Earlier this week, Gryphon Magnus ’28 and I talked about some of the most memorable films of the summer, whether they moved us to contemplation for days or stuck with us like stones in our shoes.
We round off that conversation today with discussion of four films that are, depending on who you ask, among the best or the worst of the year.
“Highest 2 Lowest”
Gryphon Magnus: This was definitely one of the biggest watches for me this summer, especially after watching Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” [a 1963 film that was readapted into “Highest 2 Lowest”] for the first time, which gave me a state of euphoria I haven’t felt from a movie in many years.
Louis Chiasson: Let this be our message: If there’s a great classic of world cinema that feels daunting…just watch it. I hadn’t seen “High and Low” either before this summer, and I promise you’re not going to have a better time watching a movie.
GM: But still…“Highest 2 Lowest” justifies itself as one of the best remakes of the last several years.
LC: I completely agree. Always, even in his movies that are less successful, Spike Lee’s mind is just a place I love to be in. He’s so funny, he’s so on the pulse, or, in this movie, aware that he’s not on the pulse, and kind of making peace with that. This is a movie about getting old and being out of touch and feeling culture kind of bypassing you. For a movie that is such a blast for large stretches, the beats of pain in that movie, particularly with A$AP Rocky’s character, are gutting! And it should also be said that he’s incredible in the movie.
GM: That’s something that isn’t as central to the original movie.
LC: Well, the whole movie is about his pain in a way, because [the original kidnapper] is the biggest hater in movie history. But, you know, he spends a lot of the movie aura farming. You know when it’s 3 a.m. and you’re watching interview clips with your favorite musical artists, and you’re just like, “Why aren’t they in movies?” A$AP Rocky is proof that that should be happening. Pusha T, please be in a movie. I mean, look at Tom Waits. One of my favorite musicians, but even more, one of my favorite actors. But to go back to “Highest 2 Lowest,” I don’t think I had an experience with a new movie this summer where my mind was so activated. It’s the opposite of a passive viewing, which is why it’s bullshit that it went to streaming so quickly.
GM: And it didn’t really get its flowers in general! Much like “The Fabelmans,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and “Megalopolis,” it’s a great summation of where a great filmmaker is at this point in his life. These are all very reflective movies.
“Materialists”
LC: How did we feel about “Materialists?”
GM: With the asterisk that this is all before a certain point in the movie, I was sort of enjoying being in its world. I think on a scene-by-scene basis it’s kind of fun. But I didn’t regard it as something that’s important to the culture at all.
LC: I have to very much disagree, unfortunately. I found being in that world insufferable, which I think could have value in a better movie, but this film was just so empty. And every character, even Chris Evans, who’s supposed to be the sort of down-to-earth guy, was actually abominable. I hate when they go into his house and suddenly the camera is like wacky and handheld. It was a movie of insufferable scenes that left me with a complete absence of feeling.
GM: And of course then comes the one plotline that makes it turn evil. Without spoiling, there is a point where the movie takes it to another degree.
LC: There’s a point where you realize the movie is aligning itself with the worst people in the world. And the way they’re acting, and the way I’m supposed to be responding to their actions is just completely foreign to me. It’s like you’re acting like a robot. I mean, there’s a scene where she essentially stalks a person in their most vulnerable state and we’re supposed to be responding to her emotions at that moment? You’ve completely lost me.
“28 Years Later”
LC: Onto greener pastures, I think “28 Years Later” was a movie we both really liked.
GM: I did, but there’s something about it that has not stuck with me at all. I thought it was amazing while I watched it, but it has just totally wiped itself from my mind. I think the emotions in that movie just didn’t have a lot of depth, and it was a very emotional movie. It had things that I feel like we’ve seen so much of but that felt different because it’s in the capsule of a zombie movie. I just was not as invested in the mom as everyone else was.
LC: To push back on you a little bit, I felt that the emotions came at me in a way that was completely unexpected. Ralph Fiennes is one of the greatest screen actors, someone whose face and voice can convey so much, but when I saw him in the trailers I thought he was just going to be playing a crazy guy, and I was sort of not excited. But the tenderness he brings to the last third of that movie really came out of nowhere for me. It reminded me that for as much as Danny Boyle is someone intensely interested in style, he’s a really sentimental dude!
GM: And the style of this movie is pretty amazing; it’s sort of different from any digital filmmaking we’ve seen at this scale before. The iPhone camera rig is insane.
LC: It feels like a way of thinking about the digital image that was sort of in vogue for auteurs in the early 2000s, whether it’s Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” or David Lynch’s “Inland Empire.” I think that once digital cameras got better, most filmmakers stopped thinking about the texture of the image. I loved to see him thinking about that with an iPhone, because it’s a texture of image that we’ve gotten so used to.
GM: And it’s a great way of updating the first film, because that was shot on a camcorder, right?
LC: I mean it looks like it was shot on a butt.
GM: It’s a really cool trajectory to have.
LC: Boyle is nowhere near one of my all-time guys—he has a lot of movies that I think are quite bad—but I love to see him constantly thinking about this. Let me just say…“Steve Jobs” is a great film. It makes me cry so much.
“Cloud”
LC: I’m going to shout out a movie I’m dying for you to see. It’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud,” which is currently my number one of the year with a bullet. It shocked me, it made me laugh so much, it looks incredible. He is just a master of light and shadows—
GM: “Pulse” has pretty much the best shadows ever.
LC: I was left with the sort of feeling I think you got from “Eddington,” a feeling of having to just keep moving in the face of the largeness of the world right now. It’s essentially about an online reseller who makes people so angry that suddenly people from every walk of life want to kill him. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is probably most known for his horror movies, like “Cure” or “Pulse,” but this is sort of his take on an action thriller. But it ends up being a slapstick comedy in a lot of ways. To use annoying Letterboxd speak, it’s a movie of bodies in spaces, and the bodies behave hilariously, even as they’re dying or getting beat up!
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Louis Chiasson can be reached at lchiasson@wesleyan.edu.
Gryphon Magnus can be reached at gmagnus@wesleyan.edu.
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