Sean Lemme

I started blogging as a way to lazily pass my high school senior project and somehow I've kept doing it for more than half my life

Criterion Month Day 23: Metropolitan

Metropolitan (1990)

As John eluded to in his hot take, filmmakers like Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and Steven Soderbergh seized on technological advances in the late Eighties and showed that you could make a movie on a shoestring budget. They helped pave the way for the indie explosion of the Nineties and, more importantly for this post, inspired Whit Stillman to give up his illustration company, sell his apartment, and go all in on making a personal comedy about wealthy young socialites. The result was Metropolitan, a film that feels equal parts frivolous and vital and serves as a reminder that there was a time that we could feel sympathy for the rich.

Continue reading →

Home Invasion

Spider-Man: Far From Home

With Endgame finally crossing the all-time box office record this weekend and Marvel announcing the opening salvo of their next phase of movies, I got the feeling I should finally write down my Spider-Man: Far From Home thoughts. MCU tradition dictates each Avengers sequel must be followed up, perhaps a little too soon, by a bug-themed solo adventure. This time it was Spider-Man who drew the short straw and had to follow the biggest movie ever with his own smaller-scale story… at least it seems that way from the outset. Far From Home begins as a chance to decompress after the cataclysmic conclusion of Endgame but soon grows into a staging ground for the next MCU saga. And the more time I’ve had to think about it, the more exciting that seems.

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 21: The Killer

The Killer (1989)

John Woo’s The Killer is a 1989 Hong Kong action thriller starring Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee as a compassionate hitman and the reckless detective who’s out to get him. It’s an insanely stylish action movie in which the rules of reality are brushed aside by rule of awesome. As in, shooting a pistol in each hand while diving through a window might not make practical sense, but it sure is cool to watch. “Life’s cheap. It only takes one bullet,” says a character at one point, but in practice it takes more like a hundred.

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 18: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

Despite only a limited knowledge of Paul Schrader’s filmography, I feel it’s safe to say that he is drawn to stories about loners making rash decisions. I think every movie I’ve seen that he’s written or directed has starred isolated characters who find themselves at odds with society. So it’s easy to imagine why Schrader would want to tell the story of Japanese author Yukio Mashima, who committed suicide after staging a failed coup d’etat fifteen years before this movie’s release. But it’s Schrader’s telling of the story that is so interesting, as it provides a template for why so many contemporary biopics seem like boring Oscar bait.

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 15: Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens (1975)

I’ve wanted to see Grey Gardens ever since watching The Queen of Versailles, a conceptually similar 2012 documentary about an hilariously stereotypical, obscenely wealthy family trying to build the biggest home in the country just as the Great Recession is about to hit. But I worried they were too similar, so I dragged my feet getting to the 1975 original. Thankfully, we have Criterion Month. Now that I’ve finally seen Grey Gardens, I can say that, while the “riches to rags” theme is shared between the two films, there’s one major difference: The Queen of Versailles is about that collapse, while in Grey Gardens the decline was decades and decades ago.

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 11: Charade

Charade (1963)

Happy 7/11 everyone! I hope you enjoyed your free frozen treat. Personally, I didn’t even try, around these parts the consensus is Slurpees were ruined by the switch to paper straws. If you haven’t guessed, I’m having trouble coming up with an angle to attack Charade from. It’s the most Hollywood movie I’ve ever watched for Criterion Month, and that means my experience watching it was a lot less emotional and I was left with much less to chew on when it ended. Which betrays how much fun Charade was to watch. It feels like having to write about It Happened One Night or North by Northwest, except for some reason this movie isn’t as talked about as those classics. Why would that be? Let’s see if we can figure it out.

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 7: Hiroshima mon amour

Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

When I think about the period following WWII, the first thing that comes to mind is fuckin’ boomers, man. America and the Soviet Union leapt straight into the Cold War, totally skipping over the decade of celebration that came after WWI (side note: the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles was June 28, did you know that?). And so my focus has always been on Germany being divided, the Korean War, and the global ideological battle between capitalism and communism. But in some places, rebuilding after the war took precedent. Seeing an insight into that experience was my favorite aspect of Hiroshima mon amour.

Continue reading →