The reboot of Funerals & Snakes happened on 7 July 2023 but we don’t publish on weekends so we are celebrating early!
I thought that today might be a good day to look back at some of the earlier posts out of the 244 that I’ve sent out since then. We only had a handful of readers then so these will be news to many of you.
The first edition was a soft launch to find out whether I could still do this. One of the films I reviewed that Friday was All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about artist Nan Goldin and her campaign to find justice for victims of the Sackler family’s OxyContin opioid epidemic:
The film isn’t just about opioids and addiction though. Director Laura Poitras artfully weaves three different strands of Goldin’s life together, showing us the parallels between the human neglect that allowed the opioid crisis to rage unanswered for so long, the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s that took so many of her friends and colleagues, and the suicide death of her older sister in 1963.
In all these cases, society chose to prioritise making moral judgements on people who were suffering rather than the harm reduction that would save their lives and Goldin (and the film) make the case that that choice represents its own form of immorality. Highly recommended.
We love Japan here at F&S and an early recommendation was Whisper of the Heart from Studio Ghibli:
Whisper of the Heart starts with Olivia Newton-John’s version of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ and then – as if such a thing were possible – gets even better!
This is a Ghibli film – not a Miyazaki and therefore not worthy of a theme park – but as charming a film as ever you’ll see.
Last Film Show was one of my picks of 2023 for RNZ and I continue to recommend to it film lovers whenever I get a chance:
Set in 2010, it’s the cinematic coming-of-age story of young Samay (Bhavin Rabari), a rapscallion determined to wag school at every opportunity in order to indulge his love of cinema and his curiosity about its technologies.
Thanks to his mother’s wonderful cooking, Samay is taken under the wing of projectionist Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali) and he becomes determined to take his experiments with light back to the tiny railway village where his father makes tea for passengers.
By its nature, television takes a lot longer to get through so those recommendations are rarer. I also won’t recommend something based on just a few episodes – endings are important – but Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House was a joy from start to finish:
I haven’t felt grief at the end of a series quite this badly for a while.
My final choice from the first three months of F&S is El Conde, a stunning and original vampire movie from Pablo Larraín:
Imagine if Pinochet was not just an authoritarian leader of a brutal military junta but also a 250-year-old French vampire, keeping himself alive with hunting trips into Santiago and refrigerated human hearts.
El Conde is a wonderfully weird blend of political satire and gothic horror, narrated by Pinochet’s great friend Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet) and featuring a supporting cast of grifters and enablers.
Edward Lachman’s black and white cinematography is a stand-out and I really appreciated the channeling of justifiable rage at the damage done to Chile by this awful human being into something so singular. And funny.
Thanks to all of you for continuing to subscribe to these updates. And every time I get one of these notifications, my heart skips a beat. They’re wonderful.
Further listening
Please join me for a chat with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights tonight at about 9.30. We’ll be talking about two films that we haven’t mentioned here (yet): Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story (National Geographic on Disney+) and Fancy Dance (Apple TV+) and the free streaming selection is Wind River (TVNZ+).
If anyone lectures me about anime (and as an older Māori woman I get anime mansplained to me by younger white guys all the damn time) but admits they haven't seen 'Whisper of the Heart', I can tell they're just a fraud.