Viewings: December 2024

Took complete advantage of the festive break and crammed an obscene amount of recent films until my eyeballs melted like Gerstead's. The biggest highlights were undoubtedly Sean Baker's comedy drama Anora and Jang Jae-hyun's horror mystery Exhuma. Two very different films and two great examples why 2024 in film was a winner for me.

Roll on 2025!

Film:

12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (Nicholas Webster, 1964)*

The Blood Beast Terror (Vernon Sewell, 1968)

The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969)*

The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969)

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)*

Hands of the Ripper (Peter Sasdy, 1971)

Fuzz (Richard A. Colla, 1972)*

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)*

I Don’t Want to Be Born (Peter Sasdy, 1975)

The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979)

Dawn of the Mummy (Frank Agrama, 1981)*

The Escapees (Jean Rollin, 1981)*

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Blood Games (Tanya Rosenberg, 1990)*

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)*

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

The Borderlands (Elliot Goldner, 2013)

Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021)*

Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)*

The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)*

Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)*

The Devil’s Bath (Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz, 2024)*

Exhuma (Jang Jae-hyun, 2024)*

Frogman (Anthony Cousins, 2023/2024)*

Gladiator II (Ridley Scott, 2024)*

Heretic (Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, 2024)*

Humane (Caitlin Cronenberg, 2024)*

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Ariane Louis-Seize, 2023/2024)*

Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Chislik, 2022/2024)*

It’s What’s Inside (Greg Jardin, 2024)*

Kill (Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, 2023/2024)*

The Order (Justin Kurzel, 2024)*

The Shadow Strays (Timo Tjahjanto, 2024)*

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Thelma (Josh Margolin, 2024)*

 

Television:

Doctor Who - ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’ (Sydney Newman, 1970)

Doctor Who - ‘The War Games in Colour’  (Sydney Newman, 1969/2024)*

Doctor Who - ‘Joy to the World’ (Sydney Newman, 2024)*

Squid Game - Season 2 (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2024)*

*First time viewings.

Dada Debaser Notes:

• Remember when Benedict Cumberbatch's mum was a giant blood-sucking moth in The Blood Beast Terror? I do, but then again, I also remember thinking it was better than it really was.
  
• Oscar bait performances by the Brits this month: Nicholas Hoult as a bowl haired white nationalist and Jude Law's moustachioed fed were both exceptional in true crime thriller The Order. Ralph Fiennes's concerned trolling cardinal in the bitchfest that was Conclave was also very noteworthy. I'll probably only ever catch these films again whenever they're aired on TV, however.
  
• Joan Collins spurning the advance of a lustful dwarf and subsequently cursed with a demonic killer offspring in Peter Sasdy's laughably terrible I Don't Want to Be Born should have been great in theory. Waste of a great cast: Donald Pleasence, Ralph Bates, Caroline Munro and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from the first lady of Play School (1968-1988) Floella Benjamin. Thankfully, Sasdy delivered with the excellent Hands of the Ripper (1971) a few years prior.
  
• The Apprentice follows the typical Hollywood style formula of any biopic or period piece featuring the aid of vintage visual filters, an OTT campy wardrobe, and nostalgic needledrops. I was sick of hearing Bacara again and again. To the film's credit, Jeremy Strong's performance as Roy Cohn makes it highly watchable. Simultaneously channelling Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man and Beelzebub. There's a hilarious scene that parallels Trump's liposuction and hair surgery with Darth Vader's creation.
• The Color of Pomegranates is a five star banger in terms of its sublime cinematography and gorgeous production design. However, despite its relatively short run time, it's a challenging slog to wade through, thanks to its cold and avant-garde religious sensibility. One for the Criterion chin strokers.
• The last twenty or so minutes in Frogman are great fun. Unfortunately, the fifty minutes that precede it are absolutely boring.
  
• The proverbial picture paints a thousand words proved true as Gi-hun's memeable mugshots from Squid Game summed up my satisfaction regarding both seasons of the show:
  

Did my best and worst films of 2024. Also listed my fave discoveries and Blu-Ray/4K releases. Even did the Top 100 Directors Challenge (and failed).

Blog reading I enjoyed this month were the Martorialist's best movies and TV shows awards and Dark Eyes of London’s top 10 films of 2024.