FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / March 2022 / Gabriel Ricard
Image © Gabriel Ricard
I don’t know how to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this column. I really don’t. Maybe I’m burnt out for the moment. Or enjoying rewatching stuff with Cara. That is, when our loveable ferrets aren’t being attention whores or tearing up the place. It’s the little things.
I might be burnt out for ideas. However, I don’t think I’ve exhausted the reasons why I started this column in the first place. So let’s bring it back to the beginning.
Ten full years and 122 columns later, I’m still at least eager to watch, discuss, and write about movies in a variety of different ways. Movies are for good or ill a big part of my personality. I certainly like a lot of things outside of film, but it remains an area that has influenced my creativity, certain viewpoints, my relationship to entities like nostalgia, and so on.
Even if I didn’t have columns, or a podcast, or those random opportunities to blather on about stories, ideas, destinations, history, and the other things about film that fascinates me ever onward, I would still watch as many different kinds of movies as possible. It’s not the only thing in the world, but it’s one of the better things.
Image © Gabriel Ricard
To celebrate that fact, as well as the 10th full year of this ridiculous column—but also because I can’t really think of anything else—this month’s Captain Canada is going to go through its lifespan. I’m going to go through each year, beginning with 2012, and choose one particularly good film from each of those years. It won’t inherently be the best movie of that particular year. It might be, but I’ll settle for something that just reminds me of gratitude.
Being the gratitude that I get to write this column at all, and that movies still captivate my attention with as much strength and surprise as ever.
The only hard rule for this anniversary edition is that the movie had to have appeared in a previous entry. I’m not reviewing them again. I’m simply pointing them out in 200-words-or-less as films I’ve enjoyed over the years of the column.
Thank you for being part of that for far longer than any of us anticipated.
2012: Tokyo Story (1953) | Original review: A+
Image © Shokichu | Criterion
Tokyo Story was the first Yasujirō Ozu movie I saw, and it was in the earliest days of the column that I had the space to write about that. One of those directors people just tell you to check out, regardless of what you think you like, Tokyo Story nonetheless hit me almost immediately. I fell in love at once with its attention to the details of its characters, and to stories with a pace that could be described as slow, but also a beautiful evolution of a narrative over a relatively lengthy period of time.
This kind of minimalism that dictates Tokyo Story and other movies by the filmmaker, with this one in particular punctuated by a stunning series of performances by its cast, may not be for everyone. I am a fan of these stories that are in fact as stylized and cinematic as it gets. I think Tokyo Story helped me then and now to continue to appreciate different modes of storytelling.
2013: The Thin Man (1934) | Original Review: A+
Image © MGM
It’s never been a completely random collection of movie reviews with this column. When I started this column, I decided I would only review movies I’m seeing for the first time (there have been exceptions to this rule) from the point of starting Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo. It was around this point in my life where I wanted to dive into more foreign films, more older films, and genres I didn’t necessarily like all that much (musicals). I was interested in those things before I started writing this, but I also hoped the column would encourage me to be a little more ambitious in trying to vary my media consumption. At least a little.
The Thin Man, the first in a wildly popular franchise featuring an inimitable husband and wife detective team (the great William Powell and perhaps even greater Myrna Loy), told me in no uncertain terms that I had the right idea for what I wanted to cover in the column. People already knew me at this point as someone pretty obsessed with film. As I worked at expanding my interests and tastes, I wanted the column to serve as a series of conversations about movies I wanted other people to see.
I wouldn’t call The Thin Man obscure, obviously, but I always want more people to see it regardless.
2014: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) | Original Review: A+
Image © StudioCanal | CBS Films
Regret is a strong word, but I do wonder if I should have tried harder to meld a more personal narrative with these reviews. Movies often swirl around other events in my life, which is one of the ways I remember them so intently. With Inside Llewyn Davis, a movie about a burned-out folk musician going through the worst period of the motions of his life, this was a film that came along at a time in my own life when the message was a little too close to home.
I was also spending a lot of time on the road. I was also pretty burned out. My 20s were closing out soon, and I found myself repeating the ugliest behaviors and patterns over and over again, hoping for a miracle that I would only have to work but so hard to obtain. The miracle was in movies like this, which features a stellar Oscar Isaac performance in yet another bleak Coen Brothers comedy (a powerhouse at that), contributing to the larger message I was also receiving from loved ones, and my own desire to make even minimal changes before it was too late.
The message to me, through stories like this poor bastard folk singer named Llewyn, was clear: Get your shit together.
2015: Mortdecai (2015) | Original Review: F-
Image © Lionsgate
I’ve tried to avoid putting too many bad reviews in this column. I’m pretty confident the vast majority of the films I’ve written about—because it makes way more sense for a column like this to generally focus on things I do like than don’t—have ranked a C+ or higher.
Still, this is the only space where I’m relatively comfortable in embracing some free-floating hostility. I’ve also tried to temper that somewhat as I’ve gotten older, but there are always going to be drizzling cinematic shit goblins like Mortdecai. A film that features a talented director, crew, and cast, and yet somehow squanders almost all this potential. Johnny Depp’s character is insufferable, and with that as the centerpiece for this, everything inevitably suffers.
This is one of the few movies I would call unwatchable. It’s not fun to say that in of itself, but sometimes, and the relative anonymity of my career has been great for this, in that no one really cares what I think anyway, it’s been cathartic to use Captain Canada to rant about that rare movie that’s bottomlessly unappealing and regrettably difficult to discard from my consciousness. I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly cruel to the actual people who have worked hard in their own way on a movie that just didn’t come together for me.
2016: Ned Rifle (2014) | Original Review: C+
Image © Possible Films | Fortissimo Films
Hal Hartley’s trilogy about a group of very damaged, highly strange, and occasionally rather horrible people has been part of my life as a movie fan for almost as long as I’ve been aware of being one in the first place. Starting with 1997’s Henry Fool, which was still playing regularly on IFC in the early 2000s, I found a sense of humor and approach to dialog and narrative that I found incredibly fascinating. So much so that I have tried to emulate the way these people talk to each other in my own fiction and poetry.
I have also been fascinated by the character Henry Fool, who appears in all three of these movies as a major point of interest for those around him. As we learn across these three movies, and as we watch Henry’s crimes against humanity come to bear in this story, which focuses on his son (a great performance by Liam Aiken), Henry has a way with people.
Ned Rifle ends all of this on a pretty satisfying note. The movie has also become something of an example of film characters I’m willing to follow, even feel sorry for, as I the audience become intimate with their horrible details.
2017: The Double Life of Veronique (1991) | Original Review: B+
Image © Sideral Films | Canal+
I didn’t go to college, and I can be a pretty mediocre student sometimes. I’ve always had some discomfort in delving into the more cerebral, world cinema sort of movies. They aren’t inaccessible to watch, but something similar to imposter syndrome kicks in whenever I want to discuss them with other people. I feel exceptionally dumb when people start deep-diving into someone like Bergman. Relentless film literacy on my own time has made me confident enough over the years to at least try to keep up.
Writing about a film like The Double Life of Veronique is as much an exercise in trying to talk about films that are difficult for me to discuss as it is part of the column’s ongoing mission to cover as decently wide a range of movies as possible.
I’m never going to be a scholar (no shit). What I have developed over 10 years is enough confidence to at least tell you how I feel. Then as now, The Double Life of Veronique has overwhelmed me with colors and its unique pace with respect to the movement of its characters and the world around them. There is also a fairly devastating story of two unique women with a fantastic, complex bond.
2018: Maidstone (1970) | Original Review: D+
Image © Supreme Mix Productions | Criterion
Of course, a movie can be thoroughly terrible, intensely unpleasant on every conceivable level, and still have qualities that make you glad you watched it. Maidstone, which still delights me because it’s the only film on record that features Rip Torn trying to kill Norman Mailer with a hammer, is a perfect member of this club.
Maidstone might be an incredible underground documentary-fiction blend for some, but it wasn’t for me in 2018. That hasn’t changed much. I do have a better appreciation for the ambition of this project, which would try to thrive on a kind of organized chaos most directors would not attempt. There really is a reason for that, as we stumble blindly and sometimes dully through this story of a film director running for President amid a stunning clusterfuck of a daily life.
But movies can have value in a variety of different ways. One thing I still try to do in Captain Canada is explore those forms. I can do whatever I want here, so why not? Even if I wind up talking out of my ass, I’m still glad I at least tried to make you understand why something like Maidstone can be seen in many different, equally valid ways.
2019: Savage Streets (1984) | Original Review: C+
Image © Motion Picture Marketing
Horror and exploitation are two of my favorite genres for several reasons. One of those reasons is their foundation of the expectations of these genres supporting the truly unique, strange, and fantastic qualities that can make a film more than just a series of certain grisly beats.
At the same time, you can enjoy them on a purely basic level of exploding guts, high body counts, and gratuitous servings of sex and nudity. Sometimes, it really is just fun to watch something like Savage Streets with the most open mind possible.
Sure, there’s a lot of nasty stuff in this story of a woman (Linda Blair, a heavyweight in both of the genres I’ve mentioned) getting revenge on the monsters who raped her sister (Linnea Quigley, who is exceptional here) and killed her sister’s pregnant friend (a very underrated Lisa Freeman). It isn’t for everyone, and there are a multitude of legitimate reasons for that.
Still, as I’ve tried to evolve my thinking in one way or another, I’ve used Captain Canada to write about the varying degrees of appreciation I think you can have for this movie. It doesn’t hold back, and its bombastic as hell, but movies like these rarely come across to me as some sort of celebration of evil.
Those movies have a right to exist, too, but my mileage with stuff like Cannibal Holocaust isn’t quite what it used to be.
2020: Dead End Drive-In (1986) | Original Review: B-
Image © New World Pictures
While I have a lot of problems with streaming, that mostly comes down to its execution in our current dumbass greedy landscape. The basic construct of being able to find new movies to watch in a sprawling virtual video store is always going to be neat as fuck. Dead End Drive-In, which I found at random in the boundless bin of free-to-watch titles known as Tubi, has become the only way to catch myself completely by surprise in this purportedly exciting new frontier we’re stuck with.
Video stores are basically gone. Likewise, the days of “discovering” new movies that kick the living shit out of my expectations and mood from several simultaneous directions are now limited to streaming services and a little patience. When I was growing up, which apparently was a while ago now, I had TV channels like IFC and Sundance (Cinemax was underrated in its strange schedule, too) providing me with a steady stream of movies that were at least different from the bulk of what was immediately available to me.
I never got to write this column in that period of my life. Probably best, as I was somehow even worse at all of this than you could arguably say I am now. One thing that hasn’t changed is that at least some of my media consumption has to come from things I wasn’t necessarily looking for. Some of my most enthusiastic reviews, including my original for the incredibly wacked-out, funny, and sincerely tense Dead End Drive-In, come from these experiences.
2021: Blood Diner (1987) | Original Review: B+
Image © Lightning Pictures
I’m not criticizing passion for a particular genre or type of movie. At the same time, I cannot begin to imagine just watching one type of movie. You don’t get points for liking a lot of different things, but I do think you’ll be a lot happier in the long run if you can watch and appreciate Cléo from 5 to 7 and Blood Diner, two very different films, both directed by women, in the same week.
Hell, go for a back-to-back double feature. If my column is for anyone in particular, it’s for people who either want to watch movies in this fashion, or for anyone who wants to appreciate the audacity of a medium that can contain these movies and others. I love writing a column that can appreciate Blood Diner, the story of two brothers just trying to make their small cannibalism-centric business a smash with the local community, and something like 1979’s Stalker, over the same edition.
I don’t think any of this makes me special, but I wish more people would admit that it’s okay to like a lot of different genres, budgets, and other facets of filmmaking.
2022: Petite Maman (2021) | New Review: A-
Image © Lilies Films | Canal+
Where in the hell did 10 years go? While my drive to see every movie ever made has shifted to slightly more realistic expectations, I’m grateful to still have this art form in my life. Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo does more than just give me a place to ramble about that.
While I am no legitimate critic, these columns have allowed me to build on a body of work that has influenced my own creativity. The privilege of writing this every month has made me at least more empathetic, and more willing to listen to voices that are not my own. I have learned to keep an open mind in a way that seems to be a little more sincere than it was when I started out. This is my place to talk about what I’m doing at the moment as someone who watches a lot of movies. The need to maintain that every month has made me in some ways a better person. Even a better writer of fiction and poetry.
No one ever bought one of my film scripts, but that’s okay. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Petite Maman was recommended to me because I write this column. The aspiration to keep up with what other people are watching, and to be open to the suggestions of real critics and genuine scholars, put me in front of this unbelievably gentle, moving story of a little girl who enters a new phase of her life when a loved one dies.
I wouldn’t trade the path I’ve been on with film and with this column for anything. I keep watching movies because things like this column continue to fuel that excitement in more ways than I can count.
Again, thank you for being part of that.
Image © Gabriel Ricard
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.