By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week I bought into the Valentine’s spirit and watched some films about all kinds of love (and some that I’m not going to try to make fit the theme).
94. I Want You Back
This Amazon anti-romcom stars Charlie Day and Jenny Slate as two people who’ve been suddenly and unexpectedly dumped by their significant others who decide to help each other break them up with the new partners each a bit too quickly took up with. This isn’t breaking new ground exactly, but with this kind of cast, which includes Gina Rodriguez, Scott Eastwood, and Manny Jacinto, you don’t really need to. Consistently funny and just unpredictable enough to keep you engaged. Three Beers.
95. Cat Daddies
As a proud cat daddy myself, my wife and I couldn’t resist this documentary about men who love cats which is now playing the Frozen River Film Festival. Even besides the simpatico subject matter, though, this is just a lovely documentary about a group of mean and their cats from a wide cross-section of American society- and these are some pretty cool cats. Mine wouldn’t do basically anything these do, but it’s all good… not jealous. Two Beers.
96. The Lake at the Bottom of the World
The other pick from Frozen River I made was this documentary about a group of scientists studying a massive frozen lake underneath the Antarctic ice. Apparently there are natural wetlands (not quite how we understand them to be, but technically so), rivers, and lakes that have always been there, including some of the largest lakes on the planet. This doubles as a study of the types of people drawn to this work, a la Encounters at the End of the World, although without any of Herzog’s lyricism. Perhaps a bit dry, but plenty interesting. Three Beers.
97. The Devil You Know
This docuseries from Vice and Hulu examines the sensational case of face-tattooed, file-toothed Devil-worshipper Pazuzu (aka John Lawson), owner of the flop-house from hell who killed at least two men and buried them in shallow graves in his backyard only to escape justice as he said he would for far too long considering how gleefully he retold the story and how many people went straight to the police just like they should. Concurrently it very graphically documents the spiral of a couple of drug addicts who were connected to the case, and makes the larger overall point that Pazuzu was just the most extreme manifestation of the desperation and deep psychic rot that has taken root in so many forgotten corners of America. Three Beers.
98. We Need to Talk About Cosby
W. Kamau Bell has the chutzpah to address the biggest elephant in any room he goes to in Bill Cosby, undeniably an absolute trailblazer in entertainment and race relations and one of the most beloved showbiz figures ever, at least until we all seemed to learn or at least acknowledge that he’s also one of history’s most heinous and prolific rapists. That’s an awful lot to square in a man, and Bell and a host of other recognizable faces clearly struggle with the task, but I think do as good a job as is possible examining every facet while letting his victims damn him to hell with simple recountings of what he did to them. Two Beers.
99. The Hypnosis
This Korean horror film from last year is about a group of college students with a shared past who find out that the terrifying things hidden in their subconscious and revealed when one a couple of them agree to undergo hypnosis seem to be bleeding unavoidably into their waking lives. This doesn’t break any new ground from visually or thematically, but is a pretty polished and often admirably nasty little film when it doesn’t rely on some under-budget CGI for scares. Three Beers.
100. Marry Me
The other big streaming romcom that hit this weekend oddly caught my interest with its strangely premised trailers and interesting pairing of J-Lo and Owen Wilson, but outside of some earworm tunes, the trailers more or less show everything that happens in this story. Unlike I Want You Back, there’s no surprise at all here, and the film often feels like it’s going through the motions to produce a three act rise and fall to a story that’s already a bit too preposterous to take too seriously. Four Beers.
102. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
This playful Georgian arthouse film is ostensibly about a couple whose meet-cute and subsequent rendezvous is thrown off course when they both wake up the next morning looking like completely different people, with no recollection of each other nor their primary vocations (medicine for the girl, football for the boy). Pretty much the rest of the rather overlong film is a slow but lovely ode to their home of Kutaisi and a drolly narrated fairytale as they unknowingly circle ever closer to each other. Watch when you’re in the mood for nearly three hours of idiosyncrasy, but this will scratch an itch when you are. Three Beers.
103. In Front of Your Face
It more or less counts as something new from Hong Sang-soo when his production values/camera quality falls back 20 years (pandemic-related?) and the leading lady and older male director character eat Korean-Chinese food and get soused on Chinese liquor. I honestly have started to find something oddly comforting about his consistency, and there is a late twist if you can really call it that which adds depth to the characters and their interactions. You should pretty much know whether you’re in or out on him by now, and I’m more or less in. Three Beers.
104. This is a Robbery
This short Netflix documentary series tries to get to the root of the mystery of who exactly the two men were who walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum dressed as police officers in 1980, and walked back out again with over $200 million in assorted, seemingly randomly selected masterpieces. Amateur sleuths will find a lot to sink their teeth into, although perhaps there are too may potential answers to this question, one still open after all of these decades. Three Beers.
