February 2014: Cinema

February was admittedly another slow month and I didn't even come close to hitting my normal goal of one movie a day, but luckily the films that I did end up watching proved to be almost constantly great. The only real dud this month was the Sara Michelle Gellar starring horror film, The Return, that I watched on HBO on a whim (never watch random movies on HBO, they are always bad). I finally got around to watching 2 John Waters classics after falling in love with Hairspray last year. Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble proved to be among the very best films I watched in the shortest month of the year. Female Trouble specifically is going to have me talking about eye liner for the rest of my life. I also watched Ms. 45 which proved to be the finest film I've watched so far this year, and if I don't fall into the trap of watching Antonio Cesaro swing every last man on earth into oblivion on the WWE I may have something more substantial to say about that film other than it's awesome at some point in the future. Yes, I'm still currently obsessive in my wrestling viewing, and I guess this is just going to have to be a thing I learn how to balance. Finally, I closed out the month on a string of 2013 films that all proved worth my time, the improved sequel in the Hunger Games franchse, Catching Fire, Lukas Moodysson's humanistic ode to punk rock and girlhood We are the Best, Spike Lee's unfairly maligned remake of Oldboy, the direct to video picture The Package, and Ridley Scott's modern noir The Counselor. March is young, but I'm already off to a good start after having just finished Ernst Lubitsch's The Doll. Here is to hoping I can keep that consistency and figure out how to get to 31 films, and if I don't then quality matters more than quantity right? Hope everyone else had a great February.

Best of the Month 

Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)

Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974)

Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972)

The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

 High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968)

Oldboy (Spike Lee, 2013)

We are the Best (Lukas Moodysson, 2013)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, 2013)

The Counselor (Ridley Scott, 2013)

The Package (Jesse V. Johnson, 2013)

Best Rewatches

Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)

Synecdoche New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997)

The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008)

Worst of the Month

The Return (Asif Kapadia, 2006)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002)- rewatch