#on second viewing

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Second take: No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)

This film is one of the most frequently popping-up titles in the slew of podcasts I listen to. It's a great watch, especially when it's a slightly-frantic COVID watch (which made me realize that this post is late by eight months), but it's not my favorite film among the big US titles of 2007: it's Michael Clayton, which I think should have received all the big Oscars that year. Here, Brolin is fantastic, and he should've taken Depp's spot in the Best Actor line-up. As is Jones, who, for some reason, was nominated in the same year for the film where he's overshadowed by Sarandon, who hasn't received any nomination since 1995 and should have.

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On second viewing: Margot at the Wedding (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2007)

My most favorite film by Baumbach, the follow-up to magnificently bitter The Squid and the Whale, hinges upon its impressively synched leading duo, Kidman and Leigh. They play sisters, who simultaneously make each other miserable and exude the incredibly intimate closeness. There's immensely watchable chemistry between them, which plays greatly along the staccato editing and barbed dialogues.

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On second viewing: Feud (created by Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen, and Michael Zam, 2017)

Susan Sarandon is the main reason to watch this, as of now, still one-season limited series, built around the infamous, legendary, and likely overblown year-long animosity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The latter is played, also fantastically, by Jessica Lange, who adds a generous amount of empathy to the character, otherwise written as petulant, vindictive, and haunted by the painful awareness of Davis's acting talent. Sarandon, who consistently delivers great roles in smaller films, is breathtakingly luminous, while having less screen time but more potent scenes than Lange. It is particularly the intimate moments that stand out, presenting her character as way warmer than her screen persona: rehearsals with her untalented daughter (ironically unconvincingly played by Kiernan Shipka), hang-outs with her almost-out co-star, Victor Buono, chats with Olivia de Havilland. The supporting cast is uniformly good too, as are set design, makeup, and costumes, making this my favorite Murphy production.

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On second viewing: UHF (dir. Jay Levey, 1989)

Even as a teenager I didn't laugh much when watching UHF. While I sense a cultish quality to its reception nowadays, its charms are scattered and meagre. What's funniest is the parodies of the TV ads that make me think of The Kentucky Fried Movie, with which this film shares its joy of perpetuating lazy racist and sexist jokes.

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On second (or maybe fourth) viewing: Weeds, season 1 (created by Jenji Kohan, 2005)

Having technically known it by heart after several intense re-watchings back in the mid-2000s, I have recently had showed it to my boyfriend, who knew it only tangentially (generation gap!). I remember criticism that Weeds' later seasons (with the exception of 4 and 6) got lost in the re-invention need, with the location shifts camouflaging the storytelling staleness. It's a valid point, I re-watched chunks of seasons 7-8 last year, and cringed heavily at the stinky quality of everything that does not revolve around Mary Louise Parker's nuanced performance. The tenure of the series proved that Nealon and Gould are limited actors and that Parrish, when given a chance of emotionally complex characterization, can pull an interesting performance (season four's ending is his highlight). But it is Parker who remains amazing throughout. In those later seasons, she got a fantastic screen partner in Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom she shared awesome, brittle, sexy, and extremely lively sisterly chemistry. In this opening season, her great partner is Perkins, whose role would become more of a nasty caricature in her last two seasons (the ones outside Agrestic). What surprised me this time though is how clumsily shot and badly written this season is, part of which points to its temporal situatedness: the characters of color are only drug dealers and maids. White guys (and Celia) throw homophobic and ableist slurs as joke punchlines. Suddenly, starting with episode four, there are weird fade-outs truncating the wobbly rhythm of the episodes. Regardless of that, I am looking forward to re-watching season two, which was my favorite back then: I never was a fan of Donovan, but his on-screen relationship with Nancy Botwin was a highlight.

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On second viewing: Wine Country (dir. Amy Poehler, 2019)

Thanks to The Ringer's in-depth "The Big Picture" podcast, to which I owe a surprisingly fascinating revisiting of the 2019 (i.e. pre-COVID) U.S.-centered cinema, I revisited this title, encouraged by Sean Fennessey's and Amanda Dobbins's cool reception of this "hang" of a movie. I didn't care for it for the first time, this time it grew on me to the extent that it was probably conceived in the first place. This is the first feature film by Poehler, who previously directed a few episodes of Parks and Recreation and Broad City (adding to her producer credit on these shows) expanding towards directing, and, while it doesn't impress, it may have been the perfect learning-curve situation. Surrounded by long-time friends and collaborators, Poehler made a pleasantly soft and occasionally funny laid-back comedy, one that fits a broader streamer-based sub-genre that has something to do with low-to-mid-budget ($5-15 mln) mainstream dramedies of the 1980s - I am thinking of Sweet Hearts Dance, Micki & Maude, and the few films directed by Alan Alda, none of which, at least at first sight, probably bears any plot resemblance to Wine Country, but there's something about the simplicity of their narratives and execution. It's cool to see Poehler developing as a filmmaker - after two films, she did Lucy & Desi, which was a pretty entertaining documentary. Cherry Jones is a magical scene-stealer in her one scene.

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On second viewing: Suspiria (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2018)

Somehow explicably a box-office failure, Suspiria is becoming my second favorite Guadagnino's film, as it stuns with detail and surprises with multiple cacophonies. There's plenty of weird elements, which work poorly in isolation, but are fantastic as a full set: Tilda Swinton's trifecta of characters, frequent shifts of protagonists and focalizers, the DDR-based focus, the surprisingly emotional coda featuring Dr. Klemperer and his bad German, Thom Yorke's songs, and the glitchy horror of it all. There are Guadagnino's usually astounding visuals, a high concept, the cute design of the credits, and middling narrative moments. It's a fascinating retelling and restaging of a famous story that was itself deeply flawed due to Argento's misogynistic tendencies. This one's flaws are in its originality.

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On second viewing: Dragnet (dir. Tom Mankiewicz, 1987)

Out of Tom Hanks's pre-A League of Their Own films, this one is predictably silly, sexist, and homophobic, yet not horrible, despite the lead presence of Aykroyd. The latter is compensated by the splendid charisma of Holmes and the slimy charm of Plummer, both of whom appears in a few short scenes. Hanks, the second lead, is effortlessly funny long before he becomes the US's most reliable mainstream actor.