Welcome back to the 4 Favorites series!
I’m trying to get back to doing these more consistently. But as you can tell from the title of this newsletter, I have five months’ worth of favorite first-time watches to catch up on. I’m also planning on resuming Panning For Gold, my Best Picture Oscar winner series, this Friday with a look at “It Happened One Night.” So, be on the lookout for that.
But cramming at least 20 movies into one newsletter is too much for Substack, so here’s what I’m going to do: This newsletter will feature one of my favorites from each month, and then I’ll point you to my blog for more writing on the other movies. This way, you only get one email instead of five.
I’ve been staying busy since my last email. Trying to stay cool and leave the house as little as possible in this Texas heatwave.
I finished my Christopher Nolan filmography podcast after finally watching “Oppenheimer” in theaters (more on that below) and I had more pieces published at work and in Book & Film Globe. Here are some of my favorites:
The Best (and Worst) Disney Movies Based on Theme-Park Rides (BFG)
Concert review: Randy Rogers, Wade Bowen make for great drinking buddies (and I interviewed both of them here, for FWST)
This is why emo heroes Paramore were a force to be reckoned with in Fort Worth (FWST)
Brooks & Dunn keep ’90s country music alive at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth (FWST)
Pearl Jam will perform in Fort Worth for the first time ever this September (FWST)
And I went to my first film festival, the Chattanooga Film Festival! I wrote about that for the local Chattanooga paper and for BFG:
Spooky films and more find a home at the Read House, home of haunted Room 311 (Chattanooga Times Free Press)
But now, as Vin Diesel says … THE MOVIES:
April 2023
“Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed”/”Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off”
Yes, this is a twofer. My newsletter, my rules. But I think these two documentaries are in conversation with each other. Both are from the same director, and both are, in a way, about what happens when you work hard to create a legacy with your art, but that legacy comes at the expense of your relationships with the ones you love.
“Reunions” was released in the spring of 2020, right after shelter-in-place ordinances went into effect in Dallas. That album from Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit got me through the early days of the pandemic. I remember shutting my work laptop after my shift was over at midnight and then walking over to my record player, plugging my headphones into the speakers so I wouldn’t wake Taylor up, and just playing that album from front to back before going to bed.
It’s an album about confronting the problems of life head-on (“Be afraid, be very afraid, but do it anyway,” one song goes) and about the realities of relationships. “Running With Our Eyes Closed” is a documentary directed by Sam Jones about the making of that album. It starts off as a making-of-doc and quickly becomes one of the rawest, most intimate portraits of a marriage I’ve ever seen put on screen.
Isbell and his wife, Amanda Shires, have been making music together for about a decade. That creative relationship takes center stage at the beginning when Jones films a songwriting session between the two of them and a fight over the proper usage of a preposition gets testy. Over the course of the making of the album, there will be several such moments, none of which Isbell or Shires shies away from showing.
Once the pandemic hits, the documentary becomes about how the two of them are promoting the album while in lockdown, sitting at home confronted with themselves.
It takes on a new shape of grace and acceptance of these two people who need art and need each other. It’s a beautiful documentary (with great music as well).
“Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off,” also directed by Jones, is less intense, but just as illuminating. If you’re like me and followed Hawk’s career obsessively in the ‘90s and ‘00s and never stopped playing THPS, there won’t be much new here about Hawk’s career.
What is new is the information about Hawk’s family dynamics growing up and how that affected his relationships as he got older. His skating and pursuit of excellence almost wiped out his personal life.
As another skater says in the film about how Hawk still pushes himself today:
“Can you imagine watching your dad tumble down a ramp at 56? Like, we’re grandparents. We’re grandparents falling from the sky.”
Both are available to stream on Max (but maybe not for long before David Zaslav removes more content from the site, so watch while you can).
Read the rest of my picks for April here.
May 2023
“The Straight Story”
Edifying. I got to see a 35mm print of this one with my friend Drew at the Texas Theatre as a part of its Lynch series this summer. It was beautiful.
I’m counting this as a first-time watch. The first time I saw “The Straight Story,” I was 8 years old and it had just been released. I only remember the opening scene where we hear (but don’t see) Alvin Straight fall in his kitchen.
Everyone calls this David Lynch’s most accessible film (which is true, it’s Disney) but that doesn’t mean it’s not extremely Lynchian. It’s about a man driving a John Deere tractor to see his dying brother, which isn’t a “weird” Lynchian concept at all, but his style is all over this thing. The wide shots and extreme close-ups, the score, the slow pace of the editing, the maximalist emotions borne out of everyday events — all are there from the get-go.
This didn’t make an impression on me as a kid, but it definitely does now. It makes its points about community and finding joy amid sorrow in a way that’s not corny or ham-fisted, despite a few scenes that seemed to be tailor-made for the Disney-ification of life.
This is such a beautiful, understated film. In anyone else’s hands, the exposition and dialogue might have been overkill. Here, we learn more about Alvin’s life as a reflection of the helpful strangers he meets along his journey, painting a portrait of midwestern America that doesn’t shy away from the real world (the pregnant teen, the conversation with the veteran at the bar) but also shows us our better angels.
It’s also so refreshing to see a movie that largely features middle-aged and elderly characters and takes them seriously. All the jokes about getting old flow organically from the characters and not from a script looking for an easy laugh.
Richard Farnsworth is so damn good here and it’s a shame Kevin Spacey beat him for Best Actor for his self-indulgent performance in “American Beauty,” a film that navel gazes but never once reaches the amount of introspection in one scene of “Straight Story.” And Harry Dean Stanton made me cry with just one look that sums up the entirety of his character and Alvin’s journey.
This is also extremely hard to find on physical media. I have a DVD copy but I don’t think there’s a Blu-Ray, and the only bonus feature on the DVD is a trailer. I know you can watch it on Disney+ but if there were ever a Lynch film that deserved a crack at the Criterion Collection or another remaster, it’s this.
Available to stream on Disney+ or buy on physical media.
Read the rest of my picks for May here.
June 2023
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” isn’t just the best animated film of the year; it’s one of the best movies of the year, period. The animators upped the ante on everything from “Into the Spider-Verse” and put it into overdrive.
Parts of this movie are in watercolor. Other parts are clipping collages. I spent most of my time watching this movie with my mouth agape, wondering how anyone could have made it. And it inspired me to do better in my own work as well.
The story is excellent, too, dealing with Miles Morales’ growing responsibility as his universe’s Spider-Man. Very excited to see how that cliffhanger ends.
Available on physical media starting Tuesday, Sept. 5 and also available on VOD.
Read the rest of my picks for June here.
July 2023
But first….BARBENHEIMER
What a year. A double feature of a movie about a beloved Mattel doll and a three-hour movie about the so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb” ended up being the hottest ticket of the summer, and the phenomenon shows no signs of slowing down.
I’m talking, of course, about Barbenheimer — the portmanteau given to the double bill of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” Once people realized the two films were opening on the same day (a studio-level decision borne out of Warner Bros. fighting with Christopher Nolan over his move to Universal), seeing both movies in the theater on opening weekend became a meme.
I’ve recorded no less than four hours’ worth of audio about “Oppenheimer,” which you can listen to below, so I’ll talk instead about the interesting similarities between “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”
Both, in a way, are about how power corrupts, and how the decisions made by the powerful are often made with the emphasis on the wrong consequences. Both also focus on a loss of innocence — Oppenheimer, obviously, with creating the bomb, but I saw a really interesting YouTube video that ties Barbie’s entrance into the real world to the Fall in the Garden of Eden.
Both movies also are the first theatrical releases I’ve seen in a long time that feel like they could have only come from their directors.
Nolan took all the lessons in imagery and montage he learned from “Dunkirk” and “Tenet” and used them to make something akin to an anti-biopic; “Oppenheimer” is as much a film montage as it is a look at a man’s life.
And Gerwig managed to take a piece of corporate IP and turn it into a commentary on feminism, American womanhood and growing up — and it’s also funny and heartwarming, just like “Lady Bird” and “Little Women.”
Both are still in theaters; see them on the biggest screen you can.
Read the rest of my picks for July here.
August 2023
Getting a head start on Spooky Season this month.
“Ghost Ship”
When I was 11, I had a babysitter who I would ask about all the R-rated movies I wasn’t allowed to watch. One night she tells me about “Ghost Ship” and how it starts with a cold open featuring a kill sequence where a boat wire easily slices through an entire ship deck’s worth of people.
I told her I didn’t believe her and said it wasn’t possible for a wire to do that to someone. She then accurately demonstrated her point using a piece of dental floss and a block of cheese. I have never forgotten that visual and will always associate that memory with this movie, which I never watched until a few weeks ago.
So as you can imagine, I was excited to see if the first 10 minutes lived up to the hype. It definitely delivered. What a setpiece. Early 2000s horror was wild.
The rest of the movie, about a ship salvage crew that comes across said ghost ship, never really lives up to the tone of gleeful abandon set by the first few minutes, but it was still a lot of schlocky fun. Eagerly waiting for the 2000s horror nostalgia boom that’s sure to hit in the next few years.
Available to stream on MAX or buy on physical media.
Read the rest of my picks for August here.
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This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer.
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