The wallop that was Tár ensured my new movie-going year was off to a punch-drunk start.
Limiting my exposure to trailers (I try to generally avoid these days) meant I was not prepared for what happened. Easily the best screenplay of the year, and driven by a career-best Cate Blanchett performance, Tár is a sniper of a film, respecting its audience to read whatever it will above and below the lines. By my third viewing, I had a LOT of questions. Like, does the last thirty minutes only happen in the protagonists head? Here’s hoping that filmmaker Todd Field gets to make more than the handful of movies he’s given us to date.
For Steven Spielberg, the soberest of his generation of filmmakers, cinema IS the drug. Which he reminded us of last year when his long delayed remake of West Side Story hit us post-pandemic with all the directorial exuberance of a young turk. Choosing to pass on another Indiana Jones, instead he slid from the west side of New York to growing up in the midwest in the 50s and 60s for his semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, a subversive, coming of age family tale, glistening with the oxy-moron of nostalgic realism. How much would YOU sacrifice to make movies? How about everything? Yes, Stevie does.
They say real movie stars are hard to come by these days. I say watch Franz Rogowski in Ira Sach’s drama Passages. He plays a gay film director whose marriage is turned upside down when he begins an affair with a woman. Whatever your judgments are of his behaviour towards his husband (Ben Winshaw) and the woman in question (Adèle Exarchopoulos) you will not be able to keep your eyes off of Rogowski from the moment he walks into any scene, whether for his sartorial choice or his matter-of-fact electric delivery. While not ostensibly a comedy, the dinner scene with Exarchopoulos’ parents is the funniest I’ve seen in any movie this year.
I miss films about real people. I realised this when I saw Full Time (À plein temps), starring Laura Calamy. Check out this for a plot: "Just when Julie finally gets an interview for a job that will let her raise her children better, she runs into a national transit strike." Yes, one of the coolest, pulse-pounding flicks of the year is about a blue collar worker just trying to live. A Cinemascope race backwards and forwards through the city of Paris complete with a Carpenter-esque score and Calamy’s seemingly limitless energy. The final moment is SO earned.
The aforementioned Indiana Jones earned his grand finale in Dial of Destiny, as did Harrison Ford, an utter joy to watch in his last appearance as a beloved character many of my generation grew up with. I took my dad to see this in town and we had a great night at the pictures. We would be so bold as to suggest an Oscar nomination is much deserved? Yes, Steven Spielberg’s visual wit is absent, but the whole cast and crew give this twenty-minutes-too-long movie (though the last twenty minutes is probably the best sequence in the movie) everything they’ve got. Can’t wait to watch this at home again.
I can’t confess to being a Barbenheimer acolyte. But from a professional point of view, the release of these two films were probably the most important of the year. While Barbie was a digital release (ingest into system, press play... Picture? Sound? Okay, good to go) the preparation of the brand new 70mm print of Oppenheimer sucked up my summer. The months leading up to it required testing and re-testing of all our 70mm bits, sound reader, amps, speakers, projector, lens. And you all showed up, making Christopher Nolan’s film the most successful in the history of the Irish Film Institute. Looking down from the projection booth at those full houses night after night helped push my COVID memories further back into the dark - though, somewhat ironically, under the blinding flash of something even more horrible.
Estonian film maker, Anna Hints, brought me one of the most touching moments of the year when she led an introductory chant at the IFI before the premiere of her documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, where "in the darkness of a smoke sauna women share their innermost secrets." Some of the stories told will make you weep at the mere thought of how difficult it must’ve been to even say them out loud. Anna’s powerful film has since become Estonia’s official submission for the Oscars. The telling of these harrowing tales carries a great power and energy, which ultimately steals from their grimness to make their experiences empowering despite their suffering.
Once in a while, we all need a reminder of what planet Ireland once was. It takes forty-five minutes to knock down the Church of Annunciation in Finglas in Ellen Rowley’s new film essay, Making Dust. And even then it’s not completely gone. This short documentary features oral interviews from local residents played over scenes of the church's destruction. The doc’s recent world premiere at the IFI was accompanied by a Radharc short from 1974, Churches for Our Children, showing the construction and the professionally planned fund raising of similar mega-churches throughout Dublin in the early 70s. The screening was almost like watching a sci-fi movie. All these aliens, all those attitudes... they were once us.
The KIller = pure cinema. Yes, that movie that popped up on your Netflix feed about a hitman is one of the greatest cinema experiences you could've had all year. It did receive a short big-screen release the month before its streaming debut. Still, it’s appalling to have to watch a David Fincher movie on any screen smaller than a picture house. Every square of acreage on that Cinemascope image has been curated within an inch of its life.
Never madly in love with Michael Fassbinder, I have to declare nobody could play this role but him: a hitman has a bad day at work and cleans up the resulting mess. What we get is a systematic, blow by blow account of the struggles of the modern gig economy. Okay, he’s a wealthy professional killer, but murder is a zero hour contract. If Jason Bourne is the king of action improvisation, Fassbender’s killer is the emperor of preparation. One of my favourite things about the picture: another more traditional action movie, twice, tries to butt its way into Fincher’s take on the story. But our killer is having none of that.
And what of 2024? The year in which Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood deliver their (allegedly) final works. George Miller returns to the desert, and Robert Eggers returns to horror - both with Anna Taylor Joy in tow. Tony Zierra finally gets to release his long delayed documentary on Eyes Wide Shut (SK:13 Kubrick’s Nightmare Dream). And there will be no new Star Wars movie, but there will be a new Bong Joon-ho film set in space, starring Robert Pattinson. Whether up in the booth or down in the screen, count me in for all of the above and whatever else, because, you know, all hail the motion picture!
