Film Daze Cinema Club #7 (May, 2023)
We are ending the month of May with Poe, ghosts, and dicks…you guessed right, it’s double feature time!
ALISHA’S MAY DOUBLE FEATURE: “Period Murder Mysteries, Edgar Allan Poe edition”
The past couple of weeks in Toronto have been gloomy. The world outside has been rainy and cold and constantly rushing and weeping and rumbling. There’s great incentive to stay inside, one need not feel guilty for it. It was the heedless persistence of this weather that left my bones aching for Edgar Allan Poe. I pulled out my thick edition containing all his stories and poems, and though I'd been determined to read a couple of his stories I’d never read before, I found myself reading and rereading “The Raven.” Almost intuitively, I also turned to the following two movies, watching one after the other and finding a great, if eerie, kind of comfort, the kind Poe would certainly approve of.
A double feature recommendation for when you want to indulge the gloom during the rains this spring.
The Pale Blue Eye (2022)
Christian Bale plays Augustus Landor, a weary but deeply intelligent detective called upon to solve the mysterious death of a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. As he uncovers increasingly strange and unnerving things about the cadet’s body, along with curious dynamics playing out amongst the men within the academy, along with their families, Augustus is aided by a young Edgar Allan Poe, portrayed unsettlingly, preternaturally well by Harry Melling. Melling’s Poe is striking, hesitant because he’s young, but still so full of a love for life, despite the tragedies that have already begun to befall him. A curious marriage of fact and fiction, this film is endlessly compelling and beguiling, and Melling’s hauntingly sympathetic portrayal of Poe will certainly stay with you for a long while.
The Raven (2012)
In general, I truly think we underappreciate John Cusack. Particularly, I think we sorely underappreciate him in this James McTeigue-directed thriller that has a delicious amount of fun as it pieces together the last few days of Poe’s tragic and turbulent life, chucking in a mind-bending murder mystery for Poe to contend with as he nears his end. Cusack’s Poe is less hesitant than Melling’s, for good reason, as he is much older. And where Melling certainly experimented with portraying the physical exuberance endemic to characters within the nineteenth century, sweetly bursting in excitement at the sight of books, for example, Cusack leans fully into the almost sensual bent literary folks, indeed Poe, needs must have possessed. Cusack is delightful to behold as Poe as he roars when a piece of his is cut from the paper, or as he hurls the most colourful insults at any and everyone about him; he possesses that love for life that Poe had, evidenced in his careful and sensual writing. Where a certain sadness twinkled within Melling’s Poe’s eyes, here Cusack wears Poe’s tragedies with a sense of their heft, moving as swiftly to quiet contemplation as he does to exuberant outbursts and hilarious insults. This is a stunning film that is well crafted and stunningly carried by Cusack, and it’s also a damn good time.
Veronica’s MAY DOUBLE FEATURE: “Outcast Horndogs” — My Year of Dicks and Ghost World.
Not quite old enough to be fully sexually experienced, but old enough to be fascinated by the process (and often deeply frustrated if they haven’t yet had the chance to experiment), this double feature is set in the limbo between female adolescence and female womanhood, when the concept of getting laid is at the forefront of your mind, but execution isn’t all that easy.
My Year of Dicks (2022)
One of this year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts, My Year of Dicks is a rapid-fire anthology of stories about a teen girl’s panicked hunt for a person who will take her virginity. Less about connection or sexual chemistry, more about just getting it over with, our teen girl protagonist stumbles through a collection of fumbling half-way hook-ups. The short film is dense and varied in its artistic styles — some stories animated with anime-esque eyes and hearts, others sketched with gaunt, melting faces in an attempt to capture the vibrancy and horror of searching for sexual validation in the midst of often appalling adolescent sexual options.
Ghost World (2001)
An adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ comic book of the same name, Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World is an ode to the pseudo-outcast teenage girl on the precipice of adult womanhood. Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) sneeringly consider themselves as better than everyone else (though most any man that passes them can be given the stamp of approval of “I would fuck him” depending on their mood). The two of them are fascinated by sex and male validation, but when it becomes a more tangible opportunity for Enid when she meets the older, nerdier Seymour (Steve Buscemi), Rebecca and Enid’s codependent friendship begins to feel the strain.