to try to return to his normal life, he tries to perform his morning routine. It seems like it’s going well until Jeff rounds a corner populated with White people who entirely lose their composure when a Black man strides around the corner at them. Eventually, his neighbors buy him out of the neighborhood because they fear the social ills and financial consequences of living near a Black man, during which Jeff takes them for all he can. Jeff was always a grating, loud, and annoying character and turning Black didn't change his personality, just the reactions and perceptions of everyone else. If you can get past the jaw-dropping, and brain-battering, amount of casual and explicit racism that's espoused, this one is definitely worth a watch!
February 2nd
Black Caesar (1973)
3/5
This film falls into what I like to call, comfort genre films. Films like For a Few Dollars More, Robocop, Lethal Weapon, or most of Quentin Tarantino's films- I consider these rainy day films whose rhythms and idiosyncrasies I vibe with on some level. Black Caesar can now be added to that group of films. It's a simple crime genre flick with an expected story structure, but it's the way that this tragedy is crafted that makes it stick with you afterwards. That and James Brown's funky soundtrack that accompanies the film doesn't do it any harm either. Down and Out in New York City is still bouncing between my ears! Even if the titular character's tale isn't the most inspiring thing in the world, a Black hit man upending old-school Italian Mafia rings is a fun, if not always moral, power fantasy. In the end, violence begets violence- as they say.
February 3rd
Bamboozled (2000)
2.5/5
Spike Lee has always been one of the most fascinating filmmakers to hit the silver screen. Every film he's made has something to say and he's gonna show you something uncomfortable and make you reckon with it. Or at the very least he's gonna make you consider (or reconsider?) something, usually profound, about the Black American experience. While I think Bamboozled has a good concept at its core, this was my least favorite of his films that I have seen so far. I understand the reasoning behind Damon Wayans' character's voice- but the idea of a “white voice” is better realized in his later film BlacKkKlansman. So I get that a Black Producer at CNS, educated at Harvard, and surrounded by white people in the year 2000 would probably change his voice over time to feel accepted etc, there are legitimate reasons for this but I found it horribly grating and the epitome of cringe throughout the runtime. There are good story points throughout that bring that familiar confrontational Spike Lee tone but the issues lie in the execution.
Similarly to the plot of recent Oscar contender American Fiction, our lead Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is tired of being derided for making art that isn't “Black Enough” and then creates something out of spite that's so offensive they can't imagine it being successful. However, to their dismay, success comes at the price of their own dignity. With Bamboozled Mr. Delacroix pitches and then produces a new-age Minstrel show featuring Black Actors in Blackface performing an extremely racist song and dance variety show. And while I like the idea of Spike Lee experimenting with the merging of Video and Film formats for this movie, particularly the fact that the Minstrel Show is shot on film whereas everything else is shot on MiniDV video, it's the early 2000s and movies shot on Video in this era still feels like it’s a home video that cheapens the clarity of the visual image on screen. I think it's a movie worth watching, but it's too long for the ideas in play with the brutally racist images, actions, song and dance. It's all just too much, too sickening to entertain for more than two hours.
Cameron Geiser is an avid consumer of films and books about filmmakers. He'll watch any film at least once, and can usually be spotted at the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Northern Michigan. He also writes about film over at www.spacecortezwrites.com.