Mo coincidences

Think of that "Mo" like in Spike Lee's Mo Better Blues, though as you will see there's a reason I chose those particular two letters.

Let me start by saying I'm sick. That's only been an explanation for the five-day gap between posts for the past day or so, though I'm ending the gap on a sick day from work, so it doesn't seem like much of an explanation at all. Really, a five-day gap between posts is fairly commonplace during the movie "low season." But, I'm telling you this to let you know this post will be short.

Finishing the movie I started but didn't finish on Wednesday night, then as the perfect viewing for when you're sick, I watched Molli and Max in the Future and Mona Lisa Smile yesterday.

When I added these to my big movie list that is now rapidly approaching 7,000 movies, and is likely to get there next month (these were #6,980 and #6,981), I noticed that they were only four titles away from each other alphabetically, which seems funny for a list that long. The only movies between them are Molly's Game, Mom and Dad and Mommy. 

Now, I can't totally hoodwink you there. There is likely an explanation for this.

Although I had never heard of Molli and Max in the Future until I came across it on Kanopy the other night, I think the reason I thought to watch Mona Lisa Smile next must be because it came up in the search results when I went to watch Molli and Max. However, I did add Molli and Max to my watchlist at the time I first noted it, meaning I wouldn't have had to search for it, so it may be a true coincidence and Mona Lisa came up on Kanopy some other way.

Here's the verifiable coincidence.

When I went to add these movies to my year-by-year lists this morning, they both came in adjacent to a movie called Monster. 

Molli and Max in the Future is from 2023, the same year personal favorite Hirokazu Kore-eda put out his most recent movie to establish him as an heir to Yasujiro Ozu, which I saw at MIFF and ranked my #4 of that year. 

Of course, when adding Kore-eda's Monster at that time, I was reminded of Patty Jenkins' Monster, the film that won an Oscar for Charlize Theron. That came out in 2003 -- the same year as Mona Lisa Smile.

While I have you, I should say that I liked both of these films quite a bit. Although Mona Lisa Smile is indeed the perfect "sick day movie" -- in that it is not very challenging in most respects, and I thought there was a fairly reliable ceiling to how much I could possibly like it -- Mike Newell's film did exceed my expectations by enough to nearly eclipse its designation as a "sick day movie." There are a lot of actresses I like in that cast and it was nice to see them doing their thing a full 22 years ago now.

And Molli and Max I liked even more. It's a real charmer, essentially a two-hander between Zosia Mamet and a guy I'd never heard of before, Aristotle Athari. Michael Lukk Litwak's debut is shot basically entirely against virtual backgrounds of various outer space locations, something I thought would seem cheap, but really grew on me. Especially since the two leads are giving such great romcom performances, and all the stuff about interstellar travel in the future is funny and light. I've always been interested in Mamet but I've never seen her cut loose and have fun like she does here. 

MIFF: Kore-eda's record

My final in-cinema viewing for the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival set a record for its director.

I talked earlier this week about how I had seen four Kelly Reichardt films during MIFF, but only two of them were official MIFF viewings. The other two were iTunes rentals, and I sort of counted First Cow as a MIFF viewing because I watched it the same night it was the festival's opening night film in 2020, when the whole thing was online.

But on Saturday, Hirokazu Kore-eda became my first director with three official MIFF viewings, meaning he has this one to himself.

The first of these viewings came in 2016, when I flocked to After the Storm after Like Father, Like Son had blown me away a few years earlier, ending up as the #2 movie of its year and ultimately my #6 for the whole decade: After the Storm was a four-star experience for me and finished about #30 for the year. I followed that up two years later with Shoplifters, which finished just outside my top ten of 2018 and earned 4.5 stars on Letterboxd.

Monster, his newest film, which debuted (as most Kore-eda films do) at Cannes earlier this summer, gives him a third official MIFF viewing and breaks a tie with a half-dozen other directors, among them Reichardt, Asghar Farhadi, Yorgos Lanthimos and Peter Strickland. 

If I'd been around for MIFF 2022, Kore-eda probably would have set this record last year, since Broker played at last year's festival. (Yes, Kore-eda is prolific.) I still haven't seen that one, as it wasn't released anywhere in time to rank it with my 2022 films, at which point it ceased to be a priority for me -- though I do think of myself as a Kore-eda completist, so I'll get to it soon. (A completist who has about half the Kore-eda filmography complete. Ha.)

It wasn't a particularly glamorous ending to the festival in terms of the theater that was hosting the movie, that being the Hoyts multiplex in the middle of Melbourne Central, a high-end shopping center. But I follow the movie, not the theater, and Monster was obviously a hot ticket as they were playing it on two screens in adjacent auditoriums. After a few slices of pizza in the food court I found my way to a very good seat in the middle.

This was a bit of a slow burn for me. For the first 15 minutes or so I was a little disoriented, until I realized that was part of the film's design. Monster is a bit indebted to Kore-eda's fellow countryman Akira Kurosawa, whose Rashomon is always a point of reference when a story shows the same event through the perspectives of multiple characters. But I say it's "always" a point of reference to indicate that it doesn't bother me, that lots of films do a similar thing and Rashomon merely got there first. I think it's a really interesting style of helping us empathize with multiple characters -- thereby fulfilling Roger Ebert's idealized notion of movies being a machine for creating empathy. 

If we're already using the problematic word "indebted," I'll say that Kore-eda is also here indebted to the films of the aforementioned MIFF alum Asghar Farhadi, inasmuch as Farhadi has any trademark on his own approach to filmmaking. I've often called Farhadi's films "domestic whodunnits," in that they present complex social mysteries driven by misunderstandings, whose details only steadily reveal themselves over the course of the narrative, and which tend to paint all the characters in lights that are varying degrees of sympathetic. If someone does something bad in a Farhadi film, it is usual inspired by their own hopeless circumstances, and not a reflection of the nastiness of their soul.

In Monster, there are multiple central events in question: a mysterious fire at a so-called "hostess bar;" an accusation of violence by a teacher toward a student; the possibility that that student is also bullying another student; a terrible accident involving the school's principal and her grandchild. We see multiple characters' versions of these events in slightly adjusted form, though the way I'm describing it actually sounds more high concept than it really is. This isn't one of those Groundhog Day ripoffs where you watch the same footage over and over again, because Kore-eda is a skilled enough filmmaker to entrust us with intuiting how events we haven't seen before relate to events we have. 

Anyway, my initial difficulty getting my bearings in the story were rewarded quickly enough and fully enough, with a story of great humanism and nuance, that Monster rapidly rose for me to the best of the festival and one of the best so far of 2023. I won't go into a huge number of details since these MIFF posts aren't meant to be proper reviews of the films, but I do want you to know that you should make it a priority to see Monster when it comes to a theater near you.

And speaking of MIFF posts, that's the last one for theatrical screenings in 2023. 

But wait there's more!

MIFF shifts online now, where a smaller selection of less prominent films continue to be available until the 27th. And this week I expect to see at least three and possibly as many as four before they finally cut us off for good next Sunday. I've written enough MIFF this year that I may talk recap them all in one post at the end of the week ... unless one of them inspires me to write sooner.