I'm reading a murder mystery and the initial set up with the paterfamilias's will making all his heirs unhappy and sparking chaos made me want to watch Knives Out again (not that that is uncommon). The last two times I watched I intended to pay attention to, like foreshadowing and clues since I knew the ending but I kept getting absorbed in what seemed to be happening now anyway...

Oh Goddammit. Goddammit, Goddammit, Goddammit.

GODDAMMIT 2020.

Chadwick Boseman has passed away from colon cancer.

Heartbreaking

Taken so young. My heart goes out to his family.

I recall seeing a frankly alarming sequence of photos depicting the progression of his physical state the past few years, and hoping it was just increasingly bad cherrypicked images. Suddenly it makes a very sad kind of sense.

A medium-length (~60) Criterion expiring list this month.

Collection-wise, it looks to be most of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Maurice Pialat, and Western Noir (as I had anticipated). That's about half of the list and then everything else is pretty scattered.

My personal September "Get Them Before They're Gone" list:

First and foremost, the rest of Western Noir. I can't recommend this collection enough. The Math Greek and I have watched about half of these and there hasn't been a bad one in the bunch. Lots of interesting female characters to boot.

My personal faves were Day of the Outlaw (Tarantino without the Tarantino, if that makes sense), Blood on the Moon (baby Barbara Bel Geddes!), and Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious with Marlene Dietrich. I also have a fondness for Station West that I can't really explain. The plot is absolutely bonkers but it stars Dick Powell, Jane Greer, Agnes Moorehead, Raymond Burr, and Burl Ives, so, you know, just go with it.

After what's left of Western Noir, I'm prioritizing The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles), A Scandal in Paris (Sirk), Le Vieil Homme et l'enfant (The Two of Us) (Berri), A Dry White Season (Palcy), and The Future (July). Except for the Welles, which I tried to watch in my younger days and never made it all the way through, they are all new to me. I don't consider any of them to be must-sees, so we'll see what happens. After all, I didn't get through that much on last month's priority list, only Kramer vs. Kramer, Day of the Outlaw, My Beautiful Laundrette, and Stop Making Sense.

I did watch a bunch of other good movies, including The Old Guard, on Netflix, Palm Springs, on Hulu, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, on HBO Max, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, which the MG streamed for his weekly Movie Night gang. (He has basically written his own app so they can have a Netflix Party session without relying only on Netflix content.)

I also watched some great silents for my Century Plus project including Stella Maris (1918), Male and Female (1919), The Lost World (1925), and Wings (1927).

But overall I watched fewer movies than usual this past month, partly because of work, but also because the MG and I started watching Le Bureau des légendes (aka The Bureau on Sundance), a fantastic series about French spies starring Mathieu Kassovitz. We've just finished with Season 2 and have 3 more to go so I imagine this month will be similarly slow movie-wise. Pas de regrets, as they say.

How did MY Beautiful Launderette age? I was blown away by it when it was in theaters. Saw it several times.

How did MY Beautiful Launderette age? I was blown away by it when it was in theaters. Saw it several times.

Hard to say. It is definitely very much of its time, but also very ahead of its time and so still fairly relevant topic-wise. I can see why it was popular, but I thought it was just okay. It's very unpolished. More like a first film than it should have been. I didn't dislike it, and I'm glad I saw it, but it's closer to the bottom of my August rankings than the top. That said, I read that Kumail Nanjiani is supposed to be making a television series out of it and I would be very interested to see what he does with it.

Speaking of things being of their time or out of their time, we watched two fascinating documentaries this week: Class Action Park, on HBO Max, and California Typewriter, on Criterion. The first is a wild look at an incredibly dangerous New Jersey water park in the 80s. The second is a meditative look at typewriters and their place in the modern world. I wasn't intending to watch the first, but the MG put it on and I just got sucked in by the insanity of it all. The latter had me wishing we were in normal times so that I could cross the Bay and buy a typewriter at California Typewriter.

Action Park is so legendary in its disregard for safety we've even heard of it down here in "Y'all Watch This!" country.

Dune trailer.

Holy fuck.