SECRET MOVIE CLUB'S THOUGHTS ON THE BIG MOVIES OF 2023 (PART 1 OF 2) by Craig Hammill

Dear Secret Movie Clubbers: After our hiatus, we are back to movie writing and movie blogging. In fact, we want to work in 2024 to really be part of co-writing the next chapter in cinema culture with worthwhile movie writing.

If you have an interest in writing for Secret Movie Club, reach out to us at: community@secretmovieclub.com and we’ll go from there.

If you haven’t already, you can also follow us at SECRET MOVIE CLUB ON LETTERBOXED

So. . .for better or for worse. . .here is part 1 of a very long-form blog extravaganza collecting a number of the reviews we posted recently on LETTERBOXED about the key pop culture movies of 2023. We want to hear your thoughts! Feel free to comment.

And more to come.

POOR THINGS (2023)

One of the more fascinating aspects of POOR THINGS is how the production design (by Shona Heath and James Price) is a strangely apt visual metaphor for filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos's directorial voice.

Lanthimos wanted two production designers with noticeably different aesthetics to work together to create a visual style with tension. He wanted the audience to feel two sensibilities cohering and clashing at the same time.

Lanthimos's own voice ever since his 2009 breakout DOGTOOTH has always felt to this writer intentionally discordant and coherent in the same way.

In DOGTOOTH, parents have kept their own children imprisoned in their home since birth through a mixture of lies, sticks, and carrots. The Children, now young adults, are clearly being abused. And yet the Parents earnestly think they're doing what's best.

The movie is also profoundly uncomfortable to watch because of scenes of incest while at the same time it has a goofy humor that courses throughout.

Weirdly, POOR THINGS feels like a variation of DOGTOOTH. Bella Baxter (in a fearless performance by Emma Stone) has been brought back to life by a brilliant if deranged doctor (Willem Dafoe, always on point). At first, he wants to keep her locked up in his home but ultimately he decides she should experience the world. Since Bella's original brain has been replaced with the brain of the child inside her at the time of her death (yes, ponder that one and all its implications for a moment), she starts from scratch but with the body of an adult woman.

The themes of parental abuse, children needing to break free, and an outside world that is terrifying and fascinating at the same time are at the heart of both movies.

What's so interesting about Lanthimos's directing style is that it feels intentional in its goal of both entertaining and unsettling you. In telling a gripping story and in introducing near Brechtian distanciation techniques to throw you off kilter.

Here Lanthimos alternates camera lenses so that he punctuates numerous scenes with sudden shots captured on what appears to be the widest possible angle lens one can shoot on (a 4 or 5mm lens) which gives shots an extreme fisheye quality. But then he cuts right back to longer lenses.

Is he trying to replicate a wide eyed childlike sense of first experiencing things? A visual idea to match Bella's own childlike experience of the world?

At this point, you've probably also heard of the sexual explicitness of the movie which almost shockingly (given how puritanical American cinema has been of late) borders on NC-17. In fact, it is something of a jaw dropper that the movie got an R given there are numerous near graphic shots of sexual coupling. But because Lanthimos shoots and cuts everything in a dry, to the point, often borderline surrealist style, maybe the MPAA didn't know what to quite make of it.

The movie itself plays like a kind of CANDIDE where an essentially good hearted and wide eyed innocent goes out into the world and must reconcile their own good soul/nature with the wickedness, hypocrisy, depravity, callousness, and brutality of reality and the human experience.

Lanthimos has always excelled at an inexplicable kind of dry humour. His performers, especially Stone and Mark Ruffalo, who here plays a hedonistic, narcissistic lawyer and cad, throw themselves into the wild tonal shifts with gusto.

Like Lanthimos's THE LOBSTER (which may still be this writer's favorite of Lanthimos's movies), there is a point to all this surrealistic madness. POOR THINGS feels determined to affirm the worth of existence and those who commit to trying to look existence as square in the eye as possible. At the same time, the movie points out how messed up people and society are and always will be.

The dysfunction at the heart of society is another running Lanthimos theme. And here numerous characters point out how awful "polite society" is and how it should be avoided.

Impressively, at least for this writer, is how the movie saves some of its most fascinating plot twists and scenes for the very end. When a sadistic military man (Christopher Abbot) shows up late in the game to claim Bella as his own, we actually do get a satisfying onion peel back to why Bella was the way she was before she decided to take her own life.

Lanthimos's cinema always feels like it wants to keep you off balance exactly because it wants you to grapple with what's going on, what's being explored, what's being said.

The filmmaker feels determined to make some kind of discordant/melodic cinema DIFFERENT than the pure melodic "lose yourself" escapist style of much American fare.

It is an acquired taste and I'm not sure it fully works. Like the clashing production design styles, there's something antithetical to the dreamlike nature of cinema when a moviemaker is resolute in establishing a dream, dashing it on the floor into dozens of pieces, then re-constituting it in the next breath.

But what POOR THINGS is, just like DOGTOOTH, just like THE LOBSTER, is pretty damn singular in its style, tone, and voice. And in this regard, Lanthimos is way ahead of the game of most of his contemporaries.

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023)

How is it that Japanese studio Toho's 33rd (!!) Godzilla movie GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023, written/directed/co-VFX'd (!) by Takashi Yamazaki, Japan) made for $10 million dollars is arguably the best blockbuster style entertainment movie of 2023?

The question itself is flawed when you start to break it down. Why should big budget equal superior quality? It doesn't. Why should we assume a movie late in a series/franchise should be bad? Maybe that's because in the United States, barring a few exceptions, they usually do feel tired and reheated.

But the wonder of GODZILLA MINUS ONE is that it somehow draws inspiration from the very first GODZILLA (1954, dir Ishiro Honda, Japan) and yet pushes the series forward into new territory.

First the story:

We're thrust into the narrative at World War II's tail end when failed kamikaze pilot Koichi disobeys orders, lands on a refueling/mechanics' island for planes in the Pacific, and witnesses a Godzilla attack on Japanese soldiers where his fear yet again overwhelms his ability to act.

He then tries to pick up the pieces in a post-war Tokyo/Japan totally destroyed by war. But an innate kindness and goodness at the center of his soul finds him taking in a resourceful young woman, Noriko, who herself has saved an orphan baby, Akiko, from death. They form a kind of "found" family that represents much of Japan's attempts at rebuilding after the twin devastations of losing the war and suffering the only two nuclear bomb attacks (still) in recorded history.

As we watch Koichi, Noriko, and Akiko work to endure and rebuild, we also watch the increasing Soviet-US tensions lead to the H-Bomb Bikini Atoll tests and the re-awakening of Godzilla in the ocean deeps.

Koichi, who has now joined a mine-sweeping team, finds his greatest fear returning to wreck devastation on Japan...

Let's get to one of the biggest strengths of GODZILLA MINUS ONE: the moviemakers have finally found a way to make the human story AS compelling as the scenes of Godzilla's attacks. In fact, the human story dominates the film.

At the same time, Godzilla's attacks ALSO somehow manage to be horrifying in a new way. No small feat.

The midpoint "Godzilla wrecks havoc on Tokyo" sequence has a horrific beat where Godzilla demonstrates his heat ray in a way too uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atom bomb attacks.

And Godzilla's tweaked design, which, for kaiju fans, is as much a source of analysis as anything else, is uncomfortable in its associations of ravaged flesh deformed horribly by radiation.

The entire story leads to a third act in which our main characters, abandoned by a post WWII Japanese government that refuses to tell the truth to its people, form a kind of "Citizens Navy". They hatch a makeshift scrappy plan to destroy Godzilla and save Japan.

And Koichi, in the depths of self-hate, decides to finally do the kamikaze run he avoided during the war.

Like many great summer blockbusters, the story beats here are as solid as steel if obvious and telegraphed. The ending you predict is the ending you get.

But this writer teared up at the ending.

What GODZILLA MINUS ONE reminds this writer is that there is no shame in solid craftsmanship. Like many late James Cameron movies, GODZILLA MINUS ONE might never surprise, shock, or swerve but it does WORK like a Honda car or a Swiss watch or a pick your favorite reliable machine.

And that's damn hard to do.

But even more than that, it reminds us of the bar movies can reach. . .and surpass.

As moviemakers and movielovers, we sometimes discount movies that REALLY WORK ON ALL CYLINDERS because they are a bit obvious or predictable. When maybe we should be reminding ourselves how FEW movies in the last decade or so have worked as blindingly well as GODZILLA MINUS ONE.

When a movie brings the emotion, the story, the human interest, the special effects, the "wow" factor all in one package, it is a gift from the universe reminding us that movies like this CAN STILL BE MADE.

GODZILLA MINUS ONE is as much a challenge to us as it is to its main character Koichi. It dares us to overcome our frustration, confusion, discouragement and ACT and MAKE.

Cinema's potential is always present and existent. GODZILLA MINUS ONE proves it.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)

Jonathan Glazer's THE ZONE OF INTEREST is at once both a bracing and daring movie and, paradoxically, one that plays it safe.

Neither inclination cancels out the other and the ultimate effect of the movie IS powerful. This is a VERY GOOD movie. Just maybe not a great one.

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival's 2023 Grand Prix award (a kind of powerful silver medal to Cannes' Palm D'Or gold), THE ZONE OF INTEREST follows the lives of real life Auschwitz concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their family as they live in a bourgeois home just outside the camp itself.

The movie, liberally adapted by Glazer from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, is rigorous in its formal techniques. We never see the inside of the camp; we only hear the horrific soundtrack of screams, furnaces, gunshots, shouted commands. The camera placements, cutting, movements are rigid and geometric. They border on avant garde in the mathematics of their angularities. Though they may also represent the kind of regimented mindset one would need to live in such horrific denial. And the score is a haunting synthesizer driven phantasmagoria reminiscent of Kubrick's THE SHINING and EYES WIDE SHUT.

The choices are often daring and effective. For all who have even a passing knowledge of the holocaust and the concentration camps, Glazer's decision to focus just on how the Nazis live their lives and rationalize their day to day existence outside a charnel house of humanity is unbearable. Like Todd Haynes' MAY DECEMBER, another movie that is relatively chaste in what it shows onscreen, THE ZONE OF INTEREST may have gotten a PG-13 but for anyone with an imagination and a passing understanding of Auschwitz, it is NC-17. Though it does leave an unsettling question as to how effective the choice to keep everything offscreen is for generations unfamiliar with the concentration camps or who might even have doubts such atrocities ever occurred at all.

For this writer and audience member (who also happens to be Jewish on his Father's side), certain sequences of the Nazi family gladly taking the fur coats of recently exterminated human beings or of eager teenage boys curiously examining extracted teeth/gold fillings as if they were exciting objects of nature in a BOY'S LIFE magazine with a flashlight in bed were almost unbearable.

The movie occasionally breaks into stratospheric brilliant territory with Glazer's stylistic decision to show a local Polish (probably Jewish) young woman risking her life at night to hide apples, potatoes, food and the like in the fields where the Jewish camp prisoners are marched, work, etc.

Glazer shows these sequences as black and white film negative (that is what a black and white film negative looks like before it's printed as a positive) while Rudolf Höss narrates off screen as he reads Hansel and Gretel fairy tales to his two blonde haired daughters.

For the most part though, Glazer plays it (kind of) straight by showing how Rudolf and Hedwig live their lives, want the best for their families, feel that Aushwitz is the best thing that ever happened to them, have extramarital affairs and engage in typical middle class hypocrisies.

The last third of the movie finds Rudolf having to return to Berlin (while Hedwig insists on staying in Auschwitz now accustomed to an upper middle class lifestyle she is loathe to leave) to begin to plan the extermination of 700,000 Hungarian Jews and find ways to make the gas chambers even more satanically efficient in killing increasing numbers of human beings faster.

Movies like THE ZONE OF INTEREST are very hard to write about. There are too many themes, topics, challenges, issues, historical horrors to even fleetingly touch upon let alone do justice to in a single piece. Nevertheless, this writer is grateful these movies get made because they MUST be made. We're only 78 years on from World War II and already too many people around the world question if the holocaust ever happened at all.

At the same time, Glazer (maybe out of necessity) isn't able to fully commit to his thesis. Rudolph and Hedwig Höss are signified as disgusting from the beginning of the movie. They are often compared in dialogue or visual motif to fat hogs. And Glazer, whether by design or coincidence, casts and lights most of the Germans, Nazis, etc in very unflattering near satiric ways. There's no doubt these people are ugly and stupid on the inside and the outside.

The problem is these folks don't see themselves that way. They see themselves (at least for a time) as idealists, revolutionaries, missionaries improving life for a new world order. This is the true horror of evil whether intentional or misguided: it is not only often banal, it is just as often exhilarating and inspiring and delusionally good to those engaged in it.

As Shakespeare said in KING LEAR, "Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile. Filths savor but themselves." (Act IV, Scene 2).

The movie might have been even more powerful if Glazer had shown the Höss's as almost heroic (from their subjective POV). Then we, as the audience, would have to actively fight to keep from buying in to their perceptions of themselves. But Glazer spares us that. He lets us know they're awful.

Glazer succeeds more (and this may also be in the Amis novel) in unsettling scenes where Hedwig talks with her visiting Mother and we realize that folks like Hedwig, Rudolf, the Mother used to have to work for upper middle class Jewish families in peacetime. These Germans were once poor, working class, struggling (during the Depression and devastation of the Weimar Republic) and now the war has improved their condition while punishing those they view as previous Elites.

The message in these scenes is terrifying and clear. We are back in the 21st century to a kind of witch's brew of populist resentment and hatred of political and societal elites that pushes working class folks to vote for demagogues who promise to be their "retribution" and "revenge".

These scenes are the most subtle in the movie AND for this writer, the most powerful.

Even as a Jew, this writer understands that the work of civilization today is not litigating the past but fighting hard to prevent repeats of such horrors in the present and the future. The problem, as it always will be, is that the horrors of the current generation will creep up on us just as incrementally as they did the Germans. And those who ring the alarm bell will again be vilified by those who don't want the alarm bell rung or who don't want to be bothered.

As it was, so shall it always be, apathy will be the devil's single most powerful tool.

And the only question left will be who will stand up and fight and resist and work to prevent the horrors on the horizon from getting any further.

Glazer ends the movie (don't worry, no spoilers) with another formal shock. He also lifts (near verbatim) a scene that occurs in a documentary this writer loves (but will not name so as not to ruin the moment if you go see the movie). For those unfamiliar with the documentary, the moment may be extremely powerful. For this writer, it was a bit of a shame that Glazer landed the plane appropriating a powerful scene from another movie.

This writer also struggles with how they feel about the formal decision at the end of the picture. There's no answer yet on that. Just dynamic ambivalence.

With his four features (SEXY BEAST, BIRTH, UNDER THE SKIN, and now THE ZONE OF INTEREST), Jonathan Glazer does remain a fascinating moviemaker who is committed to finding ways of rediscovering film grammar anew.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST is a success. It finds a way to revisit the holocaust in a way that also makes us more aware of current dangers in our present and our future.

It also shows the cinematic minefields present when a filmmaker tackles unfilmmable subject matter and works to create a somehow successful narrative in a somehow novel and original new way.

Even if Glazer doesn't fully succeed, he succeeds enough to create a necessary work for our times and add another singular, powerful, interesting work to his singular filmography.

MAY DECEMBER (2023)

Thank God all the discomfort this movie makes you go through results in something profound and thought provoking.

It's a befuddling irony in cinema that sometimes a relatively chaste movie drama like Todd Haynes' MAY DECEMBER can be more squirm-inducing than something like Italian gore-fest king Lucio Fulci's ZOMBI 2.

MAY DECEMBER tells the story of self-involved actress Elizabeth Perry (Portman) traveling to Savannah, Georgia to study married couple Gracie Atherton (Moore) and her much younger husband Joe Atherton (Charles Melton) who were at the center of a 1990's sex scandal when Joe was just 13 and Gracie well into her 30's that landed Gracie in jail and pregnant.

Elizabeth arrives as Gracie's and Joe's twins are a few days from graduating high school.

The fascinating premise of MAY DECEMBER is to actually follow up on a couple like this (a thinly fictionalized variation of the Mary Kay Letourneau-Vili Fualaau real life sex scandal) twenty years later.

The style of the movie feels like a kind of satirical stylized riff on the Lifetime Channel movies that traffic in capitalizing on tabloid sex stories as soon as possible to grab a large thirsty viewership.

Zooms, melodramatic music (a clever re-appropriation of Michel Legrand's score for the 1971 movie THE GO-BETWEEN), diffusion filter glamour photography all deceptively lure you into questioning if the movie will actually be substantial or a more (unpalatable) catty satire-parody on preposterous yet real life material.

Thankfully the movie ultimately has the tremendous discretion to go right up to the line but then veer into something deeper, more unsettling, more interesting.

As a viewer, this writer wanted to actually hit off the movie numerous times. Not because the movie was bad (it's quite good) but because the subject matter is so troubling. And Haynes and company are committed to making you uncomfortable.

The strength of the script, direction, approach is to really give this situation the focus, attention, examination it never got in the media.

In the media, the salacious sells if it's kept one dimensional. In real life, folks like Gracie and Joe (just like Mary Kay and Vili) are much more complicated, their lives continue on with children, aging, recrimination, re-examination. And their motivations are often even more unpleasant to ponder-rape, trauma, absent parents, etc.

Portman and Moore are exceptionally strong in portraying two women who are good at both projecting vulnerability, allure yet sitting on reserves of cunning and self-awareness. And it feels clear that Haynes liked the idea of "acting" and "actresses" as a unifying metaphor for a lot of behavior.

Charles Melton's Joe does come across as the ultimate victim. Because one does have to confront head on that what happens when a thirteen year old and a thirty something old have sex is rape. Even if they get married, have kids, stay together. The adult took advantage of a minor who can not nor should not be expected to have the decision making apparatus to understand the full weight of such a decision.

Still, the movie doesn't condemn Gracie. Nor does it go full savage on Elizabeth who spends most of the movie lying to everyone about her true intentions. Portman does a great job of showing that Elizabeth mostly looks down on Gracie and those around her as trash. Elizabeth, like many a self-involved artist, really only cares about Elizabeth. And how a juicy role like portraying Gracie in a made for TV movie (or is it a feature movie) might yield awards, better roles, etc.

This writer was nervous about if the dangerously self-reflexive central idea (we're watching a movie about an actress researching a tabloid story to make a movie. . .) would end up just being fodder for shallow Douglas Sirk/Rainer Werner Fassbinder lite "look the movie is commenting on itself!" type flourishes.

And to some extent, it does that. But ultimately, the movie does the right thing: it doesn't shy away from the implications, damage, trauma, and motivation that underlie these stories.

These things happen all the time. These real-life dramas occur daily, have occurred daily, will always occur.

But when they are devoured and presented by the media and even more ravenously devoured by the public, they are presented as entertainments and everyone from producer to consumer is complicit. Whatever we say to ourselves about why we're interested.

Movies like MAY-DECEMBER uncomfortably force us to spend two hours REALLY examining the troubled humanity behind these scandals. And there's nothing entertaining about the truth.

It's not fun. It's not diverting. But it is illuminating. And it is humbling.

And sometimes that's as important as anything else a movie can do.

ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE (2023)

We wrote a larger blog on some of the "expanded universe", sequels, threequels that are currently coursing their way through the cinematic bloodstream:

www.secretmovieclub.com/blog/prequels-sequels-amp-threequels-the-current-math-by-craig-hammill

In which 2023's ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE was discussed as part of a larger trend.

Today though, we wanted to write a focused piece just on ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE as part of our series of pieces on the movies of 2023.

For this writer, it seemed sheer folly to try to top or continue 2018's INTO THE SPIDERVERSE. INTO THE SPIDERVERSE felt like such a grand slam. One of the best movies of the 21st century. Possibly (and this may be heresy in some camps) the best SPIDERMAN movie ever made. And such a showcase for what animation can be in the hands of a creative team that included the comedic duo Phil Lord & Christopher Miller.

But maybe the folly was the assumption on my part that this movie should be a "one off". Any successful movie, especially a successful Superhero movie, is almost by definition meant to be a sequel generator.

And going further, comic books (the source material for so many superhero movies and the Miles Morales alternate universe storylines of SPIDERMAN) are also meant to be never-ending. Although this writer is not well-versed in comics, as an outsider it still strikes one that one of the joys of comic books is the creative team's ability to take the building blocks of any story/core group of characters and create a new, exciting, vital variation.

ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE, while not hitting the highs (how could it?) of INTO THE SPIDERVERSE, still manages to pull off a near-impossible feat: it is a more than worthy sequel full of the same heart, humor, worldview as the first. And it does an admirable job of expanding the storyline to create enough plot points, questions, character arcs to justify the third movie (BEYOND THE SPIDERVERSE coming sometime soon, no release date yet set).

Let's just get out of the way those aspects of a sequel and this sequel in particular that frustrate this writer: the movie runs 2 1/2 hours whereas the first was under 2 hours. An under 2 hour runtime still feels like it might have helped the movie.

The "reverse engineering to create a trilogy" syndrome. This is nothing new. But diving back into the first movie to come up with new plot lines/ story lines that may not have been organic to the first movie to then justify two more movies often creates a feeling of a contained movie being "messed with". And there was some of that feeling here.

The leaning into the darker themes, more complex emotions which often accompany earnest attempts at a better sequel can sometimes obscure, dilute the strengths of the first movie. Here, the constant hilarious humor of INTO THE SPIDERVERSE is now more touch and go. There are long passages in ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE that lose the humor and feel like the equivalent of a well written emo song: sincere, heartfelt, but not all that funny.

All that being acknowledged, let's dig into what is SO IMPRESSIVE about ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE.

The commitment to vanguard, boundary pushing animation. The creative team here fully understands that the "multiverse" idea which is currently being run into the ground by almost every superhero franchise DOES lend itself to the ability to showcase different animation styles. Gwen Stacey's world is an amazing riff on watercolor techniques. And the overall quality of the animation is SUPERIOR and inspiring.

The best overall sequence yet in the series may be in ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE. The midpoint "bridge collapse" sequence in Mumbhattan (an inspired mash-up of Manhattan and Mumbai in one of the alternate universes that also contains this writer's personal favorite new Spiderman, the Indian Spider-Man Pavitr Prabhakar) is AS thrilling as any sequence in recent live action action movies.

Finally, the romantic and emotional tension created by fully embracing the Miles Morales and Gwen Stacey are 15 year olds imbue the entire movie with what feels like the right emotional tone. It's just hard to want to spend 2 1/2 hours in that near tortured adolescent mindset when everything is yearning and awkwardness and unrequitedness and raw emotion and new.

All the supporting character continue to be gripping (not an easy feat) and we do continue to care about Miles' family and the relationships between the core group of Spider folk.

So. . .what are we really saying here? ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE is still easily one of the best movies of 2023. Despite its wobbliness and flaws, it is still wildly ambitious.

The end of ACROSS (don't worry no overt spoilers here) does promise a kind of return to INTO THE SPIDERVERSE. So it may be that the moviemakers themselves felt the need to return to the beginning.

This writer's 6 year old son has already watched the movie twice, a big endorsement in a family like ours. And with time, this writer finds themselves liking the movie more and more. That's a big test. Does a movie grow or recede in one's mind as time passes? ACROSS grows.

It may be that ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE, like adolescence itself, has such huge ambitions that it's just impossible to achieve them all. But so many of those ambitions are so successfully realized that it achieves its most important priority:

This writer is waiting impatiently for BEYOND THE SPIDERVERSE.

***

We’ll return next week with PART 2 of our thoughts on the big movies of 2023. And we want to hear yours as well!

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.