I didn’t spend that much time with fresh cinema in 2024. I went to the theater a decent number of times and most of the movies I saw there were also decent. Except Gladiator II, which was awful. Most of the movies I loved were not from this year, and that’s okay. I am a single point in the rolling river of moving picture history; I let all that has come before wash over me. Soon I will be ground into a nub.
I propose four categories for the cinema viewing I conducted: Films Most to Laugh With, Films Most to be Disturbed By, Films Most to be Moved By, and Films Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart. I did not see any of these films before this year (except probably Muppet Christmas Carol, which I’m sure I did see as a baby). They are fresh to me, if not to the world.
Most to Laugh With
Though I am a goofy bastard, I’m not much of a comedy connoisseur. I watched two outstandingly funny films this year: Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer Fait Tousser) and Hundreds of Beavers. A French film by noted wacko cinema crafteur Quentin Dupieux, Smoking Causes Coughing is about Tobacco Force, a team of French superheroes themed around the poisonous chemicals in cigarettes. They work for a disgusting rat man puppet named Chef Didier. He drools green slime constantly, and decides to send the heroes on a team-building retreat in a futuristic country cabin. There they tell each other weird, disturbing stories until their nemesis, Lézardin, threatens the Earth. I think there’s a talking fish at one point. A dude gets chewed up in a woodchipper but he’s still alive and conscious in a bucket of blood (until…). It’s wacked out.
Hundreds of Beavers is also wacked out, though more narratologically straightforward. It’s about a disgraced applejack brewer who becomes a fur trapper to win the hand of a beautiful girl dwelling deep within the forests of the Upper Great Lakes. Also, all the animals are played by people in mascot suits. The filmmakers use their absolutely shoestring budget to deliver maximum hilarity in the form of completely surreal open-world-game-esque stunts. It’s a true Midwest original; you can detect the fingerprints of Winter Madness upon every frame. If you like your entertainment to be extremely goofy and a bit provocative in its weirdness, you can’t go wrong with either of these.
Most to Be Disturbed By
It was a good year for discomfort and uncertainty. The first 2024 film I’ll mention here brought both, plus a certain amount of uneasy humor. That film is A Different Man, about a man who cures his extreme facial difference, only to discover that maybe it wasn’t the only problem with his life. The movie has a surreal, retro moodiness that places you in the unsettled, self-loathing mindset of Edward (played with indelible awkwardness by Sebastian Stan; thankfully he has been liberated from the textureless prison of Earth-616). Renate Reinsve as Edward’s beautifully thoughtless neighbor and Adam Pearson as Oswald, a man with Edward’s same disability but none of his dismalism, deliver stellar performances as well. This is also probably the least disturbing of the most disturbing films of 2024. It’s still fairly unsettling, but in a relatable way (if you hate yourself).
More unsettling is Fright Night, the 1980s vampire movie starring Prince Humperdinck from The Princess Bride. It is the most sexual vampire movie I’ve seen since Coppola’s Dracula, and to be honest Coppola’s Dracula is more horny than sexual. Those are two different things. Horniness can exist rupturously and uproariously without mutual consummation. But the sexual is completed, engaged, multi-actor. You can be horny all alone, with no one to see you. But you can’t be sexual without being seen. The Dracula in Fright Night gets it, and you can see why. I saw the new Nosferatu movie and in it you see Nosferatu’s Nosferenis, and it was still less sexual than Fright Night. I don’t know why everybody is not always talking about Fright Night. It is moist with repressed desires and thirsty in the blood and non-blood sense. You will be uncomfortable. It is essential viewing if you are interested in Draculas in any sense.
Also disturbing in the sexual sense is Communion, a 1989 film starring Christopher Walken. He gets abducted by aliens. He has a mental breakdown. He threatens his family with firearms. He returns to the aliens. They sodomize him (what?). Afterwards, he reconciles with his family and realizes he is now closer to God (what?). The aliens are played by funny little dancing puppets. Either you want to see that or you don’t. It was still not the most disturbing film I watched this year. That was Judgment at Nuremberg.
You might be thinking, “Why not The Zone of Interest, a new movie also about the Nazis and their dumbshit sicko ideology?” Everybody’s already said what they need to about The Zone of Interest. Ask a real critic and they can give you some thoughts on The Zone of Interest. And while the stylistic choices made in that movie are powerful and disturbing, it provides a fairly clear takeaway: don’t be the commandant of Auschwitz. Judgment at Nuremberg goes somewhere more existentially disconcerting and equally relevant – what is the madness which has possessed us to surrender our destiny to fascism? What will we do with the regular people who all just go along with it? No answers, only darkness. That’s the theme for 2024: no answers, only darkness.
And yet. There were films to be moved by, and a man who can weep for their fellows might still be redeemed.
Most to Be Moved By
There are many reasons to be moved by the cinema, at least if you are addicted to the cinema like myself. I was moved by the sheer artistry of Andrew Scott’s performance in the National Theater production of Vanya. That’s only barely a film, but it is on Letterboxd and it is a one-man show and it is the greatest acting I’ve seen in my entire life. And I regularly attend live theater by choice. I was moved by the verisimilitude and richness of super-indie film Hannah Ha Ha, which so lovingly portrayed a kind of person who rarely appears in mainstream cinema living a kind of life which receives an extraordinary lack of respect in so much of mainstream discourse. I was moved by the terrible endurance of Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) in Dark Waters, a film which testifies to the cost of faith as well as its power. I was moved by the kindness and the justice of the eponymous princess in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and by the enduring beauty of her world despite its harshness. And I was moved most profoundly, most achingly, and most painfully by The Muppet Christmas Carol. It was too much kindness, too much generosity, too much hope. I was not well again for days. In the darkest times, love is painful, too painful! But it was love also which moved me in and through each of these films, and it remains the good in in the world as well.
Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart
To love the cinema is part of my life’s work, and that includes its most indelicate and malformed iterations. Thus, Films Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart. An easy, obvious answer at the top is Megalopolis. This movie is terrible and I did see it twice in the theaters. I’ve delivered an extended discourse on this film in another venue; I shan’t repeat myself except to say that it is a greater artistic triumph by far to swing and miss so utterly, than to never do much more than bunt (here’s looking at you, Mid-ley Scott). Let’s get more obscure.
The Man From Earth is an ultra-ultra-indie film from 2007 based a script by an erstwhile Star Trek writer. It’s about a guy named John Oldman who reveals to his friends he’s 14,000 years old (John. Old. Man.). They get really upset. I’m pretty sure Tony Todd had to drive his own car for this movie, because I doubt they could afford a single prop. You have to use your stupidest brain and your smartest brain at the same time to follow the exceptional nonsense which comprises this film’s plot. It doesn’t get any better than this, if you can agree that better here means “dumber than The Twilight Zone“.
Last and so most, a film to which I will only link. I don’t want to speak the name of this movie because the director seems like the kind of person to have a Google alert on his name and then go and harass people who review the film poorly. But I have to talk about it because it and the prior installment in the franchise are some of the most significant crashouts of modern cinema. Everything doesn’t work, and it must be seen to believed. And by the end of the film, despite his dopey-ness, his cringe-inducing ideology, and his disastrous directorial decisions, you will love the director’s crooked heart. There’s no art without artlessness, and I am glad for that.
That’s the cinema, for your crooked heart. Next time, games.
Postscript
Consolation of another kind – we do not yet know what our actions today will change tomorrow. That’s what science fiction is for.