Welcome Girls and Ghosts (Boys) to yet another Shocktober! This year’s theme is G-G-G-GHOSTS! Yes, in honor of movies like The Conjuring: Last Rites and Good Boy (neither of which we’ll be covering) Shocktober is now Shock-BOO-ber. Which is a great name for an adult film. I could spitball some ideas for that but instead lets put on our proton packs, place our fingers on our planchettes, and dive into the Further!
It’s been a rough year for rock star deaths. Just this summer we’ve lost Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, Ozzy Osbourne, Mick Ralphs, Bobby Whitlock, and George Kooymans, to name a few. One name that almost slipped by me was the passing of Supertramp founder Rick Davies, who died on September 6th from multiple myeloma at the age of 81.
It’s August now, which means Colin, John, and I have completed a total of 10 Criterion Months over nine years. Is this an occasion worth celebrating? Well, after the first time I ran our stats in 2021, I always knew I wanted to do an even more robust breakdown someday. You tell me, when is the best time to crunch these numbers again? This year, upon the completion of our tenth Criterion Month? Next year, to mark a decade of Criterion Months? Maybe 2027, when we will have done one full calendar year’s worth of Criterion Months (but just shy of 365 reviews)? I don’t know, I just chose the one I got to write soonest. Let’s look at the charts!
Another year, another Criterion Month, already a fading memory, soft and delicate, like a confessional whispered into a tape recorder. Much like Glen records his subjects speaking of love and intimacy in Andrew Haigh’s subdued romantic drama Weekend. Yet again, I’m saying farewell to Criterion Month with an Andrew Haigh film, despite my ongoing struggle to articulate what it is he does best: people talking.
It’s a cliche at this point but, if you don’t mind indulging me, Infernal Affairs III makes Infernal Affairs II look like Infernal Affairs. Released just a year after the first movie, Infernal Affairs III exists to show fools like me that I had no idea what was *really* going on back when I enjoyed the story that would one day become The Departed. Is dumping this much lore on top of an already dense story a good idea? As a Star Wars fan, I feel confident in saying: eh, sometimes, I guess, but usually no!
Alas, we bid farewell, as the Prince of Darkness has finally taken his throne in Hell. Ozzy Osbourne, who probably should have died in 2003 after being crushed by his quad bike, or in 1978 when he challenged David Lee Roth to a cocaine duel, or during his self-reported “40-year bender” that lasted until he got sober around 2018, has died.
These last few years I’ve been jumping around the World of Wong Kar-wai so I think a little bit of context helps for Happy Together. In 1994, while working on the epic Ashes of Time, Wong took a break and made Chungking Express to clear his head and fall in love with filmmaking again and it ended up being a huge hit and made him an international darling. The next year, he followed that up with the stylistically similar Fallen Angels, which further earned him widespread recognition. Both movies were heavily influenced by the looming handover of Hong Kong to China, so when his next film, Happy Together, was slated to be released just weeks before the handover, everyone expected this would be what it was about. And they were sort of right, it’s just almost entirely set in Buenos Aires.
