Welcome to Part Two of my pandemic film review series! Ten months into spending all of my time in my apartment wearing sweatpants, I made a list of my favorite movies, and started watching them in alphabetical order by title. In this intro post, you can learn more about the project and find links to the other posts in the series. This post contains reviews of movies #11-21.
And Then We Danced (2019)
Basic Info: Written and directed by Levan Akin. Starring Levan Gelbakhiani, Bachi Valishvili, and Ana Javakishvili. It’s in Georgian.
Single Sentence Summary: Two young men in Tbilisi meet in rehearsals for a traditional Georgian dance troupe, fall in love, and face the consequences.
Personal History with This Movie: In the early days of the pandemic, Elena and I watched this together remotely by syncing our video streams and live chatting, as we continue to do every week. I watched it again when it showed up on Amazon Prime, so it’s only been a month or two since I’ve last seen it.
Reflections on Rewatch: I went back and forth about whether to include movies from the past couple of years in my list. I have a pretty good sense after the first viewing if something is going to be a lifelong Sarah Daniel Classic, so there’s a handful of very new films in the mix. First of these is And Then We Danced, which I’ve been boring everyone about since I saw it at the dawn of the pandemic. I still love the things I initially loved about it. It makes Tbilisi look like a fairy tale kingdom, but a troubled and run-down one. The lead actor, in the first starring role of his career, is magnetic. The dancing is incredible. Surely, I’ll be less fixated on this movie in a year or two, but I think it’s going to hold up as a favorite film in the long run.
Annie Hall (1977)
Basic Info: Directed by Woody Allen. Written by Allen and Marshall Brickman. Starring Allen, Diane Keaton, and Tony Roberts. There are tons of quality cameos: Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Mark Lenard (aka Sarek of Vulcan), John Glover, Jeff Goldblum, and Sigourney Weaver. And Marshall McLuhan as himself, of course.
Single Sentence Summary: A man reflects on his relationship with the titular Annie, what went wrong, and its context in the rest of his life.
Personal History with This Movie: I rented this during the Great Binge when I was in high school. I own it on DVD and have watched it many times since, although I’ve avoided it for at least ten years as even Allen’s best work has become difficult to watch in good conscience.
Reflections on Rewatch: I wish I didn’t like Annie Hall so much, but as a short, bespectacled, high-strung Jew, I still see myself in Alvy Singer an awful lot. For every oy vey scene (the flashback to Alvy’s second marriage where he initiates sex while his wife says no repeatedly), there’s a timeless moment, like the lobsters getting loose in the kitchen or the first date conversation with subtitles. Almost all of the jokes still land, and it pulls off a nonlinear narrative like almost nothing else. Others have written eloquently about the challenge of accepting Allen’s films’ importance while reviling his behavior, and I wonder how Allen’s career as well as his personal life might have gone differently if he’d aspired to the fundamental humanity and respect for women that Alvy strives for. I’m so mad at this movie for holding up as well as it does.
Antonia’s Line (1995)
Basic Info: Written and directed by Marleen Gorris. Starring Willeke van Ammelrooy, Els Dottermans, Veerle van Overloop, and Jan Decleir. It’s in Dutch.
Single Sentence Summary: The life of a woman and three generations of her descendants, set in a small Dutch town over a fifty-year span.
Personal History with This Movie: I saw this with friends at the art house movie theater in my hometown when I was in high school. I bought it on DVD and made people watch it a lot in college. It’s been about 15 years since I last watched it.
Reflections on Rewatch: Antonia’s Line is a big, cozy blanket of a movie, and the first on my list to make me cry. It’s brutal in places, far more so than I remembered – lots of rape and revenge wrapped up in a feminist fable of a Dutch village. But mostly, this is a sweet and unfussy tale about found family and how to live and love well. The visuals don’t all hold up: I don’t think they had the effects budget for some of the magical realism concepts they were going for. The vistas of the rural Netherlands still look great, though. Few movies are as successful at getting into the minds of neurodiverse and intellectually disabled people and honoring their emotional and sexual lives. (If this were remade, it would need to be cast with disabled actors, of course.) Sure, it’s a little saccharine, but if you don’t find this movie endearing, you’re an insufferable cynic.
The Apartment (1960)
Basic Info: Directed by Billy Wilder. Written by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond. Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray, with great supporting performances by Ray Walston, Edie Adams, Jack Kruschen, and Hope Holiday.
Single Sentence Summary: An office worker gains favor with his superiors by letting them use his apartment for their extramarital affairs, but things spiral out of control as their demands on his space and privacy increase, and as he falls for the boss’s mistress.
Personal History with This Movie: A defining moment in the Great Binge of my high school days. I bought it on DVD and watched it loads of times. It’s been about ten years since the last time, though.
Reflections on Rewatch: When people ask me what my favorite movie is, and a short answer is called for, I say it’s The Apartment. It might not be the best movie ever made, but I can’t think of a better one. Jack Lemmon was a master of physical comedy because he could draw a laugh out of mundane objects without going over the top (he gets tremendous mileage out of a bottle of nose spray here). But the cast is great all the way down, and I have a new appreciation for forgotten comedy hero Edie Adams. There’s an essay to be written about Jewish coding, representation, and passing that I’m probably qualified to write. It’s one of the great New York movies, with an unusually authentic lived-in view of the city, and one of the great mid-century critiques of postwar capitalism. It might be my actual favorite movie.
Bonus Tracks: One of my friends on Discord requested the additional essay on Jewish coding and representation. I did attempt to write it, but it turned out to require more research into film history and midcentury Jewish culture than I have time to get into. The short version is, the director and his co-writer were both Jewish Americans who emigrated from Europe to the United States as the Nazi Party and antisemitism in general were rising. They talked and acted more like the stereotypically Jewish – and warmly altruistic – Dr. Dreyfus than like the conflicted, gentile-passing but Jewish-coded Buddy Baxter. The more Buddy’s actions conform with the Dreyfus’s neighborly morality, the more endearing he is; the more he tries to blend into the Protestant work ethic and interpersonal carelessness of his employer, the deeper he sinks into trouble. I’m not going to go so far as to say The Apartment is an anti-assimilationist model for Jewish integration into American society, but I’m not going to say it’s not that.
The Avengers (2012)
Basic Info: Directed by Joss Whedon. Written by Whedon and Zak Penn. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, and Tom Hiddleston, with significant supporting performances by Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Clark Gregg, Cobie Smulders, and Paul Bettany.
Single Sentence Summary: When Loki, Asgard’s sullen bastard prince, becomes a mind-controlling interdimensional threat, a team of heroes – some reluctant, others with clashing personalities, most familiar from previous movies – assembles to save the world.
Personal History with This Movie: I saw this in the theater with a group of friends and have watched it on cable or streaming many, many times since. It’s been about a year since the last time it was on my screen.
Reflections on Rewatch: Boy, does The Avengers feel bloated after a bunch of movies in a row that do everything they need to do in under two hours. At the same time, it’s hard to think of much that’s unnecessary. It really is one of the best superhero movies ever made, at a time when Marvel still prioritized script quality and acting as much as big explosions. This is sharp and funny; it gives the actors a lot to do (even Jeremy Renner!) and they rise to the material. Black Widow is less a coherent character than a bundle of Joss Whedon action girl fetishes, and the Hulk CGI is starting to look rusty. It’s also a lot of white dudes for such a recent film. No Marvel villain rivals Loki for charm or menace, and Tom Hiddleston just about walks away with this thing. With so many comic book movies following the MCU template, this doesn’t feel like such a revelation anymore, but it’s still a damn good way to spend an evening.
Away We Go (2009)
Basic Info: Directed by Sam Mendes. Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. Starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, with a killer supporting cast including Allison Janney, Carmen Ejogo, Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, Jim Gaffigan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey, and Paul Schneider.
Single Sentence Summary: A married couple expecting their first child travels across North America, visiting friends and family as they search for a place to settle down.
Personal History with This Movie: I DVRed this about a year after it was released and watched it at home alone with the cats. I haven’t seen it since, so it’s been about 10 years.
Reflections on Rewatch: When I put this on the list, I couldn’t believe it was more than 10 years old, but within the first few minutes, it had clearly crawled right out of 2009. It’s a time capsule of Xennial delayed adulthood, but an apt one. For the first 20 minutes or so, I wasn’t sure it was holding up because of that time capsule feeling, but once I got a sense of its rhythms, it won me over. It’s a road movie where the journey is from one personal relationship to the next and a romantic movie about a couple whose primary tensions are with the outside world, not with each other. The performances are all intimate and real, even the ones that go big. It’s It does some nice things with racism and well-meaning lefty microaggressions. It’s a self-contained little snow globe of a movie that I’m glad I revisited.
Babe (1995)
Basic Info: Directed by Chris Noonan. Written by Noonan and George Miller. Starring James Cromwell and Magda Szubanski; the voices of Christine Cavanaugh, Miriam Margolyes, and Hugo Weaving; and many talented animal actors.
Single Sentence Summary: A piglet on a small family farm discovers he has a talent for herding sheep.
Personal History with This Movie: I saw this in the theater with my grandparents and brother. My family owned it on VHS, and I later bought a copy on DVD, so I’ve seen it at least a dozen times. Most recently, Ami and I chose it for some pandemic comfort viewing about six months ago.
Reflections on Rewatch: Babe isn’t a children’s movie so much as a movie that’s accessible to people of all ages. It’s gentle, but it’s not simple. The exploration of the relationship between humans and domestic animals doesn’t give any clear answers, although it will be at least a month before I can eat pork. The central fable of the pig who herds sheep by being kind to them isn’t a direct analogy for race relations or transgender experience, or even for honoring and cultivating diverse talents, but it fits into conversations about all those topics. It also fits into current educational research about social-emotional development and equitable conflict and behavior management so well that I want to make all the preschool teachers I work with watch it. But the person I really want to watch it with is my niece. It’s a movie that kids should grow up with, and then watch again as adults.
Barcelona (1994)
Basic Info: Directed and written by Whit Stillman. Starring Taylor Nichols, Chris Eigeman, and Mira Sorvino.
Single Sentence Summary: Two American expats in Barcelona navigate culture clashes, romance, and their own arrested development.
Personal History with This Movie: I rented this when I was in high school, within a year or two of its release, and watched it with friends. I don’t think I’ve seen it since, so it’s been a solid 25 years.
Reflections on Rewatch: I was really into this movie in high school and had forgotten why. The dialogue is mannered in a way that I must have thought was cool when I was 16, and that the characters clearly think is cool within the world of the movie. It’s about a couple of rich, self-absorbed American pricks running around Spain being the worst expats possible, and now that I’ve lived abroad and known some guys like this, I realize this movie subconsciously taught me who I didn’t want to be. The clever trick this movie plays is, even though they’re awful, it’s clear they’re trying to be good people in their own way, so you can’t hate them, only roll your eyes at them. Guys who were like this in their twenties are now in their fifties and running the country. A lot of the movies on my list make their settings look magical, but Barcelona here is the opposite – a drab everycity that the characters are clearly failing to appreciate. This isn’t a triumph of cinema, but it holds up and was fun to revisit.
Barton Fink (1991)
Basic Info: Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring John Turturro, John Goodman, and Judy Davis, plus a deep and fantastic supporting cast including Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Tony Shalhoub, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi, and (hey Star Trek fans!) a Max Grodénchik cameo.
Single Sentence Summary: An idealistic New York playwright suffers from writer’s block while trying to write his first screenplay in an increasingly hellish Los Angeles hotel.
Personal History with This Movie: I rented this when I was in high school, during a serious Coen Brothers binge following the release of another film that will appear on this list. I’ve caught it on cable a couple of times since, but it’s been at least 15 years.
Reflections on Rewatch: Barton Fink is one hell of a weird movie, and I can’t say I understand it any better than I did when I first saw it as a teenager. It’s a horror movie, although it works very hard not to look like one and turns out to be a different kind of horror movie than you think it’s going to be. There’s a point where the events in the film stop being real, but it’s hard to pinpoint when that break happens. It’s a profoundly Jewish movie, and it’s saying something about the particular everyday horror of Jewish generational trauma. What’s more on the surface is its satire of the commodification of art. This movie came up in the queue at the perfect moment, as I was plowing through a work assignment that felt like the equivalent of Barton’s “wrestling picture.” (I got it done.)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Basic Info: Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Written by Linda Woolverton and a room full of Disney staff writers. Original score by Alan Menken. Starring the voices of Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson, Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, and Richard White.
Single Sentence Summary: A bookish girl in a small French town agrees to become a pampered prisoner in a cursed castle, where she falls in love with the Prince, who has been transformed into a monster.
Personal History with This Movie: I saw this in the theater with my family when it came out. My brother and I wore holes in the household VHS tape. A few years ago, I caught bits and pieces while some young relatives were watching it, but I haven’t seen it from beginning to end in at least fifteen years.
Reflections on Rewatch: They literally don’t make ’em like Beauty and the Beast anymore. The hand-drawn animation is lively and quirky, and it all looks so inviting. Best score and songs of any Disney animated musical, and it’s not close. It’s underreported how important Belle was to our generation of bookish weirdos – a very ’90s-feminist version of the Disney princess. There are a couple of cross-dressing and other sexist gags that don’t hold up, but the rest feels fresh and full of wonder. Now as when I was twelve, Beast is hotter when he’s furry and has too many teeth, and I’m pretty sure Belle agrees. It’s a classic and a delight.