Josh Watched #27: December 2024
Hi! If seasons 1 and 2 of Josh Watched were akin to American TV — new episodes often, for long stretches, at predictable intervals — it’s turning out that seasons 3 and 4 are more like British telly: short bursts of limited series and an occasional holiday special. That seems thematically appropriate for someone whose teenage sense and sensibility cut their teeth on British fare (say, The Office, Doctor Who, Monty Python, The Thick of It) . . . even if some observers may opine that it’s hard to recommend movies without, you know, writing one’s movie recommendation newsletter. But hey, I was a lazy poet before I was a lazy amateur film philosopher, and I still have a poet’s cadence. Sometimes these things are just out of our hands.
Anyway, what have you been up to? Recently I was delighted to learn that no less a luminary than the pope is a disciple of the cinematograph. To mark the hundredth anniversary of the medium in 1995, the Vatican issued a list of 45 great films — and reader, the Holy Father’s taste is . . . pretty good! The blessed entries are divided into three categories — religion, values, and art — with 15 flicks in each. The religion films acquit themselves well, with usual suspects (Andrei Rublev, Ben Hur) and a few things I’m pleased the bishop of Rome knows about (Babette’s Feast, the gobsmacking The Passion of Joan of Arc). The values films, meanwhile, alternate undisputed classics (The Seventh Seal, Decalogue) and feel-good hokum you’re not shocked the Vicar of Christ went for (It’s a Wonderful Life, Chariots of Fire). But it’s the art flicks where the pontifex maximus really performs his good works, with a communion of choice cuts from the body of cinema: 8 1/2! Grand Illusion! Metropolis! Nosferatu! 2001: A Space Odyssey! Hell, even The Lavender Hill Mob earned its salvation. Let me put it this way: the 45 pictures are an eternally better (dare I say cooler?) celluloid rosary than what the church I grew up in would string together. Catholics and miraculous curation — who knew? I see you, Holy See, I see you.
The other thing I’ve been up to has to do with the changing of the seasons, in several senses of the phrase. A while back I wrote about the niche pleasure of watching movies set in certain cities in those cities — Wings of Desire in Berlin, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in Madrid, even The Friends of Eddie Coyle in Boston. This past summer I had the related vibe of seeing the new flick from a certain director in the same city where I saw that director’s last one. Namely, two years ago I caught Three Thousand Years of Longing, the then-latest George Miller joint (he of Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best pictures of this century) in Berlin. A few months ago I took in Mad Max: Furiosa, the current Miller latest, in the German capital as well. It got me thinking about new ways to mix and match travel and movies, using the latter to organize the former. Like, what if I made a point of seeing future George Miller stuff in Berlin? What if a new flick by Pedro Almodóvar, director of the fabulous Women on the Verge, was reason enough to fly to Madrid? Et cetera. (For now we’ll let it slide that Almodóvar’s upcoming The Room Next Door, his first English-language feature and one of my most anticipated pictures of the winter, is partly set in New York.)
Essentially, reader, I’m feeling my watching habits change as I myself change — five years ago feels like an eternity — and I’m looking for new rituals to enliven both. My brain tends toward optimization, toward figuring out the most effective, most efficient, or most pleasurable version of a thing and then continuing on with the thing ad infinitum, but I don’t want to just repeat myself for the next fifty years. Moviegoing remains sacrosanct; there’s still nearly nothing I’d rather do than see a flick in theaters. Yet as the years tick on I’m finding it, for example, really hard to be indoors in warmer months, which is seriously throwing a wrench into my consumption, and writing, goals. Turns out the natural world can be just as compelling as artificial ones. (One ritual I’ve split the difference with is seeing movies outdoors in the summer, which is a cinch in Berlin since there are myriad open-air cinemas — that’s freiluftkino for you Amerikaner — and they screen stuff almost every night.)
In parallel, I’m realizing that my experience of life so far is that of continually struggling to discover — or is it figure out? Pin down? Guess at? — who I am as a breathing, thinking (er, overthinking) piece of meat on this planet. Or rather, it’s of trying to get enough glimpses of that person to say something definitive about them while knowing they’re always in flux. I dunno, reader — to what extent do you, as a person, identity, consciousness, or similar what-have-you, seem to remain constant or keep changing? How much can you say about whoever you think you are? I’ve found answering that question to be a bit like trying to grab a fistful of water.
Where I’m going with this, if I’m not stretching the point too far, is lately I seem to be pondering, pondering, pondering how to understand people better, or what the goal of understanding someone even is. Which is where movies come in.
Machines That Generate Empathy
The longtime Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert, one of the few film scribes who’s a household name, once described the medium as “a machine that generates empathy.” I always liked that line because it hits on something innate in how movies infect your brain. Painting and photography can show you a person; literature and music can put you in their headspace; theater can thrust you into their existence in an arm’s-length way. But film stands alone in its ability to drag-and-drop you into someone’s life in an enveloping, all-consuming manner. When you’re following a character for 100 or so minutes, seeing how they live, watching what they do, it’s near impossible not to grow a little, or a lot, attached to them, to root for them, at the very least to care what happens to them. That alchemy is a literalization of the old saw about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes: get to know a stranger, and before long they’re not a stranger anymore.
Movies have all kinds of techniques for dropping us behind characters’ eyes. Some of them are formal tricks, like an eyeline match, in which we see a character looking at something, then the next shot shows us what they — and now we, the classical Hollywood visual grammar tells us — are seeing. Other flicks may have a fleeting scene where, say, a character gazes into a mirror and the camera shifts to a first-person point of view, seeming to become the person’s vision; this kind of thing tends to happen when a character is disoriented, waking up, on drugs, or soul-searching, for example, or especially when they’re a killer stalking a victim. On rare, delightful occasions a picture takes it to the logical extreme by being shot entirely in the first person, like the 1947 noir Lady in the Lake or the 2009 psychedelic meditation Enter the Void, which I’ve written about before in these pages. (If you’re ever really bored, buy me two to three daiquiris and I’ll wax on about movies’ predilection for capturing reality as it is and the mid-century French film theorist André Bazin, whose ideas about the “myth of total cinema,” which I’d argue have implications for first-person flicks, I’ve always liked.)
Other techniques are more in the realm of narrative construction, where the shape and perspective of the story force you to identify with whoever you’re following. A great example is The Zone of Interest, winner of this year’s Oscar for Best International Feature. Did you see it? It’s about the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who lives with his family in a lovely rural home with a beautiful, expansive garden. We observe him, his wife, his kids, and the house staff through the ins and outs of their daily routines, never directly viewing the atrocities happening nearby. And while you know the larger horrors of this story, as the movie goes on it’s hard not to feel yourself sinking into the family’s everyday challenges: Dang, I know they’re helping perpetrate mass murder . . . but that garden behind their house is really nice. I can’t believe his job is forcing them to leave it. Some critics disliked that Zone makes you feel for the overworked commandant; to me, that’s the point — the human brain’s myopia, its capacity to push away the abstract and evil and to narrow in instead on what’s familiar and right in front of it.
All that to say: movies and empathy. Our humanity wants to recognize others’, and flicks excel at making that happen. And a few pictures I’ve seen lately have me thinking about the different forms that empathy and understanding can take.
Last Summer (2023)
Why I watched it, what I thought:
The subgenre of movies about women getting involved with younger men is flourishing. See, for example, this year’s The Idea of You, last year’s May December, and the upcoming Babygirl, in which Anne Hathaway, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, respectively, play characters whose taste in lovers skews junior. (I wrote about May December in these pages a while back.) Hell, Babygirl is Kidman’s second movie this year to explore this kind of territory. Among the best of the bunch, though, is Last Summer, in which life gets complicated for a middle-aged lawyer who lives with her husband and two daughters in Paris.
If there’s a word that describes the existence of the lawyer, Anne, “comfortable” might be it. She’s successful professionally, her family appears satisfied and happy, and generally it seems that life has been good to her. Then Théo comes to live with them. The 17-year-old son of Anne’s husband, Théo is brash, direct, rude — your garden-variety teenager, but with a history of behavioral problems. Anne tries to make him feel at home, even overlooking some troubling actions to keep the peace. She’s around a lot more than her overworked husband is; as she attempts to corral Théo, she and he clash, bounce off each other.
Things build between them both slowly and not. It’s not obvious something is building — that the result of their clashing is what we call sparks — until suddenly it’s all too clear, and you’re watching from behind your fingers. But what happens next, as the affair continues and gets ever more dangerous for Anne, is the point of the movie. I liked that Last Summer, as was true of May December, perhaps the closest parallel of the aforementioned flicks, isn’t overly concerned with judging its protagonist. We don’t need to be told that what Anne is doing is wrong; she knows it — that’s almost beside the point. What the flick is more interested in is why she’s doing it. Why risk throwing away your whole life for a fleeting tryst with, gulp, a teenager? The answer is desire.
The early scenes indicate Anne’s comfortable life has grown a little staid. Maybe she’s rebelling against that, or maybe she’s letting a heretofore undiscovered part of herself get more sunlight than it should. Last Summer is curious about how desire can complicate your priorities, how it can, in a very real sense, possess you. We watch Anne weigh what she’s getting from her choices against their cost, but also, we watch her realize her thought process about it may not be so clear-cut and rational. Ultimately, the tough, knotty movie is about the determination to go after the thing she wants — no, the things she wants, plural, and especially when those things stand in perilous opposition to each other.
How to watch:
Streaming on multiple sites.
Akira (1988)
Why I watched it, what I thought:
If you’re a longtime reader of Josh Watched (thanks!), you know I love Akira. It’s not exactly a niche movie; any list of the all-time best animated flicks likely includes it. And as longtime readers like yourself will recall, Akira is an anime sci-fi flick that clowns on other blockbusters. It’s a sumptuous visual feast; it’s packed wall-to-wall with colorful characters, frantic side plots, and jaw-dropping action scenes; and it never stops cranking up the intensity.
Rewatching Akira recently, though, I was struck by a moment of empathy, or rather lack of empathy, that happens about halfway through and sets the entire rest of the movie in motion. I hate to spoil anything about the story, but here’s what you need to know: 20 years after a psychic blast leveled Tokyo with a force of a nuke, the government of Neo Tokyo is on high alert for any sign of psychic powers. They find them in Tetsuo, a member of a teenage biker gang who’s injured in a crash, and bring him to a secret medical facility for treatment and study. Slowly, Tetsuo’s powers are unlocked; eventually, both he and the government realize he’s strong enough to do whatever he wants.
Empathy enters the picture when Kaneda, the gang’s leader and an older-brother figure to Tetsuo, comes to rescue his friend with some accomplices. See, Kaneda has looked out for Tetsuo since they were kids, and while there was a time when the younger boy needed protection, what Kaneda doesn’t know is that Tetsuo is far, far beyond that point. He breaks into the facility and searches for his friend while, a few floors away, Tetsuo is realizing his abilities in thrillingly what-the-hell-is-the-nature-of-reality fashion. Then Kaneda reaches his friend’s room and says, very reasonably, “I’m here to rescue you.”
That’s it. That’s the moment when everything, which was already going south, is absolutely yanked in that direction. “I’m here to rescue you.” It’s very reasonable, except that it’s such a stunning misunderstanding of what Tetsuo needs in that moment. This boy-next-door, who has a chip on his shoulder from a lifetime of being saved, has turned out to be one of the most powerful beings the world has ever known. He doesn’t need to be saved; he just needed his friend to very reasonably be worried about him, which is why, in this moment, good intentions be damned, “I’m here to rescue you” is the absolute wrongest possible thing to say. And maybe there’s no way Kaneda could have known that, and maybe everything that happens next would have happened the same apocalyptic way regardless. But that one sentence is simply such a colossal failure of empathy that its stakes, the rest of the movie shows, can only be called world-ending.
How to watch:
Streaming on multiple sites, though obviously you’re looking for a subtitled, not dubbed, version.
Mandy (2018)
Why I watched it, what I thought:
The first time I watched Mandy, the question that was overwhelmingly on my mind, that squeaked from my addled brain through the hazy neon onslaught, was this: can a movie ask more of the audience than it gives in return? I wasn’t fully sober at the time, and the truth is, I was unprepared for the gonzo, phantasmagoric Nicolas Cage revenge flick. It’s not often that a viewing experience throws me, but Mandy threw me. The next day, fully sober, I watched it again.
Putting it glibly, reader, the movie is a PSA about the small but nonzero risk that a random charismatic asshole will decide he’s the messiah and have your girlfriend murdered for rejecting his overtures. To be clear, that is the first one-third of the picture. Red Miller and his girlfriend, Mandy Bloom, live happily in the Pacific Northwest in a modest but stylish house. Then one day a small cult is passing through, and their leader, Jeremiah, spots Mandy through the window of their hippie van. He wants her, and orders his followers to procure her. Jeremiah doesn’t seem like the messiah, but his group has the power to summon a biker gang that may or may not be demons, and the nightmarish trio subdue Red and Mandy in their home. Jeremiah tells her about his awakening as the chosen one (an amazing scene — actor Linus Roache gives a performance I’ve been thinking about for months) and offers himself to her. She laughs in his face. He doesn’t like that.
The rest of the flick is Red’s revenge quest, and it goes to some far-out places. To my question of what the movie gives you, well, the bounties aren’t inconsiderable: trippy vibes, homemade weapons, otherworldly architecture, staggering amounts of LSD, chainsaws, even bigger chainsaws, fantastical landscapes. At the same time, I couldn’t fully shake my wondering about the inciting action for this amount of hullabaloo. Mandy goes big in its mythology and world-building, much of which is wordless and all of which might be hallucinatory. Yet the event that kicks off everything, the reason for all that bigness, is the murder of Mandy. And we barely know anything about Mandy, because she’s barely in her own movie. Is it odd to wonder if the ends justify the means, whether the places the flick takes us to are worth the story’s emotional cost? We consumers of media are well used to narratives where women are killed, maimed, etc. to motivate a male hero, so in that respect Mandy isn’t so unusual. And I’d still recommend you give it a shot; when the flick does well, it really does well. But even though I liked the story’s mystical possibilities, and even though the cult is what opens those up, executing the motivating character via dime-store jesus christ just feels like a big emotional ask. Given how much the movie does offer, it’s hard not to wish it offered a little bit more.
How to watch:
Streaming on multiple sites.
Jethica (2022)
Why I watched it, what I thought:
Clocking in at a tidy 70-ish minutes, Jethica is a short feature film that’s more of a long short film. Our entry point is Jessica, a young woman who leaves Los Angeles for New Mexico to flee a stalker, Kevin, who babbles incessantly about loving and belonging with her. The thing is, as we come to see, Kevin is now dead, which brings an element of the supernatural to this story about abuse and being pursued by its perpetrators and consequences. At a gas station, Jessica crosses paths with Elena, a high school classmate, who offers to let her hide out at her grandmother’s desert trailer. Also, Elena, like her grandmother, is a witch, and she has some ideas for how to deal with the ghostly remnants of Jessica’s stalker.
The setting of Jethica feels inseparable from its slender story. The living and the dead alike cut lonely figures in the endless vistas. And while Kevin’s endless ranting and lisp (see: the movie’s title), plus the fact that he’s dead, make him seem less frightening than his actions warrant, the visual of past trauma refusing to go away works pretty well nonetheless.
As the film shambles toward its surprising conclusion, I was moved by how Jessica and Elena finally deal with Kevin. (The picture is billed as a horror comedy, which isn’t quite right, but there isn’t quite a label for the dry, thoughtful tone.) I think of this story in terms of empathy because of that ending, which some viewers might consider too generous or unrealistic, the supernatural “rules” of the tale notwithstanding. Where Jessica finds herself after 70-ish minutes is a place not of forgiveness, exactly, but of greater understanding or even mercy — of choosing to see the humanity in someone who doesn’t deserve it. There’s more to it than that, but the nuance lives in the details. It wouldn’t be the right ending for many other movies about abuse and related cruelties, but somehow it felt like the right ending for this one.
How to watch:
Streaming on lots of sites.
And that’s it for this edition of Josh Watched! Thanks for reading, and while I’ve learned not to promise exactly when I’ll be back in your inbox, I plan to send you some notes on new releases and the upcoming/ongoing awards season soon.
Until next time!