A very movie-heavy Quick Hits this go-around, because 2022 movie season is in full swing! With the Chicago Critics Film Festival coming up next month, it wouldn’t surprise me if this were the case next month as well.
Movies
Plenty of exciting programming went down in Chicago cinemas this month, from the local AMC’s slate of too-weird-for-summer blockbusters to the Music Box Theatre’s sprawling David Lynch retrospective and FACETS’s delightful Halfway to Halloween slate. For a movie fan like yours truly, this abundance was both a blessing for the senses and a bruise to my wallet, and it really made me appreciate living in a city that is a nexus of culture in its own right.
I want to use this space to rank the nine (!!) new releases I saw in theaters this April—only one of which was wholesale bad!—so this is about to be a fairly long Quick Hits newsletter. False advertising, I know, but what are you gonna do? Stop paying me the $0 subscription fee?
(Please don’t. I have a family. They need the clicks.)
9. Mothering Sunday
The less said about this messy and soppy British drama, the better, but I will spare a note here for future star Odessa Young. Between this and Shirley from two years ago, she’s really carving out a niche in roles that require that delicate balance between ingenue and pervert. Someone give her David Cronenberg’s number!
8. Cow
Brutal both on the heartstrings and on the attention span, seeing as it is essentially dialogue-free: A 100-minute document of the life and times of pair of mother-and-child cows. It is an interesting experiment—and director Andrea Arnold is adept enough to wring both a rough narrative and surprising thematic heft from this—but it feels more like a high-concept idea than a film with too much meat on it, pun intended. Notably, they apparently play Angel Olsen for these cows at farms—strong choice.
7. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
While I question the wisdom of employing one of our most singular cinematic presences—in a film meant to celebrate that very singularity, even!—and writing him as Yet Another Bad Dad, it’s difficult to deny that base charms of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Nicolas Cage is indelibly inimitable as always, but Pedro Pascal gives him a delightful scene partner in a cuddly ode to a legend that you nonetheless wish had a little more teeth.
6. The Lost City
Something about The Lost City has me thinking it has home video classic potential. Maybe it’s Channing Tatum rediscovering his movie star muscles in a role that demands that very specific Tatum energy, or maybe it’s Daniel Radcliffe and Brad Pitt having a blast being employed in their best kinds of roles—Radcliffe as a smarmy villain and Pitt as a scene-stealing character actor. Whatever it is, it is a blast that’s destined to be a regular on “Best Rom-Coms You Forgot About” lists for the rest of our days.
5. You Won’t Be Alone
Sure, it’s Terrence Malick cosplay that never makes you feel like you wouldn’t just rather be watching an actual Malick movie, but that shouldn’t detract from You Won’t Be Alone’s gentle beauty and tender performances. Lovingly capturing the Macedonian countryside in ways that evoke fellow witchy classics like The Juniper Tree, You Won’t Be Alone is a feast for the eyes even as it fails to truly bruise the heart.
4. The Northman
Head-empty himbo Viking cinema, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Unlike his last outing The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s The Northman has no illusions about being about much more than dudes going at it in increasingly ludicrous settings and vanishingly smaller and smaller stakes. There is a meditation here about the petty vindictiveness of masculine pride set against the steadfast pragmatism of its women, but one of The Northman’s great strengths (as a friend of mine put it) is its refusal to impose a modern moral code on its characters. Don’t come into this film looking for statements about the world we live in today; if anything, it is about a world that once was and perhaps in a way still is.
3. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is decidedly not a fun time at the movies, but it is one of the most profound and heart-wrenching evocations of loneliness in the Internet Age ever committed to screen. A scrappy and slapdash micro-budget film that is less a hair-raising brand of horror than the kind that crawls under your skin and burrows itself there for days, Schoenbrun’s film is tactile and intimate in ways previous takes on this theme have often failed to be; it feels like an artifact from the inside rather than a dispatch from a distance. Even as it very much suffers from the same flaws that plague most debuts, there is a magic here in its portrayal of our myriad ways of asserting existence in a world where we can no longer simply exist. I had to lie down for a few hours after this.
2. RRR
Outside of the Mission Impossible franchise, Hollywood hasn’t done the best job in recent years marrying adult storytelling with pure adrenaline thrill on a blockbuster level. Fortunately, Indian cinema has stayed true to the movies’ initial and still-honorable purpose of inducing us to laugh, to cry, and to care all at the same time: All that good stuff Nicole Kidman tells us about all the time. A heavily fictionalized biopic about 1920s Indian revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem that incorporates intrigue, bromance, CGI tigers, and incredible dance sequences, it is both everything you’d expect from a big-budget production and an indictment of just how far Western big-budget productions have fallen from their once-lofty ideals. Pure, uncut, grade-A capital-C Cinema still exists, folks; you love to see it.
1. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
I went longer on this during my last newsletter, but it’s been a joy to see this film build the word-of-mouth steam it has over the past few weeks. Beyond being the best 2022 film I’ve seen thus far, it’s also somehow the most accessible movie on this list, offering more than enough sensory thrills while still packing enough thematic heft that audiences won’t soon shake it off. Is the mawkish sentimentality and reliance on silliness occasionally a bit much? Sure, but if a tinge of saccharine is the price you pay for a cornucopia of Michelle Yeoh-fueled brilliance, I’ll gladly pony up.
Other movies I saw and loved this month…
RW = Rewatch
Akira (1988)
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
The Godfather (1972) - RW
Imitation of Life (1959)
Inland Empire (2006)
Pulse (2001)
Showgirls (1995)
The Straight Story (1999)
Videodrome (1983) - RW
Music
I’m going to keep this segment short this month, but I’m going to shout out maybe my favorite new release of the year so far: Hatchie’s Giving the World Away. A delirious combination of dream and dance pop that makes for a potent crying-in-the-club elixir, it’s a record tailor-made for my particular sensibilities. Funnily enough, the current queen of this genre, Carly Rae Jepsen, is dropping her own record next month, so Hatchie’s place atop my 2022 list might well be short-lived.
Other songs I discovered and loved this month…
Odds and Ends
To kick off the month, I caught the travelling production of Moulin Rouge. Much like the film it’s based on (which I also adore, for the record), the musical’s plot is so ludicrous (a theater-kid friend of mine described it as “stupid”) it circles all the way back to brilliant, and the mash-ups remain some of the most disarmingly hilarious things I’ve seen onstage. You haven’t lived till you watch an impeccably performed number that you slowly realize is a dark-reprise mashup of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”. Unforgettable stuff.
I have also been working my way through What About the Rest of Your Life, a memoir by Chicago-based writer Sung Yim that contextualizes their struggle with addiction and recovery into a broader diaspora narrative as a second-generation Korean immigrant negotiating that push-pull between her old and new cultures. It’s a remarkably well-written and achingly heartfelt book that’s left me gasping for air in public more times that I’d care to admit or even account for.
I’ll leave y’all with a passage from the memoir that has stuck with me, about the differences between loving and loving right. See y’all next month.
“As much as love is this miraculous practice of caring for and regarding someone in a certain dazzling light, I know it’s not enough on its own. Because as much as my mom and I both know she failed to love me right, we also both know she always did love me. That’s why love can be both arbitrary and dangerous.”
Fellow Hatchie fan? Wish I focused more on the Lynch retro than Mothering Sunday? Sound off below!