1. The Barbarian Invasions (Denys Arcand, 2003): I really liked it because it’s about intellectuals coming to terms with the fact that being an intellectual is kind of a joke, but it’s not like you can go back once you’re in it, because for all that a lot of theories are kind of bullshit, they give you ways to look at things that you can’t unsee. That sounds a lot snobbier than I mean it to, but I just mean that, like, once you start examining something you can’t unexamine it. Like, Remy the main character of the movie can’t go back to seeing history as this slow march of progress, but he also can’t uncontextualize the Holocaust from all the holocausts that have gone before; he knows that the 20th century was bad, but that other centuries were worse if you look at the raw numbers. Just like I can’t just sit down and watch a movie without automatically analyzing it and drawing parallels and thinking about how I’d write it into an essay anymore. Oh, also about love and dying and stuff. It’s really good and really engaging, and I imagine I’d have gotten more out of it if I’d seen Decline. There’s lots of old people trying to pretend they’re all sophisticated and fabulous in the face of mortality, while the younger generation (in the form of Remy’s devastatingly hot capitalist son) runs around and throws money at stuff so they can keep doing that until the very end.
  2. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999): I have seen this movie so, so many times, but I needed to rewatch it for like one little detail that I thought wasn’t there, but turned out to actually be there, meaning I am on the right track. It’s still a really good movie, I am just starting to get worn out on this whole period of Almodóvar. I will make it into thesis magic though, mark my words.
  3. Belle Epoque (Fernando Trueba, 1992): This is kind of just a charming if kind of annoyingly male fantasy fulfillment based sex farce (young man meets old guy, sleeps with each of his four daughters, marries the youngest, hurray!) with an awesome Bakhtinian carnival thrown in, until you remember when and where it’s set. Early 1930s. Spain. The monarchy’s on its way out, the republic’s on its way. There’s this kind of ominous tone there because we know that the civil war’s on its way (though the priest who hangs himself holding an Unamuno doesn’t), but they obviously think the future’s so bright they’ve go to wear shades. It’s not great, but it’s good enough that I forgive it for being a costume film with lush scenery and winning Best Foreign Film.
  4. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Doug Liman, 2005): What a delightful movie! Seriously, what more could you want? It’s got Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie both being preternaturally pretty and charming, by which I mainly mean pretty; it has Seth Cohen, killing me with the meta as he wears a Fight Club tshirt while Brad Pitt threatens to beat him up; it has lots of guns and car chases and explosions. Could have done without Vince Vaughn though. I never saw it because it was supposed to be bad and it was caught up in the whole Angelina vs. Jen thing (which in retrospect makes rebound guy Vince Vaughn’s involvement even weirder), but it’s really a good time. I am always into winkingly self-aware destructions of bourgeois suburban life. The first part of the movie, where they’re rivals even though you know they’re obviously never actually going to kill each other because it’s too obvious how into each other they are and how their mutual skill in killing people only makes them hotter to each other1,that part ends as they fight and shoot and explode apart their crazily perfect suburban home and then make love in the ruins (very reminiscent of Buffy and Spike but minus all the self-loathing). The second part ends with a massive shoot-out in a warehouse department store, which is really just a good time. They like, embrace and shoot guns over each other’s shoulders and wear yellow sunglasses and grey suits and are preternaturally beautiful some more.

I also saw most of Manhunter, which I’m now convinced is absolutely brilliant, but in the way I actually take seriously so I want to watch the whole thing before I write it up.

1 – This is in the kind of movie world where killing people is morally neutral, like in Grosse Point Blank or True Lies, where it’s okay to kill people as long as they’re all “bad guys,” so you kind of just have to table your real-world moral feelings re: killing, even though you think it might be a different kind of movie because it’s really a love story with some gunfights. Okay, it’s some gunfights with a love story.