This Week in Cinema, I Learned…April 14-20 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.
This was a great week in cinema friends. Welcome to Thriller Week! As always, there's an eclectic group of odd cinematic bedfellows that you wouldn't normally see grouped together. I began the week with a huge Oscar winner from the early 1970s starring some of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time and I hadn't even heard of the film! Whereas the week ended with a thriller from South Korea a la Memories of Murder, but with a distinctly different palette of criminal investigation and villainous scheming behind the headlines of that era. The week also includes three (mostly) one-location thrillers from Steven Soderbergh, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Carpenter. Rock Hudson also stars in a fascinating thriller full of creative risk for the actor mostly associated with romantic comedies. I also went out to the theatre and caught a showing of Alex Garland's latest, and possibly final, film with Civil War. While these films are all wildly different from each other, the thing I noticed as the most defining difference between compelling thrillers and the so-so offerings of the sub-genre is the level of precision involved with either A) the execution of the filmmaking itself, or B) the actions of the characters on screen. Or if the production is truly touched by the gods, both aspects will be entirely devoted to how finely tuned every aspect of production is. Hopefully, you find something worth watching below, come back next week for Musicals!
April 14th
The Sting (1973)
4.5/5
This film, a giant of cinema in the 1970s, was one that passed me by entirely despite the incredible casting of Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Robert Shaw as the major players of the caper. Early on Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) and fellow grifter Luther (Robert Earl Jones, father of James Earl Jones) con a surprising $11,000 off of a seemingly random victim. Luther decides to call it quits after the success but Hooker blows his portion of the winnings on a small-time game of rigged roulette. What they didn't know was that their mark ended up being the deposit runner for the Mob with orders coming from New York to wipe out the two mysterious thieves for daring to steal from the powerful. That Mob Boss, Doyle Lonnegan, just so happened to be played by Robert Shaw (Quint from Jaws), and after his minions find and kill Luther, Hooker contacts an old friend of Luthers, an expert con man, Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman). Upon meeting Gondorff they decide to tackle Lonnegan with an incredibly elaborate scheme they call 'the big con'. Not only were the performances within the film superb but the script is brilliant too! It cleverly withholds information from the audience only to reveal things in the most satisfying ways possible. The film as a whole is indeed more of a caper than a straight up thriller, but there are portions of the film that are the definition of intensity. The poker game aboard the train for example, where the three major players all interact for the first time, is purely calibrated tension at its finest.
April 15th
Kimi (2022)
4.5/5
This tech thriller comes to us by way of Steven Soderbergh. I expected very little of this film going in because I knew essentially nothing about it. But what I really didn't expect was a modern blend of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Rear Window, with Brian De Palma's Blow Out. This one-location thriller has personal, intimate, and anxiety-fueled cinematography when the story requires that level of paranoia. In fact I was consistently impressed with how Soderbergh used the camera's quizzical flow in tight spaces. Our lead is Angela Childs, an agoraphobic remote tech worker in Seattle played by Zoë Kravitz post-pandemic. Angela seems like a normal everyday functioning young adult in these modern times, but I was taken aback by the clarity of depicting fear and overwhelming anxiety when Angela attempts to leave her apartment to see a friend and neighbor at a local food truck.
It felt true to reality. After Covid-19 everyone's relationship with society changed. The unpredictability of it all made day to day life feel detached from the ongoing narrative that we're constantly writing, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world we live and react in. So it makes sense that this phenomenon would work its way into our collective storytelling, and Kimi is one of the best attempts so far at bringing that fear of the unknown into films in organic ways that benefit the story at hand. However, Kimi has a thread of paranoia and suspicion to pull at, and Angela does just that when the Kimi tech (very much a riff on the Amazon Echo and Apple's Siri) catches a snippet of audio that leads her to report the crime captured on Kimi's audio recording. This leads to a much more involved detective role with rampant conspiratorial theories and giant corporate ghouls pursuing Angela in thrilling fashion. This film was the very definition of Thrilling and I highly recommend it.
April 16th
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
3.5/5
Oh John Carpenter, how I love thy work. I absolutely love the man's filmography so this was the perfect way to fill in the missing gaps. Carpenter's second film is a tight, mostly one location thriller in which a lightly staffed Police Station in process of moving across town is besieged by a violent and unrelenting street gang. Carpenter has always excelled with simple story ideas that he later drenches in style and charisma. The Thing, Halloween, Escape From New York, and Big Trouble in Little China all essentially do what Assault on Precinct 13 did first in that regard. Here Carpenter utilizes his sardonic style of dark comedy that later Carpenter films would evoke with ease, typically with blue-collar characters forced into extraordinary circumstances. Bishop (Austin Stoker) happens to be such a character as he's assigned to babysit Precinct 13 on its last night as the final days of moving to a new building end. Bishop's problems begin with the dropoff of a few criminals for overnight holding, who join forces with the handful of cops left once things get dire.
Somewhere on the other side of town Mr. Lawson (Martin West) and his daughter happen to be near a target of the gang, Street Thunder, when they unexpectedly cross paths while his daughter is getting ice cream. The most shocking element in the movie is this beat when the young girl and the ice cream truck driver are both blown away in hyper-violent fashion. Thus Mr. Lawson tracks down his daughter's killer and gets his vigilante justice, but at the cost of painting a target on his back for the whole of Street Thunder. Lawson happens to dart into Precinct 13 for sanctuary as night falls, beginning a high-stakes night of violence and fight for survival. Between excellent framing, blocking, and cathartic depictions of action with well-staged shootouts, Assault on Precinct 13 should suffice as an entertaining thriller, I certainly recommend it.
April 17th
Civil War (2024)
3/5
Having seen only three of Alex Garland’s four films, Men being the odd man out, Civil War is my least favorite film of his- if he actually does stick to quitting filmmaking after this one, so far. I don’t think it’s a terrible film by any means, but there are so many questionable creative choices in my opinion. For me, the two most grating aspects of the film were the sound design and the soundtrack choices. At times the film almost became an unintentional comedy with the tonal whiplash from scene to scene, breathy acoustic guitar over travel montages following incredibly violent and chaotic scenes moments prior felt like the height of pretentious filmmaking if I’m being honest. I understand that creative people put their anxieties into their art, I get that, the events in American Politics over the last decade have been horrific and stupid- but most of the film did not make sense either tactically, strategically, or in relation to reality at times.
Some scenes or beats felt like they were crafted by somebody that has little to no life experience, lives in a bubble outside of American life, or somebody that simply wanted to release their war porn nightmares and unsettling hyper violent fantasies of shooting Trump in the face to the world. Personally, I have a strong dislike for both major American political parties if you must know- neither one is great and they never deliver on anything truly good for their constituents. It’s either war profiteering, demagoguery, disgustingly little done about generational income inequality, or brutally stupid nonsense. So, that’s all to say that if you wanted to critique the American political classes that would bring us to such a dumb future, then do that. Make fun of them, showcase their hypocrisy, just don’t prop either up like they’re the salvation we so desperately need. Civil Wars are inherently political, and I get why you would want to follow photojournalists as they are closest to avoiding bias in such a scenario, but as depicted the characters are fine but mostly uninteresting.
There’s some characterization given to Kirsten Dunst’s famous war photojournalist character, Lee, but she’s the only one who makes logical choices for most of the film. Everyone else either makes deliberately dumb choices or their character is simply inconsistent. I don’t want to entirely dog the film though, there are good things about it. There are moments of incredible tension, if you’ve seen the trailers, the scene hinted at with Jesse Plemons is indeed the best scene of the film. There’s some truly palatable tension in the exchange between our war photojournalists and the small town terrorists. A lot of the cinematography is great and the performances aren’t bad, but the writing lacks a bit in my opinion. Personally, this one wasn’t for me, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve seen this year by a fair margin.
April 18th
Seconds (1966)
4/5
I'm not sure if you can get much farther in difference from Written on The Wind to this film, John Frankenheimer's Seconds. With the former being the sort of film that star Rock Hudson was frequently associated with, the latter was such a creative risk for the Hollywood star that all his friends tried to dissuade him from accepting the role. In fact this is so great a departure from what Rock Hudson usually starred in that this is exactly what drew me to this film in the first place. The story begins with Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), a middle-aged banker in New York City who lives a numb, passionless life. Arthur gets a call from a close friend who had died recently, revealing facts that only he would know to prove he had faked his death. His friend refers him to an address for “The Company”, to change his life, and find motivation and inspiration again. To live again. So, after some consideration, Arthur goes to check the place out.
Unfortunately, he didn't expect to be drugged and blackmailed into his new body and life, but he admits his current life has nothing left for him anyway and he embarks on the physical transformation and new life as Wilson (Rock Hudson), a painter living in Malibu, California. Things go alright for Wilson for a while but tensions escalate as he finds this life has been chosen for him and he isn't really getting the choice and free will he desired in the first place. Things begin to go awry when Wilson gets drunk at a cocktail party and begins to talk about his former life, something the shadowy Company plants in his life aren't too eager to hear. Seconds excels in exploring the ideas of following your heart and spurning conformity while also condemning the inability to follow through on your commitments. Check out the creepy psychological thriller if you can find it, Criterion should be able to help you out with that!
April 19th
Rope (1948)
4/5
You can't have a week of Thrillers without talking about Alfred Hitchcock. I'd heard about this one-location thriller years ago but had never gotten around to it until now. The film opens directly as our two leads, Phillip (Farley Granger, who also starred as the lead in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train) and Brandon (John Dall), strangle their classmate David (Dick Hogan) to death in their Manhattan Apartment. The film is one of the few that Hitch composed as if it took place in real-time with several long one-shots stitched together to maintain the illusion. As far as psychological thrillers go, this one is a taut and precisely designed story crafted to constantly keep you guessing as to when Phillip and Brandon will get caught because the dynamic between the two clearly sets up an inevitable downfall. Phillip is more risk-averse and can't handle the pressure as smoothly as Brandon, but he's overconfident and goes out of his way to get as close to being caught as possible without anyone being the wiser.
You see they hid David's body in the trunk of the living room and then set the dining dishes out on top of the trunk so that when the party guests arrived, namely David's parents and girlfriend, they would eat off of David's temporary coffin. The extra step that really pushed the envelope of good taste was in inviting their former professor Rupert (James Stewart), who himself espouses macabre notions theoretically. Brandon's need for Rupert's approval is ultimately what began unraveling their perilous game of coy murder. If you want to see the master of the thriller casually exude perfection with a simple concept, check this one out!
April 20th
Nameless Gangster: Rules of The Time (2012)
4.5/5
This South Korean crime epic surprised the heck out of me. It’s one of the more effective thrillers I've seen with many reveals, betrayals, a few turn-of-face moments, and shocking violence that had me cackling with laughter throughout the runtime. It’s also a historical thriller based on the headlines from that era of crime and corruption in South Korea during the 1980s and 1990s. This reminds me of another stellar film depicting national newsworthy events, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder. In fact Memories of Murder is so good I would put it on any list of must see films. Anyways, this is all to say that this film was so well crafted and performed that it ranks highly among the best work of the genre. Choi Min-sik stars as Choi Ik-hyun but he also starred in another one of my favorite films to come out of South Korea, I Saw The Devil. Which I highly recommend, if you’re looking for a revenge-themed thriller soaked in grisly violence, that film should suffice. Okay, that’s enough recommendations of other films- this one is highly entertaining and that is mainly due to Choi Min-sik and the cast of characters surrounding him. The film bounces back and forth between Ik-hyun’s entrance into the world of crime, his rise among the ranks of dangerous gangsters, and the government’s prosecution of such criminals during the early 1990’s. The film is the very epitome of a thriller, and it was an excellent film to end the week’s genre on.
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.