Movie Journal: August

Wendy and Lucy

I'm somewhat late on this month's movie journal on account of work, and since I'm going to be spending much of the next week traveling and going to comedy shows, I thought I'd better write this now otherwise I'll be writing about films I saw in August in October, and that isn't a good look.

August was easily my weakest month for movies this year. Due to a hectic few weeks, I only managed to squeeze in 20 films throughout the month, one of which was Suicide Squad, far and away the worst film I've seen so far this year, and one of the most miserable cinematic experiences I can remember. I already spent two whole episodes of Shot/Reverse Shot talking about why it's terrible in and of itself and representative of everything wrong with blockbuster filmmaking, so let's leave it at that.

I also re-watched Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons for the first time in about a decade and it was roughly ten times better than I remembered. Admittedly, I remembered it being really good, but I didn't remember it being brilliant (until the tacked on happy ending, which is hilariously obvious and ill-fitting). It's easy to obsess over the fact that it's an incomplete work because swathes of it were cut and destroyed over seventy years ago, but focusing on the lost masterpiece that no one living has seen can only distract from the masterpiece that we actually have. It also reminded me of how much I enjoy the scene in The Squid in the Whale in which Jesse Eisenberg tries to impress a girl by bragging about having only seen stills of the film, a scene I think of very often because it's not a million miles away from what I was like as a teenager.

Right, let's get down to business. Here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in August.

Movie Journal: August

Mostly due to work commitments, this was a fairly quiet month for me in which I watched a mere 20 films, though at least they were all first time viewings. The only real thread in my viewing came towards the end of the month when, after recording a load of their films from TCM, I watched a string of Marx Brothers movies in a row. Through that, I have come up with a grand unifying theory regarding how to judge the quality of a Marx Brothers movie:

• If it has Zeppo (very much the Xander Harris of the group) in it, it's probably going to be a good one.
• The quality of a Marx Brothers film correlates precisely to how quickly Groucho shows up. If he isn't introduced in the first couple of scenes, then you're off to a bad start.

I didn't watch any legitimately bad films, but the least interesting was The Past is a Grotesque Animal, a documentary about Kevin Barnes and Of Montreal. It's a perfectly fine documentary and a good primer for the band, but it's a great example of a documentary which does little more than tell the story of an artist without offering any insight into why they are all that special. There's no sense that the film is offering more information than Kevin Barnes' Wikipedia page would.

It actually makes for a good contrast to the best film I watched this month...