FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / August 2021 / Gabriel Ricard
Image © Neon
How often does your top 10+ change? I’m working on my personal top 15 for “Make the Case,” the column I write at Cultured Vultures. One thing that impresses me again and again about other movie lovers is their ability to just whip that shit into being at seemingly the drop of a hat.
Ask our renaissance badass of a Film Editor Sean Woodard. Or my podcast cohost Chris Bryant. I am not good at answering the “What are your favorite . . . ?” questions with any sort of speed. To be honest, I’m not even good at answering that question when someone gives me a mass of time to consider it. There is a lot of back and forth with not only searching my brain, but also getting out my phone to make sure I don’t forget anything.
What I’ve tried to do with these questions over the years is trust my first instincts. Whatever pops into my head is probably what I’m feeling at that moment. Unless I need to have a certain list of films in a certain order to win some sort of fantastical prize (human kidney-tier), no one actually cares if I lost sleep or emotional stability trying to organize a thoughtful response to what is usually a very casual question.
This mindset has served me well for ranking films, or for just choosing ones based on a very specific criteria (favorite movies about baseball, murder in a high-rise, talking pigs, etc.) but it’s still not very useful when I must talk about the greatest movies of all time, or even the ones I would just personally call my favorites (those lists are not entirely the same). Everything freezes on the hundreds of movies that are trying to occur to me simultaneously.
Part of my problem isn’t so much revising, but my lack of an ability to stop revising. I don’t want to impress people with this list. I just don’t want to remember I’m kind the dork who will wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, shaking, muttering “My god, how could I forget The Hopsital?”
This problem extends to every form of media I engage. Doing yearly top 10s at Drunk Monkeys was fun, but occasionally a living hell of masochistic indecision. I also find it inexplicably annoying that the list is never going to be permanent for me. I’m still running into new contenders for my 10 or 15 best at a pretty solid rate.
September’s “Make the Case” at Cultured Vultures will be one of my rare attempts to gather up what I’ve seen over the years, burn off approximately 3 or 4, 000 titles, and stare dumbly at the 10 or 20 still standing.
An all-time list should be revisited every once in a while. I just wonder how often other people do this. What is your criteria for a movie you’d take to the desert island? How good does it have to be to knock off something you’ve loved for years?
See, I hate these questions. But I clearly need to obsess about them sometimes. My question is, how often do you?
In the Heights (2021): B+
Image © Warner Bros.
Obviously, when you marry a musical theater nerd, your movie musical diet takes a turn for the substantial.
Which is fine, since it’s easy as hell to enjoy something like In the Heights. Directed by John M. Chu, and adapted from a musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the story is a multi-character look at a somewhat fictionalized version of Washington Heights, New York. The music is of course what’s driving not only the soul of the film, but our interest, as well. I’m still not an expert on musicals, but I found everything to be suitably memorable, while keeping the story and characters moving along.
What makes In the Heights particularly impressive in this regard is in how well the story moves between its many characters, including an extremely affable bodega owner (Anthony Ramos), a college student struggling to find a balance between the past and future in the present (Leslie Grace), a young, brilliant, and determined undocumented immigrant (Gregory Diaz IV), and others.
The movie desires to celebrate and emphasize characters whose stories are only told sporadically, if at all, and rarely with the resources thrown behind this particular endeavor. Despite some minor flaws in keeping the momentum going for every single character of note, In the Heights is affectionate, sincere, and extremely well made.
Blind Fury (1989): B+
Image © TriStar Pictures
The argument against American/English remakes of foreign properties is an understandable one. However, there are always exceptions to the rule. Blind Fury, a very loose remake of the Japanese film Zatoichi Challenged, would be one of these.
Rutger Hauer cut one of the best villain paths of the 80s. This includes Blade Runner and The Hitcher. However, he was also extremely proficient at playing sympathetic characters. Even a heroic lead. And while there are moments here where Hauer is oddly terrifying in scenes that aren’t really supposed to go that way, Blind Fury’s mildly ridiculous plot is humanized to an impressive and notable degree
Blind Fury is pleasingly made across the board, including supporting performances from Terry O’Quinn, and Brandon Call as the young boy being protected by Hauer’s blind Vietnam vet with a talent for swordplay. The fight scenes are nicely choreographed, and the violence is balanced to a surprising degree with some genuine attempts at deepening the characters.
Still, this is very much a late 80s/early 90s off-the-wall action film. Make sure you already like that sort of things, I know I sure as hell do, beforehand.
No Sudden Move (2021): B+
Image © Warner Bros. | HBO Max
Goddamn, it is good to see Brendan Fraser in high-profile gigs again.
Everything about Steven Soderbergh’s crime drama No Sudden Move is a blast. From casting actors such as Fraser, Don Cheadle, Amy Seimetz, Julia Fox, Bill Duke, Benicio del Toro (and more), to mining dark humor from a crime story where the crime goes horribly wrong almost immediately, this is a movie that never quite stops being fun.
It helps that Soderbergh is one of the best at running several threads through an ensemble story. The focus shifts nicely for the most part between the characters, including criminals like Cheadle and del Toro, higher-ups in the criminal underworld like Bill Duke, Ray Liotta, and Brendan Fraser, and then people who have a connection to these threads for one reason or another. This includes David Harbour being extremely effective as an understated, kind-of-a-sad-sack bank employee, and Jon Hamm as a cop who frankly doesn’t get enough time in this.
No Sudden Move tells an ambitious crime and punishment (and some redemption) story with confidence, combined with an exceptional crew for music, editing, cinematography, and the other essentials of Steven Soderbergh’s best movies.
Pig (2021): A+
Image © Neon
Not to be smug about this, but at no point have I ever thought Nicolas Cage was a bad actor, or even washed up. As I’ve pointed out before, he has been turning out good performances across every single year of his run as an actor.
However, he also likes to do anywhere from 5 to 300 films a year. Being prolific is cool, but it also means the quality of the projects in any given calendar year from one end to the other can be, at best, uneven.
I mention all of this because Pig, co-written and directed by Michael Sarnoski in his feature film debt, is garnering some pretty high praise right now. Some of these reviews seem to suggest Nicolas Cage just suddenly decided to be good in a movie again. The thing is, he’s generally good. Or at least engaging/entertaining.
What Pig does is emphasize the uniqueness of his talents as an actor. How those talents can anchor an entire movie, when that movie reflects that Cage can do a lot more than just scream. Pig is gorgeously staged and shot, and also benefits from an excellent script and story, as well as wonderful supporting performances from Adam Arkin and Alex Wolff (who is particularly strong in this).
Everything about this film is perfectly, and perfectly in place. The result is an opportunity for Cage to prove, yet again, with his sorrowful, haunting, and profoundly relatable work in Pig, to prove he is two things simultaneously. He is one of the most singular actors on the planet, and he can carry that distinction to just about any type of film he wants.
And when the rest of the movie is as good as Pig is, the results are fucking glorious.
The Watermelon Woman (1996): A+
Image © First Run Features
Written and directed by Cheryl Dunye, who also stars as a character named Cheryl, The Watermelon Woman is a story of restless energy, the life of a black lesbian who aspires to be a filmmaker. Working in a video store, Cheryl tries to navigate and better understand her own identity, while also trying to simply get through the everyday of dating, friendship, and the frustration of having thousands of silent and loud limitations placed upon your existence in its simplest form. Despite being very low-budget, even for its time, The Watermelon Woman has an extremely ambitious story.
Because while all of this plot is going on, Cheryl is also desperately trying to uncover the story of a forgotten black actress, known simply as The Watermelon Woman. This component to the film naturally gets a lot of mileage out of satirizing the wretched reality of how many black actors and actresses, and others, particularly LGBTQIA+ individuals, have been erased from film history.
On top of that, The Watermelon Woman reminds us, without losing focus on the story of Cheryl trying to move forward in life in various ways, of the long history Hollywood in particular has of relegating generations worth of talent to very specific roles. The Watermelon Woman in question spent a short career playing servants. You don’t have to travel very far in reality to find the parallels.
Such as the fact that Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for playing a maid, and then that was literally it for black people at the Oscars for about 30 years. As far as competitive categories are concerned.
I can’t really cover everything here. Nor do I want to. Stories like The Watermelon Woman, even 20+ years after its release, make it apparent as to who should be discussing these stories, creating characters who try to reconcile their present with a past that was ripped away from them.
The only downside to The Watermelon Woman, which never depicts any of its characters as victims, is that it isn’t as long as I’d like it to be. By the end, I wanted to see Cheryl’s story continue. I also wanted more of the actual Cheryl’s unique approach to storytelling and social satire/commentary.
Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. His books Love and Quarters and Bondage Night are available through Moran Press, in addition to A Ludicrous Split (Alien Buddha Press) and Clouds of Hungry Dogs (Kleft Jaw Press). He is also a writer, performer, and producer with Belligerent Prom Queen Productions. He lives on a horrible place called Long Island.