SECRET MOVIE CLUB'S THOUGHTS ON THE BIG MOVIES OF 2023 (PART 2 OF 2) by Craig Hammill
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So. . .for better or for worse. . .here is part 2 of 2 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.
FALLEN LEAVES (2023, wri/dir by Aki Kaurismaki)
Sometimes the loudest movies are the quietest.
2023's FALLEN LEAVES, Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismaki's 18th feature (by this writer's count), is remarkable in how much it accomplishes and communicates while stripping down to essentials.
For near 40 years like his kindred spirit in America, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismaki has made movies in all sorts of genres yet his deadpan, melodic punk sensibility courses through all his movies.
Characters in Kaurismaki movies rarely smile (which makes what they say even more hilarious). Shots are often static. Music often plays a key role. And many of his greatest works are punchy and short: 70-85mns. A concision of style and theme leavened by a current of bemused humor at the world are the tools of the Kaurismaki trade.
The story in FALLEN LEAVES is the essence of straightforward. Ansa works a series of jobs in a tough gig economy and meets Holoppa, a decent hearted construction worker with a drinking problem, at a karoake bar.
After a few more chance encounters, they get coffee. Then see a movie (Jim Jarmusch's THE DEAD DON'T DIE). Then meet for a dinner. Then argue about Holoppa's drinking problem. A late movie realization on Holoppa's part offers hope but then an accident occurs. . .
FALLEN LEAVES plays like a Finnish Ozu movie. The scenes are domestic, short, empathetic to the working class. The emotional beats and arcs are subtle yet substantial. And the performers (Alma Poytsi and Jussi Vatanen) manage an incredible amount of character work within the parameters of Kaurismaki's trademark "don't emote" deadpan.
Within its 81 minute runtime, one feels as if one is seeing a snapshot of the world, the gig economy, the loneliness and desire for connection that must be felt by huge swaths of working folks who never married, never quite made it.
And Kaurismaki finds a way to deepen and connect to the current world atmosphere with a reoccurring bit of Ansa listening to a background radio announcer narrating the horrors of the war in Ukraine.
As on the nose as a device like this is, it does humble you as a viewer to realize that the Finnish share 832 miles of border with Russia. The war in Ukraine must be a constant reminder of what the Finnish may one day have to deal with. Here in the United States, we often treat these foreign wars and crises simply as abstract fodder for political arguing points.
Abstraction is a luxury denied most of the world.
And yet, FALLEN LEAVES is very much a comedy as well. There's a funny running gag with Holoppa's middle aged friend Houtari who has a decent singing voice but pretends he's in his late 40's when he's clearly a bit older. There are also almost quaint feeling asides about movies, movie theaters, and love of cinema. In fact the last line of the movie is a tribute to cinema.
Kaurismaki and his team also do a powerful job of succinctly communicating what the world is to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck. It's hitting off utilities when one can't pay the bill. It's frequenting a few bars where the drinks are affordable. It's drinking too much when there's not much else to do.
Made for about $1.5M USD (in 2023 terms), FALLEN LEAVES is also an object lesson in how truly creative, smart moviemakers can shape/craft/develop stories that sing in both content and form with minimal budgets. Ingmar Bergman was a master of this. Many moviemakers must be if they want to work often.
In FALLEN LEAVES, Kaurismaki and his team cover a tremendous amount of ground in a scant 81 minutes with a minimum of resources.
Yet they make a movies full of hope, realism, yearning, comedy, struggle, and grit.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: DEAD RECKONING PART 1 (2023, co-wri & dir by Christopher McQuarrie)
One of the under-reported stories of 2023 was how Tom Cruise's seventh (!!) Mission Impossible entry DEAD RECKONING PART 1 was somehow a box office hit, an underperformer, a critical success, and a bit of re-hash of the previous six movies. . .all at the same time.
Like a fascinating sound that has the misfortune to be in the pathway of a louder sound that retroactively obscures it, MI7 came out in the summer just before the BARBENHEIMER cultural frenzy.
And even though it has grossed over 500 million USD at the worldwide box office (coming in #9 in 2023's Top 10 global grossers), it is already something of a forgotten movie of the past year.
But all of this prologue isn't to write a eulogy for a series that will be returning in 2025 with what appears to be its final chapter (at least with Cruise) MI8. This pre-amble is to assert that MI7 is a fascinating jumble of what makes the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE series so shockingly good AND how the real mission impossible was trying to top MI6 FALLOUT.
First, the good news. MI7 is a worthy entry in the Mission Impossible canon. There's really only been one just okay MI movie and that was MI2 directed by John Woo which has hampered by a writer's strike and an overcharged sense of late middle aged male romanticism courtesy of go-to script doctor Robert Towne.
Since MI3 directed by JJ Abrams though, the MI series has been constant and consistent in its quality, ability to entertain, and capacity to take your breath away with REAL action sequences and stunts.
In fact, at this point, much like Alfred Hitchcock's famed cameos, everyone now waits for Tom Cruise's newest crazy ass stunt which will feature on posters, behind the scenes media clips, etc. Supposedly Cruise has to finance each MI movie until he completes these stunts (which he still insists at 61 years old on doing himself) because it's such a risk to the production.
Maybe that's true. Maybe that's Jackie Chan mythology.
Nevertheless, at this point, the MI team knows the formula: amazing action sequences, real stunts, real car chases, ensemble cast chemistry, globe trotting exotic locations, bursts of humor, stylish direction, and surprisingly engaging storylines.
But much like the most recent iteration of your favorite sports video game that ends in "2024" to signify the most current version, the MI movies can't help at this point but occasionally feel like great updates of what's already come before.
In MI7, there actually appears to be a conscious move to nod at ALL the other movies in the series. We do get the sense this is a summing up and so. . .we get Henry Czerny returning from MI1, now CIA director. We even get the De Palma canted camera angles and a finale on a train just like MI1. We get another desert sandstorm like MI4 (still this writer's personal favorite of the entire series). We get another "I've never ever been to a party like this" party with a thousand extras, LED light displays that would make an EDM rave feel like a cheap toy at a dollar store. We get the weirder and weirder storyline of how Cruise's Ethan Hunt seems to basically curse any woman he likes with death.
For a few of the MI films, Cruise's Hunt felt like he had gone full blown covert ops monk just saving people for the greater good with no sexual instinct, a kind of anti-James Bond. But in FALLOUT and then again here, the team tries to inject a little sexual chemistry between Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson and now Cruise and Haley Atwell. But he's still a Christ figure at heart. He sacrifices and tries to save the world and redeem it for its sins.
In fact, McQuarrie and Cruise inject a kind of origin story here telling us that Hunt, once a criminal, lost an early love of his life at the hands of Esai Morales' Gabriel, here the movie's villain, and then got drafted onto the IMF force.
These decisions make sense. They really do. They are often made to add some emotional heft or resonance to a long in the tooth series. It's just not clear if the series benefits from it or gets dragged down by it.
The story here is prescient if often clunky. An AI program has gained sentience and is now known as "The Entity". Every government wants to control it (via the MacGuffin of the movie-a literal key with blinking lights that comes in two parts). The Entity wants total autonomy and senses that Ethan Hunt will kill it.
One of the more laughable (and forgivable) elements of the picture is how this key is supposedly the thing that's going to control the world for hundreds of years to come and people just keep putting it in their pocket like its two quarters in change.
I'd at least put that sh@t in a shirt pocket and button it or something. Especially when trains be falling into rivers and fights be happening on tops of said trains. . .
Nevertheless, the MI team always goes all out like a Mumbai Hindi cinema musical to make an entertaining picture. And this picture entertains. Wildly. As all the MI movies do.
Even better news, it gets better as it goes and the final sequence ON the train, especially an ingenious gravity defying sequence of Cruise and Atwell scrambling to climb out of train cars that are slowly going over a ledge and dropping into a river manages to be a series highlight.
What one wonders about MI8 though is this. . .
From MI1-MI6, there appeared to be a concerted effort to make a movie that felt quite distinct in style, tone from the one that preceded it. Here though, it feels like a greatest hits album. Greatest hits albums are great to listen to (maybe this makes no sense in the Spotify streaming age) but this writer ultimately prefers when bands try something different each album out.
Will MI8 find a way to reinvent itself one more time? Or will it be MI 2025?
Whatever one wants to say about Tom Cruise, one thing feels true: he's a moviemaker who wants to make the absolute best each time out.
So I'm going to pray to the movie gods that Cruise and company go a little crazy and do everything to surpass FALLOUT. . .by making one final entry distinct and different from all those that came before.
P.S. I highly recommend you write a MI7 review. Something happened when I hit save on this one that made me laugh. Call it an MI easter egg that's somehow been programmed into Letterboxd. You'll see.
BARBIE (2023, co-wri & dir by Greta Gerwig)
Oddly, it feels hardest to write well about the juggernaut of the year.
The $1.442 billion grossing (and counting) BARBIE, co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig, produced and starring Margot Robbie as the titular doll beloved by generations of girls, with amazing support from Ryan Gosling as Ken and America Ferrera as Gloria, IS 2023's cultural zeitgeist hit.
And a full understanding and thorough and deep long form piece on the movie and its moment may need years before perspective and time can allow for that final revision that leads to a worthwhile ultimate draft.
So consider this writing the sketch but not the painting. The outline but not the novel itself. And this writer almost certainly isn't the one to write that ultimate piece as I'd be a Ken in Barbieland and not a Barbie. Maybe I'd be an Allan. I'm not sure. I am sure that the definitive piece on Barbie will almost certainly be written by a woman.
BARBIE is one of those movies where the broad strokes are so clearly daring, successful, and stunningly made that one has to resist the urge to nitpick the details.
Gerwig, Robbie, and company somehow found a way to thread the needle of fulfilling the prerequisite of making a broadly appealing movie that is still piercingly subversive, insightful, emotional, and critical.
I'm sure I'm not the first writer to point out the joyful cognitive dissonance one experiences watching a movie that somehow manages to celebrate AND brutally critique the culture in which it exists.
And why shouldn't BARBIE do this? We all do the same thing in one form or another day to day as we embrace aspects of our culture that bring us joy and actively work to change those aspects of our culture we feel need to change. BARBIE is a movie in microcosm of something everyone does their whole lives.
Taking a page from what THE LEGO MOVIE did so successfully (existing as a hilarious satire while at the same time selling a bunch of legos for its parent company), BARBIE contains multitudes.
Yes, it does act as a very funny comedy that manages to explain the destructive effect of patriarchy on female independence and agency in an easily understandable way.
But it is also, as best represented by America Ferrera's powerful third act monologue, and Robbie's entire performance, a movie about how difficult it is to be a fully actualized woman in an American society that makes impossible and contradictory demands of the female sex.
It is also transparently a celebration of all the different Barbie products that kids have grown up loving. The movie and fantastic Barbieland production design celebrate and show off the Barbie Dream House, all the different fabulous Barbie clothes and accessories, the Barbie dream car, etc.
The movie also has a special unique flavor because its creators are largely children/teenagers of the 1990's. References to the Indigo Girls, Matchbox Twenty's 1995 single PUSH, etc firmly ground Barbie in that strange 1990's intellectual space where individual agency felt central but came with a defensive serving of irony at all the negative aspects of the culture that surrounded it.
Possibly BARBIE's greatest feat is also the thing that most certainly has caused the most conversation: its marginalization of men and understanding of how men would behave as petulant little boys if marginalized.
Before anyone of the male sex rails about how Barbie solves one problem only to create another, it is probably instructive to pump the brakes and realize that Barbie is creating a movie where all the frustrations women have had to deal with in terms of representation in American cinema are transferred to the men. And a lot of men in the audience didn't love it.
And that may be the point. Cinema has almost entirely catered to men and the male view of the world because so many of its core creators and producers have been men. The male gaze, a kind of perpetual mysogyny, etc have coursed through too many movies and been accepted as a universal point of view RATHER than the truth: a specific heterosexual male point of view.
It's no wonder that a movie firmly and resolutely and positively devoted to a female sensibility should so bewilder a male audience spoiled with movies that tell men what they want to hear. That reinforce fantasies that men want to believe.
Ryan Gosling's great choice as KEN is to play a man who can't deal with how "unessential" he is to Barbie's day to day existence. Barbie tolerates him but doesn't need him. Ken NEEDS Barbie. Barbie doesn't need Ken.
Weirdly Barbie could play on a double bill with Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT and you'd find a number of the themes identical.
What BARBIE does do so well and why it is so important to this current cinematic moment is that it, along with movies like PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, Kelly Reichardt's cinema, etc, resolutely declares how essential it is to have true female sensibilities in cinema going forward.
As Roger Ebert pointed out so importantly, cinema is an empathy machine. One of its core virtues is its ability, in the hands of the best communicators, to make us understand points of view, life experiences, and sensibilities that are not our own.
As a man watching BARBIE, I have to admit I was sometimes depressed at how the men were represented in the movie. Even America Ferrera's husband who appears to be loving and supportive is more or less represented as an unhelpful, unnecessary minor clown.
BUT. . .I do think this was a large part of the point. Women, minorities, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and countless other communities have spent 130+ years of cinema with representations that at best were incomplete, biased, hurtful, not helpful, and NOT representative of the true depth and complexity of the sensibilities at the heart of those communities.
BARBIE acts as a corrective, a satire, an entertainment, and a warning. Cinema has a lot of work to do to be truly representative and inclusive.
BARBIE is an amazing example of how that can be achieved.
OPPENHEIMER (2023, wri & dir by Christopher Nolan)
Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER, released the same weekend as Greta Gerwig's BARBIE, created an instantaneous pop culture moment with everyone talking about BARBIEHEIMER.
The interesting implicit questions being which movie you would see first, would you see both, would either or both be critical and/or box office hits, etc.
We all know the results now. Both were HUGE commercial and critical hits. In fact, in retrospect, the BARBIEHEIMER weekend was a kind of cinematic shot heard round the world. BARBIE heralded ceiling breaking records for its female filmmaker and sensibility while somehow having its cake and eating it too (a subversive satire AND summer blockbuster commercial pop hit).
OPPENHEIMER encouraged many a cinema enthusiast by proving controversial serious adult subject matter told in an idiosynchratic auteurist way could still be a $1 billion box office international juggernaut. A kind of cinema many movie lovers had begun to despair had passed. For good.
And the icing on top was that Nolan had insisted on shooting the movie on IMAX film (a variation on 70MM) and audiences in big markets equipped to screen the movie in this format sold out screenings and paid higher ticket prices for MONTHS.
Thus we also have to thank Nolan for FINALLY being the filmmaker to prove that film originated, film exhibited works can still generate a top ten market share. Movie lovers may not love a movie discussed in these terms but cinema has always been a business AND an art. We have to celebrate when the art forces the business to take notice.
Let us state some basics: OPPENHEIMER is an excellent movie, well told in Nolan's signature time-scrambling style, with superb performances (especially from Cillian Murphy in the title role), and an impressive ability to convey complex themes in accessible ways.
The movie tells the story of scientist Robert Oppenheimer's shepherding of the atomic bomb from theory to reality for the United States in time to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII (to this date in 2024 still the only time one country has attacked another country with nuclear weapons) and the aftermath and its implications for all involved.
At the same time, the movie explores Oppenheimer's complex personality, his womanizing, the United States' obsession with anyone who associated with Communists from the 1930's through the 1950's, and the battle of egos that is attendant to almost all great people who must work together towards a common purpose.
For cinephiles, two templates become readily apparent as one watches the movie. Nolan is making a kind of AMADEUS with Oppenheimer as the genius Mozart and Robert Downy Jr's Lewis Strauss as the ultimately mediocre Salieri. Nolan is also batting for the fences to make his LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, a reference maybe slightly less apparent at first blush. Nolan wants to make an all-timer classic about a very complex and irreducible real life personality.
One of the movie's great strengths that deserves plaudits is its insistence on an adult sexuality as expressed most directly in the relationship Murphy's Oppenheimer has with erratic, willful American Communist Jean Tatlock (in a fearless performance by Florence Pugh).
On top of this, Nolan does borrow from LAWRENCE again with a kind of circular/spiral chronology in its storytelling though Nolan's structure ALSO declares itself (literally) as an analogue for nuclear fission/fusion itself.
The movie is imminently watchable. And its cross cutting structure which zig zags from Oppenheimer's beginnings to the Los Alamos Manhattan project to Oppenheimer's 1950's HUAC like crucifixion to Robert Downey Jr's cabinet post hearing and reveal as the movie's primary antagonist allows for a crackling editing, pace, dynamism that positions this movie most closely as a sibling of Nolan's other WWII history piece DUNKIRK.
And the reveal at the end of a key moment between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein as the core realization/epiphany of the picture is successful and powerful. And unsettling.
If OPPENHEIMER ultimately doesn't scale the heights of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA as INTERSTELLEAR didn't scale the heights of 2001, it is strangely still a testament to Nolan's ambition. He is not using lesser movies as references. He's taking aim at the GREATEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME and shooting his shot.
And he's doing it in a climate far less hospitable to quirky vision/voice driven cinema. One has to tip their hat to Nolan's dogged ability to get his high budget movies up and over and across the finish line in a cinematic world hostile to the final cut wild eyed director who insists on Hollywood money to make auteurist gambles (of which both David Lean and Stanley Kubrick are standard bearers).
For this writer's money, DUNKIRK still remains Nolan's best movie and masterpiece. Somehow in making a movie so resolutely British about a key British moment, Nolan gained access to the deeply personal subconscious underground lakes of soul that make the best art transcendent.
But OPPENHEIMER is still one of Nolan's top movies because it too rings with a clarity of message that has sometimes eluded Nolan in his other movies (THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is still befuddling in its [intentional? unintentional?] seeming condemnation of democracy and the masses).
OPPENHEIMER's greatest strength ultimately is Cillian Murphy's monofocused intense cental performance. It is ONE of the great performances of the year and of this decade.
And we do leave the movie truly feeling we saw some of the complexities of an adult life. A rarity in today's American cinema.
THE HOLDOVERS (2023, dir by Alexander Payne)
Alexander Payne sometimes feels like that memorable bit of dialogue from Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK: "It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma."
Not so much for any kind of personal or filmic way he conducts himself but simply because his movies are usually so good and yet it's hard (at least for this writer) to fully figure out where Payne is coming from.
Almost all of his movies since his 1996 debut CITIZEN RUTH have been good to great. Even his one general consensus misfire (his last picture) 2017's DOWNSIZING still deserves some brownie points for Payne pushing himself into the sci-fi genre.
And so it feels like no surprise that his new movie 2023's THE HOLDOVERS is a kind of re-set where Payne tells the unsentimental yet acutely observed humanist kind of story he tells best and re-unites with Paul Giamatti who gave one of the great 21st century performances in Payne's career high point SIDEWAYS (2004).
This idea of a re-set bedeviled this writer as he watched and contemplated THE HOLDOVERS. Because it's hard to make a good movie. Like really really hard. And it's even harder to make a good to great movie that is re-watchable. And THE HOLDOVERS is a very re-watchable emotionally astute, finely tuned and crafted piece of cinema.
So the back-handed compliment of saying something like "Payne gets back to his roots" or whatever is totally inappropriate. Many other filmmakers have tried to go back to genres in which they had success and NEVER made another good movie.
Alexander Payne makes one middling picture and roars back with THE HOLDOVERS which easily goes in the top tier of his work.
That is stunning and impressive.
THE HOLDOVERS tells the story of three emotionally damaged people who attend and/or work at a snobby elite New England prep school and find themselves alone at the school during the Christmas break.
Giamatti's curmudgeonly classics professor Hunam gets roped into being the guardian of those adoloscent kids whose parents for whatever reason are not bringing them home for the holidays. When all the kids but upperclassman Angus get a reprieve, Hunam and Angus begin to develop a fraught but important bond. The school's head cook Mary Lamb who has just lost her son to the Vietnam War mediates between the two strong personalities even though she herself is struggling with her grief.
This kind of story is a minefield for emotional manipulation, vapid "personal growth moments", and sentimentality. The small holiday miracle that Payne and his company of talented performers/collaborators pull off is that the picture is deeply emotional, warm without being cloying, and profound even though the revelations are all fairly to be expected.
Like so many American moviemakers who burst on the 1990's independent scene, Payne is a devotee of 1970's American cinema. And here he leans into that kind of moviemaking so much that he even doctors logos and sound design and visual design to make the movie FEEL like it was made in the early 1970's. But it doesn't tip into fetish since Payne, who always seems to come at material from a writer's sensibility, keeps decisions squarely focused on what's best for the story.
The movie ultimately is a three-hander between Giamatti, Randolph, and Sessa. And even though it all takes places at the school, the local town, and Boston, the big New England city nearby, it does feel of a piece with Payne's "road trip" movies (ABOUT SCHMIDT, SIDEWAYS, THE DESCENDANTS, NEBRASKA). The characters do go on a kind of journey that push them past their comfort limits and breaks them out of their defensive shells.
In some ways, the movie is a cinematic analogue to how a 1970's indie folk rock classic album like the Cat Stevens that plays on the soundtrack makes you feel. It's a funny, sharply observed, emotional feeling that still feels quiet, intimate, and contained. Like a great conversation that lasts all night you remember your whole life.
THE HOLDOVERS won't win any awards for telling a new story in a radical new way. It will however remind all moviemakers who love the form how important it is to tell stories about real, flesh and blood characters with complex backstories. And how effective it is to tell those stories with heart and empathy.
MAESTRO (2023, co-wri & dir by Bradley Cooper)
It's always a tightrope walk to write about a movie you just saw that has only recently been released.
Still, Bradley Cooper's MAESTRO about the relationship between famed 20th century bisexual conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein and his accepting yet aggravated life partner/wife Felicia Montealegre is a fascinating filmic if flawed piece of work.
But the flaws don't outweigh the movie's many merits-a felicitous style, tremendously invested performances, and an interesting ability to hold many competing sometimes contradictory truths within one story.
The movie announces this intention at the beginning with the Bernstein quote: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
And the filmmakers do mostly successfully adhere to this guiding principal. You come away from the movie asking questions rather than feeling you have been given answers.
How did the relationship between Montealegre and Bernstein really work? Were they "in love" or did they "love/admire" each other? Was the marriage one of passion or more of a team? Or was it sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both?
Was the key tension in the relationship Bernstein's bisexuality and many (permitted/condoned) affairs? Or was it his ego and the fact that many famous artists suck up all the oxygen from those around them?
The movie also pulses with cinematic style and choices sadly less sought out as time goes on. Cooper seems intent on making a "movie movie". The cuts, the camera placement, the sequences are all thought out. And the movie is better for it.
At the same time, one does wonder if ultimately the moviemakers hit on some complexities but missed others. All auteur driven movies run the risk of coming off as vanity pieces either for their perfomers, their directors, their producers or all of the above. And MAESTRO does sometimes have notes of the moviemakers thinking something is deeper then it actually might be.
But in the final analysis (after a first viewing) MAESTRO is something exciting and exhilarating. And it does bustle with the unbounded talent, contradiction, and vitality of an artist like Bernstein. How artists create and yet earnestly try (as the movie implies Bernstein did) to also be loving members of a personal family is a worthwhile topic. And MAESTRO is a more than worthwhile effort to get at a question that can never be fully answered.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club