This week’s Filmsuck is our public service in honor of the holidays! We discuss “hidden gems” of cinema, the great obscure films we love, including a long list compiled from suggestions by subscribers and friends. Bonus: a few Christmas movie suggestions!
On this week’s Filmsuck we try to figure out what the bright idea was behind the Netfix movie Mank directed by David Fincher from a script by his father Jack Fincher. It’s about screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s fight with Orson Welles over script credit on Citizen Kane, a potentially interesting topic garbled up with fictional events and a total lack of imagination.
We’re discussing the hit Netflix series Queen’s Gambit after at least a hundred people recommended it. As Evgenia sums up this beguiling show, it’s about “the Wednesday Addams of chess.”’
On this week’s Filmsuck we talk about the new four-episode Showtime docuseries The Reagans, which makes the case for Ronald Reagan’s sleazy, racist, ruling-class demagoguery as California governor and two-term president paving the way for the vile politics of Donald Trump. Includes copious quotes from Eileen’s in-depth interview with docuseries director Matt Tyrnauer.
In this week’s special election episode of Filmsuck, we discuss the broad shift in the way the American election process has been represented in movies from WWII to the present day, and talk about some of our favorite election films including The Best Man, The Candidate, The Manchurian Candidate, Election, Dave, and an obscure new favorite of ours called Spinning Boris.
We interview film critic David Heslin, editor of Metro, Australia’s oldest film magazine, about the long career and many films of legendary French director Agnes Varda (Cleo From 5 to 7, Vagabond, One Sings the Other Doesn’t, The Gleaners and I).
Halloween Filmsuck! We interview Slavic languages scholar Sophie Pinkham, whose New Left Review piece “Nihilism for Oligarchs” got us interested in the scary, crazy, hard-to-classify set of Russian films called Dau. Financed by an oligarch, these films represent the efforts of thousands of mostly non-professional actors who spent years in period costumed, performing in character as oppressed Soviets living in an elaborate scientific institute set based on the one occupied by real-life physicist Lev Landau (nicknamed “Dau”). Lurid rumors of despotic directorial control, sexual assault, exploitation and animal cruelty have made these films highly controversial.
You can watch the films here:
And here is Sophie's article behind the paywall. Our patrons will get it in the pdf format.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II125/articles/sophie-pinkham-nihilism-for-oligarchs
This week’s Filmsuck takes on the Sofia Coppola problem. We talk about her new movie premiering on Apple Plus TV, On the Rocks, which has strong Lost in Translation vibes. It’s about the daddy issues (Bill Murray is the daddy) of an affluent but creatively blocked writer (Rashida Jones) who thinks her husband (Marlon Wayans) is cheating on her. It’s being described as a screwball comedy, which will surprise you if you see it and fail to laugh even once!
In this week’s Filmsuck we interview Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley, about the Netflix documentary Social Dilemma. It's supposed be to a scathing critique of Silicon Valley's manipulative social media business practices...yet why the hell does this crap film refuse to chart the actual history of the internet and the way its operations are entirely consistent with the ordinary workings of capitalism?
In this week’s Filmsuck we rave about a new Showtime series we love called The Good Lord Bird, starring Ethan Hawke in the performance of a lifetime as the radical abolitionist John Brown. Don’t miss this wild, dark, and hilarious show in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn and Little Big Man—and don’t miss this episode either!
We talk to New Zealand designer and filmmaker Rowan Wernham about NZ cinema, its history, some of its major filmmakers (Taika Waititi, Jane Campion, Peter Jackson, Geoff Murphy), and one of its main genres that makes use of the nation’s fabulous and haunting landscape, NZ Gothic.
Here is the series of articles on growing up in NZ by Katherine Dolan:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/84158436/new-zealand-is-no-paradise-it-is-brutal
It’s the Paul Verhoeven episode on Filmsuck, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Showgirls, a legendary flop when released in 1995 that won the director a record number of Worst Film Razzie awards. We put the subsequent cult film success of Showgirls in the context of Verhoeven’s overall career that includes such films as Soldier of Orange, RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Black Book.
In this week’s episode of Filmsuck we tackle the controversy over Maïmouna Doucouré's film Cuties, a French film about the cultural problem of hypersexualizing preteen girls that empathizes with the experiences of the girls themselves. Those who object to Cuties—including members of congress such as Ted Cruz and Tulsi Gabbard, Change.org petitioners, and #CancelNetflix enthusiasts—are calling it filth, child pornography, and “a pedophile film.”
On this week’s Filmsuck, we discuss the convoluted new Academy Award rules for Best Picture nominations that are intended to promote diversity as well as the latest Netflix film, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It made us think of ending things too.
On this week’s Filmsuck we’re creeped out by The Vow, a nine-episode HBO docuseries about the NXIVM cult financed by wealthy Seagram liquor fortune heirs Claire and Sara Bronfman. The series focuses on members who escaped what they’d initially seen as a self-realization program until they realized it was a racket covering up sex slavery, sex trafficking, racketeering, forced labor conspiracy, and other crimes. Special bonus: pubic region branding!
This week we’re talking about John Carpenter, director of Halloween, They Live, The Thing, and many other great films! To quote Guillermo del Toro in a 2016 Twitter rant, ‘I am amazed at the fact that we take him for granted. How can we? Why should we?….Carpenter created masterpiece after masterpiece and they are often ignored. Now go to Blu-ray church and pray.’
LOTS OF SPOILERS in this week’s discussion of the popular Brazilian film Bacurau, which combines left-wing political values with genre movie elements drawn from sci-fi, horror, and spaghetti Westerns.
P.S. Skip first twenty minutes if you don't want to listen to us chat about Los Angeles, writing and depression.
This week we talk about An American Pickle, a new comedy premiering on HBO Max that features Seth Rogen in a dual role: a Jewish emigrant from Eastern Europe in 1919 America who falls into a vat of brine at his job in a pickle factory, and his great-grandson in 2019, a sad sack app-creator who has trouble coping with the reappearance of his perfectly preserved forebear. You may have heard of it because of Seth Rogen’s recent comments about growing up as a Jewish kid who was ‘fed a huge amount of lies about Israel.'