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 13: Destroy All Monsters

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Fourteen years after the original Godzilla, director Ishiro Honda, special-effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited to potentially end the series. Sort of like the first Avengers, the idea here was pretty simple and very much scraping the bottom of the barrel: what if the characters from all those other movies teamed up to fight a bunch of forgettable aliens? That’s right, Destroy All Monsters is an 11-kaiju extravaganza, featuring everyone from Anguirus to ‘Zilla himself. But is it any good?

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Criterion Month Day 11: Weekend (1967)

Weekend (1967)

1967’s Weekend (or perhaps “Week End”) is Jean-Luc Godard throwing up his hands in frustration. The cacophony of cars honking horns outside his window have made it clear: all is lost, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better. I knew that was going to be the vibe going in, but I was hoping there’d be something more here – some insight into how things got so bad or a vision for how we all get through it – since these days I’m kind of feeling the same way. But actually what I came away from it with was a sense that I’m still pretty far from being a Marxist French misanthrope.

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Criterion Month Day 4: Sweet Smell of Success

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Who doesn’t love some juicy gossip? For as long as we’ve had famous people, we’ve had other, lesser people starting some shit about them. Nonetheless, and rather inexplicably, the jury’s still out on whether that’s a good thing or not. Mostly you’d think we’d condemn the rumor mill for appealing to our basic bitch jealousy and false sense of superiority, but what about the ever-important gossip whispers that have snowballed into the social outcries that exposed and kinda, a little bit brought down evil men like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein? In the era of #MeToo and Instagram followers and Yelp ratings and Uber ratings and Letterboxd ratings, maybe we’re actually living through peak gossip right now? Or maybe it was the late 1950s, when Sweet Smell of Success came out?

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Criterion Month Day 1: His Girl Friday

His Girl Friday (1940)

The 1928 play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur has been adapted for the screen four times but its second film version, 1940’s His Girl Friday, is certainly the most consequential. That’s because director Howard Hawks had the inspired idea to change one of the central characters, Hildy Johnson, into a woman, completely changing the story’s dynamic. Instead of simply a story of a weary reporter trying to turn over a new leaf, we get that plus all sorts of mid-century gender dynamics! It’s a good time now hurry up and get in here.

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Mission: Accomplished

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

It’s easy to mistake hubris for ambition. In 2018, Christopher McQuarrie became the first director to make multiple Mission: Impossible movies when he went out and topped his own Rogue Nation with Fallout, arguably the franchise’s critical high watermark and certainly its biggest box office success. Having overcome innumerable obstacles in making that movie and no doubt riding high on accomplishing what no one thought could (or even should) be done, it only took a few months for series star Tom Cruise to announce that McQ would be helming an additional two Missions, to be shot back-to-back. The challenge was set, and so the universe went out of its way to make this called shot as damn near impossible as it could possibly be. Mission had never had a returning director before, now McQ will have made half the series – will that kill the magic? The franchise has thrived thanks to Tom Cruise’s dedication to death-defying stunts – can he keep topping himself as he enters his sixties? Fans like me were nervous, but it turns out those were the least of their problems.

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Oscars Fortnight: Deliverance

Deliverance (1972)

45th Academy Awards (1973)
Nominations: 3
Wins: 0

Two scenes from the 1972 thriller Deliverance have such an outsized cultural footprint that I hesitated for years to watch it. Despite everyone (especially John) insisting it was awesome, I’d already seen the iconic “Dueling Banjos” scene and heard about the infamous “squeal like a pig” moment, so I just filled in the blanks myself. I imagined an unpleasant horror film — a nightmarish descent into madness the likes of which I already kind of know I don’t have the stomach for. Boy, was I wrong… except about my preconceived notion that nature should be appreciated from afar. Deliverance did not inspire me to do any more up river rafting anytime soon.

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Oscars Fortnight: A Man for All Seasons

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

39th Academy Awards (1967)
Nominations: 8
Wins: 6

Early in the morning of December 4, 2024, a masked gunman assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City. The shooter’s spent cases had the words “delay, deny, depose” written on them, similar to the insurance industry’s famous phrase “delay, deny, defend,” which refers to the extreme effort companies put into not paying out claims. Five days later, following a nationwide manhunt, Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a 26-year-old data engineer with no prior criminal record, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. As the prime suspect in the killing, Mangione is currently facing 11 charges in New York state and four federal charges, including a murder charge that makes him eligible for the death penalty.

Among Mangione’s personal effects was a 262-word document about the corruption and failure American healthcare system. A deep dive into Mangione’s social media presence makes it difficult to put him in a box, perhaps the only label that fits him is “anti-system.” And that ideological ambiguity coupled with seeming moral consistency has helped turn Mangione into a folk hero. Mangione has become the subject of memes, look-alike contests, protests, and even a sex tape hoax. Supporters are donating to his jail commissary and writing him letters and sharing online his heartfelt responses. There is even merch being sold online that depicts Mangione as a Catholic saint, just like Sir Thomas More, the subject of A Man for All Seasons.

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