JUSTICE FOR NINE DAYS!
I watched a pretty significant number of films this year! A lot of them were pretty good and most of them had been released way before 2021! Anyways fuck the pre-amble, you know the drill, here’s ten first-watches that really hit me hard in no particular order.
Daisies (1966)
Vera Chitylova is another director that I delved into that became a fave and my favourite of hers (followed up very closely by Fruit of Paradise) is Daisies. It’s just under 80 mins of teenage girls being chaotic while Chitylova uses pretty much every filmmaking style available at the time and it comes together to create an incredible piece of chaos. What’s not to love?
Branded to Kill (1967)
SEIJUN SUZUKI! Assassinations! A badass goth girl! Possibly my favourite endings in all of cinema! Joe Shishido’s cheeks!
The Last of England (1987)
England is shit. This film, which is wordless but feels very poetic, with its incredible COIL soundtrack, understands the rage that emerges from having to endure this place’s bullshit more than most! It is like every Jarman ThingTM put in a bonfire and set alight, with the hope that the grotesque and beautiful fumes finally bring this nation to an end.
Tongues Untied (1989)
You just gotta watch this one, I don’t think there’s a way I can do any real justice to the beauty of Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs working together on this. Thes best thing I can say for Tongues Untied is that it made me believe I could actually make films.
Life Is Sweet (1990)
Only my second Mike Leigh, and he is increasingly becoming one of my favourite directors (I know I’m late to the party lol). I just love stories that feel very specific and localised with deep characters who are a little shitty but in the way that everybody can be - all while still maintaining a clear political grounding and undertone. It’s also a really funny film, with an incredibly unhinged Timothy Spall performance (though there were a few frustrating fatphobic shots). That ending in particular really hits as well.
Showgirls (1995)
Showgirls occupies a really odd place in culture. Critically panned at the time of its release, it became a “camp so bad it’s good” cult classic and that was mostly how I had heard it discussed (with some notable exceptions like the Linoleum Knife podcast). Then when I eventually got to it partway through this year I was entranced by it? In fact, I would say it is damn near a masterpiece that manages to be hilarious while still being an incredibly sharp satire. I don’t even say this to be contrarian or mean, but I don’t see how you watch this film and don’t understand that it is doing something skilled and serious (even if you come out of the other side not liking it). The gulf between the text and the cultural reception of this film is both baffling and fascinating at the same time.
Happy Together (1997)
I could have put any Wong Kar-Wai film here, I love the man’s style and sensuality as a director. But I’ll include this one because it allows me to excerpt some writing from earlier this year that I did for Unwinnable - follow the link for the full thing:
Sometimes things have to die.
You can put off the pain for a little. You can electrify a corpse, see a jolt and mistake that for life, but it won’t last long. What use is repeating the half-breath before death? A Groundhog Day but it’s just the eleventh hour. Stuck in the final moment of fall, watching the last leaf drop.
Sometimes things have to die.
Chang takes his tape recorder to the top of the lighthouse at South America’s tip. He presses play. Nothing – or at least no words. Listening in he hears a faint not-nothing emerge from his tinny earphones. Sobbing. It fades in. It fades out. Whimpers drift on the ocean breeze. Yearning, the world’s end consumes all.
The Matrices (minus the Animatrix cos fuck that ugly shit)
P SVCL FVB
O RUBK EUA
N QTAJ DTZ
M PSZI CSY
L ORYH BRX
K NQXG AQW
J MPWF ZPV
___ ___
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
It would be easy for me to put my love of Jenkins’ work down to me being a Wong Kar-Wai stan and my love for a lot of his (metaphorical) children like Isabel Sandoval, but there’s some magic to this film. Baldwin novels feel unfilmable with the rich beauty of their text and yet somehow Jenkins manages to bring the impossible to life and make it land beautifully.
Nine Days (2021)
Reuben, done with interviewing souls for the day, sank into his unnaturally black sofa and watched the array of TV screens in front of him. Liam was in school, Sarah was writing, Max was biking, Tayo was at the cinema, Milo was watching porn for the third time that day and - wait…
What was that on Tayo’s screen? Probably some dust again, Reuben could never understand how he never saw any cobwebs around here but the screens still managed to occasionally manifest dust out of thin air, as if to say “I’m bored! You aren’t paying enough attention to me!”. After a grumble, he rustled around and found a scrap of cloth fit for the job, took a step closer to the glass and realised - the screen was perfectly clean.
He looked more carefully, were those…. No, they couldn’t be. The observer went through his mental notes on the writer. This didn’t make sense, they hadn’t done this in years - why now in an empty screening? What Reuben could make out through the haze wasn’t especially traumatic, he had seen worse - even Tayo had seen worse. There was no-one else around to cause mass hysteria. Why this? Why now?
And then it hit him like a truck - they didn't know what their moment would be...
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.