Author: Village Vidiot

“Jaws,” August 15, 2021 (1975), DVD.  I had the unusual experience of watching this with an adult who had never seen it before.  Hard to imagine.  And she’s a serious swimmer in open water including oceans and Long Island Sound.  Now she swims miles in Walden Pond every week.  My wife, Bronwen, has always been…

“Blancanieves,” July 27, 2021 (2012), DVD.  Watched down on Fire Island.  This Spanish black-and-white silent film homage to the ‘golden age’ of silent in the 1920s from Pablo Berger reconfigures the Grimm story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Bullfighter Antonio Villalta (Daniel Gimanez Cacho) is the tragic wounded king whose wife dies in…

“First Cow,” July 10, 2021 (2019), DVD.  Kelly Reichardt (director and co-writer) and her writing partner Jonathon Raymand (co-writer and author of the novel The Half Life,  from which this is derived) work together a lot, and I’ve loved their collaborations.  They do wonderful, thoughtful and contemplative films like Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Meeks…

“Summer of Soul: (…Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), July 4, 2021, Hulu.  1969 marked a momentous year for popular music.  Woodstock brought 400-500,000 fans together for the concert in rain and mud.  It became both a free concert and a hugely successful movie that sanctified the moment.  The months prior to Woodstock…

“The Father,” June 26, 2021 (2020), DVD.  Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for best actor for this difficult role and it is quite remarkable. Based on Florian Zeller’s play (he co-wrote the screenplay and directs), Hopkins plays Anthony, a man in his 80s who is sliding deeper into dementia.  His daughter Anne (Olivia Coleman in…

“Bo Burnham: Inside,” June 4, 2021, Netflix.  My nephew Kyle was right in recommending this one to me.  Accomplished director (“8th Grade”), actor (“Promising Young Woman”) and established solo-comedian, Burnham spent many months of Covid worrying this into being.  It’s funny, terribly serious, sarcastic, insightful, and often very painful.   It’s about self-conscious, self-critical privilege.  It’s…

  ”Tenet,” May 29, 2021 (2020), DVD with special features. Chris Nolan does big movies.  At 250 million dollars, with filming in six countries, a huge cast and crew, an amazing set of stunts, sets, technological innovations, and grand ideas, this certainly qualifies.  He prefers real special effects rather than CGI and some of these…

  “News of the World,” May 4, 2021 (2020), DVD with attached special features. This is my third western in a month after years of not watching one.  Quite a binge for me.  Tom Hanks and the amazing new young German actress Helena Zengel star in, and make this underappreciated and beautifully filmed Paul Greengrass…

  “Haymarket: The Bomb, the Anarchists, the Labor Struggle,” May 4, 2021, directed by Adrian Prawica , 2021, documentary, 83 minutes, now at various festivals. Americans’ collective sense of history is weak at best, and their knowledge of labor history is frequently non-existent.  Though most Americans work, the institutional labor movement struggles to survive, and…

  “My Happy Family,” April 13, 2021 (2017), Netflix (Georgian with English subtitles.)  I really liked this well-acted Georgian film written and directed by Nana Ekytimishvili..  It provides an engaging and informative look at the creaking process of change and movement in this developing Caucasian nation.  52-year old Manana (Ia Shugliashvili), a teacher of Georgian…

  “Promising Young Woman,” April 10, 2021 (2020), DVD.  Nominated for Best Picture.  I’m not a big one for thrillers; I mostly don’t enjoy the stress they induce.  This, however, is a very interesting film, and I would recommend it.  It is the first feature from actress Emerald Fennel (“The Crown” and “Call the Midwife.”) …

  “Tokyo Story,” April 5, 2021 (1953), DVD.  I had never seen this brilliant, quiet, black-and-white classic from Japanese master Yasujiru Ozu, but this Criterion release is a special presentation of his genius.  It’s 1953, and Japan is reindustrializing after its defeat and losses in World War II.  You see the building but it is…

  ”Collective,” April 4, 2021 (2020), DVD.  Stellar Romanian documentary up for both Best Documentary and Best Foreign Language Oscars.  I don’t have a clue as to how they managed to construct this in real time, except for the willingness of certain journalists and officials to 1) know what they had and document the process;…

  “Deadwood—The Movie,” March 28, 2021 (2019), DVD.  We both really liked this return to the incredibly vulgar, obscene, corrupt and immoral world of Deadwood, South Dakota in its mining days.  It featured the entire cast of the original series and was written by but not directed by David Milch, who did the three season…

  “Sound of Metal,” March 21, 2021, Amazon Prime.  Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor nominations are, deservedly, in on this one.  Ruben (Riz Ahmed and Oscar nomination) and Lou (Olivia Cooke) are an up-and-coming heavy metal duo and couple in this excellent film written and directed by Darius Marder.  She sings and plays guitar; he’s…

  “The White Tiger,” March 20, 2021, Netflix.  Adapted by Ramin Bahrani from the 2008  Booker Prize winning novel of the same name by Aravind Adiga, this Indian/American, Hindi/English hybrid looks at the new and old India clashing in the era of globalization.  This India is one of political corruption and payoffs, of brutally repressive…

  “Olive Kitteridge,” March, 2021 (2014), DVD.  We both very much liked this four-part series excepted from Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name.  Starring Frances McDormand as the remarkably difficult and often unpleasant title character (she co-produced with Tom Hanks), she’s a high school math teacher with a heart of coal. …

  “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie,” March 13, 2021 (2019), Netflix.  We’ve not seen “Breaking Bad” for several years and maybe it’s time to again as some of the references here probably got lost on us.  Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) is on the run after escaping from the fascist sociopaths of The Brotherhood during…

  “Nomadland,” March 12, 2021 (2020), HULU.   Oscar Nominated.   Our Francis McDormand mini-festival continued with this new and contemplative look at an unusual American population. Fern (McDormand) loses everything when the U.S. Gypsum plant she and her late-husband worked in closed and the town, Empire, Nevada essentially disappears.  She outfits a van for living and…

  “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,” February 27, 2021 (2018), Netflix.  I had hoped for more from this film, based on the novel of the same name.  In the end, however, while the film satisfied in some ways by telling an interesting story, it felt overly romanticized for my taste.  It gives…

  “The Dig,” February 14, 2021, Netflix.  I enjoyed this film based on a novel about a true historical event.  It’s a story of mismatches and class on the eve of WWII England, this is a very studied, very British film. Ralph Fiennes excels as Basil Brown, a local, archeologist/digger whose knowledge comes from working…

  “One Night in Miami,” January 25,2021, Netflix. Imagine Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown hanging out and talking about work, life, politics, race, identity and meaning and you’re a fly on the wall.  Director Regina King has given us a likely scenario via Kemp Powers’ screenplay modification of his theatrical work…

  “Education,” Episode 5 of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, January 19, 2021, Amazon Prime. Formal education is the theme here.  Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy) is an energetic 12-year old from a ‘solid’ Afro-Caribbean British working-class family in about 1975.   He loves rockets, wants to be an astronaut, and can’t read.  He’s targeted by teachers at his…

“Alex Wheatle,” Episode 4 of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, January 15, 2021, Amazon Prime. This has not been a particularly well-received episode in this series first season, but I really liked it a lot.  It is somewhat more fragmented and impressionistic, but it is an excellent look at one of the central questions of the…

  “Natalie Palamides: Nate—A One Man Show,” December 31, 2020, Netflix.  This comedic/serio filming of a live stage show is an exploration of sexual relations between men and women as presented by NP in drag.  That is to say, it’s done by her as her alter-ego, Nate Palamino, a hairy, bare-chested, macho, posturing stereotype who…