Popwell’s Pandemic Flick Picks

Inspired by Dash Rabbit’s recent exploration of some of the better films he’s been watching during COVID-19: The Neverending Lockdown, I decided to go back through the flicks I’ve been checking out during the pandemic and recommend some winners. If my running list is to be believed – and it is! – I’ve watched over 80 movies in my six months of confinement. Here are some that I think are worthy of your attention:

Gangs of Wasseypur, Parts 1 & 2 (2012) – This epic story follows the decades-long rivalry between a trio of Indian crime families, centering on the so-called “Coal Mafia” of the country’s Dhanbad region. Together, the two parts easily rank among the greatest crime films ever made, rubbing shoulders with The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Once Upon a Time in America. This probably sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. This is an incredible work that revolves around questions of honor and family in ways that will be very familiar to fans of those films. The central characters are caught in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and retribution that swallows up everything and everyone around them, but each one of them is too proud to step back and deescalate. Originally constructed and screened at Cannes as one five-hour-plus film, director Anurag Kashyap split it into two parts when Indian distributors and sane film fans balked at the running time. The story spans the years 1941 to 2009, as successive generations of criminals, politicians, and businessmen take turns running the criminal underworld. The film is less concerned with the mechanics of their criminality as with the idea of how cycles of vengeance perpetuate themselves, so I was occasionally at sea with how exactly people were earning their dirty money. But the heart of the film lies in its generations of characters, all of them trapped in their roles by familial duty and circumstance. It’s hard to single out particular performances in such a strong ensemble piece, but I have to mention the incredible work of two actors. Majoj Bajpayee shines in the central role of Sardar Khan in Part 1, making the local warlord into a truly three-dimensional character whose violent motivations we understand even as we recoil at their results. The most powerful performance, though, belongs to Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Faizal Khan, the unexpected heir to Sardar’s throne in Part 2. Faizal is the Michael Corleone of the piece, the wayward son drawn reluctantly into his family’s brutal business, only to become the most ruthless of them all. Siddiqui is brilliant in the role, exuding a real sadness at what he’s become, even as he coldly dispatches his enemies. Gangs of Wasseypur is an amazing cinematic achievement that should be seen by anyone with even a passing interest in the gangster genre.
Gangs of Wasseypur is available for streaming at Kanopy.

The Films of Samuel Fuller – Prior to lockdown, I had only seen a couple of films from prolific genre auteur Samuel Fuller – his noir masterpiece Pickup on South Street and cheeky historical drama The Baron of Arizona. I’ve taken a deep dive over the past few months, though, seeing no less than ten of his directorial efforts. They’re really something. Fuller was the definition of the auteur as originally conceived by the French New Wave critics – a writer and director working within the confines of genre storytelling to produce unique, iconoclastic visions. Fuller’s directorial style actually fits in rather well with those French filmmakers, too – his creative framing and editing make his films stand out starkly from others of the era. My favorite Fuller flick of lockdown is probably 1952’s Park Row, a love letter to journalism in the guise of a pulpy noir, filled with more nifty little facts about typesetting and old-school newspaper production than probably any film ever made. Other greats include The Steel Helmet, a searing 1951 Korean War flick that’s more honest about both the horrors of war and racism than anything else from the era I’ve seen, and 1964’s The Naked Kiss, a proto-Blue Velvet potboiler that examines the seamy underside of American suburbia as it tells its story of a prostitute trying to leave her old life behind and start over. There’s something to recommend every single Fuller flick I’ve seen lately, but some other especially good ones are mob revenge flick Underworld U.S.A. (1961), mental hospital freakout Shock Corridor (1963), and Forty Guns (1957), a nifty Barbara Stanwyck western that’s a clear precursor to the Italian spaghetti westerns of the early and mid-60s, complete with extreme close-ups of duelists’ eyes that Sergio Leone aped pretty explicitly. My advice is to seek out any and every Samuel Fuller flick you can find; they’re all pretty darn good.

Josie and the Pussycats (2001) – Here’s a wild card. I literally only watched this because I was visiting my father, who doesn’t have wi-fi. With no streaming options, I was left to pick through HBO’s typically meager offerings until I landed on Josie and the Pussycats. With zero expectations, other than that I’d probably turn it off after about ten minutes, I decided to give it a shot. So, with my overly defensive explanation of why a 50-year-old man was watching this out of the way, I can tell you that it’s actually surprisingly good! The plot revolves around nefarious record exec (is there any other kind?) Alan Cummings, and his plans to insert subliminal messages in pop music in order to influence teens. The story’s pretty silly, but the film quickly becomes a pointed satire that critiques consumer culture, product placement, and mass consumption by embracing those concepts to excess. Directors Deborah Kaplan and Henry Elfont lean into the crass commercialization, putting their over-the-top product placement so front and center that it can’t be ignored. Literally every surface of the film is branded, from Target logos cluttering up private planes to Revlon-themed luxury hotel rooms. It’s akin to the approach used by Neveldine and Taylor in another overlooked gem from the decade, Gamer – a kind of “have your cake and eat it, too” approach that criticizes genre tropes while simultaneously pushing them to extremes. Josie ends with a surprisingly affecting finale that makes a strong case for individualism in the face of overwhelming peer and societal pressure. Plus, it’s got Parker Posey as the head of MegaRecords, and she’s always great. Believe it or not, Josie and the Pussycats is one of the most enjoyable flicks I’ve seen lately. Deep down, I know no one will believe it, though.
Josie and the Pussycats is available for streaming at HBOMax.

Padmaavat (2018) – For sheer visual extravagance, nothing can top this lavish, impossibly gorgeous retelling of the ancient poem Padmavat. A Hindi-language feast for the senses, it tells a fairly familiar story of an evil 13th-century king who yearns for an unobtainable beauty – Padmavati (Deepika Padukone), the queen of a rival kingdom. His relentless pursuit of her, from attacking her capitol city to kidnapping her husband, makes up most of the film’s lengthy running time. It’s not necessarily the story that keeps you watching, though. Literally every shot of this film is a beautifully composed image; every surface is covered in ornate carvings and decoration, every scrap of fabric layered over the actors filled with intricate embroidery. This might just be the best looking film I’ve ever seen. Ranveer Singh turns in a fantastic, scenery-chewing performance as Alauddin Khalji, the deranged king who’s pursuing Padmavati. Singh’s clearly having a great time, growling and strutting his way through every scene. And then, when you least expect it, he and his evil minions break out into a mesmerizing and insane song and dance about how in love he is! I was also surprised by the frank way the film dealt with Alauddin’s right-hand man’s (unrequited?) love for him. He even sings a song to Alauddin as he takes a bath, telling him how much he yearns for him! It’s all way more open and up-front than I would expect from an Indian film, but maybe India’s less homophobic than I’m giving it credit for. That said, I didn’t love everything about the film: it’s pretty one-sided in its depiction of the Muslim Alauddin and his followers as conniving, morality-free villains, and the Hindus he attacks as paragons of virtue, which resulted in quite a bit of controversy in India upon the film’s release. And for a film named after her, Padvamati is surprisingly absent for much of the actual action. Finally, I had some real problems with the film’s climax, which devolves into typical macho mano-a-mano bluster and forces Padvamati into a decision that the film treats as heroic, but which I found rather unsatisfying for a number of reasons. Then again, the story this is based on is several centuries old, and I guess they didn’t want to change the ending. Overall, though, the sheer eye-popping spectacle of the whole thing overwhelmed me and makes it easy to recommend.
Padmaavat is available for streaming at Amazon Prime.

On the down side: Not everything I’ve been watching has been worth the time, though. For some reason, I decided to give Drive a whirl when it showed up on Netflix. After sitting through that criminal hipster snoozefest, I was left with a familiar nagging question – has Ryan Gosling ever made a good movie? He’s a complete cypher on screen, sucking the energy out of everything around him and doing it all with the bemused smirk of someone who knows he’s the personification of white privilege. I’d say he’s failed upwards, but I don’t even think he’s trying that hard. It’s more like he’s sleepwalked upwards… Another ludicrous dud was Under the Silver Lake, a mind-bogglingly stupid attempt at creating an L.A. hipster noir that goes way off the tracks early and never finds it way back. I could only make it about an hour into Silver Lake before its combination of ridiculous conspiracy theory and deadly dull mystery forced me to come to my senses and go to bed… Probably the worst of the lot, though, was the starkly unfunny Will Ferrell vehicle Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga. Look, I didn’t come into Eurovision thinking I would be stumbling onto some great cinematic event, but it didn’t even live up to the relatively low bar I set for Ferrell’s comedies: Be kind of funny and silly. Instead, I was treated to the somewhat melancholy story of an Icelandic man who yearns for his father to accept him, and expresses that yearning by performing terrible pop songs on TV. And boy, do you get to hear Fire Saga’s terrible songs a lot. They’re not funny parodies like in Popstar or Spinal Tap, though – they sound pretty much just like any pop songs, lyrics and all. I guess it’s supposed to be funny that Ferrell has an accent. Anyway, when an especially horrid musical number featuring all the Eurovision contestants taking turns singing broke out, my wife and I looked at each other and agreed that the best course of action would be cutting our losses and turning it off. The screen going black might have been the highlight of the film.