Yesterday’s post was all about disappointment, so let’s bounce back today with some positivity. Here are a couple of movies I watched for the first time this year and really enjoyed:
Black Bear (2020, dir. Lawrence Michael Lavine)
I’m really hesitant to say much about Black Bear because if you haven’t seen it, I think it’s best to go in blind and just see what happens. Incredibly mind-bending and wildly entertaining. I feel it was largely forgotten because it had its festival premiere in January 2020 and came out in December of the same year, so not a ton of people were really focused on new movies.
Still trying to hold back on saying anything, even though over 3 years since release seems safe to speak freely. I just don’t want to ruin it for anyone.
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016, dir. Richard Linklater)
Some Linklater redemption after dinging Hit Man yesterday.
Honestly, I don’t know how I overlooked this in the years since it came out. I have a little collection of movies that are about being a freshman guy in college and what that adjustment means, and until recently I had just been totally ignorant to this.
What a fun time! I don’t even care about baseball. Linklater’s more personal movies are such perfect examples of how he makes something so specific to himself that his movies overflow with realness that almost anyone can relate to and get invested in.
I watched this following my disappointment in Hit Man and began to think about Linklater’s filmography as a whole. You could do a pretty solid 4-movie coming-of-age quadfecta by going from Boyhood to Dazed and Confused to Everybody Wants Some!! and then finally arriving at Before Sunrise. You could also throw the rest of the Before trilogy in there if you wanted, but I didn’t want to draw out the whole childhood-to-early-20s thing the 4 movies have going on.
Tenet (2020, dir. Christopher Nolan)
I know this movie has a very dedicated cult following who are very insistent on how you watch this, so I just want to give full disclosure: I watched this on a plane. I know the “intended experience” is a theatre, ideally the biggest and loudest screen possible, but when they did the IMAX re-release a few months ago I just couldn’t find anything in my city (one of the biggest cities in the country, didn’t make any sense why it wasn’t showing).
That being said, better late than never. I’m officially Tenet-pilled. This movie rocks so incredibly hard. I absolutely loved how this envisions time travel, which is a sci-fi/fantasy function that was in desperate need of a fresh take. And sure, maybe the gimmick doesn’t make a ton of sense if you think about it super hard, but I’m not defending a thesis here. Buy in to the “ehhh, does it really matter?” mindset and let it take you on a journey.
Even watching on the seatback screen, I was insanely locked in. Honestly, I would have been just as locked in if this movie was 6 hours. It was so entertaining.
Potentially a weird thought process but:
Immediately after watching Tenet, I followed it by watching Mission: Impossible, which I had also never seen. I was incredibly struck by the similarities of the two films. This led me to think about why Tenet was never franchised (an incredibly rare thought for me, I’m usually good on stuff standing alone) like Mission: Impossible has been. I don’t even necessarily mean a sequel continuing the story of the John David Washington character, just another story in the same universe using the inversion technology. I just want more Tenet (2enet?).