Film Daze Cinema Club #1 (November, 2022)

Alisha and Veronica kick off our first film club!

Hi!

We recently announced the start of our film club so now it’s time to announce our picks. Staff writers Alisha Mughal and Veronica Phillips will be our regular curators for our monthly film club. If you aren’t familiar with their work, we recommend you read their writing on the main site and their more insightful long-form essays via our paid Substack subscriptions.

Letterboxd

Make sure to follow along on Letterboxd where you can log your watches and write in more detail.

Feel free to tag/ comment on here or our other social media handles as you watch our picks for the month. Your thoughts are always important to us. the hashtag is #FDCinemaClub. Watch these films in any order you like, watch them or just a few, the goal is to go enjoy and discuss at your own pace.

Without further ado, the curations:

DEADLY WOMEN by Alisha Mughal

Inspired by this month being Noirvember

MEMENTO (2000)

Every time I watch Memento, I find myself having forgotten the plot, and I naively expect for Carrie-Ann Moss’ Natalie to be kind to Guy Pearce’s Leonard; I find myself thinking that this time around, maybe she won’t take advantage of him, maybe she’ll even fall in love with him and help him, but every time she breaks my heart. Memento wouldn’t be Memento if Natalie was kinder, if she wasn’t the brassy bartender collecting spit into a pint of beer and making Leonard drink it. There is so much that is special about this movie for me, and the delightfully sinister, conniving, and manipulative Natalie is one special broad.

THE KILLERS (1946)

Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins is steely and frightening, unflinching and worth dying for. She doesn’t get as much screen time as she perhaps deserves in The Killers, but she wields an intense amount of power nonetheless, the kind to drive men mad. One of the only characters to walk out of the plot’s wrangling drama alive, Gardner’s Kitty is a beautiful and deadly force. 

BLACK WIDOW (1987)

This Bob Rafelson gem is a wild, mind-bending ride. About a woman who marries rich men and then murders them, and the Department of Justice agent who pursues her, it’s insanely tough rooting for the side of conventional justice here. Theresa Russell’s Catharine is a confident, sexy, and determined babe who is living my dream, to be honest. 

BODY HEAT (1981)

Kathleen Turner is simultaneously cool as a breeze and scorching as a flame in this remake of Double Indemnity. This film is a must for Noirvember simply for Turner’s strident and icy, molten and steely Matty, who carries the femme fatale’s essence that Barbara Stanwyck perfected before her. 

CAN I COME OVER AND BE WEIRD AND ACT STRANGE? By Veronica Phillips

These five films are a little off and a little icky. Not surreal, or campy, or avant-garde, or quintessential horrors, but instead the kind of film to bring to a casual group movie night to off-put your friends, a beloved pastime for any weirdo cinephile. 

CRUMB (1994)

Crumb is a detailed cinematic portrait of an extremely strange man. Zwigoff’s documentary follows not just the famous underground cartoonist R. Crumb over a span of years, but also those that know him, love him, or struggle with him (sometimes all at once). A perverse artist insistent on compulsively oversharing, with extremely complicated relationships to women, sex, family, fame, and the process of creation itself. Crumb seems like a pretty fucked up guy, and yet, unlike others who try and hide the truth, he knows it about himself, hunches inward in self-loathing confusion while simultaneously often admitting his oddities with ease— a dissonance that is presented on screen to fascinating results. 

FUNNY GAMES (1997)

Funny Games is Haneke’s iconic, meta pulling apart of our cultural fascination with violence onscreen. The film centers upon the psychopathic, (mostly) ultra-realistic home invasion and torture of a polite, well-off nuclear family on holiday. Funny Games is exploratory and sharp, bending the tropes and
anticipated structure of psychological thrillers, and thoughtfully littered with meta (and sometimes literal) winks. To go in knowing less is to give yourself over to the unrelenting, tense dread of a one-of-a-kind film, and if one time around isn’t enough for your movie night, there’s always the 2007 shot-for-shot remake to turn to. 

TICKLED (2016)

In this documentary, New Zealand pop culture journalist David Farrier, known for leaning into the weirder corners of our culture, stumbles upon the world of competitive endurance tickling. What seems like a slightly quirky (and perhaps slightly homoerotic) collection of videos of men tickling each other in sportswear quickly and unexpectedly pushes Farrier down a rabbithole as he slowly uncovers decades of manipulation, dark secrets, hidden identities, and ruined reputations at the hands of a particularly cruel and strange man obsessed with tickling. Tickled follows Farrier’s and Reeve’s unraveling of this strange, multi-layered, and nefarious person in a gut-churning, sharp little documentary. An essential twenty-minute follow-up to the film, The Tickle King, can also be found on YouTube. 

ELEPHANT (2003)

Following a collection of students going about their morning in the brief time before a devastating school shooting, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is an hour and twenty minutes of acute dread. The film is so relentless in its endless and highly present tracking shots of students walking about quiet hallways that it becomes almost meditative at moments. A somewhat critically divisive film, more than anything Elephant captures the unique and difficult to accurately describe space and energy of a morning in a quiet suburban high school to a precision, which makes the inevitable outcome all the more dreadful. 

SECRETARY (2002)

Undoubtedly the sweetest pick of this month’s theme, Secretary is a testament to the potential for acting weird and being strange to become a sensual, joyous, and freeing practice. Following the youthful, naive, and internally tortured Lee Holloway (played by an endearing Maggie Gyllenhaal) as she finds freedom in a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss, Edward Grey (played by a young, sexy, and eccentric James Spader), Secretary is sexy and silly in its strangeness — a fairy tale fantasy for the modern masochist woman.

We hope you enjoy,

Film Daze team