My May Watches Ranked
Though on first blush it may appear that I’ve gotten back on track this month – a lot of the stuff on my May favourites list are short films from Love, Death & Robots, whose third season released this month. In actuality, the first couple of weeks of May were still occupied with my completing assignments for this year. Now, though, I’ve submitted all that can be submitted – with the notable exception of my dissertation – and had back all my grades (which I’m surprisingly pretty happy with.) In the coming month, then, I’ll have far more time to dedicate to film watching activities (I’ll caveat this by saying this will be dependent on whether the work I’ve applied for falls through or not) and will also be volunteering at the upcoming Sundance London Film Festival, at which I’m sure I’ll watch plenty of stuff. Hopefully, this will all mean I can provide a more interesting list in June as compared to May.
As in March, Terrorizers has once again made it to the top of my list. If you haven’t seen it by now, take this as a sign. Below that, there is another Yang film, Yi Yi – which is perhaps his most popular internationally, but was also his last. Really, I should’ve gotten to this fantastic piece of filmmaking sooner. I’ve already seen Yang’s earlier work, A Brighter Summer Day, which although entertaining was a taxing experience (clocking in at four hours long) and although Yi Yi shaves a solid hour off, I think I was hesitant to dive back into that kind of slow-going experience. What I didn’t expect was such a poignant exploration of generational experiences of loss and yearning. Each strand of this understated epic is silently crushing; really, it never reveals its hand fully until the end (and even then does so in such a way that is easily missed) but sneaks in sharp blows when you’d least expect, when your guard is down. Yang is truly letting loose with both barrels here, though you wouldn’t sense that on first glance. I also got to my first Ozu, this month, which was a joy. I think a lot of what I like in cinema is exemplified by this classical master: understatement, bittersweetness, and explorations of subtle, social tensions. I’m really very excited to be returning to the director’s oeuvre soon.
Though I don’t usually go on about my top picks for this long, I felt it would be unjust of me to ignore one of my first 2022 top 5 picks. Everything Everywhere All at Once is, compared to Ozu, probably the exact opposite of what I enjoy watching. It’s loud, maximalist, and melodramatic, yet there’s so much heart on display here it’s really very hard not to fall in love with. This is a film exhibiting and utilising many of the worst trends in modern cinema (the multiverse, rampant commercial intertextuality and overwrought self-referentiality) but manages to wrangle and reclaim each so as to contribute to and compile a singular meditation on familial relationships, duty, and love. It’s funny, slick, and heart-breaking all at once (and I do mean all at once, just as its directors do.) Though I feel I need to watch this again to see if the overwhelming effect of the film wears off and the illusion fades, I think I’m sure enough of this pick at present to recommend it wholeheartedly.
At many of the lower picks on this list are from Love, Death & Robots, I think it’s probably best I discuss the third season a little before I finish. This third season, as with the show’s previous two, is incredibly hit and miss and tends towards miss. Much of what’s on display appears to be purely technical mastery of digital, 3D and 2D (though the 2D stuff appears much more creative, most of the time) animation, rather than anything remotely interesting. I can safely say I found this to be the case with all of In Vaulted Tombs, Night of the Mini Dead, Three Robots – Exit Strategies and Mason’s Rats. Each of these appears to take an a concept that, read about but not yet seen, does admittedly sound enticing. However, what they all manage to do is take the path of least resistance into that material, obsessed solely with the aesthetic depiction of whatever they’re taking as their subject. For me, In Vaulted Tombs is the most egregious example: a Lovecraftian tale of a squad of soldiers stumbling upon an ancient evil. At first appearing a gruesome, Aliens-adjacent narrative of some soldiers being entirely overwhelmed by an otherworldly wave of insect-like creatures, the short develops into a brief glimpse at something far bigger. On escaping the lifeforms that appeared to be guarding the “tomb”, the surviving men and women stumble upon a great, Cthulhu-esque ancient evil. The evil attempts to control the soldiers’ minds, one of them dies, and the other is left a shambling husk. There’s nothing experimental or interesting going on here, the characters are paper-thin and are entirely unconnected to the evil they face and the creature, though masquerading as something far greater, is just one rung above one of Universal’s remade kaijus. It’s as though a teenager – for the first time reading about cosmic horror – slapped military personnel into a narrative alongside Cthulhu to try to add a little edge (trust me, I was that teenager). It’s not scary, it’s not bleak, it’s just superficial and sleek.
On the other hand, Jibaro goes hard. It’s as though someone decided to take a look at a piece of folklore through the headache-inducing lens of hyperpop. Better experienced than told about in a piece of writing like this.
Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1987).
Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000).
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949).
Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): Jibaro (Alberto Mielgo, 2022).
The Red Shoes (Emeric Powell and Michael Pressburger, 1948).
The Farewell (Lulu Wang, 2019).
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 2): The Drowned Giant (Tim Miller, 2021).
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948).
My Octopus Teacher (Philippa Ehrlich and James Reed, 2020).
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022).
Norm Macdonald: Nothing Special (2022).
Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949).
Love, Death and Robots (Vol. 3): Bad Travelling (David Fincher, 2022).
3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, 2007).
White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): The Very Pulse of the Machine (Emily Dean, 2022)
About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 2): All Through the House (Elliot Dear, 2021).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): Swarm (Tim Miller, 2022).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 2): The Tall Grass (Simon Otto, 2021).
The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): Mason’s Rats (Carlos Stevens, 2022).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): Kill Team Kill (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2022).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 1): Three Robots (Victor Maldonado & Alfredo Torres, 2019).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): Three Robots – Exit Strategies (Patrick Osborne, 2022).
Moon Knight (2022).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): Night of the Mini Dead (Robert Bisi & Andy Lyon, 2022).
Love, Death & Robots (Vol. 3): In Vaulted Halls Entombed (Jerome Chen, 2022).