Alleged Beef

With 2020 finally winding down, I figured it would be a good time to think about my year. It became clear in March that I’d be leaving my home less than once per week for the foreseeable future. So like many people, I looked to my hobbies as a means to distract from the innumerable things that I’m not going to mention here, but which we all know about. 2020 was a wild fuckin’ year, to be reductive.

I ended up making a list of goals to steer my hobby, though, so that I wasnt doing the 2020 equivalent of channel surfing. These goals were never explicitly written, but manifested over time. I did not meet all of them, but I did enough that I am pretty happy overall. I’ll talk about the first five goals here in Part 1 and will wrap them up in Part 2, releasing next week.

The end of this article also highlights my favorite movies of the year, both those released this year and those I saw for the first time this year..

Goal 1. Revisit childhood favorites

I’d call this a resounding success. I was very interested in targeting movies that were personal milestones, or movies that were VHS favorites for which I was almost certainly too young. I like how our relationship to art changes as we age. I’m not and will never be someone who tries to keep the world in stasis. We are reshaped daily by events around us, by bits of our bodies expiring and being replaced by new cells (or not), by chance encounters, bad dreams, or “just a bit of undigested beef,” to quote an author I dislike. A movie that you loved at age 10 may seem dumb now; you may now identify with a character you hated; some cinematic flourish or joke that you thought was incredible you now realize was an homage to some earlier movie.

A bit of clarification, though. I’ve continued rewatching movies like Clue and Back to the Future, so they don’t merit mention here. I’m talking about films that have a one-, two-, or three-decade gap since I last saw them.

 

Unforgiven

I was ten when this movie released in theaters in August 1992, but I saw it on VHS, so it was probably winter or spring 1993, meaning I was probably eleven (I recall the VHS case touting its Best Picture Oscar, so that also means it was after February 1993). I was later pulled into that predatory BMG/Columbia House mail-order scam, but at this point we were just receiving the catalogs. I used to read the catalog of movie titles, memorizing actors and dates and directors and plots. We didn’t have internet, so it wasn’t until later that I’d see the AFI lists and, in my biggest level-up moment, get access to Roger Ebert’s writing for the Chicago Sun-Times. But from an early age, I had this weird bed of movie trivia about hundreds of movies that I had never seen.

And part of that trivia was Oscar winners. I really wanted to see Oscar winners, believing  that the Academy Awards represented some important mark of success for a film (A Beautiful Mind, I think, made me realize that people just like famous actors pretending to be famous people). It has since become apparent that humans like pageantry as much as we like list-making and gambling, and awards shows give us all three.

Anyway, back to the Best Picture-winning Unforgiven. The movie is very R-rated, starting with a scene of sexual violence and ending with a dying evil man coldly realizing that he inadvertently roused the anger of a much more evil man. My family was waaaay into Westerns, which meant that I was (and am) way into Westerns. So I think it snuck past the parental censors in a way that other contemporaneous films didn’t.

I was no stranger to the ways that Eastwood’s westerns were different than, say, John Ford’s, but Unforgiven is the apotheosis of the Eastwood Western. Even at 11 years old, I knew that this movie was presenting things that I just didn’t get.

I owned the DVD a few years later, but almost certainly haven’t seen the movie since 2001-ish. I watched the 4K blu ray yesterday, and I was very happy to do so. The movie is incredible, especially Gene Hackman, Frances Fisher, and Morgan Freeman. I’d remembered the guitar/piano score but loved it more this time around. And I guess that I’m finally old enough to be kind of disgusted at all of the characters. Violence begets violence, and Little Bill’s underreaction to the knife attack in the opening scene leads to his overreactions later. Really interesting movie.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

This one came out in 1991, and was also a VHS staple. I guess that its cultural footprint was so large (including children’s toys) that it was another movie that snuck into rotation for a preteen.

This was also a 4K blu ray, and like Unforgiven, I was very happy to see the restoration print: looks way better than the old VHS on a tube TV, that’s for sure.

I’d seen this one a lot in my teens and early twenties, so this was probably about 15 years since I saw it last. I hadn’t forgotten any of the plot points, but I did forget just how rousing that score is (I refer to the horns; the DUNHDUNH dunh DUNHDUNH percussion has never left my brain since the first time I heard it).

I was again reminded why Joe Morton is one of my favorite character actors, as he really delivers Miles Dyson’s conflicting feelings about what is happening to him and what his work means for the future of humanity. Also want to shout out Linda Hamilton for being an early influence on my taste in women.

But at its heart, this is an Arnie movie, and I wanted to mention what I took away most from this viewing. He’s really, really good in this. His one-liners aren’t James Bondian asides, but are part of the fabric of conversation. The fact that they became iconic and were imitated by millions of people, thus losing their context and subtlety, is a bummer. He really does a good job of behaving like a thinking machine.

This movie slaps so hard.

French Kiss

This came in 1995 but I didn’t see it until 1998 or 1999. I had some affection for romantic comedies like The Princess Bride and Romancing the Stone, but those were also action movies. In high school I dated a girl who seemingly only watched romantic comedies, so I saw a bunch of them in a short amount of time. This was one.

This one ended up being a retroactive addition to this list, because while I had a loose fondness for the movie, it wasn’t super high on my list of rewatches. Instead, I had bought it because I was making my way through Lawrence Kasdan’s films, and this one was $5 on bestbuy.com.

I think the movie is worth watching if you haven’t, and if you enjoy Kevin Kline in lovable rogue mode, and if you find Meg Ryan cute while in maximum neuroses, but there are some script problems that don’t do any favors for the leads.

On a more personal, bittersweet note, I cannot remember the girl’s name.

Pulp Fiction

I saw this on pay-per-view at a friend’s house, and it was eye-opening. I hadn’t seen any movies up to that point that got away with dialogue like this. This is not to suggest that Tarantino invented naturalistic dialogue, but only to say that my movie life up to 1994 was a lot of stagey Westerns, action schlock, and kid’s movies, so Pulp Fiction was one of my first experiences with hearing characters be as coarse and dumb as people are in real life.

My last watch was in the early 2000s, as I’d gotten bored with Tarantino after Kill Bill. This viewing, the movie was funnier than I’d remembered, and I’d forgotten how much time it gives to Butch and Fabienne. The racial slurs remain jolting and unnecessary, and what I was most surprised about in this viewing was how many more there were throughout the movie. I’d remembered the infamous Jimmie scene, but the casual Asian, Mexican, and Black slurs are ubiquitous.

As I said in my November write-up, if you are able to compartmentalize that, the rest of the movie is still interesting and weird.

Dances with Wolves

This was one that I wanted to rewatch for a long time. I watched it on VHS a million times as a kid, and was another one of those proud movie geek achievements as a kid (“I own TWO westerns that won Best Picture in the 1990s!”), but I don’t think that I’d seen the movie since the 90s.

The dialogue around the film has overshadowed it, which was why it was so high on my list. I wanted to remember the film to better engage with the dialogue. The internet has been a vital resource in helping more voices be heard. And as a culture, we are slowly and painfully and begrudgingly acknowledging the wreck that European expansion and slavery made of this continent.

There are writers and historians who have thought more about the movie (such as here and here) and can better talk about the portrayal of Native Americans in cinema. From my tiny corner of existence, I think that the movie seems respectful than most Hollywood Westerns that preceded it, but is also a prime example of how much more progress remains to be made.

From an experiential perspective, I think this movie is one of the most beautiful films that I’ve ever seen, on par with Lawrence of Arabia, The Revenant, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Princess Mononoke, or Throne of Blood. And I can’t think of another Western this elegiac and melancholy, as the characters and the audience know what lies ahead of these indigenous peoples in the coming years.

 

Goal 2. Start a danged website

If you’re reading this, then you know that I finally did it. Like every other film nut of a certain age (i.e., too old to change career paths, young enough that podcasts and YouTube are omnipresent in my life), I wanted to write and talk about movies again.

I started out with a flurry of writing, but trailed off. I need to learn about web design, social media, digital art, and figure just how the heck to engage with people in a world of Twitch and TikTok and Instagram and the streaming wars.

Look for some fun changes in the new year, which I’ll just tease with this:

We might have a podcast in the works, and we might do occasional watch parties.

 

Goal 3. Be responsible about said website

This could be part of #2, but I wanted to emphasize it, as this is sort of axiomatic if you know me. I am pretty DIY, and wanted my site from day one to not use other people’s copyrighted or trademarked work without attribution. The art on this site has either been drawn by me or photographed by me, and while this adds a fun lo-fi Guided By Voices aesthetic to Alleged Beef, it also slows my production schedule. I am fine with that trade-off. Until I get a better idea of what we’re doing here and know what kinds of labor to outsource, I’ll be writing, editing, and illustrating at my snail’s pace.

 

Goal 4. Average out at a movie per day

As of this writing, I’m at 363 movies watched in 2020. I have 20 days to watch 3 more movies (it’s a leap year).

It is almost certainly a personal record, but I’ve never before taken the time to catalogue my watch habits, so who knows. I’ve probably watched more overall stuff on a TV in a calendar year before, because all of those Seinfeld and Law & Order and Arrested Development marathons add up.

<embarrassed cough> I did rewatch most of Seinfeld this year too. And Venture Bros. and Halt and Catch Fire. But I’m not counting them here.

Movie watching became an obsession this year. But I never felt it dominating my free time, thanks to the lack of commute, no ability to socialize in person with anyone but my wife, and my chronic insomnia. Just losing the commute has given me back roughly 1.5 hours per weekday (and even more per-day in the greyest, iciest part of Pittsburgh winter and in PennDOT season). It will be hard going back to that commute, post-vaccine, let me tell you. I’ll have a lot of thinking to do when that day comes.

 

Goal 5. Figure out what the heck has been popular the past decade outside of comic books

Part 2 will cover other gaps in my movie knowledge. But the biggest temporal gap was from about 2008 to 2019. I changed cities, changed careers, got married, spent far too much time on Magic: The Gathering, had other real-life stuff happen, and generally movies took a backseat to everything else.

As a consequence, I got to the theater only a couple of times per year, and it was often for lame-ass Marvel movies.

I didn’t catch Public Enemies or Blackhat in the theater, movies that may well be Michael Mann’s last theatrical releases. I missed The Shape of Water and The Revenant and every big movie that didn’t involve a planet-destroying calamity and a mutant/supergenius/norse god. I caught a few things here and there, but the decade was mostly a blur of releases.

So I managed to catch up on a lot of movies (see the 2020 In Movies page), and I’m very happy that I did. One often meets people in life who were into a specific hobby and lost interest or lost time for it, and with movies and music and theater, you can get a general idea for when that break happened. It was rewarding (if daunting) for me to catch back up (although I’ve yet to see the notorious Green Book or Joker, and I hate the Eddie Redmayne awards season bait oeuvre).

A few monumental talents like Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Barry Jenkins, Patty Jenkins, and Margot Robbie were new or newish to me. For familiar ones, like the Coen brothers, I caught up on their work like Inside Llewyn Davis, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Hail, Caesar!.

I came away with the impression that the 2010s were a decade rich in talent despite the disneyfication of the studio system.

 

The Best of 2020

Actual 2020 Releases

I didn’t catch a lot of new movies this year. These were the highlights, though.

• Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn was anarchic fun. The movie struck exactly the right tone by making Harley seem like a Looney Tunes character in her own head and an agent of chaos to everyone else, tolerated because of her connection to a certain clown prince of crime.
• Extraction was an interesting actioner in the post-John Wick, post-Sicario universe. I think it was successful in achieving some aims (showcase a cityscape that may be unfamiliar to Americans, massive amounts of choreography, David Harbour) and less successful in others (stop trying to make Chris Hemsworth an action guy when he’s so much better at comedy).
• The Vast of Night is my favorite movie of the year. I’ve already talked about it several times on the site. Virtuoso camerawork in a Spielbergian thriller is a must-watch for this ol’ cowboy.
• Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga works mostly because the songs are dope and Rachel MacAdams is a national treasure. I sing “Ja Ja DingDong” basically every day.
• Hubie Halloween was more pleasant than expected. I look forward to a rewatch next Halloween.

What I wanted to see but didn’t: Nomadland, Small Axe, First Cow, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Da 5 Bloods, Palm Springs

New to Me in 2020

• The Revenant (2015) is an incredible, bracing film about an 18th century tracker left for dead in the northern wilderness in the winter. Imagine Werner Herzog but with lush cinematography and even more fatalism.
• Gravity (2013) was one of those experiences that I regret missing in the theater. I’ve read how they shot the movie, and I get the gist of it, but I watch it on the screen and am 100% engaged with the reality presented there. This is a flat-out masterpiece in tension, putting claustrophobic schlock like Cloverfield to shame.
• Arrival (2016) is an elegantly constructed science fiction film that telegraphs its twists but doesn’t fall apart if you see them coming.
• Lone Star (1996) is another John Sayles drama. His writing twists me up like few other screenwriters can. The film feels at once prescient for our current battle between objective fact and propaganda (the yearbook argument in particular felt pulled from 2020) and sadly dated for how it neatly cuts a path of moving on past the sins of our forefathers. It’s hard to redress problems that the party in power refuses to acknowledge even exist.
• Blow Out (1981): I’m not a Brian DePalm stan… or maybe I am? I find it odd that he gets knocked for his tendency toward Hitchcockian mimicry when Fincher has spent his whole career aping Jonathan Demme, Nolan just does noisy Michael Mann, and Tarantino directly steals actors, shots, and costumes from other directors. Blow Out is a really interesting political thriller, similar to Three Days of the Condor. I super recommend it, as Nancy Allen, John Travolta, and John Lithgow all give career performances.
• Body Heat (1981)… this is one of the hottest noir movies you’ll ever see. Kathleen Turner and William Hurt basically ignite the television screen for 110 minutes. It’s twisty, the supporting cast is great, and it bridges the gap between classics like Double Indemnity and more recent fare like Gone Girl.
• Uncut Gems (2019) is not even my favorite Safdie brothers movie that I saw this year (Good Time being twice as tense and nerve-wracking), but it’s a must-see for Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, and LaKeith Stanfield. Watching a career swindler do his thing is kind of fun, but the Safdies manage to up the tension by having him in debt to his brother-in-law. The family gathering scenes alone are worth a watch.
• Sorcerer (1977) is one of two William Friedkins that grace the list (and the banner!). This movie had the cosmic misfortune of opening against STAR WARS. Its reputation has been saved in recent years. The soundtrack is amazing, the movie is tense as hell, and the damned trucks, damned drivers, and damned wooden bridges are iconic.
• Three Colors Trilogy (Red, Blue, White) (1993, 1994, 1994): A legendary director and one of two legendary film series from him (along with Dekalog). I was very happy to have this set lent to me by a friend. I was most drawn to White, and the plight of its lead character, played by Zbigniew Zamachowski, as it was interesting that we watch him build his life back up only to discover that he was planning revenge the whole time (and even then, we still root for him). Red was fascinating too, but Blue was hard to engage with. I love Juliette Binoche but the character’s trauma was too much for me. Her search for identity left me frustrated and cold (which, admittedly, was probably the point). These three films are a huge recommend.
• To Live and Die in LA (1985) is the other Friedkin on my list. This is a fun, trashy noir film about US Secret Service who are hunting a counterfeiter (super young Willem Dafoe) and, well, let’s just say that they view the legal system as a results-based process.  There’s very little that Chance won’t do to crack the case. The car chase is absolutely a landmark in action cinema (on top of Friedkin’s other landmark chase in The French Connection).
• Che: The Argentine (2008): Soderbergh’s two-parter about the revolutionary campaigns of Che Guevara is fascinating. I prefer part one (The Argentine) as the filming locations are more interesting to me. The urban warfare is especially captivating. I like that the film starts out with a detailed map, so that you immediately grok to the logistics of the campaign. Benicio Tel Doro is also fantastic in the lead, and the supporting cast is too numerous to mention here.

 

The Worst of 2020, and the other five goals, will be in Part 2. In the words of John Landis, See You Next Wednesday!