January 2023 Favorite Watches & Supercut Recap

That month I watched some incredible silent horror films

[posted to IG on January 30, 2023]

January Recap:

Three 10/10 movies right off the bat: helluva way to start the year. I watched some horror from the 1920s, I watched some horror from the 2020s, and the oldies won handily - though not without a fight. One of the 1920s was a revisit with the big dog F.W. Murnau (the F.W. stands for Fuck Withme), and the technical chops on that man are worthy of his legend. I also got to put my theory into practice and gained a new understanding and appreciation of the late New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard; I finally got around to the early avant-garde masterpiece A Page of Madness (1926), a lost film until a print was recovered in the 1970s; and I learned the Phantom of the Opera (1925) is basically a slasher flick. Last but not least, all hail Mia Goth. In regard to Pearl (2022), I don’t think there are many actresses out there who could have pulled that absurd of a character off with that much substance. A genre performance for the ages.

Supercut song credit goes to experimental jazz artist Sam Gendel’s lo-fi reimagination of the Willy Wonka classic “Pure Imagination.”

Top Ten Favorite Watches of the Month:

The French master of suspense turned his sharply honed craft on the courtroom drama genre to tell a doomed loved story and expose the hypocrisies and cruelty of French society.

I trudged through the 4-hour reconstruction of this famed silent and it probably wasn’t worth it, but, admittedly, von Stroheim was doing some rad stuff, and I respect the film grammar.

An entertaining and unique dark-comedy crime thriller - Coen brothers don’t miss.

Some compelling political discourse, but my biggest take away is that I want Anna Karina to stare holes into me so deeply that I die.

Although it’s sandwiched between a lot of very dry communist propaganda, the Odessa Steps sequence is still worth every minute of every film class it’s taught in.

Of all the heavyweight quotes in Weekend, I still haven’t recovered from the Emily Brönte character saying “The pebble perpetuates nothing more than it’s own memory.” Such a hard line.

Mia Goth’s absurd range and complete commitment to the character turned Pearl into just as much of a heart-wrenching domestic drama showbiz tragedy as a tongue-in-cheek exploitation horror comedy.

I always thought the phantom was just a sad misunderstood weirdo who liked to sing in the shadows, but then he dropped a chandelier on a woman in the first act of the film and went on a killing spree worthy of any slasher villain and my notions were shattered. An S-tier genre pic.

Kinugasa’s visionary avant-garde psychological horror film deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror classics. The creative ideas coming out of here are astonishing.

Epics and horror don’t often go hand-in-hand, but legendary German expressionist F.W. Murnau was up to the task, and on this rewatch, the staggering visual language and imagery of Faust floored me regularly enough to place this silent classic firmly within my top 50 favorite movies ever.