A Journey Through My Collection: The 2020's
Here we are, the eleventh decade of films from my collection. Most decades have had a theme to it that happens to relate to current events or a broader feeling in society at the time. There is a little of this that we can see even in the middle of the 2020’s, but that’s hard to avoid from what has already established itself as a very tumultuous decade, starting with COVID, instability in global politics and strikes by writers and actors in Hollywood. To start, Tenet doesn’t seem to capture a theme of the decade, except that it is incredibly unsettling and there was a bit of a fight to get it into theaters at a time when it didn’t feel safe to go out in public. Babylon has sections of the story based around workers in film that really could have used a union for their own safety. And Asteroid City is a movie that is about people contained in a place, and that place is contained under layers of the story.
Tenet (2020)
I don't get this movie, I don't really see how the logic of it works, the lighting is very off putting, the villain doesn't fully work and the stake his henchmen have in it makes very little sense... but I do like it. The way that shooting in reverse works in this is very fascinating, it does work for the unsettling lighting and the general nihilism of the villain and the general nightmarish feel seeped I to my subconscious. For whatever reason, this is a movie that always pops into my head in the quiet moment of giving my youngest a bath. I'm not really sure what it is, just that this lives in a different part of my brain than most movies. Oddly, this is fitting for one of the biggest movies to come out in 2020, a movie that Nolan tried to force into theaters for the IMax experience. I did not see this in the theater, but I did buy it on Blu-ray the moment it was released and watched it in my garage theater, projected on a screen. We have moved since then, but it's experiences like that that are inspiring me to get the garage in order to be able to my own little private theater back up and running.
The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)
I really love this movie. I love the look of it, bright white light that brings a crispness to the cinematography, the action is very good and we get another look at the old characters that is outside of their conscious selves. But that is really fascinating about this is that it takes the trans allegory of the original films and instead of a nature of being trans and coming out in the original films, this transitions the "one" from male to female, finally liberating the people of the Matrix. It's pretty funny that "binary" is a term used a lot in this film for computing systems and the video game that creates their sense of the Matrix films, but is also gender binary that is broken out of.
Babylon (2022)
On rewatch, it's a surprise how long this is, because it never feels like it. It never slows down into a lull, when it comes to a down note, the film burst of energy right into the next scene. This film really feels like getting to live in the silent film era in a time filled with color and sound. I do feel like the film history montage has a whole lot of overlap with a similar sequence in Hugo.
Asteroid City (2023)
This story inside of a story, maybe inside of another story or two, is pretty fun. Although I think I like the story at the top the most interesting and I could do without the other layers. I have been a fan of Wes Anderson since The Royal Tenenbaums, I do love the symmetry, use of color and the timelessly retro look of his films, I'm no so sure the story inside of a story trick that has been a part of a some of the recent films really works for me. Regardless, this is the closest thing we have gotten to my dream of a Wes Anderson in space movie.
Dune (2021) & Dune Part 2 (2024)
Much as Quentin Tarantino sees Kill Bill volumes 1 & 2 as one movie (although the tone is a little shifted from the first part to the second), I feel like Denis Villeneuve sees these two Dune releases as one movie despite the fact that he didn’t have production or financing for Part Two until after the release of the first part. This could have been a disaster. The first part is very done, one of my favorite movies of the decade so far, and it tells just the first part of a beloved story. Personally, I had no clue about Dune until one day in high school my mom came home with a rental of the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries. I didn’t realize it was a miniseries and stayed up late watching it, fixed to the screen for the nearly five hour runtime. I would go on to read the book, watch the Lynch version of the movie, get fixated on the Jodorowski’s Dune documentary, and hunt down those versions on blu-ray as well as physical copies of the Dune miniserieses that played on Sci-Fi Channel. And this version of Dune is such perfection. A great cast, the tone is perfected, and amazing effects. The thing about all of these versions of Dune is that it feel immersive to live in the story for incredibly long, marathon sessions. This also made the three year gap between these installments a bit testing of nerd patience. The first Duen is hardly a short film, but time flies when I have been sucked into the movie.
And so, as I approached the end of watching at least one movie per year from my collection going back to 1923, it wasn’t much of a decision to cap it off with Dune Part Two. This is my favorite movie of the year so far, and perhaps my favorite movie of the decade. While the battle at the end of the first installment that culminates in the burning of the palm trees is so beautiful and terrifying, the second installment manages to up the ante for visual awe. The gladiator scene on the planet with the black sun is unlike anything I have ever seen, and still manages to heighten the menage with extreme brutality within the fight. The horrors of this film seem greater, the battles are more epic, and the sand worms are tamed into weapons of mass destruction. This might have been the last movie of my century long experience of film, but these two films will be rewatched again and again over the years. And that is something I have learned from this, that there are more movies that I can see myself watching on a yearly basis, and this is something I would love to do again, although I would prefer to have a second movie for some of the years where I have only one representative. And in those cases, it really feels like I may already have the absolute best, or most interesting movie of the year already. This was an experience that would be hard to top.
Final Thoughts
I loved this exercise and it has inspired me to go back and watch more and more movies from my collection to reinvigorate them into my memory. It has been interesting to move through the various styles of films that I love. Many times I will connect to a movie from the ‘40’s or ‘50’s in a very different way than the ‘90’s, and the ‘90’s in a very different way than 2009 and beyond. There were a good number of movies that I either watched for the first time or found a new appreciation for them and it was a very nice experience of movie watching for the year.
Comments