My Weeks in Movies (November 20 to December 3)

Brother and Sister, All My Friends Hate Me, Skinamarink, and more

With the end of the year getting closer, November and December should be a time where I crack down and start catching up on things I need to see before submitting ballots, features, picking winners for awards, and so forth. The truth is that I’m taking a half-assed approach to all of it. Now that we’re heading into the fourth year since everything got disrupted in our lives, the shake-up in my old routines has made it hard to start them all over again. Of course there are things I still want to watch, to write about and/or participate in, it’s just that my patience for the stuff that usually takes a lower priority is a lot thinner than it used to be. The moment things feel like more like a duty or obligation I start to think of other things I’d rather be doing. Sometimes I’d prefer to rewatch something I saw a while back, watch something outside of year-end consideration, or just doing a completely different thing altogether. So here’s me trying to go through the motions yet again.

Other Writings

Somehow I’ve gotten my name into The Globe and Mail, reviewing Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO which is one of the best films of the year. I guess all those months of making bad jokes about it paid off. If I get at least one person to give the film a shot I’ll be happy.

I also reviewed Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter, another one of my favourites this year. I’m expecting this will be the last of Hogg’s collaborations with A24, so I’m glad one of her films finally worked for me after having a tougher time with her Souvenir two-parter. If it’s playing theatrically near you and you’re willing to go, the sound design and cinematography (shot on 16mm!) work better seeing it big. But it’s on VOD now so watch it theatrical or otherwise, and hopefully it’ll work as well for you as it did for me.

Regular Programming

I find that when I write about Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister I end up rambling a lot about it, which sort of fits the film. I watched it at Cannes earlier this year where it got several boos, and I came away thinking it was one of the more memorable titles out of that year’s competition, for better and worse.

I wanted to revisit it ever since, and now having seen it again this might be the movie that helps me finally key into Desplechin’s filmography (for background: I wasn’t a fan of Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale, and Deception, but didn’t mind Oh Mercy!). It’s a story about (what else?) a brother and sister, played by Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard, whose decade-plus hatred of each other comes to a head when their parents get hospitalized after a car accident. Poupaud and Cotillard overact like crazy and Desplechin leans into melodrama to the point where I can understand anyone wanting to run in the opposite direction, but I still like Brother and Sister. All of its flaws and messiness feel human, with Desplechin digging for some sort of truth even if he won’t look good doing it. It’s one of the only films I’ve seen this year where the character arcs feel true to life, with people adapting under the ever-increasing inertia of existence instead of some big, symbolic moment flipping a switch in their head. Brother and Sister doesn’t have distribution in the USA yet (Axia Films has the rights in Canada), but hopefully some company will at least provide a chance for people to watch it at some point.

When I do year-end catching up, I try to go for films that have the potential to slip by most people, which usually means something with a strong but limited amount of praise. That led me to All My Friends Hate Me, which came and went earlier this year but seemingly went over well with almost everyone who did catch it. Once I found out the film premiered at Tribeca, things made a lot more sense as to why it didn’t retain much staying power.

This is just an awful vanity project for co-writer/lead star Tom Stourton who plays Pete, a narcissistic asshole reuniting with his friends from university for his birthday. The celebratory weekend gets off on the wrong foot with the inclusion of a guy Pete’s friends met at a bar before his arrival, and soon he’s suspecting this new arrival is conspiring with his friends against him in some way.

There’s nothing more to the film than Pete being, well, a narcissistic asshole, so we get a ton of red herrings to imply there’s more going on than a guy too selfish to see everything doesn’t revolve around him. Pete’s just a selfish prick, everyone knows it, and for some reason they all put up with it. Nothing in All My Friends Hate Me makes sense until you place it in the context of a shitty attempt at boosting everyone’s careers within the shape of an Edgar Wright ripoff. In fact, I think I can’t say anything meaner about a movie than calling it an Edgar Wright knockoff, so I’ll leave it at that.

2022’s been a good year for horror films on paper at least. Movies like The Black Phone and Smile showed audiences still have a strong appetite for them theatrically, while Terrifier 2’s ability to crack the top ten at the box office as an entirely independent production/release showed that old-fashioned success stories in the industry are more endangered than extinct. Now we have Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, which premiered at Fantasia in the summer, leaked online months later, had horror fans on social media singing its praises and now has an upcoming theatrical/streaming release with IFC and Shudder.

The word-of-mouth praise had nothing to do with the acquisition itself (that was already in the works well before the film leaked online), but it should give a nice boost to its marketing campaign. Skinamarink has been talked about a lot already so I won’t repeat what’s already been said too much, but I would consider this to be the first successful example of a horror film inspired by the online fandoms of creepypastas, the SCP Foundation, backrooms, and other cosmic horror spinoffs that drive horror through nostalgia and ambiance. Ball manages to nail a few scenes perfectly, I just find the reliance on techniques more associated with experimental filmmaking to be a mixed bag. These elements can’t just exist and sustain themselves as ‘bold’ formal choices like, say, contemporary directors shooting in Academy ratio, so parts of Skinamarink don’t work as well as others. Ball still has the strength to snap his film back into place once he lands on a good image or sound though, and given the amount that does work (along with the microbudget production and how formally radical this film feels within its own genre) I don’t see a point in ragging on its issues too much. I’m happy to see a film like this get some grassroots success, I’m planning to rewatch it during its theatrical run, and I hope this is the start of a new trend in horror like the boom we’ve seen with indie horror video games in recent years.

That One List

I don’t really have much of an investment in Sight and Sound’s recent update to its list of 100 greatest films of all-time. When I was younger and trying to explore more of what cinema had to offer, consensus lists were a good point to jump off from (I started with the IMDb Top 250, then once I suffered enough I switched to TSPDT's lists of all-time and 21st century films). The films on Sight and Sound’s list are a fine group for that function, and anyone who wants to tackle what’s on it with an open mind should come away with a lot of great discoveries.

Granted, there are plenty of areas where one can criticize this list, but the arbitrary nature of these things means it’s tough to make a strong case. Mad that films from as recent as 2019 made the cut? Just go back in time to see where L’Avventura placed on the list just two years after it premiered. Not happy with the lack of representation in one area? Well that’s not how the methodology of this list works, and as much as we’d love to see consensus translate to all things to all people, that assumes we have a perfect process, which we don’t. There are too many factors at play to come up with a sufficient explanation of why the rankings fell where they did. Accessibility is one factor, whether it’s the slew of titles that have gotten restorations and/or re-releases in the last decade, or what’s been lucky enough to have a release backed by a major rep distributor like Janus (it’s also worth noting that Janus owns the rights to over half of the films on that list, which speaks to a different kind of issue people don’t really have much interest in exploring).

My point is that these sorts of things will always be inherently flawed, and unfortunately any attempt to rethink our approach to consensus tends to get overtaken by those who prefer to not think at all. A vocal group of dissenters attacked this edition of Sight and Sound’s list because they felt it was too politicized, and the more “radical” changes in rankings (namely Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman taking the top spot, along with Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight making the list) spoke to people picking films as a reaction to established canon than just picking what they consider to be the best films of all-time.

This type of argument is a waste of time. The implication here is that, if this list is too politicized, then the prior editions were somehow apolitical, which isn’t true. It’s always been political, it’s just that the politics of the past were aligned to a lot of people’s own beliefs and so there was never any reason to investigate or question things. Then there’s the fact that the list itself isn’t really that different anyway. In the grand scheme of things the modifications are small, and there’s still a long way to go if we want to change the make-up of what should go in or out of the pantheon of cinema if we’re talking representation. None of this is that serious, so when I see people getting exposed to the tiniest morsel of a different perspective and acting like they just ate a Carolina Reaper it’s just embarrassing.

Other Titles Watched

Bad Axe (2022, dir. David Siev)
18½ (2021, dir. Dan Mirvish)
On Cinema, S13E5 - ‘Devotion & Strange Worlds’
On Cinema, S13E6 - ‘Scrooge - A Christmas Carol & Violent Night’
Twin Peaks, S1E00 - ‘Pilot’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S1E01 - ‘Episode One’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S1E02 - ‘Episode Two’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S1E03 - ‘Episode Three’ [Rewatch]
Twin Peaks, S1E04 - ‘Episode Four’ [Rewatch]