Infernal Affairs (2002)

One of my guiding principles in life comes from John Hodgman, who after toying with this idea for years laid it out in his book Vacationland:

Nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory-in Appalachia in particular-of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again.

But even Hodgman admits that nostalgia feels good. So I’ll come out and boldly admit: there’s a lot of Eighties and Nineties a e s t h e t i c that I’m really into. Movies like Chungking Express and shows like ER really tap into that for me. I know I wouldn’t like going back to a world without smart phones or our beloved AI overlords (please spare me) but it’s fun to look at. And while I’ve tried to kind of embrace that in an attempt just to feel good, there’s another idea I’ve been toying with lately. And that is that I have no nostalgia for the 2000s. In fact, as Infernal Affairs reminded me, this aesthetic sucked.

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The Gleaners and I (2000)

Last year, quite by accident, I had a chance to write about legendary director Orson Welles inventing the video essay in 1973. This summer, I’ve given myself a similar opportunity by choosing to watch 2000’s The Gleaners and I, in which legendary director Agnès Varda invents the vlog. Armed with a digital camera, septuagenarian Varda went all over France talking to to people on the fringes of society. What she found were chefs, artists, and families that quietly challenged global consumer culture. And she found out about herself too, a person with wrinkled hands and gray hair who may have more in common with these gleaners than she thought.

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Fallen Angels (1995)

Let me try to assemble the house of cards that led to Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels. In the Sixties and Seventies, King Hu brought new technical and artistic heights to the wuxia genre with his films Come Drink with Me, Dragon Inn, and A Touch of Zen. Around the same time, Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon brought martial arts films to the global stage. This created an opportunity in the mid-Nineties for an up-and-coming filmmaker, Wong Kar-wai, to take his own shot at the genre. He wrote a prequel to the novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes for his first wuxia film, Ashes of Time.

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Barcelona (1994)

I originally planned on skipping Barcelona in my perusal of Criterion’s Whit Stillman trilogy, going directly from Metropolitan to The Last Days of Disco (if you call a three year gap “direct”). But it’s another year later and and I felt guilty ignoring the middle child. Plus, on paper, you gotta admit it sounds like Stillman made all the right moves in conceptualizing his sophomore effort. He teamed up with a studio, doubled down on stars Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman, and branched out into a more exotic locale that still drew from his personal experiences. Sounds great, right? Yeah, I mean, pretty much. I had a good time.

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Hopscotch (1980)

As long as we’ve had edgy, paranoid, cool spy thrillers, we’ve needed punchy satires of them to keep us all in check. All work and no play makes us all MAD. There were a lot of these movies post-Watergate, so we needed a big swing by 1980. Hopscotch wants to be that movie. It almost is that movie. The only problem is it’s a bit too caught up in the genre it should be dismantling. And that’s not just coming from me, a huge Hot Shots! Part Deux fan. Even Roger Ebert wrote, “Hopscotch is a shaggy-dog thriller that never really thrills us very much, but leaves a nice feeling when it’s over… It’s a strange thing to say about a thriller, but Hopscotch is… pleasant.”

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