“Get Your Money’s Worth” Vol. 1

Welcome to “Get Your Money’s Worth”, a series in which I try to squeeze as much value as I can out of this website I’ve been paying for over the last four years.

In 2022, I set the goal to watch 300 films in a calendar year, finishing with 307 films watched (315 total because I watched eight tiles twice in the same year) but 63.5% of those viewings were first watches. This year I changed it slightly to watch 300 titles I hadn’t seen before. This was in an effort to catch up on some blindspots, do some more film scholarship, and learn more about film history. In each entry, I’ll list what I watched that week along with a small remark about one or two of those films.

This week I watched:

• To Live and Die in L.A., William Friedkin, 4K Disc

• Nobody, Ilya Naishuller, Blu-Ray Disc

• Funny Games (1997), Michael Haneke, Criterion Blu-Ray

• Saltburn, Emerald Fennell, Amazon Prime

• Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, Criterion Blu-Ray

This a light spoiler conversation, if you haven’t seen either of these films, now’s the time to stop what you are doing and go watch them!

Funny Games (1997) dir. Michael Haneke

This is cribbed directly from the second most popular review on Letterboxd, but has Michael Haneke ever experienced a positive emotion? One of our most gifted and controversial filmmakers presents a family of three taking a vacation to the lake who are trapped in their home by two sadistic young men with a penchant for theatrics and violence. If you care about these sorts of things or dig into Euro horror, you’ve heard of or sought out Funny Games for the thrill of the violence. And it has that abundantly, but it doesn’t quite fall into the “torture porn” category and it doesn’t quite fit into some elevated category either. It’s a film about the violence people are capable of committing, and not even in the way some of these films present individuals pushed past their limits who break a code of ethics. These are two bad men who do bad things and you are there to watch; and participate.

Critics of Funny Games often bring up the flaws of its conceit and the execution of the meta tone that is revealed about a third of the way through the film; they are right to. I can understand taking umbrage with a movie that wants to remind you that as an audience you are complicit and perverse. There are a lot of horror filmmakers who do the same thing with much less success. Those criticisms are valid, but I must say, the golf ball moment worked on me in a way that few other things have in a film like this before. It’s for the sickos, but for the contemplative sicko. The sicko who enjoys a slasher but also asks if they should spend this much time cheering on violence against women.

Saltburn dir. Emerald Fennell

I want to speak directly to some of my friends who gave a full endorsement of this film at a holiday party recently: what does Saltburn mean to you? When you tell someone what it is “about” what do you say? What is it trying to communicate? As I’ve spent more time thinking about the film I can clearly see what people are enjoying and latching onto. The film is provocative and exciting, full of talented actors giving varying degrees of good performances, shot beautifully by Linus Sandgren on location. But I find this to be a film from a filmmaker who thinks she has something to say and now, on two occasions, has proven she doesn’t have a clue what she means or how to say it. A treatise on eating the rich that is written by someone who comes from wealth with the perspective of someone from a background of comfort and some amount of wealth (obviously nothing compared to the Cattons). The film never loses the tone or changes course in a way that misses the goal; I just believe that Saltburn’s goal is nonsensical and it doesn’t understand its point.

I mention all of that to also say, there were parts of it that I did enjoy. In particular, I enjoyed the tall king of Australia Jacob Elordi who is extremely charming and gives far and away the best performance of the film. He knows exactly how the character of Felix should act and feel about his immense wealth, power and privilege. There’s a sense of embarrassment of riches, while also the knowledge that being that rich is just pretty damn cool. It also has some genuinely great jokes that are an example of writer/director Emerald Fennell’s greatest skill. One thing she truly lacks is the understanding of what a “twist ending” is because, for the life of me, I cannot understand why the final 15 minutes of the film are presented in that way when the audience saw the writing on the wall half an hour earlier.

I say ehhhhh, you’ll probably watch it anyway. It’s on Amazon.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.