gabriel byrne

millers crossing

I always make a big deal out of the first film I watch in a given year. I guess I feel like it sets the theme for the year or some such thing. Or maybe I just like stats and the first anything of the year seems randomly important.

As I noted in previous posts we were supposed to be in Kentucky today, the first day of 2024. But Covid kept us home. That and a million other things kept me from really thinking about what movie I’d watch today. In fact, I spent most of the day not watching movies at all, but binge-watching the excellent Amazon series Fleabag.

But as night came I knew I needed to watch a movie and my mind completely randomly thought of Miller’s Crossing, the 1990 gangster film from the Coen Brothers.

I love the Coen Brothers. I have ever since I first watched Fargo in 2006. That movie blew me away. It was so quirky, and funny, and violent. I had previously watched Raising Arizona, but at the time it didn’t make much sense to me. I now consider it one of the funniest movies of all time.

After Fargo I started seeking out Coen Brothers movies. I think I first watched Barton Fink (didn’t get it at first but now consider it a classic). Then I watched Miller’s Crossing and absolutely loved it.

That movie single-handedly turned me on to the writings of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and made me a fan of film noir. I owe it a lot.

I hadn’t seen it in years so this viewing was somewhat fresh. It is still absolutely perfect.

It is loosely based on Hammett’s novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key, but with plenty of Coen Brothers spin. Gabriel Byrne plays Tom Reagan the right-hand man to mob boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) who gets into a war with up-and-coming gangster Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito). There are lots of twists and turns making the plot a bit confusing on first viewing, but it is full of wonderful dialogue and that Coen Brothers humor. It looks great, the acting is great, and the music by Carter Burwell is beautiful. It remains one of my all-time favorite films.

I think that makes a good start to 2024.

hereditary

This week I watched exactly one movie, Beau is Afraid the new horror film by Ari Aster. Honestly, I’m not sure what I think of it. It isn’t a bad film, exactly, but it did take me three days to complete it. There was just only so much of it I could take in one setting. It is a film with a particular point of view, and that POV is rather unsettling.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a man with intense anxiety. He is the sort of person who always imagines the absolute worst thing possible is going to happen. The film essentially stays in his point of view and so I was never sure what was real and what was just in his head. Critic Matt Singer has a very good review of the film and he explains it much better than I am.

I finished Beau is Afraid yesterday and so it is not the Friday Night Horror Movie, but watching that film made me want to return to Ari Aster’s first full-length feature film, Hereditary. And that is the FNHM.

Like Beau is Afraid, Hereditary is a strange, unsettling film and I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I connected to it much more strongly than I did with Beau.

Like so many modern horror films Hereditary is about grief. It begins with the death of a matriarch, or rather the funeral of the matriarch. She was a complicated, sometimes difficult woman as we’ll learn by listening to her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette) give her eulogy. Mother and daughter had a strained relationship. The family has a long history of mental illness that ends in tragedy.

Later another terrible tragedy will strike sending the family spiraling. Annie begins having visions of the dead. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) tries to hold the family together but his own grief envelops him. The son, Peter (Alex Wolff) blames himself for the accident.

The film goes to unexpected and weird places, almost none of it is believable, and yet I was completely carried away by it. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot as to avoid spoilers but if you like horror that find a unique way to terrify then this is a movie worth checking out.

Collette gives an absolutely riveting performance. Ann Dowd shows up too as a, well, again I won’t spoil it, but she’s always worth watching.