Hi! Welcome to Cinema Club #2, but before we begin, a few announcements:
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Missed last month’s cinema club? Cinema Club #1 can be found here. No matter the month, you can always go back and watch and or leave a comment.
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Now, let’s get back to this month’s cinema club brought to you by Alisha Mughal and Veronica Phillips
-FD
DARK CHRISTMAS (Alisha Mughal)
Rita Hayworth said of Christmastime once that it’s “the lonsomest time of the year,” and that’s something I’ve always felt about the holidays, too. The following movies comfort me during the coldness that sets like a pall about me this time of year. They’re dark, but not necessarily in a sinister sense. Some are undergirded by an antsy angst, perhaps they’ve got a tear-soaked sadness about them, while others are outright wintery horrors. By “dark” I simply mean bleak, a sense of hopelessness or the realization of things ending. What is for sure is that there is none of the cheery joy about them that is the hallmark of this time of year. It’s nice sometimes to watch a sadness that matches yours unfold about you, it’s validating and sweet.
Have a joyously dark Christmas.
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
It’s A Wonderful Life is certainly more well-known and universally revered as a James Stewart Christmas classic, and it could certainly be included on this list, dark and grim and dire as it is, with Stewart delivering a pitch-perfect performance. But The Shop Around the Corner, filmed before Stewart went off to war, holds a special place in my heart for its less urgent tragedy. While It’s A Wonderful Life explores the ideas of life and death, contrasts wealth and happiness, in a rather direct manner, The Shop Around the Corner is much more subtle in its existential woe. Scanning immediately as a sweet Christmastime love story, this film has something lurking beneath its surface that nags at me like an itch — it’s something about the way in which Stewart speaks, his cadence clippy and a whisper, the Pennsylvania drawl he’s now known for only a light whisper, it’s something about the way in which his character gives up, seems tired as opposed to possessing the energetic desperation of George Bailey. There is a pillowy silence about The Shop Around the Corner that keeps the ideas of love and death inextricably, intuitively linked, and for this reason, I weep every time I watch it.
Black Christmas (1974)
Christmastime wouldn’t be complete without a Black Christmas rewatch. This film is a masterpiece for so many reasons, but prime among them is the relative fullness and respect it allows for its female leads. Margot Kidder with her jaded and wry Barb, and Olivia Hussey with with her softly strong Jess, are divine as they buck against the domineering, gaslighting, murderous men about them. But for all their strength and vivaciousness and naivete and kindness, the women in this film are taken down one by one in a battle that proves itself impossible and skewed against them. This movie is on this list for all the hope its women contain within them, all the vibrancy that is ultimately snuffed out; little by little the rays of hope are extinguished until there is nothing but blackness.
30 Days Of Night (2007)
Admittedly, this film is not at all about Christmas. But it certainly could be. Following the dreamy Josh Hartnett slashing vampires who haunt and hunt within an Alaskan town isolated from the rest of the world as 30 days of darkness fall upon it, this film is blisteringly cold. Exploring communal dynamics fraying and fracturing under the weight of forced isolation and impending death, every aspect of 30 Days of Night is stunningly put together, from the cinematography to its score to its gore. No holiday season seems complete without Hartnett, some vampires, and the kind of dry snow that threatens to swallow you whole.
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Charles Laughton’s debut and final feature, The Night of the Hunter is perhaps the most horrifying film I have ever seen. Robert Mitchum stars as Reverend Harry Powell, an insane, violently misogynistic minister who murders widows and takes their money, believing wholeheartedly to be receiving divine proclamations/justification to do so. The film ends with the jubilance and hope of Christmas — that greeting-card-like-happiness we’ve become accustomed to, that saccharine red-green-gold vibrancy we no doubt will encounter this year — but it goes through roiling hell before it gets there. Cinematographically, this film is heartbreakingly stunning, all velvety shadows looming as if ripped straight from grim and hopeless German Expressionist films, this film is roaming and jarring as it imperils two innocent children whose money Powell is after. Mitchum is divine here, cutting a figure more frightening than any spector — he growls like a monster and yelps like a coyote, terrifyingly insane for he genuinely believes in his holiness. Watching him sing sinisterly as he stalks the children through Depression-era barrenness, upturning sites of safety and holiness, Mitchum’s Powell contains a mind-bendingly complex subtlety that I wish more contemporary horrors would portray. This film speaks to the bleakness of the holidays simply because, even as it ends happily, one wonders whether all hope isn’t defunct if a character like Harry Powell could exist.
HOUSEWIFE HYSTERIA (Veronica Phillips)
A collection of films about very conventionally put-together women snapping under the weight and inherent horror of being a very conventionally put-together woman.
Swallow (2020)
When docile housewife Hunter (Hayley Bennett) becomes pregnant with her wealthy husband's child, she develops a compulsive and inexplicable hunger for all things inedible — toy jacks, tacks, batteries, figurines. It feels as if Hunter’s quiet devouring of inanimate objects constantly shifts between a scream for help, an act of defiance, and some sort of spacey, mentally ill compulsion. Swallow is an icky, sticky film, so visceral you can taste it.
Safe (1995)
1980s housewife Carol White (Julianne Moore) is slightly ditzy, extremely charming, and not often seriously listened to. When Carol starts to have something between a panic attack and an allergic reaction, seemingly triggered solely by the San Fernando air around her, she finds a newfound confidence in the process of asserting the gravity of her totally unfounded illness. Yet this assertion of self, in its own sort of tentative, nervous way, leads Carol further and further away from society and modern life.
Serial Mom (1994)
Serial Mom is perhaps John Waters’ most straight-edge film, bordering on close to something like conventional studio filmmaking, but this is not to say the film lacks any of Waters’ usual infamous, campy deliciousness. Kathleen Turner’s performance as Serial Mom’s perfect housewife turned gleefully perverse, murderous sociopath is “good for her” cinema at its best.
Election (1999)
While Election’s Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is not technically a housewife, she has that certain brittle suburban, modern, white woman flair that feels worthy of this list. A film centered around a student council election gone awry, Election is as much about teenage neuroses as it is about the bitter edge of grown men in crisis. Election’s unlikeable, messy protagonists suggest the two groups can occasionally be bound by their shared desperation to obtain intense and total amounts of power and control.