After some light movie viewing recently I made a concerted effort to get a few more things watched this week and work through what’s in my backlist pile. One of those was a title I had picked up this week with the 2018 film Suspiria, an homage sorta remake but not of the original 1977 Dario Argento film. I haven’t seen that film as I struggle with ’70s Italian films to begin with and Argento in particular. But this one had me intrigued and on my list for some time since it never came to any theaters near me back in 2018.
A film like this is like Hereditary to me in that it’s a project that’s designed to make you feel uncomfortable and disturbed. A whole lot of filmmaking is very safe and that means a lot of very safe experiences. I’m not a fan of horror in general and certainly not in the theater, though there’s something for that group experience that comes from it. But it’s just more than my heart can take! Suspiria being a soft remake/home piece meant that it was a lot more detailed and expressive of the period, giving us a late ’70s Germany, as it explores the dance studio, the politics and tension of the time, and the intensity of the dancers themselves. There’s a really strong slow build to much of it as we start to figure out what’s going on and how it all connects and then like Hereditary it goes into the horrifying and disturbing that has left me chilled for days since then. Tilda Swanson is, as usual, fascinating to watch on screen but I was just blown away by Dakota Johnson. She’s done a lot of different projects over the years even if people know her mostly by her Fifty Shades work, but I really liked her in How to be Single a few years back. Here, she’s unrecognizable and intense in a way that really did reinforce she has a career that’s worth watching.
This week also had a family movie viewing night with Venom as that was high on the to-see list for awhile but was something we didn’t hit up in the theater. The film was a hard one as a comics fan to watch because they did get a lot of things right in a basic sense but it lacked what it needed in a Spidey sense to really be right. I get why they did what they did and I’m still surprised it was as huge as it was, but that’s the size of the fanbase for the character. I still wish the Life film a couple of years ago was the backdoor entrance for this! Tom Hardy did a solid job in this and sold a lot of what made it work and I thought Michelle Williams added some really good character material alongside it while staying playing within the usual. I’m curious to see what’s next for it but it’s still a huge case of missed opportunities when you get down to it.
Another film I caught this week was Conception. Sometimes you end up checking out a film because reasons. With this film, it was because Tumblr kept showing me pictures of Julie Bowen in lingerie. I like Julie Bowen from Modern Family so this wasn’t a surprise. But it took a bit to figure out where the images were from. She’d done some work like that in the past with an Adam Sandler movie and I really liked her from the Ed TV series, so I wanted to check this out. It was a low budget Tribeca film from 2011 about multiple couples and how they ended up pregnant. None of them cross over with each other but we get similar stages of progress through very different means. It’s not that great but I really liked the cast, such as Pamela Adlon and Jason Mantzoukas among others. It’s an oddly structured movie when you get down to it and though it does all connect in the end I’m not sure if it works well in that way compared to the more traditional interweaving connections ala things like Love Actually.
One thing I did do this past week was set up a playlist of films that I need to watch that are tied to others in the household so we have a proper list to whittle down on without wondering “what should we watch now?” moments. It’s got about 25 films in it with things like Just a Breath Away alongside more Mission: Impossiblemovies and some strange stuff like The Love Witch. But it also dabbles into the older with all of the various Invasion of the Body Snatcher films I want my kids to see for the first time along with things like The Live and The Black Hole. Film education continues!
