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.

Similarly to last week, I've included a whole trilogy in the middle of the week. I've also repeated the inclusion of at least one bad movie, though instead of two mostly uninteresting films, I tortured a few friends with the lowest-scoring film of the year so far! The remaining three films were all decent genre offerings with a thrilling car chase film, a somber prison escape flick set during the German Occupation of France in WW2, and a thoroughly cheesy Kaiju movie from the man who gave us Godzilla himself. Reflecting on the year so far, it's not always easy to parse out seven films and sort out what I've learned about Cinema every week. Though this week the lesson is clear, passion is important. Be it through the characters' aspirations or in the filmmaking itself, it's a crucial aspect as to how any given film will turn out. For Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, the passion is apparent from page to screen. From the dialogue and performances to the commitment of catching up with the characters in real-time, these films are the most passionate of the week. Vanishing Point, A Man Escaped, and Space Amoeba all generally share an admirable amount of passion for not only crafting good films but to do so while maintaining solid levels of entertainment and engagement. However, The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot is what happens when you might be passionate but just end up missing the mark with… well pretty much everything. Granted, it was worth a few laughs, but several friends commented that they felt as though they had transcended the multiverse and were somehow on the internet show Best of The Worst, being forced to watch awful, terrible movies and then discuss the nuances of trash cinema. Which, by the way, I highly recommend giving Best of The Worst a watch on youtube, it's a personal favorite of mine. Enjoy!

March 10th

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot (2018)

1.5/5

For about a month and a half The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot has been sitting on my shelf, acting as a sort of “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” film option if the assigned film for the day was unavailable for any reason. However, as a couple friends of mine were well

aware of the existence of this film, we’ve been theorizing on just how bad or entertaining this assuredly very silly movie could get. Expectations ranged from a bullet-riddled action B-movie to a film set during the Second World War where after our Man kills Hitler, he faces a newfound enemy on the homefront, a big hairy one at that. So curiosity got the better of us and we gave it a watch. It turns out that neither theory was true. The film straddles the two assassination events, one committed as a soldier in his youth during the war, and the other in modern times when the FBI comes knocking at his door to ask for a favor in eradicating Bigfoot before he spreads a world-ending virus. Granted, being released in 2018 before Covid made this beat delectably sillier as we chortled early on that he clearly didn’t get a clean shot on the mythic beast. Anyhow, while we had fun with this horrifically stupid movie that piles in as many conspiracy theory-style plot points as possible, it is very much a bad movie. Apologies to Sam Elliott, but this one was not your best work- I hope the pay was at least worth your time on set. Also, that has to be one of the worst depictions of a Sasquatch I’ve ever seen!

March 11th

Vanishing Point (1971)

3/5

I remember seeking out Steve McQueen’s Bullitt in College due to the car chase that was lauded as one of the very best depicted on the silver screen. I never found it to be all that thrilling if I’m being honest, it’s over far sooner than you might expect and it just could never live up to those expectations. Vanishing Point, however, is the sort of film that I had expected Bullitt to be. Lean on story, heavy on car chase filmmaking. Barry Newman stars as Kowalski, a pill-Vpopping former professional racecar driver, vietnam vet, and ex-cop all rolled into one melancholic existential crisis with an attitude against authority. We get these brief flashbacks throughout the movie that give us little shreds of Kowalski’s life and how he got to where he is. Where he is, by the way, is on a cross-whocountry road trip from Colorado to California delivering a white Challenger to its buyer. However, just to spice things up a bit, Kowalski makes a bet with his drug dealer to get his next stash free if he can get to San Francisco by the following evening. Kowalski throws all caution to the wind and drives as recklessly as possible though, which attracts multiple states’ police departments on the way. There’s also a blind radio DJ that turns Kowalski’s wild ride into a symbol of freedom itself, occasionally giving him tips over the radio waves, exuding an almost telepathic connection between the two. The story may be mostly bare but the fierce filmmaking on display during the more intense chase sequences keeps everything watchable enough.

March 12th

Before Sunrise (1995)

4/5

Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy has been on my radar for quite some time now, so I decided to finally take the plunge. I’m not too familiar with Linklater’s work, before this I’d only seen School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, and Bernie. I’m sure I will get around to Boyhood eventually, but in that case, it was a film that was over-recommended to me for years. When people gush to me about films they love, it’s usually an interesting conversation, but after some time Boyhood turned into an insufferable icon of what seemed like surface-level interest in film. It became the film that people would use as a bludgeon, “Well if you haven’t even taken the time to see the masterpiece that is Boyhood, are you even a real film critic?”. Which is possibly one of the only guaranteed ways to ensure that I don’t watch a movie out of pure spite. All of that is to say, I need to watch more of Linklater’s films, and the Before Trilogy seemed like the perfect place to start! What can I say about this first film though? It’s entirely adorable. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) cross paths while riding a train through Europe, and when they strike up a conversation, they reveal a cosmic intertwining through dialogue and performance that I was rather impressed with. These two actors are very adept at depicting two young people who are immediately taken by each other’s presence. When they arrive in Vienna Jesse takes a chance and asks Céline to walk and talk with him as they both would like to continue the conversation. She agrees and they wander around the European city for the whole night and continue to pry each other’s minds, to discover their pasts, ideologies, and perspectives on a litany of subjects. It’s quite a cute little film and I loved the ambiguous ending. I’m glad there are two more movies to spend with these characters, but I also would have been happy with the one film as well.

March 13th

Before Sunset (2004)

4/5

Nine years later Jesse, now a published Author, is in Paris on the final leg of his book tour and coincidentally he bumps into Céline there- it just so happened to take place in her favorite bookstore in Paris. I do enjoy the cosmic ideas of fate and chance aligning for the sake of love, or just a good conversation. I also quite enjoyed the opening credits that were a reverse of the end credits sequence in Sunrise in which the empty spaces and places they inhabited throughout the night are shown the following morning as the simple locations they are. Sunset begins with this same idea, showing us the places they will be in. Things have obviously changed in that time, their conversations this time around are of a more grounded and political approach to life. The romantic tension is still very much intact as they rediscover each other as they are, instead of as they remember. Initially, they almost seem to need to verify the details of that night with each other just to be sure that it actually happened. While continually negotiating for more time with each other before Jesse has to board a plane back to America, the two sizzle and smolder against each other’s presence until they finally throw caution to the wind before the film cuts to black. Before Sunset is another fascinating discussion between two people who have grown more into themselves since their early twenties, an evolution that most people undergo during that ever-so-fraught time of life.

March 14th

Before Midnight (2013)

4/5

Roughly another decade after Before Sunset, this final film in the Before trilogy picks up in southern Greece with Jesse and Céline at the end of a six-week Writer’s retreat. We discover that they’ve been together for years now, and they’re parents of twin girls. This film has the biggest shift between the characters of the three films, instead of longing for the knowledge of what could have been, they have the experience of having lived what they never thought possible. Now that they’ve gotten all that sexual energy burned off, how are Jesse and Céline as a couple, as parents? Well, they’re familiar with each other’s nuances, rhythm, and bullshit now. While they are still very much the same two characters, they have grown and so have their conversations, their pontifications less optimistic, but that connection is still there. However, they are both much more willing to go to bat to express themselves in the explosive argument that takes place in their hotel room late into the film. You can see the fissures of friction that were present in Sunrise, emerge in realistic eruptions that quickly mellow back out. By the film’s end you get a sense that while this was certainly a big argument for them, they will survive, they will strive to better understand each other and to love each other in the face of life’s many adversities.

March 15th

A Man Escaped (1956)

3.5/5

This is my second Robert Bresson film, my first encounter with him was by way of a little film called Pickpocket. While I admire aspects of that film, I never connected with it and while there were fleeting moments of well-executed shots that use the smallest of movements to build tension, it never amounted to much in my opinion. That being said, I was much more impressed by and immersed with A Man Escaped. Inspired by a true story of a French Resistance fighter caught by German soldiers during their Parisian takeover and thrown in prison, this is Lieutenant Fontaine’s (François Leterrier) story. It’s a simple tale with the hallmarks of any good prison escape story, but it stands above through Bresson’s style in showcasing the small acts of courage that every step of the plan took and the brutal reality of the risk inherent in his plan of escape. Each step in his plan seemed slightly more brazen. I had to keep reminding myself that this was during the 1940s in wartime- modern expectations of everyday technologies always watching you had to be suppressed, and even then the tension was well executed. I was also struck by the lead actor’s resemblance to Tobey Maguire, if I was told that François Leterrier was his grandfather I might believe that!

March 16th

Space Amoeba (1970)

3/5

This is a film made by Ishiro Honda. Director of the first Godzilla film and several others in the Showa era of Kaiju films. Just as the Godzilla series was getting more cartoonish at this time, Space Amoeba attempts to blur the line a bit and merges the goofy costumes with a story slightly more mature than your average movie in this genre at this time. It's a breezy island adventure that was likely eyeing Japanese teenagers more so than children as the main target audience. The plot revolves around a tribal island that several Japanese firms are attempting to buy and turn into a tourist trap. However, they didn't know that a space probe bound for Jupiter, which had been overtaken by microscopic Aliens, had recently crash-landed off the remote islands coast where transformed animals were growing into giant monsters! There's some fun childish mystery employed to string the story along but it's all just an excuse to have men in rubber suits bash each other senseless, and that's okay, I knew what I was getting myself into. Certainly worth a watch if you're not looking to be challenged or if you just want that classic giant monster movie madness.

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.

This Week in Cinema, I Learned…March 10-16 2024