Frezno's Criterion Challenge: July 2023 Trip Report

A very happy welcome to the second half of my Criterion Challenge Trip Reports! It's hard to believe that we have gone through half a year of cinematic wonder. It's also hard to believe that I've dragged my feet a little on some of these. I shall have to try and make September a big one, because August has me doing a lot of writing and we know what kind of madhouse October will be on the blog. Regardless, here we go. Some more movies to try and expand my cinematic horizons and make me better at something or other, and we start with...

26. Ghost World (2001, dir. Terry Zwigoff)

Well, this was a strange one. I did enjoy it for what it was, but parts of what it was did grate against me a little bit. Ghost World is very much a movie about disaffected youth growing up and trying to find a place in society. If you fail to do that, as main protagonist Enid does, you end up living like... outside of society. In like, a Ghost World or something. Whoa. The pair of disaffected teens in this film live in a perpetual state of detached irony and nihilism over society, finding the whole thing lame and uncool and desiring to fuck with it. 

Naturally, the rest of the movie is cutting against that but in different ways. Scarlett Johannson's Rebecca does it by growing up and starting to become a responsible adult, holding down a job and working on moving to her own place and generally participating in society. Enid, on the other hand, learns empathy and trust as she befriends someone she previously mocked. That someone being Steve Buscemi, who does his usual thing and is a standout in the film.

Does it entirely work for me? Not really. Some of the mean edge of this film did rub me the wrong way. Not just problematic poorly-aged words, but just the cynical meanness of it all. Still, the film does paint this as a bad thing and Enid's failure to grow and change fully is the point of the film. It's not a film I love, but it is a film I kinda liked.

27. The Parallax View (1974, dir. Alan J. Paluka)

Goddamn, this film was really something. The 1970s in America were not the happiest of times, and this film marinates in that miserable paranoia. It is 70's conspiracy thriller as fuck, and more than likely born out of the miserable mess that was American history in the 60's and 70's. Holy shit. The US political system... could be bad? It might be possible that the American dream of opportunity and freedom is built on a bedrock of lies, corruption, and murder? Politicians who threaten the conservative hegemony might just... be extra-judicially killed? 

All this is true, not just in the film but in the real world. It's a tough pill to swallow, and Warren Beatty delivers it as the perfect 70's leading man, just a bit greasy and fucked up. So many scenes of this movie just deliver the perfect amounts of suspense, tension, and mystique. The dam scene and subsequent car chase. The entire bit in the airplane with the bomb. The experimental and strange Parallax subliminal film which says everything while seeming to be a disjointed mess.

Of course the film ends on a bleak note. It's the fucking 70's, it was one bummer of a decade. I read the end with Warren Beatty on that catwalk with some ambiguity, much like the ambiguity of the Parallax subliminal film. This bleak but stunning masterpiece ends as it began, as true to life as any fiction. The US government has investigated itself and declares, no questions asked, that it did nothing wrong. 

28. Black Panthers (1968, dir. Agnès Varda)

And so we go from a sensationalized fiction of how bad the late 60's and early 70's were in America to a hyperfixation on the real thing. This short film is more like a news magazine show than anything else, but that tone fits it perfectly. It's content to just sit back and amplify the voices of the Black Panthers, letting them speak for themselves about who they are, what they fight for, and what they believe. They speak their mind about the injustice they feel from the imprisonment of their leader Huey P. Newton, and share thoughts about what they want to do to improve material social conditions for black people in America.

Over 20-odd minutes they let you know, and let you sit with that knowledge. I'm white as hell, so it does not fall to me to criticize any of what they believe. They are quite militant, but they express their point of view well: to them it is self-defense against the racist system of oppression and law enforcement that disproportionately targets black people and is out for blood. It's a depressingly relevant bit of subject matter, as things haven't improved that much for black people in America. Still, one can see the heart of things like Black Lives Matter beating alive and well in 1968 here with the Black Panthers. The struggle for social progress is a difficult one, but one that can never be quelled no matter how much some bigots might want it to be.

29. The 39 Steps (1935, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Heh. Cock. Yes, here's a filmmaker of some fame and importance, and here is a film of his that is very good. It's got a lot of cool stuff in it! It's got a general plot of intrigue and suspense as a man framed for murder goes on the run to clear his name and uncover some espionage malarkey. It's got a cool setpiece involving a train, I hear this Hitchcock fellow was really fond of those. It's also got this great transition that really impressed me, where the camera effortlessly pans from a rear-screen projection shot of driving in a car to an actual location shot of the car driving away down a distant dirt road. For 1935 that's a really slick fucking shot.

In a lot of ways this film and the things present in it are sort of a Rosetta Stone for certain filmmaking tricks and tropes going forward. The entire thing with the 39 Steps is that we don't know what the fuck it is until the end. You know, a MacGuffin! A mystery box! I guess JJ Abrams is a big Hitchcock fan. You've got the whole deal with Richard Hannay on the run and repeatedly finding shelter only to have to flee the police again in a hurry after barely catching his breath. There's the lengthy bit where he's handcuffed to a lady who's not fond of him and they have a whole bunch of friction together. Okay this part's not exactly my fave, it must be said.

Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed this film! Even though it's like 90 years old, it's still a rock solid chase thriller where the good ideas are so good as to be timeless. I gotta say, that Hitchcock fellow seems to be on to something with his movies. I think that he might have another banger or two in his cinematography. I guess we'll just have to find out sometime in the future. For now, that's that. July down. Let's see what in the holy hell I can watch in August.