In the early months of the pandemic, my wife and I had a bit more time to work with. While my Top 20 of 2020 list is coming, these are some of the older films we watched and enjoyed throughout the year.
Moonstruck (Amazon)
You may expect to hear this from someone who was born the year before this movie came out, but: what a weird, utterly delightful movie. The whole thing feels heightened, as if characters are dealing with life and death when they’re really struggling with love and what it means to them. And maybe that’s the point: love, at its most aching and enthralling, feels like a rollercoaster through peaks of life and euphoria and valleys of death and heartache. It’s so confident in its style and cadence that you can’t help but admire and love it.
The final scene incorporates almost every character we’ve come to know and takes place around an increasingly-crowded kitchen table. It’s beautiful in its construction, the way Olympia empathetically tells her husband to end his affair and he grows quiet and teary at the grace of how she ties her forgiveness up in her demand; the way the doorbell keeps ringing and we think, “Oh God, another person! But to sit where?!”’; the way you keep thinking it’s going to be the most explosive, ugly conversation ever, that there’s no way this can possibly work out, and yet, when it’s all said and done, it’s gorgeous and freeing and they all take a rather heartwarmingly bizarre family picture together.
Leave No Trace (Amazon Prime)
Director Debbie Kopnik arrived as a documentary filmmaker, and that careful, objective eye is evident. No one is ever judged. There are no villains. There is an awful lot of conflict, however, and it’s beautifully, patiently etched. We see it with the daughter slowly recognizing that what her father thinks is best for them may not actually be. That there’s worth in trusting a system he’s so deeply opposed to. That the world and community he fights and runs away from may be the one she actually wants to be in. The final exchange, wordless and heartbreaking, is one of the more gorgeous things I’ve seen all year, and not just because of the lush forest it takes place in. It’s a silent protest that flows into an acknowledgment and, finally, bittersweet acceptance.
Juliet, Naked (Hulu)
A spark is a dangerous thing. It makes pistons pump and cars run. It gives life to barbecues and satisfying grilled foods. It lights warm candles in the still darkness. But it also leads to fires, from the minor and quickly stomped out to the wild and disastrously destructive. I know this because I’ve been on both sides. I’ve seen the sparks in my life that have led me astray into crazy situations involving regrettable screenshots and multiple lapses of mental and emotional logic. I’ve also been a part of sparks that not just gave me life, but the kind of life I’ve often longed for.
Juliet, Naked is about these sparks. For Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), there are a great many sparks, short and attractive, that have led to a life of multiple kids with multiple mothers. They’ve led to a life tinged with regret and the desperation for one more invigorating spark, and yet the quiet resignation that it’s not only something he won’t experience, but that he probably doesn’t deserve. For Annie (Rose Byrne), the spark is something sorely needed, but one she worries is a good ten years too late. She’s as terrified of it as she is drawn to it. It could go either way.
Based off Nick Hornby’s novel, there’s a beautiful collision of what happens when a person who’s lived too much meets a person who’s lived too little. They’re both struggling with their own accumulation. Tucker Crowe’s got more kids than he can keep track of, all with different mothers. Rose is plagued daily with the thought she’s wasted the last 15 years of her life, in a cycle of comfort and never, ever doing anything outside her comfort zone. What this movie shows more than anything is that it’s never, ever too late to connect.
I think a lot about a short scene in the middle of the movie. Tucker has just hosted one of his daughters – who’s very young and very pregnant, repeating a cycle he’s been unable to break in his own life – for the weekend. Except it’s not even his house. It’s his ex-wife’s house. While he lives in a shack out in the backyard. There’s nowhere else for him to go and no other way to entertain her. So he does the best he can, which he knows is not nearly enough. As he drops her off on the bus, he calls her name. “Hey,” he says. “Thank you for coming to visit.” You can feel through Hawke’s great performance the full weight of the words. He’s genuinely grateful. He knows he doesn’t deserve the opportunity. And then: “Wish it was more fun.” Not for him. For her. That it was more worthwhile. That it would leave her feeling hopeful about her birth father and not slightly bemused or embarrassed or resentful. There’s a parallel universe he imagines in that moment in which he’s the supportive, loving father she wants him to be, and they’re having a great, laugh-filled weekend together. The pain in his words at the bus stop is the sound of knowing that universe isn’t the one you’re currently living in.
I deeply admire the way Jesse Peretz keeps this wild story from giving the too-safe, unrealistic ending. Both characters have to acknowledge the trickiness of the future. The best romances we see onscreen may always feel like time is running out; but the ones that give us hope are the ones that show us that it is never too late to hold something worth fighting for.
Valley Girl (Amazon)
Clearly a product of its time, it’s a fairly formulaic story about the girl who falls in love with the guy from the other side of the tracks. What elevates it to something special is the absolutely electric chemistry between newcomers Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman. Seriously, find someone in your life who looks at you the way Foreman looks at Cage. Even your most loving animals cannot compete with her infectious smile.
Broadcast News (Amazon)
It’s always fun to revisit a movie you haven’t seen in ten years (a fun thing about memory is when you can’t even remember how long ago it was and don’t want to confront the fact that maybe it was even just a few years ago). I remembered the love triangle. I remembered Albert Brooks being the brainiac, talented friend and William Hurt the smooth dullard. I empathized deeply with Albert Brooks’ character. I knew the feeling of being that guy in love with a woman who just couldn’t quite cross the friendship line with you. Of representing everything they like and still somehow not being enough. But I also recognized the insecurity of just simply wanting to be recognized for the skills I had.
What I didn’t expect this time around is how much William Hurt’s character would resonate with me. I could feel it in my chest. That imposter syndrome where you know how to be honest about the skills you lack but can’t quite get people to believe just how real and deep those feelings are. Some of this comes from the masterful writing, but a big chunk of this comes from Hurt’s performance. There’s pain and longing in his eyes. He’s so desperate for approval by people he respects, but he’s so unsure of his ability to even pull it off. He wants to be a peer, but he’s terrified of the criticism that could come with taking a risk. He’s moved up through the ranks as the handsome, smooth guy not just because he can, but because being a good-looking face is easier to deal with than the crippling lack of self-worth.
Which makes his turn at the end even more excruciating. In a weird way, I wanted Holly and Tom to work together so bad. I wanted them to go on vacation. To somehow make it work. To maybe not be their intellectual match for each other but perhaps an emotional one.
I understood better Albert being so mean to Holly because when you don’t want to confront someone you love not sharing your feelings, you want to push it away as much as possible. And because you inevitably change your minds – because you are human after all – sometimes the only effective way to do this is to be truly mean. Because you can be mean in a way very few people can. You know where the deepest pains are to be found. (Read this excellent Bright Wall/Dark Room essay that gets into it further)
What I also took away from this is just amazing a character Holly is. It’s such a beautiful mixture of Brooks’ writing and Hunter’s performance. When a producer comes by and tells Holly, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” and she responds with, “No. It’s awful.”? It absolutely kills me. It says so much about her as a character but it also says so much about women all over the world who regularly have to deal with mediocre white men making all the decisions or those some mediocre white men listening to their great ideas and brushing them off with a bit of mansplaining. It’s a lonely, depressing state to be in. And Holly Hunter makes you feel every inch of it.
How Do You Know (Amazon)
While Broadcast News is a testament to just how great a movie can be when James L. Brooks is firing on all cylinders with a great cast, his 2009 film How Do You Know shows just how quickly the train can get derailed. I remembered this film more for the headlines it created – the excessive bafflement at just how a simple movie with no action scenes or expensive CGI could cost $100 million to produce. I also remember how it seemed to fall off a cultural cliff despite starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd (before he became the Fountain of Youth), Owen Wilson, Jack Nicholson, and (the lone bright spot) Kathryn Hahn. I figured this was just a movie where famous, well-regarded people got paid a lot of money to just throw out something, anything.
But the bizarre thing about this movie – and what may help explain how inert it is – is how hard Brooks worked at it. He spent over 300 hours interviewing professional and amateur softball players to learn about them. What makes them tick. How they deal with disappointment. How they move on from a historically short career. It all seems pretty cool until you realize just how little softball plays in the life of Witherspoon’s character.
And then it just gets weirder from there. You can see Nicholson straining to make a character out of his lines and, uh, not quite getting there. You can see Rudd and Witherspoon trying their best to spark the movie to life and also not quite getting there. You can see the outlines of the story Brooks wants to really tell and the themes of disappointment he really wants to work with while his movie title is a question about how you know if the person is the person. When it comes down to it: the movie title itself shows how confused this movie is. It sounds like a question. But there’s no question mark. So what is it?
But the thing about watching something by a titan like Brooks is that even while sifting through the trash, you’re gonna find something pretty neat. There’s a late scene in which a very pregnant Kathryn Hahn gives birth and her husband, as supportive as he can be throughout, decides to propose to her. What elevates this whole scenario is the way the husband asks Rudd to film the whole thing and everyone gets so swept up in the damn emotion of what’s happening that Rudd doesn’t even realize the camera is not recording. And then after some griping, they do something unexpected: they do it all over again. And it’s still pretty moving. To me, this is what Brooks does exceedingly well as a writer: finding the emotional heartbeat of comedic scenarios.
Ishtar (Prime)
I came to this movie out of sheer fascination. I had been reading about writer, actress, and director Elaine May and how she hadn’t directed a film since 1987’s Ishtar. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for female directors to be thrown in Director Jail for long periods of time for perceived misfires while their male counterparts can cost a studio hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and still get another big-budget job as if nothing happened. Adding further to the intrigue is how Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman both agreed to star in this almost as a favor to May, who had done a great deal of movie-saving, uncredited script work to some of their bigger hits (Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, Hoffman’s Tootsie).
So what do you get when you combine all these elements with a blue-eyed camel, a Morocco film location, and the premise of two terrible lounge singers getting mistakenly drawn into an international crisis they’re only barely aware of? Well, you get Ishtar. It’s such a singular, bizarre mix of elements – both behind-the-scenes and in front of the camera – that enjoying it is an exercise in abandoning expectations and appreciating what happens when people try something new and original. It’s especially fun to see Hoffman and Beatty try to be deliberately bad at their lounge singing jobs, as it is to see a young Charles Grodin nearly run away with the whole movie.
Tiptoes (Prime)
I…uh…I have no words for this movie. You ever see something so bizarre, so tasteless, so completely stacked of baffling decisions that you are far more interested in just how something like this got made than the actual movie itself? That is Tiptoes.
So I will link you to an article that gives some explanation for your bafflement. Whew.
Crawl (Hulu)
The only thing more terrifying to me than being in close proximity to alligators is being trapped in close proximity to alligators. Director Alexandre Aja and writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen do a beautiful job in building on this foundation of fear.
This film follows a simple but effective structure.
1. Give us a spunky, stubborn protagonist with a unique skill (swimming – which comes in handy)
2. Strand her stubborn father in a flooding house in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane.
3. Lean into both of their stubborn natures so they’re both trapped in the house.
4. Throw in alligators. Lots of them.
Aja really milks all the tension out of this premise, with blind spots, subtle movements, and a jump scare so bad I gave my wife a secondary scare from my reaction alone. Just when you think they’re almost about to escape, another wrinkle is thrown in. It all adds up to a pulse-pounding, highly-entertaining ride worth checking out on a dark, stormy night.
Harold and Maude (Amazon Prime)
I had no idea what to expect going into this 1971 classic. I especially had no idea what to expect after its first scene, in which an apparent suicide attempt is treated with mild indifference. Ninety minutes later, I couldn’t get the smile off my face. What an unexpected, absolutely delightful film.
Colin Higgins’ script has a young, rich man obsessed with death (hence the playful suicide attempts) and deeply struggling with any point to his life until he runs into a wild old lady, Maude, who steals random cards and also attends the funerals of people she doesn’t know. To say any more would rob you of the discovery that comes with watching something so touchingly original and unorthodox. What makes it all work is the incredible direction of Hal Ashby. I don’t know how to describe it as any other way than treating his subjects with dignity and warmth. The slow, deliberate camera movement. The staging. The use of depth and space. It all ties Higgins’ script together in a warm, memorable blanket.
Straight Up (Netflix)
I’m really thankful my wife and I had seen 1939’s Her Girl Friday only a month before. Why? Because otherwise I would have said, “Wow, I haven’t seen a romantic comedy like this before.” And I’m well aware of just how annoying that genre of writing is where people watch old movies without context as if they’ve just stumbled upon new, alarming insight.
Straight Up is a hugely entertaining callback to the screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, in which female characters often dominate the relationship and challenge the masculinity of the male. This is exactly what happens with James Sweeney’s Straight Up. Sweeney plays Todd, a guy who’s not even totally sure he’s gay due to his extreme aversion to gay sex and, really, sex in general. He meets Rory (Kate Findlay), who not only connects with him but doesn’t seem to mind the lack of sex in their early relationship. It’s a fascinating dynamic that plays out over the course of the film, with its own ebbs and flows, and overlaid with that festive, rapid-fire dialogue of the screwball classics it honors. Sweeney and Findlay play their characters beautifully, equally hilarious and moving. This is a highly underrated movie lost in Netflix’s algorithm. It straight up deserves more.
Total Recall (Netflix)
We look back at TOTAL RECALL as a good movie and perhaps even the better Phillip K. Dick adaptation. But when seeing it in 2020, I’m struck by the sheer creative willpower it took to pull it off. The filming in Mexico City. The futuristic cars were made out of the local Mexican transportation. The impressive prosthetic effects, some of which took 15 puppeteers to pull off. This is not a movie you make when you want it done simply and easily. This is a movie you make because you believe in it. Because you want to do something wildly different.
It’s also startlingly relevant today. To see a governing head willingly cut off the air supply of its population to maintain power? It’s not a far line to draw between that and the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to provide ANY kind of federal response or support to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. If you don’t believe that our government would willingly steal and hide a life-changing discovery from another race, well…maybe you need to read your history books a little more closely. It’s as American as apple pie, warts and all.
Zardoz (Hulu)
When my wife and I watched ZARDOZ, we had a perpetually stunned reaction throughout. Just what 100 minutes of fresh hell had we exposed ourselves to? But in the time since, where a quick Google search has greatly increased my understanding of the story, it’s grown on me. More importantly, it’s made me realize how much more I need to appreciate movies that go for broke in trying something new. They may be unsuccessful in their execution, but hundreds if not thousands of people gave it their all. It distinctly feels like a movie that was written by someone who read the book, but greatly overestimated how many other readers were out there. Even writer and director John Boorman, more well known for films such as Deliverance and Excalibur, admitted he didn’t understand parts of what they were making. Should you endeavor to watch this film without the assistance of edibles or copious amounts of alcohol (this is not an endorsement), I will say Boorman shows off some impressive in-camera tricks at the end with reflections and light. You just have to get through the rest of the movie first.
Easy Rider (Prime)
Somehow I saw this movie as a kid and only remembered Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper riding motorcycles on the open road. I thought it was pretty much just a road trip movie, apolitical and full of long, sweeping shots of Americana. I thought it’d feel like a relic of the past.
Holy smokes.
Somehow this film feels as timely as ever. There’s a lot going on in America that’s exposed the consequences of steep capitalism and systemic racism, where it can feel like you can never quite catch up to where you want to be. Sometimes it’s paying off a loan early and having your credit score dinged. Sometimes it’s watching the richest man in the world run away with his wealth, likely hiding in his secret lair in Mount Rainier, giving his bald head another shine as he pumps out a few more biceps curls. Quarantine has done a thing to our brains where we are more available than ever to see what’s going on in the world, scrolling through our social media feeds and looking for answers just as we step into new questions. But that availability has been matched with an unprecedented level of chaos, when a pandemic rips through a country not entirely convinced of it. As a result, there’s a half-hearted sentimentality of just wanting to get away from “it all”. To chase a freedom in which we can bet on ourselves and not be beholden to systems we violently disagree with.
The premise of Easy Rider is simple in that Fonda and Hopper get enough money from their latest cocaine deal to take a long, leisurely ride through the Southwest and Deep South. They roll into communes. They camp out under the stars and smoke lots of weed. And then they run into people like George, an ACLU lawyer played by Jack Nicholson, in an insanely magnetic performance that actually awarded him his very first Oscar nomination.
Towards the end of the film, after a great deal has happened, Fonda demises, “We blew it.” It’s never quite clear exactly what “it” is and Fonda in the fifty years since refuses to tell. But I could feel it in my bones. Here were two guys determined to be free, only to realize they were widely rejected in swaths of the country and that, one day, they were going to run out of money and have to get a job just so they could have a home to safely sleep in. They were gonna have to reinsert themselves somehow back into the system they had tried so hard to reject.
Turner and Hooch (Disney+)
There was a time when McDonald’s sold VHS tapes in their restaurants. One of those tapes my family bought was Turner and Hooch. Seeing it again many years later, I’m struck by how well-designed the premise is. You got a cop who’s a neat freak and soon to retire. And then you throw at him a particularly complicated, sneaky case that involves the dirtiest, nastiest, drool-heavy dog you can possibly find at the tightest button of them all. It’s a classic setup of conflict – organized order meets chaotic mess – that’s elevated immensely by Tom Hanks’ performance and his hilarious, adorable energy with Hooch. There’s a reason this movie is looked back at fondly by many, and it has nothing to do with the crime that drives the plot. I still think about near the end (spoiler alert!) when Hooch is laying on the vet’s table, clearly not going to make it, and Hanks, reminiscent of his turn in Captain Phillips, pulls off that same stunned, emotionally-broken performance that inevitably drains my face of all its tears.
Three Men and a Baby (Disney +)
After a particularly gnarly episode of Hannibal, my wife and I were looking for something fun and light to rinse out our brains with. Lo and behold: 1987’s Three Men and a Baby, directed by Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy (no joke). This is one of those movies I’d seen so many times as a kid that watching it felt like a memory test. Even further: my wife and I, now expecting, wanted to see what baby tips we could glean from this filmic venture.
The setup is clear: the film paints all three popular 80’s actors – Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg – as the ultimate, responsible-free bachelors. They all live together in a giant NYC designed by Selleck. And, of course, all three main characters have jobs – architect, comic strip artist, and actor – that, while demanding, usually have pretty flexible hours. Handy! And then after a particularly packed birthday party, in which all at least two of the men have to gently turn down women who just cannot be more than six feet away from them, they are presented with a gift at their doorstop: an abandoned baby.
I had completely forgotten that Ted Danson disappears and doesn’t show up until over halfway through the movie (actors!). I had also completely forgotten about a very irresponsible drug bust that takes place in the middle. But what I do remember was only cemented further: this is a film with three highly-likable, charming leads with innate goodness. We want them to figure it out. We laugh at their mistakes and their deep misunderstanding of anything related to childcare and yet: it’s no less touching when we see at the end just how much little Mary has made an impact on their lives. They don’t care about the lack of sleep or the bizarre work hours. They just want that little girl to be safe and with a happy, supportive family. And that’s the most important lesson of all.
