Favorite First Watches of February
Sand, Sex, the South, and Sports: What Else Could a Girl Ask For?
February was a terrific month for me; not, you know, personally speaking, but in terms of all the incredible films I watched for the first time! From popcorn flicks to indie classics, I got to sample a little of everything, and a rare leap year Thursday gave me a little extra time to squeeze in Dune: Part Two before the month concluded, injecting a much-needed boost of serotonin into the worst month of the year. Let’s put it to bed before we can move on to warmer and brighter things, as a beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Be sure to keep an eye out for March’s streaming newsletter, which will be dropping next week!
Dune: Part Two (2024)
Director: Denis Villeneuve
When Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel of the same name was moved from its initial release date of October 20, 2023 (to November, to November again, to its final release date of March 1, 2024), it sent shockwaves in the community of (largely) male nerds I exclusively fraternize with—including the one I live with, who read the books around 2019 (I remember because it coincided with the death of Jeffrey Epstein). “It’s over,” I texted our Dune thread, “Dune Watch: Muad’Dib Time.” At the time, it seemed impossible to wait any longer to get eyes on Villeneuve’s specific vision for the real meat of Frank Herbert’s Dune novel, which only gets weirder the further you get into the story; Dune (2021) captured comparatively little of the source novel compared to other adaptations, luxuriating in world-building and the development of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the scion of a longstanding house who is brought to Arrakis, a desert planet mined for production of “spice,” which powers the galaxy. I know all of this, despite not having read a single one of Herbert’s books, because Vince has painstakingly trained me in the ways of the “crysknife,” including all prior Dune adaptations (like David Lynch’s maligned 1984 standalone film and Frank Herbert’s Dune, the 2000 Sci-Fi channel series, neither of which are particularly great, despite each having its own charms). Somehow, I’ve been indoctrinated into the Cult of Dune, and Villeneuve’s solid 2021 film further endeared me to the original work, even if I sometimes found his film cold and distant, like so much of Villeneuve’s work. It turns out, that’s the best possible tone and aesthetic style for this material (I preferred the gorgeous look of Lynch’s original, which incorporated matte paintings) because it tricked some clueless Hollywood executive into letting him make Dune: Part 2, which takes on the bulk of the novel’s narrative development and gets WEIRD. To quote a different sand-centric sci-fi series lorded over by a frowning, black-wearing edgelord: this is where the fun begins! (Star Wars girlfriend, “everything is actually from Dune” boyfriend).
The second film picks up where the first ended, following Paul’s attempts to survive the Arrakis desert alongside his mother, Lady Jessica (a truly stunning Rebecca Ferguson) after the assassination of his father at the hands of the rival Harkonnen family—led by a rotund Stellan Skarsgård—in the previous film. On Arrakis, Paul learns the ways of the desert, riding the big worms, and falling in love with local indigenous fighter Chani, of the “Fremen” (Zendaya, who actually brings the character to life in a way I hadn’t really seen in prior adaptations). On Arrakis, Paul is burdened by a prophecy that he is the long-fabeled “Lisan al-Gaib,” or “Voice from the Outer World,” who liberates the Fremen of Arrakis from the tyranny of foreign spice mining, an idea perpetuated by his mother as part of her machinations as a “Bene Gesserit” witch, looking to call forth the Kwisatz Haderach, a being with knowledge of ancient ancestral powers (do you see now how well I’ve been trained?). Meanwhile, Baron Harkonnen is scheming to put his nephew, the sadistic Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler, the film’s gorgeous, fucked-up highlight, who boldly steals the mantle once held by Sting) in charge of Arrakis, placing him on an ultimate collision course with Paul, who has taken the war name “Mudad’Dib” after the desert mouse that skitters along Arrakis’ hostile sands. The shocking developments of the last half of the film won’t be a surprise to anyone who has read the books, but I’ll keep mum about the biggest ones, since that’s part of the fun! (Vince noted that one of his favorite things was listening in on the conversations of people who were unfamiliar with Herbert’s novels, or the anti-colonial messaging therein, after the movie let out). I’ll just say that the film received the stamp of approval from our household Dune loyalist, who found it to be the best possible adaptation of the source material. From more of an outsider’s perspective, I found it to be a more engaging and dynamic film than its predecessor—we barely noticed the film’s lengthy runtime—and particularly loved the central performance of Timothée Chalamet, who plays the different manifestations of Paul’s sense of duty and angst at being a pawn for larger machinations outside his control really convincingly. My girlfriends Nicole and Hannah still don’t think he’s a “Movie Star” star, but I’m hoping this one brings them over to the winning side. Heading into the film, even I wasn’t totally sure that he could handle the transformation of Paul’s character in the second half of the book, but he knocks it out of the park: get on board or get used to seeing him, because he’s going the distance. Long live the fighters!
Dune: Part Two (2024) is in theaters now! Don’t wait for this one to hit streaming.
Alma’s Rainbow (1994)
Director: Ayoka Chenzira
TCM’s Black History Month programming was especially strong this year, showcasing a terrific range of works from filmmakers of all eras and backgrounds, with a particular focus on showcasing pioneering black female directors, whose contributions to the cinematic canon are woefully under-seen, thanks to the Jane Crow academic mentality that de-prioritizes films by and for black women. In the course of pursuing my film degree (lol), I also spent a considerable chunk of my studies in social and cultural analysis classes, focusing in particular on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality, so those issues are something I really do care about confronting (and deliberately keep in mind) while programming The Spread (one recent, vital resource has been Maya Cade’s Black Film Archive, which highlights classic black film that is available on streaming). It’s an unconscious bias that everyone, including myself, needs to check, particularly when there are so many terrific under-seen works out there by black female directors, like this beautiful (and truly undersung) indie gem from feminist transmedia artist Ayoka Chenzira, one of the many films green lit during the Black Cinema Renaissance of the 1990s, which we’ve showcased in the past.
This distinctive independent film, one of the definitive depictions of black girlhood—which I caught this past month on TCM—is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of early 90s Brooklyn, which largely transpires in a gorgeous family brownstone that also houses a popular local beauty salon. The salon is owned by the long-suffering Alma (Kim Weston-Moran), a single mother to a precocious and spirited teenage daughter Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), who is struggling to make sense of her changing body and the future she’d like to pursue for herself. These questions are compounded by the unexpected arrival of her fabulous, unmarried, (and judgmental) aunt Ruby (a truly stunning Mizan Kirby, who gets to wear all the chic couture from the film’s memorable costume design), who returns from Paris following a decade absence and preaches a carpe diem life philosophy; advice at odds with the sensible counsel of Rainbow’s straightforward mother, a woman who had to drop so much of herself so early in life, just to survive and provide a comfortable environment for her child. I loved all three performances, and the ways in which they all work in tandem with one another, particularly in the service of inter-generational tension. Their experiences—and clashing attitudes towards race, sexuality, and femininity—manifest in how they present themselves to the world, which gives the film a striking textural quality that sets it apart from even other films of that era; this will make you lament the digital era and its hideously flattened, desaturated aesthetic style. Bring back color! Bring back lighting! Bring back sets! Bring back slice-of-life movies! Bring back style!
Alma’s Rainbow (1994) is streaming on the Criterion Channel and is available to rent on digital platforms.
My Name is Julia Ross (1945)
Director: Joseph H. Lewis
A personal favorite sub-genre of film is “Gaslight Cinema,” aka movies in which everyone conspires to make the protagonist believe something they know not to be true (The Lady Vanishes, Gaslight, Flight Plan, etc.). When the protagonist is a woman, as in all of the films I just mentioned, these stories can feel almost proto-feminist in how they capture (and condemn) a sexist society indifferent to—and complicit in—perpetuating women’s suffering. In this terrific, hour-long film noir from director Joseph H. Lewis, which Criterion recently included in their “Gothic Noir” program, an orphaned working woman (named, you guessed it, Julia Ross, played beautifully by future 50s screen icon Nina Foch early on in her career) accepts a position as a live-in assistant to an elderly woman and her adult son, only to find herself trapped in a deadly scheme perpetuated by her new employer: after the sadistic son (noir heavy George Macready, best known for Gilda) accidentally kills his wife, he and his mother—character actress Dame May Whitty, who, ironically enough, starred in both The Lady Vanishes and Gaslight—conspire to find a lookalike to take her place, so that they can kill her and pass it off as natural. Waking up in a strange bedroom in strange clothes bearing someone else’s monogram, Julia finds herself physically trapped in a particularly bizarre hell, where everyone calls her by a different name and acts as if she’s always been married to this evil son, even though she knows that she is Julia Ross, and she is unwed! Julia’s situation is compounded by her class and gender: because she has no living family, husband, or social connections to speak of, there’s no support system when she’s outright kidnapped and held captive. It’s a fear that so many young working women have (and tragically, contend with): that they’ll be snuffed out one day, as if they never existed, with no one to avenge and mourn their loss… at least no one with any real power to do anything. Her only ally is a love interest from her prior life, who naturally wants to know where she disappeared to, as well as her own self, using her wits and tenacity to survive an unthinkable hostage situation. The film zips by at an appealingly taut pace, making notable use of light and shadow to stage a tale of domestic horror: this crime story doesn’t unfurl in the shadowy alleyways of some big, impersonal city, but rather in a palatial estate in a secluded country town. For this woman, the site of her personal horror is within her own mind, as she fights to withstand attempts to overwrite her own life. The estate, with its steep cliffside drops and spooky plays of shadow in the dark, just externalizes her internal suffering.
My Name is Julia Ross (1945) is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Plex (free with ad breaks).
This Sporting Life (1963)
Director: Lindsay Anderson
I don’t play sports—god forbid—but I have an academic fascination with sport culture: the rituals, the uniforms, the codes of conduct, the rich history, and — most of all — how gender and sexuality are presented and managed within largely homosocial environments. This film, from lefty British director Lindsay Anderson, best known for his landmark countercultural film, if…, is both sort-of a sports movie, depicting the life of a coal miner turned rugby footballer from Yorkshire (played by Richard Harris, best known to modern audiences as the “original” Dumbledore in the Christopher Columbus Harry Potter movies), and a classic “kitchen sink drama,” the predominant style of British cinema after World War II (and one of the last films of this movement). It is regarded as one of the greatest British films of all time, earning a spot on the British Film Institute’s list of Top 100 Best “British Films” of the 20th century (films deemed “culturally British.”)
Like so many industries in so many other countries, the film industry in the United Kingdom continues to be one dominated and populated by the ruling class, determined to export bourgeois values like national pride as propaganda to conceal the embarrassment of the total collapse of the British empire. But after World War II, there was a real concerted effort to democratize cinema in the United Kingdom, spearheaded by Anderson and filmmakers like John Schlesinger, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz. Like the neorealists in Italy (or the Polish Film School movement and La Nouvelle Vague in France, etc.), creatives turned their artistic lens on issues of the working class after the war, shooting documentary-style stories of everyday people on location, thanks to advances in portable film cameras. In 1947, Anderson co-founded Sequence magazine, in which he and co-founders Peter Ericsson, Gavin Lambert, and Karel Reisz espoused their (extremely political) views on the role of cinema in society. This would form the basis for the “Free Cinema movement” in 1956, which championed stories of non-bourgeois Britons in non-cosmopolitan locations. This movement would shape the direction of the so-called “British New Wave” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was heavily populated with stories of "angry young men," such as Richard Burton in Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger (1959) and Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Like these two films, This Sporting Life (1963) is a story of an angry young man, and like those other two films, the movie is really about the woman forced to contend with him. This Sporting Life, however, is unique in its preoccupation with the sport of rugby, and the ways in which such a brutal sport are born on the backs of its ferocious players, who are uncouth, uncultured, and without protection or social capital. If there is protection, it’s in the form of paternal, abusive concern from the elites in team management, including the team’s queer-coded owner, who owns the factory in the team’s hometown, and thus runs the city. “It’s a rough game, Charles,” the team owner notes, appraising a prospect’s brutality. “Personally I like seeing a man play as if he really meant it.”
Frank, our protagonist, thinks he’s moving up in the world when he gets a cushy, well-paying position on the city team, but it can’t erase his harsh upbringing, or the brutal, oafish nature of his character, sharpened over bouts of being tackled, hit, punched, shoved, and beaten… all aspects of the game that defines his entire existence. He tries to find meaning outside of football through his landlady (a heartbreaking Rachel Roberts, who won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and was nominated for the Academy Award of Best Actress), a widowed mother of two who, after the premature death of her factory husband, whose boots she still polishes every night, just wants to be left alone. “She makes me feel clumsy, awkward and big, and stupid,” Frank laments after one of her rejections, internalizing the scorn that is cruel, if completely accurate. “She makes me feel like...she makes me feel like I crush... I crush everything.” Of course, by film’s end, he’ll crush her, and make it feel like it’s her fault.
Richard Harris, towering at 6’0”, played rugby in secondary school, until tuberculosis ended his sporting life and redirected his career towards acting. In This Sporting Life, he’s big and burly and ferocious, as if the frame can’t contain him; a character likens him to a giant cat. For his career-defining performance, Harris won Best Actor Award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival and received Oscar and BAFTA nominations for Best Actor. After Andersons’s death, Malcom McDowell, his muse and real-life friend, claimed that the director fell in love with Harris through the course of this movie. The ambiguity is certainly there onscreen, and there’s this way that the camera captures his oddball charm and stocky good looks that feels truly worshipful (shades of Paul Schrader and Richard Gere with American Gigolo), even as it depicts a man consumed by a violent maw of a culture.
This Sporting Life (1963) is streaming on Tubi, Amazon, and Plex (all free with ad breaks).
Mississippi Masala (1991)
Director: Mira Nair
This steamy and sweet candy-colored, neon-lit film, a cinematic gumbo of different cultures in the American Deep South, has everything we’ve been missing from our sexless, greyscale cinematic hellscape: texture, lighting, vibrant costuming, locations, sex, sets (remember proper film sets? Remember romantic comedies?). It feels beamed in from the past to help guide us back to something we lost with moviemaking. As the popular adage — usually attributed to Jean Luc-Godard, though D.W. Griffith said it first — goes, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun; in this terrific film from undersung female filmmaker Mira Nair (Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, Monsoon Wedding), all you need is a girl (And Just Like That’s Sarita Choudhury, one of the most beautiful women of all time, making her screen debut) and a place (Greenwood, Mississippi, just two hours north of Jackson). Adding a young Denzel Washington —fresh off his buzzy appearances in Glory (1989), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990) — into the mix certainly doesn’t hurt either. The two ridiculously good-looking actors play star-crossed lovers from vastly different worlds: born in Kampala, Uganda, Meena (Choudhury) moves to the United States with her Indian family to run motels after being expunged with other “Asians” by dictator Idi Amin; born in Mississippi, Demetrius (Washington) stays home to look after his father and run a successful carpet-cleaning business. At first, those distinctions don’t seem to matter in the face of the rampant racism and xenophobia of the city they inhabit: they’re both people of color in the deep south, after all, meaning they have absolutely no social capital beyond the paternalism of their white neighbors. Meena is a “mix masala,” making romance relatively complicated: by the standards of the local Gujarati community her family associates with, she is comparatively dark-skinned, making her the target of colorist remarks and preventing her from marrying into a Gujarati family; the family, coming from Uganda, identifies with African culture and easily fraternizes with the African-Americans in their southern town. But when Meena and Demetrius begin dating, they face backlash from both of their respective communities, dredging up Meena’s father’s unresolved resentment towards Africans due to losing his lush, palatial home in Uganda, which was seized by the government during Amin’s rule. It’s a relatively lean, simple formula for a movie, but the way Nair captures and frames the visuals and cultural values of these two communities against a bleak, banal backdrop of the generally destitute, barren South really makes the film feel special (it’s also, it should be noted, extremely sexy, thanks to the crackling chemistry between its two charming leads).
Hollywood films tend to shy away from complex depictions of race and colorism and portray poverty — particularly in the South — with fetishistic distance and disdain. Nair’s film, written by frequent collaborator Sooni Taraporevala, doesn’t frame poverty or Southern racism as a prison sentence, even as both seriously impact the lives of our protagonists, but rather draws out all of the things that make life so enjoyable regardless of socioeconomic status and/or cultural disenfranchisement: dancing at a club with friends, cookouts with your family, cultural dress as tradition, and strolling along the sand at dusk with someone who makes your heart skip a beat. Life is so beautiful; Mississippi is not, so maybe it’s time to hit the bricks and leave the familial baggage in the rearview. Like Bruce sings: “Oh, someday, girl, I don't know when/We're gonna get to that place/Where we really wanna go and we'll walk in the sun.”
Mississippi Masala (1991) is streaming on the Criterion Channel and is available to rent on digital platforms.
Bull Durham (1988)
Director: Ron Shelton
Speaking of romantic comedies — and sports movies! — I was gooped, gagged, and, frankly, a little gutted to learn that I wasted so many years judging a film I’d never seen, only to find out recently that it’s actually really good. Growing up, I developed and refined my taste for classic cinema from the selection of films we had on VHS tape, which I slowly worked through as I came of age, cutting my teeth on films like All About Eve (1950), Rebecca (1940) and When Harry Met Sally (1989). But within that (honestly, really well-curated) collection of films were a selection of movies I mostly passed over, which could be classified as “dad cinema”: Silverado (1985), The Fugitive (1993), The World According to Garp (1982), and this film, the beloved 1988 minor league baseball romcom set in Durham, North Carolina, which was a massive commercial and critical triumph on release, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Ron Shelton, who previously played in the minor leagues. I passed over this film so many times, thinking it was a “sports movie,” and thus probably awful; what no one told me is that this film is actually good, and not in a guilty pleasure way. This is just straight up a well-written, well-acted, delightful, sexy, and silly little film, which Vince and I recently watched on date night and loved. The film stars my self-professed nemesis, Kevin Costner, who I generally can’t stand, and I found myself deeply humbled at how pretty and charismatic the man used to be: every film since Bull Durham, including the Best Picture-winning Dances with Wolves (1990), rests on the laurels of how attractive Kevin Costner is in this movie. He plays an aging catcher, “Crash Davis” (!), who signs on the Durham Bulls to help break in a new, flashy pitcher (Tim Robbins, adorable as always) who is headed for the big leagues — if he can get his shit together. Both men are propositioned by local hussy Susan Sarandon, just absolutely gorgeous and sexy as hell here, who sleeps with one player each season and helps them improve their game (“boy, the Dodgers could have used her!” to quote an unrelated Jimmy Durante movie). She chooses the unworldly pitcher, setting him on a crash course of hot sex and hip training, but it doesn’t stop her attraction to the seasoned catcher, or the pull she feels towards him. It’s sex, love, and baseball in this deeply fun little love triangle movie, which includes a surprising amount of taboo-ish sex and homoeroticism for a film with a reputation for being one of the greatest “sports films” of all time (Sports Illustrated named it as such in 2003). Maybe I should watch Silverado now, damn!
Bull Durham (1988) is available to rent on digital platforms.