By: Henry J. Fromage –
Realizing that for the first time in possibly ever I’m in fine position to watch every film worth watching in a year, I focused on 2020 this week.
141. Blood on Her Name
This thriller, in which a woman wakes up next to a dead man who assaulted her in the garage she owns, has absolutely no fat. It’s viciously efficient in its plotting and forward motion, which makes up for its clearly modest budget with solid characterwork and a complete lack of Hollywood sentimentality in its plotting. A real calling card for Matthew Pope. Two Beers.
142. Bull
Another social realist story in a day of them (I also finally watched the West Virginia episode of Parts Unknown, one of Bourdain’s finest) along with the preceding and following films. An aging bull rider (played by Rob Morgan, who’s on a hell of a roll the last few years and deserves more recognition) takes the troublemaking teen girl with a mother in prison under his wing after she and her shitty teenage friends trash his place. This really is her coming of age story, told sensitively but unsentimentally by Annie Silverstein in her feature debut, but Morgan commands the screen in every scene he’s in. Two Beers.
143. Sorry We Missed You
Ken Loach tells yet another tale of working-class woe, but this time ladles it on a bit too thick, perhaps. Everything that can go wrong, does with a blue collar family whose father gets in the parcel delivery game. Promises of “running your own business” and economic freedom start to be exposed as the lies they are when he can’t keep up the back-breaking pace of his legally not-employer. What makes this still worth your time is Loach’s well-honed social realist skill with casting and dialogue. You can’t help but feel for these poor bastards, and all the people you almost certainly know like them. Three Beers.
144. Sea Fever
Neasa Hardiman delivers a nasty little genre flick with some certainly unforseen (this did shoot last year), but nonetheless quite impactful parallels to our current Coronavirus-driven anxieties. A red-headed (bad luck, you see) student researcher joins a fishing expedition that befalls some increasingly gory, well, bad luck. The Thing on the high seas might be selling it a bit high, but not by a ton. Two Beers.
145. The Traitor
Marco Bellocchio delivers an Italian Mafia epic of, well, epic proportions. This is far from the typical rise and fall narrative, instead joining very Godfather-like in the midst of a familial celebration and then tracking how mob boss Tommaso Buscetta decides to turn from his backstabbing brethren and become the highest profile informant possibly ever, single-handedly helping bring the largest anti-Mafia case in history and later implicating high-profile Italian politicians in their criminal activities. This film is a bit overlong and station-to-station, but there’s some truly impressive filmmaking on display here all the same. Three Beers.
146. The Wave
There’s a bit of Donnie Darko, “I’m just so deep, maan” energy to this story about one very bad, literally mind- and reality-bending day for Justin Long’s insurance company lawyer after he decides to take an unnamed drug with a hottie who’s not his wife at a party the night before the biggest meeting of his career. Not a good decision-maker, this one. Still, a neon-soaked, quite engaging Twilight Zone-esque jaunt worth your hour and a half. Three Beers.
147. Zombi Child
Bertrand Bonello films never suffer from a dearth of beautifully crafted images or the lack of an interesting angle. This zombie movie is about the purportedly quite real experiences of a man who claims he was drugged for months and forced to work on a sugarcane plantation after his own quite convincing funeral. This 1960s-set story is intertwined with the present-day story of a Haitian girl at an exclusive prep school only for descendants of Legion d’honneur recipients. Things get properly creepy (maybe just crossing the line into silly at points) from there. Three Beers.
