For the last few years I’ve been a volunteer film reviewer for some small film festivals. The job of a screener is simple: watch a movie, rate its quality, and give it a yes or no as to whether it should appear at the festival. It’s a sheer fact of the slush pile that very few films will make the cut.

 

Film screening is quite different from my normal film viewing. When I watch movies for pleasure, I tend to lie back and let it wash over me. When I screen, I’m upright, hands on the wheel, questioning every 30 seconds if this feels worthy of its runtime, asking myself if I feel like I’ve entered a world that could exist on a theatrical screen in front of an audience.

 

I worried that film screening would make it harder to enjoy the movies I watch for fun but the opposite has proved true. Watching a barrage of mediocre film projects has only heightened my delight in seeing a good movie—I notice everything now. Even the smallest instances of beautiful lighting or intelligent dialogue become marvels. Imagine eating only white bread with unsalted butter for two weeks and then eating a lasagne. How damn good does that ragù taste? How much do you love salt now?

 

We have a limited amount of time here, both to eat salt and to watch movies, but I’ve found very few film that truly felt like a waste of time. There’s always something I can get out of it, even if I ultimately consider it a brutal failure. I’ve learned a lot from my failures, and other people’s are a welcome substitute.

 

- Celia Mattison

Marlowe Granados’s absolutely brilliant Happy Hour.

Do not be put off by the narrator being 21 years old: Isa is a captivating, mysterious, and irresistible lead character. I don’t want to wade too deep into the female friendship industrial complex but her bond with her best friend/co-conspirator is really beautiful developed and captures all the weirdnesses of emotional interdependence. I also really loved how Isa’s race and family history are handled—throughout the novel we only hear a little bit about her background, but we hear plenty about what other people assume about it (as a non-glamorous person, this was the most relatable part of the book).

 

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I’m guessing that this newsletter has a large readership of people whose childhood dream was to become a marine biologist, and it’s for that community that I come with two movie recommendations, both on streaming and with a cool hour and a half runtime.

 

Undine (2020) and The Lure (2015) are two films inspired by fairy tales, both primarily about aqueous women who find themselves on land. A lot of movies about fairy tales are closer to parables (see: any Disney movie, Shape of Water) where the story is a straight line and characters are blunt, virtuous objects. But Undine and The Lure move like water does, with a rhythm that only becomes obvious when you look at the entire picture. 

 

Undine (streaming on Hulu) is a capital-r Romantic fantasy about a woman who falls in love and evades her brutal destiny. Like many of Christian Petzold’s movies, it’s set in Berlin and has an obsessive relationship with the city’s history and architecture. It’s also one of the most tactile movies I’ve ever watched; I have never seen two people cling to each other as fiercely as Undine and Christian do. Recommended for fans of After Yang, Ms. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, Björk

 

The Lure (streaming on Criterion Channel) is more amorphous in genre, combining aspects of horror and musical. Silver and Golden are two mermaid sisters who stop in 1980s not-quite-yet-post Soviet Poland. These are not shell bra-clad sirens but scaly, sharptoothed, distinctly fishy monsters who actively crave flesh. It’s a story that works on a lot of levels, incorporating themes of assimilation and immigration, female intimacy and jealousy, and sexual awakening. Recommended for fans of Jennifer’s Body, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, P.J. Harvey.

 

Most fairytales cast magical women as objects of desire and subsequent self-ruin for a male spectator, but Undine and The Lure achieve something far more difficult and interesting. There is no everyman narrator in these stories, no Nick Carraway/Bella Swan/guy from Avatar to tell us how to gaze at this strange beauty. Rather, we get to hear directly from the most interesting characters in this story, with all their specificities and interiorities. I have long held the belief that more movies should take place underwater.

In my ongoing attempt to masquerade as Gen-Z, I occasionally bookmark remarkable tiktoks. I’ve watched this one pretty regularly for the last year. The audio of a genuinely frustrated child wrestling with the relentless drone of social media, paired with the visual of what is basically a Lego flying through the sky, is exactly what modern ennui feels like.

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My single Libra quality is my inability to make decisions; I am always looking for someone else to make up my mind. Because I’m now working in an office that is mostly empty and extremely quiet, I have found myself in desperate need of new sounds. My most recent decision outsourcer is a spreadsheet of the Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and a random number generator. Whenever I need noise, I generate a number from 1-500, listen to the corresponding album, and delete the album listing from the spreadsheet. 

 

So far, I have listened to 17 albums which, for all you math fans out there, isn’t a big dent. I’ve only genuinely disliked two of them, and it’s mostly been a pleasant chance to sit with albums I’ve never listened to end-to-end, like Al Green’s Call Me, or discover something new and wonderful to me, like King Sunny Ade’s The Best of the Golden Years. If I continue at this pace through the entire list, I will finish in two years. Maybe after that I’ll do NPR’s 150 Greatest Albums by Women, and then Pitchfork’s Top 200 Albums of the Last 25 Years, and then the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and then I’ll retire, having never had to sit in silence.

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