My Weeks in Movies (December 4 to 17)
The Harbinger, Babylon, and more
Before diving into some of what I saw from the last two weeks, I did want to go back to one title I watched at the beginning of December. Part of my awards catch-up viewing included David Siev’s Bad Axe, which as of right now is on the shortlist for a Best Documentary nomination at the Oscars.
The film starts at the beginning of the pandemic, where aspiring filmmaker Siev flees New York City to live with his parents in the small town of Bad Axe, Michigan. His parents run a restaurant in town, and the lockdown allows his older sister Jaclyn to also move back home with her husband so they can manage the business while maintaining their (now remote) day jobs. With the whole family living together (including Siev’s younger sister, who’s finishing her final year in university), there’s some chaos with trying to keep the restaurant afloat while preventing their parents from getting COVID-19.
Siev does a fine job capturing all the fear and uncertainty in those first months of the pandemic. He also has no qualms showing off his opportunism. There’s a large focus on his father, a Cambodian refugee who escaped the Killing Fields, which gives Siev the chance to show off some footage from his own short film based on his father’s youth. Then, once the Black Lives Matter protests start up across America in response to George Floyd’s murder, he films his sister at a local demonstration confronting counter protestors who hurl racial slurs at her. It’s harrowing material, which Siev quickly packages into a pitch video to get his documentary some crowdfunding.
Siev’s crowdfunding campaign and the video pitch get other people in Bad Axe furious at the negative portrayal of their town, which puts the restaurant and his family in the sights of far-right extremists who start to stalk and harass them. This climaxes with Siev’s younger sister getting tailed home by people who intended on harming her and the rest of the family at their home.
I’m describing all of this in the hopes that other people can see how gross this feels to watch unfold. Siev wants his family’s story framed as a human, empathetic portrait of a family experiencing the best and worst of America. I just saw a filmmaker using the pandemic and fraught state of US politics to swoop in on his family and force them into a marketable narrative to help further his career.
I don’t think Siev is a bad person for this exactly. He’s just playing a game that I have no interest in being a part of. Sometimes I think about the evolution of digital filmmaking, and how this was seen as blowing the doors wide open for moving the medium forward due to the increased accessibility and low cost point of high quality cameras and equipment.
What I’ve noticed is this easier ability to make films has provided opportunists with a powerful stepping stone for themselves, which shouldn’t come as a big surprise. There’s little money to be made in filmmaking purely as an artform, and while the tools may be easier to get a hold of, it’s still such an involved and time-consuming process it’s not going to guarantee an influx of new, exciting artistic voices, nor the means to support their process. What we thought would knock down borders around our self-imposed limits on film has instead adapted to the times and become a method of jumping several rungs up the ladder.
So Siev is just doing what he knows he has to in order to make a living off of his passion. And given the accolades, celebrity endorsements, and placement of Bad Axe on the Oscars shortlist, he’s made the right choices for himself. It’s also why I choose to stay away from these glorified demo reels.
I have an interest in COVID-themed horror movies, which led me to Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger, an indie Mitton directed, wrote, produced, edited, and composed the score for. And while it’s not the best horror movie about the pandemic, it might just be the most nihilistic one to date, which is not a bad thing at all.
Set during the first months of the lockdown, Monique (Gabby Beans) lives in a bubble with her father and brother in Binghamton, New York. A call out of the blue from Monique’s old friend Mavis (Emily Davis) asking for help prompts her to leave the bubble and head to Mavis’ place in New York City. It’s only upon Monique’s arrival that we find out why she’s willing to put herself at so much risk for an old friend, along with the film’s real villain: a demonic creature that enters people’s dreams, wears them down by feeding them nightmares and messing with their perception, then altogether wiping them from existence, so no one can even remember they ever lived in the first place.
There are lots of metaphors within that concept, with the most obvious one being the victims of The Harbinger as a stand-in for the people lost and forgotten about during the last several years. Mitton, who has come a long way since his debut YellowBrickRoad, can only do so much with his limited budget and resources to pull off the creature effects and dream logic in his film, but he’s willing to see his own story through in ways other filmmakers might have been too nervous to try. Like a lot of small-scale horror films, the ideas are stronger than the execution of them, and while The Harbinger is largely serviceable as a horror movie, its unrelenting bleakness and ending have left a stronger impression on me than a lot of other films I’ve seen this year.
As much as I loved Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and La La Land (and I’ll continue to insist those movies make an ideal double feature about whatever one defines as the “Millenial Generation”), First Man did almost nothing for me and Babylon didn’t do much either. Babylon’s three-hour runtime isn’t a big deal since so much of the movie plays out as episodic sequences, but those sequences are a mixed bag to say the least. Highlights for me included a chaotic day in the life on several movie sets and an attempt at shooting a simple scene with the new-fangled technology of sound recording, while the lengthy party sequence/prologue and a high class get together ruined by Margot Robbie’s character barfing all over the place don’t work at all.
Chazelle’s intent is to show off a heightened portrayal of Hollywood’s golden era, honing in on the excess and debauchery of the time when people were still trying to figure out a new industry. That idea might work better with a filmmaker who knows how to distract viewers from seeing the rails, but Chazelle is too controlled to pull that off. The only real gamble he takes here is with his conclusion, which suggests that the end result of our cinematic classics justify the reckless, dehumanizing means it took to make them. But this is just a rehash of Whiplash’s ending, which did a better job showing the pyrrhic victory of achieving greatness at a steep cost. I would lump Babylon in with Under the Silver Lake, both of them films that amount to swings so massive it almost makes up for how much they missed.
Other Titles Watched
A Love Song (2022, dir. Max Walker-Silverman)
Ambulance (2022, dir. Michael Bay)
The Son (2022, dir. Florian Zeller)
The Reckless Moment (1949, dir. Max Ophüls)
Bones and All (2022, dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Housekeeping (1987, dir. Bill Forsyth)
On Cinema, S13E7 - ‘Pinocchio & Something From Tiffany’s’
On Cinema, S13E8 - ‘A Man Called Otto & Avatar: The Way of Water’
Twin Peaks, S1E05 - ‘Episode Five’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S1E06 - ‘Episode Six’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S1E07 - ‘Episode Seven’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S2E01 - ‘Episode Eight’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S2E02 - ‘Episode Nine’ [Rewatch]
The Last of Us, S1E01
The Last of Us, S1E02
The Last of Us, S1E03
The Last of Us, S1E04
The Last of Us, S1E05
The Last of Us, S1E06
The Last of Us, S1E07
The Last of Us, S1E08
The Last of Us, S1E09