🎬 #200 Selection. 🥳
Unreal that I’m on newsletter #200. As was tradition with the first 100, this newsletter will showcase just a few of the most read editions from the last 100. Thanks again so much for subscribing and reading. Honestly it's the reason I do this, as well as me wanting to waffle on about things that I like.
Bry
FROM EDITION #115 FILM ONE: SUBURBIA [SubUrbia]
1996 Dir Richard Linklater
2hrs 1 min
Seeing this late at night, unidentified, probably as a 13/14 year old - I thought wow that’s me and my friend’s lives. Hanging out together on the streets at night, entertaining ourselves and dreaming of what we’d one day become. This is Linklater’s 4th feature and he’s really honing his Linklater-ness. He’s captured that hang out feeling again that he nailed in Dazed and Confused. That space that teenage plans occupy, how everything seems super important when it comes to socialising.
The film takes place over the course of a day, and it seems like it’s one like any other until their old high school classmate [who’s become a successful musician] returns to their neighbourhood. As a teenager - the atmosphere of it really stayed with me. The seemingly endless days of being that age in summer. Even though I grew up in a small town in Ireland, the feel of it felt like our own little world. The themes were universal, the characters you could relate to in some sense. The costume design felt like the kind of clothes you wanted to wear at that age.
It was all like us. It was also the film where I feel in love with Giovanni Ribisi. Linklater is the master of this kind of cinema, the story that feel effortless, that feels like reality in the best kind of way. The ultimate hang out movie.
TL;DR: Richard Linklater’s film puts us right into the world of a group of teenagers trying to entertain themselves.
*Available for a small rental fee on Amazon, Apple, Google and YouTube in the US and the UK.
Fact: Based on the play of the same name, written by Eric Bogosian. You might not recognise the name but you’ll recognise the face.
FILM TWO: KIDS
1995 Dir Larry Clark
1 hr 31 mins
Again, the perfect film to come across late at night when you’re a teenager. And whatever shit you were up to at the time, suddenly paled in comparison to the stuff these kids were up to. I think it took me a few times to actually watch the entire film because I kept coming to it at different points over many months of it being broadcast. Then I’d have to talk to friends, asking them about it and between us we’d figure out what the title was or look in the newspaper to check the TV listings. Then I’d check the listings again and try to plan to watch the whole thing.
It’s a shock to the system seeing this film - while like our little teenage world - this was the ultra hardcore version. Kids in NYC, getting into fights, raping younger teenage girls - it’s brutal. Made all the more so by the ticking clock structure where Chloë Sevigny’s character Jennie has to track down the 17 year old Telly - to warn him that he has HIV. The reason she knows this is that he’s the only guy she’s slept with and she’s just tested positive for the disease. Meanwhile, Telly is on a rampage to try and sleep with as many virgin’s as possible, as he weaves his way through random friend’s apartments, parties and fights.
The screenplay was written by Harmony Korine who would go on to explore youth apathy and brutality in many of his other films as a director. The film also gave a lot of younger actor’s a huge launch pad because of how good and controversial the movie was. A very young Rosario Dawson appears alongside Chloe in their first ever film roles. The film feels like it was made by and for young people. Especially at the time - it feels real, which makes the horror of the situation all the more potent.
TL;DR: Larry Clark’s film shows us the not so innocent side of kids lost on the streets of New York.
*Available right here
Fact: Korine wrote the script when he was 19. He was dating Chloe at the time they were in pre-production, which led to her being cast.
FROM EDITION #155 DAVID LYNCH’S WEATHER REPORT 12/12/22
2022 Dir David Lynch
1 min 09 secs
I remember tuning into this series a lot during Covid. It was a real beacon of hope and comfort in those days where uncertainty was pretty much the dominant emotion. But any time I watched David tell us the weather in LA, I felt better about everything. There was a lovely consistency to the output. Hair always perfect, mostly short but also long with a beard - nice to see David succumbing to the freedom that lockdown afforded in letting things grow a bit wilder than usual. But there was always the same shirt, sunglasses that were sometimes there, sometimes not. For me though it was the catchphrases that made me the happiest. They were sometimes altered a little, and the little random titbits thrown in here and there added some spice to the anthology. Theses were mainly centred around what song he was thinking about that day.
The series continued from 2020 through to 2022. But amazingly, he had started doing weather reports all the way back in 2005 - where he would phone in to a local radio station. He then continued doing them on his own website until 2010. Then brought them back on YouTube during the pandemic.
DAVID LYNCH’S WEATHER REPORT 06/01/21
2021 Dir David Lynch
1 min 18 secs
I think this is the coolest David Lynch has ever looked and he was always a cool guy. What I love about the setting of these pieces is the little hints of the outdoors and the minimalist backgrounds. The yellowish wooden cupboard doors the dominant background element. But the series did start in a different location which looks to me to be a basement studio of some kind.
He also opted for a more set-up camera, which would eventually evolve into the more casually held iPhone set-up you can see in the videos above. I think he made a great choice because the iconic ones come across as friendly, warm and inviting.
I now invite you to take a look back at these wonderful weather reports and then revisit some of your favourite David Lynch films.
FROM EDITION #147 FILM ONE: VOX LUX
2018 Dir Brady Corbet
1 hrs 54 mins
Last week I talked about Brady Corbet’s first film, The Childhood of a Leader - he followed up the inception of a dictator with the inception of a superstar pop star. Again, I like that everything in the film feels grand in some way - from the opening and closing titles, messing with our expectations of what opening titles should be and where they should appear. Like his first film too, I enjoy how things don’t feel overly lit, the image, though beautiful, isn’t overly manicured or colour corrected within an inch of its life.
The handling of the blocking, and the performances feel like Bresson in places - a huge compliment. There is a cool distance about the film, as if we’re a bit numb like the characters we’re following, as they deal with events in recent history. As I said, there is an implied largeness to the film, like a really dark version of Forrest Gump - the central characters feel connected to or somehow have influence on world events. I really enjoyed the mood more than anything - it has an early millennial feel to it, in parts reminding me of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. My friend Narghi wholeheartedly disagreed with me though so maybe not for most people.
TL;DR: Corbet’s second film takes us into the dark voyage of a pop star as she navigates the first decades of the 21st century.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple and Amazon in the US and the UK.
Fact: Rooney Mara was originally cast to play the role Natalie Portman plays.
FILM TWO: ATLANTICS
2019 Dir Mati Diop
1 hr 46 mins
One film my talented filmmaker friend Narghi did rave about to me is Atlantics. So the reason I’m recommending is purely down to her unrelenting insistence and the fact that it is a very good film.
As I mentioned, this film leans heavily into a world that is at once ours, but also one where hexes, mysticism, and possession are possible. Superstitions can be manifested, just another fact woven into the fabric of everyday life - as tangible as sweat on a hot misty day by the beach. The mood here is established mostly on a foundation of Matt Diop’s excellent use of Fatima Al Qadiri’s score. It feels ethereal - light, a cloak of magic over the beautiful yet jagged realism of the environment the film is set in. It’s a film whose elegant simplicity suddenly becomes magical in the best possible way. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of a Rinko Kawauchi photograph - another world captured in the hazy mirage of a sunset.
TL;DR: Mati Diop’s Cannes winning look at love and the possibilities of life beyond the realities of the everyday is a mysterious thing to behold.
*Available to stream on Netflix in the US and the UK.
Fact: This is one of the first films released by Netflix to be given a Blu-ray release via The Criterion Collection.
200! Good job! LFG!
Woooop 200 congrats!