Best of September

Fall is our favorite time of year so we're going to keep relishing it however quickly it vanishes. The movies get really exciting and we don't feel exhausted yet with the holidays + incessant Oscar mania. But alas, the first month of fall is already (just about) a wrap.

Herewith a bakers dozen fav posts from September in case you missed them:

• Wildlife - Chris is thrilled by Carey Mulligan & Paul Dano's beautiful drama
• Funny Girl at 50 - Tim looks at Babs' ageless Oscar-winning star turn
• TIFF Jury of One - Nathaniel hands out honors for 'best in fest'
• Cynthia Erivo to play Harriet Tubman - Murtada is watching her career
• A Prayer for Alessandro - Jason highlights one of the best turns of the year, Alessandro Nivola in Disobedience
• Roma - Nathaniel on Alfonso Cuarón's personal/visual triumph
• Destroyer - Nathaniel watches Kidman transform
• Adventures in Babysitting - Chris takes in lipsync queen Elisabeth Shue in his Soundtracking series
• Black Mirror: USS Callister - Jorge discusses the screenplay of one of TV's brightest moments this past season

And the most discussed posts by you:

• Best Actress race - the post festival rethink
• Best Actor race - the post festival shake-up
• Emmy night - the winners and highlights
• Mary Poppins Returns - the Yes No Maybe so of the new trailer

COMING IN OCTOBER...

A Star is Born mania, More from the New York Film Festival, Rita Hayworth and Teresa Wright Centennials, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Hugh Jackman's 50th birthday, Moon landing spectacular First Man, the 25th anniversary of Nightmare Before Christmas, various Halloween hijinx, the new horrors of Suspiria, Daredevil season 3, the long delayed Smackdown of 1972 (it's not tomorrow -- apologies!), and lots of Foreign Film Oscar race hoopla when the official list is announced (probably a week from now).

1972: The Emigrants

Editor's Note: We will now resume our intermittent investigation into 1972 films for the impending smackdown -- though it will not be this weekend due to unfortunate delays. Here's Eric Blume on the Oscar favored foreign epic The Emigrants, available to rent on Amazon or iTunes.

It’s fun (and by fun, I mean zero actual fun) to watch Jan Troell’s 3 hour and 20 minute epic film The Emigrants and try to figure out how this slow-burn, where nothing good happens to any of the characters for the entire running time, made it into the Oscar race, not in one year but in two!  Due to different rules than we have currently, The Emigrants was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1971, and then for the 1972 Oscars was nominated for a whopping four of the big eight categories:  Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Liv Ullman), and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Emigrants mostly follows a peasant family in rural Sweden in the mid-19th century. Despite back-breaking work, the father (Max von Sydow) and mother (Liv Ullman), realize that they cannot survive on their farm.  A series of horrible events befall them before they decide to leave for a 10-week boat journey to America in hope of a better life. Another family, who leave for the promise of religious freedom, joins them for the grueling ordeal...

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Thoughts I Had... while staring at the first photo of Taron Egerton as Elton John in "Rocketman"

by Nathaniel R

click to embiggen

Thoughts as they came without self-censorship:

Since he's wearing winged shoes we expect him to float up into the sky during a musical sequence, like a queer Mercules auditoning for the Griffiths Observatory number in La La Land...

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But why is it called "Bleach"?

by Nathaniel R

boys and their toys... i mean, superpowers.

How often do you have random streaming adventures where you watch something you've literally never heard of? This week on Netflix I caught a new Japanese flick called Bleach (2018) though for the life of me I can't figure out what the title means. It's one of those movies that's 1000% obviously based on a manga because it throws lots of random names, superpowers, and world-building terms and rules at you and assumes you'll be able to keep up. But nowhere in the entire picture does the word "bleach" factor in. I've turned it over and over in my head and unless I blinked during a crucial subtitle the title makes no sense whatsoever.

It was a fun popcorn watch but I had to share one moment near the beginning that had me howling...

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NYFF: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

Late in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation Stockard Channing's character, at her wit's end, says, "I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience; how do we hold onto the experience?" That's how I feel about writing up my thoughts on Bi Gan's dream-adjacent Long Day's Journey Into Night. It was an experience. An out of body one, sorta. How do I turn that experience into words?

Luo (Huang Jute, whose handsome face we come to know from every angle) is haunted by what else, a lost woman (played by Lust Caution's Tang Wei, for a time anyway), and he wanders the damp earth and the the even damper underworld and everywhere damp in between trying to find her - trying to hold on to fractions of dreams and memories; who can tell which is which here? It's all fractured - time, space, sound...

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