The Friday 5
Your Weekly Film Update By Film Critic and Historian Jack Hanley
I. Film I Am Loving This Week
While I profess an epicurean bias due to my own stint in a French culinary school, Trần Anh Hùng's lush and luxurious love letter to the art of food as love language is a sensuous delight that is worth the long simmer. In THE TASTE OF THINGS, Hung romantically provokes the more mainstream viewer by "...loving to challenge their feelings...not through critical reasoning but through the language of the body".
It is clear that this new banquet is one of fusion, lovingly seasoned from his many obvious cinematic influences- Ozu and Tarkovsky chief among them. Just lovely.
Now in theaters and at the Boedecker Theater in Boulder March 20th-24th
II. Film I Am Revisiting This Week
It is my annual Valentine’s Day revisiting of this masterwork with my daughter on its 33rd anniversary- and we are once again reminded of just how radically feminist this film is…I urge everyone to revisit it solely through the abject horror of our protagonist’s torturous navigation through both a patriarchal objectivist hellscape and the sheer terror of Mulvey’s seemingly omnipresent male gaze to see why Clarice Starling in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is unquestionably one of the most important feminist cinematic representations of all time.
While there still remains some fair assertions of problematic transmisogyny regarding Bill’s representation, the film radically suggests that the real “American horror” is merely being a woman who dares to exert agency within the patriarchy in general- and “male spaces” in particular. There is literally not a single scene where Clarice encounters men in which she is not subjected to their pointed stares and glances (be they of disgust, lust, or a combination of the two). It’s the metaphor of power-fused scopophilia as Monster.
EVERY man -no matter which side of the “moral divide” they claim to occupy- is framed identically from her POV to underscore the sobering indictment that, (like the similar lament of 2020’s PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN) ultimately, under a patriarchal system, there can exist no inherently pure or “good” men, but rather merely incremental levels of male complicity either passively- or violently- upholding the system that protects them.
A father/daughter FAVORITE- and my unabashed choice for best cinematic hero of ALL TIME.
III. Film Journalism I Am Loving This Week
In the build-up to the Academy Awards, the cinephiles of Indiewire know EXACTLY which performance we're all excited about...
Enjoy this great piece on Messi: The Canine Breakout of ANATOMY OF A FALL.
IV. Romantic Recommendations Of The Week!
This Valentine's Day Weekend, turn the lights down low, light a candle, and let Jack Hanley and Scott Aigner program your PERFECT romantic-comedy cinema playlist on a VERY ROMANTIC episode of Flicker With Jack and Scott!
V. Criterion Closet Pick I'm Loving This Week
Actor, comedian, and BRILLIANT cinephile PATTON OSWALT hits the closet and gravitates to 1940s film noir, the “weirdly timely” shock comedy of John Waters, and movies with memorable soundtracks. Enjoy and discover!
...and LONG LIVE CINEMA!
Jack
