Welcome to this edition of the Ambassador Almanac where today I wanted to talk about the genesis of my yearly director projects and two old movies I’ve discovered along the way while working on this years. I also want to dig into two new movies I saw this week- one that was fresh and an exciting. The other…not so much. Then I’ll close it out with this week’s pick up for the collection and what I’m eyeing next.
If you become a paying member on Letterboxd you get access to all sorts of tracking data to see how many movies you’ve seen, actors you’ve watched, directors, countries and so on. So naturally at the end of year I share the numbers and I’m working somewhere between 300-350. Though I have often said and still believe that I’m not really aiming for any specific number but they are large numbers nonetheless (large for a regular human person that works 40 hours a week at least) so I wanted to get into how I started doing filmography projects and why I like doing them.
Like most of the great things I’ve done and or experienced the start of my movie habits began after a conversation with my cousin. I’ll leave out names but for the sake of conversation it’s important remember my lack of an older brother. As a child you really need someone in your life to put you on to what is “cool” in any given moment. These lessons were sometimes subtle, a mental note taken in conversation or after a glance at bookshelf. From the concept of free agency, to learning the forward pass on Madden on the PS2, to David Lynch and Bruce Springsteen there is always something to take away from seeing a relative like this if you allow yourself. I recall a Christmas Eve when we talked about the work of David Lynch. My cousin is THE David Lynch person in my life while I was familiar with some of his stuff and had seen Eraserhead but hadn’t done the deep dive. Lynch will always make for a great conversation because his work is so elusive. I mentioned my desire to watch Mulholland Drive and he was quick to recommend that I don’t jump ahead, instead watch all of the work chronologically. The idea being that you can watch how he changes as a filmmaker over time and get an idea of what he is interested thematically in story as well as in visual style. Plus by the time you get to the end you’ll be so familiar with him that the movie will speak in a way that it wouldn’t if you didn’t put the time in.
So I did and ever since I have the “director project” as a backbone of my year movie watching calendar. Start at the beginning and watch everything you can get your hands on. Features, documentaries, shorts, music videos, episodes of tv, and whatever else I can find. It’s a rewarding but frankly difficult process sometimes and this year has been the biggest undertaking yet because I decided take the deep dive on perhaps the most beloved filmmaker we’ve ever had.
To watch everything Martin Scorsese directed is borderline impossible. However I am happy to say that I’m making great progress. As of this writing in total I’ve seen 41 of 63 according to his Letterboxd page. The last thing I watched was his documentary on Bob Dylan No Direction Home. Needless to say as a big fan of Dylan and Joan Baez I had a fantastic time with it. But it was the stretch before it that was an ever present reminder of why it’s rewarding to watch filmographies. Up next was The Aviator, another swing at the Oscars for Marty and a celebration of old Hollywood in the way of a Howard Hughes biopic starting Leonardo DiCaprio. Now I knew that Hughes was a film producer and had a couple of directing credits so I thought it would be cool to take a pit stop and check them out. Some are good, some aren’t but it helped get a sense of the man and the state of the movie business when he was working and his work on his movie Hell’s Angels is featured heavily with DiCaprio flying around with movie cameras strapped to a plane.
I can tell you for a fact that it is unlikely I’d have watched Hell’s Angels if not for the Marty Project. It follows a pair of brothers who become pilots after the start of World War One and delivers some truly exciting set pieces when you consider the movie came out in 1930. It is a massive spectacle the cost millions of dollars (a lot for the time) and was even recut to include sound after Hughes saw the box office success of early talkies from the period.
The other Hughes movie that I saw that felt worth mentioning was one he produced that was released in 1931 called The Front Page. If you know me well you there are two things I’m sucker for. One is movie cops, the other is movie journalists. In this movie we follow a reporter played by Pat O’Brien who’s looking for his big story as a journalist. He suspects it’ll come by way of a murder trial that is set to end in the suspects hanging. But when the suspects escapes and is found first by O’Brien’s character it’s clear that there is more to this story than the police are letting on and in covering the conspiracy he could have that story that has long alluded him.
On paper it should be a 5 star masterpiece. Unfortunately I found it very over written in the first half so it takes a long time to get to where it is we are trying to go in the story. Nevertheless it’s a cool movie for the era that has its own way of expressing the skepticism we should have towards where we get our information. In a pivotal scene a character is arrested in the press room at the prison with all the reporters from the various papers present to see. Each one describes the scene on the phone to the editor differently. They spice up the story to make it more interesting and heroic in the effort to make it the most compelling read possible. It’s a compelling watch and interesting to see the movies sharing a lot of concerns about media then that we do now. Even if it’s hidden under a pretty conventional Hollywood story for the era.
The moral of the story is that in working your through the work of a filmmaker you find yourself getting more insight into what they value and care about creatively. Plus, in the process you can follow other threads that come along and discover movies, actors, directors, and so much more that you would’ve missed otherwise. It’s a laboring process and not the easiest way to go about it but I’ve never been disappointed by what I’ve gotten out of it in the time I’ve done it.
What I Watched This Week
I can’t tell you exactly when I first saw a trailer for Is God Is but I can tell you that once I saw it I knew it was something I wanted to check out. There are certain things in this world that will never go out of style and a movie about someone getting bloody revenge on someone who wronged them in a real bad way is absolutely one of them.
It’s a genre that has been around forever and will continue to be. What I really like about it as a concept is the simplistic nature it has. A to B journey with some cool characters who see some other pretty cool characters before we get to the end where we tear apart the big bad. That is the clothes line of plot that run through your movie. Now what we you decide to hang on the line is entirely up to you. And so you can go back generations, look at different countries or cultures, genders or races, and there is a revenge movie to be found.
I had not heard of Aleshea Harris before this movie arrived but it doesn’t take long for you to realize that nobody could’ve done this movie the way she did it. There is a lot to the directing style and how she tells the story that feels unique. Especially in the interactions between the twin sisters and the flashback sequences. I’m not sure if I have seen it done quite the way she decided to do it. And to that I say thank heavens. I see a lot of stuff so when you walk into a movie on a Tuesday night on a whim and you see someone really pushing it and trying things its pretty electrifying.
And in turn she gets two really solid performances out of her co-leads in Kara Young and Mallori Johnson. Neither of whom I’d seen before. The energy and sensibility they bring to their characters which are as different as they are similar fit in perfectly with what Harris is trying to accomplish.
It’s by no means a perfect movie. But it is an exciting introduction to what could be a new voice in contemporary filmmaking. Plus it’s a nice little sweet spot in a studio slate that I desperately with they’d tap into more. Mid level to level budgets for original stories from creatives that we don’t get often.
I say that because what I suspected about another new release that came out this week was unfortunately true.
A few weeks back I wrote a Star Wars at the movies state of the union where we looked at the franchise and its standing in terms of it could bring to the cinema. Of course in the process we had to talk about the upcoming return to the movies in The Mandalorian and Grogu. It is what is replacing season 4 the TV series on Disney+ that will see this bounty hunter turned hero and his beloved side kick on the big screen for the first time.
Back then I talked about how I fear that the movie lacked stakes. And reverse engineering of the show into a movie made it feel really insignificant and unimportant the way that most movies in the Star Wars universe simply hadn’t in the past.
Now that I’ve seen the movie I’m here to say that those suspicions were warranted. The movie is episodic in nature but is forced to drop anything that would confuse the general audience that hasn’t seen the show. So what we find is a hollowed out plot that tries to play the highlight reel of a season TV over the course of two hours. I would say that it’s disappointing but I think we all sort of suspected that this was the outcome we were in for.There are some action sequences that are pretty cool along the way. And the movie while easy to follow for non fans of the show plays the HITS for the Star Wars die hards like myself and references all sorts of stuff from the other movies. My personal favorite example of it being the chess pieces on the Millennium Flacon in the original movie being used in a real gladiator style arena in this one.
The real highlight for me was getting to finally see Sigourney Weaver in a Star Wars movie. She is truly one of the greats and easily a top 5 favorite actress of all time. Her performance is…flat and kinda dull. BUT she gets to pilot a X-Wing and there is something buried within my DNA that allows makes the hair stand on my neck when a X-Wing is flying around a big ole movie screen.
At the end of the day it’s not to be a little cynical about this movie. But I hope that the inevitable commercial success it has serves as a reminder of the box office revenue stream and that in turn Disney invests more into Star Wars at the movies.
As a Star Wars lifer while it didn’t work for me I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t have some fun.
The Physical Media Pickup:
This weeks pickup is one that has been highly anticipated. Fight Club from David Fincher has been talked about to death and I’m not sure if I have anything I could possibly add. But to have it on 4k in this lovely steel book is very exciting.
That’s all for the blog this week. There is a ton of new stuff coming out this weekend that I’m excited to see and I’ll get into next week. Plus I’m looking to get caught up on stuff from this year that I missed.
In the meantime, have a great weekend.
The Ambassador Almanac 