I started my blog about the first four months of movies this year with, “Get ready for the craziest summer movie season any of us have ever seen.”
Was that crazy enough for you?
I hope everyone has continued to stay safe and healthy during this time. At the time that I started this blog, the big American theatre chains, AMC and Regal, were slated to open back up, finally, on August 21. By the time I finished this blog, I have gone back to work, finished covering a film festival, and the long-delayed “The New Mutants” was #1 at the box-office, finally bringing to a close Fox’s X-Men franchise. (As of this writing, however, I have not seen it.) The studios finally started to kind of get wise about what was happening in the rest of the world vs. what is going on in America when it comes to COVID-19 (namely, how we’ve half-assed our response to it to spectacular degree), and are pivoting towards a new normal that will reverberate for years to come. Big blockbusters are being rolled out internationally before they hit the US (congrats on handling COVID with intelligence, rest of the world; I hope you’re enjoying “Tenet”), the VOD push took a big step with a deal between AMC and Universal to shorten the window to 17 days, and Disney is making “Mulan” available as a premium purchase for Disney+ subscribers on September 4 before everyone else has access to it in what might become standard operating procedure for their model moving forward. (No, I don’t think the same thing will happen with “Black Widow”. Yes, I do think Pixar’s “Soul” could get the same treatment.) All the while, I mostly remained furloughed, but Sonic Cinema has kept me busy. And this summer was pretty great when it came to movies.
Now, here are my thoughts on “Artemis Fowl” from June to refute that claim:
Before I continue, let me say that I do think it is irresponsible for movie theatres in America to be open right now, outside of drive-ins. I also think that our collective response to the pandemic, and how we haven’t done much of anything to assist them, has led to their decision of needing to re-open now or risk becoming extinct forever. I will say that, personally, my theatre is doing everything it can to keep everyone safe, and if I see any theatrical films outside of drive-ins, it will be there. I am grateful for people not mobbing back into the theatre this weekend so that we can get re-acclimated, and would like to see a slow build-up, under the circumstances. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program of dumping on “Artemis Fowl”…
Look, “Artemis Fowl” was an outlier this year, and Disney knew it, which is why they didn’t try out their Premium idea when they dumped that onto Disney+ at the beginning of June. They knew what they had with that, and acted accordingly for the write-off. There wasn’t much I disliked this summer; I think the only other one that was close was the silly David Spade comedy, “The Wrong Missy”, but that wasn’t quite a dog- I’ve just never really been that high on the Happy Madison formula, especially if Sandler’s not involved. Will Ferrell has started to grow on me, however, and his comedy, “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” (which also has a terrific performance by Rachel McAdams as his sister, and musical collaborator), won me over with its great take on the underdog genre, and the best songs we’ve heard this year outside of “Hamilton”. Few comedies have surprised me more over the past couple of years, except maybe Max Barbakow’s hilarious time-loop rom-com “Palm Springs”, which provided a fantastic vehicle for Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti.
Let’s go ahead and get it out of the way- theatres being open completely would have allowed for me watching the likes of “The King of Staten Island”, “Irresistible”, “You Should Have Left” and “The High Note”; the truth is, it’s going to be a hard sell for me to do a $20 “rental” on a movie if I’m not going to have much access to it after two days. I will watch all of them in the future, as well as HBO Max’s “An American Pickle” (which released as I was neck-deep into my Fantasia Fest coverage; that one will have to wait until September for me). We’ll see if I ever watch “Scoob!”.
Let’s move on to what I did watch, which was a lot of Neon and IFC films, and a few pretty great filmmaker screener films. I won’t include my Fantasia Fest watching in the summer- that’s its own beast- but the truth is, those three categories kept me well fed, movie-wise. Before I get to the films you might have heard of, let’s get to the ones you haven’t, and mad props to filmmakers Jeremiah Kipp and Nathan Suher, and their collaborators, for finding imaginative ways to tell stories, and keep their narrative chops fresh, during quarantine, and adhering to social distancing. For Kipp, we got some pretty compelling short films, starting out with poetic recitations (“The Bells” and two Neruda poems) before graduating to narratives like “Jumper” and “The Drop”. As for Suher, not only did I get a look at a film he’s been working on for a couple of years in “The Assassination of Western Civilization”, but he made two epic quarantine films in “Far From Perfect: Life Inside a Global Pandemic” and “Comic Book Junkies” with his long-time writing partner, Lenny Schwartz. The way each filmmaker found their way around the limitations of the time in which they made their films make each among the most creatively-inspiring filmmakers I’ve seen this year. And longtime filmmaker friend and podcast guest Chris Esper also made the best of quarantine with a lovely ode to recorded memories in the short film, “Yesteryear”.
One of the things that has been snapped into focus in my Fantasia Fest viewing is the dearth of non-horror genre films audiences have gotten this year with everything pushed back. Movies like Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Old Guard” and Rod Lurie’s “The Outpost” can only go so far at sating the void left by Marvel movies and Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”, which will kick off things in the Fall. As I mentioned, I missed “The New Mutants, and I might watch “Unhinged” at some point. Otherwise, boy were these genres missed. I’ll discuss that more when I wrap up Fantasia Fest.
I’ve posted elsewhere how horror has been the genre with the most significant footprint this year. Part of that, admittedly, was covering the Women in Horror Film Festival just prior to the theatre shutdown, but honestly, horror has been the most consistently-released genre of the year, thus far; on May 1, the movie that- by default- would check in as the #1 movie at the box-office, through drive-in showings, was the Pierce Brothers’s clever riff on “Rear Window,” “The Wretched”. Give props to IFC for their handling of the pandemic times by their blend of VOD and theatrical (namely, drive-in) release, as it allowed them to be the studio of the moment, and their horror lineup- which also included the terrific “Relic” and “Sputnik”– did not disappoint genre fans. Sticking with the horror genre a bit, Shudder had a great little one debut in “The Beach House” (I have not watched “Host”), and Neon gave us one of the very best films of the year in a high-concept, low-tech doomsday scenario in Amy Seimetz’s “She Dies Tomorrow” that feels deeply personal, and yet, universal to the anxieties of the time.
Documentaries also saw some extra interest this summer. Few people who have seen it did not find themselves enthralled by “The Painter and the Thief”, and I’d like to throw a shout-out to the excellent “Coup 53” from August, about the coup in Iran in 1953. If you’ve started to watch the Topic streaming service, you might have seen the fascinating “Lynch: A History”, about the mercurial NFL running back, Marshawn Lynch, and where he fits into the Black history of the moment; another documentary about Black history was “John Lewis: Good Trouble”, about the late Civil Rights icon. “Spaceship Earth” looks at one of the most notorious science experiments of the modern age, and felt surprisingly of the moment during the COVID lockdown. In terms of narrative drama, there were some compelling offerings in Josephine Decker’s “Shirley”, about the relationship between horror author Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and a young woman (Odessa Young), and how their men (Michael Stuhlbarg and Logan Lerman) hold them back in the 1960s; “Babyteeth”, a young love drama with a fantastic performance by Eliza Scanlen; “How to Build a Girl”, a coming-of-age movie that continues Beanie Feldstein’s rise to fame; Jessica Swale’s “Summerland”, an affecting WWII drama about a woman (Gemma Arterton) who finds herself caring for an evacuee from London; and Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour”, about the complicated lives of a father (David Thewlis) and a daughter (Laysla De Oliveira).
When I think about this summer, however, four movies are going to stand out as the kind of event cinema we were deprived of this COVID summer. Now, on the surface you’ll probably question my inclusion of Michael Winterbottom’s “The Trip to Greece” with these others, but did we get any other sequels this summer? (Hold that thought.) Besides, this hilarious capper in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s travelogue of Europe is everything we hope for in a sequel and a little more. The same can be said of “Bill & Ted Face the Music”, which may very well be one of the best of a recent string of pretty terrific legacy sequels, to say nothing of a genuinely sincere catharsis for a dark time in history for a lot of people. And it might have been a Netflix film, but Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”, with an Oscar-worthy cast (including Delroy Lindo and the late Chadwick Boseman) and the filmmaker’s bold cinematic instincts on full display, is a prestige drama in the vein of “Saving Private Ryan” and “Apollo 13.”
That brings me, finally, to “Hamilton”. I get the “is it a movie or not?” debate, and I understand where the people in the “not” camp are coming from, but was there a bigger pop culture event this summer than Disney dropping this 2016 performance of the Broadway phenomenon on Disney+ on 4th of July weekend? I would argue a July 4th release hasn’t landed as more of its moment since “Independence Day” in 1996. It was a must-see if there ever was one this summer, even if you hadn’t had the original cast recording on repeat since 2015, and in the middle of a divisive Presidential election, and a summer where the sins of this country’s treatment of minorities were once again being protested in the streets, no piece of entertainment resonated more.
This Fall, I would expect some normalcy in the cinematic landscape, but before we dive into that, I’ve got a remarkable few weeks of Fantasia Fest to wrap up before I get ready for the Atlanta Film Festival in September. I cannot wait.
Viva La Resistance!
Brian Skutle
www.sonic-cinema.com
