Something to watch tonight: Friday 5 July

First anniversary special

The reboot of Funerals & Snakes happened on 7 July 2023 but we don’t pub­lish on week­ends so we are cel­eb­rat­ing early!

I thought that today might be a good day to look back at some of the earli­er posts out of the 244 that I’ve sent out since then. We only had a hand­ful of read­ers then so these will be news to many of you.

The first edi­tion was a soft launch to find out wheth­er I could still do this. One of the films I reviewed that Friday was All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the doc­u­ment­ary about artist Nan Goldin and her cam­paign to find justice for vic­tims of the Sackler family’s OxyContin opioid epidemic:

The film isn’t just about opioids and addic­tion though. Director Laura Poitras art­fully weaves three dif­fer­ent strands of Goldin’s life togeth­er, show­ing us the par­al­lels between the human neg­lect that allowed the opioid crisis to rage unanswered for so long, the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s that took so many of her friends and col­leagues, and the sui­cide death of her older sis­ter in 1963.

In all these cases, soci­ety chose to pri­or­it­ise mak­ing mor­al judge­ments on people who were suf­fer­ing rather than the harm reduc­tion that would save their lives and Goldin (and the film) make the case that that choice rep­res­ents its own form of immor­al­ity. Highly recommended.

We love Japan here at F&S and an early recom­mend­a­tion was Whisper of the Heart from Studio Ghibli:

Whisper of the Heart starts with Olivia Newton-John’s ver­sion of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ and then – as if such a thing were pos­sible – gets even better!

This is a Ghibli film – not a Miyazaki and there­fore not worthy of a theme park – but as charm­ing a film as ever you’ll see.

Last Film Show was one of my picks of 2023 for RNZ and I con­tin­ue to recom­mend to it film lov­ers whenev­er I get a chance:

Set in 2010, it’s the cine­mat­ic coming-of-age story of young Samay (Bhavin Rabari), a rapscal­lion determ­ined to wag school at every oppor­tun­ity in order to indulge his love of cinema and his curi­os­ity about its technologies.

Thanks to his mother’s won­der­ful cook­ing, Samay is taken under the wing of pro­jec­tion­ist Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali) and he becomes determ­ined to take his exper­i­ments with light back to the tiny rail­way vil­lage where his fath­er makes tea for passengers.

By its nature, tele­vi­sion takes a lot longer to get through so those recom­mend­a­tions are rarer. I also won’t recom­mend some­thing based on just a few epis­odes – end­ings are import­ant – but Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House was a joy from start to finish:

I haven’t felt grief at the end of a series quite this badly for a while.

My final choice from the first three months of F&S is El Conde, a stun­ning and ori­gin­al vam­pire movie from Pablo Larraín:

Imagine if Pinochet was not just an author­it­ari­an lead­er of a bru­tal mil­it­ary junta but also a 250-year-old French vam­pire, keep­ing him­self alive with hunt­ing trips into Santiago and refri­ger­ated human hearts.

El Conde is a won­der­fully weird blend of polit­ic­al satire and goth­ic hor­ror, nar­rated by Pinochet’s great friend Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet) and fea­tur­ing a sup­port­ing cast of grift­ers and enablers.

Edward Lachman’s black and white cine­ma­to­graphy is a stand-out and I really appre­ci­ated the chan­nel­ing of jus­ti­fi­able rage at the dam­age done to Chile by this awful human being into some­thing so sin­gu­lar. And funny. 

Thanks to all of you for con­tinu­ing to sub­scribe to these updates. And every time I get one of these noti­fic­a­tions, my heart skips a beat. They’re wonderful.

Further listening

Please join me for a chat with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights tonight at about 9.30. We’ll be talk­ing about two films that we haven’t men­tioned here (yet): Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story (National Geographic on Disney+) and Fancy Dance (Apple TV+) and the free stream­ing selec­tion is Wind River (TVNZ+).