On the Threes
1903 - Faust in Hell
1913 - Fatty Joins the Force
1923 - Why Worry?
1933 - Ladies They Talk About
1943 - Meshes of the Afternoon
1953 - Eaux d'Artifice
1963 - The Cassandra Cat
1973 - Dry Wood
1983 - Sudden Impact
1993 - Freaked
2003 - Le Lion Volatil
2013 - Munchuasen
2023 - The Mask
Slashtember
1979 - Halloween
1980 - Friday the 13th
1984 - A Nightmare on Elm Street
1983 - Christine
Go ahead. Make my day. <-- That's a humorous line from 1991's Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. And of course I immediately recognized it as quoting Dirty Harry, but it wasn't until looking it up that I realized that it's from the third Harry film, Sudden Impact, which I decided to watch without watching the first two films.
Have I seen Dirty Harry before? I don't know? Like a lot of iconic pop culture stuff, I have vague memories and a sort of surface idea of the thing, but no really strong specific memories. I definitely said things like "Go ahead, make my day" and "Do you feel lucky, punk?" when I was a child.
But I definitely had never seen Sudden Impact before. The script is goofy and self-aware. The film knows that it's the third in a franchise and gives our hero nice, tight zingers to say throughout the film while other characters reflect out loud about how ca-raaayyzzy this Harry guy is. A little deeper than that, though, it is an adequate study of grief and revenge, of the limits of the law the psychology of vigilante "justice".
Sudden Impact also has some slasher-esque moments, including a final kill that would please any slasher junkie. I'm not a slasher guy. I don't like them. As I've been watching them again and thinking about them, I'm reminded of the "roller coaster" arguments I'd have with Jason back in the old CR5FC days.
Here's a paragraph I wrote 14 years ago!
Part of this is that I could care less about "thrills." We've already established that I'm not a "roller coaster" type of guy. This is the same reason why so many action films fail for me. I don't find them all that thrilling. There's nothing scary about roller coasters until they start falling apart and dropping folks on their heads. I might be interested in horror that "goes off the rails." Most horror, though, is about as safe and dull as any roller coaster.
Anyhow, I joined a group celebrating "Slashtember" on BGG. I only committed to watching one slasher film, but that changed into me deciding to (re)watch the three "foundational" slasher films: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I appreciate them all as the strange cultural artifacts that they are, each revealing something sick about our shared pop culture dreamscape, but I also insist that they're pretty boring films. John Carpenter's Halloween score is probably the best part of any of them.
I had recently read Christine for my Stephen King book club at the library. The book has some good ideas and some good moments, but the pacing is atrocious and some of the writing (you shitters!) is so stupid that it hurts. This is prime cocaine King. What was most interesting to me, though, is that the book is not so much about a killer car as it is a ghost story, featuring the spiritual possession of both the protagonist Arnie and the car Christine by a man whose hate is so strong that he cannot die despite his body failing. This is probably the most interesting part of the story, though the character is one-note and the source of some of the worst writing in the book.
But what's fascinating is that no one thinks of this part of the book when they think of the story of Christine. They think of a killer car.
And that's because Carpenter's adaptation is so iconic. Bill Phillips deserves a lot of credit for his smart screenplay adaptation, but Carpenter gets the final nod for creating something so slick and cool. Christine, the car, is the only real villain in the movie. Christine becomes a sort of noir-ish femme fatale, seducing Arnie and becoming the catalyst of not only his moral failure, but the death of many around him.
I gather from things that Carpenter has said in interviews that Christine was just a throwaway workmanlike project for him between other films he cared about. That's surely true, but the film still has a dirty energy to it that puts it well above its slasher/horror peers of the time. Not a great movie, but a well-constructed culturally relevant movie that raises questions about American teen culture and American car culture.
Looking at my 3s list above, I'm struck by the fact that I'm deep down the cinephile nerd hole. There's nothing on that list that any "normal" person would know or care about.
Faust in Hell is Méliès' jolly adaptation of a small part of the Faust story. There's a lot of merry dancing in his hell.
Fatty Joins the Force is a good enough Arbuckle comedy in which Fatty accidentally joins the local police force, then accidentally loses that same job.
Why Worry? is an Harold Lloyd comedy feature with Lloyd as an annoying rich hypochondriac on vacation. It's probably most notable for starring John Aasen and worth watching just for Aasen's performance.
Ladies They Talk About stars a young Barbara Stanwyck in prison. Her performance is excellent, especially in a final scene in which she is literally spitting in rage as she yells out her frustrated emotions.
I don't know if Meshes of the Afternoon is overrated or not, but this recent re-viewing didn't do anything more to make me love it. It's an above average Kate Bush music video, 40 years ahead of its time, I guess.
Eaux d'Artifice is the first Kenneth Anger film I've seen and I'm intrigued. If there are movie halls or modern art museums in faerie, then this film is surely projected on a continuous loop somewhere there. Of all of the films on this list, this one is the one whose images have lodged themselves inside me after one viewing.
I was mostly bored by The Cassandra Cat until the children's anarchist revolt happened. The best part of the film was any shot of the cat wearing sunglasses. Unfortunately, the entire premise of the film required the removal of the sunglasses off the cat. What a wasted opportunity. I want to see the adjacent film in which the cat just chills on a window ledge in those sunglasses.
There's a lovely scene in Dry Wood when the men have apparently had too much to drink and are just rolling around on the ground with each other and throwing chairs at one another. Another filmmaker might have filmed this as a sad tragedy. Blank and Gosling show it as the moment of affection that it is, maybe a little pathetic, definitely ridiculous, but most certainly a breakthrough in the immediacy of love and vulnerability amongst old friends. There's another moment later in the film in which a woman laments the breakdown in community brought about by the fast pace of life at the time, a moment made far sadder by the fact that almost anyone watching this film in America in 2026, even from a rural area, will find themselves longing for a time when everyone came together to butcher a hog and make and eat head cheese with their loved ones.
I already wrote a little bit about Sudden Impact above. I guess that the only thing that I'll add is that the best part of the film is watching Harry come to terms with his female vigilante counterpart. It's just an 'okay' film, but parts of it, including the ending, are more thoughtful than I would have thought going into it.
I was talking to my friend and co-worker Jess about how I have been having trouble caring about any features and that I've been finding more satisfaction in short films. I told him about how I had started several features from 1993, including many critically acclaimed "masterpieces" on Criterion Channel, quitting each of them within 15 minutes. I brought up JustWatch and set it to all of the streaming services that I had access to and asked Jess to make me a Top 5 for 1993. At the top of the list he made for me was Freaked, available to watch on Hoopla.
I was 14 in 1993. I loved Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. How had I never heard of this film? I don't know, but I hadn't. Within the first few minutes, I was charmed. In the same year that Brooke Shields starred in the excellent TV movie Stalking Laura alongside Richard Thomas, she plays an important role in the frame story for this film. She's a daytime talk show host interviewing an actor-turned-freak about his recent experience becoming an ugly mutant. The actor is the former childhood star playing the youngest sibling on a family TV show. It's hard not to see this as a Richard Thomas reference even if the character in this movie goes on to be much more self-centered and ridiculous than Thomas ever could be. The humor is juvenile and stupid in a very recognizably early 90s pop style. It's so stupid and I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much I liked this, but it was exactly what I needed to refresh my love of movies when I "wasn't feeling it." Snarky one sentence Letterboxd reviews can be annoying, but they can also sometimes be exactly right.
The most popular Freaked review:
This is to movies what landing on the moon is to airplanes.
Back to the shorts. 2003 doesn't seem like that great a year to me either (though it didn't make me despair the way that '93 did), but Agnes Varda was still very much alive and very much making great work with Le Lion Volatil. It is playful and charming. It almost feels like it has the slightness but also the energy of a student film, only made with the full confidence of someone in complete control of her craft.
Munchuasen is a short film by Ari Aster. It also has that slightness and that energy, but none of the charm while it evidences its mastery of techniques. Instead, it feels too clever and mostly meaningless. Kinda like the rest of Aster's filmography.
Now, close to the present, in 2023. I'm not "on the pulse" of anything these days and had no idea who Conner O'Malley was until earlier this year (or late last year), but I have enjoyed digging through his work, including watching his short film The Mask for this 3s cycle. I watched Room 666 earlier this year (and fell asleep to and never finished Room 999), watching directors talk about the end of cinema and the future of cinema. O'Malley's The Mask is post-cinema cinema, a cinema native to the Internet. Very few of us are watching projected film any longer. We're all watching motion pictures digitally. On the internet. O'Malley here just takes the last step to merging form and content. The Mask is a sophisticated short narrative film. Its subject is a man trying to succeed using the video sharing tools of the Internet. The film itself postures as a sort of hyer-documentary chronicling the footage of this fictional character. But in order to do this, all of this footage in these various authentic styles native to the Internet video platforms needed to be created, then edited together to construct this particular film. It's an impressive work. What's more, the story could be condescending, but instead this character's descent into despair is made believable, just as the character himself is made to be as loveable as he is annoying. Why do we love him? Because we know that his grandmother loved him.
That's all I've got for now. Still on track for my 2026 CR5FC goal of at least one sentence written about every feature that I watch.
As I've become dissatisfied with so much of what I've been watching, I've thought about returning to the idea of SMEM (same movie every month) in which I watch the same movie every month and write something more in-depth about something I already love (you know, instead of writing something shallow about something I've just seen for the first time).
I don't know. Maybe.
I've already started the 4s yesterday and am more optimistic about the 4s than I was about the 3s. I'm still enjoying this project and I have been especially happy to be allowing myself the short film option. In general, and with a few significant exceptions (such as the nearly 5h Until the End of the World), I have found myself enjoying these short films much more than the feature-length ones. I'm not going to avoid feature films going forward, but I think that I might find myself prioritizing new-to-me shorts going forward.