These Things Come In Twos: Favorites Of 2023 (Part 1)

This piece is the first of two listing the best films I’ve seen in 2023. The introduction and the extended first slot for the two films sharing the #1 spot comprise the first piece. The other eight make up the second.

Years ago, when I worked in the Wine Department for a retail chain, I was invited to tastings around the city by our distributors and suppliers. I realized at these functions that I learned more about wines tasting them side by side and comparing them with other wines than if I’d sampled them individually. In concert with each other, a basis for comparison would take shape, with the flavor and body (or capacity) of each wine being defined partially by its relation to the others. I found the wines were much easier to describe this way. I’ve adopted a similar method for this site, sometimes reviewing two movies within one piece, when the comparison and contrast between the two could prove instructive.

Certain patterns or motifs emerge when you see a lot of newly released films in a short period of time. One can form a vague picture about the choice of subjects being made into stories these days and the values of the people (or companies) telling them. Instructive connections appear if you go to the movies often enough. It comes in twos. Usually there’s one good version of a story and one bad one released right around the same time - like with May-December and Saltburn. Both stories about upheaval within fragile family dynamics caused by the presence of a mysterious young outsider, but with the Todd Haynes film offering a thought-provoking examination of numerous types of conscious or unconscious performance, while the ensemble work of Emerald Fennell’s game cast only serves to highlight her script’s glib and mean-spirited exploitation of class resentments without adding to the conversation about them.

Or a foreign language feature will get right what a recent domestic feature got wrong, effectively beating Hollywood at its own game. The release of the Japanese-made Godzilla Minus One teaching a notable lesson when viewed alongside an item like 2021’s Godzilla Vs. Kong, with the former resembling a horror movie that uses special effects to tell a sober story, and the latter a theme park ride using a story to tell special effects. The Japanese film takes the idea of Godzilla seriously as a source of horror and menace. It’s so uncool and misanthropic in the way that it doesn’t find toppled buildings and mass murder fun. It laments the existence of the monster as something more than just a setup for a wrestling match. So looking at films this way allows me to use the more available movie as in inroad to talk about the less available movie, which, like it or not, can give a viewer somewhat more to consider after it’s over than nothing at all. Pairing reviews together within the same piece offers greater opportunity for context, useful as a prescriptive rather than proscriptive method. So each feature winds up giving the other a definition that can be instructive in exploring what’s being made these days and why.

*Godzilla Minus One* – Dir: Takashi Yamazaki

Two major problems with this approach; The first problem is that in my view of the practice of film criticism as a form of journalism, what’s in danger of getting lost is simply the providing of information. A critic should inform. Not opinion or theory, but relevant facts that derive from research, and their relation to other elements. Mass media culture finds facts boring or inconvenient, and many amateur film critics I come across on their websites and YouTube channels produce material that appears to display little if any interest in research skills because they don’t seem to care or know about how to do research. Their content doesn’t start from anything approaching journalism. It starts with whether the studio that made it in their view succeeded and how the work made them feel, whether it worked for them personally as entertainment. The immediate sensation of the work is what’s given much of the attention, or the person is writing or speaking about the movie as if they worked for the studio that made it.

While personal reactions are not totally irrelevant, they’re about the least important element of a review. They should not comprise the body of a critical piece or even a review (and this is an important distinction), and they needn’t exist at right angles to the necessary information I suspect many amateur critics are too lazy to dig up. There should not be a distance between information and opinion. The information the critic conveys should be inextricably tied to what they have to say about it. For example, I may have some issues with the choices a filmmaker like Michael Moore makes in editing his populist polemics, not to mention more than a few of his drastic oversimplifications of complicated political and social issues. But I overlook this because even at its laziest, Moore’s work serves the function of making up for the embarrassing gaps in our news feed. Even Moore’s weakest work shows up the corporate-run news media’s ongoing failure to provide us with basic information about what’s happening in our country, and this vital service in his output is what gets my attention. It’s never objective (though no news organization is, could be or should be) but I respond to his work because he builds (or attempts to build) his polemic arguments from observable facts. Basically, the work, the work, the work. What the work is doing, not doing or failing to do is what matters most.

The other major problem is that so much cinema is being produced around the world and so precious little of it is available to the general public that getting a picture of the state of film from a given year – even with this method - is impossible. No one is in a position to know. I can’t tell you the number of films I would have put on a best list from a previous year had I seen them that year, as opposed to years later, not to mention how many I’ll never see. I won’t go back and update those posted Flickering Knight pieces because as I see it, they exist now as snapshots for that moment. Still, this reflects the way the film industry thinks about how people react to what they see. In the weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, a slew of major movies are released before critics and reviews can even see them (let alone think deeply about them). This feels deliberate to me; we must go off a reviewer’s first impressions rather than a more considered and complex appraisal, which serves a studio’s financial interest, because an effective advertising campaign requires lockstep consensus. They’re setting the agenda, and their bias against what is too foreign, ambiguous, challenging, unmarketable and memorable is what their multi-million-dollar ad campaigns are so good at covering up.

So assessing the quality of a given year’s releases, when even the most prolific and studious critics are struggling to catch up, especially in an age when anybody can shoot a film with their phone – is a bit of a fool’s errand, not to mention an arrogant thing to claim to comprehensively address. It plays into the motivations and schemes of the big studios, who tailor their products so that they’re forgettable and disposable, like a cheap retailer’s clothing purposely made to fall apart. The purpose of these products is to disappear quickly after arrival and make room for new products. Much if not all of the money and the talent and the creativity went into the ad campaign. If you streamed it or bought the ticket, the experience you paid for and your appraisal of your purchase is beside the point. They got your money. They won. All marketing and no product is the American Way.

Case in point: Trailers for films like The Color Purple, Wonka and Mean Girls went out of their way to avoid any indication that these films were musicals. Musical sequences were omitted. Americans typically like musicals but those who don’t hate them, and the thinking in the industry seemed to be to use the name recognition of existing IP to get those people into the theater, where their audible groans once someone opened their mouth to sing meant nothing because they’d already forked over the ticket money. A trailer for The Color Purple playing in theaters before the Taylor Swift Eras concert film, did indicate the film was a musical, but only in an environment deemed fit for that particular audience. The studios are craven. They don’t stand by their own product. A new release is whatever distributors and promotors need it to be in a particular situation. They’ll market a feature as being anything to anyone and a movie marketed as everything winds up too impersonal to be anything at all.

*The Color Purple* – Dir: Blitz Bazawule

Then a scant few elite items can be rounded up for a marketing and PR campaign in the form of an awards show called The Oscars, the annual dressage for a system based on impostures and lies, whose major purpose, like any awards show, is to resell us goods that have already been sold to us or presell goods that have yet to arrive. A typical 21st century Oscar broadcast sees the industry engage in a great deal of gymnastics to signal its enlightened, progressive stance, typically characterized by external displays of diversity (to the exclusion of intellectual, ideological and artistic diversity). A good and vital impulse to be sure, but the strain of these displays comes off as glaring, obnoxious and distracting, as if they were worthless to an industry that can’t pat itself on the back about them. There is simply no reason to take the industry and its award shows seriously, which is one reason I’m unmoved by the frustration of viewers who thought Margot Robbie, should have been nominated for Best Actress for Barbie. A film can be released to almost unanimous praise, gross a billion dollars at the box office, set a record for returns by a female filmmaker, ensuring that she’ll continue to work for a long time, having produced a cultural item that resonated deeply with audiences.

And yet, in the hyperbole-soaked atmosphere of bipolar American pop culture, for Barbie not to have been nominated for every possible silly award dreamed up amounts to some sort of affront, both to the movie and its audience (many of whom might show no interest in award shows otherwise), to the complete ignorance of its many other accomplishments. I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. What a film, or any work of art for that matter did to you when you encountered it is all that matters. The work itself and nothing else. Least of all, box office returns or showbiz politics.

Our entire mercantile attitude towards assessing movies is out of balance. In the 1950’s, it would have been absurd to list the biggest box office winners for a given week or year in a newspaper or on a nightly news broadcast. It makes about as much sense as listing the top-selling brands of dog food. It’s a practice that originated only recently with the studios and is reflective of how they think about what they make. When we speak about a movie like Barbie in terms of box office returns or nominations or snubs for Oscars, or when we praise it for being the top grossing film directed by a woman, rather than its artistic accomplishments (which I believe are well worth discussing), we are talking like the shallowest elements of the trade press. We are playing the industry’s game, measuring our relationship to art and entertainment like accountants and promotors, vibrating to the tune of a PR machine’s hype.

Many things are to blame, with the sorry state of American education and appreciation for the arts near the top for me. But rather than get caught up in blame, I think it’s best for legit film bloggers and critics to soldier on in fostering curiosity and interest in film to the best of their ability.

So in light of acknowledging the movie industry’s control of the culture, acknowledging their need for proselytizing the public about how to relate success and how much criticism becomes just another part of publicity, I offer this this comparative listing method – with titles sharing a slot. There are five groups of two related films this year. It’s a way of adding some breadth to a Best-of-the-Year list, a thing I’m unable to resist, despite my objections. It’s my suspicion that identifying the correlative elements in pairings or groups of films may reveal more about their accomplishments to us. As always, you can take a list or leave it. My best advice is to go about exploring film history in your own way, not simply seeing, say, The Godfather, because lots of people say they like it. That said, I suppose I’d appreciate it if this list, or any article you’ll find on The Flickering Knight, might be regarded not as a destination but an avenue, a tributary that may lead you to even greater discoveries.

#1 & 2: Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World - Radu Jude, Romania / R.M.N. - Christian Mungiu, Romania

Two Romanian films that perfectly articulate the anguish, confusion and banal cruelty of the era we’re living in. Neither one could be called uplifting but then again, neither film solicits us to pat it on the back for justifying a bleak shared worldview. Both take ways of living that the disrepair, violence and hatefulness of 21st century life have further complicated, and make them tangible and approachable subjects for discussion, without oversimplifying them. They nobly give shape to the enormity of the social problem that cuts across national borders and has many names.

The film you need to see when you’re done reading this piece is Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World. The name you need to learn is Radu Jude. Part collage, part encyclopedia, his latest is as much a diagnostic of 2023 as his last feature, Bad Luck Banging, Or Loony Porn (his most widely seen in this country to date), was of 2021. Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is overworked and underpaid as a production assistant driving around Bucharest (in between Uber jobs) casting furloughed factory workers for a workplace safety video. We have every reason to believe the people she interviews and films were injured due to the negligence of the company and it’s clear from their hilarious boardroom Zoom conferences that the bigwigs are using to the footage to launder their image and squelch a potential labor dispute. The astounding final sequence – delivered in an unbroken 40-minute-long static shot – comprises the raw footage of the company’s eventual film. Before our eyes is displayed the clearest expression of the anti-humanity of late-stage Capitalism as we witness the layers of the subjects humanity and dignity methodically peeled away by the film crew and the dictates of its corporate masters, a task digital technology can make as easy and hands-free as possible.

Angela is constantly on the move, grabbing cheap food and quick sex wherever possible, changing jobs and roles as quickly and breathlessly as Denis Levant’s clandestine utility man in Holy Motors. Her creative outlet involves posting vulgar, obnoxious and sexist Tik-Tok videos using a hideous Andrew Tate filter, a blinkered form of satire that speaks suggest the kinds of release that work-strained people may need to work out their technological anxieties. As with Bad Luck Banging, we get still another of Jude’s incendiary impressions of Romania as a degraded landscape in which the most ignorant and selfish citizens seem to be the most empowered – a living hell for anyone with a brain and a conscience, with social media and the internet making everyone even meaner, dumber and uglier than they already are. And Angela herself is a fountain of random useless facts that sound memorized from internet searches – the product of a life lived online. Like so many of us, she has Google-For-Brains. Every one of her encounters brims with prickly and often ugly social and political undercurrents that pop up at us again and again, changing the effect of the film as a whole. It’s like a grand essay on social decay.

On top of that, Jude cuts away to a 1981 film called Angela Moves On, shot in Bucharest under the Ceaușescu regime. That film’s Angela is an overworked cab driver (a job few women had back then), also constantly shown in her car striving upwards to eek out a living, fighting back against her own insurmountable wall of patriarchal abuse. The actress who played Angela in that film, Dorina Lazar, appears in Do Not Expect (along with confrontational director Uwe Boll in an adept cameo) and Jude’s film appears to be dialoguing with the 1981 film. Very little might have changed since those days of the murderous dictator in this broken country that may see an artist like Jude as a thorn in its side. And if the observations in this corrosive work are as truthful as they come off, he should be proud.

If Jude is the thorn in the side of his country, director Christian Mungiu would be its conscience. His beautifully mounted R.M.N. does for rural Romania what Do not Expect does for a city like Bucharest. It should be a teaching tool. This is the best depiction out there right now of how racist xenophobia, toxic masculinity, economic hardship and class resentment coalesce and fester in small communities. We see how the grievances of the ignorant and despairing attach to each other, working in concert to amplify hatred. The contempt held by the inhabitants of the village towards a few Sri Lankan immigrants hired at a local bakery becomes the focal point of the collective anxieties and woes of the community, a catchall for every lingering social fear, rolled into one singular enemy and visited on human targets. Mungiu carefully unfolds his thesis – the way communities unite in hate, the way bigotry makes people feel “authentic”, the insane lies they make up to justify themselves, the apathy and detachment of city officials and clergymen in the matter. The inevitability of the actions that hate mobs take.

The bakery bosses – well-meaning women who hired the immigrants - are outnumbered and know they won’t come out on top. They’re shouted down by their swinish neighbors at a town meeting in protracted single-shot scene – highly reminiscent of the finale of Do Not Expect – that highlights the civic process of the community as farce with no semblance of civility or order. In the foreground of this unmoving shot, the bakery bosses sit off to the side, scarcely able to get out more than a single sentence in which to plead their case. The town’s intolerant complaints are unmitigated, baseless and stale. One perceived affront to the oppressive status quo people fight to prop up is used to invent or bolster others. It could be any town hall meeting in any county at the moment, is how the viewer is made to feel, and R.M.N. vibrates with a subdued anger underneath the surface.

In a way, the bakery bosses and the Sri Lankans who live with them are like the heroines of Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days – carrying out their actions on without a larger support network under constant threat of violent reprisal. The wrong choice could be the last one they make. There’s no mawkishness in the execution, no pleading for our sympathy. No audience members on the fence the filmmakers think they need to win over. R.M.N. is all drama, no melodrama. Its view of racist mob mentality is sharp and clear-eyed and highlights a difference in the way these kinds of subjects are handled overseas. American films are plangent and too often are content to simply bemoan the existence racism. European films on the subject show us where racism comes from and how it works and I find this far more useful and moving.

Together, we get a fraught and incisive picture of the current iteration of many of the long-standing challenges – both old and new - inherent in being part of a society at the moment, namely the way intolerance and hatefulness are still very much out in the open and present in any form a community takes. Jude’s intricate film is bombastic, outrageous and feral, where Mungiu’s is a classically related slow-burn (though equally unmelodramatic). Paradoxically, neither director can be described as anti-humanist. Their basic concern is the banality of everyday hatred and corruption and this unity of vision, achieved in both cases with relentless insight, is the residue of a palpable sense of poetry.

These Things Come In Twos: Favorites Of 2023 (Part 1)

These Things Come In Twos: Favorites Of 2023 (Part 2)

Conservative’s Dystopia: Demolition Man