My goal every year is to watch 400 movies, and for the last few years I’ve been coming up short. I came up short again this year, but I’m a lot closer than I normally am. This year I hit 366 movies, which comes out to exactly one movie per day.
I finished the Oscar list from 2023 earlier this month, just in time for the next set of Oscars, which get announced in a couple of weeks.
Sometimes I wonder what story has been filmed the most. Certainly Dracula and variations of it are at or near the top. When the Robert Eggers version of Nosferatu was released, I knew it would be one of those rare occasions when I would make it out to the theater. That said, it’s the fifth Nosferatu-related film I’ve watched for this blog—the silent version, the 1970s remake, Shadow of the Vampire, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and now this one. It’s a bit much, and that’s not even including all of the Dracula variants.
Eggers’s film expands on the original Nosferatu by nearly a full hour of running time. The Murnau version clocks in at just over 80 minutes, and this one at about 135, with roughly seven of that taken up as credits. Most of that additional running time is used to show the influence of Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) on the area around him and going deeper into the individual aspects of the story. Where the original may have glossed over some things or run quickly through scenes, Eggers takes his time.
There are weird confluences in movies sometimes. Every now and then, two studios release movies that are disturbingly similar at almost the same time. Witness The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes being released in consecutive months. Other examples include Dante’s Peak/Volcano, Tombstone/Wyatt Earp, The Prestige/The Illusionist and Friends with Benefits/No Strings Attached. The same thing happened in 2024. Both Boy Kills World and Monkey Man were released in April, and the two movies have a lot of common elements.
Boy Kills World is about a character named Boy who is attacked and left for dead by a corrupt government. He grows up with the goal of killing the people responsible for the death of his sister. Monkey Man follows the story of Kid (Dev Patel), who works in fight clubs and menial jobs. Kid was attacked and left for dead by a corrupt police force, and trains with the goal of killing the man responsible for the death of his mother. The main difference between them, aside from the setting, is that Boy Kills World is in large part a comedy and Monkey Man plays it entirely straight.
For Christmas this year my kids got me a year of HBO Max, which is honestly the only thing I asked for. I’m hoping to be more current on film in the coming year, and having a Max subscription is a part of this. It also gives me access to a number of shows I want to watch. This is also where The Zone of Interest is streaming, and it’s the last film I needed to complete everything for the last Oscars on my list of categories. Naturally, once I got the subscription up and running, it was the first thing I queued up.
There have been hundreds of movies made about the Holocaust, of course, and there will be hundreds more. An evil this huge and terrible needs to be confronted, both to keep it in the public consciousness (especially since Holocaust denial is a constant issue) and to purge it. In a sense, these films are a sort of therapy, a way of lancing the boil and draining the poison. What The Zone of Interest does is look at this terrible piece of history in a completely new way, something that I thought might well be impossible at this point.
I tend to think Ralph Fiennes rarely gets the credit that he deserves. Fiennes makes a really good villain (see the Harry Potter franchise, In Bruges, and Schindler’s List. He’s good in straight dramas—see his run in the James Bond franchise. He can also do comedy, as in In Bruges (again) and The Grand Budapest Hotel. He’s an actor who I will watch when I come across one of his movies almost automatically, so when I saw Conclave streaming on Peacock, I knew I’d get to it sooner rather than later.
My own religious opinions are fairly well known on this blog. I’m not merely someone who is irreligious but someone who is generally anti-theistic, believing that religion does more harm than good. It’s a constant part of my movie watching, though, because so many horror movies rely on religious themes. Conclave isn’t a horror movie, but it very much is a religious one, taking place essentially entirely in the Vatican.
Some movies are important because of the story they tell, the quality of what happens on screen, a break-out role for an actor, or are formative in the career of the director. Then, there are films like The Lost World from 1925, which is important because of technology. While not the first stop-motion film, it is the first one of feature length, or at least the first American feature-length film to feature stop-motion prominently. And how do you appeal to the sensibilities of the early movie-going public? You give them stop-motion dinosaurs, and a lot of them.
The Lost World is based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, who appears at the beginning of some prints of the film. This is a film that was considered lost in full—only a number of abridged copies remained, but an almost-full restoration has been created, giving us almost the entire original film. The original running time was about 106 minutes; the version I found runs about 102 with a short intro about the restoration, so maybe a total of 5 minutes missing.
On my list of Oscar movies from 2023, there are two that have been impossible to find for me. I’m going to have to do a trial of HBO to get The Zone of Interest, I suppose. The one that was more problematic until recently was Robot Dreams, which wasn’t even streaming for pay anywhere. But, suddenly, it’s streaming on Hulu, and I finally got the chance to watch it and complete the Best Animated Feature category from last year.
Robot Dreams is fascinating for a number of reasons. The first is that there is no dialogue in the film. There’s music with lyrics and there are some vocalizations, but no one really speaks through the entirety of the film. This isn’t the first time this has happened, of course, but it is pretty unusual. Another interesting part of this film is that despite having anthropomorphized animals for most of the characters, this takes place in the real world. Our characters don’t just go to baseball games, but are Mets fans. They drink Tropicana and read Stephen King books and eat Nathan’s hot dogs with (gasp) Heinz ketchup. This, incidentally, is more evidence that the film takes place in New York; no self-respecting Chicagoan would ever put ketchup on a hot dog.
When the environmental movement really got running in the 1970s, one of the results was the subgenre of environmental horror. Sure, you got all of the nuclear-powered stuff from decades earlier. There’s a whole slew of 1950s irradiated giant bug movies and Godzilla is straight out of this genre as well. But in the 1970s, it was less about nuclear radiation and the results of The Bomb and more about humankind’s purposeful destruction of the environment. The Food of the Gods, Frogs, The Prophecy, Squirm, Grizzly, Phase IV and even some straight science fiction like Silent Running were focused on the idea that mankind had it in for Mother Nature. Few were as directly targeted as Long Weekend, where the idea of Man vs. Nature is taken at its most literal.
There’s not a massive amount of plot in Lost Weekend. In Australia, two people, Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets) head out for a long weekend (hence the title) with John’s dog Cricket. The idea is to get back to nature for a few days—swim and sunbathe on an isolated beach—and perhaps work on the problems in their relationship, which are legion. As the squabbling intensifies, we learn that evidently both Peter and Marcia have had affairs, and recently Marcia has had an abortion after an affair with another man—something insisted on by Peter since he was convinced the child wasn’t his.
It’s often interesting to see the early films of someone who turned into a star. It's fun to see someone who ened up having a great career starring in something kind of trashy. That’s definitely the case with Lady in a Cage, which features the second role and first-ever credited role for James Caan. This is a good half decade or so before Brian’s Song. Seeing him playing a young tough (he’s about 23 in this) is one of the more interesting parts of this film.
The easiest film connection to make with Lady in a Cage is that this is like a salacious and vulgar version of Wait Until Dark. The reality, though, is that Lady in a Cage came first by three years. This is much closer to a sort of “youth in revolt” picture that focuses on the victim instead of the youths. If you’re an old school MST3K fan, think something along the lines of Wild Rebels or The Hellcats, but from the point of view of their victims.
There has been a long fascination with the idea of the end of the world. I’m not specifically talking about the eschatology of Christianity in this case, but more in the literal “the world is going to end” sense, whether through nuclear devastation, climate peril, or disease. There’s a part of us that seems to yearn for the species-wide abyss. Probably my first two encounters with this idea were stories—Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 and Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night of the World. Roshwald’s book is about a man living in the deepest bunker after a nuclear war while Bradbury’s story is more about the world simply switching off. I bring these up because both stories are far more interesting than Silent Night, and that shouldn’t be the case.
This is an “end of the world” story, and unlike the bombastic 2012, the action-oriented Snowpiercer, or the darkly comic Don’t Look Up, this is a film much closer to The Happening, in a sense. Essentially, humanity has dry-humped the planet so badly that the planet is fighting back. A massive noxious poison cloud has begun engulfing the world, and what everyone is getting for Christmas this year is death.
