At this point I don't think I will watch all the DVDs I have out from the library, which I had once stated as an ambition, after all. That's in part because for one particular title, I already inadvertently spoiled the little supplemental exercise I've been doing, which is checking if they're available on streaming after I've watched them. While I was doing some light browsing on Netflix, I believe it was, The Lighthouse appeared on one of the landing pages. I've already seen this movie, of course, and when I was at the library a few weeks back, I thought it might be worth a second viewing to see if I responded to it a bit more strongly this time. Now I think I'll just kick that can down the road, especially since I know I can find it online.
But I did watch one DVD each of the three nights -- or days, as you will see -- and not until I reached the end did I realize that an accidental theme had emerged: They were all released in 2018, even if one of them had a festival debut the year before that.
Friday
First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader)
I know my #1 movie of 2018 played at film festivals in 2017, and it actually first came on my radar from a "best of 2017" podcast where the podcaster admitted he was honoring it a year before anyone else would have a chance to see it. Since I usually try to disregard the year a movie started playing festivals, I continue to think of this as a 2018 movie.
It's actually the fourth time I've watched it in total, making it only the second movie (after Tangled and Parasite) that I've watched again since rewatching all my best of the decade contenders in 2019. First Reformed landed at #9 on that list of my 25 best of the 2010s, so I guess it isn't surprising that I'm seeing it for the fourth time in less than three years since my original viewing.
It may have been my first time watching on DVD, though. The first viewing was MIFF in 2018, the second was an iTunes rental (I'm pretty sure) and I believe the third was on a streaming service, though I'm going to wait on that portion until the end of this little write-up (and even if I saw it on streaming then, it might not still be available that way now). In any case, I did not recognize the DVD menu, which was a nice little repeating sequence involving a particularly memorable swath of the score, playing over an unmoving image of Ethan Hawke, his body split between his pastor's vestments and a suicide vest, with a peaceful external of his church over one shoulder and a toxic waste dump over the other. The clouds move in both images and there are some birds over the church. It's inspired by one of the posters, but it also has a metaphorical value, kind of like the angel and devil on your shoulder, as Reverend Ernst Toller is torn between hope and despair.
One thing I did not specifically remember about First Reformed, despite all my repeat viewings, was that it was shot in the squarish 1.33:1 aspect ratio. I mean, I had to have noted it previously, but the 20 months since my last viewing in October of 2019 were enough for me to forget it. This interested me this time around because it made me realize that at the time, it was my second straight best movie of the year that was shot in 1.33:1 after A Ghost Story in 2017. So in this case watching it on DVD was useful, as the DVD included a disclaimer that this aspect ratio was intended by the filmmaker and did not represent something being broken.
As with any film you love, you have new takeaways each time out, but since I'm talking about three films in this post I will be brief. These also involve SPOILERS, so you may not wish to read any further if you haven't seen this film.
The ending of First Reformed has always been problematic for people, myself included, though only for about the first two minutes after I finished watching it for the first time, after which I loved it. The apparently "happy" ending of Toller ending up in the arms of Amanda Seyfried's Mary is always something that had multiple interpretations, and people have correctly pointed out it that it may not be "real," as Cedric Kyle's megachurch pastor had previously pulled on the locked doors of the rectory and had been unable to get inside to reach Toller. Magically, Mary appears inside his domicile moments before he's going to drink Drano, materializing almost like a spirit. If Kyle's character could not open the door, why could she?
So this time around, it occurred to me -- though again, I might have had this thought previously and just forgotten it -- that maybe he did actually drink the Drano that the film shows him dropping to the ground when he sees Mary. When they embrace and kiss and the camera swirls around them, this could be his "last thought" before dying -- a concept he considers earlier when pondering what Mary's deceased husband Michael thought in the last moments before he shot himself. So in a way, it's a thing of beauty that his last thought his one of hope, of embracing a woman/spirit, even in the darkest hour when he's dying of cancer and dying more immediately of poisoning by household chemicals. When the image of them kissing abruptly cuts off, it could be like that moment the camera abruptly cuts from Tony Soprano at the end of that series -- the lights going out for the last time, in a snap, as he takes two in the back of the head. Of course, that's not the only way to interpret the ending of either of these works of art, but I like that it is one of them.
Free availability on my streaming services: None
Running total: 4-1, DVDs lead
Saturday
Free Solo (2018, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin)
Because of an expected streaming viewing of Nobody on Saturday night, I crammed in my DVD viewing in the late afternoon on Saturday. Second use of my USB DVD player on my laptop as I watched in the bedroom. We had to postpone the Nobody viewing and I considered a DVD double feature, but I wasn't in a great mood so I just stuck with the one.
Free Solo was not the reason I wasn't in a great mood. It was terrific.
I watched the previous movie a friend of mine raved about by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and her husband/cameraman/daredevil, Jimmy Chin, last year. That was Meru, and it was really good. My friend prefers Meru but I'm a Free Solo man myself, just because climbing a rock like El Capitan in Yosemite without a rope is batshit crazy.
Spoilers to follow.
Although Alex Honnold was the first person to do a free solo climb of El Capitan in June of 2017 -- I guess that's not a spoiler unless you think you might be watching a snuff film -- the feat actually has a cinematic precedent. Yes, all you Trekkies out there will know that none other than James T. Kirk was free-soloing El Capitan at the start of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, even though William Shatner was 58 years old at the time, and more than a little bit pudgy. In the real world, it takes an exceptionally fit young man of 32, who has practiced the climb with ropes dozens if not hundreds of times, to complete the feat.
So I did have Star Trek on the brain from the start of the viewing, which is all the more reason I found it funny when someone refers to Honnold as "Spock" at one point. This has nothing to do with Star Trek V, mind you -- it's because Honnold is emotionally withdrawn almost to the point of pathology. I thought it was funny, though, that there was this accidental connection. In that scene where Kirk is climbing El Capitan, Spock actually flies up next to him on a jetpack. Talk about your climbing distractions.
Despite his shortcomings as an empathic creature, and his unwillingness to "maximize his lifespan" as he puts it at one point, Honnold has gotten himself a serious girlfriend. She lets him do what he needs to do -- he wouldn't be partnered up with her if she didn't -- but it's interesting to see how the film explores the danger of what he's doing and its emotional effects on her.
The wonder of the feat itself is obviously the reason you watch this movie -- the beautiful cinematography, the sheer impossibility of what this man is trying to do -- but the film probably wouldn't be as special as it is if it didn't turn the lens inward on itself. A number of the crew discuss whether they want to be witness to the possible death of this man they have come to love and respect, and yet further, whether something they do in the course of filmmaking -- accidentally knocking rocks loose, crossing his path with one of their ropes -- might be the actual cause of his fatal plummet. Alex himself discusses his own ambivalence of being filmed, whether he wants it at all, or whether being filmed might cause him to take a risk he might not otherwise take.
Anyway, this is the complete package, and we should all be thankful it had the happy ending it did. Because the movie also tells us how many of history's great free solo climbers have died doing what they love, I couldn't resist checking Wikipedia afterward to see if Alex Honnold had succumbed to that same fate since the film wrapped. Nope, still in one piece -- and now married to his girlfriend in the film, as of last year.
Free availability on my streaming services: Disney+
Running total: 4-2, DVDs lead
Sunday
At Eternity's Gate (2018, Julian Schnabel)
I wrapped up the weekend on Sunday night watching a film about an artist whose story has been a part of two films I've loved in the past few years.
The first of those chronologically, in my own viewing sequence anyway, was 2017's Loving Vincent, the impossible labor of love that gives us a story shot on film, whose every frame was painted over by individual artists. That gives the final product a lovely watercolor vitality and sense of movement, something that Vincent Van Gogh himself would have dreamed up if he'd been alive today. I've seen it twice now actually, most recently last year.
Then there's Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which I watched last year, and which features a vignette starring Martin Scorsese as Van Gogh.
Loving Vincent was probably in my mind most as I watched, as a number of the same events and characters appear in both. Ultimately, I think I preferred that film's plot structure of unraveling the mystery of the last few weeks of Van Gogh's life, to this approach of trying to get inside his head and see the world more as the painter did. That speaks more to the strengths of director Julian Schnabel, who made the great The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which features two of the same actors we see here (Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigner). I could tell this was the same director as that film.
And while I found the camerawork, the use of color, and the use of filters to distort that color all to be quite engrossing, the film on the whole did not land for me nearly as strongly, ending up as a 3.5-star experience on Letterboxd. Willem Dafoe is great as Van Gogh -- he robbed an Oscar nomination from someone who got famously snubbed that year, but maybe it wasn't such robbery after all. I also enjoyed that Mads Mikkelsen and Oscar Isaac appeared here, basically in cameos.
Still, maybe it was being Sunday night after a weekend in self-isolation on top of lockdown, but I found my thoughts drifting during the movie a fair bit. I think it's the type of movie that encourages drifting away into your own thoughts at the best of times -- it's designed to be felt and ruminated on -- but it's not a movie I suspect I will watch a second time.
One thing I found interesting was extratextual. As I was watching Dafoe I took at guess at how old he is, and decided that he was maybe 60. The internet told me he's 65, though he would have been closer to 60 at the time this was filmed. Given the age he is now, it was almost exactly half his lifetime ago when he played Jesus Christ, appropriately at age 33, just as Christ was when he died. That became relevant as I was watching At Eternity's Gate, because Van Gogh mentions Jesus multiple times throughout to multiple characters, and you get the sense he may have been a bit of a Christ figure himself. After all, the location of his gunshot is very similar to that of Christ's abdomen wound, and when he's laid out at the end in his coffin among his works of art, finally being appreciated by the public, the sense of him almost being crucified is impossible to ignore.
Maybe Dafoe is just typecast.
Free availability on my streaming services: Kanopy
Running total: 4-3, DVDs lead
So I think I'll do at least three more nights of this ... there's a chance we'll be out of both lockdown and self-isolation on Thursday, and if that's the case, I need to get out to the theater! A Quiet Place II awaits, among others.
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