Film / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / March 2024 / Gabriel Ricard
Image © Focus Features
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind turned 20 recently, and it was satisfying a couple of months ago to rewatch the movie as part of the Criterion Channel’s “Interdimensional Romance” collection and find that it’s just as good now as it was to me at age 18, when I saw the movie in theaters. It’s nice to watch stuff that had something meaningful to contribute to your formative years, and find that it still hits my buttons for a good story, cast, performances, direction, editing, and everything.
At the same time, it’s not the exact same movie watching experience, and I know I’ve written about this before, but it’s fascinating when appreciation not only finds familiar ground but grows in ways that are an inevitable result of being 20 years older. I’m not smarter, god no, but I’m also not the same person I was at 18, getting close to 19 and still trying to explain to people that I had already been a writer for 5 years by that point, and saw no reason to stop. I’m just not. That’s the fundamental truth to any movie I watch at a different point in my life. If it’s completely the same, at least to me, then something is wrong.
One thing I came to as I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the reminder that audiences seem increasingly concerned with ensuring their favorite characters are fundamentally good people. I see this in particular with superhero media, and it does make me wonder if consuming too much of that has given some of us a type of brain rot that doesn’t allow for messy characters.
As I watched Eternal Sunshine, I watched Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) be wonderful, hideous, beautiful, unreasonable, selfish, kind, and more. The performances, direction, and screenplay all allow for a situation in which we can get behind people who are not great in any sense of the world. Maybe we respond to the fact that they’re just doing their best and are not in any way actually evil people.
While I don’t know for certain what it is about these characters that works so well for so many of us, I do look around the current movie landscape, and fail to see very many films that allow their characters to be flawed in ways that might make us uncomfortable. Is that a bad thing? It’s certainly not great. It could very easily be one of the reasons why movie audiences seem less and less interested in being challenged on any level.
It could be adjacent to the rising tide of people who don’t know why movies need sex or nudity. These elements do feel like they have a lot in common with one another, but unfortunately, I’m not smart or bold enough to say for sure. I’m paying attention, and I’m hoping my relentless, tedious pessimism is proven wrong. Soon would be nice.
It’s All About Love (2003): F+
Image © Nimbus Film
When I decided this column would reflect an ascension from the lowest-rated film in the column that month to the highest-rated, it wasn’t so I could have an excuse to pick on shitty movies. It’s really just a new methodology that keeps me interested in writing this goddamned thing month in and month out. I also thought it would push me to write reviews of movies I didn’t particularly like, because it’s important to at least me to work on writing balanced, open-minded reviews of films that didn’t work for me personally for one or several reasons. For the most part, it’s not fun being relentlessly hostile or nasty.
But sometimes, it can be a little cathartic for movies that genuinely pissed me off with virtually every facet of its production. Filmmaking is an extraordinarily difficult venture, but even keeping that in mind sometimes isn’t enough to stop me from throwing as many bricks at a movie as my sweaty, awful hands can manage.
And so, we come to the 2003 film from Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg entitled It’s All About Love. It’s a story set during a climate change apocalypse about clones and two people who love each other very much. This might be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m really just wasting time at this point because if I start writing about this vapid, confusing, childish, and virtually unwatchable piece of fucking shit, I’m going to just get angry all over again.
I pride myself on being able to say good things about almost any of the several thousand films I’ve now seen at this point in my life. I’m struggling as I recall It’s All About Love steering me, Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, and whoever else might be hanging around through an insipid plot whose elements I mentioned earlier fail to connect to each other or build anything remotely interesting. The climate change element doesn’t really seem to matter to anything, except that it mercy kills everyone stuck in this aggressively bland and uninteresting world at the end of the film. It doesn’t really matter. Like everything else in this movie, it’s just there, and it’s being filtered through one of the dumbest, most pretentious screenplays ever written, and through some of the worst performances in modern film history.
The thing with the clones, all of which are made from Claire Danes’ character, a world champion figure skater (what the shit, why not), doesn’t really have a purpose either. It just happens. It’s just another plot thread that I sincerely do not think has any significant meaning or anything of value to add to what’s ostensibly a love story between two thoroughly empty characters played by Danes and Joaquin Phoenix. Everything in the movie, it could be said, is about making things as difficult as possible for these two to just work their shit out. I guess. Maybe I’m not very smart, in fact, I’m really not, but someone needs to tell me what the point of this movie was. I just don’t see it.
Rumor has it that Danes burst into tears at the Cannes premiere, where the film went over about as well as a wet, thirty-second fart in a crowded elevator. I don’t blame her. This was a miserable experience that was devoid of interest, chemistry, joy, or anything else other than a voice screaming in my ear that I was wasting my life. I don’t hear that voice very often when I’m watching movies.
I’ll try to wrap this up. The rest of this month’s column will be shorter because of the space I’ve given It’s All About Love, and that’s just one more reason to hate a film you may just have to see for yourself.
Wait, no, I have one more reason to hate this movie: Sean Penn’s stupid fucking accent, en-route to delivering one of the most embarrassing performances I’ve ever seen. Certainly, in his wildly overrated career with a face that looks like a puckered asshole squashing its fleshier bits down to imitate a furrowed brow.
Seriously, fuck Sean Penn. Fuck the plane he’s on, narrating bits and pieces of this dumbass garbage dump called a movie and being a jackass in general. And absolutely fuck off with It’s All About Love. I’m fucking astonished this was directed by the same guy who did the amazing 2020 film Another Round.
Whew. I feel a little better. Thanks, everyone.
Dead of Night (1977): D+
Maybe I’m just not a big Dan Curtis fan. I don’t know what to tell you. I do like Dark Shadows, and Richard Matheson, who wrote the three stories that make up this TV movie horror anthology, is one of the genre heavyweights for a reason. These stories in themselves are fine. “Second Chance” is about a guy who fixes a car and travels back in time. “No Such Thing as a Vampire” is a clever twist on the story of a woman seemingly being threatened by a vampire. “Bobby” is the story of how far a mother will go to be reunited with her son.
Nothing wrong with these ideas, but none of them are executed especially well. And there is some blame I’ll extend to the material itself. The first two stories really don’t seem to go anywhere in particular, except when it comes time to establish the premise, and then when the story comes to an end. Everything in the middle feels we’re going in circles, and then it’s all trapped in the blandest 70s TV movie atmosphere possible. It’s not terrible. It’s just not very memorable.
Only “Bobby” is really all that compelling, and that mostly comes down to an excellent performance by Joan Hackett. There are actually good performances throughout Dead of Night. There’s just not a lot else.
Summer of 84 (2018): C+
Image © Brightlight Pictures
I expected a lot of fun and some subverted genre expectations from the same three maniacs who gave us the excellent Turbo Kid in 2015, and I wasn’t disappointed. The premise sounds familiar. Some kids become convinced that a police officer in their neighborhood is an infamous local serial killer. The investigation is plucky as hell, but then things take a turn for the dangerous. Again, it sounds very familiar, and there’s obviously nothing wrong with that, but the unassuming might step into this movie expecting the absolute ordinary.
You’re going to be pleasantly surprised by how wrong you are. Supported by strong performances by Graham Verchere and Caleb Emery as our two main kids, and Rich Sommer as their potential threat, Summer of ’84 is soaked in 80s atmosphere and period-appropriate sensibilities in its plot, characters and characterizations, and certainly in the soundtrack. The tension takes perhaps a little too long to amp up, and some of the performances aren’t as strong as others, but then you have this movie throwing one of the bleakest endings imaginable for a film like this. It’s a beautiful, dark ending, and one I’ve thought about for months since seeing this. Many of my favorite 80s horror films leave me with sincere, gnawing dread, and Summer of ’84 is a particularly pleasing throwback in this respect.
Zombi 3 (1988): B+
Image © Flora Film
I’ve said in the past that Fulci isn’t one of my favorites. But after a recent marathon of his works that included finally watching Zombi 3 from start to finish, I’ll have to revamp that statement because clearly, I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m talking about. Zombi 3 isn’t a perfect movie either, which has been a theme this month at Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo, but it’s easily the most entertaining film we’ve discussed so far. Zombi 3 is some silly shit indeed, but it’s also such a wonderous combination of over-the-top violence and boldly bizarre characters, reactions, and circumstances.
The best Lucio Fulci movies start crazy and get wackier from there, culminating in a scorched-earth ending that leaves you feeling as though fever dreams are in your waking life and have become a contact sport. Zombi 3, with its story of an island overrun by zombies after the dumbest circumstances you’ve ever seen, hits all those marks. Bruno Mattei should be commended, too, as he directed some of the scenes when Fulci was unable to for one reason or another (we’ll seemingly never know just how much Mattei did). Everyone deserves a victory lap on this one. An underrated minor masterpiece of the absurd.
After Life (1998): A+
Image © Engine Film | Sputnik Productions
Perhaps this format for the column will have to be dropped eventually simply because it doesn’t leave us with much room sometimes to talk about that really, really good stuff. After Life is currently in the same Criterion Channel collection as It’s All About Love, both covering the subject of interdimensional romance (I fucking guess where Love is concerned? Maybe? Are you sure?). You could not ask for two more differing movies.
Not just in subject matter, with After Life being a Japanese film about the people who help the recently deceased transition to the next world, as opposed to It’s All About Love being a Danish movie about fucking bullshit. After Life has an interesting premise that drives its characters on both sides of this story, with the counselors working in this limbo realm being tasked with not only interviewing the people who come to them, but also with helping to film a moment from their lives that they can live inside of for all of eternity. The movie doesn’t waste a lot of time on explaining this world, or going any further into the subject of the after life than is absolutely necessary to this plot and its lovely, multifaceted characters. It’s a refreshingly straightforward movie that treats its most fantastical elements as simple reality. Writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda has done a skilled job of keeping this movie focused and captivating in its desire to revere and better understand nostalgia, memory, and longing.
From the performances, which range from the humorous to the tragic, to the movie combining a documentarian’s approach to a narrative film structure in the best possible way, After Life is quite simply flawless. Watching its premise unfold will almost certainly move you to tears.
