4 Favorites: Jan. 2025
And RIP David Lynch and Bob Uecker
Welcome back to the 4 Favorites series! This month we’ll look at a documentary about a great artist, a pseudo-documentary filmed entirely inside a video game, a haunted house story told from the perspective of the ghost, and a paranoid thriller from 1950.
But first it bears mentioning that we lost two great artists this month: Director David Lynch (Jan. 15) and sports commentator Bob Uecker (Jan. 16). More on Lynch below, but I’ll always remember Uecker for “Major League” and his sardonic wit. Rest in peace to two legends.
But now, as Vin Diesel says … THE MOVIES:
“David Lynch: The Art Life”
I don’t normally get too sad when celebrities or public figures die. I’ve always joked that Jimmy Buffett, Eddie Vedder and Stephen King would be the only celebrity deaths that would affect me a lot (infer what you will about my pop culture taste from that Trinity).
Buffett’s death last year especially messed me up, partly because of the fond memories I’ve associated with his music, but mostly because he was such a larger-than-life figure it seemed like he would outlive us all.
That larger-than-life quality was the case with David Lynch — he seemed like he would be around to probe the darkness lurking underneath America’s proverbial white picket fence forever.
His death on Jan. 15 surprised me by how much it moved me — I love “Twin Peaks” and “The Straight Story,” but my knowledge of the director came more from his interviews about his creative process than his films. I saw “Eraserhead” and “Blue Velvet” in college, and those first forays into Lynch’s surrealist Dream Logic tapestries mostly put me at a loss. I do remember exactly where I was and what I felt when I first saw that Erasherhead Baby or my first glimpse of Frank Booth, however. His films stick with you long after the credits roll.
All of that is to say, that on the day Lynch died, I cued up “The Art Life,” a documentary on Lynch’s paintings and his artistic philosophy, on the Criterion Channel, and it made all of his other films snap into place for me. This documentary looks back on Lynch’s childhood and his earliest artistic endeavors and just lets him talk about his process. He never explains his art — that’s for the viewer to decide. But watching him explain how he creates gives more of a window into his filmography than anything else.
Available to stream on the Criterion Channel and available on physical media.
“Grand Theft Hamlet”
Back in 2020, when we were all in the early days of the pandemic, I kept seeing people say one sentiment over and over:
“Just think of all the great art we’ll get from this time period!”
Well. It’s five years later, and not only has there not been a lot of great art explicitly about the pandemic (give or take a Zoom-and-doom horror film, a “Kinves Out” sequel and a dystopian sci-fi novel), one of the only great pieces of art is about two friends trying to stage a rendition of “Hamlet” inside the “Grand Theft Auto Online” universe.
“Grand Theft Hamlet” is a pseudo-documentary filmed entirely inside the game world of “GTA Online,” pulled from streamer recordings of two out-of-work actor friends in London who started playing more video games together during lockdown. One day, while their avatars are running from the cops, they discover an amiptheater in virtual Los Santos. An idea sparks: What if we put on a show here? One of them starts doing the “To be or not to be…” monologue, and then it’s off to the races.
What follows is a darkly funny, surprisingly moving story about the power of friendship, the importance of creating art in a world that’s on fire, and the value of community during hard times. And how awesome it is to shout Shakespeare monologues while shooting a rocket launcher at a helicopter.
Now playing in theaters.
“Presence”
Man, I love Steven Soderbergh. “Presence,” his latest film, is a haunted house story shot from the perspective of the ghost. It’s just the latest cinematic experiment from the director who within the last 10 years gave us “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” “Kimi,” “No Sudden Move,” “High Flying Bird,” “Unsane” and “Logan Lucky” — and that’s without mentioning the “Ocean’s” trilogy, “Erin Brokovich,” “Traffic” and “Out of Sight.”
This film works more as a camera experiment than a fully fleshed-out story; the camera (that is, the ghost) shakes, withdraws, moves in a way that feels like it’s crying, glides over the whole house. For a while it seems like we, the viewers, are meant to be the ghosr, until a jarring final moment provides the film’s only jump-scare. It’s haunting and heartbreaking in equal measure.
The central performances of the family experiencing the haunting are also much more layered than one would expect, especially Chris Sullivan, AKA Toby from “This Is Us.” His relationship with his daughter forms the emotional heart of the movie, and it’s beautiful to watch.
Now playing in theaters.
“So Long At The Fair”
The Criterion Channel’s 24/7 section is a continuous feed of random movie programing. It doesn’t tell you information about any movie currently playing unless you check out its “What’s on now” website, so clicking on that section replicates the feeling of stumbling upon a movie on a random channel pre-smart TVs.
The 24/7 feed was how I found “So Long At The Fair” earlier this month, about a woman (Jean Simmons) who travels to Paris with her brother to witness the Exposition Universelle in 1889. The brother (David Tomlinson- George Banks from “Mary Poppins”) goes to bed one night, and then doesn’t come down for breakfast the next day. When the sister goes to check on him, she finds his hotel room has vanished, and the hotel staff says he never checked in. Creepy!
This formula would be repeated later by Alfred Hitchcok and several others, but this version is a lot of fun anf features some great face acting from Simmons.
Available to stream on the Criterion Channel or Prime Video and available on physical media.
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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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